El declive del imperio americano (Denys Arcand, 1986)
.Almost everybody knows The Barbarian Invasions (2003), but many people who was pleasingly surprised by this late apology of life and its unease do not know that this film was actually a sequel of The Decline of the American Empire also by the Canadian filmmaker Denys Arcand. A film that reached European cinemas in the mid-eighties and caused a remarkable—and praiseworthy—commotion to audience. It was like that because the film made an accurate vivisection of the loving disorder suffered by a generation that had already turned their forties and that some years ago had attempted to change the world only supplied with the conceptual ammunition of the newest French and German philosophy, from Sartre to Marcuse, passing through Adorno, Foucault, Derrida and, of course, Althusser.
One of the film’s main wise moves is this particular mixture of culture and barbarity dripped by all its characters, exceptionally learned and refined concerning public affairs and deeply primeval and coarse in their most private behaviours
The main characters in the film are Canadian and French-speaking professors. In fact one of the film’s main wise moves is this particular mixture of culture and barbarity dripped by all its characters, exceptionally learned and refined concerning public affairs and deeply primeval and coarse in their most private behaviours. It is a wise move due to the confusion caused by the fact that the characters are unaware of the discordance between their words and their behaviour. This fact discredits their noble purposes and evinces the hypocrisy they have become used to. This characters could have been existentialists, anti-colonial, Marxist or structuralist throughout their life but in any case they expected to be stoical— they have never bore the pain and much less they have refrained from pleasure— they neither have adopted Mahatma Gandhi’s key principle which stated that if you want to change the world you must start by changing yourself. A thought which appeared as too naïf and poor elaborated to their highly sophisticated minds. Quite the opposite, this handful of intellectuals devote themselves to pleasure daringly and without the least remorse to end up realizing that, as Epictet warned, almost two thousand years ago, desire and happiness cannot coexist.
Quite the opposite, women in the film strive to get out of the imposed path and to search their own emotional route. A personal path where satisfaction of desire takes up a more and more important place
The film presents men and women wandering around different situations. It seems to be clear that the film has much of generational portrait, although its thesis could perfectly be timeless. The male team is the flank where the director leads all his critical artillery: this great American male —naturally a Western male— self-confident and sure of his intellectual capacities, who finds no objection in making marriage engagement compatible with recurring sexual hiking. Quite the opposite, women in the film strive to get out of the imposed path and to search their own emotional route. A personal path where satisfaction of desire takes up a more and more important place. We should remember the eighties were like that, just ten years after Shere Hite’s polemical study on female sexuality was published —revealing a high degree of dissatisfaction— and thirty-two years before the Spanish Government, for instance, had more women than men ministers. Now we know more, that’s true. In fact, we know everything but there is nothing we can do. The question is, if now that we are aware that is not so easy to change the world, we have also renounced to change ourselves. Perhaps now we are powerless, but more honest. Or maybe not.
