The Convergences Contest
I recently scored a win in the Convergences Contest, curated by Lawrence Wechsler and hosted by McSweeney’s. Here’s the explanation for why I found these (moving) images so resonant when juxtaposed:
In a recent Chevrolet commercial, the camera pans
across a fence behind which various scenes of ordinary American life unfold through the decades. A decontextualized John Mellencamp lyric, “This Is Our Country” (itself derivative of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land”), twangs in the background.
In Lewis Milestone’s 1930 “All Quiet on the Western Front,” the camera pans across a fence behind which French soldiers, rushing the trenches, fall victim to German machine guns.
Chevy uses the fence to convey a sense of development, of continuous historical narrative; the fence posts mark shifts in connected eras as the settings become increasingly modern. Milestone, making explicit the metaphor of camera as weapon, shoots from a machine gun’s perspective, cutting again and again as the gunner tracks from left to right and resets. No organic development here, only regression to absolute mechanical brutality. Sight and sound reinforce each other, as staccato rat-a-tats in the background punctuate the bodies that are repelled and dismembered in the foreground.
We see here the violence that founds Chevy’s
myth of a unified national territory, which in reality is established by a border of exclusion that can only be enforced through war. A real historical sense, rather than patriotic sentimentality, reveals the fence’s unbearable cost.