The Ending of the End
Part One: An Introduction
Talking To Wim Wenders
by Adam Haynes
Everett Stillwell finishes vomiting into the toilet. Leaning back up, he wipes the residual chowder/bile off his face with the sleeve of his gabardine suit and smiles. “I wanted you to see that, kid,” he says.
Wim Wenders is morose to the point of being polite. His spirit animal is a mole, and as he discusses his new film, The End Of Violence (MGM), he sounds like a mole, a sad quiet creature resigned to his artistic urges and the ineffectiveness of antidepressants. “…all through the history of movies, film had an ambiguous relation to violence. Violence is certainly extremely attractive. I can’t say it appeals to me, on the other hand it does. I mean, I think violence is an important subject in movies and I would fight for that. My problem with violence is that it has degenerated from being that important subject to disappearing in the [film] language, to entering each and every film as if it were some ingredient and I think that is troublesome. Today, everything is violent. It doesn’t need it. Everything is always shown explicitly. The greatest thing movies can do is not show something and make it even scarier.”
We’re sitting on the floor of one of the stalls in the men’s room at a bar in Cambridge. “Are you there yet?” Stillwell keeps asking me, “Are you there yet?” I’ve been slamming vodka sours for the last two hours, which to me means I must be…somewhere, so I nod my head and watch the stall walls ripple slightly around me. Stillwell takes a pint of Five O’Clock gin from inside his suit. Has a long suck, shaking his head. Offers me the bottle and I can’t really say no because I’ve come this far. Smells like paint and pine trees and faintly of Stillwell’s own puke. Is that what he wants? Is this all about regurgitation?
Stillwell spits into the toilet and licks his lips, “Hip is dead,” he says. “Hip is dead, kid. You heard it from me first.”
“You mean in cinema, or in life?”
“What difference is there?” He screams, suddenly agitated. “Our world is burning. Hip is dead – it is the path out of the fire.”
“Please, I’m confused.”
“You’re talking about The End of Violence…”
He smiles and nods his head, “Now you’re seeing your nose, kid, now you’re seeing it. Stories over statement. Freedom.”
The End Of Violence isn’t really about the end of violence, it’s more like a meditation of our perceptions of violence and its inevitable presence within human interaction. One part William Gibson techno thriller, one part detective story, one part Hollywood romance – essentially all film genres except horror (and this is because Wenders hates horror films. The last one he tried to watch was Alien and he had to leave), the film remains unmolested by both cliché and stereotypes. How was he able to pull all this off? Lack of irony. The current state of movie culture has sunk to a level where it’s more important to be clever and reactive – both in films and in the reviews of them (when a film critic begins and ends a column with a pun lifted from the title of the film being reviewed – isn’t this just unnecessary ego bullshit? Does this really have anything to do with movies?). Wenders offers a hopeful direction for the future. Well-told stories based on artistic uniqueness. The End Of Violence does not succeed because it follows a formula well, or reacts against a formula well (the biggest copout), but because it is a story which incorporates all the language and grammar of cinema then uses them as more than just as an end in themselves… Wenders again is showing us a new beginning.