FILM
Apocalypse Now
In the world that follows, solitude becomes the norm
BY STEVE ERICKSON
“It’s easier to imagine the
end of the world than
the end of capitalism.”
Those thoughts, if
not the exact same wording, have
been attributed to infl uential philosophers
like Fredric Jameson,
Slavoj Zizek, and the late Mark
Fisher. While calls for socialism
have grown increasingly loud, the
fascination that dystopias and
apocalypses hold for fi lmmakers
and writers has long been apparent.
Just as the majority of period
pieces are really about the times
in which they were made, stories
about the future are either about
the world we’re experiencing now
or our fears about what it could
become.
But what if one fi nds hope in the
idea of the end of the world? In the
past few years, the apocalypse has
been imagined as a way of opening
up new possibilities from perspectives
on the left (Ling Ma’s novel
“Severance”) and right (John Krasinski’s
“A Quiet Place”) alike. The
ideology of German director Ulrich
Köhler’s “In My Room” is harder to
pin down, quite fi tting for the author
of an essay called “Why I Don’t
Make Political Films.”
(Warning: spoilers ahead.)
The opening shots of “In My
Room” feature a real-life German
politician fi lmed with wildly disorienting
handheld camerawork and
random glitches. A roomful of people,
including cameraman Armin
(Hans Löw), turn out to be watching
the video in editing software
on a computer. Armin’s boss criticizes
him for the poor quality of his
work. We next see Armin go to a
semi-rural house to help his father
(Michael Wittenhorn) take care of
his dying grandmother (Ruth Bickelhaupt),
There, when his life isn’t
stressful, it’s boring. But he gets
drunk in his car and wakes up the
next morning to fi nd that everyone
else has vanished. Motorcycles and
buses lie abandoned in the road.
“In My Room” never explains
what happened, but a secular rapture
seems to have taken place.
Hans Löw in Ulrich Köhler’s “In My Room.”
Hans Löw encounters a world where everyone has vanished in Ulrich Köhler’s “In My Room.”
Armin rises to the challenge,
turning himself from a sadboy to
a country squire riding on horseback
with a rifl e. But after he injures
his leg, he is lucky that Kirsi
(Elena Radonicich), who seems to
be the last women on the planet,
shines her fl ashlight on him.
“In My Room” has a classic
three-act structure but plays
around with it. The middle third,
in which Armin appears to be the
only person left on Earth, has no
dialogue. We can see Löw’s body
changing along with his character:
the scruffy beard Armin sports
is probably fake, but Löw really
lost weight and became far more
GRASSHOPPER FILM
GRASSHOPPER FILM
muscular as the shoot went along.
Armin lives in a landscape out of a
J.G. Ballard novel, where he rides
on horseback by an abandoned
mall in the very early stages of
becoming overgrown by trees. “In
My Room” also evokes the TV show
“The Leftovers,” but unlike it the
fi lm has no interest in spirituality
except to echo Christian symbolism
far out of context. Köhler himself
cites literary infl uences rather
than cinematic ones, especially the
bleak, largely untranslated German
novelist Arno Schmidt.
In his essay “Why I Don’t Make
Political Films,” which was published
in English by newfi lmkritik.
de , Köhler wrote, “The art that has
played an important role in my life
is characterized by its openness,
its ambiguity, its amorality, and its
refusal to be exploited and functionalized.
If art is political, it is
political exactly in this: It refuses
to be exploited by the daily round
of political and social concerns. Its
strength lies in its autonomy.”
“In My Room” can be read as a
wish fulfi llment fantasy, but it’s
too ambivalent to have a clear message.
It describes a generation for
whom marriage has lost its appeal.
Armin has drifted through life, tied
down only by his job and relatives.
When Kirsi arrives on the scene,
they cruise the relics of the recent
past, like video stores, as if visitors
to a museum, and dance to EDM.
The default logic of heteronormativity
would dictate that they
live happily ever after. If this were
“A Quiet Place” they would settle
down, but unlike Emily Blunt’s
character in that fi lm Kirsi explicitly
says she doesn’t want to get
pregnant in this world. As Köhler
said in an interview in the fi lm’s
press kit, “If the last woman meets
the last man, that doesn’t necessarily
mean they have to become a
couple.”
The situations described in “In
My Room” push its characters’ normal
lives to an extreme. Köhler’s
gaze is nonjudgmental to a fault.
“In My Room” winds up describing,
if not celebrating, solitude. Critic
Michael Sicinski has suggested
that it makes a political gesture opposed
to the growing respectability
of restrictions on female freedom:
“‘In My Room’ displays the most
basic truth: humanity without
freedom for all is no longer humanity.”
But this fi lm’s strength lies in
its combination of slipperiness and
allegorical riches. The freedom it
fi nds in the apocalypse extends to
the spectator.
IN MY ROOM | Directed by Ulrich
Köhler | Grasshopper Film | In
English and German with English
subtitles | Oct. 11-20 | Museum of
the Moving Image, 36-01 35th Ave. |
movingimage.us
October 10 - October 23, 2 44 019 | GayCityNews.com
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