NON-SENSE

Ellie and I watched American Utopia, the new David Byrne movie directed by Spike Lee. Given our current situation, you have to wonder whether that title is irony or satire. Well, no. Or yes, at least in part. There is certainly an absurdist element--as there has always been in Byrne's music. It was a powerful motif in his much earlier movie, Stop Making Sense, which I remember having loved when I first saw it, many years ago; and recently decided to replay. But "American Utopia" does in fact end with a hopeful vision of what this country can be--multi-racial, multi-cultural, welcoming of immigrants and their energy and talent, open to new ideas and, above all, caring for each other.

Watching "American Utopia", I was once again captivated by the hypnotic rhythms of Byrne's music and the choreography of the group of musician/dancers--you could hardly call it a "band"--he had assembled. There is something haunting about the use of minimalist staging and the movement of identically-clad human figures in its space. The "costumes"--call them that--consisted of loose grey suits and grey shirts, buttoned to the neck without a tie. Lighting was used to occasionally dramatic but often simply high-lighting effect. The whole production understated, then, leaving the emphasis on the human body, music, words.

I understood Byrne's work in a different light--though I should perhaps have recognized it all along--when he spoke in a break between songs about Dada, and the between-the-wars years after the monstrous travesty of World War I and the rise of Nazism and nationalism, when the European Enlightenment's belief in the power of reason to govern individuals and the affairs of the human species was shattered by horrific historical realities. Dada was a conscious effort to "stop making sense"--or stop trying to make sense of the incomprehensible, irrational behavior of actual human beings in a chaotic real world. 

David Byrne's work, as I see it, is an effort to get past sense and into a reality that transcends it. One sequence in this film is a lunatic snippet from a dada "symphony" followed by the setting of a sense-less "poem" by Hugo Ball; it fit perfectly in with Byrne's aesthetic. It makes some, excuse the expression, sense to suggest that we find ourselves in much the same social, cultural and political predicament as that time. We have put ourselves through the nightmare of more wars and population shifts--provoked in part by climate change--threaten once complacent Western societies, including our own. The self-protective nationalist response, with its ever-present potential for violence, is as pandemic as the coronavirus. The line that stands between us and chaos has indeed become a very thin one.

Yet Byrne sees and offers us grounds for hope in the creative human spirit, and in the desire of human beings to be in touch with each other, to communicate and, yes, even to love. The end of "American Utopia" embraces that spirit as the performance group descends into the audience, mingling, touching, encouraging, including as they play. Then they all get on bicycles and ride through the darkened New York streets to what we assume is Byrne's personal residence for what we assume to be a party.

I think you'll love this film as much as Ellie and I did. Give it a try.