Micmacs à tire-larigot

I went to the film Micmacs à tire-larigot tonight; it was the last big screenshowing in Santa Cruz, and I'd hear that it was both a great anarchist film and a film that had lots of technology in it. The theatre was reasonably full - a good sign for a foreign film - and the strong coffee I drank right before the showing helped put me in the mood for the frenetic opening sequence.

The film pits the "family' of misfits against the nonfamily of arms manufacturers, and while occasionally cloying, the plot allows for a good deal of speaking truth to power: in this case, the scene where the two competing arms dealers are tried before a surreal jury of faux Arabs in burkas while standing on a landmine and holding a rocket propelled grenade in one of their mouths. The things they say are all the things people might say if they were de

sperate and were responsible for making things like armor piercing shells and frag bombs and selling them to pretty much anybody.

It is also a fable about using the left over technologies in a different way; the film is relentless in contrasting sleek new tech with old, outmoded tech. The aesthetic is almost steampunk; the castoffs live in a magical cave under a trash heap, and take the junk of the consume society and make it into...well, into charming and entertaining art. So the funky three wheeled truck drives next to the sleek new train; the images of bombs and landmines is contrasted with the home made cannon, made for launching humans; flatscreen TVs and fireplaces that turn on with a clap in the rich guy's mansion are found wanting next to the menagerie of dancing mice, walking tables, and balletic clothing that entertain the squatters (and the film viewers, of course).

The film is firmly in the genre of Romance with a capital R; the bad guys get their just desserts, the arms companies are ruined, and all of it is done with human power and salvaged junk and Tempest-like allusions to the power of illusion and theatre.

With regard to cyborgs - well, I felt like Wall-E was playing at times, for all the loving resurrection of old machines and technologies: the manual typewriter, the baby carriage, the ancient refrigerator, the crude microphone and funky headphones turned into a spy setup, all mirror the thrown-awayness of the people in the squat. How humans merge with their technologies and for what purposes is the theme, and it is more or less a black and white fable: some ingenious machines kill people, and some are used by humans to rejuvenate people and to administer justice to those in the first category of technology.

I remembered the scene in Terminator where Reese wakes up in the present day LA freaked out by huge but mundane machines: dump trucks and backhoes. He sees them, rightfully so, as ancestors of the killing machines of the future. The postmodern Terminator technologies are, like the Terminator himself, relentless and massively death-dealing; and yet what defeats the postmodern tech is the modern Industrial tech: a factory where steel is made, where the hotter than hell vats of molten fire finally kill the killing machine. The sublime technology of yesteryear for a moment regains its sublimity, allowing for the end of a horror of technology from the future. It is as if Terminator linked up with Bill McKibben's book Enough, and brave Sarah Connors led a host of evil technologies to their ends in the honest industrial spaces that our grandfathers worked in.

Of course Micmacs has no such scene, but it does include lots of revenge on the technology of the wealth: burned sports cars, pilfered weird collections of body parts in pristine jars, racks of missiles dumped in the Seine, smashed laptops, and one bad guy car (probably German and luxury) defeated by a very large electromagnet, the kind used in junk yards. The magnet plays the role of the Terminator factory; when it hits, the guns slam to the ceiling of the car, the expensive watches of the two arms CEO's shoot upwards and trap their wrists and arms, and the whole car is lifted way off the ground, and made helpless as a beetle (no pun intended).

I was thoroughly entertained, and for once in this world of BP disasters and nuclear energy touted as "alternative" in the American Power Act (which alone has made me swear more in the last month than in the last year), I watched as You Tube brought down the death merchants, and did it by entertaining.

But go see for yourself!