The Passenger

Matthew Barney

The first of these takes place in the ascending elevator car, from whose form the Apprentice casts the perfect ashlar, the foursquare stone that the Mason must, by rite of passage, carve. Thus desecrated, the elevator becomes a vessel of treachery locked in the undeviating course of vertical ambition. The ascent continues by way of a ballad sung to the accompaniment of the whistling passages of the airshafts; a lament to the false foundations betraying the spiritual purity of architectural conception. For his hubris the Apprentice is duly punished. Judged by the architecture itself, his trial is brought before a bar. Presiding behind its surreal fallopian form, an Irish bartender struggles to draw a perfect pint of Guiness. In a snug to one side, a Masonic meeting is in congress. To the other, the initiate - a 1930s gangster moll - uses a specially adapted heel to cut potatoes into pentagonal wedges. These she slips beneath the foundation of the bar, her labours adding cant to the geometric truths already betrayed by the Apprentice. In this, she is cast as temptress and subconscious to the upright desire of the building, her disruptions registered in the head of the poured Guiness.

What follows is pure physical comedy from which geometry yields judgement. The scene in the bar is a kind of ‘Carry On’ tribunal conducted by a barman whose slapstick owes less to Buster Keaton than to Bruce Campbell in Evil Dead 2 (1987) as he fights off his own afflicted hand. Nor do the parallels between Barney’s ‘CREMASTER’ cycle and Raimi’s trilogy end in the kind of physical and architectural treachery that has us crying our eyes out over spilt beer. Like the cabin of the Evil Dead, the Chrysler building serves as both structure and repository of a rampant id. This building is the personification of will in all its monstrous and redemptive capacities. More than just the exteriorization of interior conflicts it is those conflicts: you can run but you can’t hide, as Campbell duly discovers. Before you can say ‘psychosomatic’ his cabin in the woods switches character and what was once a refuge from the monstrosity without becomes a haven to the monstrosity within. Barney refigures and internalizes the Oedipal conflict by placing the relationship between architect father and miscreant son under the Masonic umbrella.

Tending the situation, the barman’s routine of pratfalls, pump failures and mishaps gradually transforms the complex of kegs and hoses into an intoxicated bagpipe. Like the instrument, the scene acts as an absurdist valve designed to purge the hermetic system of pressure and release the bottled-up momentum of the film. What follows literally escalates the physical and the visionary to the highest heavens, the very spire of the building from which the conflict is broadcast in amplified form to the Guggenheim, the second major site of Barney’s epic ontology.

For Georges Bataille, Oedipal tensions between father and son were part of a chain of symbolic linkage that connects the Ancient Tower of Babel to the priapic ambitions of the modern skyscraper: ‘We find here an attempt to climb the sky - that is to say, to dethrone the father, to possess oneself of his virility - followed by the destruction of the rebels; castration of the son by his father, whose rival he is.’ 1 The script, which follows the Mason’s Apprentice through the temptations and betrayals of the elevator shaft in his ascent towards the Architect godhead of the building, draws on similar symbolic logic.

Barney’s skyscraper is less the tower of Babel than the Temple of Solomon whose myth of Hiram Abiff, the mason whose refusal to divulge the secret name of God, provides the basis of the murder, death and resurrection of the Masonic rite. His castration, which takes place on the 71st floor (a former dental lab visited by the Architect played by Serra) exchanges testicles for teeth. What Freud would have had to say about this is open to conjecture, but the brutality of a scene that has the mason accepting the remains of the compacted Imperial into his mutilated mouth and shitting out his own teeth leaves little doubt as to the severity of phallic retribution. With this act the Architect becomes indiscernible from the architecture itself. Isolated in his cerebral foundry, his sacrament of concrete and steel is at once secret and corrupt. By destroying the mouth he closes the first orifice of betrayal thereby finalizing the Masonic credence that architecture’s best kept secret is that it is not only knowledge of form, but a form of knowledge which, like any religion, is only accessible to those who accept its lore.

Barney was brought up in a family of lapsed Catholics. His father attended a seminary and then abandoned the church in ways that were never fully discussed. As a kid his father recalls wanting to join the Boy Scouts, but fear of the Protestant church where the meetings were held, along with an indoctrinated equation of Boy Scouts, KKK and Freemasonry, prevented him. ‘The thing I realized’ says Barney, ‘ is that I inherited a fear of both - Protestants and Catholics - while being equally ignorant of either belief system. And I think that in some ways CREMASTER 3’s effort to mine a model for an undifferentiated conflict is informed by just that.’ As with much of his work abstract systems are vehicles for personal mythologies. His own character, the Mason’s Apprentice struggles to give dimension to the partition of belief - a space represented by the white threshold that divides the fields of orange and green. Within the elevator shaft is a calling for the creation of a third undifferentiated territory that can exist between both but belong to neither. But in doing so he must betray the hermeticism of the self-referential system, marking his infidelity as the agent of truth.

In biblical terms what might be referred to as the Judas complex is applied hubris; theologians and heretics alike have long argued that Judas’ betrayal was not accidental, but rather a preordained fact in the economy of redemption. ‘The Word, when it was made flesh passed from ubiquity to space, from eternity to history, from limitless satisfaction to change and death; in order to correspond to such a sacrifice, it was necessary that one man, in representation of all men, make a sacrifice of nature’ writes Jorge Luis Borges in his elucidation of Nils Runeberg’s much refuted claim that that it was Judas alone amongst the apostles who sensed the secret divinity and terrible intent of Jesus: namely the lowering of the Word to the mortal condition.2 Included in the symbolic death to which Masonry alludes is a similar understanding of man’s physical abasement and his passage through the figurative rituals that cast the body as the temple of all religion. As they would have it the perfect cube must pass through the metamorphosis of the Cross. Within the cosmology of the ‘CREMASTER’ system so too must undifferentiated aspiration pass through the elevated passages of introspective betrayal.

All of which says little or nothing of the vertiginous and intoxicating beauty with which Barney crystallizes the moral order within an extraordinary three-hour abstract field in which nothing is without intention. But out of the paroxysm of detail you return not to the narratives but to the ineffable state of suspension at the film’s core; a state, which regardless of whether or not one knows what it is about, holds in constant thrall.

Neville Wakefield

Neville Wakefield is curator of Frieze Foundation