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Punch-Drunk Love

Nothing really works anymore. But love.

"Less a story than it is a poem..."

Punch-Drunk Love takes its modest stand in a world that allows no room for conspicuous rule-breaking. It's in this all too coherent world in which you can watch 500 television channels in 50 states. Where Bill Gates, Ted Turner and George Bush organize everyday life. Where "individuality" is said to be a characteristic of national identity, though, at the same time, it's more complicated than ever to recognize what sets oneself apart from anyone else.

The omnipresence of the media, the consolidation of cultures of thought, faith and even food, the pressing weight of an economic system set to implode: All this is steadily, quietly growing, leaving the individual to his loneliness within conformity. But at the same time, America is filled with people with a deep yearning for individuality, people who have an enormous interest in not being led by the nose, but rather in finding their own means of communication, in placing a sense of self in their own home rather than have their home devour the sense of self.

Both Moore and Anderson are such Americans - with body and soul. They love their country, they value their opportunities, and they even celebrate, consciously or unconsciously, its aesthetic properties. They represent the part of the continent that will not go along with the slide into a uniform, forced democracy.

They remind us that the United States - like no other country - still brings forth many, maybe even most of the leading intellectuals, artists, philosophers and writers. That the subversive potential of the country is all but immeasurable. Whoever talks with New Yorkers or Californians about the national sense of self these days realizes how well Anderson's film gets across the inner friction there. And how very much the strain within its hero is representative.

If there's a film this year, then, that's as subversive as it is visionary, in terms of both content and form, it's Punch-Drunk Love.

In its furious fusion of language, movement, sound, music, color and choreography, the film unleashes a subjective intoxication informing contemporary cinema that not everything has already been done after all - by far - and that it depends only on the creative freedom of the filmmaker as to when a cinematic narrative bumps up against its limits.

Punch-Drunk Love is less a story than it is a poem; or a dance; or a melody; or maybe even a painting - an abstract that changes 24 times a second. A film as narratively complete as a painting by Jackson Pollock (and just as emotionally engaging) - or one by Jeremy Blake.

That's the name of the artist whose morphing plays of color Anderson's film occasionally but completely dissolves into, softly transforming splices into a flow of delirious music and color like a nervous collective dream of Mark Rothko and Gerhard Richter.

The places where the film lingers look as if the photographer Andreas Gursky had sought them out: Powerful, hypersymmetric supermarkets; long, bare stretches of asphalt; endless empty halls in brand new buildings. Even so, in its own way, the film extols these locations where no one really knows what to do with their present yet traceless history.

But then there's also quite a bit of expressive emotion in Punch-Drunk Love. Because the sudden appearance of love in this organized cocoon, it's like an accident you don't see coming, a derailing - and that's why it also doesn't happen simply, but rather, like a forced coincidence.

Lena does not just happen to meet Barry; she arranges the coincidence since she has no real freedom within the limits set for her.

Lena, an alert, decisive, almost aggressively tender, and yes, a bit flaky personality, falls in love with Barry because she senses that his desire is set off by a torturous tension; because both of them are under the same sort of pressure, made more intense by loneliness and unbearable in their isolation. And which evaporates in being and loving together. In the most amazing love scene in the film, this couple whispers to each other with great urgency and tenderness.

Lena: "I want to bite your cheek and chew on it."

Barry: "Your face is so beautiful I want to smash it."

Love and fury: Same emotional root. Whoever recognizes this lives a happier life. It's been a long while since we've seen something so very different in a popular movie, had such a cinematic experience that varies so substantially from all the hysterical, friendly, absurd and merely adequate images that constantly pelt our retinas. Punch-Drunk Love is the name of this smiling nightmare, this tender beast of a film. It'll disappoint no one who's still exploring.

This article originally ran in Issue 16 of Der Spiegel, April 14 2003.