ABSTRACT
In one of Wim Wenders’ most recent films, The End of Violence (1997), a detective (Doc) who is tracking down a film director (Mike Max) who has gone missing and is thought to be a murderer, tells the director’s wife (Page): ‘I think everything’s connected. Did you know that in nuclear physics if you look at a so-called particle you change it? Imagine, just by looking at something you can actually change what it is. … We’re connected and we’ve never even met.’ The film explores that interconnectedness which is graphically portrayed in shots of a major road intersection outside Los Angeles and dramatised in the prominence in the narrative of video surveillancing of the city The interconnectedness is both reassuring – the detective finds the woman he loves and the main character is cleared of a murder because the event is caught on camera – and disturbing – the voyeuristic intrusion of surveillance evokes the sinister threat of a power controlling the narrative. Connectedness is also narrativised in terms of computer links, video conferencing, the use of e-mail and mobile phones. Wenders’ world is Serres’ global city. In fact, Serres himself uses Los Angeles as a metaphor for his infotech Newtown; his city of the fallen angels. In Wenders’ world the intricate networks of communication and the continuous relays of information, artificially relate human beings. For most of the characters are isolated atoms, immigrants, refugees, men (always) on the run. They make small gestures of belonging – on the run Mike Max finds refuge among the Mexican family who services his Beverly Hills mansion; Ray, who supervises the observatory (which controls the city’s surveillance cameras) begins an affair with a South American refugee who acts as a cleaner. But the belonging never lasts: the cleaner betrays her supervisor, who is shot; the film director’s wife leaves him and then threatens him with a gun when he returns. The absence of connection is dramatised in terms of the four plots running concurrently, linked through what is caught on camera (and those who are controlling what is caught on camera, in the observatory). What connections are made can appear either planned (and therefore possibly sinister) or arbitrary. For the connections themselves are tangential (at no point do any of those involved in the four plots understand their complicity one with the others).
