Jon Jost, independent filmmaker. the first movies
7. Last chants for a slow dance
Tom from ‘Last Chants for a Slow Dance’ (1977) is one such stat; married, father of two children, on the verge of divorce and unemployed. He, too, is a desperate human being, unable to cope with marriage, parenthood, or steady employment and, in the eyes of society, a misfit.
Here, for the first time, Jost has created a compelling character in a compelling situation. Direct communication between filmmaker and audience has disappeared, or at least taken a step back, and the film presents us with a narrative in much the same way that other films present us with a narrative. However, a deliberate hole is left in the illusion; at the beginning of the film, before the ‘character’ speaks, we hear the actor say, “Shall I start now? You said thirty seconds.” In these and other ways, Jost reminds us that we are sitting in a theater watching a movie, and therefore whatever meaning we perceive has been deliberately put there as a means of communication between him and us.
‘Last Chants for a Slow Dance’ works in part as a psychological study, as Tom’s decline from restless youth to murderer can be seen as a function of his own misfit personality; we are even given an indication of the source of his problems: “Everything is going so fast. I don’t remember anything. I don’t remember my childhood, except that my father always beat me and I always ran away.” Running away is all he learned to do as a child, and all he knows how to do as an adult. But at the same time, Jost makes it clear that, whatever the reasons for Tom’s maladjustment, it is society’s cues that that drive you to take the actions you do.
Tom is already desperate when the movie begins; In a society that places great value on employment, material wealth, and family life, he is unemployed, broke, and estranged from his wife and children. He turns to the only way of life that he can cope with; driving his van from town to town, ostensibly looking for work, but in reality looking for the comfort of anonymity, casual sex and escaping responsibilities.
When Tom returns home, it is only to be harangued and threatened with divorce by his wife, who is now pregnant for the third time. She verbally attacks him for her long absences from home, her inability to find work, and her lack of concern for her and her children. Her attack is justified, of course, and she probably shouldn’t have married him in the first place, but it doesn’t help Tom, who can’t help his ways, and it’s no comfort to society. in which she will face. his frustration. Jost’s view, and his case is compelling, is that Tom is a problem in society.
Having finally been rejected by his wife, Tom is back on the road. He stops at a cafe and, as he eats, he comes across a funny letter in a newspaper and reads it to a man sitting next to him. The letter is a sexual joke and the man says, “You don’t think it’s really a letter, do you? Those letters were made up by some guy sitting in a back room. The government puts out that crap to distract people.” their real problems.” This is the crux of Jost’s argument; that the media inundates society with stories that distract people from their real problems and perpetuate dehumanized values, in this case that the wife exists as a sexual object for her husband, prompting them to remain distracted even when the story is forgotten.Jost’s argument is that Tom, with his lack of intellect and lack of purpose in his life, is a helpless victim of such stories.
In a later scene, Tom spends the night with a girl he meets in a bar. The camera is positioned so that on the right of the screen we see the couple’s legs through an open door, while on the left of the screen we see a TV playing a game show. The scene is in black and white, except, curiously, the television screen, which is in color. Because of this, the distribution of values within the frame is curiously and eerily balanced, and with this being one of Jost’s long takes, we have plenty of time to consider why this should be. When Jost draws attention to color, as in his frequent shots of a girl putting on makeup, it’s almost always to emphasize her artificiality, her ability to distract and conceal. In this scene the television and the rest of the screen live for our attention. What happens on the rest of the screen is terribly grim indeed; Tom is having a pointless one-night stand with a girl he just met and doesn’t care about, and by morning he’ll be gone.
But what is happening on the television screen is too depressing; an audience participation game show, in which people’s lives are literally merged with television, and which, conveying its false spirit of competitive bonhomie, is nothing less than an exercise in brainwashing, designed to sedate to its viewers while instilling values favorable to capitalism.
The whole scene is a representation of the disguised void, and as such is a representation of Tom’s world, in which the distribution of values is out of balance with the needs of reality. Later in the scene, when the girl walks in front of the television, we see the color image of the screen superimposed on her body. This betrayal of illusion is Jost’s way of making sure we’re not just fascinated and distracted by the misleading photograph of her.
The turning point for Tom comes after he’s looked through a criminal record folder. Each page has a photo of the criminal and a summary of his activities and characteristics, including (the detail that fascinates Tom the most) his tattoos. In Tom’s eyes, these little ‘stories’, which place his subjects in a recognizable relationship to society, give meaning to his subjects’ lives. And so he has found one last chance to make sense of his own life; by becoming a criminal he can become a story, in the newspapers, on television and preserved for posterity in police records.
Jost only interpolates one ‘montage’ shot into the narration, but it’s one the viewer will never forget: suddenly we’re seeing, in merciless close-up, a live rabbit being forced to hack its head off. We see the helpless look in his eye as he fights, then he is decapitated and we see the spray of blood. Then, one by one, they cut off its legs from its still-writhing body. That, Jost implies, is how much of a chance a man like Tom has against the coercive power of society and its media.
Tom’s final, irreversible act is even more disturbing than the rabbit’s slaughter. He comes across a man whose car has broken down in an isolated rural location and stops to help him. They talk and it turns out that the man comes from the same town as Tom and, like Tom, has a wife and children. They have something in common, but the man has kept all the things that Tom has lost, and for the first time we seem to see Tom engaging in friendly conversation, talking for the pleasure of communicating.
But just when we start to think that he might be human after all and that this new friendship could be the start of a positive change in his life, Tom casually grabs a gun from his truck and robs the man. “I can’t get a job,” he explains, “I have no money, this (the gun) is all I have left.” He then takes the man into the woods and shoots him. The need to align with the values perpetrated by society’s media has taken precedence over all human values.
The film ends with a long shot of Tom’s face as he drives his truck, forcing us to contemplate the meaning of what we’ve just seen. And there’s a lot to behold, because, in this film, Jost has produced a compelling account of how society breeds its own crime and creates its own criminals.
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