Matjaž Licer // ARCHIPELAGO // Joanna Hogg

Published on: June 13th, 2012

Archipelago: proxy relationships and postmodern times (J. Hogg 2010)

Archipelago (2010) second feature of English director/scriptwriter Joanna Hogg, is a lucid observation of a wide plethora of relationships in contemporary society. Set amid breathtaking sceneries of a remote Tresco island off the coast of Cornwall, where an affluent family (mother Patricia, son Edward and daughter Cynthia) spends their holidays, Archipelago stands well equipped for an analysis of the postmodern condition.

The film is masterfully structured as a network of oppositions, feeding off each other, and contrasting each other – to expose what Hogg wants exposed. Magnificent landscapes and brilliant framings depict a harmony of opposites: man-made paths and sculptures, chiseled out of solid rock co-exist and seamlessly merge with lush vegetation, ranging from palm trees to oaks and pines. On the other hand, the family staying in their holiday home serves as a merciless representation of the disharmony of the same: the family members can stand no one less than they can each other.

The holiday house – which should represent the mise-en–scene for a condensation of social fabric in the middle of a wild and untamed nature – collapses into its own opposite: the very social bond that brought family members under the same roof is at the root of all their failed interactions. The bond that was supposed to reunite them into a family unit disintegrates under its own pressure. The wilderness of Tresco island whose imagery hints at serenity and the connectedness of nature is thus contrasted with a family which exhibits profound discord and disconnection (a disconnection between family members which can, of course, exist solely through explicit social connections).

It seems that the premise of the film is a sense of interpersonal anxiety, a hallmark of contemporary individualism: the stronger the social bond, the greater the discord of those bonded by it. Social interactions in Archipelago are actually stronger between complete strangers than between family members themselves: Edward makes friends with the cook Rose while Patricia and Cynthia find refuge in conversations with Christopher, their (hired) teacher of painting. These proxy relationships with strangers serve as forced substitutes for what the family members were all yearning for: the nostalgic and homely feeling of belonging – belonging to a family, belonging to this family. In other words, they all came to the island to reintroduce some long lost symbolic order to their lives – only to realize it is gone for good.

The unattainability of this structure of belonging is redoubled in the figure of the father – which is nothing but the figure of the absence of the father. The father is present in the film entirely through his absence, i.e. solely through his daily telephone calls to the island. In somewhat psychoanalytic terms we may say that this absence serves as a metaphor for a broader western cultural phenomenon that Paul Verhaege has named »the collapse of the function of the father«.

Long story short: until 20th century the system of western gender roles has been ordered by the symbolic field of an authoritarian figure of the father. The 20th century has witnessed a collapse of this figure – the symbolic function of an authoritarian father has been diminished through various politically-correct discourses. In Verhaege’s opinion this is a key factor accounting for the fact »that the prevailing attitude today is so-called postmodern cynicism, which epitomizes above all widespread distrust and lack of belief in any symbolic function whatever. […] the symbolic father function itself became questionable. Its guaranteeing and answer-providing function is not very convincing any more, to say the least. As a result, the number of hysterical subjects who are on the run, looking for a new master, is on the increase.«

Isn’t the above quote a most precise description of the family relations in Archipelago? While Cynthia embodies »postmodern cynicism«, Edward represents the »hysterical subject on the run«, looking for a new master – which he eventually finds in capitalistic philantropy. Verhaege continues: »The absence of the possibility of identifying with the symbolic function itself condemns the contemporary male to staying at the level of the immature boy and son, afraid of the threatening female figure, which once more assumes its atavistic characteristics. These sons are just wandering around, staying forever in the same position, owing to the lack of an identificatory figure; thirty-year-old kids and adolescents of forty are no longer the exception. […] The absence of the security-enhancing symbolic law regulating desire and enjoyment invests woman with all the ancient masculine fears, which results in a turnaround: today, we have woman-the-hunter and man-the-hunted.

Thus, the daughters are turned into hunter-gatherers for whom every male is free game, and indeed, the men are fleeing.« [Verhaege]
The analysis of the dissapearance of the father figure sounds like an in-depth commentary of the family relations in Archipelago: to break free from his family legacy (absent father, dominant sister and self-pitying mother) Edward joins volunteers in a remote corner of sub-Saharan Africa – an undertataking which Cynthia correctly and ruthlessly identifies as a phoney and ultimately opportunistic attempt to present himself as an altruistic servant on the altar of humanity. These are the lines along which Archipelago constructs an intricate and subtle network of observations on human nature and society.

To conclude, it is necessary to mention that Archipelago is also a deeply amusing film. We are all familiar with tensions that are bound to surface in the life of any family – and if anything, Archipelago is simply a condensation of all those little annoyances that one has to be a family member to recognize (and excel at). From the perspective of the viewer, i.e. from a safe distance, this ongoing series of nightmarish, but familiar tensions must seem absolutely comical to anyone who has ever participated in a family dispute over the dinner table. Thus one of the main qualities of the film is its broad conceptual scope, namely that it functions as a systematic critique on the level of society as a whole and as a sarcastic commentary on social interactions on the individual level. This is a rare enough achievement in cinema or any other field of human endeavour and deserves to be credited properly.

Matjaž Ličer
Ljubljana, Slovenia
13th June 2012
payment for article: All For A Few Perfect Waves (Rensin 2009)

References:
P. Verhaege, The collapse of the function of the father and its effect on gender roles, in R. Salecl (Ed.), Sexuation, Duke University Press, London 2000
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