There was a man with a noose around his neck. It wasnt clear who he was, or who the men were that had been chasing him before they strung him up, or why they were after him. Jonathan Glazer was not privy to the details. In fact, the British filmmaker behind countless legendary music videos (Radioheads Karma Police, Jamiroquais Virtual Insanity) and movies like Sexy Beast could not even tell you why the scenario had lodged in his head. It might have sprung from something he was writing, he admits. Or maybe a sentence or two hed come across in an article hed read ages ago.
All Glazer knew was that the sight of someone being hounded and hanged had somehow wormed itself into his brain for a long, long time. Specifically, there were two images that had embedded themselves deep in his subconscious. One was a tree being shaken, as seen from far away. And the other was someone falling from a gallows and never, ever stopping.
Both of these visuals appear in The Fall, Glazers seven-minute short, and the first film hes made since 2013s space oddity extraordinaire, Under the Skin. Both will almost certainly take up permanent residence in your skull as well, whether youd like them to or not. A free-form dystopian travelogue that plays like Kafka filtered through Cronenberg, it follows a masked mob who pounce upon another masked man in the forest. After a quick group selfie with their prey, the faceless crowd lynch him. The camera slowly tracks toward a rope that endlessly unspools into what appears to be a cavernous hole. Eventually, we see the victim quietly, methodically trying to climb back out of the hole hes fallen into. A mere description of what happens, however, cant do justice to the sensation of watching this brief yowl from the abyss. Like the best poetry and your worst nightmares, Glazers short has a way of channeling a mood that defies logic or reason. (A24 is releasing the short online; you can see it here.)
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I remember speaking to a friend of mine in London, and telling him, If I have to talk to anybody about this film, I dont really want to say anything, Glazer says, in a rare phone interview. And he replied, Well, just tell people that its reality TV. Which, I think, is fairly accurate. Its what were seeing every day, whether we care to acknowledge it or not.
The Fall started with a request from Rose Garnett, the head of BBC Films, for Glazer to make a short film. There were no rules or parameters, the director says; he had free reign to turn in whatever came to mind. It was more of a general commission, Glazer recalls. And it was quite paralyzing, to be honest. Having someone just say, make whatever you want to make . . . I mean, I do that when I make feature films, but usually I have a long time to think about things, suss through ideas and really immerse myself in it. I didnt have that here.
So it really did come down to: What am I feeling right now? Whats going on the world? he continues. He thought of the inscription that a friend had written on the front page of a Brecht anthology she had given him, taken from one of his poems: In dark times, will there be singing?/Yes, there will be singing about dark times. He thought about a Goya painting called The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, in which a figure is surrounded by predators, and a picture hed seen recently of Eric and Donald Trump Jr. posing with a kill while on a hunting trip. (This was the inspiration, he told The Guardian, for the selfie shot.) And then those two aforementioned images, which had been floating around his head for years and, he says, started to present themselves once again.
I hadnt thought about them for a long time, he notes. It was almost like they surfaced at that moment; some ideas, you just cant get rid of them or shift them. And they suddenly tied into this sense I had where were living in times when reason is under attack and aggressive ideas seem to be in the ascendancy. So I wanted to use this as an opportunity to express that notion, in the hopes that someone else out there was feeling the exact same thing I was.
If nothing else, The Fall concisely taps into the sort of communal, free-floating dread and anxiety of the current moment, in which the concept of the center being unable to hold and sheer anarchy being loosened upon the world feels like its constantly one Twitter-troll rant away. The masks, based on two models of Japanese Noh theater masks, were used as a shorthand for the anonymity that, Glazer says, is such a major part of our culture, with online comments and disinformation, all of that . . . I thought the mask was a way of expressing how comfortable we can be when were anonymous. How comfortable, and how awful. Mica Levis score, which he praises as a perfect racket, turns a consistent ticking into a background chatter of pure unease. And then there is the concept of a downward spiral that just seems to keep going and going and going, without a bottom in sight. You can tell its a Glazer work by the look and feel of it, though the closest thing you might compare it to is Picassos Guernica, if that portrait of despair had inexplicably sprung to life.
Funny you mention Guernica, Glazer says, because I have a very vivid memory of when I first saw that painting. I didnt know what it was about, I did not know where Guernica was it wasnt like I came to it with any sort of intellectual history, or knew the subject or themes of it. But I felt it. And its kind of what I was going for here. Its not an intellectual film; its much more of something from the gut. Its almost like something invisible to the eye. And the images are sort of the scaffolding around the feeling. That feeling is what were trying to get to.
Someone asked me recently if were any closer to hell these days, he says. The only answer I could come up with was, Were no closer to hell than we are to heaven. And the film is really about that.
Its part of the reason, he says, why hes reluctant to talk about The Fall at all he didnt particularly want to do any press behind it, and still thinks that my interpretation isnt going to help anyone elses. (Hes also hesitant to say much about his next feature, which he confirmed will shoot in the spring, and wont confirm that, as has been reported, is an adaptation of Martin Amis book The Zone of Interest. Its so far from any sort of source material that I just . . . I cant . . . I cant talk about it yet.) And its part of the reason why, when he turned the end result in to Garnett, Glazer suggested they just present it without introduction or explanation. The first screening of The Fall happened at 10 p.m. on a Sunday night on the BBC, slotted between a documentary and a televised talent showcase. To say that most viewers were not prepared for seven minutes in hell would be putting it mildly.
Youre sitting at home watching television, and something comes that you havent expected, you havent sought out, Glazer says. But there it is, this thing thats in absolute contrast to what you thought you were watching. Theres something very strong about being in peoples living rooms that way, and I thought that simply dropping this unannounced was our best bet. To be disruptive I suppose. I think the BBC got a lot of complaints What the hell was I watching? Here I was, sitting down to watch a nice program at 10 oclock in the evening, and then this thing comes on! What were you thinking?! Im sure thats what happened and thats how it should be.
Its actually very simple and parable-like, he adds. You know, my brother rang me up and said, Saw your short on television the other night. Oh really, what did you think? Well, a mans up a tree, he gets shaken out of it, gets hung, falls down a hole and climbs back up. Have I missed anything? Glazer lets out a low, dry laugh. And I said, No, thats pretty much it. Break it down by what happens, and its basic. Trying to explain the sensation youre left with . . . He trails off.
The filmmaker will, however, mention that viewers may want key in to the shorts long, cryptic final shot. Someone asked me recently if were any closer to hell these days. The only answer I could come up with was, Were no closer to hell than we are to heaven. And the film is really about that as well. Its up to us which direction we go. Its within our power. Its our choice as to how we want to live and how we want to be represented.
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