The Fool (2015, Yuri Bykov) is a perfect example of how didactic art can be a powerful form of expression. I’ve been preaching for decades that didacticism in art need not be a dirty word. This strategy can be an effective way to get an important message about a vital issue across to spectators. In the case of The Fool, I don’t know if there is as important an issue that needs to be addressed: The very collapse of civilization. And here I’m purposely leaving out the article “a” and/or the term “society,” especially considering how America (and much of the world) has been moving in this direction for decades, the current Trump Administration bringing this (collapse of civilization) reality to a head.
The Root Cause of Our Loss of Humanity
More particularly, for me, what makes The Fool so profound is that it both gets at the current dismal (oligarchic) state of Russia while also registering a general truth, that when a society puts monetary and materialistic pursuits before people, society degrades and eventually collapses. The Fool demonstrates this all too well, as graft, bribery, and wealth accumulation have become normalized, to the point where money is going into the pockets of higher up officials instead of going where it is supposed to be going, to making the lives of the most vulnerable in society better, whether that be in terms of housing or food or medical treatment or the many other ways of redistributing money to the needs that benefit individuals and thus benefit society.
To really sum up this dismal, dehumanizing way of being, filmmaker Yuri Bykov specifically focuses on a crumbling tenement dormitory.
The tenement dormitory in question was flimsily built decades before and now is on the verge of collapsing. Moreover, because housing for the poor is not available, there are no options for transplanting these people to a secure housing structure. The money that should have gone into fixing this building or building other structures has instead gone into the pockets of officials or into housing that will be sold as an investment to make officials richer.
We especially get this disturbing, dehumanizing state of life in a (didactic!) monologue by Nina (Natalya Surkova), a higher up official who, after being called “greedy,” unleashes her wrath on her equally greedy “colleagues”:
“Half the budget goes up to grease the palms at the regional office! Everyone there practically lives at resorts! They all have cars, houses, wives decked in gold! And if I refuse, they won’t give us a penny! How much money did we get this year? Just enough to tar a few roofs and replace a few main pipes. Pensioners are going hungry, three suicides a year. The disabled are waiting to be treated by the state. What about orphanages and large family allowances? I built a new maternity hospital! Do you think I’m made of money? And how am I supposed to survive and raise my children? I’m constantly under stress. I lived in fear for my life through the 90s. I’m responsible for everything: for taxes, for military enlistment, for elections. They’ll either send me to prison or pat me on the head. I want to live like a normal person. I have three scars on my head, hypertension, ulcers and two divorces! I’m a woman, mother, and wife—I want to live like a normal person!”
She goes on, now aiming her fury at her colleagues:
“And so do you. That’s why you grab a piece for yourself without a thought for others. You don’t give a fuck about whose walls are crumbling or whose roof is leaking. Because you have to finish laying down your own roof. Your house isn’t much smaller than mine, four stories tall. Your son, a spoiled brat, rapist and drug addict with 6 arrests and 2 court cases has an apartment in Moscow and goes to a private school.”
What is also entailed in her words is another facet of this degraded (de-evolved) way of thinking and being, where this singular focus on wealth accumulation has degraded empathy for Others and in some cases actually leads to some people — especially elites — preying on (low) Others, which, in turn, creates a belief that this dog eat dog way of thinking is the norm for humanity. What is further entailed in the above quote is that wealthy elites use their power not to just prey on Others but know that they can get away with it. Such a way of thinking and being can only actually incentivize predatory behavior, which, in turn, can only further degrade those crucial human attributes necessary for a healthy society, empathy, sympathy, kindness, tenderness, and so on. In other words, a predatory way of thinking and being begets predatory behavior.
In this way, we get how higher up (elite) officials see their fellow human beings, as disposable detritus or, because they are seen as prey for predators, disposable animals. We get this in much of the dialogue, such as this monologue from one of the very worst of the officials, Bogachyov (Yuriy Tsurilo), a sinister looking official utterly devoid of humanity:
“When did you start worrying about the people? Only when 800 of them might perish at once? Were you worried about them when they were dying one-by-one? When you took a piece for yourself out of every line in the budget? The roads are shit, one pot hole on top of another, accidents every day. The people are drinking themselves to death, killing each other because there are no decent jobs here, and the wages wouldn’t suit a beggar. Kids are wasting their lives, shooting up in basements. The schools are a mess; teachers and doctors can’t afford to buy food. Old people and the disabled are better off dying…. Here, you either live like a human being or like cattle. There’s not enough of the good life to go around. Divide it evenly and nobody will get anything. Everyone will be equally poor….Are you with them or with us?”
This rationalizing of creating situations that kill people or letting people die is particularly disturbing, for it speaks to two historically dehumanizing philosophies that still persist even today, the primitive Darwinian “survival of the fittest” sensibility and the belief in a dichotomy of humanity, between superior elites who deserve the riches and luxuries and power in society and the inferior Other who does not. This seeming perpetual self/Other dynamic becomes the way to dismiss other human beings as disposable and not worthy of consideration. In this way, we see how these elites create conditions that turn people into an animalistic-survivalist state of being and then see them as that. Though the term “capitalism” is never spoken in the film, that really is the root cause for this dehumanizing way of being, capitalism being a mercenary, predatory, survival of the fittest, dog eat dog economic system/ideology, built into it this justification espoused by Bogachyov above, reproducing in its ideology individuals who can rationalize killing people seen as low and thus disposable. Interesting too is Bogachyov’s stress on how Nina’s and other officials’ decision making in effect kill people every day, it’s only when they are so blatantly killed en masse that one’s conscience is affected, a way of being that echoes everyday choices and actions made by officials and other (CEO, moneyed interest) elites in the real world on an everyday basis.
What’s also so telling in this film is that it isn’t just the elites in society who justify their avarice with this philosophy, this dehumanizing philosophy has leaked down into the lower classes as well, especially summed up by Dima’s wife (Darya Moroz) asking her husband why he is risking so much for “nobodies.”
And that is indeed what the film gets at so well, how this view of people seeps down into every level of society, where this lack of empathy and lack of seeing one’s fellow human being as sacred becomes normalized in general, where those in a state of poverty devalue or even prey on each other, whether that be in terms of a husband beating his wife and daughter or whether that be in terms of treating each other with a lack of respect and dignity. In other words, when one is reduced to the state of an animal — when one is put in a state of survival — those still in us animalistic instincts and traits can dictate being.
The Bench Symbolism
The film also does a great job of depicting the dysfunction that typically emerges out of poverty, whether that be behavioral issues or self-medicating one’s (alienated) self with drugs and alcohol or just a general lack of regard for being civilized. This latter idea is especially resonated by a crucial symbol in the film a bench in front of the building that Dima and his family live in. Some kids routinely destroy it and then Dima and his father (Aleksandr Korshunov) repair it, seeing it as a symbol of their desire for a more civilized community. Bykov seems to want to suggest that this simple symbol of community, the bench, symbolizes this general loss of a civilized society. That is, the routine destruction of it speaks to a lack of care for community and collectivity or even, in the face of Dima and his father doggedly fixing it over and over, appreciation for others who devote their lives to making the world a better place for all.
The Allegorical Goodness of Dima, Our Hope For a Altruistic (Utopian) Humanity
This bench symbolism also begins our thread of seeing Dima’s fortitude early on, when he, along with his caring father – the suggestion being that Dima has adopted his father’s steadfast morality – stubbornly keeps running the kids destroying the bench off and keep repairing it, the act becoming more than stubbornness and a desire to keep the bench available for those who want to sit on it, but, again, them knowing that the bench symbolizes not giving into the dark, primal lack of civility rife in their community. Being good, ethical, altruistic individuals in a degraded society is not easy, for it means not going along with others and taking bribes or putting one’s well being on the line to do the right thing, here again, the capitalism system/ideology actually normalizing or even encouraging immoral behavior. The bench speaks to this, but we also get suggestions that Dima and his father refuse to do what other people do, steal, cheat, resort to predatory behavior to both survive and get ahead; Dima’s mother (Olga Samoshina) mentions how the father wouldn’t even steal “pipes” to replace broken ones.
Of course, this becomes magnified with Dima’s desire to save the lives of those people living in the tenement dormitory, for taking on this basic simple act of goodness means going against higher up officials who are all on the take and have utterly lost their humanity. What’s astonishing is that even when he almost loses his life for this cause, when realizing that officials are still not evacuating the building, he becomes a one man crusader and tries to evacuate them himself.
And he succeeds for a moment but when it is apparent to the people housed in this building that the building’s collapse isn’t happening right then and there, they turn on Dima and beat him to at least unconsciousness. The last image is of an unconscious (dead?) Dima lying on the ground as the tenants go back into a building that we all know is going to collapse soon.
Defining a Humanity Even Worth Saving
In this bleak ending, Bykov gives us two other complex issues, first that most of these people in the tenement dormitory don’t seem worthy of saving and that in beating Dima so badly, we can see how narrative art forms can give us what seems and what is.
In terms of the former, with seemingly most of the tenants in the building, Bykov doesn’t give us some romantic representation of poor destitute people, most of these people really aren’t savory individuals. The alcoholic father who beats his wife and daughter seems representative of the norm (and the adolescents who repeatedly destroy the bench), which is reinforced by kids who are smoking pot to a point of catatonia, disrespecting anyone who chastises them. One drunken man even seems to give Fedotov (Boris Nevzorov) permission to let him die: “And if the building collapses, I don’t give a fuck as well. This is no life anyway, is it?”
Of course, this sea of discontent and unsavory, or in the case of the wife beater, horrible human beings, is Bykov not making this choice easy for us. Bykov clearly wants us to suture our point of view with Dima’s and along with him make the right choice, but it isn’t hard to see that Fedotov is right too that people “stink,” that they aren’t worth saving. Even Dima’s wife and mother seem to think that Dima should just turn his back on them and let them die.
But what Bykov forces us to see, through the character of Dima, is that (A) these people are this way for a reason, because they have lost their humanity in an inhumane world that has dehumanized them, but more importantly, that (B) every human life should be seen as sacred less we begin to lose what being human means, that any value placed should make human beings the only thing of real value, or, well, life on Earth in general! In other words, if we see some (unsavory) lives as disposable, then that becomes a slide into seeing all (“low”) lives disposable. And if that happens, then we have not only lost our own humanity, we have allowed for a core tenant of what a moral civilization should be based on, the sacredness of human life. Of course, one must stress that there are good people living in that building as well!
In terms of the latter point (what seems and what is), what narrative art works such as The Fool does, is give us the inside complexity of an act. Taken out of context, the tenants probably do think that Dima getting them outside into the cold, with no alternative, is him acting in bad faith. We know from his journey to getting to this point that he is acting in good faith and is essentially sacrificing everything to save these people. Such a view can’t but force us to see that every act has a deeper side to it, that we should never base our view on what seems. What seems is not always what is. (I do wonder if this last scenario is a weakness in the film, the better strategy perhaps being to have Dima try to empower the tenants to save themselves, organize them, inform them, let them save themselves rather than making it an individual saving them.)
Of course, the other message here is a hopeful one, that the world has individuals such as Dima in it, fighting to keep humanity on the right track, to put people before material wealth and other self-interests, to once again make human life sacred not disposable. In this way, Dima becomes an allegorical figure, representing the ideal of humanity.
Because these tenement building people’s last hope for survival has fallen, the film’s bleak message seems clear, that until humanity saves itself — shifts to a more life affirming way of thinking and being, end dehumanizing capitalism and its ingrained (self) destructive mode of existence — it will fall, as we know this building will eventually fall and end the lives of a people whose lives in this allegorical tale represent all of humanity, also on the brink of collapse.