“Enter the Void” and The Problem of Experiencing One’s Own Death

The Ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus — typically known for a splendid ethos of decadence he never indulged or proselytized (and one gluttonous recipe website) — thought, as it turns out, a lot about death. Death is nothing to the living and nothing to the dead, he wrote. We have no reason to fear death, because we ourselves never experience it. In more recent days, a great deal of thinkers, many of them from across the great Atlantic divide, have churned out huge tomes of theory on the significant role of absence in our lives, especially that inevitable great nothing of all nothings on the misty horizon, which shapes our being to the very core, but of which we will never have any contact. Well, maybe. Gaspar Noé‘s mesmerizing new film, Enter the Void, a “psychedelic melodrama” as the French filmmaker puts it, entertains just this question: What would it look like to experience my own death? Or, to address the skeptics, what would it look like on film to imagine an astral projection bearing witness to one’s own death?

Noé is notorious for chasing unadulterated provocation in his films, but I’m going to let other writers bother with divulging details about the filmmaker’s personality. While his reputation for assaulting the viewer with unforgivable punishments — most notably that famous nine-minute scene of utterly horrific human suffering in Irreversible – nearly stopped me from seeing this film, I’d warn you, dear Hydra reader, against making such a mistake.

Enter the Void is a wild thriller that rips apart the spindled threads of consciousness and throws its fat ringed guts, all vacuous and raw, across a quixotic landscape of guarded desire and furtive escape. The film tears open the doors of perception, at least for a strobe light of shimmering moments, as we drift through the incredible camerawork over a Western never world fantasy of Tokyo, through walls, and occasionally, into the minds of deranged pulp characters trapped in a modality hovering between two spheres of carnality: crime and sex. So, let’s forget for a moment the cult of personality. I’m more interested in the notion of the void, and how Noé made an excellent film for its meditation.

The protagonist of Noé‘s twisted tale, Oscar (Nathaniel Brown), a 20-year-old smalltime American drug dealer living in Tokyo, is murdered by the police during a botched setup just twenty minutes into the film. Up until that point, we don’t just watch Oscar on the screen but actually embody his perspective from the first-person; the camera acts as a vehicle for both his body and gaze. But at first, it’s hard to even figure out that we’re thrown into the worlding body of Oscar.

A film metaphorically begins like a play — once the curtain falls, the action begins –but that’s not quite the case, as we’re subjected to watching a series of previews, and now, even methodically programmed car commercials before submerging into the alterverse of cinema. The ritual serves to hypnotize the audience into a glazed-over submission to consumption. But Noé effectively diverges our attention from the conventional fluff job with an usual introductory sequence: huge block letter names flutter in spasmodic color sequences while a nuclear ambient buzzing swirls into a driving electro bass line that hammers nails into your skull. It’s a spiraling night terror straight from the mind of a festering Burning Man devotee on the brink of complete mental breakdown, or perhaps, gone a little too far, beyond too far.

As we watch Oscar’s sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta) move around the cluttered apartment in a skimpy outfit (one that is often removed in the course of the film), the camera moves like a voyeuristic eye, as if we’re watching her through a handheld posed on Oscar’s shoulder. But, when Linda leaves, and the camera isn’t put down, we come to realize that we’re plugged directly into Oscar, already made to feel like a ghost within his shell.

Soon after Linda’s departure Oscar takes some DMT, a strong hallucinogen. The bright fluorescent lights of Tokyo’s skyscrapers, and the kitschy neon decorations shining on Oscar’s dim apartment walls, slowly dissolve into gurgling illusions, shifting in rhizomatic shape and glowing warmly with splendor.

The psychedelic effects of the drugs thus, as you might imagine, transform Oscar’s consciousness as much as our own visions on the screen. The effect is uncanny. When Oscar looks into the mirror, disturbed and searching for a semblance of stable identity, we too see ourselves watching ourselves; his voice, disengaged from his body, poses unanswerable questions to himself. Are you fucked up? Can you handle going outside? – and our inner voices, swimming silently in our heads/in the theater/in the movie, effectively merge into the abyss that yawns between Oscar and himself.

What this embodied camerawork carefully construes is an intimate relation between viewer and protagonist. It’s hypnotic and utterly uncomfortable; we’re not used to such close identification with characters in film. Our initial tendency towards empathy quickly degenerates into suffocation, and we yearn to get the hell out of the prison bars circumscribed by a lost 20 year-old’s quiet despair.

Once Oscar is shot in the chest, and crumbles into a fetal position onto a filthy urinal floor (depicted at the start of this article), the camera shot flitters out of his body like a detached spirit, liberating us from his mortal coil. Oscar wonders, in a hollow voice, whether he’s dying. The camera, now marked by a disembodied weightlessness, floating wistfully through empty space, pulls away from Oscar’s flesh, warps into an air vacuum, and follows, or haunts, or protects, the traces of those who he left behind. The camera is condemned to this world.

Then we fall into Oscar’s memories: the pact he made with Linda to always protect her after their parents died in a horrific car accident, and the incestuous desire which emerged between them, always there but absent, neglected and made impossible. We follow behind the memory of Oscar like a first-person shooter video game, where the avatar we play is stationed before us, but we’re unfairly stripped of our control, as we helplessly watch the back of Oscar’s body travel through an impressionistic gorge of haunted visions and unsalvageable traumas.

No matter what you make of the vacuousness of the characters, or the played out tropes of porn-crime noir worlds, and the silliness of the blatant reference to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, it’s hard not be fully enraptured by Noé’s voided nightmare. While emptiness often drills its way into heartache, it also thrusts us out of ourselves, and let’s us fall into the sensual fantasies of cinema — where from the comfort of our chairs we get off on glowing pixels and reverberating sounds. I’m not sure what to make of that. Redemption? Catharsis? Or just drugs?