D_B wrote:This is specifically in reference to aox's post, but may refer to others too - I have been meaning to post this for a long time, but only just registered on this site, so....
1. What was the plot/scheme?
(I am not an expert in the laws of land ownership in the Soviet era, but to the best of my knowledge....)
In the soviet era (Hungary was a 'satellite' of the USSR) private ownership of land was at best, frowned upon. In general, the government owned the land and in rural areas 'collective farms' were created in which several people were assigned by the government to farm a given piece of land. In the rosiest interpretation it was a 'utopian' idea that people would be happier this way, sharing their labors, etc. In a more harsh interpretation it was brutal authoritarianism...
In the beginning of Satangango, the USSR has fallen, Hungary has become an independent, capitalist nation, and the country is in a process of 'privatizing' the land. The farm workers have been named its owners, because when the land is sold they all receive an equal share of the profits.
. . .
Once he has sold them on a 'dream' and he gets all their money, Irimais shifts gears and we move from 'communism' to 'authoritarianism' OR 'capitalism' (take your pick) where Irimais essentially cons the farmers into giving up their own free will - he becomes their 'master' - ordering them all off into separate destinies - doling them out what had been their own money in drips and drabs.
As for the police station at the end: I can't say for SURE, but my reading of it is that even though Hungary has supposedly become a 'free' country - decades of citizens informing on each other and the bureaucracy designed to handle that has a life of its own. It would seem the police who had taken Irimais in let him go on condition that he inform on the people from the collective. (I would add, I interpret the Doctor as somebody who spent his life as a government-paid informant- although without anyone left to inform on he seems to be up a creek).
Thanks for this long post. I have found that reading Krasznahorkai's novel clears up a number of issues. This was also the case with Tarr's "Werckmeister Harmonies," based on K's "Melancholy of Resistance," and it is equally true of "Satantango," based on the eponymous novel. I read the latter last fall in German translation (Krasznahorkai has said that his Hungarian translates best into German).
As for the film being set in the post-Soviet era; shot in 1994, it is post-Soviet, but the novel was published in Hungarian in 1985, i. e., when Hungary was still communist, although I believe I am correct in saying that it was the most liberalized of the Soviet-bloc countries. In the novel we read that the farm (Siedlung) has been "dissolved" (Aufgelöst). We are never told that it was a state-owned collective farm but one assumes as much. In both the novel and the film the state is present only in the form of the police. The money that Irimias and Kraner return with at the beginning of the film is the wages for the entire farm for the previous eight months. Most of the people who worked on the farm have already left. Those who remained are dead-enders and drunks.
The film follows the novel very closely, but in the scene between Irimias, Petrina and the police captain, much dialogue has been added in the film. Yet in the novel it's very clear: they have been released from prison and have not yet looked for work. The Police Captain issues a subpoena ordering them to appear and tells them: "You will work for me, is that understood?" He threatens to put them back in jail, and orders them to return two days later, but we are never told in either the novel or the film that they have actually done that. It is confirmed only in the film’s final scene, where we see two comically banal police clerks preparing a report based on the intelligence provided by Irimias and Petrina, fill with contemptuous characterizations of Irimias’s gullible victims—only then does it become clear that they are indeed working for the state. As for surveillance and entrapment, it is surely significant that three of the six chapters in the first part of the novel refer to spiders and spider webs, In the final chapter of part one we are told that the tavern is covered with fine spider webs on everything, but strangely no one has ever seen a spider! The gullible farm workers, who thought they were gaining freedom in a new collective enterprise, are still under the surveillance and manipulation of the state, but is it being done through the agency of the criminal Irimias. Futaki is the only one who comes to realize that Irimias is not to be trusted. I never figured out the explosives myself, but it is clear that despite working as an informer for the state police apparatus Irimias is free to pursue his own criminal schemes.
The whole ironic point of the novel and the film, as I see it, and why it called a tango, with the chapters ascending from I to VI in the first part, and then numbered in reverse sequence, from VI to I, in the second part, shows that while they are in another location, they are, in terms of their freedom and independence, right back where they started, minus the cash that they stupidly turned over to Irimias. In the German translation the final chapter is entitled “The Circle is Closed.”
This circular pattern extends even to the narration of the novel itself. The last two pages of the novel repeat the first two pages verbatim. They are being written by the doctor; he is the author of the story we have read. This conclusion of the "tango" was not evident to me in the film. There is nothing to indicate that the doctor is a police informer. He is "the intellectual", the "historian" in the community. Nothing in the book suggests that his meticulously kept diary, full of details, is intended for the police. He has been suspended from medical practice. His diary, we are told, is his effort to preserve his memories, it is a bulwark against a world where everything is in a state of moral and physical disintegration and decay.
Both Tarr and Krasznahorkai have made clear that their work is not just about or even primarily about Hungary. It's above all a fable about human gullibility and manipulability, our desperate need to believe in utopian visions. Irimias’s tactic is to appeal to a dream of a collective enterprise, not an individualistic capitalist one. The seductive eloquence of his brilliantly manipulative speech show him to have the makings of a masterful politician--or dictator. While reading the book I couldn't help but see parallels with the political situation in the United States (although the Republicans, thankfully, have no one with Irimias's silver tongue, but with such a gullible electorate they may not need that!). If the Republicans regain control of the Presidency and the Senate and keep the House, however, it will be Satantango indeed! Truly a novel and film for our times!
