Berlin

Kusama’s Berlin

When Karen Kusama decided that her second feature film after the award-winning indie hit Girlfight of 2000 would be based on the global TV cult hit Aeon Flux, she deliberately set out to make a filmic “companion piece,” a “parallel separate entity” to, and not simply an adaptation of, the MTV animation series created by Korean American Peter Chung. ⁴ What Kusama did not want to take on board was Chung’s relentlessly bleak vision, preferring the utopianism expressed in Aeon’s culminating voice-over: “now we can move forward, to live once, for real, and then give way to people who might do it better” [italics added]. Unlike the eponymous protagonist of the original TV series, who is a cruel, impossibly narrow-waisted dominatrix involved in a mutually sadomasochistic relationship with Trevor Goodchild, the technocratic leader of the walled city of Bregna, and who is violently killed off in each episode of the shorts (although not in the half-hour episodes, with one exception), Kusama’s Aeon would not hurt a fly, or would prefer not to. This point is made quite literally in the opening sequence. Each of Chung’s episodes begins with the lashes of an animated eye snapping down and trapping a fly. Kusama’s Aeon is equally quick, but she lets the fly her eyelashes have trapped go. She is not a black widow, Venus flytrap or any of the other castrating creatures that populate the mainstream (male) sci-fi imaginary, ⁵ but rather an all-too-human being of flesh and feelings, forced to respond to a dystopian set of circumstances not of her making but also not beyond her control. Played by a top-fit Charlize Theron fresh from her Oscar-winning performance in the 2003 Monster and sporting a skin-tight black bodysuit and an equally slick, pointy black haircut, Kusama’s Aeon is not the rootless, nihilistic loner Chung’s is. On the contrary. She has a kid sister, Una, who means the world to her, and there is a touching scene after the opening sequence of them shopping together at an outdoor market. Government thugs murdering Una motivates Kusama’s Aeon to assassinate Goodchild. However, in the attempt she learns that he is in fact the love of her life and that this love stretches back seven generations. As is underscored repeatedly on the accompanying features on the DVD, Kusama’s Aeon Flux is in the first instance a love story, and it needed a setting that would provide an appropriately authoritarian yet “organic” (another word that features prominently in the DVD interviews) environment in which love could take root and literally blossom, like the cherry trees in the climactic shootout, to which we will return shortly.

Baudrillard advises us in America to move outward from the screen toward the city:

The American city seems to have stepped right out of the movies. To grasp its secret, you should not, then, begin with the city and move inwards to the screen; you should begin with the screen and move outwards to the city. (cited in Law, 2008, p. 522)

Doing so, we find that the Berlin sites that Kusama chose for her film provide a balance of organicism and authoritarianism while at the same time drawing on various layers in the city’s troubled history to create a vision that is convincingly futuristic. For example, to evoke the everyday life of Bregna’s citizens, the luscious 18th-century terracing of Sanssouci, absolutist monarch Friedrich the Great’s summer palace in Potsdam, which made its film debut in Aeon Flux (a fact the filmmakers repeat with evident pride in the DVD interviews), is used in the opening sequence of the film. The state-provided apartment complex Una and her husband live in is the Bauhaus museum Walter Gropius designed. Una’s husband, one of the good-guy scientists, is shown in a tropical greenhouse setting with a panoply of bright orange bird-of-paradise flowers. The ethereal “handler space” in which the assassins get their instructions from an angelic-looking red-haired being is the Langhans building, which dates back to 1790 when it was built to house a veterinarian school (Tierarzneischule) founded by Friedrich the Great in order to provide better care for his horses. Trevor Goodchild’s governmental inner circle, on the other hand, does not meet in a garden but rather among the towering columns of the interior of the Crematorium Baumschulenweg. Aeon infiltrates these governmental quarters via the equally imposing Trudelwindkanal, which was used as an aerodynamic testing facility for Nazi aircraft (Deutsche Versuchsanstalt für Luftfahrt). The place she and Trevor reconnect is the underground historicist brick waterworks in Friedrichshagen, which, on its completion in 1893, provided the city with state-of-the-art technology using sand to filter and purify the Berlin water supply—the purity of his undying feelings for her, which motivated his scientific attempts to transfer DNA and thus prolong human life in its singularity, is thus reflected in their surroundings. The play of absolutist and organic “good guy” locations off against more modern and massively monumental concrete “bad guy” ones is integrated into the central site of the film: Trevor’s private quarters—in reality Berlin’s Tierheim animal shelter facility, which was designed by architect Dietrich Bangert and went into service in 2001. With its concrete rimmed courtyard, this remarkable structure was able to incorporate both governmental monumentality and domestic organicism. The grove of cherry trees in the facility’s courtyard, which picks up on the vegetational, good-guy associations of Una’s husband’s birds of paradise, is one of the rare times in the film that the filmmakers added anything substantial to an existing location or used background CGI (computer-generated imagery). However, the presence of a grove of blossoming cherry trees was deemed crucial enough for the climactic shoot-out that one was specially constructed.

From this account it should be clear that Kusama’s Aeon Flux does not offer a typical dystopian sci-fi cinematic urban imaginary. While it might open with the usual conventions describing how the world in the film has gotten into the totalitarian mess it has (“2011. A virus kills 99% of the world’s population. A scientist, Trevor Goodchild, develops a cure. The five million survivors live in Bregna, the last city on earth. The Goodchild dynasty rules for 400 years. Rebels emerge to challenge the Goodchild regime”), it goes on to rub the genre against the grain to expose a particular kind of rootedness, which did not endear it to the fans of Peter Chung’s dystopian vision of Bregna. Part spaceship, part laboratory, part Barbican, and part Blade Runner, Chung’s Bregna is as lacking in nurturing, tender qualities as its protagonist. While both Bregnas are highly advanced civilizations of great technological sophistication, only Kusama’s contains spaces of comfort and contemplation: tropical gardens, markets, and cherry groves—spaces, in other words, that help humans buttress the alienation of modern life. In creating a world of the future, what Kusama in fact did was recreate a world of the past, and not just any past but one associated with an emancipatory culture noted for historically providing Jews, women and other minorities access to means of cultivating their own livelihoods. Her vision of Berlin is of a historically saturated cityscape shielded from the globalizing pressures that marked the latter parts of the 20th century. In order to see what was shielded out of that vision and to appreciate how much this view contrasts with the dystopian male urban vision of global cyberpunk, I next compare it with the Berlin in Wimmer’s Equilibrium.

Wimmer’s Berlin

Unlike the verdantly terraced, enlightened Bregna with which Kusama’s film opens, Wimmer’s Libria begins by evoking a war-ravaged cityscape with ruins reminiscent of those cleared by the Trümmerfrauen (rubble women) in the aftermath of World War II. This bunker-like, mostly CGI-generated city may look like Metropolis to the uninitiated, but Wimmer is quick on the DVD Director’s Commentary to point out that, on the contrary, not Fritz Lang but Hugh Ferriss, an early 20th-century conceptual artist, was the source of his inspiration for Equilibrium’s cityscapes, that is, the same Ferriss known for influencing the cityscapes in Batman and Kerry Conran’s Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Whatever its inspiration, Wimmer’s world of tomorrow with its massive, imposing grey stone settings unmistakably hearkens back to the monumental architectural achievements of the fascist period. Wimmer seems to be deliberately conjuring up images that ensure that the city in his film is associated with the Berlin that Alexandra Ritchie has termed Faust’s Metropolis—a Berlin notably absent in Kusama’s Aeon Flux. Not only does the establishing shot of Equilibrium’s cityscape echo Lang, the creeping fascist undertones of that era are underscored by including a Zeppelin-type dirigible in the initial cityscape and then cutting, first, to a flag with an iron-cross-like symbol in the center that looks remarkably like a swastika and then, should any doubts still persist, to a clip of Hitler addressing troops who sit listening to him in the same type of drill formation as the Librians are shown listening to their leader in. That the scene itself was actually not shot in Berlin does not alter its imaginary fascist connections but rather strengthens them; it was filmed in Rome, specifically at the Esposizione Universale Romana, or EUR, the area where Mussolini had planned to host a world exhibition celebrating Fascist Italy. Scheduled for 1942, the plans were abandoned when the war broke out, with only a few of the monumental structures completed. As Wimmer relates in the commentary that accompanies the DVD,

I chose Rome because I kind of shot Berlin out, and Rome was the only other place that had a similar fascist, sort of neoclassical, uh, fascist take on neoclassical architecture that, you know, Hitler’s production designers had sort of invented, and so we had to go there.

Implicitly offering credence to the argument that what was particular about Nazism was that it made architecture into an ideology (cf. Haag Bletter, 2001; Miller Lane, 1968), Wimmer explicitly identifies the stark, obsolete architecture of the Nazi period as something Berlin offered that no other city could: “That spare architecture does convey a sense of power and a sense of the whole being more important than the individual,” he says.

But it also is an architecture that pretty much disappeared after World War II. You don’t see it in the rest of the world so it feels uniquely frozen in time, which is precisely the feeling I wanted for Libria. ⁶

Wimmer and one of his producers, Lucas Foster, who also offers a commentary on the DVD, make no bones about how much they “absolutely loved” Hitler’s architecture and how perfect they found it for the film. As though a bit embarrassed by the effusiveness of his praise for the Olympic Stadium built for the infamous 1936 games—he exclaims: “We just loved it. We saw it, and we were like, my God, this is made of granite and stone and limestone, and it seems permanent, and we want to get this on film”—Foster goes on to clarify: “We clearly don’t admire the Nazis but some of the buildings that they built just, it’s amazing the permanence that they have. You know, there’s no building like them anywhere else.” Wimmer agrees that Nazis were actually “fairly cultured” and “contributed a lot to design.”

Given its setting, one is not surprised that Libria is, indeed, a fascist society ruled by a dictator called, with a bluntness rivaling that of the Hitler clip, the Father. Images of the Father are everywhere in Libria: on televisions in homes, on the walls of offices, outside on screens, and even on the Zeppelin overhead—a much more powerful cult of personality than Bregna’s Trevor Goodchild, who appears only on a Japanese-style flag before transforming into the main love interest. Libria’s Father “wields power through a group of Ninja-like ‘clerics’ who enforce his vision of peace through the chemical control of all emotion,” ⁷ and the plot revolves around the highest ranking of these clerics, John Preston—played by a top-fit Christian Bale en route from American Psycho to Batman with slicked-back dark hair and a high-collared black Matrix raincoat. ⁸ One day Preston accidentally knocks his morning dose of Prozium off the bathroom counter, and it shatters on the floor. When he cannot get a replacement because a terrorist attack closes the Equilibrium Center (a CG-enhanced version of the back of the Olympic Stadium known as the Glockenturm or bell tower), he begins to experience emotions. These emotions are set off in the brutal literalism of the film in terms of puppy love. Preston, who proves from the opening to the climactic fight scenes that he is as speedy and molecular as his name would suggest, is confronted with two creatures faced with extermination because their kind is capable of, in fact renowned for, generating feelings. While he is able to save the dog, who licks his face hopefully, the incineration of the woman, who did not respond with a kiss to his stroking of her face, fuels his determination to bring about the regime’s end. The result of Preston’s awakening is not, however, the enlightened bringing down of walls, the note on which Aeon Flux ends, but rather a storming-of-the-Bastille-style palace (actually EUR) revolt made possible by his taking down of the man who has been running things behind the screen of the Father, namely the Vice-Counsel, whose very title is intended to radiate the evil he represents. After making short shrift of the Father’s black-helmeted security personnel in their black trench-coats in a scene straight out of the Matrix, Preston, now conspicuously clad all in white à la Bruce Lee in The Chinese Connection, ⁹ enters the inner chamber of power, which is decked out to appear Rococo with marble pillars, a dignified chandelier and vaguely Baroque paintings on the walls with white flailing figures against dark backgrounds. ¹⁰ After more protracted displays of Gun Kata, a fighting technique Wimmer invented for Equilibrium, and the climactic execution of the faux-father figure, there is a final denouement, in which Preston, clutching the ribbon he had found among the incinerated woman’s effects, grimly smiles as he looks out over a Libria eerily similar to the Los Angeles in the film Kusama deliberately set her Aeon Flux against. Given how prototypical its dystopian sci-fi cinematic urban imaginary has become and that our two films position themselves against it in such diametrically opposed ways, the urban ur-dystopia of Blade Runner is next analyzed in comparison to the two films.

Future Noir Versus Future Perfect

Blade Runner focuses on the efforts of a Blade Runner named Decker, played by Harrison Ford, who is assigned to hunt down a half-dozen replicants who have managed to come to Los Angeles to track down their maker, the head of the Tyrell Corporation, and the film begins with what has become the iconic image of dystopian urbanity. A sea of orange-tinged lights stretching as far as the eye can see calls to mind flying into LAX at night, an impression encouraged by a text indicating that we are in the Los Angeles of 2019. ¹¹ This opening establishing shot of Ridley Scott’s 1982 genre-refining cult film, echoed in Equilibrium’s concluding cityscape and countered by Aeon Flux’s sunny terraced steps of Sanssouci, has served to entrench Blade Runner as

the definitive screen depiction of the nightmare future city. Its imagery has become the standard visual iconography for the science fiction metropolis: super-tall buildings; poorly-lit streets and alleys; smog; rain; heavy industry belching fire into the sky; neon advertisements; overcrowding; ethnically diverse (that is, non-white) crowds; eclectic punk-inspired costumes and hairstyles; retrofitted buildings of varying architectural styles; scavenged props, and so on. (Rowley, 2005, p. 203)

By locating her Bregna in Berlin and eschewing CGI, Kusama was able to provide her film with a setting that looks futuristic but was before neon and industrial pollution. The architecture in Aeon Flux is not of the postmodern glass-and-steel-skyscraper variety that dominates the cityscapes of Hong Kong and Tokyo and inspired Blade Runner. Rather, it is primarily concrete, wood and grass; this future looks softer and less regressive than the one in Equilibrium and Blade Runner.

The past that Blade Runner’s futurity evokes has been described as down-beat and destructive (Redmond, 2005). Time in both Blade Runner and Equilibrium has “gone back to earlier, ‘bloodier’ periods of human existence” (Redmond, 2005, p. 175): Equilibrium to a past that is blatantly fascist; Blade Runner to one that is more varied:

In this mish-mash of historical reference points, the economic and existential crisis of 1940s America is co-joined with the ‘lost civilisation’ of the Mayans . . . and the tyrannical Ancient Egyptians whose lust for power provided the model for autocratic rule that Blade Runner aspires to. (Redmond, 2005, p. 175)

In Kusama’s Aeon Flux, as we have seen, the autocratic impulses hearkened back to are at the same time enlightened. Nor can one maintain of it, as Bruno (1987) does of Blade Runner, that

The explosive Orient dominates, the Orient of yesterday incorporating the Orient of today. Overlooking the city is the “Japanese simulacrum,” the huge advertisement which alternates a seductive Japanese face and a Coca Cola sign. In the postindustrial city the explosion of urbanization, melting the futuristic high-tech look into an intercultural scenario, recreates the third world inside the first. One travels almost without moving, for the Orient occupies the next block. The Los Angeles of Blade Runner is China(in)town. (p. 66)

Kusama’s cityscape contains no noodle-shops, or any other kind of ethnic restaurants for that matter—only a market. Even the martial arts moves her characters specialize in are primarily Brazilian capoeira, gymnastics and street-fighting, rather than the kung fu, jujitsu, and other styles notably adopted in the “Asian invasion” of Hollywood action films (such as in the Matrix and Kill Bill franchises), which motivated Wimmer to invent Gun Kata.

That is not to say there are no traces of Asian style in Aeon Flux, but the ones there differ in noteworthy ways from the Asian-inspired exteriors in Blade Runner and the Asian-inspired costumes, sunglasses, and fight sequences in Equilibrium. The interiors of Trevor Goodchild’s and Aeon’s kid-sister’s apartments are minimalist Asian in their aesthetic; both radiate the wooded warmth of an elegant sushi bar. They are Asian as refracted through a tastefully modern European sensibility rather than through pan-Pacific popular culture. Perhaps most illustrative in this regard are the Asian billboards in Blade Runner and Aeon Flux. In the latter, it is a large white poster towering over the citizens of Bregna emblazoned with a portrait of a spiky-haired, autocratic-looking Trevor Goodchild gazing resolutely into the distance next to a red, flower-embossed circle evocative of the Japanese flag. This billboard first appears in the opening sequence in which Aeon’s voice-over expands on the caption about Bregna’s history. While she explains that “the Goodchilds built Bregna to ensure us a future,” we see a scan of what appears to be the Goodchild dynasty in Andy Warhol-type portraits followed by the face-embossed flag, which cuts to the civilized gardens of Sanssouci. The image appears again a few scenes later in the background after Aeon gets her orders to infiltrate and disrupt the government’s surveillance system (interestingly, the only time in the film she wears a white bodysuit; for the rest of the film, she is in black). However, the image proves merely to have been an establishing shot so that we later recognize “the leader;” we never see it again.

The “Japanese simulacrum” in Blade Runner, on the other hand, offers a more prominent and more thematically significant leitmotif. ¹² That the female Japanese face on the illuminated screen of a tall skyscraper with flowers in her hair signifies as motherly is indicated by her first appearance, which occurs immediately after Leon shoots the interrogator who asks about his mother. Unlike humans, replicants are incapable of emotional response and Blade Runners identify them by subjecting them to a test that measures how they respond to stimuli intended to generate emotional responses:

Blade Runner begins with such a test as it is being administered to Leon, a replicant who is trying to hide his identity. Leon succeeds up to a certain point, but there arises a question which he cannot handle. Asked to name all the good things that come to his mind thinking about his mother, Leon explodes, ‘My mother, I’ll tell you about my mother,’ and kills the inquirer. (Bruno, 1987, p. 71)

The second time we see the Japanese female screen mother is after Decker is taken from the Asian restaurant by the police. As they rise vertically in the police space-cruiser, Decker looks forlornly out the window into the rain, and we cut to her smiling at him; he is then shown in the cruiser eating the noodles he has brought with him from the restaurant as though encouraged to finish his supper. When Decker is flown to the Tyrrell building to interrogate Rachel, they pass the same screen both on the way there and on the way back, but both times it shows a bright-red Coca-Cola sign indicative of the corporate nature of the trip. The Japanese face then reappears to smile benevolently after Decker and Rachel’s passionate embrace, and it is pictured twice more smiling down through the roof of the Bradbury Building, in which the genetic designer J. F. Sebastian lives: first when J.F. invites in Pris, the “basic pleasure model” replicant played by Daryl Hannah, whom he has found in a garbage heap, and again when Decker arrives at the building to track down her and Roy Batty, the leader of the group of replicants whose escape and search for Tyrell drives the film’s plot. As Decker enters into the open central foyer of the great Los Angeles architectural landmark, ¹³ he looks up through the wrought-iron encased skylight to see the woman on the screen looking down and singing him something soothing. While being associated with a virtual mother further strengthens the possibility of Decker being a replicant, both she and the spider in Rachel’s dream have also been interpreted as being references to the city. ¹⁴ The spider evokes the same trauma as mention of Leon’s mother and prompts an equally violent and destructive response, ¹⁵ but the Japanese screen mother prevails (as do Decker and Rachel). She is the future noir.

Bruno attributes Rachel’s survival, her success, to the possession of a photograph: “She has a document—as we know, the foundation of history. Her document is a photograph, a photograph of her mother, hugging her, a child, against her, wakening in her the rumpled softness of, most probably, a hamburger” (Bruno, 1987, p. 61). Decker also owns photographs, which are on display on his piano and capture Rachel’s imagination. Leon, on the other hand, is unsuccessful at getting back what Roy Batty scornfully refers to as his “precious photos.” Having possession of Leon’s photos allows Decker to track down and kill Zhora, the snake-like female replicant, while Rachel shoots Leon to save Decker. Clearly, photographs are of a similar phallic significance to the replicants as Indiana Jones’s hat in that franchise and Neo’s sunglasses in The Matrix. The astute viewer quickly realizes that losing these magically powerful objects—when, for example, the wind blows off Indie’s hat or Agent Smith knocks off Neo’s sunglasses—renders the heroes vulnerable.

Bruno (1987) builds on the role of photographs in Blade Runner to establish a theoretical link between photography, history, and maternity that is also of relevance to Aeon Flux and Equilibrium:

History is that time when my mother was alive before me. It is the trace of the dream of unity, of its impossibility. The all-nourishing mother is there, yet as that which has been given up. The Imaginary exists as a loss. Photographs are documents of existence in a history to be transformed into memories, monuments of the past. Such is the very challenge of history, as Michel Foucault has pointed out. “History is that which transforms documents into monuments.” The document is for Foucault a central question of history; for Blade Runner it is the essential element for the establishment of a temporality, of perceiving past and future. (Bruno, 1987, p. 72)

Photographs, in other words, provide provenance. In Blade Runner they are the only guarantors of Decker’s past, underscoring the unreliability of memory and the possibility that he is not the human viewers initially assume him to be. In Equilibrium, it is through a photograph that Preston learns what it means to live as a feeling human being. He finds a photograph among the personal effects of the partner he is forced to eliminate for feeling, in which his partner appears together with a woman. On the back of the photograph the partner had written “Freedom,” which puzzles Preston until he has a chance to interrogate the woman and discover his own feelings for her. Photographs in Aeon Flux also provide provenance. They are the only surviving traces of the disappeared, their value indicated by an amber shell. We see one such photograph when an older man, driven to desperation and near madness, wanders through the market showing people a small yellow stone containing his daughter’s likeness and asking if anyone has seen her. “She disappeared two months ago,” he explains in a Latin-tinged accent suggestive of the Argentinean Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who took action to find the whereabouts of their children kidnapped by agents of the military government during the Dirty War years (1976-1983). The main photograph in Aeon Flux is the one Aeon finds in Trevor’s lab of herself in her previous existence as his wife. It, and learning her previous name (Kathryn), provide her with an identity; through the history Trevor shares with her, the history he has kept alive through the photo when he believed her DNA to have gone lost, she comes to know who she is.

Bruno (1987) calls to mind Barthes’s observation that

the photograph’s immobility is the result of perverse confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live. By attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive. . . . Photography, moreover, began historically as an art of the Person: of civil status, of what we might call, in all senses of the term, the body’s formality. Replicants rely on photography for its perverse confusion, as it induces the surreptitious belief and hope of being alive. (pp. 72, 73)

Photographs become necessary for the continuation of replicant life and render them oddly human; the replicants’ “assurance of a future relies on the possibility of acquiring a past . . . [on] the proof of having existed and therefore of having the right to exist” (Bruno, 1987, pp. 70-71). Because photographs can reproduce what appear to have been humans, rather than the mechanically reproduced objects that they themselves are, they can create the possibility that those pictured once actually were humans, that they had a past, a future, and therefore a history and an identity. Photographs are thus like mothers: “necessary to the claiming of a history, to the affirmation of an identity over time” (p. 71).

Why the virtual Japanese screen mother prevails in Blade Runner, a film about the identification of human-looking beings produced to provide slave labor for the colonizing of “outer” worlds, has to do with the science-fiction Frankenstein tradition of monstrous creation it is part of, in which humans (usually male scientists) take it upon themselves to create artificial life, and their god-like ambitions eventually run off the rails and result in havoc. ¹⁶ Unlike Aeon Flux, whose characters all contain human DNA and both good and bad guys aspire, and compete, to control the motherhood function of reproducing a human population, in Blade Runner and Equilibrium the mother function is depicted as that which separates humans from nonhumans. In Equilibrium, it is through the mother and her photograph that one can connect with the human and position oneself on her side in the monumental Manichean battle of good and evil, while in Blade Runner, because this is a tragic impossibility, mere mention of motherhood triggers violent destruction. ¹⁷ In Wimmer’s film, the mother is lost and all that remains of her is a satin ribbon, which Preston fingers longingly as he stares out over the embattled cityscape in Equilibrium’s final sequence. In Kusama’s film, on the other hand, it is not the mother who is necessary for this claiming, but rather the city itself—specifically Berlin, the quintessentially modern, authoritarian-organic city. The city takes over this identity-affirming role, rendering the symbolic mother—the dirigible containing the DNA, which in the end crashes into and brings down the wall that protects Bregna from the surrounding jungle (a form of mothership if ever there was one)—unnecessary.

We can account for the differences in these cinematic urban visions with the gendered critiques of Fredric Jameson’s analysis of modernism and postmodernism. Camilla Griggers, for example,

argues that “postmodernism” must mean something very different for a female audience than for a male one, since the experience of twentieth-century modernity has been so different for women. Jameson’s view of modernism as an artistic movement of progressive resistance to industrial society (1983) speaks little to women’s experience of the repressive material discourse that addressed them as wives and mothers during the same period. Postmodernism . . . in representations of women for a female audience, demonstrates the anxiety of a break with motherhood experienced by the new generation of middle-class women in the post-war period. . . . For women it is not Jameson’s loss of a sense of history that is the problem, but the lived history of a loss of sense. (cited in Bradby, 1993, p. 159)

It is precisely this anxiety we find in Kusama’s Aeon Flux, the plot of which hinges on the discovery of the fact that every newborn child in Bregna is actually a clone created with recycled DNA so that instead of dying, individuals are reborn and newborns carry the traces of their antecedents’ memories. Trevor’s evil brother, Oren, confesses in the final confrontation that his real enemy is not his brother but mother nature: “Beat death, beat nature, we’ve gone beyond you. . . . Nature’s the one who’s obsolete, not us.” Oren also sees this obsolescence in the interhuman bonds that Aeon’s kid-sister’s husband remains loyal to and, before ordering him killed, states that: “I don’t understand people like you and Trevor. Your sentimentality, your devotion to the past. Two things that are gone.” ¹⁸ Oren attempts to have all of the evidence pointing to the possibility of natural pregnancies, such as Una’s, destroyed in order to stay in power and live forever, and it’s up to Aeon to bring down both him and the dirigible which stores the DNA, which she does from the cherry grove. The film ends with the dirigible crashing through the wall to the tropical jungle that surrounds Bregna, opening up the city to a future in which its citizens can live “real” lives. We can thus understand how Berlin helps Kusama to overcome Blade Runner’s and Equilibrium’s postmodern approach to history. It replaces the mother in providing for “the affirmation of an identity over time.” No other city evokes as successfully the same sense of time having been frozen into and then released from totalitarianism and therefore has the same sense, not of possibility, but of recovery, of starting up again, as Berlin.

If contemporary cinema is any indication, we can conclude that Berlin will long be imprisoned, and its visual imaginary influenced, by the horrible events that were directed from it leading up to, during and in the aftermath of World War II. Not only do films like Downfall (Der Untergang, 2004, directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel), Valkyrie (2008, directed by Bryan Singer), and Inglourious Basterds (2009, directed by Quentin Tarantino) demonstrate the continued popularity of historical films about Hitler and Nazi Germany. As we have seen here, even in films not set in, or in any way involving, Nazi Berlin but rather only filmed on location in the city, one finds that the material memories of Berlin’s buildings exert their influence and that this historical influence has a clear gendered dimension that translates into eerily similar dark and spectacular styles with subtle yet important differences.