Filantropica

This article started, like all good things these days, on irc :

mircea_popescu actually, if anyone cares to explore this topic, i've wtf'd my foreign slaves with "filantropica", a romanian movie of the 90s. pretty much a slice of life, could as well be a documentary.

We were discussing rape, and gender roles, which is how I got to be everyone's fave bigot. But anyway, Filantropicaⁱ is remarkable on two different lines.

First off, the beatings. As an example : the restaurant bullⁱⁱ beats the shit out of a deadbeat customer, who also happens to [pretend to] be an underpaid teacher trying to take his wife out to a restaurant for their 10th wedding aniversary. For which he's saved. And yet he can't afford to pay the bill.

That's it, nothing else, nothing more to add : your average Romanian gov't employeeⁱⁱⁱ of the 90s could not afford to go out to eat once in a decade. Period. Full fucking stop. This is how it was, this is how it should be, quite exactly. This is how it's gonna be.

"Imbogatitii tranzitiei" ie the new commercial class sprung up after the fall of communism and composed mostly of thieves, conmen and whores (again, as it was, as it always is, exactly as it should be) could and in general did buy the daughters of these schmucks on the open market for cumrag services. And trampled all over the revered, ossified relics of "culture" as post-Stalinist Romanian woodenheads misrepresented it. And did a bunch of other good and worthy, public service-y type of things.

Can you imagine the frustration ? The impotent rage ? The blind, blistering, pointless, bleating fury of a class of people that were inept and yet believed themselves in the right ? The stupid true followers of a broken ideology ? Try to imagine it, because the US is full of them today, they call themselves "progressives" and "liberals", I call them libertards, and their daughters will be sold to serve as cumrags for the "nouveau riches" as I suppose you'll call "imbogatitii tranzitiei". And they'll be sold for pennies, and they'll love it. Not in the sense of loving it, but in the sense of hating their parents even more.

If you can't imagine it, let me tell you how it goes : a harmless looking man begs, and a well fed, dangerous looking man walks right past him. That's it, Mircea Diaconu asking "if possible" in all possible meekness, and fade out. Nu se poate.

Anyway, so this guy, the story goes, judges that in fairness he ought to be able to take his wife out on the town. Except in practice, he does not. And that practice is imposed upon his libertarded delusions at the end of a fist. Which fist is connected to the restaurant bull. So our presumptious libertard gets beaten to shit, and here's where the fun starts : they all get to go on a TV show. The Jerry Springer sort of TV show.^iv

So the host asks, "well what happened ?" and the bull, meekly himself, explains that well... "guy wouldn't pay so he roughed him up a little". At which point the host calls the camera on the deadbeat, who's beaten pretty bad, and asks, "does this look like a little to you ?". But that's it, it's purely rethorical. Not for a second is it even considered, or even proposed, by the host or by anyone in the public or anywhere else that the deadbeat should not have been beaten at all. This is nonsense, it doesn't even enter anyone's head, it's not even considered, the entire thing's constructed and predicated on the notion that of course the deadbeat's getting beaten. That's a societal convention, so widely held, so fundamental that it's not even visible to the people involved. And it wouldn't have been visible to you, either, had you seen the film without me having pointed it out aforehand. Because that's how society works, and how people work : nothing's "impossible", nothing's "off limits". The limits are only in your head, and they exist for as long as anyone cares to enforce them.

This is exactly how it was. You got caught stealing ? Of damned fucking course you'd get a good beating. The police getting involved ? Of fucking course they'd get involved : if the victim couldn't beat you properly they'd give you a sound thrashing instead, and otherwise made sure you're not about to turn the tables or some stupid shit like that.

Second off - I did say two things, didn't I ? - the women. The female lead in this movie is an ex-prostitute turned something between beggar and con, and she sticks it for some random guy who she's been simply allocated. She didn't choose him in any sense, her boss just said one day this is your guy. And henceforth he was her guy. He just happened to be completely smitten by a younger girl ? She gives him advice. He needs money to get her pretend-brother out of a jam ? She gives it to him. He's tired and the movie needs a sex scene ? She puts out. They need to cuddle ? She cuddles. Anything. Anything at any time, all the time, and meanwhile she's cleaning the place.

The younger girls of today completely fail to understand this stupid shit. "But what's in it for her ?!". Nothing's in it for her. She's a woman. She's not a man, she doesn't trade. She simply... withstands. She resists. That's womanhood.

You know where that comes from ? All the way from the Greeks, baby. Get someone who understands Romanian to translate that one for you, it's important.

Anyway, the film is stupid and gimmicky and you can tell the low production values. Just like the Romania it describes.

1. 2002, by Nae Caranfil, with Mircea Diaconu, Gheorghe Dinica, Mara Nicolescu. [↩]
2. They used to have hotel bulls in New York, and railroad bulls everywhere. Look it up. [↩]
3. Here teachers work for the government. [↩]
4. Florin Calinescu was really a major figure in the talking head space of the time, so it really is something like going on Colbert's show, but whatever. [↩]