Hal Hartley’s film, No Such Thing, tells the story of Beatrice, a young journalist looking for her fiancé cameraman who went missing on assignment. Through the magic eye of the camera and the poetic parsing of dialogue, Beatrice’s search unveils the truth behind our everyday busy lives. But what does she find?
The story is carried by the dialogue, which might have been lifted out of news reports. The characters at first seem one-dimensional or allegorical. But as the story unfolds they become lenses through which we recognize deeper stories. Beatrice (Sarah Polley) is innocent and naive, acting from the integrity of her heart. But she also feels otherwordly. The Boss (Helen Mirren), is the Editor, intent on fame through infamy or misfortune. Apparently a monster killed the cameraman. Although there is no such thing, The Boss wants the story covered just in case. Callous and calculating, everything is reduced to the bottom line. Evil witch or modern opportunist, take your pick.
Beatrice’s journey to find her lost fiancé is reminiscent of Red Riding Hood. Her limp body pulled from the crash wreckage is Princess Aurora in Sleeping Beauty. When she willingly undergoes surgery without anesthesia, she is Christ, Odin and the Bride of Frankenstein in one. She miraculously recovers, and well-wishers touch her like a Madonna figure. In some sense she is outside of life, having miraculously survived, been rescued and recovered, like Frankenstein’s monster. She wanders to the edge of the world seeking her love, reminiscent of Orpheus descending to Hades for Euridice. Her eventual pairing with the Monster is like Persephone married to Hades, living in Hell for six months.
Ironically the Monster (Robert John Thurke) is the most ambiguous character. He’s funny, irreverent and disdainful. He is Grendel, indestructible, watching the sordid evolution of humanity, secretly jealous of their capacity for transcendence and bent on their destruction. Living in Iceland,the setting of Beowulf, the first known myth, he seems an anachronism with his American accent. And of course when he and Beatrice meet, it’s Beauty and the Beast. She, like he, has nothing to fear, having faced death. And like him she is marginalized. The media want to make her a miracle icon, but she is impervious to their wiles. She doesn’t buy the Monster’s self-pity, her naiveté having deepened to a fearlessness through her ordeal. The journey to find her fiancé takes her to the ends of the earth, like Dante’s journey through Hell.
Even though they don’t become lovers, she and the Monster form a pact. He needs her to find the one person who can release him from his joyless existence. She binds him to renounce killing until they find Dr. Artaud, whose name suggests King Arthur. As they journey back to the world, an echo of Dante’s Purgatory, the covenant between them deepens. Beatrice’s succumbing to the glitzy media party seduction at first seems out of character. But it’s all part of The Boss’s enchantment. Infected with the media cult of popularity, she becomes inflated with her sexuality and forgets about the Monster and the meaning of their journey back to civilization. The Monster suffers from this by being waylaid by the Department of Defense, his indestructibility seen as a possible offensive weapon. Although he can’t die, he does weaken and feel pain.
Dr. Artaud, the Monster’s nemesis, is also apparently insane. He is consumed with quantum physics, muttering “all matter is one” repeatedly. Hilarious with his coke-bottle glasses and social awkwardness, he is King Arthur, Beowulf and the Holy Fool. Artaud is saddened by his ability to destroy the Monster. He understands he is the Monster’s only other friend. His apparently incoherent babbling actually suggests the meaning of this incredible collage. The space between matter is where life exists. The line between wave and particles is ineffable, indefinable. This is where all matter is one. Even though humanity has created the Monster to understand its existence; he has compassion on the burden we’ve placed on this creature.
Dr. Artaud’s solution brings us to the film’s title, No Such Thing. This is how The Boss first responds to reports of the Monster’s existence. And this is how Beatrice first greets the Monster’s introduction: “There’s no such thing as monsters. There must be a scientific explanation, genetics or something, for why you are the way you are.” Interestingly, the Monster lives in an abandoned nuclear missile silo, a modern fable about the monsterliness of our lust for war, and our denial of it. When the world finally meets the Monster through exclusive media interviews, he doesn’t seem real, having been reduced to a celebrity.
The doctor’s secret weapon to destroy the Monster is based on the theory that he doesn’t exist. But when the Monster is strapped into the machine of lenses that will finally destroy him, we are reminded of Beatrice’s horrific surgery earlier on. In a sense she doesn’t exist either, living a marginalized life. And in the journey to help her friend meet his end, she has indeed fallen in love. The movie ends with them looking at each other as the Eradicator completes its task. We don’t know whether he has been destroyed or not. We do know he’s found love, and that so has Beatrice. Perhaps there is no such thing as annihilation?
To tell a movie encompassing nearly every fable is an ambitious goal . The characterizations are a perfect blend of realism and allegory. Helen Mirren is unrelentingly narcissistic. Thurke plays a weary monster, with just the right mix of swagger and despair. Polley’s Beatrice conveys how in the eyes of love we are all remade. Julie Christie plays Beatrice’s compassionate doctor. The threads of love and suffering bind all these stories within a story together. One can lead to another; they can both transform or destroy us. With our world filled with examples of both, we find, along with Beatrice, how these myths are always living inside. It’s when we realize there is no such thing as no meaning to life, that meaning suffuses everything, that we can begin to live with integrity like Beatrice, to act from within, from inside ourselves, respond as we truly are, instead of how we’re expected to act. We can face the monster that we are, or the ones we meet in our days, and look at them without fear. Not without a long journey, not without a lot of pain. But we can be willing to accept the pain for the sake of the resulting deeper union.