At the press conference following the Cannes premiere of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, someone asked Robert De Niro about his character, a kind of boss with a tricky psyche. “It’s the banality of evil,” he said, describing the character’s moral ambiguity. “That’s what we have to look out for. Of course we see it today. We all know who I’m going to talk about, but I won’t say his name.” (Everyone knew who he meant.)
The banality of evil was a theme at Cannes this year. De Niro’s statement came shortly after the premiere of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, sending Cannes critics into a frenzy over the same phrase. This film – which I have suggested might best be understood as an adaptation of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, even more so than the Martin Amis novel on which it is loosely based – at first glance doesn’t have much in common with Killers of the Flower Moon”. Glazer’s film is a short, concise horror film that commemorates the Holocaust by keeping it offscreen; Scorsese’s film is epic, gory and ruthless in its depiction of a series of murders from a century ago.
However, they often rhyme thematically. Both are about mankind’s ability to exterminate one another while fooling themselves into doing the right thing. Both are about atrocities so heinous they are difficult to comprehend. And both seem incredibly contemporary at a time when prejudice, racism and fascism are on the rise around the globe.
Robert De Niro with Martin Scorsese and Chief Standing Bear at the Killers of the Flower Moon press conference in Cannes.
Mohammed Badra/Getty Images
But with all due respect to De Niro (who gives one of his best performances in Killers), only one of those films is actually about the banality of evil, and it’s not the one he stars in. An important part of Arendt’s argument in “Eichmann in”. Jerusalem lies in the fact that her subject, Adolf Eichmann, the chief architect of the Third Reich’s euphemistically “Final Solution,” was profoundly empty and had no discernible motivation or conscious vengeance against the Jewish people he was destroying. (That’s also the chilling feeling you get from the characters of The Zone of Interest.) Arendt observed Eichmann in court, where he defended that he was simply following orders. What struck her was his lack of ego, intelligence, or personal motivation. This evil, she wrote, is banal because it is hollow and is largely perpetuated by people who have given up thinking and allowed themselves to exist in a corrupt and deadly system.
That’s not the case with William Hale, De Niro’s character in Killers of the Flower Moon. Of course, Hale is complicated – as De Niro noted, he seems genuinely in love with the Osage people, while at the same time actively plotting to kill them and steal their wealth. But his motivation is obvious, his ego knows no bounds, his arrogance and manipulation and his belief in his own superiority are on a level to rival any crime boss from a Scorsese movie. He is indeed somewhat reminiscent of the former president, whom De Niro declined to name; A one-line speech (in which Hale brags about his access to the best lawyers) even seems modeled after Trump. But what he (and Trump) is not is banal.
That doesn’t make Hale any less evil than Eichmann, for example. But it makes him an extraordinary person that people are still talking about a hundred years later. If the characters of The Zone of Interest are downright evil, then Killers of the Flower Moon’s antagonists are downright evil, even those who aren’t masterminds. (Leonardo DiCaprio’s character Ernest Burkhart shares some key qualities with Eichmann — he’s not very smart, he’s easily influenced, and he doesn’t like to think — but he’s absolutely driven, loud, and passionate about money.)
Cannes is an interesting place to contemplate evil, both in its banal and in its extraordinary forms. At the end of its 76th edition, the festival remains the most prestigious in the world. Its iconic red carpet draws dense crowds who stake out a spot hours before the premieres (18, for Killers) just for the chance of star-gazing at Meat. Filmmakers around the world consider a seat at Cannes to be the pinnacle of their career. The festival is aware of its cachet of being the place where artists attain a kind of immortality. As you stroll through the city of Cannes during the festival, posters of current and past stars will be hung all over the red carpet, just to remind you that this is where the legends walked.
Johnny Depp and Maiwenn on the red carpet for the Jeanne du Barry opening gala in Cannes.
Samir Hussein/WireImage
That means the festival wields near-unprecedented royal power, an authority that festival director Thierry Frémaux seems both to love and to deny. Frémaux always manages to be controversial, but for 2023 he has reached new heights by directing controversial French director Maïwenn’s historical drama Jeanne du Barry, about King Louis XV’s favorite lover, for the festival’s opening gala. programmed. Opening films at Cannes are often not very good; Jeanne du Barry is very bad indeed, amazingly bad. But the enthusiasm for the film ahead of the festival was almost entirely a credit to its director, known for her vocal anti-MeToo stance and recent attack on a journalist, and its star Johnny Depp in his first major role since his court circus dispute with ex-wife Amber Heard.
Before the film premiered, Frémaux claimed in an interview that he had no idea why this was controversial. “I don’t know anything about the image of Johnny Depp in the US,” he said, claiming he has only “one rule: freedom of thought and freedom of speech and action within a legal framework.” He claimed he was “a person who didn’t take the slightest interest in this highly publicized trial.” When reporters wanted to know why Depp was in the film, Frémaux said, “You should ask Maïwenn.”
It was an odd answer to a relatively simple question, for reasons that have little to do with either Depp or Maïwenn. The Cannes Opening Gala isn’t just a random screening at the local multiplex cinema; It is a position of honor, a signal of what an institution values. That’s what makes Frémaux’s answer so strange: it’s one thing to choose to give platforms to two deeply controversial personalities, but quite another to refuse to defend them by explaining that choice. That’s particularly odd given the festival’s rather ostentatious decision not to screen new films by Woody Allen or Roman Polanski, two of his past favorites. Shrugging one’s shoulders at these facts not only belittles the power Cannes holds, it’s a sideways insult to the filmmakers – and comes dangerously close to claiming they’re just following orders.
But Cannes is not a single man. Throughout the festival, there were other reflections on moral ambiguity and outright badness, both in the Scorsese and Glazer films, as well as in many others. Todd Haynes’ “May December” is about a pivotal relationship loosely based on the infamous case of Mary Kay Letourneau, who spent seven and a half years in prison after being convicted of child rape after having a sexual relationship with a 12-year-old in sixth grade class had been sentenced class. She then married him and eventually had six children with him. May December imagines a fictionalized version of the couple (played by Julianne Moore and Charles Melton) after many years of their marriage when they are visited by an actress (Natalie Portman) who is researching a role. The film is funny and cheesy and off-balance, but never loses its intentionally queasy undertone; Something bad happened here, people have been and are being exploited and the mental exercises shown are extraordinary and in some ways very familiar. Clichés about love and romance can’t quite shake it all off, and the film wants us to linger in the uneasiness.
Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore at May December, Todd Haynes’ new film which premiered at Cannes.
Netflix
Such was the case with Wang Bing’s extraordinary documentary Youth (Spring), which revolves around the lives of young people, mostly in their late teens or early 20s, working in China’s textile mills, making cheap clothes. The film’s three and a half hour runtime is dotted with pop music in the background and lyrics full of dizzying romantic fantasies; Meanwhile, the workers in the foreground live very differently, casually speaking of sexual assault and exploitation by bosses while simply living the best possible life under the circumstances.
Justine Triet’s incredible Anatomy of a Fall hinges on how the legal system uses euphemisms about “opinion” and “facts”, memory, gender and love to manipulate the meaning of justice. In “How to Have Sex,” a debut by Molly Manning Walker, a young English woman on holiday with her friends discovers how cruel some male acquaintances can use language to cover up bad behavior. At its core, About Dry Grasses by the great Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan is about a teacher who feels comfortable with the misogyny around him, despite feeling that he is above the people of his village. Sean Price Williams’ “The Sweet East” is a fast-paced tour of the dumbest underbelly of American society: white supremacists, misogynist violence, a world that gleefully sexualizes young women. Or there is “Monster” by master filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda, a story that twists and turns again and again and only towards the end reveals how much it is about the power of lazy language to distort a child’s self-image. Even “The Idol,” Sam Levinson’s new HBO show (two episodes of which premiered in Cannes), takes on the theme in its own way, embodying the same ferocious hatred of young women in the pop industry that she seems intent on impaling.
The list goes on; What’s striking is how often this year’s Cannes films have actually been about the simple banality of evil perpetuated or committed by ordinary people who have left thinking behind and instead followed the system in which they find themselves. You can’t derive a proclamation about the future from a selection at a film festival, but the lack of exceptional and identifiable villains was, at least in my opinion, striking despite Killers of the Flower Moon. If there is one message coming out of Cannes this year, confusing as it may be, it is that the world is designed to make evil as easy as possible. Whether we choose to think clearly about it is the question that lingers long after the lights go out and the red carpet is rolled out again.