“The filmmaker, having scrupulously established the world of film noir, queers it by shattering the categories — both narrative and cinematic — of the world itself.”
I. NIGHT-BLINDNESS (OR, THE PROBLEM WITH QUEERS . . . )
Queer. Fucking queer. The word and the phrase slice through Eastern Promises. Queerness, and the fear it engenders, casts its shadow everywhere. Kirill, the scion of the film’s Russian mafia family, is obsessed with it. No surprise: he is queer. Semyon, the patriarch of the family, is obsessed with it. Again, no surprise: he is aware — and ashamed — of his son’s desires. “London made him what he is,” he opines; it is “the city of whores and queers.” He does not object to the whores, obviously, since he traffics in victimized women, but he cannot abide the queers. The same might be said of the critics: they have turned blind eyes to the queers in the film and cast their sentimental sights instead on the victimized women. Are the brave Anna and the beleaguered Tatiana more worthy of critical attention than the paranoid Kirill? Apparently so. Does meaning (and the construction of meaning) reside in the relative comfort of heterosexual organization rather than in the disquieting anarchy of queerness? Apparently so.
Critical opinion has been, to say the least, divided, and critical vision has been decidedly night-blind. Reviewers have turned to A History of Violence — a film which in no way addresses non-heterosexual themes or characters — to interpret Eastern Promises. They have responded with awe (“a rhapsodic movie directed with considerable formal intelligence and brooding power . . . very much a companion piece to A History of Violence,” Village Voice), with indifference (“a B-movie companion piece to A History of Violence,” LA Times), and with disdain (“a strangely placid and impersonal affair — like A History of Violence with half the intensity and a quarter of the critical self-awareness,” Film Monthly). While many of its thematic resemblances to A History of Violence are undeniable — family structures, loyalty, troubled identity, the double life, violence, crime and its aftermath — Eastern Promises has, at its heart, a radical subversion. It is a cunning and mutinous response to the notions of family, loyalty and identity. It is, in fact, a slap in the face of the struggle for stability, for “normality,” which is the animus of A History of Violence. It is not A History of Violence’s twin, it is its foil. It is only by being blind to the dark side of the film — the queer side, the fucking queer side — that one can see it as lacking in intensity and critical self-awareness, “an old fashioned movie,” “standard potboiler fare,” or even “an unrepentant hack-job.”1 By examining the film’s queer agenda, one sees it as extremely intense and distinctly critically self-aware.
“Queers and queerness, in life as in art, are not always instantly recognizable,” according to Richard Dyer. Problematizing queer stereotyping in film noir, he explains:
Queer stereotypes are posited on the assumption that there is . . . an essential being which is queer . . . the problem with queers is that you can’t tell who is and who isn’t — except that maybe, if you know the tell-tale signs, you can. . . . it’s not surprising that these stereotypes generate uncertainty even as they attempt to produce certainty . . . It may also be why they are so relatively widespread in noir, since they suit so well its general sense of uncertainty (97).
This ambiguous visibility of queers and queerness and the tradition in noir to relegate the queer characters to the fringes of the action may account for the critics’ blind spot in the reading of this film.
II. FIGURES IN A CLASSICAL LANDSCAPE, WITH CRONENBERG
Film noir has, in its panicked and unstable organization, two constant characteristics, to which Cronenberg — with his screen writer, Steve Knight — turns his experimental eye.
The first is the abiding presence of queerness. These films are “gut-and-gore crime stories, all fashioned on a theme with a combination of plausibly motivated murder and studded with high-powered Freudian implication” (Spicer 1). In film noir this “Freudian implication” plays out in recognizable gangster-film narratives and themes: patriarchal authority, filial obedience and lines of succession are fraught with Oedipal drama, honor among thieves is called into question, and the ties of family and culture that bind criminal organizations tighten and unravel. But in noir, unlike in standard-issue gangster films, these narratives and themes focus on a sometimes debilitating anxiety over the definition (and perhaps even the very existence) of “masculinity” and “normality.” The culture of paranoia endemic to the styles and stories of film noir (in contrast with the relatively uncomplicated moral — or amoral — climate of the gangster film) finds men in the throes of crises of ethics and identity, adrift in a chaotic world. In the service of this anxiety, paranoia, and anarchy, queer and queer-coded characters have always dotted the noir landscape. The literal and psychic darkness has frequently provided both a hiding place and a breeding ground for an assortment of misfits, “but it was especially welcoming, if often in subtext, to ‘perverts'” (Film Noir Studies): lurking in the shadows, they have enlivened the picture of a society in which social and moral norms are compulsively disregarded. Richard Dyer notes that “noir was one of the first places in Hollywood cinema to produce images of homosexuals on a scale that makes their presence one of its defining characteristics” (108). Eastern Promises torques film noir, whose anxieties have arguably themselves now become commonplace, predictable or complacent, into a new structural and thematic configuration. “Perverts” are brought out of the subtext, and out of the (figurative) shadows. In the spirit of radical experimentation and critical self awareness, Cronenberg — “a subversive maggot in the multiplex apple” (electric sheep) — disrupts noir, itself a narrative and stylistic queering of the Hollywood “invisible” style. In disrupting the once-disruptive, he invites us to disrupt our own interpretive strategies.3
The second is Existentialism. This philosophy is founded on a sense of the disorientation (at best, bewilderment; at worst, devastation) of the subject adrift in a world without values or moral absolutes, and devoid of meaning. Life is meaningless unless one gives it “meaning” through action. Life is valueless unless one gives it “value.” For “an alienated and confused ‘non-heroic hero'” (Spicer 2), life becomes a nightmare of randomness: meaning and logic are reduced to contingency and chance; morals and values are reduced to impulse and appetite; ethics are reduced to expediency; meaning is imposed — often in retrospect, and as mere justification — on a primitively cause-and-effect sequence of events. Nothing is clear or absolute. In this morass, demarcations between villain and hero, good and evil, and, sometimes, queer and straight, become smudged.4
“Uncertainty and chance are built into noir’s central narrative organization . . . At the most general level, homosexuality is simply one more trope in the performance of uncertainty. However, homosexuality is also central to the structure of narrative confusion in many of the films; nor is it any old trope of uncertainty” (Dyer 90, 109). Uncertainty and confusion — the uncertainty and confusion about how something is going to turn out — are certainly staples of noir narratives. But a kind of ontological uncertainty — the lack of stable or acceptable foundations on which to build one’s hopes and desires — is the uncertainty on which part of Eastern Promises‘ narrative is built. This foundation is renegade sexual desire: homosexuality — or, more precisely, queerness — is the trope of uncertainty upon which much of Eastern Promises is constructed. It is central not only to “the structure of narrative confusion” in Eastern Promises, it is central to the structural logic of the film. It is, in fact, the agent of thematic clarity, whose agenda, far from being the ultimate reinstatement of heteronormativity or heteropatriarchal stability, is a subversive but unequivocal unseating of heterosexual certainty and its replacement with what can only be called queer uncertainty. If classic film noir, though it presented audiences with images of a disturbingly queer world, finally failed to (or chose not to) dislodge heterosexual masculinity from the center of its consciousness, Eastern Promises, though it presents audiences with images of a reassuringly heterosexual world, chooses to dislodge heterosexual masculinity from the center of its consciousness and, consequently, from its narrative “resolution.” Epistemological disturbance — queer uncertainty — rather than being contained, resolved or curtailed by the narrative, is nurtured and sustained within it. It resonates far beyond the final frame of the film.
III. DOUBLE VISION?
Who is the “alienated and confused non-heroic hero”? The critical trend has been to cast Anna as the de facto heroine (though she is neither alienated nor particularly confused) since she is the innocent character, presumably the one with whom the audience identifies, who is drawn into a world of crime and bloodshed because of her noble quest to save a child. Ed Gonzalez calls Eastern Promises “the story of a woman in trouble” (Slant). Were this the whole story, any queers and queerness would be relegated to the fringes of the film’s meaning, as they have been in classic noir. So Kirill’s journey becomes the subplot, and the homoerotics of his relationship with Nikolai are backgrounded, as many reviewers maintain — in Steve Warren’s case, with an alarming blend of insight and fatuousness: “a homoerotic subplot, though non-reciprocal, suggests ‘Brokeback Mafia’ . . . Physicality between European men is often misread by American audiences, but in this case Nikolai knows how Kirill feels about him and uses it to his advantage, without having to go beyond friendly hugs” (CinemATL).
In “the story of a woman in trouble,” Kirill is merely a closet homosexual who desires his driver; Nikolai is merely an enigmatic heterosexual henchman who puts up with this attention.5 While there is no question that Anna drives an essential part of the film’s narrative, it is Kirill who, with the engineering of the killing of his cousin in the first scene of the film, claims the position as the character who sets into motion the course of events that structure the interlocking plots, taking his place among noir’s “paranoid protagonists adrift in cities that are monstrous, hallucinatory and actively malevolent” (Spicer 65).
Eastern Promises is, as Roger Ebert has noted, “not a movie of what or how, but of why” (rogerebert.com). Both the what and the why of the Anna-as-hero plot reading present no challenge: she, a midwife, embarks on a dangerous journey because her compassion and her maternal longings are aroused by the death in childbirth of the young Russian prostitute, Tatiana. In an effort to get Tatiana’s diary translated, she is drawn into a world of crime and violence, but through her association with — and attraction to — the inscrutable mob henchman, Nikolai, she saves the baby from the murderous Kirill, who (with his father, Semyon) is implicated by the diary in Tatiana’s death. Kirill’s queerness, and the narrative complications that ensue from his disavowal of it, are sidelined in what Anthony Lane calls the narrative’s “urge to pluck innocence from the embrace of evil, and to dispense punishment to those who deserve it most” (The New Yorker). In the Kirill-as-antihero reading of the film, both the what and the why are more complicated: Kirill has his cousin killed because he called him a queer and his paranoia is awakened, his rise to power (real or imagined) in the vore v zakone is threatened, and his fear of being outed (especially to his dictatorial and homophobic father, whose approval he is constantly seeking) is activated.6 He turns to his henchman and the object of his desire, Nikolai, to collude with him in keeping the double secret of his queerness and his murderousness. After Nikolai later discloses the reason for the murder (“He called him a drunk . . . and a queer”) to Semyon, Semyon asserts his heteropatriarchal authority by hatching two plans to save and control his son: Nikolai will get Tatiana’s incriminating diary from Anna, and then he will take the fall at the avenging hands — and knives — of Kirill’s enemies. The failure of the second plan leads to Semyon’s arrest and the ascendancy of Kirill in the vore v zakone with Nikolai at his side. The homoerotics of Kirill’s relationship with Nikolai are foregrounded, and the radical queering of the noir world becomes the central intelligence of the film. Citing Rabid and Videodrome, Steve Erickson writes in Gay City News that “for a heterosexual man, Cronenberg’s sensibility has always been pretty queer, attracted to ambiguous sexuality and areas where gender boundaries break down”: in the course of this narrative, queer Kirill queers — and even genderqueers — Nikolai because he desires him and can control him. And Nikolai queers, and even genderqueers, himself in order to retain access to, and control over, queer Kirill, who desires him.7
IV. GENDER IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER
The classic femme fatale is characterized by her desirability, her duplicity, and her cunning use of her own allure to manipulate. Ava Gardner’s Kitty Collins (The Killers, 1946) is described by Andrew Spicer as “the apotheosis of a mythical femininity” (91). He lists her “sloe shaped eyes, curvaceous, high cheekbones, cleft chin, full, upturned mouth, all an open sexual invitation.” Might the same not be said, queerly speaking, of Viggo Mortensen’s Nikolai’s “total gorgeousness” (Amy Nicholson, Inland Empire Weekly)? What of his “scary chiseled cheekbones and deep-set, easily wounded eyes” (Anthony Lane, New Yorker)? Certainly he extends an open sexual invitation to an unresponsive Anna at their first meeting — “go for a drink, maybe?”9 But it is Kirill with whom he goes for drinks; it is Kirill who playfully smacks him on the ass and tenderly caresses his cleft chin, it is Kirill who drunkenly supplicates himself at his feet in a tableau perilously close to a queer bootlicking scenario; it is Kirill who insinuates himself between Nikolai and a prostitute (by sliding into his lap and pushing her away) and demanding that he “fuck one of these bitches and I’m going to watch . . . I’m recommending you to my dad. I want to make sure that you’re not a fucking queer.”
The scene with the prostitute (“A sex scene voyeured by the spectre of Vincent Cassel, whose greasy Russian mobster ushers the film’s latent homoeroticism into the open,” The Lumiere Reader) has received critical mention but scant and disturbingly reductive analysis: nowhere is the critical predilection to heteronormalize the film more apparent than here.10) Ironically, it is Steve Erickson, writing for Gay City News, whose vision seems particularly clouded: “Eastern Promises emphasizes Semyon and Kirill’s homophobia, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s a relatively minor point. While the film’s relatively chaste, apart from the scene with the prostitute, there’s a subtle homoeroticism at work here. More than Watts, Mortensen is portrayed as an object of desire.”
On the contrary, while Mortensen is certainly portrayed as an object of desire, the film is deeply unchaste: in the grand guignol scheme of things, homophobia is the major point and lies at the heart of this narrative. According to Deep Focus Review critic Brian Eggert, “Vincent Cassel’s character remains shyly in question, since we’re given delicate notes to imply, perhaps, as those rumors suggested, that he is a homosexual. There’s an unsettling scene where Kirill’s sick sense of camaraderie demands that Nikolai have sex with a prostitute while he watches. And throughout the film, Kirill and Nikolai’s relationship is heavily based in touching. While this may be akin to the affection of brothers, we can’t deny how hushed Kirill becomes when his father curses homosexuality.”
How is Kirill’s open challenge to Nikolai to prove his heteromasculinity “shy” or “delicate”? How is it the expression of camaraderie, however “sick”? If the relationship between Kirill and Nikolai is “akin to the affection of brothers,” this affection is inflected with troublingly incestuous undertones.
The sexual interaction between two women as titillation is a staple of male chauvinist fantasy and a mainstay of heterosexual pornography. “Cronenberg has shown interest in the structures and stylistic tropes of pornography over many years” (Browning 58), and this particular trope is intricately deployed in this scene. Kirill constructs a scenario of macho competition, securely centralizing Nikolai in it by declaring that it is his performance that Kirill will be evaluating and his heterosexual virility that he will be policing. He also constructs a pornographic scenario in which Nikolai performs sexually for his delectation. So Nikolai becomes the star performer — the pornstar — in Kirill’s fantasy, possibly of identification, in which Nikolai becomes his surrogate phallus, penetrating the woman (since it is implied in Tatiana’s diary that Kirill is impotent with women), or — which is infinitely more plausible — of desire, in which he is himself being penetrated by Nikolai.11)
“Sex is the only human activity in which the professional has lower status than the amateur” (Davis 136). This scene depends upon the presence of the prostitute, a sex slave, and rather than “a subtle eroticism” — this is hardly a lingering look or a handshake held a moment too long — what is made possible here is an explicit network of erotic power relations between Kirill and Nikolai, power relations from which she is notably excluded. Emilia Nielsen argues that “Kirill and Nikolai negotiate power and desire over and through the body of a ‘sex slave’ who is figured not so much as an actual woman, but as a conduit whereby queer desire can be enabled” (Re-public). This is only partly true. She is not merely a conduit; she is the scapegoat, the whipping boy, for Kirill’s desires. Kirill’s performance of queerness, to the extent that he can perform it, is a performance of heterosexuality specifically through the degradation of the woman. She must be there, and she must be abused.13 So what is established here for Kirill is not only an interplay of desire and identification, but also an interplay of desire and anxiety (especially his misogyny — women are always “bitches” — and his fear of his own inadequacy); what is established for Nikolai is an interplay of sexual subject/object positionality. This replicates precisely the femme fatale’s relation to the antihero in classic noir: in order to remain irresistible to him she must keep alive both his fantasy of the possibility of her submission to him and his anxiety about his own masculinity. The spell cast by the queer pornstar on the watcher — like the spell cast by the femme fatale on the antihero — lies in the admixture of his prowess with his submissiveness, his remoteness with his availability, and his heightened sexual subjectivity with his willingness to be objectified, to be “bought.” In the erotic (and in this case, pornographic) moment, who ultimately holds the power?
The femme fatale is not just irresistible to the hero; she is also irresistible to the camera. Just as the image of the femme fatale, “the apotheosis of femininity,” is generated by and cycled through pulp fiction via heterosexual fantasy into the camera’s straight male gaze, so the queered image of Nikolai as the femme fatale is cycled through pulp fiction via queer sexual fantasy (and pornography) into the camera’s queer male gaze. The camera vacillates, as we must, between straight and queer ways of looking. Read heteronormatively, Nikolai is “a singular physical specimen” (Brian Eggert, Deep Focus); read queerly he is an erotic fantasy, and not just Kirill’s.
V. THE QUEER CAMERA
“Nikolai’s balls-out escape from the grip of two goons inside a Turkish bath ingeniously suggests a hot and sweaty fuck session” (Ed Gonzalez, Slant). Several reviewers have identified the bath house scene — a scene from which Kirill’s desiring gaze is necessarily absent — as the nexus of the film’s homoerotics.14)) The bath house needs no explication as an obvious site for the exploration of queerness, although seldom has it been used so self-reflexively. Eastern Promises‘ critical self-awareness is nowhere more apparent than in this scene and its fixing of the film’s desires and anxieties on the naked body of Nikolai. Andrew Tracy is admiring: “In the film’s most brilliant sequence — an attempted assassination of the stark naked Nikolai in a public bath — Cronenberg creates not simply an astonishing piece of cinematic choreography, but a fusion of theme, narrative, and performance which can genuinely be called masterly” (Reverse Shot). He is set up by Semyon, Kirill’s father and sometime surrogate phallus, as Kirill’s subaltern, to be killed because he is the queered substitute for the queer who started the film’s killing because he was accused of being queer. The scene and its setup are an extravagant thematic and narrative gesture aimed at eradicating (literally, cutting) queerness from the heart of the film. But Nikolai has an agenda that far exceeds this narrative and the power of this narrative to contain. His radical queerness — and the queerness of Eastern Promises — cannot be curtailed. Were this a classic film noir, this would be the scene of the femme fatale’s demise, a successful attempt to eradicate sexual instability and reinstate the co-ordinates of order. But Nikolai is no ordinary femme fatale, and this is no ordinary noir. Queerness cannot, in this narrative, be unseated. Rather, this attempt to banish it indirectly results in Semyon’s own demise.15
VI. “IT’S OUR TIME”: QUEERING KIRILL’S PITCH
“It is Mortensen . . . who truly astonishes. His elegantly accented role is dark and tortured, powerfully coiled lethality interlaced with an unfathomable compassion that hints at a secret twist . . . The final shot of the film is imbued with a profound dignity and ambiguity” (Brandon Fibbs, Colorado Gazette). This secret twist is Cronenberg’s subversion of the elements of film noir; this ambiguity is Cronenberg’s point and Eastern Promises‘ guiding principle. It resides in the parallel and contesting importance of the two plots, the heteronormative and the queer, which must be read simultaneously, and the film’s final — and deeply unsettling, heteronormatively speaking — refusal to restore heterosexual logic to a world from which it has been persuasively dislodged.
The final shot of the film shows Nikolai, sitting in the unseated Semyon’s place, in a moment of unquiet solitude. He has new status in the vore, but it is a new status dictated entirely by his relation to Kirill, and his relation to Kirill remains, by his own making, unchanged. Anxiety and desire remain its main coordinates: he has not taken over the London vore; he simply sits in this seat (a seat which, by the way, is not yet — nor ever will be — rightfully his) in a queered relation to the man who has taken over the vore. So, though queerness might seem absent from the moment — Nikolai is, after all, alone — it is abundantly, insidiously, present. The film returns, slyly, to the notion that queers and queerness are not easily apparent. Kirill’s gaze is absent, but the camera’s is not, and the accumulated power of the queer narrative is not dissipated by the demise of Semyon and the installation of the new regime. Nikolai has seen to that. Cronenberg has seen to that: the camera has lavishly established Nikolai’s queer(ed)ness.
Anna has moved on, with her baby, her beautiful “Russian doll,” to a new story, probably penned in a very different style. Not so for Nikolai and Kirill. As the final shot of Eastern Promises indicates, the drama of their relationship, and the saga of the London vore, is a continuation of the story already being told. Speaking of the sequel, now in preproduction, Cronenberg said this to MTV News: “I thought we had unfinished business with these characters. I didn’t feel that we had finished with Nikolai.” Certainly Nikolai’s business with Kirill is unfinished. Will the femme fatale get his come-uppance in the sequel?
Work Cited
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Davis, Murray S. Smut: Erotic Reality/Obscene Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.
De Villiers, Nicholas. “Queer Ways of Looking.” Bright Lights Film Journal. August 2007. 3 May 2009.
Ditzian, Eric. “EXCLUSIVE: David Cronenberg Making Plans For “Eastern Promises” Sequel.” MTV Movies Blog . 30 March 2009. 10 April 2009.
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Dyer, Richard. “Queer Noir.” The Culture of Queers. London: Routledge, 2002.
Eastern Promises. Dir. David Cronenberg. Perf. Viggo Mortensen, Naomi Watts, Vincent Cassel, and Armin Mueller-Stahl. Focus Features, 2007.
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- What follow are extracts from a wide sampling of reviews, representing reviewers’ impressions of the film, arranged in descending order from admiration to contempt:
“[A] mesmerizing power-punch of a thriller . . . Cronenberg subverts formula at every turn” (Peter Travers, Rolling Stone)
“You cannot walk out of David Cronenberg’s new masterpiece Eastern Promises without thinking of Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy . . . Cronenberg’s bravura, nuanced direction is spare and clean, bereft of the gaudy flourish and ornamentation that might detract from its bracing authenticity.Eastern Promises is meticulously paced, measured but never tedious” (Brandon Fibbs, Colorado Gazette).
What the director and writer do here is not unfold a plot, but flay the skin from a hidden world . . . the result is a film that takes us beyond crime and London and the Russian mafia and into the mystifying realms of human nature” (Roger Ebert, rogerbert.com).
“A superbly wrought yarn set in the milieu of first-generation mobsters in London that is simultaneously tough-minded and compassionate about the human condition. Eastern Promises instantly takes its place among Cronenberg’s very best films . . . The surprises and revelations continue right up to the eminently satisfying ending; it’s possible that Cronenberg has never made a film of such consistent tone and control” (Todd McCarthy, Variety).
“A rhapsodic movie directed with considerable formal intelligence and brooding power . . . Eastern Promises is very much a companion piece to A History of Violence. Both are crime thrillers that allow Viggo Mortensen to play a morally ambiguous, severely divided, if not schizoid, action-hero savior; both are commissioned works that permit hired-gun Cronenberg to make a genre film that is actually something else. As slick as it is, Eastern Promises could, like A History of Violence, almost pass for an exceptionally well-made B-movie” (J. Hoberman, Village Voice).
“Cronenberg subverts genre expectations with every plot twist” (Lou Lumenick, The New York Post). “[B]y no means Cronenberg’s most intriguing or audacious film. Its subtext, which is about sex and violence and the way one often dovetails with the other, and the skill of its making, render it gripping enough. But it often seems no more than a clever pastiche of a mafia movie set in London” (Derek Malcolm, This is London).
“[It’s] not hard to see what attracted Cronenberg to [the screenplay], yet he can’t transcend its reliance on stock characters and situations. An aura of mystery around Nikolai battles the convention of an outlaw with a heart of gold. With A History of Violence Cronenberg achieved a rare subversion of the American thriller’s codes from within. Alas, he’s unable to work the same magic with the gangster film Eastern Promises” (Steve Erickson, Gay City News).
“Eastern Promises doesn’t really deliver the killer blows one hoped for. There’s something rather staid in its pacing and its direction, and of the cast only Mortensen achieves a degree of moral traction” (Anthony Quinn, The Independent).
“[I]t’s about as safe and normal as anything the filmmaker has ever made. And who wants safe and normal from David Cronenberg?…it certainly reflects a further shift from personal, idiosyncratic efforts to more streamlined genre diversions . . . Eastern Promises is still the most conventional film he’s ever made, a mob-thriller-cum-murder-mystery that lacks even the subversive edge of A History of Violence. Genre used to be a means to an end for Cronenberg, yet this may be the first time in which he isn’t using a basic narrative framework to explore bigger ideas, but, rather, finding small ways to shoehorn his own intellectual/artistic concerns into a B-movie formula . . . standard potboiler fare . . . it’s enough to make one long for the days when you didn’t have to scrounge for hints of the abnormal in a Cronenberg movie. . . . As is, it’s a strangely placid and impersonal affair — like A History of Violence with half the intensity and a quarter of the critical self-awareness” (Andrew Dowd, Film Monthly).
“The irony is that, under the carnage, Eastern Promises is an old-fashioned picture, not just in the cautious, near-sedate motions of the camera but in its urge to pluck innocence from the embrace of evil, and to dispense punishment to those who deserve it most” (Anthony Lane, The New Yorker).
“Mortensen is good in a role like this — a man who uses his chiseled, blue-eyed, dimpled handsomeness as a mask to hide his thoughts . . . His character here is nowhere near as layered as in A History of Violence, and neither is the movie . . . Eastern Promises is finally conventional, even sentimental — or as sentimental as a film in which a knife gets driven through someone’s eyeball into his brain in a gruelingly extended medium close-up can be” (David Edelstein, New York Magazine).
“The movie is in many ways a B-movie companion piece to A History of Violence . . . whereas [Cronenberg’s] films once expressed a fierce protection of the self against external, anti-humanist forces, they now seem to insist, compulsively, on the need for order and everyone in his or her place.” (Carina Chocano, Los Angeles Times)
“It would be silly to go into a David Cronenberg film looking for the easy pleasures of a crime potboiler, but I would have settled for a bare minimum of stylistic verve or narrative conviction. Instead, Cronenberg delivers his most lifeless movie to date, an unrepentant hack-job that can neither satisfy on a narrative level or disturb on a stylistic level . . . it feels like a gaggle of story ideas in search of a unifying plot” (Bilge Ebiri, The Nerve Film Lounge). [↩]
- One would think that the presence of Kirill, who is so obviously queer-coded, would prompt the critical community into a close analysis of queerness in the film. This, however, has not been the case. Have the reviewers simply been priggish about it? Daniel Mendelsohn notices in his essay about Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain that “the lengths to which reviewers from all over the country, representing publications of various ideological shadings, have gone in order to diminish the specifically gay element is striking . . . a month after the movie’s release most of the reviewers were resisting, indignantly, the popular tendency to refer to it as “the gay cowboy movie” (281-282). [↩]
- Nicholas DeVilliers writes in “Queer Ways of Looking” that he is “inspired by Elizabeth Cowie’s suggestion that “there is no single or dominant “view” or look in cinema (either the male gaze or Metz’ identifying with oneself seeing), but a continual construction of looks, with a constant production of spectator-position and thus subject” (137). Cronenberg invites just such a progression of looks in Eastern Promises: we must move — in looking at and with the characters — from one way of looking to another, in other words, from a heteronormative way of looking to a queer way of looking, in order fully to read the film. [↩]
- Queerness is essentially disruptive. Lee Edelman writes in No Future that “the queer must insist on disturbing, on queering, social organization as such — on disturbing, therefore, and on queering ourselves and our investment in such organization. For queerness can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one” (17). By this argument, Cronenberg’s vision is quintessentially queer, and Nikolai is Edelman’s perfect embodiment of queerness. [↩]
- In a childish gesture of belated quid pro quo, Kirill posthumously villainizes his cousin by sneering “Pederast!” over his corpse. The accusation of pederasty both trumps the accusation of queerness and discredits the accuser, allowing Kirill to maintain his straight self-definition. It also transforms the murder of his cousin from an act of concrete revenge into an act of abstract justice, perhaps alleviating his existential nausea. Murray S. Davis in Smut explains that “anything that undermines confidence in the scheme of classification on which people base their lives sickens them as though the very ground on which they stood precipitously dropped away” (93). Kirill’s psychic journey in this narrative resembles nothing so much as a man’s desperate struggle to regain his ground. [↩]
- I hope that I am not cavalierly misappropriating the term “genderqueer” in applying it to Nikolai. By calling him “genderqueered” I do not mean to trap him in Wilchins’ concept that “genderqueers are people for whom some link in the feeling/expressing/being-perceived fails . . . genderqueer bodies . . . are those that fail because they don’t follow the rules, the grammar of gender-as-language” (Wilchins 28). While Nikolai is perfectly fluent in the grammar of gender-as-language, he is also a master of performance and performativity, and can easily scramble this language to alternately fuel and satiate Kirill’s fantasies. Nielsen notes that “everything about Nikolai is, in a sense, “performed” (Re-public). [↩]
- There is, in Cronenberg’s queering of the femme fatale, a recalibration of his ongoing interest in what Videodrome coigns as “The New Flesh,” not in this case as a celebration of the grotesque or monstrous, but as an inquiry into a transgressive process which violates boundary states. Citing Robert Stam on the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin, Mark Browning notes: “Bakhtin is fascinated by the unfinished body, the elastic, malleable body, the body that outgrows itself, that reaches beyond itself and conceives new bodies . . . like Cronenberg, Bakhtin is particularly interested in the metaphorical membranes that appear to encase separate existences but can be joined or even burst through. Cronenberg’s concept of “The New Flesh” carries ambiguity with it, making gender roles and sexuality appear protean and contestable, nullifying psychological paradigms that are built around an assumption of the nuclear family” (24). Nikolai’s resonance, his affect, is queer not only because he entertains Kirill’s confused advances but because he understands and exploits his body as a site of gender contestation. [↩]
- The notion of the femme fatale engaging in a romantic liaison with noir’s “good girl” is extremely queer, and is only fleetingly investigated. Their connection in the narrative, centered on the recovery of Tatiana’s diary and the rescue of her baby from Semyon and Kirill, culminates in a single tender but unerotic kiss. Siddarth Pillai writes that “[Nikolai’s] relationship with Anna will never be requited but a third act twist will hint at him seducing the queer mob heir Kirill” (Passion For Cinema). [↩]
- This sampling of excerpts from reviews shows how little analysis (and how much misunderstanding) this “wrenching scene” (Siddarth Pillai, Passion For Cinema) has received:
“Semyon’s son Kirill (Vincent Cassel), who has more ambition than brains, is trying to involve his friend Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen) in the mob’s activities, which include white slavery. Kirill takes Nikolai to their whorehouse and makes him screw a woman in front of him, “to make sure you are no fucking queer” (Steve Warren, CinemATL)
“Courtesy of Cronenberg’s masterfully composed, sharply angular compositions, the turmoil beneath the tranquil surface is palpable, most forcefully in the person of Kirill, whose demand that Nikolai bed a whore while he watches is simply the first of many times his suppressed homoeroticism bubbles to the fore” (Nick Schlager, nickschlager.com)
“Way before Semyon learns that Kirill is being ridiculed by his enemies for possibly being gay, Cronenberg has already amped up the homoerotic tension: In a crucial scene, Kirill insists on watching Nikolai fuck a whore from behind . . . ” (Ed Gonzalez., Slant)
“However, Eastern Promises all too often hedges its bets when it comes to Nikolai. It portrays him as a decent man trying to maintain his humanity in an amoral world. While he makes threats, he commits violence on-screen only in self-defense. Similarly, he has an ugly encounter with a prostitute solely because he’s bullied into it by Kirill, who wants him to “prove you’re not a queer” (Steve Erickson,Gay City News)
“But the blood-freezer comes when Kirill tests Nikolai’s manhood by forcing him to fuck a young girl while he watches” (Peter Travers, Rolling Stone [↩]
- There is a small slash community for Eastern Promises. The slash writers, obviously — and understandably — delighted by the dynamics of the Kirill/Nikolai relationship, have focused on this scene as the locus of of Kirill’s competing desire and anxiety:
Kirill isn’t a queer. He’s heard the rumours, yes, knows enemies of the family spread them, and has already made one man pay for his deceit.
But queers are weak. Queers are less than men, abominations driven by twisted, base desires, dragging other men down until they’re covered in the grit and crime of perversion.
A queer would never be a vor, and would never have the strength to rise up and lead.
One day, when his father wills it, Kirill will ascend to rule, lurk in the shadows no longer. He will command rather than obey, make good on the promise of stars, and he will do it with Nikolai at his side.
And if he embraces Nikolai too tightly, holds on for a moment too long, if he breathes in and memorises his scent — all creaking leather and cigarette smoke — it is only because he cares for him as he would a cousin or brother. It is only because Nikolai will soon be family, and family is to be cherished and nurtured, kept close and warmed against the cold.If he insists that Nikolai takes a whore, watches his cock slide deep, his muscles tense and roll, if he admires his whip-thin form, the coiled, corded tendons, the way sweat clings to skin and ink, it is only because Kirill must be sure no queer will wear the vory’s stars.
And if the way Nikolai twists his hips, grunts when he’s close leaves Kirill achingly hard, it is because the whore is beautiful, her tits heavy, her skin pale.
If he takes no whore himself, it is because this night is better enjoyed in drink and song; better to let pleasure spin out than spend it in a handful of thrusts.
Queers wear no stars, and Kirill is no queer. (caras_galadhon. “Stars.” Yuletide treasure.org)
Show me you aren’t queer, Kirill groaned softly. He couldn’t tell Nikolai I want you to fuck me, or I want to watch you fuck, so he ordered Nikolai to do it in a way he couldn’t refuse, though he did try.
How would it feel to spread himself for Nikolai? To take his cock?
It could have been him on the bed under Nikolai when those ice-blue eyes widened, when his lips parted around a deep groan as his hips jerked and he came.
It could have been him. It should have been him. (savageseraph. “Should Have Been.” Yuletide treasure.org [↩]
- Nicholas De Villiers notes that “Ellis Hanson has argued that queer theorists, troubled by the account of the “male gaze” in Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” have already “discovered that the heterocentric and exceedingly rigid structure of the look in Mulvey’s analysis — patriarchal masculinity leering at objectified femininity — writes homosexuality out of existence.”” What Kirill tries to do in this scene is precisely to write (his own) homosexuality out of existence. Ironically, he succeeds best on only the queerest level of the scene — if the femme fatale and the prostitute are having sex. His own languid, post-coital comment to Nikolai — “that was nice; that was very nice” — undermines his attempt (if, indeed, he made an attempt) to view the act as a test of Nikolai’s heteromasculinity. [↩]
- Nielsen makes this important point: “Eastern Promises . . . figures the trafficked woman as an ‘an absolute victim,’ a construction that is dependent on the oppositional characterization of the male ‘despot’ and the male ‘hero.’ In this narrative, the victimization of the trafficked woman must be unquestioningly absolute — she is a victim with no means of agency — as this creates the narrative imperative for both the ‘rescuer’ as well as the ‘victimizer’…” (Re-public). Nikolai’s objective in this scene, as much as to infiltrate the vore v zakone by keeping Kirill in his sexual thrall, is to save the girl. He is both her humiliator and her savior. The queering of Nikolai does not ipso facto villainize him (as Dyer says, “noir had no need of queers in order to have villains” 109), nor does his “goodness,” his “rescuer” status, prohibit his queering. This argument is not symmetrical, however, since Kirill’s villainy is clearly a function of his queerness. Ed Gonzalez says about Cronenberg that “only Polanski is better at framing the world along diagonal lines (Slant Magazine). [↩]
- This scene has been widely recognized as the erotic centerpiece of the film:
“Eastern Promises‘ homoerotic subtext bursts its banks and all but floods the screen in a steamy public bathhouse with an extraordinary action sequence . . . ” (J. Hoberman, Village Voice)
Cronenberg’s contemplation of codes of masculine honor by anxiously putting the male body on the line is deliciously transgressive” (Ed Gonzalez, Slant)
“In a scene that will make the film a classic, a stark naked Nikolai with every tattoo gloriously on display is attacked by two assailants with blades. It is an unabashed phallic ballet . . . ” (Passion For Cinema)
“Given that the male nude was a staple of Western art from Praxiteles, in the fourth century B.C., up to Rodin, its absence from the movies — other than pornography — has been a grave and prudish waste, and Nikolai’s struggle in Eastern Promises is an astounding piece of savagery and vulnerability (Anthony Lane, The New Yorker)
“[A]s nude wrestling goes, it sticks (as it were) to Alan Bates and Oliver Reed’s frolics during Women in Love” (The Independent)”And it’s in the film’s action centerpiece — a spectacularly violent, sexually charged fight scene, all blood and naked flesh — that the filmmaker really flexes his muscles and puts his eccentric mark on the material” (film monthly)
“[I]n the steamy male domain of an inner-city bathhouse, Nikolai is attacked by two knife-wielding henchmen, who not only penetrate his naked body, but reconstitute his skin (and symbolically, his uniform of tattoos) through gaping wounds rarely seen on film” (The Lumiere Reader)
Only Amy Nicholson refuses to see the sexualized Nikolai here:
“Despite his total gorgeousness, a nude fight-for-his-life in a steam room has all the titillation of a butcher throwing down a slab of meat” (Inland Empire Weekly [↩]
- “[A] man-turned-to-object must renounce his entire personal history, reducing himself to a naked heap of meat that famously reveals itself as such in the most realistic fight scene in film history. That Cronenberg suggests that such patriarchal codes of objecthood and value (codes which reveal what it means to be inside and outside) are the result of a hyper-masculine attempt to preserve such codes from anything that might queer them turns Eastern Promises into a complex film unafraid to examine the big picture” (Whimsical F-Bomb). The big picture, as it is revealed in Eastern Promises, presents not only “the inherent homoeroticism bubbling beneath all . . . male bonding stories” and “the seething sexual tension inherent to the gangster genre” (electric sheep), but the ultimate fragility of the heteropatriarchy. [↩]
