Cronos, Cosmos, and Polis: La Haine

The film tells of three youths who are outsiders in the sordid milieu in which they live. The protagonists are trapped in a squalid banlieue of Paris at a moment prior to the general strikes that disabled the nation in the winter of 1995. Perhaps the unsparing photography and the mix of reggae and hip-hop music on the sound track impelled Jody Foster to claim that La Haine would “rock” whoever saw it. Despite its graphic depiction of the freefall of three adolescent boys into primal chaos, the maps in the film bear witness to a classical metaphysics of space. The latter is shown in what its first and last words tell the viewer to consider: the society in which we live, likened to a person having jumped from the fiftieth floor of an immense skyscraper, blithely falls through the air until he or she crashes onto the asphalt below. In the literature surrounding the film, metaphysics is set in tandem with the epigraph the published scenario draws from Le Rouge et le noir. The narrator, up to his ears in social conflict, cites Stendhal: “‘J’ai assez vécu pour voir que la différence engendre la haine [I’ve lived long enough to see that difference engenders hate]” (Favier and Kassovitz 1995, 5).³ Hate can also be thought of in terms of its geography, in the mix of imaginary and real spaces that the film constructs from its descriptions of the suburbs and city of Paris.

To ascertain how the reflective apparatus of La Haine figures in a broader literary, geographical, and philosophical dimension it suffices to recall the quatrain François Villon was said to have uttered as a parting shot just after his executioner tightened a noose around his neck and before he was dropped to his death:

Je suis François dont ce me poise

Né de Paris empres Ponthoise

Or d’une corde d’une toise

Mon cou saura que mon cul poise.

Here goes François, child of France

To swing into his final dance.

His neck at last shall have the chance

To weigh the tonnage of his pants.⁴

In this parting shot the criminal inverts the world by displacing the center into its suburban periphery. Hailing from Paris “near Ponthoise,” the poet bears the heavy task (“dont ce me poise”) of thinking about what his identity may be: he is François, but he is also French (François). He is tagged by both a proper and a common noun that describes him, and thus he might be given to reflect upon what it means to be French in a “globalized” world or to worry about the push and pull of “competing” national, international traits defining his character before he will swing from a patibulary gibet erected on the outskirts of Paris. His thoughts anticipate what his neck will discover when his bottom is pulled down and away, earthward, from its habitual environs. The foresight of death after a life of criminal behavior and unjust treatment at the hands of authorities (the narrative line of Villon’s Testament) is staged as a cosmic comedy.

Villon’s rhymes can be taken as a strangely appropriate epigraph to a film that draws upon the story of a person, falling from the fiftieth story of a building (because of its size certainly not in the suburbs), his eyes squeezed shut, repeating in a voice loud enough for the inhabitants at every floor to hear him uttering, “Jusqu’ici tout va bien, jusqu’ici tout va bien . . . [Up to here everything’s okay, up to here, everything’s okay]” (Favier and Kassovitz 1995, 8). Of import, concludes Kassovitz, is less the fall than the landing. For Villon anticipation of the drop reveals how the lower depths of the body think and speak with admirable wit. For the rogue poet the weight of the buttocks will be a healthy—if summary—jolt, an affirmation, that will correct and resolve the poet’s metaphysical bent in the upper half of the same quatrain. So too, we might say, the freefall of three youths from the suburbs of Paris and back marks a geography of social contradiction plotting that of the very difference that Kassovitz, thanks to Stendhal, attributes to an inexorable and universal condition of hate.

Kassovitz’s preface to the screenplay maps out two areas of difference that bind the real and allegorical spaces of the scenario that follows. It relates that in 1992 during an interrogation a policeman clubbed to death a youth named Makoum. The event raised the question about how the handcuffed victim, strapped to a chair, could so madden an officer assigned to interrogate him. Did a lack of respect for public order inspire an uncontrolled reaction? Did the policeman blow his fuse because of the endlessly heated confrontations, occurring day after day, hour upon hour, in the suburbs between delinquent children and the police? The same questions could be asked of youths who find themselves gratuitously cuffed and kicked by the hands and feet of agents of the law in the dull routine of their identity checks. Failing to own a symbolic language that might mediate that of their peers, they can only reproduce the violence that is imposed upon them.⁵

Kassovitz describes the situation as a vicious circle that requires a perspective of contemplation that would modify—rather than incite—violence overtaking the suburbs in the 1990s. Surely the simple plotline of the film attests to a vicious geometry: riots break out at Les Muguets, a housing development bearing the unfortunate name of the aromatic flower of community that workers give to each other on the first of May, the French Labor Day. Televised news reports that a young beur named Abdel was grievously injured and transported to a hospital where he lies in coma. His friends, a triumvirate of boulevardiers (chosen allegorically to personify the mixed demography of French youth), include a Black, an Arab, and a white Jew whose cropped hair resembles either an inmate from a concentration camp or a skinhead, a white Neo-Nazi of extremist leanings. Abdel, seen only in televised images in the film, carries the weight of the near-cognate name of the brother, the “Cain” who would be the police, who are implicitly asked, nonetheless, to be their brother’s keeper in a world driven by hate.

The narrative hinges on two events that follow the inaugural sequence in which (beneath the overlay of the credits) a televisual documentary records an outbreak of war in the suburban streets. The scenes of violence are accompanied by Bob Marley’s lyrics about a world consumed in flames. Damage is done in the housing settlements. A school has been trashed and its gymnasium ransacked. The youths, who may or may not have been responsible, want to visit their hospitalized friend. The police firmly but in cognizance of the law deny them access to his bedside. The action prompts Vinz (Vincent Cassel), the crazed and almost psychotic member of the trio, to swear that in the name of his brother’s keeper, should Abdel succumb, he will avenge him by murdering a policeman.

Exclusion from access to a space of exchange or sociality epitomizes other episodes in the film. Earlier, the males of one of the buildings in the development at Les Muguets cook merguez sausages and watch television on its rooftop. Sayid, the beur (Saïd Taghmaoui), steals a merguez in partial response to the privilege that Hubert, the Black (Hubert Kounde), gains when the cook at the makeshift grill offers the latter a free sample for the simple reason that he too belongs to the housing complex. Sayid hides under the shadow of his brother Nordine who pays for the sausage. Violence is averted, but a news report reveals that a policeman lost a gun in the melee of battle at night (11, 30). Officers arrive at the scene, one in uniform, another in plainclothes. One is identified by his jacket, on which one shoulder has a shamrock sewn emblematizing the “Fighting Irish,” and the letters on the back spell “Notre Dame.” The cop is “nicked” by a name that hovers between allusion to the métier that identifies the Irish in America, whether footballers or police (Officers Finnerty, Kane, McKenna . . .), and to Catholic devotion given by the name of the cathedral and Holy Mother at the center of Paris.

In the initial sequence the policeman from Notre Dame and his cohort gently ask the crowd to “descend” (but not fall freely) from the roof. Nordine begs them to realize that in the community no harm is being done. The aptly named Chef Toit (“Captain Roof,” who is on the roof, but also “Captain You,” in the familiar) retorts, varying on Kassovitz’s formula heard in the credits, “c’est pas l’histoire de faire quoi que ce soit, c’est l’histoire qu’il faut descendre [it’s not about doing anything whatsoever, it’s about having to go down]” (11, 49). In the confused perspective of the dialogue, the elemental story concerns a descent from the roof that will be a double murder, a descente (a suicidal fall from a position of community and communication) and a story that itself will include a victim of a homicide (in “it’s the story that has to be shot”), descendre a pun on “going” and “shooting” down. Two primal groups affront one another. An attempt to negotiate and mediate is offered, and in lieu of a scenario in which “conflict gives way to exchange,” aborted negotiation gives way to conflict.⁶ Each time the youths attempt to cross a barrier a confrontation results and violence erupts. In the apartment building in Paris, when Hubert, Sayid, and Vinz want to find “Astérix” (translated as “Snoopy”), they are the butt of ridicule or admonished by the voices transmitted over the intercom (42, 117–18). They crash an opening in an art gallery, are shown to have come from “dehors,” and thus are deemed out of place. Where do they come from? “Je veux dire de quelle banlieue [I mean, like, from what suburb],” one of the party-goers asks of Hubert (55, 149) before the trio is pushed out of the space in which they have crashed.

The episode in the apartment building is cause enough for the police to apprehend Sayid and Hubert. An officer begins his interrogation with false gentility, uttering, “Bonjour, messieurs, Police. Alors, il paraît que vous faites du grabuge? [Good morning, gentlemen. Police here. Now it appears that you’ve made a ruckus?]” (45, 122). Vinz, who exits while the two friends are accosted, escapes by virtue of wit and strong legs. A bifurcated sequence follows in which two simultaneous events are crosscut. Vinz is seen inside a movie theater identified by a neon exit sign (“sortie”) over a door. As if a refugee from a French New Wave film, Vince enters a movie theater where he either sees or is oblivious to images that speak to the situation and context of his state of being.⁷

For directors of the 1960s the inside of the theater was a site of exchange and of citation, a locus amoenus for personages who could escape into the prisons of American and French cinema. Here the citation merely inspires and mirrors the brutality of everyday life. We (as Vince may or may not) hear the voice-off of Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone, and a Walt Disney film. These quotations prompt Vinz to rehearse the “point-and-shoot” gesture he has learned from About de souffle and Taxi Driver to aim at, in a degraded citation of The Deer Hunter, what is implied to be an animated cartoon of Bambi (46, 123–34).

Meanwhile, in the police headquarters Sayid and Hubert are shown in deep focus, in a plan américain, handcuffed and chained to two chairs (44, 124–25). They submit to scorn and loathsome torture at the hands of two interrogating officers. The victims are hazed and cuffed to a point where many spectators, if we recall the torture scenes of Roma, città aperta, can only be revulsed by the sadism. The sight of a third officer who assumes the spectator’s point of view matches the viewer’s gaze. Being trained by his henchmen, he cannot bear to see what takes place before his eyes. The close-ups of his face and eyes are set in counterpoint to those of Vinz in the adjacent sequence. A paradoxical sense of distance and immediacy is given by the style of the interrogation. It rehearses many of the scenarios in the television show Law and Order, the film Mystic River, or, in real life, Abu Ghraib in which armed forces isolate their suspects in a room and haze or torture them. In La Haine recall of Roma, città aperta cannot be avoided nor can in another way, Les Maîtres fous (Jean Rouch, 1955), in which a scene of frenzied ritual exorcism of colonial masters takes place in a remote spot outside of Accra in Ghana.⁸ In the precinct the observing recruit is shown preferring to close his eyes and forget that he belongs to an order of organized sadism and a longstanding “theater of cruelty.”⁹ As the didascalia of the screenplay emphasize, “Seul dans son coin, le civil 3 ne participate pas à la fête, il ne dit rien, mais on peut voir que dans la situation présente, il a honte d’être flic [Alone in his corner, the third policeman does not take part in the festivities; he says nothing, but we can see that in the present circumstances he is ashamed of being a cop]” (47, 125).

This sequence may indeed be the most excruciating of many in a film that is patently difficult to watch. It obviously reenacts the memory of the murder that Kassovitz invokes in the first sentence of Jusqu’icitoutvabien... : “En 1992, à Paris, un jeune homme de dix-huit ans du nom de Makome a été abattu à bout portant par un inspecteur dans un commissariat [In Paris in 1992 a young man of eighteen named Majome was beaten point blank by an inspector in a precinct]” (7). By contiguity with Vinz’s synchronous descent into the labyrinth of Hollywood violence the episode in the commissioner’s office, graphically and unremittingly displaying the physical pain endured by subjects submitting to the torture of interrogation, is matched by its counterpart in the movie theater. The mindless violence of contemporary American films seems to be the fantasied obverse of the projected violence that was aimed at the bodies of Sayid and Hubert. The sequence in the theater where American cruelty is heard off is shot in the prevailing style of televised advertising, in extreme close-ups of Vinz’s face. He is pushed up against a wide-angle lens as if to rewrite and redefine Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the image-affection that turns the view of a face into a quasi-total world of sensation in synergy with the topography of the character (1983, 105–20). Implied is that the greater film owes its own effects to the thousands of stupid American films put before Vinz’s eyes. Thus it theorizes itself and, paradoxically, gains a distance on its own violence by collapsing the geography of the world of Paris and the suburbs onto that of American (and hence, aggressively international or globalized) cinema. The dialogue of the two sequences opens a reflection on the space of conflict exactly where there would be an identity of the physical and mental worlds held within what Kassovitz calls a “vicious circle.”

The two sequences on which the film turns—when the denial of access to Abdel’s bedside precipitates Vinz’s threat to use the gun he found to shoot an officer (17, 60–62), and the torture in the police headquarters (47, 124–25), along with its obverse episode when Vinz hides in the movie theater—concretize the project Kassovitz announces in his preface to the scenario. They also reiterate what becomes ruthlessly redundant and, at the end of the film, a pummeling resolved only by the crash of ritual murder. Vinz is “he who must die” because he has internalized the difference to a point of crazed frenzy. He is shot in the head in close-up when the officer, his automatic pistol thrust against his temple, pulls the trigger. The gun cracks, Vinz expires, and a spent brass casing, ejected from the chamber of the gun, clicks and rolls on the asphalt where the victim soon collapses (70, 179–81). Chef Toit, the plainclothes officer seen earlier on the rooftop and identified by his Notre Dame jacket, is held responsible for igniting the passion. Before shooting him he hazes his victim, pressing the barrel of his pistol against Vinz’s cheek, uttering, “Regardez comme il chie dans son f... [Look how he’s shitting in hisf...]” (70, 181). The executioner, incited by the violence of his own words, goads himself into applying pressure to the trigger.

The raw speech localizes the sadism that runs rampant throughout the film. Vinz dies in a communion of unmitigated dejection. For this reason the geography of violence in the film, if projected upon a bodily surface, finds its most representative site in the vicinity of the rectum, an area of a transitional eros, where tenderness and pain are inextricably mixed. The metaphysical dimension of La Haine projects the physical space of the banlieue and all its psychic depredation onto this region of the body. Here, too, is where the film incarnates the social practice of what Stendhal is said to call “difference” and Kassovitz “hate.” The director noted that his film tends to show sympathy for the youth who lack a symbolic language of negotiation while trying to keep a necessary distance and perspective in which a dialogue can be established between the warring parties. “La Haine se situe clairement du côté des jeunes tout en essayant de conserver la distance et le recul nécessaires [Hate clearly leans in the direction of the youth while trying to conserve the necessary distance and hindsight]” (8). Du cul et du recul: hindsight might be the perspectival object that continuously reiterates and reframes the physical and bodily geography of the film. The two sequences and the variants that mark the style and plot are set in strong contrast to two others that do not quite belong to the tenor of baiting ending in conflict or to a stage where cruelty prevails. Rather, two affective and strangely tender moments in the film open a space in which all of a sudden animal instincts give way to a propensity to reflect on the situation or to obtain distance or recul. Each episode withdraws from the site of violence not by reflecting on or over the dilemma in a metaphysical way, but, paradoxically, from within its bounds, that is, within the limited scope of the topography of the film.

In sequence 39 (113–15) the triumvirate, after erring about in the streets of Paris above the ground, pause to relieve themselves in the basement toilets of a bistrot. In a miniature hall of mirrors that vaguely recalls Christine’s boudoir of La Règle du jeu or that of Tom Duncan’s widow (Jeanette Nolan) in Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (1954), even the hall of mirrors where Arthur Bannister (Everett Sloane) and his wife, Elsa (Rita Hayworth), pursue each other at the conclusion to The Lady from Shanghai, the young men are splintered in the confined space. Sayid clasps a bottle of chocolate milk, appropriately named Cacolac, in his left hand, as he tries to punch a number on the digits of a pay telephone in the background. In the first shot, in medium close-up, Sayid holds the phone and brandishes his bottle of milk. To the left Vinz looks upward before it becomes clear that he is pissing into a urinal below. To Sayid’s right is Hubert’s back. Sayid turns left and right, offering a sip to either or both of his buddies.

The following shot, a plan américain, puts four figures in view: Vinz is to the left and is the mirror image of Sayid who places his telephone call to Astérix (a rich drug merchant) for the purpose of completing the sale. To the right Hubert is in a mirror and then, to his right, Sayid again appears. The third shot, in medium close-up, cues on Hubert’s suggestion that Vinz forget about avenging the death of Abdel. The camera catches Vinz and Sayid in conflict over Hubert’s words (the subtitles read “Yes!” and “No!”). The shot pans to the right, forcing recall of the fact that Vinz had already been in a mirror. He emerges in close-up, retorting that “my name’s not Rodney King!” The camera follows his head left, back to the mirror, where Sayid, in full view, occludes Hubert.

The title of the film suddenly falls into the sequence. At the terminus of this long take (that lasts about 83 seconds) Hubert avows that Vinz should have stayed in school instead of taking to the streets. “Tu savais que s’il y a un truc que l’histoire nous a appris, c’est que la haine attire la haine [You know that if there’s something history has taught us, it’s that hate attracts hate]” (79, 114). Vinz upbraids Hubert for being on the side of cowards because he has learned the lessons of life directly (“t’es toujours du côté des enculés?! Moi je vis dans la rue [you’re always on the side of the assholes who get shafted. Me, I live in the street]”). Vinz holds his head in his hands when all of a sudden a white mass enters the frame. It is a door that opens from a booth. From it emerges an old man who utters in a foreign accent tinged with a lisp, “Ça fait vraiment bien de chier un bon coup [It’s really nice to take a good shit].” A countershot captures Vinz and Hubert staring back in astonishment when the man asks, “Vous croyez en Dieu? [Do you believe in God?].” The old man makes his way through the space, the back of his head, out of focus but following much of the frame as he advances. Still seen from behind, drawing attention to his act of cleansing his hands, he adds, “De toute façon il ne faut pas se demander si on croit en Dieu, mais si Dieu croit en nous [In any case we mustn’t wonder if we believe in God but if God believes in us].”

He adduces the truth of the chiasmus by telling his story of his friend Grunalski who accompanied him on a train filled with forced laborers. The Russians had impressed the two men into service after the liberation of the German concentration camps. While en route from Dachau to Siberia the train made occasional stops to fill the boiler of its locomotive. During these short stopovers the prisoners habitually descended from the train to relieve themselves. Grunalski had the habit of defecating out of the sight of his companions. The man’s timidity or refusal to abandon social graces, avows the storyteller, cost him his life when he could not both keep his pants pulled up and scurry to the accelerating train. The camera holds on the old man as he relates his story. When he tells of Grunalski coming out from behind a bush, the camera changes the perspective, catching the man’s head, slightly out of focus, in the foreground, in front of a pair of swinging doors fashioned after those of a saloon in classical American Westerns. Behind them is a poster of a bottle of beer displaying a label that reads Heinek, the last two letters of “Heineken” (graphing the vocable N) obfuscated by the wall in the middle ground. The man’s white head in soft focus becomes the object of Hubert’s gaze.

Baffled, Sayid (off) asks why the old man told the tale. The trio, somewhat astonished or unmoved by what they call the “depth” of the story, leave through the doors and exit right, each passing by the poster. The camera holds on the doors for three seconds, adding a Bressonian touch that implies the framing of the space is of a consequence exceeding that of the characters who have just departed. The style of the shot tells the viewer that it begs to be deciphered. Surely the en lopped off Heineken rhymes with haine, the word Hubert twice utters in the same space. The allusions to things behind the space and time of film recall the lower depths of the Holocaust and of hate in a past world of which the youths are unaware. The poster suggests that the presence of a brand name may qualify the film, as we have seen in the “life” spot in Thelma and Louise, to be of the dubious stuff and substance of advertising. No matter what is implied, the film is suddenly elevated to a tradition of ciné-écriture, where meanings are built and circulate through lexical allusions scattered by written shapes seen and read in the visual field. However ponderous or nuanced the innuendo, the sequence marks a rare instant when the characters pause long enough to consider their metaphysical condition. The cloacal depths become the space par excellence where the three characters begin to think abstractly. Sayid mutters a piece of speech that concretizes the brand-name: “Hein, pourquoi il nous a raconté cette histoire? [Uh, why did he tell us this story?]” (115). The site suddenly becomes a place where language and image are mixed, and where too a sense of recul— hindsight—is exactly what the inexperienced youths need to gather a sense of who and where they are.

Their perplexity is emphasized in the cut to the next sequence that takes place in the Parisian métro. The view in the train is seen in strong depth of field, the parallels of each side of the car converging toward a vanishing point at the doorway to the next wagon. The shot uses extensive depth of field to stress how spatial extension is foreclosed by the artifice of cinematic illusion. Closure and constriction are implied. Given the recent images of the toilets and the story of Grunalski running behind the train and paying dearly for his discretion, the itinerary in the subway moves from one depth of occlusion or blockage to another. A layered pattern of abysmal spaces runs from the nightmare of the gulags to the subway and its underground world of workers, travelers, and panhandlers in perpetual war with each other.

Wherever the métro and the R.E.R. are brought into the narrative so also is a heightened sense of social, physical, and mental geography.¹⁰ In most likelihood the fortieth sequence (116) is apparently inserted to reiterate the exchange where confrontation and hate are summed up in a pattern of quid pro quos. Begging in the moving subway, a young Romanian woman tells the story of her plight that is matched by Sayid’s cynically veracious account of his own situation. After he tells her off, she flips him her middle finger (“un doigt d’honneur”) to indicate to him that he ought to get fucked. The gesture is connected to the cartographic dimension of the next sequence taking place at the Rue des Halles. Sayid, Vinz, and Hubert are lost in the city. Sayid asks a policeman for directions that will lead them to Astérix’s apartment. The officer looks in his guide and shows the youth how to get to the address. A straight cut separates the sequence in the métro from that of the Rue des Halles. In broad daylight Sayid runs down the street and flags a policeman who responds by offering help and wishing him a good day, saluting the youth and uttering, “bonne fin de journée, m’sieu [have a good afternoon].” Sayid runs back toward the camera where, on either side of the frame, amble Vinz and Hubert. “Tu vois comme ils sont polis, les keuf ici. Il m’a carrément dit vous et tout [Hey, don’t you see that they’re polite, the police who’re here? He squarely addressed me in the “vous” and all that].”

In Sayid’s remark the metaphysical geography of La Haine is suddenly concretized. In the scenario, “T’as vu comme ils sont polis ici? [Have you seen how polished they are here?]” (41, 116) brings forward a confusion of world, government, social conduct, and violence: an agent or uniformed personification of la police carries his city-map and speaks with terse elegance. Sayid’s words, “polis ... ici”—both “polished” and “police” here—echo his observation about policy. The words also carry a suggestion of the art of governance and of domestic regulation. It resides in the broader historical definition of police, and by extension to the world at large as polis, the noun describing the city-state as a global locale. The theme of the film that poses the question about how best to go about regulating a world on the precipice of disaster is borne in the visible and aural dimensions of Sayid’s pun. The three outsiders who are lost inside the city cannot decipher maps or realize where they are. For a moment, perhaps as an aftereffect of the old man’s story, a threshold of communication is gained. Linked to an overarching effect of atopia and set in the context of trains that serve as a metaphor of spatial communication, the short sequence—in its abrupt transition from the underground to daylight or from violence to exchange—plots a metaphysical geography in the midst of conflict.

The relation that ties human conduct in a social topography (a polis) to the cosmic figure of the world floating in space is confirmed in what might be the most abstract sequence of the film (61, 155–57). Late in the night the trio has crashed an upscale opening at a gallery before finding some respite in the darkness of the night. They are seated on a rooftop that looks over Paris in the background. Soon entering the field of view are the illuminated outlines of the Eiffel Tower. A extreme close-up of a ring on Vinz’s finger (that spells “Vinz” in bold characters) precedes the long shot on the roof accompanied by a piece of rap (whose air uncannily recalls Raymond Devos’s voice in Pierrot le fou, chiming “Est-ce que vous m’aimez [Do you love me],” that here is turned as “. . . tu me connais? [(do) you know me?].” The question thresholds the view of the sky and stars that Hubert and Vinz contemplate, the backs of their bodies facing the camera on either side of the frame as they rebound a volley proverbs that end with “Liberté, égalité, fraternité.” The words refer at once to the grounding contradiction of the film, to the bond the threesome share, and to the emblematic Tower of France.

In response Hubert’s voice suddenly waxes metaphysical after Vinz reflects on the tale the old man had told in the men’s room. In the script Hubert murmurs in response to Grunalski’s parable, “Je sais pas, mais c’était profond [I don’t know, but it was really deep]” (61, 156). In the final version he in fact appropriates what the old man had been scripted to say in his monologue. “Moi je pense qu’il croit en nous, car Dieu nous aide et fait pousser le caca, vous saviez ça? [As for me, I think he believes in us because God helps us, he pushes the shit out of us, did you know that?]” (39, 115). In the final version the words are given to Hubert who varies on the formula. He declares, “Si Dieu fait chier, c’est Dieu qui fait pousser le caca [If God is a pain in the ass God is he who pushes the shit].” The remark is made as Sayid, in the background, writes his name on the surface of the building with the can of spray paint. He moves toward the center of the frame in the middle ground and offers a poem (not in the published script) he reads from memory to the two seated figures in the foreground who seem to be “thinking.” “Voici un poème” (the English subtitle translates “here’s a poem” as “check out this shit”), he announces, before stating, “Le pénis de Le Pen à peine il se hisse [Le Pen’s penis can barely get a hard-on].”

The wit elides with Hubert’s remark reiterating what he had said, voice-off, in the first shot of the film, prior to the credits, that displayed a color image of the world as it had been photographed from the Apollo mission to the moon in 1969. Hubert asks Vinz if he knows the story of the man who falls from the building of fifty floors who repeated “jusqu’ici tout va bien. . . .” Vinz replies that he knew it from a rabbi. In the final version of the film, in a shot that displays the back of his head in extreme close-up to suggest that his skull assumes the form of a globe, Vinz suddenly begins to think along the lines of Pascal’s remarks on interplanetary space in the concept of the deux infinis. Instead of putting himself in the place of the man falling from the apartment building, he avows in words uncharacteristically bereft of obscenity, “je me sens comme une petite fourmi perdue dans l’univers intergalactique [I feel as if I were a little ant lost in an intergalactic universe].” In the shot his head figures as a virtual planet amid an infinity of galaxies. Since an image of the globe is remembered from Hubert’s first telling of the tale of the falling body, Vinz’s skull, now seen as a human globe, is a counterpart to the memory-image of the terrestrial sphere first shown to the world from the Apollo rocket in 1968 and the aftereffects of May 1968.

The sequence in the toilets showed that when the film underscores a point the camera tends to hold on an image in order to promote reflection. Fixing on the space of the bathroom and the Heineken poster, it invites a gloss of the name in the context of the lower depths in which it is placed. The same effect recurs when the young men exit the frame. The camera remains centered on the Eiffel Tower in the distance. The bars of light that illuminate its sloped girders are extinguished from the bottom to the top. The boys had tried to coordinate the darkening of the Tower with a snap of their fingers, but they leave—admitting that synchronization works only in the movies and that for all they care they can plug carrots in their mothers’ assholes—before the camera registers the disappearance. On first glance the Tower would be an icon ironized, like the slogan “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” adjacent to its surrounding obscenities in the dialogue uttered earlier in the same sequence. Like a meaningless slogan, it would be a carrot thrust into the night. But as the camera holds on the Tower and the onslaught of darkness heightened by the extinction of light from the base to the summit, the structure suddenly resembles a silent rocket that seems to ascend and evanesce in the night.

The camera is asking the viewer to “read” the effect of the Tower in view of the “writing” that Sayid has just sprayed along the edge of the building. In the first version of the script he was to rhapsodize, “Mon nom est écrit partout sur la façade, je suis un putain d’enculé de tagueur qui brûle la ville de son sigle . . . [My name is written everywhere on the façade; I’m a fucked-over scumbag of a graffiti-sprayer who burns the city with his initials]” (61, 156). A straight cut to a street in Paris (63, 157) returns to the poster, bearing the legend “Le monde est à vous,” that displays in black and white the imago mundi first seen in color before the credits, and then glimpsed when the threesome were taking the R.E.R. from Les Muguets to Paris (35, 95). The scenario underscores the contrast between the battle zone of the intermediate areas glimpsed through the windows of the train en route from the housing area to Paris. The desolation becomes the object of Hubert’s thoughts as he contemplates the landscape. For the viewer memories of Les 400 coups seem to inhabit the image so much that the three boys would seem to be disaffected and disowned sons of Antoine Doinel.

Hubert thinks. Refusing to answer to Vinz’s aggression, Hubert is immersed in his thoughts and looks at the landscape, or rather the city-spaces that parade before his eyes, sometimes with a few pieces of graffiti happens to color different spots, but in general everything is grey and sad. A bus stop shelter under which an old man is standing has been shattered and sprayed with graffiti, a luxury car, its wheels having been removed, is perched on the stone squares in a wasteland. Further off is glimpsed the poster with the planet first seen at the beginning of the film. We discover that the poster is an advertisement for a travel agency and that under the planet is written the following slogan: THE WORLD IS YOURS. (95)

The camera holds on the poster before a shot in vanishing perspective displays the trio before an esplanade that recedes into the immensity of Paris. The slogan is part of a tesselated construction of recurring mementoes that includes a graffito in the suburb which reads, “l’avenir est à nous” (15, 56) and a remark by the concierge in the apartment building. In a Portuguese accent she exclaims, “Vous êtes pas fou dé sonner chez tout le monde? Vous croyez que le monde est à vous? Dehors! [Aren’t you out of your minds to buzz everyone. Do you think that the world is yours?]” (42, 118). In the sequence where it appears for the second time the poster displaying the Apollo image stands at a distance midway between the suburbs and the city.

By contrast, now, in the tiny gap between the two shots, between the evanescent penal shape of the Tower and the globe that follows, a metaphysical geography emerges. The date of the image shows that the hope felt in 1968 in the power of people to address the ills of the world in 1995 is dashed. It is clear that the poster is an interfilmic reference that allies La Haine with a number of other films.¹¹ “The World Is Yours” had been seen on the horizon of Howard Hawks’ Scarface (1932). The French title alludes to Renoir’s utopian experiment, Le Vie est à nous (1936), and surely the empyrean beyond the grasp of everyone in the film is invoked in the oblique reference to Jean Grémillon’s patently idealistic scenario of a flyer in Le Ciel est à vous (1943). Within the field of allusion the poster displays an ironic commentary on the failure of the western powers to improve the human condition despite its development of an apparatus that brought humans to the moon. In the same light it can also be asked if the Eiffel Tower, seen in view of Sayid the tagueur, can be seen as a calamitous writing instrument that exhausts its illuminated ink as might a pen its fluid or an aerosol can its compressed paint.

An answer to the question is found in the long take fixed on the poster and the depth of the street in the sequence that follows the extinction of the Tower (63, 157). The film cuts suddenly from the bird’s-eye view of Paris. Seen in deep focus and in a perspectival view of the street on the right side of the frame, the three boys walk toward the image from the Apollo mission that stands at the left. Sayid stops, pivots, and paints an N over the V of the “vous” at the end of the legend: “Le monde est à v (n) ous.” The camera holds on the difference long enough to allow the viewer to gloss the words in myriad directions. It initially forces recall of the inaugural expression of graffiti in the film.

In his first scriptural gesture in the film Sayid is introduced to the spectator in a delay (3, 19). The camera pans right along a row of uniformed policemen standing listlessly by their vehicles. The felt tip of a marker is heard squiggling before the pan reveals Sayid penning his words on the backside of a van. The screenplay furnishes an interpretation of the gesture when it anthropomorphizes the vehicle: “Dans les cars blindés, des CRS dorment ou jouent aux cartes et personne ne remarque qu’à l’arrière, le jeune beur est en train de taguer discrètement le cul du bus [In the armored vehicles the riot police sleep or play cards, and no one is aware of that in the back the young beur is discreetly painting graffiti on the bus’s ass]” (3, 19). Sayid, à l’arrière, decorates le cul of a bus bearing the emblem of the riot police. Sayid’s name, drawn in imitation of Arabic or of an exotic alphabet, stands above the words, “Baise la police [Fuck the police].” It offers a calligrammatic figure of the Eiffel Tower in the letter A. The miniature ideogram anticipates the advent of the grandiose architecture that is drawn into the night enveloping the city at large.

In both sequences the drawing of the signature would be a frustrated attempt to raise consciousness about the collective nature of a degraded habitus, or a call to arms to think globally (about marshaling energies misspent in the cursive art of cursing, or occulted frustration about a world at war) while acting locally (leaving a mark in and around Paris and defying police brutality). The drawing of the letter N would be a manifest sign of a metaphysics of squalor, or of what Kassovitz called a need to gain hindsight or recul on the world. In shorthand the letter N stands for Haine, the noun that had been glimpsed in the toilets heralding a bottle of “Heineken” after Sayid had drunk his modicum of “Cacolac.” In the prevailing language of the film the world that is “à nous” would be a hypothetical world-anew and a world-anus. It would belong to a metaphysical order on which Pascal drew inspiration for his deux infinis, of a terrible human governance—or police—of things, in which Montaigne, the author inspiring Pascal’s thoughts about the human condition wryly remarked that

[l]a presomption est nostre maladie naturelle et originelle. La plus calamiteuse et fraile de toutes les creatures, c’est l’homme, et quant et quant la plus orgueilleuse. Elle se sent et se void logée icy, parmy la bourbe et le fient du monde, attachée et clouée à la pire, plus morte et croupie partie de l’univers, au dernier estage du logis et le plus esloigné de la voute celeste, avec les animaux de la pire condition des trois; et se va plantant par imagination au dessus du cercle de la Lune et ramenant le ciel soubs ses pieds (1962, 429)

Presumption is our natural and originary malady. The most calamitous and frail of all creatures is man, and more often than not the most boastful. It feels and sees itself lodged here, in the mud and dung of the world, attached and nailed to the worst, the deadest, and the most stagnant part of the universe, at lowest floor of the building at the greatest remove from the celestial vault, with animals of the worst condition of the three; and with its imagination it goes planting itself above the circle of the Moon and bringing the heavens beneath its feet.

In this context the film folds an archaic cosmography, an aura of timelessness, in its representation of contemporary social space.

It is revealing to see how the metaphysical geography of La Haine is meshed with its craft of distribution. As much as it reflects or analyzes the social injustices it portrays La Haine figures in a broader invention of the malheur des banlieues in which the French left and right have played equally strong roles. Reception of the film is noteworthy. “One side reads the suburban youth culture as a ‘culture of protest’ and the other a ‘culture of psychosis.’ For the first, it is the society which is the problem and the emergency requires fighting exclusion. For the second, it is the kids who are the problem, and the emergency requires more police force and border patrol.”¹² As it recedes from recent memory the film blends into a syndrome of frenzied opposition to civil chaos that runs from the memory of Rodney King to the O. J. Simpson trial and the idea of suburbs in perpetual disaster.¹³ La Haine, notes Jenny Lefcourt (Lefcourt and Conley 1998), became a reference that soon figured in the mythology of the banlieue. At one point in the film the three boys sit under a televised map of a weather report in France. The meteorology is used to show that the film is a symptom of condition of violence of its time and that its mood conveys the atmospheric pressures in what Baudelaire had once called the “spiritual barometer” of the nation.

Returning to the persona invoked in Villon’s parting words in his Grand Testament, we recall “François, the child of France” who remarks that his neck will be aware of the gravity of his buttocks when he hangs from a gallows located at the edge of Paris. His words seem lighter and more ethereal than Hubert’s thrice-repeated fret about the man who will crash on the pavement after a fall from a building of fifty stories. Villon’s figure philosophizes about the space of the world by refusing to entertain any extended meditation about time, the world, and social contradiction. Kassovitz predicts apocalypse in the space of a couple of seconds.

If film, like poetry, can be said to be a mechanism that philosophizes independently of its readers or consumers, La Haine tends to think in the areas where its sense of space exceeds its own intended objectives. That sense is not located in the suburbs, in Paris, or in the suspension of a body falling earthward from the moon or a skyscraper, but between its ideology (which includes both its conscious and unconscious relation to itself and its ambient modes of production, if we are to recall Louis Althusser at the time of the American mission to the moon) and other spaces that are opened within its forms of expression. The unmitigated anality of La Haine indicates that the film is above all a work that belongs to a classical French literature that goes back not just to the fabliau but also to the salon and the literature of the précieuse, to the world of elegantly oppositional practices that we have seen in Louis Malle’s (and, indirectly, in Ridley Scott’s) appeal to the Carte du Tendre. Where there is tenderness a space for metaphysics is possible. The tender map is one that belongs to euphemism and elegant idiolect. It constructs another world or a different way of living in the one that is given.

In La Haine the same language is omnipresent, but as in Villon, it is turned topsy-turvy. Swearing about failing to hitch wires that would allow the three young men to jump-start a car they have jimmied so that they can return home safely, Sayid curses, “Enculé de putain de fils de pute de bâtard de vérole de moine de merde de volant à la con!!! [Motherfucking asshole of a son of a bitch and a monk’s buggered bastard at the goddamned wheel]” (58, 152). Alert reader that he is, Vinz, the youth with the foulest mouth, tells him to stop philosophizing and get the job done: “Arrête de philosopher et tire.” We have seen that Sayid, armed with a marker or a spray can, was the writer and the chronicler of the forms of repression. In La Haine he was the artist of glossolalia, a language of intransitive expressiveness. Vinz, who responds to Sayid’s outburst with gnomic curtness, here suggests, building on Montaigne once more, that to philosophize is not to learn how to die, but to euphemize—to euphemize upside down—where the bottom is celebrated residing in the place of the top. The distance that the film gains from its topic in its inversions, where its recul from itself identifies its site of pleasure and its festive underside becomes the sign of its appurtenance to a tradition that, as the fashion of an idiolect born of 1968 would have it, “deconstructs” its pretension to shock, alarm, disgruntle, or bait its viewer.

Three maps are made visible in La Haine. One, taken from the Apollo mission in 1968, is attached to the credits and recurs in the suburbs and in the city. The meteorological map of France under which the children place themselves for a moment indicates that the film is an allegory and that its meaning moves from police to polis and from polis to cosmos. One of the maps is less evident but ultimately the most memorable. Walking with his friends through the grounds of Les Muguets, Vinz turns about and sees a Holstein cow that looks for pasture in the midst of the asphalt. “O Téma,” he utters in place of “O la vache!,” an exclamation that would have called a holy cow a cow. For the viewers the bovine is not a memory of a laughing cow on a cellophane wrapper, a vache qui rit, but is more likely a totem of a vacherie, of a suburban cowshed where humans live in miserable compression. The splotches of black and white on the cow resemble a pattern of continents and oceans of a world map. A tradition of aesthetic cartography has turned Holstein cows into bearers of cartographic projections.¹⁴ Artists on both sides of the Atlantic have painted “maps” onto their skin in order, perhaps, to have the viewer recall that the hide itself had been the prima materia of portulan charts, the medieval maps on parchment that sailors had formerly used to navigate their way about the Mediterranean. In a crazed way Vinz seems to imagine a world-map on the cow that his fantasies bring into the courtyard of the housing project. The map is one that figures in the metaphysics and underlying abstraction of Kassovitz’s feature. If it belongs to antique and modern traditions, the projection and its material bring the viewer back to a greater history of cartography that figures in cinema. An added irony of La Haine is found in its own icon of France and of cinematic writing, the Eiffel Tower, which in chapter 1 we saw affiliated with the origins of the seventh art.