Until the End of the World / An Attempt at Analysis

UTEOTW An Attempt at Analysis
This is, at the moment, no more than a loose collection of thoughts I've had regarding the film. But I hope to develop them into a more cohesive narrative over time.

Broken Ladder
The "Broken Ladder" reference is, if not explained, clarified in the 5 hour Trilogy version of Until the End of the World. For those of us who haven't seen the film as Wenders originally intended it, Claire's reference to Gene has sparked a lot of curiosity and a lot of conjecture.
Chris Pearo, who saw the film when it was shown in Seattle in December 1996, wrote to paraphrase for me the nickname's original context:
I forget how far the original movie went into it, but the reason that Claire left Eugene was that he had had an affair with her best friend (the Asian women who Claire talks to on the videophone). She later tells him something along the lines of: You're like a broken ladder. I can never put my trust in you again.
Not the richest of metaphors, but it certainly answers the question...
The Disease of Images
In reading what some other people have written (citations to come), it seems as though it's easy to conceive as the Disease of Images theme as being meant literally. I doubt it was the filmmakers's intention to have the story involve a disease which had no reasonable biological explanation. I think of it as allegorical, as yet another attempt by Wenders to discredit the creation of signifying images with no substance, or what he calls a "television aesthetic."
After being lost in herself and her dreams, Claire is rescued by seeing herself, through Gene's words, recontextualized in a larger world view. Gene's book takes all of the images that we and the audience and the characters have been seeing and arranges them into a narrative, which is that of the film. Wenders has written previously about the strange difference he sees as a filmmaker between stories and images.
I've seen it suggested in several summaries and reviews of this film that the watching of the dreams in itself is what leads to the "disease of images." I find it more probable that the self-absorption which Claire, Sam, and Henry find themselves prone to is more closely related to their faults as people, and not the phenomenon of "dream watching" itself. For instance, the dreams that all three characters are seen viewing are dreams that involve guilt (for Henry), fear (for Sam), and loneliness (for Claire).
Henry's dream, seen just as the bounty hunters come to take him away, seems to involve Edith, with her hands in front of her face, and her face seen with black spots where her eyes should be. This could be interpreted as a manifestation of Henry's guilt for bringing about Edith's death by making her see too much, too soon (actual quote?). I would further venture to guess that Henry also has dreams that might involve a manifestation of his guilt for driving Sam too hard. (The flipside of Sam's dream where his father is chasing him menacingly?) Henry feels guilty about Edith's death not because it was related to his experiments. It's very possible that he might have simply felt sad, and continued on with his experiments, believing Edith's death was at least for a good cause. This is actually what he appears to do immediately after her death, beginnning by ignoring the proper mourning rituals of the m'bantua people that he has become a part of. But viewing his own dreams forces him to confront what he tried to avoid--the fact that his drive was more about his scientific achievements than helping his blind wife to see.
Floating Above the Earth, Observing, not Acting
In the movie's opening, Claire dreams of "gliding over an unkown land," only to end up falling and panicking. As we hear of this, we are given shots of the Earth from space, but it is dark, stony, and unrecognizably cold, like a geological survey map. At the end of the film, Claire is literally gliding above the Earth as a member of Greenspace, the 21st century equivalent of Greenpeace. She is a crewmember aboard a space station which monitors the Earth's oceans for pollution crimes. The last shot of the film gives us Claire's view of the Earth from outer space. It is essentially the same view of the Earth from the film's opening shot, turned upside down. But, whereas the view in the opening was dark, with the sun just peeking over the umbrage, we now have a lush, blue-green planet, carefully guarded by our protagonist. (There's a mother-godess sort of theme in there somewhere, but I'm not ready to touch it.) The symmetry of this closure suggests a moral having to do with the idea of "getting involved" and making a contribution to humanity in order to keep oneself grounded.
Self-Obsession & Self-Deification

Claire: This is so Beautiful...
Henry: Beautiful! Wallpaper is beautiful. You're now looking at the human soul...singing to itself...to its own god!
Claire: I don't know about god.
Henry: The god within us. Look at it. It needs nothing.
Claire: It needs everything.
Henry: (flustered) Oh! Nothing! Nothing!
Claire: (sighing) We don't have the right.
The dialogue above takes place as Claire and Henry Farber review the results of "dream recording." Henry Farber's repeated use of the word "nothing" reveals him to be the Nietzschean that only an actor who's played Jesus Christ can. (Max Von Sydow played Jesus Christ in the 1965 film, The Greatest Story Ever Told.) Not only does he renounce God, but his treatment of Sam shows him to have renounced the role of the father as well. He relieves himself of the father role in Sam's life, and apparently forces Sam to sacrifice raising his own family in order to go around "recording."
The Mediation of Images

Gene: They lived to see their dreams. And when they slept, they dreamed about their dreams.
It is not the act seeing itself that is harmful for the characters in this film. It is the act of seeing through mediums. Whether it is other people, palm sized camcorders, videofaxes, or their "nocturnal imagery." Gene says, "I didn't know the cure for the disease of images." It might be interesting to consider that images are not what we see. Images are a creation. A mediated version of what has existed in light somewhere. An image cannot exist without its medium (photograph, television, etc.). What we see is something else. Something felt more than seen. The image is the medium?
Included with the Japanese import laserdisc version of Until the End of the World is an hour long documentary-esque film by Sean Naughton called Dream Island. The film was shot while work was being done in Japan on the HDTV dream images for UtEotW. Wenders does a voiceover for the film, which begins with beautiful imagery of a junk pile. We see rusted cars decaying ina very organic sense as Wenders says, "All things turn to junk. Do our images also turn to junk?"
This question took on an interesting twist for me as I asked myself about the possibility of dreams being these "junked images". The dream sequences in UtEotW certainly are in a very real sense, because of the digital work done on them, images that have been "junked".
Images captured, as I've said before, are already mediated. Dreams are, as I think the film tries to say, images that have been mediated by our subconscious. They are like videos of images seen, and memory is the content which they mediate.
The Mirrored Self

Henry: (to Edith) ...and here you are, seeing yourself to death.
Seeing through a medium is not the only harmful way of seeing in the film. In numerous ways, harm is brought to characters in the seeing of the mirrored self. This phenomenon most obviously occurs in Claire, Sam, and Henry's obsession with their own dreams, to which Gene remarks (exclaims, even), "You're all just junkies hooked on your own dreams!" This also manages to occur however in several other, more subtle parts of the film's subtext. Notably, in the mirrored character pairs of Claire and Edith, and Sam and Henry, respectively. There is evidence to support this possibility in the very contrived device concerning the use of Claire as Edith's eyes. In the scene where Claire is "filming" images of Edith's daughter for Edith to see later, the daughter most speaks to Claire as if she were Edith. She is really only addressing the camera as a news correspondent might address television audience, but the subtext is still there for the previous interpretation.
Sam's Not-Quite Oedipal Complex
His mother goes blind (he, on the other hand, comes very close); he inadvertantly kills her with the images he helped bring her; and he says, "I want my father to know I love him." In one of the recorded dream sequences, we see Henry Farber running towards the dreamer, who can be assumed is Sam. Henry's arms are outstretched menacingly, and his face contains a grotesque scowl. As this sequence comes to an end, Henry becomes Claire, running towards Sam with her arms up as if welcoming him home after a long journey.
Dance Around the Planet
The "dance around the planet" is referred to at least twice in the film:
1. Winter's bounty hunter computer program displays graphics of two people dancing around on a globe in search of the bounty.
2. Gene calls the whole adventure a "dance around the planet" in his book. This is also the book's title

This page last modified on Saturday, December 27, 1997, at 21:37
Please send comments and criticisms to Archie Harris (archii@panix.com).
Copyright© 1997 Archie Harris.
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Road Movies Filmproduktion GmbH and Argos Films SA