High-Tech, Low-Tech
Director Wim Wenders' The End of Violence
J. A. Hanson
October 1, 1997
The End of Violence, Directed by Wim Wenders (MGM, 1997)
The new film from German writer/director Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire, Faraway, So Close!) is the story of a spiritual journey taken by Mike Max (Bill Pullman), a big-time Hollywood producer who is shaken from his hectic but comfortable life when his wife (a typically lackadaisical Andie MacDowell) announces her intention to leave him and (in an unrelated turn of events) he is kidnapped and almost murdered. Escaping relatively unharmed and at a loss for what to do next, he returns to his own home, where he is taken safely into the care of his Latino groundskeepers and their family. In the course of puzzling out the cause(s) of these bizarre events, he discovers that they are in some way connected to a man he met only briefly at a conference the year before, Ray Bering (Gabriel Byrne). Ray is now working for a top-secret project to perfect a citywide crime surveillance system, which his man-in-black supervisor promises could be "the end of violence as we know it."
In The End of Violence, as in some of his other films, Wenders creates contrasts in character and even in filming technique to illustrate the increasingly separate worlds of technological and nontechnological cultures. When we first meet Mike, he is literally surrounded by technology, bivouacked by the pool in an ergonomically designed chair, festooned with a headset phone, laptop computer with video phone installed comfortably at his fingertips, and an extra cellular phone at his side, just in case.
His wife calls him up from the bedroom to let him know she is leaving him. She tells him that no one can get through to him unless it is by phone, and it seems she is more right than she knows, because he puts her ...
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