Written by Tom
In defence of the narrative structures used by Duncan Jones’ recent Netflix film Mute.
A few weeks ago, Mute was released onto Netflix. Since then, it’s had a bit of critical kicking, and not one that I think is entirely deserved. A lot of critiques I’ve read of the film so far seem to be reading the film’s structure wrong to me and putting the empathis on the wrong points. And honestly, I’m getting pretty tired of audiences doing this. So, given that I’m the guy who defended Zac Synder’s DC films on the basis that they’re very good films which weren’t made for their primary audiences, let’s put together a review which is actually sympathetic to what Mute seems to be doing.
[WARNING: there be spoilers from this point on]
Mute follows a mute Amish person called Leo living in a near-future Berlin. (Frankly, the bizarre bricolage inherent in that sentence alone is enough to justify the film’s existence to me.) One night, he wakes up to find this girlfriend, Naadirah, has gone missing. Based on some texts that are sent to him from her number, he starts investigating the seedy criminal underworld that she was somehow a part of in order to find where she is. Meanwhile, we also follow the lives of Cactus Bill and Duck, two former-marines who now have their fingers in a lot of pies, both criminal and not. Slowly but surely, we find out that Naadirah and Cactus Bill used to be married and that Naadirah has been trying to gain custody of their daughter. Turns out that Cactus Bill broke into Leo’s apartment, kidnapped Naadirah and then murdered her to ensure he gets to keep the kid.
That’s not all though: it turns out that the texts that Leo has been receiving have been sent from Duck who saw the murder of Naadirah as Cactus Bill finally going over the moral event horizon. In order to punish Bill, he’s been throwing breadcrumbs at Leo in the hopes that Leo will find and attack Bill, which he does. When Leo kills Bill, Duck takes Bill’s kid, partly because he feels he should look after her now and partly because he’s a pedophile who has an unhealthy obsession with little girls. He also kidnaps Bill and installs a voice box in Leo’s neck so that he can apologise to the child for killing her father. Leo kills Duck though and adopts the girl himself.
Now, let’s get the valid critique of the film out of the way: it is basically a giant fridge plot about how a stoic man has had his woman stolen and now has to go into the masculine world of crime and beat a lot of people up in order to regain what was took from him. The main plot is almost entirely built out of men fighting other people for control of the two main women characters: whether it’s Cactus Bill killing his wife for control of his daughter, Leo killing Cactus Bill for avenge him killing his girlfriend, or Leo killing Duck so that he can save and adopt his girlfriend’s child. Yes, this film is primarily about masculinity and fatherhood (as I shall go on to argue) but there’s ways of writing stories about these things which don’t require women being murdered and fought over.
In fact, let’s tag this with another main criticism of the film: that it’s unoriginal. It’s aesthetic is Blade Runner. It’s style is 1920’s Noir Detective fiction (again: Blade Runner). And if you’re going to defend the sexist nature of the plot, your main way of doing it is by appealing to genre concerns: the film is trying to ape the standards of traditional detective crime fiction but port them to a sci-fi aesthetic; traditional detective crime fiction is about stoic men punching each other (usually over a femme fatale); ergo this type of stuff is just what comes with the type of territory the film’s covering.
While these are genuine critiques though, they do somewhat obscure the fact that the film does provide an interesting and relatively original way of doing a murder mystery. Usually, a detective will go into a seedy underground and have to find a series of clues which help them make sense of the lies and deceit in order to get to the truth. What’s notable about the mystery in Mute though is how little any of the criminals are hiding their activities: indeed, most of the criminals seem happy to explain what they’re doing to anyone who appears in their office. Instead the reason why no-one’s able to help Leo is because pretty much no-one actually knows what happened to her: none of them par Cactus Bill were involved and most of the criminals questioned probably wouldn’t have been able to pick her out from a line-up.
This is because the entire organised crime stuff is basically a giant feint: a massive red herring designed to hide the fact that the actual crime is entirely disconnected from the sex trade and is instead just one man who’s a bit too angry and wants to keep his daughter. And our biggest clue to this through most of the film is the way in which the narrative doesn’t quite work correctly until this fact is revealed. Intermixed with Leo’s investigative plotline is a series of almost off-topic scenes featuring Cactus Jack and Duck doing stuff. We learn about their babysitting arrangements, they go shopping, they go bowling, Duck is vaguely creepy while working at his cybernetics job. There’s something just really weird on first watching about following these two characters when presumably we’re meant to be following Leo’s investigations of the crime world. In your Blade Runner esque detective noir, why are we spending so much time concentrating on the day-to-day lives of two people who should only be side characters?
The answer is that the mystery is actually entirely about these character’s day-to-day family lives. The film is more about them than anyone else. And the film plays this entirely fairly: it spends most of it’s time focusing on them, treating them as the main characters they are. The thing is that the film starts as if it’s a detective story staring Leo, turning these duelling plots into a narrative issue which needs solving. The result is that, for most of its run-time, the audience is meant to be slightly off-put by the film’s narrative structure, questioning exactly what type of film we’re in, which in turn is an invitation to us to start engaging with the film itself. The same way that Leo’s narrative is him investigating the world around him, we’re invited to investigate it by investigating the film itself and figuring out what the narrative concerns which drive it forwards are.
Indeed, a lot of the film’s structure is about putting us in Leo’s shoes. From the very start of the film, Leo is defined as a character who doesn’t belong in the world he’s in. This is inherent from the very idea of putting an Amish person in a sci-fi film, or putting a mute person in the detective genre where survival is usually a battle of wits. He’s a man who doesn’t fit in the world around him and is alienated from it, hence why he has to put so much work into understanding it and its people. We’re alienated from the film too though. This is why the world is such a bizarre mixture of stuff: a mess of aesthetics, languages, nationalities and sexualities, housing a narrative which is purposely overstuffed and disparate. We’re meant to be constantly trying to put this world and its plots together. In the same way that Leo’s picking through the world in effort to make it make sense, so are we.
So what are these narrative principles and what is the film trying to do? Well, as previously said, by the end of the film it’s revealed that the actual plot is largely about a bunch of people fighting for the custody of Cactus-Bill’s and Naadirah’s daughter: Cactus-Bill kills Naadirah for custody, Duck gets Leo to kill Cactus-Bill to get her, Leo kills Duck and then adopts her, etc. So a significant theme of the film is the idea of family – the plot is made up of people trying to build families with others and then reacting badly when blockages start getting in their way. A subsection of this is that a lot of the male characters keep judging the other male characters for not being worthy of taking care of the child. Cactus-Bill is put off by Duck’s paedophilia because he doesn’t want her to do anything to his daughter, a thread which culminates in him threatening Duck at his place of work; Duck thinks that Cactus-Bill is no longer worthy of caring for his child after her kills Naadirah, so gets Leo to punish him; and Leo just thinks that Duck’s a piece of shit so drowns him and adopts the kid as his own. In this way, the film is actually about questioning what type of father figures are acceptable in this world. What is a good father?
The ultimate answer is one who’s disconnected from the harsh, gritty and violent hyper-masculinity represented by most of the crime world. Leo is ultimately the father figure which the film decides is acceptable for the daughter. It’s also notable that Leo is primarily defined as inherently not fitting in with the crime world. In the early stages of the film, it constantly stresses how nice he is, and the fact that he’s a mute and relatively unknowable character separates him from the verbose and profane criminals he spends most of the film with. Even when he’s beating up an entire building of criminals, he’s doing it with the leg of a bed that he carved himself and he’s only doing it because he’s been pushed so far. Eventually, he gets rid of Duck, takes the child to her mother and is next seen in a restaurant drawing with her. He’s a peaceful and innocent family man who will only attack when provoked.
Cactus-Bill meanwhile is a person who’s halfway in the crime world and halfway out of it. He doesn’t actually want to be in this world at all; he’s working with them purely to get the required papers that’ll allow him and his daughter to get out of it. But he’s tainted as a character: he killed Naadirah. And ultimately he’s selfish. Leo only attacked people to ensure Naadirah’s safety and to save Naadirah’s kid. Cactus-Bill meanwhile didn’t kill Naadirah to help his daughter but did it because she threatened to take his daughter from him. Leo is selfless, doing what needs to be done for the people around him, while Cactus-Bill is selfish, mercilessly doing whatever he wants to get the life he believes he deserves.
Interestingly, the narrative structures in play position this dichotomy as a choice. We can decide to read this text as largely being about Leo investigating Naadirah’s disappearance, showing a preference for violent masculinity, but that means that you end up constantly knocking against the family drama inherent in Cactus-Bill and Duck’s scenes. Instead, we could decide to read it as a family drama featuring Cactus-Bill, Duck and Leo, but that makes a lot of the crime drama frustratingly surplus to requirements. Instead, the film invites us to investigate and tackle with all the material on offer, asking us to question what masculinity is in the world it presents and what type of men we want to be in this world. The answer that it drives us to – that we should want to be selfless people who will do anything to help others – is certainly not the worst one on display, and it’s an answer that it tries to make its (presumably assumed male) audience work towards. In this view, it does a surprising amount of social good.
But this apparently rests a bit too much on an audience who are willing to take an initially challenging narrative structure and think through it in the way it wants. According to many of the reviews of this film, this isn’t what people were interested in doing. But is this a fault of the film or the fault of the audience? I think we’re given fair warning about how we’re meant to go around watching this film. When the first scene of your sci-fi flick is a Amish boy drowning which then segues into a Blade Runner pastiche without explanation, I think you’ve done a good job at communicating to your audience that this film is going to take a disparate bunch of things and merge them together in ways that the audience is going to have to assimilate themselves; and that in turn is good training for people on how to read a narrative which takes two plotlines that don’t easily assimilate and asking the audience to figure out how they combine into a whole.
Don’t get me wrong, the film’s not perfect, but it’s nowhere near as bad as people are saying and is, in my opinion, an interesting curate’s egg that too many people are taking at face value. Take your time with it, accept that you’re going to spend most of the movie unsure about how half of it is meant to fit together (because that’s what the film wants you to feel), and enjoy the lush visuals and surprising number of non-binary characters. There’s a good film in here if you’re willing to find it, and if you’re interested in mysteries and sci-fi world building, then I finding it is ultimately worthwhile.
FNORD 