Is there a nostalgic quality to Mr. Hulot? Initially, I think I would easily say that Mr. Hulot is nostalgic because of his asynchronous nature--there's clearly a separation between Mr. Hulot's worldview and that of his family, and after taking in the sterile nature of the suburbs, it's easy for readers/viewers to develop sympathy and a preference for Mr. Hulot, his ideas, and the old France that he lives in. But upon reconsideration of this idea, I think that the movie Mon Oncle is nostalgic while Mr. Hulot is not. While Mr. Hulot experiences a disjunction between village life and suburban life, he does not ever seem to cease being himself. Rather, Mr. Hulot maintains the past in the present, with much fumbling and little grace. When Mr. Hulot is packed off the country at the end of the movie, his complacence seems to indicate to me some degree of willingness and thus a recognition that the present world he occupies will soon have no space for him. After all, even the family who shares his odd house with him appears in more modern dress at the end of the movie.
I find it difficult to think about Mon Oncle as a whole. Instead, I find myself captivated by short snippets of the movie, often in the way they relate to the movie's many contrasts.
1. Gerard and his uncle seem to be characters that parallel each other, but I also see them as acting in ways opposite to what we might expect of a child and an adult. Specifically, I think of the two scenes involving spouting water. In one, Gerard is pretending to study, but he has really pierced a hole in his book and rigged a contraption to make it appear as though the whale is shooting water out of its spout. In the other, Mr. Hulot struggles to conceal the broken water fountain with his limbs and ultimately fails. These two scenes both outline an important difference and connection between Gerard and his uncle and the two very different worlds they come from. Gerard and Mr. Hulot both seem to have a youthful quality, but they exhibit, act out these qualities very differently--especially in the modern environment of the suburban house. Gerard, born to his parents and having lived the ultra-dictated life in technology-filled modern home, knows how to operate in the home. His play is done in a wily way, under the nose of his watchful parents, and ends in a private success. He is able to have his fun and still perform in accordance with the restrictive surroundings of the house. Mr. Hulot on the other hand is incredibly out of place in the suburban house. His fumbling is simultaneously distressing, because he is sincere, and amusing, because he is sincere and the situation is clearly beyond his control. To Gerard, the combination of sincerity and youthfulness in Mr. Hulot, I think, is very attractive, especially when Gerard compares his uncle to his insincere, domineering, and business-like father. While with his uncle,Gerard can explore the world without limitations, running around his uncle and only touching base once in a while.
2. Mr. Hulot, then, is a fairly benign character. He reacts to others and situations, rather than acting for himself. I think this could tie into the comment that Mr. Hulot is weirdly asexual. He seems to exist like a placeholder for the past in the ultra-modern world that surrounds him. He is there for the gratification of others and not really for himself. This links to my reading of Mr. Hulot's adjustment of the window in order to make the bird sing. While some people from class read that scene as a mean streak in Mr. Hulot--making the light shine in the bird's eye, thus irritating it, and making it call out--while I read the scene as Mr. Hulot's knowledge that the bird likes to see its reflection in the mirror, and the resulting daily adjustment of the mirror in order for the bird to be happy and singing.
3. I was most intrigued by what I see as the movie's two main contrasts, though. The first is the contrast between the quaint village and what I call uber suburbia (purely because uber is a neat-sounding word, of course). What I was most struck by, I think, was the... inefficiency of the village. For instance, the sweeper is never sweeping in any scene that we see him. He will look poised to begin, but as soon as someone he knows comes by, he allows himself to be distracted and strikes up a conversation. The grocer also leaves his vegetable stand along, instead choosing to relax at the cafe with a friend. While the employment of the honour system brings up nostalgic feelings for the past when a man could trust his neighbour, or some similar idea, there is still a lingering sense that the village people have in a way given up on their way of life. They await with great eagerness for the coming of news. The nostalgic quality of the village scenes if enhanced by the jaunty accordion music that we associate with old France, setting the village in the past, despite its current and simultaneous existence with modern suburbia. It is probably pertinent to note, though, that all the experiences of village life that we see as viewers are exterior experiences. Either we could read this as village life being a communal rather than personal experience, or we could also realize that we lack the heart of the story.
4. The other main contrast that I was captivated by was between the super-modern house of the Arpels and the Mr. Hulot's suite atop the quaint and quite odd little house he shares with the young girl who is enamoured with him. Kristin Ross remarks, "In the space of ten years a rural woman might live...a sense of interior space as distinct from exterior space" (111), as a comment on the modernization of France. However, given the previous observation that the exterior space of the village, ie. the village square, is painfully separated from the interior spaces of the homes, I wonder if Mon Oncle plays along nicely with Ross's observations. I think that a comparison with a particular scene in the modern house further questions Ross's statement.
In this scene, Mr. and Mme. Arpel are relaxing for the evening on what appear to be very uncomfortable chairs. Mme. Arpel turns on the television, props open the door, and sets the chairs outside the house, as though the living room or television room naturally extends beyond the boundaries of the house wall, as though there is no distinction between interior and exterior space. Perhaps the transformation of their yard, home, and community is so complete that Mr. and Mme. Arpel can comfortably consider the yard as modern as the house.
5. Aside from the village people and children, the only other natural characters seem to be the animals. It's interesting to see the role they play in undermining the modern world, such as the dog who warns the crew that the boss is coming through or the pack that invade the factor, and also the lap dog in his clothed glory who runs off with the village mutts for some raucous fun, just as Gerard does with the group of boys who pull pranks on all the innocent bystanders.
6. Ross's observation that "the films of Jacques Tati...make palpable a daily life that increasingly appeared to unfold in a space where objects tended to dictate to people their gestures and movements" (111) made me think about my own life and how I may or may not be controlled by the technology that surrounds me.
7. "A key ideological concept like 'communication', for example, began to refer in mid-century not only to the dawning of the new information technologies but to the ideal spatial arrangement of rooms in modern suburban homes..." (111-2).
"The word communication was everywhere - and yet the experience of communication itself, be it understood as spontaneous expression, reciprocity, or the contiguity necessary for reciprocity to exist, was precisely what was in the process of disappearing under the onslaught of merchandise and the new forms of media technologies" (112).
The idea that the modern home is set up for ideal communication between rooms is laughable when considering the extremes to which the "communicability" of the Arpels' home prevents them from communicating. This spurred me to record the sounds of my own morning routine to see what kind of machine noise describes my day and to see if I can even understand the machine noise that is then recorded.
8. "Things fold and unfold, are concealed, appear only when needed. Naturally such innovations are not due to free experiment: for the most part the greater mobility, flexibility and convenience they afford are the result of an involuntary adaptation to a shortage of space - a case of necessity being the mother of invention" (Baudrillard 310).
Another scene that made me pause was when Mme. Arpel is angry that Mr. Hulot has used the sofa in the wrong way. While this was one of the few scenes where I found Mr. Hulot to be inventive and adaptable--using the sofa as a very modern bed, Mme. Arpel, the model modern housewife, is appalled. Perhaps, though, her reaction is not due to the Mr. Hulot's inventive use of the object, but rather, it is due to her lack of control over the object's use--and thus, is indicative of the degree to which she expects to micromanage the house.
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