Pathetic, but worth the try: 'The Deer' (1974)

A classic Filmfarsi, 'Anti-Oedipus,' and Taylor Swift reveal foolishness and freedom in action.

The Deer (Gavaznhā) (1974), dir. Masoud Kimiai, Iran

The landlord Asghar (Enayat Bakhshi) throws Seyed’s neighbors—a man with a fake eye, his wife, and their child—out of their apartment for missing three months’ rent. He brings in a herd of sheep. (“They pay more rent than all of you together.”) They bleat, Asghar’s cronies swinging them along with rope whips, and Seyed (Behrouz Vossoughi) whines: “What are theeeeeese? Oh, yes, sheep…” All the building’s residents boil into commotion. “The sheep will make our children ill!” “Next Asghar will turn this place into a garage.” “None of you is a real man!”

She’s probably right. What can anyone really do? In Ladj Ly’s film Bâtiment 5 (2023) police beat people and destroy their belongings while, given only five minutes to vacate, they hoist them out windows and down the building’s face. Asghar comes back and throws the family’s mattress and pots into the courtyard, smashing bits of ceramic and flinging dust. The mother grabs fistfuls of her daughter’s hair and thrashes her head around: “What will I do with this child!”

Seyed’s old friend Ghodrat (Faramarz Gharibian) hides out at Seyed’s place after a bank robbery. What happened to you, he asks Seyed, the most principled of us all? He boxes knuckle-shaped craters. “Your fists could leave a mark on the wall.” He has a gunshot wound in his belly that oozes blood over Seyed’s clean white shirt while Seyed bleats and drips sweat and Asghar parades his sheep under their window.

Everyone is making fun of Taylor Swift’s new album online. She has weighed down her writing with big metaphors and cheap lines like “sanctimoniously performing soliloquies.” What is she saying? We imagine her grin as she writes, “You wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me,” she who people blast for her staggering one-woman carbon footprint. “Don’t you worry, folks, they took out all her teeth.” And they did: some exec had her get veneers, they shaved down her natural teeth into little gremlin fangs so she would always look, as she says, “dazzling.”

To become the most famous person on earth, one would have to give over their life for others’ enjoyment. I get to think, talk, and write about Taylor Swift because she has sacrificed her normal human existence. The wealth and status do not justify the cost. “I’m miserable!” she writes, “and nobody even knows!” At first I thought, we all know, Taylor. But we don’t: I still get to enjoy human life, which means change, vitality, and slippages. Extreme fame has frozen her into a sign: “You look like Taylor Swift.” I can’t talk about myself in the third person like that.

Seyed visits a different Asghar (Garshasb Raoufi), the dealer to whom he opened the local school as a market in exchange for heroin. He begs, he has no money, but Asghar beats him and throws him across the hall. Seyed scrambles to his feet and gives it everything he’s got: “It was you, bastard, who turned me into this walking corpse!” He shuffles bowlegged through the city, looking around at nothing, his shirt hanging off him and dust skidding the seat of his pants, swinging beads in his hands. The veins pop and the skin around his fingernails bleeds, the cuticles all chewed up. He talks like a wet nose and always looks down at his shoes.

He returns later and knifes Asghar to death in the hallway. Asghar crawls to the fountain in the courtyard while his wife screams and a man squatting outside smoking cigarettes falls asleep upright. He stumbles around and groans and groans. My nose runs, the man on the bus behind me this weekend snored in pops and sucks and whapping mucus. Someone threw up in an alley outside his building and it stank all night. Gurgling and woozy, like body horror, Asghar collapses and gets back up again. “Help!” Seyed! What have you done!

Some of Taylor’s new songs are terrible, some of them are beautiful (she sings, like a gesture, “For a moment I knew cosmic love”), and all of them are very sad. It doesn’t matter. There is someone behind them, a Taylor we can and can’t know, who is desperate to tell us how she feels. Some of my friends who have been her fans for a long time told me that they feel like her writing lost its beauty and simplicity. On her last album she wrote, “I wish you had left me wondering.” Now her anger has made her inelegant. She’s not “good” anymore, but it really doesn’t matter. What is she trying to say?

I started reading Anti-Oedipus last week. Deleuze and Guattari write that everything is production: something connects to something else and produces something by cutting off a flow. The “flow” is an ideal, arising and going without change or redirection. The actors in production make something from this unchanging flow, not the other way around: the actors do not show what the flow looks like, or observe it in unique ways. They make it move. A corollary: nothing is representation.

Do you know how free you are? Seyed does not hate Asghar the dealer because he is an addict and Asghar the provider, but because Asghar gave him an addiction. He does not hate Asghar the landlord because he is the tenant and Asghar the owner, but because Asghar lorded over him. Taylor does not write the way she does because she is crazy, or famous, or sick, but because her work made her crazy, famous, and sick. Addict, dealer, tenant, landlord, crazy, famous, sick woman all flow—Seyed’s knife, Ghodrot’s gun, and Taylor’s songs all produce. Do you know how free you are?—to produce?

Asghar throws up blood in the fountain, the police raid Seyed’s apartment and blow him and Ghodrot up with grenades, and Taylor writes that she wishes should could live in the 1830s, “without all the racists.” I can’t believe that this is all you’ve come up with, but at least there’s a cry. Sheep and gremlin teeth, still, but now some vitality for once.

A few weeks ago, two people came into the restaurant for dinner just before closing. They sat over their food taking pictures of it and of each other and distinctly not eating. They called a man on speaker: “Do you know what time it is?” he asked. “I have to be up at five in the morning.” They apologized; it seems like they have a habit of disrespecting people’s time. I went in the bathroom and swung at the air. I paced in the kitchen, huffed and jumped up and down, and clattered dishes away. I muttered to my coworkers (“They said they’d be quick…”). When they leave, I told myself, I will not smile or thank them or say have a good night because they have been so unkind to me.

They left and I didn’t thank them. My manager scolded me: I know it’s annoying, but when customers leave you can’t look like you’re angry at them. But I was! Am I supposed to stand there and take it, like an idiot? When people walk the earth insulting others and treating them like servants I am supposed to smile and say thank you?

Don Draper again: “I don’t think about you at all.” It’s all so pathetic, punching the air over thirty minutes’ overtime and scowling at people eating dinner. I brought their check and they thanked me—they must have hated me. So foolish. You’re right. I’m sorry I let my anger get the better of me, it won’t happen again.

See other films from: 1970s | Iran

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Cross Dissolve is my blog about film, how it makes me feel, and how I see it reappear in my life—how movies and living dissolve into one another. Please subscribe if you enjoyed today’s entry. Thank you for reading!

Love, Tyler