Club Zero (Jessica Hausner, 2023) (Patreon)

"The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life." (Walter Benjamin)

I have little doubt that Jessica Hausner, who is clearly a talented and intelligent filmmaker, would be horrified by the insinuation that her new film Club Zero is an act of right-wing trolling. And it isn't, exactly. But as I was watching Club Zero, whose very title suggests the branding of some new diet soda, I began to really think about irony and allegory, and the way that working hard to avoid making a direct statement of any kind, may exemplify the so-called horseshoe theory of politics. On the one hand, we have actual far-right trolls, the racist cretins of 8chan who use goofy cartoon frogs to swear allegiance to white supremacy. They truly believe what they say, but if anyone calls them on it, they claim that they are just kidding around, to own the libs. "Cope," they say.

And on the other, we have edgy filmmakers, folks who have no interest in being didactic or even taking a firm position on the topic on which their film ostensibly centers. They are interested in a kind of postmodern "double-coding," wherein the film is about something, but not so definitely as to prevent it from just as convincingly being about something else, as an extended metaphor. So Dogtooth is about child abuse, but it is "about" forms of fascism. Manderlay  is about slavery, but it is "about" liberalism and the master/slave dialectic. And so on. You could make similar claims about films by Tsangari, Östlund, Hadžihalilović, and others.

In other words, the aesthetic framework is understood to inoculate the film from the need to have a definable, unironic political commitment. And this is often accomplished by filling the film with any and all possible views on the given topic, across the political spectrum. The film, like a right-wing TV pundit, has no intention whatsoever of telling you what to think. Instead, it's just asking questions, just trying to provoke thought. This is where we find Club Zero. Jessica Hausner has been interested in questions of social control for quite some time, particularly as they manifest in systems of belief, such as Christianity (Lourdes) or racism (Amour Fou). Stylistically, she is extremely Austrian. While her work has displayed a fairly direct Haneke influence -- a chilly, claustrophobic visual approach to impress upon the viewer that society, or an institution, is the film's subject, not its characters -- Hausner tips over into Seidl territory with her latest.

On the surface, and a few layers further down as well, Club Zero is a film about eating disorders as a form of social control. In an upscale European boarding school, a new teacher named Ms. Novak (Mia Wasikowska) is hired as a radical nutritionist, and teaches a course on Conscious Eating. Hausner intends, of course, for this idea to dovetail with the neoliberal "mindfulness" trend, where we are meant to learn to be present, find the time to do nothing, give away our excess possessions, consume less, and the like. Whatever value these pseudo-Zen practices may have, they have one overwhelming function: to position ecological change at the level of the individual while keeping late capital intact.

The students in Novak's class all have the usual bourgeois afflictions. Fred (Luke Barker) is a nonbinary teen into ballet, whose Peace Corps parents are more devoted to "the project in Kenya" than to their son. Ragna (Florence Baker) is training to do competitive trampoline, and her mother takes digs at her weight. Elsa (Ksenia Devriendt) has an eating disorder already, one tacitly encouraged by her mother (Elsa Zylberstein). And Ben (Samuel D. Anderson) is a middle-class scholarship kid who is looked down on by the others. All but Ben live in garish, modernist glass boxes, the sort that communicate acquisitiveness and malaise to the viewer. None of them are right-wing; all are rich boho liberals, and they pay good money so the school will do the parenting for them.

Except for Ben's single mom (Amanda Lawrence). Her sin, it seems, is that she cares about Ben too much, wants to make sure he's healthy and well-fed, and that he is able to succeed at the academy so he can have a chance to go to a good university. Where the other parents are too self-involved, Ben's mother is simply too involved, smothering Ben with her concern. In Club Zero, there is no such thing as good parenting. I guess good parents sent their kids of public school? There is such a sense of blanket condemnation in Club Zero that Hausner paradoxically implies that no one is any guiltier than anyone else, that it doesn't matter what these parents or their children do. They are all doomed.

So, using standard cult / brainwashing techniques (isolation, passive-aggressive judgment, ostracism, the promise of "secret knowledge" that others aren't ready to understand), Novak convinces her charges that, contrary to popular belief, it is possible, and ethical, to live without eating anything at all. This self-starvation is cloaked in do-gooder rhetoric. You consume less, you protect the earth, you declare independence from Big Agra and Big Pharma, and you avoid the inevitable collapse of biological life that will claim everyone else. With a mix of secular self-help lingo and vague Eastern religiosity, Novak leads the kids to a better place, beyond want. They die.

But what exactly is Club Zero indicting? Selfishness? Altruism? Elitism? Populism? Eating? Not eating? There is an overwhelming sense that Hausner herself does not know what her satirical target is. But in this sterile, rectilinear environment, with its overbearing symmetry and strict yellow-and-purple color scheme, and the shapeless, identical school uniforms, it is clear enough that we are watching others, people who are not like us and live in an alien universe. We judge them, but we are not sure exactly why. And yet Club Zero intends to indict us, to make us consider our culpability in the scenario we're observing, even though we can't discern exactly what that scenario is. Club Zero isn't trying to tell us what's wrong with the world. It just wants us to never forget that the world is wrong. In the final shot, Hausner actually restages "The Last Supper," leaving us with an unavoidable conclusion. Human nature is eternal in its self-destructive pathologies. Just admire the precision and move on.