The rhetoric of leaving,or the mirage of the fetishized West in Cristian Mungiu’s Occident

Abstract

In one of his earlier films, Occident (2002), Cristian Mungiu showcases the East–West divide in post-communist Romania. First, the rhetoric of leaving and the rhetoric of staying are complex historical legacies of the communist period, when communist propaganda demonized capitalism and the West. In the communist totalitarian public rhetoric, East–West binaries emphasized the East and communism, which led to a fetishization of the West in the private sphere. I call the motility of predominant discourses between private and public spheres the dialectic of rhetoric, which is also always historical. Secondly, the fetish of the West is a kind of Occidentalism, or a reversed Orientalism, and it is made apparent in the film’s title. The film’s characters are trapped between binaries, given that all these factors have social, political and psychological consequences on people’s lives. Compositionally, the film’s multiple narrative planes compile a postmodern, fragmented structure, mirroring the breakdown of rhetorical master-narratives in post-communism.

Keywords

binaries East–West emigration fetish Cristian Mungiu post-communism rhetoric

Introduction

Cristian Mungiu’s Occident is a 2002 Romanian film that centres on the East–West divide in post-communist Romania, laying bare the population’s tendency to leave the country for the West as a complex historical legacy of the communist period. Rather than focusing on counterproductive communist–capitalist reductionist frames, we should see the past and present ideological and rhetorical detritus diachronically instead of synchronically. Therefore, the hybridity of thought resulting from abrupt societal changes within a relatively short period of time comes through in this post-communist historical moment unfolding in a particular place, or what Mikhail Bakhtin calls a chronotope (a time–space frame) (see Dentith, 2001). Compositionally, the film’s multiple narrative planes make up a postmodern, fragmented structure that mirrors the breakdown of rhetorical master-narratives of this moment in history. I call the resurfacing of previously hidden rhetoric into the public sphere the dialectic of rhetoric. Indeed, the rhetoric of leaving and the rhetoric of staying in post-communist Romania have emerged heavy with the ideological burden of the past. Mungiu’s film Occident depicts this polyphonic, crisscrossing rhetoric that keeps the characters trapped in ambivalence.

The rhetoric of leaving is the insistence of the desire to leave the country for the idealized West, which is still seen as the land of abundance in the Romanian imagological consciousness. Having previously built up in response to communism’s closed-borders policies before 1989, when Romania was a locked fortress from which people attempted to defect, after the fall of communism, the dialectic of discourses brought to the surface the rhetoric of leaving from private spaces. Because of its pervasiveness in Romania’s public sphere, the country has been confronted with massive emigration to the West. Therefore, over time, around three million people of working age have left to work and live abroad (about 15 per cent of the entire population). As shown in a United Nations report, between 2000 and 2015, Romania had the largest exodus in the world, in percentage points, except only for countries at war:

Between 2000 and 2015, some countries have experienced a rapid growth in the size of their diaspora populations. Among the countries and areas with the fastest average annual growth rate during this period were the Syrian Arab Republic (13.1 per cent per annum), Romania (7.3 per cent per annum), Poland (5.1 per cent per annum) and India (4.5 per cent per annum). In Syria much of this increase was due to the large outflow of refugees and asylum seekers following the conflict in the area. (United Nations, 2016: 19)

A disheartening result of this exodus from Romania (as well as other countries in the region, especially Moldova) is the fact that millions of children are left behind to live with relatives or by themselves, and entire geographical regions are suffering from gentrification because virtually no working-age labour force exists. These effects are not exclusively specific to Romania but to many regions in Eastern Europe and probably other parts of the world in the aftermath of massive migration. The emigration phenomenon has become so central to people’s discourses and praxis that many artistic and cultural productions of the last few decades have represented its complex, traumatic nature in cinematic creations, including Cristian Mungiu’s 2002 film Occident, which will be analysed in this article.

Consisting in the over-idealization of the capitalist countries of Western Europe and North America, Eastern Europe’s fetishization of the West has informed, among other crises, the recent significant migration of populations in search for a better life. This idealization has roots in previous centuries, when French and later German cultures were copied in Romania, mostly by the bourgeois and political elites. Later, the communist totalitarian public rhetoric constructed East–West binaries emphasizing the East and communism, which led to the contrasting idealization of the West by everyday people in the private sphere. Then, the post-communist fantasy continued to see the West as the solution to current economic problems that lingered after tumultuous regime change. In post-communist Romania, therefore, fetishizing the West is part of a specific rhetorical dynamic – a dialectic of rhetoric between private and public spheres, with social, political and psychological consequences.

Consequently, in Eastern Europe, and specifically in Romania, people’s fetishizing of the West is both a withdrawal from the aggression of communist propaganda and, more importantly, a kind of ‘Occidentalism’ or ‘reversed Orientalism’. If Orientalism is linked to how the ‘West has generated its structures of dominance over the Eastern other(s)’ (Bottez et al., 2011), Occidentalism is the range of responses to Orientalism, from the internalized dominance to the stereotyping of the West as the Promised Land. Cristian Mungiu’s Occident depicts this Occidentalism in an honest, critical manner by showing this complexity of responses to the mirage of the West embodied in a cast of characters that fall on various points of the continuum between resistance and capitulation. The film starts with the eviction of Luci (Alexandru Papadopol) and Sorina (Anca Androane), a young married couple who struggle because of unemployment and the country’s hopeless economic situation. Sorina wants them to leave the country for the West, where well-paid jobs, material success and a ‘good life’ await. When Luci hesitates, she starts looking for a ‘rich’ Westerner who could be the gateway to her dream. In the communist past, Luci had unsuccessfully tried to defect by attempting to swim the Danube, which acts as a natural border between Romania and Serbia (at the time, Yugoslavia). He attempted that escape together with his friend Nicu, who made it and now supposedly lives in Germany, or so we are told; however, we later learn that in fact he has died. In a parallel story, idealist Mihaela (Tania Popa) believes in true love, and dreams of writing poetry she hopes to publish one day, much to the disappointment of her mother who would prefer her to marry a Westerner, and even makes arrangements for that through a ‘mail order bride’ service. However, to everyone’s astonishment, the man who comes to meet her from Italy is black. Including a black character in the film challenges people’s preconceptions about the West, from where supposedly only princely rich white men can come to solve the Eastern European woman’s material and romantic problems. These characters take part in various stories, and in the end some give in to emigration. For instance, after a short friendship with Luci, Mihaela leaves for the West, where she expects to fulfil her dream of publishing poetry. The film, therefore, has an open ending: a scene in which Mihaela is leaving in a car, while Luci stays behind watching the car depart, a sharp contrast between the rhetoric of leaving and the rhetoric of staying, which remains unresolved for the viewer.

In the end, all the characters in Occident are affected to some degree by a powerful East–West binary, pulled between the powerful ‘rhetoric of leaving’ and their search for their more authentic selves. They are torn between various forces, such as true love versus the mirage of marrying for the good life in the West; idealism versus pragmatism in interpersonal relationships; or accepting poverty versus pursuing riches. Mungiu’s film, therefore, illustrates how the rhetoric of leaving and the fetishizing of the West change society and affect people’s everyday lives.

Fetishizing the West in Romania’s communist and post-communist rhetoric

The fetishizing of the West in Romania has roots dating back to the nineteenth century when, with the support of Western European powers, the historical Romanian provinces of Wallachia and Moldavia united into a nation state. The country’s elite youth would attend higher education institutions in France and Germany, thus bringing Western influences back to the country and bolstering the ‘Western dream’. These practices, as well as the fetish of the West, continued over time, throughout various regimes. Discourses employed in the public space informed people’s mixed sentiments about nationalism and cosmopolitanism at a time when national identity was taking shape.

In Romania, throughout the communist and post-communist periods, the East–West binary imbued the rhetoric of both public and private spheres in the interplay between institutions of authority and disenfranchised people. The so-called period of transition to democracy and capitalism that came after the violent fall of communism in 1989 was politically, socially and economically tumultuous and traumatic. After years of rhetorical control and censorship, the powerful blast of Romania’s 1989 revolution made room for ideas that now entered the public sphere for the first time. In light of these changes, when caught between conflicting discourses meant to ‘legitimize the relationship between rhetoric and history’ (Marin, 2015: S171), how can the population redefine a national identity vis-à-vis the West? What roles do various forms of rhetoric, employed both nationally and at the individual level, play in determining people’s actions?

The fetishizing of the West translates into the desire to achieve social status through appurtenance to all things Western. First, I argue that this fetishizing act, which in communist times was at the crux of resistance rhetoric for people without a ‘proper locus’,¹ became overt during post-communism, when it flooded the public space. During communism, the public space was controlled, censored and in fact lacked genuine meaning or connection to the people after decades of empty propaganda; however, it became rhetorically hybrid and ambiguous during post-communism, when it allowed freedom of expression and when, eventually, a variety of ideas penetrated it. This resulted in a coexistence of discourses of the past and the present, some of which were entirely new to the population. Michel de Certeau (2010) explains that, in any society, institutions of power develop strategies, while disenfranchised populations respond with tactics. This line of demarcation between official and secondary rhetorical practices is more evident in authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, although the line becomes fluid after regime change. Because of the duality of rhetoric in communism, the rhetoric of leaving was part of the secondary, unofficial tactics people engaged in, only to escalate after 1990. Cristian Mungiu’s film Occident illustrates this rhetoric of fetishizing the West as part and parcel of a larger, more encompassing rhetoric of leaving the country, which became more prominent and was indeed put into practice once Romanians could access Western jobs.

Secondly, like the desire for all things Western, the fetish of the West functioned in fact as the unattainable object of desire, rooted in the feeling of lack, similarly to Jacques Lacan’s objet petit a. Lacan states:

The objet a is something from which the subject, in order to constitute itself has separated itself off as organ. This serves as a symbol of the lack, that is to say, of the phallus, not as such, but in so far as it is lacking. It must, therefore, be an object that is, firstly, separable and, secondly, that has some relation to the lack. (Miller, 1998: 103)

It is based on the conviction that the West, in its quality of the object cause of desire, could override the ills the East/communism inflicted on people. The Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy defines as an all-human ‘desiring restlessness … [the] inability to acquire an object or attain a success that would be ‘IT’ (with-a-capital-I-and-T), the final be-all-and-end-all telos of wanting and wishing satisfying them for good forever after’ (Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy, 2013). Therefore, the more communism isolated people from the West, the more they objectified it, because in this lack imposed by the regime people saw the sign of the authenticity the communist totalitarian reality could not contain. Nicholas Mirzoeff’s (2011) reference to colonialism also applies to totalitarianism: he states that authority ‘counters desire and produces a self-conscious subject who experiences both internal desire and external constraint as “reality”’ (2011: 10). Both colonial/post-colonial and communist/post-communist situations exacerbate the East–West binary, although the former also emphasizes the North–South division.

After 1990, Romania gained a new freedom of expression that accompanied the years of transition from a highly controlled and censored communist system to democracy and capitalism. This brought about a transformation of rhetorical practices in the social conversation. Previously excluded topics of political debate surfaced into the public space, while communist rhetorical detritus lingered to coexist with new topics in the public dialogue. The host of issues surrounding East–West binary debates inundated the public space in new ways as they had previously imbued both public and private rhetoric in ambivalent, often contradictory, fashions. In light of the transition period’s pressing needs to break with the past and align with the West, issues pertaining to this dichotomy took centre stage again in the country’s discourses, with consequences for people’s lives. How does the West become fetishized in Romanian post-communist rhetoric? What role does the rhetoric of power and that of resistance have in fetishizing the West? What led to the fetishizing of the West as the object cause of desire in Eastern European societies?

The 1989² revolutionary moment in Romania marked, among other things, a clear moment of ‘before and after’ that nonetheless moulded itself on the communist/post-communist binary-infused mentality. East–West discussions reside alongside well-known ‘us versus them’ dichotomies that richly inform them, as totalitarianism thrives on such extremes and binaries. Communism/capitalism, control/freedom, totalitarianism/democracy and East/West carried various, and indeed opposite, emotional burdens, both during and after the communist period. Various ideologically imbued regimes favoured one term over the other in rhetorical and practical excesses. Communism overpraised the East and vilified the West in public rhetoric. Then, in post-communism, the enthusiasm and hope inherent in the radical changes of the 1989 historical moment reversed the East–West rhetoric, rendering it similarly distorted and misconstrued because of the misguided enthusiasm of that moment. People shared overly positive visions of post-communism, political democracy and capitalism in idealistic ways, placing undeserved insistence on them, at the same time as they violently vilified communism – all because of a previous rhetorical paroxysm that had inscribed in people a dualistic mentality.

Given that communism was imposed from the outside, post-colonial theory affords analyses of the rhetorics of power and resistance in communist Romania. I propose understanding Romania in its post-coloniality in matters of cultural identity and otherness. Both colonialism and colonial imperialism ‘operate on the conviction of one dominating culture’s superiority and of its ordained mandate to stand above other nations in this world by whatever means it finds suitable (effective conquest and rule, remote control, or directorial management)’ (Ştefănescu, 2012: 62).³ In post-communism, as David Moore (2001) also observes, post-socialist countries display a post-coloniality, and Central and Eastern Europeans ‘return to Westernness that once was theirs’ as a ‘desire for authentic sources’ (2001: 116, 118). The construction of the ‘other’ and the perception of otherness as it refers to ‘self’ play different roles in all these ‘pre-’ and ‘post-’ situations where East and West stand, respectively, for freedom and lack of it.

Subsequently, Romanian national identity was long intricately linked with this binary and still cannot escape the system of reference that continues to hold the imaginary West as the cure for people’s hardships. Indeed, people resented the state authority and oppression of the past, which they associated with the East because of communism. This resulted in the fetish of the West being in fact a withdrawal from the aggression of communist propaganda. As Florentina Andreescu (2011) argues, Romania’s cinematographic productions present a ‘structure of fantasy that brings forward a constant theme of suffering, inflicted by a source of authority with the power to constrain the agency of the hero and produce pain’ (2011: 78).⁴ The fetishizing of the West was the result of this perceived oppression felt in a political system that did everything to separate debates about East and West along the public/private divide. In the past, official communist rhetoric had long labelled the West as rotten and the root of all evil, banning any further discussion once the imposed communist regime became entirely self-affirming.⁵ In post-communism, once the East–West divide blurred with the dissolution of master-narratives, previously unaccepted rhetoric penetrated the new public space, including that of the fetishized West that had resided in the private sphere.

In both communism and its aftermath, people who lived under the force of propaganda for such extended periods of time searched for an authentic identity, with consequences at the micro (or individual) and the macro (or societal) levels. This quest for authenticity is, however, distorted in the face of the continuous change of master-narratives that the hybridized post-colonial/post-communist subject experiences. I similarly argue that people’s predilection for favouring all things Western is in fact more a withdrawal from the aggression of communist propaganda (which indeed came from the East) rather than a genuine quest for authenticity. This illustrates my argument that rhetoric is a question of positionality because discourses affect people differently according to their position vis-à-vis certain issues.

The dissolution of master-narratives or Romania’s rhetorical heritage

Contextualizing Mungiu’s film to the country’s rhetorical framework and post-colonial aspect helps with the understanding of the fluidity of ideas between the general and the particular on the national stage. Films concerned with the banality of everyday life in fact mirror the rhetorical excesses that take place on the larger national or historical scene because the planes of the general and the particular are not firmly separated, but in constant flux. In that sense, I would agree with Michael J. Shapiro who distinguishes between

two basic modes in which films have generated visual and narrative representations of national identity: in a grand way, through their reproduction of symbols and foundational myths of nations (the dominant icons and stories through which nations recognize themselves); and in a banal way, through their treatment of aspects of everyday life. (Shapiro, cited in Andreescu, 2011: 79)

While Mungiu’s Occident belongs to the latter category, it is still up to viewers and critics to discern in it Shapiro’s idea of cinematic nationhood defined as ‘the process through which film has been involved in the cultural articulation of nation-building and -sustaining projects of the state’ working ‘towards the enforcing ideology’ (Shapiro, cited in Andreescu, 2011: 77–8). How does Occident reflect this articulation?

On the larger plane, in the communist years (1947–89), the Romanian Communist Party politicized the whole of society through political propaganda, an active presence of the Party in all the institutions of the public sphere, and an invasive surveillance of the population by various means. Highly controlled, ideological propaganda master-narratives monopolized discursive practices in the public space, which had consequences at the micro level, that is, in people’s immediate realities. As in colonial or hegemonic regimes, in totalitarian regimes the rhetoric of power is self-affirming⁶ to the extent of negating others. The rhetoric of power also depicts a simple, seemingly perfect reality, which it presents to the population in overly positive tones and as the ultimate unique truth. Noemi Marin, in theorizing the communist rhetorical space as ‘ambitiously crafted to cover an entire country’s public sphere’ (2015: S167), further explains that:

by 1989 the space in which official discourse is performed is an intransigent platform in which none of the other alternative discourses can even begin to infer presence. Thus, for Ceaușescu’s regime, rhetorical space is a coercive strategy of discourse, intended to allow access only to Romanian Communist Party approved rhetoric to occupy the public sphere in its entirety. Following the Stalinist model of coercive access to communist discourse, Ceaușescu’s regime brings spatiality as a rhetorical dimension ruled by censorship and biased media to control every single domain of communication in the country. By occupying the public sphere of Romania in its entirety, Ceaușescu and his regime control population participation, leaving no space for other-ness and/or oppositional voices of citizenry. (Marin, 2015: S174)

However, the disconnection between the reality sold by the communist regime’s rhetoric of power and the everyday practice employed at the micro-social level was especially pervasive. The population increasingly understood this discrepancy. As Gail Kligman rightly shows in a comprehensive book on Ceaușescu’s regime and its demographic legislation and practices, ‘discourse is not sufficient to sustain the living body. The abundance promised in official rhetoric was nowhere to be found in daily life’ (1998: 86). This gap continued to grow throughout the decades of the communist period. The rhetoric of power emphasized the positivity of nationalism, the ‘country’s bright future’, and a golden reality people knew did not exist. In contrast to, and as a consequence of, this self-affirming rhetoric, the rhetoric of leaving the country gained predominance in the private sphere as a way of resisting the invasive ubiquity of communist propaganda. Thus, before 1989, the rhetoric of leaving belonged to the private sphere, and people partook of it in hidden ways, away from the authoritarian regime’s surveillance. In sum, people chose to engage in the rhetoric of leaving as a rhetoric of survival and resistance and as an alternative to the communist rhetoric of power that occupied the public sphere. Furthermore, participation in the rhetoric and practices of power was politically determined, highly controlled and under continuous surveillance. As Marin (2015) shows:

by the time of the call for a revolutionary change in December 1989, Romanian public space is covered by the monologue of totalitarian discourse. Ceaușescu’s regime leaves no room for anything or anybody to access the public sphere: all words are taken; the right to speak/write in public and for the public are under regime censorship; no information appears in the media unless approved by the Romanian Communist Party hard-liners; no place is left uncovered by the tributary language praising the leader. All Ceaușescu’s programmatic rhetoric promotes an exacerbated cult of personality discourse. (2015: S170)

Unauthorized, private rhetoric continued to exist, however, away from the field of vision of the authorities. A double-think/double-speak characterized peoples’ lives, a ‘social duplicity’ that Katherine Verdery explains as follows: ‘one developed a public self that praised and followed the party’s ways, and then at home one revealed one’s “real” self, this self being very critical of what “they” (in this they included the public self) were doing’ (see Andreescu, 2011: 83). Romania’s 1989 anti-totalitarian revolution was part of the changes prompted by the fall of the Berlin Wall (November 1989), which had previously divided Europe into East and West for decades, in both geographical, political, ideological and symbolic ways. In the aftermath of the 1989 revolutions that liberated Central and Eastern Europe from Soviet-imposed regimes, de-communization in the economy (e.g. movement towards a market economy and capitalist practices) and politics (democratization and political plurality) slowly began. The initial enthusiasm for the new freedoms of speech and expression later decreased because of the complications involved in processes of political, economic and social reform focused on decentralization, privatization and political plurality.

In Romania’s communist times, state propaganda antagonized both the East and the West in the eyes of Romanians by conveniently overemphasizing the negative traits of capitalism in an effort to put socialist ideology in the best light. Additionally, the population had no rights to travel abroad or even hold a passport, a restriction that further fed the desire to escape the prison-like confines of the communist state. Indeed, few people could leave, and during Ceaușescu’s time in power (1965–89), and especially in the economically difficult decade of the 1980s, Ceaușescu traded, for thousands of German Marks per person, members of certain ethnic groups (e.g. Germans, Jews) who could make a case for allegiance to other states. Romanians were excluded from the possibility of leaving under similar pretexts because being Romanian patriots and supporters of the communist regime was their only permitted identity and allegiance in compliance with the communist regime. Therefore, ideologically informed, the rhetoric of leaving should be understood in its historic evolution, since during communism the population saw emigration to Western Europe or North America as a method of escaping the communist regime.

As part of the wider changes, one of the most exacting realities Eastern Europeans had to face in the aftermath of communism/socialism was to make sense of the dissolution of master-narratives. When change came in 1989, revolutionary discourse blasted into the realm of the rhetorical ‘fortress’ Ceaușescu had created (see Marin, 2015). Given the ubiquity of former communist propaganda, rhetorical practices common to (post-)communist states persisted after the demise of the regime. Communist rhetorical detritus lingered through time in what I call rhetorical hybridity or what Marin calls ‘discursive crossings’ (2015: S171). The rhetoric of resistance found ways to surface into the newly opened public sphere of the post-communist age, and the interplay of the rhetorics of power and resistance engendered the shifting of ideas between these realms. Understanding this reality helps with a reading of Mungiu’s Occident in that the ideologically infused rhetoric of the national identity crisis affects the individual identity of the characters. In the absence of any guidance from a single political source that for decades and generations had directed people how to think of their country, their identities and everyday life, freedom brought about an explosion of opinions, political or otherwise, which created confusion, rhetorical chaos and often disappointment.

Subversions of the rhetoric of leaving in Occident

As the film’s title shows, Mungiu’s Occident plays on the East–West binary which has a diachronic complexity as it is ideologically informed by propaganda rhetoric. The film subverts the premise that leaving the country for the fetishized West is a solution for the country’s population. Regimes and their rhetoric have changed through time, indeed through Mungiu’s characters’ lifetime: they have experienced upheavals that have rendered the characters ambivalent and conflicted about life values. People’s identities are constantly ‘shaped by ideologies’, which are ‘networks of interpretation’, that also ‘help us to decide how to value what we know – they tell us what is thought to be true, or right, or good, or beautiful in a community’; furthermore, ideologies ‘exist in language, but they are worked out in practice’ (Crowley and Hawhee, 2012: 18–19). How do people enact ideological and rhetorical influences in the practice of everyday life? How do they give in, resist or subvert ideologically imbued rhetoric? Showcasing the daily, Mungiu’s films provide answers to these questions in the Romanian context.

In Occident, Mungiu at once presents us with and skilfully subverts the premises of the pervasive nature of the rhetoric of leaving the country for a better life in the West. Contextualized to Romania’s situation, Mungiu’s film visualizes how, in the post-communist period of transition, the West becomes more predominant in people’s imaginary and in time leads to massive emigration to the West. During communism, the rhetoric of leaving made people risk their lives crossing borders, sometimes venturing to swim the Danube, which acts as a border both geographically and symbolically. This practice is reflected in the story of two of the film’s characters who attempted this kind of escape, but only one of them succeeded. Nicu, the character who escaped and reached the West, constitutes the principal means by which Mungiu powerfully subverts the rhetoric of leaving and shows the negative consequences of fetishizing the West.

Binary entrapments

As already shown, the fantasy of the better West is a result of historical distinctions and rhetorical practices of exalting one term over the other in the East–West binary. This fundamental understanding permeates Mungiu’s film Occident, where characters feel the urge to either submit to the rhetoric of leaving or subvert it. Because of pre-established frameworks from the time of communism, people are trapped between binaries that seem to be as inescapable as they are constraining. In fact, all the characters are pulled between extremes they strive to reconcile, while the mirage of the West is the force that largely informs their actions. Mungiu invites the viewer to discern it and often undermines this fetishizing act.

The young married couple, Luci and Sorina, are overwhelmed by poverty and unemployment, and Sorina thinks leaving the country for the West is a solution to their unhappiness. Luci may be bitter because of an unsuccessful attempt to flee in communist times, when together with his friend Nicu, he tried to swim the Danube but was caught. In a parallel story that intersects with Luci’s, Mihaela wants to write poetry but is pushed by her family to look for marriage with a Westerner through a ‘mail-order bride’ service. Binaries such as East–West are ineluctable and include more than economic aspects, especially when characters in search of their authentic selves find themselves remembering communist times with the nostalgia people usually confer on their innocent youth.

If Sorina sacrifices her marriage for the better West by getting involved with a rich Westerner, her husband, Luci, on the other hand, has meaningful conversations about life’s authenticity with Mihaela. Both Luci and Mihaela are conflicted about the rhetoric of leaving and connect in their attempt to resist it by moving away from this pervasive rhetoric. For example, in an apparent quest for ‘Romanianness’, spirituality and truth, in their moment of deepest connection, Luci and Mihaela go back to songs they remember from the communist propaganda of their childhood. One such patriotic song is ‘We, in the Year 2000’,⁷ a symbol of the communist rhetoric of power that had politicized and imbued their childhood’s public space with ideals of a perfect future that only communism could provide. However, these characters are the age of Romania’s ‘baby-boom generation’, the country’s ‘children of the decree’ – that is, Decree 770 of 1966, which banned contraceptive measures and limited abortions, measures that led to a number of social crises including the orphanage situation the Western media focused on after 1990. Also called ‘decreţei’, the so-called baby-boom generation is made up of people born between 1966 and 1972 as a result of the decree (see Meadows, 1990). The communist ideology and propaganda brought up this generation with strong emphases on their communist destiny: for example, the song about a promise of utopian greatness made to them by the communist regime, which was supposed to be fulfilled by the year 2000. Mungiu is himself part of this largest generation in Romanian history and knows how inescapable this communist totalitarian rhetoric of future greatness was to them.

However, how does this song subvert the fetishizing of the West and the powerful rhetoric of leaving? By making a reference to communist childhood songs to enable the connection between characters in search of authenticity, the director emphasizes another inescapable binary reality for the post-communist generation. Indeed, if the way to resist the mirage of the West is by resorting to songs of the communist ‘promise’, then it seems there is no way out, no authentic alternative for these characters. Extremes persist in people’s lives in the aftermath of a regime that excessively depicted life in black or white. Therefore, this nostalgic moment of genuine kinship between ambivalent characters trying to ‘swim against the current’ together is itself prisoner to East–West and communism–capitalism binaries. There is, indeed, no escaping from these binaries in the absence of any other option.

These conflicted characters are thus tragic, and the allusion to communism here is post-communist nostalgia, defined by Mariuca Morariu as follows:

labelled as a symptom of transition and associated with pejorative meanings, a symbol of disaffection with current economic, social and political conditions, a sign of dangerous amnesia, a fashion trend, a subversive attitude toward a new order, a generalized mourning for an irrevocable past exploited through kitsch, a coping mechanism, a form of dealing with the discontinuities imposed by a radical change, a communist legacy that keeps us inert and locked onto an irrecoverable past. (Morariu, cited in Borcila, 2014: 191)

This oscillation between the past and the present further contributes to the construction of the post-communist subject, and all these binaries render these characters conflicted. Occident illustrates this tragic reality of continuous positionality against seemingly inescapable binary frames of reference.

On the other hand, of course, these songs of the communist past could simply represent a return to the age of innocence that provides the much needed common ground for these characters. However, this reading would overlook the communist dimension inherent in them, rendering them oblivious to their own communist past – which is what communism would have liked them to do: communist propaganda advanced a utopia – manifested in these songs – that this generation were told to believe in while growing up. This moment shows these characters trapped between the old and new ideologies they are still learning how to negotiate. By bringing up these songs, Mungiu proposes a comparison between this generation’s childhood expectations and their present realities. Andaluna Borcila (2014) further explains this conflictual state as follows:

The issue of how post-communist or Eastern European nations and individuals position themselves toward the past is highly charged, and understanding this positioning has been very much at the core of how the post-communist subject is imagined. The radical rupture from the past has been articulated and imposed as a necessity for countries of the region to ‘return to Europe’. The imperative to prove this radical rupture with the past has been part of official discourses. Yet strong doubts about the post-communist subject’s capacity to do so have been persistently voiced. Post-communist subjects’ inability to get over the damaging effects of the previous regime have been imputed on them … This diagnosis has pervaded Western academic literature, political and media discourse, and also the intellectual, political, and media discourse across countries of the region. One of the main symptomatic and puzzling dimensions of the post-communist subject’s relationship to her past has been identified as her nostalgia. (2014: 190–1)

Subsequently, the post-communist subject is complex, conflicted and ambivalent, thus showcasing a hybridity that is illustrated in Mungiu’s film, where characters display the qualities of people who have emerged from ideological battles of various political systems but have not yet made sense of these transformations. These rapid changes from one form of ideology to the next, often with violence, have affected them in traumatic ways.

In the aftermath of social or political trauma, people may develop behaviour typical of colonized nations, from being apathetic, disconnected from political discourse and being rebellious in non-vocal ways, to being deviant, submissive or corrupt. Given the kinship of totalitarian communist rhetoric and that of colonizing powers, binaries apply to Romania at least as much as they apply to other countries in the aftermath of trauma.⁸ Thus, a post-colonial rhetorical reading of Occident reveals the hybridity and double-think of the subject, resulting from conflicting ideological stances on cultural belonging to a ‘superior’ foreign power/ideology. As we have seen, various binaries keep characters caught between ambivalent interstices. The binary Orient–Occident inherent in the film’s title references post-colonial theory. Caught between Orientalism and Occidentalism, the authentic Romanian identity has suffered in the same way as the identities of people emerging from colonial situations in the aftermath of the breakdown of totalitarian discursive control and revolutionary trauma. The colonial project and the Sovietization of Central and Eastern Europe after World War II are comparable (see McClintock, 1992; Oţoiu, 2003; Moore, 2001; Ştefănescu, 2012; and to some extent Borcila, 2014, among others), and the post-coloniality evident in territories and populations in places not traditionally considered to be post-colonial, such as Ireland and Eastern Europe, benefits from a nuancing of terms in the ‘colonial’ family. In fact, Anne McClintock observes that ‘the term “post-colonialism” is prematurely celebratory and obfuscatory in more ways than one’ (1992: 91), and further unpacks, problematizes and calls for a redefinition of such terms as colonialism, post-colonialism and neo-colonialism. She posits that, since these are all concepts in their own right, they require more complex analyses within various forms of ‘global domination’, where she includes ‘imperial colonization’, evident in ‘the USSR totalitarian rule over Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia in the twentieth century’ (1992: 88). Similarly, advocating an inclusion of the post-communist spaces in post-colonial analyses and discussions, David Chioni Moore compellingly argues that there is ‘not a single square meter of inhabited land that has not been, at one time or another, colonized and then post-colonial’ on this planet and notices ‘how extraordinarily post-colonial the societies of the former Soviet regions are’ (2001: 112, 114). The post-colonial/post-communist parallel is still productive in research, in that it allows the application of many concepts already developed for post-colonial theory.

Consequences of fetishizing

Mungiu subverts the reductionist premise behind the rhetoric of leaving when he complicates the binaries in the lives of his characters, who find it hard to apply any pre-set ideology to their ontological experience. Karen Barad (2007) explains that the ‘material practices of knowing and becoming’ are ‘entangled’ and that ‘knowing is a material practice’ and a ‘physical practice of engagement’ (2007: 56, 342). This observation applies to the film’s characters as they cannot reconcile their existence with an ideology that presents them with a fetishizing of the West. In the end, they leave true love behind, as Sorina does when she thinks a Western European man would offer her a better life than the genuine, loving relationship with her husband, Luci. Choosing riches over happiness in poverty goes against the long-held tenet of the Romanian Marxist-led government that the rich were ‘enemies of the (simple, honest) people’ (paraphrase mine). Mihaela is another character who refuses to recognize her new-found affection for Luci, after she had been left at the altar by a man we learn nothing about. Luci’s dreams about the West had been shattered before when he tried to escape by crossing the border illegally. He had been caught, while his friend Nicu made it to the West.

Luci’s friend Nicu, however, is the character who symbolizes most directly the rhetoric of leaving and the fetishizing of the West. During communism, when leaving the country was impossible, Luci and Nicu had attempted to flee together by swimming the Danube, a common defection practice and the only way of escaping the prison-like regime. Luci was caught by the Securitate (the Romanian political police), whereas Nicu managed to escape to the West, in a move that Luci finds treacherous. Now everyone, especially Nicu’s mother, thinks he is living the good life. Having made it to the Promised Land of the West, Nicu embodies the accomplishment of the rhetoric of leaving’s insistence and persistence. Carrying with him the mother’s hopes and bitter-sweet sacrificial pain, his departure is equated to a kind of ‘going to paradise’. He thus embodies everyone’s hope for a better life and symbolizes the epitome of post-communist success.

Furthermore, Mungiu constructs Nicu’s myth by making him physically absent from the film and thus intangible, immaterial and entirely imaginary. Even in the absence of news from him, people continue to idealize his achievement if only for the sake of his mother, whose sacrifice should not be in vain. His mother, who is also a mother figure to Luci and other characters in the film, calls her son’s name, and every time someone knocks on the door she hopes it is him. This creates anticipation and prepares the viewer for the terrible news that Nicu is not doing better financially and that he has died. The news of Nicu’s death subverts the overly present rhetoric of leaving as well as the fetishizing of the Western imaginary. Consequently, behind the veneer of a light comedy, Mungiu’s film proposes a challenge to the widely held idea that the Promised Land of the West can indeed ruthlessly consume the dream and brutally turn it into a nightmare. Through Nicu’s death, Mungiu makes it clear that the dream of the fetishized West can devour its dreamers. Therefore, when we learn that Mihaela is leaving, we have to decide for ourselves what will happen to her. This conclusion fits into the film’s larger postmodern project of broken narratives and the breakdown of rhetoric reflective of the post-totalitarian times.

Conclusion

Mungiu’s film Occident presents a critique of the trend for leaving the country for the ‘better’ West through jobs or marriage as the single most desirable solution to problems people have in their native Romania. Characters like Mihaela eventually submit to the trend of emigrating to the idealized West while leaving behind what could become a relationship based on authenticity. At the same time, the film underscores the dissolution of totalitarian master-narratives in the aftermath of the highly censored, highly centralized totalitarian rhetoric of the past. Mungiu further makes visible this aspect of postmodernity through directorial choices that break up the linear narrative, shifting the focus on the film’s complex characters. This further illustrates the relativity of viewpoints resulting from changes in positionality vis-à-vis convictions held by large groups of the population. The conflict between emigration and the need for authentic lives renders these characters ambivalent in a society that expects them to align with the trend at the same time as the new post-communist, capitalist Romania seemingly continues to fail them. Behind what appears to be a light-hearted comedy in which hopes for love and authenticity turn into collateral damage, Mungiu exposes truths about tragic social realities. However, the film leaves us with no clear-cut answers to these problems, but instead allows the viewer to interrogate any preconceived notions the film challenges.

Footnotes

Notes

Author biography

Adriana Cordali Gradea is a PhD candidate in English Studies at Illinois State University, specializing in visual rhetoric and cultural theory. She has recently served as the Chair of the Romanian Forum of the Modern Language Association (2016–17). Her 2014 Rhetoric Review article ‘Embroidered feminist rhetoric in Andrea Dezső’s Lessons from My Mother’ received the 2015 Florence Howe Award in Anglophone Languages and Literatures of the Women’s Caucus for the MLA. She has published both critical works and prose, and her research and teaching interests include public discourse, political rhetoric, visual rhetoric, film studies, feminism, cultural and critical theory, and (post-)communist, (post-)totalitarian and (post-)colonial rhetorical studies.

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