A Zed & Two Noughts

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🎙️ EPISODE 571: 10.07.22 𝐏𝐚𝐫𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝟏𝟎-𝐕𝐨𝐥𝐮𝐦𝐞 RANKING GREENAWAY 𝐒𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬 Having long been an admirer of Greenaway's, especially Drowning by Numbers, The Draughtsman's Contract and The Falls, three films an obsessed professor taught at a Rutgers film studies class I attended many moons ago, I somehow went all this time without actively filling in the holes of his pictures I hadn't seen and... what a tragedy. I will be hard-pressed in ever beating the insane pleasure that is experiencing 1985's A Zed and Two Noughts for the first time. This is a masterpiece.

I think there's actually a very easy counterargument against that claim — that this movie is a masterpiece — and by dissecting it — or, perhaps, letting it rot in a contained, well-lit area until we can all see what's really inside — we'd arrive at the heart of the argument in favor of its unimpeachable greatness: that it wears its symbolism too proudly, too boisterously, that that's all there is. And if that happens to be the case, then I'd scream, "so be it." The symbolic nature of this film seems to vacillate between the hit-you-over-the-head obvious and the fleeting blink-and-you-missed-it. Both modes are staged, acted and shot brilliantly.

Plot seemingly takes a backseat (and is dead in that backseat). But the keyword is "seemingly." The trick of Zed, which makes it a classic, is that the thematic elements are in the foreground. The magician makes you look at them, distracts you with them, before hitting you with the reveal: a fully formed plot wherein all characters, big and small, are developed, their motivations flushed out. It's not supposed to work like this. I'm not sure if Zed is Greenaway's masterwork. I have it at a very close #2. But I wouldn't argue if it takes the top spot on your list.

The script is a delight. Full of one-liners that work as absurdist poetry on the surface but almost always cut deeper. The production design and what is happening to it, how it is changing, is as important as the dialogue. These are not real people inhabiting it. Sure, they're humans speaking a language, but they are every bit the animals inside the zoo. When a character complains that she has become "an excuse for medical experiments and art theory," the joke is clear: the thin line we're walking between the cradle and the grave only has two sides, there are only two gears. We like to think they're wholly separate because stitching them together is incredibly scary. But when the lights go off, the cameras go dark, and everything's covered in snails, the truth is born.

CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 570 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 572 ⫸

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A Zed & Two Noughts is a 1985 film written and directed by Peter Greenaway. This film was Greenaway's first collaboration with cinematographer Sacha Vierny, who went on to shoot virtually all of Greenaway's work in the 1980s and 1990s, until Vierny's death. Greenaway referred to Vierny as his "most important collaborator". The film is a rumination on life, love, bad sex, doubling, man's mistreatment of animals, artifice v. the life force and the inevitability of birth, death and decay. It was released on October 4, 1985.