One of the ways that American independent filmmaking distinguishes itself from its Hollywood counterpart, is in its relation to American culture. While Hollywood films are often seen as partaking in the hegemonic structure of the dominant American society, independent films typically represent an alternative. This alternative is not just found in aesthetic practice and different modes of production, but also in the often critical dialog they establish with their own cultural context. One very specific place where the difference between Hollywood and independent filmmaking’s dialog with culture can be asserted quite clearly, is in the construction of utopian spaces and how these spaces are imagined as responses to contemporary culture. In this essay, I will argue that the utopian imagination is used by Hollywood to reinforce hegemonic structures, while the independent filmmaking often distances itself from the possibility of a utopian space. Hal Hartley’s The Girl from Monday (2005) will be the main film discussed here, but in order to understand what it reacts against, I will look at a number of Hollywood films that employ utopian strategies.

When looking at American independent filmmaking, we need to keep in mind that the label ‘independent’ is a quite unstable construction, mainly pointing out that it should be seen as existing outside of the Hollywood production system, than having any particularly shared features of their own. As P. Adams Sitney points out in his Visionary Film (2002), there was a distinctive shift in the late seventies and throughout the eighties where a convergence of social and historical forces altered American film (Sitney 409), a shift where the independent film emerged. Of course, as Emanuel Levy points out in his book Cinema of Outsiders (1999), there are really two different conceptions of independent films: “those that are acceptable to Sundance and those whose contents and styles render them virtually unshowable” (Levy 5).

The Sundance Film Festival, established by Robert Redford in 1980, thus became a turning-point for non-Hollywood filmmaking and while “independent film” began as a label for films without economic attachment to the Hollywood system, this was soon to change. However, this is not the place to discuss the decline and subsuming of avant-garde film into independent film in the US, but rather to point to the convergence which happened. While most independent films may have remained soothing and reaffirming, rather than questioning and challenging (Levy 494-495), it is clear that some independent films can be considered avant-garde, and will reject narrative conventions established by mainstream Hollywood and instead enter into a “dialog of forms and voices” and regard the concept of philosophical resolution or narrative closure as an occasion for parody (Sitney 411). It is this critical and subversive streak of the independent film, that I will relate to Hollywood’s use of utopian strategies.

From the point of view of most Hollywood filmmaking, these utopian strategies are used to mirror the hegemonic structures found in society. Instead of imagining an alternate space as a resistance to dominant society, these films place USA as the utopian space. Such an argument follows what Jean Baudrillard provocatively argues in his book America: the US is utopia achieved and because of this, there are no poor people in USA. ”The have-nots will be condemned to oblivion, to abandonment, to disappearance pure and simple. […] And rightly so, since they show such bad taste as to deviate from general consensus.” (Baudrillard 111). Baudrillard’s argument must of course be understood as ironic, and as pointing to the ideological erasure of the poor, rather than a serious argument of no poverty in America.

The argument follows from his larger claim that USA has torn itself from the historical: ”at a certain point they [Americans] freed themselves from that historical centrality” (81), which points to a similar approach to the utopian space as Fredric Jameson in his book Archaeologies of the Future, where he argues that utopian texts ”struggle desperately to escape our force field and the force of gravity of our historical moment” (Jameson 71). This is the standard argument that America’s national youth has left it without proper historical grounding, resulting in nostalgia, kitsch and a loss of the real. Such a view misses the point that mos Americans are already fully aware of this, and it is only in a European perspective that his is even considered problematic, as Steven Shaviro points out (16). Equally significantly, Baudrillard’s view also reproduces a reductively hegemonic view of the American society, which Hal Hartley’s film is precisely trying to unsettle.
Baudrillard and Jameson’s arguments are also opposed: Jameson argues that the utopian impulse functions as a critical and analytic method where capitalist society is rejected and replaced with an alternative (Jameson 230), while Baudrillard points out that utopia is used to perpetuate the capitalist society (Baudrillard 77, 95).

Consider Gattaca (Andrew Niccol 1997) which portrays the struggle of Vincent who tries to become an astronaut despite being considered an in-valid, due to his faulty genes. Diagnosed with a life expectancy of no more than 30 years, Vincent goes on to prove the system wrong by living longer and becoming an astronaut in spite of the immediate rejection. However, this does not result in the film portraying the system as problematic, but simply presenting Vincent as a heroic figure. Society is not challenged, as Vincent is praised. Here, the film rejects sympathizing with the in-valids and by extension those that the in-valid symbolically represent: poor people and people of color. The film’s conclusion is the individual’s victory over the system, not the collapse or change of society. The individual succeeds in spite of the society, but this also indicates that anyone may succeed, despite the conditions they are born. Matters of race and class – folded into the image of the in-valids – are rejected as arguments for one’s situation. The geneticism Vincent faces can still be conquered, if you work hard enough: no social divide is so large that it cannot be overcome. While this may seem as a positive thing, it is also reactionary view which denies the need for change, since “the talented will overcome”.

A range of other films, such as The Island (Michael Bay 2005) and Equilibrium (Kurt Wimmer 2002) also portray this fear of the loss of individual freedom, authorities being corrupted with no respect for individual rights and a clear sense of dread that the future will bring about a commodification of the human. Whether this future is portrayed as utopia which is revealed to be false, or as a dystopia, the common denominator is the view that the future will not be better than the present we have, or the past we once had. These films thus point to the crisis which Baudrillard argues USA is undergoing; not the European crisis of historical ideals that cannot be fulfilled, but instead ”the crisis of an achieved utopia, confronted with the problem of its duration and permanence” (Baudrillard 77). It is this crisis which results in representing the future as worse than the present, and why conflicts are often resolved through nostalgic strategies. Films such as The Island and Logan’s Run (Michael Anderson 1976) reiterate the figure of Abraham Lincoln as savior.

These films thus perpetuate the view of USA as utopia achieved; this is as good as it gets, everything you could want to achieve is already true. The ideological erasure is also maintained in these films. The poor and the different – in-valids in Gattaca, the outcasts of Logan’s Run, the residents of ‘the Nethers’ in Equilibrium – are all marginalized through the films’ narrative. Although these films supposedly reject homogeneity, they do not argue for a heterogeneous society understood as a multi-cultural society. Only by striving towards a certain ideal is there a chance to break out of the conformity of the future. The tables are thus turned and a dominant device is revealed; they remain symptoms of the ideology which Hollywood generally represents: a capitalist consumer society and an acceptance of USA as utopia achieved.

Hal Hartley’s The Girl From Monday uses the utopian impulse to confront USA with its own hegemony, its construction of itself as utopia achieved. Hartley’s film poses a series of critical questions in the way it represents its future: its future balances between the dystopic and the contemporary, for it lacks many of the devices typically used to show that a film takes place in the future: there is no technological break from our present or even a specific date to go by, most of the film might as well take place in our time.

Fredric Jameson sees such a closeness to our own time as a problem which will in the end dissolve the possibility of the utopian impulse “which has forfeited its claim to any radical transformation of the system itself” (Jameson 168). I do not agree with Jameson in this assessment, as I believe it to be significant to see what the utopian text is trying to disrupt and react against. If we view Hollywood as part of maintaining the view of USA as utopia achieved, it is obvious to me that Hartley’s film is as much a reaction against Hollywood’s (representational) system, as against the American system.

The Girl From Monday takes place in a world where everything has been commodified and even the human has become a commodity: every citizen’s value can be found on the stock exchange and a person’s value derives from how much that person consumes. Since research has shown (in the film’s universe) that sexually active people who are not in a relationship are the most active consumers, a person’s value is closely related to sexual activity. Every time you have sex without commitments, your value increases. If you have sex because of love or even lust, it is considered perverted. This total coupling of sex and value becomes a symbol of complete commodification, where the only urge left is the urge to consume.

Opposed to this, we find a rebellious underground. Officially, this only consists of aliens – referred to as immigrants in the film – but as they look identical to human beings, they are difficult to locate. The interesting thing about these aliens is their radical difference from humans. They have no individual identity but are part of a greater whole, and even do not have physical bodies. They only assume a body when they arrive on Earth. The aliens originate from Star 147X in the constellation Monday, from which the film derives its title. The main character Jack Bell meets a woman from Monday, and initiates a relationship with her. The opposition between on the one hand the human as body, identity and consumption and the alien as inseparable, undivided and non-consuming is great, but the most important thing is how you can only define the aliens in the negative by how they differ from society. They are radically different, which is perceived as deviance by the official society.

Although Jack is the leader of the underground, the film’s ending suggests that this rebellion is impossible because even revolution, sabotage and terrorism are good for business as it further develops consumer society. This unbreakable circle is left as Girl From Monday returns to her (its) planet, while Jack – who has meanwhile discovered that he is also an alien – cannot leave because he has become too addicted to his own body.

The film’s disruption comes in through its cinematic form; made on digital video the whole spectrum of this medium is deployed: slow-motion, abrupt scene cuts, motion blurring and many other devices which clearly reject the narrative transparency which Hollywood is so well-known for and that Scott Robert Olson describes in Hollywood Planet (1999).

The narrative, such as it is, as well as the setting, is clearly dominated by a wry sense of irony, and we can easily see the film as distancing itself from the culture of desire, a culture of extreme commodification. But when Jack said that nothing much had changed, he is correct in another sense of the fictional world resembling our own. While there are discontinuities from our present world, technologically we only see school children using virtual reality goggles and gloves. Otherwise, clothes, cars, streets and so forth resemble present-day New York.

The film, however, has a peculiar narrative form resembling a Möbius strip, where not just the narrative twists back on itself, but where people are also trapped without potential for escape. Narratively, the film turns in upon itself here, not just because of the parallel between its opening shot and closing shot, but also because Jack and the girl were a couple, so there is also a repetition of his wife drowning; do we simply return to the beginning again? Throughout the film we have seen the same scene of Jack buying a gun and going down to the sea to kill himself; we are unsure of the placement of this scene in the narrative. The narrative space thus presents the same trap for the spectator as the consumer society creates for the characters.

The Girl From Monday does not present a solution, then, but clearly distances itself from the totally commodified consumer society. The aliens, even as they are represented with sympathy, do not represent a positive alternative; they cannot remain on Earth for long without becoming what humans already are. There is a very apocalyptic mood to the film which suspends the utopian impulse. The characteristic feature of the film is its critical approach to the present, and as opposed to the films earlier outlined The Girl From Monday rejects the vision of the American society as utopia achieved.

When Baudrillard argues that ”the disenfranchised, who have no voice and are condemned to oblivion, thrown out to go off and die their second-class deaths” it is precisely the way The Girl From Monday depicts the American society – the alien/immigrants and the rebels have no hope and no place in this society. Consumerism has taken over society and there is no room for those who resist this commodification. USA is presented as not a utopia, but a consumerist utopia, where everything is handled on consumer terms: there is no alternate space, no way of being on the outside – to be outside is to be as the aliens from Monday; either you are swallowed by the sea or you are turned into a consumer.

In this way, we can argue that The Girl From Monday is an anti-utopian work, defined by Jameson as works that are ”informed by a central passion to denounce and warn against Utopian programs in the political realm” (Jameson 199). This is exactly how The Girl From Monday functions; it denies and rejects the American society as a utopian society, but at the same time, no alternative utopian space is developed. The home planet of the aliens never becomes an idealize space; we never see it. Yet, they remain as vulnerable to commodification as we humans are. There is no utopian program to the film, instead the spectator is folded into the world being created; only through the cinematic devices which estrange the spectator, can a possible way out be located. This remains an ideological device, of course, but not a utopian one.

We find here a division in how the utopian space is employed in American film culture, and how the utopian discourse is used. Within the dominant culture which Hollywood clearly belongs to, the American society is viewed and represented as utopia achieved. The future appears uncertain and hostile, even in the cases where a positive development seem to have taken place. With Hartley’s film a critique is developed which is made possible through an alternative cinematic form of expression. This aesthetic alternative also represent an alternative view of American culture as a false utopia. The film is best understood as a parody of Hollywood’s typical utopian spaces; the future is dystopic but revealed to be similar to our present. USA as utopia achieved and the simulation of this perfect society is revealed to be one-dimensional.

What becomes very clear is how American film, either in its dominant or subversive form, has a clear connection to American culture’s self-perception. Whether it is a reproduction of dominant culture, as in the case of Hollywood, or as a disruption of hegemonic structures, as in Hartley’s case, films, both in content and form, articulate concerns considered significant for cultural discourse. In what I have laid out, the utopian discourse has shown itself to be not necessarily revolutionary, but also carrying a potential for being reactionary. The utopian impulse can be both radical or nostalgic and the utopian must be considered as an aesthetic device always closely connected to ideology.
For independent films, we can also see another more significant fact; that a culturally disruptive impulse will often require a disruptive aesthetic as well.

As I have argued, the cinematic disruptions Hartley uses in his film are necessary in order to articulate the cultural disruption. Without stepping outside of Hollywood’s cinematic transparency, it would impossible to escape a reproduction culturally dominant structures. To expand the point, just as Hollywood’s strategies have become globalized in the form of a distinctive commercial cinema, so can we point to a certain degree of convergence on the part of avant-garde and independent filmmaking, in the way that these cinematic forms always need to find alternative representational strategies, in order to resist the conformity of the Hollywood system. Instead of unifying by homogenizing their cinematic expressions, there is a move for a heterogeneity of strategies, even as they are all informed by a disruptive impulse, in order to articulate a different perspective on dominant culture and dominant cinema.