The Roddam Short

Those reviews which praise Aria usually single out Roddam’s segment as being the best and its difficult to disagree as it is undoubtedly the most powerful.

In updating Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Roddam’s imagery matches pound for pound the spirit and power of Wagner’s music. The comments on Wagner’s Opera by Mark Twain, Bernard Shaw & Richard Strauss (which I came across on Wikipedia) would equally fit Roddam’s segment.

Roddam faithfully reproduces’ Wagner’s central theme, the Love-Death & day-night concept i.e (paraphrasing wikipedia here) “it is only at night, that the two lovers can truly be together and only in the long night of death can they be eternally united” I also think it cleverly updates Wagner’s use of Schopenhauer's point that there is a false world in which we live and a true world which lives in us, day and night in Wagners Opera, but in Roddams Segment, Las Vegas is the false world and heaven perhaps is the real world.

However with ten segments to review, every review of Aria is limited in how much they can say about each segment and I think there is a little more to say on Roddam’s segment.

The opening scene of the woman being stop searched by a cop, is interesting, none of the reviews comment on this but Roddam must have had some idea in mind – I think Roddam is introducing the concept of injustice – the false world around us is unjust as well as false. Tristan, being a Round Table Knight would have righted any injustice but the film is more pessimistic. The red flags along the roadside I think of as warnings that we are about to enter this false and pessimistic world.

Then there is the question of why Las Vegas. I think Roddam is emphasizing Schopenhauer’s false world/true world dichotomy by including the oppositive qualities of the spiritual and the material. Las Vegas is I think what Stephen Hoellier describes as a materialistic human community “governed by primitive needs and instincts devoid of all dependence on spiritual realities beyond the mundane sphere.” The two lovers are in Las Vegas to transcend the material world to be together in the spiritual world. The Psychologist Eugene Pascal says “When two people come together in ecstatic union they instinctively transcend their bodies and minds and exit into a spiritual dimension, the abode of the gods - To get to spirit one goes thoroughly into matter via sexual experiences to get catapulted as it were to matters polar opposite – spirit.” Las Vegas is thoroughly a materialistic place, suicide may end the lovers lives but it’s the love that catapults them into the hereafter.

To me, Roddam’s segment marks the point where the film as a whole really takes off, before this segment the film has its good and bad moments but the next sequence of Roddam, Russell and Jarman is just incredible – its like a rocket.