The Homicidal Red Balloon

I'd always heard about Albert Lamrisse's 1956 short film THE RED BALLOON. I may have even seen part of it with my father on television as a lad, however the memory is faint and my interest has always been luke warm at best. Then tonight at a revival house in Los Angeles I finally saw the 34 minute film and was delighted. It was a distillation of many heart-tugging films which have been laid at our feet through the years offering childhood's whimsical pageantry, then discord, and finally happy resolution. It's a clean and simple formula.

Now let's move the previous paragraph aside and I'll mention another film I finished today on dvd: ZODIAC, a 2007 serial killer film from David Fincher. Though the film is a rather typical Hollywood thriller with a roster of talented actors including Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, and Robert Downey Jr., a large budget, a complex plot and dozens of ancillary characters and plot threads, I found it long, confusing, and the sort of thing Fincher had done better in his earlier films. I'm not trying to compare each movie in his career since there's no point in doing so. I thought his film SEVEN was a tight, hyper-tense thriller which was almost perfect in execution. It was a modern genre film which transcended it's formalism. Pretty creepy too. ZODIAC pales by comparison. For 2 1/2 hours we are dragged through police investigations, forensic evidence discussions, and personal catharses among the homicide detectives, newspaper journalists and those addicted to the "juice" given off by violent crime. The film in oddly emotionless and dry. The screenplay rambles every which way, and we care more about the deepening alcoholism of Robert Downey Jr.'s newspaper crime reporter than any murder victims or their famous lethal perpetrator.

That being said, I'd like to try an experiment. How about if we merge the two films? One about a cute 6 year old Parisian boy befriended by an other-worldly helium balloon; and the second movie a dire story about a serial killer who murdered indiscriminately in Northern California during the late 1960's and 1970's, teasing the public and the police with coded messages, clues and threats which were published in local newspapers at the killer's demand. Odd huh?

I'll toss out some ideas. The killer is a sociopath, distrustful of, and unable to function with, society at large. Similarly, the little boy's home life is a mystery of values, with the rare piece of information showing his mother tossing the boy's new balloon out the window, intimating a cruelty adults possess and children are bound to accept. The boy, like the killer is a loner, both are unaccepted by their peers and living outside the approval of authority. In one scene, while at school, the boy is taken our of class and locked in a small cell-like room while the principal goes off to conduct his business blocks away. The balloon dogs the man annoyingly in retribution at the unfair treatment to his friend the boy. A close-up of the boy in the cell door's window is poignant and pathetic.

If the balloon symbolizes an imaginary friend or source of love in an uncaring world, the killer is also forced into delusional imagination. He sees himself as a hunter, and rather than a cute red balloon, he resorts to befriending the company of guns, and carving knives. A rare glimpse into the killer's home life shows him living in a dreary house trailer inhabited by scores of uncaged squirrels, pets which might seem cuddly to a child, but in truth are frightened rodents shrieking to escape. Both films are about children, unappreciated and forced into delusion, each carving a subjective morality for themselves. Manufacturing worlds of personal choice rather than living compromised habits prescribed by society, they flourish and are given craved attention.

Both films incorporate the metropolitan landscape as hazardous, honeycombed environments unfriendly to the child and the killer. It's by stealth that they're able to escape arrest. The boy is hounded by a gang of youths determined to steal his balloon, giving chase as he cunningly eludes them through alleyways, vacant lots, stairways leading through the old windy streets of Ménilmontant. The killer likewise must constantly escape the cops and citizenry of San Francisco and outlining communities. San Francisco is seen as a dark re-enactment of Gotham, faceless and filled with desperation. Everyone is overworked, unfulfilled and anxious. Paris is grey, crumbling, and generally unaccepting of a solitary boy marching to a different drummer. Though some strangers on the streets give he and his balloon aid in a rain storm by allowing him to share their umbrellas, the movie is devoid of dialogue, with only a dozen or so lines at most. Language is communication. Dialogue is the passing back and forth of information among participants. In both movies we are in a void. The killer communicates in coded messages with characters from Greek, Latin, Morse code, semaphore images. It is a puzzle children might play. It is also a breakdown of mutual expression, a de-evolution returning to primal instincts. Both the killer and the boy are living outside even the requisite ambitions of language. They've had enough, they don't care to continue plodding through painful reality.

The crowd of antagonistic and violent boys who chase the child can be compared with the army of police and forensic experts who hope to thwart the killer's values and bring him to their conception of justice, thereby protecting the world at large. These groups (gang of boys and cops) could be acknowledged as Nietzsche's masses, his "herd." He believes them to follow the "Will To Live" as presented by Schopenhauer. Their primary goal is to live and continue to live, in contrast to Nietzsche's desired "Will To Power" which he considers the preeminent drive in sensible man.

Also interesting is the case one might make to label either or both of our protagonists as insane. Again to cite Nietzsche, he said "Insanity in individuals is something rare--but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule." Of course Nietzsche isn't the last word in social pathologies, one might look to his philosophical opposite, Karl Marx for a far different viewpoint. Neither strident viewpoint seems balanced, but philosophers generally think outside the accepted domain of dominant culture.

There is a common idea that groups of various kinds do comparatively insane things (wars, racism, lynchings etc.) and make equally irrational decisions owing to their propensity to think as a group. Individuals seldom think in group terms, even when a member of one. The mob is of a single mind, a single purpose, and dangerous to all who are not adherent to their creed. The little boy and the killer are true individuals and at uncompromising odds with herd morality. Only in their imaginations can they stand a chance of success. We breed hatred for individuals, when those people snap, Katy bar the door.

Eventually one of the bullies shoots a stone at the balloon with his slingshot, subsequently we watch a dying balloon. In ZODIAC, a journalistic author eventually uncovers the movie's killer and seals his fate (though a postscript tells us that he died prior to trial due to a fatal heart attack). The small boy is saved by a choir of Parisian balloons which come to his aid and float him high over the city, we assume to a better world--an imaginary resurrection, a Christ for the French kindergarten set.

A cute, cherubic little boy; a cold-blooded, child-molesting killer: both more similar than one at first might suppose. Of the 2500 suspects investigated in the Zodiac murder cases, I'll bet no one thought to search into the little French one's alibis. It all seems so obvious somehow.