No Other Choice
Gilles Deleuze | Dying, Er, Killing For A Job | Related Notes
What we most lack is a belief in the world, we’ve quite lost the world, it’s been taken from us.
| Gilles Deleuze
…
And who took it?
Dying, Er, Killing For A Job
The inimitable Jenny Odell reviews Park Chan-Wook’s newest movie, ‘No Other Choice’. The film is an adaptation of the novel ‘The Ax’ by Donald Westlake, which was set in the American east coast, and the protagonist is laid off abruptly after 25 years of dedicated work, and decides that his course of action is to gruesomely murder competitors for a job at a rival company.
Although Chan-Wook had planned to film the movie in the US, he wound up transposing it to South Korea, which demonstrates that job insecurity is not solely an issue in the United States.
Odell summarizes the film in a few paragraphs, but most of her attention is directed toward the broad undertow of the movie, which is the precarity of work, both for the protagonist and all of us:
Chronic job insecurity undermines any chance of solidarity. It reduces the horizon of struggle to one of personal survival. For an individual trying to make ends meet, there is often “no other choice” but to accept self-abasement. Other people become objects blocking the way to freedom.
This view goes beyond the material damages of unemployment. It threatens aspects of the heart and soul. “No Other Choice” demonstrates the tragedy of a once-morally-intact character who so fully internalizes the ruthlessness of a system that he believes he has no other choice than to kill his fellow unemployed. “The end justifies the means,” recites the protagonist in Mr. Westlake’s “The Ax.” “Like the C.E.O.s, I have nothing to feel sorry for.”
At the end of the day, however, most of us are not C.E.O.s. And neither are we willing to be cardboard boxes for the hydrapulper. We are human beings with ideals that have proven curiously stubborn.
Even when workers are seen from the top as nothing but labor time, we workers — no matter what we do — must still make meaning inside our lives to survive. And despite the ongoing attempt to rid us of that desire, we still value and deserve things like stability and respect. The film’s title and recurring phrase invite us to ask what, in fact, the other choice would be.
For the companies, it’s true: There is no alternative to pleasing investors. But for us, there is a choice: not to succumb to a kind of Stockholm syndrome, absorbing the anti-human values of a game that benefits so very few. The people who actually do the work have a right to the conversation about what purposes work serves in our lives and in society, beyond the brute measure of efficiency.
