A Zed & Two Noughts

A ZED & TWO NOUGHTS   ***

Peter Greenaway

1985

IDEA:  Following the deaths of their wives in a swan-related automobile accident, twin zoologist brothers struggle to process their grief while having an affair with the car's one-legged driver.

BLURB:  What is most pronounced about A Zed & Two Noughts is the dissonance between its focus on nature and its monstrously anti-naturalistic aesthetic. This paradox is aptly encapsulated by the zoo that serves as the film’s setting. A collection of wild animals categorized, arranged, maintained, and kept as objects of human inquiry in an institutional space, the zoo as figured by Greenaway is an uncanny Frankenstein’s lab where the natural world is bent and molded to the shape of human schemata. Art and science are both criticized and upheld as methods of manipulating and regulating nature, with Greenaway’s hyper-stylized, symmetrical frames pointing up the constructedness of the systems we use to classify, organize, and represent the world. Like the two “noughts” of the title, who haplessly attempt to reinstate order to the suddenly volatile reality in which they find themselves by photographically documenting processes of decay, Greenaway uses the cinematic medium to create visual taxonomies that become simultaneously undermined by the excesses that confound their (coherent) meaning. The images of A Zed & Two Noughts may be painstakingly designed with attention to line, color, perspective, and composition, but their elements exist in absurd and decadent relation, organized less by the semiotics of narrative than by some internal, often inscrutable system of aesthetic-symbolic associations. A Zed & Two Noughts is thus a series of alien vitrines, of exhibits of human specimen grasping at illusory mastery, engaging in arbitrary rituals before time and, as it turns out, snails, consume them.