Someday soon, there will be a slew of books with titles like Covid Cinema, Celluloid Masks: Films of the Pandemic, or whatever other unbearably pretentious titles I can’t be bothered to conjure up. Filling the pages of these scholarly tomes will be films from the past year like Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, Songbird (remember that one?), Bo Burnham: Inside, and Doug Liman’s Locked Down. Among them, relegated to a footnote or maybe a paragraph due to its impenetrability, will be Abel Ferrara’s Zeros and Ones, a movie so good that it defies the didactic fingers of the academic writer. Unlike the former quartet of fluff (I do feel some pain lumping Borat in with the rest of them), Ferrara’s film is not an opportunistic gimmick flick or a melodramatic self-portrait full of theater kid lip service. Zeros and Ones feels at once like it could have been born of any year since 9/11 and of no other moment in history besides 2020.
To say late period Ferrara has not fared well with audiences would be doing the flat-out rejection of his work by the viewing public a disservice; though, to be fair, it’s tough to find a time when Ferrara’s output was considered digestible. As evidence, look to IMDb, the canon thermometer of film quality, where the masterful 2014 film Welcome to New York sits at a 5.5, 2019’s Siberia has a 4.8, and Zeros and Ones is rated at a shocking 3.3, the most maligned of them all. Sad as it makes me, I can’t blame the naysayers. The maniac who began his career making cinematic grime like The Driller Killer (1979) and Ms. 45 (1980), as old age and a lifetime of hard living erode his brain, has turned to crafting increasingly obtuse, increasingly spiritual digital nightmare-scapes that were made to be listed under “outsider art” on Wikipedia. His chosen star has a similarly absurd body of work. In the past decade alone, Ethan Hawke has run the gauntlet, alternately appearing in DTV actioners like Getaway (2013) and 24 Hours to Live (2017) and the acclaimed works of modern masters such as Paul Schrader and Richard Linklater. Their pairing is natural; it’s a partnership that was bound to produce a movie that would be hailed as a masterpiece by a few mildly popular Letterboxd users, acknowledged as an interesting oddity by the critical establishment, and dismissed by the vast majority of those who even choose to watch it in the first place. No different than the fate of Ferrara’s recent collaborations with Willem Dafoe (which Hawke references lovingly in his introduction).
Bookending Zeros and Ones are two videos of Hawke talking to the audience, the first made to bring investors onboard before the shoot had begun and the second (supposedly) recorded after Hawke watched the film for the first time. In the latter, Hawke admits that the script he references in the first video wasn’t really a script at all; he hardly understands any of what happens in the movie, but he offers his interpretation nonetheless. If anyone could explain the plot to me, I would be both impressed and disappointed, because, frankly, if you come away from Zeros and Ones with any grasp on what was going on, you were looking for answers in all the wrong places. It’s a story about a soldier and his revolutionary brother (also played by Hawke), plus I think there’s something in there about a plot to blow up the Vatican. The details are negligible. The key to the whole movie is Hawke’s first video, in which he explains that Zeros and Ones is Ferrara’s singular artistic distillation “of this wild year,” a phrase that has become shorthand for anything to do with the COVID-19 pandemic.
That the movie is purely a coronavirus story is reinforced by the opening moments, in which Hawke’s JJ steps off a train wearing a mask and walks through a near empty station in the center of Rome, which is being frantically cleaned by a small crew. Images of the desolate city follow, often so dark that they look like nothing at all. These eerie sequences of an ancient metropolis strangled by the pandemic would not be as impactful as they are if not for the miraculous digital cinematography by Sean Price Williams. His visions of the modern world evoke a filthy, cosmic emptiness, open spaces consumed by shadows and digital noise leaving only the shoddily industrialized labyrinth of the historic city. Ferrara’s Rome is choking, the city itself seemingly gasping for breath. Beyond its role in the film’s text, Williams’ work here is essential in the ongoing development of a distinctly digital cinematic language — no amount of rambling praise could overstate this. Contrasting the vacant streets are scenes of intimacy, in which Ferrara focuses on the minutiae of pandemic life, with lingering images of masks hanging from ears and pulled beneath chins. More absurd than astute are his depictions of COVID-19 behavior: Hawke and his lover Luciano (Valeria Correale) kiss while wearing paper masks, military rendezvous begin with readings from temperature guns, and vital dramatic interactions occur via Zoom. Reading the movie as purely about COVID-19, however, starts to make Ferrara’s opinions on the subject seem questionable. Masks, temperature readings, and test statuses are associated with the imperialist military presence in the city. Justin, the revolutionary brother of the main character, frantically claims to stand for liberty and then promptly asks if one of his captors is American, before adding that he can’t see his face because of the mask. However, an understanding of Zeros and Ones as Ferrara’s Van Morrison style, right-wing tirade is not just reductive of the movie’s take on the pandemic, but overlooks all the most impactful parts of the film.
For one, there is not a single direct reference to COVID-19 or the pandemic in the whole movie. On top of that, political lines are blurred; the same raving revolutionary martyr who seemed to imply that masks were an affront to liberty is denounced by a group of Russian oligarchs as being a communist and anarchist. No coherent view of COVID-19 policy can ever be pieced together because Zeros and Ones is not just a movie about the pandemic. Exactly as Hawke explains in his introduction, Zeros and Ones is Ferrara’s view of 2020 — everything about our world and our very existence that “the wild year” brought to the surface. At the end, Hawke explains his reading of the movie in vague terms, offering up that it explores a spiritual binary in which one can both love and hate life, appreciate being born and connecting with others while also despairing and raging at the evils that ravage the earth. This aligns with my own understanding of the movie’s brand of bozo spiritualism to an extent. Ferrara’s philosophical statements are broad and somewhat obvious in places, notably in a scene where two characters are forced to make a sex tape while Loreena McKennitt’s “The Mystic’s Dream” plays in the background. The concept alone is almost too absurd to be taken seriously, but that’s part of the charm that keeps Zeros and Ones from succumbing to the curse of lifeless austerity that plagues similarly obtuse works. The sentiments about isolation and lack of intimacy are almost universal, but 2020 was more than just languishing inside and looking out at empty streets. Protests exploded across the world, repeatedly. A historic year from any standpoint, in 2020, as modernity crushed us all, the future came early.
Hawke’s post-viewing read on Zeros and Ones discounts just how aesthetically concise the movie is as a dissection of the year that inspired it. A heightened and shuffled retelling of the fears, anxieties, and pressures that 2020 brought — it is also a reflection of the digital images by which it was perceived. Hawke’s soldier is not just a gunman, but a cameraman. Digital surveillance and perception invade not only day-to-day life, but the activities of international systems of oppression, personified by an American military man in Italy doing the bidding of a 21st century update to the Cold War Russian heavies of last century. The anonymous pandemic in the film becomes a metaphor for the stranglehold of fascistic capitalists on the lives of average people. Acts of sex, terror, and torture are filmed and broadcast via the internet. Online experiences become indistinguishable from real experiences, both for the characters and in the formal construction of the movie. Though people may have been at their most isolated in 2020, they were also at their most connected. A majority of the world was seeing the same things at the same time. In unison, humanity experienced the same pleasure, confusion, ignorance, excitement, and fury. Complex, multidimensional cultural relationships were flattened — Like Hawke explained, life was binary, hence the title.
For all its specificity, and blatant disregard for subtlety, Zeros and Ones remains abstract. Rather than function as a didactic statement about a global moment that delved into the modern surreal, it’s nothing more than a lens. Ferrara inverts the things we’ve all seen and then shows them to us again. By virtue of its form alone, it’s a masterpiece. As a well known ride-or-die supporter of bringing movies into the digital age in the most audacious fashion possible, I found Zeros and Ones to be an absolute blast. Ferrara had me hooting and hollering as often as he forced me to stew in the juices of a culture that, for a year, was stripped naked and forced to reveal its strange evils. That said, I doubt many others would describe their viewing experience quite like that. It’s a dour and inscrutable movie that only gestures at any semblance of plot or character. However, I suggest you watch it. I would rather Zeros and Ones be widely considered a baffling mess or even outright hated than to be relegated to a footnote in Ferrara’s filmography or a single reference in the numerous inevitable critical retrospectives on the cinema of the pandemic. For a movie that feels this genuinely apocalyptic, there is no worse fate than obscurity.
