A soldier enters the woman’s apartment. It’s almost pitch-black, but with an orange light bouncing off the wall trying to fill the room, leaving the rest into dissipating digital grain. She hands him a disposable medical mask to replace his military-issued cloth one, likely contaminated by his journey over. Over the blue fabric they share a kiss. (“I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch.”)
This sequence, like the rest of Abel Ferrara’s Zeros and Ones (2021) comes and goes oneirically without explanation. There’s implication, but never detail. Under the black streets of the Roman night, occasionally illuminated by the harsh tungsten of streetlamps for Sean Price Williams’ Digital Bolex, the world moves in the darkness of knowledge. Initially, there’s no way for the viewer to know what’s going on. There are modern soldiers roaming the ancient streets, SD cards discreetly passed, temps checked (this is 2020 after all). No one is outside, apparently, except people with guns, all the rest have been relegated indoors or on screens. Something about a terrorist plot, something is happening but we can’t see the threat. While in the film’s diegesis this creeping collapse is one born out of post-9/11 imagery, the feeling is distinctly that of Covid, replicating the psychological fog of the bowels of that wretched and lonely year where the world had ended (again, like the end of the party of the 90s in 2001) and we hadn’t figured out how to live in it yet.
Ethan Hawke plays twins: the soldier, JJ, and his brother, Justin, a revolutionary who's been captured and JJ has decided to free in an attempt to save his own soul. There’s a contemplative religiosity to the narrative that’s interesting, but someone who’s more familiar with Ferrara’s work could speak better to than a novice like myself. And in a certain way, that specific lack of knowledge made the film an even stronger experience for me: everything I knew was revealing itself through the noise created by a camera pushed beyond its limits (although, apparently, some of the image’s falling-apartness comes from a grain structure added in post from a 1990s Kodak stock, like the pass between DV and 16mm in Julien Donkey-Boy’s images which give the film an explosively beautiful texture). Out of the shadows comes traces of architecture, ancient and modern, with camouflaged bodies occasionally peeking out between the pillars. The opacity of the film creates an environment of unsettledness for the audience.
There was no way to exist in 2020 without losing one’s footing—it was a world of constantly changing rules, new collective social norms and the gradual to rapid backlash to them, temp checks and masking formalities, ones which always in practice had fluid and dynamic nuances of acceptability. No one has really recovered from the psychological break that happened, similar again to the one that sent the US into a new series of Forever Wars which we’ve recently lifted the veil back on to reveal that they never really ended. Zeros and Ones takes place in a world of empty streets and screens, but one that’s been militarized in perpetuity. The post-9/11 surveillance state has grown, albeit often in ways that are meant to lean towards the invisible, hide behind the fog or fiber optic cables.
That mask has also been lifted off in recent months in the United States, with homegrown Blackshirts operating with impunity and the government moving past its need for public approval and practically foregoing its consent manufacturing altogether. We’re once again swept off our feet, flying through a tornado of a rapidly-changing world that this time comes from man-made domination rather than a force majeure. So too, as much as Zeros and Ones accurately reflected the discombobulating nights of early-Covid, it also acts as a prescient portrait of the feelings we’ll have in the days to come.