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CINEMA IN-BETWEEN: A Review of Khyentse Norbu's 'Pig at the Crossing'


By Bill Schaffer

Retired Lecturer in Film Studies, Newcastle University.




This review essay is probably best read by those who have already seen the film. It contains spoilers. The author is not an adherent to the tradition expressed in the film and anything said about the religious beliefs explored here should be qualified accordingly.



THE PLAN AND THE ACCIDENT


As Pig at the Crossing begins, we find ourselves in a crowded market where a handsome young man, Dolom, is trying to direct his own elaborate, movie-like plot over a cell phone. The shameless goal of these machinations is to evade blame for having impregnated the wife of his closest friend, and the bizarre strategy he has concocted for that end involves getting said wife, who has already refused Dolom’s offer to fund an abortion, to secretly dose her underperforming husband with viagra, so that said husband may be seduced and eventually persuaded that the child to come must be his own.


The fact that our hip Asian protagonist is sporting a Wild Ones leather biker jacket over a striped gho skirt as he hustles over the phone signals immediately that Dolom is living a life caught between the local and the global, the traditional and the modern, the ‘East’ and the ‘West.’


So, at this point it feels like we are being invited to a more or less conventional genre film, set in a more or less identifiable locale (which we will probably know in advance is Bhutan). Everything suggests we are about to enjoy a farce of sex errors in the context of a clash between tradition and modernity. Except that this time, in stark contrast to the typical pattern of that genre, our hero never gets another chance to engage in rounds of gamesmanship with the players in his own life, for the simple reason that he is about to die.


Dolom is cruising away on his motorbike, still stupidly conspiring over the phone as he rides, when he collides with eternity in the form of an oncoming truck. He is a man distracted to death, doomed by convenience, launched in a single instant from his motorcycle to the next phase of the cycle of birth and death. His plan to avoid responsibility for a birth has led to his own death, the sudden cessation of every plan he has ever conceived. Norbu marks this moment conventionally enough, as a simple cut to black, followed by a kaleidoscopic montage of memories. There are no special effects or gory details at the moment of the accident. Dolom is killed by the power of editing.


This, then, is a film about death, or, more intriguingly, as we shall see, a film about the opportunities of death. Dolom does not disappear from the screen at the instant of his demise, but instead remains the continuing focus of our attention, and the rest of the film will follow his struggle to accept and understand the stakes of his own dead condition.


Pig at the Crossing is offered as a vision of the Bardo, the in-between state that Buddhists of the Vajrayana tradition believe conscious beings must traverse between the moments of death and rebirth. According to that tradition, this interval of 49 days between states of embodiment offers the chance to liberate ourselves from attachment, and thereby from the very cycle of life and death. It is this state of suspended existence that is described in the Bardo Thodol, which we could describe as a kind of ancient, guided meditation app for the dead.


As it happens, the director also leads another life as a revered teacher within the very tradition depicted in the film. Nonetheless, Norbu does not choose to present his rendition of the Bardo as an authoritative overview or explanatory guide. To the contrary, he has said that his interpretation of the Bardo should be viewed as ‘speculation’ and as a ‘hypothesis.’


In this context, we could contrast the style of Pigs at the Crossing with the portrayal of the Bardo presented in Laurie Anderson’s 2015 film Heart of a Dog (so we are moving between a dog and a pig at this point). The unexpected irony here is that it is the postmodern American performance artist who addresses us didactically, from above, as it were, with apparent authority, while the director regarded as a reincarnated enlightened being within this very tradition offers his vision as a tentative imagining.


Norbu’s narratorial reticence, this humility in the way the director chooses to address his audience, seems deliberate. Norbu presumes only that he shares a love of cinema with his viewers, an openness to the possibilities of cinematic expression. His role here is not that of a teacher, but that of an artist. His film is an invitation to share in an imagining, not to receive instructions or blessings. Accordingly, this review will have nothing further to say about the director’s esteemed place in the lineage of Vajrayana Rinpoches, but a great deal to point out about his film’s relationship to the lineages of film history (I want to say in passing that I think Anderson’s film is wonderful as a whole. My guess would be that it is precisely Anderson‘s humility before the Bardo Thodol that makes her feel she should not tamper with it, and therefore must convey its narrative in a straightforward, expository fashion, momentarily eclipsing the provocative, tricksy persona that I love in her work).


As an invitation to imagine an experience, Pig at the Crossing is structured entirely as subjective narrative; all the information available to the viewer is determined by the frame of Dolom’s own knowledge and perceptions.


Subjective narrative forces us to share the necessarily partial and obscured frame through which characters gain information about their worlds. In the history of cinema, it has often been exploited to evoke the chaos of a world that cannot be monitored from ‘above’, from any position outside the action (Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange and Scorsese’s Taxi Driver). It is worth remembering here that subjective narrative is a different thing than subjective point of view or subjective camera. The cinematography in this film is not directly confined to Dolom’s optical experience; we are not stuck looking at the world through his eye sockets, as in a 1st person video game. This is important, since as we shall see, it is crucial to the affect achieved in the film that we are watching Dolom as he watches others he cannot interact with, just as we cannot interact with him).


The director never lets us know more about Dolom’s situation than Dolom does himself, and Dolom is more or less lost in chaos and confusion for the entirety of the film. We know only that this is the world he is now experiencing, and that we are experiencing it with him.


Relentlessly obsessed with the need to deliver his little package of Viagra and continue his ridiculously baroque scheme of manipulation, Dolom is unable to accept or adapt to the new reality in which he finds himself, the reality of death. He grasps at tatters of memory and the petty urgencies of habit, instinctively trying to continue the script of his daily life as if nothing has happened.


Despite his best efforts to reconstitute the trivial routines of his life, Dolom soon finds that he is unable to interact with, or even be acknowledged by the people he knows and loves, who should know and love him, while the familiar scenes of his life are gradually invaded by people he does not know, freaks and weirdos who clearly do not belong there.


Dolom’s mind – and Norbu’s narrative – become increasingly haunted by a kind of deep uncertainty – an ontological uncertainty – about the nature and limits of the world he is experiencing. Here, Pig at the Crossing participates in what we could call the Crumbling Worlds genre:  films where characters gradually realise they are caught in a world that is collapsing as they move through it, deteriorating at the level of its fundamental reality, the very life they habitually inhabit beginning to dissolve (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Dark City, Inception, The Matrix, The Lego Movie). Norbu’s film also communicates with the related sub-genre of Shifting Worlds, where characters are thrust and dragged across different worlds and scenes, like a series of game engines or the nested dimensions of a multiverse, without any regard for the laws of a unified time/space (Sherlock Jr, Waking Life, Duck Amuck, Everything  Everywhere All At Once, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse).


Norbu deepens this subjective focus by choosing not to employ a standard convention of editing: cross-cutting. By switching between different scenes of action as they unfold, cross-cutting constructs a commanding perspective on events that is unavailable to any actor within the narrative. Norbu never makes use of this standard device, never allows the viewer to assume a perspective that transcends the horizons of Dolom’s experience.


Just as there is no creator God in Buddhism, we might note, there is no God’s point of view in this film.


Cross-cutting was developed in the early history of cinema as a way of heightening suspense in chase scenes. The action cuts between the chaser and the chased as they converge, with suspense arising from the question of when they will meet in a single scene, and what will happen when they do. In place of using cross-cutting between different scenes to give the sense of an overview, films like Sherlock Jr and Duck Amuck experiment with what we might call shift-cutting. The character ‘goes with the cut,’ suddenly and inexplicably transported from one world to another. Where cross-cutting serves to establish a commanding overview on spatially separated scenes of action, shift-cutting expresses the collapse of any coherent, controllable space, leaving characters to stumble and fall between worlds.


Pig at the Crossing is exactly a film about giving up the chase. The suspense that will reach its peak in the forest is not the action filled suspense of cross-cutting, not the kind of suspense played out in a convergent space and time. All of that has already crumbled and collapsed. All of the sensory motor capacities that have served Dolom for as long as he can remember, allowing him to play out his scripts on the great stage of life, have already been cancelled. He could run from his fate like Tom Cruise racing to defuse the bomb before it blows for the entire length of the film, and still end up in exactly the same place: no place.


The suspense dramatised by Norbu is the pure suspense of a mind approaching a moment of possibility: a mind converging upon itself.




EMOTION


Movies constantly exploit death as a short cut to emotional manipulation, whether it is a matter of inconsolable sadness or righteous revenge. They invite us to identify with the pain of loss or the thirst for vengeance.


The emotional tone Norbu evokes in his treatment of death seems to me to be singular. There are tears and laughs, but something else within the scene usually works to distance us from identification. It might be something as absurd as an unexplained German woman bursting into full libretto in the midst of mourning rituals, or the fact that the mourners at the Suri smoke ceremony appear to be incongruously mourning a pig, or just the impotent presence of the dead hero himself, uncomprehending and impassive, impotently observing the suffering of his friends and family as they mourn for him.


From the moment of the cut that represents the motorbike crash, there is a kind of breakdown in the sensory motor continuity of the film itself, an interruption of the normal links between perception and action that allow viewers to follow and engage with onscreen action. The hero cannot react upon what he sees. He is not an observational presence in each scene, but an observational absence. He looks at the world without the world seeing him.  In this sense, as we have noted, Dolom’s relation to the world he perceives replicates our own relation to the scene we are watching.


This dissociation between Dolom and the world around him could easily be exploited for the comic effect of his incomprehension or the pathos of his frustration. Norbu may intimate these inevitable notes at moments, but also plays with these distances for a much rarer tonal effect. Even the saddest, most private moments carry a kind of distancing, if only because of the hero's impassive, impotent, observing presence. The scene where we see his sister mourn, for example, which could have been milked for all its tear jerking universally recognisable suffering, is inflected by Dolom’s own unseen present-absence as an observer. It is not at all that the scene is emotionally neutralised, it is still heart breaking, it is just distanced from itself.


We could think here of Keaton, Dreyer, Bresson, Fassbinder. All of these directors avoid using conventional acting to foster identification, each for their own distinctive purpose. Acting degree zero.


I think what Norbu evokes here is a kind of compassionate distancing.  Dolom’s confusion, frustration, pity, and fear, are conveyed convincingly and subtly by the actor Kuenzang Norbu, but we are never manipulated to hysterically identify with them. As a viewer, I did not feel compelled to redundantly ‘empathise’ in the sense of believing I was able to simulate what Dolom was feeling within myself. That did not seem to be the point. Indeed, it seemed to me the whole point of this film, at the level both of theme and form, was to let go of identification, for the sake of exploring another way of expressing and responding to emotion.


The film A Ghost Story is similar in the way that banal domestic scenes are rendered poignant by the presence of an impotent witness who remains unseen throughout by other characters. We could almost say that the two films are companion works, alternative “Western” and “Eastern” answers to the same cinematic question. In A Ghost Story , however, the already-dead protagonist is anonymously draped in a white sheet, which I think allows viewers to identify all the more deeply on another level, to correlate some unseen dimension of themselves with the being beneath the sheet (do we not all feel that some part of us, the most real part of us, remains radically unseen and unseeable throughout our lives?). It is a powerful and singular effect to experience this vicarious impotency for the length of a film. A Ghost Story seems to suggest that cinema is a kind of premonition of death in the helplessness of pure watching. In a sense, it is a film about film. At times, draped in my own darkness in the cinema, I felt like I was becoming the ghost myself, or better, becoming another ghost represented by the camera itself, also an implicit watching presence, in what we might call 1st Post-Person Point of View.


Pig at the Crossing is not quite like that.  Dolom remains a recognisable character, separate from ourselves. Both films seem to assume a similar analogy between death and cinema, but they explore that affinity in quite distinct ways. In Norbu’s film there is always a kind of observational gap, a chain or relay of gaps, between the hero and everyone around him, and between myself and the drama unfolding onscreen. I am watching a character I cannot interact with, while he is watching people he cannot interact with. I am constantly engaged, but I do not identify.




WHY A PIG?


This film about death may not exactly be a black comedy, but it’s hard not to laugh at the pig, not to mention the cactus.


A personal memory may be revealing here. Years ago, the author happened to see a documentary about a hospice run by Buddhist monks in Vietnam. The scene that most impressed and stayed with him involved a young monk administering to the dying suddenly bursting out in unrestrained laughter. When questioned by a puzzled Western interviewer as to why he would do such a thing in a place where people come to die, the Buddhist replied, “because they think they are losing something.” This surprising answer played a key role in inspiring the author of this review to study Buddhist philosophy. What surprised him most was that it did not, in fact, shock him: that at some level he was able to intuit that this laughter expressed a deep form of compassion (a very different thing, as I have suggested, than the pathos of empathy so celebrated in contemporary Western culture).


From what kind of place, after all, would one prefer to leave this earth – a room full of tears and regret, or alive with genuine laughter?


For me, Pig at the Crossing evokes a kind of existential comedy of life and death. It’s not a comedy of gags and punchlines. Life itself is a banana skin. We think we are standing on solid ground, but it is always really a banana skin that we land upon, and it is always sliding away from under our feet. It slips away by its very own nature. More than that, we slip away from ourselves. We are our own banana skins and there is no lasting banana inside!


Dolom embodies this thematic existential comedy of delusion, but also the incidental comedy of incongruous characters and weird juxtapositions signalling that his perceptions are no longer determined by a coherent space.


I will not attempt here to unravel the thorny psychoanalytic riddle of the phallic cactus. But, just as the Marx Brothers once asked, ‘Why a duck?’ we must ask: Why a pig?


I don’t think the substitution of a pig for Dolom’s corpse signifies disgust with the corruptible material body. It is less about contempt for the embodied state, or any Christian-like renunciation of fallen flesh; much more the absurdity of identifying with the body. A pig is often featured at the centre of Buddhist mandalas to represent delusion. Here, in its very absurdity, it embodies the very thing Dolom’s ongoing delusion prevents him from seeing: that he has never really belonged to his body and his body has never really belonged to him.




THE GUIDE


In the chaos of this collapsing world, where Dolom only encounters familiar characters he can no longer interact with, or strangers obviously lost in the circuits of their own delusion, one figure emerges to distinguish himself by the intense address he directs at Dolom. He clearly has a mission, and that mission is to guide Dolom.


The Guide is, at least at first, an ambiguous presence. He sometimes adopts the piercing, shifting gaze, the softly hissing intonation of a cartoon snake charmer (I understand from reliable sources that Norbu asked the actor to model his performance on the body language of Osho). The Guide is also an ironic witness. To reach for another unlikely animated example, I thought of Bugs Bunny stalking Elmer Fudd. I think it is possible to detect a kind of implied post-colonial irony about the exoticism of ‘the East’ as perceived and consumed by ‘the West’  in the portrayal of the Guide.


I would argue that the image of Tibetan Buddhism is the Orientalist fetish object par excellence.

It could even be suspected that the guide is in part a sort of affectionate parody of the teacher-director’s relationship to his own students and audience.


The Guide seems to exist in a different way than anyone else Dolom encounters.  As a viewer, I was never quite sure whether the Guide was meant to be taken as a projection of the hero’s own unconscious mind or to exist in his own right, as an envoy or agent intervening from some previously unrevealed dimension of being. Is Dolom really just arguing with himself? Is he “leading himself on”?


Ultimately, I decided that the guide must embody the Bardo Thodol itself, to represent its external guiding voice within the chaos of the dead man’s mind.

I assumed the guide to be the avatar of the Lama seen reading over Dolom’s corpse in the tent. For his part, I would further assume that Dolom can no more link the internal figure of the guide pursuing him in the Bardo with the sight of the Lama he observes conducting what he construes as an animal sacrifice, than he can identify the pig he sees there with his own self-image.

The relationship between Dolom and the Guide affiliates Norbu’s film with several sub-genres that all feature a kind of existential thought experiment.


Guide films: It’s a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Carol, The Seventh Seal, The Matrix


Don’t Know They Are Dead films: 6th Sense, Donnie Darko, The Shining


Circle films: Groundhog Day, La Jetee, Edge of Tomorrow,12 Monkeys


In all of these films, in one way or another, heroes must find a way to escape a situation caused by their own decisions and actions in a kind of karmic trap. The twist in this film is that the trap is the wheel of birth and death itself, karma as such, which the Guide says has already brought Dolom back to this same threshold countless times before, and that our hero, for his part, seems to want nothing more than to remain caught in this cycle forever.




LOST IN A FOREST


Despite the assistance of the Guide, Dolom remains unable or unwilling to hold awareness of his true condition, to sustain a state of lucid death. He just keeps cycling over the same niggling worries left over from his now irrelevant life, wandering through the tape loops of his own delusion, until he is finally brought to the paradoxical climax of this film, a moment where exactly nothing is seen to happen.


As I understand it, there are three moments of possible ‘exit’ encountered during the interval of death as outlined in the Bardo Thodol. I am unable to decide on the basis of a single viewing however, how the narrative of the film maps onto this traditional trajectory, or how the characters encountered by Dolom correlate with the various deluded and delusive beings described within the Bardo Thodol. Again, Norbu’s intention seems more about the imagining of a possible experience than providing a correct exegesis of the traditional text.

We are with Dolom and the Guide in a forest. Emotion is carried here by the world itself, more than the acting or action. Norbu uses sympathetic background, rising tensions in the music, the translucent. hypnotic vibrating darkness of the forest modulating itself, all the stuff of drama. The leaves of the forest tremble silently with affect. It could almost be a scene in an occult movie where Dolom has been summoned for human sacrifice (and in a way he has. Moksha is surely one of the most sublime forms of religious sacrifice ever imagined: sacrifice of self by self).


The guide’s message is at one level a too familiar one, the stuff of marketing hype and daily self-affirmation: Just Do It! We are exhorted endlessly to choose and self-improve, as Trainspotting so memorably reminds us. Except that what Dolom is being prompted to do by the Guide is to give up on doing as such. The choice he faces is to let go of everything he has ever known, even and especially himself, the very idea of self, for the sake of nothing that can be seen or held or touched or described.


What Dolom fears as a loss of any freedom to act, the Guide assures him, is in actuality the threshold of the greatest liberation. It can take countless eons for us to realise the time has come to go, even though we have always already arrived. You can be brought to the threshold, but you can only cross by yourself.


As I understand it, this choice is not the choice of an object, not the choice to take or claim or consume or invest in something. It is a kind of absolute disinvestment. It not an assertion of self, but an affirmation, a letting go: a ‘Yes’. When you ‘let something go’ it may escape your grip and fly away of its own accord, but you still need to let it happen. We could apply a standard Buddhist formulation: there is a choice, a choice is being made, no one is making the choice.


Norbu’s accomplishment is to have rendered this rarefied metaphysical drama—in which the stakes are infinite, yet nothing quite happens—engaging for the length of a feature film, and if that isn’t already asking enough, to do so in a narrative where the hero is already dead and unable to act.




LEAVING IS ARRIVING


One way I have tried to understand the stakes of this moment of impossible decision is as a kind of dramatic exposition of the famous mantra of the Heart Sutra, which is said to encapsulate Perfect Wisdom.


Gate Gate Pāragate Pārasaṃgate, Bodhi Svāhā

Going, Going, Gone, Arrived at the Other Side, what an awakening


I think it is possible and valid to read this affirmation in two quite different ways at the same time: as a kind of narrative describing events that occur one after the other, steps that are taken in sequence; and as a list of traits or characteristics that are all in effect at the same time.  The different moments invoked in this tiny, yet all-embracing affirmation — the moments of leaving, having already left, and having already arrived — are sequential, but also simultaneous.


Time therefore has two aspects.


At the level of eternity, or at least, the level of that which cannot be comprehended in terms of a linear chronology, we are already on our way, and we have already arrived. We have already let go. We are nothing but Buddha nature.

At the level of quotidian, chronological time, of striving and desiring, giving and taking, we have not yet left, we do not want to leave, we cling to that which we have already lost, which we have never possessed. We are lost in delusion.


And there is a third dimension of time that is no more than, perhaps even less than a moment, even as it encompasses and transforms the entire stretch of time, past and future. The awakening. The impossible moment of the Buddhist gambit, of crossing to the other side.


This, I think, is the impossible-possibility Dolom is brought to by the Guide, despite all his distractions, all his errancy, all his avoidance, and that we are brought to the point of imagining by the film itself, in the midst of this unending torrent of targeted distractions that defines our own daily lives.




LIFE IS TO DREAM AS CINEMA IS TO DEATH


Do I choose the choice, or does the choice choose me? Did I dream the butterfly, or did the butterfly dream me? This moment at the threshold seems to transcend any dichotomy between free will and grace, or between the unbroken chain of past determinations (karma) and the absolute uncertainty of the next step. It can be attributed neither to an internal agency nor to an external power of influence. There is no puppet master, inside or outside, pulling Dolom’s strings. There is no ghost in the ghost machine.


Death is imagined in Buddhism as an opportunity. Not as a sudden cancellation of all traces (scientific reduction) or a moment of judgement before a creator (theology), but as the experience of a chance, the chance to let go.


In this perspective, death could be construed as nothing more than a supreme opportunity for guided meditation. It is the best time to meditate, to bring one’s mind in relation to itself, since the mind is no longer conditioned by the demands of the body. But the Bardo is also the most difficult time, since that very condition inspires so much confusion, regret and fear, and therefore, so much desire to stay attached, to deny what has already happened.  In this case, ‘you can’t take it with you’ means any familiar or recognisable aspect of yourself.


Ultimately, isn’t this simultaneity of the greatest difficulty and the greatest opportunity merely an amplification of how Buddhism understands the human condition in general: human beings are unique in experiencing a ‘just right’ relationship between suffering and consciousness that allows for liberation?


In that sense, we could say that we are at our most human when we are dead, or that living is dying (the exact title of a book by the director in his role as Rinpoche). We could also pause to wonder if we are already in the Bardo, the in-between state, right now, in what we call ‘the present moment,’ even and especially as we watch Pig at the Crossing.


A perennial theme of film theory is that cinema resembles a dream more than real life. In Buddhism, life itself is the dream. I suspect part of Norbu’s inspiration and ambition as a director may be to reverse engineer the terms of this analogy by giving us a cinematic experience that functions in the Buddhist image of death, i.e. as a kind of Bardo, a suspension in between.


In the beginning, it will be recalled, Dolom died by editing. At the end of it all, his final moment in the forest of his mind will culminate in another cut to black. The hero’s climactic decision is thus never definitively revealed.


At this moment, as Norbu’s narrative concludes, the question of Dolom’s fate remains open. Multiple interpretations are possible. We could say the film itself has just abruptly stopped, cut off without conclusion as if the projector had broken down; that Dolom has once again missed his chance at liberation and is about to fall into a new form, somewhere along the continuum of possible sentient beings extending from gods to hell creatures;  that his consciousness has been simply negated, erased without trace, as in a scientific-reductionist view; that the entire narrative, ostensibly concerning a pig, has turned out to be a kind of shaggy dog’s tale, concluding  in a gigantic anti-climax; or that we have indeed witnessed the very instant Dolom finally vanishes from the sphere of visible form and crosses to the other side.


Whatever we say to ourselves in the face of this sudden blackness, it will certainly be our own projection.




PUNK MONK


The film itself is the expression of a culture in a profound and perilous state of transition (which could be said of any culture at this time of objective global peril) and therefore has to work in an ‘in-between’ condition: between the local and the global, the Buddhist and the non-Buddhist, the traditional and the modern, the so-called East and the so-called West (which also seems to be the pattern of the director’s own life as a Buddhist teacher with followers around the world).


The online flyer for this film happily displays 19 rejections from film festivals around the world. This reads to me like an almost ‘punk’ celebration of exclusion by the global gatekeepers of cinematic good taste. The self-affirming attitude Norbu demonstrates as an artist facing rejection is admirable; the total lack of discernment and aesthetic courage displayed by the grey eminences who control these institutions is much less so. Pig at the Crossing is a remarkable and significant film that deserves to be seen.


(This review is dedicated to my dear friend, Sammy the dog, who, according to the traditions invoked here, passed through the Bardo as I wrote it. I also want to thank Charlotte Davis for introducing me to the films of Khyentse Norbu.)




Bill Schaffer, retired Lecturer in Film Studies, Newcastle University. June 2024

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