Gaav and the Real Love

While reading Dabashi and Naficy’s writings, their relation of Iranian sociopolitical affairs and developments proved difficult to comprehend in terms of chronological progression. There is an argument to be made here, because while Iran has- alongside Turkey for the past two centuries- both geopolitically and sociopolitically operated at a crossroads between the “epistemic violence” (Naficy 327) of Western modernity’s hegemonic project and the limited subjectivities of its national ruling elite against the powers that be, (the legacy of) Gaav exposes how the embattled grounds for sovereignty have been in a similarly unstable contention at the crossroads of (homogenous, empty) time due to censorship: the simultaneous Pahlavi exaltation and disavowal of the the Iranian past while censoring a more honest representation of the Iranian present- both necessary to shift the grounds of Iranian “authenticity” and to restrict the potentialities of (who remains in) the future- within Iranian cinema. The entanglement of Western sciences (Saedi’s ethnography and psychiatry) with Iranian practices (Mehrjui’s Sufi metaphysics and philosophy) in their presentation of the uncanny thus offers a multivalent reading of Entezami’s (Hassan) and Nassirian’s (Islam) performances and purposes in relation to themselves and the village, representing (what Mehrjui considers) the philosophical contention of the Iranian left: confrontation with other self,

[One] manifestation of the other self (man-e dīgar) (in the station of controlling the lower self) consists of the relation between the ruler and the ruled. Politics and the legal machinery are areas in which the particulars of this kind of relations become clearer. In Iran, kings have always been seen as the representatives of God [...] In this regard [...] one could consider the king as that «higher power» whose existence is a symbol of the other self. That is to say: a symbol of the self controlling the lower [bestial] soul (nafs-e soflī) [my insertions]. (van den Bos 113-4)

Mehrjui’s short four minute interview provides much clarification for the film’s ending and its relevance for contemporary (past) and future (present) Iranian realities, while elucidating the core narrative as the tragic love story that it is. Naficy, unlike Dabashi, indicates this incredibly crucial dimension of Mehrjui’s work, specifying the disappearance of “the lover and the beloved as distinct individuals” in Sufi mysticism, as they “fuse into one another, forming a union.” (Naficy 33) This is punctuated by Hasan- the night he returns to find his cow dead- running off into the countryside where they claim his cow has run off, then returning the next morning transformed into the cow. This entire nighttime scene (01:02:57)- alongside the other sequential scenes- is very crucial for reinforcing the film’s phantasmagori[a] as Dabashi describes below, but especially the wails of Hasan- which I, and hopefully we, could discern as his voice but then learn that the villagers somehow did not- serve as diegetic fantasy: anxiety. As with the first sequential night scene (19:06), the visual transition from day to night is punctuated by a sharp chord and subsequent change in music as we follow Esmayil conducting relatively irrelevant affairs; however, the auditory transition within the night scene from discordant instrumental sounds to Hasan’s wails is similarly demarcated by a dog barking. This serves to not only parallel their barking when the real Bolouris intrude the village in the next sequential scene (01:18:50), but also catalyze and foreshadow Hasan’s imminent metamorphosis. 

While Mehrjui directly applies this aspect of Sufism to Hassan and his cow, it is inextricable from its ultimately mystic design: “Such waiting and longing for someone—a beloved, a savior, a Mahdi—constitutes another one of the primal themes of Iranian mysticism, literature, and cinema [emphasis added].” (339) Recognizing Mehrjui’s admitted influence by Italian neorealism, we can understand how he imbues “interiority and reciprocity” into the cow in order to localize the genre and relate the “reality inherent in [his] culture, in [his] society” by calling on Sufi philosophies of love (Mehrjui 04:03); however, the Sufi--Iranian yearning for a lover is not only correlative but dependent on this yearning for the ultimate beloved, Allah. Mystic practices ultimately serve to bring one closer to living in godliness and becoming one with the divine, usually through transcendence of the human form/consciousness; forming a love bond so deep that the two become one is certainly a form of transcendent consciousness. However, if Hasan’s transcendence into oneness with his cow is perceived as monstrous by the village, then what is to be made of the similar yet much more tacit love bond between the villagers and Allah through oneness with Islam? There is no contention as to the obvious theological allegory in which Islam functions as the 

…critical and creative intelligence of Bayal [with] the only cart and the only musical instrument in sight. Islam thinks for Bayal, and can transport–both physically and figuratively–its inhabitants either by his cart or by his string instrument, the saz, from one place to another. With Islam (as a proper name with obvious and yet subversive suggestions) as the center of its nervous system, Bayal projects a monstrous apparition, a phantasmagoric village leviathan, a chimera (emphasis added). It is not that Islam always knows what he is doing. But it seems that he must. The village wills it. The village, in effect, is the extended body of Islam, his limbs and organs, constantly demanding his attention, calling for his intelligence. (Dabashi 23)

Dabashi’s Foucauldian bares its head, relating the village to a functioning- presumably human- body and the (projected) threat of a monstrous Other (self): not simply just a phantasmagoria but a leviathan or chimera. These are monsters whose physiological proportions, constructions, and contortions are categorical crises to use Cohen’s language: the leviathan creature itself ranges across cultures (space) and even across time within cultures (snakes, dragons, crocodiles, whales, the devil, etc.) while the chimera is a three-bodied animal (a lion, goat, and snake; sometimes others). The primary crisis represented here for the chimeric village is not then Cohen’s monstrous body- because the physical body is but a metaphor- but Foucault’s (or better, Mehrjui’s) monstrous mind: there are multiple “minds” within the chimera (and in Balay) but surely only one collective mind could perceivably be in charge. One single body could not have more than one single mind, right? 

This is the question to be confronted by both the village- both in relation to Hassan and itself- and Iran. It must first, then, be confronted by Islam, or else a rogue mind will confront it for him. When Masht Hassan asks, “Mash Islam… why did you do that... Reeve, you ask him. What did I ever do to him? Why did he lie to me,” (00:59:50) he is questioning the «higher power»; he is confronting the question which Islam either refuses to or cannot answer. Everyone simply accepts the questionable reality than Hassan will believe that his cow ran away (00:29:05); yet Mash Safar’s son- who recently returned from the city- continuously questions him, and all his doubts come true: even with the corpse buried, Hassan knew as soon as he entered the shed that the cow was dead and had not run away, but most importantly Safar’s son thought that Hasan’s wife should have told him his cow died. At 00:29:44, he finishes Islam’s sentence to say this and it is unclear by Islam’s reaction whether he already planned to say that the cow ran away, or if this was a petty amendment following the interruption. The first interpretation is certainly plausible- especially when remembering his first (equally unserious) plan was for nobody to tell Hassan that she died and presumably leave the corpse in the shed for him to find- but the second one makes more sense given his general incertitude and offers a better allegory for the Pahlavi regime’s response to modernity.

After the villagers bury the cow their primary conflict is to keep the death secret: “Now… everyone should be careful not to tell Mash Hassan anything.” (00:35:35) This is accomplished by detaining two villagers: Esmayil at Abbas’ place and the unnamed village idiot (as an archetypal term) chained at the old mill. Esmayil’s detention is simply to convince Hassan that he’s looking for the cow, but the other man’s is because they assume- due to his intellectual disability- that he will spill the secret to Hasan; in other words, that his mind will deviate from Islam’s mind, the collective mind. They were worried about the wrong one! Masht Hassan and his wife are in fact the devious minds at work here, ironically tying them closer in this respect than at any other point in the film (as the representation of the opposite of the ideal Sufi love) as the two minds whose deviation from Islam’s plan triggers Hassan’s, the village’s, and the film’s descent into madness. This is not a focalization of blame, but an emphasis on Mehrjui’s depiction/perception of psychiatric disorder as moreso social pathology than natural (or bio)pathology. The comedy and brevity of the opening scene in which Safar’s son and the kids terrorize the village idiot is thus paralleled with the death scene in which Islam and the other men terrorize Hassan; the future (represented by the young) is placed ahead of the past (represented by the old) to highlight what already was the reality of a modernist (so urban Iranian) cinematic erasure of rural Iran, but also what would become the theocratic Iranian persecution of Sufism.

While Mehrjui’s parallelism of Masht Hassan and the village idiot could read as commentary on ableist conventions of biopiolitics and social structure--reproduction, the lack of closure in the latter character’s arc suggests this is simply a byproduct of his reframing the Western psychiatric into the Sufi philosophical in adherence with the prime minister’s 1968 statement to the Movie Artists Syndicate: “Iranian movies must have originality and be inspired by Iranian history.” (Naficy 328) Ironically, Mehrjui actually adheres perfectly with the nationalist project of the contemporary regime- an original story about a real village in rural Iran, “spiritually” and “morally” recalling Sufism- yet despite receiving funding from the Shah, the film was censored for contradicting the imperative of Iranian modernization (urbanization). Thus, because the ideologies attached to Western modernization and capitalism relegate the rural and pastoral to the realm of the past and undeveloped, the real Iran is now rearranged to reflect the reality the Shah would like to project and (retroactively) build: “they were kind of ashamed that Iran would be represented by its village… They confiscated the film for about a year, year and a half.” (Mehrjui 01:28) Just as the Sufi mystical transcendence of Hassan is mischaracterized by both the Western psychiatric mind as lycanthropy and the villagers who, if adherent to Sufi philosophies, would presumably be more inclined to understand the mystic transcendence of the two lovers than the psychiatrist (both mischaracterizations simultaneously serving to associate the harmless mystic or epistemic deviant with a violent Other whose reality needs to be destroyed and restructrued), Saedi and Mehrjui’s narrative- drawn from the Iranian reality of the Balay village- is mischaracterized by the West and the Shah as a political deviance in need of “managed incorporation” into the social body.

This Shah’s censorship on Iran’s greatest export- as opposed to a unified front of unabashed Iranian nationalism accepting the existence of various modes of existence under one alleged community- reflects the symbolic censorship of Hasan by Islam and the village. Just as Islam presents Hasan a false reality (a phantasmagoria of half-truths) and refuses to correct it despite questions and evidence otherwise, the Shah refuses for the image of Iran to be whole and complete even for his own people. Hasan and Mehrjui’s response? Present and insist on the real, on his real. When Masht Hasan leaves the shed to face Islam and the crowd of villagers, he says that he knows his cow did not run away. Later, when Hasan asks Islam why he lied, before he has the chance to come clean, Reeve interjects and affirms that Esmayil is indeed out looking for her. Almost as if to match their absurdity, Hasan now says he’s on the roof to watch out for the Bolouris trying to steal his cow who they just said ran away. His performance here becomes exaggerated, where before he was solemn he now seems wired with anxiety while explaining that he’s awaiting the Bolouris; this serves to parody their fear of the Bolouris and insistence that “every person or animal that dies is Bolouris’ deed” (00:28:00) in his and Mehrjui’s (as well as Safar’s son’s) most blatant critique of Islam’s authority. This critique ties together Mehrjui’s neorealistic influence and Sufi philosophy, Saedi’s ethnography and psychiatry, and the layered allegories of the film.

“Once the moon is out, I will take water for her.”

“What if the moon doesn’t come out?”

“Every time my cow gets thirsty, the moon comes out.” (01:02:00)

It is almost comical how Hasan behaves in this scene, from solemn to wired and anxious back to solemn in a matter of a minute; especially comical, however, is Reeve’s silly question: “What if the moon doesn’t come out?” I contend that, in this scene, Mehrjui wants to emphasize just how inane the villagers will become in order to avoid simply admitting the cow was killed- and on some level, because she was killed during the day, admitting that they are their own biggest threat and not the Bolouris- and that Hasan’s response is to create an equally false reality for himself. He must create his own real, and if the villagers’ real (the moon in fact rises every single night without fail) revolves around the unmentionable murder of the cow (instead of asking what if the cow’s not there he asks what if the moon’s not there), then his real must revolve around the cow, as the only being who understands, accepts, and is related to his real (the moon does not come out unless his cow gets thirsty). This is how Hasan most directly reflects Mehrjui and Saedi, as he “do[es] not as much point to the aporias of a given society as constitute them; [he] do[es] not indicate that there are unanswered and uncanny locations in an otherwise fully functioning society, but in fact create and craft them.” (Dabashi 18) This society is not fully functioning, however, because its malfunctioning perception of its Other self has allowed it to projects its fears and anxieties onto both the Bolouris and various members within itself; this is why recognizing the scene on Hasan’s roof as a parody of village aesthetics is important. These three men do not simply “create and craft” the aporias of society, but are constantly reflecting back onto themselves the projections from the powers that be that create the conditions giving rise to said aporias.

The camera lens, the pen and paper, the eye, all become two-way mirrors through which one learns about the Other while also examining the Self through projection- “to speak is to exist absolutely for the other.” (Fanon 17)- whether consciously or unconsciously. The 21st century persecution of Sufis in Iran who contest the governance of the jurist and violence in the name of religion is thus unsurprising. Mehrjui is less of a clairvoyant and more of an artist. He knew in order to catalyze this Iranian neorealism, he had to relate his reality, “and the deeper you go into that, the more universal it will be.” (04:11) The concept of the Universal transcends not just space but time, and the transcendence of Hasan into/with his cow speaks more universally to the contemporary philosophy of transcendental (especially Sufi) love- or even that of the countercultural 60s in Los Angeles while he attended UCLA- than to the political movements against urbanization and modernization of any time period, although I’m sure Mehrjui shared those sentiments as well. The mischaracterization of key Third World cultural practices as inherently political is one of the dominant imperatives of Western modernity in order to subsume all foreign bodies into its epistemological order, and Mehrjui reflects how censorship among the Pahlavi regimes acts part and parcel to translate the inherent beauty of Iranian film and society into the degraded language of Western hegemony and biopolitics. His intention, though, was to simply to elucidate the contemporary social mores (Iranian and global) preventing us (his “us” of 1969 Iran, and our “us” of an alleged global community) from achieving transcendental love through his Sufi focalization. 

Works Cited

“Interview with Dariush Mehrjui about THE COW.” Rarefilmm, The Cave of Forgotten Films, 14 Nov. 2023, https://rarefilmm.com/2023/10/gaav-1969/. 

Bos, van den, Matthijs. “Contrary Mystic Regimes, 1941-1979.” Mystic Regimes : Sufism and the State in Iran, from the Late Qajar Era to the Islamic Republic, BRILL, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, pp. 111-142. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/socal/detail.action?docID=253547.

Dabashi, Hamid. “Dariush Mehrjui: The Cow.” Masters & Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema, Mage Publishers, 2007, pp. 107–132. 

Naficy, Hamid. “A Dissident Cinema: New-Wave Films and the End of an Era.” A Social History of Iranian Cinema. Volume 2, the Industrializing Years, 1941-1979. Duke University Press, 2011, pp. 325-340. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822393016.