I Would Like to See It: A Zed and Two Noughts

At what point in the process of decay does life become death? How does one relate to the other, and can the human mind experience real intimacy with the latter? Peter Greenaway’s A Zed and Two Noughts, the tale of twin zoologists Oswald (Brian Deacon) and Oliver (Eric Deacon) Deuce whose wives are killed in a single highly improbable accident, circles the problem of finding meaning in fundamental biological processes with heartbreaking absurdity and the kind of deep beauty only Greenaway could excavate from it. Against the highly staged and sectioned backdrop of the zoo at which the brothers work, Greenaway builds an image of life as an absurd diorama, a succession of archetypal scenes both self-contained and hopelessly interpenetrating.

The cultural artifact of the zoo exhibit is itself a sort of diorama of decay and death, fixing an organism in space as it is observed day in and day out until its expiration. Human beings have a millennia-old fixation on the ownership and control of interesting animals, an impulse to play god so as to distract ourselves from our own fallible mortality. Greenaway presents the fateful accident as a tableau straight out of Greek myth, a swan’s body broken across the front of a car as though in an inversion of Leda’s tryst with Zeus, the wild divine mutually annihilated by man’s technical prowess. Oswald and Oliver’s single-minded quest to understand this single moment of destruction as a holistic phenomenon creates, ironically, an emotional distance between them and both their deceased wives and the world at large.

Presented with a chance to romance the driver of the fateful car, Alba Bewick (Andrea Ferreol), the pair instead collapses into myopic observation of organic processes, substituting image for experience. Their fixation is echoed throughout the film, from the symmetrist obsessions of Alba’s surgeon (Wolf Kahler) to the extemporized narratives of sex worker Venus de Milo (Frances Barber), which position her as a sort of detached Greek chorus interpreting the world around her into a product she then sells. Greenaway is showing us the act of missing the proverbial forest for its trees, but oh, what trees they are! One can understand the twins’ obsession with the process of flesh surrendering to entropy, with the creeping knowledge of mortality made real and tangible, replacing all other experiences by virtue of its overwhelming finality. Bodies rot and die and bloom with maggots and bacteria. Bones emerge from softening meat. All the observation in the world is powerless to penetrate this final, awful mystery, which in the end is really no mystery at all.