Write up and analysis of "The Order" by Matthew Barney.

Write-up:1st degree: The Order of the Rainbow for Girls

2nd degree: Agnostic Front vs. Murphy's Law

3rd degree: Aimee Mullins

4th degree: The Five Points of Fellowship

5th degree: Richard Serra

 

Matthew Barney, who is playing the main role of the Entered Apprentice, begins climbing the various floors of the Guggenheim, following a dance sequence from the Order of the Rainbow for Girls. On his way we see Richard Serra propping up slabs of metal against one another. As the Entered Apprentice continues his climb, we see a punk band and their fans beginning a gig. The Entered Apprentice sees and approaches a cross made of tiles on the floor. The Entered Apprentice makes a box out of the tiles. Again we see Richard Serra shoveling a Vaseline-like substance from a bucket and throwing it at the slabs of metal we saw him prop up earlier.

The Entered Apprentice is then approached is then approached by Aimee Mullins, who is wearing a white dress. All of a sudden they are both wearing white dresses. They embrace, and as they do, Aimee Mullins becomes a cat, who scratches his back and removes the cloth from his mouth, which seems to be stemming some kind of bleeding. 

 

The Entered Apprentice is now back in his clothes and climbing again. He comes across a sculpture, The Five Points of Fellowship. Across the room, there is a pile of balustrade-type objects and the Entered Apprentice begins to pule them on top of the sculpture. However,  the next time we see the sculpture, the balustrades have gone.

On the next floor,  we see the Vaseline-covered metal slabs and Richard Serra again. Simultaneously, we see the Vaseline dripping, balustrades piling up, and the ladies dressed as lambs dancing. The woman in the white dress is a cat again. The Entered Apprentice crawls along the ceiling past the cat, who is then back in the white dress. We then cut back to the punk gig. All of a sudden, the Entered Apprentice is holding a cat's skeleton. He climbs back past every floor - the pool, the dancing ladies, the punk gig, the cat woman and the sculpture.

The cat woman is hissing. The Entered Apprentice goes to the box he made from tiles earlier, and takes a hammer from within. He then goes back to the cat woman and hits her with a hammer between the eyes. The Entered Apprentice then falls past all the floors of the Guggenheim into the pool from the start of the film. The last thing we see is the woman in the white dress with blood-soaked bandages over her eyes. She is a holding a leash with lambs attached to it.

Analysis:To be honest, when we watched this film in class, I had no idea what it was about, how it was relevant, what the message was. However, having made notes during the lesson, somewhat subconsciously, and then doing a full write up from my notes, I have begun to make some links between things, and see some of the symbolism within the film. I'm not saying I completely understand this film, as it is only an extract of the entire thing, but I believe I grasp it a lot more than I did 12 hours ago.

Having done some research into the Cremaster Cycle, the project from which The Order was taken, I discovered that the concept behind the project, and Cremaster 3 especially the moment in the womb when a gender is assigned to the growing fetus. This actually helped me to understand certain aspects of the film that had confused me before.