【译】标准公司评《恐惧的代价》：无处可逃

The Wages of Fear:No Exit

ByDennis Lehane

ESSAYS—

APR 21, 2009

作者：Dennis Lehane

译者：覃天

校对：易二三

来源：标准收藏（2009年4月21日）

I first saw Henri-Georges Clouzot’s masterpieceTheWagesofFearwhen the restored version was released in the U.S., in 1991. But my awareness of it began a bit earlier, when I was twelve and saw the unfortunate American remake,Sorcerer, which sent me investigating articles about the original and searching out what Clouzot films I could find: the grim, sublimeLecorbeau(1943); the strangely touching police proceduralQuaidesOrfèvres(1947); the tingly, unforgettableDiabolique(1954). Throughout this process,TheWagesofFearwas available on video only in truncated form, shorn of all political undertones that the U.S. distributor had deemed “anti-American” during the film’s original U.S. run, in 1955 (two years after the French premiere), so I held out for the unpillaged original.

当亨利-乔治·克鲁佐的杰作《恐惧的代价》的修复版1991年在美国上映时，我第一次看到了它。实际上，我对这部电影的了解要追溯到我12岁的时候，我曾看过威廉·弗莱德金拍的美国版的《恐惧的代价》——《千惊万险》。自那之后，我在好奇心的驱使下去找到了所有我能找到的克鲁佐电影：阴暗、令人毛骨悚然的《乌鸦》（1943），风格奇特的犯罪片《犯罪河岸》（1947），当然还有令人难忘的《恶魔》（1955）。在搜集这些影片的过程中，我只找到了《恐惧的代价》的删节版，因为当它在美国上映的时候，发行商认为其中带有「反美」色彩，因此多年后，我坚持要看这部电影未经删减的版本。

Even so, nothing could have prepared me for the seismic assault of it. Here is a film that stands alone as the purest exercise in cinematic tension ever carved into celluloid, a work of art so viscerally nerve-racking that one fears a misplaced whisper from the audience could cause the screen to explode. As obsessively attentive as Clouzot is to the narrative spine of the story—four men drive two trucks of nitroglycerin three hundred （豆瓣上是500英里外）miles across a hellish landscape of potholes, desiccated flora, rock-strewn passes, hairpin turns, and rickety bridges with crumbling beams to put out an oil fire raging on the other side of the mountain—he is just as savage in his commentary on corporate imperialism, American exploitation of foreign cultures, the rape of the land, and the ridiculous folly of man. Critics at the time charged thatTheWagesofFearwas virulently anti-American (Timemagazine, in 1955, called it “a picture that is surely one of the most evil ever made”), but this is missing the ravaged forest for the blighted trees. As director Karel Reisz pointed out in a 1991FilmCommentarticle, the filmis“anti-American,” but only insofar as it is “unselectively and impartially anti-everything.”

即便如此，没有任何语言可以形容我看到这部电影时的震撼。这不仅是一部独树一帜的电影，是最纯粹的、对紧张关系描绘的影像，还是一件让人感到棘手的艺术品。当你置身于影院时，你会产生这样一种胆战心惊的体验：身旁任何一位观众不合时宜的低语都会引发电影中人物小心避免的爆炸。就像克鲁佐痴迷于叙述的故事主线一样——四个男人开着装满炸药的货车开始了命运多舛的路途，他们不仅为了扑灭500英里外的油井燃起的大火，同时也是为了丰厚的酬金，他们一路上经历了地狱般的地貌——不毛之地、布满砾石的崎岖道路和随时都会倒塌的桥。克鲁佐在这部电影中对企业的霸权主义、美国对外国文化的剥削、对土地的强占以及人们的愚行作出了辛辣的讽刺。当时的评论家们指责这是一部恶毒的反美电影（1955年，《时代周刊》甚至将它称作是有史以来最邪恶的影片之一），这样的指责只能使观赏者错过《恐惧的代价》杰出、伟大的艺术成就。正如导演卡雷尔·赖兹1991年在《电影评论》中的那篇文章中所指出的那样，这并不是一部「反美」的电影，但只有当它「不加选择地、公正地反对一切」时，它的反抗声才显得振聋发聩。 I agree with Reisz about this impartiality—Clouzot’s camera may as well be the eyeball of a lizard, for all the emotion it shows the humans who enter its field of vision—but the charge of “anti-everything,” while certainly valid on a surface level, fails to take into account one of the basic tenets of cinematic humanism as employed by Clouzot and John Huston and Stanley Kubrick, among others: that by removing all hint of subjectivity from the point of view, one thus removes any stain of sentimentality. This erasure of sentiment does not cancel out empathy. In fact, in that very void, we, the viewer, are forced to decide what our capacity for empathy is. What remains in Clouzot’s chilly remove from his main characters is a fascinatingly odd mixture of contempt and love, one akin to that of a father who has closed off all outward displays of emotion for his children because he fears the heartbreak that could destroy him should anything tragic befall them.

我同意卡雷尔·赖兹切中肯綮的评论——克鲁佐的摄影机犹如蜥蜴的眼球般敏锐，用全知的视角展现了人类的情感，但是赖兹「反对一切」的评价，虽然在表面上看似是正确的，但似乎也忽略了克鲁佐、约翰·休斯顿和库布里克以及其他杰出导演所采用的人文主义原则：他们的电影由于去除了主观性的视角，因此主角也就不再带有任何主观污点。被抹去的情绪并不能抵消同理心。事实上，在紧张的观影过程中，观众被迫展现出他们的同理心。克鲁佐在电影里冷冰冰地离开了对主要人物的注视，反而给观众留下了一种令人着迷的、奇怪的蔑视和爱的混合感。他就像一位关闭了自己孩子们所有外在情感表达的父亲，他担心一旦悲剧降临到他们身上，就可能会摧毁自己的心灵。 If so many of today’s “bleak chic” auteurs seem to have fashioned their dire worldviews by skimming Cliffs Notes of Friedrich Nietzsche while listening to Trent Reznor in well-appointed suburban basements, it’s important to note that Clouzot didn’t come by his pessimism in a vacuum. Clouzot’s career in film was just beginning when Germany invaded France, and one can’t help but imagine the effect it had on him to toil at his craft in a suddenly subjugated homeland, while all around him stood the worst aspects of human nature—not only the genocidal bloodlust of the Third Reich but also the soiled moral lassitude of the Vichy government and various everyday collaborationist Frenchmen.

如果今天这么多「阴郁、时髦」的导演们是在设备齐全的郊区地下室里看着尼采的书、听着特伦特·雷泽诺的音乐来塑造着他们的世界观的话，那么需要注意的是，克鲁佐的悲观情绪并非凭空而来。当德国入侵法国时，克鲁佐的电影生涯才刚刚开始，人们不禁想象战争对他产生了怎样的影响，他周遭的一切看起来都是那么糟糕——第三帝国灭绝种族的杀戮欲望，道德倦怠的维希政府以及随处可见的卖国者。 It was in this atmosphere that Clouzot would makeLecorbeau, a film that managed to outrage both the Nazis—under whose auspices it, like many other French films during the occupation, was made—and the French. The Nazis, apparently, were appalled by its bleakness and by its depiction of their behavior during the occupation. The French, similarly, found their representation (as provincial informers) offensive, and deemed the film collaborationist. After the war, it would be four years before the blacklisted Clouzot was allowed to direct again. WithLecorbeau, however, he had managed to commit the artist’s most triumphant miscalculation: he had made a work so unsettling in its archetypal truths that it offended everyone. All sides assailed him and none would champion him. From that point on, Clouzot would consistently attack the hypocrisy built into every “decent” society, the moral bankruptcy disguised as moralism that is so often the grimy engine that chugs relentlessly underneath otherwise gleaming bodywork.

正是在这种氛围下，克鲁佐拍了《乌鸦》，它成功地激怒了纳粹——然而就像德军占领期间的许多其他法国电影一样，它是在纳粹的赞助下拍摄的。显然，纳粹对阴郁的《乌鸦》以及影片中对德军行为的描述感到震惊。同样，法国人同样发现他们的代表（那些告密者）令人反感，并认为这部电影才是真正的通敌者。二战结束后，被列入黑名单长达四年的克鲁佐才被允许拍片。然而，正是由于《乌鸦》，他成功地犯下了一位艺术家最「成功」的错误：他让这件作品潜藏的真相如此令人不安，以至于冒犯了每个人。各方都抨击他，却没有人会支持他。从那时起，克鲁佐就开始在电影中抨击每一个「体面」社会所固有的虚伪、伪善，而肮脏的事物常常就藏匿于所谓的道德之中，在《恐惧的欲望》里，它无情地在闪亮的车身下嗡嗡作响。

Plagued by shaky health that would force him off projects throughout his life, ostracized by some in French society who never forgave him forLecorbeau, and intimately associated with the identity crisis that plagued most of postwar Europe, Clouzot would bring to bear in all his subsequent films a uniquely ironic disappointment in man’s inability to fulfill his own potential. But it was never more extravagantly crystallized than inTheWagesofFear. 克鲁佐长期以来的身体问题让他饱受困扰，甚至一度让他难以拍摄电影。另外，他的电影受到一些法国社会群体的排斥，他们从未原谅过《乌鸦》。克鲁佐的苦闷还离不开战后困扰欧洲大部分国家的自我认同的危机。克鲁佐将在他后来的所有电影中带来一种独特、具有讽刺意味的失落感，那就是人类无法发挥自己的潜力，这一点在《恐惧的代价》中尤以为甚。

When we enter the world ofTheWagesofFear, we do so by way of an opening shot (later appropriated by Sam Peckinpah for the opening ofTheWildBunch) in which cockroaches are tied together and casually tortured by a half-naked child on an oily, muddy street in the oily, muddy village of Las Piedras. A flavored-ice vendor passes by, and the child abandons the cockroaches to covet treats he can’t afford. But still he has to look, to lust after the unattainable. Once the vendor passes, the child returns to the roaches, but a vulture has already taken his place. With a single stroke, Clouzot has set in motion his primary theme—that men are constantly searching the horizon to the detriment of all else in their immediate world. Men are “goal oriented,” addicted to the “quest,” itching for the “heroic” opportunity. Or so we tell ourselves. Clouzot says no. Men are wanderers. Adrenaline junkies. Mortally terrified of home and hearth.

我们最初是通过影片的开场镜头（萨姆·佩金帕在1969年的《日落黄沙》中模仿了此片的开头）来进入《恐惧的代价》的世界的，在拉斯彼埃特拉斯凋敝、泥泞的小道上，四只蟑螂被一个孩子拴在一起、随意折磨。一个小贩路过，孩子马上抛弃了蟑螂，贪婪地被他买不起的食物所吸引。而一当小贩离开，孩子又回到了蟑螂身边，但一只秃鹰已经取代了他的位置。克鲁佐在开场精心设置的这些细节已经点出了主题：人们不断眺望着远方的事物，它所产生的吸引力却毁灭了他们眼前的生活。人们往往认为，男人为自己的生活设定了明确的目标，且沉迷于冒险，渴望成为一名英雄。但克鲁佐却说不：男人都是漫游者，是肾上腺素上瘾者，他们对家庭、壁炉这类温暖、稳固的事物嗤之以鼻。

How else to explain how our four “heroes” ended up in a hellhole like Las Piedras? They weren’t born there, and no one would live in Las Piedras by choice. While we’ll never discover what has driven them there, we know it must have been sins of a particularly unforgivable nature, because no one opts to live in hell unless the alternative is demonstrably worse. But since nothingisworse, the men have long since found reason to rue their decision and pine for escape. The four men are Mario (Yves Montand), Jo (Charles Vanel), Luigi (Folco Lulli), and Bimba (Peter Van Eyck), and Clouzot presents them as if the poverty and hopelessness of Las Piedras have already stripped them of many of the attributes Homo sapiens like to believe separate them from their simian forebears. 这样一来，四位「英雄」出现在这样一个地狱般的小村庄——拉斯彼埃特拉斯就不足为奇了。他们不在这里出生，没有人愿意住在这里。虽然我们永远不知道是什么驱使他们来到这里，但我们知道这一定是一种特别不可原谅的罪过，因为没有人会选择生活在地狱里，这四个人早就找到了后悔的理由，渴望逃离这个地方。这四个人是马里奥（伊夫·蒙当饰）、乔（夏尔·瓦内尔饰）、路易吉（福尔科·卢利饰）和宾巴（彼得·范·埃克饰），在克鲁佐的镜头下，他们被这个村落带给他们的贫困、无望折磨地一无是处。 The four men are hired by the Southern Oil Company, a ruthless, American-owned multinational that has already laid waste to Las Piedras and, by extension, Central and South America. The company is personified by O’Brien (William Tubbs, reminding one of a puffier Lee J. Cobb), who hires the men for the suicide mission and makes a blustery speech about how they should be paid a top wage, even as one suspects that he assumes only two, at best, will survive. To co-workers who argue against hiring “bums” to do the job, O’Brien counters: “Those bums don’t have any union or any families.” When informed that the Safety Commission is coming to investigate the fire, he replies, “Put all the blame on the victims. They’re done for.” And yet even as one perceives Clouzot’s icy rage at the callousness of Western corporations (“If there’s oil around, they’re not far behind,” one character quips about the Americans in town), one can also feel his seething despair at the men who would willingly hand over their lives for such a pointless mission.

这四个人受雇于南方石油公司，这是一家无情的美国跨国公司，它们的贪婪已经摧毁了这个村庄，也摧毁了中南美洲。公司的代表人物奥布莱恩（威廉·塔布斯饰）雇佣这这个人来执行自杀式的任务，并承诺回报给每人丰厚的酬金，尽管他认为最多只有两个人能活下来。对于反对雇佣「流浪汉」来做这项工作的同事，奥布莱恩反驳道：「那些流浪汉没有任何工会，也没有任何家庭。」而当他得知安全委员会要来调查这场火灾时，他回答说：「把所有的责任都推到受害者身上，这样他们完了。」然而，就在观众感到克鲁佐对西方公司冷酷无情的愤怒时（一个角色嘲笑着村子里的美国人：「哪里有石油，哪里就有他们。」），人们也能感受到他对那些愿意为这样一项毫无意义的任务献出生命的人的愤怒、绝望之情。 Mario, in particular, is an extremely dislikable protagonist. He treats his lover, Linda (the “perfect woman” in an emotionally stunted man-child’s fantasy, and played with knee-knocking sensuality by Clouzot’s wife, Véra, in all her dark-eyed, languid uncoiling), as if she were a dog, literally petting her on the head as she crawls to him on all fours in their first scene. Linda, it must be said, is a willing accomplice. She is all sexual supplicant to Mario, no matter how repeatedly she’s debased for her efforts, and is last seen lying prostrate, her eyes closed, awaiting the return of her lover.

四人中的马里奥是一个极不讨人喜欢的主人公。他就像对待一只狗一样对待他的情人琳达（克鲁佐的妻子维拉扮演了这个性感的角色），在第一场戏中，当她匍匐爬向他时，他真的抚摸着她的头。必须说，琳达是一个心甘情愿的帮凶。她完全是马里奥的性乞求者，无论她的努力如何一再被贬低，人们最后一次看到她时，她躺在地上，闭着眼睛，等待她的情人回来。

Mario’s treatment of her, however, speaks to a man consumed with self-loathing, so much so that he is incapable of seeing that the sole good thing in his life, maybe in the entire history of it, kneels before him, willing, as Linda says, to rob for him, kill for him. That Mario rejects this so flatly speaks, as others have noted, to his repressed homosexual bond with Jo, but even more so to Clouzot’s mortification at the treasures men leave behind in order to pursue goals of far more dubious value.

然而，马里奥对自己的厌恶使他看不到琳达——自己生命中唯一的美好，她跪在他面前，就像琳达所说的那样，心甘情愿地为他抢劫、杀人。马里奥如此断然地拒绝了这一点，正如其他人所指出的那样，这委婉地表明了他与乔之间压抑的同性恋关系，克鲁佐在展现人们为了追求更令人怀疑的目标的同时，在此处留下了一个未解之谜。

The other men are depicted just as unsentimentally. Jo, a strutting, petty tyrant, attracts or repels all around him with his casual cruelty yet will later be revealed as the weakest of them all. Bimba, looking like a poster child for Hitler’s Aryan ideal, is so tightly wound and fatalistic that he’s expecting death before he even gets behind the wheel. And Luigi, ostensibly the warmest and most humane of the quartet, seems at best a holy fool, because even if he survives the trek, he’ll most likely die from diseased lungs, ravaged by exposure to cement during his tenure with the Southern Oil Company.

其他人同样也被刻画得冷酷无情。乔，一个昂首阔步、卑微的暴君，用他残忍的性格吸引或排斥着周围的人，但后来，他却发现自己才是所有人中最软弱的那个人。宾巴看起来像是希特勒口中高挑如木、坚硬如铁的雅利安人，他的命运是如此的紧张，以至于他甚至在开车之前就期待着自己的死亡。而路易吉，表面上是四人组中最有人味儿的一个人，充其量也只是一个高尚的傻瓜，因为即使他在长途跋涉中幸存下来，他也很可能死于尘肺病，在他任职于南方石油公司期间，他每天都暴露在水泥中。 The journey section of the film begins at the hour mark, and from that point on—for eighty-seven minutes of Homeric obstacles and knuckles so white you expect them to burst through the skin—it never relents. Each man who, as Jo puts it, rides with a “bomb on his tail” attempts to adapt to the never-ceasing thump of sheer terror as the trek begins with a full-out dash across the “washboard,” a road so ungainly, slick, and rutted that the only way to drive it without vibrations is at under six miles per hour oroverforty; a turn so tight that to make it, they must back up onto what remains of a rotting bridge that hangs, as if by hope alone, over an abyss; and a gut-scouring set piece in which they must use some of the nitro to blow up a fifty-ton boulder in their path, and still make the fuse long enough to reach safety.

电影开始一小时后，他们终于踏上了这趟亡命的旅途，影片剩下的部分令人屏气凝神、胆战心惊，演员每走一步，观众都为他们捏一把汗。正如乔所说，「每个人的身上都绑着炸药。」

这条路途时而颠簸，时而顺滑，以至于唯一减少危险的方式，就是以每小时不到6英里或超过40英里渐次前行。当他们遇到悬崖上逼仄的弯道时，他们必须退到一块腐烂的木板上，这块木板就是他们所有生的希望了。他们必须用炸药炸掉路上一块50吨重的巨石，才能到达安全的地方。

The entire journey, in fact, is a primer in what Clouzot and Alfred Hitch-cock understood above all others—and something I always felt that I, as a budding novelist, learned at their knees: that tension exists in theabsenceof shock, in the suggestion of dire possibility, as opposed to any presentation of calamity, which often ends up looking rather pedestrian. After the boulder, there is a pool of oil to drive through, in which Mario, determined not to get stuck, purposefully crushes the leg of Jo, who is guiding him . . . and still gets stuck. As each crisis is averted, the toll on the men’s nerves (particularly Jo’s) grows worse. It’s a refreshingly authentic concept—that exposure to terror does not make one less fearful, as most heroic films purport, but more so. You can’t conquer fear, only temporarily elude it. So each encounter represents merely another wink from Death. But the four men know all too well that Death, sooner or later, will open his eyes.

事实上，这次旅程是进入克鲁佐和希区柯克所营造的悬念感的门槛。作为一名小说家，我从这两位巨匠身上学到了一些东西：这种紧张感并不来自于任何的噱头和惊惧感，而存在于任何一处对可怕结果的暗示之中。如果以灾难片的方式呈现这种紧张感，只会让影片落于窠臼。在四人炸碎了巨石之后，他们开车驶过了一片油池，残忍的马里奥不愿意车被陷在这里，于是故意开车压断了乔的腿，结果，他们还是陷进了油池。随着每一次危机的解除，他们四人也就获得了更多的「恐惧的代价」。暴露在恐怖中绝不会像大多数英雄片所展现的那样，让人减少恐惧，恐惧感只会增加。你无法战胜恐惧，只能暂时逃避它。所以这个四个人心里非常清楚，每一次危险的来临都只是死神眨了眨眼，这趟旅程终将以死亡收尾。

A film in which one character dies saying, “There’s nothing!” is bound to be attacked (as this one was and continues to be) for being both misanthropic and atheistic, but I’ve never felt that Clouzot was saying, “This is the world,” but rather, “This is the world we’ve made.” (A vision that condemns what manis, in despair over what mancouldbe, is, perversely, a hopeful one.) It was we, after all, who helped make a world in which men risk all for the simple need to do so, are willing to lose all because it confirms their self-defeating interpretations of “fate,” destroy all because all is, well, destroyable. These men are, one can’t help feeling with a tragic sense of waste, children—torturing bugs to kill time while they wait for the vendor to come hawk delicacies they can never afford to purchase.

其中一个角色在死前说：「这里什么都没有！」这肯定会让《恐惧的代价》所展现出的厌世情绪和无神论而受到抨击，但我觉得克鲁佐从来没有认为「这是一个虚无世界」，而是「这就是我们创造虚无的世界。」（在对人类未来感到绝望的情况下，谴责人类所做的事，反常地充满了希望。）毕竟，正是我们帮助克鲁佐创造了这样一个世界，在这个世界里，人们为了自己简单的需要而冒着一切风险，愿意失去一切，因为这证实了他们自我挫败的「命运」可以摧毁一切，因为一切都是可以摧毁的。这些人不禁让人产生一种荒芜的悲剧感：孩子们一边折磨着蟑螂打发时间，一边等待小贩来兜售他们永远买不起的美食。

This piece was originally published in the Criterion Collection’s 2005 edition ofThe Wages of Fear.

原文链接：https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/392-the-wages-of-fear-no-exit