Sheep's Clothing

The way mankind is such a sorry affair when you come to look at it as it actually is.

Grimur Harkonason's Rams offers us a knowledge peculiar and precious to Icelanders: the necessity of preserving the fragile human community threatened by nature and by human nature. Rams presents a desolate landscape steeped in an older, rural sense of time, tied more to natural cycles than to digital watches. The allegorical farm world of the brothers Gummi and Kiddi resists our fast-paced global, virtual society where citizens submit to the demands of constant communication, the ecstasies of information saturation, and the sense of entitlement and narcissistic limitlessness that instantaneous technological access promotes. The Icelandic world is an uncanny environment, a place well suited to tell us a more intimate story of the impossible neighbor, as Freud did in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930/1961), here in its biblical inflection, as a story of the impossible brother.

Iceland's offering draws our attention to the complexity of human community as a symbolic system that protects against violence and defends against nature. The film shows how human bonds are nevertheless subject to the Real on both these fronts which cannot be finally mastered or sufficiently tamed, threatening to destroy the human bonds completely. Rams is really an allegory commemorating the shepherds and shepherding of the drives, and lamenting the increasing failure in our moment of this very old and essential civilizing work.

Not only do the rams serve as sustenance for the community, they are also doubles of the men—their animal reflection in the mirror, pointing to the proximity of the imaginary and the Real in the Icelandic countryside. We see this when Gummi stares at the ram's head on the wall and the camera pauses in a lengthy close-up, one used for the promotional poster. The rams are the film's talisman and serve as thematic representation of this shepherding, as an allegory