Reflections on 1962 soviet stop motion "Bathhouse"

This text was originally published through my newsletter on June 10th, 2022.

Early this week, I stumbled upon this twitter account dedicated to posting gifs and short videos of Eastern European cartoons.

Beyond the visual appeal of the cartoons, I was interested in seeing how those animation reflected aspects of the communist mindset. After looking through their collection, I decided to watch the animated film Bathhouse, from 1962, that was inspired by the homonymous play by Vladimir Mayakovsky.

In terms of style, the stop motion technique is used with great creative freedom, resulting in a diverse, but coherent renderisation of the story. The film is rich in textures, colours, and material resources. Ultimately, Bathhouse offers a visually inspiring experience. Plotwise, its quite funny, and I had some good laughs despite the bad translation

But the most interesting take I got from watching Bathhouse was being told about the frustration the Soviets were experiencing while dealing with their government.

The bureaucrat characters are though-headed, ignorant, hypocritical, and benefit from the irrationally dense hierarchy of the system, meanwhile, workers get paralysed by an incomprehensibly complex state apparatus, that disables their power to make any changes or demands.

The idea of understanding reality through the lenses of communism interests me, and I've collected a list of references that touch on this motif. Many of these works offer an opportunity to dive into a different arrangement of affairs, that evoke similar feelings to the ones we already feel, but tainted by a restless dissonance.

An interesting perspective of communist anxiety is presented in Tarkovsky’s “Stalker”. The film introduces the concept of The Zone, a place where reality is constantly shifting and our own perception is not reliable. Speaking on the feelings related to uncertainty, precarity and decadence. The comparison with our current situation in Late-stage Capitalism becomes inevitable.

Being raised in a capitalist society makes us understand the world in a certain way. Capitalism's ideology spreads far beyond the purely economic real, and invade our imaginations, shaping how we see history, the future and ourselves. That being said, communism has the same reality-shaping power over its citizens who live under its boundaries, and Bathhouse explores the limitations some aspects of the communist ideology impose on society.

The animation develops from Soviet anxieties. It’s main criticism is aimed at the deep bureaucratisation of the system, that is rendered useless, inaccessible, incomprehensible and, ultimately, corrupt beyond recovery. And while it’s interesting to investigate those anxieties, it’s even more intriguing to build parallels with the state of contemporary capitalism.

Anarchist anthropologist David Graeber says in his book “Bullshit Jobs: the rise of pointless work and what we can do about it”:

“It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen. Sure, in the old inefficient Socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as many jobs as it had to. […] But, of course, this is the very sort of problem market competition is supposed to fix. According to economic theory, at least, the last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money to workers they don’t really need to employ. Still, somehow, it happens.

While corporations may engage in ruthless downsizing, the layoffs and speed-ups invariably fall on that class of people who are actually making, moving, fixing, and maintaining things. Through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper pushers ultimately seems to expand, and more and more employees find themselves—not unlike Soviet workers […]”

Bringing this thought into current capitalist media, a comparison has to be made between Bullshit Jobs and the new Apple TV series "Severance".

In Severance, the main characters are stuck doing what appears to be a completely meaningless and nonsensical job, while the reason for their employment is hidden from them. Severance speaks eloquently on the current state of capitalist bureaucracy and ,interestingly, sometimes makes similar points as Bathhouse.

Detail of a computer screen from the Microdata Refinement work from Severance.

As en example, the inaccessibility Harmony Cobel, the all-powerfull director at the severed employees floor, faces with when she needs to address the board of directors is very similar to the Bathhouse worker’s struggle to communicate with their bosses about their invention of the time machine.

The complex hierarchy of the system is also expressed in both productions. In Severance, Milchick and Cobel struggle with retaliation and surveillance from their bosses; while in Bathhouse there’s a sequence (which I kindly uploaded to youtube) describing the role of hierarchy in further complexifying bureaucracy.

Its interesting to see how late-stage capitalism finds itself developing issues that aren’t unfamiliar to the communist reality. Looking through the lens of media, we start to wonders which anxieties created by these, theoretically opposite systems, will meet in the middle of a venn diagram.

To discuss another example, Bathhouse also shows how bureaucrats are trapped in their limited mindsets even during life-changing of moments. In the story, a mystical character called Phosphorescent Woman invites the people to join her on a journey to the future. While the workers join in excitement, bureaucrats get stuck, calculating the expenses of the trip.

This same criticism is made towards capitalism in Akira: while the (second!) apocalypse is being set up, The powerful bureaucrat businessman Mr. Nezu tries to flee with a suitcase full of money and “important” documents, in denial of how those artifacts are meaningless in the face of mass extermination.

In the stories we discussed, the inability of these characters to understand reality beyond the trappings of the economic systems in which they are inserted, exposes their fatal uselessness to a society that needs to overcome the limitations of their current ideologies.

While in Mayakovsky’s Bathhouse these characters are thrown in the bin by the centrifugal force of time, in reality they tend to be able to perpetuate their dominance until a stronger revolutionary force takes them away by force - or until the decadent model of society that benefits them eventually self-destructs.

Considering the unstable and decadent state of late-stage capitalism, I believe it can be a valuable experience to gain insight from former Soviet anxieties of living in a reality that’s crumbling apart and still refuses to give up on its own deeply flawed structures.

Watching Bathhouse made me want to generate the revolutionary force that will spin the wheels of time, and that inspiration was converted into this essay. I hope you get inspired to watch it as well and send me your thoughts and opinions on the subject.