Title: Minor is Major
n our complicated American life of responsibility and self-consciousness, we have little or no tolerance for the aberrant, the irrationally insane. To be labeled with madness is to be shut away from human society until the Other-ness within can be rehabilitated, erased. Urga! allows us a glimpse into the world of Mongolian madness, in the character of Uncle Bayartou. Instead of being locked away in a sanitarium, Bayartou is allowed to roam wherever he pleases, as if he had greater spatial freedom than anyone else in the film.Bayartou represents the Other to two sides of the screen: the audience and the Mongolian couple, Gombo and Pagma. We as an American audience laugh alongside Gombo and Pagma when we see the spectacle of the drunken man carousing among the vast fields on a tired old nag, but there is an unspoken acceptance of him for his nomadic independence. Bayartou seems to be at once subhuman and superhuman, lacking shelter and a steady source of food (except for apples - a fruit potent with meaning) yet able to distribute gifts and ride his horse indoors or out. Gombo's vision of Bayartou as Genghis Khan emphasizes his capacity as a supernatural signifier of the fading past. Bayartou exists in the glorious barbarism of Mongolia's past in the fantasy of Gombo's mind, and in reality as a postlapsarian figure of confused generosity and inebriation. This dualistic filmic portrayal of a complete Other, who claims Hollywood as his brother (Stallone's Cobra), seems somehow timeless and immortal in the face of our modernity. Instead of succumbing to the mesmerizing television, where we see Rambo and Khan juxtaposed in a significant meeting between past and future, the Mongol horde chooses to destroy the connection. The historical glory of Genghis Khan will not be lost in the fabricated heroism of Hollywood.
Uncle Bayartou appears initially as the mad drunk, alien and amusing to us, yet he is an emblem of fading greatness. His inability to be constrained spatially imparts the freedom of his wandering nomadicism, a state of being with no true boundaries of beginning and end. He is a living metaphor for the history of the Mongols, and his presence is strongly felt throughout Urga! Only by exposing what lies beneath the immediate surface of the film experience can we truly understand why what we see strikes such profound chords within us - Uncle Bayartou is one such chord.