On a related note to the previous post, I think an interesting comparison can be made between The Wire and the recent film Winter's Bone. That movie is also about an economically depressed area (the rural Missouri Ozarks) and centers on characters whose lives are shadowed by the drug trade. One difference is that all the characters in the film are white.
Another difference is that the film is told entirely from the perspective of a character who herself is not directly involved in the drug trade but who has to negotiate that world in order to protect her family, her younger brother and sister.
But the most interesting difference to me is the way that law enforcement officers are portrayed in the film. They're basically peripheral, for one thing. And their roles are even more ambiguous than those of the cops in The Wire. There's a bail bondsman who's sympathetic but ultimately the enforcer of a vicious system. There's a craven sheriff who's either ineffectual or corrupt.
Mostly, the story is about the protagonist, a heroic and brave teenage girl. The film presents nuanced, interesting portraits of her uncle, an addict who's been involved in the meth trade; and, like The Wire, it also presents even some of the most villainous characters in a fairly complicated light.
My point, though, is that at no time are we encouraged to see this as a story about the forces of justice and law tackling the evils of those involved in the drug trade. The film is not interested in that. I wonder if such a movie has ever been made about black characters whose lives are lived in the shadow of the drug trade.
A friend of mine who's also a reader of this blog sent me a question today. He just finished watching the fifth season of The Wire. He went back and read this post, written after I had watched the first two seasons and a few episodes of the third. In the post, I reflect on how the show's focus on crime and punishment narrows the range of black American lives considered in the show.
My friend wondered if I thought the later episodes and seasons of The Wire address this issue:
Do you feel the show successfully presented a broader range of black American lives in the later seasons than the narrower range of criminals and crime-fighters which you identified in the first few seasons?
I guess my answer would be yes and no. Season Four brings in all of the schoolkids and widens the scope a bit. The character of Cutty also provides an interesting example of someone who forges a life outside of the world of crime and punishment. Bunny Colvin becomes a very interesting example of a middle-class black character who struggles heroically, at times quixotically, to change the world for the better.
In the end, though, the show is still about crime and punishment. We root for the cops to defeat the bad guys. Now, it must be said that the show does an incredible job of blurring the lines: showing us the corruption and dysfunction of the cops—even some of the ones we might admire most—and showing us the humanity of the bad guys. The Wire is a remarkable work of art, one that can actually make us feel more empathy for a character after he brutally beats another character to death. (I'm thinking of Chris Partlow's killing of Michael's stepfather.) And the film's cast of characters does include an impressive number of what Zora Neale Hurston called "average, struggling, non-morbid Negroes." Many of these characters are committed to the apprehension of black criminals—but there are white criminals as well, some of whom operate on a much wider scale than the black criminals. (I'm thinking of Vondas and the Greek, of course.)
So yes, I think the later seasons do add important and interesting nuance to the show's portrayal of black Americans' lives. And yet, at the same time, I still think everything I said in my earlier post is true.
I still need to watch David Simon's earlier mini-series The Corner, which other readers of this blog have urged me to look at in the context of this question. And Simon's most recent show Treme would probably also be interesting to watch with this issue in mind. My understanding is that it's not about crime and punishment at all.
Richard Brody's interesting argument about The Hurt Locker, which I enjoyed watching last night, confident that I'd be off school today (as indeed I was, thanks to six or so inches of snow):
Sure, the bomb-planters come off as monsters. But the movie’s wider implications emerge with the recognition that the world is full of monsters—but that it would be self-destructive for the United States to assume the right and the responsibility to rid the world of them (and would also suggest precisely the kind of war-addiction that the movie dramatizes). So, yes, “The Hurt Locker” is definitely a liberal movie—especially in the general sense of suggesting that wisdom and justice consist in learning to accept the existence of evil. But it’s a very particular kind of liberal movie: it suggests that the United States faces dangers that are indeed self-destructive; the question of Iraqis and their well-being is secondary to the story. It is, in effect, a liberal movie without guilt; and, I think, this fact accounts, at least in part, for its widespread acclaim.
For the past several weeks I've been making my way through all fourteen hours of Eyes on the Prize, the two-part documentary series on the Civil Rights Movement which aired on PBS in 1987 and 1990.
I've been watching it as background for an African American Voices course I'm teaching in the fall, and I'm excited about using parts of it in class.
I'm especially enthusiastic about it because the series was created and produced by Henry Hampton (1940-1998), a graduate of the school where I teach.
Looking back at a 1995 Talk of the Town piece about Hampton in the New Yorker, I came across a couple of interesting bits:
Life has done its best to foster some resentment in Hampton but, apparently, without success. A black man, he was born in St. Louis in 1940, when it was still under the thumb of Jim Crow. Hampton's father was a successful doctor, but the family wasn't welcome at restaurants or movie theaters in the white part of town.
Hampton contracted polio when he was fifteen and was in a wheelchair for three years. Nevertheless, he focuses on happier memories from that period, ones that include a sweet memory from his high school:
What he recalls from that time, though, is the friends at his virtually all-white parochial school who carried him up the steps to physics lab, and the red Thunderbird his father bought him.
Hilton Als makes some nuanced and devastating criticisms of Tyler Perry's Madea plays and films (which, frankly, I knew nothing about before reading Als's article—apart from seeing billboards and wondering, vaguely, if these productions were somehow related to those movies where Eddie Murphy dresses up like a fat woman), but he also tosses off this stingingly well-aimed aside about films like Knocked Up and Funny People, which other critics at Als's magazine have given undue praise, in my opinion:
The heroes of Perry's movies bear no resemblance to the young white men in search of a sense of purpose in the comedies of, say, Judd Apatow or Adam Sandler. (Madea, of course, would have no truck with the lack of faith in those scenarios, which are driven by the dual forces of white-male power and white-male sexuality, and by the exploration of a kind of freedom that the blacks in her community can't even dream of.) The white-boy comedies of the past two decades are about the grating, strained emo charm of never growing up, while Perry's films are about the necessity of growing up in a largely segregated world.
It's January again, time to show my freshmen O Brother, Where Art Thou?, our reward for having read The Odyssey over the course of the first semester. I guess I've seen the movie around thirty times now, and it still manages to delight me. My colleagues and I will spend the rest of the year quoting it to each other.
One thing about teaching a movie is that you begin to notice tiny details about it. Here's a fairly hard O Brother trivia contest that I wrote up last year while watching the film in class. (I'll post the answers in the comment section.)
1) Which artist from the film's soundtrack has a cameo in which she asks for a record of the Soggy Bottom Boys singing "Man of Constant Sorrow"?
2) Who performs the version of "I'll Fly Away" that's used in the film? (It's different than the one on the Grammy-winning soundtrack album.)
3) Whose translation of The Odyssey is quoted at the beginning of the film?
4) What moment in the film could be construed as a joke about Foley art?
5) Which character is speaking at a moment in the film when the sound doesn't match up with the image—when the dialogue does not fit with the character's mouth?
6) In what year is the movie taking place—and how do you know?
Yesterday one of my Facebook friends asked whether we should call the current year "twenty ten" or "two thousand eleven." It hadn't occurred to me that this was a meaningful question, but apparently some people are really serious about this.
Hendrik Hertzberg adds to the discussion an interesting bit of sociolinguistic analysis:
In my opinion, the late Stanley Kubrick is the culprit for what we’ve just been through. If his movie had been set a hundred years in the future, everyone would have called it “twenty sixty-eight.” But “2001”? You couldn’t call it “twenty one,” obviously. It wasn’t about Blackjack. And you couldn’t say “twenty oh one”; that would just sound stupid. So it was, as it had to be, “two thousand and one” or, less frequently, “two thousand one.”
It was natural for everybody to call 2000 “two thousand.” Besides the millennial portentousness, there was the fact that “two thousand” has one fewer syllable than “twenty hundred.” But when the big three-zero year was over, I’m convinced, we would have reverted to the usual practice and said “twenty oh one,” “twenty oh two,” and so on. (We’d most likely have avoided “twenty one,” “twenty two,” and so on, to avoid confusion with card games and starter rifles.) But Kubrick’s space odyssey had already conditioned us.
I like this, from Anthony Lane in the Oct. 5 New Yorker:
As a rough rule, cinema can be sundered into two halves: six-o'clock films and nine-o'clock films. Most movies are nine-o'clock affairs, and none the worse for it. You get home from work, grab something to eat, head to the theatre, and enjoy the show. And so to bed—alone or entwined, but, either way, with dreams whose sweetness will not be crumbled or soured by what you saw on-screen. A six-o'clock movie requires more organization: prebooked tickets, a restaurant table, the right friends. You're going to need them, because if all runs according to plan you will spend the second half of the evening tossing the movie—the impact and substance of it—back and forth. So "Persona" is a six-o'clock movie, though it won't leave you with much of an appetite. As is "The Deer Hunter," whereas "Platoon," for all its sound and fury, works fine for nine o'clock. "The Reader" is a nine-o'clock movie that thinks it's a six-o'clock. "Groundhog Day" is the opposite.
The other day I watched Apocalypto, Mel Gibson's quite entertaining film about the Mayans. It's a well-made thriller, but along the way the film made me think about violence in human history. In this piece, Steven Pinker asserts that our current world is the least violent it's ever been, and reviews some theories about why:
Manuel Eisner attributes the decline in European homicide to the transition from knightly warrior societies to the centralized governments of early modernity. And today, violence continues to fester in zones of anarchy, such as frontier regions, failed states, collapsed empires, and territories contested by mafias, gangs, and other dealers of contraband.
James Payne suggests another possibility: that the critical variable in the indulgence of violence is an overarching sense that life is cheap. When pain and early death are everyday features of one's own life, one feels less compunction about inflicting them on others. As technology and economic efficiency lengthen and improve our lives, we place a higher value on life in general.
A third theory, championed by journalist Robert Wright, invokes the logic of non-zero-sum games: scenarios in which two agents can each come out ahead if they cooperate, such as trading goods, dividing up labor, or sharing the peace dividend that comes from laying down their arms. As people acquire know-how that they can share cheaply with others and develop technologies that allow them to spread their goods and ideas over larger territories at lower cost, their incentive to cooperate steadily increases, because other people become more valuable alive than dead.
Then there is the scenario sketched by philosopher Peter Singer. Evolution, he suggests, bequeathed people a small kernel of empathy, which by default they apply only within a narrow circle of friends and relations. Over the millennia, people's moral circles have expanded to encompass larger and larger polities: the clan, the tribe, the nation, both sexes, other races, and even animals. The circle may have been pushed outward by expanding networks of reciprocity, à la Wright, but it might also be inflated by the inexorable logic of the Golden Rule: The more one knows and thinks about other living things, the harder it is to privilege one's own interests over theirs. The empathy escalator may also be powered by cosmopolitanism, in which journalism, memoir, and realistic fiction make the inner lives of other people, and the precariousness of one's own lot in life, more palpable—the feeling that "there but for fortune go I."
In our house we've gotten into the habit of watching a couple YouTube videos before brushing teeth and reading books at bedtime. My two older daughters have a repertoire of favorites they like to choose from. As a consequence, and somewhat to my chagrin, my daughters have gotten into the Disney Princesses pretty intensely.
Barbara Ehrenreich rails against the princesses in this piece. Here's part of her beef:
Disney likes to think of the Princesses as role models, but what a sorry bunch of wusses they are. Typically, they spend much of their time in captivity or a coma, waking up only when a Prince comes along and kisses them. The most striking exception is Mulan, who dresses as a boy to fight in the army, but -- like the other Princess of color, Pocahontas -- she lacks full Princess status and does not warrant a line of tiaras and gowns. Otherwise the Princesses have no ambitions and no marketable skills, although both Snow White and Cinderella are good at housecleaning.
When I first read Ehrenreich's essay, I was sympathetic to it, and I still think it makes some good points. Indeed, some of the clips that have been my daughters' favorites make me uneasy. In this one from The Little Mermaid, for instance, the evil witch Ursula tutors Ariel in what she needs to do to get "Dear Old Princey" to fall in love with her: 1) Give up her identity and become a human; 2) Remain mute ("The men up there don't like a lot of blather/They think a girl who gossips is a bore...It's she who holds her tongue who gets a man").
And in this one, from Mulan, the older women in Mulan's life instruct her in the gender expectations that she must follow if she wants to "bring honor to us all." It's straight out of Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology:
Granted, the movie as a whole, I imagine, calls these gender expectations into question, but in isolation the clip does little to encourage girls to resist their mothers when they tell them that "men want girls with good taste/calm, obedient, who work fast-paced/with good breeding and a tiny waist."
On the other hand, this clip from Beauty and the Beast gives us a heroine who's ambitious and curious, a reader who resists the arrogant meathead whom less intelligent women swoon after:
Likewise, in this clip from Pocahontas we see a strong female protagonist who resists the meaning that her father tries to impose on her life, along with the husband he's selected for her. She's the pilot of her own canoe, willing to brave the rapids and the waterfalls and venture down the more treacherous path.
So I don't know. I'm still a little uneasy about feeding my daughters a steady diet of these images, but at the same time I don't think they're quite as bad as Ehrenreich makes them out to be. (And, also, their diet includes lots of non-Princess female characters.) In a certain sense, knowing the Disney Princesses is essential cultural literacy for little girls. That's what they talk about at school. My hope, though, is that my daughters can gradually be able to think about these stories in critical ways: seeing what there is to admire in them, thinking about how they respond to the expectations of their families and cultures, but also imagining beyond the limits of the Disney vision of womanhood.
Luckily, too, their family is full of women who imagine and live beyond such limits, and I think those examples are more powerful than the ones on the screen.
Richard Brody responds to the Anthony Lane passage I quoted yesterday:
I think he’s right, that the device has become a stock-in-trade of contemporary Hollywood; but I also think that its prevalence represents progress, of a sort, over classic-era Hollywood; the prevalence of long-range backstory is, in effect, democracy at work. Backstory is the rejection of the notion that a character’s inner life can be determined in any significant way from the way she looks or presents herself, from the outer marks of identity. It is essentially a distinctive way of overcoming the assumptions that people have the habit of making on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, class, or social status. It’s a way of making movies that is consistent with the desire for inclusiveness, with the recognition that people cannot, in fact, be typecast fairly. The prevalence of backstory in Hollywood movies is one way that Hollywood has kept pace with, and reflected, changes in American society.
Here, in other words, is a long-range backstory—a device that, in the Hollywood of recent times, has grown from an option to a fetish. I lost patience with “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” once we learned of Willy Wonka’s primal trauma (his father was a dentist, and forbade him candies, so guess how he reversed that deprivation?), and, likewise, with “Batman Begins,” from the moment that mini-Bruce tumbled into a well full of bats. What’s wrong with “Batman Is” ? In all narratives, there is a beauty to the merely given, as the narrator does us the honor of trusting that we will take it for granted. Conversely, there is something offensive in the implication that we might resent that pact, and, like plaintive children, demand to have everything explained. Shakespeare could have kicked off with a flashback in which the infant Hamlet is seen wailing with indecision as to which of Gertrude’s breasts he should latch onto, but would it really have helped us to grasp the dithering prince?
Michael Chabon calls the novel "halfhearted" and says that even lovers of McCarthy must set it aside. Anthony Lane compares it to Elmore Leonard's crime novels, but (wittily, I'll admit) writes that "if I want Leonard, I’ll take him neat, rather than slow-filtered, drop by drop, through a layer of Faulkner, then laced with the Book of Jeremiah." James Wood calls it "an unimportant, stripped-down thriller."
They're right, mostly, though Wood is wrong when, in praising the novel’s dialogue, he writes that it is “so good that we can confidently expect the Hollywood version to excise it.” The Coen brothers didn’t excise it, of course (then again, I guess they aren’t Hollywood, properly speaking).
Maybe that's the thing to admire about this book, which is one of McCarthy's lesser efforts: it is rendered so clearly that the Coen brothers could make a great movie out of it. Everything that’s in the movie is in the book: the dread, the landscape, the dialogue, the weirdness. The film is a testament to the Coens’ attention to detail and skill in realizing a cinematic vision. It must be said too that the parts they cut from the novel—a female hitchhiker that Llewelyn has some heart-to-hearts with before he is killed; the greater part of the half-baked epilogue that tries to develop Sheriff Bell’s character further and lend the story greater signficance—are not great losses. But it’s also a testament to McCarthy’s abilities to create these indelible images, characters, and events.
I was watching some Disney clips with my daughters the other night, and this one from Pocahontas came up:
Pretty schlocky, huh? The moment when she stops him from shooting the bear puts me in mind of a chapter in Alan Weisman's The World Without Us, which cites the work of zoologist Paul Martin, who argues that the first arrival of human beings in North America led to the hunting to extinction of North America's terrestrial megafauna (woolly mammoths, giant sloths, etc.). Weisman also points out that "the existence of much of the Great Plains themselves is due to fires set by their descendants, the American Indians, both to concentrate game that browse, such as deer, in forest patches, and to create grassland for grazers like buffalo."
And it's a little creepy how Pocahontas's anti-colonial eco-topian anthem becomes a seduction dance, isn't it? By the end of it, she and her European conquistador are about to make out, and in the final moments it appears he's reaching up to grab her breasts.
I much prefer this "Pocahontas," a Neil Young cover by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings:
The other day, I watched Sam Jones's documentary about Wilco, I Am Trying to Break Your Heart. It was really well done—a great piece of cinema verite, as one of my friends noted, a window into how music is created, how band members relate to one another, how the business works, and even some peeks into a rock star's personal life. Jeff Tweedy comes across as a pretty genuine human being; Jay Bennett as something of an ass. Watching the credits, though, I did note that many of the best songs featured in the film were co-written by Bennett. I think the band probably has lost something since his departure, though who knows how long they could have continued to work together without his leaving.
The movie has sent me back to my Wilco discs. These days I find that I tend to listen only to the cream I have skimmed off the albums and put on to my iPod, so I've enjoyed going back to the full collections. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot never gets old, but it's interesting to listen to after having heard the proto-versions of the songs in the film. Being There has seemed spotty to me in the past, but now I'm reminded of its bounty, all the treats squirreled away in its corners. I had never liked Sky Blue Sky much—the prettiness of its guitar solos turned me off, and the lyrics seemed too goofy and earnest—but it's growing on me, especially the first five songs.
A few Wilco-related links: Jay Bennett speaks at length, somewhat self-servingly, about his time with the band. And, as a way of contrasting the fortunes of Tweedy and former Uncle Tupelo comrade Jay Farrar, the Wikipedia entries on Wilco and Son Volt. Finally, two well-written reviews of Sky Blue Sky, one negative, one positive.
In a previous post, I suggested pairing the films Wall-E and Koyaanisqatsi. I just finished watching another film that I think might be even more interesting to hold up against Koyaanisqatsi: Man on Wire. It's a documentary about Philippe Petit, who in August of 1974 performed for 45 minutes on a tightrope between the World Trade Center towers.
My wife and I wanted to watch it because we had read Mordicai Gerstein's great children's book about the incident, The Man Who Walked Between the Towers, to our daughters many times. The film obviously adds much more detail and background, but it also offers a powerful refutation of the message that I took from Koyaanisqatsi. That film presents humans as destructive insects whose intelligence serves only to despoil the beauty of nature. In contrast, Man on Wire looks at an individual (and his friends and collaborators), vividly dramatizing their ingenuity, originality, courage, and visionary sense of beauty. By the end, it had me (and at least one of the people interviewed in the film) in tears—of joy, recognition, appreciation.
These two movies would be interesting to discuss together. The first is an apocalyptic vision, with a score by Philip Glass, of life out of balance, a planet despoiled by a destructive, ant-like humanity. The second, a piece of computer animation marketed as a family film, begins with essentially the same premise. Humanity has ruined the planet, leaving only robots behind to compact the trash. There may be some small glimmer of hope, if only from the eponymous robot who yearns for connection with others and (maybe) teaches humanity to rediscover the joys of human contact.
I say maybe because I don't know how it ends. We turned it off with about half an hour to go because our middle daughter kept saying, "Is it almost over?"
This [blog] is my Savings Bank. I grow richer because I have somewhere to deposit my earnings; and fractions are worth more to me because corresponding fractions are waiting here that shall be made integers by their addition. —Emerson, Journal (1834)
You must collect things for reasons you don't yet understand.
