tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31944338726772774272024-03-08T02:23:32.511-08:00Politics and FilmsAn occasional blog on Films, Politics and BooksKelly Candaelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05906285455810166893noreply@blogger.comBlogger21125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3194433872677277427.post-30214965998314147702013-04-21T10:22:00.004-07:002013-04-21T10:22:52.637-07:00The Foam On a Sea of Rage - The Weather Underground and The Company You Keep<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a></div>
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Guilt — in the psychoanalytic tradition — is both a form of
self-punishment and a key obstacle to therapeutic improvement. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Ego and the Id</i>, Freud wrote that the
patient finds “satisfaction in the illness and refuses to give up the
punishment of suffering.” In a paradoxical way, obsessive guilt becomes a
masochistic attempt at an unreliable cure. </div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Company You Keep, </i>starring
and directed by Robert Redford, is a film awash in guilt. Redford’s character,
Jim Grant, an ex radical still “hiding” in plain sight, feels guilt about his
past and about the secrets he has to withhold from his daughter. A reporter,
played by Shia Labeouf, eventually feels guilty about the impact his bulldog
reporting might have on the people he’s writing about. A tenured radical
professor feels guilty about not keeping up “the struggle,” unable to inspire
his students beyond a round of applause at the end of his stories. Another ex-member
of the movement (played by Susan Sarandon) tells a reporter that it’s the “kids
that change you,” the guilt of abandoning her family audible in her voice.<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>Then there is Mimi, the hard-core hold
out, who wants her former revolutionary comrades to feel guilty for easing into
adulthood while U.S. Imperialism still runs rampant.</div>
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In recent years there has been a kind of nostalgia for the
supposedly tough, adventurous, radical critique the Weather Underground
supplied a wishy-washy “white left” during the crucible of the struggle.
Memoirs have been written, documentaries have been made, and a presidential
candidate attended a fund-raiser at the home of ex-Weathermen. Redford insists,
of course, that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Company You Keep</i>
is not about the Weathermen, but simply about people who are trapped by their
past, by small offenses they committed that they have to pay for — for the rest
of their lives. The director made this assertion (twice) in an on-line
discussion with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New York Times</i>
reporter David Carr, during which the director was joined by Labeouf, who
pointed out that Redford had given him some books to read in preparation for
the role. Labeouf also said that he had talked to his parents who were familiar
with the Weathermen, concluding, “These were the Billy the Kids of the time and
my dad was rooting for them.” (Proof that you can be a successful actor while
still thinking from hand to mouth about politics and history.) </div>
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To read the full article go to The <b>Los Angeles Review of Books</b> at the link below: </div>
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<b>http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=1599</b></div>
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<b>Book References for the article include:</b>
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Todd Gitlin - <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Sixties – Years of Hope, Days of Rage</i> </div>
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Sigmund Freud – <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Ego and the Id</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New Lectures In
Psychoanalysis</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Peter Gay – <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Freud, A
Life In Our Times</i> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Irving Howe – <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Leon
Trotsky</i> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>- <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">America
Divided – The Civil War of the 1960s </i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-outline-level: 1;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-font-kerning: 18.0pt;">Baruch
Knei-Paz - <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Social and Political
Thought of Leon Trotsky</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
James Miller - <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Democracy
Is In The Streets – From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Adam Phillips – <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">On
Flirtation – Psychoanalytic Essays on the Un-Committed Life</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Leon Trotsky – <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Their
Morals and Ours</i> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Robert B. Westbrook – <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">John
Dewey and American Democracy</i></div>
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<br /></div>
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Kelly Candaelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05906285455810166893noreply@blogger.com36tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3194433872677277427.post-91312063078247932232012-12-14T11:51:00.000-08:002012-12-14T18:12:36.057-08:00Lincoln, Slavery and the Historians<style>
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<b>This was initially published by the Los Angeles Review of books </b><br />
<br />
One of the most gratifying aspects of Steven Spielberg’s movie<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Lincoln</i> has been the debate that its
release has generated historians, a debate that is
more important than the movie itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>What were the complex<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>dilemmas that Lincoln faced as President?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What were the political realities and conduct at the time? How should we interpret the decisions that Lincoln and others made?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What role did slaves and free blacks play
in their own “liberation?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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<br />
So despite the fact that the film focuses on a short period
of time in Lincoln’s presidency and deals primarily with the political cut and
thrust associated with the passage of the 13th Amendment, there is a real sense
in which the film can be described as deeply “philosophical.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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<br />
Lincoln is portrayed as a man of discipline, concentration
and energy, all characteristics that sociologist Max Weber defined as part of
the serious politician’s “vocation.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By
forging an effective and realized political character - one aspect of Weber's definition of Charismatic authority - an
astute politician can change the nature of power in society.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By controlling his all too human vanity, he can avoid the two
deadly political sins of lack of objectivity and irresponsibility. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For Weber, a certain “distance
to things and men” was required to abide by an “ethic of responsibility” for
the weighty decisions that leaders are often required to make.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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<br />
Lincoln has always been a man for all political seasons; There
is Lincoln the principled politician who believed that war was a necessary and
legitimate means to sustain the Union; Lincoln the timid compromiser who as
late as sixteen months into the war declared that if he “…could save the Union
without freeing any slave I would do it”; and Lincoln the reconciling healer
of “With malice toward none, with charity for all…” of the Second Inaugural. </div>
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<br />
Conservative New York Times writer David Brooks argued in a November
22<sup>nd</sup> column that it was Lincoln’s internal strength and ability to
compromise that allowed for the possibility of public good. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For Brooks,<span style="font-family: Times; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"> the temptations of fame and ideological rigidity are
what undermine the average politician’s ability to compromise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Weber
called the losers in that wrestling match with fame, political “windbags.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">But for liberal Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, it was Lincoln’s
principled stand </span><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">on
the 13th Amendment and the need to ban slavery that accounts for his iconic
status as one of our greatest Presidents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In an October 19<sup>th</sup> piece, Dionne encouraged Obama to “follow
Lincoln’s example” by refusing to compromise with current economic and
financial injustice. </span></div>
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<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">While most political journalists
have viewed the film with an eye towards the current <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>political stalemate, our most prominent
historians have looked for accuracy and context in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lincoln.</i></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><b>To finish reading this essay go to: </b></i></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><b>http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=1251</b> </i></span></div>
Kelly Candaelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05906285455810166893noreply@blogger.com474tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3194433872677277427.post-44413197450978311122012-08-09T15:47:00.002-07:002012-08-09T16:07:41.883-07:00The Curious Politics of Beasts of the Southern WildThe newly released movie <i>Beasts of the Southern Wild</i>, by first-time Director Benh Zeitlin, has received critical praise and garnered prestigious awards on the film festival circuit, winning prizes at the Sundance and Cannes film festivals. The attention is understandable; the film is beautifully shot - the characters and story are compelling. Zeitlin has charmed film fans with his do-it-yourself ethos and his warm embrace of the Louisiana Bayou community where the film was shot.
It might seem churlish to critique this engaging film on political grounds. But since it takes place within a poor and isolated community called the <i>Bathtub</i> on the eve of a Katrina-like storm, it is impossible not to read it politically.<br />
<br />
The central character in the movie is a young girl called Hushpuppy. Hushpuppy is a survivor in the Bathtub's squalid world of alcoholism, filth, and outright child abuse. The adult residents of the Bathtub, including her father, engage in spontaneous celebrations, drink incessantly and grab fish with their bare hands from the Bayou waters. They are, according to a number of prominent film critics, "free."
Writing in the New Yorker, David Denby concluded that the residents of the Bathtub "just want to enjoy, in liberty, their own special existence, which for them provides satisfactions as complete as any they know of." The reviewer from the New Orleans based <i>Times-Picayune</i> newspaper (the film was shot just outside of New Orleans) asserts that the film portrays a band of "survivors who are willing to fight all day for their right to eat and drink, sing and stumble all night."<br />
<br />
While the film centers on Hushpuppy's struggle to survive the degradation that surrounds her - primarily through imagination and her incipient art - this "You've got to fight for your right to party" ethos is also a central theme. Viewers are asked to interpret a lack of work discipline, schooling, or steady institution building of any kind - the primary building blocks of civilization - as the height of liberation. "Choice," even the choice to live in squalor, is raised to the level of a categorical imperative. There is no inkling of the economic and social history of the region that had limited these "choices." We are left with a libertarian sandbox, with a rights-based philosophy gone rancid.<br />
<br />
The images in the film conjure up a debate about the political potential of the disenfranchised that took place in mid-nineteenth century Europe between Communist Karl Marx and Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. Marx was skeptical of the political and social potential of what he termed the "lumpen-proletariat," those on the margins of society who lived not unlike the residents of the Bathtub. They were difficult to organize and incapable of adopting a coherent political ideology. They could, Marx believed, raise a lot of hell through spontaneous outbursts of hopeless insurrection, but they could not build a new society to challenge the dominant capitalist one. Bakunin, on the other hand, championed the revolutionary potential of the "uncivilized, the disinherited, the miserable, the illiterate" who would eventually throw off their oppressive chains through violent revolt.
In more recent times, Bakunin's beliefs were embraced by both Franz Fanon, the widely read French/Algerian psychiatrist and author of <i>The Wretched of the Earth</i>, and New Left philosopher Herbert Marcuse who, in the 1960s, extolled the "outcasts and outsiders," the "unemployed and unemployable" as a potential source of redemption from a "one dimensional" exploitative society. This disenfranchised stratum, according to Bakunin, had not become "bourgeoisified" like organized workers who were beginning to extract concessions from their economic and political rulers.<br />
<br />
In an attempt to save the Bathtub from flooding, a small band of residents, seemingly on an anarchistic whim, dynamite a levee. Hushpuppy, at the urging of the adults, initiates the blast. We are not shown the impact this has on people living on the levee's other side. In another 1960s-era motif, a hospital in the "city" is pictured as a place where you are ignored, "plugged into a wall" to rot. In actual developing countries, one of the first things that rural citizens demand from their "leaders" is adequate health care and hospitals. But in Zeitlin's film world these basic features of modern life - places where millions of people are actually cared for and healed - are represented as oppressive institutions, places we need to escape.<br />
<br />
These images reprise some of the ideas familiar not just to Marcuse, but to writers as diverse as Ken Kesey, Michel Foucault and Christopher Lasch. Lasch railed against agencies of the state, "professional caretakers," and centralizing bureaucracies that threatened to undermine familial and local commitments and obligations that were essential to a healthy civil society.
The feeling of being disciplined and punished by cold and bureaucratic agents of social control seems to resonate with a good portion of moviegoers, not to mention voters. What social and psychological storms threaten us so much that even the technology of flood control can seem a "restrictive" interference with our freedom? Has the "State" truly become a self-perpetuating machine of repression, or are the burdens of modernity so inherently alienating that juvenile rebellion feels like liberty?<br />
<br />
In his new book <i>The Age of Fracture</i>, Princeton historian Daniel Rogers suggests that post-World War II American history has seen a "disaggregation of the social" where the broad social contract that had brought more and more Americans into the domain of full economic and political citizenship has dramatically shrunk. We are left with smaller and smaller visions of "community," often being reduced to the level of a single "rights-holding self." In a sad way, the characters in the characters in <i>Beasts of the Southern Wild </i> are an artistic reflection of this fragmented world.<br />
<br />
One of the great psychological insights in <i>Beasts of the Southern Wild</i> is that there is more to us than the environment that supposedly "shapes" us. The creative force is always potentially available, struggling to emerge. At the end of the movie the small band of brothers and sisters who remain in the Bathtub march together along what looks like a cement retaining wall as water laps over their feet. There is calm before the next storm. One of the marchers carries a black flag (a pirate flag? the black flag of anarchy?) Are they marching to petition the county government? To blow up another levee? To link in solidarity with fellow survivors nearby? It may be that they are merely marching home to have another drink.<br />
<br />
For all the creativity and discipline invested in the making of this film, its political message seems dangerously hedonist - an apolitical, individualist hedonism with a tacked-on ending suggesting an incipient social movement.
<i>
Beasts of the Southern Wild</i> will undoubtedly and deservedly win a number of Oscars next year. I'm hoping that its troubling social message won't win adherents as well.<br />
<br />
Find links to this article at the Los Angeles Book Review www.lareviewofbooks.org
And at Salon - www.salon.com/2012/08/09/the_problematic_beasts_salpart/
<b> </b><br />
<br />
<b>Further reading:
</b><br />
<br />
Michael Harrington - <i>Socialism</i> - for an outline of the Marx/Bakunin debate within the First International.<br />
<br />
Herbert Marcuse - <i>One-Dimensional Man</i> - in the last chapter he makes the argument of how the "elementary force" of the outsiders and outcasts might mark the end of a political period.<br />
<br />
Daniel T. Rodgers - <i>The Age of Fracture</i>Kelly Candaelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05906285455810166893noreply@blogger.com143tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3194433872677277427.post-84995467625046539652012-04-23T19:12:00.016-07:002012-04-26T09:58:28.988-07:00Hunger Games - Fascism Playing on all StringsWinston Smith, the protagonist and dissident in George Orwell's dystopian novel <i>1984,</i> reflects upon the nature of the totalitarian regime of Oceania. "I understand HOW," Smith observes. "I do not understand WHY." Smith saw clearly the mechanisms of authoritarian rule, the brutal means of obtaining and keeping power, but he was mystified by the deeper meaning of the ongoing sadism of the Inner Party elite. He was searching for the purpose, the rationale for power that we call ideology. Ruling groups need to to explain themselves to the people they rule and to bolster potentially lagging psychological and political morale. Winston Smith's question could as easily be asked of the cynical leaders in <i>The Hunger Games</i>. <br />
<br />
<i>The Hunger Games</i>, as even most adults now know, is a movie about kids slaughtering other kids. The ruling regime is made up of what look like fashionista Fascists, lording it over the masses who seem trapped in Appalachian poverty circa 1930, still dredging up coal to service the decadent city folk. There is no John L. Lewis to help organize them in their own defense. There are however, two young kids who are dispatched to a yearly bloodlust Olympics designed to propitiate the obscure gods of nationalism. <br />
<br />
This all takes place in the future of course. But movies and novels that outline a deeply malevolent social future - including <i>1984</i> - compel us to question whether a society structured in such a way could ultimately become real. For many viewers, given the intense political debate surrounding the release of the film, some of the more insidious elements portrayed in the film are already with us. Is the ruling group the logical extension of the authoritarian "socialist" schemes of Barack Obama, or are they the one percent gone to seed but with a firm grip on the police and military apparatus? <br />
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The themes of youthful violence, ritual sacrifice, manipulation of history and the use of sophisticated media techniques for authoritarian control are not new. In fact, these "themes" are a central part of the lived history of what historian Eric Hobsbawm calls the <i>Age of Extremes</i> - our carnage filled 20th Century. <br />
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The heroes of <i>The Hunger Games</i> are sensitive and reluctant killers, thrown into violence through state force and lottery happenstance. The villains (in addition to the obvious adults who pull the strings) are also kids, but ones who relish the mayhem and thrill to the site of blood. <br />
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New Yorker reviewer Anthony Lane suggests that the popularity of the movie derives from the fact that teenagers relate to characters that are both important and victims, zeroing in on teenagers psychic wheelhouse. But recent observations by historian Tony Judt add another dimension. In his posthumously released book of conversations, <i>Thinking the Twentieth Century</i>, he reminds us that it was young people who made up a good part of the right-wing and fascist movements that flourished in Europe after World War I. What young people had in common was the belief that they were the ones who would release the "deeper energies" of their respective nations. And for many of them, it was precisely the bloody and deadly aspect of World War I which defined their youth. "Togetherness in conflict," Judt says, "gave the war a very special glow." Similar sentiments about the decisive power of violence were common among left-wing youth as well. <br />
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But in <i>The Hunger Games</i>, the dominant power, the real engine of social control is the omnipresent "media." Cameras see everything and television broadcasts everything. These incessant images provide the symbolic framework for interpreting everyday life. In Orwell's masterpiece, as literary critic Irving Howe pointed out, the world is a place where individuality has become obsolete and personality a crime. In<i> The Hunger Games</i>, "personality" is not only manipulated and shaped by the media overlords, but a "winning" personality and a romantic backstory are commodities that provide the potential means of survival for the contestants. <br />
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In the classic Fascist mode, both fashion and the state have become fetishes. <br />
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Here is Mussolini writing after taking power in Italy:<br />
<br />
"Democracy has deprived the life of the people of "style:" that is, <br />
a line of conduct, the color, the strength, the picturesque, the <br />
unexpected, the mystical: in sum, all that counts in the life of the<br />
masses. We play the lyre on all of its strings: from violence to <br />
religion, from art to politics." <br />
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It was the typical Fascist strategy, sociologist Michael Mann points out, to merge politics, art and style. In contrast to what we now know about the social and economic interests that backed Mussolini, Hitler and Franco, <i>The Hunger Games</i> remains historically and analytically agnostic. What are the class and social interests of the party oligarchy, or do they even constitute a "party" in the traditional understanding of the word? We don't know because it is not shown. That is why Tea Partiers and Occupiers have both projected their political values onto the movie. <br />
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In the beginning there is sacrifice. In the end there is salvation. In <i>The Hunger Games</i>, the state has turned sacrifice into system and routine in an apparent attempt to solidify the nation. In one of the more provocative scholarly treatments of ritual and sacrifice, Rene Girard points out that in the traditional sacrificial ritual, the victim's function is to unite the group against the source of communal strife thereby mitigating the internal crisis that otherwise threatens to tear the community apart. Sacrifice is the source of religion and therefore also of civilization. The "victim" is devoured and then made sacred. New gods are available to worship. <br />
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But in <i>The Hunger Games</i>, the sacrificial ritual has become bureaucratized, repeated in the same way year after year. And the regime makes a political or category error. Victims abound but heroes are created too, and sent home to eventually organize a vengeful response. The internal tension - the contradictions of the society - cannot be resolved through ritual sacrifice alone. <br />
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It took World War II to destroy Fascism in Germany and Italy. In Spain, it took the death of Franco to precipitate the eventual emergence of democracy. Whatever political tendency the regime in <i>The Hunger Games</i> represents - and the filmmakers undoubtedly know that the more vague the answer the better the box office - it is pretty clear that it too will be destroyed by war. It will be interesting to see what kind of political system inherits the apparatus of what looks like a highly modern but economically distorted state. <br />
<br />
<b>Further Reading:</b> <br />
<br />
Rene Girard - Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World<br />
<br />
Irving Howe - 1984: History as Nightmare - In Twentieth Century Interpretations of 1984 (Edited by Samuel Hynes) <br />
<br />
Constantin Iordachi - Comparative Fascist Studies - New Perspectives<br />
<br />
Tony Judt - Thinking the Twentieth Century (with Timothy Snyder)<br />
<br />
Michael Mann - FascistsKelly Candaelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05906285455810166893noreply@blogger.com60tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3194433872677277427.post-244989002015229342012-03-14T23:46:00.004-07:002012-03-16T08:22:51.337-07:00The Irish BeckettIn the play <i>Waiting for Godot</i> (now running at the Mark Taper Forum), Samuel Beckett's best known work, the main characters Vladimir and Estragon are stuck in a ruined landscape where they bicker, contemplate suicide and observe a ritual of degradation performed by two visitors, Pozzo and his underling Lucky. They wait for the mysterious Godot who just might deliver them from their tedious repetitions. The literary critic Vivian Mercier famously quipped that <i>Waiting for Godot</i> is a play in which "Nothing happens twice." <br />
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Godot was written during the winter of 1948-49 in French and in France - Beckett was born in Ireland but lived in France from 1937 until his death in 1989 - but was not performed on stage until 1953 at a tiny Paris theater. During intermission at one performance, well-heeled but irate attendees got into a fight with the play's supporters. <br />
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With its themes of futility, master-slave domination and unfulfilled hope, none of the early theater journalists suggested that audiences would be in for "A great night out." But a number of them did observe that in a counter-intuitive way, the humor of the play defeated its grief. Godot is a much a Laurel and Hardy knockabout - complete with the comic use of bowler hats - as it is a play set on the edge of an existential abyss. It's possible that Beckett actually believed that there was nothing funnier than unhappiness. <br />
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Godot eventually made Beckett famous worldwide and the play itself became a secure part of western literary culture. Academics have scoured the play for symbolic references, obscure philosophical sign-posts and clues to its geographical setting. Literary critic Hugh Kenner suggests that the burned-over landscape, the anxious waiting for people who never show and the "Gestapo" tactics that Pozzo visits upon Lucky are all a somewhat abstract version of Nazi occupied France. Beckett worked with the French resistance, humbly referring to the labors that could have got him executed as "boy scout stuff." Other scholars insist that the play's setting is "nowhere," emphasizing the universal themes that transcend any particular time or place. <br />
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James Knowlson, Beckett's authorized biographer, aruges that whatever academic strip-mining that is applied to the play, the world and feel of the characters is "unmistakably Irish." Vladimir and Estragon remind Knowlson of the Irish tinkers and beggars of John Millington Synge's plays that influenced Beckett. The Irish writer and scholar Declan Kiberd places Beckett's tramps within the tradition of the 17th century Irish wandering poets, victims of the collapse of the old Gaelic order. In this analysis, Godot represents the historical and political amnesia that afflicts an uprooted people.<br />
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Just this week in an Irish Times on-line discussion, the question was put to readers if they would move again to another country given the economic circumstances. The so-called Celtic Tiger collapsed, the result of a massive banking failure and obscene real estate speculation. Judging from the posted responses, this St. Patrick's Day the Irish are ready to move again in search of opportunity. <br />
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A dominant preoccupation in Irish literature involves leaving from and returning home. In the 19th century, of all the ethnic groups that arrived in America, it was the Irish who were least likely to return to their homeland. This sense of exile and alienation, the struggle for recognition and a sense of self and the acknowledgement that "home" is a place that can sustain as well as restrict, are central themes of the Irish literary diaspora. "If it is suicide to be abroad, then what is it to be at home. A lingering dissolution," says a character in Beckett's 1957 radio play, <i>All That Fall. </i><br />
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Beckett left home following his mentor James Joyce. Like his characters Vladimer and Estragon, he determined that there was no home to return to. The two tramps are prisoners in a world they did not create, and perhaps prisoners of the theater itself. "All theater is waiting," Beckett told his biographer, a key element in creating dramatic tension. In this sense the audience is in prison too, waiting for "something" to happen and questioning, as early attendees apparently did, whether they should get up and leave. We stay, as Irish theater critic Fintan O'Toole has pointed out, because hope triumphs over experience. <br />
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St. Patrick's Day in the United States is known as a day of drinking and revelry. There is no point in being too sanctimonious about this for despite Beckett's reputation as a recluse, he was notorious for drinking binges with friends and his appreciation of Irish whiskey. So this Saturday I'll be at the Mark Taper Forum - waiting. <br />
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Here is a link to the Los Angeles Review of Books where the article first appeared. Please check out the site. <br />
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http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/2012/03/unmistakably-irish-recalling-becketts.html<br />
<b><br />
Further Reading:</b><br />
<br />
John Harrington - The Irish Beckett<br />
<br />
Hugh Kenner - A Reader's Guide to Samuel Beckett<br />
<br />
Declan Kiberd - Inventing Ireland - The Literature of the Modern Nation<br />
<br />
James Knowlson - Damned to Fame - The Life of Samuel Beckett <br />
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Vivian Mercier - Beckett/Beckett - The classic study of a modern genius <br />
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Fintan O'Toole - Critical MomentsKelly Candaelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05906285455810166893noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3194433872677277427.post-64539804924178420972011-12-19T22:23:00.000-08:002011-12-19T23:54:15.725-08:00Wiggle Your Fingers and Repeat After Me: Dreams of an Un-brokered WorldWhen I first heard of the Occupy movement's ritual of repeating a speaker's remarks as a way of orally transmitting the words towards the back of the crowd, I thought of a scene from the Monty Python Movie <i>The Life of Brian.</i> In the movie's comic version of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, by the time the words "Blessed are the peace-makers" reaches the back of the crowd the assertion is transformed into "Blessed are the cheese-makers." "What makes them so special?" asks one incredulous listener. <br />
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There are many scholarly ways - as opposed to cinematic ones - to interpret the life of Jesus, but one of the most thought provoking and plausible comes from John Dominic Crossan's book <i>Jesus - A Revolutionary Biography</i>. Crossan, a New Testament scholar, reconstructs the life of Jesus within the context of the social turmoil, shifting politics and agrarian culture of the early first century after his birth.<br />
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Crossan examines how Jesus challenged entrenched authority, transgressed the social and moral boundaries of his time by mixing and eating with sinners and outcasts, and why his itinerant preaching was an explicit challenge to the Greco-Roman social system of patronage and clientage. In this pyramid structure of power, those who had no power were clients to the patrons above them. Brokers, not unlike so much of our current political life, operated between the two, ingratiating themselves to those above them and offering their "services" to those below. These highly structured relationships kept society from unraveling, but at the expense of reinforcing attitudes of dependency and domination. <br />
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Rather than creating a "healing cult" in his family home and having those ill of body and mind come to him - a common practice at the time for village "healers," Jesus went on the road and to the people. By doing so, he undermined the hierarchy of place by symbolically and programmatically confronting the system of client, patron and broker. Without a fixed location, the sick and ill were not turned into "clients" who were tended to for a price, but brothers and sisters to whom he offered his spiritual and material gifts. This "un-brokered equality" constitutes for Crossan, the Kingdom of Heaven. <br />
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Stripped of the explicit religious content and transferred to the United States, these themes have a unique secular resonance. Thomas Jefferson admired the parables of Jesus if not the miracles: He famously constructed his "Jefferson Bible" by extracting the miraculous and keeping the wisdom. His emphasis on individual sovereignty in the radiant opening lines of the Declaration of Independence and his battles with Alexander Hamilton over economic policy owe no small amount to a desire for an un-brokered political and economic life. <br />
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In Jefferson's bucolic world, economically independent citizens - prosperous self-reliant planters and yeomen - would be protected from an oppressive and servile wage-labor relationship with urban bosses and remain politically independent. Writing in <i>Notes On The State of Virginia</i>, Jefferson argued that "Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God," and that "Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition." In the last letter that he wrote ten days before he died, Jefferson re-stated the principles that he thought animated the revolution. "The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God." <br />
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Historians have poured over Jefferson's personal life and fixated appropriately on his ownership of slaves and his attitudes towards African-Americans. But as Princeton historian Sean Wilentz points out, as illusory as the assumption of individual sovereignty may be in a world of enormous corporate power and government reach, this idea has endured as a key legitimizing principle and core conviction within both liberal and conservative American political traditions. <br />
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Debates over group entitlements or government "intervention" into the economy or our personal lives, are invariably bathed in the pervasive light of Jefferson's luminous ideas. In the ongoing Republican primary contests, outside of the specific issues of taxes, job creation or health care, the central philosophical attack on Obama's leadership goes straight to the themes of individual choice and state "coercion." <br />
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To the extent that conservatives have an aesthetic and moral critique of modern life, much of it is centered here. Through the inexorable rise of "big government," they argue, we are being turned into a nation of dependent clients. The big patron in this worldview is government itself. <br />
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So just as there is a left wing and right wing Jesus, there is a "radical" and "reactionary" Jefferson. <br />
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Since their expulsion from the grounds of Los Angeles City Hall, the Occupy movement has also hit the road, moving from support of distressed homeowners, to our major ports and to the U.S. Immigration and Customs and Enforcement offices. Like Jesus' missionaries (Although I'm sure many of them would reject this analogy) they take their face-to-face engagement, elaborate group rituals and grass-roots organizing to the places where suffering exists. They move, heal, and move on. <br />
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I'm not sure how to evaluate their ultimate impact or the exact nature of the political message they carry. Defining it in standard political terms might be beside the point. But you have to admire the spirit and tenacity, even if people like me at the back of the crowd may occasionally mistranslate what the speakers at the front are saying. I suspect that they too, dream of an un-brokered world. <br />
<b><br />
Suggested Readings:</b><br />
<br />
John Dominic Crossan - Jesus, A Revolutionary Life<br />
Richard Matthews - The Radical Politics of Thomas Jefferson<br />
Sean Wilentz - The Rise of American DemocracyKelly Candaelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05906285455810166893noreply@blogger.com44tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3194433872677277427.post-25278217562580460322011-10-20T12:51:00.000-07:002011-10-20T15:49:57.702-07:00Occupy George ClooneyGeorge Clooney has a terrible sense of timing. The <i>Ides of March</i> is a cynical movie for what I'm sure Clooney regards as a cynical time. His stance is understandable. The movie's corrosive pessimism - is there one person in the movie who retains an ounce of idealism by the end of it? - and bleak view of the internal workings of a Presidential primary campaign, reinforces the commonly held view that no one can be trusted, all politicians are corrupt and that the "mainstream media" is merely the opposite side of the same tarnished coin. It's a movie that the Tea Party should love. <br />
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The movie appears - here is the bad timing part - at the height of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Occupy Wall Street is a romantic, inchoate and multi-faceted but spirited attempt to focus our attention on the deep problems of what political liberals used to write and talk about with frequency - the dirty little secret of economic class in America. <br />
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For a good discussion on the "essence" of Occupy Wall Street go to the Symposium in The New Republic at: http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/96296/liberalism-and-occupy-wall-street<br />
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While tens of thousands of people are actively trying to sort their way towards an alternative economic program - hopefully one that is eventually coherently articulated and implemented - Clooney has thrown a dark, wet, suffocating blanket over any idea of creative political aspirations. <br />
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One of the central problems is that the movie is not really about politics at all. The <i>Ides of March</i> is really about the media. Or more precisely, about what an intelligent Hollywood liberal who comes from a media family (his father was a journalist) thinks his audience would embrace with respect to what politics and the media are "really about." <br />
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The film is bookended by the preparation for media events - a televised debate at the beginning of the film and a one-on-one interview at its end. Most of the internal machinations of the campaign directors are determined by what the evening news will say about their respective campaigns. You might be saying to yourself that "This sounds about right to me." If you are saying this, I suggest you volunteer for a political campaign. The candidates you meet will not be saints and they will tend to to bend towards the demands of the media juggernaut. But my sense is that their motivations are not far from those of non-candidates but with slightly and often more than slightly exaggerated egos. <br />
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You will also find people who actually believe in things - who fight to implement policy - who devote tremendous amounts of time and energy to getting things done - and who generally are subject to mostly unflattering portraits in the press - which is part of the job of the press in any democratic society I have to add. We all hope for a little "balance," but nobody makes anyone run for office. You basically put up your hand and say, "Ill give it a try." <br />
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The candidate that George Clooney plays in the <i>Ides of March</i> has few redemptive characteristics. He offers a good speech - if you think that giving platitudes a bad name is fine rhetoric. I found the character mostly smug and self-satisfied. <br />
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This raises the interesting sociological question of whether our society can actually "produce" candidates who go beyond the limits imposed by the structure (communications, financing, ideological constraints, class transformation and psychological conditioning) of society itself. <br />
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Why, for instance, can there never be another Eugene Debs that captures the genuine insurgent spirit of a particular kind of American radicalism? Debs only received six percent of the vote for his best Presidential campaign - the vast majority of Americans preferring to give their votes to candidates like William McKinley, William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson - but his influence went far beyond his vote totals. (For a sympathetic portrait of Debs and overall balanced view of the history of the American Left see Michael Kazin's new book, <i>American Dreamers</i>)<br />
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As Kazin points out - as does the book <i>The Liberal Hour</i> (about politics and legislative change in the 1960s), you need both dedicated political leaders and movements from below to generate significant political and economic progress. <br />
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Clooney doesn't examine these questions and it is perhaps unfair to expect him to. While apparently the play that the movie was based upon was written by a political operative of some kind, the <i>Ides of March</i> strikes me as an "inside look" at a high level campaign produced by someone who has never really been "inside." Imagine being used and trotted around by political campaigns, given "access" to candidates and asked to raise money but never being allowed into the meetings where the crucial decisions are being made. I'm not asking you to shed any tears for George, but this movie might be his poisoned love letter in return for all the favors. <br />
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Clooney has done a disservice to the idea that politics can make a difference for anyone other than the political candidates and consultants who make their careers and living through politics. His last "political" movie <i>The American</i> (see my blog below), was also without context - violence without purpose, love without connection. I hope his next movie is not an apocalyptic end-of-the-world drama. <br />
<b><br />
Further Reading:</b><br />
<br />
Michael Kazin - <i>American Dreamers - How the Left Changed a Nation</i> <br />
<br />
G. Calvin MacKenzie & Robert Weisbrot - <i>The Liberal Hour - Washington and the Politics of Change in the 1960s </i>Kelly Candaelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05906285455810166893noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3194433872677277427.post-53177607914974350962011-10-02T13:24:00.000-07:002011-10-04T08:48:06.633-07:00Casey Candaele talks about Moneyball, Naked Batting Practice and the Spirit of BaseballMy brother Casey played in the major leagues for 9 years - a strong career by any standard. One of my favorite journalism assignments was for the New York Times when they asked me to travel with my brother's team, the Houston Astros, on one of the longest road trips in the history of professional baseball. <i>Available here:</i> <br />
<br />
http://www.nytimes.com/1992/08/16/sports/baseball-postcards-from-the-edge-the-houston-nomads.html<br />
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The Republican Party had taken over the Astrodome - the teams home field - for their national convention that year so the team was kicked out. The trip allowed me to view the game from behind the scenes so to speak, with access to the locker room, the opposing teams, the umpires and the coaching staff. I also experienced the tedium of down-time between games with some of baseball's great players; Craig Biggio, Jeff Bagwell and the late Ken Caminiti. <br />
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Casey is now a roving coach in the minor leagues with the Texas Rangers. I had a chance to interview Casey just after he had taken some of his young players from the instructional league in Arizona to see the movie <i>Moneyball</i>, staring Brad Pitt as the General Manager of the Oakland Athletics baseball team. <br />
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<b>Question: Let's get right to the crucial issues that my readers are most interested in Casey. Did you really take batting practice naked when you were with the Astros? </b><br />
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CC: Well, let me explain. We had a very late night game on a Saturday that went 15 innings followed by an early game Sunday the next day. I was sitting at my locker naked before the game on Sunday - kind of tired. The hitting coach came by and asked if anyone wanted to take batting practice in the batting cage in the clubhouse. I was struggling at the plate at the time and I was just sitting at my locker with nothing to do, so I put on my socks and cleats and got my bat, walked to the batting cage and stood in the batters box. The pitcher who was throwing at the time at first refused to pitch to me. He said "I'm not doing this." So I explained to him that I would have better concentration in this state and everything would be fine. While I was hitting, one of the umpires for that day's game came by and he almost fell on the ground. During the game he asked me how batting practice was. I told him it was a freeing experience - very liberating. At any rate, I got a couple of hits that day so I started taking batting practice naked every Sunday. You know how superstitious ballplayers are. One of my teammates Pete Incaviglia filmed it once but I don't know where the tape is, thank goodness. A couple of other guys did it a few times because they saw I was getting some hits, but they didn't believe like I did, so it didn't work for them. <br />
<br />
<b>Question: You just went to see <i>Moneyball</i> with some young minor league ballplayer where you are coaching. What was their overall response to the movie? <br />
</b><br />
<br />
CC: I think it was good for them because they got to see the inner workings of baseball operations and to see what goes into it. Young players don't usually see that. Some of the players wondered why Billy Beane turned down the $12 million from the Boston Red Sox. But most of their questions were about how involved the team's General Managers get with the process on the field - are they that hands on like Beane was portrayed. <br />
<br />
<b>Question: Billy Beane and the people who agreed with his philosophy operated under the assumption that the old way of analyzing ball-players was mostly about a lot of talking and guessing and that they had a more scientific way of going about this. What was your sense of this? </b><br />
<br />
CC: I retired in 2000 so the <i>Moneyball</i> approach started a bit later. The thing that struck me about the movie is that the As were actually pretty good. They had Eric Chavez, a young third baseman who had been playing for a number of years. Miguel Tejada had over 30 home runs and over 100 RBIs that year I think. Jermaine Dye was on that team and had a great year. They also had Terrance Long who was in the running for Rookie of the Year the year before. But most importantly, and this is the film's major problem I think - the A's had a great pitching staff. They had Tim Hudson who led the league in ERA and wins a number of years in a row. They had Mark Mulder who won 19 games and Barry Zito who won 23 and was on top of his game. The pitching was outstanding but the movie doesn't even mention those guys. So this team was not like the <i>Bad News Bears</i>. In terms of the <i>Moneyball</i> philosophy, I guess it makes sense to combine people on the team who can get on base consistently with guys who can drive them in. And as it said at the end of the movie, the Red Sox used this philosophy and went on to win the World Series. The Sox had many great players at the time and they are not a small market team so they spend money. So, I don't think it is a matter of assembling a team of all players that have a high On Base Percentage, which is what the movie portrayed. You have to have some people who can drive those guys in quickly. <br />
<br />
<b>Question: There was a scene where the Billy Beane character played by Brad Pitt comes into the locker room where the players are dancing and listening to loud music after losing a game. Pitt swings a bat at the stereo in anger and suggests that the appropriate sound after losing is the sound of silence. It struck me that this scene is one that audiences might embrace because it appeals to a certain misconception about professional athletes that they don't care about wining and losing but only about their own personal situation or about money and so on. What was your experience? <br />
</b><br />
<br />
CC: I would certainly never have thought of dancing around the clubhouse after losing 16 games in a row. So I wouldn't be all that surprised if a General Manager or coach would come in and smash something if guys were doing that kind of thing after losing. But in my experience, there was not a party atmosphere after losing games. If the guys on the A's actually did that it's hard to believe. I've never been on a team where if you lose and continue to lose it's accepted by the players. I would not have been happy myself and most of the guys I played with over the years would not have been happy either. <br />
<br />
<b>Question: What was realistic about the film? </b><br />
<br />
CC: What was realistic was that Beane made a decision about how to re-create the process of how to win in a small baseball market. In that respect it was unique as they were trying to find a way to compete, and they had a great year. But as I said, they had a really good team those years. They did find three guys that could get on base and they were cheap. The other thing that was realistic was how players got released or cut from a team. It's just straightforward. They call you in and say "We're going to let you go and good luck." That's what happened to me. So I loved that line in the movie where Beane says, "What would you prefer, one bullet to the head or five to the chest and you bleed to death?" That was great. <br />
<b><br />
Question: What makes a good General Manager?</b> <br />
<br />
CC: The good ones have no fear. They do what they have to do and what they feel is going to be best for the team regardless of who you are giving up. However, they are also good at keeping the young players that can become major league contributors and they don't give away the future for the present. It's a fine line you have to navigate. <br />
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<b>Question: What do you look for in a young player? </b> <br />
<br />
CC: Well, I want them to keep their clothes on at practice. Really I just try to develop them into professional players - to enhance their skills and abilities and prepare them for the unique pressures of major league baseball. They have to have the ability to adapt so that is key. And one of the most important things is attitude and make-up, their character and determination. The thing that I look for the most is their passion and desire to play the game. That is a major factor when I work with young players. <br />
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<b>Question: What do you miss most about your life as a player?</b><br />
<br />
CC: The friendships and comradery both on and off the field that are created when you are part of a team striving for the same goal. <br />
<b><br />
Question: Who do you pick to win the World Series?</b> <br />
<br />
CC: Are you crazy? I'm picking the Rangers.Kelly Candaelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05906285455810166893noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3194433872677277427.post-86083294268711999172011-08-25T01:23:00.000-07:002011-08-25T11:09:55.325-07:00The Help and Magic Trip - Who's Driving the Bus?Imagine a group of stoned acid-heads arriving on your front doorstep who invite themselves in, commandeer your stereo and start throwing sleeping bags on the floor of your living room. The year was 1964, the acid-heads were Ken Kesey (author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) and his busload of Merry Pranksters and the living room and stereo belonged to young writer Larry McMurtry. The Pranksters stopped at his house in Texas whereupon one of the female freedom fighters who was aboard Kesey's Day-Glo bus Further wandered off into the night only to be arrested by the local constabulary. She was hauled off to a nearby psychiatric ward babbling incoherently to anyone who would listen. From what can be gleaned from the new documentary about this famous cross country escapade, <i>Magic Trip - Ken Kesey's Search for a Cool Place</i> - the freedom he and his bus-mates were fighting for was an inward freedom, a journey towards enlightenment that came from dropping LSD and discovering that the river you are wading in is talking to you and that you and the water are one with the universe. <br />
<br />
The movie <i>The Help,</i> also released last week, examines the fight for freedom of an entirely different kind - the struggle for basic human dignity - for recognition of one's humanity - and for the acknowledgment that you have a voice that demands to be heard. <br />
<br />
There is a jaunty fun that comes through in <i>The Magic Trip</i> - at least if you are not one of the unfortunate people who had to put up with the incessant talking of Neal Cassady (a brilliant raconteur apparently, but did you have to be high on amphetamines too to get into his "groove?") who drove the bus, sometimes into the mud. The pleasures of the film are the old footage and witnessing some of the sheer mad cocky conceit of it all. <br />
<br />
To some people with a particular stance towards the "60s," the unfocused narrative - the bus as a psychic liberated zone - and the band of brothers and sisters ethos will be a nostalgic journey back to a time when the dominant culture was being challenged through high-risk experimentation. The self, as historian Alice Echols points out, was for Kesey and his ilk, the site of the experiment. For a while anyways, the high priests of the drug culture regarded LSD as "revolutionary." <br />
<br />
In her survey of the cultural and political tributaries that flowed out of the 60s, Echols concluded - correctly I think - that perhaps the most "far-reaching" social movement that emerged from that period was women's liberation. For her, the Pranksters were engaging in childish antics (during their stop in Arizona they painted "Vote Goldwater for Fun" on the side of the bus) whereas the serious young people and the mature adults who often advised them were the ones who built social movements that had a lasting impact on public policy. The civil rights movement is a clear example. <br />
<br />
<i>The Help,</i> while not a movie about building a social movement, does engage the daily indignities suffered by African American maids in Jackson Mississippi during the same time that the Pranksters were driving through the vicinity (they took a southern route on their way to the New York World's Fair). Because it is not about "the movement," about the ways in which African Americans initiated and sustained their own struggles in the south at this time, the movie has been subjected to withering criticism from a number of quarters. The Association of Black Women Historians slammed the film as full of "widespread stereotyping" and a "disappointing resurrection of Mammy," a portrayal of black women as "loyal, and contented caretakers of whites..." While a viewer of <i>The Help</i> might disagree with this characterization - I didn't find the depiction of the maids as "contented," for instance - the relationship between Hollywood and historians has not been a congenial one particularly when the subject matter has been the African American experience. <br />
<br />
A few examples of past movies reveal a disturbing pattern. Jacqueline Jones, author of the book <i>Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present</i>, questioned a central plot point in the 1990 film <i>A Long Walk Home.</i> The film stared Whoopi Goldberg as a domestic working for a white family during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The film portrayed the heroic solidarity expressed by a white woman - played by Cissy Spacek who is also in <i>The Help</i> - with the black community in defiance of her family and the local power structure. "No white woman has yet emerged out of the shadows of history as a principled driver during the year-long ordeal," Jones wrote. <br />
<br />
Historian William Chafe called the movie <i>Mississippi Burning</i> - about two FBI agents who come to Mississippi to investigate and "solve" the murder of civil rights activists James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman in 1964 as "an atrocious distortion of history." <br />
<br />
Academics have pointed out that black 54th Regiment that fought bravely during the Civil War and was portrayed in the movie <i>Glory,</i> was made up of free blacks from the North, not escaped slaves as portrayed in the film. And Donald Bogle, author of the book <i>Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks - An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films</i>, asks why the movie <i>Driving Miss Daisy</i> left the black chauffer's "other world," his relationships and perspectives when away from Daisy's home, "undramatized." <br />
<br />
In <i>The Help,</i> it has been frequently pointed out that it is the plucky white journalist who initiates the primary action not the African American maids. It's fair and important to ask where are the Fannie Lou Hamer's, the Anne Moody's, the Diane Nash's who far from being inert, challenged the legal structure and the Klan in the years before and during the time the movie is set and who did not have to be encouraged by a white college grad to do so. <br />
<br />
Nash, to use one example, was arrested on trumped up charges in Jackson while pregnant in 1962. She stood before the judge and told him that if her child was born in jail it did not matter as every child in Mississippi was already in prison. How many film goers will know that in 1955 - eight years before the setting for <i>The Help</i> - ten thousand African Americans gathered in Mound Byour, Mississippi to declare their determination to vote? Or that in 1963, 85,000 black Mississippians cast "freedom ballots" to assert their democratic rights. This in a state where over 600 blacks were lynched between 1880 and 1940. <br />
<br />
<i>The Help</i>, while it emotionally leads you by the nose, does have the strength of looking closely at the lives and work of a group of dignified women. <br />
<br />
This brings us back to Alice Echols and the <i>Magic Trip</i>. Echols refers to Kesey and company as sexist but coed. There is valuable film footage and a glimpse into the incipient counter-culture belief that in order to save your soul you had to resist a life of alienated labor and social convention. But a question arises about <i>Magic Trip</i> that is the same question that can be directed at <i>The Help.</i> Who is doing the initiating? Who is in the driver's seat? On Kesey's bus at least, women didn't get close to the steering wheel. <br />
<br />
<b>Further Reading:</b> <br />
<br />
Donald Bogle - Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks - An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films<br />
<br />
Mark C. Carnes, Ed. - Past Imperfect - History According to the Movies<br />
<br />
Alice Echols - Shaky Ground - The Sixties and Its Aftershocks<br />
<br />
David Halberstan - The Children (for background on Diane Nash) Kelly Candaelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05906285455810166893noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3194433872677277427.post-90349191936089042752011-07-30T15:21:00.000-07:002011-07-30T15:57:22.819-07:00A Better Life - Moving Millions and California DreamingIt's a good week to take in the movie<i> A Better Life</i>, an earnest story about an undocumented immigrant father, his Americanized and troubled son, and a pick-up truck. The reason the truck plays such a large roll in the movie is that it is so meaningful. The truck is a source of transportation and livelihood, a symbol of pride and independence. It is also a source of trouble. Luis, the father in the film, is undocumented and therefore not licensed to drive. One misstep and your life and family are transformed - and not for the better. <br />
<br />
It's a particularly good week to see this movie as Governor Jerry Brown signed the first part of the <i>California Dream Act</i>, a bill that gives undocumented students the right to apply for and receive higher education financial aid. (Full disclosure - I have been documenting on film the organizing and passing of this bill for the past year as a consultant to the bill's author Assemblyman Gil Cedillo)<br />
<br />
A Better Life is about ethnicity and class (It seems to be noisier in working-class and poor neighborhoods judging from the opening of the film) and about the often arbitrary but historically dense creation of our borders and laws. <br />
<br />
The great virtue of the film is that it portrays the lives of people who literally live on the margins of our society and in an increasing number of states are social pariahs and political scapegoats. While immigrants are involved in some of the most intimate aspects of our lives - taking care of our children (particularly in upper-middle class neighborhoods) cooking our food and doing the heavy lifting of low-skilled labor - their stories are not often the center of commercial films. <br />
<br />
Luis, the son in the movie, is a teenager caught in transition as all teenagers are. Tatted-up gang-bangers compete with his father for his loyalty. His high school looks more like a prison than a place of learning. And the values he has assimilated through the flotsam of American consumer culture are not ennobling. <br />
<br />
<i>A Better Life </i> is about individuals making individual choices. In this respect it is a requirement for dramatic tension. But these individual choices take place within a broader context of course. For a fascinating account of the forces that drive immigration purchase Jeffrey Kaye's book <i>Moving Millions - How Coyote Capitalism Fuels Global Immigration. </i><br />
<br />
<b>http://www.amazon.com/Moving-Millions-Coyote-Capitalism-Immigration/dp/047042334X</b><br />
<br />
Kaye points out that today, one in thirty-five people in the world live in a country that is not the country of their birth. Why this is the case is the subject of his book. This global phenomena is often regarded as a local issue, providing a wedge for political debate. Kaye points to the more complex nature of the dynamics that impact and drive migrant workers. <br />
<br />
They are caught up (and "caught" is the correct word as they have no power over the economic reality that impacts them) in global labor supply chains, trade policies, trans-national business decisions and overall inequality. While politicians advocate for higher border-fences, multi-national corporations and their political hired-hands make the decisions that structure and determine the lives of millions. The young man parking your car at a downtown restaurant, is doing so because the price of Mexican corn dropped due to provisions of NAFTA. <br />
<br />
The next time someone suggests to you that "You can do anything you want if you try hard enough," suggest that they pick up Kaye's book. He thinks and writes historically, sociologically, politically and economically - the way that good journalists should - detailing the ways in which most people in the world are not masters of their own fate. <br />
<br />
And for some interesting facts about the lives of day laborers in Los Angeles check here: <br />
<br />
<b><b>http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/07/local-day-laborers-older-undocumented-under-educated.html</b></b><br />
<br />
While it is not necessarily troubling for this film - all films require some central and personal focus - there is no recognition in <i>A Better Life</i> that there is a thriving Latino Middle-Class in Los Angeles - or that there is a Latino Mayor for that matter. We see the barrios and taco trucks but not La Serenata, a high end Mexican Restaurant in East Los Angeles and Santa Monica. <br />
<b><br />
http://www.laserenataonline.com</b><br />
<br />
And Peter Schrag, another journalist who has written thoughtfully about immigration, outlines a potentially redemptive economic future driven largely by immigrants. <br />
<br />
<b>http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jul/27/opinion/la-oe-schrag-immigrants-20110727</b><br />
<br />
With the Federal Government in a political stalemate, there is not much hope for comprehensive immigration reform. If they can't agree on extending the debt ceiling, can anyone imagine a sensible approach to immigration? So we default to the state level. And this week's move by Governor Brown is one success that opens up the political space for others. <br />
<br />
Lets work towards an environment where losing one's truck does not lead to deportation, economic devastation and the sundering of families. <br />
<br />
<b>Readings:</b> <br />
<br />
Jeffrey Kaye - <i>Moving Millions - How Coyote Capitalism Fuels Global Immigration</i><br />
<br />
Peter Schrag - <i>Not Fit for Our Society: Immigration and Nativism in America </i>Kelly Candaelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05906285455810166893noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3194433872677277427.post-31942850463377079932011-07-05T12:56:00.000-07:002011-07-12T21:24:14.765-07:00Malick's Trees, Darwin's Worms, Freud's Illusions & Emerson's Spiritual Self-RelianceWhat does a tragic and senseless death do to us? How do we go forward from it? What questions does the needless death of a son or daughter raise about justice, nature, God and our capacity to even conceive of a redemptive universe? For all of the visual poetry, philosophic musings and oedipal triangles expressed throughout Terrence Malick's long anticipated film <i>The Tree of Life</i>, the emotional core is the dialectic of life and death - the origins of the cosmos set beside the imperative of human suffering. <i> The Tree of Life</i> is rooted in the fact of death - the fact that creates the fictions in this film. <br />
<br />
There is a stark philosophical and psychological dualism stated at the beginning of the film as we are introduced to a 1950s family in suburban Texas. We must, the mother of a family of three boys insists in voice-over narrative, choose the path of nature or grace. Nature "wants to please itself and lord it over others," she tells her boys and us. Grace, in contrast, is the way of love, acceptance and spiritual surrender.<br />
<br />
I'm not exactly sure what Malick means by "nature," in the context of the film. Is it what we commonly refer to as "human nature" or is he referring to the natural world? But one reasonable view of nature - and this was Darwin's view - is that nature neither "wants" anything nor "lords if over" anyone. Malick turns this understanding of nature upside down. Darwin's sober stoicism towards the natural world is, of course, one of the reasons why his theories were considered blasphemous in religious quarters. <br />
<br />
Adam Gopnik, in his fine book on Darwin and Lincoln, <i>Angels and Ages</i>, points out that one of the disturbing implications of Darwin's point of view was that he regarded the "wedge of death" - the ubiquitous pain and suffering in the natural and human worlds - as in some sense creative but not justified by any transcendent plan or purpose. "It wasn't that suffering [In Darwin's scheme] was for your own good or for the good of the species; suffering just was," Gopnik writes. <br />
<br />
In voice over and imagery, Malick explores the "religious" themes of redemption, the emergence of conscience, the role of "God" or "the father" in both the family and natural world. "Lord - where were you?" "Who are we to you?" the narrator asks. "Is there nothing that does not pass away?" <br />
<br />
As for mothers, the mother of this film is ethereal and mostly passive in the face of a confused but authoritarian husband and father who believes that life isn't fair so you must take what you can when you can. He teaches his sons to steel themselves against life's outrages and that compassion is for suckers. <br />
<br />
The other mother of course is mother earth. In one of Malick's origin images a meteor impregnates the earth thereby initiating the journey through geologic time. Malick seems to view nature as a substitute for God, the beauty and bounty of the natural world as the transcendent spirit in earthly form. There is even a scene depicting an anthropomorphic dinosaur sparing the life of a wounded kin through what looks like an act of empathy - the beginning of conscience or morality. Again, this is contrary to Darwin's sense of "origins" and his description of nature's stark and inexorable logic. <br />
<br />
Darwin was not immune from feelings of "awe" and emotional exaltation at the sublime beauty of the forests "un-defaced by the hand of man" that he observed during the voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle. But he also wrote, after the senseless death of his beloved ten year old daughter Annie, that there was "a dreadful but quiet war of organic beings going on in the peaceful woods...where we behold the face of nature bright with gladness but cannot forget that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects and seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life." Malick's picture of nature embraces the "gladness" while largely ignoring the terror of the dying bird. <br />
<br />
Adam Phillips' book on Darwin and Freud (<i>Darwin's Worms</i>) asks the right kinds of challenging questions about our social, political and religious lives. He points out that both Darwin and Freud saw themselves as revealing the truth about nature and that "nature was what truth was about." How do we take justice seriously if we take nature seriously? <br />
<br />
After Darwin and Freud, Phillips contends, one couldn't believe in nature in the way that one could believe in God. By declaring the death of immortality they urged us to surrender the consolations of religious illusions and ideas of utopian justice for the more limited goals of advancing our capacity to reason and painstakingly improving the human community. <br />
<br />
At the end of the movie the mother lets go of the grief over the death of one of her children. She makes an offering to Nature? to God? - with the words, "I give him to you. I give you my son." During the same sequence another of her sons, now an adult played by Sean Penn, walks along an ocean shore surrounded by what look like acquaintances and relatives who have died but have regained both bodily strength and emotional contentment - the absence of strife and pain. <br />
<br />
With this coda, the film loses its philosophical and psychological weight. The gravity of the intimate details of the 1950s family story with all of its conflict, repression and ultimate breakdown (did the father ever go have a drink with the guys from work or tell a good joke?) is reconciled through a mystical harmony and transformed consciousness - what Freud called the unbounded "oceanic" feeling of unity with the external world. <br />
<br />
Malick has been called a Transcendentalist filmmaker, like Emerson, determined to explore solitary artistic and spiritual paths, and like Thoreau, drawn to the sensuality and power of the natural world. Thoreau took his council at Walden Pond and Emerson wrote that "Heaven walks among us...in triple or tenfold disguises." Malick attempts to unveil or immerse us in those disguises. <br />
<br />
Literary critic Irving Howe has argued that in order to understand America and our literature, we cannot evade dealing with Emerson as a guiding spirit of a particular type of individualism. He also points out that it was Emerson's critic and contemporary Nathaniel Hawthorne, who observed that Emerson and his Concord neighbors were deluded by the notion that through an "exercise of spirit" they could raise themselves to a new state of being. For Hawthorne, there was no easy escape from history, nature and the community's incessant demands. The "heavy luggage" of intellectual pride, guilt and community obligation could not easily be tossed into the baggage car of the Celestial Railroad and forgotten. <br />
<br />
Here is a Hawthorne character in <i>The House of the Seven Gables:</i><br />
<br />
<i>After such wrong as [Clifford] had suffered, there is not reparation...<br />
No great mistake, whether acted or endured, in our mortal sphere, is ever<br />
really set right.</i> <br />
<br />
Nature would not provide Emerson's compensatory balance. It is the "invariable inopportunity of death" that renders reparation impossible. <br />
<br />
There is an Emersonian devotion to inwardness in Malick's work. The use of gnomic voice-over narrative in all of his films is an expression of it. And his non-doctrinaire version of "belief," for all of its obscure imagery, is a good fit for our time. In a democratic and egalitarian world, one belief is as good as another and there is no need for the rigorous behavioral sacrifices or devotion to "scripture" required of believers in an earlier and more demanding religious world. Through our free-floating religious energies, we are all the interpreters of our own spiritual universe - Emersonian self-reliance without Emerson's intellectual depth and hard-edged self-doubt. <br />
<br />
Howe views Emerson - and I think this view can be applied to Malick - as collapsing "the distinction between religious and secular, so that the exaltations of the one might be summoned for the needs of the other." In this grief stricken movie, grief becomes a source of secular wisdom and spiritual redemption. <br />
<br />
Freud wrote in <i>The Future of An Illusion</i>, his 1927 booklet about the psychological sources of religious belief - that "Men cannot remain children forever; they must in the end go out into the hostile life." By rejecting the infantile wish for a protective father in the sky to replace the father we experienced in childhood, we are able to mourn our loss and go forward to engage the adult challenges that face us. For Freud, good mourning releases the energies for good living. <br />
<br />
Freud criticized as "irreligious in the truest sense of the word" those who would pitifully substitute for the mighty personality of the biblical God, a shadowy and abstract principle or hide him in the misty forests of pantheism. Freud even regarded Yoga and other Eastern practices as a life sacrificing and narcissistic withdrawal from social conflicts - a futile search for happiness through "quietness." <br />
<br />
Darwin, along with Freud a "master of retrospect," was obsessed with the majestic and life creating activities of worms (his first and last books were about the usefulness of worms) and preferred to look at the things that were on and under the shifting ground. Gopnik suggests that Darwin found the evidence which reinforced his theories in "the homely, the overlooked, the undervalued." He practiced the skill of "learning from the low." <br />
<br />
After his daughter's death, according to Gopnik, Darwin abandoned any remaining remnants of Christian faith. "Serenity could only be found in the contemplation of the vast indifference of the universe," Gopnik writes. Annie was taken for no good reason and was gone for good. Darwin went back to studying and writing about his beloved worms. <br />
<br />
Malick tries to have it three ways. The close feel of his Texas family grounded in its special place and time offers its own epiphanies about frustrated desires and misguided parents. Nature is a place where a worn down world can be revived. And finally, Malick turns our gaze upwards to the mysteries of the heavens in an attempt to, in Emerson's words, "love God without mediator or veil." <br />
<br />
There is a tragic humanism that comes through in the film. <i>The Tree of Life</i> is the story of birth and death, love and hatred and a democratic stance seems to bracket the Christian mysticism. In the last scene Penn's character is at least surrounded by the multitudes, all walking on the same level ground. But when Penn was down on his knees caressing the feet of an Angel? Jesus? the Lord Himself or Herself in disguise? - I was reminded of Darwin's worms, slowly burrowing their way through the earth beneath Penn's feet, helping to create the "entangled bank" of existence that makes up the grandeur of life. <br />
<br />
We can't seem to, as the German poet Heinrich Heine suggested we do, <i>Leave heaven to the angels and the sparrows. </i><br />
<br />
<b>Readings:</b> <br />
<br />
The Future of an Illusion - Sigmund Freud<br />
<br />
Angels and Ages - A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln & Modern Life - Adam Gopnik<br />
<br />
The American Newness - Culture and Politics in the Age of Emerson - Irving Howe<br />
<br />
Darwin's Worms - On Life Stories and Death Stories - Adam PhillipsKelly Candaelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05906285455810166893noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3194433872677277427.post-78441502766109519462011-04-25T18:48:00.000-07:002011-07-03T11:31:54.389-07:00Limitless - The Problems and Advantages of Being Un-balancedEddie Morra (played by Bradley Cooper) is a struggling writer who wanders the streets of Manhattan like Dostoyevsky's Underground Man, resentfully bumping into strangers in his path. He is a sick and unattractive man who has no understanding of his illness. But Eddie's sorry condition is nothing that a new pill cannot cure.<br />
<br />
Apparently we all know that "we only use 20% of our brain." It's a fatuous but pervasive conceit and it is the central premise of<i> Limitless</i>. The black-market pill in question - which turbo-charges the brain into full usage mode - is Eddie's instant access to the contagious state of excess and also his pharmacological key to success.<br />
<br />
After popping a few pills Eddie cannot be stopped. He completes what he calls his "utopian" novel (more likely dystopian as I don't think there has been a straightforward utopian novel that has sold well in the United States since Edward Bellamy's <i>Looking Backward</i> from 1888) in four days. He learns to play the piano in three. And verbal acquisition becomes so easy that within a week he can say, "Would you like to come home with me," in six different languages. Eddie demonstrates real ambition by cleaning his bachelor apartment all by himself.<br />
<br />
If, as psychoanalyst Adam Phillips observes, developing an excessive appetite is a self-cure for feelings of helplessness, we also know that the price of excess is a painful comedown. It is Eddie's crash that condenses the metaphors. Are Eddie's inevitable troubles with gangsters and Wall Street sharks (is there a clear difference?) a cautionary tale about how the dream of power can turn you into a vampire? Is the film a post-modernist take on how a presumably stable personality can be expanded, multiplied or even obliterated? Or is the deeper subtext a concern over our economic fears about the Chinese "overtaking us" if we don't get smarter real fast? If removing teacher seniority rules won't redeem our educational system, then better chemistry might. (One of the languages Eddie learns in a day is Chinese) <br />
<br />
Eddie's new life becomes a blur of agitation and turbulence, a feeling that he has to "constantly move forward," but with all of his thoughts and knowledge "organized and available." This sensibility of being organized, calculating, having access to critical knowledge that will ensure a "limitless horizon" of never ending profit, is inseparable from the rise of the finance capitalism from which we are attempting to recover. Eddie's personal dilemmas take on the shape of his, and our, social surroundings. <br />
<br />
Marshall Berman, in his book about the experience of modernity <i>All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, </i> (A line from Marx's <i>Communist Manifesto</i> that describes both the creative and destructive dynamics of capitalism) writes that "psychic dizziness and drunkenness, expansion of experiential possibilities and destruction of moral boundaries and personal bonds, self-enlargement and self-derangement, phantoms in the street and in the soul - is the atmosphere in which the modern sensibility is born." Eddie loses his moral boundaries and personal bonds in the streets of Manhattan, the city that Berman calls a "forest of symbols," where new meanings about our political and social lives are constantly springing up. <br />
<br />
In a way, <i>Limitless</i> is an exploration of a particular view of what we commonly refer to as "human nature" - about what we would become if our intellectual and social powers were unfettered. If free markets create free people, which corporate funded "think tanks" tell us is the case, then our current economic model of freedom merely reflects the avarice and competitiveness that are part of an unalterable human condition. <br />
<br />
Terry Eagleton, in his new book <i>Why Marx Was Right</i>, challenges this orthodoxy by examining Marx's complex views on "human nature." For Marx, our powers, capabilities and desires are shaped, restrained or liberated by the material conditions that we are born into. Marx writes in Volume I of <i>Capital</i> of "human nature in general and then...as modified in each historical epoch." <br />
<br />
Eagleton points out that our potential solidarity and empathy with each other and with different cultures and peoples has a "foundation in our bodies." "Because of the nature of our material bodies, we are needy, laboring, sociable, sexual, communicative, self-expressive animals who need one another to survive, but who come to find a fulfillment in that companionship over and above its social usefulness." We identify with others due to our similar physical needs and limits, our strengths and our vulnerabilities. These constraints - part of what Marx called our "species being," have a permanence that is both inevitable and desirable. <br />
<br />
Both a realist and a visionary, Marx looked at the ravages of capitalism in England and imagined a potentially different future that might emerge from the transformative energies that capitalism had unleashed. His ideas were tragic - Shakespeare was one of his favorite authors - but not pessimistic. <br />
<br />
Once again we are involved in a debate about the "limits" of the free market - about how best to restrain the worst excesses of our economic structure. But if being "limitless" is a problem and <i>Limitless</i> the film is a cautionary tale about how the individual cannot outrun the system itself - then what problems are derived from accepting too easily the limits of our political aspirations? Isn't extreme caution and a firm belief in the adage that "You can't change human nature," a bedrock assumption of the conservative worldview - a political acquiescence? How often do you hear the cynical adage that "nothing fundamentally changes" in this world? We have become the unconscious guardians of the status quo. <br />
<br />
At least <i>Limitless</i> engages some of these questions albeit elliptically. Eddie, like "Fast" Eddie Felson of Paul Newman's <i>The Hustler</i> (which the movie obliquely references), is always on the edge of disintegration, unbalanced and hurtling forward at a dizzy pace. In that state, you forget where you began and you eliminate your desired end by focusing solely on the means. <br />
<br />
Dostoevsky questioned in <i>Notes From the Underground</i>, whether the transformative energies of the urban world could ever be a source of nourishment - a home rather than a prison. Man needs to build, he wrote. But perhaps ..."he only likes that edifice from a distance and not at all at close range, perhaps he only likes to build it and does not want to live in it." <br />
<br />
Eddie creates worlds he doesn't want to live in. He moves from novelist to day-trader to King of the stock market to mergers and acquisitions and ends up in a fortress-like home where he doesn't even unpack his bags. His plan to finally arrive at the life he has longed for - one of opulence and freedom - becomes elusive and distant, a central discord of the modern temperament. <br />
<br />
The literary critic Frank Kermode argues that we need meaningful beginnings and endings to make sense of our lives, even if those beginnings and endings are fictions. It seems that movies require these types of beginnings and endings as well. Eddie is an exhausting character and the people around him end up as exhausted survivors of his ambition. There is no elaborate beginning to the movie except a vision of Eddie balanced on the edge of an abyss, the type of imbalance that always captures our attention. As for an adequate ending, there is none. Eddie's last word in the movie is consistent with the ethos of the film. With a triumphant idiot's grin he simply asks his girlfriend the question "What?" Not, What is to be done? What's it all about? What, me worry? Since there is no positive meaning to invest in - neither tragedy or its overcoming - at the end of the movie I'm guessing you probably won't care. <br />
<br />
<b>Further Reading:</b> <br />
<br />
Marshall Berman - All That Is Solid Melts Into Air<br />
<br />
Terry Eagleton - Why Marx Was Right<br />
<br />
Frank Kermode - The Sense of an Ending<br />
<br />
Adam Phillips - On BalanceKelly Candaelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05906285455810166893noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3194433872677277427.post-42081999354359054912011-02-15T13:15:00.000-08:002011-02-22T16:43:18.446-08:00Company Men - The Visible Injuries of Class<i>Company Men</i> follows the adult lives of three upper-middle class men who lose their high flying corporate jobs amidst the wreckage of our recent economic meltdown. These guys are way upper-middle class. They drive Porsches, belong to country clubs, sequester private jets for spousal shopping trips and send their kids on senior class trips to Italy. How big of an understatement is it to observe that their dilemmas are not ones that most Americans can "relate" to? <br />
<br />
The protagonists - played by Tommy Lee Jones, Ben Affleck and Chris Cooper - have all the signifiers of success. I remember numerous conversations from college - and later as well - about how the things we own can begin to possess us, how the quest for money, power and prestige often become a futile attempt to make ourselves materially and psychologically invulnerable. These were of course, what we might call "youthful" conversations. But they were discussions derived from serious reading about, and observing how the consumer society we were inheriting shaped how we might be forced to live, how the appetite for things might spoil other appetites. <br />
<br />
There is a version of this accumulation story that even regards the obsession with money as a kind of perversion, a desire that destroys or undermines other more refined or exalted desires. In psychoanalyst Adam Phillip's understanding, our primary desire as Westerners is to escape the death of desire. We strive to avoid the fear of there being nothing or no-one that we want. It is one of the virtues of <i>Company Men</i> that it at least recognizes our ambivalence about money and ambition. As a culture we seem to admire people who acknowledge their own ambition and are successful at accumulating wealth, while remaining suspicious of the ways in which those same ambitions can get individually and socially out of control. <br />
<br />
While watching <i>Company Men</i> I thought of one of my favorite books from college - <i>The Hidden Injuries of Class</i> by sociologists Richard Sennet and Jonathan Cobb. In the introduction of the book they recount the story of a number of successful mid-level managers who had worked their way out of their working-class family backgrounds (away from people who "worked with their hands," as one remarked) into white collar positions. One man, Frank Rissarro, talks with barely concealed anguish about the psychological wounds that accompanied his own upward movement. "These jobs aren't real work," Rissarro tells Sennet and Cobb, "It's just pushing papers." <br />
<br />
Sennet and Cobb question what the drive for upward mobility means in a country where class is structured as a system for limiting freedom and for defining success. For many of the people they interviewed, moving into an "educated position" was a weapon of self used to capture respect from a society that places a psychic premium on the assumed "freedom," "creativity" and "independence" of the educated and technically advanced strata. <br />
<br />
The accumulation of cultural assets - advanced education, higher economic status - Sennet and Cobb suggest, can cover up a good deal of anxiety and shame that many working-class people associate with being brought up in "arbitrary" and "chaotic" surroundings. To be "educated," according to many of the people they interviewed, is tantamount to being in control of your passions and can help remove you from the humiliation of daily domination. But guilt is the price they pay for "leaving their class behind." Risarro, by his own admission, speaks of gaining respect from the community while at the same time losing respect for himself. He feels his white collar work as a loan officer in a bank is not as "real" as the work his father did. Despite his relentless struggle to obtain the "badges of ability" and legitimacy, Risarro still feels lost. <br />
<br />
This kind of nostalgia and guilt are at the emotional center of <i>Company Men</i>. When Ben Affleck's character Bobby loses his job and has to "lower" himself by working as a carpenter, he gets a lesson in blue-collar manliness - or at least a Hollywood version of it. Construction workers throw footballs during their leisure time rather than hitting balls at a golf driving range. They drink beer not scotch. They protect you even when you don't deserve it as opposed to stabbing you in the back. And they construct homes rather than manage the In and Out box at the office. <br />
<br />
Towards the end of the movie Tommy Lee Jones (Gene in the movie) looks back on his own upward movement through the shipbuilding company, which has evolved from Gloucester Shipping to the diversified and multi-national GTX. Sounding like Frank Risarro, he laments the passing of the good old days when he could weld a beautiful seam along the inside of a ship's hull at a time when America "used to build things and people knew who they were." It's a common, popular and non-partisan sentiment. <br />
<br />
To restore their souls, Gene and Bobby go back to their entrepreneurial roots, setting up a new company in the abandoned shipyards of Boston. Tossed out as used up garbage by the corporate beast, they intend to remake themselves by re-discovering their roots - in a way by re-enacting their childhoods when pleasure was taken in the mere sensual thrill of building. In their new entrepreneurial utopia start-up capital is readily available and the other cast-offs from GTX are ready to do battle with the Chinese and South Koreans, the countries where shipbuilding migrated decades ago. Bobby intends to "talk to the unions" about getting a deal on shipbuilding labor.<br />
<br />
<i>Company Men</i> captures the ethos of corporate liberalism quite well - good intentions sidetracked by the crushing demands of the now global "market." Bobby's wife even uses <i>One Earth</i> re-usable grocery bags (you have to look closely) to lower the family's formidable carbon footprint. <br />
<br />
During the week I saw the movie the Labor Department sent out their yearly statistics on union membership. In the private sector, union membership is now below seven percent. All those unionized Boston shipbuilders went to work for Wal-Mart or were otherwise "re-trained" for lower paying jobs a long time ago. <br />
<br />
We need utopias, even entrepreneurial ones. The lure of imagined futures have always been with us. Perhaps the enviable life has replaced any clear idea of the good life or the good society. Have the futures we now imagine been shrunken into insignificance by our lowered expectations? Is the question whether Obama can win again in 2012 the most important political question we can ask? <i>Company Men's</i> heart is in the right place and there is an explicit critique of corporate logic in the story line. What it lacks is a deeper impulse to transcend the society that exists and to show us, as literary critic Georg Lukacs argues, "human conflicts in all their complexity and completeness." <br />
<br />
I wonder what the language and imagery of a good society would be if it was free of the obsession with our rather narrow definitions of success? If we didn't love money and the things that money can buy, what other objects and goals would we pursue that might offer a satisfying substitute? Is there a filmmaker out there who is able to give us a glimpse? <br />
<br />
<b>Further Readings:</b> <br />
<br />
The Hidden Injuries of Class - Richard Sennett & Jonathan Cobb<br />
<br />
Going Sane, Maps of Happiness - Adam Phillips<br />
<br />
Studies in European Realism - Georg LukacsKelly Candaelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05906285455810166893noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3194433872677277427.post-14987620431494556832011-01-05T13:03:00.000-08:002011-01-05T14:46:25.282-08:00True Grit - Dry Bones RattlingMattie Ross, the 14 year old protagonist of the Coen brother's film <i>True Grit</i>, would have made an excellent community organizer. In her attempt to bring her father's killer to justice she exudes commitment, focus, strength of personality and faith in her mission. <br />
<br />
It might seem like a stretch to tease out the theme of community organizing from a western whose tag line in marketing materials is "Retribution," rather than justice, but the filmmakers drop enough hints along the way to open up some interesting interpretive possibilities. <br />
<br />
A fascinating sequence occurs at the beginning of the movie just after Mattie arrives in Fort Smith, Arkansas, the place of her father's murder. She proceeds to the undertakers to retrieve her father's body. Having no place to stay she asks the undertaker if she can stay in his workspace. He asks her why she would want to stay amongst all of the dead bodies, as outside in the street three men are about to be hanged and will be joining Mattie's dead and embalmed father in the same room.<br />
<br />
The hangings, which Mattie quickly moves outside to watch, have all of the characteristics of a sacrificial ritual. The community has turned up in their Sunday best to watch the proceedings. From the scaffold one of the men points out that in the audience there are worse men than him, a clear indication that he is dying as a stand-in for others. A second man asks that his own sins not be held against his remaining family. And the third, a Native American, is muzzled before he can speak a final word, a visual acknowledgement that retribution and persecution are often not far from one another. <br />
<br />
At nightfall Mattie returns to the undertakers where he offers her a coffin for sleeping in if she desires. Mattie stays the evening and we don't see her again until the next day. <br />
<br />
Mattie has clearly visited the valley of the dead as an almost mythological preparation for her impending journey, or recognition that death will be part of that journey. At a boarding house she finds on her second day in town she makes this idea explicit, stating to the women who runs it that she felt like the biblical prophet Ezekiel who famously walked in the valley of the dead and dry bones. <br />
<br />
Prophets in the ancient biblical tradition - who could be both male and female in contrast to the all male priesthood - were intermediaries between God and the people. They often were itinerants who moved from place to place and spoke of the themes of exile, return and re-building. According to my <i>New Oxford Annotated Bible</i>, the prophetic task largely concerned issues of the restoration of the community and its institutions. Like Ezekiel, Mattie arrives in a spiritually dead community full of sickness and injustice, and breathes life into a spiritually dead and unjust man - Rooster Cogburn. Her task - like all good organizers - is to help others to initiate the difficult journey of change and to restore some vitality (in this case the rule of law) to communal institutions. <br />
<br />
It is not surprising that Mark Warren, in his book on community organizing, titled the work <i>Dry Bones Rattling</i>, a reference to Ezekiel and the creative spark that brings "a community in ruins," to life. Warren's study of the <i>Industrial Areas Foundation </i>- the organization founded by Saul Alinsky - points to the power of biblical and spiritual references in providing a thematic unity to the organizing process. <br />
<br />
And Marshall Ganz, who ran organizing training for Barack Obama's presidential campaign and teaches leadership development and organizing at Harvard, uses the story of David and Goliath as a touchstone for creative organizing principles. <br />
<br />
David, in Ganz's viewing of the story, has all the attributes of a successful organizer and leader. David's first key act was to commit, to show the courage to get on the path. He knew his strengths and resources - a slingshot and five smooth stones. He engaged in an ongoing creative process where he learned as he went forward - that he was weakened rather than strengthened by heavy armor. And he understood that power can make you stupid - ask Goliath. <br />
<br />
Mattie Ross displays many of David's skills and is finally the person with true Grit. And she inspires the best in others as well. By insisting that the killer of her father be brought back to Fort Smith for trial rather than to Texas for a reward, she intuits that this is the only way that some form of social equilibrium can be established in society. When she eventually kills the man she is after - that final act of retribution - she suffers her own fall and loss. <br />
<br />
True Grit begins with the images of communal sacrifice and ends with Rooster willing to sacrifice himself to save Mattie - one man's spiritual progress. In Rene Girard's theory of the foundations of sacrifice, the tensions of society are often visited upon the vulnerable scapegoat thereby avoiding the deeper problems that exist. Real sacrifice is eventually transformed into ritual - real blood becomes symbolic blood.<br />
<br />
At the end of the movie Mattie visits a replica of the time of her youth - the Wild West Show that re-enacts an old west just as it is exiting the historical stage. The Wild West Show was full of whooping and hollering and simulated blood - a cultural ritual without the dying. Sounds like the movies to me. <br />
<br />
<b>Further Reading:</b><br />
<br />
Why David Sometimes Wins - Marshall Ganz<br />
<br />
The Scapegoat - Rene Girard<br />
<br />
Dry Bones Rattling - Mark WarrenKelly Candaelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05906285455810166893noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3194433872677277427.post-68343637871664664802010-12-07T20:58:00.000-08:002010-12-28T01:01:58.197-08:00The King's Speech<i>The King's Speech</i> is a movie about language - aristocratic language, democratic language, broken language and therapeutic language. And since the movie is set in Great Britain a place where class, as George Orwell observed, was branded on the tongue, it is invariably about the intimacies and shifts in class relations. <br />
<br />
The future British King George VI has a speech problem - a stutter leaves him ill suited to lead the country as mass communications technology has dramatically expanded. The Nazi threat - the film takes place in the period leading up to World War II - calls for leadership skills to challenge Hitler - or at least enough verbal ability to help bolster the morale of the country. If public speaking creates paralyzing fear in many people, this Royal spends most of the film looking like he would rather face a German Panzer Division by himself than give a speech. <br />
<br />
In order to raise himself to the leadership challenge George must first lower himself. With the help of his wife Elizabeth, the future "Queen Mother" as they say in Britain, they find unlicensed speech therapist Lionel Logue (played by Geoffrey Rush). Logue operates outside of the circle of medical quacks who have been systematically and unsuccessfully applying their tortures. <br />
<br />
While Logue is keen to push to the deeper levels of the King's psychological fear, apparently the product of an abusive upbringing, given the delicate social situation George and Elizabeth are content to stay focused on the "mechanics" of his stammer. In therapeutic language, Logue is admonished to operate "within the frame" of the clients experience. That frame is a rather limited one. <br />
<br />
According to psychiatrist and communications theorist Paul Watzalawick, the best possible solution to seemingly intractable psychological problems is not to convince the person that their problems are illusory but to counter-intuitively move them in the direction of the greatest anxiety and therefore the strongest resistance. Logue does this by pushing George towards tasks that he believes he cannot successfully undertake. He is the perfect corner-man, massaging, cajoling and refining the tactical therapeutic attack. <br />
<br />
Logue also adds a pinch of Freud to his approach by encouraging his client to express verbally whatever thoughts or emotions surface in his mind. There are some amusing scenes of the King spitting out expletives in a scatter-shot manner - a kind of vulgar free-association. George does not recline on Logue's couch but there is an inkling of Freud's belief that part of the methodological power of psychoanalysis derives from the "suspension of artfulness" in speech, the patient's freedom not to tell a story. <br />
<br />
The writer Lionel Trilling suggested that it is possible at times to observe social morality in the process of revision. While watching <i>The King's Speech</i> I felt like I was watching the depiction of a "dominant class" confronting the evolving democratic ethos in Britain. Not only does Logue refer to the King as "Bertie," George's informal family name, he also insists that the King travel to Logue's office for their treatments. George, with aristocratic vulnerability, abides by Logue's rules in order to receive help. A dramatic shift in the social relations in Britain is contained in these subtle uses of language and the control of space. <br />
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At the beginning of the movie the dying King George V inquires of his son "Who will protect the country from Hitler and the proletarian abyss?" While he was undoubtedly referring to Stalin's Soviet Union as Hitler's left-wing bookend, he could just as well have been referring to the assertive British working-class and the fear of approaching political degeneration. <br />
<br />
According to historian Gareth Stedman-Jones, there was a pervasive "slum-life" literature in Britain throughout the 19th and early 20th century that portrayed the lower working-class as mired in "slums," "dens," "swamps," "deeps," "wilds," and "abyss." These popular writings shaped middle and upper-class views of the lower classes while also stimulating an evangelical movement to civilize these "social inferiors." <br />
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Stedman-Jones also points out that during times of insecurity, fears for property were combined with a great emotive yearning to re-establish personal relations between the classes. When the King does manage to deliver a message via radio, several images are strung together of "regular" British citizens huddled around their radios in a British version of FDR's fireside chats. One axiom that can be applied to any movie is that if you are shown large numbers of people listening raptly to any leader and there is not a whiff of dissent, you know you are being conned. <br />
<br />
The last scene of the movie shows King George VI waving to a massive crowd gathered dutifully outside Buckingham Palace as World War II commences. Logue stands in the background proudly watching him. The masses gathered outside were about to shape history. Hitler was defeated and in the parliamentary election of 1945 that followed the war British voters threw out of office one of the war's heroes, Winston Churchill. The Labour Party won almost 50% of the vote with a mandate to make Britain more democratic and egalitarian. <br />
<br />
Extending the theme of the movie in a collective direction, attention was shifted from one man's affliction to the social and economic problems of the whole nation. The historian Tony Judt concludes that after the war there was a belief in Britain that the government had the duty and ability to mobilize people and resources to improve health care, provide jobs and to restore an aging infrastructure. <br />
<br />
In this sense <i>The King's Speech</i> is a historical anachronism masquerading as a buddy movie. Learning history by watching films is always dangerous. Their dramatic strength is generally their scholarly weakness. <br />
<br />
<b>Further Readings:</b> <br />
<br />
Tony Judt - Postwar <br />
<br />
Gareth Stedman-Jones - Languages of Class - Studies in English Working Class History<br />
<br />
Paul Watzlawick - The Language of ChangeKelly Candaelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05906285455810166893noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3194433872677277427.post-29414423068343797122010-11-07T10:18:00.000-08:002010-11-10T10:00:14.143-08:00Hereafter - Are You Talking to Me?<i>The departing soul hovers about as a dream</i>. Homer - The Odyssey<br />
<i><br />
It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death; and whenever we attempt to do so we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators</i>. Freud - Our Attitudes Toward Death<br />
<i><br />
But at the very instant he died, having made an effort, he awoke..., "Yes, it was death! I died and woke up. Yes, death is an awakening." </i> Tolstoy - War and Peace <br />
<br />
Spirituality is a tricky business. Ask ten random people on the West side of Los Angles if they are religious and my bet is that eight out of ten will respond, "I'm not religious I'm spiritual." This is sociology of course, not theology. The spiritual smorgasbord seems to offer everything from organic foods to yoga - Herman Hesse to Deepak Chopra. <br />
<br />
Clint Eastwood's new film <i>Hereafter</i>, is a movie about alienation, companionship and love as well as the despair that results from incomparable loss. It is a reflection of that distinctively American phenomena - our faith in faith, our belief that belief itself offers its own reward. Religion is in the vicinity of the film but God has been banished from town. The faith, such as it is, is that there is in fact an afterlife and it is possible to communicate with those who inhabit it. The film is spiritual - not religious. <br />
<br />
The movie involves three separate stories that converge too neatly at the end, as if we all meet in the end or at least meet the same end. George (played by Matt Damon) is a working-class loner who loves Charles Dickens. He is also blessed and cursed with the ability to talk to the dead, a gift that can attract worshipers or get you crucified. Marie is a French political journalist who has "come back from the dead" after drowning in an Indonesian Tsunami. And Marcus, a young English boy, goes in search of his twin brother Jason who has been killed in a street accident. <br />
<br />
Presenting metaphysical images in film is not easy. If we can never imagine our own death, it is even more difficult to picture a satisfying or convincing afterlife. Dwelling for too long on the threshold of the invisible induces boredom and incredulity, which is the main reason why Eastwood offers only brief and gauzy glimpses into the other world. <br />
<br />
The movie opens with a horrifying scene of nature out of control. A Tsunami separates Marie and her boyfriend and reminds us that there is a thin division between the serene and the violent. After Marie is swept away, dies and comes back, she and her boyfriend stumble upon each other amid the wreckage of thousands of homes and lives. <br />
<br />
For all of the main characters things fall apart. Marie loses her job at a Paris television station and decides to write a book about Socialist Prime Minister Francois Mitterrand. George is laid off from his factory job after a downsizing agreement "cooked up" between the union and management. After losing his twin, Marcus is taken away from his drug-addicted mother and is sent to a foster home. <br />
<br />
Marie starts her book on Mitterrand but quickly decides that a book about politics is too mundane and turns to a memoir about her own death experience - a change in direction that she regards as an awakening of sorts. While the film isn't hectoring about the spiritual quest, you can almost hear Eastwood whisper that politics and the prosaic world are not significant given what awaits us. Forget about the struggles in the material plane and the things that we eventually lose. Concentrate on what really matters. <br />
<br />
Go back and read the conversation between Odysseus and the dead Achilles in <i>The Odyssey </i>for an alternative view of this life and the next. When Odysseus visits Achilles in the underworld he observes that Achilles rules as a King there as he had on earth. Achilles admonishes Odysseus to cling for as long as possible to life on earth as even the lowliest position there is superior to life among the bodiless phantoms in the kingdom of the dead. This life-affirming attitude was later turned upside down by tendencies within monotheism which saw the after-life as the real prize and reduced our current existence to mere preparation. <br />
<br />
The title of Marie's autobiography is <i>The Afterlife - A Conspiracy of Silence</i>. This is laughable of course as the search for the supernatural is a massive industry. Capitalism, which "endlessly assimilates," long ago transformed what passes for spirituality into a commercial enterprise. After the movie I Googled "Communicate with the dead" and generated 8 million references. While it is fairly easy to create a cultural guru or fad, deep faith cannot be willed or marketed into existence. As Michael Harrington has noted, "An isolated philosopher can dream a faith that should be, but only masses of people, responding to something very real within their own experience, can make a church." <br />
<br />
George has a different dilemma - in some sense he wrestles with the dilemma of the creative artist. He lies in bed at night listening to Dickens audiotapes and spontaneously travels to London for a Dickens tour. Searching for the sources of his artistic hero's literary work, George reject's his brother's (think of a shallow Hollywood agent) attempt to turn his unique talents into a business. Like a number of Dickens characters - Jacob Marley comes to mind - George lives in spiritual chains, paralyzed by a gift that is also a burden. <br />
<br />
In a way, Eastwood's exploration of this character and his "powers," is also an exploration of the hope and risks of artistic creation. What happens when you attempt to conjure the healing power of art and inspiration doesn't appear? What risks are you taking when the "miracles" you used to perform have become empty gestures? <br />
<br />
The most effecting of the three stories follows Marcus and his twin brother Jason. It's impact lies not merely with the immediacy of the loss, but because the story profoundly reminds us that we are the others that others think of. Marcus works his way through a number of charlatans and impotent Church figures before - like a Dickens street urchin - he finds George. When Marcus finally talks to his brother it doesn't amount to much but a few familiar cliches; in the afterlife you are both weightless (the thing that Achilles lamented) and "all things all at once." But Marcus' struggle to survive a death that is also the death of a big part of himself, is deeply moving. <br />
<br />
Eastwood finally attempts to create an image of order out of all this chaos and death. He looks briefly over the brink but pulls back to provide the audience with something comfortable and reassuring - mundane earthly love. <br />
<br />
George's power of intimacy comes through his hands. At the beginning of the film Marie reaches for a young girl who has been swept along with her in the flood. She yells to the girl, "Grab my hand." The last scene of the movie is Marie and George holding each others hands. The Hereafter returns to the here and now. After all the spiritual hokum Eastwood might just be saying, "reach out to one another." <br />
<br />
As for Francois Mitterrand, I definitely would have liked to have read a book about one of the political architects of the modern French social system that Nicolas Sarkozy is now trying to dismantle. With respect to Marie's book on the afterlife, I'll just have to wait and see. <br />
<b><br />
Further Reading</b><br />
<br />
Garrett Stewart - Death Sentences - Styles of Dying in British Fiction<br />
<br />
Michael Harrington - Politics at God's Funeral - The Spiritual Crisis of Western Civilization<br />
<br />
Roy Foster - W.B. Yeats - Volume II - The Arch Poet - I'm reading this one now and it is fascinating how much Yeats was obsessed with communicating with the dead through mediums, seances, automatic writing and even through a machine that supposedly received and amplified messages from the spirit world. A similar machine appears in <i>Hereafter</i>. Even so, he pushed himself away from the Ouija Board long enough to write the most lasting poetry of the Irish rebellion. <br />
<br />
Brian Friel - Faith Healer - Ireland's greatest living playwright explores the link between healing, artistic creation and sacrificeKelly Candaelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05906285455810166893noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3194433872677277427.post-25000608869208904292010-10-11T16:12:00.000-07:002010-11-07T10:07:20.914-08:00It's Kind of a Funny Story - Defending the Spirit of PlayCraig, the 16 year old protagonist of the film <i>It's Kind of a Funny Story</i>, commits himself to the local psychiatric hospital as the only alternative to jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge, whereupon he meets the usual head-case suspects. In one corner of his floor is the schizophrenic. Over there is the delusional paranoid. There is a depression wing populated mostly by teenagers. Muqtada is a catatonic Egyptian and Solomon is a Hasidic Jew who ingested 100 too many LSD tablets. I'll let you guess where that story line is headed. They are all harmless, lovable nuts - despite the fact that a couple of them have tried to kill themselves. The patients, outside of an occasional outburst, are not crushed by unbearable suffering. Genuine mental pain is not the stuff of comedy. They mostly go about their quirky merry way.<br />
<br />
The film is therefore not unlike the 1975 film adaptation of Ken Kesey's book <i>One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest</i>. The big difference in this current look inside the "nuthouse," is the absence of a Nurse Ratched, the Cuckoo's Nest embodiment of malevolent bureaucratic control who R.P. McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) ends up strangling. Dr. Minerva, the psychiatrist who "treats" Craig, oozes wisdom and concern. During therapeutic sessions she sounds like the psychologist Carl Rogers, one of the founders of the so-called humanistic school of psychotherapy, a post-Freudian branch which placed "unconditional positive regard" at the center of the therapeutic "encounter." "It's not surprising that you are disappointed about that Craig. I would be too." Humanist oriented psychologists generally provide herbal tea during their sessions. <br />
<br />
<i>It's Kind of a Funny Story</i> is cute and pretty much devoid of political content - unless you see the whole therapeutic apparatus itself as having political implications. Many names come to mind who have taken this position: Philip Rieff (<i>The Triumph of the Therapeutic</i>), Russell Jacoby (<i>Social Amnesia</i>), Barbara Ehrenreich (<i>Bright-Sided</i>), and the most incisive critic of the ethos of therapeutic bureaucracy, Christopher Lasch (<i>The Culture of Narcissism</i>, <i>Revolt of the Elites</i> and <i>The True and Only Heaven</i>). <br />
<br />
Early in the film Craig's parents come to visit him only to discover that he has had second thoughts about admitting himself to the hospital and wants to return to school. Craig's mother responds by telling him that "They (the psychiatrists) are professionals who can help in ways that we can't." Perhaps the filmmakers were making an ironic point or merely suggesting that the family is the place where you first learn that you will not get what you want. At any rate, I thought of Lasch when I heard the line.<br />
<br />
In his later writings - he died in 1994 - Lasch railed against what he called the "reign of specialized expertise" that he asserted grew out of the particular trajectory of modern capitalism. For Lasch, a centralized therapeutic culture embodied in the growing "helping professions," undermined democratic hopes by making citizens "clients" of state sanctioned "intervention" into our private and family lives. Workers were turned into mere consumers of the products of their labor by uniting sophisticated advertising techniques with modern technology. These insidious trends, Lasch argued, produced unhealthy dependency relationships and civic passivity. Moreover, in a society dominated by the belief that a person's social or class position is exclusively a result of their own abilities, the fight for social change is abandoned in favor of "self-realization." Class politics is internalized. <br />
<br />
As Lasch pointed out in <i>The Culture of Narcissism</i>, one of the primary counterweights to an increasingly controlled and rationalized world is play. In play, we engage in arbitrary inventions, risk and chance - all of the dynamics that have been expunged from our routinized work environments. It's not a coincidence that when Craig and Bobby, his older mental hospital mentor, want to escape their confinement they head for the same place that McMurphy and the Chief went for respite in Cuckoo's Nest - the basketball court. Without play, the poet Richard Hugo wrote, people face too often and too immediately their impending doom. <br />
<br />
According to Andrew Solomon, whose book <i>The Noonday Demon</i> is about his own struggle with depression, the opposite of depression is not happiness but vitality, the ability to let productive life instincts elaborate themselves. By the end of the film Craig begins to elaborate a different future, his survival becoming its own kind of sanity. <br />
<br />
The particular vision he outlines for himself would have made Christopher Lasch smile. He develops a craft - painting (hard work). He embraces the support of his family and friends (loyalty). He volunteers at the hospital he has just been released from (community). He jettisons his grandiose fantasies and immerses himself in the prosaic pleasures of everyday life (personal clarity). <br />
<br />
One of the last scenes in the movie has Craig skipping down the sidewalk alive to his own playful desire. There is no overriding architecture to Craig's social life - the kind that might be discovered or invented in a dynamic political movement - but he has made "progress," another idea that Lasch was deeply suspicious of. <br />
<br />
As I mentioned, Craig is only 16. I say give him time. Our society just might catch up with him. How's that for hope? <br />
<br />
<b>Further Reading:</b><br />
<br />
Christopher Bollas - Being A Character - Psychoanalysis and Self Experience<br />
Adam Phillips - Going Sane - Maps of Happiness<br />
Jefferson Cowie - Stayin' Alive - The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working ClassKelly Candaelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05906285455810166893noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3194433872677277427.post-16725143653759088332010-10-04T11:30:00.000-07:002010-10-12T11:17:35.724-07:00The Social Network and the Escape From SolidarityDespair is at the center of <i>The Social Network</i>; despair about the inability to connect, about the feeling that you don't matter, about being so inarticulate that you can't seem to get your message across, or that the message you think you are sending is not consistent with the message that people receive. All this is cast against the popular operating assumption that <i>Facebook</i>, the communications platform that Mark Zukerberg created, allows us to "connect" with millions of people we don't even know. <br />
<br />
A media conceit about Zukerberg is that he epitomizes the social stance of the rebel - a visionary out to destroy paradigms, a rule breaker of the historically necessary sort. According to Ben Mezrich, the author of the book from which the film draws its somewhat fictionalized account, Zukerberg is the "ultimate rebel revolutionary just fighting the good fight." David Denby, the New Yorker magazine film reviewer describes the film's director David Fincher as someone who has always been "obsessed with outsiders and rebels." <br />
<br />
Although I have not read Mezrich's book <i>The Accidental Billionaires</i>, after watching the film it was not clear to me what exactly Zukerberg was rebelling against. There was certainly a Harvard power structure (At the time of Zukerberg's attendance the President of Harvard was Lawrence Summers) that attempted to keep the students from doing stupid things to themselves or others, but the film doesn't portray it as any more "oppressive" than any well-heeled parent would want. And while Zukerberg obsesses about getting into one of the exclusive Harvard social clubs, the stakes don't seem particularly high. <br />
<br />
I was left with the sense that those who describe Zukerberg as a rebel use the term in a rather limited way, as someone who has a stubborn and rebellious entrepreneurial drive and a contentious personal style. If the film can be believed, he once attended a business meeting in his pajamas. But if you are worth hundreds of millions of dollars, it's not a particularly brave stunt. It usually takes more than adolescent acting out to make the ruling class nervous. <br />
<br />
There are other writers of course, who have offered a more profound definition of the rebel spirit. One of the most ambitious attempts was made by Albert Camus. His book, <i>The Rebel</i>, was published in 1951. For Camus, rebellion was a way of constituting your being - I rebel therefore I am. He distinguished between negative rebellions that derive from resentment (He draws extensively from German philosopher Max Scheler's book <i>Resentment</i>) and a positive rebellion that "breaks the seal" of prolonged impotence and "allows the whole being to come into play." Camus was making a case for exploited workers and those who lived under various forms of slavery and social oppression. For Camus, the true rebel refuses to be humiliated while avoiding the conclusion that others should be. <br />
<br />
Camus' rebels don't revolt by themselves. A key component of positive rebellion is solidarity, which justifies the faith and passion of revolt. The pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty describes solidarity as a capability for "imaginative identification" with the details of other people's lives, and suggests that we work to expand the range of "us" by keeping a lookout for the marginalized, those who are too often imagined as "they." <br />
<br />
It is not easy to do this as we are often more comfortable in our "little platoons," like the clubs that Zukerburg was bitter about not being invited into, or with anemic abstractions like "humanity." <br />
<br />
Unlike Zukerberg, Camus was a sensualist, an intellectual who felt more comfortable on a soccer field than with what he called the "professional humanists" who sat in Paris cafes. He knew the joy of "living among bodies and through one's body..." on the beaches of Algiers and in the combat of athletics. When he was young he was a goal keeper on his local soccer team, a place where he said he learned everything he needed to know about loyalty and fraternity. Camus lived with a constant feeling of exile and displacement, and it is here and only here where there could be a connection with Zukerberg.<br />
<br />
Zukerberg is not a "geek" as so many have described him, but someone who lacks character and feeling and what Camus called "a strange kind of love," that connects you to those who live in a state of social humiliation. <i>Facebook</i> is a mirror not a window into the lives of others. Despite the hundreds or even thousands of "Friends," the image we see when we look at it is mostly the purged mini-narratives of ourselves. <br />
<br />
When I was re-reading <i>The Rebel</i> for this review, an image kept coming to my mind. I tried to imagine Camus sitting in front of a computer waiting for a response from Sartre to his Friend request. Every time I thought of the image I laughed. <br />
<br />
For all the billions that Zukerberg has made, I just can't take him or his invention seriously. <br />
<br />
<b>Further reading:</b> <br />
<br />
Albert Camus - The Rebel<br />
Tony Judt - The Burden of Responsibility, Blum, Camus, Aron and the French 20th Century<br />
Richard Rorty - Contingency, Irony, and SolidarityKelly Candaelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05906285455810166893noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3194433872677277427.post-69623012646699813142010-09-25T12:30:00.000-07:002010-09-27T00:50:38.813-07:00Wall Street - Money Never SleepsWhile <i>Money Never Sleeps </i>ostensibly takes place amidst the cutthroat world of high finance, the real theme of the film is fathers - failed fathers, surrogate fathers, would-be fathers, the fathers of Wall Street - and the guilt they often carry. It is also about the struggle for success and how often we are muddled about how to talk about it, define it and live with it. <br />
<br />
Upon leaving prison, Gordon Gekko sets out to frame the time that he has left through two goals. He wants to reestablish a relationship with his now grown but estranged daughter and get back into the "game" of manipulating money, companies and people, the other part of his life that once provided meaning. While Gekko has already lost his son through a drug overdose while he was in prison, he is still not clear about which of his goals takes priority. He is, so to speak, emotionally over-leveraged. Jake Moore, an ambitious Wall Street investment banker, complicates matters as he is living with and plans to marry Gekko's daughter Winnie. <br />
<br />
Sigmund Freud wrote a paper in 1916 titled 'Those Wrecked by Success,' the product of his clinical work with patients who fell ill "upon fulfillment of a wish and put an end to all enjoyment of it." Freud wrestled with the implications of desire - the ways in which guilt can surface at the most unexpected times, turning the anticipated satisfaction of achievement into symptoms.<br />
<br />
The four main protagonists of the film - Gekko, Jake, Winnie and Bretton James (a contemporary version of Gekko's younger self) can't seem to succeed without also failing. If Gekko goes back to his old ways he loses his daughter. When Jake focuses too much on succeeding he loses Winnie. Winnie can't seem to distinguish between her father and Jake, even though she has agreed to marry him. And Bretton James, who runs a top investment bank and has Goya's <i>Saturn Devouring His Children</i> (a painting representing in part an uncontrollable appetite) on his office wall, is so hypnotized by his pursuit of success that he can only answer "more" when asked by Jake what his monetary end-game is. <br />
<br />
In analytic terms the characters are compulsives, determined to act out repetitive patterns that they are not aware of. Freud, who also wrote about repetition compulsions, outlined not so much the cliche that if we don't remember our (unconscious) past we are condemned to repeat it, but rather that we often lack the ability to remember in ways that are healthy - or at least in ways that allow us to develop a different vocabulary when talking about ourselves. It is pretty clear to Director Oliver Stone that this compulsion to repeat can paralyze not only individuals but a whole society. If, as the British psychoanalyst and essayist Adam Phillips suggests, the task of psychotherapy is to turn personal pain and crisis into meaning, then something similar can be said about an economic and social crisis. Politics is partly about who wins the battle of providing that meaning. <br />
<br />
For Phillips, a breakdown can often be the precursor of a breakthrough, where previously repressed questions find their way to the surface. Some people go "insane" while others develop healthier ways of living. Applied to a society - our society - we face the same question. Will the most recent failure of capitalism - not crisis of greed - presage a further repetition and breakdown or a different way of talking about and debating what we want to be successful at? If, as Jon Stewart suggests, the Tea Party is an insane wing of our social life, then who represents the healthy political patient who is confronting the dirty and repressed secrets of poverty and inequality? Can we, in other words, fail in a way that is more productive because we actually learn something from it?<br />
<br />
Stone, through the film's narrator, repeatedly invokes the word "insanity" to describe engaging in the same behavior but expecting a different result. The content of the film's economic message is not bad. During a talk at what looks to be a college, the fawning students cheer Gekko, now a celebrity criminal, when he channels historian Kevin Phillips to the effect that our country's economy has gone from manufacturing products to packaging and selling arcane financial instruments. Collateralized Debt Obligations anyone? We have a "disease" he says, that is "systemic and global." But the virtue of Kevin Phillip's book <i>Bad Money </i>is that he actually names the system - "global capitalism" - that organizes a large part of our lives and structures the logic of Wall Street. Stone, on the other had, lets Gekko get away with propounding the supposedly universal principle that the key drivers of human behavior are greed and envy. Greed is not good if it is used to explain too much, to reduce a historically contingent economic system to individual psychology. In fact greed is not an emotion that the vast majority of Americans have the ability to either experience or act upon. Most people are merely trying to survive. <br />
<br />
<i>Money Never Sleeps</i> lacks what C. Wright Mills called a "sociological imagination," the analytical ability to describe "the problems of history, the problems of biography, and the problems of social structure in which biography and history intersect." What Stone does show us is that in the tortured logic of Wall Street, a person or company can only succeed when another person or company is failing. The appropriate analogy is Las Vegas. <br />
<br />
Fathers disappear, are taken away, are thrown out or kill themselves. They also attempt to devour their children. But they also keep coming back to ask forgiveness and to reclaim their rightful place in the social and familial order. Wall Street is, after all, a very high end boys club. The movie implies that one of the only places of repose from the viciousness of economic life is the family - that haven in a heartless world. <br />
<br />
There are allot of shiny baubles in <i>Money Never Sleeps</i>: new motorcycles, diamond earrings, and shimmering dresses. They are commodities and therefore come with a dis-satisfaction guarantee. But other than a vaguely "lefty" website that Winnie runs and Jake's earnest belief in investing in hydrogen fusion as the source of environmental redemption, there is not much dissent against the powers that be. If money never sleeps, the rest of society apparently does. <br />
<br />
In this respect, at the end of the movie I felt like an activist's version of Bretton James. I wanted more. <br />
<br />
<b>Further Readings: </b><br />
<br />
Adam Phillips - Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored<br />
Adam Phillips - Flirtation<br />
Kevin Phillips - Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics and the Global Crisis of Capitalism<br />
Goya - Robert Hughes (see the last chapter for the Spanish political context of Goya's Saturn painting) <br />
C. Wright Mills - The Sociological ImaginationKelly Candaelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05906285455810166893noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3194433872677277427.post-89785775930713871822010-09-14T17:20:00.000-07:002010-09-15T07:38:35.380-07:00When Irene Dunne Sang "Solidarity Forever" By Harold Meyerson<i><b>When Tomorrow Comes</i>, the lefty-est studio film you never heard of</b><br />
<br />
Scour the lists of pro-labor American films, and I promise you, you will find no mention of the 1939 Universal melodrama <i>When Tomorrow Comes</i>. Do the same for feminist, or proto-feminist, or embryonically feminist American pictures, and again, you will see no mention of <i>When Tomorrow Comes</i>. <br />
<br />
It's not hard to understand why. To begin with, it's not an easy film to see: it doesn't appear to have been released as a DVD or video cassette. It doesn't even get a plot synopsis on the website of Turner Classic Movies, which suggests that even TCM's manically diligent cineastes haven't seen it. <br />
<br />
More fundamentally, a look at <i>When Tomorrow Comes'</i> credits doesn't lead you to think for a nanosecond that this will be a picture with provocative - let alone progressive - politics. It's a tear-jerking tale of thwarted love from the master of Thirties romantic melodrama, director-producer John Stahl. The screenplay is by Dwight Taylor, whose best known screenplays were for the Astaire-Rogers films <i>The Gay Divorcee,</i> <i>Top Hat</i> and <i>Follow the Fleet</i>. It stars Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer, who a little less than a year previous had starred in the classic weepie, Leo McCarey's <i>Love Affair</i>, and Stahl's film is clearly an attempt to cash in again on the Dunne-Boyer romantic chemistry. The bare-bones plot summation - waitress and world-famous concert pianist fall madly in love, but he is stuck in a hopeless marriage to his mentally ill wife, so waitress and pianist must part - doesn't suggest we are on the same political turf as, say, <i>The Grapes of Wrath</i>, which Fox released five months after Universal premiered <i>When Tomorrow Comes</i>. And should you be privy to the details of Irene Dunne's off-screen life - she was a devout Catholic and a staunch Republican - the idea that she'd star in a lefty picture is silly to the point of ridiculous.<br />
<br />
Even a more fleshed-out synopsis may not sound all that promising. In Act I, Boyer meets Dunne while dining in a Manhattan chain-restaurant, and falls for her. In Act II, he takes her away to his Long Island estate, where he serenades her on the piano (only then does she realize who he is), she sings a few bars (Dunne was the star of <i>Showboat</i>) and they are caught up in a ferocious hurricane which compels them to abandon their return to the city and spend the night in a church loft (lest you think any hanky-panky ensues) while the water threatens to wash over them. In Act III, the next morning, the storm has subsided, and Boyer tells Dunne that he is married. She flees back to the city; he finds her and introduces her to his wife, who has clearly descended into a state of delusional space-cadethood; the space cadet comes out of her trance just long enough to visit Dunne and tell her that while she (Dunne) can land any guy, she (the wife) has become so addled that she knows she can't so she is clinging to Boyer and hopes that Dunne will understand her predicament and give up any thoughts of horning in on her marriage. Dunne understands. She and Boyer have a tearful farewell, and he sails off to Paris.<br />
<br />
But what is it that causes Boyer to fall for Dunne? Let's look more closely at Act I.<br />
<br />
The film begins in the Manhattan restaurant where Dunne works - a vast, high volume, low-price joint that is part, apparently, of a citywide chain. The waitresses are buzzing about a meeting to be held that night at Unity Hall, where they will vote on whether to strike. One comically nervous waitress - Dunne's roommate, it turns out - is so flustered she drops her tray and breaks some dishes. "There goes my whole week's salary," she laments. "That's all going to be changed tonight," Dunne assures her. But the roommate fears that management will reject their offer and they'll be compelled to strike. Dunne reassures her that that's unlikely. "Our demands are reasonable," she says. Then she cautions her roommate not to speak so loudly, lest management spies overhear. "Walls have ears," she says, "and great big ones in Karbs Resturants," the name of the chain. <br />
<br />
At this point, the manager - an officious type we are meant to hate at first sight - snaps at them to get moving. A customer has just come in. "Feed him and get him out of here," the manager says. "Space is money at lunch time." The manager loathes his customers as much as he loathes his staff. <br />
<br />
The customer is Boyer, who is so entranced with Dunne that he pumps her roommate for info on where he could see Dunne again, which is how he ends up sneaking into Unity Hall for the union meeting - quite the most remarkable scene in the picture, and one of the most remarkable scenes, politically, in the entire inter-war major studio cinema. While a number of Thirties pictures favorably portrayed career women, this scene depicts working girls - in the parlance of the picture and the parlance of the times - as serious political actors who are able to conquer their fears and take on an employer that abuses and spies on them. <br />
<br />
The scene begins with one union staffer in the film - a young man who also has the hots for Dunne - reporting that their talks with management have gone nowhere. "We'll strike!" one waitress shouts. "No we won't," shouts another. "What chance do we have - a bunch of girls against an organization like Karb's?" "We're not a bunch of girls," another waitress replies. "We're a union standing together!"<br />
<br />
Quite the discussion follows. One waitress says she can't afford to strike; she is taking care of her mother. Another says she's taking care of her grandchildren because their father was killed in a strike; striking is the last thing she wants to do. With the debate growing more raucous - and sounding eminently plausible - some in the crowd ask Dunne to speak. <br />
<br />
"I don't know what right I have to speak," Dunne begins. "Perhaps none, because in a way I'm more fortunate than you." (That is, she doesn't have kids or parents to take care of.) <br />
<br />
"But I've worked with you girls and I've seen the worry and the fear on your faces. I've seen you tremble at the thought of losing your jobs. I've seen you struggle to make one penny do for two, the way you skimp and save and still never have an extra dollar for a new hat, a pair of stockings, any one of a million things a girl might want." <br />
<br />
At this point, Stahl cuts to Boyer, who is plainly entranced.<br />
<br />
"We've all heard these speeches tonight," Dunne continues. "Some of you have children. Some of you have parents, aged and sick, depending on you. And it's not for me or [the union staffer] to tell you what to do. I'd rather cut off my right arm than be responsible for a decision that would bring you more suffering or more hardship. <br />
<br />
"But we want the right to stand on our own feet, to enjoy life, to feel like free human beings. And you can't go on just hoping for these things. That's what [the staffer means] when he says you've got to fight. He knows nobody's going to hand them to you on a silver platter. You've got to go in there and make them listen. And if the only way to do that is to strike, then I say Strike!" <br />
<br />
Cheers ring out. A voice vote is taken; the waitresses shout their decision to strike. Irene Dunne - nice, Republican Irene Dunne, who in <i>Showboat</i> sang "Only Make Believe" and "Can't Help Lovin' That Man of Mine" - leads the waitresses in singing "Solidarity Forever." Honest. <br />
<br />
But the scene is remarkable not just because it's Irene Dunne who sings the anthem of American labor. It's also remarkable because it takes the narrative of American labor beyond where American labor itself, during its most dynamic decade, was taking it. While the Thirties saw a tumultuous uprising and unionizing of American workers in the country's leading industries - steel and auto, most of all - most of that unionization came among preponderantly male work forces, in unions that were entirely male-led. Even unions that were substantially female, like the clothing and garment unions, were entirely male-led. There were brilliant female unionists who came out of the left, of course (Millie Jeffrey in the UAW and Rose Pesotta in the ILGWU, to name just two), but they took a back seat within their union leadership. It was the only seat they were permitted to take. <br />
<br />
As for rank-and-file militancy in female-dominated occupations in the Thirties, it was a sometime thing. Teachers, at that point, weren't joining unions, nor were many office workers. The greatest outbreaks of mass militancy among female clothing workers had taken place at the height of the Progressive Era, when the needle-trade unions - the ILGWU and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers - were still forming and rank-and-file women leaders could still come to the fore. <br />
<br />
The vast majority of waitresses went through the Thirties with no trace of union ferment in their worksites - but there were exceptions. In his 1955 impressionistic history of the Thirties left, <i>Part of Our Time</i>, the great Murray Kempton recounts the sit-down strikes of Detroit-area waitresses and department-store clerks during the two months following the UAW's epochal (and successful) occupation of General Motors' factories in Flint. "You'll be sitting in the office any March day of 1937," Myra Wolfgang, recounting her days as a young organizer for HERE, told Kempton, "and the phone would ring and the voice at the other end would say, 'My name is Mary Jones; I'm a soda clerk at Liggett's; we've thrown the manager out and we've got the keys. What do we do now?' And you'd hurry over to the company to negotiate and over there they'd say, 'I think it's the height of irresponsibility to call a strike before you've even asked us for a contract,' and all you could answer was , 'You're so right.'"<br />
<br />
So the Unity Hall scene in <i>When Tomorrow Comes</i> captures that slice of the Thirties, but even amid that decade's labor turmoil, it was an unusual slice. In highlighting it, <i>When Tomorrow Comes </i>was as much a prophecy of feminism to come as it was a representative chronicle of Thirties women's activism. Precisely because it fuses the class-based activism of the Thirties with a feminist sensibility that was to grow in future decades - even as feminists,' and everyone's, class sensibilities declined - it actually depicts a kind of idealized left that never (or hardly ever)really was, as if the Thirties Left and the Seventies Left could magically combine. <br />
<br />
However far ahead of social reality <i>When Tomorrow Comes</i> may have been, it was even farther ahead, in its combination of class and gender politics, of anything else the studios were turning out. Films of the Thirties often featured assertive career women - the Rosalind Russell part in <i>His Girl Friday</i>, for instance. Others possessed a kind of class-and labor consciousness, which you can see in such films as <i>The Grapes of Wrath</i> and<i> Our Daily Bread</i>. But as for films that combine the quasi-feminism of the career-woman films with the labor consciousness of a handful of 30s productions - as for films in which the lead character is an assertive working-class woman asserting herself as a labor firebrand among her fellow female workers - well, there's <i>When Tomorrow Comes</i>. <br />
<br />
But the most remarkable thing about the picture when viewed today is what it assumes about its audience. Dunne comes across not just as a beautiful, caring woman but also as a gifted, charismatic labor leader - and she does so because this made her a more sympathetic character to the picture's audience, which was not a bunch of New York lefties, but, rather, middle-and working-class American women. If Dunne was going to be a potential home-wrecker, however unintentionally, the filmmakers mitigated this by making her an otherwise model citizen - that is, by making her the Irene Dunne incarnation of Mother Jones. That may have been a questionable calculation by 1939, when the New Deal fervor of the early and mid-Thirties had begun to wane, but it was a calculation that no studio would have let filmmakers get away with in any other decade in American history. The feminist union parable <i>Norma Rae</i> was made for a more socially conscious audience at a time (1979)when the great movie-going public of the pre-television age had long since fragmented into distinct sub-groups. <i>When Tomorrow Comes</i> was made for a much larger, less differentiated public: the women who flocked to romantic dramas about the travails of sympathetic heroines. Only in the Thirties would a studio bet that this mass audience would find Dunne more sympathetic because she organizes her fellow waitresses. <br />
<br />
In fact, though, that's precisely the reason why Boyer falls for Dunne. When he meets her after the meeting, what he says is, "You were superb. I've never heard anything like that. I've never met a woman before who could make speeches, call strikes, serve pancakes, and look beautiful at the same time." <br />
<br />
Where, o where, did this feminine ideal come from? Is there anything in the careers of writer Dwight Taylor and director John Stahl that would suggest they'd come up with <i>When Tomorrow Comes</i>? <br />
<br />
Perhaps there is. Taylor, the Astaire-Rogers specialist who wrote the script, was an elected officer of the Screen Writers Guild during the Thirties. He was also the son of Laurette Taylor, one of the great Broadway actresses of the first half of the 20th Century, much acclaimed for her unmannered, naturalistic performances (her last role was that of the mother in the original production of <i>The Glass Menagerie</i>). Stahl, who produced and directed the picture, often made "weepies" - indeed, in the Thirties, he was the master of the genre - in which assertive women were trapped or undone by the collision of their private passions with social constraints. In 1932, he teamed, for the first time, with Dunne in the film <i>Back Street</i>, in which Dunne, a feisty working woman, abandons her job and, for all intents and purposes, her life to become a kept woman of a married man she loves - skulking around back streets, isolated from other people, her life reduced to a relationship that cannot ever be publicly acknowledged. In 1934, Stahl made <i>Imitation of Life</i>, in which a light-colored African American woman rejects her mother to pass for white, with predictably tragic consequences. Clearly, Stahl and Taylor brought a combination of feminist, non-conformist, and unionist sensibilities to the project - a combination singularly absent not just from any other Irene Dunne picture, but any other picture during that period. <br />
<br />
<i>When Tomorrow Comes</i> is hardly Stahl's best picture, though. As sheer narrative, the three acts don't really cohere. The labor activism of the first act is swept away by the hurricane-like passion of Act II, though the reason Dunne has to go back to the city amidst the storm is because she has to picket the next day. (We do learn, near the picture's end, that the waitresses win their strike.) The conflict with Boyer's wife isn't even introduced until Act III, though it is the central drama of the film. <br />
<br />
But as an oddly assembled proto-feminist statement,<i> When Tomorrow Comes</i> does actually - if roughly - cohere. Boyer is bound to a relationship with a wife who needs him, but who is incapable, most of the time, of being in the world. He falls in love with a woman who is not only in the world but capable of changing it. Indeed, he falls in love with Dunne because she's capable of changing the world. <br />
<br />
Stahl and Taylor love her for this as well, for her leadership capacities as a woman and as a worker. They know that their audience - at least a good chunk of their audience - will love her for this, too. I miss that audience, and the American from which it sprung.<br />
<br />
Further Readings:<br />
<br />
Murray Kempton - <i>Part of Our Times: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties</i><br />
Dorthy Sue Cobble - <i>The Other Women's Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America</i>Kelly Candaelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05906285455810166893noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3194433872677277427.post-16631121037143665892010-09-03T13:09:00.000-07:002010-09-07T08:47:43.497-07:00The American - Starring George ClooneyI chose the new George Clooney film <i>The American</i> as my first movie to review without knowing much about it other than that the main character is a hired assassin and that the story takes place in the Abruzzo region of Italy. With the politically active Clooney in the lead role and the suggestive and politically loaded title, I assumed the film would deal with politics in some fashion. I was mistaken. While there is a fair amount of bloodshed in the film - three perfunctory shootings in the first five minutes - the context of the killings is left purposefully obscure. It is never revealed who Clooney's character - named Jack - is working for, what his purposes are, who he has killed and why, or the social or political impact of his "work." Nothing is known or revealed about Jack's past other than a military style tattoo on his shoulder indicating previous involvement in some branch of the US armed forces. <br />
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While the obscurity of the sources of violence and the randomness of its targets can be an artistic jumping off point for a philosophical or political critique of violence itself, it is clear that this is not what the filmmakers are after. Unlike Syriana, a previous Clooney film where the violence played out against the convoluted logic of Middle Eastern politics and perceived American interests, the violence and cruelty in <i>The American</i> is like a moral green-screen - the backdrop for a snapshot of personal anguish. This role for Clooney is a form of political devolution, from a film with characters that were highly politicized - or at least motivated by some understandable political end - to one stripped of politics but retaining the violence. It's really a film about someone trying to escape from self imposed isolation. <br />
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It is in this way that it can be seen as a type of American "political" film. Literary critic Irving Howe pointed out in his book <i>Politics and the Novel </i>that what in a European context would be called political ideology, in the United States often appears in the guise of religious, cultural or sexual issues. In Howe's view, "Very few American writers have tried to see politics as a distinctive mode of social existence, with values and manners of its own." In the United States, politics has been viewed by a large section of the American public and has often been portrayed in literature and on film as shallow, boring or inherently corrupting. For instance, Howe points out that at the end of Robert Penn Warren's <i>All The King's Men</i>, Governor Willie Stark's political enabler Jack Burden wanders in "an isolation that a wounded intelligence is trying desperately to transform into the composure of solitude." <br />
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Clooney's character Jack is clearly a wounded and isolated intelligence. He is a man who looks at the world through a lens, either of his photography camera or the scope of his rifle. The only time he clearly seems to focus on and enjoy what he is doing is when he is assembling a new custom weapon that he has been paid to build or during sex with a local prostitute. I'm not sure if you can describe sex as a craft, but judging from the reaction of Jack's lover, I believe she would assent to that word. Jack is good with his hands, even if they are bloody.<br />
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In preparing the new rifle, Jack plays a slick assassin's version of the village cobbler. He loses himself in the work, paying close attention to the shape of the gun barrel, concentrating on how the parts of the rifle fit together and finely tuning its shape and weight. During these moments of work he is rooted in the material world, in what sociologist Richard Sennett refers to in his book <i>The Craftsman</i>, as a "lost space of freedom." <br />
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The priest, who befriends Jack in the medieval mountain village where he is hiding, tells him that he has the hands of a craftsman, not an artist. Sennett argues that an egalitarian ethos can be derived from the realization that everyone can become a craftsman if they have the wisdom to see the virtues of craftsmanship and the discipline to develop those skills. Jack has the skills - he is a "good man," his prostitute lover tells him - but he is unable to use those skills in a communal way, outside of his insular and paralyzed emotional world. There is no use for his finely honed rifle except as a tool for killing. <br />
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The film takes place primarily in the Abruzzo region of Italy, a starkly beautiful mountainous region east of Rome. The location of the film is not far from Pescina, the village where the writer Ignazio Silone was born and is now buried. Silone, best known for his two novels <i>Fontamara</i> and <i>Bread and Wine</i>, which are both set in the Abruzzo, was a man who wrestled with the relationship between political means and ends, how to reconcile his religious beliefs with the discipline political parties require, and the historical fate of the peasants he grew up with and next to. In <i>The American</i>, the landscape is about aesthetics, a visual opulence that exists for the cinematographer to capture. In Silone's novels, the land is life and livelihood - and politics is the cruel fight over who works it, who controls it and who reaps its bounty. <br />
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For Silone's literary characters, unlike Jack, there is no escape from the individual and collective action that is the essence of politics. In Mussolini's Italy the protagonists of Silone's stories act in ways that often prove tragic. But Silone concluded that to remain passive was a spiritual betrayal, a tragedy in itself. An early member of the Italian Communist Party, he later left the organization, choosing to describe himself as a Christian without a church and a socialist without a party. <br />
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Early in the movie, the village priest Father Benedetto (perhaps not coincidentally the same name as the revolutionary priest in <i>Bread and Wine</i>) tells Jack that because he is an American he believes that he can "escape history." Benedetto admonishes Jack, suggesting that he has committed more than his share of sins and asks him if he wants to confess. Jack declines. His attempt to escape his reduced condition is not through a redemptive confession, but neither is it through joining a more buoyant social community. The only path forward that he sees is the same one that Silone's main character sees in Bread and Wine, "that the only way to realize the good life...is to live it." <br />
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Jack tries to "get out" by living the love that has eluded him. Wounded and bleeding, he drives to meet his lover at an edenic spot on a river outside of town where he has both taken target practice with his new rifle and refused a baptism of love with the prostitute earlier in the film. There is no escape here either as the river has been polluted by the shell casings his lover finds - the empty symbolic remains of his chosen work. <br />
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Jack presses a bloodied hand against the glass of the car's window shield - another barrier separating him from the life he could not live. It's not necessarily politics, but it sure is sad. <br />
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<b>Further Reading: </b><br />
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Bread and Wine - Ignazio Silone<br />
Fontamara - Ignazio Silone<br />
The Picaresque Saint - R.W.B. Lewis<br />
Politics and the Novel - Irving Howe<br />
Bitter Spring, A Life of Ignazio Silone - Stanislao G. Pugliese<br />
The Craftsman - Richard SennettKelly Candaelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05906285455810166893noreply@blogger.com4