God in Ruins

Flippant ranting.

I just walked by a case of Mountain Dew that had a big graphic of Yoda wielding a light saber.  Yoda should have never been given a light saber.  I said it.  I'll make the exact same argument for why "Hannibal" should never have been made.  Hannibal Lecter was no longer terrifying once they decided to film scenes of him outside of his cell and Yoda was not as powerful once he needed a light saber.  The fact that Yoda, initially, was more powerful without a light saber and the fact that Hannibal Lecter, initially, was deadly even while confined in a glass box created an other worldliness in my imagination that made them cinematic icons.

When are some of these world-class directors going to understand that the film on the screen is only half as potent as the film they're creating in my imagination?

Boys II Men

I'm struck by something Joseph Campbell once called "The Father Search."  It's a theme that appears in myths of every culture.  Often it is heard described as a "coming of age story,"  but I think that definition is too narrow.  Coming of Age indicates some sort of threshhold crossed over into maturity.  This happens usually in the early twenties sometime.  The Father Search allows for a birth-like transition that can take place at any time in a person's life.

The Father Search is a term coined from the myth of Telemachus' search for his father, Oddysseus.  Telemachus leaves as a boy and returns a man, basically.  A popular reference of this story would be Luke Skywalker.  He sets out into his life beyond his mother's home where trials then start to draw him from the shapeless boy indentified as Odysseus' son into the man identified as Telemachus.  Of course, he needs help along the way and Athena joins him as a mentor.  This is where things get interesting for me.

Myths are defined as myths and not stories because they have elements that collectively resonate with all of human experience.  Frodo needs Gandalf, Luke needs Obiwan, Arthur needs Merlin, Elisha needs Elijah, and Telemachus needs Athena.  Today we have something that a lot of young twenty-somethings are suffering through which has been called, "The Quarter Life Crisis."  It's the questioning of purpose and vocation that has struck starting with Generation X.  Of course, The Quarter Life Crisis isn't a recent phenomena, it's The Father Search.  Maybe where it starts to feel more like a crisis and not a search is when our shapeless boy can not find a mentor to guide him into becoming a hero.

As a boy standing on the precipice of becoming a man, my first instinct is to run to my father.  Father will take care of everything.  However, like most boys, my father is not around.  So I need a Helper.  Really, the Helper is far better suited for the journey I have to go on than the Father.  Fathers have an unfortunate instinct that tells them to fix their kid's problems.  That makes for a pretty crappy guide into adulthood.  It is only fitting that I set out on my journey to find my father who has the power to fix everything, only to discover through the trials along the way that I have become the man and, if anything, father needs me to take care of him.

But The Father Search can take place at any time.  Most men say they secretly feel like boys trapped in a man's body.  Their Father Search may have been truncated early on because they didn't find their Helper.  So there are grown men, parents now, who have yet to go on their Father Search.  They can be spotted with a little looking.  In a nutshell, in all sorts of different scenarios you'll see them running away.  I have a friend who's dad drives each Saturday from Chicago to Wisconsin to fill up his gas tank.  He claims he does it because gas is cheaper in Wisconsin.  It doesn't matter that he burned through a tank of gas just to reach the cheaper gas prices.  He's running away from Saturday mornings, intimidated by the emotional needs of a wife and three kids.  Monday through Friday he's a false hero at work.  He's a 55 year old man who needs to go on his Father Search.

Then there is his son.  He is starting who is own Father Search which is to say, he is looking for the thing to take care for him and in that looking, with some help, he will hopefully find that he is the strong one who is here to take care of others.  The boy will die along the way and be replaced with the man.  Another way of looking at it is that the thoughts and heart of a boy will be put to death.  In their place will be the thoughts and heart of a man.  Which brings me to my controversial question:  When I consider the recent "phenomena" of the Quarter Life Crisis and the parallel phenomena that Sony now sells more video games to adult males than children, how many men really bother to go on their Father Search anymore?

Patio Man: Posted for the sheer pleasure of it.

The following is an excerpt from a book that is bringing me great joy these days.   It's David Brooks' book, On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) In the Future Tense.

In the section entitled "The Grill-Buying Guy," Brooks describes the mental visions of a single typical suburban man (known as Patio Man) as he stands at the checkout counter of Home Depot buying his overly equipped grill:

In his mind's eye, Patio Man can see himself cooly flipping the garlic-and-pepper T-bones on the front acreage of his new grill while carefully testing the citrus-tarragon trout filets simmering fragrantly on the rear.  On the lawn below, his kids Haley and Cody frolick on the weedless community lawn that is mowed twice weekly courtesy of the people who run Monument Crowne Preserve, his townhome community.

Haley, the fourteen-year-old daughter, is a Travel-Team Girl who spends her weekends playing midfield against similarly pony-tailed, strongly calved soccer marvels such as herself.  Cody, ten, is a Buzz-Cut Boy whose naturally blond hair has been cut to lawnlike stubble, and the little that's left is highlighted an almost phosphorescent white.  Cody's wardrobe is entirely derivative of fashions he has seen watching the X Games.  Patio Man can see the kids playing with child-safe lawn darts along with a gaggle of their cul-de-sac friends, a happy gathering of Haleys and Codys and Corys and Britneys.  It's a brightly colored scene--Abercrombie & Fitch pink spaghetti strap tops on the girls and ankle-length canvas shorts and laceless Nikes on the boys.  Patio Man notes somewhat uncomfortably that in America today the average square yardage of boyswear grows and grows, while the average square inches in girls' outfits shrinks and shrinks.  The boys carry so much fabric they look like skateboarding Bedouins, and the girls look like preppy prostitutes.

Typically, I'm not interested in books or films that poke fun at one person (or people group) for the sake of a laugh.  So it should be noted that Brooks' book satyrizes not just the cavernous existence of suburbanites, but of all different types of Americans.  The truth that is hitting me is this:  the shallowness of our existence is not reflected in where we choose to live, but in the decision Americans tend to make, whether Artsy Hipster or Patio Man, to surround ourselves with people who are the same as us.

Jolie Cruises to the Holmes Pitt.

I am not the first to express my revulsion at what has become the cheapest and most profitable rainmaking device in Hollywood, fake love.  If you haven't been through the checkout aisle at the grocery store in the past year, stop reading now.  For those who actually believe it is mere conicidence that Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes have suddenly spawned a high profile romance within weeks of the two biggest summer blockbusters (Batman Begins and War of the Worlds) opening, I am here to now set you free. Love, marriage, realtionships, and parenthood seem to have become the defiled territory of cheap Hollywood promotion.  Evidence, by the end of the summer Holmes and Cruise will be discreetly disengaged for personal reasons that their publicists will say should remain between them.  I.e. they never gave a shit about eachother in the first place. As a father and husband, I am enraged that the restraint, effort, pain, and sheer joy I live through on a day to day basis in relationship with my wife and daughter would be trivialized to get people into the movie theater to watch aliens.  How did we ever get this far?  A question that looms in the back of my mind.  One of my favorite voices of reason in the world of cinema, a girl and a gun, addresses the question inadvertently.  Could it be that the simple answer is a lack of creativity?  Maybe fear of creativity would be a better phrase for it.  It must be more complex than that.  But please think it over as you read her post from June 15, The Evil Empire.

Shakespeare Behind Bars and Grizzly Man

Alright, two documentaries I saw at the Waterfront Film Festival blew my pants off for two totally different reasons.  Shakespeare Behind Bars (dir. Hank Rogerson) and Grizzly Man (dir. Werner Herzog) both crack open the hardened shell of an audience and make us look at the true human soul inside characters who otherwise could be immediately dismissed with preconceived ideas.  I really can't say enough about these films.  There is nobody I wouldn't recommend them to.  So I have to limit the focus here to what was most important to me about the films and why I walked out of both of them knowing that my life is better for watching them. 

Both seem to have titles that almost taunt the audience to walk into the theater with a preconceived idea so the directors can demolish it.  One because it evokes two things: Shakespeare and prison, two terribly unmarketable icons for the multiplex theaters.  The other because it sounds like a Pulp Magazine monster, "Grizzly Man."  However, Shakespeare Behind Bars transcends any rudimentary 1:1 story about Shakespeare or prison, and Grizzly Man by the end is almost Herzog's tongue-in-cheek joke of a title he gives to his film.  Knowing how intimate you, the audience, will be with the depths of this Grizzly Man's soul there really is no title to capture who he was.  So why not Grizzly Man?

Curt Tofteland has been volunteering on a weekly basis with prisoners in Kentucky for ten years now to direct the Shakespeare Behind Bars program: 30 inmates who rehearse nine months to perform one show.  Through a friend I was given the opportunity to have breakfast with Curt Tofteland and Hank Rogerson, director of the documentary.  As I tried to hang words on what the documentary meant to me, Curt just nodded with a knowing smile.  He told me that Shakespeare isn't just a literary icon, but the writer who captured raw humanity better than anyone ever has.  Which is why he brought Shakespeare to the prisoners. 

24 hours a day, 7 days a week, year after year these inmates wear a hardened mask, a false-self who feels no pain.  It's survival of the fittest and softness is not rewarded in prison.  But for the 30 inmates involved with the Shakespeare productions, honesty is a mandate.  They are cast by their peers in roles that fit their background and their crime.  In their rehearsals they push each other to go deep, to find honesty, to not act but really wear their character, which for a lot of them means wearing their own skin for the first time.  From the screen, their souls became palpable during their rehearsals as I watched them discover for the first time the true man behind the label "prisoner," "deviant," "convict."

There is no way to passively watch Shakespeare Behind Bars because as these men discover their own authentic humanity, it becomes obvious that those whom society might label "monsters" are truly human and humans desperate for forgiveness.  As one inmate says, "I want the chance to do something to redeem myself so that when I leave this earth I won't only be remembered by the worst thing I've ever done."  It's easy to say somebody is a criminal and needs to be withdrawn from society and revoked of their freedoms that they took for granted.  However, after watching this film it raises something far more difficult to determine, which is the question of when has justice been served and when is it time to forgive a man who has truly changed?  Shouldn't we all have the chance to change?  What if you change and yet society won't remove that label of "monster" so they can see you for who you have become while behind bars?

Werner Herzog delves deep into the man Timothy Treadwell (the Grizzly Man), a self-proclaimed protector of wildlife who for 13 summers went into the Alaskan wild and lived with the Grizzlies only to be brutally killed by one.  Most of the footage used in this documentary is taken from the camera of Treadwell himself who was single handedly shooting hundreds of hours of video thinking it would someday be cut into a television program like The Crocodile Hunter.  Treadwell is a laughable character.  With the first shot Herzog lets us know that his subject is no wildlife expert and, if anything, he's a little crazy.  His childishness is even creepy in a way that I can only liken to Michael Jackson.  Treadwell goes into the wild and talks to these 800 pound Grizzlies who could rip his arm off in a moment as if he's running a Day Care.  In some ways, for Treadwell, he really is.  That opening scene evoked some giggles from me and most of the audience, but, as a documentarian shouldering his responsibility like a champion, that was the last time Herzog let us laugh at his subject.

Timothy Treadwell was by no means looked at as a passive camper.  He saw himself as a hero protecting the wild animals from civilization.  In a lot of ways his courage to not conform to the pressures of society made him a hero.  Many of the locals in Alaska felt he was violating a sacred code.  It is an unspoken rule that the wild Grizzlies should never become accustomed to man.  But the bear kills and eats Treadwell.  Was one man really taming the wild Grizzlies to civilization, or was nature passively waiting like slow moving predator to put the final period on civilization's hubris?  When man goes into the wild, sooner or later, man will come face to face with his own insignificance.  It's a little fatalistic, but true.  So Herzog's Timothy Treadwell makes us look at the smallness of our existence.  In a sense it's freeing because one can't look at the smallness of life without asking themselves, "Alright.  What the hell am I really doing with the short time I've been given?"

I believe that Herzog sets the gold standard in documentary filmmaking with Grizzly Man.  Treadwell's footage is littered with some of the most sensational moments to hit the big screen and Herzog doesn't let us see any of them.  Likewise, Hank Rogerson makes us understand his prisoners as human beings first.  So when he reveals their heinous crimes, they somehow become even more human.  For me, the word I use is human.  Maybe others might say the men in these films become authentic or sympathetic.  Whatever word is used, Shakespeare Behind Bars and Grizzly Man showed me what a shallow prick I am whenever I label another human being as "silly," "deviant," "monstrous," "retarded," "stupid," "unforgivable."

Sleeping it off: The Waterfront Film Festival

All honor and recognition I give up to the Waterfront Film Festival.  Hopwood DePree and the gang finished another succesful year in creating the most friendly party monster of a festival I know of.  The films they had there were some of the best on the festival circuit, dotted with some more daring fare for people like me who enjoy the process of exploration as much as the film itself.

I met several filmmakers who I considered to be raw genius in the process of honing their skills.  There was an unending flow of the Waterfront Ale (provided by our own New Holland Brewing Company).  Most importantly, there were a few special friends, on the short list would be a girl from the home-state of Michigan whose out in LA tearing it up.  Rebecca G. is this Charlie Brown's Peppermint Patty for the weekend. 

Soon to come:  writing on Shakespeare Behind Bars, Grizzly Man, and others that I consider to be very noteworthy from the festival.  Right now, I must recooperate from Sunday Night's self-imposed Dance Marathon (see below).

Jank London, John Cassavetes, and a guy on a bus.

Most of you don't have to scour the nooks and crannies of my ramblings to discover that I have a pretty big crush on a certain filmmaker: a Mr. John Cassavetes.  What you may not know is that I have strong affection for another, older gentleman: a Mr. Jack London.  In fact, I keep a little copy of Call of the Wild in my bag and read it on the bus most mornings.

Call of the Wild is one of those books people often say, "Oh yeah, I think I read that in eighth grade.  It's about a dog, right?"  Well yes, your hack English teacher made you read it before you were old enough to understand that, no, it's not just about an F-ing dog!

I did not read the book in eighth grade.  My class read The Yearling.  Deers.  I stumbled across Jack London in adulthood when I read Into the Wild, John Krakauer's investigation into the life of an Ivy League graduate turned vagabond who divests himself of all material possessions.  Years later his corpse is discovered in an old bus in the forests of Alaska.  With him is a copy of Call of the Wild and the words "Jack London is God!" scrawled on the wall next to his bunk.

For many months now I've felt a disparate connection lingering in the air between my Mr. London and Mr. Cassavetes.  The connection may even reach as far as a 90 lb. corpse in a broken down bus in Alaska.  The following is an excerpt from Call of the Wild about Buck the dog's transformation that begins when he's kidnapped from Southern California and dumped into life as a sled dog in Alaska:

And not only did he learn by experience, but instincts long dead came alive again.  The domesticated generations fell from him.  In vague ways he remembered back to the youth of the breed, to the time the wild dogs ranged in packs through the primeval forest and killed their meat as they ran it down.  It was no task for him to learn to fight with cut and slash and the quick wolf snap.  In this manner had fought forgotten ancestors.  They quickened the old life within him, and the old tricks which they had stamped into the heredity of the breed were his tricks.  They came to him without effort or discovery, as though they had been his always.  And when, on the still cold nights, he pointed his nose to a star and howled long and wolf like it was his ancestors, dead and dust, pointing nose at star and howling down through the centuries and through him.  And his cadences were their cadences, the cadences which voiced their woe and what to them was the meaning of the stillness, and the cold, and dark.

The generations that came before me have slowly been domesticated.  The life was beaten out of my great-grandfather who toiled as a share cropper on another man's land.  He left his wife and children for a bottle and a fuck every now and again.  So my grandfather had to drop out of school in the eight grade to support his mother and brothers and sisters.  He went to work on an assembly line building school buses for forty years.  My old man is gifted with the ability to make music people love, but his fear drove him toward the false security that large homes and fancy cars promised to him back when he was a paperboy in a working class neighborhood.  And then there's me.

I'm drawn to guys like Jack London and John Cassavetes because, although they never found a fit with the world around them, they saw through the bullshit.  Cassavetes scraped together cash he didn't have by begging, borrowing, and mortgaging his house to make his films.  He had a sense of the shortness of life and the leanness he'd have to adapt to in order to live the way he wanted to live.  Domesticated generations fell from him.  Wildness came back to him as a filmmaker, much the same way it must have come back to that young man in the bus before some rancid seeds poisoned him.  Cassavetes, like London before him, became a voice that echoed to the human race our woe and what to him was the meaning of the stillness, and the cold, and the dark.

I'd like to be wild like that, but I'm not there yet.  The leanness still scares me and the domesticated generations are hanging on real tight.  But even in writing this I'm working on falling in line with these men whose voices became so clear the world had to stop up their ears and call them crazy.  "That's a book about a dog."  "That was a really slow movie about a guy who owns a strip joint."  "That's the story about a crazy kid who gave away his car and starved to death in a bus in Alaska."

Steven Spielberg: Painter of Light

Over lunch with a couple of friends we got into a discussion about this quirky type of person who is born with immense artistic gifts, yet seems to be entirely driven in life to have commercial appeal (Jar-Jar Binks suddenly comes to mind).  Steven Spielberg naturally came up.  Then such a great quote came from my friend's lips,

"Steven Spielberg is the Thomas Kinkade of cinema."

I'll let you think on that for a while.

Hardcore

So I watched Paul Shraeder's Hardcore this weekend.  He's getting a lot of attention from me right now.  Living in Grand Rapids the last several years I've often heard the movie described as a malicious satire on the Dutch Calvinism that is so prevalent in this neck of the woods.  At a glance Hardcore looks mean, I suppose.  A teenage girl, Kristen Van Dorn, leaves for the Young Calvinist Convention and doesn't return.  Her father finds out some months later she's been making hardcore stag films.  So a sheltered Christian girl runs away to find freedom in a life of  debauchery.  Sounds like a harsh criticism of religion if there ever was one, but it's not.

I suppose it didn't help that Paul Shraeder intentionally chose the working title Providence as to avoid any contraversy while shooting in Grand Rapids.  Hardcore is a film about a man who has done everything right....