God in Ruins

Matewan, part 1

David Webb Peoples, the screenwriter for Unforgiven (1992), drew the bulk of his research For that film from a book called The Shooters (1976).  Among many misconceptions that the book debunks about the Old West is that of The Outlaw.  The typical convention around outlaws in the movies basically follows this path:

1.  Outlaw comes to town.
2.  Timid townsfolk don't want any trouble.
3.  Marshall steps in to say hello and communicate on behalf of the townies that they don't want any trouble.
4.  Shortly thereafter, the trouble begins.
5.  The Marshall takes action.

In the movies, the problem seems to stem when the term "outlaw" is only applied to a working class type criminal.  The reality in the Old West was that some outlaws wore black hats and others worked in mahogany paneled offices.  The common man felt cheated and oppressed by the rich and, therefore, celebrated outlaws who were viewed as exacting a sort of Robin Hood type vengeance.  Only in the Old West, Robin Hood didn't pass along the spoils.

This common theme then comes up in the more factual accounts of the Old West:

1.  Outlaw comes to town.
2.  Town is ecstatic over being payed a visit by such a celebrity.
3.  Outlaw tends to drink a lot and sleep with town's girls.
4.  The town slowly realizes they need to get rid of the morally corrupt Outlaw.
5.  The community takes action.

Throughout American history we have mythologized, for better or for worse, the Little Guy who steps outside of the law to take on the Big Guys.  Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath immediately comes to mind.  A working man who is forced to make one of two choices:  Step outside the law and defend others like himself or work within the law and have his inherent human dignity ground into dust.

But in John Sayles' film, Matewan (1987), another choice is explored.  Many have criticized Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath as sentimentalizing to heavily the sharecroppers plight.  Some may make the same criticism about Sayles' film which sympathizes with West Virginia coal miners trying to unionize in 1920.  In all fairness, I too would probably sentimentalize the plight of the American sharecropper or coal miner had I been around to stroll through their shanty towns during the Great Depression.  But rather than focusing on the choice one man needs to make, in Matewan Sayles goes deeper into the power found in forging a community.

Before I get too lost sojourning through my own thoughts let me say,

See Matewan.

It delivered on so many different levels.  So, so, so good.  I sat down after a full day's work and a full evening's baby caring and house choring.  I put in the disc thinking I would look at the first half-hour or so, nod off to sleep, then decide in the morning whether or not to keep it checked out.  Two hours later there were two wrinkly spots on my shirt where I had been clenching my chest.

That said, I realized why, as I mentioned in my last post, I cried during Finding Nemo.  It was in the final moments when the blue fish (Dorie?) gets caught in a net with a big school of fish.  Nemo goes into the net to tell all of the fish to swim down.  The thousands of fish in the net stop flailing around to save themselves and collectively focus on swimming down toward the ocean floor.  Then the crane hauling the net up from the water breaks and falls into the sea.  That was when the tears started flowing.

Why?  I'm not totally sure.  But it was resonating in the same place as last night I watched the coal miners trying and failing and trying again to organize a union.  Every time they split their energies or allowed racism to divide them, the union began to slip through their fingers.  Every time they reduced themselves to seeing each other as a bunch of human beings sharing in one another's struggles, The Company trying to bust up their union would wilt.

I'm thinking that my recent sensitivity to on-screen violence and my sensitivity for hopeless masses overcoming the odds by working together are some how married.  It was in each miner finding respect in the other man's  humanity where they could join together to become something altogether more powerful than any one man could be alone.  Like those fish caught in the net.  Each one had to hold prisoner his own instinct to save himself and realize that his survival could only be found with the fish surrounding him.

If I can't find compassion for my fellow man, I can't possibly see him as an equal.  Then I pursue saving my own neck and the union falls apart.

True Confessions

True Confession #1:  I have to admit that I get really excited when somebody I've never met takes a step beyond commenting to reach out via email.  So I was grinning when I got an email from ACM regarding my post Still Wrestling.  I was simply going to reply with another email, but ol' ACM got me ponderin' on an area I felt was post-worthy.  Hopefully, he (I'm taking a leap hear to assume Andy, in this instance, is a name attributed to a male) doesn't mind me posting an excerpt from his email:

"Thanks for the reply and the erudite discussions held on your blog.

I see your point about how fictional voyeurism may cross over into our real-world consciousness, and I agree that the thought is troubling. I know that the public likes to scoff at the notion that certain modes of fiction, like violent movies and raucous music, have something to do with real world violence – school shootings, etc. – but I do believe that personal responsibility can only be partially accountable for violence and the like.

Education, continuous education, is really one of few means of shaping someone’s personal responsibility in the first place. If their sense of ethics is not well formed by education from parents, school teachers, etc., than violent yet successful fictional characters like Tony Soprano may serve as a model of success for some people (adults included).

I am not sure if that is exactly what makes you sensitive to the showings of the Sopranos, but I believe it is a point to be considered nonetheless. I will still watch the show, not because I support the violence or laundering, but because I am firm in my convictions that I the Sopranos are purely fictional family, and if they were not just fictional, than a family to be reprimanded and prosecuted quickly. (I also watch the show because it has a good story line and a sneering sense of humor.)"

Hear, hear, Andy.  True Confession #2:  I had to look up "erudite" in the dictionary.   The definition I found for "erudite" is "learned."  I thought that was funny.  How erudite am I if I had to look up what the word means?  Another definition which I thought might be more appropriate was  "...Erudite meaning “learned” is supposed to have become rare except in sarcastic use during the latter part of the 19th century..."

True Confession #3:  The Sopranos has long been a guilty pleasure (or just a pleasure) of mine.  It is rare for a show to use so much subtext, and therefore treat me like I'm intelligent.  I also agree, education is more the measure of how we as an audience relate to a show rather than simply what is simply put on the screen.  I do not subscribe to the point of view that somehow TV and school shootings are directly linked.  I feel that kind of  propaganda has a serious 1950's era denial that says, "If we don't see insanity, then there is no insanity."  Some people believe that restoring morality means closing the curtains on viewing immorality.  I believe that kind of  approach is akin to trying to kill bacteria by leaving it in a dark, wet place.

But thinking about "continuous education" reminded me of something a man once said, "Children learn nothing from what their parents say, but everything from what they do."  I am young enough to have grown up in an education system that was trying to teach me on the no-win consequences of violence, but where my thoughts on this have really begun to take shape has been entirely outside of the classroom.  I have a friend who has what I am tempted to describe as an allergic reaction to violence.  Together we have watched all kinds of films from different eras and I've seen him wince at the most muted violence from older films that would, today, receive a G rating.  His behavior for a long time puzzled me.   Then, around the time my daughter was born, for reasons I can't begin to articulate I started to develop my own allergy toward violence.  I started to see the characters on-screen more directly as human beings.  I think John Cassavetes saw his characters this way and I was watching his films quite a bit at the time.

True Confession #4:  Then a really strange thing happened.  It became harder and harder for me to look at people in real life as characters.  For example, there's The Homeless Guy or The Prostitute.  These are more character types of people that I relate to rather than human beings.  I found myself feeling compassion toward perfect strangers.  It became more difficult for me to scoff at what I consider to be the Other.  Rather, I was feeling pity or anger or both, but all the while wondering how this person came to be who they are.  Maybe I have begun thinking this way because I have a baby at home and, on some level, everyone I see started off just like her.

So I've started to connect the characters I see on-screen as real human beings, the same way I'm seeing characters in my life more as human beings.  Thus I've been exploring this rabbit-hole question of can we differentiate between characters in our life and characters we see on-screen as cleanly as we think we can?  I mean, wouldn't most actors say their craft is ultimately about becoming that human being they portray when the camera is rolling?  So that, momentarily, the line between performance and real life is erased?  Purely based on my experience it seems that, on some deep and murky level, maybe we do crossover how we view people on-screen with how we view people off-screen, at least just a little bit.

True Confession #5:  Without going into details over the how and why, last night I found myself watching Finding Nemo and at one point I was crying real life tears over computer generated, talking fish.  I'm not proud of it, but it's true.

To take this discussion one step further, I'll refer to an observation made by David Brooks in On Paradise Drive (I should be receiving a percentage on the sales considering how much I write about this book).  It's no little known fact that relationships on college campuses are going more the way of packs, where in everybody is friends and those friends come with benefits (hooking up, blowjobs, sex, what have you) but it is purely an economical form of pleasure with no emotional attachment to get messy with.  In this instance, the women are far more sexually liberated than they were in previous generations, but ironically the men are acting even more chauvinistic than in previous generations (ref:  Girls Gone Wild Vol. 1 - ∞).  Brooks has witnessed (and so have I) that chauvinism seems okay because the guys play it off with irony, like their just playing a character.  It's not real.  But the blowjobs are real, and the fact that they aren't cultivating intimacy is real, and the decision to hook up based not on a person but purely on physical appetite is real.  All of those things lend themselves to the idea of male chauvinism, but the guys are just fooling around.  All of that bitches and hos and show-me-your-tits talk is just funny and ironic.  They are just guys playing a type of fictional character in real life which, coincidentally, falls in line with their real life lack of intimate relationships.  It's all just an entertaining coincidence. 

The line between a fictional character and a real human being is crystal clear.  It's simple.  One is real and one is fake.  Obviously.

Exciting news from Vegas. Yes, Vegas.

This report from Magnify Media has some sinister-giggle inducing implications.  "Future Tech: Content Creation is King at CES," By Steve Rosenbaum briefly describes a handful of new innovations in the world of Motion Pictures.  Wrap up all of these exciting new gadgets and gizmos into a ball and I see some seriously disruptive innovation barreling down the pike toward Hollywood.

The question this article brings up for me is:  What image will our children think of when they hear the word "filmmaker?"

Will it conjur up the image of a thoughtful man with salt & pepper hair sitting in an Eames Lounge chair overlooking the Pacific from his Malibu mansion?  Or that same man peering through the viewfinder of a Panavision camera?  Or will "filmmaker" conjur up the image of a homegrown, scraggly, local fellow running around with a camera and a backpack full of gear?

The possibilities are endless.

George and Me

In the recent dialogue I had with agirlandagun (See Previous Post), I began to wonder if it was serendipitous that our bandying of thoughts and opinions came on the heels of my reading David Brooks' book On Paradise Drive.  I enjoy George's blog and, upon reflection, I was well positioned for a sound academic rebuke which I feel I am the better for.  By the way, thanks George for taking the time to share your passion.  In any case, I'm glad I was able to incite that passion and I'm glad you're reading.  I think it is safe to say that George and I are from two different generations.  When these generations clash (which is most common in a university setting but, gleefully for me, recently happened in the blogosphere) I think we both come out sharper and stronger.

One of many observations David Brooks' makes in On Paradise Drive is that this current generation of college grads is the most achievement oriented and, perhaps, praiseworthy generation in recent history, but this generation has a real aversion to having a strong opinion about anything.  Heated debates that used to take place in the classroom are dwindling because the mindset that "college is a place I go to be formed" has been replaced by "college is a place I go to reach the next level of achievement."  Heated, cross-generational debate is counterintuitive to making the grade and moving on to the next level.  Let me use David Brooks' own words to help bring clarity.  In the following passage, although he writes of professors and students, I think a larger generational gap can also be extracted.

"The faculty at most schools is significantly to the left of the students.  The students know this and accept it as part of the inevitable structure of the universe.  They know who the radical professors are and regard their radicalism as an endearing blemish, the way a professor's absent-mindedness would have been regarded in an earlier generation.  The weird thing is that while most students don't share the radical ideologies, they do find them convenient.

Truth is indeterminate, the (once) cutting edge literary critics argued.  Texts can be deconstructed in an infinitude of ways, and words are signifiers open to a diversity of meanings.  Every point of view deserves respect.  The enlightened person should be open to everything--opinions, lifestyles, and ideologies--and closed to nothing.  One should never judge The Other harshly, but should respect minority or multicultural alternatives.  These notions may have been promulgated by people who thought of themselves as radicals--they were French deconstructionists, tenured revolutionaries, or transgressive countercultural provocateurs.

But these ideas are perfectly suited to the ethos of the achievement-oriented capitalist.  After all, why should the achiever want to make enemies or waste time in angry conflict?...  Easy going tolerance is energy efficient....  In other words, the radical ideas that were first espoused in fits of protest and anger--ideas that were meant to tear down reactionary hierarchies and question the foundations of truth--now seem like convenient intellectual habits for people of mild disposition and strategizing minds."

In my personal perception (and I'm making a point to disclose that now, thanks George) there is a hazy look of  confusion that often passes between George's generation and my generation.  Now I know George was rebuffing me on historical context around Bresson's film and the such, but I'm widening the lens out here to view the interaction as a whole.  You see, in the previous generation radical ideas of tolerance were a holy grail to dedicate one's life to fighting for.  But, for the most part, tolerance has been adapted into the mainstream of my generation's thought.  It has maybe in some ways been commercialized.  It's more economic for everybody to get along.  Getting along saves time and energy.

So I'm watching Bresson wondering, "what is this guy fighting for?"  It is not a given for me as it was in previous generations that there exists a hierarchy and it must be defied.   It is not embedded in my generation's DNA to take on radical ideas for the sake of discovering the depths of truth.  It is more embedded in me to take on radical ideas for the sake of creating a deeper economy, like the Google guys did.  They fought for the better Search Engine and won, and they did it their way; wearing vintage T-shirts and riding Segways.

What excites me about the dialogue with George is that maybe in some ways we were bridging the gap.  His passion for Bresson and the radical ideas of his day mingled and got messy with me, a guy coming of age as part of a generation with very little radicalism infused into it.  Like I said before, I think I'm the better for it.

I say all of this to say that I'm thankful for George and I'm glad we wasted some time to fight over a piece of art and how it should be seen.  Hopefully we've come to a greater understanding around what we believe is that which is imprisons us and that which should be defied until the last, raspy death-rattle.  No matter what our age may be.

For George

Anybody who has read my post on Robert Bresson's film A Man Escaped should read George's response (http://agirlandagun.typepad.com) on July 12th entitled, Freedom for What?

Well, George, I reckon I have some explaining to do.  I am, indeed, a young man.  I am not a passionate student of French culture or history.  I have not been traveling to France for decades.  In fact, I have only been there once, a couple of years ago.  Upon my arrival it was recommended to me by more than one American traveller that "to be on the safe side" I should just tell any French that I meet I'm a Canadian.  Maybe I still have a bit of emotion around that experience and I let it bleed through in my post.  I probably should have never allowed current political affairs that have shaped my perception into my post.  But maybe that's the problem with the post from beginning to end.  When I approached A Man Escaped I did it with my own experience and how today, 49 years later, the film relates to me.

You cite that  I did not look up the literal translation of the film's French title and that is true.  You definitely informed me of the historical context alive in the mind of the audience the film was originally released for.  The level of detail you went into is impressive.  If you find I am ever scheduled to lecture in a university on Robert Bresson, A Man Escaped, or anything having to do with the French people for that matter, please do us both a favor and run me out of the auditorium with a broomstick.

In the post I tried to separate Robert Bresson and his masterwork from my emotional response.  In retrospect I failed.  In fact, I probably tried to be too cheeky about the French and too staunch about the motivation behind Bresson's character, Fontaine.  I should have been more honest.  I should have been vulnerable.  I should have written:

"I know nothing about the historical context in which A Man Escaped was made.  All I know is the context I've brought to the film.  What is given to me from the beginning of this story is a man in prison who is more determined than his fellow inmates to escape.  I have found the premise troubling.  It has brought up in me emotions I am now wrestling with.  You see, I am the son of a man who one day informed his family that we were the prison he was living in.  He too was determined to escape and he did just that, at the expense of hurting a lot of people, namely me.  What Bresson's film has either advertently or inadvertently brought up in me is that my old man is still imprisoned by his own selfish pursuit for happiness.  It makes me realize that we are all imprisoned to something.  In my opinion, the only difference is that we imprison ourselves to self-sacrifice or self-gain.  Today, these are my words and whatever past or future may prove them wrong, I choose to own them wholly."

I think you have done a service in correcting any misconceptions I may have seeded in future audiences for Bresson's A Man Escaped.  However at the end of the day, and maybe I'm a little too idealistic, I think it's a good thing for a young man to have a genuine experience with a film made half a century before his time and go on to speak about it.  Even if he inspires the impassioned rebuke of an academic on the subject.

Incidentally, would you be interested in becoming one of my Netflix Friends?

Still Wrestling

I'm still trying to figure out what it is I'm wanting to say about the topic of my previous post.  For those of you that have enjoyed watching The Sopranos, I'll try the following example.  In Season 4, Joe Pantoliano's character (Ralphie, I think was his name) was being revealed with each episode as more and more sadistic.  Eventually, I stopped watching the show because I got the feeling that I was watching a man degrading, torturing, and ultimately destroying other human beings for no other reason than the writers wanted me really salivating for him to die.  That way, at the end of the season (or whenever he finally got killed off) I would be ecstatic with the program.  The Payoff.

So here is my dilemma: In that scenario, not only am I choosing to desensitize myself to what this character is doing to other human beings on the show, but I'm also relishing in the part of me (probably the less nobler part of me) that is passing judgment and craving to see the death of another human being.  It just seems like that can't be a good thing.   Am I on to something or am I just a big floppy piece of cheese when it comes to watching violence?  Geez.

Dogville Revisited + Violence and Rewards

Pretty much everyone I know and even some I don't know have responded to my post about Dogville and said I need to finish the film.  They've told me why.  They've told me the power in the ending.  Still I can not bring myself to finish it.  I think I'm starting to realize why.

Recently I became the father of a beautiful baby girl.  I'm also a husband.  I've noticed how lately I can barely keep my eyes open when I'm watching a movie depicting violence against women.  I can't watch because when a girl or woman is brutalized, it's because nobody is there to protect them.  That's my role.  There are two women in my life that I am in charge of protecting and I find I can't separate my imagination from what I'm watching on the screen.  I can't help but think to myself, "What if this were to happen to Jane or Kristen and I'm not there to stop it?"  Even right now it's hard to go there and I'm not thinking of anything in particular.  Most times it's more a feeling than a thought.  The feeling that this shouldn't happen to another human being and if it happens to one of my two girls it would somehow be the most helpless, awful feeling imaginable for me.  Which is why I'm angry with Lars Von Trier for taking his story far beyond the point where I as the audience can go.  It wasn't necessary to make his point.

However, I do want filmmakers to show me violence if they are taking me to a place it is important for me to go.  I think Dogville was meant to do that, but Von Trier pushed it way too far.  Unforgiven was a violent film that showed me how ugly and pointless violence is.  The Silence of the Lambs was terribly repulsive in it's violence, but took me into the place of seeing a disease in American culture.  The disease lurking beneath the surface of this society that somehow produces many times over more serial killers per capita than any other nation in the world.  I felt these are important truths to open my eyes to.

Tonight I watched a popular television program.  I won't say which one because it is irrelevant.  I'll leave it to Conservative Christian action groups to single out a program or a musician and blame moral decay on that person, as if they somehow invented the audience that demanded their work.  The program itself is simply a reference point for what is considered entertainment.  This is what happened on the show:  There was a bad guy.  In being bad, the bad guy drew the attention of the good guy.  The bad guy then hurt some good people which made me, the audience, want the good guy to kill the bad guy.  So at the end of the program that's what the good guy did.  Incidentally, in screenwriting that's referred to as "The Payoff,"  meaning the audience stuck around through the hard stuff to get The Payoff of the good stuff.  It always comes last.

I have no problem with The Payoff, but what it takes to get to The Payoff is starting to scare me.  It used to be that the bad guy could break into a house and steal some stuff, smack around the guy who owns the joint, and run away.  That was enough to have us, the audience, hankering for justice.  That is no longer enough.  For The Payoff to work, I have to really be aching for the bad guy to die.  So gradually, it has gotten to the point that the bad guy has to be pure evil or I really don't care if he dies or not.  Sure I want justice, but to really need it in the pit of my stomach the bad guy has to abuse children, rape women, and maim innocent people for no reason.  He needs to be aroused by the idea of pain and torture.  He has to get off on blood and screams.  So when the final showdown actually happens and the good guy gives it to him (usually in not nearly as awful a way as the bad guy's been giving it to everybody else)  I walk out of the theater with that good feeling.  The feeling of The Payoff.

Many times I have sat bolt upright in my bed in the middle of the night because I thought I heard somebody in the house.  The mind plays tricks like that.  Just that noise was enough to have my heart beating out of my chest.  It doesn't matter how awful that person may be.  Just a stranger coming into my house uninvited is terrifying.  But in the movie theater, that's nothing.  For me to be terrified and subsequently feel The Payoff, I have to see the most gruesome atrocities a writer can think of.

Slowly, as I've watched movie after movie, the people the bad guy is brutalizing have grown less and less important to me.  It doesn't mean so much that he's hurting another human being, it's about how bad he's hurting that human being.  Like I said, I don't mind the violence if it takes me somewhere important, but 9 times out of 10 it takes me to The Payoff.  Having a baby (and watching a lot of truly great films) has started to make watching another human being's suffering for the sake of The Payoff unbearable.  It's just too real for me now.  But something deeper bothers me.  If so many of us need to see how gruesome a human's suffering is to feel the reward of The Payoff instead of feeling pain that a human is suffering, when we need know the how regardless of the what, how is that slowly eroding our view of human beings off screen?  The ones we see with the same eyes we just watched humans on screen with when we return to the real world? 

Maybe the news is a good indicator.  Those things that make the news are often not centered on the what--a human being was hurt--but the how: how awful was this thing that happened to somebody else?

A Man Escaped

I just watched Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped (1956).  In a nutshell, it's the true story of a french prisoner in a Nazi war camp who went to great and methodical strides to ultimately escape.  What sets this film apart from others escape stories (which, incidentally, I have a soft spot for and a sister soft spot right next to it for Steve McQueen) is the quote that serves as the opening frame of the film.  The quote is by Robert Bresson and, I'll paraphrase, says basically that he's telling the story as he heard with no adornment or embellishment.

Leave it to a french director to open his film with a quote by himself.  It does create an interesting alchemy in the story as it unfolds because so many films now that are "based on a true story" are essentially one or two scenes from a person's life that inspired a two hour work of fiction.  So as I watched A Man Escaped, I'd wonder to myself, "Is this true?"  Then I remembered, "Oh yeah, this is Bresson's account of true events," which served as a way for filmmaker to keep his thumbprint visible on the film the whole time.  I like that.  I get the sense that he's not trying to sweep me away with theatrics, but sitting across from me, looking me in the eye, and telling the story as honestly as he can and letting the story's power be what it is.  That direct style of storytelling is what Bresson is known for.  It's refreshing.

Of course, Bresson had to make decisions.  One notable decision that appears immediately is that we enter the story with a man who is hell bent on escaping any prison he is confined to.  There is no explanation for what sets this man apart from the others in the prison who do not try to escape.  This seems to me something that is easily swallowed in France where there seems to be a common belief that the French are born with a chromosone that will activate at puberty and rebel against any authority that asserts its will over an individual.   This was harder for me swallow.  I do not believe that humans are necessarily born with a built in rejecting mechanism for imprisonment.  I don't mean that every human in their heart doesn't desire freedom, but I mean that we are hard-wired to serve some master.  We will serve a master: money, family, insecurity, love, career, God, sex, drugs, something.  The question is: are we serving ourselves or others?

It's hard for me to relate to the hero I'm watching when their only motivation for this doggedly constucted escape is to be out.  That's it?  I'm in and I must be out?  To be honest, I consider that motivation a bit selfish.  The master I serve is my own sense of what will make me free, but free for what?  Maybe it's an American thing, but I see an escape for freedom not as a dash to simply no longer be confined, but to escape one confinement so that I may be confined to that which makes me noble.  For instance, I escape prison because I know that my freedom from that prison is necessary for me to confine myself to the nurturing of my family.  Freedom is only necessary when there is an other, a master that if I do not get to and serve it, the world will suffer in some way.  If the master is myself and I escape a prison for the sake of pure escape, then I've escaped to nothing but my own self-centered desires, which I had back when I was in prison.

Robert Bresson is a master director, there is no question.  He is a must see for any film lover.  But with this particular metaphor, the prison escape, which is so central to our lives (for we all have a prison), I think it is important to not only understand that there is an escape but know what it is we are escaping to.  We will continually escape serving one master to serve another.  What is it?