the millennium kids

“At the Dinky Donut, outside town, Bob Pardee sat quietly as the family ate and talked. The soft pink golfer’s face had begun to droop from his skull. His flesh seemed generally to sag, giving him the hangdog look of someone under strict orders to lose weight. His hair was expensively cut and layered, a certain amount of color combed in, a certain amount of technology brought to bear, but it seemed to need a more dynamic head. I realized Babette was looking at him carefully, trying to grasp the meaning of the four careening years they’d spent as man and wife. The panoramic carnage. He drank, gambled, drove his car down embankments, got fired, quit, retired, traveled in disguise to Coaltown where he paid a woman to speak Swedish to him as they screwed. It was the Swedish that enraged Babette, either that or his need to confess it, and she hit out at him—hit out with the backs of her hands, with her elbows and wrists. Old loves, old fears. Now she watched him with a tender sympathy, a reflectiveness that seemed deep and fond and generous enough to contain all the magical counterspells to his current run of woe, although I knew, of course, as I went back to my book, that it was only a passing affection, one of those kindnesses no one understands.”

Don DeLillo, White Noise

favorite films of the 21st century

Inspired by this list by Liketx, I’ve compiled this list of my favorite films of the 21st century in alphabetical order. It’s mostly so I can keep track of this stuff myself, but go see these if you haven’t already. Also, obviously, I have not seen nearly as many movies as I would need to to make this list anything nearing authoritative. But as it is now:

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, 2001)

Bully (Larry Clark, 2001)

Cache (Michael Haneke, 2005)

Dancer in the Dark (Lars von Trier, 2000)

Gerry (Gus Van Sant, 2002)

Palindromes (Todd Solondz, 2004)

Somewhere (Sofia Coppola, 2010)

Time of the Wolf (Michael Haneke, 2003)

Werckmeister Harmonies (Bela Tarr, 2000)

Y Tu Mama Tambien (Alfonso Cuaron, 2001)

Should sex offenders be allowed to participate in the Occupy movement?

This post is not a direct response to, but was informed and inspired by this post on Daily Kos. If you are concerned with knowing exactly what I am referring to, it is recommended, but not absolutely necessary, to read it first.

Essentially, though, you need to know this: during the time when the Occupy Boston camp was active (it is now gone), there was a level 3 sex offender staying there. This information was known to organizers within the movement but was not shared during the period when the camp was active, despite the presence of children. At a recent GA meeting, the issue was taken up in a proposal that stated:

1. identify and verify a Level 3 sex offender
2. have someone approach the person and let him know that we’re aware and we think it would be best if he didn’t participate in Occupy Boston
3. denying the person Occupy Boston resources such as food, clothing, shelter, etc.

This did not pass. This decision is controversial. The points of complaint are obvious: this is harboring a sex offender, it is a callous indifference to misogyny within the movement, it creates a threatening atmosphere which is contradictory to the stated purpose of the Occupy movement, etc. The rebuttals are also obvious: we don’t ‘shun’ people, criminals are also marginalized groups that need support, etc.

I do not think that this is an easy argument beyond a certain point. This much is without a doubt: this information should have been openly conveyed to everyone within the movement. That it was not is a huge breach of responsibility for the coordinators of the movement.

I think we should begin with the arguments that I think are persuasive, but maybe not persuasive enough. First—convicted criminals are a marginalized group and Occupy claims to speak for the marginalized. Also, the decision to dismiss convicted criminals from the movement seems to contradict a certain essential tenet of our belief in the justice system (if we have one): that once a person has completed their prison sentence, they have effectively ‘done their time,’ and are no longer to be held to account for their crimes upon their release. In effect: if you against felony disenfranchisement (as most leftists are), then why can’t a convicted rapist vote in your GA?

Here, we also run into something of the radical politics version of Blackstone’s formulation: whether it is better to let 10 guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer. In other words, if we leave the Occupy Boston setting for a moment, we are forced to interrogate how we feel about known rapists escaping prosecution or imprisonment due to legal technicalities. The standard rebuttal to Blackstone is that letting a guilty person go free is letting innocent people suffer, on the expectation that they are now categorically less safe. But most leftists don’t think that moral argument holds water: we have certain safeguards that are in place, not because they have a one-hundred percent success rate, but because without them our legal system would operate only whimsically. The argument against Blackstone, and the argument presented against allowing sex offenders inclusion in the movement, both, to an extent, rely on a visceral feeling of wrongness, in a moralism that seems to preclude any tactical or strategic thinking; insofar as this is the case, I believe both arguments are fundamentally conservative.

So then, let me frame the conflict differently: is it tactically necessary to include certain people in political movements that may be aesthetically undesirable or openly threatening or hostile to other members in the movement?

And now we must parse ‘the left.’

The Occupy movement is built around a certain ideology that is anathema to many traditional leftists; namely, its love of ‘autonomy,’ ‘consensus,’ etc. What we mean, when we get down to it, is that the so-called ‘old left’ really dislikes the ‘anarchists’ and vise versa. Yes, we all have our hearts in the right place, but after that initial caveat, there are a lot of seriously fundamental disagreements that stall our cooperation. The left, to start, thinks consensus is all but completely incompatible with mass politics. Without getting too far off track, let’s just point out the key flaws inherent in consensus. It leads to lowest-common-denominator proposals that have to be vague enough to discourage serious dissent. Most of all, it too easily allows a small group of people to hijack and veto proposals that are desirable to a much larger portion of the population and in fact could do wonders in creating public support for the movement (examples of this: OWS rejecting the OWS demands working group’s ‘jobs for all’ proposal; and the blocking of a provision in the Occupy Boston charter that specifically endorsed ‘non-violence.’ It should be duly noted that the main antagonists to the passage of these proposals were the strong anarchist contingent). In fact, the author of this Daily Kos piece has another piece on the same website called “Consensus doesn’t fail. People do.” If that title isn’t the goddamn exemplar of ultraleftism eating its own tail, I don’t know what is.

Personally, I don’t think the question is as easy as it is sometimes assumed to be. To this Daily Kos writer, to refuse to kick out the sex offender is tantamount to endorsing and joining with the forces of misogyny. To her opponents in the GA, the denial of support for this person because he’s a sex offender is tantamount to selling out the communist promise of all-inclusion to the culture war. In not so many words, we have arrived at something of a restating of the question that tore at the early Women’s Liberation movement: who is the “real” enemy, man or capitalism? Is it misogyny in the form of a sex offender, or is it capitalism in the form of refusing support?

I don’t like answering this question because I don’t think it is satisfactory. After all, we can have several enemies, all of them real. The chicken-and-egg nature of how this question is posed only allows for a simplistic answer: it’s me or him.

So here’s the trick: how do we allow for an answer that asserts that both capitalism and misogyny are the enemy of our movement and yet still allows for the possibility that the dual nature of this struggle occasionally leads to friction between them, including the problem of raising contradictions?

I think the inability to grasp that dilemma is what has led the left to a constant process of self-immolation. In the absence of a mass left movement (besides the Democratic Party, which we all know is not left in any compelling sense), certain segments of the left-wing population become enamored of ideas of prefigurative politics. They begin to isolate themselves from the mass public and begin to talk only amongst themselves. The longer they are only talking to themselves, the more precise the lines among them can be drawn: this is how we end up first with anarchism and then with the innumerable ‘strains’ of anarchism. The doctrine of ‘acceptable’ leftism narrows. To quote Adolph Reed, with reference to the ‘self-conscious left:’ ‘Ultraleftism is a maximalist politics. It’s much more about taking positions that express the intensity of one’s commitments than about organizing or building anything. Rather than crafting language to build broad support for a substantively radical program, for instance, ultraleftists prefer potted rhetoric that asserts their bona fides, without concern for communicating outside the ranks of belivers.’

This is what I find striking about this case. The left these days often does communicate only within the ranks of believers. The limits of this style of politics should be self-evident. The left perspective I would argue for, not completely comfortably but with confidence, is that disallowing a member of the working class to participate in a movement dedicated above all to the assistance of the working class is ineffective and strategically detrimental. Critics may say that Occupy isn’t dedicated ‘above all’ to issues of class, but is in fact dedicated to all sorts of intersecting issues; or, again, man and capitalism. I’m okay with that—but as a basis for political organization, I believe we should fight capitalism first, and not because it’s more “real” an enemy that misogyny or racism or heterosexism, but because tactically it is what can build an effective mass political movement where the others cannot. To quote Adolph Reed again, from a provocative essay called ‘the limits of anti-racism:’ ‘My position is—and I can’t count the number of times I’ve said this bluntly, yet to no avail, in response to those in blissful thrall of the comforting Manicheanism—that of course racism persists, in all the disparate, often unrelated kinds of social relations and “attitudes” that are characteristically lumped together under that rubric, but from the standpoint of trying to figure out how to combat even what most of us would agree is racial inequality and injustice, that acknowledgement and $2.25 will get me a ride on the subway. It doesn’t lend itself to any particular action except more taxonomic argument about what counts as racism.’

I believe it is not unreasonable to argue that the question posed in the title of this post ‘does not lend itself to any particular action except more taxonomic argument about what counts as misogyny.’

I believe a central fallacy of the left these days is that they can narrow down their ranks to the strictly virtuous; that it is possible, if not in fact absolutely necessary, to create a movement without any bad apples, without any contradictions within its ranks. I am afraid that I believe the political world is not amenable to such views, as valuable as they may be as benchmarks.

I agree it is uncomfortable and unenviable to be put in the position of allowing a sex offender amongst the ranks of a political movement; and I agree that the kneejerk reaction to the question would be ‘no.’ But, it seems that contradictions have to be allowed if movements are to move forward. Otherwise, we turn inward, constantly purging our ranks, and we eat our own tail: only collapsing inward, never moving forward.

—

NOTE: There is an argument here that I am not engaging with that clearly makes this a special case. There is an obvious safety issue present because of the unique nature of the Occupy protests. Because this involves a non-policed tent city, the bar to entry should be higher. In this post, I am grappling with the larger debate: should these people be allowed to be counted as part of the movement at all, not simply should they be allowed to camp out, a question I think is more easily answered in the negative.

YOUNG ADULT

I have a Midwest problem. I was born and raised in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and many of my friends and almost all of my family still live there. After high school, almost everyone I knew went to college in-state or didn’t go at all. I understand that towns like this can be a hard place to leave, for a variety of factors, and I understand that the longer you tend to stay, the less energy you have for replanting yourself.

I also sort of hate Fort Wayne, and I’m fairly certain that you could get that statement out of most of the city’s residents, although the ‘sort of’ is what matters. You see, we all know that our city is not sophisticated or terribly culturally interesting. There are a lot of chain stores. There are not a lot of museums, and the ones there are are pretty esoteric and dull. We know you laugh at us for saying ‘pop.’ In other words, every negative comment you make about the lifestyle of mid-size Midwestern towns, we duly respond: we fucking know. We live here, after all.

To make my association with Jason Reitman’s new film Young Adult even more acute, I happen to have left the Midwest, as soon as possible, and I’m very thankful for it. I now live in Boston, a culturally elite city if ever there was such a thing. So I know why Charlize Theron wanted to get out—as she does—and live in Minneapolis instead of Mercury (not a real place, though it looks like Fort Wayne to me). I also know why she may feel a little bit better than those she left behind, or at least those that voluntarily are choosing to raise families there; I mean, c’mon! These cities blow.

But, here’s the difference between me and Jason Reitman (besides the fact that Jason Reitman inherited incredible wealth and would never in any circumstances find himself living in a mid-size Midwest city). I don’t believe for a second that the people who live in Fort Wayne, Indiana are any different whatsoever from the people who live in Boston, Massachusetts. Call me fucking crazy, but there’s nothing inherently within ‘these people’ in these ‘hick towns’ that keeps them there. So I’m especially irked when directors like Jason Reitman and writers like Diablo Cody seem to think that the only proper way to view Midwest residents is to look down upon them.

That’s where this movie becomes more than poorly constructed and poorly directed and shows itself as dripping with contempt. Charlize Theron escaped Mercury, but she’ll always be trash to this creative duo. Every possible benefit that could be had by showcasing atypical female attractiveness is deep-sixed as Theron is stigmatized by doing such horrendous things as drinking a two-liter of Diet Coke straight from the bottle, going off in the middle of the night to snag some Ben & Jerry’s, and wearing bra inserts. Jesus, how shameless is this woman, you must ask yourself! Someday I will see a movie where a woman eating ice cream isn’t portrayed as a significant sign of sloppiness, or at least I keep telling myself that when I’m considering offing myself.

Charlize Theron is back in Mercury to attempt to steal her ex-boyfriend, Patrick Wilson, from his new wife and their newborn baby daughter. Obviously, she is, as these characters often are, simply another variation of ‘a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty.’ * In fact, the film is largely an attempt to see how far one woman will go in humiliating herself.

She’s not alone though—no one in the film escapes unscathed. Patrick Wilson shows the film’s hand when he says some stupid thing about Mercury being great because it has this tacky sports bar and how he and his dad eat lunch together at General Mills, ‘sometimes pizza…sometimes sub sandwiches.’ It doesn’t take long after this to tell that for Reitman and Cody there isn’t a single person in the Midwest who has achieved any kind of happiness that isn’t predicated on a substandard IQ (Patrick Wilson), blissful naivete (Wilson’s wife, Theron’s mother), or the fatalism of lowered standards (Oswalt and his sister). This is where Reitman and Cody go horribly wrong—they refuse to accept or even imagine the notion that there are perfectly normal, perfectly intelligent, perfectly hip, people living in the Midwest who have found happiness.

Not so! claim the storytellers. The joke is on the saps! After all, it takes a truly miserable, pathetic human being to trick themselves into thinking their lives are truly happy when they are so clearly rotting away in Mercury. We are supposed to pity every single person in this movie on the basis that they are too stupid and oblivious to realize how unhappy they are. At the end of the day, after Theron proves herself to be, more or less, as unlikable as a movie character is generally allowed to be, a supporting character sets it all straight by saying: you’re right! Take me with you! Back to the big city! You were right to come here and thoroughly fuck up everyone’s lives! You are the enlightened one!

It should be mentioned, at this point, that calling the film a ‘black comedy’ does not suffice. Nor do any of the film’s alleged instances of ‘edginess’ bear out. Oswalt’s character is disabled, which would, we would hope, give the film some fucking transgressiveness. Not so—it turns out, as it so often does, that we are unable to think about disability in film as anything other than a story device to play both sides of the PC dollar. In other words, we have people with disabilities laughing at other people with disabilities, or making ‘cripple’ jokes about themselves, which gives the audience the chance to think both a.) wow, this movie sure is interesting for including these talking points, and b.) haha, see, they’re okay with ‘cripple’ jokes! The real joke, obviously, is on every disabled actor who didn’t get a part in this movie because they gave it to a famous comedian. Color me un-fucking-surprised. PS, we can blame this all on Ryan Murphy if we want.

And yes, at the end, Theron and Oswalt finally sleep together. It’s this scene where Reitman and Cody are so off-base, no matter how well-intentioned. Oswalt sits there, his leg mangled and scarred, while Theron stands there with plastic bra inserts attached to her breasts. It’s supposed to be a here-we-are-at-last moment of realization that our own bodies, no matter how ugly we may find them, are fully sufficient. Of course, in Reitman’s hands, it’s just another pity party. It’s ‘love conquers all’ but the ‘all’ is all the condescending obstacles he’s forced you to crawl through to get to this point. At the end, Theron goes back to Minneapolis and Oswalt probably resumes being unhappy. Hey, at least these two sad sacks got in one good fuck.

So! In other words: I’m sick of movies where the filmmakers are more concerned with showcasing what low-end brand-name products Midwestern characters keep in their homes than in those characters’ actual lived emotional experiences. Young Adult has nothing but a opportunistic straddling of disability that lacks political backbone, a horrible narrative structure that allows shocking reveals to be dropped in like anvils, and more than anything else an absolute unwillingness to even try to see lower-middle-class life in a way that appreciates its economic, material, and emotional realness. No matter what other attributes you have, if you live in Mercury, Minnesota, or any other analogous city, you are, to Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody, a primarily faulted person. In cutting off the emotional opportunities of these characters at the start, for no reason other than their geographical and, to some extent, their class status, this movie is fucking inhumane.

To this I respond to Jason Reitman, a wealthy hack whose entire career can be owed to his famous father, and Diablo Cody, the odds-on favorite for worst screenwriter on planet Earth, with a full ‘go fuck yourselves.’

—

NOTE: This is primarily a rant, although I hope it is apparent that I’m engaging on the film on a critical basis as well. Just don’t take this to be a completely ‘evenhanded’ view of the film’s strengths and weaknesses. It’s an aggressive attack on the heartless, bullshit assumptions that prop up the entire film’s narrative. I am thinking critically about the film—but I’m also so pissed off about the film that I’ll admit to not even wanting to mention the one or two things I liked in it.

* Apologies to David Brock. He, former right-wing hack, and current left-wing journalist and founder of Media Matters for America is the original author of the ‘little bit nutty and little bit slutty’ line that has become so notorious. It was originally a reference to Anita Hill. However, although Brock can never un-write it, I feel it somehow necessary to point out that, in my mind, he’s been as good a repenter as we could ask for.

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN

In Lynne Ramsay’s first film in nine years, We Need to Talk About Kevin, ‘the problem with no name’ becomes named. Giving up her dream career as an ‘adventurer,’ Tilda Swinton becomes a mother and caretaker for her newborn son; Ramsay’s conceit is to play this off not as merely an investigation of the ‘feminine mystique,’ but as a complete living fucking nightmare. Kevin is pure evil, up and down, his mother swears to it. And although he acts well-adjusted around everyone else, he is fully committed to psychologically terrorizing his mother. The final act of slaughter is devastating not only for its violence, but for Swinton, for its coherence.

We Need to Talk About Kevin flits about every which way and its narrative construction is what gives the film its gravitational pull. Jumping between timelines with little signposting or pattern, the film becomes an associative montage, held partially together by Swinton’s panicked psyche. Scene-to-scene transitions happen through visual rhymes, giving outstanding form to the discordance of a traumatized mind. Add to this the audio cues: this film has the best sound design of the year. Small, constant sounds are honed in on; amplified. Kevin crushing cereal or breaking crayons; a neighbor bouncing a basketball or mowing his grass. Sound bridges in this case don’t come across as annoying, but serve the same purpose as the visual rhyming: shifting emphasis to the flexibility of the narrative and the looseness of concentration. It lets the film embody Swinton’s struggle to hear herself think, to unclutter her mind.

Ramsay’s use of horror is also occasionally inspired. The struggle in a film like this is to prevent Kevin from seeming to have walked out of a B-movie and in that department the results are mixed. There’s no doubt about it that this kid is a psychopath, but as psychopathy in movies goes, I found this one convincing if frustrating. But, of course, it is in the nature of psychopaths to be frustrating. Fanatically convinced that their adolescent rantings about the dehumanizing effects of television and society’s infatuation with mass murder make them somehow prophets, as opposed to third-rate op-ed writers, is nothing, one feels, that a good ten years couldn’t cure. What fifteen-year old hasn’t mistaken their incomplexity for genius? Psychopaths, of course, don’t have time to learn, as dedicated as they are to sadism and as convinced as they are of their superiority. As a depiction of how teens murder teens, the film isn’t terribly convincing and is a bit too spruced up in its cleverness, but as a depiction of the dead-end psychopathic mindset, it’s rightly compelling. (It should be noted that I’m drawing a fair amount of my perspective on this from Dave Cullen’s admired book Columbine, which, in terms of their mentality, seems to indicate similarities between our fictional Kevin and the real-life Eric Harris). 

Ramsay does score a couple of terrifying grace notes though—early on in the film we approach Celia, Swinton’s daughter, from behind as she sits at a counter. When she turns around, she is wearing a massive grey eye patch. There’s something shocking about this reveal, so matter of fact in its ordinariness but also in its unmistakable dread. Later, in a doctor’s office, the walls are covered with images of clowns. Maybe kids are charmed by these, but again, it’s hard to shake the feeling of unease. Ramsay’s skill in moments like these is reminiscent of the offbeat, undermining horror of something like Twin Peaks. It’s not overt, but there’s no mistaking it.

Ramsay has said the film isn’t an ‘issue film,’ and we’re all the better for that, because any political significance is neutered: as mentioned, as a film about teens killing teens, this doesn’t tell us very much. But as a film about a woman beset on all sides, this one goes straight to the nerves. Expect it to round out my top ten.

It is nice and strange…

…to see something I posted be ‘reblogged’ and commented on a whole bunch of times, especially when that thing is a brief analysis of racism in The Muppets. I take this to indicate that a lot of people pick up on things like this, even if only a select few take time to write about it on the Internet. Wise up, Hollywood.

Anyway, I will take this as a good excuse to post here more. In the meantime, if you somehow come across this blog and you’re also on twitter, that’s where I spend most of my internet-time (see here).

JLG AT 81

To my embarrassment, I somehow missed that Saturday was Jean-Luc Godard’s birthday. He turned 81.

As anyone who knows me well at all knows, I am a Godard acolyte of the highest order. This man is a singular artistic influence and presence; and despite what you may have heard, he’s still going strong—last year’s Film Socialisme, though hardly seen, proved that Godard can still make every other working filmmaker seem instantly prosaic.

I am glad to report he is working on another film, titled ‘Farewell to Language.’

Here’s to 81, and the greatest filmmaker alive or dead (but thankfully alive).

Also—Godard’s Week End will be playing at the Brattle from December 9-15. You’d be silly to miss it.

Racial Coding in ‘The Muppets’

Since I can safely assume that very few people other than myself are interested in decoding the racialism in The Muppets, I’ll keep this very to the point.

As I posted before, the above is a picture of the villains in the new Muppets film.

These characters are only the most blatantly racist exponents of the racially-coded rural-urban dichotomy that props up the film’s structure.

Jason Segel and Amy Adams, the whitest people alive, are from Smalltown, USA.

Smalltown is a loving embrace of quaint, fifties-style Americana. It is described as the best possible place to live.

After beginning their quest to reunite the Muppets, Segal, Adams and Walter (his puppet brother) must journey into the city of Reno. Reno is a far cry from the kitsch of Smalltown, USA, and they find Fozzie in the unenviable position of fronting a cover band called ‘The Moopets,’ which is composed of those pictured above. There’s a pivotal scene here in terms of racial symbolism, when our heroes are outside in an alleyway talking with ‘Miss Poogy,’ the Miss Piggy substitute. During a conversation expressing disbelief that Fozzie could ever end up in such a terrible place, the sound of gunshots is heard. Later, Miss Poogy is seen sharpening knives, presumably for sheer pleasure or criminal intent.

Underpinning this entire drama is the juxtaposition of the clean, safe, neighborly Smalltown with the dirty, violent and hostile urban city. To say that this dichotomy has historically been predicated on the nostalgia for all-white rural homogeneity is not exactly a quantum leap. The sentimentality that surrounds fifties-style community is often expressed through a fear of the urban, which transposes quite naturally into (and is often meant as nothing but a coded expression of) a fear of non-white minorities.

Before the accusation comes that we are reading too much into this, the depiction of ‘The Moopets,’ and the positioning of them as greedy, violent villains says otherwise. The Moopets are entirely composed of Muppets that were darker-toned to begin with or are conspicuously darkened versions of light-toned ones. In the case of dress, clearly the Moopet versions of Fozzie, Miss Piggy and Janice are so overtly racialized as ‘thugs’ as to make the point clear.

Last, but certainly not least, comes the fact that these characters align themselves with Chris Cooper, the primary antagonistic in the film, who, in his one musical number, delivers a parody rap called ‘Let’s Talk About Me.’

In this, the racial coding finally becomes crystal clear: the villains rap, the heroes sing. But, even beyond that, we have the extra racism that is inherent in what these days passes as hip-hop parody. As something of an enthusiast for calling out every white person who thinks parody raps are funny, I am the first to assert that this is no different whatsoever. Instead, The Muppets is just another iteration of a beloved cultural trend, as seen in The Lonely Island, Taylor Swift and T-Pain’s “Thug Life,” endless commercials and Youtube videos, and God knows everywhere else. That trend is the absolutely giddy enthusiasm of white people to seize every opportunity to do that which they are not supposed to do: namely, rap, or, better put, act black. As I’ve said before, all of these jokes have the same punchline: this is not how white people are supposed to behave; and therefore, all of these jokes establish a hierarchy by telling a racial joke that cannot be told in reverse. The underlying premise is that the performers of these ‘parody raps’ are temporarily inhabiting these archetypes; that when the joke is done, they can leave and return to acting regularly—a privilege not afforded to the blacks they mimic.

That last point is what extends this argument even to white rappers who are attempting to be taken seriously, not ironically. As a white rapper, you are afforded the privilege, as Greg Tate sez about Eminem, to be ‘not burdened with representing the ‘hood and black sex to hiphop’s prime real estate, the vanilla suburbs.’ This is why I think people like the Emerson-canonized George Watsky are pricks; hip-hop isn’t all about verbal linguistics, or, in Watsky’s case, ‘rapping fast.’ The fact that you not only think it is, but can actually achieve some sort of fame from it, is nothing but an indication of privilege. After all, a Youtube video called ‘black kid raps fast,’ would never go viral. It would not be seen as exemplary, merely expected; it would not be seen as talent, merely inclination. Only when a white person excels at something that is normally associated with blackness do we care to take note, do we care to designate that skill as bonafide ability, and do we exert all necessary effort in showing not only can these white kids do it, they can do it better. What is missing from this is the baggage that white culture forces black hip-hop artists to carry: the crucible of ‘authenticity’ on which black artists must prove themselves but which white slam poets can simply bypass.

Paul Mooney puts it bluntly when he calls white hip-hop ‘blackface without the make-up.’ Harry Allen puts it even more bluntly when he sez ‘from a certain angle, there’s just a shade of difference between white people rapping and white people telling nigger jokes.’

In other words, if you’re white and you think rapping is funny, here’s some advice: it’s fucking not.

Or, is there any compelling difference between Chris Cooper’s performance in the Muppets and in vogue ‘ghetto parties’ like this?

I contend that there is not.

Aki Kaurismaki’s LE HAVRE

Aki Kaurismaki’s Le Havre opened last weekend here in Boston and my enthusiasm for it is in line with damn near everyone else’s. However, with the company I keep it’s been seen as much less than touted—I was going to write about it anyway, but this disagreement gave me a reason to offer a more spirited defense.

Le Havre primarily involves four characters: Marcel Marx, a shoeshine; Idrissa, a Senegalese boy attempting to illegally make passage to London; Monet, an inspector charged with finding the boy; and Arletty, Marcel’s wife, whose terminal illness is unbeknownst to her husband. It falls on Marx and his neighbors to secure Idrissa a safe route home to England.

The story of Le Havre sounds like something akin to Ramin Bahrani’s work, with its multicultural, working-class motifs; and, indeed, given to Bahrani it could easily and properly be turned into a devastating portrayal of the injustices visited upon France’s immigrant community. But instead, Kaurismaki, to his credit, supplants kitchen sink realism with warmness and levity—a decision completely appropriate to his characters and their hospitality, but too often unseen as filmmakers choose instead to fetishize despair and the so-called poetry of decay.

Kaurismaki’s humanism expresses itself in opposition to kneejerk neorealist impulses in its carefully manipulated color schemes and its insertions of farcical humor, but perhaps most of all in its insistence on allowing its characters to achieve their fullest dignity—the fatalism of the ghetto be damned.

My friends who disagree with me over the film decry the whimsical interludes as ‘nonsense,’ and surely the humor is quite dryly absurd; at one point, Marcel gains entry to a refugee detention center by claiming to be of the inhabitant’s albino brother. Personally, I found all this charming; but there must be something going on here besides me being a sap and my enemies being heartless. So what is it?

Importantly, we must not confuse Kaurismaki’s efforts with someone like Robert Benigni’s—this isn’t the full stop abandonment of social realism nor a disgraced effort to convert lived misery into ironic laughs. Kaurismaki’s film is not ignorant of the hardships and indignities that meet the lower class, quite the contrary; there are moments of revealed mourning and the tone is not of overcoming but of making peace with. Jean-Pierre Darroussin’s Inspector Monet (in my favorite performance of the year) moves and speaks with the subtle efficiencies of aged professionals, everything having been done before, all duties seemingly circular; Chang, Marcel’s frequent professional companion, lets it be known one night that he has lived his entire life in France under an assumed alias so as not to be deported, and he seems aware of but unbothered by what this admission implies; Arletty scolds Marcel for bringing her expensive flowers at the hospital.

There are other examples, but the point should be made: Kaurismaki’s film is ‘feel-good,’ but by no means is he stating that lower-class life in France is a whole lot of fun if only you look hard enough. His generosity to his story is not sentimental or opportunistic; instead, it seems lived through, hard-won. In Ramin Bahrani’s Chop Shop, after everything that could go wrong does go wrong, it ends with the protagonist smiling at a group of pigeons; it’s this kind of allowably ironic, pitiable happiness that Kaurismaki finds so appallingly reductive. Le Havre ends with everything that could go right going right, including Arletty’s miraculous recovery; and the last shot is the couple looking at a blooming cherry tree, as if to signify a happily-ever-after. Of course, this isn’t true; J. Hoberman calls the film ‘utopian precisely because it shows everything as it is not.’ He’s right—but I find the end of Le Havre much less trite than that of something like Chop Shop. In the latter, the understanding of the ephemerality of these moments of happiness yields to a kind of knowingness that puts the audience in a position of power over the character, a dramatic irony where the viewer is more savvy of the character’s misery than they are; in Kaurismaki’s film, this power does not exist and both the director and his characters partake in this understanding; it yields not to a vain knowingness but a shared reflection.

I don’t find this to be pandering to cliche, nor do I find it the most congratulatory type of wish-fulfillment; I find it heartfelt in the truest sense. The final shot of the blooming cherry tree recalls, whether intentionally or not, A.E. Houseman’s ‘Loveliest of Trees,’ and the poem and the film share a similar involvement with the somewhat dutiful, but nonetheless gratifying pleasures to be had in a long life.

Unlike many other directors whose work revolves around the working-class, Kaurismaki is not interested in extracting particularities; nor is he overtly interested in reinforcing the myth of a kindler, more noble lower-class; in place of these he proposes a more radical proposition—that no matter how fractured we are as a group (be it as an immigrant community or as members of a class), our common experiences cement us together. Le Havre is not about placing faith in the kindness of strangers—it’s about giving us the belief that the people on whose kindnesses we depend may not, in fact, be strangers after all.

—

Watch the trailer here.

NOTE: I don’t hate Ramin Bahrani or anything; he’s only used by name as an example. Broadly speaking, the opposite of a film like Le Havre is ‘poverty porn,’ best seen in films like Slumdog Millionaire—which speaks only to the obliviousness of its creators—or Precious, which is pure condescension through and through. Bahrani remains one of the most established, credible purveyors of ‘poverty porn;’ his films are much better than most, but could be argued to exist on an identical continuum. For this, see Richard Brody’s reply to A.O. Scott regarding ‘neo-neo-realism.’ I’m particularly fond of his phrase regarding how these films ‘cut off a wide range of aesthetic possibilities and experiences on ostensible grounds of virtue.’ This is what Le Havre does best: widens the range of aesthetic possibilities.

on ‘arthouse’

 “I’ve recently been thinking that a considerable portion of what I find the most detestable in contemporary commercial filmmaking can be summed up in a single trend: exploitation movies that go out into the world as “serious” art movies. Admittedly, two very early examples of this trend in talkies, Lang’s M and Hawks’ Scarface, are two of the greatest movies ever made, though neither of these can be accused of stroking and glorifying the audience’s hypocrisy. But ever since the Godfather pictures, it seems, artiness has been working overtime as a kind of built-in alibi for many of the baser impulses in the audience –- various kinds of cynicism viewing corruption as inescapable, everyday, and deeply profound (e.g., Avatar, The Girlfriend Experience, Contagion), extreme violence as a function of specious and hypocritical morality (or, even worse, “sensitivity,” as in Drive – or, for that matter, The Passion of the Christ), gimmicky temporal structures (e.g., Tarantino, Memento, Babel) or fatuous psychologizing that are somehow supposed to dignify various forms of boorishness or nastiness (ranging from McQueen’s sexist complacencies and brutalities in Shame to von Trier’s dubious and ongoing validation of his own depression as a practical tool for coping with glitzy catastrophes and atrocities of his own making), and even the sort of Oscar-mongering that can cast a liberal activist (Woody Harrelson) as a racist thug (Rampart) to show us how “complex” the modern world is supposed to be.”

Jonathan Rosenbaum nails it, as usual. Why did you have to retire?

NOTE: I haven’t seen SHAME or MELANCHOLIA, which get criticized here, so I don’t sign off on all of this—but the heart of this argument rings true to me. I’ll say more on DRIVE later, but suffice it to say that I find the interplay between tenderness and extreme violence every bit as much a PR decision as an aesthetic one.