Beyond Beyond Ipanema…and Beyond!

Let me tell you a thing; I will tell you this thing for free: I do not like the “bossa nova”. I do not like the jazz guitar. The Girl from Ipanema gets stuck in my head sometimes, having arrived there at some neonatal stage, even though I have never actually devoted time to listening to it.

But I love The Talking Heads.

So it’s a credit to Guto Barra’s Beyond Ipanema: Brazilian Waves in Global Music that my attention was held despite copious amounts of jazz guitar, and very little in the way of anything useful from David Byrne. Though I will say that while my attention was held, I left the theater feeling like I didn’t just see anything at all, besides a bunch of people who are all extremely fond of each other, mentioning how fond of each other they are.

Which is probably my main criticism of the documentary, and Mr. Byrne is simply a prime example—he’s way too goddamned nice. Apparently everyone in the Brazilian music scene (which, and to their credit all the artists seem as ticked off by it as I am, has largely been lumped into the category “world music”, a false genre that belies the most self-centered aspects of American culture) just totally digs knowing everybody else in the scene and getting to make music with them. Mr. Byrne himself comes under an enormous amount of praise for realigning contemporary (well, not contemporary per se…what’s the word for something that was contemporary like twenty years ago?) pop music with global influences. And he’s so incredibly humble in receiving and addressing that praise that I wanted to throw up.

It doesn’t make for a very good film you see. When your documentary is going to be an hour and a half long without any central conflict, then it would be wise to look at a specific facet of your subject in excruciating depth. Ninety minutes is about enough time to look at one subject in its entirety. Mr. Barra chose to examine the entire history of Brazilian music’s influence on American culture, from Carmen Miranda to M.I.A., which is frankly a topic that would be better served by a Ken Burns-like extensive examination than multiple scholars and journalists and musicians spouting platitudes akin to “Brazilian music is art, it’s politics, it’s life”.

All of that probably sounds like I really disliked the film, and I don’t think that’s necessarily true. It more felt like the film moved too quickly, too erratically to ever really sit and stay on a topic through completion. It left me wanting to know more, and the argument could be made I suppose that that alone is a victory for the film.

Also, the man sitting next to me looked like a swarthy old Victorian sea captain, and seeing him bob his head enthusiastically to M.I.A. was totally worth the price of admission.

I know what you’re thinking: what does this have to do with class, Jake. This blog is for class, Jake. Jake, this blog is for class. But I think that swarthy (possible) sea captain is a good place to leave this blog.

We’ve spent so much time in class examining what’s wrong with the world, and I’ve spent so much time on this blog writing about how whatever answers may exist are elusive at best. I think as we wrap everything up it might be nice to end with an image of the world as it could be. What made Mr. Barra’s film a miss for me was maybe it’s greatest and most humanizing aspect as a piece of art, for while Beyond Ipanema didn’t slake my thirst for information or, really, entertainment, what it did do spectacularly was posit the image of a world where borders are only minor hurdles. Where people from around the world, regardless of class or creed or culture, find common ground in art and music. Where everyone has a voice.

It’s not real, and I know this, at least not outside of the insular world of “world music”. But it’s nice sometimes to see that the ideal exists, even if only in small pockets of space for small pockets of time.

Sympathy for the Devil

I’m not going to spend a lot of time here talking about the plot of On the Waterfront. It’s a classic, and frankly, has been written about more than enough in the last fifty odd years. And maybe it’s a bit of a cop out seeing a film at SIFF that I could rent whenever I wanted from Blockbuster. But there was something about viewing it at the Harvard Exit theater last weekend amongst the plush and florid decor that made me think about how life must have been for Elia Kazan.

We forget sometimes, having grown up in the age of the multiplex, the power that a theater has over a viewing experience. We forget about the theater’s power to transport us all, collectively as an audience through time and through space. And being in a theater that is nearly a century old it’s easy to lose yourself in that time, to imagine viewing On the Waterfront on its opening night. The theater becomes communal again.

This was the most enjoyable aspect of SIFF for me. I’ve seen independent films before, and given time plenty of the films I missed will be on Netflix. But the sense that everyone in the theater was there to enjoy a shared experience felt unique. Nobody was there because it was Friday and they were just seeing whatever was released that week. Our collective presence in the theater assured us that we had something in common. It was a humanizing experience.

But as I’ve said, I found myself distracted from the film. Perhaps because I came into it knowing that on a certain level On the Waterfront was a direct message to Kazan’s critics. It is hard to separate that from the film when you’re watching it. And maybe it worked as a piece of propaganda because by the end of the movie I felt more sorry for Kazan than angry at him.

It could be that I am a bit contrarian by nature, that I delight in poking holes in popular opinion but consider, as I did for the entirety of On the Waterfront: how many people does it take to make a movie? Dozens? Hundreds? And how long does it take? Months? Years? And how involved of a process is it? That is, how much attention must be paid to every minute detail?

I think I feel sorry for Kazan because he obviously cares about his craft. Not only does he care about his craft though, but I get the impression that it was the only way he had found to really communicate. It was his essence. Because a film can be a powerful way to send a message, but it is also an incredibly involved way to send a message. Kazan spent an extraordinary amount of time and effort refuting popular condemnation.

This tells us two things: first that Kazan believed, or had convinced himself that he was in the right. Kazan cared so much about casting himself as a hero and not a villain that he created a piece of art to address his critics. In a way he made sure he was bound to have the last word, his film would speak on his behalf even after he died. Second, as I have mentioned above, that Kazan avoided more direct or simpler methods of refutation leads me to believe that he had found very few mediums through which he could communicate. If film was so inextricably linked to him, I find it very hard to place blame on a man who was trying to salvage his life’s work.

Because HUAC would have, or could have ruined him. And it’s easy, given the hindsight of history to assume that were we in his place we would have acted differently, it’s easy to view Kazan as a coward. But a strange thing that we do not address often enough in our society is that there are things worth being a coward for. It was selfish of Kazan maybe, but he had found his love, his calling, and he was willing to be a coward if it meant holding on to it.

I sort of hate that it’s become a conservative, reactionary standpoint to decry how out of touch Hollywood is with the mainstream, because it obscures the fact that Hollywood does, in fact, operate in a weird Twilight Zone reflection of the real world. Los Angeles is populated, more so than any other major city I’ve ever visited, with freakish pseudo-people, who adopt affectations to get noticed or to stand out. The whole studio system is basically founded on and run by imaginary money. I can’t think of a single other industry where investors could gamble hundreds of millions of dollars, lose out (for example, Prince of Persia came out last weekend, and recouped only thirty million of its two hundred million dollar budget) and still be allowed to gamble hundreds of millions of dollars ever again. Let us remember that when Kazan was honored by the Academy, many people chose not to stand for his ovation, or to even applaud at all. Meanwhile Roman Polanski gets a near-universal standing ovation for his Oscar for The Pianist and he literally drugged and raped a thirteen-year-old girl.

Which isn’t to say that Hollywood deserved the blacklist, or that Kazan was a hero for damning his peers before HUAC. I guess what I mean is that we will never, as outsiders, be able to place any meaningful value judgement on his actions because the realm he operated in is divorced from logic or reason. It’s sort of like…OK, remember at the end of Chinatown?

Forget about it, it’s Hollywood.

Another Depressing Post Wherein I Realize That I Don't Have Any Answers to My Most Pressing Questions

The first time I saw a naked woman on film was in David Lynch's Lost Highway. Like most straight guys this was probably a formative, or at the very least a significantly memorable experience. Though unlike most straight guys I was not afforded Rockwellesque, rose-tinted, nostalgic pubescent memories. There was no secreting away a pilfered Playboy to a treehouse (with "No Girls Allowed" sign, and later catching tadpoles down by the creek). No, instead, and if you're familiar with Lynch or Highway you'll probably remember the same things, I get only images of that creepy video tape, or that phone call or that guy who falls face first onto the edge of a coffee table or, y'know…

boo.

…this.

Anyways, the point is that I was, like, twelve years old. Lost Highway seems less shocking and terrifying and more fascinating now that I can understand it but at the time I was enthralled by the sheer craziness of the whole endeavor. The images in the film were decidedly not mainstream. And I was hooked. In fact, because I came from a small midwestern town that was devoid of culture (unless you like antiquing) it is probably the Independent Film Channel's fault that I enjoy anything interesting at all. Channel 58 was the only way I would have been able to see Argento's Inferno, or Babbit's But I'm a Cheerleader, or Cronenberg's Crash before the age of 13 (though I was arguably not nearly old enough to really understand any of these films, I think the most important part is that they introduced me to a world where I would actually have to try to understand a movie; that the form was actually an art form). It was Lynch's films though that remained my main draw to that 'scene'.

And that's my long and circuitous way of marveling at how I didn't see Mullholland Drive until a few months ago. Critics are normally pretty divided when it comes to Lynch but Drive seems pretty universally loved, which, given that it was still supposed to be pretty uncompromisingly Lynchian, should have been intriguing enough for me to hunt it down earlier, but what can you do?

I'm not going to really unpack the movie here (because that would take forever and probably still not get us anywhere) but, because we've been talking about heteronormativity and depictions of gays and lesbians on film I think Mullholland Drive should be applauded for the way it depicts the relationship between Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Harring. I think what I like about their relationship in the film is that while at first glance it may seem exploitative (I mean there's really no reason these two women all of a sudden have a sex scene [though, spoiler alert, the whole movie is a dream sequence so we could get into that whole can of worms about how there's no reason anything in this film happens I suppose]) but then, most sex scenes in most films are exploitative. Lynch ironically (and I'm not suggesting this--or anything in this film--is accidental) does a great thing for depictions of gays on film by giving them a perfectly tawdry, meaningless sex scene the same way that most male and female leads are given perfectly tawdry, meaningless sex scenes in most mainstream movies.

The frustrating thing though is that Drive is still undeniably an arthouse film. Lynch isn't really winning any converts. I have to imagine that most people who willingly sit through one of his films aren't rabid Christian fundamentalists. We've talked a whole lot in this class about the lack of representation for almost everyone in regards to film. In a mainstream film though you can't have a gay sex scene without Making a Statement. You can't have a black bank manager without it Meaning Something. And while I don't necessarily agree with it, I can understand how sometimes a filmmaker would just want to Tell a Story w/o Making a Statement, and so defers to the status quo if only for simplicity's sake.

But the real world doesn't work like that. I would be willing to bet that as I type this there's a gay couple out there having a sex scene of their own. It doesn't always have to mean something in regular life, they're not doing it as some form of protest. So why do we treat it as such in film? Granted, when you go against the norm people are going to notice, and, as I've touched on above, maybe since I grew up watching things that subverted norms it doesn't seem so shocking to me. And is it a chicken-egg sort of thing? That is, does subverting norms become a Big Deal because it is so rarely done, or is it so rarely done because it would be a Big Deal? I of course don't have an answer to that (that's becoming a running theme in these blogs it seems) but I think it's worth looking at. I would hope that most people upon self-examination would be able to realize that there world will remain sufficiently un-blown regardless of the "norms" they see subverted in film.

N.B. Condescension

Reading Roger Ebert’s review for Children of a Lesser God (for posterity’s sake, because I’m sure this blog is going to outlive me, we were assigned to read this for class; I don’t necessarily go about checking on Ebert’s thoughts for too many movies) I was struck in particular by one line regarding how often movies about the disabled are condescending. In Children’s case (which I have not seen yet, so am really no authority on the level of its condescension) Ebert claimed that the film was condescending by “conferring greater moral authenticity on the handicapped character”. This is a standard Hollywood trope and one that I’ve found myself writing on over and over somehow this school year (it’s almost as if all the Humanities professors are teaching similar concepts…concepts regarding some sort of human-y condition thing). What seems funny (not funny ha-ha) to me is that no matter how the disabled are portrayed in Hollywood films it almost always comes off as condescending and yet, for as out of touch as Hollywood is with reality, this is perhaps the most realistic reaction they could have toward the disabled.

That is not to say that Hollywood is correct in these portrayals, but simply from personal observation it’s clear that most non-disabled Americans I’ve seen treat the disabled with either extreme discomfort and anxiety or that voice that one adopts when one is telling a child how marvelous their handprint turkey painting is. It’s a reaction that is mirrored in major motion pictures’ very tone.

So far this year I’ve found myself writing about the insulting caricature of Forrest Gump, the misguided (if [possibly] well-intentioned) portrayal of disabled veterans in Tom Cruise’s Born on the Fourth of July, and—no less than three times—the film Murderball. Murderball is the only one that seems unwilling to present the disabled in as cloying a way as possible. It is (or seems, who am I to say?) an honest portrayal. It is hobbled (is this insensitive?) by its very format though. As a documentary it—let’s be honest—does not have the opportunity to reach a large audience. Also, by the nature of being a documentary it cannot help portraying wheelchair-rugby players realistically (though an interesting conversation could be had re: the false narratives that are enforced on every documentary; did Murderball come off as subversive of Hollywood norms [and thus more realistic] only because the narrative device imposed on it [that of a traditional sports film] has nothing to do with disability and in fact often precludes disability from having any part of the narrative, thereby creating the illusion of sub/inversion of Hollywood tropes or was it an accurate portrayal? That is, have we reached a point where we hold Hollywood’s veracity in such disdain as to deem a film realistic so long as it subverts Hollywood or is the film accurate because it is, actually, accurate?)

Anyway, the point of the above is that while Murderball is an interesting film (“Shoreline professors recommend it constantly and consistently” is, I believe, written on the back of the DVD case, though the quote remains uncredited) it is hardly indicative of either common filmic portrayal of the disabled or of prevailing notions regarding them. Which fact itself is pretty bleak yes? But then the question comes down to what can we do about this? Not just the films that is (because frankly I would not mind if we just scrapped the Hollywood disabled-person narrative and started fresh, mostly because those films are never ever ever good but I have to go for months after they are released being told how inspiring they are) but the prevailing notions that they reflect.

And unlike the other problems we’ve discussed in this class (which mostly boil down to our fear of the “Other”, a fear that easily breaks down with increased exposure to that “Other”) our condescension towards the disabled indicates to me a deeper American fear, which is the fear of the self. Because I remain convinced that the reason we marginalize the disabled is that they remind “us” too much of “ourselves”. They force introspection (i.e. what would it be like to be blind? etc. etc.) on a people that have grown to despise it. It’s why we inundate ourselves with entertainment that says “The disabled aren’t like us, don’t worry! They are almost like us but more noble/bitter/enlightened/whatever”. You will notice perhaps that while film acts as a form of escapism for most people, there are not films anymore that ask us to escape from the reality of there being black Americans, or female Americans or what-have-you. But there are films that ask us to escape from the reality that there are disabled Americans.

This though, is where my post gets disappointing, because our fear of any sort of honest self-appraisal is a problem that may be way too big to tackle. I know in a class like this we’re not supposed to think of a problem as too big to tackle, believe me. But realistically how do we change an ideology? We can change reactions, we can model acceptance and tolerance, but can we learn to be honest with ourselves? And if so, how? And then when? And…I have yet to find answers for these questions.

I Don't Want the World, I Just Want Your Half and Other Problems With "The American Dream"

I have an odd relationship with the American Dream, insomuch as I am not sure of what that relationship is. Perhaps it would be accurate to say that the American Dream is like an uncle whom, I will admit, I like very much while also recognizing that I only see him about once every six or seven months, when I choose to travel back home, across the country. Which is to say, I can’t really tell if I just like the version of the American Dream that I choose to see, on my own time, under my own circumstances.

This struck me as I was re-watching Citizen Kane recently, and as many themes as that film has, the one that has always stuck with me was its fairly strong critique of the materialism that seems part and parcel of said Dream. Kane is a tragedy, ultimately, but while Charles Foster Kane’s rise and fall is the explicit tragedy, the underlying causes of that tragedy are implicitly capitalism, and its empty promises of power and love. In the end Kane dies surrounded by his palace, but ultimately nothing else. What’s been bothering me though lately, in regards to my relationship with the Dream, is that I recognize the honesty of that tragedy. Its truthfulness is why the film remains one of my favorites, and yet I can’t say with any certainty how that truthfulness makes me feel.

I like a lot of movies that have that anti-consumerist bent. I think Fight Club (while falling short of a “great” film, and possessing, albeit, confusingly antediluvian gender politics) was subtly genius for sneaking a pretty barbed critique of modern American consumerism (Brad Pitt has a pretty funny speech in there about Ikea) into a Major Motion Picture. I love American Psycho (a rare example of a film so completely blowing its source material out of the water) because it’s really funny when viewed with an audience that appreciates black comedy (as a quick anecdote, I remember watching the movie with a girlfriend in high school, having told her that it was a “comedy, but sort of a dark one”, and look, that sort of thing should have been right up her alley, but she was really more disturbed by it than anything and afterwards said something along the lines of “why would you think that was funny?” all accusing-like and making me feel like an awful person. I have, since that time, met many people who have been able to assure me that the movie is in fact funny, and I am also an awful person, so she wasn’t all wrong), but I also connected with its criticism of American consumer and corporate culture. Christian Bale’s warped yuppie figure is strangely prescient in a society that so clearly can see themselves being violated by Wall Street bankers. And despite what our textbook would have us believe, I remain convinced that George Bailey is at least a socialist at heart, and that’s probably the only part of It’s a Wonderful Life that I like (I didn’t grow up watching that movie so I don’t have that rosy nostalgia that everybody else seems to bring to it. My family watched Die Hard around Christmas).

So, my point is that part of me connects to the rejection of the American Dream vis-à-vis materialism and consumerism, and owning everything all the time. But there’s a larger part of me that doesn’t even see the American Dream as necessarily having anything to do with those things. My American Dream has more to do with a country that gives second chances, that doesn’t necessarily believe that individualism has to mean stepping on top of other people, a country that sets its people—every single one, regardless of race or creed--to wander freely though its vast and almost limitless expanses. I suppose part of that freedom is the freedom to buy a lot of stuff if you so choose, but I don’t know when or how exactly that became the de facto Dream. The myth of American meritocracy? I know it doesn’t hold up under harsh light, but it’s still a good myth and one that we should be striving to achieve.

But all of that is selective. I'm cherry picking the values I think America should be associated with while ignoring the actual reality of the situation. Maybe that's why I like those movies though. They all critique certain aspects of the system but are, by and large, products of the system. Products that could not be par of any other system. It can all seem sort of twisty, but reality is messy and dreams even more so. The American Dream, in all of its interpretations and differences, is no different.

If I May Return to In the Company of Men, for Just One Second

So, I already covered the misogyny present in Neil LaBute’s In the Company of Men in an earlier post, but now might be a good time to discuss the misanthropy that’s in there as well. I was racking my brain trying to think of a great cinematic example of white privilege and for better or worse, one scene kept coming to mind.

Perhaps you will remember Chad, Aaron Eckhart’s character and all-around douchebag. It should not be surprising that the scene in question involves him as I think I’ve already detailed how sociopathic his character is. I think that what makes Eckhart’s portrayal so captivating is how he displays his cruelty so casually. It’s autonomous at this point for him, the way you or I would breathe. There’s something that strikes me as incredibly realistic about that. Now, Chad is ostensibly a psychopath. Not in that Alfred Hitchcock, kill-you-in-the-shower-and-dress-up-like-his-mother sort of way, but in the legitimate psychological sense where he seems to have no capacity for remorse and does whatever he has to to get what he wants, completely and utterly objectifying other people, despite what his charisma might suggest about his character. So I’m not saying that pyschopathy is realistic necessarily—it’s not really a pathology that affects a vast swath of the American population. But in reality cruelty is often casual. Most conscious, pointed maliciousness is the domain of comic book super-villains. Much as we discussed the concept of passive racism in this class, it seems to me that the majority of the evil acts that happen are the result of casual, tossed-off, hardly-contemplated-or-dwelled-upon-for-any-length-of-time cruelty.

But anyways, I have no way of proving that. It’s just a hunch. Back to my main point, the scene in In the Company of Men I’m talking about occurs about halfway through the film. In keeping with that tone of casual cruelty, it occurs apropos of nothing. It does not further the plot. I suppose it adds to the characterization of Chad as callous and predatory, but the film has ample proof of that already. Perhaps this is why it sticks in the mind so much, it’s incredibly uncomfortable to watch and it feels over the top in a movie that is, by nature, over the top.

Essentially the scene (which was recently removed from Youtube unfortunately, otherwise it would be linked to here) revolves around Eckhart intimidating a young, black intern, and of course, his character can’t just glower and shout. He has to berate the intern, and then sexually harass him. He literally makes the man prove that he has the balls to do the job. So it’s uncomfortable to watch someone in Chad’s position flex his power over somebody who does not have that power. Once again though, we know this already. The whole movie is steeped in that discomfort.

The racial undertones (and I hesitate to use the word undertone here because the scene is effusive with so much charged racial history that undertone doesn’t seem to do it justice. The feelings are omnipresent. Chad even lectures the man on the proper pronunciation of the word “ask”) are clear though. Chad is a stand in for white, corporate power over just about everybody in this movie and black Americans in this scene in particular. It’s a sad and disturbing fact that in real life if a black man wants to rise on the corporate ladder in America he is probably going to have to do so at the permission of a white man. White men are overwhelmingly the ones in power. Chad makes this dominance clear. If anybody wants to advance, they’re going to have to go through him.

Chad is also a great example of the reactionary fear that many people in power feel when they sense that their power or privilege is being questioned or challenged. His treatment of other people is predatory, much as the history of white men for the last few hundred years has been predatory, but there is also the sense that Chad is trying to cut something off at the pass as it were, that his predatory nature is now more preventative than anything. Much as his game is orchestrated under the pretenses that women have forgotten their place in the world, we can see this scene as Chad’s reaction to anyone other than white men trying to improve their station in the world.

So I promise I’ll stop writing about In the Company of Men. It’s not even a movie I particularly like (it makes a person way too uncomfortable to watch it more than once or twice) I just think it does a pretty good job of illustrating the fundamental inhumanity of white, male privilege. I would say though that if there’s any hope it’s that everyone I know who has seen the movie has been equally as repulsed by the characters onscreen. Whether this is because we all as humans tend to recoil from such a raw and naked depiction of a human being’s capability to do damage to another or because as a society we have grown to reject that capability is unfortunately not up to me to say.

On Proper Frames of Reference

I recently rewatched Boyz n the Hood for class and was almost instantaneously reminded of how frustrating that movie is for me. Part of the frustrating is on a technical level. I can’t really explain it, but everything from the 90s strikes me as distractingly gaudy and hideously dated. And it’s only that decade. Anything made before it can range from kitschy to classic, and anything after registers as, I dunno…modern maybe. Regardless of what causes it, I find it hard not to be turned off by the mere aesthetic of Boyz. The clothing and the cars and the haircuts--it all reminds me of when I was a kid and apparently that sets of some subconscious annoyance. On a more serious level though I’ve always found the film somewhat facile—a simple morality tale set to film competently, but not especially masterfully. Every time I watch it, it feels like I’m watching an after school special or something.

On the other hand, I cannot deny that the film is important as an historiographical piece, that it works towards creating a marvelous illustration of a culture that up until the 90s had remained marginalized and largely ignored by white American society. It’s also apparent to me that many of the themes that run throughout Boyz (its assertion, for example, that young black men are in need of strong father figures to help them rise above their oppression) are still present in whatever national discourse (however limited it may be) we still have regarding race in this country. More than anything I think I feel like Boyz isn’t a particularly challenging film, even though it tackles issues that are patently challenging. I think that’s where the frustration lies—I can see that Boyz is a culturally significant film, I just wish it were more like Do the Right Thing.

Spike Lee’s directorial debut does for Bed-Stuy what Boyz does for South Central, but rather than follow several black characters throughout their adolescence, Do the Right Thing focuses on one very intense week, during a heat wave, when tensions that have long been simmering under everyone’s surface are beginning to rise. It is, as you may have guessed, an allegory for America’s racial tensions. Much like Cuba Gooding Jr.’s character in Boyz, Lee’s character in Do the Right Thing is largely trying to find his way in the world, tugged at by a million different influences. Gooding Jr. does his best to keep his head down, get an education and get out of South Central. Lee’s character eventually acts as the catalyst to a mob riot, and yet he doesn’t come off as any worse than anyone else in the film. Lee seems more concerned with letting the audience determine where it stands at the end, and the film almost challenges the viewer to take a side, the direct implication of Lee’s actions in the movie being that no matter what you believe, action is what speaks volumes.

Do the Right Thing, paints a portrait of black, interurban culture in the 90s that seems slightly at odds with John Singleton’s even though the same discord and strife are undercurrents in each society. Whereas Singleton’s South Central is plagued by almost omnipresent violence and decay Lee’s Bed-Stuy is vibrant and undeniably alive, if slightly on edge. Now, part of this is due largely to the functions that these films seek to fulfill, and to a certain extent I feel like it’s even slightly inappropriate to compare the two. Boyz seeks to send a message to black, urban youth about how to escape the violence of their surroundings. That’s probably why it comes off like a morality play to me, by it’s very nature it seeks to portray the world in black and white terms. Do the Right Thing on the other hand is trying to shrink the national racial tension (and every viewpoint that comes with it) in America down to one neighborhood. It has to pack a lot of life into a few blocks.

But then, that’s why Do the Right Thing feels like a more mature, accomplished work to me. The world isn’t black and white, and the older I get the more I appreciate Lee’s attempt to show how every point of view regarding how race should be handled in this country may be both right and wrong in its own way but how the real necessity is to get those viewpoints out in the open. Boyz has a very clear sense of what is right and what is wrong, but Do the Right Thing seems obsessed with the ambiguity of what right and wrong may be. That ambiguity feels more real to me, because the tensions that exist in America to this day are real, and they remain tucked below the surface of every national discourse even though we may not want to address them directly.

That ambiguity bleeds over into my reactions to both films though. I’m left wondering if maybe I just don’t get Boyz n the Hood. I’m left wondering if I’m even qualified to speak about films that by their nature are not necessarily for me. I don’t adhere to the conceit that since I am a white male I have no voice in the conversation of race relations, but maybe Boyz doesn’t speak to me because I have no frame of reference for it. It’s set in a time and culture that I will never be part of. And I know that when we evaluate anything we do so fully ensconced in our personal history and viewpoint. The touchy ambiguity of Do the Right Thing though…I obviously have a frame of reference for that. In the end I can only hope that by taking Lee’s cue and adding my voice to the conversation that I’m helping in some small way.

Nice Guy Syndrome, John Krasinski’s Stumbly-Bumbly Dirty Mouth, and I Lose Control of My Parentheticals… or: This Weekend I Watched Some Movies

This weekend I watched a movie where Jim from The Office calls his girlfriend a "fucking bitch". Suffice it to say my world was rocked. Surely he would turn to the camera with an impish smirk and shrug, right? But alas, this was the only face I got:

That is one sullen-looking Jim.

The scene was clumsy, one of the monologues that worked the least in a movie that was full of spotty monologues. On a certain “meta” level however, hearing Jim from The Office say that reinforced the underlying thesis of the film.

Let me back up though and start from the beginning. The film was John Krasinski’s directorial debut, an adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. (Perhaps some of you have seen me lugging around all thousand-plus pages of Wallace’s Infinite Jest? BIWHM is (perhaps as a result of its brevity) an even denser book, harder to unpack and, arguably, less rewarding when one does so). Some people—and by some people, I mean me—said Krasinski was crazy to try and adapt this book to film. They (me) were correct. It shows chutzpah I guess for a guy who’s mostly known for playing bland, sheepish everymen to release a piece of cinema that plays more like experimental theater and while it doesn’t pan out completely there are certainly enough interesting ideas in it to make it the sort of film that at least begs discussion upon viewing.

Wallace’s book is largely a collection of character studies loosely tied together by brief interludes (the eponymous Brief Interviews) which feature various men being directly interviewed or overheard. Much like the film (and, let’s be honest, almost every collection of short fiction ever) some of these pieces work and some don’t, but the largest difference between film and book has to do with the scope of their underlying messages. Whereas Wallace’s collection seems to expound on his pet theme of our inability as humans to effectively communicate with one another or to accurately interface with the world and society around us, Krasinski’s film cuts out everything but the Brief Interviews. In doing so Krasinski turns our focus to the ways in which men communicate (or fail to communicate) in a post-feminist world.

The men of the Interviews are hideous, but they are neither uniform in this regard, nor entirely unfamiliar personalities. They are not aggressively violent sociopaths or rapists or murderers. They’re just guys. But the conceit that makes Krasinski’s film nigh unwatchable (it’s basically two straight hours of monologues) is also a genius method of conveying his message. By portraying monologues with very little action or scenery Krasinski forces us to confront very language used by these men. Language that is peppered with “enlightened, feminist” wording but that ultimately belies its speakers’ total inability to comprehend women. Will Forte waxes (creepily) rhapsodic about how he just loves women—the way they smell nice and all. Max Minghella and Lou Taylor Pucci engage in a movie-long debate about what it is the “modern woman” wants, and how she struggles to achieve it. Will Arnett begs his girlfriend to let him back into his apartment as he tries to explain his indiscretions. The Guy From Death Cab shows up and mumbles.

Ultimately these men, and their inability to communicate, are all meant to embody an archetype that seems to have arrived hot on the heels of the internet (and the subsequent “geek is chic” scene)—the Nice Guy. The Nice Guy is polite, some might say gentlemanly, around women. He cares about them in the way nooooobody else does, and serves as a close friend, confidante, shoulder-to-cry-on. He can’t understand why women always go for the “asshole tough guy”. (Webcomic XKCD sums the Nice Guy up…nicely). Deep down though the Nice Guy is really just a Guy and—so Krasinski argues—not really any different from the “asshole tough guys” they decry. They may even be worse, because they’re covering up their inner hideousness under a veneer of progressive enlightenment. The problem with their attempts at communication stem from the fact that while they’re using the correct words, they’re not using the correct meanings. Krasinski seems to suggest that the result of the feminist movement was only that men gained new tools with which to oppress.

That’s why Krasinski is such a perfect choice for the film’s final monologue. Krasinski is famous for playing the ultimate Nice Guy on NBC’s The Office. (Come to think of it That Guy From Death Cab was another enlightened casting choice in this regard—their music being the soundtrack to many a Nice Guy’s life (it’s also interesting that That Guy From Death Cab wrote a song about how he basically sweet-talked some girl into sleeping with him even though he didn’t like her very much (that would be Transatlanticism’s “Tiny Vessels—a song which is discussed on the Death Cab tour documentary Drive Well, Sleep Carefully very briefly by (and I’m paraphrasing here) the band basically saying, “This is going to make you look like an asshole,” and That Guy From Death Cab saying, “Yeah, well”.) (If we’re being honest with ourselves, by the by, That Guy should maybe stick to making music, and, at that, stick to maybe trying to go back in time and making his last two albums something I would want to listen to more than once (I am saying, you see, that he is not a very good actor))).

After I saw this movie I was all, "More like Ben Gibberish, amirite?"

So the Big Twist is that we’re conditioned as an audience to view Krasinski as a sympathetic, humble, decent dude. That’s why it’s so jarring to see him get so worked up when he’s explaining to his girlfriend why he cheated on her that he calls her a “fucking bitch”. It’s totally counter to the character of Jim on The Office. But out in the real world there are plenty of Nice Jims from The Office who have no reason not to act this way. Krasinski stumbles over the line enough to make me believe that he may actually just be a nice guy (as opposed to a Nice Guy) who has never called anyone a bitch in his life, but the damage is done. As an audience we can’t put our trust in the Nice Guy anymore. (As another aside, it’s really a shame that Krasinski mangles this monologue because it’s really an effective story in book form (though in the book the speech is not directed at a girlfriend and the “fucking bitch” outburst reads more like a man so stunted by the societal expectations that he remain emotionless that he cannot communicate on any level what for him was an actual spiritual, enlightening moment rather than a spoiled asshole trying to justify his infidelity)).

My favorite monologue in the movie though (barring Frankie Faison’s story about his bathroom attendant-father—a monologue that doesn’t fit thematically into the movie that exists, but would fit beautifully into the movie that would have existed if the movie could reasonably have been expected to hew any closer to the source material) comes via Detective Stabler. Christopher Meloni plays an oily executive who is overheard discussing a recent business trip with his friend, wherein he encountered a woman at the airport who was completely devastated by her lover not showing up on his flight, and, effectively, ending their relationship. Stabler spins a yarn about how he consoled that woman and the way he tells it one would assume that he connected with this woman on an intensely deep and personal level. That he was so overwhelmed by the sight of her grief that he sought to console her to offer her a moment of respite and humanity in a world lacking both. Spoiler alert: he was just trying to bang her. Meloni in that scene reminded me of Aaron Eckhart’s character in Neil LaBute’s In the Company of Men and it was then that I was reminded that the myth of the Nice Guy was being debunked as far back as 1997.

In the Company of Men details a "game" that two executives, Chad and Howard (played by Aaron Eckhart and Matt Malloy, respectively) take it upon themselves to play in order to bring some dignity back to their lives as men (dignity robbed from them by the world at large, but mostly "these women, getting out of line" as Howard puts it). The rules of the game are simple, Chad and Howard will seduce a woman (deaf secretary Christine, played by Stacy Edwards), then reveal to her that they were only pretending to love her, leaving her devastated and putting her (and by proxy, womankind) in her place. (It's been almost fifteen years since this movie came out by the way, so I'm going to be pretty liberal with the spoilers, such as they are.)

Anyway, ItCoM is ostensibly about power structures in general, really more a scathing indictment of the corporate, capitalist structure that puts white men in power and constantly struggling for more than anything else (its most uncomfortable scene doesn't even have to do with the "game", it involves Two Face casually harassing a young black intern)--especially given that the real focus of Chad and Howard's "game" turns out to be Howard himself--but it cannot be denied that LaBute reserves a special amount of ire for the way he views men to fundamentally be.

Early in the film Chad and Howard bemoan the state of their personal and professional lives, the troubles in which they blame solely on women and not, for example, their own need for power and control. In this way ItCoM echoes BIwHM, insomuch as it examines how men have reacted to growing up in a postfeminist world. (Another film that examines this is Fight Club, but FC doesn't really have any place for women in its world so it can hardly be considered postfeminist). Where Krasinski suggests a subtly insidious world lurking beneath the Nice Guy exterior however, LaBute sees only venom and rage.

The really scary thing about ItCoM though is how complicit the audience is made in the "game" that's being played on Christine. We're let in on the details at beginning and it's like a secret that we keep with Chad and Howard. As we the movie goes on we are forced to watch Chad and Howard and Christine's courtship knowing full well what the endgame entails. There's even a scene early on where Chad leaves Howard and says, "Let's hurt somebody," but Howard is already gone. Chad is speaking to himself sure, but he's also speaking to the audience.

That scene and its borderline breaking of the fourth wall reminded me of Michael Haneke's Funny Games and much like that film, ItCoM seems more that willing to blame the audience for its participation--not only as a passive audience watching a movie but as a passive audience (and thus enabler) of an unjust and hideous world. We're going to feel Just Plain Awful and it's our fault for being there in the first place.

Howard is ItCoM's Nice Guy. He's introduced as a spurned lover (or really, if you listen closely, more of a stalker, as he describes sitting outside his ex-fiance's house at four in the morning) and he's the one who seems ambivalent about the whole "game". He's even the one who feels like he's fallen in love with Christine. We've spent the whole movie with him so we're privy to the cracks in his Nice Guy facade, but until the final act he's portrayed as weak enough that we cannot be faulted for seeing him as merely a pawn in Chad's scheme. Maybe he's not bad, we think, just easily led.

But then Howard comes apart at the seams and it's every bit as jarring as Krasinski's "fucking bitch". Malloy has portrayed Howard as a pathetic, milquetoast schmuck up until this point so it's shocking when we see him violently confront Christine in his car:

He explodes, pressing Christine up against the window, berating her "stupid retard voice" and then giving away the "game". And yet Howard maintains that he's the Nice Guy. That Chad is the evil one, and that he's the one who deserves to be with her.

There's a Big Twist Ending in this film too, and it's a bit of a mindfuck when you realize that Chad (who, it turns out, is happily married, has never really been wronged personally by women and was sort of just playing the "game" because he felt like it) is a Nice Guy as well. We just don't get to see him throughout the movie with his Nice Guy face on, suggesting that one of the most revolting characters ever put on screen could, if we caught him at a different time, have come off much differently.

The outlook is bleak then, if we take these movies to represent reality. Are we doing comments for this blog for this class? Because I'd love to hear from anybody who had a view regarding how they feel the world has shaped up after the introduction of the modern feminist movement. Personally I'm still mulling it over, but for my part I was not entirely surprised by the men portrayed in these films, hideous as they may be.