THE BATTLE OF CHILE: THE INSURRECTION OF THE BOURGEOISIE (Guzmán 75): [4]

Make no mistake. Even if you were only to watch Part One, the part I've just watched, THE BATTLE OF CHILE is essential viewing. Where Chris Marker's A GRIN WITHOUT A CAT ably captures the social unrest of the entire leftist movement in the 60s, THE BATTLE OF CHILE zeroes in on the turmoil of one country and lets the implications ripple seismically outward. You may not feel the force of this documentary on a conscious level, but like few others I've seen, Part One of this trilogy manages to capture the ineffable sense of history in progress, and that effect is potent. Without any accompanying music and sparing voiceover narration, the film nevertheless creates a throbbing restlessness, drawing on the fervor of its many subjects and organizing their outrage into a loose narrative of a country's fall from grace. Guzmán peers into the heart of Chile on the brink of fascism, and the growing abyss glares right back at him, furious and defiant.

I can't claim to be a Sartrean scholar. I'm taking an upper level undergraduate course in his works and it's been fun, but also immensely frustrating. Confronted by the density of such works as Imagination: A Psychological Critique, War Diaries, and even the totemic Being and Nothingness, my confidence in my ability to open any book and understand it has taken a deserved beating. Sartre is dizzyingly intelligent, too intelligent for me really, and yet when he applies that brilliance to human beings, I find myself on surer ground. His autobiography The Words is full of tossed off insights into human behavior, and the book I'm currently reading, Anti-Semite and Jew, is frightfully perceptive about the nature of hate. To vastly oversimplify, one of the sources of the consuming fury that is anti-Semitism is the sense that one's eternal country is being stolen by outsiders. The person who feels a birthright to the continuance of their country as it has always been is the person who will feel most threatened by usurpers of any kind. And where the oppressed work to make their host country hospitable to them, sometimes on an individual level and sometimes on a larger scale (i.e. through socialism), the reactionary can only see an attack on their privileged position. Challenging the government structure that has ensured the prosperity of them and their family is the same as challenging them to their faces. As their country is held hostage by outsiders, their loyalty to the rule of law declines. Because if the ruling class is illegitimate, what sense does it make to play by its rules?

Before we move on to examining this dynamic in Chile, I'd like to make another brief detour to one of my favorite blogs, The Last Psychiatrist. The blogger Alone, commander-in-chief of this little Internet outpost, specializes in shattering false binaries and epistemological traps. One post I've never been able to get out of my head suggests frighteningly that losers in a political battle don't hate the leader of the opposite party as much as they may seem to. The example is Obama, so we'll frame it in terms of Obama. Republicans may hate Obama plenty, but what they really hate isn't the man or even his policies. They hate the people who brought him to power: the blinkered, preening, arrogant liberals. He is the symbol of their wrongness, and through their dominance of media and pop culture, they're spreading the propaganda everywhere. It was bad enough when he rose to victory on a surge of misguided optimism in 2008, but even after various policy defeats and continual economic woes, the 2012 re-election kept him in power. It wasn't even close. And that's what's scary. Liberals are too blind to see that they've elected a naked emperor, and they'll defend him all the way to the bottom just to seem smarter than conservatives. Left with no cultural or legal power (save for tenuous control of the House of Representatives), is it any wonder American conservatives have seen this state of affairs as a fight to the death?

These thoughts crept uncomfortably to the forefront of my mind as I watched Guzmán's camera crew interview assorted Chileans as the opposition party made its stand against Salvador Allende's democratically elected socialist government. Many Chileans were happy to share their socialist beliefs and their praise of Allende's governance, but as for the supporters of the Christian Democrat Party? The conservatives? No such joy could be found in their statements, even those who firmly believed Allende's rule was coming to an end. The folks who testily declined to give their opinion? You can bet they weren't socialists. Even the "apolitical" bus driver struck me as being too apprehensive to give his real opinion. There's no shame in declaring your support for Popular Unity and the workers when everyone in the streets backs you up, but who wants to come out and declare their support for the bourgeoisie? Such is the dynamic of the "national mood." You need only look to the gleeful hostility with which George W. Bush was lampooned from 2000 to 2008. Frustrated and resentful, American liberals could only express their displeasure with the conservative majority through mocking their missteps (meanwhile, the disastrous Iraq War claimed thousands of American and Iraqi lives and further justified anti-US sentiment in the broader Middle East. But LOL look at this dumb thing Bush just said!). But where American liberals were content to make Bush jokes with their friends, and where American conservatives are content to wave Impeach Obama signs at your local gas station, Chile's situation was much more dire.

Again, the energy of this film cannot be understated. There are no grand narratives, no game-changing speeches. There are only short pieces of exposition from the narrator, followed by the passionate opinions of people involved in the leftist struggle with occasional counterpoints from the opposition. Certainly there must have been Chileans apathetic to the national conflict (e.g. the affectless son shuffling through the apartment of his joyous Christian Democrat mother), but they seem few and far between here. The shots of streets packed with Popular Unity supporters are a reminder of just how important socialism was to these voters. This wasn't some idle culture war. This was about remaking an entire country so that the least among them would no longer suffer. We learn shortly that Popular Unity gains even more parliamentary power from the election, and even forty years removed, you can feel the political atmosphere tense with suspicion. The opposition suspects foul play, and even though this charge isn't necessarily brought to political attention, you can tell it affected their outlook. If Popular Unity isn't going to play fair, then why should we?

From there it's a disheartening spiral into disobedience, obfuscation, and rising popular unrest. The Christian Democrats block many crucial proposals from Allende that sought to nationalize resources, and the fascist movement gains more and more power in the streets. In the last third of the film, a copper strike lays bare the tensions of the situation. Seeking to sabotage the funding that would create a stable system of redistribution, the opposition preys on the worsening economy and convinces the underpaid copper miners to strike. Allende is sympathetic to the cause but knows copper is a huge source of revenue for his country, without which the socialist agenda will only suffer. He enjoins the miners to go back to work and suffer through the injustice, but the miners don't want to hear that it's their job to pick up the slack when politicians are paid lavishly and there are storehouses of hoarded goods that the wealthier refuse to share with the less fortunate. Add into this mix the U.S. sanctions and the C.I.A. agitators sent to stir up counter-revolutionary anger in the dissatisfied opposition, and it becomes sadly clear in retrospect how this burgeoning socialist movement was doomed from the start.

Nevertheless, a glimmer of hope appears when the country seems to unite in defense of the miners and their rights. Donations are made, of money and of tools. The miners are unhappy but many work overtime to keep the mines functioning and producing a steady output, knowing to quit now would only make things worse. It's all unfair, but what can anyone do but forge on in the face of injustice? The end of the film makes clear that this truce will be short-lived, but for a moment it seems that Chile would pull itself out of its factionalism and external pressures to keep the socialist dream alive.

I've always taken issue with people who say people will tear each other apart in times of hardship. Behavior in the aftermath of national tragedies suggests otherwise, and yet there's a thriving trend of apocalyptic fiction stoking the fears that we're all just barely civilized animals only looking out for ourselves. And certainly the increasing unruliness of Allende's opponents fueled the resistance that produced Augusto Pinochet and his dictatorship, but I refuse to see this as inevitable. An ephemeral alternate history, a "possibility" in the Sartrean sense, is visible in the selflessness of the people who banded together to support Allende's heroic endeavor. Their failure does not invalidate their attempt. In fact it vindicates Allende's belief in the people, who rose capably to the occasion. Sadly, forces outside control conspired to end the socialist enterprise, and what we have left of that battle is Guzmán's brave and informative document. I'll be watching the second two films in the trilogy and reporting back shortly.

(photo credit: en.wikipedia.org)

PROFILE: Tricky, Part One

To begin what I hope will become a years-long multi-entry project on such a singular figure as Adrian Nicholas Matthew Thaws by examining the MTV VMAs 2013 feels like a mistake, or an insult. But bear with me, because I think there's a music industry tendency represented in the outcomes of the MTV VMAs 2013 that explains Tricky's legendary rise to fame.

For the crowning Video of the Year award, Justin Timberlake was victorious, flanked by runners-up Macklemore and Robin Thicke. Macklemore won Best Hip-Hop video, beating out four black artists. But the category maybe most worth focusing on is Best Collaboration, which featured Thicke and Timberlake. They were nominated for working with, respectively, Jay Z, T.I., and Pharrell. Pink won in that category for her collaboration with Nate Ruess of sleeper-hit factory band fun.. What's worth noting, though, is the respect these artists were given for co-opting black artists into the black music they have made white. At its best, music can be a free space of collaboration without boundaries. Timberlake clearly has a deep love of R&B, evidenced often throughout his impressive career, and I don't doubt that there's a perfectly legitimate mutual respect between him and Jay Z that led him to include the famous rapper on his song. Thicke I'm more suspicious of. And then there's Macklemore, who in his mainstream success has no particular ties to blackness other than the black roots of hip-hop itself.

What these three artists represent, along with a certain newly infamous one I'll be mentioning shortly, is the way that black music is made acceptable and enjoyable to white audiences through white ambassadors. Robin Thicke has two black people in his song, and in an equal world that would make the song more black than white. But it's Thicke strutting and bragging and crooning throughout, with only Pharrell's whoops and T.I.'s subordinate verses to distract from his powerful white man's self-assertion. Blackness, for Thicke, is an exotic flavor. He has made black art his own, and his collaborators are indicators of the legitimacy of his take-over. This leaves white audiences free to enjoy the pleasures of his pop music with only momentary consideration of the blackness it's born of. This is true of Justin Timberlake too, with Jay Z being possibly the most significant black endorsement outside Barack Obama himself, and most of all of Macklemore. But where R&B always enjoyed a certain degree of respect, hip-hop has been labelled as dangerous just about since its inception. It's been touted for years by white people as signs of an impending black rebellion, an overthrow of the existing social order meant to install a new black supremacy. You wouldn't know any of that if you listened to Macklemore's various hits, and you certainly wouldn't hear of it in all the acclaim and popularity he's garnered. Because he's safe, you know. He's a good rapper. And by good, I mean white, and harmless. Just like the dreamy Timberlake and the teasing Thicke.

Black music, especially lately as black people begin to occupy ever more influential positions in our society, has a hard time gaining legitimacy. A good parallel case would be the rise of jungle in the UK in the early 90s. That lower-class largely black music was heralded as a threat to British society, with stray incidents of violence being cited as obvious signs of its danger. Eventually through circumstances both organic and external it was smoothed into the much "safer" Drum n' Bass, a genre largely practiced now by more affluent white producers. Certainly this has also been the case with rock 'n roll, as has been extensively documented elsewhere, but the whitening of hip-hop might be the most extreme example yet of this pattern. The path from N.W.A. to Macklemore would be virtually unthinkable 20 or even 10 years ago, but it seems perfectly natural now. The precedents are there of course, but we're at a specific cultural moment right now where white people seem quite interested in the blackest of black music (and can even enjoy certain popular black artists) but are unwilling to immerse themselves in the world of black music proper. They need other, more powerful white people to cherrypick what they like about rap and hip-hop (primarily the hip-hop rhythm and rap's lyrical wordplay, I'd say) in order to present a "safer," more sanitized version to suit their tastes. This practice is the opposite of cultural cross-pollination. It is theft and an act of appropriation.

Is Macklemore evil? I can't say. I haven't looked into him much or even heard much of his work. For all I know he could be the world's most diligent student of hip-hop. It wouldn't be the first time a white artist falls in love with music outside his demographic. So maybe Macklemore isn't a thief and an exploiter. But his position in popular culture casts him as one, because I rather doubt that his fans are using him as an entryway into the previously unexplored world of real hip-hop (though if they are then that's great!). More likely, they're enjoying his hits while ignoring the culture from which they came.

I don't want to suggest that the only way to truly enjoy music is to understand its lineage inside out. Doing so can certainly deepen your appreciation and is plenty laudable in its own right, but there's nothing wrong with enjoying pop music simply as discrete pieces of art/entertainment. The trouble is when an industry studiously works to ignore a black artform for more than three decades but is happy to present the white conquistadors as the true standard-bearers of that artform and an uncritical audience happily agrees. That's what the MTV VMAs 2013 mean to America. We've created a framework of systemic marginalization that's reflected in the way we award white artists for taking all the credit for showcasing black culture to us. The narrative supplied to us by this award show could hardly be more indicative of our decades of cultural appropriation.

Enter Miley Cyrus. I don't really want to say too much about her, because anything I can say and want to say has already been covered beautifully by this (uncharacteristically) excellent Jezebel piece, expanded upon even further in this history, personal and universal, of black female exploitation. The Miley Cyrus problem is very significant to our culture in multiple ways, but the aspect I'll be focusing on is how her performance is the female version of what Timberlake, Thicke, and Macklemore represent. To start, it's damning all on its own that our cultural attention is on the music of those three men but the body and performance of Miley Cyrus, who is certainly a musician in her own right. But more importantly, the performance as it exists is a parade of white cultural appropriation of specifically black culture. Miley is even more interesting than her three male comrades because this appropriation comes from a deeply personal place of self-determination, and it seems that to Miley nothing is more personally desirable than embracing and becoming part of (visible, media-promoted, stereotypical) black culture. The fact that we allow her to do so indicts us as well as her. We're all complicit in this trying-on trying-off of black culture as long as we allow media narratives to sell us the process as exciting and attention-worthy. Whether or not we approve of Miley and her actions is beside the point. Barring some supernova of outrage and backlash, she will continue to exist and perform as she already has. This is the ultimate privilege, the ability to "be black" in public and get away with it, to become "black" and be white again in your private space. Simply being white allows white people to do things we and our media are quick to condemn when done by black people, including make music.

So let's work around to Tricky. I'll give you a little sketch of his early life as a means of understanding the experiences that are forever a part of him. He was born to a Jamaican father and mixed race English and Ghanaian mother. His father left his mother almost immediately to continue a life of womanizing, and his mother spent a few short years raising him before killing herself. Some say it was her inability to deal with her epilepsy (Tricky does, for one) while others opine that her heartbreak over being abandoned by Tricky's father drove her to suicide. It's impossible to know. Your best friend could commit suicide and you would still never know all the reasons that pushed them to it. From there Tricky bounced from home to home in his multiracial extended family, most notably spending a lot of time with his (white) grandmother who encouraged him to stay home from school to watch old horror movies. He'd developed asthma after learning of his mother's death and suffered frequently from it. Music and crime became twin lures in his life as he reached adolescence. He would commit petty crimes with friends and get in fights, often at clubs where he'd be confronted for wearing a dress. He ended up in prison once, briefly, for counterfeiting money. Other times he would write down lyrics and hang out with musicians, eventually falling into the Wild Bunch soundsystem that spawned Massive Attack, early cohorts in his musical career. He started out as a rapper in that collective before separating from Massive Attack to create more personal and autonomous style of music. He's said more than once that music was his way out of a dead-end life of crime, though he's also quick to assert that he never had much interest in all the machismo and violence of it. You get the sense, listening to him, that boredom and a lack of options were determining factors in that early flirtation with criminality moreso than any innate love of wrongdoing.

If you know Tricky at all, it's because you know about trip-hop. And you might have heard that he created it. And that's mostly true. I haven't had very much interest in exploring Portishead or Massive Attack, the other two progenitors of trip-hop, so I can't say when and how they influenced the 'scene' other than they were making similar music around the same time. Some of it might even be good, or even very good. I frequently see Massive Attack ranked ahead of Tricky on Best of the 90s music lists, so presumably they have some kind of talent. Tricky enjoyed working with them too, for what it's worth, until he didn't, for reasons that are still unclear to me. But while Massive Attack and Portishead carved their way through the music industry in their own ways, neither inspired quite the fascination and mythology that seemed to grow like a moss around Tricky. He was just so sui generis that there was no way of retroactively predicting his immense success, nor his subsequent experimentations. Because while Massive Attack and Portishead kept making trip-hop (probably, right?), Tricky almost immediately disowned the genre and his contributions to it.

Why? Well, lots of reasons. Some of them involve Tricky as a person, some involve him as an artist, and some involve him as a black musician in a white music industry. First, though, consider the word "trip-hop." Tricky hates it, but you can't deny that it's a punchy, evocative and communicative label. You know exactly what to expect, and it sounds exciting. Fresh, new. No doubt that was how people in the mid-90s felt as they read the ecstatic accolades of the man who had brought the bold new genre to the limelight. Hip-hop with an edge, with a dark side. Different from horrorcore probably, more disorienting and frightening. Something you can get really high to. And again, this is in many ways an accurate description of Tricky's debut album Maxinquaye. But just as the facts I've given you about his life don't tell you anything about the human being inhabiting the body of Adrian Nicholas Matthew Thaws, neither does the word "trip-hop" tell you anything about what it's like to experience Maxinquaye (named, by the way, after his mother, Maxine Quaye. The mythology builds itself). I'll get to that some other time, maybe in my next post about Tricky or maybe the one after, but here it's important to consider what happened when the music industry, music press, and music consumers got word of an exciting new development in music. Just as with rock 'n roll, just as with hip-hop, just as with jungle, it wasn't enough to experience it on its own terms. It had to be memorialized, it had to be expanded, and it had to be colonized.

But where before there were numerous black musicians building up the sounds of rock 'n roll grassroots-style, where hip-hop was a sensibility coalescing into an artform and jungle was the result of several years of mutating electronic music, Tricky had created something completely new almost singlehandedly. Massive Attack and Portishead received no end of acclaim, to be sure, but Tricky was the mad genius, the renegade. Anyone who could create something so creepy and intoxicating couldn't just be left to his own devices. So everyone converged on this slight but fascinating man from Bristol, survivor of an impoverished childhood suddenly made famous through the music machine, the fame machine, and the whiteness machine. Because whiteness plays a part in this, make no mistake. Just as Macklemore pedals hip-hop in tune with the values of mainstream liberals (anti-consumerism, gay rights), Tricky unwittingly had given white people something with all the boldness and funk of hip-hop but with an intellectual and conceptual edge that made them feel sophisticated in their appreciation of it (hip-hop to this day is decried by white people as being shallow and superficial and unintelligent, which is their self-justification for not listening to it). It scared the hell out of them and they loved it. Trip-hop spread, safely adored by white people and so already culturally permitted to be 'developed' further. In a weird way Tricky was hardly needed anymore at this point, as trip-hop would continue growing worldwide with or without his input. But since he'd done us the favor of providing us with what we didn't even know we wanted, it was worthwhile to wait on his next move so that we could further enshrine him in the fast-developing trip-hop canon.

But Tricky wasn't called Tricky for nothing. He was never going to allow himself to be a mere pawn in this game of supply and demand. So he went and forged a career no one could have seen coming, abandoning trip-hop and all its empty promises for what made him happy, which was creating unique music with the help of others. He abdicated the throne and left the leaderless cult of trip-hoppers to descend into derivate irrelevance. Today trip-hop is a joke, a hipster cliche, the soundtrack to dinner parties too cool for pop or jazz. It's white music in the worst sense now, meant to pondered over and admired rather than considered and understood. Everything personal and shocking and unexpected about Tricky's pioneering artwork evaporated almost immediately in the legions of imitators, leaving behind a desert of stale beats and "interesting" instrumentation that's anything but. Trip-hop's a ghost town now, and the musical conversation has all but left it behind at this point (embracing instead "cloud rap," which is like trip-hop but without the fear and paranoia trip-hop became famous for). I'm pretty sure Tricky saw it coming too. Some people hate him for abandoning us at the height of his dark powers, but to take such a viewpoint assumes that his only purpose as a musician was to stimulate and excite us as white consumers. I have a feeling everyone who only likes Maxinquaye (and/or one or two of its immediate successors) and says he lost his touch afterward are those people. Because he's spend almost two decades now sharing and growing, and it seems foolish to consider him only as a historical/musical fluke, though that he surely also is.

Wrapping up: Tricky exists because we allowed him to, because we needed a Tricky. And I say Tricky because Adrian Nicholas Matthew Thaws certainly didn't exist with our consent. By all means, by all likelihood, he should've rotted away in his old neighborhood ghetto. It was only when he had something to offer us that we paid him any attention. We gave him fame and he had the gall to ignore our requests for more of what we wanted. But he was still famous, because once you've been famous you stay famous, even if only as a curiosity. And that's how he exists to a lot of people at this point: the once-mighty king squandering his unbelievable talent away in obscurity. He's still Tricky, but he's only distantly the god of trip-hop now. But buried under that official legend, the legacy we've written for him, there's the actual man and his music, and the life he made for himself after being alternately enabled and absorbed by the white hegemony. And in my humble opinion, what remains is one of the most incredible human beings to ever exist, as well as one of the few artists I feel comfortable calling a genius. More on that later. For now, just remember that the entertainment industry is a weird and powerful thing. A Moloch that consumes black artists for white pleasure. And in Tricky we have one of the few to beat the monster into obeying his will, if only for a little while. They say capitalism will sell you the noose to hang it with, and with Tricky that was very much the case. I'm excited to bring that story to you.

(photo credit: en.wikipedia.org)

FAST, CHEAP & OUT OF CONTROL (Morris 97): [4]

Some thoughts on Errol Morris for you. He's quite the Tweeter, layering each Tweet with a thought and an autoresponse to each thought. Questions with answers, assertions with doubts. And many of them are on quite specific or obscure subjects or themes, which I find reassuring in a weird way because I distrust "thinkers" with banal thoughts. Somehow it's become possible lately to become an intellectual and never really do much mental searching or self-questioning. Maybe it's best now to put the word in quotation marks, because as long as it's culturally used to encompass people who watch THE DARK KNIGHT or FIGHT CLUB multiple times a month, it loses its power as a signifier of someone worth listening to.

Morris though seems to be a curious man, and I've only come to understand the depths of his curiosity recently, both through reconsidering my first impressions of him and by watching him work through his thought processes via Twitter. His fanbase and his early work had set off some red flags in my head, and I'd begun to view him as a cynic interested only in mocking the weird people of the world. I of course am not always above laughing at weird people, but I'd hate to make a career of it, and that's what I thought Morris had done. I think it was VERNON, FLORIDA which set off those concerns. I liked GATES OF HEAVEN pretty well, loved THE THIN BLUE LINE and even enjoyed bits of VERNON, FLORIDA, but there were those slippery segments focusing on the bizarre everyday existences of people Morris had happened upon that gave me pause. In them, Morris seemed to be encouraging us to watch and shake our heads in unison with him as he pondered from above what a strange universe we inhabited. And I'm not interested in that. So watching FAST, CHEAP & OUT OF CONTROL was revelatory in a sense, because I feel like I understand Morris' sensibility more than ever now and am finding myself more and more impressed by it the more I experience it. I'd like to give VERNON, FLORIDA a rewatch sometime soon, but unfortunately that will have to wait.

Another tangential concern of mine that informed my viewing of this film was my increasing dislike of documentaries. Or the American doc cottage industry, I should say. The phenomenon probably dates back farther than I know, but I've noticed lately that a good few 'independent' documentaries seem to follow the same basic structure of introducing a problem, sharing a bit of context, and then reassuring the presumably liberal viewing audience that their proposed solution to the problem was right all along. AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH could be accused of performing this pacifying gesture, although I think it's a bit more complex than that; but a real offender in that inglorious category would be Davis Guggenheim's WAITING FOR "SUPERMAN," which seemed to exist only to remind us that the American education system is, indeed, broken, and that we should be proud of ourselves for simply wanting it to get better. Stoking liberal concern is its own niche market, and I'm tired of being coerced into caring — and being tricked into feeling informed about — issues far too complex for a documentary to fully cover. Some documentaries do their best to pack in as much information as possible to provide as complete a picture as possible (e.g. INSIDE JOB), while others use a personal narrative to illustrate the real-world effects of systems of power (TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE), but ultimately high-profile American documentary has reached something of a dead end in trying to depict a world increasingly operating behind drawn curtains. We want to know everything but are unwilling to do the work to understand it (enter here the TED talks phenomenon, a real gem of marketing genius that flatters us into thinking that our modern inclination toward binge-viewing can be used for self-improvement and education. Who needs school?).

Errol Morris doesn't want to show anything we already know. We might know *of* the things he's sharing with us, but he's dedicated to challenging whatever understanding we think we have of them while also engaging us through the language of film. FAST, CHEAP & OUT OF CONTROL is a barrage of contrasting visual schema, from old serials to cartoons to POV nature documentary shots to arthouse tracking shots of people in motion. Canted angles and slow-/fast-motion sequences disrupt our placid absorption of the images before us. Sonic bridges link voiceovers to images with no apparent connection to the spoken words.  Musical accompaniment ranges from orchestral to Autechre-esque sound collages to uneasy combinations of the two. Morris' documentary isn't meant to go down smoothly, and this is expressed through his filmic onslaught. His restlessness creates a search for new meaning very much in tune with the fragmented narrative and its subliminal links between the subjects presented.

And what a cast of characters we're given to reckon with. The mole rat expert looks a bit like Morris himself, which is probably accidental but hey who knows. Each of these men have a deep understanding of their subjects of interest, but it's the interplay between them that yields depths of meaning a mere descriptive documentary could only intimate. On some level each of the participants seem concerned with how intuition guides their crafts, and how human guidance can lead to unexpected reactions in the environments they occupy. But they don't always phrase it in this way, more often sharing anecdotes of times when they solved problems or looked at them anew in order to facilitate whatever task they'd approached. Their life stories are testimonies to the unpredictable powers of human intelligence, a subject quite relevant in a film more than a little interested in what lies beyond the merely human. Animals also have intuitions and unruly irregularities, throwing into question how unique our 'personalities' really are. And then there are robots. How can we ever hope to begin to understand their capabilities? The robotics expert seems comfortable with the knowledge he's acquired over the years, but understanding of his field only delineates more clearly the area beyond which robots are shaping the new realms of science and consciousness.

There's a contrast at work between the singularity of human experience and the unknowable shared hive minds of insects, naked mole rats, and robots. Animals like the lions and tigers fall somewhere in between, and their own familiar subjectivity only serves to establish how genuinely foreign the lower-order animals' is. The robotics expert claims that robots could be made to work like colony creatures, but the film doesn't seem to be especially interested in proving this (the aimless scrambling of the insect-like robots becomes absurd as it fails to prove what the scientist believes irrespective of their performance). But an idea needn’t be realized in order to excite, best expressed through the titular theory that having a hundred or so small robots on Mars would allow for greater innovation and risk-taking than one large and expensive robot limited by its value. In an epoch of superbanks and Too Big to Fail blockbusters, this kind of logic has a special resonance as we try to imagine a world as innovative as free marketeers falsely assure us they can provide.

I'm finding it hard to even say what this movie is about, which is perfectly delightful to me given my annoyance with one-issue one-answer film tracts. I've read a bit about essays films lately and I find the idea fascinating. SANS SOLEIL and NIGHT AND FOG are among my favorite films, and I doubt it's coincidental that I responded to FAST, CHEAP & OUT OF CONTROL's digressions in a similar way. Is Errol Morris an essay filmmaker? I'll have to get back to you on that. But he certainly understands there's more to film than sharing images and information sequentially like a textbook. I can't imagine most people would see similarities between these four guys beyond their shared immersion in highly specific hobbies/careers, but Morris manages not only to depict them as four of a kind but also pioneers in their own way, men who deal in filtering the collective unconscious into something idiosyncratic and useful in their lives. Maybe that's what this film is about: dealing with the collective unconscious. Films are an artform especially well-suited for capturing what compels and fascinates us as a people (robots and lion tamers, in this instance), and this film seems like a metatextual acknowledgement of that (another key feature of the essay film, in my opinion). Each of these men seem obsessed by a higher calling, though that calling isn't politics or religion or social work like it might be for others. They tackle the bigger issues of life and humanity through their intense focus, a theme repeated from GATES OF HEAVEN and probably personally exciting to Morris, a philosophy student in his younger years.

Something else I found interesting, unintentional though it must’ve been, was the different ways the men talked about their passions. The topiary artist and lion tamer were the older of the four and described their vocations in terms of how much work it took to master them, and how their current mastery was built on years of trial and error. This seems to me to be the way older men explain anything they love, through the work their passions took to realize. As if nothing worth having is worth not suffering over. The younger two seem more concerned with abstraction and emotion, and the ways their work makes them feel. Each ponders at length how their respective objects of interest represent the world's mystery to them. You get the sense that they see their obsessions as just that, rather than catalysts toward mastering a related skill. I think this is a generation gap in how certain American men view work and themselves, and maybe a move away from the dreaded Protestant work ethic that still dominates our lives despite our creative attempts to escape it. Would men my age disregard the labor aspect altogether, or see it as a necessary evil in exploring what interests them?

So it seems I'm an Errol Morris fan now. This was a mysterious film, and a speculative viewing experience I don't often get in dealing with a culture full of facile answers. THE THIN BLUE LINE was a formative experience but it took until now to reconcile Morris' diverse documentaries (and THE DARK WIND, a slight though impressively existential thriller) as a unified body of work. I'm now confident in his abilities as a thinker and filmmaker, both of which I'd doubted before. His FIRST PERSON series is coming up soon on my Queue and I'm looking forward to it, now too so I can see more of the Interrotron used to such uncanny effect in FAST, CHEAP & OUT OF CONTROL. Until then I have Patricio Guzmán's BATTLE OF CHILE series to occupy me, which seems like exactly the kind of in-depth, longform documentary that I've been craving.

POSTMEN IN THE MOUNTAINS (Huo 99): [3.5]

I forget where I first heard of this film, probably scouring the depths of film forums earlier in my cinephile career, but I do remember it being listed as Unavailable on Netflix for quite a while, only recently making the jump from the Saved section to my actual Queue. I knew little about it upon receiving it, somewhat expecting a rigid and difficult minimalist 'slow film' the likes of which are quite popular on the international circuit these days. Turns out despite being slow and minimal in its own way, it's a quite earnest and accessible semi-crowdpleaser. In an alternate universe where Americans regularly sought out challenging foreign films, this would be held up as a model of painlessly presenting neorealism and cultural specificity in a way anyone could appreciate. Unfortunately, in our universe, independent distributors have to fight tooth and nail to secure rights to a film even as broadly satisfying as this, and even once they have, it's a crapshoot as to whether Netflix will deign to provide it to its many uninterested subscribers.

Like many others, I consider myself a huge fan of Jia Zhang-ke. His contributions to Chinese cinema itself and its visibility on the world stage are immense and deeply praiseworthy. I've yet to see a film by him that I don't absolutely adore, and I followed A TOUCH OF SIN more eagerly than perhaps any other film at this year's Cannes. I am also very invested in seeking out the cousins of Jia's style, films made by a collection of politically active filmmakers known as the dGeneration, named, as I like to imagine it, not only for their liberating reliance on digital technology but also their films' corrosive visual assessment of their mother country. These films will only continue to proliferate as China continues its transition into late capitalist hell, and it's essential that we support them as much as we can.

It is, however, easy to forget in the wake of this artistic renaissance that China was not always the tragic lost soul of neoliberalism. To be sure, Deng Xiaoping's economic plans were already reshaping the nominally Communist country from the late 1970s and onward, but until recently these changes seemed less present in Chinese cinema itself. The filmmakers collectively dubbed the Fifth Generation, of whom Zhang Yimou is probably the most famous and the one with whom I'm most familiar, were not exactly oblivious to the changes taking place in China but seemed less interested in provoking a response in their viewers at home or abroad. Zhang, of course, could never be accused of being apolitical, as his early films dealt with social issues beneath their saturated colors and narrative parsimoniousness. Two relevant examples would be THE STORY OF QIU JU, which cleverly subsumed a sustained critique of Chinese bureaucracy into the comedic story of one woman's quest for retribution, and TO LIVE, which staged a lavish historical epic in order to better depict the changing times of late 20th century China. Zhang has shifted comfortably between these two contrasting modes of cinematic cultural analysis, omnivorously refusing to fully commit either to social realism or Fifth Generation politically-tinged dramas. Lately, however, he has retreated away from the both the present and the recent past of China, creating instead still worthy but safely fossilized works such as HERO and CURSE OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER. I quite enjoyed both of those (HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS less so), and his divergent RIDING ALONE FOR THOUSANDS OF MILES is absolutely worth attention as well. But where TO LIVE resulted in a two-year ban on filmmaking due to its stern criticism of the Communist Party's impact on the lives of Chinese citizens, it seems increasingly unlikely that Zhang will again court the controversy of his rawer early works.

Somewhere beyond Zhang's ambivalent political concern and Jia's unapologetic outrage lies POSTMEN IN THE MOUNTAINS. Taking place in the rural mountains, set in the 1980s and featuring technology no more advanced than a radio and several briefly glimpsed buses, it seems a pointedly low-key and analog piece of fiction in comparison to other works of Chinese cinema. But the anxieties of modern living are present by absence. It's impossible not to view the father's mail delivery system as anachronistic even in the mountains of 1980s China, and his son frequently challenges his father's commitment to old ways and old systems. There's no sense that the father (Ten Rujun, alternately cheerful and strict as many fathers can be) is lost in a world of his own as he explains his lifestyle to his son. Rather, it seems he's aware of the forward march of progress and simply rejects it for his old-fashioned ways. This choice comes across as political even without the father ever explaining it in terms of politics. Coming out of the Cultural Revolution and still as committed as ever to shoving its citizens into the future, China at this point in time had no place for traditionalist postal workers. The son likewise doesn't seem to think of his mild preference for modernity as political, but as always, the political becomes personal. Politics can't be escaped even in the depths of the Hunan province's mountain ranges.

This shadowy subtext faintly predicts both the state of China to come and its cinema's subsequent radicalization. Jia led the Sixth Generation into directly engaging his country's dogma and empowered the dGeneration to do the same on an even smaller and more democratic scale. Politics are inescapable these days by design, and the only two options left seem to be to fight back or ignore it all. But look back a decade and a half and you'll find Huo Jianqi engaging with the lives of his countrymen on a subtler and more humanist scale. If he's angry at what China has become and is still becoming, he doesn't show it except in the father's brief dismissals of his son's modern sensibilities. Politics is both everything and nothing, present everywhere at all times but visible mainly through the way we treat other people. And the father chooses to treat his mail recipients as nothing less than human beings with unique stories and concerns of their own, all of which are worth his respect.

The son, on the other hand, finds himself slowly growing to accept and understand his father's previous absence (and it's not easy to do, as I myself can attest; my own father was very committed to his job too and frequently spent days or weeks abroad). His father sacrificed his closeness to his family at home in exchange for being a dependable and compassionate presence for the people he met on his path. This sense of responsibility for the needs of what we might call "little people" is something almost extinct in America with our never-ending vilification of the poor and marginal, and I suspect we'd find a similar process occurring in modern China as its citizens are seduced with possibilities of affluence and independent living. If there is a political message to be inferred from this film, then, it's that the lures of capitalism and easy living are no substitute for the human connection a job, however obsolete, can provide.

Huo examines the costs of communal loyalty in a very evenhanded way, taking time to earn the mutual respect of his sensitively rendered father/son reconnection. After the son finds himself taken with a female member of a village the two visit, the father broaches the topic of marriage. The son objects calmly, saying he'd hate to do what his father did and abduct this woman from her life and make her a postman's wife ever in wait of his return. A shriller American movie would inflect this moment with decades of bitterness and resentment, but the son lays out his objection civilly and blamelessly. His father does not visibly react, but we get the sense that he has heard and respects his son's point. He's not so stuck in his ways that he refuses to accept any challenges to it on his son's part, but at the same time he doesn't seem to show any open regret over the way he's chosen to live his life (though Huo diplomatically sometimes privileges us with flashbacks the father privately experiences). This may strike some as dramatically noncommittal, but to me it felt like an accurate depiction of reckoning with one's past and another's future. There are no easy answers, just feelings and opinions on both ends that each have their own private legitimacy.

Its Huo's refusal to judge either character that lets us get to know them as humans and not symbols of two different mindsets. Their trek through beautifully photographed landscapes deepens their connection through a shared experience neither have had the pleasure of enjoying in their lives. The past doesn't go away for either of the two, it just lives on in their sympathetic but occasionally strained treatment of each other. Yet somehow they manage to do what many men seem capable of doing in sublimating their tensions through bonding and commitment to a common goal. The father has felt this sense of duty all his life, and the son grows to feel it too over the course of their journey. In place of the open flow of emotions and needs they might have perfected through years of closeness, both men seem content to at least have had the chance to see what drives the other to act as they do. When the son begins his first solo journey at the end of the film, it's clear that he and his parents each have their own personal stakes in his new career. What unites them is the hope that he can learn from the strengths and weaknesses of his father and continue to serve his fellow citizens without having to give up the chance at personal happiness.

FRUITVALE STATION (Coogler 13): [2.5]

As I walked up to the lone theater in my area playing FRUITVALE STATION, I saw two middle-aged white ladies giggling and walking ahead of me. Being a bit of a condescending prick, I amused myself imagining what they might be seeing instead of FRUITVALE STATION, having to choose from a particularly poor pool of options. 2 GUNS maybe? THE CONJURING, if they're feeling adventurous? Or perhaps, god forbid, DESPICABLE ME 2? Imagine my surprise when we arrived at the box office more or less in unison and they ordered two for FRUITVALE STATION. One adult, one senior. The AARP discount allowed the older of the two, the younger's mother, to get a $2 small popcorn. I think they did. I saw them in line for snacks as I walked by to my theater.

Maybe as a reflection of the time we spend dissecting movies' extrinsically determined audience appeal, cinephiles are as prone as anyone to categorizing people by their demographic. Two older white ladies on a mother-daughter date, hair done up in that weirdly common bushlike up-do? Tinged by probably more than a hint of latent misogyny, it's easy for me to dismiss their tastes in my head without even knowing what they planned on seeing. They're the Oprah/TLC demographic, the light entertainment lovers. And everyone knows women go to movies to escape. Only men go to engage with serious issues like police brutality and institutional racism. I don't believe this, but I used to, and it's hard sometimes to shake off that presupposition. Late capitalism has quite effectively marketed us into mutually exclusive consumer groups, and we've quite happily acquiesced, but we slip through the cracks all the time, often without meaning to, transgressing the hidden boundaries of the market.

After the movie ended, and as we tearfully found our way to the exit, the older lady mentioned she'd been interested in seeing FRUITVALE STATION due to the hugely positive press out of Cannes' Un Certain Regard (endearingly pronounced "Conz"). This also surprised me. Where, I wonder, does a white woman in her early 60s get her Un Certain Regard news? Do we maybe read the same websites? That's a thought. If I'd had the time or the presence of mind I might have stayed to ask.

I'm beginning with this anecdote to share with you how easy it is to let our judgments of others be guided by what we think we know of them, or often "their kind." This isn't news to you, of course, and it isn't news to me either. Seeing myself in act of arrogance and sharing it with you won't lead to a nationwide confrontation with the act of stereotyping. It's just surprising how really and truly commonplace it is in our perception of other people, appearing in such innocuous ways as my smug guesswork at other peoples' movie tastes. I went to see FRUITVALE STATION to sadly observe discriminatory judgment in action and sheepishly found myself noticing that I do it too. Obviously my dismissive scoffing doesn't begin to compare to the racial tension that led to the death of Oscar Julius Grant III, but it's born of the same impulse. A desire to know, to understand, to make predictable the unknown. To know what to expect of unfamiliar people. Human brains are great at recognizing patterns and forming expectations based on past experiences. The trouble is that we don't observe as objectively as we like to think we do. What we see is what we expect to see. Our fascination with people dissimilar to us leads us to pay special attention to the obvious differences between us. In doing so, we miss the innumerable (and unremarkable) ways in which we're exactly the same as people unlike us. I don't think this tendency to focus on differences is necessarily hardwired into us, but I do think we harm ourselves by not exploring and discussing the mundane nature of difference and diversity more openly.

George Zimmerman was guilty before he ever pulled the trigger. He was guilty of seeing a black person in his neighborhood and reacting as if this should concern him. His sense of suburban normality was disrupted by the appearance of a hooded black boy, and he reacted accordingly. We've been told that there were recent robberies in the neighborhood, and that Zimmerman frequently called the cops on suspicious individuals in his neighborhood. These facts have been used to give his decision to follow Trayvon Martin a certain banality, as if his specific rendezvous with Trayvon was a freak occurrence in a chain of ordinarily nonviolent behavior. Relevant to this claim is Zimmerman's history of both unprovoked violence and molestation, but I don't feel those are worth debating here, as they (ought to) speak for themselves. What I want to explore is the way we've created suburbs as presumptive white-only zones and how America's changing racial makeup has imperiled this tidy segregation.

Unfortunately, as is becoming the case more often than I'd like already, it doesn't appear as though I have the space or research skills to really convince you of what I believe to be true. I'll work on that, really. For now, you'll have to just accept my generalizations and a few relevant links.

White flight, or the very deliberate hiding away in suburbs by America's white population, is a problem weirdly underdiscussed in racial politics these days, but it explains so much of contemporary racial discord that it seems crucial to bring up here. Implicit in the allure of the suburbs is that a world exists away from all the Bad Minorities (and don't you pretend you don't know what I mean by that) and their sex and drugs and rap and crime. We get this space and you get the cities, where you can do whatever you want as long as you leave us out of it. That's the deal, and until recently, this illusion of safety has held up reasonably well. The problem now is that the emerging black middle class is mirroring our move due to education opportunities, safety concerns, gentrification and other pressures. All of a sudden the generally conservative generally middle class generally white inhabitants of suburbs are finding their worlds host to unfamiliar faces and races.

The point I want to make by highlighting this development is the effect this has on the white world view. I don't have the data or even the testimonies to prove it, but a good example of what the threat of minority presence does to a white community would be this. They'll never admit it, but white people simply don't want minorities in their safe spaces. It's a breach of a conduct on the minorities' end, and it sends white people into a panic. Never mind that Zimmerman isn't white, or even Hispanic. He doesn't have to be to understand the suburbs as a sacred zone. Simply being surrounded by mild-mannered white people creates an invisible but very real ecosystem that the presence of unwanted black people violates. Communities, however artificial, create energies and presences of their own, as can be seen in any psychological studies into ingroup/outgroup behavior. And I'd argue that anyone, white or Hispanic or Peruvian-American, so invested in removing nebulous threats from something as diffuse as an entire neighborhood is buying the race-baiting myth of us vs. them. Black men can't be trusted to exist in the space we've claimed as our own, and it's our job to do something about it!

Which brings us finally back to Oscar Grant, and to Ryan Coogler and his striking debut film. FRUITVALE STATION serendipitously found itself buoyed into national attention due to its similarities to the George Zimmerman case. The central scuffle depicted in FRUITVALE STATION, though, seems much more cut-and-dry than the RASHOMON-like incident in Florida. In making cell phones a recurring motif in the film, Coogler underscores their importance in more or less objectively bringing Grant's murder to local and national attention. 2009, if you remember, was the beginning of the smart phone era, and a time when everyone was learning to handle their newfound, handheld power. In this case, this singular historical movement allowed an unlikely spotlight to shine on Oscar Grant, father, son and member of a sprawling Californian community. Where other young black men had died in crushing silence, Oscar Grant was killed in full view of a makeshift jury. Here before you was the unmediated video record of multiple observers, the opinions of the assembled paling before the sheer visual force of watching Oscar Grant die before your eyes. And just as the democratization of technology allowed the country to hear of Trayvon's untimely death and demand justice where before he might have been killed in private, Oscar's public death became emblematic of long-embedded distrust of the police force, once and for all caught on video in the act.

White people have a hard time understanding why black people don't feel the same way about the police as we do. Raised from an early age to believe in their infallibility and rarely exposed to anything but, it's difficult to imagine our beloved dispensers of impartial justice as actively seeking to harm members of the public. As more and more black voices become heard in our culture, the tide is slowly shifting on this matter. In works ranging from Dave Chappelle's standup to N.W.A. and Public Enemy's protest rap to Spike Lee's DO THE RIGHT THING and Oren Moverman's RAMPART (to say nothing of the real life incidents on which many of these artworks were based), the race-based discrimination of the police is becoming more and more of a commonplace topic. Oscar Grant didn't intend to become a permanent reminder of institutional racial bias when he set out to celebrate New Year's 2009 with his friends and girlfriend, but unfortunately he had little choice in the matter.

In a breakthrough performance hot on the heels of his well-liked turn in surprise found-footage hit CHRONICLE, Michael B. Jordan paints an affectionate portrait of a man cognizant of his place in an unfriendly world but doing his best to succeed despite it all. Drug convictions, lost jobs, and occasional flarings-up of temper can't explain his essentially good character in full, and this is possibly the greatest strength of Coogler's film. Where the mechanics of his fatalistic story of accidental martyrdom sometimes disrupt our immersion in the world of Oakland, Oscar's flaws exist comfortably alongside his better qualities, of which there are many. And if Coogler overplays his hand in proving Oscar to be worthy of the life he was robbed, it's a moral act worth undertaking in a time when a legal defense team can convince juries and spectators alike that young black men have their deaths coming to them. FRUITVALE STATION lives or dies on its mission to portray Oscar Grant as an ordinary human being, and thanks in no small part to Jordan (among others), it succeeds wildly in this regard.

Another key strength of the film is in depicting a convincing ecosystem of Oakland inhabitants, from Oscar's sympathetic but increasingly exasperated loved ones to his friends. One feels no need to question the character motivations because the able cast more than capably illustrates them in their web of interactions. Octavia Spencer earns her Academy Award anew in conveying a world of concern and fear beneath a friendly exterior. Her children are struggling and her grandchild's future is constantly up in the air, but she does her best to give guidance and support to the ones she loves. The flashback to Oscar's prison days sticks out a bit as an obvious reminder of Oscar's unhappy past and as a poorly-concealed Chekhov's gun, but it's worth it alone to watch Spencer's face as she confronts the built-up frustrations and fears of her incarcerated son.

I found myself torn between appreciating these naturalistic moments and silently critiquing the script's frequent bids for our sympathy. Oscar's encounter with a stray dog in particular stuck out as a clumsy bit of symbolism (though as always there was no fault in Michael B. Jordan's handling of the moment). Coogler knows how to stage a scene and guide his actors, but he seems a little less sure of how to structure a story. Oscar's last day comes across less as a slice of lived experience than as a series of vignettes, each seeming like a moral test for our protagonist. This imposing top-down vision is at odds with the film's dogged focus on the small and the ordinary. Much like many of Spike Lee's films, the film seems to be a white elephant made of termites.

I would, however, like to praise Coogler's placing of the cellphone footage of Oscar's death at the beginning. This structuring device is by no means new or daring, dating back most famously to such outsized biopics as GANDHI and LAWRENCE OF ARABIA. The context, however, is what transforms Coogler's choice from a trope to a motif. The shadow of Oscar's inevitable death hangs over the film in a meaningful way, a symbol of the fear under which young black men have learned to operate. Much like in 2011's excellent ATTACK THE BLOCK, these submerged fears are externalized and depicted as easily understood environmental threats. A stray shot of a police car passing Oscar's as he drives sets off a symphony of digressive meanings, from the dramatic to the personal to the sociopolitical. We know Oscar isn't going to die so soon in the film, far away from a train station called Fruitvale, but the very threat of being needlessly pulled over passes through the scene like a phantom. In another film, in another life, this could lead to a life-altering event all its own. Shots of the BART train system and Oscar's drug dealings also hang heavy with foreboding, the former due to our knowledge of the film's preordained ending and the latter because of our familiarity with the over-policing of black drug possession. Similarly, Oscar's quickly escalating desperation as he begs for his job back doesn't occur in a sociological vacuum. We know losing this chance for legitimate employment imperils his family and his own ability to take charge of his life.

Coupled with Oscar's choice of clothing, Coogler has a keen sense of depicting the red flags in the life of a young black man. Debate rages to this day over whether or not Trayvon should have been wearing a hoodie. This question, though, presumes not only the primacy of the white perspective, but accepts as fact that black men wearing hoodies are asking for trouble. Much like blaming rape victims for dressing in ways that 'tempt' rapists, the debate moves from questioning the legitimacy of the aggressors' choices to accepting racial/sexual violence as inevitable and something against which victims can only minimize their chances of assault. We normalize aggressive behavior by thinking in these terms. The onus should be on the aggressors to not break laws and violate the sovereignty of other human beings. Ebony Magazine recently released a series of covers showing black celebrities and their sons in hoodies, and there's been an excellent photo circling Facebook which I unfortunately can't find that depicts a graduating class of black doctors first in their scrubs, then in hoodies. These are bold and necessary steps toward complicating our belief that we should accept black people wearing hoodies as a sign of danger.

The issue expands further when we consider that white men are allowed to dress in traditionally tough ways without inviting suspicion and gun violence upon themselves. Shaved heads, wifebeaters, boots, and other such masculinized stylings are common amongst white men with an interest in broadcasting their masculinity. We don't judge them for this, knowing that these fashion choices are merely a personal preference and not indicative of a personal disposition toward violence. But when black and Latino men, particularly young ones, adopt similar fashion, our automatic assumption is that they're not to be trusted. Why? Corporate media has certainly played a big role in normalizing this double standard, but we as white people do plenty of harm on our own by privately subscribing to it. In the wake of the police and George Zimmerman being moved to violence by their perceived sense of danger, it's extremely important that we confront our everyday fundamental attribution errors and ingrained beliefs about masculine fashion.

FRUITVALE STATION is not a new masterpiece of black fiction. It attempts to bridge the easy naturalism of Charles Burnett's KILLER OF SHEEP with the powerful grandstanding of Spike Lee and ends up falling short of both. But that doesn't make it a bad film, nor does it make it worth ignoring. Ryan Coogler is a fairly new director, and his mistakes are certainly nowhere near as grievous than those of innumerable other sloppy first films with far less on their minds. You can, as I did, see through the occasional pandering and audience-pleasing and still be devastated by the conclusion. I felt connected to the handful of other people who joined me in crying as Oscar lived out his final moments on film and as his family and friends learned of his death. We were one in those powerful final few minutes, united in our sadness over a life unfairly cut short. Coogler has performed a very significant act of compassion in restoring agency and humanity to the life of a man who no longer has either, a man none of us will ever have the pleasure of knowing. In a culture hellbent on reducing black men to their mistakes and shortcomings and appearances, Coogler's refusal to accept the status quo should not be undervalued.

I had a sense as I followed the mother and daughter pair, both of whom were still quietly sniffling, that there would be some kind of post-viewing discussion between us. The shared experience was simply too intimate for us to all drift away indifferently. The daughter left for the bathroom, but the older woman and I shared our thoughts briefly as participants in a shared sadness. We didn't have much to say, only that we were both affected deeply, but the viewing of the film bonded us in ways that great art often can. "That was tough to watch," I confided in her. "I know," she answered, "but I'm glad I saw it." In lieu of reinventing the artform of cinema or forcing us to confront our most private selves, Ryan Coogler chose instead to gently unite his viewers in solidarity for one man's righteousness and one people's sense of loss. Sometimes this is all we need from our movies.

(photo credit: en.wikipedia.org)

ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS (Hawks 39): [5]

Here goes the pilot review. Wish it luck.

ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS is a film in the CASABLANCA mold: compact, classical storytelling in the hands of capable craftsmen. This is what you should expect when you sit down for a classic, and I'm happy to tell you that ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS will not disappoint. Hawks' 1939 aviation drama paints a thrilling, stirring picture of the consequences of life lived to its extremes. In Barrancas, South America, emotions run as high as the planes, an inevitability when each flight carries the risk of death with it. The men who fly have learned to accept this, but things aren't so easy for Bonnie Lee (Jean Arthur, luminous) when she finds herself caught up in the self-denying game of masculinity.

Navigating the treacherous Andes mountain range by plane takes more than raw skill. It takes an almost suicidal willingness to see a mission through to its end. Geoff Carter (Cary Grant) has internalized this law of the land to such a degree that it's won him the undying respect of his comrades, but such foolhardy bravery has cost him one woman's heart already and risks the love of another. That woman, Jean Arthur, plays coy and confident in her first few scenes, at one point wielding a sword to fend off the unwelcome advances of a pair of admirers, but as soon as Cary Grant enters the arena, it's all over for Connie. Geoff Carter, decked out in such overtly masculine signifiers as a sombrero, leather jacket, and belt of ammunition, is a hard man to resist. He radiates manly self-assurance and confidence in everything he does, and Connie is smitten soon after meeting him.

And really, how couldn't she be? Cary Grant plays this daredevil character as the polar opposite of his effeminate, shrinking Dr. David Huxley in Hawks' equally excellent BRINGING UP BABY. I am somewhat new to the charms of Cary Grant, but he has impressed me greatly in everything he's done so far, and his versatility should serve as a model to any modern aspiring actor. Likewise, Jean Arthur is new to me, but she embodies the Hawksian woman par excellence. Her character more than holds her own in a room full of interested men, and one suspects she would have her pick of the lot had Cary Grant not walked in and shut down the competition. Their scenes together sparkle, and it's not hard to believe each would find themselves utterly won over by the other.

Their romance, however, is complicated by Geoff's commitment to honoring the masculine code of the times. I have a feeling even viewers in the late 30s and early 40s would have picked up on the demands of masculinity Geoff assuredly but self-sacrificially endures. To our modern and (supposedly) more liberal eyes, this human tragedy is only heightened. As he and several other characters remark, Geoff takes the toughest missions for himself and lives a life devoted to the present because the present, in his eyes, is the only thing we're guaranteed. Connie is taken in by Geoff's heroic self-devotion, but it soon becomes a bigger burden than she can handle.

Matters are complicated by the arrival of Bat McPherson (Richard Barthelmess) and his wife Judith (Rita Hayworth). McPherson, in contrast to Geoff's esteemed trustworthiness, has committed the ultimate sin in ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS' trial-by-fire environment: unreliability. His 'cowardice' in a previous mission led him to abandon his plane by parachute, resulting in the death of another. That man's brother, known as "The Kid" (Thomas Mitchell), flies with the company to this day. Needless to say, the arrival of McPherson doesn't sit well with The Kid. Understandable. But one of the keener observations of this film is how the group of men of which The Kid counts himself a member rally around him and his loss. They too dislike McPherson, despite never personally being wronged by him. But as screenwriter Jules Furthman (responsible for another of my 30s favorites, MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY) well understands, the pain of one man is the pain of all.

Let's take a short detour into masculinity and what it means to be a man. In the interest of full disclosure, I feel it's my duty to tell you I've never much preferred the company of men. This is too big a topic to fully cover in this review, but perhaps the most salient aspect of that preference is my dislike of the way men hide their feelings. This is my own personal take on the matter, but I don't think I would be incorrect to say it's a sentiment shared by many women as well. I've seen that frustration at work in the emotional lives of many female friends, and I've seen it explored as a theme in many works of fiction. Men are difficult. Emotional openness in men is not valued in many cultures. The reasons for that are also too numerous and complex to fully explore in this space, but this is a defining feature of many works of art made by and for men in the United States. ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS is no exception. The difference, and what I believe elevates it to the realms of filmic greatness, is how sensitively the issue is dealt with in this particular film.

To examine this in full, we'll need to go back to the beginning. I was immediately struck how quickly the gay mood of the South American bar in which much of this film takes place was dissolved by the death of a reckless pilot. The tragedy hangs large over the rest of the film, both in its specificity and in its indicativeness of the dangers frequently faced by the expatriate pilots. It's difficult to become attached to people whose presence is far from guaranteed in your life. The men of ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS know this instinctively. It's a lesson they've probably been taught all their lives, and it sees itself expressed most fully in the life-or-death circumstances to which they've all volunteered (/sacrificed?) themselves. In such an environment, happiness and companionship are temporary. Men here die often and violently, and learning to deal with loss is one of the unspoken requirements of surviving in Barrancas. Bonnie is disgusted with the men in general and Geoff in particular when they laugh and drink away the pain of their comrade's passing, but what she fails to realize is that this seeming irreverence isn't born out of indifference. It's the only way these men know how to deal with the hugeness of death. Cigarettes, alcohol, and women all serve as tools to beat away the personal anguish this job often offers up. Bonnie's arc in the film is one of learning to look past the desperate disavowal of emotions embodied by the men and in particular her object of affection, the lonely and brave Geoff Carter.

To serve as a contrast to the challenge Bonnie must face in adapting to this emotionally hostile environment, it's eventually revealed that Rita Hayworth's Judith is the woman Geoff loved and lost. Bonnie perceptively posits Geoff's essential hardness as being at least partly the result of a broken heart. Geoff grudgingly admits she may have a point, but he knows his job requires this hardness of him. Being the boss of an airline requires the cold logic of both commerce and managerial prowess. Geoff must take care of both his pilots and his cargo, a responsibility in which emotion can tragically play no part. His reticence drove away Judith, now married to Geoff's shamed colleague.

Rita Hayworth doesn't get much to do in this film, cast somewhat regrettably as a seductress against whom Geoff proves his emotional fidelity to both McPherson and Bonnie. But she does her best with her marginal part, conveying well the pain of having lost one great love and the threat of losing another. Judith, we find out, doesn't know about her husband's dark past, though she can tell something's amiss by the way the pilots treat him. Alone in her confusion with her husband's life ever at risk, reminded by Geoff's presence of the love she feels she'll never be fully promised, her outbursts speak of the stress she can normally tolerate until, as we might expect, the weight of it all fully strikes her. Geoff can only look on in practiced remove as the woman he once loved rails against his live-and-let-die attitude, the time when he could prove his love to her long since passed.

But Geoff's not just a tragic character, a lost soul in the cogs of capitalism. Outwardly, his reasoning for being so distant is to save the women in his life the pain of losing him. This I suspect is true enough, though certainly only one facet of it. Geoff does in fact care for those around him, despite being largely incapable of expressing that compassion. His fairness is demonstrated through the pity he extends to the disgraced McPherson. The others have long ago given up on him, but Geoff recognizes the weakness in McPherson because he too has experienced it. But rather than scorning McPherson for not being as brave as he continually proves himself, Geoff grants McPherson a second chance and allows him to fly in his company. Barthelmess smartly underplays his character's gratitude, and this muted dynamic humanizes both McPherson and Geoff, our previously unreachable hero. The mutual recognition of weakness leads to a private understanding they dare not express to their hardhearted companions.

This small moment of male camaraderie speaks to me more than any number of lone rangers' heroic conquests in countless other movies. Blockbusters often fail to grip me not because of their emotional coldness, but because of the valorization of that coldness. Such haughty self-possession runs contrary to my personal philosophy. We as humans are at our best when we defy our social Darwinist animal nature and help one another, when we allow ourselves to feel the pain of others and react accordingly. My least favorite people, many of whom are men, can't help but laugh in the face of another's weakness. I too can see the weakness and discomfort they're hiding through their outward displays of socially approved emotional strength, but it doesn't make me any more sympathetic to them. Grace and forgiveness are qualities that defy this ongoing masculine self-actualization, and to me only the greatest men are able to express them. When I was younger I found deep beauty in the Bible's tender and humane depiction of Jesus, truly the living embodiment of this philosophy. He remains a unique world historical figure to this day, the man who wanted better for the world than he was able to give it, but still trying mightily to make that change imaginable. If church held any promises for me in those days, it was in the annex between my earthly confusion and a deity's blessed purity. Even as a child, I wanted the world to be safe for me and the people I loved. So I still find myself hewing surprisingly close to those Christian ethics floating ineffably my childhood so long ago, my latter-day feminist conversion no strong opponent to ideals of Christ-like humility and acceptance. It seems strange, but I'm in some ways a better Christian now as an atheist than I was as a believer. Maybe we never change as much as we think we do.

Going back to the film, ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS has nothing but patience for these lost and confused souls, away from all semblance of stability and security in a country they barely know. Their endurance is commendable, but it's their transcendence of mere survivalism that makes a select few of them great. Geoff, for his part, learns to work through his emotional unavailability in a small but lovely moment at the very end, but we can see his humanity in the way he gradually becomes so flustered by Connie and her forthrightness. Viewing him efficiently at work as we do, these expressions of confusion and sheepishness become even more significant by contrast. Cary Grant knows better than to openly go to pieces at Jean Arthur's charm, but his endearingly slight slips in confidence (winningly played by Grant and Arthur in a screwballesque pas de deux) speak volumes about his hidden magnanimity while simultaneously acknowledging the hopeless trap of denying one's love for another.

Nevertheless, Hawks' film most truly displays its brilliance when Connie, in a strange but inspired touch, accidentally shoots and thereby grounds Geoff. This subconscious expression of need manifested leads The Kid, earlier grounded for his failing sight, and McPherson, heretofore only treated as human by Geoff, to fly a plane together into the mountains in a torrential downpour. Both are wary of each other, but as in real life, men show their love for each other sometimes in the unlikeliest of ways. The two pilots bullheadedly ignore Geoff's command to turn back and continue on only to meet disaster. The Kid is rendered helpless, and in this moment of peril McPherson finds it in himself to ignore the by now extremely real risk of death to stay with the plane and its incapacitated passenger. I'll leave you to find out for yourself what happens to the two of them, but suffice to say the film has proved its point. It's the people who aid you at your most vulnerable that exemplify the best in humanity.

(photo credit: www.dvdbeaver.com)