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)