SPECIAL POST: Video Games, Part II

I do believe there's a vacuum for meaningful success in America, because most American success comes with unwanted drawbacks nobody warns you about (again, maybe we're better attuned to those drawbacks as a culture because of how frequently we hear stories of "the dark side of success"?) [+ whether the success might be worth the drawbacks is something comparatively under-analyzed, not to mention fairly unpredictable on an individual basis]. So what we find ourselves with is a growing number of young people smart enough to see through the uncritical cultural vision of the American Dream while simultaneously craving the sense of fulfillment it offers while also fearing the attendant difficulties that might take the place of the historically unprecedented comfort of modern living they enjoy. They want the safety of now, the success of someday, and the consequences of neither. So it's not difficult to see why many have forsaken the idea of socially approved success, but it's a little harder to understand how video games, of all things, have come to fill that hole. I'm not very interested in talking about video games as a medium. It's the cultural function they serve that I find myself thinking about a lot.

There's an article by Stephanie Coontz that I don't know if I can find that talks about (among other things) the standardization of teenage experience in America. Teenagers have slowly been corralled up and marketized as a demographic. Forever the outsiders in a world sharply delineated between Child and Adult/Man and Woman/Black and White/Gay and Straight, the emergence of the concept of adolescence has brought with it an anxiety over what exactly to do with teenagers. We want to shape their indeterminate identities, but we're weirdly incapable of offering ways to do so beyond giving them market power to do it themselves. From an entertainment and marketing point of view, this obviously includes the hugely profitable PG-13 superhero movies and YA fiction and other usual suspects. Less obviously it involves the erosion of public lives they once had access to, creating a nostalgia for youthful wanderlust you can glimpse in movies like ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA (aptly titled!) and in books like Stuart Dybek's Coasts of Chicago. Where neighborhoods were once a vast playground to meet all kinds of new people, now shopping malls are the domain of the teenager and their pre-selected friends. Public parks no longer hold much intrinsic interest in the age of consumer media, particularly toward those less athletically inclined in the first place. The world has indeed shrunk, but more importantly, it seems to have also withered away. The escapism of video games, then, is a compelling force upon teenagers in need of excitement (I'd also wager that the emergence of party culture is more due to enticingly easy access to drugs + alcohol rather than any inherently criminal teenage nature).

There are a number of broader sociological factors that have furthered this process of atomization and social disintegration. Class boundaries have solidified (suburbs vs. inner city vs. housing projects), racial boundaries remain mostly untouched, and gender essentialism keeps kids everywhere constantly seeking to boost their masculine/feminine credentials. The shift from an industrial economy to a service-based economy, as Coontz detailed in her article somewhere, left young people without any real opportunity for upward mobility in entry level positions. Years of work at an automobile factory gave you skills and prestige, whereas the entry level positions specially created for teenagers now are cashier, retail service provider, and supermarket worker. I'll go ahead and throw in my own experience here: it's depressing as hell seeing the same few demographically similar faces all the time and knowing that there are only minimum wage time-killing jobs available to you. And it occurs to me now that this is probably an unacknowledged motivator behind increasing college enrollment, the desire to just get away from the dead-end world of adolescence. Unfortunately, the proliferation of college attendees doesn't seem to have led to a population of happy, satisfied adults. For now I'll chalk that up to still living inside a patriarchal white supremacist society under the dictates of late capitalism and Big Finance, and maybe I'll take a closer look at that situation later when I understand it better myself.

As for video games qua video games, what is there left to say? Surely this culture war is mostly over by now. For all my disdain for television, video games are indisputably the more repulsive medium. Sporadic cases of innovation suffocate under the hegemony of interchangeable first-person shooters and role-playing games. The hero's journey seems to be the only journey, unless puzzle games are more your style. Even as someone who enjoys postmodern culture slumming, for me there's something too flatly repellent about video games. That you're meant to spend days working through them to extract marginal enjoyment out of them doesn't help. People sometimes ask me how I can watch so many movies, and I do find myself having to acknowledge that you need a special tolerance for medium-specific mediocrity to obsessively explore a medium. Pick your own poison and all. I can watch disposable blockbusters all day in the hopes of catching something subversive or aesthetically interesting, but I can almost feel my soul crumbling as I play a video game. From ages 8-16, give or take, I was immune to the depressive monotony of gaming. Until one day I suddenly wasn't. At the time it was quite a disappointment, but now I feel glad that it gave me the chance to really explore high art and human relationships. I haven't hardly looked back.

Except I suppose I have. I've been shaped by the unspeakable aloneness of the Metroid series' alien planets, so comforting for an introverted child whose peopled world never truly registered as real. I wistfully remember playing Super Smash Brothers Melee with my little sister years ago, us giggling at the absurd character model contortions, the childish meta-rules for gameplay we created together. Today I played Mario Party 5 with my two little stepsisters, and the gleeful attentiveness to our game's competitive dynamics was a welcome reminder that it is possible to enjoy a video game. What allows me to participate in that game with them, despite totally shunning the lone gamer experience, is the unresolvable tension between the playfulness of young minds and the linearity of many video games. Without our chaotic switching of paper-thin allegiances, the dismay and the relief of shifting in-game ranks, the little humiliations and big commiserations, the game would not held our attention. Here we have the fine tradition of repurposing mass media garbage for personal and social purposes. My own nostalgia for the comforts of a lonely electronic childhood provides enough of a bridge for me to connect with this next generation, who get their fix of numbing busyness through their smartphones instead of consoles. Hyper-capitalism is our unreality, so we do our best to be receptive to what goes on inside us with the dubious help of its detritus. We are united in our uncertain engagement with the weird world around us.

And I asked myself months ago, as I lounged to TOKiMONSTA's track "Sweet Williams" while my littlest stepsister sat next to me playing Puzzles & Dragons on some device or other: is there even more to life than this? Isn't it enough that we peaceably inhabit the same room and pursue our own interests freely? Why should I be expecting every moment to be a stepping stone on the way to existential purpose, hers or mine? My experience of our time together was untainted by the presence of a trashy video game, just as my distant memories of video game love have little to do with the actual games I was playing. I look back on my childhood and wish I'd had the confidence to explore the world around me, but I'm not even so different these days, I still tuck away into corners with my obsessions of choice. Art films and novels have replaced video games and sci-fi programmers, but I don't feel any more at ease with life as it's lived. The world's still mostly baffling to me, and I can't imagine it makes much more sense to anyone else, least of all children. Increasingly since gaining stepsiblings, I wish video games weren't preying on children with clipped wings. And at the same time I mourn my own bygone youth, too hemmed in by invisible-but-deeply-felt pressures to freely enjoy much of anything beyond endless Pokemon expeditions. Those constraints still exist. They still affect me, even as I myself have changed. If children today seem ensnared by games that have evolved to be ever more immersive, addictive, and narcotizing, remember that video games are the symptom, not the cause. The cause is whatever robbed us of our public lives as children and people. The cause is a world that doesn't want anything from us except our various forms of capital. The cause is the privatization of free space, social engagement, personal happiness. So forget video games. They're just one of too many distractions. Look for what caused them, what created them. And I don't mean Shigeru Miyamoto. I mean whatever took an inquisitive child like him and funneled his youthful enthusiasm into content creation. Any guesses what that might be?

NO DIRECTION HOME (Scorsese 05): [3]

Since this post is about to cover NO DIRECTION HOME, I feel amused to point out that there was never a whole lot of reason for me to watch this film. I first mentioned it to my dad, who'd seen through e-mail that I was getting it shipped to me. I floated the idea of watching it with him, which would have been nice but he didn't bite, since Bob Dylan was a bit before his time and not really his style. What's my dad's style? I'm not sure what it would be called, but after watching this documentary and learning a bit about where Bob came from musically, it seems that the folk thing is not my dad's style. Which makes sense now, because he was always a big fan of Rush and I guess Kiss (KISS?) too. Folk seems too mild-mannered and stripped down in comparison to the bombast of those old favorites of his. Even though he does like Cat Stevens quite a bit. Anyhow we ended up watching together, variously: HEAT, THE GODFATHER: PART II, WHEN HARRY MET SALLY, ABOUT LAST NIGHT, WAR OF THE WORLDS, and INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE. We certainly had a dad day, so I don't feel that I missed much by not watching this one with him.

So again then, if I don't have a dad who cares about Bob Dylan and I sure don't know much about him either, what other than dogged completism would get me to watch a documentary like this? I'll re-up on Scorsese here for a moment: WOLF OF WALL STREET is a supreme and troubling work of American art. I watched it first as farce, alone in a theater except for two teenagers who seemed only to have come for McConaughey's chest-thumping, and then as something pretty near to a tragedy the second time. Does Marx have any words for that? Well, whatever Scorsese did to deepen his demented comedy (and it is, first and foremost, a comedy!) into something primal and horrific, it worked, and so I remain a fan. In the pantheon of safely canonized white male auteurs, Scorsese consistently surprises and innovates (big fan of HUGO too!), he has the way of a true artist about him in his eclecticism and assured experiments. NO DIRECTION HOME won't tell you much about that wily intelligence but it will tell you a lot about Bob Dylan, for which I suppose we should give Scorsese credit as an artist. Documentaries don't just build themselves, after all.

I'll confess to coming really close to disengaging right away, because hearing Dylan singing what I now know to be Like a Rolling Stone at the beginning was disorienting to me. His voice and vocal style seemed like a sharp dive over the edge of emotive rock singing, which at this point I still assumed was what Bob Dylan does. But then we take a look at Dylan's tiny childhood, and tiny is certainly the appropriate word in relation to the outsized mythical American titan Dylan grew up to become. You listen to him recount his days as a kid on the outskirts of small town America and watch the corresponding images and wonder where exactly does artistic ability come from? What on earth was there that could have created a mystic folk singer out of Robert Zimmerman? I can only conclude that Dylan's talents resided in him, ineffably, from the start. This will forever be a mystery to me, in the sense that there can be no true answer to what exactly separates artists from their peers. That there is a difference is indisputable. We can only look back in awe as unpromising beginnings lead to a great future. The elder Dylan flatly recounts his inspirations and influences, and then as we begin to get our first recorded images of the young Dylan in motion, a synchronicity emerges through what seems to be a lifetime of oddball charisma viewed, with hindsight, at opposite poles of the human lifespan. A unified Dylan eternally revealing himself throughout the ages. Which is to say that Dylan just is, and always has been. The present day interviews show him to be a bit less prickly than he was in his youth, but it still seems monumentally hard for Scorsese and co. to draw any substantial introspection out of him. He cooperates, but with a bare minimum of affect. I'M NOT THERE didn't leave much of an impact on me when I watched it a few years ago, but I certainly can see the rationale behind Todd Haynes' postmodern fragmentation when getting the actual man in a room with you doesn't tell you much more than his songs do. 

And that's what everyone wants, it seems. And now would be a good time to say that my most direct engagement with this film was as a predictor of the Tricky dilemma three decades later. I can't say I have any kind of ear for classic rock, which I know wasn't what Dylan really was but you know what I mean, and though I did go on to find myself fairly engaged by Dylan's singing, my heart ultimately belongs to Tricky and his own musical styles (though I now think, thanks to this documentary, that Dylan and Pete Seeger would be a good primer to mid-century folk if I end up developing an interest in it years later). I've been developing thoughts lately on what social subjugation does to the way artists express themselves, and Dylan ended up serving as the negative image of what I'm coming to see in marginal art. People who grow up unsure of themselves and their place in their world are much more sensitive to failure and disapproval and misunderstanding, which we can surmise leads to many potential female/black/LGBT/mentally ill/poor artists never even becoming artists in the first place. It also creates unique reactions in socially marginal people who do become artists (Dave Chappelle, Lil Kim, Azealia Banks) as they find themselves facing an uncomprehending outside world. Despite being noticeably sensitive to the world around him, Dylan presents as basically unflappable. In the film there are a number of Dylan's very transparent emotional reactions to the general weirdness of people that I found pretty striking, but every time you think you've got him nailed to the floor, he seems to just completely reassemble and become a different Bob Dylan. His fragmented identity seems adaptively resistant to the trappings of fame (though in Dylan's case it comes from a position of social power rather than subordination). NO DIRECTION HOME touches on this several times but really I think I'M NOT THERE does a better job of trying to cinematically visualize the multiple Dylans, since that was its explicit focus after all. NO DIRECTION HOME is an attempt to document these shifts as they happened inside the historical Dylan, and the archival access Scorsese had does a pretty fair job of retroactively smoothing out what must have seemed inexplicable in the moment. Listening to the people who knew him, it seems the meta-narrative of Dylan the shapeshifter helped everyone look back and at least understand Dylan's constant slithering out of reach, if not quite accept it. I ended up feeling pretty bad for Joan Baez especially, who seemed to want nothing more than the Dylan behind the public charade and ended up iced out by his chilly evasion.

Dylan's preternatural coolness definitely reaches its most unfortunate iteration in hearing Baez recount her hurt feelings upon being ignored by him, but this shambling independence is something I think Dylan was socially enabled to do. Contrast Mavis Staples' impassioned account of her father's social marginality due to blackness and Dylan's respectful but somewhat glib nods to the earlier blues which shaped his music, and you start to get an idea of how Dylan seemed to just drift into national popularity without serious setbacks. With socially dominant confidence (/indifference?) comes the freedom to do whatever you want, and Bob Dylan certainly has always done whatever he wanted. Navigating the frenzy of national attention catches many gifted artists off guard, unless they can shrug it off as ably as Dylan. There's, of course, no doubt Dylan really believed in his music, but this film seems to suggest that it was his very belief that brought him such widespread admiration in the first place. He willed his soul into the world and found an audience looking for exactly such a gesture. That's all very flattering/inspiring/affirming if you buy into the cherished folk belief that people just want real authentic music played by real authentic musicians man, but Dylan's ease in transitioning from acoustic folk to LOUDD rock n' roll suggests that he bought that story less than most. Not to mention his own bemusement at the series of lucky breaks that guided him through his early years. You can see the specter of rockism animating the confused but disapproving reactions of fans and musicians alike as Dylan went electric (sample dialogue: "fake," "hypocrite," "sell-out," "commercial"), a sign that this phenomenon was as ideological as it was personal for many fans. Dylan's dismissal of the assumptions behind genre led to his shrugging disavowal of folk's purity, which for all the anger it provoked might as well have been an infidelity to a lover. Music superfans have a conservative clannishness to them, and the walls that everyone erected around Dylan seemed only to further tempt him into knocking them over. There is an element of self-made man mythology to Dylan's defiant career path, even as his natural humility reads more as understandable discomfort than pointed rage against the fame machine.

I can't help but think, then, how easy Dylan had it, in that he did not have any of the social status confusions that Tricky did when he become famous. I see now that Dylan really was one of a kind, and that the failure to understand him was almost inevitable when journalists could seem only to ask him questions such as "Do you prefer songs with an obvious message or a subtle one?" So I respect Scorsese's more or less authoritative account of Dylan's rise to superstardom and his gradual recession from it. I do wonder what we're supposed to do now that we know there are some people who are just mysteries. Tricky is a mystery to me still after two years of love and devotion, and he's only an artist I like. The people I see day to day are mysteries to me too, and I actually have to talk to them! So now that we're pretty sure we know who Bob Dylan isn't, what about who he is? And what about who Tricky is? If we can't rely on them to tell us, what are we supposed to do when faced with them? I'll beat the drum for Tricky all my life, but it's hard to see someone clearly when they don't even see themselves clearly. I imagine Scorsese enjoyed untangling the myth of Dylan in sturdy (though rather lifeless) documentary form, but Dylan doesn't seem to have any idea of what makes him tick anymore than we do. It's futile to think I can listen to a discography, even one as extensive as Dylan's, and see into someone like him. We make this mistake with our great artists over and over again, even the ones who aren't as unknowable as Bob Dylan and Tricky. Recognizing the ardor and artistry in art only tells us everything about the people who made it. Assumptions and projections are normal, expected even, but it sure gets annoying to realize that imposed celebrity only obscures our views of people who just want to share their art with us. My opinion of Dylan and his art is pretty favorable now after watching this documentary, and I thought I had no interest in this artist and time period based on all the breathless retrospective coverage. Turns out I didn't even know Dylan at all, oops.

SPECIAL POST: Video Games, Part I

In what could be considered a defining conflict in my life, I find myself wanting to watch and write about movies but feel too hampered by shame to do so. It's a particularly ridiculous feeling when you consider the amount of time I'll gladly sink into scrolling through Twitter, listening to music, or hanging out with friends. My life at the moment is dominated by necessary work of all kinds, and those distracting activities exist at its margins. There's something easier about saying "I'll just [scroll/listen/hang] for a bit" and letting time escape you than actually committing to something that you know ahead of time will require time management. The surrender of being caught up in a slipstream of time is less uncomfortable in the short term than consciously choosing to devote hours to something you want to do. This is a curious little paradox. Obviously the irresponsibility of wasting untold hours on those micro-activities is more damaging than the several defined hours it would take to watch a movie and write about it. And of course the procrastination does me no good, no matter how fulfilling scrolling/listening/hanging can occasionally be. The obvious choice would be to watch a movie and write about it, both for the amount of pleasure that process gives me and the set amount of time I can confine it to, but somehow I feel safer giving up management of my own time and allowing my whims to take me where they may. Why?

As a psychology major, I'm sure there's an answer to that question. But I'll figure that out at some later date, probably once I've cognitively restructured myself into favoring movie watching/writing over throwing myself into distractions. The hindsight will tell me what my current immersion in aimlessness can't. This does remind me of a discussion I ambled through with a friend recently, about mindful and mindless hedonism. It seems very mindlessly hedonistic to just "do whatever" as opposed to scheduling and working through a pleasurable experience. Perhaps I still buy the liberal individualist myth that anything I want to do is valid, and what I want to do is do nothing? Deep down, I suspect so. So maybe all I need is to create a system where I limit my small daily indulgences to filling space between the larger time blocks of doing what I want to do. And then maybe eventually I won't even need to backslide into mindless hedonism at all because mindful hedonism is so much more gratifying. I suspect that's how "Type A personalities" feel, and I think a variation on that could work for me too.

I put "Type A personalities" in quotes because I'm not so sure there's an innate drive to succeed, or at least not to the extent that it's a salient trait in the complex ecosystem of a person's brain. What seems more likely to me is that people who could be described as "Type A" truly feel there is value in the rewards of hard work, and so they feel that it is the most satisfying way to utilize their time. To them, distractions would feel like exactly what they are: distractions. And why not? The successful, the driven, the hard workers are hyper-visible in American culture. Steve Jobs is a national hero. Barack Obama was the child of a single mother. YouTube celebrities regularly build a nationwide following on nothing but creativity and relentless personal branding. Success is everywhere. It's becoming more and more democratic. All you need to do is be "you," as long as the "you" you are is okay with throwing most aspects of your personal life under the bus chasing that success. And there's a lot to be said about how people whose lives revolve around success and dedication to goals have a uniquely vehement hatred of the less certain and less successful, but I don't particularly want to look into that right now. I'm more interested in why, if success is so readily available, most people aren't all that successful.

The first answer is simple: luck. For every Steve Jobs, there are a thousand Silicon Valley aspirants with game-changing ideas who never attend the right meeting or meet the right sponsors. For every Barack Obama, there are hundreds of thousands of aspiring politicians building grassroots campaigns that, for one reason or another, will not win them the presidency. And for every Laci Green, every Kevin Wu, every Shane Dawson, there are millions of kids in their basements recording videos for audiences of close friends and parents (and the occasional classmate). Success is elusive, more elusive than we can even realize when we look back on how our icons acquired their cultural capital. We see the steps that led them to where they are, but we don't see all the moments when they almost became another nobody.

"Another nobody" is also a phrase that probably deserves scare quotes, because what really is so bad about being nobody? The phrase has a negative connotation, but it's a fate most people are destined for. I, too, was ambitious once. I have wanted to be all kinds of famous and famously successful at various points in my life: a famous chef, famous paleontologist, astronaut, author, journalist, filmmaker, beatmaker, etc. Every now and then I still want to be famous. But I know I can't be, at least not the way I am now. I don't have the inspiration, the work ethic, or the delusional self-confidence to push through repeated failure. Blogging here is just about right for me: low stakes enough to not feel like I depend on each blog post to sustain fickle and precarious fame (or living standards), but also challenging enough to force me to improve as a writer. And that's something I care about, even if I don't plan to marketize it. That's my individualized ambition. Tied into it are vague aspirations to craft visual media experiments or run musical sideprojects, but I'm not in a huge hurry to realize those. If one day I feel an urgent need to film/photograph something or to program a beat, maybe it will happen. Maybe some people will like it. That would be nice, and I would appreciate that. The endeavor is enough for me, though. This is a private space, made public only because I like to share with other people. I don't rely on success-based approval to keep me going, and I think that might be a big part of why I am not a globally ambitious person.

This too is worth exploring, because there are all kinds of reasons a person may not be ambitious. In my case, I always felt sheepish asking for attention and approval. I doubted my own creations, even when other people praised them. You can read all kinds of psychoanalytics into that if you'd like. But mostly I never felt success in and of itself was something valuable. I never saw it as a self-generating engine of happiness (maybe I absorbed too many rise-and-fall narratives of disillusioned artists?). The American understanding of success presupposes the moral correctness of those who attain it, and that's something I always found rather creepy. Not just because there are so many obvious examples of people undeserving of success, but more because I worried about how much of yourself you have to sacrifice in chasing success. Success is a very conditional thing in most cases, reliant on your ability to adapt to the standards of your chosen goal. Which is why I imagine Amanda Palmer and Lou Reed and others like them are so widely revered. They get the best of both worlds, success without self-annihilation. The idea of annihilating the self has become increasingly intolerable to Americans, which is why things like pop music and church-going have slowly fallen out of fashion. It's also why we praise the ordinariness of Jennifer Lawrence tripping on stairs or Obama cracking jokes with Zach Galifianakis. It's the facade we don't like, the mask we have to wear in order to appeal to everyone. Of course we want everyone to like us, but not if it involves being "fake." If everyone can learn to like us just the way we are, that then is a fame worth pursuing. You, too, can have it all.

Again, though, we run into the idea that success is antithetical to the commonplace. Better to be Shlomo than another anonymous beatmaker, better to be Anne Rice than another local YA paranormal romance writer. And again: why? This is what really bothers me, and what I find almost scary in a way. Is it not enough to be liked by our friends? To have our parents be proud of us? To do good work in a community? Do we need to be in total control of our own public persona at all times, and by extension our own destiny? Do we need to move ever upward, garnering ever more fans and followers? Is there any room for error or uncertainty if we have a position of influence to defend against irrelevance and scorn? I mainly want to be loved by my loved ones, with maybe a dab of respect here and there from fellow artists who like my art. That, to me, is success, and it's a success fairly out of step with a country that insists your success must be continuous and worldwide.

American success is individualistic, hierarchical, and capitalistic. Competitions and personal showcases of talent are the treadmills on which we train muscles that will one day power us to unqualified success. We encourage children to practice achievement through sports, student councils, religious advocacy, military enlistment, musical instruments, entrepreneurship. I have never liked any of those things, even as I unconsciously endorsed the value behind them in my younger years. So for years I felt that the culture was right and that I was wrong, that the success I deserved was out of reach due to my need (and preference) for love and acceptance, for quiet times and lazy times, and for time to figure myself out as a confused, fearful child. I feel now that I better understand my aversion to this dominant model of success, though not without considerable harm to myself along the way as I pursued the reactionary route of deliberate underachievement. It's something I'm going to have a hard time breaking out of, as I suspect it will be for many other slackers vaguely dissatisfied with the economic logic that extracts market value from our daily lives. Performance is everything in capitalism, and even those who cannot or do not want to perform feel that they should. As such, "doing whatever" seems radical in a culture that valorizes "doing something," and doing nothing feels appropriately dismissive of the constant exhortation to do anything and everything. Because if anything and everything can make you successful, then doing nothing is the only way to keep you safe from success you don't want or can't reach.

THE BATTLE OF CHILE: THE POWER OF THE PEOPLE (Guzmán 79): [4]

After a tune pitched somewhere between fond and doleful (are those feelings maybe the two halves of nostalgia?), THE BATTLE OF CHILE: THE POWER OF THE PEOPLE opens in the middle of a crowd declaring their loyalty to the left. We look into the admiring faces of the people and watch as the military enforces a boundary. Narration begins, and then, suddenly, Salvador Allende appears, gazing down solemnly from his platform of the parade. It's a magnificent feint in many ways. First and foremost, the mostly linear chronology of the film sequence is shattered with this doubling back. We followed Allende's last stand in the preceding film and felt our hearts sink as Pinochet supplanted the brave socialist president. Guzmán, however, has no interest in showing us any more of Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet's ascension to power was the punctuation to the long, bitter death of Chilean socialism, and as such it was the appropriate end to a film entitled THE COUP D'ÉTAT. This film's title is THE POWER OF THE PEOPLE, and Guzmán intends to show us exactly that. Salvador Allende will ultimately play only a distant role in this film's narrative. He floats, phantom-like, on the platform carrying him, and we know there is no going back to the promise of his first months in office. He is more symbol than man at this point, no matter how deeply human he was to us in the preceding two films. His time, sadly, is over. Now come the people.

Guzmán and company are interested in something unwieldy here. It's a topic only broached once or twice directly, but one that structures the entire arc of the worker uprising. What role do workers play in changing a capitalist government to a socialist one? Is it enough to simply follow the orders of a reformist government, or do the workers bear a personality responsibility as well? In the case of Chile, the workers are forced to play their hand. The first half of the film gives us preliminary measures in counteracting the opposition's sabotage. Workers arrange transportation for each other and for resources when private companies refuse to cooperate. They take ownership of the factories when the bosses abandon them and make plans of their own for continuing production. Food is rationed out at stalls according to ration cards given out to families. We know from the last two films that political turmoil rages outside these communal sites, but Guzmán rarely gives us a glimpse of the outside world. Instead we watch as the workers slowly, imperceptibly even, begin to feel a larger stake in ensuring the success of socialism. Survival and maintenance evolve into activism, and soon the workers are questioning if they are now the true agents of change in this messy transition.

Again, for Chile, this is almost inevitable. As one speaker notes in an argument for worker autonomy, the government only has a 44% share of the parliamentary process. A 60% majority is impossible. The workers cannot reasonably expect government assistance as the nationalization program spurs the opposition on to greater and deadlier acts of protest. Through narration we know that the truckers' strike has the financial support of the United States. So it makes sense that the workers would take note of this state of affairs and mount their own defense against socialist collapse. But somewhere along the line, the social dynamic shifts. The workers retain faith in Allende and Popular Unity even as they increasingly feel the need to take matters into their own hands. They support Allende by supporting themselves and each other. The emergency measures solidify into business as usual, and once the workers declare their grassroots independence and establish a degree of autonomy, the momentum keeps on building.

And to all appearances, this seems to work. It seems almost beside the point to ask whether or not leftist intellectuals should question this kind of worker mobilization. Allende was responsible for the nationalization mandate, and top-down policies are an effective way of converting popular will into real, broad-ranging change. We can, with hindsight, see that it was the middlemen who blocked Allende's initiatives from truly changing the nature of business in Chile. And yet here are the workers, straining and nearly succeeding to meet Allende halfway as their management abdicates responsibility for a smooth transition. One wonders what might have happened if the opposition weren't so violent in its resistance. If the bureaucrats had simply backed off and waited out the reforms, they might have been surprised to see an economy adapting to their absence.

It would never have been simple, of course. The scarcity of food and supplies, along with 16-hour work days, should do well to cut short any romanticizing of the Chilean workers' struggles. Disagreements spring up from questions of management and process, ones that maybe not every worker or union is equipped to handle. It's no easy task to pool the efforts of all kinds of people and direct them toward a common goal. Still, the sense of competence remains. When confronted with problems, the workers seem quite capable of handling them on their own. Their collective understanding of the factory gives them the confidence to move from day-laborers to active participants in the organization's welfare. Together they're able to diagnose the problems and work toward breaking what they call the "capitalist structures" of their labor organization with little need for outside help. The filmmakers themselves seem surprised that the Christian Democrat workers hold no special loyalty to their party (illustrated amusingly when an interviewer asks a man twice where his loyalties lie and is told "with the workers" despite his presumable Christian Democrat affiliation). There is little external reward for this group unity in the moment, and all this complexity is exactly what administrators would argue people need bureaucratic leadership to handle for them. Through observation and interview, Guzmán cannily provides us with a different notion. People, the film suggests, only need to feel their time and effort are being valued and leading to a greater good.

One gets the sense that this engine of determination is what libertarians seek to activate when they attempt to rally individuals into taking charge of their own destinies. But I suspect they're vastly underestimating the mutually reinforcing power of group collaborators. Individualist paranoia of cooperation (or 'groupthink,' as they'd have it) seems to have dissuaded libertarians that any meaningful change can happen between people, that change only comes from among them. If enough individuals believe the same thing, the legend seems to go, they can each demand it on their own and prevent outsiders from influencing their opinions. To me, this seems more like groupthink than discussion, debate, and agreement among disparate groups do. I believe empathy and understanding (broadly speaking) are what enable us to grasp what benefits the larger public as a whole rather than just you and me and some like-minded friends. There's mutual reinforcement among libertarians too, but it takes the form of encouraging indiscriminate skepticism and delusional self-reliance. The reactionary thought process can be easily stimulated and distorted by exaggerated threats to selfhood, but an educated, motivated group's resilience not only resists psychic sabotage, it also sustains its own energy. The libertarian's raging belief in the power of the self is a sustained high quickly followed by the low of realizing how little a difference one individual can make. The solution is not to provoke many other individuals into thinking and feeling as you do, but to gather people and rely on their innate desire to help each other. This way, one individual's failure or doubt doesn't diminish the strength of the group. The group contains the goodwill of all involved, and it is more than the sum of its parts. Libertarianism can only ever be the sum of its parts, and when the pressure of massive social/political/economic change gets to be too much for any one participant, as it undoubtedly will, the individual will flounder and submit to despair, lost without the support of caring others that gently persuades people to keep trying against all outside odds.

We can see this at work in socialist Chile, and I suspect the opposition's campaign was built on stoking individualist fears of loss and uncertainty in more prosperous Chileans. This is actually quite an effective tactic, in contrast to libertarian grassroots change, because existential uncertainty in the privileged is a motivator all its own (and because resisting change is always easier than creating it). Agitate that dread, reveal it in the faces of your compatriots, build up a roving, faceless crowd of scapegoats and group action all but prompts itself. The hysteria of the bourgeois is a defense against the pragmatism of the workers, and screaming and lashing out through violence are the tactics of a campaign of intimidation. Spread enough chaos this way and you will eventually enable a Pinochet to gather up weapons, launch an offensive and restore 'order.' The bourgeoisie doesn't actually have to do anything but embrace and project its fear long enough for someone to notice and take action into their own hands. Uncharitably, this is little more than the wailing of a baby when it craves attention and entertainment. When this attitude exists in a sizable majority of adults with a sizable amount of power, though, the implications are far graver.

And so Chile fails to implement its socialist imperative, and it is punished for 17 brutal years afterward. This could be viewed as a warning against any similar sort of actions (the US certainly intended for it to be, and conservatives would be glad to remind you), but Guzmán wisely picks out the beginnings of a true revolution stirring just beneath the chaos into which his country was thrown. Detailing the Pinochet administration's descent into bloodthirsty dictatorship would only remind us of the consequences of daring to hope for a better life, but Guzmán has not given us that story. Instead, he shows us how beautifully proactive people can be when they fight against the inertia of capitalism. Salvador Allende may have failed to change Chile singlehandedly, but it was never his battle to fight alone. He always had the people there to support him. They are the ones who sacrificed their comfort, their security, and their safety to push their country forward. They took charge when the government was selfishly handicapped and kept the socialist dream alive. And they were the ones who stood to lose the most if the opposition rose up and cracked down, as it did, but they knew it was worth the risk. Allende may be the man on the platform, but it was the anonymous men and women of the cheering crowds that brought Chile closer than most countries have ever been to true equality. To Patricio Guzmán and company: for remembering them, and for showing us their power, we are most grateful.

(photo credit: www.patricioguzman.com)

THE BATTLE OF CHILE: THE COUP D'ÉTAT (Guzmán 76): [4.5]

Interestingly, this second film in the series opens with a list of  international honors and awards received. THE BATTLE OF CHILE received no end of acclaim after it was unveiled to the world, though it seems to have been slightly forgotten in the decades since. We seem to have forgotten how extraordinary the moments contained within these films truly are. I was struck, late in the film, by the smiling children gathered behind men being interviewed about a truck drivers' strike. It would not be long before those children grew up under the cold terror imposed by Pinochet's regime, before those socialist sympathizers would have no guarantee of safety to share their opinions. The film crew too would leave the country to assemble this gathered footage, casting these brief shared moments between them all as lost fragments of time in Chile's corrupted history. While certainly Patricio Guzmán has given the world at large a tremendous social and artistic gift in the form of his stupendous three-part documentary, it is the Chilean people who will benefit most from what he has done. Much like Antonioni's Chung Kuo, the service this film provides is a valuable, unmediated view of life during the Chilean political process in the first years of the 70s.

Using the word 'unmediated' when describing a documentary is a dangerous proposition, and it usually implies a misguided appeal to an objectivity that the camera's presence can't help but distort. I would, however, claim that the method used by Guzmán breaks new ground in this ongoing debate about cinematic objectivity. Certainly we can't claim that the parliamentary process was much affected by the camera (or, at least, no more affected than such a process would ordinarily be, considering the performative aspect of debate). And as intrusive as the camera seems to be when recording conversations in the factories or the street, the camera operators refrain from directly influencing the actions of their subjects. More ambiguous are the exchanges, about halfway through the film, between the frustrated workers and the man defending international interests. Here microphones swoop in to amplify voices, and cameras fixate on men who are gathered in a small room. Perhaps their debate was affected by their awareness of the camera crew? My opinion is that their single-mindedness and seeming fluidity in speaking suggests they were far more absorbed by the process of defending their viewpoints. The first film begins with Chilean voters giving their opinions about politics, a process obviously performative but no less useful for tapping into the energy of the people at that moment in history. In contrast, these men speak with little acknowledgement (in speech or demeanor) of being observed. They are impassioned, but it is in focused response to what the other has said. It is impossible to say for certain, so I'll also say that there is room even within that focus for self-consciousness. 

While we can't entirely remove the camera from the equation, Guzmán makes the right move in dwarfing his crew in the larger turmoil of the country. His choice aligns with the position of the Chilean people in Chile's slow destruction. At first they felt like they were part of their country's future, but soon they would find that that future was never theirs to decide. He and his editors may choose what to show us from the footage obtained, but what they do show us is almost uniformly a view from the sidelines. Possibly as a reaction to the danger posed by Tanquetazo coup (in which one cameraman was killed while filming, and which links this film to its predecessor), the crew now observes mostly at a distance. Trucks and tanks drive past, oblivious to the watchful eyes of the cameras. Guzmán and company can only contextualize what they film rather than provoking action from those directing these events. This film listens more than it asks, individual interviews notwithstanding. History marches onward, been removed from the hands of the people. They may occasionally voice their opinions to the filmmakers, but those opinions will no longer translate into political action. 

This is actually rather damning of the democratic process, as we see that creating socialism is not so easy as voting and letting representatives enact the voters' will. Representatives represent something larger and more intangible than their voters, which complicates the political process. Their only accountability is to themselves, and what are we to make of these men and their allegiances? Guzmán documents all kinds of outside interference and shifting loyalties in his films. The Christian Democrats sit idly by as the abortive coup begins, then reconsider and offer their support to Salvador Allende and Popular Unity afterward. A trial period begins where Allende and his government tentatively attempt to expropriate factories, and the Christian Democrats grow uneasy in their alliance with Popular Unity. Those fears are then preyed upon by fascist protests and the rightward wing of the Christian Democrats, who eventually make stiff demands of surrendering presidential power and halting nationalization. Allende refuses, and the end approaches.

Who can we blame? Is any one person or coalition to blame? The political process is an unwieldy one at the best of times, let alone when the fury of the United States is looming and the governing party's political goal is nothing less than the total transformation of a society. Did the Chilean Parliament fail the socialist enterprise, or did human fallibility fail the Chilean Parliament? The answer, of course, is both, but Guzmán's exhaustive documentation of the shifts in power provide us with some clues. We can see the elephants in the room of Swiss and English foreign investments in Chilean manufacturing. Those in charge of overseeing the harmonious continuation of business are unable to simply oust their investors, not even necessarily because of loyalty to those powers, but because Chile depends on the stability of trade relations to continue its reforms (particularly after the United States cuts its economic ties with Chile). The workers are tired of waiting, understandably so, but rashness and impatience would sink Chilean socialism faster than inaction. As always, the people are left waiting while vested interests outside their reach resist compromise.

Also at the ground level, we see Juan Cáceres, an experienced Marxist (since 1932!), give his opinion on just this matter. Though not a direct response, his opinion on the issue of arming the people in response to navy raids against socialists proves complementary to the view of a mother interviewed earlier. She wanted the government to arm the people because she and others agreed that they were helpless in the event of these raids turning from weapons confiscations to individual targeting. Cáceres recalls a similar instance when arming the people was a possibility that was refused. He cites an inevitable massacre as reasoning for this decision. It may leave the people vulnerable, but the alternative is chaos. "If you were the government, you'd have to do the same," he says in defense of strategic inaction.

True, but this also has a counterpoint, one far graver than a dissenting opinion. As Pinochet begins his takeover of the country, the raids do indeed turn lethal, with over 1,000 people killed. And this is before the forced internments in which tens of thousands of people were detained, many of whom were tortured. Would the opportunity for defense have made a difference? Maybe even deterred Pinochet from his plan of action? Morally this is not a game worth playing, imagining "what if" in terms of armed resistance, but each action made (or not made) by Allende's government creates a titanic reaction, which then births other equally unpredictable events. It's a game of chess very few people can play, but one all governments must. Allende and his supporters could only guess so far in the face of these mounting odds. The path to socialism was never going to be an easy one in the best of times, and this brave experiment, filmed and distributed so that we may always remember, shows us just how hard capitalism will fight back when it's under attack.

There's so much more I could say here. What about that television debate early in the film between a cocky young revolutionary and an irritable old politician? Such a clever encapsulation of the film's depth, particularly in the layers of deception the politician calculatedly creates. What about the United States' involvement in bringing down Salvador Allende, a fact made no less shocking by the passing of time? And then there's the immense dedication of the Chilean socialists, which I couldn't help compare to the apathy of American progressives. Lastly, I was floored by that quick pan from Allende's face to the grenade he was holding in that photo. So brief, but what a deeply powerful symbol of what elevates a man from a brave politician to a hero. I could come back to this film alone and write about it for days. The fact that it's preceded by a great film and followed by one probably every bit as great? Miraculous.

(photo credit: www.movieforums.com)

PROFILE: Tricky, Part Two

unfinished

I'm going to head this post off with the article that has shaped much of my thinking about it. This post is a synthesis of that article and my own thoughts on Tricky. Which is exactly what, to me, that article says I should be writing. I'm cloaking my opening paragraph in subjectivity because there's no other way to approach Tricky in a way that respects him as a human being and artist. You could say this about just about any musician or band I suppose, but few others have been buffeted by the consensus mentality, the objectivity fetish, so much as Tricky, who has slipped between our fingers just as we sought to grasp him the tightest. Tricky's place in musical history is a structuring absence, the photograph of a haunted house, an image swollen with the weight of the ghosts inside. He's there but we can't see him, because he exists beyond our comprehension. And I don't say this to attribute supernatural powers to him, or even some kind of noble business savvy, but because of the blindsight we ourselves use in examining him.

I recapped Tricky's biography in my first post on him as an exercise in futility. It's easy enough to trace his locations and doings, maybe even his motivations, as he geared up to create his mysterious debut album, and even as you listen to it, you will automatically highlight points of data that ground it in cultural, musical, and personal history. But can you, can I, can anyone explain the power of these 'reference points,' as we might call them? To back briefly up into the Film Quarterly piece, one debater notes that Marker's A Grin Without A Cat "reject[s] textbook history" and "instead offers op-ed, montage, jokes, questions, a chorus of voices." What a perfect little analogy to Tricky's project. But of course that's not a thorough enough description through which to understand Maxinquaye, or Tricky. I merely want to make sure we're approaching Maxinquaye with enough distance before we delve deeply into it.

The other debater goes on to characterize some critical voices as similar to those of children discussing Pokemon cards. A wayward Pokemon enthusiast, I found this very funny indeed. But the point is an important one to consider when we engage with critical discourse, and it's one I freely admit to struggling with as I sharpen my own analytic skills. Gathering the facts and watching them bounce off one another is a joy in which I've partaken for much of my life, whether it was memorizing dinosaur facts, Pokemon facts, bird facts, video game facts, music facts, movie facts, and now cultural 'facts.' The more you know, the more the things you know will interact, and that potentially chaotic movement has been the animating force behind my thinking and my creativity for most of my life. But if wisdom were as simple as gathering knowledge, education would provide us with a linear path to it. You've probably heard that notion expressed as an aphorism at some point or another, but what are we to make of cultural critics who utilize the Pokemon card mentality we claim to disdain?

In movies, my deepest passion (so far!), lesser cultural critics masquerading as filmmakers will often line up chunks of predetermined significance, thinking they've created that linear path from ignorance to enlightenment. This thing I'm showing you explains why Person/Organization X performed Action Y, which produced Event Z. Even if you were to accept the claims of significance of these data points at face value, any seemingly logical progression from one to the other necessarily irons over the interceding influences that shaped the route from Point A to B. I can't tell you anything about the unknowability of history that you don't already know, but I can tell you how refreshing Mark Sinker's reading of Marker's juxtaposition of the New Left and rock concert attendees was. This is the unique power of film, the collision of filmed motion (to say nothing of the color, camera angles, sound, voices, faces, etc. that compose the images of those shots) to create new meaning (in this case, the comparison of the slow deaths of both Rock and Leftism).

I think Tricky likes juxtaposition too. In fact I think he likes it a lot, if the name of his fifth album is anything to go by. But why? Or, what can I tell you about that enjoyment that will help you understand Tricky? Tricky prides himself on producing layered soundscapes built from conflicting influences, including two false binaries he's happy to repeatedly violate: male and female, black and white. Within the beings of male and female and black and white lie certain prescribed modes of conduct that constrict our behavior and, for Tricky, our music. This is why his chaotic utilization of culture and self confuses so many people. He cannot be easily defined because he is too complex to be adequately summed up or 'known.' Tricky refuses to be known as only a black male, because he is white in addition to black and, I think, female in addition to male. His femaleness is tricky to properly assert, because he has never admitted to personal gender/sexual identity confusion. And I won't be the one to remove the ambiguity for you. But I can say that I see a lot of myself in him and his irritation with men, his easy intimacy with the women in his life. Being male is not enough for me, and though I identify as a heterosexual male, I have always had an innate attraction to all things labelled feminine. I love beauty, emotions, fashion, sharing, pop music, playfulness, spontaneity, and any other number of things considered off-limits to men. My identity as a human being cannot be contained by the label of 'male,' and though I cannot tell you the extent of it, I suspect the same is true of Tricky.

To express the ambivalence Tricky feels toward competing aspects of himself, he presents us with staples of white identity, black identity, male and female identity. On Maxinquaye, his lyrics are frequently sung by his friend, lover, and artistic companion Martina Topley-Bird. Sometimes the two duet, sometimes they sing the same words in unison, and sometimes they talk on top of each other. This might be easier to parse if it weren't for the fact that Tricky asserts that Martina is not really representing herself, so much as embodying the feelings expressed by his own lyrics. This confusion only deepens on a song like Aftermath, which I and others have read as being from the point-of-view of Tricky's departed mother ("your eyes resemble mine" "so many things I need to tell you, things you need to hear" "let tell you about my mother"). And even then Tricky himself is the voice of some of those lyrics in addition to Martina, so we can't even call it a call-and-response between mother and son. Rock, hip-hop, pop, and reggae and strange noises combine in ways previously unimaginable, their blackness or whiteness becoming just as entangled as Tricky's own racial heritage.

To what end? We quickly grasp that Tricky is a complicated and talented individual, but what does disavowing all easy comparisons actually do for us? Tricky has only one thing to tell us, and he's said it many times since the ecstatic reception of Maxinquaye. His music is him expressing himself, which tells us everything and nothing. Analysis is futile. Because even if we can say this or that aspect of Maxinquaye is white black male or female, we would still be left trying to understand why the unsettling drone of Overcome, the still-astounding hell-hop of Strugglin', or the spoken word interlude of Black Steel affect our understanding of the songs' meanings, let alone how they affect us. What can I tell you about the dread I feel listening to that unexpected drum break early in Feed Me? I can tell you that it catches me offguard just as I'm sinking into the swirling chimes, the sampled whisper, and Martina's ghostly laments. I can tell you that it goes on just long enough to seem disruptive, that the mood it generates is somehow both distinct from and compatible with what comes before it. Anything more, though, would hurt your perception of it as well as my own. Per Film Quarterly: "To be right -- to solve a problem, to clarify a tangled history, to note an error -- is to remove something also: your own lived puzzlement; your spur, the source of your energy and focus." That passage of sound resonates deeply inside me, and I don't need to figure out why or if Tricky intended that or not. I think this is where most people stumble with Tricky, because they don't understand why they react to his music the way they do or why Tricky does what he does. Maxinquaye gave away just enough to be enticing, whereas Tricky's later music would be frustratingly opaque.

But where most argued that Tricky was stubbornly embracing obscurity for obscurity's sake, the answer is actually much easier than one might suspect on diving into his fractured artistic output. Tricky simply wants us to see him as he is, and the only way to do that is to remove all preconceptions of him and his music before we attempt to do so. It would be dishonest of him to pretend there is nothing white and nothing female in him, and that he doesn't feel rage, fear, weakness, or confusion. It's all right there, if we just let ourselves hear everything instead of what we want to hear.

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)