The Pursuit of Happyness

Only fools laugh at Horatio Alger and his poor boys who make good. The wise man who thinks twice about that sterling author will realize that Alger is to America what Homer was to the Greeks.
--Nathanael West

There was a pretty big disconnect for me between the advertising for this movie and the experience of watching it. For one thing, despite all the trappings of a supposed feel good Horatio Alger tale, one would have to be pretty oblivious to what can only be described as the utter panic running throughout nearly every scene. And secondly, one would have to ignore the (admittedly subtle) message that the division between wealth and poverty, success and failurere, and happiness or misery is precariously narrow. One of the opening shots of the film makes this abundantly clear by simply panning downward from the upwardly mobile heads and shoulders of the working elite to a homeless man passsed out on the side walk. A visual representation not only of the dreadful possibilities that keep those people working, but of the short distance one would have to fall to be there too.

So, to put it simply, I don't see the film as a celebration of American capitalism (nor, interestingly, a condemnation of it) but instead a sort of examination of what American capitalism feels like on the ground, from the point of view of those who are sold those dreams of success. You can take from this movie just about any political viewpoint you bring into it, which is to say it's not particularly interesting as a political film.

It's most powerful aspect, for me, comes from the basic clarity of the story: survive or perish. It's a parallel version of Cormac McCarthy's The Road with a happy ending, simply a father and son fighting for survival. Even the big speech from the trailers isn't as sappy as it appears, since the context in which it is delivered only serves to make our hero more human--it stems from his failures as father. If there's a sadder and more terrifying scene in a Hollywood movie than Will Smith crying in a public restroom, clutching his sleeping son and holding the door shut with his foot, then I'll be shocked.

When the Levees Broke



Probably the greatest sin of Spike Lee's masterful documentary is too often mistaking provocation for enlightenment. Kanye West's seemingly bold proclamation that "George Bush doesn't care about black people" may well be a daring political statement, especially considering it was delivered in a typically bland "we care about you" bullshitathon from Hollywood, but it collapses under the weight of the importance assigned to it. The fact is it merely repeats the same personalization of racial inequality that manages to obscure the real institutional, social, economic, and cultural factors that really contribute to the problem. It may even be true that George Bush doesn't care about black people, but that wouldn't tell us much about why or how Katrina (and the real issue: the desperate poverty in New Orleans) really happened. With these sorts of spokesmen, and the demagogic use to which they put the rage that they whip up at ineffectual targets, we're merely left celebrating the acquittal of O.J. Simpson as if it struck a blow for racial equality.

With that issue put aside, what's remarkable about the film in political terms is how little it resorts to the tactics described above. In one memorable section, Lee entertains and then debunks a conspiracy theory, only to provide a historical context that only raises the question yet again. The suggestion, it seems to me, is not so much the endorsement of "George Bush doesn't care about black people" or the theory that the government blew up the dam to protect the rich white neighborhoods of New Orleans, but instead the discouraging fact that these feelings still linger, that our past sins tend to revisit us. The seemingly wild conspiracy theories don't seem so wild (though still far-fetched) when we are forced to face our past transgressions. Suspicion is the lingering weight of the sin that we carry in this country.

Beyond all this, the film is most remarkable as a work of art, an ode to New Orleans, the South, Music, and African American culture. It's also a eulogy for the Utopian aspirations of that city, and a document to the legacy of Reconstruction in the South. It's a sad testament to meaningless mass death, made more ignoble by the anonymity of poverty. So many bodies left unattended, face down in the water. An army of nameless dead.

It's an angry film. It's a "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" for our time. A sermon which posits Hurricane Katrina not as cleansing baptismal waters but as a deluge come to wash away the false veneers we maintain about our culture. Fittingly, Lee seems to see Katrina as a critical moment for us to examine ourselves and see that the sins in the past of this country will not wash away so easily. No, it will take work.

Casino Royale


I don't very much about Bond movies. Just putting that out there. I don't really like them. The formula (gadgets, nice car, hot babe who is possibly a femme fatale, exotic locales) is nice once or twice, but it seems to sap the joy of surprise out of the films. Ultimately, the movies seem to blend into each other, offering infinite variation which only serves to underline their basic sameness.

I like this movie a lot. It starts out really great. A black and white scene which imagines Bond as a nearly sociopathic killer (exactly the type of man you expect your government to actually put to good use) and even gives the audience credit enough to fill in an unfinished line for the joke. Pretty bold really.

But eventually it reverts back to a "Bond" film and gets progressively more boring and predictable but thankfully it ends in time to preserve it from getting plain boring.

Thriller by Michael Jackson


Listening to this in 2006 creates a lot of cognitive dissonance. First of all, it's nice to hear some actual funk on this record, which moved Jackson one step further into pop from his best album, the almost all funk Off the Wall. There's a freshness and bounce to these songs, a sense of fun, that's all but lacking in modern pop, obsessed as it is with laughably over-serious porno style sexuality. (For another post: but why must all modern sexuality in the media be a variation on the porgnographic or the stripper; are all our modern celebrities masters of the lap dance, the strip tease, and the come-hither flared nostrils look?)

But here, as I said, it's light for the most part. Bille Jean is the dark exception. But it's a great song, with complex cast of characters and an interesting story to tell. Furthermore, it's a sonic masterpiece. The brooding bass, stabbing synthesizer, and Jackson's heavily mannered vocals create a pretty unique mood, somewhere between paranoia and dread.

But there's inevitably a sense of loss which accompanies all Jackson's good early work. Perhaps only someone as miserably disturbed and fully isolated as Jackson could come alive with joy, at at least the put-on of joy, in a performance, play acting at being happy, just as happy people play at being sad and serious. Jackson's real charade is that he was ever allowed to feel the emotions he claims to feel in these joyous songs.

Looking at his already slightly altered face on the cover of Thriller stings like a rebuke. To myself, my childhood, my culture, and this whole modern world. The assault he made on himself feels like a judgement to me, on judgement on us. Feel for one moment the sense of spiritual vacuity and emotional stuntedness that surrounds us, the fake gestures of sexuality that take on the aspects of pornography (ie, sex that only wants to sell you something), and the fear and anxiety that seems to rule over all our lives, and it's not hard to look at Michael Jackson's mutilated face and think you're looking in a mirror for Western culture. My face there, in his, and so is yours.

Superman Returns


There is another interesting post to be made on the pop-mythology in movies like this, and the fact that I feel a bit chagrined that stories such as Atlas, Prometheus, and even the Gospels are mined to lend this story a feeling of significance and unearned pathos. It's not the echoing and repetition of mythology I find annoying, just the implicit notion that a story like this can only have meaning if it makes its allusions as broad and obvious as possible, which is to say as an allegory. Which is also to say these modern comic book films lack any real purpose of their own, any real conviction in their own stories or characters. Superman doesn't need Jesus to be a moving or interesting story. And frankly, the constant recourse to classical texts that that the audience doesn't know anyway (and has literally explained to them in the film) merely serves to point out the poverty of the crap we're being spoonfed by the movies these days. Some people may find it refreshing that pop-art condescends to inform and make relevant the founding myths of Western culture, but for me it simply reveals how bereft we really are of any meaning our art anymore. If can't find the heroic around us, here and now, Jesus and Prometheus lose their power to truly mean something (sorry for the vagueness, but I'm rushing here) because they are detached from real experience. The crucifixion is merely bloody entertainment if you don't know what suffering means. It's all a hall of mirrors leading back to our continual modern self-regard, shedding the last bit of light left, as it continues to grow darker all around us.

But I digress! All I really wanted to say: Never did I think I would miss Christopher Reeves and Margot Kidder so much. Reeves knew how to play Clarke Kent in a way that emphasizes his utter dorkiness, so much so that the contrast, within himself, that Superman represents has a rare sort of pathos that this new film misses all together. Who is Clarke Kent this time? Just a hunk in glasses. What a shame.

Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism:

The best defenses against the terrors of existesnce are the homely comforts of love, work, and family life, which connect us to a world that is independent of our wishes yet responsive to our needs. It is through love and work, as Freud noted in a characteristically pungent remark, that we exchange crippling emotional conflict for ordinary happiness. Love and work enable each of us to explore a small corner of the world and to come to accept it on its own terms. But our society tends either to devalue small comforts or else to expect too much of them. Our standards of "creative, meaningful work" are too exalted to survive disappointment. Our ideal of "true romance" puts an impossible burden on personal relationships. We demand too much of life, too little of ourselves.

From G. Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form:

Let us consider, for a moment, the world as described by the physicist. It consists of a number of fundamental particles which, if shot through their own space, appear as waves, and are thus of the same laminated structure as pearls or onions, and other wave forms called electromagnetic which it is convenient, by Occam’s razor, to consider as traveling through space with a standard velocity. All these appear bound by certain natural laws which indicate the form of their relationship.

Now the physicist himself, who describes all this, is, in his own account, himself constructed of it. He is, in short, made of a conglomeration of the very particulars he describes, no more, no less, bound together by and obeying such general laws as he himself has managed to find and to record.

Thus we cannot escape the fact that the world we know is constructed in order (and thus in such a way as to be able) to see itself.

This is indeed amazing.

Not so much in view of what it sees, although this may appear fantastic enough, but in respect of the fact that it can see at all.

But in order to do so, evidently it must first cut itself up into at least one state which sees, and at least one other state which is seen. In this severed and mutilated condition, whatever it sees is only partially itself. We may take it that the world undoubtedly is itself (i.e. is indistinct from itself), but, in any attempt to see itself as an object, it must, equally undoubtedly, act so as to make itself distinct from, and therefore false to, itself. In this condition it will always partially elude itself.

It seems hard to find an acceptable answer to the question of how or why the world conceives a desire, and discovers an ability, to see itself, and appears to suffer the process. That it does so is sometimes called the original mystery. Perhaps, in view of the form in which we presently take ourselves to exist, the mystery arises from our insistence on framing a question where there is, in reality, nothing to question. However it may appear, if such desire, ability, and sufferance be granted, the state or condition that arises as an outcome is, according to the laws here formulated, absolutely unavoidable. In this respect, at least, there is no mystery. We, as universal representatives, can record universal law far enough to say

and so on, and so on you will eventually construct the universe, in every detail and potentiality, as you know it now; but then, again, what you will construct will not be all, for by the time you will have reached what now is, the universe will have expanded into a new order to contain what will then be.

In this sense, in respect of its own information, the universe must expand to escape the telescopes through which we, who are it, are trying to capture it, which is us. The snake eats itself, the dog chases its tail.

Damn I knew it!

Well, add A History of Violence to the list below, somewhere in the middle, probably after Munich. It's mostly just funny to me, not really worthy of the self-important seriousness many critics want to attach to it. It's a cartoon version of America and probably says a lot more about how we accept and use violent stories of innocence and corruption (see the two justly lauded sex scenes) rather than any sort of statement about violence and America itself. If you want that shit, just read Richard Slotkin....

1. The New World


This was the best film of 2005, and perhaps the best film of the decade so far. I saw two different versions, and while I preferred the dreamy abstraction of the longer cut, the shorter one has its virtues as well. Malick, more than any other working filmmaker, uses film language for amazingly expressive and intelligent ends which never sacrifice emotional weight. I guess some find his films distant and academic, but I've never been able to see that. For me, Malick's films are so emotionally wrought and felt that this is almost a flaw. What's the point of his films? Perhaps it's just the film itself, and I mean this in a sense that gets to the very basic wonder inherent in art. Our world is reflected back and made new to us, made strange or beautiful. A great film can pull us out of our world, out of ourselves, and hint at a greater whole. This is not a strictly happy or sentimental observation. Evil demonstrates it as much as good. But at the very basest level this film is a testament to the beauty of a life, and as such all life, all Being itself. It's all reaching skyward...

Life has no memory. That which proceeds in succession might be remembered, but that which is coexistent, or ejaculated from a deeper cause, as yet far from being conscious, knows not its own tendency. So is it with us, now skeptical, or without unity, because immersed in forms and effects all seeming to be of equal yet hostile value, and now religious, whilst in the reception of spiritual law. Bear with these distractions, with this coetaneous growth of the parts: they will one day be members, and obey one will. On that one will, on that secret cause, they nail our attention and hope. Life is hereby melted into an expectation or a religion. Underneath the inharmonious and trivial particulars, is a musical perfection, the Ideal journeying always with us, the heaven without rent or seam.

--Emerson, Experience

Malick finds the filmic language to express Emerson's words. When John Smith and Pocahontas fall in love, we see the world itself beginning to swell and bloom, and when he betrays her we see that it has begun to rot. The point, however, is not that the world is reflecting the feelings of the lovers, but that the lovers are part of the world, that their love itself is a creation of the world. The moving final minutes of this film show us our transformation, our connection with the Universe and the Ideal and even Heaven, like the sun peaking through a crowded canopy of trees, light which graces us only momentarily before succumbing to darkness. "All things shining...." as the final words of The Thin Red Line remind us.

2. Brokeback Mountain

Another love story on a slightly different register from The New World. I have the suspicion that this film is admired and disliked for similarly bad reasons, namely political ones. Yet the film itself is apolitical, more concerned with human interaction on a personal level than the fundamental political structures which dictate those interactions. I guess that's my fancy way of saying that this movie is not really a Liberal movie, not to say Leftist. In fact you could make an argument that the very fact that the film concentrates so much on the personal at the expense of the political, it includes narratives of redemption and damnation, that it's closer to a conservative film than a liberal one. If those labels really mean anything.

With that out of the way I can say that this film is one of the best depictions of the sheer silence and loneliness of the American west of any film I've seen. Or to use more up to date terms, "fly-over country." It remains true to its characters in a way that refuses political utilty. Ennis is not gonna move to San Francisco with Jack. He does not consider it an option, it's just not done. He accepts his thwarted desire, stuffs it down and silences it, in a way that Jack can't. This film is more about the problem of masculinity than being "gay" as such (and it's clear to me anyway that Ennis is not really gay, though Jack is): the codes of silence and work that slowly erode a person's spirit to the point where they can't talk anymore, and the pain is, as it were, stuffed in the closet. When men take on the part of being "masculine" we give up a part of ourselves, force it to be silent and hidden. Because the work has to be done, it's not as if one can evade responsibilities, as we so often casually do these days. This film is the tragedy of being gendered as "male," and as such it's movie about something a lot more important and fundamental than being gay. Ennis' one moment of anguish is so very subtle but it carries enormous emotional force. If you can feel the isolation present in every frame of this movie from the opening shot on, the terrible distance and beauty of nature which infuses everything, then your human, and you can certainly empathize with these characters.

3. The Weather Man


As a friend told me, this movie hits pretty close to home sometimes. Essentially about growing up and becoming and adult, which simply means accepting that life is limited and imperfect, but you've got to focus anyway. It's darkly funny, and the running subtext about fast food is a pretty profound critique of the way most of us lead our lives in a sort of shallow distraction. The final scene between father and son is filled with much unsaid pathos, and Nicholas Cage plays it perfectly. The father's advice to his son, one curt sentence, is brutal but also emancipating.

4. Munich


Sort of sickeningly terrifying and yet compelling. The film charts the journey through the moral wasteland of the 20th Century as a endless search for Home. The ethical deadlock strikes me as despair rather than hope, but it's equally powerful nonetheless.

5. Grizzly Man


Funny and weird, and sad of course. It strikes me as being about how we often refuse to see what's in front of us, for the sake of continuing a fiction which we need to survive, even, ironically, to the point of dying for it.

6. The 40-Year-Old-Virgin


Nasty and funny, but it's also on here for the no-so-subtle suggestion that the title character is only one who can have a normal, healthy, happy relationship because he doesn't care about sex as an end in itself.

7. War of the Worlds


Spielberg's other tour of 20th Century horror, this time on the ground, away form the decision makers.

8. 2046

Hollow and fruitless where as the first one, In the Mood for Love, held out an expected promise. Desire is flawed here, too real, too accessible.

9. Wedding Crashers


This just cracked me up. Subtext is pretty clear though: they are too in love with each other to really commit to a woman. It's at least as gay as Brokeback!

10. Kung Fu Hustle


Hey, I needed 10 and this will do! Funny, inventive, a bit too cartoony for my taste, but I was never bored.

So here's my top ten, as promised. I've decide to just post the list now and add comments later, hopefully soon. As for relative quality, take number 1 as a "great" film and 2-3 as "very good" and the rest as just "good."

1. The New World
2. Brokeback Mountain
3. The Weather Man
4. Munich
5. Grizzly Man
6. The 40-Year-Old-Virgin
7. War of the Worlds
8. 2046
9. Wedding Crashers
10. Kung Fu Hustle

Life's splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come.

— Franz Kafka

Well it's been a while, hasn't it? I'm gonna start this puppy up again, and hopefully keep at it more regularly. I'll probably being posting a movies and music round up of 2005 in the next few weeks as I catch up on what the year had to offer.

In the meantime, check out Matt Zoller Seitz's blog "The House Next Door" added on the sidebar. Seitz is one of my favorite critics and one of the few to notice just how great The New World is. (I guess I just gave away my best of 2005 there, oh well!)

See you soon.