Author Archives: Jackson Harper

What If Ethan Edwards Was a Nineteenth Century Wallachian?

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When I checked out this film’s profile online, multiple reviewers classified it as a Western of sorts. Initially after watching Aferim!, the connection seemed to me a bit loose, or at least unintuitive. Sure, there’s lawmen on horseback and confrontations with a nation’s violent and ugly past, but the genre comparison still didn’t fit well, at least emotionally. Maybe the forests and plains of Walachia just can’t substitute for the dusty expanses of Monument Valley.

However, after a bit more thought, one scene started to give off the Western vibe, or at least a kind of sentiment that I’ve come to associate with the Western genre. At the end of the film, a constable by the name of Constandin rides into the distance besides his son Ionita. The two men discuss the heinous act of violence that was committed right before their eyes moments ago, and Constandin muses that this is just the way of the world. Sure, he wanted things to go about more justly, but what are you gonna do? Walachia is antiziganist and practices slavery. What can I do about it? Nothing, so toodle-oo! Instead of giving the audience justice, Aferim! delivers a portrait of complacency, perhaps to remind viewers that no norm is permanent. People dismissed cruelty back then, so think again before you make light of the problems of the present.

Compre this to The Searchers, a 1956 film in which John Wayne plays a deeply racist ex-Confederate solider, Ethan Edwards. The film allows Ethan revenge on the Comanche chief who killed his brother’s family, but it does not celebrate him and depicts his vengeful zealotry as grotesque and unhealthy. Tellingly, The Searchers ends with Ethan leaving a cabin as the doors shut behind him; the film seems to say, “Thanks for your help, but you’re not wanted anymore“.

And then there’s 1973’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, which, as the tile suggests, tells the story of Billy the Kid’s last days as he is hunted by his ex-friend-turned-reluctant-lawman Pat Garrett. Unlike most cat-and-mouse stories, this film is bereft of tension. History dictates that Garrett shoot Billy; the audience knows what’s going to happen. So instead, director Sam Peckinpah weaves together a series of vignettes that depict the Old West as a blood-soaked frontier in which no one wants to kill each other, but they have to because they’re on opposite sides of the law. This law, by the way, is also shown to be little more than a way for wealthy ranch owners to rub out those whose deeds threaten their business operations. When Garrett finally shoot Billy dead, he fires another bullet at his own reflection before riding alone into the night, a stray child tossing pebbles at his horse, condemning him for selling-out.

Aferim!, The Searchers, and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid are three very different films, but at their core, all are stories of inglorious ancestors. Constandin let horrific acts go unpunished. Ethan Edwards surrendered most of his life to hated. Pat Garrett  sold out to the money men. Each carries burdens of different weights and have committed sins of various degrees of severity, but none will receive a romantic ride into the sunset.

The Second Window

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I had a bit of trouble writing this entry. Not that it was stressful or anything, it most definitely wasn’t, but Carol was a movie that affected me more personally than I was expecting. Forgive me for deciding to keep some elements of my reaction undisclosed.

Fortunately, director Todd Haynes composed one shot which nicely represents the feelings his film evoked in me. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the shot through an image search and ASCII art is a bit hard to do here, so this is the best visual aid I could generate:photo-2

In the scene, our protagonist Therese (Rooney Mara) is at a party hosted at a friend’s apartment. At first, she stands in the frame of the right window, talking with some friends (or friends of friends or whatever) about who-rembers-what (it’s one of those conversations). She then leaves their company and moves across the room so that she is framed by the left window. She stands alone for a moment, but then a woman who has been watching her all night (Carrie Brownstein) approaches her. They make brief small talk, and the scene ends with the woman tellingly saying something to the effect of “I see why your ex-boyfriend speaks so highly of you.” As this conversation occurs, Therese’s friends continue talking amongst themselves, occupying the same space while also existing completely apart from the two women. At no point does anyone in Carol say “lesbian”, “homosexual”, “gay”, or anything of that nature. Acts of kindness, acts of malice, statements of resignation, statements of indignation, and the bluntly invisible words that go unsaid reveal the truth regardless.

For reasons I can’t quite explain, there is something about being gay that produces an intuitive sense of otherness. It’s not particularly acute and it only occurs ever so often, but it happens. Therese and her admirer aren’t that different from everyone else, not really, but here they are, separated from everyone else anyways.

 

Religious Unity

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Last week, Professor Sherman Jackson delivered a lecture on the possible role of Islam in American society, offering nuanced opinions on how to balance religious principles and priorities with the interests of fellow citizens who follow entirely different faiths, if at all. Particularly striking was his vision of how religious groups could act politically outside the traditional model of liberalism. Since the Enlightenment, most Western though tends to treat religion as a personal choice that is to be confined to the personal realm. Such a perspective may fend off any theocratic impulses, yet it also can obfuscate the communal aspects of religious behavior.

This reminds me of Saia v. New York, a court case concerning whether Jehovah’s Witnesses had the right to project their sermons to the public with the audio equipment tied to their cars. It was almost frustrating reading the legal discourse between the Witnesses and the state, as the mainline Protestant perspective of the latter could comprehend the view of religion held by the former. Time and time again, a state lawyer would ask why Witnesses could not simply keep their religious practices private, to which the Witnesses responded that being loud and disruptive was part of their religious practice. To them, religion was not something that could be confined to discrete sanctuaries and personal prayers before bed, but rather it is something integral to a person’s daily life that must be shared with others.

But Professor Jackson’s view on how religion should act in the public sphere is also rather distinct from that of Jehovah’s Witnesses. While putting the community above the individual, he likewise also places nation above the community (or at least he honors it such that community concerns do not become restricting and isolating). Muslims do not have to surrender their religious beliefs in order to serve their fellow Americans; these duties can compliment each other quite well. He also recommends that all people of faith, whether they be Shi’ite and Sunni or Jain and Mormon, should unite together. As gargantuan as this task is, I agree with the sentiment behind it. As the world becomes more secular and globalized, religion would do well to set aside theological arguments in favor of preserving and promoting the value of the numinous experience in order to secure and maintain its place in contemporary society.

The True Scotsman Game

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Last week, Esmerelda discussed the issues facing young undocumented Americans, particularly the debate surrounding the DREAM Act. Of particular note was the blowback expressed by many of those who stood to benefit from the bill’s legislation, DREAMers, who believed that the terms of the law were insufficiently inclusive. For one, the law and the dialogue surrounded it represented the DREAMers as victims of their parents. Proponents of the act at times seemed to liken DREAMers to kidnapped children, hauled across the border to this country by their parents while blissfully unaware of their illegal status. Unsurprisingly, many DREAMers rejected this attitude which antagonized their parents as scapegoats rather than offering them some route to citizenship as well. Furthermore, DREAMers rejected discourse which emphasized how they “deserved” citizenship due to their scholarship and possible future contributions to the United States. Not only does this treat citizenship as something to be stingily granted according the state’s whims, but it also excludes many undocumented Americans who never entered college. If a person is unable to give much, can they really be refused citizenship?

To me, the issues surrounding the DREAM Act seem to replicate whenever a group tires to construct an identity for themselves. Rarely is a group so narrow and limited in its membership that all its members can unite under a single archetypical story. More often, a group is constructed from multiple narratives with similar themes that nonetheless are too distinct from each other to be interchangeable.

Lingering Habits

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It really would be best if everyone who drives bought a Prius (or a Tesla or some other model of fuel-efficient car). Professor Blalock pointed out at the beginning of last week’s Rose Cafe that for every barrier to people switching to a more green car, there exists a viable solution. Yet there exist psychological blocks that discourage people from taking action. Most people recognize that an individual making the car switch would have virtually no environmental impact, but if all drivers switched, there would be a rather sharp reduction of carbon emissions over time.

Professor Blalock then described how such principles function in developing nations such as Uganda. There, the great majority of people cook their food on open fires, with the most common set-up being a set of 3 arranged rocks. Not only are these apparatuses not particularly efficient, meaning women have to spend more time gathering more firewood, but they produce large amounts of smoke. So much smoke, in fact, that it has serious negative affects on the health of people who work and play around the fires.

You would probably think that people would happily switch to any other kind of stove that is less likely to kill them, but in reality the opposite is true. Professor Blalock mentioned a special program that involved engineers designing an oven just for people in developing countries, but Ugandans largely rejected it. The model that was created was to expensive for its intended customers was not as easy to use or repair as the 3-rock stove. Professor Blalock went on to describe other efforts to get Ugandans to adopt new, healthier stoves, such as trial runs, information sessions, adding a warranty, and helping pay for the cost of the new stove. But even when people do purchase the new stove (about 50% of the time), all will evtually return to the old 3-rock model. I think the case outlined by Professor Blalock demonstrated how important psychological factors are to development programs and economics, perfectly illustrating how even if a choice seems rational and obvious, committing to it is actually quite hard.

Adonis Not Phaeton

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Creed is about living in the shadow of a famed predecessor, of feeling bound to the expectations of others. This anxiety is explored through both the film’s story and how that story is told.

Creed is the story of Adonis Creed, the son of boxing great Apollo Creed. His father’s fame and wealth entitled him to a cushy upper-class life, but because he was born from an affair, and after his father’s untimely death on top of that, he spent many of his early years fighting in juvenile detention centers. Even after Apollos’s wife spots him and brings him home to a spacious mansion, Adonis is unsatisfied. He refuses to be merely an heir. He wants to be Adonis Johnson, champion light heavyweight boxer, not Adonis Creed, Apollo’s son who also happens to be pretty good in the ring. Thus he goes to Philadelphia to train under his father’s old friend Rocky Balboa and become his own man.

But Creed is also the story of a sequel trying to make a name for itself. Creed is the seventh Rocky film, and while I may not be familiar with the standard formula, I can still see the familiar beats of an underdog sports drama. So how does a franchise film forge its particular identity? Apparently with stellar direction and acting. I may not know the style of John G. Avildsen, but I figure he didn’t shoot boxing matches in one take. Ryan Coogler keeps the film down-to-earth for the most part, letting the the affective melodrama play out, but he knows how to bring the flash when he needs to. Elite fighters make dramatic entrances. Every punch is a wrecking ball. Michael B. Jordan carries the mantle of the lead role elegantly, and supporting actors Tessa Thompson, Sylvester Stallone, and Phylicia Rashad all add the proper oomph to the drama.

In Greek myth, Adonis was more than just a pretty face. He was occasionally associated with resurrection, a youth taken too soon that returns from the grave. I find the name fitting in this case.

The Humor of Tomorrow

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Last week, Professor Sachs discussed environmentalist humor, or the lack thereof. Environmentalism, at least within the United States, has a reputation of being humorless and dour. A West Wing clip presented by Professor Sachs demonstrates this view. In it, a trio of environmentalists propose a highly expensive highway for migrating wolves, demonizing ranchers and deflecting all humor during their presentation. Professor Sachs proposes that environmentalists might be able to improve their image by employing self-deprecating and gallows humor to prove that they are not a hoard of pessimistic malcontents who would rather hug trees than human beings. He compares his proposed paradigm with Jewish humor, which is also prone to finding the funny in the grim.

However, there still exists a problem, one that Professor Sachs himself pointed out: environmental catastrophe isn’t psychologically close. Global warming is a rather gradual phenomenon that will not reach its critical peak for a few more generations. The upheaval it is predicted to produce is alien and temporally distant. While one could crack a joke about how we will all drown or burn or melt in acid rain unless the climate comes around, the possibility of any of those occurring within the lifetime of the listener is infinitesimal. I do believe that humor can make a political position more approachable, but I wonder whether environmentalism can effectively transmogrify some of its points into jokes due to this time gap.

Not in My Nature

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Many of the shots presented in the eight short films shown at the Banff Mountain Film Festival screening last week really were something. The shot of skiers sliding down the fearsome peaks of Svalbard in front of a total solar eclipse was simply fantastical. And yet I felt somewhat estranged from the festival in general.

This may have been because of the style of the films. Too often they felt like advertisements. Although there was a good deal of sponsorship, the festival didn’t seem to be selling a product as much as it was promoting an adventurous approach to life. This is typically all fine and good, but the intensity of confident support for this lifestyle seemed to be preaching to the choir. If a person who is predisposed to view nature as a hostile, uncaring, and awful (in the archaic sense) sees such films, they will not register the sense of inspiration and wonder and beauty that is intended.

The structure of the films also felt too ad-like for personal preference as well. Well, there was one parody of pharmaceutical ads and a trailer for a soon-to-be-released documentary, but it seemed unintentional in the others. Most of the films felt like diluted versions of larger stories. A river expedition through the Yukon covers all the major events that happened, but the film jumps too quickly from one episode to the next. It would show the team members goofing around or passing an impressive cliff formation, but these moments did not feel properly woven together. Instead of a careful fluid progression of one event to the next, I felt a scattershot melange of memories visually uttered to wow a like-minded friend.

While I am quite glad that I went to the film festival, I also recognize that I could not enjoy it as much as the intended audience. Some prefer contemplative terror while others prefer exhilarating majesty.

Lingering Doubts

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When describing the history of foreign aid to African nations,Professor van de Walle acknowledged how past policies were ineffective at generating satisfactory economic growth. Capital investments didn’t work. Improved infrastructure didn’t work. Now the answer appears to be eliminating corruption so that the flow of incoming aid isn’t damned up in the personal coffers of dictators and their cronies. And yet the past failures of economists don’t inspire confidence.

Furthermore, counterexamples exist of autocratic states that have managed economic development better than that of democratic counterparts. While these states (namely Rwanda and Ethiopia) have managed to reduce corruption, they are not the democratic ideals that Western economists promote. Repressive states are undesirable, yet their success seems worrisome. Are there other factors beyond an honest democratic government that push developing nations from the red into the black? The issue at hand is complicated and the source of much suffering, and there appears to be no known solution that is desirable, practical, and effective to produce meaningful change.

How the Times Haven’t Changed

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Ah, the biopic. Too possessed by the narrative spirit to remain a documentary, and yet too beholden to historical fact to become a fully fictitious film. How you frustrate me so.

Going into the theater, I knew little about NWA. They were a gangster rap group and they made “F*ck tha Police” and their members included Dr. Dre and Ice Cube. Beyond that I was more or less clueless. Fortunately, Straight Outta Compton is a rather extensive biopic, covering the origins of the band to the death of member Eazy-E by AIDS. I may be unable to attest to the wisdom of any choices made in the process of crafting its screenplay from history, but the final product seems satisfactory.

The direction of F. Gary Gray largely succeeds in making the goings-on of the 1980s and 1990s feel very, very relevant to the present day. Instead of dating itself like many a historically set film more interested in contrasting the past with present, Straight Outta Compton wants to assert how little has changed. There is no reassurance that police have stopped abusing their power here.  The performance of “F*ck tha Police” is foreshadowed with managerial mutterings about how the song will attract trouble, only to be rebutted with reminders of how the reaction proves the song’s importance. The audience knows just what it’s about to get at the sound of “Yo Dre, I got something to say”, but it is still cathartic and as fresh as it was to the contemporary audience.

It is this social awareness that elevates this film above the standard biopic. Sure, it probably plays too close to the prototypical band movie plot for my taste (I don’t care if that’s actually how it happened; it is still the job of the writers to decide what exactly goes in the film. With enough finagling and less ambition, a tighter and smaller story can be told within a large one.), yet the content of that plot outshines any problems I have with its structure.