Thank God Amy Chua’s memoir on Chinese tiger-mothering was so reviled by so many who either don’t know how to read or just didn’t read the book: I would not have picked it up if not to see what the fuss was about. But I did pick it up, always curious to see what the moronic literal-minded reading of some complicated event the media is in the midst of perpetrating, and I devoured it in one sitting – it was a funny hyper-achieving mom story of trying to carry the traditions of the old country into the new and meeting with mixed success, narrated by an insanely energetic, hyperbolic and studiedly “unself-conscious” voice. As one trained in literature, I approach a memoir or autobiography as a piece of fiction, or at least I judge it by the same sort of standards, and this one was really pretty entertaining, like Mary Karr’s Lit. Both Chua and Karr’s narrators are people I love to hate, self-destructive but talented beings in love with themselves whose boundless sense of entitlement (we should want to hear their stories why exactly?) I can only envy and, bizarrely, admire.
But as is so often the case with American reviewers, the references floating around the blogosphere demonstrate almost no understanding of the actual genre of the book. If someone wants to say that this is a lame memoir, okay, I’ll listen. But somehow it got turned into a guide to parenting and was attacked on that basis, this after one of the epigraphs states that “it’s about a bitter clash of cultures, a fleeting taste of glory, and how I was humbled by a thirteen-year-old.” Sounds like a memoir to me.
I responded to her immediately, this first generation Chinese woman who worked “psychotically” hard and achieved and then tried to apply the same techniques to her daughters that her parents had applied to her. Her dad, immigrant, was a prof; she did Harvard/Harvard law school; her first sister did Yale/Yale law school; second sister did Yale/Yale med school. The last sister, who has Downs Syndrome, won two swimming medals in the Special Olympics. Much of the story is in that poignant detail, I think; the rest is just the development of it: each daughter is encouraged to achieve and achieves according to her ability. The rest of the story is in the way Chua's mother coped with her last daughter. We are told that the Chinese generally reject disabled children. But Chua’s mother, having absorbed some of the compassion of her new home, devoted all her time to that fourth daughter. This the rest of the story: one keeps the best of the old country and but modifies it to include the good that American culture has to offer, in this case, the value of compassion.
The book has been read as a harangue against western parenting, but this is not the case. It is a harangue against the same elements of American culture that we all harangue against: junk food, facebook. But Chua's experience with parenting has been from an extremely privileged perspective, both as a receiver and a giver of parenting, and her memoir is not simply critical: it is an interrogation of herself as a person trying to carry the torch to the next generation. She was very very fortunate. First to have parents that promote a tradition of intellectualism and achievement. That is hard to find – what I wouldn’t give to have been born into such a situation. All my life I have struggled to overcome my own backwards education: I still have not. And I certainly have never overcome my sense of inferiority beside those who were lucky enough to be properly educated. Second, to have married even further up, cerebrally speaking. Of course she wanted to pass this gift on.
The rest is just hyperbole, funny. She was pushy; most of us are lax. We are all good enough at being mothers. But her kids have the huge advantage of growing up in a tradition of overachieving, which is a tradition that one can reject later, but that one cannot take on later if one has missed it.
Saturday, February 12, 2011
Certified Copy (Copie Conforme)
“Certified Copy” (2010) begins with a bit of banal dialoguing on the relationship between copy and original, so banal that all you can think is that the characters need to read Walter Benjamin and bring the level of the discussion up a few notches. But then suddenly the film starts to act out the relationship that the characters have been discussing in their stilted ways. And that is really pretty stunning.
The transformation originates in a game that they characters suddenly begin to play – that they are married. He dashes out of a café to take a phone call, while she (although he, an English writer called James Miller, has a name, she does not: the point is that this is how marriages work) remains behind discussing her “husband” and his shortcomings with the café owner. The problem is that they are not in fact married; they have just met the day before when he arrived in Florence to promote his latest book on copies and originals. She has taken him out sightseeing in the Italian countryside. He returns to his coffee, and when she tells him that the cafe owner thought they were married and that she did not correct the mistake, he plays along with the game. Why? The game feels natural, a way of flirting, pushing the bounds, trying on an alternative life. It is a game we all play in a new but intense relationship.
But as the story progresses, we forget that the two really aren’t married, becoming engrossed in the details that feel so mundane and yet tragic. The actors, who at the outset feel their ways through the roles, watching the other for clues to see how they should react, settle in and become the husband and wife they are pretending to be. Their argument is the same one that all married couples have – he is too remote, she is too demanding. We know the lines before they are uttered. As they wander through the village, watch a wedding, stop in a restaurant and finally visit the hotel they stayed in during their “honeymoon,” we are torn between the hope that they will stay together, preposterous as it seems, and the knowledge that he has to catch his train at nine o’clock. She asks him to stay, he reminds her that he told her at the beginning that he had to leave. There is the whole universal story of male/female relationships condensed into two sad little lines, at least as we have learned them through literature and film.
Ultimately the question of the copy in this context is not philosophical but behavioral. The film is not about metaphysics but performance theory. This is how love works: we say the words that our culture offers us, play out the scenarios we all know by heart, and in the act we feel love. Marriage is a script.
Amazingly, a number of the critics reviewing the film didn’t realize that they were watching two people in a film pretending to be married – although the film sets up the game very precisely. A tendency that we Americans can’t seem to kick is to read films literally. And yet if we miss the point that the couple is not in fact married but playing out a marriage according to a well-rehearsed screenplay the film has no meaning, the central question of “what is the difference between copy and original” loses its coherence. The answer to the question is that there is no difference – you can’t tell between the performance and the real thing because there is no difference. At least in human relationships.
Juliette Binoche as the woman
William Shimell as the husband, writer James Miller
The transformation originates in a game that they characters suddenly begin to play – that they are married. He dashes out of a café to take a phone call, while she (although he, an English writer called James Miller, has a name, she does not: the point is that this is how marriages work) remains behind discussing her “husband” and his shortcomings with the café owner. The problem is that they are not in fact married; they have just met the day before when he arrived in Florence to promote his latest book on copies and originals. She has taken him out sightseeing in the Italian countryside. He returns to his coffee, and when she tells him that the cafe owner thought they were married and that she did not correct the mistake, he plays along with the game. Why? The game feels natural, a way of flirting, pushing the bounds, trying on an alternative life. It is a game we all play in a new but intense relationship.
But as the story progresses, we forget that the two really aren’t married, becoming engrossed in the details that feel so mundane and yet tragic. The actors, who at the outset feel their ways through the roles, watching the other for clues to see how they should react, settle in and become the husband and wife they are pretending to be. Their argument is the same one that all married couples have – he is too remote, she is too demanding. We know the lines before they are uttered. As they wander through the village, watch a wedding, stop in a restaurant and finally visit the hotel they stayed in during their “honeymoon,” we are torn between the hope that they will stay together, preposterous as it seems, and the knowledge that he has to catch his train at nine o’clock. She asks him to stay, he reminds her that he told her at the beginning that he had to leave. There is the whole universal story of male/female relationships condensed into two sad little lines, at least as we have learned them through literature and film.
Ultimately the question of the copy in this context is not philosophical but behavioral. The film is not about metaphysics but performance theory. This is how love works: we say the words that our culture offers us, play out the scenarios we all know by heart, and in the act we feel love. Marriage is a script.
Amazingly, a number of the critics reviewing the film didn’t realize that they were watching two people in a film pretending to be married – although the film sets up the game very precisely. A tendency that we Americans can’t seem to kick is to read films literally. And yet if we miss the point that the couple is not in fact married but playing out a marriage according to a well-rehearsed screenplay the film has no meaning, the central question of “what is the difference between copy and original” loses its coherence. The answer to the question is that there is no difference – you can’t tell between the performance and the real thing because there is no difference. At least in human relationships.
Juliette Binoche as the woman
William Shimell as the husband, writer James Miller
Roma Città Aperta (1945)
Before viewing “Roma Città Aperta” I watched Martin Scorsese, narrating “My Voyage to Italy,” laud this exemplar of neo-realism to the heavens. Over and over, he marvelled at the way it presented a piece of real life. Cut to more sophisticated takes on the film – of course these harp on the film’s melodramatic aspects.
Furthermore the film is criticized for being a long bit of propaganda, a tribute to Stalin and the Catholic Church.
The film has also been compared to “The Birth of a Nation,” except that the group ludicrously caricatured is the Nazis, not slaves. The reviewers chastise the film’s cheerful application of every sorry old homosexual stereotype in the book. The mincing Bergmann, the campy but sinister lesbian Ingrid. The Nazis in general are portrayed as a godless hegemony of homosexuals, according to this reading. One reviewer sternly points out that the German watchword, Kinder, Küche, Kirche, shows that the film is gratuitously conservative. No, the Nazis were not really homosexuals, he argues, as if the argument is important.
The first two criticisms must be grouped. Of course the film is propagandistic. It was hardly created to offer a “slice” of everyday life in occupied Rome – not that any work of “realism” is ever offered without an agenda, simply to offer a picture of the real world. Such an intent would be doomed to failure, even if anyway were unsophisticated to have such an intent. The stunning thing about the comparison between Scorsese’s take and that of the more recent supposedly serious film critics is that they are equally convinced that “realism” is a style that should be employed exclusively within a film, independent of any other style. But why on earth would a neo-realistic film not also be melodramatic? Neo-realism in this context is, after all, a style. It is not an ideology. Melodrama is a style. Any decent artist systematically mixes styles. The assumption can only be that neo-realism is somehow genuinely “realistic,” an authentic ideology, and that adding “unrealistic” elements to it somehow damages it. Certainly realism can be an ideology, but it isn't here - this is a film that creates memories, a film of propaganda. It is not the exposition of a theory.
The argument that the homosexual allusions are unworthy ignores the joke. The Nazis were the most excessive imaginable variety of tough guys – the ultimate gay bashers. Remember, they did send gays to concentration camps. Who could resist taunting them as sad repressed versions of their deep anxieties? The mockery has nothing to say about gays and certainly nothing about gay stereotypes. It has a lot to say about Nazi ideas of homosexuality. No, of course the Nazis were not more or less inclined to homosexuality than any group of people. No one thinks that they were, least of all Rossellini. The point is to turn their insult back on them.
A strange to thing to enter into a film so alien from our mentality of unbridled consumerism , but, on second thought, not so strange. Because that society as it is given to us is filled with a constant excitement that far surpasses our current level – there is enough buzz to satisfy even people who spend the day surfing political blogs. War, one hears, is in fact generally long stretches of mind-numbing boredom with rare rare flashes of mortal danger. And yet the war we get here is heavy with meaning and heroism. Living through it is represented as interesting as reading breaking news reports all day long. But this of course is what a movie does – it condenses, and it attributes meaning. It does not really create knowledge, or, if it does, it is a very particular type of knowledge, a knowledge of what it means to have meaning in one’s life.
For modern viewers who have no need to redeem the Italians, the Catholic Church, or Stalin, the common criticisms of the film are simply trite. Does someone really think that the film is a realistic portrayal of life during the German occupation? I’m not sure why the point would even need to be made. What we do get from the film is a front row seat at a demonstration of meaning in the making – we witness the memory of the resistance as it is being created. We are accomplices. We enter into that suspension of disbelief, we cry, we let ourselves be entirely duped, watch while we are duped, and, in the process, we begin to understand why people need to create memories. This is the very essence of neo-realism. This is similar to the impulse that motors reality tv, which is of course no more realistic than any other tv show. But we are fully engaged in our own duping. We watch ourselves crying in a mirror, loving the sight of our own tears in the reflection, and, filled with self-pity, cry all the harder.
Furthermore the film is criticized for being a long bit of propaganda, a tribute to Stalin and the Catholic Church.
The film has also been compared to “The Birth of a Nation,” except that the group ludicrously caricatured is the Nazis, not slaves. The reviewers chastise the film’s cheerful application of every sorry old homosexual stereotype in the book. The mincing Bergmann, the campy but sinister lesbian Ingrid. The Nazis in general are portrayed as a godless hegemony of homosexuals, according to this reading. One reviewer sternly points out that the German watchword, Kinder, Küche, Kirche, shows that the film is gratuitously conservative. No, the Nazis were not really homosexuals, he argues, as if the argument is important.
The first two criticisms must be grouped. Of course the film is propagandistic. It was hardly created to offer a “slice” of everyday life in occupied Rome – not that any work of “realism” is ever offered without an agenda, simply to offer a picture of the real world. Such an intent would be doomed to failure, even if anyway were unsophisticated to have such an intent. The stunning thing about the comparison between Scorsese’s take and that of the more recent supposedly serious film critics is that they are equally convinced that “realism” is a style that should be employed exclusively within a film, independent of any other style. But why on earth would a neo-realistic film not also be melodramatic? Neo-realism in this context is, after all, a style. It is not an ideology. Melodrama is a style. Any decent artist systematically mixes styles. The assumption can only be that neo-realism is somehow genuinely “realistic,” an authentic ideology, and that adding “unrealistic” elements to it somehow damages it. Certainly realism can be an ideology, but it isn't here - this is a film that creates memories, a film of propaganda. It is not the exposition of a theory.
The argument that the homosexual allusions are unworthy ignores the joke. The Nazis were the most excessive imaginable variety of tough guys – the ultimate gay bashers. Remember, they did send gays to concentration camps. Who could resist taunting them as sad repressed versions of their deep anxieties? The mockery has nothing to say about gays and certainly nothing about gay stereotypes. It has a lot to say about Nazi ideas of homosexuality. No, of course the Nazis were not more or less inclined to homosexuality than any group of people. No one thinks that they were, least of all Rossellini. The point is to turn their insult back on them.
A strange to thing to enter into a film so alien from our mentality of unbridled consumerism , but, on second thought, not so strange. Because that society as it is given to us is filled with a constant excitement that far surpasses our current level – there is enough buzz to satisfy even people who spend the day surfing political blogs. War, one hears, is in fact generally long stretches of mind-numbing boredom with rare rare flashes of mortal danger. And yet the war we get here is heavy with meaning and heroism. Living through it is represented as interesting as reading breaking news reports all day long. But this of course is what a movie does – it condenses, and it attributes meaning. It does not really create knowledge, or, if it does, it is a very particular type of knowledge, a knowledge of what it means to have meaning in one’s life.
For modern viewers who have no need to redeem the Italians, the Catholic Church, or Stalin, the common criticisms of the film are simply trite. Does someone really think that the film is a realistic portrayal of life during the German occupation? I’m not sure why the point would even need to be made. What we do get from the film is a front row seat at a demonstration of meaning in the making – we witness the memory of the resistance as it is being created. We are accomplices. We enter into that suspension of disbelief, we cry, we let ourselves be entirely duped, watch while we are duped, and, in the process, we begin to understand why people need to create memories. This is the very essence of neo-realism. This is similar to the impulse that motors reality tv, which is of course no more realistic than any other tv show. But we are fully engaged in our own duping. We watch ourselves crying in a mirror, loving the sight of our own tears in the reflection, and, filled with self-pity, cry all the harder.
Just Melvin, Just Evil (2000)
During my first attempt at this documentary I made it through about forty minutes, finally too uncomfortable with the sleazy sort of free for all of social misfits, most of whom appeared to be semi-literate. Their living conditions were appalling, filthy and unsavory like the family in “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” or “Deliverance.” I knew of course that the documentary was about incest, but I had imagined that it would be a complicated and wrenching story about a family’s long and difficult journey to enlightenment and justice: that it would consider incest as a social problem and offer some kind of coherent reaction to this atrocity. Instead, the documentary presented a family of visibly unwell, both physically and mentally, forty or fifty-something people, accusing not only the bizarre lunatic patriarch of the family of incest, but also each other. Furthermore, the only male in the large group (besides the ludicrous, cud-chewing Melvin) asked two of his half sisters to marry him, and then expounded on why he thought that there was nothing wrong with loving your sisters. The documentary played into every sad stereotype about small towns wherein everyone is related to everyone else, presenting us with a freak show rather than a serious consideration of this very serious issue. This is why I initially refused to continue watching – I felt exploited, I felt like a voyeur.
I could not imagine what to make out of this documentary that first time around. But I eventually returned because I wanted to see how the director finally set the material up as a social critique. Where would the fault lie? With society? I should have known better. The director, who during the documentary pretends that his purpose was to bring Melvin to justice or see him dead and help his family heal, intersperses the odd carnevalesque family scenes with clips of himself taking part in a series of be-sequined tv dancing contests, he and his partner flying through the air in back handsprings. We even saw a video of his wedding, with his bride back flipping her way down the aisle. If people don’t get us, the director notes defensively, that’s okay.
No, it's not really okay if people don't get you. The documentary is supposed to be about incest. We didn't tune in to form an opinion on the director’s wedding – who cares? So, one assumes, the comment applies to the family in general – the film is supposed to be about them, after all. And if the director doesn't care if we get them, why does he want us to watch them?
More fundamental, in addition to being asked to rely upon this wannabe tv entertainer for a serious exposé on incest, we are asked to believe that the charges being flung around by the family members are true, without any evidence whatsoever. As a viewer I have no reason either to believe or disbelieve that these wildly gesticulating very large people were the victims of the grotesque Melvin. Why not? But, on the other hand, why should I believe it? Much later in the film we learn that Melvin was in fact convicted of incest and served eight years (which raises the question of why the director wanted to bring Melvin to justice when society had already exacted its justice – did he think that Melvin should have served longer? If so, he doesn’t tell us that). So it appears that the incest story must have been true. But a murder charge is also flung about, without a shred of evidence. The children claim to have witnessed Melvin pound a nurse on the head with an andiron. But why was the case never brought to trial if a group of about eight witnesses saw the old bugger beating a woman to death in the living room? The film is filled with frustrating innuendo and no conclusions, no guidance as to what we are meant to understand.
Most frustrating of all, we are told that one of the many sisters, fed up with forced sex with Melvin, turned him in to the police. The police showed up, questioned everyone, went to their school, questioned, questioned, and the children all denied the charges. The police, therefore, had no case. Many years later, several of the girls corroborated the story, and this time he was flung in the slammer. But what are we meant to understand? Is this a critique of the police? If so, how? Should they have pressed forward without any witnesses? If so, the director does not tell us this.
Truly disturbing are the accusations of one of the sisters, this one with terribly deformed legs (we are shown many detailed pictures of the problem), accusing the now wheel-chair bound Melvin of recently having paid her a dollar to have sex with him. This is clearly a fantasy, given that Melvin is immobile. Or, if it is true, why did she comply? It isn’t as if he could have forced her. Once again, what are we to understand? Equally stomach turning is the shot of the group of large middle-aged women visiting Melvin in his rest home. They dash down the hall, squealing with excitement to see him. And these are the women upon whom he perpetrating decades of sexual abuse? Why are they visiting him, telling him how good it is to see him?
Bizarre showcase for the handspringing director, this documentary does a disservice to efforts to bring incest to the light of day. Without any context for understanding the visible instability of this family – are they insane because of the incest, or did they cook up the incest because they are insane – we cannot reasonably be expected to separate truth from fantasy.
I could not imagine what to make out of this documentary that first time around. But I eventually returned because I wanted to see how the director finally set the material up as a social critique. Where would the fault lie? With society? I should have known better. The director, who during the documentary pretends that his purpose was to bring Melvin to justice or see him dead and help his family heal, intersperses the odd carnevalesque family scenes with clips of himself taking part in a series of be-sequined tv dancing contests, he and his partner flying through the air in back handsprings. We even saw a video of his wedding, with his bride back flipping her way down the aisle. If people don’t get us, the director notes defensively, that’s okay.
No, it's not really okay if people don't get you. The documentary is supposed to be about incest. We didn't tune in to form an opinion on the director’s wedding – who cares? So, one assumes, the comment applies to the family in general – the film is supposed to be about them, after all. And if the director doesn't care if we get them, why does he want us to watch them?
More fundamental, in addition to being asked to rely upon this wannabe tv entertainer for a serious exposé on incest, we are asked to believe that the charges being flung around by the family members are true, without any evidence whatsoever. As a viewer I have no reason either to believe or disbelieve that these wildly gesticulating very large people were the victims of the grotesque Melvin. Why not? But, on the other hand, why should I believe it? Much later in the film we learn that Melvin was in fact convicted of incest and served eight years (which raises the question of why the director wanted to bring Melvin to justice when society had already exacted its justice – did he think that Melvin should have served longer? If so, he doesn’t tell us that). So it appears that the incest story must have been true. But a murder charge is also flung about, without a shred of evidence. The children claim to have witnessed Melvin pound a nurse on the head with an andiron. But why was the case never brought to trial if a group of about eight witnesses saw the old bugger beating a woman to death in the living room? The film is filled with frustrating innuendo and no conclusions, no guidance as to what we are meant to understand.
Most frustrating of all, we are told that one of the many sisters, fed up with forced sex with Melvin, turned him in to the police. The police showed up, questioned everyone, went to their school, questioned, questioned, and the children all denied the charges. The police, therefore, had no case. Many years later, several of the girls corroborated the story, and this time he was flung in the slammer. But what are we meant to understand? Is this a critique of the police? If so, how? Should they have pressed forward without any witnesses? If so, the director does not tell us this.
Truly disturbing are the accusations of one of the sisters, this one with terribly deformed legs (we are shown many detailed pictures of the problem), accusing the now wheel-chair bound Melvin of recently having paid her a dollar to have sex with him. This is clearly a fantasy, given that Melvin is immobile. Or, if it is true, why did she comply? It isn’t as if he could have forced her. Once again, what are we to understand? Equally stomach turning is the shot of the group of large middle-aged women visiting Melvin in his rest home. They dash down the hall, squealing with excitement to see him. And these are the women upon whom he perpetrating decades of sexual abuse? Why are they visiting him, telling him how good it is to see him?
Bizarre showcase for the handspringing director, this documentary does a disservice to efforts to bring incest to the light of day. Without any context for understanding the visible instability of this family – are they insane because of the incest, or did they cook up the incest because they are insane – we cannot reasonably be expected to separate truth from fantasy.
The Godfather (1972)
The most startling scene in movie history, I believe, is the final shot of "The Godfather," part I. Michael Corleone, separated from us by the doorframe of his office, is having his hand kissed by his apostles. Perverted version of the Pope (or is it perverted? Maybe just a straightforward analogue), he takes our breath away: we are completely seduced and absolutely terrified by his immense power. He can do anything; he is our black Father.
"The Godfather" pulls off an amazing feat. It shines a light on the violence that lies at the heart of the Mafia. It revels in introducing us to the sickening underworkings of the clan. Traitors are ruthlessly blown away, hunks of their brains spatter the sidewalk. The film kicks us in the face. But at the end we kiss Michael’s ring. We are willing accomplices in our own seduction.
It isn’t just the Mafia whose violence we collaborate in. It is an entire ideology of violence. At the top is the US government. But we are given to know that even though the Feds stride around with their big guns, they can’t control criminals. We are not safe from predatory males: the undertaker Amerigo Bonasera pours his heart out to Don Corleone, explaining that his daughter has been brutally raped by her boyfriend and his mates. But they are given suspended sentences. Justice fails.
Thus we turn to the “family.” Father will take care of us; all we have to do is subject ourselves, body and soul, to his way of life. No mention of Mafia or even "Cosa Nostra;" we are talking here about traditional family values and what it means that this social grouping lies at the foundation of all society. We try to create rules of law that supersede those of the family, but we can’t do it, because ultimately even the purveyors of justice in our supersystems are beholden to the family. The father is everywhere, everywhere,everywhere. There is no getting away from him.
How does he do it? Why don’t we run away? Ask Connie, the pathetic daughter of the Don. She screams around the house in a pink satin negligee, heavily pregnant, because her husband, sick of her, has taken a mistress. She throws plates, rips curtains, he beats her up. She tells her brothers on him. But when the family finally springs to action and rubs the joker out (although not because he beats their sister up, but because he betrayed the biggest brother – after all, this is a man’s world), she collapses, grief-stricken. She loved her tormentor! She craves that boot in the face. That’s how the family works. It gets us addicted to getting kicked.
Law, religion, and family - all collapsed into the figure of Michael, from whom we ask nothing but the chance to prostrate ourselves before him, naked, begging him to take our virginity, Michael, from whom we ask for reassurances and then smile with relief when he lies to us. “No, I did not have Connie’s son murdered,” he intones. Kay thinks, “Just let me bear your child, Michael – that’ all I ask. I degrade myself willingly to your slightest whim, just let me live in your light.”
In other words, the film hands us the reality of family and religious values, and we see only the beauty of Michael’s eyes, savor the timbre of his voice. He is Satan, perfectly beautiful, tempter, seducer, the Father, building his fallen empire on earth.
"The Godfather" pulls off an amazing feat. It shines a light on the violence that lies at the heart of the Mafia. It revels in introducing us to the sickening underworkings of the clan. Traitors are ruthlessly blown away, hunks of their brains spatter the sidewalk. The film kicks us in the face. But at the end we kiss Michael’s ring. We are willing accomplices in our own seduction.
It isn’t just the Mafia whose violence we collaborate in. It is an entire ideology of violence. At the top is the US government. But we are given to know that even though the Feds stride around with their big guns, they can’t control criminals. We are not safe from predatory males: the undertaker Amerigo Bonasera pours his heart out to Don Corleone, explaining that his daughter has been brutally raped by her boyfriend and his mates. But they are given suspended sentences. Justice fails.
Thus we turn to the “family.” Father will take care of us; all we have to do is subject ourselves, body and soul, to his way of life. No mention of Mafia or even "Cosa Nostra;" we are talking here about traditional family values and what it means that this social grouping lies at the foundation of all society. We try to create rules of law that supersede those of the family, but we can’t do it, because ultimately even the purveyors of justice in our supersystems are beholden to the family. The father is everywhere, everywhere,everywhere. There is no getting away from him.
How does he do it? Why don’t we run away? Ask Connie, the pathetic daughter of the Don. She screams around the house in a pink satin negligee, heavily pregnant, because her husband, sick of her, has taken a mistress. She throws plates, rips curtains, he beats her up. She tells her brothers on him. But when the family finally springs to action and rubs the joker out (although not because he beats their sister up, but because he betrayed the biggest brother – after all, this is a man’s world), she collapses, grief-stricken. She loved her tormentor! She craves that boot in the face. That’s how the family works. It gets us addicted to getting kicked.
Law, religion, and family - all collapsed into the figure of Michael, from whom we ask nothing but the chance to prostrate ourselves before him, naked, begging him to take our virginity, Michael, from whom we ask for reassurances and then smile with relief when he lies to us. “No, I did not have Connie’s son murdered,” he intones. Kay thinks, “Just let me bear your child, Michael – that’ all I ask. I degrade myself willingly to your slightest whim, just let me live in your light.”
In other words, the film hands us the reality of family and religious values, and we see only the beauty of Michael’s eyes, savor the timbre of his voice. He is Satan, perfectly beautiful, tempter, seducer, the Father, building his fallen empire on earth.
Red-Headed Woman (1932)
I had always believed, naively, that the Hays Code came about because of a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of film: Hollywood censors, stupidly assuming that film’s purpose was to entertain the masses, failed to accord the medium the liberty accorded to art. In fact, the issue was never about art at all. It was much simpler and stupider – instigated by a movie company, Mutual Film Corporation, that sued the state of Ohio for its censorship which the company felt kept it from making the kind of sexy movies that would make serious money. The 1915 Supreme Court decision, Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, was based on whether movies were a “business” UNLIKE the press, which was free under the first amendment. Yes, movies were a mere business and therefor not entitled to the protection that the media enjoyed: “the exhibition of moving pictures is a business, pure and simple, originated and conducted for profit … not to be regarded, nor intended to be regarded by the Ohio Constitution, we think, as part of the press of the country, or as organs of public opinion.” This decision forced Hollywood to pursue the lesser of two evils and create its own code to keep the serious oppressor at bay.
On what planet are newspapers not also businesses? The truly sinister thing, of course, is that this early collusion of filmmakers and the courts by pretending that film was a business and therefore not new media quietly made the industry into a political arm, a silent purveyor of perverted values (racist, sexist, classist). The Motion Picture Commission created a code in 1921, but it was fairly ineffectual – Hollywood, after all, had a lot to lose. However, in June, 1934, supported by the “Catholic Legion of Decency,” invented just for the occasion, an amendment to the Code required all films released after July 1, 1934 to be approved. This time the Code was applied with the brutal precision under the direction of Joseph Breen, head of the Production Code Administration (PCA). Benjamin had not yet alerted the world to the dangers of the aestheticized politics – not that America would have listened! The ludicrous state of affairs continued until 1952, when in Joseph Burstyn, Inc., versus Wilson, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overruled its 1915 decision. Film was now entitled to First Amendment protection, and the New York State Board of Regents was not permitted to ban The Miracle.
So I have been watching films that slipped in before the code went brutal, wondering what Hollywood might have been. The answer is violent earlier on with bad gangsters coming out on top. And bizarrely obsessively interested in prostitution.
Why all the interest in the murky boundary between legitimate relationships and prostitution? The 1932 Jean Harlow vehicle Red-Headed Woman (where her hair looks like Barbie doll hair) has Lil pimping herself to move ever higher on the income scale. First she steals an incredibly stolid rich young guy away from his wife, then after they get married, she bags the guy’s father-in-law. Much humiliation for poor Lil from the New Yorkers who won’t accept her as part of their crowd, then the whole things ends in Paris where we are given to know that she has nabbed an even richer guy.
Irving Thalberg, apparently worried that the screenplay as originally written by F. Scott Fitzgerald (what??) was too ponderous, had Anita Loos re-do the thing into a punchier, more playful version. One assumes that this accounts for the insane careens of tone – are we meant to laugh or cry at Lil’s ability to snap her fingers and make men grovel? Is her sexual power a joke or the product of male phantasmagoria? An effort to contain the danger of female sexuality through ridicule or demystification? Apparently the censoring powers were nervous that Lil got away with her astonishing social climb, and the film led directly to greater control even though it was a big box office success because of the controversy that it generated.
Watching this and a series of other films from before the big crackdown makes one wonder if we really missed anything, anyway? How much musing over the immediate and uncontrollable male attraction to prostitutes do we need? And if we slip over to consider what the women in the audience were watching, how many times do we need be told that it’s a tough life – the only way up is to sell yourself? The themes continued just slightly less obviously (it is after all the big Hollywood story that a beautiful young woman snags a big rich guy). As far as I can see, pre-censorship Hollywood was not producing serious meditations on these issues – or any other social issues – anyway. Had Hollywood remained uncensored we would have seen more beautiful young women lying around in obvious post-coital positions, but their stories would have been no more probing than they turned out to be in post-code Hollywood.
On what planet are newspapers not also businesses? The truly sinister thing, of course, is that this early collusion of filmmakers and the courts by pretending that film was a business and therefore not new media quietly made the industry into a political arm, a silent purveyor of perverted values (racist, sexist, classist). The Motion Picture Commission created a code in 1921, but it was fairly ineffectual – Hollywood, after all, had a lot to lose. However, in June, 1934, supported by the “Catholic Legion of Decency,” invented just for the occasion, an amendment to the Code required all films released after July 1, 1934 to be approved. This time the Code was applied with the brutal precision under the direction of Joseph Breen, head of the Production Code Administration (PCA). Benjamin had not yet alerted the world to the dangers of the aestheticized politics – not that America would have listened! The ludicrous state of affairs continued until 1952, when in Joseph Burstyn, Inc., versus Wilson, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overruled its 1915 decision. Film was now entitled to First Amendment protection, and the New York State Board of Regents was not permitted to ban The Miracle.
So I have been watching films that slipped in before the code went brutal, wondering what Hollywood might have been. The answer is violent earlier on with bad gangsters coming out on top. And bizarrely obsessively interested in prostitution.
Why all the interest in the murky boundary between legitimate relationships and prostitution? The 1932 Jean Harlow vehicle Red-Headed Woman (where her hair looks like Barbie doll hair) has Lil pimping herself to move ever higher on the income scale. First she steals an incredibly stolid rich young guy away from his wife, then after they get married, she bags the guy’s father-in-law. Much humiliation for poor Lil from the New Yorkers who won’t accept her as part of their crowd, then the whole things ends in Paris where we are given to know that she has nabbed an even richer guy.
Irving Thalberg, apparently worried that the screenplay as originally written by F. Scott Fitzgerald (what??) was too ponderous, had Anita Loos re-do the thing into a punchier, more playful version. One assumes that this accounts for the insane careens of tone – are we meant to laugh or cry at Lil’s ability to snap her fingers and make men grovel? Is her sexual power a joke or the product of male phantasmagoria? An effort to contain the danger of female sexuality through ridicule or demystification? Apparently the censoring powers were nervous that Lil got away with her astonishing social climb, and the film led directly to greater control even though it was a big box office success because of the controversy that it generated.
Watching this and a series of other films from before the big crackdown makes one wonder if we really missed anything, anyway? How much musing over the immediate and uncontrollable male attraction to prostitutes do we need? And if we slip over to consider what the women in the audience were watching, how many times do we need be told that it’s a tough life – the only way up is to sell yourself? The themes continued just slightly less obviously (it is after all the big Hollywood story that a beautiful young woman snags a big rich guy). As far as I can see, pre-censorship Hollywood was not producing serious meditations on these issues – or any other social issues – anyway. Had Hollywood remained uncensored we would have seen more beautiful young women lying around in obvious post-coital positions, but their stories would have been no more probing than they turned out to be in post-code Hollywood.
Solitary Man, 2009
As a medievalist, I have been trained to accept a work on its own terms. I don’t like to imagine what a work could have been, criticize it for what it is not. I take the work as it is given to me and think about what it is, its advantages and its limitations.
“Solitary Man” is Hollywood’s version of an aging playboy confronted with reality. Only in Hollywood can a man in his mid-sixties (actually the film pretends that Ben Kalmen is in his late fifties, but we are not blind) hit on an 18-year-old and be successful. We all know that in Hollywood or the entertainment industry more generally very young women really do sleep with old men whom they have reason to believe have some connection to the business. We have seen the Girls of the Playboy Mansion. But in New York, an aging failed car salesman simply cannot have any teenager he wants. And he certainly cannot show up at a university party with a beer in his hand and start propositioning the students. Security would be on to him before he knew what was happening.
What we have, then, is a film whose premise, that a broke guy in his mid-sixties who used to be a car salesman can have pretty much any woman he wants no matter what her age, is, on the surface, ludicrous. We can either accept the film as a displaced story of the Hollywood version of aging, in which case we wonder why the directors bothered to set the film in New York instead of just letting it be what it was meant to be, or we can puzzle over what the premise really means, figure out a way to make the incredible credible.
How to explain Ben Kalmen’s success with every woman he hits on? I am going to opt for this: the film is actually meant to depict the interior fantasy life of Ben Kalmen, who is in REALITY just an ordinary failed car salesman – probably undone by the recession – who would really enjoy slutting around, if he could ever find any takers. In his fantasy he becomes the most successful car salesman in New York history, wildly rich, sought after by women. He re-imagines his current situation as a the result of a spectacular fall from money and power due to his own fraud, dreaming himself up a fantasy version of going out of business (after all, we all incorporate realistic detail in our fantasies – we don’t reinvent ourselves wholesale). In his dreams he accompanies his girlfriend’s beautiful daughter to a university interview where he gets invited to a dorm party and sleeps with the daughter. Then we follow Ben's meandering fantasy through other women, growing money problems, all excuses for his real-life failure.
One of the most astonishing elements of the film - if one takes it as a straightforward story of aging - is the information given by Ben’s wife in the last few minutes: that Ben’s sexual escapades only began about six years ago when he discovered that he had some unspecified heart condition. In addition to being asked to believe that this sagging ordinary man before us is a sexual god of infinite charisma we are now asked to believe that he suddenly transformed from a family man into a ho overnight and has been working women only since his late fifties? But let’s imagine this bombshell as part of Ben’s fantasy – it gives him a justification for his guilty daydreams.
This film received generally very positive reviews, praised as authentic, etc. Those reviews were written by men. It seems that men have an emotional investment in this fantasy, the fantasy that 18-year-olds are ready to sleep with really old guys. Maybe the same need that drove the films’ directors to spin this tale out fuels the male film-going audience in general. But as a female I have to say that I am getting a little tired of this narrative, of sexually potent old guys with nice aging wives successfully putting the moves on gorgeous young women.
“Solitary Man” is Hollywood’s version of an aging playboy confronted with reality. Only in Hollywood can a man in his mid-sixties (actually the film pretends that Ben Kalmen is in his late fifties, but we are not blind) hit on an 18-year-old and be successful. We all know that in Hollywood or the entertainment industry more generally very young women really do sleep with old men whom they have reason to believe have some connection to the business. We have seen the Girls of the Playboy Mansion. But in New York, an aging failed car salesman simply cannot have any teenager he wants. And he certainly cannot show up at a university party with a beer in his hand and start propositioning the students. Security would be on to him before he knew what was happening.
What we have, then, is a film whose premise, that a broke guy in his mid-sixties who used to be a car salesman can have pretty much any woman he wants no matter what her age, is, on the surface, ludicrous. We can either accept the film as a displaced story of the Hollywood version of aging, in which case we wonder why the directors bothered to set the film in New York instead of just letting it be what it was meant to be, or we can puzzle over what the premise really means, figure out a way to make the incredible credible.
How to explain Ben Kalmen’s success with every woman he hits on? I am going to opt for this: the film is actually meant to depict the interior fantasy life of Ben Kalmen, who is in REALITY just an ordinary failed car salesman – probably undone by the recession – who would really enjoy slutting around, if he could ever find any takers. In his fantasy he becomes the most successful car salesman in New York history, wildly rich, sought after by women. He re-imagines his current situation as a the result of a spectacular fall from money and power due to his own fraud, dreaming himself up a fantasy version of going out of business (after all, we all incorporate realistic detail in our fantasies – we don’t reinvent ourselves wholesale). In his dreams he accompanies his girlfriend’s beautiful daughter to a university interview where he gets invited to a dorm party and sleeps with the daughter. Then we follow Ben's meandering fantasy through other women, growing money problems, all excuses for his real-life failure.
One of the most astonishing elements of the film - if one takes it as a straightforward story of aging - is the information given by Ben’s wife in the last few minutes: that Ben’s sexual escapades only began about six years ago when he discovered that he had some unspecified heart condition. In addition to being asked to believe that this sagging ordinary man before us is a sexual god of infinite charisma we are now asked to believe that he suddenly transformed from a family man into a ho overnight and has been working women only since his late fifties? But let’s imagine this bombshell as part of Ben’s fantasy – it gives him a justification for his guilty daydreams.
This film received generally very positive reviews, praised as authentic, etc. Those reviews were written by men. It seems that men have an emotional investment in this fantasy, the fantasy that 18-year-olds are ready to sleep with really old guys. Maybe the same need that drove the films’ directors to spin this tale out fuels the male film-going audience in general. But as a female I have to say that I am getting a little tired of this narrative, of sexually potent old guys with nice aging wives successfully putting the moves on gorgeous young women.
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