Fences is a modern story. Who cannot relate to it? Who cannot relate to its main character, Troy Maxson? I love Troy. He is a son of America; he is the ultimate, "maximum" son of this country, which is to say he questions the American democratic ideal. There never should have been a time, he says, too early for the realization of his or, by extension, other black's dreams. Life for him, as for Lorraine Hansberry's Walter Lee Younger, "ain't been no crystal stair" (Hughes). Troy is my father and my brother, my uncles and cousins. He is a migrant, having come up from Mobile to what was supposed to be a Promised Land--the urban North--in his case Pittsburgh, where the author himself, August Wilson, lived. Wilson knows Troy; he has met him in bars, on stoops, in smokey jazz clubs. He has captured their language and their pain is represented in that language.
The play opens on a Friday after work. How familiar this is to me. The eagle flies on Friday/Saturday I'll go out and play/The eagle flies on Friday/Saturday I'll go out and play/Sunday I'll go to church and fall down on my knees and pray. Friday is a day of relief and release for those who labor during the work week, usually in factories or on the streets of America's cities, in various capacities, for example, as sanitation workers. The jobs are hard, sometimes demeaning, but they pay oh so much better than those old jobs, picking cotton for Mr. Lubin and being cheated. Yet, Wilson suggests that, as Martin Luther King was heard to say, Michigan Avenue in Chicago is no promised land. In other words, the Negro exchanged one set of oppressive conditions in the South for a new set of oppressive conditions in the North. Troy feels fenced in. He says he "locked [himself] into a pattern" and forgot to leave something for himself. What has locked or "fenced" him in? The answer to this question depends on how large you think Wilson's critique is. The playwright once stated, in the late '80s, that black people still, by and large, had not experienced the American dream but were, rather, still in survival mode--trying to keep a roof over their heads and food in their stomachs. Did Wilson see the American Dream as an American nightmare, from which one could be freed only by death? Did Wilson reject what capitalism offers the common laborer?
I do not know the answer to this question without further study, yet the life of fictional Troy Maxson does seem a case study. Troy's life seems tragic on the one hand. His life is a series of struggles framed by a desire to move away from yet an ultimate repeating of his father's blues. His father had to get the cotton in; Troy is on the rubbish. Temporarily, the lives of the two men may have been different yet similar. His father's life would have been framed by seasons, by weather cycles, and by the processes of agricultural production; Troy's life is framed by the eight-hour, five-day work week. It is a familiar scheme that Troy accepts; he makes a deal with the devil--Mr. Rand or the furniture dealer. It is the modern proposal that most of us are offered--forty plus hours a week of our lives for a wage--for money. The weekend is a short-term cure for what ails us, and what ails us is the fact that we have traded our very lives and may have come out with the short end of the stick. This is a sad realization.
Growing up in Detroit, I observed the Friday evening or afternoon ritual. Well, I didn't observe it up close. Our fathers kept their distance from their families on Fridays. A good friend of mine, whose father worked at Chrysler, was after school on Fridays, sent directly to her grandmother's house--away from her father who drank very heavily on that day and the next and sometimes became violent as a result. But he did not drink on Sundays though he did not appear to fall down on that day onto his knees to pray. Maybe he did so in quiet, but more likely his work and his "play" were his prayer or at least his communion with God. He was so much like Troy Maxson this man.
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
Magic in Jamaica Kincaid's "Girl"
Jamaica Kincaid's "Girl," a prose poem or a short story, is classified as magical realism. What this means is that the author bridges what is normally thought of as the real with what either is thought of as the unreal or as an area of uncertainty. For instance, life and death may be bridged rather than being accepted as apart.
In the case of "Girl," Kincaid bridges everyday tasks, chores, with a certain magic that may in fact be a part of black Antiguan routine. This magic exists in the poem's language and in its expression of folk culture. One could argue that the entire monologue (it is mostly one voice; the daughter hardly speaks) is a casting of a spell over the daughter if we think of a spell as usurpation of a person's will or submission of one's will. Of course, one could argue, to the contrary, that at the end of the mother's instruction, "girl," continues to ask questions and, earlier in the poem, she defends herself, which is a clear assertion of her own will. If one reads the poem in this way, then at the end of the piece, the daughter appears to have a choice.
At the same time, the mother speaks over the head of her daughter, meaning upon the head of her daughter, instructions, which are akin to incantations. She tells her precisely what to do and what not to do, and importantly, these instructions are delivered in what anthropologist Paul Stoller calls "old words." For example, "this is how you sweep a corner/this is how you sweep a whole house/this is how you sweep a yard." Kincaid walks in two realms, that of the literal and that of the metaphorical. She may be referring to literal sweeping; it would appear so, but she is also invoking sweeping as removal of stagnant or negative energy, and she instructs her daughter on how to use sweeping as an act of empowerment and influence. Here, girl is given options for the size of influence she would choose to have. To this very day, in island nations, and in America as well, there exist practitioners of this art or science. The Lucky Mojo website explains that sweeping is one of the most powerful counters to the influence of foot traffic. It argues that foot traffic and the use of powders are one way to trick someone. The counter to this trick is the sweeping away of such powders.
Indeed, the realm of real power is in the symbolic universe, which means that this poem must be read on two levels though for readers unfamiliar with the folk sayings Kincaid shares, the piece will simply seem to be about working class women's lives in twentieth-century Antigua. To the extent that the symbolic universe is hidden it remains a realm of power for those who believe in the strength of such words. This is language of an oppressed people who have survived because they have had a part of their being within this universe.
It would appear, however, that girl is unaware of the two-level meaning of her mother's instructions. As my own mother believes, having lived in a traditional South African community, power within this realm cannot reach you if you do not engage (or believe in) it. I suppose this is one power that girl has and perhaps this is the distance that scholars suggest exists between Kincaid herself and her real mother.
In the case of "Girl," Kincaid bridges everyday tasks, chores, with a certain magic that may in fact be a part of black Antiguan routine. This magic exists in the poem's language and in its expression of folk culture. One could argue that the entire monologue (it is mostly one voice; the daughter hardly speaks) is a casting of a spell over the daughter if we think of a spell as usurpation of a person's will or submission of one's will. Of course, one could argue, to the contrary, that at the end of the mother's instruction, "girl," continues to ask questions and, earlier in the poem, she defends herself, which is a clear assertion of her own will. If one reads the poem in this way, then at the end of the piece, the daughter appears to have a choice.
At the same time, the mother speaks over the head of her daughter, meaning upon the head of her daughter, instructions, which are akin to incantations. She tells her precisely what to do and what not to do, and importantly, these instructions are delivered in what anthropologist Paul Stoller calls "old words." For example, "this is how you sweep a corner/this is how you sweep a whole house/this is how you sweep a yard." Kincaid walks in two realms, that of the literal and that of the metaphorical. She may be referring to literal sweeping; it would appear so, but she is also invoking sweeping as removal of stagnant or negative energy, and she instructs her daughter on how to use sweeping as an act of empowerment and influence. Here, girl is given options for the size of influence she would choose to have. To this very day, in island nations, and in America as well, there exist practitioners of this art or science. The Lucky Mojo website explains that sweeping is one of the most powerful counters to the influence of foot traffic. It argues that foot traffic and the use of powders are one way to trick someone. The counter to this trick is the sweeping away of such powders.
Indeed, the realm of real power is in the symbolic universe, which means that this poem must be read on two levels though for readers unfamiliar with the folk sayings Kincaid shares, the piece will simply seem to be about working class women's lives in twentieth-century Antigua. To the extent that the symbolic universe is hidden it remains a realm of power for those who believe in the strength of such words. This is language of an oppressed people who have survived because they have had a part of their being within this universe.
It would appear, however, that girl is unaware of the two-level meaning of her mother's instructions. As my own mother believes, having lived in a traditional South African community, power within this realm cannot reach you if you do not engage (or believe in) it. I suppose this is one power that girl has and perhaps this is the distance that scholars suggest exists between Kincaid herself and her real mother.
Friday, November 2, 2012
Having fun with "Girl"
One of the learning outcomes for Intro to Literature is "students will learn to offer radical interpretations of literature." What can be more radical than magic, and what can be a more appropriate topic as we end the month of October and head into November? We're in full harvest mode.
Before I give my take (actually one of many takes) on Jamaica Kincaid's "Girl," I'd like to play a little with Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" and Penny Marshall's "Riding in Cars with Boys"--our other two texts. In my last post, I spoke a little about the title of Marshall's film. I am intrigued by the oversimplification of the sexual act that initiates reproduction. The film could have been called Teenagers Having Sex, but this would have been way too explicit I guess even in this time, and some would say there would be no art in that title. I disagree. This alternative title is on a scale more realistic than that which the film's producers chose, one that, perhaps appropriate to the time--the late '60s--still maybe held on to Victorian understatement. Girls (not women) got pregnant not from having sex but from riding in cars with boys. This representation of female sexuality on the surface would seem to preference the male role in the sex act to that of the female since being with boys suggests that the boys are doing something to the girls that results in pregnancy. Or, I suppose one could also argue that the girls do something to the boys. The girls are doing the riding; the boys the driving? In either case, "Riding in Cars" is partly a story about female power and women's choices, and though this title seems to cast girls as passive victims, this way of locating women in the passenger seat doesn't necessarily negate their power. Never do we see Bev literally in the driver's seat, but the question is whether--behind what appears to be--she is in fact the one in control of her life. Put another way, the question both for this film, for the "Story of an Hour," and for "Girl" is whether beyond the surface of things exists a dynamic women's space and women's power.
As one who studies temporal (time) constructions, I have enjoyed thinking about the concept of time in Chopin's short story. Time for me is not absolute or fixed but constructed (built) and regulated (measured) and mechanized. Chopin returns to her character Louise Mallard an organic time, maybe even a feminine sense of time. The story of an hour is a very brief narrative in which Mrs. Mallard transcends earthly time that has come to be controlled by man, or by men like her husband who, working in offices, govern themselves by the clock and by a temporal order that has its origin in the movement of trains. Mr. Mallard's own false death was thought to be by train accident, and it is this crisis that frees his wife from earthly time, from the life she has with him that is governed by this order. Chopin flirts maybe with the idea that he too could have been freed from regulated time, but alas he is not dead but his wife is. Clearly, the universe opens or shows itself to Mrs. Mallard, who has re-entered a celestial order in the crack in time that was the suspension of the human-regulated. This crack in temporal order is fascinating, and it suggests to me an opening to an alternative space in which those whose lives are not entirely beholden to the clock--and the life of the clock--may find their freedom and not only that but alternative ways of being. Mrs. Mallard, who becomes Louise again--is victorious because she has transcended this tyranny. What she accomplishes either through literal death of the body or through figurative death of regulated time, Bev accomplishes in becoming a real actor within her own space.
Finally, "Girl." What does its title suggest? Eternal childhood? Upon first reading, one is overwhelmed maybe by the seeming lack of power between this mother and daughter, and this would be an accurate reading given strained relations between the author and her own mother. But, on second thought, perhaps girl is a suggestion of sisterhood, an indication of unity. In other words, maybe the connotation of girl is much more messy than it seems. From the lips of the overbearing mother, it sounds spirit-killing. Is she not training her daughter to be a robot? What spirit could survive such a mechanical life in which washing of white clothes must always be done on Mondays; washing of colored clothes on Tuesdays. Mother would seem to have this routine down to a science. Many women do. Is this order organic, or imposed? Does it mimic or is it informed by some other order, for instance, that learned on a plantation, or is it "natural"? Is this a natural, women's rhythm? Or, is it influenced by both, which would mean that Mother has found her liberty in appropriating an unnatural order and mixing it with other ways?
This tight text certainly seems to leave no room for freedom either for Mother or for Girl, yet, as with our two other texts, maybe that is where power resides because it is so well hidden. The first order of business when living in a colonial state is survival; the second is discovery of one's own organic power. Deeply embedded for instance in Kincaid's short story (or prose poem) is the instruction--"this is how you sweep a corner; this is how you sweep a whole house; this is how you sweep a yard." Is Kincaid via Mother not telling her readers how to expand their power? And what of this act of sweeping? Is this cleaning, working, fixing? These are magical terms, in addition to being ordinary, every day terms. Kincaid indicates a relationship between the woman actor cleaning and organizing her assigned outer spaces to gaining power over her inner spaces, from corner to yard. One who sweeps at once declutters her own mind and, very actively, removes from her life those things she doesn't desire to have control over her inner life.
At the end of the story, Girl appears completely deflated. She has not learned Mother's lessons. She has not learned the power of woman which her mother has passed on so secretly, so tightly. But, we trust that she will. By all appearances, she will be controlled, but Mother knows that she will be in control--if she has listened well--of herself.
Before I give my take (actually one of many takes) on Jamaica Kincaid's "Girl," I'd like to play a little with Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" and Penny Marshall's "Riding in Cars with Boys"--our other two texts. In my last post, I spoke a little about the title of Marshall's film. I am intrigued by the oversimplification of the sexual act that initiates reproduction. The film could have been called Teenagers Having Sex, but this would have been way too explicit I guess even in this time, and some would say there would be no art in that title. I disagree. This alternative title is on a scale more realistic than that which the film's producers chose, one that, perhaps appropriate to the time--the late '60s--still maybe held on to Victorian understatement. Girls (not women) got pregnant not from having sex but from riding in cars with boys. This representation of female sexuality on the surface would seem to preference the male role in the sex act to that of the female since being with boys suggests that the boys are doing something to the girls that results in pregnancy. Or, I suppose one could also argue that the girls do something to the boys. The girls are doing the riding; the boys the driving? In either case, "Riding in Cars" is partly a story about female power and women's choices, and though this title seems to cast girls as passive victims, this way of locating women in the passenger seat doesn't necessarily negate their power. Never do we see Bev literally in the driver's seat, but the question is whether--behind what appears to be--she is in fact the one in control of her life. Put another way, the question both for this film, for the "Story of an Hour," and for "Girl" is whether beyond the surface of things exists a dynamic women's space and women's power.
As one who studies temporal (time) constructions, I have enjoyed thinking about the concept of time in Chopin's short story. Time for me is not absolute or fixed but constructed (built) and regulated (measured) and mechanized. Chopin returns to her character Louise Mallard an organic time, maybe even a feminine sense of time. The story of an hour is a very brief narrative in which Mrs. Mallard transcends earthly time that has come to be controlled by man, or by men like her husband who, working in offices, govern themselves by the clock and by a temporal order that has its origin in the movement of trains. Mr. Mallard's own false death was thought to be by train accident, and it is this crisis that frees his wife from earthly time, from the life she has with him that is governed by this order. Chopin flirts maybe with the idea that he too could have been freed from regulated time, but alas he is not dead but his wife is. Clearly, the universe opens or shows itself to Mrs. Mallard, who has re-entered a celestial order in the crack in time that was the suspension of the human-regulated. This crack in temporal order is fascinating, and it suggests to me an opening to an alternative space in which those whose lives are not entirely beholden to the clock--and the life of the clock--may find their freedom and not only that but alternative ways of being. Mrs. Mallard, who becomes Louise again--is victorious because she has transcended this tyranny. What she accomplishes either through literal death of the body or through figurative death of regulated time, Bev accomplishes in becoming a real actor within her own space.
Finally, "Girl." What does its title suggest? Eternal childhood? Upon first reading, one is overwhelmed maybe by the seeming lack of power between this mother and daughter, and this would be an accurate reading given strained relations between the author and her own mother. But, on second thought, perhaps girl is a suggestion of sisterhood, an indication of unity. In other words, maybe the connotation of girl is much more messy than it seems. From the lips of the overbearing mother, it sounds spirit-killing. Is she not training her daughter to be a robot? What spirit could survive such a mechanical life in which washing of white clothes must always be done on Mondays; washing of colored clothes on Tuesdays. Mother would seem to have this routine down to a science. Many women do. Is this order organic, or imposed? Does it mimic or is it informed by some other order, for instance, that learned on a plantation, or is it "natural"? Is this a natural, women's rhythm? Or, is it influenced by both, which would mean that Mother has found her liberty in appropriating an unnatural order and mixing it with other ways?
This tight text certainly seems to leave no room for freedom either for Mother or for Girl, yet, as with our two other texts, maybe that is where power resides because it is so well hidden. The first order of business when living in a colonial state is survival; the second is discovery of one's own organic power. Deeply embedded for instance in Kincaid's short story (or prose poem) is the instruction--"this is how you sweep a corner; this is how you sweep a whole house; this is how you sweep a yard." Is Kincaid via Mother not telling her readers how to expand their power? And what of this act of sweeping? Is this cleaning, working, fixing? These are magical terms, in addition to being ordinary, every day terms. Kincaid indicates a relationship between the woman actor cleaning and organizing her assigned outer spaces to gaining power over her inner spaces, from corner to yard. One who sweeps at once declutters her own mind and, very actively, removes from her life those things she doesn't desire to have control over her inner life.
At the end of the story, Girl appears completely deflated. She has not learned Mother's lessons. She has not learned the power of woman which her mother has passed on so secretly, so tightly. But, we trust that she will. By all appearances, she will be controlled, but Mother knows that she will be in control--if she has listened well--of herself.
Thursday, October 25, 2012
Riding in Cars with Boys
After viewing a film, I almost always check Rottentomatoes.com to see what the critics think, so I did not change this habit in the case of Penny Marshall's "Riding in Cars with Boys" (2001). Though I am not myself a film critic, I agree with those who think that Marshall's thumbprint is all over this movie, which is now eleven years old. I can see her input because I watched LaVerne and Shirley back when I was in elementary school. The two characters in this film remind me of the two characters in that sitcom. And this similarity is suggestive of the consensus of the critics; "Riding in Cars with Boys" tries to be serious, and yet it is cute. Some might think this a good, because realistic, combination. (Life is funny even when serious, even in the midst of a crisis.) Others may differ.
If I am not a film critic, however, I certainly am critical. I had my students watch this film actually because I couldn't get my hands on "It's Complicated." I was looking for a film about white women's lives in order to study patterns of treatment. I saw some recognizable patterns in "Riding in Cars..." Too often, films of this theme, tie up stories, end them, with a nice big bow, like the one atop the main character Bev's head on her wedding day. Seated alone in an overdecorated peacock chair, the fifteen-year-old Bev appears to be alone. Her new husband is on the other side of the room. Her family members are seated together away from her. When her father rises to offer what should have been a toast, he instead thanks the guests for supporting the family in what is for them an embarrassing moment in their lives. Bev's only real companion it seems is her best friend Faye. This much is clear. Marshall obviously likes dealing with women's bonds of friendship, and this one endures. I did almost cry when the two finally parted, Faye leaving for Arizona, Bev left in Connecticut--in her view, alone, though she had her son Jason.
The question is whether Bev is in fact truly alone. On the surface, it appears that at every critical moment, she is in fact not alone at all. Although she is left in the peacock chair early in the movie, she clearly has a whole host of supporters, both blood family and other kindred. She is not alone on a desolate island or in a run-down ghetto apartment for that matter taking care of her baby without any help. To the contrary, by the time baby Jason arrives, she has been nicely installed into some of the nicest public housing I have ever seen, a single family home on a cul-de-sac that is Rockwellian minus glowing white paint. Immediately, her home is equipped with everything she needs to make a go at motherhood at the tender age of fifteen--a husband, a stove that goes all the way up to 550, and a mother who, like Bev, would seem not to have to work outside of the home since she has time to come over to her daughter's house during the week and iron and mop for her. Clearly, the family has no intention--good for them--of letting their prodigal daughter fall too low. And Bev, throughout the film, has her mind set on rising up out of her working class life. (We never really see her in poverty--her shoes talk, yes, but she is not without a home; she does not live in a shelter despite the fact that her husband--a junkie--barely works. Marshall doesn't allow the audience to see Bev or her husband Ray applying for Food Stamps. We don't actually see Ray shooting up.)
The long and the short of it is that there is always a lifeline for Bev, and there is a community of watchers--neighbors who never speak but who are there, maybe as silent witnesses to this story of a young white girl's journey toward her American Dream. She is offered a way up and out--even by Lizard, who will pay her two hundred dollars an hour to dry weed for him in her oven. It's a crazy offer but no crazier actually than that made by the nerdy boy-turned-hunk, who invites her to bring her whole family to California. He is another observer of Bev, one who just happened to be in town and chose to stop by a twenty-year-old married woman's house for her six-year-old child's birthday party. He saunters into her living room looking very '70s sexy indeed and, then, like the stalker-observer he is, after the sun has gone down, startles Bev, as he walks from behind her house. He offers her a completely unrealistic deal--the housing of her whole family including a not-yet-discovered drug abusing Ray. Why? Is he that in love? Maybe. "You don't belong here," he tells her and advises her to do the right thing--take him up on his offer and get the heck out of the world of public housing. These are the makings of a Cinderella story (or any other damsel in distress narrative) only Bev will soon find out that she cannot go to California. She has to help Ray break his heroin habit, about which she has been for two years clueless. Is heroin usually taken intravenously? How could she not have known? The answer is that Bev is not real; she is a Hollywood made character, and more than that she is a meta-character. Or, as one critic wrote, "the rough edges of Donofrio's life are either ignored or smoothed away." Her pains are kept at a distance, from her and from viewers. There are no closeups, no sweaty faces, no hearts beating out of these characters' hearts as they try to figure out how to make rent. If this is a drama, it could have been more dramatic and without moving too far--toward melodrama. It is a comedic drama and, as such, does serious injustice to its topic of teen pregnancy, drug abuse, and poverty.
So, finally, the question becomes why America might want a film that is, on the surface, about difficulty but that won't deeply engage the difficulties. First, I think this movie is representative of the kind of bubble we lived in during the early 2000s and, second, America has reason not to want to see certain figures hit rock bottom. "Riding in Cars with Boys," a film whose very title refuses responsibility, i.e., Bev gets pregnant not because she decided to have sex (she boldly denies it to her father) but because she rode in a car with two bad boys, who, as bad as they were nevertheless did the right thing and married the girls they got pregnant. The title doesn't so much suggest complete falsehood as it does our postmodernness, an inability to come to terms with present reality because reality is always being buffered and constructed by those who mediate it. We are now living in a Recession-Depression, and we were sliding into it even as we lived in the bubble that finally burst. And yet, there are people who are now and have for a long time been alone in the world for real--many of them white women. But too many American films just hint at these realities, never getting beneath the surface or allowing us to see our desperate selves really up-close and personal. In this way, films create the buffer, which is why Marshall's film fails to rise above entertainment to a level of social critique. Even high art can offer social critique, so film doesn't have to sacrifice seriousness out of fear of compromising art.
By the way, there is, in this film about the difficulty of rising from the working class, one minority, whose name is omitted from Rotten Tomatoes' list of characters. Marshall had no problem showing this Latina in all of her desperation. Where Drew Barrymore's character always appears nicely put-together, Ray's second wife was disheveled, hair tossed, with a cigarette hanging from her mouth and her weary hands shaking. On the other hand, after all that Bev supposedly goes through, Marshall's treatment does not try to depart from the theme of creating happy endings for white women. Rather, the film ends with wayward Bev, honestly not looking a day older than she did at the start of the movie despite lots of vibrant red lipstick and a more mature haircut, reuniting with her father. And the same song that began the film ends it. "Dream, dream, dream..." She and Dad have healed their relationship and, through it, healed any doubts the audience may have had about the health of the American Dream. It seems too easy to suggest that the health of that dream depends on Hollywood continuing to nurture a psychic wellness itself dependent upon perpetuation of the message and the myth of white women's wellness, but there it is.
I asked students to look in this movie at themes of race, class, and gender. So far in our discussions they have not talked about race. Some have said they don't see race being treated. I have not yet responded to that observation. I'm waiting for them to discover that sometimes race is treated by not being treated directly. Some of the most dangerous treatments of race are those that create false worlds in which people of color are rendered invisible.
If I am not a film critic, however, I certainly am critical. I had my students watch this film actually because I couldn't get my hands on "It's Complicated." I was looking for a film about white women's lives in order to study patterns of treatment. I saw some recognizable patterns in "Riding in Cars..." Too often, films of this theme, tie up stories, end them, with a nice big bow, like the one atop the main character Bev's head on her wedding day. Seated alone in an overdecorated peacock chair, the fifteen-year-old Bev appears to be alone. Her new husband is on the other side of the room. Her family members are seated together away from her. When her father rises to offer what should have been a toast, he instead thanks the guests for supporting the family in what is for them an embarrassing moment in their lives. Bev's only real companion it seems is her best friend Faye. This much is clear. Marshall obviously likes dealing with women's bonds of friendship, and this one endures. I did almost cry when the two finally parted, Faye leaving for Arizona, Bev left in Connecticut--in her view, alone, though she had her son Jason.
The question is whether Bev is in fact truly alone. On the surface, it appears that at every critical moment, she is in fact not alone at all. Although she is left in the peacock chair early in the movie, she clearly has a whole host of supporters, both blood family and other kindred. She is not alone on a desolate island or in a run-down ghetto apartment for that matter taking care of her baby without any help. To the contrary, by the time baby Jason arrives, she has been nicely installed into some of the nicest public housing I have ever seen, a single family home on a cul-de-sac that is Rockwellian minus glowing white paint. Immediately, her home is equipped with everything she needs to make a go at motherhood at the tender age of fifteen--a husband, a stove that goes all the way up to 550, and a mother who, like Bev, would seem not to have to work outside of the home since she has time to come over to her daughter's house during the week and iron and mop for her. Clearly, the family has no intention--good for them--of letting their prodigal daughter fall too low. And Bev, throughout the film, has her mind set on rising up out of her working class life. (We never really see her in poverty--her shoes talk, yes, but she is not without a home; she does not live in a shelter despite the fact that her husband--a junkie--barely works. Marshall doesn't allow the audience to see Bev or her husband Ray applying for Food Stamps. We don't actually see Ray shooting up.)
The long and the short of it is that there is always a lifeline for Bev, and there is a community of watchers--neighbors who never speak but who are there, maybe as silent witnesses to this story of a young white girl's journey toward her American Dream. She is offered a way up and out--even by Lizard, who will pay her two hundred dollars an hour to dry weed for him in her oven. It's a crazy offer but no crazier actually than that made by the nerdy boy-turned-hunk, who invites her to bring her whole family to California. He is another observer of Bev, one who just happened to be in town and chose to stop by a twenty-year-old married woman's house for her six-year-old child's birthday party. He saunters into her living room looking very '70s sexy indeed and, then, like the stalker-observer he is, after the sun has gone down, startles Bev, as he walks from behind her house. He offers her a completely unrealistic deal--the housing of her whole family including a not-yet-discovered drug abusing Ray. Why? Is he that in love? Maybe. "You don't belong here," he tells her and advises her to do the right thing--take him up on his offer and get the heck out of the world of public housing. These are the makings of a Cinderella story (or any other damsel in distress narrative) only Bev will soon find out that she cannot go to California. She has to help Ray break his heroin habit, about which she has been for two years clueless. Is heroin usually taken intravenously? How could she not have known? The answer is that Bev is not real; she is a Hollywood made character, and more than that she is a meta-character. Or, as one critic wrote, "the rough edges of Donofrio's life are either ignored or smoothed away." Her pains are kept at a distance, from her and from viewers. There are no closeups, no sweaty faces, no hearts beating out of these characters' hearts as they try to figure out how to make rent. If this is a drama, it could have been more dramatic and without moving too far--toward melodrama. It is a comedic drama and, as such, does serious injustice to its topic of teen pregnancy, drug abuse, and poverty.
So, finally, the question becomes why America might want a film that is, on the surface, about difficulty but that won't deeply engage the difficulties. First, I think this movie is representative of the kind of bubble we lived in during the early 2000s and, second, America has reason not to want to see certain figures hit rock bottom. "Riding in Cars with Boys," a film whose very title refuses responsibility, i.e., Bev gets pregnant not because she decided to have sex (she boldly denies it to her father) but because she rode in a car with two bad boys, who, as bad as they were nevertheless did the right thing and married the girls they got pregnant. The title doesn't so much suggest complete falsehood as it does our postmodernness, an inability to come to terms with present reality because reality is always being buffered and constructed by those who mediate it. We are now living in a Recession-Depression, and we were sliding into it even as we lived in the bubble that finally burst. And yet, there are people who are now and have for a long time been alone in the world for real--many of them white women. But too many American films just hint at these realities, never getting beneath the surface or allowing us to see our desperate selves really up-close and personal. In this way, films create the buffer, which is why Marshall's film fails to rise above entertainment to a level of social critique. Even high art can offer social critique, so film doesn't have to sacrifice seriousness out of fear of compromising art.
By the way, there is, in this film about the difficulty of rising from the working class, one minority, whose name is omitted from Rotten Tomatoes' list of characters. Marshall had no problem showing this Latina in all of her desperation. Where Drew Barrymore's character always appears nicely put-together, Ray's second wife was disheveled, hair tossed, with a cigarette hanging from her mouth and her weary hands shaking. On the other hand, after all that Bev supposedly goes through, Marshall's treatment does not try to depart from the theme of creating happy endings for white women. Rather, the film ends with wayward Bev, honestly not looking a day older than she did at the start of the movie despite lots of vibrant red lipstick and a more mature haircut, reuniting with her father. And the same song that began the film ends it. "Dream, dream, dream..." She and Dad have healed their relationship and, through it, healed any doubts the audience may have had about the health of the American Dream. It seems too easy to suggest that the health of that dream depends on Hollywood continuing to nurture a psychic wellness itself dependent upon perpetuation of the message and the myth of white women's wellness, but there it is.
I asked students to look in this movie at themes of race, class, and gender. So far in our discussions they have not talked about race. Some have said they don't see race being treated. I have not yet responded to that observation. I'm waiting for them to discover that sometimes race is treated by not being treated directly. Some of the most dangerous treatments of race are those that create false worlds in which people of color are rendered invisible.
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Let the Paint Peel and the Weeds Grow
I loved this quote from Laurie Essig, who writes for the Chronicle of Higher Education, the very first time I read it.
It’s time to return to the basics of educating young minds as best we can with the money we have. I say let the higher ups go find jobs in the for-profit world that they have tried to impose on academe. Let the student-life folks go work in social services outside the university. Let the weeds grow and the paint peel. And let’s make higher ed about educating young minds with the money we have and not the money they borrow.
My favorite phrase: "Let the weeds grow and the paint peel." This is my new mantra. What is Essig trying to get at? She's critiquing the bubble, the false economy and false consciousness that nearly every aspect of American society has tried to believe in since, as Thomas Frank tells us, the end of The Great Depression.
How many parents choose colleges for their children because they have been overcome by the shiny-ness of them, residence halls that look, as Essig describes, like condos? Does it take all of this to educate, or do America's colleges wish to send a message that, indeed, this is the standard of living for American grads so it might as well be the standard while they're in college? What ideas does this marketing infuse into students? A: a commitment that they should become workers so that they can get a job to, one, attain such a standard and, two, pay back student loans. Sounds like a trap, doesn't it?
But I love the image of peeling paint and weeds for implications beyond academe to the American economy as a whole. I'm so inspired by the image I've added a photo. Enjoy.
Friday, February 10, 2012
Weight Counterweight
I like to think that I am a balanced person. My body is symmetrical. My eyes, ears, hands, and feet work in partnership. Beyond my own body, the natural world provides me other things--the climate of the atmosphere, oxygen as a complement to the carbon dioxide I exhale, and gravity that accepts the force of my weight. Natural scientific realities such as these from the time I was born initiated me into the world as a physical creature so that I would learn to use by body, the physical, even as I think. Sometimes, when I'm deep in thought, I will assist my process by doing something with my hands. I love early morning walks. They usually produce a small essay. I love this advice from author Raymond Inmon: "If you are seeking creative ideas, go out walking. Angels whisper to a man [or woman!] when he [or she] goes for a walk."
However, it seems that in the western part of the world we haven't really begun to acknowledge the role of the body in thinking and in creating. Some would even say that we are strangers to our physical selves. We create and recreate what we think of as culture from a predominance of mental activity alienated often from the physical. "I think therefore I am," according to philosopher Descartes.
If this is true, then one could find I think in studying different aspects of western cultures, this same alienation that I speak of. This week, for instance, my students read "The Gold Standard" by Thomas Frank (Harper's, July 2011). The essay basically is a cynical response to the current interest by some in investing in gold as a safety measure against an anticipated eventual collapse in the value of the dollar. The larger concern of such persons is not merely a belief that the American economy is in decline but that when America abandoned under President Franklin Roosevelt the gold standard that once served as a reference point for the dollar the nation moved toward a wholly different kind of economy, one which some believe is doomed for failure much greater than what we have seen so far.
I am no economist, but as a worker and taxpayer I certainly do participate in the economy. One of my earliest clues that the nation's economy was headed for short-term disaster was when developers first started in the early '90s tearing down small forests and plowing up fields that had just been harvested months earlier to build the three and four thousand square-foot homes that some refer to as McMansions. This obvious aspersion on the realization of many Americans' dream in truth contains an underlying criticism of an economy growing too quickly or of what has been called "an Avatar economy." In other words, from the beginning of the housing boom, people, myself included, were suspicious of whether there was really any reference, any substance beyond even the bricks and mortar of the very large houses, to substantiate or justify the growth of the real estate market. Were Americans, in the last twenty years, really doing so well that the middle class was holding steady and their standard of living was appropriately increasing?
As with most questions, I began to answer this one from my own personal experience and observations. Most people I knew were during the boom years relying heavily on credit including popular home equity loans that helped put their homes under water even before the bubble burst. Americans are still of course using and abusing credit, and so it seems that a second point of our modern economy is plastic, working in concert with fiat money, i.e. money without a material check (as in check and balance), and American consumers who place great faith in the idea that this system works constitute the third point. If the critics of the late twentieth century real estate game aptly refer to Wall Street bankers as high stakes gamblers--they gambled on tens of thousands of realistically worthless mortgages--the metaphor might be applied to us commoners as well. Investments that we made were in relative terms just as high and, in the end, just as costly.
The question now is have we come to our senses. And, for me, this question doesn't merely ask if we understand that some things the market puts before our faces are not affordable, and, if a critical mass of Americans decide not to consume, then an economy that has come to rely on spending really will be in trouble. No, a deeper question for me is if the American middle class is ready to think not just with its minds but with its bodies as well. Doing so not only might help us to avoid a whole bunch of troubles that the mind gets itself into but remembering the physical might also impact so many other aspects of our culture--for example, education.
However, it seems that in the western part of the world we haven't really begun to acknowledge the role of the body in thinking and in creating. Some would even say that we are strangers to our physical selves. We create and recreate what we think of as culture from a predominance of mental activity alienated often from the physical. "I think therefore I am," according to philosopher Descartes.
If this is true, then one could find I think in studying different aspects of western cultures, this same alienation that I speak of. This week, for instance, my students read "The Gold Standard" by Thomas Frank (Harper's, July 2011). The essay basically is a cynical response to the current interest by some in investing in gold as a safety measure against an anticipated eventual collapse in the value of the dollar. The larger concern of such persons is not merely a belief that the American economy is in decline but that when America abandoned under President Franklin Roosevelt the gold standard that once served as a reference point for the dollar the nation moved toward a wholly different kind of economy, one which some believe is doomed for failure much greater than what we have seen so far.
I am no economist, but as a worker and taxpayer I certainly do participate in the economy. One of my earliest clues that the nation's economy was headed for short-term disaster was when developers first started in the early '90s tearing down small forests and plowing up fields that had just been harvested months earlier to build the three and four thousand square-foot homes that some refer to as McMansions. This obvious aspersion on the realization of many Americans' dream in truth contains an underlying criticism of an economy growing too quickly or of what has been called "an Avatar economy." In other words, from the beginning of the housing boom, people, myself included, were suspicious of whether there was really any reference, any substance beyond even the bricks and mortar of the very large houses, to substantiate or justify the growth of the real estate market. Were Americans, in the last twenty years, really doing so well that the middle class was holding steady and their standard of living was appropriately increasing?
As with most questions, I began to answer this one from my own personal experience and observations. Most people I knew were during the boom years relying heavily on credit including popular home equity loans that helped put their homes under water even before the bubble burst. Americans are still of course using and abusing credit, and so it seems that a second point of our modern economy is plastic, working in concert with fiat money, i.e. money without a material check (as in check and balance), and American consumers who place great faith in the idea that this system works constitute the third point. If the critics of the late twentieth century real estate game aptly refer to Wall Street bankers as high stakes gamblers--they gambled on tens of thousands of realistically worthless mortgages--the metaphor might be applied to us commoners as well. Investments that we made were in relative terms just as high and, in the end, just as costly.
The question now is have we come to our senses. And, for me, this question doesn't merely ask if we understand that some things the market puts before our faces are not affordable, and, if a critical mass of Americans decide not to consume, then an economy that has come to rely on spending really will be in trouble. No, a deeper question for me is if the American middle class is ready to think not just with its minds but with its bodies as well. Doing so not only might help us to avoid a whole bunch of troubles that the mind gets itself into but remembering the physical might also impact so many other aspects of our culture--for example, education.
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