Lone Star / No Country for Old Men

I just showed Lone Star, written and directed by John Sayles, to my English class. I remember when I first watched it in the movie theater in 1996, back when I was reading a lot of Raymond Chandler detective novels. Back then, two things about the movie really struck me. First, what a cool idea it is to use the noir detective genre to explore the history of race relations. After watching the movie, I began to read African-American detective novelists Walter Mosley and Barbara Neely, who also do this really well. Second, that Elizabeth Peña is one of the sexiest actresses of all time. (Hey now — I know this is a theory-teacher blog, but I’m just saying what I was thinking as a young guy thirteen years ago.)

That was 1996, but last year, as a teacher, I was reminded of Lone Star because the Cohen brothers’ movie No Country for Old Men won so many Academy Awards then. And here’s why I can’t help but make the connection between the two movies, and why I can’t help but think Lone Star is the movie that most clearly demonstrates what a load of crap No Country is. Both movies are about the Texas-Mexico border. Both movies can be categorized as noir. (Noir is usually defined as hardboiled and morally ambiguous crime fiction.) Both movies feature a supernaturally evil villain. Both movies were nominated for a lot of awards. 

But those similarities make the differences all the more striking. Lone Star actually developes white, black, and Hispanic characters in some depth, whereas in No Country, the Hispanic characters hardly speak at all, which is kind of messed up considering that its main character Llewelyn Moss spends some time across the Mexican border. In other words, in No Country, Hispanic characters are more symbolic than real, and the movie is somewhat racist in the way that, symbolically, their presence in the story is always associated with drugs, violence, and the moral degredation of society. In contrast, as one of my students pointed out in class a couple days ago, Lone Star actually has black and Hispanic poeple in it, who talk and think like real people and whose lives are cross-culturally entangled the way real peoples’ lives are — in other words, they aren’t some assinine Hollywood stereotype or a plot device or shorthand symbol for violence. You can tell Sayles put a lot of thought into his movie  (as you can see his interview about it [here].) To put it another way, we come away from watching Lone Star with a better understanding of the Texas-Mexico border than we came in with, but we come away from No Country with a worse understanding than we came in with.

Second, Lone Star features many conversations among characters of different backgrounds (not just cultural backgrounds, but also professional backgrounds) and uses the cinematic form of the noir detective story to bring their inter-connectedness to the surface. In contrast, the only lengthy conversations we see in No Country are either between a couple of old, white sheriffs moaning about the good old days or between the psychopathic killer and his victims. While the noir structure of Lone Star encourages us to develop a more complex ethical vision, the noir structure of No Country merely excites and titilates us. Now, against my argument, I suppose someone might point out that the absurdity of No Country — along with its unresolved, troubling ending – deconstructs our nostalgic sense of law and order, and I would grant that that’s true… but so what?

Finally, the evil villain in Lone Star is the white sheriff who stands in as a symbolic figure for the systemic violence of racism and who must be overthrown by a collaboration among black, white, and Hispanic characters, but the evil villain in No Country is an unbelievably omniscient psychopath who stands in as a symbolic figure for the arbitrary randomness and senselessness of criminal violence. Curiously, this villain’s ethnicity is vague — all we know is that he is somehow foreign, a foreigness which is used by the Cohen brothers to augment his evilness. It is curious that a character who is meant to symbolize the monstrosity of pure evil has to be not just somehow foreign, but indeterminately foreign.

In my view, John Sayles is one of the most ethical writer-directors of all time, and many actresses and actors have said they love acting in his movies because they feel like they are performing real characters. Especially women have noted that his female characters actually have some depth and aren’t just a projection of a male writer/director’s fantasy about, desire for, or fear of women. This is especially true in his beautiful movie, Casa de los Babys. To be fair to the Cohen brothers, most of the time, I think they also do a wonderful job in their movies, just not in this one. 

But here of course is the kicker. While Lone Star was nominated for an Academy Award for best screenplay, it didn’t win. In contrast, No Country was the Cohen brothers’s most successful film of their careers, nominated for eight Academy awards with four wins, including best screenplay even though the movie was merely adapted from the novel. (And if you’ve read the novel, which I have, you’ll see that the Cohen brothers didn’t do much with the story. Their cinematography was excellent, for sure, but best screenplay?) In other words, the Academy Awards was stupid and unethical in 2008 just as it was in 2009 for giving all the awards to Slumdog Millionaire. (About that movie, see my blog post [here], and also go to your local Barnes & Nobel or Borders bookstore and get the current issue (#78) of CineAction, which features a terrific analysis of Slumdog… as well as, I’m not too modest to mention, my own essay about James Bond, which was originally conceived in this very blog!) However, in spite of the lameness of the Academy Awards, I won’t despair because all of the critial and scholarly essays that continue to be published about Lone Star assures me that it will endur as a classic, while No Country will fade as a cinematic novelty.

The Suits and Trappings of Shanti; or, The Pain of Disco

If you like Bollywood movies — with all the singing, dancing, costumes, and scenary — you’ll love Om Shanti Om, produced in 2006. I just watched it yesterday. One of my colleagues screens a Bollywood film every semester for her friends, followed by a lot of delicious food and things that go with food… such as conversation. Usually, these films are like 3 hour music videos with predictable romantic plots, but Om Shanti Om is somewhat different than the usual Bollywood fare, because it is a parody of itself… and of the whole Bollywood film industry.

I’m blogging on this in part because my theory class just began reading The Holder of the World by Bharati Mukherjee, which is an amusing novel that takes place in seventeenth-century New England, alludes multiple times to Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, and then travels to the cost of India via the ships of the East India Companyat the very beginning of England’s mercantile and colonial project there.

What do these two texts have in common? Honestly, not much, except that I happen to be teaching one at roughly the same time as I watched the other, and both have something to do with India. Mostly, I just want an excuse to post up this YouTube video of a song from Om Shanti Om — “Dard-e-disco” — because I think it’s hilarious.  The chorus translates as “In my heart is the pain of disco, pain of disco, pain of disco.”

For a translation of the lyrics to the song, go this website here, and scroll down to “The Pain of Disco.”

But perhaps I can think of a more significant relation between the two texts. The ”Pain of Disco” scene in the movie reminded me of a passage in Holder of the World, which is just as much a “romance novel” as it is a “postcolonial” one. In this one passage, a fisherman on the Coromandel Coast of India witnesses an English man and woman riding horseback on the beach  and kissing in public. He is very excited and decides to move to Europe to experience what he imagines must be an exotic and liberating world “without rules.” Of course, at the time, Puritan New England, where the two characters came from, had just witnessed repressive witch trials, so it was hardly a liberated world without rules. But in seventeenth-century India, the sort of European one was likely to encounter would have been an outlaw. (Is it any different today? I don’t know.)  What I like about this passage is the way it flips the gaze — an Indian fantasizing wrongly about Europe in the same manner that the Europeans were at that time fantasizing about India (and the novel proceeds to allude to one of those fantasies: John Dryden’s 1675 play, Aureng-Zebe.)

And I guess I like how the movie Om Shanti Om also comments (very indirectly) on India’s relationship to America through this video and through the plot. In a sense, the movie is reversing the scopophilic gaze we got in Slumdog Millionaire, that I blogged on a few months ago [here]. So, basically, that’s the topic of my blog post today – how the novel Holder of the World and the movie Om Shanti Om both deconstruct the long,  historically convoluted, transnational relationship between East and West.

SPOILER ALERT: Seriouisly skip this paragraph if you haven’t seen the movie and want to. The plot has two parts. Part one takes place inside the Bollywood of the 1970s, as a young man named Om struggling to become a famous actor falls in love with a rising young starlet named Shanti — the star of a movie fittingly titled Dreamy Girl. Om eventually discovers that Shanti is not only secretly married to the producer but also pregnant with his child. The producer fears this might interfere with the success of his Bollywood film company, so he decides to kill her and hence becomes the arch-villain of the story. When our hero Om finds out, he tries to save Shanti and also dies. So ends part one. Part two is thirty years later. Our hero has been reincarnated as the son of the most successful Bollywood actor — something like the Bollywood version of Charlie Sheen, son of Martin Sheen, or Michael Douglass, son of Kirk Douglass. Anyway, his name is still Om, but at first our reincarnated hero is a spoiled, self-centered brat (like Charlie Sheen). This all changes when he accidentally visits the scene of his and Shanti’s death. There, he is psychically merged with his previous self. His two identities become united, and he remembers the crime that he witnessed. For the rest of the movie, he attempts to catch the villain the same way Hamlet tried to catch his uncle in Shakespeare’s play — by reproducing the crime in art form. Coincidentally, the villain has just recently returned from America, where he has been making millions of dollars as a film producer for the past thirty years — ever since that fated day of his criminal act. As in Hamlet, Om’s efforts fail because the woman he hires to be Shanti can not convincingly play the role, but fortunately for our sense of poetic justice, the real ghost of Shanti (not just her “suits and trappings”) appears and gets her revenge.

Although the villain’s detour in America is a minor part of the plot, it is significant. It  reminds me of Salman Rushdie’s novel Fury (published 2001, just a month or so before 9/11)  in which America is a place of refuge for a character who has committed crimes in his home country, and hence “America” psychically and symbolically takes on all sorts of strange, convoluted, and contradictory connotations that you might imagine it would take for a character who is running from his past and toward an indeterminate future. In the case of Om Shanti Om, consider that this movie is a parody of Bollywood, and the fact that the evil film producer would flee Bollywood because of his crime and go to Hollywood (which doesn’t just rhyme with Bollywood, right?) seems more than a little bit suggestive. And what it seems to me to be suggesting is something about the transnational nature of the culture industry itself.

But what?

As I mentioned in my blog about Slumdog Millionaire, the real question one should be asking about it is not “what does this say about India” (which is what the mainstream media was asking), but rather “what does this movie say about Europeans and Americans?” Similarly, Om Shanti Om and its self-consciously silly video on “The Pain of Disco” suggests not something about American disco or Hollwyood, but about how India feels about its relationship to the American culture industry — perhaps at the heart of this relationship is both a dream and a crime.

Found in Tranference

There are two inspirations for this post. First, an acquaintance of mine circulated on one of those “online social networks“ a YouTube clip of this music video “Lloyd, I’m Ready to Be Heartbroken,” by the band Camera Obscura, in which the boy and the girl dance through the shopping district of Shibuya in Tokyo for no sensible reason at all. Second, I’m going to be leading a three-week study-abroad trip in Japan this May, and since I don’t really have anything to blog about this week, I thought I’d blog about something that relates to my upcoming trip… even if the music video doesn’t really relate to my trip… or relate to anything at all.

Except maybe it does…. I’m going to try to say something immensely clever by the end of this post. What that will be, I don’t know yet. I hope you’re as excited and shaking with anticipation as I am about it. Anyway, here’s the music video, which my aforementioned acquaintance from the unnamed online social network claimed would be an “optical seducation.”

Oh, oh, so fun, so fun, indeed — a seductive frolic through color and 60’s kitsch. I’d never heard of the band Camera Obscura before, but because of the location in Shibuya, I was reminded of the movie, Lost in Translation. And if you haven’t seen this movie yet, you should. And if you don’t think you should, then it’s quite possible that you’ve got, um, you know… “issues.”

That movie came out in 2003, and the song about Lloyd came out in 2006, and so maybe the people in Camera Obscura saw the movie… but so what? Who cares that the synapses of my distrubed brain connected one thing with the other?

But here’s the thing — the thing of the two things. The two things are opposites. The music video is the reverse of the movie.

What? Is this the clever thing I promised?… Hold on.

The movie of course is about two characters — Bill Murray and Scarlet Johanson — who are “lost” even before they get to Japan, but who are even more lost in Japan where they don’t know the language or the culture. Obviously the whole “being lost” thing is a metaphor for how meaningless their lives had become before they even arrived on the scene. But they don’t realize their existential lostness until they encounter a literal lostness – similar to the TV show Lost.  (Except the literal lostness is actually the metaphorical vehical to explore their existential lostness.) Although the movie seems at first to be about their confrontation with the “other” foreign culture, we eventually realize that the real other is their own self.  I’ve written about the American fascination with Japanese otherness before [here]. Eventually Murray and Johanson become friends, come to like being in Japan… and find that their lives have meaning. In other words, they translate themselves. That is to say, it is their confrontation with otherness, with strangers, that allows them to reconcile themselves to their own internal otherness — to the fact that they had long before become strangers to themselves.

The music video “Lloyd, I’m Ready to Be Heartbroken,” [lyrics]  would seem to be the total opposite. Instead of a confrontation with the other, the music video is fantasy escape into total otherness — the Shibuya skyline, the retro-60s clothing and furniture, the ecstacy, etc.  This is what Freud calls “transference” when you redirect your libidinal desires or feelings onto an idealized object. In this case, the idealized object is the metonymic symbolization of perfect happiness, and I’m using the word somewhat differently than Freud. For him, the object of transference was the doctor himself — the One who knows all,  the one who knows the secret cure. But the culture industry is in many ways a substitute doctor. And in the case of the music video, the singer longs to be the happy, skipping blond couple who seem to have some secret knowledge of the way to happiness. This is the solution to her identity, which is why she sings, ”I know you can stay a girl by holding a boy’s hand.” The knowledge of this secret happiness is key, especially since the singer clearly knows that she does not know it. And in a sense, she doesn’t want to BE them at all (because who would want to, really?); she just wants to know what they know. She is “ready to be heartbroken.”

This is the secret to happiness, she believes… a secret she wants but doesn’t really want… but of course the writers of the song don’t really believe that. They are playing the standard love narrative, which soons becomes uncanny and strange, when the couple skips past the allusion to Andy Warhol’s famously postmodern Brillo boxes and we discover how completely reproducable Lloyd is. Immediately after the Brillo/Lloyd boxes we enter a Hollywood cinemascape from a 50s musical. The “boy” is, like the Hollywood romantic musical, a fabrication — a substitute for another, a constructed thing that confers identity on the girl. There is no unique “him” that is needed. Any “him” will do.

So, on the one hand we have Lost in Translation, with its fearful confrontation with otherness that leads the characters out of their psychological feeling of void. And on the other hand, we have the music video, with its desire for otherness that reminds the singer (if not also us) that her life is not the idealized one — an other that seems to be not just difference, but the big Other. The big Other with a capital O (according to Lacan) is the symbolic order that demands the subject not necessarily conform to it, but — at least — relate to IT somehow, whatever IT is, which of course we don’t really know because we only know that by holding the boy’s hand,  the girl gets some kind of status conferred upon her.

So, I’m almost done, amost done trying to sound clever. So, here’s the thing: in a sense, the music video is the flip side of the movie. What does this dialectic between two opposites teach us? Search me, I’ve lost myself.

Even More Globalization Cinema: Duplicity

So…uh… yah, my addiction to globalization cinema continues — this time with Duplicity, starring Clive Owen and Julia Roberts. That makes three globalization thrillers for Clive, first Children of Men back in 2005, and now two more, practically within a month of each other. As you may recall, I blogged on The International exactly five weeks ago [here]. And a couple years ago, our theory pal  Slavoj Žižek talked about Children of Men in the context of global capitalism, and you can watch the YouTube of the clip which appeared on the DVD special features [here]. And, by the way, if you haven’t seen it yet, Children of Men is pretty damn good. And by the way, can you believe that there is already a journal dedicated to this guy? Žižek Studies. Very tacky, in my opinion, to create a journal about someone still alive, but nobody asked me… and maybe nobody asked Žižek. 

So, apparently, with three movies in rapid succession, Clive Owen has somehow become something like the spokesperson for this new genre that I am calling the globalization thriller, beating out the prettier but less articulate Daniel Craig, who only has the two Bond films to his globo-thriller credit, unless you count his not-so-memorable role in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. Perhaps it’s Clive’s clever-sounding British accent, or maybe it’s his permanent, five-o’clock-shadow scruffiness that seems to vaguely symbolize the shadowy ”new world order” of globalization, as if globalization must be represented by a character who is simultaneously civilized (in that imperialistic British way) and scruffy (also in that imperialistic British way — since empire building is never actually that civilized and is always actually brutally chaotic and… ruggedly unshaven.)

My question is this: how to analyze this movie? (And I guess I ask this question because apparently I’m obsessed with globalization thrillers and maybe should write a book on the subject… if only I had the time… or were even more obsessed than I pretend to be.) On the one hand, we can analyze it the way we were taught to analyze poems in high school — to find the meaning. So…

… even though the story is told in a disjointed, deliberately confusing way, the plot is actually straightforward. An American CIA agent (Julia Roberts) and a British MI6 agent (Clive Owen) decide to leave their government jobs and become spies for rival cosmetics corporations. The metaphorical/allegorical concept of the movie is obvious but nevertheless well conceived and artfully done. Like an earlier movie starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the spy world is a metaphor for their romantic relationship… or, maybe their romantic relationship is a metaphor for the spy world. It’s hard to tell which is the metaphor and which is the meaning, but in any case, the directors take considerable effort to make one express the other — to make the standard conventional plot structures of the romantic comedy parallel the standard conventional plot structures of the spy thriller.

So, the two lovers/spies find it hard to trust each other, because… uh… you know…  they are spies/lovers, and everyone knows what lovers/spies/spies/lovers are like, especially when one is a metaphor for the other….

Hold on, I’m confusing myself.

Uh… did I mention that they don’t trust each other?… And did I mention that, despite their lack of trust, or perhaps precisely because of it, they have secretly teamed up (because they are secret agents, after all… and secret lovers) to steal the new secret cosmetic formula and sell it on the global market and become rich, rich, rich, to live out their days in secret-lover-agent bliss in one of those gorgeous global locations…. Where exactly? The particular location hardly matters, as over the course of the movie, they are doing their secret-agent-lover business in posh-picture-postcard locations such as Rome, Miami, The Bajamas, New York, and Zurich. And any one cosmetically beautiful (pun intended) location could be substituted for any other cosmetically beautiful location in the genre of the global thriller, so long as there is something cosmetically classic like Italian architecture and/or something decadent and unshaven (metaphorically speaking) like endless white beaches, cosmopolitan martinis, and high stakes gambling.

Spoiler Alert: as it turns out, in the end, they learn to trust each other because they discover they really are in love (awwww), and AND AND, they learn that love is all they need, just as the Beatles promised us, which they learn when they find themselves suddenly poor… duped by they very same corporation they sought to dupe. And we learn that there never was any secret cosmetic formula for curing baldness, because apparently that symbol for male virility (a lion’s mane of Sampsonite hair) isn’t necessary when what you really value is at home, waiting for you (awwww.)

So, the moral of the story is that the Beatles were right, all we need is love… lesson learned. This is the allegory… yawn.

But, on the other hand, isn’t it more interesting to read this movie metonymically (instead of metaphorically) — to chase the chain of signifiers across the cultural landscape of the postmodern twenty-first century? Isn’t the more interesting question, why now? Why at this precise moment in the spring of 2009 is Hollywood giving us this movie about spies for multinational corporations? Okay, admittedly, the answer to this may be all too obvious, given that we’re all experiencing the economic recession and given that we’re all hearing global corporate scandal after global corporate scandal on the news. Why else would the script writers include a lengthy monologue by the CEO explaining how human nature may have gone into genetic recession (pun intended), but the multinational corporation has taken mankind’s place in the evolutionary order… no longer are individual genius and moral fortitude the seats of invention; rather groups of human beings incorporating themselves are…?… Gag, OK, I admit it, maybe the metonymic reading isn’t so muy interesante either. 

Perhaps the really interesting thing to do here is put the metaphorical reading in conversation with the metonymic reading… a conversation we might call a dialectic if we want to sound real fancy-pantys. After all, according to Jacques Lacan, we create metaphors to explain our existence, and we chase metonymies to fill in our lack, our feeling of void.

Damn, I’m confusing myself again…. No, wait… here it goes, I can do this.

What does the lover/spy metaphor have to do with the metonymic context of global capitalism and its void? What indeed? The very lesson that the romantic story distracts us from is that at the end of the day, the cosmetic company actually had no real product. (It is a cosmetic company, after all, get it?) And apparently, even though real corporations are supposed to be built on “trust” (both in the moral sense and in the banking sense of the word), this one is built on “duplicity.” It spent millions of dollars spinning the simulation (or simulacrum, if we want to sound fancy-pantsy in a postmodernist sort of way) of its economic potential, all the while trying to outwit the other company. And at the end of the day, what they actually had… and what we in the audience are left with is… nothing… nothing but the love between Julia Roberts and Clive Owens… and really, not even that, because all we really have is the image of that love, and a group of capitalist conspirators chuckling voyeristically (like the movie’s audience itself) at a clandestine videotape of Roberts and Owen lovingly play-acting their duplicity on their cheap futon mattress on the floor of a decrepit apartment.

More Globalization Cinema: The International

Those of you poor saps who read my blog regularly may remember back last November when I wrote about “Globalization Theory in the New James Bond film Quantum of Solace.” What I noticed there is that the new Bond was different from the old Bond because the way people today conceptualize the world has changed. But the new Bond is certainly not unique, as so many films today seem to be responding to a vaguely understood economic and social phenomenon popularly known as globalization.  For example, consider the last year’s versions of The Incredible Hulk and Iron Man, in which the superheros find themselves in the ghettos of Brazile and the mountains of Afghanistan fighting againt a globalized, corporate military industrial complex. This isn’t the kind of superhero movie I grew up with; something  out there has obviously changed. But what?

And of course, many university instructors are now teaching classes about globalization through such films as Dirty Pretty Things, Babel, Lord of War, Blood Diamond, Syriana, and Children of Men. There is even a new guide book on The Cinema of Globalization. Hollywood seems to be reading the journalism of Thomas Friedman and Naomi Klein about globalization, as well as such sensationalistic memoirs as Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, if not also the academic theories about globalization such as Saskia Sassen’s Globalization and Its Discontents and Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s Empire.

So, of course, I couldn’t resist going to see the new movie starring Clive Owen and Naomi Watts, The International, about a multinational bank that attempts to buy and sell missiles and manipulate the economy of war. I wanted to see if it would do what I predicted in my blog on Bond that all suspense thrillers about globalization would do…. and lo! It did.

Thing one: in the new suspense thriller, the evil organization is always part of a network of legimitimate and illigitimate organizations. This is what globalization theorists tend to call the “network” form. So, no longer is the good guy agent operating on behalf of a national government opposed to a nefarious crime syndicate. Now, the nation state is unwittingly part of a larger global network of legal and illegal activities that crisscross national borders. And in The International, Clive Owen’s character, Interpol agent Louis Salinger travels around the world to prove the nefarious deeds of this bank (just as all suspense thriller characters jump around the world so easily these days, as if they were Hayden Christiansen’s character in Jumper.) As he does so, he discovers how difficult it will ever be to prosecute this bank on acount of how enmeshed its nefarious deeds are in the global network. Of course, whereas in the real world this network is a complex chaotic mess, in the cinematic world the dark side of the network is personified. In this case, it is the evil banker, and the movie is obviously capitalizing (pun intended) on recent popular frustration with the many banking scandals. While banks collapse due to corrupt practices and governments scramble to bail them out, ordinary people lose jobs and starve. So, it’s certainly not the least bit surprising that a movie about an evil bank would appear in theaters at this particular moment in history.

Thing two: as Negri and Hardt argue in Empire, there is no longer anything outside Empire. What they mean by this is that in the old days, individual nation states had imperial ambitions to control more and more territory and competed with each other, but much of that territory remained outside their direct influence. Today, however, although nation states and smaller tribal communities still exist, they are all part of a single socio-economic structure that Negri and Hardt call Empire. So, in The International, banks and arms dealers are selling weapons to both sides of any political conflict. It doesn’t matter which political side of the fence you are on. It’s all part of the same global economy.

Thing three: in contrast to yesterday’s way of looking at international relations, or relations between nations, in today’s way of looking at things we analyze the relation of the local to the global, as in the environmentalist slogan, think globallay, act locally. Clearly the global economy transforms local cultures, often turning those cultures into commodities that can be sold. This dialectic between the global and the local has been called by theorists glocalisation. And in The International, local political conflicts proliferate in the background as effects of the evil multinatinal bank’s effort to benefit from the arms trade.

Thing four: because there is no longer an outside to Empire, the moral dilemma of global suspense thrillers is how can the good guy confront an evil that is part of the very same system (or network of relations) as the good guy. As the movie tells us, how can we go after a multinational bank that is protected by the very system of justice that would prosecute it? And how can an Interpol agent do any good “lost in the complexities of international law?” Of course, as with the new James Bond, the agent can either abide by the principles of law and order or can forego those principles and become a rogue agent. But, unlike the fantasy world of Bond, Clive Owen in The International finds he can’t operate outside the system. So, following one of the many fortune cookie maxims that saturate the dialogue of the movie, he realizes that when there is no way out, he must go further in.

Thing five: part of this opposition between a supposedly ineffective international law and the undulating, extra-legal, network form of global relations is an opposition we see in globalization theory. Some globalization theorists argue for the importance for international law, regulation, and transparency for preventing corporate abuses and war. Others argue that the legal system only protects the most egregious forms of economic exploitation, and instead values the multitude that resists such exploitation through its extra-legal connectivity. And indeed, in The International, the good guys are always circumventing protocols and resisting the evil bankers because of personal bonds — what Negri and Hardt call “affect.”

Reading Slumdog Millionaire

The movie Slumdog Millionaire has already won numerous awards including Golden Globe’s best picture and best director, and it has been nominated for ten Academy awards. The movie is essentially a fairy-tale rags-to-riches story about Jamal and Latika, a poor boy and girl in Mumbai, India who are finally able to be together after he beats all odds to win the “Who Wants To Be a Millionaire” show. The narrative trick of the movie is that he tells the story of his life to a police officer, who suspects him of cheating, in order to demonstrate how he knew the answers to the triva questions. Each question corresponds to a significant moment in his life. Hence, in the process of telling a story of an alternative to poverty, the movie also suggests an alternative epistemology — or way of knowing the world — that romantically evokes the fundamental equality of all humankind. Even a poor, ignorant “slumdog” can know things. What I think is stylistically interesting is how the movie in many ways resembles the kind of fairy-tale plot typical of the “Bollywood” Indian films (alluded to in the final scene), but it is shot in the hyperrealistic style now popular in London and Hollwyood cinema.

Though the movie has been almost unanimously praised by American and European reviewers, it has provoked angry protests in the country it purports to be about. NPR radio recently asked how people in India would receive a movie set in India, starring Indians, but made by an Irishman from England, Danny Boyle. Some of the Indians interviewed are glad that Indian cinema is finally receiving the attention it deserves, others are angry that western media always repeats stereotypes of Indian poverty, and still others assert that poverty is an issue that ought to be addressed in India as well as in the West. (No comparison is made to Wes Anderson’s Darjeeling Limited, which came out the year before and is also set in India, but perhaps this is because Anderson’s movie has nothing “Indian” in it, and is so self-consciously absurd that it might as well have been set in any exotically foreign space – Brazil, Congo, Mars, whatever.)

The question NPR raises in turn raises some important questions about the relation between readers and a text — a relation that I have blogged about earlier here in a post about a Japanese comedy skit that was more popular outside of Japan than inside it, and also here in a post about the politics of rock and roll. Explicit in NPR’s question is the issue of representation, and how a single representation may mean different things to different people depending on the context, as the theorist Stanley Fish argues. Implicit in its question is the historical relation of power and how power can be exercized through media representations, as Michel Foucault suggests. India was once a colony of England and is now still greatly affected and perhaps even partially controlled (in a neocolonial way) by British and U.S. corporate agendas. In other words, to put it oversimply, it’s clearly not the same thing when an Indian movie represents poverty in India and when India’s former colonizer represents poverty in India, and the reason it’s not the same is precisely because of the disparity in power between the Anglo-American film industry and the various audiences. This disparity in power is not necessarily a problem for all movies made by a Brit about its former colony, but Slumdog Millionaire practically ignores this centuries-old relation. In it, we see how Mumbai has changed over the course of Jamal’s life presumably because of globalization – and we see that this change creates both wealth and poverty – but the movie in no way tries to understand why or how . . . or even what is going on.

However, none of this really explains why Americans and Europeans love this movie so much, why some in India hate it, and why some reviewers can so blatantly contradict themselves by claiming simultaneously that the movie is a fairy-tale and that it truly represents life in India without even noticing that they are contradicting themselves. How can it be both a fairy-tale fantasy and a realistic portrait of India at the same time? And for me, this contradiction is a far more interesting question than the question NPR raises about the different reactions in India. Instead of focusing on how they-over-there appreciate the movie, why doesn’t NPR follow Slate.com’s example here and analyze how we-over-here do?

To answer this question about the obvious contradictions manifest in how it has been appreciated, I suggest that the reason why the movie is so successful and so troubling at the same time is its style — its synthesis of gritty, hyperrealism with romantic fantasy. The result is an uncanny eroticization of poverty (as an article in The Guardian points out here) that is likely to be offensive to some precisely because they suspect that it is romantic and titilating to others.

So, returning to the question of the relation between readers and text — a relation we call interpretation — I want to emphasize that it would be wrong to claim that Indians see the movie one way and Americans another because of differences in Indian and American culture. This is clearly false, since people everywhere have read the movie in so many different ways, and this is not what Stanley Fish meant by “interpretive communities.” Rather, what is meant is the reading of the film is partially determined by the context of the act of reading, not the life or background of the reader.  What is involved in this particular act of reading is, of course, an intuition about what the movie means not only to oneself but also to others — an intuition informed not by singular cultural identities but by a history of political relations.

“Choosing” to be a Single Mother

The topics for this week are “agency” and “representation,” and in our class we are exploring these two related topics by considering the issue of “single motherhood.” For this post, I’d like to discuss how recent movies have “represented” the “agency” of single mothers. Perhaps not since the movie Striptease (1996), starring Demi Moore as a woman struggling to make ends meet and fighting for custody of her child against her abusive, alcoholic, and criminal ex-husband, has Hollywood so strongly affirmed the rights of single mothers against social stigma and economic hardship. Many films, from North Country (2005) to The Perfect Holiday (2007) and TV series such as Gilmore Girls and Weeds are about the difficulty of working and raising children at the same time. But for the year 2007, Hollywood gave us not just one but three movies that explored the choices of an unwed woman who discovers herself to be pregnant: Knocked-Up, Waitress, and Juno.

The two questions that all three of these movies explicitly raise are (1) what choices are available to a woman in her first trimester of pregnancy, and (2) why choose to become a single mother. In addition, considering that we began this class with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter (1850), how might we re-read that classic novel in the context of twenty-first century feminist debates about single motherhood?

But before I start talking about the three movies, a little context. You may be too young to remember this, but back in the late 1980s, Vice President Dan Quayle famously railed against single mothers as a force of evil in American society, and a bit later, Bush and Clinton proceeded to pass laws — “reforms” — that made life more difficult for working single mothers. However, something has changed since then. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the percentage of single-parent families today is more than double what it was in 1970, and 32% of all births in 1998 were to unmarried women. As a result of this demographic shift, the representation of single mothers by popular media, politicians, and corporate advertising has also shifted from negative stigma to positive stigma as the business community (e.g., Wal-Mart) has begun to see single mothers not only as a large consumer niche but also as valued employees. Politicians likewise now see single mothers as a formidable constituency. However, although positive stigma is certainly better than negative, both popular representations and the legal system continue to favor heroic individuals and the nuclear family rather than the extended families and networks of support upon which most single parents — and many married parents — rely. These two different models of the family are precisely the topic of Jane Juffer’s book Single Mother. And although mainstream media appears more permissive about a woman’s sexual choices and about the possibility of raising a family without a father, the conservative Heritage Foundation last year published its “data” that single mothers and their children are less likely to succeed.

Back to the movies. I was trying to think of how to talk about all three, and here is what I came up with. All three of the movies this year are fairy-tale fantasies, and I don’t call them that to criticize or dismiss them. That’s what they are — self-consciously so — and that is what we enjoy about them. The logic behind all fairy-tale narratives is that they offer something like an escape-hatch that allows us to avoid dealing with the reality of difficult choices by indulging our fantasies. The question I want to ask is whether these narratological escape hatches merely side-step the dilemmas of single-motherhood, or whether they turn on themselves and force the audience to notice the difference between fantasy and reality, or whether the fantasy actually offers some kind of utopian ideal for how we might reform things. So, that’s my question . . . how to answer . . .

I’ll start with Knocked Up, since it came out first and since it is the most sexist of the three. (Even its own star Katherine Heigl has publicly said so.) Heigl plays Alison, a beautiful, charming, successful, ambitious journalist in the entertainment industry who finds herself pregnant after getting drunk and sleeping with the epitome of loserdom — an unattractive, unemployed, pot-smoking, illegal immigrant from Canada whose friends are creating a website devoted to when their favorite movie stars appear naked.

What’s “sexist” about this movie is how little time it spends on the difficult choices Alison can make. Inexplicably, Alison has not a single friend except for her sister with whom to discuss her options. The word “abortion” is never spoken, and only the joke “sounds like smashsmortion” made by one of Ben’s stoner friends draws attention to how her choices may be getting censored by a film industry fearful of the religious right. Instead, the movie shifts emphasis from the very serious issue of what to do about being pregnant to the far less serious issue of whether Alison and Ben can fall in love. This is, of course, not surprising since it is a “romantic comedy” and is supposed to celebrate the magic of romantic love against all odds, but in this case, the “romance” is perhaps even more absurdly improbable than the genre’s usual fair. There is no way Alison would fall in love with Ben, and who among the movie’s audience would want them to? The movie has tricked us. We walked into the theater thinking we were going to see a “chick flick” but instead we got a loser-geek-boy fantasy. It is this improbable romantic plot which is the “escape hatch” for the film makers, allowing them (and us) to avoid the difficult choices women face in the real world, but its absurdity turns on itself, exposing the plot’s artificiality and hence encouraging the audience to entertain themselves with other, more probable scenarios.

Waitress is about Jenna, played by Kerri Russel, who is a genius at making pies but is married to a controlling jerk of a husband who won’t even let her drive a car or manage the money she makes as a waitress. Both the nature of their marriage and the cutsie style of the movie remind us of the 1950s, except that Jenna’s gynecologist drives a Lexus. Since Jenna’s biggest challenge is her financial situation, she plans to win a pie contest and leave her husband, but like Alison in Knocked Up, she instead finds herself pregnant after one drunken evening with her husband.

What the writer-director and actors all claim is “special” about this movie in the “special features” of the DVD is that it actually shows us a married woman who is depressed about being pregnant. (This is apparently the movie’s “truth value.”) As with Knocked Up, we are wondering why the movie can’t even say the word abortion, considering that Jenna clearly does not want to have a baby, but this is a romantic comedy, so the plot has to move on. And so it does; she soon begins a love-affair with her married gynecologist, and the fairy-tale style of the movie teases us with the possibility that he could be the knight on the white horse. But no. After she gives birth and leaves her husband, she then discovers that her sympathetic and aging boss has given her a check for an enormous sum of money right before he slipped into a coma — all of this happening on one day.

The sudden appearance of this money is the deus ex machina of the fairy-tale, the escape hatch for the movie, since it enables Jenna to buy the café where she works, become a self-sufficient single mother, and live happily ever after in more brightly colored clothes. The check stands in for the financial assistance that the vast majority of single mothers do not ever receive though perhaps justly deserve considering the important affective labor they perform. And here, the check symbolizes the “exchange value” of Jenna’s affective labor, since the reason her boss gives it to her is because Jenna has a special, ineffable quality (so he says), a quality symbolized by her pies which always seem to embody her mood. In other words, she makes the old guy happy because of this special, un-namable quality, and hence, it’s hard for the audience not to understand this quality in terms of Kerri Russel’s good looks and impending motherhood.

Finally, Juno, which ought to win the Academy Award for best screenplay, is about a 16-year old girl, named after the Greek goddess of mothers, who gets pregnant after experimenting with her lovably geeky friend. Unlike the other two movies, Juno actually plans to go to a clinic and have the abortion. Inexplicably, she goes to the clinic alone, and so, without the moral support of her friend, she has a moral panic attack and decides instead to find a “cool couple” who can adopt it. She finds the perfect, beautiful and financially well-off couple. And both to Juno and to the audience for most of the movie, the husband seems cool — an ex-indie-rocker — whereas the wife seems to epitomize the uncool, bourgois woman. But the movie has deliberately deceived us. Suddenly, when Juno is eight months pregnant, the husband confesses he wants to leave his wife, almost makes a play for Juno, and lo and behold, his man-boy nature is revealed. A distraught Juno finds solidarity with the wife, leaving her the note “if you’re still in, I’m still in.” And so, in a twenty-first century plot-twist, Juno gives her baby to a woman who has become (over the course of the 9 months of the story) a single mother.

What is the escape hatch in Juno? There are two. The obvious one is that the single mother is the almost impossibly perfect woman — wealthy, smart, beautiful, and terrific with children. She’s played by Jennifer Garner, an apt casting choice, because she is, after all, a superhero (in Elektra and Daredevil), and we in the audience naturally feel comfortable with a superhero single mother, especially one who seems also to have a social life (unlike Alison in Knocked Up) and has a demonstrated a genuine love and talent for raising children. The less obvious escape hatch is not so much narratological as it is stylistic — Juno’s improbable wit. Many have criticized the movie for being unrealistic in that regard, but criticizing Juno for being unrealistically witty for a 16-year old is like criticizing Shakespeare’s characters for being unrealistically eloquent, and Juno’s wit is what we love about the movie. It is also the escape-hatch that allow us to avoid the dilemmas. For instance, when the lawyer offers to explain to Juno her legal rights as the biological mother, Juno brushes her off with the line, “Can’t we just kick this old school?” And then she adds, like Moses . . .  . Now, does anyone really want our society to go back to the time of Moses? Unlike the escape hatches for Knocked Up and Waitress, those in Juno do not turn on themselves to reveal their absurdity. Instead, we leave the theater giddy and happy and wanting to see the film again. We don’t care that this movie is anything but realistic.

In terms of the politics of single motherhood, Waitress and Juno are obviously progressive (despite complaints from the pro-choice position) and Knocked Up obviously conservative. But beyond the all too obvious politics of these movies, there is the fairy-tale escape hatch that offers us something not only more fun but also more dynamic and full of possibility. In terms of questions about “agency” and “representation,” movies are complex and — in my view — can not be pinned down by terms such as “conservative” or “progressive.” Instead, we notice how the fairy-tale excape hatches do two contradtictory things at the same time: avoid reality and critique reality.

The 60s, I’m Not There

On New Year’s Day, with some friends, I saw the movie I’m Not There, a kaleidoscopic rendering of Bob Dylan’s life 1965-66, when Dylan famously shocked the folk music scene by adding the electric guitar and by distancing himself from the protest movement. This event is surrealistically symbolized in the movie by Dylan’s band firing machine guns into the audience. Not being myself a devotee of Bob Dylan (I possess only the Highway 61 album, which I enjoy mostly because of the whistles and pithy paraphrase of Genesis 22 on the title track), I know I am incapable of saying anything about Dylan that wouldn’t provoke genuine fans and more knowledgeable music historians to laugh at me scornfully.

Instead, I want to appreciate what I take the movie to be implying about how we today relate to the iconic 60s. Now, it is 2008, a year that — despite all of Barack Obama’s wonderfully inspiring speeches — feels rather hopeless (war, recession, etc.). When the word “change” is THE word on every presidential candidate’s lips, it’s hard NOT to cynically suspect that real change is precisely what will NOT be happening anytime soon.

But it is also tempting to compare and contrast today with the 60s, a decade that has come to symbolize change. And few media pundits have resisted this temptation. Isn’t the Iraq war the new Vietnam? Isn’t Obama the new Kennedy? But at the same time, the now aging ”New-Left” activists have repeatedly complained, “the kids today are so gosh-darn apathetic and ignorant. . . not like we were in the 60s.” Over the past few years, I have been to anti-war protests, have read the syllabi for college courses, and have even attended school assemblies that all nostalgically refer back to the 60s as that decade when students really changed things, when music was meaningful. And likewise, the social sciences and humanities departments at universities are still dominated by theory that blossomed in the 60s (e.g., Lacan, Foucault, Bourdieu, Derrida, Habermas, etc.) Once at an anti-war rally, after a droopy group-sing of “Where have all the flower’s gone”, somebody actually said to me, “how come there’s no good political music being written today?” And later, on a list-serve for “radical” literature professors, when a query was posted for examples of “political” literature, almost all of the responses were about 60s anti-Vietnam prose and poetry. And I wouldn’t be surprised to hear someone say, “how come there’s no good theory being written today?”

And sometimes I feel almost guilty reminding these people that most of the music in the 60s was about insipid puppy love between boys and girls or about how little they knew of science books and the French they took. More to the point, a lot of the music — as well as the political activism and theory — in the 1990s (from Nirvana to Mos Def) is perhaps even more politically sophisticated and gutsy than “The Times They are a-Changin.”

But let’s get back to the movie, I’m Not There. One of the important early scenes is a young Bob Dylan (portrayed by a black child actor) in the 1950s playing songs about the struggle to unionize the railroad, and an old black woman says to him, “Didn’t they unionize a long time ago? Before you were even born? You need to play songs about your own time, child.” And so, just as we today romanticize the 60s as the decade of change, back in the 60s the young folk singers were romanticizing the 1910s, 20s, and 30s as the decades of change. And for damn good reason. A lot happened then: women’s right to vote, 40 hour week, overtime pay, legal protections for unions, the end of child labor, not to mention most of the groundwork for civil rights… and that’s just what was happening in the United States. Instead of seeing the 60s as the beginning of change, we could see it as the end, culminating in the failure to pass the ERA in 1972 at the same time that rock music became more about hedonistic pleasure-seeking than about anything else.

The movie focuses intensely on Dylan’s despairing revelation that things are more complicated and difficult than the folk scene was able to articulate — that “change” did not usually go the way the changers thought it would go — but I left the theater not with a feeling of despair or hopelessness about Dylan in 1965 or about us in 2008, but instead with an oddly hopefull feeling that we can and ought to reinvent the music, the theory, and the spirit of protest and social justice. In other words, the 60s is dead; long live the 60s.