The Imagination Is Not Our Escape

Six Degrees of Separation has been haunting my thoughts since I showed it in a disability studies class I'm teaching about alliances and advocacy involving people with and without disabilities.  I wrote a post about the movie a few weeks ago ("Just Fill in the Names"), but now I've read the papers the students in the class wrote about the movie, and I feel inspired.  While not explicitly about disability, Six Degrees focuses on the complicated and emotional relationships forged when people from completely separate cultural and socioeconomic worlds decide to make an alliance.  It's rough stuff.  In the movie, Paul (Will Smith), the African American, gay, homeless kid starving for upscale approval and connection, and Ouisa (Stockard Channing), the rich socialite who loves him and sees his worth despite the circumstances of their meeting, represent two forces coming together and changing one another in ways they could never have foreseen before their collision.  It's life-changing, for everyone involved.

Here's what some of the students wrote:

From Shelby Stanovsek:

"The main character in this film, Ouisa, works for justice because she is willing to look outside of the boundaries and lines that her class of people creates and is willing to accept someone who was not born into a life of privilege...  In the film it is evident that she has developed a deep emotional bond with Paul, and is proud of the work he has done to better himself.  She does not feel he should be punished for lying about his identity because she knows that had he not constructed a fake story to get into their lives, they never would have allowed him the chance, and I think that she admires his bravery and commitment in that regard."

From Hannah Hampton:

"Regardless of the way Paul has taken advantage of them, they still agree to help him.  This is a true portrayal of an ally -- they overlook Paul's flaws and realize he is just a boy who needs help."

From Caitlin Coholich:

"Six Degrees tells the story of how easily alliances can be made; however it also shows how easily they can vanish."

From Jennifer McMillan:

"Ouisa doesn't fully transcend the boundaries of her upper-class lifestyle until the very end of the movie when she ultimately and fully rejects the society and the imagination-starved life she had been living.  The fact like Paul was black and homeless is perhaps what kept the alliance between Paul and Ouisa alive for as long as it was.  He was the opposite of what she symbolized, and this enabled her to enter an opposite world by connecting to him.  Ouisa was a controlled person before she met Paul.  Paul completely turned Ouisa's life into chaos.  However, chaos is not always a negative experience.  What comes from chaos is often a rebirth, an invigoration."

From Tori Evans:

"Paul stated in the movie, 'The imagination is not our escape.  On the contrary, the imagination is the place we are all trying to get to.'  He wanted people to expand their stereotypes and prejudices and see others not for their color, sexuality or class."

Just Fill in the Names

I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet. The President of the United States, a gondolier in Venice, just fill in the names. I find it A) extremely comforting that we're so close, and B) like Chinese water torture that we're so close because you have to find the right six people to make the right connection... I am bound to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people. 

Ouisa Kittredge in Six Degree of Separation, a play and screenplay written by John Guare



I've blogged a few other times about the Disabilities Studies class I'm teaching this semester at Miami U.  It's titled, "(Dis)Ability Allies:  Making It Work," and basically we've been trying as a class to figure out how authentic, effective, meaningful relationships among people with and without disabilities happen, and once we figure out how they happen -- how we can ensure these alliances provide ways to address social injustices, including decolonizing people who have often been relegated to institutions, both logistical and cultural.  

In trying to come up with unique and fresh texts to talk about along those lines, I remembered a movie that came out almost 20 years ago that is completely about how human relationships can change the course of people's lives irrevocably, and how hard and gut-wrenching that process is.  Six Degrees of Separation, written by John Guare and directed by Fred Schepisi, tells the true story of a homeless, gay, African American man who conned his way into the homes of the upper-classes in New York City during the early 80s by claiming he was the son of Sidney Poitier.  The story centers around that man, named Paul, and one of the people he connected with, Ouisa Kittredge, the wife of an art-dealer with children at Harvard and Groton.  Ouisa, in the film, is played by Stockard Channing, and Paul by Will Smith.  Paul and Ouisa make an alliance despite the fractured, fraudulent way they meet, and through the course of the film that connection pulls Ouisa away from her comfortable life of nights at the opera, upscale fundraisers, and champagne luncheons.  She actually feels a maternal impulse toward Paul, and Paul finds succoring shelter in her presence. 

They make an odd, and oddly poignant couple, and as Ouisa realizes that she may have more in common with Paul than she does her own children, husband and society, she starts to disconnect from that world.  Finally, in a penultimate scene, during a stylish brunch peopled with the cream of the crop of Manhattan culture, Ouisa loses it.  By this time, Paul has been found and arrested and he has disappeared into the prison system.  By this time, as well, Flan, Ouisa's husband, has used the Story of Paul as a way to aggrandize himself and his status; their relationship with Paul is now a piece in the New York Times about how the Kittredges were bamboozled because they were so kind and openhearted and gullible. 

Ouisa wants to correct this narrative.  She has made an authentic alliance with someone so alien to her existence she does not want him to become an anecdote.  At that elegant starchy affair Ouisa tells the crowd that she loves Paul.  It shocks the room.  She ends up stomping off, eventually separating not only from her husband, but from the world they have always occupied together.  Her connection to Paul is both freeing and terrifying, in that it rips away the restraints and manners of charity and replaces it with actual empathy, a state of grace that does not allow for sentimentality.

That alliance between Paul and Ouisa never comes to full fruition in the movie.  In fact, it is thwarted.  But that's not important.  Ouisa's desire to go beyond charity, as the privileged person in the relationship, is what the movie is about, and what possibly will spur her on to make changes in her own, and in other people's lives that have meaningful ramifications.  It takes someone who has power and connections and resources to help people like Paul break out of the colonization that has always kept people like Ouisa and Flan feeling safe and secure.  Ouisa abdicates her power in order to love Paul.  In other words, being an ally to people normally shut out of the conversation (people with disabilities included) is not a touchy-feely exercise.  It is often about sacrifices you never intended to make, but have to in order to stay sane.

Here are the questions I asked the class to answer in order to draft a short paper...

How does the film deal with alliance issues?


• Hostility & rejection leveled at ally by majority: 

• Stigmatized by association with marginalized

• Dismissed by majority for giving up privilege



How does, or does not, the main character:

• Work for justice?

• Work with passion?

• Seek immediate change?

• Work to effect long term change?


How do Class and Race factor into making, and sustaining, alliances in the film?

I'll be reading their papers this weekend and will share some of what they've written here on the blog soon...

Say Goodbye

I watched The Blind Side last night on pay-per-view. It's one of those movies I wanted to see just because of its zeitgeist purity, but also dreaded seeing because of the zeitgeist subject matter: Southern upper-middle-class white family "saves" a homeless African American high school football player from the ghetto. Based on a true story no less.

But The Blind Side blindsided me. It has a big-hearted tenacity to it, and while it is completely sentimental, the sentimentality is rooted in the excitement caused by being a do-gooder even when no one asks you to. In fact, it's the last thing most people want you to do. This seems to be the drug Bullock's Leigh Anne Tuohy is on: she really digs doing the right thing especially when it mystifies and even pisses off her family and friends. Her altruism has a shock value she enjoys, and Bullock allows that renegade spirit to shine through the right-wing polish and make-up.

Bullock's stubbornness gives The Blind Side its grit. But Quinton Aaron's performance as Big Mike gives the movie its gravity. He emboldens the orphaned left-tackle with a spirit that flickers with tenderness and fury. He is comically scary at times in the movie -- pushing little girls in their swings on the Christian school playground kind of like Frankenstein -- but then there's the scene where he washes his t-shirt out in a laundromat sink and then sticks it in a dryer and sits, contemplating the quiet and the loneliness, but also somehow savoring it all too. Aaron's triumph is that he suffuses each of his scenes with that quiet, self-taught fierceness, and he produces not just a pathetic sweet figure, but a true hero.

The movie coalesces around what "heroism" is actually: Leigh Anne Tuohy's stubborn allegiance to her true feelings of generosity and kindness, and Michael Ohler's stubborn resourcefulness and intense need to succeed, even though he does not know exactly what that "success" means. Both characters' heroic natures come from their "outsiderness." That's the movie's structure: Big Mike, the ultimate outsider, in taken into the fold, but in the process Leigh Anne Tuohy begins to understand what it means to be "outside" of her own privilege and class. The journey she's taking is pretty cushy of course, and it pales in comparison to the strife and struggle involved in Big Mike's transformation from homeless orphan to college student to pro-football recruit, but still the plot of The Blind Side pivots on the connection the two of them make, and the benefits of being outside of what's normal in order to eventually find a way to be sane.

This narrative of the insider becoming the outsider in order to allow the outsider in is a direct descendant of the plot to a movie that came down the pike in 1994. Also based on a true story, and a play before it was turned into a film by Fred Schepisi and playwright John Guare, Six Degrees of Separation stars Stockard Channing as Louisa Kittregde, a Manhattan socialite who is conned by Will Smith's Paul, an African American homeless gay man who craves insider status so bad he feigns injury and risks everything to become a part of Louisa's elegant, elite universe.

Will Smith's performance in Six Degrees is both vulnerable and vengeful; a beautiful blend of resentment, envy and love registers in just about every move he makes, and those moves in turn are watched by Louisa with an intense interest and yearning. Stockard Channing's Louisa, like Bullock's Leigh Anne, is a stylish, head-strong dame who stumbles upon a new identity, and new meaning, by empathizing with someone totally outside of her realm. It's an act of imagination really, a creative exercise in which Louisa re-creates herself by finding Paul's desire within herself.

The denouement of Six Degrees occurs when Paul finally pulls one con too many and becomes a criminal outcast sought by the cops. Louisa still cannot give up on him. Like Leigh Anne Tuohy's desire to adopt Michael, Louisa must save Paul; unlike Leigh Anne she can't because the stakes are too high, and Paul is too much of an outsider to pull into her world in one piece. This creates a tragic but cathartic ending, in which Louisa is at a luncheon with her high-society tribe, and everyone is asking her to "tell the story about that boy," that really entertaining anecdote about how she and her husband almost had their throats slashed, etc. Everyone at the luncheon table stares at Louisa, wanting all the juicy details without any of the reality or meaning or cost.

Finally Louisa breaks down and turns into a prophet, wondering outloud if Paul, who was taken into custody weeks before and absorbed into the system, has killed himself, and if "the anecdote" they all want will be the only thing left of him. She lets them know how "paltry" all their lives are, and yet that was all Paul yearned for: to be like them, to live like them. At the very end of the movie she can no longer stand her own superficiality. She breaks away both from her society and her husband. She is an outsider walking the city streets.

"Outsiderness" is a concept that gets overused. You know it has become a cliche, of course, when Sarah Palin rallies the troops around it. In the world of art and art-making, it has become an even bigger cliche, a way to type and often disregard artists who don't have a pedigree or a status significant enough to allow them in. What both these movies tell us about "outsiderness" is that the outsider truly is not the main entity that needs to be "helped." Both Leigh Anne Tuohy and Louisa Kittredge are upper-class ladies who have to realize how meaningless their lives are in order to live the lives they need to. Michael and Paul, the outsiders they come across who cause their epiphanies, are survivors; they need a roof over their heads and they need someone to stick up for them, but it is obvious they have strength far beyond their predicaments. Louisa and Leigh Anne need to connect with that strength in order to shake themselves out of their complacency.

So "outsiderness" is not about the outsider. It's about the insider mainly, and how that status must always be questioned and reinvented. The grandaddy of the concept of "outsider art," Jean Dubuffet writes, "Unless one says goodbye to what one loves, and unless one travels to completely new territories, one can expect merely a long wearing away of oneself and an eventual extinction.”

"Outsider art" as a concept often ossifies into a trope: untrained people making untrained art. Isn't that nice? But in actuality "outsider art" and the idea of "outsiderness" is about how training and tradition and insularity often lead to extinction. An infusion of what is uncomfortable, what is true, always has to make an appearance.

In The Blind Side there's a wonderful moment when the Tuohy's are having their Christmas card picture taken. Leigh Anne asks Michael to join the photo session. His presence in the family portrait is both jarring and sincere. Leigh Anne is "outing" the whole family as a group of people unsatisfied with who they are, and willing to let the stranger share center-stage. That strangeness becomes the way out of themselves.