White Trash Baroque

Paul Dano plays a man with developmental disabilities in Prisoners, a thriller that came out this fall, and at first look the performance seems like prototypical caricature.  Silent, blank-faced and pathetic, Dano's Alex Jones skulks through his scenes as a predator who does not seem to understand his own debauched status, or sins.  He just is what he is:  pure nameless feeble-minded evil.  But the movie, and Dano, do not allow us a lot of comfort in our judgment of Alex as that sort of freak.  In fact, by the end of the movie, no one is exactly who they and we think they are, and yet nothing really has changed. 

Ostensibly, the movie is about two little girls being abducted on Thanksgiving in a suburban working-class neighborhood in Pennsylvania.  There's a rainy, grim fairy-tale focus from the start, and the director, Denis Villeneuve, has a beautiful fetish for grit and pallor.  The center of his focus is a beaten-up RV that seems to absorb the two girls.  Next up is the frantic chase to find them, headed by Jake Gyllenhaal as a police detective who is enjoying a solitary Thanksgiving feast at a local Chinese restaurant when he gets the call.  The drab world Prisoners depicts has a sort of an inner-growl to it, as Villeneuve fills the screen with busted walls, rotten wood, and lots and lots of rain.  Hugh Jackson, as one of the dads, carries the movie as his emotions transform from horror and grief into torture and sadism.  It turns out the main suspect is Dano's Alex, that no-good weirdo from down the street who once he is arrested doesn't even have enough sense to answer polygraph questions to the point they can measure the depths of his deception.  According to the detective, Alex has the "IQ of a 10 year old."  This lack of intelligence and morals only increases Jackman's father's anger and eventually he kidnaps Alex and tortures him in an abandoned apartment. 

The paralleling of intelligence with morals is a toxic leftover of course of old-school early 20th Century eugenics and phrenology, and the movie depends on that paradigm in order to place Alex in the context of plot and atmosphere, but somehow Dano's diligent dedication to the part renders Alex's identity as something more than just genetics gone "horribly and predictably wrong" (that's a quote from Henry H. Goddard's 1912 eugenics masterpiece, The Kallikak Family: a Study in the Heredity of Feeble-mindedness).  Alex through the course of the movie's wrenching, white-trash-baroque plot becomes a sort of anti-hero that isn't heroic but has somehow survived a secret holocaust horribly scathed and yet supernaturally real. 

Dano does not escape the stereotype as much as he bores through it.  His face is both Joan-of-Arc-spiritual and stilted, silent-movie delirious.  He seems to drift through the interstices of thought and place, a ghost that isn't involved in his own story and yet has to live through it, without any resources or access to relief.  Somehow Dano makes that helplessness and hopelessness into a sort of mantra that we can hook into, without turning Alex Jones into a demon or an angel or a "normal guy" underneath it all. 

Alex Jones is what he is, somehow, and I don't really know what that is outside of being human.  Dano gives us a human being that has none of the constraints and controls of the usual movie performance.  He's making performance-art inside the chilly, horror-movie contexts of Prisoners.  And it's a total compliment to Villeneuve that the movie's moral compass is more of a spider-web than a navigational tool.  The whole piece seems to take its marching orders from Dano's blank, beautiful, unnerving face.

Missed His Shadow When He Was Gone

Missed his shadow when he was gone.  He was a silhouette mostly.  Sometimes though I caught him whole, looking down, like a bear wanting into a cave. 

Still think about him when I'm down there, looking up from wires and cables, breathing in that damp-rat smell.  One night it was cold as hell, crystal-clear sub-zero cold, and we were working on laying in new cable-pipe, and I remember just looking up and I could see him almost floating up there like he was stuck in glass, motionless, just staring down at me.  I saw his eyes, open wide like he was taking in all in, his brain just a big camera inside his skull.  He needed to know.  You got that feeling, and I looked up there and said something hey buddy or whatever and as soon as he heard me say something, as soon as he realized I was looking back he was off. 

But then he'd be back an hour or so later and I understood. 

This was our relationship.  I didn't even know he drew pictures.  Just thought he was interested in the work we were doing. 

Still miss him.  Even now.

I Mean It

This old lady had a middle-aged daughter, and they lived in this house in a rundown neighborhood near downtown.  Their house was way off from the street, but the other houses were close to the curb.  There was a little sidewalk that led to their front door, and the aluminum siding looked sore and gray, as if it had a rash.  The front door was a little off its hinges, and whenever I went in to pick them up to take them to her daughter's eye-doctor appointments it sounded like a pterodactyl screaming. 

They were both fat in a jolly kind of way.  The mother had bright silver hair and a round large nose, and she wore housecoats with huge pockets around the house.  This was her uniform that she wore to work and her work was ironing people's clothes.  She took in ironing, in other words:  she had a big ironing board, and a couple of large clothes racks next to the ironing board hung with men's shirts.  "Taking ironing in" seemed like a total 1950s thing to me, an anachronistic almost ghostly activity, now that there were drycleaning places in every strip-mall, but she still had clientele.  "Mostly lawyers," she'd tell me, proudly.  Her eyes were always lit up inside as though one of those lawyers were always whispering some sweet little joke into her ear.  But I had a feeling that she just had those shirts there as a way to pretend she still took ironing in.  One time she explained to me in one short unsentimental sentence that her husband and her daughter's father had left them years ago because the daughter had turned out to be what she was.  "Just disappeared one day," she said.  "He couldn't take it." 

There was a huge industrial bag of starlite mints on the floor beside the ironing board, opened for easy access.  The old lady explained that she put a starlite mint into every shirt pocket.  Like a little treat for her customers.  She said she had started it years ago for Christmas, but then they all started to expect it every time. 

The daughter was retarded.  I know that's not politically correct to say, but that's what the old lady always said to anyone they met, and the daughter went along.  She was a little rounder and bulkier than her mother, with dirt-brown hair permed into a tight ornament atop her large head.  Her eyes were tiny.  Her mouth had a stubborn, tight set to it.  She always wanted to hug people, and her mom was always apologizing for it. 

One time when I went over to pick them up, the daughter was putting on her shoes in a La-Z-Boy chair, and as soon as she heard that door open she looked up and grinned great big and just stopped what she was doing and waddled over to me and hugged me so tight it felt like she was trying to hug her way out of her own life.  I smelled shit, and then saw that there was a small piece of shit on the back of her blouse.  The mother was going through her purse to make sure she had the right insurance papers, and when she looked up to tell the daughter so stop hugging me she instantly saw the piece of shit and scolded her.

"How did that get there?" she said, as if the daughter might have an explanation.  The daughter just slumped her shoulders and walked toward the mother. 

"Get in there and get that off of you," the mother said.  "I mean it.  That's nasty."

The daughter asked, "What?"  She was mad.

"You got poop on your back," the mother said.

The daughter did a little circle dance, trying to see it. 

The mother said, "Come on.  I'll help you."

The mother was pissed, but laughed despite herself.  I did too.  It just seemed so sad and typical and perfect somehow, one of those moments when everybody is exactly who they are and everything is strangely okay.  And for a few seconds the mother and I and the daughter looked at each other like, Lord have mercy.

One time I went over to pick them up to take them to the utility company because they had a huge bill and they couldn't pay it.  It was late March, and there was a tornado warning on the morning TV show they watched.  The lady meteorologist was standing in front of a mean-looking fluorescent weather map.  Their whole neighborhood felt lit from within.  I looked out the windows above their little TV and clouds were roiling and trees-limbs were flailing.  They were both ready this time, and for some reason the mother and the daughter had dressed alike that day, as if going to the utility company called for it.  Burgundy dresses, like maybe what they once wore to church.  They didn't go to church anymore because the pastor came and visited them because the daughter had made a couple scenes during the Sunday services there.  Burgundy dresses with black belts and black shoes.  The house had a cinnamon-candle smell.  I remember thinking they there was no way we could drive in this weather, and yet what if the tornado hit while we stood there?

A few months later the daughter died in her sleep, and the mother died a few months after that.  It was like they never existed.  I don't go into that neighborhood now.  It's way out of the way to go by there.  But I still see it in my head sometimes, just because they're gone, and I guess I need to remember them.  I guess somebody does. 

Nothing Easy about It

Have you ever been an "outcast"?  I have.  Multiple times.  It's a set of experiences that scar you in ways you don't discover until the next go-round, when the next mob of villagers gather together with torches to chase you up a mountainside.  It's transformative without allowing for a lot of self-reflection, and by the end of the process your whole personality has changed.  Your whole being.  But you just move on, scarred and smarter, exhausted and scared but also filled with a knowledge you could not have gotten any other way.

Emma Stone's Olive in Easy A, a talky, sweet, self-conscious movie-reinvention of John Hughes for the 21st Century, is the perfect "outcast," in that she is female, smart, sarcastic, and warm-hearted, a perfect recipe for pissing most "normal" people off for some reason.  And the movie gets a lot things right around the concept of being exiled and scorned.  First of all it's ur-text is The Scarlet Letter, and Nathaniel Hawthorne's beautiful starchy novel is used in a variety of ways to enlighten us on the sociology and psychology and artfulness of being driven out of town.  As well, the actors who support Stone, especially Patricia Clarkson as her mom and Stanley Tucci as her dad, have a nonchalant lovingness in their eyes, and the actors who play her tormentors, especially Lisa Kudrow as a whore/guidance-counselor and Amanda Bynes as Marianne, the Bible-believing bitch-leader of a group of teenaged Jesus Freaks who lead the EXPEL-THE-SLUT campaign, have a special, dry, cartoony evilness, like Jeffrey Jones' principal in Ferris Bueller's Day off.  The plot is easy and swift:  Olive lies about having sex with "George," a made-up college freshman, but her lie ignites a rumor inferno to the point that Brandon, a gay friend of hers with tormentors all his own, begs Olive to lie and say they've done it too.  To be his extra-special beard.

What sets Olive, and the movie, apart from a lot of other teen comedies trying to channel Mr. Hughes, is the joie de vivre Olive has in tormenting her tormentors:  she doesn't just lie about bumping uglies with the gay guy.  It's an all out Cirque de Soleil of teen-sex at a house-party, with the two of them yelling and moaning so all the high school kids outside the bedroom door can hear.  As Olive tells Brandon:  "I don't do anything half-assed."

Emma Stone is a star, and this movie is only the beginning I hope.  She can dish it out and take it.  She can be victimized without being a victim, kind of like Barbara Stanwyck or some other glamorous, throaty, old-school movie star.  There's a scene in which she is waiting to go to the principal's office and Marianne (who works in the principal's office) is sharpening pencils.  Stone's Olive does not let this anal-retentive display of whore-hatred go unnoticed.  In a hilariously sarcastic triumph, she "coaches" Marianne through her pencil-sharpening fit:  "Sharpening pencils are we?  That's just great.  Yes.  Keep sharpening.  Yes.  Yes."  And so on.

At that moment I knew Emma Stone is a star, and that the movie has something to say about surviving being an outcast by getting the joke but also never forgetting that the "joke" is serious as hell.  Marianne would like Olive to disappear.  Meaning:  under all the high-school farce and frenetic pacing and Olive's sweetly insouciant voice-over there's a serious tone, a life-or-death feeling in the movie.  The only way you can get through a life like Olive's, the movie is letting us know, is torment right back, and also figure out your exit strategy, or you're dead.

Olive's exit strategy goes into movie-movie brilliance, with a wonderful homage to Ferris Bueller's Beatles number in downtown Chicago.  She ends up happily ever after, thank God (you wouldn't want it any other way thanks to Stone's performance), but the movie leaves an afterburn.  It made me think about all the times I've been cast as an "outcast," and how that feeling has given me both a sense of terror dealing with people, as well as an evil sense of humor.  There's never one without the other.  I've had religious zealots pissed at me because of a novel I wrote about a child-molester, asking for my head and my job; I had hoods and even a cheerleader threaten to beat up in high school; more recently, as a co-founder of a non-profit arts organzation that supports people with developmental disabilities here in Cincinnati called Visionaries & Voices (V&V), I had some folks there unleash some vicious rumors about me because I was seen as a stubborn megalomaniac who wanted their heads.  Etcetera, etcetera.  What all this boils down to is that I've learned absolutely nothing I can actually tell you about concerning "outcast-ness."  Except there is now a density in my thoughts, a fear that hardens into a new kind of laugh, a new way to approach the world.  Stone's Olive is symbolic of this new approach:  sew a letter A on your outfit, torture those who torture you.  Don't do anything half-assed.

Raymond Thunder-Sky, the reason I helped co-found V&V, dressed up like a clown and a construction worker (a scarlet letter all his own) and walked around town drawing drawings.  There are stories of him being beaten up.  Called names.  Stories of people calling him a "John Wayne Gacy" freak.  One story about him being pushed off a city bus.  But you know what?  He was triumphant.  He did what he needed to do.  It's in his face, that look of derision and gallow's humor, that mix of innocence and the wear-and-tear of what people can do to you.  

There's nothing easy about it.   

Gleaks

The pleasure of watching Fox's Glee is witnessing a group of outcasts form their own unique society through an interest in performing and using that performance as a way to seek glamorous revenge on those who have consigned them to the status of "freak."  Every week the Gleeks get victimized:  the stridently talented girl-singer is egged in a parking lot, the gay kid is thrown into lockers, the pregnant teen is ostracized by her once tight network of cheerleader friends, the guy in the wheelchair is pushed down the stairs...  And all this humiliation is answered through heartfelt, intense performances of pop songs.  The catharsis comes through karaoke, only it's not mimicry the Glee cast is indulging in:  it's reinvention through pop, self-acceptance channelled through a song on the radio.  The pleasures Glee offers all of us losers are intensely satisfying because we have constant access to both sides of the equation in our daily lives:  we all get treated like crap, and we all crank up the radio in the car when Lady Gaga belts one out.    

It's the same beautiful vengeance you feel at the end of Carrie when our pig-blood-covered teenaged heroine finally lets loose the hounds of hell at prom; only with Glee it's a really splendid rendition of Katy Perry's "Teenage Dream" that does it for us.  Carrie is performing her pain in that famous horror movie scene, but remember:  she is the Queen of the Prom and the Queen of the Night combined in that image, and her power not only comes from what has been done to her, but also from her own glamorous transformation from dowdy girl in the gym showers having tampons tossed at her by mean girls to this figure of both horror and transcendence at the end of the movie:  the center of attention, a centrifugal force of teenaged pain and telekinesis not singing her way out of outsiderdom, but burning the whole stupid joint down just because she can.

Hallelujah.

The connection between the pain of daily humiliation and the release of a triumphant performance, between being bullied and glamorously confronting those bullies in show-tune showdowns, is palpable especially now because of the media coverage of gay teenaged boys killing themselves after being tortured by classmates.  The fury that comes from knowing this is happening is always quivering under the surface now.  And it's not just a pop-song we're talking about here, but still Glee provides a public service:  it allows us to know the truth (the gay kid getting thrown into lockers and worse) and the beautiful fiction it takes to transform and survive (that same gay kid singing a song from Victor/Victoria and all the other Gleeks clapping amazed and stunned by his talent).  Without fantasy, without music, without performance, the torture becomes an unbearable malignant force.

Watching Glee, I keep thinking of Todd Browning's 1932 controversial masterpiece Freaks.  Freaks is a revenge-fantasia concerning sideshow freaks taking revenge on the "normal" people who are trying to trespass into their own happy society.  The freaks in the movie (people with disabilities ranging from microcephalia to leglessness, a bearded lady, midgets, conjoined twins, etc.) survive through performance:  they use what is seen as "wrong" with them as a way to make a living, strutting their stuff inside tents and cages to suckers who pay to see them.  But the movie never catches that gaze:  it's interested in how freaks live and survive and flourish behind the scenes, and it is that society that both Glee and Freaks tap into, that cultural creative diaspora that allows groups of people often consigned to "outsiderness" to reinvent what it means to be "real," what it means to be alive.  

The penultimate, most gorgeously hilarious and strangely heart-warming scene in Freaks happens a little past midway in the movie, when the Freaks gather for an acceptance dinner.  The circus' beautiful trapeze artist has agreed to marry the leader of side-show performers, the midget named Hans.  The trapeze artists is not a freak, and she has secret plans of killing Hans after their wedding in order to get his inheritance.  At this dinner all of his sideshow friends (not knowing his betrothed's evil plans) pass around a goblet filled with wine, everyone taking a sip from the loving cup while chanting, "Gobble, gobble, we accept you, one of us."  Over and over the phrase turns into a beautiful song.  The camera lovingly pans from sideshow freak to sideshow freak, everyone happy and free and enjoying each other's company (kind of like the choir-room in Glee). 

"Gobble, gobble, we accept you, one of us!  Gobble, gobble, we accept you, one of us!"

But the trapeze artist is not amused.  She just can't take it anymore.  She turns on the chanting folks and screams, "Freaks!  Disgusting freaks!"

There is a moment in this scene of pure guttural rage flowing through the shot-down happiness of the party.  The bully here is outnumbered however.  The mob has switched from chasing the monster to being chased:  the monster now is the mob.  The freak controls the room.  This morality changes the atmosphere.  There is a close-up of the trapeze artist's face.  She is dumbfounded and horrified and amazed.  Freaks are people too, she seems to understand.  But it's way too late for sorry.

Glee captures this same shift in the moral code, only in slightly less horror-movie terms of course.  But the sentiment is there:  freaks shall inherit the earth.  Now let's all break into a song.