Epic (Not Icky)



Derek Cianfrance's The Place beyond the Pines is a Douglas Sirk movie for the 21st Century.  It exudes melodramatic grandeur, a sweet, delirious pompousness that enthralls you without being true and without being false.  Everything in it is too much:  the over-tattooed body of Ryan Gosling, the sublimation of all the female characters, the bank robberies done in a sort of Billy-Idol flourish, the burnished sunsets, the sad teenaged wasteland that comprises the movie's coda.  You are hypnotized by Cianfrance's dedication to what he is trying to pull off.  Like Sirk's masterworks Magnificent Obsession and Imitation of Life, Place sprawls across time-zones and feelings, the narrative pulling itself forward while sinking back into emotions and situations that never really feel authentic, but still somehow resonate, so charged up for your viewing pleasure that you feel obligated, even a little flattered, that the movie is working so hard to enchant/overwhelm you.

"Melodrama" is often maligned, seen as a cheap way to exaggerate in order to manipulate.  But exaggeration in Cianfrance's world heightens and entertains, just like in Sirk's stiff, over-the-top universes of feeling.   Sometimes you just want things to be exaggerated and to feel emotions that aren't quite "real," but still come across as necessary, vital.  There are scenes in Place that are beautifully underplayed yet still overt -- as in one of the penultimate ones, pictured above, when Gosling, playing a dare-devil motorcyclist who wants to give up dare-devil-motorcycling in order to be the father and husband he dreams he can be, has an impromptu photo session with his girlfriend and baby son.  Eva Mendes is the girlfriend, and she really does try hard to overcome the underwritten part, to the point that you are totally with her.  In this scene, outside an ice-cream stand, she and Gosling and their baby ask a stranger to take their picture.  They stand in front of his motorcycle, and they seem happy/sad/wistful/anxious, all the emotions you think they should be feeling, and everything is so summed up in the scene you don't have anywhere to go but with it.  The symbolism of Gosling holding his hand over Mendes' eyes, his hands and arms covered in those aforementioned tattoos, is so over-the-top that it becomes easy to access, sweet and dumb and funny, the way life can be sometimes when cameras aren't rolling.  And the baby's face, staring off in the future, and the stranger asking, "Why is the lady crying?"

Scenes like that happen all over the Place.  They could be lampooned pretty easily, and yet somehow Cianfrance invests enough artistry and imagination that they turn toward epic instead of icky.  By the end of the movie you truly feel something that big melodramatic Technicolor movies used to make you feel:  surrounded by artifice and yet also enraptured by it. 

Us and Them

I'm teaching a Disability Studies class at Miami University this semester titled "Allies and Activists."  It's been great so far, as we delve into the meanings and absurdities around the way people with disabilities often have been relegated and erased, and how we might counteract the erasure and relegation through thoughtfully considering how to create "alliances" and forms of "acitivism" that actually matter.  This post is a combination of a lot of the stuff we've been doing and talking about... 

Image from Lest We Forget:  Silent Voices, a documentary about Ohio's institutions for people with developmental disabilities.  The film includes interviews with "disability professionals," parents and other family members, and people who lived in the institutions when they were open.   

Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized:  "The colonized is never characterized in an individual manner; he is entitled only to drown in an anonymous collectivity.  They are this.  They are all the same."

In the classes we've had so far we've discussed how representations and ideas about people with disabilities are often about Us and Them, "Us" being people who consider themselves "able," and "Them" being the colonized other, a mass of people separated from civilization often in order to "fix" them, or to protect us from them.  This historical vantage point allows us to understand why, even in a contemporary society that prides itself on the integration of people with disabilities into the mainstream, actual inclusion hardly ever happens.  When a group of people are colonized and then decolonized, the apparatus and attitudes that created the colonization in the first place still exist -- only now in a still pervasive yet more hidden form.

Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization:   "Modern man no longer communicates with the madman [...] There is no common language: or rather, it no longer exists; the constitution of madness as mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, bears witness to a rupture in a dialogue, gives the separation as already enacted, and expels from the memory all those imperfect words, of no fixed syntax, spoken falteringly, in which the exchange between madness and reason was carried out. The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue by reason about madness, could only have come into existence in such a silence."      

Without a "common language" (outside of the language imposed by medical professionals), the colonized (people with disabilities) and the colonizer (everybody else) don't have to speak to one another.  The colonizer can maintain a "silence" for the rest of time, comfortable in the fact that a language isn't necessary unless someone needs to be diagnosed or told what their IQ is.  We've done a lot of in-class writing about what "power" means in the lives of people with disabilities, and how people not labeled with a disability often participate unknowingly in a power structure that keeps Us away from Them.  The power of  Us comes from that lack of a language spoken by both sides:  whoever controls the one-sided mechanism to speak and label, to assign and diagnose, wins. 

We read and discussed Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, as well as watched Lest We Forget: Silent Voices, a documentary paying witness to the historical horrors of some of Ohio's large institutions for people with developmental disabilities.  Both Kesey's novel and the documentary try to create a language for the other side of colonization.  In Cuckoo's Next, this language is created and spoken by a Native American who is labeled "deaf and mute."  Chief Bromden is the storyteller within the colony of "insane people," and as he tells us about McMurphy's struggles with Nurse Ratched (whom the Chief calls "Big Nurse"), we begin to understand how devastatingly and existentially vast the inside of the insane ward truly is, so immense that the Chief nicknames it "the Combine," defining the institution, and therefore the culture that operates and adminstrates it, as a machine so anonymously huge no one recognizes it as a machine except those who are being processed into it and eventually consumed by it.  "Big Nurse" is at the controls of this Combine, overseeing a strategy of rewarding and punishing that allows for no critique and no escape.  

Lest We Forget creates a language and a dialogue from the actual voices and images of the inhabitants of large institutions for people with developmental disabilities, showing us how groups of people when housed together in order to be "fixed" are actually massed together so we can forget about them.   In Lest We Forget, we pointed out the alliances among the "inmates" of the institutions and the "professionals" in charge of "fixing" them.  All of these alliances are complicated by the fact that they take place within the confines created by the dominant class, in the shadow of the Combine.  In Lest We Forget, people who lived through abuse narrate what happened to them, while professionals apologize and seem mystified as to how it could have occurred.  These alliances between the colonized and the colonizer both nurture the need to be free from confinement while also maintaining that confinement, eliminating the possibility of making a difference though activism.  "Freedom" is not possible within the Combine.  The voices, both fictional and not, in Cuckoo's Nest and Lest We Forget, attest to the need for alliances outside of the colony, while also showing us how ineffective these alliances are unless they help to dismantle the Combine, allowing actual freedom to occur. 

Jack Nicholson as McMurphy in the film version of One Flew over the Cucko's Nest.

Last week we talked about Million Dollar Baby, and how its narrative about euthanasia is a direct result of how "Us and Them"can become a death sentence.  This quote from Ragged Edge, a disability rights magazine, is from the essay we read in Representing Disability in an Ableist World:  Essays on Mass Media, by Beth A. Haller:

"Life with a disability is so devalued, society is so bigoted against the idea that life with a severe disability can have quality, that in such a climate the 'right to die' becomes a 'duty to die.' Activists fear that people who become disabled will choose suicide over living with disability. They fear that people whose disabilities make them burdens on family members will be pressured -- subtly or not so subtly -- to end their lives."

Million Dollar Baby is about that "duty to die," a narrative constructed around "dependence" and "independence," in which once you find yourself dependent on help all hope is lost.  Hillary Swank's character is a boxer who has spent most of her life on a quest to be great, but at the end of the film when she is injured and has to reassess who she is and what she wants to do there are no choices except being snuffed out.   When you consider how over-praised the film was upon its release (winning lots  of Academy Awards, including Best Picture), you get the idea: in America at least being dependent on support = being a pariah. 

Eastwood and Swank in Million Dollar Baby.

We then looked at Mitt Romney's statement from the previous day.  Romney was secretly videotaped by someone with a camera-phone at a fundraising event.  Romney was talking about people who are "dependent" and "victims," relying on the government for their "food and healthcare and housing."  While Romney was not explicitly talking about people with disabilities, the dichotomy he was using to tap into the collective unconscious (and the deep pockets) of his audience is pretty clear:  "Us," the independent and healthy masses versus "Them," the dependent and not-so healthy Other. 

So where's the hope?

Since this class is about understanding how to form sane and productive alliances with people with disabilities in order to affect some kind of overarching change in the way we both support and relegate them, we found some hope, I think, when we looked at another recent incident that was captured by a cell-phone camera.  Bede Vanderhorst, a 16-year-old boy with Down syndrome, was kicked out of First Class on an American Airlines flight by the pilot because, as the pilot states, Bede seemed "agitated" while sitting in the waiting area before boarding the plane.  Robert and Joan, Bede's parents, tried to stand up for their kid, but the American Airlines staff seemed very adamant.  The cell-phone footage showed Bede sitting in the waiting area doing really nothing, and they also videotaped airplane staff being discriminatory.  "Us" versus "Them" in this instance got redefined through the use of a common language:  mass media.  Bede's mom and dad went to CNN and other outlets and told their story, backed up by the footage they had shot.  The alliance they have made with their son, in the capacity of standing up for him, is one way in which the power structure gets redefined.  In the news-story we watched, they showed pictures of Bede playing in a rock band, going to school, being a part of the world -- in effect pulling him away from the colony we often assign him to.  He was no longer in the Colony of Down Syndrome:  he was now a teenaged boy being discriminated against.        

We also watched a movie called Lars and the Real Girl.  Lars and the Real Girl was released in 2007 to not a lot of acclaim. The premise sounds like a bad joke, which is probably why the movie did not get as much notice as it should have. Lars is a functional recluse who lives in the garage behind the house where he grew up. His brother and sister-in-law live in the house-proper. The sister-in-law, Karen, is trying desperately to include Lars in their domesticity, even at one time tackling him out in the snow to ensure he makes it to dinner. As played by Emily Mortimer, Karen is the beating, beautiful heart of the movie: someone so guileless and sweet that she feels the need to enforce kindness, not just give it. An example of an alliance transforming into advocacy and activism.

And that's also the way many of the townspeople in Lars and the Real Girl come across throughout the rest of the film. When Lars orders a fake girl through the Internet (and it's a salacious website he gets it from, advertising poor lost lonely orphan-girls to be adopted by poor lost lonely old men), and the girl arrives, you expect the movie to lurch into simpleminded, mean-spirited comedy.  But the triumph of the film is that it takes that low-grade concept (lonely loser purchases a fake doll to make love to) and elevates it by paying attention to what the fake girl means.  In order to move Bianca (the fake girl) around Lars imagines a disability for her, so he has to get a wheelchair for her. Bianca, his first love, is a woman with a disability, and yet the townspeople, when asked to help Lars through his delusion by believing in it along with him by the local family doctor, take Bianca into their midst as one of their own. They provide her with a job at the mall as a model, and eventually she is even voted onto the schoolboard. In her vacantness and in her pliability, Bianca becomes a perfect symbol for human kindness.

Ryan Gosling and Bianca in church:  "Us versus Them" gets turned inside out.

Lars is as well a person with a disability: loneliness manifesting itself into a delusion, some kind of mental illness, I'm sure, but what the movie does is dramatize not the internal aspects of "being diagnosed and fixed," but the external ones many movies about people with disabilities miss. When Lars goes to a party with Bianca, there are stares and comments, but there's also this feeling that somehow Lars is using Bianca to let people know how human he is too, and how much he needs. He could never tell them that upfront, so Bianca becomes his visual cue, and we see him and what is "wrong with him" through innocent eyes. His attention to Bianca, his devotion to her, becomes as natural and real as any romance in movies can be.

"Disability" gets deconstructed because the secrecy and shame usually connected to a story like Lars' are not there. He is openly courting a fake girl he ordered over the Internet, and guess what? Everyone in town is in on it. The "disabilities" inherent in both Bianca and Lars' bodies and persona are somehow "owned" by everyone, and in the end a sort of catharsis happens. Us becomes Them; Them becomes Us. 

Shut Your Beautiful Mouth

Michelle Williams is a movie star who can disappear into the people she plays and the places where they live.  Watching her performances, you get the feeling that she has an intense desire to be anonymous merging with an overriding passion to be filmed being anonymous.  And it's in that mix of obscurity and fame where the magic of her acting happens:  she becomes another person and yet there's an almost silvery Warholian glamor to the whole process.  But still it's an overall emotionally satisfying transformation:  you ache right along with her.  You're actually exalted by that ache.

In Blue Valentine, she outdoes herself.

Williams plays Cindy, a nurse with a young daughter and a husband (played by Ryan Gosling) who paints houses for a living.  The movie is a paean to love and the torture and ecstasy it causes, but it's grounded in a lyrical drabness; this love and its downfall take place in a doctor's office, a kitschy "space-age" motel room, a nursing home, a community college campus, a weed-covered backyard with a little girl trying to find her lost dog.  In those dreary but poetic spaces, the writer/director Derek Cianfrance allows moments to happen without a lot of push or pull, just a steady intensity that pulls back to catch the landscape and other surroundings, but then goes in for the kill:  juicy, nervous close-ups of the faces of his stars as they kiss, yell, laugh, sing.  Cianfrance knows that the true pleasures deep inside all movies are those moments when a close-up becomes a whole universe:  one face transmutates into a new way to feel.

Williams' face is moony but wan, pale but tinged with a fury of pink, and her eyes carry a loss inside them Cindy the nurse can't express but truly needs to, a truckload of poetry, ambition, and sadness inside each iris.  When Cindy is driving to work in their minivan, about to take a big bite of a jelly donut, with Pat Benetar on the radio singing "We Belong," there's an instant when Williams' expression goes from everyday-driving-to-work to Joan-of-Arc.  The transition works seamlessly, a pulse of charisma that dislocates both her and the audience watching her.  The camera shows us why:  her daughter's lost dog is dead at the side of the road.  But Williams and Cianfrance do not use that scene to make us cry; it's to show us how beautiful and lost Cindy is, how she was just about ready to go into her work-trance, but then there the dog is, and all that she is capable of feeling unleashes itself in one brief flash.  You just want to go into the movie and help her right at that moment.  You also want to be wrapped up in Williams' ability to make that pain so glamorous yet real.

The movie is organized in a simple past/present feed:  the innocent past and the very tried present bleed into each other.  In the expositional scenes, Ryan Gosling gives the young Dean a swagger that lets us know it's Deans finest moment.  Right now he is at his peak:  rugged, lean young hipster working for a moving company, a smile that is somehow indecent yet boyish, not mischievous as much as trying to find out how to be obedient so he can get what he wants from Cindy.  Cloudy eyes, blissful thoughts, just trying to get there.  Unlike Williams, Gosling does not disappear into his performances as much as reappear; he merges with Dean, all in, but also is astute enough to give Dean a metrosexual attractiveness in the beginning scenes, a masculine prettiness that calls to mind Brando in Streetcar Named Desire, dirty enough to be "real," preened enough to be sexy.

In another expositional scene, Dean helps an old man unpack all his wares in his new nursing home room.  Dean does not treat the process like your average everyday mover.  He turns himself into a makeshift interior decorator, trying to please the old man.  Gosling's face is lit up like an artist on the verge of finding his true voice.  It's in that same scene that he first sees Cindy for the first time.  She's there visiting her grandmother.  He is automatically smitten, and you can see in Dean's expressions and gestures that he realizes at that moment all he needs to be happy for the rest of his life is to have this girl. 

At the end of the movie, when Cindy and Dean are trying to rekindle their relationship in a really cheap-ass "outer-space-themed" motel room called The Future Room, Dean tells Cindy that all he wants is to get drunk, paint houses, and come home to his wife and daughter at the end of the day.  This is happiness for him, he says, and yet you can tell it's prison for her.  That loop of misunderstanding -- Cindy falling in love with that sensitive swaggering beautiful fool only to end up with a guy with a receding hairline and lowered expectations and 24-hour beer-breath, and Dean falling in love with a girl he thought would be able to save him only to find out she's just plain sick of him -- is what gives Blue Valentine the heft and depth of great literature.  There's no way out except the way Dean and Cindy are doing it:  haphazardly, violently, blindly.  And no one is to blame.

Dean of course has to follow Cindy to her work that last day they are together.  He has to be completely drunk and stupid and full of love, barging in and throwing things around.  But as he does this, he's sobbing, not wanting to be "a big man," but just her man.  He is trying to re-enter that early phase of swagger and masculinity he performed back in the good old days, but this time desperation and hurt turn it all into a sad, awful parody of what he used to be.  And then there's Cindy, frustrated, teary-eyed, trying not to remember how much she loved him, just wanting to move on.

This is one of those movies you can't shake out of your head.  As soon as it ended, I remembered a scene that happend in the cheesy motel room, when they were trying to revisit who they once were.  Cindy is trying to tell Dean all that's wrong with their relationship, and Dean just looks at her, smiling, trying to turn everything into a joke so they can laugh like they used to.

"Shut your beautiful mouth," he says to her. 

Cindy does that.  She just shuts up.  Williams and Gosling are actors who can even make that short exchange seem as meaningful as wedding vows.  He playfully grins and tries to turn on the charm, and she just closes her eyes, wanting everything to disappear.
   

A Lovely Thing to Behold

Lars and the Real Girl was released in 2007 to not a lot of acclaim, except a smidgen for Ryan Gosling's incredibly moving performance.  I've seen it three times now, and each time Lars moves me more as I see how the writer Nancy Oliver creates a universe that's Utopian in scope, but utilitarian in the way it is conveyed.  The premise sounds like a stupid joke, which is probably why the movie did not get as much notice as it should have.  Lars is a functional recluse who lives in the garage behind the house where he grew up.  His brother and sister-in-law live in the house-proper.  The sister-in-law, Karen, is trying desperately to include Lars in their domesticity, even at one time tackling him out in the snow to ensure he makes it to dinner.  As played by Emily Mortimer, Karen is the beating, beautiful heart of the movie:  someone so guileless and sweet that she feels the need to enforce kindness, not just give it. 

And that's the way many of the townspeople in Lars and the Real Girl come across throughout the rest of the film.  When Lars orders a fake girl through the Internet (and it's a salacious website he gets it from, advertising poor lost lonely orphan-girls to be adopted by poor lost lonely old men), and the girl arrives, you expect the movie to lurch into simpleminded, mean-spirited comedy.  Even the third time when I watched I was almost anticipating some crude aside I missed the first two times, but the triumph of the film is that it takes that low-grade concept (lonely loser purchases a fake doll to make love to) and elevates it by paying attention to what the fake girl means, and how her presence in Lars' life allows him to find his way out of all the traps he has set for himself.

This time seeing it I noticed even more of the disability aspects of the movie.  In order to move Bianca (the fake girl) around Lars imagines a disability for her, so he has to get a wheelchair for her.  Bianca, his first love, is a woman with a disability, and yet the townspeople, when asked to help Lars through his delusion by believing in it along with him by the local family doctor (a miraculously understated Patricia Clarkson), take Bianca into their midst as one of their own.  They provide her with a job at the mall as a model, and eventually she is even voted onto the schoolboard.  In her vacantness and in her pliability, Bianca becomes a perfect symbol for human kindness.

And Lars is as well a person with a disability:  loneliness manifesting itself into a delusion, some kind of mental illness, I'm sure, but what the movie does is dramatize not the internal aspects of "being disabled," but the external ones movies always miss.  When Lars goes to a party with Bianca, there are stares and comments, but there's also this feeling that somehow Lars is using Bianca to let people know how human he is too, and how much he needs.  He could never tell them that upfront, so Bianca becomes his visual cue, and we see him and what is "wrong with him" through innocent eyes.  His attention to Bianca, his devotion to her, becomes as natural and real as any romance in movies can be.

"Disability" gets deconstructed because the secrecy and shame usually connected to a story like Lars' are not there.  He is openly courting a fake girl he ordered over the Internet, and guess what?  Everyone in town is in on it.  The "disabilities" inherent in both Bianca and Lars' bodies and persona are somehow "owned" by everyone, and in the end a sort of catharsis happens, at least for me, as I watched.  Throughout the film, Ryan Gosling's face transforms from the face of a weary, half-dead soldier in the beginning to a beautiful half-asleep silent-movie comedian in the end.  He finds peace, a casual insouciance, but there's neediness still in his eyes, and a desire coming from his forehead somehow to figure out how to be who he is, and get what he wants out of life, without losing his mind.  Lars' quest becomes a sane journey if not to self-acceptance, at least to accepting reality, which is probably the same thing.  And this movie truly does something miraculous:  it delivers a tableau hardly ever constructed for movies and rarely seen in true life:  people being nice to each other, even when being nice means putting up with something they might easily toss aside as "deranged" or "sick."

It's a lovely thing to behold.