What is right?

Joseph Kony is flavour of the Twittergeist at present along with controversy about how we manage bad things in Africa. And who is “we” and what should be the extent of “our” influence. And is it OK to buy wristbands for moral causes when you’re not sure just how moral they might be? Or is it OK to buy wristbands (assuming that the bulk of the money goes to a good cause) just because it’s trendy if you don’t actually care about the cause. And are we seeing the rise of “Slacktavism” as opposed to “slacktivity”? Weighty questions for a Tuesday.


They fit well with the latest “novel” I’ve read titled What is the What. Written by Dave Eggers, it states that it is “a soulful account of my life” – the life of a young Sudanese man variously named Achak, Valentino, Dominic or Gone Far. There are two things of interest in respect of this novel. The content, and the politics of the way it is written. Let me start with the content.


Achak is about six when Muslin murahaleen sweep into his village, destroy houses, kill some of the inhabitants and carry off children, women and livestock. He survives this attack and eventually sets out to walk to a safer location in Ethiopia. It is an epic walk of young boys who become known as the Lost Boys of Sudan. Horrible things happen to Achak and those around him. I can’t do them justice here but am glad I read the book – I know more about this period of recent history now and that’s a good thing. Death, hunger, abuse, the ambiguities and cruelties of the liberation soldiers (SPLA), the loss of family – these are just a few of the elements of the book. He spends many years in two refugee camps, the one in Ethiopia and then one in Kenya. No plot spoilers here – we first meet Achak in the United States so we know he survives.


Survives is a good word for what happens to him in America as well. This is the part of the book which worked best for me. I kept thinking of the Sudanese who live in my local neighbourhood of Footscray. (See the Footscray Food Blog for a taste of this.) It must be radically different living here. From 2001, 3,800 Sudanese were allowed to settle in the USA. Most of these were young men. Achak ends up in Atlanta in the States. He arrives just after 9/11. He has high expectations of his ability to prosper quickly; to go to college and emerge with a good job and good prospects. It does not play that way despite his determination and clear intelligence. He is looked after by some people and harassed by others. At one stage he is working for $8.50 an hour as a storeman. It takes him three changes of bus to get to his workplace. Some young Americans stop him, harass him and tell him to go back to Africa. He says:
Through Eggers we experience the increasing cynicism and disconnection of Achak in his new home. It’s a powerful thing to read about, falling as it does on top of the truly horrible experiences of his previous time as a lost boy. Actually he is a lost boy in both countries…

“When I first came to this country, I would tell silent stories. I would tell them to people who had wronged me. If someone cut in front of me in line, ignored me, bumped me, or pushed me, I would glare at them, staring, silently hissing a story to them. You do not understand, I would tell them. You would not add to my suffering if you knew what I have seen.”

A little of the comparison.

“Some sociologists, liberal ones, might take issue with the notion that one society is behind another, that there is a first world, a third. But southern Sudan is not of any of these worlds. Sudan is something else, and I cannot find apt comparisons. There are few cars in southern Sudan. You can travel for hundreds of miles without seeing a vehicle of any kind. There are only a handful of paved roads; I saw none while I lived there. One could fly a straight east-west line across the country and never pass over a home built of anything but grass and dirt. It is a primitive land and I say that without any sense of shame. I suspect that within the next ten years, if the peace holds, the region will make the sort of progress that might bring us to the standards of other East African nations. I do not know anyone who wishes southern Sudan to remain the way it is.”

The title? Achak is from the Dinka people of southern Sudan. Dave Eggers is quoted in The Guardian as saying: gifts, and were using this What to inflict unending pain upon the southern Sudanese.”

“We had agreed that we would include in the book an ancient creation myth known in southern Sudan. In the story, God, pleased with his greatest creation, offers the first Dinka man a choice of gifts: on the one hand, the cattle, visible and known, an animal that can feed and clothe him and last forever; on the other hand, the What. The man asks God, "What is the What?", but God will not reveal the answer. The What was unknown; the What could be everything or nothing. The Dinka man does not hesitate for long. He chooses the cattle, and for thousands of years Dinka lore held that he had chosen correctly; the cow is thus sacred in southern Sudanese culture, the measure of a family's wealth and the giver of life. It was not until the torment of the southern Sudanese in the 20th century that the Dinka began to question this choice. What was the What, they wondered, and speculation about the answer abounded: was it technology? Education? Sophisticated weapons? Whatever the answer, it was assumed that the Arabs of the north - who, legend had it, had received the What - might have got the greatest of God's

The controversy? Eggers was asked to help Achak write the book and recorded many interviews with him. At first I think they intended some kind of factual account of the style of ‘They poured fire on us from the sky’ but that book emerged first and Eggers felt that they could not add to that narrative. He also ran into some issues with recreating the story using just the fragments of Achak’s memory. It’s the usual issue – how do you recreate conversations with people where someone may only remember the intent or outcome, not the actual words. So he eventually decided to tell it as a novel but to use the first person voice of Achak as the narrator. IN doing this, he has got himself into trouble. I wasn’t too bothered by it because I think the story itself is really important – but here’s some of the criticism:


Lee Seigel’s review, titled The Niceness Racket says:

“The generation of people who survived the Holocaust and Stalin's vast network of camps is disappearing, but the number of novels about modern genocide has increased, and most of them are written by people who have no firsthand experience of their subject on which to draw. This presents a curious problem. Bearing witness, even in fictionalizing form, to extreme historical events that you have experienced is one thing. It is quite a different thing to try to recreate extreme historical events that you have not experienced, and then to try to imagine what it would be like to think and feel your way through them. This is hardly an illegitimate endeavor -- the imagination has an obligation to wrestle with even the most unimaginable experiences; but it is an intensely demanding endeavor, with moral and aesthetic pitfalls all around.”

Interesting, this connection with The Holocaust. Having just read The Street Sweeper, I had thought about this a lot. Seigel goes on to say:

“Deng's attitudes are tyrannically refracted through Eggers's reshaping of them. Deng does not represent himself. Eggers represents him. You never know whether the startling self-pity that Deng occasionally displays -- when two other boys are eaten by lions, Deng laments his unluckiness -- is his own or not. In Deng's own voice, these flashes from the underside of his ego might have been extenuated by irony or self-awareness. The same goes for Deng's hostile, suspicious, sometimes contemptuous attitudes toward American blacks. They might have been somehow vindicated in the full-throated revelation of his personality. Or maybe not. We will never know. In Eggers's hands, the survivor's voice does not survive.”

To some extent, I think Seigel is right but Achak has read and endorsed the book – he labels it his “soulful account” so do we take his own words at face value? Does it undermine his power and agency as a person to say that he is not capable of judging and addressing the ways in which Eggers has represented him? Is this just as patronising? I’m not sure.


Seigel goes on:

“And Eggers's book is also another unsettling thing. I never thought I would reach for this vocabulary, but What Is the What's innocent expropriation of another man's identity is a post-colonial arrogance -- the most socially acceptable instance of Orientalism you are likely to encounter. Perhaps this is the next stage of American memoir. Perhaps, having run out of marketable stories to tell about ourselves, we will now travel the world in search of desperate people willing to rent out their lives, the way indigent people in some desolate places give up their children. Perhaps we have picked our psyches clean, and now we need other people's stories the way we need other people's oil.”

I selected What is the What to read because I’d read Eggers’ Zeitoun and thought it very impressive. It’s a later book – about a Muslim man and his family who are victims of some truly appalling events post-Hurricane Katrina. It’s written in the third person – it’s very clear that the author is not the person experiencing the events. But vivid and compelling all the same.


I like Eggers – he is a good man. You can read about the things that he and Achak do in Sudan after the book is written, to try to improve the lives of the villagers where Achak is born. (See the article in The Guardian.) He wants to make a difference. He, like Eliot Perlman in The Street Sweeper, is driven by the need to have the story heard. I think this justifies what he does in telling it.

Disappointment is a beautiful woman reading Ann Rand

The title of this blog post comes from one of the stories I have just finished reading. It's The Best American Short Stories 2011. One of my favourite reading events for the year – time-out with a 20 page short story that almost always leaves you transported in time and place and most importantly, wanting more. It’s like a perfect little entrée. I try to use it as a guide to new authors – to read more widely in the coming year. In this case I’d happily read any of the people featured in this anthology though I don’t think it was quite as startlingly good as the 2010 collection. And a quibble – last year’s edition featured a story from Jennifer Egan’s book A Visit from the Goon Squad which is arguably a novel. I felt a bit cheated encountering another piece from the same book, even though this is a classy bit of writing. It either falls into publication in 2010 or 2011, not both. My favourite stories were ‘Foster’ by Claire Keegan (you can read it as first published in the New Yorker, A Bridge Under Water by Tom Bissell, The Sleep by Caitlin Horrocks, Housewifely Arts by Megan Mayhew Bergman and another story by the fabulous Rebecca Makkai who has been anthologised in this series four times.

Series Editor Heidi Pitlor makes some general comments about the kind of short stories that American writers are producing. She says that each of the 2011 stories sustains its own momentum through “premise or language, character or even perfectly placed silence.” Geraldine Brooks, who was the guest editor of the 2011 collection, is forthright about what she encountered(or did not encounter) in whittling down 20 stories from 100.

"Enuf adultery!" "Foreign countries exist." "Consider the following: Caravaggio's Conversion of Saint Paul, Handel's Messiah, Martin Luther King. Why, if religion turns up in a story, is it generally only there as a foil for humor?" and on said humor: "There's so little. Why, writers, so haggard and so woebegone?"

I can’t really do each story justice here but there is a blogger who can. She is working her way through each story with a detailed review – very interesting and entertaining reading. Go to Claire Guyton’s Sideways Reviews. If this is too much info, there is a shorter but detailed review which discusses each story in some detail.

Still life with scissors

If I have a reputation for being difficult, it’s because I love the everyday and want to present it. In general people go to the movies precisely to escape the everyday.–Chantal Akerman

1975 was a big year – I finished school and Gough’s government came to an end. At the same time Chantal Akerman was releasing a film called Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. A feminist film. At that time I owned a copy of The Female Eunuch though it was more for the look on my bookshelf than a well-thumbed text. I got into Greer a bit later than this. But I thought of myself as a feminist – and still do.

I saw Jeanne Dielman for the first time on Saturday night. I might not have gone if I’d realised that it was three and a half hours long but it was fabulous. It tracks the life of a widow over three days, at times seemingly in real time, and with about 15 minutes of dialogue in the entire film. Enticing? Oui. (It was set in Belgium and described as a masterpiece of French minimalist cinema. In fact I think every film maker should see it for the quality it has of being experiential cinema. We are forced to endure the tedium of Jeanne’s life as she is living it. We become attuned to small changes in her domestic routine as harbingers of a kind of breakdown. And even though there is one major dramatic event in the film it does not linger as the talking point or provider of residual images. What does linger are the long takes of Jeanne making meat loaf, endlessly pushing and prodding the pink mince until it resembles a large and horrible visceral thing (If ever something was going to send me into a vegetarian state, it would be that scene), or the scene of her washing, endlessly, compulsively or the scene of her sitting in a chair waiting for nothing. For a long time. For a very long time cinematically. We are used now to relentless action as the mode of telling a story; this film shows another way.

Jeanne is widowed and prostitutes herself by day to make enough money to support herself and her almost grown son. Her life constructed and maintained with immense care and precision; as if a light left on inadvertently or a door left ajar will bring everything undone. It’s a film about a woman trapped in the home; trapped by financial poverty and by a kind of limited horizon that seems to be the fate of many women of that time. It reminded me of the flip side of Mad Men, the TV series now playing. All those wives at home going quietly mad. Some 2009 critics have referenced the film Revolutionary Road as a new print of Jeanne Dielman came out about the same time as Revolutionary Road. It’s not a film I liked much, I found it emotionally cold; I felt nothing for the characters. Jeanne Dielman works in a much stronger way because the film forces the viewer to sit with the tedium and pain, the quiet bleakness, the existential meaninglessness and loneliness of the life of main character. It forces you to be in the film, not to just watch which is what it felt like with the Wheelers in RR. One reviewer contrasts the films really well - (not a fan of Sam Mendez either). Kenji Fujishima describes it as “Akerman’s refusal to present easy explanations for her predicament” in contrast to Sam Mendez (in Revolutionary Road) “predictably pins it all on the suburbs and on stifling social codes regarding marriage.”

It has been described as a ‘still life film”. Scott Foundas, writing in LA Weekly, said

“ It is also about repetition and routine as a justification for existence, and
how such things might drive someone mad without anyone realizing it, least of all the person herself. That it was all told from a woman’s point of view, at a historical moment that was not particularly robust for women either as subjects or makers of films, sealed the movie’s status as a classic — albeit one that has been nearly impossible to see for the past three decades. “There was a lot about Jeanne Dielman that I didn’t understand when I wrote it,” Akerman told me in a 2004 interview. “I had a script that was quite precise, but I didn’t even know before I started the first few shots that it was going to be a long movie. After two or three days, I said to the actress, ‘You know, it’s going to be a very long movie.’ But it was not planned.””

The woman who introduced the film described it as a masterpiece of the French minimalist cinema. I know little about this. And there’s quite a bit on the web about her film making techniques including a long essay, written in the 70s by Jayne Loader. It says (the essay) as much about the concerns and language of the times as it does about the film and is a provocative read. Some of it is about technique:

“The most striking formal technique in JEANNE DIELMAN is Akerman's use of the static camera. We see Jeanne's life as if it were a painting which we have all the time in the world to study. Thus we are not manipulated by dollies in or out of space that force us to focus on some particular point of action, or by changing camera angles which hurtle us up or down emotionally. Akerman has said that she saw no reason to move the camera in her film, and for the most part I agree with her: her character's actions speak for themselves.

Since Jeanne is the heart of the film, this is expressed visually by her placement in the still frame. She is centered precisely within it, and unless she moves from one room to another, Akerman not only holds the camera steady but holds the shot as well. There are no cuts except when absolutely necessary, and Jeanne is almost always on screen. Akerman's cinema focuses our attention on her smallest gestures, gestures that reveal character but would be lost in a more flamboyant film: a knife that almost slips when a potato is peeled, a light turned off unnecessarily, a facial expression of disquiet or of frustration, the curious act of making coffee in a thermos in the morning for drinking at lunchtime. The effect of such details, repeated and ritualized, is cumulative. Slowly the portrait is pieced together.

Amazingly, Akerman was only 25 when she made this film. I am in awe of her achievement and her courage and will finish with this quote about it: “Because Akerman's scenario and her realization of it are so provocatively heterogeneous, and because the interpretations of the film's place in the canon of great cinema are so varied (and also because Akerman's editing rhythms and pacing are as methodical and unhurried as Stanley Kubrick's), some have called it the "domestic 2001."

Despair

About a quarter of the way into Synecdoche, I had to make a decision. Whether to go with it or not. It makes demands of the viewer in a similar way to the film You, the living. The scene which triggered this feeling is one of the less successful ones; a woman is being shown around a house by a real estate agent as smoke is billowing from its walls. Silly. Surreal. Kaufman, the writer-director on drugs. A lot of people will describe this film as a pretentious wank. And while I think it’s a head – job, it’s way more interesting than the pretensions on the surface. What it is in fact is a journey into the psyche – the psyche of the main character, Caden Cotard, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Cotard has been abandoned by his wife who wishes he was dead. (”I wish he was dead; it would be cleaner”, she tells their therapist as he sits there, blank-faced, numb.) Shortly after, she takes their young daughter and goes to live in Germany. Cotard is ill, ageing and filled with despair. He is a play director which gives Kaufman the opportunity to set a fiction within the fictions – or a set of fictions. In reality, what he is exploring is the rubbish which fills our heads. We are privy to Cotard’s paranoias, fantasies and self-talk. It’s done really cleverly through the play within the play construct so Cotard has a set of actors playing himself and other key people in his life. Through them, we see his imaginings, his preferred dialogue, possible scenarios written and re-written. At times too, there is a voice in his ear which helps him decide what to do. It is a film about Everyman and about one man, with despair the prevailing motif. Once again I am watching a film about an ageing man.

I think it’s a really brave film because it’s trying to depict what happens in the brain. Anyone’s brain. The reviewer in The Times describes it well:

“There is some bitter, anguished humour here, but the overriding tone is a deep, aching melancholy. There are numerous possible interpretations of the film, but the constant in all possible readings is the film’s immutable sadness. Does it work? Not always.Kaufman’s ambition occasionally overshoots his skill as a director. But this is a curious and bleakly beautiful piece of work that rewards repeated viewings.”

The title, Synecdoche, is emblematic of the film; hard to say, pretentious, yet trying to say something of real meaning. It means an image in which the part stands for the whole - for example, "head of cattle" meaning cow, or "crown" meaning king. The part is emblematic of the whole. Cotard‘s headspace is symbolic of what is true for all of us, his huge, mad, pasteboard world stands for the real world, is part of it, is superimposed on to it, and finally melts into it.

I also saw Samson and Delilah yesterday. Two films about despair in the one day. They both open in the same way, someone waking up and getting out of bed. In Synecdoche, Hoffman is blearily surrounded by ordinary domesticity, by the demands of the alarm clock and a daughter and telephone. His entry into the day is slow and tired. In the Australian film, we see Samson wake up into the curtain-muted morning light of an outback morning. His bedding is dishevelled and he gropes for a shirt to put on before he gets out of bed. He then gropes for a containner of petrol to sniff. Good morning Samson. Its really hard to watch. Like Hoffman, Samson is slow to start the day. This contrasts with the outdoor waking of Delilah and her nana. Delilah more purposefully and immediately tends to her grandmother’s needs. It’s outback Australia, somewhere on a small remote community surrounded by the beautiful red rock of the area.

Delilah is the one who does the tending in the film which otherwise lacks tenderness. It is bleak in the extreme. After it had finished, my friend Naomi and I talked for a long time about it. The depicted options for indigenous people are few. Down the creek with petrol. On a community with little to do and little (depicted) connection or tenderness. Being exploited by Western art dealers. Getting God. Or getting right away from anyone else. The characters are shown as having little or no agency (with the exception of Delilah, who may get hers from God). I wonder how indigenous people feel about this kind of positioning. The dysfunctionality is the primary motif.

I don’t know what to do with this film. David Stratton gave it 5 stars and described it as “one of the finest films ever made in this country”. It’s definitely about the most important topic that we are likely to see on Australians screens and I think it’s really well made. I especially liked the lack of dialogue though I’ve never known teenagers to say as little as these two. But, and this is not the film’s fault, we are left with the certain knowledge that the film could be a documentary; that it illustrates the reality of life for lots of indigenous kids and that every few people know what to do about this. It’s bleak. Blogger Jane Simpson says:

“David Stratton's review is entitled "A world beyond words" and words are what's absent in the film. Everyday chat, everyday laughter, everyday interaction, doing things together, all the things that make life on outstations much less bleak than the portrayal here. And the family connections are missing - are Delilah and Samson two lost children without parents, sisters, brothers, cousins, who no one looks out for? Or indeed without fellow petrol-sniffers?”

The thing that happened to me as I watched it was a kind of splitting – which often happens when I watch films about other cultures. I’m more tolerant of values that are at odds with mine; I sit there and think “Well that’s their culture”. I’m prepared to tolerate weirdnesses, bad singing (Tulpan) and other little things. In the instance of this film, it played out in this way. The first part of the film begins with Samson’s courtship of Delilah. She is not interested in him. She makes this clear. She’s not playing games; she repeatedly pushes him away. On only one occasion during the initial part of the film (she buys him food) does she show any positive feeling. She knows that he is trouble. But I think we are positioned to want them to be together (even through their names) even though Samson is going to be nothing but trouble for Delilah. Jane Simpson’s blog entry sums up my misgivings about this aspect of the film in this analysis of the ending:

“The end is a fairytale ending, perhaps a fantasy of male hope - that a beautiful young woman would leave her own car and gun to go off with a petrol-sniffer, come back and find the car and gun still working, that she would have her own outstation, and would then dedicate herself to looking after the brain-damaged, wheel-chair-bound petrol-sniffer on her own. Julie Rigg takes this as the commitment demanded by love. I take it as obsession. Good outcome for Samson, lousy for Delilah.”

Having said that, Warwick Thornton is a very talented filmmaker. I loved his short film Nanna. The actors in Samson and Delilah are great. I loved the small surprises in the narrative. It‘s a really important film. I hope it does really well. It‘s more worthy of attention than Synecdoche – one being a cerebral head-job and one almost a documentary. About us. Australians. And both about despair.

Ego integrity and despair

I like listening to Radiotherapy on RRR on Sunday mornings. It’s a bunch of doctors chewing over medical stuff and sometimes they do film reviews. I don’t know if it’s the same reviewer every time but he often comes at things from a psychoanalytic POV – often quite a different take on films. Yesterday he reviewed Gran Torino which he and I both liked. He talked about Erik Erikson’s work on the 8 stages of man – the last one is Ego Integrity vs. Despair - old age. “Some handle death well. Some can be bitter, unhappy, dissatisfied with what they accomplished or failed to accomplish within their life time. They reflect on the past, and conclude at either satisfaction or despair.” (Wikipedia)

This had huge resonance for me because I think this is where my father is at; reflecting on his life and in his case, I think he fluctuates between the two Erikson categories of despair and ego integrity. In the case of Gran Torino, it’s Clint Eastwood who plays an angry, lonely old bastard, a man who has just lost his wife and who has the slightest of relationships with his family. I’m not going to write at length about the film; I liked it despite the fact that most of the plot is a basic redemption plot - dysfunctional person is led to a better, happier life almost in spite of himself. It is also about the Hmong community in the USA, a community I know a little about because of the book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. While Gran Torino is not a great film, the baddies (Hmong gangsters) look like total baddies and it is largely though not entirely predictable, it was oddly satisfying seeing this old curmudgeon gradually accept friendship even though he never lost the surface elements of racism. I really enjoyed it. We love seeing bad guys get what they deserve. And Eastwood obviously had a lot of fun with the non-PC aspects of the character he plays - there are some very funny moments. He is great – and brave – he looks his age. Which is old.

I thought of the film gain yesterday after watching The Wrestler which I thought was great. Mickey Rourke was playing a man at the end of his wrestling career, held together by steroids, bandages and headlines from the glory years of his character, “Randy the Ram”. His life is crap: trailer park trash, he’s lonely, broke and damaged. Like Eastwood, he has fucked up relations with the only family he has, his daughter. It’s a stretch applying the Erikson stage to it because Rourke’s character is, I think, meant to be in his fifties but steroid abuse and the damages perpetuated by wrestling have really aged him and one of the events in the film causes him to want to change his life. Rourke is really fabulous. It’s painful watching him try to connect with the lap-dancer character played by Marissa Tomei. He is embarrassingly gauche and shambling with the Tomei character Cassie/Pam, as he also is with his daughter. The Cassie/Pam character has a twofold purpose in the film; she represents new possibilities for Randy and her own life parallels his – they are both struggling with jobs that require a specific and damaging kind of performance that is at odds with the “real” or regular lives that other people live. Both have a performance persona, they frock up (or down in Tomei’s case), they play for the punters and suffer humiliations as a result. (One of the best scenes in the film shows the small cohort of deadbeat wrestlers seated at card tables in a community hall, selling videos (not DVDs) of past glories and signing autographs for the meagre numbers of fans that trawl through this bleak and wintery town)

I can’t do justice to the treatment of wrestling in the film. It is remarkable. The wrestling scenes are violent and theatrical and there were segments in the film which were hard to sit through even though I watched knowing that it was all about performance. Like lap-dancing. The film avoids predictability; I thought it was great. In an interview conducted by James Rocchi, director Aronofsky credited a 1957 Charles Mingus song "The Clown," an instrumental piece with a poem read over the music about a clown who accidentally discovers the bloodlust of the crowds and eventually kills himself in performance, as a major source of inspiration for the movie.