Elles

Elles is the second film I’ve seen this month that focuses, in part, on prostitution. It would be misleading to see this as the sole focus. It’s a subject that’s always going to grab attention but I think the film is really about something else. The main character (Anne) is wonderfully played by Juliette Binoche – I can’t imagine anyone else doing it so well. A middle class journalist, she is writing an article about students who turn to prostitution as a means of getting through uni. The two women that she meets in the course of interviewing for the article present an unexpected view of their work. The Juliet Binoche character is intrigued by both their perspectives and what it throws up about her own life.


There are few reviews of this film yet but mostly I think the reviewers have got it wrong. Read these two snippets:

“While Szumowska and her co-writer, Tine Byrckel, hammer home their arguably offensive theory that well-to-do femmes are acting as hookers in the kitchen and at the keyboard, they seem far less clear on what they want to say about actual harlotry. Scenes of the journalist's collegiate interview subjects satisfying male clients to earn tuition money are lit and shot like perfume commercials, even as the sex in some cases turns disturbingly brutal.” (from Variety)

and (from The Guardian):

“Juliette Binoche gives it her considerable all in this otherwise dubious film, which purports to investigate the moral and emotional price of teenage prostitution…Presumably the idea is to explore the emotional disconnect required to function as one of those can't-be-too-thin French bourgeoises.

I think what the film is about is not the metaphor of prostitution, but of compromise. The Anne character is not economically reliant on anyone. She does not need to prostitute herself, as the students feel they need to do (One compares the work favourably with working in a fastfood restaurant). She could have a viable and interesting life as a working journalist living by herself. The compromise comes in wanting a relationship, in having children, in wanting to work, in being a daughter, in being part of a middle–class mileau. Parts of herself are suppressed in this process – just as parts might also blossom. (A friend of mine said recently of her time as the mother of two very young children: “I feel like I lost myself for about five years.”) I think that’s where the film maker, Malgoska Szumowska is heading. Much of what we see of Anne’s life is unpleasant; her sons are providing little joy and her husband is disconnected and angry. She is frustrated. Not a pretty picture. One effective scene is when she visits her ailing father in hospital. She picks up his foot to give him a foot massage. Lots of feelings went through my head. What a loving thing this is to do. How horrible old men’s feet can be. How difficult it would be for me to massage my own fathers feet. The importance of touch. Its disappearance in life as you age.


You might think that the prostitution would not be pretty either. Szumowska tries to upset expectations here; the two women present their work as one that provides them with choices and as mostly benign. I was reminded very powerfully of Kate Holden’s account of her life as a prostitute Under my skin. I never quite believed that the things she described in that book did not have a substantial impact on her and I felt that with the accounts of the two girls in the film. I think Szumowska intends us to be sceptical observers; there are small cracks in the façade presented by the two girls.


Binoche is authentic and believable – it’s a very powerful film about being a woman.


Black & White & Sex is the other film I’ve seen recently that features sex workers. It’s a new Australian film by John Winter. This film is much more explicitly about the way we view prostitution though, like Elle, it wants to mess with our preconceptions about it. Winter said that he was inspired to make the film after going for a round of institutional funding in relation to another film script which featured a prostitute. The film fund reps were concerned that the portrayal of the sex worker was too upbeat – not “victim” enough. This inspired him to write the script for this, a film in which the sex worker character is played by eight different women (not dissimilar to the portrayal of Bob Dylan in the film I’m not there).


It begins with the feel of a play. Two characters on stage, almost entirely dialogue driven. I wasn’t sure it was going to work for a while, then the character of Angie got going. She reminded me of kids I’ve taught – like half-loved dogs, never quite reliable but yearning for contact. The film covers some great topics: intimacy, censorship, power, gender dynamics, love, control and trust. What happens is unexpected and interesting. It also looks good – shot in black and white, and using split screens where necessary to fragment the focus and force the viewer to make choices about what to look at. The use of eight actresses was clever; giving life to the idea that there are many facets and perceptions within the world of the sex worker; and that that person can embody universal desires and feelings but simultaneously be uniquely individual.


Need to conclude with this snippet from a review – just because I liked the imagery.

“The film industry, so the common wisdom goes, is chocked to the gills with carbon copy cinema, stuffed like a poisoned piñata with the bile and fluid of a zillion regurgitated ideas. Here is a bold, audacious and throbbingly original Australian film, particularly palatable for viewers partial to edgy, intimate and explorative interpersonal dramas.”

Julie Rigg, in commenting on this film, said: “My colleague Jason Di Rosso reckons that Australian directors are not very good at directing sex scenes. We lack a true erotic cinema. What do you think?”
He might be on to something, though I don’t think anyone would argue that the scenes in Black & White & Sex are meant to be sex scenes per se. I can’t think of any Australian films that have the kind of sensuality I’ve seen in some French films or some of Ang Lee’s work for example. The sex scenes in Elles looked real. Real doesn’t always mean erotic but it can. I think what Australians are good at is the flirty Diver Dan kind of schtick – but this is not erotic. There's something in the image of Australian men that refuses the erotic - it might be that you have to take women seriously and risk intimacy. This is at odds with the ways in which masculinity in Australia is traditionally presented on the screen. Maybe I will stop there.

Reading crime. Norway v Australia

I’m an erratic reader of crime fiction. Mostly, I like to read it at Christmas – where I suspect it works at sublimating my desire to murder my family. Right now I’m in the middle of a Norwegian crime spree courtesy of Jo Nesbo. What I like about his books is what I like about most detective novels – the character of the sleuth or anti-hero detective. In many ways, the plot is less relevant though I like things to make sense, to add up. I like to think about “whodunit” but this is secondary to the anti-hero’s journey.


In The Leopard, Harry Hole (pronounced ‘Hooler’), the detective, is holed up in Hong Kong at the beginning of the story. He’s in a bad way; bashed up by a triad over gambling debts and a cosy little relationship with an opium pipe. In a way, I wanted him to stay there. Kowloon is vivid in my head, after my recent visit there and it seemed like the perfect destination for a man like Hole – so rife with possibilities. But he is bundled onto a plane by a young Norwegian female detective who inevitably provides some other ‘rife with possibilities’ moments.


The novel actually begins with a torture scene. I was thinking quite a lot of things while reading it. How often this genre starts with this kind of scene – the reader is placed immediately in a scene of great danger – portrayed either exclusively through the panicked eyes of the victim, or the paranoid nastiness of the killer. The scene is often so strange and disconnected from the subsequent narrative, which usually defaults to something way more domestic, that I usually forget that I have read it. It’s never my favourite part of the book, even though I suspect that the writer will have laboured over making it gripping. The opening scene of this novel is graphic and horrible. I felt voyeuristic reading it (as I did with a couple of other violent scenes in the novel). In searching for a novel kind of torture, I think that Nesbo has stretched too far. It’s likely that the whole thriller/detective genre has run out of realistically gruesome new ways to die. One reviewer, Patrick Anderson, wrote of this scene:

“The novel opens with a four-page exercise in horror. A young woman — captive, confused, desperate — is in the grip of a fiendish instrument of torture. As we watch, this device inflicts a terrible death on her. This is a brilliant scene, in its way, but it’s also stunningly sadistic, both in terms of what the killer is doing to the woman and what the author is doing to the reader.”

However much of the novel is devoted to Harry and his struggle with officialdom, with the politics operating between two institutions fighting for jurisdiction over murders in Norway. These, for me, are the most satisfying parts of the novel, just as, in a drama series like The Wire, the political machinations, treachery and power plays provide the gripping underpinning of the drama. The parts that I don’t like are the most dramatic: an avalanche, a volcano, a trip into Colonel Kurtz territory in the darkest Congo. I just don’t buy the melodrama of these events. But I’ll wear them because I’m a Harry fan and I do like a good murder. Anderson, the aforementioned reviewer, was not as kind, but I did enjoy the way he described The Leopard:

“Now, alas, I must report that ‘The Leopard’ is a bloated, near-total disaster. Reading it, I came to imagine myself trapped in a vast, fetid swamp from which I might never emerge."

The reviewer in The Independent, Paul Binding, writes about the ways in which family genes and upbringing become a theme in ‘The Leopard’.

“Nesbø's insight into inherited conflict – of which this novel affords a disturbing double instance – must emanate from his own declared family background. His father fought for the Germans in the Second World War, his mother for the Resistance, this duality being the emotional foundation of The Redbreast.


Nesbø's imaginative preoccupation with division, above all in the individual, makes him a distinctively Norwegian writer. His mentors – Ibsen, Hamsun - have magisterially contrasted the wild with the harmonious, the lover or explorer with the conscientious citizen, the stern moralist with the easy-going hedonist. This distinguishes him from the Swedes Mankell and Larsson, to whom he is so often compared.”

Finally, the other thing that the opening scene made me think about was the absence of torture from Australian detective novels. I need to say that I have not read really widely of the entire genre but within my experience, we kill quite quickly and efficiently for reasons other than straight-out sadism (I’m recalling a quite bizarre and stupid scene from Peter Temple’s otherwise very fine novel The Broken Shore as an exception.) Perhaps I am wrong – happy to be corrected. Our sadistic murderers tend to be more of the Wolf Creek mode – their place is in the outback or Bangalo State Forest. Our detectives are slightly less anti-hero – Cliff Hardy, Murray Whelan, Jack Irish – more Diver Dan than Harry Hole. If Paul Binding is right, that Nesbo is preoccupied with ‘division’ in the individual; that is a trait less obvious in Australian protagonists – who tend to be outsiders, but intact outsiders without the self-destructive aspects of a character like Hole. I will keep thinking about this.

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.

Blessed?

Like several films I have seen this year, Blessed begins with images of people sleeping. The faces of the seven teenagers at rest, some in their own beds, one sprawled amongst a few sleeping bodies and two children who are asleep under a bridge. Watching, I thought how rarely I see anyone asleep except the cat. It’s a rare intimacy – the unguarded softened face at rest.

The central theme of this film is the connection between mothers and their children and this plays out in the division of the film. The opening half focuses on the children and is shot in tight close-ups. The latter half is called ‘Mothers’ and the camera angle widens; we see more of each family’s context, both literally and metaphorically.

I wanted to like this film. It’s set in the western suburbs of Melbourne though there are few actual markers of this landscape (Noise, released a couple of years ago, conveyed the physical landscape the west much more potently, as did the film My Year Without Sex, though what these film makers choose to show is quite different). So it’s set in the place I have lived the greater part of my life and focuses on the lives of teenagers. I’ve spent a lot of time with teenagers from the West. I was deeply interested in how filmmaker Ana Kokkinos would represent these things.

The theme is also powerful; Kokkinos talks about ‘that connection between them (mothers and children) is primal, so powerful, and no matter what shit’s going down, at the end of the day there’s that incredible capacity to return to the mother’s embrace.’ And there’s one extended scenes which shows this; involving the Miranda Otto character Bianca and her daughter Stacey. Stacey has been in trouble (I won’t describe what it is) and her mother opens the front door of their house to discover both her daughter and a policewoman. Later, as she shuts the door, she gives Stacey a complicit smile. “I did this once, she says”. It’s a response that should have come after a parental blast about bad behaviour but Bianca is half-pissed and not capable of reacting appropriately. Then later that night, Stacey opens the door of her mother’s bedroom, her mother lifts the doona and Stacey snuggles in next to her mum. Shit goes down, shit is forgiven. It feels real, this scene.

A lot of the film failed to persuade. I think two things were happening. The actors were just a tad too middle class in presentation (teenage girls with perfect skin, neutral middle class accents, delivering lines without the almost essential uplift at the end of each sentence – that badge of teenage girl uncertainty that haunts most kids I know. Drinking bourbon straight. No sign of even getting a bit giggly on it). I wasn’t convinced that they inhabited the same train line as I do. And the other problem with the film is that the large amount of intersecting plot lines means that we never develop a strong sense of any of the personalities. You could sum each character and what happens to them in one or two sentences without omitting much information. Not that this always matters. One of the best films I saw at MIFF this year was Treeless Mountain where there is a similar sparseness of information and plot development. It’s a film about the reverse issue to Blessed; about a mother who effectively abandons her very young children. But in the case of that film, we live through the pain of the young sisters by seeing events at their level, experiencing their attempts to survive and care for each other in a slow and careful script which allows the viewer to spend time with the character. Blessed felt like a gallery of semi-one dimensional “issues”.

The most interesting and believable character in the film is Rhonda (Frances O’Connor). Her young kids leave home and sleep rough for reasons which become obvious in the film. All her scenes are interesting but we find out so little about her that she seems short-changed. If I described what happens to her in the film, it would seem like a paragraph from the Herald Sun about no-hoper mothers and tragedies. Kokkinos is quoted as saying that the screenplay for the film would not hang together until she went back to the core of what attracted her in the first place: a powerful monologue in which single mother Rhonda describes her missing and neglected kids as her “blessings”. “Of all the words in the play, they resonated with me most the first time I saw it,” says Kokkinos. “If you can imagine that, as a filmmaker, there are a couple of key lines in a film that actually continue to hook you in and provide you with an emotional core to keep going, over years, no matter what.” It is a powerful moment in the film but the film goes nowhere with it. We get no further handle on Rhonda. Almost none of her behaviour is in sync with the notion that her children are her blessings yet we get little opportunity to understand why. She’s lost in a kind of film limbo and seems unfair.

I am biased. The films I have come to love emerge from the Neo-Neo Realism school of film-making. In a great article on this genre, writer A O Scott talks about the aftermath of 9/11 and other unsettling global events and what audiences therefore might be been looking for. He/she argues that, rather than necessarily wanting escapism as many pundits thought,

"what if, at least some of the time, we feel an urge to escape from escapism? For most of the past decade, magical thinking has been elevated from a diversion to an ideological principle. The benign faith that dreams will come true can be hard to distinguish from the more sinister seduction of believing in lies. To counter the tyranny of fantasy entrenched on Wall Street and in Washington as well as in Hollywood, it seems possible that engagement with the world as it is might reassert itself as an aesthetic strategy. Perhaps it would be worth considering that what we need from movies, in the face of a dismaying and confusing real world, is realism.”

I guess that many people would argue that realism pervades Blessed. But none of the characters got the time they deserved on screen so they melted into a sort of working class pastiche. A O Scott describes a number of films which fall into the category of Neo-Neo Realism and goes on to say that they serve as an antidote to the wish-fulfilment films of Hollywood.

“Not because they offer grim counsels of despair or paint lurid tableaux of desperation but rather because they take what has always seemed seductively easy about moviemaking — the camera can show us the world — and make it look hard. Their characters undergo a painful process of disillusionment, and then keep going. The disappointment they encounter — the grit with which they face it, the grace with which it is conveyed — becomes, for the audience, a kind of exhilaration.”

The ambitious scope of Blessed allows for neither grit or grace to stick around for long.

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.

Alone in the world

I’ve been thinking about therapy and its literary and filmic representations lately. Purely by coincidence, I saw the films One Flew over the Cuckoos Nest and Men’s Group within a 24 hour period. Both films are broadly about men in trouble, though this is perhaps where the similarity ends.
I think I saw One Flew over the Cuckoos Nest last in 1976. It was quite shocking. Literally of course but that’s a pretty lame joke. I remembered the shocking aftermath of Nicholson’s treatment but not the way the film ended. I don’t know how prevalent lobotomies are any more. I saw it at a time when shock treatment was very controversial as was the institutionalisation of people. I saw it in the free-wheeling 70’s where the mood of rebellion against authority was very strong. I am betting that I saw it just as Whitlam had been kicked out of office and we in Australia were battling against the early, nasty impact of the Fraser government, the razor gang and, interestingly, the first incarnation of John Howard.

Filmsite.org describes it as

“one of the greatest American films of all time - a $4.4 million dollar effort directed by Czech Milos Forman. Its allegorical theme is set in the world of an authentic mental hospital (Oregon State Hospital in Salem, Oregon), a place of rebellion exhibited by a energetic, flamboyant, wise-guy anti-hero against the Establishment, institutional authority and status-quo attitudes (personified by the patients' supervisory nurse). [Forman himself noted that the asylum was a metaphor for the Soviet Union (embodied as Nurse Ratched) and the desire to escape.”

The film holds up but looks quite different to me now. I have a greater appreciation of where Milos Forman was coming from. He says in the support material for the film that he felt like he had been living in an asylum for 20 years in the Czech Republic. Most of the filming was done in the mental hospital; the actors would come in the morning and rehearse then just hang around getting themselves into the feel of the institution in the afternoon.

I see Nurse Ratched differently though. In some ways, I think she is treated unfairly – this is a film where the only women are whores or nurses and maybe this is how some of these dysfunctional men perceive women in general but it seems a little unfair that Ratched carries the entire can. The doctor, who is a real psychiatrist, is not demonised in the way that Ratched is, though it’s he who is responsible for what finally happens to Nicholson. A nurse, in reality wouldn’t have had that sort of power, even though Ratched is depicted as conducting the therapy sessions by herself. And in the first instance, the Nicholson character is incarcerated in prison because he has had sex with a 15 year old girl; it’s a construct that a director wouldn’t use now if he was looking for audience sympathy for the main character. There is some unpleasant gender stuff lurking in the dark recesses of this film but it is really about dysfunction, abuse of authority and agency.

Critic, Roger Ebert said it “is a film so good in so many of its parts that there's a temptation to forgive it when it goes wrong. But it does go wrong, insisting on making larger points than its story really should carry, so that at the end, the human qualities of the characters get lost in the significance of it all. And yet there are those moments of brilliance.” He and I both liked the small scenes of rebellion inside the ward and the depictions of the ways in which people collude with authority; the scenes showing just how hard it is to take stock, stand up for yourself.

Following my at-home screening of Cuckoo’s Nest, I went to see Men’s Group. I was very disappointed in this film. I had high hopes of this film representing my personal experiences of a women’s group on the big screen; the value of doing the work and the toughness of the experience. And it began promisingly with the very first meeting of the 5 men. This meeting was filled with the confusion and difficulty of making contact with other people; it felt authentic in the strange embarrassment of the session. Their consultant who says, at the outset ”This is not therapy. It’s simply a space to be safe and talk about things.” And this was the truth of the work that he does and that they are up to doing. The consultant seemed unable to work at any depth with the men in the room. They were there for the regular variety of issues that people (men?) face; loneliness, fathering problems, father problems, relationship issues, just generally being disconnected. And why they turned up again after the futility of that first session, I don’t know.

It gave me plenty of time during the film to think about the kinds of successful renderings of therapy on film. The best one for me is the fractious and flirtatious relationship of Dr Jennifer Melfi and Tony (or Anthony, as she likes to call him) Soprano. It is my favourite part of this series. Other people might reference the Analyse This/That films but they are much more about other things than therapy. Pyschotherapist, Irvin Yalom has done so much to render therapy an accessible and interesting thing in fiction and in his books about his practice. I’ve been profoundly influenced by his work. In Love’s Executioner he talks about 4 fundamental things that we need to come to terms with as humans. The first is obviously death. Another is our fundamental aloneness – not loneliness but aloneness. I can’t remember what the other two are but these two are big for me. Here is a little of an interview with him in Salon:

Q: “Most of us feel we do not want to think about death. But you assert that confronting death is a key to living a full, authentic, happy life. I wonder if you could describe in personal terms what living authentically means to you?”

A: “Certainly as I've grown older, I've been thinking a lot more about the end of my life, which may not be too far away. My father and his brothers all died relatively young because of heart conditions. So I think, Well, life is finite. I don't have unlimited years left, and I want to know what is more central to me and my life right now.

Above all, I don't want to do anything that feels repetitious. And I tell myself that I don't want to belong to any more committees or teach anymore, because the field is becoming drugs, pharmacotherapy. The next generation of therapists isn't going to be trained for psychotherapy because the insurance companies aren't going to be paying for it any longer.

What feels most central for me is being creative and looking at the way in which I have creative talents and gifts that I haven't used. I basically see myself as a storyteller engaged in ideas that have to do with an existential, deeper approach to life. I feel very uncomfortable with the idea of these gifts being unused.”

It reminded me of going to hear David Tacey and John Carroll talk about Jung at Readings. One of them said that in this secular society, we use stories to make meaning out of life. This statement sounds so painfully obvious but when I heard it, it resonated so much - this is the compelling thing about stories, in the absence of that large meta-narrative about God, we need some others. (The blog Thinking Shift has some writing about this topic.)

I think that when it comes down to it, this is why I felt so cross with Men’s Group. The film fluttered across the surface of the stories of these men; all of whom had deep and painful histories. The film-maker, Michael Joy, said “Within my own life I ended up needing some people outside of family and friends to talk to and I found myself going to a men's group this one evening and heard these guys' stories and just realised that there was a story there that had to be told.” Joy needed to hang around and do the stories justice. He needed to attend the men’s group for months to see what deep and painful issues were raised and worked through. If they were worked through. Or to read a little Yalom and see what universal truths can come from the process of therapy whne you stay with the pain of the person you are working with, when you linger.

So out of it all, when I talked about it with Naomi, my FFFF, we decided that there was merit in showing the fact that the 5 men were facing similar issues (as opposed to making a film about any one one of these characters seperately). Loneliness. Disconnection. Inarticulateness. Aggression. How to be a father. How to love a father. How to manage that sense of being alone in the world. These are the stuff of important stories; they make meaning for everyone. But while there is great merit in trying to work with these themes, the film did a pretty crap job of it.

It did, however, spawn this funny piece of dialogue between Margaret and David (At the Movies):

MARGARET: Getting away from that, I mean it’s interesting for me, having that sort of rawness of blokes’ emotions. How do you, as a man, react to that?

DAVID: I found it - I think I’m the sort of person who keeps my emotions in check.

MARGARET: Yeah.

DAVID: And so I don’t entirely recognise that, but I was impressed by the way the actors handled it and the way it developed during the course of the film. I would never go to a group session like the one in the film. Never.

MARGARET: I can imagine. No, but because, you know, I think that’s true of a lot of men. They’re too contained and they are in the beginning of this film.

DAVID: You’re looking...

MARGARET: It’s not easy to expose yourself.

DAVID: You’re looking at a very contained man, Margaret.

MARGARET: Oh, I know that, David.

DAVID: In case you didn’t know after all these years.