I am Helen Kaplow, writing as Helen Highly: I'm a little bit high. ...highly suspect ...highly sensitive ....highly enthusiastic ...highly educated ...highly humbled ...highly intoxicated? ...highly likely.
When not posting articles here or at IndieNYC.com, I am being a culture vulture in my adopted home of New York City.
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Helen Highly Vindicated. In the last two days I’ve heard at least two pop-culture references to an ancient play by Aristophanes. As someone who can’t seem to stop writing commentary about popular culture by comparing it to classic theater, it is refreshing to hear someone else finally do it – two people no less!Alyssa Milano and Bill Maher, thank you very much for making me feel less out of touch with the world.
First, Alyssa Milano called for a sex strikeuntil Georgia’s new anti-abortion law is repealed. She didn’t mention the play Lysistrata by name, but I assume (and hope) it was buried in her subconscious and gave her the idea. In famous Greek literature, this character convinces women to refuse sex with their husbands until they end a war. Milano did reference contemporary director Spike Lee, who used the same idea as a remedy for gang violence in his film Chi-Raq.
Then, Bill Maher, on Real Time with Bill Maher, listed a New Rule he called “The Great Wife Hope,” suggesting that two famous ex-models, Melania Trump and Jerry Hall, both married to “super-rich Republican monsters” – Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch, respectively, deny sex to their husbands. Maher specifically mentioned Lysistrata when explaining that getting men to quit their destructive ways by threatening to cut them off in bed is a tale as old as time. He added, “I know they’re rich, but is it worth Western Civilization?” See the clip, below:
So there: I guess American culture is not as disinterested in classic drama as it might seem. I don’t expect this small “win” for intellectual literature to change me from being mostly Helen Highly Irrelevant or to bring more people to my online essays, but I will mention them here nonetheless. I keep writing commentary about pop culture by comparing it to decidedly unhip, old stage plays, or just writing about the most esoteric aspects of culture, I guess. Most people have no idea what I am talking about and the rest don’t care. I am ridiculously irrelevant, and I can’t seem to stop myself.
I know that almost no one wants to see a new, controversial “cinematic memoir” about alleged sex-predator and old Rolling Stone Bill Wyman, much less read an article that compares that film to a vintage Samuel Beckett play – especially not on Mother’s Day! But I posted it anyway. Click here to read my review of The Quiet One, where Helen Highly Suggests that viewers might come for the music but stay for the existential irony. If nothing else, it’s an in-depth discussion of the absurdist nature of reminiscence.
Bill Wyman in “The Quiet One”Bill and Suzanne Wyman at Rupert Murdoch and Jerry Hall’s wedding
As a not-entirely-irrelevant tie-in, I am going to post a photo I found of the elderly Bill Wyman and his third wife Suzanne at the wedding of the aforementioned Jerry Hall and Rupert Murdoch. I didn’t have space to include the picture in my Quiet One review, but it kinda makes sense here, in a grotesque sort of way. I assume Donald Trump was in attendance as well. I call that triple-down monstrosity.
And before The Quiet One, I wrote about an urgently important advocacy documentary, Slay the Dragon, which discusses the least appealing political topic – gerrymandering, a term most people can’t pronounce, much less understand. Although, people’s disinterest in it only makes it more the symbol of everything that’s wrong with America. I tried to make my film review seem relatable by referencing Game of Thrones, which I did not do nearly as successfully as John Oliver did last night, when making The Green New Deal seem interesting by comparing it to Game of Thrones. But he is more clever than I, alas. Still, the topic of gerrymandering is actually more urgent than climate change, and there are more immediate and concrete actions that we can take. Click here to read my Slay the Dragon review and interview with the filmmakers. Really: this is THE most vital political film of the year, and if I can contribute anything to popular culture, it will be in getting people to see this surprisingly compelling movie, directed by Barak Goodman. (Note: Recent events have brought up correlations between gerrymandering and Alabama’s new, super-restrictive abortion law, which actually out-outrages Alyssa Milano’s Georgia abortion law. I’ve updated my Slay the Dragon article to include these latest events.)
Gerrymandered Dragon“Us” movie poster
Before that, I reviewed the much-anticipated pop-culture phenom Us – the latest horror flick from super-cool Jordan Peele. But I compared it, point by point, to a theatrical adaptation of Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov(in a new play titled Life Sucks).I asked if the two were tethered together like combating doubles of each other. I know; it seems random, but at a time when immigration has become a national emergency in our country, both stories deal with issues of outsiders vs insiders, us vs them (within ourselves and society), and blame vs responsibility, and I thought it was worth discussing. And also, both mix humor into their portrayals of pain, which makes them both meaningful genre-benders. Doesn’t even matter if you’ve seen the film or Chekhov, methinks; it’s all good food for thought. Click here to read that incisive review. – A little scissor humor there. ha. (Hey! Play just got an extended run uptown starting June 4! Go buy tickets!)
Maybe Wikipedia is happy to have me around. I seem to do nothing as much as insert Wikipedia links in an attempt to help people understand what the hell I’m talking about. So it goes. I’m thinking that next I will discuss The Avengers in terms of Henrik Ibsen’s Brand. Just kidding! I promise I won’t. Happy weekend, y ’all!
The Quiet One, a cinematic memoir about bassist Bill Wyman, founding member of The Rolling Stones, directed by Oliver Murray, played at Tribeca Film Festival and is set to start a theatrical run in June. It’s far from the typical music documentary. Based on Wyman’s immense, personal archive of film, photographs and audio, including new voice-over commentary by Wyman himself, Murray (previously a music video director) had the unenviable task of making a documentary that would offer something fresh to fans or insightful to music historians, while working under the employ of the notoriously private man-of-few-words. The film is oddly fascinating for all the reasons it aims not to be – for the things it doesn’t say, for the ways in which it is not penetrating or thoughtful, and how it skims over controversy. It depicts a rather sad and unsatisfying culmination to a long career and mysterious life. It portrays a man searching through the rubble of his memorabilia, still unable to make sense of the emptiness and alienation that defined him as the famously “stone-faced” member of The Stones.
We watch Bill Wyman watch his younger self in “The Quiet One.”
Nonetheless, there is reason to watch, if you are someone who can appreciate the philosophical absurdity and existential pathos of Samuel Beckett-style stories. Watching Wyman watch his younger self and listening to him to comment on his former comments, this documentary becomes a story about the nature of reminiscence and a man struggling with his legacy as much as it is a guided, behind-the-scenes tour of the life of a rock star. Come for the music, stay for the irony.
“It’s what he doesn’t play, what he leaves out..”. — Eric Clapton
Bill Wyman: The stone-faced Rolling Stone
The setting of this movie is bizarrely similar to the setting of Samuel Beckett’s famous play, Krapp’s Last Tape, and the thematic parallels are hard to ignore. In Beckett’s play, the set consists of a desk and a chair with an overhead light, and on the desk is a reel-to-reel tape recorder, microphone and ledger. Around the desk are boxes filled with an archive of recorded tapes. Seated at the desk is an old man with grey hair. Now, take a look at the opening shot of The Quiet One:
Bill Wyman in “The Quiet One” documentary
In the play, the ensuing action discloses that Krapp is a man who has chronicled every aspect of his life since he was 24 years old. He has created annual audio tapes to record his impressions of the previous year’s important events, and then cataloged each tape’s number and contents in a ledger, which he keeps locked in his desk. Each year on his birthday, he listens to one of his former tapes before recording his new one.
Stage production of Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape”
The play depicts Krapp listening to a tape from 30 years ago, which references and derisively comments on a previous tape, and the elderly Krapp replays and comments on them both, in real time, before recording this year’s tape. He is essentially in discussion with his former selves and trying to come to terms with his past.
Krapp’s Last Tape” with Michael Gambon
At the conclusion of the play, the older Krapp sits listening as his younger self ponders the loss of his best years, saying “but I wouldn’t want them back.” And then the tape runs out. The plays ends in silence with Krapp staring blankly into space.
“Krapp’s Last Tape” with John Hurt
The Quiet One opens with Bill Wyman in his basement, present day, sitting at a desk with his back to the camera, light shining down from above him. He speaks to the sound technician beside him, who is holding a mic as Wyman records his backward-looking commentary on his life. There is a computer on his desk, and later a reel-to-reel tape recorder. There is a detailed diary and ledger that he often references. He is surrounded by stacks of old tapes and archival materials from the enormous collection he created over his lifetime. Except for the computer, it’s almost the identical setting to Krapp’s Last Tape (written in 1958).
“Krapp’s Last Tape,” stage production
To help make the point that this is a film about a man and his recorded memories, a montage of old black-and white film footage is intercut with images of stacked film cases, cameras and audio equipment, all played against the dark Stones song, “Paint it Black” (written by Wyman). Cut to silence and a long slow scan of the rows and rows of archival material and memorabilia that fill Bill’s basement. If not such a capacious space, it would look like a hoarder’s house. Finally, we hear Wyman say, “People always ask me why I collected things.”
Bill Wyman always collected things,
This is an odd reminder of a similar moment in another TFF2019 archival-themed documentary, Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, when Marion’s son says, “People always ask me why she did it. To understand that, you need to know my mother.” And that leads us into the strange story of that hoarder/archivist – an African American ex-librarian who started her compulsive collecting in 1979, amassing over 70,000 VHS tapes over 30 years, and is even more a mystery than Wyman. But the two are perhaps not as different from each other as they might seem.
Bill Wyman with Keith Richards
Both were born poor, had bitter childhoods strongly influenced by World War II, which left them suspicious of the world, with a strong need for privacy. Both felt compelled to keep a record of “the truth.” During the course of this movie, we hear one of Wyman’s bandmates recall that “We argued about what exactly happened, but Bill was probably right because he has all the fuckin’ records.”
Wyman says “I always thought it was important to keep a record of what was going on. It started when I was a little boy, during the war. Whenever I came in contact with something that I could call mine, I wanted to save it – collect it.” His recollections of his childhood during WWII, his combative relationship with his father and his being mostly raised by his grandmother are portrayed through a series of old family photos and provide the most interesting and insightful moments in the film. We learn that Wyman grew up feeling “pushed aside all the time,” lonely and unloved. We hear Wyman tell how he switched from playing guitar to bass because no one else would do it and it was his way into a band, and that he was too poor to buy a new bass, so he made his own. But it’s the older Wyman who tells these childhood stories, and his resentment seems to have festered over the years, rather than subsided.
Wyman playing behind Jagger
Wyman then looks back at himself a bit older, now in his late twenties and trying to perfect his technique on the bass. As if Samuel Beckett had scripted his words, Wyman expresses a disturbing contempt for himself. “Leave space! Don’t be busy! Don’t overdo it! You’re not the fuckin’ lead guitarist!” he barks at himself. Later in the film, Eric Clapton will praise Wyman, saying “something about Bill’s bass… it was so contained and so precise. It’s what he doesn’t play – what he leaves out that marks his brilliance.” I doubt that either Wyman or Murray intended that praise to sound as sad as it felt, but it sure seemed to me like brilliance born of self-loathing – the kind of personal pain that Krapp would be forced to relive on one of his tapes.
“There is one shot in the movie of a pinned butterfly in a frame…”
Wyman says playing with The Rolling Stones was the most exciting time of his life. He also talks about resisting the cult-like mania over The Beatles – how he wanted to be taken seriously and truly appreciated. He says he avoided the press because it was “too show-biz,” and minutes later we see a memorabilia montage that includes a series of newspaper clippings that he’s saved. We hear him talk about the hundreds of women he had – more than Mick Jagger. We hear him talk about the thrill of playing live for half a million people. We see him living a lavish rock-star lifestyle. Later he says he plays for himself and doesn’t like to think of himself as famous. At another point, he speaks of an emptiness he feels that terrifies him.
Clearly, each of these moments are on different “tapes” from his life – experienced at different times. The tapes and multiple selves show us vividly how our identities and self-understanding are constructed through language and narrative, and that those narratives are always changing, which points to the paradox that we are both one person and many persons as we develop across time. The challenge, in terms of modern psychology, is to integrate those multiple selves, those differing attitudes and feelings, as we grow and change. But in this movie, we and Wyman are confronted by his different voices that often feel disconnected from each other.
Wyman playing with The Stones
Yet Murray’s movie seems completely unaware of any sense that the audience is viewing past events through multiple sets of Wyman’s eyes. Murray’s story is strictly chronological and plods ahead with old footage and bland, mostly non-reflective narration by Wyman. Still, it’s hard for viewers not to see the layers of memory and changing perspectives stacking up on each other, whether Wyman or Murray are conscious of it or not. Certainly, the Wyman we see touring the United States for the first time, and reveling in the band’s new-found stardom – the young man who is still insisting that they are a blues band, not a rock band, is a different man than the one who sees his bandmate and close friend, Brian Jones, die from a drug overdose or four fans die at a Stones concert at Altamont. And then there is an entirely different Wyman who left The Stones and went solo with a semi-hit Euro-pop song, “(Si Si) Je Suis un Rock Star.” No mention of any problems between Wyman and the rest of The Stones exists in this film.
Here’s just an odd tidbit that is not at all included in the movie:
Bill Wyman removed from “Rarities” album cover
In 2005, The Rolling Stones released Rarities 1971-2003. The album features a selection of rare and obscure material recorded between 1971 and 2003. The album cover shows Mick Jagger, Ronnie Wood, Keith Richards and Charlie Watts. But the original photo was taken during The Stones’ 1978 music video for the song “Respectable.” And remember that Bill Wyman was part of The Rolling Stones until 1992. Yet, Wyman is missing from the album cover. His image was digitally removed, but you can still see his bass cable hanging between Mick Jagger’s microphone stand and guitar. What’s up with that? And how did or does Wyman feel about that? No telling.
At one point, Wyman admits he “probably had a sex addiction,” but seems to justify it by reminding us that he avoided drugs, unlike his bandmates, reporting that “I felt lonely and the girls offered affection.” Wyman gives small mention to his controversial marriage to Mandy Smith when he was 52 and she was 18 – a scandal so dramatic that it almost prevented this film from being released, due to public outrage. But his nonchalance seems less an evasion and more a genuine lack of appreciation for the significance of the subject. The documentary never does mention that Smith was only 13 years old when the relationship began, and Wyman casually remarks that “it was stupid to think it could work,” because “she was too young.” Stupid.
Bill Wyman and Mandy Smith
If you want to hear raw, self-searching of Wyman’s psyche, you won’t find it here. And you have to wait till later to learn of his next marriage. For the audience, this movie sometimes feels like we’re trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle from all blank pieces.
Once we get deeper into the story of Krapp’s Last Tape, we learn that our solo character had intended to surprise himself with memories kept “fresh” on tape, but there are few surprises to be found. Krapp worked as a professional writer, so he created carefully phrased speeches on his tapes, recorded solely for his own benefit, and they ring hollow across the gulf of time. Much the same can be said of Wyman’s tapes. He basically shot his own fan footage; there is nothing probing or incisive in his archives, and nothing much exciting or truly new either. Wyman was not just the quiet one; he seemed to be the boring one, too. His archive is simply not special. There is one shot in the movie of a pinned butterfly in a frame, from which the camera slowly pulls out to reveal the broader expanse of Wyman’s archives, and that unintentionally eerie moment may be one of the most telling.
So, if not the imagery itself, then this movie needs some excellent narration to make it work, and Wyman is not the guy for that. In fact, it may be most interesting how excessively detached he is from his past experiences. His lack of expression of joy or exhilaration or shock or regret about almost everything is notable. The boy who felt pushed aside as a child seems to still feel disassociated from most of his memories. The main emotion we get from Wyman is weariness.
Elderly Bill Wyman
My favorite part of the film was the Super-8 personal movies that Wyman took during their early concert tours in the U.S. – road trip and highway footage taken from the tour bus. It’s America-on-the-road through the eyes of young Englishmen seeing the landscape for the first time. I mention that because despite my general disappointment, there are actually several bits of nifty unseen footage or photos, especially from the early days of The Stones’ stardom.
Between the archival show-and-tell segments, the documentary repeatedly returns to the Krapp’s Last Tape scene, with Wyman at his desk, personally handling the photos or cassette tapes or film reels. We see him listening to or watching tapes from his earlier life, while he also records a new tape, commenting from his place in time now, as an old man. These breaks in the story continually remind us that there is no consistent narrative tale being told; it’s a scrapbook. And that adds to the self-consciousness of time as it intersects with memory, which when taken together are key elements of absurdism; there is a feeling of futility in Wyman’s efforts to neatly wrap up his life story. He even speaks directly about his need to “sort out my personal life” by going through these archival materials – trying to make sense of it all. He says he wants to “relive what I have experienced and put it in some sort of order.”
Bill Wyman plays brilliant bass.
But here’s the problem, for Krapp and for Wyman: Our sense of identity is our comprehension of our own story, but as time goes by and as personality develops, our self-interpretation of our identity not only expands, but alters in unexpected and, at times, self-contradictory or self-erasing ways. What was once of utmost importance now is forgotten. Who we are now serves as ironic, or comic, or tragic comment on our previous selves. Meanings we have staked our worth on can crumble, and experiences we once dismissed as either irrelevant or alien can come back, against our will, to permeate our consciousness and show how deeply they have defined us. This seems to have happened to Wyman with regard to the love-of-his-life child bride, for starters. But there’s also a lot more that he needs to flesh out and/or dig into from his dim and distant memories – for the sake of a compelling movie and also for his own sake.
From the very first shot, we always see Wyman from the back, in that Beckett-like pose alone at his desk. It’s not till near the end that we see Wyman’s face and he speaks directly to camera, along with his latest wife. We see an 82-year old, grey-haired, pot-bellied man whose face is puffy and has almost no resemblance to the music icon he once was.
He’s looking for a happy ending. And Murray obliges by portraying Wyman as all comfy in his quiet retirement, with his 3rd wife and his country estate, now taking photos of butterflies and birds. But there’s a disconnect.
Here is Wyman still embedded in his assorted collection of memories from his past, lost in his separation of selves, his tapes more confusing than clarifying, while he’s concurrently making what will likely be Wyman’s Last Tape which so far is no better than a glossy music video (sorry, Oliver Murray), and that makes the film feel inherently sad.
“Krapp’s Last Tape” with Chad Jones
The final scene we see Wyman tape is his standing with his wife, telling an old story of his dramatic encounter with his idol, Ray Charles, and how it shook him to his core to hear him play “Georgia,” live. Then we see Wyman actually shed tears as he recalls that Ray Charles said he was a fan of Wyman and invited him to play with him on an album he was recording. But Wyman turned him down – said no to recording music with his hero. “I’m not good enough,” he said, as he choked up. (Yup, that’s the end of that story. It doesn’t get better. Wyman never did record with his hero. And no further commentary is provided.)
I didn’t make notes about exactly how The Quiet One ended. But here is how I will remember the ending: Younger Wyman questions whether it’s worth it to make any effort in life. He wonders if his best years are behind him, but he decides he would not want them back. And then the tape runs out. The movie ends with elderly Wyman staring at nothing while the tape plays only silence.
Click for a review of another documentary about a rock star — Little Girl Blue, about Janis Joplin (as compared to Art Addict, about Peggy Guggenheim.)
Click for another review by Helen Highly Literate (otherwise known as Helen Highly Irrelevant): I compare the new horror movie Usto an adaptation of an old play by Chekhov.
Game of Thrones is ending, and now where will we hide from our disillusionment and despair? Hell, even that doesn’t provide the escapism it promised; we are confronted with a Starbucks cup in the Land of Westeros. It’s not just the crass contemporary brand in our escapist fantasy television that offends. Don’t forget that Starbucks owner Howard Schultz was campaigning for president just a few weeks ago, and the prospect of our upcoming presidential race only reminds us of our collective disgust. That Starbucks cup was like a cruel joke wrapped in a bad dream plopped in some dragon dung. What are we supposed to do with all our alienation and desolation? Well, if watching Jon Snow learn to ride a dragon in Game of Thrones didn’t give you quite the lift you wanted, Helen Highly Suggests you try watching Slay the Dragon,directed by Barak Goodman and Chris Durrance – an earth-shaking documentary that follows a brutal civil war for the prize of Democracy in the land of the United States of America. It’s a movie about gerrymandering, and it doesn’t matter how unappealing the word sounds or how nerdy it seems, it’s THE most important thing to watch right now on any screen. (And really, if you can handle a name like Hizdahr zo Loraq, then you can handle the complexities of gerrymandering.)
Gerrymandered Dragon
If you feel you have been abandoned by your belief in democracy, your sense of justice, your morality, then this is the movie for you. If you feel hopeless and helpless in the face of political power that seems beyond your control, this movie is for you. If the dragon you have is not the dragon you want — whether you aim to slay it or to ride it, this movie might make your fire-breathing wishes come true. But it’s not just big-wing-span enthusiasm on film; it’s a highly timely Call to Action. Strained dragon metaphors aside, and regardless of your party affiliation, this movie is the most significant and vital political film of the year, and perhaps the most empowering. Produced by Participant Media and premiering at Tribeca Film Festival 2019, Slay the Dragon tells the story of a fight for the soul of our country that is real and urgently relevant.
About this Dragon: Gerrymandering, the practice of redrawing electoral maps to serve the party in power, has been around for centuries. It often results in districts that are bizarrely shaped, and this film points to one famous case in which critics said the redrawn district resembled a mythical dragon. So, that’s how we got this gerrymandered dragon. Going further, the film looks at how gerrymandering has been used in the past and what’s so different and dangerous about it now, in our hyper-partisan times. It shows how a secret gerrymandering initiative launched 10 years ago used newly unregulated Dark Money and newly available high-tech analytics that produced Big Data demographics to enact “the most audacious political heist in modern times” – an unprecedented extreme in gerrymandering that effectively negated the will of the majority of voters across the country.
Now we have this beast of a dragon that is threatening American democratic principles by overpowering the will of the people. Late-night comedian Seth Meyers pointed to a recently gerrymandered district in North Carolina and asked, “What do you see in this shape? I don’t know, it’s either a dragon or 300 years of institutional racism.” The real problem, however, is that the “old gerrymandering” was bad, but starting in 2010, the “new gerrymandering” has jumped into the steroid era.
“Voters should choose politicians, not the other way around.” — Katie Fahey
Goodman and Durrance offer a staggeringly thorough investigation into the entrenched and increasingly perilous problem of “dirty redistricting,” which enables politicians to ignore the decisions of the people they govern. Slay the Dragon gives some harrowing examples of what happens when legislators are no longer accountable to the people. It explains how gerrymandering is directly connected to real-life issues such as: the much-publicized and still unresolved water crisis in Flint, Michigan; Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s removal of collective bargaining for public employees; newly extreme voter-ID laws intended to disenfranchise targeted groups; and North Carolina’s bathroom bill.
Goodman says, “I felt very strongly about connecting the dots and showing not that gerrymandering in some abstract way dilutes your vote but how the policies that are passed in these states are so out of step with the people in these states. If you’re a voter, it’s not just a sense that your vote doesn’t count. It’s actual things that affect your everyday life, whether it’s environmental stuff or a union issue or whatever. It’s real-life stuff. It’s not abstract.”
Gerrymandering cartoon from the Florida Sentinel
The film explains why, to so many of us, our democratic representation doesn’t feel representative, at both the state and federal level. Interwoven into those bleak realities, the film also follows ordinary people as they speak up and organize and fight to make their votes matter in a system that has been rigged against them by what can fairly be called one of the greatest political manipulations in American history.
We can pretty reliably count on John Oliver at HBO’s Last Week Tonight to address our nation’s most serious and most complicated issues with wonderfully instructive and hilarious style. See his treatment of gerrymandering, below, where he says, among other things, “Everything about gerrymandering is stupid and wrong.”
Although not as comedic as John Oliver, this documentary wastes no time with unconstructive outrage. While it efficiently functions as a lesson about the recent history of American politics and its dark underbelly, the film is most crucially about activism — why it matters and how it works. It speaks about what is happening in our country right now, last week, next month – who is doing what, and where, and why, and how it’s all affecting you, whether you realize it or not (and how you can participate in ways that will make you less helpless and hopeless). But its aim is not to proselytize; its aim is to educate and motivate – now, before 2020.
The filmmakers have faith that once regular people understand the terrible truths that lie behind the boring word “gerrymander,” those disturbing realities will galvanize them to join with their neighbors and take back the reigns of democracy that has run amok. In fact, the film shows us some daring individuals and grassroots organizations who have already done just that, with amazing results.
With 2020 bringing both elections and another census that will further shape how voting districts are drawn, Goodman and Durance are hoping their film will make people aware of the urgency of the current gerrymandering problem and embolden them to take action.
Chris Durrance. Katie Fahey and Barak Goodman from Slay the Dragon, at TFF
“I feel there’s a lot in common between the two. In both cases, the story is about ordinary people, especially young people who have a different vision of the world, and how they’re taking that into their own hands and making change. In that respect, I find both films totally inspiring, and I’ve immensely enjoyed working on both of them. For old fogies like me, to see that kind of thing – to see how young people can do so much just with passion and vision… it’s inspiring. Working on these films has renewed my faith in America. I see that democracy is still very much alive. And that’s what I wanted to communicate in both documentaries.”
Rat F**ked by David Daley
Shaken by the book Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count, written by veteran journalist David Daley, Barak Goodman initially set out to make a film that would shine a spotlight on the enormous dangers of this little-understood problem.
“It was a complete revelation,” says Goodman of Daley’s book. “I had heard of gerrymandering, of course, but like a lot of us, I didn’t completely understand it. And I certainly didn’t understand the extent to which it had been used as a partisan political weapon in the last eight years, and the threat it posed to some of the bedrock principles of democracy.”
Goodman adds, “I think most Americans – Republicans and Democrats – however much we might disagree with each other on other issues, feel that every person’s vote should count equally and that everyone should have the opportunity to vote.”
Goodman called Daley to ask if the film rights were available for the book and if the author would be interested in participating as a consultant on the project. Happily, the answer to both questions was yes. Goodman then approached frequent collaborator Chris Durrance about co-directing the film.
Modern Gerrymandering Shapes
Durrance was equally shocked by the revelations in the book. It reminded him of his – and many other observers’ – confusion after the 2012 national elections. That year, President Barak Obama won reelection comfortably and Democratic House candidates received 1.4 million more votes than their Republican opponents nationwide, yet Republicans came out of the election with a 234-201 majority in the House. “I remember seeing the gulf between the number of votes and the number of seats they won,” he says. “Some people said it was a matter of geography. I bought that for a long time. But after reading David Haley’s book, it was brought home to me that no, this was orchestrated. What happened was by design.”
Goofy and Donald Duck gerrymandered in PA
As they started trying to explain the complexities of the situation in ways that would translate dramatically to the screen, Durrance says he quickly realized that the film would be far more compelling and relevant if it moved beyond the historical perspective of the book and focused on the people who are leading the fight against gerrymandering today.
“The film really clicked into gear when we came across Katie Fahey, who was running what was then a fledgling online group of political neophytes who had decided to take on gerrymandering in Michigan,” says Durrance. “That’s when we realized this was a film that could live in the present, but a present informed by what had happened in the recent past.”
Fahey, a 20-something with no political experience, is the founder of Voters Not Politicians, a grassroots organization dedicated to wresting redistricting control in Michigan away from political parties and putting it into the hands of a citizens’ commission comprised of people from across the ideological spectrum. The group’s argument that voters should choose politicians, not the other way around, struck a chord with Michigan voters, and with an extraordinary door-to-door effort, despite all the big-money opposing forces, the group managed to get the gerrymandering Initiative Proposal 2 on the 2018 midterm ballot. The film also focuses on similar initiatives in Wisconsin and North Carolina.
Slay the Dragon documentary
The story of the Proposal 2 campaign was so gripping that the filmmakers decided to hold off on completing the film until the fate of the initiative was decided in the November 2018 elections. The proposal passed. But the story didn’t end there.
There is a new term for political neophytes to learn: “weaponized lame-duck legislation.” The Powers That Be do not release their power easily, even after losing an election.
It gets more complicated from here, but I will say that the story continues in ongoing court battles and in different states across the country. (In early May, the Supreme Court ruled on Ohio’s Congressional map, and new actions are being taken almost weekly on cases around the country.) In fact, after the documentary’s final scene of Fahey’s group celebrating their win and drinking champagne, the filmmakers felt the need to place a screen graphic at the end of the film to update viewers. It reads:
WITH A ‘BLUE WAVE,’ DEMOCRATS
RECAPTURED CONGRESS IN 2018.
BUT IN NORTH CAROLINA, MICHIGAN,
AND WISCONSIN THE GERRYMANDERS HELD.
IN ALL THREE STATES, LEGISLATURES QUICKLY
MOVED TO PASS NEW VOTER SUPPRESSION LAWS AND
STRIP INCOMING DEMOCRATIC GOVERNORS OF POWER.
Honestly, when I saw that final graphic, my heart fell. It put me back into the defeatist “even when you win, you lose,” mindset that has felt so overwhelming in recent years. After Goodman spoke so enthusiastically about how both his new documentaries shared a spirit of optimism about democracy, I asked him a hard question. I asked, “Do you say you believe that democracy is alive and well because it’s the thing you want to believe and that you hope can and will be true, if people keep trying despite the setbacks, or do you honestly believe that democracy is alive and well in America – based on your real experiences and what you have seen happen over the past few years? Is functional democracy a wish or reality?”
Katie Fahey, Voters Not Politicians
He did not pause before he answered, emphatically, “The latter. I believe it. I’ve seen it.” He is here to testify. But he adds, “People have to fight for their democracy. They have to get upset and they have to get mad and really make it clear to politicians that they will not stand for it. That’s what happened in Michigan. It’s what is going to happen everywhere.” And Fahey stepped in to add to that answer:
“I spent two years of my life, every single day, seeing what democracy can be, seeing strangers join together and decide to stand up for doing what was right over what was easy – take democracy into their own hands and talk to their neighbors about how to make a better future. And what we did… we changed the course of history. There may be setbacks but there is no turning back. The tide is turning. Change is happening.
Katie Fahey winning, in Slay the Dragon
“And what we’re doing now is… we had so many people reach out to us after hearing about our story on the national news and say that they want to challenge gerrymandering in their states, so now I’m working on creating lessons based on what we did and organizing to help other people do it for themselves too.”
Okay then. This is testimony from people on the front lines of the fight. Helen Highly Persuaded: I will give hope a chance.
This is not an ordinary archive-on-film documentary; it’s not just a history lesson, a story about ideas, or something you put on your to-watch list; it’s a breathing thing, with a life force and a will for justice and hope to offer, but it needs daylight and care to stay alive. The fight is happening right now. The hope the film holds is not just an offer; it’s a plea. I am pleading with you; let’s not give up on everything quite yet. Watch this movie first.
(Slay the Dragon is set to be released later this year, but keep an eye out for updates.)
Fashion films never go out of style, and now you can easily stream them to watch anytime you want. Tribeca Film Festival 2018 offered several films about art and artists, but perhaps the most compelling selection is the list of Fashion Films — three documentaries that profile fascinating characters from the fashion world. Here’s the list: Yellow is Forbidden, about Chinese designer Guo Pei, by director Pietra Brettkelly; The Gospel According to Andre, by director Kate Novack; and McQueen, by directors Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui. And there are more, too.
Recognition from Paris’s Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture is considered the apex of the fashion industry, and Chinese designer Guo Pei is determined to reach it. With a remarkable eye for detail and exquisite blending of visual art forms, veteran documentarian Pietra Brettkelly captures Guo’s drive, artistry and meticulous acumen, from the designer’s emergence on the international scene—when Rihanna wore her hand-embroidered canary yellow gown to the Met Gala in 2015—through her remarkable 2017 show “Legend,” presented at La Conciergerie, in Paris.
Yellow is Forbidden, at Tribeca 2018
Along the way, Brettkelly reveals the myriad opposing forces that confront Guo’s ambitions: those of Chinese tradition versus Western modernity; acceptance versus prejudice; and ensuring a thriving business versus pursuing more expensive and exclusive techniques. Most of all, she highlights the pressures that China’s economic rise places on its individual artisans. As Guo puts it, “I’m a designer, not a nation.” Nevertheless, Guo thrives amid these challenges, establishing herself as a singularly capable and uncompromising warrior for her art. With loving fidelity for Guo’s work, Brettkelly depicts both the process and the fashion itself, resulting in a timely examination of what it takes for an outsider to earn acclaim from one of the West’s most redoubtable institutions.
André Leon Talley—unmistakable in his regal stature, his fiercely original way with words, and his incomparable historical knowledge of couture, has been a fixture of the fashion world for more than 40 years. A mentee of the legendary editor Diana Vreeland, Talley called Vogue home for years: he served as news director; creative director; and finally, editor-at-large, until 2013. As he drifts effortlessly from the front row at fashion weeks across the globe to television appearances and New York Times assignments, one begins to wonder how such an original as Talley came to be.
André Leon Talley, in Gospel According to Andre
In Kate Novack’s film, the viewer is invited back to his childhood in Jim Crow-era North Carolina. His beloved grandmother, Bennie, raised him, schooling him in decorum, religion, and, unsurprisingly, clothes, sparking an early and powerful love for all things fashion. This led him to New York City, where he battled—and continues to battle—both racist and homophobic assumptions about black men in the industry. With great insight, Novack pulls back the curtain on this towering icon, revealing new and beautifully vulnerable moments with Talley—as well as endlessly hilarious ones—as he discusses his storied career and the women who helped him achieve it.
Gospel According to Andre is available for streaming on Hulu and Amazon Prime.
Beginning with his modest upbringing in London, Lee Alexander McQueen quickly ascended the ranks of the international fashion world. After graduating from Central Saint Martins and establishing his eponymous label, McQueen became head designer of Givenchy at age 27 and went on to win the British Fashion Awards’ prize for British Designer of the Year four times. His theatrical runway shows and daring designs existed on the cutting edge of ’90s fashion, while his controversial and confrontational work earned him equal attention from fans and detractors alike. At the same time, he also forged a friendship with the influential stylist Isabella Blow, cultivating an intimate relationship that would last until her death in 2007. As McQueen’s star rose, so did the pressure and accompanying anxiety to constantly strive for ever greater heights of genius.
McQueen, the documentary, at Tribeca
Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui’s documentary tells McQueen’s story through the testimonials from his closest friends and family. Featuring personal archives extending back to the earliest days of his career, as well as dynamic footage of his most boundary-pushing shows and creations, McQueen offers a vivid portrait of the tortured but inspired auteur’s work and persona.
McQueen is available for streaming on Amazon Prime.
Watch the trailer for McQueen below:
More
If you’re hungry for more, check out the fashion films from Tribeca 2017.
Zac Posen has become one the most recognizable faces in modern fashion, with his truly unique aesthetic style. He is a force to be reckoned with whose talent shone through as early as childhood. However, like any journey to great success, it hasn’t come without cost.
Follow the creation of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “China: Through the Looking Glass” exhibition, by curator Andrew Bolton. With unprecedented access, director Andrew Rossi captures the collision of high fashion and celebrity at the Met Gala and dives into the debate about whether fashion should be viewed as art.
First Monday in May is available for streaming on Amazon Prime.
H.G. Wells said, “We all have our time machines. Those that take us back are memories, and those that carry us forward are dreams.” The new documentary film, Our Time Machine, which premiered at Tribeca Film Festival this year, manages to do both, and more. Using a kind of Chinese magic-realism, directors S. Leo Chiang and Yang Sun and editor Bob Lee, along with artist Maleonn, take the viewer to a world that not only interweaves dreams and memories, but also mixes transcendent allegory and deeply-rooted personal reality as part of one amazingly cohesive story, told with both power and grace. The extraordinary work of new director Yang Sun was acknowledged with the TFF Award for Best Cinematography in a Documentary.
Our Time Machine poster
Our Time Machine is a profound and poetic film that is achingly uplifting as it tells a universal tale of father and son, love and loss, and the exquisite sadness and joy of life – with puppets! If that seems like too many concepts or too grandiose an endeavor, I can only say that it likely would be in the hands of any other directors. But the deft artistry and grounded wisdom of these filmmakers treat life’s most abstract paradoxes in a way that feels like the life-blood of this movie is shot straight into your veins, as pure, essential truth.
It seems nearly impossible for an entirely factual documentary to be such a perfectly formed narrative tale. Can it also be a brilliant piece of poetry? It’s a rare thing, but here it is. Through an entirely unconventional use of mechanics (with a fresh take on puppetry and cinematography), these filmmakers have taken society’s collective pain and re-engineered it into beauty.
Shaken by news of his father’s dementia, Chinese artist Maleonn decides to build an intricately-designed time-machine puppet that will unite him and his father as it transports them to the memories his father has forgotten. If you don’t understand how puppetry can be a true art form, this film will show you. Originally conceived to be a collaborative theatrical project between father and son, an idea thwarted by the quickly advancing illness of his father, Maleonn must reimagine his production to be a parting gift to his father, and when even that fails due to his father’s inability to understand, Maleonn is left talking to the puppet he built, as if it were his own son: “Dear son, I want to try something impossible – to love another person. There is no practical purpose, because love is like art. There is no reason. We do it because we can’t help ourselves.”
Our Time Machine rehearsal photo by Maleonn
Maleonn follows in the artistic footsteps of his parents; his mother was an actress and his father, Ma Ke, was a long-time director of the Peking Opera Theater. Through the lens of a father-son relationship, Our Time Machine explores what it means to be an artist in China in the 20th century and today. From the condemnations of the Cultural Revolution to contemporary financial and social challenges of putting on a complex and wholly original hybrid art performance, directors S. Leo Chiang and Yang Sun probe the artistic impulse across generations. Mixing haunting imagery with real-life moments, Our Time Machine conveys the mystery and consolation of art against the ravages of time.
Maleonn in Our Time Machine
There are several puppets in the movie – both people and machines. In addition to the time machine puppet, there is an airplane, which the elderly-father puppet senses circling above him. Director Chiang explained to me that the plane is symbolic of a bird – a crane, and in China there is an ancient belief that when you die, you ride a crane to heaven. In the film, the father puppet repeatedly says he sees or hears an airplane coming, and the grown-son-puppet reassures him, “No, there is no plane.” Even if you don’t know about the Chinese crane metaphor, it is clear this plane represents the thing both father and son want to avoid – death. The time machine not only takes the father back to the lost memories in his past, it becomes the instrument that his son uses to avoid the future he fears for his father and himself. But will it work in real life?
Our Time Machine, Maleonn builds a large puppet
Helen Highly Analytical does not cry easily during movies. And I did not cry in this one. But it was quite a surprise to feel myself tear up when I was only speaking about this movie as I interviewed its filmmakers. I want so much to tell you, my readers, the pair of beautifully symmetrical repetitive sentences that frame this story, but I don’t want to cheat you of the experience of revelation that will come when you hear them in context. And it does feel like a genuine revelation.
Out Time Machine, “Son, can you float on water?”
As the Baby Boomer generation ages, we are met with an increasing number of emotionally grueling stories, told in films and in books, about the horrors of illness, the challenges of eldercare, and the miseries of troubled relationships between adult-children and their flawed or failing parents. At the same time, so many of us are suffering through those experiences in our real lives. The prospect of going to the movies to relive it on the big screen seems to me unappealing at best. I find myself avoiding films on these subjects, despite often being assured they are excellent or insightful. I feel I already have too much insight to bear. But this film is something different.
Especially in America, convention dictates that every story – even the saddest ones – must end with some sort of redemption, something learned, some problem resolved, and that expectation too often results in a contrived happy ending being slapped onto the conclusion of a story. Endings are hard – perhaps the most important and difficult part of any story. And if the writer resists the phony and simplistic happily-ever-after, then we often are left with an unsatisfying bitterness at the end – a bad taste in our mouths. In the film world, I call those “Life Sucks and Then You Die Movies” – not highly recommended.
With true stories, we often hear the justification, “That’s what really happened. You can’t change the facts.” But a real artist, a dedicated artist, will mine that real-life ending for a moment that is as unequivocally accurate and honest as it is transformative. It’s the sign of a true master – to be able to craft a beautiful ending without a whiff of anything artificial or the feel of anything forced. When we see that happen… it’s like a miracle. That’s what this documentary is. It is truth at its best – miraculous.
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Interested in another smart, well-made Asian-American film? (This one is in English.) Winner of the Tribeca Film Institute and AT&T Untold Stories award, Lucky Grandma is a dark comedy about immigrant life, the vulnerabilities of aging, and the primacy of family. Mostly it’s hilarious with a knock-out performance by Tsai Chin. Click here to read about it and another Untold Stories film.
Tribeca Film Festival 2019 presents a wide diversity of films, including screenings of branded entertainment. Branded programming is sponsored by a corporate marketing strategy, trying to connect with an audience in a richer way about the brand. On Friday, April 26, Tribeca X explored the intersection of storytelling and advertising. In an era of “Instagram influencers,” the audience for films no longer differentiates between advertising and editorial; that’s an old-journalism idea that has become almost irrelevant. Among other speakers, Natasha Lyonne discussed her work with the fashion brand KENZO. A short film she created for the company was so successful that it resulted in the Emmy-nominated Netflix show Russian Doll, which enjoyed amazing, almost-instant-cult-like popularity. Several different types of branded entertainment, from Feature to Episodic to VR, will be in competition. IndieNYC had the chance to view one of the intriguing Episodic Finalists, History of Memory (Short Documentary), sponsored by The Garage at HP, and talk with the directors Sarah Klein and Tom Mason, of Redglass Pictures.
“a sort of branded Proust”
Tribeca X has not created a new category of filmmaking; branded cinema has a well-established tradition. One legendary BMW campaign employed the auteur’s talents of John Frankenheimer, Ang Lee, Wong Kar-Wai, and Guy Ritchie, among others. See Frankenheimer’s remarkable film, The Hire: Ambush, starringClive Owen, below:
Tribeca’s effort to bring the genre to prominence now, through Tribeca X, offers a fascinating look into the process.
Klein and Mason were hired by HP to create a series of short films about how printed photographs affect people’s lives. They were given an evocative working title, “History of Memory,” to start them on their creative journey. The duo focused on the power of photographs to generate deep emotions, and how printed photos act as “magical artifacts.” When I interviewed him, director Tom Mason said:
“If your house catches on fire, what do you grab? You take your photo album. It’s an irreplaceable family heirloom.”
So they asked themselves, “What are the stories that do justice to the incredible emotional connection we have to our most treasured images?” Ultimately they asked the “Can one picture change your life forever?” which became the tag-line for the film series.
As with any documentary film, a key element is the selection of subjects and storylines. Klein and Mason found four compelling, true stories about lives that were altered by the image:
“At First Sight” couple in History of Memory
a woman who discovers her true racial identity via a long-hidden family photo album, and then becomes part of the family in those photos;
a couple who meet across continents because of a single printed photograph sent through the mail, now married, 25 years later, having aged along with that old picture;
an adoptee, who as a young adult receives his “baby picture” that was never taken, now framed on the wall along with the rest of his adopted family, providing a part of his life that had been missing;
and an elderly Chinese man who becomes an international sensation, based on a photo of him captured many years before, but the picture and negative lost, then discovered by a French archivist who takes his gallery show of reclaimed pictures around the world.
Separately titled “A Secret Album,” “At First Sight,” and “It’s a Boy,” each story depicts personal memories of how people were shaped by their own photographic history, sort of the branded equivalent of Proust.
“At First Sight” bride in History of Memory
It is interesting that Klein and Mason have worked with Ken Burns, where the photograph reigns supreme. Burns famously gives life to still photographs by slowly zooming in on subjects of interest and panning from one subject to another in the same photo. This technique is now made possible in many professional and home software applications and is termed “The Ken Burns Effect“ in Apple‘s iPhoto and iMovie. His once-genre-defining technique has become a commodified effect that can be placed onto a photo as easily as a colored filter.
Photo from “The Vietnam War” by Ken Burns
But Klein and Mason did not copy the stylistic methods of their mentor. They talked with us about what they learned from master-documentarian Burns — to ask the questions “Does the story move me? Does it enrich my understanding of the world?” The stories in this movie do just that. They are well-told tales about real people in the most important moments of their lives. And the film’s investigation into the relationship between photographs and personal history elevates the stories from being merely sentimental.
These four films are very seductive about the inherent power of photographs. But they are talking about analog images, good old-fashioned snapshots and fading family portraits – very tangible in the hand and lasting in the mind. Today, we live with thousands of personal photos on our phones and hard drives, too many to contemplate much less remember, and we squint to see them on tiny screens – pixels, not paper.
Can the emotions that existed when those images were captured be transported to the digital future? Maybe with the help of a printing machine, HP would like to suggest. But will digital photos, forever cleanly stored in the computer, have the same impact when they are converted to paper?
Gail as a young girl, in History of Memory
I assume HP wants us to choose the pictures we wish to save from the digital trash heap, and print them now on HP printers, so they can become our new family heirlooms. The problem is that now we have the option not to print, and to just store on a thumb drive. This is an option that did not exist in the past, and we are no longer compelled to use those antiquated analog formats, which seem burdensome and produce clutter. Modern life cares about saving trees, not memories.
It is somewhat ironic that HP, a “new technology” company, wants to re-invent the past. But if photos are to continue to play important roles in people’s lives, and especially if they are to preserve our emotional connections with our most important memories, then we and HP can only hope that people will opt to print. (See the History of Memory trailer, below.)
I cannot help but compare History of Memory to the now-classic TV series Mad Men – season 1, episode 13, called “The Wheel,” which centered around Don Draper’s efforts to create an ad campaign for Kodak’s new, circular slide projector. That particular ad presentation by Don Draper is the moment when Mad Men became a certified pop-cultural phenomenon. Watch a clip from that famous episode,below:
Don compares the slide carousel to a portable nostalgia creator. He says, “it lets us travel around and around and back again, to the place we know we are loved.” Great line! But the real story of that episode is that Don is savvy enough to manipulate the marketplace but ultimately his ad campaign works on him as well and affects his personal life. Don falls victim to his own manipulation when he uses his own family photos for his ad presentation. It’s a dramatic narrative inside an ad campaign inside a dramatic narrative.
Mad Men, The Wheel
And History of Memory works in a similar way. Director Tom Mason even mentioned that the process of making this movie changed the way he and his own family preserve and display their photographs. I think Don Draper would be proud of what History of Memory accomplishes, and so would Mad Men creator, Matthew Weiner.
Update: Congratulations to History of Memory filmmakers Sarah Klein and Tom Mason, and HP, for winning the Tribeca X Award in their category!Click here for the full press release.
Following up on my previous What-to-See article, which focused on Archival Movies at Tribeca Film Festival, I am listing a few more Top Picks that I could not exclude. There is really SO MUCH great stuff at Tribeca2019 (including Tribeca Television Festival and Tribeca Immersive, which I won’t even touch but are worthy of exploring), that it’s tough to pull out a short list. But here are some films that grabbed my attention during the pre-festival screenings, and which you cannot fail in seeing. I am recommending two Magic Realism films that are beautiful and dramatic, and two Activism films that are urgently important. Plus, one of the several Music Documentaries that I haven’t seen but is sure to be a winner.
How can a documentary be so gorgeous and tell such a perfectly formed narrative? It doesn’t seem possible; it’s a rare thing. Our Time Machine is a profound and poetic film that is achingly uplifting as it tells a universal story about the exquisite sadness and joy of life. Shaken by news of his father’s dementia, Chinese artist Maleonn sets off to build an intricately-designed time-machine puppet that will unite him and his father as it transports them to the memories his father has forgotten. (If you don’t understand how puppetry can be a true art form, this film will show you.)
Our Time Machine, at Tribeca
This Chinese-language film is full of tableaus that blend the real and the surreal as Maleonn follows in the artistic footsteps of his parents; his mother was an actress and his father, Ma Ke, was a long-time director of the Peking Opera Theater. Through the lens of a father-son relationship, Our Time Machine explores what it means to be an artist in China in the 20th century and today. From the condemnations of the Cultural Revolution to contemporary financial and social challenges of putting on a complex and wholly original hybrid art performance, directors S. Leo Chiang and Yang Sun probe the artistic impulse across generations. Mixing haunting imagery with real-life moments, Our Time Machine conveys the mystery and consolation of art against the ravages of time.
I put this movie on my Pick List because of its evocative use of animation and graphic elements (by Smith and Lee), which seem to lift the vibrancy and energy of this film off the screen and make the entire experience feel palpable and enthralling. The depressive grittiness of the story layered with the magical storytelling mechanism make for a rich film that stays with you after you’ve left the theater. Plus there is the electric actress, Slick Woods, who plays Goldie; when she is on the screen, it is impossible to look away.
Slick Woods as Goldie, at TFF2019
Goldie is a street-wise, 18-year-old dancer with big dreams of big fame, even as she is stuck at home minding her two sisters while their mother is in jail. When an opportunity to audition for a real music video comes her way, Goldie feels the time has finally come for her star to rise. All she needs is the perfect canary yellow fur coat she has had her eye on in a local vintage store window. But with the day of the shoot rapidly approaching, and Goldie’s pockets still empty of the cash needed to purchase the coat, her desire for it—and its perceived promise of transformation—becomes an all-consuming obsession.
Sam De Jong’s second feature is a stylish coming-of-age fable, anchored by a magnetic debut performance from Woods. Against the background of the vibrant Bronx streets in the summer, viewers are invited to keep up with Goldie’s breakneck race to realize her dreams or lose it all.
After the 2008 election, a secretive, well-funded partisan initiative poured money into state legislative races in key swing states to gain control of their redistricting processes and used high-tech analytics to dramatically skew voting maps based on demographic data. The result is one of the greatest electoral manipulations in U.S. history, one that poses a fundamental threat to our democracy and exacerbates the already polarized atmosphere in Congress and state houses across the country.
Slay the Dragon documentary
Gerrymandering, the practice of redrawing electoral maps to serve the party in power, has been around for centuries. But in today’s hyper-partisan political environment it has been taken to unprecedented extremes, fueled by the elimination of corporate campaign contribution limits and the availability of vast amounts of personal information. The effects of this audacious plan have continued to bear fruit through the 2018 midterms. But voters, fed up with cynical efforts to sidestep the will of the majority, have begun fighting back. In one example, a grassroots movement led by a young woman with no political experience gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures to put an anti-gerrymandering initiative on the ballot in Michigan.
The new documentary Slay the Dragon shines a light on this timely issue, and follows a handful of citizens’ groups, outraged by what they see as an attack on the core democratic principle that every person’s vote should count equally, as they battle party operatives and an entrenched political establishment to fix a broken system.
Katie Fahey, in Slay the Dragon
In this film, we learn about “packing” and “cracking” and witness creative redistricting lines full of twists, curves, and squiggles to guarantee a certain majority. But we also experience hope in the form of Katie Fahey, a Michigander who forms the group Voters Not Politicians working to bring a measure onto the state’s ballot to require an independent group—not the legislature—to draw the lines. And in Wisconsin, an activist group challenges the state’s redistricting in a case that makes its way to the US Supreme Court. Directors Barak Goodman and Chris Durrance craft a detailed, infuriating, ultimately inspiring look—deftly balancing the facts and maps with the tireless work of people like Fahey to get us to act to ensure that democracy will survive. But the battle isn’t over yet; you need to be informed and vigilant.
Note: Barak Goodman and Chris Durrance have directed several films together, including Clinton for PBS’s American Experience, and the six-part series Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies. Separately and together, they have won numerous Peabody, Emmy®, and Writers Guild Awards, and an Academy Award® nomination. Barak is also the director of another film at TFF this year, which I also recommend — Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation, detailed below.
Captain Paul Watson has dedicated his life to fighting for one thing – to end the slaughter of the ocean’s wildlife and the destruction of its ecosystems. Without the ocean’s ecosystems, Watson contends that life on earth itself will not survive, and he makes a surprisingly convincing case for the urgency and necessity of his mission. Co-founder of GreenPeace and founder of Sea Shepard, Watson is part pirate, part philosopher, in this provocative film about a man who will stop at nothing to protect what lies beneath. Like a crime-fighting superhero of the high seas, Watson and his crews confront illegal whaling vessels from Europe to the Southern Ocean, seal hunters in Canada, and shark finners in Central America. Impervious to threats, with more than one nation issuing warrants for his arrest, Watson continues to intervene on behalf of the endangered ocean creatures and ultimately life on this planet.
Captain Watson, at Tribeca
Braiding contemporary interviews with Watson, archival footage from decades of Watson’s ferocious activism, and spectacular underwater nature footage, award-winning documentarian Lesley Chilcott (An Inconvenient Truth and Waiting for Superman) tells a story that is shockingly informative, magnificent, and deeply disturbing. Watson is a must-see for anyone concerned about the future of our planet.
When business partners John Roberts and Joel Rosenman floated the idea of hosting an opening day party with live music to celebrate their new recording studio in Woodstock, New York, they had no idea what it would eventually become: a pilgrimage of 500,000 like-minded radicals and hippies to Max Yasgur’s farm in Bethel, where they would find spiritual reassurance and release in a celebration of freedom.
Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation
50 years later, Barak Goodman’s retelling of the three-day music festival captures the zeitgeist of the time. Structured faithfully around audio testimony from attendees, Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation focuses not just on how it all came to be, despite enormous challenges, but how it felt for it to happen: an endless traffic backup was elevated to a communal experience, and a food shortage became a collaboration rather than a disaster. Historic musical performances spotlighted in the film, from Jimi Hendrix to Joan Baez to Crosby, Stills, and Nash, form the backdrop to what is fundamentally the audience’s story. Woodstock takes us all back to a time and a place now captured in a time capsule, but also reminds us of the immediacy that love, music and shared experience can elicit.
It’s Spring in New York and that means one thing to cinephiles: Tribeca Film Festival. The festival runs April 24-May 5 at Village East Cinema and Regal Cinemas Battery Park. This year I will save my “what makes Tribeca so special” intro for later (if time allows) and cut right to my Curtain-RaiserPick List, as the Tribeca2019 opening day is soon approaching. Continuing to expand its entertainment offerings, Tribeca has broken up their titles into an even more confusing array of categories than ever before, including Documentary, Spotlight Documentary, Viewpoints, Untold Stories, Spotlight Narrative, US Narrative, International Narrative, Movies Plus, This Used to Be New York, Critics Week, and on and on – not exactly easy to navigate. So, ignoring all that, and also side-stepping the more typical Critics Picks of big-name and high-profile productions (see any other publication for that), I will offer a select list of films that fall into a category defined by my own tangled and perhaps questionable perspective: I am interested in the number of Archival Movies at TFF2019, and I will list just a few here.
Archival Movies
This seems to be an unofficial theme this year – films that begin and end with images of VCR tapes or microfilm, drawers full of old photographs or scrapbooks of newspaper clippings. Archival materials are typical components of well-researched documentaries (and TFF is always wonderfully rich with documentaries), but this year the focus seems to be as much about the archival material itself as it is the subject of that material. Several films investigate real-life individuals whose identities where defined by and sometimes destroyed by their images on paper or video.
Recorder Movie: archival footage galore
I theorize that with the advent of the internet and the digital age where unlimited masses of everything are recorded, without context, the old concept of carefully collected documentation is increasingly a thing of the past. And old, analog items, such as photographs on yellowed, warped paper, are a dying breed of memoires — history made real by material things. It’s the beginning of the end for archiving as we know it, and we rightly are already nostalgic for those tangible touchstones. Here are some movies that ask the viewer, in various ways, to reflect on the relationship between archival items, the people who keep them, their depictions on screen, the memories they create, and reality.
Marion Stokes secretly recorded American television 24 hours a day for 30 years, amassing an incredible 70,000 VHS tapes. Long before our current era of “fake news,” Marion was seeking and protecting the truth by archiving everything that was said and shown on television. The public didn’t know it, but the networks were disposing of their archives for decades – into the trashcan of history. Remarkably, Marion saved it. A mystery in the form of a time capsule, Matt Wolf’s film delves into the strange life of a reclusive archivist who was perhaps crazy, perhaps genius, perhaps both.
Marion Stokes in Recorder
Beginning with the Iranian Hostage Crisis in 1979 and ending with her death during the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook, Stokes captured wars, triumphs, catastrophes, talk shows, bloopers, commercials, and more. The archive reminds us who we were and explores how television shaped the world of today. At the same time, it looks at the woman who dedicated her life to this visionary and maddening project and the toll it took on those around her.
Tribeca X explores the intersection of advertising and storytelling, in itself a fascinating topic. For more on that, click here.
The History of Memory is a series of short documentary films, created by Redglass Pictures and the Garage at HP, that celebrates the power of printed photographs to change our lives. From Florida to India, Beijing to New Orleans, the short films explore stories of real life people whose lives were forever altered by the discovery, creation, or preservation of a photograph. In At First Sight, a deep connection is made across continents following the exchange of two images. A Secret Album tells of a woman who discovers her true self after the uncovering of a hidden family photo album. And in It’s a Boy, a young man poses for an unconventional photo shoot, and then feels a part of a family for the first time in his life. In each film of History of Memory, we are reminded that the most important memories are those that we cherish, share, and protect. (And ideally, if you believe HP, that includes printing your cherished photos.)
Throughout his life, Bill Wyman, one of the original members of The Rolling Stones, shot hours of unseen film footage, took thousands of photographs, and collected a vast archive of memorabilia. He also kept a detailed diary to accompany these treasures. Known by his former bandmates as a man of few words, the notoriously private bass player reveals himself to the audience by talking us through his life’s archive and reflecting on his experiences. It’s an engaging perspective of a man at the end of his career. Directed by Oliver Murray, The Quiet One is a cinematic memoir from a working-class boy, raised by his grandmother, who found his home in the band that disrupted the music scene and made rock n’ roll history.
Note that I have not yet seen this film, so Helen can’t Highly recommend it. But I will suggest that it seems to be an intriguing and fresh look at a can’t-be-told-too-often story. I include it in my Pick List primarily because of the compelling and devastating use of a home-video archive. Nine year old Emmanuel began filming himself and his family with a home video camera in 1999, capturing his Washington D.C. neighborhood through the eyes of an innocent child. Growing up just 17 blocks from the U.S. Capitol, however, proved more difficult than expected. Filmmaker, journalist, and frequent This American Life contributor Davy Rothbart befriended the Sanford family as they continued to document their daily life over a 20-year period in a city plagued by poverty, addiction, and gun violence.
17 Blocks, documentary
What resulted from this uniquely collaborative effort between Rothbart and the family is a portrait of the unwavering strength of familial bonds. The film follows the characters through periods of joy and sadness, all captured on tape with stunning intimacy. This non-fiction odyssey offers a remarkable look into the lives of one family who was brave enough to share their story with the world.
I am going to break this Archival category into a sub-group of Rise-and-FallStories about iconic men whose lives were quite literally defined by the images of themselves created by and about them. Destroy the image, destroy the man? The Halston movie below begins by telling the audience how all of Halston’s tapes of himself and his work during the years of his reign were intentionally and systematically erased by the man who pushed him out of the business branded with Halston’s own name. The tapes were not trashed; they were erased, with fresh blank labels attached to cover up the old ones. Did this destructive act succeed at erasing the man himself? The documentary investigates.
Pictures meant everything to Halston. “Life is like a picture,” he used to say. The man, the brand, and the downfall of legendary fashion designer Halston, are poignantly portrayed in this documentary by TFF alum filmmaker Frédéric Tcheng (Dior and I, and The Eye Has to Travel, about fashionista Diana Vreeland). America’s first superstar designer, Halston created an empire and personified the dramatic social and sexual revolution of the last century. The film reveals Halston’s impact on fashion, culture, and business. It captures the epic sweep of the life and times of Roy Halston Frowick, the man who set women free with his unstructured designs and strove to “dress all of America.”
Halston, the documentary
While framing the story as an investigation by a young archivist diving into the Halston company records, Tcheng expertly weaves rare archival footage – depicted through contact sheets, TV monitors, negative images, and video glitches, with intimate interviews with Halston’s family, friends and collaborators, including Liza Minnelli, Andy Warhol, Iman, and filmmaker Joel Schumacher. What results is a behind-the-headlines look into the struggle between Halston’s self-created image, his depiction in the press, his artistic legacy, and the man himself. As in the story below, it is suggested that perhaps cocaine was key to this icon’s downfall. But the film digs deeper and looks at a carefully considered timeline of events; there is a lot to this story. In addition to its glitzy appeal, this documentary truly investigates America’s cultural and business history in a way that makes it surprisingly significant today.
*Take note during the credits of the film at how much of the archival materials came from the Andy Warhol collection. Now there’s a guy who protected his image.
The story of John DeLorean and his iconic car is mainly associated these days with the beloved movie Back to the Future. The true story has faded since the cameras, gossip, and intrigue swirled around him in the 80s, epitomized by a top-model wife and an infamous cocaine bust, followed by revelations of theft and corruption. But this film suggests that DeLorean’s triumphs and downfall, and their consequences, remain relevant today. And who better to portray a flamboyant man with a giant ego than Alec Baldwin, who appears in this film portraying himself portraying DeLorean?
Alec Baldwin as DeLorean
DeLorean’s fascinating tale is documented by one of the most glamorous archives in biopic history – full of private planes, fast cars, celebrities, posh lifestyles, flashy ads, mob-guy confessions, FBI secret footage, and even a filmed polygraph test plus the rehearsal for that test. The use of that archive in combination with process-aware re-enactments and interviews with many who knew him, including his much-disillusioned and angry son, provide a portrait of a complex, brilliant innovator and marketing genius whose Midas touch disappeared too quickly. The juxtaposition of archival materials, present-day interviews, and occasional commentary from actor Alec Baldwin overtly begs the question: what was real and what was a con? But perhaps the most compelling part of the film is the disclosure of what happened after the cameras stopped filming and the newspapers stopped reporting.
What’s Better: Jon Snow Rides a Dragon or Batman Pitches Opioids?
While Game of Thrones famously warns that “Winter is Coming,” John Oliver warned “Omar’s comin.”
by The Critic and HelenHighly, re 4/14/19
Game of Thrones vs Last Week Tonight w John Oliver
The Critic Says: Last night everyone was indulging in the power manipulations of Game of Thrones, for the 8th season premiere. But the show now articulates its power struggles more as spectacle than crafted dialogue. Yes, Westeros has dragons, but Shakespeare has yet to make an appearance in their universe. The truly shocking words of domination last night came not from the Targaryens but from the return of Walter White, Omar of The Wire, and Batman, just an hour later on another HBO show, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. To bring home the hideous thoughts of the reclusive Richard Sackler, former chairman of the OxyContin empire, Purdue Pharma, Oliver enlisted Michael Keaton, Bryan Cranston, and Michael K. Williams to summon everything evil as they read transcripts from Sackler’s deposition. If only these truly wicked words could be incorporated into Games of Thrones.
Helen Highly Expands the Correlations
As our Critic suggests, life’s truest statements come from legal depositions, where even villains are afraid to lie. Thus, when Last Week Tonight employed four master actors to read excerpts from Richard Sackler’s leaked testimony, both the acting and the dialogue were better than Game of Thrones.For the most genuinely emotional human drama, John Oliver won the day.
Bryan Cranston as Walter White does Sackler
Also on TV last night was Anderson Cooper doing a 60 Minutes segment about the much-anticipated final-season premiere of Game of Thrones. Cooper interviewed George R.R. Martin, writer of the fantasy novels on which the television show is based. Martin says that despite the showy dragons and magic in his story, he aims to depict “a story that is about the human heart in conflict with itself, about these very basic human emotions.” He’s using fiction to depict human truth. But John Oliver used real-life human testimony to depict fantasy-level super-evil, and it was more effective. Of course, Michael Keaton was a big help. Oliver chose Keaton to read from transcripts of Sackler’s statements because “When you’re casting for a shadowy heir to a vast fortune, who doesn’t like to be in the limelight, you go Batman.” Game of Thrones had Jon Snow learning to ride a dragon, but Last Week Tonight had Batman pushing drugs.
The Sackler and Stark family stories have even more correlations worth mentioning. Martin explained that his story is all about “Power – what it does to someone, how much we covet it, how it goes wrong in the wrong hands, and how different it is when you have it versus when you’re coveting it.” He easily could be talking about drugs, yes?
Winter is coming, in more ways than one.
Powerful drugs, such as the infamously addictive painkiller OxyContin, continue to lay waste to families and communities far and wide – even more lethal than the power in Games. Despite multiple lawsuits, new government regulations, enormous fines, and desperate efforts by the drug’s victims, this war to manipulate and control addiction is almost unstoppable. (Like White Walkers?) The Game of Thrones notorious line, repeated again last night, seems morbidly appropriate in articulating the significance of the deadly-yet-ongoing opioid addiction cycle: “What is dead may never die, but rises again harder and stronger.”
While Game of Thrones famously warns that “Winter is Coming,” John Oliver warned “Omar’s comin’,” as he presented The Wire’s Omar Little, Michael K. Williams. Omar delivered a similarly ominous quote from Richard Sackler: “The launch of OxyContin Tablets will be followed by a blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the competition. The prescription blizzard will be… deep, dense, and white.” Which winter is worse: a blizzard of killer pills or an army of frozen zombies?
To see more of John Oliver’s actors reading scary Sackler transcripts, go to www.SacklerGallery.com
Are Us and Life Sucks tethered together like combating doubles of each other?
by HelenHighly
“Us” Movie Poster with Lupita Nyong’o
It happened again: Entirely randomly and coincidentally, I saw two different narrative presentations (this time a film and a live play) just days apart, and despite their having no real connection, they merged in my brain to produce one review. The various parallels in the two stories, including matching themes and potential relevance to right-now America, were difficult to ignore and not compare, so I did – compare and contrast. First, I saw Us, the much-anticipated sophomore-effort horror film by Jordan Peele, which follows his much-celebrated first writer/director endeavor, Get Out. Next, I saw Life Sucks(now extended for a summer run at Theater Row, beginning June 4 )a play that claims to be “sort of adapted from Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov,” also a much-anticipated sophomore-effort variation on Chekhov for contemporary American audiences, by Aaron Posner (with Wheelhouse director Jeff Wise), following Posner’s much-acclaimed Stupid Fucking Bird, an adaptation of Chekhov’s Seagull. As Us was percolating in my brain, and as I was noticing more and more articles discussing the supposedly mysterious themes and hidden meanings within this genre-bending movie, my experience at the genre-bending Life Sucks hit me hard, as an answer to all my doubts and emerging cynicism about Us.
Note: There are some “spoilers” in this article. But Helen Highly suggests that if Peele wants to play in the philosophical Big Leagues, discussing archetypal relationships, then he needs to grow up and leave the notion of spoilers for lesser minds. Generations of people have known how all the Chekhov stories end, but that hasn’t yet stopped them from watching.
In the movie Us, Adelaide Wilson returns from the city to the beachfront home where she grew up, accompanied by her husband, son and daughter and planning to spend time with old friends. Haunted by a traumatic experience from the past, Adelaide grows increasingly concerned that something bad is going to happen that will threaten the safe, docile, middle-class lives of her family. Her worst fears soon become a reality, when four masked strangers descend upon the house. When the masks come off, the family is horrified to learn that each attacker takes the appearance of one of them and is harboring some long-buried resentments about power inequities and secret yearnings. Each family member must face off against their murderous other-selves, who are figuratively and sometimes literally “tethered” to them. It’s the quintessential us vs them scenario, where the threat from others truly comes from ourselves. Thus, in keeping with the classic horror genre, the danger is coming from inside. In the end, there is a parting between us and them, but the future is uncertain.
“Life Sucks” Poster, by Aaron Posner
In Life Sucks, an urban professor (Austin Pendleton in the original production and Kevin Isola in the remount) returns to the country home where he grew up, accompanied by his beautiful young wife. They descend upon the house that contains the long-ignored family and friends he left behind. Haunted by a family history of power inequities, repressed resentments, and secret yearnings, the characters experience increasing concern that something bad is going to threaten their complacent, docile, middle-class lives. Their worst fears soon become a reality as they each are confronted by the images of themselves that they project onto others, and they are forced to face their own regrets as mirrored in the seeming success of those most closely connected to them. Denial has been living in the basement and accountability has come to call. Posner has taken Chekhov’s traditional “suffering is beautiful” stance and given it some edge, and a pointed opinion: We are our own worst enemies. In the end, there is a parting between us and them, but the future is uncertain.
“Us” movie poster
Do the two sound similar? Yeah. Dualities. Opposites that create and destroy each other. The way that people are tethered to their darker selves, both personally and as a society. Who is the real “us” – the people we feel we are inside (our hurts, our hopes, our dreams) or the people others perceive us to be (selfish, ugly, threatening)? What happens when our worst selves are unleashed? In us vs them, who is truly to blame and who is the victim? Who gets to walk away a hero, and at what cost to others?
The real question is this: Would you rather explore these philosophical quandaries within a bloody battle with speechless creatures from a subterranean world or over tea and vodka with articulate intellectuals as they stroll through gardens and play piano in their living room? Box office sales would surely indicate that most would prefer the former. But Helen Highly prefers the latter. (And for the sake of total accuracy, I note that Posner changes the traditional Chekhovian beverage from vodka to rum and coke, as part of his modernization of the play – a small detail that I would have preferred to remain traditional.)
My immediate reaction to Us was extreme disappointment, as I had adored Get Out and would have been happy to see it win an Oscar for Best Picture. But this new movie is a relentlessly violent and bloody slasher flick, where the crude brutality overwhelms whatever finesse, imagination, or meaningful messaging it may contain. Peele gave quite a few interviews explaining his film, after-the-fact, and many an article was written deciphering the riddle-like significance of the film. But whatever nuanced complexities might have been in Peele’s head didn’t make it to the screen, and certainly didn’t make it into my head. And just like any joke, if you have to explain it afterward, that means it didn’t really work.
Even when Peele’s often heavy-handed metaphors did scream about their social or psychological significance, I just didn’t care, because I didn’t want to have to sit through another kill-fest scene in order to grasp his laborious, clumsy philosophizing. Is there more ironic significance to be found if one swims through all the blood to reach it? Maybe. But when I saw Life Sucks, it was profoundly and unequivocally clear that Chekhov is and always will be a master writer and philosopher, no matter how much contemporary silliness is thrown at his work, while Peele is still very much a newbie, and this film did not earn the “homework” afterward to try to make sense of his mess. Kudos to Peele for his commanding first film, and he certainly should keep working, but Helen Highly suggests that those watching keep proper perspective and reserve their highest praise for those who truly deserve it. Aaron Posner deserves it.
“Life Sucks” Play by Aaron Posner, w/Jeff Biehl as Vanya
Posner brings Chekhov out from the dusty past and makes him as fresh and relevant to contemporary life as Jordan Peele wishes he were. And director Jeff Wise seems to work in perfect partnership with Posner, delivering an audacious, immensely entertaining production that mingles mirth and angst with shock-and-awe in ways that portray life’s greatest dilemmas and despairs while ultimately sending the audience from the theater feeling strangely uplifted despite their newly activated personal pain.
It’s amazing how a few surprise gunshots that miss their targets and draw no blood can be as alarming and powerful as countless bloody murders. But what’s it all about? Both the movie and the play have a lot on their minds – virtual prisms of contemplation.
Speaking of prisms, I’ll start with mirrors, which figure prominently in Us. There is a decrepit carnival house of mirrors (and later, fractured shards of mirrors) that reflect a frightened little girl, who sees – or imagines? – her darker double, an image that returns repeatedly throughout the film. That scared little girl grows up to be a troubled, bourgeois wife and mother of two, who finally comes face-to-face with her “tethered” underworld double – her metaphysical opposite, both played with extraordinary dexterity by Lupita Nyong’o.
Plus, there is a vanity/makeup mirror in which a bleeding, murderous doppelganger of another bourgeois housewife applies lipstick with ghoulish panache, which is perhaps the most entertaining part of the movie, thanks to a thrilling performance by Elisabeth Moss. This deranged opposite-monster gives the most heinous portrayal possible of the superficial, self-absorbed character she seeks to kill and replace. At this point, it’s certainly no spoiler to reveal that all the ordinary, petty, self-entitled, real-world characters each have a zombie-like double who seeks to destroy and replace them. Does this already sound like Invasion of the Body Snatchers? Ding ding ding: You win the prize.
Meanwhile, Life Sucks sticks to the old theatrical trick of characters acting as human mirrors of each other. There is a clever scene, amazing in its simple effectiveness, in which all the characters line up to face off against the bourgeois, self-absorbed, complaining, Vanya (played by Jeff Biehl), each asking in turn, “What, am I supposed to feel sorry for you?” and then detail their own under-the-surface pains and grievances, which sometimes serve as confessions as well. Posner has taken the underlying psychologies of his layered characters and turned them inside out, so that they directly speak their interior thoughts, and even explain their personal issues and social philosophies, and still the play does not get near the level of over-bearing, self-important obnoxiousness that runs through the movie Us.
“Us” Movie Poster
What’s the most scary thing in Us? Your miserable, moaning, opposite-self, who is emotionally tethered to you, is coming to stab you to death with a giant pair of scissors. (Scissors are made of two identical halves that are attached to each other, and also represent a severing of unity: Get it?) What’s the most scary thing is Life Sucks? I asked the director, Jeff Wise.
He answered, “The scariest thing in life is our ability to delude ourselves. The characters in this play, like so many people, detach themselves from reality to avoid taking responsibility for themselves and the pain that brutal honesty would bring with it. And the more detached you are, the more vulnerable you are to reality making itself known to you. This is very scary – being so sure of something that is not real. And when the truth is made real to you, that’s terrifying. That’s when people have psychotic breaks.”
He continued, “Vanya is not happy about the decisions he has or has not made in his life. He thinks in an entitled way. He blames others. He blames society. He refuses to be accountable. And finally he starts lashing out in real and violent ways – the dissatisfied, angry part of himself who believes that life has been unfair to him. He brings a gun into the house. Now his fear has manifested in real danger. He has become toxic to his community. His unwillingness to confront his own struggle is dangerous to others. So, they must confront him.”
It’s the emotional confrontation that is terrifying. The other characters force Vanya to look at himself, as if in a mirror. But who needs a real mirror when you have the genius of Chekhov to depict the conflicts in our consciousness – the smashed glass between our egos and our ids? In fact, Posner interweaves sardonic humor with cutting truth so easily, you are able to watch that conflict – the confrontation between who we pretend to be and who we are afraid to be, and laugh at Vanya’s and our own tortured psyches. Posner doesn’t need absurd giant scissors; he has language.
Helen suggests that when Vanya’s seething resentment peaks, and he attempts to shoot and kill his better-than-him brother, he is attempting to tear the same type of tether to their better-halves that the ghouls in Us so viciously resent. In some ways, it’s a struggle to own ourselves and a question about free will. Can Vanya be the person he wants to be or is he doomed by his denial of who he truly is – his jealousy, his guilt, his weaknesses? Can Adelaide ever truly free herself from her ugly underground double? And which one of her double-selves most deserves the daylight; which one is the real one? It seems odd that these two very-different stories both grapple with the same questions. Are Us and Life Sucks tethered together like combating doubles of each other? If so, Chekhov walks away the winner.
Austin Pendleton in “Life Sucks”
There is another pair of tethered characters in Life Sucks that merits mention. Vanya’s niece, Sonia (Kimberly Chatterjee), is homely, hard-working, unsophisticated, and sexually “invisble,” especially to the man she loves — Dr. Aster (Michael Schantz). In contrast, there is her father’s beautiful, alluring, worldly wife, Ella (Nadia Bowers), who receives unwanted romantic overtures from every man within wishing distance, especially from her brother-in-law Vanya, and also, painfully, from Dr. Aster — the man Sonia believes should rightfully love her. There is a wonderful heart-to-heart scene between the two women, in which they confront each other’s (and their own) jealousies and failures and reflect on how each possesses much of what the other wants. Their late-night drunken dialogue has a charm that is both solemn and giddy. It’s a true, heart-wrenching joy to watch, and far out-classes any Jordan Peele scene of two, female opposites literally ripping each other’s hearts out.
In Get Out, Peele was more effective at integrating comedy into the tragedy than he is in Us. But Life Sucks reaches moments of outright hilarity, although it is not quite as tight and astute as Stupid Fucking Bird. Neither writer has achieved the greatness of their first efforts, but both remain promising young artists who are contributing to our national discourse on personal and societal responsibility as we move from the “old order” to the “new order,” or at least they’re making the attempt. At a time when immigration has become a national emergency in our country, they are dealing with issues of outsiders vs insiders, us vs them (within ourselves and society), and blame vs responsibility. That’s the wonder of art – to make us think while we are entertained.
Lupita Nyong’o in Us Movie
Both stories have a moral seriousness and earnest intensity dotted with amusing pop-culture references. In Us, we get to see an Amazon-Alexa-like voice-operated music player get splattered with blood as it plays “Good Vibrations” by the Beach Boys (a song from 1966). In Life Sucks, we get to hear the Pickles character sing “Why Don’t We Do It In The Road,” by the Beatles (a song from 1968). We also hear Paul Simon’s “American Tune” (1975). The lyrics are right at home in Life Sucks but would have fit just as well into Us:
I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered
I don’t have a friend who feels at ease
I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered
or driven to its knees
But it’s all right, it’s all right
We’ve lived so well so long
Still, when I think of the road
we’re traveling on
I wonder what went wrong
I can’t help it, I wonder what went wrong
Okay, maybe that’s me showing my age. I do agree with other critics who have applauded Jordan Peele’s savvy exploitation of how tethered we are to pop music. See this article by Micah Peters at The Ringer, for more on that.
Peele aims to be more overtly political in his story, but… his 1980’s-era Hands Across America tie-in reads more nostalgic than meaningful. I think he gets himself too twisted up between Alice-in-Wonderland rabbit references and homeless guys with Bible verses written on their foreheads to really put together anything resembling an intellectually viable political thesis; he’s made a mediocre, psychological-thriller / slasher-film combo with some archetypal undertones and enough symbolic details to let anybody read anything they want into the meaning of it all. It is generous to include his movie in any real philosophical discussion, but he does seem to be thinking about things; maybe next time he’ll express some real ideas.
Posner and Wise’s effort is much stronger and more emotionally gripping. Let’s face it; no one can touch Chekhov when it comes to existential angst and human complexity. It’s worth noting that Posner does squarely place the setting in the United States but is vague about the date, although there is an Exxon reference at one point. So it seems both stories see something significant about America in the 1980s, while they also speak to a contemporary audience.
I am left with questions: Are we our own worst enemies? Does life really suck? And if it doesn’t suck, what does it do?
Life staggers. It confounds. It rages. And it yearns. Life is beautiful and Life Sucks.
Go see the play. Skip the movie.
Life Sucks was a downtown smash hit at Wheelhouse Theater but now is having a summer run uptown at Acorn Theatre, beginning June 4. Helen HIGHLY suggests you go see it. I personally guarantee you will be glad you did. Click here for tickets.
