Recently in Film Category

This month, I'm helping run mailorder for my friends' label while they're on tour in Japan. This "company story" manifesto thing is from their forthcoming company catalog.

Our company was formed when we decided to have one name and address for all things we made and all the makers. It is an imaginary general store from a time before figuring out all aspects of one's work became a novelty. In 2003 we started writing the brand name on our projects in order to unify our various objects and to jokingly participate on the uneasy commerce that we all live in, but in the simplest, most direct way we could think of.

Not knowing how to best be useful in a world that increasingly seems to need SOMETHING, some kind of massive sweeping broom and warm embrace, and finding ourselves with enough money to live, we are producing frivolous booklets and records and posters.

It is an uneasy life, living in the dark belly of the modern megastate with any kind of awareness, so we sing and write to keep ourselves and our customers aware and uneasy, not too comfy and not too guilty, awake.

No amount of well-intentioned song-products would be enough work, no matter how home-made or deliberately done. We must encourage each other constantly to nurture our literacies, leave our bubbles, increase our knowledge, refuse to accept stupidity, offer love in gentle ways everywhere. We must participate in real life.

I love this statement, and the way it points us to a mature, nuanced theory of the role of culture in this troubled age. Key ideas:
• Culture matters; it's not just about celebrity, commerce, entertainment, or even self-expression, or art for art's sake.
• Choices about methods of production, manufacture, and distribution are as much a potential space of resistance as the work itself. The way the CD or the book or whatever is made and the way it reaches its audience is as important as the information it contains.
• At the same time, cultural products are not enough. Participation in cultures of resistance is best understood as one component of a broader strategy of mindful living.
• We can be self-aware about the limitations of music-making/book-making/art-making/film-making without falling into cynicism or knee-jerk irony. We just have to remember that admonition from the Upanisads, that this cultural stuff we make is "the finger pointing at the moon, and those whose gaze is fixed upon the pointer will never see beyond."

May 1 was Mayday! aka International Worker's Day, an official state holiday in most nations. (There are indications that Labor Day was created to avoid a U.S. recognition of Mayday and its displays of international solidarity). To celebrate and honor working people, I lazily sat on my ass and watched John Sayles' excellent 1987 film Matewan.

The mostly-true story: Labour leader Joe Kenehan (a surprisingly hottt Chris Cooper) comes to the town of Matewan to try to organize the local mine workers of the Stone Mountain Coal Company in order to better their and their families' lives. He takes a room at a boarding house run by Elma Radnor and her young son Danny (a surprisingly teenaged and beardless Will Oldham). The talk of unionizing has prompted the mine owners to bring in black and Italian workers as scabs while at the same time, they are employing "muscle" in the form of detectives from a private agency to try to break up any unionizing activities. The internal process of unionization is a difficult one as the workers deal with racism and betrayal in trying to develop a common front. The struggle culminates in a violent confrontation on the main street of the town, the infamous Matewan massacre. (synopsis stolen from DVD verdict)

The film nicely illustrates how religion can be a tool for enforcing hegemony (director Sayles makes a cameo as a red-baiting preacher denouncing unionization) or as a means of encouraging liberation (Oldham as the boy preacher Danny talks union from the pulpit and finds scriptural support). It all depends on who is allowed to interpret the tradition.

But moreover, I like Matewan because to me, it is a film about the power and the challenge of faith.

To explain what I mean by this, I'm going to have to first unpack what I mean by faith. Too often we reduce faith to simple willful adherence to a set of unprovable doctrines. Instead I'm going to use the definition of faith provided by the 20th century theologian Paul Tillich in his excellent and very short book Dynamics Of Faith. Tillich contends that Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned about something without conditions. It is all-encompassing, a way of living, an act of total personality - one's whole being is drawn to the ultimate concern. Faith is about commitment, trust, and investment, not about the veracity of a set of empirical claims in the absence of supporting evidence.

One nice thing about this definition is that it allows us to see faith at work in contexts we don't think of as religious. Capitalism, nationalism, DIY punk subculture; these are manifestations of faith. The object of faith might be undeserving, but it is faith nontheless.

Additionally this definition breaks down the false binary between the "irrational" religious faithful and the "rational" secular faithless. Everyone has faith in something.

Okay, back to the film. Chris Cooper as Joe Kenehan is an atheist marxist, and yet he is a man of deep unwavering faith. For him the ultimate concern, the object of faith is social justice through a praxis of nonviolence and solidarity.

Kenehan understands that driving wedges between different subsets of working people is a trick to distract and weaken them, to keep them from ably fighting the battles that matter. In Matewan the divisions are racial and ethnic. As Danny says "They got you fightin' white against colored, native against foreign...when you know there ain't but two sides in the world - them that work and them that don't. That's all you got to know about the enemy" Today in the U.S. the wedge is cultural: red state vs. blue state, urban vs. rural. (Here's an example, it's the absolute worst political analysis I've read in recent memory, and let me take this opportunity to out Dan Savage as a libertarian propagandist posing as a liberal activist. Jerkface.)

So the workers and their families put their faith in the union, putting aside differences and finding strength in each other. They invest themselves in the cause fully, even with no guarantee of success. The film is honest about the difficulty of holding onto faith in hard times, as we see that Danny's faith is wavering. His choice about whether to repay violence with violence is the film's dramatic climax.

Hopefully it does not spoil anything to note that Matewan doesn't have a happy ending. Actually it doesn't have much of an ending at all. It seems intentional; the fundamental struggle between the workers and the wealthy elites hasn't ended. Arguably, it's still the dominant narrative of our history-in-progress, and radical faith in nonviolence and solidarity is still desperately needed.

The film is sort of obvious in its moralizing. But is there anything wrong with that really, as long as its done honestly and artfully?

For another object lesson in faith, read John Sayle's book Thinking In Pictures: The Making of the movie Matewan . This book documents the struggles Sayles went through trying to get the film made, and his commitment to doing the project on an independent level. It's practical inspiration for creative folks trying to stay honest about their art in the face of tough fiscal realities.

Note: if you are interested in this movie, do not get the domestic DVD released by Artisan. It is a very crummy transfer with poor image and sound. Get the Canadian DVD released by Seville Pictures, it's way better. Canadians may get better DVDs, but the USA gets better slurpees.

Director David O. Russell describes I ♥ Huckabees as an attempt to introduce audiences to the principles of Eastern Religion, particularly Buddhism, without framing these principles in explicitly religious terms. The film seems to target a young progressive audience that is aware that something is very wrong with the state of the world but is feeling alienated and somewhat hopeless. You know, people like me, and like you and like most of our friends have been feeling since November 2. That audience is personified in Albert (Jason Schwartzman), a frustrated environmental activist, who recruits a pair of existential detectives (Dustin Hoffman & Lily Tomlin) to unravel his personal mysteries.

Huckabees teaches so artfully and efficiently that we barely notice that we're learning. Complex Buddhist concepts seem like common sense; Hoffman's character (based on Buddhist teacher Robert Thurman) demonstrates, with the help of a blanket, in 30 seconds, the concept of interbeing-everything is everything else. We learn of interconnectedness: between people, between events, between the psychological and the interpersonal, and the political. We learn of impermanence as we watch Albert and his sleazy corporate arch-nemesis Brad (Jude Law) experience devastating losses. But along with Albert, we learn how to be compassionate toward Brad; we learn to see that even our "enemies" are suffering. It is this insight that allows Albert (and us) to let go of our attachment to anger and move on.

The movie is not a thinly disguised religious tract promoting Buddhism as an easy ticket to Happytown. It is honest about the temptation and dangers posed by nihilism dressed up in a zen disguise. This is important because the whole "fuck as many people and do as many drugs as I can and ignore the consequences because I am beyond good and evil" mentality has haunted American Buddhism since Kerouac and Ginsberg.

The portrayal of a family of a typical American evangelical Christians needs a little work. Russell depicts the family as warm-hearted but narrow-minded and oblivious to their complicity in world problems. Sadly, that sounds about right. But he gets the theology behind their arrogance wrong when he has the clueless daughter state that “Jesus is never mad at us if we live with him in our hearts.” Actually, very few evangelical christians would say that. Russell seems to be hypothesizing that their confidence in their salvation-by-grace is responsible for their self-righteousness and lack of attention to social justice, but in fact personal piety and the struggle against sin remains a focus even for those who consider themselves "saved". A more nuanced diagnosis would find that the real issue is the shift in emphasis from social holiness to private personal holiness since the 19th century, or what Jim Wallis calls the "great heresy of 20th century American Evangelicalism."

Not enough films have something important and substantive to say beyond an interesting story or a character study. Huckabees doesn't provide empty escapism or deny how screwed up the world is, but still leaves you feeling hopeful and empowered to keep fighitng the good fight. And it's all delivered with sincerity and humor, like a little smiling buddha in movie form. I ♥ this movie.

Please read this cool interview with David O. Russell, written by Jeffery Overstreet for Christianity Today. It features a guest appearance by devout catholic/sexy underwear model Mark Walhberg, who says of the film, rather confusingly, but sincerely: "It's all about Jesus"