Take a Swing, Get a Hit

I’m a sentimental gal. I’m easily stirred. And somehow also, as a kid of the eighties who grew into adulthood during a time of deep conservatism in Australia, I find myself embarrassingly hungry for political sentiment.

You know. The kind you find in speeches.

I found Rudd’s public apology to indigenous Australia totally moving. I stood in Federation Square (of all places) and sobbed with the crowd.

Patriotism has always been a dirty word in my mind but for the first time in my adult life I was confronted with a political leader saying something I unreservedly agreed with. Time has showed it was still (mostly) a bunch of rhetoric but it was built around one extremely truthful word that can’t be taken back: Sorry.

Something similar occurred just a few weeks ago when Julia Gillard talked to parliament about misogyny. At both these times it felt to me like something fundamental was shifting. That politics and nationhood are suddenly digging up the very foundations that they’re built on and examining for rot.

Throughout the late 90s and early 2000s I hardly tuned in to politics, when I did it always seemed like someone was saying something appalling, someone’s face was being stuck on a playing card, some more immigrants were being left in the ocean to drown. Archaic terms such as Evil and Tyranny and Freedom were bandied around. And, as though all this ancient vocabulary were not enough to contain the depths of our prejudice, new terms like un-Australian were being coined. I heard the attitudes of intolerance, how nations would not stand for things more than I heard about the intricacies of the things they would not stand for.

This is partly my own fault. I’m the kinda gal who turns the radio off when they keep playing the same shitty song.

Around 2007, Bush saturation point, I remember my friend Scotty watching Clinton and Kennedy speeches on Youtube. He said he wanted to remember what it felt like to listen to an American president who wasn’t greedy, bloodthirsty and reactionary in simultaneity with being a bumbling fool. It’s a reasonable desire. Our generation are linked to the USA since birth through the TV umbilical. It’s better to have hope you won’t always be feeding on shit.

At times, their culture feels indivisible from ours.

So we pay attention come election time. We watch with the feeling that a conservative government elected across the other side of the world will only empower our own conservatives. Will only encourage our own conservatism.

Barack Obama tapped in to a great sense of relief in his victory speech yesterday. I watched with a kind of sentimental rapture. The symbolism of having a black president in America and a female prime minister in Australia feels pertinent indeed. And I am not one of those who feel this makes the need to criticize all the more pressing. The fact of their identities alone is incredible.

“You carry the memory of the history we made together, ” is how Obama starts. Technically, he’s not talking to me, but he perfectly framed the moment of his address as one of important history, and everyone, not just in North America but around the world, as vital witnesses and actors.

Although there are times when the Obama speech sounds more like a Bette Midler Song, the historical thrust remains. Here is the first black president. Again. This is no flash in the pan.

Maybe you’ll think this very cheesy and in poor taste but the speech made me hungry for more speeches. I wanted to watch so many poignant speeches that I got a vim-over. I wanted to have my house torn down by the wind of change.

I decided to go with Spike Lee’s Malcolm X. Super American. Strong black political voice. It wasn’t much of a stretch. As far as biopics go, Malcolm X is about as biased and tributary as they come. It’s 3.5 hours of worship and wide shot. But it’s a good movie. And it had what I needed.

Malcolm’s early gangs, drugs and sex-with-white-girls years are brought to us in cool, sweeping stylised tableau. Sweeps of 1950s Harlem with the dashing Denzel Washington in bright glad-rags swagger-dancing down the streets. As a detail, heroin is cool until its not. All the speakeasies and sock-hops are styled in primary colours. A palette that assumes political significance. It implicates and judges the designation of black and white at the level of aesthetics. Black and white? How ridiculous in such an oversaturated world. And it’s 90s/50s. A stylistic link made by the filmmaker between the shit hot fashions at the sock hop and those on the courts and dance floors in the 90s. There is an understandable pride in this styling.

See? It says, we dominate politics and cool.

Malcolm X, in a speech, describes his early years as ‘living like an animal’, but Spike Lee doesn’t see it like that at all.

The story tracks Malcolm’s short life from street tough to prison, where he discovered Islam and completed a Masters degree, to his time as a minister, first for The Nation of Islam and then, after a fight with his prophet over hypocrisy, his own ministry. That’s where he is assassinated in 1965, in full view of his congregation, his wife and children.

The films laborious detail and stylish indulgence is justified, for the most part, by the significance of the life being represented.

Through Malcolm X’s story we become witness to the multiple paths of working through the trauma of racism, enacted as historically locatable violence as well as broad structural hate.

And, right in the middle there is a speech montage so long it takes up almost half the movie. That’s where I got my fix. Lines like “throw off the shackles of mental colonisation” and “We ought to pray for our enemy? No! That’s not intelligent!” should make everyone want to wave (or burn) flags.

While watching these speeches though, I had to notice the difference between a protest speech and an official, institutionally acceptable speech. Malcolm X’s speeches were more dangerous, more important and exciting than the one’s that I have been thinking about lately, but they were a reaction. They voiced a view that at the time was considered officially unspeakable. So dangerous that it attracted the attention of the CIA, harassment and surveillance.

Before officials can speak of equality to flag waving crowds, someone had to speak about inequality. Someone has to say the things that are hard to hear before someone else can butter our minds with heady paradise.

In some ways though, it occurs to me that the sense of relief I feel right now is that the content of the official speech is slowly meeting that of the protest.

Julia Gillard’s misogyny speech was not so dissimilar from some of the wonderful speeches at this years’ Slutwalk, for instance.

Obama too is still speaking of work that needs to be done. It’s somehow shocking to hear him mention climate change in a speech where he doesn’t have to, or simply refer non-judgementally to the existence of gay people and their place in the context of all that freedom and equality being divvied out.

This is not a protest march but we still have work to do. This is not the voice of dissent; it’s the president of the United States. After decades of the opposite, the lunatic fringe might finally be reserved for the racists, the homophobes, bigots and misogynists.

There is a long tracking shot toward the end of Malcolm X. He’s floating, almost out of body down the street. A big contrast to the dandy, swaggering, embodied young man he was.

We just know he’s on his way to die.

The difference between Spike Lee’s biopic and most though is that Spike doesn’t actually let his subject die. Instead, he moves forward in time to protests in Soweto, to children in 90s classrooms on Malcolm X day and on to the end of apartheid. Nelson Mandela teaching a classroom about Malcolm X.

We can carry the link on too, past the end of the film and into the speeches of today that once were unspeakable. Sometimes the voice of protest is the one we have wanted to hear all along.

Obama said, “democracy is noisy and messy and complicated. Big decisions stir passions. That won’t change and it shouldn’t. Our arguments are a mark of our liberty.”

He’s speaking from a pertinent historical position of course. And we are witnesses to the fact: someone always gets shot before someone else can speak without fear of bullets.

Monstrous Journey

Though I am well passed the saturation point for serial killer movies, I agreed to rewatch Monster for the same reason it was funded (lesbian serial killer movie) and awarded an oscar (Charlize Theron).

Monster is a wonderful movie. It’s another biopic about a complicated and violent woman, written and directed by a female director, Patty Jenkins. While researching the screenplay Patty established a correspondence with the film’s subject Aileen Wuornos, the sex worker, abuse survivor and serial killer who was executed in Florida in 2002 for the murder of several of her clients. Before starting on scene one she already had a list of things not to do. She wouldn’t make Wournos a glamour puss, she wouldn’t demonise or lionise her, she wouldn’t lose sight of the woman, she wouldn’t write her off as a wacko, she wouldn’t loose the emotional intensity. She wanted to stay clear of the ‘dumb serial killer’ narrative. Genre had already done its work. It had secured the funding. Now it was time to make something remarkable.

While Patti said in interview that Aileen was not always on board with the project, alternating from understandable distrust to timid hopefulness, she eventually did fully endorse the project and gave Jenkins and Theron all of her personal correspondence to use in making the honest and heartbreaking film.

I don’t bandy around words like heartbreaking for no reason. Olof and I spent most of Monster huddled together on the couch sobbing. Actually, for once Olof did more sobbing than me. His weakness is movies where a person is dehumanised and monstrous. He cries for clones and androids and psychopaths and for Aileen who doesn’t want much – love perhaps, and a modicum of comfort. But who gets nothing right up until death.

Monster is the kind of movie that makes you ache for how lucky you are.

When Jenkins was asked what Wournos’ victims might think, when they saw this film which above all creates a space for empathy and compassion she replied that she hoped they didn’t see it.

Other than Theron’s performance, which is incredible, the film is very well directed and shot, moves apace and doesn’t let the voiceover intrude on the story. There is a kind of late 80s ugliness that moves through the film like a ford capri daydream. All the streets, the strip malls and suburban homes are horrible. The whole of Florida seems empty and lonely. All the people are out on the highway, driving their cars, picking up hookers to fuck in the forest for 40 bucks. The beautiful roller disco slow dance to Journey seems to skate right into the courtroom and expose the whole cheap lie of romance, of hope and the notion that love will conquer all.

The courtroom’s just another stage where another kind of fantasy is dolled out, dolled up and made to dance around.

All the characters in Monster are so clear and the culture of victim blaming that it illustrates seems particularly pertinent to this moment. There’s a wonderful speech in it that so directly sums up the ‘Christian’ attitude that every individual gets, more or less, what they deserve. Good people, says a concerned aunt, don’t turn to crime when they are hard up.

Everyone has a choice. Whores whore. Thieves thieve. And good folk, it seems, condemn the hell outta everyone in between.

Christina Ricci plays the fictionalised girlfriend Selby, based on real life Tyria Moore, who Wournos met in a gay bar and lived with for several years, during which time the murders took place while she was on her murderous revenge rampage. Selby loves Wournos, though in the end betrays her love to save her own skin. This is an especially heartbreaking moment, when Wournos, on the phone to Selby, realizes that her final sacrifice for love is her own life. It sounds dramatic and cliché but it isn’t. It’s played just right. Sickly sweet, naive and self-serving, Ricci is a great foil to Theron.

I googled Patty Jenkins as soon as the titles rolled but was surprised to find that, other than Monster she’s done no other features. Still outraged by Killing Me Softly I immediately sought to find a feminist quibble with this. Why, for instance, had a woman who directed monster not been slated for another film when the man who made Chopper seemed to have cart blanche to make the most indulgent bullshit in the world. Unfortunately for me however, there is no obvious answer to rail about. I was working up a furver about women director’s who make ‘women’s stories’ not being given other opportunities, but Mary Harron of I Shot Andy Warhol went on to direct American Psycho.  And Jenkins has been working, but in TV directing some of my favorite shows including Six Feet Under. So maybe this is not all an injustice of the patriarchy.

In order to find out I will have to complete an exhaustive study of women’s stories written or directed by women but other than Harron’s movies, I can’t think of any. Please clue me up if know some. It’s my turn to dictate the theme of the binge.

In the end, Monster ends on neither a note of victimhood, nor of pure aggression but a splice. As the death penalty gets handed down, Wournos loses it. Somehow, despite the way life kicks her in the teeth continually, she is still moved to violent reaction. And that’s the thing. Good people, or specifically good women, lie down and die when condemned.

“You’re a bunch of scum,’ says Aileen, as they drag her from the courtroom.

S.C.U.M on Screen

Following the Warhol’s New York biopic thread, last night we watched I shot Andy Warhol the story of separatist lesbian feminist Valery Solanas’s time in NYC culminating in the title act, the shooting of Warhol.

This is one of my favourite movies about this period. Lilly Taylor is wonderful as Solanas, playing her just right – not so aggressive and paranoid as to be unlikable, but not as a victim of her own mental illnesses either. And Jared Harris’s Andy Warhol is great too, a less cartoonish impersonation than Bowie’s, but then, David Bowie can do whatever he wants and it’s still fabulous because he’s David Bowie.

The story follows Solanas and her various passions, from writing provocative short plays for performance in a lesbian dominated diner to penning the scum manifesto. Solanas ingratiates herself with Warhol briefly, acting in one of his films, before being excommunicated from the factory crowd on account of her paranoia and lack of social graces. Her relationship with Warhol is interesting however, considering that Valery advocates the extinction of all men and views the genders as two different species. She nonetheless respects Warhol, and sees him as her ticket to exposure (getting on TV) one way or another.

Solanas’s approach is both brash and naive. She targets Warhol because he is the most neon figure on her horizon. There is a tragic moment when, watching TV, she sees a feminist rally.

‘Those are my women’, she says, ‘I should be with them’.

Her fixation on the New York scene has prevented her from making contact with the growing on-campus women’s movement. There is a sense she graduated from college too early, was born too early. I wonder what form her art terrorism might have taken if she was in her 20s in the Guerrilla Girl’s NYC reign.

But there is also a feeling that, no matter what opportunities comes her way, Solanas’ paranoia and obsessiveness would prevent her taking full advantage of them. A publisher signs her for a two book deal which she begins to see as robbery. IN the film, she falls in with notorious anarchist collective Up Against The Wall Motherfuckers but can’t see them even as collaborators because of their gender. She formulates elaborate conspiracies in which her publisher, Andy and the New York art crowd in general are out to get her, repressing or stealing her work. She alienates all her friends and then she shoots Andy Warhol. After she is arrested she is diagnosed with schizophrenia.

When the cops ask her why she says she doesn’t want to get into it right now, there are a lot of reasons, it’s complicated. But then, who can be bothered explaining the patriarchy as it manifests in radical communities to a bunch of cops after they have arrested you?

In epilogue, everything seems to get pinned on Solanas. A text block tells us that Andy never really recovers from the shooting and dies in 1987 but fails to mention he dies, not from shooting related injuries but from a gallbladder infection. Candy Darling (sensitively portrayed by Stephen Dorf) has her death summed up in a sentence and scene in which cancer is linked with illegal hormone treatments, which is linked with Valery’s insistence that dressing in drag does not a woman make.

I can imagine there would have been pressure not to glorify attempted murder in this film. Lou Reed was certainly concerned about that, he refused to license Velvet Underground music for the soundtrack and famously advocated the death penalty for Solanas.

Still, unlike in Basquiat, I Shot Andy Warhol seems to be a more nuanced portrait of its subject. Perhaps this is because Solanas was a writer, and writing, unlike painting, in easily adapted to the cinema narrative. In I shot Andy Warhol, this takes the form of Taylor as Solanas, delivering sections for the real SCUM Manifesto to camera, in black and white Warhol screenshot style scenes interspersed throughout the story. Her delivery is cool, stylish, menacing. Her writing punchy and proud.

Director Mary Harron, a woman, a writer and a feminist was careful not to let the SCUM Manifesto come out of the film looking like the rantings of a lunatic. She doesn’t  black out Solanis’ resonance, her punk attitude and her vision. In other words, she lets Solanis remain a person. In Harron’s narrative, there is no rise and fall, just collage. There is no need for Solanas to emerge from the film as a hero and so no need to hem her into the corner. To supply her with a fictional romance, to glorify or explain or neutralise her mystique.

After all, she shot Andy Warhol, how much more mythology does a gal need?

Livin the myth

As kids – only children with overbearing single mothers and overactive imaginations living in oppressively small Australian towns – both Olof and I lapped up the glut of 90s biopics about the cool lives that other people lived, in other places and other times. It was clear that we too would grow into mythology and effortlessly cool apartments for pretty much no rent. We both obsessed over Sid And Nancy and The Doors movie, and over the smut biopics like Boogie Nights and The People V Larry Flint and later, over films about more serious artists like Frida, Before Night Falls and Basquiat.

Actually I have always lapped up everything about or relating to Warhol’s New York City. I loved I Shot Andy Warhol and even sat riveted through the pretty lame Factory Girl, I also love books about the time, biographies like Please Kill Me and Death and Disaster as well as Tama Jovavich’s Cannibal in New York which features a photo spread of Jean Michelle Basquiat as the polygamous cannibal artist entangled in both the art and crime world’s of NYC in the 80s.

In general, biopics can be fairly problematic and Basquiat is particularly illustrative of this. It sacrifices plot cogency and insight in order to better fit the indulgent mythologising of the artist into a fairly narrow rise and fall type structure.

In rise and fall you need the bright idealistic youth, the success that does not fulfil as imagined, the vices, the disintegration of relationships and then death. Oh yeah and a love affair fallen by the wayside of fame. There isn’t room for much else. As a result, the portrait you have of the subject barely contains the possibility for real life.

In Basquiat, the subject, highly collectable neo-primitive cool graff n canvas art star Jean Michelle Basquiat, is portrayed as terminally cool, disconnected, bumped along by the tide of his rise and fall, apathetic and never truly engaged. So when, in a restaged press interview, Christopher Walken Journalist asks him about his DJ sets in international clubs, his dates with Madonna, we the audience have trouble believing that this guy could have pulled off such rousing activity.

The movie gives us the impression that all he did was sniff heroin, paint found objects and ride the slippery slide in expensive grunge pyjamas. His art career, the movie implies, was pretty boring, leaving Jean Michelle always in a pose of slightly regretful shoulder glancing.

The reason for this, I suppose, is the wish not to draw too many unflattering conclusions about the subject. Like perhaps he overlooked his old friends not because he was young, caught up and introspective, but because he was a a bit of a jerk. And perhaps he didn’t look back with such nostalgia on his early-years girlfriend. Maybe he really liked dating Madonna. There’s no shame in this.

Suggestions which mark the subject as regular, flawed in a less than eccentric genius way, are typically precluded from this kind of biopic. Rather, subjects are victims of their own inevitable tragetory, doomed to repeat the patterns of the lone genius. Another great example that springs to mind is 2005’s Walk The Line in which Jonnie Cash falls to pill poppin, not cause he like to party and drugs are fun, or because of hubris or even the false world of touring but because ‘Elvis is doing it’. Please.

In Basquiat, the incredible cast – Gary Oldman, Dennis Hopper, Courtenay Love, Benicio del Toro to name a few – serve mainly to reinforce the mythology in a performative mirroring of the way celebrity strengthened Warhol’s empire in real life. This is not to say their aren’t great performances, especially from Bowie and Del Torro. But mainly, it’s a celebration movie. A cinematic party where one bunch of cool kids plays another. David Bowie, who knew Basquiat, plays Warhol. At a dinner party at Chang’s Basquiat takes his seat at the coveted Warhol table across from Vincent Gallo, playing himself, sort of. Why? Cause Gallo was in a noise band with Basquiat.

There are other moments in the film where you can just tell a someone famous is doing a cameo, like an ample man in a rose shirt who buys a painting at a lost party, but alas, my knowledge of what 80s art stars look like is incomplete, and there is as yet no recognition app for celeb spotting or cosplay.

Some of the technical aspects of the film, like the excessive jump cuts, used to make the whole thing feel more druggy and also somehow poetic, now seem super dated. When I first saw the film I was totally enamoured with an above bed shot of the sleeping couple moving toward and away from eachother in their love bed. Profound metaphor, I thought then, though now it seems like a taudry cliche done much better in Gallo’s Buffallo 66.

Plus, what the fuck is with the female love interest, whose character name I barely remember, and whom we are told is also a painter, with more realistic dreams (Statten Island rather than Hawaii) but whose work we are never really shown and who appears as a kind of wallflower to the plot – a pretty waitress imbued with biopic significance the moment the male subject wants to fuck her. Ick. While one imagines this girlfriend must have been a pretty exceptional person to be attracted to Basquiat, who seems deeply narcissistic and affected, a kind of unfuckable genius, a quick googling reveals she is fictional and therefore simply a shill body, a symbol of a relationship for the subject to rise and fall against and therefor a pretty poignant summing up of how I feel about the whole movie: Fun to watch, easy to get caught up in but ultimately shallow and unreal, revealing less about the artist than his tag, painted on a door, stolen by cool opportunists and sold for a mint.