[Trumbo - movie review] you can't do that. this is america

(Cross-posted between my daily Groundhog Day Project movie blog and my far-less-regularly updated Against the World political blog.)

The Naturalization, Alien Friends, Alien Enemies and Sedition Acts of 1798. Anti-German and anti-Irish sentiment in the mid-1800s (and beyond; is not the drunken Irishman still a staple of film?). More anti-German sentiment around the two World Wars. The Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918. Anti-Italian sentiment from the 1800s into the 1900s.

(For example, the largest mass lynching in US History was that of nine Italian-Americans who had been found not guilty of murder and let go in New Orleans, 1891. They and two other Italians held on unrelated charges were dragged from jail and lynched. Arrests followed, but not of those who did the lynching. Rather, more Italians. In a piece at cnn.com, 10 July 2012, Ed Falco describes how President Roosevelt called the lynchings "a rather good thing.")

Anti-Catholic sentiment just made things worse for the Italians.

(24 December 1806, protestors surrounded St. Peter's Church in Manhattan because of the strange rituals going on inside, i.e. Christmas Eve celebrations. Just last month, armed protestors surrounded a Mosque in Irving, Texas.)

Anti-Japanese sentiment and internment during World War II. Anti-Communist sentiment running throughout the 20th century. (Which is where today's film--Trumbo--puts us. (I have also just watched an episode of HBO's John Adams and the film version of 1776 is on as I'm writing.) But, let us not stop there just yet.) Anti-black, anti-Mexican, anti-gay... Anti-Muslim of late--that's just keeping up with the usual practice.

The American tradition of Otherization.

Dalton Trumbo and many others in Hollywood were blacklisted because they were (or were rumoured to be) Communists. There was no crime committed by Trumbo and the rest of the Hollywood Ten until they were subpoenaed to Congress and would not answer the questions put to them.

The film plays that testimony scene with both Trumbo (Bryan Cranston) and Arlen Hird (Louis C.K.) almost as comedy, despite the serious implications for these men's careers and also potential jailtime that may come from being in contempt of congress. 

In fact, there is a lot of comedy... or at least comedic moments in Trumbo. The film also, necessarily takes a dark turn as Trumbo deals with being blacklisted by working even more, under assumed names, taking amphetamines and drinking and smoking (perhaps) more than before. Trumbo is a deeply flawed character, the kind of character I love. There's a moment in the film in which he will not even take a break for his daughter's birthday celebration and cake and his daughter and (nearly) his wife turns on him. The film does not shy away from his horribleness, but rather presents him as a flawed man desperate to survive in the face of adversity that has put him in jail and cost him his career (officially, but not completely as long as he is willing to remain anonymous). My pet subject--identity--comes into play, but only incidentally. But the related idea of voice is key to the story. These Communists are the Other, distrusted just for meeting together. There's a line repeated a couple times (including in a theatrical newsreel) about the conspiracy of these Communists to undermine our American way of life, or something along those lines. a) I don't have the movie handy at home

b) the exact wording is not the point because the same damn argument just keeps happening in this country. (To be fair, I would never suggest that America is exclusive in this behaviour. But, America's part in it is the one that is immediate and personal to me.) Rex Reed (who I should really cite more often than I do) ends his review of Trumbo with the hope that the film "will broaden the knowledge of young audiences today that remain ignorant about Hollywood's darkest past." The real hope, I would say, is that any audience--let alone a young one--might even go see the film. It's made about $4 million so far, and I think there were about 3 other people in the theater where I saw it today. It opened at 37th in the box office about a month ago. #1 that weekend was Spectre, #2 The Peanuts Movie. The Martian was still doing pretty well, too. (I was actually excited to see this movie but took a month to get around to seeing it, so...) It's not going well.

But, we cannot expect a film that questions the joy we take at Otherizing anyone with differing political views to do well. We prefer out entertainment patriotic, jingoistic. We don't like a film that presents us someone different who remains unapologetically different. (Some of us do, but generally speaking, not so much.) Even Rex Reed, who seems to like the film, calls Trumbo's joining of the Communist Party "naïveté."

When Trumbo eventually won an award from the Writer's Guild in 1970--a moment dramatized at the end of the film--he said, "The blacklist was a time of evil. Caught in a situation that had passed beyond the control of mere individuals, each person reacted as his nature, his needs, his convictions, and his particular circumstances compelled him to." In the film (and possibly in the actual speech, though I cannot find a complete transcript), he adds, "[N]o one on either side who survived it came through untouched by evil... none of us--left, right or center--emerged from that long nightmare without sin." I think of images from the civil rights movement and the violence put against it--the dogs, the hoses, the burning crosses and lynchings, and I can see the point of Trumbo's phrasing. I don't believe in "evil" but if there is such a thing, surely it is that which turns man against man to no real end.

a brief thing about "feminism"

It bugs me when my kids think the term feminism is a negative. Wanting everyone to be equal is all well and good, but equalist just ain't gonna have the same ring. Nor is it descriptive. Nor is it the most appropriate term available.

Take the recent transition from gay marriage to marriage equality, for comparison. The point where the media starts referring to it as the latter instead of the former--

(Let us forget the limitation in the term gay marriage, because calling it (prior to Obergefell v. Hodges) gay trans bi all-inclusive marriage just doesn't roll off the tongue as readily.)

--is when, arguably... officially, equality exists. The problem before you get to that point is that one side of the debate thinks the other side is encroaching on its tradition, trying to tear down what it already has, rather than just attaining the same for itself. The same is true with gender equality, with feminism. Men are on top. Women are not. The patriarchy is held in place by tradition, by practice, by the sheer will of constantly reified heteronormative, paternalistic beliefs.

Equality can be attained two ways--if we simplify things. Tear down men to the level of women or raise women up. So equalist could mean that you want either one of those. Feminism, on the other hand, implies the raising up of women. However frightened some men may be, feminism does not imply the tearing down of men. It just doesn't.

We can call it equality when we've got it. As I told my son earlier today, it would be great if feminism and feminist were just words for a history class. Because we don't need them anymore. But, we just are not there yet.

don't. shoot. him.

In response to the shooter Dylann Roof--a white supremacist who murdered nine black people at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston--being taken alive, a friend of mine posted on Facebook, "Great... now shoot him." Comments that followed included the usual notions about coming up with something better because shooting it too good for him. Because that is what a wounded nation needs--more violence and more death.

If anyone deserves to die, it is the likes of this man. But, that is a very big if. You know what we lose if this man dies, if we torture him to somehow pretend that that cures any ill or repairs any damage done? I mean, aside from a piece of the soul of who we should probably try to be instead of being the fucked up, mostly indifferent people we are. We lose any hope of understanding.

Why would we want to understand this man, you might ask. Or some question close to it. Because the racism at the heart of this man's murderous rage is the same racism that is at the heart of too many scenes of men in authority--white men and, unfortunately, men of color--taking the lives of men of color because it is all too easy to assume the worst and shoot first rather than risk... well, knowing that you are an overreactive, triggerhappy pawn of a system that needs us to struggle constantly against one another rather than ever fight against the system itself or the powers and forces and people at the top that keep this treadmill going.

The recent incidents in McKinney, Texas come to mind. Some deep-seeded expectation that we have that when a police officer tells you to do something, you do it, no questions asked. It's not even a matter of race, so much as it some cult of authority in which we have ceded away far too much of our freedom for an illusion of security. Just this week, outside of Cincinnati, white officers were recorded using pepper spray and one put his arm around a girl's throat in the process of removing a black family from a swimming pool over a boy not wearing the "proper swimming trunks."

And, that seems like a tangent, an insignificant matter when I should be listing off the dead people of color who died because it is okay for the police to use deadly force and darker skin makes for more of a hair trigger. It's easier to suspect people of color of wrongdoing because we've spent centuries now just in this country putting white over every other color. Of course a black boy would seem a little more dangerous because he's an outsider and outsiders can't be understood, can't be reasoned with, must be put down. It would just be sad if we didn't constantly defend such a system and such a nation and such authorities. Instead it's far beyond sad, far beyond tragic; it's disgusting and its despicable and its criminal and we need to stop asking why and start demanding change. Not just people of color. All of us. Stop defending the system just because you happen to be on top of it. Stop assuming that any system works if it results in death after death after death.

And, do not demand more death as a response when you bother to take the right side for a change. We do not need to take the life of a guilty white man to prove some sort of fucked up equality. We need to stop taking the lives of men of color, stop taking the lives of, well, anyone, and take a long, hard look at the world we've made for ourselves, at the people it creates. Dylann Roof is an anomaly, but he is not so far gone from the police officer who throws a teenage girl to the ground because she didn't follow orders to vacate a neighborhood she should have every right to be in, he is not so far from the neighborhood watch coordinator who saw a boy in a hoodie and assumed he was up to no good.

We click like and we share news stories and think that's enough... it's not enough.

But neither is an eye for an eye. More blood just perpetuates the idea that taking a life is ever something worth doing. If your reasons are good enough for murder, it's a nice ol' slippery slope to his reasons being good enough, anyone's reasons being good enough.

Lethal force is not somehow magically good because it is ours. Because we're the good guys. We're not the good guys. Nor are we the bad guys. But we seem to have a knack for doing bad things. And we need to stop.