On Race, Class and the Hollywood ‘Whiteout’

From the Newsstand Screening Room
February 16, 2011 | 7 books mentioned 19 5 min read

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covercoverIn Sunday’s New York Times, inspired, I suspect, by Black History Month, movie critics A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis had a long piece on the glaring absence of black writers, directors, and actors in this year’s Oscar nominated movies. They refer to this phenomenon as a “whiteout.”  Some might say that Scott answered his own question—why there are no major movies this year by or about black characters (never mind the rest of America’s non-white racial panoply; Scott never mentions them)—with his rather insightful piece of a few weeks back, “Hollywood’s Class Warfare,” which argued that in the wake of the financial crisis, in the midst of mass unemployment, mortgage defaults, and forecloses, many American filmmakers became preoccupied by class, and that some of the best of this year’s movies (The Fighter, Winter’s Bone, The Town) were about working-class and underclass lives, the kinds of lives that the dominant American class mentality—we’re-all-middle-class-here—doesn’t acknowledge or examine all that often.

Yes, I know: there are still a great many statistics that demonstrate that race and poverty’s fault-lines still mirror each other, still have a causal rather than accidental relationship, and thus that class is not the new race: that race is the new race and the old race. But, it’s Hollywood we’re talking about, and we can’t ask them to attend to too many weighty aspects of American life at once.  So, at least for this year in American movies, the answer to the rhetorical question in “Hollywood and the Year of the Whiteout,” “Is class the new race?,” is yes: For Hollywood this year class was the new race.

That doesn’t mean that this year’s “whiteout” isn’t a problem. But neither the problem nor the answer to the problem are quite what the authors here take them to be, though they touch on the real answer fleetingly.

The problems with the argument? First, and most obviously, when there’s a whiteout year in Hollywood, black isn’t the only color that’s missing.  And, second, the solution to the whiteout is not, as is suggested, a new black indie cinema movement—a few new Spike Lee/Lee Daniels-style black moviemakers. Or, at least, that’s not the full answer.

coverMy sense is that the way out of the whiteout requires something more subtle, something unprecedented. The answer isn’t just a new coterie of black directors making movies in the line of Do The Right Thing or Precious. More serious films about black American life in our yearly cinematic output would be great, don’t get me wrong. But there’s something else American cinema needs more now—something we’ve only had accidental and fleeting glimpses of thus far.

What we need are more serious movies with multiracial characters/casts that aren’t SCARE QUOTES MOVIES ABOUT RACE END SCARE QUOTES. We need more movies that simultaneously are and aren’t about race: movies that are dramas and comedies, about love, death, the usual human plots—and also happen to be about race. We don’t need only highly self-conscious, politicized movies about race, but movies that look at race the way Ben Affleck’s The Town look at class: askance—Affleck uses a popular genre, a crime-thriller, to smuggle a story that’s really about class onto the big screen. This is also how Lisa Cholodenko asks us to think about sexual orientation in The Kids Are Alright: The movie’s lesbianism is sort of incidental. The movie is about a marriage undergoing a crisis brought about by a daughter’s departure for college–oh, and the couple happens to be gay.  Cholodenko does not tell us that gay love, marriage, or family exist in a special category of experience unfelt and un-feel-able by heterosexuals: She tells us that the struggles marriage and children involve are a basic human experience, whatever the sexes of those involved.

I’m not saying that we as a nation have arrived at an idyllic, post-racial (or post-sexual orientation, or post-class) age in which we do not need MOVIES ABOUT RACE, but we could also use a less melodramatic, less strident cinema of race in the vein of The Kids Are Alright that’s just about sort of normal human plots inflected by the post-racial-ish reality that has come to define more and more of our lives.  Because in some American communities, in some American homes and workplaces—more and more, I think—a version of the post-racial age has arrived and it’s not because we have a biracial president. We’re married to and related by marriage to and work with and hang out with people of other races and nationalities, and at the end of the day our relationships with these people aren’t really all that different from our relationships with those of our own races. It’s sort of mundane, actually. Bi-racial marriages and friendships are actually pretty much like any other marriages and friendships most of the time.

Are there moments of fracture sometimes—a sense that your partner of another race is experiencing or feeling something you can’t? Yes, certainly. And are there strange moments in bi-racial relationships in which you suddenly feel as if your marriage/friendship is some sort of radical political choice—that you’re poster-children for something (usually caused by other people’s delighting in/awkwardness about your biracial-ness)?  Again, yes. And I hope that this new cinema I imagine would capture and explain such moments with the subtlety they deserve. But most of the time in interracial relationships, it’s all the same laundry-on-the-floor, bills, celebrations, in-laws, dishes, fights, compromises that the same-race couple next door are dealing with.  And I hope my new cinema would capture this too—how normal and humdrum inter-racial relationships can be.

This American experience has yet to make its way onto the screen, but we catch glimpses of it: A.O. Scott sort of touches on this idea of naturalizing race when he talks about 2009’s The Hurt Locker and its focus on “the volatile friendship between two soldiers, a hot-headed white bomb-disposal specialist played by Jeremy Renner and his cautious black sergeant played by Anthony Mackie.  Race in that movie was not a theme or a problem to be solved, but rather a subtle, complex fact of life.” This is what I’m talking about.  In an ever-increasing number of American lives it’s probably this kind of representation—race as “subtle, complex fact of life”—that feels most resonant. This understated mode (friends and coworkers first; incidentally, black and white) is a norm for more and more Americans and it should become a stronger presence in our movies.  Race, for some of us now, isn’t a be-all-and-end-all melodramatically determinative fact of life, but a fact nonetheless—one that inflects our lives in increasingly subtle, nuanced ways—ways that have only just begun to be reflected in our movies.

What we need now are not white movies with Benetton tokenism (think Harry Potter: Cho Chang and the Patel twins), nor movies that ghettoize racial experience. What we need now, if our movies are to reflect American life as it is lived by more and more of us, is not white or black, but multiracial, biracial—movies whose plots and characters show how people of all races, not just white and black, combine and intersect in more mundane ways (marriage, friendship, work) and how these intersections have their particular, subtle racially-inflected nuances but are also just that—friendships, work, marriages.

is a staff writer for The Millions living in Virginia. She is a winner of the Virginia Quarterly's Young Reviewers Contest and has a doctorate from Stanford. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Times, In Character, VQR, Arts & Letters Daily, and The Daily Dish.

Annals of Japery Screening Room

Happily Ever After: Husband and Wife discuss “The Bachelor”

Annals of Japery Screening Room
March 1, 2010 | 7 books mentioned 1 10 min read
We at The Millions appreciate good criticism for its own sake, whether it be about The Paris Review or soccer commentators, Orhan Pamuk or Beyonce Knowles.  In that spirit, we present this dialogue--inspired in part by Slate's TV Club--about one of this season's most fascinating television shows, The Bachelor: On the Wings of Love. Edan Lepucki and Patrick Brown are not only regular contributors to The Millions, they are also married.  They watch the show together, and they started this dialogue via email a few weeks ago.  Neither can wait for tonight's season finale. Edan: We started watching The Bachelor on Hulu two episodes after it began (it took us a single night to catch up). Although you originally expressed displeasure at the thought of watching the season, you quickly became invested in Bachelor Jake and the throngs of ladies (most of them blonde--oh how my people embarrass themselves again and again!) who adore him.  It's strange, because, although the show is fairly boring, with its drawn-out rose ceremonies and its empty-platitude-strewn confessionals, as soon as an episode ends, I begin salivating for the next.  I must be drawn to the show because it's so inane and heinous.  I suppose I enjoy being incensed by 23-year-old women who feel their lives are empty and meaningless because they haven't found "Prince Charming."   Do you think there are people out there who watch this show without judgment?  Is there an audience for whom The Bachelor is neither a farce nor a tragedy? I know a married couple who watched the show religiously, and even place bets on who would be the last woman standing.  Is The Bachelor a narrative for smug married people (ahem)?  Or is it more for smug single people, who would rather remain unattached than degrade themselves on national television?  What, do you think, is the appeal of this show? Patrick:  It's true, I wasn't too excited by the prospect of watching The Bachelor again after a couple years off.  The last one I remember before "On the Wings of Love" was "An Officer and A Gentlemen."  The bachelor that year was a captain or a lieutenant or something in the Navy.  He was the most boring person I've ever encountered, either in real life or through my television.  All he did was work out.  That was it.  He was like The Situation on a battleship.  I think he married a personal trainer, too, if I remember correctly.  Anyway, that guy turned me away from the show for a while. But surprisingly, I'm enjoying this season.  Whether it's the bachelor himself -- Jake (Pilot Jake, as I call him) -- or the women, this season is genuinely entertaining.  To answer your question, there's no doubt that there are plenty of people who enjoy the show "unironically" or however you want to put it.  And I think, on some level, I enjoy it this way.  I love the drama of it.  I like to see people put it on the line.  Whether you believe these people can really feel something in just a few weeks or not, I do think they feel a profound disappointment when they're dumped.  I've seen women crying so hard they were hyperventilating.  That's good TV. I think the reason the show resonates with so many people is several fold.  Mainly, I think people crave repetition, and The Bachelor is highly repetitive, which Adorno claims reassures us against death.  This is why good pop songs have a tried and true structure (also, incidentally, why a song like "Pink Moon" is unsettling, because it turns itself upside down and doesn't follow that typical structure).  Everything about The Bachelor -- the sensationally stagey rose ceremonies (My favorite part is when the guy stares at the pictures of the remaining girls, thinking longingly about which ones will make it to the next round), the way they all keep saying the same key phrases ("I felt a connection," "I'm not sure she's here for the right reasons," etc.), the way even the characters know the sequence of the show ("Next week is hometowns, and I don't take that lightly") -- it's all there to reassure us that we're still alive and everything is moving along as it should.  I think this is especially powerful in that it deals with marriage, so not only is it "We won't die," but rather "We won't die alone."  That's powerful, whether you enjoy it ironically or sincerely or whatever. I also think that people love to judge one another's relationships.  How many conversations have you had in your life that were about how wrong two people were for each other?  A lot, right?  Well, this is that on a national scale.  Of course, whenever you're judging a relationship, I think you're always insinuating that one part of the couple is wrong or poorly matched to the other.  There's an implicit (or, sometimes direct) suggestion that one of the people is inferior.  I think we see that with Vienna, who comes off as fake, desperate, cloying, etc.  My question to you is why does she illicit those responses from us?  Is she not successfully playing the role we've assigned her?  What is it about Vienna (and others of her ilk who have come before) that makes everyone hate her?  If Jake really thinks she's the bee's knees, who are we to judge? Edan: Well said, Husband!  Regarding this idea of repetition, one of the things that bothers me most about the show, and which I also depend on and anticipate each time a new episode begins, is the use of overly familiar and vague language.  As you've pointed out, the contestants from season to season use the same key phrases (if another person refers to the process as "the journey" I'm going to throw up), and Jake repeatedly describes the women he likes in the same bland terms.  For instance, in the last episode we watched, where he and three of the women go to St Lucia, he kept saying, in confessional, "She's amazing"--and he was referring to a different woman each time!  The women, too, aren't able to tell us why they actually like Jake, other than to say stuff like, "He's the kind of guy I've always dreamed of," or, the most meaningless of phrases, "He's perfect."  In many ways, the rhetoric of the confessionals is a fiction writing teacher's nightmare: all telling, cliched language, absent of specificity and individualized, perspective-driven emotion. But I wonder, is that the comfort of the show?  And is that the comfort of the marriage narrative?  I wonder if the scenic action on the show--the scenes we see of Vienna and Jake making out on the deck of a pirate ship, for instance--is meant to suggest the spontaneity of a romantic relationship, while the voice-overs and direct addresses to the viewer, emphasize the comfort, the familiarity, of that same relationship.  A fantasy of marriage, in other words, one perfectly counterbalanced by risk and safety. It's funny you should should bring up Vienna, the show's villain.  She's been demonized on the tabloids and the other contestants disliked her. You say she's fake, cloying, and so on--but, you know what?  I love her!  This has been my favorite season of "The Bachelor" because Jake, for all his washboard ab dullness, has made some surprising choices.  Yes, he got rid of your favorite hot girl, Gia (Lord, is that crush getting tiresome), but he kept her for much longer than either of us expected.  And Vienna continues to hang on, and online gossip says she is the ultimate winner.  She's not the prettiest, she's got terrible extensions, and her relationship with her father (she's a self-described "Daddy's Girl" ) is questionable.  Vienna subverts our expectations.  The villain is not meant to win this kind of show!  Nobody is supposed to want a villainous wife!  What do you make of Jake's choice to keep her on the show?  And how do you compare her to sweet and wholesome Tenley, the woman of "values" with the I-was-molested-as-a-child porn star voice? Patrick: Vienna's father uttered one of the truly remarkable phrases in recent TV history, when he said (and I'm paraphrasing here):  "You want a good wife?  She'll be a good wife.  You come home, your house will be clean, your kids will be raised right."  It's perfectly acceptable to want a marriage where only one spouse has to work (you could point out how unlikely this is on a pilot's salary, but that might poke some unwanted holes in the narrative), but coming from her father, it seems wrong, somehow.  Like that's all she has to offer.  Vienna seems to represent a certain kind of person in America.  I think the fact that you (and some of the other women on the show) see her bad dye job and her unsubtle tan, and what they really see is a clue about class, right?  She just seems lower class than some of the other girls (like Ali, who has a plum first-world job tending the cloud at Facebook).  That seems significant to me, since the show is pretty much an aspirational narrative.  We forget that the origins of The Bachelor aren't that far from the sordid Fox shows like Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?  A previous bachelor was heir to the Firestone tire fortune, and a major part of his narrative was that he had a ton of money and would make some lucky girl into a real life princess.  Another Bachelor was titled nobility somewhere (they filmed that season in a castle, in case the fairy tale element wasn't obvious enough).  I think that's what America sees in Vienna.  They have dyed hair and spray tans.  Many of them want the sort of rigidly defined gender roles that Vienna's dad described.  And if Vienna can win, it means they can be the princess (in a standard middle-class fantasy life in suburban Dallas). Speaking of Ali, when we were watching the episode in which she had to choose between keeping her job and staying on the show, you remarked that it was the typical "Man or career: you can't have both," dilemma that women have been confronted with for years.  In a way, this season's final four encapsulates the show's reactionary sexual politics quite nicely.  Of the final four, Ali had to choose between her job and her love life, Gia was too sexy, maybe, to get a husband, leaving the slightly lower-class woman who the man could dominate economically, and Tenley, the juvenile one, who he could dominate psychologically and physically.  Or maybe I'm just a cynic.  Tenley seems like a bland religious type (there's one in every season, though, like the villain, they don't often make it to the finals).  Jake's connection with her is all about "values," which I think means that they don't think gay people should get married (though that's never explicitly addressed).  She's juvenile, in a creepy sort of way.  My question to you is why does The Bachelor -- a show with a largely female audience -- continue to enforce these sexist stereotypes of what a women can (and in some cases, should) be?  Why can't sexy Gia be a wife (or villainous Vienna)?  Why does Ali have to choose between her man and her career?  And if we can agree that the show does reinforce some retrograde ideas about gender, why do so many women enjoy it?  Is it a self-loathing thing? Edan: You write, "And if Vienna can win, it means they can be the princess (in a standard middle-class fantasy life)." You may have a point, but how do you read the public's vilification of her, then?  Most people (not me!) don't want her to win.  They don't believe she's worthy of Jake, worthy of the life he would provide for her. So if she doesn't deserve to be the princess, do they?  Does her vilification mean we don't believe the classes are as porous as we've been taught?  Or perhaps this season of The Bachelor proves that love (or at least sexual attraction) conquers all, and that Jake--Mr. Values, Mr. Nice Guy, Mr. Stable, Mr. Right--will choose the former Hooters waitress over the classy Christian woman simply because he likes her better. This seems to return the show to its purported roots: a narrative of two people finding one another and discovering an undeniable connection despite a series of obstacles.  So why the outrage? Fans of Ali protest that picking Vienna wouldn't be a wise choice, but that brings me back to the question of marriage, and what it means in our cultural imagination.  How is choosing Vienna unwise?  Cannot one's wife be a bratty 23-year-old? Perhaps that's what Jake wants in the end: a fun girl to take care of.  Maybe "dominate economically" is the official term, I don't know.  When Jake asked Vienna how she imagined marriage, she said she expected it to be like they were kids, just so in love, doing what they pleased, kissing all the time.  This definition of marriage must be devalued in the eyes of the viewers.  I agree that her vision is a little narrow, but, then again, it's not a totally inaccurate depiction of marriage, or ours, at least.  But is there only one definition of marriage?  I marvel at how many woman on the show have mentioned "the fairy tale" narrative--as if that were the only one, and as if, as if!, this were a plausible reality.  Never do these women point out that the fairy tale ends with the wedding. It's funny that you think Jake kicked Gia to the curb because she's too sexy. That's definitely your biased interpretation; I'm not so sure Gia is as sexy as you keep exclaiming.  I actually think she was kicked off because she's from New York City, and still lives there. Jake was intimidated, perhaps turned off by, her cosmopolitan lifestyle. In the narrative in Jake's mind, one can date a New Yorker, can revel in the Carrie Bradshaw fantasy of it, but that woman isn't wife material.  On the show, his explicit reason for dumping her was that she "didn't open up" as much as he needed her to. Every season, we see this conflict; the game requires the women profess their love, but strategically: not too early, and not too late.  Perhaps this is one of the appeals of the show: it mirrors the dating life, if that mirror were in a fun house.  Maybe the fantasy of The Bachelor isn't that woman will revert to these outdated  gender roles that you speak of, but that there are single men out there who want to get married and have children.  They're ready for the commitment, and, on top of that, they require a woman to speak her heart.  Usually, it's women who are asking this of men, not the other way around.  Perhaps, here, this reversal of roles, is what gets the female viewership off.  Maybe they're turned on by the anti-Old School story that The Bachelor perpetuates. Patrick: You're probably correct that I'm inventing the "Gia's too sexy" narrative, in part because the women on the show aren't sexualized (at least not in the context of hypersexualized contemporary American culture).  On this show, it's the man who is sexualized.  It's Jake who soaps his abs for the camera.  Even the scenes where the women are in bikinis are pretty tame.  It's clearly a show for women, and I'm not supposed to be thinking about who is the sexiest, only who is the best mate, the most fitting for Jake.  It's another reason Jake is a bit of a rogue, as far as Bachelors go -- he's probably going to choose Vienna, and a part of the equation has to be her sexuality.  As for the New York angle, there's certainly some validity to that, though Jake was pretty comfortable with Ali, who lived in San Francisco.  I think it was also that Gia was ethnically a New Yorker -- she had an accent, etc. -- while Ali was suitably blond and "All American." In the end, I think the show succeeds because it holds different appeal for different people.  For those in a committed relationship, they can mock the people proclaiming to have fallen in love after just a few hours together.  Those who are still looking for a partner can feel a bit of envy, and more than a touch of escapism.  My issues with the show remain its cliched portrayal of love as the result of some sort of checklist.  Does your partner:  look good, enjoy the outdoors, drive a truck, proclaim to want kids, have a Golden Retriever and believe in traditional marriage?  Then it must be love!  Maybe this season has been so enjoyable because it has, to some small degree, subverted this idea. Nobody can put their finger on why Jake likes Vienna precisely because she doesn't conform to that checklist.  (Does your partner have a bad dye job, a strange ex-marriage and a 401K from her days as a Hooters waitress?  Then you're in love!)  This version of the show, early on at least, had a bit of spontaneity to it, something earlier seasons have lacked. Of course, if Jake picks Tenley tonight, then everything I just said is moot. He'll have chosen the same kind of goodie-goodie they always pick.  Most people, I think, would be happy with that, but I think I'm coming around to your opinion, that choosing Vienna is the more interesting way to go.  I wouldn't want to be married to her, but who can say what's in Pilot Jake's heart? Edan: Amen to that.  Can't wait to see what happens tonight. When I was a kid, my vision of marriage was eating dinner in front of the television with a handsome and witty man who'd read The Dialectic of Enlightenment.  Dreams do come true.
Annals of Japery Screening Room
| 7 books mentioned 1 10 min read
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The Long, Lonely Walk: Hallways in Horror Films

Lists Screening Room
August 4, 2015 | 7 books mentioned 3 7 min read
“The hallway is my sleep,” writes poet Rafael Campo. Hallways are simultaneously prosaic and oneiric. Hallways are all about perspective. Jean-Paul Sartre thought modern existence contained a “labyrinth of hallways, doors, and stairways that lead nowhere.” We believe -- structurally, metaphorically -- that all hallways end. Hallways were not meant for standing, but we adorn them with images. Li-Young Lee’s lines “The photographs whispered to each other / from their frames in the hallway” capture the sense of this place. I grew up in a ranch house defined by its long central hallway. My bedroom and the living room were on opposite ends of the hall. The New Jersey of my youth was a land of bottleneck traffic, creatively corrupt politicians, and suburbs lined with video rental stores. Whippany, my hometown, was graced with a Movie Van that delivered VHS tapes to doorsteps. The van was a suburban cinephile’s dream, but it didn’t have every horror movie I wanted. After I exhausted the late-night timer recordings on my VCR, I began borrowing obscure titles from older friends. I covered my eyes during The Beyond, a particularly gruesome Italian film set in Louisiana. When the movie ended and I turned off the television, I froze. I realized what scared me the most: that long walk down the silent hallway back to my bedroom. My brothers had moved out. My sister was home from college, but was on the phone in her room. My parents had gone to sleep after trying to convince me that I should do the same. I did what any kid with an overactive imagination would: I sprinted down the hallway, shut my door, and dove into bed. When I built up enough nerve to actually finish all of the horror movies I rented or borrowed, it became obvious that hallway scenes are an essential element of American and international horror films. Hallways are tight, narrow, walled, made for transit -- and yet sometimes our most sensitive moments are out in the hall, doors closed behind us. Hallways are places for tense encounters, confusion, and fear. Here are eight essential hallways from horror films. 1. The Shining (1980) Young Danny Torrence spends much of the film riding his Big Wheel through the hallways of the Overlook Hotel. His hypnotic travels reinforce the idea of the hotel as maze and labyrinth. A ball rolls along the carpet to Danny, and he looks up, allowing Stanley Kubrick to use the hallway structure as readymade perspective. During the first quarter of the film, viewers are introduced to the layout and grounds of the Overlook as if they were to be also hired as caretakers. Kubrick’s methodical method establishes expectations and curiosities. In our homes, hallways are spaces shared with those we know well; in hotels, hallways are tight byways, places where we share space with strangers. Jack is a stranger to his wife and son, and possibly to himself -- his Vermont teaching backstory is blurry in Kubrick’s treatment. He appears to have been birthed at this hotel, naughty from the start (he is casually reading an issue of Playgirl while waiting to meet with the hotel’s manager). Early in the film, he spends much time in the hotel lobby -- typing gibberish for hours, throwing a tennis ball at the wall, starring into a model of the hedge maze -- but as the film progresses, Jack is more confined to tight spaces: the Gold Room bathroom, the storeroom, and the hotel’s many hallways. Dick Hallorann’s long, slow walk seems to get longer and slower with each viewing of the film. The Shining continues past its final reel: a hallway without end. 2. Black Christmas (1974) The film’s anonymous killer hides in the attic of a sorority house, so he must descend through the upstairs hallway. Near the end of the film, Jess Bradford is alone in the big house, worried as much about the prank-calling killer as she is about her overbearing boyfriend -- who is enraged about her decision to get an abortion. Director Bob Clark, who would revisit this holiday in a lighter fashion within A Christmas Story, plays with hallways and tunnels throughout the film. The police attempt to trace the obscene calls made to the sorority, and the narrative cuts to a technician at the phone company trying to find the origin as he moves through hallways of sound. 3. The House of the Devil (2009) Viewers of horror films from the '80s remember the convoluted music interludes that preface the real horror. Think Silent Night, Deadly Night for the right amount of camp. Ti West’s film is a litany of horror homages, but his two-minute dance interlude is quite effective. College student Samantha Hughes spends the night house-sitting for strange owners. An ill, elderly family member rests upstairs, behind a closed door. Bored, Samantha pops a cassette of The Fixx into her Walkman, puts on her headphones, and rocks her way around the house. The song stops when she knocks over a vase in the upstairs hallway. In a later scene that nods to Rosemary’s Baby, Samantha walks down the hallway, knife in hand. She is not prepared for what happens next. 4. The Exorcist (1974) Regan MacNeil is sick, and her mother is desperate. She soon enlists the Catholic Church via nearby Georgetown University, where some Jesuits still dabble in that old-time ritual of exorcism. Father Damien Karras, perhaps the most haunted priest to ever appear on film, battles the demon that inhabits Regan. Beaten by the guilt of not caring for his ill mother, Karras limps his way through early attempts to banish the demon. William Friedkin holds Karras’s pause for a heavy moment. He stands between the domestic world and the supernatural world; are not bedrooms our most mystical spaces -- where we love and sleep? 5. Halloween (1978) I have always found John Carpenter’s film to be so perfectly suburban -- violence and mayhem in one house, silence and peace next door. Exhausted Laurie Strode has stabbed somnambulant killer Michael Myers in the neck. She tells the children she’s been babysitting to get help, and then do -- they run out the front door, their screams piercing the suburban silence. Moments later, as Laurie rests in the hallway’s doorframe, Myers rises. A blank-faced Lazarus, Myers is the perfect villain for horror in the home. 6. Rosemary’s Baby (1968) In the climactic scene, the film’s title character finds that a hidden door in her closet leads to a hallway. Rosemary enters, and immediately faces a painting of a burning church. Rosemary's subsequent walk is funereal: her body has been drugged, her heart has been wounded, and her child has been taken. As in Halloween, the threshold between hallway and room becomes a place of union, but the effect is somehow opposite. The satanists in the room first appear banal, urban, engaged in a cocktail chatter, while the hallway Rosemary exited was the infernal place. Parley Ann Boswell sees Roman Polanski's work in this film as influential for Kubrick in The Shining: the long hallway “provides a sort of birth canal.” Rosemary is, at the least, reborn to a clearer sense of sight when she exits the hallway. 7. Suspiria (1977) Dario Argento’s film mixes pulsating images, almost impossible colors, and an overwhelming score by Goblin to create a psychotropic Black Mass. American dancer Suzy Bannion attends a ballet academy in Freiburg. After leaving practice, Suzy walks down a hallway. She encounters a strange woman and a child who put a spell on her. Hallways are transformative throughout the film. A red glow paints Suzy as she hopes to discover the evil secret within the school’s labyrinthine corridors. 8. A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) The only place that might contain more charged memories than our childhood home is our high school. Nancy Thompson wakes in class to see the animated corpse of her friend Tina sitting next to her. A student in the front of the room drones lines from Hamlet, the class rapt. Nancy follows Tina’s blood trail to the hallway. It is best to end with a film about nightmares, because that is how we sometimes encounter hallways. We wake from a bad dream and rub our eyes. Unable to sleep, we walk down the hall, and though we know there is nothing to be afraid of, our fingers trail along the wall, hope for comfort in the dark.
Lists Screening Room
| 7 books mentioned 3 7 min read
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Birdie’s the Word: Mad Men’s Pop Culture References

Screening Room
September 11, 2009 | 7 books mentioned 3 4 min read
My mom kept an old VHS copy of Bye Bye Birdie, recorded from a television broadcast, complete with commercial interruptions.  I watched it at least once a month in junior high, so the opening moments of the second episode of the third season of Mad Men was a sense-memory jolt back to my childhood.  The advertising executives and writers of Sterling Cooper sit around a long table in the projection room, watching the opening number of the Bye Bye Birdie film: Ann-Margret (born Ann-Margret Olsson) sings the title song, running towards and away from a camera that pushes in and pulls back on her, like the girl and camera are engaged in a coquettish, flirtatious dance. The clip from Bye Bye Birdie, and the subsequent discussion of Ann-Margret’s allure, provide a framework for the episode of Mad Men.  Pepsi wants Sterling Cooper to design a Birdie rip-off to advertise their new diet cola product.  However, that advertising-related story is simply the element that pulls Bye Bye Birdie into the character’s lives.  What the characters do as a result of watching provides their emotional story arcs for the episode. Most television shows incorporate some popular books, movies, music, and even other television shows into their story lines.  But most of the time, those references are shallow.  In The O.C., loveable geek Seth Cohen would rattle off the names of whatever indie band was the new cool thing; in an episode of Six Feet Under, an ill-fated day-player read the then-hot book Fast Food Nation as a golf ball struck her in the head.  She died and the book, a glorified prop, fell out of her hands. A popular trend of this type is for geeky characters to use the word “Frak,” a minced oath developed in a burst of genius by Glen Larson, the creator of the original version of the geek-popular sci-fi series Battlestar Gallatica.  Kudos to the other writers, who realized they could use it as an FCC-approved profanity too, so long as it was coming out of the mouths of geeky characters.  (And doesn’t Seth Cohen just wish he were around to get a piece of that action!) One reason these references are used is to tie a television show’s characters or world to our world, the “real world,” and to trick us into believing they live in it.  Another reason is to trick us into thinking a character is cool, because they consume “cool” media.  Pop culture references are an easy way to write quick characterization.  A guy walks into the room and mentions the new issue of Green Lantern, you know what kind of guy he’s going to be. These references are sometimes cloddish or clumsy, and work against the writers by calling attention to themselves.  However, I love it when television shows reference other television shows.  I enjoy the mixing of media, watching a world where the geeks say “frak” for fun, right after watching a world where “fuck” would be the strange-sounding replacement profanity. Mad Men does something different, though, something better.  The show's writers use media references not just in passing, not just to create basic plot lines, but to develop emotional arcs for the characters.  The characters in Mad Men react emotionally to the media they consume, just like we do in real life. After seeing Bye Bye Birdie with a gang of salivating boys (and one closeted homosexual pretending to salivate), the only female copywriter at Sterling Cooper, Peggy Olson (same surname as Ann-Margret) goes on a related emotional journey, trying to find herself in the world of alluring women. Peggy Olson tries, and both fails and succeeds, to be sexy. Peggy, dancing in front of her mirror Ann-Margret style and failing to entice, breaks your heart.  Later, Peggy picks up a college kid at a bar using a joke stolen from the always sexy office manager, Joan. The kid is lame, a messy eater, and assumes she’s a secretary – but we know why Peggy goes home with him.  Though part of us is silently begging her not to bag the loser, we are also elated that she’s able to. And as viewers, we know how Peggy feels.  All the books and movies and music and TV around us help to define our relationships with others and our views of ourselves. The characters of Mad Men seem more like real people because their relationships with their pop culture are deep and emotional ones, because what they watch and read and buy affects the course of their lives and the way they see themselves.  Even if I didn’t care about Bye Bye Birdie, Peggy’s emotional reaction to the film means more to me as a viewer than another character name-checking the year’s coolest new band.
Screening Room
| 7 books mentioned 3 4 min read
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19 comments:

  1. I couldn’t agree more (and would add that the “whiteout” extends into the indie scene–seen any Sundance movies lately? No better than Hollywood on this issue). I have some personal knowledge of this issue. I am an African-American writer who has had had two novels optioned for film (by white producers) for many years, both of which fall into the category you describe. Race is part of the story but not the focus of the story. My hard-working producers hang in there–but why is it so hard? I can’t help but think that part of the problem is what you describe above. I hope that renewed attention to the issue will begin, slowly to shift things. Doesn’t have to be my stuff that gets made (though I’d love that!) but there are many, many stories to be told.

  2. There’s also the stellar model of “The Wire”: it’s a show very much about race and poverty and power; but it utterly complicates these things, i.e. the characters of the darker hue play roles all over the power map, as do the white characters. At the same time it never bows to a sloppy notion that race “doesn’t matter anymore.”

  3. Dear Martha,

    A while back, I met a filmmaker on a flight to New Orleans who was working on a movie featuring a biracial relationship (white woman; Asian man) but not explicitly and heavily about biracial relationships. I’ve been on the lookout for it since, but no luck. Which is to say that you’re not alone in having Hollywood and Indieland neglect your work about/not about race. I just don’t think they know how to sell it and don’t realize that there’s an appetite for it.

    And Sonya’s right that The Wire is a prime example of a successful and highly lauded TV series that’s story first, character first, but is also attending to the nuances of multiracial relationships/communities. There was a bit of this in Deadwood too with the character of Mr. Woo and his relationship with Al Swerengen. And the all-white Friday Night Lights has also, in the past season, become a multiracial show. So there are little inklings of progress–no major feature films along this line yet, but I think they’re coming. Take heart! And thanks for reading, Emily

  4. Before comments, some examples:
    1. Devil in a Blue Dress–Denzel Washington gets caught up in late 40s racial scandal and LA politics but who is he? A WW2 vet, come to California in the Great Migration from the south, owns his own modest home in a black neighborhood of other modest well-maintained homes, which he will do anything to keep (hence, he gets into big noirish trouble when he loses his job). Race is integral to the backstory and it’s a thriller but it’s so much more than a thriller. A man newly middle-class wants to keep his home–an amazing achievement for a black man in this era. Who of whatever race cannot relate to this?
    2. Before The Wire which I agree is the best best best , there was NYPD Blue (first 4 seasons are on DVD and seasons 2 and 3 are to die for)–Sipowicz, white, racist, alcoholic cop with a conscience that drives him crazy and ultimately for his own salvation he gets a lot of help from those around him including his patience-running-thin black lieutenant boss, and a half-hispanic partner. The help comes unwelcomed most of the time.
    3. I suppose Eastwood’s Gran Torino has to be mentioned altho I didn’t like it.
    4. Mother and Child with Benning, Smits and Samuel Jackson.
    5. Immigrant stories can bridge some gaps–The Visitor, Goodbye Solo, Sorry, Haters with an extraordinary performance by Robin Wright Penn (be prepared for a surprising harrowing ending).
    6. Movies I never want to see: movies about the hood aimed at 20 year olds; feel-good inspirational with a mix of characters. Double yuck.
    7. I love the movies of Rodrigo Garcia. He gets it right. I want complex, I want subtle, I want less-is-more. Hollywood mostly: if more works, then give ’em more, and more or top of more.
    8. Fatih Akin is a director who makes German films about Germans and Turks. Fassbinder RIP made movies in the 70s about racism in Germany. There are a whole slew of North African-French directors who open up the wounds and expose the real life of multi-racial characters straddling worlds–race and class. There are many Israeli and Arab-Palestinian movies that expose what needs to be exposed.
    (Now I will look through my movie list and see a lot which I wish I had included, but this is long enough.)

  5. To the extent that there are fewer prominent black characters, this isn’t something that’s happening in a vacuum. There’s been an ugly change in the economics of film. Multiplex theaters are popping up like mushrooms after a rainstorm, and the vagaries of distribution deals encourage expansive marketing campaigns that drive audiences into movies on their opening weekends. Movie attendance is so front-loaded that the second weekend gross is often only half of the opening weekend. DVD releases now follow theatrical release by as little as four months.

    Huge opening-weekend grosses on 4000 screens are driven by enormous marketing campaigns. It’s inefficient to run enormous marketing campaigns for movies that aren’t enormous, so there are fewer non-enormous movies. These enormous movies with their enormous budgets are the tent-pole products that prop up the earnings of major corporate conglomerates, so they’re engineered to be very broad, and to appeal to the tastes of the largest portion of movie viewers. This audience is primarily white and largely under 25 years of age.

    A few very powerful auteurs, like James Cameron and Christopher Nolan, can make art in this space. But before “Avatar” and “Inception” were box office successes, they were viewed as unreasonable risks and potential follies by executives who could have played safer by investing in franchises and sequels. The Hollywood norm tends to look more like the output of Michael Bay. There are roles for non-white actors in these movies, but not the kinds of roles that get people nominated for awards.

    In the last couple of years, this new calculus caused the studios to shutter the specialty divisions that blossomed in the earlier part of the decade. With a few exceptions, studios are avoiding smaller and medium-sized comedies and dramas. When Scott and Dargis bring up “The Hurt Locker,” they seem to forget how that film struggled to find distribution and did not get a wide release until after it started getting awards nominations. If there are fewer good roles for black actors, it’s probably a symptom of the fact that there are fewer good movies being made.

  6. I couldn’t agree more: Hip-hop has done little more than turn black men and women under the age of 30 into little more than cliches. The lack of employment opportunities for Hispanics as made Hollywood see them only as part-time workers and immigrants. Movies and TV, more than any other media, can change this: there ARE educated, responsible, gainfully employed non-white citizens out there. If the movies don’t want to recognize this, then non-white citizens will get a raw deal.

  7. I take your point, Daniel, about this being part of larger forces at work in Hollywood and Independent film-making. And I remember reading an excellent piece–think it was in the LA Times–about The Hurt Locker’s slow, uncertain journey toward major distribution–that it was picked up after getting knock-out reviews, Oscar buzz, steady audience numbers in the few theaters that had it initially. So I’d agree that it was a one-off example. Can only hope it’s done a little trail blazing. Though we’re still a long way away from the 90’s indie/Miramax era, when it seemed like anyone could make a movie and everyone was and that those movies quite often made their way to decent distribution (High Art, The Last Days of Disco, The Brothers McMullin, Chasing Amy, Clerks, Swingers, Kids). Of course, all these titles are very white movies. But if another golden age of independent filmmaking were to come about in this decade–and how I hope one does–I think it would be different.

    But you’re right. For right now we’re stuck with a movie making and distribution system that’s profit-driven and very cautious and that this is perhaps the main barrier for the kind of films I imagine.

    And Thomas–thank you for writing. I absolutely agree that the more our culture’s books, movies, media show us non-stereotypical images of ourselves, the weaker those stereotypes become. I had a professor once who said that the tv show 24 had helped make a real black president possible by depicting a fictional one. I don’t know if there’s a way to quantify that kind of effect, but it’s definitely a provocative and inspiring idea.

    And I agree with you absolutely that very few directors can do anything approaching art

  8. Emily,

    The issue you describe is a glaring problem, not only in Hollywood, but in other environments as well. The post-racial age ideal you described does happen, but all too often non-whites are hired, befriended, etc. as if to make some kind of point. “Look, we hired/invited this black/asian/latino person! We’re a company/family/city that values multi-ethnicity! Look at us! Look at us!”.

    Does anyone have any suggestions on how we can make diversity less of an “issue” and more of an accepted reality? It’s 2011, folks. Surely we can come up with something…

  9. What we need now are not white movies with Benetton tokenism (think Harry Potter: Cho Chang and the Patel twins), nor movies that ghettoize racial experience. What we need now, if our movies are to reflect American life as it is lived by more and more of us, is not white or black, but multiracial, biracial—movies whose plots and characters show how people of all races, not just white and black, combine and intersect in more mundane ways (marriage, friendship, work) and how these intersections have their particular, subtle racially-inflected nuances but are also just that—friendships, work, marriages.

    This is exactly how I feel. I have no interest in either Benetton tokenism or ghettoized racial experiences, and that is the huge bulk of films (and books, and television shows) that feature people of color. As a woman of color, this is especially disheartening for me, because this means I have a hard time enjoying most things marketed as “black” works of art or “Asian” works of art or “Hispanic” works of art. Most of them end up being either tokenism or ghettoizing or “privilege porn,” i.e. lurid depictions of how “horrible” life is for the (usually black) people in said film/book/TV show.

    I agree with Sonya re: The Wire. That was one of the finest TV series ever made. It was consistently subtle and complex. It should have had more seasons!

  10. Quick note on a side point: Harry Potter is a British film, I have no idea why you are criticising it for not representing American life.

  11. Another quick side note re. Harry Potter and racial diversity: the books are full of non-white characters who really couldn’t be left out of the movies: e.g. Cho Chang, the Patel twins, Dean Thomas, Angelina Johnson, etc.

  12. Also, it seems odd to take the Harry Potter movies to task, as it is based on a book. It’s like complaining there weren’t enough Asians in Beowulf, or enough Latinos in Gunga Din.

  13. Hey Harry Potter fans–Yes, HP was written by a Brit and all of the film’s actors are British but it was made by a Hollywood studio (Warner Brothers).

    Thanks for reading, Emily

  14. Emily,
    Maybe one reason for the glaring absence of black directors, writers and actors at this year’s Oscars is because the Academy, in its rush to embrace the so-called “underclass,” overlooked a gem called “Night Catches Us.” It was written and directed by a talented black woman (Tanya Hamilton), stars two mesmerizing black actors (Anthony Mackie from “The Hurt Locker” and Kerry Washington), and deals with the racially charged hangover from the Black Panther movement in 1970s Washington, D.C. It may not be the thing that you, and I, are hoping for – namely, plausible dramas and comedies about love and death and family that also happen to be about race – but it is nonetheless and nuanced and unflinching film that deserved a larger audience and more awards attention. Given what we’ve got, I’ll be pulling for “Winter’s Bone” on Oscar night – partly because it’s a great gritty movie, but mainly because it grew out of a novel by the gifted Daniel Woodrell. Thanks for this thoughtful, thought-provoking essay.
    Bill Morris

  15. I didn’t even hear about Night Catches Us, Bill–but will certainly seek it out now that I have.

    And I’m pulling for Winter’s Bone too–am delighted that it didn’t fall under the radar–and surprised since Deborah Granik isn’t, or wasn’t, a member of the directors guild.

    Another thing this year’s critical mass of movies about the underclass and the whiteout have obscured: This year was a pretty good one for female directors with Granik and Lisa Cholodenko’s films both in the running for top prizes. I’m a big fan of Cholodenko, but think her less gritty/more bougie film is less likely to win big–though I think the writing is as good and the performances. Plus, Andrea Arnold with Fish Tank and Floria Sigismondi’s The Runaways.

    And thank you for reading, Emily

  18. The cover of Vanity Fair’s annual Hollywood issue once again reflects the film biz: zero Asian-American, zero Latinos. One (token ?) black actor (Anthony Mackie), one black/white actress (Rashida Jones, daughter of Quincy Jones). White men and white women dominate the very glam 1930 era shot. (Note: To the far right is a Swede (her father is a Spaniard): Noomi Rapace of “Girl with the Dragon Tatooo”, etc. fame.)

    I’m white myself and I went: Ouch!!

    One of my favorite black actresses Angela Bassett: whatever happened to her? Halle Berry (white mother/black father) is talented but gets far too much attention in the media.

  19. Dear Jennifer,

    Just back from inspecting the cover and think I’d agree that Anthony Mackie’s their token non-white. And about that: if you’re putting Mackie in the mix, presumably for Night Catches Us, why would you not put his co-star–the ravishing and uber-talented Kerry Washington–in there too? I mean, if Rashida Jones made the cut with her short career of low comedy and that trustfund babe who used to play a lesbian on the OC–who was in some godawful robot/video game movie this year (Tron?)–why not Kerry Washington?

    But I don’t expect much of Vanity Fair–the shamelessness/thoughtlessness/idiocy quotient is so reliably high! Though they do still manage to out-do themselves, as you’ve noted. Personally, I still haven’t fully recovered from the shamelessness/hookerishness of their World Cup cover with Didier Drogba and Christiano Ronaldo. I guess the disappointment is that they could use their considerable artistic powers for good–and so often they squander them on inanity.

    Thanks for reading, Jennifer.

    Emily

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Screening Room

Digging Beneath the Cliché of Ruin Porn in Detroit

Screening Room
March 31, 2014 | 7 books mentioned 1 7 min read
There are two new documentaries that add to the rising chorus – of filmmakers and journalists, writers and artists, even businessmen and politicians – who are proclaiming that the same old song about Detroit is played-out. It's time for a new tune, these people are saying, one that goes beyond the tired cliché that the Motor City is nothing but miles of abandoned factories, boarded-up houses, and empty prairie. The first of these documentaries, American Revolutionary, opens with a shot of a little white-haired lady pushing her walker up to the massive Packard plant in Detroit, an abandoned auto factory in a state of such rococo decay that it helped spawn a lurid genre of photography known as "ruin porn." "The devastation is so fabulous, so incredible," the woman says, gazing at the rotting factory with a mixture of awe and horror familiar to anyone who has been to Detroit in recent years. "This is a symbol of how great things fail. It's obvious that what used to work doesn't work anymore." The woman's name is Grace Lee Boggs, the documentary's 98-year-old title character, a Detroit-based activist and writer who lived through the city's glory years and its long decline and now, in the twilight of her life, is still busy nurturing and enjoying the undeniable signs of its rebirth. "American Revolutionary" is the work of Grace Lee, a Korean-American filmmaker who first met Boggs while making The Grace Lee Project, her 2005 documentary about women who share her oppressively common name. The Grace Lees of this world, according to Grace Lee the filmmaker, are "thousands of interchangeable drones." If so, Grace Lee the activist is the exception who proves the rule. Born into a middle-class Chinese American family, she first became aware of discrimination against African Americans while living in Chicago. Her urge to unite workers led her to Detroit, where she fell in love with and married a black autoworker from North Carolina named James Boggs. Together they began to agitate to revolutionize American society – pushing for workers' rights, civil rights, and, eventually, women's rights. And so Grace Lee Boggs became that rarest of insiders, an Asian American woman deeply involved in a movement dominated by black men. As the civil rights and Black Power movements gained momentum in the 1960s, she evolved from a hard-core Marxist into a hard-nosed pragmatist. She was initially partial to fiery Malcolm X over mellifluous Martin Luther King Jr., but, like so much of her thinking, this changed with time. One of the most telling shifts in her thought was her revelation about what the civil rights movement was all about. "I realized that black people did not want to become equal to whites," she says. "They wanted to become equal to their idea of themselves." Whether she was writing books, lecturing, forming political parties, or helping young people plant gardens and paint murals, Boggs, to her credit, never abandoned some of the core beliefs she shares with so many black Detroiters. On camera she tells a stunned Bill Moyers that by the 1960s the Detroit Police Department had become "a white occupation army." And what happened in Detroit in July of 1967 – a conflagration that scorched great swaths of the city and left 43 people dead – was not a race riot. It was, Boggs says, "a rebellion." That rebellion helped make Detroit the first black-controlled city in America  In 1974 a former union organizer and state senator named Coleman A. Young was elected the city's first black mayor – or "Mayor Motherfucker," as he liked to be called. He would rule the city with an iron grip and a salty tongue for the next twenty years. Though it didn't ignite white flight – Detroiters had begun moving out to the suburbs in the early 1950s – there's no denying that the summer of 1967 accelerated the city's decline. Coleman Young, depending on your point of view, either greased the city's skids or did everything in his limited power to apply the brakes. Detroit's demise, as Boggs sees it, can't be pinned on any one event or any one man. It was a collective failure to change after the seizure of political power by blacks. Instead of coming together, people split into warring camps: blacks vs. whites, city vs. suburbs, management vs. organized labor. "A rebellion is an outburst of anger," Boggs says, "while a revolution is an evolution toward something greater. Just being angry and resentful does not constitute a revolution." She adds wistfully, "Changing was more trouble than not changing." That may be changing, at long last. People are discovering what Boggs has known for half a century – that there's more to Detroit than crime, ruin porn, racial strife, and economic woe. The city's music scene has always been unkillable, and now alongside it there is a proliferation of start-up businesses, urban gardens and farms, a growing creative class, a booming downtown and a healthy auto industry. Let's not forget abundant cheap real estate. As the city struggles to emerge from bankruptcy, everyone agrees that the good old days are not coming back. As Boggs puts it, "It's time for a new dream." Among the ashes, there are enough sprouts to suggest that the time just might be at hand. If it is, it will be because of groups like the Navin Field Grounds Crew, the subject of a new documentary called Stealing Home by Jason Roche, a professor at the University of Detroit Mercy. The film is an homage to a crew that could come together only in Detroit: people who took it upon themselves to maintain a vast patch of grass at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull near downtown – simply "The Corner," in local parlance – the field where the Detroit Tigers played baseball from the late 19th century until 1999, when they decamped to a shiny new ballyard downtown. The powers that be then went about demolishing the grandstands of the stadium – originally Bennett Park, then renamed Navin Field, Briggs Stadium, and, finally Tiger Stadium – one of the most cherished pieces of the city's soul. The Navin Field Grounds Crew is headed by Tom Derry, a native Detroiter who grew up going to ballgames at The Corner. After the demolition was complete, he cajoled a group of fellow Tigers fans to spend their weekends picking up trash, pulling weeds, raking the infield dirt, and mowing the outfield grass where Al Kaline and Willie Horton used to roam. "Something happens to you when you're here – a tingling," Derry says, trying to explain the allure of a place he regards as "sacred ground," but which the city sees as a nothing more than a parcel that might one day become the site of a big-box store. Despite the city's hostility to their cause, the Grounds Crew has gotten media attention from ESPN The Magazine, the New York Times, even Australian TV. In keeping with the If-you-mow-it-they-will-come mantra popularized by the movie Field of Dreams, tourists now come to The Corner from all over the world to play pickup games, snap pictures, and swap memories. Stealing Home is not flawless. Though I love baseball and have been a Tigers fan since I was in short pants, I have to admit that the sight of middle-aged guys riding sit-down lawnmowers doesn't always make for riveting viewing. And the documentary sometimes has a high quotient of gas, such as one guy likening baseball to Homer's Odyssey, and another, a "mythologist" no less, proclaiming that all humans share "an irresistible longing to connect to their roots." Fortunately, Roche has also woven in archival footage that takes us beyond the bromides and the outfield wall – images of bustling auto plants, civil rights marches, and the bloody summer of 1967. The last word belongs to a member of the Grounds Crew, who sums up the movie's message nicely: "This shows what Detroiters can do when we come together." Indeed it does. The Navin Field Grounds Crew is emblematic of what's happening in a broken city where a lot of people have come to the realization that the old ways are gone forever and the only way to get some things done is to do them yourself. And so Detroiters pamper an old ballfield, they spruce up parks the city can't afford to maintain, they patrol neighborhoods the city can't afford to police, they turn entire neighborhoods into works of art, they plant gardens, start businesses, renovate houses that haven't slid beyond salvation. In a word, they figure out a way to endure. The current DIY ethic was explained to me in 2012, when I was in Detroit on a newspaper assignment and wound up talking to George Royce, a waiter by day and a rock 'n' roll drummer by night, who had recently moved from upstate Michigan into a downtown loft. "There's a bizarre combination of things here in Detroit," Royce told me. "Exquisite grand architecture and other buildings that are broken down. Extreme wealth and extreme poverty right next to each other. The people who live here usually have something going on. They're artistic, they're handy, they're self-starters. People who are finicky don't come to Detroit  You've got to have self-sufficiency." Yes, but why do they come here? "They come," Boggs says, "to be part of this new world." Only a true Pollyanna would try to minimize Detroit's staggering problems. But buying into the dreary old ruin-porn narrative is, in its way, as myopic as rosy optimism. Despite their many differences in approach, subject matter and tone, these two documentaries arrive at the same conclusion, one that may hold the key to the salvation of Detroit and countless other troubled American cities. The conclusion, in Boggs's words, is this: "The changes are not going to come from the top." No, the changes are not going to come from governments or corporations or philanthropists; the changes are going to come from the below, from the street, from individuals and small groups who believe that what they do can make a difference. Even if what they do is as humble as fixing up an abandoned house, or showing kids how to plant a garden, or taking care of a patch of sacred ground. Image via davescaglione/Flickr
Screening Room
| 7 books mentioned 1 7 min read
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From the Newsstand

Sex and the City Creates Fans of Fake Book

From the Newsstand
June 11, 2008 | 7 books mentioned 2
This story brought me back to my bookselling days.A consumer alert for the millions who have seen the Sex and the City movie: There is no such book as Love Letters of Great Men, which Carrie Bradshaw reads while in bed with Mr. Big.The closest text in the real world apparently is Love Letters of Great Men and Women: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present Day, first released in the 1920s and reissued last year by Kessinger Publishing, which specializes in bringing back old works.Rarely a day went by at the bookstore without a strange request: books long out of print or requests for misremembered titles were common. I can imagine beleaguered booksellers across the country taking pains to untangle the confusion wrought by Carrie Bradshaw et al. Meanwhile, Sex and the City fans who have purchased Love Letters of Great Men and Women - the book has achieved an astonishing #123 sales rank at Amazon - are becoming acquainted with the likes of Victor Hugo, Goethe, and Alexander Pope, according to the bits of the book and table of contents available at Google Books. Sometimes it is a strange world we live in.(Via my mom, who made a good point when she directed me to this story: "sounds like an opportunity for a fast writer.")
From the Newsstand
| 7 books mentioned 2