America in 10 Films

Journal sielwolf's Journal: America in 10 Films 8

Journal by sielwolf on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @12:49AM

George started this and it's an interesting concept: explain America as an idea in ten movies. I hate ordered lists because they assume an order where I'm not drawing a line but a demarcation. What ten movies would I give to St. Peter (knowing he'd look through any of our lies)? When America is no more, what would the appropriate coda be? I wanted to gather our best artists and directors and I wanted each to be fitting. I wanted to have our two great genres represented (the Gangster film and the Western) as well as the major eras (the silent is lacking). I mention musicals out of the corner with The Wizard of Oz but I probably could do better there. Anyway, the list:

2001: A Space Odyessy - The film that represented the format's triumph over stock narrative also proves a vehicle for the sort of 20th century American will to be (from the Nietzsche nod of "Thus Spake Zarathustra"). Here the humans, dwarfed by an unfathomable force are still propelled after it, seeking to glimpse its reason though danger finds them along the way. Technology is both the enabler of such voyages and the tempest that must be reckoned with. The idea that our own humanity can be overcome.
Being There - The ultimate political movie. It is easy to see this as a demonization of systems of government, politicians, leaders and the whole stripe of power. But the ending twists this knife delicately at the corner. Who is this Chance character really? His last act seems to point to something larger: maybe that the foundations of authority in our systems are blind faith (misplaced it may be) in our peers. The "Democracy is the worst possible government, except for all others" argument.
A Christmas Story - I think Wall Street is too easy in villifying greed without finding the pathos of what gets us there: the very human, base childish wants. That we can somehow form ourselves through a symbol that we attach meaning to and build ourselves into the world through its exchange (very Baudrillard there). Want defies reason. It defies the rudimentary and academic... and that does not make it whole cloth wrong. Exchange reinforces us with our parents, to our siblings, to our friends ("Double dog dare"), to our enemies (the triumph over Scut Farkas), our teachers and our supposed idols ("Drink. Your. Ovaltine"). Capitalism and consumerism at its finite atomic state.
Citizen Kane - This I pair with Scarface (below) where they follow similar negative arcs. Where Scarface focuses on the possibility and parable of the American Dream (from nothing to something to nothing) Kane takes an almost reverse role: the childish innocence upended into a character better out of a Tall Tale and when he's lost everything, that first bit, once thought flicked away, glimmers for a moment. Charles Foster Kane, the identity of the backdrop, just as America abroad, is a distortion of projection: some things are masked, illusions created, parts big and small appear as you had never seen them before.
Do the Right Thing - People should see this movie three times, each time with a different audience. What many fail to see is how bipolar this movie is: Spike Lee captures both far corners of the conflict at the heart of any American drama (beyond just the topic of race or money). It's too easy to say "I am for/against how the movie ends" as that isn't what this movie says at all. The movie ends with a smiling picture at the top of a burnt cinder and who ever "wins" will inherit nothing. The conflict among the citizens is one between done propositions. We're battling over how to punctuate a finished sentence. In the end it wasn't what was "right" but all the things that could have been done, each alone, that could have prevented the climax. Where we'd rather be right than accurate.
On the Waterfront - If we're talking about the American Dream, let's talk about the failed batch: the loser. By fate or act, everyone in there life will finish a race last. What when your one chance passed you by? There's something in the scrap of a character, how he battles with the woman too smart for an idiot like him, with the stevedore boss, with his own brother, with God. The fists that would have gotten him out only seem to back him further into the corner. Humanity at its best.
Scarface - This is a cheat. I get to mention two here: the Prohibition era RKO original and the cocaine fueled 80's decadent remake. A parable of American temperance and American sin and how deeply they are intertwined.
The Searchers - The ultimate John Ford movie. The seeking through the Big Out There for something we are sure of. When we find it, the reality shakes us. And when the story feels it is time for us to settle home we turn around, look out through the doorway, to that great open space where the sky rises up from the earth.
The Wild Bunch - American foreign policy? American interventionalism? Shock and awe? Both sides of the blade are shown, the savagery of war and the kinship it draws men into. This movie ended the decency standards in Hollywood, it's gore was an anti-violence statement that was beloved often for just the pleasure of the violence. Where the curtain falls on the Western.
Wizard of Oz - A wholly American folk tale: from the dustbowl of the Great Depression to an urban utopia of wonderful things that is tinted dark not just by a pure evil but the falliability of man. Childhood is made of such things; we step through to greater responsibility and push back against the darkness. The legend of this is populated with our own personal pantheon. The exodus from the 30's through the War to the 50's might not have been better predicted.

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