The Long Kiss Goodnight
My mother was an endurance athlete. Not in the gym or on the road….but of life. She did not want to say goodbye to it. She comes by that honestly; in our culture the long-suffering, tenacious, enduring woman is someone to be admired—a figure of virtue, of honor. This attitude was interwoven in her DNA; thick like blood, deep like marrow.
She lived up to this image, and down to it as well. For the same woman who was used to putting others first, often put herself last. She bought a set of fine china when she was in nursing school that to my knowledge, has never been dined upon. She had some beautiful clothes that were seldom (or never) worn. Same with jewelry. She was all about taking care of business, and not much on pomp and ceremony. Frankly, she was hard to buy gifts for. But…she had a lifelong love for action movies—even westerns—anything that had suspense, thrills, speed, gunplay, strategy, and most of all—where the heroes won at the end, and the villains got what was coming to them.
And it was with that thought, that several years ago, I got her some films for Mother’s Day; among them, The Long Kiss Goodnight. It’s an action-packed spy movie featuring Geena Davis, who plays an amnesiac kindergarten teacher with a very interesting past as a top CIA assassin, and Samuel L. Jackson, a disgraced former-cop-become-private-eye who helps her research her past and rediscover herself—much to the shock of her former colleagues, the architects of a false-flag operation designed to create a faux-”terrorist” threat (with real explosives) in order to secure greater funding for their department.
It had everything my mother loved in a movie: politics, intrigue, fast-paced action, killer fight scenes, revenge, redemption, the requisite good guys winning and bad guys dying, and a badass female hero….who wasn’t just a hero, but also Somebody’s Mother.
She watched this movie all the time. More often than The Godfather, another of her favorites. Every time she played it, she lived vicariously through “Charli Baltimore”, the fierce, never-say-die heroine of the film. Charli, who cheated certain death several times throughout the story. Who above all, fought for her little girl. Charli didn’t just save the day; she was the path through which Samuel L. Jackson’s “Mitch” redeemed himself as one of the good guys. Charli was tough, resourceful, and a tough taskmaster; one of the more salient lines in the film comes from her stern lecture to her daughter while teaching her to ice-skate: “Life is pain. Get used to it!!” Charli taught her daughter well, and realized this when she handed her the exact tool Charli needed to make yet another of her great escapes; hidden in her daughter’s arm cast—the cast she wore from the fracture she received ice-skating, from the fall that prompted the lecture.
Poet Maya Angelou once said, “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” My mother didn’t tell many of her stories; omertá was her modus operandi. I think on some level The Long Kiss Goodnight wasn’t just entertainment for her; it presented an authoritative statement on motherhood, and the intensity of a mother’s love. The lengths to which we must go for its defense.
G’night, Ma.
Capitalism: It’s just not that into you
We went to see Capitalism: A Love Story Thursday night. As far as I’m concerned, Michael Moore is a national treasure. This particular film wasn’t his best effort (I especially loved Sicko, even as it enraged me by triggering memories of bill collectors and hoop jumping for services), but I’m glad he’s still using his bully pulpit to represent the rest of us. People who groan about “polemic” and “oversentimentality” and such aren’t getting it. This is straight-up preaching to the choir. Like a rousing speech at the union hall or a picket-line chant, this is all about getting asses off the seats and into gear.
The film opens with bank robbery—a visual play on the theme of who’s committing the real grand theft. And then…three foreclosures. Three families being kicked to the curb. I notice the expression on my daughter’s face changing as she realizes this is a documentary. We’re watching a woman appeal to the carpenter boarding up Anthony King’s home in Detroit: “You’re a working-class person! I’m just sayin’….couldn’t you make a different choice?!”
“Mama? Is this real?”
“Yeah hon, it’s real. This is going on all over the nation. People are losing their jobs and their homes. Everything they’ve worked for.”
By the time we’re watching the Hacker family lose their Peoria farmstead that goes back four generations due to the perfect storm of ballooning mortgage payments and Randy Hacker’s jobsite injury on the railroad (eventually landing him on permanent disability)….
my daughter is really blanching. She notices this is fairly close to home. Her godmother lives not too far from Peoria.
“Is this going to happen to us?”
“I sure the hell hope not, kid.”
Mixing cuts of schlocky educational films on capitalism produced for high school students in the 50s with home movies and other documentary footage, the tagline of the film (“A Love Story”) is brought to light. But this isn’t just any love story. No, it’s a made-for-Lifetime television saga: a tale of epic dysfunction, enabling, excuses, and let’s just go ahead and say it….abuse. “This is Capitalism, a system of taking and giving. Mostly taking.” Moore traces the “courtship” period of his childhood, pointing out the steady benefits of the boom-time of no competition on the world stage (the competition having been bombed into oblivion in WWII), and frankly, no competition for white people in the good jobs (Moore phrases it, “as long as we were willing to put up with a little of this (shots of civil rights activists being beaten by the police and/or having firehoses and dogs turned on them), and a little of that (war footage).” Home movies from Moore’s childhood show his father as the happy, robust patriarch in the swimming pool; Life is Good. Later, Moore takes his father on a walk through the Flint of today—desolate, boarded up houses, factories reduced to rubble, looking much like the remnants of war footage interspersed throughout the film. His father is slender in his old age, stooped posture, eyes searching, trying to conjure the image of the building where he worked while he and his son gaze through a chain-link fence at the empty, weed-strewn lot that once housed a factory that provided thousands with paychecks. Flint isn’t alone; it’s what most of the rust belt looks like.
We meet Peter Zalewski of Condo Vultures, a brokerage company that dives into the wreckage of the Florida housing market, the debris of what once were people’s lives. He frankly describes what his company does and how the name was derived—what vultures do in the ecosphere, swooping in after the carcass that others have conveniently already killed…even down to the properties of vulture vomit. Moore asks him what are the differences between him and actual vultures. “Well,” says Zalewski, “I don’t vomit on myself.” Condo Vultures threw a party for themselves on opening night of the film as a promotional opportunity.
Moore interviews some priests for their opinions on whether capitalism is compatible with Christianity. Seems as if these priests take liberation theology seriously; Father Dick Preston bluntly states, “Capitalism is evil, immoral, and contrary to the teachings of Jesus.” Father Peter Dougherty puts it in stronger terms, “Capitalism is radically evil.” Bishop James Alan Wilkowski showed up to support and offer communion to the workers conducting a sit-down strike at Republic Windows and Doors, talking about growing up the son of a steelworker on Chicago’s southeast side. Moore wickedly overdubbed an old movie on Jesus; when the sick man was brought for a healing, Jesus refused to help, blithely saying something about a “pre-existing condition”.
“Dead Peasant” insurance (the name given in the industry) is the practice of taking out a life insurance policy on a worker with the hope of benefiting from his or her death—like a lottery ticket on the life of an employee. Irma Johnson learned about this practice when her husband died of brain cancer. Her husband’s employer was the beneficiary of the policy that she knew nothing about. A widower who worked for Wal-Mart was devastated to learn his wife—a part-time cake decorator—was insured by the company for their own benefit. While he was left with nothing to pay the hundreds of thousands in medical bills from his wife’s asthma attack, coma, and death, Wal-Mart pocketed the change.
We never did get a concise definition of what a derivative is, although we did find out that if we could accurately explain one, we would probably be offered jobs on Wall Street. (from what I could gather, a derivative sounds like a combination of playing the horses and the shell game, but hey, whadd’a I know?)
Moore didn’t pull punches on either political party—both corrupt Dems and corrupt Rethugs got the ax swung at ‘em. Senator Chris Dodd was especially noted for being a “Friend of Angelo” (Mozilo, head of Countrywide Financial, who offered sweetheart deals for his “friends”). Legal-to-the-letter or no, the concept “appearance of impropriety” didn’t seem to mean much to this crowd.
There were heroics, too. The workers at Republic Windows and Doors won. Sheriff Warren Evans halted the sales of foreclosed homes in light of bank bailouts until relief came through for homeowners, too. Community organizers in Florida re-occupy houses for displaced families living in vehicles or on the street.
There’s a lot to unpack with a subject this large. Capitalism is a Leviathan, and I excuse Moore for the disconnected flow of the film. That leaping from subject to subject, story to story, and method of telling speaks to the difficulty of trying to escape the Titanic, rather than rearrange the deck chairs. I imagine this was a rushed project—an attempt to get the word out, to motivate, strike while the iron is hot. Yeah, he isn’t above cheap stunts like the crime scene tape around Wall Street….
“That’s a crime scene? That’s where they stole the money?”
“You fuckin’ A, kid. That’s the crime scene, baby.“
….but dammit, other media outlets are too afraid, too mealymouthed to take sides. Whatever else may be said about our era (Moore describes it at the start of the film by juxtaposing old movies about ancient Rome with scenes from the present), this is definitely a time for declaring where we stand.
To be real: the commentary that my daughter and I raised back-and-forth with one another throughout the film? That’s how I was raised, too. Old-school labor union democratic socialism, the kind referenced in the film as FDR’s Second Bill of Rights. As is pointed out in the film, other nations enjoy this “second bill of rights” while people in the United States did and do not. While I was raised with an ethic of solidarity, the outside world, the world that feared unionism treading in its space, taught that capitalism is “human nature”. That looking out for “number one” was the way of the world. That people were fundamentally selfish and lazy, and that given any opportunity to cut corners or abandon others, they would. The philosophy of the gabbillotu, the overseer. Another legacy of the U.S. history of slavery; the recognition that oppressed people would resist in any way possible, no matter how limited their means to do so—but this time, extended to reference the entire character of people at large.
Unreferenced in this capitalistic worldview is the call to Craftsmanship. Creativity. The will toward artistry, imagination, virtuosity as a province of the common people. Capitalism holds that these qualities are rare. I disagree. Seeking craftsmanship, taking pride and ownership in one’s work, is as human as language…and as widespread. And that’ll be the subject of the next post—mastery, without masters. Assabenedica.
Sunshine Cleaning
Through Feministe, I found a really cool website featuring the undersung sheroes of the film industry, Women and Hollywood; author Melissa Silverstein pumps the hell out of woman-centric films (preferably, those written and/or directed by women). There’s such a dearth of good films by and for women, that I find myself going to this website often to get tips on what to see. If we want our stories told, we need to support the people doing the telling when we can. As my daughter gets older, she is expanding her taste in film beyond cartoons and films based on comic books. Film is an interest we share together, and she is always interested in films about women….I think it’s a way of exploring how she wants to be when she grows up. That, and she’s had a keen sense of women being shortchanged for years. She used to point out the lack of female characters in storybooks in preschool, drew pictures of animals (and pity the fool that said, “what’s his name?” or “what’s he doing?”), and marched through the Body Worlds exhibit at the St. Louis Science Center last year intrigued with the bodies but disgusted at the lack of female presence (“there are only four females in this whole show! Just four!”). Heh, no…I didn’t drill her into doing that……she did it on her own, practically from the moment she could speak. She’s nine now, and growing up fast. She’s always had a handle on the various ways women and our contributions are diminished, but she’s reaching an age where she’s impressed with the ways in which we challenge and change those misconceptions and misrepresentations. I make a point of showing her art (in all its forms) by women to give her models for creating and imagining……resistance, truth, beauty, evolution, revolution…..models I didn’t have at her age. She will be one of many making this world a better place.
A couple of weeks ago, we went to see the film Sunshine Cleaning written by Megan Holley and directed by Christine Jeffs. It’s the story of Rose Lorkowski (Amy Adams), a struggling single mother whose glory days as the high school cheerleading captain dating the quarterback are long gone; she now spends her hardscrabble days working as a maid and trying to make the ends meet. Besides raising her bright, too-imaginative-for-school eight year old, Oscar (Jason Spevack), she also feels responsible for her younger sister Norah (Emily Blunt), a perpetual slacker who still lives with their eccentric dad, Joe (Alan Arkin).
Rose has been the adult in that family ever since the death of their mother. While her salesman/hustler father never met a get-rich-quick idea he didn’t like (or want to try), Rose kept it all together, spending her life seeking normalcy—a convention that has always eluded her. She practices affirmations in the mirror to jump start her psyche in the morning; verbal coffee for the day ahead.
Her only escape is the evenings at the motel with her married, cop boyfriend, Mac (Steve Zahn)—the quarterback who didn’t pick her for his team. After Rose complains about the need to get her son into a different school, one that won’t label his nonconformity as disability, Mac turns her on to the idea of starting a crime-scene cleanup business. “You wouldn’t believe how much money they make!” So, with no training, no knowledge, no start-up money, no contacts (save for Mac, who lets her know where the latest atrocity occurred and who to speak to about getting the job)—Rose jumps in with both feet, dragging her reluctant younger sister along for the ride (“do you want to live with Dad forever?”).
It’s…..messy. Like life itself. Rose finds her guardian angel in the form of Winston (Clifton Collins, Jr.), the owner/propietor of the cleaning supply house she frequents; Winston lends her his study manuals for the certification exam (that she didn’t know she needed!) and doesn’t report her for the egregious code violations that the upstart “Sunshine Cleaning” has already committed. It’s tough. But so is Rose. And so too are Norah, and even Joe.
As Rose and Norah clean up the final tragedies of the lives of others, they learn how to clean up the unfinished business in their own; burying what is finished in the past, and moving toward the light in their futures. “Sunshine Cleaning” isn’t just about smoothing over the surface, spit-and-polish to cover up after the casualties—it’s about how people themselves are assigned stations as the detritus of this life, and how those who are still living don’t have to accept it. This is a film about—and for—survivors.
In Lubu’s Den, me & the cub give it two thumbs up* for realism, recognizable characters, inventive scriptwriting, and a stellar cast that didn’t sleep in. The shots of Albuquerque gave just the right touch. This was Megan Holley’s first script (entered in a scriptwriting contest!). For more on Sunshine Cleaning:
*head nod to fellow Illinoisan Roger Ebert!
Pacing & Howling
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Changing Moods
