MOVIES

Oscar night is coming up. Not that I go to the movies that often but they do spread life out, like butter on toast. It melts so you can’t tell where entertainment stops, where life lessons unfold and it gets personal, validating or challenging your own experience. Sometimes you react, “Unbelievable; that’s not how it works.” It didn’t resonate with your world. Then there are the, “Yeah, oh yeah; that’s right on.” They’ve made a movie about your life, you’re just not in it. The way men react to Walter Matthau and Jack Lemon in Grumpy Old Men, their behavior and ideas, if you’re not already there that’s where you’re headed. Likewise for ladies with Kathy Bates and ‘Bee Charmer’ Jessica Tandy in Fried Green Tomatoes. Good movies don’t just happen. When they get it right it’s about you and you may be required to recalibrate your moral compass. Even though they are vicarious experiences, they can shift our personality, even a tiny fraction, with or without permission. 

‘Dances With Wolves’ moved me but not for the obvious; it was a sad exploitation of Indigenous tradition. Very much a civil rights movie, Indians as victims. The U.S. Army and by inference, Americans in general were ruthless, murderous invaders. But they couldn’t let it go at that; they had to insert a sympathetic, heroic white-man-hero who defends them valiantly and escapes not only with his life but with the Indian princess who isn’t really an Indian after all; talk about white privilege. But the sense of entitlement and brutality did resonate; it has been internalized in out national conscience, so it goes under the radar. My compass moved a little bit. The ‘Back To The Future’ trilogy is a favorite. Humor is good but there are life lessons threaded in the fabric as well. George McFly needs help wooing Lorraine so Marty feeds him the pickup lines. But George fumbles when he is supposed to say, “I am your destiny.” He makes a Freudian slip and says, “I am your density.” At that point, density clearly was his strong suit. I was reminded again what I already believed; you want to make your own mistakes, not someone else's. George gets his act together later with a happy ending and we laughed all the way home. But still, along with many other ‘Faux pas’ templates it left me with, ‘Make your own mistakes.’

Recently I bought the DVD, ‘The Departed.’ I understood when it came out that it was a depressing, murder-mayhem view of people at their worst. That’s why I didn’t pay theatre prices to see it. But the DVD was cheap and 7 or 8 of the best actors in Hollywood were in the cast. If it was too bad I could always fast-forward or pause and read the plot conclusion on Wikipedia. So I hit the play button. It was like crawling through a sewer but the acting was all it was cracked up to be. Jack Nicholson’s character, a mobster boss was indoctrinating Leo DiCaprio, an under cover cop, planted in his organization. After a day of bloody brutality, broken victims and flash backs to murders carried out as casually as leaving a tip on the table, the Nicholson character sits DiCaprio down and tells him, his raspy voice dropped down a couple of measures, “Nobody gives it to you you have to take it.” The plot unwinds with more violence, followed by more violence. I did turn it off and read the ending on Wikipedia. My first suspicion proved true; there were no good guys. But the, “ . . . you have to take it” line stuck. The director set that line up with several minutes of compelling violence. He wanted it to resonate. But it didn’t draw me in deeper; I spun off in another direction. 

I thought about that sense of entitlement, free to do as you please, to the victor go the spoils. It took me to where people of good character and best intentions want an environment with few rules and an unchecked opportunity to prevail. Viewed in one light it sounds like the American Dream but move the light and see where the shadow falls. It sounds like ‘The Departed,’ a virtual pecking order; the strong compete and the vulnerable perish. I have Libertarian friends who would disagree and I wish one of them would explain it for me again, so its dark side doesn’t give me heart burn. In another movie the big dog, Gordon Gekko states what had been the unspeakable, “Greed is good.” Feeling confident and justified in that scheme would be wonderful, sort of like Jesus’ second coming. Proponents would say that the ‘Big Dogs’ will keep each other honest. But we been waiting on Jesus for so long now I don’t believe that either. I saw the Nicholson character as simply an unpretentious, highly motivated Libertarian whose business was extortion and murder. I know the rhetoric. The core necessity is either that, personal gain supersedes fairness, or you redefine fairness; whatever you can get away with. Liberty would be about asserting yourself and poverty would be the booby prize. Equity under the law would be unfair to the privileged and the powerful. Somehow equality has become a sullied principle. I can’t get my head around that. Ultimately we have a collective responsibility for each other’s well being or we do not. I think we do; it’s about family and we’re all related. Jack Nicholson’s convincing performance just strengthened that view but he’s not nominated this year.