Heading Home: The Tale of Team Israel

This spirited, entertaining feel-good documentary follows the success of an Israeli baseball team — made up of American Jewish players — in an international tournament. Not so much David vs Goliath as Rocky One: survival proves as significant as victory.

The film’s primary theme is Identity. The Americans come from the whole spectrum of Jewishness, from Devoutly Practicing down to Married to One. Several qualify by their parents or grandparents. As one player observes, they qualify as Israeli players by the same terms Hitler qualified even non-practicing Jews to slaughter. 

  The players’ varied experience reveals a similar spectrum of antisemitism. In contrast, the media reports on the team’s unexpected success shows the American society’s embrace of the team, with a sense of adopted community and humour. 

Several players express the profundity of their emotional experience in Israel, whether in the spiritual aura of the Wailing Wall or in their confidence that Israel is the refuge to which Jews from all over the troubled globe can repair, if necessary. The title points to the double meaning, the runner hitting home to score and the diaspora Jew finding security in the homeland. 

      Because Israel is the Jewish state “Team Israel” legitimately comprises Americans, not  Israeli citizens. All Jews qualify for Israeli citizenship. A journalist raises the issue. The tournament’s Heritage regulation allows that; Spain too is made up of Spanish speakers not citizens. 

The Americans hope their example will generate Israeli baseball and a national team that won’t need Americans. A baseball is planted in symbolic parody of the trees that have been historically planted to turn the desert into a garden.  

  In that hope — and the planning of a baseball stadium named after a young terrorist victim — the game replays the state’s overall emergence into independence and self-reliance.

Another scene extends the identity theme beyond the Jews. The players visit a shop that sells Hebrew versions of US sports jerseys. The Arab owner jokes with the players and even tops them on some US baseball stats. Despite their bonhomie, though, he can’t even pretend that he will cheer for the Israel team. He can’t get a passport. He can’t feel himself an Israeli. 
     In the harder edged extension of that theme, a terrorist drives a truck through a Jerusalem crowd. This is the shadow that falls across even the feel-good stories that depict the remarkable growth, accomplishment and hopes of the Jewish state.   

The Antenna (2016)

An 80-year-old holocaust survivor Joshua’s traumatic memory affects his three grown sons.          As the English prof argues, literature has the responsibility to reach that terrible history, for its effects damage successive generations whether they know it or not. The narrative demonstrates his principle beyond even his awareness.

The antenna is a metaphor for the old man’s preternatural sensitivity to the remaining toxicity of his time. His neighbor has rented his roof for a cellular company’s antenna. Joshua blames the antenna’s radiation for all his pains and sleeplessness.

As it happens, the old man is proven right — but his sons don’t tell him, for fear of more violent response. However irrational Joshua’s fear, it costs him his leg anyway. Sometimes a paranoia proves right.

The military son shows his holocaust shadow in his absence from home, his heavy handed discipline of his sons and a general insensitivity that drives his wife into an idle tryst with his brother, then home to her mother. He’s punished for losing a gun. His oldest son rebels with tantrums at home and a violent attack in a classmate that gets him expelled. Kicking the principal didn’t help his cause.

  The prof is divorced and unproductive in his discipline, which costs him a promotion and leaves him vulnerable to a student’s seduction. When his young son insists on being carried out of school, his self-infantilizing shows a third generation of paralysis.

The deejay son deals in drugs and refuses to bring his pregnant German gentile girlfriend to meet his family. Fearing his father’s anger and pain, he claims his four years in Germany were in Amsterdam.
     The old man’s death — which results from the removal of his radiated leg — liberates his family. The soldier gets an easier posting, to his family’s benefit — and his wastrel brother finds the lost gun. The deejay finally takes responsibility for his pregnant girlfriend and brings her into his family. She is converting to Judaism to marry him.
     The prof breaks free from his father’s hunger for vengeance when he stops his own covert attack on the neighbor. He also abandons his delusory affair with his student. He realizes that her promising draft novel seduced him into using her to fill his void — an unreciprocated commitment.

Even the mother is at least freed from the rigorous demands her family placed on her and the harsh demands of her cantankerous, even violent and impatient patient.

     The film reminds us of the lasting damage, anger, fear, instability, that remain in the shadow of the Holocaust. It falls across the land still. 

Where's Poppa? (1970)

Carl Reiner’s film of Robert Klane’s black comic novel remains a cult classic. It deserves a wider audience.

The plot’s serious centre is the difficulty in properly caring for the aged. Successful Sidney (Ron Liebman) leaves schnook brother Gordon (George Segal) to look after their uncontrollable aged mother Mrs. Hocheiser (Ruth Gordon). Her genius for driving away caregivers incapacitates Gordon both at his law career and from realizing his new love-hope, the angelically sparkling and soft-focus Louise (Trish Van Devere). 

Gordon is so paralyzed by his father’s deathbed instruction that he can’t even utter the word when he considers putting his mother into a “ho…ho..ho….” When he finally squeezes out the full word, “home,” it’s as physical as the turd Louise’s first husband left on their honeymoon bed after their first love-making (“Doesn’t everyone?). 

Gordon rushes his mother to two homes, both “State Approved.” Gus and Grace’s proves a nightmare of elder care. The lone Gus (Paul Sorvino) manages only minimal service and concern. Gordon finally leaves her at a palatial rural estate, too idyllic to ring plausible.

Gordon completes the dream ending by carrying an old man over to his mother and presenting him as her lost husband. “Poppa?” “Momma?” Two hopeless delusions cohere for the happy ending. Make that three, counting our relief at the opulent placement.  

Mrs Hocheiser denies her husband’s death so the new assignment satisfies her. Behind the opening credits we see souvenirs, mementoes, army implements, tossed into an old trunk, emblematic of the missing father whose ghost shadows the film and propels his widow’s madness. We assume her new old man has persisted in a parallel fantasy.  

That human drama plays against a social landscape of broader insanity. The film reflects several lunacies of its time. The trials that the befuddled Gordon can’t focus on represent outrageous abuse in a society run amok. 

  In the first, the hippie (Rob Reiner, pre-Meathead) accused of cutting off a general’s toe is found in contempt of court for his profanity and anger. He’s all but justified by the general’s insane monologue of murderous racism. That catches the madness of the Viet Nam war and its protestors.

  In the second a mad football coach (Vincent Gardenia, puffing on a cigarette holder that augurs new health) is suing the team that fired him — for staffing it by kidnapping huge helpless children from the backwoods.  

  In this mad racism a taxi passes up on a black woman to pick up a gorilla (Sidney in costume). A woman dissolves when she thinks the panting man in a gorilla suit is masturbating beside her in the elevator. 

The madness extends to Sidney’s ostensibly normal family. His wife refuses to let him go help his brother — until Sidney threatens his mother will have to come stay with them. “Go. Now. Take a cab.” 

This home is as violent as Gordon’s. To get out Sidney threatens: "Get away from that door, or I'm gonna choke your child.” “He means it, Ma.” And again: “Let me out. I haven’t got time to beat up the kids.” 

Of course, in the first scene Gordon dons the new ape suit before waking up his mother in hopes of scaring her to death. But “Almost doesn’t count.” He suggests getting her a big dog after he fantasizes his mother shrinking to the point a dog eats her (“in one bite”). The dog raises a paw to be cuffed before being taken to the station to be booked. 

The only coherent social unit here is the gang that ritually robs Sidney every time he crosses Central Park. The slick swaggering leader extemporizes new scenarios. In the first he replays The Naked Prey requiring Sidney to shuck his clothes to escape his dread pursuer Motherfucker.  The next time, Sidney — as guest of honour at their gala party — is forced to lead off the gang rape. He’s arrested when the mini-skirted victim turns out to be an undercover male cop.

This leads to one of the decade’s richest shots. In the back of the cab Sidney — a cerebral lawyer animal in his gorilla suit — treasures the flowers and beams at the prospect of a new love. He asks Gordon if he should indeed follow up on the invitation. The roses and romance offset the ludicrous suit and the sordidness of the Park scene and the pervasive madness — without quite descending into sanity. Beside him sits the broken and despairing Gordon, who feels he has lost his one last shot at love. He has little patience for Sidney’s new bliss and his request for advice to the love-looming. 

When he first meets Louise her name sends Gordon into a long slow whispering recital of the eponymous love song. As it draws them together for a kiss, the song evokes the sonnet by which Romeo and Juliet first converse. Just meeting her has fired hope and love into Gordon's unrelievedly despondent condition. Only her plan to return to Waukegan (“Isn’t Jack Benny from there?”) inspires the courage for him to say “home” and put his mother into one. Love conquers all. 

Make that three romances. The Momma and the Poppa connected at the end provide a third relief in romantic delusion. Incidentally, the novel ended slightly differently: Gordon dumps his mother off at the Home but dry-humps her before leaving. (This alternative conclusion may be on the laser disc edition.) The scene recalls the Park mugger’s name, which may have been the first appearance of “motherfucker” in American mainstream cinema. Or not.

Finally, attention must be paid Mrs Hocheiser, in Ruth Gordon’s brilliant portrayal. Despite our sympathies for Gordon, she commands our sympathy and respect. The monster is a pathetic waif. Reduced to a one-room life with daytime TV, she touchingly shifts between perception and memory. She’s childlike in the difficulty of dressing her and in her breakfast, Lucky Charms drenched in Coca Cola, and an orange that MUST be cut into six pieces. When she dances and studies her looks she relives her lost beauty, that would return with her lost love Poppa. She’s plucky enough to punch the attacking gorilla in the nuts.

In her scenes with Louise she wavers between confusion and disturbing perception.  Rebelling against Gordon restricting her to mashed peas, she swipes something more solid from Louise’s plate. In an alarming perception she spots the couple holding hands. That prompts her major defence against abandonment. First her finger reveals the size of Gordon’s “little pecker.” Climactically, she pulls down Gordon’s pants: “I’d recognize Gordon’s tush anywhere.” The mother’s intimacy blocks out the fiancee. 

The film only incidentally touches on the eldercare issue. Its deeper drama derives from the minefield of parental control and its traumatic effects. That makes this film an even more comic partner to Hitchcock’s Psycho, but with the additional thread of contemporary social satire.

   

You Were Never Really Here

The film is framed with montages of apparently overheard conversations, chat with no apparent purpose, theme or coherence. If there is meaning to that collection it is elusive, especially when so many phrases are indecipherable.

That also describes the film, a powerful but elusive narrative centred on a compelling, damaged hero. Ex-GI Joe completes a mission to retrieve a senator’s 13-year-old daughter Nina from sexual enslavement.

      But it’s not quite a character study and it is too enigmatic for a clearly defined thriller. I’d call it an expression of the spirit of the age, especially as it references today's callous nexus of sexual and political exploitation in America. It’s the trenchant outsider's perspective of Scottish writer/director Lynne Ramsay.

A governor seeking re-election wastes many lives to recapture his favourite sex slave, the underage Nina. That corruption costs the lives of his supportive senator friend (Nina’s father), along with Joe’s boss, Joe’s contact, Joe’s frail mother and several incidental thugs.   

While sensitively caring for his mother, Joe slips in and out of memories of his traumatic past, both as a Gulf War soldier and as the victim of an abusive father. His physical scars point to his psychological.

  His bare-chested scenes show Joe to be a massive physical presence, not muscular but bulky. His build is augmented by the bulk the beard gives the already intense Joaquin Phoenix. It leaves him virtually no face to read. Joe’s dark physical bulk is the opposite to Nina’s pre-pubescent blond frailty. 

But they share a common absence. Paradoxically, the very physical Joe is “never really here.” He is emotionally detached from his existence, paralyzed by the past traumas which he has attempted to flee in self-asphyxiation. Similarly, Nina retreats into the silence and removal of a drugged stupor so she is “never really here” either. Both Joe and Nina count backwards as if their retreat from consciousness were anesthetically induced. 

Telling details abound. In a miniature of Joe’s emotional confusion, he finds a green jelly-bean, his favourite, then crushes it. Buried in a lake, his mother’s long white hair escape the bag and float elegantly underwater, like an unsupressable memory. To bury her, Joe — suit and all — fills his pockets with rocks to deliver her to the bottom of the lake. He fully immerses himself in his missions.

The pedophile governor fingers the furnishings of a toy dollhouse, even setting in motion a rocker (like the one he’s off?). His luxurious mansion has a classical painting of a seductive woman with one breast exposed. Of course, classical art provides such a cover for male-centred pornography. This exposed woman is a cover for his obsession with the flat-chested girl.  

The violence is both ubiquitous and tempered. Most of Joe’s assaults are off-camera or shown obliquely through a security system. But we see him rip out a painful tooth, bloodying himself. As they chat, his agent litters his desk with tissues bloodied from his nose. In this world breathing means blood. 

In this lawless America the only police we see are the ones who steal Nina from Joe, killing the hotel manager and Joe’s connections. The governor has the power to commit and to hide his corruption. An elected government official assumes he is above the law — and his officials support that warping. (It’s only a movie. Right.)

  If the villainy is current America so is the trace of hope. The big macho hero doesn’t save this day. The small abused teenage girl does. This is Me Too with a vengeance — and a political impact. After Joe entertains the despair of suicide, she returns trim and possessed and takes command: “Let’s go.” 

The last shot is of the diner table Nina and Joe vacated. It’s an image of calm, symmetry, a pallid assurance a world away from all the film’s splattering. The victims have survived, escaped, saved themselves. As America yet may. By default, the new generation has to point the way. 

Indian Horse

Dolby Sound is a vital force in this film. The narrative is framed — beginning and end — by unseen people around the theatre speaking as if before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. That was established to explore Canada’s historic abuse of its indigenous citizens — from the notorious Catholic schools to the current injustice in the treatment of natives, especially the women. 

When the film narrative unfurls it’s the hero’s own long and cripplingly suppressed story of his suffering. The surround sound voices put us in the committee, make us a witness and potentially a sharer of the speaker’s horrid experience. That stereo adds to the immediacy of Richard Wagamese’s source novel. 

The story is so riveting and the social predicament it exposes so compelling that one can suspend ordinary judgments upon such things as the acting, the narrative rhythm, the emotional manipulation. The cause justifies the means. 

All three actors who play Saul at various ages hold us, from the child’s innocence through the adolescent’s promising success to the adult’s defeat. The climactic revelation of the six-year-old’s exploitation provides an unexpected and summary shock. 

Wagamese celebrates Canada’s indigenous culture and spirituality in the face of its national oppression. The film does both his fine work and Canada’s shame justice.  

Ostalgie (reprint)

Ostalgie on film

Yacowar, Maurice. Queen's Quarterly; Kingston Vol. 110, Iss. 4,  (Winter 2003)

Trying to keep a loved one shielded from a painful truth - a reality that is considered too immense to bear - is one of the oldest family games there is. In the world of cinema, such deceptions have been explored for touching comic effect in numerous guises - Life Is Beautiful, Truman, La Cage aux Folles, to name only a few. But beyond the comedy, of course, are the larger social issues, with the central question of why anything should be so unacceptable. Germany's Good Bye Lenin! explores the final collapse of a world into which untold millions had invested more than just their lives, and which - despite its own best efforts - was unable to crush entirely its people's bitter-sweet affection for it. 

THIS ECCENTRIC FAMILY DRAMA explores the mixed blessing of East Germany's post-Wall world. Wolfgang Becker's two-hour serio-comedy has been hailed as a symptom of the new Germany's Ostalgie, a sweeping nostalgia for the dismal products of the old German Democratic Republic. With the pull of old roots and dissatisfaction with the storied glories of the West, apparently many Germans yearn for the old system - or at least for part of the dingy charm they carved out within it. 

It is East Germany, 1989, and the devoutly communist Christiane Kerner (Katrin Sass) suffers a heart attack when her son Alex (Daniel Bruhl) is brutally arrested at a political demonstration on the fortieth anniversary of the GDR. When she awakens from a coma eight months later, of course, the unimaginable has come to pass. Alex finds himself protecting his mother and her weak heart from the potentially fatal disappointment of learning that her world is gone and unlamented. The Berlin Wall is down, her socialist dream is dead, and the Germanys are reunited. But Alex carries on as if East Germany is not just surviving but thriving. He is begrudgingly aided in this increasingly elaborate subterfuge by his sister Ariane (Maria Simon) and her new West German lover Rainer (Alexander Beyer). 

The film's exclamatory title is ironic, as if inviting the punch line Hello, Dolly! West German Becker even questions at times whether East Germany is the better for its absorption into the wide world of capitalism and rampant consumerism. In one scene at a bank, the Western bureaucracy of power proves as heartless as that of the old totalitarianism. The East's "working class heroes" begin to suffer unemployment in the social upheaval; Alex loses his job but in a draw wins a new one hustling satellite dishes. The fixer of old television sets now peddles the latest in high-tech, wide open communication - for better or worse. His first "cultural discovery" is a buxom stripper in onanistic lather (while ballet is no longer televised). The West is represented by surreal icons like a Big Bird strolling the supermarket aisles and a profusion of tantalizing car dealerships, billboards, and banners. Though "our drab corner store had turned into a gaudy shopper's paradise" in which "the customer is king," it somehow is unable to provide the Ossies' traditional needs. 

Christiane comes to personify the socialist ideal. And that ideal remains at least a theoretical alternative to capitalism's avarice, selfishness, and consumerism - what the GDR used to disdain as Konsumterror. For even now, the trouble with socialism is what G.K. Chesterton famously remarked is the trouble with Christianity: it has never been tried. 

To protect his mother's cherished sense of idealism, Alex wages a war between sign systems, between stories. He scrounges to obtain jars of the obsolete Spreewald pickles she craves, the inferior Mocca Fix coffee, and old GDR jam jars into which he pours the sundry jams of the West. Assured by the old familiar labels, she doesn't notice the improvement, especially in the coffee and the Dutch gherkins. The family's brand-new furniture is dumped, and their discarded old Eastern Bloc furnishings retrieved (when Christiane's old bed supplants Rainer's tanning machine, one false appearance replaces another). 

While Alex's satellites beam in the outside world, he labours to keep it from his mother. To sate her craving for current TV broadcasting, he replays tapes of old news programs. Whenever Christiane catches so much as a glimpse of the new reality, Alex and his colleague Denis (Florian Lukas) quickly counter with fake TV transmissions. To explain away a large banner advertising Coca-Cola, Denis reports that East Germany has proved that it, in fact, invented the soft drink. With its own injunction ("Trink"), the red Coke banner has replaced the scarlet communist banners that festooned the early scenes of the film. When Christiane glimpses the bustling crowds and new material wealth outside her apartment, a fake newscast explains that the GDR has granted asylum to hordes of refugees from the West who have realized that they prefer East German values. Reflecting on his tiny media empire, Alex notes that his version of events is more generous than that of the old regime: "The GDR I created for her increasingly became the one I might have wished for." 

In her delusion, Christiane seems frozen against a changing world and within a growing family. Alex begins an affair with Lara (Chulpan Khamatova), Christiane's Russian student nurse in the hospital. The grandchild Paula grows. And gradually, with their Russian and West German lovers, Christiane's children come to represent another dissolution of old borders. 

But Christiane has been harbouring her own family lie, and she will suffer a second heart attack when she unburdens herself. She has long claimed that her husband abandoned his family and nation for another woman. In reality, she had promised to follow him to the West, but did not because of her fear for her children and her dedication to communism. And for years she has been keeping from them his many letters. Revealing this sustaining lie sinks her. When she asks to see the love of her life one last time before she dies, Alex seeks out his father Robert (Burghart Klaussner) - now a successful Wessie with a new family - and brings him to Christiane's bedside. And Christiane realizes at last that she should have endured Robert's Western life to preserve her family. 

It is also worth noting that Alex finds his father in Wannsee, the Berlin suburb where Hitler's top officials formalized their Final Solution for the Jews. As a national emblem of guilt, this unassuming place symbolizes the nation's and the family's need to confront their past, especially their betrayals and lies. The allusion asserts the need to acknowledge history, to confront the mythopoeia by which nations - and families - sustain themselves. 

In the film's climactic irony, Lara - who has long argued that Alex's campaign of deception is "creepy" and profoundly dishonest - tells Christiane the truth just before Robert arrives, girded to maintain her delusion. 

When Alex enters, Christiane looks between him and Lara, as if trying to decide which one to believe. When Alex plays his last bogus newscast, proclaiming the East's triumphant absorption of the West, Christiane watches her son's face more than the tape. Realizing that Alex's Big Lie has been a manifestation of the deep love he feels for her - and even for the ideal of socialism that existed within her, if not within her beloved GDR - she performs her own act of love and deceit, rewarding all his efforts by pretending to believe the broadcast. Her exclamation "wow" is directed less at the news than at the scope of her son's labour to reassure and protect her. As Lara does not reveal what she said to Christiane, her son will always believe that his mother died comforted by his elaborate ruse. He wrongly declares, "My mother outlived her GDR by three days." But in fact she knew it was gone. He, in turn, is comforted by the fantasy that she passed away surrounded by a tiny part of the country in which she believed. Lara and Christiane serve Alex as he served Christiane. 

Part of this film's charm is found in the camera strategies that cleverly represent the power of subjectivity. Becker plays with time when he speeds up the frantic action of Alex and Denis restoring Christiane's room and when he turns East Berlin's new motor traffic into an dazzling abstraction of lights. Alex's detention scene opens with the prisoners appearing to be lying down, their arms comfy above their heads. A 45-degree rotation reveals the harsher reality: they are forced to stand that way. 

Becker's parable of domestic sacrifice and loss, of painful truth and salutary deception, encapsulates the new Germany's ambivalent progress. Old divisions persist. "You East Germans are never satisfied. Always whining and complaining," Rainer charges Alex. As Becker's fiction includes old newspaper headlines and TV and documentary footage, this family represents the reunited country in all its questionable advance. 

Clearly this film strikes different chords wherever it plays. Its ambivalence finds in Germany the same bittersweet that Russian Premier Putin has expressed of his transformed nation: "Anyone who doesn't regret the collapse of the Soviet Union has no heart, but anyone who wants it restored has no brain." When Lara saves Alex from choking on an apple we're reminded that we Westerners are not living in any Eden. The divided and the reunited Germanys are both flawed attempts at social organization, heavily dependent on myths to brighten the real conditions of living. And so for all of us. 

THE FRACTURES, generosity and love in this family reflect well beyond Europe, as does the film's sense of the myths that nations, families, even individuals, contrive to sustain themselves. We've had this lesson often before - from Big Daddy's unwitting crutch of "mendacity" to Jack Nicholson's "You can't handle the truth!" But rarely with such compassion.

Eastwood's "Unforgiven" (Reprint)

Negotiating the loner [Critique of Western movies] Queen's Quarterly; Kingston Vol. 105, Iss. 4,  (Winter 1998): 543-555

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Perhaps the basic paradox in American culture is the tension between its rhetoric of individualism and its practise of conformity. Certainly this lies behind Will Rogers' observation that "Liberty doesn't work as well in practice as it does in speeches." That note is far likelier to emerge from America than from, say, France, where the good citizens, leaders, and thinkers are better known to take liberty as -- and liberties with -- a basic convention of conduct. Compare, for example, the public acceptance of President Mitterrand's mistress with the brouhaha-ha when President Clinton made the presumably dyslexic discovery that you can get sex even from protected aides. 

The paradox is most clearly caught in how America treats its favourite myth -- the solitary hero. Across the American film landscape -- in the Western, the musical, the gangster film, the political thriller, the comedy -- the star is a loner trapped between conflicting necessities of individualism and community. In fact, that tension lies even at the core of Hollywood itself, given its historical basis on the star system. The American film industry -- and hence its rhetoric -- has paradoxically based this most collaborative of artforms upon the allure -- and inflected signification -- of an individual star. The "lone star" theme is so powerful and pervasive that it provides the cultural pulse at any point in time. You can read a period by the stars that emerge to emblematize it: resourceful tramps (Chaplin, Groucho) during the Depression; reticent, valorous soldiers (Van Johnson, John Wayne) during WWII; sombre or wisecracking gangsters (Robinson, Cagney) in the shadows of postwar reconstruction; affluent lovers (Cary Grant, Rock Hudson) in the somnolent '50s ... and so it goes. There's a lone star or two for every thesis. 

Although the loner theme may vary with its genre, there is one constant: the tension between liberty and restraint. The comic film, for example, affirms the validity and fertility of an idiosyncratic hero's deviation from conventional forms and values. We license our clowns -- like Lear's Fool -- to violate decorum and to run athwart conventions, but we expect them to be reined back into conformism at the end. Hence the mock-heroic persona in Woody Allen's films (i.e., the early ones -- you know, the funny ones), the anti-sentimentality from Where's Poppa? (1970) to There's Something About Mary (1998), the irreverent parodies of Mel Brooks and the Airplane! crew, and the sentimentalized mania of Jerry Lewis (and his spawn: Pee Wee Herman, John Candy, Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Jim Carrey, etc.). Deviators if not deviants all. 

The comedy of unaccustomed candour provided two scathing political comedies this year: Dustin Hoffman's caricature of Washington/Hollywood hubris in the famously prophetic Wag the Dog and the exuberant but doomed liberation of Warren Beatty's politician by self-marginalization in his undervalued Bulworth. The comic genre flirts with chaos before re-establishing social order, classically in the form of a marriage but in these two films by the rather more drastic technique for subduing a disruptive energy: assassination. 

Even as the classic musical typically celebrates the energy and egotism of an erupting individual talent, lip service is paid to the overriding values of the collective. It's not enough for Fred Astaire to dance alone: he must have a Ginger Rogers to validate his genius within the classical conventions of romance. (Of course, as Ms Rogers rightly has pointed out, she had to do everything he did -- backwards and on high heels -- but Astaire remains the senior partner, the founding owner, and the logo of the firm.) The team-player and selfless performer is valued over the selfish star. Hence the showgirl-next-door's (Debbie Reynolds') triumph over the shrill shrike (Jean Hagen) in Singin' in the Rain (1952) and the innumerable elevations of the stand-in or chorus-line hoofer to stardom. In the cognate melodrama All About Eve (1950) the glamorous star's attendant (Anne Baxter) stands in for the stand-in who steps forward into the limelight. Because Eve betrays an unrespectable ambition, the selfish new star's triumph is villainous. In contrast, in Singin' in the Rain Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor work together in their generous support of Debbie Reynolds and then reveal her selfless role as the voice behind the narcissistic shrike's success; their generosity excuses Reynolds' success. In the case of the current animated fable Antz, the whole film promotes individualism, in the nebbish-voiced hero's anti-conformity (the nebbish voice provided by Woody Allen), but at the end it reaffirms the community's well-being. Classically, individualism is allowed only insofar as it serves the interests of the community. 

Obviously, the genre that most clearly enunciates the loner theme is the Western. As that genre depicts America's transition from frontier to civilization, the lone hero stands in stark relief against the skeleton of the nascent modern society. The Western seems America's most telling myth and its most influential genre. Indeed, some historians contend that in the early years of this century, when America was isolationist in its external affairs, it was the popularity of the Western film that preserved the nation's potential for militarism. Of course, the cowboy fantasy of the Reagan presidency goes without saying. But the Western is not simply jingoistic. At the end of Stagecoach (1939) John Ford chooses to save his outcast-hero couple from "the blessings of civilization." In the Western myth, civilization is a mixed bag. The purity and integrity of an independent, self-sufficient champion give way to the hypocrisies and corruptions of the modern world, as embodied on the coach by the thieving banker, whose wife leads the pack that drives the good-hearted whore and the marinated medic out of town. 

Indeed, the culture's ambivalent attitude toward the "progress" that now afflicts us extends the Western motifs into two new arenas of gunmanship. In the crime film, the outlaw builds a personal urban empire instead of settling an arid wilderness. But it's still an individual striving against his class or mob for his bad eminence of fame, fortune, and a stylish suit. In the historical epic views of Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather trilogy (1971-90) and Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America (1983), the criminal world is a microcosm of America itself, as normalized and self-respecting as corporate law. The other offshoot is the space film, where the cowboys ride the collaborative future sciences into a new frontier, against mutant savages. George Lucas's Star Wars (1977) is an avowed grandson of Ford's The Searchers (1956) -- with Chewbacca as Gabby Hayes. Although the Western per se may by its numbers seem to have lost its hold on the imagination, its spirit rides new ranges in these later sagas. Sagebrush to the stars. 

F. Gary Gray's recent thriller, The Negotiator, explicitly draws upon the American tradition of the Western. When the Chicago police force's star hostage negotiator, Danny Roman (Samuel L. Jackson), finds himself framed for the murder of his partner and for stealing from the force's disability fund, he stumbles into taking his own hostages. Roman demands to deal with another star negotiator, Chris Sabien (Kevin Spacey). In their first discussion Sabien and Roman argue over the implications of the last scene in Shane (1953). The more naive Roman maintains that Shane is only wounded when he rides out of the frame; his hero can't die. The more pragmatic Sabien contends that in the last image Shane slumps over dead. (For the record, Shane does slump, but the image remains ambiguous. His death is suggested not so much by a deeper slump than by the fact that his horse takes him upward, past the top left corner of the screen, as if the saint were returning to heaven.) Sabien prefers sagas where the hero survives, like Rio Bravo (1959), the classic siege/hostage Western, and Red River (1948). It is apt that the more scholarly Sabien favours these two films by Howard Hawks, whose theme of men bonding through an ethic of professionalism propels The Negotiator. When Sabien later shoots Roman, in order to entrap the chief villain, he uncharacteristically professes fondness for Shane because the film kills off its hero. Both men are characterized by how they read the film -- and how they pattern their behaviour after it, such as Roman's bravado when he stands at the window ledge daring the helicopter police to shoot him. The Shane allusion also prompts us to read The Negotiator in the context of the Western. 

Shane is the most idealistic of the classic Westerns, presented with a tone as pastoral as its setting. Its hero, played by the blond, (very) short, soft-spoken Alan Ladd, is viewed through the worshipful perspective of the settler's young son, Joey (Brandon de Wilde, before he knocked up Carol Lynley in Blue Denim). Shane is the wandering gunman who craves domestic roots, but such roots are precluded by his bloody past. Call him Citizen Cain. He is doomed to this paradox: although the domestic folk depend upon a gunman to stabilize their social order -- in this case, to oppose the professional blackguard (Jack Palance) hired by the big rancher family to drive off the small home-steaders -- the community cannot accommodate the gunman. If he stayed he would disrupt the very order he has secured for them. In some exercises of this theme (e.g., The Gunfighter, The Shootist, I Shot Jesse James, Unforgiven) the gunman is disruptive because his presence attracts killers who wish to wrest away his glory. But Shane is too powerful in his own virtue to stay. Christ-like, he has to ride away. Whether he dies or not, his sacrifice for the settlers must include his departure. Little Joey expresses more truth than he realizes when he calls after Shane, "My mother wants you. I know she does." (The mountains shrewdly echo back the words "wants you" and "I know," as if speaking Shane's saintly and abstemious awareness.) Shane would pose as big a threat to the emotional balance in his hosts' marriage as to the peace of the town. 

The American Western valorizes the gunman but is compelled to banish him. This points to the essential clash in the culture between idealism and pragmatism. The culture espouses law, order, peace, individualism, but continually calls upon the outlaw, the chaos of war, and suppressive restraints, all for the communal good. In this respect the popular culture seems at one with the international politic. The nation pleads lofty values but has been known to stoop from them to conquer hostile nations, radically departing from these ideals in order to enforce them, whether at Hiroshima or in the theoretically smart bombs of the Gulf War. Glorious, high-speaking America has pocked the globe with Wounded Knees. Its films reveal the problematic nature of that American self-assertion. Either the culture is hypocritically glossing over its murdering ways or it is regretfully acknowledging the need for war to maintain peace. In any case, this tension pervades the culture. 

Perhaps the most brilliant dramatization of this point is John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). The earnest young lawyer, Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart), builds a national political career and a happy marriage upon the legend that he killed (in self-defence, of course) the vile libertine of the title (Lee Marvin). But the real hero is the lonely rancher, Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), who from the shadows gunned Liberty down when he was about to finish off the wounded lawyer. As Stoddard unwittingly stole the good gunman's glory, he also won his girl, his hopes, his fame, his future. The film is framed by the lawyer's return to honour the forgotten rancher at his funeral. Over Doniphon's coffin, Senator Stoddard reveals for the first time how all his success and renown are owed to his old protector. 

As the villain's name suggests, the film is about the ambivalence of liberty. The film is based on two opposing triumvirates. Evil is represented by the wild Valance and his two scrupulously delineated hench-people: Strother Martin as a percolating sadist and Lee van Cleef as a vulpine killer. The side of good consists of the man of words (Stewart), the man of deeds (Wayne), and the drunken journalist (Edmond O'Brien) whom Valance tortures because of the effective power of Iris words. As a gunman, Doniphon's selflessness and control contrast to Valance's unbridled lust. Stoddard's eclipse of Doniphon represents the passage of the Old West into modern civilization, with this specific corollary: the primacy of the new word of law over the old rule of the gun. But at the heart of this film persists the American paradox: behind the law must stand the gun. It is only a politically convenient illusion that the lawyer gunned down the outlaw. In reality, idealism is helpless without a militant pragmatist. The gun remains mightier than the word, even if it is doomed to the shadows. 

This Western theme continues into The Negotiator. As independents whose maverick methods and professionalism set them apart from -- and even alienate -- their colleagues, the two cop heroes are cowboy types. As they stand alone at the front, what distinguishes them is that they are primarily men of words. Roman chooses Sabien because he knows they both believe in holstering the gun until all possible words have been exhausted. Sabien famously negotiated for 55 hours once to ensure the safe release of hostages. Both have infuriated their superiors by over-extending the negotiation. Sabien's last words to the wounded Roman are the weighted "Nice talkin' to you, Lieutenant." This film values talking, words, to an extent unique among American cop films. We're talking negotiation here, not Magnum Force (to recall a less garrulous flick of 1973). So we're suspicious of the cops whose disrespect for talking makes them impatient to attack, especially the antagonistic Beck (David Morse). 

Even here, however, the words do not replace the gun. Instead, they prepare for its most efficient use. The value of negotiation and patient psychology is theoretically espoused, but in both the opening and final scenes it's the gun that gets things done. Thus Sabien's wife jocularly explains why his negotiations are less effective at home than on the mean streets outside: "That's because no one is standing behind you with a big gun." So, too, in the heroes' parallel bluffs. Where innocent Roman only pretends to shoot a policeman hostage, worldly Sabien actually does shoot Roman. He backs his strategic words with the film's most dramatic strategic gunshot, then shoots the arch-villain -- to prevent his killing himself! For all his gunplay, our Sabien keeps an eye out for symbolism. In short, The Negotiator perpetuates the American dependence upon the gun. In focusing on negotiation the film pretends to the more civilized value of talking; but its faith and primacy still reside in the gun. 

The black, violent world glossed over in Shane is exposed in what seems to be an explicit remake, Clint Eastwood's Pale Rider (1985). Standing as Songs of Innocence and Experience respectively, the plots parallel too closely to be either accident or homage. Eastwood recasts Shane for the grit of more modern realism. The Big Rancher versus Little Homesteaders battle becomes an even more uneven fight of independent pan-miners against a corporation that destroys the land with its hydraulic mining techniques. The hero helps his host break down a huge rock, in place of the large tree-stump the hero-host team uproots in the first film. In parallel scenes, the good gunman and the bought gunman appraise each other. There are the same tensions in and around the general store, though Eastwood's merchant is meaner spirited. That is the defining tonal difference. In the later film, the child's dog gets killed in the first scene and buried in the second. More important is sexualization of the innocent; Joey is replaced by a budding 15-year-old girl, Megan (Sydney Penny), who offers herself to our hero and is barely saved from a gang-rape. Like Joey, Megan briefly rejects her hero but ends up running after him, calling "We all love you, Preacher." 

That Preacher is Clint Eastwood's large, dark, violent, but still soft-spoken refashioning of Shane. When he's not wearing his guns, he wears his white collar, which more than anything he says or does leads to his being called Preacher. Otherwise Clint is still playing The Man with No Name. As he drinks, fights, kills, and beds his host's fiancee (Carrie Snodgrass), he's a shade less saintly than Shane. Burying her dog, Megan recites "The Lord's Prayer," but with marginal comments that express more doubt than faith. Eastwood's hero seems to materialize out of the mists of her prayer for a miracle, his pale bay horse emerging from the snow and birch. 

In sum, Eastwood's film is a grittier retake on the Shane myth. It exposes the violence and venality that are glossed over in the pastoralism of Shane. In fact, there's even a curious reflection upon the ambiguity around Shane's death. The good host miner (Michael Moriarty) has taken note of the five bullet wounds on Preacher's back. In the climactic shootout, Preacher kills his old nemesis with the same number and pattern of bullets. Unlike Shane, there's no question about whether Preacher lives or dies at the end. The implication is that he came back from the dead, then drifted into the campaign that would enable his revenge. The virtuous gunman doesn't die, then, but is recycled, recast for every new age, as an archetype to validate the use of the gun. Eastwood amplifies both the gunman hero's humanity and his mythopoetic abstraction. 

From our delicate little Ladd to our earnest Eastwood, then, the heroic loner dominates American cinema. Even when these figures are at the top of the Establishment, like President Harrison Ford in Air Force One and the anti-Clintonic bomber president of Independence Day, they are accorded the rugged individualism and martial prowess of the cowboy. Hollywood has backed away from Stanley Kubrick's comic take on the nuclear cowboy -- Slim Pickens yahooing into eternity astride the eponymous instrument in How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1963; a.k.a. Dr. Strangelove). But now it's fashionable for the president to be a cowboy again, a skilled, murdering individualist, who operates free of his guards and societal restraints. 

If The Negotiator looks to the Western, John Frankenheimer's Ronin (1998) looks to the East. The film is a heist thriller set in the contemporary landscape of a world that has lost its traditional values. Here are heroes without even a subordinate cause. The mixed band of criminal specialists is explicitly compared to the ex-samurai "ronin" who, when their liege was betrayed and murdered, wandered the world as hired swords, killers, and thieves until they could avenge their master. Then they showed their guts by killing themselves (seppuku). 

Again, the film exploits the glamour of the independent, self-sufficient loner, but two provisions negate that. First, the individualist is valued by how much he serves his team of individualists. That is, in an age without traditional values we have to serve our colleagues. As well, the film ultimately puts its faith in the institution, in this case the duelling acronyms, the IRA and the CIA, who -- once the evil is defeated -- make their way to peace. The arch-villain (Jonathan Pryce) turns out to be a self-serving killer who was disowned even by the outlaw IRA. That makes him the rogue's rogue. The arch-hero (Robert de Niro) pretends to be a rogue ex-CIA agent, but as he cryptically explains to the obligatory love-interest, "I never left." Again, the outlaw is revealed to be a company man after all. In context, the film's two centrepiece car chases -- much admired by the audience and maligned by the reviewers -- assume thematic point. In the first the modern cars speed through narrow streets and sidewalks, as if the old ethical battle is waged in an anachronistic setting. The second chase is a long, disastrous rush against the flow of heavy one-way traffic. This motif dramatizes the characters' dangerous thrust against the social currents of their time. Both chases suggest the massive destruction and the death of innocents that result when maverick armies clash by their dubious rights. 

Since Watergate the lone hero has assumed a new function: he blows the whistle on corruption in high places. From the savvy Washington journalists of All the President's Men (1976) to Nicolas Cage's seedy, on-the-take cop/hustler in Snake Eyes (1998), heroism awaits the outsider who exposes the plague in the system. These are the modern maverick cowboys. Maintaining the integrity, ingenuity, and strength of the outsider, their effect inheres not in settling the desert but in expunging the infestation in the garden. 

A more complex alternative is provided by novelist-director John Sayles Lone Star (1996). In contemporary Texas, this loner hero is a sheriff who -- like Oedipus -- explores his own past to uncover the source of the corruption that afflicts his town. In Sayles's next film, Men with Guns (1998), an uncompromising drama about political suppression in Latin America, one line explains both Cortez's conquest of an empire with but a handful of men and the current citizenry's submission to their oppressors: "The men had guns and we did not." Not surprisingly, then, his Western does not value the gun in the usual manner of the genre. In fact, Lone Star has only three scenes of gunfire: an off-camera shooting in a bar, and flashbacks to the two key murders. The bulk of the film is made up of words -- questions, good ol' boy evasions and warnings, political ire, and reminiscences. 

The hero who launches all these words is paradoxically named Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper), son of the legendary sheriff hero and friend to all, Buddy Deeds (Matthew McConaughey). Decades before, as a deputy, Buddy had the moral temerity to face down the murderous, corrupt sheriff Charley Wade (Kris Kristofferson) and apparently make him flee. Now, as the town prepares to unveil a monument to Buddy, Wade's skeleton is found in the desert. Sam sifts through the evidence and finally uncovers the truth behind Wade's murder, but as in Liberty Valance, it is decided that the greater public good will be served best by "printing the legend" instead. Sam decides not to correct the community's assumption that it was Buddy who killed the evil Wade. In fact, Buddy is a rarity, a sheriff whose primary courage was expressed in words. We don't see him shoot anyone. Sam saves the honourable killer's reputation by letting Buddy be thought of as the more conventional hero, who kills as well as talks. 

But there's much more to Lone Star. In one key scene, a repatriated Mexican draws a line in the dust with his Coke bottle. When Sam crosses that line he abandons any legal authority he might have had. The Mexican's point is that the various borders and boundaries man defines are absurdly trivial and arbitrary. Making that point with a Coke bottle neatly summarizes the political context: Americans' vicious paranoia about illegal Mexican immigrants (a paranoia shared even by erstwhile wetbacks), the varieties of class and economic snobbery, and the lingering remnants of segregation. As the redneck barkeep complains, "the lines of demarcation are getting fuzzy." In Lone Star Sayles uses the loner figure to dramatize the need to transcend societal borders. As his narrative seamlessly drifts between the present and the past Sayles provides a formalist equivalent to flying over borders. 

That's also the unifying theme of the various subplots. In one, a hard-case black army colonel, Delmore Payne (Joe Morton), breaks down his own borders when he softens his stance towards errant soldiers, his alienated father, and his own stifled son, providing less pain for all. In another, a successful Mexican bar owner overcomes her prejudice against the current generation of striving wetbacks, still trying to transcend the Mexican-American Coke-line in the sand. In the background there is an uneasy tension in the new and shifting racial mix in the schools, the bars, the civic elections, and the romantic couplings. 

The major crossing of a border is Sheriff Sam's resumption of an old love affair with a Mexican teacher, Pilar (Elizabeth Pena). Years before, Buddy literally ripped the couple apart when he caught the highschoolers necking at a drive-in. AS adults rekindling their romance, Pilar and Sam dance to the lyrics "My love is a deep blue sea," in effect denying the shallow sand-lines that have separated them. Their resumed love crosses the line of their parents' opposition. More dramatically, however, it crosses the incest taboo, for Sam discovers that Pilar is his half-sister. Where Oedipus's discovery of his incest maddens him to the extent that he blinds himself, Sam's discovery enables him to see beyond his community's borders/prejudices, and to agree with Pilar that they should continue their affair. As she cannot have children, there is no reason not to -- except for the societal convention. In arguing against borders, Sayles presents a case that challenges our most universal border, that of incest. For once the loner reasonably and responsibly refuses to be reined in. 

Sam Deeds finally lives up to his legendary father's courage but achieves a superior moral position by transcending the reflex values and assumptions that fragment his community. Ironically, in preserving both his personal secret and that of the sheriff-killer, Sam might be considered morally compromised and as self-serving as his father. But he is absolved by his moral and romantic motivation. As a weary army man observes, "It's always heart-warming to see a prejudice defeated by a deeper prejudice"; it's even more gratifying to see an ambivalent film genre heightened by an exemplar that is humane, humanistic, and courageous enough to challenge its culture's conventions and expectations. The star loner is the one who brings wider understanding and courage to the reflexes in which his community is locked. That's when the loner star lights the night. The film's last line of dialogue is Pilar's "Forget the Alamo." That is, the new Lone Star State has to define itself and its values realistically, by its present composition, situation, and needs. As the closing song promises, the example of this "cowboy's sweetheart" can bridge "the great divide." 

Sad to say, Lone Star hasn't had the box office, exposure, or influence accorded The Negotiator. Hollywood and its symptomatic Western continue their assuring compromises, double-think, and faith in the gun. That's another way in which the boundary between entertainment and politics has long since fuzzed over. Dwight Eisenhower wrote that to people in a democracy the outbreak of war always comes as a shocking surprise. If you read the subtexts of popular culture, you may despair, but perhaps you won't be so surprised.