solidarity: looking back with pride & forward with hope & vision

For the Old Mole Variety Hour 15 June 2015

This past weekend Portland Pride Northwest coordinated a series of events--including the trans and dyke marches, the pride parade, a festival at waterfront park, and more.

As KBOO listeners probably know, pride celebrations usually occur in June in commemoration of the 1969 Stonewall riots, when police raided the Stonewall bar in New York, and the patrons, especially drag queens of color, fought back. Clashes between police and the queer community continued for several days, and the incident is considered a turning point in the modern gay movement. Marches were held the next June in New York and San Francisco, and Pride Parades and events now occur around the world.

As KBOO listeners probably also know, there's been a good deal of criticism within queer and radical communities of the ways that, as with other movements of the 1960s and 70s, the call for liberation shifted over the years to a call for rights, and marches became parades. Pride northwest has a long list of corporate sponsors.

As Charlie Hinton puts it on dissidentvoice.org,

The idea behind gay liberation is that no one is free until all are free. The politics of liberation advocate building a united movement to overcome all forms of discrimination and oppression, if LGBT people are someday to be truly free. . . .
The idea behind gay rights is more limited -- build a movement that addresses strictly gay issues -- housing and job discrimination, military, marriage/partnership, etc. and unite solely on the basis that we’re gay.

This might also be thought as the difference between wanting a place in the existing system, and wanting to change the system.

But also last week as part of Pride festivities, the Hollywood theatre showed the 2014 British film Pride, a drama inspired by the events surrounding the 1984-85 miners strike in the UK and the support that lesbian and gay activists provided to the striking miners. The film is available on DVD at the Multnomah County Library, and well worth seeing if you haven't yet had the chance.

As Ragina Johnson notes on SocialistWorker.org, the film holds important lessons for activists today about "how solidarity and alliances across oppressed groups can be built actively and deliberatively."

Other viewers have described it with terms like "lovely," "brilliantly entertaining," "joyous, well-researched, and liberating," and similar superlatives. Detractors have pointed to some broadly drawn characters and easy culture-clash comedy, and some (potentially trivializing) narrative clichés.

Arguably, it also underplays the significance of the police violence against the miners (though we see some archival footage at the start), and omits other important historical context.

For instance, in the 70s, the Labour government had split the union by introducing 'Area Incentive Schemes' alongside the structure of national pay bargaining and against national ballots, so that wages and conditions were to be decided locally. Thus when the Thatcher government declared in 1984 it was going to close 20 mines it considered insufficiently profitable, at the cost of 20,000 jobs, some miners in areas, including Northern Wales who considered themselves less at risk of losing their jobs, continued working rather than supporting the strike. That's why the villagers in the film's south Wales town comment on their hatred for the northern Welsh.

In addition, it may not be entirely clear to all viewers how historically significant the strike was. Like Ronald Reagan's breaking of the air traffic controller's strike in the US, Thatcher's breaking of the miner's strike in the UK marked a turning point in the defeat of traditional organized labor unions.

Despite its flaws, some of us are perhaps suckers for the soundtrack of 80s dance club tunes and traditional workers anthems.

Ray Goodspeed, writing in LeftUnity about his experience in the original events, comments of the film that

The most obvious change is that the antagonism towards us in [the Welsh Mining town of] Dulais has been exaggerated for dramatic effect. The welcome we received was actually even better than in the film, which also downplays the extent to which the original members were actively involved in the organised left, and reduces the numbers of those involved to tell a manageable story. Most of the important things portrayed are true, however, and Pride stays true to the spirit of a wonderful episode of British labour history.

Excluding the political affiliations and savvy of the activists involved is the central ground of critique in the scathing review of the film on the World Socialist Web Site, which faults it for allying itself with gay identity politics rather than worker's class politics.

And indeed, the film downplays the extent to which the relation between the groups was intersectional, emphasizing instead the analogies in their shared experiences of vilification and oppression by press, public, and police.

Moreover, in the current era of climate chaos, the demand to keep digging coal has a painful edge.  In practice, the choice was not between using coal and using less damaging sources of energy, since after the strike the UK turned to importing its coal.  In that sense, the film points toward the need for something more.

The rearguard action to hold on to the benefits of the Keynesian-Fordist bargain of the postwar years failed in the face of the triumph of neoliberalism marked by the defeat of the longest miner's strike in UK history.

As Bill's guest today, Leo Panitch, commented in The Guardian last year,

‘Responsible capitalism’ is nonsense – the left must offer a real alternative
Merely blaming Thatcher free-market rhetoric and sheer force of will for the undoing of the Keynesian welfare state ignores the deep crisis it was already in by the time she came along. As the main parties of the left responded to the growing contradictions between capitalist markets and social reforms by trying to cling to the chimera of a responsible capitalism, neoliberalism triumphed everywhere. The misguided attempt to cling to a romanticised image of a stable responsible capitalism in the face of the rise of neoliberalism was recognised as a failure by New Labour. But by embracing so completely a financialised global capitalism centred in the City of London, it further contributed to the growth of this chaotic and increasingly irrational system – as 2008 proved.

But the grassroots connections that grew up in the face of the fragmentation of traditional trade unionism prefigure the kind of organizing that we need more of for the future. Many activists and theorists are at work on plans for the future, and many visionaries are trying to help us think beyond capitalism.

Ursula Le Guin, in a speech last year at the National Book Awards, said,

We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality.

 

One place to find more of this is in the fiction collection Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, edited by Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown. The collection takes its title and inspiration form the work of science fiction writer Octavia Butler and opens with the observation[from Imarisha] that

all organizing is science fiction. When we talk about a world without prisons; a world without police violence; a world where everyone has food, clothing, shelter, quality education; a world free of white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, heterosexism; we are talking about a world that doesn’t currently exist. But collectively dreaming up one that does means we can begin building it into existence.
[But visionary fiction (she continues, alluding to Le Guin's comments)] allows us to imagine possibilities outside of what exists today. The only way we know we can challenge the divine right of kings is by being able to imagine a world where kings no longer rule us—or do not even exist.

Tonight at 7pm at The Independent Publishing Resource Center, 1001 SE Division, will be the Portland book release with readings by coeditor Imarisha and contributors Gabriel Teodros and David F Walker.

A listener calls attention to

another film that came out last year called 'Still the Enemy Within,' This film is a documentary from a rank and file miners perspective. I did a review of it for socialistworker.org.
http://socialistworker.org/2015/04/28/the-great-strikes-long-shadow
Trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJF67Ma9VRs

The struggle for justice still carries on, particularly the demands for and official inquiry into the  police violence at Orgreave- one of the most explosive episodes in UK labour history

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jun/12/andy-burnham-calls-for-hillsborough-style-inquiry-into-battle-of-orgreave

knocked up

Knocked Up was written and directed by Judd Apatow, best known for The 40 Year Old Virgin, and the director of photography was Portland native Eric Edwards. It’s a beautifully shot film, and it’s been getting enthusiastically positive reviews (especially at sites like Reviews for Guys and Movie for Guys).

All that press may have made the storyline familiar, but here it is in brief. Alison (played by Katherine Heigl), has just been promoted from behind the scenes to doing on-air interviews with celebrities. Out dancing with her sister to celebrate, she meets Ben (played by Seth Rogen), who’s out with his stoner slacker roommates. They spend the night together and she’s clearly alarmed in the morning (he asks, did we have sex?). But, as it turns out, she’s pregnant, and with little discussion of her options, she decides to continue the pregnancy and try to develop a real relationship with Ben.

A number of critics have suggested that the emotional center of the film lies with Alison’s sister Debbie and her husband Pete, played by Leslie Mann and Paul Rudd. The film is more interesting if we understand the Alison and Ben pairing as a kind of projection of the feelings of someone in Paul’s position (or Apatow’s).

At least one critic has suggested that the obvious thing for pretty, successful, upwardly-mobile Alison to do is the terminate the pregnancy and move on.

The problem is not that Knocked Up is “liberal” because it’s about casual sex and having a baby out of wedlock. The problem is that it is horribly conservative about embracing and enjoying an adult version of sexuality that has moved beyond dorm-room-esque groping. One night with some guy you don’t even know does not mean you must tie yourself to him for the rest of your life... unless you think that women must be punished for sex. Oh, but it’s not punishment: you get an adorable baby out of the deal! And you get to “train” a man!

Another observes that

It's just not believable that, in Alison and Ben's upper-middle-class, secular L.A. milieu, abortion would not be matter-of-factly discussed as a possibility in the case of a pregnancy this accidental. If she doesn't want one, great—obviously, there'd be no movie if she did—but let's hear about why not. Otherwise, her character becomes a cipher, a foil for Ben's epiphanies about growing up, without being allowed any epiphanies of her own.

The pro-natalist position is implicit; we never hear anything about Alison’s possible religious or moral scruples. But we know little about her character. Aside from her job and family, she seems to have no life, no friends, no interests, no psychology.

Clearly the movie is a Guy Fantasy that the gorgeous successful blonde will fall for the crass loser; that's pretty much the central joke. Comments on some blogs have been far more scathing:

first of all, the woman gives up her hope of love and compatibility. face it, it's a trade up for him, a trade down for her. second of all, when the woman's mother suggests she get an abortion, the woman digs her heels in for daughter rebellion. the guy writer obviously can't have a powerful older woman giving the gal advice. third, the woman has no women friends except bitches. Another guy fantasy. And the woman rejects her friends in favor of the guy. Another guy fantasy. Lastly, the guy gets to command the woman's sister to leave the birthing room because she doesn't belong there. Another guy fantasy - telling off the sister. . . . The message is - abandon all your friends and sisters and your mother for the chubby guy. Of course, he gets to keep his friends. Does anyone see how hateful that is?

The World Socialist Web Site notes that the film is very narrowly focused, entirely concerned with individual choices and relationships, and that despite the superficial lewdness, its values are conservative, signs of an "inward turning and lack of interest in broader currents of American life":

At a juncture when it’s difficult in everyday life to avoid complaints about (or curses aimed at) the Iraq war, George Bush, gas prices, multimillion-dollar salaries for corporate executives, falling house prices or other sources of public anger or anxiety; conspiracy theories, plausible or otherwise; rage of an increasingly social or anti-social character; and varying, often infuriating, manifestations of the generally dysfunctional character of American society, none of this appears or is hinted at in Apatow’s work. It is consciously oriented in another direction, a kind of comic, chaotic self-help book....

Apatow stacks the deck, in any event. He creates a situation in which there are only two possibilities for Ben—carrying on with his vaguely bohemian, hedonistic, idle lifestyle or “growing up” and becoming a respectable, money-making petty bourgeois. The possibility of maturing and accepting certain personal responsibilities as well as doing something substantial and challenging, not necessarily financially well-rewarded, with one’s life is excluded.

It’s perhaps worth acknowledging that the hedonistic idle life of Ben’s friends and roommates could be understood as a resistance to capitalism and the protestant work ethic, and that may be part of the appeal of those sections of the film, but surely there are better means of resistance.

kiss me deadly

Kiss Me Deadly will be playing this coming weekend (April 28th & 29th) as part of the Northwest Film Center’s Film Noir series, “Killer Ladies.” In the 1940s and 50s, Film Noir combined the grim vision of the American hard-boiled detective novel with the dramatic camera angles and lighting of German expressionist cinema, and Kiss Me Deadly is considered a late masterpiece of the genre. Directed in 1955 by Robert Aldrich, the film draws its title, though little else, from a Mickey Spillane book. It opens with a barefoot woman in a trenchcoat stopping a car on a dark road. The hitchhiker, Christina Bailey, played by Cloris Leachman, and the driver, private detective Mike Hammer, played by Ralph Meeker, are themselves stopped by mysterious thugs who torture them and leave them for dead. Mike survives, and his subsequent interrogation by interstate police convinces him that he’s on to something big, and potentially profitable. With the help of his secretary Velda, played by Maxine Cooper, he pursues the secret that Christina was hiding, and along the way encounters her supposed former roommate, Lily Carver, played by Gaby Rogers, as well as an opera singer, an art dealer, a number of boxers, and assorted cops, thugs, and other sadists wielding knives, guns, and hypodermic needles.
For more on femmes fatales and film noir, listen to the Old Mole Variety Hour tomorrow (April 23), or check out these links.



http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr0600/rc1fr10m.htm
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/classics/rr0600/cfrr10b.htm

movie mole: a history of violence

J & I reviewed A History of Violence, directed by David Cronenberg.

Nothing new here.

The film opens with a slow shot of a couple of guys, evidently criminals on the lam, “checking out” of a motel. This involves killing the folks who run the business, and the small girl who might have been a witness. We cut immediately to another small girl, screaming. She's had a nightmare about monsters, but her father, brother, and mother all pile into her bedroom to reassure her. The over-the-top contrast between the two sequences sets the tone for the film. Viggo Mortensen plays the devoted father of the small screamer, Tom Stall, who runs a diner in an Indiana town apparently without franchises, chain stores, or big box developments. When the criminals from the opening try to rob the diner, however, Tom goes into action, ruthlessly and gracefully killing both drifters and saving the employees and customers. The publicity that follows, presenting him as a hero, brings into the diner another group of scary men, this time mobsters from Philly who insist they know Tom as “Joey Cusack.” Although Tom's skill as a killer raises questions about his identity and threats to his family, it seems to empower his teenage son Jack, who finally stands up to a couple of high school bullies, and who seems to have inherited his father's ninja fighting skills. This comes in handy for another carefully choreographed scene of violent defense of self and family, in which the women are safely in the house, and father and son defend their turf.

What is the film saying about male violence, the american dream, redemption and forgiveness? Little enough about history. The stylized schematic quality of the film means there’s not much cultural or social context. And there’s not much personal history: we hear about Tom's transformation in becoming the family man we see at the beginning of the movie, but we don't see that transformation or know what motivated it.

The male protagonists (Tom and Jack) are both presented as soft, effeminate, gentle new-man types. But underneath, there’s violence. Tom’s wife Edie is a lawyer; Jack’s girlfriend tries to defuse a confrontation with the bully: the women try to avoid violence but the men know how to use it. She gets a restrining order and the the gangsters show up in the yard. And it turns her on even if she's also disgusted by it. Edie assures the sheriff that she trusts her husband is who he says, but then when they're alone, she rejects him. Tom begins to rape his wife, until Edie gets into it herself. We might suppose this shows that violence is a turn on for women as well as men, that everyone has that shadowy side underneath, or, more cynically, that it reflects a male fantasy about women being turned on by rape.

This film has been praised for the performances, which are generally good except for the stilted little blonde girl, and for the twists of the plot, which I found predictable, as well as for a critique of violence and its representations. The fighting and killing scenes are the most rapidly edited and kinetic parts of the movie, but some reviewers see the film as forcing us to interrogate our pleasure in these representations by holding the camera on the blasted, bleeding corpses of the dead, holding our attention to the consequences of violence, and placing the action hero in a version of the American dream—middle american heartland small town where neighbors greet each other on the streets, and the protagonist has a small business, a beautiful wife, two attractive children and a house in the country. Both Tom and Edie wear silver crosses, and one neighbor bids farewell by saying, “See you in church.” After killing his brother (who's been trying to kill him his whole life), Tom throws the gun in lake & bathes, baptism, rebirth, yadda yadda, yadda. Redemption is possible, but is apparently achieved by cleansing violence. The scenes of Tom's violence are all morally justified –he's acting in defense of self and family, the men he kills are not themselves redeemable.

But the notion that the wholesome heartland conceals a violent shadow is hardly new. (American Beauty, Blue Velvet) Nor is the gunslinger who tries to hang up his guns and gets pulled back to violence (Shane, Unforgiven).

The heterosexual nuclear family remains intact. Men defend it through righteous violence. Nothing new here.