Death on the Nile (2022)

The prologue of the movie is ingenious, and surprises the viewers by plunging them immediately into the trenches of World War I and a glimpse of Belgian Detective Hercule Poirot’s past, before he was an investigator – but when he already had the kind of mind that would develop into one. That sequence, in fact, is quintessential Branagh. It epitomizes Kenneth Branagh’s assets as a filmmaker: flamboyant, theatrical, boldly expanding out from the anticipated milieu and imagining a back-story for Poirot that isn’t strictly necessitated by the mystery Agatha Christie wrote but that grounds the story to come by adding depth to Poirot, and in a way that the audience can readily understand and enjoy. Branagh’s greatest strength, perhaps, is his willingness “to go there” – wherever ‘there’ might be – without pulling his punches in fear of whether it is proper, de rigueur, intellectually sanctioned, etc. When he directed Shakespeare films, this was known as ‘popularizing’ Shakespeare, although that was always a very odd way to put it, considering that no writer since Biblical days has written for the mass audience more overtly or successfully over the long-term than Shakespeare. Nevertheless, Branagh was intent on bringing out what was already there in Shakespeare, unlike the stuffy dramatizations which seemed to want to hide it, and now with Death on the Nile, as with Murder on the Orient Express, he seems again on a mission to make us appreciate the author he’s adapting to the screen, not as a distant curiosity, but up close and visceral.

Death on the Nile is a grandiose kind of movie, the kind where Gal Gadot goes for a walk on the ship’s deck to go speak to Poirot and the shot itself is a tour de force that shows off the boat and how big it is, and has fun being able to move the camera in a crane shot that follows her in one move. When a spurned love interest makes a reappearance, the scale of her entrance is operatic, with an enormous red train on her dress in a high camera angle. When the holiday-makers pass by ancient Egypt’s pyramids and sphinxes, these ancient wonders are giant-sized – something akin to D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance, although this time they are probably CGI – and the grandeur of them dwarfs the human sight-seers and their petty squabbles. It’s obvious that this is a big-budget movie, and that it fully exploits how expansive it can be. But it does so in a classic-Hollywood vein, not in a typical modern action-movie vein (the kind that sacrifices visual beauty and originality for special effects wizardry and rapid cutting). It’s a movie that wants to spin you a tale, of another place and time, and let you participate in the story-making. Mystery aficionados like trying to guess who the killer is, and a game is played between the reader and the author, leaving clues but trying to surprise as well. Branagh lays down clues with the right amount of aplomb (in a story with sufficient complication) so that you can enjoy the ride and the process simultaneously. For instance, you might notice how shifty-eyed one of the characters looks when the camera pans past the group of passengers, or you might register “huh, that character mentioned she has lost an item, I bet that item’ll turn up as part of the plot,” but this just makes it more fun when the strings are untangled later.

This time, the film is not as visually frenetic as Murder on the Orient Express was. Branagh was so busy in that first Agatha Christie film, it almost looked like Baz Luhrmann. Poirot could not even lie down in his bunk on that train without the camera angle slanting bizarrely, and there were a lot of attention-getting compositions, movement, and sudden cuts. Though lively and energetic, the many distractions made it difficult to follow the plot. By contrast, this time around, the plot flows smoothly and the cinematic style is entertaining and inviting, less hyperbolic. 

Death on the Nile is also quite witty. There were a number of laugh-out loud moments. For example, in one scene Poirot accuses two people of murder and they are deeply offended, and his friend, from the other side of the room, helpfully offers comfort: “He accuses everyone of murder.” Poirot admits: “it’s a problem.” There’s also the casting of ‘Saunders and French’, the longtime comedy duo from England, as a couple traveling together -- a clever little reference. Jennifer Saunders’ character is also amusing because she’s a socialist, and keeps expressing her critical attitude about the rich and their morays. There is also, of course, Poirot’s own anal-retentive qualities, and how his ability to notice when tiny little details are out of order is both a bonus, as a detective, and an annoyance, as a person. And there’s his mustache, which has only grown more stylish and more relevant.

The cast is consistently excellent, and features Wonder Woman herself, Gal Gadot, as a hostess to this huge ship-bound party; Annette Bening, a a grande dame who carries her artist’s easel around Egypt with her and is a controlling matriarch to Poirot’s pal Bouc (Tom Bateman); Sophie Okonedo as a lounge singer and Letitia Wright as her daughter; Russell Brand in a surprising appearance as a stoic, clean-cut, bespectacled doctor – clearly not type-casting; and Arnie Hammer and the French-British actress Emma Mackey as one-time lovers. Though Christie’s novel is from 1937 and the film retains that period setting, Branagh and the screenplay by Michael Green (who also adapted Murder on the Orient Express) have made the sensibility more modern, so there are inter-racial and same-sex romances, and some fluidity and openness between classes.

Though Branagh and Green manage to extract an overall theme about love and passion from Poirot’s own personal arc as well as from the murder plot, Death on the Nile is a movie that embraces unabashedly how frothy and frivolous it is – as John Gielgud said, “Style is knowing what kind of play you’re in”, and Branagh as a director follows that dictum and embraces the style of the material itself. He is not embarrassed to show us rich people leading pampered lives and then murdering each other and acting shocked, because that’s the material, and it has its own value, even if that value is no cure for cancer or climate change. In order to underline what world or style we’re in, Branagh stages several musical numbers, set in night-clubs or on the dance floor of the cruise ship, which enliven the whole enterprise (especially with some risqué moves that I’m pretty sure were not period artifacts) and which also provide Poirot with a love interest of his own. The movie makes no bones about showing us just how decadent the wealthy characters on this pleasure cruise really are, knowing that the audience is later going to enjoy seeing them get their comeuppance.

As far as class politics, Poirot himself also helps to provide balance. Though he is invited into the highest echelons, we have already seen from the prologue that he came from humble farmer stock. Moreover, he doesn’t get down with their debauchery; he is an observer, an outsider. He counters their excesses and histrionics with his own reasonableness and calmness. While he is quirky enough to be a memorable and interesting character, it is also clear that he remains sane even in the midst of this insular, self-centered social circle, so the audience can watch these vain and corrupt people through his eyes – detached and bemused. Though the idle rich would love to win him over, his loyalty is, always, to uncovering the facts. In short, he is actually a timely role model for our own society.

"The Dark Knight Rises", Media Violence, & Social Change

This article was originally published on OpEdNews.com on Tuesday, August 14, 2012:

"The Dark Knight Rises" still of Christian Bale and the suit

It seems obvious to me that the Aurora, Colorado cinema shooting and the close-on-its-heels massacre at the Sikh temple make the need for gun control clear and absolute, in particular the need to renew an assault weapons ban that would have covered the assault rifle James Holmes used. I immediately signed all the gun control petitions which showed up in my inbox, such as this bipartisan one from 700 mayors. (Others are listed at the end of this article). What seems patently obvious to me, however, is not so obvious to everyone, as gun sales in Colorado spiked 41% after the shooting at the Batman screening. The gun lobby -- which is to a large extent a gun manufacturers' lobby -- is certainly not going to let reforms come easily, even though there have been 60 mass shootings in the U.S. just in the 18 months since the Arizona shooting that injured Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.

Though there are many factors that contribute to this insanity, surely one of the reasons reform is so difficult is the prevalence of extremely powerful gun commercials available 24/7, slickly produced by multi-national corporations. These are not ads for specific gun models per se but movies, video games, TV shows, online videos, violent songs, and yes, graphic novels and comic books, which send the message that it's a very threatening world out there, that there are people who are less-than-human who you should hate, and that the way to be strong and cool is to be proficient at violence. This is emotional, gut-level propaganda, and it works.

James Holmes' deep identification with The Joker of the 2008 Dark Knight movie is one more very serious warning signal about our culture. When scientists measure toxicity levels in our water or air or they measure the growth of an epidemic, the markers that indicate the problem seem to first be the most susceptible members of the population. Poisons tend to be more noticeable in the homes of the poor and the bodies of children, pregnant women, the elderly, and those with compromised systems. Individuals like Holmes who so horrendously mistake movies for real life -- or real life for a movie -- are the ones who happen to be most susceptible. But the breakdowns or mania or whatever you want to call it that they go through are indicators of the presence of toxins which put everyone at risk.

The high school massacre at Columbine (another city in Colorado) was linked to the fantasy sequence in Basketball Diaries , when a very young Leonardo DiCaprio in a cool black trenchcoat mowed down his classmates to a sound cue of applause. Several other similar high school shootings ensued which were also linked to the movie. In fact, two years before Columbine, Basketball Diaries had already been the subject of a lawsuit by parents of victims of at a high school shooting in Paducah, Kentucky.

The same lawsuit targeted Natural Born Killers , which has been linked to eight different murders committed by extreme fans of the film, including a matricide and fraticide, a decapitation committed by a 14 year old, and the murder of the family of the killer's girlfriend. Oliver Stone's killing-spree saga was also sued (unsuccessfully) by a victim who'd been paralyzed in an NBK -inspired shooting--novelist John Grisham supported that lawsuit.

"Child's Play" still of Chucky and friend

In one of the most chilling instances of life imitating art, an Australian man devoted to the horror flick Child's Play killed 35 people; the same movie was implicated in England, when two10-year olds (who clearly should never have been watching Chucky in the first place) abducted and murdered a toddler. Another Brit watched First Blood too many times, and went on a Rambo-inspired shooting rampage through the streets of his village. Back in Colorado, a teenaged girl and her boyfriend beat the girl's sister to death while babysitting because they were practicing moves from the video game-derived film Mortal Combat. 

Other films implicated in separate incidents of overtly influential violence include Fight Club(with several copycat fight clubs and even an attempted bombing linked to it), The Matrix, Gladiator, RoboCop2, Money Train, Scream (in costume), Magnum Force, Dirty Harry, The Collector, The Deer Hunter (in the form of Russian Roulette), Taxi Driver, and A Clockwork Orange,  and the pattern dates as far back as 1949's White Heat.

The New York Times points out that five of the films on the above list, as well as The Dark Knight and many other violent films, were made by Warner Brothers. But I doubt that this is truly a matter of a specific studio or specific films. (And I personally think schlock-meisters shouldn't even be put in the same camp as the brilliant ace directors Scorsese, Kubrick, and Fincher, nor should smart and artistically ambitious Cimino, Stone, or Nolan be tarred with the same brush as a vacuous industry just out to make a profit.) The issue goes much deeper, and is a continuing and unthinking trend despite all the evidence that violence in mainstream media is linked to increased aggression. Two of Warner Brothers 1960's movies, Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde and Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, were controversial for the graphic way they depicted violence, new at that time. But those seminal achievements took violence seriously -- they were realistic about it because they were considering the actual consequences of violence on the characters and what it really means in a big-picture way. Since then, however, Hollywood has co-opted the gore but shown next to no interest in the meaning.

It is no longer conjecture what effect this is having. In 2003, for example, a study by the Texas Department of Human Services and Iowa State University found that music with violent lyrics led subjects to have more aggressive thoughts and feelings. A number of studies on violent video games have also found links to aggression and violent behavior. One such, a 2012 study, discovered that video games featuring violence against women increased male subjects' belief in myths about rape.

University of Michigan professor L. Rowell Huesmann claims that research in this area of media effects is already conclusive: "It's been well established that media violence makes kids behave more aggressively. Of course, there's no scientific way to evaluate how media violence may have or may have not caused real violence, but there's definitely a relationship, a 'priming' or 'cuing' of behavior for certain individuals." Huesmann's clarity is chilling: "Every study indicates a relationship. The statistical correlation between childhood exposure to violence in media and aggressive behavior is about the same as that between smoking and lung cancer."

Amusing Ourselves to Death

There is the possibility that we, as Neil Postman put it in his 1985 "media ecology' treatise, areAmusing Ourselves to Death . Urban life has cut many kids off completely from any meaningful experience of nature or any of its calming, restorative effects, Richard Louv argued in his 2005 book Last Child in the Woods , and replaced it with a "wired' existence -- which is starting to show links to learning disabilities and ADHD. 75% of families own a video game player; boys spend approximately 41 minutes per day playing video games between the ages of 8 and 18. Yet scientists have recently learned that the human brain is still in a formative stage throughout that span -- our brains don't reach full maturity until age 25.

Still, the effects don't even stop at age 25. In their July 16^th issue, Newsweek ran a cover story headlined "iCrazy." It consolidated reports coming in on what the amount of time we spend online, emailing, or texting, is doing to us, and the results aren't pretty. A study released this year found that intensive web use alters our brains: heavy web users are adding abnormal white cells -- "extra nerve cells built for speed," Newsweek explains -- while at the same time losing 10-20% of their grey matter: areas needed for memory, emotion, and speech processing, among other key functions. The magazine quotes UCLA neuroscience expert Peter Whybrow: "the computer is like electronic cocaine." Oxford pharmacology prof Susan Greenfield does not mince words: "this is an issue as important and unprecedented as climate change."

The article discusses the case of Jason Russell, a campaigner whose video went viral, leading him to virtually fuse with his computer, barely sleeping, over the next subsequent days. He ended up likening his life to, ironically, another Christopher Nolan movie, Inception , telling his followers that he felt like he was in "a dream within a dream" -- and then had a public breakdown, apparently a "reactive psychosis.'

Another alarming result of internet addiction left a tragically innocent victim: a depressed South Korean couple spent 12-hour stretches at an internet cafe, raising a virtual child in an absorbing fantasy game -- while back at home, their actual infant starved to death.     

In the late Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 , the hero's wife is so narcotized by an electronic fantasy life she can't even recall her previous night's suicide attempt. She lives for the nightly serial story that appears on the walls of her living-room, a fiction she is so emotionally engaged in she calls the characters "the Family." (The show also provides scripts and interactive opportunities for the spectator -- it's like the late Bradbury predicted gaming back in 1953.)

Soap opera actors have long been baffled by fans who can't tell them apart from their characters; quite a few other actors have also had that experience. A few are named on tvtropes.org: Robert Young would get asked for medical advice because he played Dr. Marcus Welby on TV, and Edward Woodward was often asked for help because of his recurring role as The Equalizer. Jason Hervey, who played Kevin's older brother on The Wonder Years, was once berated for being so mean to his sib. The biggest head-scratcher of a plethora of anecdotes comes from Dan Blocker, best-known as Hoss on Bonanza, who maintained that a woman asked him how Hoss was, and when he told her he was fictional, she replied: "I know that, all I want to know is if he's alright!"

  
Movie still of Keanu Reeves inside "The Matrix"

It's so bizarre it seems funny, but not knowing which reality you're living in was not so funny when a teen who watched The Matrix more than 100 times ended up taking part in the 2002 sniper attacks in Washington, D.C. The Matrix also allegedly convinced three other (separate) murderers that they were in an alternate reality; a "matrix" where murder wasn't really murder.  

Celebrity hype is also its own ongoing fantasy, existing on a plane above the narratives these professional artists create. Holmes' state of mind leading up to the Aurora shooting was probably goaded by the huge advance hype for The Dark Knight Rises. Ads for the opening of the movie would have been constant and omnipresent, and the fan base was passionate and vocal -- causing a furor on Rotten Tomatoes even before the film opened.  Some people think they receive messages through their TV sets. John Guare's Obie-winning play The House of Blue Leaves is set in the 1960's and features an "empty nest"-aged mother descriptively nicknamed Bananas. She does little but watch TV. In a monologue, she tells her husband about a vision she had featuring LBJ and Jackie Kennedy and others from the news: "I turn on Johnny Carson to get my mind off and there's Cardinal Spellman and Bob Hope... I'm nobody. I knew all those people better than me...I know everything about them. Why can't they love me?" 

Or as progressives like Ralph Nader have pointed out, the people on the covers of magazines are always the "winners", the ridiculously successful stars of entertainment, politics, business, and sports -- and everyone else is invisible. The onslaught of virtual reality doesn't stem from the consumer's imagination, it's pre-fabricated, and suits a particular agenda. There's a possibility that when we consume so much media it is really consuming us instead.

Batman, Counter-Revolutionary

The mainstream news media has certainly not been very diligent about the issue of massive domestic surveillance after 9/11. For starters, they ignored evidence that the Bush Administration began secretly and illegally spying on Americans months before 9/11. Consequently, in the previous Batman movie The Dark Knight (2008), screenwriters David S. Goyer, Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan made this kind of large-scale spying seem completely justified by having Batman do it to catch the Joker. They evidently got their news from corporate media, not from indy sources that showed the scarier ramifications of government surveillance, like "Democracy Now."

These three writers seem to continue to rely on mainstream news too much, judging from their current film The Dark Knight Rises. Their new Batman movie envisions a people's movement to "take back" New York from the rich; it fills the streets with revolutionaries. Yet it reveals them to be a criminal, violent, unthinking mob. Director Christopher Nolan maintains that he and his collaborators conceived of the idea long before the Occupy movement came into existence, and the production schedule would seem to bear that claim out. But what this means is that the Nolan brothers and Goyer (whose other writing credits include Call of Duty video games) saw the economic crisis of 2008, saw the lack of accountability for Wall Street, saw the gap between the haves and have-nots, and concluded that the most fearful thing out of all of that would be if the people were given their chance to rise up. It's ok for the craped crusader to rise, as the title indicates, but then that's pseudo-religious. He knows what's best for the people much better than they do.

Nolan attests to Rolling Stone that the scenario was an evil person seizing control of a populist movement -- and Bane (Tom Hardy) is a nasty, nasty villain, make no mistake. But he doesn't actually steer the revolution. All he does, once he's killed various people and disposed of Batman (Christian Bale), is trap the city's police force underground and open the prisons; the rest he seems to leave up to the people. And what they do with the freedom is to run rampant. At the same time, (BRIEF SPOILER ALERT) the environmentalist and investor in sustainable energy played by Marion Cotillard turns out to be a fraud. That's the problem with The Dark Knight Rises.

Unlike Occupy's scrupulous and egalitarian parliamentary procedures, the only grassroots decision-making process on display in the film is summary sentencing. The crazed judge who presides at the lethal, retributive tribunals is Dr. Jonathan Crane (Cillian Murphy), the Scarecrow villain of Nolan's first Batman film and the cameo in his second. Also unlike Occupy's experiences, the confrontation between the film's revolutionaries and the police -- literally referred to as "war" -- is the complete inverse of what actually happened at protests. Nolan's police wear such quaint, friendly-cop uniforms, they look like their aim is to give directions to tourists. They brandish no weapons, not even "less lethal" ones like those they often shoot or spray at protesters in real life. On the other hand, the rebels are obviously armed and eager for violence. They've even got tanks Bane stole for them from our superhero -- batmobiles painted in camo. You can tell it's a comic book when civilians have the military advantage over the NYPD.

With the news media having already done their best to defeat the Occupy movement, the resonance some have noted between the uprising in The Dark Knight Rises and Occupy Wall Street is just the kind of simplistic, visceral demonization of a particular group that does brainwash people and lead to violence against that group -- whether in the form of hate crimes or just in acquiescence with the abusive practices of authorities or government policies. The way this works is illustrated, for example, in Vito Russo's groundbreaking book The Celluloid Closet (also a film), which shows how Hollywood has propagandized against LGBT characters, often having them either die tragically or become killers. (One notorious example was William Friedkin's Cruising, which gay-bashers referenced directly.) Jack Shaheen's encyclopedic tomeReel Bad Arabs (now a doc as well) exposes Hollywood's shabby, stereotyped, and hostile treatment of Arabs and Muslims on-screen. (Another Friedkin film, Rules of Engagement, vilifies the people of one such country and was probably very helpful in inculcating support for U.S. bombing in that part of the world.) The Dark Knight Rises, even if it was never deliberately meant to invoke Occupy Wall Street, adds another powerful element to an already dangerous technological, political, and cultural mix in our society that breeds hatred and violence. This must be very pleasurable for Frank Miller, the graphic novelist who created the ultra-violent Sin City, the racist and war-mongering 300, and the Batman comic book series which had the mostinfluence on Nolan's film trilogy. He made headlines with a hysterical screed against Occupy on his site last November.

Nolan, meanwhile, has tried to stress to interviewers that A Tale of Two Cities was the conscious inspiration for The Dark Knight Rises , not Occupy. Indeed, Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) reads aloud from the novel in the film, equating Batman with the self-sacrificing Sydney Carton hero. But in A Tale of Two CitiesCharles Dickens wasn't just critiquing the Red Terror, he was issuing a warning, essentially the same as JFK issued: "those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable." Dickens doesn't get to the carnival of death of the French Revolution until after he has poignantly described the gross injustices suffered by the French masses under their oppressors -- so we can see how the violence perpetrated by the aristocracy came back to literally bite their heads off.


Catwoman in orange in a still from "The Dark Knight Rises" 

By contrast, all The Dark Knight Rises has to represent the plight of the downtrodden is the Catwoman-origin-story of scrappy, slinky Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway), who makes class-conscious jibes at our billionaire hero. Kyle resents the wealth of Batman's alter-ego Bruce Wayne, makes statements about inequity, and has to cat-burgle to pay her rent. This sure doesn't justify a revolution the way Dickens did, with a nobleman callously running over a pauper's child, and aristocratic brothers hiding their rapes and murders by incarcerating an innocent physician, in solitary, forever.

Still, as in Dickens' classic, prisons are a prominent motif in Nolan's third Batman film. An aggressive new city ordinance has swelled the prison ranks of Gotham -- and when the doors open, those thugs hurry to exact revenge. Like many comic book superheroes and archvillains,The Dark Knight Rises is a model of Freudian theory: Batman certainly experienced an original trauma, and there's an excruciating origin story on the villain side as well, revealed in the climax. It revolves around an exotic, primitive prison where the inmates are dropped down to the bottom of a deep pit they can never escape, taunted only by a small circle of burning sunlight high above. This experience destroys the psyche, as indefinite detention did to the gentle doctor in A Tale of Two Cities.

However, it should be noted that the neglected prisoners in The Dark Knight Rises wear desert-climate robes and face-concealing head scarves, they live in a barren vaguely Eastern land, and oh yes, they claw and tear at each other, because the assumption is that's a region where there's always civil unrest, I guess. Perhaps that is why Batman cares only about Gotham, and doesn't try to get the prisoners out of their hell-hole; perhaps their lives are naturally barbaric, and they have none of the First World's right to a decent life.

A rope-and-pulley system to help them escape would be nothing to this billionaire with an engineering firm. Bruce Wayne uses, as his butler Alfred (Michael Caine) puts it, "air superiority" to defeat evil. (This joke is delivered in the middle of a taut action sequence; it's amusing unless, of course, "air superiority" makes you think of U.S. war crimes.) But if The Dark Knight Rises is going to lay messiah vibes on Batman -- he's got a little resurrection thing going on, and Les Miserables of the Asian prison feel it and chant for him worshipfully -- then it's unlikely the movie really sees him and them as fellow humans.

Rising Up from the Hell-Hole
A survivor of the terror attack on Colorado's midnight screening, but the friend of one of the twelve who were murdered, is suing Warner Bros., among other defendants, on the grounds that the 2008 Dark Knight film incited James Holmes to commit his heinous imitation of the Joker. 

While lawsuits like this are understandable as a way to vent the rage and grief such a senseless loss engenders, what could the legal grounds be? And who would be more legally liable, filmmakers who create wooden characters and one-dimensional plots, or those who craft convincing films?

If movies or other forms of mass entertainment have content that is harmful to society's interests, we're going to have to use sociological arguments to make them change -- and when their profits are going sky-high, it will take an organized effort to be heard. When the Council on American-Islamic Relations campaigned against the title of Alan Ball's film Towelhead (coincidentally, a Warner Independent release), Ball met with representatives in a recorded dialogue, and heard their objections during a panel discussion. This airing of all sides was one of the bonus features on the DVD. It is consciousness-raising like that which we ought to embark on with the entertainment industry about violence.

The way media violence often defines the identity of "the other' -- justifying and encouraging racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, and imperialism -- merits extensive discussion. It could be a kind of Truth and Reconciliation Commission between the industry and the audience. This process would educate both media-makers and the public in general -- including consumers, parents, and those in the helping professions who treat addictions. It could also put us on the road to eliminate some of the propaganda that makes a segment of the U.S. favor gun proliferation in the first place.

Ironically, the entity which knows best how to run respectful, attentive consciousness-raising sessions these days is Occupy. The entertainment industry should try asking them for some pointers.

 
Still of the Joker from "The Dark Knight" (2008)

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Here are links to take action for gun control:
Credo Action petition; The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence petition; Mayors Against Illegal Guns website; American Friends campaign for assault weapons ban renewal; Petition by a MoveOn member for assault weapons ban

Women’s Work at the Oscars: The Iron Lady, The Help, and Albert Nobbs (2012)

Originally published on Political Film Blog on Saturday, March 3, 2012. 

By Jennifer Epps

This Oscar season a pair of period films about the British Isles, The Iron Lady and Albert Nobbs, were nominated for their tour-de-force performances by two of America’s most established and acclaimed actresses. Meryl Streep has now won the Best Actress Oscar for her sincere and uncannily precise mimicry of Britain’s Margaret Thatcher. But Streep and Glenn Close both delivered dexterous physical performances with distinctive internal rhythms – Close as the cross-dressing, timid ‘girly man’ Albert Nobbs; Streep as the unshakably determined prime minister whom the Soviets dubbed ‘The Iron Lady.’ Added to the mix of women’s work at the Oscars this year was The Help, and Viola Davis’ Best Actress nomination for her dignified and emotionally full performance as a mistreated maid in racially segregated Mississippi in the 1960’s.

The Iron Lady and Albert Nobbs take diametrically opposed stances on the British/Irish class system, and this is no insignificant thing with a system that has served as a centuries-long organizing principle of oppression. The legacy of the British class system, which believed unquestioningly that some people were superior and others were inferior simply because of who they were born to, has left lasting, subtle scars over generations and has had a huge impact on the economic and cultural fabric of that society. The same thing, of course, could be said about the stateside system at the centre of The Help, which joined class oppression with racial subjugation and manifested in even more vicious forms and even deeper scars. Furthermore, all three films are very tied up with themes of gender politics, in ways we don’t often get to see on screen. The commonality of themes makes these three movies and their lead-actress performances interesting to discuss as a trio.

Albert Nobbs (2011)

The drama Albert Nobbs (in theatres now) is like a cross between Boys Don’t Cry and The Remains of the Day. If you thought it was impossible for any server to be more uptight than Anthony Hopkins’ head butler in the latter film, Glenn Close’s hotel waiter “Albert Nobbs” has a surprise for you. Hopkins’ butler certainly did suppress a lot of himself, but at least he was open about his gender. Nobbs is actually a woman in 19th century Ireland, but she has been passing as a man for years because the employment opportunities in the service industry are better that way. Although women dressing as men in literature often find new levels of independence, in Nobbs’ case, it has led to a life of rigidity and self-effacement. Terrified of being discovered, she has squashed down anything that could give her away, and obsessively plays by the rules. (She glowers when other hotel staff stray from them.) This has gone on for so long, she comes across to her co-workers as lacking a core self; all they really know about her is that they can’t figure her out.

Albert Nobbs features an all-round great cast full of familiar, mostly British or Irish, faces. Mia Wasikowska, Brendan Gleeson, Pauline Collins, Phyllida Law, and Jonathan Rhys Meyers bring to life the tensions between the ‘upstairs’ and ‘downstairs’ worlds of the residential hotel. The filmmakers are especially interested in the lively downstairs atmosphere, and those characters are much fuller. The soul of the movie, however, belongs to Close’s eccentric performance as a delicate misfit uncertain about her place in the world, and to the solid, steady-eyed work of co-star Janet McTeer as a housepainter who also cross-dresses as a man — but is secure about her strategy and her perceptions.

Based on a novella by Irish author George Moore, this film’s origins as literature can be felt in the ironic and somewhat detached tone, in the elusiveness and ambiguity of the scenes, and in the preferences for long looks between the characters as they ponder and scrutinize each other. Though a small film, it has an enormous amount on its mind. Lesbianism, gender roles, marriage as an economic contract, the class system, selfishness, kindness, loneliness, and love are all themes that bubble up as the tale unfolds.

This is not mere British miserabilism. There is plenty of humor and light-hearted moments, and certainly warm ones: the lively conversations and mischievousness among the staff; the example McTeer and Bronagh Gallagher set as the happy lesbian couple of “Hubert Page” and Cathleen; Hubert’s patient mentoring of Albert; even the compassion the director Rodrigo García lets us feels for the young servants Helen (Wasikowska) and Joe (Aaron Johnson) at the same time as we are sickened by their cruelty to Nobbs. It is a non-judgmental story of the differences in how people try to make their way in the world.

It is part of the film’s worthy mission to unveil the universes swirling behind the most placid exteriors. Early in the film, for instance, a heartless patrician gets a young hotel footman fired. The footman (Johnson) glares at the aristocrat with a coiled look reminiscent of the furious gladiator in Kubrick’s Spartacus, right before he strikes at Laurence Olivier. We get to know this employee, and his energy, resourcefulness and dreams quite well. And yet it turns out he doesn’t know how to translate any of that into the kind of life he wants.

Nobbs, the main character, is harmless, but her life has become so constricted (both figuratively and literally, with daily chest-binding) that she has devolved into a naïve, childlike daydreamer. She can’t fathom how it is that “Hubert” has been able to create such a fulfilled life while bucking the system. Nobbs is methodical and disciplined, but following steps precisely just won’t apply to such fundamentals.

Moore was pretty far ahead of his time to be writing about women masquerading as men — without the standard reassurances that it’s just a lark and gender roles are still unchangeable. In so many performances of Shakespearean comedies, for instance, the cross-dressing heroine is too scared to sword-fight, and a man – believing she’s a guy – punches her jokingly on the arm, and it hurts her. At the end of these plays, the women are restored to skirts and rewarded with husbands. In Albert Nobbs, however, Albert and Hubert take a break from their usual man garb and don some old dresses. Though Close and McTeer have both played very sexy hetero women in other films, in this scene they manage to look completely out of their elements, as if they’ve lost the ability to wear women’s clothes. Unlike the Shakespearean masquerades, this film seems to be saying that gender roles are not set in stone but are to a large extent social constructs.

Albert Nobbs is squarely on the side of the disenfranchised, and on resistance. The script, co-written with Close by Gabriella Prekop and John Banville from István Szabó’s story, is very astute about survival (physical, financial, and emotional) and the different ways people go about it. Pauline Collins’ hotel-owner is certainly no role model, but the film shows a Dickensian understanding of her determination to do what she thinks is necessary to survive. In the society of this film, stratified by class, gender, and sexual orientation, the meek do not inherit the earth.

Other titles in author Moore’s literary oeuvre include “Celibates,” “In Single Strictness,” “The Untilled Field,” and “Memoirs of My Dead Life,” all of which hint at the kind of poetry of the unlived life that emanates from this film. Perhaps the main subject of Albert Nobbs is a troubling question neither sociologists nor psychologists yet seem able to solve: What makes some people resilient in the face of adversity while others fail to thrive? Or as the hotel’s resident doctor (Gleeson) mutters in frustration: “I don’t know why people lead such miserable lives.”

The Help (2011)

The Help (now out on DVD) is certainly, predominantly, a film about racism, and a tribute to generations who withstood it and carved out meaningful lives in the midst of it. It is also about mothering (both good and bad), women’s friendships (between blacks, between whites, and between blacks and whites), and women’s liberation. Writer-director Tate Taylor doesn’t aim for a naturalistic tone in any of these areas – at times the film is so broad, it seems to be more comedy than drama. But it’s obvious from the moment tomboyish wannabe journalist Skeeter (Emma Stone) swears she has no interest in marriage that this film aims to be an empowering crowd-pleaser, not an exposé.

It’s true that the reality of racial violence in Mississippi remains discreetly in the background of The Help, but this is a movie that re-imagines the period with a different outcome, like when we go back to sleep after waking from a dream that has turned bad — and we change it. This movie is a fantasy about fighting back: not unlike Nine to Five, though with domestic staff rather than secretaries. The revenge is carried out by way of humiliating pranks and blackmail, and the empowerment is achieved by speaking truth to power, which the maids Aibileen (Viola Davis) and Minny (Octavia Spencer) do when they go public with their stories – via a book Skeeter writes based on interviews with them. The smart, rebellious Skeeter is one of two liberal whites in the film who never considers African-Americans as anything but equals; the other is Celia (Jessica Chastain), a sweet, sheltered newlywed who is excluded from the cut-throat society of the town’s white housewives, and therefore hasn’t learned their prejudices.

Though a feel-good movie like this adaptation of Kathryn Stockett’s wildly popular debut novel may go easy on the audience, there is something to be said — if your aim is to spread peace, love and understanding — for making a movie that people will watch. Aibileen has trauma in her past, daily humiliation in her present, and heartbreak on a recurring basis, as she bonds tightly with the children she takes care of only to have them wrenched away from her on an employer’s whim. Certainly there’s nothing very radical or new in that, and Taylor makes sure to surround the sadness with uplift and frequent allusions to the power of friendship and love. With a pretty uncontroversial message, is The Help unnecessary? Sadly not; we’ve seen from reactions to Obama’s presidency that things have not progressed nearly as far as we had hoped. Though Americans should already know Aibileen’s story and others like it, they need reminders.

Besides, by focusing its portrait of racism on rich white women, rather than the blood-and-guts style of their KKK cousins, The Help actually increases its relevance to today. It trains us to look for the milder manifestations of racism under a veneer of cordiality. It also highlights the hypocrisy of double standards. These well-coiffed housewives hysterically enforce racial segregation of bathrooms in their homes because they think their maids carry disease, but they’re happy to eat the maids’ cooking and blithely hand their children over to those same maids to do all the mothering – which, as is demonstrated for us early in the film, includes potty training. (Plus if anyone should be worried about disease it ought to be the maids themselves – they’re the ones who have to scrub the families’ commodes).

Toilets, incidentally, are even more central a motif in The Help than in a Danny Boyle film, though with less work for the props department. I do have to say the toilet motif here is eventually integrated into the plot in such an extended and ridiculous way that it destroys credibility. But as an initial idea, the bathroom segregation theme is a very real and down-to-earth way to demonstrate the tangible effects of racism on the most everyday human behaviors.

The Caucasian society-ladies in The Help also happen to be terrible mothers. These upper-class wives don’t just hate blacks, they hate their own children – they have kids because that’s what is expected of them, but take very little interest in them. Children are noisy and inconvenient, totally contrary to the values of the class. Without Aibileen and others like her, these children would have no one on their sides. I don’t think sympathy for a privileged white toddler diminishes the pain and suffering African-Americans underwent in 1963 Mississippi. It just shows the intersection of prejudices.

Besides hating blacks and children, these matrons hate women too. The young married clique led by Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard) meets for bridge and ladies’ auxiliary meetings, but they still behave like they’re in high school. They’re bitchy and gossipy – and we see how their cattiness is a sublimation for lives that are empty shadows to their husbands’. By contrast, Skeeter rejects both Hilly’s attempts to make her a segregationist and her own mother’s attempts to fuss over and prep her for the marriage market. Skeeter’s independence in one area feeds her independence in the other.

Incidentally, because The Help is a film devotedly focused on female constellations – men are mere background figures –when Skeeter embarks on a romantic subplot, we know it’s of secondary interest to what’s going on between the women.

Though the story does bleed into cartoon territory, it also returns to the subtleties of prejudice in some astute ways. The racism depicted in The Help is not one-size-fits-all – there are chinks in it. These white women are not confident enough to risk being scorned by their social circle if they’re ‘soft’ on the help. They perpetuate the system because they don’t want to be deviants, even when sometimes this goes against their own better judgment. Like the participants in the 1961 Milgram experiment at Yale on blind obedience to authority – participants who administered simulated electric shocks (thinking they were real) to subjects, simply because they were told to — most of the white women in The Help go along with the program despite its cruelty. Director Taylor takes the time, with two mothers in two different dismissal scenes, to show their realization that what they are doing is wrong. He stays on their conflicted faces as they sacrifice the black women who have served them faithfully, along with their own children’s happiness, simply because they are afraid to rock the boat. These astute moments reveal the power of peer pressure – and suggest that the antidote is individual conscience.

To the movie’s credit, Skeeter and her conscience are not the core of The Help. Although an ensemble cast fills out the picture, the protagonist is clearly Aibileen – hence Viola Davis’ Oscar nomination for Best Actress in a Leading Role (as well as her SAG Award and Critics’ Choice Award wins in that category). What she does in telling her personal story to Skeeter, and in reaching out to other maids to develop the whole research project, is the true act of courage in the movie. Aibileen’s individual conscience and her sense of responsibility to other black women as well as the future are the true focus of the film. Fittingly, The Help ends with a shot of her turning heartbreaking injustice to independence as she strides away defiantly, ready to take on the world.

The Iron Lady (2011)

Meryl Streep’s Oscar-winning rendition of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady (in theatres now) is so impeccable it often feels like newsreel footage. Still, a movie is not just about great acting. It is hard to believe that the timing of The Iron Lady is pure coincidence, when Britain is once again racked by austerity measures and street protests. While Streep’s performance undoubtedly deserves high accolades (and has indeed received them), we would do well to separate the actress from the film, and to question the movie’s message.

Viewers intimate with the details of Thatcher’s 11-year rule might suspect the fix is in when the biopic begins with the doddery ex-P.M. buying a pint of milk at a corner store and tsk-tsking over the price. At home, over the tea table, she brings up the price again to her husband, though he turns out to be a hallucination. Yes, the fact that he’s not real is a good punchline to the scene. But what’s not so funny is how the movie forgets to mention that as Secretary of State for Education and Science, she slashed government milk programs for school-kids and earned the sobriquet “Thatcher Milk-snatcher.” It’s more than a little ironic that the filmmakers should start out by using milk to redeem her — it’s dishonest.

Her corner-store shopping trip matters because she has snuck out unescorted by staff, a no-no due to her apparent senility. (This mental state becomes the framework for the movie, which unfolds as a series of memories.) But Thatcher’s disapproving of inflation is also the tool with which screenwriter Abi Morgan and director Phyllida Lloyd (who also directed Streep in Mamma Mia) bathe this politician in middle-class thrift and self-discipline. Similarly, flashbacks show Margaret as a teen laboring in her father’s small grocery, missing out on good times because she has to sweep up. And when she enters politics as a young woman, her drive stems from a burning sense of morality and a work ethic instilled in her by her father — a preacher and local civil servant as well as a greengrocer.

Thatcher’s stellar career climbs steadily, intermixed with domestic scenes to humanize her – she’s stubborn and stalwart in politics, but puts down her pen and goes to bed when her husband tells her it’s late. Her stubbornness continues over into her implementation of her pet policies as Prime Minister, despite strong public opposition – at times so intense (in 1980 she had the lowest approval rating of any prime minister in British history) the filmmakers have to show it (albeit fleetingly). But she also had moments of great popularity, especially after she made war on Argentina over the Falklands, so Morgan’s script is able to balance the two poles. These come across as the ups and downs of political office, and allow The Iron Lady to place its main emphases on Thatcher juggling family with career, and breaking into an all-male political club.

What’s missing is any real examination of Thatcherism. She was intent on peeling back the safety net and other reforms towards a more equitable society which lawmakers from the Labor Party and so on had established not long before. She gutted basic social services, privatized government industries and cut subsidies, and pushed for deregulation, especially of the financial sector. (One would think it would be especially relevant for the latter to be included at this moment, but it might have proven hard to win sympathy for her if it were.) She re-organized public housing — helping speculators and raising property costs in the process. She also instituted a flat tax, redistributing wealth from the poor to the rich. This was met with vitriolic protests, including massive protests in London in 1990; the movie inserts chaotic newsreel footage of bloody street fighting (and Streep staring stoically ahead as she is driven through angry crowds pounding on her car) but doesn’t make any sense of it for the viewer. We’re left lumping the British public together with the male chauvinists who scoffed at her; democratic protest becomes just another obstacle to be overcome.

The Iron Lady makes the most notable aspect of Thatcherism her determination, not her beliefs. Whether her policies were right or wrong is somehow miraculously excluded from discussion. Lloyd and Morgan seem much more interested in how Thatcher fought male politicians and snobbish conservatives who saw her as an upstart. As one might guess from the title, her willpower is the central subject of the film.

By focusing intently on Thatcher’s personal story – with a lot of time spent on her, in retirement, shuffling around her bedroom – the film makes her policies appear to stem from a deep-seated set of values. (It’s an old line of propaganda: equating conservatism with ‘moral character’.) Lloyd and Morgan take her statements about her principles at face value. They do not seem to suspect, for instance, that her fiscal policies could come from anything except an old-fashioned code of restraint and responsibility.

Perhaps they are unaware of transactions mentioned by feminist scholar Germaine Greer, who notes that Thatcher used the foreign aid budget to hire British contractors who gave to the Conservative Party, and also that the Iron Lady arranged for U.K. funding of a $65 million hydroelectric dam project in Malaysia in return for some under-the-counter arms sales: an illegal deal but one which became a scandal only after she had left office.

Neither does the film question Thatcher’s support for tiered schooling in Britain, which for decades had segregated students — by way of a monolithic exam at the still-unformed age of 11 — into entirely different school systems. This exam decided their fate by either giving them a sound academic education (and a chance at a professional career) or sending them to inferior schools which only trained them for the trades (and perhaps a place in the same blue-collar unions this P.M. was later to fight). Those who’ve seen The Up Series, an ongoing British documentary which re-joins a group of Brits from different classes every 7 years to find out how their lives are going, may remember that the upper-class boys knew their entire academic futures at age 7, but others from the working-class didn’t even know the word “university”. Thatcher herself benefited from the tiered system because she got the choicest education, a grammar school, which helped prepare her for Oxford University and after that work as a research chemist — which she followed with a law degree, election as a Member of Parliament, and so on. Ironically, despite the luck of her own middle-class head start, she made so many cuts to higher education once she got into power that even her swanky alma mater turned on her: a student petition was circulated against her at Oxford, and consequently the governing assembly voted overwhelmingly to refuse the P.M. an honorary doctorate.

The filmmakers also exercise a perverse discretion in how they portray Thatcher’s relationship with her son Mark. They don’t show Mark on-screen, just Margaret’s lonely long-distance phone call with him; but they also don’t show how she used her influence to win a construction deal in Oman for the company he worked for. They also leave out, according to Germaine Greer, the charges and investigations against him for loan-sharking, racketeering, andinvolvement in a coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea.

Like some other conservative leaders we could name, she was adept at making strong statements and at putting blinkers on to ‘stay the course’, ignoring such things as whether her decisions were actually working. Her reaction towards the hunger strike of Bobby Sands and other Irish prisoners was the epithet “Crime is crime is crime” — while she stuck to her sound bites, terrorism in Northern Ireland increased. Herself a near victim of a terrorist attack as Prime Minister, the film has her weigh in on the coordinated attack in London during the war on Iraq. She of course responds with courage and firmness, with the usual tenacity about tenacity itself — as if terrorism had no context of any kind, and the only consideration was the need to condemn it strongly and fight it ferociously.

Thatcher is on record for declaring that the Soviets “put guns before butter, while we put just about everything before guns” though she herself presided over both a catalogue of cuts to things like ‘butter’ and an upsurge in the arms race, including the establishment of cruise missiles (from her friend Ronald Reagan) on U.K.’s soil. She also allowed Reagan’s mission to take off from British bases to bomb Libya in 1986. Like Reagan, she talked a good talk about freedom and democracy, but she aided vicious dictators and mass murderers, like Indonesia’s Suharto, Chile’s Pinochet, and the Khmer Rouge.

It’s hard to justify a script streamlining Thatcherism down to a story about her inner strength, how it helped her rise and, perhaps even, in excess, led to her fall. Though that may be a very dramaturgically correct way to write a biopic, the end result is whitewashing. (Which doesn’t mean screenwriter Abi Morgan’s streamlining ability is not an enormous asset – it works beautifully in her other 2011 screen credit, the achingly concise film she co-wrote with Steve McQueen: Shame.) In The Iron Lady, however, the masses spend much of their time striking and rioting in the streets, while Thatcher doggedly earns every victory through tireless work and determination. This doesn’t just seem concise; it strengthens the view that success is entirely based on merit, while the poor bring misery on themselves.

Thatcher pronounces coolly from a government office that “the patient must take his medicine”, but no doctor would want Thatcher’s stats. First of all, a key part of her agenda was clearly to break the unions. When two-thirds of the country’s miners went on strike in 1984 over proposed mine closures, she called them “the enemy within” and “more dangerous to liberty” than the enemy Britain had just fought in the Falklands War. Her union-busting dream eventually came true: by the time she resigned, Britain’s unions had plummeted from 13.2 million members to only 9.8 million. Other results of her reign are quantifiable: in 1979, the poverty rate was 13%. At the end of her rule, it was 22%. This accompanied a rise in inequality: British society was one-quarter unequal when she took office; it had gone up to one-third by the time she left.

To be fair, Lloyd and Morgan may have only wanted to make a feminist film, to pay tribute to the first woman elected to lead the British Empire. Indeed, honoring women as leaders is of course necessary to encourage women to pursue these goals in real life, and Prime Minister is certainly the highest professional achievement of the five roles nominated for Best Actress at this year’s Oscars. Of the five examples of women’s work enacted by the nominees, two play serving staff, one a movie star celebrated for her sensuality, and the other a private investigator and hacker (I have analyzed the feminism of the Lisbeth Salander role here.)

Undoubtedly, Streep did deliver a scrupulous, note-perfect performance, but it is also significant that she won the Best Actress Oscar for playing a national leader because it is still a very uncommon thing — and the other female leader roles in Oscar history tend to be born to it, like Helen Mirren’s Elizabeth II in The Queen and Katherine Hepburn’s Queen Eleanor in The Lion in Winter.

But the glass ceiling isn’t the only women’s issue. Decimating the labor movement is also a women’s issue. Stripping the poorest families of their housing is a women’s issue. Cutting milk programs for kids and undermining their educational opportunities is a women’s issue. All of these things hurt girls and women and families. And arms races, wars of aggression, and support for dictators not only hurt girls and women and families — they kill them. Thatcherism, both her domestic and foreign policies, were examples of paternalism at an extreme. A woman being at the helm doesn’t make paternalism less paternalistic. If Margaret Thatcher and The Iron Lady are models of feminism, then feminism is only skin-deep – and I had always thought looking past surface appearances was supposed to be at the core of feminism.