Army of Shadows: Close Vested Gangster Film Retooled as Meditation on Anti-Fascist Resistance

Jean-Pierre Melville was a connoisseur of threadbare meditations on gangsters, thieves, criminals. Empathy was never asked for nor implied by backstory. I saw Le Cercle Rouge and Le Samourai at a time where I kind of preferred a spoon-fed association with real problems and neither of these films offered any kind of insight into anything aside from extensive male posturing. My assessment was that there was really nothing but b-movie frameworks stripped of sensationalism and excess, but with the same running time what was left was an empty con, just as much as the one being pulled in front of the camera.

What they had, though, was solitude. People said no more than they needed, conversations were terse, interactions minimal beyond the required task at hand. It's as if the goal of the criminal acquisitions was to never have to speak to anyone again. Le Samourai is only tragic in the sense that the one attempt at romance is undone by the lifestyle it would inevitably be attached to. What drew me to Army of Shadows was not how the substantive shift from underground crime to underground resistance might give the film a more bombastic, stylistic heft and thus an engaging draw, but how the preceding cold and distant meditations might work on something as personal and dangerous as fighting nazis, especially personal as Melville was a resistance member himself.

Well, maybe a viewing of The Dirty Dozen did get me in the mood for a little anti-authoritarian rabble rousing, but there was nothing rousing and little to no rabble. For most of the film there was actually nothing separating it from previous Melville offerings except for a change of aims. The film is almost silent, the characters as close to the vest as Delon's thieves, their ongoings as stark and aversive as Le Cercle Rouge's thorough but impersonal diagrams of escapes, thefts and chases. The same sense of tragedy looms, but something clicks in a way that is brilliant and suggests Army of Shadows should both be a starting and ending point in any Melville retrospective, because the context illuminates both within and without the proceedings, with repercussions that extend backwards in his canon.

Army of Shadows' main conceit is that a fascist regime will create a self-contained globule in which those trapped inside are at the behest of whatever the organizational framework sets up for them. Therefore, criminals are no longer a class of their own, the world of crime is now an ever-enveloping overhaul of any individual who might be deemed disagreeable to the status quo. Plucked from all nationalities, all races, all creeds, it no longer takes direct transgressions of criminal activity or ideological confrontation, but arbitrary distinctions decided by portentous and paranoid whim. In fact, as is observed in a prisoner camp in the film's beginning, the black marketeers end up being an odd fixture in an otherwise political/racial set of government targets.

The fascist regime here is the capitulatory Vichy government of France, footstools for the overarching German forces. The center character, Phillippe Gerbier is a former civil engineer, stripped of his function and now an organizational leader in the underground French resistance. On a side note I'd like to mention Melville's choice of Lino Ventura over Alan Delon for Gerbier, the exact opposite of a leading man, he's stocky and stout with a pudgy face and glasses. He looks like my grandfather did in his fifties with the advent of a black toupee. No longer is Delon's cool disposition a photo opportunity, but the ravages of a real person.



The film's lack of distinguishing character isn't a directorial misfire but a reflection on the drab temperament of an occupied country. Following Gerbier from Vichy holding to resistance hideouts there's almost no distinction in the aura painted. It's the same draw, and that draw is short. Early on, during an prolonged and painful execution of a traitor who sold out key elements of the movement to the occupation, I initially thought of the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw walloping Syriana with confused outrage as their presumably progressive pedigree was ironically undone by the choice of showing an american being tortured by an arab who was actually a british character actor. Here there's a point, though, as the distinction between resistance members and common criminals becomes that same aforementioned draw.



The only references to family come when one member deflects a train station suitcase inspection by the Nazis by grabbing a mother's child and calmly blending in to her family as the previously missing patriarchal figure, shortly after dropping the child to face lower guard inspection anyways. The other comes when Gerbier and co-resistant Mathilde are discussing a dangerous operation and she pulls out her wallet to show a picture of her 17-year old daughter. Instead of affectionately commenting with an interested platitude of some sort he tells her to get rid of the picture for safety, which culminates in a final unfamilial blow in which loyalty is absurdly set up against loyalty. This in no way is meant to characterize the one strong (and really, only) female character as an emotional hazard, she's actually based on a member of the French Resistance named Lucie Aubrac and is generally portrayed as a mastermind with a no-nonsense head on her shoulders.

The only references to love are in a fleeting but discarded reflection by Gerbier on Mathilde, and a platonic adoration Gerbier has for resistance supreme leader Luc Jardee, a mathematical genius Gerbier familiarized himself with during his days as a civil engineer. Jardee's brother is the would-be leading man, a dashing former pilot now in it for the sport of things reduced to the periphery because go-it-alone heroics and romantic thrills are blockaded by the morose and clandestine proceedings. There are no affairs, there is no love, there is what must be done, an association of self-effacing individuals preserving a right to function in a way that has become as abstract and unattainable as any philosophical text by which they might be pushed to persevere.

When Gerbier leads a team to London to procure weapons from England, he ends up escaping a German blitzkrieg by stepping into a youthful British Army jukebox soiree. The absurdity of the scene isn't how the troops keep up while their towns are blown to bits, but how an underground member who hasn't allowed himself any kind of joyous emotional engagement in god knows how long can't rest with the proceedings for a minute, choosing instead to go back out to the crater-making havoc outside.

The film's emotional aspect is less of a closet case than a closet raided bare, a black hole of dedicated, methodical coldness that leaves no spirit untrampled in its wake. The spy games and daring games of deception I expected unfold in the same impersonal way Melville's previously thefts and procedurals did, but the point here seems to be these things aren't a game. An attempt later in the film to break a resistance member from torturous captivity doesn't go anywhere, as the ambulatory disguises are sent away by a Nazi doctor who tells them a dying man can no longer be revived for further torture. Here there aren't any grisly torture sequences, just the dismal, horrific-looking aftermath. The faces of the captives are transformed into archeological digs, failed sculptures of harried rock that are painful just to behold.

The criminal snitches in ditches code of honor that permeates every forming camaraderie is what also forms the film's final nail in the coffin for every character's semblance of humanity. When a capitivity leads to some dangerously detrimental developments a hit is order on a former ally. Instead of it being given to one member to take care of, everyone still alive packs into a car and takes off. Gerbier turns to Jardie and quips that he'd never thought he'd see the day when someone as grand as the philosopher Jardie would sit in backseat with a den of killers. That they were already dead inside is no coincidence.

In the film's one legitimately breathtaking sequence, a summation of the loss at hand comes flashing at Gerbier, reflecting on the small things he was forced to give up while being led to his doom. His lack of games is met with a game in itself, a shooting range in which all prisoners have the opportunity to run fast enough to make it to the next round of summary fire. His defying act of self-preservation has nothing to do with his life but with his dignity as he has to decide on whether to give in to their game and run or stand there and be shot.

That the movie eventually is revealed to be a diagrammatic portrait of the perpetual undoing of the resistance movement by external forces is there met by internal undoing of what it means to fight for your humanity. The excluded explication here is a mirror of the excised self a shadow network requires of a saboteur. The ground-up sabotage is both anti-authoritarian and slowly but surely an authoritarian effacement of the individual at their own hands.

Tom Tom Magazine entries on Terry Lynn and Valerie Scroggins

So, while Assholes and Elbows remains an infrequently visited/updated interwebs destination I've done a couple of entries over at the typographically rocking venture, Tom Tom Magazine: A Magazine About Female Drummers. In an age of post-modern and post-gender delineation of cultural, philosophical and political dialogue the fact remains that many of the social institutions radicals got their britches twisted up over are still in full effect, and Foucault-like, the traces are apparent even in "enlightened" circles. Thus, while ideologically we may have moved on from established gender norms of who can do what and where, the imbalance still exists. Thus, in the realm of drummers a specific ongoing documentation of female drummers is a good reminder that the norms, while silly and outdated, exist only because there was a historical/political precedent, not a biological one, and plenty has been done and is being done to level the conversation.
The enterprise itself isn't as heavy handed as the preceding paragraph and is instead focused on being awesome and fun.

I wrote one piece on danceably confrontational Kingston MC Terry Lynn:

"In a pretty great confluence of import importance and shat on toss-offs, Terry Lynn and Swiss-based Canadian production partner Russel Hergert took Daft Punk’s much-maligned Human After All track “technologic” and re-vamped it as a populist anthem for Jamaica’s impoverished, exploited and fed up underclass. By replacing software advert ad-libs with weapon readying directives, the original’s cheap, sony-commercial baiting hooks become a dissatisfied reveler’s checklist for starting a violent revolt."

and another about the intergenerationally gyrational history of Valerie Scroggins from ESG.

 

From my understanding, ESG is a band that gets to you before you get to them. Early in high school, when buzz finally got from New York to my Miami abode via my mom’s NYMag subscription of those found noise pranksters with a mean hankering for a groove, Liars, beats had only begun to mean something. Those 9 tracks on their first album might seem tame now, but my lack of a concern for dancing (aside from my first inebriation in 7th grade at a family function thanks to drinks left unattended) was becoming something to be concerned about in itself. Liars’ stilted high-BPM groove didn’t really help that much but their song Tumbling Walls Buried Me in the Debris w/ ESG was one of many doors. The use of UFO was by then old hat, historically plundered more than almost any other song, but it was my initiation. Being the time of cult experimentalism and whatnot, it’s that song’s ethereal and otherworldly rumblings that lit up my room at night, playing close-lidded REM games in the dark. "

"39 Years to Pension!" Wendy and Lucy + Morvern Callar

Not only are Wendy and Lucy/Morvern Callar streaming on netflix instant watch, but they're also a cross-atlantic pair of escalating desperations in the face of diminishing opportunities for menial income. Of the differences is the outcome for the female leads' respective digressions.



In Wendy and Lucy, Michelle Williams plays the titular Wendy Carroll, a drifting 20-something on their way to an Alaskan cannery with nothing but a car, a dog named Lucy and 535 carefully unspent dollars to their name. The film unfolds in a small Oregon town Wendy stops at on her way to a remote and alien but steady and secure job. Whilst wandering a nature trail Lucy trails off, leading Wendy to a sparsely attended train-yard bonfire. Liberated from societal obligations, these are the crust punks and the free spirits navigating the fringes of industrial decay and census bureau statistical give-or-takes to jump trains, re-up with under-the-counter paying odd jobs, and temporarily set up shop wherever their backpack sees fit for however long the local authorities don't notice. Wendy remains silent and hesitant while a hooded Will Oldham, sporting markered fangs under his bottom lip and the name Icky, casually tells her about his time at the cannery and on which levels of the hierarchy mentioning his name works and doesn't work. Kinda bragging in self-deprecatory manner he goes on about a drunken fuck-up with a vehicle whose consequences he didn't bother sticking around for.

Either not seeing the humor in that or disinterested in the outlying company engendered by that kind of un-"intentional community" she leaves for what essentially amounts to a slow dissipation of the barriers between them. Parking her transportive hibernation chamber at a Walgreens, she encounters the first glimpse of the somewhat damaging causality of "just doing my job." A perfectly genial security guard wakes her up to tell her she can't park there and go to sleep, despite her situation, and despite her car not starting, but being both a stickler and a human helps her move her car just outside the parking lot. Carefully tracking where and on what she spent her money she knows a check-up at the car shop will run her some money. Sleeping in her car and washing herself in bathrooms her tight ship is slowly sinking. As a human she can process the situation but doesn't want her dog to starve unnecessarily for the fuck-ups she's going through and when Lucy's Iams supply runs out decides to go on one major fuck-up to offset the costs of a car repair.

Wendy ties Lucy up outside the nearest food mart and gets caught walking out with somewhat fuller pockets than when she came in. The person who catches her is a naive young townie with no sense of right and wrong outside of the strictest acquiescence to policy. Even when dragging her in to see the manager the only stickler is him. The boss knows the ins and outs and probably noticing what's coloring her concessive attempt at wriggling herself out of it initially tries to weather the storm being drummed up by his employee of the month. You get the sense that if the conversation were between the boss and Wendy things would go down a lot easier, but here's the good 'ol boy citing a mixture of store policy and traditional notions of good and fair totally removed from the reality unfolding in front of him, almost as a measure of faith.

Instead the police drag her off leaving Lucy unattended while she thumbprints her way out of a minor offense. Between 50 dollar fine and 50 dollars plus a two-week-later court date she loses 50 dollars, more than her shopping excursion would've cost and goes back to fetch her dog. What follows is a slow descent out of a slightly deluded can-do, up by your bootstraps perseverance into a disillusioned realization of abject poverty. Somewhat befriended by the security guard after continual potholes in her search for Lucy her quip about not being able to get a job without an address is met with "you can't get an address without an address or a job without a job, the whole system is rigged." Her sister and brother-in-law politely dismiss her with a set of their own problems when she calls them on the phone, suggesting this isn't the first time she's looked for a bail-out, and has been slowly working towards a full-blown expression of failure to acclimate, delayering her subtle stabs at integrity separating herself from either abject homelessness or the casual, self-congratulating interaction with homelessness proffered by the group at the train yard.

Echoing her plight is a brief interaction with potentially menacing homeless man, perhaps an ex-con, lamenting his inability to stay good in the face of his hatred for everybody. He stumbles on her asleep under a tree and fumbles through her things, tells her not to look at him, he could either be talking about his desire to rape her or articulating the trajectory of her choices and the external forces leading her to where she seems bound to end up. He just leaves, and she dry heaves in a nearby restroom having survived a potential attack that went nowhere. She also, though, has experienced the dregs, no car, no money, no job, with only the slightest semblance of a life.

At the same time, despite the somber trappings, these are the kinds of people director Kelly Reichardt knows, the entire film has decisions made by Wendy resting on Lucy, told by that supermarket superstickler that she shouldn't own if she can't take care of. Despite being small it's also a kind of ridiculously epic story about a girl coming to terms with her situation via her relationship to her dog. Somewhat analogous is WAVVES as deconstructed by Young Berg over at No Trivia making these seemingly self-indulgent laments about being a white suburban teen without particular accoutrements like money and jobs that aren't his parents, but there's also a healthy amount of self-parody in its characterization as a snuff-worthy "life's a chore." Reichardt's sympathy can only go so far, but at some point she also has to pull Wendy aside ask her to ask herself some tough questions.



Morvern Callar, on the other hand, has a job at a supermarket, and a boyfriend well acquainted with posthumous publishing. The former is dead-end chore requiring menial subservience, the latter is just dead, ostensibly looking past shock and grief towards an opportunistic grab at publishing requiring Morvern take his manuscript to a list of publishers. I say ostensibly because his reason for doing so is never explored, seemingly intentionally as Lynne Ramsay's focus is entirely on Morvern's reaction, or non-reaction.

What follows the opening discovery, her boyfriend dead on the floor with a floppy of the manuscript and a task as well as a mixtape of indie tunes specifically crafted for Morvern, is straight dissociative. Instead of calling the cops Morvern picks up a payphone and answers a barrage of questions from a stranger. Instead of grieving she takes ecstasy with a friend and weaves through a young and hip gathering in some rich kid's wood cabin, generally unaffected by the social pressures of being seen where needs be (in fact jokingly humping and dumping a dude with her friend before stumbling home). Instead of paying for a funeral she takes the money left her and goes to Ibiza.

This almost jumps dissociation and goes into full-blown nihilism when on top of this she changes the name on the manuscript to her own. Where Wendy and Lucy's theft leads to a reflection on responsibility and current life stations, Morvern's is more of a post-reflective response. Wendy is being forced to come to terms with the way her means don't support her life and her insistence on a fairly overblown solution to it on the other side of the country in Alaska. Morvern, on the other hand, is a check-out girl/supermarket attendant, though not the end of the road, she's kind of entered the real world of post-secondary job market exploration and hasn't gotten very far. That she shacked up with a naive-seeming idealist more in tune with the publishing world than his surroundings is perhaps an indication of the vicariousness by which she holds herself back.

His book is dedicated to Morvern, is apparently about a girl, but judging from the mixtape Morvern comes off more like a writing experiment than a girlfriend, someone her boyfriend can decorate for cultural references and commodifiable appropriation. By Ramsay's estimation it's the boyfriend who takes the easy way out. Her attraction to the story came from the idea that the "romantic" character is killed off and his "non-intellectual" working-class girlfriend takes over. It's a knock to the genre of young, intellectual males piecing together their surroundings in alienated, supercilious fashion. The film takes on the periphery, that angry young man's periphery that they can be seen as callously trampling on and putting it front and center with an upper-hand almost.

Ramsay sees nothing wrong with what the character does, finds it "kinda...punk rock" actually, but notes the precise rationale to her actions. Despite being cold, chopping up his body and disposing of it before shipping off to Spanish rave culture, Morvern's use of drugs isn't indicative of any nihilistic free-spiritedness, it's a numbing agent. Her hedonism, which includes the three-way hookup early on almost immediately after her boyfriend's death, isn't blase, it's almost empirical. Her friend is a co-worker, a kind of aloof party girl whose association with Morvern is almost like a cipher she keeps to attach herself to before it was "like this."

Knowing where she is, where's she's probably not going, she doesn't even read the manuscript but instead sees where it can take her. The way she was a stepping stone for her boyfriend's posthumous literary career she kind investigates where else she's just a cute checkout girl with a use beyond herself. When meeting with the literary agents, she kind of intentionally slips-up. While they fall head over heels for her, noting her potential explosiveness, they almost look past her. She doesn't say much, not in a mysterious way, but a kind of seemingly unsophisticated manner, blurting out she works at a supermarket when they ask her about the fine details of her authorship and her story, she's totally aware of how ridiculous the situation is, and how little she has to do to navigate it.

On the cusp of meeting with a literary agent she kind of sees through all of it, a continuation of her druggy threesome at the beginning, and disconnected Ibiza-going later on, it's just as much a dead-end as her job. She's able to draw it from the face of a Scandinavian girl knocked out standing on who knows what celebratory numbing agent, looking undead as she smears her make-up outside a dressing booth with her head against the door.

The only moment she wallows in misery comes later in the film, where disconnected from the youthful shenanigans across the way she wanders the hotel and stumbles on a young man who's mother has just died. His crying rings through the halls, and she offers to comfort him, he requests it even. She starts off with an anecdote of a familial funeral, but they both just end up bawling, pillow-brawling and fucking, not just each other, but each other's grief, almost themselves through the other's misery.

But the film doesn't offer moral hand-wringing, it doesn't offer reflection of an audience-sating kind, it just offers Morvern Callar, disinterested in the boundaries of her means, aware she almost kinda means nothing to them and thus they almost kinda mean nothing to her, but she's still affected by and can affect them.


Interview with Kelly Reichardt at Slant Magazine
http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/features/kellyreichardt.asp

Interview with Lynne Ramsay at warp records
http://www.warprecords.com/morverncallar/home/pages/interview.html#

Both films available on dvd (and instant watch!)

Milking It: Commodifying Harvey's Legacy, Neglecting Fox and His Friends and Ignoring Gays with "Gays"

During last year's arts section parade celebrating Sean Penn's temporary transformation into a visibly homosexual politician, whose assassination was martyred by cinematic tropes to illuminate the plight of homosexuals barred from legal union, it was easy to forget that the film wasn't particularly radical. Harvey Milk was somewhat anomalous in the world of politics as his ascendancy retained a firm root in the constituency that propelled it forward, including a sympathy for the local Castro street working class being potentially outrun by attempted corporate takeovers. Discussion of Milk as a politician assassinated for his homosexuality unfortunately places the conversation within a false dichotomy, which discussion of his legacy generally doesn't address.

Milk was assassinated for being gay, as well as popular and successful whereas his rival and eventual assassin's wholesome good looks and good 'ol boy patriotism had become dated and useless in the wake of the homosexual and working class representation surging within local politics. By resurrecting the story of Milk to time it with the debates over gay marriage amendments not only did the filmmakers deflate Milk's legacy by associating it with what essentially amounted to a reformist capitulation to heterosexist standards of cohabitation, but also ignored the larger socio-economic variables affecting homosexuals as individuals outside of their orientation.

As much as my anarchistic tendencies want to harp on the legacy being built around Milk's political trajectory, culminating in his becoming a fixture within the local government's bureaucracy and being forced to partake in a system where people are answered for instead of answered by, Milk's actual political activities were fairly nimble in a more amiably radical way than discussion would suggest. Milk's assassination took place less than a year after he was elected to office. The name Milk built took place entirely outside the realm of public office i.e. it took place in public, with the people.

For instance, one of Milk's more actually revolutionary accomplishments, at least within the scope of what he was working with at the time, was his integration of gays into the union. In exchange for aiding Teamsters in their attempt to oust large beer companies from area bars for their refusal to sign union contracts for their workers, they began to hire more gay drivers. It's a particularly odd dynamic given the generally conservative reputation of the working class (even though the Teamsters were pretty much an establishment half-removed and the conservative reputation rests on a narrowly defined double standard), to foment ties between one oppressed subset, workers, with another, gays. This, of course, is a false dichotomy because one subset is defined by their occupation and the other by their orientation, neither contradicting the other. The workers were stiffed and the gays were excluded, but at least the workers had developed a buffer which could now be extended to ensure gays previously excluded would have an organizational defense as well.

Milk acknowledged that the prevailing power structure, white and state capitalist, was an equal opportunity offender with no intention of extending its sphere of influence to the general population, especially to minorities and the working class at large. His community work engaged in the notion that the only way to provide a buffer against such a monolith would be to sap the power given it by an acquiescent population and aligning them on a grassroots level with each other.

That he's remembered as a short-lived politician is almost a joke when he was a life-long activist. Not to completely discount his political aspirations, which were undercut by a theatricality that gave the ridiculousness of the political process its due, but that he was able to facilitate a confluence of wants with material accomplishments in wildly divergent community without relying on the prevailing power structure is more impressive than his eventual election to public office. The deconstruction of homosexual mythology and breaking down of standard misconceptions was a great service that his flamboyant and bombastic campaigns really only served as a platform for. Boy was a hustler in a system that hustled.



As Sean Penn got an oscar for tastefully impersonating a homosexual while Robert Downey, Jr. was quietly ignored for making fun of that same cultural appropriation with the aim of reaping critical acclaim and the material awards that go along with it, Milk's screenwriter made a cloying speech about capitulating to god while remaining defiantly homosexual, with a nod to the gay marriage movement. While Milk would have supported equal rights and have been glad to lend his name to the cause, it's kind of an insult to his political legacy, in which much more radical barriers were broached. Where equality with heterosexuals was less an empty slogan and more an assessment of what that kind of equality means. Just like homosexuals aren't all the same neither are heterosexuals, and Milk's work with trade unions and local businesses in defiance of government sponsored development was a far more penetrating olive branch than the "me too" politics of marriage laws.

Most major films broaching the subject of homosexuality fall into that trap, too, placing homosexuals squarely within the context of a sociological statistic, a constant which can respond uniformly to any variable. The most daring thing done is to merely present to generally heterosexual males within a homosexual paradigm, make generalizations about their relation to all homosexuals and finito, you've got a message picture. Though I'll give I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry for engaging an audience that would normally write off homosexuals in one fell swoop out of gay panic in a fairly combative assessment of what it means to be gay in superficially masculine, oppressively heterosexual atmosphere (don't hate, it could have been worse, like, in and out, at least this one acknowledged the falsity of the stereotypes it was playing with).



In contrast, I'd like to point you to Fox and His Friends, a classic of German cinema and a milestone in sexual discourse. It's director, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, moved beyond the confines of the sexual binary, not defining himself as either gay or straight, but willfully acknowledging the plights of both. Growing up and operating within West Germany Fassbinder experienced the less overt oppression of the capitalist economy and the government which enforced it. Historically written off as the democratic counterpart to its fascist soviet neighbor behind the wall, not everyone living there forgot that that critiques of power and exploitation by german intellectuals like Marx and Luxemburg were born within a capitalist economy. Not everyone forgot that Luxemberg was executed for her anti-capitalist critiques. And not everyone was averse to the conditions that made her put her life on the line. Fassbinder's films tended to explore the damaging effects of new manifestations of old power structures. Male-dominant, heterosexist, and exploitatively competitve. Fox and his Friends is an excellent amalgamation of those exact illnesses.

What goes unacknowledged in presumably homo-progressive cinema is that homosexuals are also human, and are citizens confined within the systems their surrounding societies are governed by. Therefore, the same hierarchical delineations that affect heterosexuals can affect homosexuals as well. In the film, Franz Biberkopf is a lower-class gay carnie who goes by the name of Fox. Fox wins the lottery and inherits a fortune as well as a new group of friends, a bourgeois collection of biting socialites with an exquisite, extravagant, and expensive taste in living standards. Fox's sexual relationship with one of them makes him a prime target of their classist standoffishness, automatically measuring everything about him, from his education to his fortune to his dick size.

Due to the decadence of their lavish lifestyle they seem to value bodies as exchangeable commodities just as well as their most recent wardrobe purchase, and the organ in which Fox rode in on is soon replaced by another member of the circle by the name of Eugen. Eugen is derided as "prissy" by Fox's street standards while Fox is deemed uncultured and savage by almost everyone else. Despite Eugene's precise calculations of Fox's behavioral qualities and their relation to his carefully measured upper-class standards, Eugen delves into a carefully mannered but mildly uninhibited affair, much to the chagrin of his own partner, another member of the circle who won't even regard Fox's presence as a human being.



Soon Fox is initiated into Eugen's family, an ostensibly well-off and well-rounded mother and father facing financial troubles in an unstable economy. Eugen's expensive lifestyle and his family's financial woes are charitably assuaged by Fox's good fortune, naively assuming it's what one does in a standard cohabitation, he assumes the good will of his new de facto in-laws. Having been used to a more free flowing, and more amicable interaction with a less judgementally uptight group of working class queers, his quick quips from the wells of street smarts find themselves no match for the bourgeois lifestyle demands of an armchair decorator with cushy tastes requiring books for shelves instead of shelves for books, 18th century artistry for a place to sit, and crystal castles for the light switch.

And here the groundbreaking aspects of the film's discussion can already be assessed. Fassbinder was criticized for his negative portrayal of homosexuals by gay rights activists. What their narrowly defined objective ignored though was Fassbinder's acceptance that homosexuals ARE people, and instead of being an ideal definition of people "as well," they could also be a less than ideal people "as well." The adaptation of class doctrine can defy oppressed designation, working within multiple paradigms in a way that's both counter-intuitive to one's own self-worth but also to those one is closely associated with by means of a similar societal deprivation. The movie's subtitle is survival of the fittest, a bastardization of Darwin's theories that inevitably lent itself to conservative social theories, one in particular being the ruthless accumulation of capital. Fox's Friends in the title acquired the capital necessary to exist as themselves without interference, but their unstable method of acquiring that protective power affects every realm of the lifestyle they've adopted to properly maintain it. And not even if. Fox's sugar daddy co-optation comes about when Eugen is kicked from his apartment for "immoral relations."

Already incisive enough the film has an unexpected interlude. Eugen and Fox elope from the confines of their staid, placid, and increasingly hateful constraints (Eugen has begun training Franz to be civilized, causing Franz to resort to binge sessions hating himself with the bar stool queers) to Morocco. Hoping to spring some vitality back into their relationship they intend on picking up a male to use as their temporary sexual liason. Seemingly having studied from a pick-up manifesto his society friends cobbled together from years of clandestine pursuits of the libidinal, Eugen ropes Fox into a shopping spree with the market being Moroccan men. The film, having already engrossed you in the classist dehumanization of a poor German by fellow citizen of the same sexual orientation, now asks you to question the levels of exploitation, the levels of dehumanization, and the hierarchy intensifies and stretches beyond belief. Germany was a powerful colonial force and it's citizens, being part of a European ancestry that for centuries defined the world against its will, still have a lingering sense of entitlement to the fruits of their geographical counterparts.

Fully anticipating Eugen's rope tricks a Moroccan falls into their favor and bides his time in a knowledgeably patient manner while Eugen and Fox debate whether or not to jeopardize their already fragile relationship with a fling. Eugen being the most adamant for saddling up with a "camel jockey." When they get back to the hotel they are barred from entering their room together, as the Moroccan bell hop has been trained to follow the European hotel chain's orders and not allow Moroccans to exist on the premises. An argument ensues in which Eugen defends what he payed for and Fox defends their potential lover's rights in his own country (they both possibly make this point). The Moroccan boytoy, having been through this before, willfully leaves without further commotion. Feeling like they've been busted and sabotaged Eugen and Fox kind of kick their feet in until the bell hop comes back and tells them not to make a fuss. If they want a boy they can send someone from the staff!

If Eugen and Fox, as European tourists with large amounts of currency, want to have their choice of servants for personal pleasure their continental clout allows them that. The movie abruptly reverts back to Germany after that, where you have to refocus your attention on Fox. It's slightly jarring, but also substantially more enriching for the rest of Fox's story.



Culminating thoughts: Group identity can be necessary for erecting a protective barrier against individual oppression for a common trait, but it also creates a lowest common denominator standard of non-consented absorption where manipulability and exploitation of an entire set of arbitrarily linked individuals becomes feasible. Individual identity allows one to see outside the cloistered association to understand why one particular aspect of your biology might define your link to a subset but not your relation to everyone else, mostly the dominant subset, or even yourself, each person being a confluence of characteristics that would require an obnoxious amount of hyphens to properly explicate. As a result each member of a subset can be affected by laws and mores of another subset they are excluded from, particularly when it's a subset has control over their standards of living and means of sustenance. Fox's friends can be gay and oppressed, but they can be rich, elitist and exploitative like the best of them, because they're not defined by their gayness, they're defined by the class they belong to, and a new hierarchy that doesn't revolve around preferences inevitably separated potential companions.

"Let Me Put Some God In You": A closer look at the videos for Usher's Love In This Club and Z-Ro's Tired

Yeah, so, this is a year late but bear with me. Every time I view Usher's Love In This Club video it continues transmogrifying from a sleek, celebrity-filled vision of the hottest blue balls ever to something even scarier than I originally imagined. The video's initial allure was the way it wrapped itself up in the material excesses the genre is criticized for and subtly flaunts them in a preternaturally seductive way.

Usher stumbling alone into some purgatory of his repertoire's intended haunts, with the doors leading back into itself, suggests an isolated detachment the seemingly retired superstar had to face when making a comeback. When Timbaland production team member/rising pop star Keri Hilson shows up as the video girl, her sultry taunts in response to his nervous and aggressively defensive inquiries play like the unstable youth demographic he's after. "I'm your every desire." Does the dude still matter? All the girls that fawned over him before his cameo in She's All That are grown, youngsters like Omarion or even weirdos with a futuristic vocoder and a Stevie Wonder visage like T-Pain done stole his place, and the market is unpredictable for celebrities not returning on the surreal life.

But then Polow Da Don comes in, the synths take over, and all of a sudden Usher is at home again, no need to freak out, just freak. Just like the song is about fucking right there on the dance floor because there is no waiting to get out, about that moment that can't be suppressed, that is so immediate it feels just right, the music feels that way, too. Usher puts on his sunglasses, shouts out the DJ, and proceeds to ceremoniously emcee the main event, in which Usher attempts to fucks with a lady right there in the club or, maybe, slide his way into the pockets of his desired demographic.

There to witness the proceedings are fellow Rap and R & B luminaries currently taking the clubs by storm. Those that Usher fizzled out to. The artists that Usher maybe passed the torch to before going back to his dressing room. Here everyone's a friend, Usher's like the kid that took a gap year and is now back for some serious business. Now he finds himself surrounded by wizened industry heads, borderline divas on the cusp of saturation, their entrance, their existence almost a wax work in a museum, crystallized in slow motion. Kanye with his back on the bar while a pair of high heels with legs attached to them saunter past his elbows, barely cocking his head in acknowledgement cause his glasses do enough attitude for him, one of Keri's girls slowly grazing his proximity (as well as Nelly's and that of many others), feels just as right as the song does.

What undercuts the self-indulgence of the proceedings is that all this is good and great, but Usher isn't actually getting any. He's on the cusp of getting some when Keri Hilson and her crew of temptresses taunt him. Moving past the bevy of new social circles being famous and photogenic Usher is getting swept up by the libidinal undercurrent, it's not just flashy it's fuckable in there and he's going to cash in but right as they lock lips, right as they're about to bump hips she disappears. Usher being left to dance choreographically to his heart's and his loin's discontent. And still nothing. Then it ends. Everyone disappears. The girls are there no more. Usher tries to run out again, but this time he ends up in some approximation of heaven. Surrounded by clouds he's actually standing in the rubble of what was once the structure that hosted his grandstanding re-entry into superstardom.

All of a sudden the song's libertinism becomes apocalyptically conservative, with the site of casual sex being done in like Sodom and Gomorrah. What really drives this home, and I didn't notice this until a recent appraisal, is that Keri and her girls don't just graze by and tempt the guys in the club. They leave them hanging in more ways than one. Each encounter leaves the men's lusty demeanor with a parting gift. When Kanye is walked by his hand goes out and a chain is dropped into his palm. Attached to that chain is a cross. When Nelly's hands are clasped by one of the girls, he's being signaled to guard the cross now placed in his holding. In the context of Usher's return, this is a trainwreck. Back in the lime light and before his first video is over his dick killed everyone. By unleashing the atmosphere of promiscuity everyone was blown to bits. Keri's angels did what they could, but maybe it wasn't a sure thing. In the context of Love in this Club, is there no such thing? Or is such a thing a sure fire way to get crossed out of existence?

Like, the brilliance of the thing doesn't necessarily make it agreeable, but holy shit is it a sight to behold. The idea of spiritual liberation from the libations of liminal turmoil makes a startlingly irresponsible return in Z-Ro's tired:



I've written here extensively of Z-Ro's depression, the way don status mythology making was progressively de-layered by his own self-admonitions. Raised by extended family, harassed by the police, isolated by both a perpetual violence that claimed most of his friends and a systematic injustice that incarcerated the others. Ro doesn't have time for romance, all he has time for is to scramble. And constantly being down on his knees he looked to god. Even if you're an atheist you understand the prescriptive nature of his laments are less out of ideological puritanism and more out of desperation.

Despite being robbed of a comfortable existence, despite needing Lexapro to deal with it, he still looked outside himself. No matter the antipathy he still made space to reach out to gays, lesbians and other discriminated demographics. His willing of god onto others was, yes, superstitious, but also dissociative. A coping mechanism in which he saw the breadth of oppression claiming more people than himself. If he could use god maybe everyone else can, too. But what's odd is the continual knee-dropping, and not just because of it's undeniable presence, but because of how aware he was on I'm Still Living of its apparent inability to solve anything. "I pray so much I should be kin to the heavenly son." It's beyond solemnity now, it's a cruel joke, and one he assumes he'll keep on having to tell himself or he'll break down and stop waiting for anyone else to do him in.

What's weird about this new video, boasting Mya instead of, say, past Rap-A-Lot hook roster stalwart Tanya Heron, is the comfort level. Ro's music video production values have gone up, and despite the relative obscurity, his old line about how "Niggaz say Rap-A-Lot ain't payin me like I ain't got nuttin, If six figures is bein bent over, I'm lovin the fuckin"seems to be the de facto protocol.

What's awful here on my part is that his artistry is invariably also judged by his honesty, and Z-Ro's honesty was particularly hard to swallow because of the shit he had to get off his chest. His real talk was that he was living the same fucked up life everyone else around him was. The more fucked up, the more stirring, the more depressed, the more soulful. It's as if the only way he could get any better was to be on his death bed and though everyone wanted him to pull through his exit would have left a mark on rap analogous to that of Ian Curtis.

What's great is that now Z-Ro seems to be finally doing better, or at least the videographer is making a convincing case. Sure the subject matter is about the shackles caused by societal constraints, but looking at all of his new videos dude looks a whole lot better than he did in his most recent stint in county prison, better than he did on his last album before going in. This video, though, is where it gets uncomfortable. Not because of the subject matter, which is aptly conveyed with Z-Ro's trademark sympathy, but his sympathy now seems to have a punch line. The whole thing plays like a weight loss infomercial. Sure, Z-Ro might have found god and told you before, but he never gave weight to it, he just obsessively referred to it as the last thing he could possibly turn to, telling others out of concern, but still not being 100%. Here, though, it's like it's a given, he's outsourcing the work to a street corner preacher. Every symptom of malaise and oppression is lined up like a welfare line and written off with the power of god, at least through the hands of this preacher. All the symbolic shackles are miraculously undone by that dude that was always catcalling you with catechisms on your block.

At least Ro doesn't blow you up, but it's like meat and dairy and the split between vegans and vegetarians. Which is worse? Being killed or being stuffed in a cage and prodded at?

Rachel Getting Married

(I know I'm late on this, but it's now on on dvd so go watch it)

In a moment of familial convalescence I had only gotten a glimpse of falling asleep to late night conversations between my mom and her sister, the two sibs at the center of Rachel Getting Married wash up scars both real and embedded. It blows the fire-breathing wound salting that came before it out the loch ness dwelling it wallowed in, almost making the mythical burrowing seem absolutely necessary so the connection could be made this strong again.

My mom's upbringing, from the bits and pieces left at my disposal, was less than ideal. Impenetrable parentals barely there (youth done in by a nazi escape route, shell shocked IDF backlash, double time work loads to pay for the housing) with the double-edged sword of authorial command left at my mother's feet. The chance for being siblings was upended by a circumstantially forced hierarchy that tore them apart for years, the youngin's not knowing who the real mother was, my mom not knowing where her allegiances lay, or where her priorities were to be spent. Empty house for months at a time brought on round the clock, drunken card games, on one hand putting the youngest two of the four on display for guests to play with like dolls, with her other hand broom-ready, a dust pan in tow.

On a most recent trip, while sleeping next to the crib of my sister's new born kid in her village house outside tel-aviv, both my mom and sister, always prone to on and off familial theatrics, just pored over the details of their youthful responsibilities. I, of course, felt unusually privileged and spoiled, again any sunk moods the result of first world neuroses. It was an odd moment, billion piece puzzle finally seeing some kind of solidified semblance.

Rachel Getting Married is kind of like that. Both experiences making me jealous I wasn't and didn't have a sister to deal with the world through. I've got a little brother, he's more like the music hired for the film's festivities, a self-proclaimed god of rock blazing trails only distanced from a telescope in NASA. He's loads of fun, the infighting there aplenty, but the feminine quality that my post-gender lib/arts education is doing away with is totally missing.

Without going too heavy into details, the film's wedding video with a broken record button on infinite gaze catches the whole unpacking of the family dynamic's fractured psychology. The constantly shifting alliances when a junkie sibling breaks back into the fold, the center of a tragedy she'll never be able to outlive being partly responsible for, the intimate knowledge thus wielded by every knowing relative to cut deep into that black hole of emotional negation. Why would blood relations be so cruel to one another? The underlying joke being that the titular character is working on her PhD in psychology, a bevy of statistics and APA terminology still finding itself useless in the alien terrain of another person. No matter what institutions these bloodlines hide behind, it's each other they'll eventually have to answer to. The sooner they realize that, the sweeter the release of finally knowing who they're forever bound to. Don't watch it for Anne Hathaway, watch it for who her character represents, in the context of her familial extensions.

That release will never be that sweet, as the film attests, a bitter taste left on the tongue, too much baggage for a swift layover and departure, the desire to just leave the bags and fuck the f off. But finally, knowing what to fuck the f off from, and being able to decide what parts of it to warm up and into. Cut deep, but with a surgeon's precision. Stitches are imperative.

Blackness we can put our money behind!

Apologies to anyone who is studying graphic design and/or has seen a legitimate flyer. This is happening on friday at my school:

(The event went through some budget drama and was overshadowed by last year's trainwreck involving Mickey Avalon falling through due to heroin chic/aggressively amplified narcissism. I originally wrote this for the school paper. I was asked to cut it down to 600 words, due to my own aggressively amplified narcissism I agreed but will put the whole thing online here!)

So, In the process of getting Mania Music Group approved for Serendipity I nearly broke down when someone in the student senate asked if this unverified rap group would be problematic. While understood in the context of Mickey Avalon, the present circumstances that question were asked under unveil an underlying prejudice. Like, why did no one question spending who knows how much on a group of white guys playing southern fried noodling with a Malian melengoni thrown in. You could have done that for 2k with predominantly white Michigan Afrobeat enthusiasts NOMO (I spoke to their agent last semester). Better yet, for that kind of money, why not have gotten actual African artists? Why didn't they consider ACTUAL MALIANS like Amadou & Mariam? Or the DRC-based electric thumb-piano percussion group Konono No. 1? Afrobeat legend Hugh Masekela is still playing shows, but he's better off with people who actually listen to African music, right? GuilCo is too busy being progressive to pay respects to African culture outside of a possible documentary in Bryan Jr.?

And then Holy Ghost Tent Revival, who don't even bother with the rest of the world, because they're busy playing American roots music. Great. So the moment a black rapper drops b and n bombs in one of their songs it's like "what? did they use the n word? are they talking about our women? put a leash on their barbaric blackness!" It suggests that Mickey Avalon's problematic factor wasn't his misogyny, glorified drug abuse, or general crudity (who was expecting better from the rap section of myspace's music label?), but that he was doing it in the overtly eyebrow raising framework of the predominantly black genre of rap music. Not a problem was that his cherry picking of rap's material excesses without the socio-political factors that shade their existence is basically a minstrel show, in which he's putting on the white presumption of black regressiveness.
If he were some kid with a guitar writing pained songs about anonymous females that ruined his reason for being by not caring about his feelings and breaking his heart, that the only thing he could do was recycle and perpetuate the tradition of dudes singing about archetypal heartbreakers (i.e. women) that make up the bane of their existence would be left off the hook as opposed to being called out for its misogyny. No, "love songs are soulful...oh, soul! Now that's black music I can get behind!" Yes, thirty years too late.

Essentially the only rappers that can perform without scrutiny are Common, who we paid an unmentionable amount of money for two years ago. Why? Because he's a quote unquote conscious rapper, essentially meaning that he can be held up as a light against the dark recesses of the woman-hating, drug-running gun happy gangsters. Let's for a moment forget that Common once rapped the line "I house more hoes than Spelman." We'll let that slide because Common raps about being positive, about being non-violent and anti-gangsta, he says words like "revolutionary" and writes songs called "the people." That half of Common's lyrics are made up of lazy pop culture references is not really a populist form of witty poetics. Being a major label rapper with large corporate capital it amounts to synergistic strategies generally employed by companies like McDonald's when they want to reach the urban market by writing Lovin' instead of Loving in their trademarked phrases and doing an R &B jingle to back it up (yes, now probably you'll have to pay McDonald's to say I'm Lovin' It in a product). Making matters worse, Common, for all his supposedly elevated lifestyle accounts for, made not only a GAP commercial (sweatshop haven, because the streets of China aren't as important as the hood in Chicago) but a whole song for a Coke commercial about keeping it real (as opposed to "not selling out.") But not even the conscious ship lasted that long. Anyone interested in seeing Common play into what's "popular" check his last album Universal Mind Control, where he pulls a Mickey Avalon as if he wasn't in the rap game for 15 years but was instead 15 years old.

The whole thing reeks of commodified solidarity. We'll decide what luminaries from underprivileged communities to spend money on, and that way we can set up a venerable collection of progressive and "civilized" black products, while simultaneously distancing ourselves from erroneous statistics about the majority white consumer demographic that purchases rap. By arguing that it's the white consumers whose preferences for misogynistic, materialistic violence gives white record executives the incentive to mold the apparently servile and malleable black kids into honky-approved Sambos for white consumption suggests that black people don't make decisions, that they're too good to think for themselves and now we have to save them from destructive immorality.

One, even Soundscan, which is where these willingly unverified but politically useful statistics come from have admitted that they don't really check the races of all the consumers. Usually, if a music store is in an upscale neighborhood or a mall, it's assumed to be white. This rules out not only the black population, but various other minorities as well. It also completely disregards the communal, DIY nature of most rap consumption. The underprivileged people we prefer black rappers to speak on behalf of (as if they should know better about their own life) actually have cost-effective methods of distributing and sharing music, and no it's not filesharing. It's mixtapes they can get on the streetcorner, or unpublished cd's they sell out the back of their trunk. How do you think Young Jeezy started? Independently as Lil J.

It's not really important how they did what they did, it's that they spoke about the stuff that they did before it that wide consumption of their new product allows them to live without doing. "But rap perpetuates drug use." Go to the National Security Archives website, click on Colombia, and pull up the list of the CIA's top narco-traffickers. Right under Pablo Escobar is Alviro Uribe. This was in 1991. Come the Bush Presidency he's our number one ally against terrorism in brown country. Or, read (about) Gary Webb's Dark Alliance: CIA, Contras and Crack-cocaine explosion in which he details the connections between the early 80's outbreak of the crack epidemic with the funding of the Contras, as if training and sending militants to rape, pillage and slaughter tens of thousands of peasants in the Nicaraguan country side in the name of preserving business interests wasn't bad enough. "Why don't rappers speak about that?" Why should they hold themselves up to white, or "progressive" standards when the supposed leader of the free world those standards come from is busy killing people with drug money it made off of their parents' generation's drug abuse?

And that suggests that all gun talk and drug talk and sex talk is ignorant. Because it's only okay for Martin Scorcese to get critical acclaim for writing epic portrayals of the depravity of street life, like Goodfellas, that amount to a whole lot of drugs and guns and sex, but ends with a dude snitching and are all of a sudden deep. If rap was actually consumed by its antagonizers as opposed to the phantom white demographic that perpetuates its supposed problems, you'll find that rap works like a fictional narrative, too, writing its violent stories with poetic zeal that third person treatises with recycled compound-syllable academic terms can't really touch on. It's like a history book on Russia under Napoleon versus Tolstoy's War and Peace. It also has more head above water moments than you can count. Check out The Geto Boys classic My Mind is Playing Tricks on Me. It's not an anomaly.*

Ignoring that is how we end up with Finding Forrester, where we're supposed to care about this black kid because he knows how to write fiction. Now white people have something to empathize with! He can join civilization! What if there's no civilization to join? Finally, after centuries of slavery and subjugation, the young black boy with potential understands how to be well-recieved in the white world.

End scene. Here's to an open-minded future.

*Beanie Sigel made an entire album's worth in The B. Coming. UGK kick off their classic Ridin' Dirty with an example. Trick Daddy started rapping to verbally explicate the nastier aspects of his life he didn't want to repeat physically. Z-Ro has made a career trying to survive the emotional turmoil the toll of dead and incarcerated friends takes on someone still roaming free on the streets. Read G-Side's bio on their myspace. Affected by Huntsville's variation on poverty and crime, they were in and out of foster homes and community centers. Instead of buckling down, "growing up" and getting an entrepreneurial internship at a local business institution they instead got together with the Paper Route Recordz crew, specifically the Block Beataz to create life affirming anthems for all their potential brethren stuck in the same situations. Notice the lack of bootstrap pulling in their songs, they actually care about each other and their audience. They're not kicking doors down with condescending maxims. Mania Music Group don't exist within the "conscious" archetype by typical standards, perhaps they sometimes rap topically but they're not wrapped up in a manifesto, they just live in Baltimore. That's going to happen, real talk comes from real living. Their M.O. is essentially the joy of rapping, creating communal enjoyment by playing with the words on the tip of their tongues. Their producers BeaLack and Headphonemusik basically play with all palettes of sound offering the aural equivalent of the experimental kicks the Mania Music MC's wordplay offers.