Race-Passing-Bias-A Date on a Winter's Day-40 Minutes Home in Light Traffic
One of great dividends of time without a formal schedule is that everyday is Saturday. Some dreams do come true. I dreamed of this life, full but languid, intense but only by choice. Time freedom is about following my nose to the end of thought as far as I can take it and finding joy in the sheer pleasure of connecting the dots.
Dave plans dates. It is not written or profound. It just is. I have to be courted into one of his ideas. It is not automatic. He has to create a scenario with reasons why this is good idea. It has to have moving parts. He is still remarkably fun to date.
We rarely see a film out. When we do, it is an event, a thing, a lunch. Friday afternoon, we wandered down to Damariscotta, about 40 minutes to the south on the coast. The drive is a delight and it is peach of a town, sporting early American 18th century architecture with some heft.
and a center chimney home of Nathaniel Chapman greets you on the north of Main Street, built in 1745 and one of the oldest residences in Maine. There is a Reny's, the king and queen of dime to department stores and a charming pub. You get the picture. It is Maine down to the ground..."not Louisiana, Paris, France, New York or Rome," to paraphrase Meredith Wilson's, The Music Man. It is also the ancestral home of the holy, Frances Perkins, the first female Secretary of Labor, the grandest of all gals, who goes relatively unnoticed in a the grand scheme of this democracy but kindly, assured each of us with a social security, workman's com, an eight hour day, and child labor laws, all passed in the 1930's under Roosevelt, in the midst of crisis. She is the real deal, the New Deal.
“The people are what matter to government, and a government should aim to give all the people under its jurisdiction the best possible life.” Frances Perkins
She is not the subject of my writing but I want to think she was watching with me from above and enjoyed this new film as much as I did.
American Fiction slid into the 2023 ranks and hit the screen in late December. In a year of fairly remarkable film making, it is nominated for best picture and in many other categories. I will not presume to tell you what I think but I will say this...drop everything, see it today, not tonight but this afternoon. It is a game changer. Let's talk around it.
In 1989, Gregory Peck, (click here for a treat) received the American Film Institute Achievement Award. He was a man who selected his own scripts and never shied from exposing the cracks in the American sidewalk. Peck wonders if quality in films and television might ever be viewed as "glamorous" as the then-recent mergers in multi-media conglomerates.
and I quote...."Making millions is not the whole ball game. Pride of workmanship is worth more. Artistry is worth more. The human imagination is a priceless resource." He goes on to quote TS Eliot's ideal of entertainment,
"it enlarges the sympathies, that it stimulate the mind and the spirit, puncture the balloons of hypocrisy and greed and sham, tickle the funny bone and leave us with a glow that comes when we are well-entertained."
And there it is...nothing difficult but the same message that dates from the Greeks. Theater and film must entertain and puncture the balloons and, if you are lucky on a Friday afternoon, it can be very funny.
American Fiction is based on a book, Erasure. Ever hear of it?...me, neither. Will I read it now?...senza dubbio. The author,
PERCIVAL EVERETT, is a Distinguished Professor of English at USC. His most recent books include Dr. No (finalist for the NBCC Award for Fiction and winner of the PEN/ Jean Stein Book Award), The Trees (finalist for the Booker Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction), Telephone (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), So Much Blue, Erasure, and I Am Not Sidney Poitier. He has received the NBCC Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award and The Windham Campbell Prize from Yale University. American Fiction, the feature film based on his novel Erasure, was released in 2023. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the writer Danzy Senna, and their children.
The angry young man with a pen is hand, move over Euripides
In 22 years, he has written 19 books, including a farcical Western, a savage satire of the publishing industry, a children’s story spoofing counting books, retelling of the Greek myths of Medea , "For Her Dark Skin is a tightly crafted exploration of the story of Jason and Medea weaving both traditional and contemporary fictional and thematic elements into a sharply ironic tale of revenge, ambition, passion and pride. Desires and consequences lead the all-too-human characters through a piercing new interpretation of classic themes" and Dionysus, "Frenzy is an engrossing, haunting retelling of Euripides' tragedy The Bacchae, in which the god Dionysus takes out his vengeance on King Pentheus and the Thebes by luring all of the city's women out into the countryside for orgies and raw meat eating and a philosophical tract narrated by a four-year-old."Good Reads......Yes, please! There is the book list for 2024 but would I have found his work and the work of his wife without this film? I do wonder.
I feared, when being invited on this date that this film would be....predictable, pandering, "langweillig" spiral of poverty and death, sprinkled with overworked contemporary look at the 'hood....a type of Black film. Please, do not get me wrong, John Singleton and Spike Lee are daring and evocative directors. But our perceptions of race are multi-faceted, but our understanding of it can be limited.....I am reminded of Fintan O'Toole's review of, Jez Butterworth's, The Ferrymen, as he excoriates an English audience who feel compassion for the 1970's Troubles in Ireland as they cheer the work in 2017 because history can be so pastel and doesn't smell of despair.
In American Fiction, every word counted, every gesture, truism, pause, silence, reflection, both black and white, every family dynamic. Two sentences in and I was rapt and listening.
Here is the ensemble cast of artists in American Fiction with director Cord Henderson
The film score is so gossamer that you want to wrap yourself in it. There are such gentle quotes from Thelonious Monk, who lends his name to the main character, Monkie, to Maurice Ravel, Herbie Hancock...such a sweet compassion with a nod to Mozart in the end piece. Bravo, Laura Ann Karpman.
On the way home, we spoke about the span of our lives within the context of the churning, turning tide of race in America. Another literary work to become a film surfaced on the horizon line of our conversation..
“So now it’s life. Money is life. Once upon a time freedom used to be
life...now it’s money. I guess the world really do change ...”
Since it was named by the New York Drama Critics’ Circle as the Best
Play of 1959, A Raisin in the Sun has continued to make a permanent,
passionate impact as “a play that changed American theater forever”.
A Raisin in the Sun...the beginning of racial change in the 20th century
The film was made in 1961 and Sydney Poitier becomes every white person's new best friend. I studied it in high school and my grand daughter is studying it in high school. It is, as you know, an expose. The reader becomes a voyeur and the reveal made my teeth ache in 1968 when I could not possibly comprehend what was to come. If it was only about poverty then it becomes the first cousin of Arthur Miller's View From the Bridge (1955)
But it is not just hard hitting verismo, it is a question of race, right? Film and theater make us take a looking glass at our surroundings. Think... In the Heat of the Night, Mississippi Burning, Moonlight, the incomparable, Fences, and August Wilson's other nine masterpieces. There is a specific and a universal element, the human conflict that binds us all and the very real outcome of generations of bias.
I leave you with the musical score from To Kill a Mockingbird by Elmer Bernstein. Speak to me of that recurring minor key theme...always, Scout's Song… so much to consider on the ride "40 minutes to home in light traffic."