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Why I want 12 Years a Slave to win the Best Picture Oscar

Yesterday I did a two minute sound bite on a local cable news station following the Oscar nominations. During this discussion, in addition to forgetting Robert Redford’s name, I said that I thought Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave had a good shot at winning the Best Picture Award, making it the first film by a black director to do so. And who knows, maybe McQueen would win Best Director too, another first.

Not exactly stepping out on a limb there. But then I added that I hoped 12 Years did win. Before I could explain my reasons for this, we were on the topic of snubbed performances and that’s when I blanked on Redford’s name (now that I think of it I also forgot to mention the cat, or cats, in Inside Llewyn Davis, who I thought should have gotten some recognition. Damn!)

After the broadcast, my colleague Laura Frank Clifford, who was kind enough to watch, mentioned via Facebook (and I thank her for overlooking my Redford senior moment) that my endorsement of 12 Years a Slave seemed to contradict an earlier posting on Artsfuse where I had in fact listed the film among as number one among the worst films of 2013.

Another senior moment? Perhaps not. As I noted to Laura, that “worst” film list referred not necessarily to really awful films, but to films that either failed miserably to live up to expectations or were vastly overrated (okay, an amended list also included Grown Ups 2 and A Madea Christmas, which were indeed very awful films). And my reservations about the film remain – I am definitely with Gerald Peary and Jonathan Rosenbaum and even the printable version of Armond White’s opinion on this one.

At any rate, if quality was the issue I would not think 12 Years is deserving of the Best Picture Oscar. It’s not the worst of the nominees (I’d award that prize to Gravity, which barely missed inclusion in my ten worst list) nor the best (I’d go with Her, but probably would have opted for Llewyn Davis if it made the cut).

But as all but the most ingenuous or disingenuous would acknowledge, quality has little to do with who gets an Oscar. It is about image and p.r. and politics and making money.

Image-wise, an Oscar for 12 Years could serve to counter the Academy’s well-deserved reputation as a segregated bastion of white, male, middle-aged privilege that has denied access and recognition to minorities and women. It would be a historic first, a sign of better times to come! Just like giving Kathryn Bigelow Best Picture and Best Director Oscars for The Hurt Locker in 2009. And we all know how that threw open the doors for women directors in Hollywood.

It would be great for Hollywood’s image, then, but substantively meaningless when it comes to opportunities for black or other minority filmmakers. It’s an award that would honor the Academy more than the recipient. As was the case with Bigelow, McQueen doesn’t need this bogus imprimatur to prove that he is a brilliant filmmaker. Though not a fan of 12 Years, I believe his previous two films, Hunger (2009) and Shame (2011) are evidence of a major auteur. Whether he gets an Oscar or not, he’ll be making many great films and has at least a few masterpieces in him.

So I don’t think 12 Years should win the Best Picture Oscar either because it is the best film among those nominated or because it can serve as a token gesture that will make no difference in the fundamental racial imbalance of Hollywood. I think it should win because it might get more people to watch it.

I’m not talking about the already converted, those who know that slavery was an abomination and should not be forgotten or forgiven and who realize that the malignant racism that engendered that monstrous institution still lies not so far below the surface in our society.

Nor am I talking about those unembarrassed by their recidivist racial attitudes, like the fans and defenders of Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty who agree with his belief that African-Americans had it pretty good before the Civil Rights movement made them all uppity and angry. People like Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Ted Cruz, etc… For if even by some miracle those people are prodded into watching the film, they will no doubt dismiss it as a fabrication by the left wing traitors of Hollywood and the liberal-biased lame stream media.

Instead, those who would most benefit from watching the film are those who feel satisfied that the battle for racial justice is a done deal. And maybe overdone. These are people who don’t think much about these issues but who if pressed might be on the fence about whether we’re making too much of a fuss out of voting rights, equal opportunity, social programs for the poor. You know, the kinds of things that Martin Luther King Jr. and others spent decades fighting, and sometimes dying for.

It’s not an easy movie to watch. And in some ways it’s not even a very good movie. But it is a brutally efficient history lesson. It tells the truth about a terrible thing that most people would just like to forget about. If giving an Oscar to 12 Years a Slave in any way helps preserve the progress we’ve made in the 149 years since slavery was abolished, I’ll be rooting for it.

Joyce on propaganda and porn — part two: Blue Is the Warmest Color

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[A version of this previously appeared in the Artsfuse web site. Also, beware of spoilers.]

While 12 Years a Slave, according to Stephen Dedalus’s Thomistic formulation referred to in the previous post, induces “loathing” which “urges us to abandon, to go from something,” and therefore is “didactic” (and I would add, propagandistic), Blue Is the Warmest Color arouses “desire,” which “urges us to possess, to go to something.” It, too, is kinetic, not static, in its effect, and pornographic rather than didactuc. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s still art, though “improper” art.

That’s not how most critics see it, however. The film has gotten nothing but high fives since it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. It scores an 89% favorable rating at Rotten Tomatoes, an 88 at Metacritic, and is currently on a victory lap of awards from critics groups nationwide, heading for a sure lock on the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.

Nonetheless, almost lost in the near universal praise for the film, Manohla Dargis’s dissenting article “The Trouble With ‘Blue Is the Warmest Color’” in the October 25 New York Times points out something that would seem obvious: The director, Abdellatif Kechiche, really likes asses.

Is that really a problem? Well, it is a distraction. Involvement in the characters’ ongoing drama takes a detour once Kechiche’s camera takes a leering up-close look as they engage in lengthy male fantasies of girl-on-girl action. The scene seem designed to arouse not contemplation, but desire. (Or loathing, if one is of an intolerantly moralistic bent).

Speaking of moralism, maybe this aspect of the film wouldn’t bug me so much had Kechiche not indulged in it with such self-righteousness. The film flaunts its sex scenes in a humorless and disingenuously sanctimonious way that discourages any discussion about it being a turn-on, if not for the viewer, then for Kechiche himself. It is a variation on the Emperor’s New Clothes, with the actors’ nudity exposing the director’s pretensions and predilections.

Be forewarned, then: if you want to enjoy the film as the intense and moving love story it claims to be (and despite everything, sometimes is), don’t pay attention to the man behind the camera indulging his voyeurism, fetishism, and his power over women. And if you find yourself stimulated during the relentless scenes of two naked, beautiful women engaged in energetic, artfully lit, exquisitely shot, explicit fucking, don’t worry, it just means you’re emotionally involved in a bravely realistic love story.

I think Joyce would regard this explanation with a skeptical smile and say, who are you kidding? I mean, where’s the stasis?

Instead of the sex scenes serving to intensify the love story, the love story exists to justify the sex scenes. Without those steamy interludes tarting up what is otherwise a routine narrative, would this film have garnered so many rave reviews and prizes?

Well, maybe “routine” is a bit harsh. I admit that at times the film stirred my tear ducts a bit and made me reflect on the eternal verities of life and love, my mind raised beyond desire and loathing to a condition of stasis, particularly in the scenes near the end…

But let’s take it from the beginning. Fifteen-year-old Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos, who looks at first like she’s barely pubescent),

doesn’t know what she wants to be when she grows up. She is also uncertain about her sexual inclinations. After an unsatisfying clinch with the class hunk, and a confused kiss with a female classmate, she catches the wry eye of Emma (Léa Seydoux), who is older and – as can be seen by her short-cropped blue-dyed hair, insinuating half-smile, and the way she smokes a cigarette – worldly wise and artistic.

She looks like she knows what she wants and what to do with it when she gets it. And, by the way, why is the twenty-something Emma hanging around a schoolyard?

Be that as it may, the two fall in love, or so you assume because they spend so much time in the sack. They do have occasional discussions about philosophy – after all, this is a French movie. Emma quotes Sartre while pontificating about the meaning of life and freedom, and the irrepressibly unsophisticated Adèle brings it all down to earth by observing that existentialism is pretty much summed up in the Bob Marley song “Get Up, Stand-up.”

Deep. Meanwhile, not everyone is keen on their relationship. Some of Adèle’s classmates get nasty. Of course, since Adèle is by far the prettiest girl in school, the ugly girls are the meanest to her. They corner Adèle, taunt her, and accuse her of ogling their asses. Dream on, ugly girls! Not even Kechiche is interested in looking at your posteriors.

But such petty obstacles can’t deter true existential love. Instead, the usual culprits break it up: the passage of time, the inevitability of change, and the vagaries of human nature. (Did I mention Being and Nothingness?) Blue’s big insight: relationships don’t last – deal with it.

Adèle and Emma’s seemingly non-traditional relationship devolves into sadly traditional roles, with Adele becoming the docile drudge who waits alone at home and Emma the self-absorbed artist who increasingly neglects her as she pursues her career. In one dinner scene, Emma barks over the phone at an art dealer who wants to exploit the lesbian sexual imagery of her work – imagine! – while Adèle feebly offers her a cup of coffee and a slice of buttered bread to get her attention.

Such is the fate of those with low self-esteem involved in an unequal relationship. At parties Emma’s arty friends are bemused at Adèle’s ignorance of Klimt and Schiele, and then compliment her on her prettiness. Adèle tries to keep up with all the fancy talk, but all she really wants to do is cook and clean and pose for Emma’s erotic paintings. That, and tell stories to her classes of preschoolers. (Emma suggests that Adèle try writing children’s books, but the matter is wisely dropped). Adèle tries hard to make it work, but her efforts only result in more loneliness and neglect, and finally, infidelity, jealousy, and rage.

To his credit, Kechiche – as in his brilliant The Secret of the Grain – is masterly when depicting the passage of time, a subtlety that is the antithesis of his approach to the sex scenes. The years pass unnoticed until you realize that Adèle is no longer in high school, but has a job, and that the pregnant woman whom she met at a party now has a three-year-old child. Had Kechiche practiced such artful restraint throughout the film, he might have attained the elusive “esthetic emotion” that Joyce describes.

Instead, Kechiche the pseudo-realist decides that truth requires gawking at some bodily function. In the film’s final break-up scene, for example, the focus of attention shifts from the feelings of devastation experienced by the characters to a close-up of the growing stream of snot dripping from Adèle’s nose. Give the girl a tissue, for crying out loud!

Maybe Kechiche here is leaning towards the loathing side of the desire/loathing dichotomy that Joyce was talking about. In any case, just as the spectacle of slamming vulvas and enthusiastic cunnilingus distract from the love in the love scenes, so, too, does this prolonged, gratuitous booger deflate any sense of tragedy when they break up.

Maybe now I’m just getting petty. Like my annoyance at the eating scenes. Always spaghetti, with a greenish chunky sauce that sticks to lips and faces and moustaches and is clearly visible as a half-masticated pulp when people yammer on about Klimt and Schiele with their mouths open. Why is there never a tissue or napkin available when people need them in this movie?

They had far better table manners in The Secret of the Grain. Maybe that’s why I prefer it: it is a film about food in the same way this is a film about love, and it does not need to show the biological processes of chewing, digestion, and excretion to make its point.

Another thing – Emma’s artwork bugs me. Here is one of those situations in which everyone in the film wildly acclaims the creative work of a character who is an artist or writer. And then some of the writing is read out loud, or the paintings hang in a gallery, and you say to yourself, wow, that is really, really bad.

Theoretically, perhaps, Emma’s paintings serve the purpose of setting up a self-reflexive conceit in which the male gaze (Kechiche’s) is directed at the female gaze (Emma’s) which is being directed at an objectified woman (Adèle). But when you come right down to it, the paintings are vulgar, soft-core pornography hypocritically disguised as art. And so, at its worst, is this overpraised movie.

Matters of Gravity

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[BEWARE OF SPOILERS]

Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but three movies released in the past couple of weeks – all high-profile studio films and so far box office winners and definite Oscar nominees – all seem to be about the same thing. In Paul Greengrass’s Captain Phillips, J.C. Chandon’s All Is Lost, and Alfonzo Cuarón’s Gravity, someone is cut off from the rest of the world, and takes shelter in a womb-like refuge from hostile elements that strip away all their connections to the outside world. The ordeal forces these characters to draw on their inner strength and rediscover their essence, and in doing so, they are reborn.

Are these films tapping into some current kink in the collective unconscious? Or are they just cashing in on the universal appeal of claustrophobia and motion sickness?

Motion sickness doesn’t figure much in Captain Phillips, a recreation of the real-life 2009 hijacking of a US cargo ship by Somali pirates, though a lot of time is spent bobbing about in high seas. Instead, it exploits our fear of starving, khat-addicted, zombie-like third-worlders with AK-47’s coming to kidnap us and grab their share of the bounty of the West. That’s the situation the captain of the title, a Yankee from Vermont played by Tom Hanks with an erratic accent reminiscent of the Pepperidge Farm man in the TV commercials, will find himself in. He already has a premonition that something bad is going to happen as he drives to the airport to take the flight to Dakar where he’ll assume command of his vessel, the Maersk Alabama.

Meanwhile, an ocean and a continent away in a fishing village in Somalia, a similar situation unfolds. Minions of a local warlord show up and order Muse (newcomer Barkhad Abdi, who is terrific; Best Supporting Actor nominee maybe?), a scrawny fisherman turned pirate, to get off his ass and snatch another big ship so they can demand millions in ransom. Begrudgingly (Muse probably has a bad feeling about things, too), he enlists a ragtag crew of desperately poor men (watch out for the big mean guy with the scar!) and sets out in a frail skiff to track down and land a 500 foot behemoth and its 3,000 tons of cargo, kind of like an African Ahab after a mechanized Great White Whale.

We all know how this ends, but maybe not what it means – at least according to Greengrass, whose previous films about geopolitical inequity and conflict range from Bloody Sunday (2002) to United 93 (2006),to The Bourne Identity 2004). As might be expected, his new film dutifully critiques the disparity between rich and poor that leads to such tragic confrontations. These pirates may scare the hell out of us, but aren’t they just victims themselves, the road kill of globalism whose only way of living the dream is at the expense of nice guys like Phillips? And Phillips, after all, is not all that different from them, just another working stiff who has to answer to a boss.

So we feel bad for the pirates. Nonetheless, everyone rejoices when Navy Seals show up and blow their brains out. And so I would say that as a political parable, Captain Phillips is kind of ambivalent, with two ideological impulses cancelling each other out.

Instead of being political, then, Captain Phillips, like All Is Lost and Gravity, is existential. All three films tap into the state of mind of felt by people faced with the prospect of catastrophic loss brought about by causes beyond their control. Confronted by this fear, they recover their true selves. But this occurs only after an ordeal that has stripped them of everything that has defined their lives, uncovering the indomitable spirit beneath.

For Captain Phillips, that means he first loses his authority, as Muse climbs on board with his three followers and declares, “I am the Captain.” No longer in command (and it is clear from their interactions before the hijacking that Phillips wasn’t exactly a crew favorite) the deposed Captain must draw on those basic, traditionally masculine virtues of rationality, sang-froid, and self-sacrifice. In short, he becomes the Tom Hanks we all know and love from such roles as Captain Miller in Saving Private Ryan (1998). Vulnerable, decent, level-headed, and when it matters most, utterly courageous.

But is it enough? After he loses his ship, he then loses his freedom, and may well lose his life. The pirates drag him from into a lifeboat – an enclosed, womb-like vessel

– and head out to sea. As the situation deteriorates and the pirates get desperate (we warned you about the guy with the scar!) Phillips jots down a farewell note to his family, cutting off the last tie that binds him to the world beyond. But having reached that extremity, he is pulled from the lifeboat covered with blood, courtesy of the miraculous intercession of SEAL Team Six.

Meanwhile, things are not looking so rosy in All Is Lost. “All is lost,” Robert Redford intones at the very beginning of the film, reciting in voiceover a farewell letter he has written, put in a bottle, and thrown into the ocean. Like Captain Phillips when he scribbled a similar note, Redford’s character (referred to in the press notes as “Our Man” – a variation on Everyman?) has reached the end. The film then flashes back to the beginning and retraces the events that led to this situation.

Like Captain Phillips,” All Is Lost also involves cargo ships, except in this case the hero is not on board with these symbols of mass consumption and international capitalism, but is their victim. One of these behemoths has apparently lost a container en-route, and the bus-sized metal box has drifted into Our Man’s yacht, the Virginia Jean, rupturing the hull. A prolonged battle for survival reminiscent of Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” follows, as Our Man resourcefully struggles to overcome every new ordeal (rendered in fascinating detail; you keep wondering what life-saving tool the guy will come up with next).

But with each new crisis he also loses more of his possessions – both material items and personal belongings – that preserve his identity and link him with the human world. And as with Phillips, this attrition reduces Our Man to his core being – a beleaguered soul determined to survive.

His initial patching of the hull succeeds at first, but subsequent storms undo his work, forcing Our Man to abandon ship and take refuge in an inflatable life raft – a vessel much like the one in Captain Phillips.

He navigates the tiny craft into the shipping lanes, where, like Muse and his tiny skiff, he tries to waylay passing container ships, the cause of all his problems in the first place. But lacking an attention getting device such as an AK-47 (a flare gun has no effect), he is ignored by the towering hulks, which seem devoid of any human presence. By the end he has lost everything, and sinks into the sea, until he too is rescued by a near miraculous intervention, even if it is only imaginary.

Which brings us to Gravity, number one at the box office for the second week in a row and, perhaps not coincidentally, the least political film in the group (though a stickler might complain about its compliance with gender stereotypes). Once again, our hero gets cut off from the rest of the world, but instead of pirates or cargo ships being to blame, it’s those darn Russians who, for whatever nefarious warmongering reasons, have blown up an old military satellite, setting off a chain reaction of blasted orbiters. The debris storm rips by at mindboggling speed and in utter silence into the path of astronauts Stone (Sandra Bullock) and Kowalski (George Clooney), who are tending to an ailing Hubble telescope. The lethal space junk shreds the shuttle, not to mention their fellow astronauts, and sends Stone adrift, her umbilical cord to the mother ship severed.

And so Stone goes through the now familiar drill of losing touch with all that connects her to her old life (not just Kowalski and Houston but also her grief for a dead child — a perfunctory, button-pushing attempt to establish a backstory) and in so doing discovers her inner resources – the resilient, resourceful, independent identity she didn’t know she had. Well, not entirely independent, as Kowalski

– here the disembodied male superego that grounds Stone’s flighty femaleness – walks her through the various procedures via radio contact. Again, the protagonist is ensconced in a vessel and even assumes a fetal position to make sure everyone gets the point.

And after a stunning last minute reprieve from certain death (ah, the miracle of oxygen deprivation), Stone, too is reborn, and like Phillips and Our Man, emerges from the sea of troubles renewed.

So, once again audiences are taken to the brink, they learn to “let it go” (the phrase repeated in Gravity), learn that “everything is going to be all right,” (the somewhat ironic refrain in Captain Phillips) even though, as in All Is Lost, it looks like all is lost.

And what does this mean? Are people flocking to these films because they are scared, feel cut off from and ignored by those who are controlling their lives, and are looking for either their own resources or some deus ex machina to save them?

Probably. Also, they are really good movies.

Just a couple of closing notes on the many films that Gravity resembles. Two in particular, both of which explore similar themes with darker conclusions: 2001, though with Bullock as the space baby and Clooney as the monolith; and Alien with Bullock as Ripley (there is a scene with Stone in her skivvies manning a spacecraft that must be an allusion)