This is only the third of these newsletters, and already I’ve missed a deadline. I’m late. I’m sorry. I said in the first edition that I was not going to be “weighed down by my own outsized expectations,” but that I would “try to be here every week,” and here I am, falling short on the one fucking expectation I set!
I’ll admit, I spent a lot of the time I should have been writing playing video games, including The Last of Us. I missed out on this game when it came out in 2014, and while I could have guessed a brutal pandemic is not the best time to pick up a game set after a brutal pandemic, I’m glad I decided to wait. Playing that game within the context of Our Current Moment is almost a source of relief. Fighting off hordes of humans infected with a zombifying fungus, my reaction was less “This is scary!” and more “Well, at least things aren’t this bad.” The worst we have to deal with now is millions of deaths worldwide, economic collapse, and the complete abdication of responsibility at virtually every level of government. But at least there aren’t Clickers.
A few weeks ago, I finally watched Do the Right Thing, a movie I’d always meant to see but must have been waiting for a fitting occasion. The Music Box screened it on 35mm last year — but I didn’t go. My girlfriend said she’d watched it on VHS at a friend’s apartment, the way my brother and I used to watch movies as teenagers, hunched in front of Fight Club on a small TV/VHS combo. I missed out on both those fundamental experiences — the proper ways to watch Do the Right Thing. Instead, I rented it on Amazon and watched it on a 55” HDTV for a Friday film series my friends have been doing for quarantine. The occasion I had been waiting for all along, I guess, was 2020.
It is, of course, an amazing film. It might be impossible to watch this movie right now, this summer, in the midst of both our own heat wave and a renewed racial reckoning, and not have an intense emotional reaction. I cried during the riot scene, mourning both the death of a character on screen and the dearth of any cultural progress in the 30 years since the movie came out. How could Spike Lee have depicted this tension with such clarity three whole decades ago, yet we haven’t done anything since then?
I can’t speak to the way the zeitgeist responded to Do the Right Thing at its release. Roger Ebert’s 2001 Great Movies essay offers some insight there:
I sat behind a woman at the press conference who was convinced the film would cause race riots. Some critics agreed. On the Criterion DVD of the film, Lee reads from his reviews, noting that Joe Klein, in New York magazine, laments the burning of Sal's Pizzeria but fails to even note that it follows the death of a young black man at the hands of the police.
Back then, a few months before 9/11, Ebert shared his thesis of the film’s message:
None of these people is perfect. But Lee makes it possible for us to understand their feelings; his empathy is crucial to the film, because if you can't try to understand how the other person feels, you're a captive inside the box of yourself. … Those who found this film an incitement to violence are saying much about themselves, and nothing useful about the movie. Its predominant emotion is sadness.
RogerEbert.com has published a few more essays on Do the Right Thing over the years, marking its various anniversaries with retrospectives that attack it from the lens of Our Current Moment. Matt Zoller Seitz gave his own summary in a 25-year retrospective, published in June 2014 — two months before Michael Brown’s murder in Ferguson:
If it's a cautionary tale about anything, it's the dangers of putting one's vanity first. Fragile egos lead to fights, riots, arson. The real killer here is pride. …
[The characters] are animated by wounded pride of one sort or another—racial, ethnic, macho, sexual, paternal, maternal—and they can't resist preening and puffing out their chests and jabbing fingers in each other's faces even when there's no good reason to act that way.
And here’s Wael Khairy, in an essay published last month:
The core of the problem is hidden within the problematic way ethnic groups perceive themselves and one another: it’s the way the three corner men judge the Koreans for stealing their jobs; it’s the gaze of patrolling police officers ever fixed on the Black community; it’s the Puerto Ricans group fending off Black bystanders; it’s the African Americans bullying the only white man living on their street. The problem is in how they all perceive one another.
All these readings seem correct to me, more or less, but I’m struck by the way they have evolved over time. At the turn of the century, Ebert saw a profound sadness at the heart of the film. In 2014, Seitz saw a fable of American vanity. Now, in 2020, Khairy stares into our society’s shattered looking glass. On Do the Right Thing’s 35th Anniversary, when we reflect on what it tried to tell us about who we were in 1989, what more will we have realized we missed the first time?
New Perspectivesies
Speaking of Roger Ebert, I watched Newsies the other day. I found it entertaining enough, spirited and fun in a wonky sort of way, but Ebert was not so kind in 1992:
"Newsies" is like warmed-over Horatio Alger, complete with such indispensable cliches as the newsboy on crutches, the little kid, and of course the hero's best pal, who has a pretty sister.
Compare that to this piece on the Baffler by Sarah Marshall, about the community that sprung up around Newsies by her and her fellow adolescents, particularly teen girls writing slash fiction of those indispensable (and irresistible) cliches:
Deciding how well Newsies works as a political text seems impossible to do without deciding how well it works as a movie, and the answer to that question is: it does because it doesn’t. It’s a movie that worked in my life, and in the lives of so many girls I knew and loved, not as a story but a space: a set of characters and sets we could use to explore our desires, our creativity, our fears, our sexualities, ourselves.
I like this reminder that art is — for lack of a more insightful term — subjective. Where a 50-year-old man might see a kid on crutches and remember Tiny Tim, a teenage girl sees a whole new canon of possibilities.
(In)stability
I might have more time to write now that I’m unemployed again. This pandemic — and our anemic response to it — has unearthed so many inequities embedded in our society, so I’m not about to complain about my own circumstances, but this shit sucks, man.
When I first got laid off in March, I told myself I could seize the opportunity to do some good, to find a way to help the world in this crisis, but that mission quickly gave way to “just don’t lose your apartment.” Now, as I scramble yet again for some stability, I’m trying to reframe my outlook in those revolutionary terms: what can I do, where can I put my energy, that still might serve some good? What can a humble Web Content Manager do to stem the tide? Even the app-makers can’t get contact tracing right.
One of the effects of life in this country right now, in which we have to operate within this steady thrum of dread, this constant awareness of bad things happening, is that I feel obligated to devote every ounce of my attention to the moment. Most people have jobs just to make a living — that’s the point. A dollar for your day. Compensation, meet labor. You don’t have to make Changing the World your job. But isn’t anything else, right now, a waste of time?
Doing the Wrong Things
There’s no shortage of horror stories in the news lately, and that’s before you can even begin to comprehend more distant tragedies, like the Beirut explosion or Wilford Brimley’s death. I truly cannot grapple with our nation’s insistence on treating things like normal. Take this viral photo, for instance, of a packed hallway in a Georgia high school:
According to NYT, the superintendent of the school defended the photo in a letter to parents:
Students only remained in the hallways briefly while switching classes, he wrote, and the school was following recommendations issued by the Georgia Department of Education.
“Sure, we stuffed the chickens into the coop, but we only loose the fox for five minutes every hour. That’s what Farmer Tyson said to do.”
I desperately want to see football this season. I want to feel some sense of normalcy, too — something to look forward to every week, something to read about and feel entertained rather than depressed. Give me a source of constant misery that doesn’t matter.
But I just don’t see how it’s possible that we get out of this any time soon. Cases are starting to track down, I guess, but we’re about to open schools. Republicans are just outright demanding that the working class return to danger — including my parents, who should be staying home as much as possible. Listening to the GOP insist that the $600 benefit was causing a “disincentive” to return to work was one of the more disheartening things I’ve heard in a while. Staying home is still the point.
On Sundays, I’ll sure as hell be staying home. I just hope I get to watch some guys crash their brains into each other without having to worry about their lungs.
Pods with Friends
My friends have been productive, by which I mean everyone is busy making podcasts to help deafen our collective insanity:
I had fun as a guest on Alex Nichols’ podcast, The Gunkhole State Park Podcast, where I channeled my inner Timothy Treadwell to talk about bears and Two and Half Men auditions. It’s a funny, goofy podcast that I’d recommend even if I didn’t have a selfish reason to share it.
Lara Unnerstall is a talented filmmaker who loves horror movies and mental health in equal measure, so her podcast Psychoanalysis is a perfect outlet. As someone who struggles with anxiety, I’ve found that horror movies only lead me to dwell on my inner demons. It’s interesting to hear it from the other perspective — that creepy crawlies and slashers can unlock some sort of catharsis in our dumb, wrinkled brains.
I really like Conspiracy You Can Believe In, Patrick Winegar’s historian-hobbyist breakdown of plausible conspiracies. The episode on the assassination of Olof Palme taught me a bit of history I’d never even heard about. Patrick is a great narrator and a smart historian; he could convince me of anything.
Well done on not being defeated by lateness. "Do the Right Thing" is as you say; I saw it in Toronto in the summer of 1989. If you have not seen it, "Jungle Fever" is its peer, I think, and has one of the most frightening and despair-inducing performances I know. In a good way. Writing taglines is not always a simple task. : ) Keep writing. Tell people what you see.