Volkseinbildungsbesorgnisschrift

I had the good fortune to stumble across an inexpensive copy of Good Bye, Lenin! recently. This is a profoundly German film, despite the gratuitous English title, a sorta-comedy sorta-drama about a young man living in former East Berlin during the tumultuous reunification process which occurred in the early 1990s. I first watched it back in 2005, not long after its release in English-speaking lands. As I was the only person in my then-circle of friends to understand German, or to have any personal experience with the nuances of its language and culture and history, I merited the film more highly than the rest of them. Having the maternal side of my family hailing from the Fatherland helps.

I was too young to care about or understand my mother's and grandparents' opinions on the reunification at the time, but that changed once I matured mentally and politically. Even twenty years after reunification, former West Germans looked down at the former Ossies. The way the East Germans were treated by some (including my grandfather and to a lesser extent my mother) was seemingly paradoxical and profoundly patriarchal. On the one hand, East Germans didn't deserve any kind of assistance in getting a leg up on the pile. Using West German resources to bring the East up to economic speed was the worst kind of pandering. The incredibly generous currency exchange given to bearers of the East German Mark was seen as tantamount to robbery, or perhaps more accurately a financial scam, by the West Germans. On the other hand, the worthless ex-commies had nothing worth contributing to greater German society. That their manufacturing base was in the shitter was their own fault, not the fault of the centrally planned economy under which they existed for 40 years.

To anyone who follows American political discourse with any regularity, these arguments may sound a little bit familiar. Different players and different words, perhaps, but overall the same out-group ostracization that happens whenever the topic of using collective funds or political power to impact, for better or for worse, someone not of one's own social group comes up—North vs. South, urban vs. rural, Caucasian vs. non-Caucasian, male vs. female.

It's only natural for people to place the greatest emphasis on their local identity—the community to which they most immediately belong—because that is the social group with the greatest impact on one's daily life. People are the most forgiving towards, even ignore, egregious deeds which would make them scream bloody murder if anyone else asked it of them. Local taxes are a good example; people bitch about having to pay them, sure, people bitch about anything (*cough*), but how common is it for anybody to flip out over them when compared to state or, Osiris help us, federal income taxes?

Gender hypocrisy is another big one that I'll nudge with a twenty-foot pole right now. Things which are socially acceptable for men to do or for women to do are not okay when done by the opposite sex, and that's not even touching on the great twisting ball of one's social gender. That damnable, mysterious Other rears its head once more, and opacity of comprehension gives way to revulsion and indifference and no small amount of ignorance. I didn't know until about three months ago that I ought to refer to myself as “cis-sexual” in gender theory circles and discussions as opposed to “normal”; the rudeness and connotations of using that particular word never occurred to me.

One thing I perhaps ought to mention at this point is that Good Bye, Lenin! does not portray all of the former Ossies sycophantically, and that there is a great deal of nuance within the characters, particularly the protagonist's mother, who is an ardent believer in the socialist state and whose coma and recovery therefrom drives half the film's plot; the other half is, by necessity, a love story, but it's kept from being overly cloying because it is treated fairly realistically and the conflicts within the blooming relationship tie into the other half of the plot. The street of cultural acceptance (homogenization into the social majority collective?) runs both ways. As the old adage puts it, the horse can be led to water but cannot be forced to drink. Does the horse have a right to be as stubborn as it wishes, even if it will clearly result in a death by dehydration?

People much much smarter and wiser than me—Hobbes, Locke, Rawls and Nozick among many many others—have tried tackling this problem. That we as a species have not come to a consensus could portend that we never will come to a consensus. That does not, however, mean that we should not work towards such an end. One individual will never be capable of totally understanding another person's point of view and way of life, but not striving for at least some degree of understanding is tantamount to throwing our hands up in the air and resigning ourselves to not accomplishing anything seeing as perfection will never be had in pursuit of any endeavor.

What is it that prevents us from embracing a larger understanding of community, of opening our minds to the social and psychological Other? Is it merely cultural, the persistence of a clannish or tribal social upbringing that is passed on to successive generations through word and deed? Or is it something deeper, something more primal and biological, a style of social organization hardwired into our brain chemistry like pack behavior in canines or schooling among some types of fish? The constructivist in me believes it to be the former. The cynic, of course, tends to the latter. Sadly, there is no way to definitely, let alone ethically, prove which is the correct option, or if there exists some third (fourth? Fifth?) explanation.

But even that style of thought, a black and white nature vs. nurture sociological debate, falls into a zero-sum trap. The quest for absolutes, for a Platonic purity of logic and structure in understanding, drives most scientific discourse. The need for conformity, while understandably laudable given the methods and philosophy of science, seeks to compartmentalize the disparate flora and fauna, the varying geography and strata of geology, of the sprawling forest which is existence into a perfect solid, a thing which perhaps has many disparate and flavorful bits trapped within it but which, in the grand scheme of things, is as sterile as any modern medical lab.

I've been to parts of the former East Germany. Even twenty years after reunification, there's a distinct difference in the air, a unique visual and cultural flavor that two decades of Western integration has not entirely managed to stamp out. It's most prevalent in and around the small towns. The rail lines are iller-kept, the roads are more worn and prone to potholing, and the buildings are dingier compared to sibling villages in the former West. The dialects of German spoken there have a curious, generation-long lingual diaspora. The younger folk I interacted with were perfectly understandable, but I struggled a bit to understand older men and women, ones that had lived in and through the DDR, on the occasions when I spoke with them. Of course, they were eminently surprised when I revealed that I was an American student-tourist rather than a visitor from elsewhere in the country. Apparently it's rather uncommon for lone young Americans to pay a visit to Leipzig, let alone the Nietzschehaus in the cozy hamlet of Naumburg; the wonderful old lady who manned the ticket table at the museum's entrance told me that she thought I hailed from somewhere around Frankfurt once we got to talking.

For better or for worse (personally I feel it's for better), people are not all one uniform culture or creed. We'll have arguments over the “proper” way of doing things. Usually those arguments will be hashed out with harsh language; other times the situation will sadly devolve into an exchange of bullets and missiles rather than ideas. I don't hold to much of the Marxist (though technically it comes down from Hegel) thought I once embraced in my naïve university days, but one bit which I do cling to is an idiosyncratic interpretation of dialectical materialism, the notion that conflicting ideas can be resolved into a greater, more complete whole. The world and all its bits are not inevitably destined for Marxist-style communism, no, but they are destined for something different from and greater than what they are right now. It happened in the reunification of the two Germanys in the early '90s. Some places, like North and South Korea, may rejoin into a political whole, peaceably or maybe not so much, in the coming years. Other places have been and will continue to break apart along ethnic or cultural lines, like the state of Kosovo from Bosnia; or South Sudan from Sudan, also for the better.

Fighting change merely for the sake of fighting change leads to stagnation and frustration. Nothing can hold back the tides of progress; it is as inexorable and relentless as wind and rain shearing down a mountain range, and may need to act over just as long a span of time. Mindlessly going with the flow is likewise not the appropriate reaction. Being swept up in a gamut of new ideas without grounding oneself in the familiar is as short-sighted and suicidal as yelling, “Hey, watch this!” and diving into a tsunami's riptide.

As for the what proper ratio between the two ought to be...well, if I had the answer to that, I wager I'd be doing something with my life other than running a video store.

Super? More Like Mediocre

I want to like the movie Super, starring Rainn Wilson and Ellen Paige, more than I do. I want to believe that there's some sort of cohesive message in this movie's garbled set of images and dialogue. The writer and director, Mr. James Gunn, probably feels he has communicated a statement about violence-glorification in American media and personal growth, but I just don't see it.

Rainn Wilson is Frank, who acts pretty much like Dwight Schrute would if he were a short-order cook married to Liv Tyler instead of a paper salesman. Liv Tyler is disenchanted with her marriage, and so enters Jacques/Jock, portrayed by the ever-enjoyable Kevin Bacon. He's a drug pusher and pimp and he has a malicious hold over Ms. Tyler. She is a recovering drug addict, though she's not very good at the whole “recovery” thing, and she ditches Mr. Wilson in favor of her new paramour/drug dispensary. This rightly upsets our hero, enough that he has a religious epiphany starring Nathan Fillion in which he decides to become a superhero named the Crimson Bolt who whacks baddies with a wrench. “Baddies” in this case range from child molesters to people who cut in line at a movie theater. Yep.

He's eventually joined in his quest for righteous retribution by Ellen Paige, a 22-year-old comic store employee who has a weird sexual fetish for Mr. Wilson's superhero persona. Together they fight, and simultaneously perpetrate, crime. Eventually the obligatory happy ending is achieved, despite this being labeled as a “dark” comedy. Insert eye-roll here.

My displeasure with this film stems firstly from its inconsistency regarding its fetishistic use of violence. Mr. Wilson is not a particularly nice guy; in fact he's a pretty selfish bastard. Okay, viewers can buy that. Not all protagonists need to be shining avatars of goodness, and there's this faux-existentialist, quasi-nihilist malaise that seems to afflict most of our protagonists in recent years. He's, first and foremost, devoted to his wife (can't fault him that, I suppose) and, second, to upholding “the rules.” The problem is that he is a great big hypocrite about those selfsame rules, especially when it comes to rescuing his wife from the clutches of the nefarious Kevin Bacon. If it's okay for him to break the norms of society in pursuit of his own interests, how can it be justified that other people are in the moral wrong for doing the things for which they, apparently, deserve punishment? The movie never addresses this ethical knot and it doesn't do a particularly good job of comparing Frank's moral situation vis-a-vis his victims', though it does a whole hell of a lot of contrasting.

Second, there's the matter of Boltie. Ellen Paige did a marvelous job portraying the stereotypical annoying kid sidekick. At one point near the end of the movie some events occur and something life-changing happens to Boltie and, by extension, the Crimson Bolt. During the film's denouement, a whole hell of a lot of time and attention is given to Frank and his wife's life-situations, but none to the fallout of what befell Boltie. This happens after it was emphasized more than once that there exist real-life repercussions for Crimson Bolt and Boltie's antics, up to and including police investigation of the vigilantism. Leaving such a gross plot thread unresolved by the credits is more than merely unsatisfying; it's outright lazy. There's also the little matter of her, at one point, raping Frank. You read right. Last I checked, rape was not something to be condoned, but Frank takes to the act with considerable aplomb once he goes through a superficial resistance phase. More of that “it's ethical when I or my buddies do it” moralizing, I guess? Or there's an exception to the “rape is bad” rule when it's girl-on-guy? The incident, at any rate, is forgotten by both parties by the time the next scene opens.

Maybe, just maybe, my critiques are in fact what the director wanted to achieve with this film. Maybe he was less concerned with creating verisimilitude in his fiction and more intent on exploring the metafiction of the vigilante superhero genre through calling out its inherent inconsistencies. But if that was his intent, it was done clumsily. He played too many other tropes straight when he should have deconstructed and subverted nearly all of them, and what resulted was a confusing clusterfuck that feels as if it came from the second draft of a script rather than a polished, tight final product. There exist worse movies, to be sure, but a positive, must-see recommendation for Super is not something I feel I can give. Give it a go if you're specifically craving a superhero deconstruction film and are sick of Watchmen, but be aware the movie's title in no way describes the quality of its contents.

Portentous Title, Indeed

I had serious reservations about Sucker Punch. The way the film was marketed, everything I had heard, all the reviews I had read, all of it made the movie out to be nothing more than the feverish, masturbatory fantasies of a repressed fifteen-year-old. I mean, the trailer featured hot chicks in skimpy clothes killing shit with swords and guns while dragons attacked Nazi-unicorn-zeppelin-biplane pirate ships, for Kali's sake.

Okay, maybe the absurdity wasn't quite to that degree, but nevertheless the movie looked like a shameless, pandering cash grab. After all, Zack Snyder is a human and humans love money to the extent that scruples don't matter, provided enough money is thrown at the individual in question. The overall high quality of one's previous filmography in no way disallows one from creating schlock to buy another four dozen solid gold potato peelers.

When one of the customers whose opinion on film quality I trust rented the movie and returned it with a solid recommendation, I was flabbergasted. “Are you sure you're talking about the same movie I am?”

“Yeah, positive,” says the customer, pointing at the case with a disc reading “Sucker Punch” within. “Aside from some weird jumpy shit near the beginning and end, it's a solid movie.”

Well then. Away we go.

There is indeed some “weird jumpy shit” in the movie, and one of the complaints I regularly have seen leveled against the film is that the “weird jumpy shit” is confusing. Except...not really. Not really at all.

Emily Browning has been committed to an asylum by her jackass stepfather so she is unable to claim an inheritance after her mother died. Said jackass stepfather bribes Oscar Isaac, a corrupt employee of said institution, into forging papers recommending Emily for a lobotomy. Said lobotomy is to take place five days hence.

Meanwhile, Carla Gugino is the resident psychiatrist and, in this asylum, group therapy takes place in a large, dirty room called The Theater. Emily has no desire to live the life of Randle McMurphy, so she concocts a plan to escape. Enter the “weird jumpy shit.”

See, one of the things that I really enjoyed about this movie (I'll get to the other one in a second) is that it has a cohesive plot and uses metaphor and allegory to tell a cinematic tale. The “weird jumpy shit” is actually a form of mental escapism used by Emily in which she and a bunch of other girls are dancers in a brothel run by Oscar. Once she's inside her fantasy world, she goes deeper, Matrix-style, into the domain in which all the hot chick asskickery occurs. Some found it apparently confusing, but I found it to be a simple and straightforward concept to grasp. Perhaps people need to play some Dungeons & Dragons? They should at least read up on the coterminous, overlapping nature of the Material and Ethereal Planes and how from the Ethereal Plane one can “go deeper” into the Astral (and, holy crap, you can even go from the Astral to other-other places!).

That's the basic plot. The film's emotional climax is rather predictable (I guessed right away what form a mysterious McGuffin took once its super-secret “you'll-know-it-when-you-reach-understanding” existence was revealed to our protagonist) but doesn't really detract from the plot; cliches are not bad. The asskickery is marvelously executed, but this is Zack Snyder we're talking about. The man knows how to do action. The visuals are overall splendid, as well. One thing I found refreshing, for a change, was the limits placed on depictions of violence (and there's a damn lot of that) due to the PG13 rating. I don't think the movie would have been nearly as enjoyable had it had Watchmen-like levels of realistic gore.

Why do I say this? It brings me to the second major point of approval I have for this film: it's the most positively feminist movie I can recall seeing in a good long while. It features a cast of strong females who are thwarted time and again by conspiring, asshole men without creeping into the violent pseudofeminism of revenge flicks, nor portraying all males as straw men (heh) who simply exist as punching bags for the creator's message. Hell, my favorite character in the movie is a Cool Old Guru played by Scott Glenn. But he never overshadows the female leads; he gives guidance and provides objectives only. Instead he leaves the women to their own devices when boots hit the ground and requires them to do their own heavy lifting in a quest for freedom.

I only have one real quibble regarding the movie; near the end, the girls have to hijack a bomb from a train before it reaches its destination and explodes (again with the metaphors). They have to wade through a legion of angry robots to reach said bomb. What follows is roughly four minutes of spinny camera syndrome; the thing where the camera rotates around the focus of the scene as the other stuff unfolds. It had happened to a smaller, more palatable degree at points earlier in the movie, and while I appreciate on a technical level the gorgeous attention to detail provided by bullet-time shots of severed robot parts falling to the ground, it just got boring after the first minute. It was the only time during the movie I felt disconcerted and even confused. That all the robots were identical and posed no real threat at all to our leading ladies made the scene even more tiresome. The camera just wouldn't stop spinning spinning spinning around Emily and her companions as they hewed their way down the entire length of a train and left a trail of robot corpses in their wake.

Aside from that, though, I really cannot find any other serious fault with the film. Does this make it high cinema? Well, no. It doesn't offer any truly deep insight or message. That there are feminist overtones to the film doesn't mean the movie is a feminist movie; if I cared enough to put the effort into it, I could find that sort of thing in many other films. The structuring of the movie's plot into ogre-like layers of metaphorical reality is refreshing and well-done, though. At the end of the day, Sucker Punch is an action flick, albeit a well-done action flick that certainly doesn't deserve all the hate it has received from movie critics more famous and wiser than me. I highly recommend it.