Mined from the notebooks,Thursday, August 16, 2018. Posted Sunday morning, August 25, 2019.
Another note from the Department of In Search of Lost Time.
While back, on the Fourth of July, as a matter of fact, and not coincidentally, there was one of those quick twitter games intended to get a fun discussion going: New York Daily News opinion writer Josh Greenman challenged his followers to list some great American movies that don’t wink, blink, or close its eyes to our flaws and failures as a people and a nation but were still “patriotic”. That’s how I took it. Here’s how Greenman actually put it:
What are some great American movies that don’t necessarily celebrate the country in a purely patriotic sense but represent it well, with both pride and honesty?
I’m one of his followers, so I played along. I listed “Moscow on the Hudson”, “The Milagro Beanfield War”, “Nashville”, “I, Tonya”, “Brooklyn”,“Milk” and “Hidden Figures”.
That’s six. I could have listed at least seven more. “42”, to start. “The Grapes of Wrath,” “The Big Short”, “The Sweet Smell of Success”, “Mr Smith Goes to Washington”, “The Music Man”, and “Glory.” (Mrs M says she would add “All the President’s Men.” Once a newswoman…) But five seemed to be the rule of the game, and I was pushing it with six, and those are the six I went with. “Moscow on the Hudson”, “The Milagro Beanfield War”, “Nashville”, “I,Tonya”, “Brooklyn”,“Milk” and “Hidden Figures”. And although I didn’t rank them, at the moment “Milk” would be at the top of my list.
You might notice that a theme running through most of the movies on both my lists is how people the majority of Americans excluded from the definition of American pushed to expand that definition to include themselves and others like them.
To put it simply, the theme and the plots of these movies center around answering the question, “Who counts?” And the answer is “We all do!”
(Another theme is resistance to the corruption that’s at the heart of the American notion of success.)
Setting aside for now how good a movie it is and what fine performances Penn and Josh Brolin give, “Milk” isn’t just the most exemplary of that theme, but it’s the one that most explicitly shows how the people rise up to answer that question. It’s the most political and democratic of the movies---political in that its characters’ main occupation is taking political action; democratic in that it shows how politics works in a democracy (messily); but also political in making the case that politics can be a societal good, is in fact necessary to creating a good and just society, and democratic in that it answers that question.
“Who counts?”
“We do! We all do!”
That’s a question we’re being forced to answer again by the racist lunatic in the White House and his henchmen in Congress and the hideous men and women who make up his most ardent mobs of supporters. They have their own answer the question--- “Who counts? We do! You don’t! Unless you conform to our way of being American!”---and are determined to make us accept their answer.
At any rate, a year and a week ago, “Milk” was our feature for Mannion Family Movie Night....
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Thursday, August 16, 2018.
“How do you teach homosexuality? Is it like French?”
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“If it were true that children emulate their teachers, we'd have a lot more nuns running around.”
Those lines from “Milk”, this week’s feature for Mannion Family Movie Night, are delivered with perfect charm and timing by Sean Penn in the title role. I hope they’re really Harvey Milk’s words. They’re too good not to be true. They probably are. Milk was that quick and that witty. He was also something else. Well-practiced. In his short career as the political leader of the gay rights movement in California, Milk had to answer the same questions and accusations from adversaries, critics, and less-than-wholehearted allies---some of them gay themselves---and men and women who wanted to join the movement but were afraid or too much in despair to see the point of taking political action--- “Hope” was one of Milk’s rallying cries. The questions boiled down to “Why should we let you people in?” And Milk’s answer was always a variation of “Because we’re like you! Because we are you!” Sometimes he was witty in his answer. Sometimes he was angry. Very angry.
“Milk” plays down the anger.
In doing so, it plays down a quality that was a necessary part of his public character as a populist politician. Sean Penn and director Gus Van Sant take him a ways down the road to portraying Milk as a secular saint. At times he’s practically a holy fool. This is fine by me. For one thing, it’s historically accurate, if far from the whole story. I don’t mind if “based on the true story” movies take some licenses, as long as they remain true in spirit to what actually happened and who the people involved were and what they stood for. But for another, I’m not a fan of populism. Populism, on the left as well as on the right, depends too much on appeals to anger and resentment and a sense of grievance that looks to scapegoat and place blame on them, and it tends to create cults of personality focused on an authoritarian demagogue, otherwise known as the Man on a Horse. “Milk” is almost a how-to manual on how to organize a small d democratic political movement and Harvey Milk is portrayed as a (somewhat overly-idealized) ideal democratic political leader. I think we need to see that, particularly as the political media can’t get over calling Our Mister President Trump a populist as if that’s a good thing and a mitigation of his awfulness. When they try to explain his success---which they tend to do as if they’ve played no part in it while they define “success” at keeping his mobs riled up and rallying around, again as if they play no part in it. He’s just a genius at manipulating the media whoever they are---they take it for granted that populism and democracy are totally compatible, even nearly synonymous, at least in the United States. They don’t seem to grasp that “populism”, particularly Trump’s brand of it, is a threat to democracy. It’s an appeal to mob rule leading to dictatorship.
There’s a good reason FDR considered Huey Long the second most dangerous man in America.
The first was an actual man on a horse or, at any rate, notoriously in command of men on horses. Douglas MacArthur.
A beauty of Van Sant’s direction is that the crowds at Milk’s rallies are never seen as a mob or even as a crowd. In every shot you can pick out the individual men and women who happen to be in a crowd of other like-minded but still individual men and women.
The shots of those crowds---in street scenes, at the rallies, in campaign offices, at parties, coming and going at city hall and in and out of Harvey Milk’s camera store---make “Milk” a cinematic Whitman-esque hymn to democracy sung at 24-frames per second.
Ok. Maybe I got a bit carried away there.
Penn does capture some of Harvey Milk’s anger, along with the abrasiveness and goofiness that were part of his charm. He and Van Sant also point up Milk’s recklessness which at times amounted to irresponsibility. Their Harvey Milk is damaged goods, like, the movie implies, every gay man and woman of the time who grew up thinking of themselves as “problems”, “weirdos”, “sinners”, “freaks,” “perverts,” and “monsters,” and learned to hate themselves for it. The only gay character who seems free of that self-loathing is the much younger Cleve Jones (played with an anger of his own that is not wholly righteous by Emile Hirsch), and he’s, if not saved from it, then protected from it by Milk’s friendship, love, and example.
Another character who is not gay---or at any rate not certainly gay---but who is still damaged goods and crippled by self-loathing is Milk’s erstwhile friend turned assassin Dan White, played by Josh Brolin with a neediness that is at once pathetic and repulsive. Brolin is able to draw us to White at the same time he makes us cringe from him and not just because we know what he’s going to do. There’s a Jekyll and Hyde duality to his White, where the monster is felt lurking in the background when White is seen at his most well-meaning and good and when the monster appears to do his worst the good and well-meaning man is right there with him.
In “The Mayor of Castro Street”, the biography of Harvey Milk by Randy Shilts “Milk” is not based on---to my surprise. I’ve always assumed it was. But imdb says no. Dustin Lance Black won the Academy Award in 2009 and the Writers Guild Award for Best Original Screenplay.---there’s some extended speculation that White was a closet case, much of it seemingly in hindsight as an easily grasped explanation for what White did. Easier to grasp than the Twinkie defense, at any rate. I don’t recall its being significantly mentioned in the movie---if it was, I was either out of the room or it was done as practically a throwaway that I missed. What the movie’s White is is out of place. Everywhere he goes. He’s a former cop and firefighter too refined, sensitive, and emotional to have felt at home in squad rooms and firehouses, and as a former cop and firefighter he’s too working class to have felt accepted by the political and business elites whose ranks he aspired to. And yet as an elected city official he was assumed to be part of that elite and consequently distrusted by the blue collar voters of his district. What he sees in Milk and what draws him to him as a would-be friend is someone who has learned not to care what other people think and to live cheerfully if not always comfortably in his own skin.
The irony is that White is a perfect example of someone who would have benefited from the movement, even if he’s not gay, because one of its prime goals was to make it possible for everyone to be free to be themselves regardless of what other people think and yet Milk keeps him at a distance and for the same reason the audience does---he senses the Hyde within.
That’s part of it.
Another part of it is that Milk’s a politician, and as a politician he needs to be opportunistic. As a fellow member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisor, White wants Milk to think of him as the sort of colleague who’s practically indistinguishable from a friend. Milk, however, sees him as just another politician and as such White is either an ally---a useful ally and so usable rather than befriendable---or an adversary to be outmaneuvered, no matter how cordial their professional relationship, and manipulated. The cordiality is part of the manipulation.
A further irony is that Milk has his own Jekyll and Hyde inner drama. His Hyde is a monster of self-destruction and a reckless and irresponsible hedonist.
Then, of course, there’s the Jekyll and Hyde nature of all politicians. “Milk” doesn’t blink at showing that too. Milk has a public self who is mostly an expression of his real self. His private self is hardly monstrous but he can be ruthless, coldly calculating, self-serving, opportunistic, and vain and ambitious, and he---Milk’s Mister Hyde---manipulates the public Doctor Jekyll, to Milk’s own and the movement’s benefit.
And that’s something else I liked about “Milk”. It’s a political movie. Dramatically and thematically. Dramatically, it’s about how politics works and its characters’ main occupation is taking political action. Thematically, it makes the case that politics can be a societal good, is in fact necessary to creating a good and just society,
And thematically and dramatically it makes an important and often overlooked (by liberal elitists, particularly the ones in Hollywood who green light movies) point about civil rights movements in America since the beginning: they’ve been led and won by the people whose rights were denied by the ruling majority and who refused to accept their marginalization as citizens and devaluation as human beings. There are no heterosexual saviors in “Milk”. The only prominent straight good guy is Milk’s fellow assassination-victim, San Francisco mayor George Mascone, and he’s generally seen briefly and at a distance and shown to be one of Harvey Milk’s useful allies and an opportunistic politician in his own right who, even though he’s sincerely on the side of the angels, sees Milk and his movement as useful allies in furthering his own political agenda. Milk and his people rise up together and on their own to counter the conservative answer to what I think of as the fundamental question We the People of the United States have been arguing over since 1787 at least. Who counts as the People?
That’s essentially the same as asking “Who counts as a human being?” And the liberal answer---unfortunately given piecemeal and inconsistently over two hundred and thirty years---has been “We do! We all do!”
The conservative answer has been an adamant and unified “Only we do! You don’t!”
In “Milk” the conservative answer is given and championed by Anita Bryant, the former Miss America turned singer turned orange juice pitchwoman--- “A day with orange juice is like a day without sunshine!”---turned Right Wing Christian turned professional homophobe and anti-gay rights activist and reactionary movement leader. Bryant appears in actual news clips from the time and as the subject of actual newspaper stories, so she speaks in her own words. And those words are their words---still.
Forty years later, they’re using the exact same words to answer the question.
“Who counts?”
“We do! You don’t.”
“Milk” ends with a victory and Harvey Milk dies as a hero not a martyr. But Van Sant keeps his eye and our eyes trained on the fights that are to come. Nothing stays won. And let’s not kid ourselves. After they get Roe v Wade overturned, they’re going after marriage equality.
They’re going after equality period.
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“Milk” directed by Gus Van Sant, written by Dustin Lance Black, and starring Sean Penn, Josh Brolin, James Franco, Emile Hirsch, Alison Pill, Deigo Luna, Victor Garber, and Denis O’Hare is available on DVD and Blu-ray and to watch instantly at Amazon.
“The Mayor of Castro Street” by Randy Shilts is also available at Amazon, in paperback and for kindle, as well as an audiobook from Audible.
Filed under Mining the Notebooks and Now Playing at Cine 1-10,000.
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We're going though this at - of all places - the soccer stadium here in Portland, Oregon.
The owners of the Portland soccer clubs have decided that the "Iron Front" symbol of anti-Nazi (and, hence, anti-fascist, anti-the-current-white-supremacist-regime-in-D.C.) resistance is "too political" and has to be banned from public display.
So the symbol of fighting against fascism, with all that that implies, is "too political" for display at a goddamn soccer game.
And we have concentration camps along the southern border.
Just think about that for a moment, and consider the message of films like Milk, or 42 or The Grapes of Wrath.
Or, hell, Meet John Doe.
The one thing I never thought I'd see, growing up in the Sixties and Seventies, is re-fighting the battles that I thought this country had settled in 1945; that "fascism is bad", or in 1969, that "racism is fucked up".
But it seems like the sort of people who voted for Taft in '48 and Wallace in '68 just never give up, now, do they..?
Posted by: FDChief | Sunday, August 25, 2019 at 06:24 PM