People are anxiously poring over the forces of the last ten years -- the militarization, the money trap, the flashy sex-obsessions -- but I haven’t seen much of anything about what often troubles me: the trivialization of the big powerful cultural forces like literature, religion, and even psychotherapy. They are all centered on popularity, feeling good, fitting into some statistical category. Where are the enormous outraged cries of agony? Maybe that’s why I’ve been watching war movies.
Last night’s movie was about the internal war in this country: the drug-fueled underclass that patterns poor and rich alike along the path to prison. So many people in prison. The movie was “Shakespeare Behind Bars.” Instead of “this little wooden O” like a ship in a sea, this is a concrete sprawl like a nation of troubled men. The play is “The Tempest.” I’m convinced that I’ve seen another movie about this program with a different director and play, but can’t bring up the title. I almost passed on this one, thinking it would be a repeat, but it wasn’t. (I should start keeping a list.)
In a way the tight supervision and structure of a prison makes it safe to really look at humans honestly in all their hatred and violence the way a real play does, the way “penitentiaries” were once presumed to work: to produce penitence. This movie demonstrates, but it is cut down from 170 hours of film, which means there was a lot of winnowing in the editing room to get this gold. (Mixed metaphor, I know.) But the arbitrariness of prison and court systems -- which is like, because it is produced by, real life -- rarely allows the gold to provide escape. The container up-ends and all is spilled. A chance cats’paw of breeze blows it all away.
When we look at crime in movies it’s more usually made spectacular and swaggering with lots of stunts. But real felonies, esp. murder, are more likely near-accidents, the deep storms and undertows of people happening into opportunities for real damage. Domestic violence, guns close at hand, mixed families, harsh religious beliefs, and always booze and drugs. As Charlie Sheen knows, it’s not just a matter of being in Vietnam. In fact, some actors entering this territory can’t leave it. The adrenaline rush is SO addictive.
At first this movie shows us the burly, self-guarded men as though they were the local Moose or Elk club. Slowly and often individually, Hank Rogerson begins the work of finding their inner systems and relating them to Shakespeare’s insights. We become attached to certain people as their disclosures increase. Sammie is the tent pole of the narrative. Howie, who plays Prospero, seems the unlikely inmate. Halfway through, his wire-rimmed glasses are exchanged for prison-issue plastic, his neat goatee becomes a bit runaway, and his original story of how he murdered his “first” wife shifts around a bit into a more literary tale of deception, his own little play. Still, he can talk about how he is somehow “clamped” in the middle by his rigid religious upbringing. Sammie is harder to understand since he’s been a productive worker, a supervisor, in the database center. He expects parole but knows he’s habituated to prison life. The filmmakers, to some extent, are controlling the plot by choosing what to show.
Still, that’s aside from the point of this post and I probably shouldn’t write about these individuals until I’ve watched the DVD voice-overs by the men themselves. What I wanted to get at is that among the losses after the counterculture, we lost some grand, passionate, daring, confrontive therapists who were probably not quite balanced themselves, like the vivid BBC crime-solvers or tormented abstract expressionist painters. We used to value them. I knew a few. Some were college professors.
People are criticizing Obama for not being more like these extraordinary and media-friendly people. They miss the drama queens like Rumsfeld and Cheney. And yet no one was more cottage cheese than Bush, stumbling through his B-movie scripts while his wife smoked and watched, smoked and watched. I think we’re afraid of extraordinariness now, can’t trust EITHER the big gesture or steady persistence.
I’ve been cruising back around among some of the big name therapy gurus of the past and am finding that they’ve been seized by “spirituality,” a great cloud of devotees, mostly female and looking for womb-like peace and harmony. (Not unlike the majority of book-readers.) A few have put out little feelers towards the dark and dangerous, you might say the world of “The Lord of the Rings” with its orcs and wizards, but then withdraw into the Harry Potter world of thinking caps and pet phoenixes. In both cases (fantasy movies and fantasy psychotherapy), it’s mostly special effects.
Such a huge percentage of our national population are in prison that, taken en masse, they must be telling us something about ourselves. When I was on the street in the Seventies, we used to joke that NE Portland (where the blacks lived) had the highest percentage of time-serving felons in town while outlier SE Portland (where the poor whites lived) had the highest percentage of unarrested felons in town. Some of us were pretty uncomfortable in NE and others were highly nervous in SE. The place everyone was nervous was where people were most educated/prosperous, because they wouldn’t shoot you but they’d get you fired. We had no black officers. We tried to hire them. No Asian or NA. One hispanic. Women, yes. But having female officers changed the role, trivializing it.
Dave Lull, the cross-pollinating reference librarian, is an admirer of Nassim Taleb, the originator of the trope he calls “The Black Swan” which is his word for something totally unexpected, like big time money collapse. I was trying to express to Dave what I thought was a possible black swan in the future. I said civil war in the US, like what almost happened in the Seventies, because it was never really resolved -- just stuffed. We got out on parole by promising to be good. But some people had their fingers crossed.
In my view, Obama is our Hank Rogerson, patiently bringing high-grade education, history, and processing to bear on a lot of denial, jealousy, and greed. Even though we blame him for what we find.
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