MEN IN GROUPS

Okay, so I have three all-male groups here: the “Platoon” cast; the “Shakespeare Behind Bars” company and Cinematheque boys at risk. “Platoon” is a true memoir, written many years later and rearranged/conflated a bit. The Shakespeare group is a year’s worth of film, edited and rearranged for theme and meaning. Cinematheque is a three-year email journal with vids which I get almost daily. Out of that resource I’ve edited two manuscripts: “Orpheus Pressed Up Against the Windows of the Catacombs” about the years 2007 to 2009. “Pole-Dancing with the Universe” starts from the present and moves backwards farther, counter-clockwise as it were.

“Platoon” is about violence, with real, justified-and-unjustified, kill-and-be-killed events. War means murder, and not just the enemy. Bystanders and comrades as well. The Shakepeare inmates were not all killers but I don’t think there were any who had not been exposed to violence. Not just on television but family and acquaintance conflict. One had been a military sniper, like the one in the recent Vanity Fair article, but this one came back and found a civilian who “needed killing.” The Cinematheque boys raise questions about the quiet lethality of passing HIV virus as well as questions about a society allowing them to die by ignoring them.

Each forms a kind of ecology, a set of expectations, but the most obvious characteristic of all of them is that they are flowing, moving, developing processes, the Shakespeare company most self-consciously. Nothing holds still. The groups change, the people within the groups change, and then the dynamics among them change. The question of what is “real” and what is “fiction” hardly seems useful, much less answerable. Anyway, says Hank, the director of the Shakespeare group, don’t concentrate on the end product, look at the process and if that is done well, the product will be there. Certainly a principle of all arts. Even in the ministry the wisest people would say, “trust the process.”

When the Shakepeare company talked about what confined and distorted their lives, it seemed to me most often it was the attempt to force them to comply with a role, to stay within expectations of either family or church. Or at least the appearance of that role. But the demand was sometimes destructive, esp. for the gay or otherwise sexually nonconformist. The men themselves noted that one of their most gifted members, who committed suicide after breaking the prison rules (no tattoos), came from a neighborhood with half-a-dozen men in that prison. Evidently the local template for honor and valued behavior was in conflict with the laws of the state. (The tattoos were meant to honor the memory of the man the convict had killed to avenge. He was serving two life sentences with no possibility of parole.)

These Shakespeare men were far from stupid, but -- of course -- they were self-selected from the general population. One pointed out that they were totally unlike the Forties version of convicts, criminal hustlers always trying to “get over” on the man, working scams and corruption. Some of these contemporary men were so big and powerful that when they lost their temper they could break people’s necks as though they were drinking straws. Things happened fast, especially since the big men seemed somehow child-like. One had been damaged and abused in childhood and -- though he was massive because of weight-lifting -- still spoke in a high child’s voice and could not manage a predatory woman who leeched off him except by killing her. He couldn’t generate options. This is the man who became one of the themes of the film.

When they talked about what healed and redeemed them, it was bonding with each other in a safe context -- exactly what one would expect in a family or ministry rather than in a prison. It was not the prison that provided the safety, though it did structure their lives, kept them off the street, clothed and fed them. (Admittedly increasingly low-grade food.) Safety, emotional safety, came from the Shakespeare group. Also, their intimacy meant no drugs because everyone would know right away and because the group itself did what drugs would have done.

Race was there, but not the kind of determining factor that studies show at the bottom of prison gang violence. The same was true of “Platoon” where blacks sometimes grouped politically (events were almost a half-century ago) but the real differences were between drunks and potheads, country music versus hard rock. (Putting aside the HUGE differences between enlisted men and educated “suburban” white officers, that old class rift at the bottom of so much fragging. Is that where the contempt for “suburbanites” comes from?) At Cinematheque the issue doesn’t seem to arise. They are a European group. But age can group them, youngest versus oldest.

The mantra in the Shakespeare company was “truth and courage,” or, more elaborately, the courage to tell the truth once a person managed to figure it out. The human “truths” of the plays were only a means to get at the individual truths of the men. Courage, of course, was right up front in “Platoon,” but the failures were notable and fatal. Truth was just a theory. Cinematheque, for its own protection, must work with private -- even secret -- truths while spinning out artistic constructs that hopefully illuminate larger social truths. It is essentially iconoclastic, self-defined “guerrilla,” but also learning and growth-based. The members stay included by choice. No one makes them stay.

“Groups” or “communities” are major puzzles that I have not personally solved. Church, school and small government are the places I’ve made my living, always painfully and blindly in ways that forced me to compromise. Why is that? Is it me or them? Or both? Or is there something in “Western society” (in the sense of Euro) that makes it toxic, for instance, the hierarchical principle or the insistence on certification and supervision or the obsession with either/or? Surely in any Asian system I’d have been excluded, confined, or killed as a trouble-maker long ago.

There’s an old WWII joke about soldiers. It was said that German soldiers were so obedient that they would do things obviously lethal or immoral; American soldiers were so defiant that they’d be standing there arguing with the sergeant who told them to dive-and-duck until the bomb hit them; and -- naturally, because this was a Brit joke -- the English hit the proper balance of judgment and compliance. But what is that?