An inordinate number of peppers

Under discussion:

Escanaba in da Moonlight  (2000)

Team America: World Police  (2004)

Ten Canoes  (2007)

Live Free or Die Hard  (2007)

I watched Ten Canoes over the weekend with my wife. I'd say we found it enjoyable. I was expecting something like an aboriginal Escanaba in Da Moonlight, and there were some fart jokes which was nice. The great mediator: intestinal gas.

I thought it was a little tiresome after a while to be reminded of the cultural gaps which were obvious and easily plucked from the surface. The storyteller did a delightful job of burrowing into the narrative, but the filmmaker's attempts to do the same often left me wishing for color. I realized from the credits that he was mimicking the photography style of some particular photographer, but the rich colors of the landscape works so much better than the bleached stark black and white, that I regretted it every time. I know he was trying to provide another touchstone to avoid confusion among the deeply nested stories, but really, the storyteller had it covered. It came off like overkill. 

It's a delicate balance of course. The aborigines were very interesting. The narrative asides were probably charming to some, but again, they bugged me. I was fascinated by the anthropological insights. I loved the bits about the waiting in your watering hole to be born. The sense of a mythology well integrated with the landscape was very refreshing. It all felt timeless in just the way it aspired to. That worked for me.

The story of stolen brides, the obligations of the younger brother, those mythic guiding principles that become practical ethical considerations once internalized (again, I'm a Michigander: Escanaba in Da Moonlight), point the finger directly at what is typically an undertone in Hollywoodland. I just heard a coffee pot review of Live Free or Die Hard that sounded an awful lot like just this sort of mythmaking: 

Hackers do the biding of disgruntled security consultants. American patriot kicks their asses. Sounds like Team America, but sadly, lacking all satire? Mythmaking goes on all around us. Ten Canoes  is not a nostalgia piece, but an object lesson. What do we really aspire to teach with our myths?

In Ten Canoes, an older brother is trying to warn away his young brother’s desire for one of his wives. She’s beautiful, sure. But do you really want the headaches of all the older brother’s responsibilities? The lesson seems to be, keep to your place. The younger brother plays the younger brother role. His role is to be available to replace the older brother if necessary. This doesn’t disavow the younger brother’s desire to be the older brother, in fact, it seems to validate those very jealousies. It suggests that he desire, but not actualize. His time will come.

What does that mean to Joe American all topped off with technology and terrorism? Perhaps that things are still just as simple as in the ancient ancestor’s time. I don’t know. That seems good enough to me. I liked the film. I particularly like the making of the canoes, very cool.

Under discussion:

The Devil and Daniel Johnston  (2004)

You're Gonna Miss Me  (2005)

There was recent discussion in the Count Zero group about watching troubled artists in film. I watched this thinking I would see a troubled artist and I suppose you could say that Roky is deranged or damaged, but other than some paranoia, he seems remarkably untroubled by his mental illness. He seems downright content.

The Devil and Daniel Johnston is an obvious comparison, although Daniel is more firmly an outsider. Given the timing of the rise of pyschedelic rock, Roky seems to have come off as a more conventional  hero of 60's culture. With everyone doing drugs in the scene, it seems easy to miss the history of mental illness in Roky's family. It seems pretty clear that a lot of heroin and LSD didn't help out his condition much, but the condition was established before the drugs. It seems clear to me that mom and siblings have their own issues and drugs are an all too convenient scapegoat.

I knew the music of 13th Floor Elevators before seeing this, but I had not made the connection. I remember a band called the Judybats had done a cover of "She lives in a time of her own" and hearing it in the film took me back. It made me want to dig up more music, that's for sure.

Documentraries these days seem to follow a formula established by Errol Morris: do your interviews, dig in with the subjects, wait for something interesting to happen, don't miss moments of metaphoric potential. Some shots are clearly staged. Roky's father walks out the front door of his youngest son's house and hobbles next door to his own home. Point taken. Relations are hinted at discretely, perhaps too discretely. I feel like the real story was missed perhaps.

When should a documentary end? Once the story gets told I suppose. So what is the story? Roky's mom is bad, but sympathetically so. Roky's brother is a bit of a kook, but sympathetically so. Roky? Along for the ride I guess. Just rolling with it all. I think the real story either comes after the movie or just got glossed while trying to be polite to the subjects.

Roky is a great creative talent. I can understand the temptation to lure him back to being functional. But happiness is relative. Roky's mom is a great subject, as is Roky, as is Roky's younger brother. Whatever is missing from the film is perhaps just chance. Reality gives you what it gives you. I enjoyed watching this, but I didn't feel like the story transcended its subject. Does that make sense? Worth watching.