The day before Thanksgiving in 1987, Arnold Friedman, a mild, nebbishy science teacher, and his youngest son, Jesse, were arrested by police at their home in the affluent suburban town of Great Neck, N.Y., and charged with numerous counts of child sexual abuse. As the story unfolded, the cops charged that the father and son had committed their crimes during hour-long computer classes held in the basement of their Great Neck home. Both Arnold and Jesse eventually pleaded guilty. Arnold died in prison in 1995, and Jesse was released in 2001 after serving 13 years of a 16-year sentence.
There was only one problem: They were almost certainly innocent.
It’s fitting that the devastating “Capturing the Friedmans,” which could be said to be documentary as an act of detection, itself came about through a piece of inadvertent detection. The director, Andrew Jarecki, who had made millions as the founder and CEO of Moviefone, was making a documentary about the people who work as children’s birthday party clowns in New York. Nearly everyone he interviewed told him he had to talk to David Friedman, the most successful of the city’s party clowns.
In his interviews with Friedman, Jarecki was struck by how bitter this man, who made his living as “Silly Billy,” seemed. Pursuing the answer, he eventually found out the history of David’s family — and also uncovered an unlikely treasure trove for a documentary filmmaker. During the trial and up until the time each Friedman began his prison sentence, David had made hours of home movies depicting the family turmoil the ordeal had set off.
“Capturing the Friedmans” includes interviews with David and Jesse (the middle son, Seth, declined to take part in the film) and their mother, Elaine, as well as police, prosecutors, the judge in the case and some of the (now grown) kids who took those computer classes. It also makes liberal use of David’s home movies. In other words, the film is not just the history of how a family came apart — it actually allows us to see the Friedmans coming apart before our eyes.
Jarecki, whose method is sympathetic and nonjudgmental, does not offer any psychological explanations for why David Friedman took those movies (no reason you could come up with would be very attractive). What’s important to note is that Jarecki’s use of David’s home movies rigorously avoids any note of exploitation or prurient interest. In interviews, the director has refused to offer his own opinion on Arnold and Jesse Friedman’s guilt or innocence, saying he thinks it’s important for each viewer to make up his or her own mind. That’s a canny P.R. move — and also a necessary one. Despite the work journalists have done in discrediting many of the mass child sexual abuse cases of the ’80s, despite the jury’s wholesale rejection of the charges brought in the McMartin case in Southern California — the longest and most expensive prosecution in the country’s history — and despite the fact that the FBI never found evidence to support the existence of satanic cults that practiced child abuse and murder, the debate over those cases can still inflame passions. You can hardly blame Jarecki for not wanting potential audiences to expect a jeremiad. And to his credit he hasn’t delivered one.
But I don’t see how any reasonable person could watch “Capturing the Friedmans” and not see it as a tale of mass hysteria and the American judicial system gone amok. No physical evidence was ever found to corroborate the charges against Arnold and Jesse. The only former student interviewed in the film who still says he was molested later reveals that his memories of abuse only came to light after his parents put him in therapy, where he “recovered” those memories under hypnosis. Another former student, Ron Georgalis, ridicules the stories of abuse and says he never saw anything remotely like them occur. One student who did claim to be molested admits in the film that he made up the stories to escape the pressure the police were putting on him to admit that something happened. (His story alone led to 16 charges against Arnold and Jesse.) And a parent of one of Arnold’s computer students tells how, when he determined that nothing untoward had happened to his son, he found himself under pressure from the cops to say that abuse had occurred, and was even attacked by neighbors who told him he was “in denial.”
That said, there is a complicating factor in the Friedmans’ story, and not an insignificant one: Arnold Friedman was a pedophile. The case against him began building when he was arrested in a postal sting operation for ordering child porn from the Netherlands. A further investigation began when John McDermott, a government postal inspector, noticed the Friedmans’ basement set up for computer classes and suspected, as he says in the film, “We could have a problem here.” Arnold Friedman later admitted to molesting two boys (neither one of them a computer student) near his family’s vacation home, and said that when he was 13 he molested his 8-year-old brother, Howard.
But no victim has ever come forward to verify those claims, and Howard, a gentle man overcome with grief at the destruction of his brother (his interviews with Jarecki are the film’s most painful), says he has no memory of sexual abuse. To complicate matters further, Jesse Friedman, at his sentencing, claimed that his father Arnold had molested him when he was a child. In the movie, however, Jesse denies that. He says he told the story at his attorney’s urging, in hopes of a lenient sentence. (The lawyer, for his part, believes the story about Arnold having abused Jesse is true.) None of those denials, of course, will carry much weight with proponents of repressed-memory syndrome, who treat every assertion of innocence as further proof that something terrible must have happened
But even if you decide that Arnold Friedman’s admissions were something more than a way of expressing guilt for his pedophile urges (which had driven him into therapy), there seems little doubt that the case against him and Jesse was bogus. It isn’t just that not all pedophiles act on their urges — it’s the crazy nature of the allegations. If these stories of hour-long computer classes turned into ongoing bacchanals of violent sexual abuse were true, then parents picking up kids afterward would surely have found their children in physical and emotional pain. They would have found blood or semen on their clothes. They certainly wouldn’t have reenrolled their kids in Arnold’s classes, as many parents did.
No Great Neck parent ever raised an alarm about Arnold Friedman. This fits in with the recurring narratives common to all mass abuse cases — increasingly elaborate, steadily expanding stories that somehow leave behind no trace of physical evidence. And the interviews with the police and prosecutors in “Capturing the Friedmans” give you a clue as to how these stories developed.
It’s a given that cops are usually censorious when it comes to what they consider any unconventional sexual behavior. How many times has the presence of pornography, or evidence of an extramarital affair, been a red flag for all sorts of suspicions? Now imagine how those suspicions increase when there are allegations that kids are being sexually abused. The cops and prosecutors in “Capturing the Friedmans” are frightening because their absolute conviction in the rightness of their suspicions and methods is matched only by their apparent stupidity.
Detective Sgt. Frances Galasso, the retired cop who headed the investigation, says, “Everyone could see what was going on.” But none of the stories were ever validated; no one saw anything. At one point, Galasso talks about the Friedman home as a nightmarish den of depravity, with stacks of pornography visible everywhere. As she says this, Jarecki shows police photos taken during the raid on the ordinary suburban home, which show nothing amiss (Arnold’s cache of porn was, befitting his shame, hidden away behind the family piano). Later, Lloyd Doppelman, a detective who worked the case with Galasso, talks about how he and other cops went about gathering “evidence.” Essentially their method was to tell the kids they knew something had happened and that the kids had better tell the truth. “If you talk to … children,” Doppelman says, “you don’t give them an option.”
Jarecki allows the cops and prosecutors to hang themselves with their own words. But you wish that his impulse to be fair and nonconfrontational didn’t impede him from challenging these people with the ridiculousness of their claims. All the mass child sexual abuse cases, taken together, never turned up any consistent, provable evidence of anything — except a widespread pattern of police and prosecutorial misconduct. Galasso should have been presented with the photos taken during the raid and asked to point to the alleged piles of pornography. Doppelman should have been asked what the point of gathering evidence is when the cops think they already know what happened and browbeat witnesses into submission to confirm their suspicions.
When the judge who presided over the case, Abbey Bolkan, says, “There was never a doubt in mind as to their guilt,” you long to see her made to square that statement with a judge’s sworn duty to be impartial. When the assistant district attorney, Joseph Onorato, says, “There’s a reasonable human expectation of some people that where there’s smoke there’s fire,” you wish Jarecki had asked him if, absent any physical evidence, this was the assumption on which his office proceeded against Arnold and Jesse Friedman. When cops, a prosecutor and a judge so flagrantly violate the ethics of their respective offices, they deserve to be made to squirm at least a little.
Where Jarecki’s determination to be fair does work is in the interviews with Arnold’s widow and Jesse’s mother, Elaine Friedman. I found it impossible to resolve my feelings about her. It’s clear she felt trapped in a rotten marriage with a man who couldn’t begin to address her sexual needs. And the confusion and betrayal she feels when deeply troubling charges are brought against her husband and son is understandable. In her way, Elaine Friedman shows a sort of integrity. Because she doesn’t know what happened, she refuses to say one way or the other. But there’s also something needy and whining about her. At times she seems so focused on her pain that she can scarcely acknowledge the pressure on Arnold and Jesse. Jarecki’s movie also makes it seem as if, in part, she persuaded her husband and son to plead guilty for her own peace of mind.
You experience it as a slap in the face when Elaine says that, after her husband and son went to jail and she was alone in the house, she felt peace. It’s understandable, given the horrible family arguments David captured on video, that she needed a break. Yet you can’t help seeing something selfish in her lukewarm support of her husband and son against what she should have seen were ludicrous and unsubstantiated charges, and you can’t help disliking the way she takes her resentment of her husband out on her sons. But the image the film leaves you with — Elaine reuniting with Jesse on his release from prison — makes clear how badly she was torn up by what happened.
People who doubt that the Friedmans were entirely innocent of the charges against them will ask, reasonably enough, why they pleaded guilty to such damaging criminal charges. As Jesse says in an interview, there was no way, on the Long Island of 1988, that he could have gotten a fair trial. (He couldn’t have gotten a fair trial anywhere else in the United States either.)
At one point we see a clip from a Larry King interview with Debbie Nathan, one of the first journalists to cast doubt on the veracity of the mass child sexual abuse stories. (Her book, “Satan’s Silence,” co-authored with Michael Snedeker, is the best account of the phenomenon that’s yet been written.) King’s first question to Nathan sets the tone. “So all these parents are wacko?” he asks. Certainly some of them were. “Satan’s Silence” reported that the woman who first made allegations in the McMartin case had a history of paranoid schizophrenia. Nathan is interviewed in the film, mostly about how she became interested in the Friedman case. Jarecki misses the chance to include the larger context Nathan could provide.
For example, Nathan has made the case that it was no accident the legend of mass child sexual abuse caught fire in the ’80s. With Reagan in the White House and the country turning to “traditional values,” stories of mass child sexual abuse allowed a focus for national anxieties about mothers who worked outside the home and the changing structure of the family. It’s one of the horrible ironies of this whole sorry episode that, as they did during the Meese Commission’s anti-porn crackdown, right-wing extremists found common cause with some elements of the feminist movement. Using the dubious notion of “repressed memory,” some feminist therapists were able to present a romance of children and women as the victims of mass abuse, of fathers who routinely raped their daughters. In a great Orwellian construction, absence of evidence was taken as proof. (The notorious incest-survivor’s handbook “The Courage to Heal” told readers that if they thought they might have been abused they probably were, and that questioning whether you had really been abused was “a misguided attempt to repress the memories again.”)
One of the main reasons fantasies of mass child sexual abuse took hold — our national obsession with the purity of children — isn’t limited solely to the ’80s. It was often argued that kids couldn’t possibly be making up stories like the ludicrous scenarios held up as fact during the worst of the panic. In fact, kids weren’t. As the proceedings of many cases showed, the stories were planted by overzealous cops and prosecutors and investigating psychologists. But the larger implication of that defense was the comforting belief that little kids simply do not have sexual thoughts.
A few weeks ago, the New York Times ran a letter from a reader supporting Wal-Mart’s decision to ban FHM, Maxim and Stuff magazines from their stores. The correspondent said that the magazines were dangerous because they were on view to adolescents who were “corruptible innocents.” You have to be living pretty far inside a fantasyland to believe that adolescents can be corrupted by photos of starlets in bikinis and lingerie. But if that belief in adolescents as “corruptible innocents” has any currency — and I think it does — then you can understand why children would be fantasized and fetishized as wholly pure beings. One of the tragedies of the ’80s cases, as Nathan has pointed out, and as scholar Frederick Crews pointed out in his 1994 New York Review of Books article debunking repressed-memory syndrome (reprinted in his book “The Memory Wars”), was that these fantastic, delusional stories drew resources and attention away from actual child abuse cases.
In cases like that of the Friedmans, the uncomfortable fact remains that the real victims were most often the accused. Even in a rare case like the McMartin trial, where the jury rejected the prosecution’s case, the defendants had become stigmatized. Many more are still in prison on bogus charges. And then there are the accusers, many of them young children who suffered God knows what trauma by being convinced they’d been subjected to unimaginable abuse so they could be used as tools in phony prosecutions. The sole accuser of the Friedmans whom we see, the one who admits he didn’t remember anything until he underwent hypnosis, seems to be a basket case. His “recovered” memory alone accounted for 35 charges against the Friedmans.
“Capturing the Friedmans” is a slice of one of the ugliest chapters in American history, one to which the overworked appellation of “witch hunt” can reasonably be applied. Andrew Jarecki could have done more to lay out the marriage of sexual and religious and social hysteria that made cases like this possible. But he deserves credit for having the guts to say, in this case and in so many like it, who suffered the most.
American men are bewildered about their place in the cosmos, or so we have been told repeatedly over the last 20 years. They don’t know whether to thread their eyebrows or wield a welding torch, and end up trying to do both at once (which is inadvisable). As comedian Adam Carolla laments in a scene from Morgan Spurlock’s documentary “Mansome,” the old-time certainties of gender identity have melted away: Women are flying fighter jets and men work at the hair salon; there are no longer “chick jobs and guy jobs.”
I get that Carolla is just cracking wise, from inside the bubble of his own lame version of post-rockabilly guy-shtick — he is interviewed inside a garage, with what looks like an orange Camaro behind him in the middle distance — and that if you brought up the fact that those old-time “chick jobs” paid 40 to 80 percent less than “guy jobs,” he’d get all irritated with you for being a drag. He’s still an idiot, though, even if he’s an idiot in quotation marks. That’s kind of the problem with “Mansome,” which tries to tackle the enormous subject of contemporary male vanity as an assemblage of whimsical anecdotes, which are often entertaining in themselves but studiously avoid any semblance of intelligent analysis or historical understanding.
It’s pointless to come down too hard on a film like “Mansome,” because like all Spurlock’s work (including “Super Size Me” and “Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?”) it’s driven by a good-hearted frat-boy humor that seems fundamentally sincere. It’s more first-person journal and travelogue than it is cultural archaeology, and as such it’s basically OK. Spurlock gets to interview some of his celebrity pals about their attitudes toward masculinity and grooming: Paul Rudd is slightly ill at ease, Judd Apatow is charming, and Zach Galifianiakis steals the show, of course. (When asked to rate his looks on a scale of 1 to 10, Galifianakis responds confidently that some people find him “a strong 2.”)
Spurlock documents his own decision to shave off his trademark porn-star ‘stache, thereby reducing his 5-year-old son to torrents of tears. (It was definitely a mistake, Morgan.) He meets various kooky characters who have some tangential relationship to his theme, including a California suburbanite named Jack Passion who describes himself as a professional “beardsman,” meaning he travels the world exhibiting his Hagar-the-Horrible facial thatch in competitions. (Anthrax rhythm guitarist Scott Ian responds: “Beard and mustache competitions, for want of a better word, are kind of gay.” I laughed, and I know that’s wrong.) Then there’s the elegantly coiffed and tailored Manhattan clothing buyer who describes himself as the “dictionary definition of a metrosexual,” perhaps making up for his teen years as a Sikh immigrant outcast in middle America. And the entrepreneur who has introduced a lotion-y product called Fresh Balls: The Solution for Men. (Yes, it is what you think it is.)
In fairness, Spurlock is at least half aware that all the jokes and episodes of “Mansome” never add up to anything, except perhaps the conclusion that neither male narcissism nor male grooming is anything new, but that they have been coded in different ways at different times. Masculinity is no less a troubled construction than is femininity, and it’s just as easily whipped about by the tides of commerce and fashion. The aristocratic dandies of the 18th century make Spurlock’s New York Sikh metrosexual look like a shoeless Dust Bowl farmhand, and every Important Man of the 19th century, regardless of background or affiliation — King Leopold II! Karl Marx! The pioneering Ambrose Burnside! — had his own tonsorial signature that required extensive maintenance.
Now, I’m not denying that there’s something specific and contemporary about the version of male narcissism wrought by consumer capitalism, with its tendency to turn things once seen as immutable, such as gender or sexual identity, into fluid and exchangeable commodities with no fixed meaning. (Speaking of Karl Marx, it was he who wrote that, under capitalism, “all fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away … All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.”) It was to address that question on a pop-sociological level that the term “metrosexual,” first introduced to America a decade ago in this Salon article by Mark Simpson, was originally invented. (Simpson’s coinage was instantly stolen by marketers, of course, and turned into a pretty-boy Frankenstein monster who was, in turn, burned by the resentful villagers.)
Some of that big-picture stuff comes up almost by accident in “Mansome,” but Spurlock doesn’t even pretend to pay attention. He’s just a guy! He’s confused like the rest of us! He makes his little boy cry and watches pro wrestler Shawn Daivari (a Minnesota native who plays the anti-American “heel” called Sheik Abdul Bashir) shave his back all the way down to his butt crack. He sticks for far too long with an embarrassing framing device in which Jason Bateman and Will Arnett go to a spa and engage in uneasy homoerotic banter. He chops up the movie into irrelevant chapters about beards, mustaches, hair and so on, as if those things were unrelated. When he goes to get his own hair cut, it’s at some pseudo-old-fashioned place in downtown Manhattan where the wood fixtures are way too polished and the barbers are conspicuously overdressed. It’s kind of endearing and kind of asinine.
“Mansome” is now playing in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, Portland, Ore., San Francisco, Seattle and Austin, Texas, with more cities to follow.
Here’s the short version of humanity’s relationship with water, as delivered by hydrologist Jay Famiglietti in Jessica Yu’s compelling and often gorgeous documentary “Last Call at the Oasis”: “We’re screwed.” Yes, we should all install low-flush toilets and plant gardens that require less watering, but conservation is simply insufficient to cope with a global fresh-water crisis that involves many interlocking factors: overpopulation and overdevelopment, depletion of groundwater, climate change, and widespread contamination.
Solving the human race’s worsening water problem requires overcoming what Yu’s film terms the “Hydro-Illogical Cycle,” which is defined by the belief that because most of the Earth’s surface is covered in wet stuff, there’s no problem. As one horrified woman proclaims in a hilarious segment that explores the possibility of marketing recycled and purified sewage water (to be sold under the brand name Porcelain Springs), “This says to me that there’s some shortage I don’t know about. When they show those photographs from space, there’s a lot of water!”
“Last Call at the Oasis” is the latest social-advocacy documentary from Participant Media, whose previous output includes “An Inconvenient Truth,” “Food, Inc.” and “Waiting for ‘Superman,’” along with many other less obvious (and less successful) films. Like most of those movies, it’s adapted from existing material in another format, in this case journalist Alex Prud’homme’s book “The Ripple Effect.” At its best, Participant has been able to marry a message-delivery system to a genuine cinematic experience, and that’s definitely what Yu — an eclectic talent whose work includes the documentary “In the Realms of the Unreal” and the narrative feature “Ping Pong Playa,” along with numerous TV episodes — delivers here. “Oasis” packs in a lot of dire information, but it wraps it in often-spectacular images and cutting-edge graphics, moving from Las Vegas to rural Michigan to the Australian outback to the nearly depleted waters of the Jordan River, where the traditional baptismal spot of Jesus has become a fetid swamp contaminated with sewage from a nearby Israeli town.
While the discussion in “Last Call at the Oasis” is never directly about partisan politics or ideology, and although Yu relies mostly on the testimony of respected scientists, this film probably faces a version of the “Inconvenient Truth” problem. It’s largely preaching to the converted, in the sense that if you fail to accept certain basic premises — that climate change is a scientific fact, for example, and that fresh water is a limited and fragile resource that is nearly maxed out on a global scale — then you’ll just blow this off as left-wing fearmongering. In one especially effective section, Yu shows us file footage of Sean Hannity and Sarah Palin ostentatiously taking the side of Latino farmers in California’s Central Valley who were denied irrigation water because of an endangered fish called the Delta smelt. Then she has a scientist explain the larger context: Yes, the smelt is an insignificant species in and of itself, but you can’t consider it on its own. In fact, it’s a key indicator species in an enormous interlocking ecosystem that extends from the rivers and estuaries of the inland West to San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean. If the smelt dies, that tells us the whole system is dying.
“Last Call at the Oasis” follows a familiar pattern seen in Participant productions and other social-issue docs, but it does so with such panache and visual variety that I really never felt lectured at. About three-quarters of the film lays out an immensely complicated set of problems and argues that they’re all connected. Agriculture and overdevelopment in the West and Southwest have drained the regions’ reservoirs and aquifers nearly dry, while in many wetter heartland areas the groundwater has been poisoned with exotic industrial toxins and antibiotic-laced cattle manure. Americans’ growing use of all sorts of supplements and pharmaceuticals — many with unknown long-term effects — has created a problem for municipal sewage treatment facilities, which are set up to remove trash and organic waste, not unknown chemical compounds.
Then, of course, Yu has to make the case that it’s not too late for us to clean up this precious resource — along with sunlight, the one absolutely necessary component of life on Earth — and learn to share it better. Erin Brockovich leads a campaign on behalf of poisoned homeowners in Midland, Texas, that leads to new regulations on hexavalent chromium in drinking water. (Yu does not fail to mention that Midland is George W. Bush’s adopted hometown.) The Israeli town stops pumping poop into a Christian holy site, and a coalition of Jordanian, Palestinian and Israeli activists work on a plan to share the Jordan River’s water. Many people, the marketing firm discovers, can be convinced to try Porcelain Springs. (The water we drink every day is recycled sewage, too — we just don’t know where or when it happened.)
If anything, the real downside of “Last Call at the Oasis” comes after the movie is over, when you think back over the rather thin optimism of the last 20 minutes. Sure, Los Angeles will supposedly start piping recycled tap water by the end of this decade, and that’s great and all. But that does nearly nothing to address the fact that only about 1 percent of the planet’s water is drinkable, and 80 to 90 percent of that is used to grow food, often in agricultural regions (like the Central Valley of California) that would otherwise be barren. In case you’re wondering about desalinating seawater, by the way, the answer is no. (It’s like the hydrogen-car solution to the energy crisis, an expensive boondoggle that won’t work.) So we need to figure out how to use a lot less water, very quickly, with a rapidly growing population. Or we just shrug our shoulders and agree with Famiglietti’s two-word prognosis.
“Last Call at the Oasis” is now playing at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema and Sunshine Cinema in New York, and at the Landmark in Los Angeles, with wider release to follow.
A time capsule loaded with smack from the bohemian underbelly of JFK-era America, Shirley Clarke’s 1961 film “The Connection” is an illustration of how much things change, and how much they stay the same. I’d be stretching to call “The Connection” a great film — it’s mannered and edgy, in a way that’s partly deliberate but also distinctive to its period — but it’s an important one in cultural and historic terms, despite being largely unknown. Watching this ensemble drama about a multiracial group of New York jazz musicians and beat philosophers in a run-down apartment, waiting for their drug dealer to show up, is like traveling back 50 years in time, only to encounter the same people you might meet on the street today (at least, in certain neighborhoods of Brooklyn, San Francisco, Austin and so on). At one point, the characters even debate the illusory distinctions between “hipsters” and “squares.”
A Park Avenue society girl turned Greenwich Village beatnik, Clarke was the pioneering female director in the early history of American independent film, good friends with John Cassavetes, Frederick Wiseman, Jonas Mekas and other downtown legends of the period. If her name and her films have virtually disappeared from history, that’s partly due to institutional sexism, no doubt, and partly to bad luck and bad timing. Milestone Films, which is releasing this version of “The Connection” restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, will go on to release Clarke’s 1960s documentaries “Robert Frost: A Quarrel With the World” and “Portrait of Jason,” an interview with a black gay street hustler, along with her 1985 comeback film “Ornette: Made in America,” about jazz legend Ornette Coleman. (Clarke died in 1997.)
“The Connection,” Clarke’s first feature, was a high-profile project, the screen adaptation of a 1959 Living Theater play by Jack Gelber that had become a cause célèbre despite scathing reviews, attracting uptown artistic types like Leonard Bernstein, Salvador Dalì and Lillian Hellman to take a walk on the wild side. Clarke and her producer, Lewis Allen, funded the film’s $177,000 budget — not so meager, at the time — through the then-unknown tactic of collecting small sums from a large number of investors, establishing a model that endures in micro-budget and mid-budget filmmaking to this day. (Weirdly enough, as Manohla Dargis has reported in the New York Times, former Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum’s parents were among the investors, along with Norman Mailer and architect Philip Johnson.)
But once completed, “The Connection” only screened twice at a single theater on Manhattan’s 45th Street before being closed by New York State’s censorship board. I’m not sure which is more amazing: the fact that New York had a censorship board in the early ’60s that could control what movies the public saw, or the reason for the seizure of “The Connection,” which was two or three uses of the word “shit” (as a synonym for drugs). By the time some edits were made and the ban lifted, public interest had faded, largely because of a swath of unrebutted hostile reviews. Bosley Crowther of the Times, a noted get-off-my-lawn crank of the time, wrote an especially peculiar one in which he praised the actors, the live jazz soundtrack and Clarke’s “bold direction,” but described the film overall as “deadly monotonous, in addition to being sordid and disagreeable.”
I won’t pretend not to understand what Crowther was talking about. “The Connection” remains much better known among jazz fans for its soundtrack album featuring pianist Freddie Redd and saxophonist Jackie McLean (who play live in the film, as they did onstage), than it is among movie buffs as, you know, a film. Clarke should certainly get credit for exploring the faux-documentary format decades before it became a film-school gimmick (the story-within-a-story premise was already present in Gelber’s play), but the first 10 minutes or so of “The Connection” are decidedly awkward. Squaresville white filmmaker Jim Dunn (William Redfield) wanders around in his high-waisted chinos, trying to convince the group of crashed-out junkie hipsters to “act natural” and “be themselves,” and assuring them that he’s studied the documentaries of Robert Flaherty and knows what he’s doing. (A dig at the old-school variety of documentary film, before cinéma-vérité, I guess.) It’s clear that the addicts would rather relate to Dunn’s hipper African-American cameraman, J.J. Burden (an early role for future Hollywood character actor Roscoe Lee Browne), who is rarely seen but makes occasional oracular pronouncements.
In the interests of art, Dunn has apparently agreed to finance a major purchase from a smack dealer named Cowboy, but for most of the movie we are obviously encouraged to ponder the similarities between drug culture and Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” and to wonder whether Cowboy will ever show up at all. Prowling the dingy, open flat restlessly — it looks disconcertingly like a group household I actually lived in, 20-odd years ago — Clarke’s camera introduces us to the all-male assemblage, in fragmentary interviews. Leach (Warren Finnerty), a wiry, whiny fellow who looks and acts alarmingly like the young Steve Buscemi, is the official tenant. He is troubled by a painful boil on his neck, which may symbolize the fact that the other denizens suspect him of being gay. As his black friend Sam (Jim Anderson) will tell him later, he’d be more relaxed if he could “get with the whole homosexual scene.”
There’s also Ernie (Garry Goodrow), an embittered-genius West Coast white jazzman who has hocked his horn to buy junk, and Solly (Jerome Raphael), an educated, middle-class Jewish guy who has thrown it all away for philosophical reasons, or none at all. McLean, Redd, bass player Michael Mattos and drummer Larry Richie get fewer lines, but every so often pick up their instruments to deliver angled, edgy blasts of early-’60s hard bop. Today these characters would presumably be obsessed by some other cultural form — hip-hop or Scandinavian black metal or YouTube clips or hockey fights or something else I’ve never even heard of — and they’d be able to badger Cowboy with illiterate texts every few minutes. But they’d basically be the same guys; Gelber’s characters are drawn so sharply that many 21st-century viewers will identify people they know or used to know (perhaps even people they used to be).
When Cowboy finally arrives (played by Carl Lee, who would become Clarke’s longtime partner), he turns out to be the archetypal “hip Negro” in Ray-Ban shades, sporting a blazing white outfit and a messianic mien, and bringing with him an old-lady evangelist, as comic relief and cover story. He brings other kinds of blessings too, the kind that allow this cast of semi-lovable, self-destructive losers to get through another day. The central conflict faced by the characters in “The Connection” doesn’t have much to do with heroin, though — that too is a symbol or synecdoche. It goes way back before Clarke’s time, not to mention ours. If this film has something to say to us now — and I emphatically think it does — it’s about the costs and opportunities that come with “dropping out” of mainstream society, in the name of political-cultural-aesthetic rebellion. It asks a question that has no answer, one that every disgruntled young dreamer — every potential Shirley Clarke, of every generation — must face on her own.
“The Connection” is now playing at the IFC Center in New York, with other cities and DVD release to follow.
Prostitution isn’t just the world’s oldest profession. It’s also a longtime focus of cultural obsession, across many historical periods and on every continent, from the poetry of Catullus to the woodblock prints of 19th-century Japan. There’s such a long history of male artists, writers and filmmakers who depict prostitution in erotic, romantic and sentimental terms that it’s only natural to approach Austrian documentarian Michael Glawogger’s “Whores’ Glory” with suspicion. Indeed, in the film’s opening scene, Glawogger’s camera directly engages the lurid allure of sex work, showing a group of scantily clad young women in a Bangkok brothel called the Fish Tank as they try to attract clients: Pretending to make out with each other, pressing their breasts and buttocks against the window, using a laser pointer to pick out likely-looking men on the street. But those are just the opening moments of a long journey, a daring, novelistic and unforgettable account of the real lives of female prostitutes in three very different countries and social contexts.
If “Whores’ Glory” successfully resists romanticizing the lives of women who sell their bodies to make a living, Glawogger also does not surrender to what you might call the vulgar Marxist alternative, in which such women are interchangeable victims in a vast, mechanistic sexual economy, stripped of any agency or personality. Indeed, if there’s an ideological point (and a smidgen of hopefulness) to be found in “Whores’ Glory,” it lies in the film’s insistence that the women Glawogger meets in Thailand, Bangladesh and Mexico remain defiantly individual, even in the face of a system of sexual and economic exploitation they cannot (or at least do not) resist. Indeed, “Whores’ Glory” has a surprising double focus on the women’s economic lives and on their spiritual and religious pursuits. If one is inevitably reminded of Marx’s famous remark that religion is the opiate of the masses, one might also remember that his preceding comments were not nearly so harsh: “Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation.”
Right after that scene with the girls from the Fish Tank strutting over the Bangkok street, Glawogger introduces an extraordinary epigraph from Emily Dickinson, one that convinced me right away that this movie was something unusual. “God is indeed a jealous God,” Dickinson wrote. “He cannot bear to see/ That we had rather not with Him/ But with each other play.” Indeed, we have already seen brief vignettes of women in the three countries talking startlingly about their relationship to the divine. In Reynosa, a battered Mexican border city across the Rio Grande from McAllen, Texas, the street hookers all seem to pray to La Santissima Muerte (the Most Holy Death), a demonic female entity who seems to coexist with God and Jesus in their version of Roman Catholicism. In the City of Joy, a filthy warren of stone buildings in Faridpur, Bangladesh, a young woman tells the camera that she resists clients who demand oral sex by telling them that Allah did not make her mouth for that purpose; it is the mouth she uses to recite the suras of the Quran.
It’s details like those that make “Whores’ Glory” both a wrenching journalistic exploration of real life and something close to great cinema. This film, which took four years to complete, is the third installment in Glawogger’s series of documentaries about work in the era of globalization, which began in 1998 with “Megacities” and continued with “Workingman’s Death” in 2005. (I’m coming late to his work but what I’ve seen so far is absolutely remarkable — and you can see it for yourself in a retrospective that just concluded in New York and will soon reach other cities.) While the fluid camerawork of Wolfgang Thaler is never ostentatious, this film has considerable artistic ambition, with a score by Pappik & Regener (members of the German band Element of Crime) and soundtrack songs by PJ Harvey, CocoRosie and other indie-type artists. I suppose some viewers will find those ingredients intrusive or distracting, but sometimes the music (and Monika Willi’s remarkable editing) serve to create a little dreamlike distance from what we’re seeing on-screen. Without that distance, “Whores’ Glory” might be too difficult to sit through, quite frankly.
Compared with the dire conditions found in Faridpur and Reynosa, the women who work at the Fish Tank have almost middle-class lives. They live in modest but clean apartments, often have outside boyfriends, come to work by taxi, and punch in on a digital clock like industrial workers all over the world. On the other hand, the universal commodification of sexuality in Bangkok and the relentless capitalism of contemporary Asia seem to permeate almost every aspect of their lives. Perhaps it’s surprising that many of them spend their leisure hours hanging out with “bar boys” — coiffed and styled young men who work as prostitutes for an older female clientele — but on the other hand, this is a world where no one believes in romantic love, and everything is for sale.
In Bangladesh, social and religious taboos mean that the prostitutes generally won’t perform oral or anal sex (both of which are routinely available in Thailand). But the women of the City of Joy are virtual prisoners, often sold to madams after their first menstrual period and expected to live out their lives there, first as sex workers, then as madams and finally as servants. On the dusty back streets of Reynosa, where groups of profane, hard-bitten women turn tricks out of tiny sidewalk-level apartments, it’s a drive-by Darwinian free market for every possible sexual act or display, along with drugs, liquor and almost anything else that can be bought or sold. Both these sections of the film are tough to watch, at times, but Glawogger’s interviews with the prostitutes (and sometimes with their clients) always reveal things you aren’t expecting.
In Thailand and Bangladesh, what happens between the women and their johns remains behind closed doors, but in Reynosa, Glawogger persuades a prostitute and her client to let him film their interaction from beginning to end, an utterly businesslike encounter that’s about as sexy as buying half a pound of roast beef at the deli counter. It’s a moment of physical nakedness, but not nearly as revealing as when we see the same woman a bit later, smoking crack with a friend who is avidly trying to seduce her and talking about how visions of the Holy Death have eased her fear of mortality. There’s no judgment in “Whores’ Glory” — certainly not of the working women it depicts, and not even especially of their bewildered clients, who seem to vacillate from misogynist hostility to wistful romanticism and back again. There is, however, tremendous compassion, and more than a few moments of piercing clarity, as when a Bangladeshi hooker who looks no older than 15 tells Glawogger that women are fundamentally sad creatures. “Who can explain why this is true?” she wonders. “Is there no other path?”
“Whores’ Glory” is now playing at the Cinema Village and Lincoln Plaza Cinema in New York, and the Northwest Film Forum in Seattle. It opens May 25 in San Francisco, June 15 in Boston, June 22 in Philadelphia and July 6 in Atlanta and Washington, with other cities and home-video release to follow.
During a road trip to a quasi-legal medical marijuana growing facility in the legendary cheeba-producing region around Mendocino, Calif., a couple of students from Oaksterdam University encounter a cheerful little guy in a cowboy hat known as Human (no other name given). Human assures his visitors, with an ostentatious manner of saying exactly the right thing, that he’s growing potent, high-quality “medicine,” and he knows that the “patients” are out there waiting for it because they need help. Yeah, they need help — help getting wicked high, you mean.
This scene occurs most of the way through Dean Shull’s scattershot but entertaining documentary “California, 90420,” which is sort of, kind of, a movie about Oaksterdam, the institution of higher learning — ha! I kill myself! — in Oakland, Calif., that provides the nation’s first-ever cannabis-centered curriculum. (Yes, many of our campuses have provided such an education for decades, but none officially.) Although the film closely follows the failed 2010 campaign to legalize and regulate pot throughout the Golden State, it clearly gains currency from the recent federal raid on Oaksterdam, which has put the future of weed-ucation in jeopardy. (While California law allows local municipalities to license medical marijuana dispensaries, growing and selling the stuff remains a violation of federal law.)
I don’t know whether Shull intends to debunk the stereotypes surrounding marijuana use or reinforce them, but he does a little of both. While he focuses on a number of characters around Oaksterdam, he can’t stay away from 21-year-old Alix (or just “Ix”), a stick-skinny gamine who is profane and funny and clearly intelligent and massively baked almost 24/7. Ix’s problem may simply be that she’s a kid facing a difficult transit into adulthood (and aren’t they all?), but given that she’s a bright and talented young person who appears to have abandoned all conventional ambitions in favor of growing, selling and smoking weed — mostly the latter — she doesn’t make the world’s best poster child. “Everything you love in the world will either reject you or die,” she tells Shull’s camera early on. “But not marijuana.” Why didn’t they use that in the Proposition 19 ad campaign?
The problem with California’s nudge-wink medical marijuana system is the same as the problem with weed-attitudes (weeditudes!) in our culture generally, whether pro or con. You can find the same problem reflected in pop-culture depictions of marijuana use all the way back to the Beats and the bebop era, and right through high-school scare films, Cheech & Chong, George Carlin and Harold & Kumar. That problem is universal hypocrisy, not to mention the difficulty of having any form of conversation about pot without descending into caricature and bad jokes, often abetted by marijuana users themselves.
Whether “California, 90420″ means to capture all these contradictions or simply does so with stoner felicity, I cannot say. If you are personally familiar with the dank, the skunk, the Irie and the chronic, by the way, you probably don’t need the movie’s title translated. If you’re not, “420″ is longtime West Coast slang for pot smokers and pot culture, reputedly going back to San Rafael High School in the early 1970s. At any rate, we seem to have agreed as a society, for the moment, that we like marijuana being illegal but widely tolerated, disreputable but ubiquitous, associated with subcultures of music and art and surfing and blackness and other things that seem cool but dangerous.
Just to be clear, I grew up in Oakland and nearby Berkeley (so draw your own conclusions about my personal history), and I’m 100 percent in favor of legalizing pot. But California’s current medical marijuana law is a total farce, and you can’t blame people who genuinely think that drugs are evil for claiming that it amounts to soft-focus legalization. Because it does. Yes, cannabis is medically helpful, and in some cases necessary, for people with cancer or AIDS or glaucoma or certain psychiatric ailments. And of course they should be able to get it. But everybody in California knows that’s not how the system works in practice. You find a sympathetic doctor (and the right ones advertise widely), and you say, “Gee, doc, I’ve been feeling kinda depressed lately. Plus I’ve been having hella headaches. Kind of seems like a recurring situation, dude.” He or she signs something, you get your ID card, and you’re gold. Or Purple Urkel, or Diesel Granddaddy Mandala, as the case may be. (Blends of, y’know, medicine that are evidently for sale in downtown Oakland.) As Ix says when she first sees a legal cannabis dispensary, “This is what heaven would be like if God were real.”
I suppose there’s nothing so morally or ethically troubling about that, as a temporary hack to a vexing social dilemma, that of how to police a substance that does little harm and is widely available but retains a strong stigma in some quarters. Prop. 19, the failed ballot initiative spearheaded by Oaksterdam chancellor Dale Sky Jones and her husband, longtime pot activist Jeff Jones, tried to raise marijuana to the legal but heavily taxed and regulated status of alcohol and tobacco. That was, perhaps, entirely too rational and non-hypocritical an approach to the problem, and (as we see in the film) was resisted by both Northern California’s big pot growers and Southern California’s most conservative law enforcement officials. Perhaps the most telling moment in “California, 90240″ comes when Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca tells voters that if they want to “do a joint” in the privacy of their homes, he doesn’t care and doesn’t want to know about it. But we still can’t have legalization because, as Baca puts it, “You can’t pass a law that would be illegal.”
That confusion is actually right on point, and reminds us that the current, fudgey social covenant on marijuana allows it to be used as a covert instrument of social control. Baca’s version of “don’t ask, don’t tell” seems like a reasonable complement to the fuzzy status of medical marijuana, but we all know that he and people like him will enforce the existing laws when and how they choose to. If people get high at a backyard barbecue in my middle-class Brooklyn neighborhood, there is exactly zero possibility of the cops giving a crap. If young men who don’t look like me get high on the street in a different part of Brooklyn, they could easily get roughed up and spend two or three days in jail, just for the hell of it.
It might sound like pothead paranoia to suggest that President Obama told the Justice Department to go after California’s medical marijuana industry because it’s an election year and he’s willing to trade the freedoms of stoners in Venice Beach and Oakland for a (largely theoretical) handful of blue-collar voters in Ohio and Pennsylvania. But this is the Democratic Party we’re talking about, so almost no level of moral cowardice is inconceivable. Obama himself seems way too tightly wound to have been much of a toker (whatever he may say about his Columbia years), and has proven to have little concern for civil liberties of any sort, except as they are deemed to affect electoral votes.
Over the next generation or two, pot will probably become decriminalized, step by step, but for the time being we’ll make do with massive hypocrisy on all sides, as depicted half-accidentally in Shull’s film. Oaksterdam is in trouble, and Ix never got to teach her proposed class on “bluntology” and the importance of avoiding “canoeing” (you figure it out). On the other hand, she’s now a copywriter at NASA, and that joke finishes itself, I think.
“California, 90420″ plays this weekend for brief runs at numerous theaters across the country. Check website for complete listings.
Jack Passion in "Mansome" 
A still from "Whores' Glory" 
A still from "California 90420" 
