Sixty-two years ago, the greatest conflict in the history of humanity came to an end. Fifty to 60 million people had died. Many millions more were wounded or had lost their homes. Nations were shattered. The most appalling genocide ever had taken place. And for the first time, nuclear weapons had been used, raising the specter of human extinction.
Every way of trying to tell a story this vast carries with it blind spots, reveals its own assumptions and biases. Ken Burns’ “The War” is no exception. But this magnificent 15-hour series will stand as one of the most extraordinary accounts of war ever made. Panoramic in its sweep, unflinching in its openness to all the faces of war, crafted with rare intelligence and sensitivity, “The War” is an epic achievement.
Burns’ subject has always been America. From “The Civil War” to “Baseball,” from “Jazz” to “The West” (for which he was executive producer), to “Thomas Jefferson” to “Mark Twain,” Burns has sought out subjects that are deep in the American grain, themes and people that illuminate our history, our ideals, our triumphs, our failures. He is obsessed with the things that hold America together, that define it, that are quintessentially ours.
The danger of being America’s Storyteller is that you can end up producing Norman Rockwell history — sweet and satisfying, but sentimental. “The War” is the latest in a long line of celebratory works about World War II and the American heroes who fought it, including Tom Brokaw’s “The Greatest Generation” and Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan”and “Band of Brothers.” Those are praiseworthy works, ones that don’t minimize the hideousness of combat or the moral ambiguity of war. But Burns’ goal was more ambitious: to tell the whole story, to write a warts-and-all history of World War II. Was he the right man for the job?
In her review of the series in the New York Times, Alessandra Stanley argues that he wasn’t. She criticizes the documentary for approaching the war from an American perspective — that is, for being a documentary made by Ken Burns. “Examining a global war from the perspective of only one belligerent is rarely a good idea,” Stanley argues. Pointing out that America’s self-centered ignorance helped lead us into the Iraq debacle, Stanley concludes that despite its virtues, “The War’s” parochialism leaves it fundamentally flawed.
Stanley is right about Iraq and right about the dangers of American parochialism. She’s also right that “The War” is parochial: It’s about America from beginning to end. But she’s wrong to conclude that this viewpoint is pernicious. That notion — that a documentary is automatically suspect if it limits itself to one national perspective on a global war — is dubious. Countless successful historical works about wars are limited to a single national perspective. Stanley’s criticism is driven by her frustration with the blinkered state of American culture. But for every American who becomes more jingoistic and insular because they watched “The War,” there will probably be five who are inspired by it to learn more about the world outside America. In any case, history isn’t a zero-sum game. There is room both for a documentary that takes a global view of WWII and for Burns’ approach.
The real issue is whether Burns’ vision, his take on the war, is adequate to its subject. “The War,” like all of Burns’ work, is essentially elegiac. An elegy, while at bottom an affirmation, is deeper and darker than a celebration. It contains the sense of tragedy, the note of fatality, the long view of time and loss. Burns is not a polemicist or a critical documentarian. He makes deeply emotional films that pluck at America’s mystic chords of memory. In the case of World War II, this approach feels absolutely right.
World War II was not Vietnam or Iraq. It was a war forced on the United States, a struggle to the death against an aggressive and powerful enemy. As one of Burns’ characters, former Marine torpedo bomber pilot Sam Hynes, points out, there are no good wars, but there are just and necessary ones. The idea of a necessary war has been debased by our current president, who has tried to don the mantle of Winston Churchill by claiming that his war of choice in Iraq is part of the “defining struggle of our age.” But World War II really was necessary. There are controversies about the war (Burns, in a rare but nevertheless huge lapse, fails to address one of the biggest: whether we were justified in dropping atomic bombs on Japan). But few question whether it needed to be fought.
The war brought the entire country together in a way that had never happened before and probably never will again. We paid a terrible price — not, as Burns acknowledges, as terrible as that paid by the other major combatants, but a terrible one nonetheless. After four years of bitter struggle that cost 400,000 American lives, we won. The struggle is long over. The men and women who won the war are dying. The memories are fading. If you can’t make an elegiac film about this subject, you can’t make one about anything.
James Joyce defined the sentimentalist as “he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done.” But Burns is not a sentimentalist here: He’s a lyrical historian. By looking unflinchingly at the horror of war, the devastation it wreaks on countries, people, families and individuals, he earns the right to his lyricism. Yes, Wynton Marsalis’ deep-dish soundtrack, filled with folk strains and bluesy notes made in America, poignantly evokes our shared national experience. Yes, Burns tugs at our heartstrings with majestic images of American sunrises and photographs of ordinary Americans pulling together, whether on Iwo Jima or in the factories of Mobile, Ala. But there is far more footage of the darker reality of war — the mangled bodies of the dead. Those stirring images of America the beautiful, those shots of determined Americans, are never allowed to function merely as patriotic synecdoches. “The War” is a war monument, but it’s one that recalls the Vietnam Memorial, with its shattering wall depicting the names of the fallen, far more than a conventionally heroic statue.
Burns and his team, including his longtime collaborator, the fine writer Geoffrey C. Ward, and a group of extraordinary archivists, interviewers and editors, studied every aspect of America during the war. They unearthed a stunning collection of photographs, written documents, radio broadcasts and films, a magnificent treasure-trove of the past. But above all, they found the American men and women who fought the war abroad and endured it at home.
Burns hangs his narrative on four American towns: Waterbury, Conn.; Sacramento, Calif.; Mobile, Ala.; and Luvurne, Minn. These places serve as microcosms of the entire country. Burns explores the way the war changed these towns and paints quick portraits of each, but they aren’t his real focus. They’re of interest only because they were the hometowns of his central characters — the young men who went off to fight and the mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, children and friends who waited for them at home.
Burns put out a call for WWII vets before arriving at his locations and chose carefully from among those who responded. Not only did they have to be from the four towns (there are a few eloquent exceptions, like writer and ex-infantryman Paul Fussell and memoirist and ex-Marine pilot Sam Hynes), but they also had to be the right kind of people — neither inarticulate nor glib. It was important to find individuals who represented a wide spectrum of experience, who could speak about killing and watching buddies be killed, who were prisoners and volunteers and pilots and infantrymen and wives. They had to be real.
The search paid off. Burns’ characters, now old, experienced the full gamut of the war’s horror and heartbreak. They are stoic and funny, angry and forgiving, bitter and serene. Each has a different personality; each had different experiences. As the searing memories return, emotions often overcome them. None of them speaks “the truth” about the war, but they all speak their own truth, and their stories cut to the heart.
Few viewers will forget Quentin Aanenson, the Minnesota farm boy who became a fighter pilot and who decided to stop making friends after he watched his buddies die around him one by one. Or Raymond Leopold, a young Jewish man from Waterbury who was trained as a sniper, but whose desperate commander turned him into a medic after he removed a bullet from his own leg in the brutal fighting in the Italian campaign. Or Glenn Frazier, who survived the Bataan Death March only to end up in a prison camp in Japan, knowing that if the Americans invaded, his brutal captors would immediately kill him. Or Katherine Phillips, a young woman from Mobile who volunteered at the Red Cross.
Burns’ series presents the war as it felt to America at the time. By avoiding omniscient, ex post facto knowledge, it restores the sense of uncertainty about the war’s outcome that prevailed then. Every WWII buff knows that the Battle of Midway was the turning point in the Pacific War, and, with Stalingrad, one of the decisive battles of the entire war. Burns, however, gives it a relatively cursory treatment. This is legitimate, because Americans didn’t know that it was a turning point at the time.
“The War” makes no attempt to be comprehensive. The causes of the war are only quickly discussed, and its aftermath hardly at all. Those who want a discussion of how Yalta affected the postwar world will be disappointed. The debacle at Dunkirk, the Blitz and the Battle of Britain, the war in the North Atlantic, the campaign in Norway, and the decisive battle of El Alamein, to mention only a few examples, are dealt with cursorily. Other significant events like the sinking of the Bismarck, the French Resistance and the death of Mussolini go completely unmentioned. Because these events didn’t mean that much to Americans, they play only a small role in the film. It doesn’t matter — Burns didn’t set out to make a definitive history of World War II.
But having said that, one of the series’ many virtues is that it highlights forgotten battles and campaigns. How many Americans know that the U.S. Army was humiliated in its first major campaign in Tunisia? Or have ever heard of the battle of Peleliu, which many vets said was worse than Guadalcanal?
“The War” cuts back and forth between huge military campaigns and personal tragedies, battles over machine-gun nests and furlough romances. We learn how Americans at home learned to save bacon grease to make munitions, how black GIs were brutally discriminated against at home, and why the nation was shocked when Life magazine first showed images of dead Marines in the Pacific, nearly two years after Pearl Harbor. (Little has changed: the American press is still leery of showing the deadly realities of war.) But through it all, a thread always runs through the narrative, a thread made up of many American voices.
One of the most memorable is that of Al McIntosh, the editor of a small Minnesota weekly newspaper. His editorials are low-key but eloquent in their simplicity and good-heartedness. He describes harvest time, and sends Christmas wishes to the troops, and remembers the red-headed boy who was a checker in the local grocery store, a kid who was always going places and who was just killed in action. Beautifully read by Tom Hanks, his columns serve as a kind of Greek chorus throughout the series, the voice of ordinary America.
But the film’s deepest, darkest thread is the heart of war, the experience of combat. If Burns had wanted to make a safe, patriotic tribute, he could easily have downplayed this element. Instead, he makes it one of the central themes of the film — perhaps its central one. Again and again, his characters relate what being forced to kill others, seeing their buddies killed, and constantly facing death themselves, did to them. By the end, no one can have any illusions about the devastating effect of combat on human beings.
Or about how the war touched every corner of America. When the narrator informs us, not once or twice but three times, that young men from each of the four towns had been killed in the same battle, the incredible reach of the war hits home.
“The War” is neither nihilistic nor triumphant. There are inspiring trumpet blasts here, like the moment when the Nisei soldiers of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the most highly decorated unit in the history of the U.S. Army, put their bayonets on their rifles and started forward to attack the Germans after learning of FDR’s death. They said they were doing it for “the old man.” Daniel Inouye told his incredulous commanding officer, “Sir, I can’t stop them.” FDR had ordered them to go into concentration camps because they were of Japanese ancestry, but he had also given them a chance to prove their loyalty by fighting. It was that they chose to remember.
But there are also stories that drown out the trumpet blasts. Like the tale of a young wife and mother who, when told that her husband had been killed in action, “let out an unearthly howl.”
And there are prosaic tales of love. As he endured hell on the bloody Anzio plain, Babe Ciarlo, an Italian-American from Waterbury, kept sending cheerful letters to his mom that made it sound like he was eternally stuffing his face in a “chow line” that did not exist. The photograph of his mother, an immigrant who spoke no English, embracing Ciarlo as he prepared to leave for war, appears again and again. Her anguish, barely disguised by a wavering smile, stands for that of all the mothers in the world.
It all piles up, the incredible saga, the haunting images, the gut-wrenching words, until by the end you are emotionally spent. You know that everything you have seen, all the heartbreak and death and fear and madness and hope, is only an infinitesimal part of the war.
The vets are dying, a thousand of them a day, but the legacy of the war is inscribed in our national DNA. Every American, of whatever age, is likely to take something deeply personal away from “The War.” For me, that moment came when Burns looks at the fate of the Japanese-Americans on the West Coast, many of them farmers in the Central Valley, who were shipped off to desolate camps in remote areas across the West. One of those camps was Amache, in Colorado. As the narrator describes the evacuation, a photograph of the camp appears, its shabby, drafty, uninsulated wooden huts lined up beneath the towering, snowy Rockies.
My father, who grew up in a tiny farm town near Turlock, Calif., and whose ambition at that time was to become the biggest chicken farmer west of the Mississippi, was one of the 110,000 Japanese-Americans who were packed on trains. He was sent to Amache.
My family has talked about going with my dad to Amache for years, but we’ve never done it. Joe is 82 now, and I don’t know if we’ll make it. As the image of those shacks filled the screen, part of his wartime experience was commemorated forever — not just for me, but for everyone else who watched. And I suspect many Americans who view “The War” will have such a moment.
“The War” is many things, but above all it is an act of affirming memory. To remember, even the most painful things, is to shine a light into the past. By bringing back the war, in all its shame, heroism, ugliness and, yes, glory, Burns allows us to touch not only what makes us Americans but also something larger: our common humanity. That’s an achievement that will last.
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" 
