Restorative Justice Will Change the World: Find Out How

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtTgGUv1OYU] Quick heads-up on a fantastic event taking place north of LA in January.  My friends Elaine Enns and Ched Myers are running their annual Bartimaeus Co-operative Ministries Institute - five days of intensive engagement with questions of spirituality, restorative justice and peacemaking.  Ched and Elaine will be joined by Rev Nelson Johnson of the Beloved Community Center in Greensboro, NC; and Rev Murphy Davis from the Open Door Community in Atlanta, GA.  These are seriously cool people - with huge experience in radical activism for the common good. It's not stretching a point to say that they are at the cutting edge of civil rights work today.

The Institutes that Ched and Elaine host are renowned for engendering life-altering experiences; axes of change for the participants who find their hopes revolutionised as answers to the questions of how change can be achieved in the world become clearer through a week of interaction with others who are committed to the same path.  The Institute takes place from January 18th-22nd, 2010, in the character-filled village of Oak View, where I have spent many a day soaking up the atmosphere of one of the funkiest neighborhoods I know.  It's limited to 30 participants, so you know you'll have a meaningful and very substantial experience - but you probably should apply as soon as possible.  And whether or not this will enhance your visit, I should probably tell you that I may be around for some of the time too - I'm co-facilitating a film & spirituality retreat on the weekend of 22nd-23rd January in Los Angeles, beginning just a few hours after the Institute ends, so you may find that you can go to the Institute and get to the our retreat too.  More information from BCM here.

Problem of the Day: Has Martin Scorsese made a Ghost Story? And if so, What am I going to do about it?

So I was up early this morning having slept restlessly after watching the end of 'Battlestar Galactica' last night (no spoilers - suffice it to say that fans of Richard Dawkins and Thomas Merton may find themselves both satisfied; I certainly was).  Cylons colonised my repose (for some reason the early models, one of whose bosses is depicted above, were the stuff of my childhood nightmares), but I managed to avoid the bad dream I might otherwise have had when I was younger and less apt to resist imagining the imminent doom of the planet.  I have a sensitive constitution, as they say.  Which segues neatly into the reason for this post: why I am about to let you, dear reader, down.

Over at The Film Talk, my genial co-host and I are busy as usual in TFT Central, grafting away at the plans for Episode 98, which will - must - feature 'This is It' (and if you heard our preview at the end of Episode 97 you'll know just how much we're looking forward to that particular endeavor, although early reviews are surprisingly good), and 'Paranormal Activity', (image below) the once-every-ten-years-straight-outta-the-gate-micro-budget-huge-audience-scare-the-life-from-you-neo-Blair-Witch-Project, cleverly marketed with midnight screenings before opening wide wide WIDE.  It will be unavoidable for the next few weeks.

And here's the problem:

I hate scary movies.

I spent the better part of 'The Sixth Sense' (and, yes, before you jump in, there was a better part - and we tend to like Shyamalan round here, no matter how unpopular it makes us) employing the time-honored tactic of removing my glasses and staring at my left foot, thereby reducing the height that I would be propelled out of my seat when whatever Mr S wanted to frighten me with appeared on screen.

I got as far as being picked up by my friend Alex and half-way to the theatre before I decided that I couldn't go through with our previous arrangement to see 'The Exorcism of Emily Rose'; I was sure it would be an ordeal.  (Note to the snark police: I mean for good reasons; I'm told the movie's not bad at all.)

I even found my viewing of 'The Black Hole' at Escapism last week to be problematic - Maximillian Schell made me jump on more than one occasion, and the final sequence in which he is possessed by the spirit of his pet robot to rule over Hades is just about as much as my resolution can take.

So, to the presenting issue:

Jett wants us to review 'Paranormal Activity' this week.  I can't face seeing it.  I think I can address the ethical question by carrying out one of our patented q&a reviews; and I'll devote some serious attention to thinking 'em up; but I just don't think I can sustain the emotional assault course of watching the movie.

This isn't just for reasons of psycho-spiritual balance, although I do tend to think that there's enough struggle in most days to make me less than apt to subject myself to more for entertainment's sake.  And I'm not averse to horror films per se - 'The Exorcist', 'The Shining', 'Quiz Show' (trust me - it's a horror movie about the potential collapse of a man's soul) each find their way into my roster of re-watchable movies, most of the time.  No, I guess my resistance to 'Paranormal Activity' resides in a combination of the emotional terrain questions I've just raised, and the fact that it seems this apparently very accomplished film chooses to present the mystery of spirit as a threat.  We've mentioned on the show before that no less a philosophical artist than Stanley Kubrick considered the tale of Jack Torrance, the hotel, and the tricycle to be 'an optimistic story', because, he said, any story that posits the existence of an afterlife for human beings must therefore include hope.  Fair point, Stanley, even though I think he was slightly joking.  Of course, 'The Shining' doesn't exactly present its vision in an optimistic way.  Nor, I'm told, does 'Paranormal Activity'.  [SPOILER BELOW THE PICTURE]

We see a young couple killed by ghosts.  It's supposed to thrill us.  Next week, we will watch angels try to save humans from their selfishness in 'Wings of Desire'.  It will feel transcendent to watch it again.  It will thrill me.  And I don't think I'll have missed anything by not seeing 'Paranormal Activity'.

Now, I've read that Orin Peli, the director of 'Paranormal Activity' used to be afraid of ghosts, and that he made the movie as an attempt at catharthsis.  Good for him.  I'm pretty sure, however, that it wouldn't be cathartic for me.

So here are my five questions to you - I'd appreciate any advice you can give:

Can any of you convince me to see 'Paranormal Activity' before we record on Friday morning?

What is the purpose of horror fiction?

Does horror on film create, reduce, nurture, or ignore horror in real life?

Is it a good thing to pay to be frightened?

And, given that Martin Scorsese's 'Shutter Island' looks like a serial killer/scary mental institution/murderous-rage-from-beyond-the-grave film, is there any advice you can offer to help me prepare for the inevitable repeat of my pre-emptive angst when that movie is released next year?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYVrHkYoY80]

The Teeth of Gilgamesh

I saw 'Jaws' in a cinema for the first time, having grown up afraid of swimming due to repeated pan-and-scan broadcasts on probably all four of the terrestrial channels granted me in childhood, but never having the opportunity to see it projected on a canvas large enough to do it justice.   I was struck by my friend and co-host's suggestion that the story of Roy, Ricky, Bob and the shark is a Holocaust film in disguise - evoked by the the city fathers' refusal to acknowledge the danger, the fleeing of the powerless bathers from the sea, the conversation about the delivery of the A-Bomb, and, perhaps most Freudian of all, the fact that gas is used to kill.  As is often the case, my co-host impressed with his mysterious ability to find things in movies that no one has said before, or that at least don't show up on the first page of a Google search.  I'm fascinated by his suggestion that the most obvious analogue to 'Jaws' in Spielberg's work may be 'Schindler's List', and I'm sure we'll talk about this on TFT soon.

It dovetails with the fact that, for me, 'Jaws' has become the archetypal film for representing the meaning of violence in our shared culture - there are obvious parallels between the death of the shark and the origin of the myth that order can be brought out of chaos by the application of more chaos found in 'The Epic of Gilgamesh'.  In 'Jaws', paradise is restored through ultimate force; in that regard it looks like the story that catechises pop culture, unquestioned.  So it's troubling, and philosophically compelling.  It also happens to be crafted from a rock that looks to me like the secret headquarters of perfect film grammar; so it's an utterly compelling, character-rich tale.

I leave you with three questions:

1: What other films do you, the TFT community consider to be philosophically deeper than their reputation would suggest?

2: What films other films can you think of that end with the opposite of the climax in 'Jaws', with a negotiated settlement rather than killing the bad guy?

3: Where did Murray Hamilton (below) get his jackets?  And does anyone know if you can buy them in Tennessee or North Carolina?

Mental Illness and the Movies

Just a brief post from me as I'm on my way to Nashville to, among other things, meet up with the maestro for a screening of recent cult film 'The Room' at the glorious Belcourt Theatre. Meantime, I'd like to recommend the gutsy article at the Huffington Post from Glenn Close on the cinematic portrayal of mental illness. It's a significant moment when anyone is prepared to criticise their own work, especially when that work is among the most successful and iconic they've done, but Close all but disassociates herself from 'Fatal Attraction' because the way it turned a human being with a personality disorder who needed help into a monster whom the audience was supposed to consider worthy only of being spectacularly murdered.

There are, as Close writes, notable exceptions (such as 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest', above) to the superficiality or demonising portrayals of mental illness; but for the most part, the contours of the mind in the movies are subject to the same kind of over-simplification or plain ignorance that shows up every time the term 'schizophrenic' is used to describe 'split personality' (an entirely different condition) or, more disturbing, when 'psychotic' is used interchangeably with the accurate term given to the extremely rare phenomenon of 'psychopathy'. According to the Native American scholar Joe Gone, 48% of US Americans have a diagnosable mental illness, and so Close's points about ignorance not helping any of us are just the tip of the iceberg.  I'm not an expert in any of this, although like most of us, have not been untouched by mental illness in my friends, my family, myself; I'd love to have a conversation here about the portrayal of psychological conditions in cinema - any particularly good examples of accuracy, or bad examples of egregious misunderstanding?  If mental illness is frequently rooted in conflicted desire and expectation, and if cinema is about desire, is it possible that the movies might actually have the power to make us sick?  Or to heal us?

Monsoon Wedding: 'There's a temple right in the middle of the driveway'

The good folks at the Criterion Collection have set a new standard for themselves with their edition of Mira Nair's 2001 'Monsoon Wedding', out today, and, if it wasn't for the fact that they're giving us 'Wings of Desire' in a couple of weeks, it would be my choice for simply the best DVD release of the year.

I remember being exhilirated by the film when I saw it in Belfast - a mostly handheld family soap opera centering on the microcosm of all human life that takes place around a Delhi wedding, that also manages to take in the impact of globalisation, the economic transformation of India, sexual identity, the re-interpretation of religious traditions to accommodate modernity, but most of all the question of how love on earth is possible.  For four days it feels like the whole world has arrived in India to dance, to fight, to eat, to complain, to stress out, to wear extraordinary colors and carry out the tensest of rituals: a family gathering.

And so we get Old and New India scattered in our direction, English and Hindi in the same sentence, remixed Bollywood dance tunes underscoring ancient rituals (flowers arranged as if their lives depended on it, mothers-in-law hiding the fact that they smoke, motivations mixed).  It's utterly exuberant, but far deeper than that: this is about what India is really like.  It's kinetic enough to feel like a rehearsal for 'Slumdog Millionaire', its scope wide enough to invoke the spirit of Robert Altman, its high drama mingled with a smidgen of magic is undeniably sourced from Fellini.  (While it's become fashionable to detract from 'Slumdog', I'm still a fan (with reservations); but there's a scene of a boy with an eyepatch carrying coconut halves through the rain in 'Monsoon Wedding' that's as evocative than anything I saw in this year's Best Picture winner.) Nair knows when to up the emotional ante (to 'milk it', as she says on the erudite and illuminating commentary track); her cinematographer Declan Quinn arrives at a representation of these people and this place that makes you feel like you're there (and was to repeat this technique for 'Rachel Getting Married' last year, a film that could be considered a sister to 'Monsoon Wedding'); the music and editing dovetail perfectly.

Nair's early work was in the theatre, and she says that with the wedding scene she wanted to create 'an enormous drama in one night'.  It's obvious that in making this film she organised things so that something approximating real life would happen on screen.  And you're into it from the opening frames; totally compelled by these people who remind you of yourself, even if you feel that you have nothing in common with their rituals or culture.  What's most compelling is how there are so many well-rounded characters - Naseeruddin Shah's patriarch chief among them, granting his role dignity, soulfulness, authority, and - the hardest thing - a moment of change that feels completely convincing.

Now, I just got married, so I may be allowing the residue of sentimentality that derives from that day to prejudice me in favor of this movie; I'd counter that by saying I liked it when I was single too...It's a genre-defying film patched together from Bollywood/Hollywood romance, musicals, a bit of psychological thriller here, a family soap opera there.  It will make you cry and laugh, and think about your own family while it teaches a gentle lesson about how the world is changing, and the place of India in the world (it shouldn't be a surprise that Steven Spielberg sees the future of Dreamworks as intimately bound with the country).  Most of all, though, 'Monsoon Wedding' portrays the mad courage that it takes to enter into love with other people; it's liberating to imagine that life could be like this.

Criterion's edition includes several short documentaries and fiction films from Nair, and a crop of thoughtful interviews, alongside the requisite essay; there's almost nothing you could imagine being left out of the supplements.  It's a fantastic edition of a wonderful film that repays repeat viewings.

*Images courtesy Criterion Collection.