Cinematic States: America in 50 Movies

Hi folks - my book CINEMATIC STATES: AMERICA IN 50 MOVIES will be published next week, and in the days between now and then, I'm going to post a thought or two about each state. I'd love to be in conversation with you about how this transcendent artform, which although it was born in France, really came to life in the US, interacts with, underpins, challenges, and reinvents the American myth of itself. I've taken one movie (sometimes two or three) from each state, and attempted a perhaps quixotic endeavor - to wonder about this nation, now my adopted home, to learn more about what is truly 'American', and to imagine how it can better serve its best visions.  North Carolina gets BULL DURHAM, California has CHINATOWN, New Jersey is ON THE WATERFRONT.  Wisconsin is discovered through AMERICAN MOVIE, and Wyoming opens HEAVEN'S GATE. Alaska has LIMBO and THE GOLD RUSH, and New York is so big it can't do without DO THE RIGHT THING, LENNY, CHOP SHOP, SMOKE, and KING KONG. I'd welcome your choices too.

I'm aware that I write as an outsider, which of course brings gifts as well as challenges. I won't see what you see, which is wonderful, so let's get pointless arguments about objectivity or which film is 'right' for which state out of the way before we go any further. I do think it's important for writers to acknowledge their perspectives where possible, and there are a few that I think are pretty important here. The first is that I think there are three qualities necessary to be a decent film critic - you need to know something about cinema, something about life, and something about language. Two out of three ain't bad, but they're not enough. The second is that, particularly since 9/11, the popular view that America is shit deserves significant interrogation. My friend and mentor Don Shriver puts it brilliantly in the subtitle of his book HONEST PATRIOTS - he wants to 'love a country enough to remember its misdeeds'. I think that the aphorism should be reversed, in my case at least: I come from a European liberal tradition that has too often remembered only the misdeeds. If America is Babylon, as another friend says, it may be the best babylon we've got. There are glories and mysteries mingling with shame and conquest, humble awe with imperial intent. So CINEMATIC STATES is not another 'Why People Hate America' missive; nor is it a Disneyfied rose-tinted gaze into an abyss that's pretending to be heaven. It is, I trust, a record of a lover's quarrel, from a guy who grew up believing what he saw on cinema screens, and hoped that even some of it could be true.

You can pick up CINEMATIC STATES here - and I hope you enjoy it.

Tomorrow: Where this all began...

What's the Point of 'Terrorism'?

BBC Radio Ulster's Sunday Sequence yesterday hosted a debate on the use of the word 'terrorism' regarding the conflict in and about northern Ireland. There's a long-running public debate over who gets to use the word, and what to define with it. It mixes up politics and personal pain, and serves for some as a way of respecting the gravity of their suffering, while for others it's a way of demonizing their experience. My thinking on this is shaped by something I think I heard someone else say once - that if part of the intent or consequence of an act was to create terror, then it's terrorism, no matter who does it - state or non-state actors alike. So what persists for me is that amongst a thousand other truths, in northern Ireland and elsewhere, the state and non-state actors alike sometimes did terrible things, and everyone thinks they have their reasons.

Most of our people getting to the point of mutual recognition of the validity of that statement would, I think, be a massively positive step. (And it's of course not the only step: it needs to go alongside accountability, truth-telling, and at the very least some form of amends or reparations as part of a restorative justice process alongside vast listening to, consoling, lamenting with, and respect for victim/survivors.)

Meanwhile, I'm very aware that in the US, my adopted country, that kind of radio debate pretty much never happens in the mainstream/dominant media. Indeed the utterly mainstream view in northern Ireland - that peace comes through negotiation between enemies - is considered anti-patriotic by many, and is only very rarely aired by the national networks or political figures. Until, all of a sudden, President Obama is on the phone with the Iranian President trying to work things out. So maybe we're getting there.

But the question remains - how can we tell the kind of stories (about northern Ireland, about 9/11, about our people's chosen traumas, whatever they may be) that might lead to sincerely fearful, certainly wounded, people transforming their response to the legitimate memory of sorrow into something better than retribution?

CINEMATIC STATES: ALASKA

There's a scene in John Sayles' film LIMBO, in which the camera glides past a bunch of weather-beaten salmon-gutters at their local dive.  They're relating the potted history of the state, where it's dark half the year, where snow is like grass, where people go to escape - it's like an entire state variation on the French Foreign Legion.  They're not taking much cognizance of the fact that Kris Kristofferson is playing pool in the corner. In Sayles' Alaska, people are connected to the land, to the work of their hands, and less concerned with the kind of certainty and boundaries perhaps best represented by the straight lines of the Manhattan skyline. 'Limbo' means 'a condition of unknowable outcome', and the film certainly gives voice to that ambiguity, inviting the audience to consider what vast tundra might mean as a metaphor of the inner life.  The tonal shift at the film's mid-point is unlike much else in US American cinema, and the dramatic axis turns at the moment when the three lead characters are forced to strip off wet clothes and hold each other to avoid freezing to death. Their condition of unknowable outcome compels them to the most intimate, vulnerable human action. A winking governor may have colonized the popular vision of Alaska as a place of paranoia and exclusion, but this is but a temporary meme.  This state is massive enough to contain a range of 'real Americans' that both Sarah Palin and John Sayles could have invented.  Jon Voigt, in RUNAWAY TRAIN, another Alaskan epic of the soul, finds ultimate liberation when exposed to its incomparable elements.  He's alive and free, and (as with LIMBO) the film is content to leave the last part of his story unwritten. Alaska gives rise to conditions of unknowable outcome, it's a site of possibility, and it's a place where people sometimes have to take their masks off in order to survive.

Read more in CINEMATIC STATES, published this November - and available as an ebook now.

Fozzie Jesus

The lovely folks at the Raven Foundation interviewed me about movies and violence and taking love more seriously than killing.  Fozzie Bear appeared in the conversation, and I think he made an interesting point: http://www.ravenfoundation.org/resources/podcasts/voices-of-peace-talk-radio/june-27-2013-film-critic-gareth-higgins-on-voices-of-peace/

Hopeless Fear, Fearless Hope

A decade ago I stumbled out of an Edinburgh cinema during that city’s inviting and kaleidoscopically diverse film festival (this year's edition takes place from June 19th-30th), gut-wrenched, stomach-punched, spirit-elevated and, I still believe, changed. I had just seen Japon, the debut feature from Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas. I had followed Japon's protagonist through his own existential crisis, wandering back to a mountainside village, preparing to die, experiencing love, and falling into fate. It was one of the most physically imaginative films I'd ever seen; the perfect fusion of music and image, the simplicity of observation, the experience of being provoked to consider my own life paralleled how I'd felt on first seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey, I thought I'd found a new favorite director. I was wrong. After seeing Reygadas' follow up work - especially Battle in Heaven and his most recent work Post Tenebras Lux - I realize that he's an example of a magnificent artist, but I can't make friends with his films. They're too close for comfort. He wants to show us the world as it is, which for him means eating and sleeping and bleeding and being afraid and making love in a far messier and more revealing way than the gauzy fake romanticism that most movies consider adequate to the task of representing love.

Read the rest here.