Put Your Hands Together

Warning: This Post May Not Make Good Linear Sense. While I will endeavor to be specific, it's not directly riffing off an article I read or a show I saw or even a bad day I had. It's more like there's something in the air that is asking to be examined. It's the whole situation.

I saw WALL-E a couple of days ago. And as a hardworking garbage-transformer with a heart of gold myself (with a good-looking and technologically advanced soulmate no less), I strongly identified with the protagonist. This was good for me, because the only other character I have ever really identified with while I work is Fred Sanford.

But this is not about me moving up in the world and finding more wholesome role models, no disrespect to the honorable memory of Mr. Foxx intended.

I can't possibly be the only person who left WALL-E in a state of deep cognitive dissonance. It was a moving and sweet children's film, and at the same time it was a total fucking indictment of our consumerist culture and the waste we create. I was out of coffee, so stopped in the Price Chopper while my eyes were still adjusting to daytime. And when I entered the store, I am pretty sure I was changed forever by the total visual assault of crap. Future garbage. Stacked on shelves the way WALL-E would stack cubes of stomached garbage into pyramid-skyscraper hybrids. A whole acre of it.

I felt nauseated. And I stood there and wondered how I would feel if I were seven. Or four. And I closed my eyes and said a prayer. I prayed that every single child who saw WALL-E would become a total pain in the ass for at least a year if not forever, pointing out every single piece of garbage and every single tire and every single piece of future-garbage the way I used to opine at length about each of my mother's cigarettes as she smoked them.

I drove to the movie, but I almost walked, even though it's a far walk--about a half an hour. Gas is expensive, and my small Sculpture Space stipend does support me here, but it does nothing for all the expenses I left in Brooklyn. There is a car here, but I work hard not to put any gas in it, and am not jerky enough to plan my driving around when other people put gas in it. Instead, I've been enjoying walking places and being efficient. Thinking of it as part of the residency. Food is expensive too. The floods, I think, are going to make everything even more expensive.

And there's this election. I was following the Obama/Clinton soap opera like, well, like it was a soap opera. And now I am replacing that blow-by-blow attention to the drama with increasing conviction that Obama will win in a landslide, because McCain actually looks like he's not really there. He looks, physically, like an actual memory. Like what a real ghost is probably like. Separated forever from the context but hovering just next to it. Asserting weakly that it is not of the past. That it knows what the internet is.

Terry Gross has been running back-to-back stories about how messed up personal finance has gotten. About credit cards and the mortgage industry and the evil of the 401(k). And these stories are just fucking gripping because they are not about money as much as they are about a total loss of control. A total misunderstanding of what the game is. It's as if Wall Street is using human beings like batteries, like the Matrix. Making your smartest-seeming financial decisions stupid. Shoehorning every single American into a house, whether they can afford one or not. Compounding fees that drain the retirement plan you fund yourself, and doing it in a way you can't see or calculate. Stealing fifteen dollars at a time, but doing it all the time.

It's literally inhuman. And that Seymour Hirsch article--that Seymour Hirsch article made me ball my hand into a fist and beat it against my heart! Covert operations are starting in Iran--Bush and Cheney asked Congress if they could go do a little exploratory killing--and Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are not planning to do anything other than wring their hands and say okay.

And in response to this I start to wring my hands. I wring my hands over all the evil we are wreaking, over how deeply correct it was of Pixar to portray us as boneless and infantilized. I wring my hands because we are trapped by our greed and shortsightedness. Because things are getting so bad that they might get too bad even for SuperObama to fix. Especially since he's neutering himself over FISA.

I'm still only a day or two out from that experience of seeing WALL-E, and the more distance I get from it, the safer I feel in saying that it was profound and relevant and artful. And it behooves me at this point to remember that the other big summer blockbuster I have seen this year was also surprisingly serious, and surprisingly complex.

tYou Don't Mess With The Zohan took some risks. If there is one thing that is not funny, it is the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. In fact, if you pressed me for a short list of tropes Americans should be either too ignorant or too embarrassed to laugh at, my list would be:

*The Israeli Army as cultural institution and signifier of Jewish Manliness, and the fact that the words Jewish Manliness are just funny, and whether or not that's anti-semitic. *Tel Aviv as disco-beach-backwater-paradise *Fatah: Terrorist Organization or Legitimate Government? *All Arabs Look Like Terrorists

But there we all were in that theater, laughing our fucking asses off at every single hummus joke. And that gives me hope. Hope is where it should be in this. It is in art. Art can not just imagine a world in which Palestinians and Jews square off together to fight a common enemy. Art can do that re-imagining by reducing The Peace Process to a gooey love story, terrorist jokes, a hacky sack tournament and a Mariah Carey cameo, with a sex+scatology+hummus finale.

I know that I am gushing about The Zohan, but bear with me. What I am saying here is real. I am saying that there are two summer blockbusters addressing real crises, with courage and sensitivity. It takes gigantic balls to make every single human in your movie so fat that they are incapable of standing, or to find humor in an altercation between an Israeli soldier and a frightened Palestinian.

This leaves me wondering where exactly my balls are, and hoping that I can cowboy up once I have found them. I mean, if Hollywood can tackle Envirogeddon and Peace in the Middle East, surely I can muster up a little something relevant.

It beats handwringing.

Comments

[timothybuckwalter]

I agree about Wall-E -- it does make you notice a little bit more.

My friend did this, and it ended up in the NYT:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dorkmaster/2658178905/

[cjagers]

I applaud your celebration of these movies, they are great. But please don't lessen your already profound contribution. Fine art is a less direct medium, reaching less people ... but not less powerful.

[21st Century Plowshare]

Hey beautiful blog people,

Tim, your friend's photo is great!

Chris, first of all, The Zohan was not exactly great... it was a schlocky silly thing. There was greatness in it because it achieved relevance and riskiness. So with fine art.

My larger point is not to denigrate our contributions as much as herd them. The world is so interesting right now. So fucked up and so fertile at the same time--begging for equilibrium.

If the zeitgeist is telling me anything, it's saying that it's OK to demand more and better along specific axes.