Life On Mars

Well, it's been six months since inauguration, meaning that we are only one eighth of the way through the first term of Trump's presidency. Every now and then I force myself to stop and look at what surrounds me and to remind myself the subtle changes that have already happened. We have already come to accept the fact that the leader of our country will go on Twitter to denounce his enemies, intimidate the press, and spew a torrent of lies and bullshit. That has become normal. Hell, it's become the daily entertainment for a lot of people. It reminds me of Kierkegaard's tale about a clown who rushes out to the stage of a theater to tell the crowd that the theater is on fire and they must leave. The crowd thinks it's a joke, and just laughs harder the more that the clown implores them, before it's too late.

We have made the destruction of our own democracy a kind of true life reality show. As I wrote about before, America went through a long Brezhnev period of rot, where the masses stopped actually believing in the system they were living under. I know more than one person who voted for Trump out of a kind of nihilistic glee. (At least one of them regrets it, but too late.) Even people who oppose Trump get fascinated by the show, forgetting the stakes involved. Back in the 2016 election, too many media voices treated him as a joke, and they still do. After all, they're not the ones getting deported, and it drives up their ratings and ad revenue. I get the feeling that Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death will be seen as a work of great prophecy by future generations.

And you what, I play my role in this. I watch Hayes and Maddow way too much. I spend a lot of time on Twitter. There is a difference between being engaged and being distracted, and I think I am becoming the latter. This morning I got a good reminder of that. I went to a nearby town to get some bakery bread, and there were folks setting up what looked like a protest in the small town square against Trump's immigration policies. At that moment I realized that while I had been diligently calling and writing lawmakers for the past three months, I had not been doing anything communal, not since I joined a protest for transgender rights in Austin, Texas, that I happened to run into back in March. That's not good enough.

Salvation is not going to come from anyone near the top. The top-level media still equivocates and still, after all these years, tries to play the false equivalency game. The Republican Party has signed a blood pact with the criminal in chief, and will not turn against him until maybe the 2020 election, if then. On the other side, if political smarts was TNT the Democrats could not blow their nose. Change is only going to come from those of us who take the time and make the sacrifices to act. That's a fact that I am going to try to keep in mind as the world around me becomes increasingly unbearable.

Music For Troubled Times

Ever since Saturday night a feeling of dread has accompanied me. It has to do with Donald Trump winning the South Carolina primary, and the feeling that his candidacy is actually viable.  Right now I must admit that I think he stands a fifty-fifty chance of getting the Republican nomination.  While one would assume that such a large percentage of people dislike Trump and his ideas that he would be destroyed in the general election, stranger things have happened.  A Trump nomination could bring about a Bloomberg third party run, which would sink Clinton or Sanders. If Clinton is the nominee the email scandal could maybe turn into something big.  Basically, it’s a chance I’d rather not take.  And even if Trump does not win the nomination, the fact that so many Americans are behind such a vulgar, fascistic man who appeals to the worst instincts in this country is depressing enough.

On top of all of this we had yet another mass shooting met with a collective shrug this weekend.  Police still get away with murder and the wealthy keep choking off opportunity for others.  I’ve turned to music to salve my soul.  Here’s some songs for these troubled times.

Ray Charles “The Danger Zone”

This is an absolutely beautiful song in its dejection, but one that expresses the dread of living when “the world is in an uproar.”  According to the song, “the danger zone is everywhere.”

Arcade Fire “Windowsill”

This is a song and album I associate very strongly with the Bush years.  It starts with a litany of “I don’t wanna”s before the last, devastating one: “I don’t wanna live in America no more.”  This is a song of disgust at a country gone insane, one I am really feeling right now. “Because the tide is high/ and it’s rising still/ but I don’t want to see it at my windowsill.”

The War On Drugs “Under The Pressure”

This gorgeous song sounds like it comes from an alternate-universe 1980s when the production techniques of the day were slightly toned down and put to use for art’s sake.  It has a wonderful driving quality, which is why I often listen to it while I ride the subway on the way to work, “trying not to crack under the pressure.” 

Bob Dylan "Political World"

The War on Drugs' sound reminds me very powerfully of Bob Dylan circa Oh Mercy, an album that dealt with the broken-ness of the world.  "Political World" puts the point most starkly, speaking of a world where "Love don't have any place/ we're living in times where men commit crimes/ but crime don't have any face."  That just about sums it up, don't it?

U2 "Seconds"

I know it's trendy to knock U2 these days, but we shouldn't lost sight of how great they were in their heyday.  This ominous song came out in 1983, in the midst of renewed threats of nuclear war, the subject of the song.  It's a very pretty song about that lingering fear that the world can be blown up with the push of a button.  Thinking about Trump's finger on that button makes me shudder.

The Coen Brothers' Cinema of Existential Despair

As I mentioned recently, I finally saw Inside Llewyn Davis, a film I had greatly anticipated, both for its subject matter -the early 60s Village folk scene- and its creators, the Coen brothers.  The Coens are without a doubt my favorite contemporary American film makers, but knowing the storyline of the film, I needed to be in the right emotional frame of mind.  The Coens have made many films, all of which fit into a set of genres (which I have listed at the end of this post), and Inside Llewyn Davis, like Barton Fink, The Man Who Wasn't There and A Serious Man, fit in their genre of existential despair.  In these films a man (it is always a man, unfortunately) sees his life unravel before his eyes without any solace or comfort.  For Barton Fink, Llewyn Davis, Ed Crane, and Larry Gopnik, there is no divine consolation, no happy ending, no way out from the crushing hand of fate.

The Coens' movies usually present humanity as stupid, naive, petty, and cruel.  This is sometimes played for laughs, as in Raising Arizona's farcical tale, or dead serious, as in Fargo.  Their films of existential despair are hardest to watch, however, because they ring so true.  Watching Llewyn fail to achieve his dream despite his talent and aided by his penchant for being his own enemy hit just a little too close for me.  It's a very similar character to Barton Fink, a writer who finds his personal hell in LA and whose arrogance and unwillingness to listen to others helps lead to his undoing.

The Coens could make it easier on their viewers by making their protagonists in these films more perfect and more likable.  That way, when the audience sees someone being crushed, they can be fully, uncomplicatedly sympathetic, and perhaps avoid the disturbing thought that they too could find themselves in such a state.  Barton and Llewyn are both highly unpleasant at times, but they are not bad people, just petty and inept like the vast majority of us tend to be.  Ed Crane in The Man Who Wasn't There is emotionally stunted and reserved to the point of catatonia.  Larry Gopnik in A Serious Man is probably their most likable "man falling apart," but his inability to stick up for himself and not let people walk all over him makes him incredibly frustrating to watch.

It would be easier to watch these men squirm under fate's cruel hand if they were completely innocent of responsibility for their situations, but they're not.  (Larry Gopnik is the possible exception here because he is explicitly a Job-like character being beset on all sides despite his goodness.  However, his aforementioned passivity in the face of a cheating wife, sponging brother, spoiled children, and a blackmailing student only make matters worse for him.)  Ed Crane meets his downfall after murdering the grotesque man cheating with his wife.  Barton Fink refuses to listen to Charlie Meadows, causing the secret killer to enact his revenge on Barton.  Llewyn Davis constantly alienates those who love and want to help him and ends up beaten down in a gutter after he takes out his anger at those exploiting him on somebody else.

These Coen films are highly subversive because they go against the grain of the American ideology.  We are told that we are the masters of our own destiny, that hard work will be rewarded, that good things happen to good people, and that the universe operates according to moral principles.  All of these films show the opposite.  They show good people suffering, hard-fought dreams crushed, and cruel people in power prospering.  I firmly believe that forty or fifty years from now, these are the Coen films that will be remembered most, because no one else with their sizable audience is willing to probe the cruelty and meaninglessness of existence, and to do it so well.

The Genres of Coen Brothers Movies

Farces
This is my least favorite genre of Coen films, mostly because they lack the depth that animates their other work and the streak of cruelty (pun intended) that gives their work their bite.

Raising Arizona
Intolerable Cruelty
The Ladykillers
Burn After Reading

Dark Noir Murder Tales
In many ways these films are superficially darker than their films of personal despair, and also probe the horrors of this world we live in.  At the end of Fargo, when Frances McDormand's character sits in her bed after a harrowing hunting down of the killers, she contemplates the awful world she is bringing a child into.  It is one of the most quietly devastating scenes in cinema history, and sums up the Coens' worldview.

Blood Simple
Fargo
No Country For Old Men

Existential Despair
Barton Fink
The Man Who Wasn't There
A Serious Man
Inside Llewyn Davis

Historical Genre Flicks
The Coens love to set their films in the 20th century past, and also to recall older historical genres.  They sometimes do this for laughs, as in O Brother, Where Art Thou, which gets its name from a reference to the Depression Era-film Sullivan's Travels while using the Depression as a backdrop.   (Superficially The Man Who Wasn't There, which strongly recalls 1940s noir, could be put in this category, but the storyline of a man whose life falls apart puts it in the personal despair genre for me.)  I put the almost impossible to categorize Lebowski here because it is a takeoff on Raymond Chandler.

Miller's Crossing
The Huduscker Proxy
O Brother, Where Art Thou
The Big Lebowski