Reading Habermas

Robin spends her days zooming around town picking up linens and dropping off used flower vases,  She meets with anxiously beautiful brides and their beautifully anxious moms.  She helps them make decisions about flowers, photographers, caterers, musicians, and so on—incredibly detailed decisions that involve things like coordinating the color of the flowers and food and linens and so on with the color of the bride’s eyes.  Then she comes home to her office to call florists and photographers and caterers and so on, and to keep track of it all on papers organized in files according to date and the color of the bride’s eyes.  When she walks in the door exhausted and in a hurry to get to work and meet a deadline, she sees me sitting on my ass reading philosophy.  Been there all day.  Day after day.   For weeks.  Good thing I did the dishes.

For the first time since graduate school, I’m reading a lot of philosophy; and for the first time in my life, I’ve set myself a program of reading a large chunk of a philosopher’s oeuvre, four and a half books approaching 2,000 pages so far.  To support my position that sitting on my ass all day is not vacation, I’ll say that 1) reading Habermas is hard work, and worth some hard work for its insights into everyday life.  Reading Habermas also 2) takes me back to what could have been a brilliant intellectual career if I’d read Habermas twenty years ago.  Finally and most significant for my defense, 3) it’s opened up new writing ambitions.

(1)    

Proof that reading Habermas is hard:  I’m constantly stopping to use the internet, not only to take a break from holding all those philosophical balls in the air at the same time, but also to check up on some half-forgotten or half-learned philosophical term, or research one of the many thinkers I never read like Weber or Durkheim or barely even heard of like G.H. Mead or Talcott Parsons.   I’m sure learning a lot, not only about Habermas but about the history of philosophy.  Habermas draws upon everything that has ever been written, and he aims to explain every aspect of our species from the combined perspectives of philosophy, sociology, psychology, anthropology, art history, literary analysis, and etcetera. 

It’s hard but it’s worth it, especially since his basic concepts are very practical and recognizable in people’s everyday lives.  His main purpose is to rescue us all from the dominance of thinking about money and power, and instead celebrate more human and moral ways of thinking. He calls it “system” versus “life world.”  Think Wall Street versus Occupy Wall Street.  I might even argue at some point that Habermas’s theory of communication is a theory of love.

(2)

Reading Habermas brings back the ambition of the old days, back when I thought I might make a more significant contribution to scholarship.  I lost that ambition back in the painful 90s, as I slowly awakened to the reality that trying to get a job as a scholar was like banging my head against the wall.  It felt much better to stop, yet I didn’t know how.  I was that guy in the old joke:

A young man runs away with the circus because he wanted to be in show business.  Years later, his brother catches up with him, witnesses his job cleaning up after the elephants, and exclaims, “You spend all day knee deep in elephant shit.  You don’t have to do this.  Quit!”  

The guy responds, “What! And leave show business?!”  

Despite the bitter delight in such irony, my professional woes continued for a long time.  Even after I landed in Santa Barbara and got my personal life back together, I couldn’t live with myself as a second-class academic, a poorly paid teacher rather than a respected scholar.  So I left academe altogether.  

It wasn’t six months before I wanted my old job back.  Took me five years to get it, and five years more to return to philosophy.

In retrospect, I’m feeling that—with my blue-collar pedigree, my preference for spending time with family and friends, my satisfaction with woodworking and gardening projects, my taste for the bitters, and my increasingly principled aversion to spending 18 hours a day sitting on my ass reading everything that’s ever been written—I’ve done about as well as I have a right to expect.  I love my job these days.  I’ve become a damned good teacher, and I relish the six weeks it allows me to sit around reading Habermas.

(3)

I’ve embarked on some concrete writing projects that reading Habermas enables.  

(a)     I came to Habermas first from my scholarly frustration with genre theory in American composition studies.  I hoped to gain the conceptual ammunition to launch a comprehensive attack on genre theory, American Pragmatism, and Composition Studies as a discipline that fails to distinguish between practical and instrumental reason, remains blind to the systemic sources of power and hegemony in our society, and thus fails to satisfy its own liberatory aims.  I also hoped to gain from Habermas a communicative practice that doesn’t make me sound like an asshole, always a problem. 

(b)   I also came to Habermas hoping to explicate the failure of the environmental movement to initiate the changes it clamors for.  Habermas might help at least to explain the problem as life-world versus system.  Accordingly, the eco-problem is not simply a matter of convincing people to do the eco-right thing.  As an idea, sustainability has already achieved consensus; no one really wants to trash the planet.  In the life-world, environmentalism rules.  Yet the economic and political system continues to trash the planet.  In short, from Habermas’s perspective, the environmental movement becomes part of the larger effort to make the system more responsive to human concerns.  I could elaborate this somehow in relation to environmental texts like Paul Gilding’s The Great Disruption.  But what I’m really hoping is that I will discover among Habermas’s later essays one that deals directly with environmental issues.  That way I can simply read it and save myself the trouble of original thought, even of the derivative, secondary literature, apply-some-really-major-thinker’s-ideas way. 

(c)    I’m also thinking that perhaps my real destiny is in articulating how academic theory offers insight into everyday life. Last year I spent a good part of my six weeks of concentrated writing and research working on a project that aimed to make literary analysis relevant to a non-academic audience.  I focused on a little artsy film called Get Low and planned to work up a series of interpretive readings from different theoretical perspectives, each one more ambitious than the one before—pop-cultural, moral, political, socio-economic, philosophical, and so on.  The idea was to treat the non-academic audience as smart and wisely grounded in life, though with no time to waste on academic specializations, and to treat academics like me as ass-sitting arrogant windbags, too specialized and professionalized and focused on mental masturbation—in short, too unwisely ungrounded in life—to realize that we were saying some pretty profound stuff.  I wrote two interpretations and posted them on my blog as parts 1 and 2 of “The Low Down on Get Low.”  I’m pretty sure no one read the posts.

Undaunted—or unintelligent—I’ve been thinking of taking up the project again in light of reading Habermas.  His thinking opens up whole new possibilities.  I figure that I could incorporate Habermas’s really smart way of looking at everything into my own brand of blarney (or McHughing), focus it all on popular culture texts or phenomena like Occupy Wall Street, address it to an intelligent public audience, and ramble on about whatever I feel like, movies and morality, the environment and the market, love and happiness.  I could spout all kinds of world-healing wisdom.  

Whether I’ll have any actual readers for any of these writing projects is entirely another question.

Blarney in "The Guard"

The new Irish film, The Guard, opens with a horrific car accident on a narrow stone bridge west of Galway, the very same bridge we drove across last March when we were a bit lost, a long quarter-mile bridge barely wide enough for one car.  We crossed in the wrong direction without incident, but on the way back we faced disaster:  a car coming in the opposite direction, moving fast, not about to stop or slow down or even care.  I remember how we all collectively drew deep breaths to make the car smaller and closed our eyes to summon the Bridge Fairie, and thereby squeezed by unscathed.  Great times.

The movie too is a great time, hilarious as blarney.  The fat Irish cop, Boyle, is constantly messing with the expectations of everyone else in the film, especially the American FBI cop played by Don Cheadle.   Boyle feigns veracity or sincerity or ignorance just for fun, acting the racist to get a rise out of the black cop, or claiming to have finished fourth in an Olympic swim meet.  Rather than just saying the truth, Boyle plays around with it, leaving the Cheadle character guessing.  “I can’t tell if you’re incredibly fucking stupid or incredibly fucking smart,” he says, showing that he understands blarney perfectly.  It ensures that neither truth nor the self be taken too seriously.  Boyle’s performance of blarney reminds us that we’re all full of it. 

Just as Boyle presents himself to the American, The Guard presents itself to its audience as pure blarney.  It features a surprisingly flawed and likeably human hero: Boyle is a clown cop with the heart of gold who delights in whores, trips on LSD,  runs guns to the IRA, and gets the bad guy.  It also features surprisingly intellectual and self-aware and thus human bad guys.  The cold-blooded professional killer yearns to settle down with one woman; the socio-path quotes Nietzsche on command.  Kind of like The Commitments meets Pulp Fiction, the film plays around with the action/suspense genre even as it fulfills its moral/emotional demands.  In this mocking performance of its genre, it calls attention to its own artifice, its blarney, and it invites the audience to see that the genre as a whole is blarney, and maybe film and culture and life in general are blarney, which is either incredibly fucking stupid or incredibly fucking smart.

The tourist books say, “Blarney is the attempt to deceive without causing harm.”  Habermas might say that blarney works by intentionally disrupting the assumptions normally necessary for communication.  The resulting humor, once the audience gets it, and I’m not sure Habermas would get it, results in even deeper mutual understanding, because it demonstrates that the assumptions and expectations grounding everyday conversation might be wrong.  In short, blarney communicates a deeper mutual understanding by evoking the fallibility of human communication and understanding.  We all get along better when we know that our truths are blarney.

In this way, Irish humor evokes the poststructural distrust of language evident in Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault.  Language is the medium of meaning, where truth and desire, the objective world and other people, conscious and unconscious experiences become symbolically structured.  Poststuctural French thinkers explore the limits of language, where symbolic structures break down, the gap between language and whatever it attempts to structure symbolically, the idea that language cannot fully articulate truth or desire or the world or experience or the other.  There arises the supplement, the excess, the remainder escaping symbolic structure, rendering meaning forever uncertain.  Thus, both blarney and French philosophy evoke the fallibility of human communication and understanding. 

The difference between blarney and French philosophy is that blarney joyfully understands this fallibility from the beginning, while the French eventually find joy in the end.  The French are teleological, concerned with the ultimate end; or rather, they are anti-teleological, concerned to show that language, meaning, desire never reaches its end, always remains incomplete, uncertain, unsatisfied.  They typically locate the possibility of jouissance in the gap/remainder at the end, the far limit of language and meaning and desire, realizing only at the end that the gap/remainder that was always there always will be there.  By contrast, blarney takes impish delight in knowing itself as blarney from the beginning.  As the speaker knows and the audience laughingly discovers, blarney is always already blarney; that’s why it’s fun. 

My friend Bob says this difference can be explained historically.  The French were European powers, colonists, who discovered only at the end of the colonial process that their imperialist way of thinking was bankrupt at best, a violence toward the other, the world, and the self.   The Irish, of course, were themselves colonized and knew from the beginning that empire and its ideology were shite.

For his part, Habermas has more faith in language, or more precisely faith in communication, coming to mutual understanding through rational communicative action.  His style is to read everything that’s ever been written and integrate it all into his argument, as if everything that has ever been written amounted to one great conversation that comes together in his own model.  Fortunately, he is sure to admit from the beginning that he is constructing a model.  He knows it’s all blarney, but he’s giving it a go anyway, because that’s what we do; we  try to understand and to communicate.  Habermas also implicitly invites the reader to join in the blarney and help construct or reconstruct the model.  All we have to do is read everything that’s ever been written.  In this sense, German scholarship may be more reliable, but not as much fun. 

The Lowdown on Get Low, Part 2

I Profess: Christianity for Sinners and Secularists

Get Low presents Christian morality as a mature reflection on innocence, which is a vision of happiness a non-believing literary academic like me can embrace.


Loss of Innocence

Get Low begins with FIRE! 

We see a two-story house, isolated like a farmhouse, fully engulfed in flame, the fires of hell raging against dark heavens.

We see a figure distinguish itself from the flame, stumbling out of the inferno, flames rising from its flailing arms. A man?

The figure falls, disappears. Damned?

 We watch forty seconds of hell-fire consuming hearth and home and who knows what else? Has the man in flames perished in the fire?

Finally someone appears out of the darkness much further from the house, running away. The same man? Did he save himself?

The mystery behind this fire drives viewers’ interest in the film. Unlike most good Hollywood films, this mystery has a moral.

Get Low re-tells a Southern Gothic fable usually meant for innocents—children or young adults. It’s a brimstone fable about the loss of innocence, a lurid Southern Gothic tale about sex and violence in all its passion and humanity. Someone learns a hard lesson the hard way: the guilt of hurting people, the shame of behaving badly, the wrath of God. It’s a lesson innocents must learn about how people get hurt, how sex and violence are often involved in the worst cases of human moral failure.

Get Low is not this story, not a story for innocents. By putting the fire at the beginning of the film and forty years before the main action, Get Low retells this fable as one for sinners, those Christians for whom the loss of innocence has already happened, in other words a fable for adults.

Get Low tells the story of an old man, Felix Bush, facing death. To find redemption, Bush needs to disspell:

1) the comfortable lie he tells the community about himself

2) the comfortable half-truth about the past he holds

3) the comfortable misunderstanding he holds about Christianity

Being honest sounds easy in the fable for innocents, but it took Bush took 40 years of damnation to tell the truth.

 
1. Bush’s Lie 

As a mean old hermit, Bush lives a decidedly unchristian life. Rather than loving his neighbors, he’s been waging a decades-long war against them. 

We meet him first as the target of a boy’s dare: to throw a stone at the mean old man’s window. With hair to his waist and a beard to match, Bush appears shooting a rifle, scaring the poor kid out of his lunch and off the farm.

Later he goes to town, braving Depression-era cars and modern ways with his mule-drawn cart and hand-made clothes. In the street, a young man (the boy who threw the stone and grew up?) yells at the old bastard about his evil ways. Bush proves the young man’s point by beating him brutally with a stick.

Later still, another young man, Buddy (another boy who threw a stone and learned the Christian lesson of compassion?) arrives at the farm to help Bush get his funeral party; Bush greets him with a rifle shot past his ear.

Bush is a mean, violent, despicable human being, a physical and moral menace. Rumors swirl through the community to explain him by some unknown and horrific sin involving murder likely, certainly involving ruination for those around him and damnation for himself. To his Tennessee neighbors, Bush is an evil character straight out of Southern Gothic.

 As we learn, Bush may be a character but he ain’t evil.  

Buddy, a good-hearted young guy who works as the moral filter of the film, figures out pretty quick that he’s not really a menace to society; he just wants people to believe that lie so they’ll leave him alone. He’s been living that lie for forty years.

Then he gets a visit from a man he doesn’t shoot: the preacher. Bush listens, though he never stops chopping wood and never says a word. He’s gonna die and needs to make his peace, the preacher tells him.

Bush thinks it over and agrees with the preacher, after his own fashion. He wants to have a funeral party that he himself attends. “I’ll pay,” he tells the preacher.

But the good man of the cloth can’t make the man’s request fit with the good book. Gathering his neighbors to damn him publicly is just not the Christian thing to do. 

Buddy and his boss, the funeral home director Frank Quinn, will, however, take Bush’s money. 

The funeral party is on! Pretty soon, he’s a phenomenon, an instant legend in rural Tennessee: The old bastard paying big money for everyone including most of all himself to go his own fucking funeral.

Why’s he doing it? To have a hoot before he dies? To kill the neighbors who hate him? To have his day of reckoning? No one knows, and Bush isn’t saying.

“Maybe he won’t say.”

“Maybe he can’t say.”

Bush’s lie thus becomes a mystery. When we find out what’s behind his lie, will we find out the truth of the fire?

2. Bush’s Half-Truth

Get Low is a love story. Turns out Bush loves in a deep and abiding and honorable way. 

He keeps a photo of a woman’s face by his bed. Before lying down to bed every night, he kisses her. Has Bush shut himself up for forty years with grief over a lost love?

He runs into Buddy’s Aunt Mattie outside church, and she remembers him fondly. Even after Bush leaves without uttering a word, Mattie speaks of a handsome and suave young man, a fine catch in her day. The old hermit was a hunk?

After cutting his hair and beard, he spends time with Mattie, showing himself to be a gentle, charming, tea-serving man. Where’d he come from?

Bush tells Buddy and Quinn that he and Mattie “had a go.” Had a go! She can’t be the woman in the picture, can she?

A human heart beats, pumps blood, and animates the soul of Felix Bush. Who knew? Why’d he keep it hidden behind his misery and meanness?

The answer comes from Mattie. While enjoying Bush’s tea and charming company, she suddenly runs out, flustered and probably angry. She saw the picture by Bush’s bed, we later learn. It’s not Mattie; it’s her sister, her married-to-someone-else sister, who died long ago. She confronts Bush. Why does he have her picture? What does he know about her death? Was he involved?

We can be pretty sure about what we suspected all along: Bush is the man saving himself from the fire in the film’s first scene. But we don’t know the whole story. Half the truth is that he loved a woman and lost her. That’s the good half, about a good man. The other half is ugly: she was married; she died in the fire; he ran away.

Along with intense human grief, we see that Bush also has lived all these years with intense human guilt and shame, hellfire and damnation.

The mystery thickens. Did he kill the woman he loved? Abandon her?

Bush isn’t saying.

"Maybe he won't say."

“Maybe he can’t say.”

3. Bush’s Misunderstanding of Christianity

In Get Low, the Christian story of redemption is for Bush the way, the truth, and the life. It begins with Bush coming to an honest reckoning of his own loves, his acts, and his failures; it ends in him telling his story: confession. Bush takes a long time to get there because a) he misunderstands the role of the church; and b) he misunderstands the meaning of the Bible.

 a) Bush wants the church to tell his story for him.  

He offers the preacher a wad of cash not only for the funeral party he wants to attend but also for a funeral oration about himself. He gets neither, and the preacher doesn’t know Bush and couldn’t speak the truth of his life anyway. 

He dangles the wad of cash in front of the funeral home people and gets a funeral he can attend, but he doesn’t get anyone to tell his story. All the funeral can promise are the neighbors’ lies about him. 

So Bush goes back to the church, a particular church a long drive away, from Tennessee to Illinois. There he looks up Reverend Jackson. The two go way back.

Bush built the church’s beautiful sanctuary, a masterpiece of craftsmanship, a gift of devotion, a prayer for forgiveness. 

Jackson knows what happened at the fire. Bush made his confession to him decades earlier.

Bush asks Reverend Jackson—he actually gets the words out—to come to his funeral and tell the truth about him, his love, his sin, his years of repentance. 

Jackson refuses adamantly, almost angrily. “Did you tell her?” he demands to know. Bush doesn’t say, but this time without mystery: he has not told Mattie about her sister’s death; has not told her about his role in it; has not apologized to her.

The more Bush wants the church to tell his story, the more he learns what he’s known all along: The church wants him to tell his own story.

 Bush returns to Tennessee. His faith shaken, he announces to Buddy and Quinn that the funeral is off. Has he rejected the church and its teachings? Rejected his Christian duty?  

b) Bush is left where’s he’s been most of his life, thrown back into his personal relation to the Lord. The film spends little time developing this personal (non-dramatic and non-visual) relation, at least not directly.  

 We know that Bush is no church-going man; yet he’s been feeling remorseful for forty years, punishing himself in his own hermetic prison of grief and guilt and shame. He also seeks Christian redemption before he dies.  

We see him apparently at the grave of his dearly departed beloved. He’s silent, possibly in prayer. Is he asking the Lord’s forgiveness? 

He breaks off and utters perhaps the most intelligent words of his life. “Ain’t no use asking Jesus to forgive me. I didn’t do nothin’ to him.”

Bush finally learns his Christian lesson. Faith and worship and the teachings of Christ require much more than faith and worship and Bible study. Like Christ himself, Bush must make the word of God live on earth, not by praying to Jesus but by living a Christian life. The leap of faith is the leap from the Word into life.

On the strength of Bush’s religious epiphany and moral courage, the funeral is back on!

Bush’s Loss of Innocence

Telling the story of the fire is Bush’s triumph and redemption. By the time we hear the story, the details are important, but we already know their meaning: Bush is a good man who erred.

He fell in love with a married woman. He didn’t mean to. He’s asked himself for forty years and still doesn’t know if a man can choose the person he loves, or if love chooses him.

He visited the house of his beloved to find her husband, who is in the know about the two lovers and in a jealous homicidal rage. Bush fights him off. Perhaps he’s killed him? 

Rushing upstairs, Bush sees the bloody hammer on the steps. 

He finds his beloved in a pool of blood—but alive. 

Next thing he remembers, he’s knocked violently against the wall by the husband, not yet dead but intent on death and destruction. He’s set the house on fire.  

Again the husband attacks Bush. Again Bush fights him off.  Dead?

Bush discovers he’s on fire. 

He goes to save his beloved, but ends up flying, outside the second-story window. Was he pushed? Did he fall? Did he jump?  

The only thing Bush can say for sure is that, if he left his beloved to die, everything he knows about himself is a lie.  

Here is the Southern Gothic tale in all its lurid sex and violence and loss of innocence, except, in Get Low, it is not a cautionary tale told to scare innocents, but an exculpatory tale told at the day of reckoning. The fire at the beginning of Get Low is indeed about sin, the loss of innocence, the fall into humanity. But rather than the childish morality of brimstone and damnation and the fires of hell for those wickedly human enough to stray from the path of righteousness, the story of Felix Bush shows the much more difficult adult path of salvation.

Bush helped cause the fire; he was torched by the flame of human passion and sin; and he suffered forty years of hell. But in the end, just as he escaped the burning house, he escapes the fires of hell by being honest with himself and by loving his neighbors enough to be honest with them. Bush earns forgiveness from Mattie and all concerned not because he’s completely innocent, but because he’s human, and because he told the truth of his human story.

A Literary View of the Christian Story

Biblical stories are moral. They mean to show us how to live our lives and be happy. Yes, happy. Morality has always meant the wisdom that leads to happiness. Who doesn’t want to be happy? What does the Bible show about the human condition? What wisdom does it relate that might help make us happy? 

Get Low presents biblical wisdom that requires no belief in God or the afterlife, yet remains deeply moral, deeply concerned with human happiness.

Felix Bush becomes self-aware, dispelling lies, half-truths, and misunderstandings to get closer and closer to the truth about himself. That is exactly the path of secular thought in the west since at least Socrates: Know thyself. Bush reflects upon his passions and actions and, especially, their consequences for others. Who doesn’t want neighbors who are self-aware like this? Who doesn’t want to be self-aware? 

Bush finds the meaning of biblical words not in the Book but in life. He learns that morality isn’t bookish, but finds its truth in living relation to other people. Who thinks happiness is in books and not in life? 

Bush is not perfect; he’s made a human mistake and played a role in others’ pain and death. Most of us are more fortunate; our human mistakes only rarely cause death and such profound pain and suffering; few of us live with such guilt and shame. But who among us is perfectly innocent?

Bush find peaceful redemption. Through self-awareness, love, and a leap into life, Bush is reconciled with his community, himself, and his God. He does this ultimately by telling his own story; by fessing up, he earns eternal happiness. Who doesn’t think that being honest with the people you love is a good thing? An act of love? A means to intimacy?

Bush knows love. He knows the passionate love for a woman he wants to possess, the love that can be as compelling and ecstatic as it is blind and destructive. He also learns a more mature, self-aware, and selfless love for his neighbors, the human community. “God is love” is a perfectly secular formulation. Who doesn’t believe in love? the passionate kind? the selfless kind? 

Morality is compelling for us secular types not because we’ll be punished or rewarded after death, but because we want happiness in this life. Why wait like Bush to find self-awareness and peace and love just before death? Why not mature early—and often—and pursue happiness in this life?

I Confess: The Story of a Literary Analyst

The biblical story of happiness is as difficult in secular terms as it is in sacred. Like Bush, we find it hard to be aware of ourselves, hard to understand that we are not perfect, hard to process the pain we cause. Above all, like Bush, we find it hard to confess.

To Be Continued…

The Lowdown on "Get Low"

My wife tells me I think of movies in a more literary way than most people, looking not for fun and entertainment, not even for a chance to think about life and emotions and people. I get passionate about deep literary and philosophical meanings. After seeing the new movie Get Low, I started thinking all kinds of cool stuff about Character and Christianity and Capital. Perhaps I give the film more credit than it deserves, imbuing it with literary and cultural value it doesn’t merit. But I’ll give it this: it made me think.

So, as my friends and family, especially my wife, would no doubt be quick to say: Watch out! I’m going into thinking mode, indulging literary interpretation, speaking Ph.D. mumbo jumbo, which invariably makes me not only verbose—have you seen how long this is—but, even worse than boring, I become an insufferable know-it-all.

Actually, I’m going to try to curb my tendency to make people feel stupid and wrong, or at least I’ll try to explain why I think in literary terms, why it’s important to me, and why I think—insufferably—literature should be important to you. But, alas, I make no guarantees. You may feel the need to hit me, which would be the usual response. I only hope you hit me with words.

Before I get to literary interpretation, however, let me introduce Get Low with my take on the Industry view.



The Industry View of Get Low

Get Low is what Hollywood calls a small movie, an epithet in the industry that doesn’t quite reach an insult.

Avatar and Inception and Slumdog Millionaire, to take three high quality, Oscar caliber examples, enjoy big budgets and produce big entertainment value. They typically sport exotic, international or alien locales, exceptional and heroic characters usually played by beloved stars, and epic plot lines that place history, governments, even civilizations in the balance. They are especially distinguished by cinematic virtuosity, first-rate cinematography, sound, costumes, special effects, and the rest of what Hollywood does so well, movie-making talent that sweeps audiences into an intense visual and visceral experience. Big films require lots of capital, receive lots of marketing, and are expected to make huge profits.

At the other end of the Industry, small films have small budgets and thus no access to the full arsenal of cinematic virtuosity. This can be a good thing. Released from the capital demands of cinematic virtuosity and not expected to make blockbuster profits, small movies entertain with traditional literary and artistic techniques like a good story and strong acting performances. As such, they tend to attract small, educated, older audiences, often, as with Get Low, at theatres specializing in artsy films. In the Industry view, small movies have limited entertainment value and limited audiences, but they often feature quality, character-driven stories with Oscar-caliber writing and acting.

As a small film, Get Low gets mixed reviews, a good, not a great film. It’s story is a simple moral fable, good as far as it goes, moving, even thought-provoking for some, but not likely to garner Oscar consideration. Its real strength is in its performances. Robert Duvall carries the film in the lead role, an impassioned and flawed old country curmudgeon, a Duvall role perfectly cast, which is sure to enter him in the Oscar conversation, though not all reviewers were convinced. On the other hand, Bill Murray is universally acclaimed, virtually a lock for an Oscar nomination if the reviewers are right. He plays a supporting role as a man struggling against his weakness for money, which is a Murray role perfectly cast. Overall, then, with some reservations, the reviewers point to plenty that makes the film worth seeing.

The story stars Duvall as a good-hearted old coot, a hermit, who fosters for forty years the idea among four counties of locals that he is a mean evil son of a bitch. We first see him shooting at a boy for throwing a rock through his window, a typical dare among eleven year olds, a kind of local rite of passage as we later learn, braving the old bastard’s wrath. But of course the old bastard, Felix Bush by name, shoots not at the boy, but into the air, aiming not to harm but to scare. Bush further shows his heart when he traps the boy in a barn, frightens him out of his lunch, and then invites him to run away, scared but unharmed. Clearly, all he wants is to be left alone.

The premise of the story, apparently taken from a true Tennessee legend, is that Bush decides to throw himself a funeral party. He wants everyone from four counties to attend and tell a story about him, the mean old hermit bastard. The kicker is that Bush wants to be there alive at his own funeral, so he can listen to the stories. Bill Murray’s character, a funeral home director who smells profit even without a corpse, gets involved, and the funeral party is on. Bush surprises everyone by showing a talent for living, like the time he announces on air and out of the blue the offer to raffle off his own 40 acres of timber, instant riches for any local with five dollars and a story to tell. It quickly becomes a huge deal involving real money, and the party promises to be a legendary hoot.

As Bush comes out from the backwoods and out from behind his beard, preparing for the funeral party, the farcical premise turns into a moral fable. Through his surprisingly savvy interactions with Murray, we learn not only that he’s no fool, he’s probably playing Murray for a fool. Inevitably, of course, we learn that Bush is not a mean old bastard, but quite human, quite admirably likeable. Through his talks with an old flame, played by Sissy Spacek, we learn much more about the human tragedy that drove him to live like a hermit for forty years. We eventually learn that the funeral party is Bush’s chance for redemption.

Get Low then is a Christian moral fable of a man who withdraws from the world for forty years with the shame of a grievous but all too human moral failing; he seeks redemption before he dies. It works for most reviewers. While some critics call it simple, a bit too thin for a feature-length film, they stop short of saying it’s trite or not worth telling. Some like me applaud its moving moral significance. The general consensus is that Get Low tells a thought-provoking character-driven story that earns the audience’s affection for its interesting, honorable, and flawed characters.

In the Industry view of a character-driven story, Get Low is worth seeing because the performances by the actors bring the characters to life. Duvall as Felix Bush is always compelling on screen, deeply sympathetic; we feel for him, we like him, we need him to succeed. His performance is Oscar-caliber, especially in making what could easily have dissolved into a hoaky backwoods stereotype into a believable human character, and thus saving the film’s moral fable from a hoaky fate. In particular, Duvall’s soliloquy at the end, when he finally tells his story, is, as the reviewers say, worth the price of admission.

But Duvall’s performance is not pitch perfect. His transformation from a mean, ashamed, and guilty bastard into lovable old codger who wants redemption is too easy, as if a shave and a haircut could instantly turn 40 years of hermetic misanthropy into the suave charm of a man who serves tea to a sophisticated old flame. Duvall plays Bush, or perhaps he is directed to play Bush, in a heroic way that does not match the story. In the story, he is supposed to be so shaken by shame that no one knows whether he will actually walk the path of redemption, least of all himself, but we see precious little shame in Duvall’s performance. Mostly we see a Hollywood hero controlling events, influencing people to do his bidding, and doggedly pursuing his quest to right the wrong he created.

This perfectly played imperfect performance may be why some reviewers get downright cynical and nasty about Duvall’s performance, all but calling it a tainted and unseemly quest for an Oscar. Duvall's heroism is virtuoso, but it runs roughshod over the story.

From another cynical Industry perspective, that of the filmakers, perhaps Bush’s unheroic shame is best left buried beneath the surface of his moral courage, since no one wants to watch on screen an uncertain, hesitant, fearful Hamlet of a hero, even if it is a better story. Shame just doesn’t play.

Bill Murray’s lesser role is more perfectly performed. He encounters Bush first and foremost as an opportunity for profit, death and morality be damned; and he aims to make Bush’s funeral party a huge financial success. When Bush surprises him by taking control of events, maybe playing him for a fool, Murray’s character faces his own moral conflict between money and morality. He is betting big-time that he can have money and be moral too, but he might not be able to make it happen, since Bush is in control.  Murray brings us into his well-written character’s inner conflict subtly and humorously and completely.

So, Get Low is a small movie, featuring a good story and excellent performances, all reason enough to see the film. It also boasts high production values, meeting or exceeding Hollywood’s estimable standards, especially given the challenges of a period piece on a low budget. The costumes, the shooting locations, the musical score, the camera work, all of it first rate as far as I could tell. I especially enjoyed the theme song sung by Allison Krause and written by Aife O’Donovan (lead singer for Crooked Still, a Boston band that recently played a great set at the Lobero Theatre in Santa Barbara).

The film is currently playing Santa Barbara at the Riviera. I hope it does well enough to move to the main theaters, but it’s not likely. So don’t wait to see it.


The Literary View of Get Low

Literary analysis discusses exactly what Industry analysis cannot discuss: the meaning of the story. Movie reviewers, really anyone connected to the Industry and writing publicly, can only evaluate the story and say, for example, that Get Low is thought-provoking or simple. They can also say what the story is about, that Get Low is about a man’s sin and shame and redemption. But rarely if ever does an Industry writer interpret the meaning of the story, never elaborate an interpretive thesis, never write, for example, Get Low is a Christian fable that elaborates a profound critique of Christianity, and then go on to explain what that thesis means by providing examples from the story.

No Industry writer interprets because interpretation gives too much away, and spoils the viewers’ pleasure. No one likes to be told the end of the story, and everyone likes to think about movies on their own terms, because thinking is part of the pleasure. No readers want so-called experts to tell them what to think and feel about movies.

Those of us who engage in literary analysis, especially those of us who do it for a living, have no trouble spoiling movies for audiences, no problem giving away the ending, no hesitation to tell people what to think and feel about movies. We--I should say I--have no trouble playing the role of an insufferable know-it-all.

But let me confess my sins later, first allow me to profess.  I'll try and watch my professorial mumbo jumbo.


I Profess About Get Low

Get Low tells a story of a man who fucked up, knows he fucked up, not just by social standards of moral conduct, nor just God's standards, but his own admirably high standards.  Felix Bush fucked up, he hurt people, and he knows he's to blame.  He feels his shame so deeply that he punishes himself by living in self-imposed imprisonment for forty years, beoming the mean old bastard hermit, in order to atone for his sin, and perhaps find peace with his conscience.  That's the past, the back story.  The future is Bush's death.  Thus it's a common, possibly universal human story.  Who hasn’t fucked up and hurt people? Who hasn’t felt such shame?  Who doesn't want to die in peace?  The movie chronicles how Bush finds redemption before he dies, and so becomes a model for us all.

It's a simple Christian fable, deceptively simple, since, through a simple literary twist to the story, the Christian moral fable becomes a critique of Christianity, a Christian self-correction.  The moral of the fable in Get Low is about shame and redemption, not only for Felix Bush, not only for us, but also for Christianity.

To be continued.

My Pickup Truck

I've been hankering for a truck for a while, even before I cracked up the Honda.  It took me 31/2 months from the accident to let the financial dust settle, a month to get past Robin's mid-life crisis jibes, and fully three weeks after the test drive to buy a 2000 Mazda B2500, 4 cylinder 5 speed, with a little bigger cab and a lumber rack.  All of it perfect for Big Table Designs (and my mid-life crisis).  Pretty cheap too (especailly for a mid-life crisis).

The Gender Gap in Environmental Practices

Women tend to be tidier than men, at least the women in my life--mother, girlfriend, wife--have all been able to see dirt before I do, feel disgust before I do, and act to clean up before I do.  Not to say I'm a slob, not anymore at least.  Growing up with all brothers started me off deficient in hygiene (among other deficiencies), which I've worked to mitigate with the more or less constant, um, encouragement of mother, girlfriend, wife. This gendered relation to hygiene is certainly far from universal.  Indeed, my daughters tend to take after dear old dad in this regard; as one daughter famously articulated the problem when she was three and facing the task of cleaning her room: "It's so uneasy for me."  Nevertheless, I don't believe I'm wrong to say that women are tidier than men--by nature, nurture, or both.

Normally I'm inclined to defend my relative slovenliness--cautiously, in very limited contexts.  For example, order for the sake of obsessive orderliness is certainly unhealthy to individual minds and interpersonal relationships.  Plus I think that science will prove, if it hasn't already, that exposure to pathogens is healthy for the immune system and thus longterm health.  Why else would kids eat a peck of dirt?  In short, I argue, cautiously and in limited contexts, cleanliness is not always next to godliness.

I am, thus, abashed to consider the issue of gendered relations to hygiene in the face of environmental issues that are essentially issues of housekeeping, such as recycling, pollution, conservation of resources, which is to say, those issues that individuals typically can control.  This occasion to think about gendered environmentalism came from my students.  I asked a class this summer to do little research projects focused on environmental behavior.  Among many interesting projects and results, several student projects found clear correlations to gender.

• One student counted the number of people at a grocery store using canvas or other re-usable shopping bags.  She discovered to her surprise that the overwhelming majority of them were women.  She even interviewed a male friend who insisted that carrying recyclable bags cramped his style, which involved hitting on women in grocery stores.
• Another student found that his fraternity not only recycled nothing, but a survey of his housemates revealed they had zero interest in changing their behavior.  Apparently, they had enough trouble getting all the trash into the dumpster every once in a while.
• Another studied the amount of water usage.  He hypothesized that women used more than men--they're cleaner after all, longer showers, more washing dishes and floors, etc.  The subjects of his survey, evenly split between male and female, agreed with his hypothesis, as did the entire class when he asked them--mostly women--at the beginning of his oral presentation.  In fact he discovered that, despite the universal belief that women used more water, actual usage, as measured by water bills, showed that men used more water; indeed, the lowest man's bill was higher than any of the women's. (One women in the class suggested that this unexpected result might point to the fact that women more often sleep at their boyfriends' place than the reverse.)

Abashed, but also intrigued, I did a quick search for publications in the area of gender and environmental behavior and found exactly one.  A Canadian study of people actively committed to cleaning up the environment found that, even in this group, women were more apt to participate in environmental organizations and more apt to perform environmental acts in their personal life--recycle, compost waste, use alternative transportation.  While more research is clearly needed, I suspect it will overwhelmingly confirm the inevitable:  Women are better environmentalists than men--by nature, nurture, or both.

These days, the maternal superego originates with Mother Nature.

The Outdoor Room

We love our outdoor room, to hang out, to eat, to use as the main entrance to the house.  Even now when it's getting California cool, the room beckons us into the air, encouraging us to be hale and hardy at home.  Plus Robin's touch looks great, no?