Che Part One, The Spirit, Slumdog Millionaire

Recently, I've watched three movies about heroes, three very different movies, from three very different genres. It’s almost odd to compare them, but I think the exercise might be worthwhile, especially when considering the nature of contemporary myth-making, a subject I’m very much interested in.

In the first film--the heavily art-directed The Spirit -- the hero presented is a bit of a buffoon, a skirt-chasing comedian, blessed due to some genetic sci-fi with the ability to survive being stabbed, pierced, hacked, shot, blown up, and in one scene gratuitously beaten over the head with a ceramic commode. To give this much abused protagonist an aura of faux emotional complexity, writer / director Frank Miller has the cardboard creation deliver long, meandering monologues about the nature of his own spiritual and heroic significance to the city. These somewhat pretentious introspections don’t fit with the rest of the film which features homicidal belly-dancers, mutant henchmen, and one particularly surreal segment where Samuel L. Jackson and Scarlet Johansson strut around in S.S. garb for no apparent reason other than to appear even more villainous than they already do.

The film’s script left much to be desired, the acting was wooden and corny, and ultimately despite all the pyrotechnics the feature failed to entertain. And there was also the fact that it’s hard to sympathize very much with a protagonist who seems to be pretty much near invincible in the first place, and yet not particularly noble.

The second film I saw was Che Part One, directed by Steven Soderbergh. The hero in this case was a real-life figure and the mode of the narrative was a form of documentary realism, so it’s unfair perhaps to compare it to The Spirit. So I won’t push the comparison very far, other than to say, perhaps rather redundantly, that Che’s (a.k.a. Benicio Del Toro’s) introspective monologues in this film, being based on the writings of an actual revolutionary who fought real wars in pursuit of a cause he really believed in, were far more compelling. Resonances with contemporary world events, including the war on terror added an interesting layer to this film devoted to the creation and rise of a legend and an icon. There were moments when I felt very uncomfortable, as I found myself drawn into Che’s worldview, found myself buying it to a certain extent, and then had to step back and really consider the implications of what he was saying. According to Guevera, a revolutionary is motivated by love above all else. A romantic and poetic notion, the sort of thing that certainly sounds beautiful and captivating. But how, I struggled to understand, in real terms does love translate into a series of politically-motivated violent actions? Sure, the revolutionary loves his cause, and he loves his ideals, and he loves his own sense of self-righteousness. But does he really love people? Because in any revolution or insurrection, innocents are bound to suffer, to be hurt, raped, killed. And these innocents unlike the hero, unlike the legend, remain nameless and do not have the ability to be or act invincible. True, injustice when it is clear cut, when it weighs heavily on one side, seems to demand some sort of action to correct it. The problem of course, lies in the fact that it’s not often clear cut. The young men who brought terror to Mumbai this past November, very much resembled Che’s band of guerilla fighters in their lightning strike methods and their battle-cry against decadence and wealth, and perhaps in their fanaticism as well, in their arrogant belief that their cause was so just that it didn’t matter who they hurt in its pursuit. But these young men did a terrible thing, and I would cringe if anyone even tried to label them as heroes of any sort at all.

And speaking of Mumbai, and also of class-struggle, that brings me to the third film—Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle’s urban, somewhat disturbing fairytale. Here the hero was the lowest of the low, a noble underdog trying to pull his way out of the stench and squalor of Mumbai’s poorest districts. And here again, while the hero was extremely heroic, the villains that thwarted him in his quest for upward mobility were extremely villainous—child abusers, pimps, slumlords, brutal policemen, rioting mobs—the protagonist had to endure quite a lot before he could safely make it to the Bollywood dance number at the end. Though many westerners have liked this film, I have to say, that I found it overly simplistic, that though it pretended towards realism, it fell apart for me at multiple points. It was sort of a whirlwind tour of stereotypical social evils, mixed together like an ill-conceived masala. What’s sad is that these issues really do need to be explored and talked about, but in a rather more considered manner, and not in such a cursory way that they reek of cheap emotional manipulation and perhaps even a little bit of cross-cultural satire. Having said all that, I must say that the children who performed in the movie were truly exceptional—they held up the film with their charm and their mischief. For them alone, the movie is worth watching.

More on heroes later!!!

Finding Zion in Alaska

Imagine a parallel universe, one where the Jews were driven out of Israel in 1948, only to re-settle in the federal district of Sitka, Alaska, a town where “the wind carries a sour tang of pulped lumber, the smell of boat diesel and the slaughter and canning of salmon.” Here black hat orthodox Jews share the streets with Russian gangsters, the citizens speak Yiddish with a smattering of American thrown in for color, roughnecks and assassins frequent chess clubs, bums are named Elijah and even the chickens proclaim the coming of the Messiah, in Aramaic no less. Such is the setting for The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, an anatomy that co-opts the detective noir genre as it seeks to examine the themes of homeland, shared identity, and faith in an original and comic manner.

Michael Chabon seems to delight in re-casting popular pulp in literary avatars, while managing to shed some light on the Jewish experience along the way. His Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, was homage to the world of comic books as much as it was an exploration of impotence, escape and the desire for revenge. His novella The Final Solution, featured none other than Sherlock Holmes as the protagonist, and pulled off a range of nifty tricks, such as a sudden and abrupt shift into the perspective of a kidnapped parrot. Chabon’s prose is vivid and precise, his metaphors surprising and yet apt, and his sense of narrative pace is impeccable, which is probably why his books make for such compelling reading.

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union opens on a crime scene and proceeds swiftly from there, the quest to solve the mystery providing an easy and logical vector for the plot. There is more at stake here though than the solution to a homicide. Detective Meyer Landsman, the protagonist, is a hard-boiled cop with some surprisingly soft edges—he’s afraid of the dark for one thing. Landsman is still recovering from the recent death of his younger sister, a pilot who crashed her plane into a mountain under mysterious circumstances. When he isn’t working he spends his time in an alcoholic daze, contemplating suicide. There’s also the shadow of his failed marriage weighing on him, further complicated by the fact that his ex-wife, the love of his life, is now his new boss. Added to all this is Landsman’s general sense of apprehension about the near future, an apprehension that is shared by all the Jews of Sitka—in less than a month the district, after sixty years of independence, is going to revert back to Alaska, losing its autonomy and its distinctly Jewish identity at the same time. These are indeed “strange times to be a Jew,” a refrain that is echoed by multiple characters over the course of the novel.

When a heroin addict bearing the name of a famous chess master turns up dead in the same hotel that Landsman now calls home, he enlists the aid of his partner and cousin Berko Shemets. Shemets is a practicing Jew whose mother, a Tlingit Indian, was killed in the infamous Tlingit-Jew riots—Chabon’s none too subtle way of illustrating the fact that even in Sitka the Jewish quest for living space has met with marked resistance. Together they follow a chain of clues that lead them to some rather disconcerting discoveries— that the dead man is the estranged, possibly gay, son of a rabbi / underworld don, that he was said to have performed miracles, that many believed he was in fact the Messiah, and that some very powerful interests were involved in his murder.

Landsman and Shemets soon find themselves ordered off the investigation by Landsman’s ex-wife, who is anxious to have all open cases at Sitka Central “effectively resolved” before the yanks take over. Predictably, Landsman can’t let it go, especially when he discovers that he’s personally connected to the mystery in multiple ways. What follows is an action-packed ride, straight from the pages of a Robert Ludlum thriller, with an interesting, if somewhat fabulous, twist at the end.

Chabon’s narrative motor sure has plenty of thrust, and it follows a clearly defined path, with good solid waypoints to anchor it as it goes. The question is whether the momentum comes at the expense of a certain degree of complexity. There’s not much time spent dawdling over Landsman’s relationship with his sister—we’re left to fill in the gaps. His relationship with Bina Gelbfish, his ex-wife, is given weight primarily due to the fact that they almost had a baby together, but had to abort when a scan showed the fetus had deformities. One wishes more had been made of these opportunities. Then again, too much emotional layering would probably have slowed things down, and taken away from the narrative’s hard-edged, tough, linear nature.

Where the novel succeeds is in its careful creation of an alternate world, and an alternate history for the Jews. The characters are believable and likeable, the premise is interesting, and the commentary on current world affairs is witty without being didactic. There’s a touch of the absurd in these pages too, especially when we reach the rather implausible solution to the mystery. It’s this absurdity, this reveling in the ability of people to act in unusual and unexpected ways that makes Chabon’s style truly refreshing.

Fathers and their estranged / lost sons are an important motif in the book. The game of chess plays a prominent role too, symbolizing as it does a struggle for space, the quest to conquer the board and kill the other king. Ultimately though the book is about faith—what happens when you have too much, what happens when you have too little, and what happens when others put ( rightly or wrongly) their faith in you. In this it moves beyond the political and the religious, and touches upon something very, very human.

Chabon likes to keep his characters alive beyond the pages of his fiction. After the success of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay he wrote and released a series of comics that had supposedly been created by the protagonists of the novel. One wonders what trick he has up his sleeve next. Perhaps a graphic novel about the escapades of Landsman and Shemets? Perhaps a collection of Yiddish songs from Sitka, with lyrics about black hat Jews in sleighs? Who knows? Whatever he chooses to do, Chabon is bound to keep his readers on their toes.