| Sunday, December 29, 2002 |
00:37 - Makes Compton look wussy
|
(top)  |
So I saw Gangs of New York last night. Excellent... big, thick, chunky, chewy movie. It's one of those things that's just so full of rich detail that if you look away for five seconds, you've missed at least one fascinating little historical bauble that someone tracked down and cared enough about to weave into the overall jigsaw-- something that you can't remember after it's over, but that the movie would have been measurably less cool without.
I love this kind of "trace a location through time" thing... when it's the same place as one you know, inhabited by completely different groups of people telling their own stories, there's just something fascinating about it, at least to me. It's that whole Time Machine time-lapse thing, where you get to see buildings rise and fall, people come and go, but some things never really change. They talked about the Five Points area on that "History vs. Hollywood" show on the History Channel; and one thing's for sure: even if Coppola did exaggerate certain things, the city today is immeasurably more civilized these days. You can be a rich person and go to what's now Chinatown and stand in the middle of the streets with your many-thousand-dollar camera gear and make documentaries, and go to one of the quaint hole-in-the-wall restaurants afterward, and nobody would bat an eye. But in those days... sheesh. Police escort, where even the sympathetic characters in the police were on the take? Small wonder not a single character in the movie was an appealing person.
There are some movies where when you walk out into the parking lot, you look over your shoulder, because you're convinced that everything about the modern world sucks. But other movies... you come out those doors, and all you want to do is suck in a lungful of clean rainy air, and enjoy the sheer lack of explosions on the horizon. You wonder just how in the hell things managed to turn out so well, if what you just saw is anything like what the past really was like. It's an intensely optimistic experience.
And the fact that the last time-lapse photo of Manhattan at the end, just before the fade-out, was one of the skyline sometime before last September-- with those two silhouetted towers reaching up past the top of the screen area-- just bolstered that feeling. You think, God, those things are tall. And so are the rest of 'em, even the short ones. It's the nucleus of the country, and it's stable today-- so stable that even if the two biggest features in it are forcibly ripped out of it along with three thousand of the city's most vibrant residents, the people living in those dim concrete labyrinths that line the island are still immeasurably better off and more stable and rich and strong than they ever were a century and a half ago. And if the nucleus is that stable, what does that say about the cytoplasm where the rest of us live?
Since we're supposed to commiserate with the Irish immigrants and boo the scare-quoted "American natives"-- the latter of whom resemble nothing less than what would happen if the KKK ran a whole state-- you end up leaving the theater thinking of the bizarre dichotomy of how "America" and "Americans" can only be defined by the infinitely changing nature of whatever people live within the country's borders at a given time; and you wonder just what about America can't change, lest it stop being "America"? What's the immutable core of the concept of this place, the one thing whose very immutability is what allows-- nay, demands the rest of the country to reinvent itself every generation?
I don't know. The Constitution? Secular rule of human law? A gun (or a throwing knife) in everyone's hand? History books that reserve their most florid and breathless language for the chapters on armed revolution against central government, rather than on loyal wars on behalf of beloved kings? Schoolhouse Rock?
Whatever it is, it does often seem to be the case that in a movie like this that drives right to the heart of such matters, it's the people who wrap themselves in the American flag and drape it over the altars at which they pray who seem to miss the point of America the most drastically: the America they want is the America they grew up with, but to keep America that way means to halt the very fundamental constant change that is really at the heart of America. Bill Cutting thinks he's the patriotic one, and in his own mind he's absolutely right-- he can totally justify thinking that. But it's the Irish, singing wistful songs of the Emerald Isle while they hang their filthy clothes in the offal-lined Paradise Square, who really embody what the country has turned out to be about. It's "trickle-down patriotism". The next generation does melt in the pot. Everybody's languge does average out to English. And each generation takes its own turn wrapping itself in the Stars and Stripes and warning against incursion by the hated outsiders.
Nobody said it was a pretty process. But that's the thing, isn't it? We accept some ugliness that's inherent to the mechanism we've adopted, and it buys us protection against the much bigger ugliness that falls on other places where everybody behaves themselves. It's like Bill Whittle, the blogosphere's newest explosive phenomenon, said in different words: our choices cost us dearly, sometimes in innocent lives. But if we did what was necessary to cut back on how much of that price we pay, what we'd be giving up would be something that's far more valuable to us in the long run. What we have going for us is a bargain at the price.
How did I get onto this topic? I'm not sure; it was a good movie, one that even if it stretched the historical truth to the point where it'll never regain its original shape, at the very least makes me want to study Tammany Hall and the Civil War draft and early New York geography until I'm a kooky old Terence Mann locked up in a Manhattan apartment muttering to myself. If it means I end up spending most of my time wondering how Malcolm McDowell would have looked in a top hat and walking-stick instead of a bowler and codpiece, well then, so be it. I'll have missed the point, but not by much.
|
|
