Bad Santa 2

Bad Santa 2 is as funny, raunchy, vulgar and Politically Incorrect as the first Bad Santa was. Translation: Add it to your list of Christmas season perennials, with Billy Bob Thornton as the bracing antidote to all that Jimmy Stewart and Bing Crosby crap. The films’ relentless profanity is a salutary balance to the smarmy sweets of the Yule. Their ambition, their driving motive, is to be as Politically Incorrect as possible. In art that’s funny. In life, as we will see, that’s dangerous.

The basic plot is repeated: the drunken obscene department store Santa connives with his black dwarf elf friend to pull off a major heist. Again the grown white man needs the black dwarf to help pull off the heist. Again the friend tries to rob and kill him. This time the department store is replaced by a large-scale charity, which broadens the satire from the season’s commercialism to its ostensible social concern.

The one major addition — Kathy Bates as Willie’s violent, vicious, conniving, tattooed mother— adds another dimension to the film’s radical rejection of knee jerk sentimentality. This mother not only betrays but robs and shoots her son. In their first meeting mummy responds to sonny’s slugging her with “You still hit like your fuckin’ father.” It’s not affection that runs like blood — or, for that matter, bile — in this family. The mother is so much like her son she’s named Sunny — in dramatic antithesis to her disposition.

In exulting in the profane these films evoke the tradition of the Saturnalia, the annual festival in which the medieval Christian church allowed its language and rites to be blasphemously parodied. The fathers intuited the need for their congregants to let off steam, briefly to exercise -- and exorcise -- what the rest of the year they had to suppress. In Shakespeare, Falstaff is the exultant Saturnalian opposite to the heroisms of Hotspur and Hal. 

Here when Willie seems to soften at hearing Thurman’s soprano carol, he’s briefly allowing the release of conventional sentiment and piety into his world of lust, greed, irreverence and rage. That’s the Saturnalian in reverse. It’s just a moment, though, not enough to ruffle the while film’s driving spirit of anger and indecorum.

The film’s entire human landscape is vile. The charity Santa initially honourable in reclaiming his spot is assailed as a pedophile (justly or not, no matter, the virtue is lost). The handsome couple running the huge charity is stripped of all virtue. The thief husband has abandoned his marriage for sex with his assistant. His wife is no innocent victim. 

She embraces Willie’s rough and dirty sex at every opportunity, with the same proviso: “This was a one-time thing. It never happened.” For all her present sophistication and gentility she has a working knowledge of outre sexual kinks: “I believe that’s ‘felching.’ Not that I’ve ever heard of it.” As she explains, “I’m a good girl but sometimes I have to be bad.” More precisely, she’s an essentially bad girl ( i.e., only human)who usually plays good.

The charity’s obese sexpot replays her boss’s hypocrisy. She leads on the black dwarf Marcus’s courtship for an expensive lobster and champagne dinner then dumps him — finally admitting it’s because of his “height.”  In leading him on she pretends to be liberal and colour/height blind, but in the clutch she won’t give him the chance to prove himself adequate. However repulsive, the full-size and white privileged Willie, of course, wins more sexual service than he can shake his stick at. in addition to the socialite, he scores Marcus’s rejector and the drink server at the wealthy soiree his mother is burgling.   

Marcus gives Willie and his mother constant opportunity to be unfashionably racist and bigoted:

Willie: Why are you even out of the joint anyway? You know, they used to sterilize guys like you, to keep the world from          becoming some negro Land of Oz.

Marcus: Early release, you racist moron fuck!

Thurman constantly inspires Willie’s refusal to show him support, affection, any form of encouragement. Even Willie’s sole service to him — hiring an obese black grandmother to “pop his cherry” — proves futile. 

Willie’s Santa persists in being unseasonal toward the children he’s supposed to encourage:

Boy: Why do you have two beards?

Willie: That's none of your fuckin' business.

So too the mendicant Santas invite their donors: “Spare some change. Think about somebody besides your fucking self.” "Well bless your heart. Cheap little fucker.”

Now, a funny — well, if a national catastrophe with global destructive implications can be considered in any sense “funny” — thing happened between the two Bad Santa films. I remind the reader of the election of Donald J. Trump to be America’s next (and quite possibly last) president. 

That election makes these Santa films profoundly symptomatic of their society. The frustration and rage that Willie articulates in both films inspired Trump’s supporters to buy into his promises of economic and social reform, despite his clear record of the very elitism, corruption, lying and criminal self-service that he promised to oppose.

Art can play out the tensions and themes of real life. But here’s the difference. The film ends and releases you back into the real world. There’s no such release from reality. 

We need films, among the other arts, to expose the problems in our real lives and to mobilize the humanity and values to address them. When the forces behind the exhilarating release of black comedy come together as a political force in real life, the black intensifies and the comedy evaporates.    
     The film ends with Willie tormenting the helpless dwarf by an adolescent sexual humiliation. What the new presidency threatens its minorities and marginalized is far more serious. 

Moonlight

Juan tells “Little” Chiron that a little old lady nicknamed him Blue when she saw him among other boys fishing in the moonlight: 

"Running around, fishing in a boat of light. In moonlight, black boys look blue. You're blue. That's what I'm gonna call you: ‘Blue'."

But Juan rejects that name. He won’t be Blue. “At some point, you gotta decide for yourself who you're going to be. Can't let nobody make that decision for you.” Ironically, Juan refuses to be identified with a colour. But his life leads him into a Black stereotype nonetheless: the flashy drug dealer. 

As the title suggests, the film is about the blues of the black in America. Chiron grows from Little into Black, the nickname bestowed by the boy Kevin before they make love, by the water, in the moonlight. This scene apart, there is nothing romantic or radiant — the usual implications of moonlight — about the characters’ experience here. Moonlight is what turns the black boys blue, so it’s a paradoxical emblem for the black experience in America.

The film’s focus on black alienation and disenfranchisement makes the film seem like a parallel universe that occasionally intersects with ours. White characters are few and emblematic: a cop, the obese customers in Kevin’s greasy spoon, where the American flags are the only sign of America’s ideals, and ineffectual at that. In that key restaurant scene where Chiron and Kevin reconnect, the white customers act as if the blacks were invisible. Kevin treats his customers graciously — with no response whatsoever. One white man sits alone as if in his own bubble, not responding to anything, as bleak an existence as the blacks’. 

The very setting of the restaurant evokes the civil rights struggle, where a black man at a counter was a challenge to the social “order.” When Chiron enters he checks out the scene, then sits at the counter. Kevin moves him to a booth for his personal service. As a barometer of the African American’s place today the film reveals the races in desolate isolation from each other.  

Chiron and Kevin both pass through prison. But vertical bars are a constant motif in all the interiors, the houses, the school. Even the outside world is the black man’s prison. 

Food is another motif that unites the three stages in Chiron’s growth — the community and love expressed in cooking: the meals Juan and Teresa give the boy starved for affection; the meal the adult Kevin makes for the grown Chiron, rekindling their lost and furtive intimacy and love. In the intervening food scene, set in the school cafeteria, Chiron is fragile and alone and the brute Terrell prepares young Kevin to assault Chiron.

In the cafe later the Chef’s Special Kevin prepares for Chiron moves from the cafe to the bed. Whether they have sex or not is irrelevant. The two men achieve a rare openness and intimacy. Kevin phoned Chiron out of the blue because he had come to terms with himself and his life and felt the need to reach out to the friend he had betrayed. Chiron drives out to him but is reluctant to admit his motives:

Kevin: What man? Come on, you just drove down here?

Black: Yeah.

Kevin: Like you was just, you was just on one, and you hit the highway?

Black: Yeah.

Kevin: So where you gonna stay tonight man?

Having healed himself Kevin can now heal Chiron. The first step is self-awareness and self-acceptance. 

Kevin: Where's you Chiron?

Chiron: I'm me man. I ain't trying to be nothing else.

But the reticent Chiron is not himself until he drops his pretence to casualness. He tells Kevin he hasn’t touched or been touched by any one other than Kevin. The touching is emotional as well as physical. Now the massively muscled Chiron and the warm, generous Kevin finally find grace in each other’s arms. This blues song ends happily.

Significantly, the two men’s tenderness happens in Kevin’s rental near the water. Water scenes mark key turning points in Chiron’s life, mobilizing its association with the subconscious and the origin of life. Juan slips into a fatherly role when he teaches young Chiron to swim, to keep his head above water and advance. His sexual initiation by Kevin happens over a joint at oceanside.

Perhaps the film’s dominant theme is the mystery of manliness. In his boyhood Chiron doesn’t have a father, just a druggie mom bringing in strangers. Juan becomes his surrogate father. Though Juan would determine his identity for himself, rejecting the Blue nickname, he breaks down when Little Chiron rejects him: “Do you sell drugs?” We don’t see Juan again after he weeps at Chiron’s rejection. The teenage Chiron finds refuge in Teresa’s house, not Juan’s. She only refers to him when she recalls him giving the boy gin. When he’s neither mentioned nor seen again we infer Juan is another of those disappearing dads, perhaps a casualty of his drug trade. Juan has broken his promise: “Never let you go.”

Juan’s influence is clear when we meet the adult Chiron as Black, his nickname an echo of Juan’s rejected Blue. Chiron has grown into a Juan lookalike with his powerful build, the result of his jail time, his drug dealing empire, the black bandana, the diamond ear-rings and golden chains and silver teeth. At that vulgar flash many whites tend to sneer — but it's not unlike Donald Trump’s golden furniture and guilt-edged estate. Chiron has to remove the silver teeth to eat Kevin’s meal. The flash fails to nourish. Chiron’s essential choice is between the Juan’s flash and Kevin’s tenderness.

Juan seems sensitive to Little Chiron’s nature when the boy asks what a faggot is and if he might be one. “A faggot is a word used to make gay people feel bad.” Chiron will only later learn he is one. In the school scenes Terrell and others bully Chiron mercilessly because they read his “softness” as a lack of manliness. Young Kevin has learned to play the game, so he flaunts his hetero success to explain a detention and however reluctantly obeys Terrell’s orders to beat up Chiron. This after they’ve had sex. The film’s  climactic manliness is the tenderness when Kevin and Chiron meet again.

The last shot is of the boy Chiron facing the sea. After the man has found his better self, the image reminds us of the hapless boy still inside. Having looked out at the sea he turns back to look at us. The shot evokes the famous lost shot in Truffaut’s 400 Blows. There young Antoine Doinel looked out in fear and uncertainty at the ocean of dangers ahead for him. Here the boy Chiron has the new courage to face us.

But after so much suffering. The film’s representation of black life in America has a texture, emotion, empathy and dignity that make it a swan song of pre-Trump America.The astonishing quality of this film — the script, the direction, every single performance — expresses a commitment to our disadvantaged and excluded that the new Trump government seems determined to eradicate. The powerful performances — performances so strong we forget they’re actors playing roles; they seem like real lives on which we are eavesdropping — suggests the wealth of African American talent that we have left unheard, unseen, unconsidered. Like their community’s lives.

It’s not that the film is arriving too late. In fact it may be coming just in time to remind us that the best of America is far from what the new president and his racist appointees represent, indeed their polar opposite. These blues are a rallying cry for the opposition. It’s a loyal opposition but one properly loyal not to the vicious government but to the people, especially the marginalized, the downtrodden, the persecuted. 

 

Arrival

Structure is theme in Canadian director Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival. The two interwoven plot lines embody the distinction between our linear time and the broader perspective that reveals the past and the future as well as the present. That’s the perspective we would get from outer space, from beyond our normal experience and apprehension. That's what we could perceive if only we could rise above our normal understanding. 

The space alien plot unwinds in simple linear story telling. It introduces creatures who have that greater perspective. The aliens have come to earth to provide the wisdom we need to survive. They have foreseen a disaster 3000 years from now in which they will need us. They now give Dr Louise Brooks the gift of their wisdom, their perception of the future and the past. With the latter she can win over the Chinese general by telling him (in Chinese) his wife’s dying words.  With the former she can foresee the heartbreak that awaits her — but she embarks on that journey even knowing its pain. Life and love are worth it. 

The more familiar story line, Louise’s marriage, her bearing, raising and loss of her daughter, is told in a non-linear mode, leaping forward and back, because of that greater perspective the aliens gave her. Hence her constant tension between memory and foresight. So too the daughter's name Hannah is a palindrome, a variation on that idea, because it reads the same backwards as forwards. 

This difference also distinguishes their two languages. We speak in linear sentences that unfold over time. The aliens communicate in whole circles, with instant complete structures. They apprehend a whole where we only see a part. The circle is our emblem of completeness and eternity, the never-ending. We live in arcs, blind to the higher wholeness. 

Because the film opens on the story of Louise and her daughter we initially think the alien plot happens after her divorce and her daughter’s death. In the first scene Louise tells her infant that they are at a beginning or an ending. That’s truer than we realize, because the film ends on the beginning of that family story. The film’s first scene actually happens after its last. 

The family narrative starts at the end of the film, when Louise has published her dictionary of the aliens’ world language and has had a child with scientist Ian. This plot-line is like the snake biting its tail — or the instant complete circle that is the basic form of the aliens’ language.  

        So there are two arrivals. One is the aliens' at the start of the narrative. The other is the arrival of Louise's future -- which the aliens have enabled her to foresee -- which includes the joys and heartbreaks of a marriage and a lost child.  

The aliens’ broader vision and understanding provide the genre’s familiar lesson — mankind has to overcome its delusions of difference and rivalries and its mortal competitions, to embrace a common humanity. That lesson is as old as The Tower of Babel, here replayed as the wall of TV screens on which the 12 nations visited by the aliens at first communicate and share knowledge, but then shut down out of mutual fear and suspicion.  The aliens have brought their message in 12 distant instalments because they need us to overcome our animosities and superficial differences to work together, to harmonize. Their circles are the antithesis to our fragmentation. 

       Louise's dictionary provides a global language that offers to overrule our fragmentation in languages and conflicting cultures. At its release the Chinese general appears in a suit, the civilian freed from the uniform, whispering in Louise's ear where he once transmitted bellicose threats. 

As in so many alien creature films, the military’s first impulse is to attack them. Here at least they make an attempt to learn to communicate with them first, but panic when the language difference kicks up the term ‘weapon’ instead of ‘tool.’ For the frightened any hint of danger can trigger aggression. Unfortunately, the unknown seems always to trigger our fear, whether our aliens are from outer space or another culture. Our aggression projects aggression upon the Other. 
     In this film the military impulse is fortunately checked by the linguist and the scientist. Seeing world governments embrace science over their old ideology is extremely heartening but — especially after The Election — not a very convincing assurance. 

Denial

The last shot of the David Hare/Mick Jackson Denial adds an important coda to the film. 

The narrative ends with Holocaust denier David Irving (Timothy Spall) losing his libel charge against historian Deborah Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz). She celebrates her win, warmly thanks her legal team for their diligence — and for the tactical wisdom that she earlier rejected. Then she goes on her morning run, her usual life restored in light and spirit with no more fear for her security. It’s a happy ending. 

But the last shot qualifies that cheer dramatically. It’s a black and white photo of the roof that the Germans collapsed to bury the gas chamber at Auschwitz. The camera draws in on the shot, finding and by nearing it enlarging a hole amid the materials of the roof. 

That hole recalls Irving’s first triumph in his trial. He contended that the absence of any visible holes in the roof’s remains debunked the claim that there were vents in the roof for the cyanide that had supposedly slaughtered the Jews within. “No holes, No Holocaust,” was his briefly successful summary. The last shot finds the holes Irving had denied. 

     It also ends the film with the bleakness of black and white, in contrast to the colours and brightness of Lipstadt’s morning renewal of her life. The hole swallows the screen. 

     As the screen turns black the film closes on a saddening, contemplative darkness. Why are we feeling happy? What has been won? The true historian’s record of the Holocaust has broken the credibility of the antisemitic self-styled “historian” who declared it a self-serving lie by the Jews. 

The closing darkness suggests even that happy ending may be yet another — denial. For the victory at the trial rebutted only one denier. And even he persists in his antisemitic slander, as we see when Spall is cut into a Jeremy Paxton TV interview with the indomitable racist Irving.  

As Irving persists so do other dangerous bigots. When Spall’s Irving tells reporters he’s not a racist, indeed he has had several foreign staff, all girls with beautiful breasts, denier Irving segues into a more current case of dangerous lies, sexism and bigotry, the American presidential candidate Donald J. Trump. 

The story of the racist liar David Irving resonates beyond his particular case to the more general danger of someone hungry for the power to promote his prejudice. The clips of Irving’s incendiary speeches harken back to Irving’s hero Hitler but also across to Trump’s feeding the furies of hatred and fear. In this wider resonance the film rises above Aristotle’s definition of “history” — what happened once — to his “poetry” — the patterns that replay over and over in human history.   

At least to this viewer, the victory over Irving’s denial of Jewish history is even in itself an unconcluded campaign. When major powers — including President Obama — primarily blame Israel for the failure of the “two-state solution” they ignore the main reason for its failure. Since 1922 the Arabs involved have refused any statehood that would have required them to coexist peacefully with the Jewish state. Every negotiation since has crashed against the Palestinians’ insistence (i) that Israel be forced to withdraw to the indefensible borders it held before the 1967 war and (ii) that millions of Palestinians — those who fled Israel in 1948 to escape the  slaughter of the Jews promised by the surrounding Arab states, plus all their supposed descendants — be allowed return with full Israeli citizenship. That would swamp the Jewish citizenry.

Both Palestinian governments are pledged to destroy Israel. Hamas includes the eradication of the Jews in its constitution. PA leader Abbas has promised that not one Jew would be allowed to live in the new Palestine, which by his people’s maps, textbooks, and banners would REPLACE, not join, Israel. That coheres with the fact that Abbas’s doctoral dissertation was a denial of the Holocaust, despite his claim to have recanted.

In short, the denial of the imperilment of the Jews is a continuing modern issue and shame. Irving’s defeat in court was one small victory but his impassioned evil and its pretence to principle and truth persist today. People, groups, even political parties, that support the BDS movement — boycotting the supposedly apartheid state of Israel — whether they know it or not are serving the intention of Berghouti, the movement’s founder, which from its outset was to destroy the Jewish state. 
When those lies and poison spread through Western political parties and when antisemitism in this new form pervades European and North American university campuses, taking the ending of Denial as a happy closure is itself a dangerous form of denial. The last shot tries to save us from that false confidence. The trial goes on.