This was a year in which Hollywood reached out into the rest of America to find some of its most compelling heroes.
From the very start, it had been taken for granted that something was deeply wrong with America this year. The movie of that moment, in the midst of those weighty January moments, was Jordan Peele’s race horror drama Get Out, a movie that has aged well enough to keep it high on the year-end lists. Months later, in the DVD commentary, Peele describes the movie’s central villains, the wealthy parents of a Brooklynite, as “sort of liberal elite god and goddess.” The movie’s near universal popularity suggests that Peele was striking some universal chords in a nation that many were in the habit of calling intractably divided. The aspirational paradises that had been vigorously celebrated throughout the Obama era (Brooklyn, Silicon Valley) were feeling evil, insidious. Trump’s election, among other events, was commonly narrativized as a response to a polite and out of touch elite and, in kind, writers of all caliber had been dispatched to the middle of America to see what was there. A book called Hillbilly Elegy, written by a venture capitalist named J.D. Vance, about life in rust-belt Ohio spent over a year on the bestseller list. Ron Howard is making it into a movie.
“What are the new narratives in a changing economy and racial strains driven by identity politics?,” asked Jeffrey Fleishman of the Los Angeles Times, at the year’s very start. These were the terms of the discourse and, like many, Fleishman cited Trump’s election as an event that had to be responded to, with attention paid to the “disillusioned and bitter parts of the country.” At the Oscars, a month later, movies were discussed excessively in that language. “[It] allows you to understand the socio-political predicament in which the US currently finds itself.” Andrew Pulver observed in February about David Mackenzie’s Hell or High Water. Jeff Bridges was even more explicit, revealing that the movie “shines a light on why the election went the way that it did.” Marketing Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea, we discovered that the movie was about “what’s going on in the country right now — a story of working-class white people,” Bob Berney, Amazon Studios’ head of marketing and distribution, winked at the Los Angeles Times. Strangely, the one major Oscar season contender that took place in a major swing state, Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, did not seem part of that conversation, despite its similarly narrow geographic focus and characters working in the lower rungs of the service economy, its characters work fleetingly in diners or outside the system entirely. The movie was about “black male intimacy,” it was about “what it means to will yourself into an uncertain existence,” it was even about “drug abuse, mass incarceration and school violence.” Yet this seemed the preclude discussion of the movie as a reportage from the front lines of the working poor American experience, the wilting paradise of plazas and parking lots where it took place.
Making a curious case in the pages of the conservative National Review, Kyle Smith draws a deliberate line between movies like Moonlight and Sean Baker’s similarly Florida-set The Florida Project. Grouping Moonlight with two other movies with black protagonists (Precious and Beasts of the Southern Wild) Smith writes: “[Those] celebrated films cast their protagonists as passive victims. All three are tearjerkers aimed mainly at activating the pity reflex of well-off white liberals, and all of them, crucially, center on children and teens in order to sidestep questions of personal agency.” On the other hand, “movies such as The Florida Project clarify that poverty is mostly the predictable outcome of various types of unwise behavior.” Smith calls this genre “white-trash cinema” and, sidestepping that The Florida Project is almost entirely about children, the desire to read it about the general problem of poverty while dismissing Moonlight suggests that something about its characters precluded its participation in the larger narrative about poor America, its poverty was simple: white people, bereft outlying problems, without money.
While The Florida Project could made do, for some, as a film adaptation of Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, Steven Soderbergh returned from his brief feature-film retirement to actually make a movie this year about hillbillies. Centered on a pair of siblings (played by Adam Driver and Channing Tatum) who commit what unaffected newscasters call a “hillbilly heist,” Logan Lucky is set among “the ‘white working class’ whom Hollywood is constantly accused of ignoring,” in a place that “is coded, again and again, as Trump Country.” The latter, in Anne Helen Petersen’s version of the movie, at the more left-leaning Buzzfeed, reads the movie’s working class, rural setting as deliberately exaggerated, surreal, with it’s own kind of politics, which underlined “the ease with which we follow the cues set before us — much as many Americans accepted the simplified explanations offered throughout the last election cycle for who was supporting Trump.”
One of the plot points in Logan Lucky involves a beauty pageant where the child of one of the robber’s children (Farrah Mackenzie) prepares to perform a cover of Rihanna’s “Umbrella” but then, at the last minute, sings a John Denver song instead. This gesture is both cute (her father, Tatum’s character, delivers a monologue in the movie’s beginning about the song) but it also, in the spirit of Peterson’s search for Soderbergh’s hillbilly coding, suggests a world that enjoys its hit songs on the radio but prefers their own children to sing from a whiter canon. It reminded me of another movie about poor white people that also pivoted, somewhat, around a Rihanna song, Andrea Arnold’s American Honey. In a much beloved scene, a group of white adolescents led by Shia Labeouf, entrance a teenage runaway played Sasha Lane, who is mixed, by performing “We Found Love” atop the check-out lanes of a Target, another image lush with exaggerated trashy visual value. But the more interesting music choice is probably “American Honey,” the Lady Antebellum song that the movie takes it’s name from. Lane’s character is asked if she recognizes it, by Krystal (Riley Keough), who is both named “Krystal” and is wearing a bikini with the Confederate flag. Lane doesn’t and she remains codified, in racial and cultural terms, an outsider. Writing about that scene a month after the election, Ira Madison III read it in the language of a newly combative political clime: “[her] ignorance of the song is Krystal’s first sign that she isn’t truly ‘one of them.’” Ditto Arnold’s abundant Americana iconography: “[it] represents ‘us’ — working-class Americans who drive national elections, the ones politicians pander to, the ones who rule Nielsen boxes, the ones whose values are, we’re told again and again, the only ones that matter.”
Released shortly before the election, American Honey felt like a curious antecedent to the worlds of The Florida Project and Logan Lucky: jazzed-up versions of the thieving, white trash American South. Like The Florida Project, its largely white world is diegetically soundtracked with popular pop-rap and R&B hits, something that strangely fills the movie’s aural space with a kind of unseen blackness that, for critics, translated into authenticity. Writing for Variety, Owen Gleiberman compares the experience of Arnold’s characters to the bars of one of the Rae Sremmurd songs that he identifies as “one of their favorite lyrics.” Arnold’s superficial engagement with the sonic wrapping around her film feels like a poorman’s version of the much-exalted Baby Driver soundtrack; a bunch of hipster songs that were popular in the ‘90s, playing in a car for no particular reason. But if it can be easily articulated, probably in a forgotten Nick Hornby novel somewhere, why a British dude would think a songs by The Damned, Beck or T-Rex would be really cool for the sensibility of somebody who he thinks is supposed to be cool, the juxtaposition between black pop art and poor white people gels less comfortably together.
Another movie this by a British person that gels uncomfortably with American racism was Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Ostensibly both a movie for “a divided blue-and-red-state Trump Nation” and led by a “feminist heroine,” McDonagh’s third movie was marketed as a bad-ass tale of small-town comeuppance, a microcosm of the rage directed at a system that is unable to resolve its problems. And like American Honey, the movie heads to the outwardly racist South in order to find an authentic version of poor working America. There, McDonagh, with all the subtlety of a Law & Order screenwriter, discovers a police force full of likable “good men” who occasionally beat up people of color and is visibly uncomfortable when another one is assigned to take over. Of course, this was part of the movie’s charm, part of what makes it “just the bitter pill the times call for,” the movie’s deliberate ambiguity indicative that, maybe, the weird, terrible world we live in might, instead of being very terrible, might instead be very ambiguous. In 2017, the ambiguity of the working poor felt like a refuge, rich with problems that wealthier movie patrons had already solved by not being poor. They could be human, after all.
The article The Working Class Heroes of 2017 appeared first on Film School Rejects.
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