French Christmas

Meditation on Violence

I feel like a fool for every time I’ve watched Goodfellas or Casino or Scarface. For ever time I’ve alternately anticipated and cringed at the death scenes.

I’ll admit it: I like a bit of violence in my movies. Or at least I used to. Violence seems to me a marker of reality, a reminder of the brutal and dark side of life, that things don’t always work out how they are supposed to. I don’t like narratives that are too rosy. They just don’t seem real to me.
 
I sense I’m not alone in this. We Americans, we like our violence. We like it as the main course, on the side, as an after dinner drink. In movies and video games and HBO series. We have heroes of all shapes and sizes, but the ones were revere the most are violent and lawless: old West gungslingers, East Coast Mafia bosses, West Coast gangsters. (After all, do kids want to dress up as Buzz Aldrin or JFK or Martin Luther King for Halloween, or do they want to be Al Capone?) Our cultural DNA seems to be laced with it, this unslakable thirst for violence.

But that violence that appeals to us, even though it appears very real onscreen thanks to animation and CGI and whatnot, is not real violence. Therein lies the issue. Onscreen violence – one thug gunning down another in an empty alley – is like most thing Hollywood. It is a watered down version of its real self. It occurs in a vacuum. One shot, one death, and the narrative continues. We can pause it or rewind it or fast forward it if we don’t want to watch. 

The reason I’m telling you this is that I saw a shooting on Halloween. I have been wanting to write about it for awhile now, so that it could mean something and not become another fleeting blip in my memory. But the thing is I didn’t know how to write about it in a way that didn’t sound crazy or clichéd or overly sentimental. Because I think that in movies and on the news and in the paper, that is what violence becomes. It exists in one scene – bang! The bad guy is blown up and how cool was that and we move on --  or one story – innocent 8-year-old bystander killed in drive-by shooting, isn’t that tragic and someone should really do something about that, and we move on. Either way, we get enough of a taste to satisfy the craving. There is no fallout; there is no repercussion.

But in violence, in real violence, there is always repercussion, an uncontrollable rippling outward, the reciprocal arc of the boomerang. For the people that live in violence, it will always come back around. And in these moments it is not just a taste, it is a noise, the scent of sulfur, the momentary slowdown of time, then the speeding back up of time until it devolves into chaos. It is a coldcock straight to the jaw.

An Alien Resurrection

 

Flipping through the channels the other day, I came across a scene from my childhood. In the flickering lights of a dystopian landscape, a wasp-like alien corners a sniveling corporate bureaucrat, its lips peeled back in anticipation of the meal to come. The image was so familiar I could slip it on like a glove. 

Yes, it’s true. I find great comfort in extraterrestrial creatures that dine on human flesh and have acid for blood.

As a child, I eschewed Barbie for Indiana Jones, Cabbage Patch Dolls for Optimus Prime. But the myth that reigned supreme over my formative years, the movie that I watched over and over and over until I could quote it like lines from the bible, was the Alien series. Not so much 1, 3 or 4, but particularly number 2, always and forever in my mind the sequel to end all sequels.

On top of the special effects (which for the time were pretty awesome) and the pulse rifles (I desperately wanted one), there was always Ripley. Most of you probably know her as Sigourney Weaver, but to me she will always be Ripley—the protagonist of all Alien films, the original (possibly only true) female heroine.

If you’re not familiar with her, let me give you the basics:

• Ripley is the only survivor of the original Alien encounter. (She’s asked to go on a second galatical expedition when a group of human colonists comes up missing—the premise of the second film.)
• Ripley knows how to operate every machine on the spaceship (much to the surprise of the Marines running the search-and-rescue).
• Ripley does not wear bright red lipstick or leather bustiers that make her girls jiggle around during the big action sequences. (She’s too busy killing aliens, duh.)
• Ripley holds and fires a gun the way you’re supposed to.
• Ripley finds and becomes a surrogate mother to Newt, an orphan living in the human colony overrun by aliens.
• Ripley always finds a way out when there is none.

Watching this movie over again as an adult, I am struck by the femininity at its core. And by femininity I don’t mean pink hair bows and stereotypical demureness and baking. I mean a femininity that is blatant and powerful and willing to do whatever is necessary.

You obviously don’t expect it to appear, much less be driving narrative force, in the imminent masculine domain of the sci fi genre. But in this film it sneaks up on you and cold-cocks you right in the face, the realization that this film is very much about women and mothers and how they survive. You have Newt, a tiny girl who finds a way to live amongst unthinkable horrors. You have Ripley, who through sheer will (rather than coyness or blatant sex appeal) becomes the leader/savior of a military-sanctioned mission. And you have the Alien queen herself, who Ripley must face in the final scene of the movie. Two mothers locked in battle, fighting for the lives of their offspring.

But I didn’t know any of this when I was 10 or 11 or 12. I just knew that Ripley was a serious badass who could outrun, outshoot, outwit, and outlive any Marine, scheming company man, or Alien Queen out there. And I wanted to be just like her.

Photo: Via Google Images. Because I read somewhere once that book covers and promotional posters--since they're promotional in nature--aren't subject to the same copyright laws as say, a paparazzi shot of Lady Gaga. So I'm really hoping that's true.

 

On the Shady Side of the Street

The other night when I got home, Aaron was watching a documentary about abortion. Somewhere down south, there’s a pro-life “crisis pregnancy center” that purposely leased a property right next to an abortion clinic. They even had their phone number configured so that it’s only one number different than the actual abortion clinic’s number.

The result of all their efforts is that many young women who try to make an appointment at the actual abortion clinic often end up at the “pregnancy center.” The pro-life workers at this clinic don’t tell these women where they are or that they don’t actually perform abortions, until after making them wait around for hours, watching videos of partial-birth procedures and being handed pamphlets full of misinformation. (They say, for example, that says abortion causes breast cancer and all kinds of nasty other stuff.)

Those women that do make it to the right side of the street are harassed by protesters outside the clinic, who promise them money, clothes, food—anything to keep them from going inside.

Whatever your stance is on this issue, there are two things about this that especially make me want to pull my hair out. One is that the vast majority of these girls are barely out of their teens. They are young, scared, and frightened. They are accosted by protesters, who pray and wave their rosaries and spit verses from the bible at them. I really don’t think this is God’s or Jesus’ or whoever’s idea of being merciful. 

The second – and you have to take this with a grain of salt, since I couldn’t make it through the whole film – is how absent the fathers are from the scene. So much shame, guilt and responsibility are thrown on the shoulders of these women, when we all know they didn’t miraculously knock themselves up. At some point, there where two people in the equation when the condom broke or that 14th shot of tequila was poured. So where are the men in this dialogue? Why are only the women held accountable in this debate?

The name of the documentary, if you’ve got the balls to watch it, is 12th and Delaware.