Nomadland by Jessica Bruder

 This is about the book, not the movie. 

It’s a rather sad tale of USA hopelessness in a situation in which the rich are getting a lot richer, and fast, while people are losing the jobs and homes/houses they invested in while buying into The American Dream. The dream is over but the dreamers carry on fantasizing of an unencumbered life free of mortgages, rent, taxes, and debts. The problem is that most of the people in the book are quite old and still have to make some kind of a living by bringing in some income. Although they are out of “sticks & bricks'' stationary housing they have shifted to some form of mobile housing. These, just like the old housing, vary widely. Some with more money have big RVs with the motor and all in one unit. Others have tiny trailers that they pull with a car. Some have converted standard vans, or built something onto the back of a pick up truck. Many have solar collectors to generate electricity which puts them off the grid to a degree, but not off the tit of the gasoline companies. Worse than that is the type of exploitative jobs they have to take, mostly as Amazon warehouse workers. Some owe money on their mobile homes.

   The book goes into detail describing these hellish jobs in which the workers are forced to become part of the Amazon machine in these partly automated vast facilities. The company has a structure for recruiting these transient workers. It’s called CamperForce. The company has them drive in from all over the country to work during the holiday shopping season push. They don’t even have to supply old style company town housing, just lots where these workers can park. But the people have to put up with it being one of the few income options to augment inadequate Social Security monthly checks. 

   Other such jobs are beet crop harvesting and workers who take care of US Forest Service campsites. These campsites, of course, are not managed by the USFS, but contracted out to some outfit that needs to make a profit by overworking the people they hire. Making something that could be a pleasant job in nature into another exploitive trap. It’s the good old American Dream of profit out of the sweat and toil of slaves or virtual slaves. We like to make the masses miserable to protect the interests of “investors”. It doesn’t matter that in the process workers who have no investments, other than their bodies, break down. That doesn't matter because after all humans multiply so there is another sucker, worker, soldier, born every minute.
  

   The author does a CampForce Amazon job herself. Having the option to bail out of it she soon does. She also does some sugar beet harvesting in North Dakota. Both of these gigs are hellish and dangerous and mostly performed by workers in their 60s. Jessica Bruder was in her 30s when she wrote this and she could last at them.

   The main character she follows is Linda May. Linda has a sad story that has driven her to this mobile life but she wants to get out of it. She buys land out in the middle of nowhere desert and wants to build an Earthship house. Something made out of tires packed with dirt/earth. We leave her at age 66 dreaming a never very practical variation of The American Dream.
(Well, she’s even older now and in the movie. Maybe the movie money helped her build her house. Getting over by being pulled out of obscurity, A Star is Born, well, there is alway some hope in fame and fortune.)

Island

 Island

A novel by Aldous Huxley

  This is Huxley’s final novel, so in that way his final word on the human condition in which he found himself in his lifetime.
  It is said to be a utopian novel. In a way it is that.
  We have an outsider, Will Farnaby, from our world shipwrecked on the island nation of Pala. He is a journalist who is looking for a big score to take a year off the grind of the work he has to do for his boss, the industrialist who owns the paper he works for. There are unexplored oil reserves on Pala. That puts Will in a position of manipulating the situation in favor of his boss who is bidding on drilling rights. Except Pala does not want this. They are protective of the culture that they have nurtured over the past 100 years. It is naturally based and protective of that by not permitting the machines of civilization into their island. They have, limited industry, very few cars, no TV, safe from these outside capitalistic corrupting influences. They are passively protective which adds to their vulnerability, but would they be what they are if they fought back?  

  Will is given a book written by one of the long dead influencers of the island. The Notes on What’s What

“Dualism. . .Without it there can hardly be good literature. With it, there most certainly can be no good life.” -Notes on What’s What

    The novel is thin on plot. It is mostly a tour of Pala’s culture and modes of operation as we travel with Will and his local guides. Through this we get the idea of what a mostly equitable, non-dualistic, social structure would look like and how it could be maintained if left alone.
    During Will’s tour his heart is opened to the place so that he rethinks his position of betraying it for his own financial betterment. They use psychedelic mushrooms as a tool toward enlightenment.
Will ultimately takes the mushrooms and we are shown what he sees and feels in the long trip at the end of the book.

  Although the book is somewhat utopian, it is a fragile utopia that is headed for ultimate destruction. The outside threat is far worse than Brave New World, it is militaristic fascism. Pala is only a utopia for the moment. This could be taken as the major theme of the novel. Modern capitalism is on an unstoppable march across the earth. This was clear to Huxley in 1962, the year of the book's publication. What then is the point to the tour through the utopian structure? Perhaps it is that if we can find a space out of the range of interest of modern civilization, then THIS is how it could be structured and maintained. This is how children should be educated and nurtured for connection, non-dualism. But it is very unlikely that we could find that space to live, grow, and play out of the line of fire. In the meantime, which is basically forever in the human condition, we can have another connection to utopia through non-attachment to anything other than THE MOMENT.
  Utopia is in the breath of the HEAR & NOW. All the rest, important as it is on its own level, is a matrix of nostalgia or regret for the past, and dreams, or fear, of the future.
------
Mild spoiler:
  It is interesting that the coup occurs during the mushroom trip, complete with assassination. It is a fact that Aldous Huxley was injected with LSD on the day he died of cancer. That was November 22, 1963, and like the book a day of an assassination and what could be seen as a coup d’etat.
He was tripping during the assassination as in the novel.

The Card Counter

 The Card Counter (2021)

Written and directed by Paul Schrader

  This movie channels collective guilt and rage at what we have been made to do. How, in our name, our pain, shock, and grief was twisted and exploited by people in power to make us monsters worse by far than the act that hurt us, that caused us this pain and horror
. 

  Will Tell (Oscar Isaac) the character in the movie, has been made into a monster, a sadistic automaton, manipulated into performing horrifying acts against other humans. He is going to have to pay for this, for what he was made to do by people in the highest positions of power. He has to pay, to take the fall, for what they made him do, as his “superiors'” retain their lofty, lucuratice, respected, and honored positions. 

He tries to just go on with his life after. He likes to play cards and is good at it. He has clamped down the justifiable feelings of vengeance and guilt he has to carry with him always. He can never forget, but plays cards.
 

  He meets another damaged, traumatized man (Tye Sheridan) and this sets the story in motion.

  Yes we were told to never forget after the collective trauma. Then asked to support people in power who used our trauma for further a separate and horrifying agenda. We put millions of others, those who managed to survive, through trauma, to a position where they can never forget which will cycle into more violence, horror, trauma, and more never forgetting that has not yet ended and likely never will. 

  The Card Counter is a very disturbing, deeply moving artwork that channels our collective guilt, rage, vengefulness, and yearning for justice, reconciliation, or to somehow get it all to STOP. 

An important movie and a masterpiece from a broken heart. A message from that broken heart to ours, if we still have one.

Strangers When We Meet (1960)

 I watched this movie on YouTube because I’m a fan of the novelist Evan Hunter. 

The movie is an adaptation of his novel by the same name. Hunter wrote the screenplay. 

This is a really good movie. The two leading actors are Kim Novak, as Margaret (Maggie) and Kirk Douglas, as Larry. Both of them are at the peak of their careers and they, particularly Novak, deliver very effective performances. 

The story is set in middle class suburbia. There are nice homes, lawns, newish cars, sidewalks, and shade trees. This projects everything that we have come to be seen as The American Dream. It’s an early sunny morning. Elementary age children are assembling on the sidewalk. They are being seen off to school by their youthful parents. A man drives up. His son jumps out of the passenger side and we see his father, Larry (Kirk Douglas). Something catches his eye and he stops to look out the passenger side window leaning from the driver’s seat. Reverse angle reveals a beautiful blond young mother in the final moment of delivering her son. She glances at the driver looking at her. He drives off to his day. It’s that “first sight” moment very nicely shown to us. 

 We follow him into his life. He is a successful architect. He drives to the apartment of a successful young novelist played by Ernie Kovaks. He is going to build a home for him. It’s one of the fruits of his first two novels being commercial hits. He is also a footloose playboy.
They talk about the house Larry is to design for him. Along the way they discuss artistic freedom. Larry tells him not to write for the commercial crowd, but what he really feels inside.This is an indicator of what is to come. A breath of Do What thou Wilt no matter what the others think as the path to real success and personal fulfillment in life.
  This 1960 movie represents a departure from the Motion Picture Production Code (1929-1968) in that it deal directly with love and sex and infedelity outside of the institution of marrige and shows it in an unjudgemental way. It is treated for what it is simply a matter of fact and what a certain number of people do.
This is not a free love romp, but a clearer view inside the Ozzie and Harriet, Leave it to Beaver world that the entertainment of the 1950s presented. Larry and Maggie get together and have a caring love affair out of the view of the spouses of each. There is guilt, but there is also clear justification particularly in Maggie’s character. Her husband is distantly doing what he has been trained to do, job number one for a man. He is caught up in business, working, and excuses himself when Maggie indicates being lonely and wanting to get together. “Not tonight dear”, as he sits in the living room after work, busy with pressing matters in his work papers.

Kim Novak is so great in this. In a very reserved close in performance she clearly shows Maggie’s demure nature that is shaken up by her desire for love, for life. Although the modern viewer might cringe a bit at certain aspects of the mutual physical approach scenes of these two which skirt the edge of the cliche “no means yes” familiar in so many movies as the man makes his move. But in this instance there is some reality. Maggie is really in that edge of the high dive position of wanting but governed and held in check by the culture she is willingly a part of but is not fully serving her. 

   There is a critical scene at a house neighborhood cocktail party that Larry’s wife, Barbara Rush, has. She invites all the neighbors including Maggie and her husband who in fact show up. Late in the evening Maggie and Larry have a moment away from the others in his home studio. They quietly talk and Larry writes I LOVE YOU on a big yellow legal pad. At that moment an obnoxious neighbor, Walter Matthau, enters and sees Larry tear off the sheet, crumple and toss it in the trash. This sets up the climax of the story. 

   A rare honest movie in which many will find it easy to see themselves in one of the roles or feel like they are spying on a couple of friends. One can feel an uneasy compassion toward them even if not directly involved, maybe even left out of their passion. There could even be a sense of relief in not having to go through it all again. 

The Mother by Paddy Chayefsky

 The Mother

Written by Paddy Chayefsky
Directed by Simon Curtis

“I’m 66 years old and I don’t know what the purpose of it all was.”

This is a 1994 Channel 13/BBC TV production of Chayefsky’s 1954 TV play. Starring Anne Bancroft as the 66 year old widow and empty nester looking for meaning in her life as she faces aging and loneliness in a world that passes her by.

  Set in NYC, she wants employment, partly for self support but mostly for her spirit, for something to do. She worked on a sewing machine in the garment district until her marriage in 1916 and now 40 years later goes back into the high-pressure, need-for-speed industry, with a bullying boss (Stephen Lang) and predictable results.
Joan Cusack is her daughter who is married with a young child, worries about her mother, and wants to take her in.

There is a scene in which mother wonders what to do with the furniture and others things of her life with her late husband. The daughter doesn’t want to chair that father sat in. But mother points out that is it perfectly good. She doesn’t want her things abandoned to the junk man. 

The daughter doesn’t want the chair. She says that they have a house full of modern furniture and the things of her mother will not fit in.
Paddy Chayefsky was a young man in 1954 but apparently had a sensitivity to the old and the lonely. This is around the same time as a more famous TV play Marty which again features working class loneliness and later made into the theatrical movie that propelled Ernest Borgnine to Oscar winning star status.
Ageing and loneliness also drive Chayefsky’s fine Broadway play Middle on the Night concerning a hopeless May/December romance Filmed in 1958 with Fredric March the aging garment industry factory owner and Kim Novak as a worker who becomes his beautiful young lover. A very fine movie.

  

Jewtah (2018)

Jewtah (2018)

Directed by Cameron Bossert
Written by Jermy Rishe & Cameron Bossert

It is difficult to comment objectively on a movie that defies genre or standard categorization such as Jewtah. It plays with elements of madness, magic, spiritual entities, and ethnic background which leave a viewer to make of it what they can from what they bring with them to the experience. Broadly it is a comedy/drama of a young man’s coming of age and mature stability.

Pincus is a young Jewish man. He lives with his aging war-baby or early boomer grandmother and her partner in a beautiful middle class home in the suburbs of a Utah city. He was abandoned there at age 8 in the care of his granny by his parents who vanished to find themselves.
He retreats to his grandmother's basement in isolation for 13 years after being abused as a “Jew Boy!” by the blonde heartless Morman kids in the hood.

But grandma has to sell the house which is the set up of the crisis at the core of the movie.

Jeremy Rishe delivers a powerful and deeply convincing performance as Pincus. Since he is also the co-wirter of the picture it is easy to assume there are some autobiographical elements in the play.

What goes on? Madness, spiritual entity visitation, hallucination after 13 years of wandering in the basement desert of his own mind.
What can Pincus do to resolve his dilemma, if there is to be a resolution. Convert to LDS, or LSD? Discover the cure for everything and find reward? Get a PC and become an angry INCEL. (But then there remains the housing issue.) Move into a refrigerator box?
Win with special skills and entertainment like outsiders, George Burns, Sammy Davis, Aratha, Fanny Brice, Jack Benny, Irving Berlin, Franklin Pangborn, Liberace, and tour as a comic on the Utah Borscht Belt circuit. Buy an AK and visit the mall? Can he become a Jewish oddity museum display? (No threat in the land of Ol’Joe Smith.) Will he wander off beyond the bushes and live in Desert Solitude, start a personality cult? Can he latch on to a love to take his in out an affectionate pity? Flutter his big brown eyes and rely on The Kindness of Strangers?

He might do any or combination of the above but that would be telling.

Check out this interesting indie and find out.
It took a few days to decode Jewtah. (“Ah! That’s what it means? Duh!)

See it here offered by Third Wing Theater company which is doing innovative things with live theater and streaming media all very inexpensively.

   

Cecil B, DeMented (2000)

 Cecil B, DeMented (2000)

Written & Directed by John Waters

This could be looked at as a clever witty fun violent comedy romp. It certainly scores in that. It is a terrific, very fast paced entertainment but it’s deeper than that. It has youth rebellion, but more. The violence is a lot of fun, but there are consequences and deaths. There is really something else going on here. 
 
  The setup is simple enough. Fading Hollywood movie star Honey Whitlock, played by Melanie Griffith, is in Baltimore for the premiere of one of her movies. The scene is infiltrated by the Demented crew, disguised as the worker staff at the premiere; waiters, etc. They kidnap her and force her to act in their underground movie.
  “Lots of kids dream of making a movie but only those willing to die for it are able to succeed.”, - Cecil B, Demented, the director tells her as she sits bound and taped up in a chair in the gang’s old movie house hidaway. The colorful crew and cast introduce themselves. Each has a tattoo of the name of  a legionary, off mainstream, or maverick, director hero. Cecil’s is Premminger. The crew, Warhol, Peckinpah, Anger and others. This establishes that these outlaw film crew terrorists are products of the influence of movies. It is the movies, by highly successful internationally renowned filmmakers that have made them what they are.

They proceed in shooting their movie with the captive Honey. Lots of other movie reference stuff familiar to most movie fans goes on, plus more inside production material that would delight anyone who has worked on mainstream movie or TV productions. There is a tone of revenge flick. They attack movie related events and eventually a big production of a Forest Gump sequel as armed outsiders righteously enraged at being left out riding in on a high horse of disgust at the entire bloated big money system and the boring redundant products it continuously spews forth.

“Death to mainstream cinema!” cries former mainstream tool Honey who, after some resistance, has become a convert by way of passage through a sort of Stockholm Syndrome. Honey, now one of them, is attacking the very thing that created her. She is along with the others who are attacking what has made them, through manipulation of their consciousness, but leaving them confused wannabe outsiders without any of the success of Honey the movie star.

  The movie is filled with really great movie connected locations and set pieces, including a very funny scene in a porn theater among the wankers and the climax at a drive-in movie theater.
  The viewer can easily be pulled into the revolutionary fervor of the lovable outsider terrorist crew. Aren’t we all movie lovers? But are we not movie haters too? We love the products that we love but hate some other stuff with a vengeance. We know it’s a big eliete money game that we aren't a part of no matter how strong our wannabe dreams might be. We know it’s just another enormous global big business but one that we are more hypnotically sucked into. We know how powerful it is, akin to That Ol’ Time Religion which it has been partly responsible for replacing. We feel how it has implanted and distorted much of what makes us human, our ideas of what love is, what success is, what is right and wrong. We can resent that and are enraged within at how we have been manipulated by this outside and out of our control power, even if we are not consciously aware of that manipulation and the resulting rage. Yet we can’t turn away and continue to feed in the endless streaming of big budget products. We are addicted to the dopamine thrill of the 2 million dollar action scene and the empathy we feel for the coming together of the play-acting yet completely convincing lovers. We watch people interacting with their “Friends” while we, in viewing isolation, have no friends. We know we love it, and are constantly told we ought to so that we bury rage at it all within us. This is the rage that can reemerge in self-hatred knowing that we can never measure up or really be involved. We are just enslaved consumer couch potatoes.

Cecil B DeMented and John Water knows all this. He is the one, the unique individual who more than any of the others came up out of us, out of the deep filthy underground our fandom and rage and breached that gated community. Yet the movie shows it all to be a suicide mission. A åfailed attempt to fight fire with fire.
“Lots of kids dream of making a movie but only those willing to die for it are able to succeed.”, - Cecil B, Demented. Indeed!

There is also a real story fictionalized, hidden in plain sight in this great and culturally astute movie. Patricia Hearst has a small acting role in it but her real life story parallels that of the Honey Whitlock character. Patricia Hearst was a princess of the ruling class and kidnaped in 1974. She sooned joined that ragtag band of revolutionaries biting the hand that created her, either a converted revolutionary or a victim of coercion, the Stockholm Syndrome. She participated in bank robbery until her eventual capture.

In view of this the Cecil B Demented crew is also revelied as a unhealthy personality cult following their leader into destruction or others and themselves. There is even a long scene where Cecil demands that they all submit to being branded with his initials. Was Keith Raniere (NXIVM) influenced by this movie? The same demand for control and submission in his cult many years after the movie was released particularly stands out, the branding of the DOS sex slaves.  

Cecil B Demented is a great movie.