TMA 691 Online Response #5: Be Kind Rewind & Sweding Subculture as Community Builder

To point out the obvious, “Fats Waller was Born in Passaic” could not have happened without Mr. Fletcher’s invented story—one could say “appropriation”—of Fats’s birth in the building that houses Be Kind Rewind.  Neither could it have happened had Mike, Jerry, Alma, and the rest of the neighborhood not appropriated it in their own way.  The making of the community film is a coalescence of older generation and younger, the latter fitting Phil Cohen’s description of a youth subculture: “subculture is…a compromise solution, between two contradictory needs: the need to create and express autonomy and difference from parents…and the need to maintain…the parental identifications which support them.”  Mike, more than any other character, feels the need to maintain parental identifications by preserving the story of Fats, as told to him by Mr. Fletcher, from the outset of the film.  After all, he and Jerry make a graffiti mural of Fats underneath a nearby overpass and take every opportunity to share the Fats story with customers of Be Kind Rewind.  Their difference with the older generation is not so much a rejection of appropriations as it is an extension, for they make an entire catalog of popular culture (not just the Fats story) their own.

             The subculture of “Sweding” in Be Kind Rewind does not technically seem to be split along generational lines; by the film’s conclusion, the whole neighborhood, young and old alike, has gotten involved in remaking popular films their own way.  Despite its inclusivity, however, the generational implications of Sweding make it a youth subculture before anything else.  Aside from what is shared with the parent culture, Clark et al. describes a second element necessary in any analysis of a youth subculture, which “consists both of the materials available to the group for the construction of subcultural identities (dress, music, talk), and of their contexts (activities, exploits, place, caffs, dance halls, day-trips, evenings-out, football games, etc.).” 

            The VHS tapes--the materials available to Mike, Jerry, and Alma--are “generationally very specific.”  One might associate the relic-like nature of VHS more with Mr. Fletcher than with any of the younger generation, but Mr. Fletcher’s reluctance to transition to a newer format has more to do with ignorance and lack of money than with any inherent connectedness to the physical tapes.  The younger characters would have been children during VHS’s prominence and consequently have a very different relationship with the format and its outlet, the independently owned video rental store.  Unlike Mr. Fletcher, they grew up with increased accessibility to movies, being able to re-watch certain titles over and over, thus developing a collective consciousness of popular culture.   

            To say the VHS tapes from Be Kind Rewind are the characters’ materials is insufficient, for what are the tapes if not films?  It is also insufficient to say the films alone work as material for these characters; the technology used to watch these films and the way in which they are accessed—their contexts—are vitally important elements to understanding their appropriation by the people of Passaic.  Technological implications are apparent even in the title of Be Kind Rewind—a certain amount of effort is required in the maintenance of VHS that is not necessary in the on-demand, digital age.  Be Kind Rewind refers, of course, to the stickers found on VHS rentals during their prime.  One not only needed to rewind the tape before returning it but also to keep it out of the heat.  The clunkiness of the cassette tape made it less space-efficient than what was to come later and was probably the main reason that rental stores did not (or possibly could not) carry extra copies (Mr. Fletcher, conversely, observes the multiple-copies idea for the first time when taking notes at a West Coast Video).  Consequently, customers looking to rent a video at an establishment like Be Kind Rewind might enter without expectations of finding a specific title lest they suffer the same disappointment as the customer wanting Rush Hour 2.  Under this mindset, one could walk away with just about any title, which seems to be the case with the average Be Kind Rewind customer.  While the dearth of new, available titles might discourage someone looking for a new release blockbuster, it does encourage eclecticism by default—Be Kind Rewind’s small but varied library offers the possibility of walking away with either Citizen Kane or The Garbage Pail Kids…

Be Kind Rewind's eclectic Sweding: Boyz in the Hood, Driving Miss Daisy, and Ghostbusters

            …which explains the diversity of the films chosen to be Sweded by the neighborhood.  During a Sweding montage, lists of their choices scroll down the screen, revealing such disparate titles as Last Tango in Paris, Mortal Kombat, Frequency, Seven, Happy Campers, Body Shots, Lost in Space, and Umbrellas of Cherbourg.  Less an attempt at well roundedness than an illustration of “circumstances and restricted opportunities,” the people of Passaic know these films because they have seen them time after time, having little choice in what they could rent from Mr. Fletcher’s store, more public institution than actual business.  The copy of Ghostbusters Miss Falewicz wanted to rent was the presumably same copy seen by Mike, Jerry, and everyone else in the neighborhood over the years.  That it circulated so widely in such a small geographical space makes it—the physical tape and its contents—property of the neighborhood, regardless of the FBI Warning.

             The neighborhood does not realize their ownership of the movies until they begin to Swede them.  Jerry’s inadvertent erasing of the tapes allows them to more easily “adopt and adapt material objects—goods and possessions—and reorganize them into distinctive ‘styles’ which express the collectivity of their being-as-a-group.”  The destruction of their Sweded creations at the hands of Mr. Rooney and Ms. Lawson only proves to galvanize the group, which, feeling empowered after having created new and improved films, is intent on telling their own story in their own way.  Accuracy might have mattered earlier, but not anymore.  Miss Falewicz's statement prior to the filming of “Fats Waller was Born in Passaic,” indicates the way in which the older generation’s and the younger generation’s style of negotiating, in particular their style of storytelling, has converged into a powerful community-building tool: “Our past belongs to us; we can change it if we want.”      

TMA 691 Online Response #4: Son of Rambow and Media Effects

One could view Son of Rambow simply as a film about the positive expressive power of film: young Will Proudfoot, already an artist with his biblical sketchbook, finally discovers the medium through which he can truly exorcise his demons.  Along the way, he overcomes a domineering mother, first through disobedience and then by winning her over to his side when she cuts ties with a puritanical sect known as “The Brethren.”  Acceptance of what was once thought to be corruptive is arguably a theme of Son of Rambow, but the inclusion of another character, Didier, makes the film’s presentation of media effects more complex.  Film functions differently for Will than it does for Didier and thus reflects a prediction made by Charters: “If it is established that children are moved by pictures toward dislike for one social value and toward liking for another, and if it is shown that both facts and errors are learned and remembered, it is apparent that motion pictures have fundamental influences which may be exerted in any direction” (6).  Son of Rambow presents two case studies, one in which a character is effected by media, while the other is merely affected.

First Blood effects Will tremendously; visiting Lee Carter’s home for the first time, he views it voyeuristically from a canoe, while Lee records bootleg copies for his brother.  This experience is Will’s first with multimedia—he is not even allowed to watch educational documentaries about fire or the wheel when he is at school—and it proves to be the missing ingredient for the narrative he is constructing to reconcile the loss of his father.  After watching First Blood, Will becomes “the Son of Rambo,” a role of empowerment.  Though he begins to wear a headband and other accouterments from time to time, his adoption of the role is more psychological than outward.  His first declaration, after all, happens in a dream during an exchange with a villainous scarecrow:

“Who are you?”  the Scarecrow asks.

“I am the Son of Rambo.  What have you done with my dad?”  Will becomes muscle-bound and proceeds to rescue his father as the dream unfolds.  

He publicly announces his role for the first time when filming screen tests with Lee, who is more technician than artist.  Manipulated into performing stunts, Will falls out of a tree while being filmed, and when he gets back on his feet he runs in circles, screaming, but in control.  Lee asks, “Wait, what are you doing?”

Will approaches the camera for an extreme close-up, and with as much malice as he can muster he says, “I am the Son of Rambo.” 

“Hang on.  You want to be the Son of Rambo?”  From that moment onward, the boys’ screen tests become less derivative of Rambo and more like Will’s imaginings from his sketches.  Rather than reenact scenes that have already been filmed, the boys do something much more praiseworthy: they become creators. 

   While film inspires Will to work out his problems through creation, it has a different effect on Didier, who seems to be a superficial result of media.  Part Michael Jackson, part Robert Smith, and part Patrick Swayze (albeit self-proclaimed), Didier arrives with much fanfare at Will and Lee’s prep school with a group of other French exchange students.  His power as opinion leader is evident as he quickly gathers an entourage that follows him through the school grounds, adoring his every move.  He and Will cross paths eventually, at which point Didier discloses his greatest wish: “Well, to be star of movie is my dream, my friend.”

Will obliges Didier, partly out of necessity; Lee has been suspended and, therefore, unavailable to film for a time.  As soon as Didier enters the picture, though, the film starts to lose its integrity.  It becomes all Didier, all the time.  The focus of their film shifts from the protagonist, the Son of Rambo, to Didier, also known as Wolf.  Around the school Will begins to enter the spotlight, though not because others know his name; instead he is “that little boy making a film with Didier.”  To the chagrin of Lee, other kids become involved in the film for the same reason as Didier: to be seen.

Didier and crew, reminiscent of a shot from "Beat It" (below).

Jealousy aside, Lee takes issue with Didier and others’ inclusion in the film because they are ruining something that was once more pure.  Though the film was not without its own obvious influences, Didier gives the boys’ Son of Rambow an MTV-like infusion, in effect mainstreaming it.  From a study group standpoint, he gives the boys’ movie the sex appeal it was lacking and completes “the process of apparent convergence of outlooks” (Gerbner 181).  The problem with Didier, though, is he seems to have been created by a study group, as if he were the result of a survey, circa 1985, asking teens what they most like and dislike about the pop stars of that era.  He is “the theoretical elaboration and empirical verification of television’s cultivation of common perspectives” (183).  He meets the coolness criteria for teenage boys, while also being attractive enough for girls; his supposed brooding and dangerous nature appeals to both groups.  However, he is also boring and bored, as he tells his followers.  Didier functions as a critique of the in-crowd, in all of its contradictions.  As an opinion leader, he funnels current trends to his entourage, but he emphasizes style over substance.  His inability to appropriate these styles in an original way makes him a rehash, a retread, which does not go unnoticed by his fellow French exchange students, who are not blinded by his exoticness like the British are (who, by the way, gradually become more like him as the story progresses).  Will, on the other hand, fashions First Blood into something all his own.  Intellectual property reasons notwithstanding, he and Lee create Son of Rambow, different on the surface--its title--and in content than its inspiration, a claim that Didier cannot make. 

TMA 691 Online Response #3: The Maltese Falcon & Wood's Ideal Figures

“Look at me, Sam.  You worry me.  You always think you know what you’re doing, but you’re too slick for your own good.  Some day you’re going to find it out,” Effie Perine tells Sam Spade, early in The Maltese Falcon.  Her prediction does not come true, at least in the case of the Maltese falcon.  Sam is always in control, always as slick as he thinks he is, as he becomes involved with a cast of unsavory characters only to deliver them to the police.  The preservation of justice in The Maltese Falcon gives the impression of a more hopeful conclusion than later film noir; “it’s subversive elements are, in the end, successfully contained,” it seems.  After all, the hero makes it through mostly unscathed (aside from being “slipped a mickey”), the villains are detained, and Archer’s death is avenged.  However, a closer look at Sam’s interactions with the female characters (and their placement on Wood’s ideal figures spectrum) reveals the subversive means by which justice prevails.

From American capitalist ideology, or “the values and assumptions so insistently embodied in and reinforced by the classical Hollywood cinema,” emerged two ideal figures: “The Ideal Male: the virile adventurer, potent, untrammelled man of action,” and “The Ideal Female: wife and mother, perfect companion, endlessly dependable, mainstay of hearth and home.”  Due to their incompatibility, we also see their shadows, “the settled husband/father” and “the erotic woman.”  The Maltese Falcon has three female characters, each of which occupy a different archetypal role.  Early in the film, Sam Spade interacts with each in succession, starting with Iva Archer, just widowed wife of his murdered partner. 

Waiting inside Sam’s office, Iva is playing the part of the grieving widow, black dress and all, except her veil is pulled up from her face.  As soon as Sam closes his door they kiss, more passionately than one would expect from a man and his business partner’s wife.  “Sam, did you kill him?” she asks, believing she was the motive, the prize, for Archer’s death.  “Well, I thought you said if it wasn’t for Miles, you’d…?”  Feeling foolish, she begs, “Be kind to me, Sam.”  Sam points out the ridiculous contradiction in her interrogation and plea by repeating them back to her: “You killed my husband, Sam.  Be kind to me!”  When she asks him to come to her, he humors her: “Soon as I can.”  She pulls the veil over her face, a mourner once again, despite the shadowed letters from the window giving away whom she is really thinking about: SPADE is on the wall in giant font, completely dwarfing the much smaller ARCHER. 

Iva Archer is The Maltese Falcon’s ideal female, albeit a failure of an ideal female.  The only wife in the film, she is hardly a perfect companion, dependable, or the mainstay of home.  Her affair with Sam goes in the face of the civilized values she is supposed to embody.  Not surprisingly, Sam, the ideal man, can hardly stand to be around her.  Their “staggering incompatibility” apparent, Sam never offers her a seat, nor does he give her enough time to sit down before shooing her away. 

The ideal female’s shadow, the erotic woman, is filled stylistically and narratively by Brigid O’Shaughnessy.  Miss O’Shaughnessy has already given Sam two different aliases before revealing her real name to him after letting him enter her hotel room, an act in itself unbecoming of an ideal female.  She is also in a state of undress in her pajamas; what they look like might be more important than what they are, though.  The pajamas, along with the furniture, are vertically striped, in contrast to the oblique shadows coming through the venetian blinds.  The incongruity of lines parallels Brigid’s stories, which change multiple times.  Her voice becomes increasingly desperate, and she pleads with Sam: “You’ve got to trust me, Mr. Spade.”  The camera cuts to an unmoved Sam, sans clashing shadows: “You won’t need much of anybody’s help.  You’re good.  It’s chiefly your eyes, and that throb you got in your voice when you say things like, ‘Be generous, Mr. Spade.’”  Though not immune to all of Brigid’s charms, Sam never loses control in their relationship; she remains a means to an end in solving the case, as if he knows she is a femme fatale whom he must get close to in order to get all the answers.

Effie Perine does not fit as neatly into ideal female or its shadow as the other women.  She cannot be the ideal female because she works and she is unmarried.  Neither is she an erotic woman because her interaction with the protagonist is, on the surface, benign.  In some ways she occupies a motherly role, ever ready to offer helpful advice.  In a scene sandwiched by Sam’s aforementioned visits with Iva and Brigid, Effie walks into Sam’s office, and we see the true nature of their relationship.  Sam slumps in his chair as Effie sits on his desk, the only instance in which Sam allows a woman to be above him.  They talk nonchalantly about an otherwise serious topic: the belief that Sam played a part in Archer’s death. 

“Well, how did you and the widow make out?” she asks, upon entering the room.

“She thinks I shot Miles.”

“So you could marry her?”

“The cops think I killed Thursby…the guy Miles was tailing for that Wonderly dame.  Who do you think I shot?”

“Are you going to marry Iva?”

“Don’t be silly.  I wish I’d never laid eyes on her.”

“Do you suppose she could have killed him?”

“You’re an angel.  A nice, rattle-brained angel.”

Sam is more casual with Effie than any other character, let alone female.  This casualness is punctuated when Effie makes and lights a cigarette for him, an act teeming with symbolism in a film made under the Hays Code.  Sam and Effie have a relationship outside the values seemingly extolled by classic Hollywood cinema.  Theirs is not a relationship of “legalized heterosexual monogamy;” that is what Archer had, and now he is dead.  Nor is theirs like the illicit union of Walter Neff and Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity, a pairing bound to end in disaster (though had Sam been more passionately involved with Brigid, it could have been).  The Maltese Falcon shows an awareness of the “hopeless contradictions and unresolvable tensions” of the ideal male/female pairing.  The ideal, virile male—the only character strong enough to enact justice—cannot be domesticated, lest he meet death or become, in a sense, neutered, like Detectives Polhaus and Dundy, who must abide by the law, a type of ideological values.  Neither can he allow a dangerous woman to control him, thereby bringing on himself predictable ruin.  Sam Spade triumphs by going a route that cannot be categorized (as represented by his relationship with Effie), which is truly subversive.   

TMA 691 Online Response #2: How Green Was My Valley & Wollen

The opening and closing scenes of How Green Was My Valley, while not as visually symmetrical as those of The Searchers, present a similar dichotomy of arrival and departure, except in reverse order.  The film begins with a waist-level shot of Huw Brown, now fifty years old, packing his belongings in a shawl as he prepares to leave his valley and never return.  “I am leaving behind me my fifty years of memory,” he muses.  “Memory.  Strange that the mind will forget so much of what only this moment has passed and yet hold clear and bright the memory of what happened years ago, of men and women long since dead.”  The topic of memory returns in the closing scene after the death of Huw’s father: “Men like my father cannot die.  They are with me still, real in memory as they were in flesh, loving and beloved forever.  How green was my valley then.”  A memory montage follows Huw’s narration.  In order, the entire family sits at the dinner table; a young Huw meets and greets his sister-in-law Bronwyn as she goes to the market; his sister Angharad opens a gate leading out to the meadows to see Huw and Mr. Gruffydd walking towards her; Huw and his father walk together up a hill, spanning left to right on the screen, while in the next shot his older brothers enter right and continue left, signaling an inevitable convergence. 

In contrast to the final shot in The Searchers of Ethan Edwards, “[leaving] the house again to return to the desert, to vagrancy” (573), the Morgan clan returns home.  The horizon, visible in both endings, serves different purposes: In The Searchers it completely envelopes Ethan, who becomes smaller and smaller as he walks away from the camera and into the desert’s vast expanse; in How Green Was My Valley the characters divert attention away from the horizon by coming towards the camera.  

The endings of both films emphasize “the master antinomy in Ford’s films…between wilderness and garden” (573).  Wollen explains differences in antinomic presentation thusly: “As we have seen, in the case of Ford, some antinomies are completely reversed.  Instead, there will be a kind of torsion within the permutation group, within the matrix, a kind of exploration of certain possibilities, in which some antinomies are foregrounded, discarded, or even inverted, whereas others remain stable and constant” (575).  The antinomy of wilderness and garden, contorted by the reversal of arrival and departure in The Searchers and How Green Was My Valley, has the same implication in both films: the wilderness is the garden. 

Wilderness is Garden most certainly means something different to the Morgan family than it does to Ethan Edwards.  After all, they are settlers, or at least established in their village; one could even make the case they are natives, this film's version of the Comanche (the Morgan's occupation of this role depends on the civilized/uncivilized antinomy between mine workers and mine owner, townspeople and clergy transplant Mr. Gruffyd; the obvious torsion here is the Morgan's attachment to their land versus the Comanche's transient relationship to land as hunters/gatherers).  Cwn Rhondda is the only place Huw knows before beginning school; it is his home until he leaves at age fifty.  As an adult he associates his childhood in the valley with purity: “So I can close my eyes on my valley as it is today, and it is gone, and I see it as it was when I was a boy.  Green it was and possessed of the plenty of the earth.”  The earlier the memory, the better, for he associates the infiltration of industry with corruption: “In those days, the black slag, the waste of the coal pits, had only begun to cover the side of our hill, not yet enough to mar the countryside nor blacken the beauty of our village, for the colliery had only begun to poke its skinny black fingers through the green.” 

Oppressive and ever looming, the colliery remains the sole means of subsistence for the majority of the valley’s residents.  Trouble begins when a notice is posted announcing a reduction in wages.  Too many men are willing to work for less, which leads to talk of creating a union.  Crucial to this plan is Mr. Gruffydd, the new preacher.  Like Ethan Edwards, Mr. Gruffydd plays the role of the nomad; he is an outsider from the University of Cardiff, come to “conquer the world with truth,” more plough-share than sabre.  In helping the miners unionize, he hopes for them to stay, not to become nomads in a different sense by going to America. 

His entrance also reveals a forbidden love.  In The Searchers, the barrier between Ethan and the woman he loves, or at least used to love, is his brother; in How Green Was My Valley, the barrier between Mr. Gruffydd and Angharad Morgan is his status as clergyman.  In the wilderness/garden overlap, or torsion, Mr. Gruffydd, like the colliery owner Mr. Evans, brings civilization to the people of the valley.  The difference between the two is their method: Mr. Gruffydd hopes to civilize via the Word, Mr. Evans via industrialization.  Mr. Gruffydd's method proves unsuccessful when rumors of a scandalous relationship between Angharad and him surface.   The accusers call a deacons’ meeting to determine a fit punishment for the female party involved.  No one has accused Gruffydd of wrongdoing, which is proof to him that Christ’s teaching have become corrupted, perverted.  He announces his departure: “This is the last time I will talk in this chapel…I am leaving with regret.”  His regret is not an admission of indiscretions but of a sorrow that his stewardship over the people of Cwn Rhondda did not have its intended effect.  Mr. Evans also has a corrupting influence on the people and the village, although one could argue that his intentions were never as altruistic as those of Mr. Gruffydd.  His unstated contribution to the village--providing employment on a large scale--only serves to dispossess Huw's brothers and accelerate their exodus to America.      

Mr. Gruffydd’s presumed exit is never confirmed; as he is readying himself to leave, the emergency horns at the colliery begin to blare, distracting him from his plans.  Whether he stays or goes is not as important as the fate of Huw and the rest of the Morgan family, though, considering How Green Was My Valley opens with Huw and ends with Huw.  The “My” of the title belongs to Huw, who, though just a boy, is the protagonist in a story full of adults.  The placement of nomad onto a supporting character is just another torsion of John Ford, always mindful of “the theme of the quest for the Promised Land, an American re-enactment of the biblical exodus, the journey through the desert to the land of milk and honey, the New Jerusalem” (574).  For Ethan Edwards, never able to stay put in any one place, the Promised Land is the wilderness.  Conversely, for Huw Morgan and his family the Promised Land is a memory of times lost; it is a garden, a virgin land uncorrupted by industrialization's pollutants.