Cinema Paradiso, Miami Purgatorio

The evidence of things not on screen

Welcome, creatures! I have a book note, some rambling about prayer in the movies, and a British children’s book on—what else—the pleasures of discontent.

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Cash Capital of the Free World

The Year of Dangerous Days, Nicholas Griffin’s new pop history of the birth of 1980s Miami, has one of those tripartite subtitles: in this case, Riots, Refugees, and Cocaine in Miami 1980. And he does end up telling three stories which collide with one another, rather than three stories which turn out to be one story. The Mariel boatlift and the rise of cocaine—and cocaine money—are both stories of Miami turning south, truly becoming the door of the Americas which swings in both directions. But the story of a brutal murder by police, the cops’ acquittal, and the ensuing, ferociously violent riots which left big swathes of black Miami burnt out, is its own separate trouble, a story of English-speaking Miami: a story of the U.S.A., not las Américas.

This was a propulsive book and it’s so well-crafted. Griffin strikes close to noir territory as he describes the vaudeville and lowlife violence in a cop’s family background. He can touch sweet chords of nostalgia, as with his quick description of the children’s game “Moonlight Baby” in a paragraph which is really about how the freeways destroyed black neighborhoods. His description of the Mariel boatlift and the events leading up to it is simply unforgettable—the bus speeding under gunfire onto the grounds of the Peruvian embassy in Havana, the crowds of tormented people camping around the embassy, the flotillas of first-time captains heading south to free their families, he makes you catch your breath and feel all the hope and heartbreak of those desperate events. If you want to know what the reading experience is like, I can tell you that this is a guy who will give the weight of a money-launderer’s cash in pounds, and then again in adult male alligators.

Dangerous Days makes you feel the misery that cocaine and violence can unleash on a city. It makes you feel the frustration of Miamians trying to cope with Castro’s victims, and even do a little good in this world, while Jimmy Carter dawdled in distraction. It’s a story about the power of dirty money—Griffin suggests that while cocaine violence tore Miami apart, cocaine money may have rescued the city, especially given the punishing economy of the end of the ’70s.

Griffin sticks closer to the official record than I would have liked. He isn’t writing simplistic law’n’order propaganda—the recurring discussion of what it means to be “Officer of the Month” (like several cops present at the murder of Arthur McDuffie) shows that the violence and chaos created by Miami’s police was not the result of a few bad individuals but of a system that made individuals bad. Still, this is a cop story; at one point he says that law enforcement was the only entity trying to address the city’s soaring murder rate, and I wonder if that’s ever really true. We see a lot of the internal divisions of law enforcement but the city’s religious divides, for example, are only glancingly mentioned, as we learn that the city’s Cuban establishment was Catholic but the new refugees often practiced Santeria.

Griffin gives us the establishment voices: mayor, federal agent, crime-beat journalist. This book is good and I’m glad I read it, but if you want to hear from someone who rioted, someone who used, someone who hired Marielitos, someone who tried to salvage the city from the ground-level or someone who knew himself complicit in the city’s suffering, someone who experienced only the ordinary tragedies of their time and not the iconic ones—that’s another book, without which the story of Miami in 1980 is still untold.

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Cinema Paradiso

Last time I rambled a bit about how a movie can show you a character’s distorted thinking, their isolation and their break with consensus reality. Music is one way to show that a character is perceiving something that the rest of us don’t see—or that they’re failing to see something we do see, like the imago Dei in their victim. There’s another situation which presents similar challenges for more or less opposite reasons: prayer.

How do you show what prayer means to a character? Prayer is not primarily in the words, I think, so just doing voiceover is a technique best suited for comedy—Election does this terrifically. Terrence Malick uses voiceover in both The Tree of Life and A Hidden Life, not technically for prayer but to similar ends I think. In Hidden Life the voiceovercontrasted the calm, grounded voice of the imprisoned dissident Franz Jagerstetter with the brutality he was experiencing. In that film voiceover did show a disconnect: the hope of another life, totally hidden beneath the skin of this one. In Tree of Life it just struck me as an excuse to pontificate and overexplain.

I can think of two scenes using music to show prayer as a life-within-life, a greater life contained within a smaller life. Zach Clark’s 2016 indie comedy Little Sister, a terrific poignant tale of a postulant (iirc) who’s told that she has to reconcile with her messy family before she can take final vows, frequently shows the ex-punker would-be nun praying silently—while goth-metal blasts on the soundtrack, war in Heaven in her head. And of course one of the greatest scenes in the great Of Gods and Men is the dinner scene scored to “Swan Lake.” This also is not explicitly a prayer scene and maybe I shouldn’t count it, but it does show spiritual events (the monks’ acceptance of their decision to stay in a place where they’ll probably be killed) not through action but through secular music.

I’ve thought about this a lot in part because I want to see at last the Great Gay Christian Movie. This movie would need to show, I think, the relationship with God as a relationship: as B.D. McClay says, a world or a life in which God’s love “formed the ground on which you stood as well as the arrow that pierced your heart.” How do you show a relationship (a domestic life) with the invisible?

Music would be one way to convey the shifting textures of prayer. Different scenes can look fairly similar, or parallel, or the actors can have similar postures or expressions, but if the music is different, the scene will feel completely different: Making the Kuleshov Effect Work For You. So we could see e.g. a character's journey from self-loathing to self-acceptance, from fear to peace. A lot of these thoughts are coming from an old conversation with a far more film-savvy friend, who noted that many gay Christian stories include both trauma and catharsis; repetition and parallelism are easy ways to show “the same life, but different now for me.” The same God, but different now.

The camera can also communicate humility and surrender. The Rupert Everett vehicle Wilde was not a great film—although it’s an interesting film, and when I give you my list of Great Gay Movies in our next installment it’ll get an honorable, if that’s the word I want, mention. But the swooning camera angles when the priest kisses the altar—alongside, I admit, the voiceover—made you feel the movie’s theme of love as submission. Physical action plus camera angle plus voiceover (this element I think was not even necessary!) conveyed both a theology and a religious experience of requited love.

I have more thoughts here but I’d like yours. Which movies show the mystery and the embrace of prayer?

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Deep Thoughts

Progressive novelists write about how suffering is bad. Conservative novelists write about how suffering is good. I write about how suffering is goo-ad.

icymi

I reviewed Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman: “Sayaka Murata’s 2016 tale of a woman who becomes the perfect convenience-store employee, her whole body humming with the rhythms of the store, could have been a tragedy or even a grotesque. Instead it’s a strange romance, in which Keiko is the ingenue facing down societal disapproval in order to be with her fluorescent-lit, fully stocked beloved.”

Now Playing

For the Sunday of the Word of God, the Joubert Singers “Stand on the Word.” Lol there are ways to question the Lord in humble surrender to His will but also this song rocks.

And last…

“I mean,” returned P.J., “that so far you have all acted Happy only when thoroughly rehearsed. May I ask you, as a matter of cold fact, whether you do contrive to be Happy on Christmas Day?”

“Of course we do!” cried Mrs. Bagthorpe.
“Certainly,” lied Mr. Bagthorpe. He raised his voice to somewhere near a shout because William had just broken out on the drums overhead. “You appear to have a very shallow view of happiness. You are mistaken, for instance, if you suppose the family not to be Happy at this present moment. People have different ways of being Happy.”

Mrs. Bagthorpe was so touched by this speech that she edged up to him and squeezed his hand, which he instantly snatched away.

“Happy, are you?” said P.J. cuttingly.

“You try proving that we’re not,” replied Mr. Bagthorpe calmly.

--Helen Cresswell, Absolute Zero