Weepies
You should watch "Beaches"; you should watch "Sinners"
Creatures, sometimes you just need a good cry. So when my partner was having an outbreak of possibly-shingles, she said, “Let’s watch ‘Beaches.’”
Bizarrely, I’d never seen it. “Beaches” is an exultant example of the Women’s Picture. It’s got bad romances! It’s got enormous hair! It’s got a mysterious illness! It’s centered in the love between two women: the on-again, off-again friendship, the unfailing devotion, the rivalry and drama of the family created by C.C. Bloom (Bette Midler) and Hillary Whitney (Barbara Hershey).
“Beaches” is really wonderful. Midler is pure star—as is Mayim Bialik as young C.C., all grimaces and cigarettes and longing. I think if you know anything about “Beaches,” or the kind of movie it is, it won’t be much of a spoiler to say that Hillary dies. Her illness and death force/allow (ahhh the pleasing psychological Mobius strip!) C.C. to admit her love.
I found myself thinking that “Beaches,” like its high-’80s women’s picture BFF “Steel Magnolias,” is griefwork. They’re part of the tradition of art mourning a friendship after the death of the friend, I thought. Like Augustine’s “Confessions,” and “Spiritual Friendship,” and uhhh Montaigne I think, and everything Plato ever wrote! (I have written about this tradition before: here and here, for example.) This whole way of thinking was helped along by the fact that my partner and I are also watching “Veronica Mars,” whose storyline, especially in its first and only necessary season, is driven by Veronica’s grief over her best friend Lilly’s murder. Veronica sees Lilly’s ghost several times—Amanda Seyfried is unforgettable as ghost- and flashback-Lilly. Their friendship is the only thing that wasn’t broken by Lilly’s violent death and its spiraling consequences.
Okay, you may have already noticed the slight flaw here: All of the tradition of art mourning a friend is about, how to put this delicately, real dead people. Asserting the friendship’s reality is a big part of what the art is doing.
And yet, and still—“Beaches” and “Veronica Mars” are both about what it means for a friendship to live on after the death of one of the friends. And that persistence after death is real. Friendship may forge a family, as in “Beaches” and also in Jesus’ giving John and Mary to one another from the Cross. Friends spur one another on in dedication to a mission, which Lilly does for teenage P.I. Veronica and which many, many deceased partners in adelphopoeisis did for their surviving brother or sister in Christ. So I was grateful to stretch out on the couch with my beloved, and sniffle at something real.
We’re Gonna Pitch a Fang Dang Doodle All Night Long
“Sinners” is a thrilling film, and I didn’t need it to be a perfect one.
Ryan Coogler’s vampire movie stars Michael B. Jordan as the twins Smoke and Stack, come back home from Chicago to the Mississippi Delta in 1932. The Smokestack Twins are fleeing the gangsters they ripped off in the Windy City; they want to open a juke joint. They recruit their cousin, the preacher’s son Sammie (Miles Caton and his soul-gripping voice). They buy a property from a Klansman. They revisit old, bad memories and young, bad women. And when the fish is sizzling in the oil and the dice are clattering from the cup, when the smell of sweat and several kinds of hunger fill the air—when the pale, pale moon rises, and the music starts to talk to the ghosts…
… then the ghosts come. Oh, well, so much about this movie is perfect. Wild and rooted: dreamlike, totally enthralling and often hallucinatory when somebody’s singing, and yet also grounded in the folkways and specific cultures of the Delta in the Thirties. (The scene where the Chinese shop owner’s wife crosses from the Black side of town to the white side is showy—it knows it’s giving us a Delta past we haven’t imagined before—and I loved it.) There’s a tense-funny-terrifying homage to “The Thing,” and Rachel Manija Brown catches a possible hat-tip to the legendary badman, Stackolee.
There are messages here, and some of them feel a bit pasted-on, while others are mysterious and complex. There are a couple speeches about Christianity as the colonizer’s religion, capped off with an atheistic baptism scene. Imho (imho!!!) that is a discourse that “Ganja and Hess” handled with a lot more nuance and insight, and the fact that “Sinners” also denies the supernatural power of African-American rootwork doesn’t make the movie feel bigger or deeper. (There’s also a multi-character obsession with a particular sex act, which, to me, went past “earthy” into “I don’t want to be thinking about the screenwriter’s sex life during the movie.”)
And the heart of the story is about the power of music. It’s easy for The Power of Art artworks to feel trite and kind of pompous. Whoo boy, though, not this one. Art does have power—and not always power to do good. “Sinners” has music-making scenes that absolutely convince you of music’s supernatural power. And while there’s a triumphant heavily-symbolic moment that I did find a little silly, overall there was just so much conviction and truth in the way the film shows music bringing the past to life, forming nations, bringing people together for purposes good and bad and ugly. The juke joint isn’t a haven—people are beatin’ and cheatin’ there before any fangs flash in the darkness. And yet it is a haven, a place the vampires can’t come without an invitation. That’s a dual reality that James H. Cone might write about.
This is an ecstatic movie—and whatever else I might say about it, that’s always gonna be high praise. Stay all the way to the very end, as there’s both a mid- and a post-credits scene that genuinely do add to the tale.
Bette resplendent, photographed by Alan Light and used under a Creative Commons license.