The Oscars

As usual, the Academy Awards arrive with me having not seen many of the nominated films.

Saw 'em: Crash; Good Night, and Good Luck; Junebug; Pride & Prejudice; Walk the Line

Didn't see 'em: Brokeback Mountain; Capote; Cinderella Man; The Constant Gardener; A History of Violence; Hustle & Flow; Mrs. Henderson Presents; Munich; North Country; The Squid and the Whale; Syriana; Transamerica

But even though I missed so many of these, I've read enough about them to disagree with John Horn and Susan King of the Los Angeles Times, who referred to this year's best picture nominees as "five overtly political message movies."

I'll grant that Good Night, and Good Luck is "overtly political," what with one of the key characters being a bona fide politician — Sen. Joe McCarthy, playing himself in archival news footage. Like Munich and Capote, it's also, as they say nowadays,* "based on actual events." Clooney and Spielberg both chose to tell stories from another time because those stories speak to our time — and specifically to political questions of our time. So, yes, these are "overtly political," if not exclusively political, films.

But Capote? Again, I didn't see it, but I don't remember the murder of the Clutter family being the subject of a partisan political dispute. And it's not like you can make a unique oddball genius like Truman Capote stand as an Everyman symbol for some larger political agenda.

I haven't yet seen Brokeback Mountain because it's a big, sweeping romantic tragedy. I have to get pretty psyched up before watching a two-hankie movie, even one that earns such critical acclaim.

I've seen Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet three or four times and I'd happily watch it again because I know it's a romantic comedy and that watching it will make me happy. I'm told that Brokeback, on the other hand, is a romantic tragedy and that watching it will make me sad. I'm not suggesting that all stories ought to have happy endings but when the question is "Do you want to feel happy or sad?" I tend, more often, to pick happy. (Roxanne expresses a similar reluctance to subjecting herself to what is advertised as a painful story.)

The theme of star-crossed lovers can certainly be "overtly political" — just look at Romeo and Juliet. But I'm pretty sure that Brokeback doesn't end with two grieving families reconciling in a belated, "glooming peace." It's mainly, from what I'm told, just a love story.

Horn and King insist that this love story is "overtly political" because the two people in love both happen to be the same gender. But they didn't fall in love as a "political" act. No two people ever have. Not Romeo and Juliet, not Tony and Maria, and not Jack and Ennis.

Falling in love is, by definition, a personal and not a political act. The idea that "the personal is political" arose on the political left, but seems nowadays to be more embraced by political conservatives, who seem to mean something rather different.

Which brings us to Crash.

I understand why Horn and King would call Crash a "political message movie." It's about racism and prejudice, and these are seen as "political" subjects. But they are not exclusively political subjects, and Crash scarcely even hints at the realm of politics. Roger Ebert notes that its reliance on coincidence owes a debt to Charles Dickens. So, too, does its "politics" — which is explicitly reformist. Paul Haggis' movie is, as George Orwell wrote of Dickens, "always preaching a sermon," and like Dickens' sermons, it is primarily a moral, and not a political, appeal.

Here is a rather large chunk of Orwell's essay on Dickens, much of which, I think, also applies to Crash:

His radicalism is of the vaguest kind, and yet one always knows that it is there. That is the difference between being a moralist and a politician. He has no constructive suggestions, not even a clear grasp of the nature of the society he is attacking, only an emotional perception that something is wrong, all he can finally say is, "Behave decently" …

The truth is that Dickens's criticism of society is almost exclusively moral. … There is no clear sign that he wants the existing order to be overthrown, or that he believes it would make very much difference if it were overthrown. For in reality his target is not so much society as "human nature." …. His whole "message" is one that at first glance looks like an enormous platitude: If men would behave decently the world would be decent.

It seems that in every attack Dickens makes upon society he is always pointing to a change of spirit rather than a change of structure. It is hopeless to try and pin him down to any definite remedy, still more to any political doctrine. His approach is always along the moral plane, and his attitude is sufficiently summed up in that remark about Strong's school being as different from Creakle's "as good is from evil." Two things can be very much alike and yet abysmally different. Heaven and Hell are in the same place. Useless to change institutions without a "change of heart" — that, essentially, is what he is always saying.??… Two viewpoints are always tenable. The one, how can you improve human nature until you have changed the system? The other, what is the use of changing the system before you have improved human nature? … Dickens, who had not the vision to see that private property is an obstructive nuisance, had the vision to see that. "If men would behave decently the world would be decent" is not such a platitude as it sounds.

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* Call anything a "true story" now and you unleash the nitpickers who attack the film for any artistic license: because the dialogue was — gasp — crafted by screenwriters and not taken from a direct historical transcript, or because the real Hurricane Carter wasn't as good looking as Denzel, or because it was Glorfindel and not Arwen who really confronted the Black Riders at Rivendell.