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THE SEARCH FOR THE GLOBAL TALE
In Part III of this book I have been exploring those elements of storytelling that together suggest how the internationalization of story has proceeded, particularly in the last decade. Clearly every filmmaker wants to see his or her story succeed with audiences all over the world. Now there is a pattern emerging that suggests there is a kind of story that does succeed with audiences all over the world. One component of this pattern is the cultural diversity of writers and directors who are making films in cultures other than their native culture. Ang Lee, Agnieska Holland, Michael Radford, and Shekhar Kapur have joined Bruce Beresford, Peter Weir, and Phil Noyce from Australia, Roland Emmerich and Wolfgang Peterson from Germany, Paul Verhoeven from the Netherlands, Roman Polanski from Poland, and many others making films in another culture. So often these storytellers using their own voice alter the balance of plot and character, and although their films are set in a particular culture other than their own, the new perspective—their voice—transforms the story from a regional film to a universal story.
The other component of this search for the global tale is revealed when we look at the kind of story these filmmakers are telling. They have to choose a large theme as their subject matter—the fate of the family, for example—and we will look at how these filmmakers have treated material that will travel globally. There are basic universal elements that transcend national boundaries: relationships, the individual in society, the influence of politics on the individual, and the family. To create a coherent examination of how international storytelling has proceeded, a focus on one issue will help, and for that one issue I will look at how family has been represented.
The context for this chapter is how the family has been represented in the past. The melodrama has always been the basic story form for family stories. However, when the writer and director wanted to make a larger statement about society, for example, they resorted to another genre; but this too has everything to do with the prevailing values of the day, of the culture, and, of course, what the writer and director want to say. We begin with the 1940s.
The value of the family unit and the dissolution of the family unit due to economic change is at the core of John Ford's How Green Was My Valley (1942). Set in Wales, Ford's family is an ideal. Respect, affection, and identity all accrue from this family. So too the family in William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Set in postwar middle America, the Stephenson family, represented by Fredric March and Myrna Loy, is an ideal of a different kind. The parents love each other expressively, and they are not so much idealized authority figures as in the Ford film; they are flesh and blood. They are decent, thoughtful, and fair-minded. As a loan officer at a bank, Al Stephenson gives a loan to an ex-soldier who is a farmer because he's fought with men like him, rather than refuse him because he has no collateral. The Stephensons have decency and fairness in their blood and in their personal conduct, inside the family and beyond the family. These are solid, feeling, and generous individuals, and this is the image of family that they project. In Europe, destabilized by six years of war, the family also remains the core of decency and feeling. In Vittorio de Sica's The Bicycle Thief (1948), Antonio, a father, jobless because of the theft of his bicycle, steals another bicycle not out of outrage but out of economic necessity to support his family. He is caught, and observed being caught by his son, Bruno. Although it is Antonio who is humiliated publicly and embarrassed because of Bruno's knowledge, it is Bruno who accepts the father. The tolerance and the dignity between them is painful, but it projects the same image of family as we see in the Wyler film.
The preservation of family changes somewhat in the 1950s. In George Stevens' Giant (1956), a sense of dynasty and acquisitiveness is not enough to fracture the Benedict family. Leslie, the mother has to protect the kids, Luz and Jordan, from Jordan, the father, in order that they can live their lives rather than their live father's version of their lives. This disillusionment with father only gets worse in Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause (1956). Adolescents blame their parents for being conformist, and they turn their backs on the parents and look to the peer group for identity and individuation. This is not the portrait of family projected in Sajayit Ray's Father Panchali (1952). Here, economic hardship challenges the integrity of the Ray family, but the unit is fundamental and powerful, even though it is under attack and eventually eroded. Ray's portrait, however, echoes the old-fashioned family idealized in Ford's How Green Was My Valley. The family remains the ideal, the safe haven from the dangers and threats of the real world.
If the children were having the identity crisis in the family films of the 1950s, it's the adults who are having the identity crisis of the 1960s. In the 1960s families were not only not supportive havens, they had become the enemy. A kind of paranoia had set in. In John Cassavetes' Faces (1968), a longstanding marriage collapses, and the film chronicles how Richard and Maria Forst seek solace from inappropriate outsiders. It gets even worse in Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968). Here the husband, Guy Woodhoouse, makes a pact with the Devil. In return for help in furthering his career as an actor, he facilitates his wife, Rosemary—without her knowledge—being host for the Devil's baby. This horror film implies that the Ford family is dead and that a wife is a material means to self-promotion. The me-generation had arrived. It gets no better in Italy, where Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert illustrates marital ennui and wanderlust that doesn't promote a sense of well-being but seems to fracture the identity of the main character, the woman in the marriage, even more.
The 1970s revisits family as an ideal and a haven. In Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972), the family is the reason Don Corleone takes up the family business, criminal acquisition of material goods and power. The family is quite central to the rationale for the behavior of the Don, and throughout the narrative he tries to inculcate family values among his children (with mixed success). Because The Godfather is essentially an immigrant-makes-good story in a gangster film form, family is contextualized as an immigrant and pre-World War I phenomenon. As we see in Godfather II, which focuses on Michael Corleone, the film opens with brother Fredo aiding assassins to attempt to kill Michael, and it ends with Michael having Fredo killed for doing so. The view of the family as ideal does depreciate with the future generation.
Paul Mazursky continually examined the modern family in this period. Could the family manage the pressure of an open marriage is the subject of his Bob and Ted and Carol and Alice (1970). Could the family handle the pressure of infidelity is the subject of Blume in Love (1973). Not well, but still hanging in was the answer. But not for long. By the time he made An Unmarried Woman (1976), the family-unit was broken and he was advising, fend for yourself. The cause in each case is the same: a self-obsessed character, particularly a husband, who needs to be unfaithful. These selfish characters were a negative for the concept for the family. But they did fit right in on the continuum of the me-generation that flourished in the 1960s.
Power is at the core of Luchino Visconti's Aschenbach family in The Damned (1969). The fusion of Nazi power and the political and financial rivalries and ambitions in this powerful family is the drawing force of the narrative. The consequence is to break down every taboo within the family: a mother sleeps with her son; brother kills brother; and brother-in-law kills them all. Visconti's portrait of family is as a cancer that destroys. Not a very appealing presentation of family!
The 1980s opens with Robert Redford's Ordinary People (1980), which portrays the Jarrett family not as ideal but as all too human. Here families are made up of individuals, and individuals don't always pull together. The consequence is a vulnerable group of family members who can help or harm each other.
Family becomes far more vulnerable in Bob Rafelson's The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981). Here a husband, Nick Papadakis, is a barrier to the desire of his wife, Cora. A younger stranger, Frank Chambers, will provide Cora with the means to get rid of the barrier so she can have Nick's finances and the younger Frank as well. Here the selfishness of the Mazursky films' characters and the Polanski film's husband echo through, but this time the woman is the frustrated catalyst for the destruction of the family, in line with film noir expectations. We see this impulse come up again in in Polanski's Chinatown (1973) and Kasdan's Body Heat (1981), both film noir.
The same corrosive selfishness and destructiveness permeates the southern Provence family in Claude Berri's Jean de Florette (1986). It also destroys the family in Bille August's biography of the parents of Ingmar Bergman in The Best Intentions (1992).
Although we will focus on a number of films made in the last decade, there are other benchmark films of the 1990s that should be mentioned. Joel and Ethan Coen brothers are obsessed with family values in their mixed-genre films Raising Arizona (1987) and Fargo (1996). In Raising Arizona, Hi and Edwina McDonnough, want-to-be parents, kidnap a baby from Nathan Arizona, a rich businessman who has quintuplets. In Fargo, Jerry Lundegaard has his wife, Jean kidnapped to extort money from his father-in-law. In Fargo, a trail of death is the upshot. Neither film portrays family as solid, but rather as a social structure for the sake of appearances. Beneath the surface, venality, selfishness, and cruelty abound. The Coen brothers make family and family values a primary target for examination. They want us to get past the surface social rhetoric. They want us to see the pathology.
The family doesn't get much better in Michael Mann's Heat (1995). Husbands and wives have problems, and the kids pay a high price (a suicide attempt). In this gangster film, the family is a collective of individuals. Families break down and reconstitute, but not very securely. The family here is a loose federation of individuals, and not a very effective federation. All the individuals suffer as a result.
It doesn't get much better in James Gray's Little Odessa (1994). In this gangster film Joshua Shapira reenters his family's life and neighborhood, the Russian area of Brooklyn (he's on assignment for the Mob). But he can't prevent the destruction that is inevitably the upshot of family tensions in the gangster film. His younger brother, Reuben, dies. A similar fate is in store for Danny, the younger brother in Tony Kay's American History X (1998). As hate has played a role in the identity of Derek, the eldest son of a family, a younger brother emulates his idol. The single mother is incapable of managing herself, let alone her children. No matter how hard this family tries to be a unit, it is always invaded by outside influences, and destruction is the upshot in this melodrama. In both of these films there is a nostalgia for family, but what stands out most is how the family cannot protect its most vulnerable members from harm. The family is a sociological phenomenon, but it's not an effective, stable influence in the lives of its members.
A question lingers. Is there any place in the world where the family is portrayed as a more positive or strengthening influence? In Clara Law's Floating Life (1997) the family is a source of strength, but the majority of the narrative focuses on the diaspora, the leave-taking of a single family from Hong Kong to Australia and Germany and its consequences. Those consequences are considerable. Zoncka's Dreamlife of Angels focuses on a temporary, reconstituted single family of two young women. But it is a temporary stopgap. The family in Thomas Vinterberg's The Celebration is the cause of the death of one child (a victim of incest) and the neurotic behavior of all the other children of the father whose sixtieth birthday is the plot of The Celebration. Families are not doing very well in the 1990s. This is the impression given by so many of the film stories of the period. To get more specific, we now turn to a number of these films.
THE CASE OF AGNIESKA HOLLAND'S OLIVIER OLIVIER
Although Agnieska Holland has dealt with family often in her work, nothing in her work quite prepares us for Olivier Olivier (1992). Her film The Secret Garden (1993) dealt with loss and the effort to restore family in order to contain being overwhelmed by that loss. Whether children or adults fare better faced with loss is a legitimate question in that narrative. Holland's Washington Square (1997) based on the Henry James novel, is less fair-minded. The blame for the insecurity and poor judgment in Catherine Sloper, a young woman of means, is laid squarely at the feet of her father, Dr. Austin Sloper. His blame of the daughter for the death of his beloved wife has poisoned his relationship with Catherine and given her an unquenchable thirst for his approval and the affection of Morris Townsend, a would-be suitor. In both of these stories, psychopathology runs rampant in “parental” behavior with devastating consequences for children.
Olivier Olivier (1992) tells a very particular story about the relations between children and parents. The narrative hinges on the disappearance of the beloved younger child Olivier when he rides his bicycle to his grandmother's to deliver lunch to her. He never returns. His older sister, Nadine, jealous of the attention Olivier gets (and she doesn't) is self-punitive. The mother, Elisabeth, who was high-strung in any case, is inconsolable. The father, Serge, is angry and looking for someone to blame. An investigation follows with no result. The family falls apart. The father leaves to work in Africa.
Seven years later a boy is found in Paris by the police. He claims to be Olivier. He has a similar scar from a childhood operation. He returns and the family heals. Only Nadine knows this is not Olivier. Serge returns. Elisabeth is almost happy. And then a body is found. The new Olivier admits he is not the real Olivier. A neighbor is accused of killing the real Olivier, and he confesses. The mystery is over, and now the question is whether the family will fall apart again.
Olivier Olivier is a rather toxic view of family. The individuals are high-strung and not together. They argue and fight for attention, and the mother is a millimeter from collapse. This is not an appealing portrait of family. Indeed, Holland implies a porous view of family, where strength ebbs under any pressure. There is no leadership only will in this family. It's as if the tragedy victimized a family that was already a group of victims. Each individual was suffering prior to the disappearance of Olivier. The disappearance merely gave them a focal point for their anguish.
THE CASE OF MIKE RADFORD'S IL POSTINO
In the case of Mike Radford's Il Postino (1994) the family again becomes an ideal, a source of strength for the main character. But in this narrative the problem is that the main character is too shy to make the first step in family life: to attain a wife.
The main character, Mario, is not only shy, he is lacking in confidence. His gentility could easily be mistaken for weakness, but it is not weakness. He is encouraged by his family, but the more important catalyst is delivering mail to the island's new inhabitant, Pablo Neruda. The postman has seen Beatrice, the woman of his dreams; she works in the town pub. For the postman she is an ideal—beautiful, sensual, and unattainable.
Neruda is expressive, self-assured, and sensual. He also welcomes the postman and becomes his mentor. He will help the postman be expressive, and the vehicle will be as it has been for Neruda—poetry. Through the tutoring he receives, the postman takes the chance and the young woman is surprised by his approach. She agrees to see him. Coached in a poem by Neruda, the postman goes to the sea with the young woman and wins her with his words. This victory sets up the transformation of the postman from a shy individual to an active family man.
As Mario marries, has children, and has a family, his continued transformation under the tutelage of Neruda deepens. From being a poet he becomes a political activist. This clearly presents family as strengthening the individual member of the family. This extremely positive view of family harkens back not to the idealized family of John Ford but rather the family as a stabilizing force as portrayed in De Sica's The Bicycle Thief. It is also the view of the family in Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers (1962), Paulo and Vittorio Taviani's Good Morning Babylon (1987), and the view of family in the recent Benigni film, Life Is Beautiful. Indeed this view of family as a stabilizing influence on its members is echoed in the films of tradition-rich cultures from India (The Apu Trilogy [1952, 1956, 1959]), Japan (Tokyo Story [1953]), and China (To Live [1994]).
This is a markedly different portrait of family from what we find in American films, where the picture has been far more malleable, ranging from the idealized view of family in John Ford and Frank Capra (It's a Wonderful Life [1946]), to the demonized view as represented in the work of the Coen brothers and Paul Schrader (Affliction [1997]). We turn now to current views of the American family.
THE CASE OF ANG LEE'S THE ICE STORM
We saw in Tod Solondz' Happiness a nonlinear treatment of contemporary suburban life. (See Chapter 11, “The Ascent of Voice.”) Applying an MTV style, Solondz created a disturbing disconnect on American family dynamics. The same subject set in the 1970s rather than the 1990s is the basis for Ang Lee's film The Ice Storm (1998).
The Ice Storm takes place over a Thanksgiving week in 1973. It is set in New Canaan, Connecticut and focuses on two families, each having two near-adolescent or adolescent children. As a nonlinear story, however, the narrative focuses on the points of view within one of these two families, the Hoods: the parents, Ben and Elena, and the two teenagers, Paul and Wendy. The narrative unfolds through each of their points of view. The second family, the Carvers, is very important because each of its members has a relationship with a member of the Hood family. Their lives are essentially sexual, and the implications of those relationships bears on the view of family that Ang Lee and writer James Schamus want to articulate.
What must be said about the Hoods is that they are overtly successful, that their children seem more morally centered than the parents, and that the parents, Ben and Elena, are individually unsatisfied and as a couple are dysfunctional. She seems depressed, and he seems false and insincere. Verification of this view of the marriage is found in his unfaithfulness—he is having an affair with Mrs. Carver—and by her dalliance with a hippie priest.
In both cases sexual expressiveness has become the replacement for a reaching out and communicating with the other. These parents have a serious communication problem, and the example they set is not lost on Paul and Wendy. They too strive for sexual validation to be “with” their peers.
The Hoods, however, are the best communicators of the bunch. The Carvers are in breakdown. The wife is angry and disinterested in the family. She is a furious narcissist. The husband is unavailable. He's out to work in every sense. The younger son likes to blow up things and is sexually obsessed and intimidated. And the older son is simply out of it. He has a drugged sensibility about him. We know he is unpredictable, dangerous, and in danger. He is the one who dies the night of the ice storm. His death is an expression of all that is wrong in all these families.
Rather than being a stabilizing force, the view of the family in The Ice Storm is that of toxicity. The social organization of a family houses a group of individuals with their own needs and desires. Family gets in the way and more. It disables its members, and it destroys its weakest members.
Although The Ice Storm is set in the era of Watergate, it is also set in affluent America. Yet the affluence isn't enriching the spiritual lives of its members. Sex has replaced feeling. Wife swapping has replaced reading a book. These people are bored, self-absorbed, and miserable. They are in therapy, in self-help groups, and they read the wellness diets. And yet they continue to die spiritually. This portrait of the family is dark and disturbing. It's a long way from Frank Capra's family. It's no wonder that the Hood daughter is so contemptuous of the politics of the day. Her dissatisfaction and her involvement in the world beyond herself (the position her parents represent) is the only hint of optimism in The Ice Storm. For the rest, it's family life through the prism of a Love Canal.
THE CASE OF SAM MENDES' AMERICAN BEAUTY
Sam Mendes' American Beauty (1998) shares a philosophy about family with The Ice Storm. This time the story is from the point of view of one character, Lester Burnham. He narrates the story from the perspective of the last year of his life. He tells us at the outset that he will die, in effect, at the end of the story. The time is now, the place suburban Southern California.
Within his family Lester is viewed as the emasculated male. He has a job, but clearly it is his wife Caroline who is the breadwinner. He is without respect from his wife or his teenage daughter, Janie. He is cynical about all aspects of life, including work. It is clear that he doesn't care for his job, and that the job he has as a media writer in advertising is under threat. (He does lose his job before the midpoint of the narrative.)
The view of the woman, Carolyn Burnham, in the family is little better. She is materially successful but doesn't feel she is a success, and so is driven with all her energy to seek out “success.” Her lack of feeling successful bleeds over into her feelings about her husband and her daughter. She denies herself a sexual life until she begins to have an affair with her successful rival in real estate. But even there she can only feel sexual because being with him means affiliating with a materially successful man.
The daughter Janie is very alienated from each parent. She seeks solace in self-assured friends, such as Angela, who will become the love object for her father (the catalytic event of the narrative) and her new eighteen-year-old neighbor Ricky, who becomes her own love interest.
As in The Ice Storm there is a second important family, the Fitz family, who move next door. The son, like Janie, is the product of an eccentric family, and he's come to an accommodation with his parents. He lies. He earns a living dealing drugs, yet in his manner of communication with Janie, he seems by far the best-adjusted character in the story. His parents, however, are quite another story.
Mrs. Fitz seems utterly absent, whether because she is constantly medicated or simply because she is a person who has escaped into herself in order to live with the reality of the family. Ricky at one point of the story advocates denial as a management strategy. Mrs. Fitz is the best example of this. She works so hard at denying that she's barely there.
As to Colonel Fitz, he introduces himself as a marine to two gay neighbors who arrive at his doorstep to welcome his family. His rudeness to them illustrates his homophobia. His paranoia is so great that he insists on drug-testing his son. He is also physically abusive, beating his son when he catches him videotaping his environment next door at night. Colonel Fitz is an angry bundle of contradictions. Together, the Fitz family is an even less attractive family than the Burn-hams. In fact, the Fitz family represents the pathology of family and the Burn-hams merely represent the dysfunction.
The plot of American Beauty follows Lester's efforts to secure his version of the American Dream—the American Beauty of the title, Angela Hayes. For Lester, Angela, who is youthful, blonde, and beautiful, represents the opposite of what his marriage has brought, material well-being and misery, resulting in Lester's cynicism. Angela represents hope, and once he fastens on to her as a goal, vitality reenters his life. He's pleased to lose his job. He begins to stand up to his wife (much to her chagrin). And when he overhears Angela talking about him sexually with Janie, he adopts a new goal. He exercises, running with his gay neighbors with the goal, “I want to look good naked.” He is preparing to make a conquest. When he finally does get the opportunity to sleep with Angela, a moment of honest communication occurs. Angela confesses she is a virgin. Up to this point she has boasted loudly about her many conquests. And Lester becomes protective, fatherly, and age-appropriate with Angela. Rather then the self-absorbed dysfunctional male he has been, he becomes a real person with Angela. This two-way communication is healing for each of them, and in a sense it is one of the few moments of hope in the narrative. Shortly thereafter Lester is killed by Colonel Fitz who, in a state of homophobia, has interpreted Lester's naked exercising in his garage as a come-on to him. The colonel reveals his own homosexuality and self-loathing. He shoots Lester. Having found almost a state of grace, Lester becomes a victim of another dysfunctional family—his neighbors the Fitzes.
In many ways American Beauty echoes the view of family proposed in The Ice Storm and in Happiness. There is simply too much self-absorption and not enough recognition of the other, whether it be wife, husband, or child, to help each other. The result is a focus on materialism as a replacement for affection and support, and on pathology, where the family is victimized by the lack of honesty, inability to communicate, and the inability to accept the self. Here the family creates victims. No longer is the family seen as a stabilizing force or an idealized focal point to project powerful and decent social values. The family in these films is a toxic zone. In order to understand this family pathology more precisely I turn to a film that focuses on the individual. When the cult of the individual becomes an obsession, strange things happen to families.
THE CASE OF MARY HARRON'S AMERICAN PSYCHO
Mary Harron's American Psycho (2000) is based on Brett Ellis' controversial novel of the same name. But Harron gives the story a particular reading that yields some insights into the dysfunctional characters of Ben Hood in The Ice Storm and Colonel Fitz in American Beauty. Both of these men are family men, but they are also self-absorbed men, over-concerned with how they are perceived by others, their peers particularly. Because they live too much in their heads and they are ruled by the conflict between desire and duty, they are confused, troubled men. This is the notion of character that Mary Harron works with in American Psycho. She simply takes the character to another level. The operation of this character, however, will yield insight into why so many of the recent portraits of the American family are so critical.
American Psycho focuses on a single character, Patrick Bateman, a young business executive who is successful, concerned with appearances, competitive, and acquisitive. Set in the 1980s, American Psycho also focuses on a character who feels empty inside, and lives too much in his head. And what Patrick imagines in his head is murder. If he could he would challenge convention and not simply best his rival at work, he'd butcher him. And in terms of women he wouldn't go after conquests alone. He would have two women at once. He'd pick up women. He'd buy women. And then he would make love to them violently, and then he would do away with them violently. In his head he sees himself as a man out of control. Once he actually gets a taste of killing, he feeds on it and his killings grow exponentially.
At the end of the narrative we learn that all this killing has simply gone on in the main character's mind. In fact, his life is empty in direct proportion to the degree he has filled it up with violence.
What Harron has done is to give us a portrait of the end-game in self-absorption. The result is emptiness, unhappiness, and a wave of resulting hostility that is large enough to fill a small town morgue. This is the pathology that is crystallized by Ang Lee in The Ice Storm, by Tod Solondz in Happiness, by Sam Mendes in American Beauty. This is the caution each of these filmmakers puts forward: an excess of self-interest poisons the members of families. Do so and you imperil your society. These filmmakers, from Taiwan in the case of Ang Lee and from England in the case of Sam Mendes, are using their critiques of the American family to say something about families the world over. Radford suggests that the Italian family, a traditional family, is a stabilizing force in the life of his main character in Il Postino, the husband and father in that narrative. The choice is ours. Which is it to be? Families and filmgoers the world over ponder the question as they engage with these stories.