Secret of the River - a film review

One of the things about Trump's habit of trashing Mexicans that gets under my skin is not the obvious racism, which is disgusting enough, but the fact that it flies in the face of my personal history of encounters with Mexicans. I live in California and Mexicans are everywhere. Overall, I have not just a different view of Mexicans from Trump's "They're sending rapists and murderers..." horseshit, but a very positive one. I think of Mexicans as super hard-working people always looking for a chance to laugh. A colorful lot. Loud, much of the time, but more because of exuberance than annoying. Think of mariachi music. Trumpets, more than violins. Ai, yai yai yai! more than la la la. My bias, I'm trying to say, is a positive one.  My list of Mexican friends and acquaintances is broad enough to include artists and intellectuals, architects and doctors, as well as just plain folk who send their kids to bilingual schools like the one a block from my house, but along with Germans and Japanese and Brits and Canadians and Argentines, I list Mexicans among the folks I am essentially at home with.

So I was not surprised when a friend recommended a Netflix series to me that takes place in a small town in the State of Oaxaca and I immediately got carried away with the sweetness of a friendship between two young boys thrown together by tragic circumstances. 

Manuel is sent to his grandmother's when his mother gets sick, and meets Erik, a boy his age, who is tasked with showing him around and making him feel at home. A not particularly unusual place for a story to start.

But where the story goes from there is anything but usual. It turns out that the context for this story is the native Zapotec community of Oaxaca. In particular the Isthmus Zapotec community, and even more particularly the community of men whom the Zapotec folk consider a third gender. Suddenly, we're talking not about the kind of Mexicans who form cartels and become drug smugglers - Trump's view of Mexicans - nor of the "Cucaracha" singing Mexicans that I expressed a fondness for, but an unusual segment of the Mexican population associated with pre-Columbian Central America who have evolved a culture that makes space for a cross-dressing minority called Muxes.

Secret of the River is divided into two distinct four-episode parts, the first when the boys first meet at the age of nine or ten, and the second twenty years later, when Manuel returns to the village to try to repair broken relationships. I won't spoil the plot line; the story is engrossing and you should experience the twists and turns for yourself. Things get rough at times, the good guys are a bit too good and the bad guys a bit too bad at times, but in the end, I predict you'll be as charmed as I was by the child actors and the character of Solange, a Muxe, who becomes a mentor and protector to Manuel who, even before the age of ten, is showing tendencies of not being comfortable in his skin. 

The dark side of Mexico - intense machismo and homophobia, corrupt police, child-abuse and sex-trafficking - is also present. This is not a socialist realism fantasy. But if you are open to taking in a hitherto unfamiliar view of Mexico and another way of dealing with the  current challenge of what to do about the T in LGBT, this movie is for you.

I give it a 5 out of 5. It's probably a 4, but I'm a sucker for cute kids.

photo credit

Ajax and his friends

Taku and I have tickets to a play that my niece is in this Friday. It appears to be all about a homeless guy in Oakland who thinks he’s Ajax - the ancient Greek warrior, not the bathroom cleaner.

Time for a little review of the Trojan War. And that means a bit of theology.

It all began with the wedding of Peleus, the King of Phtheia, and his wife Thetis. They are the parents of Achilles, of vulnerable heel fame.  Well, not the wedding, exactly, but with Eris, the goddess of discord, who didn’t get an invitation to the wedding. Eris was a spiteful goddess and spread mischief by showing up anyway bearing a golden apple as a wedding present. The apple bore the inscription, “For the fairest in the land” and that set off a bitch-fight among three other goddesses. One of these was Hera, the jealous (with good reason) chief wife of Zeus, who also happened to be his sister, and goddess of women, marriage and the family and protector of women in childbirth. A second was Athena, who was in her mother’s womb when Zeus swallowed her whole, making it necessary for Athena to pop out of Zeus’ forehead at some point, which she did geared up for battle (at least in artistic depictions) in helmet and spear. The third goddess was Aphrodite, known to the Romans as Venus, the goddess of love, war and prostitutes.

To settle the question of which of these, Hera, Athena or Aphrodite, was most worthy of the “fairest beauty" title, they turned to a shepherd named Paris. Well, turns out he was actually a prince of Troy who apparently liked animals and being outside in the fresh air. (Or who was raised by shepherds and was doing what comes naturally, depending on which version of the story you read) All three goddesses offered Paris a bribe. Hera wanted to give him power, Athena, wisdom, and Aphrodite, love. Paris chose love and gave the prize to Aphrodite.

In gratitude, Hera made Helen, the real most beautiful woman in the land, fall in love with Paris. Hera either didn’t think this through very carefully, or didn’t have a very high sense of responsibility, because when Paris left Sparta to return home to Troy, Queen Helen was determined to follow him, to the chagrin of her husband, King Menelaus of Sparta.

There are other versions of this tale, and virtually all of the details are contested, but I’m trying to get back to Ajax, so this version will do, while I try to figure out where Ajax fits in.  Ajax was the son of King Telemon and nephew of Telemon’s brother, Peleus, whose marriage ceremony got this whole ball rolling when Eris messed everything up by creating such discord among the goddesses. That means Ajax is also Achilles’ cousin.

I've never read the Iliad but I understand that Ajax comes across as a superman, or at least as a guy with strength that goes on and on. Hence the name of the toilet cleanser, I think.

But the real story, I think, lies in the Latin phrase I chose to run under my picture in my high school yearbook, something the 15th Century cleric Thomas à Kempis is remembered for observing: Homo proponit, sed Deus disponit, Man proposes, God disposes. I was clearly indoctrinated into the belief that our every move is dictated by a deity. Maybe that’s why I get such a kick out of reading about how the gods mess with us. It absolves us of responsibility. Like making Helen fall in love with Paris so that the Greeks and Trojans slug it out for ten years. In the end, when Achilles gets it in the heel, Ajax claims his armor, but then Athena gives it to Odysseus instead because she likes the way he talks. And that pisses Ajax off so bad that he flies into a rage and wants to go after Agamemnon, Menelaus and Odysseus. Athena channels his rage into killing livestock under the delusion that he is getting his revenge. And when he awakes out of his hallucination he is so ashamed that he kills himself.

Homo proponit, sed deus disponit.

I dip into Greek mythology from time to time and always have a great romp.  It’s lovely to get back to the days when I first discovered Edith Hamilton and was faced with the need to try to explain why the theology I was raised in could arguably be seen to be making more sense than Greek or Chinese theology, say. When somebody first suggested that “virgin birth” was just another way of saying “parthenogenesis.”

Looking forward to Friday night and a story about a man who thinks he’s Ajax.

After some Chinese food.

 

Heartstopper - a Netflix series review in two parts

Part I: the sex and gender context of the series 

I grew up in a time when sex and gender were two easily distinguished concepts: sex was a biological term that assumed all mammals, including humans, fell into one of two separate categories: male or female. Males could be identified at birth by being born with a penis; females by being born with a vagina.  If anybody wanted to explore further, they could define male and female on the basis of hormones and/or chromosomal patterns. This distinction applied in 98.3% of births. In 1.7% of the cases, there was some ambiguity.

In contrast to sex, the biological category, there was gender, a sociological category. Gender was defined as the norms of behavior in any given society, and the roles males and females were expected to play. When I went to high school, for example, all the boys had a class called "shop" where we learned to operate machinery and use construction tools, and all the girls had a class where they learned to cook and sew. Things were neat and clean, in other words, in terms of sex and gender.

When it came to sexuality, and it became clear that some people had same-sex attractions, we began to hear more and more of the term homosexuality. My first encounter with the word was when somebody explained to me that "homos" - meaning male homosexuals - were men who wanted to be women. And that meant that there had to be another category - lesbians - or "women who wanted to be men."  Another word in common usage to refer to both male and female homosexuals was queer.

Complications quickly set in. What about people who were attracted to both sexes?  We called them bisexuals.  The English language had to adapt to the quickly changing terms in common use. Just as nigger became taboo and was replaced by Negro, or colored, and then black, and then Afro-American and then African-American, homo, the disparaging word at the level of colored, was replaced by gay - at least by people who defined themselves that way. After a time, women began to prefer the term lesbian, as opposed to gay and homo, terms that made people think first of males, and women were often invisible. In time, lesbians and gays developed a political consciousness, and the term LGBT came into being - for lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transsexuals - sometimes augmented by Q for queer, once a synonym for homo, now drummed into service to cover the broad category of people who resisted being put into boxes of categories. For some, even queer was not enough and they wanted to add a plus sign, making the organization name:  LGBTQ+.  Queer has since even taken on a loftier essence, and can be found even in academia, where more and more schools now offer Queer Studies programs.

Without going into the details of historical development, many people in the trans community now find that transsexual carries the same onus as colored and homosexual, that it smacks of medicalization and is somehow demeaning. They prefer to use transgender (trans for short) exclusively as an umbrella term to cover what was previously understood by the separate terms transsexuals, cross-dressers, genderqueers, androgynous people, and gender non-conforming people.  I will follow that practice here.

One more term is necessary, though: cisgender (cis for short) refers to someone whose internal sense of gender corresponds with the sex the person was identified as having at birth.  And it's nice to be back when the world was simpler and we can work with either/or categories.

Part II: Heartstopper - a review with commentary

Heartstopper is a teenage romance written by Alice Oseman and brought to the screen by Netflix: Season 1 in April 2022, Season 2 in August 2023, and Season 3, just now, in October 2024. Despite a plot line that sometimes goes a bit over-the-top (more kisses per square inch and more I love you's) it's a sweet romance clearly written to make the LGBT community feel warm and welcomed and maybe proud.  It's an ensemble piece centered on sixteen year old Nick and fifteen-year-old Charlie and moves glacially slowly through three seasons of teenage angst starting with first attempts to come out, and ending with a mental health issue, specifically an eating disorder, in the third season, after passing through struggles with parental control, bullying, and whether to go to college and if so where. Mostly it's about kissing and partying and gossiping and self-doubt at an Olympic level.

I viewed the story through an old-man's eyes (these are the only eyes I have), stumbling at times over the extreme naiveté and having to remind myself these are just kids and what I'm calling naive can just as readily be called innocence - and sweetness. There isn't much "story" to the 24 episodes, 8 per season, exactly, other than the crushes and coming out tensions,  who's going to ask who to be their girlfriend/boyfriend and when are they going to be ready to take kissing to the next level. Not a lot of surprises. Just kissing and more kissing.

Back in the old days I used to squirm at social realism. I saw it as kitsch. Cliché. Lack of artistic imagination. But I have a soft spot for people trying to make life better for LGBT people, and particularly the trans community, what with the ugly politicization they have to face these days from people trying to turn back the clock. OK, so the smoochie-smoochie was in-your-face excessive and the stereotypes were stereotypes. When you reach the end of the third season, you are relieved that Charlie (spoiler alert) has finally gotten over his fear of taking his shirt off in front of Nick. And there is something quite appealing about a bunch of kids who do absolutely everything collectively and make a point of being each other's support system.

The characters are Charlie (gay), Nick (bi), Elle (trans), Darcy and Tara (non-binary), Isaac (asexual and a-romantic). Additional characters are the resident homophobe, Harry, the teacher combo, Mr. Farouk and Mr. Ajayi; there's another trans character, Naomi, and three adult characters, an aunt, a grandmother, and a therapist, who are all super supportive. Haven't seen anything this gay-friendly since that wonderful film, Big Eden, where the character leaves New York and finds love in his Alaskan home town.

In the end, I love it that we are finally making queer love stories and putting queer characters in the starring roles. Kit Connor, who plays Nick, was forced to declare himself as bi in real life a couple years ago - would prefer he had been allowed to do that in his own time, but given his role in making LGBT people more salonfähig (fit for the salon), maybe that's no longer such a big deal. Joe Locke, who is from the Isle of Man, plays Charlie, as an out-and-proud gay man, came out to his mother at the age of twelve and is apparently responsible for getting the British government to allow blood donations from gay men once more.

All things considered, despite my initial decision to pass this one up as being too much about teenage romance, i.e., not my farm; not my animals, I find myself hoping there will be a Season 4, hoping that Nick and Charlie are real and not just TV characters, and might actually get married. And will send me an invitation.

My suit is ready to go in for cleaning and pressing, my black shoes are polished and I am looking forward to a trip to London.

photo credit