Boots - a review of the TV series

It's easy these days to succumb to dismay or even depression over the efforts of the oafish Pied Piper in the White House to dismantle democracy in the U.S.A.  Two hundred and fifty years we've been at this project, trying to include more and more of the American populace into our sometimes hit sometimes miss effort to make the Enlightenment ideals in our founding documents a reality.  We are in an era where our steps forward seem to be wiped out by steps backwards.  But... but... I'm writing this on October 18 and the images are coming in of millions in the streets of all fifty states on No Kings Day, so the fat lady ain't sung yet.

It's always useful to be reminded of how far we've come.  It's for that reason I just sat through the eight Netflix episodes of Boots, a series inspired by The Pink Marine, a book by Greg Cope White, about his experiences as a gay man in the Marines in the days before "Don't Ask Don't Tell."  Normally I don't take a lot of pleasure in beating my head against the wall, but I read somewhere that the fact that it was spread over eight episodes meant it was able to track the progress of gay liberation in the military that paralleled the progress in society at large, and who doesn't like happy endings?

There were times when I thought I'd wandered into enemy territory.  Boots is gay history and ultimately a coming out story with a happy ending.  But it is also a full-throated endorsement of the world of macho men and the U.S. Marines.  The story takes place at a basic training camp where "boys are made into men" - i.e., where they learn to shout "kill" at every opportunity and grit their teeth against pain.  I wanted to turn it off at times.  The reason I didn't was that the acting was superb and the gay characters were complex personalities.  There are multiple sub-plots, all shedding light on contemporary American minority groups.  The lead character, Cameron, and his best friend, Ray, join the Marines to get away from home. Cameron is running from his mother's neglect, Ray from his father's pitiless machismo.  They wonder at times if they haven't moved from the frying pan into the fire when Cam gets bullied for being gay and Ray for being a mixed-race kid.  There's a lot of bullying, in fact.  The recruits are not the most enlightened of folk.

I discovered, once I got far enough into it, that one of Boots' producers was Norman Lear. The company is headed by a female captain, there are twin brothers working out family dynamics, a suicide, masochistic leadership, and plenty of examples of selfish kids learning to care for their fellow recruits.The characters grow and mature over time, and that is probably the reason why I couldn't put it down.  It's a superb sociological study of America's difficulty in handling its diversity.  

And lots of jingoism and chauvinism.  You have to take the less appealing with the more appealing.

Semper fi!

The Penguin Lessons - a film review

 I went to live in Argentina for several months in 2007 when friends of mine decided to accompany their daughter there for a gap year before she started college. I had been there before to visit them in Bariloche, a town in Patagonia known for harboring both Nazis fleeing arrest after World War II and Argentines being chased by the military dictatorship which held the country in its grip from 1976 to 1983. That incongruity - the town is famous for its chocolates and its Swiss chalets - led me to dig into the history of the "dirty war,"  in which opponents were snatched off the street and stuffed into Ford Falcons and dropped into the ocean from helicopters, and where children were stolen from their families and given to military families to raise as their own.  I had grown up in a German-heritage family and knew a lot about evil in theory, but here now in Argentina I got to see it and feel it up close.

An old friend recommended a 2024 movie just out on Netflix called The Penguin Lessons.  It's based on a memoir of an English teacher in Buenos Aires who encounters a penguin covered in oil slick while on a vacation trip to Uruguay, cleans the penguin up and smuggles it back to Buenos Aires. The lead actor is English comedian Steve Coogan.  I began this review with the political background - the story takes place in the early days of the dictadura - because it's the elephant in the room.  A better metaphor would be to call it the weak link. The story is sweet and almost impossibly endearing - what's not to love about a penguin paddling around the house - but the fascists get let off lightly, and that keeps the film from succeeding, in my opinion.  It's still a lovely experience when you're in need of a feel-good evening in front of the screen, but it does require you to leave your conscience in check a bit.  Perhaps more than just a bit.

I wanted to find a way to tell you I'd come across a delightful film I'd like to recommend to you, but I find the encounter with fascism that we find ourselves in at present contextualizes much of how I see the world these days, and certainly makes it impossible to avoid mentioning the fascism of Argentina half a century ago that has left a permanent mark on my conscience. Like the protagonist Steve Coogan character, who fails to come to the aid of a friend as she is being arrested, I stumble around looking for a place to start, and find myself stumped over what action I can take, other than to call out what I see happening right in front of us, as a bare minimum.

Watch the film.  Enjoy the warm embrace of the characters.  Let yourself be delighted by an animal who mates for life and let your mind run free over reflections on loyalty, living with evil and deciding when to lie low and when to speak up.

Netflix.

Revival - a review

A friend, whose opinions I tend to share, put me on to the 2017 movie Revival, available on Roku. It is the story of a Southern Baptist preacher in rural Arkansas who is torn between his conviction that homosexuality is an unforgivable sin and his attraction for a drifter who comes to his church one day looking for food and shelter.

Read no further until you've seen the film.  I can't do a decent review without revealing the ending.

Because the topic matter concerns the intersection of religion and homosexuality, it was a given that I would be strongly drawn in by the story.

And right up to the ending, I assumed, as the plot unfolded, that this would be just another tale of the imbecility of homophobic evangelical bigotry and I would be writing a critical review of the film, listing predictability as its main weakness.

When the ending turned out to be anything but predictable, I was blown away. I then had to take a bit of time to consider why it left such a bad taste in my mouth.

At first I concluded that what I expected was that the gay preacher would see the light and choose love and affection over the rigidity of evangelical homophobia. And the fact that the bad guys won this one pissed me off.

But that thought gave way to the conviction that the story simply went off the track.  The preacher had displayed nothing but decency and sincerity up to this point.  Why would he act so out of character?

And that thought then gave way to the argument in my head that his self-loathing, clearly the motivation for his actions at the end, was sufficiently intense to explain the ending after all.

Add to this act of murder the actions of the minor characters, the blood lust of Trevor, the incestuous thoughts of Jimmy, the greed and duplicity of the rival pastor in the town, and you've got, if not an actual horror film, a depiction of Christian folk filled with sin and depravity.

The weakness of Roman Catholicism, Protestants are wont to say, is that the clergy have too much power: they can forgive the worst of sins in the confessional. The weakness of Judaism, by contrast, is that there is little emphasis on doctrine or belief; what counts is going through the motions. When evangelical Protestants turn the focus on themselves, their failure to live up to the impossible demands of Sermon-on-the-Mount morality means that the overwhelming majority of them are caught in an endless cycle of sin and imperfection. And a moral code in which sexual acts are right up there with murder and deceit, if not out ahead in importance.  Add to that the fact that the church is made up of a large number of emotion-junkies, people who "feel the spirit" and confuse the thrill with religious sincerity.

Watching a community of evangelicals display these sins to an almost exaggerated degree makes you question why anyone should be attracted to religion. Was this the real goal of the filmmaker?

If so, maybe I need to give the film a much higher grade than a B-minus.  And the acting is first rate.

And if in the end I still have a bone I have to pick, it is with the book, not the movie version of the story.

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

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

Nobody Wants This - a TV comedy series review

Just out on Netflix is a first-class romantic comedy called Nobody Wants This. The thing nobody wants is supposed to be a marriage between a Jew and a non-Jew. In spades.  Between a rabbi and a blond Los Angeles shiksa so clueless about Judaism that she has apparently never heard the word "shalom" before - a bit of a stretch for anyone living in modern America.

The young couple who fall in love are Joanne, played by Kristen Bell and Noah, played by Adam Brody. Joanne makes a living working on a podcast called Nobody Wants This, hence the title, with her sister, Morgan. The two girls have an antagonistic rivalry which they let play out on the podcast and which makes their dialogue interesting. Noah is a cool with-it modern-day rabbi with ambitions to become head rabbi at a major synagogue. The two meet at a party and have an instant, totally convincing, attraction to each other.

The dialogue is hilarious. Really witty. The supporting characters really support the plot, moving it along by contributing additional incongruities: Bina, Noah's mother isn't quite the smothering Jewish mother type, although she plays out the stereotype by trying to pull this "shiksa" and her son apart. Sasha, Noah's brother, is a natural comedian and you can't wait to hear what he's going to say next.

It helps that the Noah character seems to have it all in spades. He's handsome. He is smart, generous and understanding to a fault, compassionate and never ever appears to lose his cool. You can't not like Noah. Joanne is, with her total cluelessness about Judaism, less appealing, but the pairing seems to work. The actors are friends in real life, and that no doubt helps make them believable as a couple.

Less believable is Noah's willingness to allow himself to let a non-Jewish girl into his life, given his lifelong ambition to have a successful career as a rabbi, and it is this existential struggle for Judaism to survive that is the elephant in the room nobody wants to pay attention to, except on the obvious superficial level.

It is unfair of me, and unrealistic, to expect a rom-com to confront the issue of anti-semitism on an existential level. Elise Foster, the author, herself a convert to Judaism, takes it as far as it can go without getting too far into the weeds and asking the real questions: can anybody in the modern world support a group that believes it cannot survive without closing the door to the outside world?  And can Jews survive as a people if they don't? Can one suggest that it's individuals who need help surviving and not ethnic or cultural groups without sounding - or being - anti-semitic?

I'll leave it there. To say more is to spoil the plot ending, and it's too good a production for me to risk doing that. Does Joanne get her man? Does Rabbi Noah fulfill his lifetime dream of becoming chief rabbi?

You'll need to watch the series to find out. 

You won't be sorry; it's a first-rate comedy with characters you're very likely to fall in love with.

Rewatching Six Feet Under

I have just finished binge-watching, for the second time in twenty years, Six Feet Under.

I waited twenty years, I realize, for the same reason I waited years before I could rewatch Brokeback Mountain: some works of fiction can be even more powerful than reality; they can grab you by the spine and make you stop whatever else you're doing and give it all your attention.

Six Feet Under first came out as a series in 2001 and ran through 2005. I was home on sabbatical during part of that time and used to gather with half a dozen friends once a week to watch it together. We recognized its power then, and I have to say that power has not diminished in the two decades since.

If you are not familiar with it, it is the story of three families, the Fishers, the Chenowiths and the Diazes. It takes place in a funeral home in Los Angeles and begins with the death of Nathaniel Fisher Sr., whose car is hit by a bus on Christmas Eve on his way to the airport to pick up Nate, Jr., a kind of prodigal son who ran away to live in Seattle to escape getting drawn into the family funeral home business. At home is Nate's younger brother, David, a "good little son" and closeted gay man; their sister, Claire, still in her late teens who feels very much like the "also ran" child of the family; and their mother, Ruth, who has perfected the art of turning herself into a doormat while at the same time never surrendering the right to lay expectations on everyone else in sight. 

While waiting for his father, Nate meets and has sex in a public restroom with Brenda Chenowith, who has a psychologically incestuous connection to her bipolar brother Billy.  Billy frequently causes real havoc when he stops taking his meds so that he can "feel again" from time to time. They are the children of two sexually-disturbed psychiatrists who have imprinted their kinks and hangups onto the souls of their children and seem not to know what they've done or care.

The third family consists of Federico "Rico" Diaz, a restorative artist who works at the Fisher Funeral Home, his wife and two boys. They seem to have been included primarily to contrast how a supposedly "normal" family falls apart.  Just in case you missed the point that this show is about dysfunctionality.

This second-time around, Six Feet Under, no surprise, had a wholly different impact on me. The first time I zeroed in on the gay characters and the comic effect of the dysfunctionality of the Fisher and Chenowith families. This time, as an old man whose friends and acquaintances are dying faster than I can keep up with them, and whose own death, now that I've been diagnosed with a terminal disease, is, if not imminent, at least in sight, I naturally saw the 63-episode series as being more than anything else about how one contends with death.

It wasn't long before I began to feel the same impatience I feel with virtually all series-length productions. Eventually the time comes when you get annoyed with the failure of the characters to learn from their mistakes. Here, as in most soap operas, character flaws are all over the place: Nate is clueless, Billy is pathologically self-involved, Ruth is a textbook case of passive aggressivity, etc. It's hard to like these people; you find yourself wanting to slap some sense into them. But a moment's reflection makes clear that this response is evidence how good the writing is, and when I reached the 63rd and final episode, which is all about how the characters die in the future, an episode which has justifiably been called the finest ending ever written in a television series, I found myself mourning their passing, and sitting quietly for the longest time wishing I could bring them all back to life.

There are scenes along the way that are over-the-line heavy.  The one about sudden infant death syndrome - crib death - was one. But the one that wouldn't let go is the one in which David is car-jacked by a crazed psychopath pretending to have car trouble. David stops and offers to help when the guy pulls a gun on him and makes him dump the body David is transporting, then makes him get out of the van, pours gasoline on him and sticks a pistol in his mouth before laughing and driving off with the van, leaving his gasoline-soaked victim to find his way home. Keith too is living with a memory he can't shake of killing a man who points a gun at him in a struggle.  David and Keith both struggle to overcome shame and guilt over not being able to seize control in a moment of life-and-death consequence. and can't get themselves to recognize and accept how powerless they were to change the way things came down.

A major player in the plot line is the evolution of gay rights.  When the story begins, homophobia is still ever-present and Keith is frustrated with David for being so resistant to coming out. By the end of the series, five years later, David and Keith are married and adopting two abandoned boys.  They have come through the struggle to form a mixed-race family - Keith is black, as are the boys, and David is white - with two daddies, and it's David who is, if anything, the more progressive and enlightened of the two.  Alan Ball, the writer and producer of Six Feet Under is himself gay, and the story is a beautiful example of his activism. The warmth of the social realism - if that's what it is - contrasts with the starkness of all the death and dysfunctionality.

I don't know if I'd recommend the show to everyone. The language is coarse, the sex is kinky and often overwrought, and focusing on death is understandably not everyone's idea of a good time activity. But if you believe, as I do, that movies, whether made for the big screen or for television, are the art form of our day, you could do much worse than binge on Six Feet Under.

 photo credit

left to right in photo: David Fisher, (played by Michael C. Hall, of Dexter fame); Ruth Fisher (Frances Conroy); Claire (Lauren Ambrose), Nate (Peter Krause), Brenda (Rachel Griffiths), Keith (Mathew St. Patrick), Federico Diaz (Freddy Rodriguez)

The Boyfriend - a review

A gay reality show?  From Japan?  You've got to be kidding.  Could Japan's essentially conservative nature really have undergone this dramatic - not to say unbelievable - transformation in recent years?  I thought Japanese society was an inherently homophobic society.  Not of the thuggish Islamicist sort where gays are thrown off of tall buildings, or even of the gay-basher sort common to many parts of Europe and America, but of a kinder gentler sort, where gays are simply shunned for being just a bit too far over the line from "normal" behavior.

That's one possible reaction many will likely have after watching the Netflix production just out called The Boyfriend. And it was my first reaction, as someone who has spent twenty-four years of his life in Japan in two segments, one from 1970 to 1974 and a second one, after a hiatus of fifteen years, from 1989 to 2006, plus several shorter stays in between. I was an out gay man from San Francisco, but I determined it was in my best interest when I took a job as a professor at a Japanese university to go back in the closet. True, that may have been an unduly fearful decision on my part - and I did come out again in time - but I had plenty of confirmation from other LGBT men and women that I was doing the smart thing.

But - to return to the topic of the Netflix ten-episode series The Boyfriend, there are at least a couple of much simpler, more straightforward explanations for why a reality show with gay characters should suddenly appear on Japanese television. One is that gay liberation is finally catching up with Japan. It's not ready yet to allow same-sex marriages, but five months ago, in March of this year, both a Tokyo district court and a Sapporo high court challenged the ban on same-sex marriage, and it would appear it's only a matter of time. Netflix is probably seizing the moment.  Whether for cynical reasons (gays are still an entertaining curiosity) or profit-motive reasons (romance sells and the general population is now ready for LGBT love stories) I leave for others to figure out.

Another explanation is that it's not a particularly remarkable event in the first place. Japan has traditionally allowed parallel worlds to exist between people in the everyday world and people in the arts. Japan is the land of the geisha, after all, and men in drag appear regularly on modern-day television, especially in talk shows dominated by people known as "talents" - people who dress in unusual costumes selected to push the envelope into shock, outrage or simply silliness. These folk assume the role of soothsayers, supposedly insightful social commentators, although their contributions sometimes get so sophomoric and inane that you find yourself thankful people don't wear shoes inside the house or you'd be flinging them at your TV screen. 

The presence of such a group in this show - call them the Japanese version of a Greek chorus - begs the question of what exactly a so-called reality show is anyway.  And invites the observation that it is anything but real, but rather nothing more than a form of performance art designed to stimulate and titillate a bored audience looking for ever new and original entertainment. The group includes Otake Masaki, who goes by the stage name Durian ("the king of the fruits") Lollobrigida, who comes out in normal male dress at the start but gets more and more into his drag personalities as the show goes on.

The set-up is a simple one: nine unattached gay men, raging in age from 22 to 34, gather together at a resort by the sea for a month, allegedly to find friendship and love - with a camera following their every remark and facial expression.  Believe that's "reality" and I've got a bridge to sell you.  To build a closer bond between them, they are assigned the job of driving off to the beach each morning to sell coffee and cookies to the general public, although "general" isn't the right word, since the number of customers is small enough for the focus to remain on the personalities of the two gay characters in the coffee truck as they interact with customers one at a time, even bringing cups of coffee to their table. Camera running, of course.

An obvious question is why anybody would think you can simply throw people together and expect them to fall in love with each other, or, at minimum, form lasting meaningful relationships. That question is addressed directly by a member of the Greek chorus who makes the observation, "Anybody can fall in love with anybody."

In addition to the nine love-seekers and the "talents" (Greek chorus) there is another important but unseen character: from time to time a laptop dings and somebody opens it and reads a message from on high. This godlike character determines their daily activities, chiefly who will take the coffee truck out on any given day. He (it is a masculine voice) also has them do such things as write anonymous notes as a secret admirer and drop them in the mailbox each one has on their door. On several occasions, the boss-man decides they will have an overnight with a person of their choice who agrees to the arrangement.

As simplistic as the notion is expressed by the authority in the machine (the laptop) that "We hope you will find an irreplaceable partner," the reality performers play along. Rather than understanding that friendships take years to form and depend on observing the other in all kinds of character-revealing situations, they seem willing to believe the observation of a simple act of kindness, or generosity, or even politeness, is sufficient to make one fall in love. It marks them as astonishingly superficial.

At the same time, because the filmed interactions are so sanitized, we only get to see these guys on their best behavior. There is no cruelty, no harshness, no violence, no meanness. If anything, they display the stereotypical Japanese feature of being other-oriented to such an extreme that you need a Greek chorus to speculate over what's going on behind the masks of politeness they are all wearing.

At the same time, they do reveal markedly different character differences over time, giving some credibility to the producer who claims he selected the characters for their diversity of type. Two of the more extreme differences show up in the connection established by the two youngest participants, Dai and Shun, who do (spoiler alert) actually become a couple by the end of the series. Dai is outgoing and assertive (he sends Shun a dick-pic at one point); Shun is pathologically shy and suffers from an obvious inferiority complex. Shun is the kind of guy you'd expect to say, "I couldn't possibly fall in love with somebody stupid enough to fall in love with me."

Kazuto is everybody's first choice of a best-friend type. He comes in on Day One with food and continues to prepare meals for his colleagues - he is a cook and restaurant owner in real life. Another stand-out is Usak, a nationally well-known go-go boy who enters in Episode 2 and leaves early in Episode 5. He has a handsome face and is built like a brick shithouse. He lacks articulateness initially, but manages to bring everybody to tears when he leaves, and clearly has what it takes to break down the cool of Chef Kazuto, who otherwise plays his cards close to his chest.

And I trust my remarks in the previous paragraph reveal what I think the show has going for it, despite the charge of superficiality and banality: the characters may be not all you'd like them to be, but they are by and large sympathetic characters you come to root for. If this program is in fact staged, which Durian Lolobrigida claims it is not but I nonetheless suspect it is, it is well-staged with a well-composed plot line.  And that makes it worth watching. I've heard many non-Japanese comment over the years that they find Japanese too anodyne to actively like or dislike, and that was my first take on Japanese too until I made Japan my home and came to understand that its rich and complex culture makes it a world-class civilization, which contains the full range of human personality differences, unlike the manicured personalities in The Boyfriend.

Watching "gay boys" as they go about looking for love will not be everybody's cup of tea, even if this so-called reality show does turn out to be real. But in notable contrast to all the violence, blood, gore and duplicity in the shows Netflix brings to market, this one is refreshing, uplifting, and in the end, immensely sympathetic. I am not sure I share the Rotten Tomatoes rating of 100%. It moves slowly and youthful indecisiveness isn't at the top of my list of fun things to spend your time on. But if you have the patience, I think you will find it is worth the watch.

The characters are, in order of introduction:

1. Dai, age 22, a college student

2. Taeheon, age 34, a designer originally from South Korea, notably not out to his parents as a gay man

3. Ryota, 28, a model, a barista - considers himself a bisexual

4. Gensei, 34, a hair and make-up artist

5. Shun Nakanishi, 23, musician

6. Kаzuto, 27, cook and manager of an izakaya-type restaurant, everybody's favorite among the group 

7. Usak, 36, a nationally known go-go dancer

8. Alan, 28, a mixed-race (Brazilian/Japanese) guy who grew up in Japan, works for an IT company

9. Ikuo, 22, the late-comer, works in the food industry

Eric - a Netflix Series review

Back in the day when I first became aware of the talented English actor Benedict Cumberbatch - I think it was when he was playing Sherlock Holmes -  I had trouble remembering his name. It kept coming out Cummerbund Bandersnatch.  Since then, I've been blown away by the astonishing breadth of his talents as actor and public figure and become a big fan. I won't go into the lengthy list of his accomplishments; you can find them listed on his Wikipedia page. 

He's on my mind at the moment because I've just finished the six-part Netflix Series, Eric, in which he plays the role of Vincent Anderson, a man with exceptional artistic talents. He is the father of Edgar (Ivan Howe), an equally talented nine-year-old who yearns in vain for his father's attention. The neglect leads to devastating consequences; the son goes missing and for a long time we don't know whether he has run away or been kidnapped and the story evolves into a thriller. Two other characters play major roles in the drama: Cassie, Vincent's wife, Edgar's mother (Gaby Hoffman), and a missing persons police detective, Michael Ledroit (McKinley Belcher III). Driving the plot is the fact that Edgar has had to witness regular violent conflicts between his father and mother and the fact that Detective Ledroit, known as Micky, has to relive another kidnapping case eleven months earlier where the victim died.

Some of the plot line can come across as trite or pedantic. Micky is black, as was the former kidnap victim, and he suspects not only that white racist NYPD cops were involved, but that his immediate surpervisor's refusal to let him investigate Edgar's disappearance properly is somehow connected.  This is the 1980s, Micky is gay and his lover is dying of AIDS, and the racism, no surprise, is accompanied by homophobia. But most of the tension stems from watching Vincent fall prey to alcoholism and drugs, even becoming a suspect in his own son's disappearance at one point. This is where BC adds even greater acting chops to his bulging list of accomplishments.

Besides Vincent, Cassie, Edgar and Micky, there is a fifth major character, the one the series is named for: Eric.  Vincent is the creator of a kid's television show called Good Day, Sunshine, a puppet show widely known across the country (think Sesame Street). When the producers insist the show needs a new character to boost ratings, Vincent decides that puppet should be Eric, a furry monster invented by his son, hoping that Edgar will see the character and understand that his father is trying to reconnect with his lost son and want to come home.

In his drunken stupors Vincent begins to see Eric as a real character and talks aloud to him, even in the presence of others, leading them to conclude that he has lost his mind. Eric plays the role of Vincent's conscience, uttering one harsh bit of self-criticism after another.

The plot gets a bit woozy at the end. I won't spoil things by revealing how the story progresses toward a conclusion. And I can't guarantee that everybody will find it in their hearts to forgive the character flaws of Vincent; they are seriously reprehensible.

But that, in a nutshell, is why I think so highly of Benedict Cumberbatch's performance. I don't think I've ever seen a character this troubled and difficult to forgive that I felt I could relate to. Few actors, I think, could pull that off.

But then I've already shown myself to be among those who believe BC is that good.

photo credit

Society of the Snow - a film review

This is a first for me, commenting on a film I can't praise highly enough for its conception, production, acting and message while suggesting that most people might find it too unpleasant to watch. I'm talking about the film streaming on Netflix since January called La Sociedad de la Nieve - Society of the Snow, in English. It's a film version of a book by the same name about a plane crash in the Andes in 1972, in which a crew of Uruguayan rugby players, on their way to a game in Chile, were reduced to cannibalism to stay alive.

I'm in good company in thinking the film is exceptionally worthy of the awards it has received and the positive commentary. It obviously took some doing to get past the gruesome facts of terror associated with being in a plane crash and cannibalism.

Society of the Snow takes head-on the question of how far we would all go to stay alive. Its central focus is the meaning of life. At various points throughout the 72-day-long ordeal the sixteen survivors of the crash had to contend with not just the possibility but the likelihood that they would freeze or starve to death.

I watched the film only because a friend without Netflix access asked to watch it at my house, so for me it was more a social event than a film-watching experience. The first fifteen or twenty minutes or so I nearly left the room because the images of air turbulence (I've never been a comfortable flier) and the terror of the crash made me wonder why one would subject oneself to this degree of horror. But once it began to sink in just how well the film was put together, I became glued to the screen. It's two and a half hours long, but the tension is compensated for by the gradual discovery of the high quality of filmmaker, J. A. Bayona's direction.  It was filmed in chronological order so that the actors could lose weight and make the notion of slow starvation come alive. Ditto with the growth of facial hair, chapped lips and damage to the skin on their faces. The actors speak Rioplatense Spanish, i.e., the language of the actual victims of the 1972 Uruguayan crash victims.

What came through as powerful filmmaking even more than these efforts to create verisimilitude, though, was the spiritual message of what it can mean when people face hard times as a team and hold to integrity despite temptation to let the devil take the hindmost.  Advocates of sports as a means of instilling character in kids have an ally in this film; one assumes it is the victims' conditioning to function as a single cooperating unit that kept them alive. 

Further, the survivors actually debate the morality of using the flesh of their friends to stay alive on. The biggest hurdle is not the disgust of the very idea of cannibalism but the fact that they were never given permission by the dead victims to use their bodies in such a way. In the end, those in the throes of dying actually make a point of extending that permission to their colleague-survivors. I suspect most viewers of this film will wonder for some time whether they would embrace death rather than engage in cannibalism. How many moments in our lives have we felt obliged to ask such ethical questions?

Watching Society of the Snow was a memorable experience. I repeat: I cannot in good faith recommend that you watch it - it's beyond gruesome. But if you can grin and bear it, watch it as a sign of respect for film as an art form which some people handle with a great show of talent.  And be glad there are folk unafraid to ask meaningful life-and-death moral questions.

Society of the Snow is a film to watch - not on a casual night out, but - when you're ready to give some time to a serious consideration of the meaning of life.

photo credit: 

The Comey Rule - a belated film commentary

I got into a discussion with an old friend the other day about one of philosophy's most nagging questions: do we have free will? Are our thoughts and behaviors determined by forces external to ourselves - our upbringing, the values of our tribe, something the postmodernists speak of when they talk about "narrative"? Or are we free to choose those values, attitudes and beliefs we want to live by and is there such a thing as objective truth to guide us in making those choices?

My view is that while objective truth is often elusive, we are better off assuming such a thing does exist and acting accordingly. "Enlightenment values" - values based on the conviction that all human beings are born with equal rights, that man-made categories such as race and ethnicity and the hierarchies we build around them should not be what determines the rules of society we live by.

The post-modernist take on things - that we don't live by truth but by the stories we tell ourselves - has taken hold so thoroughly and so powerfully that our national debate in America is now determined by it. The Republican Party has been captured by a self-serving narcissist who has brought the country to the point where it is entirely possible it may surrender its 250-year pursuit of democracy, an ideal form of government sought after and never quite reached, because a critical mass of Americans have determined that the power of the presidency should be in the hands of a strong authoritarian leader, and that it doesn't matter whether that leader speaks objective truth, since objective truth, according to post-modernists doesn't exist anyway. What matters is law and order, control, enforcement of authority. 

I have a hard time listening to well-intentioned people bewail the polarization of the American electorate. What we need, they say, is an ability to compromise, a move to common ground, an acceptance of other people's ways of doing things. For me, it's not polarization that is the trouble, it's the willingness to grant authority to a strongman rather than pursue the hard work of living with our differences.

Democrats are beginning, at long last, to recognize that in a battle between principled and unprincipled folk, the bad guys have the advantage. If you don't have to tell the truth, you can persuade others to believe in conspiracies and expect to get away with it. Comedians - the people most of us get our news from these days - have had a field day satirizing Trump's penchant for making things up. But lost in the laughter is the fact that the polls show him neck-in-neck with Biden in the 2024 presidential race.

The response to this challenge, it seems to me, is for Democrats to fight fire with fire. I don't mean to play dirty, to lay out a parallel false narrative, but to give up on the idea of "reaching across the aisle." Ever since Newt Gingrich put in place the value of winning at all costs and making fools of naive legislators across the aisle from him, Democrats have allowed the Republicans to ride roughshod over them. I am delighted to see Biden begin to call out the dishonesty he is up against. Others in the Democratic Party should follow suit.

Another way of fighting back against deception of Trumpist magnitude is to take a cue from the Buddhist practice of regarding bad news and the dark side of life not as reality but as products of the mind, artificially constructed out of theoretical material. Rather than agonize over a world gone sour through human malfeasance, imagine ideas as if they were in a bubble floating before your eyes. "Oh, look," you say to yourself when somebody drives anger or deception in your direction, "there's a bubble of anger floating up there in the air. I've got some choices. I can take it in and let it wreak havoc with my state of mind. Or I can pop it.  Or just let it float around there in the air until it burns itself out and no longer feels relevant." Nothing is certain, say the Buddhists, except change. All things do pass in time.

I've had some success with this strategy of handling danger and bad news. I've been able to avoid pushing the panic button, take deep breaths, and repeat one of my father's favorite biblical verses: "Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof." 

Until this week, I was doing pretty well in following that coping strategy. But then I became aware that the Supreme Court was choosing not to deal with the question of a president's immunity from prosecution in favor of speculating over the danger that a president might not want to leave office for fear of such prosecution. So much for my resolve not to get upset over the American political scene. I'm taking seriously the claim that the Biden-Trump race is neck-and-neck and the only thing that would be likely to sway voters on the fence would be for them to see him actually convicted for one or more of his crimes. Or, at least, to hear the kind of information that would come out in a trial. Unfortunately, the majority of the members of the Supreme Court seem hell-bent on delaying any such trials, exposing their hand as political appointees to the court with a political debt to pay, rather than men (those furthering delay are all men) of integrity committed not to a boss-man but to the rule of law.

The Republican Party has noble origins. It was formed as a party of resistance to the spread of slavery. Today it has become a party of deceit and hypocrisy. It purports to be in favor of small government, but at the same time insists on controlling the reproductive lives of American women. It comes down on the side of gerrymandering and convincing black voters to stay home on election day. And it now even rivals Fox News, the propaganda wing of the party, in its politicization of the Supreme Court.

What - I repeat the question - are the democrats to do to counter this force for deception and opposition to democratic ideals?

The bare minimum, I think, is to keep up the democratic narrative, to use the postmodernist term. Tell the "story" from the democratic perspective at every opportunity.

To give you an example - one of the best I can think of - we can haul out the likes of Jeff Daniels. Remember him in that wonderful scene from "The Newsroom" where he shuts down the question, "Why is America the greatest country in the world?" with the answer that it is not the greatest country in the world, and ticks off the many ways in which it falls behind?  It is, ironically, the democratic analogue to what Trump appeals to in his "Make America Great Again" campaign - except that his approach is based on actual ways to bring back American greatness, not to bring back white supremacy, the goal the MAGA folk are after.

Daniels does it again, this time in a two-part (four-hour) series available on Netflix, which was filmed in 2019 and came out in 2020.  He plays former FBI director James Comey, who took the heat for Hillary Clinton's loss to Trump in 2016. Actually, there is an even more powerful impact in the series than Daniels'. It comes from Brendan Gleeson's brilliant portrayal of the Donald. I challenge anyone to watch this couple go up against each other without taking sides. Comey has been accused of being "too righteous," but the script should put that inaccurate charge to rest. A telling scene is the one where Trump invites Comey to dinner - just the two of them. Comey tries to get out of it by insisting the head of the FBI and the Chief Executive need to scrupulously avoid an appearance of a collusion between the executive and the judicial branches of government. Trump has no use for such rules and tells Comey he's expecting "loyalty."

All through the series one member of the judiciary after another voices their concern that Trump will ride roughshod over Comey's principles. Which he does, of course, and in the most dramatic fashion.

I can't improve on James Poniewozik's excellent review in The New York Times of The Comey Rule in September 2020.  If you want to dig into the story, I recommend that you start there.  I am departing from my once firmly-held conviction that the art of the film should not be politicized. The stakes are too high.

And à propos post-modernism, and to counter my friend's argument that we are all simply telling our own narratives - with the implication that there is no single objective truth to be had - let me observe that when Trump first took office and kept Comey on, he praised him for his work in exposing Hillary as "crooked." But when it came time for Comey to "show his loyalty," and Comey preferred to tell the truth about what was going on, Trump turned on him and declared he was no damned good from the start. That story lines up with what is actually the case. It's not two stories different according to perspective; one is true, the other isn't.

Take the time. Get a Netflix subscription if you don't already have one.

The Comey Rule is one of the ways Americans have of fighting back against the Trumpist tyranny.  It is a must-see.

Fellow Travelers - a film review

 

A good reason for watching Fellow Travelers is that it stars easy-on-the-eyes Matt Bomer. His co-star, Jonathan Bailey, doesn't need to hide his face, either. Another good reason is that it is a pretty decent history of the history of gay liberation as well as a powerful condemnation of anti-black racism in America from the witch-hunting days of Senator McCarthy and Roy Cohen's manipulation of American fears of communism, and the "Lavender Scare" in the 1950s through the years of the AIDS crisis to the long-time-coming general acceptance of LGBT Americans of the modern day.

Fellow Travelers is both romance and political thriller.  Brought to the screen in eight episodes by Paramount, the 2007 fictional story by Thomas Mallon follows historical events closely enough to come across as a documentary. In fact, there are moments that brought back such ugly memories that I was tempted to shut it down. You'll need to steel yourself against the reminder that America's susceptibility to proto-fascist authoritarianism didn't begin with the current Trumpist effort to replace democracy with a Führer-and fear-centered regime, but has been a risk since 1787, when Benjamin Frankin answered the question, "What have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" with the ominous words, "A republic, if you can keep it."

And it's not just the external political scene that makes this a difficult watch at times. The flawed characters of Hawkins Fuller, played by Bomer, and also of Tim Laughlin, played by Bailey, are reminders that heroes can take their time growing into their roles. Bomer and Bailey are first-rate actors, but watching them stumble and occasionally fall is often painful.

I wish the filmmakers might have told the story with fewer jumps back and forth in time; I don't like having to retain multiple story-lines at once. But that's not a criticism as much as a preference, and some will appreciate the way that story-telling method can layer the richness of the characters. Chronologically, the story of the lovers begins when Tim comes to Washington as a theology student and meets and falls in love with Hawk. Hawk is a user and a climber, very much at home in the world of Washington political hypocrisy. We are left to wonder what draws them to each other, Tim the earnest romantic struggling with the demands of his Catholic faith on his sexuality, and Hawk, the diplomat living a double life, with wife and kids at home, and seedy contacts with rough trade when he can get away with it. Hawk personifies the expression "fellow traveler" of the title of the story, someone whose silence in the face of wrong-doing, enables that wrong-doing. Originally popularized by Trotsky to refer to supporters of communism who wouldn't make the effort to actually join the party, it still works today as a synonym of "enabler," the sort of person that tyrants and other miscreants depend on to make their policies socially acceptable.

An important sub-plot is the relationship between Marcus Gaines (Jelani Alladin), a black reporter for the New York Post who runs up against a ceiling keeping black perspectives out of the news and his lover, Frankie Hines (Noah J. Ricketts), a female impersonator, who reminds us that gay life once existed only in dark alleys or on the outskirts of town. Marcus gives up, in the end, and goes to write for Jet, a publication for blacks, tying together the two liberation struggles - for racial and sexual identity. Blacks and gays can make it, as long as they stay in their lane as entertainers and portray stereotypes to maintain the illusion the customers are looking for in theaters and nightclubs, as Marcus learns when he is refused entry to a club where Frankie is performing. A hypocrisy not exclusive to America, but certainly characteristic of its cultural values.

Fellow Travelers has been described as "a journey from shame to pride," if not for the lives of its leading characters, for the evolution in the larger world.  I don't want to spoil the viewing experience for those who want to make that journey, but if you are already familiar with American history from the nightmarish McCarthy era through Vietnam and the AIDS epidemic, you'll be prepared to accept that a journey through history is often a bumpy ride, not for the faint of heart. 

But watching actors bring it to life on screen, as they do in Fellow Travelers, can make it a trip very much worth making, all the same.

photo credit: 

Manhunt - a film review

I've just finished watching the first six episodes of Manhunt on AppleTV and am looking forward to April 19th, when the seventh and final episode is scheduled to be shown. It's the story of the pursuit of John Wilkes Booth, the confederate sympathizer who shot Abraham Lincoln in the back of the head and killed him for his efforts in eliminating slavery and holding the Union together.

It took me a while to get into the drama. As with every TV serial, it suffers from unavoidable flaws: the characters become tiresome because they keep making the same mistakes over and over again, the plot line is padded with irrelevancies, the characters change from good guys to bad guys and back again, often without discernible motivation.

I had trouble getting into Manhunt the first two or three episodes. The writing is loaded with anachronisms, the dialogue is hard to follow in places, and mostly I wanted to break away from the darkness of the world the story portrayed and retreat to something more uplifting.

In time, though, I got drawn in by the awareness that I was getting huge gaps filled in my knowledge of American history.  Good history can be as good as good fiction, especially when writers take liberties with it.  I learned the name John Wilkes Booth in a high school history class, as most American kids do, but it has never been more than just a piece of information useful perhaps when doing crossword puzzles or playing trivial pursuit, and nothing of serious consequence. I knew that he was an actor, and that's about it. Manhunt turns him into flesh and blood, somebody who matters enough to make you want to join a posse and dash off and catch him before he crosses the Potomac into Virginia and makes it back to safe ground in Richmond. It turns out the writing wasn't so bad, after all. Nor were the characters at all bland and indistinguishable from one another as I had thought there for a while.

Suddenly I had to pause the series and go to Wikipedia to get at the list of those characters. I knew Andrew Johnson was Lincoln's successor and I think I remember that he had been impeached for some reason, but I didn't know a thing about William H. Seward, or George Sanders, or Edwin Stanton. Or David Herold, or Samuel Mudd, or John and Mary Surratt. In the end, Manhunt is more about Edwin Stanton than about John Wilkes Booth. Stanton was the historical character the writer of Manhunt took the greatest liberty with. In reality he was a political opponent of Lincoln's who ended up joining his cabinet and becoming one of Lincoln's most trusted colleagues when he took on the job of Secretary of War. The Manhunt version of the man hunts Booth down and that's apparently fiction. What is not made up, though, apparently, is the counterweight Stanton was to Andrew Johnson.

The two men, Stanton and Johnson, fought over two of America's most crucial post Civil War challenges: how to go about reintegrating the rebel states back into the Union and what to do with the newly freed African slaves. Johnson advocated pretty much a forgive-and-forget policy with the states which had formed the Confederacy, and he was unmoved by the argument that the slaves lacked the ability to handle the responsibilities of the freedom they had just been given. Stanton felt justice demanded that treason be punished and that forty acres and a mule was the least the country could do to give black men and women a leg up in the challenge they faced now that they would be living alongside whites as equals.  It is one thing to remember that a hundred and sixty years since the Emancipation Proclamation we are still arguing over racism, segregation and the possibility of reparations. It's quite another to be taken back to a time when half the white men running the country barked orders at their black servants and called them by a name we today believe decent people should not even be allowed to say out loud in public. 

The revulsion that rushes over you at the depiction in Manhunt of white Americans coming to terms with the freeing of slaves in their midst puts the drama, even if it is partly fictionalized, in the same category as other films of recent years depicting slavery and racism. I'm thinking particularly of Lincoln in 2012 and 12 Years a Slave in 2013, and am sobered by the fact that a full decade has passed since those two powerful treatments of slavery in America were capturing so much attention. 

Manhunt is set in the historical period in which the Republican Party, led by Abraham Lincoln, was formed as the corrective to the failure of the founding fathers to pay more than lip service to the claim that "all men are created equal" in our founding documents.  You can't watch it without reflecting on the irony that that same Republican Party is now in the hands of white supremacists who want to "Make America Great Again." 

Does history have to repeat itself?  Is America destined to wipe out the society generated by Lincoln Republicans and replace it with one more in tune with his impeached "bring back the good old days" successor, President Andrew Johnson?

At some point watching Manhunt, I conjured up a vision of a Martian doctoral student doing research in Washington, D.C. for a thesis making the case that, although it took them over a century and a half, it was actually the Confederate States of America that won the Civil War.

Manhunt, it turns out, is not a downer to run from. It's the pick-me-up in the end I was wanting to search for.

Tore - a film review

I want to talk about another of those movies that seem to be piling up these days, the kind you watch and can't quite explain why because they are not all that good.

This one fits that category. It intrigued me no end. First off, I found I had an intense attraction to the writer, William Spetz, who also plays the lead role in the TV series. It's titled Tore.

It's Swedish and takes place in Stockholm.

Tore, the main character is, like Spetz who plays him, 27 years old. He's not a loser, exactly, but he has done nothing of note in his life, has lived at home with his father since his mother's death, has no ambition, has never had sex, never gotten drunk, can't drive a car. His father, and his best friend, a girl named Linn, believe he needs to be pushed out of the nest so he can get his life started.

It's painful to watch. His naiveté is cloying, and I no doubt would have turned the film off in the first twenty minutes if it were not for his eyebrows.   

His father gets hit by a garbage truck and dies, suddenly, and the entire plot line consists in watching this immature kid fail to grow up, fail to grieve, fail to do anything useful. If I'm correct about American tastes when I say Americans like people to be "good deep down inside" I'm probably also correct when I say Swedes don't have any need for their fictional characters to be good guys. They are willing to watch somebody bob on the waves and find themselves - or not - by the end of the 90 minutes it takes to tell their story.

While Tore has never had sex, his desires are same-sex desires, and he stumbles into sex, drugs and alcohol with equal clumsiness. We're supposed to believe the story is about a guy who can't process grief. It is that, but it's just as much about a guy who can't process much of anything that matters in life. He even sells his dog, at one point, the third creature in his life, along with Linn and his father, who love him unconditionally. Spetz, the writer, risks creating a character so devoid of character and interest, that you wonder at some point, as I said, why you're still watching. It can't be just the eyes and the eyebrows.

There are some very graphic sex scenes, and they are well played. The drag queens are talented and the child actors are well chosen.

A mixed bag of a movie. My guess is the reason I got to the end is that I couldn't believe this guy could mess up his life so badly; I had to wait to see the happy ending that I hoped would be there.

I also want to give credit to movies that feature gay characters who play roles that have nothing to do with their being gay. I can't put the label "The Long Hard Slog to Gay Liberation" on this one because it depicts a world in which gay characters are not fighting for liberation; they are living with it and in it.

Won't spoil the ending for you.

Netflix streaming - six episodes

El Houb - a film review

الحب (El Houb) is the Arabic word for "love." It's also the title of a Moroccan-Dutch film that came out a few months ago about a young man, Karim Zahwani, caught in bed with another man by his father.  The discovery breaks the resistance Karim has long struggled with to come out to his mother and father, partly to free himself of the prison of silence he has been living in, partly to get them to stop nagging him to get married. To say it doesn't go well would be an Olympic-sized understatement. By the time the Zahwani family even begins to come to terms with their son's homosexuality, Karim has holed up in a closet, turned off the water and the electricity and even trashed their apartment. "Knock down drag out" doesn't begin to tell the story.

El Houb is not an easy watch. To start with, if one has lived in Europe or America or in most places in the modern world where homosexuality is now old hat as a topic, one has to go back to a time when LGBT people lived closeted lives of hypocrisy or deception.  The obvious question that comes to mind is why should we waste our time with yet another coming-out story?  "Been there, done that, didn't like it, moved on."

The answer is that along with the fact that, come January 1, 2024, Estonia will be the 34th nation to recognize same-sex marriage is the equally salient fact that it is still illegal in 35 countries, including every one of the Islamic states. That includes Morocco, the country of origin of the immigrant Zahwani family now living in the Netherlands.  Karim's mother has two major concerns: what will the neighbors think?  And how can her son possibly want to do such a haram thing?

I have to admit I was tempted to shut the film down several times. The Sturm und Drang gets seriously heavy and you want to throw things at the screen each time you see a face twisted in agony over the struggle both sides are going through. If Karim were clear-headed on the subject and it were just a question of getting his mother and father over the hump, it would be a lot easier. But a great deal of the agony is watching Karim struggle with his own doubts.

What made me stick with the histrionics - and that's an appropriate term here - was my lifelong interest in what happens when cultures clash. And the knowledge that the actor, Fahd Larhzaoui, who plays Karim, is himself a gay man of Moroccan origin born in the Netherlands. The story will no doubt frustrate you with its surfeit of homophobia, much of it self-imposed. But only if you fail to recognize that it is also, ultimately, a tale of homophobic Moroccans coming to embrace the modern values of their adopted country, and their gay son in the process.

Seen in that light, it's a nice little contribution to the long slow slog toward gay liberation.  Belgian-born Lubna Azabal, of Moroccan origin, plays the mother. Slimane Dazi, a French actor of Algerian origin  plays the father (and he apparently had to work hard to learn Moroccan Arabic to get the role). They are both superb, as is the kid who plays Karim as a boy in the flashbacks.

I watched it on Amazon Prime, but I believe it's also available online at:

https://tubitv.com/movies/100003839/el-houb-the-love?start=true&tracking=google-feed&utm_source=google-feed .

Not crazy about blue-bloods

King Charles III of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, move over. You're not the only monarch taking it in the ear for being a royal these days. Swedish writers Lisa Ambjorn and Camilla Holter and writer-producer Lars Beckung of the hit show Young Royals on Netflix have clearly got more than one bone to pick with the Swedish monarchy.

It's easy to miss, since the main focus is on Young Royals as a gay love story, with the bit about an heir to the Swedish throne who falls in love with a non-royal being little more than a device to drive the plot.

A google search shows that the first season made it to the top 10 in 12 countries briefly and was streamed for more than 9.8 million hours worldwide. In the first week after its release, the first season was ranked the 8th most streamed non-English language series on Netflix worldwide. In case you're not in that number, here's a quick plot summary from the show's Wikipedia page:

Young Royals is a Swedish teen drama romance streaming television series on Netflix. Set at the fictional elite boarding school Hillerska, the plot primarily follows the fictional Prince Wilhelm of Sweden (Edvin Ryding), his romance with fellow male student Simon Eriksson (Omar Rudberg), and the drama which results.

A soap opera, from all appearances.  Television for teens. Just another of hundreds of coming-out stories for the LGBT community, maybe.

But you can't miss the fact that while this is for all progressive thinkers these days, including probably the vast majority of people under twenty-five, a feel-good romance, it's also very much a study of rapid, possibly too rapid, social change. It's a gay love story, a very sweet one, and let's ring the bells for that. But it's also an unmistakable clash between not so much homophobia as the power of social norms, status quo and tradition on the one hand and individual freedom on the other. Even if you agree on the importance of aggiornamento, to use Pope John XXIII's term for "updating" the values of society in Roman Catholic terms, you have to recognize that drama and serious conflict are inevitable. The argument here over change between conservatives and progressives is less about the what, far more about the how fast.

The attack on the monarchy, the thorn in Crown Prince Wilhelm's side, is a relatively gentle one. Wilhelm loves his mother, the Queen, and she is loving and accepting of her son's need to explore his sexuality (this is Sweden, after all). But she is also a staunch defender of the notion that Sweden must provide not just an heir, but a blood heir, to keep the institution of the monarchy going. Sweden, she says in effect, is the monarchy. For Wille not to produce an heir is to betray his country. One imagines her saying to herself, "We all get over our first loves! Let's get our priorities straight."

Given the attitudes of modern Swedes, it's not too much to expect they might toss around the possibility of a gay king. Even call it, like the idea of a female president in the U.S., an idea whose time is way overdue. But Mama is clearly nowhere near ready to take her progressive parenting ideas to this future possibility. Even if Wille were to produce an heir with a high-born surrogate, would the country be able to wrap its head around the notion? Not bloody likely. What are the chances of finding another royal willing to surrogate?  Even less likely. You see how quickly this notion spins off into the ridiculous.

So we are not yet in the year 2066, or whenever such a notion might actually be entertained seriously. We're in 2021 (when Young Royals comes out), and both Mama (the good cop), and the royal advisor (bad cop) are determined that Wille has to put duty over any personal relationship and ditch this non-royal lover of his.

Note the implications. Sweden may be a modern progressive democracy. But the story centers on royal "blood" and on the arrogant snobs at this elitist private school. Even the scholarship students, Simon and his sister, Sara, are sucked into the belief that they are second-class, for a time and to a degree. Wille finds a confidant in another gay student, Nils, but even Nils advises Wille to "stick to his own kind" and juggles the question of having to come out one day as the first CEO of a major company. It's a world of winners and losers, or "top-drawer" people and nobodies.

Another aspect of this drama viewed as a sociological study is the fact that these 16-year-olds are highly sexual beings. There is open depiction of masturbation on several occasions, as well as full-on penetrative sex and everybody talks as if such goings-on were all around and commonplace. Ironic, since the show has an "adult audience" rating. Or maybe the word should be "cutting-edge." The casting of Wilhelm as a Swedish blue-blood and Simon as an Hispanic immigrant (Omar is Venezuelan-born in real life) was brilliant. They're both way older than 16, but Wilhelm's teenage acne went a long way to making these characters believable.

The real bad guy in the story is August, a second-cousin to Wilhelm.  Nasty, manipulative, self-serving in the extreme. Unafraid to do anybody in almost for the fun of it. And what does he get for being a thoroughly rotten character? The Queen actually taps him to be the replacement in line for the throne in the event that Wilhelm wusses out. So much for looking out for Sweden's best interests.

I watched Young Royals when it first came out a couple years ago and on a whim just watched the whole two seasons again, on a binge. I'm glad I did. I loved the love story. Loved hating August and the whole concept of an upper-class boarding school. Got to feel terribly superior about my working-class roots. Love being an amateur sociologist.

I have to admit that I'm not against the idea of having an updated, de-fanged monarch as head of state, given the evidence that the American decision to put head of state and head of government into the same person has turned out to be a terrible mistake. But this depiction of the Swedish royal household, if even partially accurate in tone, suggests to me we need to think more the way the Germans have done in selecting a respected elder to the office of president to do the head-of-state job. It's not just that I think strangling young love is a crime against humanity. I also think there's something really wrong about calling yourself a democracy and then putting your fate in the hands of so-called blue bloods and requiring everybody to speak of them in terms of "highness" and "majesty."

Thanks Lisa, Lars and Camilla, for prompting me to give more thought to the question than when Elizabeth II died and Charles-who-barks-when-the-pens-don't-work took over.  You can move me into the anti-monarchist column now.

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Pick-me-ups

I have a bunch of stuff I turn to when times get dark. Music, especially classical piano artists like Alexander Malofeev, Vyacheslav Gryaznov, the Jussen Brothers and many many others, heads the list. Naps always work wonders. So do friends who answer their phones when I call out of the blue.

But when I get in that space where I hear myself thinking things like, "I wish I loved people as much as I love dogs," or "maybe the Christians are right and we are all born in sin and in need of redemption," I turn to my reservoir of good books and movies. Not the usual feel-good sort like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington - although that's a really good one - but my own private repertoire, ones that speak to me usually on more than one level.

I won't go down the list. I just want to mention one that I actually paid to get on Amazon Prime last week when I discovered that my DVD player is no longer working and I couldn't play my personal copy the other day, The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen).

In the early 1960s I worked for the Army Security Agency listening in on East German party officials doing business in the German Democratic Republic. I was in my early twenties, unmistakably wet behind the ears and susceptible to both harsh and kind words. The U.S. Army was providing the harshness, the cadre in East Germany I was listening to provided the other extreme. Most of the people I listened to knew each other and chatted about birthdays and their children and things other than broken water mains in the city of Leipzig. I came to understand how it could be that people might be tempted to cross the wall from west to east as well as the other way around.

But I never lost sight of the fact that by far the greater number of people fleeing their homeland went from East to West Germany. The wall had gone up between the first time I visited Berlin and now. I understood the logic of East German administrators - they were providing free health care and education for all its citizens and couldn't continue if people ran away just as they were able to begin paying back. They had to find a way to keep people in line.

It's hardly a secret that they went way too far. They formed a vicious police state and turned the entire country into collaborators, neighbor against neighbor, children against their parents. Nobody felt safe from prying eyes and a hyper vigilant police force.

Virtually all of my friends and family who lived in Berlin had friends and family in the East, and I came to share their dream of reunification. When it took place in 1989 I cried like a baby alone in my living room in Tokyo, having left Germany behind and moved on. My colleagues all wondered aloud about whether the Germans were going to become dangerous again. I felt particularly isolated. My sentiments were with the Germans now challenged on how they were going to put two hostile societies back together. And I didn't feel comfortable sharing my view that I had more than a bit of sympathy for the socialist project, and concern that the new narrative was going to make them into bad guys.

That is exactly what happened. Most Germans, Americans, other Europeans today now combine the two great evils that Germany suffered under: naziism and communism. With good reason. Both were nasty regimes, although I see a very important distinction. The Nazis were arguably pure evil; the socialists were idealistic dreamers who got corrupted, just as democracy and religion is readily corrupted by less-than-perfect human beings who work their way into leadership positions for self-serving ends.

Which brings me to The Lives of Others. Released in 2006, almost two decades ago now, it holds up as a perfect illustration of what my grandmother termed "good Germans" and "bad Germans." If you're not familiar with the plot line, it concerns a state security (Stasi) agent who spies on a writer and his actress girlfriend and comes to question his convictions that socialism as practiced by the GDR is what he always believed it was. I won't go into detail. For that you should see the film for yourselves. What the producers of this film have done is move beyond the goal of using entertainment to teach history and to drive home the fact that the GDR was an ugly authoritarian state to stress the point that we all contribute to the society we live in. The spy had a conscience. It served him well.

And if you need a pick-me-up when you believe the world is overly populated by shady characters, get hold of this movie and renew your faith in the human race.

It always works for me.

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