Category: Reviews

Go Set a Watchman and the Moral Economy of Tumblr

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go-set-a-watchman-US

“It is not simply a matter of undoing something whose meaning is too easy to find; to be able to know it, you have to unlearn and not think you know it from a first reading.” – Arlette Farge, Le Gout de l’Archive

This is about Go Set a Watchman, but it is also about the internet. That the two should be somehow married the way they are is tragic, but Watchman was born six decades late: in a time when the demands of fast relevance, immediate content, and quick messages have supplanted the mechanical assurance of newscopy or the tortoise-paced calculation of magazine reviewers for which it was intended. So the internet is what we have. Let’s start there.

The internet isn’t a thing, of course, apart from time. It is in time, of it. And in case you haven’t noticed, the internet right now is obsessed with reactions. MFW and TFW gifs pass over Tumblr like inflationary currency. Instead of Washingtons and Franklins, Minions and ogres and Nickelodeon stars from the Nineties rule over the vast fiefdom with a nuanced vocabulary of eye rolls, blank stares, facepalms, and raised eyebrows. Half-a-million people subscribe to /r/reactiongifs on reddit, upvoting everything from politics and culture to “MRW when I fart and enjoy the fragrance.” Youtube is a hotbed of reactions as well. 9,000,000 people have watched children react to rotary phones. 7,000,000 have watched kids listen to the Beatles. And more than 4,000,000 people—including me—have watched 7 year-old Evan try to explain a typewriter in “KIDS REACT TO TYPEWRITERS.” “It is basically like a computer,” Even tells us confidently, “all except it doesn’t have a screen. All you do is type out messages.”

This summer, the part of the internet that deals with books sounded a lot like Evan trying to explain the typewriter. “It is basically like a sequel,” the bloggers and freelance reviewers told us about Go Set a Watchman. I’m paraphrasing here. “Except Harper Lee wrote it first, before Mockingbird. And it feels icky.” This kind of treatment works well for superhero movies and video games—which, by sheer dint of numbers, are the most meaningful cultural products for most Americans right now—but it just doesn’t work for a novel written in the 1950s. Yet, for months before Watchman’s release, the biblionet rocked back and forth between anticipation and shock. Was Harper Lee exploited? Is Atticus Finch really a klansman? Is there a third manuscript out there somewhere? A producer grabbing the film rights to a Hobbit-esque movie trilogy for the NPR crowd? Driven by this never-ending hype train, Go Set a Watchman set sales records at HarperCollins.

But To Kill a Mockingbird is not a franchise. Go Set a Watchman is not an installment in that franchise. Atticus Finch is not a superhero.  Nor is Watchman a rejected draft. To treat it as such is absurd. Watchman is a completely different book.

It is brilliant. Where Mockingbird offered readers the kind of complications they could understand—bad racists, wrongfully accused innocents, children coming-of-age—Go Set a Watchman offers the more intractable frustrations of adulthood: good people who happen to be bigots, the guilt we feel by association, and the inevitable crush of aging. To Kill a Mockingbird was the book that the United States needed in 1960. As Americans struggle with many of 1960’s problems in 2015, Go Set a Watchman may be the book we need now. Lee’s meditation on coming to terms with the things we cannot change vibrates with the kind of life, humor, and wit that the square-shouldered Atticus Finch of Mockingbird might not understand. More importantly, it points readers toward the kind of empathy he would understand. Good people say and do and believe disagreeable things. We should not condone them—Scout Finch does not—but we cannot always write them out of our lives, either. The urgency of this message in a time when Americans seem violently divided yet again suggests that Watchman’s message is every bit as important as that of Mockingbird.

It is just more frustrating. Like Mockingbird, Go Set a Watchman challenges us. Some booksellers have offered “refunds and apologies” to customers, advising, “we suggest you view this work as an academic insight rather than as a nice summer novel.” Parents in Colorado changed their son’s name from Atticus to Lucas after reading the book. “When the new book came out,” they told a reporter from People, “we just felt like, this does not at all encompass the values that we want for our son to have and know.” Even the editors of the Chicago Tribune were challenged. “We can’t reconcile the change either,” they wrote, “as much as this elder Atticus might illustrate the way people’s views ebb and flow through life…. With so many real-life characters tumbling off their pedestals (Bill Cosby comes to mind), why knock such a noble literary hero off his?” And so on. Indeed, the merest whisper of Atticus Finch being anything other than what he was in the eyes of his six-year-old child in the depression is enough to send adults in the twenty-first century stomping straight for the exits.

Go Set a Watchman is authentically challenging. For readers trained to read the frugal moral economies and straightforward story lines of franchises, the split-second impressions of reaction gifs, or the predictable binaries of the internet’s never-ending culture wars, Harper Lee’s mid-fifties manuscript is perplexing. “Unlearning” the simple—and total—demands of hashtag morality can clear the confusion. Harper Lee’s difficult questions call for nothing less. Thankfully, her prose makes it easy.

Dope and the Location of Culture

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Dope Poster

“A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing.” – Martin Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking”

A month after its release, there’s a particular scene from Dope that still sticks out in my mind. It’s when Shameik Moore’s character Malcolm Adekanbi—a charismatic protagonist, I’ll just say here at the outset—is frantically driving to meet a Harvard alumnus as part of his college application. He’s driving away from an impossibly, hilariously complicated situation to one that is even more outrageous and complicated. Along the way, he sees someone completely unexpected, however, in a completely unexpected situation. The camera pans to his face. Dumbfounded, he asks aloud: “what the fuck?” The audience asks it with him before he (and they) are inexorably carried onward, further into a story rich with anomalous characters and ridiculous situations. The scene I remember is a fleeting moment, unnecessary to the story, but that question—Malcolm’s bewildering and fleeting encounter with the wholly new and unexpected—captures Dope’s cultural meanings more than any other could.

First, the film itself. Dope is a bildungsroman for the twenty-first century. Protagonist Malcolm Adekanbi is a product of Ira Berlin’s fourth great migration—a Nigerian-American geek living in a rough section of Los Angeles—where he and his friends Jib and Diggy share a love of early-nineties hip-hop and play robopunk songs in their band, Awreeoh, while they finish their senior year of high school. Malcolm is ambitious. He plans to attend Harvard University, on one hand, and his college application frames the narrative. Much of the story takes place at school and in classrooms. But Malcolm wants to be “dope” on the other hand. An encounter with drug dealers and street violence offers Malcolm an inside look at his neighborhood and his own strength. Stuck with a backpack full of molly, death threats and the danger of arrest hanging over his head, and looming standardized tests, Malcolm (and Director Rick Famuyiwa) must resolve the tension between his ambitions in order to survive. Famuyiwa resolves them in style. Dope is engaging, warm, outrageously funny, beautifully rendered, and vibrant.

While I’d like to take credit for reading Heidegger closely and taking detailed notes, the quote that opens this review is the epigraph of postcolonial scholar Homi Bhabha’s 1994 book The Location of Culture. In The Location of Culture, Bhabha argues that the re-iteration and repeated translation of hegemonic cultures associated with colonialism—or “globalization,” if that term is more palatable—leads to the formation of new cultural identities in the “interstices” between opposing social or cultural forces. Because they can only translate the received hegemonic wisdom of nation, race, gender, and so on for themselves, minorities and oppressed populations create “hybrid” identities that transcend these simple categories. Globalization and hybridity go hand-in-hand. Forced to puzzle over entirely new identities and situations, colonizer and colonized alike must both sometimes throw their hands in the air and ask, like Malcolm Adekanbi, “what the fuck?”

Dope is about hybridity. Malcolm crosses the boundaries between “geek” and “dope”; between generations, marrying his love of nineties hip-hop to his skill with the tools of twenty-first century cunning, like bitcoin, digital money laundering, and the dark web; between poor and affluent; between East Coast and West Coast; between African and African American. Without entirely new categories, it is impossible to pin Malcolm down and label his identity.

Malcolm’s friends and enemies demonstrate the futility of creating new labels. Drug dealer and gang member Dom quizzes his street counterparts on logical fallacies; Malcolm’s lesbian friend, partner-in-crime, and bandmate Diggy crosses the boundaries between genders; friend Jib—who claims to be 14% African—and stoner hacker Will—emphatically not African but unapologetically crass in his use of the N-word—cross the boundaries between races. Even Malcolm’s band, Awreeoh, crosses the boundaries between punk rock and hip-hop with a subtle nod toward race. Situations, too, cross the boundaries of class and morality: upper-class acquaintances struggle in vain for street cred; Malcolm is sympathetic and good, but he sells drugs to earn his way into the Ivy League. Hybridity abounds.

And it is wonderful.

Dope crosses boundaries without turning the mirror on itself and preening for attention. Its characters navigate a world of ambiguous definitions and unsteady moorings without sinking beneath the onerous weight of racial awareness and class-consciousness. Their awareness feels more real, more like a tool to adapt to the world as well as shape it to their own ends, rather than the self-destructive rebellion or acrobatic accommodation a previous generation of storytellers demanded from their characters. Famuyiwa—perhaps uniquely positioned to comment on hybridity by his location within the Nigerian diaspora—captures the fracturing of the twentieth-century’s colonial order better than any filmmaker in recent memory. If millennials exist, this is surely their film.

Insidious: Chapter 3 and the Wage of Postmodern Capital

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Open with a reluctant medium, an unsuccessful reading.

These first five minutes or so of Insidious: Chapter 3 sum up the remaining ninety-two minutes with depressing clarity. Sure, Leigh Whannell and Blumhouse have manufactured a suitably dark aesthetic, an occasionally unsettling package of jump scares and visceral death fetishes, a nightmarish and demonic villain, and an angelic white protagonist, but the parts are greater than the whole.

Neither individual parts nor whole package, to be clear, are very substantial.

The story takes place a few years before the initial installment in the Insidious series, some time in the late-mid 2000s, when teenager Quinn Brenner opens a door to the dark reaches of “The Further”–readers familiar with the rest of the Insidious series will recognize this dreary world of underpowered handheld lamps and hideously re-embodied voices–by visiting spirit medium Elise Rainier in order to make contact with her departed mother, Lilith. After the reading goes wrong, Quinn ignores Rainier’s frank advice to avoid talking to dead people and makes a connection with a respirator-wearing demonic presence–an angry old miner with black lung, perhaps?–through the air vents of her family’s hipster-proletariat apartment building while trying to reach her mother. This initiates a classic haunting sequence–what screenwriters call “fun and games”: bumps in the night escalate rapidly to full-on bodily violation and spirit possession. Skeptics must turn believers and seek the assistance of psychic intermediaries. Elise Rainier returns, thus, and overcomes her own demons to lead the final confrontation with evil. But–surprise!–the battle is far from over at the end. The Lambert haunting from the first movies hangs over the ending and clears the air once again for a fourth instalment in the series.

Storylines float to the surface and sink away again, barely acknowledged. Main character Quinn’s teenage friendships, fledgling romantic interest, and acting ambitions form an important leg of the story in the beginning of the film, for example: they are almost completely forgotten by its conclusion. The “Man Who Can’t Breathe” haunts a seemingly empty building. His backstory–a former resident of the building turned soul-devouring denizen of “the further”–is left undeveloped. The fact that he is old and was obviously disabled at death is enough, apparently, to explain his paranormal anxiety. Quinn’s troubled relationship with her father is unconvincingly resolved; her brother is a foil, at best; her friends are forced caricatures.

There is little here for viewers interested in questions of race, gender, class, and age–Insidious is a rather retrograde product on the whole in these areas, in fact–but the cinematography is effective in a workmanlike way, and the movie will keep your attention for the entire 97 minute runtime. Which is nice, I guess.

This, then, is the wage of postmodern capital: a wholly predictable haunted house, a ham-fisted and cynical rumination on mortality mediated by basic cable spiritualism, and an open door for the next commodity in the series to enter the pop culture milieu. Insidious: Chapter 3 is effectively ineffective. It is maximally profitable with a minimal investment on the part of its producers. They’ve risked no cultural capital, placed nothing more than money on the line. Viewers–myself included–have so far responded by paying them back the money and then investing our own cultural capital in the film. This insidious arbitrage is the truly horrifying part of the entire experience.

The producers of the Insidious series are not alone. Neither are they cynical magnates laughing and rubbing their hands together as they steal from bovine audiences. They are logical actors at work in a global system that glorifies the most gruesome forms of self-interest. Hollywood is driven by profit, after all, and motivated by an army of willing promoters among the public to profit from the easy sell of franchises today more than ever before. They can’t help themselves.

We can’t help ourselves. Brand relationships broadcast through social media are an easy and powerful forge of identity claims. If I’m the kind of person who likes Insidious in a public way, whether you agree with my preference or not I hope that you’ll form an opinion of me that is favorable to my social strategy. Bundles of preferences are movable pieces in a game of identity claims that, powered by the internet, forms the very fabric of postmodern existence. Preferences can be easily and quickly located on the left-right spectrum of the culture wars; rapidly deployed to build or dismantle relationships with other people; worn; shouted aloud; photographed. We are what we like.

Hollywood franchises like Insidious are vitally important pieces in this game. Simple preferences–for the color green, say, or for long walks on the beach–are easily overshadowed by the cultural complexity of brand relationships. More than merely personal decisions, preferences for brands involve negotiating bundles of meaning. Apple computers, for instance, are symbols that stand in for images, videos, songs, other people you’ve known who have owned them, and conversations you’ve had or overheard–in addition to objects that do things and with which you may spend a great deal of time in interaction. These symbols do thirty years’ worth of cultural work daily. So, too, The Avengers, Jurassic Park, and so on. So, too, Insidious.

Viewed alone, Insidious: Chapter 3 is mostly hollow. It is merely visceral. As part of a franchise, it is completely empty. It is little more than a single level in a vertical marketing video game. The “Man Who Can’t Breathe” is just a minor boss in a dungeon, a bump on the road to progressively “harder” bosses in even more deeper dungeons. Where does the game end? Who will be the final villain? Will the whole finale be one long jump scare planned and carried out by the Dark Angel Beelzebub to put this “insidious” horror film brand in a shallow grave once and for all? One can hope.

The Artist as Producer: The Milk Carton Kids, Monterey

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MKC_Monterey

Music is made from things. Some–the great majority of the productions on the radio or iTunes chart at this moment–is built from a remarkably predictable collaboration between machines. Humans sit atop the machines, to be sure, pressing the buttons and typing the commands that guide their logic. But the machines make the music. Pressing the hard plastic keys or soft rubber pads of a synthesizer produces the same sound, by design, every time. So, too, clicking the mouse or applying pressure to the trackpad to carefully arrange drumbeats results in a strong, predictable rhythmic skeleton. The programmed bass kicks and snare taps kick and tap with remarkable precision, over and over again, until the human clicks the mouse again to end the loop. This kind of music is one solution to an algebraic function that could just as easily produce the parenthetical smile of an emoji on the screen or guide the decision-making processes of a linebacker in the latest installment of Madden. The same math makes this kind of music a natural choice for record executives, bean counters, and stock analysts. The formula is well-known, as are the tools.

The Milk Carton Kids’ fourth album, Monterey, is made from different things. The quiet, haunting harmonies of folk duo Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan evince the more subtle workings of wood and air, flesh and string. Their delicately interwoven guitar work reminds the listener of the instrument’s traditional bona fides. Equal parts philosopher and showman, the guitar in the hands of Pattengale and Ryan is an instrument of nuance and intimacy. The dynamic relationship between performers, audience, instruments, and space makes each acoustic performance different from the last. In contrast with the cold predictability of digital pop, then, Monterey is contingent. It is honest.

The album opens with an earnest invitation to sit and reflect with “Asheville Skies,” an introspective piece reminiscent of Simon & Garfunkel and the California mellow sound that would be difficult to perform for a raucous audience. “Getaway” finds the duo descending from the foothills of the Appalachians to the darker reaches of the soul. “The shatter of the bottles would scare me somethin’ awful as a kid,” the duo sing in unison to open the track. “My fear how it would harden,” they continue: “and find a home in places that I hid.” The sunny guitar tones of Baja California trouble the song’s vague references to the Deep South, however–the pair mention an event “outside Tuscaloosa”–and briefly complicate the integrity of the piece. “Monterey” puts this tension to rest by evoking the classic country sound of Marty Robbins and Willie Nelson. “I can hear the road call,” Pattengale and Ryan sing in the eponymous track, pointing to “an old refrain to light the way.” American roads cut twisted paths through the middle of Monterey, indeed; The Milk Carton Kids pass through the postindustrial landscapes they reveal with the windows up, though, relaying only filtered impressions of what they see and feel. The miseries of abuse and the cryptic darkness of the Deep South are but distant blips in the rearview mirror by the third song on the album.

“Secrets of the Stars” and “Freedom” offer understated and straightforward technical ability. “Freedom” is quietly skeptical. “Candles burn in memory,” the duo sings at the end: “freedom is a fading dream.” “High Hopes” resolves this intellectual dissonance with consonant chords but refocuses the tension on the individual. “The war ain’t over there,” Pattengale and Ryan sing: “It’s here with me. The battle of the bloody century.” The rest of the album revolves around these individual struggles, introducing an occasionally refreshing note of clarity to otherwise tired themes. The thirty-something singers struggle with aging in “Shooting Shadows” (where, tellingly, “I heard your grandpa died” is meant to convey the advancing age of the singer and his listener) and “The City of the Lady,” but argue poignantly that “history is hangin’ as a picture in a frame/ everywhere we go we are the child of where we came.”

“Poison Tree” ends the album as quietly as it began. “I’m a little man in a little town,” the duo explain in the voice of a nameless narrator: “it’s a little cold [and] I’m a little down.” As if to give one final nudge before parting, the repetition of the word “little” throughout “Poison Tree” reminds the listener of Monterey’s understatement. Humility and restraint underwrite the confidence and maturity of Pattengale and Ryan’s songwriting and instrumental skill.

Sometimes they could push a little harder, in fact. If the folk revolution of the early sixties was about making space and finding time to think–to ponder “events too troubling to dismiss,” as the authors of the Port Huron Statement put it in 1962–folk music today is an increasingly hardy reaction to the false logic and icy predictability of neoliberalism and its popular soundscape. Monterey positively shimmers with this promise, inviting listeners with warm harmonies and charming instrumentation to be present with one another as they consider its modest claims. This modesty often translates into a frustratingly flat affect, however, and one song threatens to blend into the next by the end of the album. Pattengale and Ryan could better harness the power of contingency and intimacy on Monterey. They could push a few more emotional buttons. They could let the music drive them, sometimes, rather than the other way around.

There is much more The Milk Carton Kids could do, indeed; but Monterey is both challenging and rewarding all the same. It is rich and beautiful. Some music is made with numbers and plastic. This music is made from more natural elements.

Watch the official video for “Poison Tree” here.

Buy the album here.