An argument for watching impenetrable, arty movies

The other night, after I finished watching Harmony Korine's film, Julien Donkey-Boy, Jon and I had a conversation in which we both recollected how much we'd initially hated Kids, the movie Korine wrote on which his whole reputation was built. When this film was released umpteen celebrities (including, if I recall correctly, Madonna) weighed in, acclaiming it as a raw and realistic depiction of high school life in America. It was 1995. Both Jon and I would have been seniors in high school, ourselves. I remember thinking that that film was so far removed from MY high school experience that I couldn't imagine how it was anything other than an alarmist swamp of teenage debauchery.

The film tells the story of Telly, a delinquent brat who runs the streets of NYC, getting stoned and fucking virgins. Oh, and little does he know, but he's HIV positive and therefore, he's gaily spreading late 20th Century plague and pestilence with nary an eye to the consequences. He infects Chloe Sevigny, in her introductory role, and then moves onto a little, skinny, barely post-pubescent Rosario Dawson. And the whole thing culminates in a rape scene involving Telly's friend Caspar and some anonymous catatonic girl in the midst of a post-party conflagration. Yes, this film is depressing as all get-out but it was absolutely seminal as a representation of mid-90s American arthouse cinema.

So, in 1995, I was 18. My existence had, heretofore, been a strange mixture of exposure and shelter. My high school experience had been wholly devoid of both drugs and sex. I mean, I knew a few girls were having sex and I knew a few girls were into weed-- but the general culture at my somewhat schmancy private all-girls' school was that those sorts of activities were a little trashy and those who partook were subject to derision. But somehow, I'd never really felt as though the rougher parts of life had been kept from me. I don't know if it's because I'd debate politics with my dad over dinner or because I intuitively felt that people were always doing self-destructive things all around me, but I never encountered the shock that some of my friends did when they learned that life wasn't so idyllic as one might presume from behind Harpeth Hall's lion gate. But I also remember thinking, if Kids is so "realistic," is it my life, then, that's the fantasy? In other words, I felt very unrepresented in this film that was supposed to be the most accurate representation, to date, of the youth of my generation-- the slackers, the stoners, the fuck-ups and the disease-ridden. I thought the movie got it wrong and I felt alienated from it and therefore, I hated it.

So many years later, after having expanded my frame of reference with regard to how arty movies operate, I think I have a little bit better perspective on what Korine was doing, what he continues to do, and why these sorts of films-- the ones that are misanthropic and uncomfortable to the core-- are worth watching. I still think Kids is an alarmist representation of teen life in America. But I also recognize that it DOES represent the experiences of SOME kids in America. Doubtlessly, my childhood and adolescence were privileged in a way that I could never have understood now in the same way that I do now. And Korine has no interest in telling the stories of the middle class. He's a troubadour of the disenfranchised and the marginalized-- and my 18-year-old self had a lot less patience with such ne'er-do-wells. He's confrontational in his style, as well. He wants his audience to squirm-- not unlike Damon Packard does. Though, I should say here that I find Korine's films watchable, as they are suffused with an extremely understated empathy and lack so many of Packard's sophomoric gags (and gagging).

Julien Donkey-Boy isn't really any more enjoyable to watch than Kids is. It's just barely narrative and the film quality is so grainy that you can hardly tell what's going on in parts. The blurb on my NetFlix envelope says that the main character, Julien is "schizophrenic" but it seems more likely to me that he's autistic or mentally handicapped in some other way. He lives with his pregnant sister, his little brother who wrestles with garbage cans, and his father who slurps cough syrup and wears a gas mask. They are a family of minimal means and no real aspirations to evade their poverty by way of anybody's American Dream. Sooner or later, we learn that Julien is actually the father of his sister's baby... and when the kid is born still, he steals the fetal corpse, runs home, and squirrels it away in his bed. If the implication of incest doesn't give you the willies, surely the image of a retarded kid curled up in bed with a dead baby will. Oh, and that's the final scene, by the way. Uplifting, it's not.

So what's Korine's point, here? Why produce art that relentlessly skeeves out an audience? And furthermore, why become an audience willing to be skeeved out? I could make an argument about how we spoiled middle-class babies NEED to be subjected to the miseries of the have-nots-- to give us perspective, to inspire our empathy. But that argument, in and of itself, reeks of a superiority with which I'm just not comfortable. But Korine must know that the down-and-out people he describes in his films are not his audience. The simple reality is that people of minimal education and low economic status do not watch ooky, sad, artsy films. So I return to the notion that Korine is making the films so as to challenge my desire (and that of people like me) to look away, to flinch, when faced with stories of derangement and marginalization.

I personally find that experience valuable. And I also find value in engaging with other peoples' artistic obsessions, even if they have little in common with my own. There aren't a whole lot of people puttering around within these little crevices of human experience and because Korine is compulsively scavenging through the scapes of poverty and insanity-- and using the characteristic voyeuristic and low-tech methods of Dogme 95 (the film almost reads as though it's composed of film scraps you found in a dumpster somewhere in the heartlands)-- I'm interested in his work. It's not for everyone. And ever since I saw Reflections of Evil, I'm feeling a little more receptive to moods of the things I consume than I usually am. So, I've felt sad ever since I pulled the thing out of my DVD player. This movie made me want to be hugged.

But ultimately, I feel like people make art so that other people will see it. I may as well be that audience. As may anyone else who cares to go looking. So, we watch weird art movies because they exist. They may move us; we may think they're crap. But they're out there, interesting little experiments or self-indulgent outpourings, either way. And they only exist so long as their audience does. So, I guess what I'm saying is, if we can accept the concept of art for art's sake, why not also embrace the concept of audience for the sake of being audience? The art exists, so why not watch it for its own sake, rather than with an eye to some sort of personal reward? If I approach a film hoping to be affected, rather than entertained, my But ultimately, I feel like people make art so that other people will see it. I may as well be that audience. As may anyone else who cares to go looking. So, we watch weird art movies because they exist. They may move us; we may think they're crap. But they're out there, interesting little experiments or self-indulgent outpourings, either way. And they only exist so long as their audience does. So, I guess what I'm saying is, if we can accept the concept of art for art's sake, why not also embrace the concept of audience for the sake of being audience? The art exists, so why not watch it for its own sake, rather than with an eye to some sort of personal reward? If I approach a film hoping to be affected, rather than entertained, my perspective expands. And this, I like.

the confines of the poem

I've been thinking some lately about the course of events that led me to believing that poetry was a valid and necessary pursuit. Why is it that I love this particular art form so very much, when most folks think it's rarified and elitist at best and utter nonsense at worst. And truth be told, I keep coming back to one small classroom experience that I had in high school.

Whenever I sheepishly confess to some new acquaintance that I went to private school (what good liberal wants to confess to such a privileged childhood?), and an all-girls' school at that, I frequently feel like I have to disillusion folks of all the rich-bitch, spoiled-brat, silver-spoon, socially-oblivious stereotypes that they might hold about such institutions. And this feeling is, of course, ridiculous. The stereotypes are all true. But they're also not true at all. But I don't really want to delve into the good and bad of single-sex private education. I should say, however, that I got really lucky in terms of teachers-- and in terms of the rather subversive methods some of them employed in order to impart the desire for abstract thinking to us. They didn't just teach us how to do it... they made us WANT to do so. Or at least, they made ME want to.

So, anyway, I had one particularly no-adjective-positive-enough sort of teacher for my junior year advanced English class. She later went on to become the book editor for The Nashville Scene, the independent free paper to which I often refer for great film reviews. But I have a very specific memory of a discussion we once had in that English class about how writers come to terms with and make decisions about which parts of themselves they want to make public and which parts they'd rather obfuscate in their work. Truth be told, I think writers have less control over where they draw the line between what they actually display and what they actually hide... though, we do like to put forth the valiant effort, right? However, I think the discussion was an important one to have with 15- and 16-year-old girls. Mostly, I think this is true because it plants the idea that writing can be more than just catharsis or therapy or confessions. It can, after all, be a vehicle for communication that doesn't have to be anywhere near as self-involved as all that. It's true, you write about yourself no matter what your write-- because you're you and you can't escape being you-- but it's hard for readers to care about your work if it's ONLY about you, right? In this way, objective distance as an artistic discipline can be a tremendously useful tool.

And the poem that my great teacher used as an illustration of this negotiation between the writerly private and the writerlypublic?

The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator

The end of the affair is always death.
She's my workshop. Slippery eye,
out of the tribe of myself my breath
finds you gone. I horrify
those who stand by. I am fed.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.

Finger to finger, now she's mine.
She's not too far. She's my encounter.
I beat her like a bell. I recline
in the bower where you used to mount her.
You borrowed me on the flowered spread.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.

Take for instance this night, my love,
that every single couple puts together
with a joint overturning, beneath, above,
the abundant two on sponge and feather,
kneeling and pushing, head to head.
At night alone, I marry the bed.

I break out of my body this way,
an annoying miracle. Could I
put the dream market on display?
I am spread out. I crucify.
My little plum is what you said.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.

Then my black-eyed rival came.
The lady of water, rising on the beach,
a piano at her fingertips, shame
on her lips and a flute's speech.
And I was the knock-kneed broom instead.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.

She took you the way a woman takes
a bargain dress off the rack
and I broke the way a stone breaks.
I give back your books and fishing tack.
Today's paper says that you are wed.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.

The boys and girls are one tonight.
They unbutton blouses. They unzip flies.
They take off shoes. They turn off the light.
The glimmering creatures are full of lies.
They are eating each other. They are overfed.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.


--Anne Sexton, from Love Poems



I do so love this poem-- not because it's dirty and not because it was so audacious when it was first published in 1967 and not because it is so very evocative of heartbreak. I love it because it contains within it both a metaphorical exploration of self and a very literal one. And because, even outside of its subject matter, Sexton's sense of language is paramount. Simply put, I find more artistic rigor here than I find titillating confession.

And the fact that this was the sort of work put before me at a formative age, I think, had a great deal to do with my falling ass over teakettle in love with poetry. Would I have ever seen this poem had I not sat in Margaret Renkl's English IIIA class? Maybe so. But would it have been presented to me in a fashion that affected the course of my life and my artistic aspirations? Maybe not. But as it stands, this poem represents, to me, the greatest possibility for engagement with the world that writing can hold. Bless its little heart for finding such a prominent position in my personal mythology!

Don't get mad; get plaid!

I was going to write a short comment in response to the post about mandated high school attire in Nashville over on Jon's blog, but I got going in my comment window and realized I have more to say here than I thought.


The truth is, I don't really have a strong enough opinion about this to really offer anything terribly interesting here but I can say this: having gone to a high school where uniforms--not the khaki pants and polo shirt, but plaid skirts and saddle oxfords--were required, I really found the uniform rather empowering. I mean, the Catholic schoolgirl image is an American pornographic icon-- and because we weren't religiously affiliated, we got to hem our skirts so short as to blur the line between "skirt" and "belt." The sexual heritage of that uniform is a really rich ground from which a young hyper-sexual girl such as my high school self could draw a certain variety of self-affirmation. In retrospect, of course, I realize that those uniforms were really not terribly flattering-- the skirts were too high-waisted, the blobby sweatshirts we all wore all winter long were pretty damn hideous, and a yellow oxford-cloth shirt (2 sizes too big-- to hide your over-developed/under-developed boobs--I had the latter) just doesn't look that good on anyone.

But, now, the most common complaint from the other girls was that the uniform "prevented us from expressing ourselves." And while I do agree that clothing is one way in which kids can and do "express themselves," wearing a uniform provided an opportunity for me to decide that no matter what I wore, I was really very dissimilar to the other Harpeth Hall girls. And even now that I'm an adult, I tend to dress somewhere more on the conservative side, with a little too much cleavage now and again (oh, and, well, with liberal applications of various pairs of fuck-me shoes). And while my clothing, I'm sure, engenders opinions from other folks, it's certainly not the last word on my personality. Really, once I open my mouth, people generally appreciate my relative freakishness with great speed. So what I'm saying is, the self-expression argument doesn't hold much water with me.

There is, however, one of Jon's points that does, in fact, hold plenty of water for me. That argument being the cost thing. I went to a fancy-pants private school. I mean, quite literally, I'd bump into a cranky first-thing-in-the-morning Reese Witherspoon with her big black horn-rimmed glasses and her stringy-from-the-shower hair every morning by the lockers. Harpeth Hall, with its rolling lawns and big white-pillared buildings and state-of-the-art Fine Arts building is like another planet when compared to your average Nashville public school. My parents could afford two or three high-waisted plaid skirts. Joe Schoolboy from Stratford High in East Nashville? Maybe, maybe not... the point is, he shouldn't be required to publicize his parents' socio-economic status via the conduit of his clothing. I doubt that would be the sort of self-expression some of these kids are arguing for, right? Of course, the argument here is that dressing all the kids in the same clothes will help erase class strata in the classroom... but you just know there are plenty of kids who get by wearing hand-me-downs.. and those are the ones who'll be having the hardest time dressing within the confines of the dress code every morning. And aren't they the ones proponents argue will be helped the most? I'm skeptical.

And, truthfully, khaki pants and tucked-in shirts are a whole lot more Orwell and a whole lot less Jenna Jamison. Had I been forced to wear nothing but khaki for the duration of my early education, I might not have been so complacent as I was in my plaid. And, I know, I know... staid grown-up that I am, I supposed to think it's bad when kids look too sexy. But-- and I've made this argument plenty of times before--teenagers have sexual agency! And, within reason, what the hell is so wrong with enjoying your pre-spare-tire body?

So maybe this is the thing: if we ban khaki and institute an all-plaid clothing policy... and help the kids parse out the cultural mythologizing of what the plaid has come to mean... maybe everyone-- dirty old men included-- will be just thrilled with the whatever dress codes Metro Nashville decides to put in place.