1. I now have a full vaccination card. I guess if it seems prudent in six months (or whenever) to have my Covid vaccination boosted again, I'll have to have the shot recorded on a second card. I went to the Heritage Health clinic uptown for today's shot.
2. I am pretty sure I've written on this blog before about how much I enjoy watching documentaries made in the 1970s and 1980s. One of the many great reasons I subscribe to the Criterion Channel is because they often make documentaries from this time period available, many I'd never heard of. One of these days, I need to make a list of all the documentaries from these decades I've watched. Several, like Harlan County USA, Streetwise, The Last Waltz, Hearts and Minds, the continuation of the UP series, The Thin Blue Line, and others are not obscure. They were Academy Award nominees (some were winners) and at least were released in art film houses, if not mainstream theaters. Others did not enjoy wide release, were shown on cable television or on community tv stations or were shown in other more obscure settings.
Today, I watched three of these lesser known documentaries. All three were directed by Lee Grant. It's my understanding that they were all shown by HBO in the 1980s, but I'm not positive about that. They are each just under an hour long -- that would fit in HBO's broadcast schedule, and each addressed social issues that were emerging in the late 1970s and on into the 1980s and continue to be matters of great importance in our country forty and more years later.
Before I list the movies, I want to say a word or two about something that bothers me, something that feels way beyond my ability to do anything about, something that seems to be pretty well hard-wired into the current national consciousness.
It bothers/troubles/unnerves me that thanks to the intensification of the culture wars over the last thirty years or more, social problems and approaches to trying to address them are filtered primarily through ideological filters. For example, one of the movies I watched today is Lee Grant's 1985 documentary, What Sex Am I? The movie explores the experiences of transexual (or transgendered) men and women and of transvestites. I did not experience this movie as what I might imagine would be said about it from the perspective of the cultural wars. I did not experience it as a left-wing propaganda piece nor as a film promoting any way of living sexually in the world.
I experienced it as an earnest project working to understand people's experience of being a woman who wants to live as a man or vice versa. The movie also quite intimately explored these people's experiences with going through the demanding preparation and surgery to change their sex.
Likewise, the interviews with transvestite men give these men an opportunity to openly express why dressing as a woman is so vital to them.
I experienced this movie as a documentary inviting human understanding, of giving its subjects a means to frankly discuss, from within themselves, the experience of sexual or gendered ambiguity.
3. Likewise, the other two nearly hour-long Lee Grant documentaries I watched also explored two different (and similar) forms of social suffering in very specific, concrete ways, giving us as viewers, again, a look at the human consequences of this suffering, not ideological discussion or argument about it.
The first of these movies, The Willmar 8, tells the story of eight unassuming, low key women, employed by the Citizens National Bank of Willmar, MN, who, over time, decide to no longer put up with being treated as inferiors in their work place because they are women. Their pay is not equal to men's pay at the bank. They are completely shut out of any opportunity to enter the managerial ranks, yet their managers assign some of these women the task of training new male managers when they get newly hired in a managerial position. The men running the bank see the women as qualified to train new managers but not become managers themselves.
So the women go on strike -- for two years -- yes, for two years, they walk a picket line in front of the bank, and nothing deters them -- not the pockets of disapproval in Willmar (there are also pockets of support) and not the bitter, unforgiving weather they walk in during the brutal Minnesota winters.
In telling these women's story as members of a collective action and in telling the individual stories of these women, Lee Grant moves her viewers to see this strike as, yes, a political action, but as a political action growing out of injustices that impair these women's daily lives and as a political action that puts immeasurable strain on these women's personal and social lives.
I won't divulge what the strike's outcome is. No one should spoil that detail for anyone who hasn't seen the movie. I will divulge, however, that Lee Grant's strength as a documentary filmmaker is in portraying the dignity of her subjects. As The Willmar 8 develops, we are invited to see more and more of these women's inner depth, their commitment, yes, to justice, and also their commitment to one another's well-being and improving one another's standing in the work place.
Lee Grant's Down and Out in America is set in mid-1980s. Her crew travels to Minnesota farm country, a shanty town in Los Angeles, and a rundown, rodent infested, leaky, filthy hotel in Manhattan that the city of New York rents out as a shelter for displaced, homeless people.
Once again, I don't remember the name of Ronald Reagan ever being mentioned, but it's clear that this movie is portraying the consequences of the tax cuts and shutting down of social relief programs that the Reagan Administration enacted during Reagan's two terms.
Once again, Lee Grant's immediate focus is on the day to day suffering the subjects of her movie endure. She interviews farmers who have suffered foreclosures and the loss of their livelihood. She talks with people in Los Angeles who have lost jobs or suffered other blows and have bonded together in a shanty town they have built and where they work to help each other find work, be fed, and have shelter, only to have this project destroyed by city (or is it county?) bulldozers and the people are sent out into the city on their own during the making of the movie. She interviews formerly fully employed people in Manhattan who suffered calamities beyond their control and are now living in the squalor of a dilapidated city operated hotel.
Two threads run through these people's lives. First, they did not bring their poverty on to themselves. Second, Lee Grant's interviews bring out the dignity and deep human feelings of these people, all of whom want more than anything to be back on their feet, productively working again, and taking care of their families.
But, they face insurmountable obstacles and barriers.
I'll close by saying, simply, that each of these documentaries further bolster my view of history. I don't see history as repeating itself. I don't see history telling stories of progress. I see history as helping us see a continuum. You'll never hear me say, "Oh, that's history. That's over with." You'll never hear me say, "That's still happening? Come on! It's 2022. Aren't we done with that?"
I can't think of anything in the human experience that is done. Everything continues. What was, is.
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