Sibling Assignment #65: There's No Place Like Home

I handed out this week's Sibling Assignment. It's pretty simple:

"What do you understand about The Wizard of Oz as an adult that you didn't understand as a child?"

InlandEmpireGirl's beautiful, moving post about her adult understanding of the Tin Woodsman is one you must read and it is here; Silver Valley Girl's post is not posted yet.

Twenty-six years ago, I taught full-time for two years in the English Department at Whitworth College (now University). My first semester I taught the Shakespeare course and I was going through a transformation in my thinking about and my feeling toward Shakespeare's plays.

I was only twenty-eight years old and had been studying Shakespeare seriously for about two years, but his plays had really been on my mind since I was twenty.

During much of that time, I saw the tragedies comprising Shakespeare's most profound thinking and deepest feeling. I regarded the comedies as fluff. I treated them as afterthoughts. To me, it was as if Shakespeare needed a vacation from writing real plays, so he dashed off some comedies.

But during the fall of 1982, my thinking and feeling and attitude began to change.

In part, I think the divorce I'd just been through inspired this change. Divorce left me longing for reconciliation, healing, stability, union, and reunion; in short, I longed for home.

I was preparing to teach A Winter's Tale when it hit me that this play, like many of Shakespeare's comedies is about the pain of separation and the longing for reunion. Furthermore, A Winter's Tale, like The Tempest, was about being separated from home and the longing to return home again.

Shakespeare's comedies satisfy that longing to return home, whether home is in actual place or whether it's portrayed in the success of a threatened love relationship culminating in marriage and the promise of a new home.

It suddenly struck me that this idea of home, a place of security, trust, belonging, and ease, was not only a physical place, but an inward spiritual truth.

Inwardly, home takes shape as a wholeness and Shakespeare's comedies suddenly were more profound and meaningful than his tragedies in their portrayal of the joy that comes when one's home is lost or one is separated from home and one returns. The comedies portray peace.

Suddenly, preparing A Winter's Tale, I pictured Dorothy wandering the yellow brick road through the forests and poppies and finding herself in the castle of the Wicked Witch and I remembered her baleful voice, the sound of longing.

All Dorothy wanted was to return home.

The Wizard of Oz always moved me as a child and its power was beyond my understanding.

Now I know.

As an adult, I began to understand that Dorothy's longing to return home was not just her longing, it is a deep human longing, deep in all of us, and I had been feeling Dorothy's longing since I was about five years old.

In the loneliness and despair of being newly divorced, I felt the loss of the sanctuary I thought I had with my wife; within myself I was casting about, pitching between the joy of my work and my inward misery. I knew I couldn't return home with Eileen; I wanted to find home within my soul. It was a futile search. It's still elusive.

My literature instruction began to seize more and more upon the idea of home. When I wanted my students to understand the emotion, outside of themselves, of this universal longing for home, I implored them to remember Dorothy and her repeated mantra: "There's no place like home."

Like me, my students began to understand The Wizard of Oz as adults in a way they hadn't as children.

Movie: Harlan County, USA

Barbara Kopple (pictured above) hadn't yet made a feature length documentary movie when she started work on a movie that would explore the United Mine Workers of America's election between reform candidate Arnold Miller and longtime incumbent Tony Boyle. When a strike at the Brookside, KY coal mine broke out in 1972, Kopple and crew moved to Brookside and "Harlan County, USA" resulted.

It's a harsh, sobering, and, inspiring movie. The strike is its main focus, particularly as it documents the role of the miners' wives in support of their husbands and as it looks at Basil Collins, an infamous strike breaker, and his men who were scabs and gun thugs.

As compelling as the main story of the strike is, the genius of the movie lies in its detours. The UMWA election story gets told in "Harlan County, USA". On New Year's Eve, 1969, Tony Boyle's leadership opponent Joseph "Jock" Yablonski, along with his wife and twenty-five year old daughter were murder in their home.

The movie takes a brief look at this murder, at the ascension of Arnold Miller as the reform candidate, and at Tony Boyle's being tried and convicted for having hired two men to murder his opponent. It also covers Miller's successful campaign to unseat Boyle, before Boyle was convicted.

This detour into the corrupt practices of Boyle and the divisions within the United Mine Workers of America keeps the movie from being an uncritical view of the United Mine Workers of America.

Yes, on the local level, the union is the coal miners' only hope for better pay and benefits and for an increased focus on safety. But, at the national level, the union organization is in the same league of corruption and greed as the mine operators it purports to be in conflict with.

The movie's other detour is its examination of blank lung. The coal operator's are as callous toward the miners' pulmonary health as they are to the miners' living conditions (no running water or indoor toilets). The pictures of older miners at pulmonary capacity machines and others being treated with respiratory therapy deepens the movie's overall story of the terrible plight of these miners.

In fact, the miners are being crushed underneath layers of power weighing down on them. The Brookside mine is an Eastover mine which is run by Duke Power of North Carolina which is under the sway of the nation's petroleum companies and all of these entities have the government regulatory agencies, particularly the Bureau of Mines, on their side.

The government wants the mines to operate so steel production continues unabated and so the nation's electrical demands are met. Then, as today, mines are given safety extensions, are subject to less than rigorous inspection. Miners' wages are kept low. Benefits are lousy. Lower company overhead means cheaper steel and electricity.

It's a dictatorship. The miners have next to no real control over their work and their lives. In fact, the strike the movie covers happens because Duke Power refuses to recognize the miners' vote to join the United Mine Workers of American.

The movie, released in 1976, is not titled "Harlan County, KY". It's "Harlan County USA". It's a microcosmic look at the USA, labor conditions, power, health, corruption, disregard for miners and other workers, and indifference in the USA for anything much beyond production and inexpensive products.

The movie always makes me think of the Silver Valley and my hometown of Kellogg, Idaho.

What I experienced and witnessed in the world of hard rock mining and smelting could have been made into a movie called "Silver Valley USA".

I lived in a place where the environmental indifference and disregard for workers was also a microcosm of the USA itself.

Movie: The Story of the Weeping Camel

I wrote a pretty funny post about Mongolian cinema here. I just read it again. It's not bad!

For today, though, I'm going to reflect a bit more seriously on "The Story of the Weeping Camel".

I'm trying to think when I first knew this movie had come out. It seems like it came to my attention in Cincinnati in 2005 when the Deke and I were visiting Adrienne and Nathan and I was poking around in the district near the U of Cincinnati and found an art movie house that was playing "Hustle and Flow" and "Murderball" and it seems like "Weeping Camel" was also being shown or about to be shown.

I didn't go. I did, however, visit the Cincinnati Reds Hall of Fame and marveled at a wall where one ball was mounted for each of Pete Rose's 4,256 hits and where I looked at a model of Crosley Field and remembered watching Vada Pinson on television run up the slight grade that served as a warning track as he camped under a long fly ball. I loved that sloped outfield feature of Crosley Field.

I don't think "Weeping Camel" was at that theater in Cincinnati now that I think about it. Oh well.

So, I didn't watch "The Story of the Weeping Camel" in Cincinnati, but a few years ago, when my struggles with mental depression were at a nadir, I had decided to try to medicate myself by watching at least one movie every day.

It's funny. My doctor sent me to see a therapist around that time. I only went to this guy once. His self-centeredness creeped me right out. All he talked about was himself as a psychologist of elite athletes and his therapy area was plastered with certificates, pictures, and other crap, all about him.

Anyway, he asked me what I was doing to take care of myself. I told him I watched movies, at least one a day. He asked me to name some and it was the usual litany of "Raging Bull" and "Apocalypse Now" and "Godfather".

He thought I needed to lighten up.

Well, about that same time, I bought a bargain priced copy of "The Story of the Weeping Camel" at Hollywood Video.

It's a Mongolian documentary.

I put it on late in the evening. I fell asleep while watching it.

It's a slow movie. Not much happens. There's wind. Yurts. The Gobi Desert. And camels.

But I was tired that first time.

So I gave it another shot another evening when I felt better.

With this viewing, I began to realize that the movie was inviting me to enter into a pace of living within a way of understanding time that I was unfamiliar with.

It's a movie about patience, about a family who patiently bends their will and their ways of doing things to the demands of the harsh environment of the Gobi Desert.

I began to realize that while the movie told a story about a family, their place in the world was very small. In some ways, then, they had a small role in the story.

Nature starred. The movie moved at a pace congruent with the patience nature demands.

I began to let the movie work on me. I surrendered myself to becoming a Mongolian nomadic sheep and camel rancher and to the idea of depending on living in cooperation with the environment to survive.

I won't tell you why it's called "The Story of the Weeping Camel". Watch the movie and find out. If you are looking for escape, this movie will invite you to escape to a world of story telling, reliance on nature, traditions and rituals, a journey, and to a world where joining song and with a camel's inward being has a miraculous outcome.

It's an amazing documentary film.

Movie Thought: Brief

I don't watch movies for escape.

I don't know why I've never looked to movies to get away from things in my life.

I do want to escape, though, and I do it at the casino playing electronic slot machines.

I watch movies to enjoy stories, to learn, and to appreciate pictures and acting.

I keep writing about my roots in Kellogg and how much I either am or want to be a Kellogg guy.

Honestly, when it comes to movies, I think I betray my Kellogg roots.

When it comes to movies, I'm kind of a loner, living in the enjoyment of my own private eccentric pleasures.

Movie: We Don't Live Here Anymore

I was over at 2Blowhards yesterday and read Michael Blowhard's derisive musings on the movie "Stranger than Fiction", here. I resisted his dismissal of the movie as pretentious drivel. I'd enjoyed the movie, on its own terms, and immediately I thought of a movie I'd just watched, that I imagined Michael Blowhard resenting in a similar way for its existential musings and lack of action and zip.

"We Don't Live Here Anymore" features Laura Dern, Mark Ruffalo, Peter Krause, and Naomi Watts in a painful exploration of adultery.

A week or so in WR 123/ENG 257, Margaret and I showed out students the movie "After Innocence", which I'll write about soon. It features several men who were incarcerated for crimes they never committed, only to be released after many years in prison thanks to DNA evidence.

The movie featured a police officer in Providence, RI who was accused of murder. What linked him to the victim? Adultery. He'd had an affair with the victim. He was innocent of the crime, but the prosecutors had established a strong motivation because of their liaisons.

I told my students that there are very pragmatic reasons not to commit adultery. I thought the police officer's story substantiated my comment. Adultery never works out well, never creates trust or harmony, and can even make a person almost automatically a crime suspect if something goes afoul. I din't care to speak moralistically with my students. I was being a pragmatist.

No murders occur in "We Don't Live Here Anymore".

Brokenness does.

Jack and Terry are married. So are Edith and Hank. The couples are best friends with each other. Jack and Edith are having an affair.

Jack and Edith meet outside an auto repair shop and run off to a river bank or to a motel room and consume each other, charged by lust, excitement, despair, and make believe love. They even have a morning stand up quickie in Hank and Edith's kitchen while Hank sleeps upstairs.

The adultery becomes a virus. Jack turns on Terry, savaging her for the way she keeps house, degrading her intelligence, and belittling her as a mother. He's really savaging himself. He's haunted by his adultery and it perverts him. When Terry retaliates and has sex with Hank, Jack wants to know the details, as if Terry's detailed account, as if being a voyeur to his wife's adultery, will alleviate his guilt.

Hank, on the other hand, views his wife's adultery, and his own, with casual indifference. He thanks his best friend Jack for loving his wife, grateful that his wife seems happier around the house.

Slowly, deliberately, with scenes of long conversations and multiple close-ups of pained faces and anguished contemplation, the movie takes us deeper and deeper into the erosion of these two couples' marriages and the erosion of the relationships between the adulterers.

It's not a motion picture. It's more like seeing a play or reading a novel.

It's why this movie was not a major release, but an independent movie that showed in limited theaters.

The characters are childish, self-centered and self-absorbed, and bent on destruction of themselves and each other, whether by adultery, alcohol, petty cruelties, verbal abuse, or amoral indifference.

In this way it's an adult movie, serious, dark, literate, sad, and unnerving.

I found it absorbing and disturbing and I envied the actors for their opportunity to play such conflicted, miserable, and complex characters.

It's not a moralistic exploration of adultery. It pragmatically unfolds adultery's poison.

Why I Could Never Be a Professional Movie Reviewer

Why couldn't I ever be a professional movie reviewer?

Because, I love movies.

When I go to a movie or put one on at home, the first thing I say to myself is, "Okay, movie, try to disappoint me."

Basically, I enjoy almost every movie I watch. I like movies just for being movies, most of the time.

I read movie reviews at rottentomato.com and most of it sounds phony, like the reviewers are duty bound to fabricate reasons to be critical in order to sound knowledgeable about movies.

When I show movies as a part of the courses I teach, I ask my students not to act like Siskel (RIP) and Ebert and give it a thumbs up or down or use some phony stars system to register their response to the movie.

In other words, I ask them not to be consumers of the movie, but viewers looking to learn from the movie. I ask them to view the movie on the movie's term, not on their terms.

So, in the posts I'm going to write about some movies I've seen recently, I won't be rating the movies or recommending them.

I'll be writing about what I enjoyed; but in the rare case that I watch a movie I didn't enjoy, I'll try to account for why I didn't.

In the last year or so, I haven't been able to remember movie titles of movies I've seen, even if I've seen them recently.

I'm going to write about movies more often in this blog. It'll help my memory to have a record of the titles, if nothing else!