The Left is the Left's Biggest Problem

UPDATE: Link to video of cartoon bunnies doing The Big Chill in 30 seconds. Thanks, Carsten!

*First, Jamie: where did the picture of Jesus and the monkey go?

Like being the President of the United States, thinking about how we got from the past to the present is hard work. Taking your forebears seriously enough to closely examine their actions in hopes of finding some connection to current circumstances is a tall order, particularly if you are a left-leaning American who doesn't think the 1960's, 1970's or 1980's produced particularly worthwhile human beings (to say nothing of political systems, economic schemas, or wearable fashion).

I saw two movies recently that seem inextricably linked to one another in important ways. They present a view of the American middle class experience that is still relevant today, even though both films are over 20 years old. Both, it would seem, are the basis of modern American--and listen up, Lars von Trier--and Eurotrash cinema; and both help explain, I believ, the sad state of liberal existence in American in 2006. Naturally, both films also suck balls.

They are Five Easy Pieces (1970) and The Big Chill (1983).

The latter film has already been repudiated by its formerly biggest fans, in deed if not in word. The former is still considered by critics a "brilliant" piece of method acting and a character study in...something.

The feeling persists, however, that these movies, bad as they are, have real explanatory power in the immediate sense. And here is the craw-sticker: if you want to know what people were thinking, if you want to know your subjects, you have to respect them. You have to take them seriously. Oh, how it burns! It burns!!

Five Easy Pieces is somewhat like most "serious" dramas of the late 1960's and 1970's in that it presents the world as being composed of two kinds of people: aimless drifters with no care for people or material things, and frightened hermits, who shut themselves up in big houses and hide behind wealth in order to avoid exposure to the big, dangerous world. Jack Nicholson, obviously, plays the drifter (not the hermit). He is never happy--CAN never be happy--precisely because it is the film's contention that life is a series of euphoric highs and crushing lows, and nothing is sustained for long. In fact, we are driven, it would seem, to destroy ourselves for no other reason than we want to know what will happen if we do x.

The Big Chill is a less complicated film. It proposes that life is all about the people you know--or knew--in the process of becoming an adult. In short, memories can stand in quite nicely for actual present circumstances and one need not feel anything for one's past except nostalgia. Naturally, anyone who has graduated high school will reject this premise (oops! must get back in "respect mode.").

The characters in this apparent experiment in navel-gazing (damn! lost the respect for 'em already!) are all successful yuppies who feel guilty about their lives and disconnected from their "friends" (who, it turns out, they don't really know, anyway). The moral of the story is made apparent in the final ten minutes when literally all the characters sleep with somebody (except Jeff Goldblum, who is busy with a self-absorbed therapy session on video with Glenn Close. Besides, no one wants to think about Jeff Goldblum getting laid.): You're still the person you were twenty years ago, you're just surrounded by different objects. In other words, you're still a hippie, but you drive a Porsche. Shame and guilt need not rear their badly-needed little heads.

As an historian would say: so what?

Well, look at the American left and tell me what you see. I see good hippies without shame; I see people who thought they were on the leading edge of radicalism (but of course, weren't) pretending to still be radicals while simultaneously belonging to the same clubs and churches as the self-proclaimed exterminators of the liberal "disease." The Big Chill removed the notion of action from the liberal mind and replaced it with the idea that complacency is OK, that self-interest is OK. It also allowed its viewers to think that superficial self-examination is the only kind necessary--no hard questions need be asked because, hey, it's MY life, dude. Reality thus is constructed in the head of the individual (as opposed to being constructed socially--that is, cooperatively), and if the individual thinks that he has done enough to end world hunger, or help the environment, then he has. This is the lesson in the big fight at the end of the Big Chill: when one character tells another that they don't really know each other, the response is that anyone can "know" anyone else as long as they think they do. Self-delusion is thus enshrined as a core tenet of an entire generation of liberals--no wonder they aren't rioting in the streets over Bush's fuck-ups.

Five Easy Pieces has at its center a worldview a bit more bleak than the ensemble group-grope of 1983 (shit! respect them, dammit!!). To wit: life is a dirty pit, and everbody has to roll around in the mud a little. Thus, the cringe-inducing frequency of humiliation in this film and most American cinema from the period. The story of Five Easy Pieces doesn't make much sense, but if you keep the principle in mind that all characters must be humiliated then the events are a little easier to link together and the script becomes knowable. The drawback to this feature is that it reflects, as all modern-era art does, a tendency in popular culture. Perhaps this is the basis for the disturbing frequency with which Democrats now take their lumps and bleat "thank you, mistress, may I have another?"

But I jest. It seems more reasonable that movies like this are the reason people like me cannot take the older generation seriously. There is no hope, quite frankly, in the view that we are all pinballing from one cosmic joke to another (hence, to digress a bit further, my dislike for Douglas Adams' helpless heroes, and the British sense of irony in general). The very notion removes the chance for human agency--the notion of radicalism and reform as being relevant--and relegates human activity to just one more pathetic marker of pointlessness.

The movie was made in 1970, when some Americans could rightly question whether the country was headed anywhere, and such frustration could account for part of the film's bleakness and the overarching feeling of both the main character and the viewer that one must get away (far, far away...dammit!) from this whole scene. This may be a parallel (proving that nothing was learned?) to the current fashion of declaring the country dead and trying to distance oneself from its stinking corpse. Of course, future generations might look upon this as just so much likewise self-absorbed defeatism.

Finally, I would like to say that I will forever throw up when I see a movie more about the "classic" soundtrack than the plot (The Big Chill) and also when I view one that presents parts of the human race as worthy of extermination (Five Easy Pieces, Triumph of the Will, anything by Lars von Trier). I think these films live on both in their unfortunate introductions of certain now-conventional film techniques and also in the American popular consciousness that consumes but does not see. Wallowing is perhaps the opposite of celebrating--or maybe it's the twin. In any case, the messages contained in Five Easy Pieces and The Big Chill are the reason I can't take the left seriously anymore. And that is a big problem for an historian. Excuse me while I go self-flagellate...