Getting to Own You: CLOUD ATLAS (2012), RUGGLES OF RED GAP (1935)

In my eleven feet of apartment, in a couch gone saggy from my restless weight, armed with a cat and a vast battlefield of Coke Zeros and Camel Lights, I spent the 4th of July weekend watching a  six part Revolutionary War documentary, me marveling at the mule-headed courage of our American revolutionaries (many of my ancestors fought in it, from Ipswich, Mass --how Lovecraftian!): "All men are created equal," Jefferson wrote, believing it "self-evident," yet even on his deathbed the man could only bring himself to free five of his many slaves.

The meaning of freedom is lost on those who are born free. Unless they watch the right empathy-triggering movies, of course.

Here now I celebrate my freedom from the bondage of self, from the need to socialize, the benefits of age and medication allow me to sit and be fully absorbed into what I watch. I observe no bed time, no three course meal structure. I am free to gild my cage and wallow in the tube's glowing captivity. Fuck the picnic grilles and distant echoing screams of children. The world outside the screen becomes more and more like an easily forgettable dream, the waiting in line portion of Space Mountain, a place to freshen one's palate before the next dip into the collective cable-DVD-Blu-ray-Streaming never-ending ocean of dream options. I am free to choose any illusion --a true slave, at last, am I.

And over in 'real life,' what is it about owning our fellow man that is such a vile turn-on? Why are we natural enslavers of ourselves, and each other, we who revere freedom with such sanctimonious lip service?

I didn't realize my next choice of dream submission transmission, CLOUD ATLAS (2012), would perhaps explain all that and more. There are whippings and escapings of black slaves, SOYLENT GREEN references, incarceration, schizophrenic devil visitations, bombs on planes, cannibalism, Tom Hanks as you've never seen him before, an ingeniously understandable futuristic neo-ebonic patois, interesting predictions, way too many Jim Broadbents, and strangely CGI looking faux-epicanthic folds. There are slaves and there are escapes, the sweet sting of freedom's disconnect and the bizarre difficulties in trying to whittle a human soul down to a commodity.

Its source novel written originally no doubt in that page-turner potboiler manner where something bad is almost about to always happen at the end of every riveting chapter, each small victory coming cathartic through the door at the last possible moment, and even if we're all going to eventually be sucked under by the petty tyrannies of the Miss Fellowes-closeted dyke types, racist capitalists and homophobic Capulets, somehow we go on, and write interesting if overly familiar philosophy about our intertwined destinies through one life after another.

The fantasy here isn't reincarnation, for there are enough documented cases of past life remembrance to make that a fact for anyone willing to look at the copious research. The fantasy is that our words, art, or music will somehow endure through the ages, even if it looks for all intensive purposes like we'll die in obscurity. But even if we only get a handful of copies of our music out on CD-R, or LP, or our films are only seen by a few hundred on youtube, our our abolitionist diaries are only used to prop up piano benches, as long as we reach one other person in the future, we will have succeeded, because that person might be us, or have known a future/past version of us, and even be interested in helping this future version of us, based on what they read or heard by this past us. And so, each piece of art or writing is a message in a bottle, every shipboard journal or pirate broadcast a possible future bible. It's what we writers and artists and musicians tell ourselves when laboring in near-obscurity, writing sermons that no one will hear. Even if we're world famous we still have to face that blank page alone, and it's never satisfied, even long after inspiration has flown it begs for words like a junkie. It's a fantasy we on this web cling to like a life raft. Only a focus on the perfection of craft has any results, bailing-wise.

Hugh Grant - Reloaded

All writers of today and even yesterday dream and wonder about whether their words will live on to tomorrow, or disappear forever in some massive power outage that kills all internet files. We wonder if we wouldn't have been better off writing everything down in longhand and saving it all in a mysterious pouch for our future descendants to marvel over in 3-D Technicolor flashbacks, but years of typing and bad posture and impatience has made our thoughts too rapid for slow pen movements. I end up writing three sentences ahead of my previous one. My text collapses in on itself like a slowly forming whirlpool. Doesn't yours, Mr. Anderson?

CLOUD ATLAS understands all this. The censors of the mind are some seriously twisted villains, cast against type mostly, except for Hugo Weaving who is cast as, depending on the century, a Papa Legba style-demon, a corporate assassin for big oil interests, an old world evil enslaver of black flesh... and an evil female nurse at a no-escape Dickensian old folks home wherein s/he looks unaccountably like Matt Damon or Dexter. And then, evilest of all, Hugh Grant as a cannibal, another slaver, and an old grotty rich dude who traps his brother in said gulag rest home.

Hugo Weaving, about to get (finally) clobbered by a Scotsman

But the siblings Wachowski and Tom Tykwer may have brought over too much baggage from THE MATRIX. For one thing, they are way too into face ornamentation and futuristic neo-pagan nonsense (who can forget the shark jump douche chillbient rave scene in RELOADED?). The many lives/many genders thing is great, though, and the vibe of impending hostility and anti-freedom crusaders breathing down your neck has never seemed so urgent. Having one of your writer/directors be a real-life transgender undoubtedly helped this, as who else has the chance to live two distinct but intertwined lives in one skin? But more than gender, this crazy threesome bask in the glory of art and letters to transcend time. They want us to know that without art and letters it's all meaningless (life, not necessarily the movies). With the ability of writing to transcend time and keep flames of freedom alive it's like V FOR VENDETTA all over again, or THE FOUNTAIN (see: American Grievers), wherein one letter writer gets an art exhibit and people flock to gaze at their faded penmanship of their past selves. Experiencing the full magnificent weight of ATLAS, you get the feeling they're already justifying to themselves that it's okay if this film doesn't make any money; future generations will recognize it as the defining film of our century. Hell, maybe it isn't, but here it is anyway, permanently.

The Fountain 

And who amongst us, late at night, alone, drunk off our asses with notebook in hand, haven't looked down upon our incoherent scrawls and felt the surging power of Wagnerian music in our unbound soul, as if every line will one day be memorized as gospel by millions? Does it really matter if that's all just the booze? As long as you feel famous, who gives a shit whether anyone's ever heard of you? They all suck anyway.

But if you could feel entwined and get that old unfamilar familiar feeling listening to a dead stranger's music, or seeing their art, or reading their life story, or seeing them act in a film, does that make them you in a past life? What about a future life? (Which is how I feel about John Dies at the End). Or what about contemporaries? Can't you be living more than one life at the same time, separated from it by a wall of conscious amnesia that only art and music can cross?

Didn't I write this....tomorrow?

See, I feel that way about Lou Reed (hear me sing "Sweet Jane" here). I felt a deep connection to him and his music even BEFORE I ever did drugs, drank, or realized we shared the same birthday, and studied the same subject at the same University. And so I feel that reincarnation can occur in a contemporary phase. If all of us are connected and time doesn't really exist, then it makes sense that not only will we live many lives along a linear historical axis, but we WILL live every life in all eras, eventually.

Unlike the Wachowskis and Tykwer I'm not a big budget story teller. Rather I am a story liver-througher. I treat what I see onscreen and hear through my headphones as part of my own living heritage. As Peter Tork said (while wearing a white robe): "It is impossible for the brain to distinguish between the real and the vividly imagined." Media is more meaningful to me than my own reality, too deep to extract from the personal. I can read the future in a passing synchronicity ("plate o' shrimp") on TV, and find any mood or exaltation reflected in any actorly face. God, in other words, speaks to me through the randomness of TV chance. Film is my I Ching.

There are reasons for this: I grew up in the land where color aerial TV was the height of home entertainment and no child overruled their father on what to watch, so we learned to take it all in without distinguishing what we liked or disliked.  Cartoons were on until dad came home from work and switched on the news, without so much as an apology, and I regularly had to go to bed before the end of the prime time movie, forcing me to dream the rest of it. I learned to roll with the boredom, exalt in the heights, soak it all up sans filter, ride the cathode ray like a twin-stalked lobster surf into the blue dream mystic.

Anyway, my point is this:

Close our eyes and think hard enough and we can feel the feelings of being anywhere any other human has ever existed. If it can be imagined or performed, if we can hear or see our fellow man, if we can feel and hear and taste that which is suggested, then it's all true, and those instantaneous links our words and music and art create are proof we are immortal.

Hugo Weaving

By contrast, the evil people--the racist, classist, sexist, and intolerant-- the Hugo Weavings and Hugh Grants in their various ATLAS incarnations-- will always want to isolate, enslave, incarcerate, or annihilate a subset of humanity, the way they'd like to lance a boil, but they themselves are the boil, and this is their problem. They won't see that. They refuse to be connected in any compassionate way to the people they've deemed lower than themselves, in other words, themselves. We can never be these people or them us, their souls can only plague until some mystical conversion brings them back around and up the river to us. And this is why to oppress humanity in any of its forms is to oppress a perceived despicable aspect of oneself, which is what leaves homophobic racists on a shrinking life raft once people finally have the guts to turn on them. What anti-gay marriage proponents forget to mention is that up until 1968, it was illegal in most red states to marry outside your own race (see: Anti-Miscegenation Laws). Nowadays even the Rushes don't dare wish this law was reinstated.

I pity the haters in many ways because I know the horrible feeling of powerlessness that underwrites such veiled misanthropy. These souls feel like they can only create human bonds the cheap, fast way, by demonizing a subset. "Not it!" they cry, always first, always terrified of being "it" in life's game of tag. But they know it's only a matter of time before they're next on their own chopping block, like the Duke of Buckingham (above) in Richard III, slowly realizing that if one sells out others one shall inevitably be sold out in turn, for the crime of hesitating even a second over the idea of killing the slain king's children. It can be no other way, by definition.

BUT even within the context of this, there's something downright unnerving about CLOUD ATLAS and its suggestion that evil souls can survive through many lives, rather than the common conception that after one they get ground up in the Archons' furnace and recycled. Hugh Grant and Hugo Weaving in ATLAS however are shits for centuries, persecuting the same souls over and over. Now, I don't believe this is 'really' how reincarnation works. Any of Weaving's characters would probably wind up re-melted in Satan's forge and caste in lower forms, or better still, would reincarnate as their own victim. BUT - it's damned scary to think that some souls are just evil forever, given a license to shit on the same other soul throughout eternity. That idea is just too odious to bear, though it does make for riveting viewing.

I cooled down after ATLAS in the warmness that is RUGGLES OF RED GAP (1935). In this Leo McCarey masterpiece the struggle against systematic oppression involves a third generation English butler (Charles Laughton) learning to stretch out in America's limitless potential as a Washington State restaurateur, and to stand up to both his original British earl "owner" (Roland Young) and current harridan employer, Effie, the petit-bourgeois wife of Egbert (Charlie Ruggles, in his finest hour), the laconic heir to a vast lumber fortune in Washington State. But getting there first involves the pain of being 'lost' in a poker game he wasn't even present at.

"You're going to America, Ruggles," the Earl (Roland Young) simply announces that morning as Ruggles lays out the Earl's suit and hands him the paper.

"The country of slavery, m'lord?"

"Oh that's all finished, I think", the Earl quoth.

And yet Ruggles has been used as pokers stakes. He later takes to drink, and starts worrying about Indians, perhaps unaware they are basically genocided out of existence. Still it's quite interesting to hear an English valet dismiss America as beneath contempt for its practice of slavery even as it boasts of its classlessness. Meanwhile, a few major cities like New York and Boston hold onto 'old money families' who vainly try to bring their strict stratifications across the land like a plague of misery to the land of the free. Among other brilliant things (I cry every time), Ruggles recites the Gettysburg address, learns to have fun, and is even allowed to drink on the job because Effie is "broad-minded."

Director Leo McCarey shows his humanist steak in spades here, and I think it's his best film. The Hugo Weaving of the piece is snobby Boston in-law Belknap Jackson (Lucien Littlefield) who, together with Effie, turns the mansion into a gigantic antique shop all tacky and stuff. He tries to fire Ruggles for various perceived insults (including, outside a beer-bust, Ruggles kicking him square in the arse), and generally gets what's coming to him to the delight of all. Bellknap and Effie are the types who used to uphold to the traditions of slavery because it was 'being done' in all the best southern families, and if it's tradition and prizes one type of person over another, i.e. enhances or upholds some brutally oppressive class system, then it must be superior to the French ideal of liberte' egalite' et fraternite' which is way too populist for the rich afraid of losing their riches... even now.

But as I learned while working in a high end art gallery through the 90s, the really classy people--Ma, Ruggles, Nell, and Egbert --avoid the bourgeois nonsense and stick to drinking and having fun. The highlight being that the Earl and Egbert sneak out of the house to avoid the guests at the dinner party Effie's giving in the Earl's honor. All they really want to do is drink and hang out with pals like their cool-as-hell ma (Maude Eburne, below right), a wise woman cinemarchetype if ever there was one and there was, never getting involved in the petty domestic squabbles, just paying the bills and shrugging it off with a good laugh. We should be able to do the same, and thanks to Warner's Archives, RUGGLES is at last on DVD, and looking great. Don't ever not see it.

I'm about out of time so in closing, America, happy birthday again. For the most part, you rule! Just don't try to rule me, because I am not even here, psychically or spiritually. The last thing I want is for you to find that out and come looking for me inside the screen, hunting your lost property like a relentless alarm clock, insisting as my mom used to do that I come outside, to work, play, and be my awful trapped-in-the-sticky-amber of linear time self along with all the other kids. It took me years to be able to let all that go and indulge my misanthropy and vanting to be alone. But I made it, Ma. Look at me looking. After all, I am not really even my own master - I belong to that remorseless muse, riding me forever deeper into the muck, heedless of fame or fortune, caring only for the next crazy turn in the untraveled yellow wood, as long as it's less traveled, and a dead end, I'll keep going.