KEITH C. BURRIS ON AMERICA’S THIRST FOR DECENCY
Let’s talk about going to the movies. Although the popcorn is overpriced and the previews are often as mind numbing as they are deafening, there is no way to duplicate at home the experience of seeing a good film in a darkened theater, on the big screen.
Young people watch movies on laptops and travelers watch one movie after another on airplanes. That’s a different experience — entertainment as distraction. You watch a film in a theater and you are its captive. You are immersed; taken out of time.
That’s one reason, of course, why the movies were so popular during the Great Depression. For a dollar (or six to eight dollars today), you take a trip.
The movies are also reflections on and of our culture.
Lately we’ve seen an endless parade of moves “based on a true story” (based being the operative word). And we have now the very interesting phenomena of films “based” on real people and their often unspectacular days but monumental lives: Fred Rogers (the documentary and soon the Tom Hanks film), Thurgood Marshall, Ruth Bader Ginsburg (a documentary and soon a fictionalized bio-pic), Neil Armstrong.
Biopics are nothing new from Hollywood. But a biopic about a children’s television host or a Supreme Court justice? This is a new wrinkle.
There is even a new documentary about one of my own political heroes — Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
What next, a mini-series on Bob Dole?
We could do worse.
What we are seeing is a great thirst for decency: Show us a person who is not a superhero flying through the sky and commanding fire and ocean waters, but who is honorable, has courage, and who has made a difference.
When I saw the Mr. Rogers film, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor,” a young man who worked in the theater told me: “We thought this thing would play a week to mostly empty houses. We sell every seat for every show and have extended the run indefinitely.”
We want to see a person who expresses a full and ennobling humanity.
And there is something else: We want to see flesh and bone expressions of American values.
When we see a good citizen do his duty as he sees it, as Armstrong did, we rediscover common ground and find the center again.
Our values belong to two long traditions or modes of thought. But in this country, and this is the great thing, those two traditions, though in tension, complement and complete each other. They are not meant to be at war with each other.
My wife and I recently saw “Creed II,” the second film in the re-booted “Rocky,” franchise, with Micheal B. Jordan as the flawed hero and Sylvester Stallone as the pugilist’s Obi-Wan Kenobi. My wife liked it. I loved it. Walking away, she said: “I don’t quite get boxing. What’s the appeal of pow, pow pow.” Well, all the “Rocky” films are about boxing, sure. But more than that, they are about perseverance — getting up off the mat. Or, as Rocky puts it, taking the hits and finding a way to move forward.
The film is an overwhelming success because Americans want to celebrate Rocky values — loyalty, heart, not lying to one’s self, and the absence of self-pity. There is a moment in the film in which Rocky tells young Creed not to feel sorry for his newborn daughter who may well be deaf. For she will be loved, and she will only learn self-pity if she is taught it by example.
These are not just Rocky values but Emersonian values. The values of the inner directed human being — the individual with a moral compass.
Often in a well-crafted popular film, there is a small moment that says more in a few lines than an art film can say in two hours of avant garde navel-gazing.
There is a moment in the film “Green Book,” in which a tough Italian-American from the Bronx has to bail his boss, a refined concert musician, out of a compromising, embarrassing, and potentially dangerous sexual situation. If you thought of the Italian gentleman, Tony, as a Deplorable you might expect him to be appalled, judgmental.
Instead he deals with the situation and simply says that he has worked for years in nightclubs and he knows human life and human desire are complicated.
“Green Book” is, according to the cynics, too predictable, too cliched. It’s a story we have seen before about an odd couple — two people with nothing in common learning to talk to each other, appreciate each other, and like each other.
Yes it is a story we have seen before. Is it not one we need to see again and again?
For it is not just about people reaching across the black-white divide, or street fighter-high culture divide, or gay-straight divide, but all divides. These values are Franklin Roosevelt values. Franklin was the ultimate patrician, who somehow knew the common man and the broken man, and reached out, not down, to him. These values are Harry Truman values: He integrated the military, so that Americans from different races might know each other as they both fought for the country.
In its ultimate form, the democratic vision is respect, and even friendship, across the divides. Pat Moynihan wrote a line that I have shared in this space before and which contains more wisdom than whole volumes of political commentary. He said: “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”
We need Rocky values and we need Franklin and Harry values. We need both truths.