today's films were depressing

On Thursday we watched Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) which was a post-code gangster movie. What makes it post-code? The gangster redeems himself in the end. The code says you can't have any drugs, can't have too much violence, and certainly can't glorify violence. So there's often people getting shot, but there's never any blood. And at the end of the day the gangster has to do something to make him the bad guy with the heart of gold. In fact in this one there were moments well before the end. We ended up on a discussion of Gangsters vs Westerns. Both are full of men prone to violence. In the Western he comes to town, uses violence to help the community, and then leaves at the end because he's far too violent to actually be part of any civilized community. All the classic westerns end with the hero riding off into the sunset. The hero in a Gangster however doesn't have anywhere to go. He starts out a part of the community. In Angels very early on he gets back to town after having been in and out of jail for 10 years and the community welcomes him back. "Sure I'll rent you a room in my boarding house even though I know exactly who you are and what you've done." He grew up there. Since civilized society can't therefore send him on his way he has to become civilized somehow and/or die. In this case both.


Then today we watched two films. The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford 1940) and The Plow that Broke the Plains (a documentary from 1936). I hadn't seen The Grapes of Wrath before, though I knew what it was about. I'm trying to remember if we read the book in high school. It's the kind of thing we would have, but I don't remember most of what we read in school. As expected it was depressing and nothing good happened to them. The pacing was really slow. It took a long time to get out of Oklahoma and a long time to get across the country. They kept having hardships but it didn't feel like the tension was escalating at all until they finally got to California. To be honest I'm not entirely sure I got the point because I think there was too much going on and the point got diluted. These people had a hard life? Corporate farming is evil? The common man will prevail just because you can't snuff them out, there's always another? Don't put farms in places with no rivers or rain? Oh no wait, that last one was the documentary.

The doc was interesting just to see real images of dust storms. But it was very heavy handed and melodramatic. Some things never change I guess. It reminded me of the kind of thing Dateline and those types of shows do: take a subject that is already dramatic enough on its own and then add big music cues and unsubtle narration just to make sure you don't miss how Important this really is. For that matter I hesitate to use the word documentary to describe this film. Having spent 4 years listening to Nina's lectures I would say this is journalism at best and really more like propaganda in that it was made by the government. Though I'm not sure quite what agenda it had beyond trying to explain to everyone else why there were 50,000 people per month in the summers for the previous three years leaving the Plains. Watching both of them, but especially the documentary, I kept thinking about the project I did for the Journey Stories exhibit for Museum on Main Street. The curator of that exhibit was very interesting and he was talking about migration and immigration over the centuries. In the early days they called the Great Plains the Great Desert. It wasn't until we filled up both coasts that we started moving into the middle. Because there are millions of acres with little rain and no rivers. When you take away all the grasses there's nothing to hold in what little water there is. I was sad for the family in the Grapes of Wrath that they kept getting taken advantage of, but really they needed to leave. If the land can't support you don't stay.

Then I was also thinking about this short film we watched in screenwriting class about a farmer in Norway who was very old and his daughter wants him to go to an assisted living place in the city. In the end he buries his wife who has just died and buries himself with her just so he won't have to leave the land. And all I could think was I'm too far removed from my farming roots to relate to these people. In both films it was "I am part of the land and the land is part of me and I will fight to stay here." Really? You're starving. Just go.

Perhaps I'm just cynical and heartless.