Notes On Camp

I watched the preview for Notes on a Scandal about two dozen times over the past month. To the annoyance of, well, pretty much everyone I know, I memorized and enacted all the lines. I finally saw the movie and it definitely lived up to the expectation-- the expectation being that it would be superbly acted, thought-provoking, and finely tuned, but also hilarious, ridiculously campy, and deliciously over-the-top. Think Cape Fear meets Mommie Dearest, for a whole new generation of queer boys and girls.

The movie tells the story of the bizarre relationship between two school teachers: the effortlessly beautiful, ex-punk, unhappily married Sheba (Cate Blanchett), and the old, haggard, and just plain creepy Barbara (Judi Dench). Sheba joins a lower-income public school in Northern London as an art teacher and has trouble keeping her rowdy pupils under control. Barbara steps in to help and guide Sheba and soon develops a crypto-lesbian crush on her. Soon after their friendship develops, Barbara discovers that Sheba is having an affair with a 15-year old student. And hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. She is hurt and furiously jealous, and she uses the knowledge of this illicit relationship to her advantage, blackmailing Sheba in order to win her affection. As is to be expected, this fundamentally unbalanced relationship ends in disaster when Barbara fails to get from Sheba what she has so deeply desired.

I tend to empathize with villains. Sure, Barbara is a pretty rotten human being. She exploits one woman's mistakes for her own personal gain. She sets up a facade of friendship but her real intentions are far more turbulent. But at the same time Barbara is a sad, pathetic human being who is so deeply bored with life that, in her own words, will make going to the laundrette the highlight of her weekend. That doesn't make me hate her. It just makes me sad for her. And I don't mean that in a condescending way. Loneliness, especially at an old age, is something that I find extremely depressing, and even more so in this case because I speculate, although the movie does not explicitly say this, that the reason behind Barbara's deep loneliness is an undealt conflict with her latent homosexuality.

Is this movie homophobic? I am tempted to say no. Does it show a pretty heinous gay character? Sure. But there is something so clumsy and pathetic about Barbara that, despite how conniving and perverse she is, makes me feel like she deserves my sympathy. I imagine her as a teenager longing so desperately to share her life with another woman. Her desires are met with fear and rejection and they soon push her to become a recluse. Throughout her life she is unable to have real, meaningful, interactions with other people, and as such has the emotional maturity of a child who doesn't understand that relationships are two-way streets.

Forgive me if this is a stretch, but I feel that while watching the movie I encountered the same conflict between empathy and reprehension that I do at my job. Every day I get new clients who have made mistakes in their lives. They range from people accused of gun possession, to illegal immigrants, to drug couriers, to makers of child pornography. Some of the crimes are heinous. Some of the crimes I don't even think should be crimes to begin with. But regardless of what the offense may be, I very rarely lack sympathy for our clients. I know that people make choices and, like I suppose Sartre would say, our worth as human beings ultimately comes from the choices we make.

At the same time, I find it impossible not to wonder what pushes people to make choices and whether in a world that is deeply unfair-- be it to people in the third-world, to African-Americans, to gays and lesbians, to women, to people with mental disabilities-- we can always fault and punish the individuals for their poor decisions. It is perhaps more productive to examine the deeply-flawed system in which we live and strive to change it, rather than locking away those whose behavior we find unacceptable. I think, both at my job, and in Notes on a Scandal, it boils down to the unresolved age-old sociological conflict of structure versus agency. That is my two cents of naive, liberal bullshit.

I enjoyed that this movie could be both campy and serious. It made me think about sociological rhetoric, but also kept me amused with its snappy dialogue and iconic images-- one of my favorites was Cate Blanchett applying severely punk eye make-up and lipstick, and subsequently going crazy, as in foaming at the mouth, holy-fucking-ape-shit crazy. I loved this movie and I am sure that it will be the new camp classic for the Y-generation.

A New and Improved Bond

I don't claim to be one of those people who knows everything about James Bond. I don't think I have even seen more than five or six Bond films, and these are mostly the newer ones. But despite my limited knowledge, I was very excited to see that with Casino Royale, the 007 franchise was given a much-needed breath of fresh air.

The film, as probably everyone knows, stars Daniel Craig as the new Bond. He is blond, buff, and beautiful. Unlike his predecessors, he doesn't rely on technological gadgets to get the bad guys, but rather on his huge and perfectly-defined muscles. With animal-like agility, he runs and he wrestles, he hangs from crates and bounces from walls. The energy which he exudes is unlike anything I've seen in the movies in a long time and makes the movie belong entirely to Craig.

Casino Royale does away with the tired cliches that had identified Bond for the past few decades. Charming and novel at first, these idiosyncrasies seem trite and out of place nowadays. When asked if he wants his drink shaken or stirred, Craig responds brusquely, "Does it look like I give a damn?" The movie replaces the Bond conventions and gives free reign to Craig to create a completely different persona. And he does a great job at that. The James Bond of this movie is a very complete character. Every look, every word, every movement is congruent with the whole. Bond partially lets you into his psyche, his motivations, making you feel like he is an actual human being who happens to be a spy, rather than a recycled caricature of a spy. At the same time he manages to maintain an air of mystery and impenetrability that keeps him compelling and attractive. A significant part of this new characterization of Bond is that he is now a far more sexualized character. I mean that he is both sexual in the way the old Bond was-- ie: a man who is good with the ladies-- but also in the sense that he has become a sexual object himself. And I think that is wonderful and shows a very cosmopolitan and refreshing take on gender relations.

In a related note, I felt the movie had a strong homo-erotic under current. There was no explicitly gay content but there were aspects of certain scenes that were reminiscent of elements of gay culture. The sexy banter between Bond and Vesper, for example, seemed to suggest that Bond has an acute self-awareness of his own physical beauty and sex-appeal in a way that is both charming and narcissistic. Another example is the torture scene where Le Chiffre beats a naked Bond, which seems just one or two degrees removed from an elaborate S&M porno that ought to be performed by bearded men in leather chaps.

The rumor floating around the Internet is that in his next Bond flick, Craig wants there to be more daring elements, like explicit homosexual content and full-frontal nudity. Kudos to Craig, and to director Martin Campbell for catching up with the times.

The Rwandan Quagmire

We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families by Philip Gourevitch is a comprehensive analysis of the Rwandan genocide. The book interweaves the history of the Rwandan people, first-hand accounts of the genocide, and political narratives of the period of turmoil that followed.

The account is fascinating and well written. But despite having read the 353-pages of the book, I am still at a loss in understanding how a tragedy like the Rwandan genocide could have happened. This is not to say that the book is not extremely thorough in its explanation of the events that led to the mass killing of Rwandan Tutsis-- it is. But even after reading about the colonial legacies of the Belgians, the history of social inequality and violence between Hutus and Tutsis, the collapse of the economy in the 1980's, or the boom of genocidal propaganda in the 1990's, I am left with a feeling that something still does not make sense.

The events that took place in Rwanda in 1994 stand out because, unlike in other cases of genocide such as in the Holocaust, the killing was not achieved, per se, through state-operated, systematic means. Efficiency was not achieved through technology. Instead, "the people were the weapon: the entire Hutu population had to kill the entire Tutsi population." (96). The genocidaires relied on every single member of the Hutu majority to carry out their campaign to annihilate the Tutsi population. The genocide that ensued was the swiftest, most efficient mass killing of the twentieth century, with over 800,000 people being slaughtered in a mere 3 months.

As someone who studied social sciences in college, I tend to think that everything that happens around us has an explanation. Revolutions and wars, treaties and alliances, can be studied as combinations of underlying factors and variables that interact in a particular way to create a specific outcome. However, sometimes, like in the case of Rwanda, it seems that we are at a loss in understanding what happened. The tools at our disposal all of a sudden prove to be useless.

Any historian can tell you that the assassination of Rwandan President Habyarimana was the spark that ignited the fire in Rwanda in 1994. But unlike in other historical events, we are not talking about a state, or a faction of the state, making a decision to go to war. We aren't talking about people having a collective uprising against the government. We aren't even talking about scores of people suddenly deciding to attack a neighboring country. We are talking about ordinary citizens picking up machetes and killing each other. In Rwanda there was a tipping point when, literally, doctors started killing their patients, teachers started killing their students, and neighbors started killing each another. There are even reports of brothers killing brothers, husbands killing wives. When, and how, does that spark go off collectively for hundreds of thousands of individuals, turning ordinary citizens into killing machines? Society, on its most basic level, collapsed. Ties of affiliation created by family, community, or professional duty degraded and broke down completely. How, if at all, can we make sense of this?

I feel conflicted. I'd like to think that there is a way to break it down, to analyze what happened from a rational, methodological angle. To some degree, I would like to beleive that if we are able to demystify what occurred, we might be more successful at identifying similar events in the future, thus increasing out ability to stop tragedies before they occur. But perhaps that is just my own naive hope. What really went through the mind of those hundreds of thousands of individuals is something that neither Gourevitch, nor any reader of his book, may ultimately know.

The text also raises some fascinating questions about foreign involvement in Africa, and also of the lack thereof. The history of Rwanda has been marked by one catastrophic intervention from a foreign power after the other. To start out, the borders of the country were carved out in Europe without any regard to natural or ethnic boundaries. In the eighteenth century the Belgians, for their own administrative and financial purposes, reified sectarian identities, through extremely racist methods of classification such as measuring the widths of people's noses, dividing the country into two competing camps.

And the list of mistakes committed by foreign governments extends well into our era. In 1994, the great powers and the United Nations cowardly failed to even acknowledge that a genocide was taking place, in fear that an acknowledgment would equate a mandatory intervention. Other countries, such as France, had no qualms about continuing to support the Hutu authority, pretending that what was going on in Rwandan was a civil war of all against all, rather than acknowledging the reality of the situation.

Even after the worst was over, the world continued making mistakes. The international community set up incredibly misguided aid programs that directly helped the genocidaires, giving the people who committed the genocide food and shelter, and ignoring the survivors who had been victims of unprecedented violence. The reason behind this preposterous mistake was that hundreds of thousands of Hutus, had crossed an international border into Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and as such were regarded as refugees in need of the world's pity and aid. The Tutsi survivors of the genocide, on the other hand, remained in Rwanda and largely ignored simply because they failed to classify under the narrow definitions of what the UNHCR considers a "refugee."

Despite the generally depressing subject matter of the book, Gourevitch ends with a note of hope. It was neither the international community nor the Hutu men and women who made the right choices in Rwanda. The last page of the book contains a description of a small, yet significant, act of heroism that highlights that, even in times of despair, there are right choices to be made. And, surprisingly, sometimes the right choices are made by those whom we may least expect to do so:

"During the attack on the school in Gisenyi, as in the earlier attack on the school in Kibuye, the students, teenage girls who had been roused from their sleep, were ordered to separate themselves-- Hutus from Tutsis. But the students had refused. At both schools, the girls said they were simply Rwandans, so they were beaten and shot indiscriminately." (353)