We went to see We The Animals at Argenta Community Theater Friday night.
It was the opening feature of the fourth annual Kaleidoscope Film Festival, which, according to its website, "celebrates the diversity of the LGBT community and filmmakers by presenting poignant and thought-provoking films documenting LGBT lives truthfully and with respect."
It's a fair summation of what the festival is, and what it aspires to be. You don't have to be gay to appreciate movies like We The Animals or Skate Kitchen (which I wrote about last week), but I imagine underserved constituencies appreciate seeing realistic portrayals of people like themselves on screen.
One of the things human beings crave is reassurance, the feeling that they're not doing things all wrong all the time. One of the things that makes art important is that it allows us to delve into the heads and hearts of others, to feel like others have felt the same inchoate things that we have felt.
Art connects us who might otherwise be trapped inside our prepossessing minds.
I don't expect most people to get that, and that's OK. While the first thing we must understand about human beings is that we are all pretty much the same (and that constructs like race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, nationality and religion are superficial descriptors that don't tell us anything about the most essential parts of a person), the second thing we must understand is that not everyone is like us. Art teaches us how to simultaneously hold these contradictory ideas in our heads at the same time. Some people call that cognitive dissonance; others, like Scott Fitzgerald, held it to be a sign of high intelligence.
I wonder if it can't be both.
And we are all compelled to think as we think, whether those thoughts are supported by the observable world or not. Some of us, maybe most, believe what we believe then hustle backwards to selectively collect evidence that supports our faith. It's easier than embracing our fundamental cluelessness and letting the mystery be.
Some people tell me they go to the movies to escape themselves, to get away from whatever problems they think they have in real life. I understand this. There have been a couple of times when I have coped with stress by going to matinees. Now I remember the films (Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the 2009 Star Trek) better than the circumstances that drove me to them. There's nothing wrong with retreating to the dark when the light hurts your eyes--and a cinema is probably a healthier way to forget yourself than medication.
But there is also a danger in ingesting too much overly processed, artificially sweetened junk. Too much Hollywood rots your brain and kills your soul. You run the danger of mistaking comfort for sustenance.
A movie like We The Animals invites viewers into a very specific world, that of the youngest of three close-in-age brothers living a kind of feral existence seemingly on the rural edge of civilization, in a working-class home in upstate New York in the 1980s. Their parents--white Ma and Puerto Rican Paps-- met in high school in Brooklyn. Now she works in a beer bottling plant while he, with his tattoos and lean dark depressive mien, cannot keep anything screwed together for too long.
There's not much to it in the way of narrative drama; it's a series of dreamy vignettes, some of which seem naturalistic and rooted in specific incidents. A terrifying swimming lesson, parents shaking you awake late at night, car rides--at various points in the narrative I was reminded of other incongruous-seeming artists. I thought of Lucinda Williams' "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road" and of a minor character in Anne Tyler's latest novel, who, it is remarked of in passing, "resigned" from her family.
It is a life different than what I have lived, yet the specific details resonate. Jonah, the 10-year-old protagonist, is different from me, but the same. The sensations and emotions evoked by events felt familiar. All children are confused, accepting of their lots, and unreliable narrators.
I recognize that some wouldn't receive We The Animals as an entertaining movie; some would question its reason for existing. It's not the kind of movie that the Oscars honor but--even though Hollywood is more worried about neglecting its most lucrative products--it argues for film as the most potent form of art.
Some people will recognize in Jonah a member of their tribe and be encouraged to see a character like him given space on a cinema wall. Others would never think of going to see a film at an LGBT festival, not because they are bigots but because they think the movies aren't for them.
Maybe some of them aren't. All I know is that the best films I've seen at the Kaleidoscope festival over the years have been among the best films I've seen anywhere. Because what art can do is connect us with people very different from ourselves by showing us how we're all the same.
Most people think that movies are big overt things that have little to do with the way real people live--that the movies are all about superheroes and spies and other projections of our collective id. I hate that that's all so many of us want.
What is great about the movies is that even now--with all the digital Balkanization and the migration of seriousness to TV--they are a way to experience community. They are where strangers can gather to forget themselves and receive connection.
To understand we are different. And the same.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 08/14/2018