So on a snap decision tonight, Karthika and I went to see Milk. Because it’s catch-up time on movies (and I appear to have missed Synecdoche, New York, which makes me sad).
The problem with Sean Penn is that he’s so consistently head and shoulders above the rest of the actors out there that it’s hard for him to stand out anymore. He’s competing with his own stellar performances–I thought a few times of his Willie Stark from All The King’s Men during this movie even though the two roles are of course almost nothing alike.
Milk is a very well done biopic–there’s almost nothing wrong with it, and it’s filled with quietly excellent performances. James Franco is heart-melting as Milk’s longtime partner and support system, and even the more flamboyant roles seem very comfortable, unforced. The lone exception is Diego Luna as Milk’s neurotic, needy lover, who hits all the wrong notes and seems so clearly to be designed to make you wish Milk and Scott were still together. If he was supposed to show a flaw in Milk by highlighting his devotion to work above his own life, it failed–anyone would want to avoid that hot mess.
Josh Brolin plays Dan White, the one character not comfortable in his own skin, and his entire life feels like a drag performance or an ill-fitting costume–even his hair looks like a bad toupee. The contrast between the less attractive, older, social-outcast Harvey Milk who is still so at home in himself, and the attractive, married, “respectable” White, who is so at odds with himself that he resigns, then wants his job back, then is willing to kill for it…well, it’s well done.
Gus Van Sant has little use for scenery chewers, and indeed his more recent movies (Elephant, Gerry, Last Days) have been so meditative, eschewing standard narrative in favor of watching people interact in front of the camera, that I was almost shocked at how conventional Milk was. (Then again, I’m also talking about the director of Good Will Hunting-which I love.) But it adheres to all the biopic traditions, and has perhaps an easier time of it with the life of Harvey Milk, which has a nearly perfect dramatic arc over an 8-year period. He falls in love, moves to California, faces discrimination, runs for office, loses, runs for office, loses, runs for office, loses, and then finally wins, only to face a bigger, scarier fight against Proposition 6 (it seems too coincidental how close it is to our own Prop 8), wins that, and then…well, you know how it ends.
The film made me tear up at several points, but like the aforementioned Van Sant movies, felt a bit distant. I would have liked more of Milk’s personal life–more pieces of him to see the human that was lost to an assassin’s bullet, not just the symbol. Aside from a few scenes between Franco and Penn, who make an easy, natural couple, mostly I cried because I knew what was coming, and I knew how little has changed in the thirty years since Milk died.
Just thirty years. And at the same time, thirty years! Longer than my lifetime, yet not long enough. The signs carried in the film were so similar to the ones a few weeks back at the anti-Prop 8 rally, and the arguments given by Milk’s opponents not too different from the ones we still hear. And the scenes with Milk and the bourgeois gay folk reminded me of recent battles with the HRC and the gloss put on the marriage fight all too often: see, we’re acceptable!
Milk never bought into that. One of my favorite moments in the film is him telling Emile Hirsch’s character to wear his tightest jeans and make a grand entrance every time he showed up in City Hall. Milk both made himself accessible and insisted on openness, and I like the combination. Don’t I wish he’d been around to help with the fight against Prop 8.
(Side note: I’ve seen the trailer for The Wrestler twice in two days, and both times it’s made me cry.)
A comment someone made over at this thread has me thinking about when it’s time to shut up and when it’s time to speak out.
I was standing in line on Friday to get my lunch. It was the Day of Silence and there was a group of students sitting at the Bell Tower on Temple campus handing out information on the protest. Two girls got in line behind me. One of them said, “Are you glad they’re all going to be deaf from sitting under that bell when it rings?”
And the other said something about the “Fag-straight alliance.”
I didn’t even think about it, I just reacted. “Wow,” I asked her, turning to look her in the face. “Did you really just say that out loud?”
She didn’t really answer me, and when I turned back around she and her friend started quickly talking about how they were in the gay-straight alliance back in high school, so somehow that alleviated them being assholes about these students’ protesting. (Reminded me of this.)
I didn’t even know about the protest until that day. I’m a grad student, which means I live under a rock when it comes to campus events. Regardless of whether or not I was involved in it, or whether or not I was the person being put down by that girl’s words, I had to say SOMETHING to let her know that what she said wasn’t cool.
See, over at that Feministe thread (the first one I linked to), someone pointed out that the thread was full of white women who were angry about the racist imagery in It’s a Jungle Out There. And that person suggested that white women who were speaking out were just as bad as others in appropriating the words, feelings, and thoughts of women of color.
I know sometimes I err on the side of not speaking up because I feel like it isn’t my place. Hi, privileged white girl. But lately I just can’t keep quiet and wait for someone else to say it. Even in the feminist blogosphere, I find myself annoyed with the persistence of attention paid to white middle-class women’s issues while other issues that affect women of all ethnic backgrounds and economic status are ignored. I’ve started to see why women I admire, like Patti Smith and Susan Sarandon, (yes, white women) don’t claim the label feminist, and why bloggers I admire are leaving.
So I have to speak up when I see things that are just effing wrong. I have to not feel uncomfortable calling people out on their racism and homophobia the same way I regularly call them out on their sexism.
And at the same time we all need to know that there are times when I do need to shut up and listen. There will always be people whose lived experience gives them a right to speak out about racism and homophobia and transphobia and poverty and many other things that I have simply never experienced. And the last thing any of us should ever do is tell anyone else that their concerns are trivial, that they should get over it, or that they’re jealous.
On these blogs, as I mentioned here, we don’t have to claim our race or gender or age or privilege level (other than the obvious, which is computer access and enough time to blog). But yet we do, and it gets brought into all the discussions, either as a positive or a negative. It is painful for me to see, even in a world which is supposedly free of judgment based on appearance, how even here voices are privileged because of the bodies they come from.
Giving white women a pass because they’re feminists, because they’ve experienced sexism, misses the point. Giving them a pass because they’re our friends doesn’t work either. Because someone is on the right side of one issue, it doesn’t make them right about all of them. (See Dick Cheney and his disagreement with Bush about gay marriage, for example.) When they’re our friends, it’s even more important to call them out on the things they do wrong, because we care and want them to do better.
When they aren’t our friends, but are people in a position of more power than we are, whether that be a big-name feminist blogger or a presidential candidate, it is hard for a few voices only from the group being slighted to speak up and be heard. They need more voices to join in the chorus.
Those voices are not more important because they are white. They are important because they are making that chorus louder. If there are enough of us, we WILL be heard.
