How Films Help
I spent a lot of 2016 grieving. The worlds I belong to were roiled by news-making disaster all through last year. A hate-mongering would-be autocrat ascended to the highest political office in the United States, where I currently live. The Holey Artisan Bakery siege in Dhaka was preceded and followed by reports of violence against minorities across Bangladesh, where I used to live. Demonetisation left chaos in its wake in India, home of my extended family; and bigotry-based populist authoritarianism continued to gain strength and vigour across the globe.
Despite the multitude of memes that gloomily asserted 2016's exceptional awfulness, I sternly reminded myself that all years are terrible for most people on this planet, given that there are more poor people than rich ones, more hungry people than well-fed ones. I didn't want to lose perspective just because the bad news seemed to be coming to me from closer, more familiar quarters.
But I, like just about everybody I knew, couldn't help but lose heart at the state of affairs. I wondered how I would keep finding the emotional energy to work and make myself useful to underserved communities at a time when the values of inclusivity and justice that I cherished seemed to be roundly rejected by loud, violent hordes.
I found my solace in the dark. I've watched film after film the past few months, not in an effort to escape my reality, but in an attempt to make sense of that reality and to return to it with more clarity. I've always gone to cinema for its restorative magic, its ability not only to reproduce life but to parse its truths. Films can reduce the messy, inchoate business of living into something trite and phony. They can also distil those truths into revelatory image and sound and word.
Consider Moonlight. It is a pointillist bildungsroman, a story told in sidelong glances and silent stares about one young, queer, black boy growing up around poverty and addiction in Florida. The film is gentle and undidactic. It makes no facile thesis statements about queerness or blackness or poverty or addiction. It does something far more sorcerous: It brings you marvelously close to the light and silence and air around this boy, who suffers blow after often literal blow, and whose experiences may not be like yours in any way. It asks you to see him, a person built of love and pain, and pay attention.
I walked out of Moonlight feeling a sort of hushed joy, awed by its thoughtful craft but also inspired by the keenness of its empathy. I wanted to keep seeing with the film's clear-eyed, loving, unsentimental eyes, even if the sights around me seemed too unrelentingly brutal sometimes.
No wonder, then, that I exulted at the end of another tedious Oscars ceremony, when Moonlight scored a surprise Best Film victory. Tarell Alvin McCraney, the writer of the unproduced play the movie is based on, had spoken words of explicit support earlier in the night to the queer boys and girls and gender non-conforming (perhaps the first time GNC identities were acknowledged on the venerable Oscars stage) kids watching, and I got moist-eyed. I cheered for those kids and wished that I'd seen someone on television say those words when I was growing up.
A film like Moonlight makes visible the power of representation in art. When artists, against incredible systemic odds, are able to send into the world like a crimson flare work where the historically othered is writ large and legible and nuanced, many young people who witness something of themselves in that art are given assurance of the vitality of their own stories, their own minds and bodies.
Cinema, at its most effective, shows one not only as one is, but as one can be. It vividly suggests the radiant possibilities of the human condition as something eminently realisable. Not long after the Presidential Elections in the States, I had a good, long, cathartic cry at the conclusion of Neerja, an Indian film that came out last year. The film is based on the real-life story of a young flight purser who was killed in an attempt to evacuate a hijacked flight and save the lives of her passengers.
On paper, this narrative sounds like those culled-from-the-headlines tragedies that elicit in one a vague, high-minded sort of admiration and are then forgotten. On film, however, it becomes a reminder that courage isn't an unflagging, spectacular thing, but is perhaps forged amid the quotidian pleasures and pains of work, family, and friendship.
Neerja Bhanot, as portrayed in this film, was a wonderfully everyday young woman, who had an ordinary family life, enjoyed singing and dancing and a good joke, had lived through the trauma of domestic abuse, and was looking joyously forward – to professional success, to love, to her birthday. This sounds like me, or like some of you. The film is terrific in finding a way into her mind, where her ordinariness is in no way at odds with her bravery.
Her valour is the kind I can aspire to, the sort of cobbled-together, unshowy, ultimately resolute thing that I hope desperately I can muster in the face of adversity. It is not dissimilar to the valour I see every day in people around me who agitate tirelessly and at great risk to themselves for justice. Neerja thoughtfully demonstrated to me that behind such impossible-seeming heroism are life-sized persons, anxious and afraid and funny and silly and working to keep it all together. It was okay, I told myself after my good, long cry, to be scared and despairing, because the will to work and do good would eventually rise again from the fear and despair.
I've come into this year, most of its days already marked with dismaying international incidents, with some of that succor I found in a darkened theatre. I found it elsewhere, too, of course – in community, in work, in reading and writing and dancing. But the movies are so often dismissed as the modern day circuses from that Roman formulation, noisome spectacles that serve to distract and anesthetise, that a belated love letter to the good ones, the ones that helped, doesn't seem undue as I move forward with trepidation and hope.
The writer lives in Chicago and works in HIV testing and prevention counselling.
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