The Cynic: Oscar-nominated Films and My [Apparent] Discontents

The only way I can describe my relationship with television and films is to shamelessly pilfer some words from the late and great David Foster Wallace's essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction": "[...] there's no denying the simple fact that people in the U.S.A. watch so much television basically because it's fun. I know I watch for fun, most of the time, and that at least 51% of the time I do have fun when I watch. This doesn't mean I do not take television seriously." I, for one, feel that the same could (and should) be said about watching films.

Yet, the last few movies I've [attempted] to watch have left me yearning for something more substantial. And these are Oscar-nominated flicks, the creme de la creme, if you will. Now, keep in mind that I've cried at episodes of Doctor Who and at certain moments in Harry Potter novels--not because they're the classiest brand of literary texts, but just because characters were so well evoked. I'll try to twitterpate the last two of these experiences--140 characters or less--to convey what I mean.
Juno: If I didn't adore Ellen Page and her snark, this would've flatlined before she finished chugging Sunny D.
American Beauty: Wait. Family Guy parodying a cheerleader unbuttoning her blouse is more poignant. Angst-enough to shame Holden Caulfield, who at least has some verve.

And I'm not being stodgy, "I've-got-a-lot-of-books" guy. Yet...there needs to be a bit more going on than simply the plot, and I feel that's what happens with a lot of these Academy Award nominees. They have good stories, and the stories are left hauling a lot of the tensions. In Juno, Ellen Page acts circles around the rest of the cast. In American Beauty, rose petals out-act Kevin Spacey's award-winning performance, IMHO.

Neither Juno nor American Beauty are bad films, but I wanted more in terms of character development and personalities--which I didn't quite feel in either flick.

So, here's the request: What are some films, faithful readers, that you've found in which a rich plot and strikingly-evoked characters evolve hand-in-hand?

It's Been a While, and Still Some Things Don't Ever Change

Long time, no see. America is drowning from a recent tea party (btw, totally symbolically boycotted tea on Election Day and got all of my caffeine from coffee, despite my preference for tea!), and in the world of fictional narratives, maybe nothing's different. Despite national turmoil.

Right now, I'm teaching a section of freshman comp in the Rutgers-Newark Writing Program, and we're moving into a unit on heroes. We've started with part of the introduction to Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in which Campbell argues for what he calls the "monomyth": It's very Jungian, in that Campbell posits that there are archetypes that recur throughout cultures. And we've basically been dealing with the same kinds of stories. It's the context that's different, the names and faces and particular quirks of characters that are unique.

That seems to be a popular opinion in what I've been reading as of late. In A Short Story Writer's Companion, Tom Bailey argues that it's characters that make stories different and meaningful. This is not unlike Campbell's monomyth, which has been appropriated by modern tale tellers like George Lucas.

How'd I get on this tangent? The most recent update to Kate Beaton's webcomic Hark! A Vagrant! Beaton lampoons Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe in a series of strips that place Friday as the more intelligent, sophisticated of the two. The purpose behind Beaton's comic is to mock a recurring film archetype that she read about in the Bright Lights Film Journal, in which Frederick Zackel argues that we've been seeing Robinson Crusoe's master-slave/white-black dialectic played for years. And it's everywhere. Yet we've been overlooking it in to address other concerns. Zackel writes,

For instance, we all remember the brouhaha about whether the 1993 movie Rising Sun actually represented Japan-bashing. Yet none of us seemed to have noticed that the two male leads in that movie, Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes, were busy reenacting (or maybe "perpetuating" is a better word) one of the oldest fictional partnerships in our Western culture.

Englishman Connery played the part of Robinson Crusoe, while Snipes, a descendant of slaves, played his Man Friday. Not that those were their characters' names, of course. Not that either man realized what they were reenacting, either. Nor can either man be blamed for his part in perpetuating the myth.

First of all, I take offense to his referring to Sean Connery as an "Englishman," but his point is that Connery's and Snipes's characters are reenacting/perpetuating (his words) the Robinson Crusoe/Friday model. And it's not just Rising Sun; other movies, like Men in Black, have the older, wiser, patriarchal white male figure overseeing, guiding, and correcting a black counterpart (Tommy Lee Jones with Will Smith, for instance).

But seriously--Sean Connery is a Scot. Mr. Zackel is perpetuating his own stereotype--that Scots are happily English. But just as the rise of the Scottish parliament speaks towards Scotland's move toward freedom, so too should we try to craft into our fictions a move away from the Crusoe/Friday paradigm (first African American president, anybody?). Otherwise, nothing will ever change.