What's Class Got to Do, Got to Do with It?

More and more talk these days about growing socioeconomic inequality.  For example, according to the Pew Research Center:

In 1982, the highest-earning 1% of families received 10.8% of all pretax income, while the bottom 90% received 64.7%, according to research by UC-Berkeley professor Emmanuel Saez. Three decades later, according to Saez’ preliminary estimates for 2012, the top 1% received 22.5% of pretax income, while the bottom 90%’s share had fallen to 49.6% — the lowest level since at least 1917.

Inequality is higher in the US in comparison to other developed economies (2nd highest income inequality, after taxes and transfers, out of 31 OECD countries).  The income gap between whites and blacks and Hispanics has grown.  Inequality of wealth is even more skewed.  And notably, says Pew, "Americans are relatively unconcerned about the wide income gap between rich and poor" (see 2013 global attitudes survey here).

Why not?  Maybe because we're so good at rationalizing it?  Matthew Hutson suggests this in his piece for Slate, Social Darwinism Isn't Dead.

New research indicates that in order to justify your lifestyle, you might even adjust your ideas about the power of genes. The lower classes are not merely unfortunate, according to the upper classes; they are genetically inferior.

Hutson summarizes this research, and gives some examples of social darwinist talk, such as that of former Lt. Governor of South Carolina, Andre Bauer.  During a 2010 town hall meeting, he said this in response to a question about school lunch programs:

My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. . .You know why? Because they breed. You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that. And so what you've got to do is you've got to curtail that type of behavior. They don't know any better.

The problem with this example--aside from the grotesque lack of empathy--is that Bauer isn't a member of the elite, those one percenters, and probably not in even the top 5% in terms of wealth and income (check out this NY Times site where you can guestimate your class position).  This brings me to what I think is the cognitive obstacle to reducing socioeconomic inequality.  It's not so much the elite, who have always rationalized their disparate wealth (or never deigned to to explain it).  It's that swath of people constituting the amorphous middle class--from employed working class folks on up to the upper middle class (where Bauer probably sits).  These are the ones who live on various comfortable rationales for inequality.

This large group includes people who are happy with inequality, even revel in it, as long as they're on the winning side of the movement of capital, from the schmucks who have little to the dashing buccaneers who evidently deserve a lot.  Back in 2004, CBS News acquired the following from the Justice Department, a recording of two Enron employees gloating over all the money they made for their company by driving up energy rates under false pretenses, and joking about a California utility's effort to recover some of that money:

Employee 5: They f_ _ _in' takin' all the money back from you guys?  All the money you stole from those poor grandmothers in California?
Employee 6: [chuckling] Yeah, grandma Millie, man. . .
Employee 5: Yeah, now she wants her f_ _ _in' money back for all the money you charged, jammed right up her ass for f_ _ _in' $250 a megawatt hour. . .
[both chuckle a bit]

(You can learn more about this affair in the documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room)

Or I could cite the more recent home mortgage crisis, where educated middle class people in the housing, mortgage, banking and financial industries--wittingly or not--colluded in screwing over other people and fomenting an economic crisis (listen to This American Life's excellent report on this in "Giant Pool of Money").

This large group includes managerial staff who think their paternalistic gesture towards underpaid employees is noble.  Even Forbes, hardly a bastion of liberalism, couldn't believe that Ohio Walmart managers last Thanksgiving ran a food drive for their employees.  "Associates?"  Orwell would roll his eyes.

Photo courtesy of Our Walmart
at http://www.today.com/news/wal-mart-defends-controversial-food-drive-employees-2D11618754

This large group includes all of us that consume media that routinely celebrate individualism and deny the effect of socioeconomic origins.  Bill Murray does a nice job of satirizing this in this clip from the 1979 movie, "Meatballs."  "It, meaning class, "just doesn't matter," he repeats, though the movie goes on to reward the lower class Camp North Star its first victory over the nearby upper class Camp Mohawk in the annual Olympiad.  That's the kind of story we tell ourselves over and over again.

And there's some truth to it, for sure.  There is more social mobility in the US than most countries in the world, though that mobility has declined in recent decades, in part because of growing inequality in our educational system (see this Brookings report).  But those of us who have not fallen down the class ladder tend to explain our success, and the failures of those on lower rungs, in individualistic terms.  We worked hard.  We earned what we have.  We acted responsibly.  They didn't.

Never mind that we probably went to better high schools, grew up in more stable communities, with families and sets of peers that socialized us to maneuver well in our economy.  But we didn't work hard for that.  We didn't earn it.  It came our way because we were born in a particular socioeconomic stratum (and in my case, I got more unearned entitlements because I'm white and male).

Am I arguing that economic outcomes for people are all structural?  No, clearly they're not because people from the same social class can go in different directions on the ladder (though the great majority stay in the same place), and people from the same social class can end up in very different economic niches (say, a political science professor compared to a bank manager or a chemist).  But I am saying that our staunch individualism, and our faith in the myth of 'pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps,' contributes to the widespread sentiment that socioeconomic inequality is nothing to worry about, or nothing we can can or should address, even as it continues to grow.

It's not the odd politician spouting silly social darwinist stuff who is really behind our inaction on inequality.  It's that "silent majority" Nixon loved so much who has turned a blind eye to the causes and consequences of inequality.

Movie Reviews: Too Bad The Spring Breakers Didn't Face The Impossible

WARNING: All sorts of spoilers.

The other day I jumped the gamut of cinematic art--from film as a slap in the face to one intended to inspire.  Spring Breakers and The Impossible.

I started the first, knowing I was entering this movie with predispositions and baggage.  I already have a class conscious-cum-stern Lutheran knee-jerk reaction to the very idea of college kids rushing south to enact some banal version of bacchanalia.  In my undergrad days (hrumph), in Reagan's "morning in America," I worked full time during spring breaks to make ends meet (plus, you know, I biked miles through perpetually flooded streets while at Oregon State, always uphill).  And my introverted sensibility could not have born partying with hundreds or more of unknown people in various states of drunkenness and dress.


The Beatles, Baby You're a Rich Man (Magical Mystery Tour, 1967)

The closest I came to this was a night of bar-hopping soon after my 21st birthday--and I will forever associate partying in a human herd with desultory dancing to a Beatle's medley mashed together with an ear-bashing 4/4 techno beat (BOMP bomp bomp BOMP, and repeat), vaguely pretty women trying not to look bored or disappointed (they had good reason, no doubt), an air of sexual tension suffused with competing, clogging colognes, smoke, and alcohol, and the second worst hangover in my life (the worst was after a night of rum and cusha at a going-away party in Guatemala).

Scene from Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine, Writer/Director)
Source: Salon.com

But I had heard about Harmony Korine's previous controversial movies (Kids, Gummo), and decided to finally give this cult-status moviemaker a try.  The story centers on four college girls, bored, and desperate to join others heading to Florida for spring break.  Apparently, they've known each other since kindergarten, are very close, though one is an evangelical Christian (her name, Faith, has me immediately smelling clumsy allegory) and the others (Candy, Brit, and Cotty) spend class time doodling penises and partying hard the rest of the time.  The poor girls don't have enough money for the trip, though somehow the three baddies with cutesy names have enough to score coke.

But this movie isn't about plausibility, it's about polemic, and parody.  The scenes of spring break partying on the beach or in cheap hotel rooms are idealized.  Impossibly, all the young partiers have beautiful sculpted bodies as they dance ecstatically, guzzle beer, snort lines, with guys taking pics of girls baring magnificent breasts, and the girls just delighting in being little more than objects of sexual desire.  Debauchery is just non-stop fun!  Korine makes it clear, though, with dreamy color schemes, slow-motion moments, and jarring editing, that this is a fantasy.  He does give us a few dark moments: a girl collapsed head-down by a toilet, a near rape scene, and the creepy ATL Twins doing lines on a comatose girl's naked body.  But the party rocks on.

Sadly, I suspect some viewers won't get the joke.  It will be party porn, similar to what Anthony Swoffard described in Jarhead, young marines watching anti-Vietnam movies like Apocalypse Now or Platoon, not for the critique of war, but for the "magic brutality" of the combat scenes.

There's brutality in Spring Breakers, too.  The girls find a way to reach spring break nirvana after the three more nihilistic ones--Candy, Brit, and Cotty--rob a restaurant and its patrons, wielding squirt guns and hammers, which they use with abandon, clearly loving the mayhem and fear they provoke.  Once down in St. Petersburg, they are in paradise.  Faith never wants to leave, never wants the moment to end, uttering fatuous lines to her friends, her mother, her grandmother, about how perfect it all is, how she's found herself.  But it does end, she does leave, lost again.

First, they get busted at a party for drug use, and spend the night in jail.  A rising local drug lord named Alien had noticed them before and shows up to bail them out.  But his scene scares Faith, and she's on the bus back to boring college, weeping.  Later, in one of the more nightmarish scenes in the movie, a prelude to a stint of violent crime, the three girls are in swimsuits and pink ski masks, dancing around with guns, while Alien plays a Brittany Spears song on a white piano, as a garish sun sets on the sea around them.  They look like a vivisectionist experiment grafting feral skinned mole heads onto nubile teen bodies.  Predictably, I suppose, this image has become something to emulate in pop culture rather than an occasion to think critically about pop culture (I don't want to promote the websites by naming them here--but if you just google "spring breakers scenes pink ski masks...").

Soon things get too rough for Cotty.  After she's shot in the arm during a showdown with Alien's competitor, Archie, she's also on the most unmagic bus, glumly headed home.  "Spring break forever," is a repeated in the latter part of the film, but it isn't.  The remaining two girls shame Alien into avenging Cotty and his manly honor.  It's enough to screw him and then call him "scaredy pants," thus giving him the choice of their bodies or their contempt.  A no-brainer (literally and metaphorically), and they're off to do in Archie and gang, Candy and Brit in day-glo yellow bikinis and those pink ski masks, their beautiful bottoms swinging in time with the guns in their arms.  Alien is downed immediately (the pathetic Alien, who not long before had repeated "Look at all my shit" to the girls while showing them his money, guns, hat and shoe collections, and his Calvin Klein cologne).  The girls massacre the entire Archie entourage, briefly stop to caress Alien's dead face on the way back, and then drive back to Anywhere University in his car.

The point of the parody?  Not surprisingly, the Hollywood Reporter's David Rooney didn't think there was much of one, just an interesting experiment in pop-art that is "bound to acquire at least minor cult status."  But according to Boston Globe's edgier Ty Burr:

Korine delivers a teenage apocalypse that’s shocking and stupid and exhilarating and tender in equal measure. “Spring Breakers” fuses our worst nightmares and most reckless dreams of freedom until the two become indistinguishable.

Well, I'm neither as dismissive as Rooney or excited as Burr.  I was, believe it or not, once in my late teens and early twenties, and remember the yearning for freedom to do just whatever I wanted to do, to hell with consequences.  But I'm sure that yearning does not disappear in later decades for most people, who go to lesser and greater lengths to ignore it, or keep a lid on it (for the record, I've tried both lesser and greater).  Adults hardly have a monopoly on virtue.

Also, having taught college students for the past twenty years--and hearing variations of "kids these days" ad nauseum--I can't buy the notion that the current cohort of youth is any more rife with self-indulgence or nihilism than the previous cohorts, including my own.  And who raised all those awful kids, anyway, or taught them?  On top of that, over the years I've known many students who have been anything but self-indulgent and nihilist.  In other words, I think the parody in Spring Breakers is too harsh, too generalized.

At the same time, I think the film's most important critique has been missed by most.  It's the ending.  The two middle class students, who have gone to the marginalized poor white and black populations for their highs, who have fed on their cultural fodder, get them all killed, and get away with nary a scratch.  Korine's allegory is in part about class, and it made me think of young grads going into Enron at the end of the last millennium, living large while helping trash California's energy economy (for examples, see the documentary The Smartest Guys in the Room), or more recently, young grads making mounds of money off of mounds of toxic debt that drove us into "The Great Recession" (listen to This American Life's Giant Pool of Money or Another Frightening Show About the Economy).

But that message about class, unfortunately, is likely lost in the question of gender.  Why does Korine make four young women (three of them, as many have noted, from the relatively innocent world of Disney) the fulcrum of his ironic catapulting launch against youth pop culture?  Women can be as badass as men?  A hipster cool point that the masses (especially straight guys) will like the Spring Breaker fantasy, thereby confirming their idiocy (and justifying the condescension)?  I am still a bit mystified, but maybe that was Korine's intention--unsettle the viewer.

So, time for something far more conventional.  Incredibly conventional.  Talking about The Impossible after Spring Breakers is like wolfing down a McDonald's combo meal on the road after a gluten-free free range entree at a restaurant with distressed furniture, and artfully pierced and tattooed servers who in their off-time ride with a biker gang.

But some times a quarter-pounder and fries ain't all bad.

Scene from The Impossible (J.A. Bayona, Director)
Source: aceshowbiz.com

The narrative in Spring Breakers was anything but straightforward, full of sudden cuts, flashbacks, repetitions, foreshadowing and backshadowing.  The Impossible story moved chronologically from an opening that fleshed out the main characters, to a horrific tsunami that separates them, a harrowing aftermath as they look for each other, and a soothing denouement where the main characters are reunited, hurt, but not broken.  All based on a true story (the 2004 tsunami that swept through countries abutting the Indian Ocean).  Humans can survive grave disasters.  Families can remain intact despite awful calamities.  Those are assurances most of us like to hear, even if we know that not all humans survive, not all families remain intact (the movie makes that clear, too).

The movie delivers that assurance with good direction and storyline, great effects, and marvelous acting.  I was so taken in that I didn't think about the craft involved, except for one moment of wondering, "How did they make this all so believable?"  So different from watching Spring Breakers, where every other moment I'm thinking about the moviemaker's flourishes, as if Korine were muttering in my ear, "Hey, look what I do next..."

The story follows a British family--mother, father, and three young boys--living in Japan, which decides to spend Christmas at a lush resort in Thailand.  Naomi Watts plays the mother, playing her so well that she received her second Academy Award nomination (the first was for the 2003 21 Grams).  I'm not sure why.  She was great in The Impossible, but being thrown around by a flood or lying in bed on death's door was not as complex or compelling as her roles in 21 Grams, Mulholland Drive, Eastern Promises, or even I Heart Huckabees.  I thought the notable star was the boy playing her oldest son, Tom Holland.  Really, all three boys were eminently believable.

I checked in again with Rooney and Burr and their takes on this film, and they again took opposite sides.  Rooney gushed over it, calling it "one of the most emotionally realistic disaster movies in recent memory." Burr, though appreciating the moviemaking, in the end deemed it "frustratingly myopic." I suppose I agree more with cynical Boston than starry-eyed Hollywood on this one.

A problem I have with the movie is, again, connected to class--this habit of framing horrible events that disproportionately affect the poor and people of color through the eyes of relatively wealthy whites.  I mean, give me a break.  The moviemakers couldn't even handle giving the audience the family from Spain on whom the screenplay was based?  Granted, there are understandable commercial reasons for anglicizing the characters.  It's easier to give us dumb Americans a way to avoid sub-titles.  It's easier to avoid the awkwardness of having a Spanish family indicated by actors speaking with a Spanish accent (oh, and then the hassle of picking one of Spain's vernaculars).  As well, white audiences who make up the more lucrative cinema market will more readily identify with white characters.  And, after all, thousands of white tourists were injured, died, or went missing as a result of the tsunami.  One need only glance at the BBC's partial list of the 149 missing and confirmed British dead to get a sense of all the heartrending pain for survivors and their families and friends back home.

2004 Asian Tsunami
Source: tsunami.com

Still, according to Wikipedia, in total there were over 148,000 confirmed deaths, close to 46,000 missing, 125,00 injured and 1.69 million displaced.  Most of these casualties occurred in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand.  The Impossible ignores the global scope of the disaster and its victims, and the fact that the tourism trade for wealthier white folks exists because of poorer countries with ample supplies of very cheap labor and a need for hard currency.  It also avoids the plausible observation that natural disasters are so much more disastrous in places like Thailand, in part because national governments that expend resources on facilitating vacations for the wealthy have less to direct toward disaster prevention and relief.  Sure, all that context could make a movie screenplay unwieldily.  But it would be something if fewer movies depended on universalizing the experience of the rich and beautiful, while excising the misery of the rest of the people.

Okay, I'm grousing.  I enjoyed the movie, was moved by this story of the human will to survive, of the capacity for humans to put others before themselves in a crisis, and of the love in a family that pulls its members back together in spite of great odds.

But as with many things in my life--film, books, sports, teaching, politics, etc.--I can enjoy something, but still be unhappy with aspects of it (and vice versa in the case of Spring Breakers).