This would be longer if it weren’t almost tomorrow. I’m sitting here finally finding out why everyone is so crazy about Orange Is the New Black. I was literally afraid to watch it; not sure what I expected but it is SO MUCH BETTER than I could have expected.
So much more to say but this is it for now.. Placeholder Sunday. Tomorrow I want to talk about Citizenfour and Dear White People.
Nora Ephron was our neighbor when we lived in New York. Once, when I complained about PLENTY, a play I had seen and hated, and its “such good reviews” she responded, “you need to learn to read between the lines; some things get ‘good’ reviews just because reviewers think they are supposed to like them.”
As usual, she was right. It’s ironic that BIRDMAN, which got so many good reviews, (and has an excellent cast) includes a scathing diatribe, possibly the best speech in the film, from a reviewer. This showy, weird, kind of pathetic film deserves no less.
I never read reviews until after a I see a film because they reveal too many plot points and great lines, but in this case it wouldn’t have mattered; the praise is pretty universal. But I’m a pretty open audience and it touched neither me nor my companion. Unless you are feeling intellectually fashionable or like burning ticket and popcorn money, see something else.
Few places are more private, spiritually critical, inspiring and, as Rabbi Danya Rutenberg writes, comforting, than the mikveh. Her piece on the unspeakable desecration of that space by Washington Rabbi Barry Freundel, who allegedly used hidden cameras to spy on women while they were there, brought me to tears even though I became observant when I was older and the mikveh less central than it was for all my younger sisters, who taught me to keep kosher and light candles and honor Shabbat. For them it is all so much worse, a kind of collective rape. Rutenberg writes:
I don’t know what percent of the water in the mikveh is actually made up of women’s tears, but I suspect it’s a lot. The mikveh is meant to hold vulnerability. The fact that one is naked when immersing is not just a literal fact — the symbolism of it penetrates every single pore, every inch of the self that goes under the living waters. It is, for a lot of women, a unique place for a certain kind of stopping, a certain kind of reflection, a certain kind of engaging with the present moment and with God. Not everyone has the same experience, obviously, but the ritual of mikveh opens up a space that can be exquisitely intimate and deeply personal.
Six years ago, I wrote about one young woman’s mikveh experience; I’m republishing a version of it here as an example of just what has been violated.
We had a party Saturday. Ice cream cake, fruit, songs and verses. It wasn’t exactly a birthday party, but kind of. It’s very tough to convert to Orthodox Judaism. Rabbis ask you over and over if you’re serious. You have to study. You have to read out loud in Hebrew. You have to answer questions to a board of 3 (male) rabbis. Then, you have to immerse yourself in a mikveh. It’s the culmination of several years of study and soul-searching.
So we had a party to celebrate a young woman who had navigated the process and, just this past week, emerged from the waters – Jewish. As she spoke to the assembled women she told us not just about her own journey, but, in a way, about our own. Unable to begin without tears, she decided first to read the passage that seemed to her to describe where she’d been – and where she’s landed. (Another convert friend of mine told me she’s clung to the same verses; they have particular meaning to those who choose to become Jewish, to “go where we go.”) Standing at one end of the table and surrounded by many of the women of our congregation gathered in her honor, she began to read from the Book of Ruth.
Mother-in-law Naomi is trying to convince her widowed daughter-in-law Ruth to go back to her own nation and not suffer with her.
But Ruth answers “Don’t ask me to leave you! Let me go with you. Wherever you go, I will go; wherever you live, I will live. Your people will be my people, and your God will be my God. Wherever you die, I will die, and that is where I will be buried. May the LORD’s worst punishment come upon me if I let anything but death separate me from you!”
The story represents much of what she feels about her new life. Her choice: to immerse in the mikveh as one person and emerge as another, committed to the very demanding requirements of conversion and to join the tribe that I was born into and, for much of my life, lived within – accepting my identity as a Jew but very little else.
In many ways, I have made the same choices she did. Compared to the way I live now, the Judaism I knew then was an identity easily moved aside when inconvenient. Now, after four years of increasingly observant life, my identity is so tangled with my Judaism that there’s no way to pretend it isn’t there, isn’t affecting all I see and every choice I make. They call it “the yoke of heaven” — acceptance of the rules handed down so long ago. It looks so weird from the outside, so whether you’re my young friend choosing to become a Jew, or me, choosing to actually live like one, you’re somewhat set apart by your decisions. Keep kosher – you can’t eat in most restaurants or even at your old friends’ homes. Observe the Sabbath, you can’t go see Great Big Sea or Bruce Springsteen or to a good friend’s 40th birthday party because they’re on a Friday night. Honor the holidays and you may antagonize clients and risk losing business. And sometimes, friends, and even family, look askance, withdraw or just shake their heads.
Even so, what my friend has chosen — what my husband and I have chosen — what the community of friends we love has chosen – is a life rife with meaning and commitment, with tangible goals to be better, more honorable, more committed beings with an informing value system and sense of purpose. After a lifetime that was pretty successful and often seemed glamorous and highly visible, this is a choice of which I am very proud. Different from before, but at least as demanding intellectually, ethically and emotionally as any other stop on my life’s journey. In many ways, it has allowed me to rediscover the person I used to think I was, and liked – as a writer, a thinker, a wife and mother and friend. I am grateful that I have found it, and so very glad that this generous and articulate young woman reminded me, through the moving and exquisite reflections on her own choice, just why I made mine.
Remember 8 Mile, the sad story of a neglected trailer park teen from Detroit – supposedly pretty close to the story of its creator, rapper Eminem?
I kept thinking about it as I watched Men, Women and Children, the profoundly moving story of a different kind of alienation at least partially enabled by the Internet. Nobody’s mom was an abusive alcoholic, but one mom fled her family so completely 
that she blocked her son Tim from her Facebook account, one sold slightly risqué images of her cheerleader daughter online and yet another intercepted and read every online communication to and from her daughter Brandy and tracked her movements with a tracker on her phone; Brandy was so stifled that she created a secret online identity just to get away once in a while.
It’s a beautiful film, a survey of young people so much on their own ; life online allows so much distance from parents and any love or wisdom they might offer. And even though they make mistakes beyond the web, the same technology seems to have trapped their parents, too.
Reitman chooses to move beyond individual dramas, however, and take us beyond his own observations as he closes the film with Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space – with a hopeful description that connects us all to one another: enemy or friend, alive or dead, present or past, online or off:
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Movies stay with us; they’re great historic documents, but television is intimate, and when it’s good, television is us.
My own early understanding of injustice and race and poverty and social change came from television. For example:
There are plenty of others but this is #microblogmonday so I’m about done: consider though the WWI episodes of Upstairs, Downstairs, and Route 66.
* The Museum of Broadcast Communications called it “perhaps the most socially conscious series the medium has ever seen”, a show”singularly resonant with New Frontier liberalism.”
OK so I was all set to do some real work this morning. I was. Then I saw this in my friend Katherine Stone’s Facebook feed:
Katherine is a remarkable person whose fierce advocacy for women with post partum mood and anxiety disorders is legendary. I listen to her.
The problem is, I really really hate Gone Girl. Really.
First of all I figured out the ending near the beginning. Secondly, the ending was kind of lifted from SPOILER ALERT: Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent. Third, I’m betting the movie, soon to be released, is really good, which will just get more people saying nice things about the book. David Fincher. Ben Affleck. Neil Patrick Harris. What could go wrong? I read they changed the ending, too. In principal, that usually bothers me but in this case I’m really curious to see if the change makes the story more palatable.
I am far from the only person with negative feelings toward this novel. The sample in Katherine’s feed includes comments like these:
Rachel Kaffenberger Great writing but the characters just pissed me off. I hated that book. Awful, horrible people are in that book.
Jen Neeld Bradshaw Ha! I read it two weeks ago and I still have some rage.
Asha Dornfest That book freaked me out.
Deb Rox I threw the book. You can guess which scene.
Kit Kelly I hated it.
And my own two personal favorites:
Susan Petcher I feel like “Books that Make You Hate Humanity” needs to be a new FB meme.
Doug French I wanted the last sentence of the book to be, “And then they all piled into a Greyhound Bus and drove into a volcano.”
I’m with Doug. There were also some positive comments but these are the ones I agree with and there are already enough good comments out there in the ether and it’s my blog so….
Even so, it is true that the book evoked a ton of comments and a lot of emotion. I guess there’s some skill required for that to happen but if that’s true, she’s squandered it. Allegedly her other work is better but that’s no excuse – especially for a public which seems to be gaga for this one.
Right now I am reading California, a dystopian, almost too real story of a dark American future. It’s probably only on the radar screen because Stephen Colbert used it as an example of books by young first-time authors who are most hurt by the Amazon-Hachette battle. Since then it too has gotten a lot of attention so one makes me think of the other.
California doesn’t have as many stars on goodreads. For me though, it’s so very much more exciting and provocative. Her characters are more than horrible stereotypes, and it’s Edan Lepucki’s first published novel which is exciting.
This is not a contest between California and Gone Girl or between Stephen Colbert and Ben Affleck. At least not to me. I just didn’t want to be this mean about a book without including one that has my attention, is unpredictable, and includes some decent, interesting people.
Don’t we love that books can get us all riled up like this? Far more fun that terrorists and the NFL!
And for a treat, here’s the Colbert Report after LePucki’s book made the New York Times Best Seller List:
OH and #boycottNFLsponsors.
Nobody can stop talking about the NFL. Me neither. Yesterday I wrote about the complicity of broadcast networks and sponsors (who by the way paid my salary for more than 25 years) in this issue of women’s and children’s safety. I’ve never seen so many tone-deaf people in my life. Even CoverGirl can’t seem to get it right.
But today, on Microblog Monday, I have another question. What do we do about this world of modern gladiators in a game that damages their brains until many of them are never able to think clearly again? How do we protect them from the impact of the conditioning and brutality that is part of their work? And what is the difference between NFL owners and those who sent Rome’s ancient, doomed fighters into the Coliseum?
I saw The Normal Heart, then Love is Strange — with no premeditation, both in the same week.
Each is a great document of a time in our history. I began thinking about the power of these films and how valuable they would be as teaching tools. With that in mind, I hereby initiate the “films to teach American history by” list. Here are some more of mine; please add your own in the comments.
Kramer v Kramer Hair Do the Right Thing The Deerhunter
Bullworth Dead Man Walking Valley of Decision Gentleman’s Agreement
Good Night and Good Luck The Green Berets Get on the Bus The Pawnbroker
Today’s lesson: When Rick Atkins picks a movie that ISN’T American Pie, go. Tonight we saw Love Is Strange – a warm, loving, measured story beautifully built and executed. I am still reeling from The Normal Heart, as I wrote here and I hadn’t wanted another sad tale in the same week.
SO when I heard what this film was about, I balked. No More Sad. I ended up agreeing to go though, and am so very glad I did.
In most cases with “small” films like this people say they’ll wait for Netflix; there are no special effects or broad vistas that require the big screen. In this case though, Manhattan was such a part of the story that it was worth seeing it in all its glory.
It wasn’t even sad. Sad things happened but there was so much love and humor, Charlie Tahan, the young man in this photo, was so wonderful and Lithgow and Molina‘s couple was so much like any couple who’d been together a long time that there was also a deep familiarity that was a great part of the pleasure on the journey we took with them all.
No big conclusions here. We just got home and these are my first reactions but I doubt they will change; go and see for yourself and comment here if you have thoughts to share.
Of course there’s no such thing as time travel. Of course not.
The Normal Heart though, for anyone who was in New York in the 80’s, comes about as close as you can get. We watched it after the Emmys. I had avoided it, knowing how troubling it would no doubt be, but it felt wrong to not look. Too many people had done that 30 years ago. Here’s how one New Yorker described, to the New York Times, Manhattan in May of 1987:
‘Going to funerals has become a way of life,” said George Getzel, a Hunter College social work professor who counsels AIDS patients as a volunteer. ”People in their 70’s and 80’s experience this but here people in their 20’s and 30’s are visiting the sick at homes and in hospitals and burying the dead. Some are themselves sick. It’s become a regularized aspect of the lives of gay men and others like myself who are involved.
The Normal Heart slammed me back to those days:
The day, when I worked at the TODAY SHOW, that my friend Susan Weaver did one of the first AIDS stories that included a live guest in the studio. There was fear in the air that morning. A couple of studio crew members asked to be replaced and people debated in advance whether to shake hands with the young man who had the courage to show up and talk about what was happening to him, to New York and, we know now, to all of us.
The day that Allison Gertz, who succumbed to AIDS in 1992 at the age of 26 (and who spoke at many high schools to very effectively remind teenagers that for her, AIDS came from a single encounter with an infected man and that heterosexual sex was anything but safe) spoke, with enormous impact, at my own son’s high school.
The day that our sweet friend Stephen left us.
The day one of my oldest friends told me that of his entire book group, he was the only survivor.
The day Elizabeth Glaser, wife of actor Paul Michael Glaser, stricken through a blood transfusion during the birth of her daughter Ariel, who also contracted the disease, showed up at a Georgetown party lobbying and fundraising simultaneously. Ariel’s illness drove Glaser to form the Pediatric Aids Foundation, later renamed the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric Aids Foundation in her honor. She was everywhere, from Georgetown to Hollywood to endless television appearances, raising money and awareness until she died in 1994.
The day we watched Mark Harmon, the loveable, mischievous Dr. Caswell, walk away alone from the brilliant St. Elsewhere, his own AIDS diagnosis and certain death drawing him to an AIDS hospice to provide care until he died among his patients.
For everything here came days and weeks worth, years worth of deep melancholy and, for so many, pain, death and grief. Because New Yorkers live so close together, ride mass transit, hang out in public parks, buy food from hotdog carts on the corner and, even if they’re really really rich, can’t stay clear of strangers, we all knew it, felt it and feared it.
Of course, AIDS is still with us, a terrible epidemic in the developing world, and still present in the West. Here the reality is different today, if not entirely.
So yes, The Normal Heart was time travel; the gift of a perfect document reminding us, and portraying for those who came after, of a terrible, terrible time.