American Cinema of the 2000s: Themes and Variations

2005

2005 Movies, Terror, and the American Family KAREN BECKMAN The first of January marked the passing of Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman to be elected to Congress, the first woman to run for the Democratic presidential nomination, and the first major-party black candidate for the U.S. presidency. As this pioneer left the stage, George W. Bush was about to commence the second term of his ill-fated presidency. Undeterred by the doubt cast on the legitimacy of his initial election, he promised energy independence, the partial privatization of Social Security, and continued vigilance in the War on Terror. The year would also require him to replace two Supreme Court justices, Sandra Day O’Connor and William H. Rehnquist. Terror, turmoil, and turnover marked the year for the nation and its film industry, and the disasters occurring at the national level found cinematic parallels in the industrial breakups and makeups (Universal and Paramount ’s joint venture ends; Disney and Pixar move toward and away from each other; the Weinstein brothers depart from Disney, but Disney retains the name Miramax, derived from the Weinsteins’ parents, Max and Miriam) and in the plethora of films that depict trouble in the white American family. Junebug foregrounds the tension between a northern art-dealer wife and her southern in-laws. Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale dramatizes a white, middle-class, urban couple’s extramarital affairs and separation through the eyes of their two boys. Thumbsucker addresses the troubles of another white adolescent boy who struggles with his thumbsucking habit and with the traumatic realization that his mother has professional and sexual desires. Gus Van Sant, Jim Jarmusch, and Werner Herzog shared this fascination with white American lost boys: Van Sant through Last Days, a sparse account of the final days of Blake, a character loosely based on Kurt Cobain; Jarmusch in Broken Flowers with his lost boyman , Don Johnson (Bill Murray), who goes in search of four of his former lovers to discover which of them has sent an anonymous letter informing 125 him that he may be the father of a nineteen-year-old son; and Herzog in the documentary realm, through Timothy Treadwell’s monologues about the bears he thought he was protecting, in Grizzly Man. These angst-ridden performances invite a certain degree of empathy, but American screens were also populated by far less appealing if equally troubled white men, men who seem to be prepubescent but aren’t. Into this category we might place Wedding Crashers, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, as well as the back-from-thetelevision -grave cousins found in Jay Chandrasekhar’s Dukes of Hazzard. Other forms of masculinity also dominate the screen this year. We see the fear of and desire for racially marked masculinity in Peter Jackson’s extravagant remake of King Kong, and the purportedly unconventional revision of traditional male types (the soldier, the cowboy, and the wanderer) and genres (the war film, the western, and the road movie) in Jarhead, Brokeback Mountain, and Transamerica. But in a year so concerned with masculinity , what were female directors doing? Though there were some strong films directed by women, there was also some discouraging news on their progress within the industry. Martha Lauzen’s “2005 Celluloid Ceiling Report” noted that although in the first years of the new millennium women had accounted for 11 percent of all directors working on the top 250 domestic grossing films, a record high, the figure dropped back to 7 percent this year. The number of women in executive positions had increased, but 19 percent of the top 250 films still employed no women directors, executive producers, producers, writers, cinematographers, or editors. And after twenty-five years of spectacular programming, Women in the Director’s Chair organized its last festival due to lack of funds. Nevertheless, Niki Caro’s North Country counterbalances films such as Thumbsucker and The Squid and the Whale and their tales about the damaging effects working women have on their sons’ lives with a narrative about the first class-action sexual harassment lawsuit in the United States. And Sally Potter’s Yes (a U.K. and U.S. co-production) puts romance in a global and political context, responding to the post-9/11 demonization of the Middle East in the form of a verse narrative about an impossible affair between an Irish American woman and a Lebanese man. This year also forged a path for a different kind of documentary, described...