leave-no-trace-castaways

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/castaways-leave-trace/"></div>A spider’s web appears in the opening and closing images of Debra Granik’s new film Leave No Trace. It’s an apt metaphor. Granik’s film meditates on how social fabrics hold people together and the degree to which those same tensile wires make for social death traps. Leave No Trace explores the uneasy relationship between social life and death in America, an old question the film takes up with new and complex urgency.
The film rests on the father-daughter relationship of Will, played by Ben Foster, and his daughter Tom, played by the excellent Thomasin Mackenzie. Both a coming-of-age and castaway tale, infused with the themes of social, economic, and environmental destruction, Granik’s film opens to the pair living in the woods, off-the-grid. While the reason for their remove isn’t immediately clear, Granik unfolds the logic of their isolation in the film’s opening movement: Will is an Iraq War vet with PTSD.
For viewers in 2018, it isn’t hard to build the case for opting out. Will and Tom’s life in a lush public park in Oregon only formalizes the trouble so many Americans see in existing social fabrics and the escapist allure of leaving them behind.
Granik invites her viewers to the old questions of a castaway narrative — as enduring a story shape as any we have. In the history of literature and film, stories involving castaways begin with The Odyssey and Robinson Crusoe and run forward through The Swiss Family Robinson, The Blue Lagoon, Lord of the Flies, Mosquito Coast. More recently, films like Cast Away, Gravity, The Martian, and All is Lost reflect the genre’s enduring appeal.
Spanish philosopher and essayist José Ortega y Gasset wrote of the relationship between castaways and modernity: “These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked.” Gasset connects the search for meaning and popularity of castaway stories: “to live is to feel oneself lost  —  he who accepts it has already begun to find himself … He who does not really feel himself lost &#8230; never finds himself, never comes up against reality.” Gasset wrote these lines in the looming darkness of 1929 Europe, but they may well feel fresh to viewers of Granik’s film in 2018. If we are undeniably lost, adrift, in search of something, what is it these castaway stories provide? What do we hope to find in them?
The politics of the castaway tale remain divided. What level of material and physical comfort the characters achieve in the castaway tale looms large in the meaning of these stories, but the genre endures for its ability to ask hard questions of the existing social and economic structures. What can be made in the absence of social and economic organization? Can an individual survive or even thrive without help? What do stories of individual living outside of society say about existing social and economic logics?
Robinson Crusoe, one of the original articles, suggests a comfortable existence outside of social and economic society — a bumptious and optimistic vision of the individual. By the middle of the novel, Crusoe parades around his island with a handmade umbrella, debates about starting a brewery, and travels between his three houses. The novel is fantasy of more than simple survival off the grid. Crusoe thrives. Swiss Family Robinson indulges in the same imperial fever dream. Castaway stories of this type reassure viewers of the power of the individual, while indicting existing socio-economic structures as limiting or unnecessary.
Other castaway tales suggest dependent relationships between individuals and the societies they’ve lost. Robert Zemackis’ Cast Away allows Tom Hanks’ Chuck Noland — an apt last name for the lost man — a brutal form of survival. In one of the film’s most iconic scenes Noland’s DIY dentistry chills the viewer, who unconsciously longs for laughing gas, novacaine, and office park complexes with sterile, fluorescent waiting rooms, blaring their deathless adult alternative music.
Similarly, Gravity, The Martian, and All is Lost portray protagonists who survive by will and ingenuity alone, and — in the suffering of their central characters — these stories suggest the allure of social and economic society. The dramatic resolution of these tales always involves a return to society and its strange but comforting conventions. If the castaway narrative successfully horrifies viewers, it concurrently reassures them of existing social and economic structures. We learn to love the world in our fear of losing touch with it. In this sense, a castaway story traumatizing its protagonist necessarily represents a conservative artform.
In Granik’s Leave No Trace, Will and Tom don’t achieve the comfort of Crusoe or experience the horror of Cast Away. Their campsite is sparse and efficient, and the surrounding landscape fills Granvik’s camera with fecund greenery. The two main characters, like the forest, are vibrant, alive — foraging for mushrooms and embodying elements of DIY fantasy. The transitions between forest and the shots of urban Portland, Oregon advance the film’s suggestion of the social and environmental death at the core of our age. Granik’s Portland is no left-wing, crunchy paradise. We see only highway, the screeching and grunting of modern life, a bleak VA Hospital. When Tom and Will venture to Portland for supplies, viewers long for the bucolic scenes of the forest.
The allure of remove never leaves the film’s first act. Once the Park Police and Child Protective Services capture the pair, Tom says, “We didn’t need to be rescued” in an interview with a social worker. Inhabiting the audience’s voice, another social worker says to Will, “A lot of people like to imagine they could live like you guys did,” as the state apparatus subjects Will to an absurd, automated psychiatric exam.
Granvik’s film is no fan of modern life and its endless layers of bureaucracy. Her eye seems to revolt at suffocating rooms with their mineral fiber drop ceiling tiles, and these bleak scenes fill the film with sympathy for Will and Tom. Crucial to both the film’s plot and purpose, Will is no bad father and his reasons for taking Tom into the woods feel right and true. Tom performs well on the standardized tests the social workers give her, suggesting isolation from the social fabric does not, in some sense, preclude success by its standards.
Leave No Trace fills its middle-section with indictments of American late capitalism through the lens of Tom and Will’s failed attempt to re-acclimate to social and economic life. Granvik finds much tragic irony in Will’s job on a Christmas tree farm, where nature bends to the will of commodification and standardization. The staff teaches Will how to trim the tree to exact specifications of the consumer. It’s an industrial-style harvest, involving chainsaws, helicopters, and tree-packaging machines. Granik turns it into a warzone. Helicopters roar over ahead, carrying trees to be wrapped and packed, and Granik’s original, wild forest comes to mind. Viewers won’t miss which one is more appealing.
The scenes at the farm trigger Will’s PTSD — and Granik draws a straight line between the damage of US foreign policy and environmental degradation. The marketplace is another form of social death in the world of the film, and, while Will suffers from acute war trauma, Granik sees larger forces at work. We live in a horrorshow of our own making. Even as Tom tells her dad, “it might be easier on us if we try to adapt,” the audience doesn’t totally believe her. When the pair eventually run from the farm — Will’s choice, not Tom’s — we understand the flight. We chased them away; part of us wants to run with them.
The delight and brilliance of Granik’s script and film lies in its complexity and ambiguity. The systems enmeshing the father-daughter duo are evil, but the people running them aren’t. Social workers in the Portland scenes exhibit kindness and decency; an avuncular farmer sees Will and Tom’s story on the news and wants to help; a neighborhood boy invites Tom to join in 4-H events, involving a series of adorable and winning rabbits; a trucker offers Tom and Will a comfortable and sociable ride; a mobile-home park-owner opens her doors to the two travelers; an army medic provides critical care, free of charge. Everywhere in the film people do the right thing and do right by one another. Without spoiling the dramatic resolution of the film, Granik never fails to offer both indictment and endorsement of social life.
Granik’s castaways in Tom and Will emerge as mirrors of American social and economic life. Viewers understand well the need to run and the urge to stay on. This question undergirds our fascination with the castaway narrative. Ramping the emotional stakes in the film’s final act, Granvik probes these cultural wounds with an unflinching eye.
If each castaway narrative must finally decide whether and how to return to civilization, Granik’s film remains ambiguous. Like the best moments near the end of Zemackis’ Cast Away, where Hanks’ Chuck Noland wonders if the way back was worth it, Granvik refuses to let her audience away from questions about existing social and economic organizations. Unlike Zemackis’ sentimental ending, Granik expands the castaway trope to contain both sympathy for return and desire to flee in the same story. Here, Granik has contributed a new and vital position for the castaway story. She neither beatifies the individual, nor does she endorse existing social relations.
Tom spends the film’s final movement learning beekeeping. It’s a useful metaphor, but a bit unlike the spider’s web with which we begin and end the film. It is Aristotle, who, in the same sentence as his famous declaration that “man was a political animal,” attempts to delineate the difference between people and bees. The famous line about humans innate sociality also illustrates Aristotle’s respect and reverence for what he calls the “gregariousness” of the bee, a creature on which he spends a great deal of time in The History of Animals. When he thought of what made us us, he thought of the bee as our closest analog in terms of social organization. Humans are social animals in Aristotle’s formation, and Tom finding a home in beekeeping is perhaps Granik’s final endorsement of some inescapable human, social destiny.
It’s tempting to see Granvik’s film as a choice between the life of the spider — solitary, self-sufficient — and the social life of the bee. However, she takes no side. Leave No Trace holds no reassuring plot resolution, and part of the film’s lack of commercial appeal may well lie in its refusal to resolve its central questions. Like Gasset’s argument for the enduring truth of the castaway philosophy, Granik brings us right up against reality. These are the genuine ideas: “to live is to feel oneself lost.”
Viewers sympathize with Will’s need to leave society and Tom’s desire to return to it. In this duality, Granvik breaks new ground for the castaway narrative. We feel horrified by the world we’ve built and feel bound to it in the same moment. We love the individual and still know her need for others. We long to live outside of history and continue to realize how much history needs us here to help it.
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The Castaways of Leave No Trace

The Castaways of Leave No Trace

nelson-mitski

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/walkout-mitski-alienation/"></div>Mitski, one of the emerging and indispensable voices in indie rock, keeps walking out of her own videos. Already with two sleeper-hit records, Bury Me At Makeout Creek and Puberty 2, Mitski — the stage name of Mitski Miyawaki — readies her fifth studio album, Be the Cowboy, for release this August on Dead Oceans. So what is she walking away from?
In both “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_hDHm9MD0I">Your Best American Girl,</a>” the chunky and awesome lead single from 2016 LP Puberty 2, and “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qooWnw5rEcI">Nobody</a>,” the glittering disco-buffet from forthcoming LP Be the Cowboy, Miyawaki walks off set while the camera lingers. We see the studio where the crew shot the video. In “Your Best American Girl” Mitski walks out of the soundstage door altogether; in “Nobody,” she wryly sits in a director’s chair emblazoned with “Nobody.” It was all a fantasy — the narrative spell breaks.
Modern viewers might find themselves both accustomed and inured to metanarrative moves in popular art. Zack Morris calls “time out;” Jim Halpert looks dead-pan into the camera with arching eyebrows; Cusack stares at the audience quipping, “What came first, the music or the misery?” Reminding the audience they’re an audience, that the production is production, is no new move. But unlike these white male narrators, breaking the fourth wall only to produce a vague frisson of subversiveness, Mitski’s use of metanarrative in her music videos emerges as markedly different — something more akin to Bertolt Brecht’s theory of alienation in epic theater. Mitski’s work aspires not merely to inhabit or survive the world, she hopes to change it.
An early 20th century German playwright, poet, and theorist, Brecht argued for the transformative socio-political power of art. His most famous contribution to modern theater is the theory that for theater to serve a social or political purpose, it must remind the viewer of its fiction and construction. Brecht observed traditional theater as serving a bourgeois function — suspending disbelief so successfully, the viewer would be moved to empathy, remaining unchanged. When theater mimicked reality or suspended disbelief so completely, Brecht contended the audience would “submit to an experience uncritically (and without practical consequences) by means of simple empathy with the characters in a play.” In these circumstances, Brecht theorized the audience would remark, “Yes, I have felt like that too just like me — It&#8217;s only natural — It&#8217;ll never change — The sufferings of this man appall me, because they are inescapable.”
Empathy in theater presented a problem for Brecht. It was emotive and fleeting. Audiences left the theater reassured, not moved. By contrast, Brecht’s plays reminded the audience of artifice, dislodging viewers from their comfort and producing a sense of complicity, what he famously called, “alienation.” Of “epic” theater, he argued “the stage began to tell a story” and “the narrator was no longer missing, along with the fourth wall.” In this environment theater produced a questioning and critical audience, not an empathic one. Brecht theorized: “the production took the subject matter and the incidents shown and put them through a process of alienation: the alienation that is necessary to all understanding.  When something seems &#8216;the most obvious thing in the world&#8217; it means that any attempt to understand the world has been given up.” If art could jar audiences from the comfort of a fantasy world, the performance might produce more critical viewers.
Mitski’s visual and sonic work aims to both describe the world and alter the viewer. At least part of Mitski’s talent as a songwriter involves navigation of the particular and the universal. Some of her work deals in explicitly identitarian terms; a woman of color making art in a predominantly white industry, Mitski musically comes to grips with the pain of racialized consciousness alongside more generic anthems of romantic loss.
For white audiences, Mitski’s articulation of the jilt and self-consciousness that comes from rejection may suggest a pathway to empathizing with the position of a racialized other. But as Brecht suggested, mere empathy presents a block, not a portal. White audiences need more than empathy to answer the questions she poses. For people of color, Mitski’s music about self-acceptance in a world built to make her feel less than whole may emerge as a cypher and a map. I see you; it hurts; I know; you’ll make it, she seems to say. The political and artistic exist coterminously in her work. How does one make peace with a world that does not love you in the way that it should? How does one learn to love oneself? Navigating these tensions involves both accepting the self and changing the world.
We see Brecht’s theory of alienation and Mitski’s politics most clearly in the video for 2016 single “Your Best American Girl.” Directed by Zia Anger, the video deals in stark colors on a white sound-stage. Mitski makes eyes with a conventionally-attractive white boy, before the male lead turns his attention to a similarly Eurocentric woman. Mitski stares into her hand, mimicking a mirror, as the song’s first chorus hits. Mitski sings, “Your mother wouldn’t approve of how my mother raised me / But I do, I think I do / And you’re an all-American /I  guess I couldn’t help trying to be your best American girl.” Mitski draws on the double-consciousness race theory of Du Bois and Franz Fanon — she sees whiteness as dominating social norms and mores, seeing herself through a lens of inferiority.
The “Your Best American Girl” video hinges on Mitski accepting herself — dramatized through a corporeal and graphic make-out session with her hand. She rocks, ripping her guitar through the power chords of the song, as Zia Anger intersperses these performance shots with footage of the white couple making out, wrapped in an American flag, in a dark and hilarious send-up of self-congratulatory Eurocentric beauty. As viewers, we empathize with her as the jilted lover; we empathize with her as an Asian woman caught a network of socially constructed power structures. Yet, Brecht would argue, viewers know about racism already — for the politics of the video to work, Mitski must alienate us.
Mitski and Anger turn Brechtian in the video’s final shot, as Mitski puts down her guitar and the camera follows her off set as she walks out of the soundstage. In this new context the white space of the set reads, symbolically, as the entrapment white reality, logics, and standards of beauty. When Mitski rejects the artifice of the soundstage, she concurrently rejects the white system of reality. Brecht argues this metanarrative move takes the politics of Mitski’s the performer — where we might only empathize with her — and makes her Mitski, the person, entering the world anew. She confronts viewers with her humanity outside of the performance space. The line between performance and reality fractures, and we see her entering our reality. White viewers must confront her truth more critically, and people of color may well see the empowerment to be found in rejecting the logic and demands of whiteness. This artistic world is dynamic, not static, critical, not passive. The world outside becomes a changeable thing.
In the video for “Nobody” again Mitski points her artistic lens at the struggle for self-acceptance. The racial politics may well be a bit more muted, but the reference points are similar. The video, directed this time by Christopher Good, shows Mitski inhabiting a surreal world of color, object, and erasure. Mitski’s bedroom becomes a funhouse of horrors: she received an anonymous love note and painting of her. The plot involves Mitski finding the anonymous artist — here used as a metaphor for Mitski’s search for validation in the gaze of another. She finds the artist’s house, only to discover the artist has a digital reproduction of her own face. The video ends with Mistki strolling, sort of dumbfounded, from the bedroom set and sitting in the Director’s Chair.
The Brechtian implications involve Mitski moving from performer to director in the fracturing of the fourth wall. Audiences may well empathize with her while she searches for love in plot of “Nobody,” but in the Brechtian notion of alienation, the audience finds itself provoked by Mitski as the artist in control of her art in the end. She leaves the role of performer and becomes the real artist. The paradox in “Nobody” lies in Mitski’s twined self-actualization and loneliness. Like the final moments of “Your Best American Girl,” Mitski breaks the fourth wall as a real and empowered artist, but she either sits or leaves alone.
To apply the Brechtian theory, viewers are not trapped by their empathy with her. One must confront that even in her self-acceptance, isolation and dislocation leave the studio with her. This sadness is not just in the music or the performance, it weaves itself into the fabric of the real world. If we care about the Mitski who walks off stage and out of the video, then we must confront the circumstances and logics that produced the isolation — admitting these circumstances are changeable by us, not permanent social conditions.
In our alienation from her as a performance subject, Mitski draws viewers critically to her subject matter and all the vexing questions contained therein. How do we divorce ourselves from Eurocentric standards of beauty? How do women divorce themselves from patriarchal and hierarchical notions of companionship and the affirmation that comes from another? How does one find self-acceptance in a world built to produce shame in certain communities and people? We might, for instance, hear her album title, Be the Cowboy in a new way — a lonesome, pointed subversion of patriarchy, whiteness, and colonization. When Mitski walks out of her videos, these questions — and the viewer themselves — must walk out, too. The answers lie outside with her.
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The Walkout: Mitski and Alienation

florida-project

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/grotesque-aesthetic-morality-florida-project/"></div>Near the end of director Sean Baker’s recent critically-acclaimed film The Florida Project, the vulgar and precocious seven-year-old Moonee, played by Brooklynn Prince, and her mother Halley, played by Instagram star Bria Vinaite, attempt to clean the motel room they call home. Halley sprays the room’s window with glass cleaner, an allusion to the movie’s opening scene where Moonee and her feral friends spit on, and then are forced to clean, a car windshield. In the world of the film, it matters what’s dirty, what’s clean, who does the dirtying, and who cleans up. The circumstances of this instance of straightening up are bleak — a visit from Child Protective Services visit in which custody of Moonee will be decided looms — but the cleaning subplot reveals many of the embedded questions of Baker’s film. The aesthetic circumstances of child-rearing prove to be decisive in The Florida Project, in which Baker suggests that of all the terrible consequences of late-stage American capitalism, the worst may be how its aesthetic ugliness forces people into moral corruption. <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/grotesque-aesthetic-morality-florida-project/#more-5761" class="more-link">Read more</a>
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The Grotesque Aesthetic Morality of The Florida Project

The Grotesque Aesthetic Morality of The Florida Project

Geoff Nelson is a culture writer living in New York City. His work has appeared in Buzzfeed, The Village Voice, Paste Magazine, and No Depression. He serves as the English Department Chair at the Masters School in Dobbs Ferry, New York.

Geoff Nelson

The White Nostalgia Pandemic

"You can't ignore politics, no matter how much you'd like to." — Molly Ivins

Politics

Geoff Nelson is a culture writer living in New York City. His work has appeared in Buzzfeed, The Village Voice, Paste Magazine, and No Depression. He serves as the English Department Chair at the Masters School in Dobbs Ferry, New York.