An apt write-up by Allison Samuels on MSNBC sets it up best:
Lee is older and wiser than the man who made "Do the Right Thing," and the result is arguably the most essential work of his 20-year career. Act I covers the storm's arrival; Act II chronicles the failure of the emergency response; Act III follows an abandoned community coming to grips with all that it lost, and Act IV addresses the halting, haphazard effort to begin again. But images and ideas echo through each act like a fugue.
It's taken me a month to have the time to devote, over several nights, to Lee's four-hour masterpiece. The path of praise is well-worn before me, and while terms like "staggering" and "encyclopedic" are just as applicable as the first time a critic applied them to this HBO produced documentary, here's a few feelings I'm left with having just finished watching Act IV.
- If it doesn't change drastically and quickly, in essence both reverse course and plow a new, progressive path to the future, America will continue to decline as a Republic, let alone an Empire.
As so many residents and analysts in the documentary ask, how could this happen here, this complete failure to protect so many of our citizens and one of our most historic and thriving cities from natural disaster, when a country with just 14 million people (The Netherlands) can?
Towards the end of the picture there's a fact-finding visit to Holland. After watching the lousy, flimsy, un-upgraded levee in New Orlean before, during and after the breech, to see the massively impressive dikes their oh-so-socialized technocracy has constructed to protect their populace, you've gotta wonder who's kidding themselves about our place in the world.
There's no spinning to be done with the Presidente and Cheneylord footage, these guys are stooges of the most rapacious kind. They don't give a shit about Americans, except in their own sociopathic narcissistic construction.
- The people, in this case of New Orleans, are great.
By extension, I think the movie makes you feel, that the people of America are great. What's so unusual about Spike's doc is that you actually get to hear their voices, unprocessed and unFoxed, the real analysis and memories and courage and rage.
You get to hear them telling the Vice President to "Go fuck yourself" as Cheney did to Sen. Dodd (D-CT) on the Senate floor itself. You get to hear them railing against the insurance companies that have ruinously reneged on their agreements. You get to hear them telling of the odd hero here or there who liberated the bottled drinking water or broke every rule in the Coast Guard manual to airlift flood victims to safety. You get to hear of the family life throughout the city, and then see their home in ruins.
Lee manages to end even the darkest segment, Act II, with a surprisingly uplifting moment in the Superdome. His faith in Americans is in his welcome confidence letting them speak for themselves like adults, letting them reveal their intelligence, no matter how poor. You only hear Spike a couple times from behind the camera, Errol Morris style, an incredulous question or impish probe.
New Orleans had a particular life to it, the birthplace of Jazz, an unusual polyglot culture mixing race, music, tastes. Maybe that makes the people Lee interviews particularly interesting, but I think the doc makes you feel you could go anywhere in America and with a little discernment find plenty of intelligent, aware, relatable fellow Americans you'd be interested in hearing. His mosaic approach defines what I've grown up at least imagining I love most about our country.
- The story of Katrina (and this is just in New Orleans) is epic.
Whether you watch it in one sitting or over time or just running and drifting in and out of it, there's a hugely powerful narrative here, made raw and open by its incompletion even today. You forget how much you don't know about the story, or since it still seems so current eventish, may have forgotten just what it is you forgot.
Lee has a lyrical way with the beginnings of Acts and photographs of devastating, but the story builds hard and relentless in Act I and II. What makes it a novel is the aftermath, immediate in Act III (the image of Presidente W. peering out the window of Air Force One says more about the stratospherification of power in America at the turn of the 21st Century than anything I've ever read) and looking more broadly ahead in Act IV.
What does it say about our great nation that we let so many of our fair citizen drown, lose their homes, lose everything they've built even for generations, lose actual family members to a storm? This story is myth right in front of our faces, working on the personal, local, national and elemental levels.
After a week of NIE verifying the failure of Bush's so-called War on Terrah thanks to his disaster in Iraq, Condi Rice ignoring 9/11 warning alarms brought right in front of her face, Bob Woodward revealing that the emperor never had any clothes and that the Iraq War is, by design, a refighting of Vietnam, and the curdled milk that is the Rep. Foley (R-FL) Internet sex scandal, it's both refreshing and doubly damning to watch When the Levees Broke.
In the end, there is one catharsis that I felt, so strong as to balance the uncertainty and apprehension for what's still ahead. It's actually a relief to hear the truth from such a wide range of fellow Americans. It's a veritable truth festival.
In such short supply these past six years.
No comments:
Post a Comment