by Ben Spatz
There is this film called _Brokedown Palace_ in which two girls go visit Indonesia and get falsely arrested for drug trafficking and go to jail. One of the girls is played by Clare Danes, who throughout the movie is filmed like a model at a photo shoot. The movie is obviously trying to sell her as a sex goddess to drooling teenage boys. There is this scene in a boat where she's standing up and it looks like a magazine ad. The storyline is of no importance in comparison to the supreme beauty of Clare Danes, apparently.
This is annoying in the boat scene, but it's really potentially evil in the jail scenes. There is this shot where the camera follows her walking through prison, tracking her from behind, with rock music playing a slow, sexy rhythm. It's right out of one of those music videos where the singer walks through povertyicken streets and passes by homeless kids and sings gloriously of their poverty and homelessness while making tons of money. This scene was like, "Oh, how sad it is that Clare Danes is in jail, because I mean she is just so BEAUTIFUL." It was a beautiful scene, and that's what made it dangerous.
This is part of a much more general philosophical issue. The easy version of the problem is: What do you do with movies that portray real suffering in a hopelessly romanticized way? The answer to that version is simple. Such movies are judged to be aesthetically good and morally bad, and there is no inconstancy in such a judgment. A much more difficult version of this question is posed at the end of the movie, in the violently disturbing final shot, in which Claire Danes (narrating to herself about how lying to get her friend freed was the best thing she had ever done with her life) is standing amongst all the other inmates, and she looks around, and she feels purged because of her good deed, and she smiles. A big, broad grin. Cut to black. Credits.
What do we do with movies which portray individual responses to larger social issues as perfect things? For example, the response of an inmate to the problem of innocent people being jailed. What if their response is to go inside their head and find freedom on this inside? This is wonderful for anyone who can do it, and such people are fresh. But doesn't the making of a movie which offers that as THE solution do harm to those people who are REALLY in jail, by offering them personal enlightenment as a solution, instead of GETTING OUT OF JAIL? This is even more clear in a medical context. Anyone who can meditate until they don't feel pain is a really cool person, and good for them. But if you make a movie where someone has lots of pain, and then they find inner enlightenment and conquer the pain, then what does that say to all the people who haven't found enlightenment and who are suffering? Is it their FAULT? That's always the problem with mushy undefined illnesses such as depression or CFIDS, and of course this problems comes up much more when the disease is effecting mostly women, or mostly gays, or whatever.
It's the mind/body problem, in a politically relevant form. We have to support those who conquer the problem via mind as well as those who cannot, and turn to drugs (etc.) for remedies. Or what about poor kids who mug people? Individual responses to large-scale issues are fabulous, but America loves them too much, at the expense of real large-scale responses.
Clare Danes' grin is too perfect. It's given too easily as the one and only solution. This is not true of the fresh Nigerian woman's advice to "find freedom in here [mind], here [heart], and here [walkman]." That woman is the BOMB DIGGITY. Nor is it true of Andy Dufresne having listened to Mozart in his head while in solitary confinement. It is with good reason that America loves individual heroes. But it goes too far in this movie with the constant rock-music justification of Claire Danes.