Mn Enta?

In Jordan, I stick out like the proverbial sore thumb.  I don’t think there’s been an individual in all of Amman who has mistaken me for anything but foreign.  Well, actually, that’s not true.  A car pulled up to me once just outside my apartment and asked directions to a nearby mall.  Not only did I comprehend the question, but I knew the answer and delivered it in colloquial Arabic.  I’m almost positive he heard my atrocious accent and disregarded my instructions immediately; I’ve never felt so flattered in my life.

A visual representation of my life on many levels.

But more frequently, I encounter the question: “Mn enta?”  To which, I of course, reply: “Ana Amrikee!”

 

And then, I get the review.  Jordanian opinion is a lot like American opinion when it comes to our government: one-in-three people actually know anything about it, but everyone has an opinion.  In Amman, people have extremely polarized views, but most see it as the Promised Land, thanks to Hollywood and our multi-billion dollar advertising industry.  The biggest complaint Jordanians have with America is its inaccessibility, whether due to financial or diplomatic reasons.  Once my friend Jarvis misunderstood a cab driver’s question, and accidentally confirmed that the three passengers worked at the American Embassy.  For an uncomfortable ten minute drive, we were heckled for not providing him a visa.  In the end he continued his tantrum in Englibic (that special language half-way between mine and his) until we awkwardly paid, and departed.

I mentioned earlier that most don’t really know their subject matter.  Another friend had an encounter with a Jordanian very critical of America.  He cited reasons that danced the line between offensive and hysterically funny in their ignorance.  George Washington and his famous Trail of Tears.  9-11 as an inside job.  The best we can do, as Americans abroad, is sketch an accurate picture of our culture as we try and absorb theirs.

 

American History 101

At the same time, there are Jordanians who probably know more about certain aspects of America than I do.  Specifically, I’m thinking of two teachers I have: Dr. Anas Altikriti and Dr. Omar Rafai.  Dr. Altikriti is a former president of the Muslim Association of Britain and has founded his own think tank, named the Cordoba Foundation.  Dr. Rafai is an alumnus of Harvard, Oxford, and Georgetown as well as the former Jordanian ambassador to Israel and member of the diplomatic team that drew up the first Jordanian-Israeli peace agreement in 1994.  They are both brilliant men, who I am honored to know.

My respect for them is what makes it difficult to accept their stories of arraignment in American airports (if memory serves, both had at least one experience in JFK).  They were detained from three to six hours based on their appearance, nationality, and passports.  TSA members demanded Dr. Rafai share credit card information to allow them to track his location during his stay.  Of course Dr. Rafai refused, offering to take the return flight to Jordan, but security eventually conceded the absurd request.

This picture is irrelevant.

As a somewhat-educated American, I’m outraged, discouraged, and most of all embarrassed to hear stories like this.  I understand the sociopolitical situation that has permitted this kind of prejudice to dictate policy, but how can I approve?  Ignorance births fear.  I get it.  And as an American in the Middle East experiencing a very different culture, even for the second time, there are still holes in my knowledge that my imagination fills with dark things.  I do not understand every part of your average Jordanian’s life: their religion, values, or behavior.  And sometimes that is a bit scary.  But that fear is not carte blanche for the same kind of suspicion that birthed the Inquisition and imprisoned Mr. Miyagi’s wife.  Mistrust is not the solution.  Policies founded in that only treat the symptoms of fear, helping us to sleep at night.  As cliché as it is, knowledge is what can alleviate the ignorance, and truly banish our fear.  But even in the absence of knowledge, we should demonstrate the personal courage to contain our fear, and resist attacking the liberty of another human, nationality, or religion, even if that attack generates some kind of perceived protection at their persecution.

That was my rant.  No, I don’t expect my readership includes any big-wig bureaucrat who can put an end to racial profiling, but I hope that we all just consider how we evaluate the worth of people we know and people we don’t.  How much more important is our family than our neighbor?  How much more important is an American than a Jordanian?  There’s a different between the “right” answer and the truth.

Finally, I’ll leave you with two pieces of advice when speaking Arabic.  Whenever describing something as “different,” make sure you’ve studied the word well.  Swap one letter in mukhtlif and you might just tell an Egyptian that his culture is not different, but retarded.  Also, the word for bathroom is a lot like pigeon, and pigeon is not an uncommon Middle Eastern dish.  If you ask for the bathroom, and your waiter writes something down, you probably just ordered the pigeon.

Adjusting to Amman

I have certainly arrived in Jordan, although things are different than I expected.

As cliche as this is going to read, those commodities that we truly take for granted have proven elusive.  Many can be worked around.  Heat -- who needs it?  Just pile on clothes, or wrap in a blanket.  Clean water?  Meh, I'll play $2 for an eight-liter jug.  No worries.

Some things are more difficult to improvise (read: the internet).  Looks like if I want to provide even the occasional blog, I must grow accustomed to the idea that the internet is not at my convenience.  It is not available at my beck and call.  I may have to make a trip to a cafe for the smallest of data packets.

That being said, Jordan promises to be the best four months of my cadet career.  No pressure.

Les Mis -- Emotional Pornography?

First of all: Les Mis may have been my favorite movie of 2012. If I had to order the Big Three from December it would probably go:

1. Les Miserables
2. Django Unchained
3. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

…whether that ordering reflects my actual feelings or is merely the reverse order in which I saw the films is worthy of legitimate speculation.

Anticipation was high for the film adaptation of the musical adaptation of Victor Hugo’s examination of 19th-century France. The cast featured stage veterans (Eddie Redmayne, Samantha Banks) and film stars (Anne Hathaway, Russell Crowe) as well as the great Aussie who lives in both worlds: Hugh Jackman. But the marriage of musical and movie is a different breed altogether; neither wholly musical nor wholly movie.  The result was delightful.

The casting was inspired. Crowe’s performance was the low point.  As Javert he was lukewarm; not up to the caliber established by Jackman (Valjean) and Hathaway (Fantine). His castmates set the emotional bar to unheard of heights. More than ever, the episodic nature of this musical was emphasized. Years passed between scenes and songs, pausing only a moment to zoom in on the individual crucibles of characters, who sometimes had only five to ten minutes to relate the tragedy that was the pinnacle of their lives.  Absolutely, the character of Valjean was a tethering point whose unique journey from parole to paradise acted as the central impetus of the story; however, characters like Eponine and even Fantine were largely ignored save for crucial moments folded into Valjean’s biography.

But what moments they were!

A quick matching game:

Survivor's Guilt	Eponine
Marriage to Tim Burton	Cosette
Inferiority Complex	Javert
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder	Jean Valjean
Unrequited Love	Mdme Thenardier
Absent Parent/Oppressive Parent	Marius

Some of these are a bit of a stretch and are unfairly reduced – but so is the entire novel! Of course I can hardly condemn the manufacturers of movie or musical; some books are too cumbersome to neatly fit into two, three, or even four hours (read: LotR).

However, one consequence of this necessary pruning is that it becomes emotional pornography, plain and simple.

I Googled emotional pornography to ensure that I wasn’t talking out of my ass. I, of course, discovered that I was. So I should clarify a quick definition of what emotional porn is to me. Its any form with the seemingly singular intent to ply an audience to a state of empathy with a character.

But isn’t that art? In its entirety? To implore an audience to connect so closely with a cast to feel their loss and their triumph.

I would counter with the question, isn’t that pornography, in all its graphic splendor? Both emotional and "traditional" porn introduce a variety of stimuli to evoke a specific reaction from an audience. It allows the audience to feel sexual or emotional arousal without investment in an actual situation where they are confronted by actual sex or actual emotion.

I don’t think my argument can be so easily dismissed as being overly reductive, assuming everything down so far to its component parts that Gershwin is no better than Green Day and Mom's home-cooking no better than McDonalds. Instead, I think art – and I grimace and brace myself against all due consternation incited by using such a broad term – appropriates this idea of emotional excitement and uses it as a vehicle to examine a greater point.

Emotion is a medium. Otherwise art becomes a scientific investigation connecting stimuli to reaction, and no more.

And that’s what I experienced while watching Les Mis – and quite possibly to other audience members as well. Victor Hugo’s commentary on the social injustice rampant in France at the time was overwhelmed by music, spectacle, and tragedy. The focus of the direction seemed to be to leave its audience as a quivering mass of sadness (read: Karen, my sister), with the setting of France as a background for this goal, rather than a unique setting recipient of condemnation.

When I left the theater I intended to return: because I wanted to feel that way again. I don’t think I’ve cried so violently in a movie since Leo popsicled in the Atlantic. And it was that specific sense of emotional fulfillment/exhaustion that calls me back, a feeling junkie, looking for another quick cry.

The Nature of Violence in Django Unchained

Last night I watched Django Unchained with a friend and his father.  It was a surprising two hours and forty-five minutes long, but undeniably entertaining throughout.  Would I recommend it to most people I know?  Probably not.  The truth is, Tarantino produces uncompromising content.  Scenes are visceral, even to seemingly gratuitous effect.  But you have to understand that the violence onscreen consists of two significantly distinct types:

Slapstick Justice
Django's trailer essentially contains the first scene of the movie: a freezing chain-gang of African slaves are marched through the night to the music of the late Johnny Cash (a song which appears in both the trailer AND the movie, much to my delight).  Former dentist, now full-time bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) bounces into the grave scene with the decorum of a mildly sober Friar Tuck.  After infuriating the slave-wrangling brothers with his egalitarian treatment of their stock and superior vocabulary, Dr. Schultz is ordered at gunpoint to leave at once.

In the trailer you see him utter: "Very well" as he drops his lantern.  He draws his six-shooter like lightening and fires two shots.

But what you don't get from the commercial is the Nickelodeon slime-fest that was the head of one brother and the other brother's horse.  You don't get the sense of triumph as an audience member that an outnumbered character with morals evolved beyond the time dispensed justice so efficiently.  The slavers are goofy characterless archetypes; they were never any match for the charismatic German.

This keeps up for the first forty to sixty minutes of the movie.  Django (Jamie Foxx), now with Dr. Schultz, are a hot knife; the South is their butter.  Only when we meet "Monsieur" Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) do they meet any resistance.

This breed of violence is borderline Monty Python and the Black Knight.  The audience laughs at the gruesome well-deserv'd fate of life's villains.  This violence isn't any more real than the exploits of Curly, Larry, and Moe.

Then there's...

Nightmare Fuel
And I don't call it that lightly.  Django is set in 1858 (much to my disturbance, the movie is compelled to contextualize with the addition "two years prior to the Civil War" -- which, I thought, began in 1861 at Fort Sumter) and with that epoch of American history comes the inhumanity of the institution of slavery.

Two scenes in particular made me emotionally sick.  The first occurred when Schultz and Django first meet Candie.  For the sake of the movie, Quentin Tarantino invented mandingo fighting, an unobtrusive extension of the cruelties of slavery.  Akin to gladiating, rich owners pit their trained fighters in a bare-fist brawl to the death.  Candie is the premier dealer in this sport.  We watch one of his stock disable, blind, and the kill his opponent with a literal hammer-blow to the skull.

In and of itself the violence might offend some, but I wasn't bothered by the countless other slayings.  No, what is troubling here occurs on a more psychological level.  Candie deprives his fighters of any morality.  In other fictional accounts of gladiators (Gladiator, STARZ Spartacus, etc.) the gladiators have embraced the culture, to a degree.  No where did I see the stomach-wrenching abomination represented in Django Unchained.  After he murders a fellow slave in kill-or-be-killed wrestling match for the pleasure of their two wealthy owners, Candie's mandingo is rewarded with a tall beer for his performance.  A dog rewarded.

Again, later in the film when Django and Schultz have begun their infiltration of Candie's plantation, they witness the treeing of a runaway mandingo (named D'Artagnon by the francophilic Candie).  The slave is ripped to shred by dogs while Django and Schultz stoically look on in order to cement their reputation as heartless slave-traders themselves.

In a discussion following the movie with my friend's father, he identified that scene as the most upsetting; I would agree.  It was tailored to be that way, itself motivating significant action from Schultz (it turns out that a cocktail of injustice and Beethoven generates Teutonic retribution when given to a German).  But to me this was one of the movie's most important scenes.

Quentin Tarantino told the Guardian:

"When slave narratives are done on film, they tend to be historical with a capital H, with an arms-length quality to them. I wanted to break that history-under-glass aspect, I wanted to throw a rock through that glass and shatter it for all times, and take you into it."

 Mission accomplished sir.  Quentin Tarantino approaches the horrors of our nations past (and more broadly, the subjugation of human life wherever it occurs) and wraps it up in a bear hug.  He doesn't forgive it, he doesn't have that power.  But he refuses to forget it, or allow it to be forgotten.  This isn't about "white America" "owing" anything to "black America"; it is a lot like Inglorious Basterds: ugly, ugly shit happened, if I could write history I would have had Adolf Hitler gunned down by Jews.  I didn't, but here's what it would have looked like, and during the drive home, remember how it really played out.

Will I ever recommend this movie to anyone in my parent's generation?  Fifty, sixty plus?  Absolutely not.  A lot of my friends would find the violence completely offensive as well.  But what I will tell of Tarantino's latest effort is that it shows a keen awareness of cinematic techniques and affecting an audience.  In a time where violence's prevalence in media is under scrutiny, Tarantino demonstrates that panache (a sense of showmanship) is everything.  A man's death can be a triumph or tragedy in cinema, and ultimately it shouldn't be entertainment's responsibility to educate the world on the value of a life.  Sure, he ironically treats death as a punchline for 95% of the movie, but that's because those deaths are the murder of fictional villains.  Real people: heroes and the innocent are treated with reverence.  If you want a movie about redemption, don't see Django.  The Bad are Bad and the Good are Good, more or less.  No one is going to change teams.

I don't know if I ever need to see it again, but I'm glad I saw it once.  I don't want to relive the experience, if only to preserve the authentic disgust and rage the movie's more empathetic moments evoked.

Finally, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Samuel L. Jackson all delivered magnificently.  Jamie Foxx was engaged, but I think the direction of his character came second to action of the movie, requiring choices that conflicted with Django's authenticity.  I don't know how these things are determined, but I wouldn't be surprised if any of the first three are put up for Academy Awards.