Friday, September 22, 2006

Bad Guys Wanted?

We just watched Russell Crowe in Ron Howard's Cinderella Man, a movie that leadenly tries to be what critics calls "Capra-esque," as in Frank Capra, director of It Happened One Night and It's a Wonderful Life, and thirties Hollywood's sentimental champion of democracy and the "little guy" against the excesses of capitalism. Sure enough the movie had a cigar-chewing, suspendered "fat cat" capitalist (played by the explosive character actor, Bruce McGill, awesome in another Crowe movie, The Insider, where he out Pacino-ed Al Pacino). He looked a lot like the cartoon capitalists our book included in the last chapter!

Anyhoo: the movie was not content to make their "good guy" metaphysically Good in contrast to the Evil Capitalist, but also gratuitously made a villain of thirties heavyweight champ Max Baer, making of Baer a monstrous killer in the ring, and an insatiable, misogynist womanizer outside of it. Well, as it turns out, Baer, a Nebraskan butcher's son who famously killed two of his opponents in the ring, was a warm, clowning guy who was wracked with remorse for the accidental deaths (for one of which he was prosecuted, but acquitted). Baer was proud of the fact he never had a fight outside the ring: he once rather heartbreakingly said, "I never harmed anyone outside the ring. I loved people." His son, Max Baer Jr. (yes, Jethro!), said his father put the children of one of the dead opponents through school:

My father cried about what happened to Frankie Campbell. He had nightmares. "In reality, my father was one of the kindest, gentlest men you would ever hope to meet. He treated boxing the way today's professional wrestlers do wrestling: part sport, mostly showmanship. If I were to make a comparison, he was more like Muhammad Ali than the Sonny Liston of his day. He never deliberately hurt anyone."
Now I am not saying that "fat cat" capitalists weep at night over the poor and excluded. But it may be that such black and white versions of reality as Ron Howard tends to dispense in his films are confusing and unhelpful: is capitalism really a deliberate and sadistic assault on the hated poor by greedy old men like Mr. Potter in Its A Wonderful Life? Or is it something more complex? In fact, to personalize it in that way seems to be the reverse of what our book calls "blaming the victim," emphasizing personal failings of individuals over the systematic obstacles presented by class inequities. Doesn't representing capitalist abuse as similarly "personal" and malevolent also obscure more complex realities at work? Is there really a bad guy to blame? This is not to minimize the class inequities of capitalism, but to notice how Hollywood, even when it professes "good" intentions, tends to simplify problems in ways that make it difficult to think clearly about the complex and systematic forces at work in the American class system...

I mean I hate your evil fat cat as much as the next person, but does he really exist?

1 Comments:

Blogger toddo said...

or maybe your next viewing will be expanded by adding the class angle to the boxing angle--in fact, since you said that I suddenly see a new metaphor that should have been obvious: class conflict/boxing conflict? To some in my family, this ruins a good movie. But for me and my wife, who like to talk about movies, being able to find deeper meanings are the fun of it--esp. in bad movies....

9:52 PM  

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