Encounterculture

Here is an experiment.

The true test of skill is not to try to do what you want to do; this is simply safeguarding yourself against failure, since if the results turn out to be unsatisfactory, you can simply shrug it off as "not meeting your expectations". The truth is that skill is the ability to do things, not the ability to want to do them. Allen Iverson is an unbelievably skilled basketball player not because he wants to beat everyone off the dribble, but because he can, and does.

I just finished watching Brown Sugar for the second time, and feel compelled to do...something. I want to write something about it, because midway through this time I kind of tripped and found myself in the middle of a couple of thunderclap realizations; it's just that writing about those realizations instead of the movie is decadent and masturbatory and the Village Voice already has enough critics. Thus, the experiment: what can I say about this movie?

- I did like it, most elementally. For one thing, I liked it on a content level; I'm always going to be something of a soft touch when it comes to Ye Olde Fairy Tale About Those Who Did Safeguard Their Ideals Only To Later Reap The Spiritual/Critical/Financial Benefits (for obvious reasons), but more than that, I think I liked it on a formal level. I saw Brown Sugar for the first time as part of a film-school class where we'd see a theatrical release a little early, and then have a Q&A session with someone creatively involved with the film (insert USC fight song here). For Brown Sugar, we actually got the director, Rick Famuyiwa, although that was probably something of a shooting-fish-barrel situation since he'd graduated from the school less than a decade previously.

I forgot (and/or smoked away) most of the questions and answers from most of the sessions, but the Famuyiwa one stayed with me. For one, of course, the Qs were put forth by Dr. Todd Boyd, who rules in ways that those of you who've never had a class with him will never know. But more than that, I remember one specific question from the audience about the prevalence of self-referential technique in the film, all the jump-cuts and freeze-frames and so on. Famuyiwa admirably characterized them as tips of the hat to DJ tricks like dissolves and transforms and such. At the time, I didn't think much of it other than to be impressed that he was going for something above and beyond "Hey, I'm making a movie!", but this time it was something different.

As I said, I really did like this movie; I responded to it like crazy. The best compliment I can pay a movie is when I involuntarily start carping about like a circus seal mid-scene; it's embarassing and childish and uncharacteristically undignified (and I'm hardly Lord Autumnbottom to begin with), but movies can bring you to moments where you just can't help it. Brown Sugar was full of moments like that this go-round, and the little tricks were among the most prominent. It's just that they're so...well, musical I guess.

There's a quote in Nick Hornby's Songbook, one that he describes as "one of the few lines of music criticism that ever meant anything to me", which characterizes music as the art that all of the other arts aspire to be. Usually I laugh that off; for one it's stupid to prize one artform over another, and for two everyone knows that cinema is the go-to artform anyway (grin), but it's undeniable that music is the artform that can move us like no other. There are times, of course, when we don't want to be moved, when we're doing perfectly fine right where we are. But who the hell wants to be like that all the time? There's lots of time when I want to be thrown into violent fits of furious emotional candor, and for that, I need the Sex Pistols or Blondie or Hybrid or even Jackson Browne (since "melancholy" is in fact an emotion).

It's not rare to find moments like that in movies, but it requires a certain degree of complicity. Moments like that don't just stick out of movies, or if they do, then they're probably pre-fab and don't really register anyway (which would explain why I haven't seen any copies of those compilations of "great fight scenes" sitting on anyone's shelve. Ever). A lot of times, filmmakers will cheat by backing up an interesting scene with a stupendous song (Exhibit A: Casino. The whole thing), but there's no art to that, unless there's an art to liking songs. No, they emerge from the context of a whole, both the whole movie and your whole experience of living up to the moment you sat down to watch said movie. What's simultaneously great and frustrating about them, of course, is that the appeal lies in the way the moment defies categorization; the best you can do is throw elaborate similes or complicated psychobabble at the wall and hope it sticks, but if that's what's going through your mind, never ever ask me anything about movies or music ever again. When I first heard the guitar solo from "EMI" or saw Pulp Fiction (most of the whole thing, anyway), I wasn't thinking "Oh man, this is like X and Y but not like Z because..."; I was thinking, and this is a direct quote: "YES."

- I can also say that Brown Sugar was very anti-musical, because by definition, music and literature are two different beings, and Brown Sugar happens to be a movie with a lot of literary charm. If people identify with music nonverbally, by which I mean that they can recognize things without making formal connections, people identify with literature hyperliterally, for the obvious reason. This is in no small part due to the way we approach the literary medium; if music is so attractive because (to repeatedly quote Nick Hornby - I should really just get permission from McS Publishing House to post the whole book) it's a glib analogue for our emotions thanks to dramatic the crashing switches in tone and timbre, then surely literature is attractive because it's very much how our mind records things. I for one think in complete sentences, and as such I walk around all day describing sensations, emotions, events unfolding in front of me in patterns which eventually become familiar and even more eventually become little chunks of shorthand.

Thus, when I see those chunks popping up in a movie, I connect very rapidly and with a great deal of warmth. There's a great little exchange early in the movie when Sanaa Lathan (you'll excuse me if I don't look up character names; it's a stupid and draconian practice anyway) embarasses Taye Diggs over a speakerphone. What made it work for me was the way in which the dialogue wasn't overwrought for laughs (a simple "wet the bed" joke that wouldn't make it past the SNL cutting-room floor if it were matched up against a dildo joke); it's simply something that would probably be embarassing, but doesn't overpower Diggs' explosive little bit of defensive physical comedy.

I don't wet the bed, of course, but God only knows I've done plenty of shamefully embarassing stuff in my life (eight words, an ampersand, and a slash: Latin poetry recial & Peter Lorre/Sydney Grenstreet impersonations). It sucks to get called on stuff like that - it sucks a lot - but it's also not soul-crushing like your Hipster Guilt Culture Mag of choice would probably lead you to believe.

When I characterize moments like this as distinctly literary, I'm simply saying that their referent is basically your everyday life, or rather whatever you choose to preserve of your everyday life. It's not particularly artful, if you think about it - you're the one doing all the work, since you're the one who has to be embarassed if you're going to get the joke - but it is a connection, for better or worse. If anything, Brown Sugar is probably actually richer in literary moments than musical ones (as are most of the movies you really like, if you're really honest about it). Not all of these moments are real, of course, and they're rarely dead-on. Another one, a more personally involving one, came when Diggs' character decides to start his own record label; this is relatively close to "start a printed magazine", which is something that I'd really like to do, but more importantly, it's close enough.

- And fundamentally, that's what makes it cinematic, which is really all I wanted to say about it. Just to continue the metaphors for the sake of OCD, if music is an analogue of the emotions and literature is an analogue of the intellect, then cinema is an analogue of the world we see around us. Something cinematic, then, is simply something provided by a movie which affords us a chance to look at the world differently, even if the way we look at it happens to be distorted by our own hangups. Or rather, to put it differently, cinema is a catch-all for whatever goes on that makes us give a real-world referent to the sprawling fabricated world of the movies. It's not anything definite, or rather it's not consistently anything definite. Sometimes it may be that a movie plays with time in a way that seems resonant of the way the real world operates; other times it may be that a movie employs technology to show you things about the real world that you ordinarily wouldn't take notice of (and you people wonder why I love Michael Bay so much). But usually, it's neither that noble nor that simple. Cinema, most typically, is just a reaction to the synthesis of content and style wherein we can see what we want for ourselves.

Movie nerds are the absolute worst. I'm sure you've all been stuck in some interminable one-way-street of a conversation where someone's insisting on explaining every pedantic detail of something to you; inevitably there comes a point where the laws of society should cease to apply to you and the right to crush their head with a broken-off chair leg should be temporarily bestowed by the Moral Authority. And yet, as a (slowly) recovering pedant, I can say without hesitation that I know where they're coming from. The great myth about movies is that they're popular because they allow people to see the world if it worked out like it should, and while I can see the appeal of that, it doesn't account for all of the things like the Lumiere brothers' movies (simple scenes of waves crashing on a beach or workers leaving a factory) or the non-narrative art films by people like Joris Ivens (who once went out to film rain).

The truth is that movies are so appealing simply because they offer us a different perspective. If things work out, great; if not, oh well, it's just a movie. It's just so addictive to see things working out in a world that looks so much like your own. Again, this isn't as noble or accomplished as other types of cinema, but fuck it. You have to stake your claims wherever you find gold.

And that's what I can say about Brown Sugar.