"Policy is policy."

We saw One Child Nation last night, which is a documentary about China's "one child" policy that it maintained from 1979 to 2015. On the one hand, you can look at a government attempt at strictly controlling human behavior and laugh at the folly of it. On the communist side of the scale, it's akin to the Soviet Five Year Plans, wherein everything would proceed in perfect lockstep order in terms of demand, production, and pricing; all of it under the guise of keeping things in that perfect lockstep on account of heroic patriotism toward the state. In China's case, no one was going to keep people from screwing (cue abstinence proponents...) and no one was going to keep people from wanting more children; especially male children.

On the other hand, you can look at the much darker aspects of said foolish policy, which played out in the form of forced sterilizations, child abduction, and mass corruption by government apparatchiks, who made money off those activities and more. The film delves into all of that, emphasizing the fact that this wasn't just about people not being able to have the families they wanted or the simpler corruption of wealthier people being able to afford the fines for deviating from policy. This was about human trafficking. This was about the abrogation of women's rights to make decisions about their own bodies. This was about people profiting off the sale of other humans.

Director Jialing Zhang and director/narrator Nanfu Wang (above) were both born under the policy and decided to make a film about it when Wang became pregnant and she began to consider the different circumstances surrounding the birth of her child, as opposed to those that surrounded her own. Unlike many documentarians, given the omnipresence of the policy, Wang didn't have to seek out the story or find good candidates to interview. She could instead return to her own village and interview those people that knew her and knew her family and examine how they were directly impacted and how it changed their lives.

One of the most brutal consequences was the intersection of the policy with the longstanding cultural preference for male children in order to maintain the family name. As one of Wang's relatives mentions: "A boy continues the family. A girl just gets absorbed into someone else's family." Prior to the communist takeover, it wasn't uncommon for people that were hoping for a male baby and were disappointed by the arrival of a girl to simply abandon that child and let it die of exposure. This became even more prevalent in rural (and less wealthy) areas in China, the residents of which couldn't afford to pay the fines for having multiple children. Female babies would be placed in the local market, with the common wisdom being that, with more passersby, someone may be willing to pick up the child. If that child were "lucky", she would get picked up and handed off to one of the state-run orphanages for money. If not, she'd end up like millions before her throughout history, while people hurried past and pretended not to notice the corpse being fed upon by maggots.

But profiteering played its role even when parents weren't willing to so callously abandon their children, as government officials would threaten multi-child families with dire consequences unless they handed over their offspring to those officials who could then make a tidy sum by handing off those kids to the orphanages. Wang took a moment to stop in and inquire with a separated twin in her village who was the victim of this kind of corruption. Her sibling is now in the US and has been located by a volunteer organization, attempting to identify the origins of many of those adopted by well-intentioned families in the West.

A running theme of the interviews which the directors then stop to highlight is the passive acceptance among all of the actors and victims of the policy: "What could we do?", they said. Indeed, Wang's mother gives the quote that titles this piece: Government policy was government policy. The law was the law. This was how things were and no one would speak against it. One has flashes of Nuremberg in these comments, where everyone simply accepted the sale of children, the screaming women being put under the knife, the tiny bodies in the streets as market customers hurried past. Everyone knew what was happening, but no one was willing to stand up and point out the ashes in the air. At the very least, many of those she interviewed were willing to acknowledge the shame of what they participated in and allowed to happen.

But another theme stuck out to me in the audience reaction at the Michigan Theater. When they showed footage of the propaganda used to encourage cooperation with the policy, there were many chuckles and audible snorts of contempt. The implication was obvious: "How could people be taken in by these ham-handed dances and songs, cheering on the 'best families have only ONE child!'?" But when you're given the message constantly about what best serves the state's interest, it becomes easier to accept. People laugh at the grotesquerie of glorious sunbeams arcing past the angelic workers in Soviet artwork, too, but they don't stop to think about how they just accept the reciting of the pledge of allegiance or the playing of the national anthem before every sporting event, in addition to the military flyovers, or how that kind of constant pressure to accept the flag and the military and the "perfection" of the American system is every bit the same kind of propaganda as anything the Chinese state tried to instill in its own people. Is the worship of the military and its excursions around the world as damaging as a policy that encourages people to profit from the trafficking of children? It's worth a thought. To Wang's enormous credit, she takes a moment to cite the fact that the denial of basic rights to women in China under the policy is simply the other side of the coin to the same thing happening in the States, of which she is now a resident, over the issue of abortion and birth control. The final note of the film mentioning that Beijing is now using similar propaganda to promote the new policy of restricting families to two children ("Our chief weapon is surprise... fear and surprise... Our TWO weapons are fear and surprise... and ruthless efficiency... Our THREE weapons are...") is where we begin to shift from tragedy to farce. If you can find it, One Child Nation is definitely worth the look.

Snakes but charming

I was the one pushing for Them That Follow with the movie group this week. The ratings for it on Rotten Tomatoes weren't especially high (62/59%) and, after seeing it, I can understand why. It's not an easy film to watch in certain moments and it can leave the rational viewer with the pounding questions: Why? Why is Mara (Alice Englert) staying? Why subject yourself to this ritual? Why do these people believe this stuff? But those questions and the circumstances that surround them are what make the film a compelling story, because they involve three things that many humans have a tough time dealing with: emotion, family, and religion.

Mara is a young woman in the northern mountains of Virginia who is the son of the local pastor of their Pentecostal church. When I say "local", I mean "very", as their community is a tiny hamlet on top of a mountain that is comprised of perhaps three dozen people. They also happen to be members of that sect of Pentecostals who think that handling serpents is a test of faith and demonstration of salvation (The specific verses that are the foundation of this belief are Mark 16: 17-18.) Given the obvious public health objection to people handling venomous animals, it's not difficult to see why the community might be secluded. On top of that, as with many wings of the Holiness movement, other literal interpretations of scripture predominate. Mara has been promised to a man who assists her father regularly in the church and must undergo a ritual of acceptance, during which she struggles with the fact that she's in love with another man in their town who is actually a non-believer. The inevitable familial and personal trauma should be obvious.

The foundations of Christian Protestantism are based in the concept that the church had lost its way and that finding the way back to Christ was the only way to arrest that decay. The proliferation of sects after the initial split was based on cultural differences, changes of interpretation over time, challenging and misunderstood circumstances, and sometimes just a charismatic figure who convinced people to think in a new way. Mara's father, Lemuel (Walton Goggins) plays that type of figure quite well. He's gaunt, driven, conveys a burning intensity with just a glance, and has a commanding baritone. It's easy to see how he could be the focal point of people looking to believe in something greater and even easier to imagine his children not wanting to step past the boundaries he's set for them, even given the natural tendency to rebel as one grows older. Mara, being an only child and without her mother, has no one else to turn to on a regular basis, except Augie (Thomas Mann) whom she cares for, but whose non-belief makes it even more difficult to take that first step outside the door of the family confines. And that's where the story is.

Them That Follow is a story about personal transformation as one grows older; the struggle with viewing the way things have always been with newer, older eyes; family pressure; religious pressure; and the struggle with personal spirituality. These are all very broad and timeless aspects of storytelling, regardless of background or religion (or lack thereof.) But they're also very humanocentric in nature, which means that the film is about the way humans feel about the events happening in their lives. Given those two aspects, I thought it was appropriate that writing-directing team Britt Poulton and Dan Savage (first-timers behind the camera, incidentally) kept the story small. There were no broad statements or events on screen that took place off the mountain. The law was a constant background noise, given the local authorities' interest in preventing people from dying by snakebite, but everything was contained among these few people and how they handled the personal traumas of their lives.

On the one hand, you could suggest that the snakes were the element that made this different from the "small town girl wishes to break away" plot. It's certainly more exotic than the usual fare. But, as interesting as they were, I don't know that the spirituality angle that included them was really that crucial. Certainly, they were important. One example of husband-to-be Garret's (Lewis Pullman) failure in the eyes of some was how difficult he found it to be part of the rituals that defined their religious lives. He was terrified at the prospect of being involved in the hunt for new snakes for the church and was highly uncomfortable when instructed by Lemuel to "treat Mara like a wife" by making her wash his feet in true Biblical style. In contrast, Mara fed and tended to the snakes with indifference and warned Garret during the washing that "There are limits to what I'll let you do to me." Certainly, the inner strength that made Augie reject the devotions of his family and friends matched up better with Mara's determination to be her own person, even under the weight of the pastor in the house. The scene of Mara's own direct experience of snake handling is tense, but perhaps superfluous to the whole. Despite her protestations to Augie ("It's my faith, too!"), her struggle isn't really with her faith. It's whether she can break those bonds that also mean family and what has embodied her entire life for all of her 16 years.

Another performance of note is that of Olivia Colman, who was excellent in The Favorite. In this film, as a devoted follower of Lemuel's but the mother of apostate Augie, she went from having to convey her fervor for the church to a mother's sympathy for Mara's personal travails to genuine terror at what might happen to her dissenting son, both in the community and from her deity. All of that was helped along by the wild, searching eyes that she used as Queen Anne in The Favourite. In the end, when confronted with the fact that the belief system that occupies her every thought may lead to the death of her son, it's fascinating to watch her deal with it in utter confusion but with perhaps a sneaking, cynical understanding that maybe this was always how it was going to end.

Religion is a difficult topic in modern times. It's tricky to tell something that displays a respect for others' beliefs while still calling them into serious question, without descending into outright derision or parody. Those questions of "Why?" are always easier asked by the outside observer than by those actually living the events. Fictional or not, I think Them That Follow did a solid job of conveying that struggle and presenting those questions without taking away from the fact that different humans will always have different answers to them.

Marveling at the future

At Comic-Con this year, Marvel laid out its plans for films in the post-Endgame era. (I have yet to see Endgame, but I am well aware of all spoilers.) I think there are a couple things that approach the concept of intriguing, one real oddball, and then a lot of business as usual.

Black Widow: Given the events of Endgame, this has already been revealed to be a prequel, set in a time when Black Widow was a spy... but for which entity? If they're suggesting that the Widow is much older than she looks and we're hearkening back to the Cold War, where she was an eventual defector from the Soviet state, OK. That's the most interesting period for this kind of espionage tale and could certainly drag along on the coattails of things like HBO's Chernobyl miniseries (among the best things ever done by that network.) However, putting her in the transition era of the 90s, when no one really knew who they were supposed to be spying on, as the USSR crumbled into the CIS and then finally Russia and associated allies, would be almost as interesting. Either of those scenarios would be able to incorporate the already-revealed Red Guardian (the Soviet version of Captain America) in some capacity, but the overall package is still kind of lacking. That is, unless they go full-bore and bring in people like Red Dynamo, Ursa Major, and Darkstar. But that sounds like too much baggage for what seems to be a Scarlett Johansson vehicle, given that she had input on picking the director. I'm lukewarm on it.

Thor 4, Black Panther 2, Guardians of the Galaxy 3: Blah blah blah... I just can't. Rumor has it that Thor: Love and Thunder is going to retain the comedic turn of the third film, which was quite welcome, if occasionally kind of disjointed. But the rest of it just sounds like status quo superhero stuff which I think we've all had enough of by now...? No. Fine. Whatever. Knock yourselves out.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness: aside from having the most awkward title of any film in the Marvel cinematic universe, is also supposed to be veering closer to being an actual horror film, which... OK? Points for trying? They've already taken a sex-and-profanity turn with the Deadpool films, so at least they're trying to veer away from the exclusively heroic explosions. (One awaits the Spider-Man romcom with bated breath. Into the Puberty-verse?) In that same vein (ahem) is...

Blade: A reboot of the Wesley Snipes version, which was outside the purview of Marvel Films (1998), one assumes that the typical genre of Blade material (vampires, shooting people with silver spikes and watching them disintegrate) would leave that safely in the horror field, as well. It'll only really be successful if they get Kris Kristofferson to reprise his role as the gruffest man alive, however.

By far the oddest of announcements, though, is Shang-Chi: Master of Kung Fu. Shang-Chi was created in the mid-70s by Steve Engelhart (legendary for his run on Batman/Detective around that time and later for Coyote) and Jim Starlin (likewise legendary for his work on Dreadstar, The Death of Captain Marvel and, incidentally, the creator of Thanos.) Marvel was attempting to secure the rights to the David Carradine series, Kung Fu, for a comic adaptation and, when they failed to do so (because Kung Fu's owner, Warner Communications, was also the owner of primary rival, DC Comics...), found that Shang-Chi was popular enough that they could carry on with it into the early 80s (125 issues.) Given the original creative team and intent of the book, it shouldn't surprise anyone that Shang-Chi was a somewhat more thoughtful character than the rest of Marvel's chopsocky output of that time (Iron Fist, et al.)

But the announcements have carried across the idea that the primary intent is to not only have a Marvel film with an Asian lead, which is commendable, but also a mostly Asian cast, which is also commendable, except... Is that really the best reason to make a film, especially one based around a pretty minor character who was always- ALWAYS -out of place in the cosmic-powered Marvel Universe? Yes, yes, I know. Daredevil, Luke Cage, the Defenders, yadda yadda. I get it. There can be low-powered people in Marvelworld, too. But those people are still all equipped with super powers, be it radar sense for the blind man or bulletproofiness for the bartender. The obvious comparison is being drawn to Black Panther and its Afrocentric cast and story, which is fine. But that character had a history of exactly that in the comics. No creative chasms had to be jumped in order to bring that story to life. Shang-Chi? He's a guy. If the intent is to show that Asian people are part of the Marvel U, too, wouldn't it be better to go with someone like Sunfire and be able to tie in the X-Men (fellow mutants) and all that? I don't know, man.

And, yes, there's also The Eternals. Ugh. What a long story that is. (deep breath) So, famed co-creator of the much of the Marvel Universe, Jack Kirby, had a falling out with fellow creator Stan Lee and the rest of Marvel management in the early 70s and decided to switch sides in the comics cold war and join up with DC. What he brought them was a story called The New Gods. This was a titanic struggle between cosmic beings of light and darkness who inhabited the worlds of New Genesis (good guys) and Apokolips (bad guys; subtlety was not always Jack's strong suit in terms of naming conventions.) Carried along with that was an Oedipal scenario, where the battle commander of New Genesis, Orion, was leading their forces against his own father, Darkseid (case in point; it's pronounced just how it looks: "darkside"), ruler of Apokolips. Kirby had intended the whole story to be kind of a novel in comic form, such that it was intended to run for a finite period and then come to an end; a rarity in comics of the day, but typical for the vision of Kirby, who was usually looking to try new things with the medium.

DC, of course, constantly hamstrung by the corporate outlook, wanted the newly-popular books (New Gods, Forever People, Mr. Miracle) to run in perpetuity and also to drop in all kinds of guest stars from the rest of the DC Universe. This, as you might expect, neither worked well nor pleased Kirby at all. In the end, the books got distorted from their original vision and came to an end, anyway, because of faltering sales. Frustrated, Kirby eventually made his way back to Marvel. What he brought with him was kind of a re-envisioning of the New Gods saga in which these two collections of cosmic beings, the Eternals and the Deviants (seriously...) were fighting their little war under the uncaring vision of even more powerful entities known as the Celestials. Just to bring this full circle, when Starlin created Thanos, he picked right up on Kirby's wavelength and decided to make him the misshapen son of the leader of the Eternals, Mentor; looking far more like a Deviant than the generally perfectly-formed good guys. Incidentally, the starbase/town that the Guardians of the Galaxy operate from in both comics and films is the skull of a dead Celestial, so the planning has, like usual, been in place for a while.

As you can probably predict, The Eternals as a comic lasted a very short time because Kirby's grand visions were either perceived as repetitive or just not in tune with the zeitgeist of the late 70s. They and the Celestials would, however, go on to become part of the fabric of the Marvel sprawl. And now they're going to be a movie of some kind. I guess that's interesting? A lot of Kirby's characters in his later days were basically a bunch of square-jawed, thick-fingered dudes that didn't have a whole lot of... well, character. They basically just showed up and punched people while wearing even more outlandish clothing than what is typical for the Marvel setting. So, I'd like to add it to the "intriguing" list, but it sounds like another excuse to blow stuff up. Guess we'll see.

Beginnings and endings

A while back, I told my friends, Larissa and Jaime, that I'd be regularly writing up reviews of different films that we'd seen together. We're all members of the Michigan Theater (and State Theater) in Ann Arbor, which is a regular host for documentaries and smaller releases, in addition to the standard explosive Marvel output. I've fallen down on that obligation, only talking about a few films that really piqued my interest and/or irritated me to the point that I'd start writing as soon as I got home (see: Tarantino's latest effort, for example.) But, in an effort to get a little more exposure, I'm going to try to redress that failing and attempt to talk about everything we see, fascinating or not. (On that note: if you're reading and interested, can you take a moment to link people to what you like? Tweets, Facebook, archaic email, whathaveyou. More readers is better readers, yo.)

In the past couple weeks, we've seen two films that were really well done, largely because both of them worked well on an emotional level: The Farewell and Maiden.

The Farewell is, as noted in the opening credits, "based on an actual lie", wherein writer/director Lulu Wang gives us a story about a family whose matriarch in China has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and her family decides to hold a reunion so that everyone can say their goodbyes but without actually putting her through the emotional trauma of telling her that she only has a short time to live. That leads to as many emotional and humorous moments as you might expect, all of which are depicted in a very natural and familiar manner, which is the heart of the film's appeal. There are no dramatic pauses or orchestral crashes. It's all quite mundane, but easily conveyed as quite traumatic for the family as they dwell on their hidden knowledge and bicker with each other about whether they're doing the right thing.

Foremost in the ethical discussion is Billi (Awkwafina), the only granddaughter, whom everyone else suspects won't be able to contain herself and will spoil things for everyone, especially Nai Nai (Mandarin for "grandma".) Billi, properly, questions whether everyone else's cosseted nobility is serving Nai Nai's interests, or merely their own, so that they won't have to fully deal with the trauma. Her father's past troubles with alcoholism and her uncle's issues with gambling emerge as stones to be slung by the others when they begin to lose control of themselves in their grief (while Billi remains relatively stoic, in contrast.) But what it also does is make all of these characters, even the minor ones, very human and easily understandable in this, the moment of greatest crisis for the family unit as a whole since the patriarch (referred to by Nai Nai in a gravesite memorial scene as "Old Timer") passed on.

It was kind of fascinating to see many of the common issues of family relationships and identity struggles through the lens of another culture, but without the usually ominous aspects of drama. For example, Billi's mother, Jian (Diana Lin), is the practical one and is already cooking for the whole group when Billi surprisingly arrives in China after being deliberately excluded from the trip by her parents for her supposed inability to control herself. That confrontation between emotion and duty which is part of the backdrop of the whole story manifests between mother and daughter when hearkening back to their decision to leave China for the US while Billi was young, but old enough to remember Nai Nai and the rest of the family. You feel badly for Billi, but also sympathize with Jian's attempt to make everything go off smoothly; helped along by Billi's self-awareness that she probably would spoil the plan, albeit semi-unconcerned since she doesn't agree with the plan in the first place.

Similarly, Billi's cousin, Hao Hao (Chen Han), who is getting married as the convenient excuse for this family gathering, is derided as "sensitive" and whom is consequently also suspected of giving away the facade; "sensitive" being a euphemism for "emotional" or "weak" in American culture, the similar chauvinism of which is fully on display by both men and women in this look into Chinese culture, as well. I think Wang did a great job of keeping the story simple, but giving even minor characters like Hao Hao obvious depth as they struggle with the pain of losing their grandmother/mother, the uncertainty of seeing the whole family together again after so many years, and the simple joy that manifests from that uncertainty when they realize that their family bonds should be a positive thing in their lives and, in the end, still are.

Next up was Maiden; a documentary about the running of the 1989-90 Whitbread Round the World Race, a yachting regatta that begins and ends in Southampton, England after circling the globe, largely in the southern seas. What made this one unusual was that skipper Tracy Edwards entered a boat with an all-female crew, a first for the race and extremely rare in sailing, in general (of the 200+ crew among the boats of the previous running of the Whitbread, four had been women.)

The film is set up in classic documentary style, using on- and off-boat footage of the race where they could get it, alongside wonderfully blunt interviews with Edwards, her crew, the skippers of other boats in the race, and journalists who covered it. In the typically chauvinistic world of sailing, it was kind of remarkable to see how many of the male interviewees' attitudes really hadn't changed about the Maiden's crew or circumstances, in general, over the past 30 years. It was also fascinating to see a film on a topic that I knew next-to-nothing about, having no knowledge that the race even existed or how much work it would take to refit a boat of that size, not to mention sail it around the world. I did know enough to understand that when Edwards said she was sailing the "most southerly route possible" on the leg from Uruguay to Australia, she was taking an incredible risk. Read enough history about explorers trying to find their way past Cape Horn, dealing with the subzero temperatures and mountainous waves, and you get the gist of just how dangerous it can be, especially when you're in nothing larger than a 50-foot boat.

I think what really sells the film, however, is Tracy. Thirty years later, you can tell that she's still the same extremely determined woman who was desperate to prove that she (and, by inference, all women) could accomplish this monumental task just as well as any man or anyone. Watching her and their struggles on the screen and the obvious anguish she felt (and still feels) from both setbacks and triumphs, it was hard not to be blinking away some reaction of my own at the disappointment, the tension, and the elation that permeated everything that was happening. Tracy's childhood went from idyllic to traumatic and it shaped her in ways that she still struggles with (as her mother noted after meeting her following one successful leg of the race: "I can't believe that this little horror did this!"; spoken quite endearingly.) It colored her relationships throughout the stress of searching for funding, refitting the boat, and guiding it around the globe. One could see that her crew were being as evenhanded as they could about those times (outside of the thrill of what they were doing) and one can easily see the regret that Tracy carries about the way she handled herself, alongside the realization that the huge crowds that eventually gathered at their ports of call just wanted to be there to share in what Maiden and its crew were saying about gender, about emotional, mental, and physical strength, and simply about sailing and the joy that comes with the open ocean and the possibilities that it promises.

So, there it is. I'm hoping to catch Them That Follow next Tuesday, but we'll see what shakes out.