David Klion (contributing editor): The United States of America turns 250 tomorrow, and no one seems very happy about it. What exactly are we celebrating here? The US political system has rarely been in worse shape. Donald Trump’s authoritarianism is no less cruel for its incompetence—while the Supreme Court just narrowly rejected his effort to overturn the birthright citizenship explicitly guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, it also granted him the power to strip hundreds of thousands of Haitian refugees of their protected status so that Stephen Miller can satisfy his libidinal urge to deport them. Trump’s cartoonishly vulgar celebrations on the National Mall have drawn minuscule crowds that serve as an apt metaphor not only for his historically unpopular presidency, but also for national self-esteem at the semisesquicentennial.
Maybe we’ve always had it coming. Among the ostensibly righteous grievances Thomas Jefferson enumerated on July 4th, 1776 were the British Crown’s “raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands” and “endeavour[ing] to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages.” Never mind taxation without representation; America declared independence in significant part so that settler-colonists could carry out a century-long genocidal rampage across an entire continent, slaughtering and dispossessing tribes that had negotiated treaties with London. It’s right there in the text. No wonder the Israelis have no patience for liberal American Jewish moralizing; they see our history more clearly than we do, and they aim to replicate it.
I’m trying to think of this weekend less as the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and more as the 50th anniversary of the bicentennial, a weird little episode in the American saga. In 1976, Americans were also having a crisis of confidence, reeling from the triple humiliations of Vietnam, Watergate, and stagflation. Despite all this, the nation embraced patriotic pageantry in an ideologically amorphous spirit of renewal that found political expression in Jimmy Carter’s outsider victory a few months later and in Ronald Reagan’s cheerfully reactionary “Morning in America” four years after that. Neurosis was out and naivete was in. Fifty years later, whatever sense of underlying tragedy America was processing now repeats itself as farce.
My first recommendation to mark the bicentennial is the current cover story of Harper’s, penned by my friend Chris Hooks and titled “Happy Fucking Birthday: An exhausted America turns two hundred and fifty.” Hooks is an uncommonly gifted prose stylist, and he brings his full talent to bear as he tours Washington, Harpers Ferry, Gettysburg, Valley Forge, and Philadelphia in search of a past worth honoring. The closest he finds is at the gravesite of Thaddeus Stevens, the Radical Republican congressman who ceaselessly badgered Abraham Lincoln to emancipate the enslaved. In his final speech before Congress during the early Reconstruction years, Stevens proclaimed “man still is vile,” a prescient warning given the century of reversals awaiting the Black South. Hooks writes:
To note that man is still vile, though, is to leave open the possibility that someday man might not be, which is to say that it could be a kind of patriotic sentiment. Across the street from the tomb is an elementary school in the system that he helped preserve, where a fresh-faced and racially diverse group of kids was lining up. The anger Stevens felt about his country’s unrealized promise had been good for America.
My other recommendation is a film, Robert Altman’s Nashville, released just ahead of the bicentennial in 1975 and filmed on location in the titular Tennessee capital. A messy, rambling 24-character ensemble loosely organized around a concert gala fundraiser for a fictional populist presidential candidate, it’s a rare film that attempts—and largely succeeds at—encompassing the full scope of America. Nashville is better experienced than described; blending cynical satire of American media, politics, and capitalism with earnest celebration of the Black and white roots of American music, it resists any straightforward or didactic reading. All I can say is that the film channels the ambivalence that honest contemplation of American history demands—an unsparing look at an often disappointing country that must be doing something right to last 250 years.
Arielle Angel (editor-at-large): To get in the mood for our fall trip to Japan, my husband and I have been watching movies set there. We recently watched Perfect Days—written by Wim Wenders and Takuma Takasaki and directed by Wenders—which follows a cleaner of Tokyo’s famous high-design public bathrooms as he goes about his routine. For much of the film, we watch Hirayama (a divinely present Kōji Yakusho) from the moment he wakes at dawn to the sound of his neighbor sweeping the street below his window to the moment he dog-ears a page in a book (Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying or Aya Kōda’s Tree) and turns off the lights. When we graduate to the weekend and a new routine comes into view, it has the force of a plot twist.
One can’t help but ask: Why is this so riveting? In the course of the day, our hero barely speaks to anyone; he scours and scrubs with the intention of a monk and the precision of a craftsman. Between toilets, he listens to American proto-punk—the Velvet Underground or Patti Smith—on cassette. He takes pictures of light coming through trees with a ’90s-era point-and-shoot camera. The film’s insistence on analog technologies offers a non-scoldy counterpoint to our smartphone-addled lives. The result is a love letter to attention.
Attention can be difficult; it leaves room for emotions. Isn’t that what we’re escaping when we disappear into our phones? And indeed, if Hirayama feels joy and wonder in his day-to-day, he also feels loneliness and sorrow. The force of his pain, without dilution or distraction, is like a brick to the face. And yet—and Perfect Days makes this cliché feel new and profound—tomorrow is a new day.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Ross McElwee’s classic 1985 personal essay/documentary Sherman’s March is back for a brief run at Film Forum. What a sheer delight it was to return to this film, a trip through the love life of the filmmaker as he seeks to reconnect with lost loves, connect with new ones, and rectify the mistakes of his past. This was not McElwee’s original intention. As the title indicates, the premise of the film was to retrace General William T. Sherman’s March to the Sea during the Civil War. McElwee sort of does so, meandering through the Carolinas and Georgia. The ruins he comes across are rarely those of Sherman’s troops meting out justice to the rebels, but rather of his own love life, now in a state of total ruin. Everyone around him wants him to settle down, and he’s trying. But his enjoyment of the attempts overrides any such compulsion.
McElwee is self-effacing, reflective, and totally unable to set things right. Women he knows try to fix him up with their friends, sometimes with bizarre results. In one case, a beautiful divorcee leads him to a band of far-right survivalists, a premonition of our national future. McElwee isn’t interested in commenting on them and their evident political insanity. It’s love he’s after.
You will never see as goyische a film as Sherman’s March in your entire life. A trip down the Amazon couldn’t be any stranger for a New York Yid like me than this journey through the land of the bland that is the wealthy white South.
Remake, McElwee’s latest film, opening next Friday, is brilliant, too, but in an entirely different register. It’s called Remake because it starts out as an account of a plan to make a fictional version of Sherman’s March. The idea is strange, but the producers who want to carry it out truly love McElwee’s masterpiece, so maybe it’ll work out. We’ve learned early in the film that McElwee’s son Adrian is dead, though for the moment it goes unexplained.
What follows is another account of a journey, one with moments of joy as it begins, and which then spirals down through every kind of disappointment imaginable. McElwee had filmed his son countless times for his own enjoyment and included him in as he grew up in earlier films, particularly Time Indefinite (1993) and Photographic Memory (2011). We journey through the life of Adrian, a cuteish kid doing cuteish things. We hear about McElwee’s wife, who’s tired of appearing in his films, but at first it seems that the search for love that was the motor of Sherman’s March has been a success. The former bachelor has a wife and two kids and a nice house in Boston.
But all is not well, and Remake ends up as an account of all that can go wrong. The marriage disintegrates, McElwee’s health becomes an issue, and, worst of all, Adrian, his beloved first-born goes off the deep end, and the cheery documentary turns into a horror film about drug abuse and mental illness. Throughout the film, McElwee remains for the most part the stoic WASP, confronting issues as best he can, though there really is no best way to handle this. Remake is a dark film whose director seeks a way to find some light, some joy. His loss is immense, and so is his anger, which has many targets, himself among them. The two earlier films in which Adrian had featured foreshadow the horrors of this film. In them we watched the happy little boy turn into a surly adolescent and young man. Watching them after seeing Remake was a devastating experience for me, not only as a film critic, but as a father.
The pairing of these two films, I realized when I finished watching them, is as despairing as can be imagined. By film’s end McElwee has a new wife, and they seem happy. But the unspoken lesson of Remake is we can’t know if we’re really happy, or whether we really know our kids, or, especially, whether we really know ourselves…
Weekly Parshah Commentary
Parshat Pinchas from Avi Garelick
This week’s parshah opens in the aftermath of a shocking episode of violence: Pinchas, the grandson of the high priest Aaron, has summarily executed an Israelite man and a Midianite woman having sex. The pair, both of noble birth, had paraded before Moses and the broader Israeli community, brazenly declaring their promiscuous intentions. The murdered man, Zimri ben Salu, is the only Israelite offender whose name is recorded in relation to this incident, but the Torah tells us that he was just one of many men who had attached themselves to Baal Peor, a local Canaanite god, in a lustful frenzy for Moabite and Midianite women. This staggering social breakdown had prompted a deadly plague that felled tens of thousands of Israelites, until Pinchas’s intervention ended the maelstrom of sex, idolatry, and divine wrath.
The frenzy that culminated in Pinchas’s bloody action was a toxic stew brewed of several ingredients, but what ultimately drove Pinchas to plunge his spear into the offending couple was the blatant mingling of sex and idolatry. (The Talmud, in imagining how this linkage worked, describes Moabite women producing small idols from under their clothes at the height of an Israelite man’s arousal, demanding: “First, worship this!”). The story thus revolves around sexual desire for outsiders and ties that desire to exploitation, trickery, humiliation, false gods, and, finally, submission to the enemy Moabite and Midianite peoples. Israelite men who should have been proud warriors are instead dominated—yoked like oxen, as various commentators describe it—by foreign women and their gods. Pinchas is the valiant restorer of Israelite masculinity; with the vivid symbol of his spear through the lovers’ genitals, he brutally reinscribes Israelite male domination, as well as the domination of the Israelite’s conquering God.
Until the past century, rabbinic Judaism, along with Jewish cultural tradition, tended to regard some aspects of this narrative as vestiges of a bygone age, relics that could be passed over or ignored. The God of conquest was, for a long time, abandoned in favor of God the merciful teacher; the ideal of masculine domination was discarded, and values of cleverness and subversion (based in the mythical underdog figures of Jacob and Joseph) became important ideals instead. But certain elements of our parshah persisted through the centuries in Jewish culture—namely, the association between love of foreign women and love of foreign gods.
This coupling echoes throughout biblical texts that use the Hebrew root “z-n-h” to refer to “whoring after” both women and foreign gods. It appears in the story of King Solomon, who eventually succumbs to idol worship under the sway of his foreign wives, and it is codified in the Second Temple-era principle of matrilineal descent (“partus sequitur ventrem”)—the precept that children of gentile mothers are themselves gentiles., We also see this tendency in contemporary American Jewish culture—for example, in the regrettable slogan “shiksas are for practice,” a phrase by which young Jewish men reenact the depravity of Zimri, who consorted with an outsider out of adolescent defiance instead of love and respect, thus succumbing to the idolatry of dehumanization.
This persistent identification of women and idolatry entails not simply a rejection of sexual relations with gentiles, but an abiding misogyny that tangles female sexuality with deceit, and a bifurcation of male sexual desire into licit and illicit, inside and outside, socially constructive and socially destructive. Prohibition turns the subject, as well as the object, of forbidden sexual desire into an empty husk—what Audre Lorde would call the victory of the pornographic over the erotic. A man’s desire for a woman becomes a symbol of either submission or rebellion instead of a moment of human connection. For Zimri, the Midianite princess is a vessel for his mutiny. Pinchas takes urgent action to disrupt this dynamic, but his methods are fatally flawed. By responding through violence, he reinforces the bifurcated dynamic, using the woman as a vessel, just as Zimri did, though for his authority and control rather than defiance.
So where do we find ourselves in this story, if not in Zimri’s rebellion or in Pinchas’s zeal? We might find our answer in the reaction of Moses, who stood and cried while Zimri openly flaunted his leadership. Why did Moses not act—castigate the sinner, issue an order to have him stopped, physically bar his entry into the tent with the Midianite woman? A Rabbinic tradition, attempting to explain Moses’s inaction, tells of how Zimri confronted Moses: “Was not the woman you married herself a Midianite?” Moses had no response. Perhaps he felt personally implicated, but perhaps he had the advantage of a prophet’s perspective. He knew that anxiety around the seductive danger of the outsider was a creature of its time, an injunction born in the desert and meant to consolidate Israelite identity; it was, after all, until only recently that marrying an outsider was considered a benign choice. (Ironically, according to one tradition, Pinchas himself had a Midianite mother.)
Moses may also have sensed that, in only a few generations, a Moabite woman named Ruth—who, the Talmud teaches, was descended from Balak, a king of Moab—would seduce an Israelite man, leading to the creation of the Davidic line. The presence of both Moabite and Midianite women in our broader story of Jewish history affirms the connection between the Torah’s heterogeneous beginnings (Moses with his Midianite family) and the promised redemption (the Messiah, the tradition goes, will be a descendent of King David, born of Moab). Rather than being compromised by his own hypocrisy, then, Moses may be disoriented by a kind of prophetic fugue state. He is facing an interregnum of indefinite duration, in which attraction to outsiders and connection across difference are seen as threatening. But, we might infer, he knows they have redemptive potential, and that redemption will only be possible when outsiders are welcomed as family.
As for us, we must count ourselves not among the descendants of Pinchas, vigilant in enforcing a warped erotic order, but as children of Ruth, set on healing and restoring it.
Avi Garelick is a researcher and organizer based in Washington Heights, New York.
