Sep

6

2024

Mari Cohen (associate editor): More than 1.9 million Americans are currently incarcerated in state prisons and jails, while 113 million have an immediate family member who has at one time been behind bars. Yet major literary fiction that directly and unsparingly takes up the prison remains rare. A welcome exception is Rachel Kushner’s 2018 novel The Mars Room, which conjures a California women’s prison in painstaking detail.

Drawing on deep relationships with incarcerated women as well as her own experience as a rebellious, free-range teen in San Francisco, Kushner centers the novel on the character of Romy Hall, a young mother raised in the Golden Gate City’s underbelly sentenced to two life sentences for killing her stalker. Alternating between Romy’s perspective and that of other figures from the prison, Kushner renders the building as a textured society with its own rich set of social codes: methods for passing items between cells in solitary confinement; canteen food recipes; and constant political negotiations with staff over privileges and rules. The narrative spares little in its frankness or its horror: An early scene involves a teenager going into labor in handcuffs while fellow prisoners are punished for coming to her aid.

The fictional prison called Stanville, based on a facility in Chowchilla, California that is one of the country’s largest women’s prisons, is presented as both continuity and contrast with its surroundings. Mountain lions shriek and gray foxes dart through rich yellow grasses in the Sierras above the facility, indicating an enduring natural beauty off-limits to its inhabitants. Yet on the valley floor, the prison’s sense of confinement extends to the eponymous town where it is located: The water is “poisoned,” the air is “bad,” and “people without cars walk the main boulevard in the hottest part of the day, when it’s 113 degrees. They amble along in the gutter of the road, scooting empty shopping carts, piercing the dead zone of the late afternoon with the carts’ metallic rattle.” In this sense, the prison and the world outside become a free-flowing and interdependent ecosystem, with the prison both resulting from and producing poverty and despair. But against this backdrop, Kushner’s narrative also shows how the prison, like all societies, encompasses a whole range of experiences: the characters reflect on their lot with dry wit, and Romy and her friends make each other laugh in the prison yard, walking past groups of women playing guitars, or having sex while lookouts watch for guards, or tanning slathered in cook oil and wearing homemade undershirts known as “slingshots.”

Given the sensitivity and depth I observed in the book, I disagree with diagnoses like that of critic Christian Lorentzen that The Mars Room foregoes literary beauty or complexity in its quest to make a noble political statement. While it’s true that the prose can be uneven—and Lorentzen correctly identifies that the voice of Romy, tasked with being our anthropological guide to the prison, can sometimes lose its independent spark—I didn’t find The Mars Room exceptionally didactic. On the contrary, I appreciated Kushner’s decision to draw characters with complicated pasts who have indeed committed grave harms, as opposed to others that could more easily win liberal sympathies such as the nonviolent drug offenders or the wrongfully convicted. The Mars Room refuses to tiptoe around its reader; it is confident it can tell full stories of incarcerated human beings without ever eclipsing the sharp edges of the prison walls that cage them.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that the history of the past half-century of Brazilian cinema is the story of the producer Luiz Carlos Barreto and his family. He and his wife and children have served as directors and backers of many of the country’s most important films and filmmakers since 1963, when he founded his production company. A man firmly on the left, he was a key supporter of the work of the Cinema Novo movement of the ’60s and ’70s, which brought Brazil to the forefront of world cinema. A small selection of the 50 films he has produced will be showing until September 15th for “Isso é Brasil,” a retrospective at Lincoln Center.

This festival includes a sampling of the full range of Barreto productions. The ’60s—the height of Cinema Novo—are best represented by two classics: Glauber Rocha’s Entranced Earth (1967) and Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s Barren Lives (1963). One of the most European of Brazil’s directors, Rocha made films radical in both form and content. Entranced Earth is an uncompromising satire of the political and intellectual classes in Brazilian society, highlighting their weakness and cowardice; none of those responsible for the injustices that reigned in the country escapes unscathed. Barren Lives is a harsh portrayal of the even harsher experience of the peasants of Brazil’s Northeast. Shot in gleaming black and white, it’s a tale of the callousness of the wealthy and the destitution of the poor—and the little hope they had for a better life. Like Barren Lives, Pereira dos Santos’s later, epic-length film Memoirs of Prison (1984) is based on a book by Graciliano Ramos—one of the most important Brazilian writers, a Communist arrested for his part in a 1935 left-wing uprising against President Getúlio Vargas. Sent to prison and then to a prison colony, his two-volume memoir of his incarceration is the basis for this film, a powerful tribute to the courage and tenacity of Ramos and his comrades.

This being a Brazilian festival, naturally there are two films about soccer stars: Garrincha, the People’s Joy (1963) and This Is Pelé (1974). Neither is a portrait of the men as men; Pelé’s support for the military dictatorship and Garrincha’s personal problems, which led to his drinking himself to death at age 50, are totally absent. Rather, we are presented with the magic of their play, with large chunks of both films dedicated to highlights from their careers, their amazing artistry with the ball at their feet. The retrospective also includes other popular cinema like the international smash hits Bye Bye, Brazil (1980) and Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (1976), which made Sônia Braga an international star.

As we prepare for the arrival of two important new Brazilian films in the coming months—Walter Salles’s film on a political crime of the ’70s, I’m Still Here, and Petra Costa’s documentary on evangelical Christianity’s role in Bolsonaro’s rise, Apocalypse in the Tropics—“Isso é Brasil” provides us with crucial cine-historical background to understand the Brazilian filmmakers of today.

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): My husband and I have been on the hunt for the perfect ’90s movie. By that we mean: original, fun, and action-packed, that doesn’t take itself too seriously. (Think: Last Action Hero, Sneakers, Speed.) In discussing our quest with friends, people kept telling us to re-watch Twister (1996), which features a ragtag group of storm chasers getting way too close to tornadoes for the sake of science. It’s true: Twister got everything right: an ensemble cast (Bill Paxton; Helen Hunt; Carey Elwes; and Philip Seymour Hoffman!), romantic drama, world historical stakes, and CGI that holds up despite being almost 30 years old.

I cannot, unfortunately, say the same thing for Twisters, the paint-by-numbers remake released this summer. Every scene in the original has an analog here—the Big Trauma Backstory, the Twin Twisters, the Twister Hits a Community Event—in a way that punishes you, rather than rewards you, for having recently seen the original. There seems to be no discernible narrative connection between the original and the remake—no sense of whether or how this new team of storm chasers, using at least some of the technology that belonged to characters from the original, is related, or whether we’re even in a world where the first team existed at all. Paxton’s analog here is played by Daisy Edgar Jones, whose character’s Okie accent repeatedly slips into her Irish one. There is so much expository dialogue that it sometimes feels as if you’re reading the script doctor’s outline.

Both films are already somewhat ridiculous considering their villain is a natural disaster. (“This has to stop!” cries Hunt’s injured aunt in the original film. I burst out laughing.) But in that movie, at least it’s about understanding the tornadoes, collecting data to increase warning times. In the remake, it’s about dissolving them altogether by driving into them with some kind of chemical, which veers into techno-optimist Marvel movie territory. Skip Twisters, watch Twister instead.

All too often, when left-wing Jews critique mainstream American Jewish organizations’ nearly unconditional support of Israel, they are met with the predictable counter-charge that they lack ahavat Yisrael, love of the Jewish people. Love of one’s fellow Jews, goes the logic, should compel us to moderate or even withhold such criticism. But this week’s parshah, Shoftim, can help us articulate a radically different understanding of love.

In its discussion of judicial testimony, the Torah states that “a case can be valid only on the testimony of two witnesses or more.” If there is only one witness to a crime, testimony—and thus judicial action—is impossible. However, even though a single witness cannot testify, the rabbis insist that the individual still has a legal responsibility “to hate the sinner until they change their ways.” While an obligation to hate may sound extreme, it was codified in several of the most authoritative Jewish legal codes, among them Maimonides’s Mishneh Torah and Yosef Karo’s Shulchan Aruch. In a number of other central legal texts, the principle is extended beyond the specific case of a single witness and becomes a general legal obligation to hate anyone who repeatedly sins and will not accept rebuke.

What is the purpose of this hatred? For some interpreters, it relieves us of complicity with sin. For others, it is an act of identification with God: Since sinners rebel against God, we must hate them. But perhaps hatred serves a more subtle function. In the absence of a framework for holding those who do wrong accountable—whether because of the limitations of the legal system or because the sinner will not accept critique—hatred may prevent wrongdoing from being excused or forgotten.

Despite acknowledging the utility of hatred, the rabbis place limits on its expression, mandating that “one must still return [the sinner’s] lost objects and [assist them by] loading and unloading [animals] with them.” The reason for these restrictions may lie in the verse the rabbis cite as proof: “It is not My desire that the wicked shall die, but that the wicked turn from their ways and live.” Hatred should not be punitive; following God’s example, we are meant to keep alive the memory of wrongdoing not so we can punish those who sin but rather so we can encourage them to change their ways. This mandated care for those we hate demonstrates that we must still see them as worthy of love, and reveals that what we should really despise is their actions and the ways in which they’ve allowed themselves to be distorted, rather than their core being. But it also serves a function for those doing the hating: Absent such care, the medieval Talmudic commentators known as the Tosafot warn, our hatred is liable to become harmful.

Rabbi Moshe Amiel, a largely forgotten early religious Zionist who opposed war and the idolization of nationalism, followed the Tosafot in insisting on the importance of hatred while also delineating its risks. Though other mitzvot should ideally be done joyfully, he cautioned that hatred “should not be done with joy but rather with distress.” If we take joy in our hatred, we are more likely to foster revenge than repair. And whereas other mitzvot, Rabbi Amiel explains, can be performed rotely, even if it’s best to carry them out with intention, hatred should never be routine, for routine hatred inevitably leads to fantasies of domination. “Even though a person may have begun performing this mitzvah [of hatred of sin] for the sake of heaven,” he argues, “habituation has made hatred natural—a nature . . . of cruelty for the sake of cruelty.”

The rabbinic tradition thus suggests a far deeper understanding of ahavat Yisrael than the one advanced by the Jewish left’s detractors: Love for one’s fellow must at times come in the form of hatred for who they have become and what they have done. And yet Rabbi Amiel also reminds us of the risks that come along with loathing. It is easy for such an orientation to become reflexive and to nurture the very cruelty against which we are fighting. To truly love our fellow may at times require hatred, but paradoxically, that hatred demands an even greater degree of care.

Aron Wander is rabbinical student, organizer, and writer.