The Face Knife

Rage Against the Machine, Brooklyn Style
Recently, a friend of mine was trying to get me to argue with her about which is cooler, believing in free will or believing in determinism. Not that my opinion about what’s cool is so great, mind you - the request was directed at a number of people, most of whom are probably way more equipped to answer this question, and I can only be considered cool in so far as that I can come off as monosyllabic and aloof on most social occasions. Or is that being a creep? I forget. Anyway, not being long on style, I, as is my nature, avoided the question by flippantly observing that I only believe in over-determinism. Causes are multiple and of varying magnitudes, and end up limiting possible outcomes in ways that are unforeesable to you but totally fucking transparent to all your smart friends. No matter how much you whine about it, you’re probably just going to keep doing what you’ve been doing, whether it’s working some stupid cubicle job or writing badly proofread movie reviews or smoking crack in the elementary school bathroom.

Half Nelson is about a school teacher (Ryan Gosling) with a passion for dialectics, girls’ basketball and some of that “other stuff,” as his dealer calls it, (you and I call it crack). It’s also a film about the dissolution of idealism when the idealist can no longer reconcile his passion to change the world with the multiple and seemingly contradictory ways the world presents itself. His relationship with one of his students, Drey, (Shareeka Epps), whose world is a daily play of unstable oppositions, is the prism through which the light of idealism is hopelessly split. I guess the crack is a factor, too, though at first it seems like the only real side effect is forgetting to shave. But later in the film his cat dies! I don’t think the cat smokes crack, though. At least not on camera. Maybe feline crack smoking is implied. The cat thing is probably the part of the film I disliked the most, and if something as small as that is the largest hole I can poke, it should be obvious that I recommend this film.

There seems to be a critical consensus that when the film limits its portrayal of inner city school life to basketball matches and such it is succesful, while the interjection of overtly political material that’s not directly related to the narrative as such is a bad thing. I don’t think that’s necessarily true - I prefer to think of the interludes with the kids staring directly at the camera reciting factoids about Salvador Allende or whatever being as being a resurrection of the Brecht/Godard alienation effect, here placed strategically in a film with more mainstream, traditional virtues like strong characters, excellent acting and a decent if amorphous plot. Yeah, it’s sort of embarrassing, in the sense that I can embarrassed for anyone so earnest, but that’s a problem all of us very cool people (I lied, earlier) seem to have.

The discussions about dialectics are another issue. Gosling’s character talks about incremental change, that forces are always in conflict but that change is possible and even inevitable given enough time. Um, no. If this film has a moral message, it’s that we are all part of the machine, we are trapped in the superstructure and that the values that the “good” people of the world try to uphold have just as a tenuous relationship to the everyday experience of life as the values we impute to the “bad” people. Dialectics can be seen as the process of humankind’s alienation from and reconciliation to the material world through the creations of institutions like religion, prisons, schools, and while it’s nice to believe that historical materialism is inevitable perhaps it’s best not to do so when all you can think about is getting high. Or if some of my college roommates are any evidence, maybe it is.

While theoretically the world is spiralling ever upwards through the process of teleological change, one inescapable fact of life gives the lie to that. Say hello, mom and dad. Half Nelson shares with 2006’s mediocre junkie flick Sherrybaby a familial party sequences where some unresolved issues are revealed, but while Sherrybaby’s scene of paternal malfeasance is a melodramatic shocker that immediately drives her back into the arms of heroin (or more to the point, drives heroin back into her arms), Half Nelson’s scene is more a slow-burner, with the now-morbid 60s style liberalism of his parents turning into a hypocrisy that threatens to undermine everything they ever staged a sit-in against, if those gains hadn’t already been swallowed up by corporatism and the other unstoppable institutions that are crushing my, excuse me, our lives.

Like the character, the film “bottoms out” leaving us with a sense that things could go either way, for him, Drey, Brooklyn or the world. The future of Gosling, Epps and filmmakers Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden seems not so dim, however. I look forward to their next projects and hope that some of the more radical elements of their filmmaking and politics are not recuperated by the kudos Half Nelson has received. The experimental and political parts of the film, while modest by some standards, are to be encouraged and not dismissed as half measures.