Monthly Archives: April 2022

Tangerine   Sean Baker (USA 2015) Kitana Kiki Rodriguez, Mya Taylor, James Ransone, Karren Karagulian

Viewed: Star and Shadow Cinema, 21 April 22   Ticket: £7

It’s Christmas Eve and time to eat and rejoice and to suck cock

Sean Baker’s movie Tangerine is about desire. Specifically the streets of LA or any large city as portals of desire giving onto open spaces where desires are embodied and satisfied in forms outside the censorious morals of ‘normal’ society.

Tangerine, so called presumably because of the fake tan colouring of the ladymen hustlers, comes up from the streets, with a sassy ‘know it’ voice.   A movie with a voice that says I want. It wraps the audience up in the gladiatorial defiance of the transsexual street whores locating the action on the LA Boulevards that are the points of intersection between the transgender hustlers and their clients from the straight world. The structure of the film comprises a series of cameos from the two worlds that finally lead to the collision of the two cultures in the local doughnut store.

Sean Baker’s Tangerine fronts up the street persona of its two leads hustlers. Sin-dee and Alexandra are the axies around which the film whirls as they strut across their Sunset Boulevard turf, a zone characterised by the fractured architecture of retail and commerce. Baker’s movie is driven by iPhone cameras that track and trace the enraged war dance of betrayed Sin-dee, playing out her theatrics of vengeance. The iPhone the chosen tool of the street workers: drugs gangs prostitutes and cabbies, brings immediacy to the volatility of mood and light that are part of the film. The iPhone as a tool of the selfie, everyone is playing out to themselves. That’s the scene.

Mechanised sex, women paid and used as ‘come’ machines has always been a recourse for men either as pimps and exploiters or as clients for distraction entertainment or frustration. Hence the inherent vulnerability of women in the trade: they got to be both ends facing.   The issues of the ladymen seem to me to be different. Sin-dee and Alex realise their desire to be ladymen makes them social pariahs. Being street whores, dangerous as it may be, has possibilities. It enables them not only to flaunt what they are but also gives them a certain type of discreet power. Their work is a vindication of a life.

Sin-dee and Alex are comic book gothic characters. Like Superman Spiderman and the rest, Sin-dee and Alex are superheroes (‘superheroes have feelings too’ as Batman once said), with their own costumes and their own special powers. Powers of attraction and repulsion. As the iPhone follows Sin-dee with her power walk, her huge fake mop of flowing locks (like a WWF fighter), her scaly hose and tight hot pants, we get the message: this girl can fight.

At the core of the expressive game of adopting the persona of the female but retaining the physiognomy of the male, is a claim on personal power. Immediate power. Power based on being different from appearances, being ambiguous, being knowing, being potentially dangerous. It’s a personal power generally confined to particular situations: entertainment, brothels, certain types of streets and perhaps the home. Spaces where the persona is protected from institutional hostility and assault. However vulnerable and inadequate the cross dressing whore may be there is something in the choice that involves integrity, and integrity is a source of inner belief.    

In Tangerine, the power of the ladymen is on the streets. At the other end of the spectrum lies the conforming power of the home.   Conversely the power of the home is often weakened out on the streets where it is overwhelmed by a culturally engendered overflowing sexuality that can no longer be contained by conventional strictures.

Baker’s script cleverly takes the two worlds of objective and subjective desire and sets them into momentary interpenetration. Baker selects for his ‘home’ subject an Armenian immigrant (Razmik), married and part of a large (and probably unwanted) extended family. Razmik is a cabby.

Christmas Eve: Here are the streets; here is the home…I want cock…

Baker chose not to depict an American. American’s these days in big cities never drive the cabs. Only immigrants drive cabs: long hours and usually treated like the nobody they are. So Razmic is a cabbie, an Armenian, part of a close knit newly arrived immigrant family. So it is a real traditional family and the script is set on Christmas Eve when all the values of the family, its love its consideration, are set to full display mode. But Razmik, after plying the cab trade all day, likes to take time out sucking cock of ladymen.   The desire for ladycock overwhelms him when confronted on Christmas Eve by his family who want him be part of their embrace: the wife the mother in law the kid the cousins and aunts. But he is possessed by the image of Alex.   Her image her power reaches out to him, overwhelms him . He makes his excuses (gotta work!) and abandons the family at their Christmas Eve party, to seek out Alex and suck her dick.

And so it comes to pass that in the doughnut store where the film begins the stories reach their climax. The two worlds collide in a finale of ‘scandal’.   It’s very funny, but the script doesn’t simply exploit the humour of the situation. It stays responsive to the human factors in play, and this is the defining feature of Baker’s scenario. Both in the doughnut store and in the final street and launderette scene, the characters affirm both their dignity and humanity. Both worlds, the street ladymen and the family world understand something: they have to look after each other’s vulnerability.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Killer of Sheep   Charles Burnett (USA; 1978) Henry G Sanders, Keycee Moore

viewed: 19 March 2022 New York, dvd loaned from New York Public Library

Who’s the killer?

The title of Charles Burnett’s film ‘Killer of Sheep’ sends out a double edged message about the state of mind of the black population in LA in particular and USA in general. In itself the title provokes a kind of derision. The black lead character, Stan works in an abattoir that slaughters sheep, and that’s what Stan is, a man involved in the killing of docile easily led creatures. Is that all that can be said about him?  But the title points not only to Stan’s job but also to White people and the situation of American Blacks. The Black people in the USA are the sheep; the more or less docile easily led and misled trampled ex slave population, led on by the white majority towards certain sacrificial symbolic death. The Black population – sheep – people who do what they’re told, only anxious in the main to please.

At the core of Burnett’s script is his main character Stan. Burnett centres his script, about the life of his protagonist the Killer of Sheep who it becomes clear is in the midst of an existential crisis – using ‘existential’ in its philosophical usage pointing to an individual’s own sense of meaning and identity in the world. Stan of course isn’t actually a slaughterer, that’s the high paid work so it’s the monopoly of whites. Stan is a labourer on the killing floor witness to all that happens there. The nature of the work and the endless lines of the meek creatures walking to their death, trigger a crisis in Stan: ‘the Meek shall not Inherit the Earth’. No!   ‘The Meek’ shall be butchered on an assembly line and eaten for lunch.

Stan sees something; he does not articulate it. On the face of it he should be ‘content’. A happy man. He has a good wife, kids, house, a job. What’s to complain, is this not the American Dream?   But Stan sees something. Within Stan’s psyche there is a premonition, an unidentifiable fear, a feeling of dislocation and insecurity. This what it is to be Black in America: the Whites will never leave you alone. Even when you think they are not there, they surround you everywhere. Stan’s in the racial trap and needs a line of flight. There is no way out for him: there are no whites on whom to focus rage, he is too decent to take it out on his family. For Charles Burnett, Stan’s only escape is into an interiority, into a state of mind of existential disassociation. In one of his last interviews Jungian psychologist James Hillman recalled that Aristotle had written: “Man is a political animal.” He comments that this observation is something never developed or picked up on by White psychoanalysis. Powerlessness and insanity.

Stan as a black cannot be just an individual with his identity centred about ‘job’ or ‘life style’. He is part of a collective. Stan feels like one of the sheep in a flock. Stan sees that his ‘good life’ is in a critical way an illusion. His life situation, whatever its economic properties, can never be separated from the precarious actuality of being Black in America. Whatever his personal situation, his destiny and that of his wife and children is anchored to the unpredictable murderous discrimination perpetuated by Whites on the black community, on the black population of the USA. Stan’s life, however it may look from the outside is as precarious as that of the individual sheep he consigns each day to the knife.

‘The Killer of Sheep’ is structured about relations. The script is organised about the nexus of relationships that comprise Stan’s life: it is not about his individuation. Burnett’s film is not a narrative it’s a cross sectional impression of being Black. The script is about implications, the enmeshing of Stan in the life of his children, in the life of his wife of his community, of his friends and kin. Stan’s situation is not in general different from anyone else in his life, but each of these relationships impinges upon him, each relationship communicating and provoking a different strand of insecurity. Filmed in Watts 10 years on from the Watts riots, it is clear that Blacks have no future outside the ghetto, which is to say whatever Stan does he can only watch the forces of the ghetto close in about him about everyone.

Even as Burnett was wrapping ‘Killer of Sheep’ Watts and other LA ghettos were witnessing the rise of generations of gangs, such as ‘the Bloods’. These gangs discovered that black alienation black deterritorialisation black insecurity could be provided with a mechanistic line of flight in the form of drugs. Based on a criminal subculture that promoted death or wealth they were able to exploit Black vulnerability to White supremacy by creation of a drug culture based on use of and peddling of narcotics. To the devastation of many black communities heroine and crack became a solution to the Black existential crisis, instigating and perpetuating a crisis of the psychotic helplessness for black males in particular. In his portrayal of Stan, Charles Burnett clearly saw this coming.

so listen to the music….

Music in movies has recently become a curse. A serial plundering by Hollywood (and others) of the world’s music resources with a view to using sound to manipulate or distract. Music archives are cynically married to images for their contagious affect. This spectacle of exploitation often promotes in me despair as a song is ripped out of the back catalogue and re-aligned to promote a mood or the legitimise a period or a setting. Authentic contextual use of music is rare. But this is the case in Burnett’s movie, where the recordings of black artists, in particular blues and jazz performers, cover the experience of black people. Burnett’s marriage of sound and picture in context has extraordinary power, conveying not just emotion but also experience The music felt it was being used where it came from and where it was meant to be. The music articulates what Stan cannot. In particular Dinah Washington’s rendering of ‘This Bitter Earth’ with its overtone of Billy Holiday’s ‘Strange Fruit’ felt like it stopped the film.  

In LA in the 1970s Blacks no longer had to fear organised lynchings by white people. But death in the Ghetto one way or the other, perhaps by a police bullet, gave the earth in Watts the bitter tang that Stan could taste.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk