A movie saved my mind today: Barry Levinson's Good Morning, Vietnam

 Robin Williams, Forrest Whitaker, Bruno Kirby, Tung Thanh Tran, JT Walsh. Dir. Barry Levinson, Touchstone, 1987

I used to spend time on a music message board, but usually in the threads devoted to movies and books. I found it impossible to have serious conversations with music fans who divided the world into "rockists" and "poptomists." I'm not good with those binary absolutes. It looks like such weakminded horseshit.

Not that it went much better in the nonmusic threads. I remember a discussion about some movie, I forget which, but I remarked that though the movie wasn't a dramatic masterpiece it covered a fascinating swath of recent history and its perspective on that time kept me engaged. "That's very nice," the guy replied, "but no one watches movies for that."

Because I'm slow, it took me awhile to realize that the only people he spoke for was himself. He meant, "I don't see movies for that, so I refuse to believe anyone else does."

My personal belief is that people watch movies for every reason imaginable. I know people who put movies on to go to sleep. I know people who watch movies to see guys kill each other in strange new ways. I know people who watch movies to see parts of the world to which they'll never travel. The beat goes on.

Increasingly, I have no idea what life means. I remember Neil Young, interviewed in some magazine in the early '90s about his band Crazyhorse, said, "These days ain't got shit to do with us." That's about where I come out, anymore. These days do nothing for me. They mean nothing. Nothing that makes sense to me.

I go on Facebook first thing in the morning and read posts saying America is now zero-tolerance on racism. Racism sucks, and racists are nitwits, and the last two times this country tried zero tolerance the schools, which would be oh-so-much safer if little kids were suspended for trying to play "war" at recess, turned into bloodbaths. School shootings went UP after zero tolerance for "violence" went into effect, "violence" meaning anything from an 8 year-old cocking and pointing his fingers like a pistol to kids saying they planned to blow their PE teacher away. Zero tolerance makes no distinction between the two. It can't. It wouldn't be zero tolerance if it saw outside of its absolutist perameters. Kid pointing finger at friend saying "pow" = 16 year-old threatening to put a bomb in a teacher's car. Zero tolerance dictates the 8 year-old draw the same punishment as the 16 year-old. And that will prevent school shootings. Which only got worse, more frequent, and more deadly in the next years. Funny how that worked. 

Of course, before the schools, we decided to use zero-tolerance to save ourselves from violent crime. We often called it "broken windows," but it meant zero-tolerance policing. If cops treat the kids breaking windows in a neighborhood as harshly as the guy slinging rock on the corner, as the guy spraying the block with Uzi fire, crime will go down. If cops stop young black men at random and frisk them, regardless of probable cause, and arrest them for possessing a blunt, as they'd arrest a guy pimping young girls, crime will decrease. 

Never mind that crime had already decreased and had been doing so every year. No, it's zero tolerance that will deliver our streets. A generation of black men will go to prison, sometimes for life, for selling a few grams of crack, or for weed, but everyone will be safer. White police officers will execute young black men for trying to hoist their drawers, for playing with a cap gun, for passing a fake $20-dollar bill, and American cities will become armed camps in the summer of 2020, because zero tolerance works so goddamn well.

Zero tolerance deals in absolutes. It doesn't work because it can't work, because absolutes do not exist and never have. But now we're going to solve racism, and misogyny, and homophobia, and all our social ills through zero tolerance. If we fire everyone who says something in public someone else finds offensive, if we shame them, if we prevent them from working, there's no chance all we'll accomplish is to drive our -isms back into the shadows, there to fester and infect and contaminate. There's no possibility zero tolerance for offensive speech and hate speech will explode in our faces as it has in poor neighborhoods and schools.

Now it looks like I'm in favor of hate speech. I'm fairly certain I'm not. The kind of speech isn't the issue. The issue is our method of dealing with it. The issue is watching people I respect and admire because of their intelligence say things and embrace policies they knew damn well were stupid and guaranteed to fail when applied to school violence and violent crime. Yet now they're going to solve our hate-speech problem.

I don't understand today. Ever since 9/11, my country has looked crazier and worse each day. I feel like I live in a nation where even the left has bought the farcical notion that liberty derives from security, when we know damn well security derives from liberty and always has. Everytime a people puts security ahead of liberty they pave the way toward an authoritarian state. It never works out otherwise.

That's one thing I don't understand, but the truth is I understand almost nothing in 2021. I don't understand progressives who talk about rebuilding the middle class through union jobs as they sign up for Netflix and take Uber everywhere. Netflix isn't a union shop. The residuals and royalties creatives count on to pay their expenses as they continue to seek creative opportunity don't exist with streaming platforms. Residuals and royalties built the Hollywood middle class. Hollywood and Hughes Aviation practically built Southern California's middle class. Yet we're going to rebuild the middle class by using services designed to hollow it out even more. I mean, what? 

I don't understand how an economy built on global trade will continue to exist when the Green New Deal calls for banning jets and container ships. There may well be a plan, a real plan, not just "oh, tech will figure it all out," but I have yet to hear it. 

These are just the things popping into my head as I write, not the sum of what I don't get. I don't get most of what I hear and see. I don't understand "safe spaces" on college campuses, the bastions of intellectual freedom. I don't understand this utopia we're going to achieve by worrying about everyone's fucking feelings. The most mercurial and intangible things imaginable. We're going to build our new paradise on pandering to them. How?

What can I tell you, I'm a middle aged white guy. The world is passing me by. Maybe that's best. We white dudes haven't done our best work running the world in our image, to understate things by a factor of some magnitude. The world may run really well on zero tolerance and less global commerce and streaming media and saying nice things to nice people about other nice things and always feeling nice.

I don't know what to do with, or in, that world. I don't know what to think or how to function. Most of the time, I don't want to. It's all very confusing most days, and my confusion only seems to get worse.

In such times, I turn to movies. For comfort. Perhaps for few of nostalgia's tranquilizing lies. For avoidance and anesthesia. For self-medication. 

Or, if you like, for a reminder of a world where guys who look like me ruled. I tend to think white privilege was the worst part of that world, and I know life was never better or simpler in the past, except through application of the most selective memory possible, but maybe the desire to retreat is more about those than I want to admit. Seems like a good idea to be open to all possibilities. There are no absolutes. Remember?

Barry Levinson's Good Morning, Vietnam, from 1987, comforted me this morning. I tried to watch Spielberg's Ready Player One, but it started with a Van Halen song and I just had no feeling for a movie full of '80s pop culture references when they reference everything I hate about the '80s. I fucking hate Van Halen, if I'm being honest. Cockrock posturing and guitar masturbation, ugh. So I turned it off and put in the Levinson picture, made in 1987 about events in 1966 Vietnam.

I feel like I understood the 1987 world, even if the movie is set 20 years earlier. I understand the world where Robin Williams was hilarious and turning him loose to free assiciate his way through the a war spelled box office gold and Oscar Night glory. Or I think I do. 

I didn't understand relationships any better then, or family, or why working at a job I hated improved my character, but my 21st year, 1987, feels comprehensible now as I think it did at the time. I feel the same about Vietnam. The war didn't end until I was 7. It loomed over my childhood and adolescence. I read any book I found about that War, saw all the big, and small, movies, watched TV specials, listened to the music. It's probably the most deranged, debauched and debased, degrading military conflict in US history up until that time. Yet I feel as if I understand it, as if I have a grasp of its parameters, its implications and its fallout. 

The war in Afghanistan, the longest war in our history, and the second Iraq War, probably the most illegal and immoral, don't make any sense to me. The media I've consumed related to those wars has only bewildered me.

Let Robin Williams rear back and have at our military and foreign policy, our pop culture, for two hours in a movie as thoughtful and as faceted as his rants are demented, though, and I'm on home ground. Put him up against actors like Forrest Whitaker and JT Walsh and Bruno Kirby and Noble Willingham and watch him hold his own, remembering how glorious it was to see him finally find a movie role perfect for him, and the world smooths out and slows down a little. Set and shoot it in Southeast Asia, one of the most beautiful places on earth, and score it with James Brown and Martha Reeves and Wayne Fontana, and the same tears, the same grin of delight I experience watching an old Disney animated movie, return. They are most welcome.

I watch movies for all kinds of reasons. I watch to feel less lonely. To feel less alienated and bewildered. I watch for history, for sociology, for language, for beauty. I watch movies because they and their worlds make sense to me and any day I can get 2-4 hours of sense in 2021 is a day that makes staying above ground worth all the other bullshit. I watch movies to live. 

Good Morning, Vietnam brought life to me today. There is nothing more I can ask of any movie than that. Thank you, Barry Levinson. I owe you one, man.