Thursday, November 16, 2006
Matewan and M
So the John Sayles movie from 1987 and the Fritz Lang movie from 1926(?) sort of remind me of one another. They have nothing to do with one another, although the actual plots are roughly contemporaneous: a coal miners' strike in 1920s West Virginia and a child-murderer (played by Peter Lorre) in Weimar Berlin.
The former involves the incorporation of a foreign body (Joe Kenehan, a labor organizer and ex-Wobbly played by Chris Cooper) into a tight, suspicious, mountain village reeling from the deaths of several miners and the coal company's punitive response to the strike. The latter relates to modernity's (or, better yet, the Modern(ist) state) attempting to capture the criminal and dispense with him according to the rule of law before the mob finds him first and tears him to pieces.
In Matewan, a local shop owner named Lively is revealed to be an agent provocateur in the employ of the coal company. Interestingly, his store had accepted company scrip as payment for goods at the rate of 2 to a dollar. So while appearing to be an admired paternal figure, a success in spite of the company's harsh actions, he was not only gouging the impoverished miner families but actively working behind the scenes to keep them down. Lively seeks to discredit Kenehan by convincing a dimwitted girl who's in love with him that Kenehan had made fun of her to all the other strikers, but winds up having to leave town when his subterfuge comes to light, carrying only his glasses as he fords a river that's deeper than he is tall.
He, the heart of the community, is rejected and Kenehan is grudgingly welcomed, and proceeds to admit, forcibly, African Americans and Italians into the union. Appreciative of the benefits of solidarity, and preferring not to be scabs, those two outsider groups's assimilation is awkward and incomplete, but nonetheless the cobbled-together coalition holds long enough for the union to endure, and at the end, one of the greatest shootouts ever kills off the corrupt and powerful strikebreakers. Here, an ambiguously utopian though straightforward premise--that there is power in a union, and workers' material lives will improve immeasurably if they can form one--propels a tiny, backwoods community to recognize its own heterogeneousness as a precondition for its continued survival. The polity must incorporate the Other to last.
In M, by contrast, two groups with the same ends in mind pursue a wanted felon for the purposes of plucking him out, expunging him like a contaminant. The "M" itself, attached to the murderer's coat, resembles the "A" in the Scarlet Letter in that Lorre's character is convicted of sin in the court of public opinion well before his actual trial; one group treats him as a murderer, the other as a suspect.
Shot after shot of desk drawers, files, charts, urban planning maps (all in that immaculate and ornamental Germanic typeface I associate with Oktoberfest) drive home the point that Germany just before the rise of Nazism self-consciously considered itself a young state with something to prove. M is in essence a film about the consolidation of the State's monopoly on violence. It's anti-fascist in its mistrust of the mob, in cheering on the orderliness and well-oiled sense of procedure that good cops and a good bureaucracy bring to bear on the pursuit of justice and retribution. The decadence affixed in hindsight to the Weimar Era may be celebrated (as in Isherwood's "Berlin Stories") or despised (as by conservative harrumphs that Nazism was only possible because of the fragile Republic's tolerance and effeminacy), but Lang might have wanted to do for Germany what the young Kurosawa wanted to do for Japan in Stray Dog: boast a little about its maturity. Barely half a century old (as a unified nation) and carrying all the blame for WWI, Germany-as-State had to prove it was as capable as Britain, France and Italy, and the equal of Germany-as-a-people as a standard bearer for high culture.
The former involves the incorporation of a foreign body (Joe Kenehan, a labor organizer and ex-Wobbly played by Chris Cooper) into a tight, suspicious, mountain village reeling from the deaths of several miners and the coal company's punitive response to the strike. The latter relates to modernity's (or, better yet, the Modern(ist) state) attempting to capture the criminal and dispense with him according to the rule of law before the mob finds him first and tears him to pieces.
In Matewan, a local shop owner named Lively is revealed to be an agent provocateur in the employ of the coal company. Interestingly, his store had accepted company scrip as payment for goods at the rate of 2 to a dollar. So while appearing to be an admired paternal figure, a success in spite of the company's harsh actions, he was not only gouging the impoverished miner families but actively working behind the scenes to keep them down. Lively seeks to discredit Kenehan by convincing a dimwitted girl who's in love with him that Kenehan had made fun of her to all the other strikers, but winds up having to leave town when his subterfuge comes to light, carrying only his glasses as he fords a river that's deeper than he is tall.
He, the heart of the community, is rejected and Kenehan is grudgingly welcomed, and proceeds to admit, forcibly, African Americans and Italians into the union. Appreciative of the benefits of solidarity, and preferring not to be scabs, those two outsider groups's assimilation is awkward and incomplete, but nonetheless the cobbled-together coalition holds long enough for the union to endure, and at the end, one of the greatest shootouts ever kills off the corrupt and powerful strikebreakers. Here, an ambiguously utopian though straightforward premise--that there is power in a union, and workers' material lives will improve immeasurably if they can form one--propels a tiny, backwoods community to recognize its own heterogeneousness as a precondition for its continued survival. The polity must incorporate the Other to last.
In M, by contrast, two groups with the same ends in mind pursue a wanted felon for the purposes of plucking him out, expunging him like a contaminant. The "M" itself, attached to the murderer's coat, resembles the "A" in the Scarlet Letter in that Lorre's character is convicted of sin in the court of public opinion well before his actual trial; one group treats him as a murderer, the other as a suspect.
Shot after shot of desk drawers, files, charts, urban planning maps (all in that immaculate and ornamental Germanic typeface I associate with Oktoberfest) drive home the point that Germany just before the rise of Nazism self-consciously considered itself a young state with something to prove. M is in essence a film about the consolidation of the State's monopoly on violence. It's anti-fascist in its mistrust of the mob, in cheering on the orderliness and well-oiled sense of procedure that good cops and a good bureaucracy bring to bear on the pursuit of justice and retribution. The decadence affixed in hindsight to the Weimar Era may be celebrated (as in Isherwood's "Berlin Stories") or despised (as by conservative harrumphs that Nazism was only possible because of the fragile Republic's tolerance and effeminacy), but Lang might have wanted to do for Germany what the young Kurosawa wanted to do for Japan in Stray Dog: boast a little about its maturity. Barely half a century old (as a unified nation) and carrying all the blame for WWI, Germany-as-State had to prove it was as capable as Britain, France and Italy, and the equal of Germany-as-a-people as a standard bearer for high culture.
