Deconstructing Capitalist Ethics: Two thought-provoking movies

Watching George W. Bush win re-election--purportedly because of "moral values"-- in spite of serious ethical flaws in his administration and amidst feasible charges of vote tampering and race- and class-based voter intimidation... Listening to friends and colleagues I once trusted and respected call each other names over political differences (and I am unable to exempt myself from such transgressions)... Reading daily of corporate fraud and corporate murder... Watching, over and over again, athletes beat up fans and each other...Reading about the Department of Justice's determination to prosecute sick, dying human beings for using medicinal marijuana; rushing to speed up the prosecutions before the victims die... And through it all, watching and listening to children, college students, and adults celebrate these horrors with a vigor one can only call blood-lust...

Well, you might say that the relationship between the twilight of capitalism and the twisted perversion of morals (and the concurrent celebrations of brutality mentioned above) has been much, much, much on my little mind. Watching my sons (two of them about to turn 13, the other one, 19 months old, learning to talk and think) grow up through all this makes the phenomena all the more urgently interesting. I want to know how we ought to expect to raise ethical, loving children in a society that cavorts sanctimoniously about moral values while in reality rewarding and lauding dishonesty, shallow popularity, and above all, shameless and endless brutality. Marx said Money was the modern "jealous God." If so, Brutality is Money's Holy Ghost.

I doubt that either "Napoleon Dynamite," or "Spellbound," were made with any of this in mind...in fact I am quite sure they were not. But both movies contain implicit --and often explicit-- messages criticizing the brutality and emptiness of winning for the sake of winning. Both movies carefully examine the pressures of competition and conformity on children, and even though the movies creator's are probably good old fashioned American capitalists, both movies --the former a work of very believable fiction, the latter an unbelievably true documentary-- have important things to say about the way capitalism reproduces itself in social relationships.

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Ann and I saw Jared and Jerusha Hess's Napoleon Dynamite in a theater over Thanksgiving weekend. Much has been said about the movie's "Mormon" context (The Hesses, as well as stars Jon Heder and Aaron Ruell, are former BYU film students, and the movie takes place in Lewiston, Idaho, with a Utah-Idaho cast and crew). But this is decidedly nowhere near a Mormon inspirational film. It was a hit at Sundance, where it was immediately picked up by Fox Searchlight, and its themes are dark, universal, and subversive. Napoleon (Heder) and his older brother Kip (Ruell) live outside of Lewiston with their frequently-absent grandmother. Napoleon is a first-class geek who draws pictures of fantasy creatures and has a Dragonslayer poster in his room. Kip chats online for hours every day, finally meeting (and, in bonus footage at the end of the film, marrying) LaFawnduh, an African American woman (Shondrella Avery) in one of the most unlikely (and, again, subversive) hookups in recent screen history.

Unethical greed and brutality manifest themselves in two different ways in "Napoleon Dynamite." First, Kip falls under the spell of the brothers' Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), a middle-aged loser who enlists Kip to sell tupperware-like junk door-to-door. Rico even tries to entice high school girls to buy his mysterious breast-enlargement products. Rico's shallowness and self-loathing (he longs to re-live his days as a mediocre high school football player) are directly related to his schilling of these products, and his assumption of the stupidity of the townspeople he seduces. Only Kip's encounter with urban authenticity, in the form of LaFawnduh, saves him from a life of pushing junk door-to-door punctuated by endless online chat sessions.

Second, and more powerful, is the high school Napoleon attends. It isn't so much a high school as an incessant collection of ritualized and administration-sanctioned competition, cliquishness, and brutality. Napoleon is routinely pushed against lockers, harassed by jocks, made fun of by pretty girls, and ignored by teachers.

Here also, I must add, is something that struck me as very significant in the film. Nobody would have been surprised if Napoleon would have reached a "breaking point" after the ten thousandth locker-beating, and stabbed or shot a few people. After all, we've been told that's how geeks respond to jock-induced abuse in contemporary America. Instead, Napoleon maintains his gently irritable nature, scowling and stumbling through his classes and onto the playground, playing tetherball alone, and manifesting no greater abnormality than a few harmless fantasy-lies about his "skills" in martial arts and girlfriends. It makes you feel good, then, that his patience is ultimately rewarded.

Just as Kip is saved by outsider LaFawnduh, Napoleon is saved, and the battle against brutality is propped-up, by two delightful and inspiring characters: the pretty, awkward nerdess Deb (Tina Majorino, who I really hope we see more of), who begins the movie like Rico selling crap door-to-door (in fairness, she is trying to establish a college fund, but quickly gives up on the door-to-door venture) and ends up falling hard for Napoleon; and Pedro (Efren Ramirez), a new student whose kindness and sincerity propels him as the symbolic force deployed by the movie against shallowness, competitiveness, and (of course) bigotry.

Pedro runs for school president against the sure-winner Summer (Haylie Duff). In the end, the students pick gentleness of spirit over shallow popularity, although their choice is sealed by Napoleon's surprise dancing skills in one of the most delightful and sincere scenes I've ever seen in a movie. To me, that dance, like Pedro's run for the presidency, Deb's idealism, and Napoleon's refusal to fight back, are all responses to ideologies of exploitation, class hierarchies, and violence. The quiet latino kid isn't supposed to beat the blonde popular girl. Napoleon isn't supposed to be able to dance better than the dance team, nor is he supposed to walk away from abuse unscathed. Deb isn't supposed to be pretty. These things happen because the Hesses and their characters insist not only on protesting the brutal and exploitative ethics of our time, but also in offering an alternative way of being, doing, and relating. See "Napoleon Dynamite" and if you have kids, take them too.

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Jeffrey Blitz's documentary "Spellbound" actually came out in 2002, but Ann bought the DVD recently and we finally sat down to watch it last night. After being entranced by "Napoleon Dynamite," it's likely that we were conditioned to look for similar patterns of unhealthy competitive behavior, and we weren't disappointed. Like "Napoleon," the movie is about geeks, but in this case, they are real: the movie follows the lives and perspectives of eight young people who all qualify for the 1999 National Spelling Bee championships in Washington, DC. You couldn't ask for a more diverse group of kids--one is the daughter of Mexican immigrants, another a rich, prep-school bound girl from Connecticut, another a poor African American girl from the D.C. projects. One boy and one girl are South Asian immigrant children, although the attitudes of their parents could not be more different.

All of the kids do well at the Spelling Bee championships, and one even wins. But it is the parents who pose the most interesting dialectic between the brutal drive for success and the quiet acceptance of their children's talents. Blitz clearly has more sympathy for the latter parental philosophy, and so do I, but the former is the more instructive of the two. With few exceptions, the wealthier families are the ones who put more competitive pressure on their children. One child, Neil Kadakia, has a father who chatters endlessly about how many thousands of words he and his son have practiced that day, of all the computer equipment he has purchased to help his son win, of how many coaches (coaches!) he has hired to help his son learn the linguistic origins of various words, and how important Neil's success is to his family. Neil's mother unironically refers to their quest for Neil's spelling bee championship as a "war."

But as sickening as that portrayal was, I have to admit that I was even more disturbed by the less-blatant elitism of Connecticut preppie Emily Stagg's parents: Obviously loaded beyond belief, their daughter takes riding lessons, studies endlessly for the bee, and sits uncomfortably at the dining room table with her equally uncomfortable rich parents, pontificating and philosophizing about winning and losing. Mr. Stagg, at one point, opines that Americans are more competitive than Europeans, obviously proud that he knows enough to make such distinctions, and blissfully unaware of the life situations of the less-privileged kids portrayed in the movie...or, it seems, of less-privileged people anywhere.

In emphasizing the positive and supportive responses of the parents (including Neil's) to their kids' gradual and ungraceful eliminations from competition, Blitz is only partially successful in his obvious effort to paint a happy face on this very odd competitive subculture. Those hugs and "I'm proud of you"'s can't really answer the earlier incessant parental rhetoric about the link between this particular competition and success in the cold, cruel world that will finally suck the life out of these talented youngsters. There is, finally, subtle critique, and no solution, in this documentary. And that's a good thing. By all means, watch this movie and celebrate the success and character of these very sincere (if somewhat misled) children. But shake your head in disgust at the partially-hidden system of which the competition is only a prepatory ritual...and those disgustingly rich, smug, hypercompetitive parents.