A Staggering Work of Sobering Stupidity

I am the product of Finnish and Chinese immigrants. My father moved to Toronto in the 1970s from Kolkata from Kowloon Bay, and my maternal grandfather twenty years before him from war-torn central Finland. Due to my half-Chinese descent, I have spent 24 years of my life growing up distinctly as an Oriental in two incredibly Caucasian suburbs at least 20 kilometres north of one of the most multicultural cities full of some of the most sympathetic and empathetic – people in North America – possibly the world round. Due to cultural assimilation in schools that never neglected an opportunity to point out that I must be academically outstanding, or pondering whether my family and I cook Chinese food for dinner day in day out, I relinquished all associations to my Chinese upbringing. Hell, I’m currently writing after drinking two trappists in an hour while blasting R.E.M’s “Automatic for the People” on vinyl at a near deafening level. The answer to both prejudices is no: I was good at music, decent at English and art, and enjoyed French; terrible at math and science.

I awaited writing this review of Master of None, starring Indian-American comic and actor Aziz Ansar, after two weeks for two reasons: to distance myself from my overzealous appreciation of it and gage what other viewers (read: my friends, predominantly Caucasian) thought of it. The online feedback from a group of the aforementioned sympathetic Torontonians was surprisingly sanctimonious, if only mostly a complete misreading or under-appreciation of the show and what it is trying to do. For the most part, criticism of the show had to deal with Ansari only scratching the surface on issues that “nobody” really cares about: the elderly, how Indians are portrayed on television, one’s immigrant parents. For people who are fifth generation Irish- or Italian-Canadian, this is understandable: they are nearly a decade apart from the diaspora of their ancestors, and might lack the interest in such matters.

As someone whose courageous immigrant family is mostly still alive, Master of None highlights two issues; one overlooked, and one constantly highlighted in the media, but never satiated. The former is what is the life of the beginnings of a child of recent immigrants. In the first season of the series, three episodes – Parents, Indians on TV, and, to a lesser extent, Old People – address the immigrant experience, which is surprisingly not a popular topic in a continent renowned for its multiculturalism. The latter issue is how often such contemporary multiculturalism is neglected in contemporary television: Friends is the most notable series, with How I Met Your Mother’s ensemble cast pulling a close second: seriously, they shoved two minorities into the gay-Black brother of Barney, who makes no more than six appearances – in the show’s nine seasons, comprised of 208 half-hour episodes – I’m counting the last season as just one big appearance since it encapsulates one day. Anyhow, I won’t further sanctimoniously nitpick.

Between ardent politically-engaged people of my generation, there has come a degree of irony that has conflated genuine enthusiasm with vitriol, and resulted in an unacknowledged increase in political partisanship. 

Last night, during Canada’s federal election that saw a Liberal government end eight years of Conservative dominance, supporters and voters of the country’s three major political parties (four if you take the Greens seriously) gathered to eagerly and patiently watch as votes started to fly in, starting from the Liberal Atlantic peninsula and ending in the similarly Liberal west coast.

There’s no course you need to take to find out why people orient themselves with like-minded people: it feels good to know there’s a community that shares your beliefs. Supporting an institution as shrouded in mystery, engulfed in controversy, and opposed by much of humanity as Scientology must even be acknowledged as helping an individual in some fashion.

However, if you spend your undergraduate taking courses in politics (inadvertently being immersed in an entire community that does, too), you find out that people not only like to spend time with like-minded people, but criticize and distance themselves from the opposition. This sort of isolation starts to make hypocrites of those conducting it. All too soon do ideal leftists drink the punch, criticize the right for a genuinely deplorable statement, but compare – and this a true anecdote regarding yesterday’s electoral fervour – an opposing candidate to a completely unrelated shameful public figure.

What’s truly deplorable about this sort of irony is that it is almost immediately lost in translation: whether because these vitriolic sentiments are bought by the person saying them, or, much more dangerously, by an enthusiastic audience. While employing language used by radical right parties (i.e. UKIP, National Front) to discourage or outright insult insensible and degenerate voters of opposing candidates, leftists rely on their idealist values to give them free range to espouse whatever the please with some sport. In either case, there runs the risk of eventually neglecting the irony that they believed gave them carte blanche to say something facetious. Luckily for supporters of the NDP, because the party has never had the pleasure of its leadership being the prime minister, all the idealist speculation over its performance is as good as speculating over Creationist theory’s factual accuracy: you might not be wrong.

As someone who’s too anxious to be considered well-adjusted, but not enough to be considered outright neurotic (like, redeemingly so), I usually find myself ruminating over almost any human reaction unfamiliar to me: chitchat at the end of job interviews, ostensibly passive asides, even knocks on the head such as getting a woman’s number.

I used to tell most of my close friends about the latter, but only stopped after realizing I didn’t agree with their advice (possibly not empathetic enough to my anxiety) or thought it was childish. I still kept one person in pocket, mostly because she’s more well-adjusted, forward, and curtly blunt than anyone I know.

Akira Kurosawa - Composing Movement

Two months ago I watched Akira Kurosawa’s adaptation of Macbeth, Throne of Blood (1957). The film takes the famous Scottish play and transplants it to Feudal Japan. Despite knowing the story, which is faithfully adapted if the Bard’s prose are relinquished, the film is ultimately engrossing. The video provides a couple reasons why.

What I have read of director Alejandro G. Inarritu's work is that most of his films weave in multiple plotlines, such as in his 2006 film Babel. This style of filmmaking, while not entirely commonplace, has been done before: the multiple storylines in Steven Soderbergh's drug trafficking 2000 film Traffic are made explicit by coloured tinting; and, to a considerably vaguer extent, Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski's 1991 art drama The Double Life of Veronique splits the tale of the lives of two identical women (Veronika from Poland inexplicably affecting Veronique from France) when the former, unexpected, dies, and the narrative of the latter picks up. Inarritu's latest, Birdman: Or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) abandons his familiar narration style. Beyond a new creative direction (for Inarritu) and undeniably impressive cinematography from dextrous wizard Emmanuel Lubezki, I could not for the life of me figure out how a movie so clearly influenced by one other famous film in particular won the Academy Award for Best Picture/Director/Screenplay.

Birdman, instead of multiple storylines in isolated spaces, Birdman focuses on a group of characters whose spatial and temporal relations are singular. Seemingly shot (and rendered) as one 119 minute-long take, the film is set almost entirely in a theatre with its company as its characters. It tells the story of Riggan (holy fuck it's Michael Keaton), playing a middle-aged actor unable to shed the celebrity he achieved with the titular superhero character, but who takes stock in life while attempting to produce a Broadway adaptation of a play by Raymond Carver. His relationship with his rebellious daughter Sam (Emma Stone) is in shambles, as with his wife Sylvia (Amy Adams) and virtually everyone involved in the production. Consequent of all these complications, Riggan--I mean Birdman--no, I mean Riggan slips in and out of fantasy scenarios: he turns the TV off with the snap of a finger, he makes things levitate through telekinesis, and ultimately imagines himself flying as Birdman in an elaborate action sequence.

After watching the film, I reflected in the shower, "what movie includes someone producing theatre while attempting to salvage his relationships with the women in his life while escaping the his mounting crises with daydreams that are not made explicitly clear in the film?"

Italian director art house Federico Fellini's comedy 8 1/2 was the ticket. In it, the ever suave and very much not balding Marcello Mastroianni plays Guido, a famous Italian film director who is suffering from writer's block, while the production of his film – which includes veiled autobiographical references – is stalled, and his interest diminishes among artistic and marital difficulties. Guido finds himself in daydreams, which are not made explicit in the film, including one where he imagines himself delivering Christmas gifts, then the halcyon days of being a young boy without complications (despite Guido visually represented at his current age), then whipping his associates.

Replacing the ambitious Italian film director with off-centre Broadway theatre director; daydream sequences of floating to and falling from the sky with, well, pretty much the same thing; and the presumably autobiographical element of Fellini wrestling with his relationships and artistry with the presumably autobiographical fact that Michael Keaton turned down Batman 3 not unlike Riggan having turned down Birdman 4 (also, why else cast Michael Keaton in a leading role all of a sudden?); and Guido's fantasized suicide (the only comparison that I can't claim I thought of myself) with Riggan's ostensible suicide, there are many ways 8 1/2 more-than-likely affected Birdman, whether consciously or unconsciously.

When your day goes from weird to markedly bad before it's even 5pm, getting home and slapping on some Sonic Youth after dinner goes a long way.