Jul. 30th, 2015 11:35 am
Express Justice
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muckefuckI may have managed to catch a summer cold. (One day after switching the AC on at home. Coincidence?) I only meant to take off half a day yesterday, but by the time I woke up from my nap it didn't seem worth going in. And since NetFlix had sent me Midnight Express, I thought I might as well spend the afternoon watching it.
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monshu got an earful at dinner when he asked me what I thought of it. To summarise what I ranted to him: technically accomplished, politically awful. I guess I'm just automatically supposed to identify with the protagonist because he's a good-looking middle-class White American guy like me? Never mind that he was actually guilty of the crime he was convicted of and only started out with a reduced sentence due to his family's money and pull. Yeah, the conditions inside the prison were terrible. But know what? They're every bit as terrible for the rest of the people in there. But (except for Randy Quaid, whose sad fate is also supposed to pain us though he brings most of it on himself) they're not Americans, so fuck 'em.
Honestly, any bit of sympathy I had for Hayes is extinguished halfway through by his grandstanding speech in the dock where he goes way beyond lamenting the fact that the Turks unaccountably aren't willing to give him special treatment and personally insults every one of them in the most brutal and vicious terms. And the director has the judge look abashed by this? I'd be like, "Fuck your slowly rotting living corpse."
What makes it even worse is the historical perspective that the movie was released just as the USA launched its "War on Drugs" in earnest. We all know how that turned out: sky-high incarceration rates, overcrowded prisons with conditions eventually ruled "cruel and inhumane", the decimation of inner-city communities, etc. It all makes his self-righteous speech about "justice" ring very hollow.
Ironically, those developments helped inform the script: In the featurette, Oliver Stone goes on about how the Turks were just a stand-in for oppressive authority in general. How convenient! Why take on your peers at home when you can demonise a whole country of brown people on the other side of the world who aren't in a position to put up much resistance? And since this is a Stone script, as a bonus we get the consensual homosexual relationship in Hayes' original memoir downgraded to a "thanks but no thanks" and a completely gratuitous (not to mention ludicrous) climactic male-rape-cum-revenge scene.
I'm glad I watched the "making-of", since hearing how Puttnam and Parker had to fight the studio to keep in even the hint of homoromance at least took some of the bad taste out of my mouth. The details of production, from the grueling shoot in Malta to the struggles with casting and the dramatic reversals of Cannes, were interesting to. But mostly, I'm just glad I can cross it off my list--and sad to see the late Paul L. Smith in another thankless part that probably contributed more than the rest to his relentless typecasting.
Poor
monshu got an earful at dinner when he asked me what I thought of it. To summarise what I ranted to him: technically accomplished, politically awful. I guess I'm just automatically supposed to identify with the protagonist because he's a good-looking middle-class White American guy like me? Never mind that he was actually guilty of the crime he was convicted of and only started out with a reduced sentence due to his family's money and pull. Yeah, the conditions inside the prison were terrible. But know what? They're every bit as terrible for the rest of the people in there. But (except for Randy Quaid, whose sad fate is also supposed to pain us though he brings most of it on himself) they're not Americans, so fuck 'em.Honestly, any bit of sympathy I had for Hayes is extinguished halfway through by his grandstanding speech in the dock where he goes way beyond lamenting the fact that the Turks unaccountably aren't willing to give him special treatment and personally insults every one of them in the most brutal and vicious terms. And the director has the judge look abashed by this? I'd be like, "Fuck your slowly rotting living corpse."
What makes it even worse is the historical perspective that the movie was released just as the USA launched its "War on Drugs" in earnest. We all know how that turned out: sky-high incarceration rates, overcrowded prisons with conditions eventually ruled "cruel and inhumane", the decimation of inner-city communities, etc. It all makes his self-righteous speech about "justice" ring very hollow.
Ironically, those developments helped inform the script: In the featurette, Oliver Stone goes on about how the Turks were just a stand-in for oppressive authority in general. How convenient! Why take on your peers at home when you can demonise a whole country of brown people on the other side of the world who aren't in a position to put up much resistance? And since this is a Stone script, as a bonus we get the consensual homosexual relationship in Hayes' original memoir downgraded to a "thanks but no thanks" and a completely gratuitous (not to mention ludicrous) climactic male-rape-cum-revenge scene.
I'm glad I watched the "making-of", since hearing how Puttnam and Parker had to fight the studio to keep in even the hint of homoromance at least took some of the bad taste out of my mouth. The details of production, from the grueling shoot in Malta to the struggles with casting and the dramatic reversals of Cannes, were interesting to. But mostly, I'm just glad I can cross it off my list--and sad to see the late Paul L. Smith in another thankless part that probably contributed more than the rest to his relentless typecasting.