Made it through another Monday! And halfway through June! (What?! How?!)
Grocery shopping in the early days of the pandemic
If there are any listeners of The Daily who didn’t tune into this morning’s episode, I’d encourage you to do so (or give it a listen even if you don’t normally listen!) The Times’ Cassandra, Donald G. McNeil, Jr., gives a sobering but necessary update on COVID-19. We’re not out of the woods yet.
On another note, I know many of us have endured a full news cycle of “don’t share traumatic videos” warning. But in case you missed that one (which is totally understandable given the rate of the news these days), I’d recommend reading Matt Zoller Seitz’s Vulture piece on the vicarious trauma of watching footage of brutal real-life violence. He’s normally on their film/media beat, so it’s an interesting match of writer and subject that yields fascinating insights as he interviews a trauma therapist. I found this in particular an answer worth pondering:
“I tell people that it’s important to remember that you can turn [the footage] off. Being active and engaged around this issue doesn’t require you to watch police brutality footage over and over. When you are watching people commit violence against people who can’t really fight back, it creates feelings of helplessness. That’s related to what we’re talking about. That helpless feeling can be a part of vicarious traumatization.”
Spoiler alert: she also says the “cure” for vicarious traumatization is to take action. If you’re looking to do just that, might I remind you that you can double the donation impact of your dollars through my company’s matching donation policy! There’s actually an updated list given that some of the organizations have now openly stated they don’t need any more money, so take another look and see if there’s something that matches your fancy. (Or maybe take a first look since more of you tend to open these on Mondays … I promise I’m not getting too creepy with the analytics but don’t think I can’t notice an obvious trend.)
Now, what you came for…
DAY 95: Raising Arizona (available on HBO GO and HBO Max)
A silly younger Marshall once wrote off Raising Arizona as he did his first pass through the filmography of the Coen Brothers roughly a decade ago as being an amusing but largely slight film about trailer trash. An older, slightly wiser Marshall now realizes the folly of this analysis upon rewatch and review. This is a ludicrously amusing comedy with the manic energy of a Looney Tunes cartoon, to quote actor Simon Pegg, but it’s also razor-sharp satire of Reagan-era family and economic values made in 1987 when most studio movies embraced that culture unquestioningly rather than critically examining it.
Nicolas Cage stars as H.I. “Hi” McDunnough, an ex-con who falls in love with Holly Hunter’s Edwina, known as “Ed,” the police officer who takes mugshot after mugshot of him. Try as he might to walk the straight and narrow, he slips into recidivism with few options for income or rehabilitation. Hi and Ed want the American Dream of upward mobility and a family just like anybody else, but the combination of his infertility and a criminal record make that out of reach … unless they turn to theft. The Arizona family gives them a perfect target as they overflow in babies — quintuplets! — like they overflow in cash thanks to the voracious, shameless, unceasing capitalistic salesmanship of their patriarch, furniture magnate Nathan Arizona.
Raising Arizona is 95 minutes of zany crime caper as Hi and Ed attempt to start their family with a stolen baby, all the while fending off his scheming ex-con buddies, his crass swinger boss and a terrifying bounty hunter. It’s every bit as off-kilter as the Coen Brothers’ later work, though the delights here feel distinctly less ironic than their more famous films. As I shared when recommending Inside Llewyn Davis last month, there’s an ongoing (and largely futile) critical debate over whether the Coens are “mean” to their characters given the brutal obstacles the filmmakers place in their way. This is a rare film of theirs where we don’t feel like we’re observing like specimens under a magnifying glass. Absurd as these humans are, it feels as if the Coens’ sympathies lie with them. Or, at the very least, their sympathies are near enough to characters that hope feels just out of reach, if ultimately unattainable, rather than dangled over their heads like a cruel form of punishment.
Be good to yourselves and to each other,
Marshall