The Devil Comes on Horseback, The Milk of Sorrows, and The Maid

Watching orders to evacuate along the shores of North Carolina, Virginia, New York and New Jersey to avoid Hurricane Irene and its aftermath of flooding, power outages, and flying debris, I thought of some of the ramifications of displacement, a loss of place and, perhaps, the identity attached to it as we witnessed after Hurricane Katrina. Just prior to Katrina, for example, the population of New Orleans was nearly half a million. Five years later, according to the 2010 census, the population was still less than 340,000, an increase from the approximately 255,000 calculated in 2006. Approximately 1464 people died during the hurricane and its aftermath. The rest of the more than 200,000 people were evacuated, and only a small percentage of these displaced persons ever returned.

Three recent films interrogate displacement from various perspectives and levels of violence but move beyond natural disaster to human rights and environmental justice violations, sometimes at monumental levels. Yet they all highlight the power of place and the yearning for a return to a home, even one associated with pain, torture, rape, and death.

In Riki Stern and Anne Sundberg’s documentary, The Devil Comes on Horseback (2007), Marine turned military observer, Brian Steidl, snaps away with his telephoto lens as he watches Janjaweed raiders shoot children, rape women, massacre men and burn entire villages to the ground in Darfur, Sudan. Steidl serves as a witness to the horrific crimes on display, offering his photographic evidence as a powerful rationale for intervention when, as an observer, he could shoot only pictures instead of the cruel Janjaweed.

Steidl’s return to a Chad refugee camp highlights the further losses suffered by those who survive the unspeakable atrocities of the Janjaweed. Their homes and villages are gone. Their land is unfit for farming, not only because the Janjaweed have burned their crops, but also because oil production and transport have destroyed soil and watersheds. Their family members have been murdered or mutilated. And their only home is a crowded tent camp.

Claudia Llosa’s Milk of Sorrow (2009), a fictionalized account of the repercussions of the Peruvian Civil War, centers on a woman’s struggle to cope with her mother’s experiences with rape as a tool of war, a traumatic experience passed onto to her through her mother’s songs and, perhaps, breast milk. To protect herself from a similar sexual assault, Fausta (Magaly Solier) inserts a potato as a shield, gingerly cutting off growing vines.

Fausta’s displacement is two-fold. She must leave her village home when her mother dies, transporting her mother’s body to her uncle’s home in a Lima ghetto. To earn money to bury her mother, however, she also leaves her uncle’s home and the ghetto community to work as a maid in a walled compound where a concert pianist tosses a grand piano out a window and steals Fausta’s songs in exchange for the promise of pearls. The post-Civil War Peruvian setting clearly bifurcates both rural and urban and rich and poor, but it also illustrates the repercussions of the traumas of war, placing a rape of women, landscapes, and cultures on display in relation to both Colonial and Post-Colonial exploitation.

In Sebastian Silva’s The Maid (2009), a fictional narrative based on the filmmaker’s own experiences with his family’s live-in maid, Raquel (Catalina Saavedra) suffers from headaches and an eventual temporary paralysis as a result of her more than 20 years working as a live-in-maid for a rich Santiago family patterned on Silva’s own and filmed in his family home. The film demonstrates Raquel’s loss of identity and family connections and her attempts to replace those losses with her employers and their children, so much so that she wards off her employers’ attempts to hire another maid to help her with her grueling tasks of cleaning, cooking, and child care.

Yet the entrance of another maid, Lucy (Mariana Loyola) amplifies the clear displacement suffered by Raquel on display in the film. Lucy enters Raquel’s home and is subjected to some of the same games that intimidated other maids hired to help Raquel. Lucy, however, reintroduces Raquel to the concept of family and home, first by becoming her friend and then by inviting her to her own rural family home for Christmas. After a long bus ride, Lucy and Raquel enjoy a holiday on a family farm that contrasts with the city mansion they leave behind and the distant relationship shared between Raquel and the family she serves. What stands out, however, is a phone call between Raquel and her mother during the Christmas celebration. For the first time on screen, Raquel asks her mother about her health and her siblings’ well-being, and when her mother seems not to answer, Raquel apologizes—for what we’re not sure—highlighting the losses felt by those displaced in quiet but powerful ways. 

Nightmares and Nature in Eco-Disaster Cinema

Here's a nightmare scenario that even films like The China Syndrome could never imagine: The East Coast of the United States is hit by a 5.9 richter earthquake. At least one nuclear power plant in Virginia is shut down by the shock. Nobody really knows whether or not the plant has released radioactive steam. The safety of the plant's structure will not be known for weeks. And if that wasn't enough, a potential category 4 hurricane is sweeping up the coast and may move inland towards the plant. Well, it's not fiction. No game planner has ever come up with this twofer.

Critics have warned about nuclear power plants being built on fault lines, near major cities, near coastal areas that could be hit by tusnami waves larger than anyone has ever predicted. Now, within one year, the Fukushima complex in Japan has been destroyed by an earthquake and tsunami wave, producing a new Chernobyl, a dead zone that may never be repaired. A major quake has struck the Eastern Seaboard, crippling the North Anna plant, which is now running on backup diesel generators. It appears that planners never anticipated an earthquake of this magnitude when the plant was designed and built. And noone ever imagined a crippled nuclear plant that was hit by a catastrophic hurricane after a major quake.

Films that speculate on the destruction of nuclear power plants cannot keep up with reality. It is the problem Philip Roth once commented on: how can you write fiction when reality outstrips anything anyone can imagine? The destruction of the Japanese complex was feared, but lax planning, lazy and incompetent management never dealt with the imagined future, one where 40 foot waves caused by an earthquake swept over walls that were built to resist waves of no more than 20 feet.

Films like Earthquake (1974), Dante's Peak (1997), Volcano (1997), The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and others have all had field days speculating on the disasters that could occur from apocalyptic natural disasters. But I have yet to see a film that has imagined the potential disaster that could easily occur in the next few days in Virginia or New York. What happens if another large quake hits at the same time as Hurricane Irene strikes New York City? And the Indian Point reactor, just miles north of the city has a catastrophic failure? People have been warning for decades about the dangers of a failure of this plant to the country's largest metropolitan area. Maybe this week's natural events will force people to rethink nuclear power again.

It is not unimaginable. Insurance companies know the score. From the start of building nuclear power plants in the United States in the late 50's and early 60's, insurance companies refused to write policies for such plants. All of the liability is handled by the federal government. The Price/Anderson bill produced that solution in 1959.

A nuclear power disaster is forever, an event that Hallmark really has no card to represent. And a film that created the scenario that may occur in the next few days would be seen as laughable and too fantastic even for the cheesiest disaster genre to produce. Give us a hurricane, like John Ford's The Hurricane (1937) or give us a nuclear power disaster flick like The China Syndrome, but don't ever try to combine the two. Let natural forces and nuclear power plants built on fault lines create a story like that, please.

The Help, Live-In Maid, and The Oblongs: From Environmental Racism to Environmental Justice

The Help, Live-In Maid, and The Oblongs:

From Environmental Racism to Environmental Justice

Recently I screened both The Help (2011), a mainstream American adaptation of the novel of the same name, and Live-In Maid (2004), an Argentinian exploration of unexpected consequences of the country’s economic crisis. There is much to critique about The Help. Joe Morgenstern of The Wall Street Journal states the film “takes us on a pop-cultural tour that savors the picturesque, and strengthens stereotypes it purports to shatter.” According to Ben Sachs of The Chicago Reader, “As in many reductive period pieces, there are no real characters here, just archetypes, namely reactionary cretins and sensitive souls who anticipate modern attitudes.” While acknowledging its shortcomings, other critics note positive aspects of the film that make the film more palatable: For example, David Denby of The New Yorker notes that the film “is, in some ways, crude and obvious, but it opens up a broad new swath of experience on the screen, and parts of it are so moving and well acted that any objections to what's second-rate seem to matter less as the movie goes on.” And Lisa Kennedy of The Denver Post asserts, “Thanks to a talented cast -- starting with leads Emma Stone, Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer -- the movie is often entertaining. But The Help should have been challenging too.”

Some of the weaknesses of The Help move beyond its focus on picturesque archetypes instead of well-developed characters, however, and may stem from the film and novel’s popularity and its implications. A statement from the Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH) highlights some of the film’s problems. The statement responds to the popularity of the film adaptation, noting it “is troubling because it reveals a contemporary nostalgia for the days when a black woman could only hope to clean the White House rather than reside in it.” The ABWH provides effective evidence for its stance: Giving adequate examples, they demonstrate that the film and book “misrepresent African American speech and culture,” especially the portrayal of the black family and its supportive place in the black community, as well as “the historical realities of black masculinity and manhood.” They also note the absence of “sexual harassment as well as physical and verbal abuse” from white employers in the film, an historical misrepresentation that contradicts the facts. The film also disregards “the rich and vibrant history of black Civil Rights activists in Mississippi,” except the attention given to the assassination of Medgar Evers. Reactions to the assassination are “a far cry from the courage demonstrated by the black men and women who continued his fight,” however, according to the statement. 

Instead of an accurate portrayal of the life of “the help” in the Jim Crow South, the film is “a coming-of-age story of a white protagonist, who uses myths about the lives of black women to make sense of their own.” Jorge Gaggero’s Live-In Maid, however, highlights a growing relationship between two women of differing classes, a friendship that is heightened by the consequences of Argentina’s 2001 economic disaster. According to A. O Scott of The New York Times, the filmmaker “invites you to contemplate, within the context of two perfectly ordinary lives, the paradoxes of friendship and the challenge of maintaining dignity in a world that conspires to undermine it.” The film centers on the changing dynamic between Beba (Norma Aleandra), a middle class divorcee who has now lost her money, and Dora (Norma Argentina), a rural working class “moral pillar” who leaves Beba to find work and complete the work on her house. Although Dora does have a partner, Miguel (Raul Panguinao), Dora and Beba share the strongest of connections, a friendship that continues and is demonstrated by small gestures: a cake for Beba’s birthday, a gift of furniture for Dora when Beba must move to a smaller apartment.

Live-In Maid is a stronger film than The Help because of its close attention to character instead of stereotype or archetype, but both films begin to illustrate the issue of environmental racism and its ramifications for environmental justice. In both The Help and Live-In Maid, social, racial, and economic classes are bifurcated not only by laws and mores of society, but also by their connection to either a rural or an urban sense of place. In both films, the maids must travel distances by foot and by bus to reach their employers’ homes. In The Help, that journey is wrought with danger from the KKK, as exemplified by Medger Evers’ assassination and its consequences. In Live-In Maid, Dora’s walk from the bus stop to her home goes through bare fields of mud and packed dirt, so Dora covers her shoes with plastic booties to protect them. In The Help, the rural homes these maids occupy are clean but sparse, with chipping paint and dusty lawns, even around Aibileen Clark’s (Viola Davis) house. In Live-In Maid, Dora’s home is also sparkling clean but unfinished, partly because Jorge did not buy or lay the rest of the flooring, partly because Beba could no longer pay her.

These few scenes begin to broach one of the problems thinly illustrated by the films: environmental racism and injustice. According to the EPA, “Environmental justice ensures that no population, especially the elderly and children, are forced to shoulder a disproportionate burden of the negative human health and environmental impacts of pollution or other environmental hazard.” Environmental justice breaks down into three distinctive categories: procedural inequity, geographical inequity, and social inequity. These categories serve as the basis for the UN Draft Principles on Human Rights and the Environment, which state

(1) Human rights, an ecologically sound environment, sustainable development and peace are interdependent and indivisible.

(2) All persons have the right to a secure, healthy and ecologically sound environment. The right and other human rights, including civil, cultural, economic, political, and social rights, are universal, interdependent and indivisible.

(3) All persons shall be free from any form of discrimination in regard to actions and decisions that affect the environment. (Cifuentes and Frumkin 1-2)

Although Beba exclaims that the air is cleaner outside Dora’s rural home than in Buenos Aires, the home and its surroundings tell a different story, one that aligns with the chipped (lead?) paint on the walls in the rural Mississippi Aibileen’s home.  They struck me as hidden inequities that have a lasting effect on health and well-being, mirroring racial and class bias around them.

This glimpse of environmental injustice brings to mind a more blatant and instructive look at the effects of environmental inequities, The Oblongs (2001), a short-lived animated television series, which centered on the Oblong family. The Oblongs lived in a poor valley community called Hill Valley where everyone is physically deformed or disabled because of toxins in their air and water resulting from the lavish lifestyle of the rich community above them known as "The Hills.” The Hills’ residents exploited and harmed the valley community with absolutely no regard for their safety or well-being. Although neither The Help or Live-In Maid explicitly address the environmental injustices broached by the bifurcated sense of place in both films, they provide a glimpse of another form of racism and classism, environmental racism and injustice, a form of racism that continues near waste dumps, factories with toxic smoke and water emissions, mountaintop removal and natural gas fracking sites, and nuclear and coal-generated energy plants around the world.

Animal Rights, *The Rise of the Planet of the Apes*, and NIMH

A few days ago, I overheard a friend talking about a owning a pet raccoon as a child. For him it was the ideal pet, primarily because it had so many human attributes. It cleaned its food, for example, had opposable thumbs, and learned at least simple lessons quickly and easily. I pictured the raccoon friend adopted by the Cajun boy in Louisiana Story (1947), a documentary validating off-shore oil drilling with a claim the drilling would have no ill-effects on the pristine bayous of Louisiana. The film, however, also sets up a common binary in feature films, that between domesticated and wild nature, perhaps also bifurcating that tame raccoon with a wild alligator the boy kills when he believes it has eaten his 'coon.

The Rise of the Planet of the Apes  (2011) draws on a similar bifurcation. The film provides a new explanation for the ape takeover of planet Earth—cruel laboratory experiments, the testing on sentient animals that PETA and other animal rights organizations argue against, coupled with an accelerated evolutionary process. The animal rights debate goes back a long way, at least to Pythagoras, but it also takes center stage in live-action and animated films from the silent era forward. See, for example, Back to God’s Country (1919) and multiple Walt Disney features, including his first full-length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). All of these films align well with Peter Singer’s argument that animals have rights because they share human traits, especially sentience, the ability to feel pleasure and pain.

In The Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Will Rodman (James Franco) adopts an infant chimpanzee, Caesar (Andy Serkis) after his attempts to create a drug to cure Alzheimer’s disease fail. Rodman and his staff had tested the experimental drug on chimps, including Caesar’s mother, but when the new mother runs amuck, Rodman’s boss shuts the project down. Rodman, however, takes his scientist role to extremes and tests the drug on his ailing father (John Lithgow). In this center of the film, the drug succeeds temporarily, curing Rodman’s father’s dementia.  Because he has inherited the effect of the drug on his mother, Caesar becomes a welcome and highly intelligent member of the family. But when the drug no longer helps his father’s dementia, Rodman tries again; creating the drug that will lead to the apes’ rise, a drug that increases apes’ intelligence but kills humans.

The scenes in the laboratory and in the primate habitat where Caesar is sent when he protects Rodman’s father from a neighbor most effectively highlight the animal rights elements in the film. In both the lab and the habitat, chimpanzees are tortured, even though they are portrayed as more human than their torturers. In fact, none of the human characters in the film stand out. We are meant to sympathize only with Caesar, a chimpanzee, who has inherited the intelligence his mother gained from Rodman’s drug. More human than the emotionless Rodman, Caesar seems to find it difficult to negotiate between the wild and the civilized, perhaps lending a more ambivalent reading of animal rights in the film.

The Rise of the planet of the Apes reminds me of a film with a more explicitly forceful animal-rights message, The Secret of Nimh (1982). The film is the first feature from Don Bluth after he left Disney Studios to join an independent animation team; a connection that aligns the film further with the earlier Disney animated features. In a seemingly direct reaction to both Disney and Singer’s text, the film argues vehemently against animal testing and experimentation. According to Nicodemus, the rat narrator, scientists from NIMH, which is ultimately revealed as the National Institute of Mental Health, captured and performed dangerous experiments on mice and rats:

In the beginning, we were ordinary street rats, stealing our daily bread, and living off the efforts of man's work. We were captured, put in cages, and sent to a place called NIMH. There were other animals there, in cages. They were put through the most unspeakable torture, to satisfy some scientific curiosity. Often, at night, I would hear them cry out in anguish. Twenty rats and eleven mice were given injections. Our world began changing.

Nicodemus explains the plight of the rat community to Mrs. Brisby, a mouse who comes to the rats for help, telling her that her husband, Jonathan, was a good friend. He points her to a book, and it opens and shines. “Jonathan made possible the rats’ escape from the terrible … Nimh,” The National Institute of Mental Health.

Then, in his magic television, Nicodemus shows her what happened to rats and mice at NIMH and how they ultimately escape. He shows the history of the rat community from ordinary street rats to intelligent animals after lab experiments performed on them at NIMH. After the testing performed on them, “he looked upon the words under the cage door and understood them. We had become intelligent. We could read.” The rats and mice escaped through the ventilation system. Almost all of the mice were sucked down through the vent except Jonathan and Ages. But Jonathan made possible the unlocking of the door and became their hero.

In The Secret of NIMH both rats and mice outsmart humans, the peripheral characters in the film, and the NIMH Institute. Rats are indeed intelligent and agree to help Mrs. Brisby move her house to avoid a farmer while keeping her sick child, Timmy, in his bed. The rat city Mrs. Brisby visits to ask for help demonstrates the rats’ level of intelligence. In the rosebush where the rats live, there is a door and then a lit tunnel. Vines grow and light up. Mrs. Brisby walks past what looks like a red skull to a brightly lit garden where she is greeted by a rat guard. She says she is looking for Nicodemus. The guard attacks her with an electrified spear, but Mr. Ages appears and asks her what she is doing there. The guard chases her away, but she explains that she has seen the great owl who told her to go to the rats, so he takes her to see Nicodemus and calms Brutus, the guard. Nicodemus watches her walk into his home, but he also watches Jenna, a rat consumed by a lust for power. Jenna could do her harm. Nicodemus says, “Jonathan, your wife has come at last…. The amulet is safely hidden, but if he finds it, forgive us.”

When Mrs. Brisby goes to see Nicodemus, opening a door that reveals bright light and a breeze, the intelligence of rats is even more evident. He tells her to come closer. His eyes shine. After telling her the secret of NIMH, Nicodemus gives her the amulet. “It becomes a blinding radiance…. The stone has a power when it is there.” He continues, “You can unlock any door, if you only have the key,” the inscription on the Amulet reads. This is a gift from Jonathan, he tells her. You must move your house to the protected side of the stone, the lee of the stone. Jenna’s desire for power drives much of the rest of the story, but from a cage where she has been placed after successfully drugging the cat, Mrs. Brisby hears the father on the phone telling NIMH they can bulldoze the rosebush.

Although Jenna crushes Nicodemus with Mrs. Brisby’s house when he cuts a rope, ultimately rats and mice join together and defy the humans who would destroy them. Mrs. Brisby runs to the rats, reaches them, and tells them NIMH is coming. With the help of the amulet, she moves her home, and the rats move to Thorn Valley, so the next morning when trucks from NIMH are at the farmer’s house, the rats and mice have left. They are safe. The animals have outwitted NIMH and moved to a safe haven beyond the human world.

In The Secret of NIMH the rights of animals overshadow those of humans, not only because human characters serve only minor roles in the film but also because humans mistreat animals both in the laboratories of NIMH and on the farm. Laboratory testing may have led to positive results—increased intelligence—but it explicitly changed rats and their community without their compliance. And both the farmer and NIMH now want the rats killed, even attempting to bulldoze their home with them in it. The Secret of NIMH, then, explicitly argues against cruel mistreatment of animals both in laboratories and in “the field,” while demonstrating that animals deserve rights because they so resemble us. The Rise of the Planet of the Apes effectively argues against cruel treatment of animals, but whether or not their ultimate retaliation is justified depends on the perspective of the viewer.

*Mardis Gras: Made in China*: Social and Environmental Justice of Beads

 Near the opening of  Mardis Gras: Made in China (2005), one reveler explains the purpose of Mardis Gras beads: “Beads for Boobs,” and the scene illustrates the trade. David Redmon, the documentary’s filmmaker, asks everyone celebrating where the beads they wear and throw come from, but they don’t know. The film explains that they come from the Tai Kuen Bead Factory in China where workers live in dorm rooms with four beds and mosquito netting; yet they make 1.5 million profit per year. It is 37 degrees Celsius in 1995 when the film is made, and there is no air conditioning. Electric volts heat the pin and stick the beads together in the factory one by one. With these contrasting visions of New Orleans and Chinese cultures, Mardis Gras: Made in China reveals the exploitation of developing world revelers that has been constructed as necessary to support first world fun.

The lack of environmental and social justice is blatant in the factory. All workers must wear red hats, so management can keep track of their movements. They have a minimum quantity to produce each day. One worker's hands are covered with bloody nicks from the bead work. They earn 10% bonus when they are over the minimum and receive a 5% punishment if they are below. The workers are 95%female and 5% male. They need the “boys” for strength but don’t want more than 10% because it is easier to control female workers, the management explains.

In one example, the difficult working conditions are illustrated by a day in the life of factory workers, showing their rise from bed at 6:00. They must brush their teeth, wash their face in the communal bathroom, eat breakfast and get to work by 6:45 to turn on their machines on time. Then they pull beads from it at arm’s length—one left and one right. They have to pull the beads firmly to cut them and must pull 3000 per day, working 11 hours, and sometimes adding on hours between meals for up to 14 hours.

The background on the factory highlight the economic inequities at play here. Workers in this factory make beads for Accent Annex, which sends them to K-Mart and Walmart. The manager, Roger Chen, came from Hong Kong and moved to China in 1984 when more Capitalism was accepted. He set up this sewing factory for Mardis Gras paraphernalia and moved into a middle class that exploits labor for profit.

But Roger works for Don Carlone, who owns Accent Annex. He tells viewers that Mardis Gras revelers spend $500 on each float, and workers don’t even make that in a month. Workers are even fined a day’s pay for talking while working. With these low wages, one worker highlighted in the film sends money home. She paints beads. Her quota is 300, but she can only make 100. Another earns 500 yuan, or $62 per month.

Roger says he designed the factory and residence halls, so everyone works hard and is satisfied. The workers may work 15-16 hours because they are afraid the boss will punish them. One worker has only one day off every two weeks, but still tries to learn English and wash her clothes in a sink.

Ten workers share five beds in each dorm room. They can leave only on Sundays if they are not required to work. The workers went on strike when their pay was lowered. It worked, according to a worker. But Roger says no. He raised their hours but not their pay.

These horrific working conditions are exacerbated by the environmental hazards associated with the production of beads. Beads are made from 12 petroleum products, including styrene , a narcotic that affects the central nervous system. It is toxic and causes cancer when inhaled; yet Roger says the factory is pollution free.

Contrasting with these injustices, in New Orleans, 1000 revelers expose themselves every 3 hours. Hundreds of workers rally for better conditions but fail in China. They only close the factory for two weeks a year at Chinese New Year. Contract between workers’ word and Roger’s. The World Trade Organization is opening up to China, so Roger’s loyalty to Don Carlone is discussed. Everything changed in China when Capitalism became encouraged.

At the end of the film, New Orleans revelers watch footage of the bead factory, which exposs the means of production. They tell workers how much beads cost, and pictures of revelers are passed around the factory. Chinese laborers look at the naked breasts in shock. In Mardis Gras: Made in China two cultures clash and converge. Excess in the West is built on the backs of young women laborers, who are both exploited by uncontrolled management and poisoned by toxins they inhale every day in the Tai Kuen Bead Factory.


Note: The filmmakers also made a Kamp Katrina documentary.