nothing new: america through the eyes of a foreigner
9 thoughts on 80s westerns, expat writers, and the unseen heartland of Reagan's america
Nothing New is a weekend column about something old. It’s usually about a piece of music, film or a book that has entered my brain and has refused to leave.
1. Sometimes being an outsider comes off as naive. Sometimes it can reveal things more plainly than it would to people on the inside. I’ve been thinking a lot about this watching foreign directors make films about America.
In Stroszek, the Werner Herzog docu-fiction black comedy about Germans immigrating to the American midwest, the foreigners talk about moving. “People make a lot of money in places like California.” One of the characters is an old, gentle intellectual man who has an answer for everything, but maybe no solutions. He explains far away American job opportunities such as waiting tables with comical patience (“Waiting tables in America is as common as being an engineer in Germany”).
Collectively the immigrants agreed on one thing: Anybody can make money in America.
Of course (spoiler alert), things end horribly. It wasn’t the American dream they were sold abroad. The German couple contemplate a letter from the bank, which is politely hounding them for being behind on their trailer payments. “There is so much small print,” said the main character, Bruno S. He is referring to the thicket of legalese we as Americans have all grown accustomed to seeing on everything. “Here they hurt you with a smile.” They murder you, diplomatically, in the fine print. The husband’s wife eventually cheats on him and runs off with a rogue Wisconsin truck driver, while his trailer gets repossessed in a ridiculous auction that blows the provincial European mind.
When my aunt came to visit America from the Soviet Union and had her first meal in the states, she held a Big Mac in her hands and marveled at the presentation. My grandmother’s take on America was, “So many different people living together peacefully.” She was kind of right, but also very wrong. My family observed that Americans stand around a lot during holiday gatherings. But they were just used to sitting down at a table for 5 hours straight and ripping shots of potato vodka.
But the outsider foreign mind brings to the surface what many Americans deal with every day. Predatory loans, high healthcare costs, and a difficult barrier to entry. The problem is Americans have internalized these problems.
2. I thought about this same American outsider perspective in Nomadland, which blends fiction/nonfiction much like Stroszek and depicts transient workers who just don’t fit into the box society has created for them. That film too is a very American story through the eyes of Chinese filmmaker Chloé Zhao. In Nomadland, the bourgeois thinks Francis McDormand’s life of working on the road is a choice, failing to see that her choices have been drastically narrowed due to her tragic personal and economic situation.
3. And re: movies that feel like docs. I want more of this kind of content. Both Stroszek and Nomadland are presented like a fictional story, but most of the characters are non-actors and give a certain amount of starkness to the screen. Check out No ‘I’ in Threesome for a different spin on this style, and if you want to get a little hot and bothered.
4. Recently I’ve been digging 80s westerns like Paris, Texas, also directed by a foreigner, or the Coen Brothers Blood Simple (American directors I know). But both are very different from the high-gloss America presented in media during the Reagan era. In Blood Simple, desperation, naïveté and loneliness are on display through poverty, not wealth. We’re not watching Patrick Bateman. We’re watching Johnny 99. Visually, Paris, Texas is a languid bath bomb. It is also a road movie about a person who is very lost. And it’s one of the best films I’ve seen about families breaking apart.
5. Minari also takes an alternative look at Reagan’s America, but through the Korean diaspora. And it does a great job of subverting the image that working class American struggles only happened to white people. In Minari, a husband and wife are being pulled in two directions: one towards America, the other towards the homeland. The husband sees hope in the back-to-the-land farm life they’ve chosen in Arkansas, but he struggles cultivating his farm. Meanwhile, minari, an East Asian plant, grows in abundance in a nearby creek.
Farmers began to seriously struggle during the Reagan era due to rising land prices and a surplus in production, which devalued crop prices. Many farmers became saddled with debt and lost their farms. It became a full-blown crisis. Farmers were committing suicide. One in Iowa went postal and fatally shot his family and a banker. During one scene in Minari, somebody says, “Reagan’s out to make the farmers happy.” But what types of farmers exactly? The Reagan Administration’s approach to agriculture policy and aid was inconsistent, and a disaster. A government program dolled out by people who did not want government to work in the first place.
6. Speaking of the dark side of Reagan’s “morning in America,” Springsteen’s Nebraska is a great example of this. Fresh off reading Howard Zinn’s A People’s History, Springsteen sings from the point of view of serial killers on the lamb, rural drifters, and a highway patrolman who has a reckoning with his criminal brother. It’s all in subversive contrast to the nostalgic, hey-how-are-ya Americana of the 1950s. On most days it is my favorite Springsteen album, the opposite of the Budweiser rock and roll on Born in the USA.
7. But back to the immigrant perspective. In literature, a couple Russian writers wrote some pretty good and funny stuff about America in the 1980s. Here are some quick recs:
A Foreign Woman, Sergei Dovlatov: Third-wave Soviet immigrants living in New York. All of them are drawn to the orbit of a demur Russian woman named Marusya Tatarovich, who emigrates from the Soviet Union because “I was in a bad mood.” Hahahaha.
It’s Me, Eddie, or A Butler’s Story: Eduard Limonov, the legendary Russian dissident who died last year, wrote one of the most brutally honest books I’ve ever read. It’s Me, Eddie was actually one I had to put down before I could finished it. It’s about his experience as a writer in late 1970s NYC, when New York was mostly a disco wasteland of lost 1960s idealism.
8. What I’m trying to say is the immigrant perspective has something to share with the American working class perspective. Both have been ostracized and ignored by runaway capitalism. Both have been caught in the middle of extremes. Both are outsiders recognizing something is wrong when others don’t. A broad, multiracial working class coalition is out there.
The comedian George Carlin, definitely not an immigrant, once said something like “I’m an outsider by choice, but not truly. It’s the unpleasantness of the system that keeps me out. I’d rather be in, in a good system. That’s where my discontent comes from: being forced to choose to stay outside.”
9. Mainstream American cinema doesn’t portray working class topics much. When they do it isn’t very good. The closest we got recently was Parasite, and that of course was done by a non-American. Mainstream audiences don’t want to look at economic violence, or poor people.
Anyway, if anyone has any good book or film recs from a nonwhite, foreign working class perspective, drop me a note!