Author: The Arts Are Life

April 20, 2019

I just finished the film Big Eyes and it left me with a lot of questions to consider: what is the purpose of creating art? If you are not a big self-promotional person, does that make you any less of an artist if you enjoy staying out of the spotlight? What are the emotional costs to succeed in the creative world, and how can you establish boundaries when people try to push you to give up that authentic little spark that goes into your art?

Big Eyes is based on the true story of Margaret Keane, an American painter based in San Francisco whose husband, Walter, sold her paintings and gave himself credit even though he promised her that the two of them were going to work as a team. In the film, we see Margaret Ulbrich furiously rushing to shove her paintings and her daughter, Jane, in her car because she needs to leave an incredibly abusive husband. They leave Northern California for San Francisco, where she meets up with her friend Dee-Ann. Back in the 1950s, social norms frowned upon women who left their husbands without jobs lined up, so Margaret lands a job painting on furniture at a furniture company while also selling her work at local art fairs. Margaret’s art features children with big sad eyes staring at the viewer, and as the real Margaret Keane reveals in the bonus DVD feature “The Making of Big Eyes” she painted sad children because she herself was sad. She had just left an abusive marriage and didn’t have many friends other than her daughter and Dee-Ann.

At one of the art fairs, she struggles to sell her paintings, and when she negotiates $2 to paint a little boy, the boy’s dad says he’ll give her $1 instead for painting him (at the time, American society traditionally viewed women as caretakers, and often didn’t take female artists seriously). But then she notices this painter named Walter Keane selling paintings like hotcakes. He comes over to her and tells her she’s not being promotional enough, and tries to convince Jane to let Margaret paint her (Jane soon tells him she is Margaret’s daughter.) When Margaret reveals she separated from her husband, the two immediately start a relationship and within a short time they are married. Dee-Ann tells Margaret she thinks something is fishy with them marrying in a short time, but Margaret says she thinks Walter is sweet and will take care of her.

Walter then brings his scenic paintings to Ruben, an art dealer, and he immediately rejects them because, according to Ruben, no one wants landscape paintings anymore. They want abstract paintings and not literal street scenes. When he shows him Margaret’s paintings, he gives her credit but Ruben still rejects them. So then Walter takes them to a jazz club and the owner at first rejects them, but then because Walter is a pushy outgoing person, he convinces Banducci, the owner, to buy them, and one night while waiting outside the restrooms for people to ask about the paintings, a couple comes up to him and asks him who painted the children with large eyes, and Walter takes credit (and pay) for it because he is desperate and knows Margaret isn’t a self-promotional person and wouldn’t feel comfortable telling people she did it. Honestly, all Margaret wants to do is paint and spend time with her daughter, but Walter has a completely different idea of success, one that involves about 99.9 percent promotion and about maybe .01 percent actually doing the work. Unlike Margaret, Walter waits for inspiration instead of actually doing his own work (we later see this clearly in a much later scene.) Margaret actually has a reason for painting the children and she puts her energy into her work rather than just talking about and pitching ideas like Walter does.

I cannot fully relate to Margaret, but I totally understand why she didn’t speak up at the beginning. She had just left an abusive marriage and just wanted someone who wouldn’t beat her. However, as we see throughout the film, Walter is a fraud and was just as toxic as Margaret’s ex-husband was, and even more so because he promised her all these nice things (money, a nice home, fame) and they did get those things like he promised. He also promised her she would be living the dream of just making art and not having a day job. However, Margaret knows her limits even though she doesn’t listen to them, and to essentially make Walter more famous (and to keep her marriage with him) she sits in the room all day painting for hours children with sad eyes. Because she is producing so many paintings, she doesn’t take breaks and thus doesn’t have room to just think about how to most authentically express her own self through these paintings. In one key scene she tells him that art is personal. The children with sad big eyes come from her own feelings of sadness, and to give this not sad (in fact, overly zealous) man credit for her work means giving up a key part of herself to an impersonal world of mass production, fancy parties, and small talk. Margaret only wanted a happy marriage, and did eventually end up in a happy marriage after leaving Walter, but in a way, she went through this experience so she could help inspire other artists (in particular, female artists) who felt threatened in any way into lying about their work or letting someone else take credit for it.

Nowadays, we can take it for granted that we can promote ourselves through social media and sell our work online. However, there were no computers at the time, and so Margaret couldn’t just put up a Skillshare video showing people how to paint children with big eyes on the Internet. Also, this made me wonder how I, as an introverted musician, should promote myself even though I don’t really enjoy self-promotion. Does not playing in gigs all the time not make me a musician? What if I just love music for its own sake? What if I just want to play for others because I love it? In one scene Margaret is walking in a grocery store and finds a grand display of her work in commercialized style. There are postcards, posters, all sorts of inexpensive paraphernalia with her art on it. And the display is labeled is big bold letters “Walter Keane,” showing how the situation has gotten out of hand and that although Walter promised her work would get famous, it became mass produced and lost a lot of its quality. And let’s face it; not everyone liked Margaret’s paintings, and everyone was pretty divided on whether one could consider her work to be “real art” (whatever the hell that means.) But after seeing this display, Margaret actually sees customers in the store as having big eyes like the children in her paintings. I saw the trailer and thought, after seeing the woman in the grocery store with big eyes, thought, “Ehhh…I don’t know if this is going to give me nightmares.” But after seeing this film, I really did feel for Margaret because in this moment, we see how this entire scheme messed her life up. It not only ruined her friendship with Dee-Ann and her relationship with her daughter (she forbids her daughter Jane from going into her studio and lies, telling her it’s Walter’s studio and those are his paintings.) It also ruined her self-esteem. I know she had this silent strength for ten years, but Walter was incredibly toxic and Margaret thought how many women at the time did: that their husbands were going to take care of them and they should just stay quiet and stay at home. This scene, along with the incredible score by Danny Elfman, conveys all the complicated feelings Margaret has about her relationship with Walter, and moreover, her relationship with her art.

There was a wonderful composer named Melanie Bonis. She was one of the crucial composers to bridge the gap between Romantic and Impressionistic music, and from a young age she taught herself to play piano. However, because of gender norms at the time, her parents frowned on her passion and wanted her to just live with a husband. Even though she produced several works throughout her life, Melanie Bonis, like Margaret, really didn’t want to become famous, but really just wanted to produce art. At the time, you had to be extremely self-promotional to get anywhere as an artist, but Mel B wasn’t super self-promotional (she named herself Mel because women weren’t taken seriously as composers, so she had to shorten her name so she could gain access to the male-dominated world of composers. The only other Mel B I know of is Mel B from The Spice Girls.) Because she wasn’t all about promoting herself, no one really knows about her, not even me. I wanted to play more female composers because I was done just playing pieces written by men (not that there’s anything wrong with Bach or Debussy; it’s just that times are changing and people are becoming more aware that the classical world has often put up barriers against composers who are often underrepresented in the field.) So that’s how I came across Mel Bonis; I just googled “female composers” and the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP) had a long list of them (thank goodness for IMSLP.) Just because Mel didn’t promote herself a lot doesn’t mean her work stunk. I love playing her Cello Sonata because it just has this richness to it, and a lot of people haven’t heard of Mel Bonis, so I wanted to dig her out from the trenches and play her music since I haven’t played it before. Same goes for other less well-known composers such as Florence Price and Dora Pejacevic; their music is beautiful and I honestly wish I had encountered them sooner.

Now, of course, it wouldn’t be fair for me to reduce Big Eyes to a movie about a woman letting a man walk all over her. In “The Making of Big Eyes” feature the screenwriters said that they kept asking, ” Why did Margaret let Walter take credit for her work for so long?” and from that there were so many other questions that the movie addresses: what is love? what is art? what is criticism? Interestingly, Walter is very bad at taking criticism because he hasn’t produced his own art to show to the public. When you just rely on charisma, you don’t really prove anything. Margaret, however, tells him straight up after finding he painted over the name of the actual artist for those street scene paintings he sold, that “the more he lies, the smaller he seems.” Of course, I was snapping my fingers every time she spoke out against his nonsense because she let him do it for ten years and it really hurt her. But unlike Walter, Margaret handles criticism by continuing to paint. I think what has helped me as a musician is not saying “Ah, I can’t play Tchaikovsky; I give up.” I work on what needs to be improved and keep playing different kinds of music. Again, I cannot emphasize enough how this movie really drilled it into my head this very key lesson: you must always do your own work. Never try to copy someone else. Yes, you can see inspiration, but in the end you need to produce your own ideas so you don’t end up plagiarizing someone else’s. And yes, you need to know your worth and yes, it’s okay to want to sell your art and get paid for your work. However, if people poo-pooh your work, it’s very important to not let other people’s criticism make you feel like any less of an artist. And having a day job doesn’t make you any less of an artist, either. Elizabeth Gilbert said that artists should work at their day jobs so that they don’t have to just support themselves with their art. Because as the film shows, if you support yourself with your art, you need to also take care of yourself and not become so immersed in the business aspect that you forget the sheer reason why you wanted to make art in the first place.

Big Eyes. 2014. Rated PG-13 for thematic elements and brief strong language.

April 14, 2019

Categories: movies

I just finished watching the film Burnt and at first I didn’t know what to expect. At first I didn’t think I would want to watch it because it got a 29 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and a lot of people didn’t like it. But I liked Bradley Cooper in A Star is Born, Silver Linings Playbook and Guardians of the Galaxy, so I thought I would have no problem seeing it. Honestly, even though people said the plot Burnt was too slow and I honestly was thinking, “This movie is so stressful. I feel too much for all of these restaurant employees, I should just stop,” I am still glad I watched it anyway. Sometimes you learn lessons from watching films that don’t get high Rotten Tomatoes ratings.

The film takes place in London. Adam Jones is an arrogant chef who moved to Paris when he was younger after working a minimum-wage job and saving up money, and met his mentor Jean Luc, when he traveled to Paris to become a chef. He then lost his dream after his struggles with drug abuse and anger issues and moved to New Orleans to try and get his life together, shucking hundreds of oysters a day and keeping a notebook of how many oysters he shucked. He then quits the job when he finally shucked 1 million oysters and heads to London for better opportunities. When he gets there he runs into his old colleagues and persuades them to work for him, but after he recruits them, the real issue comes when they actually work for him. He turns out to be the same arrogant micromanager he is in daily life, and one night he throws all the dishes his employees make around the kitchen and yells at everyone, even threatening to hurt one of the few female employees at his restaurant (Helene, a single mother who is just trying to make ends meet as a sous-chef until she meets Adam.) Eventually, Adam comes to terms with his ego and Helene tells him the importance of teamwork and that he shouldn’t feel he has to run the restaurant on his own.

My thoughts on the film

I didn’t think it was bad because it taught a lot of valuable life lessons and proposed some really deep questions. Does perfectionism add to or kill artistry? Are there alternatives to a micromanaging style of leadership? How can people practice better self-care when working in a stressful environment such as the restaurant industry? What does it mean to be a mentor? In the film Adam sees Helene’s potential and has her get up early every morning so he can coach her; however, it is not easy, especially because she has a young daughter and can’t get off work to just stay home and celebrate her daughter’s birthday (I would be interested to find out how the daughter is going to grow up remembering how her mom went through such rough training.) Adam calls her over to his restaurant every morning to coach her, and throws away several of the things she makes in the beginning because they do not live up to his standards. But eventually, she practices enough so that the one dish she makes perfectly he doesn’t throw away. However, this led me to wonder: is the pursuit of excellence worth making someone work long hours with no breaks in between? Honestly, for this very reason, it has made me respect employees who work with difficult bosses in the restaurant industry. While I did work in food service, the drinks and food weren’t expensive and I was more expected to get things done than to do everything perfectly. Helene also becomes just like Adam, throwing dishes when they don’t taste perfect and screaming cuss words at her coworkers when she becomes the lead chef who tastes the dishes before serving them. Michel tells Adam he liked Helene better before Adam trained her to be a micromanager like him, and I agree that Helene could have led the crew in her own way, not just to impress Adam or emulate him.

However, in the culinary industry, it sounds as if you have to be perfect to do your job. However, I would argue that there really isn’t a perfect because everyone has different tastes, and who’s to say whether Adam can judge how something tastes simply based on how the Michelin critic is going to judge the dish? While of course you need to make sure that the food is cooked at safe temperatures and that it looks nice, to say it has to be perfect is relative. Taste is subjective, and what may taste like garbage to someone may taste like heaven to someone else. In one scene, Tony tells a very stressed-out Adam to make Helene’s daughter, Lily, a birthday cake because Adam forced Helene to work instead of take the day off to celebrate Lily’s birthday, and Tony has to keep Lily company while Helene is in the kitchen. In a scene that at first fooled me into getting choked up, because when Adam brought out the cake, it was super sweet looking and said “Happy Birthday Lily” on it (the music score also made it seem like a touching moment), Adam asks how Lily how the cake tastes and she says that she has tasted better. Adam tries to challenge her by eating the cake himself, but then realizes that it probably could have been better. However, Lily knows that Adam treats Helene like garbage, so she already feels a sense of distrust with him, and this affects how she judges his cooking (of course, I don’t forgive how Adam treated Helene, though. Women already have it hard enough in the food service industry.)

Also, the film brings up a good point about consistency. In the film Adam has Helene meet him at Burger King and she tells him that Burger King is the last place she wants to meet him. She refuses to eat fast food and opts instead to wait until she prepares something better prepared for herself. Adam questions her rejection of fast food and says that, contrary to Helene’s argument that fast food is fattening compared to culinary arts food, the exquisite French food that her and other culinary chefs strive to perfect are made of the same ingredients that fast food is: dairy, meat and a lot of fat. She then tells him that she wants to stick to anything but fast food so she can stay “consistent,” but then Adam tells her that chefs should strive for consistent hard work but they shouldn’t strive for the same tastes every time, and that it’s okay to enjoy a burger and fries even if you work at an upscale restaurant because you’re exposing your palette to other tastes. Adam also points out that it’s not fair for her to turn her nose up at fast food, and accuses her of being classist and not wanting to eat food prepared by people making minimum wage. Helene points out that she worked on minimum wage as a sous chef, and Adam continues to say that people with upscale tastes often view fast food as “for the working class,” and asks why it’s more expensive to eat at the place he and other chefs like Helene work at than it is at fast food joints like Burger King. Even though I didn’t like Adam condescending to Helene, I do think that as someone who used to work in fast food, I think he made some valid points. Now of course the minimum wage for fast food workers is supposed to (hopefully) go up, so Adam’s argument might be slightly outdated in years to come.

But still, he has a point: does making fast food so accessible and inexpensive cheapen our appreciation of the food? As a kid I ate out all the time because it was convenient to just go after sports lessons to get something from McDonald’s upstairs, but after going vegan and eating most of my meals in and bringing my own meals to lunch, I definitely felt a lot more appreciative when I do have the spare time moment to eat out. Even when I went to eat at Panera, I hadn’t had it that often since I started eating in, but when I ate the chocolate chip bagel I literally felt all the sweet and savory pop in my mouth and I relished it, even though I ate it rather quickly. Even a $2 bagel was an aesthetic experience simply because I learned to not take eating fast food for granted. Even eating Taco Bell became a special occasion, and I actually enjoyed it a lot more when I didn’t eat it every day. Honestly, as someone who would have to save up serious money to afford to eat the kind of Michelin star foods being prepared in Adam’s kitchen (they looked positively delicious and made me wonder if I should start binge-watching Food Network like I did when I was a kid), savoring a $2 bean burrito with guacamole and chips is no less a beautiful experience than if I were to eat a $100 vegan zucchini souffle covered in truffle sauce and sprinkled with 5 karat gold dust (or some other kind of elegant-sounding dish).

The film also teaches the importance of teamwork, very similar to The Imitation Game. Alan Turing recruits people for his team to crack the Enigma code, but then ends up shutting himself off from his colleagues and not accepting their lunch invitations or ideas. But Joan teaches him the importance of teamwork, and so the team is able to crack the Enigma code together. Burnt teaches that especially in a competitive industry like food service, people need to work together. When you work in fast food, you can’t worry about whether you made a better latte than someone else. The only thing you have to really worry about is getting someone’s order exactly how they tell you to make it. There is no ambiguity really; you have someone working at the register, and you’re making the drinks according to the recipe cards and warming up the food. If there’s any bad blood between you two when there’s twenty people in line waiting for their orders, you’re toast. It doesn’t matter if something is perfect; in food service, you just work with your teammates to get the customers out the door with their beverages and food, whether or not the customer gives you a pat on the back for it. We all had to work together without letting our egos get in the way, and, this is just me, but from the film’s portrayal of the restaurant business, teamwork is a no-brainer. When someone’s ego gets in the way, it messes up the flow of all the kitchen employees because now no one can focus on their work. Adam’s ego gets in the way of his successful management of his team and it takes him a long time to sincerely change his outlook on success. Basically, the message of the film is that success can be lonely and consuming, especially if you struggle with mental health issues, but you can’t let your personal problems ruin the flow of your workspace, and while it is easier said than done, your employees will get their jobs done better when there is no drama. Also, Helene’s use of the sous vide method was genius, and honestly I would have loved to see her open up her own restaurant during the movie because she held her own throughout the film even when Adam didn’t want to accept her help (he at first joked that the sous vide bags looked like condoms, but then after it worked he swallowed just a dash of his pride.) Her and Michel would have the most amazing restaurant, with women and people of color running the show. That should be a movie in and of itself.

While I think hard work and criticism are necessary for success in a tough career, I think Adam did too much of a Fletcher (the demonic coach of a jazz band in the film Whiplash who throws chairs and screams at his students) and this prevented him from having any meaningful relationships with his coworkers at the beginning. But as I mentioned earlier, he realizes that knowing how to work together with people is just as important as knowing how to manage people. A mentor should encourage their employees, not necessarily by always coddling them, but also not out-rightly abusing them. The film taught me especially as a performing artist who has played with ensembles that you cannot let your rigid ideas about a piece get in the way of the teamwork efforts you and the other ensemble members put into creating beautiful music. Also, you need to take care of your mental health. Read a book, watch a movie, paint a sunset, anything that will get you back in the swing of things and help you destress from your professional creative life.

Overall, the movie provided great lessons on overcoming perfectionism, teamwork and the importance of never giving up.

Burnt. 1 hr 41 minutes. 2015. Rated R for language throughout.

March 27, 2019

In this incredible video, film composer Germaine Franco talks about what it takes to be a film composer in Hollywood. I was frustrated with my music career before watching this video, but hearing Franco talk about how she overcomes writer’s block and just keeps working extremely hard every day has inspired me to keep going. She says that she started off as an orchestra musician and thought she was going to be an orchestra musician, but then she realized she always had a passion for writing her own music, so she started writing for her own Latin jazz group. Here are some of the excellent lessons I took away from this video:

• Work on as much writing as you can so that you can be ready. Don’t figure it out when you get your first gig. This is important for me as a musician and as a writer because I sometimes worry that I’m not good enough to play more pieces, so I would just focus on Schumann’s Cello Concerto. But I have learned that if you want to make it as a musician, you can’t always play it safe. You have to explore lots of different kinds of writing, lots of different kinds of music. The reason so many folks in Hollywood are successful is that they keep working every day on something, and even if it doesn’t get a lot of accolades, they just keep working at it.
• Get up early and work on your writing. Franco gets to the studio around 7 am, doesn’t check emails until lunch, and just writes. She says that you can’t worry about whether your writing is perfect at the beginning because you have a deadline you need to meet, so you just need to keep writing, working with different instruments and sounds. I find myself often checking emails a lot, and that it really stifles my creativity when I check emails every day, so I find when I don’t check my emails a lot I’m able to get a lot of writing in.
• It really, really helps to spend some time in Hollywood if you want to write for film. There are many other places such as Nashville, your home town, Europe, but most people who work in Hollywood spend some time (if not all the time) in Los Angeles. At first, this was hard for me to wrap my head around because as things are now with the economy, it would be hard for me to move to Los Angeles, especially because it is pricing out low and middle income folks. But I am not giving up. I am stubborn like that, so I am still determined to go to Los Angeles somehow even if it’s just for a few weeks.
• You need a mentor. When Franco moved to LA she didn’t know anyone but she kept working and working and meeting people in the business who connected her with other composers in the business, so she was able to take all of these incredible opportunities. I have learned this throughout my life as a musician, as a student, as a person. Just keep collaborating with others, always ask for help and be open to receiving constructive criticism so you can improve your craft.
• Even when you don’t have a gig yet, work on your own personal library. This was incredibly inspiring advice because sometimes I feel that if I’m not performing my music that it means nothing. But a lot of times, most of the successful folks in the business keep working at their craft, they keep working on their music, their own stuff, and then when they’re ready with their own portfolio, then they are able to get those opportunities. But if you just wait for inspiration to strike, you’re just kind of letting your talent grow dormant and just remain untapped. People nowadays don’t care about perfection; they just want someone who can meet deadlines and get work done. If they don’t like your writing, that’s fine. You just need to figure out what you can do better at and just keep writing. Basically, you can’t take things personally and you just need to keep doing a lot of work each day, whether you think it sounds good or not.
• Sometimes it’s ok to step away from your work for a few days and come back to it, but a lot of the time you don’t have that luxury, so you just need to keep pushing past that writer’s block and just keep going. This was inspiring because I love to write and have always written since I was young, but I hit a snag in my 20s when I was just done turning in papers for grades and so I became a perfectionist, thinking if I didn’t have experience then it wasn’t worth my time to apply for certain jobs. But a lot of times, when you’re struggling to make ends meet, you’ve got to speak from your heart. Yes, grammar, editing is important, but not everyone has the luxury of just crafting their work until it’s perfect. What’s most important is just working on something, even if you’ve set these unreasonably high expectations for how your writing is supposed to be the first time. Also, you don’t have the luxury of beating yourself up when you have writer’s block. You just have to keep going.

Last night I watched the film Doubt, a period drama based on a play by John Patrick Shanley about a charismatic priest who faces allegations of sexual abuse at the hands of the parish’s head nun. Sister Aloysius, played brilliantly by Meryl Streep, demands order in the parish and will do anything to establish this order, even if it means bopping students on the head while they sleep or talk during Father Flynn’s sermon. Father Flynn, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, preaches about how, after the year President John F. Kennedy got assassinated, everyone had uncertainty about the fate of the nation, but that this shared doubt is what united everyone because before that, there was all this divisiveness among people. Father Flynn says that “doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty.”

Indeed, this film grapples heavily with the concept of doubt, specifically in the context of sexual abuse. When the parish’s first Black student, Donald Miller, arrives, Father Flynn takes a liking to him and takes him as his pupil. Donald also develops a liking for Father Flynn. However, things get pretty messy when he calls Donald to the rectory and Sister James (played by Amy Adams) finds, out of the corner of her eye while watching her students’ dance rehearsal, Father Flynn putting Donald’s white T-shirt in his locker, implying that Father Flynn molested Donald. When Sister Aloysius hears about this she immediately sets out to campaign against Father Flynn and get him kicked out of the parish. However, Father Flynn says to the two sisters that they are wrongly accusing him of wrongdoing, that no, he didn’t give Donald communion wine and no, that he didn’t have an inappropriate relationship with him. When Sister Aloysius meets with Donald’s mom (played by the always incredibly talented Viola Davis) to tell him that Father Flynn made inappropriate advances toward her son, Donald’s mom tells her that Donald is just trying to survive until he graduates, and that if her husband were to find out about what Flynn did to Donald, then he would literally kill Donald.

The film is important to see not just because of the philosophical theme of doubt and truth, but also because in the #metoo era we need to recognize the experiences of male sexual abuse survivors. Terry Crews, famous actor, spoke out against sexual assault after another man groped him. Anthony Rapp held allegations against Kevin Spacey for making unwanted advances towards him when Rapp was only 14 and Spacey was in his 20s. And just recently, two men came forward with traumatic experiences of the late pop singer Michael Jackson molesting them when they were very young (I have yet to see Leaving Neverland but I can imagine it is quite terrifying considering how much I worshipped MJ as a kid like so many other people). Now of course, people have often tried to associate the entire LGBTQ+ community with these men, and this is another messy discussion in and of itself (in my opinion, it has really harmed people’s perceptions of the LGBTQ+ community when we equate a few individuals’ actions with an entire group of oppressed people. There are plenty of straight men and women who commit similar abuses.) The film’s central premise is sexual abuse, and, while not the main premise, the psychological toll it can take on its survivors. Donald comes back to Sister James’s class from his meeting with Flynn feeling uneasy and ashamed, implying that Flynn did in fact use his position in power to seduce Donald, who was under the age of consent, into letting him push past Donald’s personal boundaries. The film also delves into how people treat allegations of sexual abuse. The #metoo movement, while it has given many women and men the chance to voice their experiences, has also received some backlash. As someone who cannot relate to what victims of sexual abuse have gone through, I at first couldn’t understand why survivors of trauma wouldn’t speak out against their perpetrators, but as I learned more about survivors’ experiences and talked with more people about it, I came to understand that people in positions of authority use intimidation in order to silence the survivors of their abuse and therefore protect their position.

What Father Flynn did, though, is no different from workplace harassment or catcalling on the street. In one scene of the film, he is talking to the parish boys about consent, and they ask him whether or not it’s ok to turn down girls to a school dance. He says it is fine for them to do so, but to also remember to respect girls if they themselves do not want to dance with you. However, this is quite ironic because he made unwanted advances toward Donald in the rectory, even though he tried covering it up by telling the sisters that Father McGuinn caught Donald drinking the communion wine and that Father Flynn was trying to protect Donald from punishment. When Father Flynn is transferred to a different church and promoted to a different position, he tries to cover up what he did with handshakes and charisma, while Donald sits in the pews silently crying. We don’t know whether he is crying at the thought of Flynn leaving or whether he is crying because of what Flynn did to him, so it’s up to the viewer to understand what happened.

After watching this film I remembered that in recent news several reports came forward about Catholic priests, living and dead, who abused children at the church for many years without suffering any kind of punishment for it. Attorney Jeff Anderson revealed in his report that 395 Catholic priests, 6 nuns and several laypeople sexually abused children in several Catholic churches around Illinois (5/28/21: I wrote this back in 2019 so statistics may have changed), and all but one of the abusers are dead or no longer in the ministry. However, as Anderson reports, the list of abusers is far from exhaustive, as a lot of these people not on the list have shrouded their identity from the public so no one would find out about their abuses. The Dioceses of Springfield and Peoria have underestimated these allegation, saying that since they happened decades ago, there is no point in chasing after them, especially since most of the abusers are dead. Anderson made sure though that these abuses received public coverage to show that no, they weren’t made up and that yes, they are still highly relevant today. In February of this year (reminder: I wrote this back in 2019) the Archdiocese reported that more than 100 priests and other clergy staff sexually abused children, and in San Francisco Bay, 263 priests were branded as sexual predators. Some perpetrators were intentionally transferred and retained in trusted positions with direct access to minors even with their history of sexual abuse. In Doubt, Father Flynn gets promoted to a higher position at another church despite his history of abusing minors, so who’s to say he wouldn’t get away with abusing minors in his new position at the new church?

Although Pope Francis called a global summit recently to address the long history of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, many criticized him for not providing any direct solutions to addressing the issue. Many activists said that while he acknowledged the sexual abuse, he did not implement any policies that would tackle it head on, such as a zero-tolerance policy or even having the Pope actually release the church files of abusive priests. Still, even though there is much more to be done about the sexual abuse in the Church, it was a huge step for the Pope, considering that the Church has kept these abuses hidden away for many, many years until now. While these cases had been hidden, the abuse took a serious psychological toll on its survivors, and these survivors shared their experiences during the summit of enduring depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and suicidal thoughts after the clergy raped them. Even though the film does not go into direct detail about the serious impact Father Flynn’s abuse had on Donald’s self-esteem, it is clear that it traumatized him. After Sister Aloysius calls him out for his abuses, Father Flynn delivers a sermon about a woman who gossiped about a man she didn’t like, and God came to her and haunted her forever because she gossiped, telling her that spreading rumors about someone was a sin. Pope Francis called gossip “the devil’s weapon” after he defended a Chilean bishop accused of sexual abuse, saying that talking about someone’s abuses was slander that caused divisions within the Church (he later accepted the bishop’s resignation after an outcry from abuse survivors in Chile). However, the film wrestles with a very important question, one that Sister Aloysius addresses in great length: is it really slander if you’re speaking out against an injustice? Sister Aloysius tells Sister James that “when you take a step to address a wrongdoing, you are taking a step away from God, but in his service.” Yes, some traditional people may argue that revealing someone’s inappropriate behavior to the public is slander, but today we live in a world where sexual harassment policies are a lot stricter because more survivors of sexual violence have come forth with their actual detailed accounts of what happened to them. It may seem as if one is going against their traditions or culture by speaking up against injustice, but you are helping someone else by addressing the injustice done to them. Then again, the movie raises more questions: if people speak out against injustice, should they be aware of any injustice they themselves might have committed? Father Flynn grills Sister Aloysius by asking if she ever sinned when she continues to burn him, and she immediately is rendered speechless and admits to past wrongdoing. The movie also asks: what role has doubt played in how we treat cases of sexual violence?

Of course, I have to read more on these questions to really understand their depth, but seeing this movie raises a very important thought-provoking discussion about power and the individuals who abuse it, and the power of silence, what happens when someone doesn’t feel they have the power to speak up because their perpetrator took it away from them? How does doubt affect the ways we tell the stories of abuse survivors? Whose side should we trust? A mentor is supposed to lift someone up, not make someone feel small. A mentor is supposed to respect someone’s boundaries, not overstep them. But what happens when that mentor uses charisma and their loud voice to make themselves feel justified in abusing others? All of these questions are incredibly important and kept me up all night well after the film’s fittingly stark-looking credits rolled. Overall, brilliant movie. I will have to read the play by John Patrick Shanley next. Can I mention again how much I love Meryl Streep’s acting? 🙂

Doubt. 2008. Rated PG-13 for thematic material.

March 18, 2019

• Anne screaming bloody murder when she is suffering with gout is me when I have period cramps. Even with our increasingly unaffordable health care system in the U.S. I at least appreciate that we have doctors and medicines. Oh, and Advil because cramps are no joke. Back then, all they could really do was put mashed-up herbs and raw meat on gout wounds. Sounds very painful.
• Seeing Rachel Weisz and Nicholas Hoult in About a Boy was delightful and sweet. Rachel plays a single mom who befriends Marcus. In The Favourite they couldn’t have played more different characters. In several scenes Harley (played by Hoult) cusses out Sarah (Rachel Weisz) and threatens her. She just calmly insults him right back. When the insults become too much Harley stands up and actually stares Sarah down. It is seriously one of the most intense moments in the film, and shows the breadth of the actors and what they are willing to play. Rachel and Nicholas seriously are great actors and gave excellent performances, and I am totally sure it was a blast for them to work together on a comedy that, unlike About a Boy, was anything but sweet and touching.
• The camera lens and lighting were seriously on point in this film. In quite a few scenes, they make the camera lens sort of spherical, very MC Escher, and this sort of gives a closed-in tight feeling for the viewer because it forces us to focus in on just the people being filmed, and not so much the surroundings. Also, Yorgos wanted to have minimal lighting, so he uses pretty much natural sunlight from the windows throughout the film. When some of the actors wanted to know when the lights were going to be turned on (as in “lights, camera, action”) he said to them “This is the lighting.” It’s very much like The Lobster, where the lack of lighting gave the film its overall ominous mood. It’s one of the things that I really enjoy about Yorgos’s films because it allows the viewer to focus on the characters’ development throughout the film and not so much the glitteriness of the lighting.
• I really loved the music for this film. There is a common theme playing during the most suspenseful scenes of the film: a single G, with a string instrument (probably a violin or viola) playing a tremolo bowing, which means that the bow stays in one place on the string and goes really fast, producing a suspenseful sound. And intermittent with the G is a plucked G (in some cases, I heard the G of a piano). The music that I’m talking about starts at 1:09 in the trailer.

What makes this film’s music so excellent is that it is very simple. Even with the Handel, Bach and Vivaldi concertos and sonatas that play throughout the film, we still have this very simple theme that doesn’t require a lot of instrumentation but still keeps us on edge whenever there is a suspenseful scene. Yorgos also uses very austere but beautiful-sounding classical pieces in The Lobster to convey the darkness of the film.

June 17, 2019

Categories: movies

I was kind of down on my luck with the music career thing, so I wanted to see a movie that would inspire me to keep at it. I checked out The Soloist at the library because a friend told me about it, but I had wanted to read the book first before seeing the movie. I went ahead and saw it though because I just wanted to have some inspiration so that every day of practice didn’t feel like a grind.

After seeing this film, I can say it taught me to appreciate my musical playing more. It is based on the true story of double bassist Nathaniel Ayers, who attended Julliard but dropped out after developing symptoms of schizophrenia and suffering a nervous breakdown. Steve Lopez, a columnist for The Los Angeles Times, is struggling to keep his job and a good rapport with his coworker and ex-wife Mary. He finds Nathaniel playing a two-stringed violin under a statue of composer Ludwig van Beethoven in downtown Los Angeles. Nathaniel ran away from home after dropping out of Julliard, and is homeless. Steve is just focused on getting an interesting story for the newspaper so he can gain some credibility and feel good about himself, but Nathaniel doesn’t care about everyone else’s ideas of success. Steve contacts everyone who knew Nathaniel at some point: the Julliard Admissions Office, Nathaniel’s sister Jennifer. An elderly woman even donates her cello to Nathaniel (in the film, he plays the cello; in real life he played the double bass).

The movie addresses a lot of important issues: how able-bodied people treat individuals with mental illness, supporting homeless individuals, the idea of a successful music career, and the experiences of Black music students in predominantly white spaces. In the film, we flash back to when Nathaniel is at Julliard and he enjoys his time there at first, but then he develops symptoms of schizophrenia and has a hard time getting through his orchestra rehearsal because he hears voice telling him to leave Julliard and that he should give up his dreams. Now of course, actor portrayals of people with mental illness cannot speak for all real-life individual experiences with mental illness (serious props to Jamie Foxx though for going through such a difficult acting process. I was watching the special features of the DVD that talk about the film’s production, and Jamie said this role really took a lot out of him and his emotions because it was such a moving role to play and also was difficult in terms of playing the cello. From lived experience, I can tell you learning cello is no easy feat, so additional props to Jamie).

But at the least, the film shows how hard it can be living with any form of mental illness. There has been this “tortured artist” myth which somehow makes it seem like you just have to have a mental illness to be considered a real artist, that mental illness fosters artistic genius. I remember watching an interview by composer Nico Muhly and he said that people need to stop making it seem that mental illness is the reason behind artists’ genius. It’s not. Having depression is a day-in-day-out struggle, and while we use our art as a means of catharsis, one should never have to go through a suicidal breakdown in order to create meaningful art. Believe me, I’m living proof. Depression actually stifled my creativity. It told me I wasn’t a true artist, that I should give up. Nathaniel’s schizophrenia deters him from playing in front of people, it just straight up ruins his life. It wasn’t until I learned to treat my depression that I used my past suffering as inspiration for how I express myself when playing music.

The movie also made me think about how we define success as musicians. We typically think of success as making money and playing in front of lots of people in a packed concert hall, and while that is a mainstream definition of success, it’s not the only definition of success. When Nathaniel is with the other members of the LAMP community outside on the steps (5/24/21: I was curious what LAMP stood for and it originally stood for Los Angeles’ Men’s Place), his cello playing brings everyone together and lets people have that time and space to relax and contemplate. When Steve is sitting outside with him on the sidewalk and first gives Nathaniel the cello to play, he at first tries to give Nathaniel to stop playing after five minutes but then comes to understand that for Nathaniel, after running away from the competitive environment of music conservatory, music is his home. Music defines Nathaniel’s existence and survival. When he attends the rehearsal at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, he feels comfortable because it is just him and Steve instead of lots of people.

However, when Graham Claydon, the principal cellist of the L.A. Philharmonic, has Nathaniel perform for his first ever recital, Nathaniel flashes back to those tortuous days at Julliard and panics when Graham, who is a religious man, tries to get him to pray before heading on stage, and flees from Graham and the audience. While I don’t fully relate to Nathaniel, I remember how stressful my first professional orchestra audition was. When I auditioned for my college campus’s orchestra, I didn’t feel nervous because I knew I was going to still join the orchestra, and that the audition was just to determine which seat I would be in for the season. However, before my professional orchestra audition (this was after college), my depression got horrible and my anxiety went through the roof. I cried a lot, I remember feeling dead before the audition, the inner critic telling me I should jump off a cliff because I would never make it in the orchestra. I still played for the judges and did my best, but I remember still shaking even after the audition. For my second professional orchestra audition it wasn’t nearly as bad, but I still felt like I was going to vomit. My hands were shaking and my heart was pounding. I know nerves are normal, but while I played I couldn’t shake them. After getting rejected by the orchestra, I stopped playing much and stopped auditioning for orchestras. When I had my first recital in three years, I tried everything I could to stay calm beforehand, but when I got into the small recital hall, I felt once again like I was going to vomit. Nathaniel’s experience playing outside versus playing in a concert hall where everyone’s eyes are on you at all times taught me that we shouldn’t limit venues for classical music to concert halls, and while concert halls are nice, they are not always accessible or pleasant environments for musicians. I think Nathaniel’s experience also reminded me that community is just as important as the individual. Anyone of any career can get wrapped up in ideas of their own success, but classical musicians tend to do this a lot. And for young Black musicians, being in spaces where they don’t see anyone who looks like them is a challenging experience, especially if those students deal with both microaggressions and macroaggressions from non-Black musicians. While more orchestras and classical music organizations are addressing the issue of racial diversity, we still need to keep talking about it and recognize each individual Black musician’s experience. Of course, every Black classical musician can’t speak for each other’s experiences; some may feel ok in predominantly white spaces, other Black classical musicians may have had terrible experiences. Racial diversity in classical music is a topic that I have been thinking about it for some time, and I want to continue educating myself and talking about it.

Noa Kageyama wrote this piece called “Do Classical Musicians Get More Nervous Than Non-Classical Musicians (And If So, Why?)” and he explores performance anxiety in classical musicians versus non-classical musicians. Researchers did this study and found that while classical musicians experienced more performance anxiety and had less fun performing in front of people, they enjoyed practicing a lot. Most likely because when you’re a classical musician in a traditional music setting, you go off to a practice room by yourself, practice a few hours or more, and then you go out to perform. And of course, musicians of other genres do spend quite a bit of time on their craft, but they mainly focus on their performance experience and how to brush off nerves when performing. It’s why I enjoyed playing with orchestra or chamber music ensembles though because the focus was never on myself but on how the group functioned. Practicing is of course important, but if you get wrapped up in the idea of being perfect or good enough for people, or how you measure up to other musicians, it becomes more of an egotistical thing rather than doing the work of making music. We always need to strive for improvement, but when you’re going through a rough patch you want to transcend the idea that you should only play perfectly, and play music because you love it. Nathaniel, being away from the uptight music environment of college, gets to have a genuine human interaction with the composers he admires through playing his music outside of the concert hall. He isn’t worried about success, he loves playing music for its own sake, not to show off his talent or make lots of money. I think that when you transcend that ego-centered state of “Is everyone going to like my music?” you feel physically, emotionally and spiritually better.

Now, of course, I don’t want to romanticize Nathaniel being homeless. In fact, things are seeming to get problematic with regard to legislation around homelessness. Just yesterday, Steve Lopez wrote a piece about how the mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, wasn’t following up on his promises to address homelessness in the city with concrete solutions. Even though the LA government spent $16 billion to address the homeless population, homelessness still has increased by 16 percent. Lopez presents alternatives that organizations have used to provide access to resources for homeless people, such as SHARE, a nonprofit that finds homes for people and helps them move into these homes and find employment. Even though these programs like SHARE help, City Hall doesn’t provide much support, so it’s hard for them to expand. Now, as Lopez points out, Garcetti has been taking lots of initiative to address the increasing homeless population in L.A. and has fought tirelessly for more funding and more housing. Moreover, the power is divided between city and county agencies, so Mayor Garcetti can’t just do what he wants all the time. However, Lopez says that Garcetti should keep searching for other ways to address the needs of homeless citizens of Los Angeles and get at the true root of why these citizens are not getting adequate care they need, such as access to mental health resources.

Even though the film The Soloist came out a decade ago, it is still relevant to discussions on injustice, and has encouraged me to do more as a musician to bring social justice to the people. And here is an NPR piece on the book and film adaptation.

The Soloist. 2009. Rated PG-13 for thematic elements, some drug use and language.