beats - 2007 - Neal Cassady

Neal Cassady
Noah Buschel
2007
Jean Doumanian Productions
80 min

Neal Cassady is a biographical film focusing on Jack Kerouac's Dean Moriarty muse for On the Road, Neal Cassady. This film minimizes his friendship with Kerouac, confining their interactions to the first 20 minutes of the film. Most of the movie actually focuses on the second phase of Cassady's career as a behind-the-scenes countercultural protagonist, his relationship to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.

Cassady is a pivotal figure in American counterculture, first inspiring the beats to write and later befriending one of the best known hippie collectives of the era. His relevance is rooted in his friendships with the era-defining writers of these periods, and some of the scenes in this film use these writers interactions with Cassady as metaphoric markers of the passage of one era to another. In particular tensions are represented between Kesey and Kerouac. Kerouac is shown to reject the hippies who, in return, rejected him as well. Interestingly, Alan Ginsberg, who not only knew Cassady but also enjoyed relevance from one era to another, and was friends with Kesey himself, was not mentioned until 50 minutes into the film. The film is thus two travel narratives, first On the Road and Pranksters On the Bus.

Much of the movie is a simulation of 1960s film footage of the Prankster's cross-country bus trip or of a Ken Kesey party where Kesey pressures a drunken 1960s Keuroac to take acid. This shift in perspective and in media is a technique for conveying a sense of authenticity, and here it also refers to the hours and hours of film the pranksters shot of their voyage, film that was never edited into a proper film but nevertheless has found its way into countless documentaries about the 1960s.

The jazz music soundtrack largely signifies the beat era even if the film's emphasis is on the 1960s and psychedelia.

radical right - 1996 - The Siege at Ruby Ridge

The Siege at Ruby Ridge
Roger Young
1996
Victor Television Production
192 min.

The Siege at Ruby Ridge is a 1996 television mini-series dramatizing the events of the 1992 armed stand-off between the apocalyptic/survivalist Weaver family and multiple federal agencies at the northern Idaho Weaver homestead situated on a mountain hilltop called Ruby Ridge. The stand-off resulted in the deaths of Weaver matriarch Vicki Weaver, her son Sammy, their dog Striker, and a U.S. Marshal. The event was a catalyst for the anti-government far right movements of the 1990s and an episode in the excessive authoritarian force the U.S. government is willing to use to suppress nonconformist citizens. The story of the siege was, in brief, that an illegal firearms sale set off a sequence of events that escalated to an armed stand-off with three dead. For the Weavers, the stand-off was the apocalypse, and it confirmed all of their anti-government ideas and attitudes to be valid.

Something that interests me about the representations of the far right in America is that there is mainstream media willing to portray its figures positively. Probably the most extreme example is the heroic representation of the Neo-Nazi Daniel Vinyard in American History X. Whether as a Nazi or as an anti-racist, Vinyard always lives his ideals, and he suffers for them. Here too, in The Seige at Ruby Ridge, survivalist and Aryan Nations hangaround Randy Weaver, along with his wife Vicki, are represented as intense, unwavering, acolytes of their anti-government worldview who stand rocksteady when the FBI and US Marshals come for them. Randy falters for a moment, considering whether or not he should turn himself in over the charges stemming from an illegal firearms sale, but Vicki encourages him to stand strong against ZOG (ZOG is a white power consipiracy acronym referring to the 'zionist occupied government'). What really interests me is that this work is one of a small number of examples of American mainstream media that positively represents the far right, I am not aware of any such films, television shows, mini-series, etc that represent figures of the American left in a positive manner.

There are films of other countries representing leftists positively, such as the German films The Baader-Meinhof Complex, and The Edukators. There are the Stephen Soderberg Che films about the great Marxist guerrilla leader, a positive portrayal but of an international figure most strongly associated with the Cuban revolution. The 1999 TV movie The 60s portrays its leftist as dangerously ignorant youth who just need to grow up and learn how the world works. There are films about the Chicago 8 and the Black Panthers, for example, which portray their subjects positively but they're produced outside of media systems that draw mass audiences. The Siege at Ruby Ridge was a network TV movie shown on CBS. As far as I know there are no leftist counterparts to this.

The event of Ruby Ridge and the preservation of its memory as a historical example of a dramatic tragedy involving the government repressing non-conformist ideological minorities has its leftist counterparts. The story of Sacco and Vanzetti and the Haymarket Affair are two examples that have been represented in PBS documentaries and independent films. Right wing radicals are more likely to be be commemorated by mainstream American media with a sympathetic portrayal, presumably because their values more closely correspond with those that are dominant in America. I wonder if there will ever be a film like this, shown on network television, that represents the Michael Brown murder, for example, and the subsequent protests in a manner that is sympathetic to the protesters. Given the existing patterns demonstrated in media history, of the choices made in subject matter and ideologies represented in mainstream media, we're far more likely to see a TV movie positively representing the Bundy Ranch affair. A Ferguson film would likely focus on the anguish of the MI governor and other public officials, who have to make the tough decisions to return order.