These movies are not tickets to escapism. If you don’t want more proof that some people’s (too many people’s) lives are way too hard, don’t watch them. But you should watch them, and you should bring friends. And tissues.
LA MISMA LUNA (Under the Same Moon)
A mother and son through a week of their respective journeys to be reunited across borders, despite all who stand in their way (be they La Migra, exploitative employers, police, or even folks trying to help). Bonus: this film has one of the best nine-year-old actors I have ever seen.
STOP-LOSS
A soldier and his fellows as they return from Iraq to civilian life, only to find that the President has “stop-lossed” them, sending them back to Iraq, regardless of whatever they have to say about the matter.
These two movies deal with different communities facing different battles, and yet their core features, which make them great movies, are shared:
1. They’re both really good movies.
2. They have strong female characters.
3. They show that the government is not always our friend.
4. They pull you in one way and then another, ripping your heart along with you, so much that you never know just how things will turn out.
5. Some of the saddest characters are the ones I would least expect.
6. They give glimpses of worlds rarely portrayed with such richness in movies: the nuts and bolts of the US economy in the former, the mortar fire on the ground in the Iraq war in the latter.
7. They both present the real life decisions we have to make (or we don’t have to make - in which case, we should be wondering why we don’t).
8. You should really see them both. But maybe not on consecutive nights - I speak from experience on that.
Yet again, we mourn this hellish incarnation of war. This war is on Iraq, and it is showing yet again why all war is humanity’s great sin.
Here are some pictures: one sign from today’s rally at San Francisco’s Civic Center (put to good use); the other sign from the two-way protest at Berkeley City Council a few weeks ago (the one where the Lafayette Flag Brigade deigned to enter Berkeley city limits in order to sing patriotic songs (poorly) and make it known to anyone who would listen that they didn’t like the Berkeley City Council’s decision to support the Code Pink protests at the Berkeley Marine recruiting station; in response, ‘Code Pinklets’ (as the Flag Brigadiers called them) and folks from the World Can’t Wait campaigns staged a counter-protest; I’ll let you guess which protest this sign is from).
The pictures below are from the memorial vigil at Grace Cathedral. As an acolyte passed among the crowd dispersing incense, clergy from various faiths (among them Christian, Buddhist, and Jewish) read off the names of victims of this war on Iraq. We crowded around them, standing among pairs of shoes placed on the cathedral steps.
The effect of the shoes was profound. I appreciated the somber tone of the vigil, even while my soul is fed by the liturgy of street protests just as much. The memorial vigil allowed me a few moments to pause and try to really remember the loss, as Jesus urged us to do as his disciples.
I imagined the people who, but for being murdered by this war, might have stood there on the steps filling those shoes. There would have been hundreds of them, thousands, hundreds of thousands - the actual number don’t really matter when mourning. Too many. I wondered if they would stand in those shoes staring out from the steps, as the shoes were pointing, facing the world with accusing eyes, or if they might turn around and listen to the prayers being spoken from the top of the cathedral steps.
With the lessons from my Swedenborgian friend still fresh on my mind, I understood for the first time the concept of angels, at least as she describes them: the disembodied presence of those humans who have died but are still among us. And even though fear (and its companion, hatred) was the source of their deaths, these angels only love, and ask us to remember.
I also knew that a pair of shoes was not nearly enough to remember the complexity of even one single person lost in this war. Standing next to my partner and amongst many of my dear friends, I felt just how much effort it would take to properly remember anyone so dear to me as them.
Shoes were not made to memorialize murders; they are not strong enough to bear the burden. But they are an important start.
