Intrusive Thoughts
Every year, the Library of Congress picks twenty-five films that may send a message
Two of my favourite film days as an American come fairly close to one another. The National Film Registry just dropped their annual list, and of course it’s almost Public Domain Day. One is interesting on a purely historical perspective. The other often tells you what’s going on with the people who make the selections over at the Library of Congress. Their choices often come across, to me at least, as being their way of talking about the state of things while also preserving deserving materials.
This year’s full list, in chronological order, is as follows.
Now. It is true that I do not recognize all of those myself, and some of them take a bit of digging to discover what’s significant about them. Even some of the ones that seem purely innocent. It doesn’t take a lot to figure out what some of them are trying to say. Still, let’s go over this a bit at a time. With the understanding that I’m not trying to say any of these are undeserving, necessarily. Even the ones I don’t like or haven’t seen or what have you. But there’s definitely points being made.
“Annabelle Serpentine Dance” probably isn’t trying to say anything and is just a beautiful bit of early film, often shown hand-tinted. It’s a woman dancing, and it seems the most interesting thing about it is that it could be cranked at varying speeds to change how the dance looked. It’s on YouTube, because of course it’s in the public domain, and it looks really cool. I don’t think there’s a message involved, though Annabelle Moore is said, apparently, to have introduced eroticism into film, so maybe? Even that’s more than I can say for Invaders From Mars, which is bad but the first invading aliens movie filmed in colour.
I know what you’re thinking now. You’re thinking, “Even Star Trek II?” Friends, especially Star Trek II. You’re thinking Ricardo Montalban and his allegedly fake pecs, as well you ought. What the Library of Congress seems to me to be thinking, however, is “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few,” and Kirk’s eulogy declaring Spock to be the most human soul he’s ever known. Several movies on the list are about how real and human people outside your in-group are, and if that’s the first time anyone has put Star Trek II and Common Threads: Stories From the Quilt in the same category, well, buckle up, kids.
Because obviously Dirty Dancing is in that category. Johnny gets treated as lesser-than by large amounts of the cast for being “just a dancer.” There’s more there that we’ll be getting back to, but it’s a start. Angels With Dirty Faces has some of the same class issues as Dirty Dancing, albeit it goes very different places with them. Chelsea Girls is Warhol, so that’s a whole new group that is probably human with the exception of maybe Warhol himself.Zora Lathan’s student films appear to be (it’s hard to find specifics online) there to simply be images of black people having a good time. Even Spy Kids has a family of color, albeit one, you know, doing espionage-related things.
Powwow Highway is a Native American story that in part talks about the problems with things like strip mining on Native land and goes some into Native religion. So okay, My Own Private Idaho is kind of sort of Shakespeare’s Henriad, but also it’s about young male sex workers. Beverly Hills Cop is Eddie Murphy being genial while black. And, of course, the assorted films directed by PoC, which well get to in a minute, feature casts predominantly from that culture.
Dirty Dancing is also in the category of “hey, here’s a thing that’s banned that quite a lot of people would like to not be banned.” It’s the forgotten subplot about abortion that ties it into Up in Smoke and Cheech and Chong’s passionate fondness for marijuana, a fondness that is shared, if not quite to the same extent, with a hefty percentage of the population. And even a lot of us who don’t share it are opposed to current federal law on the subject. Angels With Dirty Faces, meanwhile, has the death penalty, which quite a lot of people are opposed to but which is still there.
A lot of the films are made by PoC. Cheech Marin, for example, who is in two of these movies. But among directors, we have Robert Rodriguez, of course. Uptown Saturday Night is directed by Sidney Poitier. (And, sigh, featured Bill Cosby.) Ganja and Hess, a black vampire movie directed by Bill Gunn. Will was directed by a black woman, Jessie Maple. Compensation is directed by Zeinabu irene Davis, also a black woman. Mi Familia, Gregory Nava—of Mexican and Basque descent. American Me, Edward James Olmos.
And of course, those last two are specifically about the Mexican experience in the US. A character in Mi Familia is deported despite being a US citizen because she looks Mexican, something that clearly could never happen again. American Me starts with the Zoot Suit Riots. Both films also talk about the role racism and poverty play in crime. No Country for Old Men similarly touches on cross-border crime, and Angels With Dirty Faces makes the point that crime stemming at least in part from poverty is not new and is not limited to immigrant communities. (In fact immigrant communities generally have lower crime rates than native-born ones.) And makes the point, as the others do, that children will follow what they see their elders do.
The Miracle Worker and Compensation are both about deaf people. Pride of the Yankees, of course, is about Lou Gehrig. (Who ironically turns out to have maybe not died of Lou Gehrig’s disease?) Common Threads is about AIDS victims and My Own Private Idaho includes narcolepsy in its plot. Illness has always been with us and always will be, and if a lot of deaf people do not consider themselves disabled, I think they can agree that Helen Keller’s (probably) meningitis was certainly an illness.
And, of course, we’re connected more than ever due to things like Facebook, for good and ill, and the people in charge have more power than is safe for us. Tech executives are not our friends and don’t have our best interests at heart. They are spiteful and petty, making bad decisions for bad reasons and thinking they’re the heroes of the story. They will lie to you if it’s in their own interest, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
Oh, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre? A creepy guy with unnatural skin who attacks us all and is particularly unpleasant toward women? Yeah, that’s clearly just because the Library of Congress is full of slasher fans.
About the writer
Gillian Nelson
Gillian Nelson is a forty-something bipolar woman living in the Pacific Northwest after growing up in Los Angeles County. She and her boyfriend have one son and one daughter, and she gave a child up for adoption. She fills her days by chasing around her kids, watching a lot of movies, and reading. She particularly enjoys pre-Code films, blaxploitation, and live-action Disney movies of the '60s and '70s. She has a Patreon account.
Gillian Nelson’s ProfileTags for this article
More articles by Gillian Nelson
Celebrating the Living
A talented actress whose career has not advanced as it should have.
Attention Must Be Paid
Arnold Stang, who appeared in a movie with "Arnold Strong" once.
Intrusive Thoughts
There was a time when musicals were about having the biggest gimmick possible.
Camera Obscura
One woman does what she can to help foster kids until she kind of becomes Cary Grant.
Department of
Conversation
I’d definitely agreee that the curation of this year’s LOC film registry list, as with the lists of the last decade and a half or so, reflect values pertaining to inclusivity in the areas of representation of, and by those individuals representing, race, gender, and disability. I’d have to prepare a spreadsheet on this (perhaps an end of the year project for this site) to see if the numbers of films focusing on inclusion have increased over the movies that have been widely recognized as “popular” among the general populace, based on sustained viewership or recognition. It might also be interesting to see how the films chosen over the first four years of the LOC mirror those of the AFA’s top 100 American motion picture list, which were compiled by a narrower demographic of the population and were geared towards a more universal (or white cis male ableist dominant, if you prefer) set of factors to determine American Cinema’s cultural viability.
The issue of viability forms an implicit bias in these lists. There is an emphasis on affirmation in these selections over calling attention to the more controversial, or negative, aspects of representation, even if these are important to American history (or are part of a film that has left an otherwise significant cultural footprint). Should such lists, justifying themselves on the basis of educating the populace on cultural history, include films like TRADER HORN or TARZAN AND HIS MATE because they underscore racist and colonialist worldviews embedded in popular genres? My guess is that earlier lists have unintentially accomplished this, but problematic representation wasn’t cited, or emphasized, in their inclusion (BIRTH OF A NATION, or perhaps GONE WITH THE WIND excepted). Lists such as these provoke interesting duscussions on the definition of a national culture, but they don’t in and of themselves stand in as an evidence bank for a discussion of that culture due to affirmation bias and the pragmatic institutional imperative to minimize controversy.