Rare free time this morning, so I thought I would jot down a few thoughts on the new film, The Descendants. This is a movie I’d been looking forward to for a long time for two reasons: the presence of my favorite contemporary writer/director, Alexander Payne, and for its setting, the islands of Hawai’i. Although I have no desire to write anything on him (the Anderson book—stay tuned later today—will be my last auteur study for the foreseeable future), Payne has always had a special place in my heart for reasons I’ll touch on below.
One thing I will be writing a book on in the near future, however, are US media images of Hawai’i—in particular, film and television, but also books, records, and so forth. The Hawai’i project has been postponed a year or so because of the digital cinema project, which has taken precedence only because I’ve spent so much time teaching it in the last ten months or so. Once the Anderson book is completely finished--as in, off to the printer--I imagine the Hawai’i project will slide back in to its slot—probably summer of 2013. Ironically the Hawai’i project doesn’t cover contemporary media—it’s intended to span roughly the 1930s to 1970s, as I will focus on a particular wartime generation (WWII, Korea, Vietnam) of US audiences in relation to those images of the islands. But I’m still very interested in how recent stuff, such as The Descendants, “represent” Hawai’i.
As an auteur vehicle, I was quite disappointed in The Descendants, but as a story of contemporary Hawai’i, its probably one of the better texts I’ve seen in awhile. I think part of why I’ve always loved Payne’s films is two-fold—its keen sense of middle-class, middle-America, and the way they manage to present completely self-delusional characters as nonetheless endearing and even deeply moving. I guess because we are both from the mid-sized towns of the Midwest, I’ve always felt his take on the area and its personalities genuine, even sympathetic.
Some people find his movies condescending, but to me Payne, and his collaborator Jim Taylor, always seemed to understand the complex contradictions of identity, belief, and motivation, which underlined the characters' behavior—and thus I never found them one-dimensional stereotypes. To give one example, they are one of the few in recent years to really get the use of voice-over narration right—using what is a very clichéd, and potentially lazy, device, to really create layers of conflicts in their characters. In its own gentle way, the Payne/Taylor-produced Cedar Rapids (2011) was much closer in spirit to their earlier work than The Descendants. It didn’t have the same satirical bite or sense of melancholia to it as an Election or About Schmidt, but it was dealing with the same kind of people.
As a narrative experience, I found The Descendants one-dimensional, and filled with less interesting characters. I think Clooney gives a good performance, but I feel like he had less to work with than Paul Giamatti, Matthew Broderick or Jack Nicholson. The film establishes itself as a tearjerker in the opening minutes and honestly I was surprised at how it never really evolved beyond that. The whole movie feels like the same scene over and over again—different people finding out that the same person is going to die. There is other plot line (namely, an extramarital affair investigated), but nothing really comes of it, and in the end it feels like a way to just prevent the whole movie from taking place in a hospital room.
Maybe, I’m being too harsh, but I was really shocked at how unrelentingly sincere the film ultimately is—I don’t object to tearjerkers in and of themselves, but if there are no personal contradictions, no narrative inconsistencies, to work through, the movie becomes quickly repetitive. Just a lot of under-developed characters standing around, crying.
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Anyway, that aside, I found the representation of Hawai’i fascinating—far savvier than Saving Sarah Marshall, the new Hawaii Five-O, episodes of Modern Family and Cougar Town, or even my beloved Punch-Drunk Love. All of those recent texts, and others, perpetuate the same idea—Hawai’i as an ahistorical utopia, a hub of leisure culture connected to, but also firmly uprooted from, the Mainland.
But The Descendants articulates something very different--retaining, but also deconstructing a distinctly white lens on the Islands. To a degree, this latest film certainly depends upon some of the same standard, ancient iconography (i.e., every other beach in Hawai’i apparently has Diamond Head in the background, etc.), but pulls back the curtain slightly on some of the more troubling historical and economic contexts underlining the usual utopic depictions of the islands as pure leisure paradise.
Another subplot in the film is the impending sale of a hugely lucrative piece of beach property in Hawai’i that is owned by the ironically titled "King" family (led by Clooney). The film implies, but never directly states, what is obviously the case—that his descendants stole the land from the Hawaiians, and thus really have no right to profit by selling it. The passage of centuries has allowed generations of the family to plead ignorance on the subject now--even to be ignorant about being ignorant.
Of course, its possible to argue that The Descendants itself may be oblivious to the true, ugly extent of this history as well—since its presentation of “history” is passive at best. But, early in the movie, King narrates a montage of the poverty which exists throughout the islands today, and thus playing up the grotesque income disparity there—particularly, between the haoles and native Hawaiians. This suggests the movie is keenly aware of issues of class, though I suppose its also possible to argue that the moment of “poverty in paradise” is little more than another Payne irony.
The Descendants speaks to the notion of a postmodern colonial culture—I use “postmodern” in two senses of the word. For one, there is the lack of historical consciousness. Most (predominately white) people who view Hawai’i as an escape from their lives are oblivious to the ugly history of direct and indirect forms of colonialism that underline the islands’ contemporary culture of tourism. For another, I mean “postmodern” in that more rigorous Jamesonian sense—the lack of class consciousness (strictly speaking, of course, historical consciousness in the Marxist sense is defined through the aware of class dialectics).
The Descendants shrewdly plays up in a couple of scenes—first in a board room, later at a barbeque—how fat, lazy white guys in floral shirts and khaki shorts are the postmodern iteration of plantation owners, literally descended from the coffee land barons who conspired to overthrow the sovereign Hawaiian monarchy in 1893—unconsciously seeking to exert the same level of control and power today, but hiding behind the cultural logic of late capitalism.
