I think I should begin by offering a
disclaimer: the majority of my friends (meaning people I hang out with) are
younger than me. I don’t know how this came to be, but I think I can remember
when it happened. Around 2008, I was living with my girlfriend (now wife) in a
cozy apartment on Margaret Street in Binghamton, New York. The ceilings were
high, the backyard tiny, and the utilities taken care of by our landlord. I was
hanging out with my high school friends at the time, each from the previous
year’s graduating class. My friend Steve moved to Syracuse with my brother,
while my friend Justin and I hung back. This essentially left him as my lone
source of platonic companionship. He got married, had a kid and our time
together dwindled quite unsurprisingly. This led to me meeting two friends from
a band that I had played shows with about a year before. They essentially threw
shows and parties at their dilapidated house on Chapin Street, only a fifteen
minute bike ride from my apartment. If I always seem to come back to “the music
scene”, it’s because indigenous art has pulled me out of many funks, and in
this case it stalled obsolescence.
I cherish these friendships, even as I’m made
fully aware of the desperation that upholding them ensues. Put simply, I
sometimes can’t keep up. Just last Sunday I was invited to go “gorge jumping”
in Ithaca, an invitation I had to decline for various dad reasons. At 32, I
absorb vitality however and whenever I can though my wild days are waning
swiftly. In this way I can relate to a lot of the awkward pandering and
embarrassment endured by Josh and Cornelia in Noah Baumbach’s While We’re
Young. Like Tara and me, they have their snug dull existence shaken up by pesky
youngsters, only in Baumbach’s world everyone eventually becomes full-fledged
villains. This misanthropic turn of events is more in step with his early films
where bitter/tetchy middle-aged/upper class white rascals stare down their
noses at everyone brave enough to step in front of their peripheral vision with
nothing resolved and no lessons learned. This movie is kinder, more in line
with his previous Frances Ha, which finds him looking benevolently upon the
same type of young soul that his latest gazes at with an indignant leer. This
works for the first half of the movie because the japing isn’t exclusive to the
youth but the movie unfortunately wanders into the ethics-in-documentary-territory
where characters reveal their true colors and the movie loses much of the
whatever pleasure and insight it had to begin with.
Of course, while watching the movie Tara and
I laughed uncomfortably at Josh’s unfortunate style and social decisions while
part of me wondered if she was really just relating too much to the material.
There is devious montage where Baumbach swiftly chronicles the divergences
between the old and the young; the Roku vs. the VCR, typewriter vs. computer,
etc. The basic idea being that younger people are finding uses for the things
old people threw away hoping they will somehow mature them beyond their years
whilst old people lap up the convenient technology being hurdled at the young
in hopes that it will hinder aging. As I said before I’m not opposed to
absorbing vitality, and being from Binghamton, which is second in America for
both obesity and depression, I approach spots like the ones filmed in
gentrified Brooklyn with a mixture of horror and shame. On one hand, these
bastards are just a shallow/entitled scourge driving out the indigenous
population and wearing matching uniforms to better identify friends and foes.
They are the non-conformists who think that by shunning convention they aren’t
actually conformists. And we squares are bitter about their very existence,
mostly because we’ve settled into our tedious ruts but partly because their
style is so fucking stupid. So I find myself in the city quite often, usually
in the anodyne hotbeds, and have the nerve to return home feeling disgruntled
and disgraced in many of the same ways that Josh is. I can see how this annoys
Tara, but I’m not entirely ashamed of my pathetic self. While I’m not eager to
wear a fedora or don wingtips without socks, I’m also not willing to capitulate
myself to the ways of the Twilight Zone. I’m going to travel, and by gum I’ll
sop up whatever cool rites I please, regardless of whether or not they stay or
matter.
While We’re Young ends with an image that’s
supposed to leave our ill-fated couple at an age assimilation conundrum. It
ponders the parental path of least resistance and its emotional value in this
modern hopeless age, all of these trivial problems dwarfed when side by side
with Abderrahmane Sissako’s magnificent Timbuktu. In this movie, which I have
frequently called a masterpiece with little to no reluctance, Jihadists
infiltrate and occupy the West African city with foreseen tragic results. Timbuktu
has dealt with the scary realities of Sharia law since 2012 so the events have
chilling reality. Mauritania
born Sissako spent most of his life in Mali, thus he
undoubtedly bared witness to a passive way of life being interrupted and sent
on a slow decline towards complete religious rule as well as all of the
suffocating repercussions therein.
In Timbuktu the majority of our time and
empathy is reserved for a cattle herder named Kidane, his wife Satima, and
their daughter Toya though we get mini-glimpses into many lives throughout. Kindane’s
rural existence is relatively peaceful in contrast to his municipal neighbors. He
lives with nominal dealings with the invaders until a slip in judgment renders
him a criminal, requiring him to face the full extent of Sharia law, but more
on that later.
The opening of the film is the image of a young
gazelle being chased by the Jihadists, who are urged to not shoot it but to
“wear it down,” a frighteningly clairvoyant symbol for the sorrow ahead. But
while I’m certainly painting a gloomy miserable picture for you, Timbuktu isn’t
as one-dimensional as all of that. The villains are villains in their
livelihood alone but they aren’t completely stripped of their humanity
altogether. The boss for instance, an older Libyan gent, exhibits a certain
kind refinement in several instances even as he is ultimately obliged by his
faith to act the part of a bully. This is a big part of the point here; that
duty-bound men are dangerous in their predestined lack of options. It’s just
another form of erroneous desperation, where most crimes find their impetus.
Sissako isn’t excusing anyone, but in the age of such thunderous terror as
we’ve seen lately many seem to prefer their villains cackling and pillaging,
the lack thereof in Timbuktu sparked Mayor Jacques-Alain Bénisti to ban the film sight-unseen from
the Paris suburb of Villiers-sur-Marne.
As the gang enters, they enter incompetent
and fairly pitiable like most men. They find themselves bumbling straightforward
tasks such as riding a motorcycle, driving standard, or even speaking clearly.
Being a multilingual throng they can barely speak to each other, which is
fitting considering the capricious rules they are obliged to impose. These are
laws that force women to wear gloves while handling fish while covering their
heads, each of these much against their will. They also require all fun activities
subsist such as futbol or singing. The townsfolk mimic the latter to no
consequence while the act of making music proves to be the catylist for the “justification”
of violence that these otherwise inconsequential oppressors have been waiting
for. The city’s tranquil pace proved a sturdier fortress to penetrate, but they
eventually wore them out as forseen. From there we get a glimpse into the
horrors of Sharia law from lashes, forced marriage, and a horrific image of an
adulterous couple buried to their heads and stoned to death.
----- While it’s tempting to pat ourselves on
the back too loudly from our comfy Western perch, it’s important to note that
this type of zealous aggression isn’t exclusive to Islam, though they are
certainly the current poster boys for the type of foolhardy behavior that disgruntled
sociopaths that religion seems to attract. The net spreads wide and typically
snatches the likes of lost men with a wearisome lack of self worth. I’m
reminded of the pathetic ineffectual dopes who ruled over Trinity Baptist
Church in Burlington, Vermont where I was forced to attend following the death
of my grandmother. This creepy congregation was under the antiquated teachings
of the nefarious Bob Jones, who if left to his own devices would probably enact
a similar horrifying coercion had it not been for Legislative, Executive, Judiciary
institutions that thankfully keep militant Christians somewhat at bay. The
bottom line being that Ayaan Hirsi Ali had a point when shedding light on the intrinsic
problem of religion rather than the constant insistence that it’s just a few
guys “distorting” things. Similarities always seem to include the male gender and
a healthy dose of anger and frustration towards their own unimportance. ------
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