Working in Protest

Unfussy and raw, Working in Protest charts a series of protests in America, mainly from the mid 1980s to Trump's presidential inauguration.

Working in Protest isn't driven by a specific message. For 76 minutes, we are simply privy to the United States' social fissures that seem to widen with each passing decade, swallowing more and more of its ordinary citizens whole.

The massive divide between the upper and lower classes is at its most depressingly cavernous during nearly every protest, regardless of the decade. One can't help but feel disgust when defenseless protestors are clobbered by cops who are up to their eyeballs in hardware and weaponry; they look less to my un-American eyes like lawmen and more like chunky, armoured monsters. Even when bedlam is not ensuing, the sheer difference between the cops and the civilians is enough to make you wince at the possibility of what all that weaponry could do to an unprotected face.

What's the expression? When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

This reaches a nadir of sorts when Working in Protest documents the Occupy Wall Street movement. One protestor, a jacked war veteran, obviously no stranger to violence, angrily pleads with the cops: “How can you do this to your own people? How do you sleep at night?!” Neither the cops nor the filmmakers can offer an answer. 

I appreciated the lack of answers by the filmmakers here. They trust us to make the connections, to ponder what they're showing and why. Forgoing narration and ironic pop music to paper the cracks or to get an agenda across, the directors, Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley, are instead right there in the thick of the mess, and this grants the documentary a gripping immediacy. During 2004, when the Iraq War was a year in, they ventured to the centre of Times Square and asked pedestrians for any thoughts on the war. Most were either for it or ambivalent. Two children expressed innocent distaste. Everyone else declined to answer. Clearly nobody there knew what a colossal disaster it was shaping up to be, for either the world or their economy. It was quite an unnerving sequence. 

Fast-forward to a decade later, when Black Lives Matter was snowballing into a movement. Working in Protest takes us to a small Black Panther rally in North Carolina. The leader preaches to the crowd gathered around his home. He talks of generational trauma; a trauma which courses through the veins most terribly when a young black person is pulled over by the cops for no obvious reason and they begin physically shaking. The leader begins a chant. The huge man standing guard beside him accidentally chants out of time. Everyone laughs for a moment and the big guy blushes. Working in Protest is peppered with these unexpectedly tender moments of humanity amid rage and sorrow.

Then there are the Trump rallies. The crowd at these rallies are a mix of gun-toting, right-wing militia psychos, amoral opportunists giddily making a quick buck off sleazy merchandise, and middle-aged white people whose dishonest geniality is somehow just as disturbing as lunatic ramblings or unscrupulous profiteering. I'm glad that Working in Protest chose not to show footage of Trump hamming it up for the crowd; that'd be too easy, too blunt. Instead, they kept the filmic eye on the sorts of folks who'd want to show up to such a carnival of grotesquerie in the first place. As a few stragglers enter the arena to watch Trump bloviate, a guy greets them sarcastically with "Heil, Trump" and "White power". A pissed off cop approaches the guy, telling him to knock it off, that there's a difference between inciting violence and free speech. Members of the KKK in this film are given no such stern lecture. On the contrary, there are moments where the policemen greet them with an obscene neighbourly smile.  

But not all of it is so hopeless. During Trump's inauguration, some Bernie/Hillary supporters and Trump supporters seem close to trading blows. But that never happens. Instead they begin a dialogue and hear each other out for an entire minute. It was like someone lit a candle in a formless, pitch black room.

You Never Had It: An Evening with Charles Bukowski

Neither a fictionalised narrative nor a documentary, You Never Had It: An Evening with Charles Bukowski is a fuzzy old home-video of famous (infamous?) German-American author Charles Bukowski and his lady friend Karen entertaining a few guests in their living room, drinking bottles and bottles of red wine, and smoking enough cigarettes to fill up a handful of ashtrays.

Said fuzzy old home-video was unearthed by an old friend of Bukowski's, Italian journalist Silvia Bizio, in 2016. In fact she was facilitating much of the conversation throughout the evening. Bizio spiced it up with some music, some edits, and voila – An Evening with Charles Bukowski.

First, a little background information. Bukowski didn't write for a living until he was 50 years old. Up until that point, he was subsisting on meagre dough made from working in post offices, factories and gambling at the racetracks. He details this in explicit terms in his first few books, Post Office, and Factotum. Hard-living is a major recurring theme throughout his entire oeuvre, even when fame and fortune afforded him shelter from the shadier and lonelier LA streets..

This is an interesting glimpse into the mind behind some of the foulest and funniest novels ever written. It's interesting because there's nowhere for him to hide, no way for him to edit himself. Bukowski the Man chooses his words carefully, whereas Bukowski the Author casually plucks profundity from thin air. Bizio both challenges and flatters him. And he in turn reveals more of himself as the bottles of wine pile up. Their back-and-forth adds quite a bit of crackle and heat to what is ostensibly meant to be a convivial evening between friends.

Bizio gently prods him, questioning why his novels are filled with so much sex. He shrugs and replies because it's how you make money. Which is the most Bukowski answer to anything ever. Still, it was surprising to learn that he of all people is indifferent to matters of sex. But he expounds on his initial answer, pivoting from sex to love, insisting that certain things are “better not expressed or said”. The camera zooms in on Karen's glassy eyes as he drones on about the virtue of not expressing certain feelings. It was the one pointed shot in the whole video. And yet throughout the whole evening Bukowski and Karen share an easy physical affection with one another. But they say they've gone long periods where they've decided that celibacy is the best thing for their relationship. To quote Larry David in that one Woody Allen film, "Whatever works."  

To put it bluntly, Charles Bukowski is a physically ugly man. He's got a crumpled face that'd compel a frugal man to charitably part with all the spare change in his wallet if the question "Got any spare change?" should pass through those dead looking lips. To put it more bluntly, if Bukowski were a chair he'd be made out of broken glass and rusty nails. But his drawl is calming -- lyrical, even. And he's so slyly funny and without pretension that when he claims without pride or shame that he's had sex with lots and lots of women, it's easy to believe him; his charisma is undeniable. 

Naturally, Bizio asks him what he thinks of other living famous novelists. 

His low opinion of his contemporaries is unsurprising if you're one iota familiar with him and his work; he hates them, thinks their heads are up their asses, and that without the type-writer, they're detestable pricks. He liked one or two other living writers, but he never named names. However, he said of highly regarded author Henry Miller something to the effect of “He's on the ground for two or three pages, but then he trails off into the stars and it's frustrating,” which brilliantly articulates my own maddening experience of reading Miller's novels and why I'm always drawn to Bukowski's work even though I'm pretty sure I know what I'm gonna get. It's not about matters of reality and fantasy -- after all, some of my favourite stories of his are the science fiction ones -- but more that Bukowski is one of the few – well, was – writers of fiction who wasn't so full of writerly guff and self-importance, lurid and black and ghastly though his fiction often was. If he wrote about the "stars", as he did so with his last novel Pulp, you'd swear his feet were still on the ground.  

If you're at all a fan of Charles Bukowski and his work, find a way to see this. It sings with the same truth that has immortalised his best work.