BunnyBlinks

My admiration of Emma Thompson helped me to overcome my reluctance to watch the movie Stranger than Fiction. Watching the movie was a small triumph over my fear that Queen Latifa would settle for yet another roll that might call into question her royal designation.

Last week, my friend John and I were discussing the movie at a favorite local restaurant, whose kitchen, by the way, is lovingly managed by my friend, the culinary genius Chef Jen. The restaurant sits across the street from Madison’s Barrymore Theater, whose marquee is more likely to advertise a sold-out John Prine or Moe show than something I’d be more likely to attend. (For the record, I’ve seen a few amazing shows there during my time in Madison: I’ll never forget dancing to Moby’s “Go,” after which he commented on the appropriateness of the faint, twinkling light’s on the theater’s ceiling, nor could I ever forget Cibo Mato’s sexily slogging hard-core cover of “Welcome to the Jungle” — if anyone is able to find a clip of them playing that song, please send it my way.)

Anyway, the movie includes a few scenes where Dustin Hoffman’s character gives us a lesson on narrative, and John and I were discussing one of the main (and self-referential) themes of the film: does this particular screenplay (and the fictional novel whose writing the screenplay examines) have to be a tragedy — this kind of tragedy, not this — for the story to have any value?

Staring across the street at The Barrymore, I remembered how Michael Franti had recently performed there. I missed the show, and the accounts of my many friends who attended suggest I missed a good time. I’ve never listened to much of Franti’s music, in part, I suppose, because what I’ve heard is a little too overtly political lyrically for my ear to nuance it in a way that can make the music enjoyable for me. (Franti’s audience might’ve been an issue for me some years ago, but these are different times, and I’d like to think I’m over my old hang-ups.)

Drawing on our respective fields of study, John and I discussed a few plots and heroes before I suggested that our mutual distaste for the “Hollywood ending” was arguably rooted more in a distaste for predictability than a belief that a character has to die.

I thought about the first time I’d heard “We Don’t Stop,” which was one of only a few Franti songs I’d heard when it came out in 2003, a year by which many of us had come to internalize the sense of depression and futility with which the Bush regime was weighing us down. No one seemed to listen to our complaints, and the few heroic voices we could seek out were so faint they didn’t need to be silenced. They just were ignored.

“We Don’t Stop” struck me as different. Its message was political, critical, and even artistically expressed. The music demanded we remember we could still dance, and not simply to escape the reality that we’d somehow allowed W to not only come to power, but to take away our own. I won’t entirely dismiss Franti’s neo-neo-Adornian critics (of the non-academic world — I admit they might not call themselves that), that his music is so polished, poppy, and over-produced that the lyrics are rendered trite, or somehow inauthentic. Still, the song is a good opening for a discussion of contemporary artistic responses to tragedy. Do heroes have to die? Is it wrong to experience joy if we seek to accept responsibility for our political sins?

“We Don’t Stop,” like Stranger then Fiction, makes a good case for preserving the life of the hero. Who could possibly wish harm upon this guy, who was inspired by the song to do, um, whatever this is:

Compare “We Don’t Stop” to “Positive,” a Franti song he recorded (when his band made music under the name “Spearhead”) nearly a decade earlier. I liked it then and I like it now, even though it’s one of those songs it’s hard to lose yourself in, on account of its direct (even if smooth) commentary on another globally shared personal and traumatic cultural experience.

Props to Franti for directly confronting AIDS at one of those recurring moments where society begins to ignore it, and for doing so in a style that self-consciously reached out to a demographic that was beginning to realize it was disproportinately afflicted by AIDS, and needed to fight back. We certainly don’t want the protagonist of “Positive” to die, but I struggle to hear anything in the music that tells us he won’t.

The funky beats of “We Don’t Stop” give us permission to accept that there really is hope.

Happy Thanksgiving.