On the anniversary of Elvis Presley's death this year, the 'Fesser and the cinetrix found themselves on the Jersey Turnpike. Hey, it happens even to the best of us. College students had begun their annual migration back to campuses up and down the eastern seaboard, so we shared the road with many "safe" SUVs packed full of stuff and festooned with university decals.
Then we saw the kid heading back to Tulane. Now, if you know anything about Tulane, you know it traditionally attracts a fair number of students from the Tri-State area. But something about seeing this girl heading back to New Orleans, mostly likely after some serious family discussions about whether continuing in the ruined Crescent City made sense for her, just about brought me to tears.
So we dialed up our pal the Sultan down in NOLA to let him know that Jersey ["Only the Strong Survive"] was sending one of its children down to drink Hurricanes and vomit in the streets once more. We had second lined out of his wedding at the New Orleans Botantical Garden back in March of this year, so we had some idea of what this kid had chosen.
He was girding himself for the evening, when he would be joining his fellow citizens for the world premiere of Spike Lee's documentary, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. [It airs in full on HBO tonight.] I encouraged him to tell you nice people about it here, if he wanted. What follows is his account.
Be good to one another today, people, and consider breaking bread together tonight.
High Water
I saw the premiere of Spike Lee's When The Levees
Broke in the New Orleans Arena with 4,000 other people, most
of whom had gone through exactly what they were about to see. As I walked in, I talked with several people
and we all had the same idea: We didn't
need to see this. We had been living
it. The folks who need to see this are
the ones living in D.C.. If Spike had
guts, he'd get a big projector and screen it on the face of the White House and
the Capitol for all to see. After Spike--all in white--introduced it, we settled in for the entire 4-hour ride.
And it was a rough one. Everyone in New Orleans has the most direct
emotional connection to what most people watched on TV. It hurts to see folks walking through waist-deep water and the piles of debris that still haunt our nightmares. It's a physical pain and a catch in our
breath. This is us to whom this
happened. However, the movie let the
whole story unwind in a deliberate fashion, trading newsreels from those
torturous days with interviews after the fact. It is wrenching to hear from people like the man whose grandmother
died at the Convention Center--and he had to LEAVE her! He put his cell phone number on a piece of
paper in her hand, draped a sheet over her wheelchair, and got on the bus.
It is also sad to see grown men like
heroic radio broadcaster Garland Robinette or composer and musician Terence
Blanchard break down and cry on camera when recounting the ordeal. There is a sequence where Terence takes his
mother back to her house--which was flooded with 8 feet of water--in Ponchartrain Park for the
first time that again brings out the scope and depth (no pun intended) of this
tragedy that we will be dealing with for the rest of our lives.
About three and a half hours into the film, there
is a funeral for a 6-year-old boy whose body was found in the wreckage of his
house six months after the flood. At that
point, I couldn't take any more and walked out. I knew that point would come and was surprised I had sat there as long
as I had.
Another surprising thing is that the
film has many funny moments. Interviews
with folks out in St. Bernard Parish who are outraged at their treatment
before, during, and after the storm are laugh-out-loud funny. A recurring character is Phyllis Montana
Langley (I think that is her name), who got stuck out in the East. In the way that many people in New Orleans
will tell you exactly what they think in very colorful yet not necessarily
obscene language, she tells you in no uncertain terms what she went through and
what she thinks, and it is hilarious in its poignancy.
There have been criticisms that
Spike didn't put in the white people's point of view. That's bullshit. There are plenty of white people in the
interviews. He should have focused his
camera on other devastated parts of the city besides the "famous" Lower 9th
Ward, which is where all the shots of rubble and houses on upturned trucks come
from. He also could have taken some of
the black local leaders to task for their lack of preparations instead of just
blaming everything on the feds (even though most of the aftereffects are and continue
to be the fault of the government run by W. and Dick.) He also gives a little too much credence to and
does not definitively refute the wrong rumor that "they" blew up the levee in
the 9th Ward.
Those criticisms aside, When The
Levees Broke is necessary viewing for everyone: to see what nature can do and
what the government can't. It is a
warning, because as Jello Biafra has said in this world of W., “Today, New
Orleans; tomorrow, America.”
The cinetrix is an avid cinephage, constantly devouring images. So in addition to teaching film this semester, I am sitting in on a colleague's film noir class. Mostly, it's an excuse to commune with some of my favorite flinty flicks. But it's also a connection to my friend Rob, who lovingly built up an amazing collection of films noir at the video store we worked at together. It was tough watching Bogey in The Maltese Falcon yesterday without thinking of Rob, but it also was comforting to skulk around the Hotel Belvedere and find it and its shifty denizens unchanged.
