So, I just rewatched The Grapes of Wrath this evening, and golly by golly, it has to be one of the saddest stories ever told. We had to stop it twenty minutes short because class was over, and seeing how last twenty minutes are the most tragic part, we didn't even watch the worst of it. But you could feel the spirit of the class puddling around our shoes when the lights came on...a very real way to start "Class, Poverty, and Politics" this semester.
It is always a unique experience re-encountering things you have encountered before - it becomes so much more clear to you what effect time and growth has had on you in the space between. The book made a great impression on me as a teenager, partly because of the horrible fate of the Joads, and partly because of the language. Steinbeck's use of Midwestern dialect was credited as making the book accessible, but I found it be full of words that couldn't be looked up in the dictionary. For example, I have a strong memory of the whole chapter about jalopies, which I thought were some kind of strange fruit until my teacher explained they were lemon cars. I also remember how "Rose of Sharon" was written "Rosasharn" to emulate the dialect, but I really thought the character's name was "Rosasharn," not "Rose of Sharon," largely because I didn't know that rose of sharon is a plant (which my mother told me) and from the bible (which evangelical classmates informed me).
Watching the film again, which I haven't seen in four or five years, brought some of these memories back. It also struck me how superficially I understood the film the first and second, and probably third, time I watched it. As a teenager, I thought it was just a sad story about the Great Depression. Sort of like movies about the Holocaust - you watch them and feel a wrenching sensation in your gut because it's not pleasant to reflect on the horrible things we have done to each other, especially when we are in need. But then you go home and watch Boy Meets World and do your calculus homework, and that's that. To feel badly about or for someone is not the same as being reflexive.
Before we started the film this evening, our professor asked us to think about the relevance of The Grapes of Wrath to today. What if this film just came out? Where do we see the themes of this film played out today? What similarities exist between the Great Depression and our great recession? And so now being reflexive was built into the viewing. It was no longer an old black and white movie with some sad-looking poor people in it. They were more human to me now, more real. And the utter tragedy of their situation was not one that was bandaged by Roosevelt and some rain, but timeless. It persists. It rages on.
At the end of class, the professor pointed out a line where the Joads are refused admittance to a town by a group of torch-bearing men. "We ain't gonna have no goddamn Okies in this town," one says, "You turn right around, and don't come back until the cotton's ready." Versions of this have played out over and over again...although The Grapes of Wrath is about white people, this is said to low-income Central American immigrants today. The professor gestured to the way in which mid-westerners could once be considered migrants in California, and now we think of migrant workers as being from out of the country, especially Mexico. The boundaries of statehood have expanded to nationalism, but the message remains the same: we don't want you, except to do the lowest work for the lowest pay, and you better not plan on doing it where we can see you.
Such forced invisibility and dehumanization of the poor was a prominent theme in the film (and book), and it is not limited to migrant or undocumented laborers in our contemporary society. Two other themes - although I am sure there are others - from The Grapes of Wrath are widely experienced by the poor. The first is the policing of the poor, as the Joads are monitored, refused admittance, inspected, scrutinized, surveyed, and always doubted by authority figures. This remains true, as law enforcement is set up to protect those in power from those without. (I grew up believing the police would protect me...but not all my classmates saw the police that way.) Patrolled borders, limited mobility, containment...all serve to prevent the poor from class-based organizing.
Tied to this is the second theme, that of disunity. The logic of classist structures seeks to disunify the poor. They are pitted against each other to compete for starvation wages, used as strikebreakers, separated to prevent the spread of information, and all "agitators" are removed to ensure groups remain malleable and controllable. Families, as Ma Joad laments, are torn apart as a result of such hardship and depravity. Poverty - structurally-enforced poverty - breaks the spirit of a family. People die. People go mad. People lose children. People do terrible things to each other out of hunger and emptiness. Those who are not shown love are equally denied the ability to love one another. Poverty ensures there can be no "whole" to a family, only fissures and cracks and shards.
On another note, there is an interesting strain running through the film about how Ma Joad is the central figure of the family. She does an awful lot of emotion work, and it seems like a large conclusion of the film is that, despite all the misery and tragedy and all-around crappiness of poverty, women will stick around to heal those fissures and cracks, to pick up those shards. Men might lose their dignity in not being able to secure a job to fulfill the gendered provider role, but, by golly, their women remain steadfast. And in many ways this is true, as a gendered expectation of women is to fulfill family duties. They do not get to go crazy, or beat up the cop, or die...they have to take care of everyone who does.
Also, I wondered what happened to black people during the Great Depression, because there were only white faces in the film - this is something that never occurred to me the first few times I watched it. Surely there were black people in Kansas and Arkansas and Oklahoma who migrated when the dust storms came and richer white people came to swallow up the land...but their story is likely even more tragic. It is also not the film that was made. It may also have to do with why we'd like to think of the Dust Bowl Migration, with Henry Fonda's salt-of-the-earth white tough guy who got a raw deal, as entirely different than our current dependence on invisible and dehumanized undocumented labor force. Or the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which displaced over one million people, most of them poor and black. It's always much easier to think of ourselves as roses, and as not having any thorns.
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