The Wolfpack

[osprey_archer]

Crystal Moselle’s got a new movie coming out, Skate Kitchen (which is about a girl who joins an all-girl skateboarding gang; it looks super cool), so I decided to see her earlier film, The Wolfpack. One of the benefits of watching films by female directors is that many of them have short filmographies; it’s easy to catch up.

(It's an aggravating benefit when you think about why it's like that, but still.)

The Wolfpack is a documentary. It’s about a family in New York City who followed their own peculiar individual interpretation of Hare Krishna which led them to strive to have ten children (they ended up with six boys and a girl, all with Indian names; the parents are not Indian), whom they homeschooled. The father was the only member of the family with a key to the front door. The children rarely left the apartment.

To entertain themselves and teach themselves about the outside world, the boys watched movies, and eventually started filming themselves reenacting their favorite movies. (The girl seems quite left out of things; I did wish that the documentary gave a little more information about her.) Eventually, they started to leave the apartment in a group, all dressed up like they’ve walked off the set of Goodfellas. This is how they met Moselle.

It’s an interesting documentary. I sometimes wanted it to dig a bit deeper, but on the other hand this is a sort of awkward criticism for a documentary: you can’t really demand that the people being documented dig deeper into their emotional pain and screwed-up family dynamics for your entertainment.

I think this is why I generally prefer fiction films to documentaries: they can go as deep as they like and you don’t have to worry what kind of effect they’ll have on the characters. Fictional characters may suffer all kinds of hell in the movie itself, but, since they’re fictional, the existence of the movie won’t hurt them.

Comments

[asakiyume]

Wow, what a strange interpretation the parents put on their faith. It's interesting (I say this in a sour, cynical voice) how no matter what the base religion is--whether it's some sect of Christianity or, as here, Krishna devotionalism, and I'm quite sure you can find similar for followers of other religions--whacked out parents can make it involve keeping kids locked away from the world. The having-lots-of-children thing too. It strikes me as a very visceral approach to nation building: I will create a nation by having lots of children, and they will live by commands.

The serendipity of how the director came to create this documentary is pretty cool, though--just bumping into the kids in the street. And her next one sounds *very* cool.

[osprey_archer]

I'm so excited for Skate Kitchen and I thought of you instantly when I saw the trailer, because of your skateboarding adventures. Girls on skateboards! What's not to love?

There are times when the content of someone's beliefs really does matter - but I think just as often, what matters more is the way in which people approach those beliefs, the spirit in which they try to live them. Do they believe with love and generosity? Or is their belief narrow-minded and inward-turning, suspicious toward all outsiders - so they try to create their own nation, as you put it, by having a lot of children and keeping them close.

I've noticed particularly with feminist writers that often what ends up being most important to me is not what precisely they believe, but whether they actually like women, as women are, even if women are not living up to their standards for what women ought to be. I've read authors (Elizabeth Wurtzel) who seem just about as touchy about actual women's shortcomings as a Bolshevik writer frustrated by the way the actual proletariat falls short of their vision of the New Soviet Man.

[asakiyume]

Yeah, I really appreciate in stories a warmness toward the characters and empathy for people's failings (not to go as far as that one you wrote about the other day, the Talented-Mr-Ripley ripoff--there's a difference between empathy and admiration for psychopaths!) I think it's all too easy to be disappointed in real life for not living up to ideals, and--since we're talking empathy--I can feel for that; real life can be disappointing. But it's also pretty wonderful in all its warts, and so are real-live women and real-live workers.

[osprey_archer]

Oh God, I'm still so baffled by everything about Genuine Fraud. I think Lockhart fails to understand that being really pissed off that you personally are not on the tippy-top of the privilege ladder is not the same thing as being opposed to privilege, oppression, and injustice, and this is why she keeps creating protagonists (not just Jule in Genuine Fraud but also Frankie from The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks) who she treats as heroic rebels when actually they're basically social climbers. Frankie wants to be part of her boyfriend's all-male secret society; Jule wants to have lots of money. Neither of them give a hang about anyone else who has been excluded from the secret society or the echelons of the rich.