Winner, Winner, Cookie for Dinner
A coronavirus-tinged film festival trophy brings a critique of the USA full circle.
“…Sweet land of liberty. Of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died…”
I didn’t put any of that into the elementary school essay contest sponsored by the VFW, something about “Our Flag and Country.” What I did write was the jingoistic propaganda fed to me by a culture that made imperative the daily recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. This tiny essay merited first place. The Veterans of Foreign Wars bestowed upon me a beautiful honor in return for my heartily parroted words. The dignified statuette, a winged woman with a torch, was a cross between Lady Liberty and an Oscar statuette, and I found its implied symbolism enthralling even if I had no clue what lofty ideals in particular it was supposed to stand for.
I played with that trophy like it was a Barbie doll. Her hands were raised in the air in permanent triumph, and I would put my thumb in the little indented cup of her left hand, and tap my index finger on the point of the torch held in her right hand, and I’d tap the points of her wings, and with sweat-grippy thumbs I'd polish the shiny gold-tone plastic as if it were a genie bottle that would recognize my touch and might eventually shimmer into life. Then I’d put it back on the windowsill with all the others and go watch some TV.
Among other things I am a product of the 1980s’ American public education system and the traumatic, sudden loss of my dad at the age of nine. Looking back I am so grateful that it was all pre-internet viral gawking, but it was also a time and situation of no access to social services or grief counseling. I’m not even sure if I missed a single day of school, but my siblings and I must still have been a subject of some concerned gossip among teachers in the break rooms. Did they coddle us? Did they compensate us somehow for such an unimaginable loss by treating us differently? I can’t really know. I was smart but not tested into a gifted program, and I was talented but didn’t know how small a pond I was in. My only contact with a larger world came from the TV that was on from morning to late night playing orchestral adventure themes, jingles, laugh tracks and the first glimmer of what is now called reality porn with real people overcoming incredible hardships that were supposed to be inspiring, but to me were somehow only monumentally guilt-inducing. My dad died, but other than that I faced no adversities whatsoever. Poor little middle-class girl. Poor little default winner.
How hard do I work, really? I grew up befuddled that every outcome came easy to me if I worked for it, aware that the system must somehow be rigged in my favor in invisible ways that nobody was equipped or inclined to discuss. I was right, but my level of exposure to the world left all of this knowledge firmly in the realm of instinct and I was very, very good at gaslighting myself. In retrospect, undiagnosed lifelong clinical depression was my unseen adversary, but clearly there was something else too, something larger. Even just the glimmer of awareness of an all-permeating societal injustice can be a profoundly demotivating force for anyone under its umbrella, an umbrella the size of the sky itself. It can also have the galvanizing effect of a hot pink dot in a sea of black umbrellas. It can rally a righteous cry of Black Lives Matter.
In the past several years, the human need for validation beyond school assemblies has driven various groups such as new parents to make their own jokey-but-not-really-jokey merit badges for every messy, tedious, mundane category from diaper changing to leaving the house fully dressed. In these days of pandemic surreality the same types of trivial categories apply to all of us now, parents or not. Hard times make us crave comfort wherever we can find it and if you want a medal for doing the dishes 100 times in a row, be your own guest.
“Coastal Fire: A Common Diary” has won honors at film festivals, for which I am so glad and grateful. We’re still in this coronavirus soup so I haven’t experienced any of it other than virtually. An upcoming physical screening at a major theater in Berlin has me incensed and heartbroken about not being able leave my country to attend. But there was something about this hefty trophy from the Vegas Movie Awards, with her upstretched hands holding a gleaming sphere with spikes radiating outward, almost like... a corona… alright, I wanted it. I simply could not pass up the irony of crowning 2020 with what to me looks for all the world like a giant, beautiful middle finger to SARS-CoV-2, the literal raging coastal fires, our collapsed, infested government, and all that comes with it and is yet to come before we emerge from this slow-boiling melting pot.
We find our little joys where we can. We work hard to do it.
Don’t forget to vote, as early as possible, and don’t forget local.