by Steve Boman
It’s a tremendously high-stakes partnership, and we’re asked to make our choices after only a few months in film school. Like others in the class, I hardly know anyone from the other two 507 sections. It’s like dating within a very small pool of potential partners.
As class lets out, I walk from Zemeckis with S. The sun is setting, and it’s a really beautiful evening in Los Angeles. I tell him I’d like to partner with him for our 508 class. We share an overall comic world outlook, and I tell him I am impressed he does not have any apparent issues with sadomasochism or ego or heroin. He is surprised I am asking so quickly in the mating ritual, as the deadline is several weeks away. I explain I don’t like to wait ’til the last minute on anything, much less something as important as a 508 partnership. Despite our age difference, we enjoy each other, and he agrees we’d make a good partnership. I think: That’s easy! A partnership! Whoooo!
As I walk to my car I feel lucky. I don’t know anyone else in our class who would be as good a partner as S.
Having to find a partner emphasizes the fact that our 507 class has become less cohesive as the semester goes on. Turnout is down at the Thursday-evening gatherings at the 2-9 Café. We’re all tired, and it seems some of the more biting comments and critiques in class are taking their toll. We are becoming cliquish. I make an offhand comment to S. that critique is French for “rip the shit out of someone.” We all seem to take joy in snapping at each other’s throats.
We are also learning more about FTC. He shows favorites, which becomes fodder for gossip after class. He likes the women in our class, and jokes and offers them support, but with the straight men he’s colder. During a break in class one day, I ask him directly—I feel like a reporter again—if he feels hostility toward heterosexual men. “Yeah,” he says, nodding. “I do. I consider straight men to be the enemy.”
He says the worst are older straight men. “They have been disruptive in class in the past,” he says. He feels they’ve been hardheaded, and he implies they carried an antigay bias.
I ask him if I’m being disruptive. He shrugs and smiles slightly. “Not really, no. You’re different.”
I’m surprised at his honesty. It’s refreshingly direct. Yet I can’t imagine an instructor at USC expressing antigay views with the same intensity. If an instructor said, “I don’t like homosexuals, I consider them the enemy,” he would likely be bounced from campus.
Still, I find myself liking FTC the more he expresses himself. It was blatantly obvious I bugged him from the first moment I showed up in class. At first I thought it was me, the individual. Now I realize he disliked what I represented: all the straight white males of the world. One day not long after that, I met him by chance outside of class on a campus sidewalk. He was walking to lunch. I was walking to lunch. We talked easily and even joked a bit. The tension of the early days had mostly dissipated … and I thought of inviting him to get a burger with me. But I didn’t invite him. I figured he’d consider either me or a Fatburger XXL (or both) too unpalatable. Or maybe I didn’t invite him because I still harbored a slight grudge against him for his behavior in class.
Favoritism and outbursts aside, FTC talked about some very important things. His chief tenet in class is: have a point of view. During this period he’s writing a film in which the lead character shouts: “I wanna kill every straight fucking asshole!” This character eventually moderates his stance and urges his new lover not to kill his heterosexual parents with a bomb, but rather to shame them with a little PDA. “You can’t get rid of them with their weapons. I tried that,” the lead character advises. “But if you really want to fuck them, all we have to do is kiss, because when two guys kiss, it’s like a bomb going off in the straight world.”
The promotional material for the film says the characters free themselves “from the homophobic bonds of an oppressive American society.”
FTC most certainly has a crystal-clear point of view. He’s deliberately stationed himself on the outer edge of queer cinema (a genre term, not my name). In his work, gays are good and straights are very bad. It’s us vs. them.
The more I learn about FTC, the more I understand him. And the more I feel, well, a little sorry for him. All the heterosexuals in this film are violent or dishonest scumbags. All parents are unaccepting at best, abusive at worst. He’s obviously got a worldview different from mine. I do find it slightly ironic that the guy who complains about oppressive American society is an instructor at the world’s best film school. That’s a pretty good gig. I apparently represent to him the oppressor class. Yet I’m the one without money in the bank, without a job, without power. He’s the teacher, I’m the student. I wonder if he sees the irony.
The more I ponder my relationship with FTC, the more I learn about the USC School of Cinematic Arts administration … and my point of view toward the place. The leadership, so sensitive of doing the right thing, tends to turn a blind eye to reverse discrimination (Lord, how I hate that term) from some key faculty. In my time at USC, I learn that certain people are fair game for jokes and mockery from a handful of instructors. The list is short: white males, blue-eyed blondes, Mormons, political conservatives, religious Christians. Especially Mormons. In an environment where I never once heard a joke or criticism aimed at Jews or Muslims or Buddhists or freethinkers or New Agers or blacks or, heck, even Canadians for that matter … it seems the only outlet for venting is against people who live in Utah or go to church or have very little melanin in their skin. When I hear one of these occasional broadsides, I sigh at the predictability. It’s so tired and timid. Where’s the creativity and boldness in that?
The prevailing attitude coming from the administration seems to be that all of the above (white males, etc.) represent Repressive Power; therefore, fighting the power, whatever exactly that means, puts one on the side of the angels. The student body at USC is a mosaic of colors and sexual orientation, with every class of incoming film students a perfect Benetton commercial. There is diversity in everything at USC, it seems, except diversity of opinion.
At USC’s film school, the fashion is to say that America is a corrupt and villainous empire, with injustice under every rock. It is as if the 1960s were sealed in amber. I hate to use the word irony so much, but it is ironic that in this bastion of wealth and privilege and luxury, I hear almost unrelenting criticism of the society that creates all this wealth and technology and freedom of expression. I notice the loudest critics often have perfectly straight and dazzlingly white teeth. Sometimes these opinions seem more often based on the desire to be cool than on clear-eyed political analysis.
I’m different from most of my classmates, I realize. My worldview is different. My former girlfriend grew up in East Germany. Her father was imprisoned for five years by the East German government for the crime of speaking to the American Red Cross. She knew what it was like to be monitored by the secret police. My wife worked for three years in an Ecuadorian village where squalor and corruption were endemic. For better or worse, I’ve spent a lot of time interviewing people, cloaked in the full power of the First Amendment, and I take complaints with a grain of salt. Only in America can a guy like filmmaker Michael Moore get stunningly rich and powerful by continuing to play the underdog card. So, in film school, I sigh quietly when I watch and read a seemingly endless stream of stories that depict (choose a topic) American GIs torturing innocent prisoners, square suburban bourgeoisie squashing someone’s dreams, buzz-cut cops brutalizing innocent kids, villainous corporate types, and, of course, bad dads. It truly is the minor leagues of whiny Hollywood, and I often think (as a buzz-cut suburban bourgeoisie former corporate speechwriting dad) you don’t know how good you have it. I’m guessing most of my classmates didn’t grow up in rough-and-tumble towns like Duluth, a place where my eighth-grade shop teacher had us build gun racks and where the biggest employers in town when I was a kid included a U.S. Steel mill, an air force base, and the Duluth shipping harbor.
To magnify my differences, I’m also a
bit of an outlier when it comes to gender politics because I’ve lived the progressive dream, and it gave me a chomp in the ass. To wit: I put my career on the backburner and supported Julie through medical school and residency and her postresidency payback so she could become a doctor and we could have a family. I became the supportive spouse, a feminist’s dream. I shunted my career onto the mommy track as her career took off. Then Julie got sick, and she had a very basic desire: she wanted to work less and stay home with her children more. By then, my earning potential had crumbled. We were broke, and I couldn’t get a decent job. That’s what led me to film school.
The fact is, I had started our marriage as Mr. Public Radio Liberal (but one with a couple of nice rifles in that eighth-grade gun rack). Then I began to realize I had been hoisted by my own petard. I’m reminded of the old joke: What’s the definition of a conservative? A liberal who’s been mugged. I began tuning out public radio. I started subscribing to The Wall Street Journal. My views put me in a very small minority at USC.
Now I certainly wasn’t expecting anyone on campus to be humming Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA,” but I often roll my eyes at the reflexive anti-Americanism on campus, and the lack of historical perspective of my classmates, and, well, the simple absence of life-lessons. Granted, some of my gripes are simply an age issue. I was much more idealistic/naïve when I was twenty-two, but my time at USC let me clearly see where the institution sits on the political spectrum.
In classes, discussions regarding the Hollywood blacklisting era are common, as are discussions about the current lamentable state of American democracy. The bogeymen are the standard punching bags of the American Left (McCarthy, Bush, capitalists). I understand their frustration, but I’m intrigued at the lack of a rounded discussion. For example, I never heard any mention of filmmaking conditions in other countries. Sure it’s fun to complain, and people are absolutely right to expect nothing but the highest standards in American political discourse. But a little comparative analysis would be helpful in film school. Consider Boris Shumyatskiy. I bumped into his name while I was doing a paper on early Soviet filmmaking. Shumyatskiy was the head of the Soviet film industry and the boss of filmmaking greats Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov. Unfortunately for Shumyatskiy, he failed to please his boss, Stalin. In 1938, Shumyatskiy was executed by firing squad, a blacklisting that was undoubtedly more permanent than the one accorded screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. And on that tiny vexing issue of Islamic radicalism, there was silence on campus, at least from my perspective. From what I witnessed, the only terrorists in student films and scripts were Americans in uniform. Given that my dad was an army officer before getting his PhD, and my brother was a captain in the air force before he went to medical school, it rankled me a bit. I never witnessed a discussion about the fate of Dutch filmmaker and provocateur Theo van Gogh, who was shot, stabbed, and nearly decapitated in 2004 by Mohammed Bouyeri as a protest against van Gogh’s criticism of Islam. That’s a subject apparently too prickly to broach, as was the controversy that resulted when the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten printed a series of cartoons depicting Muhammad. From my perch, I witnessed only nothing-to-see-here whistling from ostensibly daring filmmakers. If van Gogh had been murdered by, say, a pale and fleshy Kansas Baptist, ideally a banker at that, I can only guess how many student films would have been spun from that narrative.
So, in the halls of the film school, George W. Bush quite naturally is reviled constantly as a gun-packin’ cowboy. Yet a real gun-packing cowboy, Che Guevara, is seen as a stud. Che Guevara shirts are popular here. I find it disquieting, and illogical, that historical figures who represent the very antithesis of artistic and academic freedom are often the ones who are enshrined by the academics and artists. Sometimes there’s even a passing appreciation of Mao that gets aired. So strange.
The writer Tom Wolfe was right about radical chic. Many filmmakers seem to love asshats like Mao and Che, both in film school and in the real world, and they generally ignore the current messy reality of Islamic fundamentalism. Imagining a film student wearing a T-shirt depicting, say, a Lincoln or Churchill or George Washington is supremely laughable. Che? He’s cool. So what if he jailed gays, banned free elections, hated free speech, and unloaded his pistol into people he didn’t like? What matters is that his hair was sexy, and he looked great in photos, the hard-Left’s Christ.
5
Annette
When I put my application package for USC in the mail, it was early fall 2002. I wouldn’t hear whether I was accepted until March. My life went on as normal: getting the kids ready in the morning, walking Lara to school, coming home and doing laundry and going shopping and changing diapers and cleaning the house and putting the kids down for a nap and picking Lara up from school and feeding them snacks and getting dinner ready. I know the thrill and joy and utter monotony of being a stay-at-home parent. I loved being with my kids, and I valued deeply the time I had to share with them and play with them. I was glad I was home with my kids, raising them, reading to them, guiding them.
Yet I didn’t have a Plan B. GeezerJock was dead in the water. Julie had another year in her government-mandated job. Newspapers were laying off my friends.
Month by month, Julie got stronger. That fall, I took her and the kids down to USC, and we explored the film school. It seemed such a foreign place … all these film students who seemed so familiar with each other, smoking and sitting on an old rickety picnic table and talking. I walked by with my family and the film students ignored us.
One Saturday night, Lara had a friend over to watch a movie. During the film, I got a phone call from my parents. They were crying. My younger sister, Annette, was in the hospital in Duluth. She had leukemia, diagnosed just that evening.
Her cancer was very aggressive. She had two young children, a boy and a girl, and a husband.
When we were young, Annette and I would pour water on our sloped driveway and watch the rivulets stream down toward the curb. We named the rivulets and urged them on like we were watching a horse race. With the peculiar logic of preschoolers, our favorite names were Nixon and Snoopy, both dogs in our world. We’d stand there and yell, “Go, Nixon! Go! Go, Snoopy, faster!” I don’t recall us choosing sides. They were just two water rivulets slowly running down an asphalt driveway.
In early March I traveled back to Duluth with my three daughters. During the day I was a sad Pied Piper who led around Annette’s two small children and my own kids. At night I would visit Annette in the hospital. She was very sick. Four months earlier she had been a vibrant, healthy woman without a hint of problems.
She died a painful death. It snowed hard the day before her funeral. It was late March.
When we flew back to California after the funeral, we seemed to be on the other side of the world. The sky was blue and sunny, and the temperature was in the seventies. Our mailbox was stuffed with bills and junk mail and catalogs. Then I spied it: a thin letter with the USC logo. With a shock, I remembered my application.
I ripped it open. It was a form letter, thanking me for applying, but the length of the letter itself had already told me all I needed to know: I wasn’t accepted.
I tried not to show my disappointment. I realized that the sun was shining, my kids were healthy, and Julie was healthy. After all that had gone on in the previous few months, and the death of Annette, graduate school at USC seemed a petty issue. Maybe next year, I thought.
That night I tossed and turned. I dreamed about a surreal journey that involved me being in film school—it was a fantastic place—and when I woke I felt a painful ache in my chest. I wasn’t going to film school. That was reality, just like Annette’s death. I didn’t want to admit to myself how disappointed I was by the rejection. The next day it was back to normal: Julie went to work, I walked Lara to school. A few more days like that went by. Then there was another letter from USC. I ripped it open. Longer this time—it said I was accepted to USC. I read it slowly. I called USC’s admissions offi
ce. A nice woman answered the phone, and I asked her in my most mellow radio voice if the letter was legitimate.
Yes, she said.
I asked her about the previous letter. She apologized and said there had been a clerical error and that some people on the acceptance list had inadvertently gotten rejection letters. (Some of my classmates later reported the same thing.) She apologized again. I thanked her, hung up, and jumped around our living room, whooping and pumping my fist into the air.
Three-year-old Maria and one-year-old Sophia, both with big eyes, started mimicking me. They pronged around the house, excited. Maria finally asked me what I was yelling about. I picked her up and held her high in the air. “I’m going to USC, honey, the best film school in the whole world!” She squealed and laughed as I tossed her in the air.
When I put her down, she asked me another question: “What’s film school?”
M
y fourth film is coming up and I want finally to hit one out of the park. The three 507 groups hold an informal film fest, but I’m too embarrassed to show any of my first three films. On the night of the screenings, nearly every 507 student is there. I don’t want to go. I make up an excuse not to be there. I feel like a complete outsider.
Meanwhile, the 508 partnership dance has been quietly going on behind the scenes. We don’t have to formalize the partnerships until after spring break, but from what I’m picking up on, most people are already in partnerships.
One day at the end of Holman’s sound lecture—the only class that has all three groups of us 507 students in one place—a trio of students takes the podium. They’re from the previous semester and they’re looking for 508 partners. They go onstage, one by one, and give short speeches that explain their predicaments. They give rather pitiful “choose me” pleas.