The scene, filmed as a veritè of pain, is the perfect kind of cinema to examine growth in relation to it. Back in the 90s, things were fairly peaceful, fun, extreme with many extra X's, and a scene like that, to younger eyes, often played like a badass doing badass things, but I often wonder now, those same guys and gals, is their favorite Dog still Mr. Blonde. Are they the same folks who think Fight Club is about fighting, Scarface about how cool guns and cocaine are, and the same folks who think Sid and Nancy is a lovely love story for the ages?
That crowd has held up cruelty as the point with a lionization of villains without the media understanding as to why they are bad. In fact, we have spent the last several years making all the media we can about why they are not bad. The bad guys are okay, they say, nothing wrong with them, it's ok to be a bad guy they are just misunderstood. There's even a huge organization which often goes out and helps kids, which is great, while dressed up as identical space nazis, which is less great.
We have spent years making the bad guy the good guy and we wonder why we have a culture that is okay with being seen as evil.
Compounding into a culture which is already rife with jingoism, racism, and isolationism, this culture of the bad guys being the cool ones is the kind of thing that lead us to the leadership that has stuffed America into a trunk and is currently dancing around while considering which body part to cut off first. The tune this time is the Village People. The knife cutting out with precision everything that seemed promised in the 1990s and 2000s, and perhaps, in the end, leaving the country to bleed out like the cop in Dogs. (Spoilers on a 33 year old flick).
Madsen himself, at least, never turned down that road. He would star in Free Willy a year later, making a different, happier indelible mark on a younger generation of kids than myself at that time. He would work to raise money for Children's Cancer Research. He would go on to have a career that spanned over three hundred films. He worked with everyone on every kind of thing you can imagine. He survived personal tragedy when is son died and his own marriage splintered as a result. He lived a life we should all be lucky to have full of art.
Yet I wonder in the moment how many more artists like Michael Madsens will we make? I How many will be deported or jailed or disappeared? How many won't be able to afford an education or even the travel to take a chance? How many will not pursue the arts because it's less manly or forbidden by this or that? How long will it remain a format where people can tell and we can watch true and honest stories? I'm not sure of any of that anymore, and growing up, I never thought I had to be unsure of any of it. The melting pot, the American Dream, the promise of the better day, from one party to another, they still seemed codified in the American Experience.
These days, my age, nearly 50, and Madsen's final age don't seem that far off. In fact, we are almost exactly as removed as we were in age when I first saw him on my TV. So I have to wonder in the time there is left, either to live in the free world or to live at all, is there still time to even worry about the cruelty that has come into the world, or is it time to create those last things that might bring small glimmers of hope into a dark future. Looking back, I wish I and many other folks had been able to turn more folks away from the Dark Side, Mr. Blonde's side, and a few more folks could have been a fucking professional.
No comments:
Post a Comment