End of Watch and Doing It Right
(No spoilers!)
It's old news, but I hated the movie Crash.
With the heat of a thousand dying suns, to vaguely paraphrase something or other.
It struck me as the paranoid fantasy of someone deeply sheltered by his race, class, and gender, and I was not surprised to learn that what's-his-name that was behind it (Paul Haggis, IMDB reminds me) was inspired to write the movie by his own carjacking. The L.A. that it portrayed was one that was utterly alien to me, one where every person you pass on the street mutters a racial or ethnic slur as you pass (no matter what race they are and what race you are), and where every interaction is layered with fear and loathing.
The fact that it won the Best Picture Oscar and was pretty much universally acclaimed depressed me.
The fact that my little sister wrote a 15 page paper about it for one of her college sociology courses made me want to bang my head against the wall, particularly as her professor was clearly a fan.
So the last day of last year, I saw a movie called End of Watch. I did not go into the movie thinking about Crash at all -- what I knew about End of Watch was that it was a cop movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña, reviewers disliked it because of all the handheld camera work, and it kind of came and went without making much of a stir. I was expecting, at best, something like Training Day, a well-acted, gritty, edge-of-your-seats thriller in my hometown. At worst, I figured it'd be a forgettable way to spend the afternoon, watching pretty people (in addition to Gyllenhaal and Peña, Anna Kendrick and America Ferrera are also in it) and laughing at all the things utterly wrong about it.
What I got was the movie that I'm pretty sure Crash and all its fans thought it was -- a movie that puts L.A.'s multicultural nature front and center, and doesn't shy away from how tense and ugly that can get, but which also doesn't shy away from how glorious it is. So Gyllanhaal's and Peña's cops use ethnic slurs to refer to the gang members they're policing; they also use those exact same ethnic slurs in conversations with each other, as terms of endearment. The action is kicked off by some Latin@ gang members shooting a group of black people they felt were encroaching on their territory; but earlier, Peña's Latino cop and one of the black men shot at (named Mr. Tre) goad each other into a fistfight, at the end of which Tre cuffs himself and the only thing Peña charges him with is whatever the original call was (I forget, something minor like messing with the mailman). It is, in fact, while Tre is talking to his friends/relatives about his interaction with Pena, talking about how much the LAPD has changed since the bad old days, that the Latin@ gang shoots them.
In short, what I took from Crash is that Paul Haggis thinks race/ethnicity is destiny, and no one is capable of respecting/admiring/even tolerating someone outside their own race/ethnicity; what I take from End of Watch is that its creator (David Ayer) understands that identity is a hell of a lot more complicated than that, and even though a lot of people do break up into groups along racial/ethnic lines, everyone is entirely capable of more discernment than just "me=good" and "not me=bad." Or rather, people are capable of expanding the "me" group in idiosyncratic ways, and looking past the initial "me/not me" breakdown to the individual being thus categorized, and treating that individual individually nstead of as a faceless representation of all "not me"s that look like them.
What I found even more impressive about End of Watch is the way it managed that thing so many people decry as an impossibility, an absolutely utopian ideal: representation for PoC, women, queer people without feeling like it's meeting some dreaded "quota."
There are more non-white characters than white characters. The movie passes both the Johnson and the Bechdel Tests. These are such seemingly simple ways to evaluate movies, and so very few movies pass them.
More than that, the narrative is beautifully balanced. Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña are given equal screen time and their concerns are given equal weight. They both have lives outside their relationship to each other, and we see equal amounts of Peña's wife and newborn daughter as we do Gyllenhaal's growing relationship with Anna Kendrick. The two women are shown becoming friends through their partners. And when the movie is focused on Gyllenhaal's and Peña's jobs, their white/Latino male/male buddy cop pairing is contrasted with the white/Latino female/female buddy cop pairing of America Ferrera and Cody Horn. Looking at group representation, the Latin@ gang is shown after their drive-by drinking and celebrating; the very next scene is of Michael Peña's little sister's quinceñera where, guess what, there is drinking and celebrating. And when Gyllenhaal brings Anna Kendrick to the party to introduce her to his partner, Pena starts to explain what's going on, and she immediately jumps in with an anecdote about her Irish family and their, you guessed it, drinking and celebrating. Back on the job, Gyllenhaal and Peña get called out to a black family's house and find children duct taped in the closet; a few scenes later Tre and his friends are (of their own volition, presumably at some danger to themselves) warning Gyllenhaal and Peña about a hit put out on them.
It's not 100% perfect in this balancing act; all the white characters are cops and therefore on the side of Right, and there is only one Asian character and one queer character, neither of whom are heroes. The Asian character is a cop who clearly can't cut it and whose tale ends badly; the queer character is one of the gang members. But, both of those characters are women, and I am never going to complain about a movie that shows an Asian woman and a lesbian in male professions, not being treated as sex objects by the men around them or the movie itself. And overall, the balancing works. It lets all the characters be people, with strengths and flaws, instead of stereotypes of their race/gender/sexual orientation. There are heroes and villains, but there are people of all races/ethnicities and genders on both sides of that line.
And the best part? It's a damn good movie too. The morality is a little black and white for my taste, but I wasn't sitting in the theater keeping track of racial representation as a way of staving off boredom. I was sitting there invested in the good characters, though you have to know going in that people are going to die; and even after I left the first thing I marveled at was how much Gyllenhaal and Peña are distinct individuals throughout. We're never given a big infodump about their pasts, but by halfway through I knew that Peña was the one with the hero complex who was incapable of keeping calm when children were in danger, and Gyllenhaal was fighting PTSD from his tour in Afghanistan but was still able to use his military training to help keep himself and his partner safe. Now that I've fallen into the fan fiction world, I can see that this movie is ripe for it; every character, not just the two leads, has a distinct voice, and without ever getting in the way of the plot I still managed to infer a significant amount of the back stories of all the actors whose names I knew going in. The finale is a predictable tearjerker, but the whole movie is imbued with so much humor, so much warmth that I came out rather uplifted anyway.
The movie as a whole is just a damn good example of Doing It Right.
It's old news, but I hated the movie Crash.
With the heat of a thousand dying suns, to vaguely paraphrase something or other.
It struck me as the paranoid fantasy of someone deeply sheltered by his race, class, and gender, and I was not surprised to learn that what's-his-name that was behind it (Paul Haggis, IMDB reminds me) was inspired to write the movie by his own carjacking. The L.A. that it portrayed was one that was utterly alien to me, one where every person you pass on the street mutters a racial or ethnic slur as you pass (no matter what race they are and what race you are), and where every interaction is layered with fear and loathing.
The fact that it won the Best Picture Oscar and was pretty much universally acclaimed depressed me.
The fact that my little sister wrote a 15 page paper about it for one of her college sociology courses made me want to bang my head against the wall, particularly as her professor was clearly a fan.
So the last day of last year, I saw a movie called End of Watch. I did not go into the movie thinking about Crash at all -- what I knew about End of Watch was that it was a cop movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña, reviewers disliked it because of all the handheld camera work, and it kind of came and went without making much of a stir. I was expecting, at best, something like Training Day, a well-acted, gritty, edge-of-your-seats thriller in my hometown. At worst, I figured it'd be a forgettable way to spend the afternoon, watching pretty people (in addition to Gyllenhaal and Peña, Anna Kendrick and America Ferrera are also in it) and laughing at all the things utterly wrong about it.
What I got was the movie that I'm pretty sure Crash and all its fans thought it was -- a movie that puts L.A.'s multicultural nature front and center, and doesn't shy away from how tense and ugly that can get, but which also doesn't shy away from how glorious it is. So Gyllanhaal's and Peña's cops use ethnic slurs to refer to the gang members they're policing; they also use those exact same ethnic slurs in conversations with each other, as terms of endearment. The action is kicked off by some Latin@ gang members shooting a group of black people they felt were encroaching on their territory; but earlier, Peña's Latino cop and one of the black men shot at (named Mr. Tre) goad each other into a fistfight, at the end of which Tre cuffs himself and the only thing Peña charges him with is whatever the original call was (I forget, something minor like messing with the mailman). It is, in fact, while Tre is talking to his friends/relatives about his interaction with Pena, talking about how much the LAPD has changed since the bad old days, that the Latin@ gang shoots them.
In short, what I took from Crash is that Paul Haggis thinks race/ethnicity is destiny, and no one is capable of respecting/admiring/even tolerating someone outside their own race/ethnicity; what I take from End of Watch is that its creator (David Ayer) understands that identity is a hell of a lot more complicated than that, and even though a lot of people do break up into groups along racial/ethnic lines, everyone is entirely capable of more discernment than just "me=good" and "not me=bad." Or rather, people are capable of expanding the "me" group in idiosyncratic ways, and looking past the initial "me/not me" breakdown to the individual being thus categorized, and treating that individual individually nstead of as a faceless representation of all "not me"s that look like them.
What I found even more impressive about End of Watch is the way it managed that thing so many people decry as an impossibility, an absolutely utopian ideal: representation for PoC, women, queer people without feeling like it's meeting some dreaded "quota."
There are more non-white characters than white characters. The movie passes both the Johnson and the Bechdel Tests. These are such seemingly simple ways to evaluate movies, and so very few movies pass them.
More than that, the narrative is beautifully balanced. Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña are given equal screen time and their concerns are given equal weight. They both have lives outside their relationship to each other, and we see equal amounts of Peña's wife and newborn daughter as we do Gyllenhaal's growing relationship with Anna Kendrick. The two women are shown becoming friends through their partners. And when the movie is focused on Gyllenhaal's and Peña's jobs, their white/Latino male/male buddy cop pairing is contrasted with the white/Latino female/female buddy cop pairing of America Ferrera and Cody Horn. Looking at group representation, the Latin@ gang is shown after their drive-by drinking and celebrating; the very next scene is of Michael Peña's little sister's quinceñera where, guess what, there is drinking and celebrating. And when Gyllenhaal brings Anna Kendrick to the party to introduce her to his partner, Pena starts to explain what's going on, and she immediately jumps in with an anecdote about her Irish family and their, you guessed it, drinking and celebrating. Back on the job, Gyllenhaal and Peña get called out to a black family's house and find children duct taped in the closet; a few scenes later Tre and his friends are (of their own volition, presumably at some danger to themselves) warning Gyllenhaal and Peña about a hit put out on them.
It's not 100% perfect in this balancing act; all the white characters are cops and therefore on the side of Right, and there is only one Asian character and one queer character, neither of whom are heroes. The Asian character is a cop who clearly can't cut it and whose tale ends badly; the queer character is one of the gang members. But, both of those characters are women, and I am never going to complain about a movie that shows an Asian woman and a lesbian in male professions, not being treated as sex objects by the men around them or the movie itself. And overall, the balancing works. It lets all the characters be people, with strengths and flaws, instead of stereotypes of their race/gender/sexual orientation. There are heroes and villains, but there are people of all races/ethnicities and genders on both sides of that line.
And the best part? It's a damn good movie too. The morality is a little black and white for my taste, but I wasn't sitting in the theater keeping track of racial representation as a way of staving off boredom. I was sitting there invested in the good characters, though you have to know going in that people are going to die; and even after I left the first thing I marveled at was how much Gyllenhaal and Peña are distinct individuals throughout. We're never given a big infodump about their pasts, but by halfway through I knew that Peña was the one with the hero complex who was incapable of keeping calm when children were in danger, and Gyllenhaal was fighting PTSD from his tour in Afghanistan but was still able to use his military training to help keep himself and his partner safe. Now that I've fallen into the fan fiction world, I can see that this movie is ripe for it; every character, not just the two leads, has a distinct voice, and without ever getting in the way of the plot I still managed to infer a significant amount of the back stories of all the actors whose names I knew going in. The finale is a predictable tearjerker, but the whole movie is imbued with so much humor, so much warmth that I came out rather uplifted anyway.
The movie as a whole is just a damn good example of Doing It Right.