[Marxism] Buffalo 66

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Just watched this quirky but deeply involving film on the IFC cable
network. Rather than write something up, I'll just send along the
wsws.org review. It really amazes me how these people can be so
sensitive to film aesthetics, but with a sectarian tin ear to the class
struggle.

Buffalo '66: "All my life I've been a lonely boy"
By David Walsh and Joanne Laurier
22 July 1998

Vincent Gallo's Buffalo '66, co-scripted by the director and Alison
Bagnall, is one of the most beautiful and moving American films I have
seen in a very long time. It deserves the support of every serious
moviegoer.

Billy Brown (played by Gallo), just out of prison for something he
didn't do, kidnaps a girl from a tap-dancing class so that he can have
someone to present to his parents as his wife. Layla (Christina Ricci)
is lonely too, and she falls in love with Billy during the course of an
evening. In the end, the strength of feeling that develops between the
two is enough to make Billy drop his plan to exact revenge on the man
whose action, indirectly, landed him in jail.

The film communicates a level of anguish that is difficult to bear at
times. Billy repeats virtually everything he says several times in
rapid-fire fashion. He has to, no one has ever listened to him.
Certainly not his parents (Angelica Huston and Ben Gazzara). His mother
is an avid football fan, still bitter about having missed the game in
which the Buffalo Bills won its only championship because she was giving
birth to him. His father is tightfisted, cold and angry. They have
albums filled with pictures of his mother with various football
celebrities; they have one "Billy photo."

Layla does her best to impress his parents. "Make me look good," Billy
has told the girl he's grabbed roughly out of dance class, "or I will
never, ever talk to you again." She tells his mother and father that she
thinks Billy is "the most handsome guy in the whole world." How had they
met? Layla explains that she was a "lowly typist girl" for the CIA and
Billy "a top agent." He was the "kindest, smartest, most handsome" man
there. "He was like the king."

It's difficult to convey in print how well Ricci and Gallo (and Gazzara)
deliver these banalities and others (Huston is less successful). Not a
hint of condescension or derision, not a single wrong note. It could so
easily have been utterly false. The lead performers treat their
characters' pain and delusions with great earnestness as if they were,
as they are, life-and-death matters.

The film's theatricality is a strong point. There is no fetish here
about being "cinematic." Such considerations are trivial, anyway.
Everything is permissible in the effort to establish the truth. One of
the film's most powerful scenes takes place in a bowling alley. Billy
obviously enjoyed success bowling as a kid. His locker, which the owner
has kept for him, is filled with trophies. He begins to bowl, making
strike after strike. He turns to Layla, his arms raised over his head,
"The kid is hot.... You saw it. Billy's back." An entire life is summed
up in this pathetic, hopeless gesture!

At one point the girl gets to her feet, in her ridiculous baby-blue
outfit, and imitates Billy-- she approaches the foul line, releases an
imaginary ball, watches the pins crash, turns and raises her arms in
mock triumph. She's mimicking his silly gesture, she's getting back at
him for pushing her around, she's establishing herself as a
presence--Ricci conveys all that, without making the put-down too cruel
or too punishing. It's also pouty, mischievous, enticing. Anyway, she
has her own life, even if it's not much. And then the film's lights dim,
a spotlight shines on her and she does her little tap-dance. It's an
unforgettable moment. From then on, the film is about two human beings,
not one.

Billy wants to love and be loved, but he can't stand physical contact.
He's that isolated. Seated on the steps outside his parents' home,
feeling ill at the thought of seeing them again, he tells Layla, "Would
you hold me?" She does. "Don't touch me!" Later Billy and Layla get some
pictures taken of themselves in the bowling alley photo booth, where you
get four shots for two dollars. He intends to have her send the photos
to his parents, one by one, over time, to prove that they're still
married. Billy tells Layla that they should look "like we like each
other. We span time as a couple. We're spanning time, we're in love.
Look like you like me. We're in love, we're spanning time." When she
kisses him--again: "Don't touch me! We're the couple that doesn't touch
one another." It's funny and dreadful.

They rent a motel room, but not for sex. Billy takes a bath by himself.
The girl, in the other room, says, "Can I come in there with you? ...
I'm alone and I'm cold." Everyone in the film is always alone and always
cold. Eventually, he relents, as long as she promises not to look at him
in the bathtub. Of course, she looks. "You look like a little boy." They
lie on the bed, fully clothed. Finally, they kiss. He leaves to carry
out his revenge, not expecting to return.

But faced with a choice between life and death, surprisingly he picks
life, the more difficult choice. He tells his friend on the phone, "I've
got a girl. A girl who loves me. She's pretty.... My girlfriend's
waiting for me." In the film's final, brief shot, Billy and Layla hold
each other, his eyes are closed, she stares blankly. Their difficulties
have just begun. Gallo is extraordinary, Ricci is equally extraordinary.
One can't imagine two other performers improving on what they've done.

Everything traumatizing is magnified and distorted in the film. (Even
the facts about Buffalo's football history, for example, are slightly
off.) It is a child's-eye view. "All my life I've been a lonely boy,"
goes the song at the beginning of the film.

Certainly, there's an element of self-indulgence, self-pity, perhaps
egotism. Not everyone has the opportunity or feels the need, like Gallo,
to dramatically recreate childhood and adolescent traumas. But the pain
here is not individual, it is universal pain. Because I haven't even
spoken about how the film brings this city, Buffalo, to life, and every
decaying American city. No film has ever given me such a visceral sense
of the awfulness, the alienation of these cold, gray, unfriendly places.
The cheap, the tacky, the second-rate. Restaurants, motels, bus
stations. And in November, in raw weather, with little smudges of dirty
snow on the ground.

Buffalo is an industrial city of a third of a million people, "located
in the North Eastern part of United States, on the shores of Lake Erie
and the beautiful Niagara River. Buffalo is only 25 miles from one of
world's seven natural wonders, the Niagara Falls,"(sic) according to the
city's official fact sheet. The city rose to prominence as the western
terminal of the Erie Canal, completed in 1825, and ultimately became the
largest grain handling port in the world. Due to its strategic location
on the Great Lakes the city subsequently became a major industrial
center, in steel and auto and chemicals.

Buffalo became infamous in the 1970s for Love Canal, a landfill into
which Hooker Chemical had dumped 20,000 tons of 248 assorted chemicals.
(The site has an estimated 130 pounds of dioxin, three ounces of which
can kill in excess of 1 million people.) The chemicals at Love Canal
will take 20,000 years to decompose. The city has a large number of
contaminated and unused industrial sites, including 60 sites covered by
the national toxic waste cleanup fund and more than 20 on New York
state's registry of inactive hazardous waste sites.

According to the New America Network's 1996 Real Estate Planning Guide,
"Buffalo is evolving from a smokestack-oriented and heavy manufacturing
area to a high-tech, light manufacturing market. Suburban areas are
seeing the construction of new office space, and healthy growth is
occurring in the retail sector." Somehow this hasn't made itself felt in
the lives of Gallo's characters. They're the "losers" in the new, global
economy.

It's shameful to see film critics, with six-figure salaries, echo this
sort of language and refer to Billy and Layla, even while praising the
film, as "lovable losers." These commentators imagine that everyone
lives like they do. It merely indicates how remote American films and
critics are, in particular, from the realities of contemporary life.
There is nothing exceptional about the physical and emotional conditions
reproduced in the film; millions live in this forlorn, desperate manner.
As a rule their lives simply aren't represented on film. The phony
exploits of math geniuses from the slums, sexy policewomen and
well-heeled, empty-headed college kids are so much more interesting.

There is much more to be said. One might point out that works of art
that fail to stir profound emotions are useless from nearly every point
of view. There are still too many politically-conscious individuals who
imagine that for a film to be valuable it must be a "panorama of great
events." But life and art are hardly exhausted by dramatizations of
social laws as such. There is something chaotic, disturbing and tortured
about this film, something that speaks far more powerfully than a
hundred historical "epics" and a hundred carefully organized "social
realist" dramas about the need to do away with all existing relations.

The real artist must be, first of all, deeply moved by the human
condition. Theodore Dreiser, the novelist, would be so overcome by the
state of things that he could break into tears walking down the street.
The German filmmaker R. W. Fassbinder once told an interviewer early in
his career something similar: "When I meet people in the streets and
railway stations, see their faces and their lives, it fills me with
despair. I often want to scream out loud."

It's difficult to see how Gallo will go from here. Buffalo '66 is such a
personal, in certain respects, autobiographical film, that one doesn't
know how he will follow up on it. Whatever Gallo does from now on, this
film is an indelible contribution.



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