--Brett Story, The Hottest August
I haven't felt like writing or blogging because I don't have anything to add. Even in therapy, I notice as I parrot phrases or sentiments I've seen on Twitter or angry Instagram stories or in personal essays in publications whose URLs start with "ny." But anyway, yesterday I watched this very powerful and beautiful and excellent documentary called The Hottest August and I would like to recommend it to you. It starts showing on PBS on Monday.*
The film depicts August, 2017--not the very hottest summer of all, but close--across the five boroughs. That month, the third season of our current administration, saw the murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Hurricane Harvey, and the solar eclipse. Also, people here packed into subway cars, called 311 about pitted roads, laid out on the beach in the Rockaways, vaped at the skate park, and (obviously my personal favorite moment) brawled at an amateur baseball game. Throughout the film, Story asks a broad range of subjects how they feel about the future. Mostly, they feel worried.
No scientists appear in the movie with doomsday numbers about glacial ice. One interviewee mentions her fear of having children because of climate change; another uses climate change as a for-instance of something she doesn't even worry about because it's too remote, unlike her financial future. At the same time, the film's interviews with an economist/investor type who clearly thinks of himself as a good guy rich guy and the mellifluous narration that draws occasionally from Capital bubble up to remind the viewer that behind all of these intimate hopes, dreams, and fears--a desire to start a small business or buy an apartment--lurks the superstructure of rapacious global capitalism and with it, the destruction of our planet and our island city.
The narration explicitly looks back at 2017 from an unspecified future, although whether it takes the perspective of the sci-fi future (represented in the film by an artist who walks around in an Afrofuturist astronaut costume) or just from 2018 remains nebulous. You have the feeling of watching the beginning and end of some certain era. In the film's logic, the past of 2017 represents a time when climate change seems remote and reaches less into our individual destinies than it inevitably will. Watching Story's Rockaway beach loungers on April 16, 2020, the day after the mayor announced that city beaches will be closed all summer, though, the film looks like the end of something very different than intended.
For the first time, I felt real grief for my city, seeing these everyday images of how it used to be just regularly, the Nostrand A train stop and Chinatown after it's closed and you can see people cleaning up inside restaurants. At the same time, seeing these little moments of every day life and these goofy New Yorkers trying to figure out how to make lives for themselves served as a reminder of the alone-togetherness of our current moment: all these people right now boxed up in their apartments, still harboring hopes, still under this same bright sky with a distant view of the skyline. In one of the last interviews in the film, a naturalist describes all the animals, the ospreys and coyotes and skunks, that have begun making their way back to the city. Nothing will be the same and everything will be hard, but those of us lucky to make it through will still find ways to go on.
*note: I have heard that the PBS version is a shorter cut than the original? I definitely recommend the longer version if possible to find!
** note 2: you can rent the full version from BAM
No comments:
Post a Comment