God in the Hands of Angry Sinners

by Justin Helmer (@justinhelmer)

Anyone who finds their mind boggled by the idea of Kevin Smith making a stark and violent film should consider that in the originally scripted (and filmed) ending of Clerks Dante is shot and killed in cold blood in the final seconds of the film. Think about that for just a second; the entire third act of the film turns on Dante finally deciding what he wants. He has made peace with all of the stupidity of his day and he finally has a plan for tomorrow. Has a plan for maybe the first time in his life--when his life is brought to a sudden violent and utterly senseless end. We haven't really seen much of that Kevin Smith in the years since, though that sensibility crept into the edges of Dogma, but he is well and truly back in his latest film Red State.

I was lucky enough to be able to attend the Red State USA screening in Minneapolis, Minnesota on March 9th. Because I am a fan of his work I have been following the development of this picture for years now and had been looking forward to seeing this movie for quite some time. I have taken the opportunity that Kevin has offered screening attendees to write a review of the film for posting in the Red State Reviewed section of www.coopersdell.com. I will do my level best to avoid any spoilers--because this is a movie that you should really experience with as little foreknowledge as possible--however, if you are the kind of person who does not want to know anything at all, consider yourself warned.

In his introduction Kevin talked briefly about the difficulties people have had in classifying this movie. He uses the label horror film but even as he said it on stage he qualified it. I would say that Red State is a moral horror movie; all of the truly terrifying things, at least for me, were moments of people who should have been, by the conventions of storytelling, protagonists making compromised moral decisions. As far as the antagonists at the center of the story, they were appalling in their utter certainty of belief in the rightness of their actions. That as much as anything else seemed to be the over-arching theme of the movie people can get up to the most awful things because of a belief; something of a variation of Dogma's theme of having a good idea being safer that having a codified (and therefore limiting) belief.

The story takes as its jumping off point the classic 'horny teens looking for sexual conquest' story and spins it off into the deep dark woods of religious fundamentalism. Smith remarked that the story concerns itself with the things America tends to obsess over: religion (as opposed to faith), sex, and violence. At the center of it all there are these two opposing forces brought to life in a pair of truly remarkable performances: John Goodman as Joseph Keenan and Michael Parks as Reverend Abin Cooper. Both actors bring a wealth of honesty to their performances that makes the most hair-pin logical turns of storytelling ring true.

Parks, in particular, plays the kind of fundamentalist abuser of religion who makes you desperately wish you could label him a movie monster and put him out of your mind. The truth is Abin Cooper is everywhere in the world that people have taken to killing in the name of whatever god they believe in. Smith was raised Catholic so he made Cooper a ruined Christian in the vein of Fred Phelps, but those nineteen men who betrayed Islam and destroyed so many lives in 2001 could have easily been cut from the same cloth. That was the most unsettling element for me personally: the utter damned plausibility of the whole thing.

One of my friends who was with me at the show remarked afterword that "Dave Klein shot the hell out of this movie." I could not say it better than that; whatever you imagine you know about the way a Kevin Smith movie looks, forget it. There is a claustrophobic closeness to all of it and at times the movie puts you in POV shots of various characters. The sustained POV reaction shot of a character as he wakes up in great peril is almost too much to bear. I felt like there were a couple of times that the sound mix went a little too heavy on the bombast, for my taste, covering up a fairly important plot point with the sounds happening around the phone conversation.

The only story issue I had was in the denouement which I felt had just a little bit too many jokey moments in it. This is an important point of summation for the characters in the film, and I was losing every other statement to laugh lines. Good jokes--or they wouldn't have gotten laughs--but there and then I was wanting to hear the conversation and I couldn't make it out.

In October Red State is going to be given a wide theatrical release; when it hits your town I suggest you go check it out. Take along two or three people who you can go out with afterward and chew over the story together. Kevin Smith has created a jet-black satire of humanity's tendency towards fundamentalism and the ways we react to it. If you were expecting Red State to be just another Smith movie you are in for a revelation of your own.

In Which I Make a Plea for Reason
Justin Helmer

I think it must have been the summer of 2002 the first time the St. Cloud Superman popped up on my radar. I love comic books almost as I love strange theatrical behavior--and if you can somehow engage my geekdom and my deep appreciation for truly bizarre showmanship at the same time you will ninety-nine times out of one hundred have me on your wavelength. So, yeah, I was jazzed and a little bit curious when I heard there was a guy standing on a busy street corner wearing a full Superman costume and brandishing an American flag that seemed to be almost big enough to fly over a federal building, or even possibly a Perkins.

Based on all of the initial coverage I saw, this was a guy who, not knowing what else to do with all of this angst he was feeling, decided to create a little bit of a positive vibe by taking his comically-outsized symbol of America and stirring up a little good old-fashioned USA good feeling. I can't fault him for that; not knowing how to process the new normal became, in the months and years following the attacks, a kind of second national pastime. I was no different, so I was given to positive feelings about somebody just doing something anything that didn't start and end with killing brown people in the desert.

His sense of theatrics certainly could not have been any better. He would stand on the corner and wave and salute or point to cars that honked as they drove past; he would pose for pictures and lean down and tell young children to stay in school and not be an evil-doer. And he seemed to be there every day, standing on the corner of 25th and Division providing a clarity, a focal point, something to feel good about when we were still spending a part of every day half convinced that planes could start dropping the sky at any minute. There was at least one guy willing to go out of his way to give other folks a moment of joy, and pride, and hope, and never expecting anything in return.

At least it seemed that way at first.

It didn't take long to start hearing the darker reports of Superman's night time exploits. It was really quite the Jekyll and Hyde scenario: by day he was out there on his corner upholding the American way of life and protecting the Dairy Queen from the Saint Cloud Solomon Grundy. By night he would wander into a bar and let others buy him drinks till he was well and truly shit-faced, and then he would get belligerent and grabby until he was eventually ejected from the bar. There seemed to be a story of this guy--I can't remember his name, we'll call him Clark--being banned from every bar in the area. Now, it is probably true that the stories of his drunken douchebagitude were exaggerated, but by letting himself become associated with those behaviors he lost, in my mind, any right to wear that costume.

Look, I know that Superman (and his infinitely cooler fellow DC character Batman) are not real. And maybe I'm the only person in the world who cared but if it is true that the meaning in a symbol is whatever you place in it, then Clark lost his right to represent all of the things that Superman stands for.

I have been thinking of him a lot these past few days watching the United States wrestle with the question of health care and how to reform it. Now, please believe me when I tell you that I count amongst my friends people of almost all the possible political leanings; if you can believe it, care about it, argue about it or hold it as a belief chances are you can find it represented amongst my friends. Christian, Atheist, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, and at least one honest-to-goodness Maltheist. A Canadian intimately familiar with nationalized health systems who swears by their services and a Norwegian who works in the health care field who comes to America for her medical treatment. Liberals so far left as to make Emma Goldman proud and Conservatives so very, very conservative. Hear this: This is NOT about health care reform.

I do have opinions, just ask me I'll tell you, but that is a whole other polemic and not why I'm taking your time right now (thanks, by the way, for investing the time to read this--I'm coming to the important bit here soon, promise). This is about the disgusting and disquieting behavior I have seen in the short time since the bill has passed. Death threats and bricks through windows and all of the shouting of "nigger" and "faggot" at members of the Congress, and all of it from people who call themselves patriots.

I'm here to tell you: It's a damnable lie.

I know patriots. My whole life I have been privileged to know men and women who can and do accomplish great things, on the smallest of scales and the largest possible venues. Teachers, Law Enforcement Officers, Nurses, Farmers, Law Professionals, and Homemakers. People out there every day making the world a better place in the only way that really works: one day at a time, one person at a time. And among those people I care about, if you asked four of them their opinion about any particular issue you would likely receive five different answers. None of them would stoop to namecalling and bigotry--none of them.(1)

One of the classes I work in is a eighth-grade level history course. I have heard the story of the Boston Tea Party more times than I can count, and this year, for the first time, I winced at the idea of the connections the students were making to their present-day lives. There are good people in the Tea-Party political movement--I know it--but when you let Tom Tancredo(2) become the public face of your movement, you a relegating yourself to not only irrelevance but you cross the line into actual hot-button knuckleheadedness. Frothing at the mouth, wild eyed, carrying-guns-in-public, crazy and dangerous. And as we all know, that way leads to dead doctors, and dead civil rights leaders, and dead citizens, because when you crank the rhetoric up that loud eventually you are going to run across someone who takes the figurative call to arms literally.

Now there are some out there who are literally cleaning their weapons in an almost masturbatory fantasy of "taking back the gubment" in honest-to-god armed conflict. These people are, by and large, victims of one kind or another, and like all trauma sufferers prone to doing stupid things. They need to be watched, but no more or less than they ever did before. It is the places where the lunatic fringe is steeping into the mainstream I'm really concerned about.

Leaders of the Tea Party? Organizers of the "Kill the Bill" (oh, but isn't that an interesting choice of imagery?) rallies? Renounce these people. Do it now. If you want to be thought of as a patriot -- if you really want to earn that big "S" you pasted to your chest -- start calling for reason and understanding. Cause yeah, Jefferson said that "Blood Watering the Tree of Liberty" thing but he also said "A coward is much more exposed to quarrels than a man of spirit."

Renounce these people, do it now--earn that "S." Please, for the sake of the country you say you love, don't wait till you have to say it to try to wash blood off your hands.

Please.

***Two Small Points of Clarification***
1. Everybody has at one time or another called someone or something they didn't like a name. It is not my intention to suggest otherwise, nor am I some kind of hand-fluttering Victorian who is incapable of taking a few digs, debate--up to and in some cases including invective--is a part of life and can even be healthy. Bigotry in service of intimidation is a different animal.

2. I have not seen--nor do I believe there to be--any evidence of Mr. Tancredo's calling *DIRECTLY* for what has become a pattern of violence against Democratic law makers. I also have not heard him or Mrs. Palin (the other nominal figurehead of the movement) make any sort of public call for the violence to stop, and there have been plenty of opportunities.



In Which I Make a Plea for Reason by Justin Helmer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Five Minutes In

Five Minutes In
Originally uploaded by Helmer, J

In the aftermath of this year's trivia game I was sitting in Michelle's living room talking to Spooner about all things "Firefly" attempting to make clear how cool this new thing I'd found was. I went so far as to leave him the first disc of the series out of my set--thinking that, after listening to Craig, Sarah and I ramble during the whole weekend he would be an easy sell. Last night I got a phone call letting me know that the seeds we had planted that weekend had germinated quite nicely. The three of us had created two new browncoats--always a nice feeling.


I'm still working on KJ--in fairness though I should point out that it is a extreme stretch of her taste in popular entertainment. She dosen't like westerns or speculative-fiction and since "Firefly" is a melding of the two, well as you can imagine it is taking some doing. The only way the show could possibly be a worse fit is if it we're a space/western/mob drama which, is sounding kinda cool to me but I digress. Incidently, the mob thing is a deal breaker for the lady, she finds the people and situations to be so repellant that enjoyment of the story is utterly impossible. Aside from having no one to talk Sopranos with, I find that kinda cool, so strong is her moral compass in that regard that even fictional mobsters leave her cold. Though the whole "Firefly" thing is still a going concern, and I can wait...


I do have one thing going for me in my mission to make a browncoat out of my love...Joss Whedon. If the man can make her love a TV show called "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"--well anything is possible. Truly, I run the risk of over-stating things when I talk of my regard for Whedon's work. I have even caught myself using the phrase 'greatest living writer' which has a nice grandiose ring to it, but is of course, utterly ridiculous. He might well be, but I'm in no place to judge without having read everything else by anyone alive, still there aren't many people whose work I'll patronize sight-unseen. Joss Whedon, Aaron Sorkin, Spider Robinson, Tom Robbins and Neil Gaiman that's about it. (Btw...Why are all my favorite writers men? Kay I'm offically putting out a call for any and all fiction suggestions by writers with xx chromosomes.) That group of writers could call me up and say "I need to borrow $500.00 bucks to finish my new novel/script.", and I would do whatever I could to get it for them.


So, yes, if you are out there reading this and my opinion in these matters is one that you feel you can trust--go put your hands on a copy of "Firefly." You might as well drop the extra $20.00 and get "Serenity" as well cause you are not going to want to wait once you get there. (DO NOT under any circumstances watch the movie and the TV show out of sequence, I cannot be held responsible if you do.) If, you know me, you know of my deep and abiding love for "Star Wars," know how much a part of my life that world is...


"Firefly" and "Serenity" are better.

Tip O' The HAT

Terrible Live
Originally uploaded by Helmer, J.

The year was 1997, your friend and humble narrator was sitting in the Apocalypse lounge on the campus of SCSU; smoking and listening to the table full of physical plat/custodial staff talk about work stuff. If you ever want to know what really goes on someplace like a State university--seek out these folks--I was getting a whole other education I wasn't even paying for. When I wasn't evesdropping, I was reading Robert Anton Wilson's "Shrodinger's Cat Trilogy--and I suddenly ran across the phrase "Trick Top Hat." Something clicked. I pulled out what was ostensibly my History folder and began to write; Wilson book still open in front of me just pulling random phrases and Images from the book and fitting them together as best I could. I eventually came up with what I thought was a cool song lyric to take to my bandmates--Eddy Burke wrote music to it and it went into our set list. Always a fun song to play cause the lyrics confused the hell out of the audience; plus Eddy had written in that loud/soft/loud Pixies--Nirvana style which made it a cool switch-up style wise.

Years pass. The band dissolves in a very garage-band "It used to be about the music, man!" kinda way. I put a copy of some of Terrible's lyrics up as a section of my webpage and forget all about it for the most part.

Eight years later I'm up in the middle of the night (one of my periodic insomia adventures) and I punch my name into Google's search bar. Yes, I'm man enough to admit I've 'Google-d" myself...and I run into this. It is odd enough to find yourself quoted--and credited for something years and years after you created it. Still, stranger to me, was the fact that I hadn't the slightest idea what this guy was talking about--you'll notice that it's prefaced as 'a message from Chris_Titan. I don't know who or what he is, and looking arround the rest of the blog--I can't make much sense outta anything that's there. Does anybody out there reading this speak paranoid-delusional? Maybe it's some sorta weird meta-joke or a art project?

An odd little message from myself at 19 shows up years later being quoted--and now I suddenly have a connection to this author. It is a strange feeling to write something, forget about it, and have it pop up years later. Makes me wonder what othe sorts of web-detrius I've got floatin about.

Snow again today--I keep hearing people say March is the snowiest month. I would like it to be spring now please--wet, frozen rain in my face, on my shoes, in my shoes. It's pretty, yeah, and now if we could just keep it from melting and making a mess of everything that would be great. I only focus on the negative cause I'm a cynical person--I love Minnesota and I should just shut my yap. Fargin snow!!!

I've been watching the new season of "The Sopranos" on HBO and I gotta say; I'm glad the family is back in town. Only one episode in and I'm already chomping at the bit for the next show, you'll get no spoilers outta me, but holy Hannah talk about your cliff-hangers.... Here's a perfect example of why I love this show; the first episode in 22 months of making the public wait for the rest of the story the first line of dialogue is: "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public."

We, the viewing audience, just got smacked upside by the head by the shows creators. David Chase as much as said "I could do this forever. I could keep feeding you progressively more craptastic product for as long as I like. You would eat it up, you would gorge on it in point of fact, and I would have more money than God. I'm not going to--we are going out while we are at the top of our game--but I know I could do 'Tony goes to Cabo' and you sheeple would be there."

And he did it at the top of the first show back--after making us wait. I love it.

Before I get too far down today's tangential trail--let me point out a couple of additions to the ol' Blog. First, way down on the bottom of the page you will notice a button that links to my Flickr photo page check me out--I'm sharing photos. Now if you'll be so kind as to direct your attention to the link list to the right you will notice two recent additions.

The first, "Geeks in Residence," is maintained by my friend Kelly out in NYC--her and to a certain lesser extent her husband Patrick (I've noticed that he doesn’t post there as frequently) aside from being all-around cool people they were kind enough to show us about when the Lady K and I visited this past summer.

The second, "Letters To The Ether," is one of the online homes of Mr. Shawn Holster a friend and coworker of mine from my days at KVSC. (Actually come to think on it, Pat was my mentor and Co-Host of "Insomnia Heaven" as well. So in a weird six degrees of Kevin Bacon sort of way the two are related.) Shawn is an artist/writer/cool-cat from the Twin Cites metro area, aside from being one of the sharpest people I know he also is responsible for turning me on to the music of Ike Reilly. Check them out when you get a chance--both blogs are good reads.

And now on with the show:

Today, the ides of March, was the day I finally managed to finish holding auditions for the play I'm directing for the local High School. Of the whole process, this beginning bit has got to be the most tedious. Without ever having held a rehearsal or a Tech meeting I'm already a week behind schedule--gotta love it. It's not that I'm not excited, I am, but there is just this horrible Tantalus moment here at the front. I've chosen the show and committed to this production--I now have a cast and I desire nothing more than getting to work. Between now and May when the show goes up I will live and breathe these characters and situations to the point of saturation. Before that happens though, say from now till the show starts tooling around on its own power, I will be at beset by questions and fears about my choice of show and cast. Past experience has demonstrated that I have (if nothing else) a pretty decent sense of who goes with what role--still they say you're only as good as your last show so until this starts coming together I'll be biting my spiritual nails a bit.

The whole audition process is problematic in my experience, for the simple reason that it really doesn’t do THAT much to get the right actor in the right role. Granted we are talking about a High School play here so, in some sense, standing and talking at the same time is the main requirement. Still I take this stuff seriously and I'm looking at character matches, and who reads well, and who looks ready to carry what size role plus taking into consideration student seniority and who has been around the longest. Now the real work begins with all of the attendant schedule related nonsense--any bets on how long it will be till I hold a rehearsal with a full compliment of actors? Stay tuned...