Stray (2020) - Elizabeth Lo

In Stray, documentarian Elizabeth Lo turns her attention to the massive population of stray dogs that call Istanbul home. I was somewhat expecting this movie to be reminiscent of Kedi, a fantastic documentary from 2016, about the massive population of stray cats that call Istanbul home. As it turns out, it’s a very different film, but a very good one. Kedi was a kind of feel-good movie about the way we deepen our humanity by opening our lives to animals. Stray, on the other hand, is a story about the ways in which a society begins to lose its humanity when it refuses to open itself with empathy to living beings of both the animal and the human variety. These aren’t exactly flip sides of the same coin, because I wouldn’t say that they are that diametrically opposed; there are moments of tenderness and kindness to be found in Stray, even if the overall tone is darker.

A large part of that darker tone is down to the fact that the dog we spend the most time with, Zeytin, at one point finds himself taken in as an erstwhile companion by a group of young Syrian refugees who themselves live on the street. The movie makes a lot out of the way the lives of the stray dogs and the Syrian refugees mirror each other. Both groups have been left to survive on their own with no resources by a society that sees them as second-class citizens at best and, more often, as non-citizens. There are scenes of both the dogs and the refugees being given food by charitable Turks, but there are also scenes of both the dogs and the refugees being driven away from food and shelter by the authorities, angry residents of Istanbul and even tourists. It’s the old idea of judging a society based on how it treats its least powerful members, in this case refugees and stray animals. This, of course, isn’t the first movie to draw parallels between the way society treats marginalized groups of humans and animals and it won’t be the last either unfortunately.

I don’t want to give the impression that this movie is an ultra-bleak slog, because it isn’t. There are, as I said above, a lot of nice moments of kindness and connection. A small black-and-white puppy named Kartal gets a lot of screen time and she always brings the cuteness. And then there’s also just a philosophical pragmatism to the attitudes of the “strays,” both human and animal, that we see here. They just go on, if you know what I mean. In the face of hardship and difficulties, they just go about their lives as best they can, finding moments of kindness where and when they can. The film treats these individuals without much in the way of sentimentality or overt tugging of the heart-strings. These beings aren’t being captured on film so they can be pitied, but so they can be seen. Much of the emotion of the film runs under the surface, but by the time you get to the ending, you will be moved. The final scene of the movie is a shot that the filmmakers’ have clearly carefully chosen. As dusk falls over the city, we hear a muezzin in the distance making the call to prayer; in the foreground, a dog howls along with the sound. It’s the perfect final shot for a movie that is itself a prayer for all the forgotten ones. 3 ½ stars.

tl;dr – documentary about Istanbul’s stray dog population also has political points to make about refugees and the need for justice for all of God’s most powerless creations. 3 ½ stars.  

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Going to Meet the Man (1965) - James Baldwin

While the tale of how we suffer and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell . . .

Wrapping up this little four-book James Baldwin marathon with this really excellent short story collection. The oldest short story here, Previous Condition, was originally published in 1948, so the stories here span a period of over fifteen years of Baldwin’s career, so perhaps the most striking thing about them is that they are of a very consistent quality. The first story, The Rockpile, is the weakest in the collection. It and The Outing both revisit characters from Baldwin’s first novel, Go Tell It On the Mountain. The Rockpile is mainly of interest because it allows us to revisit those characters. The Outing, which follows the characters on a church picnic, is better. None of the other stories explicitly reference Baldwin’s first three novels, but if you’ve read them, you’ll certainly notice a lot of thematic familiarity. Sonny’s Blues put me in mind of Another Country with its portrait of a troubled jazz musician and his strained relationship with his sibling, a brother this time, not a sister as in Another Country. This Morning, This Evening, So Soon features a character preparing to return to America after a time spent in Europe and the feelings of dread and uncertainty he faces about going back, being a black man in a relationship with a white woman and with a biracial son. This one evoked both Giovanni’s Room and Another Country for me. This is not to say that these stories don’t stand on their own; they do because Baldwin is a master at capturing large emotions and themes in small moments of time. This Morning, This Evening, So Soon takes place over a single evening, but it ranges far afield in its emotional and thematic ideas and the stakes are high.

Other stories are different from what we’ve seen from Baldwin so far. The Man Child follows a cast of rural white characters and the way one of the wealthier farm families looks down on Jamie, a failed farmer, and the fall-out of that clash. Come Out the Wilderness is the only story here that has a main female character and it’s a fascinating look at how she has to navigate office politics and deal with sexual harassment from her boss. The fact that both characters are black adds an extra layer of difficulty to her position within the company.

The best story, ultimately, is the final one, the title story. It’s told from the perspective of a racist white police officer in the American South and it’s one of the most disturbing pieces of fiction I’ve ever read. Some of the content is violent and graphic certainly, as when the officer tortures a Civil Rights leader in a jail cell, but the inescapable horror of the story is the heat of the man’s hatred. Being inside this perspective, seeing through this man’s eyes and thinking his thoughts is a claustrophobic, stifling experience. As the story begins, he is unable to perform sexually with his wife and, after thinking through the events of the day, he recalls becoming aroused while beating a protestor earlier in the day. And then he goes back in his mind to the day he saw his first lynching, when he was only 8 years old and taken to the event by his father. The depiction of the lynching is graphic and incredibly difficult to read, but as the officer remembers it, he finds himself soothed. For him, the memory is one of peace and love, connection to his father, connection to his community. Even as we are seeing through his eyes, though,  our experience is very different, made all the more horrifying because of the rosy filter of childhood we’re looking through. Baldwin talked a lot about the ways poor whites were negatively impacted by racism. He would often say that they were mentally enslaved in much the same way black southerners had been physically enslaved. I think that’s very much what this story is about. Because, relatively speaking, it’s easy to break a physical chain (though there are certainly societal chains that surround those for Black Americans then as now), but to break a psychological or an emotional chain is much harder. This is especially true because these chains were often forged at the earliest reaches of a person’s memory or even in that pre-memory period of a person’s life.  

I’ve gone into more detail about this story, though I haven’t told exactly how it ends, because, while I am not a guy who goes in for trigger warnings, I think you kind of need to know what you’re getting into before you read this story in particular. Baldwin’s books are often very disturbing, deeply sad or passionately angry, but Going to Meet the Man is disturbing and upsetting and horrifying on a level nothing else I’ve ever read by Baldwin has been. It’s nothing short of an absolute masterpiece and it’s the perfect way to end this collection of stories. The other stories are emotional, sad and disturbing at times, though they do have some hope as well. But the book ultimately builds to this final story and it’s like a brick to the head. The force of Baldwin’s prose is a hammer and you will not walk away from this story unscathed. Nor should you. Sixty years on, Baldwin’s power is undiminished. Read at your own risk. 4 stars.

tl;dr – gripping collection of short stories is mostly excellent as expected for Baldwin and it builds to a final story that is among the most harrowing things Baldwin ever wrote. 4 stars.  

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