The Least That We Could Do (0 words) by
seekingferretChapters: 1/1
Fandom:
Indecent (2017)Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Manke/Rifkele, Sholem Asch/Madje Asch
Additional Tags: Fanvids, Politics, Jewish Character, Jewish Identity
Summary:
But they came, and when they finally made it here
It was the least that we could do to make our welcome clear
Come on in, we haven't slept for weeks
Drink some of this, this'll put color in your cheeks
Thanks to
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obopolsk for beta.
I'm entirely unclear on whether this vid works, because every time I watch it it means something entirely different to me. Possibly that means I created something deep and complicated and interesting?
The truth is that since 2016 an important part of me has been this inchoate ball of rage about American immigration policy. I've done a few things to fight that- I've gone to protests and supported friends going to protests, given money to refugee and immigrant aid organizations, I've sent emails to politicians, and of course, I voted against Trump. But mostly I've just spent a lot of time feeling powerless, and angry for that. And the other kernel of truth, which is undeniable, is that it's not like pre-Trump immigration policy was devoid of horrendous offenses against moral order. We've been fucking this up for as long as there's been an America and so I have always carried some part of that ball of rage with me. And yet as the grandson of Jewish immigrants, I carry along with the inherited trauma, the flight of Philip Roth's 'immigrant rocket'. I'm lucky to live in America, lucky to have had all the opportunities for growth and success and security this country has given to me.
skygiants recommended Indecent, a Paula Vogel musical about the creation and staging of Scholem Asch's controversial play God of Vengeance, in 2016, and it sounded amazing and I tried to get tickets, but it was already sold out. And I missed the Broadway run because as a rule I don't tend to go to Broadway shows. But fortunately PBS filmed Indecent and when
skygiants's Equinox request ended up a pinch hit I finally watched the musical and grabbed the pinch hit instantly, before I'd even finished watching. It's a brilliant piece of theater, combining sincerity and irony into the meatiest kind of metatheater. The music and dancing is fabulous and the acting and storytelling even moreso. And beyond all that, it tells an incredibly important and personal story for me, the story of Jewish immigrants struggling to figure out what life in America means, and how to balance the good and bad of America against each other. This show being on Broadway meant so much to me.
My first impulse when I grabbed the pinch hit was to vid Indecent to Tom Lehrer's "Smut", a song about the American impulse to censor art that people find too enjoyable. But I ran into a surprising problem pretty quickly. Indecent is such a powerful political work, and its questions about censorship and art and insiders and outsiders are so central to the moment, that vidding it compelled me to pull in all sorts of modern contexts. Smut as the beautiful lesbian love story in God of Vengeance, set against our President telling a reporter that he just grabs women by the pussy? Which acts of desire are valuable and which are truly indecent?
This wasn't a problem in that I didn't know how to pull it off. I had a pretty clear vision of what that vid looked like. But it was going to be the most razor-edged humor possible, a vid, as I told
bessyboo, built on angry tears. Which wasn't what I'd thought it would be, when the song popped into my head I'd thought that maybe I could make a funny satirical vid to "Smut." But if I was going to go biting and political, I wanted to talk about the part of the political narrative of Indecent that was most important to me, which was not the censorship aspect, but the immigration aspect. My little ball of rage.
And I'd just met the amazing Ibibio Sound Machine cover of John Darnielle's "Color in Your Cheeks" a few months earlier on the podcast "I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats". Ibibio Sound Machine is a band full of immigrants and they breathe new life and joy and frustration into Darnielle's paean to our moral obligation to welcome the stranger in both big and small ways. So I scrapped the Smut timeline and started breaking "Color in Your Cheeks".
American Jewry has been very lucky in America. In spite of all the struggles, all the persecutions, all the efforts to eradicate our identities, we have often been able to be ourselves here, and we have been safer here than anywhere else in living memory. The most mesmerizing thing for me about watching the PBS Indecent was seeing a Broadway play where a bunch of Jews dance to Ale Brider. In 2017, that is a thing that happened! Who could have ever predicted that could happen, that we could figure out how to be ourselves, the eternal wandering outsiders, and find a place for that authentic testimony of self on Broadway, centerstage of the dominant cultural paradigm? The massive and important and impossibly joyful irony of Indecent is that it stages scenes of Jewish life on the Broadway stage that were once literally banned from that same stage. How things have changed in a century. How things haven't changed.
This vid tries to be as conscious of all the struggles of the 20th Century Jew as Indecent is, and yet as celebratory of the place that the 21st century Jew finds themself. And it tries to be conscious of both the theatrical and metatheatrical stories being told, both the story of Scholem Asch and how he coped with the horrors of the 20th century, and the story of the story that he created and how it transformed in meaning as it moved from place to place. That's the balance I tried to strike, and every time I watch the vid the balance works out differently. So I don't know. But I do know that my ball of rage required that I acknowledge at the end that for all the celebration of immigrant success at the heart of Indecent, we are as an American people right now failing people who are desperately in need of our help, with an infuriating cruelty and callousness to human suffering. And in case the vid wasn't already transparently my work, the final shot in the vid, of the umbrellas, is a photo I took at a HIAS rally against the Muslim ban.
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