Christopher Schroeder

Category: community and culture

  • Unto Ourselves?

    The movie Islands, which was written by Jan-Ole Gerster, Blaž Kutin, and Lawrie Doran, is an engaging exploration of appearance, reality, and aloneness that never quite coalesces into clear conclusions.

    Tom (Sam Riley), a former tennis pro and current resort coach, has an apparently ideal life at least to Canary Islands tourists. The sun is constant, his obligations are limited, and even these can be avoided when he wants. Nevertheless, he suspects that something is missing, especially when a local family, with whom he has become friends, announces their imminent retirement, and return to their former homeland.

    Tom soon befriends a family on holiday, who also have their own needs. They’re struggling with infertility, and perhaps infidelity, and as a result questioning their choices, including their marriage. A second child seems to be Ann’s (Stacy Martin) answer, but her husband Dave (Jack Farthing) is less certain of what they’re doing and who they are.

    Tom agrees to escort Dave to a nearby club where he disappears. Any uncertainty Tom might have been feeling evaporates as he assists with the search for the missing husband, who had disclosed his suicidal intention to Ann. Tom later supplies a false, and unsolicited, alibi for, and subsequently has sex with, her.

    Dave, dehydrated and exhausted, is eventually found while swimming toward a volcano where he intended to throw himself over its crater. Tom and Ann have a moment in the hospital just before she returns to Dave’s side. Tom then returns to his previous life, and recreates a former moment of glory on the courts for the latest group of mouthy, boisterous tourists.

    There he passes out, and is found by Dave, who has brought the payment for his son Anton’s tennis lessons and some additional money for Tom’s efforts, including Dave tells him caring for his family. Tom in other words is still hired help whereas Dave, Ann, and their son are returning to their own lives.

    Audiences are to be attracted to Tom’s experience, which has the outward appearance of Eden or heaven. The sun is constantly shining. His responsibilities are minimal, especially when he can eat and stay at the resort when he wants. He has a constant churn of female companionship and court-mates.

    This movie succeeds as a psychological thriller, and also explores an almost palpable loneliness in all of their lives. Moreover, it suggests that Tom’s desperation isn’t as much malicious as perhaps opportunistic, which makes it all the more poignant.

    The ambiguity almost seems borderline excessive, but the only obviously false moment is the conclusion. Tom back in his own apartment is eating the cereal he purchased for Anton when he swipes his wallet and keys and then races to the airport. Once there, he asks if he can still purchase a ticket, which he can, and then is asked to where.

    Perhaps he intends to follow this family although that seems less likely than the possibility that he could be fleeing from his unsatisfying life. The details however are wrong. He seems not to have a passport for example perhaps because he in his haste left it at home.

    The bigger problem is the emotional resources he will need to leave. Are audiences to think that he is ultimately incapable of escaping as his camel-farm friends did? Or that Tom has acted rashly again?

    Even his front desk friend has had enough of his shenanigans. Has he learned anything from escaping his self-manufactured legal jeopardy?

    Is his motivation even the point? Perhaps not, the title seems to suggest. Maybe all of us in contrast to the line from the John Donne poem are islands unto ourselves, and perhaps forever are so.

    That could be the conclusion of this movie. All the ambiguity while not ruining the experience unfortunately makes that unclear.

  • Theater Today

    I attended the final production of Manual Cinema’s The 4th Witch this past weekend, and was elated at the outset.

    I had forgotten how thrilling live performance can be. I unfortunately had sufficient time throughout the rest of the performance to contemplate the relative absence of theater in my life.

    Its presence dramatically diminished once I left a theater awards organization. For eight years, I had been a theater judge, and was seeing more than one hundred, and sometimes more than two hundred, different productions each year.

    I left the organization as a result of its lack of professionalism, and its resistance to professional development, and its leaders’ lack of integrity and ethics. I was also was concerned about the amount of time that I was spending at less than noteworthy productions, which were hours of our lives another judge reminded me that we’d never get back.

    For the first year or two, I resumed my theater subscriptions, which meant that I was attending fifteen to twenty performances a year. That effectively reduced my attendance rate, which allowed more space and time for other activities, but inadvertently increased the costs, which now included money. A single theater subscription, which could include four, five, or six performances, could cost several hundred dollars a season even for preview performances or midday matinees.

    These increased costs I admit could have highlighted the diminished quality, or could have made it more salient. Such a trend had been evident when I was still a theater judge, especially after the pandemic when theaters rushed to respond to the loudest calls for a more woke world.

    Such calls could have been coming from those who were first to return to theaters, or the ones who most often attended shows. Regardless, these calls seemed to pressure theaters into featuring the same systemic racism themes that had a long presence even before the 2020 “We See You, White American Theater” missive.

    Theater as the most synthetic of art forms has a tradition of featuring such themes, and pushing social and artistic boundaries. Such a tradition is evident in the United States, as illustrated for example in August Wilson’s call for tradition and change, and even here in Chicago, which has made numerous contributions to theater both across the United States and around the world.

    Post-pandemic American theater however seemed more concerned about placating patrons, and in so doing became too timid. Too often, snapping, and easy laughs, rippled across too many darkened theaters in response to one intellectually and emotionally insulting scene after another.

    Most theaters, or at least the ones I had long been attending, seemed to reinforce mainstream liberal mentalities, and to refuse to reckon with the never-been-woke realities of too many social justice initiatives. So I stopped subscribing.

    I still cannot rationalize these costs, especially now that I’m retired. Maybe I wondered this weekend I never will.

    The challenge confronting theaters is to some extent understandable, and a perpetual question in debates about the economics of art. Realistic answers require a careful balance of finances and function.

    Regardless, American theater could confront the political economies of theater today, and rebalance its approach in ways that don’t compromise accessibility and affordability and challenge and change. To this end, Chicago again offers ideas, such as the Hull House approach or the little theater movement in the early twentieth century or the little theater movement soon thereafter to the storefront tradition in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries.

    These and other approaches offer accessible and accountable art, ones that theaters here in Chicago and elsewhere would be wise to consider. And these could mean more thrilling theater for me too.

  • Texts Today

    I’ve had my issues with the Chicago Sun-Times, but I’m objecting this time to recent comments from one of its writers.

    Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg wrote one that was ostensibly about why Chicago Children’s Museum had missing lights on a recent national broadcast. He elsewhere described it as “a columny sort of column” from “a columnist for column readers,” and admitted his uncertainty whether the newspaper would even publish it.

    The reason he suggests is that its features — “something chatty, a little funny, with a voice” — represents a kind of article that is disappearing over time. He offers no evidence but should know, and probably isn’t wrong.

    Such a claim could however have made the same claim about all newspaper articles generally. Newspapers as has been reported are disappearing across the United States, in which case readers would have fewer opportunities to encounter all newspaper articles, and not just “chatty” and “funny” ones that have “a voice.”

    Steinberg is suggesting I realize that forms, or genres, of newspaper articles seem to be changing, but that again isn’t particularly insightful. The medium as media critic Marshall McLuhan explained in 1964 is its message — content and “character” — and perhaps even more so after the appearance of the internet, social media, or AI today.

    The more interesting issue I believe can be found not in Steinberg’s comment but its connotations, particularly the suggestion of nostalgia and loss. Are “columny columns” better than the versions that are placing these?

    Should we lament the loss in other words of the “something chatty, a little funny, with a voice” columns? Are columns or while we’re at it other traditional journalistic genres inherently better than other kinds, including blog posts and social media to which he also turns?

    Steinberg’s opinion I believe cannot be separated from his ideas about his reputation for example or his need for continued employment. The rest of us might have different answers, but these must be considered contexts in which genres emerge, evolve, and are sometimes even eliminated.

    Discursive changes, like those in life, are unavoidable, and conclusions about whether such changes are unproductive or undesirable are debates worth having before offering opinions even throwaway ones.