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Monday, February 09, 2009
Episode 140: Milk
Went to see Milk at the Arts Centre with Daniel because I saw his Facebook status and decided on a whim to get out of my room rather than do work. Went to the Library to return the John Berryman poetry that I hadn't read (for the second time), and picked up a couple of books on Stoppard in exchange. Shall have to do some serious work on my essay over Friday to Sunday, which means I really need to finish my fiction by Thursday. No luck with ideas so far. Anyway, Milk was excellent. I'd had no idea who Harvey Milk was until I heard about the film, but between seeing it and looking him up on Wikipedia, I'm seriously impressed. The determination it took to do what he did, despite failing multiple times, is incredible. What I found patently ridiculous, on the other hand, was the 'Twinkie defense' coined to get Dan White off the hook. Sure, junk food is bad for you, but claiming it makes you murder people? That's more like something from an episode of Fringe than real life. My only quibble is that there didn't seem to be sufficient motivation for the double murder. Anger perhaps, but killing? I'm not sure. Perhaps I'm just missing something?
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'lack of motivation' seems to be Gus Van Sant's thing: it's never really explained, in 'Elephant', why the massacre happens, nor in 'Last Days' why the central character does himself in. It's part of the appeal to me, personally. It kinda denies the Hollywood idea that we can somehow know everything about the characters onscreen, how their lives slot together; to us, in real life, these things are kind of opaque - no-one really does know why Dan White murdered Milk, so it's perhaps presumptious to impute a particular motive to him.
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