Happy Endings in the Land of Nothing

I recently watched My Big Fat Greek Wedding again. Not one of my favorite movies, not particularly profound, but always enjoyable nevertheless. I think one of the reasons it strikes people so is because it is essentially a fairy-tale in all the mechanics, and because its selling grace lies in its representation of cross-cultural contact resolving in classic eucatastrophe, the happy ending inserted in that space which in reality is so often the scene of the tragedy this movie flirts with. Ostensibly this is a brave, admirable message with contemporary relevance. But I couldn't help thinking how much this movie's happy ending depends on not only constructing a space in which it can operate, but on displacing that space where vital tragic elements should have been resolved.

Examined closely no inter-cultural understanding takes place in the movie, because there is no contact. What happens from the beginning of the movie is that a place is introduced for one culture, the colourful warm American Greek family. That culture is set up in Tula’s opening lament against a vague unresisting homogenized ‘norm’, invested with the authority of its status as ‘normal’, but essentially no real character of its own. This ‘norm’ is represented first by the ‘blond, delicate’ girls who mock Tula’s Greek culture as a little girl, and later by Ian and his parents, the Miller family. The function of the first is to provide a context for Tula’s angst and to locate the American Greek culture as defined by ‘difference’, a difference which is celebrated and whose short-comings are redeemed through sentimental comedy. The function of the second (the Miller family) is simply to maintain the basis for that celebration through simultaneously emphasizing its peculiarity and locating the culture’s value in its difference from the Miller family, whose homogenized lack-lustre status is epitomized in Tula’s father’s phrase ‘the toast family’. How is that celebration maintained?

Who is the Miller family, and just what are they supposed to represent? If the comparison between the two families is examined it is plain that their primary signification is that of emptiness, comprised of negatives, ‘not-being’, ‘lack’. Ian’s family lacks loudness so there is space for Tula’s family’s loudness and even for Ian to learn their language. They are not religious so there is space for Ian to assume Tula’s religion. Ian is a vegetarian, his diet defined by lack, while Tula’s family are big eaters. All contact with the Greek culture then is defined by ‘filling’, a ‘filling’ which is enabled by their structured emptiness. A large part of that structure consists of Ian giving in to all Tula’s family’s demands while there is no instance where the opposite ever needs to occur.

Their silence is contrasted with the Greek family’s loudness; their dispassionate secularity with the colourful faith in the Greek Orthodox Church; even their colouring tends to hues and lines (beige, white and understated shades) suggesting ‘space’, while Tula’s family wear bright or dark colours. Gus calls them ‘dry’, the ‘toast family’ and they lack life, emotion and even religion. Ian tells Tula ‘I came alive when I met you’, and the sign of the Miller parents getting up and dancing at the end of the movie signifies the same. ‘Life’ enters the empty culture through being substituted by fullness, signified by the American Greek culture.

I want to be plain here that my complaint is not simply that inter-cultural understanding occurs at the expense of any one culture. I am not implying that Western culture, secular culture or whatever is being represented by the Miller family is vilified by the movie, because it simply isn’t present in the movie. The Miller family are rather conveniently empty; and as such they don’t so much signify a culture as a vague West emptied of culture. Ian effectually ‘becomes culture-ed’ by accepting Tula’s culture where before there was none. And what this implies is that there is only a space for other cultures if we make absent the vitality of the dominant culture, implicitly, because other cultures simply cannot hold their own in a direct tackle with it were it allowed to be present in its true complexity and vitality, and that is deeply discouraging and offensive.

The Problem of Knowing

Information has always been, in some form or other, a currency of prestige. It is the material from which we spin our reality, but more importantly it codifies the focal point around which that reality radiates, a sense of self, the I in the face of the universe. We use it to tell us who we are and it both sustains and illuminates the cultural geographies that frame our hierarchies of social status.

More importantly, though, are the politics of visibility that validate those geographies. In a real sense, it isn’t what we know as who knows we know it, not what we know reveals about ourselves, but how it portrays us for others, and what they choose to do with that which counts, and now becomes knowledge in confrontation with their own focal points of knowing.

I can wrap information around myself like camouflage or I can filter everything I know through the sift of who I want to be. I can’t know everything I know and be myself, the Self I choose to sell to others, to counter the self they will make subordinate to their own selves.

I have also learned now where ignorance cannot be disdained. Of course we punish this for reasons that can be entirely arbitrary; people who do not know have chosen not to know, not to live in some way which we see as vital to our own selves, and so they must have chosen not to be wise, not because they have validated other aspects of being, but because this in some way then signifies their spiritual laziness. But those reasons, in the main, have especial tendencies to self-serving agendas, so intrinsic and insidious, that we’ve forgotten the reasons we punish for not knowing, and for not being as we see being.

It is neither wrong nor especially reprehensible to be ignorant of certain things, even things that are supposedly ‘commonly known’. It is however wrong to express disparaging opinions, opinions which have not drunk from knowledge, which have not partaken of the selves of others and stewed in that rare wisdom, compassion.
That is not autonomous being, as I have attempted to qualify it; it is crudeness. Not because it is spiritually lazy or even self-involved, but because it is violence without purpose and without being. It is not human, and it is not animal; it is base.

A Comedy of Contacts

The most recent post on my sister's blog, appropriately (rather cleverly I thought) entitled 'Networking', is what provided the impetus for this train of thought. I won't spend time, however, clearing up the story, although that was my original idea, because as I considered with immense amusement the prospect of taking different sources and putting them together I realized something. Essentially, this was that the story didn't so much as show up the value of itself on face alone, as both my sister and I presumed, because not everyone saw the value in it as we did. And that taking the extra effort to piece together the story would either baffle most of the people involved or strike them as a ludicrously trivial waste of time.

That said some offering of the occurence from my point of view will serve as useful. I was sitting with a friend in a restaurant when she got a call from another friend of mine, one who she knows only artificially. The event essentially circles around my sister losing her phone, and although most of it seemed to have been managed by my other friend, who phoned the friend I was sitting with, the 'network' of people who were roped in to facilitate its return to its owner was amazing to us. Most of these people had only the barest connection to each other, and yet for a single afternoon they were drawn into the accomplishment of a single goal. They ranged from the secretary in the University department where I work as a tutor, to a boy in Jo'burg whose connection to my sister through my other friend was itself obscure. It involved another tutor in the English department who had studied with my other friend and who used to work as a tutor in the department where I was now working. It criss-crossed from my school best-friend's little sister to Jo'burg, to another girl who had studied with my other friend, who was also a friend of the friend sitting across from me, and who also worked as a tutor in the same department.

It is striking to me that so many people in the department where I work on campus got drawn into the task of helping my sister's phone get back to her, since she has nothing whatsoever to do with any of them, and not very much to do even with me. It is striking that it drew into contact a boy my sister was studying with (who found the phone) with a boy she was friends with in Jo'burg, striking that my friend sitting with me in a restaurant in Menlyn had cause to say my best friend's little sister's name, via a childhood nickname given to my best friend, who she will probably never meet in this lifetime.

It is striking not because of how far we have come with technology, or because the world can be so amazingly small. It is striking because my sister and I have a peculiar way of being moved by every single person that touches us in our lives, whether it reaches her only through her connection to me or vice versa. We are amazed every day that there are so many, that those people are so different, and that we all cherish them on some level in a truly personal way because, even the most random mundane incidents show how they are in some way part of us.

Concerning Others, Selves and Stories

I recently had cause, although certainly not for the first time, to wonder again about the role of the familiar in the Perilous Realm. Granted, what constitutes the 'familiar' is different to every individual, and in a postmodern world, the 'familiar' is also fraught with ambiguities and politics when it comes to those still forced to negotiate the post-colonial identity. Such as us, or to use Queen Lestat's terms, Blaaaahnians. We, it seems, are in a continual state of conflict with our 'Selves', our projected selves, our given selves, our spontaneous selves. And in that, when it comes to fantasy, there is curiously something both soothing and defeating in the pages of the classics, to cite a notable example, The Lord of the Rings.

Of course we may argue, we know that the values embodied by the narrative are not alien to us, not alien to the values which we grew up with, in the stories we were told by our teachers or our parents or our books. Even if they might have come to contraries when it comes to the actual practice of some of our illustrious elders. For the themes are the same, war against tyranny, the unexpected heroics of the meek, the lights of faith and kindness in the darkest of hours. The ringing of elvish laughter, which is to say laughter which was sad and thus most true in its joy, wise laughter, silver with moonlit nights of yearning for a better world. But then I have to remind myself that the very act of arguing brings into conflict those stories, whether they in nature, are in fact the same. Why do we need to argue, I need ask, why is the familiar always strange, always in conflict with the beautiful?

Perhaps we lack the metaphors which would have brought our own beauty to the familiar, to the strange. Perhaps we lost the sense of the beautiful in our Selves, oh, far too long ago now for the reaches of the memory or the heart.

In Which the Formidable Lobelia, Herself, figures

Identity is a magical, arcane business, fraught with illusion and prone to treachery. I know this when I write here, know that a projection of myself gets flung to the mystic highways of knowledge dissemination, so that that part of me will never be in my control again, will morph and mutate into a monster that might devour a Selfness I might fail to rescue should it be not so carefully alienated from itself. Forgive me while my head spins and I channel Derrida.

I think this in particular in connection with one Lobelia Sackville-Baggins, whose code-name many will know is derived from an exceptionally unpleasant character in the otherwise idyllic Shire in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and whose icy tyranny wields its poisonous tentacles in my identity with rather callous explicitness. I think this when I meet my esteemed Teacher, the formidably unpleasant Lobelia herself. I think this when I confront the theatrical elegance and pungent dislike which inspires the terror I feel whenever in her presence, and ironically, but perhaps with poetic justice, informs my rather conscious sense of Self-construction.

For we all construct our Selves, and to an extent, we all leave parts of ourselves lying around for others to pick up and twist and display. With particular reference to those who write blogs, I have to think our time allows for a dissemination of Self that is not even hardly within our control. Too many of the inventions used for social projection - cell phones, T.Vs, blogs - allow for a projection of evident self that exists, separate and concrete, indefinately, outside ourselves.


Recently my chosen name has risen behind me with some of the wily motives described above. Lobelia's Student, while projecting some of the predominant tensions in my life into the Perilous Realm, could hardly have done better than getting shortened, rather well-meaningly, into Lobelia. Now I found my tensions merging, so that Lobelia's student, a self-perceived victim of Lobelia's tyranny, becomes Lobelia, and the Student being both victim and student, must be the tyrant in some form or other.

I wonder if Lobelia herself, should she read this, would mind much the notion of existing in me. But I can't guess, looking at this mergence the wrong way up. From the bottom, I have to say I am only Lobelia's unfortunate student, NEVER Lobelia herself.