Written by Stephen Pimpare
Translator: Issac
Proofreader: Zhu Puyi
Source: The Guardian
This year's Oscars highlight films that go straight to poverty and its causes. However, whether in the Oscar-nominated films or in the overall environment, the films with the poor group as the protagonists are always in the minority.
Given the Trump administration's recent budget, there have been proposals to drastically cut the funding for food relief vouchers. Instead, government-provided food is bound to be meaningless and a waste of resources, as it will only benefit companies that have contracts with the government to produce and transport food.
But such a program is further evidence of the lack of policy knowledge of the authorities and their ignorance of the extent and scope of hunger and poverty in the United States, and of their indifference to the millions of Americans who have done everything in their power to survive.
In other words, there has been no change in the attitude of the American authorities – disdain for the poor has always characterized American political culture.
White Oscar
Hollywood has always struggled to exonerate. Thanks to The #OscarSoWhite campaign launched by April Ryan, it's become a habit to assess how many women, people of color and sexual minorities are among Oscar nominees.
But we should also note that we still haven't considered whether the film more fully depicts poor people. We should pay attention to this.
Of the more than 50 films nominated for the 2018 Oscars, only one seriously tackled the subject of poverty or vagrants in the United States: Florida Paradise. William Dafoe was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for the film.
Florida Paradise (2017)
The film tells a sympathetic story in which the mother loses her rights and challenges, making choices in order to care for her young daughter – choices that may not always be good. But it's the only film to focus on people in precarious financial difficulties and get a nomination.
As in most of the past, part of the problem is that very few films are meant to begin with the story of poor or homeless Americans. I've done research and found that between 1902 and 2015, of all the films made in the United States, only 299 were actually involved in poverty and vagrancy to some degree.
Among the 2017 films, I can find five films that fit this genre: Stranger's Love, Glass Castle, I Am The Other You, Seeking, and Florida Paradise.
Stranger Love (2017)
The problem isn't just that people don't see the poor, but that when they do appear on the big screen, they often only deepen long-standing stereotypes. Florida Paradise is an exception, and the Oscars were not nominated for any other film that was the right choice.
Take "Strange Love", for example, the film tells the story of a homeless black man, but the film focuses most on a wealthy white couple who save their marriage and their souls in the public welfare kitchen.
This is a common pattern. Films that seem to depict the poor usually really show that the people who are not poor are redeemed by saving others.
The film also repeats another antiquated pattern in which it carefully concocts traumatic stories or tragedies for each wanderer to explain how they ended up in such a homeless field, without revealing even the slightest hint of political or economic circumstances, which may better explain why so many people in the United States have fallen into such a desperate predicament.
Worse still, the film's solution to the problem of vagrancy is to rely on prayer and the generous charity of the rich (affordable housing, good jobs, or generous, well-planned social support). In its description, it is entirely within the power of people to escape poverty, whereas for the vast majority of people this is not the case at all.
"The Glass Castle" is not much better. The film is based on Janet Walls' memoirs, and part of her memoirs is its refusal to tell a clean and tidy story. Rather than giving explanations, the memoir focuses on descriptions, thus showing the harm that poverty can do to children every day.
However, the film does not express the lingering poverty and lack in The Walls book, but instead transforms the rational narrative of growing up in poverty into a sensational work of self-pity and self-pity around the father-daughter relationship. Thus, yet another opportunity to reveal the reality of poverty in the United States has been squandered.
The Glass Castle (2017)
Filmmakers depicting homeless people are usually always looking for explanations —the more startling the better—and that's what Wang does, telling a fairy tale in I Am The Other You, a fairy tale that could have told the story of a young man with good looks, curiosity, and restlessness, but instead made a film about mental illness (like "The Soloist," "The Saints of Washington Castle, and The Fall of Two Hearts at the End of the World.")
It is true that among homeless people, the proportion of people suffering from mental illness that is not diagnosed or untreated is higher, but its use as a cause of homelessness obscures the fact that in other democracies mental illness does not easily lead to this situation. Why?
Finally, "Seeking," a documentary that introduces us to the Rennie family living in northern Philadelphia through seemingly bland footage, albeit somewhat impoverished. The Rennie family is worried about their friends, children, and young people who have suffered a lot to stay on a "normal trajectory", battling alcohol, drugs, and the difficult obstacles in life.
The Quest (2017)
Toward the end, as the Rennie family sat in front of the television watching presidential candidate Trump woo African-American votes, he asked, "What else can you lose?" Christine Rennie replied, "You have no idea how we live."
Even so, the film doesn't seem to be very interested in political or social commentary, but instead aims to show the audience an American family that works hard and cares for their families and communities, even though they still have to struggle to live week by week, month by month.
If politicians in Washington (and cities and states across the country) were making policy with the Rennies in mind, rather than the intractable, racist, and absurd "welfare queen," they might be able to come up with smarter bills to get closer to what poor Americans really want and need.
Perhaps if others had seen a more realistic depiction of poverty in the film, they might have been more willing to embrace projects aimed at helping poor people rather than belittling and punishing them.