Hipster Anxieties Abound: I finally saw MfM

Thank you, Ernest Hardy, for taking me to school and tipping me off to Medicine for Melancholy.

(*Sigh*)

Yesterday I booked it hard through the Redline to the 2 bus down Sunset in West Hollywood trying desperately to get to the 3:10pm showing of Barry Jenkins' emotional stinger of a flick at the Sunset 5. I got there on-time and waited for my friend, Shizu, to hurry up the steps. No color people time for us. We roll into Theater 3 only to be subjected to 15 more minutes of previews. So far so good.

Medicine for Melancholy is a really good film with a lot of good things going for it. I highly recommend it to anyone that went and saw and thought they loved Danny Hoch's gentrification show. MfM brings the tensions around authenticity, blackness, gentrification and class to a boil in a quiet storm of unsaturated colors. There's no white guy shouting people of color characters into your already burdened consciousness with skull snaps and the utmost of hip-hop ironies in the background.

Basically, we meet Micah and Jo in the first 45 seconds coming out of their hook-up hipster hangover. How funny that it transpires between the seemingly only two black people at the white hipsters loft party--complete with a white guy wearing tight cut-off corduroy pants offering the sheepish walkers of shame some cereal before heading out. Is it the site where the category of black truly empties?

Then we see the courting session begin because boy unicorn can't let go of girl unicorn just yet. When can you be assured that you will meet another unicorn in the sad worlds of your making?

I couldn't help but wonder about their choices in clothing and gearless bicycles, thinking to myself that I, too, would like to have a track jacket with fighting roosters on it to match my tattoos. Or that I would totally date a woman that screened female directors' names on t-shirts. Am I revealing too much here?

It sort of has a "each one, teach one" vibe about it with boy identity-checking girl and girl resisting labels in such a way that will appeal to all my essentialist revolutionary peoples yet is anchored by a certain cynicism making the rounds with the more angst-riddled existentialists de colour. But it's really about two people trying to connect but end up unloading their racialized anxieties in a city where black people make up only 7% of its population.

I really enjoyed the moments where it's just the ambivalence wrapped in giggling, glances and goosebumps taking hold (on a carousel, at the organic food co-op) while society is drowned out by the music and the identity politics are temporarily shelved. The kind of moment propelled by curiosity and chemistry--those little luxuries rarely afforded to complicated people of color on film. These transcendent moments are ever ephemeral but when they occur I appreciate it because pretty soon the anger will take back the reins and I remember exactly where my place is in the already overwhelming schema.

Anyway, here's a quick excerpt taken from an interview with Barry Jenkins on blackvoices.com:

Why shoot the film in black and white?

BJ: That was one of the original discussions I had with the cinematographer, my buddy James Laxton. We wanted the visuals to portray San Francisco,and the first thing we decided to do was to capture the image that would best display the emotional mood of the characters in relation to the city of San Francisco. It's not completely black and white. It's about 93 percent saturated. In a way, it reflects the small population of African Americans in the city. There is some color in the film, when the characters are being more intimate and are talking about politics and race.

I often forget that Shizu is from San Francisco/Mission District and post-film and over garden burgers she shared her own frustrations with a city that has no place for kids of color trying to listen to Bloodcat Love and Oh No! Oh My! amongst their own. It is hard not to feel blessed (for lack of a better affective state) to live in Los Angeles, where you could find and make a ghetto in your own image, readjusting the center to reflect the true majority. Shizu and I both agreed that the music was pretty phenomenal and that it would suck to only get to enjoy it in white-dominated spaces.

Lightbulbs - The Answering Machine

New Years Kiss - Casiotone For The Painfully Alone

No One Needs To Know - The Changes

I Have No Sister - Oh No! Oh My!

I'm jamming to the soundtrack right now. Are you mad? Do you hate me? Do you feel overshadowed by my tragic hipness?

Heh heh, I thought so...