In Which The Films of Lynne Ramsay Stare Back At Us

The Ramsey Trap

by HELEN SCHUMACHER

The films of Lynne Ramsay move slowly and quietly. Her characters tend to be inwardly focused and she eschews narration in favor of presenting motivations in a more abstruse manner, if at all. Despite her subtlety as a filmmaker, the dramatic effect of her films is still brutal. In her first work, a short called Small Deaths that went on to win the Prix du Jury at Cannes, Ramsay sets up three scenarios that capture the minor moments of growing up. Each young protagonist experiences a slight shift in perception that makes them view the world in a different, more cynical way.

Small Deaths was Ramsay’s graduation piece for her studies at England’s National Film and Television School, which she won a scholarship for based on the strength of her undergraduate work in still photography. At the school she studied cinematography and met a group of collaborators (cinematographer Alwin H. Kuchler, editor Lucia Zucchetti, and production designer Jane Morton). After Small Deaths, Ramsay went on to make two more shorts: Kill The Day about the day in the life of a junkie, and Gasman.

In Gasman, two children follow their father on a Christmas outing to the local dance hall, accompanied by two other children with whom he has an ambiguous relationship. It’s a convolution of festive dancing and drinking and familial jealousy and dismissal. Ramsay’s background in photography and cinematography is evident in her poetic composition. The trio of short films introduced audiences to the stronger themes of her work: the Scottish working class, their societal norms and family dynamics, and how these play into the sensitivity and naivety of an individual.

This would serve as the center of her first full-length, Ratcatcher. In Ratcatcher, which Ramsay also wrote, her camera follows the domestic life of saucer-eared James, played by a young amateur named William Eadie, and his struggling family. James is haunted with guilt from his role in the death of a neighborhood boy who drowned after their roughhousing in a nearby canal. Set in a 1970s Glasgow ghetto, the film’s mise en scène is the Winter of Discontent, where residents of a housing project are nearly barricaded inside their apartments as the bags of rubbish accumulate outside their doors for weeks on end. As the film progresses, James attempts to find warmth and purpose in his friendships and familial role, but eventually we see him realize the futility of his hopes.

With its grim atmosphere grounded in industrial decline, Ratcatcher is easily described as social realism, or as it is known regionally, a kitchen sink drama. Reviews of the film often mention its similarities to the work of the genre’s Ken Loach, in particular Kes, his 1969 film about a young boy who devotes himself to the raising and training of kestrel chick, only to have it killed by his vindictive brother. What makes Ramsay’s work more than just an update of the the ‘50s and ‘60s genre is that she’s not an Angry Young Man and neither are her central characters.

Ramsay possesses an incredibly intuitive understanding of the power of the gaze and how to manipulate it. Maybe it’s because, as a female, she is so endlessly subjected to it and, as a filmmaker, she has been able to then become bearer of the look, to take control of its power to name and define. (Or maybe it is because her own childhood was similar to James' that she was able to so exquisitely add depth to the characters.)

In interviews, she has discussed her desire to get her audience to look beyond the image. She frames the details in order to make the audience wonder what’s going on outside the screen. With her subtle camerawork, she directs her audience to not look at the characters onscreen, but to meet their eyes. By subverting the gaze and twisting its power away from the viewer, she gives her working-poor characters a chance to be more than just a cliche. After all, the most basic class distinction is that between the powerful and powerless.

Through this manipulation we come to terms with the actions of the title character of her last movie, 2002's Morvern Callar. Morven, having discovered her boyfriend dead on their scullery floor on Christmas morning and then having kept his death a secret, stumbles through the next month of her life in a reflective catatonia, one where the details have become visceral. Ramsay’s camera follows Callar to her job at a grocery store, to the countryside where she buries the hacked-up pieces of her boyfriend’s body, and to a hedonistic Spain with her best friend Lanna — after having funded the trip with what was meant to be the boyfriend’s funeral money. She even sells his novel (left completed on their home PC, along with a list of possible publishers) under her own name.

Maybe this sounds more like the work of a sociopath. In an interview with the Guardian, Ramsay explains, "Morvern’s boyfriend commits quite a selfish act as the tortured artist looking for posthumous fame, and she takes complete survival from that. You can question her morally if you want, but what he does is only a romantic notion whereas what she does is more about survival."

Callar grew up in foster homes and is a low-paid supermarket employee. With this new source of income lifting her of the burden of survival, she is for the first time able to indulge in curious exploration. The suicide has given her a new life and she is discovering the sights, sounds, and textures of Scotland and Spain. Ramsay obscures the motivations of her protagonist in favor of drawing the viewer into Callar’s world. While the film’s perceived lack of plot or dialogue might seem alienating to audiences, instead viewers find themselves deeply invested in the characters. Ramsay's nuanced style is aided by a compelling performance by Samantha Morton, who grew up in the foster system like Morvern.

Adrienne Rich writes that for women the act of seeing with fresh eyes is an act of survival. But this "reclaiming of vision” is also applicable to the survival skills of other alienated segments of society. Ramsay’s films help us to (again, as Rich calls it) “see difference differently” and therefore understand a wider scope of humanity. Her work is heavy with compassion, but not sentimentality.

It’s too bad that Ramsay was removed from the task of adapting and directing Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones. Ramsay was assigned to the script while the novel was still being written. It seemed a job well-suited for her ability to approach harsh realities through a lens of innocence, not to mention that her own background in photography could have played to the young narrator’s amateur interest in the medium. But, after the book became a best seller (and after she had spent two years working on it), the project was given to Peter Jackson, who unfortunately relied on the special effects that have made him a crowd-pleaser to portray the other-world setting and heavenly gaze of the murdered teen, inevitably turning the movie into a corny mess.

While it’s been nearly 10 years since Ramsay’s last feature-length film was released, this year should see her return with We Need To Talk About Kevin, another picture that looks at family and remorse. The movie stars Tilda Swinton as a mother coming to terms with the violent actions of her son Kevin (played by Ezra Miller), a teenager who, in an all-too-familiar scenario, shoots up a high school. Kevin’s actions certainly lack the moral ambiguity of a typical Ramsay character, however the focus on the indeterminate influence of parents on a person’s conscience seems like perfect fodder for her dark, lyrical work.

Helen Schumacher is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She last wrote in these pages about Homicide: Life on the Street. She tumbls here and here.

"Half Ton Load" - Icarus Himself (mp3)

"Digging Holes" - Icarus Himself (mp3)

"Cadaver Love Song" - Icarus Himself (mp3)

In Which It Was Nothing New For David Simon

First Folklore

by HELEN SCHUMACHER

In 1993, the year that Homicide: Life on the Street debuted on NBC , the number of murders in Baltimore hit an all-time high of 379 deaths. (Coming out of the crack epidemic of the ‘80s, the murder rate for that year was 48.1; New York City’s was nearly half that at 25.9 deaths per 100,000 people.) The series was based on the book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, written by a journalist named David Simon, who had five years earlier — at the age of 28 — spent a year following Baltimore’s premiere men in blue as they investigated the city’s most violent crimes. Since the publishing of the book and the series’ seven-season run, Simon has earned the reputation as being one of the nation’s most talented crime-folklorist for his work on The Wire. With the critically acclaimed show, the portrayal of Baltimore that Simon had been building for years became an urban legend.

A circa 1989 David Simon with real-life detectives Sgt. Terrence McLarney, Det. Robert McAllister, and Det. Robert Bowman.In his book (and in the series), Simon’s focus was not on the crime figures of Baltimore, but on the occupational culture of its police force — not an easy topic to parse. The psyche of his detectives reflected the complexity of their role in the community. Constant exposure to the depravity of humankind isolated them from family, from lovers, and from the communities they’d sworn to protect. No matter the color or income of the neighborhoods the detectives found themselves in, they were nearly always confronted with civilian antagonism stemming from deep-rooted notions of police corruption, racism, and paranoia.

Their relationship to their job was further complicated by a lack of support from the brass upstairs, knowing that the only thing the captain wanted to hear was that the clearance rate was going to please the politicians and that the latest red-ball case was staying out of the news. Even their relationships with each other were dysfunctional.

At the center of the Homicide was Lieutenant Al Giardello’s squad. The shift lieutenant was played by Yaphet Kotto. His magisterial onscreen presence was perhaps due to his royal lineage (he claims Queen Victoria as an ancestor). The Sicilian he played was always the tough but fair leader.

Melissa Leo played Detective Kay Howard. The daughter of a Chesapeake Bay fisherman and a thorough and observant detective, Howard passed the sergeant’s exam halfway through the series.

First appearing as a lieutenant, then as a captain, then finally demoted to detective is Megan Russert talking to Ned Beatty’s seasoned Det. Stanley Bolander.

Detective Mike Kellerman joined the squad from the arson department. He would become disgraced first through allegations of taking bribes and later the shooting of drug kingpin Luther Mahoney. Here we catch the detective in a pensive moment.

The baby-faced Det. Bayliss was haunted throughout the series by his first case as primary detective — the murder of Adena Watson. The young girl was mostly likely killed by an arabber she had befriended, however Bayliss was never able to get a confession out of the man and put the red ball down.

Perhaps the most memorable character of the show was squad diva Det. Frank Pembleton (Andre Braugher). He was the undisputed master of the Box. If you were lucky enough to catch him at work from behind the small brick room’s one-way mirror, you’d witness something closer to an opera than the questioning of a suspect.

Homicide was an attempt to not only show the detective’s mind state, but also the slang, the rituals, and the tools of the occupation. One professional tool that became an integral part of the show was the bureaucratic relic of the criminal justice system known as the Board. It served as a stubborn reminder of the current year’s death tally. The Board was a white board that has been divided into columns — one for each detective—and under each of the detectives’ names, a list of victims, either in red or black depending on the case’s open-or-closed status. As the year moved on the list got longer. It was where the life of a murder detective and the life of a victim intersected.

Simon described the Board allegorically: "In the time that it takes the coffeepot to fill, shift commander Lieutenant Gary D’Addario (Al Giardello in the series) can approach the Board as a pagan priest might approach the temple of the sun god, scan the hieroglyphic scrawl of red and black below his name, and determine who among his [detectives] has kept his commandments and who has gone astray. The board reveals all: Upon its acetate is writ the story of past and present. Who has grown fat on domestic murders witnessed by half a dozen family members; who has starved on a drug assassination in a vacant rowhouse. Who has reaped the bountiful harvest of a murder-suicide complete with a posthumous note of confession; who has tasted the bitter fruit of an unidentified victim, bound and gagged in the trunk of an airport rental car."

Like any good scholar of folklore, Simon knows the vernacular of his subculture. The two terms used throughout the book to describe a case are dunker and whodunit. The case of the murder-suicide complete with a posthumous note of confession is a dunker. The unidentified victim in the trunk of an airport rental car is a whodunit. The detectives of the network TV series were of course able to solve both — either by luck, following the evidence, or a psychological beat-down in the Box.

The Box refers to the interrogation room and setting of the show’s most dramatic moments. Inside the Box a carefully acted seduction takes place, with the detective exploiting the criminal’s stupidity and fear for a confession. “The effect of the illusion is profound, distorting as it does the natural hostility between hunter and hunted, transforming it until it resembles a relationship more symbiotic than adversarial. That is the lie, and when the roles are perfectly performed, deceit surpasses itself becoming manipulation on a grand scale and ultimately an act of betrayal,” writes Simon.

What a suspect could expect to be confronted by once inside the Box. From l to r: detectives Meldrick Lewis, John Munch, and Tim Bayliss.Simon wasn’t Baltimore’s only proponent to take part in the series. The patron saint of Charm City’s freaks and deviants, John Waters appeared as a prisoner being escorted by Chris Noth in one of several Law and Order crossover episodes. Barry Levinson was the show’s executive producer. In his "Baltimore films,” Levinson wrote and directed four fables of growing up in the city in the ‘50s. As he did with his semi-autobiographical films, Levinson weaves himself into the series in a self-referential episode where a suspect is chased into an alley where the director just happens to be shooting a show called Homicide.

Levinson with squad videographer J.H. Brodie and Det. Lewis. Homicide was primarily filmed in the historic Fell’s Point neighborhood of Baltimore.Not all of the show’s action took place on the job. We also got to learn more about the detectives through their barroom philosophizing. The storytelling tradition of law enforcement officers has long found sanctuary in the cop bar.

Stories bearing the trademark gallows humor of the profession are passed down from veteran to rookie. There is the one about the polygraph-by-copier (now a staple of cop lore), where a confession is obtained after a suspect has been tricked into believing a Xerox machine pre-loaded with paper bearing the statements Truth and Lie is tracking the veracity of his answers.

There is the one about the black widow Geraldine Parrish (Calpurnia Church), a part-time voodoo priestess who collected life insurance on five husbands before finally getting caught after the ploy to collect on her niece’s life is botched. There is the one about the petty thief with the unfortunate nickname of Snot Boogie.

Baby Gyllenhaal and Robin Williams, Steve Buscemi in the Box, John WatersBy calling Simon a folklorist, I don’t mean to detract from the authenticity of his work. After all, the reporter’s attention to facts that goes into his writing is a major reason he has been so successful. My point is that Simon’s work concerns itself with the ways in which people make meaning in their lives. As the scholar Mary Hufford has said, "folklife is lodged in the various ways we have of discovering and expressing who we are and how we fit into the world.” Homicide looked at the role of Baltimore’s murder detectives in the national ethos.

Benjamin Botkin, considered a father of the study of folklore, was one of the first academics to recognize oral history as a legitimate historical source. In 1954 he wrote a book called The Sidewalks of America: Folklore, Legends, Sagas, Traditions, Customs, Songs, Stories, and Sayings of City Folk. Simon’s A Year on the Killing Streets is in effect a modern regional translation of the work. Like Botkin, Simon understood the importance of an authentic conversation with the subjects of his work and the honest relaying of their stories.

The best known piece of lore to come out of the city was written by lawyer and amateur poet Francis Scott Key while locked aboard the HMS Tonnant during the Battle of Baltimore. The now-sacred text, with its imagery of the broad stripes and bright stars and the rockets’ red glare, is grandiose and inspirational, but its pomposity doesn’t resonate with everyone. For others, the truth and spit is in the tales swapped at 3 a.m. at the desolate end of Clinton Street over cheap beer and whiskey — it is in the blue-blooded story of Bodymore, Murderland.

Helen Schumacher is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. This is her first appearance in these pages. She tumbls here and here.

"A Bit of Glue" - The Tellers (mp3)

"Hugo" - The Tellers (mp3)

"Second Category" - The Tellers (mp3)