The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Tuesday, April 23, 2019 — 5
I stopped watching football
last year. Even before Kap
took a knee, the NFL had been
driven by a certain noxious
brand of culture warring:
the massive penalty flags, a
collective shoulder shrug at
domestic violence. The “clean
hits” didn’t feel especially
clean. The tackles seemed to
be getting louder. Or maybe
it was just me. The sad thing
about sports is
that
they
can
be
fun
until
you think about
them too hard,
and once you do,
you can’t escape
the ugliness. For
every player I
loved to watch
— OBJ and that
preposterous
one-handed
catch,
the
speedy,
elusive
Russell
Wilson
— I was haunted
by
an
Aaron
Hernandez. Or a
Junior Seau.
“Seau,”
a
new “30 for 30”
documentary
from
ESPN,
follows
the
tragic
undoing
of the charismatic linebacker,
whose suicide in 2012 ignited
a
long-overdue
national
conversation
about
the
likelihood of football players
to suffer chronic traumatic
encephalopathy
(CTE),
a
degenerative brain disease.
Drafted by his hometown San
Diego Chargers in 1990, Seau
played nearly 20 years in the
NFL, making two Super Bowl
appearances and earning 10
All-Pro selections. His death
came as a shock not only
because of his stature in the
league, but also because of his
cheery demeanor. “Buddy!”
his friends and teammates
remember
him
greeting
everyone he met.
But as each NFL season
passed, director Kirby Bradley
illustrates,
the
damage
football
was
inflicting
on
Seau grew more conspicuous.
He announced a short-lived
retirement
from
football
through
what
his
agent
remembers
as
a
bizarre,
incoherent
public
speech
in San Diego. He went on
to play a final season with
the Patriots, but it ended in
heartbreak with a loss at Super
Bowl XLII. Seau had been
happily married and a doting
father but began to withdraw
from family life and turned to
gambling. After retiring, he
divorced his wife and spent
less time with his children.
Everyone
who
knew
him
was baffled by the dramatic
change
in
his
mood
and
personality. When a neighbor,
an MLS soccer player who had
suffered a concussion, told
Seau about his symptoms, the
linebacker scoffed: “I’ve had a
headache since I was 15.”
For years, the NFL’s token
response was that playing
football
was
unrelated
to
degenerative brain disease.
“Seau” is a damning look at
the lengths the NFL went to to
ensure that Seau’s death didn’t
become a real problem for the
league. Despite decades of
research on the lasting health
effects of a football career, it
was only very recently that the
NFL even acknowledged the
possibility of a link to CTE.
And though they’ve made
various rule changes, the fact
remains that the tackle, the
animating force of football, is
what makes it so dangerous.
Junior Seau’s fight
won’t be won so
easily.
The NFL Draft
is
this
week.
Roger Goodell will
saunter on and off
a stage in Nashville
to announce the
picks,
everyone
there
will
boo
him and when the
weekend
ends,
there will be 254
rookies
in
the
league.
Some
of
them
won’t
get
much playing time
in
their
careers,
but some of them
will. A few will
be
linebackers,
like Seau, and in
a lifetime of play,
they’ll endure sub-
concussive
blow
after blow to the head. Over
time, clumps of tau protein
will build up in their brains
until they strangle nerve cells.
The research says CTE can
make a 40-year-old man’s
brain look like an 80-year-
old’s. Years after these players
retire, they’ll find themselves
becoming
angrier,
more
depressed,
more
confused,
more forgetful. And cowards
like Goodell and Jerry Jones,
who spent years peddling
doubts about the link between
this vicious sport and lasting
trauma to the brain, will be
laughing their way to the
bank.
Junior Seau and the grim
truth of CTE in football
MAITREYI ANANTHARAMAN
Daily Arts Writer
ESPN
TV REVIEW
30 for 30
ESPN+
One unexpected effect of live
theater is that it makes writing
accountable to speech, in a way
reading
fiction
aloud
doesn’t.
Watching
people
interact
as
characters means that a theater
writer has to recreate human
interaction to some extent, and in
a lot of plays the first thing to “get
past” is the total non-resemblance
of the script to real speech. In what
world do people always say exactly
what they mean, or at least the
exact right thing for a set of clearly
devised situations? Plays make
the inner workings of fiction —
plot, “characterization,” narrative
structure — visible (and audible) for
the viewer.
Of course, there’s a
very good reason why
most playwrights don’t
try to replicate speech.
Speech
is
frequently
illogical and often bizarre,
carrying with it highly
detailed shorthands that
demonstrate
people’s
relationships to each other.
If people are unsure of their
relationship to each other,
verbal
communication
frequently doesn’t work at
all. The 2018 play “Wheelchair” by
Will Arbery demonstrates this in
its style, which saturates the page
with tics, half-sentences and whole
conversational threads that don’t go
anywhere. It can be frustrating to
read.
GORDON
Can we
Um
How does that feel?
DEVON
The wine?
GORDON
Yes.
DEVON
Good, I love wine. Thanks sorry,
I had the
craziest day, so when I saw the
wine, I was just
GORDON
Yes it’s
Can we
Pause.
DEVON
What
Pause.
GORDON
What was crazy about your day?
This is a completely contentless
conversation that continues in this
fashion for pages and pages, but
try reading it out loud! It’s not only
recognizable as speech, it captures
a subtle and rather common
feeling of being stuck in a weirdly
transactional situation, trying to
bridge a gap between people who
are unsure of their relationship to
each other.
Gordon, a Jewish man in his
sixties, is giving away all his
furniture to Devon, a 19-year-
old Black man, for free. We find
out later that this is in advance of
Gordon’s eviction from the building
in West Williamsburg, which is
being redone as “artist studios.”
Gordon first has a strangely
intimate interaction with Devon
and later with his niece Sascha, who
is evicting him.
The nervous impersonality of
the overall tone is coupled with the
instability of the whole scene. The
stage directions at the beginning
of the play indicate that the action
should be underscored both with
the sound of construction and a low
hum which is “enough to get in our
brains.” There’s a Beckett-esque
sense that the theater the play is
staged in is some kind of limit: at
one point Gordon says, cryptically,
“Going out there — I will dissolve.”
The characters seem either
anxious to leave or to be left alone,
and they sometimes seem to not be
directly addressing each other. This
makes it that much more jarring
when characters declare their love
for each other, apologize for long-
standing hurts and speculate about
religious concerns and the nature
of correct action. Additionally, two
vaguely-related
monologue-rants
that Devon and Sascha embark on
completely shred the discursive
fabric of the play. They read like
emotional vomit, like a torrent of
thoughts that burst some kind of
dam.
“What am I doing? I hate talking.
Everyone always cuts me off mid-
sentence or replies with ‘Oh.’ or
‘Yeah.’ and I hate it, damn it. I’m
scared to go outside. I’m scared all
the angry old people can’t see how
free I am … I can’t even do drugs,
and can’t do anything right.”
To this Gordon replies “That
feels like an error. What you did
just felt like an error.” In a way,
the overcorrection for the nervous
tics of everyday life constituting
its own kind of solipsistic fake-
ness. There’s no easy way out of
the awkwardness of the situation,
no good way to institute “normal”
human interaction given the banal
inhumanity of the situation. The
long rants and confessions of
various kinds that the characters
give to each other land them right
back where they started.
The
discursive
dead
end
“Wheelchair” depicts points to the
larger context that frames the play.
Devon taking Gordon’s furniture
for free on the brink of his eviction
can be read as an allegory for what’s
happening in New York City as well
as cities around the US, as long-
standing
residents
of
cities get evicted to make
way for younger and
richer people.
The journalist Peter
Moskowitz
describes
gentrification
as
“a
theory
of
governance
that places the needs
of capital over people.”
While
gentrification
in the United States is
usually
talked
about
in terms of individual
gentrifiers and, much less often, the
people it displaces, the frameworks
that hold it up are less commonly
discussed. Moskowitz shows that to
understand gentrification, you have
to understand the history of urban
planning, real estate speculation
and
the
almost
half-century-
long legacy of neoliberalism in
the United States. “Wheelchair”
recognizes that Gordon, Devon and
Sascha are swept up in a process
largely outside of their own control,
and it’s sympathetic to all three of
them without excusing their faults
and flimsy justifications.
The play seems, at times, to be
approaching the question of how
to continue living in a world like
this, rife with alienation and at
times downright cruel. All three
characters largely fail at this:
Sascha starts out by excusing her
callous behavior with the folding
of her nonprofit and devolves in
her monologue to rapid-fire and
contradictory buzzwords. Devon
has so thoroughly internalized
competition
and
individualism
that he’s terrified of other people.
Gordon makes recourse to lying
about his past and proclaiming that
he’s a “lamed-vavnik,” one of the
36 righteous people for whom God
preserves the world. The play seems
to suggest that these failures are all
very human, and it doesn’t make
sense to punish people for them.
The question of justice just out of
reach, the play settles for a question
of empathy.
‘The Wheelchair’ depicts a
dead end in gentrification
EMILY YANG
Daily Arts Writer
BOOK REVIEW
The Wheelchair
Will Arbery
3 Hole Press
July 1, 2018
Henry Hill in ‘Goodfellas’
WARNER BROS.
UNDERCOVER CRIME SERIES
“When I was broke, I just went
out and robbed some more. We ran
everything. We paid off lawyers.
We paid off cops. Everybody had
their hands out. And now it’s all
over.”
The
relationship
between
organized crime in film and the
reality which it is based on is
both distorted and uncomfortably
close. Often, on the silver screen,
crime
is
sensationalized,
a
guiltless opportunity to root for
the bad guys. But as I articulated
with both previous installments
of this series, I found that
organized
crime
can
expose
dark truths about identity and
American values. We don’t just
consume mob mythology for the
wisecracking and the brutality;
under the surface, we connect
with something deeper.
With that said, the best way I
can conclude this cultural thread
of the series is by digging deep on
one of the most accurately told
mob movies ever: “Goodfellas.”
The mafia-fascinated journalist
Nicholas Pileggi, who penned the
film’s nonfictional source material
“Wiseguy” ensured that nearly
every scene is based on an event
that actually happened, every line
of narration an anecdote from the
stories’ actual gangsters.
The
result
is
a
nuanced
spectacle of the mafia that points
out both the humanity and lack
thereof among its members. Henry
Hill, the story’s sharp, laconic
main player complicates his sense
of cultural identity when he joins
the mob. While working at his
neighborhood’s seedy cab stand is
all he’s ever wanted, he can never
truly be one of the family.
“My father, who was Irish,
was sent to work at the age of 11,
and liked that I got myself a job,”
Hill says. “And my mother was
happy after she found out that the
Ciceros came from the same part
of Sicily as she did. I mean, to my
mother, that was the answer to all
her prayers.” Henry’s half-Irish,
half-Italian heritage prevents him
from securing a position in the
upper echelons of the mafia. His
existence as an immersed outsider
to the roiling, brutish politics of
Sicilian families not only gives
the film a unique perspective, but
shapes Hill’s bitingly sardonic
worldview.
For playing a boozing, robbing,
racketeering wiseass, Ray Liotta’s
performance as Hill is surprisingly
quiet. Hill’s cool reservation is
linked to his isolation from the
mob, his hesitation to always speak
in sharp contrast to the vitriolic
comedy of Joe Pesci’s Tommy
DeVito. Tommy, a total Sicilian,
is something of a foil to Hill, a
hypothetical path of even greater
reputation and criminal success if
Henry weren’t part Irish.
One of the subtlest moments in
the film that lays out this parallel
is when the two are eating dinner
at Tommy’s mother’s house along
with Robert DeNiro’s Jimmy
Conway.
“Henry,
what’s
the
matter? You don’t talk too much.
You don’t eat much, you don’t
talk much,” his mother observes.
And with his signature calmness,
Henry replies with a chuckle,
“I’m just listening.” To that,
Tommy’s mother launches into a
joke about a similarly tight-lipped
man, concluding that “In Italian,
it sounds much nicer.” What
better way to articulate Henry’s
permanent feeling of exclusion
from the Sicilians around him?
The most hilarious part of
this conversation, though, is that
from Tommy’s car, a gagged mob
boss, Billy Batts thuds against the
inside of the trunk. Later on, when
Billy, Tommy and Henry must
dig up Batts’s body and rebury
it, the movie goes a step further
in distinguishing Henry from
his brutal companions. Tommy
jests while hoisting his Batts that
they’re going eat wings at his
mother’s house that night. Henry,
in arguably the most realistic
response to that comment, turns
away and wretches. As much as he
accepts and partakes in the mob’s
violent deeds, he has a conscience.
His isolation not only blocks him
from becoming a “made man”
like Tommy eventually does, but
makes him less desensitized to
gore than his fellow wiseguy.
The other fascinating aspect of
Hill’s ethnic separation from the
mob is that it may be the reason
that he was spared from life in
prison. In “Wiseguy,” Pileggi
draws
from
Nassau
County
Narcotics Detective Daniel Mann
to reveal exactly what made Hill
an precious potential informant
for the FBI. “Henry, in fact,
was neither of high rank nor
particularly vicious; he wasn’t
even tough as far as the cops could
determine. What distinguished
Henry from most of the wiseguys
who were under surveillance
was the fact that he seemed to
have total access to all levels of
the mob world.” In other words,
Henry’s ability to scale effortlessly
between various echelons of the
organization the reason he could
inform on each of them.
In the end, Henry’s illegibility
to become a “made” boss with
his own unit working under him
saved him from the heat. His
outsider status was a blessing
in
disguise.
In
examining
“Goodfellas” through a lense
of cultural division, it becomes
apparent that, what separates us
from those around can shape us
for the better.
Henry Hill is certainly not
a defensible character. He is at
his best a charismatic natural
mastermind, and at his worst, a
paranoid, drug-addicted, convict.
And yet, he somehow gives us
all someone to root for in the
underworld of crime. Henry is at
once a shimmering, impossibly
magnetic image of the mafia’s
verve and a wide window into the
harsh realities of organized crime
— a brute and a sympath.
ANISH TAMHANEY
Daily Arts Writer