Colonialism and the missonary position

In the DVD commentary track, Sherman Alexie says he’s surprised that no cirtic had addressed “The Business of Fancy Dancing” as a musical. The fact surprises me too because the movie has pageantry, dancing (fancy and otherwise), and gorgeous music. (See Swil Kanim.) Add to that mix Sherman Alexie’s poetry and you have one powerful film, a “visual poem” to quote Gary Glazner.

Here is Alexie talking about his concept of poetry in this film:

I was interested in making a movie about a writer and a poet specifically. The movies I have seen about writers are rarely about their work and you never see or hear the poetry. They are always about the poet’s life and never the poems. I wanted to make a movie that really featured the poems as well as the poet. So in my film you have performance of the poems; you see the poet doing the poems in bookstores and at readings on stage. It also has poems in voice over montages of images and it has poems up on the screen as epigraphs. I wanted to have words, images and stanzas be very much a part of the movie. I tried to think of the movie itself in terms of stanzas, that it was one long poem. Each edited section was a stanza itself; I moved them around, juxtaposing ideas and images. I thought of them as separate units during editing that I could move around and change the meaning based on the arrangement. There is still a story to be told, a narrative. Most mainstream movies are narrative-driven and I wanted this film to be at least as much lyrical as narrative.

I have just recently watched another film about a poet — “Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle”. Both films feature a lot of poetry, both use humor to address painful subject matter, both use cinematic techniques that remind you that this is film and tell a somewhat nonlinear story. But where “Francydancing” left me feeling sad but somehow enriched, “Mrs. Parker” merely left me feeling depressed.

Part of that may be class prejudice. Hard to feel sad for some one who is at the top of the heap. Though now I think of it, Alexie’s poet protagonist is at the top of that same heap and I can feel both his sorrow and his joy in that accomplishment. Part of it is no doubt performance. Though Jennifer Jason Leigh won awards for this role, I never got beyond the mannerisms and the fact that this was Jennifer Jason Leigh as Dorothy Parker. Alexie’s actors are performing closer to home, doing a lot of improvising and using their own biography. Easier to seem authentic perhaps.

Maybe it’s the artistic vision. Wit distances, and Dorothy Parker was a wit. But Alexie is also a poet of wit.

So what was it that made me like “The Business of Fancydancing” so much more? Maybe it comes down to artistic vision and the writer/director’s ability to pull us into the life of his characters.

And whence my post title? When asked by a journalist how he came to be named Polatikin. Alexie’s gay poet protagonist says he doesn’t want to discuss colonialsim and the missionary position.

Speaking of wit.