Harking back to the junkyard scenes in Jean-Luc Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil, only without the class consciousness, black militants and assault weapons, Verena Paravel and J.P. Sniadeck’s Foreign Parts provides a visually striking insight into class divisions.
The myth of America as a classless society is a surprisingly persistent one. Even among the working class, who should, from personal experience, know better, the myth continues to hold great sway. Americans routinely overstate their income in official surveys; they also claim, in massive numbers, to believe that they have a better than average chance of climbing out of their current circumstances and up the economic ladder. This despite the US having statistically lower social mobility rates than almost every other country in the developed world.
The characters in Foreign Parts don’t really suffer under such illusions. One or two say as much explicitly, and still others allow the events of the plot to do so for them, though mostly the film pulls it punches and makes its argument visually. (It drops this strategy in the closing credits and goes for the elite jugular with some inflammatory voiceovers.) But then, these characters not really the working class, but rather the working poor, and seeing as a great many of them are members of minorities—illegal immigrants, one can pretty safely assume, among them—most seem perfectly aware that this myth wasn’t inclusive of them in the first place.
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The film owes much of its overall affect to this kind of visual misdirection and manipulation of our expectations. Jean Rouch would be proud. The film’s images teem with ironic detail and visual wit. The resident alcoholic wears a Sleeping Beauty tee-shirt. Citi Field, home of the New York Mets, looms ominously over the shanty-like garages as its lighting towers reach skyward like the heads of the hydra. County officials realise that the camera isn’t going to pan away from them anytime soon and awkwardly move themselves out of frame. There are beautiful, slightly surreal images, too: an entire wall of side view mirrors, a man bouncing across a metallic canopy of car doors. But the most remarkable thing about the film’s visuals—about 747s flying over oil drum fires and Hispanic teens sitting on old car seats and eating barbecued ribs—remains the fact that they are images of the United States of America. The First and Third Worlds brush up against each other in each and every shot. Yet Foreign Parts isn’t even set in one of the poorest one hundred counties in the country. It’s set a half-hour drive from Wall Street, twenty minutes from the Upper East Side, and only a couple of subway stops from the Hotel Gansevoort, where you’re only allowed in the rooftop pool if you’re wealthy or busty enough. Jay-Z’s Empire State of Mind is about as close as you can get to an official New York anthem, but its lyrics are dark and they don’t lie: “City, it’s a pity, half of y’all won’t make it.” By the end of Foreign Parts even fifty per cent might seem an optimistic estimate.
MIFF Extended Program Note, July 2011
