Bones, Boats, and Bootstraps

“One day, a man was drowning in the water, and a boat came by and said, ‘do you need any help?’ he said ‘no thank you, God will save me,’ and another boat came by, said ‘do you need any help?’ and he said ‘no thank you, God will save me,’ then he drowned and he went to heaven, and he said ‘God, why didn’t you save me?’ and God said ‘I sent you two big boats you dummy!’”—The parable of the drowning man as told by little Christopher to his dad (also Chris).

In 2007 I watched The Simpsons Movie with my mum and the two things I took away from it were: (1) the ‘All-is-Lost’ moment (think Marge leaving, taking the kids, and taping a goodbye message to Homer over their wedding video); and (2) the understanding of melodrama (v. the exact same scene). The Pursuit of Happyness is the pinnacle of melodrama, it’s a film which goes out of its way to show you every single thing go wrong in Chris’ life—a barrage of all-is-lost moments—to elicit emotion from you, and whilst this is not necessarily a bad thing (v. Will Smith’s Oscar nomination for Best Actor), it is a style of filmmaking that I have become cautious around as it tends to leave me with the feeling of being manipulated. But behind the rather clichéd narrative structure sits a wealth of interpretability, and even though I must say I did not find much resonance in the story itself, I have found myself thinking a lot about film.

01. Bones

The omnipresence of a computer-sized, portable bone-density scanner (P-BDS) is one of the most immediate and obvious symbols in the film. Chris is a man physically weighed down and encumbered by the failure in his life, it is a permanent reminder of the disintegration of his relationship with Linda, of his financial misfortune, and of how his former optimism has been crushed into poverty and obligation. Whilst it is quite on-the-nose, it is remarkable that the real Chris Gardner really did do this. But the question which dogged me for the duration of the film was why? why a portable bone-density scanner? why not something else equally as awkwardly valuable and yet not strictly necessary? The quick answer is, of course, that it is true to life, but I find this boring. Instead I am drawn to the idea that the P-BDS is emblematic of one of the core themes of the film: internal value. Bone-density is not something we can see from the outside, it is a trait of a person which exists under the skin, something core about us as humans and which speaks to the structural strength of us as living beings. Read this way we immediately see a pattern emerge, that of internal value being overlooked for surface level immediacy: doctors will not buy his machines and so Chris must spend long hours convincing them to see their true value; Linda tells Chris to skip the stockbroker interview and to focus on selling the remaining units that are under his contract. The P-BDSs serve, in this way, as a microcosm of the film itself, that internal value can be shown to be worthwhile given enough time, effort and belief. I am only disheartened by their sudden disappearance from the film. Rather abruptly, Gardner’s narration informs us that he has managed to sell all of his remaining scanners and that he now has some breathing room for the first time in a while; however, we have spent so long with these machines, selling them, losing them, chasing them down, that their sudden off-screen completion feels unearned and lacklustre—just one scene of that final sale would have helped drastically.

02. Boats

Early-ish in the film, Christopher (Jaden Smith) tells his dad the parable of the drowning man. You don’t tell stories like this in a film unless they are pertinent to its themes. In the story, the drowning man overlooks help from two boats which are, it turns out, sent by God to help him. Typically, this is read as ‘God helps those who help themselves,’ and in this way it is very thematically relevant to the story. Chris helps himself throughout the film and is shown to be a dedicated worker and provider who simply made a wrong decision (investing his entire lifesavings into P-BDSs, which (ironically) I’m sure he learned was a terrible idea when he’d made it through his thick copy of what I assume was Graham & Dodd’s Security Analysis). But it raises the question of who, or what, were the two boats in Chris’ story?

Disappointingly, I cannot come up with an answer. For a long time I was hoping that one of the boats would have been little Christopher, but as the film goes on it becomes apparent that he is not the emotional driving force you would assume he would be. Christopher is always shown as a source of joy for Chris, the one thing he has left in the world who loves him dearly, and even in the face of heightened emotions (being screamed at by his dad multiple times, and being rushed onto a bus so fast to make it to a shelter that he drops his Captain America figure) he stays true to his dad, trusts him and loves him unconditionally. It is, however, these moments which play into the melodrama. The lost action figure is not used as anything more than a sad beat to show yet more despair in the lives of the pair; we get no further reflections on the impact this new life has on little Christopher as we always remain inside the perspective of his dad, which I believe is a real loss.

So, if Christopher is not a boat, then who is? The stockbrokers...?

03. Those are some real white bootstraps you’ve got there…

Right. The thing I’ve been circling.

The Pursuit of Happyness came out in 2006, and oh-boy is it a post-9/11 American movie if I have ever seen one. This period of time saw films riding the wave of American patriotism, but also in many more subtle ways we saw ideas of American greatness in the face of adversity diffuse through the artistic world. You’d be blind to miss the main theme of the film: “see, America works. Is it easy? no, but is the Dream still real? Yes.” The film is designed to validate the teachings of the American educational system, to give faith to the populace that, in the face of the Iraq war and terror attacks, everything they have been told about their country is, in fact, true.

As a product of its time it is understandable, but my issue comes from how this rather emotionless message dulls what is really a very human story. This is exactly why we follow Chris and see very little from Christopher beside resilience, it is because the story is about success, not about how the trauma of poverty and a disrupted family life effects people and the communities they live in. How can we be sure? The ending speaks volumes. All of a sudden, Chris is hired, and in the span of no more than five minutes we are told (via text on the screen!) that he goes on to make millions of dollars, and we watch as he walks down the hills of San Francisco with his son and the film ends. We’ve just spent two hours following every single pain in his life, watching his life fall apart and how he finds some solace in his son, and it ends by telling us how much money he made? Show us him buying a house. Show us his son sleeping in his own bed for the first time in months. The film is the American Dream incarnate and it lives by that message, and it does so tremendously well, but at the cost of the stories of the people who inhabit it.

It is through this human narrative flattening that a deeper issue appears which I cannot quite let go of either. I do not think the film is making any kind of racial commentary, but I believe it does so implicitly. The way out for Chris is, unmistakably, through rich white people: doctors buying his P-BDSs, CEOs taking him to the football, and stockbrokers giving him a job. As the possible boats in Chris’ life, this is uncomfortable. The film physically gets brighter the moment he walks through the doors onto the trading floor, and he stands alone as the one black person in the room. Now, is this physically representative of 1980s American finance? yes, and would an optimistic reading of this be that America is inherently blind to race, and that the pure character of a person is enough to pursue success? of course. Chris encounters no racism or any hurdles in his life due to his race, and that is a stylistic choice, it is an omission which speaks to the American ideal being conveyed, but what does not sit comfortably with me is how the structures change in the presence of Chris’ abilities.

Chris lives in a black neighbourhood, his friends live behind reinforced doors and the windows have bars on them. His excellence is overlooked here, and yet when he sits in the taxi with the partner from the brokerage it is the first moment in the film that he is seen for the intelligent man he is. The black community he is from is shown to be unreliable and dysfunctional but watch as the white structures of high-finance do not blink upon the addition of Chris, they do not change, they do not learn of his strife, they are not impacted by his presence, they simply accept him, they allow Chris into their ranks and offer him salvation from his poverty. This is a nice message, but I cannot help but read it as ‘the way out of your poverty is through abandoning your race and embracing the (white) hegemony of capitalism.’ In the parable of the drowning man, the help from God is unambiguous, it is costless, and yet the film portrays the presence of white high-finance as costless, but this flattens a lot of the truth of the matter. It is an uncomfortable tension in the messaging: America will do right by you, regardless of your race, but to do so you must forget your race entirely. This is an admittedly cynical take on the message, but post-9/11 American optimism has waned in the twenty years since this film came out, and the outwardly sceptical view of American idealism has grown considerably outside of the US and as much of a product of its time as it is, it sits inside a very different world now than it used to.

04. “Let me be clear”

My review may make you think I disliked this movie, but I can tell you I didn’t. Is this type of film for me? no, not really, its melodrama feels too intentional to force me to feel bad for the guy and I prefer a film to show me pain obliquely, slowly, and to operate on a much smaller scale. But I think there is a lot to The Pursuit of Happyness which is worth talking about. It is a quintessentially American film, but there is enough stylistically to get the mind going.

From a purely artistic angle, the film is excellently cast (choosing Smith’s own son adds fantastic chemistry to the pair), well shot, lit and produced, although I found the score to be somewhat forgettable. The shot of Smith’s character leaving the brokerage after finding out he has got the job is wonderful, seeing his head stand out above the crowd of people he had earlier watched and wished he could be just as happy as they were, was a lovely touch; removing the sound and letting us feel the elation was artful and I would have loved to have had more of those smaller moments through the film.

Ethan—if you’ve made it this far, I hope you don’t think I’ve just trashed a film you like <3