Films

Life without pity

RUMBLE FISH. Directed by Francis
Coppola, screenplay by F. Coppola and
S.E. Hinton.

Rumbk Fish is the latest creation of
Francis Copola, who directed The God-
father films and Apocalypse Now. His
new film continues and deepens his
preoccupation with social issues, as
well as providing a medium for expan-
sion into experimental and imaginative
forms of style and action. Coppola
traces his own changes in cinematic
perspective between ‘‘a traditional film
like The Godfather and another, which
is without restraint, beyond the pale of
all limitations.”

The movie is a tense, jarring story of
working class youth searching for iden-
tity, recognition and purpose amidst a
destructive, chaotic urban landscape.
Mitt Dillon, who starred as the engaging
bully in My Bodyguard is electric and
gutsy as Rusty James, though, brash,
volatile and streetwise, but at the same
time bewildered and impressionable,
emotionally frantic, desperately seek-
ing relevance and fulfillment in an indif-
ferent and treacherous world.

Rusty James focuses his yearnings,
as do the other teenagers, on his older
brother, Motorcycle Boy, a rootless,
introspective mysterious young man,
himself a former streetfighter. Motor-
cycle Boy had left town, and he has
now returned only to become, much to
his discomfort and dismay, an idolized
figure, a local legend. He is color blind
and partly deaf as a result of previous
fighting injuries and he is also psycho-
logically scarred, remote, withdrawn,
disaffected from reality.

Motorcycle Boy is fascinated and
consumed by the pet store rumble fish,
an exquisitely hued species of Siamese
fighting fish that attempt to kill, not only
each other, but themselves as well
when they are in captivity, as they
catch their own reflections in the glass
of the fish tank. For Motorcycle Boy,
their unnatural fate mirrors the hope-
lessness and self-destruction of the-
young lives around him, particularly his
brother’s.

He increasingly focuses his deter-
mination to reorder the bitterness of
circumstances symbolically, through
the fish. They must be freed, returned
to the natural life of the river. In this

Dillon and Rourke in Rumble Fish

way he hopes to dramatize to Rusty
James the urgency of escape, the criti-
cal moment for decision and change,
before he, too, is destroyed by his sur-
roundings. Rusty James, who has
concentrated all his aspirations on the
mythic ideal he has created for himself
in his brother, is nearly shattered by the
impact of disillusionment, but through a
series of tragic circumstances,
reemerges with a clearer understanding
of, and relationship to life.

Rumbk Fish is based on the novel by
S.E. Hinton, popular author of adoles-
cent fiction. Coppola first discovered
her writing in the public library, and he
has been fascinated by her characters
ever since. ‘“‘Rusty James is like Pinoc-
chio,’’ Coppolla explains, ‘“‘He’s the
bad boy in us all, but someone we feel
has warmth.’’ Motorcycle Boy on the
other hand, is brooding, enigmatic, elu-
sive. According to Hinton, ‘‘I did not
give the Motorcycle Boy a name be-
cause I wanted to emphasize his aliena-
tion.”

The movie, which was filmed in Hin-
ton’s hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma, is
less a strictly narrative story than a
series of brutal, captivating images that
assault the senses, a blend of stark, jolt-
ing visual episodes and_ turbulent,
ctashing sound effects, filled with
evocative and familiar symbols and
moods of a U.S. city. The soundtrack
was developed by drummer Stewart
Copeland of the English rock group,
The Police, and it is awesome. Cope-
land used the computerized, high-tech
devices of music to ‘‘convey a sense of
urgency, of time running out.’’ The
music and special effects of this movie
are, in fact, so magnetizing, that they
tend to dominate the film at the expense
of the characters, who seem somewhat
undeveloped. Except for the per-
formance of Dillon, which is provoca-
tively forceful and agonizing, there is a
lingering feeling of disappointment.
There is so much more we would have
wished to know and learn about the
other characters, especially Dennis
Hopper, who plays the sympathetic but
shattered alcoholic father. He seems so
regrettably under-utilized.

Nevertheless, Rumble Fish is an
overpowering film that works magni-
ficently at establishing intensified mood
and image. The city, as perceived in the
film, is the emotional city we carry with-
in us, as it jars the senses, creating
bewilderment and disorientation and
despair. Motorcycle Boy is a seething,
raw symbol of illusions and myths laid
bare, revealed, for their inherent emp-
tiness and meaningless, especially as
these myths are perpetrated against the
young. Rumble Fish stands out as a
timely film critically relevant to the pre-
sent.

Coppola states of his intentions in the
movie, ‘‘ ... that seems to me where
youth is at now. They.have no room to
grow; our institutions only want to con-
trol them.’ However, it is clear that
many of the nation’s youth don’t fall
into this self-destructive pattern. It is
true that the ‘institutions’ want to con-
trol young people through drug and al-
cohol abuse, forced induction into mili-
tary service, etc. but the evidence bears
out the fact that young people are
fighting for their fair share.

— Prairie

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—NOVEMBER 23,. 1983—Page 10

System and theories |
both in deep crisis

CURRENT PROBLEMS OF CONTEM-
PORARY CAPITALISM. Edited by M.K.
Bukinas. Progress Publishers, Mos-
cow. Distributed by Progress Books,
Toronto. 206 pages. Paper: $2.95

It is not only the capitalist economy
which is in crisis. So are the theories,
analyses, and remedies of the practition-

_ ers of bourgeois economics.

Monetarists, such as Milton Fried-
man, whose prescription for the Chilean
economy under dictator Pinochet has
only made the economy of that country
more sickly, are fighting economists who
hold differing views.

As Barry Bluestone and Bennett Har-
rison points out in their book, The De-
industrialization of America: Plant Clos-
ings, Community Abandonment, and the
Dismantling of Basic Industry some econ-
omists find ‘‘the root of the current crisis

. not in some technical maladjustment
in the economic machinery, but deep in
moral fiber of society.”’ Another group
blames ‘‘the entire demise of the U.S.
economy on ‘big government.””’

There are trade union economists,
who ‘should know better, who blame
‘‘hard times’’ on imports, Japanese and
other foreign competition, etc. Some
economists include what they call “high
wages’’ among the causes of economic
recession and argue that labor has to give

‘up hard-won advances supposedly to

‘‘overcome’’ economic crisis.

In June 1980 Business Week called for
a national policy of reindustrialization,
but did not question why deindustrializa-
tion — plant closings, community
abandonment and dismantling of basic
industry — had occurred.

Yet, as Bluestone and Harrison show,
‘‘deindustrialization is the outcome of a
worldwide crisis in the economic sys-
tem.’’ And it is precisely because it is,
that bourgeois economists evade the is-
sue.

It is to the advantage of working
people who had to battle on the eco-
nomic and political front with the em-
ployers to know the facts and the truth
the facts reveal. They need to know what
the capitalist system really is, its laws,
how they operate, why crises occur and
what can be done in the struggle on the
economic front.

The clear, simple, and relatively short
book under review here can help in
supplying the knowledge that workers
need, that arms them ideologically, ex-
pands their horizons, and makes them

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section of the book examine the period!

better defenders of workers’ and t
people’s — as well as the national
interest.

The four economists who each wrot@)

the 1970s in which ‘‘capitalism Wa
rocked by a chain of crises.’’ The§
crises included cyclic economic cri
energy, monetary, raw material,
and ecological crises. There were ¢
of state monopoly management of
economy and in international econ
relations, among imperialist state
well as in relations between imperi
and the developing countries.
In the 1970s and first years of th
1980s, all contradictions were aggl
vated. State monopoly regulation of #
economy is ever becoming less effectil
in dealing with crisis problems. The me
for, and the possibility of, workers’ 4%
the people’s anti-monopoly struggles’
enhanced.
In hiding the real nature of the et
nomic crisis and its relation to the ge
crisis of capitalism, the interweavi
the structural and cyclic crises, the
geois economists block workers’ und
standing of the real situation and Ww!
they must do.
In this connection, the book under!
view examines the nature and rami
tions of the anti-monopoly struggle ¢°
ducted by the workers and masses
people, its connection with the struge)
for progress in expanding democracy,!’
example democratic nationalization, ©
peace and advance toward socialism:
‘‘Democratic nationalization is P
ticularly important in defending the
tional economy against foreign capi
it is pointed out. ‘‘In some countt
where militarization is especially P
nounced, the progressive forces
democratic nationalization as a mean>
checking the militarization of state p™
erty and reducing the power of the ™
tary industrial complex,”’ it is also no’
Work for the building of an
monopoly coalition and exercis!
democratic control over the economy,
the main political goal at this stage in”
United States. Progress toward that 8
will be facilitated by a scientific, M
ist-Leninist understanding which *
book under review offers.
— Conrad Komoro¥