Horns
and Halos
posted
to www.marxmail.org
on March 2, 2003
Co-directed by Suki Hawley and Michael Galinsky
and now showing at Cinema Village in NYC, "Horns and Halos" is the
best documentary I have seen since "Startup.Com," with which it
shares some important aspects. Both films revolve around doomed projects: in
one instance, a typical dot.com that crashed and burned like so many others in
the 1990's; in the other, a Quixotic mission by a small threadbare publishing
house to get the troubled George W. Bush biography "Fortunate Son" to
market.
The other thing they have in common is two
extremely compelling and memorable figures at the center. In
"Startup.Com", we meet co-CEO's who were college pals with radically
clashing temperaments and ways of doing business. Under the mounting pressure
of the dot.com bust, the two lose both their friendship and their business. In
"Horns and Halos" the two key personalities are Lower East Side
punk-radical Sander Hicks, the President of Soft Skull at the time, and
biographer Jim Hatfield, a drawling 40ish Arkansas ex-con determined to hit it
big with a tell-all biography of George W. Bush.
The title of the film is a reference to what
Hatfield thinks a good biography should consist of. It should include both the
good parts (halos) and bad parts (horns) of the subject. As soon becomes clear,
this also describes Hatfield himself, who veered wildly from serious
investigative reporting to supermarket tabloid sensationalism, all the while
straining to contain the kind of criminal tendencies that once landed him in
prison.
Lurking in the background are two powerful
institutional forces with a full set of horns that emerge as the documentary's
true villains. One is St. Martin's Press that symbolizes the bottom-line
mentality of corporate America. The other is George W. Bush and his lawyers who
after successfully intimidating the prestigious publishing house to drop
Hatfield's book assume that Soft Skull will be easier to push around. While the
film was made before the recent war buildup, the connections with White House
bullying in the Mideast and Europe cannot fail to come to mind. Like the Iraqi
people, Soft Skull President Sander Hicks and Jim Hatfield are in way over
their heads. During the film, we retain hopes that they will be successful
against overwhelming odds but can never shake a feeling that the whole project
might eventually come crashing down around their heads.
Although I have met Marxmail subscriber Sander
Hicks in person just once, I do consider him a friend and comrade. When he
showed up on the list about three years ago, he informed me that Soft Skull had
added Marxmail to the recommended links on their website. Eventually I
discovered that although he was about twenty years younger than me, he had gone
through a similar experience with sectarianism. Like so many other people
active in the peace movement and other struggles, this experience had not
weakened his resolve to oppose US capitalism.
As a character in the documentary, I discovered
a whole other side of Sander that I knew nothing about previously. He is a real
battler. No matter how many times he was threatened with legal action and no
matter how many times some investigative reporter with loyalties to the
Republican Party had uncovered some dirt on Jim Hatfield, he never lost faith
in the project. He obviously understood that despite flaws in "Fortunate
Son," it was the first book to challenge the prevailing mythology around
George W. Bush. It detailed his shady business practices and his chicken-hawk
record.
In one memorable scene, Sander provides a biting
exegesis of Bush's heavily censored military record that was obtained under the
Freedom of Information Act. "You see this," he says pointing to a
series of blacked-out boxes that indicate a preference for overseas duties,
"this shows that he could have possibly chosen to serve in
Vietnam--otherwise they wouldn't have blacked out *all* the boxes." In
another scene, he is gazing at family photos from the pages of a Bush biography
of the kind that Hatfield had decided he would not write, including a daughter of
George Prescott Bush. He explains how bizarre it is that they refer to his
investment banking credentials, but don't mention that he was arrested for
trading with the Nazis.
All the time that Sander was running the Soft
Skull business from a terminally funky basement in a Lower East Side tenement,
he was working as a super in the same building. He is seen sweeping the stairs
or running off to fix a clogged toilet. He is also seen performing on stage
with his band "White Collar Crime". On the album "Their Laws Are
Dimwit Greed," which is dedicated to Jim Hatfield, Sander expresses the
hopes of his generation in the song "White Collar Fight Song". In it
you will find a reference to the tension between beatitude and damnation that
defines this unforgettable documentary:
the land has brought this moment
her people will feed us fruits
harbor us when we are fugitives
we are working now
day & night
editing copy
in a breaking light
the sun sets
we are one day closer
for the poor
for the children
for the kids
who hate the system
smash the devil
destroy white collar crime
we are not saints
we are not angels
a humble hard-working
people's army
God?
God is just the Idea
in the streets.
-----
Sander Hicks website:
http://www.sanderhicks.com/
Soft Skull Press: http://www.softskull.com/
Cinema Village: http://www.cinemavillage.com
Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list:
http://www.marxmail.org