For the last year or so, I have been working on an article-length analysis of the film My Life in Ruins. I am interested in the ways in which this piece of popular culture draws from Hollywood genres, Western, and Greek narratives of identity to construct national belonging for the diaspora. In other words, this is a transnational analysis of the making of a diaspora subject.
During the analysis I realized that the film is as much interested in constructing diaspora as it is in projecting an image of positive American (white male) identity. This latter concern is necessary for ideological purposes. Because the narrative tells the story of heroine who is an unhappy American ethnic, and who eventually turns down an offer for an academic career in the U.S. (having found a sense of belonging in Greece), the film implicitly interrogates the United States, albeit vaguely, as an anomic
society. Thus the image of Irv (Richard Dreyfuss) as a fulfilled individual (professionally and maritally) serves the following narrative function: it restores the idea of the U.S. as a place where one can find happiness. In fact, a close analysis shows that the film does something more than this. Here is my analysis, building on some initial thoughts I posted in this blog almost three years ago, http://immigrations-ethnicities-racial.blogspot.com/2010/05/my-life-in-ruins.html (in Greek):
The film neutralizes its implicit critique of the U.S. when it attaches a host
of affirmative attributes to male whiteness. The figure of Irv delivers a
template of desirable masculinity: wise, passionate, creative, playful, loving,
tender, sensitive, fulfilled, and, as an unattached male, yes, open to sexual
dalliances. This construction works relationally in a series of hierarchies, of
which I have already identified the first: The gendered and classed pair
American-male-professional/ American-ethnic-female-scholar corresponds to the
contrast fulfilled body/closed off body. The second hierarchy builds on a
reversal, demythologizing the global icon of Greek national identity, namely
the figure of Zorba the Greek (1). It
juxtaposes white masculinity with this celebrated portrayal of Greek manhood
along the plane civilization/savagery to proceed with the metonymic devaluation
of Neohellenism. To explore this latter duality, my discussion moves from the film’s
tongue-in-cheeck critique of American society to its voluble indictment of, in
fact orientalist gaze on modern Greece.
The
heroine’s interaction with the crude receptionist serves as a pretext for this
critique. A male of savage sexuality (exchanging postage for sex) and vulgar
manners, this character does not simply serve as a cultural type to focus a
feminist and cultural critique. The figure stands metonymically for generalized
national dysfunction. Significantly, this is someone absorbed by televised
images of Zorba the Greek, transfixed
by and bodily emulating the famous dancing scene. Heralded as an icon of modern
Greek identity, Zorba could be read as a character who refuses to be subdued in
the face of life’s adversity and loss. The lewd receptionist’s identification
with Zorba stains the legendary male archetype of Greekness with pathological
masculinity. In her indictment, the heroine reads Zorba in a literalist manner
– the man dances in response to loss (not in spite of loss) – to condemn this
image as a sign of a dysfunctional society: The country
does not work (2). Once more, the
encounter between Greek America and the homeland perpetuates the Orientalist
image of Greece as a place engulfed in irrational abandon and unregulated
passion. Rationality and agency is absent when the answer to failure is dance.
As an
essential Greek male archetype, Zorba is bankrupt, in need of reconstruction.
One alternative is the romantic Greek native, “Poupi” Kakkas
(Alexis Georgoulis), who falls in love with the heroine. The other is Irv, who
restores meaning to whiteness against vacuous identity. My Life in Ruins quotes scenes from Zorba the Greek with the purpose of reversing the hierarchy
embedded in the latter between the emotionally freed Greek native (Zorba) and
the psychologically oppressed, westernized male (Basil/Alan Bates). The figure
of Irv resoundingly testifies that the west does not repress.
The text
undermines the exalted indigeneity of Greek masculinity by rewriting Irv as a
(reconstructed) Zorba away from the national soil. The global icon of the ideal
male is deterritorialized. The rationalized meaning of dance as the expression
of a positive outcome (recall the occasion of the tourists dancing in the newly
air-conditioned bus) is restored. As the credits fall, Irv gleams while
watching alienated Basil urging Zorba, “teach me how to dance.” It is him, after all, who has been
instrumental in mentoring Georgia’s rehabilitation of self. The Greek Zorba has
been dethroned. An American male has taken the role of a caring yet
paternalistic mentor of gendered ethnicity. Male whiteness is not merely
restored; its authority is also asserted as a cultural template for American
ethnic women to emulate, including, as I discuss in the forthcoming article, the narration of heritage.
The feminist critique in this narrative thread degenerates to all-encompassing
Orientalism and the cultural domination it reproduces.
Notes
1. Peter
Bien (2000) notes the inconsistencies between the literary and filmic Zorba.
“The whole point of the book’s end is that the boss is liberated as an artist…
He does not become like Zorba (as the film would have us believe)” (164).
2. The
Zorba image is contested in Greek America. My
Life in Ruins registers the narrative of discomfort, aptly captured in Dan
Georgakas’ personal response: Zorba the
Greek “projected the Greek male as an instinctive brute, lovable at times,
but totally incompetent and irresponsible” (236). Charles Moskos (1989) draws
an unambiguous boundary between that image and U.S. Greek immigrants: “They had
their share of rascals and more than their share of infighting, but Zorbas they
were not” (185).
References Cited
Bien, Peter. 2000. “Nikos Kazantzakis’s Novels on Film.” Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 18 (1): 161–169.
Georgakas, Dan. 2006. My Detroit: Growing Up Greek and American in Motor City. New York City: Pella Publishing.
Moskos, Charles. 1990. Greek Americans: Struggle and Success. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. (Originally published in 1980 by Prentice-Hall)
