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Barrow on the Big Screen, A Little at a Time

06 Wednesday Nov 2013

Posted by danielwalldammit in Alaska, Movies

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Alaska, Barrow, Ethnicity, Film, Film Reviews, Movies, On the Ice, The Big Miracle, Thirty Days of Night

38483_1544951388794_3220306_nOne thing about coming to Barrow, it has made conversation much easier, at least in the lower 48. All I have to do is tell people I am from Alaska and the conversation is well on its way. They will ask more questions than I could possibly answer, and once I start telling them about Barrow I can generally be assured of willing and sympathetic audience. I’m a socially awkward kinda guy, so yes, this is a good thing. Anyway, I’m happy to talk about my new home. Barrow can be damned interesting!

…so I suppose it should come as no surprise that this town has made its way into the occasional television show or movie production. Three particular movies about Barrow seem to have made it into the popular culture to one degree or another. These films couldn’t be more different from one another. Each tells a different kind of story to a completely different audience, and each portrays the community of Barrow in a very different way. I’m always fascinated to see the community change its shape in order to meet the needs of the film-makers behind these project.

…fascinated enough to write a post about it anyway!

***

30-days-of-night-poster-1_6599Barrow as Darkness: Thirty Days of Night is of course the most well known movie about Barrow. In this film based on a graphic novel) vampires descend upon the town at the outset of Polar Midnight in order to enjoy a month-long feast in the safety of a season without sun. Thirty Days of Night wasn’t filmed here; it was filmed in New Zealand. Still, the central premise of the film is very much about Barrow and the dramatic significance of a long polar night.

The small hills and valleys of the movie’s opening sequences were about all it took to shake my sense that this film had much to do with the Barrow in which I live. The exaggerated sense of polar midnight didn’t help either. Once it goes dark in this film, it stays dark, …completely dark. What a lot of people don’t realize (and what the film-makers didn’t seem to find interesting) is the fact that we get a kind of fake sunrise here. If you can imagine the moment before the sun actually rises, that’s what we get in the midst of polar midnight, only it isn’t followed by an actual sunrise. You could swear the big ball of warmth was just about to pop over that horizon, and then the light just starts to fade.

…yes, it can be a little disappointing.

…kinda like Thirty Days of Night.

30DaysofNight_6lgBut perhaps I am being too harsh. Barrow does one thing only for this film and that is to provide the central premise, a vampire paradise. So, it should come as no surprise that the movie makes no attempt to convey anything meaningful about the people of this community. Still, you would think the directors would be kind enough to give their villainous horde of undead a bit of variety in their diet? Nope. The  Barrow of this film is a lily white community if ever I saw one before. As I recall, a token native does make an appearance in the living feast that is Barrow’s population for this film. Other than that, the menu is white meat only.

This is a fun film in its own right, but it is definitely, not the Barrow I know.

***

bigmiracleartworkpic1Barrow as a Big Warm Hug: Hollywood has made one popular film here in Barrow, and they did it since I arrived, The Big Miracle. At least it was about Barrow, and they did shoot some film up here. Some residents even made it into the movie, as did natives from other parts of Alaska. With a cast featuring Drew Barrymore and Ted Danson, this film recounts a real event in the history of this community. In 1988, three grey whales became trapped in the ice not far from here. The entire town as well as a number of outsiders (including a Russian icebreaker) worked hard to break them free.

The ironic thing about this movie is that it was based on a rather cynical book, ‘Everyone Loves Whales’. I gather the original script may even have had a little bite to it, but the final cut of this film is a feel-good celebration of compassion, humanity, and …whales! By the end of the film, the plot is fully focused on efforts to save the big lugs of the sea, but the early scenes focus on political questions about whether or not anyone will help them. One of those questions was apparently whether or not to eat the whales instead of saving them. The Iñupiat community of the north slope harvests Bowhead whales every year, so that possibility could hardly be described as a stretch. This plot point is eventually resolved when the whaling captains of the town decide instead to help free the whales.

(Big sigh folks!)

images (2)The eat-or-save sub-theme provides The Big Miracle with its main window into the community up here. Unlike Thirty Days of Night, this film actually finds a place for the Iñupiat community of Barrow in its storyline. They start out as potential villains and end up being god guys in the end.

…kinda like Clint Eastwood, only with chainsaws and snow-machines instead of Colt Walkers and a horse. (Let’s not talk about the harpoons.)

Folks up here are of mixed minds about how whether or not the film does justice to Iñupiat community of Barrow. Drew Barrymore (who plays a Greenpeace activist in the film) gives a pretty brutal speech about the native community and its whaling practices, and its hard to shake the sense that some of her points in that speech might have served as the voice of the film-makers. Later attempts to show the native community in a more positive light may or may not be enough to settle concerns about the politics of the movie, and for those here still very much committed to whaling, the major theme of the movie itself may be a little discomfitting. Barrow’s native community gets some love here precisely to the extent that their actions do not reflect what natives of the North Slope normally do with whales. It’s a conditional kind of love, and I can’t blame folks for being wary of the conditions.

For what it’s worth, this movie at least knows that natives exist in Barrow. It even kind-of likes them, so long as they aren’t eating muktuk.

***

imagesBarrow as Native Youth: I can think of one REALLY good film set in Barrow, and that is On the Ice by Andrew Okpeaha MacLean. MacLean is from Barrow, and he uses the film quite deliberately to tell us something about life here at the top of the world. On the Ice tells the story of two young Iñupiat men with a secret they’ve been concealing from the rest of the community. And while this main story plays out, the film does a wonderful job of revealing the interplay between indigenous values and outside cultural influence in the native youth of this community.

On the Ice is a tense drama, and one which portrays the native community with a deliberate sense of realism. This film was shot in Barrow, and it features a number of residents in the supporting cast. It’s both amusing and a little disconcerting to see scenes on street corners I pass regularly, and even more so to see people I know in various scenes, but that is definitely one of the film’s charms. If the other films are set in Barrow (or at least an imaginary version thereof), the real Barrow jumps right out at you from this film.

…at least it does for me.

On-the-ice-premieresWhat’s missing from On the Ice is everyone else! …besides the Iñupiat community, I mean. Every once in awhile you can catch a glimpse of a non-native somewhere onscreen in this film, but that is definitely the exception. For the most part this film has eyes only for the native population. Gone are the white folks, yes, but so are the Koreans, the Thais, the Tongans, the Samoans, and the Filipinos, each of whom has a substantial place in this town.

On one level, fair enough. This movie is about native youth not the rest of us. On another, it’s a simplification, perhaps even an over-simplification. I can’t help but think it makes a difference that the outside influences (and the people who represent them) are present here in Barrow itself, and I would think that would be part of the story of native youth, at least if that story is to be a realistic portrayal (perhaps it is not). It would have been interesting to see how these characters dealt with ethnic relations over the course of the story. Leaving out all the sub-communities from the town simplifies the storyline and that is the one thing that jars me a bit when I watch it. But seriously, I mean to praise the film with faint damn. Because what this film does, it does well.

If you want to watch a movie about Barrow, this is the one.

***

So there it is. The community in which I live takes on radically different forms whenever a camera is pointed at it. It is darkness for those seeking a fright, a reluctant helper for those seeking a heart-warming smile, and in it’s best incarnation to date, it is an all-native community. The full community of Barrow never seems to make it into these stories, and the interplay between all the ethnicities of this town has yet to make it onto the big screen.

Ah well, goodnight.

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Thirty Days of Night: Vampires Come to Barrow and it Ain’t Pretty

20 Tuesday Nov 2012

Posted by danielwalldammit in Alaska, Movies

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Alaska, Barrow, Ecology, Film, Horror, Malthus, Movies, Thirty Days of Night, Undead

It is certainly a memorable scene. Vampires chasing down the residents of a small town on the frozen tundra. Its residents cannot leave, they cannot contact the outside world, and the sun will not return for 30 days. The town-folk are powerless against their assailants. And the vampires run rampant through the town, slaughtering the residents at will and completely without mercy.

Shot from above, the figures run this way and that across the blood splattered snow. Which is vampire and which is victim? You can just make it out in some instances, mostly when one of them dies. Horribly!

This is classic horror, is it not?

No. It’s the Tragedy of the Commons.

You see the real tragedy in this story is not the loss of human life. That story is so old it hardly merits mention. Yeah, yeah, there is a couple, an adorable grandma, a spunky teen, and even a weird uncle-like character who will do some good before he dies. We even get a token minority, and of course we wonder which will live and which won’t.

All been done before.

What makes this film truly original, what separates it from the rank and file horror-flicks, what makes this high art, is the fact that this movie explores the economic ramifications of a completely unique ecosystem. Sadly, the movie seems to suggest that vampires just don’t get it either. Immortal though they may be, they too are doomed to experience the miseries of a Malthusian nightmare. They too will exhaust their food supply.

In this case, it is entirely unnecessary.

You see, the Barrow in Alaska of Thirty Days of Night is a vampire’s Utopian dream. Easily cut off from the outside world, and subject to 30 full days of darkness, what blood sucking undead would not regard it as the ultimate dinner banquet, just waiting for an RSVP? And with a little over a hundred and fifty people remaining in town for the winter, there should be plenty of food to go around.

Right?

Of course, if a vampire was paying attention, he would have noticed that Barrow actually has about 5,000 people and 2 months of night (or 40-something days of it, depending on what counts as a day without sun). So, Barrow is even more plentiful than the fellows in this movie could possibly have imagined.

Even better!

So, you would THINK that a small hoard of vampires accustomed to long drawn-out plot lines just to get a single meal in before the second act would be able to make the most of this opportunity. Well perhaps if they had read their Garrett Hardin! …or if they had implemented a proper system of human resource management. If they had even auctioned the mortals off as private property, things might still have gone better. With proper incentives, each of the undead could have had food enough to last for the entire winter.

But no.

The greedy vampires regard the entire population of Barrow as common property and so each sets about slaughtering as many town-folk as he can, thus reaping the benefits of extra blood consumed individually while imposing the costs of a rapidly diminishing food supply on the entire vampire hoard. Even at the cost of diminishing returns, this approach grants to each rampaging vampire a greater share of the blood gushing from the necks of his victims than he would get by patiently consuming his fair share. And each does just this until there is nothing left for anyone to eat. That is simply what happens when property, even human property, is held in common, and without a mechanism for properly managing the finite resources of the town’s residents.

It doesn’t help that these wasteful buffoons leave large quantities of their meal to spill out over the frozen snow. But that really is beside the point. What matters most is that they never really did establish a viable means of managing the cornucopia that lay helpless before them. As a direct result, they run through their food supply very quickly and spend the rest of the movie working hard to track down the few remaining humans smart enough to make themselves central characters in the movie.

It really is a damned shame.

You can see the results toward the end of the film as a whole town full of vampires tries to make do with a single teen-aged girl. There really isn’t enough of her to go around. Oh they toy with her; they even say some scary things at her, but let’s face it, nobody is all that impressed when you play with your food. And all that sadistic pleasure taken in tormenting the poor girl doesn’t change the fact that, she was the last meal any one of the gluttonous night fiends was going to eat for a long while. This wasn’t scary; it was pathetic.

The hunger of the poor starving vampires leads to still worse events when some of the mortals manage to fight back. Don’t even try to tell me that would have happened if the vampire hoard had not gone hungry in the wake of their wasteful banquet. These guys were bad-ass at the beginning of the film. Bad-ass! In the end, well let’s just say that even the alpha-pire turns out to have a glass jaw. All of that could have been avoided if the vampires had simply instituted some mechanism by which individuals could be held accountable for using up the common resources of the community.

There really is no excuse for any of this. These guys could have ruled the longest night in movie-making history, released a satisfying belch and rode off into the moon-set.

If only they had had a plan.

***

We are just now entering into Polar Midnight here in Barrow, and as always, some of us are a little worried about the whole thing. I mean it’s just a movie, yeah, we all know. But all that darkness does get a little spooky, and I think I saw something out on the tundra last night. Or maybe it was this morning. Hard to tell.

CAUSE IT’S DARK!

Anyway, I have no idea if the vampires will actually come this time. But if they do, then I certainly hope my life and that of my friends and neighbors will not be wasted frivolously by some foolish fiend who doesn’t finish his plate.

After all.

Lycanthropic children are starving in Bulgaria!

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