Windy City to Washington to Beijing
Politics can be found in ‘Chicago 10,’ real life, and ‘Summer Palace’
By Andy Klein
As some of you may remember – and those too young may have heard – there was some … stuff … that happened in the ’60s (which, for the sake of this article, encompasses a bit of the ’70s). In fact, a lot of stuff: the Kennedy assassination, the Beatles, the Vietnam War, the increasing public disgust with that war, upfront gay pride, a new wave of feminism, the rise of a more militant response to black oppression, the realization that many pleasurable substances were illegal for totally bogus reasons, and the counterculture that arose from it all. (My apologies if I’ve omitted your fave, but the list would be endless.)
I wouldn’t want to pin down any one event as the nexus of all this, but the trial of the Chicago 8 (or 7 or 10) – the subject of Chicago 10, a new documentary from Brett Morgen (The Kid Stays in the Picture) – is certainly a contender. (To explain the numerical confusion: There were initially eight defendants; one case was severed from the others, leaving seven; and eventually the vengeful judge gave all eight, plus two of the lawyers, unprecedented sentences for contempt of court.)
In brief, there had been antiwar demonstrations during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The cops really overreacted: Even a later government inquiry characterized the resultant melee as “a police riot.” Nonetheless, a grand jury indicted some of the organizers for conspiracy, together with some fairly minor cohorts and – not wanting to leave out the brothers – one Black Panther leader, Bobby Seale, who had given two speeches at the demos but didn’t even know the others.
Adding Seale to the mix of traditional peace activists (Dave Dellinger), more militant SDS types (Tom Hayden), and counterculture agitators (Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin) cemented the notion that this was a showdown between Us and Them – the government/establishment and the disenchanted/disenfranchised (respectively or not, depending on which side you’re on). Basically, the grand jury had provided a structural outline for the drama to come, with judge, defendants, and lawyers acting as a sort of improv group filling in the details.
Much of the casting was better than could have been hoped for. Abbie and Jerry were consciously comedic figures already, Abbie brilliantly so. Judge Julius Hoffman was a hypocritical, seemingly forgetful fuddy-duddy right out of a Preston Sturges film (but scary). And Seale was the righteously defiant reminder of America’s slave past, who, a century after emancipation, was clearly being dealt with by harsher standards than the others. (Ironically, Seale was the only one of the group who had actually been a professional comic, but his situation didn’t provide a lot of opportunities for humor; it’s hard to articulate a punch line when the judge has you gagged and chained to a chair.)
The result was amazing theater. Some of the excerpts in Tales of Hoffman, a book of selections from the trial transcripts published a few months after the verdict, read like Marx Brothers scenes or Clevinger’s court-martial in Catch-22. You couldn’t make this shit up. (Well, Joseph Heller could, but he was a genius.)
Morgen crosscuts between newsreels of the 1968 demonstrations and scenes from the trial. But, since this was in the days before cameras were allowed in the courtroom, he has employed animation for the trial material. (Hank Azaria does a stellar job voicing both Allen Ginsberg and Abbie, capturing the latter’s accent more convincingly than Vincent D’Onofrio in the 2000 biopic Steal This Movie.)
For the most part, Morgen plays it serious. We get some very funny stuff from Abbie: The guy really was a star. The film covers the history of the central events as well as could be hoped in an hour and 40 minutes and conveys some of the feel of the time. I think it all comes across clearly, but, then, it’s hard for me to judge, since I remember a lot of this from when it was happening. (Let’s make it clear once and for all: Contrary to the saying, one can remember at least some of the ’60s and still have been there.)
One of the relevant events I remember most clearly was an antiwar demonstration in Washington on November 15, 1969 – the largest political demonstration in U.S. history. Something between a quarter and half-million people gathered at the Washington Monument. After George McGovern and others had spoken and the folkies had sung their earnest songs, a more militant group of roughly 10,000 – including Abbie, Jerry, and at least one future alternative-weekly film critic – split off and marched on the Justice Department to protest the Chicago trial. (Indulge me: This will all connect in another paragraph or two.)
The building was sealed tight as a drum. We yelled some slogans. There were speeches and some high-spirited anger. Some rocks bounced off the tall metal doors. As the mood intensified, we heard a pop … a few seconds pause … then another pop. Looking up, we could see previously hidden police atop the Justice Department and neighboring buildings, firing tear gas canisters into our midst. The popping increased in rapidity. Within a minute or so, it sounded like being in a popcorn popper; the air was so dense with gas that we felt like we were suffocating … literally, like we might die before escaping the area. Most of the crowd had been trained not to run, but, even prepared with bandannas for facial covering, the sense of imminent death was so great that a few ran anyway; one 13-year-old acquaintance was lightly trampled and spent several days in the hospital.
I had come to Washington with one of my dearest friends, someone I was in love with but not “involved” with; she had been paying attention to another guy during the visit and was at the demonstration with him. I wasn’t thinking about the war or the Chicago trial; I was hurt and jealous and resentful … until the tear gas onslaught scared the living bejesus out of me. Suddenly my head was filled with nothing but “Where is she? Did she get out? Is she hurt?” There’s nothing like a sense of true peril to make emotional pettiness seem … well … petty. (This later inspired me to write the first two verses of a country song entitled “It’s Not the Gas, These Are Real Tears I’m Crying.”)
The reason I bring this up – besides the fact that it’s a really cool story and a fortuitous segue – is that almost exactly the same setup appears in Lou Ye’s 2006 Summer Palace, only now showing up in the U.S. … except that it’s Tiananmen Square, and people really do get killed.
The first half of Summer Palace follows Yu Hong (Hao Lei), a small-town girl who leaves her family and boyfriend to study at Beijing University in 1988. Intoxicated by the new sensations of an urban, intellectual world, the confused, passionate, and manifestly unstable young woman falls madly in love Zhou Wei (Guo Xiaodong); they fuck like bunny rabbits, in scenes amazingly explicit for a mainland production. There is infidelity; her ex comes to town; they excitedly converge at the Tiananmen demonstrations (exactly halfway through the two-hour-plus running time); but then the situation gets really somber, and everyone flees Beijing.
After a montage covering eight years, the second half of the movie peeks in on Yu Hong, Zhou Wei, and several of their friends, all leading up to a reunion of the long-distant lovers.
I loved Lou Ye’s first feature, Suzhou River (2000) – a fascinating Shanghai gloss on Vertigo – and found points of interest in his subsequent, much slicker, Purple Butterfly (2003). Summer Palace returns to the rougher look of the earlier movie, but it’s much tougher to follow, particularly after the focus becomes more diffuse in the second half. It benefits from a riveting performance by newcomer Hao, but the whole is sadly unsatisfying.
Chicago 10. Written and directed by Brett Morgen. With Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and the voices of Hank Azaria, Dylan Baker, Nick Nolte, Mark Ruffalo, Roy Scheider, Liev Schreiber, and Jeffrey Wright. Opens Friday at the Nuart.
Summer Palace. Directed by Lou Ye. Written by Lou Ye, Feng Mei, and Ma Yingli. With Lei Hao, Xiaodong Guo, Ling Hu, and Xueyun Bai. Opens Friday at Laemmle’s Music Hall 3 and Laemmle’s Playhouse 7.
Published: 02/27/2008
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