The two protagonists of Michael Mann’s Public Enemies and Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy are both products of economic collapse from two different eras in American history. John Dillinger rose to fame during the Great Depression, offering the disillusioned American public a hero who made a mockery of the capitalist system, which was being questioned more and more as it began to fail the working class. Wendy is a lower class woman desperate for work, traveling by car to Alaska. When her car breaks down in a small town, her hopes and funds begin to deplete, and in a sick reversal of the American dream, supporting her companion, a dog named Lucy, is such a burden, that when the pet goes missing it actually provides as much financial relief as it does emotional distress. In Public Enemies, our protagonist provides vicarious escape for the working class and in Wendy and Lucy our protagonist is a working class person with no escape. Thus, the characters in both films demonstrate a distortion of American ideological ideals and illuminate the fragility of a system which continues to fail its’ people at the dawn of a new century.
I do not mean to suggest that these two films are similar in any stylistic, or even thematic fashion, but often films are more then just what they set out to be. As products of a time and of a society, films can reveal much about a culture and the shifts therein. There are social tectonic plates that move and produce change but also conflict as they crash into one another, and cinema, like all popular arts, is an intricate part of the process. Of the two films, Wendy & Lucy is the only one explicitly created in response to a social change or problem, which in this case is the recent economic crisis of the United States, labeled as the Great Recession. The myriad origins of the crisis suggest that there is no single flaw in American capitalist society to point a finger at, but that a system with such instability is corrupt in itself. This profound economic inequality is what inspired American filmmaker Kelly Reichardt to make Wendy & Lucy, which debuted in 2008, as the reality of the Great Recession was hitting American citizens.
Wendy & Lucy’s greatest success is in its’ uncanny ability to express the political without resorting to any expository elements or to even explicitly criticize capitalism other than through natural character conflicts. As described in a piece on Reichardt entitled “A Completely False Security,” “her films are not didactic manifestos of any kind; rather, they are films that superficially, seem to have little to do with national politics” (Wigon). It is in this way that Reichardt shares traits with Italian Neorealist filmmakers like Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica, both of whom were able to make beautiful films that expressed profound political statements through the personal stories of realistic human characters. Reichardt’s slow-moving lateral tracking shots, also feel like they originated from this era of filmmaking.
The film demonstrates how working class people at the bottom of the social pyramid are not able to pick themselves up regardless of their efforts. Michelle Williams’ Wendy becomes stranded in a small town in Oregon on her way to Alaska when her car breaks down. Not only is social mobility seemingly impossible but so is literal mobility: Wendy is trapped in every sense. It is especially appropriate that the automobile, forever a symbol of American freedom as well as a key representation of status, is used as a manifestation of the antagonistic force of capitalism. In having to cover day-to-day expenses for herself and her dog Lucy, as well as paying to fix the car, her funds quickly deplete, eventually resulting in her having to leave her dog with another family. Reichardt sees the economic inequality of capitalism as an oppressive force that alienates friends, companions and loved ones from each other. Wendy left her family behind to find work, and in one scene calls them for help, but clearly they can not offer financial assistance nor do they offer familial solidarity, implying a rigid dynamic between kin in a difficult situation. Tragically separated from her one companion, Wendy is a victim of a system that leaves little room for humane expression and cooperation.
Exemplifying this within the film is when Wendy is arrested for shoplifting at a supermarket. A male adolescent employee catches her. He aggressively brings her into the office of his manager, an older man. The young man insists she must be punished and is subject to the rules like anyone else. The manager is clearly reluctant, but upon the fervent insistence on the behalf of the young man, he agrees to involve the police. In this scene, the young man has conviction for the rules of the system in which he has been raised, whereas the manager, clearly lacking this conviction, is old enough to know and to have experienced the lack of human consideration in “rules”. An earlier scene also suggests a disdain for such rules, when Wendy, asleep in her car in a Walgreen’s parking lot, is woken up and asked to move by a kindly old security guard, despite the abundance of free parking spots surrounding them in the lot. As her car refuses to even start, he simply repeats, “you can’t park here, that’s the rules”. The security guard himself is an insight into the lie of the American dream by being around the age of retirement but employed in a menial job.
Riechardt smartly keeps the story self-contained and only subtly suggests the problems that exist beyond our protagonist. When Lucy is lost, and Wendy posts a “lost dog” sign, we see another similar sign in frame. Also, when Wendy visits the pound in the hopes of discovering her lost dog, there is a long tracking shot showing us all the caged canines, which when considering the connotations of the story of dog and owner in the film, implies a sense of immense social devastation. The small town is revealed to have largely depended on a local mill, now closed down, for jobs, the reliance on industry for sustenance being an intrinsic flaw of capitalism. The film’s modest production feels organic in relation to the themes. Wendy & Lucy even lacks a proper musical score, instead having Wendy’s humming persist throughout the film, a tune we discover comes from the Muzak played at the supermarket: a capitalist lullaby that has passed on from its’ source to its’ victim.
In contrast, Public Enemies does not aim to tackle a social crisis through the story of the celebrity criminal John Dillinger. Instead, Michael Mann’s interests lie in the man himself: his passion; expert skill; flaws; and his potential as a hero, and maybe a tragic one at that. However, few filmmakers are as thorough as Mann, and his fascination extends into that of the context of Dillinger’s rein as America’s most beloved criminal. It is difficult to separate Dillinger’s story from the Great Depression, the height of which coincided with his release from prison and most prolific streak of bank robberies. For the struggling working class, whose newspaper headlines reminded them either of their dire situation or that of John Dillinger’s latest conquest, the notorious criminal was an anti-capitalist hero whose actions made a mockery of the system that was oppressing them. It is during this period of time that capitalism was being questioned the most by the American public and political alternatives were being introduced into public consciousness. Whether John Dillinger is in reality an anti-capitalist hero is a much-complicated notion. He may have laughed in the face of capitalism and institutions but at the same time he pursued an extreme version of the American Dream, accumulating wealth by his own hands. As described in an essay published in Senses of Cinema, “Crime and theft are expressions of class division and conflict, but only in the most reactionary manner; Dillinger, Alvin Karpis and their ilk aped the most diehard and vile habits of the acquisitive bourgeoisie” (Rothermel). Still, we know reality and perception have a fickle relationship, and the media’s Dillinger gave the people a symbol imposed with their own hopes.
What makes the timing of the latest retelling of the John Dillinger story so interesting is that it is rooted in the Great Depression and came out during the Great Recession. Released in 2009, the film was not created as a response to the economic crisis, but nevertheless is an appropriate manifestation of a public consciousness that may again desire an anti-capitalist hero. It was the Great Depression that made the Gangster film a thriving genre. Herry M. Benshoff and Sean Griffin state the following in America On Film: “Heroes…had given up trying to find success through legitimate means and were now going outside the law to do so. Gangster films…proliferated during this period” (181). This public fascination with gangster films has, of course, continued throughout the 20th and 21st century with works such as The Godfather (1974), Goodfellas (1990), and The Departed (2006) and countless others, but it is apposite that a blockbuster Hollywood production be made during the Great Recession about the infamous man, a product of the Great Depression, who was instrumental in influencing the genre in the first place.
In recent cinema related pop culture, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, co-host of the new television program Ebert Presents At the Movies, discussed how Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) Du Cinéma influenced who he is as a critic by causing him to see all of cinema as part of a single story. If we accept this then we see that two seemingly dissimilar films like Wendy & Lucy and Public Enemies are of a common continuum. They lack commonalities as far as narrative, style, etc. but they feed into each other as all films do. This perspective can help generate meaning out of films and help probe the social stratosphere of art and culture. Let us take this even a step further and imagine that as Wendy hops onto a train and continues on to Alaska without her dearest friend, she dreams of something: a force to attack the oppressive “hegemony”, a dream that manifested itself in cinemas but a year later. Wendy & Lucy and Public Enemies demonstrate that in nearly a century, as the social tectonic plates shifted, certain dynamics have regrettably stayed the same. However, such is the cinema, to give life eternal to a figure like Dillinger, made a hero on a movie screen. After all, cinema does not imitate life; it transcends it.
