Shiny Happy People (Holding Hands)

As Mike D'Angelo will happily tell anyone in earshot, I love to read spoilers. If it's going to be awhile before a see a particular movie, I will frequently read a precis of the plot, mainly so that I can follow the film critical discourse around it until such time as I see the film itself. I suppose I'm not all that different from that character in Whit Stillman's Metropolitan who claimed to prefer literary criticism to literature, because it gave you both the plot and an opinion.

I mention this because I have, in fact, read several summaries of Jordan Peele's Us, a film that is obviously playing everywhere. In fact, I have a movie theatre ten minutes from my home. But it's proving to be a very busy semester, largely because Jen's mother is very ill and so she has had to fly to California for several extended stays while I managed the house, cats, and kid by myself.

But anyway, I of course read that a major theme in Us is the use of the charity action "Hands Across America" as a final emblem of the Tethered's refusal to simply go away. This struck me as both comical and ominous, because I had been thinking about "Hands Across America" very recently for the first time in a long while. And that's what I'm really here to discuss.

If any mass action were secretly designed to take its ideal Platonic form as a chain of zombies, it's this one. I was recently hanging out with friends, and we were all randomly talking about our single biggest regret. Most of the ones others mentioned were college-year, early adulthood fiascos -- some acid they wished they hadn't dropped or somebody's particularly gamy genitalia they'd have preferred not allowing inside them or putting themselves into. But for me, it was much earlier, when I was 14. 

Let's set up a little context. Charity events were all the rage in the 1980s, particularly after the Band Aid and USA For Africa singles, "Do They Know It's Christmas?" and "We Are The World" respectively. I need not point out the obvious problems with these singles, as it has already been done many times over -- a Christmas record for Ethiopia, a majority-Muslim country, and an American-centered effort chauvinistically announcing "we are the world." But in many respects, Live Aid made up for all the missteps. Even with the regrettable overhead, 150 million pounds (nearly $200 million USD) is nothing to sneeze at. And hey....QUEEN.

As one would expect, a number of people in America, politicians in particular, started lodging objections. "Why are we helping to feed Africa when we have starving people right here at home?" Leaving aside for a moment the erroneous assumption that charity is a zero-sum game, several organizations took up the challenge, most notably John Mellencamp's Farm Aid, and, notoriously, Hands Across America.

The concept was so simple as to be laughable on its face. For fifteen minutes, hundreds of thousands of people would stand in a line across North America, right down the middle of the Corn Belt and from sea to shining sea, holding hands. Folks would pay $10 to secure a place in the line. In an unintentional irony, the proceeds would go to the homeless. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I often give change or even paper money to the homeless when I have it, and I usually don't hold their hands. I observe a standard six-inch vertical change drop. Nothing against the homeless, mind you, but we know that sanitation is not what it ought to be for those experiencing mandatory open-air living.

So my mother was way into this, and she sold the idea to me, hard. She didn't want to do it alone, and as it happened, the closest segment of the line to our home in Houston was almost a day's drive away, in Amarillo, Texas. So I acquiesced. 

As you might expect, Hands Across America, Inc. traced a pretty desolate route across the U.S., mostly along two-lane interstates with nothing but empty fields around for miles. I suppose that was a practical concern, but I suspect they also liked the aesthetic of it, as if they visualized a low horizon line with an endless string of connected people cutting across it, like the conjoined paper dolls they used to cut out in elementary school. 

Now, a funny thing happened along this section of the line. Between the time when the organization drew up the path and the actual event, there was an Exxon station built smack-dab in the middle of the route. From what I am told, the organizers, and some ordinary $10 punters, pleaded with the station's owner to let them string themselves along the front of the pavement, but this would apparently have prevented cars from entering and exiting the Exxon with ease. So it was nothing doing. Their only alternative was to bend the line around the back of the station, producing a little pimple along the nation's backbone.

Well, you can see where this is going. Even with valiant efforts, which allegedly included trying to coax passers-by out of their cars to join in (!), the line just wouldn't make. Later on, of course, we learned that there were dozens of similar holes along the entirety of the World's Saddest Kickline, but there was no way for us to know that then. We looked right up the road and saw people straining but failing to connect, resembling some adult game of Red Rover that might be conducted at a mandatory corporate retreat. "We" were dooming Hands Across America to failure!

Privately, I was pretty amused. But my mother (on my left) was disappointed, and despite multiple tugs of bilateral tension, she did not let go of my hand. Hers was the grip of a parent dragging their (much younger) child through the streets of an unfamiliar foreign metropolis, not that of someone who'd spent $10 to drive up to Amarillo to do some utterly symbolic shit. But she was not even my problem.

The woman holding my right hand was tall, quite large, and had a brass-colored wig hairsprayed into a towering mound. She watched the breaks and jerks and tugs in the line with increasing Southern Woman distress, and kept looking down at me with a combination of determination and rue. If Hands Across America was going down, so be it. But it would not go down at her junction. Weakest link she was not.

She crushed my young hand, going so far as to drive her Lee Press-On Nails further and further into my skin for extra grip. As the tug came down the line, like a version of The Wave in some hypothetical sports arena where the basic Newtonian laws no longer held sway, she yanked me violently to the right, never letting go. At one point I was pivoting on a single leg, holding fast to the ground by the tiniest fragment of shoe leather. I wouldn't be surprised if I was totally airborne at some moment, participating in the greatest experiment Eadweard Muybridge would sadly never get to see.

And then it was over. "All right, thank you! Great job everyone! Give yourselves a hand!" And I thought, you know, Ms. Administrative Bullhorn, I may never clap again.