Foreclosure (2014)
Near the end of the millennium, some five years after leaving Paris, approaching the end of my time in graduate school, driving on the Cross Bronx Expressway with my fiancée and my uncle Jimmy, headed into the Bronx to meet part of my father’s family, I listened as Jimmy turned to my fiancée and told her how smart her future husband’s father had been to get himself admitted into the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital. I thought, "What the fuck?"
The film I watched most often in Paris while Reagan was president in the 1980s was The Shining by Stanley Kubrick. It became the inspiration for my first horror film, Foreclosure (2014). However, my connection to the film was not only that of a cinephile.
Bill (Michael Imperioli) and Raymond (Bill Raymond) meet Christina (Meital Dohan) at the front door of the house Raymond has inherited after his brother's suicide. Foreclosure (2014)
During this time, John Bertucci, an expatriate American filmmaker and environmental activist, edited my first 16mm short film Animals (1984). He also taught me how to use the weekly Parisian publications that featured listings of all the film screenings in the city. I learned to organize my free time each week around seeing films. It was a golden age of small cinemas throughout Paris, showing both a wide variety of films from the entire history of cinema and films recently released. Inspired by the Cinematheque that Henri Langlois had founded in Paris, these small cinemas sometimes grouped films according to filmmaker, according to nationality, genre, even according to–it appeared– “what the fuck—fuck your categories.” It was exhilarating. While in Paris, I started to share Bertucci’s obsession with The Shining.
At the end of this period I found a way back into the U.S. as a graduate student at NYU in Comparative Literature. Without really even knowing it myself, this one 16mm short film that I had shot and edited in Paris had transformed me into a filmmaker. Once back in the United States, I would write a doctoral dissertation on the traces in literature, film and popular culture of the transformation of mental healthcare in the U.S. after WW2. The new role of mental healthcare in the U.S. was initially represented as organized around treating veterans. Like a prisoner who has been planning his escape, I turned my research for this thesis into the basis of my first feature fiction film, A Hole In One (2004). The film stars Michelle Williams and Meat Loaf. It's about a woman in the US in 1953 who wants a lobotomy.
On the Cross Bronx Expressway, while my fiancée steered the car, my uncle from the back seat explained that my father had wanted to delay his trial for some shady financial deal. This involved real estate in the District of Columbia, in violation of his employment at the time with the Internal Revenue Service. My parents were living in Georgetown with their first born child (me). My father, in order to accomplish this subterfuge, my uncle Jimmy revealed to us–shouting because the car’s windows were open–had shrewdly had himself admitted into New York’s most famous ward for the insane in the country’s oldest public hospital. I had never before heard this story and–speeding along the expressway that had torn the Bronx apart in the late 1940s–I suddenly felt I had no idea where I or anything else was going.
As I became all ears, my uncle continued that the admitting psychiatrist was an old friend of my father and of his three brothers from their days of playing stickball in their Pontian Greek neighborhood in the Bronx. This childhood friend had become a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst on the G.I. Bill. My father’s complaint at the time of his admittance to Bellevue, Jimmy explained, was that he felt an impulsive need to kill someone. I felt certain when I heard this that day–one of my last as a bachelor—and continue to still believe it today—that it was very far from being an arbitrary fabrication by my dear old dad to avoid going to court.
When I was growing up my father would often speak about his encounters with lone men in lonely places where he would be forced into combat and overpower them. He had a twin lens camera into which I used to enjoy looking vertically downward into its viewfinder and seeing displaced there the world horizontally in front of its lens. He said it had been given to him by a bartender at an Irish bar because of all the money the bartender had won betting on my father when he would disappear out the back entrance of the bar to fight a bigger man. On one occasion, when I was around seven, he recounted to me meeting a man late at night halfway down a narrow corridor of a train car. Neither of them, he said, wanted to back up or get out of the way of the other. My father then demonstrated on me, putting his thumbs inside my mouth, how a man could put his thumbs inside another man’s mouth and, forcing them apart, inflict excruciating pain, causing the other man to stop resisting.
Steven (Spencer List) watches his father Bill (Michael Imperioli) carving wood on the back porch.
Perhaps in case he was attacked by his dreams, my father kept a bayonet between his mattress and the bedspring. At the same time his happy place, he often reiterated, had been the Marines, until the plane accident that prevented him from seeing combat in Korea. At his funeral I remember the Marine honor guard placing his coffin in a horse-drawn carriage as we walked behind. On another occasion, a few years later, when I was nine or ten, I remember him raving to my mother in the kitchen about “homosexuals.” At the time I thought that whatever was bothering him seemed to be something imaginary in his head.
Of the multiple failing small businesses on the verge of liquidation that he took over and tried to resuscitate, he finally had success publishing and writing for a couple trade publications in the allied industries of fashion and cosmetics. His over-the-top editorials about patriotism and business were popular with his international readership of executives in the industries. Eventually, on the front page of his newsletter, he began to publish for the cognoscenti among his readers coded messages in rhymes that purported to contain insiders' information about developments in undisclosed industry deals. He had discovered his talent for writing and poetry a few years earlier by observing they were what I had become passionate about and noticing that I had started to receive some recognition for them. My father followed in my footsteps.
If perfume companies didn’t advertise he would insinuate that he could disclose how they were dumping unsold merchandise on the gray market. He was brilliant in his own way at threatening his friends and patrons. Sadly my father seemed to be unable to hold onto any of his adult male friendships. Inevitably there would be a moment when he felt betrayed and would lash out and the friendship would end or continue only in a new distanced way that my father perhaps wasn’t even aware of. At other times, on the flip side, my father could be extremely charismatic, generous and warm-hearted. This was also true in his attitude towards my brother and myself. I thought of him as an unassailable fortress of strength who would come to my defense if needed but I always knew the other side could appear unexpectedly and I repressed knowing that he was both the threat and the source of protection. I’ve often thought that my love of ancient Greek–the language of a culture that symbolizes the establishment of a patriarchal order–was a way for me to imagine another form of paternity that could shelter me from the one my father embodied. For me, ancient Greek appears to serve what I imagine Lacan meant when he spoke about the name of the father or–in French, where the word for “name” and “no” sound the same–le nom du pere–instead of a father obsessed with identifying with me.
When my father’s final last will and testament—breaking with the many previous versions he had made of the same document—disinherited my brother and myself with terms that emphasized his wish to show both the maximum aggressivity towards us and also detachment, it was a terrible shock. Outwardly he had remained very close to me and on loving terms up until the end. I would visit him with my wife at the time and our young children. Within a day, he would forget our visit and call and leave a message saying he loved me–using my childhood nickname–and asking when we were coming to visit. When I learned about his last will and testament, I was unprepared to learn that the impulse of which his acknowledgement had gotten him admitted into Bellevue had–for reasons that are still in dispute–finally dominated what was left of his mind. That my father had had the courage to speak to the psychiatrist who had grown up like himself speaking modern Greek and reveal his impulse to kill someone I take to be a sign of the courage, honesty and love that he possessed.
Obviously aspects of my father have appeared in my films in various incarnations. He was incredibly cinematic to me and terrifying when he was not sewing a button onto my jacket, watching football with me while he paid the bills at his desk, or cooking me a sandwich or grocery shopping on the weekends with my brother and myself to give my mother a break. So the murderous homicidal father in The Shiningplayed by Jack Nicholson felt close enough to home that I could work with the structure of The Shining on a visceral level, not just an intellectual one. And my father’s name was, of course, John. « Heeeeeere’s…”
The movie Foreclosure is about a fragmented family. Bill (Michael Imperioli) a Greek-American down on his luck, his son Steven (Spencer List) and his father-in-law Raymond (Bill Raymond), have been sleeping in their car when the film opens. Bill is awakened late at night and forced to move their car from where he had parked it. Bill gradually becomes possessed by the idea he has to lynch his son to prove he is white.
Bill has already lost his job at the start of the film, his wife has left him and he has lost his home to foreclosure. After spending time living out of the car, he, his son and father-in-law move into a house that the father-in-law has inherited from his late brother Carl (Jeff Burchfield ).The house is located in a neighborhood that is itself collapsing under the weight of more foreclosures. It is revealed by a police officer (Matt Servito), who lets them into the house, that a lynching of a Black man (Brandon Gill) took place less than a hundred years ago from a large tree outside the house. The face of the father-in-law Raymond lights up when he spots a framed small Confederate flag hanging in the living room. He enthusiastically tells his grandson about the importance of blood in the boy’s maternal family. Bill is horrified by Raymond’s embrace of the heritage of the Southern states. They soon meet Cristina, a young woman who used to party with Carl in exchange for his “generosity.” When Bill promises that they too could show her generosity, Cristina agrees to join the new occupants of the house for an afternoon of drinking followed by a barbecue. At the barbecue Raymond’s drinking leads to an outburst of racist anger that is directed at his son-in-law Bill. Bill and Raymond are about to come to blows when Steven and Cristna have to pull them apart. Cristina angrily leaves. The next day, a Black former school teacher Virgil (Wendell Pierce) drops by and--in exchange for letting him partake--reveals where whiskey was hidden by the former owner. They start to drink and the school teacher explains that the former owner was a collector of relics of the Civil War and liked to discuss with the former history teacher over glasses of whiskey the history of the Civil War. Virgil explains to the new occupants of the house that the lynching was carried out by prior owners of the same house who mysteriously disappeared afterwards. The ghosts of the former owners return and it is then that Bill becomes possessed of the idea that only by lynching his son Steven can he prove he is white.
As chance would have it, the foreclosure crisis in the U.S., which unleashed a worldwide economic crisis, was underway while I was looking to forge the story for a horror film. The word ‘foreclosure” is the usual translation for the French term forclusion which Lacan uses to highlight certain aspects of the mechanism of psychosis according to Freud. With my background in Lacanian psychoanalysis, when the foreclosure crisis hit, I heard it as “the madness crisis.” And, of course, racism became more acute at this time, as those who had been exploited by the banks and other financial institutions also then served as scapegoats for the collapse. In the U.S. this was aimed at people of color and poor whites but in Europe it was aimed mainly towards the Irish and Southern Europeans, especially the Greeks.
One of my most searing memories of this time for me took place at a birthday party for a friend of my daughter who was turning six. It was at her family’s country house. At one point the father of my daughter’s friend introduced the parents of his daughter’s friends to his German neighbor who worked for one of his country’s airlines. Intending to be humorous, the father of the girl whose birthday it was pointed out that since his neighbor was German and I was Greek (sic), perhaps the two of us could solve the economic conflict between the two countries. The neighbor then looked at me and—with a very grave face, speaking to me but also announcing it to the other parents seated around us—said that “the Germans should not have to take care of lazy brown people.” I thought he had to be kidding and was being ironic. I smiled. After all, it was at a birthday party for a girl turning six. However, he continued to stare at me—perhaps waiting for me to confess my culpability— until he walked off. I realized he was serious. In a certain sense, we could say a dormant racial fantasy from the past had been reawakened.
As a child, having been rejected by the private school that accepted all of my siblings, I started at the local public school whose students were disproportionately Black in relation to the surrounding population. When I brought home on a play date a Black boy, I remember my mother’s discomfort. In the days that followed, she read along with me–for the first and only time–the story of Little Black Sambo who is turned into butter. One of the signs of something potentially being off about me was my friendship. Fantasies, including racial fantasies, are transmitted between members of different generations of a family as well as other group formations–religious, military or political, for example, and can be “reawakened,” given the right conditions.
Currently, in Europe, in the U.S. and around the world, in the midst of rising inequality promulgated by new forms of capitalist exploitation--aptly referred to as the “Uberization of work"--simultaneously we are seeing a rise of scapegoating that underpins the ideologies of extreme ethno-nationalist parties. Freud wrote about scapegoating in Civilization and Its Discontents (1938). He references pogroms against Jews in Europe as an example of this pervasive tendency of societies. The fluidity of what constitutes different racial identities is one of the ways in which scapegoating can be adapted to stabilize hierarchies of power by justifying aggressivity towards stigmatized groups. This was the case in Europe in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008 regarding southern Europeans (i.e. the so-called “P.I.G.S,” Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain).
The 1790 Naturalization Act, the earliest immigration law in the U.S , allowed for citizenship to be granted to “free white persons” who had resided in the country for a minimum of two years. Nevertheless, what constitutes being white remains open to revision and beginning in the 1920s tensions around what were seen as the pressure on wages from unchecked immigration from countries such as Ireland, Italy and Greece, coincided with the emergence of mass movements and concepts that asserted that these new arrivals were genetically inferior to other people who self-identified as white. This was also the time of the American eugenics movement that Hitler would emulate. In 1924 The Johnson Reed Immigration Act became law in the US. Responding to a perceived crisis–a panic–about wanton miscegenation with the new arrivals, the goal of the act was to return the percentage of different immigrant populations in the U.S. to the percentage they had represented in the US fifteen years earlier. It also included a total ban on Asians. The passing into law of The Johnson Reed Act was a reflection of nativist anti-immigrant sentiment among a large part of the population. Perhaps the most infamous consequence of this act was the refusal by U.S. officials to allow passengers from the SS St. Louis to disembark in the US when the ship arrived in 1935. Most of the passengers were Jews fleeing the Holocaust. Of the Jewish passengers who were forced to return to Europe, 254 died in the Holocaust. The ideology behind The Johnson Reed Immigration Act is foreshadowed Madison Grant’s 1916 book The Passing of The Great Race. Grant argues that only Northern Europeans represent the truly superior race and that miscegenation with other European races dilutes this “great race.” Although contemporary notions of race may seem to have changed, the economic crisis in Europe triggered by the foreclosure housing crisis in the U.S. reawakened ideas that once had been codified in law with the passing of The Johnson Reed Immigration Act. The year it was passed, 1924, also happens to be the year my father’s parents arrive as Greeks expelled from Turkey. Grant’s book included the first formulation of the great replacement theory that was encapsulated in the cry heard in 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia, “Jews will not replace us.”
For my film Foreclosure, I wanted to film in an area of the country where the banks and other lending institutions were in the process of foreclosing on loans and forcing people out of their homes. I visited a number of areas around New York City as well as the city of Detroit. One of my contacts in Detroit showed me the most recent issue of the Detroit Free Press. Foreclosures in Detroit required a notice in a local newspaper. The current issue of the Detroit Free Press that he showed me, filled with notices of foreclosures, was the thickness of what once might have been a telephone book for Detroit.
Producer Ged Dickersin looked with me at a number of homes in a part of Jamaica Queens, New York, where at the time many of the homes were already foreclosed. Some of the foreclosed homes appear in the film. We found an older house with a large tree outside that fitted our story. We needed bookshelves in the house to be filled with old books. Our production designer Brian Rzepka followed a common practice of buying them by the pound from a supplier. Looking through these used books came across a copy of Madison Grant’s The Passing of The Great Race. Although I had read about this book I had never actually held a copy in my hands. In the film it became the book Virgil is reading when he gets a call that makes him worry about the boy Steven. The fact that I came across this book randomly is emblematic that these ideas are still out there circulating, waiting for the right circumstances to suddenly serve reactionary politics.
During research for the film, I watched Birth of a Nation (1915) by D.W. Griffith. It fabricates a laudatory story about the creation of the Klu Klux Klan and was the first film ever shown in the White House. One scene in Griffith’s film in particular stood out for me. The character Ben Cameron (Henry B. Walthall) has gone into the mountains, feeling distraught about the future of white supremacy. He is seated like Rodin’s thinker when he spots white children being chased by Black children. The white children hide under a white sheet and are mistaken by the Black children for a ghost. The Black children are afraid and run away. The character Ben Cameron has a sudden inspiration. From the white sheet used by the white children to scare the Black children, he invents the uniform of the Klu Klux Klan. I think Griffin was drawn to this scene—or even this story—because this white sheet also carries an association with the white screen on which movies are shown. Griffith is thereby asserting the primacy of the cinema and the “ghosts” it creates for constructing a national ideology around a white race. Jack Nicholson’s character in The Shining, Jack Torrance, dies during a snowstorm, a virtual white out–lost in a labyrinth of whiteness. Given the significance of racism to Kubrick’s film, I see this death of the protagonist as a reference to the concept of race in ways that echo and critique the famous film of Griffith and its promotion of cinema as a tool for promoting a racist ideology around whiteness.
In Foreclosure Raymond, played by Bill Raymond, watches this scene from Birth of a Nation as he prepares to sleep on a couch in the living room. As Raymond watches from the couch we can see behind him the framed embroidery of a Confederate flag that is part of the memorabilia of the Civil War bought by his late brother Carl. It is this small flag he has earlier proudly shown to his grandson. The flag we used in the film had been carried by an unknown relative of my mother’s who had fought on the side of the South in the Civil War. Our pictures--like our speech--are always complicated. We can strive to give them new meaning for new audiences by our actions–which include our acts of speech and the pictures we put together.