An antidote to Black Friday: Barry Levinson's Avalon (1990)

By Michael J.W. Stickings

So it's Black Friday, the day, at least in the U.S., our consumer impulses are meant to run wild, the day the economy needs to get the holiday shopping season going lest it collapse in on itself, the day we see most clearly what modernity is really all about.

The desire to acquire, Machiavelli, the founder of modernity, called it. But instead of political acquisition, today is all about acquiring shit in one form or another.

Don't get me wrong. I like my stuff, my material goods. I like to acquire as well. But today is the day the lid comes off, the day humanity, or at least American humanity, turns wild again. If you're at a Wal-Mart or a Target today, or pretty much anywhere shit is sold, you and your fellow consumers might as well be wolves fighting over a scrap of meat. It may be a cheap blu-ray player or maybe even a Hyundai. It hardly matters. You have been programmed to shop, to consume, to acquire more and more and more, indeed to identify your very soul with your worldly possessions. It's your drug. And you're being drugged, willingly, by a society, nay, by a civilization, that requires you for its very survival to be thoughtless consumers of shit.

Sorry, is that a bit too negative? Hey, like I said, I like my stuff. I just think that Black Friday, and indeed the whole holiday shopping season, now a year of shopping seasons (Christmas, Valentine's Day, Easter, etc.) bleeding into one another, is our society at its most fucked up.

So today, why not do something else? Like watch a good Thanksgiving movie. (I assume you were just too busy yesterday with family and football.)

There's Plains, Trains and Automobiles, of course, the very funny (and very touching) "road" movie with Steve Martin and John Candy.

And Woody Allen's wonderful Hannah and Her Sisters, one of his truly best films, the story bookended by Thanksgiving dinners, the first bleak and depressing, the second warm and hopeful.

And then there's Barry Levinson's Avalon, the story of a Polish-Jewish immigrant family in Baltimore. It's an amazingly beautiful film with rich characterizations and a remarkable sense of time and place. It is indeed the story of America: "They shared a dream called America... in a place called Avalon." To me, it's simply one of the best films ever made about what it means to be American.

And, if you've seen it (and even if you haven't), you may recall its famous Thanksgiving scene, when Uncle Gabriel (Lou Jacobi) arrives late and says, enraged and bewildered, "You cut the turkey without me?" It's a funny scene, in a way, with this highly quotable line, but through the drama that unfolds, as well as through the context in which it takes place, we come to see the tension at the heart of the movie -- and at the heart of the American experience.

Gabriel is late because he had to drive out to new suburbs far from the urban core that had been the locus of immigrant life. Avalon, you see, is about family but also about the culture of change and dislocation, the culture of American modernity, that ultimately threatens family, or at least the extended family that is so important to the Krichinskys as to so many others.

In this sense, perhaps, there's a continuum from America's earliest European settlers through the waves of immigrants who were to one degree or another assimilated into modern American life to today's rampant consumer culture. It should be noted that the Krichinskys own a successful appliance store. I'm sure they had, or would have had, Thanksgiving sales. They, too, well removed from their less consumerist origins, would have partaken of Black Friday in one way or another.

But no matter. It's a great movie. I remember seeing it in the theaters in 1990. I was in high school in New Jersey. That opening scene, with Sam Krichinsky arriving in Baltimore to Fourth of July fireworks, pulled me in right away. It's one of the best opening scenes in any movie I've ever seen. And by the end I knew I'd seen something truly special.

If you've seen it, go back and watch it again, because you probably saw it a long, long time ago. And if you haven't, well, you simply must. Here's the trailer: