In a recent feature article published in the L.A. Weekly, April 15-21, 2005, writer/director Todd Solondz offered a series of explanatory remarks about his latest Palindromes. Written by Scott Foundas, the article entitled “No Justice? No Kidding” includes the following text on its sixth paragraph:

Solondz continues, “Young people in college or just out of college go backpacking, they want to see the ‘real world,’ meet ‘real people’ and experience ‘real life.’ And they go into South America or Asia or Africa, and these families take them in, and they’re so generous, so wonderful, etc. But all you have to do is say, ‘I am gay’ or ‘I am a Jew,’ and then it’s like death. All of a sudden, the savagery comes out. And what I’m getting at in the film is this kind of reconciliation, that something you may love is at the same time married to something at which you shudder in revulsion and horror” (NOTE: emphasis added).

It’s possible to assume that Mr. Solondz’s understanding of subjectivity goes beyond the essentialism implied above; to his defense, the characters in Palindromes exist under the influence of a series of social, historical, and psychological forces. But if essentialism can be ruled out as an overriding philosophical bias in Mr. Solondz’s fourth feature film, his usage of the word savage in connection with a list of ex-colonized areas such as South America, Asia, and Africa illuminates not only his own ideological bias but also the way his film represents religious sociocultural intervention.

While I intend neither to attack nor to defend the rise of religious movements in the U.S., I believe that the dichotomy savage/civilized, which still frames certain argumentative explanations of nonliberal and/or nonsecular movements across the globe, re-appears in Palindromes. Conversely, Zézé Gamboa’s debut feature The Hero provides a wonderful example of how to productively frame social movements that lie on the outskirts of liberal, capitalistic, and secular affiliations. Linking these two films should be no surprise: both Palindromes and The Hero feature marginalized main characters staggering through ruined landscapes. While in the former, capitalism and Burger King are the implied agents of impoverishment, it’s the legacy of Portuguese colonialism and years of civil war—encouraged by Soviet and U.S. forces—that caused much of the destruction depicted in the latter film.

Focusing on the story of Aviva, a young Jewish girl craving to become a mother, Todd Solondz’s Palindromes begins with the staging of a trauma. Forced by her parents to have an abortion after an ingenuous sexual encounter with her cousin, Aviva sneaks into the back of an eight-wheeler and desperately escapes suburban America—leaving behind the devastating loss she still struggles to understand. On her way out of New Jersey and into America’s “heartland” (parts of New Jersey, Kansas and Ohio states), Aviva stumbles onto a series of equally muted types and quickly realizes that red-state and blue-state America have, indeed, a lot in common.

Infatuated with Earl (played by Stephen Adly Guirgis), a pedophile truck driver committed to assassinating an abortion doctor, Aviva finds in him the same pro-life ideology she briefly encountered when facing, with her mother (played by Ellen Barkin), abortion protesters at a New Jersey clinic. Now Aviva sees chance to affirm her motherly desires; she even encourages him to subject to “God’s will” and kill the “baby killers.” In another segment of Palindromes, Aviva (now played by Sharon Wilkins) is sheltered by a family of disabled (and adopted) kids ran by the devout Christian Mama Sunshine (Debra Monk). At Mama’s house, everyone is treated with heartwarming acts of charity and Aviva quickly fits in by claiming her stake of victimhood—her parents, she tells them, died in the World Trade Center attacks. Notwithstanding the compulsion for sympathy, Mama Sunshine’s house of pariahs is, in many ways, an amplification of the same dogmatic values Aviva found in her family; in Palindromes, suburbs and heartland are interconnected parts of the same dysfunction.

The Hero focuses on two main characters: the first is Vitório (played by Makena Diop) a recently discharged 35-year-old soldier who, months before the official end of Angola’s 20-year civil war, accidentally stepped on a landmine and lost one of his legs. Upon his return to Luanda, Vitório fails to find a new job and ends up penniless and homeless—on the streets of a city still struggling to recover. The other is Manu (played by Milton Coelho), a young boy who anxiously waits for his father’s return from the same conflict. Raised by his paternal grandmother Flora (Brazilian actress Neuza Borges) and educated under the vigilant eyes of his teacher Joana (Patricia Bull), Manu does his best to finish school but ends up resorting to robbery when he decides to go on a trip in search of his father. Manu steals a car stereo and brings it to a local junkyard run by an elderly mechanic; there, one can buy and sell virtually anything—stolen stereos, guns and even prosthetic legs.

A site for trade and negotiation, the film’s junkyard is emblematic of the way in which writer/director Zézé Gamboa articulates the project of post-war reconstruction: in Angola, rebuilding the whole (i.e. society or individuals) involves uncovering, re-assessing and re-incorporating used (i.e. historical) parts. In comparison, Solondz’s version of reconstruction (or as he puts it, reconciliation) features traumatized subjects as aggregations of vulnerable spots, while disenfranchised social groups become featured only as expressions—and roots—of fundamentalism in American culture.

As it is well known, eight actors of different ages, sizes, genders, and backgrounds play the role of Aviva, the main character in Palindromes. This choice is part of Solondz’s avoidance of realism as a mode of representation and, in fact, some of the work’s most interesting moments come from a clash between lyricism and the film’s ugly/mundane version of America. But what this played-by-all performance also announces, differently from what the character study in Welcome to the Dollhouse indicated, is that interchangeability (or sameness) is one of the themes in Palindromes—while difference was the political frame in Dollhouse. Black, overweight, white, pro-life fanatic, slim, queer, religious right … All connected; all of them with shared interests, with something in common.

Certainly, in a society where the labeling and domestication of difference (i.e. America) has neutralized several strategies of resistance and subversion, a film dealing with sameness seems like an artistic coup d’état. However, Palindromes is too invested in shock-satire—and too desperate for reconciliation —to elaborate on the possible meanings of interchangeable “Avivas,” or even, to explore Aviva’s need to position her personal affiliations as similar to the investments of other people and movements. Solondz’s seems uninterested in illuminating whatever it is that needs to be reconciled. And combined with Mark Wiener’s climatic speech (“—No one ever changes. They think they do, but they don’t.”), Palindromes amounts to an aggregation of doomed stories set in a deterministic reality.

Aviva is as much of a social allegory as Vitório, the forlorn soldier in The Hero, stands as a paradigm of post-colonial reconstruction. A melodrama in the best tradition of sub-Saharan African filmmaking, The Hero is a spectacle on many levels: it contains some of the most beautiful double-exposures and matted shots I have seen in years. But more importantly, Zézé Gamboa’s feature film tackles Angolan history and politics with brave originality.

Although committed to the field of ethics, which is often a site of elaboration in mainstream African cinema. The Hero manages to productively represent the intersection between personal investment and social currents. An example of this “productiveness” lies in the way which the romantic encounter between Vitório and Joana, Manu’s teacher, is both acknowledged and deferred—or re-directed—for the sake of political reconstruction in the film.

Driving back from a date with Joana, Pedro, the European-educated son of a local politician, accidentally hits a street kid. Minutes later, both Pedro and Joana end up in the same hospital in which Vitório patiently waits for a replacement for his stolen prosthetic leg. Pedro acts like a spoiled brat; he “knows” the kid will be fine and tries to convince Joana to go home with him. Joana kindly suggests that he must leave without her, and sits next to Vitório in the hospital’s waiting room. After that, one can do little but root for both of them to fall for each other. Besides, Pedro’s crass bravado and his dubious political commitments make him an unsuited match for Joana.

She and Vitório exchange meaningful stories and candid words—as well as ambiguous look of admiration—and later on, have a romantic dinner in a gorgeous colonial building. Joana decides that Pedro’s father can place Vitório on a national radio show so he can tell his life story and also, pledge for another prosthetic leg. But although the romantic build up between the two never leads to a closure, it is neither dissipated nor resolved. Sexual tension simply morphs into a manifestation of Joana and Vitório’s political commitment towards Angola’s reconstruction. After Manu returns the stolen prosthetic leg, which accidentally arrived at his house, to Vitório, the latter decides to move in with Judite, a prostitute struggling to start a new life. Joana still committed to social change, dates Pedro, although we are dubious if it is love—or her own commitment to social change—that brings them together.

Productively ambiguous and politically sophisticated, The Hero is an example of high-quality sub-Saharan African cinema. Its war-traumatized characters have certainly been victims of several social events, but Zézé Gamboa portrays them as subjects with vested interests—unlike Solondz’s Aviva, who is a victim of her own traumas.

But victimization is not the problem with Palindromes. What makes Solondz’s new film dangerously reductive is its lack of individual specificity combined with an attempt to examine social and collective categories—i.e. religious movements, middle-class values…—without an assessment of the historical and political processes that formed these categories. How can one discuss a need for collective affiliations without dissecting the groups that respond to such needs?

If the individuals are interchangeable and the movements that galvanize their personal and political efforts are ideologically mired and poorly conceived, then all that is left are the conditions for a re-staging of the opposition between savages, (or unenlightened) and modernizers (or the homogenizing forces of capitalism). On its way to satirical closure, Palindromes resorts to the savage/civilized dichotomy as an explanation for the success of non-secular ideologies to appeal to the disenfranchised. And such contribution is a major disservice to what is arguably, the most urgent cultural and political discussion in Republican-ruled America.