DIY, or heck, just be homeless

marjorie says...

I went to see The Pursuit of Happyness with at best a wary hope that it wouldn’t be completely reactionary about homeless people. I was prepared to be highly critical of the message, and indeed in some respects I am.

The subject of the movie, Chris Gardner, struggles against tremendous odds to become a successful businessman, odds that at one point force him into homelessness. He’s an intelligent and energetic person who has high aspirations to make it rich as an entrepreneur. In the pursuit of that, he invests all his money into medical equipment that in fact is not something he can sell easily. His dogged pursuit to sell his goods rather than go punch a clock somewhere places enormous strain on his hard working wife, eventually leading to the end of their marriage. Ultimately he runs out of money and gets evicted from his apartment. Rather than go look for a job, he enters into an unpaid stockbroker internship on the gamble that he will be the one selected to fill a very lucrative job at the end, which he was. But it caused him to live a precarious life with his son, barely able to thread the financial pieces together at times, ultimately having to live in a homeless shelter.

This is a movie about the entrepreneurial spirit. It is not a movie about homelessness. It’s a movie about a certain type of person with a certain type of ability. It is not about the ability of all people. Chris Gardner had assets and skills that he could rely on ultimately, which is why he would never have been homeless for long. Likewise, this is what makes me middle class and not living on the edge. Yes, I might one day be out of a job with no money, but I have a marketable set of attributes (not to mention a big family) on which I can rely. Many people do not.

So why is it that we see these screenings for homeless people here and there, as if they need to see it? As if all homeless people are like Chris Gardner. They are not. There are some like Chris Gardner. And then there are the chronically homeless…those who will never, ever by like Chris Gardner. It's not the homeless that need to see this movie. The ones who need to see it are the rest of us, who either don't see or forget about homelessness or go around disparaging homeless people.

Instead of showing it to organized groups of homeless people in order to inspire “hope,” it should be shown to the elite sectors in this country to illustrate the stress, anxiety, and inhumanity of poverty.

I was surprised at how well this movie got across that on edge feeling of not knowing what you’re going to do next. The desperation. Gardner's wife wasn't just a selfish woman who won't stand by her man. She is a desperate woman living on the financial edge. It comes across in the movie incredibly well. And the scenes showing the inhumanity of many homeless shelters... the forced religious dogma pushed down these people’s throats just so they can get a bed and meal, the lights out as if they are in jail, the having to leave and then line back up every night and fight for their bed…are spot on.

This is what I liked about this movie. It really stressed me out...I could feel what it was like to be on the edge, to experience how the domino effect of financial hard knocks eventually lead to homelessness. It’s something rarely, if ever shown in American movies. This is what we need to see more of, not simply one more pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps piece of dogma. Homelessness is a real problem for us, and all of us are responsible for fixing it.