New York. Boston. Philadelphia. Atlanta. New Orleans. Chicago. San Francisco. Each place has its own culture, its own economy, its own environment, and its own politics; and yet, even in America, we rarely know the details of these cities and their people and we know even less about the small towns and villages that surround them. When hurricane Katrina, fragile levees, bad management, and a sordid history led to the flooding of New Orleans, the country and the rest of the world saw a segregation of peoples and a poverty in America that they had not had to face in many years, so much so that it had been forgotten.

Not long after the hurricane hit on August 29, 2005, the New Orleans-born classical and jazz music trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who is also an arts educator and administrator connected to Lincoln Center in Manhattan, said in a public statement—available on EURweb.com, as of September 6, 2005, when I read it—that “New Orleans is the most unique of American cities because it is the only city in the world that created its own full culture—architecture, music and festive ceremonies. It’s of a singular importance to the United States of America because it was the original melting pot with a mixture of Spanish, French, British, West African and American people living in the same city. The collision of these cultures created jazz and jazz is important because it’s the only art form that objectifies the fundamental principals of American democracy. That’s why it swept the country and the world representing the best of the United States.”

The jazz tradition of musical texts given varied interpretations, and of individuality and improvisation in group performance, can be models for social participation and understanding, just as the fact of the city’s multiculturalism is evidence that—in cultural terms—sharing is possible. New Orleans is also known for rhythm and blues, and not long after hurricane Katrina hit, in early September a film on that music scene, Make It Funky, was opening in Manhattan, and featured Irma Thomas, Allen Toussaint, and the Neville Brothers. Musicians born in or associated with New Orleans include the great Louis Armstrong, and Sidney Bechet, Buddy Bolden, the Boswell Sisters, Harry Connick Jr., Fats Domino, Dr. John, Mahalia Jackson, Ernie K-Doe, Jelly Roll Morton, Joe “King” Oliver, Lloyd Price, Louis Prima, and Professor Longhair.

New Orleans is the jewel of Louisiana, and is the first place people ask about when they know you were born, as I was, in Louisiana, which has significant agricultural, manufacturing, marine, mining, and fuel businesses (cane, pepper, corn, cloth, seafood, salt, and oil). I have been in New Orleans only a few times, and remember pink flamingoes in a zoo and eating fried crab cakes. Of living in southern Louisiana, I recall going for long walks and also picking pecans, small cherries, and mulberries, fishing, and eating boiled crawfish and crabs. Scenes involving nature and food are most likely to make it into depictions of Louisiana. Ernest Gaines and Walker Percy are two well-known Louisiana writers, and they did better than that in their depictions; and writers born in or connected to New Orleans have included Truman Capote, Lillian Hellman, Elmore Leonard, and John Kennedy Toole.

Many years ago, Robert Flaherty directed a film, Louisiana Story, set in the state and focusing on nature and modern machinery, with a music score by Virgil Thomson and cinematography by Richard Leacock; and upon the film’s released, Bosley Crowther of The New York Times (September 29, 1948) described it: “Leisurely it tells a story of a little “cajun” (Acadian) boy who lives in the swamps—the bayou country—of Louisiana and whose life is suddenly filled with wonder and dismay when a great floating derrick is brought in to sink an oil well beneath the muck of the swamps. Slowly the lad makes acquaintance with the drillers who operate the giant machine, instructs them in his brand of magic, and beholds their miracles in turn. He has had an enriching experience with people from the outside world when eventually the well is spudded and the derrick is taken away.”

The state has been featured in other films for theater and television, such as Albino Alligator, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, The Big Easy, Blaze, Bonnie and Clyde, Dead Man Walking, The Fugitive Kind, A Gathering of Old Men, Highway 61, Interview with the Vampire, JFK, King Creole, The Pelican Brief, Pretty Baby, Storyville, Suddenly Last Summer, and WUSA. (Tim Reid’s television series “Frank’s Place” was set in New Orleans.) Sounder, Eve’s Bayou, and Schultze Gets the Blues are, probably, my favorite films set in the state; and there is a difference of time and class between the first two films starring African-Americans, with Sounder focusing on poor sharecroppers, set in the 1930s, and made in the early 1970s, and Eve’s Bayou about a doctor, his glamorous wife, their two daughters, and his clairvoyant sister, set in the 1960s, and made in the late 1990s, with Schultze Gets the Blues, a German film set in contemporary times and released in America earlier this year, 2005, actually giving a tourist view of the state, one that makes it easier to like the culture than if one actually recalls incidences of poverty and racial discrimination read about, seen in films, or worse, lived. One of the images people have of Louisiana is of political corruption, and I remember a report quoting one politician, four-time Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards, saying that the only way he’d be rejected by his constituents is if he was found in bed with a dead girl or a live boy. Often the primary public image of Louisiana is one of carnival—Mardi Gras. It may be a bitter coincidence that not long before hurricane Katrina people were talking about how Louisiana, especially New Orleans, was becoming one of the preferred sites for filmmakers. An August 21, 2005 article by John Hill in The Shreveport Times reported, “The value of film productions shot in Louisiana has gone from $20 million in 2002, the year the state enacted a film industry tax incentive program, to nearly $625 million in productions this year.” The state’s tax credits include twenty-five percent of production costs for expenditures in Louisiana, including the building of stages for film and sound production and also editing shops, and additional rewards for hiring Louisiana residents. The article reports that there was talk of probable investments in multi-million dollar Louisiana soundstages by various companies. A Denzel Washington film was being filmed in New Orleans when the hurricane hit; and one film starring Ashley Judd and another involving Lou Gossett were planned. The hurricane hit August 29, 2005; and the next day, on August 30, 2005, The Los Angeles Times reported that—while twenty-seven theatrical and television films had been made in the state the previous year—the hurricane would likely affect near-future productions. The chief economist of the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. was quoted as saying, “This is probably going to put them out of competition for a while.”

Wynton Marsalis also said in his public statement about the hurricane’s aftermath: “In a country with the most incredible resources in the world we need the ingenuity of our best engineers to put the cultural heart of our nation back together. To put it together with 2005 technical expertise and with 2005 social consciousness, which means without accommodating the ignorance of racism and the deplorable conditions of poverty, and lack of education that have been allowed to fester in many great American cities since slavery.”

Much has been made of the abandonment of New Orleans residents, particularly the poor, who could not afford to leave the city and had no place to go. People waited days for food, water, transportation, and other help; and were reprimanded when they entered stores to gain food staples and other supplies. There were scenes broadcast on television of flooded neighborhoods, of corpses floating by in the moving water, of people wading through water on their feet and in boats and on doors, of people pushing carts with their belongings. These were stark images of devastation, need, and suffering, images often worse than that of any American film that had preceded them. All we’ve seen before acts as preparation for what we might see in the future, but few people were ready for these images not of fiction characters but recognizably real people—and some of these people, and most of them black, were the kind, without education, glamour, or money, that many otherwise would have turned away from: and that may have been part of the unspoken nature of the anger and sadness that attended these images, knowing that one’s own indifference was reflected in government indifference. One’s own indifference now, for the moment, had been broken and overwhelmed. Why weren’t buses used to take the elderly, the ill, and the poor out of the city? Why weren’t provisions made for food and water and health care for those who remained in the few established shelters? Why was that neglect allowed, after The New Orleans Times-Picayune had done a series in year 2002 that predicted that as many as 100,000 residents could be stranded if a bad hurricane hit the city, which is below sea-level and has been described as having the shape of a bowl or saucer? Didn’t the legendary floods of 1927 and 1965, in which it was reported that the levees were breached intentionally so that the lands and homes of the poor were flooded instead of the business and wealthier areas, act as warnings? (Was there an intentional breaking of the levee this time, sacrificing the poor ninth ward on behalf of the better known business and entertainment areas?) Some religious conservatives—not a meteorologist or engineer among them—attributed the hurricane’s touchdown in New Orleans to an expression of divine wrath in response to the decadence of the city, signified by a gay celebration scheduled for the early September Labor Day weekend. Blame went back and forth between government agencies and officials for the inept handling of the residents’ post-hurricane needs; and residents were being referred to by journalists as refugees. Were the Homeland Security’s Federal Emergency Management Agency and its incompetent leader Michael Brown to blame? Was President George W. Bush, Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco, or New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin to blame? Why did having a woman governor and black male mayor not unlock the compassion or efficiency of government agencies? While the politicians gave interviews and speeches, and rumors about various crimes from theft to rape to murder ran wild in newspapers and on television and the internet, ordinary citizens helped each other to higher ground and to food and water. Nurses and doctors and fishermen and church members and neighbors gave aid. Other Louisiana towns immediately set up charities, accepting donations of clothes, food, and money, and offering shelter, with schools waving the immediate need for records and transcripts. Cuba and Venezuela and a few other countries offered help that was, shockingly, refused. (Castro’s Cuba had evacuated more than a million people from Havana when it was threatened with hurricane.) When the Louisiana governor said that troops would be sent to New Orleans to protect property, many people were outraged by such a priority. Congress passed a multi-billion dollar aid package, and an announcement was made that no-bid contracts to rebuild were being given to companies with ties to vice-president Cheney and the Bush administration, despite criticism of how such contracts had been managed—with allegations of exorbitant overcharging and incompetence—in the past in places such as Iraq. A week went by without official help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and more than six weeks following the hurricane, even after the resignation of Michael Brown, there remained many complaints about FEMA’s ongoing handling of the crisis.

Brutality, indifference, paranoia, and suspicion have attended matters of class and race in America; and this was so with the hurricane—and some people wondered if the levees were intentionally breached to flood the poor and spare the commercial landscape and if the slow response time was determined by who the people in need were, unvalued citizens. It had happened before; and some people said that it—the neglect, in other ways—had been happening every day. “As we clear away the debris of a hurricane, let us also clear away the legacy of inequality,” said President George W. Bush (“Bush Vows…,” New York Times, September 15, 2005). No one expects him to become like presidents Franklin Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson, who created visionary programs that helped the poor, including blacks, but President Bush was forced to admit “We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action” (“Amid the Ruins…,” New York Times, September 16, 2005). Does duty only begin when other people know what you should be doing (when the world is watching)—or when you know?

Not knowing that areas of New Orleans had been intentionally flooded in the past, I had been skeptical about accusations that the levee had been intentionally subverted, attributing this to reflexive paranoia, though I know, as someone else once said, that conspiracy theories are often the explanations for reality of people who know something is wrong, know it’s not accidental, but do not have the facts or intellectual resources to adequately explain it. However, I was taken aback when I read an article in New York’s Newsday, originally from The Washington Post, that reported that though the Army Corps of Engineers “has said that Katrina was just too massive for a system that was not intended to protect the city from a hurricane greater than Category 3, and that the floodwall failures near Lake Pontchartrain were caused by extraordinary surges that overtopped the walls,” engineers and scientists at the Hurricane Center of Louisiana State University “have concluded that Katrina’s surges did not come close to overtopping those barriers. That would make faulty design, inadequate construction or some other combination of the two the likely reason why levees were breached” (“Levee breach causes called to task,” Newsday, September 22, 2005). Was it true that there was a hole below water in the levee wall, as one visiting journalist reported (Playthell Benjamin, New York’s WBAI radio), and was this made by a barge that had been docked in the lake nearby—or by the explosion that some people thought they had heard and told the radio reporter about (was the sound of the barge hitting the levee what they heard)?

All of that was too much for most people to think about; and many people felt concern for human suffering and wanted to contribute and didn’t want their contribution misused (well-known charities have collected more than a billion dollars, and several of these charities have been known to spend contributions on administrative costs rather than on the needy). Some people worried about the cultural loss. An Associated Press writer, Gillian Flaccus, writing September 7 in an article appearing on an AOL site, said that “Creoles who live thousands of miles from the bayous of southern Louisiana suddenly find themselves uncertain ambassadors for a city—and a way of life—that is endangered.” Gillian Flaccus wrote about Creole people in Los Angeles, their move from Louisiana after the last century’s second world war in search of jobs and opportunity, and their longstanding get-togethers for friendship, food, and zydeco music; and how time, not only the hurricane, has threatened the cultural inheritance. What is that inheritance? Creoles have, as some people know, ancestry that is African, French, and Native American (the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Natchez, and Chitimacha lived in Louisiana); and early Africans in Louisiana were Malinke-speaking Bambaras, and also Wolofs and Sereers. (The Native Americans and Africans, whether taken as friends or as servants and slaves, were fundamental to the survival of white settlers in Louisiana, many of whom received the charity of natives for years after their arrival.) Some of the descendants of Africans have done well; and some have not, having known decades of negative discrimination and mistreatment—and that disinheritance will likely make its way into a film documentary on hurricane Katrina’s impact, perhaps in the one Spike Lee has said he wants to make. The inheritance the Creole people and Marsalis spoke about—in the French language, in food such as crawfish etouffee and shrimp gumbo, in music and rites such as jazz funerals, and in various institutions—is only partly known and is inconsistently celebrated or even evaluated—and that is true of culture in other parts of the country and the world.

I recall that last year when many avid filmgoers were saying that it was a good year for movies, I had not thought the year had been exceptional, but now, looking back, I do agree it was a good year for film. I think I have found the films this year, 2005, less diverse, interesting, and satisfying than those of last year, but I do not know what I will think about them six or twelve months from now. I do know that one of things that has made a positive impression on me this year is the tendency of certain films to attempt to deal with particular people in particular locales—Junebug, Broken Flowers, Elizabethtown, Loggerheads, and Thumbsucker come to mind: it is as if filmmakers are trying to give us an America we can believe in as true, as imperfect but humane. There are other films I appreciate for what they provide of an introduction to—or reacquaintance with—certain actors, such as the comedies Be Cool, Guess Who, and Monster-in-Law. A couple of French films reminded me—a little—of what I like about French films: Kings and Queen, 3 Dancing Slaves, and Cote D’Azur, in which indulgences of personality and in pleasure are prevalent. The Island and 2046 offer views of the future that do not encourage anticipation.

Be Cool—which I have tended to think of and refer to as Being Cool, for its cast of unusually attractive performers, including Uma Thurman, Christina Milian, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Vince Vaughn, John Travolta, and Cedric “the Entertainer” Kyles—is a movie, a musical comedy, focusing on creativity, corruption, and crime in the music industry, and it is full of action and people. The movie is not elegant, nor is it as joyful as it might have been, but I liked it. Uma Thurman is effective in dramatizing grief and its inertia following a loved one’s death and the movement back to life—and a sensuous response to music in the way she moves her head and later dances with Travolta. The Rock, who is probably miscast as a gay country music singer, is nonetheless smooth charm in a blue suit—handsome, likable, funny; and his enthusiasm and warmth make it difficult for doubt to arise as one watches him. Vaughn—as in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and Thumbsucker—turns in another dynamic and amusing performance, this time as a rap-influenced white man. Christina Milian as a nubile, rising young singer, and Cedric the Entertainer and Andre Benjamin as part of a rap posse, exemplify reigning powers in the music industry today: on stage, black (and brown, as in Latin) people rule—and it is a rule not without its dangers for artists and audience. Milian, gorgeous, talented, is presented as an innocent sexpot; and the rappers are inclined to violence to achieve their goals: and there’s a world of thought and values neither seems familiar with; and so one wonders, are they really in control, consciously, of their destinies?

Judith Scott and Zoe Saldana, who star, as mother and daughter, with Bernie Mac and Ashton Kutcher, in Guess Who, were new to me, and I was glad to meet them—I recognize their styles and sensibilities—cosmopolitan, earthy, feminine, and practical—and as there are few African-American actresses who regularly appear onscreen (I think of Nia Long, Gabrielle Union, Kimberley Elise, Angela Bassett, and Halle Berry), the introduction of Scott and Saldana to me is especially welcome, even in a film such as Guess Who, a rather broad, though not unintelligent treatment, of interracial romance (Saldana/Kutcher) and intergenerational male conflict and bonding (Mac/Kutcher), directed by Kevin Rodney Sullivan. Saldana looks like a black American princess, pretty and privileged, and if she’s lucky and gets good parts, she’ll develop as an actress, and she just might reign. Films such as Guess Who, which acknowledges social tensions, enacts conflict and resolution, are certainly more respectable than a film that pretends those tensions do not exist, though I do not know that significant consciousness is changed by such a film: especially as the people in this particular film are not the problem. All involved are financially and socially grounded, comfortable, though Kutcher’s character has what is probably temporary professional insecurity, and all are basically well-intentioned: these are not cruel or troubled people—and so the real mess of the world is not to be found in the film. Identity is not simply skin color, who a woman or man sleeps with, nor one’s bank account; identity is also the nature of perception, the movement of mind, depth of feeling, philosophy: and the first, regarding material and social categories, may be as inevitable as they are shallow, and society prefers we pay attention to those markers as it obstructs and frustrates the more individual, intellectual, and independent ones.

Emmanuelle Devos is able to suggest the confused and the needy—the romantic and dangerous (possibly murderous)—youth of a woman who becomes the kind of confident, glamorous woman who seems without need, without trouble, in Arnaud Desplechin’s Kings and Queen, a film that offers one of the more nuanced views of a woman’s life and of male-female relationships seen recently. That may be saying a lot in a year that saw strong and varied performances by women, including Radha Mitchell in Melinda and Melinda, Joan Allen in The Upside of Anger, Angelina Jolie in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Glenn Close in Heights, Embeth Davidtz in Junebug, Sharon Stone and Jessica Lange in Broken Flowers, and Gwyneth Paltrow and Hope Davis in Proof. Jane Fonda’s performance may be little more than a manipulation of looks and mannerisms in Robert Luketic’s Monster-in Law, in which she co-stars with Jennifer Lopez, but I still found Jane Fonda captivating. I have liked her in so many things over the years that I may be unable to judge her. Here, she plays a world-class journalist who suddenly finds herself unemployed and faced with the working class young woman her son wants to marry; and she disapproves. Lopez—good in Out of Sight and The Cell—has dramatic resources and is still appealing but her character seems designed to be admired—she has several jobs (focused, hard-working is she)—rather than amusing, and Fonda, who performs in what seems a classic comic style—full of large gestures and enthusiastic spirit—is funny. I laughed and my laughter joined that of others in the theater. Jane Fonda’s early career began with Tall Story, Walk on the Wild Side, and The Chapman Report, and she appeared in Barefoot in the Park and Barbarella but she began to hit her long stride with They Shoot Horses, Don’t They and Klute, having proven herself bright, sometimes brittle, and capable of erotic comedy and piercing emotion, before making Julia, Coming Home, The China Syndrome, On Golden Pond, Agnes of God, Old Gringo, and Stanley and Iris. Jane Fonda’s willingness to give herself to the part in Monster-in-Law is the stance of a professional and also an act of generosity.

The land in which Jane Fonda’s character in Monster-in-Law has long been an uncrowned queen is less recognizable as a place to be found on a map than as, simply, the land of success, a view that Hollywood film has circulated around the world. The year’s more interesting films occur in places that one could expect to find on a map, their people have loves, families, jobs, and the scars to show for them. During one evening I saw both Elizabethtown and Loggerheads, both of which I enjoyed though I preferred the second. There are plenty of appealing qualities in Elizabethtown—almost all of which money can buy, and did. Kirsten Dunst—radiant, quirky, sulkily sensual, and speaking with a regional accent—impersonates a Kentucky girl, Claire, a stewardess, who befriends Orlando Bloom’s Drew on a rather solitary flight as he goes from Oregon to Kentucky to take care of funeral arrangements following his father’s sudden death and his own business failure. Drew’s destination is Elizabethtown, Kentucky, an actual town which is about forty-four miles from the better-known Louisville, and has a population of a little over twenty-three thousand people. Susan Sarandon plays Drew’s mother, a woman whose grief is soon sublimated into a quest for new experience. Alec Baldwin is Drew’s boss, who fires him. Jessica Biel is Drew’s co-worker and sexy girlfriend who distances herself from him after his dismissal. Paul Schneider plays one of Drew’s cousins, a musician and indulgent father, Jessie. Baldwin, Biel, and Schneider make strong impressions, creating some of the texture in the worlds in which Bloom’s Drew moves; and there are interesting things in the script, written by Cameron Crowe, of Elizabethtown, such as Drew’s success as a sports shoe designer and the undependable camaraderie of the corporate atmosphere when that success ends; and the pushiness of Kirsten Dunst’s character in her pursuit of Drew, and her suggestion to him that he explore the melancholy of the situation. When Drew goes to the bathroom while on the phone with Claire, he extends the hand with the phone outside the bathroom door and against the wall so she cannot hear his tinkling. Claire and Drew kiss while still resisting their attraction, the kiss interrupted with practical words without either Claire or Drew loosing their swoon. The stubbornness and suspicions of Drew’s father’s family are believable (it is a stubbornness rooted in love, and the suspicions are of anything different). However, each scene shines with money (cinematography is by John Toll and production design by Clay Griffith, with art direction by Beat Frutiger and set decoration by Robert Greenfield)—and almost everything looks expensive in what is supposed to be a small-town, and a getting-back to-basics movie. We want to pay attention to character, dialog, emotion, and location—but a contrived glow is being continuously pushed on us; and the sentimentality of the film, despite its wit, is insistent. There’s unevenness in how some of the scenes play with and against each other. (There may be also too many long-distance and mid-distance shots, though more glossy close-ups of Bloom and Dunst might have provided too great a charge or too much goad to laughter.) The director of the film is Cameron Crowe, who directed Singles, Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous, and Vanilla Sky; and his leading man, Orlando Bloom, exemplifies, unfortunately, some of my principal concerns with the film.

Orlando Bloom is still more of a presence than an actor—though he is capable of fine emotions. He has a delicacy that makes him intriguing and remote. He’s a pretty boy—and likable, but I wouldn’t describe him as charismatic. In Lord of the Rings, he was given impressively physical things to do (I still recall him shooting arrows from the back of a large, rough moving beast)—and so he was able in that film to embody a force one doesn’t otherwise see or sense in his personality. I’m not sure what kind of film would be ideal for him, but we may need to see him struggle and suffer (sometimes his eyes seem small pools of pain): I think we need to see the impact of ordinary reality on him, something this film comes close to providing though not enough. That seems a sadistic wish, I know; and I’m surprised to find myself thinking it, as I do like him and appreciate watching him, as did the small audience of mostly young women with whom I saw the film in a downtown Manhattan theater. However, it was harder to watch Bloom when Paul Schneider was on the screen: Schneider as Jessie seemed energetic, friendly, muscular, nonchalant, flawed, fully in character and fully alive on the screen. Schneider, who was born in Tennessee, and appeared in George Washington and All the Real Girls, immediately reminded me that Bloom was born in England. (I think it was Armond White who commented that Jude Law did not resonant as an American in Cold Mountain.) I wonder if Bloom would do well in interpretations of stories by Henry James or E. M. Forster.