Tillie Olsen / "Three Billboards"

Notes on the start of Tillie Olsen’s great story, “I Stand Here Ironing”--

I stand here ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron. (This is a famous first sentence. Famous for a few reasons. It’s the definition of in medias res …In other words, who are “you”? What have you asked? The speaker’s uneasy relationship with her interlocutor will be a feature of the story—alongside the speaker’s uneasy relationship with her daughter. Then the metaphor. The question is a thing—trapped under the iron. Pushed right and left. Is there a better way to suggest ambivalence? The ambivalence in tortured love? The mother must release her aggression somehow; she will release it through the iron.)

“I wish you would manage the time to come in and talk with me about your daughter. I’m sure you can help me understand her. She’s a youngster who needs help and whom I’m deeply interested in helping.” (So much tension here! You feel as if you’re reading a murder mystery. What is wrong with the daughter—precisely? Who is this speaker—a social worker? He, or she, is so careful with language!)

“Who needs help…” Even if I came what good would it do? You think because I am her mother I have a key, or that in some way you could use me as a key? She has lived for nineteen years. There is all that life that has happened outside of me, beyond me. (More figurative language. The body of the mother as key. Anyone who has struggled with an exasperating relative must recognize the pain in the things the mother is saying. I think of the special hell of being related to a drug addict—for example. The problem of trying to help a person who will not help himself.)

And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total? I will start and there will be an interruption and I will have to gather it all together again. Or I will become engulfed with all I did or did not do, with what should have been and what cannot be helped. (Those active verbs! The enormity of experience! We sense the mother is fighting herself; a part of her does want to sift, to weigh, to become engulfed.)

She was a beautiful baby. The first and only one of our five that was beautiful at birth. You do not guess how new and uneasy her tenancy in her now-loveliness. You did not know her all those years she was thought homely, or see her poring over her baby pictures, making me tell her over and over how beautiful she had been— and would be, I would tell her— and was now, to the seeing eye. But the seeing eyes were few or nonexistent. Including mine. (And then, despite her protests, the mother is sifting, weighing, totaling. The body again becomes hitched to a metaphor: The lovely body is a house the soul has “uneasy tenancy” in. The mother struggles with lies; she admits she could not see her own daughter’s loveliness for a while. Form underlines content: The mother’s internal fumbling finds its match in the awkward verbs that come out of her mouth. “How beautiful she had been—and would be, I would tell her—and was now, to the seeing eye. But the seeing eyes were few or nonexistent. Including mine.” See how many swerves occur in those three sentences! The exciting gap between the mother’s platitude and her own secretly un-enchanted, “un-motherly” mind. This narrator is like the heroine in “Jolene”—weak and struggling and complicated. It’s just simple language. But the use of mystery, subtext, and ambivalence creates tension. With the evasions and contradictions she puts in her narrator’s mouth, Olsen creates a Divided Self. Brava!! And the story has just started.)

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Some thoughts on "Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri." I know, I know. Yes, yes, yes. It's offensive to liberal tastes. It uses the assault on an offstage black character as a kind of prop--a way to plant seeds for a white character's redemption. That's tone-deaf; it has to be the sign of a non-American at work (and it is); the writer's non-Americanness does not excuse his insensitivity (fair enough). The laws of cause-and-effect don't really seem to work here. The story doesn't seem to be a record of how actual humans behave. The script seems more like a hackneyed fairy tale.

Okay, okay. But what an interesting failure! There's so much that is odd and startling in this movie. Take the title, which seems to promise very little. (I especially like that the billboards aren't even *inside* the less-than-bustling Ebbing, a town that does not exist. And I like the idea of "ebbing tides"--swelling, receding, changing, as the characters in this story are constantly changing.) A brutal moment becomes an odd poem, almost like a haiku: "Raped while dying. / And still no arrests? / How come, Chief Willoughby?" McDonagh is--as always--fearless in showing violence, and this trick goes as far back as "The Beauty Queen of Leenane." (Leenane--another town that does not actually exist.) McDonagh seems to ask: "Am I upsetting you? Does it bother you to see Sam Rockwell's face melted off? Who says I'm obligated to not-bother you?" And: Why not insert a beautiful Welsh goddess into this fictional Missouri town--without explaining the accent, or the startling beauty? All of this intrigues me. It feels less "safe" than a movie as perfect as "Lady Bird" (a movie I loved). Maybe perfection isn't always something to aim for?

I like how McDonagh works with the energy of different characters. I like how he is often toiling to disrupt the conclusions the audience may have reached. Is a visit to the dentist really going to become a bizarre, bloody, sadistic stand-off? Yes, it is. Did our "heroine," McDormand, really drive drunk with small children, then loudly wish for a rape for her daughter, moments before her daughter actually did get raped? Indeed. Can a visit from a stranger in a gift shop lead, suddenly, to violence; thrown, shattered trinkets; deep uncertainty; a suggestion (un-confirmed) of lying? Sure. Can you stop a tense marital confrontation to make room for a weird monologue from a dim-witted gamine about the mundane pleasures of grooming horses? Yes, you can. Can you leave the central mystery unresolved while still creating a satisfying final scene? Sure, if you are Martin McDonagh. How about including awkward sexual dialogue between McDormand and Peter Dinklage? ("I'll have dinner with you, but I won't fuck you.") Why not?

"Three Billboards" doesn't really move me. (That said, I do know how it feels to be a victim of injustice, and to be powerless to tip the scales back where they belong. I understand the temptation to go for revenge, and the insanity that frequently results from revenge. And I like Woody Harrelson's monologue-from-beyond-the-grave: "Love leads to calm leads to thinking. And you have to think to solve crimes.") "Billboards" seems not to "earn" the big reversals of the third act. But I'm here to ask: So what? It's bold. It swings for the fences. That's rare in an Oscar movie. And I'm grateful for McDonagh's chutzpah.