I blame Daria and then Aubrey Plaza and whomever first crossed their arms while uttering “whatever” for having ruined the world. OK, that may be an exaggeration. But these influencers are responsible for having inspired a zillion students to fold their arms, pull hoodies over their heads, and convey complete disregard for every book I ever tried to teach. Granted, The Grapes of Wrath is a long slog, Beloved baffles most adults, and sometimes Holden can whine too much. But the job got a whole lot harder when it became cool to declare, “I’m bored,” and that everything “sucks.” Welcome to the era of ennui, the It’s All Been Done Before generation, the 21st century nihilists whose champion should be Melville’s Bartleby, who famously said, “I would prefer not to” to the exasperation of everyone.
So now let’s talk about Sorry, We’re Dead, a film directed by Alex Zajicek, starring Sarah Lee and featuring current Alamedan, Katherine Park. Lee plays Lana Jing, a video editor who does not like her job very much, likes her co-workers just a bit more, and likes her roommate (played by Anna Sharpe) just a smidge more, saving most of her affection for chickens. She wears a chicken T-shirt, has a chicken-themed phone case, chicken art on the wall, and a chicken stuffie.
Lee’s character, the center of this clever—at times overly clever—film, is the linear descendent of Bartleby, Daria, and Plaza. We see her as indifferent to pretty much everyone and everything. So much so, that when she messes up at work, causing someone else to be blamed for her mishap, her struggle is more of a shrug than OMG what am I going to do? I think the story is meant to be a hero’s journey, and it is in that she mends the fences she steps over and around along the way. But minus the humor of her animated godmother and the adorable drollness of Aunt Aubrey, Lee’s Lana is a fairly privileged person who longs to be a screenwriter while having to put up with the greatest disrespect of all time—she has to work. All the people around her like and love her more than she seems to warrant, including my favorite character, Bertha, played by our Ms. Park.
We meet Bertha sitting in a swing, teasing our disconsolate friend, while wearing more bracelets on her arm than are probably allowed by law. She’s got cool glasses, the kind of attitude I adored when teaching (Oh, shush, Mr. Kahane) and jostles Lana in a way that is flirty, but only a little. As the story moves forward—with multiple instances of meta filmmaking, shifting to black and white, and adding whimsical subtitles—the friendship between these two serves as a catalyst for our hero’s growth and is honestly the most genuine relationship between any two characters in the film. Kudos to actor Park, actor Lee, and director Zajicek for playing it without gimmick, just two people clicking without all the trappings that really overshadow this film.
Full disclosure: I’m a baby boomer, dad to millennials, and a teacher up until a few years ago, so I’m a little familiar with the alphabet labels applied to youth. To borrow from Thomas Paine, “these are the times that try men’s souls,” and I’m sure there are many folks out there who, like Lana Jing, struggle through the disillusionment and depression of doing a job that is only a fragment of what they ache to do. All the characters in Sorry, We’re Dead are handsome, the film is beautifully shot, and may in fact be the perfect mirror that reflects and reveals an unpleasant theme of American life—the demise of the American Dream. I just wish the filmmakers would have been less cute, made the protagonist more multi-dimensional, and had fewer shots of her Resting Bored Face. When Sarah Lee smiles, especially at Katherine Park, the film warms up and invites us to really care about these people.
Gene Kahane is the founder of the Foodbank Players, a lifelong teacher, and former Poet Laureate for the City of Alameda. Reach him at [email protected]. His writing is collected at AlamedaPost.com/Gene-Kahane.
