Essay 862

From The Chicago Sun-Times…

------------------------------------------

FX’s ‘30 Days’ flips the script on immigration

BY DOUG ELFMAN, TELEVISION CRITIC

Frank George gets his kicks when he locks and loads and heads to the Mexican border to keep people from crossing over illegally. He’s a “Minuteman,” members of a volunteer group inspired by 9/11 to put the nonviolent smackdown on Mexicans who want to cross over. But for one month, he lived with illegal aliens to see what their lives are like for the second-season debut of the FX series “30 Days.”

This is not a traditional documentary, filming what would happen naturally. It’s a pop doc that creates a situation, then records results. Show creator Morgan Spurlock and his crew do a fair job of stepping out of the way after they create situations, leading to surprisingly emotional, seemingly natural scenes. It's a contrived concept but not a contrived execution.

George is no villain, and neither is the family that takes him in. Everyone’s personal and intellectual flaws are laid bare.

But to me, George seems to represent an axiom of world history, which teaches us that once people rise into a higher class, they turn their backs on the next wave of people trying to do the same. George was brought to America as a child by his parents from Cuba. Thanks to their status as political refugees, many Cubans get in freely. Mexicans do not, by and large.

Yet in “30 Days,” George says of his Cuban family, “We weren’t given any breaks.” Um, what?

In the most effective scenes, George goes to Mexico to see where this family was living before they came here. In Mexico, they were essentially homeless, living in a field, drinking water out of a “well” that was a disgusting, glorified puddle of nastiness.

Now in Los Angeles, the patriarch takes day jobs and squeezes under houses for repair work. The matriarch’s hobby is sifting through trash and selling recyclables to save money, in a can, for her children’s future.

“I’ve collected $49 since January,” she says eagerly, unaware she is breaking my middle-class heart.

George shows the capacity to understand his opponents, the illegals, as flesh and blood. He says he would help them be Americans -- but only legally, which of course he can’t do for millions of others.

He says men don’t cry, so he doesn’t. And he says cynically that it’s funny and unrealistic that the daughter, Armida, wants to be an American and go to college. Ha, ha. How funny America is, with its hopes and dreams.

This is what defines George and Armida. She tries and fails and tries and succeeds, just as her family tried to get a better life than homelessness and are now providing for their kids. Armida represents evolution, the process of attempting. He represents conservatism, the attempt to stop change.

The grace of “30 Days” is looking at both types of people not as types, but as human beings, not just the immigrant who releases tears of joy, but the first-generation citizen whose brain won’t yield to his heart.