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Contributed by Sara Schieron
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Friday, 19 May 2006 |
| FIRED! Begins as a personal documentary about the devastation of
Annabelle Gurwitch after she was fired from a play by "Cultural Icon,
Woody Allen." Commiserating and looking to regain her bearings,
Gurwitch goes from friend to friend, all of them recognizable actors
and writers like Tim Allen, Illeana Douglass, Bob Odenkirk, Andy Dick
and Judy Gold, to comfort her with their perilous employment histories. |
Armed with these comic and uplifting stories, Gurwitch fashioned a stage play in which all these friends tell their stories to a paying crowd. This spawned a book (available on special at Amazon right now!) and then this film. In the process of creating the film, however, it became apparent that the pleasantries of these stories of love and loss are only a piece of the pie. Being Fired, Gurwitch finds, is an American Industry and a something of a plague; a plague, I note, Gurwitch contributes to (positively) with her FIRED! Franchise. Transforming her search for consolation into an all out national inquisition, Gurwitch speaks with economists and HR specialists, Union Leaders and Civil Servants, and concludes that while society isn't and shouldn't be ruled by Jungle law, losing a job is still a sign that we could (nay, should) be doing something different with our lives.
The histories of her friends are quite painful. From the fold of what Gurwitch calls "showbiz people" come harsh stories of rejection that is less circumstantial than personal. After we pass through these cathartic and conciliatory rituals, the film becomes a public service mission. No longer is Gurwitch searching for comfort, now she's searching for national vindication of her loss and the loss of others. Once she experienced "getting canned" she was curious about the other 1.5 million people who also lost their jobs the year "Cultural Icon Woody Allen" dropped the axe on her. Ben Stein, Economist and ex-speechwriter for Nixon, spoke less of job loss and more of the flood of open positions doing light labor. ‘Old people in palm springs like me really need someone to screw in their light bulbs for them.' But the real injustice, according to this republican is that looters are getting away with more than just contraband. Explaining the ability of large name corporations to declare bankruptcy, take hundreds of millions of dollars home as profit and in the process leave destitute their flock and fold, it becomes clear that what this "jungle rule," described by Rob Reizs really means. Small-scale job loss is one thing, dealing with rejection and the wounding of ego are concerns for certain, but the national syndrome of economic and social disregard offers us little hope as a country seeking solace and (to quote Kerry) "healing."
FIRED! suggests that the industries dismissing their legions of workers do so because the workers are somehow replaceable: their labor being no greater than the work of lower paid alternates. It's here the film's formal simplicity seems to make it's most understated (if unintentional) statement. As a result of the homespun sensibility initiated by Gurwitch, our own Virgil, the film also echoes the subject of our interchangeability, that each of us is somehow like everyone else, and in the survival of our eventual dismissal, this unity is exactly where we go for consolation and exactly what we shed when it's our time to begin the search again. We all fall down the same, but Gurwitch shows us, we all get up in different ways, and it's our unique way of getting up again that distinguishes us from the rest.
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