Joe Loya remembers growing up in what he calls a “warm and loving home.” He “really admired’ his father, who was in turn well positioned in the local church, a Mexican American “looked up to” by older white men. Hoping to be like his dad, Loya remembers, “I would, like, quote Bible verses, that was the kind of kid I was.” When his mother was diagnosed with kidney disease and died in 1971, when Loya was only nine, his father, he says, “got very violent.” It wasn’t long before his father was regularly beating Joe and his little brother, leaving the older child feeling helpless, frustrated, and — unbeknownst to the boy — furious.
Loya’s story is one of four assembled in Jessica Yu’s Protagonist. All are unquestionably compelling, tales of extreme circumstances and results, about boys who become men with special skills and inclinations, shaped by hardship and fear. Divided into multiple sections, some titled according to the crucial points in Greek drama (conflict, revelation, catharsis, and resolution), the movie finds similarities among the life stories of four men by way of fifth-century-BC dramatist Euripides, especially one character type, the Extremist. Cast in the mode of Dionysus, that is, a figure who is simultaneously protagonist and antagonist, the interviewees appear in strangely spaceless, abstract settings, their faces intent, their memories harrowing.
The interview settings point to the film’s efforts to “universalize” and connect the men’s experiences. As each narrates, the movie Each has endured a particular crisis, each has come out the other side as a “changed” man, reflecting on the deceit or violence he embodied, his early life shaped by cultural and personal pressures, and his new understanding of what it means to be a man. Loya eventually stabbed his father, then took up a life of brutality and crime (robbing nearly 30 banks in Mexico) until he was caught and sent to prison.
Loya frames his experience as an effort to attain a kind of masculinity, a model he identifies as Nietzsche’s Übermensch. “I didn’t have to live by the rules,” he says, “because I had learned how to say ‘Fuck you’ to the rules.” Of course, he eventually learns, he is only subscribing to another set of rules, epitomized by his father, the very man he so hated and feared. While his story is powerful, the film, which was commissioned by the Carr Foundation, initially as a documentary “on Euripides,” fits it into a reductive framework, the artful architecture — including the decoration by title cards fashioned after Greek art and illustrative parables from the Bacchae acted by marionettes — more precious than allusive.
Other men in the film come to similar conclusions, seeking ideals of manhood and finding their initial concepts are wrong, products of simple-minded social frames. Mark Salzman (Yu’s husband), describes his childhood — bullied in suburban Connecticut, he dedicated himself to martial arts, and authored several inspirational books, including Iron & Silk, made into a movie in which he starred as himself. As Salzman remembers it, he “wanted to be like my dad [a public school social worker], but I didn’t want to have my dad’s fear, my dad’s anxiety.” In order to fortify himself, Salzman focused his energies — inspired in large part by David Carradine in Kung Fu — on after school lessons at the Chinese Boxing Institute. Here he was mentored by a teacher whom he first esteemed, then found to be emotionally unstable, to say the least. (The man nearly throttled Salzman’s best friend to death during a “demonstration,” which Salzman recalls as and the film titles a “turning point.”) With his drama accompanied by home movies, snapshots, and reenactments, Salzman looks every bit the hero of his own life — though this last, non-hardship part is abridged, a mention that he traveled to China and studied with a “real” master (as opposed to the “asshole” who convinced him he could beat back his fearful-boy demons by assuming “control” over his life and thinking).
A third “protagonist” in his own story is Hans-Joachim Klein, an erstwhile German leftist and member of RZ (Revolutionary Cells, a subsidiary of the Baader-Meinhof gang), and subject of another documentary, My Life as a Terrorist: The Story of Hans-Joachim Klein (2006). Son of a Ravensburg concentration camp survivor who killed herself the year after he was born, Klein spent his first nine years with a foster family, then suffered mightily on his return to his father, whom he describes as a “beast” and a Nazi (“My father always said that Hitler was a good man”). Klein describes his gradual immersion in terrorism (though he didn’t see his work as such at the time, during the 197s), affiliated with the Venezuelan-born Ilich Ramírez Sánchez (Carlos “The Jackal”). As part of Sánchez’s Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Klein participated in the attempted kidnapping of 11 OPEC ministers in 1975, resulting in three deaths and Klein’s own serious injury. Seeing an Iraqi bodyguard lying dead, Klein is horrified (“I saw him lying there in his brains and I felt sick”), which leads eventually to his renouncing terrorism and providing information to authorities. Still, he hid out in France, from police and his previous associates, for some 20 years before he was caught and imprisoned.
Protagonist‘s fourth self-reflection belongs to Mark Pierpont, a former Evangelical preacher who denied his homosexuality for decades, before finally outing himself and feeling, at last, at peace with God. Growing up in Wildwood NJ, in a family that was “very religious,” Pierpont says he was so troubled by his feelings about other men, that he sought out structures that might help him order and repress them. “My queerness,” he says now, “drove me to a personal interaction with God,” meaning, intensive ministry training and missionary work in other countries, marriage and a son — who, in Pierpont’s telling of it, is at first mortified when his father comes out and then supportive (no mention of the wife’s response).
As interesting as the men’s individual experiences may be, their force-fitting into the “Greek” structure turns old by film’s end, as links between single words or phrases sound contrived. In the section titled “Reflection,” Salzman and Loya reject their former feelings of “certainty” (“I am very wary of people who are certain,” says Loya, “Certitude has been very dangerous in the world”), while Klein and Pierpont assert their lack of “knowledge” in “Resolution.” As Klein, now feeding cattle on a farm, puts it, “I never say I know anything. All I know is, I don’t know.” By the end of Protagonist, so determinedly ordered and precise, such a pronouncement seems almost candid.