Conscious Choice: Towelhead

September 2008 | Art & Soul

Towelhead

In Alan Ball’s feature directorial debut, a derisive epithet becomes an instant film classic

By Warren Etheredge

Invest a little time and effort and you can come up with far better reasons to dislike people than just the color of their skin or their country of origin. Hate them, for example, for the content of their character.

Maybe this isn’t what Martin Luther King, Jr. had in mind, but Alan Ball might agree — though his spin would be far less curmudgeonly. The Emmy-winning creator of Six Feet Under and Oscar-winning screenwriter of American Beauty is a compassionate progressive, acutely capable of parsing people’s differences and poetically adept at celebrating those distinctions on screen.

Towelhead, based on the novel by Alicia Erian, proves Mr. Ball’s greatest challenge. The movie is primarily told from the point of view of Jasira, a 13-year-old girl shuttled from her indifferent American mother to live with her intolerant Lebanese father in Houston. Once ensconced in this religiously air-conditioned, precariously-integrated cul-de-sac community, Jasira is subjected to her father’s double standards regarding assimilation, her neighbor’s indelicate prejudices and inappropriate sexual proclivities, and a schoolmate’s natural, if premature, romantic desires.

The results are dramatically diverse and universally moving. We caught up with Ball to find out what it was like to guide his superb cast — Aaron Eckhart, Maria Bello and Toni Colette along with rising stars Summer Bishil and Peter Macdissi — through this enthralling and emotionally draining story.

You’ve created your own stories for so long, what was it that made you adapt and direct Towelhead?

I actually had another screenplay I was ready to go out with — a screwball comedy set in the ’30s — and my agent called and said he just got a manuscript and thought I should take a look. When I read it, I got so pulled into the viewpoint of Jasira and what she was going through. The book had a tone I responded to… it was harrowing, sweet, and there was a lot of humor. Obviously, there are themes in there I’ve explored before, that obviously I respond to, but also I loved the whole casual, multi-culturalism of it. I loved the fact that the book refused to judge its characters. It refused to cast Jasira as a victim, it refused to punish or condemn her for being sexually curious and allowed her to keep that curiosity after everything she’d gone through. A lot of people are uncomfortable with female sexuality, and there is a little bit of a fetishization of victimhood in pop culture. We like our women to be victims. So I loved the fact that here is this young girl who, out of the sheer strength of her own character, transcends this horrific event and not only does it not ruin her, but it enables her to extricate herself from another abusive situation and to take control over her own life and her destiny and her body for the first time in ways she wouldn’t have been able to.

Is it your life experience that allows you to have that compassion for all the characters in your stories?

I’m just not interested in stories that judge their characters very harshly, even in real life. I feel like as a society we tend to want to seal everything into this viewpoint: all or nothing, good or evil. Life is much more complicated and much, much richer than that. Things are not simple, no matter how much we want them to be. And you can look at that as a blessing as well as a curse.

But some things people do can actually be wrong, no?

Of course, absolutely. And if I were the father of a 13-year-old girl and some guy molested her, I would want to kill him, but… as a writer, as a storyteller, what is interesting to me is: why does he do this, how does this happen? I don’t think the movie in any way lets him off the hook for what he did. He certainly is punished for it. And he should be. But that doesn’t mean he is not a human being, that he doesn’t have his own reasons for having done what he did. It doesn’t excuse him, doesn’t let him off the hook, but I’m interested in how this happened, as opposed to just condemning him.

So is it safe to say that for any character there are explanations for behavior but not necessarily excuses?

Yeah, I believe there are explanations… I think we are all capable of doing great things and we are all capable of doing monstrous things and that’s part of what life is about, learning to make those choices… We grew up with a mythology that taught us the right choices get rewarded and the wrong choices get punished, and I think that’s a lie. A lot of people are making really evil choices and getting away with it. So in reality, if you make the right choice it’s probably going to make things harder for you, but it’s still important to do that.

Is everyone redeemable?

I can’t answer that. I don’t know; you’re talking about millions of people.

But I think of you as a god amongst writers.

Well that’s a misconception maybe you shouldn’t be operating under. I don’t know. I like to think everyone is redeemable, but I can’t possibly say with utter conviction that’s the case. Maybe there are some people who are irredeemable. Dick Cheney jumps to mind.

If Rodney King were to ask you “Can’t we all just get along?” would you say “Nope?”

You know, actually I wouldn’t. I would say yes we can, but we have to realize we are not separate from each other, and we aren’t separate entities, that that’s all an illusion. That it’s easy to hate each other. It’s also incredibly un-evolved. So yes we can — but we don’t seem to want to.

Towelhead
Written for the screen and directed by Alan Ball; towelhead-themovie.com

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