Musings on "An American Pickle" ✅

    After watching An American Pickle by Seth Rogen, I can say that I'm pleasantly surprised. First off, it is usually unlike many of his other movies, including Neighbors which I've seen and are notable for their fairly low-brow slapstick, vulgar language, and often pretty obscene graphics. Moreover, I had also heard a bit of controversy regarding his interview on the Marc Maron podcast and his beliefs on Judaism and the state of Israel. I came into the movie that I saw in large part only because the rest of my family wanted to primed with fairly low expectations. Rather, I think it is a touching film which encapsulates fairly neatly the current national and perhaps international cultural struggle. 

    Certainly, there were a few points that gave me pause. At first we see a reference to a blessing from HaShem in the Greenbaum's wedding followed with an attack by the Cossacks in 1919, which I assumed would be the attitude towards religious sentiment from then on. Indeed, throughout the film, Ben, the younger Greenbaum, raised in the modern era, is shown to have all-but abandoned religion, and while he never says anything actively against religion or Judaism as a whole, he does clearly reject it at first. He also struggles to reckon with the grief of the death of his parents, not wishing to visit their graves. That said, by the end of the movie, we see a few other things including (major spoiler) that he chose the name of his product after a childhood name for his parents, as a way of honoring them, and has a sort of awkwardness about saying the mourners' Kaddish because he doesn't know the words but once it is said, in a way which I think is emblematic of the wider theme, he does relax into the rhythms of it or even remembers the words. Indeed, while he is shown to have dealt poorly with the loss of his family, he is able to make a sort of connection through the structure that religion brings. 

    Ultimately, while this film is rightly critical of sentimentalizing the past, showing Hershel's violent inclinations and bigoted views, I think it speaks to the void that is brought about by the loss of a connection to one's religion and of course to family. Multiple times, through both Twitter and through the symbolic replacement of the Greenbaum parents with this app in development, we see tech attempt to fill the gaps left by family and culture. America, and perhaps the West more broadly, is having a reckoning with itself. Of course, this is true as it [they] respond to the natural rhythms of the world, but on a broader point, as president and founding father John Adams famously said, "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." We can neither be so intolerant to others as Hershel nor can we be as ignorant to our own needs as Ben. We need systems to pull things together and remind us of how we can be best, with some of those existing around family, and then the lingering traces of family no longer around: tradition, and further still coming together in order to be in awe of the divine. I think An American Pickle highlights an American predicament, but reveals an alternative to the current road most of us tread.