Admit it: Despite yourself, the movie, The Pursuit of Happyness seduced you. What’s not to love? An eager, energetic, down-on-his-luck—and briefly homeless—father, Chris Gardner (Will Smith), takes his adorable five-year-old preschooler, Christopher (Jaden Smith), by the hand, guiding him on a dangerous odyssey through San Francisco’s labyrinthine streets, subways, and skyscrapers, and modeling for his little son the grit and determination that culminates in his final tearful realization of the American Dream.

Who wouldn’t be touched by the total loyalty and trust between Christopher and Chris: a father who pledges never to abandon his son as his father abandoned him, especially when played by actors who are actual father and son?

Gardner was the rags-to-riches charmer who catapulted himself from 1980s poverty by dint of deftness with a Rubic’s cube, math skills, ease with people, and a grade of 100 on a six-month broker internship program exam, to fabulous wealth in 2006 as entrepreneur CEO of his own Chicago brokerage firm, Gardner Rich & Co.

Gardner swept Nightline, 20/20, Oprah, Tavis Smiley, and San Francisco PBS’ Josh Kornbluth shows reviewing his book and the film he produced, exiting the talk shows and, in the final scene, disappearing over the top of Lombard street far richer than before.

Everyone I interviewed agreed the movie never pretended to be about homeless people, but about someone temporarily un-housed. As one Kabuki movie-goer observed, “It was about a very smart guy who made it.”

However, the film was ensconced firmly in a setting showcasing Glide Memorial Church with its homeless meals, cots, and gospel. A black-suited Chris holding Christopher’s small paw, stood in bold relief against a backdrop of pale forms standing dully in rags, shuffling like the Dawn of the Dead.

Homeless Horatio

Chris Gardner spun a Happy Horatio Alger tale in which a phenomenally talented man, called “Ten Gallon Head” for his brilliance in elementary school, simultaneously lost and found his way:

In the early 1980s, his wife left him a single father. Lack of professional focus, bad business decisions involving selling doctors a useless bone scan machine, and petty financial reversals like too many parking tickets, forced him into eviction.

At this critical juncture, he stumbled on the stock broker job he really loved. He and his son victoriously survived one month of dangerous brief homelessness, threatened by the loss of basic amenities homeless people routinely suffer: lack of bathroom, bug-less bed, and four walls to protect them from night, weather, or each other. When Chris barricaded his son and himself into the “cave”—the Oakland BART restroom—he experienced his nearest brush with, and the movie’s closest portrayal of, true homelessness.

It was no accident that this popular feel-good film was released for the 2006 Christmas season. By January 2007, it was relegated to smaller multiplex theaters and DVD release.

In the wake of its success, however, the movie’s undertones whispered about brutal racist stereotypes carried forward from the ’80s and endemic in America today.

Though there was no overt mean-spiritedness, unconscious assumptions of white and class privilege were rampant: The brokerage coach, Mr. Frakesh, ordered Gardner, Stepin Fetchit style, to bring him coffee and move his car. A wealthy potential client invited him and Christopher to his box seat at Candlestick Park, smack in the middle of the African-American Bayview, under perpetual siege from racist land grabs.

When, Chris was called in for his final interview, the CEO told him to wear a shirt tomorrow, “Okay? Because tomorrow’s going to be your first day, if you’d like to work here as a broker. Would you like that, Chris?”

The tone of this last question was especially unctuous, as if he were patting the head of the Little Black Brother Who Could.

Happyness also raised serious questions about responsible media portrayal of the true nature of homelessness and flawed classist social policies that seem never to solve the problem.

Bootstraps

The Happyness story created the false impression that, working diligently, anyone can pull her- or himself up by the bootstraps out of poverty or homelessness.

In its 2006 study of homelessness’ root causes, Without Housing, the Western Regional Advocacy Project’s found that:

“It is logically incorrect and misleading to rely on individual biographical factors to explain why societal rates of homelessness suddenly sky-rocketed in the 1980s.

“We must ask ourselves what systemic factors changed in the late 1970s and early 1980s to allow so many people to fall through the social safety net and end up living and dying in our streets.”

An early scene established the 1980s time frame and barely suggested a reason for homelessness: Gardner sat before a TV set from which Ronald Reagan addressed the nation about tightening the national budget. His book exposes a mind clearly aware of concurrent social forces like the fleeting, but powerful, face on the screen.

In a section entitled “The Dismantling of Federal Affordable Housing Programs,” WRAP’s charts illustrate that from the 1980s Reagan era to the 2000 Bush administration, new construction of HUD subsidized housing units fell from 125,000 yearly to below 2,500 in 1982 and never rose above that level again. Existing housing stock thinned by attrition and other causes from above 250,000 in 1979 to below 25,000 in 2004.

Below the page 13 chart is written: “The cutbacks in federal funding of affordable housing were the primary precipitating cause of the emergence of massive homelessness in the 1980s through to today. As a result of these cutbacks, millions of single adults, families, and youth found themselves out on the streets and homeless for the first time in decades.” Other forms of de-funding occurred. “The Federal government also stopped the construction of new affordable rural housing.”

Coincidentally, “…millions of [Americans] with different biographical backgrounds came to simultaneously experience homelessness.”

Factoring the cause of today’s homelessness is mathematically simple: There are too many people and too few housing units.

The film suggests that, by his unique superior brilliance and entirely on his own, Chris Gardner challenged powerful systemic forces that vanquished millions of apparently inferior others. Thus, Hollywood feeds what WRAP termed a grand, all-encompassing public “collective deception” or “collective mis-recognition” of the reality of homelessness:

Individual: “I must dig myself out of this homeless morass, or I am a failed inferior human. If Chris could do it, so could I.”

Society: “You must dig yourself out of this homeless morass, or you are a failed person. If Chris could do it, so could you.”

Following the housing cutbacks, explains WRAP, “many politicians, government officials, community agencies, corporate interests, and journalists immediately declared that these homeless people were themselves the problem. They were losers, addicts, crazy, lazy, misfits.”

This assumption strengthened public consensus stereotypes that the entire homeless population was slothful, too lazy to work, or were criminals living off ill-gotten gain, too drugged, or mentally defective to hold down jobs.

In one scene, a wispy-haired homeless man scurries across the screen carrying Chris’ stolen bone density scanner, believing it to be a time machine back to the ’60s. Though apparently whimsical and lighthearted, this joke at another’s expense reinforces the stereotype that all homeless people are mentally ill.

Hugely under-funded local homeless programs and Federally-subsidized 10-year plans organized to target these “special groups” continue to perpetuate both homeless stereotypes and homelessness itself.

Along with domestic violence victims and immigrants, low-wage earners (like Gardner before brokerage school) who make too little for rent are often one personal trauma, one paycheck, one pink slip away from homelessness. In fact, WRAP reported that the fastest growing group of un-housed people were families with children. Parents struggle to keep families together, sometimes losing the fight. Without housing, the State can deem them unfit.

All the while, “vast sums are going to the rich whose tax write-offs let them purchase second ‘McMansions.’” The national gap between rich and poor has widened to “the highest poverty rate in the entire developed world.”

The Pursuit

WRAP states that social workers should help homeless people face personal challenges, while policy-makers and community organizations should fix systemic structural conditions causing massive rates of US homelessness.

“But unless we make a massive commitment to the construction and subsidization of affordable housing, no matter how many case managers and outreach workers we fund, homelessness will continue to grow.”

WRAP holds with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that, until we recognize quality education, economic security, healthcare, and housing as essential human rights, we cannot resolve the systemic causes of United States poverty.

“Once we do recognize and commit—as a nation—to ensuring that all people have a roof over their head, then the legislation, the policies, the funding allocations will follow.”

Chris Gardner observed at the movie’s start that Thomas Jefferson somehow had it right. Though every American was endowed by the Creator with “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” individuals lived most of the time in pursuit, rarely attaining the goal.

Without the basic need for housing met, we cannot take up, in security and freedom, the true pursuit of happiness.

The WRAP report can be found at http://www.wraphome.org.

Carol

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