Bianca Steele

I haven’t been posting much lately (Obviously), and Pynchon

Have you bought your kids’ Halloween costumes yet?  This being my first time, I hadn’t realized you were supposed to have that all taken care of well before Labor Day.  I’ll write it down in my calendar for next July.

I have made it—almost—to page 1000 of Against the Day, though.  (For those not familiar, that’s not a typo.  I did mean to write one thousand.)  No matter how much you’re enjoying a book, to still be reading it months and months after you’ve begun, and to feel you’re making no headway at all, to judge by how much closer you are to the end, can be daunting.  It begins to feel like an assignment: like a work task that you’d thought would be just the thing you’d like doing best, but that you now just wish would be over already.  I might not feel the same way if I picked it up only for a couple of hours on the weekend, but then it would feel as if I’d never get through it, and actually I don’t have a couple of two- or three-hour blocks each week.  So I read for fifteen minutes or half an hour every few days.

I think I’ve reached the point where Pynchon has finally become Pynchon.  By Pynchon I mean the writer who—in spite of the hippy stuff, and the nerdy stuff, and the funny names, and the improbable plots—really celebrates sitting on the front porch of a house in a Good Place to Live, with someone you love, and a bottle of wine or a beer, and living in the present.  This is the life that’s always to denied to his characters who’ve gotten caught up in the Cold War and post-Cold War System.  I don’t know if any of his people ever approaches as close to this ideal as the Traverses do.  But even if it was unattainable (though approachable, asymptotically, appropriately enough), the ideal was always present.  In Against the Day, I think, it has only appeared at the end.  And I had really been savoring its absence.

This is the first of Pynchon’s novels that I’m reading at about the time it first appeared.  It’s the first of his novels that I’m reading after having read enough other, more or less similar novels to make sense of it.  The absence of that theme I’d just described was enough to make me question whether I’d misread his earlier books, in fact, whether finding the hobbits safe home in Bag-End wasn’t as important to them as it had seemed to me at the time.  Now, I find myself wondering whether the new stuff I thought I’d seen in this novel was really there—whether the passages I’d mentally marked for re-reading are worth the bother.

So, is that all there is?  What about the ways in which this one appeared to be different, for the one thousand pages up to this point?  It’s a long slog of a book to go through it all again, unless you were an English major and you reflexively outline everything you read (indexed, because you learned that skill in the pre-computer age).  Frank Traverse’s sketchy adventures in coffee bean engineering are interesting, but his repetitive yet never-repeated-twice pseudo-spiritual insights are getting on my nerves; I get it, already, and I’m ready to say goodbye.  Should an annoying last fifth of the book end up overbalancing hundreds of pages that I found especially, if intermittently, delightful?

I’ve been finding it surprisingly difficult to find time and mental energy just to draft blog posts even on topics where I know exactly what I want to say and the order I want to say it, much less to revise and rewrite (I remember reading a young journalist whose dad is also a journalist solemnly advise his online readership that this is the only way to write for the public, so I’m self-conscious).  More to come, eventually

Canine Linguistics

At Language Log, commenter “anon” (who I'd guess is British) says:

Many years ago, some Army combat engineers tried to teach dogs to sniff out explosives. They taught the dogs to bark once for a land mine, twice for an unexploded bomb, and so forth. Unfortunately, when the dogs encountered explosives for which they had not been taught barking and growling patterns, the dogs ignored the explosives, and some of the dogs and their trainers were blown to bits.

The engineers concluded that the dogs' ability to detect explosives depended on the words for explosives in the dogs' language.

This is called the Sapper-Woof hypothesis.

(Explanation: here or here).

How do you feel about the word inspired?

My freshman year in college, my roommate and I both were prospective English majors and writers/journalists.  She had a lot more experience than me, however: more preparation for college-level study of literature, and a better idea about how to write.  One day she came back to the room and announced that, after having struggled to find a topic for an essay, she was inspired.  Sounded reasonable to me.  But, some time later, I tried the same thing on a guy who lived in the same dorm as us, down the hall.  It was the first snowfall of the year, my first snowfall in New York, and I had gone for a walk down Broadway to get a sandwich at Mama Joy’s, and was when I came back, I told him, “inspired.”  His reaction was scorn.  “Inspired?  What does that mean?”  I was tongue-tied; I didn’t know what inspired really meant, or why it was a good thing with reference to essay-writing.  Since then, I’ve been leery of the word.

John Holbo over at Crooked Timber isn’t afraid of it, though, apparently.  And he’s a philosophy professor, so he should know.  He’s also got a good post about why the conservative arguments against health care reform are silly.

I'm Okay, You're Dumb (The Dumbest Generation, by Mark Bauerlein)

My local public library has purchased a copy of Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation.  I may be the first person in eleven months to have turned pages past the midpoint of the book, but they do have it on the shelf.  I picked it up several months ago, opened it randomly, and said, “this doesn’t make sense,” so I put it back.  Then I saw it again at Border’s, and this time I noticed that there was a chapter titled “The Betrayal of the Mentors” that appeared to talk about what has gone on in academic humanities departments over the last thirty or forty years.  I didn’t agree with it on a first glance, but on a second glance it seemed thoughtful and thought-provoking.  On a third and fourth glance I’m puzzled and, strangely, almost, insulted.

I figured the book would discuss why, in spite of increasing access to higher education, young people evidently score less well than their seniors on social scientists’ measures of knowledge and skill.  Since Bauerlein is an educator who has written as a conservative activist, he would presumably focus on what liberal college professors believe and on what education schools advise regarding lower-level schools (both topics conservatives consider important).  Instead, we find a complaint to the effect that reading, of the kind Bauerlein teaches and was himself taught, and the kind of reading all educated people (according to Bauerlein) have practiced for centuries, is dying out.

That is the argument of the first two chapters, especially:  The Internet has been around for between ten and twenty years, depending on how you count.  Therefore, American kids now finishing high school and beginning college have grown up with the Internet and we can expect them to display whatever advantages Internet is actually able to confer.  The Internet contains lots of information about topics of civic and academic interest, so kids who have grown up with it ought to know a lot.  They don’t, though.  The reason for this is that they don’t read; reading provides all kinds of benefits that help kids do better in school, and readers acquire all kinds of information as they engross themselves in books and reflect on what they say.  Kids don’t really acquire information in school, so it’s natural that their leisure-time activities are what determines how well they do on standardized tests and in college.  Bauerlein pulls the elements of this argument from a smorgasbord of sociological studies.

He appears to take the incredible yet still increasing popularity of the Internet as obviously the reason for the decline he feels exists.  The book is addressed both towards people who are interested in the rise of this new technology and also towards people who are interested in culture and reading.

As Bauerlein reads the studies, working with computers appears to improve a kind of putative intelligence which is actually bad. (He does not describe what it is, or at least not in any detail, but presumably he knows it when he sees it.)  Thus, the book will make those who work with computers consider whether they have been missing anything.  And, correspondingly, it will make those who are interested in culture and reading, and who suspect that those who work with computers are missing something, more sure that they are right.

I don’t personally find this argument convincing, but Bauerlein covers the bases very neatly.  The data for the arguments are not Bauerlein’s, so if they are questionable, he is not responsible.  And he emphasizes frequently that lots of people appear to be highly intelligent yet are (in his opinion) unable to read.  Those who disagree with him and cannot make sense of his argument may conclude they fall into this category.

Which raises the question who he thinks his audience is.  Because he has lost the people for whom critical thinking involves evaluation of evidence, as well as felicity in word choice.  He has lost the people who are turned off immediately by statements like the one I peeved about last week.  He has lost the people whose response, when faced with huge metaphysical arguments like the ones that English professors today are so fond of, on one of which I presume Bauerlein implicitly bases this book, is WTF?  And I’m not sure whom that leaves, other than college professors, the more credulous sort of journalist, and maybe the clergy.  Yet his book is published by a nonacademic press. 

To a large extent, he is criticizing educators like himself, yet his book is addressed to a general readership.  I get the sense he is trying to rally nonacademics to join in his critique of a subgroup among his fellow academics, something that conservative college professors have been doing for two decades, at least.  Because the book reads, essentially, like an (ever so mildly worded) jeremiad.  Yet it seems ungracious to harangue his lessers for not correcting his own colleagues and even himself.  Why would he do that?

Perhaps to make readers feel guilty or indignant enough that they would urge their legislators and other elected officials to support the educational policies Bauerlein promotes (vaguely described as these are).

Perhaps to intrigue future teenagers who feel they are smarter and more moral than their peers, who after reading this book may feel inspired to major in English and put into practice the high-flown sentiments they’ve learned from reading it.

Perhaps to console middle-aged and retired autodidacts and former English majors, who know they know how to read and are frustrated by the fact that they can’t express their own opinions without being challenged.  Perhaps to give them talking points for responding to such (explicit or implicit) challenges. 

Perhaps to encourage what general readers may actually remain (and have time for books like his) to discuss the ideas it contains with their friends and colleagues after work or during their lunch hours.

Of course, it’s more than probable that Bauerlein had no such rhetorical intention.  Perhaps he is simply articulating the beliefs of those he considers the entire educated class.  In fact, I have little real doubt that he sees himself as doing something quite different from what I describe above.

As a conservative and an English professor, naturally, I think, he writes a kind of book that is really rather traditional.  He assumes no subject matter expertise and, indeed, prefers no such expertise.  Though he seems to have no problem turning reading itself into an expert skill.  He assumes a unitary culture and even proceeds as if one existed.  Though, at the same time, he is continually discovering individuals and groups that don’t properly belong to it.  Though he dehumanizes those he disagrees with by referring to them as a faceless horde with an ugly name like “technophiles” or “technovangelists”: almost a metaphysical cause in itself—like Tony Kushner’s imagination of what an angel is—here, though, a fallen, Satanic angel.  It’s the continual casting out of the other that really grates, but maybe I ought to ignore that.  After all, none of us are without sin.

He is writing for a general audience: not political, not professional or technical.  He is writing an old-fashioned kind of book, the kind of book that can be read by all educated men and women.  His book is not at all of a type that can be read and be of use only to wonks, to bureaucrats and technocrats and low-level government clerks.  His book is, precisely, a book that informs educated men and women of what’s going on behind the scenes in the social and governmental institutions that determine what their lives will be like (on those infrequent occasions when they interact with such institutions).  His readers do not themselves work within those institutions, and they don’t have any influence on the controlling beliefs within those institutions either (except the small incremental influence any one of us has, and uses when we talk among ourselves or raise concerns with authority figures).  His readers are educated and at least vaguely conservative and much like himself.

This interpretation, however, while generous to Mark Bauerlein, leaves this particular reader out in the cold. 

Peeving The Dumbest Generation

I’ve been reading Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation, a screed against kids today and the culture that formed them, the scapegoat being the Internet.  I’m planning a longer post on the book, and I don’t intend to make style a main object of criticism.  But I wanted to get this off my chest: I just came across the following sentences, on page 107:

“Because that glorious creation of youth intelligence hasn’t materialized.  The Web expands nonstop, absorbing everything it can, and more knowledge and beauty settle there by the hour.  But no such enhancement has touched its most creative and frequent users, the digital natives [i.e., youth who’ve grown up with the Internet].  There is no reciprocal effect.  Digital enthusiasts witness faithfully the miraculous evolution of the digital sphere, but they also assume a parallel ascent by its consumers, an assumption with no evidence behind it.” 

This isn’t even a mixed metaphor, because there is no metaphor here.  There’s just words.  All the words apply to “[t]he Web.”  The Web expands, the Web absorbs things, and it’s possible for good things to settle on the Web.  (We don’t have to suppose the subject should be replaced.  We can just redefine the predicates to make them fit.)  Like God according to some medieval philosophies, the Web can have any and all attributes applied to it.  But the Web isn’t really any more like God (or a god, or a divine-like kind of something or other) than anything else is.  When people write in the style Bauerlein has chosen, it’s just that words can be used any way that seems convenient.  Again, this isn’t zany creativity, which would imply there are limits being pushed up against—rather, everything just kind of seeps around everywhere.

Meritocrats Vs. Rockefeller Republicans

I don’t know as much about Robert McNamara as I should.  I do know he was the Lyndon Johnson adviser who was responsible for the escalation of American military involvement in Vietnam.  His recent death brings David Brooks and Gail Collins, on their New York Times blog, “The Conversation,” to discuss a question the caption writer words as, “Has our ruling class gotten better or worse over the ages?”

Brooks starts off.  He compares the bureaucratic elite of the 1950s to the elite of the 1960s (McNamara’s time), and presents McNamara’s failings as of a piece with what he as a conservative considers the decline of America generally over those two decades.  He presents a narrative in which the “wise men” of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations were great men, innovators, responsible for creating the institutions that made the America of the second half of the twentieth century what it was.  The corresponding “best and brightest” of the succeeding decade, however, were entirely different.  In their hands, everything fell apart.

In case you were wondering why, Brooks offers up a handful of possibilities: the kind of education they were given, their belief that they were in possession of scientific knowledge that could tell them exactly how to govern, their belief in their own competence, and their belief that they could improve conditions for other people at home and around the world.  Basically, they were Democrats.  The men of the 1950s, on the other hand, were wealthy industrialists (and the sons of industrialists), plutocrats with Wall Street values who believed their wealth and opportunities gave them the responsibility and the competence to participate in government.  In other words, Republicans (though probably Rockefeller Republicans, as they’d later be called, not necessarily conservatives).

Undeniably, something happened sometime between 1958 and 1974.  The difference between the bureaucrats of the immediate post-war period and those of the Vietnam era makes a nice example.  But the question remains what the causes of the difference really were.

With the data Brooks relays to us, it seems that the only way of explaining the change is by the subsequent generation’s being inexplicably dumber than its predecessor had been (not its parents: the only subsequent political Harrimans that Wikipedia lists exist in science fiction).  Or we might invent some theory of inevitable decline—where the men of the 1950s were indeed better than those of any other period in recent memory, but where the law of reversion to the mean shows that all good things must come to an end, and that they correspondingly did.  What seems certain is that, for Brooks, many other possibilities, though imaginable, are not likely.  The men of the 1950s did not leave weak or fragile institutions to their successors.  The men of the 1950s did not leave nearly insuperable problems, of their own creation, to those of the 1960s.  The men of the 1960s did not do the best they could under bad circumstances, and certainly did not lay the groundwork for improvement in the next two or three decades.  (Any of these possibilities would cast in doubt Brooks’ assertion that the 1960s were a sad falling off from a high place.)  No: what you see is what you get.

What you see is what you get.  Americans were generally happy in the 1950s, and the presidents of the 1950s were Republicans.  Americans were increasingly unhappy in the 1960s, and the presidents of that decade were Democrats.  In the 1950s there wasn’t yet much in the way of the social sciences, and bureaucrats could be only generally educated yet govern with little outside criticism.  In the 1960s many people felt a lot more was known, and at the same time problems were being identified with increasing frequency.  Conservatives like David Brooks are asking you to do the math.  He thinks you’ll be forced to draw the right conclusion.

From The Broom of the System, by David Foster Wallace

This is possibly my favorite passage in Wallace's first novel, The Broom of the System:

"Now, Weight Watchers perceives the problem as one involving the need to have as much Other around as possible, so that the relation is one of minimum Self to maximum Other.  This is a valid though, as I've seen this afternoon, by no means exclusive way to attack the problem.  Are you getting my drift, Vigorous?"

"Well, a drift is such a--"

"It occurs to me that I couldn't care less.  A full universe, Vigorous, Ms. Beadsman.  We each need a full universe.  Weight Watchers and their allies would have us systematically decrease the Self-component of the universe, so that the great Other-set will be physically attracted to the now more physically attractive Self, and rush in to fill the void created by that diminution of the Self.  Certainly not incorrect, but just as certainly only half of the range of valid solutions to the full-universe problem.  Is my drift getting palpable?  Just as in genetic engineering, Vigorous.  There is always more than one solution."

. . .

"Of course one other advantage of my approach to the Yin/Yang problem is that dieting becomes the worst possible thing to do.  I find dieting makes me extremely angry at everything.  Dieting makes me want to murder everyone around me."

"Instead of merely appropriating their space."

"You are not un-sharp, are you?  Rather like your father.  Your father whips a mean carrot.  I could, of course, leave selected small corners of the universe unfilled for those who might arouse in me feelings of affection and attachment."

"I'll get back to you, probably, if things begin to crowd."

This is not, of course, a light-hearded view of the universe.  Corporate CEO Norman Bombardini has rethought the idea of universal complements as an idea of aggression: taking a gentle theory and importing an entirely different idea into it, making it something very dark.  He appears not to have considered the possibility of a middle ground between total equivalence and total domination--or, at best, if he did consider such middle ground, it seems he had not been able to discover any appropriate stopping point between these two extremes.  But it is a fascinating personalization of what I personally feel to be a problem in philosophy or in logic.

"All Summer in a Day"

It has been raining around Boston for a really long time, and the Globe editorial page is reminded of Ray Bradbury’s 1954 story, “All Summer in a Day,” which

describes a gloomy world where it rains all the time, and where the inhabitants see the sun for an hour every seven years. . . .  Bradbury’s story revolves around a maladjusted schoolgirl who’d emigrated from Earth. The mean Venusian kids lock her in a school closet, just as the long-hidden sun is about to peek out.”

Like a great deal of mid-century science fiction, Bradbury’s story is usually understood as a commentary on 1950s (McCarthyite, conformist) America, and in Bradbury’s writing, the science fiction foundation usually serves mostly as background for a rather conventional story, the kind of thing the Saturday Evening Review Post or Redbook might accept.  “All Summer in a Day,” accordingly, illustrates various truisms: Children (and by extension, people generally) can be cruel, especially to those who are different.  Careless actions can have serious consequences.  It can be more difficult to go without something one remembers having had, once, in the past, than never to have had that thing in the first place.  Some events, once done, cannot be reversed or repaired.  No one would quarrel with these statements, as possible “morals” for the story.

Without this historical and political context, however, the psychological meaning is outlined clearly, and the story might appear to be only about metaphorical darkness and a metaphorical “closet.”  That is not to say that the closet represents Margot’s denial of her own homosexuality, only to say that she is denying something.  Subjectively—from her own point of view—she feels “as if she has been locked in a closet and cannot get out to see the sun.”  But a closet is always something one puts oneself in, never the fault of another.  By depicting Margot’s suffering in the closet as having been caused by the deliberate actions of another person (a person whose overt intentions were malicious towards her), the story appears to be a fantasy, written from Margot’s point of view, improperly relieving herself of responsibility for her own actions.

It is not necessary to read the story as written from the child’s point of view.  It could be read from the point of view of an adult who cares about children, or of any adult generally who thinks scapegoating and bullying are wrong.  It could be read as speaking from the omniscient, or “God’s eye,” point of view.  However, the omniscient stance is unfashionable these days (and since fiction writers are themselves not omniscient, the idea of pretending they can represent omniscience raises questions).

Without knowing the convention that stories like this one are expected to present a unique, even eccentric individual, and ask the reader to “identify with” him or her for the duration of the reading, there is actually little reason why one might not read the story from the point of view of someone who sympathizes more with the schoolhouse bullies than with Margot.  Bradbury even provides hints as to how that might be done.  The other children are excellently adapted to their gloomy world, where they hardly ever see the sun they don’t remember in the slightest, where the rain creates such oppressively effusive growth.  They take real joy in their two hours of sunlit outdoor play, and can expect similarly ecstatic joy at regular intervals, even if those intervals are for children unimaginably long.  Margot makes them feel bad about what little they have even though she can really expect no better—she makes herself feel bad about what is really pretty good.

However, that reading emphasizes our feelings about what the characters “are like,” as if they were real people, over and above the actions that actually form part of the narrative.  It discounts narrative (in the sense of story, of actions the characters engage in, and way they interact with one another), viewing it as an unavoidable obstacle to expressing what the author supposedly really wants to say.

Also, the interpretation I’ve offered is almost certainly not compatible with Bradbury’s intentions in writing the story.  At best, Bradbury’s probable libertarian streak—incompatible, as he illustrates, with the prevailing mores of society—could be understood as a pathology: to preserve the interpretation that the story is a criticism of society, it could become a criticism of the way society failed to prevent this pathology.  That is obviously ridiculous—maybe there’s a theoretical way to express it that makes it sound better, though I hope not.  Whatever one thinks about “authorial intention” as a guide to interpretation, it is undeniable that someone who interpreted “All Summer in a Day” in that way would be incapable of understanding Bradbury’s work as a whole (what would become of works like Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles?), and probably also incapable of understanding most popular or “genre” writing of the period.

(Via Wikipedia: It seems that the US Department of Defense has placed “All Summer in a Day” online for the use of K-6 educators worldwide.  Is this really a story for ten- and eleven-year-olds?  Apart from what the television censors call the “thematic content” of the piece, most sixth-graders are still reading from children’s books and from textbooks specially written to be level-appropriate.)

Di Chirico and Art History

At The Wisdom of the West, Jim H. has a painting by Di Chirico up.  I think a lot of people could identify Di Chirico’s style—it’s kind of Escher-like, a little more filled out—and have probably seen a few of the paintings he did.  Fewer, I’d guess, could place him in his historical context.  I’ve been thinking about this since I saw an exhibit a few years ago at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.  The museum has been expanding and renovating, and in the process of doing that they decided to display their entire collection of art from the first half of the twentieth century, some of which was already on permanent display, and some of which had been in storage.

Since the choice of works to display was already made, there could be no imposition of some curatorial vision that manipulated the viewer into believing some modern, fashionable idea that in the end might turn out to be only the idiosyncratic opinion of the probably youngish curator and their circle of friends.  Only the division of the paintings into groups (by geography: England; France, Spain, and Italy; Central and Eastern Europe), and the order in which they were placed (Picasso’s mythology-inspired paintings interspersed with the more run-of-the-mill mythology-inspired paintings done by his contemporaries, later Picasso’s cubism-inspired paintings ditto, and so forth), imposed any narrative at all.  It was impossible by the rules self-imposed on the curators to exclude a painting that didn’t fit what they wanted to say, or to add a painting that made their pet theories more plausible.  They included what they had and excluded everything else.  This meant that no real narrative emerged.

I’m not trying to make a distinction between “traditional” and “fashionable” ways of thinking about art.  There are people who do make that distinction; they complain that, as they think, too many people these days try to impose new, false, probably politically-inspired ideas on art to which these ideas are actually totally foreign.  I’m just pointing out that ideas about art do change over time, and that it is really possible to make a specious argument that isn’t really supported by the evidence (the evidence, in this case, being the paintings).  But people who think of themselves as “traditional” can make specious arguments too.  A specious argument is an imposition no matter what point of view the person making it has.  Even a good argument can be an imposition, for one thing because it usually has to exclude a lot in order to get made in a reasonable amount of time.  The exhibit was interesting in part because it had so much stuff in it: way too much stuff for any theory to be convincing.

Mona Lisa, a film by Neil Jordan

Mona Lisa turns out to be the second movie set in Kings Cross that I’ve seen in as many Saturdays. 

Like Breaking and Entering, it depicts London’s criminal underworld.  Unlike that movie, it shows us almost nothing of any other part of London.  George, a former taxi driver (I think) played by Bob Hoskins, has just been released from a seven-year prison sentence and finds his wife won’t talk to him.  She won’t let him see his fifteen-year-old daughter either.  George moves in with his friend Thomas (Robbie Coltrane)—a mechanic whose hobby is putting together strange, semi-artistic installations made of kitsch plastic spaghetti towers and glowing Madonnas.  He needs a job.  Since Thomas has preserved his vintage Jaguar for him, and since, in some obscure way, a small-time crime boss (Michael Caine) owes him for taking a fall, the latter gives him a job as a driver.  In fact, his assignment is to act as a beard for Simone, a lovely black call girl (Kathy Tyson) who has a secret. 

The cinematography is beautiful.  The film opens in the fog as George crosses the Thames.  He sits alone on a park bench for a while, then gets up and resumes his walk to the old neighborhood.  Nat Cole’s “Mona Lisa” plays in the background.  The lighting is reminiscent of classic British cinema and somehow also of those films that used to lovingly depict the tight-knit neighborhoods of New York’s outer boroughs.

True, Tyson’s hairdos were distractingly reminiscent of Rachel Ward’s in Blade Runner, and Ward herself had probably darker skin than Simone’s Arab client, Raschid.  (Intriguingly, the end of the story could be interpreted—though with some violence—as having some similarities to that of Thelma and Louise, which like Blade Runner was directed by Jordan’s fellow Brit, Ridley Scott.)  But these are minor points.  Mona Lisa was released when independent film was just getting big.  It has something of the nascent underworld vibe of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, and even Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill, as George uncovers a world of kinky sex and degradation that he had never sunk quite low enough to suspect the existence of. 

The sexual politics of the film, however, are what stand out twenty-three years later.  George rescues Simone from her destructive way of life, but not in the traditional way he’d hoped.  Hoping to win her gratitude and consequently her affection, he agrees to search the London sex clubs for her younger, drug-addicted friend.  He rescues her and they all run off to Brighton.  There, he discovers that the two women are in love with one another. 

Shocked and disappointed, he accuses Simone of using him, but before long the bad guys intervene.  Simone kills them both in a nearly hysterical rage (the life of a prostitute, in the end, has been too much for her), and stops just short of killing George.  He returns to an honest mechanic’s life with Thomas and reacquaints himself with his daughter.  The nonjudgmental treatment of homosexuality is very subtle, and very brave for its time.