Bianca Steele

Is That His Brother or Something? (Leaves of Grass, written and directed by Tim Blake Nelson)

I couldn’t remember adding this movie to my queue, and didn’t remember anything I’d read about it.  “Leaves of Grass”— sounds like a pretty typical, probably genial movie about a college professor—probably okay.  Then I read the blurb again and realized that “grass” was a pun.  A movie about potheads . . . wonderful.  The trailers, for things I’d never heard of and have no wish to see—movies like As Good As Dead and The Locksmith—were no more promising.  But, surprisingly, Walt Whitman does make an appearance (at least his poetry does), and the movie is very appealing.

True, you’ve seen this movie before, for the most part.  It’s a lot like a Coen brothers’ film, with wackiness, violence, and middle-America combined in unexpectable proportions.  It’s your basic story where an uptight guy goes home to his family and rediscovers wisdom.  It’s your basic story where two guys who look exactly alike switch places with hilarious results.  It’s your basic buddy story.  And it’s your basic story about the ability of a good woman to save a man, with a neat twist on the Manic Pixie Dream Girl[1].

Nelson’s movie takes place in Abilene, Oklahoma, nicknamed “Little Dixie.”  Billy Kincaid, played by Edward Norton, is an up-and-coming professor of the classics and philosophy.  Brady Kincaid, also played by Norton (of course), is a drug dealer.  Their dad was a druggie, and so is their mom, a pleasant crazy woman in her fifties who lives with the elderly in a rest home because she likes it.  Long ago, Billy fled an environment he felt he simply couldn’t cope with.  Now, he is flying home for what he believes is a family emergency.  Quickly enough, he is entangled in his brother’s mad, criminal—and ultimately, inevitably violent—schemes.

Leaves of Grass is basically a quiet indie film, with a little violence thrown in, generally kind of slow moving.  In addition to Joel and Ethan Coen, it reminded me a little of Craig Brewer, who sets his films in Memphis, where he grew up.  What makes the movie interesting are the characters.  It’s true that some of the characters you’ve also seen before.  It would be a stretch to call Edward Norton’s stoner brother “charismatic.”  He’s a skinny guy with Jesus hair (picture Ted Neeley, the way he looked in the film of Jesus Christ, Superstar, but with middle-aged jowls, and you won’t be far off), one of those regular-American types who didn’t go to a fancy college and doesn’t have what you’d really call ambition, but who is super-smart, can figure things out and build things, is curious, and likes to read well enough.  He plays the guitar a little and throws parties, and he has a rather wide variety of friends, but aside from an obsession or two, he’s a drifter.  The other twin, despite his Indiana Jones/Ryan O’Neal good looks, doesn’t have charisma, either.  He did go to a fancy college, though.  He got a Ph.D., and teaches in the Ivy League, and is on the verge of being given—by Harvard!—an institute to run that will permit him to apply the study of classical philosophy to the study of law.[2]  His special interest appears to be the importance of reason in controlling the passions, and the impossibility of doing so.  He worries that back home, where he came from, people abandoned the idea of having any structure at all in their lives, and lapsed almost irredeemably into a hopeless haze, punctuated by intermittent violence and smoothed over with illegal drugs.  He’s the usual uptight Eastern elitist to his brother’s happy-go-lucky good guy.

The female characters, however, aren’t women you see in Hollywood movies often, if at all.  One of them, at least: the hometown love interest, played by Keri Russell.  We don’t see enough even of her.  It’s not a coincidence that the New York Times review doesn’t mention a single woman character, and Roger Ebert’s grants female characters exactly one paragraph, plus one sentence (he calls Russell’s character, Janet, “valuable,” which is surely high praise).  But it’s something that such an original character—one who, if you think about it, we really should see a lot more of, in movies, than we do (and why we don’t has to be a topic for a different day)—appears at all.  She’s an English teacher, with a Ph.D. or at least some graduate studies behind her, who decided that she prefers teaching high school.  She talks like an English teacher, an educated woman and a poet, what Brady might be if he spent a little time thinking about real life and real people, instead of collecting psychedelic posters and new-fangled plant foods.  She also wrassles catfish into submission and guts them on the riverbank.  What keeps her from manic pixiedom (Brady is much more of a pixieish character, in fact) is her ordinariness.  She offers Professor Kincaid a glimpse of what life could be like for an educated person like him who wanted to live in the place he came from, a place where people look out for each other (unlike, it turns out, the ivy tower, where one tiny hint of sex could be capable of ruining a career).  Russell, with all her high-falutin talk about language and psychology, looks comfortable in the landscape in a way none of the other characters does.

There’s a parallel storyline about a Jewish orthodontist who’s been forced by economic circumstances to move his family back home from New York to Omaha Tulsa, so it's very timely; and the plotline leads through a synagogue where the rabbi is a woman played by Maggie Siff (Rachel Menken on Mad Men).  Here are more echoes of the Coens’, in this case, of A Serious Man.  Richard Dreyfus’s rant, as Bug Rothbaum, at Brady Kincaid and his friend Bulger (played by the director, Tim Blake Nelson), is brilliantly funny—he wants consideration, in spite of being a violent organized crime boss, because he donates money for buildings in the community, and gives most of his money to Israel—and he gets what’s coming to him—as with the Coen brothers, the world is violent and incomprehensible, but it is nothing if not just.  

These characters talk and think about theology.  They wonder why life, for them, is so messed up, and whether there’s anything they can do to fix things.  Although you won’t find anything deeper here than a high school kid’s ruminations over pizza and a bag of potato chips, these people are not stupid, and the filmmaker wants you to know it.  There are more things between the East Coast and the West than are dreamt of in a Brown professor’s philosophy.

--

[1] Manic pixie dream girls “are usually static characters who have eccentric personality quirks and are unabashedly girlish. They invariably serve as the romantic interest for a (often brooding or depressed) male protagonist.”

[2] Martha Nussbaum, who holds a similar “dual” appointment in philosophy, law, and religion, and whose specialty has long been in the ancient Greeks, is credited as an advisor on “philosophy and academia.”

Anonymous and Oxfordianism

The reviews are pretty well unanimous that Anonymous is a silly film.  If you’ve missed seeing them, the plot involves the theory that William Shakespeare didn’t write plays, but rather acted as a front man for a nobleman, a member of Queen Elizabeth’s court, because the reputation of a nobleman would be harmed if his name had been attached to plays produced for a commercial audience.  There are several different people offered as “candidates” (as those interested in the controversy call them) for the “authorship” of the “works.”  Over the centuries, these have included Francis Bacon (a lawyer and scholar, one of the founders of both modern science and modern philosophy) , Christopher Marlowe (a playwright exactly William Shakespeare’s age, who was killed young under dubious, slightly sketchy circumstances), and Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, who is the candidate put forward here.  “Oxfordians” are said to include some prominent Shakespearean actors, including Derek Jacobi, Mark Rylance, and Michael York, as well as several North American literature professors.

There seem to be two or maybe three kinds of issues that concern people who become convinced that “Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare.”  (Here is a link to a discussion thread at an “Oxfordian” site, answering the question, “Why I became an Oxfordian.”)  First, William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon was a middle-class boy who attended state-run schools, and stopped attending them in his early teens—while the plays are considered masterworks of the English language, worthy of study by the most learned of people, and with considered allusions not only to high-level political events and to the best theoretical knowledge of the times, but to ancient Greek and Roman texts, as well.  People have even found in them apparent allusions to esoteric mysteries of the sort that it’s supposed only a scholar like Bacon could be familiar with.  Second, it can appear that the connection between the standard biographies and the available source materials sometimes fail to sustain skeptical scrutiny.  Third, some readers and playgoers report that the plays opened up a deeper meaning to them, culturally and emotionally, once they began thinking of them in terms of the works of a specific human being who is emphatically not William Shakespeare.

I have some sympathy with the second of these.  It actually is not the case that there are no source materials documenting William Shakespeare’s life.  The Riverside edition of Shakespeare, for example, lists all of these and excerpts some, and so does this site (which is maintained by people who find the very idea of “alternate authorship candidates” to be pernicious and anti-intellectual).  These few facts, however, are not enough to build a 400-page biography on.  Biographies of Shakespeare, like biographies of most historical figures of the early modern period (even kings and queens), include a large portion of conjecture and literary reconstruction.  Moreover, throughout the centuries, English and American writers have interwoven their fancies with facts, often producing deeply influential portraits that by now have become part of the culture, as much as the exact words of Hamlet’s famous soliloquies.  James Shapiro (in 1599), no less than Virginia Woolf (in Orlando and A Room of One’s Own), builds literary theories on the basis of a Shakespeare who was presented at court, and even had a room at the castle in which to write.  The skeptical or scientifically-minded student, who may try to investigate the history as if it were, say, a crime still unrecognized and unknown to the police, can quickly become frustrated.

There are good histories that take account of what we know about the history of the period, often by English scholars of the history of the theatre, with full scholarly apparatus.  These even examine practices of collaboration, and of “borrowing” that today we might consider plagiarism.  They are, unfortunately, quite expensive, and they are not necessarily intended to affect the literary discourse, but they are not hard to find and they are not hard to read.  This is far from the conspiracy theory some “Oxfordians” imagine.

The first and third objections, though, are silly, and I think they are connected.  The reason people put Oxford forward as the probable author of “Shakespeare” isn’t just that their interpretation of these canonical works—unlike the accepted interpretation—is that they put forward a strongly aristocratic, Catholic, anti-Reformation point of view, which requires the playwright to have been a Catholic aristocrat who hobnobbed with the Queen’s Catholic opponents. 

It’s also that they want everything they see in the plays (and also in the poems: the sonnets, Venus and Adonis, and The Rape of Lucrece) to have been available to the playwright, fully, and consciously.  The idea that someone who studied Latin in grammar school, but didn’t graduate from college, could allude, as an adult, to Terence and Virgil and Seneca, doesn’t seem possible to them.  The idea that ideas were shared among playwrights, that knowledge of politics was shared among men in coffeehouses, similarly, doesn’t seem possible.

They want to be able to attribute real knowledge to the playwright, to use him as an authority, and they can’t do it if he didn’t quite know what he was talking about, himself.  This is not the way skilled readers encounter literature.  Playwrights (like novelists and poets) write from a subjective, partial, emotional perspective—they don’t get Ph.D.-level knowledge of a subject so they can invent stories that embody scientific or theoretical truths.

In the 1920s and 1930s there was a large amount of amateur scholarship being produced about Shakespeare.  Among lawyers, this sometimes took the form of displaying the depth of Shakespeare’s understanding of law, and then arguing that this meant that the author of the play in question must have been trained in the law.  Physicians, similarly, argued that he was a physician.  This scholarship doesn’t hold up well.  Others went to great lengths to find an actual historical figure who seemed to fit the idea the plays gave them of the author, and they came up with Edward de Vere: a youngish, fairly low-level member of the court, raised in a kind of orphanage run by William Cecil, Baron Burleigh, Elizabeth’s chief minister, specifically for parentless young aristocrats, married unhappily to Burleigh’s own daughter, flirting with Catholicism in the face of Elizabeth’s excommunication by Rome, always complaining about how he was treated and how much money he was being allotted by his betters.

To some extent, I think, the Oxfordian narrative embodies a particular kind of confusion about how imaginative literature is written, and it could be interesting for that reason.  There have been literary fronts in history (see The Front), and at times literature has been used politically (as Clare Asquith notes, applying her experiences with the arts of the former Soviet Union to the situation of Elizabethan England).  There is a lot of collaboration—huge teams of writers on Hollywood television shows, unnamed script doctors and collaborators on Hollywood films, novel factories that “touch up” stories drafted by the named author—that often goes unrecognized.  There are interesting new-historical questions about “social energies” that are harnessed by great writers, but not literally created by those writers ab ovo—and there are interesting cultural questions about where those social energies really do originate, and how they do.

I somehow have a feeling that Anonymous, from the creator of Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, will itself say nothing particularly interesting about those questions.  But since—as more than one reviewer suggested might be necessary to make sense of the plot—I already have some sense of the differences between the Earl of Oxford, the Earl of Leicester, and the Earl of Southampton—I will probably watch it anyway.  If you don’t, you may prefer reading James Shapiro’s recent book, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?.  Or watch HBO’s miniseries with Helen Mirren as Elizabeth I, and learn what those differences are.

Angels with Dirty Faces

In an episode last Tuesday, titled “Occupy Hollywood,” critic Garen Daley was interviewed by Callie Crossley on NPR about “the history of social movements through American cinema.”  I’d like to listen to the episode again, but I wonder about some of his choices.  Talking about Angels with Dirty Faces, which at one time was my absolute favorite old-time movie, Daley claims that what made the story acceptable to an audience, as a film with a good message, was the happy ending.  My recollection is that the final scene of Angels with Dirty Faces has James Cagney being executed, in the electric chair.  That doesn’t seem like a happy ending.  I suppose what he has in mind is the fact that Cagney goes out, not defying death and Society, but crying for his mother and asking whoever’s out there listening for forgiveness—not because he really repented, arguably, but because he wants the Dead End Kids listening, who look up to him, to abandon their own lives of crime.  That moment is, assuredly, a heartwarming one, which affirms the meaning of the film for the audience leaving the theater.  But to call it, not even tragic, but “happy,” to me seems peculiar.

Melancholia, a film by Lars von Trier

On Friday, after a couple of days of unseasonably warm weather, well up into the 60s, it was surprisingly cold.  Instead of getting into the high 50s, the temperature barely reached 50 degrees Fahrenheit all day.  The leaves were falling quickly, and instead of a curtain of yellow at the back of my house, by end end of the day, out my back window there was nothing longer anything to block the much too early dusk.  It reminded me of this famous poem by Emily Dickinson, which usually makes me think of the lingering February snow:

There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons—
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes—

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us—
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are—

None may teach it— Any—
'Tis the Seal Despair —
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air—

When it comes, the Landscape listens—
Shadows— hold their breath—
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death—

It also made me think of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, which previewed on cable the other night.  It was on a channel I didn't even think we get, and I only noticed it because I wanted something to watch while I folded laundry.  I watched it under un-ideal conditions, starting in the middle, then watching most of the first half from the start, not bothering to watch part of the middle, and not under terrific sound conditions either.  But I didn’t like it.  I did like both Dogville and Manderlay, and I could almost see the point of Europa, though I didn’t like it much.  This quasi-review could be considered to be by way of convincing my husband that he—who didn’t like any of those three films the very slightest bit, and who I’d pretty much predicted will absolutely hate Melancholia if he ever sees it—should ignore reviews like the one by Andrew O’Hehir in Salon, and not bother to rent it when it becomes available on DVD.  The post grew out of a series of IM’s along the lines of “did that Salon guy really like it? nothing happened for two and a half hours. and music was really awful. he said what about the music?”

The film has two parts, named for two sisters: Justine, played by Kirsten Dunst, and Claire, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg.  (Like Dunst, Gainsbourg is excellent, but I’m sorry to say that I haven’t seen her in anything.)  These happen to be the names of characters in two of the most important French language novels of the eighteenth century: Julie, or la Nouvelle Héloïse, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the Marquis de Sade’s sadistic response to Julie, Justine.  Claire is not the heroine of Rousseau’s novel, but the heroine’s sensible, somewhat put-upon cousin.  “Justine is a reversal of the Nouvelle Héloïse,” wrote Mario Praz in The Romantic Agony, an exceedingly important book about the Romantic movement that I read a very long time ago.  However, as far as the film is concerned, I don’t know what this means.

In a kind of prologue, we see dream sequences, some imagined and surrealistic and fitting in with the rest of the story, some very strange but from scenes that will become obvious by the second part of the film, and some depicting the time just before and just after the events that end the film.  (This is not much of a spoiler unless you are totally innocent of the film’s publicity.  In fact, if like me you saw the end before the beginning, the beginning might leave you still wondering whether what you thought had happened really did.)

(THERE ARE SPOILERS AFTER THIS.  Skip to the end to reach the more general discussion again.)

The first half of the movie is Justine’s wedding reception, at her sister’s house.  It’s almost impossible to know what’s going on here.  Justine first appears to be a free spirit, then begins to seem unstable, and finally seems—possibly—depressed—but if the word Melancholia weren’t in the title, you might never know.  Her behavior is outrageously inappropriate.  She's hours late for the reception and then leaves the guests further, for hours at a time.  It’s not only as if she doesn’t know how to behave at a wedding: it’s as if she doesn’t know she is actually at her own wedding.

Though others’ behavior is inappropriate, too.  Her boss keeps tailing her throughout the reception, trying to get her to write her daily copy for him.  (She is a copywriter whose promotion to art director, perhaps surprising enough in itself, her boss announces during the toasts.)  In fact, her behavior is just what you’d expect in a dream.  She wanders around the house and forgets what she was supposed to be doing.

There’s nothing wrong with a film that’s dreamlike, but this plot summary makes it sound much more exciting than it is.  Really, nothing happens.  People eat.  People toast the bride and groom.  The wedding cake is cut.  The bride’s nephew is put to bed.  The guests troupe outside and down the bride’s brother-in-law’s private golf course to drink champagne and set off paper balloons with good wishes written on them, like something out of La Dolce Vita.  Every shot is about five times longer than feels necessary.  We're just sitting in the audience, watching.  And what dialogue there is has no connection that I can see with Justine’s apparent depression; it feels thoroughly arbitrary.

It is possible, obviously, to dredge up a coherent storyline from surrealist storytelling like this—and O’Hehir tries—but that seems to me to flatten out what’s most interesting about it, at the same time that it absolves the artist in advance for not really bothering to depict things for himself, and I guess I just don’t see the point.

I must have found the second half more interesting, since I sat through it well past the time I’d intended to go to bed, and even watched all of the first half, in order to find the connecting link: how people realized there was a second planet hurtling more or less in the direction of our own, and how all those people were gotten out of the brother-in-law’s house, leaving only Justine, Claire, and Claire’s husband and child.  The answer to this last question is that the wedding was some time ago, and the guests went home days before.  Now, it seems, Justine is so depressed that she can barely manage to get into a taxicab that someone else has hired and has waiting by the curb.  Claire doesn’t seem especially fond of her sister, but is determined to help her. 

She is worried about the planet, barely glimpsed the night of the wedding, but now discovered and studied and named “Melancholia.  Her husband, however, who is some unspecified kind of scientist, says there’s nothing to worry about.  He chides her for “going on the Internet again,” and says “the real scientists” know that the idea the earth is in danger is simply alarmism.  Well before the end of the film, Claire is herself depressed, and mostly sits on her terrace, often asleep.  All four of them gather there daily to observe the progress of Melancholia.  Will it strike, or will it pass by and leave all of them unharmed?

I sat through the end to find out, and I was sorry I’d bothered.

(SPOILERS END HERE.)

O’Hehir has an entirely different interpretation of the characters’ motivations than mine, which he's entitled to.  He also loves the artistic aspects of Melancholia, which I agree are fine, but which I don’t think add up to anything.

He starts with the assumption that Von Trier’s film is “the ultimate cinematic expression of the German Romantic aesthetic, which was an enormous source of inspiration for Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich,” and gives the Salon reader a deep interpretation along those lines.

First, O’Hehir explains that the score is using some fairly well-known music from Wagner’s overture to Tristan und Isolde, an opera that romanticizes the wish for death.  Then he explains how the movie refers to other well regarded films, including those in which the major actors of this one—John Hurt, Charlotte Rampling, Stellan Skarsgård—have previously appeared.  So, from the point of view of someone who’s educated about film, Melancholia is very meaningful.  I won’t deny that someone who’s very educated about film will have a more worthwhile opinion, in many ways, than someone who isn’t.  But even setting aside that these particular meaningful facts are fairly specialized even for most very sophisticated filmgoers, I do want to deny that allusions are enough to make deeply meaningful art.

I didn’t recognize the Tristan theme, and without this recognition, the recurring ultra-romantic orchestral music just reads as overwrought and inappropriate.  The cold cinematography and minimalist plot felt spoiled by the inadvertent addition of schmaltz.  Every time I heard the orchestral music, I wished it was something more recent, something twentieth-century, something spare and stark like the Musica ricercata by György Ligeti that Stanley Kubrick used in Eyes Wide Shut.  By now the Tristan theme and music that sounds like it registers simply love, without the death.  Only by recalling the sentence, This is music by Richard Wagner that signifies the Liebestod or Love-Death, would the filmgoer have the experience O'Hehir describes.

Similarly, although I recognize John Hurt, Stellan Skarsgård, and Charlotte Rampling by sight, I’ve seen almost nothing that they’ve appeared in.  I’ve seen none of the films Andrew O’Hehir marks as possible influences for this one.  Yes, that’s my failing and not the filmmaker’s, but the question is, how much energy should an artist draw from other works that he or she alludes to only in the barest, most tenuous, sense?  Is a film (or a novel) that depends, so heavily as this one seems to, on allusions that are detectable only on an intellectual level, and then only at a couple of levels of (sheerly logical) remove, a deep one, or is it shallow? 

And yes, those visual shots are beautiful.  But they are static.  The same angle is shown over and over again, as if the film were instead a painting in some style suspended halfway between nineteenth century decadence and twentieth century minimalist futurism.

What O’Hehir’s insistence that Melancholia is in the tradition of German Romanticism reminds me mostly of are the twentieth century paintings from this exhibition.  One of the most striking things about that show, which divided up artists by region (England; France and Spain; Germany and Russia) was how sentimental and soft-edged the German paintings seemed—for the most part—by contrast with the French ones.  The placards all explained how much the painters had been influenced by the most shocking recent French styles.  But in that age without television, Internet, or cheap color reproductions, few of them can have actually seen the paintings they were trying to imitate.  All they saw were words.

A Long Way to Go to Get to a Post about Philip Roth

Shortly after my last post here, I started a project for a longish blog post that would require a fair amount of reading, which has been taking up most of my time.  I’ve begun and abandoned a few posts to fill the gap, but first the reading turned out to take longer and be much more absorbing than I’d expected (books in genres I don’t usually read, brick-like enough to encourage a glad switch back to the Kindle), and then real-life events intervened, and then the “quick” post I had in mind turned out to need longer to write than I have right now.

(Incidentally, here are things I’d like to see available on the Kindle, or whatever the next generation of e-book reader will be:  More foreign books—it would be nice to be able to buy books from amazon.fr or amazon.de for my US-based Kindle.  And more classics of history and social science from the past fifty years.  There is already a good, though not perfect, selection of recent books on social science, politics, and history, which is probably something we can thank the hordes of tech-savvy wonks and bloggers for.)

So I could blog about the sudden breakdown of my clothes dryer with half my daughter’s wardrobe in it, and how if I’d done the laundry on Friday instead of Sunday, we would have had the whole weekend to shop for a new one—but, also, it might have broken while we were out of the house, and burned all the clothes.  And how I wasted most of a day trying to research new washers and dryers online, figuring it might be time to replace the 1975-era washing machine too (which works perfectly well except that the “warm” water is better described as “cool,” and probably isn’t very efficient, and is so old and low-tech it just plain looks silly), only to discover that the question of the modern high-efficiency washer is a highly vexed one, and give up and decide to buy the simplest dryer I could find—only to learn that the online description of its dimensions was off by just enough that it wouldn’t fit through the door. 

Or I could blog about how, at just about this time last year, and the year before, right after my daughter’s birthday party, I got sick, and how I ended up being sick almost continually last year from November until almost May—though this time I got sick two weeks before the party, and since then so far I seem okay.  Or my attempts to determine whether the sore throat I’ve been waking up with every morning is from a cold, allergies, or acid reflux.  Though it does appear to be the last of these (it can be preempted using Pepcid), and so far I’m not sick, just tired from pre-party cleaning and from swimming in my daughter’s swim class to the deep end of the pool with her, for the first time in half a year and ve-e-ery slowly.

I could write about the movie Howl, and whether it is somehow cheating to have the original Ginsberg poem’s imagery displayed for you on a screen so you can understand the metaphors without doing the thinking for yourself—and whether it is actually possible to read all the words of the Neal Cassady section of the poem without having them read for you as a voiceover to a cartoon.

But I will blog, fairly briefly, about modern literature, and women in modern literature.

One of the novels I value most these days is American Pastoral, by Philip Roth.  The plot of the novel involves a successful Jewish-American businessman whose daughter, in the political turmoil of the 1960s, joins up with the Weathermen and bombs the local post office, killing the owner of the grocery store in which the PO’s located.  She disappears, and twenty years later, he finds her living a life of squalor in a slumland squat, doing a kind of penance and renunciation through a form of Jainism (involving the refusal to do violence to any living thing) which she has worked out for herself through reading and introspection.  Most of the novel consists of her father’s tortured attempts to work out what—in America, in his own parenting, in the belief systems of the other adults who helped her over the years—possibly could have resulted in both her crime and her unacceptable religious beliefs.  He rakes over her situation with the utmost of empathy of which he’s capable, but ultimately he fails to comprehend the path she chose.  He condemns her along with the society that made her that way, even as he is too much of a conformist to stand apart from society in any real way.

It’s the painstaking and thoughtful recreation of the emotional dilemmas faced by the girl and her father, the novelist’s willingness to implicate the father’s own beliefs and his way of life in actions he repudiates, and the selection of both male and female characters to illustrate various modes of being in the society he depicts, that I find appealing.  The moral, if there is any, isn’t on the surface, any more than it is in any other novel—there are some obvious “morals,” if a reader had to have them, like don’t commit murder, or don’t trust in wealth to preserve your family from misfortune, but the question of what could have helped these characters more isn’t answered—and I don’t assume that I would agree in full with Philip Roth’s take on their lives if I knew it.  (In fact, although I’ve been tempted to see these painstaking moments of empathy with female characters as a refutation of the broadly accepted notion of Roth’s general misogyny, I’ve ultimately concluded that they’re overwhelmed by the rest of his writing, that moments is all they are.)

But when I declared, on Internet discussion forums, that American Pastoral, along with The Ghost Writer and Zuckerman Unbound, were my favorites among all Roth’s novels, I was told, by male participants, in no uncertain terms, that I was wrong.  Roth’s best novels are those, like Sabbath’s Theater, they said, that foreground the male id and the issues (in our society and given the realities of aging) that surround exuberant male sexuality.  There was no discussion, there was no admission that a preference for one novel over another may largely involve subjective factors, there was only a flat statement that I was wrong.  There was no explanation.  The idea may have been that those novels are more characteristic of Roth’s writing—maybe given the long view of his work as a whole, maybe given the idea of Roth as essentially a novelist of exuberantly aggressive sexuality and rebellion—and maybe because they took those apparently more characteristic novels as a condemnation of the author, or maybe because they equated characteristic with best.  The idea may have been that those themes always make for better literature, or the idea may have been that those novels are better because they are less political.  The idea may have been that those novels spoke well for the men making the claim, a subjective claim, if surreptitiously so.  Whatever the underlying reasons, if I tried to give reasons for my preference, their response was to insist that no possible reason could cause them to change their minds.

It seemed as if they were claiming that they could speak for the entire literary world, and that no alternative was possible.  They did not seem to envision the possibility of discussion about the merits of one novel over another, or of one way of writing novels over another.  They seemed, on the contrary, thoroughly invested in the concept of modern literature as the self-expression of a callow young man whose interests are eternally opposed to the needs of “the community”—entire shelves of novels the reader could take or leave depending on whether that character’s interests aligned with her own, but with which she could not dispute.

Maybe they were right.  Or maybe they just didn’t understand.

The Social Network: Baby, You're a Rich Man, Too

The Social Network, a fictionalized account of how the website Facebook was founded and then turned into a social and financial sensation, primarily poses the question whether its founder and creator was a nice person.  But it actually raises some much weirder questions.  The film has two large problems: its creators’ inability to depict a plausible narrative of the creation of something like a website, and its creators’ inability to depict a plausible version of success that involves more than buying a nice house with a pool, throwing wild parties, and getting your name in the paper.  The plot seems to be—oddly—Mark Zuckerberg becomes a Hollywood superstar, very much like the filmmakers themselves; there is almost nothing in the story to mark his success as being of a different kind than theirs.  Everyone knows that the moral of the film is that Mark Zuckerberg is a bad guy who has been living a bad life, but if the story has the fictional Zuckerberg living the life of those who imagined him, what is it that’s supposed to be bad about it?

This is not the story of how Mark Zuckerberg struggled and worked to overcome obstacles that arose as he tried hard to accomplish a difficult goal; this is not Apollo 13, in which people were called to go above and beyond, working extra shifts for no recognition greater than a gift of a new tie from their wives.  This is the story of how Mark Zuckerberg ignored every obstacle that put itself in its path: and all of those obstacles arose from the will of others’ opposing themselves to him (usually by telling him there’s something he should pay closer attention to).  Actually, there are no real obstacles.  He and his friends tell a few friends about “The Facebook,” and they tell a few friends, and so on and so on and so on.  On campus after campus, within a couple of weeks of students’ getting access to the site, it is the biggest thing since pitchers of beer.  The coding goes smoothly, and everything just falls into place.  There are no technical challenges that require hard work and thinking even from a programming genius.  There are no unforeseen hardware failures, no power outages that make prearranged deadlines impossible.  There is nothing Mark Zuckerberg got wrong—except the rule that one should never stomp on the little people on his way up the ladder.

The only problem Zuckerberg has is that he doesn’t know an algorithm to create an absolute ranking of a large group of competitors on the basis of a limited number of real competitions between selected pairs of them.  He has to ask his friend Eduardo Saverin for that information.  We do see him in an Operating Systems class, in which he solves a complex calculation, involving addressing theory, on the spur of the moment (Zuckerberg’s actual Harvard OS professor has written up some of his reminiscences, with reference to The Social Network, here and here).  But there is no sense, in the film, that memorizing theory and doing quick mental math is not enough to create a successful computer application, much less a distributed application.  Admittedly, a focus on technical issues would be boring.  But the filmmakers suggest that Zuckerberg’s accomplishment lay in finding an opportunity and making sure he was the only one who profited from it: the near equivalent of climbing onto a speeding train and pushing those already riding it over the side.

It was not necessary, moreover, to hinge the film on the bizarre personality (as portrayed in the film) of Sean Parker.  (He is described in the film as the founder of Napster, though according to Wikipedia his real involvement is questionable.[1])  Parker, as depicted, and presumably as can be shown through publicly available documentation, is a flake.  He has a history, not only of being unable to work with colleagues, but of fallouts with police, over cocaine use and underage girls.  He appears to be paranoid and (in the words of Saverin in the film) delusional—which is not so surprising if the allegations about cocaine are true.  He does have contacts in the business world that Zuckerberg and Saverin lack.  His intuition that Facebook could have an even bigger impact—on something—than Napster had, on music sales, turned out to be right.  Saverin’s apparent feeling that what they had was just an ordinary dot-com business success turned out to be wrong.  Yet the narrative is set up as Zuckerberg’s choice—between remaining on the East Coast, finishing college, and being ordinary—and breaking into the big time in California, turning himself into a superstar.  Saverin remains committed to the first of those choices, while Parker tempts Zuckerberg towards the second one.

The problem is that the film does not successfully distinguish Parker’s way of life from his business and technical ability.  There is a relentless focus on the way having lots of money gives men the wherewithal to form private all-male clubs and party, to stay out all night drinking and taking drugs and getting hot women to take off their clothes and dance with one another.  At Harvard, this is the province of the final clubs, like the Porcellian, to which Zuckerberg’s nemeses the Winklevoss twins belong.  Mundane fraternities like AEP[2] only have lame-looking mixers, and people like Mark Zuckerberg—because of their aggressively ambitious personalities, the film suggests—will never be accepted into those people’s clubs.  In California, on the contrary, a smart guy with lots of ambition has the chance to become Sean Parker.  You can write code in your rented house and party with college girls at the same time.[3]  You can get hot women who wouldn’t have looked at you twice before you were rich.[4]  There is no real sense of irony in the film’s idea, expressed by the Beatles’ song that plays over the film’s final shot, that Mark Zuckerberg is now “one of the beautiful people.”

And Parker’s personality is certainly typical California.  The drugs, the partying, the contempt for the East Coast as old and stodgy, the idea that nothing of any importance is going on anyplace else.  The identification of expertise with knowing the right people and being willing to play them, of creativity and intelligence with business sense and aggression.  Parker is Zuckerberg’s Paul Simon to Saverin’s Woody Allen (with Mark Zuckerberg, then, as Annie Hall, if rather more successful than she will ever be).  And he behaves, and talks, in a manner more frequently associated with Simon’s and Allen’s generation (or with Sorkin’s) than with that of today’s young people.  There is no apparent irony in this, either.  The idea seems to be that California tech executives and Hollywood stars are the same—and better than everybody else—and, not least, just because they are free enough and rich enough to party.  At least the filmmakers don’t seem to have cared to do some research and find out whether they and their subjects are different.

Which raises the question: Are the filmmakers capable of understanding success as anything deeper than money, fame, and personality, as anything more important than the ability to gain access to a kind of secret society where drugs and free love are the rule?  Is joining a men’s club (a gentlemen’s club in the real meaning of the phrase) what “making it” means?  Are rich people better than the rest of us, really, only because they know how to party?[5]  It’s as strange as if “the music of the night,” promised by the phantom of the opera in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical of that name, were only what could be heard from a ladies’ room stall at Studio 54.

(For more, here is an interesting story about Mark Zuckerberg and the origins of Facebook, by Zuckerberg’s Harvard classmate Rebecca Davis O’Brien.)

[1] It’s interesting that the MP3 format used by Napster is, technically, a very poor format.  Its great advantage is its simplicity.  It is easy to program to.  I’ve wondered whether this is an example of technical lock-in as a result of nontechnical path dependence, something that is far from rare (Sony Betamax is widely regarded as superior to VHS), but in this case arose because the only broadly available application for downloadable audio files was created not only by amateurs, but by student amateurs.

[2] At Columbia, for what it’s worth, AEP renamed itself as TEP when it decided to become coed and admit women, not just as “little sisters.”  Does Harvard have any coeducational fraternities?

[3] Was the racist garbage about how perfect Asian women are for Jewish men really necessary?  And while the male characters were cast to resemble more or less plausible college students (as opposed to, say, characters on The Practice), the women looked like Victoria Secret models more than like Boston undergraduates.  There are plenty of good-looking women in Harvard Yard.  Couldn’t a little effort have been made to find out how they dress? 

And what was up with the BU girlfriend, Erica’s, beret?  Did dating Zuckerberg upset her so much she decided to become Orthodox?

[4] Aaron Sorkin’s dialogue, as usual, goes by too quickly, but especially in the first scene, he definitely nails a certain sort of man and the way he talks to women.  Believe me, they are not all geniuses.

[5] Do they think poor people don’t party?

P.S.: It's been pointed out to me--by my husband, who has a Facebook account, which he signed up for initially for distributing baby pictures--that it's ironic I would be writing a post about The Social Network when I don't use Facebook myself (except when he shows me his account, so I can see my relatives' pictures, or updates from female acquaintances of his who cook much fancier than I do). 

Framingham Reads The Killer Angels and Three Cups of Tea

The Killer Angels, the subject of my last post but one (with a few others begun in the interim but this not done) and the main subject of this one, was my town’s “One Book” selection for 2011.  Three Cups of Tea, which I’m going to mention briefly, has been in the news lately because it turns out not to be true—how much is false is, as yet, unknown, though it seems pretty certain that on top of the book’s being false there are a few financial improprieties involving the charity the book’s author, Greg Mortenson, founded and described (and promoted) in his memoir.  Aaron Bady has useful roundups here and here.

(Side point: Is there a comma missing in this title?  In other words, did I mean to say “This post is about the program, ‘Framingham Reads The Killer Angels,’ and also about Three Cups of Tea”—which is true?  It is true, but as it happens Three Cups of Tea was the Framingham Reads selection a few years back.  Children’s versions and even picture books broadened the scope of the “One Book” project to the high schools and elementary schools, and there were cross-cultural programs, as well.  Improving understanding of other cultures can’t hurt, so I hope the book is not inaccurate in that regard, too.  For example, the title of the book, Mortenson says in interviews, comes from an Afghan custom of making a stranger almost a part of the family, though he has to drink three cups of tea with them, and the process takes time.  Something to think about.)

More on The Killer Angels: Economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, in an otherwise unexplained post titled “Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain,” linked a little while ago to a scene from Gettysburg, the not very well reviewed movie that was based on The Killer Angels.  The scene is of the point at which Chamberlain (played Jeff Bridges) tells his officers, “Fix bayonets.”  He has been ordered to hold the left flank, maintaining the Union Army’s position on the series of hills called Cemetery Ridge, and not under any circumstances to withdraw.  Now his men are entirely out of ammunition, and the enemy is still coming.  If they fix bayonets and charge downhill, they may at least prevent the enemy from circling around behind the Union line.

The film shows Chamberlain surrounded by his staff as they react to the command.  They all are stunned by what seems a foolhardy charge, nearly unprotected, into certain death.  Chamberlain himself appears to be perfectly aware of the unusual nature of his own order.  His mood, as much as his decision, seems to illustrate something dangerous in his character.  In the book, however, it is different.

In the novel, Chamberlain is described as making the obvious choice.  His options are limited.  His men are out of ammunition, and his requests for more bullets haven’t been answered.  If he retreats—as he has been ordered not to do, under any circumstances—shifting to the right, towards the rest of the Union line, the enemy will not only take the hill, but will sweep behind the Union line and attack them from behind.  If he stands pat, he and his men will likely be slaughtered.

His only option is to tell the men to fix bayonets.  They will be armed only with those, against an infantry armed with guns (and possibly also a cavalry armed with swords), but this would be their situation in any event.  What he does that is unusual is order them to take the offensive (unplanned by his own superiors), and charge down the hill.  He tells them to sweep to the right, pushing the enemy across the front of the remaining Union guns.  He has heard of the maneuver in his training to be an officer but has never seen it done.  His troops end up sweeping well across the front of the line, taking large numbers prisoners.  They may well have startled the enemy as much as they did their own side. 

It’s only after the battle is over that Chamberlain realizes that what he did was unusual.  He knew the battle could not be won unless he ordered his men to charge downhill, so he ordered his men to charge downhill.  Most experienced officers, though, as he discovers, would probably not have done the same.  His reason for acting as he did, in giving such a risky order, is not so much that he was a college professor as that he was inexperienced.  He probably acted more as a young man would, just out of officer training school, than as a professor of military science (which wasn’t his field in the first place).  Of course, in most wars, twenty-somethings have not been given command of so many men as Chamberlain was given.  He happened to combine the confidence of an experienced professional with the inadequate, untried school-learning of a recently graduated student.  That doesn’t have much to do with his being a professor—it wasn’t Chamberlain’s thinking like a professor that led him to take such a foolhardy action—so much as with his being an older, respected professional man whose high position in society was seen as transferring easily to another sphere.  As it happens, that worked out well at Gettysburg, but it might have been otherwise.

And Shaara illustrates well that, though social hierarchies operated slightly differently in the South than they do in the North, every social interaction that happens in the Army is necessarily hierarchical.  The visible double-takes the characters allow themselves in the film version of Gettysburg are unthinkable in the world of Shaara’s novel.  Nearly everything in the novel is described from the point of view of a high-ranking officer: in most cases, the highest-ranking officer possible, given the situation as prescribed by the plot.  There are few exceptions.  The book starts off in the point of view of a sometime-Shakespearean actor turned Rebel spy who is well aware of the fact that the real Army is more than a little suspicious of him.  The second section begins with the point of view of John Buford, a cavalry officer who has never really reacclimated to life in the East, and who stakes out a Union position in Gettysburg, not entirely trusting that additional troops will arrive in time for his efforts to do any good, and—again—well aware that he will get little credit from history or from Washington.  After that, however, the novel shifts to the regular Army officers who have taken over the battlefield.  The only conflict we see between officers in which the commander is not always the one in the right is that between Longstreet and Lee, the former arguing that they are sure to lose the battle if they engage again the following day.

The scene from the movie is damning for Chamberlain’s case.  At this point, in Chamberlain’s chapters of the book, the reader seems to be humming under his breath, “Another victory like that and we are done for.”  In Longstreet’s chapters, however, what we hear is most likely worse: “We were hip deep in the Big Muddy, the big fool said to move on.”

Reconsidering Pauline Kael

Via Arts & Letters Daily, the often very readable Open Letters Monthly offers an appreciation of the late film critic Pauline Kael.  One commenter (Belinda Gomez) notes, “Far too often, she’s a fan girl, not an actual critic. Her knowledge of film was wide but shallow.”  That may be the case.  But Kael’s were reviews that a beginning filmgoer could use, to work her way into the way knowledgeable moviegoers think.  The reviewer notes that the way Kael thought was not the way academic film critics think (there were few serious film critics even existing at the time, though, I think), but I don’t see why this should be reason to ignore her writing and opinions, even as judged by academic standards.  If academic criticism explains how a culture views a work of art, then academic criticism must take into account the views of that culture’s best critics (possibly, making an empirical study of what they wrote).  If, on the other hand, academic criticism ignores the best internal critics a culture has to offer, it raises the question, on whose views academic criticism is based.  (Even if it gives what Thomas Nagel called “The View from Nowhere,” one would like to know what that view is and who can tell us about it.)

Auntie Mame on Hollywood Boulevard and the Female Peter Fonda

In today’s New York Times Magazine, Carina Chocano has a piece explaining why and how her possessing an undergraduate degree in cultural studies, in fact, ill-prepared her to understand actual popular culture.  She focuses on two movies from 1990 and 1991, respectively, Pretty Woman and Thelma and Louise, and she makes a lot of sense, though I disagree on a few points.  I think she leans more heavily on the political question than those movies can bear.

What Chocano calls Vivian’s (Julia Roberts’ character in the first of the films) denial of being a fallen woman is actually a true innocence.  She (unlike her roommate, whom she tries, eventually successfully, to save) is really a good girl, fallen in with the wrong crowd and with few choices available to her (in part because her roommate is stealing her money, making a mockery of her attempts at prudence).  She is shown to be more moral than any of the wealthy men, or the servant class who caters to them.  She simply doesn’t know how to behave.  She is Auntie Mame—a few decades younger—as the hooker with a heart of gold.  She is perfect wife material—just marred a tiny bit by the excesses of popular culture.  (Moreover, her perfection is the only thing that keeps the women in the audience from suspecting that in a few years she will be just as mean as the Rodeo Drive sales clerks whose treatment of her made every single one of them cringe.)

The movie was released in 1990, as Chocano points out, but it was produced in the days of Madonna, who sang about how much better her Wall Street boyfriends liked her than their uptown fiancées and wives.  But not all the young women in the clubs were artistes.  Hollywood blockbusters aren’t usually known for their nuanced characterization, but it can be enlightening to pay attention, not only to the beautiful people on the screen, but to some of the passing bits of dialogue that seem almost inserted just to have something to fill out a scene—especially if they all tend in the same direction.  Looked at this way, the story of Pretty Woman is, in essence: Hard-partying club girl is wooed by the boringest, but richest, guy on campus, and finds her inner fuzzy-slipper wearing suburbanite.  The easy equation of “club girl” with “prostitute” seems dubious, admittedly, until you realize that Pretty Woman isn’t Vivian’s story, but Edward’s.  (Even as Vivian’s story, as Chocano says, it’s the story of her accepting a life as his living female accessory.)  He has two choices, romantically: a woman from his own social circle, or someone who chugs champagne straight from the bottle and hangs out with lowlifes downtown.  This is how he sees the situation.

The brilliance of Pretty Woman is that his story can apply to anyone.  Successful businessman looking to have a little fun slumming, old letch fascinated by the customs of young girls these days, or head-in-the-books college student who thinks girly girls are stupid: any one of these can see himself in the story of the man who leaves the bitchy ice princess for a “real” woman.  On the contrary, the story of Vivian is reduced to a generic plotline about the girl who accepts the proposal of a man who is actually coldhearted, though powerful: a merely clever reworking of the Cinderella story, the real innovation in which is its appeal to the male half of the audience.

It’s hard to understand how Chocano thought either her rejection of the overt message of Pretty Woman, or her delight in the transgressiveness of Thelma and Louise, augured any imminent change in the nature of society.  She is surely correct that “Thelma’s transformation is about evolving from chattel to free agent” (the opposite of the path taken by Vivian in the other movie); this is a common theme in Ridley Scott’s films, from Blade Runner to Body of Lies.  She is also right that the two women’s “solution” turned out to be a dead end, and that that fact ought to have been obvious from the film itself on its initial release.

However, Scott’s recycling of the American genre of the road movie can’t disguise the fact that the stories he tells are not American ones.  As such, they are irrelevant to American society, and Chocano cannot really use them to make arguments explaining what did and didn’t happen in the United States in the twenty or so years since Thelma and Louise appeared.  Ridley Scott loves to make films in which naïve American men free themselves from their corporate and military-industrial overlords, and Thelma and Louise can be seen as a female version of the same narrative (or even—interestingly—as initiating the freedom of the sheriff, played by Tommy Lee Jones, who is chasing them).  But the idea that most men are, initially, chattel, is a European one.  The whole point of the road movie, on the contrary, is that we don’t need Europe; because we have the Painted Desert.  Moreover, Thelma and Louise don’t become gangsters, and they don’t become revolutionaries—rather, they engage in the kind of happy-go-lucky, wild-and-crazy fun and games that movies about young men have made a staple for decades.

To a woman, under thirty, watching the movie for the first time, this onscreen gender switch was exhilarating.  Chocano argues that the film has dated, because many of us women no longer hope for the kind of transformative social change that Ridley Scott seemed to have been predicting.  I would disagree, to the extent that I doubt Ridley Scott was predicting anything of the kind.  His movies are fantasies, imposing European social fantasies onto the freer seeming American character and landscape.  Kind of the way Edward Lewis imposes his fantasies onto the lovely Vivian, as a matter of fact. 

Inception, a film written and directed by Christopher Nolan

Inception starts with a novel idea: that it’s possible to insert an idea in somebody else’s mind: and that it’s possible to induce someone to have a new idea that they will think is original but that is entirely engineered by you.  “Inception” is a word meaning “the implantation of an idea.”

In the film, it’s also possible to “extract” an idea from another person’s mind without their knowledge or cooperation.  (Basically, you trick them into looking at it in your presence, in a kind of mental structure you’ve designed for them.  No, it doesn’t make sense to me either.)  In the world of the film, both of these are done only through the technological means of a drug-induced sleep undertaken in close proximity to other sleepers with whom the dream is shared—not by means of such old-fashioned means as, you know, talking to people—and both are highly illegal.

This is a clear parallel to what a writer does, and even more, to what a novelist or a screenwriter might be said to do.  Writers of fiction make people believe things that are not true, often using emotional rhetorical devices or “tricks” to encourage people to believe things the words don’t even say and the screen doesn’t actually show.  Novels and films are quite often compared to dreams.

So the theme concerns what the writer does.  And in a certain kind of novel we might expect to find a considered reflection on writing and on fiction itself.  Not in Inception.  The film does not explore the details and implications of what the writer does or comment on it.  Christopher Nolan is interested in exploring the “how and why” of writing fiction up to a point, and no farther, and getting to this point actually doesn’t really take long.  The writer chooses an idea and tries to persuade people of it, maybe for admirable reasons, maybe for vicious ones.  That’s it.  If people believe it, their belief will affect the way they live, and when people come to realize that their beliefs are grounded in something other than reality (what that is doesn’t seem to matter too much as far as the movie goes, but it definitely is not as vicious or as horrific as what we have seen in the Matrix films), their realization will affect the way they live. 

So we have a Matrix-like philosophical dilemma about how we can ever know our lives and thoughts are real, and our own.  (It feels more like Synecdoche, New York than like the Matrix films, though, most of the time.)  The main character, Cobb (played by Leonardo Di Caprio), lives his life on the run from shadowy corporations—but the need for him to live in this way is questioned by other characters as sheer paranoia.  The world of Inception is a world where corporations hire teams to stalk, and in effect to brainwash, their rivals, in order to influence the rivals’ actions.  Rather than being slaves to a worldwide tyranny, as in The Matrix, in Inception we are subject at any moment to arbitrary treatment from little bands of people who spend most of their time in a dream world and demonstrate little concern for the long-term effects of what they do.  This would be much scarier—except that most of us aren’t important enough to merit that kind of attention.  So, in the end, this is just a silly film about how the comeuppances of the rich are brought about by self-declared super-detectives using super-technology.

But this doesn’t seem to be enough, so Nolan tricks out the science fiction plot with ruminations on love, marriage, parenthood, and men’s relationships with their own fathers.  (The father here is played by Michael Caine, inviting comparison with Nolan’s Batman films and with The Prestige.)  But this more humanistic story is told only in flashes.  Too much is left for the viewer to fill in, and ultimately the romantic plot is hollow.  Like the thriller plot, it seems to have been included only to give audiences the sense that they are seeing something familiar.

As an action film, Inception is slow, the plot is convoluted and self-important.  As a science fiction film, it’s pretty good.  As a film with ideas, though, the kind a good science fiction novel might have, it is lacking. One character (played by Lukas Haas, the little boy in Witness) is named Nash, and there’s a running joke about an unstable equilibrium, which is clever—the way Moonlighting once named Mexican bodyguards “Ortega” and “Gasset.”  If you think you can rework the images you get from this movie into anything resembling an idea, much less an argument, that’s up to you.

Recent Reading

Some weeks I don’t find a lot that interests me in the New Yorker, but that certainly isn’t true of the April 26 edition.  There is a short story by E.L. Doctorow about a suburban couple haunted by the homeless man who used to live at their address, stripped down and minimalistic in a Barthelmeesque way, and a selection of letters written by the late Saul Bellow.  The following is from a letter to Lionel Trilling in 1953, shortly after The Adventures of Augie March was published:

“It isn’t that Augie resists every function—that would make him a tramp; and while I would not hesitate to write about tramps if I were called to it, Augie is something different.  I was constantly thinking of some of the best young men I have known.  Some of the very finest and best intentioned, best endowed, found nothing better to do with themselves than Augie.  The majority, whether as chasers, parasites, bigamists, forgers and worse, lacked his fairly innocent singleness of purpose.  They had reached the place where they fixedly doubted that Society had any use for their abilities.  I think if you had been aware of their great negativism you might have taken another view of my ‘propaganda.’  To love another, genuinely to love, is the inception of a function, I wished to say.  I suppose I didn’t quite make it convincingly.”

This is beautiful.  We should have had more of Bellow’s criticism as he laid it out in these letters, the novelist talking about the novel.  Instead, unfortunately, what we got is, “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?”

In the same issue, Hilton Als has a feature about Tyler Perry.  He compares Perry’s Madea films in passing to movies about white men and women in similar situations, living it up in the single life but ultimately deciding it’s better to settle down and get married.  “The heroes of Perry’s movies bear no resemblance to the young white men in search of a sense of purpose in the comedies of, say, Judd Apatow or Adam Sandler. . . .  The white-boy comedies of the past two decades are about the grating, strained emo charm of never growing up, while Perry’s films are about the necessity of growing up in a largely segregated world.”  Als might have added Kevin Smith to that list without detracting from its accuracy—or, for that matter, Craig Brewer.  Perry also seems to be a data point for Ehrenreich’s account of the prosperity gospel: “[S]peaking of his sixteen-thousand-square-foot mansion, which he named Avec Chateau, Perry said, ‘. . . I realized this house was a testament to my religious faith.”  (A video about Perry, narrated by Hilton Als, is here.)

On politics: Last week TPM Café’s Book Club discussed Jeff Shesol’s book on FDR’s attempt to “pack” the Supreme Court with justices who would not overturn the New Deal, by adding to the size of the court.  The spring issue of Democracy Journal has a series of responses by various liberal and progressive thinkers and writers to the question where liberalism is today, a little over a year after Barack Obama’s inauguration.  John Quiggin, an Australian professor of economics who I read at Crooked Timber, has been raising similar questions here, here, and here.  Quiggin says, “Practitioners of this kind of managerialist quasi-social democracy have found themselves unable to handle the challenge posed by the irrationalist right . . .”  By “social democracy” he means, more or less, welfare-state liberalism.  I don’t see much difference at the moment between that kind of center-left liberalism and what in America is usually called “neoliberal.”  (That is, I don’t see neoliberalism as a center-right position, or equivalent to “classical liberalism.)  We are all neoliberals now, but pretending the managerialists are the same as the irrationalist right—as I think John Quiggin might like to do—is a waste of time.

Finally, Stephen Holden reviews Stephen Sondheim’s career to date, while discussing the new revue, Sondheim on Sondheim:

“In this revue’s videotaped interviews, Mr. Sondheim goes out of his way to praise Hammerstein for teaching him the craft of writing lyrics. But if you compare the two, the inescapable fact emerges that Mr. Sondheim’s lyrics programmatically repudiate his mentor’s optimistic, inspirational ideology.

“. . .

“For all his songs’ universality, the Sondheim philosophy is specific and exclusive. Directed toward his own class — an urbane, well-educated, culturally cosmopolitan gentry — his lyrics define what might be called the Manhattan sensibility: humanist, proudly intellectual, psychologically sophisticated, hyper-articulate, liberal, Jewish and disenchanted.”

I’ve actually finished reading Bright-Sided and will post my notes slowly, as I clean them up and copy over some of them from my spiral notebook.  Non-magazine reading currently includes The Happiest Toddler on the Block.  I’ve also just gotten Michael Bérubé’s book on the campus culture wars, What’s Liberal about the Liberal Arts, from interlibrary loan.  Other than the fact that the plastic-enclosed jacket is unfortunately quite shiny, unread looking, and toddler-attractive, all I can say of it so far is that Professor Bérubé’s published prose style is quite a bit more staid than his blogging style.

Brief Links

Matt Bucher has a facsimile of a marked-up student paper from one of the undergraduate classes David Foster Wallace taught in the late 1990s.  I learned something about both Cormac McCarthy and Frederic Jameson, but by the second or third page, the sight of the man’s handwriting was heartbreaking.

An excerpt from Elif Batuman’s memoir (h/t Language Log): She hated creative writing because it involved craft.  This is very strange.  She says herself that what she disliked about it is the focus on making something and perfecting it (not just on what’s often referred to as “narrow technique”).  I have never heard any literary person (much less a would-be novelist) disparage the relationship between an artist and their work in that way.  What are they teaching at Harvard nowadays?

Matthew Yglesias says Fight Club is a critique of a masculinity that’s hypertrophied to such an extent that it becomes mental illness, by way of more or less empathetically depicting people who have in fact veered into such mental illness.  Maybe.  Interpreting Fight Club as a critique depends on interpreting the (unnamed) Edward Norton character as the moral center of the film; which makes sense, as although the character is kind of a cipher, it is with him that we both begin and end the story.  On the other hand, there’s some reason to view the plot in psychohistorical terms, with Brad Pitt’s sociopathic leader Tyler Durden as merely an element of the Norton character’s psyche, in which case Yglesias’s interpretation kind of falls apart.  Then the film begins to look like a mostly sympathetic representation of Durden and his plan to (among other things) get everyone’s debts forgiven by blowing up the banks, from the point of view of a man who admires Durden but doesn’t have the guts to decide to follow him, just as Durden himself claims.  There’s nothing in the film that explicitly says all this is immoral—only the Norton character’s queasiness, which seems to be the same as the viewer’s.

The New Republic has moved a March 17 article I hadn’t seen, mentioning Bright-Sided, to the top of its online version.  The article, tagged “Marcus Aurelius, life coach,” is actually a review of books on Stoicism.  I’d recommend Martha C. Nussbaum’s Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions for those who’d like a densely written and long-winded account of the Stoic philosophy.

Today’s New York Times has a graphic illustrating recent wargaming at the Brookings Institution of a possible sneak attack by Israel against Iranian nuclear sites.  The write-up is by Kenneth Pollack, whose similar wargaming about Iraq was covered by the Atlantic Monthly a few years ago.

Also in the Times, the Museum of Modern Art announced its acquisition of the @ sign.  From now on, presumably, art books wishing to include representations of the symbol will need to obtain permissions.  They ought to be free, given that MOMA paid nothing for the right to control them, but can MOMA hold up publication of works they deem to interpret the symbol wrongly?

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.

Miscellaneous Friday

Angels and Mullets

How can anybody resist the word mullet?  I wouldn’t say mullet is one of my favorite words, in the sense meant in this thread on Language Log.  I don’t think saying “mullet” is a pleasure in itself, or hearing “mullet.”  It’s the idea that I think is fascinating, with all the cloud of connotations and historical references and visualized images that follow in its trail.  I first saw a mullet, I think (at least as a distinct look, up close), in 1984, as a freshman in college, on an engineering student from one of the more distant villages of Queens County, and first heard the word about fifteen years later.  In between, I’d seen lots and lots of them.  I really didn’t know there was such a word.  By way of pointing to Christopher Orr’s review of Angels and Demons as a film about a haircut:

Robert Langdon, has returned, but without the mullet, which in the interim evidently detached itself from his scalp, crawled off to some dark corner, and grew up to be Danny McBride.

Orr says the film has been “lightly reworked.”

The Producers is being produced in Berlin.

Despite coverage of the show in local newspapers, not all Berliners have been clued in to its comic nature, Bech said. City police have received a number of complaints about posters for the production, which “provoked associations with the Nazis” despite the fact that swastikas have been replaced with images of pretzels in order to conform to German law. (Swastikas can be used onstage as part of an “artistic statement,” Bech said, but not as part of the show’s promotional materials.) 

Here's the poster, complete with pretzels.

Every so often, Michael Bérubé

. . . finds himself witnessing . . .

. . . or sometimes actually taking part in, exchanges that go like this:

First Person: Hey, what do you think of this proposal?

Second Person: Excuse me, but I wasn’t consulted about this.

First Person: Beg pardon?

Second Person: I wasn’t consulted about this.

First Person: Um . . . but that’s why I’m asking what you think.  I’m consulting you.  This is the consultation right now.

Second Person: I can’t believe you went ahead and did this without asking for anybody’s input.  I really think we need to talk.

First Person: ??

And no, I am never the Second Person.  When people ask me what I think about X, I simply say “kewl” or “meh” or “ZOMG” or “do not want” or some other Internets locution. 

Breaking and Entering

The other day I watched Breaking and Entering, one of the last films that Anthony Minghella directed.  It got pretty bad reviews among Netflix viewers but it sounded interesting, and I guess it was, but I’m not really sure whether I liked it or not.

It is fairly easy to see why movies that seem “interesting” while you’re watching them can trigger negative reactions with some viewers.  I don’t think it’s only that such viewers dislike these kinds of films, and that they’re translating the thought “I don’t like this kind of movie” into the language “Nobody will like this kind of movie: it’s a bad movie.”  Interesting means something most filmmakers don’t automatically do, and movies that try very hard to be interesting often fail.  These readers are probably accurately picking up on things that promised something interesting and ultimately fell short, elements in the film that weren’t persuasive about the new information they tried to communicate.

Usually the main problem seems to be the dialogue.  It’s stilted, or else it’s overly metaphorical.  It has nothing to do with the plot.  It may not make sense as normal, conversational human verbal behavior, or even as any recognizable form of in-group banter.  At times the actors are very evidently uncomfortable with it.  Occasionally you suspect that what you’re seeing is the least interesting parts of the script, and that what otherwise would have been significant scenes were relegated to the cutting room floor.  Which does no good to a plot that may be teetering on the edge of coherence anyway.

But there’s no such thing as a perfect movie.  It’s still not obvious why this problem generates more hostility than others might. I don’t know the answer.

Anyway, the plot is still there, but what is the story about, really?  The main character is an English architect, played by Jude Law, still young but getting close to middle age, often enough tempted to stray from his beautiful wife but never yet having done so.  He is very nearly the only thoroughly English character in the film.  His wife is Swedish though her father was American and she attended college here.  His partner (Jim from the English version of The Office) is apparently Jewish.  Their subordinates are Asian (and only one, that I recall, is male).  The criminal gang with which his apparently perfect life becomes tangled up is composed of refugees from Bosnia.  The only other English character is the gruff but not uncompassionate police detective.

The Dickensian situation Law finds himself him in uncovers the reality of how the other half live.  Or maybe opens a somewhat cold (typically English?) professional to the possibility of compassion.  Or something.

In the dénouement, he saves a Bosnian teenager—who has twice burglarized his office—from the prison sentence that ought to be his fate.  Instead, the boy gets to return to Sarajevo with his Muslim mother, and escapes the bad influence imposed by his father’s Serbian relatives.  (Though his uncle runs a crime ring, his father had been a doctor and died because he stayed behind to care for victims of the war.  His mother, now a very busy seamstress for rich people, used to play Bach on the piano before the smallness of her apartment required her to give it up.  These are utterly gorgeous housing projects by American standards, incidentally.)  To do this, he bravely announces, publicly, that he has had “an inappropriate relationship” with the boy’s mother.  That part is true.  He goes on, though, to fabricate an intimate and long-lived relationship with the pair of them, in which he had employed the mother for years, and (together with his partner, who’s inclined to be a bit more vindictive) had offered extensive career counseling to the son.  Thus, he knows the boy ought not to get caught up in “the system,” that he ought to be let go, and given a second chance.

So this pure person saves two lives by telling a lie.  But it’s strange how their lives are saved.  The good Bosnians go back to Bosnia and get away from the privileged Brits who exploit them at low pay; the Muslims get away from the Serbs who tempt them into a life of crime.  How is this so different from the ethnic cleansing that had them fleeing to London in the first place?  (The violence is missing, of course, and that’s not nothing.)

And there is a shadow tale that’s the more traditional ending for an English story like this one.  London, that most urban of cities, corrupts outsiders who aren’t prepared to deal with it safely.  It seems Law is permitting a young man to live a more normal life—which he may be—and to finish school, and also rescuing a sensitive middle-class woman from life in a tiny mews apartment strewn with the suit jackets and party dresses of strangers. But distant as the Dalmatian coast of Bosnia may seem, it is not the bucolic English countryside, much less Eden.  And the architect who plans to beautify dismal Kings Cross with greenery is a very good liar.

Is this coherent?  I don’t know, but I felt I was missing something important by not being English.  All of this occurred to me days after I’d watched the thing.  Emotionally, at the end of the film, I felt the story was about this Englishman and his discovery that there is an other half out there at all.  But, if so, so what?  It’s a typical story of discovery, a typical plot for this quiet little kind of film.  If that’s not enough, I do think it’s a failure of execution on the director’s part.