Bianca Steele

Columbia in the 1980s

From Ginia Bellafante's Big City column in the New York Times yesterday:

If you spent any time in Manhattan during the 1980s, particularly on the Upper West Side, you are likely to recall a recurrent vignette of dissent — the presence of a thin, wiry woman with hair that made emphatic her seriousness, who colonized the sidewalks in what appeared to be a full-time avocation as a crusader against pornography and other forms of sexual degradation. To make her point, she would often have with her a blowup of a notorious Hustler cover that featured an image of a woman who had been plunged headfirst into a meat grinder. Her approach was hardly solicitous; she demanded of those who passed by, “Sign the petition!”

Even then, among my circle of largely earnest college friends in Morningside Heights during the high point of women’s studies, the phrase “sign the petition” became its own circulating laugh line. By the ’80s, and certainly culminating in the ’90s, many young feminists had abandoned the idea that what we really needed to worry about was the violent enmity that men harbored to one degree or another toward women. Misogyny as a conceptual framework through which to view the world was distinctly out of vogue.

Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace

I’d been putting off buying Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, D.T. Max’s biography of the recently late David Foster Wallace.  But also I was nearly obsessively returning to the Amazon page to reconsider it.  Eventually, needing something nonfiction to read, I gave in.  At one point, I’d seek out and read anything Wallace wrote, but eventually gave that up—the nonfiction first, a lot of which I haven’t read (in this, I’m the opposite of many of Wallace’s fans, especially among journalists, who really adore the nonfiction, and especially the pieces I tend to like least), and eventually the fiction, too—Oblivion doesn’t fall into the category of books I’m going to borrow from the library enough times that I really ought to buy them[1], though actually there are only three stories in the collection that I don’t already have in magazine form.  I’d gone through the same nearly obsessive process with The Pale King, which, similarly, I eventually broke down and read.

It’s not too surprising that the biography itself raises the question whether it really needed to be published, and whether anyone really needs to read it.  The book ends with what for many readers, most probably, will be the starting point from which they decided to pick it up: Wallace’s suicide and what led up to it; and what he had in mind for The Pale King, the unpublished and uncompleted manuscript that would be his final novel.  Most of this material appeared already in Max’s 2009 New Yorker piece. 

The penultimate and antepenultimate chapters, similarly, cover material that is already somewhat familiar to many readers: Wallace’s publications after his blockbuster (in literary terms), Infinite Jest, and the editing process and publicity tour for that novel.  Max actually has little to say about the many stories and magazine articles Wallace wrote after Infinite Jest.  The origin of the Harper’s pieces, which it’s known were much longer in manuscript—and as later published in collection—than as printed in the magazine, if they ever appeared at all—is described; but the editing process is not.  The origin of Wallace’s Dostoevsky piece, a review of a biography by Joseph Frank, is dealt with in some detail, but not the fact that it never appeared in print in any magazine (nor the rumors that it was included in a galley version of Wallace’s first nonfiction collection, which appeared in 1997, and circulated in quasi-samizdat form among some insider fans, but was removed before that book went to press—in fact, no rumors at all of this kind make an appearance in this book[2]).  It’s with the publication of Infinite Jest that the “accepted” biography of David Foster Wallace begins.  As far as what comes after that goes, we know all this, or think we do, and there’s not much a biographer can add.  Max recounts a lot of correspondence between author and agent, or agent and editor, all of it pretty much the same as all the rest.

Wallace’s worldview was pretty much set by that point.  What’s more interesting, or was for me, at any rate (and maybe also for the biographer, who counts The Broom of the System, written while Wallace was still in college and published before he got his MFA, as his favorite book), is what comes before.  Max devotes lots of space to the genesis of Wallace’s early stories and nonfiction articles, and to the interactions with university programs and fellow writers they grew out of, as well as to (in passing) debunking certain myths.

Maybe we really didn’t need to know these things, and so didn’t really need a biography of David Foster Wallace.  His life isn’t really history; it took place very recently, so a book about him is inevitably going to fall into the category of journalism, even of publicity hype.  Looking at it feels a little prurient, like wanting to satisfy our curiosity about any individual person, who deserves their privacy.  We don’t have to satisfy our curiosity about where the novelists writing now are coming from, what they studied at school, who mentored them, or what obstacles they encountered, any more than about their political ideas or whether they consumed illegal substances.  But then again, we really don’t need novels, either.

As far as David Foster Wallace’s early life, influences, and development go, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story is a good, basic biography that gives you all the facts (for the most part).  Wallace was born in New York State and moved to rural Illinois as a small child.  He grew up in a university town and attended public high schools where only some of the students were, like him, faculty kids.  He played competitive tennis.  He watched a lot of TV.  He read a lot.  He drank and smoked pot.  His father, a philosophy professor[3], taught him about philosophy.  He had a complicated relationship with his younger sister, his only sibling.  His mother, a teacher of college composition, really was very insistent on good grammar, and really did cough at the dinner table every time one of her children made a grammatical mistake.  He really did go to Amherst College, and considered going to Oberlin (viz. The Broom of the System, in which a girl rejects Amherst’s sister college for Oberlin after visiting her elder sister there).  He really was in recovery.  He was really hospitalized for depression.  He did take a dual summa in English literature and philosophy.  He did know Mary Karr and Elizabeth Wurtzel.  He went to Yaddo twice.  “E Unibus Pluram” was commissioned by Harper’s but not published by them.  He wrote a good number of book reviews early in his career.  Etc. 

There’s some attempt to place David Foster Wallace as a writer, but Max isn’t a literary critic, and there’s blessedly not too much of it.  There’s no attempt to diagnose him or to subject him to commentary.  Only once does the biographer allow himself to wonder whether a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, rather than depression—which would have necessitated, presumably, a drug different from the Nardil he was prescribed—had been called for, and the question whether Wallace was in therapy for most of his adult life, and if not, how he was getting his prescriptions refilled, is not considered.  The book is sympathetic to the twelve-step movement, in a vague kind of way, and respectful of Wallace’s and his friends’ privacy.

The genesis and development of each of the stories that went into Girl With Curious Hair is described to a significant level of detail.  So is the kind of work that was expected at Amherst and at the University of Arizona.  The classes Wallace took at both places are described, and the kind of work Wallace turned in for them.  His struggles with the curriculum, when it pulled against his intuitions, is described, as well.  Every one of his emotional collapses (as an earlier age would have termed them) is narrated, in its genesis, phemonenology, and eventual resolution.  All of this leads up to the completion of the magnum opus, Infinite Jest, and the apotheosis (whatever his feelings about it) of David Foster Wallace as a teaching writer, albeit an occasionally blocked one, with complex feelings about that blockedness.

Where the book is also useful is in debunking (assuming you think that kind of thing is necessary, or desirable) some of the rumors that swirled around Wallace’s persona—what he called “the statue”—while he was alive.

The “standard, accepted” biography of David Foster Wallace during the time of his greatest fame included the following “facts”: that he had never held a teaching job until after around the time Infinite Jest was published, that everything he wrote about AA was based on research and he was not himself in recovery, that he was a cradle Catholic; that the manuscript of The Broom of the System was accepted at Amherst as a thesis in the department of philosophy, as a text about Ludwig Wittgenstein.  Max’s biography shows all these “facts” to be, in fact, false, and it’s helpful for other areas, too, that simply were never very clear.  On the other hand, other questions, such as the pseudonyms mentioned above, aren’t addressed at all.

On the literary side, the following additional facts, I think, were generally largely accepted: that Wallace’s understanding of literary theory (Derrida, De Man, and so on) was one that had been inculcated in him in the standard undergraduate English literature sequence (and not in philosophy classes, which tend to take a different tack); that he had rejected philosophy for literature and that, if he hadn’t done so, he had certainly rejected technical formal logic and Anglo-American analysis in favor of a more literary and subjective philosophical style; that the beliefs held by the faculty of the University of Arizona writing program were his own (in fact he disagreed with them vehemently and was somewhat miserable there); that the best parts of his early published fiction were written by an author who despised Mark Leyner (in fact, he was a fan, and only turned against Leyner’s kind of writing a bit later).  Some might feel that knowing whether these “facts” were true or false is important for understanding what Wallace wrote.  To my mind, Max’s biography casts them in doubt (even for readers who didn’t already doubt them, as a consequence of having read the texts themselves).   To be fair, Wallace did change his mind (or at least nuance it) about, especially, the purpose of fiction and the best way of writing it; but it is not obvious that he made a complete about-face and came to fully embrace the writing preferred by the MFA program that he attended.  And to my mind, it’s an important fact that for Wallace, unlike many of his peers who came out of English-literature programs, De Man belonged to philosophy and not to literature.

It would be too much to say that this book is going to give ambivalent (or even mourning) readers closure about Wallace and the manner of his death.  It did help me come to grips with the earlier stories, again, after I’d become frustrated with his later ones and with the way he’d become given to speaking about them.  It helped me better appreciate The Broom of the System, which never was one of my favorites.  And it helped to explain why there were parts even of his best work—Infinite Jest and Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, in particular—that eventually came to rub me the wrong way, and why the parts I liked best were so often the parts that Wallace himself seemed to disown.

 

[1] Now that I have an e-book reader, though, the criterion has moved from “don’t really really have to have it, but am about to borrow for the third time,” to “would consider borrowing again just for reference, because it looks pretty interesting.”

[2] This is reasonable, actually.  The book is about the writer, not about his readers.  But all except the bare facts of the publication histories of many of the stories that would be collected in Oblivion is excluded here.  And even that’s an exaggeration, unless the fact that some of them appeared under pseudonyms is excluded from the category of “bare fact.”  For instance, “Mr. Squishy,” one of the best stories in the collection, first appeared as the work of “Elizabeth Klemm,” but the name “Klemm,” like the words “pen name” and “pseudonym,” appear nowhere in the book.

[3] If it were my book, I’d have mentioned the fact that one of James D. Wallace’s books (on open stacks in the Boston Public Library in Copley Square) is about the philosophical implications of fiction.  Maybe also the fact that another of his books is on virtue ethics. But it’s not.

There lay he, stretched along, like a wounded knight.

Joan Wickersham op-ed in Globe last Saturday, on grammar:

But before you go lie down, you’ll need to lay down your fork. “To lie,” means “to recline”; “to lay” means “to place or put.”

That’s pretty straightforward, assuming that this is all happening right now. But suppose it happened yesterday? Suppose that yesterday you ate a lot, and then you got rid of your fork and then reclined? It would be correct to write, “Yesterday I laid down my fork and then I lay down.”

So can we say that if you recline today it’s “lie,” and if you reclined yesterday it’s “lay”? Not exactly. Suppose you want to say that yesterday at your grandmother’s you ate a lot and then made a decision to go and recline? It happened in the past, and yet the correct way to say it is, “I decided to lie down.”

Why?

Because “lay” is the simple past tense of the verb “lie,” but in the sentence “I decided to lie down,” “to lie” is the infinitive form of the verb, which here functions as the object of the simple-past-tense verb “decided.” That’s why.

She’s right, of course. 

On the other hand, I cannot actually bring myself to use the past tense of “to lie down,” in any situation where I feel required to use it correctly.  In a blog post, I’ll instead write something like “decide to lie down,” rather than write “lay down,” which seems stilted and actually a little bizarre.  In an IM I will probably write “laid,” though occasionally I get self-conscious about this and write “lay.”

I’m always pleased when I'm reading a children’s book to my daughter and it uses the word “lay” correctly, especially when it’s also used elegantly.  That doesn’t happen very often.  (Most American picture books, in particular, seem wedded to the idea of the casual.) 

What does get on my nerves is the use of “as” for “while.”  This doesn’t seem grammatical in the slightest; and maybe it’s colloquial somewhere, but I’ve never heard it in speech, any more than I’ve seen it in print.  I suppose it’s easier for a child to read than “while” is, and it’s probably more likely to be on basic word lists.  But what it feels is like a reactive attempt to avoid either “like” (which doesn’t actually fit anyway), or the whole controversy over the proper use of words like “since” (which doesn’t fit either but at least is close).

Freude! Freude!: On not-reviewing the new Die Hard movie.

I may or may not get around to seeing the new Die Hard movie—I saw the last one, but I think I missed the third—but I thought it was interesting that two different movie critics decided to write about it without actually really reviewing it.  In Slate, Eric Lichtenfeld writes about the tag line, instead, and at the Tor blog, Ryan Britt publishes a predictive review he wrote before he actually saw the actual film, with notes interspersed showing what he’d gotten wrong.

I had already thought about reviewing the trailer.  (This is the version I saw in the movie theater.  There are others, but it looks like they all use the same music, in one form or another.)  Because it’s a really good trailer.  And it’s good in part for the reasons Lichtenfeld gives, for why the tag line is so memorable.  Or rather, if the tag line (you know, “Yippee-ki-yay, m-f-”—I think only the first part in fact appears in the trailer) weren’t so memorable, the trailer wouldn’t work as well as it does.  The tag line, as it appears in the trailer, is the moment of recognition, the moment when the viewer realizes that this is a trailer for a new Die Hard.  (Which is exciting, for reasons explored in the Lichtenfeld and Britt pieces, even though the viewer also knows it’s not likely a new Die Hard is necessary, or that it’s any good.)

What I liked was the way the music parallels that moment of recognition.  If your knowledge of classical music is at about the same level as mine, so that you’re familiar with a lot of great works but on intimate terms with at most a few of them, you knew from the opening bars of the trailer’s score that you knew this music from somewhere, but you couldn’t quite place it. It’s pretty good, though.  Then you see Bruce Willis, and you begin to wonder, but you’re still not sure.  Then he pumps a semi-automatic and says “Yippee-ki-yay,” and you’re certain.  And the score hits full bloom with the Ode to Joy, backgrounding the facades of majestic old European buildings, and you remember that Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was the hallmark of the Die Hard movies, and you know exactly where you are. 

Why the Ninth was chosen for this movie is something that escapes you, as it happens.  This is the point at which you start to question the whole lingering Cold War theme of the new sequel, and your questioning casts a shadow back to your enjoyment of the earlier one, such as it was (you were never really a fan of helicopter chases).  Of course the question, “Is this really a hero for our time?”, was one that was proposed already by the previous sequel, in which McClane’s daughter begins to take over for him, and Justin Long’s nerdy guy teaches him about cyberwar.  And so why is McClane’s son not only CIA, but CIA in Russia?  Is the answer that we actually do still need McClane, unreconstructed?  One hopes not.

Anyway, about a week ago I heard a really good recording of the Ninth, the Berlin Symphony conducted by Claudio Abbado, with a big tympani sound, real stringy strings, and a big, Russian-sounding men’s chorus.  We’ve gotten used, I think, to the sound of Bernstein at the Brandenburg Gate, heavy on the joy, light on Romantic drama, the Sturm und the Drang.  I like the Abbado better than the recording of the Ninth I already have, Dohnanyi and the Cleveland Symphony. 

Morozov v. Johnson

In the past I’ve found it hard to follow the internal arguments about whether “faith in the Internet” has been somehow inflated.  Besides reviews in magazines, there was Tom Slee’s three-part discussion of Evgeny Morozov’s attempted takedown of enthusiasts, The Net Delusion.  More recently, Morozov wrote a scathing review of Steven Johnson’s book, Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age.  Johnson replied, and Morozov replied to the reply: Johnson “doesn’t understand my critique.”  I don’t think Morozov shows anything of the kind.  What he shows is that Johnson doesn’t accept the assumptions that Evgeny Morozov claims underlie Johnson’s own argument.  Johnson and others describe a more or less loose collection of progressive tendencies that can be enabled either by the Internet or by institutions that are like the Internet in certain relevant ways: he describes what those ways are.  But that isn’t enough for Evgeny Morozov.   He wants to push the idea that there’s a thing called “Internet-centrism,” a real thing, the nature and so on of which he thinks people ought to understand before they dare to talk about its effects publicly.  Yet he himself can’t or won’t explain what he means by it.  Equally, he can’t or won’t find any public, human representative of it who accepts the label for himself.  He uses the word “Internet-centric” like the name of a disease; you wouldn’t expect a sociopath to accept the label for himself, either. 

Some questions about why Morozov comes down so hard on Johnson:

Does Morozov really think Johnson should not have been allowed to write a popular, journalistic book about a contemporary social trend without having first written a Ph.D. dissertation on all the college professors who had imagined and written about the characteristics of not-yet existing social trends, in articles they expected only other college professors to read?  Presumably he would have had to incorporate the dissertation directly into each of his books, as well, or Morozov and other reviewers would have no way of telling whether he’d “done his homework” (in Morozov’s words), or not.

Does Morozov really think it’s unreasonable to write a book on the Internet as a tool, without examining other tools in the same book, and presumably allowing those other tools to come out ahead a proportional number of times?  Does he really think it’s irrational for Johnson to “start with his preferred solution—the ‘Internet’” (what’s with those scare quotes, by the way?), as if the Internet didn’t exist yet and Johnson were proposing it to readers as something they might want to ask their governments to produce?  Someone writes a book that says, “Here’s this great new tool, here are some progressive ways to use it,” and Morozov replies, “Why do you think progressive ways to use this tool will arise without any thought?  Why are you looking at this tool at all?  And ‘great new tool’ is a ridiculously utopian turn of phrase.”

It’s possible to wish someone’s books were a little deeper (why I’ve never gotten around to reading Johnson’s books, or other popular “progressive” books, like Chris Mooney’s, or Chris Hayes’s), and to wish there were a little more available at a level between the absolutely journalistic, book that’s really an article with a lot of filler, and the academic journal article available only to college professors on campuses with enough money in their budgets to spring for free access for everyone to the best academic publishers, without needing to jump to attack an author for not being what he’s not.  This is not going to get us better books.  It’s not going to instigate people like Steve Johnson to “step up his game,” in Evgeny Morozov’s opinion.  It’s going to do the opposite: intimidate writers and suggest they ought to lower their sights, lest they be accused, by the likes of Morozov, of pretending to know what they can’t.

P.S.: I didn’t look up his bio until after I had written the above: Evgeny Morozov is not, as I had assumed from his articles, a grumpy Soviet-trained engineer in his late fifties.  He was born in the same year that I graduated from high school, and graduated from Stanford.  Should that change what I think about what he says?  (Certainly, if his ideas about a thing that exists and is called “Internet-centrism” derive from what he learned from studying cutting-edge research in one of the best universities in the world, that’s very different from whether his ideas about it derive from a half-remembered compulsory study of historical materialism, combined with after-hours bull sessions with fellow engineers on Usenet.)

January Movies

Moneyball: Manager of a baseball team, with limited budget, puts together a winning team by focusing not on a player’s ability to play the whole game, but on his ability to do one thing well—get results in a way that counts—all worked out by computers.  Not bad, though I can’t say I cared about it much.  It’s based on a book by Michael Lewis, but obviously had to be stripped down to a single story.  It wasn’t so obvious that a “composite” character, a very young stats expert who’d been educated in Yale’s economics department, had to be made up for Jonah Hill.  The human interest becomes aging . . . or maybe specifically aging in a very youth-oriented career like baseball, where everybody except the very best hits a point where he just can’t keep up, and the very best get old eventually . . . or maybe overcoming the bias in nature and society against aging (like other defects) through science and careful management . . . or something.  At one point the script was in the hands of Aaron Sorkin, and it shows in the main character’s sense of victimhood, especially at the beginning, and in the way getting sports right is made to stand in for beating all the forces of economic injustice and stupidity.

Sorkin really ought to be left to be an auteur, and to direct his own writing.  I can’t say I loved Studio 60 or The Newsroom (the first episode, which I saw when it had been put up for free online), but they were better than the commercial hash that’s been made of the script he started with here.

Crazy, Stupid, Love: A fine comedy, not quite a date movie (the main characters are too old, and it’s mostly too depressing).  When it works, it’s good, but it doesn’t quite work, kind of a lot of the time.  The first part of the movie is too invested in the idea that the Steve Carell character is a schlub (at most he’s ordinary), and in what it would take to make him into a womanizer with exquisite taste (a kind of taste that would only work in a few cities on either Coast), for the inevitable reversal towards the end of the movie to be reasonable.  It’s not entirely “realistic,” as opposed to “poetic,” in the sense that a lot of mileage is gotten out of scenes like a guy standing in the rain, staring into space, for minutes at the time, with no discussion or explanation later of what he was thinking about.  A different kind of movie would talk it to death.

I was disturbed a few days after I saw Crazy, Stupid, Love, when I saw what I thought was a picture of Emma Stone, the ingénue of the picture, and it turned out to be Kate Middleton.  Whether you think that’s weird will probably depend on whether or not you think Ryan Gosling looks a little like Prince William. Why would anyone do that intentionally?  I have no idea.

Jared Diamond and Writing about Book-Length Nonfiction

At the academic anthropology blog, Savage Minds, this post, the first in a series, on Jared Diamond’s most recent book, is a nice example of how to write about complete books on the Internet, especially when you’ve got too much to say.  A lot of times I end up abandoning a piece, especially about a nonfiction book, because I’m not sure how to approach it.  In part, I worry about sounding too critical and writing a piece that ends up offputting.  In part, I think, my model for what writing about books should be has become something like Andrew Seal’s Blographia Literaria.  Seal, and the bloggers who wrote like him, always set each book in context with finality and authority, indicating its proper place in a larger discourse, apparently certain that they knew what was expected in the best literature-discussion circles.  But even if I felt competent to do the same, which I don’t, it wouldn’t really get at what I wanted to say about my reading.

Antiprise and the Internet

(What’s antiprise?  It’s the opposite of expertise.)

If you’ve been on the Internet in the last couple of weeks, you’ve probably run across playwright David Mamet’s weird screed against gun control and Obama.  Now Andrew Sullivan (late of England’s blessed shores) has weighed in (via LGM and Ta-Nahesi Coates).  As Coates notes, Sullivan presents himself as the Voice of Reason as usual.  He characterizes Mamet’s blather quite correctly: “This is a sentence only a teenage anarchist could write.”  Harsh.

And yet Andrew Sullivan goes on to write nearly 650 words, plus a graph that he apparently has spent the time to work out himself (though maybe he’s had his research assistant do it for him), explaining the actual data that would have to be used in order to support Mamet’s factual claims, and explaining how they actually show Mamet’s factual claims are false rather than true.

So I guess Mamet’s essay wasn’t such a waste of dead trees after all.  It’s served an educational function of its own.  And maybe Sullivan’s attack on Mamet, accusing him of being as sheltered and ignorant as “a teenage anarchist,” isn’t as harsh as it seemed at my first, superficial glance.  Maybe it wasn’t an “attack” at all.  A more charitable reading, one that takes Mamet’s importance in the world of thought into account (and the fact that they're both largely on the same side, politically, and neither gains from making the other really look bad), is that Sullivan is recognizing the fact that obviously Mamet was really covertly dramatizing the thought processes of “a teenage anarchist” with whom he obviously disagrees.  Thus, Sullivan is telling readers what Mamet really intended to convey by the piece: “This is a sentence only a teenage anarchist could write.”  Mamet’s piece is clearly the product of an author who believes the opposite of what he says in the Newsweek piece.  He’s just engaging in division of labor.  The American Prospect is right: Mamet isn’t a political analyst.  What he is, clearly, is a prophet.  He’s harsh, scolding, and factually incorrect so that responsible journalists can be bland and informative.  But he’s the prophet and he gets to claim the moral high ground.

Apparently, the information economy of the Internet is that prophets propose, and crowdsource to bloggers to dispose.

(Irony off.)

Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree: The Year of the Gadfly

This novel, by Jennifer Miller, got a few minor mentions in major media outlets, but I picked it up because it had been placed on the top of the New Books shelves at the local library.  It’s a fun little first novel about the high school years, by a woman who also has a journalistic book under her belt, and has master’s degrees in both journalism and fiction writing. 

The main story follows Iris Dupont, a high school freshman from Boston and a budding journalist, who’s been moved from Boston by her parents, to a small town just east of the Berkshires, to attend the local exclusive private day school, after they find her having a conversation with Edward R. Murrow in her room (he’s not visible to them, of course, being quite dead).  They take this to be a symptom of impending depression after the suicide of her best friend.

The Duponts end up living in the house of a former headmaster of the school, and the rest of the novel revolves around the aptly named Lily Morgan, the headmaster’s daughter and an albino.  (One of the few false notes in this very status-conscious novel—think of a condensed, significantly more fun version of Prep—has Lily’s classmates shunning her because of her physical appearance and social awkwardness, instead of sucking up.)  Eventually Iris begins to investigate Lily’s life, through the intermediary of her extremely unconventional biology teacher, Jonah Kaplan.  Jonah’s twin brother, Justin, was Lily’s boyfriend, and he died under mysterious circumstances.  Lily becomes obsessed with Jonah, and equally obsessed with writing a sensational exposé about a secret society called Prisom’s Party,which claims to bully people in the name of justice and truth, and in the name of exposing the hypocrisies of the Community Code, the student honor system.

For the most part the characters, except for Iris and Lily, are types, but most of them are portrayed sympathetically.  Iris is maybe a little too cynical and distanced to be the primary narrator and for the reader to accept her thoughts as an authoritative way of understanding the events of the book.  The way she automatically judges everybody and everything comes from a place of disconnectedness and isn’t believable in a character who's very nearly an adult (even Harriet the Spy must have grown up a little bit by fourteen).  The Kaplan twins, too, as depicted, seem excessively negative.  We see only a small proportion of their lives, missing almost all their classes, their family lives, and their hobbies.  Just a little of this might have pulled the novel off-track, but it also might have removed the sense that the author her thumb on the scale in favor of characters who really aren't worth it.

The novel is built up journalistically, by accumulating examples.  There are multiple instances, for example, of bullying or emotional violence; of secret societies and social cliques; of references to dark works of fiction like 1984 and The Dead Poets Society; of outside events like Columbine and the rise of the Internet (and 9/11, implicitly, given the dates).  While the teenaged characters discuss what they think of these and in what ways they’re a comment on adult society, there’s no authorial attempt to tie them together or to think about them.  All the scandals could have occurred in a pre-Facebook, pre-Photoshop world, in a private or a public school, among the wealthy or the working class.  None of them requires the secret-society, honor-code, popular-kid culture in which the story happens to be set, or for that matter the heavily emphasized contrast between scientific and humanistic manners of thought.  This is just the milieu in which the author, knowing it well, has decided to place her young characters.  Kids are cruel, she implies, and will find any opportunity that presents itself to exercise their vices.  Rumination about larger topics is almost rigorously excluded, presumably on the principle of “show, don’t tell.”  Unfortunately, the effect is to make the novel a bit YA-ish, while still too linguistically difficult for the majority of teenagers, who probably need a little more guidance in following the story and figuring out its emotional and moral resonance.  It’s not atypical of “genre” novels—science fiction or murder mysteries—but actually there’s no genre called “literary coming of age novel (directed toward non-literary readers).”

There is, however—almost—a genre called “hipster literary  Brooklyn twenty-something,” and that’s where The Year of the Gadfly falls.  It’s a bit Girls meets The Hour (Jonah Kaplan, the novel’s most important male character, is introduced as looking quite a lot like Ben Whishaw with red hair) meets Foucault’s Pendulum (there’s a bit of Atonement in there, too, I think).  The important characters are either high school students or underemployed recent graduates who’ve returned, quite literally in this instance, “to the scene of the crime,” the town where they grew up and the friends they had while living with their parents.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.  But attempts to figure out the moral and political point of view of the characters—and there must be one, in a novel so fixated on unrespectable behavior, nonconformity, corruption in high places, and even democratic action of a sort—will probably run aground in the same way they might, for any other young writer of that budding proto-genre.

About two-thirds of the way through, I got that sinking feeling when I thought, “Oh no, all the setup has been done, and all that’s left is to chunk methodically through the windup of the plot, step by step, in all its fully articulated detail.”  But I was wrong.  The end of the book was consistently engrossing.

Should Framingham Still Be a Town? There's Time to Sign the Petition.

The town I live in Framingham, Massachusetts, is incorporated as a town.  This means it's governed by an elected Board of Selectmen and a Town Meeting (as well as a Town Manager, hired by the Selectmen, and various elected and appointed boards, such as the Board of Health and the School Committee).  While many smaller towns in the area still have a Town Meeting that's literally open to anyone who wants to show up and speak, Framingham (with a population of close to 70,000) has an elected town meeting, in which each precinct elects a slate of meeting members.

There's been agitation for a few years to turn Framingham into a city, with an elected mayor and full-time city council.  I don't know all the arguments the advocates are giving, though I've heard suggestions that it would improve efficiency and accountability.  Marlboro, with slightly over half Framingham's size, has always been a city.  I don't know whether it's felt to work well there or not.

But anyway, I think it's worth airing the issues, and the advocates of charter reform have been trying to get signatures to put the question on the ballot this April.  If it passed (the ballot question, not the petition), a charter reform committee would study the question.  According to this article in the Metrowest Daily News, they have until Feb. 5 to get 5,544 signatures, a little over ten times as many as they already have.  If you want to sign and haven't yet, I suppose, you can contact them, or go find the guy who stands in front of Stop & Shop.

The Love of My Youth, a novel by Mary Gordon

This is quite a good book, and I didn’t really enjoy it.  I first heard of Mary Gordon many years ago, probably when Spending came out.  I have a distinct memory of reading a review of Spending in the New York Times Book Review, and of thinking I’d heard of her already, but I may have been confusing her in some way with Mary Gaitskill.  I didn’t have any idea, until after I’d picked up The Love of My Youth, what kind of novels Gordon writes.  I’d gotten the idea they were more or less “literary,” and expected something at least a little “edgy,” in the manner of Gaitskill—whose Two Girls, Fat and Thin, I’d read when it came out, twenty years ago, and liked.  I could see this was an older woman’s book and somewhat milder and more reflective than something like that would have been.  Yet the review of Spending had given me an impression of something rather racy.

Instead, I found a really very mild women’s novel, as respectable as respectable can be.  It seemed to be the kind of novel I’d be reading in my fifties and sixties if I’d gone on reading the same kind of books I’d read as a teenager, novelists like Helen van Slyke, Belva Plain, and Madeleine L’Engle.  Like Van Slyke’s and L’Engle’s novels, The Love of My Youth presents characters, mostly female, who are respectably bourgeois, self-critical, and concerned about the world around them in a generally “liberal” sort of way.  Like L’Engle’s, in particular, it concerns itself with religion, with music and the nature of a life devoted to it, with the amount of submission that’s properly due from a woman towards a man and towards their family, and with the world of music—though it deals with them in more attractive, or some might say “politically correct,” ways than L’Engle does (as was discussed in Mari Ness’s re-read of some of her books at the Tor Publishing site).  But I didn’t go on reading that kind of novel, and I’m not yet fifty.

It would be interesting to compare Gordon and The Love of My Youth to Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers or to Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot, both of which I recently read, and each of which it has something in common with.  It’s interesting even that the styles of these books are so different.  The fact is that I think Gordon’s style here is impossible.  At one time, it might have seemed more normal, but these days only an incredibly well-established writer could get away with it, and even on its own terms, it just doesn’t really work.  The end of the novel especially conforms to ideas like those of John Gardner (the novelist and writing instructor, and author of several well-known books for writers), with a deeply emotional and almost “musical” denouement that quite literally “ties up” the novel’s still-loose strands.  But it is much too neat.  It’s not popular enough and it’s not arty enough.  It owes nothing to the more postmodern constructions of an A.S. Byatt, a Hilary Mantel, or a Jonathan Franzen.

The story begins in the present, with a visit to Rome, separately, by two people who have some as yet unspecified past between them.  Day by day, they visit with one another and think about their lives, and the missing pieces are gradually revealed.  Then there’s an extended flashback to the 1960s, when they first met, in incidents that have already been described in part.  The story moves back to present-day Rome, with two more flashbacks.  The novel is very “talky,” with a lot of thinking and very little dialogue, even very little narration: people and events are talked over and around, then finally, in a flashback, disposed of in a couple of sentences.  The reader who isn’t familiar with the landmarks of Rome will need a guidebook or the Internet to get some idea of where they are walking and what the buildings they’re visiting look like. 

One of the novel’s themes seems to be rebellion against old-fashioned values generally, and sex in particular: loss of virginity, infidelity, unplanned pregnancy.  (I picked up Gordon’s first novel, Final Payments, to see if the peculiar style is something she’s always had, and found that it isn’t, but that these themes are the kind of things she’s always written about.)  The book clearly appeals to women, to older readers, specifically to people who came of age in the 1960s.  Readers who think Baby Boomers are generally narcissistic will find lots of evidence in The Love of My Youth.  The characters can come across as oh-so-precious.  It’s not that they’re especially full of themselves, so much as the fact that their good qualities are heavily pronounced, while their faults are considered, recognized as such, and overcome.  The novel does nicely present two different kinds of paths that people might have felt, in the 1960s were newly possible—maybe they’re paths that are always possible, but in the 1960s seemed especially hopeful, and potentially revolutionary—but which turned out, sadly, to be incompatible. 

Thomas Friedman thinks corporations are people.

In today’s New York Times, Thomas Friedman’s op-ed calls for real collaboration in Washington, like there is in Silicon Valley.  He quotes “an expert on networks who has been involved in several successful startups,” who notes the need for “collaboration both within and between firms,” where “’collaboration’ is defined as something you do with another colleague or company.”  Then Friedman goes on to contrast this with Washington, where it’s known that “collaboration” means always and only working with the enemy.  Silicon Valley gets things done, and Washington (especially nowadays) doesn’t.  So Friedman calls for Washington types to learn from Silicon Valley . . .

. . . but he doesn’t mention people collaborating anywhere in the essay.  Instead he talks about corporations collaborating with one another.  It seems that the idea of individuals, employees, being important, is something he actually can’t begin to imagine.  The people he mentions are: a corporate vice president, the founder of an energy company, a co-founder of LinkedIn, and the current CEO of the same company.  CEO’s and heads of marketing, in the world of the New York Times Business Section (written largely for people who aren’t themselves in business, but want to feel culturally au courant about the economy, as well as the theatre), are the only individuals who matter.

I could go all critical-theoretical, and claim that Friedman is telling us a little bit about The Truth about how the economy works, who is really important in Society right now, and so on and so forth.  But why would you want me to?  Does Thomas Friedman know anything about this world that he hasn’t read in the New York Times, himself?  Why should you, or I, believe that what he says has a basis in anything except his own head?

Finally, two paragraphs before the end of his essay, he mentions developers, the people who do the collaborating.  He refers to a corporation’s “developer community,” people who aren’t formally affiliated with the corporation, and who (if they get paid at all) aren’t paid by the corporation.  They use the software developed inside the corporation—by employee developers—who do, Virginia, exist—in order to produce consumer tools, or the kinds of tools they themselves would like to use, and they’re motivated by enthusiasm for the platform software, and by the wish to create something cool.  But this is not the only model for a company.  It isn’t even the concept Friedman started out with, about five paragraphs back.  Again, I could ask what Friedman may be trying to tell us, by saying this thing that I think is wrong (or, he could argue, that I didn’t already know, that had never occurred to me before).  But why?  What is it that’s supposed to have earned a reader’s trust?

The fact that he doesn’t seem to know this, that it isn’t at all obvious that he knows anything at all about the subject he’s writing on, beyond what a handful of sources, cabdrivers, and people at cocktail parties have mumbled in his presence, has already put me off.  Just in this same paragraph, he seems not even to know that “the developer community” and “headhunters” are different groups of people.  I suppose that a New York Times op-ed writer may be assumed to know the difference.  But the fact remains he wrote a confusing paragraph that doesn’t sufficiently distinguish between them.  No composition teacher would permit this degree of confusion.  Again, why is he supposed to have earned the readers’ trust?

I can only suppose that he really does think corporations are people, and that he understood the quote at the beginning of his essay in precisely that sense.

Lincoln, a film by Steven Spielberg, from a screenplay by Tony Kushner

The movie follows Abraham Lincoln and the men he’s deputized as they attempt to pass a Constitutional amendment banning slavery.  (The Constitution as originally ratified didn’t explicitly permit slavery but didn’t prohibit it either, and implicitly made it legal, by admitting the states in which it was incorporated into law.)  Obviously it is worth watching.  Whether it’s fatally flawed by its treatment of race and its depiction of slavery as an issue that primarily concerns white men, I don’t know.  I tend to have low standards when it comes to how politically complete and accurate historical films should be.  You can read other people’s writing on this topic and make your own decision.

The film is directed, as everybody knows, by Steven Spielberg, from a script by Tony Kushner.  It’s supposed to follow Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, about the political rivals who got together within Lincoln’s presidential administration, but apparently draws on only four pages in the middle of that book.  Several other historians are credited as consultants, as well, some of whose contributions (like those of James McPherson) seem fairly obvious.  The rivals who play such large roles in Goodwin’s book do all make appearances here, and in important positions, but they don’t necessarily get large amounts of screen time.  And one of the big revelations of her book was that Lincoln suffered from dejection and spent a lot of time reading his Bible, neither of which fact makes any appearance onscreen in Spielberg’s film at all.

Tony Kushner has worked with Spielberg before, on Munich, which he co-wrote with Eric Roth, but he’s best known for the two-part play, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.  Angels in America uses techniques that in a novel might be called magical realism to explore AIDS and the history of Jewish and homosexual life in the United States.  On the one hand, Roy Cohn, a historical figure, former deputy to Richard Nixon and persecutor of the Rosenbergs, and a closeted gay man, is dying of AIDS.  On the other, Prior Walter, a true-blue WASP, is coming to grips with his recent diagnosis.  In between are Joe Pitt, a Mormon lawyer and disciple of Cohn; Louis Ironson, who leaves Prior because he’s unable to deal with illness, and then takes up with Joe; and Belize, Prior’s friend and Roy Cohn’s nurse.  The conceit of the angel is that God has, literally, absconded, leaving a gaggle of angels (in the tradition of Milton and Blake) unable to cope, unable to perform their usual bureaucratic functions.  The angel America brings a revelation to Prior, in his illness, telling him to stop trying to change the world.  He refuses it.

Theater is often inaccessible, and large-scale visual effects can be expensive to produce.  Except for the HBO version of his play (directed by Mike Nichols from a script by the playwright), Kushner’s brand of magic has been hard to find.  Lincoln, especially near the beginning, evokes some of the same magic Kushner brings to the theater.  This is interesting, because there is probably no movie director who is less theatrical—in the sense of being theater-like, play-like—than Steven Spielberg.  No one leaves a Spielberg movie saying, “That was okay, but it was really too much like a play.”  No one is leaving Lincoln saying this, either.  But it’s nice that the Kushner sense of visionariness, which is much more personal and cerebral than Spielberg’s sense of magic, made its way onto the screen, at least a little bit.

This is probably the first digital Civil War film.  The crudeness of everything was emphasized: the shaggy hats, the obviously homemade uniforms, the sense that everything the government and army were using had been jerrybuilt for the purpose a very short time ago.  High-ranking army officers tip their chairs back on two legs, in a way I learned from the books I read as a kid was considered a sign of uncouthness.  The President drinks from a tin cup.  You know that when you watch a movie directed by Steven Spielberg, you’re going to get a good story and a good visual experience, and Lincoln does not disappoint.

I didn’t think Daniel Day-Lewis looked like Lincoln, and this bothered me, probably more than it should have.  He was not nearly gaunt enough.  Spielberg plays this as if the infamous presidential super-accelerated aging process, always especially noted in regard to Abraham Lincoln, applied only to the last month of his presidency.  In fact, though, Lincoln was gaunt throughout his life.  Day-Lewis looks well-fed and self-satisfied.  He doesn’t look like Lincoln—he looks like Arthur Miller, or better, like Leonard Bernstein.  But really, who he looks like is Daniel Day-Lewis.  He looks like a movie star.  It can be annoying when a historical movie casts the main character with so much regard for personal likeness that acting ability is disregarded, but reworking a historical drama so that the central personage can fit some kind of charismatic ideal tends to be a bad sign.

Day-Lewis is surrounded by a bevy of stars and well-known performers who are more or less character actors, or what passes these days for character actors: Tommy Lee Jones (who is good but whose character is excessively marked by, alternately, his hick accent and diction and the viewer’s remembering that he graduated from Harvard), David Straithairn (in other words, Edward R. Murrow), Sally Field (Norma Rae), Jared Harris (the Brit accountant on Mad Men, playing Ulysses S. Grant).  They circle around the President, pursuing their own agendas, but always deferring to him.  At times, not always obvious times, the film recalls Walt Whitman’s idolization of Lincoln, in poems like “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed,” an elegy written in the wake of the President’s death.  They, in turn, are surrounded by a mass of little-known actors who look like ordinary people, real Americans, even nineteenth-century Americans—whose motives tend to be more petty, who aren’t very interested in big ideas or in political movements, and who have to be persuaded one way or another to link up their personal destinies to the cause of Abolition.

I can’t help but compare this vision of how political change is made with Kushner’s own account, in an essay published with Angels in America, of how little is ever accomplished by one person alone, how any accomplishment worth anything is always a group effort:

“The fiction that artistic labor happens in isolation, and that individual talents are the sole provenance of artistic accomplishment, is politically, ideologically charged and, in my case at least, repudiated by the facts. . . .  The smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction.”

I can only half-reconcile this essay with what I saw on the screen in Lincoln.

The movie was marred, for me, by Spielberg’s usual crude, mechanistic use of Christian imagery, which he makes use of as if it were something he had to have, to please the crowds, as much as music by John Williams or big sweeping panoramas.  When Thaddeus Stevens pretends he doesn’t believe all races were created equal, but only that there should be equality before the law (something that apparently did not really happen), solely in order to win votes, his opponent has to jump up and use the word “deny.”  The moment this happens, you just know it’s going to happen three times.  Otherwise, how could there be a parallel between Stephens and Peter's denying Christ after the latter’s arrest?  But this parallel does nothing.  There’s no reason for it: no reason why this particular character should be compared with Peter, and no reason why this particular point of the story of Lincoln should be linked to Peter’s threefold denial of his friend and his God.  It’s there to say something about The Universality of Myth, yada yada yada, this is a Christian country, where gospel stories are shared by all of whatsoever creed, so a story is made more resonant and “deeper” if it’s associated with Christian narratives.

I said that nobody is going to leave the theater after watching Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, saying, “That was too much like a play,” but actually, there is one play it is very much like: the 1967 musical, 1776 (made in 1972 into a film—badly butchered, incidentally, in the broadcast television/VHS version), about the proposal and ratification of the Declaration of Independence.  Even more than Lincoln, 1776 focused on the wheeling and dealing needed to get a legislature to take action: in the case of 1776, to persuade the delegations of all thirteen colonies to the Continental Congress—at a time when New England, New York, and New Jersey were the ongoing sites of battle, but many still hoped for reconciliation—to agree to declare their independence from Great Britain.  There are a number of parallels.  The plots of both Lincoln and 1776 are in large part stories about persuading legislatures to vote a certain way.  The sharp-tongued Thaddeus Stevens is mocked by his Southern colleagues in the same way as the “obnoxious and disliked” John Adams.  The debate over the morality of slavery is portrayed as an essential element in the legislative process, in both cases, as (according to 1776) Jefferson edits his draft of the Declaration to remove language condemning the Atlantic slave trade, as the price of securing the agreement of the South, and as (in a musical number that can be viscerally upsetting if done right) Adams is reminded that Massachusetts is home to the ships’ captains who carry on that trade and bring back the profits that follow upon it. 

And the question whether this is really the last legislation needed, ever, on this and related questions, arises in both.  There’s a sense in which the characters naturally feel something like, “This is the one big fight.  All we have to do is get this piece of legislation passed, and we’ll already have achieved our goal.”  In the case of the Thirteenth Amendment, viewers certainly know that a long subsequent struggle was needed, and that the struggle still is incomplete.  Any sense, which a viewer might feel on leaving the theater, that the story is over and won, is clearly illusory.  In 1776, this is signaled more within the story, as the elation of having the Declaration in large part accepted is punctured, as delegates make specific objections to the text—not least to its mentions of slavery—and it is watered down.  In Lincoln, though it isn’t always in the foreground, when it is, it makes the story feel very ironic.

If Lincoln makes a specific political point, one that’s relevant to our own times, beyond "racism is bad," I’m not sure I could say what it is.  But it’s a pretty good movie, and it’s almost certainly going to be a staple of high school history classes for many years to come. 

I Have Never Liked "Les Miz"

In the New Yorker’s blog, movie critic David Denby has a piece on the new film version of the musical version of Victor Hugo’s bloated nineteenth-century French novel, Les Misérables.  Denby says he hasn’t seen the stage version, but from what he writes, all its flaws are carried over nearly in full to the cinematic one (and with a few more added, which I can’t speak to, since I haven’t seen it yet).  The show has been so ridiculously popular for nearly thirty years that it’s nice to see someone who feels about it the same way I do.

Denby writes:

It’s terrible; it’s dreadful. Overbearing, pretentious, madly repetitive. . . . I couldn’t help wondering what in the world had happened to the taste of my countrymen—the Americans (Americans!) who created and loved almost all the greatest musicals ever made.

And:

The music is juvenile stuff—tonic-dominant, without harmonic richness or surprise. Listen to any score by Richard Rodgers or Leonard Bernstein or Fritz Loewe if you want to hear genuine melodic invention. I was so upset by the banality of the music that I felt like hiring a hall and staging a nationalist rally. “My fellow-countrymen, we are the people of Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin! Cole Porter and George Gershwin, Frank Loesser and Burton Lane! We taught the world what popular melody was! What rhythmic inventiveness was! Let us unite to overthrow the banality of these French hacks!” (And the British hacks, too, for that matter.) Alas, the hall is filled with people weeping over “Les Mis.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Les Miz (as it’s called, for short) just isn’t a “musical.”  It’s a spectacular.  The show’s creators, Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil, are from France—not a country that had given us a large number of Broadway shows.  (The same writers went on to create Miss Saigon.)  It was adapted for the London stage before being brought to New York.  At the time, Broadway was struggling, and the traditional style of musical play was having difficulty finding producers and audiences.  Into the vacuum spilled new large-scale productions from London, often by Cameron Mackintosh, and eventually corporatized productions, often by Disney.  The British shows, by Andrew Lloyd Webber, for example, were not in the American-music tradition.  Webber began by writing rock operas, from the standpoint of which the American songbook appeared musically old-fashioned, but which were themselves old-fashioned in form, more like operettas than like the American form that had grown from the operetta.  It helps a little, in appreciating Les Misérables, to recognize that it is definitely not a Broadway musical, but more in the operetta tradition.

I saw Les Miz onstage in the late 1980s.  I didn’t like it.  Like David Denby, I thought the only number that seemed a real musical number was “Master of the House,” performed by an innkeeper and his familiars.  It had a bouncy tune, it had dancing, it had characters who seemed to be having fun.  It was reminiscent of some of the songs in the 1960 English musical Oliver!  The rest of the show is ballads and musically formless spectacles, both of which are okay in small doses, but not enough to sustain a Broadway-style musical.  The plot alternates between the pathos of a young orphaned girl and the pathos of revolutionary students at the barricades of a revolt that’s never clearly defined.  In my memory, the students lose, very badly, and in my memory, they’re also joined by a small boy who is shot by the government forces.  I may have made him up, though, conflating the baggage carriers in Henry V with Fantine, the tiny waifish girl on the theatrical posters and the cover of my Signet paperback.  The rest of the plot, as everyone knows, is The Fugitive, more or less, with Jean Valjean as Harrison Ford, and Inspector Javert as Tommy Lee Jones.  And for my money, the South Park movie (Bigger, Longer, and Uncut), though unwatchable in parts, is worth the price of admission just for the parody of Les Misérables, in the song “La Resistance Lives On.”

However, for the past few years I’ve been listening to XM Radio’s Broadway channel in my car, and they fairly often play songs from Les Miz.  Obviously, these were recordings of the casts from the stage versions.  At first, I would change the station whenever these came on, but over time, the show’s biggest hits started to grow on me: rousing ensemble numbers like “Do You Hear the People Sing?” and “Red and Black,” fairly typical musical numbers like “At the End of the Day” and the comic “Lovely Ladies,” and even (to a lesser extent) the ballad, “A Little Fall of Rain.”

On the same channel I’d hear songs from Miss Saigon, and although these really aren’t as good, I began to hear the way melodic lines, vocal types, and plot elements echoed back and forth between these plays and, especially, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s.  So there’s a comparison to be made between “The Heat is on in Saigon,” where the virginal hero wanders through the fleshpots of the city, and “The Temple,” where Jesus reacts badly to the moneylenders and other merchants in the temple at Jerusalem.  Schönberg-Boublil gained by the comparison.  Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s attitude toward “superstars,” and the degree to which they distinguished between Jesus Christ and Evita Peron, was never very clear.  Miss Saigon made more sense than those plays, even if it was not as good as them, theatrically or musically.

But when I saw the full set of trailers for the film, I remembered how painful the show really was to watch.  Three minutes of a rousing ensemble number, or six, is one thing.  Moment after moment of emotional “peak” is another.  It’s not usual for a Broadway number to be especially intense, emotionally.  This may be why they seem silly to many people these days.  It may also be why the songs from Les Miz sounded better on the radio.  The repetition of motifs was overbearing, the orchestration was overbearing, and every moment seemed designed to evoke strong emotion (which I knew, from my memory of the show, would eventuate in pity for the very piteous ends suffered by almost all the main characters).  “Castle on a Cloud,” sung onstage by a small girl, can sound sweet and honest, and out of context, not very kitschy at all.  But the film version (featured on the trailer) is intensified until it sounds like something from a horror movie.

And “Master of the House,” for me, has aged poorly.  I saw the play on tour, at Boston’s Colonial Theater.  The acoustics at the Colonial were terrible every time I saw a play there.  Spoken or sung, you were lucky if you could hear five words in a row.  Amplification still seemed new at the time, and it didn’t seem to work well.  (This was one reason I was willing to assume the show was better than I’d thought after I saw it in person: the fact that it sounded terrible, muddy, and unmusical might not actually have been the composers’ fault at all.)  I had no idea what most of the lyrics even were, beyond the much clearer tags like “master of the house, ruler of the inn.”  Then I heard it on the radio, with the London cast.  The innkeeper was clearly the butt of the song, a grasping letch whom all the lodgers hated, and his wife was Patsy from AbFab.  The number turned out to belong to the cruder kind of BBC comedy.  I don’t look forward at all to seeing it done by Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen, two Brits who I expect to perform it in a similar way.

December Movies

Casino Jack: It’s probably possible to make a good movie about a corrupt lobbyist, or about a character much like Jack Abramoff, but this isn’t it.  It was nice to see Kevin Spacey on screen again, and that’s the only really good thing that can be said about this movie.  If you want to see it, you probably know most of the facts already, and then it’s unlikely you would want to sit through two-plus hours of straight-up narration of the facts.  If you followed this story in the news as it was coming out, you experienced a narrative much more dramatic than the one in this film.

The movie follows Abramoff and his sidekick as they overreach and meet with their downfall.  The inclusion of so many different deals was probably supposed to add to the sense that they were overreaching, but instead it makes the movie feel like a bad documentary.  The decision to focus on Abramoff’s relationship with a mobbed-up mattress salesman, played by the also recently underused Jon Lovitz, in his purchase of a mobbed-up Miami gambling operation, for his own profit, seems like a lame attempt to juice up a boring movie.  The fact is that this was actually what brought Abramoff to the attention of authorities.  Underplayed in the movie—if this part was actually true, and not a compression (and again, if it was a compression, it was a dramatically misguided one)—is the stupidity of Abramoff’s extending himself financially and morally on so many fronts at once.  Especially combined with his obsession with movies, especially, as documented in the press, gangster movies, it suggests some kind of personality disorder.

You do see a glimpse of an aggressive, even potentially violent, Jack Abramoff when he body-checks his best friend on the racquetball court.  Spacey underplays this, making Abramoff a play-it-cool kind of guy with an aging jock’s physique, whose thoughts sometimes get away from him.  But in reality Abramoff was pudgy, with a scraggly beard.  He might have been better played, physically, by Jeffrey R. Smith, the actor who plays Grover Norquist in this movie. 

Again, if you watch this movie, you probably already know what a lobbyist is.  Spacey tells us, for good measure, in voiceover, in the first minutes of the film: without people like him, he says, people like Tom DeLay wouldn’t know whether to vote up or down on a bill that raises taxes for corporations.  Which is a little simplistic, but to say that without lobbyists members of Congress and their staffs wouldn’t know what bills to write, to benefit specific people who think their taxes are too high, would be too complicated for this movie.  Isn’t the rise of people like DeLay a sign that lobbyists like Abramoff are close to putting themselves out of business?  

There are reminders here and there, throughout the film, of the importance of money in the world of its characters.  Abramoff’s mistake was to think he could buy the friendship and loyalty of important people—but only in part.  He seems equally to have thought that he could buy off the fates, by surrounding himself with the physical trappings of success, and by contributing to the community in ways he couldn’t afford.  If he were the hero, the movie would be about his corruption at the hands of Washington.  The movie can’t suggest the reverse, but it might have been more interesting if it did.

Contagion: I’ve never been an enormous fan of Steven Soderbergh’s.  I don’t think there’s anything he’s done that I’ve really, really liked.  (Sex, Lies, and Videotape seemed good enough, I guess, and I’ve never seen Traffic.)  This one had enough stars to be another Airport.  Too many stars, and too many plot strands, for the movie to be very interesting as a story.  Lots of damsels in distress.  It was a good documentary, I suppose, and it puts a scare into you from the very first moment.  In fact, in the dictionary, next to manipulative, they should put the poster for this movie (and the soundtrack for Les Misérables).  About forty-five minutes in, when it turned into The Road, it got interesting, but then it became a generic disaster problem-solving movie again.  Matt Damon was fine, Jennifer Ehle was wonderful as always, but the best thing in the movie was Jude Law’s bandy-legged walk.  None of their performances added up to much, really, though; the real stars of this movie are The Virus and Our Interconnected Modern World.  But after too many indie films that I’m probably too old for these days, it’s good to see a “normal” movie.

Cedar Rapids: This was pretty good.  The plot involves a small-town salesman who suddenly is picked to attend a big industry conference in Cedar Rapids.  The story is about the hypocrisy that results when religion and business meet, but it’s really a movie about what happens to an ordinary guy in an extreme situation.  It’s to the movie’s credit that it doesn’t excessively overpower the characters with silliness.  Ed Helms doesn’t get the Saturday Night Live star treatment; instead, he’s paired with veteran actors like Stephen Root, John C. Reilly, and Kurtwood Smith.  There’s one party scene too many: these were presumably supposed to build to a crescendo of horror, of a kind, but they feel like filler.  On the other hand, partying is just what these people would do in this kind of situation.  “These guys are dopes . . . but they’re our dopes,” is the moral, more or less, assuming there is one.

Skyfall (James Bond): It was very beautiful.  The opening credits were real Bond opening credits, psychedelia and all—if probably a little darker and less Bond-worshiping than they usually are.  The film makes London look almost sunny.  It opens in the very Bondish locale of Turkey and ends in remote Scotland, passing through China and a deserted city that I took at first for Dubrovnik or Beirut.  The director, Sam Mendes, took some criticism that in my opinion amounted to “this movie is too much like a Batman flick.”  You see the reflection in this movie of memes you’ve already seen in others: in The Godfather, in Batman, maybe in Waltzing with Bashir, and I could go on.  But that’s how movies are made these days.  They draw quite overtly on the same social energies that motivate other movies.  They borrow, in the same way Shakespeare did.

The plot revolves mostly around M, who may be losing her grip, and who’s being eased out in favor of younger blood.  She’s brought to testify before a parliamentary committee, in the course of which she quotes from the one piece of British poetry most likely to be confused with a speech in an Ayn Rand novel.  This sequence, cutting back and forth between M in the committee room and the respective pursuits of the villain and Bond as they race toward her, is probably more complex than most Bond films, which are old-fashioned and which, on second or third viewing, begin to seem kind of boring.

The pre-credits sequence, by placing Bond at the mercy of M and of a young, unnamed black female agent, suggests a question of gender: are the interests of men and women the same?  Do they see what’s at stake for someone like James Bond in the same way?  The first two of the Craig Bond films tended to pity him.  This one emphasizes the inability of women, those with desk jobs, and especially Members of Parliament to understand the lives of those who are taken out from “the shadows” in order to protect those who continue to live there.  And is it an accident that Ralph Fiennes’ Minister wears suspenders, like a Wall Street banker?

Gattaca: I watched this, for the second time, while I was wrapping presents.  I still think it’s an intriguing premise that didn’t turn out very well, but it’s hard to see how anyone thought the improbabilities weren’t so impossible they needed to be excised.  No society that could lengthen a man’s legs by a full two inches, in a way that caused no lasting pain or weakness and was impossible to detect, could really, reasonably, draw a distinction, well into adulthood, between those born with perfect vision and those who’d undergone surgery to correct myopia.

Martha Marcy May Marlene: Also pretty good.  It’s hard to explain what it’s about, exactly, though the reviews described it pretty accurately.  Another movie about people in extreme situations, more open-ended and arty than Cedar Rapids, and suspenseful rather than humorous, it lacks the kind of Hollywood-style backstory that explains in detail who these people are, what they want, how they got to where we see them now.  We get the bare bones: a girl in trouble, a newly married couple, two sisters with a history of difficulty between them.  The situation—a young girl trying to fit into a commune or cult of some kind, on the one hand, and a woman trying to handle her disturbed younger sister, on the other, with hints and intimations of crucial facts, yet to be revealed—suggests the more sensational kind of blockbuster—which is without question not what this movie is.

Lincoln: This deserves a post to itself.