Old Smiley

Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, Joe Paterno and Occupy Wall Street

2012-01-30T08:44:00.001-05:00

Phi Beta Kappa Address, December 7, 2011

I recently had the opportunity to attend the UGA Department of Theatre and Film Studies’ production of the Arthur Miller play All My Sons. The production was excellent, and after seeing it I made a point of rereading the play. It seems particularly timely. All My Sons was the first major success for Miller, one of the great American playwrights of the 20th century. Produced in 1947 at the Coronet Theatre in NYC, it focuses on a middle-class American family shortly after the end of the Second World War. Three years after the fact, family members still struggle to accept the death of their son and brother Larry, who was lost at sea, his body never recovered. The play unfolds almost as an overwrought melodrama. Early on, you become aware that something is wrong. The mother Kate believes Larry is still alive and that one day he’ll return. Any mention of her son upsets her. The father Joe Keller is a loud and boisterous man who seems to love his wife and his family. He presents himself as a consummate family man, a successful factory owner, and a paragon of civic virtue. Gradually this illusion of a family grappling with tragedy evaporates. The dead son’s widow Ann returns from New York for the first time since Larry’s death. The surviving brother Chris, we learn, has been writing her and now he wants to propose. Joe is upset, supposedly because this marriage would force his wife to accept Larry’s death. But other facts come out: Ann’s father, Joe’s former partner, is in jail, imprisoned for manufacturing and selling faulty cylinder heads for use in military warplanes. 21 deaths were the result. Then we learn that Joe himself was imprisoned, blamed by his partner for the same crime. Later exonerated, Joe says it was all a mistake, but then we learn that he could have prevented the sale of the faulty parts and that he basically set his partner up to take the blame. Finally a letter that Larry sent to Ann on the day of his death reveals that he couldn’t live with newspaper stories about his father’s involvement with the faulty parts, and that he plans to kill himself by crashing his plane into the China Sea. What this means is that Joe caused his son’s death, on top of the deaths of the other airmen. He betrayed one son, lied to the other, betrayed his business partner, and has to get up every morning and stare at himself in the mirror. He did so, he explains to Chris, to save his business.

All My Sons is about how a man builds his vision of the American dream on a fantasy—that he has lived a good life, he’s been honest, he loved his sons and his wife, that he’s much beloved, that the unfortunate things that have happened to him were the result of people who took advantage of him, people he unwisely trusted. This was the image he presented to his son Chris. What he didn’t want Chris to know was that it was more important to him to protect his livelihood, his business, than it was to withdraw the faulty parts and save American lives. The play is about failure of responsibility, about evasion of the truth, about breaking the basic bonds and values of human connection that keep us all going, that prevent us from diving our own planes deep into the China Sea.

And so we come to the sad and awful story of Joe Paterno and Jerry Sandusky at Penn State University. You all have heard the details of this tragedy. I won’t repeat them. Let me say that though I am not a football fan (other than of the Georgia Bulldogs), I have always regarded Joe Paterno as a man who set a standard for character, excellence in academics, and service to his University. He was a model for other coaches and for players to emulate. His career is marked with many good deeds and accomplishments, with an excellent record in football, but now more than anything else, it is marked with this scandal. Shakespeare, in his play Julius Caesar, wrote that “the evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.”

We don’t know all the facts of the Penn State scandal, and more of them will undoubtedly come out. What is clear is that in one way or the other Mr. Paterno and other university and athletic officials failed to act in a responsible and moral way. They failed to report one crime, at the least, and failed to prevent other similar crimes from happening. These men might not even have wanted to admit the truth, they might even have hidden it from themselves. Where was the failure? What and who failed? We’ve heard many answers: Coach Paterno did not report the crime soon enough, or Assistant Coach McQueary did not report it soon enough; neither of them followed up; they all allowed Sandusky access to University facilities even while rumors of his activities were flying. Friends were protecting friends. University officials –the president and vice presidents--were complicit because, wanting to protect the university’s reputation, they suppressed what they’d been told. College football was blamed for becoming such a money-making industry that it made decisions on the basis of profit margins, rather than what was good for the players or the school’s academic mission or the welfare of young boys. Our whole society was blamed.

We can find blame for this mess in a whole lot of places. But I’m less interested in sweeping generalizations about higher education or college football or modern American culture than I am in understanding how presumably decent people could fail in such a fundamental way. Here were men who heard rumors, received reports, even directly witnessed events that they ignored because they couldn’t believe them, or they wanted to protect friends, or they wanted to protect their own jobs, or they wanted to protect the football program, or they wanted to protect their university, or they simply didn’t want to put their reputations on the line. They didn’t take responsibility.

Arthur Miller’s play is about men who fail to do what is right, about a man whose desire to protect his name and his business causes the death of his own son and of other American young men fighting in the Second World War. Joe Keller loses his son because he allows profit motives to corrode and destroy basic human values. When his surviving son calls him a murderer, the accusation is not unjust. “You can be better,” Chris chastises his mother at play’s end when she asks him what more than sorry can she and Joe be for how events have turned out. “Once and for all you can know there’s a universe of people outside and you’re responsible to it, and unless you know that, you threw away your son because that’s why he died.”

Numerous works in literature pose this question of responsibility. Think first of the parable of the Good Samaritan in the Book of Luke in the Bible. In the novels of Charles Dickens, social and moral injustice is a major target. In Herman Melville’s story ”Bartleby the Scrivener” an entire office staff sits by, first joking about and then ignoring a man whose repeated statement “I would prefer not to” signifies his decision to die. In Franz Kafka’s story “The Hunger Artist” a man’s decision to starve himself becomes a sideshow attraction in a circus. Spectators don’t care that he is dying—they are just entertained by his advancing emaciation. Think also of the 2008 film Doubt, based on the play by John Patrick Shanley, in which the principal of a church school struggles with her growing suspicion that the priest of her church is molesting a young student. Finally, consider this statement by Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Atticus tells his son: “The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.”

The Penn State scandal is doubly shocking for those of us who work in higher education because it forces us to pause and wonder whether, in a similar situation, we also would fail to act, whether we would fail do to what was right, or whether we would just ignore it and hope that the machine rolled merrily on.

In a larger sense, the scandal should prompt all of us to ask similar questions: am I failing to be responsible to my fellow man and woman? Are there injustices in our neighborhood or our community or our nation or our world that we should not allow to go unchecked? Should we act on behalf of the fellow human beings with whom we share this globe?

One might not have to agree with their methods, or everything they believe, to acknowledge that both the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movements are based in part on the desire of citizens to call attention to what they believe is wrong. These are both, in my opinion, flawed movements, but at least their members are not willing to sit still and do nothing. The members of Occupy Wall Street are expressing their belief that the American banking and investments industry is, like Joe Keller, putting the desire to make money above the welfare of millions of other Americans, above the welfare of this nation. Lives are destroyed, people suffer. One can think of many other injustices and problems in the world that demand our attention: poverty, economic disparities, the national debt, the global economy, climate change, environmental decay, pollution, disease, intolerance, violence, racism, sexism, resource depletion, over population, the list goes on and on, and it seems a darker and more difficult list than it has ever seemed in my lifetime. Unfortunately, this is the list that confronts you in the life ahead.

Our hope of survival in this troubled world may depend on your willingness to take responsibility.

As Phi Beta Kappa graduates of the University of Georgia, I know that many of you have already taken steps to be responsible by volunteering in service programs and charitable organizations and other activities that serve the campus and community. That service can’t end when you leave here. Having done good work here at the University, ready to go out into the world to take on jobs or further study or even a stint of leisure time, none of you is free of the necessity of doing more. Your achievements here suggest that you will lead good and comfortable lives. But those same achievements make clear that you have much to give. My hope for the future lies in the abilities and new ideas and intelligence and enthusiasm and commitment of people like you. Our world needs you. You have an obligation to give, and to exercise courage in the face of injustice. I hope you will. Thank you.

Hesher

2012-01-04T11:11:00.000-05:00

Hesher (2011; dir. Spencer Susser) is an indie film in which damaged people join together to assuage pain. On the surface, the film is hard and relentlessly grim, even while it is funny. It focuses on a young boy, T. J., trying to deal with the loss of his mother in an automobile accident. His father is so passive and depressed that he can’t help the boy. Their grandmother, with whom they live and who is caring for them, can’t do much to help other than cook their meals. She chooses to let the wildness of her family go on around her, although in fact she hears and absorbs everything that happens. The boy is obsessed with recovering the family car in which his mother died. It’s at a junk dealer’s office and is scheduled for destruction.

The son of the junkyard owner harasses the boy, and after he defaces the car and flees, he runs into Hesher. Played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt in one of his best roles ever, Hesher is a foul-mouthed, hostile, heavily tattooed young man with a long mane of hair. He tells wild tales of sexual bravado to everyone he meets, including Natalie Portman, who plays a secondary role in the film as a grocery store clerk..

Hesher begins living at the boy’s house—he isn’t invited, he just shows up. Gradually we learn that he is in his own way as wounded as the others, and that he takes solace from this connection with a grieving family. They come to take solace from him.

The film really doesn’t have the courage of its convictions. That is, an underlying sentimentality gradually emerges. Hesher himself really doesn’t ever change. We just learn more about him and understand that beneath his brash and unpleasant exterior is a genuine human being.

Hesher gives an unusual speech at a funeral, and his last gesture of comic defiance is a profanity inscribed on the roof of the boy’s house, but by then we have succumbed to the unconventional charms of his character. The boy and his father begin recovering from their grief, and Hesher goes his way.

De Rerum Natura, by Lucretius

2012-01-01T10:34:00.000-05:00

In De Rerum Natura the first century BC Roman poet Lucretius presents his view of the universe as governed by natural laws. He rules out the influence of gods and of supernatural forces, though he doesn’t argue over their existence. He strongly takes issue with religion, which he sees as destructive. Lucretius argues that all matter of any sort is composed of atoms, extremely small particles. Atoms vary significantly in type, though there is a limited number of types. Various combinations of types of atoms account for the variety of things in the world. Lucretius believes in the immortality of only three things: of atoms, the void (the empty spaces between atoms and between substances made of atoms), and of the universe itself, beyond and outside of which nothing exists. Atoms themselves are infinite in number, just as the universe and the void are infinite in extent. Although his belief in atoms anticipates modern atomic theories, his ideas about how atoms work do not.

Lucretius argues that there is no reason to fear death. First, all things are born and must die. This pattern is the natural way of things. The mind and the body are separate from one another but inextricably linked. They are born together, mature together, grow old and die together. The mind, the spirit, does not outlive the body or exist in any form after the body perishes. Why fear death, then, Lucretius asks, when there is no afterlife in which one can be punished or rewarded for how he has lived his physical life, and when there is no mind or spirit remaining to contemplate the life that has ended? (He does not succeed in convincing me not to fear death). This view of the universe, of atoms, of religion and life after death is Epicurean.

Lucretius believes that the world can be known through reason, not through supernatural or religious explanations. Although many of his explanations for how the world works are wrong—for instance, he believes the moon, sun, and stars are embedded in a firmament surrounding the earth, and that their motions are accounted for by contending winds, and that earthquakes and volcanoes are the result of subterranean disturbances caused by winds—the important revelation of his poem is that through reason we can understand the natural laws that do govern the universe. He does anticipate many modern theories—the science of genetics, for instance.

This translation of De Rerum Natura is more than 7000 lines long and is divided into six parts or “Books.” The least interesting was Book IV, “The Senses,” while the others were compelling to varying extents. The first two books, “Matter and Void” and “The Dance of Atoms,” are a good introduction to Lucretius’ thought and the poem as a whole.

The translator, A. E. Stalling, is an American poet who writes often about classical subjects. She graduated from the University of Georgia with a classics degree and lives in Athens, Greece. Her translation is intentionally modern. It is well done, clear (with some exceptions), and makes uses of such modern terms as “pathogens,” a word that implies more knowledge of disease than the ancient world possessed. This is a flaw in an otherwise effective translation.

Meek’s Cutoff

2011-12-30T12:01:00.000-05:00

Meek’s Cutoff (2010; dir. Kelly Reichardt) extends and subverts the grand tradition of American film westerns. Its point of view is that of three women traveling west with their families. Although the film is episodic after a fashion, it doesn’t offer a series of climactic encounters of crises that we have seen in such films as Stage Coach—attacks by Indians or bandits, internal squabbles among characters. Instead, the challenges the travelers face are mundane—repairing broken wagon wheels, searching for water, encountering a lone Indian who (apparently) becomes their guide, and, most of all, searching for the right trail—their expedition leader Meek (a self-styled Wild Bill Hickock, an Indian hater, and a teller of lies intended to make the group more reliant on his leadership) led them through a cutoff from the main trail that was supposed to be a shortcut, and instead they became lost. They are lost throughout the entire film.

The setting for this film (mostly filmed in Oregon) is beautiful, though it is always arid. There is no sense of westward-ho in this film, of mighty settlers moving ever westward towards a new land of plenty. The film avoids John Ford-like shots of glorious landscape and instead keeps the wagons in a middle ground. (As Roger Ebert points out, it’s photographed in a 1:1.33 screen ratio, which prevents spectacular widescreen panoramic shots).[1]We get a sense of what they can see, but even more we understand how they feel--tired, bored, increasingly hopeless. There is boredom, monotony, and walking. Virtually no one rides on the wagons, to reduce the load and strain on the animals—oxen and mules—everyone walks, unless sick or injured. The travelers and their clothes are dirty and worn (frankly, not dirty enough, given that if they can’t find water for drinking they certainly can’t find it for bathing or washing). The film is muted, low-key, understated.

The three women are distinct individuals. One, Emily Tetherow (Michelle Williams), has a family, another is Irish and pregnant, a third is prone to hysteria. For the most part, the film doesn’t press the idea that the women are being dragged through the western prairies against their wills, but one can infer. The big decisions are made by the men, on their own, though the women may express their opinions to their husbands—still, the women do not have a say in what’s decided. There’s never any question they will refuse to comply with what’s been decided. Given their plight, of course, lost on the prairie with no water, they have little option.

The cipher in the film is the Indian whom one of the women discovers spying on their wagons. He runs off, but the men pursue him and bring him back. Meek wants him killed, and talks of various indignities that Indians will inflict on their group, especially the women. But the group decides to let him live, hoping he will lead them to water and the trail. The trouble is that they can’t communicate with him, nor he with them. They talk at one another. They seem at moments to understand each other, but one is never sure. Emily makes the greatest effort to talk with the Indian, and he talks back, in his own language, so that he remains to us (we see the film from the settlers’ viewpoint and can’t understand his language either), a mystery as well.

The final scene in this film is astounding, frustrating, unsatisfying, and magnificent.

[1] http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110511/REVIEWS/110519991/-1/RSS

The Secret of Kells, Despicable Me, and Megamind

2011-12-29T23:28:00.000-05:00

I saw Despicable Me (2010; dirs. Pierre Coffin, Chris Renaud), Megamind (2010; dir. Tom McGrath), and The Secret of Kells (2009; dirs. Tomm Moore, Nora Twomey) all within a 24-hour span. Each was entertaining. Megamind and Miserable Me are really animated science fiction films about comic villains who want to take over the world and who, either through becoming a foster parent or falling in love, discover they have human and redeeming dimensions. They rely especially on digital effects and are in fact digital creations, and although some preliminary manual sketches may have been involved for the most part they were developed entirely on computers, as most animated films are today. I don’t deplore this. Digital animation is a major new development. It is only natural that animated films would make use of it. But The Secret of Kells shows that traditional styles of animation are still relevant. It won’t necessarily appeal to the same audience as Megamind and Miserable Me (there will be some overlap), but it is a better, more imaginative, more entrancing work than either.

The Secret of Kells is animated with hand-drawn images, in the style of Warner Brothers cartoons from the 1960s and 70s. It is a largely, if not entirely fictionalized account of the creation of the legendary Book of Kells in the eighth or ninth century. Its main character “illuminates” hand-copied bibles. In the film, he is assisted by a sprite-like wood spirit. The book comes to be through a combination of magic and inspiration. It is also seen as a product of discord, as it is created while the monastery is threatened by invading Vikings. The film’s images are simple and stylized, drawn with an intense palette of vivid colors. While Megamind and Miserable Me rely on cute children, super heroes, loud noises, and bombast, The Secret of Kells is quiet, allusive, elusive, fanciful, and subtle. It’s a magical film, while the others are entertaining and forgettable.

Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War, by Nathaniel Philbrick

2011-12-29T13:36:00.000-05:00

Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War (Viking Adult, 2006) contrasts and interweaves two themes. First, the struggle of the Pilgrims to find a place to settle and worship as their conscience dictated. When they decided that Leiden, in the Netherlands, was no better than England, they chose to go to the New World. The first group travels over to New England on the Mayflower. Other groups follow. Initially they live in terrible conditions. Disease wipes out half the group during the first winter, but they persevere. Their society evolves as it enlarges, especially as outsiders gradually join them. They are not religiously tolerant, they don’t like nonconformity, and they are devious and bloodthirsty in their dealings with the Indians. Of course, the Indians are more than capable of bloodthirstiness and deviousness themselves, especially since they are struggling to survive, especially as it becomes clear that to the Puritans the Indians are not a people to be accommodated but rather are a people in the way. The second theme, no surprise, is the changing, evolving relationship of the Puritans and the Indians to live with, accommodate each other. Ultimately, the native tribes of new England resist these new occupants of lands where they’d lived for centuries, and disastrous wars result.

Philbrick’s account of the Puritans is detailed and highly readable. The book’s narrative force is one of its great attributes. Philbrick is an elegantly descriptive writer of a straightforward, unadorned prose. He relies on other historians, journal entries, letters, and an assortment of primary and secondary documents, yet the book is not overridden with footnotes and scholarly references (these are documented in the book’s final section).

The Mayflower, the early Puritans, the first colonies in Massachusetts are the subject of a deeply engrained national mythology. This book brings welcome and chastening illumination to the story.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

2011-12-29T00:08:00.000-05:00

Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2011) seeks to remind us of our links to the distant past through images of the recently discovered Chauvet caves of Southern France, which contain the oldest examples of art ever encountered. Many of the images on the cave walls are so fresh they appear to have been painted yesterday, but more surprisingly many of them are rendered with a skill and style that make them seem almost modern. Herzog’s documentary films are his own meditations on the stories and pictures that interest him. In this film he meditates on the nature of the past and its connection to the present day. The cave is nearly pristine, virtually unchanged from the moment when some 20,000 years ago a massive landslide sealed off the entrance. Although no human bones have been found, it is full of the bones of animals—deer, cave bears, even a golden eagle. Some of these animals lived in the cave while others were brought there and consumed or used for ritual purposes by the people who visited the caves. The images on the walls have meaning, of course, but what exactly they mean or meant is beyond reach. Herzog speculates, with the assistance of archaeologists and scientists, that they may have had spiritual significance and that in some way they signify the prehistoric belief that the divisions between the worlds of men and animals were permeable and sometimes could be crossed. Men could change into beasts, or beasts could change into men, or beasts and men could share one body. Herzog speculates that in the Chauvet caves and surrounding regions the modern mind was born. It is inescapable that as modern intruders into this cave we along with Herzog would impose our own philosophical questions on the paintings. It’s natural to ascribe significance, maybe religious significance, to the images in the cave. But who knows what the cave’s residents believed about them? Maybe they just loved to draw. Maybe they were bored, and painting on the cave walls was a way of passing time, having fun. Herzog displays the images with reverence and awe. The film is especially worth viewing in 3-D, which is especially effective for showing the twisting, narrow passageways of the caves.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams makes clear that whatever we wish to make of it, however we strive to interpret it, the past is beyond recovery.

Emma, by Jane Austen

2011-12-28T23:05:00.000-05:00

I listened to a complete text of Jane Austen’s Emma (1815) on the treadmill. I find that it is easy to “read” books with strong plotlines on the treadmill. Not so with Emma. It is a novel about a closely bound social set. Much of it is conversation back and forth between characters, and it took me quite a while to grab hold of this book and be carried by it. The novel is first of all a book of social manners focused on the courtship of young women. Emma as the main character is self-absorbed and much concerned with the lives and business of others. She spends a good bit of her time trying to arrange matches for one person or another, especially Harriet Smith, whose illegitimate birth, virtually never spoken of, is nonetheless widely known and a primary reason why gentleman of the upper class would never seriously consider marrying her. By setting the young woman up with one gentleman after another, Emma causes her much embarrassment and pain. In believing that she knows what is best for people around her, Emma is largely unaware of what is best for herself. In Austen’s world, what is best for a woman is a good marriage—a marriage to a suitable man, a man of means, of her own social class or better, a man whom she chooses or who she allows to choose her. Much of the novel is concerned with Emma’s interest in people who are not interested in her, or whose interest in her is unwelcome. The obnoxious Mr. Elton, who Emma tries to set up with Harriet, is one example. Mr. Churchill, who seems to be interested in Emma’s company for much of the novel, is another. Emma’s misjudgment of character, her limited appreciation of the feelings of others, is at the center of many of her errors.-

Emma is also a comedy of manners, or, simply, a comedy. Satirical portrayals of characters such as Emma’s father and Mrs. Elton and others reveal Austen’s talent for caricature, for humor in general, and the vehicle for her satire of her society.

Captain America: The First Avenger

2011-12-27T00:00:00.000-05:00

Captain America: The First Avenger (2011; dir. Joe Johnston) offers one of the better film adaptations I’ve seen of a comic book hero. It’s set in the early 1940s, with the United States preparing to engage Hitler’s troops in combat. The United States needs a secret weapon, and a scientist has devised a means to turn ordinary soldiers into super-soldiers. The process involves needles and iron-maiden-like machines and green liquids and numerous other devices (most of which glow, make noise, and emit sparks), but it does work. That’s how our hero Steve Rogers, a puny weakling who begs and lies his way into the army because he wants to serve his country, becomes Captain America. None of this makes much sense, of course, unless you’ve read enough comic books (as a boy, I read them), in which case it makes perfect sense. The Nazis make great villains, of course, as do the public relations people who try to turn Captain America into a swill for selling bonds and recruiting soldiers.

There’s no real break-out moment of super hero glory in this film, as there have been at moments in the early Superman and Batman and Spiderman films, but noise, action, guns, military trucks, and fighting abound. The film is entertaining and never boring and requires no thought. In fact, it’s better if you don’t apply to much thought to the film—just watch it.

The end of this film, which moves Captain America from the 1940s to 2010, is a bit contrived and forced. The 1940s plot doesn’t really come to a conclusion. It just stops. Then Captain America, catapulted by some absurd 1940s contrivance into the future, finds himself in Times Square of New York City, all in preparation for another film, The Avengers (2012; dir. Josh Whedon) in which Captain America teams up with Iron Man and Thor and some other super fellows. Oh boy.

Bangkok 8, by John Burdett

2011-12-26T00:23:00.000-05:00

Boundaries are at issue in Bangkok 8, by John Burdett (2003)—transgressed boundaries, American vs. Thai boundaries, colonial boundaries, sexual boundaries, racial boundaries, criminal boundaries. This murder mystery set in modern Bangkok and narrated by a half-American, half-Thai detective who is ridiculed by his colleagues for having scruples, has one of the most terrifying crime scenes I’ve encountered—it involves baby cobras, a boa constrictor, dry ice, and a Mercedes limo. American imperialism and its consequences are another issue. The years of the Vietnamese conflict transformed Bangkok, which became a self-made pleasure dome for American soldiers on leave. In the modern-day Bangkok sexual tourism remains a major source of income for the city. The Vietnamese war also helped create a new population of Asian Americans who are always, or at least in the case of our narrator, at some sort of odds with the rest of the population.

The narrator, Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep, loses his partner early in the book, and one wonders whether their close friendship is the reason he avoids falling into a relationship with an American CIA operative who is attracted to him. She’s been assigned to the murder investigation because the murder victim was a former American soldier, and for other reasons

I was never comfortable with this novel. It has the tone of tough-guy noirism, but its protagonist, who on occasion you might compare to Philip Marlowe, never makes clear exactly where he stands. He’s elusive and slippery. What you do realize is that his strong sense of virtue and of moralism won’t allow him to let the murder go unsolved, even when his life is at risk.

The novel imbues its scene and story with claustrophobia, from the tiny apartment where the narrator lives, to the sex shows, to the jade shop. And this is claustrophobia not simply of a spatial sort. Everyone is watching everyone else. No one moves or acts without someone else’s being aware. Corruption, human exploitation, deception are rampant. Bangkok in this novel suggests the Los Angeles of Blade Runner (1983; dir. Ridley Scott).

Source Code

2011-12-20T10:32:00.001-05:00

Source Code (2011; dir. Duncan Jones) is one of those time travel films wherein the hero travels continually back into the past and triers to prevent an event from happening. In Source Code that event is the explosion of a bomb on a train where the pretty young woman that the protagonist gradually falls for is killed. There are wrinkles to this story, one in particular that changes our view of the protagonist Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) in a significant way. This is one of those time travel films wherein the viewer must constantly suspend belief in rules of logic, reason, and science. The film never explains how the protagonist is thrust back into the past, only that it is possible, in some instances, for an a person of the present to be thrust back into the consciousness of an individual in the past who is eight minutes away from death. (If you find this plausible, then this film is a holiday for you). When Colter travels back into time, he takes over the body of a young man whom the woman is planning to marry. By the end of the film he has permanently taken over the poor man’s body and stolen his fiancée, and when the film concludes and all is easy and well with the universe, no one pauses to think about him. He’s the real victim.

Source Code is a puzzle. As we return repeatedly to the past, we gradually gather clues about the bomber’s identity, and about the bomb he has planted. We gradually gather information about our hero. Time travel as a way of ordering the plot gradually becomes tedious, and only our interest in seeing how the pieces of the puzzle fall into place keeps us holding on.

The Last Werewolf, by Glen Duncan

2011-11-30T10:20:00.000-05:00

Jake Marlowe, narrator of The Last Werewolf (Knopf, 2011) is an intelligent, literate soul whose laces his story with ironic observations, literary allusions, and historical philosophizing. He is the last werewolf, on the earth, supposedly, the others having been hunted down and killed by werewolf hunters. They pursue him throughout the story. He writes passably well (he narrates through journal entries), and it took me a while to put my virtual finger on the real problem with him and the novel in which he figures. There is a brittle, faintly artificial quality to his voice that competes with the novelty of his situation—novel at least for us readers—that situation being that he is the last of his kind.

Author Glen Duncan describes effectively how on a monthly basis Jake changes to a werewolf, and although I haven’t read too many of these novels he does a credible job of dramatizing the change. Marlowe does not welcome it. He spends the entire month dreading it, yet when the transition comes he has no choice about giving himself up to it. He has no control over the change or over himself once it has occurred. The novel wallows in such moments of self-pity and loss of control.

Ultimately, the conventions of werewolfery take over this novel, which is most interesting when Marlowe talks about what it feels like to be a werewolf, how he dreads the change, his world weariness, and so on. He is a sort of existential werewolf. He waits willingly to be hunted down and killed. He remembers the attack in the forest two hundred years before that led to his condition. He remembers the woman he loved, his wife, who became his first victim, an act that haunts him.

Sex and passion—of the human and bestial sort—are the real focus here, as becomes clear when Marlowe meets another werewolf (there really is another one, after all), and she is female. They have incredible sex, as werewolves and as humans, at least Marlowe says they do. Therefore the novel satisfies our prurient interest in the moment of human to wolf transformation and also in the sexual lives of werewolves. This is assuming we have such an interest. Glen Duncan assumes we do.

The main character’s name—Jake Marlowe—alludes to two important literary narrators—Jake Barnes of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and Joseph Conrad’s Marlowe, in such tales as The Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. Jake’s mannered self-consciousness especially suggests Hemingway’s narrator, also trapped in a situation over which he has no control.

The novel awkwardly telegraphs its ending.

None of this was actually very satisfying.

Paul

2011-11-20T10:22:00.000-05:00

Paul (2011; dir. Greg Mottola) is here because I am trying to record thoughts on each film I see. I am shamefacedly reporting that I did watch it, that I cannot remember why I watched it, and that the experience was without value. Paul is a stoner comedy about aliens. Basically, two nerdy and stoner UFO enthusiasts set out on a road trip to Roswell, NM, and other places of renown in the community of people who believe that alien visitations occur on a daily basis. Somewhere along the road, they run across Paul, a digitized alien with the standard shape and large eyes of aliens as envisioned by ET folklore proponents. Paul has lived among us for some time, and he is himself a stoner. Since he is voiced by Seth Rogen, there can be little surprise. The movie loosely parodies and satirizes ET and Close Encounters, but it’s real purpose is to elicit laughter through jokes and comic antics that have no bearing on Paul’s extraterrestrial origins. They are stoner antics, and this is a stoner movie, and not a very good one. There have been some entertaining stoner films, but the laughter and occasional warm feelings this film elicits are cheaply won.

Biological hubris has some bearing on the pervasive, wistful notion that aliens—if they are out there—would be basically like us. To suggest they would smoke dope, drink beer, and take on most of the less than savory characteristics of a pop-addled generation is something else, and difficult to name.

Hannah

2011-10-31T18:35:00.001-04:00

Hannah (2011; dir. Jon Wright) is a far removed version of The Tempest—a young woman raised by her father in the Arctic wilderness, with no opportunities for contact with other people. Her father is, as we learn early on, training her for guerilla-style, ninja influenced combat. The film quickly introduces several mysteries that it immediately sets to unraveling. What is Hannah being trained for? Who is her father, and why is he marked for termination by a secret security agency? What happened to Hannah’s mother? Who are the people who want to track Hannah and her father down?

These questions are more interesting than the answers. Saoirse Ronan is very good as Hannah, a perfect sort of combat machine. She is aggressive, combative, and strangely unemotional—she has been, as we learn, raised to possess these traits, and “raise” has two distinct meanings. We learn about Hannah from her actions, from what she does; we know little about her otherwise. She says very little, and she spends most of the film trying to elude pursuers.

This could be an interesting film about identity or about nature vs. nurture or about the extents to which governments will go in covert operations. Hannah could also be a suspenseful thriller, but it really fails to be any of these. It substitutes stylish camera work, frenetic editing, and rhythmic music for substance. After a time it becomes monotonous. The set-up is promising. The carry-through is disappointing. Saoirse Ronan creates an interesting character who doesn’t have much of a story.

Comments on Despy Karlas

2011-10-31T11:26:00.001-04:00

I am glad to have the opportunity to say a few words today about Despy Karlas. I did not know Despy at all until her later years, long after her retirement, when I would see her at social events. One thing I remember about her in particular is her keen, piercing eyes. She watched everyone around her and enjoyed conversation. I remember one conversation in particular when she talked to me about how she had returned to the piano after some time and was practicing pieces by Chopin. I did know of her reputation in the school of music, where her presence as a teacher and performer was part of the legendry of the School.

What do great teachers leave behind when they retire and pass from the scene? Where do you look for them? You might find their names in departmental histories, or their books moldering in the library, or in the names of old buildings. Former students may come asking after them. Speaking as a professor myself, I hope our impact on students is the most important mark we leave behind us. We hope our students learned from us, we hope we helped them grow and mature, we hope we helped them in some small way prepare for the rest of their lives.

Despy’s students are her greatest legacy. You will hear from some of them today. Today they are teaching and performing throughout the state and the nation. And the students of those students are her legacy too, for the example she set, the methods she taught, the discipline she instilled, the love of the piano she embodied—all of these are passed on to them. And of course another way Despy lives on is through the professorship endowed in her name and through her other generous gifts to Music.

I have the privilege of having had her legacy passed to me. I began to study piano as an adult student in 1989, under the guidance of Sue Baughman, who lives here in town, and who herself studied with Despy. Sue was a wonderful teacher and good friend. For the past 6 years I’ve studied under Despy’s final piano student, Joey Hokayem, who teaches many talented young students here in Athens. Let me hasten to say that I am neither young nor talented, but I enjoy the struggle to learn new pieces. Joey often speaks of Despy and her ways of teaching piano, her comments, her strategies, her ways of letting students know when they did or did not measure up to expectations. Here is what he said about Despy: “She totally transformed my approach to the playing the piano. She not only set goals for her students but showed us how to achieve them. She was a true pedagogue and was always very thorough in every detail of the music. She was also very concerned about the other areas of our life and how we were balancing them with the demands of our music education. I was her last student at UGA and felt very fortunate to have studied with her for over 6 years.”

It pleases me to know that in my labors as an adult piano student I am studying with teachers who studied with Despy Karlas.

Comments presented at November 30, 2011 celebration of Despy Karlas

The Help

2011-10-28T15:42:00.001-04:00

In The Help (2011; dir. Tate Taylor) we experience the big events of the early 1960s indirectly-- through news reports about the integration of the University of Mississippi in 1962 and the Kennedy assassination of 1963. An exception is the murder of Medgar Evers—since the film is set in Jackson, characters learn of the murder on the street and from friends. This story of how oppressed black women working menial jobs find a voice to tell their stories, to contribute in their own way to the struggle for equal rights, is in reality a small chapter in a much larger narrative.

I watched this film with a mostly white audience. A few black people were present, but not many. My suspicion is that the readers who made the book a best seller, and viewers who made the film a commercial success, were mostly white. Black viewers will have to explain their reactions to the film. I suspect many may have enjoyed it, but that the scenes of black women working as maids for white families who at worst were racist and cruel caused discomfort. As a white viewer, I felt discomfort over how the women were treated, over the circumscription of their lives—this is a reaction the film intended. Another source of discomfort came from the fact that I lived through the times this film portrayed. I wanted to resist this portrayal of the middle-class white South, in part because I knew it was accurate.

Early in my life my family lived in an old duplex in College Park, Georgia. My father was struggling to make a start in the florist business. My mother was raising children. They were not wealthy. Our maid was a woman named Mary Lou. She lived a little more than a mile from our house, and every morning she would walk to work. I’d see her pass the side window as she headed towards the backdoor. We paid her two dollars a day at first. Eventually we raised her pay to five dollars. She worked for us for twenty years. My father helped her buy a house, a run-down wooden frame on an unpaved road where she and some of the other black residents of College Park citizens lived.

This was the segregated South we were growing up in, though as children we at first knew nothing of it. It never occurred to us to question the status quo or even to know what it was. It was just for us life. Gradually, as I grew older, I became aware of a racial divide. I heard my grandmother promising me that if integration came to the schools of Georgia and they shut down as they did in Arkansas, she would have school for us in our own house. I heard my grandfather promise to wash her mouth out with soap if she kept using a particular word that even then was regarded as impolite. I heard my father express his dislike for Sammy Davis Junior and his marriage to a white woman. I heard conversations among my friends and their parents. In general, my parents were inhabitants of their time and their place, but their opinions and manners of speech were moderate and moderating. My mother regarded the white mobs that attacked the Freedom Riders in 1961 as troublemakers, and I remember clearly her sadness over the murders of the four children in Birmingham, Alabama.

By the standards of the time we treated Mary Lou well. She kept good care of us children, seemed to love and enjoy us. But how can I know for sure? Like the maids in The Help, Mary Lou wore a uniform to work. We had a few other maids during my childhood. I remember only one of them well. When one maid left and another came to work, it did not matter much to us children. We did not care much about how these women felt about coming to work for our family. Some of them we treated badly—not in the same way as the racist woman in The Help, but in the way that four or five young children can run amuck and make life difficult for a caretaker. Mary Lou usually managed to maintain control and when she didn’t, she would moan, “I’m sick and tired.” This is the statement I can remember her making repeatedly. As she grew older, we began picking her up and taking her home each day. One day on the way to our house, several of us children quarreled, and Mary Lou moaned, “I’m already sick and tired.” That mantric refrain probably carried more meaning and weight than we could have known. When she was too old to work any longer, we occasionally visited her (at first) or talked by phone. Eventually our visits and phone calls for the most part ended.

In The Help the white character Skeeter Phelan provides the necessary entry to the world of the maids. Skeeter is a sort of nonconformist to begin with. She’s not noted as a beauty (despite the fact that she’s played by Emma Stone). She wants a career as a journalist, a writer, while most of her friends from high school are either already married or planning to be. And while her friends treat her as a member of their group, they also look at her as different. Skeeter’s first attempt at publishing was rejected by a northern editor, and she gets the idea that she ought to write about what she knows. So, ironically, she decides to interview maids to discover how they think and what it is like to be who they are. The first woman she talks to, Aibileen (Viola Davis), agrees to talk because she sees it as her small contribution to the movement. In fact, Aibileen wants to write her stories down for Skeeter rather than tell them out loud. Minnie, known for her careless tongue, is the next woman who agrees to talk. After the Medgar Evers murder, many women decide they are ready to talk. Although Skeeter is the conduit through which these women convey their experiences to the white viewers (and readers through the fictional book The Help that Skeeter goes on to write anonymously), the stories they tell are their own. The problem is that we hear only a few details of those stories. The film itself is anecdotal.

Even though the black woman are talking (and writing) of their experiences, it is a young white woman who records their stories and puts them in a book. Obviously there were limited ways for unlettered Southern black women in the early 1960s to get their stories into print. But it’s nonetheless true that The Help is another film about the black struggle for freedom told through a white person’s perspective.

By recording their stories Skeeter engages in her own struggle for a voice as a writer and an individual. Like the black women she talks to, she faces limited choices. Not only does everyone around her expect her to look for and find a husband, they are concerned that she may fail to do so. Marriage is fate, in her world. Geography is fate too. The citizens of Jackson white and black have carefully defined, predefined roles. They have carefully prescribed ways of thinking too. Allegiance to the South, which means allegiance to the codes of racial separatism and white supremacy, is a given for the white citizens of Jackson. When Skeeter begins to speak and act in a way that suggests she may not honor these codes, she provokes suspicion and, ultimately, castigation.

The Help makes clear that racism is not simply revulsion against a particular skin color. As the character of Celia Foote reveals (Jessica Chastain) it’s also a matter of social and economic class. Celia is the product of a poor white family, a “poor white trash” family. She doesn’t know how to act or speak in a way that would admit her to the circles of most of the white women in this film, and even if she did her lower class origins (not to mention her marriage to the one-time boyfriend of Hilly Holbrook) would probably leave her excluded. She’s an outcast, and her exclusion becomes one basis for her friendship with Minnie. The film is clear as to how we’re to regard Celia—she’s simple but good, misguided and errant but teachable. It’s therefore no surprise that she holds few assumptions about race. She welcomes Minnie into her home, talks freely with her, eats at the same table, and in general extends friendship. I must say that lower-class whites in 1963 were as racist as anyone else. If Celia is somehow supposed to suggest that coming out of poverty cures one of racism, then we have a problem in logic and fact—the middle-class Southern white folks in this film make that clear. Celia is a rare exception to the rule of early 1960s Jackson, MS, and the rest of the American South. The film absolves her of racism in order to make clear that she suffers from prejudice herself. Such distinctions were never so simple.

After Hilly fires Minnie, accusing her of theft, she becomes a social pariah. No one will hire her. She manages to find work with Celia, who along with her husband promises her a job for as long as she wants it. Aibileen also becomes a social outcast when her involvement with the interviews becomes known—Hilly makes sure that it does. Skeeter, of course, can leave Jackson and go to New York and have her career in publishing. Her book on the stories of the black woman not only lands her a best seller but also a job as an assistant editor for a New York publisher. Her mother is dying, so she has little left in Jackson to stay behind for. Aibileen is not so fortunate. She has to live in Jackson, and every white family that Hilly talks to will have nothing to do with her. Although she was Skeeter’s entrance into the world of the black women in the film, she’s left alone in the end with dim prospects.

Melancholia

2011-10-25T11:29:00.001-04:00

Visually, Melancholia (dir. Lars Von Trier, 2011) is striking. This film opens with images of Justine (Kirsten Dunst) that at first appear to be random photographs but instead we discover they are slowly moving. They don’t make sense initially, but they gather meaning. One that struck me was of Dunst standing in the middle of a green field with birds falling from the skies around her. In another, trees and telephone poles appear to be radiating bursts of energy.

The film is cast in two sections, one concerning Justine’s wedding at a palatial mansion near a golf course, the other set at a palatial mansion near a beach, concerning a heretofore unknown planet passing close to the earth—the planet is named Melancholia and has supposedly hidden behind the sun until it appears at the time of the film.

Despite the fact that in its method and view of things Melancholia is distinctly different from The Tree of Life, there are links. Both regard major questions—the meaning of our lives, mortality, our place in the universe—in the context of personal lives set against major cosmic events—in Mallick’s film this means the birth and development of the universe, in Von Trier’s film it means the destruction of the earth. Mallick allows for some kind of life after death, while Trier’s does not. The end of the earth means the obliteration of human identity and all life, and as the film would have it the end of the only planet in the universe that harbors life.

Justine and Claire are sisters who have never gotten along. Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) has settled into a wealthy and conventional life with her husband John (Kiefer Sutherland). She is nervous and fearful, and resentful of her needy, troubled sister, but she takes care of Justine when she suffers one of her numerous emotional breakdowns in the film. At points she seems catatonic, at others schizophrenic. She is also a kind of Cassandra who claims to know what others are thinking and that the end of the earth is approaching. Justine in the film’s first half seems to have accepted the prospect of life with an extremely wealthy man. Her wedding is ornately staged, an ostentatious displays of wealth by her new husband’s family. On the evening of her wedding, at the after-wedding dinner, she grows increasingly distracted and detached. She frequently leaves the room, wandering off to drive a golf cart or to comfort her young nephew or to nap or to have sex with a man on a putting green. By the night’s end she has viciously castigated her father-in-law, quarreled with her mother, and ended the marriage that has just begun. Virtually everything that could go wrong with this dinner party does, and Justine is the cause of much (though not all) of the trouble. It’s clear that she is troubled and, like her caustic, bitter mother, not suitable for conventional living.

The film’s second half, entitled “Claire,” shows Justine and Claire and their differing attitudes towards the approach of Melancholia. Claire is terrified the planet will strike the earth, and she frequently reads various prophecies of doom on the Internet. Her husband, an amateur astronomer who looks forward to the approach of the planet as a wondrous event, assures her that nothing will happen. Justine, on the other hand, says little, and tells Claire that she is glad her husband’s reassurance makes her happy. When the planet drifts towards the earth, John commits suicide in the barn, leaving the sisters and the child to confront the end on their own. It is Justine, acquiescent to obliteration, who doesn’t care that her life will soon end, who builds a shelter on a hill and invites Claire and the boy to enter in as the planet massively looms.

The final scene is intensely powerful. The planet is destroyed, the screen transitions into darkness, and the credits begin to roll. The end is the end. This film is aptly named.

In The Tree of Life recurrent images are a kind of symbolic, coded language of thresholds, of entrances and exits, of transformations. In Melancholia they are simply pieces of a puzzle that gradually fall into place.

Bridesmaids

2011-10-25T10:05:00.001-04:00

Melissa McCarthy is the reason to watch Bridesmaids (dir. Paul Feig; 2011), just as Josh Galifinakis is the reason to watch The Hangover (2009). There are other reasons to watch both films, of course. This film about women in their mid-30s and 40s preparing for a wedding, written by Kristin Wiig and Annie Mumolo, offers an array of women comedians and actors opportunities to play to their talents. But in its plot it is like any number of films about friends drawn apart by circumstances and then drawn back together. What we learn of course is the importance of friendship and of remembering your roots. There are numerous funny moments, along with some unfunny ones. But McCarthy’s portrayal of Megan is the center of the film. That she plays a plain and goofy overweight character who visually contrasts with the mostly thin and attractive cast is not the point. The point is that she plays a whacky, off-beat, perverse, hilariously unpredictable character who surprises in every scene. Unfortunately, Megan succumbs to sentimentality when she is the person who appears to force Annie (Kristin Wiig) out of her self-centeredness and depression by recounting her own problems. McCarthy plays the sort of quirky character that Wiig herself often portrays on Saturday Night Live. Wiig’s character Annie in the film is relatively conventional and bland. To show that women can compete with men for grossness, the film offers a food poisoning scene with vomiting and diarrhea. It culminates in a wedding dress in the middle of a Milwaukee, WI, street. This film is intermittently entertaining. I also enjoyed Maya Rudolph as Lillian, Annie’s friend.

Dazed and Confused

2011-10-25T08:54:00.001-04:00

My oldest son Michael told me to watch Dazed and Confused (1993), Richard Linklater’s first effort at directing. Linklater has an uncanny ability to portray real and believable characters. I have especially enjoyed Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004), about two would-be lovers and their relationship at different points in their lives. A Scanner Darkly (2006) was a truly innovative film using rotoscope, while The School of Rock (2003), with Jack Black, was eminently fun.

In Dazed and Confused we have teenagers on the last day of school before summer vacation. Some are graduating seniors, others are freshman, and at least one is a drop out trying to relive former high school days. (Played by Matthew McConaughey, he gives a creepy performance, which is I think the point). Some students are looking forward to their teenage years while others are looking back. They cruise around town and attend various parties and get drunk and smoke dope. The boys are looking for sex and the girls are not too far behind.

One thinks of American Graffiti (1973). In that film some of the characters were looking forward to a life beyond high school and their town. For the most part, none of the characters in Dazed and Confused look beyond their present lives. The idea that there is a life beyond the town has occurred only to a couple of them. Even though many of them complain about their town, none thinks about leaving.

There are certainly some characters in the film to dislike-- especially the senior boy (played by Ben Affleck) who over enjoyed initiating freshmen by slapping them with a paddle—most are in their own ways versions of people we’ve known. The pothead Slater (Rory Cochrane)and the sultry dew-eyes Michelle (Milla Jovovich) and the girl with explosive red hair (Marissa Ribisi) were especially memorable.

The young people in this film, living in the wake of the 1960s and the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnamese conflict, seem largely unaware of, or at least indifferent to, the problems of the outer world. They just drift, aimlessly, and one assumes that sooner or later reality and life will dawn.

Midnight in Paris

2011-09-30T18:18:00.001-04:00

In the 2010 film Midnight in Paris Woody Allen again indulges his apparently unquenchable nostalgia for past days (in the case Paris in the 1920s), his romanticism, and his interests in the connections between life and art. We’ve seen this before, from Annie Hall to Zelig to Radio Days to “The Kuglemass Episode.” In Midnight in Paris the turf may have been oft-visited, but Allen makes it at least amusing and fresh. The film is light and entertaining and well done, but not very heady. The plot: a struggling writer travels with his fiancé and her wealthy parents to Paris. The writer and his wife often have diverging interests, and one night on his own he wanders out into the Parisian streets and finds himself in 1920s Paris, with Fitzgerald, Zelda, Hemingway, Picasso, and many others. These are people he idolizes, and he idolizes the Paris of the so-called lost generation in general. Traveling back and forth from past to present (the film never bothers to explain how he manages this), the writer explores questions of artistic and personal commitment, of the real and the fanciful, and so on. The film comes to a conclusion that will ring familiar to Allen’s fans, but at least it’s an amusing journey.

Allen has often shown his interests in intellectuals and in artists (some might say artistic celebrities). He admires as well as derides. In Midnight in Paris his particular target is a self-important art historian who never stops talking, over-interpreting practically everything he encounters. Allen’s treatment of the artists and writers is satiric, and we don’t get much from our encounters with them other than some humor. Hemingway in particular cannot speak without mocking his own famous writing style and code, and it’s clear that both Allen and Corey Stoll (who plays the writer) enjoy the fun. The appearances of these artistic luminaries is more a form of quotation than an effort to say something about art. Eliot and Gertrude Stein and Bunuel and Cole Porter and Salvador Dali pass through, and the audience says to itself (sometimes aloud in the case of the audience I saw the film with, which included many English majors) “there’s Eliot and Stein and Man Ray and Porter and Dali.” The thrill comes from recognizing those figures at the heart of our own romantic and self-congratulatory obsessions with the artists and writers we study.

Kathy Bates as Stein is memorable, but my favorite among the artists was Dali, as played by Adrien Brody, obsessed with the hippopotamus.

A more obscure film about 1920s Paris with more to say about authenticity and the meaning of art is The Moderns (1988).

Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte

2011-09-29T16:52:00.001-04:00

Many of the characters in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (1847) seem to be types. The first one I noticed was Helen Burns, the virtuous and consumptive friend Jane meets in the school for orphans. Helen speaks with the sort of prescient wisdom that some like to think a dying person would have. Another is Mr. Brockhurst, the cruel and unfeeling owner of the school, and then there is Jane’s aunt, Mrs. Reed, who takes care of her dead brother’s daughter and despises the girl as a result. In fact, Mrs. Reed and her two daughters could be characters from a Cinderella tale. Many of the characters, most notably Mr. Rochester, are types. Even Jane herself is the kind of character who often appears in narratives about unfortunate orphans left in the care of cruel relatives. Yet humanizing, individuating elements within these characters bring them to life.

Jane certainly encounters a series of insensitive, doctrinaire, overbearing men, from Mr. Brockhurst to John St. Rivers (who wants her to travel with him to India to work as missionaries—she must agree to marry him for the sake of propriety rather than love), to Rochester himself.

One of Jane’s constant goals in this novel is democracy and equality. She is no activist crusader, but as an orphan abandoned by her aunt and whom many consider to be illegitimate (she isn’t), she occupies a low rung on the social ladder. She’s constantly reminded of her low social status, treated by some in the novel as hardly human. Her true state becomes clear when she leaves Mr. Rochester’s estate, after a shocking discovery, and travels out on her own. She loses her pocketbook and is penniless, wandering from one house to another, rejected. She almost dies of hunger and exposure. Her abject social state is never more clearly shown.

For Jane Eyre, equality and democracy have to do with social class and gender. She’s keenly aware that the problems she faces are largely a reflection of her low social standing and the fact that she is a woman. On a number of occasions she stands up for herself, even at the moment her rescue seems at hand. She wants to be treated as a human being. She refuses to allow Rochester to treat her as an “angel.” Once she comes to know him, his temper and ego don’t cow her. Bronte’s position on the British social class system seems clear: she doesn’t like it. Nor does she like the unequal station accorded women in 19^th-century British life.

Yet what is undeniable about Jane is that rescue for her doesn’t mean life in a world without class differences—it means rescue from poverty and lower-class circumstances. It means rescue from “spinsterhood” (she is 19). Jane is highly educated, virtuous, well mannered—she has all the virtues of the upper class (and few of its defects). Hence, the upper class, so the novel seems to suggest, is where she belongs. Despite her “plain and marked appearance” she also deserves a suitable husband, as this will give her the freedom, the independence from care and work, she deserves. The husband she receives is the one she pined for, even after her unpleasant discovery, and despite his missing arm, missing eye, and generally disagreeable manner. But he loves her, and she loves him. So the rescue that comes to her is a life of unending service to a man who loves her, but whose needs given his condition are considerable. I suppose we are to see this as a willing life of servitude rather than the unwilling one which she’d previously suffered.

There are interesting elements of Gothicism throughout this novel—the strange noises in the attic, the unexplainable fire, the ghost or apparition Jane sees as a young girl, the cruelties she suffers in her aunt’s home, the hints of emotional unbalance in Rochester, in other characters, in Jane herself.

This novel really is a sort of hodgepodge of styles and modes and ambitions. But it’s an entertaining hodgepodge centered by the character of Jane.

St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, by Karen Russell

2011-08-26T16:02:00.001-04:00

The title of this 2006 story collection, the first by Florida author Karen Russell, is a good clue to the book as a whole. Russell’s world is easily recognizable even as it is weirdly bizarre. It combines the magical realism of writers like Borges Gabriel Garcia Marquez with the lush psychological realism of Eudora Welty (who herself is something of a magical realist). Each of these stories takes a surprising and new approach to its subject. Each story seems a kind of hallucination in which distinctions between dream and the real are blurred and sometimes simply not there.

An example is the first story, “Ava Wrestles an Alligator,” a young girl’s story of her life with her sister and father (Chief Bigtree) in a roadside alligator park called “Swamplandia.” The girl’s hulking older sister goes out into the swamps in the night to lay with ghostly lovers. Does the young narrator, naively uncomprehending, simply believe the stories her sister tells? Is her sister what she seems—a deeply disturbed young woman, or something more? The genius of this story is that it doesn’t allow the supernatural to be reduced to a matter of limited narrative viewpoint.

In “Haunting Olivia” a brother and sister search for their dead sister’s underwater ghost.

“Z. Z.’s Sleep-Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers” is about a summer camp for children with sleeping disorders. The two main characters dream about historical events that have already happened. The camp leader’s wife suffers from paranoid dreams about ravenous packs of dogs which she acts out in her sleep by killing her husband’s beloved sheep.

My favorite story is “from Children’s Reminiscences of the Westward Migration.” A boy tells his family’s story of traveling west on a wagon train. They suffer storms, sickness, squabbles with other families, marital tensions. The story’s descriptive powers are considerable—I was reminded of Charles Portis and True Grit. As things grow more difficult, the boy’s parents’ marriage is increasingly strained, but finally they resolve their difficulties. The one unexpected element in this story is that the boy’s father, Asterion, is a minotaur.

In “Lady Yeti and the Palace of Artificial Snows” a boy talks about the ice rink where people from his hometown go to escape the heat of the summer and the tensions of their middle-aged and disappointed lives. The palace features a group of skating monkeys, a DJ who never takes off her Yeti costume, and an apocalyptic artificial snow storm with blizzard force winds. Inside the ice rink, the rest of the world falls away.

In “The City of Shells” a janitor tries to rescue a little girl stuck in a huge artificial conch shell at a New Jersey amusement park as a hurricane approaches. He ends up stuck in the shell himself.

“Out to Sea” describes an ocean-bound retirement community where each elderly person lives in his or her own private boat. Focused on an old man who falls in love with the young woman who’s assigned to be his companion (she’s doing community service), the story is sad. The final paragraph: “When he was a boy growing up on the swamp, Sawtooth used to know all of the constellations, but now he has forgotten how to find them. Overhead, the sky lurches in unfamiliar, opalescent swirls. All around him, the muted yellow lamps of his neighbors’ boats blink off quietly, one by one, until Sawtooth is left alone bobbing in the darkness.”

In “Accident Brief, Occurrence #00/422,” the Waitiki Valley Boys Choir flies to the top of a glacier once each year in a ceremony that is meant to cause an avalanche and that is also an important community ritual. The narrator’s befriending of a mute boy in the choir leads to dark tragedy after their helicopter crashes. The setting seems to be entirely fantastic—descendants of the Moa tribe and the pirates who overran them populate the story. The boy is angry because his father ran off and his mother has married to another man, Mr. Oamaru, whom the boy resents.

Most of these stories don’t end conventionally. They just stop, and the effect is unsettling. “Haunting Olivia” ends in a cave where a young boy is looking for his sister. “The City of Shells” ends with the girl and janitor stuck in a conch shell. “Children’s Reminiscences” ends with a covered wagon family headed for what seems a bleak disaster. The stories are set in or near a swamp in central Florida. Yet their world seems an alternative one to our own—place names, histories, geographies--all different and unfamiliar. A number of the stories involve children who have lost their parents, especially their fathers, or who in some way come from families in crisis. This collection, including its title, struck me as novel, whimsical, interesting, and off-kilter. Fantasy and nightmare commingle, but the human element in each story never falls from view.

Loneliness is a major theme—the loneliness of children forced into adulthood, lost or abandoned by parents, facing calamity in any number of forms, children who encounter too soon the void of the world.

Dracula, by Bram Stoker

2011-08-26T15:40:00.001-04:00

One of the interesting aspects of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897) is its narration. The story is told through letters, journal entries, newspaper accounts, memos, and so on. The effect is of a first-person narration by a number of narrators, some of whom don’t survive the story. Another interesting element is the fascination with late 19th century technology: dictaphones, phonographs, typewriters, trains, boats (transportation in general), science, medicine. Countervailing against the modern, of course, is the novel’s fascination with the irrational—with demons, magic, superstition, vampires, the undead. What most surprised me about the book, which I have long avoided, was how melodramatically entertaining it is.

Stoker is continually telegraphing his readers about events soon to occur. His technique isn’t especially refined or sophisticated, but he gets the story told. Early in the book, when it’s clear that Lucy is being preyed on late at night by the evil Count, Professor Von Helstrom warns his associates that they must never leave her side. Someone must always be in the room to protect her. Yet whoever it is that happens to be there protecting her always finds a way of leaving, if only for a few minutes, during which time the Count gets his dinner.

Dracula is especially delicate about women, yet women are almost always Count Dracula’s victims, and an exorbitant Victorian eroticism infects the story surrounding Dracula and his female victims. Also evident, but not overly apparent (both Lucy and Mina Harker are Stoker’s versions of the saintly Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin) is the xenophobia. Count Dracula comes from eastern Europe, Transylvania, and before that from Turkey. Fears of the East, of darker-skinned races, of Jews in particular, are often apparent. Dracula is an early reaction against globalism.

Rango

2011-08-26T15:10:00.001-04:00

The foundations for the animated feature Rango (dir. Gore Verbinski, 2011) lie in old films about the American west, especially of the Clint Eastwood/Sergio Leone variety, an essay by Joan Didion from the late 1960s, Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, Carlos Castaneda, and Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Early in the film we get a brief glimpse of Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo speeding down a highway in a blue Cadillac. This gives us a clue as to what’s to follow. Not that the film concerns drug addled hallucinations, but that the desert landscape, the creatures who inhabit, are beyond the range of the usual documentary about western wildlife. Of course, Rango is no documentary.

Rango does a surprisingly good job of entertaining its viewers and of pointing out the impact of encroaching civilization on the American western deserts. The environmental dimensions of the desert are pitted against the demands of ruthless corporations for water and for replacing old ways with new ones.

This animated comedy depicts the desert landscape and its characters in a hyper-realistic yet comically exaggerated and caricaturish way. Even without a plot, Rango would be fun to watch simply as an exercise in animation. But it does have a plot: a lizard is thrust from the cage where he has lived all his life. He’s a tall-tale spinner, and when he stumbles into a desert town, his stories convince the townspeople that he is a great hero who will bring water to their parched settlement and vanquish their enemies. Rango must prove himself, win the female lizard who’s attracted his fancy, and defeat corruption and corporate greed.

I enjoyed this film.

The King’s Speech

2011-07-12T15:24:00.001-04:00

I am not a fan of the British monarchy, an anachronism if ever there was one. But Americans, defenders of democracy, adore the British royals. The King’s Speech (2010; dir. David Seidler) feeds that adoration.

This film’s virtue is that its real interest is not the monarchy but the developing friendship of two men—one of them a shy man with a temper who happens to be second in line to the British throne; the other a failed actor turned voice coach whose controversial methods are said to help people who stutter. Prince Albert, Duke of York (Colin Firth), doesn’t wish to be king, though he recognizes that his brother David, the Prince of Wales, is immature, shallow, and unprepared to lead. Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush) on the other hand wants to make a mark in some way. He fails at landing roles in the theatre, so he works as a speech therapist. His family lives in a shabby apartment, and he ekes out a living at what he does. The parallels between them extend into their families—the tawdry apartment and meager circumstances of the Logues and their sons contrasting with the plush, elegant surroundings of the prince, his wife, and their daughters—Margaret and Elizabeth.

Albert’s wife, Elizabeth, seeks Logue’s help for her husband’s stammering, and the voice coach and the prince begin working together. Both are aware of the differences between them in class—an impoverished teacher on the one hand and a member of the royal family on the other. Albert expects to be addressed by his royal title, but Logue insists on calling him Bertie, a name used only by family members. Logue requires that they work together on a basis of equality, a requirement Albert resists. At one point Albert’s objection to Lionel and his methods brings an end to their work together. But when brother David (King Edward VIII) abdicates the throne Albert finds himself King George VI of England and in need of speaking successfully to the British people on the eve of the Second World War. His relationship with Lionel resumes.

The title has multiple meanings. One is the literal matter of the king’s speech. Albert suffers a terrible stammer that prevents him from speaking publically without great difficulty and embarrassment. His stammer causes him to doubt his own worth, especially in comparison to his older brother , who makes vicious fun of his speech difficulties during an argument. Another meaning is the radio address Albert gives on the eve of the Second World War He needs to speak well enough to reassure and inspire the British people, who are about to enter a long and painful war. A third meaning derives from the power that derives from the speech of a king—as an expression of will, power, authority.

This friendship and the surrounding melodrama give The King’s Speech its interest. It doesn’t rely on the aura of glamour surrounding the monarchy. Nor does it show the royals as anything more or less than what they are—privileged, imperfect people. The acting of Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush is excellent, and as a human story set in a mid-twentieth century historical context, the film works on every level.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon

2011-07-06T15:02:00.001-04:00

Several reviews suggested that this film would be entertaining. I found the first Transformers film (2007) diverting. It had a sense of play, didn’t take itself seriously. The inevitable sequel, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) cranked up the noise and mayhem. Despite some impressive effects, its story (even for a Transformers film) was weak, and its point seemed encapsulated in the giant toys, the explosions, and Megan Fox’s heaving breasts.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011; dir. Michael Bay) is far worse than I’d expected. It’s profoundly bad and doesn’t even function well on the level of the comic book characters it’s bringing to screen. The few moments of pleasure come from minor characters played by Frances McDormand , John Torturro, and John Malcovich (my favorite; he plays a raving Ayn Rand-inspired tycoon). The main character Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) and his new girlfriend Carly (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley—well dressed in every scene) seem basically to go through the motions.

Is it really possible that Sam, who has “saved the earth” twice and received a medal from the President, is unemployed?

Many of the Transformer robots have the quirky personalities of Disney or Warner Brothers cartoon characters—they’re types, some of them vaguely ethnic types.

The film briefly haunts us in several scenes with images of collapsing skyscrapers and sheets of paper wafting down from the skies--echoes of Sept. 11.[1]

The battle between the Autobots and Decepticons is a battle between the forces of freedom and its enemies. This film is far more violent than its predecessors, where violence against humans was mostly implied. The thin and illogical story, the often preposterous dialogue, the acting of the main characters, the Transformers themselves, the battles and explosions—none of it mattered.

[1] See Dana Stevens review of the film and its references to the events of 9-11 in Slate: http://www.slate.com/id/2298063/.

Battle: Los Angeles

2011-07-06T14:28:00.001-04:00

Battle: Los Angeles (2011; dir. Jonathan Liebesman) has an ample amount of CGI special effects. Aliens attack the major cities of the earth, and Los Angeles proves to be the one place where resistance is not futile. A staff sergeant on the verge of retirement (Aaron Eckhart) finds himself called back to duty, and he and a platoon of Marines square off with the aliens. Much of the film focuses on the efforts of the soldiers to rescue civilians trapped in a police station. What sets this film apart from most films of this type is that it focuses more on characters than special effects and space creatures. It’s basically a battle movie, with all the standard clichés and formulas. The staff sergeant, Michael Nantz, of course, has a past—a decision he made a few years earlier in Afghanistan resulted in the deaths of four men in his unit. His confidence is shaken, and this event helps convince him to retire. He finds in the platoon he’s assigned to the brother of one of the dead soldiers, who makes everyone in the unit aware of the sergeant’s past. So, in addition to fighting the aliens Nantz must battle his own self-doubts and those of the men he's leading. As is the rule in many battle films, we find our time occupied with wondering which soldier will die next, and how. We wonder whether the sergeant will overcome his self-doubt and win the confidence of his unit. We wonder how only a few men could possibly do anything to defeat the nasty and apparently invincible aliens, who have invaded the earth to harvest its water.

CGI spacecraft mostly hover in the background, with a few close-up encounters. We recognize some borrowings from other films-- Stephen Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (2005) seems to be an influence on how Battle: Los Angeles shows alien weapons that disintegrate human bodies, and the appearance of some of the alien ships.

Like many battle films, this one is entertaining but in no way distinguished. There’s a lot of action, gunfire, and explosions, and the narrative moves fast. It’s fortunate the aliens hover mostly in the background. The one time we get to see them up close, they look like poorly made puppets. Staff Sergeant Nantz is the character who lends this film what virtues it has.

You Think That’s Bad, by Jim Shepard

2011-06-30T12:20:00.000-04:00

You Think That’s Bad (Knopf, 2011) is a collection of stories linked by the style and ironic posture of the author Jim Shepard. A unifying theme is dysfunction in human relationships, especially dysfunction resulting from the conflict of a man’s job or outer interests (mountain climbing, secret operations for the government, avalanche research, filmmaking) with his personal life, specifically with his romantic entanglements with women. Many of these stories seem to argue that the male ego, while needing personal relationships, is prone to drive them away, to invest itself in outside activities that substitute for or destroy personal connections. The world Shepard describes is hostile to such connections.

In the first story, “Minotaur,” a secret weapons operative, compelled not to disclose the secrets of his work, even to his wife, finds himself in a marriage where his wife distrusts everything about him. The secrecy to which his work obligates him is in fact a fundamental part of his nature and a flaw in their marriage. Is their marriage just another pose—a constructed reality? Is her husband’s friendship with another man more serious than she had thought? The indirectness of this story makes it difficult to assay exactly what the issues are between husband and wife. A rereading makes these questions more interesting yet no less clear.

In “The Track of the Assassins” an unmarried wealthy British woman travels into the most desolate locations of the Mideast, searching for the location of the fabled assassins, “that sinister and ancient sect that for two hundred years held the entire East in its reign of terror.” Descriptions of her travels are mixed with her memories of her life as a young girl, and her relationship with her mother and her sister, who recently died. The travels are her expression of guilt and regret for having abandoned her sister. Is she seeking to obliterate herself from the human world? The descriptions of her young life in Italy, and of her travels in the desert, are precisely detailed. Shepard’s lyrical prose style is especially effective.

“In Cretaceous Seas” compares a husband and father to a prehistoric creature. He feels increasingly disconnected from everything: he is “a crappy son, a shitty father, a lazy helpmate, a wreck of a husband. As a pet owner he’s gotten two dogs and a parakeet killed.” As someone who answers questions for other people (his line of work is unclear), he can’t answer the most basic ones for himself. This is a stripped down version of the story John Cheever tells in “A Country Husband.”

In “The Netherlands Lives with Water,” the collapse of a marriage parallels the inundation of the Netherlands by rising seas. Meteorological disaster, global warming, parallels calamity in a marriage.

In Happy with Crocodiles” a World War II infantryman in New Guinea struggles to survive on a muddy mountain while he recalls his troubled girlfriend and her love for his brother. The battle scene descriptions are intense.

In “Your Fate Hurdles Down at You” a research team in 1939 perches on the side of a frozen, snowy Swiss mountain studying defense techniques against avalanches. The narrator and his team are obsessed with the mechanics of snow, of avalanches and their history. His twin brother is killed in an avalanche for which he feels responsible. The story is an exercise is self-reprobation, but it’s also about competition between two brothers for one girl. He is attracted to the girl, but she is attracted to his brother. The narrator’s has distanced himself from personal connections all his life. He is more content on the side of a mountain where he knows that an avalanche will one day sweep him away than he is in the human world.

In “Low Hanging Fruit” a particle physicist describes his fascination with his work and reveals the growing estrangement of his wife. Just as in “Minotaur” and “Your Fate Hurdles Down at You,” and in the story “Gojira: King of the Monsters,” obsessive involvement in work replaces the need for human relationships.

An especially disturbing story in the collection is “Boy’s Town,” about a former soldier recovering from a brain injury and dealing with PTSD going through a final downward spiral. The great element of this story is the narrator’s voice, with conveys his anguish and isolation as well as his irrationality—it’s both comic and frightening.

In “Classical Scenes of Farewell” the assistant of Gilles de Rais, notorious murderer of children in 15^th century France, gives his confession and life story before his execution. The story is gruesome, and the author’s use of historical detail creates a sense of absolute authenticity.

Finally, in “Poland is Watching” a member of a Polish winter mountain climbing team talks about his vocation and his relationship with his wife. He’s part of a group attempting to climb Nanga Parbat, the 9^th tallest mountain in the world, in the middle of a raging winter storm. Once again a man’s obsession with what he regards as his calling stands in tension with his personal life.

Many of these stories don’t end, or at least don’t offer resolution. We never know if the mountaineer makes it off the mountain, or whether the soldier in New Guinea survives the battle. In most of these stories one’s personal fate stands just beyond the confines of the story. We can sense it looming, we can guess what it is, but the story itself doesn’t describe the moment (the woman in “Assassins” will probably die of malaria and dysentery; the narrator of “Classical Scenes of Farewell” is about to be gruesomely executed; the narrator of “Boy’s Town” will die in a shootout with police). Shepard’s vivid prose style varies from one story to the next, but his use of detail and description imbeds us deep in the minds of his characters and the contexts of the situations his stories describes.

The Year of the Dog

2011-06-30T11:53:00.001-04:00

The Year of the Dog (2007; dir. Mike White) is a light, airy film whose thinness is compensated by the talents of the lead actress Molly Shannon. She plays Peggy, a woman in her 30s who works as a secretary in a non-descript office. She listens to her co-workers talk about their relationships, and she feels that she should enter into that world. She has, apparently, never had a “relationship.” She is shy and tends to withdraw at social gatherings rather than to put herself forward. People sometime seek her out to talk, but they do so because she mainly listens and virtually never disagrees or criticizes. She instead devotes herself to her dog, whose death (she believes he was poisoned by a next-door neighbor) foments a crisis. Her attempts to bond with men invariably fail. The man to whom she is most attracted declares that he is not interested when she expresses her interest (he is probably gay). She becomes increasingly unsettled, depressed, and begins collecting dogs, numerous dogs, keeping them shut away from harm in her house. When she attacks her next-door neighbor (John C. Reilly) with a pitchfork, her mental breakdown is complete. She’s institutionalized.

She recovers and returns to work and again begins to feel the pressure to conform, to socialize in the conventional way. Ultimately she decides to pursue her interest in animals, announces to her coworkers that this is what she wants to do, and boards a bus to attend a SPCA to a protest about animal cruelty in another city.

The Year of the Dog wants us to feel good about her decision—she has discovered what makes her happy, she has accepted that she doesn’t need to be like other people to find contentment and satisfaction. The film is a gentle defense of individualism.

I don’t accept its conclusion. Not that I don’t believe in individuals—I do—and not that I am indifferent to cruel treatment of animals—I oppose it. But her rejection of human company, of the social life of people (which can be entered into in any number of ways) strikes me as a surrender.

The Califfs of Baghdad, Georgia, by Mary Helen Stefaniak

2011-06-30T11:17:00.001-04:00

In tone The Califfs of Baghdad, Georgia (Norton, 2010), by Mary Helen Stefaniak, reminded me of Olive Anne Burns’ Cold Sassy Tree (1984). Both are told from a child’s perspective, both involve narratives about family life in the old days, both are tinged with a wash of nostalgia and tragedy. Califfs is deceptive. Its first half is a ten-year-old Gladys Califf’s account of her family seventy or more years in the past. They live in a small town called Threestep and are, compared to most in the town, more moderate and tolerant in their racial views. Gladys and her family are good friends with a black neighbor named Theo Boykin, a young boy whom everyone recognizes as brilliant and who shows talent in engineering. There is a nonconformist school teacher, an Arabian Nights pageant, a long-suffering big sister named May whose husband keeps her busy bearing children, and so on. Midway through, as the children wait to learn whether their friend will recover from a serious accident, May begins telling a story about Arabia, and about the Muslims who moved for a time to live on one of the Georgia coastal islands before returning to their native land. Although her story goes on too long, it meshes in an intriguing way the first half of the novel and shows than Stefaniak has ambitions above and beyond those of nostalgia. The Arabian Nights is a major influence in this novel, especially on May’s long narrative.

Among the points of this novel: inadequate or nonexistent opportunities for education were a crippling force to many African Americans in the early part of the century; segregation and racism denied American society the full use of people like Theo; and our ancestry individually and culturally is far complicated than we might imagine. There is an implicit argument here for racial and international understanding.

Though I find fault with certain issues of realism in the portrayal of the South in the 1930s, and though it tells its story through another instance of a Southern family that is exceptional rather than typical, The Califfs of Baghdad, Georgia held my interest from start to finish.

Unknown

2011-06-29T11:54:00.001-04:00

Unknown (2011; dir. Jaume Collet-Serra) is an adult thriller in which a man awakens from a coma and discovers that everything he believed about his life is false. Although there are pretensions here of a drama about identity, essentially this is a mystery-espionage thriller whose hero, played by Liam Neeson, tries to discover who he really is. Car chases, gunfire, fights, bomb blasts and so on ensue. There are some significant non sequiturs in this film, but in general it moves inexorably forward in a way that engages the viewer to the end.

In many of John LeCarre’s novels the Cold War era of U. S./British relations with the Soviet Union provides the context for his stories. In Unknown we have a post-collapse context. East Germany is no longer separate from West Germany. The Wall is down. The Soviet Union has collapsed, and the old espionage networks no longer exist. Espionage and intrigue in Unknown focus on corporate interests. A man who has a product to sell that may revolutionize the food industry is marked for murder by corporate interests that see him as a threat . The film is aware of this post-collapse context. Two secondary characters are former members of Cold War espionage units—one of the secret East German Stasi, the other of the KGB. Neither survives the film.

Despite the adult (by which I mean “mature”) tone of this film (a modern-day take on a lesser Hitchcock), it is essentially formulaic, as the final scene in which the older man who gets the much younger attractive girl makes clear.

The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London

2011-06-29T11:00:00.001-04:00

Two figures loom in the backdrop of Jack London’s The Sea-Wolf (1904): Nietzsche and Darwin. These are the governing texts for this fascinating and ungainly novel: übermensch and evolution. Nietzsche is mentioned in the first paragraph, and Darwin is on the bookshelf of one of the main characters.

Early on this novel echoes a familiar story—a pampered literary critic, Humphrey Van Weyden, plunged into a difficult, hostile situation for which he is unprepared. Survival requires fortitude, manliness. He rises to the challenge. He is transformed. We saw something similar but less desperate in Captains Courageous, and the grand incarnation of this plotline is Heart of Darkness. And of course this is the story in animal form of The Call of the Wild.

Van Weyden is cast adrift when the ferry he is on sinks. He is rescued by a seal vessel, the Ghost. Its captain, Wolf Larsen, refuses to deliver him to the nearest port and instead enlists him as a member of the crew. He explains that he wants to save Van Weyden.

Wolf Larsen is the center of this novel. He is working class, formally uneducated, but he has taught himself, reading widely from great literary works and philosophers. He believes in nothing but brute force. Larsen is the übermensch of this story.

Ven Weyden represents moral and civilized values and believes in the human soul, while Larsen believes in an amoral world governed by Darwinian law. Larsen believes in achieving his own ends by whatever means possible, even when it requires brutal treatment of his crew. He believes in nothing but himself. Although Van Weyden argues for civilized values, the course of events in this novel make clear that it takes Larsen’s view.

And there is Maud Brewster, a poet and journalist whose own boat sinks and who is rescued by Larsen. Until her arrival, the story moves forward well enough. Van Weyden (“Hump” as Wolf calls him) is learning the ways of the sea, coming to understand if not accept the brutal methods of Larsen. He’s becoming hardened. But when Maud comes aboard, he melts into vanilla custard, fawning over her delicate femininity, gradually falling in love with her. He wants to protect her from the “horrors” that he and she both think Larsen represents for her (I think this means sex). Maud’s arrival interrupts the tone of the narrative and essentially breaks it in half. It’s as if London decided the opposition of Van Weyden and Larsen couldn’t sustain the story, and he had to introduce another element. And though the connection that develops between Maud and Van Weyden essentially demonstrates the truth of Larsen’s philosophy, it leaves the novel unbalanced.

When Hump and Maud are marooned on an island after they escape the Ghost, they have to struggle to survive and to overmaster Larsen when he arrives. Here we have an early kind of D. H. Lawrence story, wherein a man learns to be a man and a woman learns to be a woman. There’s deep Victorianism here—the closest to candor London can manage in describing Hump’s feelings about Maud is to tell us that he felt his masculine self stir: “I shall never forget, in that moment, how instantly conscious I became of my manhood. The primitive deeps of my nature stirred.“

The Color of Night, by Madison Smarrt Bell

2011-06-28T15:44:00.001-04:00

Madison Smartt Bell’s The Color of Night (Vintage, 2011) uses the Manson murders of 1969 and the attack on the Twin Towers in 2001 as a frame in which to consider the latter decades of the 20^th century. The narrative comes entirely through the view of Mae, a member of the “Family.” The Manson family is fictionalized but recognizable. Manson is “D.” Mae’s story offers a sense of the cult mentality. Many of its members are damaged to begin with—Mae dislikes her mother and has had a sexual relationship with her brother since she was 12. She is not merely alienated from her family—it simply doesn’t exist for her. She inhabits a kind of void until she goes to work for a pimp in Los Angeles and later is absorbed into the “Family.” There she has a passionate relationship with another girl named Laurel but is also involved in numerous relationships with other members of the Family. “D” on occasion lends female members of the Family to other men for sometimes violent and abusive sex. Although Mae on the one hand is wholly committed to the Family, she fails to see, even to the end, how much she is a victim as well as a perpetrator.

In Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying (1930) we are plunged into characters’ lives through their stream of consciousness narratives. But Faulkner was not exploring or commenting on historical events. Anse Bundren had, as far as we know, no historical basis. He was most likely an imaginative composite, a representation of a particular sort of farmer. I reference Faulkner’s novel because I often thought of it while reading Bell’s—especially in the way he reveals the mind of his main character Mae, who reminded me of Darl Bundren in particular. In The Color of Night “D” is clearly based on Charles Manson, while Mae is more loosely based on the young women who were members of the family and who participated in the Tate murders. This reliance on a factual model puts certain constraints on Bell—certain narrative points have to be touched on, especially the murders. I sometimes felt that this novel was laboring to evoke the Manson family even as it worked to fictionalize. Manson’s paranoiac fascination with the Beatles song “Helter Skelter” becomes an obsession with “higgledypiggledy.” The popular singer who was briefly associated with the Manson family becomes “O.” One of the women whom Mae and other members of the family murder is pregnant and pleads for her child; she is hanged and stabbed to death, the same fate as Sharon Tate. Yet Bell certainly did not feel bound by facts and invented much of the story, which he used for the exploration of his own interests.

Chapters tend to alternate from southern California in the late 1960s to the California desert and finally New York City in 2001.

I was never fully drawn into this novel. A point of comparison is Don DeLillo’s Libra (1988), whose main character is Lee Harvey Oswald. There the use of a fictionalized historical character works as well as it ever has in American fiction. In Bell’s defense, his character Mae is not based on any single individual. She is instead an imaginatively constructed composite. She never becomes recognizably real in the novel, always remaining vague, indistinct. This may have been Bell’s intention. Unlike the main female personages in the Manson trials, Mae escapes capture, never goes on trial, and lives out the rest of her life in hidden anonymity. Yet she is prepared for pursuers.

The chapters that describe Mae’s wandering in the dark nighttime desert reminded me of DeLillo’s Point Omega (2010) as well as Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky (1949) and the essays of Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968). These chapters are deeply unsettling and show how completely isolated Mae has become. At the end, when she manages to find her way into the ruins of the Twin Towers and lies face down in the gravelly ashes, clutching a small piece of what might be human bone, we recognize the full extent of her wrecked and devastated life.

Kidnapped, by Robert Louis Stevenson

2011-06-15T13:54:00.000-04:00

Over the past few months I’ve been reading books I should have read decades ago. Some of these were books for adults. Others were for younger readers. Kidnapped (1893) by Robert Louis Stevenson is one of the so-called boyhood books I’ve recently read.

Kidnapped is constant motion. By motion understand travel. The narrator from the first page is on his way somewhere, first to find his uncle who he believes will give him work, then aboard the vessel that kidnaps him, then waylaid on a barren island, then fleeing pursuers through moor and forest. Whatever one might say of the book, its motion-wise attitude prevents dullness. Its main character Robert Balfour is a seventeen-year-old boy who goes to find his fortune after his father dies. He never seems quite that young, and though he does learn certain skills in the course of his adventures—fighting with swords, for example—he’s not that much different when the novel ends than he was when it began. I suppose his main lesson in this narrative is friendship. Balfour makes a friend in a Scotsman named Alan Breck Stewart who helps him escape the island, and who remains true to him throughout the rest of the book, even when Balfour mistrusts and insults him. These two men grow to like each other so much, constantly professing their love for one another, that we’re tempted to see a 20^th-century dimension in their friendship that is not really there.

Try as I might in thinking about this book, I cannot conclude anything other than the fact that it is well done, full of excitement and interesting characters, and eminently shallow. There’s not much here beyond the adventure itself and the evocation of 18^th century Scottish nationalism and clan conflicts . It’s fun, it’s readable, but there’s little to it. Maybe this is what a child’s book should be.

There is a historical basis for some of the events and people in the novel. The murder for which Balfour and Breck are suspects was modeled on an actual murder. The main character’s kidnapping and ultimate rescue were inspired by a historical event. Alan Breck was an actual figure in 18^th century Scottish history, as were a few other characters in the book.

Swanee River

2011-05-31T12:03:00.001-04:00

Swanee River (1939; dir. Sidney Lanfield) gives a sentimental and largely fictional account of Stephen Foster, the American composer famous for his ballads about life in the antebellum South. The movie follows Foster’s life from his courtship of his future wife, to his struggle to make a success of his songwriting, to his work with the Christy Minstrels, and finally to his death in New York City. Although Foster visited the South only once in his lifetime, the film suggests he was there often. It shows Foster composing songs off the top of his head after listening to slaves singing spirituals or attending traveling music shows. Don Ameche plays Foster. The other notable actor in the film is Al Jolson, who plays Edwin P. Christy of the Christy Minstrels. Jolson certainly didn’t have much range—loud is his normal style. He sings and dances as one would expect , and through much of the film he and his entire troupe are in black face. He often sings out of time with the music.

The Christy Minstels popularized the music of minstrelsy and singing in black face. The Minstrels are white men made up to look like slaves, including black face paint. Their performances of Foster’s songs made him famous. Today, the tradition of white men in black face singing minstrel songs seems preposterously racist, though it was accepted in much of the 19^th century and even in the era that produced this film.

Foster’s songs, many of them still quite listenable, extoll the virtues of the Old South, of slavery, of “the old folks at home.” Their basic theme is nostalgia for a lost past, one in which Foster, his audience, and certainly the makers of this film largely believed. The film certainly doesn’t ever look critically at this aspect of Foster’s music.

Film biographies are problematic. Most of them mythologize their subjects. This one is no exception, though it suggests that love of fame, money, and success were perhaps too important to Foster, and that alcohol and alcoholism, which the film clearly refers to though never quite using the name, were the cause of his downfall personally and professionally.

Let Me In

2011-05-31T11:12:00.001-04:00

In the lives of parents and their children inevitably comes a time—difficult to measure—when parents discover they can no longer control and protect their children. It is not simply a matter of adolescent rebellion. It is more that as children become increasingly self-determined, they begin to make choices independently. Next to the influences of friends and the attractions of the world, the parents’ influence wanes. Parents who see this time coming may try to protect against it with advice and instruction. They may see what the child cannot—the dark possibilities of the world, troubles, predation, evil. In the end the child as an independent soul will stand or fall on his or her own.

Let Me In (2010; dir. Matt Reeves) is about this moment in the life of a child. His name is Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee). He is physically immature, and boys at school bully him over his small size and his trebling voice. His parents are recently divorced, and his father lives elsewhere. The boy is obviously disturbed by his parents’ split, but we see this mainly through the solitude of his life, and through one phone call he makes to his father. His mother is an ardent Christian who tries to protect her son against evil, but mostly she is wrapped up in her own miseries, and she leaves her son on his own. The boy is lonely and even depressed. He needs a friend.

Evil is one of the issues in Let Me In. Set during the years of the Reagan administration, the film offers an early scene in which the president speaks on television about the presence of evil in the world.

The boy strikes up a friendship with a girl his own age, Abby (Chloe Moretz). He meets her on the playground at night outside the apartment complex where he lives. She has just moved in next door. She is cold and distant at first, but gradually a friendship develops. Although Owen needs a friend, it turns out that she needs him even more. Abby appears to be in every way a young girl. She enjoys talking with Owen, she enjoys the Rubic’s Cube he lends her, and she tells him that she likes solving puzzles. She obviously enjoys Owen’s companionship. We rarely see the man she lives with, maybe her father, just as we rarely see the boy’s mother.

I don’t enjoy vampire films. The typical vampire film seduces with its appeal to adolescent and immature desire for otherness. In this film, vampires act as vampires usually do, but there is a significant twist to the standard formula. For one thing, vampire activity openly figures in only a few scenes. In fact, the vampires of Let Me In are incidental to the film’s interest in the loneliness of the boy, his need to reach out and take hold of whatever might give him solace and love, even if what he takes hold of is evil. He is seduced not by the vampire’s hypnotic attractions, but by his need for love, companionship, connections. Towards the end of the film, in a moment of despair, he calls his father on the phone and asks him if there is such a thing as evil. The father does not know what to make of the question. The boy’s parents can do nothing for him—they’re hardly aware.

Let Me In is a somber, moody film noir. It takes place almost entirely at night. The acting by Smit-McPhee and Moretz is very fine. The film’s point of view is Owen, and our concern for him grows throughout the film. Our concern might initially be that he will fall victim to a vampire, but finally what endangers him is something deeper and more disturbing , and the film’s ending confirms our anxieties. Even if you don’t relish vampires, this film is worth viewing.

Goya’s Ghosts

2011-05-31T09:12:00.001-04:00

Goya’s Ghosts (2006; dir. Milos Forman) is a fanciful melodrama woven around the life of Francisco Goya during the late 18^th- and early 19^th centuries. Ranging over a fifteen-year span, from the reign of Carlos IV and the revival of the Inquisition to the Peninsular Wars, the film proposes that Goya’s muse was a young noblewoman named Ines (Natalie Portman). Her face, the film suggests, appears in numerous paintings and drawings and frescoes by Goya, played by the Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård. He refers to her as having the face of an angel. He also paints less angelic subjects, including satiric drawings and paints of Spanish nob les and members of the clergy, as well as more somber works. In the film he paints a large portrait of a Catholic priest named Lorenzo. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, Ines is accused of heresy by the Catholic Church, tortured, and imprisoned for fifteen years. When she is released, she is close to insane and is obsessed with finding the infant daughter fathered by an archbishop, Lorenzo (Javier Bardem) while she was in prison—he approached her supposedly to offer consolation but one thing led to another. Both Ines and Lorenzo are fictional characters.

Goya’s Ghosts like some other films about artists wants to find the clue to the painter’s artistry in one story or fact: in this film, that clue is the fictional Ines. Such explanations seem to me in principle flawed. Goya himself in the film is portrayed as ambitious and often compromised—willing to work for or with whatever monarch is in power. When the family of Ines appeals to Goya to intercede with Lorenzo and to ask for their daughter’s release, he refuses to help. Even when Lorenzo, the center of evil in the film, returns from France after the French Revolution as a advocate of reason and power, Goya remains his friend. Lorenzo is the supreme Machiavellian of the film—willing to do anything that will improve his position. He has no conscience. He imprisons and sentences him to death the archbishop who banished him 15 years before. He’s responsible for Ines’s imprisonment—accusing her of heresy before the board of inquisitors. Her sin, it turns out, that her great grandfather had renounced his Jewish faith when he moved to Spain.

Is Goya in the film any less worthy of blame than Lorenzo? At least he has a conscience, and when he encounters the demented Ines after her release from prison, he tries to help her.

Goya’s paintings convey the chaotic change and depravities of the age in which he lived. The film conveys those meanings as well. Whatever the historical accuracy of the background against which the fictional story of Lorenzo and Goya and Ines takes place, one suspects that the chaos of his age, the unexplainable vicissitudes of change, genetics, and environment, are what made Goya an artist.

Inexplicably, almost unrecognizably, Randy Quaid portrays Carlos IV in this film.

The Apostle

2011-05-25T14:19:00.001-04:00

The Apostle (Dir. Robert Duvall) is a film about a religious man, not about religion. Much was made of the film’s respect for religious faith and religious people when it was released in 1991. The Apostle does portray religion in a serious way, without irony or undertones of sarcasm. It even indulges in moments of mystery—when Sonny “saves” a young man seriously injured in a car wreck, and when he “saves” an angry construction worker (Billy Bob Thornton) who has threatened to demolish his church with a bulldozer. Religion is more the context of the film than the subject. The subject is Sonny, a deeply flawed man who derives gratification from his ability to preach and save souls, and who’s also susceptible to more venal indulgences. it's suggested he womanizes, and he drives a Cadillac, and it’s clear that he measures his own worth by his ability to build and keep a church. Yet he’s also a man who wants to make amends, to be better than himself. His desire for fame and power conflict with his need for redemption, and the riddle of his character revolves around this conundrum.

Southern films rarely show religion in a realistic manner . Usually it’s simply an incidental element. We know in Gone with the Wind that the O’Hara family is religious because we see them holding a devotional early in the film. Intruder in the Dust opens with a church bell tolling on a Sunday morning in Jefferson as worshippers sit in church. Some recent films show religion as both a target of humorous jabs and as a dimension of Southern mystery. In the film Borat it’s an aspect of backwoods degeneracy—one scene focuses on a fundamentalist church of ecstatic dancing and speaking in tongues. The documentary Searching for the One-Eyed Jesus offers a similar view couched in a respectful aura of soul-searching that is really just an invitation to voyeuristic spectacle. Of the few films that attempt to deal with religion in a realistic way, I’d Climb the Highest Mountain is notable. Based on an autobiographical account by Georgia novelist Corra Harris about her life with a circuit-riding Methodist minister, the film dramatizers the experiences of a young woman as she settles down with her husband in his first assignment in a North Georgia mountain church. The film is pious without being too sentimental, and it takes seriously the preacher’s efforts along with those of his wife to adjust to their assignment. John Huston’s adaptation of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood is another film that pays serious attention to Southern religion, though with some satiric as well as serious intent.

The Apostle, written and directed by Robert Duvall, who portrays the main character Sonny, focuses on religious Pentecostalism of the Southern variety. Mega churches, speaking in tongues, tent revivals in which energy and yelling count more than fidelity to the Biblical text, the possibility of scandal, the admixture of faith and violence and sex and ambition—these are its setting. The Apostle inhabits and presents with respect the same fundamentalist world that Borat ridicules. The film seems to argue that outside the corporate mega churches of big-city religion is a genuine, simple form of worship that serves an authentic purpose. The Apostle presents us with a string of characters—a retired preacher, an auto mechanic, a disk jockey, a young woman separated from her husband, and others who have lost their churches or lost their way and who need the support that religion can provide. They are waiting there in in the small isolated Louisiana town of Bayou Butté for someone to arrive and start a church. Then Sonny comes to town.

Building a new church is Sonny’s way of seeking to expiate his crimes (which include the probable murder of his former wife’s boyfriend). Chastened by the loss of his mega-church (his wife and other church members vote him out of the pastorate for reasons that that probably have to do with misuse of funds or womanizing or both), his ambitions are now more modest. Any church will do. The Apostle chronicles how Sonny builds the church by befriending townspeople who have lost their own churches, or who need one. Always the entrepreneur, Sonny cooks burgers in a restaurant to raise money for the church. He finds an old bus, preaches on the local radio station, attracts a small congregation of both black and white worshippers. Yet he never makes known his past or his true name: he calls himself the Apostle E. F., and although one or two people ask him about his name he is evasive and it never becomes a real issue. Whatever Sonny’s conflicted reasons for building this church might be, the film does not question his sincerity for doing so, and even when the state police come to take him away, his congregation remains faithful. The last time we see him he is leading a chain gang in call and response song and preaching the Word.

Sonny is the center of the film. The conflicting elements of his imperfect self pose a puzzle that the movie exposes but does not solve. We’re left with an imperfect, sinful man who may have committed murder and who strives to make amends, to build a church that serves others. His new church lacks all the glitter and spectacle of his former church—there is no speaking in tongues, no luxurious building, no electronic guitars—just simple, authentic worship. Yet Sonny seeks to redeem himself on his own terms, rather than God’s terms, or the Law’s terms. He runs away from his crime. He drives his Cadillac into a lake so it can’t be found. He rebaptizes himself and gives himself a new name: the Apostle E. F.. The new name is of course a sign of his desire to make a new life. Yet it’s also an alias that hides his crime. His takes refuge in a remote and small Louisiana town where he hopes and expects that no one will know about him. The good that he does , the people whom his church there serves—all is built on the foundation of his deceit.

I have viewed The Apostle on a number of occasions. It initially left me deeply moved. Not religious myself, I nonetheless was taken with its straightforward and unironic presentation of people who are. Robert Duvall’s performance as Sonny is one of the best of his career, if not the best. The smaller characters whom he meets in Bayou Boutté are interesting and endearing. The story of this man trying to make amends for his life was impressive. On repeated viewings, Duvall’s performance remains strong, as does the wealth of minor characters, but the flaws and conflicting elements in Sonny’s character, and the relative formlessness of the film have begun to weigh on my reactions. The film is a bit too long. Some scenes are gratuitously inserted for dramatic effect and do not advance the plot. An example is the scene in which Sonny “saves” the bulldozer driver (Billy Bob Thornton) who threatens to push the church down. The scene is stirringly orchestrated, with members of the congregation arrayed around Sonny, protecting the church and also reacting to, supporting, Sonny’s ministrations to the man who threatens him. We see how zealous and effective Sonny is as a preacher, how the strength of his faith enables him to undertake actions that in themselves might seem almost miraculous. Yet there is the faint suspicion in this scene that the conversion is simply another hash mark on Sonny’s tally sheet, like the saved young man in the wrecked automobile early in the film. Increasingly I have come to feel that this scene is inauthentic, manipulative, and false. It contributes to the film in the same way as the car chase in Bullitt.

My students have had two predominant reactions to the film: one group of students felt that it was basically an invasion of privacy. They saw it as voyeuristic and intrusive. How a film can unfairly intrude on the private experiences of its characters is a question to ponder. (Literature does this all the time). What these students were really reacting against, I suspect, was the film’s intrusion on their own private religious impulses—the film delves into a territory rarely entered and it does so in a direct way. Another objection was that the film “is too religious.” This objection came from students who were not religious as well as from ones who were. Most of my students come from a large metropolitan Southern city. Their experiences with religion are through conventional mostly Protestant churches. Few of these students have experience with Pentecostal worship . They are mostly reacting to the otherness of what the film portrays, which is outside their experience.

An interesting division became apparent when I taught the film most recently. The class consisted of ten white students, one Hispanic student, one Muslim student, and three African Americans. The Muslim student paid close attention to the film but ultimately chose not to speak about it—as a Muslim, he said in a heavy Southern accent, he didn’t know what to make of it. The Hispanic student, a Roman Catholic, agreed with the white students (for the most part) , who were uncomfortable with the film’s portrayal of what they regarded as an extreme form of worship. The three African American students, all women, reported that they enjoyed the film. One student, the daughter of a minister, said that portrayal of religious worship in The Apostle was exactly what she had grown up with.

The Apostle attempts to show religious worship in a racially ecumenical way. E. F.’s church is open to all races, black and white, young and old, male and female. But of all the people who assist Sonny with starting the church, only one, a retired minister, is actually black. The others are white males. Many of the minor characters, members of the congregation, provide humor and detail. There are two black women who compete with one another for piety and attention. There are two little black boys, cute and mischievous. There’s an old black man who plays a trumpet. As a young child, Sonny’s first experience with a church is an all black church to which he is taken by the black woman who looks after him . Thus we are to know that Sonny grew up with a racially blind sense of religious worship. The film itself, however sincere it may be, relegates most of the black characters to secondary roles that often, though not consistently, show them in a humorous light.

Deliverance

2011-05-25T11:47:00.001-04:00

The publication of Deliverance in 1970 and release of the film of the same name in 1972 inspired among young Georgians an interest in the Chattooga River and its rapids and the surrounding mountains. Located on the border of South Carolina and Georgia, a few miles from the small mountain town of Clayton, the river was the basis for the Cahoolawasie River of Dickey’s novel, and the location where much of the film was made. During the spring and summers, campers, canoers, and kayakers flocked to the river, with their money and gleaming new equipment and big city ways. They traded stories about their experiences on the river, using names like Bull Sluice, the Narrows, Woodall Shoals, and their encounters with local residents. To an extent the local economy benefitted from this sudden popularity, but many of the campers and river enthusiasts viewed the local folk in much the same way that Dickey’s novel and John Boorman’s film did: as backwoods exotics.

I was among these enthusiasts and visited the river a number of times, wending my way down section three, never daring section four, where the most challenging rapids are found. Once I floated down section three in a raft with my brother and a beagle, and when we went over Bull Sluice, a narrow and furious two-step drop of nearly sixteen feet, I was flung from the raft and plunged by the force of the water deep beneath the river’s surface. I remember telling myself, whirling around down there deep beneath the river, that eventually I would rise to the surface and breathe, and fending off the fear that I would not. After what was probably an interlude of only a few seconds, to me very long seconds, I rose to the surface, thereby making it possible, some forty years later, to offer these comments.

Deliverance was a city boy’s view of wilderness in the modern South. Zell Miller, lieutenant governor of Georgia when the film appeared, was incensed by its portrayal of North Georgians. In his recent book about the people and culture of north Georgia, Purt Nigh Gone, the Old Mountain Ways, he wrote about how “the false portrayal of mountain people as depraved and amoral cretins by writers like James Dickey in his popular novel ‘Deliverance,’ have done lasting harm in how the mountaineer is portrayed.”[1] When he was governor of Georgia in the 1990s, still smarting, he placed the novel on his list of “most hated” books.[2] As far as stereotypes go, the governor had a point. Both novel and film do stereotype mountain people, especially those who live in the remote regions alongside the upper reaches of the river. The people of Aintree are portrayed in a more chairtable way, though it’s clear we’re meant to see them as quaintly unsophisticated.

But Deliverance isn’t a documentary or a historical study. It’s a film based on a novel whose literary reputation seems to have endured and grown over the last four decades. Deliverance is a very fine film, one of the best films “about the South” ever made. Its virtues are manifold: it retains the core elements of the novel’s narrative, it translates the poetry of Dickey’s prose through remarkable cinematography, it uses the local setting of North Georgia’s Chattooga River to good effect, it foregoes a dramatic musical soundtrack and instead uses the sounds of the river and forest, it focuses the action largely on the interactions of the four main characters, and more specifically on the relationship of Lewis and his protégé Ed, the narrative consciousness of both novel and film. The rape of Bobby by one of the mountain men is graphic, brutal, and deeply disturbing—it was meant to be nothing less. And the entire film is shrouded, veiled, with ambiguity—from such minor details as why Lewis speaks to one of the mountain men in a rude and aggressive way, to the meaning of a random sound in the woods, to the configuration of the dead rapist’s body as the four men carry him upstream to bury him, to such major issues as why Drew dies (was he shot, did he fall from the boat, did he throw himself out) to the identity of the young mountain man Ed shoots (was he the wrong man), to the fundamental ambiguity of the rising hydroelectric impoundment waters that will rise and cover, obscure, obliterate the buried bodies and the truths of what happened (if truths they can ever be) on that fatal weekend. The film’s very title is an ambiguity: Deliverance. From what, or whom?

The reputation of Deliverance (both novel and film) as an icon of masculine swagger obscures the central interests of the story. Beyond and behind the macho bluster of Lewis and the middle-age lurching of his friends is an investigation of cultural imperialism, of the impact of the modern urban world not only on the rural outlands of the mountain South but on the very consciousness of Southerners, of Americans, of the modern individual. Two of the most difficult scenes in the film focus on encounters between the weekend canoers from Atlanta and the inhabitants of the mountains near the Cahoolawassie. One is when Lewis and crew stop at a mountain house to find men to drive their vehicles down to Aintree. The other is the infamous rape scene. One is implied violence and the other is explicit violence.

Boorman, guided by Dickey’s screenplay and his own inclinations, places a number of plot lines in uneasy relation to one another. One is the idea that civilization has deprived men of their essential animal humanity, separated them from what D. H. Lawrence would have called blood knowledge. Cut off from their natural origins, left soft and weak by civilized conveniences, they must relearn how to survive in the world. The character Lewis (Burt Reynolds) embodies these ideas, and he makes it his mission to expose his three companions to survival skills. He’s especially interested in mentoring his friend Drew (Jon Voight), who feels somewhat adrift in his life, dissatisfied. These ideas are expressed in one of Dickey’s best and most characteristic poems, “Springer Mountain,” where the deer hunter must lay down his weapons and shed his clothes in order to accomplish a true knowledge of his natural self. (There are echoes here of Faulkner’s “The Bear” and, more deeply, of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.) Director John Boorman visited this theme again in 1985 in The Emerald Forest, about a young American boy lost in the Amazonian forest who is adopted by a local tribe. When his father finds him, he has taken on all the traits and behaviors of his benefactors. The larger theme of this film focuses on the pristine Amazonian forest, threatened by the construction of a huge dam that will, like the dam in Deliverance, inundate the forest when it becomes operational. In this film, however, the boy and his father blow up the dam and save the rain forest, at least temporarily.

The ethical debate at the heart of Deliverance centers on the argument of the four men about what to do with the mountain man Lewis has killed. Drew, the intellectual in the group (his glasses and guitar signify this), believes in the conventions of civilized society: he wants to take the body downstream to Aintree, explain what happened to the authorities, and accept the consequences. Lewis takes the opposite view, arguing that if they take the body downstream there will be a murder charge and a trial by a jury of local residents, some of whom may be the dead man’s relatives. Lewis takes the survivalist view—he wants to do what is necessary to extricate the group from the situation. It is a view indifferent to the law and the family of the dead man. It is also an argument based on convenience—he doesn’t want to waste his time trying to explain why he killed a man, especially a man from the backwoods who forcibly sodomized one his companions. Ultimately Bobby and Ed side with Lewis, and the group takes the body a ways upstream to bury it. In a pointed statement, it is Drew who is killed (or who dies accidentally, or who kills himself) while they are navigating rapids downriver shortly after the burial. Drew is so upset with the decision the group has made that he seems overcome. He furiously digs the grave with his bare hands, wheezing and panting. When they return to the river, he refuses to wear his life jacket and does not respond to his friends. Then he pitches into the water. Significantly, the only one of the four to argue for civilized ways of doing things, he dies soon after he loses the argument.

Lewis does not win the argument either. His attitude is that with learned skills and brawn he can tough his way through any adversity, especially in the natural world. Yet he has not been careful in scouting out the rapids and waterfalls of the Cahoolawasie, and when the remaining men come to an unexpected waterfall, they tumble into the water. One canoe is broken in half. Lewis emerges with a broken thigh bone sticking out of his leg—he’s rendered powerless, unmanned. Even when his protégé Ed crawls up the cliff by the river, waits through the night, and then manages to kill with a bow and arrow the man he believes shot Drew, he does not win either. The dead man does not look exactly like the mountain man they encountered in the forest—is he the wrong man? Now the three men do not bother to debate the ethics of tying rocks to the corpse and sinking it in the river.

The point is that neither Drew nor Lewis nor Ed nor the raped Bobby win the argument. Drew dies, Lewis is maimed, Bobby is violated, and Ed is left with haunting uncertainty and guilt over all their actions in the woods. Three dead men are left behind as the result of this weekend lark on the river.

Despite the stereotypical portrayals of the mountain folk, the film’s clear viewpoint is that the men from the city have transgressed. They have first of all come to the river unprepared for the rapids and falls they face, for the mountain folk they encounter. Their assumptions from the start are ones of cultural superiority—mountain culture is inferior and primitive--and they act on the conviction that education, employment, and income empower them to act without concern about consequences of their actions. This form of transgression is passive and unintentional—the city men simply are who they are, city men, in all their blandly sheltered homogeneity, and when they enter the foreign terrain of North Georgia, their indifference and ignorance lead to disaster. A second form of transgression is more pervasive and sinister. The four men from Atlanta are mere aspects of this transgression, embodied in the hydroelectric dam whose reservoir will flood and submerge the Cahoolawassie River and everything around it. An entire culture and way of life, not to mention wild forest and its ecosystem, will disappear. This change is already taking place as the film ends—cemeteries are being moved, churches transported to higher ground, people leaving Aintree. The dam is the agent of the modern world, of the growth of Southern cities, of technology and a world economy of ravenous capitalism. The dam will provide power and drinking water to the city of Atlanta. It brings progress, but at the cost of the mountain wilderness and the culture and community found there.

It’s easy enough to view the experience of the four men in Deliverance as akin to the experience of Mr. Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: they wander into the dark forest and discover their capacity for savagery, for murder. What Boorman’s film emphasizes, however, is also the destructive impact of modern commerce and technology on marginal yet distinctive cultures around the world.

[1] As quoted in http://www.gainesvilletimes.com/archives/18744/. See Zell Miller, Purt Nigh Gone, the Old Mountain Ways (Stroud & Hall Publishers, 2009).

[2] Dwight Garner, “’Deliverance’: A Dark Heart Still Beating,” New York Times, August 24, 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/25/books/25dickey.html.

To Kill a Mockingbird

2011-04-29T15:32:00.000-04:00

Does To Kill a Mockingbird (1962; dir. Robert Mulligan), one of the most popular and revered of American films, show its age? Based on the novel by Harper Lee widely taught in virtually every American high school, the film has been seen by virtually everyone. When I polled students in a college film and literature class recently to find out how many were seeing the film for the first time, only two hands went up. Popularity and exposure are no reasons to dismiss a film. Indeed they may be signs of its centrality as a representation of crisis in the nation’s historical experience. They may also be signs that in helping its audience understand a shared moment it may also have obscured certain realities of that moment. Forty years ago films such as To Kill a Mockingbird might play on the local television channel once in a year, and if you were lucky enough to know the film was scheduled to be shown, you could watch it. Opportunities to see your favorite film were infrequent. Today, with cable channels, Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, video rental stores, and other sources, it is easy to find that favorite film and to watch it over and over and over, or in the case of high school and college classrooms, to have it shown to you over and over and over. Seen too often, even the greatest works lose their luster. Familiarity breeds contempt, or at least indifference.

The film version of To Kill a Mockingbird was released when the civil rights movement was fairly young. Desegregation was underway in some states, and still being resisted in others. Protests, sit-ins, lawsuits, marches—these were all the landmark identifiers of a tumultuous time. Passions and opinions were heated, divisive, hostile, and sometimes violent. To Kill a Mockingbird offered welcome shelter from the tumult. Set in a small Alabama town of the 1930s, it envelops its characters and readers in a warm and supportive community. Children play on the streets and range across the neighborhood even at night. Neighbors support one another. The interactions we see among social classes and between the races are amicable. Partially this is because we experience the film from a child’s point of view, a child who is the daughter of a Southern lawyer who teaches his children egalitarian attitudes. Partially also it is because the film is told from a middle-class white point of view, insulated to an extent from social and racial conflict. Finally, it is because class and racial lines in the town are clearly demarcated. Residents of Macomb know their place and seem content to occupy it without chafing against the boundaries. The conflict that does occur happens when people on the margins, people who worry over maintaining the boundaries of their own social and racial categories, transgress, or fear that someone has transgressed. No doubt there is much more discord and unhappiness in Macomb than the young narrator Scout is aware of, and the film in part records her gradual education in the way her world really is.

To the adults of Macomb, the social and racial boundaries are clear enough. They accept them because they have done so for generations. They live in a cultural inertia, immovably fixed in their positions because no one or no event has ever prompted them into motion. From Scout’s vantage point, nothing makes sense and everything makes sense in Macomb. The events of the film are a learning experience for her and her brother Jem: they learn their father is a man with some real talents (sharpshooting, for instance), that some people judge others purely on the basis of skin color, that right and justice do not always prevail, that personal and moral responsibility may entail personal suffering, that some men are by nature bad. But it is Scout’s vantage point, and the more general vantage point she shares with brother Jem and their friend Dill, that envelops the film with nostalgic innocence. In a way the film is a childhood idyll, a respite from the realities of the world of 1962. Atticus Finch, the self-sacrificing lawyer of virtue and integrity, is part of this idyllic constructed world.

The placid relations between whites and blacks in the 1930s era Macomb on the one hand must be meant as a counterpoint to the more disturbed relations of the late 1950s and 1960s. Yet it also is meant as a context, a parallel narrative to that of twenty-five years after the time of the story. In essence To Kill a Mockingbird argues for the importance of social and racial equality and also reflects a particular theory of social change. The argument for equality is irrefutable. The theory of social change is problematic, a product of the era of the novel and film, of how many enlightened Southern liberals—and American liberals—felt about the movement for civil rights in the 1950s.

As in Intruder in the Dust, To Kill a Mockingbird views the African American community of the respective small towns as circumscribed and threatened by a hostile white community. Racist attitudes are so thoroughly ingrained that any behavior by a black man or woman that threatens the stability of the community racial and social structure is met with swift retribution. Vigilantism, lynching, are real possibilities. In Intruder a black man is framed for murder and a mob of white men gather at the county jail intent on carrying out their own form of justice. In To Kill a Mockingbird a mob of men try to push their way into the Macomb jail where Tom Robinson, accused of assaulting a white woman, is held. Although both Lucas and Tom are presented as respectable men, in different ways, both are treated as victims. Lucas’ stubborn arrogance infuriates every white person around him. Even so three white citizens band together to try to save him. Tom Robinson, less problematic than Lucas from the town’s perspective, is shown as unsophisticated but hardworking, honest, and compassionate—in many ways distinctly unthreatening. Yet when he’s accused of rape, all the black community can do for him is support his wife and worry. The white community never doubts his guilt—just as it never doubts his white victim’s accusations. It takes the efforts of a white man, Atticus Finch, Tom’s lawyer, to stand up for and defend him.

Both films show enlightened white people as the agents of change for a black community that cannot bring about change on its own. It is in this light that Malcolm Gladwell in “Atticus Finch and the Limits of Southern Liberalism” takes on this hero.[i] Although he is writing about the novel, Gladwell’s argument can apply to the film as well. Gladwell compares Finch to 1950s-era Alabama governor Big Jim Folsom. Both believed, says Gladwell, in the equality of the races as a matter of heart and mind. But when it came to bringing about social change, to altering the system that relegated blacks to secondary status, neither was willing to go that far. When Atticus shows courtesy and respect for the old woman down the street who calls him a “nigger lover,” or for Walter Cunningham who leads the mob at the jail, he does so not as an agent of the law or a fomenter of change but as a member of their community. Different people have different beliefs, and all need to be tolerated. Gladwell takes especial exception to Atticus’ defense of Tom Robinson. Because the case for Robinson’s innocence is weak, Atticus argues for innocence by attacking the rape victim, impugning her character, and implying her incestuous relationship with her father. The novel more clearly makes the allegation of incest, while the film merely hints at it. Atticus thus substitutes class prejudice and character judgments for hard and clear evidence. Gladwell writes, “Finch wants his white, male jurors to do the right thing. But as a good Jim Crow liberal he dare not challenge the foundations of their privilege. Instead, Finch does what lawyers for black men did in those days. He encourages them to swap one of their prejudices for another.”

Neither the novel nor the film is a treatise in law or Southern politics. Harper Lee was not a lawyer (though her father was) nor a sociologist. She wrote as a liberal Southerner of her time. The film suggests that the case for Robinson’s innocence is strong, but as Gladwell suggested of the novel it also shows Atticus attacking Mayella’s character and arguing that she is being manipulated by someone, clearly her father. Why does Atticus do this? (I am thinking now purely in terms of the film). Atticus is clearly convinced of Tom’s innocence. He uses every reasonable strategy he can think of to defend him. Even when he believes he will lose the case in Macomb, he knows he has a “good chance” on appeal. He argues on the basis of Tom as a family man, a virtuous church-going man, a hard worker, a man with compassion, and a man with a withered right hand incapable of doing injury to the left side of Mayella’s face. And he appeals to the higher natures of the men on the jury (who are not swayed). When he loses the case, he understands that the white jurors could not bring themselves to find Robinson innocent against the testimony of a young white woman. That is, he knows he lost the case to culturally ingrained racism. But he trusts in the efficacy of the law and believes that at some point it will find in Tom’s favor. Whether this will happen we never know because Tom tries to escape from the deputy sheriff who is transporting him to jail, and is killed. This happens off screen, and Atticus seems to accept the story at face value as true. There is at least the possibility that Tom was killed intentionally rather than in the course of an escape attempt. In any case, Tom is dead and the law’s efficacy remains untested.

It may be a product of the film’s dated racial liberalism that the law and Atticus’ skills as a lawyer are never really the issue. The real issue is his moral courage in this case that puts him at odds not only with individuals (and mobs) in the community but with the fundamental principle of white supremacy that undergirds Macomb, Alabama, and the rest of the South. By championing Tom’s innocence, which he believes in both on the basis of evidence as well as personal conviction, he does challenge the racial codes of the South. He puts himself and his children at risk, he is criticized and ridiculed by people in the town, Bob Ewell repeatedly threatens him, and in the end his children are physically attacked. The fact that Atticus is a lawyer, apparently a good one, who has difficulty earning enough of a living to make ends meet, suggests that this is not the only unpopular case he has taken, that he often allows the poor and downtrodden to pay him in immaterial ways, and that this is why the judge comes to him with the case in the first place. (The judge himself believes Tom is innocent. He believes Atticus will do what is right). The film adds to these reasons the fact that Atticus is a widowed father trying to do his best to raise his children without assistance (of course, this discounts the black housekeeper, Calpurnia). He is lonely, it is hinted. And Maudie Atkinson from across the street may be a future helpmeet the film suggests (in a way the novel does not).

Basically, To Kill a Mockingbird presents Atticus as a virtuous man rather than as a racial change-maker. He believes in the law, in the principle that “all men are created equal,” and is willing to stand up for his beliefs. He’s not swayed by social pressures, threats, or other considerations. This is the basis of the argument the film makes for his stature as a hero.

[i] The New Yorker, August 10, 2009.

The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake

2011-04-29T11:36:00.000-04:00

Breece D’J Pancake’s Collected Stories (Little, Brown, 1983) are hard, dark stories of life in West Virginia coal mining country. All suggest circumscription, entrapment by social class and ways of life, by generations of defeat and exploitation. Pancake doesn’t highlight political themes in his stories, but one can infer them. Most of the young adult characters, most of them men, live in the troubled shadows of parents and their relationships with their children. In almost every story parents are missing or absent or dead. These characters have few options beyond the coal mines and the small-town jobs available to them. They don’t attend college—it’s not an option for them, and some of them are well aware of what this means for their future. Several stories suggest an awareness of the past through memories and images and relics: fossils in two stories, Indian mounds in another. Only one story has a humorous tone, while the others brim with varying tones of pessimism and bleakness. Only one story is set outside of West Virginia, but its two main characters are from there.

Pancake shows a certain versatility in his use of form. Many stories are in the third person, but two are first-person narratives. One, whose narrator seems to be a truck driving serial killer, is particularly chilling. In another, a young girl runs away with a man who vows to murder someone who has hurt her. She doesn’t believe he will carry through on his threat, and when he does she announces her intentions to leave him. The last sentence of this story speaks with disturbing irony: “’Then let’s talk,’ and his hand brushed against the revolver as he reached for another cigarette.”

Several of these stories are outstanding: “Trilobites,” “The Hollow,” “Fox Hunters,” “In the Dry.” Others are nearly as good. Pancake evokes an intense awareness of place and time, and of the self-awareness of his characters. His best stories plunge you deeply into his world.

The depression and emotional disturbance that led Pancake to suicide at age 27 are always evident in these stories, only four of which were published during his lifetime. An introduction by James Alan McPherson and afterword by John Casey muse over the reasons for his decision to end his life. Everyone seems convinced he was headed towards a brilliant career as a writer. These are the hyperbolic expressions one expects when talented people die early. We can never be sure of what might have been. Despite the promise of these stories, the entrapment they describe extends beyond Pancake’s characters. They suggest entrapment of a particular emotional and intellectual sort, entrapment in a subject matter, in a way of thinking. Pancake would have had to move beyond these frames of mind, the mountain-rimmed country of West Virginia, if he were going to build on and move beyond what these stories achieve. In some sense they dramatize his struggle to break out.

It’s not clear to me that Pancake could or would have moved beyond, and I wonder if his awareness of that entrapment contributed to his death. Such speculations are pointless, as are the ruminations of McPherson and Casey that try to find sense and pattern in his self-annihilation.

An additional afterword by Andrew Dubus III discusses the various merits of Pancake’s writing.

Facing the Music, by Larry Brown

2011-04-28T14:19:00.000-04:00

Larry Brown’s first story collection, Facing the Music (Algonquin, 1988), for the most part is a dreary series of accounts of working-class middle-aged adult life. From a man who cannot bring himself to have sex with his wife who lost her breasts to cancer (the title story), to a divorced woman in her fifties who attempts to make connections with a handyman with his own problems (“Leaving Town”), to a man who loves his self-destructively drunken wife (“Kubuku Rides (this is it),” there is little lightness in these stories and no humor (with one minor exception). The prose is wooden, the structure static, the tones monochromic.

At the center of most of these stories is a working-class white male in his 30s or late 20s who is disaffected, alienated, unhappy. These males seem to be intelligent, but they are trapped by unhappy marriages and dull jobs. There seems to be no way out for most of them, no means of escape. The stories therefore have a decidedly male viewpoint, and women more often than not are oppressive forces. An exception is “Leaving Town,” which alternates in point of view between an older woman recently divorced from an abusive husband and a younger handyman whose girlfriend sits all day in front of the television. He would leave her but for her young daughter, whom he cares about. This story is particularly sympathetic to the older woman’s situation and the isolation she suffered in a long and unpleasant marriage.

Most of these stories have a domestic setting. There is little movement or action. Several of them take place in bars, an iconic frame of reference for Larry Brown, it would seem.

Brown experiments with a number of different narrative styles in Facing the Music—stream of consciousness, alternating points of view, clinically cold reportorial narrative, dialect. One of these efforts, “Kubuku Rides,” which attempts to mimic an African American street dialect, is not successful. Another story, “Night Life,” uses moralistic sentimentality to justify the narrator’s decision to beat a woman for neglecting her young children. The last story, “The End of Romance,” is little more than a sustained and not especially funny joke. In general Brown’s style seems minimalist and deadpan, in the fashion of Raymond Carver.

I would rank “The Good Samaritan”—an ironic title in a number of ways—as the best in the volume. Overall, Brown’s current reputation doesn’t seem to rest on this collection alone.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe

2011-04-27T14:09:00.000-04:00

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous novel (1852) is a complex and hyper-melodramatic chronicle of slaves and slave owners in the decades before the Civil War.

The true force of the novel lies in its dramatizations of the impact of slavery on both the slaves and their owners, especially those owners who have qualms about the practice but lack the moral resolve to address act on them.

Most of the characters are stereotypes: Little Eva, Simon Legree, Uncle Tom, Topsy, Chloe. The writing is florid and overwrought and often sentimental but the human story has force and energy, and we care about what happens.

Southerners claimed not to like the book because Stowe, who knew “nothing” about the South, did an injustice to slave-owners by impugning their honor with her descriptions of the indignities of slavery: in the course of the novel, she covers most of those indignities, which involve family members broken up and sold apart from one another, broken promises by owners, sexual exploitation of young woman, cruel beatings, and so on. Stowe distinguishes between various kinds of slave-owners—those who believe in the institution but are kind to their slaves, those who have doubts about slavery but are too cowardly to act on them, those who believe that slavery gives them license to do whatever they wish with their slaves, and those who are malignantly evil, like Simon Legree. She excuses none of these slave owners. She also takes issue with Northerners who turn their backs to slavery or who in one way or the other conspire in allowing it.

Despite her clear belief that slaves are human beings who deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, she invokes numerous stereotypes in depicting them: heavy dialect, shallow thinking, easily tempted, superstitious. She clearly favors those slaves of mixed ancestry: they are more intelligent, more attractive, and more capable of managing their own affairs than slaves with a purely African genealogy.

Stowe sees Christianity as the way that slaves can survive and endure the cruelties of perpetual bondage. She doesn’t favor social solutions, though at one point she hints at the possibility that slaves will rise up against their owners. Uncle Tom, the novel’s paragon of loyalty, human kindness, and piety, remains loyal to all his owners—the one who sells him away, the one who makes the promise to emancipate him but fails to do so before dying, and the one who has him beaten to death. Tom tells Simon Legree that he will be a loyal slave but that he will disobey commands to inflict cruelty on another human being. Tom never tries to run away, even when he’s being mistreated. He counsels other slaves, such as Cassie, Legree’s former lover, not to act against him. When he knows he may be beaten to death for failing to submit to Legree, his faith that he will be leaving one life for another better one consoles him. Stowe holds up Christian faith and piety as the consolation that allows believing slaves to accept the life of pain and servitude.

The African Americans who survive to the end of the novel decide to go to Africa, to Liberia, to work among the African peoples there. This seems to be Stowe’s concession that the United States in the 1850s was not ready for freed slaves to live alongside white Americans. It must also be her concession that she is far more comfortable with the concept of human rights for slaves than she is with the realities.

Whatever faults it may have as literature, few novels can equal the power and moral intensity of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Trailer Trashed, by Hollis Gillespie

2011-04-25T15:58:00.000-04:00

Hollis Gillespie, author of Trailer Trashed: My Dubious Efforts Toward Upward Mobility (skirt!, 2008), has a biting wit, sharp sense of satire, and the ability to sum up a character with just a few concise details. This book is a collection of short stories that serve as a sequel to her first two collections, many of which appeared in Creative Loafing. Gillespie portrays herself as a former nonconformist and wild woman now trying to reconstruct herself, primarily because of her young daughter, who is the center of her life. Most of the humor in these stories—really, they are more like sketches—stems from the friends Gillespie has collected for herself—Grant, Lary, David, and Keiger, her intermittent boyfriend. They are wild and crazy—or at least they were in the past—and she portrays herself as constantly imposing on them for help, entertainment, and support.

I enjoyed Gillespie’s accounts of her family, especially of her sister who lives in Costa, and of the itinerant childhood she lived with her parents, a mother who builds missiles and bombs for the government and a sometimes inattentive, hard-drinking, and ultimately absent father. In the job he seemed to hold the longest, he sold travel trailers, which may account for the author’s habit of collecting trailers and storing them in her back- and front yards. These family tales, too infrequent in the collection, are poignant, whimsical, and sad.

One of the problems with these stories is that Gillespie is a bit too insistent on seeing herself as a former outlaw. There’s a good bit of repetition here, as the sketches move on, and a lack of focus. Deeply interwoven with facts and tall-tale exaggerations, these sketches do not always make themselves clear. Gillespie’s a bit too proud of herself, and in the final pages of the book, after assuring us for the previous two hundred that she doesn‘t care about much for anything other than her daughter and her friends, she spends a good bit of time dropping Jay Leno’s name (she appears on his show) and relishing the possibility that one of her books may be turned into a movie or sit com.

These stories entertained me. But it strikes me that Gillespie could be a much better writer if she’d dispense with the wild guy tall-tale bravado and just get down to work.

Skyline

2011-04-20T15:24:00.000-04:00

In Skyline (2010; dirs.. Colin and Greg Strause) six young people in their 20s witness an attack on Los Angeles by aliens who land with huge ships that send out drones to capture humans. They take the humans to a mother ship where their brains are removed and reinserted in android devices (this is made explicit in the last few minutes of the film). Among the many fatal flaws of this effort are the six main characters—they are for the most part narcissistically dimwitted. They watch the invasion from an apartment building as the huge dinosaur-like organic robots tromp around the town, attacking anything that moves, especially humans. Their idea of how to escape is to drive through the city to the bay and sail away on the yacht of one of the characters. This is a decidedly unsuccessful plan.

Through much of this film the main characters do their best to escape the aliens, running, screaming, scampering up and down stairs. There are explosions large and small, burning helicopters, military jets knocked from the sky, smoke, fire, noise. Some of the jets are clearly models, and you strain to see the wires that hold them aloft. One by one these characters are killed or captured, stomped on, consumed, incinerated, harvested.

One could imagine such a film as a comic campy send-up of War of the Worlds or Independence Day, and indeed there are echoes of both those films here. Not echoes in the sense of homage paid to groundbreaking work, but instead the kind of echoes that occur when you borrow, knowingly or not, the plot devices of other films. This is no Invasion from Mars. This film is deadly serious, deadly dull.

There is no excitement in Skyline, no tension, no engagement with the characters, no comedy, no satire, no creative imagination, no nothing. You feel nothing when one or the characters is sucked up by an alien machine. The film’s most disturbing aspect comes in the last scene: it sets up a sequel.

Captains Courageous, by Rudyard Kipling

2011-04-12T15:29:00.001-04:00

Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling (1897) is a great adventure story about a spoiled rich kid, Harvey Cheyne, who falls off an ocean liner and is rescued by the crew of a fishing vessel named the We’re Here. Harvey’s parents believe him dead. On the vessel he learns the meaning of hard work, courage, and danger. He becomes friends with the captain’s young son Dan. Kipling tells a great story, but it’s all on the surface—nothing much beneath. Here we have a Horatio Alger tale in reverse: the spoiled rich kid befriended by the hard working fishermen who teach him how to be a man and help instill life skills. When he returns to land and contacts his parents, they are astounded at what he has done, where he has been, and how he has changed. The distant father recognizes his failures and seeks to bond with the boy. The values of this tale lie in its social point of view: it’s told from the rich boy’s perspective. Wealth is not his problem. His problem is that he is spoiled and doesn’t know how to carry his privilege, how to behave towards others (his inferiors). Underneath it all is the idea that this wealthy child was born for power and wealth, and that he must learn to become the sort of person who can assume his rightful position.

Strengths of this short novel include the colorful, diverse personalities of the men on the vessel and Kipling’s descriptions of the sea. One euphoric passage describes the journey of the boy’s father across the American continent as he travels to meet his lost son. Its breathless descriptions sets the boy’s father up as a Gilded Age tycoon, wielding economic power, standing down adversaries, manipulating workers all to the end of securing a fast and uninterrupted train ride to Boston. Another records the father’s story of his life.

One can’t complain about the story, the prose, the characterizations in Captains Courageous. It’s a grand children’s tale. I would want to have some conversations with young readers about the story’s class-based value system and stereotypical traits in a few of the characters. But these are not issues that need tending to the first time a child reads the story. They can be handled later.

City of Thieves, by David Benioff

2011-03-31T10:03:00.001-04:00

City of Thieves, by David Benioff (Viking, 2010) is an almost flawless narrative. Set in Leningrad and surrounding regions during the siege in the Second World War, it chronicles the search of a 17-year old boy (Lev) and a young deserter from the Russian Army (Kolya) for a dozen eggs. If they fail, they’ll be shot. But that threat seems almost incidental as they make their way across deserted frozen farmlands. They are threatened and then captured by Nazis. They escape and flee. They fall in with a group of Freedom Fighters. They encounter scenes of brutality and cruelty.

The narrative is framed. The grandson of the main character begins by asking his grandfather to talk about his experiences in the Second World War. After he begins to talk, the grandson disappears until the last pages of the book.

World War II now seems like such a distant event. As those who participated in the war die, memories disappear, and only official histories survive, along of course with records—memoirs, oral accounts, films, and so on. But the living memories die with the participants. Moreover, the war’s Eastern Front is one Western readers don’t often think about—yet more men died, more battles were fought, more suffering and carnage occurred, on the Eastern Front than the Western. (Some accounts say thirty million Russians died in the war). City of Thieves is an entirely fictional story but it brings the war to life through the eyes of a 17-year old who worries about still being a virgin, who’s afraid of death, but who also is ready for adventures.

Some of the scenes in the city are nightmarish. The siege has gone on so long that people are dying of starvation or killing one another for food. In one scene the main characters meet a man who is selling human flesh. In another they meet a man who is nearly dead from starvation. Friends are killed when an apartment building is bombed and collapses.

City of Thieves describes horrors, but it doesn’t dwell on them. it just moves on. The result is an intensification of the horrors, and at the same time a dispassionate disengagement from them. The overall tone of the story is gently comic, governed by the bragging tales and jokes of the deserter Kolya, who claims to be writing a great novel and who never admits to being a deserter until the end.

Events from the past have tangible impacts on the present. City of Thieves is about how a 17 year old experienced the war, but it’s also about the other narrator’s genealogy, how he came to be.

Caribou Island, by David Vann

2011-03-18T15:32:00.001-04:00

Caribou Island is a domestic horror story, not in the vein of Stephen King or Shirley Jackson but rather of Jonathan Franzen. A couple in their mid-50s, recently retired, children out of the house, are having difficulties in their marriage. Each partner has different reasons for the difficulties. Each blames the other for disappointments in life. To attempt to repair their marriage and to address personal issues, they decide to build a log cabin on a small island in an Alaskan bay. (The husband insists on this solution, to which the wife acquiesces—this is a life pattern for them). I can hardly conceive of a worse way to solve marital difficulties, which play themselves out in the course of this novel by David Vann, his second.

The children of the couple also lead lives of disappointment, or lives headed in that direction. Their son Mark lives in a half-built house he has left unfinished. He earns a living as a fisherman. Their daughter Rhoda is thirty and unmarried, though halfway through the story she becomes engaged to her boyfriend, a dentist. He begins working out in anticipation of extramarital affairs.

Vann’s view of human relationships is dismal. In this book they all head towards pain, betrayal, unhappiness, and worse. The Alaskan setting accentuates the predicament of the struggling married couple. They’ve made their own hell, and the natural world with its storms, cold temperatures, wind, rain, snow, offers little solace. They are on their own, as are we all.

Setting is a strength of the novel. Descriptions of the ocean, the Alaskan countryside, the island and the lake surrounding it give a visit sense of place. Of particular interest are the descriptions of trolling for salmon on Mark’s fishing boat. A community of counter-culture wanderers, disaffected souls, eccentrics on the margins populate the peripheries.

This novel demonstrates how in the course of a 35-year marriage small resentments and larger ones build up, accumulate, until they add up to far more than the sum of individual complaints, and then some final accounting brings them all to bear. It also shows how children inherit the miseries of their parents, dooming them (at least in this book) to repeat failed lives already lived.

I recognize the skill of the novel, especially the scenes on the island, and in the final chapters, but nothing in Caribou Island gave me any satisfaction.

Get Low

2011-03-18T14:46:00.001-04:00

Get Low (2009; dir. Aaron Schneider) offers a folksong of a story in the vein of “Barbara Allen” or “Long Black Veil.” But folksongs don’t always translate neatly into fully developed narratives. What is suggestive and allusive in a song or ballad, enough so that the listener’s imagination fills out the empty spaces, may seem mere thinness in a traditional film. An old man, Felix Bush, haunted by images of a burning house from the past, decides to stage his own funeral. His reasons are at first unclear. He has lived alone for forty years, stubborn and bitter and hostile. He is childless and has never married. He’s the source of rumor and myth in the community, where everyone knows him by sight but no one really knows him personally. The announcement of the public funeral, to which the whole town will be invited, causes an immediate sensation. Why does he want it? Maybe he wants to dispel the myths about his meanness. Maybe he wants to confess his sins before he “gets low.” Maybe he has other reasons. The idea of a gruff old man who wants to change his ways and make amends, if that is what he means to do, is certainly interesting, and we are more than willing to see where this will take us.

When Mattie Darrow (Sissy Spacek), a woman whom Felix once courted, returns to town, complications develop, not necessarily along the lines we’d expect. And with these complications the film founders. In the last scene, overly sentimental, the film gives up the ghost in more ways than one.

Up until the point when Mattie arrives and the story careens off path, Get Low seems promising. Robert Duvall as Felix is gruff and grisly and, at the age of 80, looks the part of a man preparing to leave this world. Any film that gives Sissy Spacek an acting opportunity is worth seeing. Bill Murray as the undertaker with a checkered past, who sees in Felix’s funeral plans a chance to make some money but who ultimately becomes more interested in Felix than in a profit, is good. And his apprentice Buddy, played by Lucas Black, is effective as well.

The problem is that Felix Bush as a character is not convincing. He’s not all there. Robert Duvall is entirely capable of playing such a character. Witness The Apostle (1988). The logic beneath his sudden shift from irascible misanthrope to a man set on celebrating his demise is weak. As the film moves forward, we learn more about his past and the reasons for the funeral. Both because the unraveling of information comes too late, and because the various threads of the tale finally seem too melodramatically tenuous and contrived, the film seems hollow.

Set in the 1930s, with a storyline reaching back to the 1890s, Get Low depicts characters and a community from a past long since disappeared. Felix himself is the emblem of those vanished times. Though the Southern setting gives the story an atmosphere and a place, it could have happened anywhere. It is not a Southern story but rather one of lost love, guilt, regret, the desire for understanding and forgiveness.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

2011-03-01T15:15:00.001-05:00

The primary struggle in Richard Brook’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) is not one typically associated with the American South. For Brick (Paul Newman), depressive alcoholism seems to be the result of any number of causes—regret that he is older and can’t be the star athlete he used to be, humiliation over his wife’s betrayal, grief over his friend Skipper’s suicide, shame over his feelings of guilt for the suicide, or something else. In the end, as he and his father Big Daddy (Burl Ives) confess to one another in the basement cluttered with family acquisitions, it’s suggested that the root cause of his problems is that his father never truly loved him. Given Brick’s behavior and mood throughout the film, this explanation seems inadequate—the disconnect between Brick’s mood and the ultimate explanations for it leave the film seeming empty.

The reason, of course, is that the Brooks screenplay strips away the theme of homosexuality from the stage play, provides a happy ending to replace the desperately despairing one that Tennessee Williams originally wrote. In the play Brick doesn’t drink because his daddy didn’t love him enough or because he thinks his best friend slept with his wife—he drinks because he loved Skipper, and his own failings along with those of the oppressive world in which they lived prevented them from fully accepting or expressing those feelings. In the film, it’s hinted that Skipper loved Brick in an unnatural way that Brick himself rejected. When Big Daddy hints at this possibility, Brick blames him for dragging the friendship through the gutter, but that’s as far as this 1958 film is willing to go.

The film Cat on a Hot Tin Roof requires that Maggie’s (Elizabeth Taylor) struggle to win back her husband’s affections will actually succeed. In the play, we realize that it won’t. Maggie’s struggle then seems more one of economic and personal survival. So wants to conceive a child with Brick so that she can breed her way into the family and thereby into Big Daddy’s inheritance. In the play she’s less sympathetic and more conniving than in the film—she’s more like her competitor Mae (Gooper’s wife). In the film it’s love she’s after, and a family. Yes, she wants the inheritance, but she wants it as much for Brick as for herself. She sees Gooper as unsuitable and incapable of carrying the family name forward (despite his five children—and one on the way—with May). In the film Gooper and May care far more about the inheritance than they do about Big Daddy, while in the play they are much closer to the same level as Maggie the cat.

The film carefully positions itself as a Southern film by way of iconography. The family lives in a large traditional Southern mansion with columns and porticos. Black house workers serve guests. Big Daddy’s farm is 25,000 acres (we’re repeatedly reminded). Everyone speaks with a heavy Southern accent, though not heavy enough to seem false. May’s children, trained to march and sing for Big Daddy’s entertainment, carry a Confederate battle flag with them when they go to greet him at the airport and when they march around the house playing “Dixie.” (The film does a good job of conveying Williams’ distaste for children—these are among the most distasteful children on American film).

In fact, these Southern symbols are simply decoration. Race, Southern nationalism, traditional regional culture, have little to do with the concerns of the film. Patriarchy, patrimony, gender, class—these are the central issues. They are part of Southern history and culture, but they are part of culture and history in general. Perhaps the most “Southern” element in the film is the class division. Maggie comes from a poor, lower-class background. Her need to survive, her desire for Brick to take possession of the patrimony that is his by right (at least everyone in the film seems to think so, except Gooper and May--and Gooper is the older of the sons). By marrying into Brick’s family, and by giving birth to a child, presumably a son, she will acquire the necessary means of survival. In the play, Maggie is an equivocal character. It’s never clear whether her love for Brick is stronger than her desire for wealth, or whether the two motives have become so entwined that they can’t be separated. Brick’s possible homosexuality complicates the issue of Maggie’s love even further. In the film, though Maggie makes clear that she wants Brick to receive Big Daddy’s patrimony, her love for him is the driving force in her behavior. There’s no issue of homosexuality to complicate of confuse her motives. Mae comes from an upper-class family that has lost its wealth. She had a privileged upbringing, but needs the inheritance from Big Daddy so that she and Gooper and their progeny can live in the lifestyle she wants. Love does not drive her behavior; pure greed and the desperate need to cling to some vestige of family name and honor are what drive her.

Another aspect of class in the film is Big Daddy and his origins. Although we may speak of Brick as taking possession of his patrimony, it is not as if Big Daddy’s family is descended from Southern aristocracy. His story is a rags to riches tale. As a young boy he rode the rails with his father, who bequeathed to him only an empty suitcase, a hat, and memories. He says he was driven to acquire wealth so that he could share material things with the people he loved, his wife and his sons, though Brick says he substituted things for love. (This acquisitive substitution of possessions for love echoes Citizen Kane, 1941). And in his ambition he seems to have driven off or dismissed any conventional connections to his family. Big Daddy says he had to pretend to love Big Momma for 40 years. He makes no bones of preferring Brick to Gooper, or of intensely disliking Gooper’s children. In a sense Big Daddy is another version of Faulkner’s Flem Snopes, or of the Faulknerian patriarch Will Varner in The Long Hot Summer.

The film Cat on a Hot Tin Roof offers a redemptive conclusion for everyone (but Mae and Gooper) that is hollow to the core. Brick and Big Daddy come to an understanding. Maggie tells her lie, Brick doesn’t betray her, and together they proceed up the stairs to the bedroom where they will make the lie into truth. Big Daddy invites Big Momma to walk out on the farm and survey the land. By stripping away the issue in the play that ties everything together—Brick and Skipper’s forbidden love—the film denies itself necessary logical underpinnings of Williams’ play. Instead we have a lot of loud people yelling for sustained periods of increasing monotony and then a kind of family harmony. We have a claustrophobic domestic drama that in the end makes little sense.

But Cat on a Hot Tin Roof reminds us what Elizabeth Taylor was like at her height, and Burl Ives gives the best performance of his career, the “Little White Duck” notwithstanding.

The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien

2011-02-18T16:19:00.001-05:00

In The Things They Carried (Houghton Mifflin, 1990) Tim O’Brien writes about his experiences in Vietnam. Rather than a personal memoir, this is a book of closely related stories in which O’Brien actively participates as author and character. As he narrates the stories, he explains how he came to write them, how he changed characters and experiences. He makes himself the persona of the book, the author-narrator. In most of the stories he examines characters coming to grips with their experiences. One story, “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” about a soldier who manages to bring his girlfriend to Vietnam, and who then goes native, is reminiscent in ways of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Another, “Speaking of Courage,” which describes the difficulty of a former soldier named Norman Bowker to connect to his life after the war to the war itself, suggests Hemingway’s ”Solder’s Home,” from In Our Time. A number of personal narratives I’ve read about the Vietnamese conflict are linear in how they recount events, beginning with arrival and proceeding through wartime experiences. O’Brien’s approach is not linear. He constantly circles back and forth from his position as a 43-year-old writer trying to make sense of his experiences to the experiences themselves—a constant movement between past and present. He offers multiple presentations of a single image—for example, of a dead soldier on the trail (“The Man I Killed”), or a fellow soldier blown apart by a mortar shell (“How to Tell a True War Story”).

As in many other Vietnam narratives, the narrator’s voice is a forceful perspective. Michael Herr’s Dispatches provides the archetype. O’Brien’s persona actively tries to make sense of the war, obsessed with memories of friends who died and how they died, of how others changed, of how he himself changed.

Freedom Summer: The Savage Season That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy, by Bruce Watson

2011-02-17T15:11:00.001-05:00

The Freedom Summer of 1964 in Mississippi is one of the great stories of the 20^th century in America. Drawing from interviews, documents, personal accounts published and unpublished, and published scholarship, Bruce Watson in Freedom Summer: The Savage Season That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy (Viking Adult, 2010) tells the story of these volunteers who move to Mississippi for ten weeks in the summer of 1964 to register voters, teach in freedom schools, and otherwise develop a movement for civil rights. The murder of the three civil rights workers near Philadelphia, Mississippi, serves as a framing device for the narrative. The workers disappear on the first day most of the Freedom Summer volunteers arrived in Mississippi, and their bodies were recovered as the summer began to wind down. He also focuses on a number of volunteers in the project, beginning with Robert Moses, and continuing on through a teacher, two college students, an organizer, and Fanny Lou Hamer, who became famous for the speech she gave at the 1964 Democratic Convention in an attempt to get the Mississippi Freedom Delegation seated in place of the all-white delegation Mississippi democrats had chosen.

As a fourteen-year-old during the year of the Freedom Summer Project, I was far removed from what was going on. I followed with dismay the disappearance of the three volunteer workers, who were brutally killed by Klansmen and buried in a dam, all with the collusion of local law enforcement. But many of the details of the project I didn’t learn until I read this book. An amazing list of prominent names from the 1960s and 1970s forward had a role as organizers and volunteers in the project: Stokeley Carmichael, Moses, Abbie Hoffman, Susan Brownmiller, William Kunstler, Mario Savio, John Lewis, Barney Frank, are among them. With the exception of Moses, regarded as a kind of saint by many in the project, and resented by some, the figures on whom Watson focuses were rank-and-file participants.

The brutality with which African Americans in Mississippi were refused basic rights, including the right to vote, and the right to equal treatment under the law, during the 1960s and earlier is sobering. The experience of the Freedom Summer volunteers—young and old, black and white, from all over the nation—was brutal.

Despite the hyperbole, some minor instances of repetitiveness, and less analysis than I would like, this book is a good introduction to the Freedom Summer Project and is the product of a daunting amount of research, reading, and work. It’s exciting, filled with tension and human interest, and a compelling story of courage, moral fortitude, and heroism.

Inception

2011-02-17T15:07:00.001-05:00

Inception has been hailed as a groundbreaking film that utilizes cutting-edge special effects with state-of-the-art postmodern narrative. Director Christopher Nolan made his mark in the The Dark Knight (2008) with intensely somber and moody visual presentations of an oversized American city, the aesthetics of film noir, and a fully realized Byronic hero. The visual aspect of Inception is perhaps its most striking element--in scenes where the main character Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) demonstrates to a new recruit the ability to manipulate the content of dreams, where a modern city seems to rotate in upon itself; where confetti spontaneously erupts into the air; where decaying buildings collapse into the sea of what appears to be an earth in the distant future – these are rendered with overwhelming detail, imagination, and artistry. Such scenes occupy a relatively brief portion of the film, but they certainly capture your interest. Almost as important is a narrative plot that sets its own ground rules and adheres to them. The film is built on an unlikely premise. To say that it's unlikely is not to say that it's impossible. The technology, the scientific knowledge, that would make it possible, as this film suggests, to invade the dreams of other people, to alter what they're dreaming about, to discover secrets they're hiding, is simply not within the realm of the near future. It may be possible one day, or it may not. The notion that we could one day read the thoughts of other people by scanning their brain waves would have seemed ridiculous 10 years ago. It's now beginning to happen, at least in a rudimentary form, and it's likely in another few decades that electronically reading human minds will be commonplace. Although by current levels of technology the film's claims about invading the dreams of other people are unlikely, at least they are conceivable.

The characters in Inception work for a security agency that specializes in invading the dreams of people who have important information that others—the government or a corporation--want. One company wants to plant in the mind of the owner of another company’s owner an idea that will affect business decisions he must make in the near future. The film never really questions the ethics of trying to do this. It's as if the film occupies a post-ethical world where such considerations are irrelevant. What the film pays attention to is the process, and director/screenwriter Nolan weaves around that process an exciting and innovative adventure. The people in this company determine that they will have to penetrate through six nested levels of dreams to carry out their assignment. This means that a character invades one dream and then in the dream contrives to go to sleep and have another dream in which he contrives to go to sleep and have a third dream and so on. This is convoluted, and at some point I lost track of where we were. But the concept as a narrative form works.

There's a complication. The main character played by Leonardo DiCaprio lost his wife two years before. He feels responsible for her death and constantly dreams about her. In fact he goes to sleep with the intention of meeting and talking to her. He’s grief stricken but can't let go of his grief because he's able to see his wife in his dreams, literally. The film does make clear that when DiCaprio encounters his dead wife in dreams he's not literally encountering her—she’s not a spirit--he's encountering his memories and his guilt over her loss. As he talks to his wife he's attempting, perhaps unwittingly, to come to grips with her death. But he’s still so wrapped in grief that he puts himself and the whole team at risk as they penetrate deeper and deeper from one dream to another. His dead wife is continually appearing in his dreams, at times interfering with the project, and in general offering added layers of distraction.

Director Nolan and the rest of his crew effectively keep multiple narratives in motion—the action within each dream takes place at different rates of speed. In one case the members of the team are on a van that drives off a bridge and plunges towards the river. The 2 1/2 seconds that it takes for the van to hit the water are in fact the time period during which much of the rest of film takes place. In other dreams narratives occur in real time, and the film switches back and forth from the people on the bus as it careens towards the river and to what people in other parts of the film are doing. This could become so confusing that the narrative of the film simply collapses into meaninglessness, but that never really happens. Nolan employed a somewhat different use of fragmented parallel narratives in his early film Memento (2000)

Inception offers an effective fusion of state-of-the-art special effects, an innovative script, and many good elements of filmmaking. Excellent actors include DiCaprio and Ellen Page. the young student he recruits to assist in the project. The music is effective, similar to the music from the The Dark Knight written by the same composers, James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer.

The nested narratives central to Inception are not new. They’re a primary device in modernist and postmodernist literature of the 20^th and 21^st centuries. One film Inception particularly reminded me of was Flatliners (1990), where medical students experiment with near-death experiences to discover whether there is life after death, and in which one character tries to contact a deceased relative.

Notes for a Roundtable on the Future of the PhD in the Humanities

2011-02-03T14:35:00.001-05:00

The topic of the future of the PhD in the Humanities might seem to have been suggested by the ongoing crisis in the job market. Are we producing too many PhDs when many of them can’t get suitable jobs? Are we training them properly, given the kind of teaching many of them go into. Can a humanities PhD prepare them for employment in nonacademic fields. Should we even worry over whether our PhDs are employable?

There has always been a crisis in the humanities job market—it was in crisis when I started looking for jobs 33 years ago. There has always been the promised surge of open positions when the current generations of faculty retire. But economic crisis, downsizing of programs, changes in universities, and changes in the humanities itself have proved such hopes empty.

The job crisis raises serious ethical and professional issues that we cannot ignore or pretend not to see.

However, the PhD’s future in the humanities is not merely an issue of too many graduates and too few jobs. It’s a matter of whether graduate programs in the 21^st century should be governed by disciplinary models that date back into the 19^th century. It’s about the quality and substance of the graduate education we provide. Do we overvalue the dissertation? Do our students take too long to finish, or not enough time? Is humanities graduate study too narrow and focused? Is a new PhD who has never studied outside a single discipline truly educated? Our world is one of virtualities, of inter- and multidisciplinary research and teaching, of the traditional monograph’s rapid decline, of radically evolving forms of scholarly publishing, of new technologies in instruction and research. Can we afford not to consider the fundamental shape of doctoral study in the humanities?

Death at a Funeral (both versions)

2011-01-31T14:51:00.001-05:00

Death at a Funeral (2007; dir. Frank Oz) is a British madcap comedy about a funeral where almost everything conceivable goes wrong. It reminds me of some of the Peter Sellers comedies of the 1960s and 1970s, of the Fawlty Towers television series (1975, 1979), and of old Hollywood comedies such as and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) and The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming (1966). Death at a Funeral is fairly well focused, so it almost succeeds in keeping the action within rein. More controlled than some of the aforementioned predecessors, it is prevailingly silly. Characters are well drawn caricatures. At the center of the film are two brothers—one a successful novelist who can’t seem to find the funds to help pay funeral expenses for their father. His brother remained at home with his aging parents, struggles to make ends meet, and is pressured by his wife about finding a place to live now that his father is dead. The successful novelist is really fairly vapid, while his brother has more substance than he knows. There is mordant gallows humor aplenty. No one in the film escapes the numerous satiric jabs it levels: old men, the dead man himself, his wife, the married and unmarried, the minister performing the funeral, a man given the wrong bottle of pills, an opportunistic dwarf. Although the increasingly zany hijinks follow a well-worn slapstick pattern, building towards a climactic moment on the roof of the family home, the film is hilarious and entirely satisfying.

Using almost exactly the same screenplay and shooting script, and nearly identical to the 2006 film on a scene-by-scene basis, the 2010 version of Death at a Funeral (Neil Labute) features a mostly African American cast, with a few exceptions. Danny Glover, Chris Rock, Tracy Morgan, and Martin Lawrence play the primary characters, with assistance from a generally excellent group of supporting actors. Each actor brings his or her distinctive spin to the film (in particular Glover and Morgan). There are a few topical references to the United States, to basketball, to African American issues, but this is not really an African American film. It’s still basically a British madcap comedy. Even the house and surrounding grounds where the story takes place seems the same. One actor, Peter Dinklage, the dwarf, plays the same role in both films—he’s a fine actor, but just for the sake of spreading the joy around, couldn’t the director have found someone else to play his part in the second film?

Clearly, someone saw money potential in the script used for the original film. But someone also didn’t see money to be made in hiring a new screenwriter to rework the original script. (The script has been mildly revised to allow for American and African American language usage—but even with those differences the line-by-line dialogue is very close in both versions). The assumption must have been as follows: this British film with mainly unknown actors is funny. In fact it’s hilarious. But it doesn’t have any actors in it American audiences recognize. So, hey, why not completely reshoot the film with popular actors and aim it towards a young and African American audience—the sort of audience that would attend a Tyler Perry film--and do a major publicity campaign?—that will make money.

The American version of the film is entertaining and funny. So is the British version. The British version works better because the comedy and the madcap antics seem more naturally attuned to the talents and language and setting of the actors. The American version is neither stilted nor forced, but it does seem contrived. And it’s difficult not to conclude that the only reason for its existence as a filmic replication of the 2006 original is the desire for filthy lucre.

Get Him to the Greek

2011-01-30T13:42:00.000-05:00

Judd Apatow is producing and often directing a growing list of films aimed at teens and young adults. The members of each generation have their own interests and preferences, codes and values, and they are reflected in the films they watch. Apatow’s films are funny, sometimes witty, usually raunchy, occasionally heartwarming, and the latter emotion in some way is meant to excuse the raunch. I am hesitant to make the following statement, for fear of being labeled an old kludge, but the entertainment offered in Get Him to the Greek (2010; dir. Nicholas Stoller; produced by Apatow) reflects the long, slow decline in popular films since the 1970s.

Get Him to the Greek gave me a lot of chuckles and a few belly laughs. But I am a cheap date. A young man who wants to find a place in the music business (Jonah Hill) is assigned to escort from England to Los Angeles a drug-addled, recently divorced, basket case of a rock star named Aldous Snow (Russell Brand) for a comeback concert at the Greek Theatre. Hijinks ensue, fairly silly and lewd, and entertaining. In the end, we discover that Brand is only a lonely artist who needs a friend. Jonah Hill’s improbable character finds his place in the music world, and all is good. The film is hollow. From the beginning the odor of the formula permeates—an overly ambitious hero too willing to compromise himself for the job he wants learns what’s really important in life. Hill and Brand merely go through the motions of filling in the formula. Hill plays a character much like he has always played (just a little older) while Brand plays a version of himself. Brand is fun to watch, but he doesn’t seem to have much range or depth.

Apatow and followers have learned that scatology, over-indulgence, drug jokes, and various forms of kinky sex (or the promise thereof) are what the demographic this film is aimed at wants. They’ve also learned that if the end of such a film tacks on a moralistic ending, one in which the drunken sot of a rock star discovers his need for friendship, and the music company lackey escorting him across the continent realizes his selfishness, then they will be praised for their refined perspective.

Were the films I saw when I was twenty on the same level as this one? When they are thirty years older, will the audience members for Get Him to the Greek rank this film and The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up and Superbad in the same category as Cool Hand Luke and Easy Rider and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Graduate?

Entropy is one diagnosis.

Tron: Legacy

2011-01-28T09:36:00.001-05:00

Failure of imagination might be a term that assumes too much as applied to Tron: Legacy (2010; dir. Joseph Kosinski). This sequel to the 1982 film, itself the product of failed imagination, is enjoyable if bright colors, swift movements, and loud noise entrance you. Probably, in an altered state, one might find this film profound and a religious experience. In the rational but also hopeful state in which I viewed this film, it was an ordeal. Midway through, I muttered to my son (yes, this was a father-son bonding experience) that Tron: Legacy was far worse than I could have imagined. Straining for the right expression to say just what I meant, I myself suffered a failure of imagination.

Tron works on the premise that a computer programmer, Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) can enter the virtual world of a video game he has created and interact with the subprograms that reside there. The subprograms appear to him as people. He somehow undertakes to work towards the creation of a perfect world, and in the process a “race” of superior beings—they are like the elves of Tolkien, or Milton’s angels. But some of the other programs revolt, kill all the angels, and force Flynn into hiding. He engages in a long-running stand-off with his alter-ego Clu, a computer program replication of himself, which is not himself. Anyway, Flynn is trapped for twenty-one years in the virtual world. Then, his son from the real world appears, intent on his rescue.

Most fantasies establish and adhere to their own laws, their own operating procedures. They operate according to an underlying logic. Above and beneath Tron, I think, is no logic at all. With some of the worst dialogue in recent years (example: “In there is a new world! In there is our future! In there is our destiny!”), with impressive digital animation (Bridges appears as two versions of himself, one old and the other young), with a narrative worthy of an old Lost in Space episode, or maybe of the “Space Hippies” episode of the original Star Trek television series, with borrowings from The Matrix and Buddhism and The Wrath of Khan Star Trek film, Tron blunders and flounders and whirls out of control (as if it were ever under control to begin with).

The low point comes in a scene where characters from the virtual world meet in a disco bar, drinking and dancing.

Only a role as impressive as Rooster Cogburn could compensate for Jeff Bridges’ appearance and performance in this one.

Hallelujah

2011-01-18T11:08:00.001-05:00

Hallelujah (1929; dir. King Vidor) is the earliest sound-era film featuring an all-black cast I have encountered. Released in 1929, it is crudely made by current standards, with poor editing, acting, sound quality, and cinematography. By 1929 standards, however, it would have been close to state of the art. Hallelujah is about an African American cotton-farming family somewhere in the deep south, possibly Mississippi, since a town named Greenwood is mentioned. We see scenes of the family working happily in the cotton field and eating together at home. At the center of the film is a young man named Zeke. He is hard-working and responsible, but several scenes give us to know that he is full of sexual desire that is hard for him to repress. One day he and his younger brother take the cotton they have harvested to town and sell it for a hundred dollars. Zeke comes across a young woman, Chick, dancing before a crowd of men. He's attracted to her and doesn’t realize that she is probably a prostitute. When he tries to get her attention, she rebuffs him until she learns he has money. At a local honky-tonk, she connives with a gambler, probably her pimp, to convince Zeke to gamble his earnings. When he loses the money, he blames the gambler. A fight ensues, and Zeke accidentally shoots his brother to death. At his brother’s funeral, the guilt-stricken Zeke sees the light, becomes a peachier who begins touring the local countryside under the name of Zekial, preaching to the brethren. Apparently as a way of channeling his sexual urges, he also marries a young woman who lives with his family. But Chick tracks him down and after mocking him at an outdoor service she claims to be converted. Zeke is still attracted to her, and they run away together. Six months later she leaves with the gambler. Zeke realizes he's been duped and tracks the pimp down in a local swamp and kills him. Zeke goes to jail and, on release, returns home where his family awaits.

Hallelulah opens and closes with the iconic image of blacks toiling away happily in the cotton fields. They talk freely with each other, joking playfully, giving no sense that picking cotton in the hot summer fields is hard work. We’ve seen this image often in films of the 1930s and 40s—in So Red the Rose, Mississippi, Gone with the Wind, and Song of the South, for example. One might argue that because this film focuses exclusively on black characters, with white people nowhere in evidence, that its intent is to celebrate African American life. We see the family life, community socializing and worship, and much singing. We also see how Zeke and his family work hard and successfully at raising cotton and then taking it to market where they sell it for a good price.

Could Hallelujah be an early expression of respect and appreciation for African Americans?

That might be the intention, but not the result. The film carefully and inexorably undermines the positive image of independent black farmers and rich, hearty family gatherings by reifying all the basic racist stereotypical notions about African Americans expressed in the opening image. While Zeke can grow a field of cotton and bring it to harvest, lust and alcohol and poor judgment induce him to gamble it away. When he feels shame for his actions and becomes an evangelist, he is clearly impressed by the popularity he enjoys. Although his conversion seems sincere, the film treats his career as an evangelist with humor. However pious he might be, he’s easily lured away from a revival service by desire for Chick. The film seems to equate religious mania in African Americans with sexual desire, suggesting that Chick and Zeke can’t see the difference and can’t control their impulses. And after serving his time in the local penitentiary for the gambler’s murder, Zeke returns home to his family and to his wife Mattie—he’s welcomed with open arms and little hesitation, the suggestion being that he is just a man, a black man for all that, susceptible to temptation and passion, and therefore deserving of forgiveness. Chick is not much different in this regard than Zeke. She’s not only a woman—vulnerable to, as this film would have it, temptation and eager to lure men to sins of the flesh—but also a black woman, which in this film means weaker, more sensual, more corruptible still.

The temptations to which Zeke falls victim could as easily have brought down a white protagonist. But this film--with its African American cast that strives so fervently to present African American life--is making a general statement about the perceived qualities and defects of African American character. On the farm, working in the fields, eating and funning around with family and friends, African Americans are safe and carefree. In the city, the lures of temptation along with their naturally weak morals and strong passions will bring them down. No surprise, then, that the film ends with Zeke’s return home and with more images of the happy blacks in the fields picking cotton.

The two strongest actors in the film are Daniel Haynes as Zeke and Nina Mae McKinney as Chick. Haynes sings well. McKinney overacts, especially when she’s overcome with religious/sexual frenzy. Her primary trait is her eyes—which are unfortunately close to the bug eyes of the stereotype. A decade or two later, and certainly by the 1950s or 1960s, Haynes and McKinney might have had successful Hollywood careers, but Haynes appeared in only a few minor roles after this one, and McKinney played mostly minor parts until her last film in 1950.

While Hallelujah means to give a positive portrait of African-American life, the cultural and racial biases of its day limit its success.

Airships, by Barry Hannah

2011-01-12T23:34:00.001-05:00

Barry Hannah's Airships (Knopf, 1978) bowled me over. These stories offer a remarkable alternative to the clean, precise, antiseptic short fiction that has proliferated since the 1970s in American letters. The typical Hannah story rambles. You often think it's going nowhere, or that it's lost track of where it was going, and then suddenly you realize it's right on target. Hannah’s typical persona is a middle- to lower-class Southern white man, possessed of the usual prejudices one would expect from rural areas of the 1960s and 70s. Hannah pays no homage to political niceties. His characters pretend not to be fond of black people, of Northerners, or of other people unlike themselves. It takes getting over.

Hannah's stories are the opposite of minimalist. They give the illusion of formlessness, of stream of consciousness, but although the unconscious may be a source of the stories, they are quite deliberate.

In subject these stories range from short brutal tales about murder (“Coming Close to Donna” and “Pete Resists the Man of His Old Room”) to Civil War stories somehow involving Gen. Jeb Stuart (“Knowing He Was Not My Kind Yet I Followed” and “Dragged Fighting from his Tomb”) to World War II stories (“Testimony of Pilot”) to Vietnam stories (“Midnight and I’m Not Famous Yet”) to apocalyptic science fiction (“Eating Wife and Friends”). Rarely have I read a story collection so varied in content. “Escape to Newark” is about a futuristic world so polluted and depleted of resources that everything is dying. Only the rich can afford to build rocket ships to escape. A woman abandons her husband to secure a place on a spaceship built by a former friend who selects his passengers much as he might choose whom to invite to a swank party. The conclusion is sudden and unexpected and entirely fitting. In “Water Liars” old men sit around fishing and telling stories to each other that are lies but that also dredge up deeper truths. In “Our Secret Home” a man who lives with his wife and disabled twin sister discovers why neighbors decline to attend his parties. “Return to Return” is about a brain-damaged former tennis champion and his admirers (it reminding me in ways of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral).

These narratives intermix contemporary America with traditional America, the modern with the postmodern, the real with the unreal. They deal with hillbillies, the era of Civil Rights, the problems of the modern world. They offer no solutions and even their diagnoses are typically unclear and not even to the point. Faulkner is an occasional echoing presence, but so too are Updike and Cheever and Roth.

Many of these stories seem told by characters whose own grip on reality is uncertain—psychopaths, hallucinators, the half-aware, the dispossessed, the grievously embittered and disappointed. They inhabit a world in which the real and unreal commingle, not in the way of the magical realists, but more in the way of trailer parks and starvation and Kafka.

White Fang, by Jack London

2011-01-05T23:59:00.001-05:00

Jack London’s problematic racial views are faintly evident in his short novel White Fang (1906) in his comments on the difference between pure and mixed breed wolves and dogs. Pure blood wolves hold entirely to the laws of nature, of the wild. They have pure instincts, cannot be lured into complacency by the wiles of men, they are pure predators. White Fang’s mother is a half breed, the product of the union between a wolf and a dog. Although London describes her in purely adulatory terms, it’s clear that her domesticated side distinguishes her from the pure bred wolves that run in the woods nearby. She is drawn to the fires of men.

There’s certain logic to London’s comments on the differences between pure-blood wolves and half-bloods. Interbreeding animals of different species can produce offspring who carry some of the weak traits of the parents as well as strong ones.

In his comments on human beings—especially on white men and Indians, and on men of good breeding as opposed to others less well bred--his racial views become clearer. The Indian men who look after White Fang after he joins their tribe with his mother treat him with cruelty. But White Fang looks up to them as “gods”—the word London uses to characterize how he regards them—as beings above and supreme to himself. But the white man who rescues him from Beauty Smith, a dog fighter, is clearly above and beyond any other men he has ever encountered. To White Fang, the man who comes to be the owner he grows to love is a “super god.” In this novel white men and clearly superior to Indians, and some white men, by dint of breeding or their innately moral natures or whatever, are clearly superior to all others. They are the super gods, the super men, the ubermensch.

London’s descriptions of the behavior of Indians are probably based on his own observations. He appears to know much about their ways of life, their diets and family habits and social habits. His descriptions are not for the most part condescending or negative. In fact, he treats Indians with far more respect than many other writers of his day. But when he compares them to white men, simply by the judgments he draws, his racial views are evident.

Of the books in American literature that exemplify in the most literal and straightforward fashion the meaning of naturalism, White Fang is among them. In telling the story of white fang’s first year as a pup, London makes clear the harshness of the natural world into which he is born. The pups born with him die of starvation during a famine. His father dies in a fight with a lynx. Wolves pursue and apparently kill two men lost in the wilderness. White Fang learns to kill prey to nourish himself. He learns to fight and defend himself against becoming prey. In his world, the fittest survive and the weak perish. London apparently knows his Darwin.

London makes White Fang out to be a product of heredity (breeding and interbreeding) and of environment. He refers to White Fang’s genetic makeup as “clay” but makes clear that environmental factors, what he has learned in his life, the influence of his encounters with people and other animals, mixes with clay to form his character.

Oddly, there is sentimentality here in this book about an animal. Many of the animals have names—some are given by men but others are not—who gives White Fang’s father the name One Eye, for example? London presumes to know what they think and feel and why they act as they do. He sometimes ascribes motives and logic to their thought. The ending of the novel seems particularly sentimental, which is not to say that I didn’t like it. Everyone wants a dog story to have a happy ending. But if London sought to make this story a purely naturalistic, Darwinian tale, he didn’t really succeed.

London writes with a spare and descriptive narrative force. He has observed the behavior of wolves and other animals in the wild and therefore writes with a convincing attention to detail that gives his narrative credibility.

Black Swan

2011-01-05T23:51:00.001-05:00

Black Swan (2010; dir. Darren Aronofsky) shows the jealousy, competitiveness, self-destructiveness, and sacrifice that can underlie the creation of art.

The ballerina Nina (Natalie Portman) has focused her entire life on becoming a successful ballerina. She is driven, both by her own ambitions, and those of her mother, who left the ballet at age 28 to give birth to her daughter. The mother is the kind of parent who relives her own failed career through the aspirations of her child. She both wants and doesn’t want her daughter to succeed. She recognizes the psychic damage the ballet is doing to her daughter, and while she is genuinely concerned and even takes action to try to protect her child, she also feels vindication, relief, at what she believes will be her daughter’s failure. Because she needs her daughter to rely on her, she infantilizes the girl, whose bedroom is decorated with stuffed animals. The mother is constantly painting pictures of her daughter that she has placed on the wall in her daughter’s room. Or are they really pictures of herself, dancing her daughter’s roles? A picture of herself is attached to the corner of her easel. She is one source of tension in her daughter.

Jealousy, competitiveness, envy are far more rife among artists than most would admit, and we see those forces at work among the members of the ballet troupe and their director. When the senior ballerina is forced out of the company, the others see the opportunity to take her place. They are genuinely pleased when one of their own wins a part or scores a success, and even more pleased when she fails. They regret her departure yet move immediately to fill her place. Nina is no different than the others. She is certain that others, specifically Lily (Mila Kunis), a new member of the troupe just arrived from California, are out to thwart her desire to dance the title role in Swan Lake. She imagines various plots Lily has concocted, and for the most part they are all in Nina’s head.

There is predation here. The Director Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassell) in trying to awaken passion in Nina, may or may not sexually exploit her, as he has apparently done with other members of the company. He hints to her that there are ways she can encourage him to give her the part she wants. And he knows he has made her love him—he uses her attraction to him as a way of tormenting her and compelling her to dance with passion. Nina’s mother implies something of the same may have happened to her.

Nina is the artist who merges her identity in the part she plays or wants to play. In this case that role is of the Swan Queen in Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Nina so identifies with the part she wins, and that she is afraid of losing, that she begins to live out the role in her own life. The roles of the White Princess and Black Princess she is supposed to dance become contending aspects of her personality. The director tells her that although she can dance the White Swan to perfection, she lacks the emotion to dance the Black Swan. He drives her towards feeling that emotion.

About the dissolution of Nina’s personality and identity as the premier of the ballet approaches, Black Swan is narrated through Nina’s eyes. As her personality and identity dissolve, she hallucinates, imagines entire scenes, but because we experience them from her viewpoint, we’re late to realize how ill she has become, even as we experience some of the terror and confusion she feels. The difference between the real and what Nina believes is real is often unclear.

Visually this film is beautiful. But it is not a pleasure to watch. It is not a pleasure to witness a gifted personality’s destruction. The film shows the ballet as a craft of obsessive work, self-mutilation, pain, and suffering. The gliding, beautiful movements seen by the audience are moments of physical and emotional anguish for the dancers on stage. In this sense the beauty of the ballet is a created illusion in which the audience must believe, but which the dancer feels not through the grace of her movements but through the applause of her audience and of those whose praise she craves.

Among the various films about the ballet, from the The Red Shoes (1948) to The Turning Point (1977) and White Nights (1985) to Robert Altman’s The Company (2006), we have seen a number of varying perspectives, some romantic and some not, of this classical dance form. None of these films portrays the physical and emotional pain and destructiveness of the ballet more successfully than Black Swan.

Easy A

2011-01-05T15:52:00.001-05:00

Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter serves as a faint narrative source for the 2010 film Easy A (2010; dir. Will Gluck). Emma Stone plays the good high school girl Olive who has never gotten in trouble, whose reputation is pure, and who actually does her homework. One of her good friends is a gay boy constantly bullied and harassed by students in their school. He convinces her to assist him in a ruse that he thinks will help him survive high school until graduation. At a party they pretend to be drunk and go into a bedroom where they make the sounds of wild sex. Everyone gathers outside the door, listening. As a result the boy is able to hold his head up in high school and pretend that he is a manly heterosexual. Other marginalized boys in the school—Asians or Hispanics or overweight boys--soon make similar requests of Olive. She starts charging them for her “services.” She soon acquires the reputation of a loose woman. Even her best friend is convinced, though Olive tries to tell her the truth.

The high school in this film is defined by a double standard. On the surface everyone seems to be outraged at Olive’s supposed sexual promiscuity. A group of pious campus Christians prays for her redemption, or at least for her to leave the school. The group leader does what she can to get her expelled. Beneath the surface, things are a different matter. The leader of the pious Christian group has a slow-witted boyfriend who hasn't been able to graduate high school for four years—she dates him because he’s safe and she can control him. She doesn’t know he's having an affair with a school guidance counselor, who contracts chlamydia from him as a result. She's the person Olive goes to for advice and counsel. To avoid her husband's learning about the affair, she spreads the rumor that the boy has been having an affair with Olive, who gave him the disease.

Matters quickly mushroom out of control. Olive has to deal with the consequences of the supposed promiscuity that has made her a scandal in the school. One boy who befriends her she discovers does so only because he wants to have sex with her. Everyone, her best friends, the other students at the school, the teachers, her parents, are more than willing to believe in her newly acquired reputation.

Easy A is entertaining and amusing but not very deep. Emma Stone’s work as Olive is excellent. She's an endearing actress. But most of the other characters are broadly drawn, almost cartoonish. The film gives the students little credit at all, suggesting they are all shallow dunderheads who care about nothing other than fashion, sex, and gossip. The adult characters are funny but wholly out of touch. Olive's parents want to be her best friends. They encourage her in whatever she does so that she will have self-esteem. When Emma's mother hears rumors about her daughter's promiscuity, she never questions the rumors, assumes they are true, and confesses to her own promiscuous youth. The father does the same. Olive learns far more about them than she ever wanted to know. All the adults are vapid hypocrites. There's really no one Olive can go to for advice. In the end she has to make her own decision about how to deal with her situation.

This film is not really an adaptation of The Scarlet Letter--it’s more a riff on the novel and its character Hester Prynne, who willingly wears a bright red A on her dress as admission of her adultery. That's what Olive does— she wears a big red scarlet A on her dress--except that she admits to behavior she hasn't engaged in—she wears the scarlet letter out of anger and resentment of what everyone so easily comes to believe about her.

Olive learns that she has to control her own situation, make her own decisions, and not allow social pressures and other people to lead her astray. This is a too prosaic a conclusion for a film that actually showed much promise.

Restrepo

2011-01-05T12:39:00.000-05:00

Restrepo (2010) is a documentary made by Sebastian Junger and photographer Tim Hetherington about the U. S. military outpost in Afghanistan that Junger wrote about in his 2010 book War. The film is not an adaptation of the book. Instead it is a treatment of the same material. Junger and Hetherington filmed the documentary during their 14 months with the soldiers in the Korengal Valley of Eastern Afghanistan. The soldiers build from scratch a remote mountain outpost.

The outpost is named for a medic in the unit killed in an attack by Taliban soldiers. We see him, PFC. Juan Restrepo, early in the film on a bus with his fellow soldiers, talking about the war and his love of life. He is a looming presence throughout the film. His death leaves everyone shaken.

The outpost is roughhewn, dug out of the dirt on a mountain top. It offers little comfort. Large concrete blocks and bags filled with cement protect against incoming rounds. The building where the soldiers live is more like a cave than a military barracks. A small makeshift lookout tower provides an overview of the valley below. The troops are constantly working, patrolling, climbing up and down the trails along the mountainside. Grueling, hard, difficult, lonely, monotonous—these words barely begin to describe their daily lives.

Almost all the soldiers are in their early 20s. They look like students in one of my classes. As their time in Restrepo progresses, they change and age. Their once fresh and innocent faces by the end of their assignment are marked by everything that has happened—some soldiers seem stronger, more mature. Others seem shaken to the core.

More than anything else about the film, the eyes and faces of these men struck me—their expressions, fear, humor, tension, uncertainty, anguish, and other emotions. We learn more about the experience of war for these soldiers through their eyes and expressions than through any statements they make or actions they take part in.

Late in the film, another member of the platoon is killed during an encounter with Taliban soldiers. One of his friends comes across his body and collapses in grief and hysterical weeping. No scene in any war film I have seen is so disturbing and affecting. These soldiers suffer grievously when their friends die or are injured. A strong comradeship is evident throughout the men of the Second Platoon. The movie makes their feelings for one another clear, and when a death occurs, their suffering is real, not an actor’s performance.

Restrepo has a raw and unprocessed quality. Much of the camera work is shaky and fluid—the cameras aren’t mounted on pulleys or trestles. When Hetherington runs behind a group of soldiers he carries the camera with him, and it shows exactly what they encounter. In the scene where they find their dead comrade, the impact is wrenching. There’s no narration in the film. It’s loosely structured in chronological order, following the men of the Second Platoon from their arrival at the military outpost to the day of their departure. Obviously, through editing and selection from the hundreds of hours of film Hetherington shot, the film does make its statement—it’s not so much a statement about the Afghani war as it is about the experiences these young men go through. Interviews with various members of the unit, made after their tour of duty ends, are interspersed through the film. The soldiers talk about what it was like to fight in battle, the conditions of their existence, the deaths of their friends.

Toy Story 3

2010-12-31T23:54:00.001-05:00

I would have thought that the Toy Story (2010; dir. Lee Unkich) narrative had exhausted itself. But, even though Toy Story 3 is really just a further embellishment on Toy Story 2, which showed toys worried about being forgotten by their owner, this third and presumably final installment is entertaining and, forgive my use of the word, heartwarming. The animation is so good that you don’t even think about it. Instead you focus on the characters, all of whom have distinct personalities. Toy Story 3 shows us how the toys approach the day when their owner leaves home for college. Will they be thrown out with the garbage? Will they be relegated to the attic? What fate awaits them?

My suspicion is that this film is designed more for the parents of children who play with toys than for the children. It hit a sensitive spot of mine with its focus on the boy about to leave home and childhood behind. Several scenes seem aimed directly at adults. A sequence in a daycare center is full of dark humor and satire. The toys in the center are terrorized by the younger children. A stuffed bear that smells of strawberries and his capo, a one-eyed plastic baby doll, keep the other inmate toys in a state of fear and submission. It’s a gulag for toys. Any parent who ever felt pangs of guilt for leaving a child at a daycare center will find much of interest here. The most intense scene, which takes place in an incinerator at the city dump, is too strong and terrifying for young children.

In this fantasy, you don’t question the logic or sense of what happens. You just get to sit back and enjoy.

The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia

2010-12-31T14:17:00.001-05:00

What we have in The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia (dir. Julian Nitzberg, 2009) is exploitative cultural voyeurism. This documentary about a family of self-avowed hillbillies and outlaws in the mountains of West Virginia is a follow-up to a movie of about two decades ago called The Dancing Outlaw (1991) in which Jessco White talks about himself and his life. In the tradition of his father he dances to mountain music. His personality alternates from that of a jokester to an Elvis imitator to a vicious and violent and dangerous person. He’s a self-conceived outlaw and rebel. This new film takes up where the other left off and moves forward about 20 years.

While The Dancing Outlaw focused primarily on Jessco and his immediate family, The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia focuses on the extended family, starting with the two grandparents and moving on down the lineage of three White generations of alcohol and drug abuse, violence, crime, and murder. In one scene Jessco walks through the town graveyard pointing out the tombstones of various family members including his sisters, both of whom died violently, one murdered by a former boyfriend, the other dead in an automobile accident. His father D. Ray was shot to death in a family squabble. The family tree is pockmarked with violent deaths. The film moves systematically through the family tree as sisters and brothers, nieces and nephews, sons and daughters tell about their lives, their sins and crimes, and personal problems. For the most part the film allows the various members of the White family to tell their own stories and they talk without apparent self-consciousness about what kinds of drugs they like, the trouble they’ve been in, the prison sentences they've served, their attitudes towards the law, towards each other, towards the people they dislike, towards the people they want to kill.

What's the point? The film never pauses to consider why the White family is like it is. We hear speculation from a couple of lawyers in town that the White family has been isolated in the hills of West Virginia for generations, that their isolation and ignorance have made them who they are. But that's the only kind of explanation we hear. The film doesn’t ask us to think about why. It just offers the spectacle of the Whites droning on about their sins, their misery, their addictions, their self-abuse, their despair and their indifference to their condition. This film is a form of voyeurism. It's cultural voyeurism. From a superior standpoint the audience of this film is invited to gape at the ` family and to laugh.

Producers Johnny Knoxville and Johnny Tremaine are part of the team responsible for the Jackass television series, and the Jackass films. They play the Whites for laughs. They rejoice in the scenes they portray—for example, of a young mother who has just given birth snorting pills with another family member in her hospital room. Only occasionally, through the words of the White family members themselves, do we feel empathy, pity, sorrow for them—the woman who enters rehab when she loses her infant child to the county protection agency, the young man sentenced to 25 years in jail, the hopelessness and helplessness and indifference they all seem to feel. The woman in rehab, and the brother of Jessco who moves to Wisconsin to try to escape the White legacy, are among the few in the film who even try to break away from the family and its self-propelled momentum towards doom and defeat.

Throughout the film when the Whites talk and act out they know they are being filmed. The film itself is a self-fulfilling prophecy—intended to show the misbehaving antics of the White family, it encourages the Whites to make good on the image.

Alice in Wonderland

2010-12-31T13:19:00.001-05:00

Late in his article on Hollywood’s gutting of children’s classic literature, Sam Adams expresses displeasure with Tim Burton’s adaptation of Alice in Wonderland (2010). He accuses director Tim Burton of turning the novel into a “tepid Joseph Campbell myth.”[1] I disagree. Tepid the film is not, and though one may detect the presence of Campbell and Jung and others, they are not a distraction. Reviews of Burton’s Alice were mixed. I found it an ingenious, visually creative, and fairly entertaining jaunt into an overworked narrative. I don’t think that many people have actually read Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll. I think many people like the idea of Alice more than the book itself. And their readings of the book are largely filtered through various Hollywood adaptations over the years, along with watered down and simplified children’s versions of the story.

Burton weaves many of the elements of the original novel into a new tale, wherein Alice, now a young woman, falls into the rabbit hole a second time, just after a fairly uninteresting Lord has proposed. She can’t remember having visited “Wonderland” before, but she has dreamt about it since early childhood, never sure of where the dream is coming from. She even wonders if she is going mad.

In Burton’s film, Alice is the daughter of a brilliant thinker who dies shortly before the film begins. Her mother is worried for her daughter and through various means unexplained arranges for a marriage to a relative. Alice is a strange character—her face is pasty white, she is clumsy, she doesn’t feel naturally drawn towards the rigidly prescribed social patterns for a Victorian woman of her age--marriage and subordination to a man’s will. She doesn’t really know what she wants, or who she is. When she falls down the rabbit hole a second time, she begins to learn the answers.

She is greeted by many of the characters from Carroll’s novel—the creepy twins Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee, the caterpillar, the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat. The Red Queen still reigns as a ruthless tyrant who orders the lopping off of her subjects’ heads at any whim.

In this film, the characters from the novel remember Alice from her first visit to Wonderland, but are not sure they recognize this newly grown Alice. Part of the thrust of the film is for Alice to discover who she is, to convince others and herself of who she is. The Wonderland narrative then becomes a struggle between the fate Alice is supposed to fulfill—that of slaying the Jabberwocky and defeating the Red Queen. She is convinced she can’t play this role; others are convinced she can, and others just don’t know.

Visually this film is interesting and off-kilter, in exactly the way you would expect a Tim Burton film to be. Burton seems especially fond of showing the out of proportion sizes of various characters, as well as the large head and coiffure of the Red Queen. Alice becomes an increasingly engaging character as the film progresses, and the narrative gradually congeals and gains force (there are some dead spots).

Alice is about a young woman’s search for self-definition (individuation, to use C. G. Jung’s term), her struggle to know whether she should conform to social expectations or to go her own way. I enjoyed it. It is hardly unusual that a young woman on the verge of adulthood and independent life would be trying to decide who she is and what road to follow—building this version of Alice around that search is hardly an artificial imposition.

Johnny Depp was especially good as the Mad Hatter, who plays a major role in the film. The voice of Alan Rickman (known to many as Severus Snape) is just right as the blue caterpillar. Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen brings more vigor to the story than anyone else in the film. Anne Hathaway as the White Queen seems congested and without effect. Mia Wasikowska does a fine job as Alice. I don’t think this film would work for young children, but for young adults and adults in general who enjoy narratives that run away from their sources yet at the same time pay them vigorous homage, it may work well.

[1] http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2010/12/29/gullivers_travels

The Evolution of God, by Robin Wright

2010-12-31T12:47:00.001-05:00

The Evolution of God by Robin Wright (Little, Brown and Company, 2009) considers how religions developed in the western world. Its main focus is Abrahamic religions, those that claim the Old Testament figure Abraham in some sense as a founding ancestral figure. This means Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Wright suggests how the idea of a god or gods developed over thousands of years as humans evolved culturally. He marks the emergence of tribes and nation-states as the starting point for the modern religions we know today.

Wright suggests that the concept of God—Yahweh, Jehovah, the Lord, Allah—developed in response to the social, cultural, and political environment in the Middle East. Three thousand years ago the Middle East consisted of tribes and states that believed in an array of gods. They were polytheists. Some gods they believed were more powerful than others. Some groups prayed to their own deities, but also acknowledged the existence of other gods.

Gradually, by the first millennium BCE, for the Hebrews the Old Testament god Yahweh emerged not only as the most powerful god but as the only god. They at first conceived of him as their own god, but over time they came to view him as the god of everyone, as a universal god. Wright discusses how the Old Testament God became the Christian God and, later, the Islamic deity, Allah. (Some members of these faiths refuse to believe that their god is also the god of other faiths). Linguistically, the words for “god” in the Jewish and Islamic faiths are closely related.

A basic thesis in this book is that the emergence of a monotheistic God was closely related to the development of the concept of nationhood, of national identity.

By arguing that the Abrahamic concept of a single deity emerged from social and political circumstances, Wright presents God as a social construct. He doesn’t insist on God’s existence or nonexistence, but it’s clear, both from his approach to this subject and to his comments in the text, that he is at best a skeptic. But he does not argue for skepticism or atheism. He merely presents his theories, and those of religion scholars, about how the concept of a monotheistic god emerged in western culture. For believers, this process could be described as the way in which God chose to reveal himself. For nonbelievers, it is a matter of cultural evolution.

I was particularly interested in his description of the evolution of Jesus as a religious figure. Wright argues that the earliest statements that can be attributed to Jesus are ones indicating that he thought of himself as a political and even military leader, someone who might lead the Jewish people in a revolution against their oppressors. When Jesus was crucified, no revolution or revolt had occurred, and the followers of Jesus were left with a problem: how to characterize a messiah who did not bring about the long-prophesied revolt. Gradually, especially in the books of the New Testament that were written long after Jesus’ death, his nature came to be associated with miracles, with divinity, and finally with resurrection. The political, earthly messiah becomes a divine messiah. Wright regards the apostle Paul as a brilliant manager who in his epistles sought to solidify the growing Christian faith and church and in the process laid down many of the basic tenets of Christianity.

Wright sees evidence of moral progress for humanity in how the Abrahamic faiths have evolved towards inclusiveness and tolerance. This progress he suggests might be seen as evidence of a divine presence or force, but this would be a much different deity, a non-anthropomorphic deity, from the one at the center of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Even for a nonbeliever, Wright’s presentation of the Abrahamic faiths as the product of environmental and cultural and political forces offers a challenging and difficult approach to the idea of religion.

The Wolfman

2010-12-30T16:33:00.001-05:00

A number of landscape shots in The Wolfman (2010, dir. Joe Johnston) seem derived from the 19^th-century British painter John Constable. One in particular shows the skyline of London from a distance, and even though Constable rarely if ever painted cityscapes, especially ones suggesting the industry and smoke that characterize cities, this scene in the film has all the characteristics of a Constable painting. Along with the smoke and smokestacks that rise above the horizon, there is a strange sort of pastoral serenity. For some reason this particular shot of the London skyline reminded me of William Blake’s poem “”London,” especially the opening stanzas:

I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear.

It’s tempting to say that Blake’s poem has nothing to do with The Wolfman, yet the film’s depictions of the city’s inhabitants and of the sordid city itself are consistent with the poem. The wolf man may inflict much of the suffering and carnage in the film, but he is in fact only an emblem, an expression, of the human world’s depravity and evil. I’m imposing these thoughts on the film as a viewer. The film itself does not ask for such ruminations. The serenity of the Constable-like visuals contrasts, of course, with the darkness that pervades the film.

As a wolf man film (there have been a number), this one is above average. Bernecio del Toro plays Lawrence Talbot, an actor called back to his father’s estate by the fiancé of his brother, who has gone missing, and who by the time Talbot arrives at the estate has been found mangled and dead. The widow begs Bernecio to investigate, and he agrees. Anthony Hopkins plays Lawrence’s father John in an odd, cold, disaffected manner that is explained by later events in the film. For me Hopkins was the most interesting character in the film. Also notable was his personal servant Singh (Art Malik), a highly educated Sikh who, in the traditional manner of servants, knows more than anyone might expect about the family he works for.

The film interweaves the traditional wolf man narrative with dark family melodrama and a beauty and the beast tale.

Whatever interests these interwoven narrative elements might generate dissipate in the film’s final apocalyptic battle between two wolf men. It’s as if any conventional working out of the problems dramatized proves impossible, and the filmmakers resort to fire, supernatural transformations, battle, ultimate violence in order to bring it all to an end.

One of the most enduring images from a film seen in my childhood is in the 1941 film The Wolf Man (dir. George Waggner), in which Lon Chaney transforms from a man into a wolf man. The change is depicted with what I take to be stop-action photography, crudely rendered by modern standards, but utterly effective and convincing to my 8-year-old state of mind. The digital effects in this most recent wolf man film are serviceable but predictable—hair sprouts, limbs transform, and so on, but they lack the primal horror of Lon Chaney’s transfiguration.

The Wolf Man in general is a symbol or expression of the notion that beneath our decorous and civilized exteriors looms a bestial essence. The film Wolf (1994, dir. Mike Nichols), with Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer, investigated this notion in a literal manner—Nicholson never undergoes a supernatural transformation, but the wolf—his primal masculine fury and sexual anger—manifests in his character.

Implicit in the wolf man films is a fear of racial impurity, of immigrants from non-western and lesser known parts of the world. The wolf man comes to England with the Roma people (gypsies in the film). Their presence, and the wolf man contagion that accompanies them, endangers the purported racial character of the English.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

2010-12-30T16:27:00.001-05:00

What makes this film unusual and interesting is not its story-line about a young man trying to win a young woman’s affections. Nor is its trendy invocations of contemporary high school and early 20s culture unusual. Many films try to do this, some relatively well (as best as I can tell, from my aging perspective). What makes Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010; dir. Edgar Wright) an interesting film is its stylistic freshness, its wham-pow use of comic book motifs (it’s based on a comic book series), its use of video games (the story is essentially a video game narrative, a series of battles or challenges in which Scott Pilgrim must defeat a former boyfriend of the woman he loves), its post-postmodern use of fantasy and non-sequitur, its relentlessly frenetic pace and movement.

Wrapped inside this shiny chimerical package is the story of a boy who has to gain trust of self and respect for others, especially women. There’s also a love story here (several, in fact), and the story of a girl who has her own challenges to overcome, lessons to learn. This aspect is almost formulaic, hackneyed. Scott Pilgrim learns an important lesson about himself. This fact was a bit of a letdown, given the stylistic flair of the film as a whole.

The film begins with a bang and rarely slows down, until the end, when it drags a bit. But it’s always entertaining. Humorous, and witty. Full of action, funny characters, odd situations.

As innovative as the stylistic aspect of the film might seem, the use of on-screen labels to punctuate the action, or exaggerated sound-effects, links back to the Batman television series of the 1960s. In fact, when characters in the film posture and verbally spar before a fight, I am reminded of how Batman and the Riddler or the Joker would talk with one another before setting to. I was also reminded, in a way, of Stardust (2007), the film adaptation of a Neil Gaiman graphic novel. There’s something of the same whimsy and romance here, aimed at a different age set.

Comic books, graphic fiction in some cases, are providing the basis for all sorts of filmic adaptations, in many cases very successful ones, and this film is in that category..

Dreaming in Cuban, by Cristina Garcia

2010-12-30T16:18:00.001-05:00

Cristina Garcia’s novel Dreaming in Cuban (Knopf, 1992) covers three generations in the life of a Cuban family, extending from the 1930s to 1980. Garcia’s focus is on family relationships, especially those between mothers and daughters. She also illustrates the impact of immigration to America on family members who leave their native country and who stay behind. Celia del Pino is the mother, and her daughters are Lourdes, Felicia; her son is Javier. An underlying anchor in the narrative is the revolution of 1960. Castro appears in the novel as el lidre, mainly in the thoughts and memories of the characters.

One might argue that this novel is latter day magical realism. Two characters speak to the ghost of their dead father shortly after his death. One speaks to him for most of a year, as he appears to her at random moments in New York. Felicia, who never leaves Cuba, is initiated into Santeria. Yet the world of this story is not necessarily an alternative world where fantastic things happen. Clashing cultures are evident—clashing sensibilities, ways of thinking. Western rationalism, Catholicism, and Africa-influenced Santeria all strive against and with one another in the various characters. A character who speaks with a ghost is not necessarily insane or demented; ghosts are in the reality of her culture. Cuba is a nation of the West, but also a nation heavily influenced by African culture, and Cubans reflect these different influences. What we really have in Dreaming in Cuban is an excursion into the clashing cultural realities that result when family members move from Cuba to the U.S. In New York, Lourdes is constantly reacting to her circumstances: she becomes a baker, she avidly embraces the ideology of rightwing Republican Americanism, she gains weight and then (in an incredible stint of fasting, loses it all, only to gain it back after an equally incredible feat of eating). She’s convinced her daughter Pilar has fallen into licentious ways. She has obsessive sex with her husband, often summoning him from his workroom for service. She patrols the neighborhood as a voluntary security person. She runs her bakery like a work camp in the gulag.

Lourdes’ daughter Pilar (the central consciousness of the book) is in constant revolt against her domineering mother, yet she holds her distance, accepts her mother’s tirades and accusations as expressions of personality traits she cannot control. The gradually evolving relationship of these two women is a subcurrent of interest throughout the novel.

Dreaming in Cuban examines the impact of immigration on those who move to another country, leaving their own behind, and those who stay at home, separated for decades or forever from family members. Some never adjust to the new state of things; others adjust so totally that they leave their former cultures behind and forgotten; others move forward. Pilar, who lived in Cuba for such a short time that she hardly remembers it, feels drawn there, but in the end accepts that it is not her home.

The characters in this book are sometimes larger than life—too eccentric, too exaggerated, too extreme. Yet they make an impact. You sense in this novel both the influence of Toni Morrison as well as of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The device of narrating this story through the voices or minds of characters, and of breaking the narrative into chronologically disconnected units, so that over the course of the book you move constantly back and forth between the 1930s and 1950s and 1970s, seems to me the influence of Faulkner, whom Garcia might have encountered directly in her readings, but who also could have come to her through the fiction of Marquez, strongly influenced by the Mississippi writer.

Men in this novel are adulterers, betrayers, impregnators, overbearing authoritarians, weak and insignificant presences. They are rarely in the foreground. El lidre himself is one of them. They make up part of the menacing, constantly shifting world through which the women struggle to prevail and survive.

Dreaming in Cuban is not a political novel. It does not argue for a particular position in the complicated political world inhabited by the members of the immigrant Cuban community in the U. S. It shows how radically changing circumstances impact people’s lives, destroying some but not others. It demonstrates the at once powerfully nurturing and constantly oppressive pull of family.

Paranormal Activity

2010-12-29T23:13:00.001-05:00

I’m sorry that I watched Paranormal Activity (2006; dir. Oren Peli) alone. The film gradually raises tension, suspense, and fear through the most traditional and formulaic of horror-film techniques, but it does so artfully and inexorably. It shook me up. Afterwards, I regained my composure, ate a cracker, and settled down, but this film does what it’s supposed to do. With virtually no special effects, relatively amateurish actors, and a budget that was (supposedly) $11,000, the filmmakers used a video camera and ingenuity to build this tale of a young couple whose house has been invaded by an unwanted spirit—probably, as the psychic phenomena expert they consult explains, a demon.

This is not a film in which the supernatural phenomena are expressions of a character’s imagination. This is not The Others (2001) or The Turn of the Screw. The spirit is real. We see it at work via a craftily employed device: a video camera the boyfriend sets up in the bedroom to record any paranormal activity that takes place at night. He reviews each night’s activities the next morning. When something happens, we see it through the recording camera’s lens, and the effect is chilling objectivity. When things start to happen, they can’t be explained away—we see them.

The bedroom camera offers an interesting perspective. The bedroom is the center of the intimate life of a young couple, but there is only the suggestion of sex here. Rather than voyeuristic entry into the sex lives of these characters, the bedroom camera gives us access to the supernatural. It also makes us voyeurs, a role that gives the film a certain off-putting power. It disorients us, leaving us more open and vulnerable to the visitations that occur.

The setting of the film is tightly focused. All the action occurs in the couple’s apartment, most of it in the bedroom. The sense of constriction, even claustrophobia, that results contributes to the tension the film evokes.

The man is initially skeptical when the woman tells him about the visitations that have affected her since childhood. He sets up the camera in the bedroom to prove to her, and perhaps to himself, that she is imagining things. But what the camera does record convinces him. The woman fears the spirit that has attached itself to her. She is afraid of what might happen, of what it might do to her. The man takes a logical, rationalist approach. He is certain that he can figure out what is happening and find a way to combat it. His can-do attitude grows increasingly brittle as the film moves along, and as he continues to dismiss the woman’s fears. Though she begs and orders him not to try to communicate with the spirit, he can’t resist—sometimes he speaks to it aloud; and he brings in a Ouija board to try to communicate.

The husband is a brash and controlling personality. Although the spirit that invades their lives seems real, the way he tries to deal with it suggests problems in the relationship that might have consequences later on. He largely dismisses his girlfriend’s warnings, and those of the paranormal expert, about trying to communicate with the spirit. He’s more interested in outwitting the spirit than in the woman’s fears. His bumbling aggressiveness makes the couple more vulnerable and has a direct link to the outcome of the story.

In Paranormal Activity the rational and the irrational collide--the world we believe we know and the one that is threatening, irrational, and beyond our control.

The Book of Eli

2010-12-21T11:07:00.001-05:00

The Book of Eli (2010; dir. Albert and Allen Hughes) is more like The Road Warrior (1981) than The Road (2009), with a dash of Song of Bernadette (1943) thrown in for good measure. The palette of colors is similar to that in The Road—grays, black, white—dust and desolation everywhere--except that faces have color, and as the main character Eli approaches the West Coast in his trek across the continent we begin to see green.

The scenario here is that 38 years in the past a terrible war destroyed human civilization and most of the world’s population. The bombs left a hole in the ozone layer, so that the sun’s rays burned directly through the atmosphere, destroying most animal and plant life. Only roving bands of marauders and renegades and a few good souls are left. Men are killed, women are raped and killed, and there is some cannibalism—judging from the welcoming elderly couple we meet at one point. We don’t know many details of the war, though we do get to see ruins and a few craters.

Eli is one of the good souls. He discovered the last remaining copy of the Bible and is protecting it. Yes, the Bible. Of all the millions of copies in the world, only one remains. For some reason survivors of the war blamed the destruction on religion, apparently on Christianity, and they destroyed every copy of the Bible they could find. Eli has heard a voice, and he is trekking across the continent towards a place where the voice has told him the Bible will be safe.

Eli is a whiz with the bow and arrow, and he ruthlessly kills anyone who threatens him or people in his care, specifically Solara (Mila Kunis), an attractive young woman whom he rescues from the band that has taken her hostage. One man in particular, Carnegie, played by Gary Oldman, a man so savage that no one will mention his name (does this suggest another character played by Oldman?), is hunting for the Bible in Eli’s possession. We assume he wants to destroy it, though we learn differently later on. There, essentially, you have this film’s plot. Eli heading west, Carnegie looking for him, and we know some encounter is inevitable.

Like Jimmy Stewart and Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington plays himself in most films, and he usually does a good job of it. He is effective enough as Eli in this one. It’s the plot that’s at fault, and the essential concept underlying the film. That concept is that God has chosen Eli as his personal assistant, and he has assured Eli of safe passage as he heads west across the continent, whacking everyone who threatens him, piously certain of his purpose and destination.

I don’t object to religious films or religious themes or religious people. I object to the fraudulence of this film. Only at the end do we learn that Eli is blind, and that he has been guided all the way through his travels by God’s hand. When the Bible he has protected is taken from him (he gives it up to Carnegie to save Solara’s life), he heads on to California, and finds a fortress on the island of Alcatraz where all the relics of western culture are protected. The one item the fortress doesn’t have is the Bible, and Eli, grievously wounded, proceeds to recite it, word for word, before he dies. He has memorized it from the Braille edition he had carried with him.

Why do I object? The film itself plods along and is mildly entertaining but not excessively so. It is full of improbabilities large and small. Primary among them is the notion that every single copy of the Bible in the WORLD has been destroyed, save one. Also important is the notion that people were so mad at the Christians after the apocalyptic war that, rather than struggling to survive and rebuild their lives, they hunt down the Bibles and destroy them. Underlying the film then is the notion that Christians in our own world are imperiled and persecuted and are also the bearers of the light of Western Civilization. I reject this notion, though I do understand that many accept it. The voice that guides Eli in his journey, that aims his arrows straight and true, is a matter of faith, I suppose, but I believe that if God exists and that if he has an impact on the world (this is fairly implausible to me) it is through the actions of people who believe in him. I don’t believe he reaches down and guides a blind man across America in killing outlaws and shooting arrows and otherwise wreaking havoc on behalf of the holy book he carries. God if he exists is not like Jim Henson, or the designer of a video game.

If God is on Eli’s side, then God removes any dramatic tension or uncertainty from his journey. Who cares what threats he might face—he will succeed in his mission.

We are supposed to feel awestruck and humbled when the great revelation of Eli’s blindness comes. Instead I felt deceived. Cheap pandering tricks don’t win converts or make good films.

If you’re disappointed that I gave away the point, thank me for saving you the time you would have wasted had you watched this film.

Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time, by Greg Mortenson and David Arthur Relin

2010-12-09T10:12:00.001-05:00

Greg Mortenson’s work during the 1990s and 2000s building schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan is the expression of a distinctly individual perspective towards the world, a resolute character, moral determination, and a deep desire to better the human condition. As a tool of international diplomacy building schools offers a distinct alternative to bombs and soldiers.

Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time (Viking Penguin, 2006) is Greg Mortenson’s story up until around 2006. Mortenson and David Arthur Relin are listed as authors, though the book reads as if Relin wrote it, drawing heavily on Mortenson. The book is honest about Mortenson’s defects, his disorganization, tendency towards depression, impatience. It describes how he lived in a storage locker while working as a medical assistant in the United States. He seems always to have been an odd character, in the sense of eccentric and maladjusted, also in the sense of possessing an integrity and a will that few others can emulate, that empower him to take up causes that to others would seem impossible. If Mortenson had fit neatly into the mainstream, we wouldn’t have this book and his story.

The title refers to an expression of hospitality in Afghanistan. If a visitor to a home is offered three cups of tea, he knows he has become a member of the host family.

Three Cups primarily focuses on Mortenson’s work in the remote areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and his efforts to raise support and funds for his efforts in the United States. He becomes friends with a number of tribes. They are at first suspicious of him as a strange American, but ultimately his sincerity, respect for their customs, and knowledge of their culture and languages make them welcome him in. The descriptions of the countryside, the mountains and valleys, and of the villages where he works, are vivid.

Not all war is avoidable. But the approach that Mortenson has taken to building schools in a part of the world that is at present at odds with the United States offers a better way of mending fences and building relations than do bombs and drones that often kill civilians. Many of the people Mortenson meets express friendly attitudes towards America. Many are opposed to Al Qaeda and to terrorism. But when the U. S. operations against Al Qaeda begin in 2002, the charitable notions of these people towards the United States are challenged. The efforts of people like Mortenson offer a counterbalance to the violence and destruction of war.

In ways Three Cups of Tea reminds me of The Places In Between, Rory Stewart’s narrative about his trek across Afghanistan in the months immediately following the 2011 terrorist bombings in New York City. Equally informative, Stewart’s book is more literary in nature, a masterpiece of its sort, though the example of Mortenson’s life and career in itself is compelling and humbling and its own example of a life well lived.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1

2010-12-09T10:02:00.001-05:00

The latest installment in the Harry Potter series (dir. David Yates, 2010) is a somber and melancholic film. Harry, Hermione, and Ron leave Hogwarts, their home for the past six novels and films, and go out into the countryside, trying to lead Voldemort away from friends and family, and preparing for the final confrontation that all the previous films and books have lead towards.

While the earlier films gave us these characters in the context of friends and families, and of Hogworts, this one thrusts them out in the world. They’re alone, often at odds with each other, and at risk. There’s little that’s warm and cheery here—compare the tone of this film with the first and second installments.

There’s allegory—the allegory of our own lives, the loss of childhood and innocence, the discovery of compromise and complication, of responsibility, pain, mortality.

I can’t think of another instance where over a ten-year period three actors portraying characters of about their own age, appearing in film after film, grow older together, learn and mature, preparing for adult life, just as their characters are doing. It’s life imitating art, and vice versa. As the characters grow up through the novels, we have seen Rowling herself developing as a novelist. We begin with a book written for children, about children, and now in the final installment we have a book whose characters are grown and who confront dark forces. For a child, the latest Harry Potter film, like the book it’s based on, should be frightening. But many readers have grown up with these books and films, and others (including this writer) have grown older with them as well. Readers, film viewers, fictional and film characters, and the author grow up together.

This film is better than, bigger than, itself alone because it is (for now) the sum of the individual parts that make up the series. The ideal viewer of this film is not someone who hasn’t read the books or seen the earlier installments. The film does stand on its own, but it’s more meaningful as a part of the series, and as a penultimate step towards the confrontation and conclusion that we know will come.

Where the Wild Things Are

2010-11-29T23:53:00.001-05:00

I admired Where the Wild Things Are as a film (2009; dir. Spike Jonze), but not as a version of the 1963 Maurice Sendak story. The illustrations and the minimalist narration of the book make it a classic bit of story-telling. Illustrations that bring to life the few words on each page work on the imagination—imagination fills in the gaps. Each child reads the story in a different way. When I read the book to my sons we spent much time pouring over each page, each sentence and illustration, filling them in, wondering about them, speculating.

The film (which Sendak coproduced and apparently approved of) gives a specific reading to the original story. The images of the original—the wild monsters and their jungle—are better preserved in the film than the story itself, which becomes a tale of morose adult monsters who can’t get along, like small children just learning to play, but also like adults who have learned to play too well. The monsters in the film interact as if they’re living on the same level as the boy, but they also seem to have other lives that extend beyond the limits of the film and the story and the boy’s comprehension. The boy in the film has run away from home because of arguments with his mother. The film tempts us to think that the monsters have been banished to their island because of their own problems in the adult world—divorce, failing relationships, disappointment.

The film has its moments—the boy Max’s journey by boat across the sea, his first encounter with the monsters, the wild rumpus, his departure from the island and return home to his worried mother and warm soup. The visual imagery from the Sendak story, and the beautifully exotic settings, bring moments of recognition as the book occasionally comes to life in the film. But all the filler and emotional baggage drag it down. I can’t imagine it holding the interest of many young children.

But then it’s been a long while since I was a young child. What do I know?

How to Tame Your Dragon

2010-11-29T16:28:00.001-05:00

Some plots are so common we ought to grow tired of them. Thus it is with How to Tame Your Dragon (2010; dirs. Dean DeBlois, Chris Sanders), in which a young boy of around twelve, Hiccup, smaller than the rest of his peers, held in uneasy suspicion by his father (who also loves him), always clumsy and weak at physical exploits but intelligent and daring as well, has to prove himself. He’s a Viking, and the main activity of his clan is hunting and slaying dragons. Here we have the story, in another cloth, of Henry V or of (as I’ll explain in another posting) that of the fabled American racing horse Seabiscuit, in whom no one believes until he proves himself.

The boy in How to Train Your Dragon proves himself by befriending a dragon that no one else in his tribe believes can be subdued. He does so to the astonishment and eventually the support of his band of friends, one of whom is a young girl who aspires to be the first in their group to kill a dragon. Each person in the group is a different personality. They are amusing and help bring the story to life.

There’s excitement and humor here, along with excellent animation—scenes in which the boy soars through the cloudy skies on the back of his dragon are outstanding. How to Train Your Dragon is entertaining and a pleasure to watch, more for how it tells its story than for the story itself.

Seabiscuit: An American Legend, by Laura Hillenbrand

2010-11-29T09:56:00.001-05:00

Seabiscuit: An American Legend, by Laura Hillenbrand (Random House, 2001), is another tale about an American underdog who confounds his detractors and finds glory and fame. I don’t mean to make the book seem trite. It is wonderfully written and reads as a novel, though it’s non-fiction, the story of an American racehorse who caught the nation’s imagination in the depths of the Depression of the 1930s.

The four main human characters are Charles Howard, a man who pulls himself out of poverty by selling automobiles after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the jockeys Red Pollard and George (Iceman) Woolf, and the horse trainer Tom Smith. The eponymously named horse, Seabiscuit, for some readers may seem the real main character. But if anything is fabricated in the book, it is Seabiscuit himself. It’s not that Hillenbrand makes claims for him that can’t be certified. All the races she says he won, he won. The facts of his life and career are clear. Where the fabrication comes in is not through Hillenbrand but through the humans who work with the horse—Howard, Pollard, Smith, Woolf--they’re often quoted talking about what the horse is feeling, what he is thinking, how he likes to taunt his opponents in races by slowing down just enough to let them catch up and then speeding ahead, out of reach. Seabiscuit was an actual horse. He physically existed. But the people in the book, along with the reporters who wrote about him and the fans who idolized him, never knew what the animal actually thought or felt. They invented him as the character at the center of this story, as the projection of their own needs and desires. That’s the horse at the core of this narrative.

The sub titular reference to Legend is no exaggeration. Hillenbrand deeply believes in the Seabiscuit legend, and she is willing to allow some of the mystique and mystery of the story to go unquestioned. She doesn’t try to provide a rational explanation for every aspect of her story. She believes in the mystical man-horse bond. She doesn’t always look deeply below the surface details. Although her book is full of social history from the 1920s and 1930s—indeed, this is one of its primary merits—social analysis is not profound or extended. For example, Hillenbrand points out that the jockeys have a hazardous occupation and few benefits. Owners are particularly worried about the jockeys organizing. When one jockey tries to take up a collection to cover the medical costs of an injured friend, he is accused of trying to form a union. Hillenbrand makes note of these facts but they don’t alter her basic contention that the jockeys are equal partners with the owner in the story she is telling. The fact that horse racing is an enterprise of economic inequality, in which the jockeys are little more than pawns in the ambitions of the men who own the horses they ride, doesn’t come into play here. Hillenbrand sees in the Seabiscuit story and the uproars around him the roots of the contemporary fascination with celebrity and fame. She doesn’t comment on the story as another instance of how in times of crisis Americans have a tendency to become entranced with meaningless trivial events and figures.

Where Hillenbrand excels is in how she builds the story, portrays her characters, and describes the build-up to the races. She narrates the races with uncanny suspense and tension. She makes the Seabiscuit rivalry with War Admiral a centerpiece of the book and builds towards their 1938 match at Pimlico through much of the book. When Pollard is gravely injured, and when Seabiscuit pulls up seemingly lame in a later race, Hillenbrand builds towards still another story of American resurgence. There’s genuine excitement here, and it comes not from cheap devices but from Hillenbrand’s prodigious research, her skills as a writer, and from the story itself.

Zombieland

2010-11-27T12:45:00.001-05:00

Why this fascination with zombies? I suppose it could be an aspect of the adolescent mind, because adolescent males from 12 to 25 are a prime audience for zombie films. But the appeal of zombies is wider than that. This nightmarish fear that some biological or supernatural disaster could cause those we love and depend on most either to die horribly or to be transformed into ravening beings who want to kill and eat us suggests a fundamental anxiety about the stability of human institutions, about the stability of how we live, about reality. It suggests fear of losing control, of illness and death, of unexpected violence, of being overwhelmed by events wholly out of our power. Most of all it reflects a profound and existential distrust of human nature and of the stability of contemporary life, a suspicion if not certainty that sooner or later those we love and trust most will turn on us darkly and rip out our throats.

One of my childhood fears was that one morning I would wake up to discover that my entire life—everything I knew, my parents and friends—was a dream, and in their place I was left in an entirely new and horrific reality. This I suppose is one reason for my dislike of zombies.

I don’t understand why every film about a global epidemic generally involves a virus that, instead of killing its victims, turns them into zombies. Why zombies? But Zombieland (2009; dir. Ruben Fleischer) I liked. The zombies are a secondary nuisance. They bite you and infect you with the zombie virus. Or they eat you. But the film’s real interests lie elsewhere.

Zombieland is like an amusement park, a video game. Amusement parks, like the one at the end of this film, constitute a kind of picaresque narrative, a loosely connected series of rides, or episodes. You walk from one ride to another and then the day is done and you depart. Video games are structured in the same way, except that in many cases you don’t leave the park--you ascend to a higher level. Zombieland is built this way—we move from one encounter with zombies to another, and then, after successfully surmounting the obstacles of the amusement park, we move off for further adventures, outside (of course) the province of this film.

Zombieland makes no pretenses—it doesn’t take the zombies or the disaster that has befallen humankind or anything else seriously. It moves fast. It has its moments of melancholia, of humor, but mostly they’re subsumed in one character’s search for a Twinkie or in another’s hope of finding his family.

A great and ironic sense of humor runs throughout the film. The four main characters are named for American cities: Columbus, Tallahassee, Little Rock, and Wichita. Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) has made up a list of rules that he follows in order to avoid the zombies. He’s constantly adding to them. When a girl who has been pursued by zombies takes refuge in his apartment, he thinks that at last he is going to lose his virginity, but then she turns into a zombie like everyone else. Tough luck.

The highlight of the film comes when the characters make their way to Hollywood and the mansion of the actor Bill Murray. They assume he’s dead. Two characters go into his viewing room to watch Ghostbusters. And then the zombie Bill Murray appears. Except that he’s not what he seems. This is the postmodern, metafictional touch—a film about zombies in which real people appear—a film in which Bill Murray plays himself--the disconnect between the real and the imagined softens, becomes indistinct.

Zombieland lacks the vision and sense of space of I am Legend (2007), with its eerily deserted New York City, and the tragically alone figure of Robert Neville played by Will Smith. It lacks the hopeless horror of 28 Days (2000) and 28 Days Later (2002). Or the gross stupidity of the zombies in George Romero’s films (no, I am not a fan). But what it does have is humor, suspense and tension, funny and whacky characters, and surprising turns of plot. It’s all good fun. That is, as long as you don’t mind the zombies. (They still want to eat your brains).

Woody Harrelson is great in this film.

Men Who Stare at Goats

2010-11-12T09:56:00.001-05:00

I wanted to like Men Who Stare at Goats (2009; dir. Grant Heslov). The title, the concept (a military unit assigned to investigate using psychic powers against the enemy), the actors (Kevin Spacey, Stephen Root, George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges), the promise of droll and satiric humor, the supposedly factual basis of the story—all of this stood in the movie’s favor. But I had difficulty staying awake. The humor was obscure, the settings were dark and dreary, the plot was torturously winding and forked and uninteresting. The characters were indistinct. The film never came to life. In ways it was a lot like The Big Lebowski (1998)¸ except that the latter film made sense, was hilarious, had wonderfully bizarre and distinctive characters, worked in every possible way, and remains engaging and entertaining after many viewings. Jeff Bridges almost seems to play a version of the Dude in this film. But in the end it is as disappointing and unrewarding as one might expect staring at goats to be.

Splice

2010-11-11T16:24:00.001-05:00

I decided to watch Splice (2009; dir. Vincenzo Natali) because the New York Times called it “an intelligent movie that, in between its small boos and an occasional hair-raising jolt, explores chewy issues like bioethics, abortion, corporate-sponsored science, commitment problems between lovers and even Freudian-worthy family dynamics” (June 4, 2010), and because my son Charles and his friend Chelsey assured me it was the worst film ever made. It is a bad film, no doubt, much worse than the Times review suggests, but a core of intelligence does inform some of its themes. In this drama about two scientists who are genetic engineers working for a pharmaceutical company that seeks to create organisms that will excrete chemicals for use in treating disease, Splice considers such questions as scientific research with a profit motive, bio-engineering, gene splicing, artificial life, and human-animal hybrids. It considers what responsibility scientists have over life forms they might bring into being, including semi-human beings. The film gives special force to the latter theme by having one of the research scientists (they are lovers) use her own ovum to create a hybrid being. Her childhood with an abusive and disturbed mother comes to bear in particular ways.

The trouble is that Splice is a horror film, not a film about science. It’s a melodramatic horror film with a dash of sex and incest thrown in for good measure. It lacks essential understanding of how scientific research works, of how long it takes, of how many hits and misses are usually involved before a scientific experiment or project reaches a successful conclusion. It makes assumptions without investigating them first. The assumptions are reasonable—that profit-driven research might have a dark side, that creating human-animal hybrids might be physically and morally risky, that genetic experimentation and engineering might be dangerous. But it simply considers these assumptions as true. The film therefore operates on a foundation of vast right-wing paranoia and ignorance. The human hybrid the researchers create (secretly, without knowledge of the rest of their research team or the company they work for) has the legs of a deer, a long whip-like tail with a poisonous stinger, huge wings that come out when it is angry, and, of course, super human strength. It also changes gender in mid-adolescence. It’s a completely ridiculous creature. (I am wrong in calling it a beast—the film wants us to think of it as a human-like creature with big eyes and it grows up into an attractive young woman, uh, female (before it turns into a male)). Of course, the creature has to be fetching and lovable so we’ll care about it. Conveniently for the 90-minute length of the film, the creature grows and matures at an accelerated rate, so that the scientists don’t have to get older. They simply sit and watch. The woman researcher, to whom the hybrid is related, of course feels motherly towards it. The film suggests that although the scientists knowingly chose to splice together genes from various creatures in order to create just the type of creature they wanted they had no idea what they would really get. Thus the wings and the poison tail and the gender change come as a big surprise. Scientists advanced enough in knowledge and technique to splice genes will have a good sense of what they’re going to get in the resulting hybrid organism.

Why did Aidan Quinn (who seems to be choosing one bad role after another) and Sarah Polley (who once had a promising career as both actor and director) choose this film? Was it desperation? Or were they too drawn by the intelligence at its core, the intelligence that when spliced with large doses of digital effects, scientific confusion, and melodramatic Hollywood palaver came to naught?

Hurry Sundown

2010-11-09T15:51:00.001-05:00

Released in 1967 during the later years of the Civil Rights movement, Hurry Sundown (Dir. Otto Preminger) is set in 1946, and its two main characters have just returned from service in the war. The film serves as a prequel to the movement, exploring through characters and their conflicts the ideas and themes that will bring the movement to national prominence in the middle 1950s. The audience views the film through the lens of the ongoing movement.

Hurry Sundown is a convoluted melodrama that exploits a Southern setting, Southern characters, family and racial relationships, stereotypes, and accents to flesh out and advance its narrative. At times it has force, as when Rad McDowell (John Philip Law) returns from Europe to reunite with his family, or when an old black woman who served as mammy for the rich landowner’s wife explains to her son that she grieves for the failure of her life. More often the film drags along, inert and lifeless. Only the performances of certain characters—Fay Dunaway, Law, Fonda (occasionally), Burgess Meredith (ridiculous as a stereotyped and racist Southern judge) give it some life. Michael Caine plays the corrupt Henry Warren, married to a wealthy landowner, ambitious to consolidate that land and make big money by selling it all to a land conglomerate for development. He’s devious, corrupt, and without scruples. His face is usually emotionless throughout the film. He seems happy only when he plays his saxophone (he’s convinced he could have had his own band, and that success and fame are awaiting him in Hollywood).

This film is so cluttered and busy that its 2 hour and 44-minute length is hardly enough yet also too much.

The score is by Hugo Montenegro, a successful film composer of the day. His most famous scores are for the Man without a Name films, but his work here is conventional, out of place, and hardly recognizable until a final climactic scene late in the film.

Hurry Sundown is structured around a struggle for land. Two young men, Reeve Scott (Robert Hooks) and Rad McDowell (Law) return from the Second World War. Rad is a poor white farmer who lives on land next to Reeve, a poor black farmer who lives with his sickly mother Rose (Beah Richards). Friends while growing up, Rad and Reeve have grown apart. Reeve lives on land deeded to his grandfather in 1866. No one seems to know about the deed but Reeve and his mother. It becomes a crucial piece of evidence, especially when Henry argues that no deed of ownership from 1866 made out to a black man could possibly be credible. If Henry doesn’t succeed in securing these two plots of land for sale to the conglomerate, he will lose a potential fortune and possibly his job too. He lusts for power and wealth, neither of which he has ever had until he married the daughter of a rich landowner. The film therefore raises questions about land ownership—who has a better right to the land, families and individuals that have owned it for generations, or a land conglomerate (that happens to be from up North)? Hurry Sundown explores this issue mainly through Henry’s struggle to seize Rad and Reeve’s land. It’s not really a struggle of North vs. South but instead of wealth and power against powerlessness. Does the power of money—directly tied to the local system of law and justice—trump the ownership of individuals without power or money? Does the fact that one of the small landowners is black affect the struggle? In the end, Henry does use race in his attempt to seize Reeve’s land. The film is more interested in the racial structure of the community that in any broadly defined struggle of North vs. South.

Family relationships in Hurry Sundown are complicated. Henry is Rad’s cousin. Rad has struggled to eke out a living throughout his life, while Henry had the good fortune of marrying his wealthy wife Julia. Julia was nursed as a child by Rose and feels kinship to her (up to a point). Henry pressures her to use that relationship to convince Rose and her son to move off the land. Although he never concedes that they own it, he offers to pay them $5000 if they move. Julia is convinced that Rose loves her and her family. Rose is convinced that Julia’s love will protect her land from seizure. Henry offers Rad $7500 for his land and seems to suggest that he will profit in other ways from handing over the land. Rad distrusts Henry on a fundamental level. All these familial interconnections enhance the melodrama and also underlie the film’s contention that in shared family and community connections there is hope for the future.

Judge Potter (Burgess Meredith) is a stereotyped, old-time corrupt Southern judge who rules over the community with the iron fist of arbitrary judgments. He’s the most racist person in the film, though Henry is not far behind. The Judge’s family does not occupy the same social status as that of Julia. His daughter Sukie wants Julia to serve as her matron of honor. This will be a sign of social status. Henry pressures Julia to agree, so that he will have the judge on his side in any land disputes, and at first Julia won’t agree. She regards the Potter’s as beneath her, as from a lower social class. Her cousin Clem de Lavery (Frank Converse) has just moved to town to serve as associate pastor of what appears to be a Catholic (maybe Episcopalian) church. He is open-minded, progressive, friendly towards the black community, and immediately an object of suspicion to conservative members of the community. When he offers Judge Potter communion from a cup that a black woman has just sipped from, the Judge is outraged, spits in the cup, and tromps out of the church with his wife and daughter. For this insult, and for further insults to her cousin at a reception she gives in his honor, Julia orders the Judge and his family to leave her house.

Judge Potter is disliked by most of the towns[people to begin with. They see him as too uncultured, too openly racist, and his wife reminds him that the only reason he gets elected in one race after another for the judgeship is that the people in rural regions of the county always vote for him (implying that none of the city voters do).

Obviously, class is a major issue—let us say a major thread rather than theme. The film isn’t particularly interested in exploring class differences so much as in using them to explain tensions and conflicts among various characters. By having Rad and Reeve live on farms next to each other, and by having them become partners in an effort to keep their farms going in resistance to Henry’s pressures, the film seems to acknowledge the fact that class prejudices and racism are closely linked. Rad is at first resistant to a partnership with Reeve. His wife worries that the family will be ostracized in the community. But their common plight—the threat to their land posed by Henry and the conglomerate, and their childhood friendship—finally overcomes these concerns.

Race is another major issue, but I am not sure this film can be accurately described as a film about race. As with class, race is an element of the Southern context that the film uses to enhance tension and the essential conflicts. Viewers born after 1970 may be surprised by the completely segregated society that the film accurately portrays. In reality, society was probably even more segregated and separate in 1947 than this film suggests. We see separate bathrooms for the white and colored races. We learn that the local Sheriff, an inept bumbler played broadly by George Kennedy, has an ongoing sexual relationship with a black woman, that he enjoys the company of black people in general, but that he doesn’t hesitate to back up efforts of Henry and Judge Purcell, and of the “hunting club” (Ku Klux Klan—not named in the film but its members wear white hoods) to deny Reeve and Rad their rights to their land. It shows how in a difficult and life-threatening moment the black characters behave in a friendly, ingratiating way as they talk to the Sheriff in order to protect Reeve. (This is a deliberate strategy—they know they must play the stereotype to get what they need from the whites). Reeve’s friend Vivian (Diahann Carroll) even ingratiates her way into Judge Potter’s favor so that he will allow her to do research in the county court records. (Vivian has lived in New York for some time, seen other parts of the world, had a previous relationship with Reeve. She has come home, for some reason, and wants to move away again—she is an exception to the general portrayal of blacks in this film as honest, good-natured, and uneducated. In general, the black characters in the film all have similar traits and behave in similar ways. When black children learn a song in the local school (where Vivian teaches) it is a blues song about catfish,. When they gather to congratulate Reeve on having successfully opened up an irrigation canal for his and Rad’s farms, they sing and eat in celebration. For a film that seeks to portray racism and discrimination in a direct and open way, its portrayal of black characters is flat and paternalistic.

The racism that the film portrays is undeniable. The film seems aware of nuances in racial attitudes of the time—the difficult relationship between a white girl and the older black women who raised her (her mammy), the vulnerable position that Rad puts himself in by agreeing to work with Reeve and by backing up his claim to the land up in court. On the other hand, racism was far more complex and pernicious than even this film makes it out to be, to have been. Yet all the black characters in the film are portrayed with a uniform brushstroke of goodness. There is little variation. That is, a subtle paternalistic racism permeates the portrayal of the black characters whom the film clearly means to support.

Hurry Sundown tries to maintain audience interest with a strong dose (1967 style) of sexuality. Although Henry gives Julia numerous reasons to hate him, he always manages to overcome her qualms with sex. One night, after she has made him mad by showing concern for their son, he locks her out of the bedroom. The next day she returns the favor, but he climbs into the room through a window and practically rapes her—she resists at first and then responds. In another scene Henry plays his saxophone rather than respond to his wife’s sexual overtures. She sucks whiskey from a bottle in a suggestive way. Then she takes the saxophone from him as he reclines back on a sofa, ready (I assume) for oral sex. She pantomimes oral sex in a graphic and obvious way as she takes the saxophone, holds the grip in her hands, and tries to blow a note. In another scene Henry receives oral sex from Judge Purcell’s daughter (the same daughter who is getting married). Sex here is one of the hot passions that govern the South (e.g., Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; The Long Hot Summer, Baby Doll). Frankly, Julia’s scene with the saxophone is the best scene in the film. Something real is happening there.

In the aforementioned saxophone scene, Julia’s pantomime is one of the few instances of subtlety in the film, and even in that scene the film strains to make clear what it’s suggesting. Most of the time this film uses sledge hammers. Everything must be made clear, repeatedly. It’s not enough to show that Henry’s ambition to acquire the land of Rad and Reeve is a major character flaw. To make sure we understand that Henry is a bad man, we must see him abuse and lie to his wife, commit adultery in a convertible, mislead his cousin, conspire with the corrupt judge, lie in court. The worst sledge-hammer blows come when we learn that Henry’s mistreatment of his son left the child emotionally damaged—an offense he repeats later in the film when he locks the child in a storage room while he goes to check on some business. The child pulls shelves over on himself and is left unconscious. Then Henry lies to the law enforcement folks that careless use of dynamite by Reeve and Rad injured the child. No doubt about Henry—a mean old bad man. Michael Caine never once in this film seems comfortable in the role.

It amazes me that Horton Foote had a hand in the screenplay.

The Littlest Colonel

2010-11-04T14:15:00.001-04:00

In The Littlest Colonel (1935; dir. David Butler) the border state of Kentucky is the Deep South. A white columned plantation house, an elderly colonel who refuses to accept defeat by the North, loyal black servants indistinguishable from slaves, courtly manners, Southern belles. The South is a setting for this tale of how a winning little girl brings reconciliation between an estranged father and daughter. The film also serves as a vehicle for the 1930s child star Shirley Temple. Her acting never varied much from one film to the next, except that over the decade she got older.

The North-South division is the crux of the event that tears father and daughter apart. The colonel wants her to marry a gentleman from the south. She plans to marry a northerner, aptly named Jack Sherman. Father and daughter are resolutely stubborn. She leaves with her fiancé and her father tells her never to enter the house again.

The strongest figure in the film is Lionel Barrymore, who plays old Colonel Lloyd. He struts and huffs and puffs and overacts and holds your attention. There are entertaining moments between the house servants and Temple, entertaining within the narrowly defined lives of the servants. Bill Robinson plays the head house servant, Walker. He knows and has opinions about everything going on in the house, but he usually holds his tongue. (This in is a stereotype—the knowing, avuncular house servant who doesn’t say what he thinks). He and Temple perform two dance numbers together, one on the inner stairs of the colonel’s house, another in a barn where he looks after horses. Robinson was a wonderful dancer, as the scene on the stairs makes clear. Hattie McDaniel appears in her stock role as personal servant, or Mammy, to Shirley Temple’s character. McDaniel played these parts well—she was human and believable despite the constraints of her roles.

The characters played by McDaniel and Robinson are important secondary roles, but none of the black characters in the film ever wanders outside the prescribed social boundaries. Nor would they in a film like this, that exists only to tell a story, to broadcast the talents of its child star, that isn’t interested in subverting or questioning or satirizing. The Littlest Colonel accepts the conventions of the Old South without question.

Other black characters in the film, in particular two children, and one house servant, provide comic relief. Children can be funny without much effort, of course. These two children—a little boy and an older girl--play roles secondary to Temple’s. They follow her around, obey her commands, and make comic statements and comic actions. The little boy can do little more than moan and groan and utter monosyllables. This film offers further confirmation of the fact that African Americans in the 1930s had virtually no choice of roles beyond those involving servitude and slavery and low comedy. I wouldn’t characterize the portrayal of black characters in this film as viciously racist, but instead as conventionally racist. Given the decade, that’s about what one could expect from an A-list film written, directed, and produced by whites for a mostly white audience.

The film shows whites and especially blacks as accepting of their positions in life, as masters and servants. It purveys the notion that within this range of acceptance blacks and whites lived comfortably together in a nurturing community, helping and supporting one another when circumstances called for it. It’s important to remember that the story takes place in the 1880s, long after the end of the Civil War, when the former slaves could have left the plantation for better opportunities. That they have remained with the colonel simply reflects the golden gaze of Thomas Nelson Page apologetics that underlies this film’s conception of historical reality.

I’m always a sucker for films that show reconciliation between parents and children. In this one there’s no question, from the earliest scene in which they argue, that reconciliation will come for the colonel and his daughter. What gives the film interest, beyond Barrymore’s wonderful overacting and Temple’s carefully managed talents and the merits of other actors is the question of when that moment will occur. It comes not a moment too soon. And then, except for a final scene in which all the characters, black and white, enjoy a barbecue together, a scene filmed in color (in contrast to the rest of this black and white film), the affair is over.

The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science, by Norman Doidge

2010-11-04T13:06:00.001-04:00

Neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain to change in response to various kinds of injury, external stimuli, and therapy. For instance, when one studies piano, the neurons in the parts of the brain that govern sound and manual dexterity multiply to support the needed skills. Sometimes stroke victims can regain use of paralyzed limbs through physical exercises that stimulate growth in portions of the brain that “take over” for damaged areas. In The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science (Viking Adult, 2007), Norman Doidge studies neuroplasticity. He describes the cases of some of his own patients and reports on the careers of scientists involved in neurological research. The result is a history of neurology and of brain theory, explanations of the physiology and anatomy of the brain, and a series of case studies that show how various therapies have helped stroke victims, people suffering from phobias and OCD, forms of addiction, and other mental or behavioral issues, to recover from and cope with their problems. Such therapies can be used to treat learning disabilities and to keep the brains of aging people vital. Doidge argues that psychoanalysis sometimes works because it compels patients to think and act in ways that change their brain structure.

For years traditional science held that the brain is hardwired. That is, certain portions of the brain control certain functions--Broca’s area controls speech, while other areas control facial gestures or mobility. If these areas are damaged, according to traditional thought, then the abilities they support are permanently affected or lost. Neuroplasticity has overturned this notion. Also overturned is the idea that neuroplasticity affects only the young—that in older people the brain loses its plasticity. In fact, while the brains of the young are the most pliable in their ability to change and rewire, the brains of older people, including people in their 70s and 80s, can still show plastic properties.

This was an encouraging book for me, a person who, at the age of 60, worries about the loss of cognitive ability that can affect older people. There are physical and mental activities, exercises and therapies, Doidge suggests, that can stave off the inevitable mental decline.

The social implications of neuroplasticity, of therapies that can treat mental disorders and restore function to stroke and accident victims, that can, conceivably, be used for behavior modification both on an individual and wider scale, are complex. The possible use of brain modification therapy for social programming should receive serious and wary attention. We’ve heard about groups that claim to “deprogram” cult members and homosexuals, for example. Should people who exhibit behaviors regarded by some as unacceptable be compelled to undergo modification therapy? Social programmers or governments could use similar methods to modify the behavior of entire populations. Doidge hints at these implications but doesn’t explore them fully. Some other writer should do that. As a psychiatrist, Doidge’s main interest lies in understanding how the plastic nature of the brain can lead to effective treatment of physical and psychological problems of patients.

This Side of Paradise, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

2010-11-04T12:12:00.001-04:00

Were it not for the publication in 1920 of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel The Side of Paradise, we might never have had The Great Gatsby or Tender is the Night or any of those fine short stories (“Winter Dreams”) for which Fitzgerald is remembered. In these later works Fitzgerald was a beautiful writer. In his first novel, self-absorbed, forced, disorganized, pedantic, sophomoric—he was still learning to write. He was very early in that process.

Fitzgerald must have written his first novel under the influence of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Surely he had this book in mind as he wrote his story about the privileged yet burdened Amory Blaine and his struggles to discover his vocation, his struggles to become a writer. In the final paragraph we are told that Blaine has discovered his calling, that he knows who he is, but the novel—both in the story it tells and the way it is written--gives no assurances he will make good on this knowledge.

Fitzgerald devotes nearly half of the book to Amory Blaine’s experiences at Princeton University, where he makes friends, joins a social club, becomes a campus luminary, has numerous intellectual conversations, drinks often and long, and experiences various romantic intrigues. It’s difficult to conceive of anything less interesting than detailed accounts of one’s college days, and one suspects that Amory’s self-absorption is a reflection of the same property in young author who imagined him.

After he graduates from Princeton, Blaine goes to war, the first world war, and returns (we are to believe) a changed and chastened man. Yet Fitzgerald gives us two or three fairly broad pages about the war (which he had no role in) and then moves on. At the age of 24 or so he returns to the Princeton campus and feels nostalgic and so grown beyond those collegiate days gone by. This is self-indulgent nostalgia. Fitzgerald is a much better nostalgia artist in his later work.

Several romances mark the dramatic centers of this books—two with socialites, one with a strange girl in the rural areas of New York who seems to be an early version of Nicole Diver and is perhaps Fitzgerald’s version of la belle dame sans merci. Blaine’s most traumatic romantic experience is his rejection by a beautiful upper-class girl who leaves him because he hasn’t the financial means to support her well. (Shades of Zelda?)

I’d put this novel in the same category as Faulkner’s much superior Soldiers’ Pay—it’s a beginner’s novel. But not all first books are necessarily so flawed—consider Hemingway’s In Our Time.

That Evening Sun

2010-11-03T14:39:00.001-04:00

That Evening Sun (2009; dir. Scott Teems) foregrounds place. The setting is Tennessee. Intensely visual cinematography, a strong soundtrack of insect sounds and other ambient noises, mountains in the background, views of fields, houses, tenant shacks, pickup trucks, a nearly abandoned small town. These do not image a stereotypical American South but instead a particular one.

The South is not the subject or even the primary issue. Rather it is a context. The dramatic focus is an 80-year old farmer, Abner Meecham, who has been living in a retirement home for three years. It is a dreary, depressing place. We learn that after the death of Abner’s wife, his son Paul convinced him to move there. But Abner decides he cannot tolerate the home any longer and packs up to walk back to his farm. When he arrives, by walking and by taxi, he discovers someone else living there. He learns that as soon as he moved to the retirement home his son rented the house and farm to Lonzo Choat, a ne’er do well local citizen struggling to make his way. Although he lives only off the benefits from disability checks, he wants to make the farm work. The conflicts here revolve around class, age, and family. Lonzo is around 40 and holds Abner in contempt. Some years before Abner refused to rent a tenant shack to him. Abner hates Alonzo—he calls him white trash, accuses him of laziness, thievery, and worse. While Abner wants to return to his farm and live out the remainder of his life, Lonzo wants to make a home there. Both desires, the film gradually brings us to know, are not likely to be fulfilled. This is not a narrative in which two stubborn, resolute characters struggle and argue and finally come to an understanding. As the conflict between Abner and Lonzo deepens, each becomes more firmly set against the other. They are stubborn, yes. But Alonzo’s stubbornness may be fueled by alcohol and upbringing, while Abner’s may come from advancing age if not early senility. There are moments when it seems the gap between these men might be bridged, especially through Alonzo’s wife and daughter, both of whom are sympathetic to Abner, but they lead nowhere.

That Evening Sun is based on a story by Tennessee writer William Gay. The director and screenwriter Scott Teems is a native of Lilburn, Georgia. Ray McKinnon, who plays Lonzo, has appeared in a number of Southern films, including The Accountant, The Blind Side, and O Brother, Where Art Thou? His production company, “Ginny Mule Pictures,” which he co-owns with Walton Goggins, who plays Abner’s son Paul in this film and who also appeared in The Accountant, has produced several films about the South. Although Ginny Mule Pictures did not produce That Evening Sun, McKinnon was a producer. To some extent, then, this film is the creation of Southern writers, director, and actors. This may account to an extent for its realistic treatment of the Southern setting. The film shows us an old farm nestled in the mountains. It is instantly recognizable. We are not surprised that it is Southern. It is particular unto itself—it doesn’t seem constructed from preconceptions of what a Southern farm ought to be. It simply is what it is. The makers of That Evening Sun give us the South of their own experience. Of course, their Southnernness simply means that they bring their own preconceptions to the film. But compared with the treatment of the Southern farm in such films as The Long Hot Summer and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, this one seems quietly real.

Although Abner Meecham’s farm is near the small town of Ackerman’s Field, only a few scenes occur in the town. There is no real farm vs. city conflict here, though the setting makes clear that the town is a part of the rural South that has been left behind by modernization, urbanization, and homogenization. It is analogous to the small town in Eudora Welty’s The Ponder Heart, left behind when the highway passed it by, or Eula Springs in James Wilcox’s novel Modern Baptists. In a sense, all the characters live on the margins. Abner is old and isolated. He lost his wife (whom he remembers in occasional flashbacks and dreams) three years before. His only friend, Thurl Chessor, a nearby farmer played by Barry Corbin, has difficulty walking and cannot drive. Abner lives on social security and support from his son Paul. A long history of unemployment, domestic violence, alcohol, and an injury to his leg have given Lonzo the reputation of a terminally unemployed no-count. He is struggling, as his wife explains to Abner, to make something of himself, and he was (apparently) successfully managing to avoid abusing alcohol and his family, until Abner returns to the farm. The two women in the family are trapped by Lonzo’s domineering personality, his violence, and their love for him (though ultimately the daughter leaves).

Too many conflicts and struggles afflict That Evening Sun. The main one is Abner’ s struggle to come to grips with his age, the loss of his farm and his wife, and his difficult relationship with his son Paul. His son is a lawyer and while it’s apparent that he’s not a wealthy man he at least has money. He complains to his father at one point about how much it costs him to keep him in a retirement home, and it’s clear that he never had much of a relationship with the old man. Abner complains that all Paul has ever done is lie to him. In fact, Abner’s conversations with Lonzo and Paul are full of insults, rancor, and bitterness. He feels abandoned and betrayed by everyone, and the worst insult comes when he returns to his farm to find a man whom he has long disliked renting his farm (with an option to buy) from his own son.

Abner blames everyone for his misfortunes. Gradually events lead him to realize that to some extent he bears responsibility for some of the things that have happened, including his difficult relationship with Paul. He comes to see how cruel and difficult he has been, even to his wife. We recognize, even if Abner does not, that Abner is much like Lonzo after all.

Abner shows some sympathy for Lonzo’s wife Ludie (Carrie Preston) and daughter Pamela (Mia Wasikowski). Ludie tries to be friendly with Abner, perhaps hoping to soften the developing tensions with her husband. She seems to understand Abner both as an old man with his own problems and also as a threat to the life she and her husband hope to build on the farm. It is Pamela, a sixteen-year-old girl, whom Abner at brief moments talks to and even behaves kindly towards. She seeks him out on several occasions simply for conversation, as if she is looking for a warmth and connection she cannot get from her embittered father. When Lonzo, drunk and angry over her being out late at night with a boy, beats her and his wife with a hose, Abner threatens him with a gun and turns him into the local sheriff. Later he warns and then demands that Pamela leave the farm, for her own safety (Ludie has encouraged her to leave as well). We see a dimension of Abner in these scenes that suggests he is not all gruffness and bitterness. In these two woman he may see something of his former life, of his departed wife. At the same time, Lonzo’s abuse provides him with a convenient excuse to escalate their dispute.

There is no peaceful resolution here. After Abner is injured in a fire, he wakes up in a hospital room to find Paul watching over him. They agree that Abner will go to live in a retirement community apartment near Paul’s home. Paul tells him he will have a backyard where he can grow tomatoes, and Abner, true to form, answers that he would rather grow corn. In the final scene we see Abner peering into windows of the abandoned house where he once lived. Lonzo and his wife have moved out, but, significantly, Abner does not enter the house. He walks around the front of the house, peers through the windows at vacant rooms and unused furniture, and then walks out of view.

Hal Holbrook is excellent as Abner Meecham. His is a one-note performance, of sorts, but then Abner is a one-note sort of man. McKinnon is effective as Alonzo, but then again Lonzo too is a flat character whose basic stubbornness only deepens as the film moves along. Preston, Wasikowski, and Corbin are a fine supporting cast.

Abner Meecham and Lonzo Choates are vaguely Faulknerian names. The struggle here between a displaced landowner and the lower-class white man who has supplanted him suggests Faulkner’s Snopes Trilogy. The plot of the film as a whole, about a man displaced and struggling with his age and ownership of land, reminds us of The Field (1990), with Richard Harris in the lead role, an even darker and grimmer film than this one. The ultimate ancestor of both is King Lear, about an old man raging against age, betrayal, and abandonment.

That Evening Sun has comic moments but is not a comic film. Abner’s plight is sad and hopeless, as is Alonzo’s. No one seems headed towards a happy outcome. Abner and his friend Thurl will die soon. Lonzo will continue to falter in an ongoing downward spiral. Maybe his wife will put up with him a while longer. And who knows what will happen to their daughter?

My Shtetl, by Robert Cooperman

2010-11-02T09:39:00.001-04:00

My favorite poem in Bob Cooperman’s My Shtetl (Logan House, 2009) is “Machatonim,” his memory of attending a family reunion as a young boy and being approached and sloppily hugged by a distant relative. The poem begins:

     A friend defines
     that verbal mouthful
     as “the extended family stretched
     like a polite smile at a social
     function you’d almost rather
     be dead than have to attend.”

     They’re the distant kin we’d greet
     with, “It’s wonderful to see you again!”
     and wonder afterwards, “Who
     in God’s holy name was that?”

Everyone has experienced such a hug. It is the general appeal of the situation in this poem, and others like it, that makes these poems so readable and affecting, that allows us, whatever our heritage, to find ourselves and our own memories in the events and people and feelings described.

Cooperman tends towards short or medium-length poems. Most of the poems here fit individually on one page, so that each page of the collection encapsulates a discrete memory of a family personage or experience. As one reads these poems, individually, a page at a time, they take on a cumulative force, so that in the end one understands and feels the importance of these recollections. They are frequently poignant, often humorous, sometimes angry and biting.

My Shtetl is organized into sections, each with a loosely specific theme or focus. Many of the poems concern Cooperman’s parents, his memories of his father, who died decades ago, and of his mother, infirm but still living in NYC. He muses over the fact of his father’s departure from his life, and the prospect of his mother’s departure as well.

In Yiddish shtetl means my little village, or my home town. It’s a term that names Jewish settlements in Eastern Europe. Cooperman’s paternal grandparents immigrated from Poland, escaping the horrors of the Second World War, and in a quiet way Cooperman brings the impact of life in Poland, of the move to America, of the holocaust, into his own presentations of family memory and identity. Some commentators see the word Shtetl as associated with a sense of nostalgia, as something vanished forever. There is certainly nostalgia in these poems, not so much for a vanished way of life (one which in the literal sense Cooperman never experienced) as for a nearly vanished family existence. In writing about experiences from childhood, parents and other relatives, of people he knew when he was younger, Cooperman is indeed writing about a vanished reality, yet it’s a reality that is captured in his memory and embellished in the imaginative evocations in these poems.

The poems in My Shtetl are infused with comedy, sadness, longing. By looking back to relatives, family, and early experiences, Cooperman defines himself in terms of his religious heritage and also in the broad terms of a shared experience of memory and loss that is the curse of all human experience. He touches on the shared nature of this experience in “What I Would Sing for the Romany,” where he seems torn between the English and American traditions of the ballads and songs he loves and the

     Yiddish song
     my grandmother sang
     to get me peacefully asleep:
     a song of the Old Country.
     She escaped with her life
     and little else.

As with many of Cooperman’s other collections, his poetic biographies of Keats and Shelley, his collections set in the 19^th-century Colorado mountains, even in his reminiscences of The Grateful Dead, whom he loves, the accumulative effect in My Shtetl is of a coherent narrative that is evocative, moving, powerful.

My Shtetl was named winner of the 2009 Holland Prize by the Logan House, given for the “best unpublished book of poetry in American English.” Cooperman lives in Denver, CO, with his wife Beth, a business professor at the University of Colorado/Denver.

The T.A.M.I. Show

2010-10-22T11:36:00.001-04:00

The T.A.M.I. Show (1964; dir. Steve Binder) often appears on lists of the 5 or 10 best rock documentaries. It was shot with special television cameras that allowed conversion to film—not common in the early 60s. The black and white documentary is a compilation of two concerts held in Santa Monica, California, on April 28 and 29, 1964. In ways it resembles a television show of the day, with singers walking on and off stage with their own guitars, plugging them into small amplifiers, and then singing. Wildly distracting disco dancers are always gyrating in the background. They’re an artifact of the times. Also an artifact is how the film is introduced—by the 60s duo Jan and Dean, cruising on skateboards, driving cars, running along the sidewalk, heading for the concert, mimicking the requisite traits of what passed for “cool” in 1964. Among the aspects of the film that mark it historically and, occasionally, as dated, are Jan and Dean, who in 2010 simply come across as weird.

Once the show is underway, the film really moves. The sound equipment used in the film was by modern standards primitive, so it’s sometimes difficult to hear the singers (especially Chuck Berry), but usually the music is at least listenable. Among the best performers are the Beach Boys, the Supremes, the Rolling Stones, and James Brown. If not for any other reason, James Brown makes this film worth seeing. He gives a career-defining performance. He acts, struts, slides, croons, screams, screeches, and by the end of his 17-minute set he’s drenched in sweat and exhausted, and the audience verges on riot.

That audience is almost entirely white—middle-class teenagers and students in their 20s. You see, especially with James Brown and the Stones, the kind of hysteria we saw when the Beatles made their first appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show. In one scene, a chic young woman screams and dances wildly to the music on stage. Her somewhat older boyfriend—staid and conventional, with a pipe and a tweed jacket (frankly, I don’t remember whether he was wearing the jacket or smoking the pipe, but it would have been in his character), gazes at her with shock and incredulity. It’s an image that defines the cultural divide this film is contributing to. One can imagine parents from the 1960s watching their sons and daughters (mostly their daughters) in the audience of this film with fear and uncertainty.

Here we find an early example of how the entertainment industry sought to market rock music to the young generation. The opening scenes of the film show Jan and Dean engaged in a series of hijinks as they make their way to the theatre. Jan and Dean also host the concert, introducing each act, continuing to play jokes and act up on stage. Disco dancers and their frenetic movements (which would bring anyone to exhaustion) keep the atmosphere energized, so that if a particular group fails to play well the audience won’t notice. There’s no suggestion here that rock music might appeal to a wider audience than the one in the film. It’s cool and it’s hip and it’s young. More than that, the film seems to argue, it’s an inherent product of the younger generation that marks and distinguishes it from the rest of society.

In The T.A.M.I. Show you see rock music as it was in 1964–still developing, moving towards the explosive middle years of the 60s (they’re almost here in the film) that forced some of these groups to grow and redefine themselves (particularly, the Beach Boys—the Stones were already on the way) and that consigned others (Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas) to obsolescence.

The Beach Boys give a strong performance that reminds us that their harmonies were not a product of studio engineering. They could really sing, despite their striped jackets. Their set is tight and fast-paced. In 1964 they were a few years away from the transformations that would bring Pet Sounds, one of the finest of American rock albums.

Chuck Berry seems almost out of place in the film. He’s the only performer who sings in the barebones rock style of the 1950s. In 1963 he had finished serving a jail sentence—he had been convicted of having sex with a 14-year old girl. He appears in three short segments at the beginning of the film, and the effect is that he seems segmented off from the rest of the performers, as if he is damaged goods. He’s clearly not among the featured singers in the film.

Lesley Gore was a popular, successful singer of the early 1960s, performing a type of music that would seem increasingly out of style as the decade progressed. Most of her songs about traditional romance hardly strain traditional boundaries, yet her performance of “You Don’t Own Me” in this film delivers a strong feminist message. It’s a remarkable statement.

The T.A.M.I. Show offers an interesting study of the racial politics of the music industry in 1964. The only time we see color among the dancers on stage is when a black group is playing. There’s a different performance style among these black groups—the white singers tend simply to stand and sing, while Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, James Brown, and the Supremes dance and move in rhythm, acting out as they perform. Compared to them, most of the white singers are stale. (The Rolling Stones, who perform songs written out of the American blues tradition, are the exception). Some of the black singers almost seem to ingratiate themselves to the audience—at the end of their songs, the Supremes bow their heads in humility but also one might suggest in submission. There’s still a subtle disconnect and discomfort among these singers racially. Only at the end of the film do they appear on stage together, and even then they’re singing alongside rather than with each other. The fact that black singers are here at all is a statement. Yet when James Brown and the Famous Flames step on stage everything changes. In Brown’s performance, and in the performance of the Rolling Stones, you can see the pop world of Jan and Dean and Gerry and the Pacemakers and Lesley Gore coming to an end.

This fascinating and often exciting film is entertaining from beginning to end, if only you give yourself up to the time and its contexts.

The Arabian Nights, by Mary Zimmerman, as produced by the UGA Department of Theatre and Film

2010-10-21T13:53:00.001-04:00

The Arabian Night (1992) by Mary Zimmerman interweaves creative imagination, storytelling, fantasy, patriarchy, the struggle of women for self-determination, love and trust, sex and death. The latter two concepts are interdependent—Scheherazade uses her imagination and narrative abilities to escape death by the sultan, who for the last three or four years in the play has each night married a virgin and then killed her, out of anger over betrayal by his first wife. The sultan is a monster of the worst sort, but can he be redeemed?

As Scheherazade tells her tales, her characters literally come alive on the stage, materializing out of the shadows. She stops telling each tale just as dawn breaks, on a note of suspense or discovery, so that the sultan delays his plan to kill her in order to hear the end. The existence of the play itself, woven from her tales, depends on her success in maintaining the sultan’s interest. Sometimes a character in one of the tales will begin telling a second tale, and new characters appear. The pace of the play is fast, but not so much that the audience can’t enjoy the tales as they are told. As Scheherazade talks, over nearly a three-year period, her stories take on faintly allegorical or parabolic meanings, all designed, we can guess, to bring about a certain transformation.

As produced by the UGA Department of Theatre and Film Studies in October 2010, this play was entrancing and magical. Under the direction of David Saltz, the actors were in constant motion. They seemed to enjoy the play as much as the audience did. When they laughed in certain scenes, I wasn’t sure they were doing so because the play called for their laughter, or because they were entertained by what particular actors were doing. Jennifer Schottstädt as Scheherazade and Lynwoodt Jenkins as Harun al-Rashid were especially outstanding. Both are MFA performance students. Many others in the cast gave fine performances. Everyone, audience and players alike, seemed caught up in the play’s enthrallment.

The two acts of the play differ in mood. The first is wild and frenetic, full of comedy and ribaldry, while the second is more somber, drawing from Arabian myths and stories, Muslim teachings. The Arabian Nights calls in a subtle yet earnest way for cultural understanding. It dramatizes the power of imagination to create tales, to create life out of nothing, and to abolish it. It shows how imagination can enable self-definition and empowerment. Imagination is the source of the magic in this play, along with the inventiveness of the director, his crew, and the actors themselves. This UGA production was as entertaining as one could possible want.

2012

2010-10-18T00:22:00.001-04:00

None of the science in 2012 (dir. Roland Emmerich, 2009) works, first of all. Logic doesn’t work either. I could offer explanation, but why bother? In this film, around a million people survive an incredible catastrophe that wipes out (apparently) all other life on the planet. They are so happy to be alive in the end that no one seems to have noticed the disappeared five billion, nine hundred and ninety-nine million others. The supposed humanism of this film (one scene in particular strains to ensure we’re aware of it) is astoundingly smarmy. We are asked to feel somber and meditative as we see numerous scenes of people waiting to die and then meeting their miserable fates in various cataclysms. In death, the film intones, we all are united, and never more so than when tidal waves, exploding volcanoes, the collapse of the earth’s mantle, and swarming neutrinos from the sun bring an end to it all. We see numerous images of people falling into endlessly deep cracks in the earth, of skyscrapers falling, of great monuments crumbling, of California sliding into the sea, of an air craft carrier crushing the White House. In one scene, a multitude is gathered in Vatican Square waiting for the End. The Sistine Chapel frescoes of Michelangelo crumble, and the dome of St. Peter’s itself falls and rolls around the square, squashing all the faithful gathered there. We follow the efforts of a failed writer and limousine driver as he tries to save himself, his ex-wife, their two children, and her new husband. Woody Harrelson (who looks amazingly like the Lt. Governor of Georgia, Casey Cagle) appears in a small role as a nutcase Internet preacher of doom camped out at Yellowstone Park, waiting for the gigantic caldera there to blow. There are special effects everywhere, none especially impressive given what we have already seen in films like War of the Worlds (2005) and The Day after Tomorrow (2004). Mt. Everest has a role, and we are prodded to think about the Book of Genesis and Noah’s Ark. But at least there is tension (when is that tidal wave gonna wash over the Himalayas, and, hey, how about the obligatory last-minute, cliff-hanging suspense scene?). Supposedly, according to 2012, which cites Mayan prophecy and astrophysics all in the same sentence, this catastrophe, which causes the earth’s magnetic poles to shift and the continents to collapse and reform and all life to be wiped out, happens every six or seven hundred thousand years. Then life somehow regenerates--evolution sure does happen fast! Catastrophes on film are supposed to be heart-rending and entertaining—I could reel off a list a mile long, but, hey, why bother?

2012 is a yawner!

Conversations with Cosmo: At Home with an African Grey Parrot, by Betty Jean Craige

2010-10-13T09:41:00.001-04:00

The relationship Betty Jean Craige describes in Conversations with Cosmo (Sherman Asher Publishers, 2010) is not a simple owner-pet bond. It is a much closer connection, almost as if she and her parrot have become partners in life, a symbiotic animal-human relationship. Although in the early chapters Craige describes how she acquired and began adjusting to life with her African Grey parrot, and how the parrot began talking, her most interesting and thought-provoking discussions come later in the book when she contemplates Cosmo’s acquisition of language and how it defines her not only as a parrot but as a member, in a certain sense, of a human linguistic community. Cosmo’s ability to talk back and forth with humans brings into question traditional conceptions of how birds can acquire speech, and of whether their speaking is mimicry or something more significant. These discussions touch on such issues as the meaning of consciousness, identity in both human and parrot form, the rights of animals to exist in a human-dominated world, the obligations of humans to protect and secure the survival of animals in the natural world. Cosmo can communicate in English in a way that often seems to use some of the more advanced features of language. This distinguishes her from parrots who live in the wild, and from most non-human animals in general.

Craige is careful to explain that she acquired Cosmo from a domestic breeder, not from someone who caught her in the wild. Raised in captivity, Cosmo would not survive in the wild. She depends on her owner for food, protection, and companionship. Craige makes clear that Cosmo provides a close and meaningful companion for her. I am not well read in some of the issues Craige considers in this book, but I have never read a discussion of the animal-human relationship that approaches its subject in precisely this way. This book is entertaining from beginning to last, at times quite moving, and in the final chapters often profound.

The Valley of Light, by Terry Kay

2010-10-12T13:45:00.002-04:00

Terry Kay’s novel The Valley of Light (New York: Washington Square Press, 2003) is set in the fictional community of Bowerstown, in the North Carolina mountains, just north of the Georgia border. It could just as well have been set in North Georgia, near Young Harris College, where the poet Byron Herbert Reece taught English for a number of years before committing suicide (he was ill with tuberculosis). Reece plays no role in Kay’s novel, but his influence is there, in the rhythms and imagery of the prose, in how Kay draws his characters as both individuals and as emblems of something larger. Reece’s novel Better a Dinner of Herbs especially comes to mind—it describes people of the North Georgia mountains in a similar way.

The Valley of Light describes the impact on a small mountain community of an itinerant fisherman named Noah who wanders into the town, stays a few weeks, and then goes on his way. Noah has an almost magical ability to catch fish, and he uses it to make a living. Near the town lives a young woman named Eleanor who recently lost her husband to suicide—he returned traumatized from WWII and never recovered, and he brought secrets back with him as well. Eleanor lives in isolation, is a deep reader (the novel she is reading is The Grapes of Wrath—there are similarities between the prose style of that book and Kay’s as well). Noah befriends her. He becomes friends with a store owner, Boyd, who wants to woo Eleanor when she stops mourning. Noah is the unifying force, the focal point, a catalyst, in a melodrama of entanglements among these characters. Yet there’s no sensationalism here. One might expect certain developments to occur—some do and others don’t. One particular focus for the community is a fishing competition—everyone is looking forward to Noah’s taking part. There’s an attraction between Noah and Eleanor.

A bittersweet nostalgia underlies the novel, which takes place in the late 1940s. Set in the isolation of the North Carolina mountains, the novel portrays the community both as a living force and as a conglomeration of individuals. The developments of the 1950s—highway systems, easy air travel, television—all of which will bring an end to the loneliness as well as the distinctive identity of Bowerstown—loom just beyond the mountains that surround the town.

Kay’s narrative voice is powerful and dominating. It moves the story forward with skill and momentum, as if there is an inevitability to the events that occur.

Noah has what in modern times we call a learning disability. He can’t handle mathematics. He may be slightly below average in intelligence. But he thinks and feels deeply. His parents are dead, his brother is in prison, and he walks through the countryside, from one community to another. He has no sense of where he is going. Noah himself served in WWII and was present for the liberation of one of the death camps, where he saw suffering prisoners and stacks of bodies. He carries a small souvenir from the camp, fashioned by one of the inmates. Boyd served in the War as well. In a sense The Valley of Light is a recovery novel—recovery from the trauma of the War (which leads Eleanor’s husband to suicide), recovery for Eleanor from her husband’s death.

I enjoyed The Valley of Light. What most impressed me was the final chapter. It is the kind of chapter any novelist would yearn to write. It left me gasping.

The Blind Side

2010-10-11T16:22:00.001-04:00

The Blind Side (2009; dir. John Lee Hancock) offers another melodrama about white and black folks getting acquainted in the American South. The message: mutual interdependence will make us better people. In the film, a conservative, wealthy Christian woman befriends a large and passive African American boy who is practically a street person. She feels sorry for him. His mother is an addict, and his father is nowhere to be seen. When she sees him walking down the street in the rain and asks where he is headed, he answers that he is going to the gym. She knows the gym is closed and realizes he has nowhere to sleep. To the surprise of her family, she offers to let him stay at her house for the night, and then for as long as he wants. She buys him clothes, pays his tuition at the local private school that her children attend, and ultimately she and her husband become his legal guardians. He calls her Mom, and she calls him her son.

There is much potential for sentimentality and stereotyping here, but though the film has its sentimental moments it for the most part evades both pitfalls. The characters run contrary to type. The woman, Leigh Anne Tuohy, is exactly the sort of person you’d expect to have no interest at all in homeless black kids. Michael Oher, the kid she takes in, is not your stereotypical street-smart black teen-ager. He’s shy, unassertive, and virtually never talks. He’s been bruised and traumatized by his difficult life. School bores him because he’s convinced he can’t do the work. He’s given up on himself and on life—he’s fundamentally depressed. Most of all he’s alone. Tuohy would undoubtedly say that Christian charity is why she took Oher in, and the movie offers no alternative explanation. It’s fairly free of platitudes and points of view. It speaks through the actions of its characters.

I dreaded watching this film for three reasons: it was about football, it featured Sandra Bullock, and because of the first two reasons the advertised length seemed too much to ask. It’s difficult to conceive of a subject less interesting on film than football. Unless it is golf, or maybe bowling. And Sandra Bullock, well, I’m just not a fan. On all three counts, the film won me over. Football is an issue, but only a minor one. Sandra Bullock, though she still plays another version of herself, is fully convincing as Tuohy. Quinton Aaron, who plays Oher, is excellent. There’s not tremendous depth to this film, but there is a winning and earnest sincerity. Sincere films normally drive me howling out of the theater. But in this case I was entertained and moved.

But perhaps also I was seduced, lulled, by the vulnerability of Oher, by Tuohy’s earnest concern for his well-being, into overlooking other aspects of the film. In a sense, by choosing characters that run counter to type or stereotype, the film is able to avoid specific commentary on race and economic disparities. It’s focused on individuals, not on their social and racial contexts. Tuohy never comes to any realization about the conditions of life in the projects—she knows something about the projects because she visits them twice in the film. She even threatens a drug dealer. She sees Oher as someone who needs help, and she responds to him on that basis. Oher’s passive vulnerability wins our sympathy, and as he begins responding to Tuohy’s efforts to help him, we like him all the better, but that’s because he’s trying to become the kind of person Tuohy wants him to be. When he becomes a member of her family, he does so primarily on her terms, not his.

I have no arguments with Christian charity. But in this film it operates on the premise that people like Oher are victims incapable of raising themselves up without the white folks’ help. Moreover, where the victims are raised up to is defined by the white folks too—eating well, living in a nice house, showing courtesy and manners, studying, attending college, acting like white folks. This is made all the more clear in how the film divides its characters into categories: the rich white people on the one side, the poor and drug-addicted black folks in the projects on the other side. In this film, solving the problems of the projects means getting people like Oher to live and be like their white benefactors. I am oversimplifying, but my point is that The Blind Side does not argue for social change. There is nothing radical or even moderately progressive about its solution to social problems. It argues the case of the Good Samaritan. Be good to people fallen by the wayside, but pay no attention to how they got there, to their ethnic or social origins.

Oher’s immense size automatically makes his high school football coach see him as a valuable addition to the team. He convinces the school admissions officer to admit Oher, despite his academic problems. (The football coach is played by Ray McKinnon, who played the title character in The Accountant, 2001, and in the recent film That Evening Sun, 2009). In fact, Oher is so shy and unaggressive that he bumbles around during practice and during games. Tuohy finally realizes that he’s afraid of hurting other people, so she persuades him to think of his team as his family, which he must defend. This does the job. The white lady shows the black kid how to play football and rise to his potential.

The Blind Side at moments seems almost aware of its disingenuousness. Tuohy and her husband as graduates of the University of Mississippi are archly fierce football fans. They want all their children, including Oher, to attend the school. Tuohy early on recognizes that Oher might qualify for a football scholarship to Ole Miss, and she does everything she can to help him qualify, which primarily means giving him pep talks and hiring a tutor (another arch Ole Miss fan) to help him with his studies. When an NCAA officer tells Oher that the Tuohy’s might have befriended him solely so that he could play football at Ole Miss, there is a genuine crisis. Oher wonders whether his new family loves him after all. And Tuohy questions her own motives. The film resolves the crisis in a way that seems satisfactory to the viewers, and to the characters, without wholly answering the question about motives. In real life, whatever that is, motives are always tangled, never pure and simple. In The Blind Side, what matters from the film’s point of view is the way in which racial and economic divides are bridged through the kindness and love of one family for a young man in need. If every wealthy family behaved like the Touhys, many problems in our nation might be solved, though we’d have a less diverse, more homogeneous nation as a result. And here we have another film suggesting that the way to success for a disadvantaged, minority character is through sports. The fact is that most families do not behave like the Tuohys, or cannot afford to, so what The Blind Side gives us is an isolated incident rather than a program for change. It makes us feel good without asking us to question how we live our lives.

[Old Smiley’s note: A recent Slate article argues that the befriending of black athletes by white families is not as unusual as I’ve suggested. See http://www.slate.com/id/2270482/.]

I’d Climb the Highest Mountain

2010-10-11T16:09:00.001-04:00

I’d Climb the Highest Mountain (dir. Henry King, 1951) is a small and pious film. Nether adjective is meant to slight. Although one can always find reason to question the motives behind why a film of this type is made, the product itself is earnest enough. Based on a novel by the Georgia writer Corra Harris, the film chronicles the experience of Mary Elizabeth (Susan Hayward), a young woman who comes South to marry minister William Thompson (William Lundigan), assigned to a church in the North Georgia mountains. The house they move to is so isolated that the nearest neighbor is five miles away. The film was made largely where it was set, and numerous scenes show authentic mountain people (the film used numerous people from the region as extras) going about their daily business. Their faces are drawn and often haggard. Their children wear worn clothing and go bare footed (and often seem to have come straight out of Walker Evans photographs). They travel on horse and in buggies on washed out dirt roads. In many ways the use of setting and local inhabitants in the film is a major virtue. It rarely condescends. The only automobile in the area is driven by a rich woman from Atlanta who has a summer home in the mountains. She’s driven around by a chauffeur. The appearance of her car suggests that the film is set around 1920.

Through her own narration, we learn how Mary Elizabeth adjusts to marriage, to the rigors of life as a preacher’s wife, to the isolated mountains region where she lives. Most of all she has to adjust to her husband William. He has a lot of modern views, has a couple of wild streaks, rarely loses his temper, but is stubborn. He’s not afraid to argue with unbelievers or with the richest man in town, who makes donations to the church. (On occasion his virtuousness seems difficult to bear, even for his wife). As modern as William might be, she is even more so. When a local young man (Rory Calhoun) widely regarded as a ne’er-do-well falls in love with the daughter of the wealthiest man in town, both she and her husband take his side. In one prolonged episode, an unspecified pestilence strikes the area, and Mary Elizabeth and William assist the local medical doctor in caring for the ill.

In a certain way the film dramatizes an ongoing conflict between faith and reason, belief and disbelief. A Harvard-educated man and his family live nearby. He has taught his children that religion is false and raises them in a firm and unyielding way. He and William have several discussions about reason and faith. As the pestilence wears on, the local doctor questions why God would inflict such suffering. Even Mary Elizabeth seems to have doubts. William is an unwavering believer. He’s never swayed by arguments against the existence of God, by the pestilence, by personal tragedies. Gradually his piety wins over his wife, and gradually her willingness to break with traditions and even to break some rules in service of a good cause wins him over too.

There’s only a tenuous relationship between the film’s title and its subject. In addition to the title’s being a vague expression of religious faith, it also implies all the challenges Mary Elizabeth must face as she learns to live with her husband. In the end, she explains to him that she’s realized her destiny is to be a minister’s wife, to go with him wherever his calling takes him, quoting from the Book of Ruth, “Whither thou go’est, I will go, and whither thou lodge, I will lodge,” and so on.

This brings us to some of the more archaic aspects of this film. Shortly after the death of a neighborhood boy by drowning, Mary Elizabeth goes into labor and delivers a stillborn son. She is, understandably, grief stricken. She rouses from unconsciousness to insist that her husband baptize the child because she doesn’t want to believe he isn’t alive somewhere. For months she says she is in mourning, hardly aware of where she is. She then says that she commits “the gravest sin a woman can commit against her husband: I ceased to care how I looked.” Only the visit of a wealthy woman from Atlanta, who says she wants William to explain “some Biblical questions,” brings her out of her stupor. As Mary puts it, she was “rudely awakened” by the sight of this woman. After the second visit, Mary warns the Atlanta woman to go back to her own husband and to leave William alone. She goes to the local store and buys expensive fabric to make a dress that will win William’s notice. Later she confesses to him that this wasteful act inspired all the women in the church to spend money on expensive fabric rather than donate to the local mission. So it takes jealousy, envy, and self-indulgence to rescue this woman from grief—no spiritual or emotional or philosophical coming to terms with tragedy, not the passage of time, but jealousy, and at the cost of the local mission to boot!

The poorly hidden subtexts of this film (reinforced by the quotation from Ruth above) are that woman is shallow and fickle and that marriage is a sacred institution to be revered above all others, and that a woman must accept her subordinate place within it—to follow her husband’s will, to play a subservient role. Although we are told that William’s stubbornness is a weakness he must struggle to overcome, it is Mary who does most of the struggling. Her litany of mistakes and small sins are all what we would expect from a female character in a 1950s melodrama or comedy about marriage—a woman who does not closely cleave to her expected role as wife (and, in this case, minister’s wife)—must be brought back into the fold. Mary Elizabeth is a North Georgia version of Lucy Ricardo, always getting into trouble, always in need of gentle correction. Her husband is invariably smarter and more perceptive than she—when she confesses (on several occasions) that she has lied to him, he tells her that he knew she had lied all along—all of this in the lightest and most flirtatious of marital banter.

One wonders about the domestic life of the screenwriter, Lamar Trotti, an Atlanta native. Was he trying to deliver a message to someone at home? Or was he just speaking for the culture at large? In 1951 marriage was a revered institution, a pillar of the social structure, and this film, through frequent demonstrations of piety and good heartedness, makes the dramatic moment for Mary Elizabeth not her recognition of the value and goodness of the community where she has come to live but instead her willing and happy acceptance of her role as obedient wife of the church minister.

The Circuit Rider’s Wife (1910) by Corra Harris is often described as semi-autobiographical, but it doesn’t reveal the less-than-satisfactory nature of her marriage to her own husband, a philandering and alcoholic Methodist minister whose adultery cost him his position and led to his ultimate suicide, and to her public shame and humiliation. The marriage of William and Mary Elizabeth is sometimes faced with minor challenges, but not of the sort Harris faced in her own life.