I’d Climb the Highest Mountain

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.

Babies

Babies (2010; dir. Thomas Balmès) is both an entertaining and disturbing documentary about the first year of life for four babies born in different parts of the world—Namibia, San Francisco, Mongolia, and Tokyo. There is no narration and virtually no dialogue, other than what people in the film occasionally say to one another. The camera moves back and forth from one baby to another, paralleling their growth and experiences. All these babies are cute, but their cuteness quickly becomes (despite the trailers) a secondary interest. The film focuses both on what these babies and their families have in common, and on differences. For instance, while we see three of the babies looking at, reacting to, cats and dogs and other animals, we see the Namibian baby, Ponijao, entranced by swarming flies. The conditions of his life, especially compared with the lives of the San Francisco and Tokyo babies, seem severe and deprived. He will grow up in challenging circumstances, but the film suggests that his life is what he will have—his mother cares for him, his siblings play with or sometimes ignore him, the world rolls on around him. He will grow up as most children grow up. The film does not ask its viewers to feel sorry for him. Instead it wants us (I think) to see him and his life as an example of human and cultural diversity.

Compared to the Mongolian and African babies, the babies in Tokyo and San Francisco are growing up in world of affluence and self-indulgence. In one scene the mother of the San Francisco baby takes her to a class where mothers and their babies sing a song to Mother Earth. The Tokyo baby rides with its mother on a glass-lined elevator and gazes in awe at the brilliant lights of the city skyline. The Mongolian baby has the rolling grass-covered hills of the steppes surrounding him, and for the African baby there is bare dirt and dry grass.

The Mongolian child, Bayar, a boy, was my favorite among the babies. His family loves and cares for him but often leaves him untended. We often see him by himself, as he lies swaddled on a bed (surrounded by goats) or sitting in a water-filled basin or standing in a doorway. His is a rich environment. He lives in an elaborate tent with the rest of his family (a tent with electricity and television). His brother is jealous of him and in one scene rolls him in a carriage out into the middle of a field full of cows and leaves him. The film’s final scene is a moment for Bayar of triumph and transformation.

The most poignant and painful moment in the film comes when Bayar accidentally spills a bowl of milk on the floor. He’s not really aware of what he has done or of the mess he has made. When he sees his mother come into the room he smiles at her, but then she speaks roughly and swats him. The look of confusion, pain, unhappiness, and despair that passes in waves over his face as he becomes suddenly aware of the world of sorrow and separateness is hard to see.

I have difficulty accepting what Babies seems to argue—that the common experiences shared among these babies are more important than the differences that separate them. The film leaves no doubt about the material and social differences in their lives. It is difficult not to wish for Ponijao a better life, to worry about the conditions in which he lives. The mortality rate for children younger than five years in Namibia is 65.6 deaths per thousand children, as compared to 4.2 for Japanese children and 7.8 for children of the United States. The mortality rate for children in Mongolia is 53.8 deaths per thousand.[1] The futures for some of these babies may be no future at all. These painful facts for me undercut the feel-good intentions of the film.

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[1] CIA Factbook, April 2009.

The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James

Henry James’ prose style has been described as turgid, wordy, labyrinthine, difficult. I find it artful and effective. It is part of the context and the environment of his fiction. James deliberately uses his prose style as a way of methodically uncovering the hidden layers of his characters, and of giving readers time to absorb statements and realizations and discoveries about characters. We’ve been spoiled by contemporary fiction that conditions us to expect short and deliberately styled journalistic sentences. Not so with James. His language provides entry to the consciousness of his characters.

In his 1908 introduction to The Portrait of a Lady James explains that he thought of this novel as a work of architecture constructed around the consciousness of his central character, “erecting on such a plot of ground the neat and careful and proportioned pile of bricks that arches over it and that was thus to form, constructionally speaking, a literary monument. Such is the aspect that to-day ‘The Portrait’ wears for me: a structure reared with an ‘architectural’ competence, as Turgenieff would have said, that makes it, to the author’s own sense, the most proportioned of his productions after ‘The Ambassadors.’”

Through his influence on such writers as Conrad, Joyce, Faulkner, Wharton, and others, James taught modern readers how to read. His use of irony, his ability to suggest what is going on around a character who herself may have no idea, his use of unreliable narrators, his placement on the reader of the burden of comprehension, perception, and judgment—these are what we expect of modern fiction. We are more attuned to these devices in 2010 than we would have been when Portrait was first published as a magazine serial in 1880 and as a book in 1881 (it was later extensively revised for the 1908 New York Edition, the one I’m commenting on here). Our surprise at various revelations in Portrait might therefore be less intense in 2010 than it would have been 130 years ago. Yet we can still appreciate the careful delineation of character, the genuine human understanding and sympathy that James brings to his characters, his ability to define the structure of an entire social structure and historical period.

One of the most interesting characteristics of this novel is how the reader’s estimation of various characters changes and develops. Isabel’s understanding develops as well, but readers are typically able to sense before she can what the intentions and virtues (or defects) of certain characters are. Madame Merle and Gilbert Osmond are two examples. I was suspicious of Osmond from the start, and when Isabel was persuaded to marry him, I was sure unpleasantness would follow. James carefully and subtly builds the case against Osmond so that the reader reaches conclusions without being forced to them. Even our perceptions of Isabel evolve. At first she seems wholly innocent and good, yet her acceptance of Osmond as a husband seems a grievous mistake, as does, in retrospect, her rejection of the marriage proposal from Lord Warburton (whose character is never much in doubt). James’ characters in this novel are three-dimensional forms to be regarded from all angles and perspectives, in different lights and contexts, before their true nature comes clear. James in his preface to Portrait writes that "The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million — a number of possible windows not to be reckoned, rather; every one of which has been pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will."

To James, characters are not merely fictional constructs—they are living organisms with whom he engages fully.

Isabel Archer as a virtuous yet ambitious American falls victim to her own gullibility. Her initial obliviousness to the bad intentions of others makes her an inevitable victim. She is manipulated by others around her, even those who she believes are her closest friends. She is a constant object of scrutiny—because she is an American abroad (a circumstance more remarkable in 1880 than today), and because she is a beautiful, intelligent, and perhaps headstrong young woman. Everyone watches to see what decisions she will make, what her ultimate fortunes may be. She is a possible marriage partner to some, a possible source of wealth and advancement for others. Like Christopher Newman in The American, her innocence and lack of experience with “Europeans” put her at risk.

It’s easy to regard Portrait as a feminist novel. While Isabel means to determine her own destiny and wants to see as much of the world as she can, others are intent on making certain she is tied down. Marriage is the social institution to which most women in the 1880s would be drawn, but Isabel is not necessarily interested in that choice. When she does marry, she does so as the result of a character she misjudges. When she is faced with the choice of not returning to her husband after a long separation, the demands of social convention, propriety, and commitments to others for whom she feels responsible over weigh her desire not to go back. It is a cowardly decision in some ways, a surrender to convention, to return to a cold and manipulative husband, yet because certain individuals need her and depend on her, it is also a decision of courage and sacrifice. Portrait as a novel offers a dim view of marriage, which it shows as oppressive to women. There are four failed marriages in the novel, most notably Isabel’s. Portrait’s conclusion is as dark a conclusion as one might imagine for Isabel personally, barring her serious injury or death.

James has often been described as a novelist of human consciousness. Portrait is a full and rich evocation of the consciousness of Isabel Archer. Few characters have I admired so much as Isabel--in the sense that a reader admires literary characters--and few books have given me as much pleasure in the reading as this one. In his Preface, James explains how he decided to develop the novel, “’Place the centre of the subject in the young woman’s own consciousness,’ I said to myself, ‘and you get as interesting and as beautiful a difficulty as you could wish. Stick to THAT— for the centre; put the heaviest weight into THAT scale, which will be so largely the scale of her relation to herself.’”

Crazy Heart

Crazy Heart (2009) is notable for its relatively successful (because narrow) portrayal of a once famous country music singer struggling with decline, alcoholism, and general physical collapse. The acting by the two lead actors, Jeff Bridges and Maggie Gyllenhaal, is strong. The settings—bowling alleys, seedy nightclubs, one concert arenas, Gyllenhaal’s house, Bad Blake’s house, and the western desert--are what you’d want in this film about a down and out country music singer.

The plot is predictable. It reminded me of the 1971 film Payday in which Rip Torn portrayed a similar sort of country music singer in serious decline. But Crazy Heart is its own film with its own narrative. It works on the proposition that the love of a good woman can redeem even the most lost of lost men. This is the premise of innumerable country and western songs. Payday gave a grim naturalistic portrait of the country music industry from the viewpoint of a man--Maury Dann--struggling to pay his way from one day to the next, indifferent to the pain his alcoholism, drug abuse, and narcissism have caused. It’s difficult to like Maury Dann, or even to recognize what there might have been about him that once would have given him promise in the country music world. Crazy Heart asks its audience to like Bad Blake. Yes, he’s an alcoholic who has made all the mistakes alcoholics make—broken marriages, alienated children, lost opportunities. But he’s also lovable. When he sings we can understand that he really does have a talent. When he screws up, we’re sorry. And when he and Jean Craddock (Maggie Gyllenhaal), bruised by a painful divorce, start a relationship, we’re hopeful. Jeff Bridges portrayed a character vaguely similar in the title role of The Big Lebowski (1998).

(Crazy Heart is in fact about a lost opportunity, but also about the possibilities it opens up).

Payday ends with Maury Dann dead in a cornfield. Crazy Heart refuses to give up on its romance with Bad Blake, even in what happens in his relationship with the younger Jean. The novel by Thomas Cobb on which the film is based provides a darker, and perhaps even more realistic, outcome.

Good acting and a strong screenplay make Crazy Heart work. Robert Duvall’s brief appearance as Wayne, a bartender and Blake’s close old friend, enriches the film.

The Lovely Bones

I have not read Alice Seybold’s novel The Lovely Bones, the basis of the 2009 film directed by Peter Jackson. My comments on the film do not necessarily apply to the novel, which I will read eventually.

Visual imagery and acting are the strong points of Jackson’s film. The premise, that a dead girl can somehow interact with the living world, that there is an intangible interconnection between the living and the dead world, is highly speculative. And the film’s portrayal of heaven, or whatever place it is that the dead girl goes to, is simply fraudulent—the film goes where it shouldn’t, where it can’t. If heaven exists, it is beyond the ability of anyone living to comprehend. That part of the movie is fantasy. It is one thing to have a dead character narrate a story—Quentin Compsons does that in the second section of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. But he does so as a purely narrative convention. Faulkner does not speculate about where or how or if he is—his voice merely recounts events leading to his suicide. In this film the dead girl Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) inhabits a world for the dead but at the same time can observe and somehow move around in the real world. At key moments, in ways subtle and in the end obvious, she can influence events. In the end she seems to interact directly with a still living character. The Others (2001) uses the conventional trappings of a ghost story but adds a Turn of the Screw kind of twist. The Others succeeds because viewers don’t know the truth until the very end. In The Lovely Bones director Jackson spells out the situation in so much detail that the implausible fantasy overrides and weighs down the film. On the one hand we have grieving parents, siblings, and friends trying to deal with a horrible tragedy; on the other we have the dead girl inhabiting a fancifully drawn, arbitrarily constructed after-life that seems less heavenly that psychedelic. The two dimensions of the film are a mismatch.

The Lovely Bones is a fantasy and a murder mystery. The murder mystery is more interesting and successful, though we know from an early point who the murderer is. The dead girl narrates the film as she attempts to understand what happened to her and why, and as she tries to accept her new situation. She can see family members but cannot interact with them. But there are subtle, faint ways that she can influence them, especially her father’s growing obsession with discovering his daughter’s murderer. Saoirse Ronan as Susie Salmon is beautifully convincing as she grapples with her loss of the life she was just beginning to live. She plaintively, wistfully mourns her own death, the life and family and boyfriend she has lost, and she feels real fear—or whatever fear it is that the dead may be said to feel—as she moves closer to discovering or realizing or remembering the moment of her death. Mark Wahlberg as her deeply grief-stricken father is particular good. This film was most affecting in its portrayal of how the parents and Susie’s sister react to her disappearance, not only when they learn of it but as her absence influences them for weeks and months to come.

Some might argue that the film is a fantasy and that I should view it as such. No. It tries to be fantasy and reality both. It doesn’t work.

The film is often engaging, with strong characters and scenes, but its ultimate premise offends. Its conception of the afterlife, and of what happens when one dies, should offend those who believe in heaven and those who do not. Surely the Afterlife—if it is, whatever it is—is not a New Age Theme Park.

The Birds

The 1950s and 1960s were decades replete with mostly B- and a few A-list films about monsters and aliens threatening the earth. Examples are The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), War of the Worlds (1953), It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955), and many others.

There were Godzilla films about giant fire-breathing dinosaurs, there were giant moths, giant crabs, giant rabbits, giant frogs, hordes of bees. We’re still seeing films about ecological catastrophes and threats from extraterrestrial sources—whether meteors or comets or alien invasions. For me the reason for these films lies in the end of the second world war, the atomic bombings in Japan, the dawning of the nuclear age and the Cold War, the revelations about the Holocaust. The world and our place in it as human beings became more difficult and complex and uncertain.

In this context Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Birds premiered in 1963, though prospects of ecological catastrophe or global apocalypse didn’t much influence how I viewed it as a thirteen-year-old boy.

I first saw The Birds in 1963 at the East Point theatre, in East Point, GA, just south of Atlanta. Every Saturday I would board the bus where I lived in College Park and ride fifteen minutes to the stop at what was then Russell High School. The East Point theatre was across the street. For 25 cents every Saturday afternoon you could see a double-feature. That is where I saw the film.

In 1963 The Birds was frightening and disturbing and highly satisfying. I find it all these things and more now.

Hitchcock took the idea for The Birds from a 1952 story by Daphne Du Maurier. He had earlier directed adaptations of her novels Jamaica Inn (1939) and Rebecca (1940). The latter won the Best Picture Oscar in 1941. Du Maurier’s set her story on the Cornish coast of England. Hitchcock moved the setting to a small California coastal town named Bodega Bay. The brief invasion of another California town in 1961 by seagulls lost in the fog also influenced this film about birds that inexplicably and viciously attack human beings.

Hitchcock’s film engages in little speculation about why the birds attack. His birds are the same cute, harmless creatures we think of as charming at the seashore or at the feeders in our backyards. They attack hapless individuals without warning, and with increasing ferocity—children, old men, random people, then the entire town. And their central target is the main character Melanie Daniels (played by Tippi Hedren)—what does she do to deserve the attacks? Is she just in the wrong place at the wrong time, or is there something more? The absence of explanation is a central part of this film’s artistry.

Here are several ways to think about The Birds:

1. As a science fiction or a monster film—some people regard it as such. I don’t, but it was as I note earlier made in that Cold War era of science fiction films.

2. As a film about hysteria among individuals and within an entire community. The hysteria is focused on Melanie Daniel. She’s a cosmopolitan, upper-class jet-set type. When she arrives in Bodega Bay looking for a man she hardly knows, Mitch Brenner (played by Rod Taylor), she is an intruder and an outsider. Her big city San Francisco ways clash with those of the people in this small town. Mitch’s widowed mother Lydia (played by Jessica Tandy) is suspicious of her, as is his former flame Annie Hayworth (Susanne Pleshette), as are others. Do their suspicions radiate outwards? Do the attacking birds somehow give them form and force? The film especially reminded me in this regard of Shirley Jackson’s 1948 story “The Lottery” and even of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1835 story “Young Goodman Brown.”

3. As an Oedipal melodrama. This is how the quirky but always interesting critic Camille Paglia views it (she claims to enjoy the scenes of birds attacking children, and she believes Hitchcock did as well). Melanie’s powerful and wealthy father is always absent, though she often talks to him on the phone. Lydia’s husband is dead—his portrait looms always in sight in the scenes set in her living room. She is afraid her son will abandon her (he spends every weekend with her); Annie has been abandoned as well. Do tensions and rivalries that result somehow manifest in the swarming birds?

4. As a drama about violence and revenge against women—single young women, outspoken and aggressive women who cross expected bounds of propriety for 1963. Melanie Daniel is such a woman—she’s wealthy, affluent, perhaps sexually aggressive—she’s rumored to have danced naked in a Roman fountain. And she does come looking for Mitch in her fancy car and clothes and immaculate hairdo. If we see her this way, as the object of violence from birds and characters in the film, then she’s also Hitchcock’s victim—both inside and outside the film--what Tippi Hedren endured in the making of The Birds is astounding and legendary. You may recall a similar victim, played by Janet Leigh, in Hitchcock’s 1961 film Psycho.

5. Finally we might see The Birds as an early film about ecological disaster. Hitchcock himself suggested as much in a short and wry film he made to publicize The Birds—it’s an extra on the DVD. The Birds does suggest that the attacks in Bodega Bay are spreading elsewhere, are not isolated. Are the attacking birds taking revenge on humankind for all of its sins, ecological and otherwise? In various subtle ways this is the explanation the film seems to favor, without discounting the others.

The performances in The Birds are remarkable, from Rod Taylor as the leading male character to Susanne Pleshette as the school teacher to Jessica Tandy to Hedren herself. Hedren is the film’s center. This is one of the two truly great performances of her career, the other being Marnie, the 1964 Hitchcock film that followed this one. There’s also a wide cast of minor characters, most of them inhabitants of Bodega Bay—each of them distinctive and fully drawn. It’s unusual to see a cast of secondary characters like this in contemporary films.

There is no music here—only the menacing cries of birds.

There are no digital effects either—there are a few papier-mâché birds, a lot of careful editing and deft film work—but most of the birds you see are real crows, ravens, seagulls, finches. The effects are successful enough, though they are clearly not state of the art by contemporary standards.

In The Birds virtually all the elements of filmmaking—screenplay, directing, acting, editing, sound, cinematography, art design, effects—combine in a terrifying and complexly disturbing work. (It also has its moments of humor too). The Birds is one of Hitchcock’s great films.

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Having recently seen The Birds again on my own, and then having watched it with a sizeable audience at the local arts cinema, I wonder whether a film such as The Birds, whether any great film, is doomed to irrelevance by the passage of time. Today’s audiences have seen far more gruesome and terrifying films (many of which borrowed from The Birds). Does the way in which Hitchcock builds suspense and portrays his characters strike modern viewers as formulaic and clichéd? Does Melanie Daniels herself come across as the sexy and independent woman she is supposed to be, or do modern viewers see her as a kind of overdressed joke from the early 60s? Hitchcock invites total immersion in the lives and experiences of his characters, especially in Melanie Daniel’s experience. But do the cultural and historical markers that identify this film as a product of the early 1960s prevent modern audiences from appreciating it? I lived through the 50s and 60s, and it is easy for me to be caught up in The Birds without worrying about the historically marked ways in which characters dress and talk and act. Is the same possible for viewers born in 1970 or 1980 or 1990? Some viewers can suspend their sensibilities and give themselves up to the film. But some viewers in the audience with me at the recent screening laughed in places where laughter was not what I expected. Either I was failing to recognize the humor they saw, or they were reacting to what they regarded as archaic elements in the film. For them, The Birds may not have offered the immediacy of experience that great art should provide.

Kick-Ass

Few recent films have given me as much pleasure as Kick-Ass (2010, dir. Matthew Vaughn). This independent film is one of the best comic-book-based films I’ve ever seen. It’s also a coming-of- age tale—an anonymous young high school boy, a comic book geek, ignored and made fun of by his classmates, ignored especially by the girl he’s fascinated with, wonders why in the real world there are no super heroes when there is so much need for them, when so many people enjoy reading about them. He decides to become one. There’s a super-hero “origin” story embedded here that makes gentle fun of the stories of how Superman and Spiderman and Batman came to be. The heroes in this film have no super powers. They live in the real world.

Rather than ruin the story for you, I will simply say that Kick-Ass is full of violent action of a type that makes you flinch. It has the foulest mouth I’ve ever heard in a thirteen-year-old girl, not to mention her skills with gymnastics, knives, guns, and all forms of mayhem. It has Nicolas Cage as her geek-father, Damon Macready, a former police officer set up for selling drugs and sent to jail by the town crime boss. Macready’s out for revenge and vindication.  Cage is, for a change, quite good in the role. Kick-Ass also has one of the meanest, nastiest, dislikeable bad guys imaginable.

Notwithstanding the presence of Chloe Grace Moretz as a child super hero (“Hit Girl”--Moretz was 11 when filming began), no sensitivities are honored here: the violence and the shedding of blood and limbs are intense, graphic, and frequent—much of it accomplished by Hit Girl. I’ve read objections to the film’s use of foul language and violence in the guise of a 13 year old. There may be a point there, but the movie is what it is.

Kick-Ass is funny and gruesome. It employs a terrific soundtrack.

There’s not much substance here—why should there be?—Kick- Ass is mainly action and character. It shows us how Dave Lizewski struggles out of his timidity to become an adult. The central theme is not that “with great power comes great responsibility,” a line (I think) from the Spiderman films. Rather, it is that even without power one must take responsibility and act. The city where Dave and other characters live is overwhelmed with crime and major crime lords. We see scenes where citizens watch crimes being committed, people under assault, without doing anything to interfere. Dave assumes that responsibility.  (A subtext here might be a call for average citizens to take action and exert moral authority when others are in peril).

If you measure this film by the laws of logic or physics or statistical improbability (with so many bullets flying, how do the good characters avoid them, how can they leap between buildings, and so on?), if you look for depth, the film won’t work. If you like intense action, spectacle, violations of traditional boundaries, and mockery of the very form to which the film pays tribute, then Kick-Ass will work for you. A sequel, unsurprisingly, is on the way.

As in many other films like this one—the Batman and Spiderman films, Watchmen, From Hell, and Sin City are examples—the urban world is dark and crime-ridden, on the verge of collapse if not already there. It’s a place of total moral anarchy. The protagonists of Kick-Ass are particularly young, facing on their own a world that adults have made for them. I find in this a grim assessment of our own situation.

Mary Chesnut’s Civil War Epic, by Julia A. Stern

See The Civil War Book Review. 

Thunder Road

In the 1950s and early 60s young America was obsessed with cars. Consider Rebel without a Cause (1955), the car songs of Jan and Dean and of the Beach Boys and others. Thunder Road, released in 1958, played directly into this obsession. If you saw the trailer, you would think that cars are all it is about. In reality, although cars and wild races along dangerous mountain roads occupy much of the film, there are other concerns. Thunder Road invokes for me the film Lonely Are the Brave (1962), a modern-day Wild West fable based on the Edward Abbey novel The Last Cowboy. That film traces the struggles of a cowboy (played memorably by Kirk Douglas) who wants to live only on his own terms to escape pursuing law enforcement officials and other pressures of the modern world. He’s struggling to retain his individualism, his identity as a solitary soul in a world that increasingly demands conformity and corporate buy-in-signified by the fences that enclose much of the land through which he passes.

In Thunder Road (1958; dir. Arthur Ripley) this struggle of tradition and the modern, of the way of life in an isolated mountain valley set against the great world outside, of the individual against the demands of the federal government and a corporate criminal syndicate, is expressed in the venerable practices of moonshine and bootlegging.

Lucas Doolin (Robert Mitchum) is the bootlegger who drives illegal whiskey all over the southeast, from Tennessee and North Carolina to Kentucky. Much of his driving is back and forth between the mountain home where he lives and Memphis, Tennessee. These are polar opposites—Memphis is the big city, with all the temptations the word suggests, while home in the mountains is family and tradition and basic human values. In Memphis Doolin carries on an affair with a night club singer (Keely Smith) while at home he tries to fend off the attentions of Roxanna Ledbetter (Sandra Knight), who truly loves him.

The central struggle is between Doolin and a corporate hoodlum, Carol Kogan, who is trying to threaten and intimidate all the moonshiners in the area to sell out to him. It’s also with the federal government. Gene Barry plays Troy Barrett, a Treasury Agent on the lookout for illegal moonshiners. Barrett sets out to capture Doolin, who is breaking the law by running whiskey. But Barrett also comes to sympathize with Doolin and wants to save him from Kogan and his henchmen. Kogan begins ambushing and killing moonshiners who won’t sell out to him. Doolin isn’t threatened, so Kogan sets his sights on eliminating him.

In the value system of this film, Barrett is only trying to enforce the law. Doolin is the emblem of American individualism. Kogan epitomizes criminal and corporate greed.

Thunder Road does an admirable job of portraying mountain people in their own contexts. We see what appear to be authentic cabins and farms, mountain farmers dressed in overalls and smoking pipes and talking to one another around a fire. They have their own dignity and are not presented as inbred degenerates. If there are stereotypes here, at least they are not intentionally offensive. The fact that many (if not most) of the mountain men make illegal whiskey is a sign of their adherence to the old ways of life, and of their resistance to the forces of the federal government that wants to regulate and tax the whiskey they make and sell. Apparently, the moonshiners and the feds play by a certain sets of rules that both sides understand. It is Kogan who introduces a new dynamic, who bullies and kills and is essentially nothing more than a ruthless mobster.

As Doolin, Robert Mitchum (who wrote wrote the story on which the film is based, and who coproduced with the director) plays a figure fundamental to 20^th-century American cinema and literature—the loner who strikes out against all odds to resist the efforts of governments and corporations to control him. We’ve seen characters like Doolin in Godard’s Breathless (1960), in Easy Rider (1969) and Cool Hand Luke (1967) and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), and in numerous other literary and cinematic works. He’s an existential hero of the modern age. He doesn’t particularly like what he does, but it’s what he knows, and he’s good at it and intends on getting better and on not being caught until his number comes up—he knows it will. Doolin repeatedly insists that he doesn’t want his younger brother Robin, who keeps his car in repair, from getting involved in bootlegging, and he goes out of his way to prevent him from doing so. In fact, when he learns that Kogan has set his brother up to be ambushed and killed, he calls Kogan up to promise him that he will kill him. This seals Doolin’s fate.

One issue I have with Thunder Road is the unlikely romance Doolin carries on with the Memphis nightclub singer. It’s not only the improbability that a sophisticated big-city singer would be attracted to a mountain moonshiner, but also the improbability that such a woman would ever interest Doolin. Yet he professes his love to her, and we are supposed to believe he means it. I suppose his romance with her is a sign that he is more sophisticated than he lets on, a confirmation of his stated desire to leave moonshining behind for a better life outside the mountains. It’s also the film’s way of trying to make Doolin exceptional and therefore worthy of our attention—would a less savory moonshiner be as interesting as Doolin? Thus the film hedges its bets.

Special effects are also a weakness. The film is convincing in its shots of moonshiners barreling at breakneck speeds down mountain roads, pursued either by the revenuers or Kogan’s gang or both. But when the camera moves inside the car with Doolin, the background behind him is clearly on a screen, moving past the car in a studio. It’s not believable. This problem does not merely reflect the limited technology available when the film was made, but also its low budget.

Robert Mitchum’s portrayal of Doolin makes this film an iconic landmark.

Generosity: An Enhancement, by Richard Powers

Generosity: An Enhancement (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009) is one of Richard Power’s most accessible novels. It revisits topics he previously explored in such works as Galatea 2.2 (1995) and The Goldbug Variations (1991--my personal favorite). But Powers in this novel gives new twists to issues of genetics, genomes, and the relationship of the human individual to science. At first this novel seems headed towards an exploration of genetic engineering, and the question of whether one’s genetic makeup necessarily compels one towards a particular behavior and disposition. Powers provides a background frame to this subject by having the book narrated by its own author—a fictional author who may or not be Powers himself. The author imagines characters into being and, in the conclusion, imagines them out of being. This frame focuses our awareness on the fact that characters in a novel are artificial constructs who behave at the whim of their authorial creator. Or do they? Are the actions of a fictional character as determined as the behavior of an individual with a particular genetic makeup? Is there self-determination, free will? Do we inhabit a genetically determined world?

One of the two main characters in Generosity is a failed writer, Russell, who, after several early successes with nonfiction, suffers a long and extended and possibly permanent writer’s block. Blockage extends to other areas of his life. He is stuck in an unending rut, able to make few if any decisions for himself, constantly dealing with his sense of failure, which controls everything he does. In a temporary instructional assignment he teaches a creative nonfiction class to a group of mostly adult students, one of whom is Thassa, a young Berber Algerian woman blessed with an ebullient, sunny, always positive disposition. She has the ideal genetic makeup for optimism, for happiness. Can her genes be mapped? Can they be bought and commercialized and become the basis for a genetic engineering marketing campaign that offers happiness to everyone who buys it?

When word gets out that Thassa has the happiness gene, she becomes an object of celebrity fascination and notoriety. Fans and opponents picket her dormitory. She is invited to appear on the television show of a famous media star (similar to Oprah Winfrey). She is the subject of newspaper articles and TV news reports. A famous journalist wants to write about her. How Thassa responds to this attention, and to the interest of a genetic engineering entrepreneur who wants to explore and, in some way, market her genetic makeup, is part of the focus of the novel, which becomes a study of the destructive power of the celebrity and media cultures in contemporary America. It suggests that having scientific issues debated in public can result in fundamental misunderstandings. It suggests that the fusion of scientific research with corporations and commercial interests can lead to unhappy and even destructive compromises. To an extent these additional themes give the novel a bifurcated focus, and the concern with genetic engineering and determinism is partially derailed.

Russell falls in love with Thassa, and he also falls in love and has an affair with a psychological counselor at the university where he teaches. All of the characters in this narrative have personal interests and obsessions that intermingle with professional ambitions—no one is uncompromised, even Thassa.

By the way its plot works towards a conclusion, Generosity provides some speculative answers to the questions it raises. By basing its narrative on the premise that fiction is, after all, nothing more than fiction (Henry Fielding and Henry James and Paul Auster and others have made this notion explicit too), by having the author-narrator consign his characters to non-existence as the novel ends, Powers makes his point, but in the process strips away a level of pleasure from this reader. Who does not understand that novels are fiction, the creations of a writer, that characters are imagined beings? Who needs to be reminded?

The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence, by Paul Davies

In The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence (Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt, 2010) Paul Davies reviews the history of the fifty-year-old SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Life) project. His specific interest is the “eerie silence” of his title. Although SETI has been looking for radio signals from alien civilizations elsewhere in the universe, no signals have been received. What does this mean? That SETI is looking in the wrong places, that there is no alien life out there, that their civilizations are too advanced to use radio signals, that SETI is looking for the wrong kinds of communication? Davies considers all these possibilities. He reviews not only the history of SETI but also the speculation over the last several centuries about whether extraterrestrial life exists and the forms it might take. Davies is a serious scientist who explains that SETI research is a scientific enterprise carried out with scientific methods. Searching for ET he regards as a natural expression of human beings for making connections and for a larger understanding of identity and existence.

Davies suggests that looking for radio signals may be quixotic. The Universe has existed for twelve or more billion years. If there are alien civilizations out there, they may have developed and disappeared millions of years before our present moment. The probability that there is a civilization out there at this precise moment in time that has decided to use radio signals to contact other beings is unlikely. Moreover, such a civilization might be using another form of communication, such as laser beams (which SETI is now looking for).

Davies hypothesizes that an alien civilization further developed than our own might communicate in forms we can’t imagine. To them radio signals would be an ancient, antiquated technology. Perhaps, then, we’re not looking for the kinds of communication aliens might use. Perhaps they wouldn’t be seeking to communicate at all and instead might have left by accident or intention other artifacts of their existence. Davies discusses what these might be and how we could recognize them. He suggests that if an encounter with aliens ever comes, it might be with independent self-replicating robots sent out by their creators to explore and report back on the state of the universe. This aspect of the book is highly speculative.

Davies notes that much speculation about alien civilizations has been anthropomorphic, and that we tend to think of other civilizations as being similar to our own. He speculates as well that life on other planets might well not be carbon-based. He discusses the possibility that life might have begun elsewhere, such as on Mars, and later transferred to earth by meteor impacts.

I was most interested in Davies speculations about the possibility that there is no other life at all out there in the cosmic expanses. As a scientist he expresses his conviction that intelligent life does not exist elsewhere in the universe, that its development on the earth was a highly random and unlikely event. This runs contrary to what many others believe, but Davies makes a persuasive case for his position. He suggests that life may not be as quick to develop as some, such as Carl Sagan, have suggested. At the same time as a human being he wants to believe in the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the cosmos.

Davies’ concluding discussion of the consequences of discovering that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the cosmos, or that there isn’t, and his ruminations on what such a discovery would mean to our sense of ourselves as human beings, is fascinating.

Point Omega, by Don DeLillo

Point Omega is the endpoint: the apocalypse, the end of human life, the end of the world, the prospect of personal extinction. In this slight novel by Don DeLillo (Scribner’s 2010) —and by slight I mean in length, not in substance—personal extinction looms in the foreground, but all the other meanings are present as well. The novel has three sections—in the first a filmmaker named Jim Finley (we don’t immediately learn that he is a filmmaker) is obsessed with an exhibit at the New York Museum of Modern Art. An artist has taken Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and slowed it down so that it takes 24 hours to watch. People drift in and out of the exhibit room. No one seems to remain for long, except Finley, who is there for most of the eight days the film is playing. He’s obsessed with it.

At the exhibit, Finley meets Richard Elster, a brilliant and aging intellectual who is living out the final years of his life in a desert shack in California. His most recent work involved advising the U. S. military on how to package the concept and practice of war for public consumption. He says he wanted to reduce the concept of war to a haiku. Finley becomes obsessed with making a film in which Elster does nothing but talk. Elster invites him out to the cabin. Finley spends much time trying to convince Elster to do the film, and Elster seems to be interested, although he never commits to the project. The cabin is a place of extreme isolation. Cell phone signals barely work there. But Elster is the most isolated of all in the novel.

Elster’s daughter comes to the cabin to visit. Elster loves her but rarely speaks to her directly. Instead he speaks about her, most often to Finley. She doesn’t really want to be there—her mother has forced her to make the visit so that she will not see a man she has been involved with romantically. Finley grows attracted to her. One night on the porch, after Elster has gone to bed, he takes her hand and holds it. But Elster suddenly turns on his bedroom light and then comes out on the porch. The daughter goes inside. Later the same evening, Finley walks past her door, slightly ajar, and looks in to watch her sleep. He suddenly realizes she is awake and watching him, and then she turns away from him—a clear rejection.

The next day she disappears, without explanation. Has she been abducted or committed suicide? The local sheriff comments than many people come to the desert to commit suicide. She never returns and no trace of her is ever found. Did Finley kill her? Probably not. He never hints or implies in any way that he did, but the possibility is there. He also seems totally unaware, or unwilling to acknowledge, that his actions the previous evening may have had some connection with her disappearance.

Elster is devastated and destroyed by his daughter’s disappearance. He stops talking and begins wasting away, physically and intellectuals. Eventually Finley takes him back to New York, planning to leave him in the care of the most recent ex-wife.

In the final section of the novel Finley is back in the Museum, watching the slowly progressing Hitchcock film. He makes a half-hearted effort at conversation with a woman, who gives him her number, but he forgets to ask her name. The novel ends.

There are no real resolutions here. Rather, there are circumstances and situations. One can see (or imagine that he sees) much of DeLillo in Elster, the aging artist and intellectual. But one can also see much of the reclusive novelist Bill Gray and his relationship with his two assistants in DeLillo’s Mao II (1991).

The emotional impact of the middle section, where Elster’s daughter disappears, is haunting and powerful. The writing and its evocation of the desert setting reminded me of several essays by Joan Didion in her book Slouching towards Bethlehem (1968). This novel never clearly sets forth what the narrative or intellectual issues are. It implies them by reflecting them—Finley’s obsession with the slowed-down Psycho, Elster’s comments about the modern world. We know simply that Finley wants to make a film about Elster, and that Elster has withdrawn from life, feels alienated from everything, believes the end is coming both for himself and the rest of humanity, even as he is considering the film. Finley himself is a younger version of Elster. His obsession with filmmaking (he has made only one other film) costs him his marriage. He lives alone in a New York apartment and, despite his intention to make films, is adrift. He’s also a kind of voyeur, a watcher. Elster’s foreboding sense of doom and horror, not only at his own situation—death’s approach—but at the general situation of the world, dominates the novel. A spooky, eerie, depressive gloominess envelops Point Omega, and the fact that the novel never comes to a conclusion, that nothing is resolved for any of the characters, enhances the pervasive sense of doom.

What to make of the 24-hour Psycho? Such a film was actually made by Scottish artist Douglas Gordon in 1993 and screened at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC in 2004. DeLillo was reportedly impressed by it, and he acknowledges the artist on the last page of the book. But was he impressed or depressed? For me such exhibits are signs of how self-absorbed and obsessed with artificial constructions we have become in the contemporary world of interpretation, where we care more for the apparatus of interpretation than for the works under study. Finley’s obsession with the exhibit is a sign of his own narcissism and essentially obsessive-compulsive nature. Does the film signify for DeLillo the fragmentation and deconstruction of modern culture, or is he truly impressed by it as Finley was?

36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, by Rachel Goldstein

36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction (Pantheon Books, 2009) by Rachel Goldstein is structured around a conceit—each chapter is given the title of one of the thirty-six arguments. An appendix to the novel explains and refutes each argument. The chapter contents sometimes do correlate with the argument named in the chapter title, and sometimes do not. As I read, I became increasingly interesting in identifying connections between chapters and their titles, and ultimately gave up trying. This aspect of the novel’s organization to me seems clever but also contrived. I enjoyed a previous novel by Goldstein, Particles of Light. There she employs concepts from physics to advance the narrative. Goldstein is a novelist of ideas, and she aims her novels at readers who will understand and appreciate the worlds she writes about. Even when her novel may seems unsuccessful, the situations and ideas she explores are interesting. Even trying to decipher the structure of this novel was a rewarding engagement, though ultimately one that disappointed.

36 Arguments moves between the main character Cass Seltzer’s years as a graduate student working under a famous professor‘s tutelage and his adult success as the writer of an academic study that makes him famous. 36 Arguments is an academic novel—it’s about the academy and the academic ego, especially the egos of those ambitious for the kind of fame that research in the academy offers. Some pursue fame avidly, while others, like Cass Seltzer, stumble into it. He writes a book entitled Varieties of Religious Illusion that explains the psychological attractions of religion. It contains an appendix listing the 36 arguments of the title. This appendix becomes the basis of his fame, and he is labeled an “atheist with a soul.” There is also the fame (and ego) of the eminence grise Jonas Elijah Klapper, a truly monumental and oppressive figure who has outlived whatever fame he once had. Opposed to the modern, a defender of tradition, he invokes arguments and speaks in a language that make no sense. He gathers around him an entourage of graduate students (Cass among them) and ensures that most of them never graduate. And there is the ambitious yearning for fame of Seltzer’s romantic partner, Lucinda Mandelbaum.

The academic dimension of the novel is satiric. The religious dimension is not. While Cass argues that religion is an attractive illusion, he is nonetheless attracted to it himself. Raised in a Hassidic community by a mother who later breaks with Hassidism, he has lived in the secular world all of his life. Many of the scenes describing the “New Walden” Hassidic community and Cass’s interest in the Rebbe’s son, a mathematical genius, are quite moving.

Cass is a sympathetic character who has had a number of unsuccessful romantic relationships. Is he a hapless victim who hasn’t a clue as to why these entanglements failed, or is he somehow responsible for their failures? He is likeable, but Lucinda breaks up with him when he tells her that Harvard has offered him a position. She accuses him of a number of sins, and although she is jealous of his success, at least some of her accusations are just.

Divine Secrets of the Sister Ya-Ya Hood

Based on a novel by Rebecca Wells, Callie Khouri’s 2002 film Divine Secrets of the Sister Ya-Ya Hood uses with prodigious thoroughness stereotypes and characters drawn from the South. One wonders what connection the novel, and the film, have to Mary McCarthy’s The Group (1963), which traced the experiences of eight close friends in the years after their graduation from college. Ya-Ya Hood takes as its premise the convention that women, especially but not exclusively Southern women, can share a close bond of friendship that supports them in difficult times and shields them against the extremities of the outer world. This is a theme in Steel Magnolias (1989) and in Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), of course, and in fact Eudora Welty dramatizes the idea in her story “Lily Daws and the Three Ladies” as does Greg Johnson in “Crazy Ladies.”

The four women who are the main characters in this film are true Southern eccentrics (the purported protagonist, Sidda, daughter of one of the sisterhood members, is really just an excuse for the sisterhood members to tell their stories, their secrets). In their early adolescence they formed a secret sisterhood and vowed to remain faithful to each other throughout their lives. The sisterhood is a bond of commonality that supports its members through bad marriages, motherhood, nervous breakdowns, and crisis. In the film three members of the sisterhood decide to repair the relationship of Sidda and her mother Vivi, the fourth sisterhood member. The two have had a difficult relationship. Sidda is a New York dramatist whose plays seem to dramatize her childhood experiences. An interview with Sidda in Time identifies her mother as a source of childhood trauma. Vivi is enraged and cuts her daughter off. Sidda is about to marry an Irishman she lives with in New York, but she has been putting off the marriage for years, and when Sidda is kidnapped, drugged, and put on a plane to Louisiana by three members of the sisterhood, she seems ready to take the opportunity to delay the marriage again.

The basic premise of the movie revolves around the rift between Vivi and Sidda, the difficult times in Vivi’s life which her daughter either doesn’t know about or has repressed (she tells the interviewer that she had an uneventful childhood that gave her nothing to write about), and the importance of sisterhood. Once Sidda comes to understand the difficulties her mother faced (the death of the man she loved, her marriage to a man who loved her but was cold and emotionally repressed, her difficulties with alcoholism, her physical abuse of her children, and her nervous breakdown) then she can comprehend her own relationship with her mother and feel free to go ahead and commit to the Irishman. At least this seems to be the logic of the film.

The Southern environment makes Southern women into eccentrics: this also is an underlying premise. They marry men who have been repressed themselves and who are repressive. The sisterhood gives its members power over the men. Vivi’s husband is a case in point. He married Vivi because he loved her and despite the fact she didn’t love him, because he thought “he had enough love for both of them,” but his frequent absence during the marriage creates problems that lead to Sidda’s breakdown. It is the repressiveness of the Southern environment that makes these characters eccentric, and their eccentricity is what makes them interesting. Or is the film saying that the Southern environment tolerates eccentricity and individuality?

African-American characters are prominent. A black woman is a servant to some of the women (she is in effect an initiated member of the sisterhood). Black characters play music, and at the end there is a birthday party for Vivi where a Dixieland band performs. All the characters intermingle and the implication is that interdependency extends between the races as well as between genders. This is not inaccurate, of course.

One of the best scenes in the film occurs when the four sisterhood girls are taken by their maid to Atlanta for the premier of Gone with the Wind. The girls are enthralled, but the maid is not, and she thinks of the place as hellish. At the breakfast table the young son of the family that is hosting the girls refers to the maid as a “nigger” and the ya-ya hood girls throw food at him. The moment is significant for the irony of this trip for young white girls chaperoned by a black women to the Gone with the Wind premier, by the treatment of the maid at the table, and the snobbishness of their host family. Racial equality and tolerance were not part of the 1930s American South. In this sense the film presents the sisterhood members as exceptions to prevailing racial codes.

Many aspects of the film do not depend on the South for meaning and authenticity. The friendship of the sisterhood women has little to do with their Southernness. The experience of young women whose loved ones go off to World War II is not inherently Southern either. The film strives to portray a universality to the experiences of the women that is not limited by the regional setting.

Ultimately, the characters in this film are stereotypes, comic and even comic book figures. The notion that Sidda must return to her Southern home to face the past (aka Quentin Compson) is a platitudinous plot device. It reminds us of the main character in The Prince of Tides (1991).

This film takes place largely in the rural South, although there is not much evidence of a city or town nearby.

Sandra Bullock as Sidda does not speak with a Southern accent. Her prospective marriage to an Irishman is evidence of her desire to move outside her Southern heritage, but her willingness in the end to have the wedding at her mother’s home indicates her acceptance of or at least acquiescence to that heritage, especially when in the final scene she is initiated into the sisterhood.

The false or absent Southern accents in the film signify that the filmmakers wanted a Southern setting to flavor events but that they were not particularly interested in accurate portrayals of that setting. In fact, I would say the same of the Rebecca Wells novel, which mines the Southern stereotypes for all the comic effect they are worth and creates a mythic world of eccentricity, friendship in the face of suffering, good feelings, and reconciliation that has only loose connection with the outside world.

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call--New Orleans

The disorder and destruction in Post-Katrina New Orleans mirrors a similar state of being in the main character of Werner Herzog’s The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call--New Orleans (2008). I found the title of this film awkward the first time I heard it. Why “Port of Call”? The film has nothing to do with shipping or sailing or travel. The title seems a contrivance, an effort to suggest something more artful and exotic than what the film really offers. It should offer more. I felt the entire film was a contrivance, and not in a positive sense. The first fictional film directed by Herzog in years (he has been making documentaries in the meantime), Bad Lieutenant is a loose remake of a 1992 film set in New York. Herzog has a great eye for settings—I think in particular of his 1992 documentary Lessons in Darkness on the first U. S. invasion of Iraq, and his 2007 documentary Encounters at the End of the World. That perceptive eye is sometimes in evidence here, especially in views of the New Orleans skyline and of devastated streets left vacant by the post-Katrina floods.

But for the most part the film is a hyperbolic and excessive mess. Nicolas Cage plays Terence McDonagh, a detective already inclined towards questionable behavior when we first meet him. In an early scene he and his partner (Val Kilmer) are taunting a prisoner in a city jail cell about to be submerged by rising flood waters from the hurricane. They laugh at the prisoner, a young Hispanic man, who is terrified. Finally Cage jumps in the water to release him from the cell, but he injures his back and is left permanently in pain. He is promoted and honored for his heroism, and a year later he is seeking relief from his pain through various forms of legal and illegal drug use, and his life seems a darkening shambles. He’s faced with gambling debts (and mobsters who threaten him for failure to pay what he owes), he loses his temper with two citizens whose relatives are influential with the police captain, he pressures a football player to throw a game he has bet on, he blackmails arrest victims for sex, he’s suspended from duty, he promises to fix speeding tickets, he makes a deal with a local drug lord (Big Fate, played by Xzibit) in hopes of making enough money to pay his debts, the list could go on.

McDonagh’s difficulties finally reach the point where it seems impossible to conceive that he will find a way out. I found myself overcome with suspense as to when and how he would meet his fate. Amazingly, he doesn’t.

The one possibly redeeming trait in McDonagh’s character is his interest in solving the murder of five Senegalese illegal immigrants. Children are among the dead. McDonagh is horrified and enraged at the crime. But it’s difficult to sort out his desire to solve the crime with his numerous small and major acts of corruption. He does solve the murders and brings about the arrest of the murderers. His success could be the result of crafty thinking and planning, or it could simply be the result of good luck.

Some scenes in this film make no sense. In one McDonagh hallucinates and listens in hilarity as various lizards, including an iguana, sing. The iguana shows up in another scene. McDonagh’s colleagues never figure out that he is addicted to drugs, many of which he is stealing from the police stock room. He often looks drugged out, and his behavior is often very unusual. (Maybe they do know and don’t care—maybe that is Herzog’s point—it’s OK for the white detective to do drugs, just not the blacks and Hispanics and the young). McDonagh’s father, struggling with alcoholism, lives with his drunken younger wife in what appears to be a broken down Southern mansion—exactly how does he manage to afford living there? Near the end of the film, McDonagh is sitting with Big Fate when the mobster and two henchman show up to demand that he pay his gambling debt. Big Fate and his henchmen (everyone in this film has henchmen) shoot the mobsters to death. In a scene just a few moments later, McDonagh leads his police colleagues in a raid on Big Fate’s home—he is arrested. Yet the drug lord never reveals that McDonagh had conspired with him. Are we to believe that McDonagh’s plotting was all the result of a conscious plan? Does Big Fate never give a second thought to why this white detective wants to help him sell drugs and make money? McDonagh does convince Big Fate to smoke crack from his pipe—this allows detectives to use DNA on the pipe to connect him with the murders—a solution that in the context of everything else in the film seems too gratuitous and forced.

In the penultimate scene, all McDonagh’s problems have vanished. He’s given another commendation and promotion by the police department. He has married the woman he loves, who is pregnant and sober (she was a drug addict prostitute throughout most of the film), and they live in a handsome New Orleans home. Everything is wonderful. (I was reminded of the final scene of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet). And in the closing scene we see that, as much as McDonagh has turned his life around, he is still the same corrupt lieutenant as in the beginning.

One of Herzog’s points in this film is to show that the American legal system, the American system of values and its commitment to democratic ideals, the entire concept of the American Dream (which McDonagh has incredibly attained at the end of the film) are hollow and corrupt. The devastated New Orleans landscape, especially the poverty-stricken areas whose inhabitants suffered horribly during Katrina and its aftermath, is his embodiment of the discrimination and corruption that he sees underlying the system. The oppressed and powerless—African Americans, Hispanics, the young—are victimized by those in power. Herzog has frequently shown his disdain for America in his films. It is entirely appropriate for him to dramatize and illustrate his opinions. But one wishes he could have done so in a better film.

Many reviewers of this film liked it more than I did. Did they pay too much deference to Herzog? Perhaps they were reacting to the performance by Cage. His McDonagh is wild and remarkable, reckless and self-destructive. He held my attention.

Catch-22, by Joseph Heller

A memorable scene in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) is Yossarian’s romance with Nurse Duckett, which is followed immediately by death when McNutt’s plane flies too close to the wooden raft on which Kid Sampson is standing. The first is lively and vital and satiric, and the second benefits from the gruesome contrast—the idyll of love followed by the bizarre gruesomeness of a horrible death.

Much in this novel is slapstick and vaudevillian. A good example is the scene in which the three officers interrogate cadet Clevinger. The dialogue could easily be that of a vaudeville comedy act from the 1920s or 30s, and it reminded me of the famous Abbott and Costello “Who’s on First” routine—nonsensical and hilarious. This novel contains more self-contained hilarious one-liners than any book I can think of. They sometimes overwhelm the narrative.

One might argue that Catch-22 is a moral indictment of war. I regard it as an amoral indictment. Yossarian is the heart and conscience of the book. He is outraged by the death and carnage of war, especially by the deaths of men in his unit caused by corruption of the military bureaucracy or the incompetence of senior officers or simply bad luck. But he is also afraid to die, and this fear drives him more strongly than any other motive. It explains why, in a scene late in the novel, he joins in a plot hatched by Colonels Cathcart and Corn to send him back home to the states if he will simply agree to “like” them. He later rescinds this agreement, in part out of concern for the other men in his unit, but it is nonetheless an example of the subversively amoral undertones of the novel.

There is not much plot here. What plot there is concerns Yossarian’s desire to survive the war, with corollary threads concerning Nately’s whore and her attempts to kill Yossarian, his half-memories of Snowden mortally wounded in the plane, his various stints in the hospital tent.

War in Catch-22 is a capitalistic enterprise. The growing conglomerate that Milo Minderbinder builds after he is appointed to kitchen duty is the primary vehicle through which Heller develops this idea. “What’s good for the syndicate is good for the country.” This notion leads Minderbinder to sell the morphine in the first-aid kits used to treat wounded soldiers, to bomb his own squadron headquarters, to feed chocolate-coated cotton to the soldiers, to enter into business agreements with the enemy, and so on. The enterprise is the nation, but more than that, the enterprise is the institution, the bureaucratic organism that consumes every individual. Catch-22 is about that organism, which feeds on the corruption and self-interest of all characters, including Yossarian himself.

In some ways the novel may be dated, especially in its treatment of women. In others it remains vital and pertinent. In the later chapters, especially after the death of Yossarian’s friend Nately, the novel becomes increasingly dark and hallucinatory. Some of the scenes, especially those in which Yossarian searches for the young sister of Nately’s whore, in which he discovers that Minderbinder’s men have driven all the whores away, in which he experiences one horrific vision after another, is like a journey through hell. It doesn’t approach the gruesomeness of the scene in the plane with Snowden, which Yossarian manages to avoid through most of the novel.

The novel’s pessimism is summed up in this realization: “He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all.”

The Post-American World, by Fareed Zakaria

Fareed Zakaria writes about significant global paradigm shifts in The Post-American World (W. W. Norton, 2008). A native of India and a naturalized United States citizen, he advocates a nonwestern view of global culture without pushing an anti-western agenda. He does not argue that the West (and specifically the U. S.) is in decline, but that such nations as India and China are experiencing dramatic growth, that they are becoming major factors in world economic and political matters. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the U. S. has stood unchallenged as a global super power. That position is changing. The U. S., Zakaria argues, still wields major economic and cultural influence, but other nations are gaining in power and prominence, and the question that confronts the U. S. is what kind of role it will assume in this new world order. Will we work with other nations, including ones with whom we have major disagreements, or will we pursue our own goals unilaterally, without regard for other players?

Zakaria notes that the West tends to view its history only from its own point of view. He notes as an example that we think of World War II only as a war fought by the West against totalitarian regimes, yet argues that most of the fighting in that war, and most of the deaths, occurred on the Eastern front between Russian and German armies. We also overlook the former prominence of science and of other forms of knowledge in the Asian and middle-eastern worlds. The West is not the only wellspring of knowledge and of civilization, he argues.

Zakaria is clearly an admirer of the United States. He calls it the first multinational nation and notes that much of the rest of the world has had great admiration for our nation and culture. But since the 1990s, as the U. S. has acted in an increasingly monolithic way, and especially since the second Bush administration, the nation has forfeited its former position of respect. Zakaria argues that much of the current prosperity of the U. S. is attributable to the creative work of recent immigrants from other countries. He praises our system of higher education as the best in the world, one that teaches students how to think critically and to solve problems, but notes that our public school systems are in crisis and that they’re not working well—we haven’t discovered how to educate the diverse population of students in these schools. The open market of the United States, its receptiveness to new ideas and ways of doing things, is a major key to its success. He notes that China’s open market approach to the world economy is a key to its burgeoning success. China is not a democratic nation, and Zakaraia observes that when the Chinese government decides to enact change, change happens fast. When India decides to do something, decisions get bogged down in the democratic process. The same is true in the United States. Zakaria finds our government a weak element in our nation—it is crippled by partisanship and political bickering.

Zakaria discusses the rise and fall of the British Empire and considers whether it offers parallels to the current position of the U. S. He regards the Boer War at the end of the 19^th century as responsible for the decline of British world influence. He suggests that the current Iraqi war for the U. S. could be similar, but also notes significant differences that do not guarantee a similar outcome if appropriate decisions are made.

Much has changed since Zakaria wrote this book—a devastating international economic crisis (which some nations are blaming on the U. S.), growing anti-immigration sentiments in our nation, the Tea Party movement, the election of an African American president who has taken an approach to foreign policy decidedly different from that of his predecessor—all these changes and others have significantly altered the landscape he describes. But they don’t alter his fundamental argument.

The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen

The American nuclear family has not fared well in American literature. Whether it has been William Dean Howells or Sinclair Lewis or John Steinbeck or William Faulkner or Jane Smiley or Joyce Carol Oates or John Cheever or John Updike or any number of other myriad writers, the family is often portrayed as a source of anguish, wounds, suffering torment, and existential angst. Usually, however, there is some small redemptive glimmer. Not so in Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections (2001). This novel is well written. Franzen is a fine prose stylist. Scenes are artfully conceived and executed. Characters are fully and credibly drawn. But artfulness is not its own justification. The deeper I got into this novel, the more abysmally depressive and dark it became. The Lambert family is clearly supposed to be representative, the quintessential American family of the new century. Yet its members are mired in self-interest, vanity, egotism, self-indulgence, cruelty, fatuousness, pride. They corrupt each other. They corrupt themselves. They mistreat their children and their aging parents.

Franzen’s novel is ripe with misanthropy and pessimism. Nary a glimmer of light is there anywhere. Franzen tempts his readers to laugh at the comic miscreants who make up his family, but after a while the various pains and indignities they suffer and inflict become all too deafening and one-dimensional.

The Lamberts are an all-too-easy target. Franzen invites us to laugh at and revile them. But he lacks pity, mercy, compassion, generosity, sympathy, understanding. In their place he exhibits smug scorn, self-righteous superciliousness, arrogance, heartlessness—I’m sure he’d insist otherwise.

Never Too Late: A Prosecutor's Story of Justice in the Medgar Evers Case, by Bobby DeLaughter

Never Too Late: A Prosecutor's Story of Justice in the Medgar Evers Case (Scribner, 2001), Bobby DeLaughter’s account of his prosecution of Byron de la Beckwith for his murder in 1963 of civil rights leader Medgar Evers explains how prosecutors meticulously reconstruct the details of the case thirty years after two trials ended in hung juries. It is notable for its portrait of Beckwith himself, whose racism and anarchistic propensity towards violence and murder were not merely monstrous but pathological. Beckwith admitted his responsibility for the murder of Evers to numerous individuals after the two hung jury trials. He was convicted in 1972 of the attempted murder of a Jewish leader in New Orleans, for which he spent three years in jail, and he bragged of involvement in other acts of violence and terror. De la Beckwith (known to friends as “Delay”) believed in the sacred virtues of white Christianity. He favored the elimination of nonwhites—especially Jews and African Americans—by whatever means possible. The rhetoric by which he expressed his views was essentially the same as that of the Nazis. De la Beckwith was the tip of a cultural iceberg that, one hopes, is rapidly melting.

DeLaughter sees his successful prosecution of Beckwith as evidence that Mississippi and the South have shed (to some extent) the racist heritage of the past. He also saw his victory in the case as the result of divine providence. That I doubt. It was the result of persistence, hard work, and the changing demographics of Mississippi society—the first two trials of Beckwith were heard by juries of all white males. The third trial jury included eight African American jurors, four whites, a mix of men and women. If divine providence had a role to play, Evers would not have been murdered to begin with.

One may be tempted to think that DeLaughter over-estimates the significance of his successful prosecution of Beckwith. Yet this book makes clear that DeLaughter’s persistence, hard work, and commitment to the trial were crucial to the outcome. He wasn’t simply a man who happened to be in the right place at the right time. He recognized the injustice in the fact that thirty years after the death of Evers, and after admitting to the crime on a number of occasions, Beckwith still walked and breathed a free man. Thanks to DeLaughter and his associates, and to a state that had changed, Beckwith was convicted and died in prison.

In an afterword, DeLaughter discusses his unsuccessful campaign for judge. He lost by a 2 to 1 margin. He felt many whites voted against him out of resentment over his prosecution of Beckwith. Some voters may have resented the negative attention the film Ghosts of Mississippi brought to the area—the film was a docudrama about DeLaughter’s prosecution of Beckwith. He is unhappy too that many African Americans did not vote in the election—he felt he had put himself and his career on the line in support of their cause and that they should have acknowledged his efforts by supporting him. Elections and the reasons why people do and do not vote are more complex and conflicted that DeLaughter would have it.

The narrative ends with DeLaughter’s appointment as a county court judge in 1999. Sadly, in 2008 DeLaughter was charged with five counts of bribery and suspended from the bench. He pleaded not guilty to these charges but eventually pleaded guilty to a count of obstruction of justice and was sentenced to eighteen months in federal prison.

The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring, by Richard Preston

Richard Preston, author of Hot Zone, is most interested in The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring (Random House, 2007) in the character and background of young men who become obsessed with the huge California redwoods, especially with climbing them. He focuses especially on three individuals, Steve Sillett, who becomes a botanist who studies the redwoods; Michael Taylor, afraid of heights but obsessed with identifying the tallest redwoods in the world—they grow up to 380 feet tall; and Marie Antoine, who compensates for childhood loneliness following her mother’s death by various hazardous activities, among them tree climbing. She eventually marries Sillett.

There is a subculture devoted to tree climbing, and Preston describes it along with the technology, techniques, and attractions of climbing the huge redwoods. Especially harrowing is his account of how a group of climbers sleep one night hundreds of feet above the ground in an especially tall and ancient redwood that leans at a precipitous angle out over the rest of the forest. A storm front comes through, and the tree sways and shudders wildly in the wind. The climbers can hear the tree groaning as it bends, but darkness and the wind make it too dangerous for them to descend to safety. They wait out the storm. A few weeks later the tree falls to the ground.

Although the redwoods originally covered large expanses of land near the California Pacific coast, logging and development have taken their toll, and now the trees remain in only a few areas, some of them protected as national and state parklands, others still vulnerable. They represent one of the largest and most remarkable life forms in the world, yet they’re threatened with extinction.

In the huge upper structures of the redwoods, which can live thousands of years, soil accumulates in the nooks and crannies of the branches and trunk stems. Other plants and animals take up residence there, and the redwoods therefore sustain their own unique biological environment.

Although the discussions in this book about the biological and environmental significance of the redwoods are fascinating, its greatest interest lies in the redwood climbers themselves. Disaffected in certain ways from their families and the greater human world, they find solace and satisfaction clambering above the ground in the redwood branches and trunk stems.

Easy Rider

“This used to be a helluva country,” says Jack Nicholson’s character George Hanson at a critical moment in the 1969 film Easy Rider (dir. Dennis Hopper). Later, the character Wyatt (Captain America, played by Peter Fonda) announces in response to Bill’s joy over their newly acquired wealth that “We blew it.” The plural pronoun “We” refers to more than simply these two biker dudes, who bought and sold drugs to fund their cross-country ride. “We” also refers to “we” Americans, to the nation and the American Dream.

This film is so much a product of its time that it seems more revelatory today than it did 41 years ago when it was first released. It clearly sets out the polarities into which, from one simplistic way of thinking, the counter culture and the nation as a whole divided ideas, ways of thinking, and people in the 1960s: young vs. old, those in power vs. those without power, the rich vs. the poor, white skinned vs. dark skinned, individuals vs. group think.

The most important scene in the film takes place shortly before George is clubbed to death in his sleeping bag by hostile local citizens of the small Southern town they’ve just passed through. The alcoholic lawyer George is wondering what has happened to the country. Billy, who thinks on a fairly impetuous and superficial level, believes that the reason he and Wyatt have been refused hotel rooms and experienced other forms of discrimination is because of their long hair:

“George: Oh, no. What you represent to them is freedom.

“Billy: What the hell is wrong with freedom? That's what it's all about.

“George: Oh, yeah, that's right. That's what's it's all about, all right. But talkin' about it and bein' it, that's two different things. I mean, it's real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace. Of course, don't ever tell anybody that they're not free, 'cause then they're gonna get real busy killin' and maimin' to prove to you that they are. Oh, yeah, they're gonna talk to you, and talk to you, and talk to you about individual freedom. But they see a free individual, it's gonna scare 'em.

“Billy: Well, it don't make 'em runnin' scared.

George: No, it makes 'em dangerous.”

Scenes in this film range from the sublime to the ridiculous, from profound to shallow. But this particular exchange is a key to the underlying themes and symbols in Easy Rider, and one of the most important scenes in American films from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. It’s a statement about profound economic, social, economic, and philosophical divides, an explanation of how in a certain way the American idolatry of the individual is really veneration of conformity. Individuals who do not conform to the requisite social and cultural expectations are cast out and held in contempt.

The American South in Easy Rider epitomizes the failure, from the film’s point of view, of the American experiment and the American Dream.

In a small Louisiana town, the three riders enter a small restaurant. They are ogled with admiration and interest by a booth full of Southern high school girls on the one hand, and eyed with contempt and hatred by another booth full of older Southern white men. “I don’t think they’ll make it to the parish line,” a gaggle-toothed man in a Cat hat leers as they watch Billy, Wyatt, and George. The South from this film’s viewpoint provides a ready vehicle for illustrating and exploring the failure of democracy and the egalitarian spirit.

Certainly one might complain about the one-sided and stereotypical view the film gives of the South. But though there are many other rooms in the Southern mansion, the room the film portrays is undeniably part of the larger structure.

The film makes clear that, no matter how cool and trendy they might appear to be, Wyatt and Billy have been a part of the American marketplace. Though Billy seems impervious to this realization, it hits Wyatt hard in the later scenes of the film, especially after the murder of George.

A number of scenes focus on people on the social and cultural margins. These especially include scenes featuring black people in the American South. Other scenes focus on images of power and affluence: a small-town courthouse, for instance, and white-columned Southern mansions. There are numerous images of waste, refuse, junked cars and machinery, abandoned houses. This is how the film construes America: a nation of waste, loss, disappointment. The film may be simplistic in its view of things, but at least it makes its view clear.

The Hurt Locker

The Hurt Locker (2008; dir. Katheryn Bigelowe) was difficult to like even though I admired it. It’s well made, and imaginatively detailed. About a team of American military technicians whose assignment in the Iraqi war is to defuse IEDs (improvised explosive devices), it should be fraught with tension. In a way, it is. But after a while the tension becomes so much an element of what the film is about that you don’t feel it as much. And when you realize that the real issue is how that tension affects the main character, that he isn’t going to die in an early scene, the suspense diminishes further. Instead you pay attention to how tension affects members of the unit. Each member is different. Sanborn, the black sergeant who is a long-term veteran of the war, is cautious to a fault. He follows procedure scrupulously and wants to survive his assignment to return home to his family. Specialist Eldridge is traumatized by the death of a former member of the unit. He doubts his own courage. Sergeant First Class William James (Jeremy Renner), called in to replace the team member who dies, relishes in the danger and pressure of defusing bombs. These moments bring him to life. He sees each bomb as a different challenge. He saves fragments from the devices he disassembles to remind him of his close encounters with death.

The Hurt Locker is about the breaking moment between one’s conscious life and the possibility of sudden annihilating death. It is about how familiarity with that possibility brings about its own normalcy.

The film’s central character is Sgt. James, the senior member of the unit. The highly episodic film is mostly fashioned around scenes in which the team undertakes to defuse various roadside devices. One would expect that the film therefore constantly generates tension over whether the IED is going to explode, whether one of the team members is going to die. In the opening scene a character who is not one of the primary figures works to defuse a bomb. Because in this early scene we do not know what to expect, because of how the scene is constructed (especially how it is edited), tension builds to an intense level and is then resolved. Midway through the film, the team drives out into the desert and stumbles into an ambush, with bullets whizzing back and forth from an indeterminate source, and American soldiers suddenly falling dead. This scene generates much tension. In another scene James tries to defuse an intricately rigged bomb in a military vehicle. He removes his helmet and protective gear in order to see better. He smokes a cigarette as he works. He knows that if he fails and the device explodes, the protective gear won’t help him. From nearby buildings, and in a more distant minaret, men watch him with binoculars and cameras. We do not know how they are, but the implication is that they had a role in setting up the bomb and want to see whether it explodes, whether James succeeds in defusing it.

The scene with the greatest tension occurs after Sergeant James return home from a tour of duty. He has survived hair-raising encounters with hostile soldiers, bombs rigged to explode in the most ingenious of ways. He has rescued Specialist Eldridge from kidnappers. He’s risked death on a daily basis. This scene shows him in his home with his wife and small child. He wanders down the aisle of a grocery store, picking out items. It’s a most domestic and banal moment. You expect something to happen, some crazed lunatic to enter the store and begin firing, whereupon James will try to intervene and be killed. The irony would be great (and hackneyed)—survive the horrors of the warfront, killed on the home front. But nothing happens. Nothing at all, which is why it is so tense.

War is supposed to be long stretches of boredom interrupted by brief and intense moments of violent terror. The Hurt Locker is built on this principle.

The final scene in this film reminded me of the concluding image in Runaway Train (1985; dir. Andrey Konchalovskiy), with the escaped and doomed convict played by Jon Voight standing on the top of a locomotive careening at breakneck speed down the track towards a dead-end. This is his willing apprehension of his own impending annihilation. It’s a moment of terrific glory, of existential self-assertion. In The Hurt Locker Sergeant James heads alone down a deserted street towards an IED that he must defuse. He doesn’t know if he is going to die, but’s it’s clear that the uncertainty, the tension, makes him alive. It makes him who he is. It’s the essential scene in the film.

Up in the Air

Up in the Air (2009; dir. Jason Reitman) is certainly stylish. It reminded me in ways of Stephen Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can (2002), though this film explores issues of substance too: unemployment, the increasing tendency of business to treat employees like faceless integers, the conflict between family and career. The film is well made. The acting by the three principals, George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, and Anna Kendrick, is certainly good, and Clooney is especially effective as the corporate terminator Ryan Bingham who travels from one assignment to another, informing employees in the most positive, cheerful, and upbeat way imaginable (but working mainly from a script he has long had memorized) that the company they work for no longer requires their services. Clooney loves his job. He lives in the airplanes and hotel rooms that are the warp and woof of his work. His real apartment, which we see only once in the film, is empty and bare. He has no settled life at all.

The crisis arises when Bingham’s firm hires a young woman (Kendrick) who convinces the owner that terminations can be as effectively carried out via long-distance video as in person. This would save the firm big money in travel and lodging expenses. Around the same time, Bingham becomes involved with a woman he meets in his travels. Like him, she seems to have no home, is always on the move. He invites her to accompany him to the wedding of his sister’s daughter. Later he discovers that she has a settled life with a husband and children.  These three events reveal to Clooney the emptiness of his life.

This discovery may be a big one for Clooney’s character, but it could hardly be for the viewer, who is probably aware from an early moment that Clooney’s job is one no one would want, that he deceives himself into believing it allows him to engage personally with his clients, that his lifestyle is no life at all.

I enjoyed the film but found it to be an exercise in emptiness. You could see the conclusion coming a mile away.

Ghosts of Mississippi

There are no moral ambiguities in Ghosts of Mississippi (1996; dir. Rob Reiner). Given that this film is about the 1994 trial of Byron de la Beckwith for the 1963 murder of civil rights worker Medger Evers, perhaps there shouldn’t be. But their absence does indicate the level on which this film functions. It begins with a montage of shots alternating between brutal scenes of struggle from the civil rights movement and images of African American achievement. The montage is followed by a message stating that “This is a true story.” As with any film based on fact, what we really have here is a version, an interpretation, of the true story. But because the story is “true” and because the screenwriters thought it important to stick with the facts, basically, there are some scenes, some information, some moments that detract from the dramatic focus on de la Beckwith and the young Mississippi assistant district attorney Bobby DeLaughter who succeeds in putting him on trial and convicting him.

De la Beckwith as played by James Wood is cold, frightening, and crazy. There is no drama associated with him. He’s the evil racist perpetrator, and the film makes little effort to understand him or how he became what he became. He is what he is, and the film implies that in various ways he holds beliefs and values that much of the rest of the white South held in 1963 and continued to hold, perhaps, in 1994. The white racist South, and the oppressed African American South, is the film’s historical context.

Whoopi Goldberg as Myrlie Evers is the ever vigilant and long suffering widow who never gives up on her hope that one day her husband’s killer (who was freed after all-white juries in two 1964 trials could not reach a verdict) will be convicted. Goldberg can be a good actress, and she performs well in this film that makes few demands on her.

The dramatic center of the film is Bobby DeLaughter (Alec Baldwin). He embodies the moderate white Southerner of the 20^th century who holds in contempt the racism of people such as De La Beckwith but who finds it easier not to stir up trouble and to live with the status quo. DeLaughter in the film struggles against the idea of opening a case that has been closed for twenty-five years. His guilty conscience gnaws at him. He reviews the evidence, talks to some witnesses, visits the home where Evers was killed, thinks about his three children (Evers had three children as well), and finds enough new information to reopen the case. As a result, his wife leaves him, he receives bomb threats, some of his former friends insult him, and the political career he hoped to have is ruined. The key moment in the film comes when leaders in the local black community accuse him and his boss Ed Peters (Ed Nelson) of being racists who want to prevent a new trial. Peters decides to assign the case to another lawyer, an African American woman. DeLaughter appeals for support to Myrlie Edwards, but she hangs up on him, only to appear in the court house a couple of days later with key evidence that ensures both that the trial can take place and that DeLaughter can stay on the case. He sacrifices a great deal personally in pursuing the case. His character is the most interesting aspect of the film—both as a white Southern moderate moved to act, and as a man compelled to sacrifice his marriage and his place in the legal and social community by his obsession with the case. But the film does not explore this potential beyond the issue of DeLaughter’s moral commitment.

This film succeeds as a dramatization of an important event in American civil rights history. It falls short as a film because of its overzealous earnestness, its lack of depth or nuance, its simplistic definition of the issues, the Hollywood characterizations, the stark binaries in its portrayal of the late-20^th century South, the predictable ways in which the plot develops (more predictable than even a film based on fact should allow).

Ghosts of Mississippi ends with DeLaughter’s successful conviction of De La Beckwith, who died in jail in 2001. Outside the courthouse, a mixed crowd of blacks and whites celebrate—underlining the film’s assertion that many people in Mississippi disapproved of De La Beckwith and people like him. But the film doesn’t suggest that the victory led to improved race relations in Mississippi, though in some small sense it should and must have, though DeLaughter’s passion for prosecuting the case is evidence of that improvement.

Filmed in 1996, Ghosts of Mississippi doesn’t touch on DeLaughter’s later financial difficulties, his unsuccessful career in politics, or his bribery trial in 2009.