That Evening Sun

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Shtetl, by Robert Cooperman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The T.A.M.I. Show

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2012

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

2012 is a yawner!

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

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

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

The Valley of Light, by Terry Kay

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Blind Side

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’d Climb the Highest Mountain

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.

---

[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.

--

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.