Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley, Michael Ruppersburg, and Me

When my children were young, I told them a lot of stories. Some were about things that had happened to me. Others I just made up. My oldest son Michael developed a propensity for yarn-spinning at an early age. I would tell him stories late at night, getting him ready for sleep, and then he’d tell his own tales.

When Michael was four and five, he went to pre-school at Athens Montessori School. Michael Jackson in those years was at the height of his popularity. His album Thriller was selling millions. His music videos, which were truly innovative, and which brought to the music video format the imagination and energy of the best Hollywood musicals, were making a terrific impact. I remember watching Michael and his friends trying to do the moonwalk, the dance step that Jackson popularized. I tried it myself, with no success. Michael and his cousin Bill would sing the lyrics to “Billie Jean” and “Beat It” over and over. They had no idea what the words meant. They just liked the way they sounded.

Every afternoon I’d drive to Montessori to pick Michael up. One afternoon I drove over and got out of my car and headed for the building where I knew Michael would be. I soon found myself surrounded by a group of perplexed little children, starring up at me with looks that combined idolatry, disbelief, and confusion. I wasn’t sure what was going on. I saw those children every day, and they knew me. What was up? Finally one little boy walked up to me and asked, “Are you really Michael Jackson?” No, I assured him, I was not. Michael came around the corner. The boy turned to him, protesting, “But you said your dad was Michael Jackson . . . “

I liked to kid my children. When Michael was barely a year old, I trained him to respond to my question “Where’s Elvis?” by craning his head upwards and pointing to the sky. This was a parlor trick. I regretted doing this to Michael in later years, just as I regretted telling him one day when he had misbehaved about Hell (in which I don’t believe) and about how the sun would eventually burn out. Five year olds don’t need such knowledge. This is the kind of information that terrorized me as a little boy. I’d lie awake at night for hours worrying about tornadoes, earthquakes, meteors.

I used to tell my sons a lot of stories and jokes about Elvis in those years. He had been dead only a few years, and he was still prominent in the popular imagination. Everyone talked about Elvis as the King of Rock and Roll. “Elvis the King” was a phrase heard often in my house, and Michael knew it as well as I did.

When he turned six, it was time for Michael to enroll in first grade. We enrolled him at St. Joseph’s School near downtown Athens, conveniently located close by to where my wife and I work. Michael had a problematic relationship with the head nun at St. Joe’s, a forbidding woman named Sister Ignatia. She was a stern and unforgiving nun of the old school. She didn’t tolerate nonsense. Michael, like many of the children at St. Joe’s, had some run-ins with her, and had some stories to tell. One afternoon I went to pick him up. He climbed in the car and sat down in the seat next to me and sat there, silent, as we headed home. He seemed a little quieter and more thoughtful than usual. Finally he turned to me and said, “Dad, Sister Ignatia says Elvis is not the King. He is an earthly entertainer. She says Jesus is the King.”

In my imagination, I pieced together the encounter between Michael and Sister Ignatia concerning Elvis the King. She would know well enough where Michael got his information. I decided to avoid Sister Ignatia and the judgment she might render on me at all costs.

The Reivers

The Reivers (1969, dir. Mark Rydell) was filmed while the Civil Rights movement was still making inroads in American culture. Although important civil rights legislation had been passed, although barriers were coming down and people’s attitudes were beginning, slowly, to change, the notion of racial equality with all its implications was still fresh and even controversial in the viewing public’s mind. Yet in 1969 the strictures of political correctness had not yet taken hold, and in some ways it was easier to have open discussions about race and ethnicity than it is today. The use of the “N” word in The Reivers is an example. Some characters in the film (for example, Sheriff Butch Lovemaiden) use the term as a racist and hateful expression. Others simply use it as a common term that refers to a black person. Undoubtedly the term carried negative connotations. Although its use did not necessarily connote deliberate racism, when a white man used the word to address or refer to a black man, it clearly carried negative meanings. But it could also be used simply as a vernacular way of naming what a black man was. The use of this word today is far more sensitive and charged than it was when this film was made. To give a historically accurate depiction of life in the South in the early 1900s—a time when the “N” word was in common use, and when not every person using it was a villain deserving of castigation—is a more difficult and risky undertaking today than it would have been in 1969. At the same time, we have a more informed perspective about race and racism today, perhaps, than we had forty years ago. The Reivers as a film tends to camouflage or underemphasize issues of race in order to focus on other aspects of the story it tells, and in order to avoid the controversy that accompanies the issue.

When some characters in The Reivers use the “N” word, the film is accurately reflecting how people in Mississippi and Tennessee of 1905 might have talked. But the film is not an accurate depiction (as best I can tell) of how the white and black races in the American South of that time interacted. The Reivers makes clear that the South is a place of racism where there are clearly demarcated boundaries between black and white people. Typically in the film, blacks are shown working as servants or at menial labor or in the fields. In rare moments, white characters such as Sheriff Lovemaiden threaten black characters—as when he suggests that he if townspeople hear that Uncle Possum is alone with a white woman on his farm, there will be trouble. The character Ned McCaslin is not allowed to accompany Lucius and Boon into the white whorehouse, and he always sleeps separately from the white characters (although Uncle Possum shares a bed with Lucius when the latter spends the night at his house).

The film implies two different kinds of white Southerners. “The Bad Whites” are racist in behavior and attitude—Lovemaiden is an example. The “Good Whites” may do little to change the racial separatism of the times, but they treat black Southerners in a kind and respectful way. What’s more, the film often shows blacks and whites interacting on a more or less equal level when, for example, the train arrives in town carrying Boss McCaslin’s car—everyone rushes to the train station and exhibits a common enthusiasm for the newfangled contraption. (The absolute absence of any consciousness of race in some of these scenes is suspicious and unrealistic). Blacks do tend to group together. Ned McCaslin, who is apparently known for his outspoken and aggressive ways (though he always seems to know when to back off) speaks to Lucius and Boon on an equal basis. The film portrays Ned as a character who keeps his own counsel, who knows when to speak and to remain silent. That is, he is shown as an intelligent black man who for his own well being stays in his place, though he does push the boundaries. Part of his assertiveness, as he takes pain on two occasions to explain, is that he is descended from Lucius Carothers McCaslin, the patriarch of the white McCaslin clan, who had a child by Ned’s great grandmother.

In reality, in 1905, there would have been considerably less interaction between whites and blacks than The Reivers portrays, than even Faulkner’s 1962 novel The Reivers, portrays. In that novel, and in reality, the division in racial attitudes between “good” and “bad” Southerners was considerably less clear than the film would have it. The film wants to ensure comfort in its audience by portraying a society in which racism is not as pervasive and obvious as it in fact was. In doing so, it allows focus on the main story, that of Boon and Lucius and their illicit trip to Memphis, and of Lucius’ initiation into the complex ambiguities of adult manhood. But in doing so it also gives a historically inaccurate view of life in the South in the early 1900s—Faulkner’s novel gives a more accurate view.

When I studied Faulkner in graduate school and in later years, almost everyone dismissed The Reivers as a film. It was generally regarded as having smoothed over and simplified the nuances of Faulkner’s final novel. Undoubtedly, the film does that. It also gives Hollywood treatment to Faulkner’s characters, who are not as glamorous or as easy to pigeonhole in the novel as they are in the film. Ned McCaslin is more of a clown in the novel, while the film portrays him as a more assertive and substantial person. The film also ignores the history of Boon Hogganbeck, his mixed race ancestry and his occasional wild recklessness (the film shows us that Boon is a bad shot—an important aspect of his character in The Reivers and Go Down, Moses—but it does not dwell on the fact. In fact, Boon’s mixed ancestry helps explain his relationship with Ned). The film gives us a considerably sanitized Boon, played in uproarious mode by Steve McQueen.

The film preserves the basic outlines of the novel’s plot and the essence of its themes. Narrated by Burgess Meredith, an elderly Lucius McCaslin who tells the story of his boyhood escapade with Boon, it focuses on the grandfather, Boss McCaslin (wonderfully played by Will Geer) as a source of probity and moral rectitude. While the world portrayed in the film is more like the world of a Disney film than of a Faulkner novel, while the tone of the film is substantially different from that of the novel, the theme of a young man’s education in what it means to be a gentleman, in the ambiguity of truth and virtue, is retained.

See Jonathan Yardley’s column on Faulkner’s novel The Reivers

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (2008, dir. Bharat Nalluri) feels like a throwaway stage play adapted without much change for the screen. In fact, it’s based on a novel, not a play, but it feels like a play. It’s about a governess, Guinevere Pettigrew (Frances McDormand), who has had a long series of unsuccessful appointments and secretary or head housekeeper. She is apparently rigid, stubborn, and puritanical enough that employer after employer finds her unacceptable. After her most recent employer throws her out, her employment agency decides to have nothing more to do with her and tells her to go away. She overhears a conversation about an available position and surreptitiously picks up the address card and goes to the address. There she meets a young woman, Delysia Lafosse (Amy Adams) living the high life, sleeping with three different men, casting about for her best option in life. She is a nightclub owner’s mistress, she is sleeping with a young producer in hopes that she will get a part in his play, and she sings with a pianist who loves her and has proposed. This is exactly the kind of woman Miss Pettigrew is most unsuited to work for, but she is desperate. She somehow finds herself working for the woman as a personal secretary. She comes to like her. The film follows the developing situation. Miss Pettigrew gradually relaxes and lightens up. She buys new clothes and suddenly looks attractive. She meets a man, a fashion designer, her own age, and he’s interested in her. She helps Delysia make some important decisions.

The whole situation is improbable. In one day Miss Pettigrew goes from being a homeless person sleeping on the bench in the train station to living the high life and accepting a marriage proposal. Her change in character is the most unlikely aspect of the film for me. I do not doubt that a person can change attitudes, personality, lifestyle, but such transformations usually take place within a longer span of time than 24 hours.

Amy Adams is an attractive, vivacious actress whose fresh appearance and ebullient personality have made her a rising star. In such films as Junebug (2005), Doubt (2008), and Enchanted (2007) she has proven the depth and range of her talents. In this film she is playing a kind of cartoon stick figure, a flighty, disorganized, wholly amoral flapper (though the film is set in the Depression, right before World War II begins) who feels no compunction about using sex to get what she wants. But her mission is survival—she has no wealth of her own, and without the men she relies on and tries to exploit (and who exploit her), she would be out on the streets with people like Miss Pettigrew. Adams is as good in the role as it allows her to be, which means that she mainly has to simper and flirt and cavort and look confused. This is not one of her better roles.

Frances McDormand is a wonderful actress. This is an odd role for her, but she plays it well enough. She knows woebegone.

This film is entertaining, but you know from the start how it all will go. I didn’t like the film. It seemed half-hearted, from the obvious use of sets to the shallow characterizations to the trite and hackneyed script. Most of all it seemed pointless and insulting. Why sympathize with insipid souls like Delysia Lafosse or the three men who pursue her? The problems of these people seem wholly at odds with the environment of depression and war that looms menacingly in the background of the film. There are numerous mindless, empty, vacuous films coming out every month. Why do they get made? Who bothers to watch them? Who cares about or remembers them?

Song of the South

It is never quite clear whether Song of the South (1945, dir. Harve Foster, Wilfred Jackson) takes place before or after the Civil War. We can guess that it occurs after the war, since the young boy’s father is a newspaper writer in Atlanta whose editorials are not popular among many readers. This may have something to do with why the boy and his mother go to live with the grandmother—to escape the unpleasantness of their lives in Atlanta. (It may also have to do with the fact that Joel Chandler Harris, author of the Uncle Remus tales, was a post-Civil War Atlanta newspaper writer). Walt Disney himself claimed the film was about the time following the Civil War. However, if we base the time of the film on the behavior of the African American characters, who work in the fields and at menial jobs and who show fawning respect and deference to the white characters, and who sing contentedly on their way to and from work in the fields, the time could just as well be before the Civil War. Oddly, the film never mentions the Civil War. It might well have never occurred. The film occurs in a sort of alternative universe. This ambiguity about when it is actually set, the absence of references to important events in the outside world, suggests that the makers of Song of the South were uncomfortable with their subject.

Song of the South mentions the city of Atlanta a few times—it is where the father works, where he is going after leaving his unhappy wife and son on the plantation, where Uncle Remus plans to go after being ordered not to have anything to do with the boy. That is, Atlanta is the modern world, the place of controversy, discontentment, dispossession, broken homes, endangered marriages, unhappy families. When the father comes back to the plantation at the end of the field and announces that he plans to stay, the family is reunited and we know where the film’s heart lies—on the plantation, where the darkies sing and Uncle Remus tells his stories, the opposite of everything that big cities represent.

Because it was last available for sale in the 1980s, and last shown on television in the early 1970s, many people have never seen Song of the South and know about it only by reputation, by what others report about it. The film’s reputation as a racist encomium to the Old South has prevented its release in DVD. It is an important document in the response of American films to history, slavery, and to race relations in the 20^th century. Unlike Birth of a Nation, which is an impressive film, and a racist one, Song of the South is not especially distinguished, but it deserves to be seen so that viewers can judge for themselves the film’s reputation and can appreciate how far American race relations and the filmmaking industry have come in the last 60 or more years.

If this film were more tightly focused on the friendship of the boy and Uncle Remus, if the timing of events in the film were clearer, it might be more difficult (though not impossible) to accuse it of racism and racial stereotyping. Remus and the boy are individuals. Individuals have specific and distinctive personalities. Individual relationships can occur in any form and fashion. There is no reason why an elderly black man and a young white boy should not strike up a friendship, especially when the black man is naturally inclined to like children, and when the young boy needs a father figure. If the film does occur shortly after the Civil War, during Reconstruction (of which the film gives barely a hint), and since it is set in the rural South, then certain elements of Remus’ dress, speech, behavior, and living habits make more sense—they reflect the particularities of place and time and economic status. From this point of view, Remus and the boy stand only for themselves, not for anything larger.

It is the larger context of this film that makes it what it is: an apology for racial paternalism and the Old South. In the larger context, Remus is the focus of a film that argues for the good old simplicity of slavery times. Song of the South in this regard is a latter-day version of the 19^th-century apologist stories of Thomas Nelson Page (“Marse Chan”) and others. It invokes all the sacred icons of the venerated Old South, the white columned plantation house foremost among them. The white inhabitants of the house dress in elegance, have swank parties, live a life of leisure. The black servants (or slaves, depending on when the film takes place) love their white masters, regard themselves as members of the family (though they understand the limits of their membership). Uncle Remus himself gives advice to his mistress but knows when to back off. She understands the wisdom of his words but at the same time calls him “an old rascal.” As if to make clear its position, the film trots out Hattie McDaniel, the actress who portrayed Mammy in Gone with the Wind (1938). She plays almost exactly the same character.

Many plantation films focus visually on the plantation house. In this one the columned front of the house is frequently shown, but it is often seen from the perspective of the slave quarters nearby. Thus we see the house not only up close but also in the distance with the slave cabins on the left and the fields of the farm on the right. This is an unusual perspective, one that emphasizes the size of the farm and that perhaps is meant to reflect the importance of the African Americans in the film. When Uncle Remus addresses the boy’s mother or grandmother in front of the house, he always stands at the bottom of the steps, she on the upper steps, looking down at him. He enters the house only when invited to enter.

An underlying premise of the film is that modern times bring family discord and disunity. In the opening scene, when we first see the boy and his parents, as they are headed towards the plantation where the boy and his mother are to stay while the father returns to the city, we can see something is wrong between the father and mother. The nature of their problem is not clear. Although they embrace with passion as the father is about to leave, there is coldness and tension between them. This is about as clear as a children’s film made in 1945 could ever be about the marital problems of parents. The boy isn’t old enough to understand what is wrong, but he senses the discord and is heartbroken when his father leaves. Later that night he tries to run away, intent on going back to Atlanta to be with his father. This is when he happens on Uncle Remus, telling Brer Rabbit stories to a group of black children. The boy has heard about Uncle Remus and has looked forward to meeting him. Remus becomes the boy’s substitute father. Remus is portrayed as a compassionate old man who understands the boy’s unhappiness and is pleased enough to spend time with him.

Song of the South is another film in which an insightful black character helps the hapless white folks solve their problems (a standard stereotype of race relations in film and literature—we see it even in the recent films Black Snake Moan—2006--and in The Secret Life of Bees--2008). The only insight the film offers into Remus’ own personal situation, his possible loneliness and suffering, comes in a few thrown-away comments he makes as he is getting ready to go away to Atlanta.

Uncle Remus as a character symbolizes all the purported virtues of the mythical Old South, especially as compared to the problems and coldness of the modern world. The film clearly endorses the virtues of elegance and entitlement, rigid social and racial hierarchy, white racism, and so on associated with the Old South. It may use the Old South as a vehicle for expressing more general discontent and unhappiness with the state of things in the modern world, it may not even be that interested in the Old South as a real time and place, but even so what it yearns for nostalgically is a past of racist agrarian pastoralism.

In line with the portrayal of older women in such Disney films as Snow White, 101 Dalmatians, Sleeping Beauty, The Littlest Mermaid, and others, Song of the South offers in the boy’s mother (played by Ruth Warrick) one of the coldest characters imaginable. She believes Uncle Remus has a bad influence on her son and ultimately forbids him from seeing the boy. She makes her son dress in Little Lord Fauntleroy-type clothing that embarrasses him, and in general doesn’t seem to recognize his needs as a young child who misses his father. The film implies that she is uncomfortable with the controversy caused by her husband’s unpopular newspaper articles, and that her unhappiness is part of the reason for their separation. She seems more interested in maintaining social status and propriety than in the problems of her son and duties of her husband. Of course, Uncle Remus helps her see things in a proper light.

See my entry on this film in the New Georgia Encyclopedia.

Bubba Ho-tep

The term Southern Gothic vaguely refers to the supposed prominence of violence, the grotesque, and (sometimes) the supernatural in Southern culture. We find early elements of the Southern Gothic in Edgar Allan Poe and in the Southern humorists. The proximity of the frontier in the Deep South for a much longer time than in the northeastern part of the nation may account for these elements, along with the South’s loss of the Civil War, and external perceptions about its languishing condition for nearly a century, with family fortunes lost, family lines burned out, depressed economic conditions, inbreeding, and so on. The decaying ancestral and columned family mansion as a symbol and relic of the dead family fortune and the South’s loss in the Civil War neatly serves the Gothic formula; consider the houses in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! In Bubba Ho-tep (2002, dir. Don Coscarelli) that mansion becomes an old folks home. The creeping Gothic horror is the ancient Egyptian mummy. In the traditional Gothic the creeping horror is often a reflection of family sin and decay. The old folks’ home enshrines the mythology of American cultural icons, especially those connected with the American South.

Bubba Ho-Tep is about an old folks home whose inhabitants include a man who believes he is Elvis Presley and another man who believes he is John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The film allows that these men may be deluded, but it also allows, and depends on, the assumption that they may well be who they think they are—Elvis himself (Bruce Campbell) narrates the film. With J. F. K. (Ossie Davis) he mounts an attack on the ancient Egyptian mummy that is attacking residents of the home and sucking out their souls.

The old folks’ home as a setting symbolizes the distant and irrelevant presence of the mythic Southern past and comments on the more immediate relevance and irrelevance of the myths and symbols that Elvis Presley and J. F. K. signify.

The film builds on the mythology of Presley and of J. F. K. Presley is the modern American hero, idolized and misunderstood, mythologized and ridiculed. His is a Southern Horatio Alger story on the one hand, a Southern Gatsby on the other, destroyed by his own excess and greed and by the greed of others, specifically Colonel Tom Parker, whom Elvis mentions disdainfully in the film. Bubba Ho-Tep exploits our knowledge of Elvis, depends on our familiarity with his life and career, enforces the idea that he was exploited by Colonel Tom Parker and others, that he threw his talent and success away. Elvis in the film clearly believes so. He often mentions with regret his former wife and his daughter. The film depends on our sympathy, and on the idea that we might desire an alternative life for Elvis where things would have gone better. In the decade following Presley’s death, rumors, stories, and folk legends about his survival—in disguise, with another name, in another country—were widely current in American popular culture. (In the film, Elvis tells us that he traded places with the best of the Elvis imitators, Sebastian Haff, who subsequently died of heart disease and drug abuse, while the contract that he and Elvis signed to cement the exchange was destroyed in a trailer fire, so that the real Elvis has no way of proving who he is). The Elvis of the film is the mythologized Elvis—we never go beyond that popular iconic image--what the narration tells us is what we wanted to believe to begin with.

We have another kind of myth-making with J. F. K. We might think of his assassination in a Southern city, Dallas, Texas, as the family sin at the center of the plot, but the film doesn’t go in that direction. Rather through J. F. K. it invokes the conspiracy theories and general paranoia surrounding his assassination and its aftermath. In the film J. F. K. is convinced he was the victim of a vast government conspiracy involving every conceivable person imaginable (including, perhaps, Elvis himself), and that the conspirators are still out to get him. He believes his skin was dyed to make him an African American to hide his true identity. To an extent we might see in Ossie Davis, himself a kind of Southern icon, a commentary on J. F. K. and race. Of all the white people a black man might want to identify with, J. F. K. is a logical choice because of his advocacy of the civil rights bill, not to mention that he is also a symbol of prestige, nobility, popularity, and power, all that we might imagine the character Ossie Davis plays in the film did not have. Davis’ character fantasizes himself into this role--that is, if indeed he is not the actual J. F. K. (Novels by Don DeLillo and Norman Mailer dealt with the mythologizing aspects of the assassination, as does the Oliver Stone film J. F. K. Consider as well the rumors that abounded in the 1960s and 1970s about J. F. K.’s survival of the assassination, his comatose body maintained on the fifth floor of a hospital somewhere near Washington, D. C. A story in a popular scandal magazine described how, after the comatose J. F. K. died, his widow Jackie buried his body in the Aegean Sea during her marriage to Aristotle Onassis.)

The film is infused with major intertextual references to American culture and popular iconography. It especially makes reference to other films: to Ben Hur (in the opening title sequence), Barton Fink (the bug on the wall), The Shining (the hallway scenes), spaghetti westerns, John Wayne, Clint Eastwood.

What is significant, literally and symbolically, about mummies that waken from the dead and that must destroy the living to survive? This is certainly the underlying logic of Bubba Ho-tep. Some reviewer I read suggested that in battling the mummy, Elvis is battling himself, and there is sense in that notion—resisting the mummy that would suck out his soul and reduce him to nothingness (a person whose soul has been sucked away by the mummy, the film tells us, has no prospect of a life after death—the soul simply ceases to exist). Elvis and J. F. K. are battling their aged, infirm physical selves. They are resisting mortality. Elvis is also resisting the caricatured image of himself that he left behind—he’s proving that he is, in the end, a person who can “take care of business.” When, after he sets the mummy afire and pushes its burning carcass into the river, he himself lies on the bank of the river, gasping his last breaths. A message appears in the sky: “All is well.”

In Bubba Ho-Tep the mummy is a caricature of an old West gunslinger, a gambling sharpie, and a geek. The feather in his hat perhaps suggests a Native American connection. But the assemblage of cultural references that he incorporates makes him all the more macabre as well as ridiculous.

A Quantum of Solace

The most substantial element in this 2008 film is the title, taken from an otherwise unrelated Ian Fleming short story. The plot here is one of revenge—James Bond’s quest for vengeance against the individual responsible for the death of his lover Vesper in the predecessor to this film, Casino Royale (2006). To say that this film lacks substance is not a complaint. This is an action film centered on exotic European and South American locales, constant travel and action and suspense, and the acting of Daniel Craig.

Let’s be clear: never has there been in the long series of films based on the Fleming novels a James Bond as persuasive, well-rounded, and enigmatic as Daniel Craig. He is the definitive James Bond. In Casino Royale he reinvented and resurrected the failing series. In A Quantum of Solace he carries it forward. Craig is an excellent actor, and the two scripts for him thus far have been effective vehicles for his talents. No predecessor—most decidedly including Sean Connery—is his equal. A Quantum of Solace is well made, beautifully photographed, tightly edited, aptly paced. If there is a weakness, it is the script, which is not as carefully or deeply developed as it was for Casino Royale, which was about the first assignment in the young James Bond’s career. But those weaknesses are lost in the energy and furor of the action.

Fleming’s Bond novels were premised on the intrigue of cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union. In the absence of that tension, the new Bond films focus on international crime syndicates, eco-terrorists, global criminals. In this film, the bad guy is stealing water and hording it in caverns beneath the Bolivian desert. He plans to sell it back to the Bolivian government at a high price. Various shots of suffering and thirsty Bolivian Indians make clear the damage he is doing. We know that he is evil, not only because of the sneer on his craven, rat-like face, not only because he helps overthrow governments hostile to his interests, but because he killed Bond’s woman.

If production values this high can be sustained, and if Daniel Craig remains interested, all the James Bond novels should be re-filmed.

The Band’s Visit

The Band’s Visit (2007, dir. Eran Kolirin) is a small, modest film that gradually and unexpectedly flowers as you view it. With subtitles in both Hebrew and Arabic, it records the visit of the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra to a small Israeli settlement. When one of the band members attempts to get directions to the settlement at an Israeli airport, a difficulty in pronouncing the town’s name results in his receiving directions to a different town, an isolated settlement in the middle of the desert, a place clearly not expecting or prepared for a visit from an Egyptian police band.

Every character in this film is an individual, from the sober, tired looking bandleader Tawfiq Zacharya (Sasson Gabi) to a young recruit, Haled (Saleh Bakri), who clearly irritates the bandleader at every turn, to the attractive and hungry-for-male-companionship proprietress of the restaurant, Dina (Ronit Elkabetz), whom the band members ask for assistance, to the young Israeli man stuck in an unhappy marriage. The film spends more time with some of these characters than with others. It is quiet and respectful of these individuals—it stands back, in effect, and allows their gestures, their facial expressions, their at first uncomfortable interactions to tell the tale.

At heart, The Band’s Visit is a gentle, compassionate comedy. It shows us how cultural differences and wariness break down as human individuals recognize what they hold in common. The most interesting character of all is the band leader Tawfiq. His wife is dead, we learn, as the result of heartbreak over their son’s suicide, for which he feels responsible. Tawfiq also feels responsible for the fate of the band, whose value has apparently been called into question. Gabi portrays Tawfiq in a wholly understated way. At first we see him as prim and Muslim proper, unwilling to interact on any but the most formal and reserved levels with the Israeli characters to whom he turns for assistance. Gradually we see him relax and emerge, tentatively, from his shell, and then we see him retreat back into it again.

One would expect, in this film about an orchestra (which is really only a small ensemble, a band of eight members), that we would hear the group play. Finally, ultimately, almost as a kind of afterthought, they do play, in a revelatory scene that resonates deeply.

Angels and Demons

Angels and Demons (2009, dir. Ron Howard) is based on the 2000 novel of the same title by Dan Brown, who knows just enough about art history, the city of Rome, and the hierarchy and rituals of the Catholic Church to write an entertaining suspense story about someone who is murdering cardinals, all of whom are candidates to become the next Pope. This novel preceded The Da Vinci Code by three years and features the same protagonist, Robert Langdon (played again by Tom Hanks), an expert on ancient codes and the like. The film follows the novel closely, with the one significant difference that the events in the film Angels and Demons follow, rather than precede, the events in The Da Vinci Code. As in the novel, Langdon is summoned to help find the murder of the cardinals. One clue leads to another. Mostly the clues have to do with ancient paintings and sculptures, many of which involve statues or figures who seem to be pointing conveniently in the direction of the next clue. Langdon has little difficulty deciphering the clues, but he and the crack Vatican security agents tend to arrive just a moment or two after the most recent murder has occurred.

Like the novel, the film highlights the intricate rituals of the Vatican and the Catholic Church, especially concerning the selection of a new pope. The film would have us know that these rituals are obscure and arcane and replete with pointless elements that no one understands but that everyone feels obliged to follow carefully. Like the novel, the film attempts to highlight a struggle between science and faith, with Langdon representing science and the Church representing faith. Like the novel, and like The Da Vinci Code, the film focuses on a secret group that has existed for centuries. In Angels and Demons, this group is the Illuminati, a cabal of scientists who have banded together to resist the efforts of the Church to suppress learning and reason. The film and book make these matters out to be far more straightforward and simplistic and mysterious than they are (if they are at all) in reality. One could imagine an intelligent and interesting film that seriously considers the faith vs. science controversy. This film gives serious lip service to the issue, but little of substance.

The Da Vinci Code featured Audrey Tatou, portraying the beautiful descendant of Jesus and Mary Magdelene. Angels and Demons features Ayelet Zurer, playing a beautiful particle physicist involved in the efforts of the CERN laboratory in Switzerland to study antimatter and to identify the Higgs Boson, the so-called “God Particle.” She is brilliant and somehow becomes Langdon’s sidekick, which means mainly that she uses her intellect to follow him around in high heels—she doesn’t have much to do.

And, oh, yes, someone has stolen antimatter from the CERN laboratory and is threatening to use it to blow up the Vatican.

Most of all, and again like the novel, Angels and Demons is entertaining and unimaginative.

Up

Although Up (2009) is not the best film of the year, as some have suggested, it is well made and entertaining. The film begins with a maudlin review of the main character Carl’s life—his yen for adventure, his meeting as a young boy the girl who would become his wife (she too loves adventure and idolizes the same explorer he does). They marry and discover they cannot have children. As solace they plan to travel, to live that adventurous life they had imagined as children, but one thing happens and then another and their plans never get off the ground. They grow old, she sickens and dies, and he is left alone in the house they shared for all their lives. Once in the country, now it is surrounded by skyscrapers. A soulless developer (he looks almost like an alien) wants to take it over and raze it for another skyscraper. Carl has a run in with construction workers, and a judge orders him to move to a retirement home, where he can be looked after.

This is heavy stuff for a film aimed (at least in part) at children. It made me long for a cup of the old hemlock. People near me were weeping by the time we reached the death of Carl’s wife.

But the tone quickly and abruptly changes. Carl has rigged his house with thousands of helium balloons. He inflates them, the house breaks free, and he is off on a quest to find Paradise Falls, the remote South American location that he and his wife had dreamed of visiting. Along the way we encounter a rotund and irritating cub scout, a talking dog (a pack of talking dogs, in fact), a zeppelin, a famous lost explorer, a thunderstorm, a fabled bird the size of a giant ostrich, and so on. The remainder of the film is replete with the action and dangerous moments and hairbreadth escapes you would escape from this kind of entertainment. The old man bonds with the Cub Scout (abandoned by his parents) and with the talking dog and with the giant colorful bird. Despite old age and infirmity, Carl becomes remarkably energetic and agile, running and jumping, and in general acting half his age. He has his great adventure. He learns that his life isn’t over yet, and he finds reason to go on.

The trouble with this film is, of course, that things are not so simple. Old people left alone by death and poverty and time’s passage and infirmity can’t easily find escape through fantasies and floating houses and adventure. Most of them remain alone. Most abandoned or ignored children don’t find elderly substitutes.

With its sudden and dramatic change in tone, with its shallow solution to the problems of the old, Up is a bit dishonest. At the same time, the animation is stunning (in the conventional fashion of Disney/Pixar), and the film is a pleasure to watch. I saw it in 3-D—the effects were impressive for the first five minutes, after which I didn’t notice them.

Forrest Gump

Late in this 1994 film Forrest Gump speaks to the grave of his dead friend Jenny and tells her that he has always wondered whether we just drift accidentally through life or whether we have a destiny. He says that he has decided that maybe the answer is both. The wafting feather that floats down and alights on Forrest’s shoe at the start of the film, and that wafts away in the final scene, embodies this question. Does it float by accident, or is there a purpose, an intent, to where it lands?

Forrest’s life is a series of fortuitous, accidental coincidences that taken altogether would seem incredible were this film not so obviously the fable that it is. He is at the right place and the right time repeatedly in his life, from teaching Elvis how to swivel his hips to playing football for Bear Bryant to winning the Medal of Honor for valor in Vietnam to playing ping-pong with the Chinese. The film is a summary of events in American history from the 1950s through the 80s, a survey of the Civil Rights era, Viet Nam, the tumultuous 60s, and the AIDs epidemic.

What ties the film together is the character of Forrest himself and his love for Jenny. Forrest is slightly below average in intelligence, and his flat, inexpressive reaction to almost everything is his characteristic demeanor throughout the film. He acts on command. When Jenny tells him to “run” to escape from boys who are throwing rocks at him, he does so, and he remembers that command throughout his life. He fits so well into the military because he can follow commands easily and effectively. He takes events one at a time, without fear or prejudice or concern for his own well being. His mother (Sally Fields) tells him he can do anything he wants, and he pretty much proves the truth of her statement throughout the film.

The optimism of Forrest’s mother, her certainty in the promise of her son, belies a selfless ruthlessness. She will do anything it takes to help him, even if this means sleeping with the superintendent of education to ensure that Forrest can attend a regular school.

The poignancy of the film resides in Forrest’s innate goodness, his innocence, and his love for Jenny. These carry him through all the events he experiences. Some might regard him as a kind of saint. He clearly possesses a strong sense of right, of morality and virtue. But to what extent does he choose to be good and virtuous? To what extent is he simply obeying an injunctive command: run?

Why is the film set in the South, specifically in Alabama? Once again, the South offers a natural, bucolic setting for a set of sometimes eccentric characters—although the main such figure is Forrest himself. The setting contributes to the fabulist nature of the story, a story that seems to take place in our own time but that in some other sense seems to be another place and time. The old plantation house in which Forrest lives with his mother and later with Jenny and their son contributes to this atmosphere. Much of the narrative moves from one episode to another of American history, especially the civil rights movement, and the South is the natural setting for those events.

It is odd that although the film makes note of the deaths of the two Kennedy’s and of John Lennon, it does not mention the death of Martin Luther King. The film does not foreground issues of race, but they are present. At the start of the film Forrest is sitting on a bench in Savannah, and a young black woman sits on the other end of the bench, waiting for a bus. He begins to talk to her, and it is clear that she isn’t initially interested—the image of Forrest on one end of the bench and the young woman on the other end, her clear attempts not to be engaged in conversation, is an image of racial division. The film makes a point of showing how Bubba Gump’s mother and her ancestors have served shrimp to generations of white men—when Forrest makes money out of his investments in the stock market, he gives a share of the money to Bubba’s mother, and the film makes a point of showing her seated at a table, being served shrimp by a white woman. Black Panthers whom Forrest meets at a demonstration in Washington, DC, reflect the racial turmoil of the late 60s and early 70s—the film is neither sympathetic to nor critical of the strident statements their leader makes—Forrest is wholly unresponsive. So we know in the film that racial issues and turmoil are going on around Forrest even if he is largely unaware of them. Forrest himself seems to be wholly color blind.

In a sense, the South in Forrest Gump is an enclave away from the real world. It’s a place of isolation, a backwater, and so Forrest’s rise to prominence is all the more remarkable.

Forrest Gump is a fable of late 20^th-century American life. Forrest is an American Everyman, prominently present in a series of significant and major events—always present to observe, sometimes present as a catalyst. He’s like all us who lived through that era. It happened to us, we had no control over it, we participated in a minor way, and now it has all passed us by.

Forrest’s life-long love affair with Jenny gives the film special poignancy. His love for her is constant and unwavering. Her love for him changes and wavers a good bit, but in the end she comes back to him, both because of his constancy and because she knows he will be a good father to their son. Forrest does his duty, throughout his life, because he knows it is expected of him, because he doesn’t know of an alternative. Once again, with his constancy, his love for those he has lost, his adherence to family roles and obligations, he is like many of us.

Sherman's March: A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation

Every now and then I encounter a book or film or painting that lacks a point of reference, an identifying marker or set of markers within the literary or cinematic or art worlds that allows me to place and understand it in comparison to other books or films or paintings. Sometimes—perhaps most of the time—this is the fault of my own ignorance. Perhaps other times the fault belongs to the work itself—to shoddy form or unfocused vision or downright ineptitude. Occasionally it is the result of a distinctive and original artistic vision. Sometimes the reason is just not clear.

For much of Sherman's March: A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation (1986, dir. Ross McElwee) I thought I was watching a self-indulgent and long-winded home movie. This film is really about another film. The director Ross McElwee begins by announcing that he wanted to make a film about the impact of Sherman’s campaign on the Southeast, especially Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. But just as he was about to begin, he tells us, his girl friend broke up with him, leaving him hurt and traumatized. So instead he makes a film about a quixotic odyssey in search of a romantic partner that takes him through the states through which Sherman marched. Occasionally, he actually talks about Sherman, a man with whom he finds much in common. Sherman for much of his life regarded himself as a failure, a judgment the director levies on himself as well. Following the end of the war, Sherman was criticized for negotiating a surrender with the South in his campaign that was too lenient, and he was treated unfairly. Sherman loved the South, lived there much of his life, and so when he was ordered to wage his campaign of destruction, McElwee finds that fact highly ironic. McElwee believes Sherman was a brilliant writer. By overt connection and implication, he finds much in common with the Civil War general.

But Sherman occupies only a relatively short portion of this two-hour and thirty-seven minute film. Most of it is taken up with what at first appears to be casual and amateurish footage of the director’s visit with his parents and with various women whom he has been involved with in the past, or whom his parents or friends try to fix him up with, or whom he just happens across. Mostly they are in their late twenties or thirties, like him, and like him they are trying to find their place in life. Several aspire to be actresses, one wants to be a singer, another is a Mormon who wants to bring God into her house through marriage, another is a linguist living on Ossabaw Island working on her dissertation, another is an anti-nuclear power activist and teacher, and another is a lawyer in an off-again, on-again relationship with a man.

McElwee easily becomes infatuated with these women, but he seems fairly inept at relationships. This is one of the points of the film, which features McElwee’s attempts to discuss with the various women their reasons for lack of interest in him. In part he blames his own mistakes and weak character. Several women are more interested in their careers than in him. He and the linguist become involved in their idyllic Ossabaw Island setting, for a time, but then he leaves for a part-time job in Boston and she finds someone else. The women with whom he was involved in the past aren’t really interested in rekindling the former connection—they’ve moved on. In part, he blames the nuclear age. How can he sustain a relationship at a time when the threat of nuclear destruction looms constantly in mind?

McElwee portrays himself as a kind of Southern Protestant nebbish. He’s romantically inept and miserable as a result. He’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. At the end of the film, having failed at romance, he announces that he doesn’t really like the South and travels north to make films and teach filmmaking at Brown University, where he teaches today. With this pronouncement, the end of the film has the effect of subverting in an amusing and ironic way McElwee’s sense of failure and incompetence. He’s clearly good at something.

McElwee defines his own documentary style in Sherman’s March. It’s not a style that could easily be imitated, and indeed, given the length of this film, not one with much commercial potential. It’s a style that is obviously a projection of McElwee’s personality. Despite the casual, deliberate sloppiness to the film, there is a clear method at work, one that parallels the route of Sherman’s march with McElwee’s own romantic odyssey, and that portrays an interesting series of Southern characters—mostly white and female, affluent to varying degrees (with one exception)—at a time when the South was becoming increasingly urban and suburban, deracinated, deregionalized.

A minor sort of theme in the film involves Burt Reynolds. The first woman whom McElwee encounters in the film (in a meeting arranged by his father and step-mother) is an aspiring actress who has a connection with a friend who works for Burt Reynolds. She hopes to wrangle a part in a Reynolds film. Later in the film, McElwee actually runs across the set of a Reynolds film (Stroker Ace? Cannonball Run II?) and tries to film Reynolds but is thrown off the set and threatened with arrest. Does Reynolds represent the authentic South?

In a sense, as a filmmaker from Boston who comes down South to make a film about a man known for his destructive campaign in the South, McElwee joins with those forces that are changing the South in as drastic and fundamental a way as Sherman ever managed to do. The film shows several vistas of the skyline of Atlanta, Columbia, SC, Savannah, and Charlotte during the mid-1980s. These cities represent the South’s recovery from Sherman’s March, and at the same time the long-term and undeniable impact of the victories he achieved.

(In my favorite scene, McElwee walks towards the banks of the Congaree River, in Columbia, SC, gazing at the city skyline. He tries to clamber down the banks towards the river but falls, disappearing from view. The image of this awkward, bumbling figure trying to negotiate the Southern landscape is representative of his demeanor in the film as a whole).

Religulous

Bill Maher’s satiric documentary Religulous (2008, dir. Larry Charles) is a sustained editorial attack on religion. Maher sees religion—particularly Christianity, but the Jewish and Muslim faiths as well—as responsible for hatred, bias, racism, nationalistic bigotry, persecution, superstition, and ignorance that have been the bane of the civilized world for centuries.

Maher’s method is to visit various individuals and locations associated with religion, to interview or talk about them, to point out logical fallacies in what they argue for or represent, to use film clips from religious films, or messages scrolling across the screen, that have the effect of ridiculing them. He’s interested in making fun of his subject more than he is in trying to understand it

Maher is completely transparent about his goals in Religulous. He’s against religion. He’s out to show what’s wrong with it. He doesn’t try to be balanced or fair, though on a couple of occasions, when someone on the “other side” has made a good point, he gives them credit.

In one scene at a recreational park called “Holy Land,” Maher interviews a man impersonating Jesus—not as if he is talking to an individual dressed up as Jesus, but as if he is interviewing Jesus Himself. The costumed Jesus does his best to answer Maher’s pointed questions and to counter his argument, but he’s an easy target.

In another scene, Maher impersonates an evangelist preaching Scientology to a crowd gathered on a street corner in what appears to be London. The scene is hilarious, but the teachings of Scientology make another easy target.

Most of the people whom Maher interviews are easy targets—evangelists, right-wing Jews who deny the Holocaust, semi-coherent Catholic priests, amusement park characters and patrons, a self-described Jew for Jesus who runs a religious souvenir shop, a formerly gay evangelist married to a former lesbian who is convinced that gay people are not really gay (he doesn’t believe in gay people) but are “out of balance,” and so on.

The most interesting figure whom Maher interviews is a priest who is an astronomer for the Vatican. This is an interesting man who has succeeded in reconciling his own commitment to science with his faith in the Catholic Church—but Maher doesn’t take advantage of the opportunity to ask interesting and probing questions about science, logic, religion, and faith. In general, he avoids talking with people of substance.

I have no argument with Maher’s contention that leaders of the world should use logic and education. I agree that it is disturbing to hear leaders invoking irrational and illogical principles, religious nationalism, astrology, superstition, zealotry, all in the name of whatever god they believe in. But Maher resorts to ridicule and satire to make fun of religion and of religious people. In effect, he’s guilty of the same sort of bigotry that he is criticizing. His film is amusing and entertaining but it lacks substance, and it lacks respect for its subject and even for its viewers. It will appeal to people already inclined to agree with its viewpoint but will do little to persuade others.

One could argue that Maher approaches his topic with the same lack of respect and understanding and tolerance that some religious people express towards people or topics with which they disagree—evolution, stem cell research, those who believe in other faiths and creeds, etc. The trouble is, of course, that the term “religious people” encompasses billions of individuals with a wide array of attitudes—you can’t stereotype all religious people as thinking the same way, as having the same attitudes. But Maher does.

To Bill Maher, religion represents illogicality, irrationality, and ignorance. He favors logic, reason, and enlightenment. I favor those ways of thinking too. But the divide between religion and science, faith and logic, superstition and reason, is not as simple or clear as he would have it.

Star Trek

Entertainment value. What does it mean? For the money you spend the product you purchase possesses an intrinsic worth directly proportional to the pleasure it gives you. The entertainment value of the new Star Trek (2009, dir. J. J. Abrams) is high. There is nary a dull moment. While the original television series often took time out for political or philosophical pontifications, the new film takes little time out for anything. It is constant action, motion, noise. It has numerous cliff-hanging moments, free-fall hijinks, warp speed teleportation, sex with green women, phasers set at stun, black holes, imploding planets, brain devouring parasites, you name it. It has a strong sense of fun—it takes seriously the TV series on which it is based, but lacks more than enough respect to play fast and loose with the particulars. If you are a fan of the original series or any of the films it spawned, then you will watch this film with a particular anticipation—awaiting the appearance of each of the original characters, awaiting the appearance of the Enterprise itself. (If you were not a fan of the original, then you will simply be entertained). All the original characters are here, including Scotty, who appears relatively late, but who is immediately recognizable. The characters, especially Spock, seem more three-dimensional than their TV-based originals. Chekhov and Sulu for the first time are genuinely interesting. Uhuru for the first time seems more than a token representative of racial equality—she’s downright fetching, a brilliant linguist, and, as we learn, she and Spock are romantically involved. The film shows the half-human/half-Vulcan Spock in a series of transitions as he chooses to be neither wholly Vulcan nor wholly human. He has logic and precision but also passion and, surprisingly, a temper. Obviously, the full-grown adult Spock is a product of self-discipline. Spock and the actor Zachary Quinto who portrays him are the best human elements in the film.

Basically, and fundamentally, Star Trek is entertaining. It reinvents and reinvigorates the original story line, pays homage (not too reverently) to the mythology of the television series, uses a legion of special effects to the maximum (this is not a film where one can complain of too many special effects), is full of humor and humanity and constant movement.

The film has its problems. For one, Leonard Nimoy’s appearance was contrived and unnecessary. For another, the science underlying the series has always been questionable. It remains so here. A major problem has always been Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Star Trek neatly avoids the light speed limit by use of warp-drive, a technology that allows the Enterprise to bend space and travel light years in only a short time. The series has never offered much explanation for this technology, other than the fact that it relies on the ever-present (and problematic) lithium crystals. Physicists have speculated about warping space as a way of evading the light-speed limit but have not gotten far in proposing how it might be done, other than to suggest that it would require more energy that the galaxy or the universe or certainly human technology can generate. Over the past few years physicists have succeeded in creating a form of teleportation—but this has never involved more than moving a proton or two at a time. Theoretically, teleportation may be possible. Practically speaking, it may not be, and if it is, we are probably millennia away from being able to employ it in the reliable way the folks on the Enterprise do. The film also invokes time travel and parallel universes, and the science for these remains speculative though tantalizing as well. In general, Star Trek depends on the premise that it’s possible to move around in the galaxy without much difficulty—a galaxy that is 100,000 light years across and a 1000 light years thick, populated by some 300 billion stars. In Star Trek the galaxy is conveniently small and navigable. It is like the Old West in cowboy movies, easily traveled, fraught with its own perils. The real galaxy is a lot bigger, emptier, colder than this film would have it.

But Star Trek does not rise or fall on such quibbles. I enjoyed it thoroughly.

Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor, by Brad Gooch

The new biography of Flannery O’Connor by Brad Gooch (Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor, Little, Brown, and Company, 2009) gives a better and more three-dimensional portrait of the writer than any other I have encountered. It is not a literary biography--it does not read or interpret her stories and her two novels, and it does not trace her development as a writer in any but the most general details. But it is an engaging and sympathetic account of the writer’s life and of the conditions and challenges she faced. It is also well written. The biography is sympathetic to O’Connor without being hagiographic. Gooch may find much to admire in his subject, but he doesn’t hesitate to bring out issues that might place her in an unflattering light (her views on race, for instance, which moderated over the years).

I have always found O’Connor and her fiction difficult. She strikes me as an exceedingly doctrinaire and uncompromising writer both in her theology and in her fiction. She shows no mercy to her characters, though she would argue that it is not her business but God’s to do so. She was a devout Catholic in a Protestant South. She lost her father, whom she loved, at an early age to the same disease that would later afflict her. Her mother Regina was, apparently, strict and difficult. When she contracted lupus and returned to Milledgeville to live out the remainder of her life, she did so in part because she knew she could depend on Regina for help and support. She worried about what might happen to her if her mother died before she did. But mother and daughter apparently did not always get along, and Regina did not understand or like her daughter’s writing. Various visitors to the O’Connor home at Andalusia commented on the tension in the household and on Regina’s occasional hostile or embarrassing comments. Of course, lupus itself was a major challenge during the last fifteen years of O’Connor’s life. She knew the diagnosis was a death sentence, and the main question was how long she would last before it took her. Amazingly, she continued to live a full life right up until her final illness and completed two of her best stories, “Parker’s Back” and “Judgment Day,” shortly before she died.

Gooch seems to have read every document and interviewed every conceivable living subject who knew O’Connor. His accounts of her early childhood and Catholic upbringing in Savannah are detailed and fascinating. He depicts a young Flannery who was a self-styled character from an early age, writing stories about her family, drawing satirical cartoons, training chickens to walk backwards, disdaining social occasions that for other Southern girls would have been command performances. It is to Regina’s credit that as much as she might have exerted authority in her household she gave her daughter ample space and opportunity to grow and develop, both before her illness and afterwards—although this may have been the result of O’Connor’s own strong personality.

One way the biography manages to depict a three-dimensional O’Connor is through the people she was friends with and, in a few cases, in whom she may have been romantically interested. The main example of the latter category was Erik Langkjaer, a young book salesman who visited her frequently during the early 1950s but who returned to Europe and became engaged to another woman while O’Connor apparently still believed a relationship might develop. Gooch portrays the failure of this relationship as one that was painful for the writer. O’Connor apparently later incorporated elements of this relationship into her story “Good Country People”— Langkjaer even recognized himself in the story. There has been some speculation over the years about O’Connor’s sexuality. She was friends with two women who professed their love for her—Maryat Lee and Betty Hester--but she did not reciprocate their affections except in a friendly way. She remained close with both women to the end of her life. The friendship with Hester was clearly an important one that produced a rich and revealing series of letters. Friendships with writers such as Robie McCauley, Robert Lowell, Caroline Gordon, Andrew Lytle, and others demonstrate that she did not lead a life of isolation and that she often traveled away from Milledgeville to visit friends such as Brainard and Frances Cheney in Nashville.

One flaw in the book, I think, is Gooch’s constant attempts to draw parallels between O’Connor’s life and her fiction. Obviously, there were links, and clearly O’Connor got much of her material not only from people she knew and events she experienced but also from stories told to her by family and friends. But imagination clearly played an important process in the invention of her stories, and Gooch doesn’t sufficiently credit it. He seems to believe that everything in her fiction has some connection or basis in her life, though he acknowledges the often dramatic ways in which she transformed life experiences into her art.

Gooch is especially effective at making clear the extent to which O’Connor’s devout Catholicism affected every aspect of her life and work. He makes clear that she read widely in Catholic theology and philosophy and that she was especially fond of the Catholic novelist Francois Mauriac. In literature she read fairly widely, including the literature of the American South, and she had strong opinions on the writers she admired (Faulkner) and those she disliked (Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote).

Gooch quotes generously from O’Connor’s letters, stories, and other writings, as well as from interviews and accounts by numerous other individuals. He brings O’Connor to life in part by allowing the reader to hear her own voice as often as possible in the biography, and by allowing us to see O’Connor through the opinions of the others who knew her.

I have often wondered (along with others) whether by the time of her death O’Connor had written herself out. Late in her life, she herself seemed troubled by this question. Would she have continued to write the same sort of fiction? The questions of whether and how her work would have evolved invite the kind of pointless speculation inevitably focused on writers who die at a relatively young age.

Doubt

The title of Doubt (2008, dir. and writer John Patrick Shanley) expresses the themes and concerns of the film in every possible way. The film is about political and cultural doubt, personal doubt about one’s motives and perceptions, theological doubt, ethical and moral doubt. In other words, the film is about those modes of thought that make us self-aware and thinking creatures, that give us a sentient self, that burden us with uncertainty. Doubt is a film that, despite its concern with faith and the Catholic Church, doesn’t take anything for granted, a film in which there are no absolutes and everything is up for interrogation, examination.

Doubt takes place in 1964, when the Civil Rights Movement was making major political and cultural inroads in America, the year following the assassination of John Kennedy, two years following the pronouncements of Vatican II. The placement of the film in 1964 thereby enables it to explore issues that remain pertinent today. Another issue that was not much spoken of, if at all, in 1964, was the concern that some priests might be molesting young members of their churches. The film examines this possibility; helps explain why the problem went for so long unacknowledged or addressed; yet at the same time does not make this issue its main subject. Instead, its mains subject is exactly what its title conveys: doubt.

I can think of few films with better acting. Meryl Streep as Sister Aloysius and Philip Seymour Hoffman as Father Flynn provide some of the best acting I’ve seen in film in quite a while. Streep in particular so fully inhabits her role as the senior sister of the school, a stern disciplinarian both to students and to others, totally dedicated to her calling as a teacher and nun, devout in her faith, fully disapproving of the reforms of Vatican II beginning to make themselves felt. The film is worth seeing solely for the experience of watching the expressions on Streep’s face—she can say more with a grimace, a raised eyebrow, a clenched lip, than many actresses can manage in a career. In her public appearances on talk shows and other venues, Streep has always struck me as highly intelligent and without any kind of distinct personality. In her acting roles, she becomes the parts she plays.

Amy Adams is fresh and convincing in her role as the young nun and teacher Sister James.

The plot focuses on Sister Aloysius’s growing suspicion that Father Flynn is having an “inappropriate” relationship with the only black student at the school. Sister Aloysius does not like Father Flynn’s informal way with the parishioners and the students at the school. He’s too relaxed and familiar for her tastes. He’s willing to have a secular song as part of the Christmas pageant, and this bothers her as well. Flynn is apparently responsible for the admission to the school of its first black student, Donald Miller, and although the sister does not openly disagree with the student’s presence she feels he needs special attention because of how other students may treat him.

The film suggests, and Sister James and Father Flynn suggest, that Sister Aloysius’s suspicions of the priest are motivated by her dislike of his reformed ways. The film neither confirms nor denies this possibility, just as it neither confirms nor denies her accusations against the priest. In the end, those accusations seem confirmed circumstantially—Sister Aloysius is told something about Father Flynn by a teacher at another school, and when she threatens to go public with what she believes she knows, he decides to resign. Is this because he is guilty of her charges, or because he wants to avoid embarrassment? The film never gives an answer. It provides only possible explanations.

Gradually, Sister Aloysius collects evidence. Flynn held a special meeting with the boy, after which the boy appeared upset and may have had wine on his breath. Sister Aloysius sees Father Flynn put an undershirt in the boy’s locker. We see Flynn and the boy together only twice. The first time the boy is confessing his desire to enter the priesthood. The second time the priest is comforting the boy who has been jostled in the school hallway by another student. There is nothing untoward in these two scenes. Everything Sister Aloysius knows about the boy and about Flynn is circumstantial, assumed, inferred, implied. Nothing is certain. As members of the audience we are in the same position as the characters in the film. Only Sister Aloysius seems sure that she knows what is happening, and she vows to bring Father Flynn down.

The film makes a point of portraying the male-centered structure of the school and the church. Father Flynn is the final authority. The nuns live and eat together in relatively Spartan surroundings, while Father Flynn and other priests dine and joke together in a social, jovial way. If Sister Aloysius follows protocol, she will have to forward her concerns about the school and Father Flynn through Flynn himself. Father Flynn himself must answer to other priests, cardinals, bishops. It’s only when Sister Aloysius contacts a nun in another school and asks about Father Flynn’s past that she is able to make headway. Even when Father Flynn resigns his position in the church, he is reassigned by his superiors to another church and school, a better one, in fact.

The only person who does not have doubt about what she believes she knows is Sister Aloysius. In the end, even she is unsure.

Taken

It’s always been interesting to me how the American popular imagination is constantly on the lookout for people to identify as Enemy. In the 1950s, when I was growing up, Indians and Nazis and Communists were the enemy. As political attitudes evolved, Nazis remained a convenient enemy, but Indians (Native Americans) were replaced by other ethnic groups—Mexicans, South Africans, East Europeans, and (for the last several decades), Arabs. There was even a period in the 1980s and 90s when outer space aliens substituted for ethnic enemies. The events of September 11 and the ensuing war in Iraq focused the popular imagination not so much on Arabs as on people of the Muslim world.

East European Muslims—Albanians, to be exact—are the enemy in the film Taken (2008, dir. Pierre Morel). This well made, soulless, and intellectually vapid action film operates entirely on a visceral level. Liam Neeson plays a retired U. S. security agent whose 17-year-old daughter is visiting in Paris when she is kidnapped by Albanians who drug her and sell her into the slave trade. Neeson sets out to rescue her, vowing to her kidnapper in a cell phone that “I will find you, and I will kill you.” This he does, with grimly calculating efficiency. I did not count how many Albanian—and Muslims and ethnic individuals of other stripes—met their maker at Neeson’s hands, but the number was high.

Neeson functions in this film like a super hero. He’s relentless and unstoppable.  He uses skills acquired as a security agent to track down the kidnappers, the people they work for, the individuals to whom they sell their victims. He shoots, stabs, garrotes, throttles, and otherwise dispatches the bad guys in his quest to find his daughter. The film leaves little doubt that he’ll be successful. While the film is exciting and entertaining, there’s not much tension involved. I watched it with the curious sort of interest one would feel watching someone lining up the colors of a Rubik’s Cube, or putting together a jigsaw puzzle.

As a parent, I understood the obsessive dedication of Neeson’s character to finding and rescuing his child. One can easily imagine that he applied to his work as a national security agent the same single-minded ruthlessness with which he pursues his daughter’s kidnappers.

As if to make clear what the stakes are, the film makes clear that she is a virgin, that she is (as one of her kidnapper’s describes her to a potential buyer) “100% pure,” so she has to be rescued not only from kidnappers who want to drug her and sell her as a prostitute, but from dusky-skinned Arabic-speaking Muslims who want to deflower her.

Taken is a version of the myth of American indomitability and moral righteousness—a myth that events of the last several decades should have dispelled. In this 91-minute film, Neeson (who himself is Irish-born, not a native U. S. citizen) succeeds in defeating and killing the Muslim enemy in a way that the U. S. nation has not managed in various wars over the last two decades.

Waitress

Waitress (2006) instills a familiar plot with a fresh perspective, partially because of the particular approach the film takes to its subject, partially due to the excellent acting of Keri Russell and supporting cast. Russell plays Jenna Hunterson, a young waitress who works in a pie diner in a small Southern town. She expresses her emotional life through the pies she bakes—she names them after moods and situations she is in. She has no other emotional outlet. Early in the film Jenna discovers that she is pregnant by the husband whom she doesn’t like and whom she is plotting to leave. He is a controlling and self-centered bubba. She begins a hot affair with the obstetrician she goes to see about her pregnancy—he is new to town, married to a resident physician at the local hospital.

The film traces Jenna’s reaction to her developing pregnancy, the affair with her doctor, and the increasingly domineering behavior of her husband—he forbids her from traveling to a local town for a pie baking competition, requires that she turn over all her earnings, and forces her to swear that she will never love the baby as much as she loves him. Jenna narrates the film, and she makes clear that she does not love her husband and does not want the baby. She plans to have it anyway.

The freshness of the film comes partially through the perspective of director and writer Adrienne Shelly, who questions the traditional notions that a woman can find fulfillment through marriage and motherhood. Jenna’s dissatisfaction, her sense of entrapment in her marriage to Earl, is a constant focus. The pregnancy and the not-so-subtle urgings of her friends at the diner to embrace motherhood become another layer of entrapment. The two waitresses who work with her in the diner are themselves constantly on the lookout for men. One is married to an older man who is (apparently) an invalid—she is having an affair with the thoroughly distasteful manager of the diner. The other seeks companionship through a newspaper dating service. She becomes involved with a strange little man whose enthusiasm and poetry writing initially put her off.

The setting of a small Southern town helps focus Jenna’s struggle against a deeply entrenched Southern male power structure. We see this in a number of other films about the South, such as Jezebel (1938), Norma Rae (1979), and Places in the Heart (1984). (The power structure is Southern only because the film is set in the South—it exists everywhere, though the South’s reputation as a bastion of patriarchal traditions underlies the logic of the film).

Waitress pursues its concern with Jenna’s entrapment, with her need and the need of the other waitresses for release and fulfillment, through comic and satiric means. This is not a heavy-handed or doctrinaire film. But it makes its point.

Perhaps the most comical character in Waitress is Jenna’s husband Earl. He views Jenna solely in terms of how she serves his own well being. When they have sex (rarely) he is concerned only with his own satisfaction. He tells her that she has never been sexy and comments often on her increasing size. When he discovers the money she has been hiding around the house (money she has been saving to fund her escape from the marriage) she tells him she has been saving it to buy a crib and other things for the baby. He believes her, and uses the unspent portion of the money to buy himself a video camera to film the birth. Earl is the supreme example of a self-centered, wholly egotistical man who views his marriage and his wife solely as an enhancement to his own ego. Although he is an exaggerated parody, not a few men who watch the film should feel a wee bit uncomfortable with what they recognize of themselves in his character.

Jenna finds an alternative to Earl in her obstetrician Dr. Pomatter. He compliments her, enjoys her cooking, listens to her thoughts and concerns, and for much of the film she genuinely considers running away with him. In many ways, as she finally decides, he is just another version of Earl.

The small town in which Waitress occurs offers the director a venue for a comical cast of eccentric and quaint Southern characters. Foremost among them is Old Joe, played by Andy Griffith. He owns the pie bar and comes in each day with an exacting set of demands that only Jenna seems able to carry out to his satisfaction. Despite his crotchety exterior, the film gradually reveals an inner personality that at first we don’t see.

A fortuitous turn of events at the end of the film—not wholly a surprise—provides Jenna with an escape from her predicament. It is, unfortunately, not a solution available to most women in her predicament, a fact indicative of the basically romantic and fairy-tale character of the film.

Nonetheless, Waitress is thoroughly engaging.

Adrienne Shelley was murdered shortly before the film’s release.

The Innocents

In his short novel The Turn of the Screw Henry James through a gradual accretion of situations, details, hints, and improbable moments builds the case that his central character, a young governess charged with the care of two young children, isn’t really seeing the apparitions she thinks she is seeing. One can read the story as a straight tale of the supernatural, a story in which the ghosts are really there. Or one can read it as a study in psychological deviance in which the ghosts are the projections of a neurotic young woman. The genius of the story in part rests in the fact that you are never sure how to read it—though once you glimpse the outline of the psychological reading, it is difficult to put out of your mind.

The 1961 film adaptation The Innocents (dir. Jack Clayton) begins with a scene of the disturbed young governess, in distress and in prayer, agonizing over her desire to protect the children in her charge. She is clearly an upset and hysterical woman. From its first scene, this film leaves little doubt which reading it will undertake. From the start it strips away that layer of narrative subtlety in the novel. The film otherwise offers an effective and literal rendition of James’ novel, with Deborah Kerr portraying the governess in what may be one of her finest performances.

The film retains much of the uncertainty and nuance so important in the novel—the strange tales of the recent deaths of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, their love affair, the boy’s expulsion from school, the distant and indifferent uncle who is responsible for the children, but who doesn’t want to be bothered by them or by the governess in any way.

When the uncle implores the governess to take the position, he does so almost as a kind of marriage proposal, and she is clearly marked by the moment. The uncle is often in her mind.  The film is more explicit than the novel in suggesting the sexual undertones and overtones of the story—the governess’ dissatisfaction with her own life, her sexual inexperience and repression, her attraction to the uncle, the strangely adult way the boy interacts with her (including a lascivious kiss he plants on her), his self-conscious innocence that, with a different inflection or facial expression, becomes, at least in her mind, proof of his corruption.

While the novel is all subtlety and restraint, the film adds a strong note of hysteria to its portrayal of the governess. The fear the film inspires is not about supernatural occurrences but about what the governess thinks she is seeing, her deepening psychological disturbance, the dangers she poses to the children. The film is not so much an adaptation as it is a reading, and in that role it performs in an intelligent and interesting way that does no violence to the novel.

The Day the Earth Stood Still

The Robert Wise version of The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) was simple and straightforward. Produced when special effects were primitive, it relies on ideas and characters to convey its message. The nuclear age and the Cold War had just begun. The Age of Science was in the ascendant. It was a time of fear, uncertainty, and hope. The film was set in Washington, DC, the center of political power in the Western World. The space ship, a conventional flying saucer-type craft, lands on a baseball diamond. A figure emerges from the ship, and when he raises his hand, he is shot and wounded by a nervous soldier. He is hospitalized but soon escapes and takes up residence in a boarding house where a young woman (Patricia Neal) lives with her son. They become friends, he reveals himself along with his desire to speak with world leaders, and complications ensue. The Bernard Herrmann score is a spectacular and original enhancement to the film.

The 2008 remake of the film (directed by Scott Derrickson) preserves the main plot outline but transfers the setting to New York City—the space ship lands in Central Park. Rather than a conventional flying saucer, the ship is a glowing, translucent globe. Keanu Reeves plays the alien, Klaatu. Reeves actually could have done well by the part had the rest of the film been something other than what it is. The new film dispenses with practically every admirable element in the older one. Whereas the earlier film shows people infused with fear and wonder as the space ship lands and the alien figure emerges, this new one mainly shows fear. Everyone assumes the spaceship has come to do harm, and the film complicates matters by having not just one spaceship but hundreds land on the earth. The menace they pose is clear. (The idea of subtlety in the 2008 film is a truly alien concept). In the older film we are told that the robot Gort can destroy the world, if called on to do so. We are shown only a few minor examples of his power. He is a frightening and imposing figure, and there is no doubt that he is formidable. But this is clear only because of implication. In the later film we are also told that Gort can destroy the world, and then in graphic and considerable detail for the last twenty or so minutes of the film we are shown how he can do so. The trouble is that I never believed in the robot of the newer film—he looked like a special effect from the beginning, and when he starts in on his destroy-the-world shtick, all I could think to myself was, "these are special effects." Gort in the newer movie lacks the mystique and reality of Gort in the older film. He is an abysmal failure.

Jennifer Connelly plays the Patricia Neal character in the new film. She is an exo-biologist. Federal agents drag her from her house to join a team of scientists supposed to advise and work with the government in deciding how to respond to the alien visit. The new film pays a lot of attention to how the government mobilizes the military to meet the challenge of the alien menace, and of course all their efforts are ineffective. In fact, the new film seems to exult in the notion of humankind's utter helplessness.

Whereas Klaatu in the first film comes to the planet to give a warning (he sees the human race as too warlike), in the second film he comes to destroy. Mankind has created such an environmental danger to the survival of the planet, one of the only planets in the galaxy that harbors complex life, that Klaatu decides the humans must be destroyed to save the planet. Whereas Klaatu in the earlier film shows no hostility and even seems interested in the humans that surround his spacecraft, in the latter film he shows indifference.

The second film relies heavily on special effects, and the human characters seem secondary. They merely follow the alien around and periodically try to convince him that the human race can change and that he shouldn't wipe it out.

Although the second film preserves the major characters of the original (including the robot Gort) and even the basic plot and many of the same scenes (often completely reenvisioned), it substitutes noise and explosions and spectacular effects for intelligence and human engagement with an extraordinary situation. The first film may seem dated, but the second film is simply dead.

The 1951 The Day the Earth Stood Still was a visionary film, one that puts aside national boundaries and ideologies and addresses larger issues of peace and survival for the human race and the planet. It is one of the many reasons why I love films.

Places in the Heart

Places in the Heart (1984, dir. Robert Benton) is schizophrenic. The title suggests a warm, sentimental, somewhat addled encomium to the idyllic past. There is a degree of that past in the film. But it is also about the hard struggle a young wife and mother, Edna Spalding (Sally Field), must endure after her husband's unexpected death. On the night of his funeral she asks a friend to show her how to write a check—she has never written one. The next day the local banker shows up at her door to inform her about her husband's finances—he left barely half the money she will need to make the next payment on the farm. The banker is sure that Edna is incapable of understanding her plight and certainly lacking the skills required to save the farm. He advises her to sell the farm and move in with a relative. He suggests that she can farm her two children out to relatives in Oklahoma. At first she is incapable. But eventually she rises to the challenge, intent on disproving his certainty that she will not survive on her own.

The film shows the pervasive racism of the 1930s in Texas. The young black man who drunkenly and unintentionally shoots her husband, killing him, is lynched. A procession of cars drags his body through the town, stopping in front of her house long enough to ensure that she knows "justice" had been done. The Klan makes an appearance in the film as well.

But Places in the Heart also wants us to see Edna Spalding as an exception in this environment. An itinerant black man named Moze (Danny Glover) comes to her door, asking for work, and she turns him away. When she finds him chopping wood in her yard, she sends him away again, harshly, but not before he manages to steal some of her silverware. The local sheriff arrests the man and discovers the stolen silverware. In the meantime, she has had another meeting with the local banker and now understands her circumstances better than before. The sheriff brings the thief to her door with the silverware. Instead of confirming that the stolen goods are hers, she tells the sheriff that she had given the silverware to the man so he could clean them. She remembers his promise that he is an expert at growing cotton, his offer to help her, and her plan now is to take him up on that offer.

Soon after, the banker shows up at her door again with his blind brother-in-law (John Malcovich) in tow. He suggests that if she takes his brother-in-law as a border, the bank will think better of her when it comes time to consider another loan. She takes him in too.

In the course of the film, these three marginal people—the widow woman, the vagrant black man, the blind man—become allies and friends. It is certainly within the realm of possibility than such an alliance could form. There are more than a few examples of such alliances in the historical record. But they were rare exceptions. Many films about the Southern past avoid dealing with the historical reality by focusing on exceptions. This film focuses on an exceptional situation but also includes glimpses of racism and patriarchal prejudices. It shows murder, bigotry, adultery, yet in the final scene everyone—the dead and the betrayed—gather in church together to worship—this is apparently Edna's wish-fulfilling vision, the way she would want her life to be. It is also perhaps Robert Benton's way of showing (if indeed this wasn't merely a way of pandering to the audience and glossing over the negative elements) that everyone is washed in the Blood of the Lamb.

The film is more than a portrayal of Edna's struggle to save the farm. It portrays life in a small east Texas town during the Depression. We see Edna spending time with her children and with two couples to whom she is close. An adulterous affair between two of her friends provides melodramatic interest. The film shows that in the rural South of the Depression life was slow and difficult and different from what it is now, but it also shows similarities that link past and present.

In Moze, Benton gives us a positive portrayal of an African American male that both embraces and subverts racial stereotypes. Moze is itinerant. He needs a way to feed himself, to survive. He is wily, crafty, and not beyond stealing. He sees in Edna a vulnerable woman in need of assistance. So he attaches himself to her—out of self-interest at first, perhaps, but later out of loyalty to the friendship they develop. He is skilled at farming, gives good advice to Edna, and is protective of her children. The stereotype he embodies is of the virtuous black character (usually a man, sometimes a woman) who rescues white people in need—Sidney Poitier portrayed many such figures in films from the 1950s and 1960s. There is also an element here of the fond desire of some Southerners to believe that whatever one may say about the racist past there were strong bonds that held blacks and whites together.

In the end, the woman and her two new friends work together to save the farm. Moze plants and cultivates the cotton, and when it is ready for picking he talks other black folks in the area into working for Edna for a price, and he convinces her to hire them. When she takes the cotton to the gin, he makes sure that the gin owner doesn't cheat her, as of course he tries to do. She is able to make her payment to the bank. How she will make subsequent payments the film does not make clear and in fact does not even seem interested in the question.

Why during the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s did Sallie Field appear in so many Southern films—Smokey and the Bandit (1977), Norma Rae (1979), Places in the Heart (1984), Steel Magnolias (1989), Forrest Gump (1994)? She first of all looked the part of the strait-laced and conventional Southern belle—attractive, pliant, and unthreatening. Someone who by her appearance one might think could not get along on her own. But in most of these films part of the interest in her character grows out of her struggle against the type she portrays--the bride who declines to marry, the farm owner who is determined to make the bank payment, the mill worker who resents exploitative policies by management. Without wholly moving outside the convention role of Southern womanhood that her appearance and demeanor suggest, she proves herself to be resourceful, resilient, feisty, and determined. When she perseveres, she does so against a Southern male power structure. She was, in this sense, an expression of the impact of the Feminist movement on the American South and on Southern women in the 1970s and early 1980s.