Easy Rider

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

George: No, it makes 'em dangerous.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Hurt Locker

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

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

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

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

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

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

Up in the Air

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

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

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

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

Ghosts of Mississippi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Race to Witch Mountain

A sequel of sorts to two Walt Disney films from the 1970s, Race to Witch Mountain (2009; dir. Andy Frickman) features The Rock, Dwayne Johnson, in his new child-friendly persona as an ex-con cab driver named Jack Bruno trying to go straight. Unfortunately, he picks up as his fares two children, brother and sister, from another planet. The girl can move objects through the air and her brother can alter the molecular density of his flesh so that he can poke his hand through doors. Both behave in an aloof and creepy manner. The plot thickens and coagulates with each moment of this film. Suffice it to say that the brother and sister are trying to get back to their spaceship, which has crash-landed and been secretly impounded by the U. S. Government. They come from a planet that is dying, and their species is planning to migrate en masse to the Earth and take up residence. The parents of the two space children have discovered a way to restore life to their home planet, thereby making invasion of the Earth unnecessary. For some reason the boy and girl have been entrusted with possession of the discovery, which they are supposed to carry back to the home planet. But there is also an evil robot assassin sent by enemies of their parents to kill the children and recover the discovery so that the aliens can take over the planet anyway. And much of the action takes place at a UFO convention in Las Vegas. In one scene The Rock and his female scientist sidekick gape in embarrassing and unconvincing awe at a flying saucer lifting off just past the edge of the screen. The boy and girl, who are repressed and uptight and who speak in stilted bureaucratic sentences, by the end of the film have warmed up. The girl tearfully bids The Rock goodbye and makes him promise to take care of the friendly dog they have picked up along the way as they fled the evil robot assassin and the irrepressible agents of the U. S Government. Driving his yellow taxi at top speed up and down isolated dirt roads (and through railroad tunnels) just outside Vegas, the Rock manages to stir up a lot of dust.

Appaloosa

Appaloosa (2008) held my interest for three reasons. First was the spectacular landscape in the background of many scenes. Director Ed Harris obviously heeded the films of John Ford. Second was the character Virgil Cole, played by Ed Harris, one half of the gun-slinging team hired by the power-structure of Appaloosa to restore law and order. Harris is an under-appreciated actor who in The Right Stuff and Pollock (which he also directed) and The Hours seemed capable of reinventing himself. In Appaloosa Virgil Cole is an upright sheriff who can’t countenance bad language or disrespectful talk about women and who has slept only with prostitutes and an Indian woman. He is an interesting character, if somewhat predictable, and Harris effectively brings him to life. Third was how in this generally mediocre film the three lead actors, Harris, Viggo Mortenson, and Renee Zellwegger, moved the story along. Although it never moved particularly well, it at least kept me awake. Jeremy Irons played the bad guy, a vicious cattle baron and businessman and nemesis of the other three. He is supposed to embody the evil developers and business opportunists who are taking over the West. My main interest in Irons was how he suppressed his British accent by talking as if his mouth were full of pebbles, much like Daniel Day Lewis in Gangs of New York. Zellwegger portrays a widow woman, Allison French, so uncertain of her welfare and survival that she sleeps with any man who shows promise of being able or willing to take care of her. Although her character was supposed perhaps to provide the film with a feminist angle, illustrating the limited means for survival available to an unmarried woman in the Old West, she is basically a wanton, amoral, and vacuous opportunist. She is, of course, who Virgil falls in love with, but not before he asks on their first meeting whether she is a whore.

None of the three main characters seems particularly intelligent. They go through the motions, responding to the challenges and opportunities that confront them. They reminded me of characters in a Frank Norris novel (McTeague came to mind). Moral rectitude drives Virgil. Amoral self-preservation drives Allison French. Viggo Mortensen’s character Everett Hitch never says much, and though he makes what is supposed to be the noble gesture of the film, you don’t really care. Randall Bragg, played by Jeremy Irons, does seem intelligent. But as the bad guy, it’s OK that he has the smarts.

Ponyo

Ponyo (2008; dir. Hayao Miyazaki) is not as charming as Howl’s Moving Castle or Spirited Away, but visually it is a stimulating, confusing, disturbing, phantasmagorical animation. This is a child’s tale about a boy who falls in love with a fish who happens to be the daughter of the wizard of the sea and of Mother Nature. The logic that underlies the film is not adult logic. Only a child could appreciate or follow it. Even as a fairy tale the narrative strains against credulity. The best way to approach Ponyo is to watch it image by image, with no concern for how the images cohere. Although Japanese folklore and culture must be the source of many of the images in this film, they remind me of nothing so much as childhood dreams (and nightmares). The main character, a five-year old boy, lives in a house on a tall peak on the coast. In one scene waves from a storm stirred up by huge fish who themselves are the products of waves invoked by the sea wizard, wash over everything and even lap at the doors of the boy’s house. As he and his friend Ponyo (the fish turned into a girl his age) sail in a boat through the sea, he recognizes fish from the Devonian period swimming beneath the boat. Ponyo herself while a fish takes care of myriad miniscule baby fish that swarm all over the place—are they miniature Ponyos? Is she their mother? When the boy first spies Ponyo caught in a jar jostling in the surf, he rescues her while ominous waves with large eyes pursue him. The wizard of the sea lives in a huge bubble on an underwater ship. The list could go on. English language voices were provided by such folks as Liam Neeson, Betty White, Tina Fey, Cate Blanchett, Lily Tomlin, and others. Their dubbed-in voices seemed forced. The original Japanese voices with English subtitles might have worked better.

At Home in the World: A Memoir, by Joyce Maynard

At Home in the World: A Memoir (Picador: 1999) is Joyce Maynard’s recollection of the first four decades of her life. Known for her columns in the New York Times and her other writings, she recounts how her father courted and married her mother, their early years together, the births of their children. Her father, an English professor two decades older than her mother, was a frustrated artist and an alcoholic. Her mother was a brilliant woman who would have been a college professor and perhaps even a writer had she not lived in a time when married women with children found it difficult if not impossible to have careers. Encouraged to be creative and intellectual, Maynard and her older sister grow up in an environment that might have been idyllic had it not been for the frustrations of their parents and the tensions of their marriage. Maynard is preoccupied with how in much of her writing she was never able to write about the truth beneath the superficial veneer of her family’s life—she could not bring herself, for instance, to write of her father’s alcoholism or of problems in her own marriage. In this story, the daughters to some extent inherit the faults of their parents even as they succeed in escaping them.

The center of this memoir is Maynard’s account of how she wrote an article for the New York Times that caught the attention of J. D. Salinger. He wrote her, she wrote back, and following several months of correspondence she moved in with him and spent much of a year in his house. She was eighteen. He was fifty-three. Their relationship was strange and increasingly strained. Salinger practiced homeopathic medicine and diets, he counseled Maynard to share his bitter rejection of the world. He encouraged her writing and initially praised her work, though he warned her to be honest in her writing above all else. Although they discussed having children, they never had sex (her inability rather than his). Maynard discussed her uncomfortable relationship with Salinger’s daughter (about her age) and son. (Salinger’s daughter has written her own account of life with her father).

The end of the relationship caused a major crisis for Maynard. The rest of the book narrated her recovery, her marriage, three children, and divorce and a final meeting with a bitter and angry Salinger while she is writing the memoir.

Maynard writes well. But does she write well enough to justify this memoir? Does she exploit Salinger by violating his obsessive privacy and writing about their relationship? Perhaps. But she comes to believe that he exploited her, and there is no doubt that he did. She is shocked to learn that he had a correspondence with another young woman about the time he was writing her, and that in fact he had a number of such relationships with younger women. He is living with a younger woman the last time she sees him, when he is seventy-seven.

I found Maynard’s parents the most interesting part of the book. They were eccentric to a fault, yet they loved their daughters. Their family was dysfunctional, and Maynard grows up to raise her own dysfunctional family. What family isn’t dysfunctional?

The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, by Richard Dawkins

In The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (Free Press, 2009) Richard Dawkins reviews systematically and with great clarity all the important evidence for evolution. The fossil record offers one small bit of evidence. Especially interesting is Dawkins’ explanation of why the so-called gaps in the fossil record do not amount to a weakness in the case for evolution. Also interesting are his explanations about DNA, the skeletal structure of mammals (all mammals share the same bones, however much they may differ in shape, function, and appearance), the interrelatedness of species, how the development of embryos reenacts the evolutionary process (this is the concept of embryology),the role of continental drift in evolution, and how the fact that all life on earth shares a common proportion of DNA means that life began on the earth only once, and that all life is descended from a single common ancestor.

For Dawkins evolution is a fact. We refer to it as a theory only because science defines a theory as a fact supported by evidence. The evidence for evolution is overwhelming.

Dawkins prefers the term natural selection to evolution.

Dawkins has no tolerance for evolution deniers. He refers often to the high percentage of people in the United States and England and the Middle East who believe that the earth is only 6000 years old and that all life is divinely created. He sees such people as threats to reason and education and enlightenment. There is no denying that. He is extremely effective at debunking and refuting their arguments, which at best are uninformed and at worst are deliberate distortions of fact, reason, and scientific evidence. Yet Dawkins often seems a bit too eager to deny religion and the possibility of any supernatural involvement in scientific processes. To me evolution (which I accept as fact) and God (whom I regard as unlikely but possible) do not cancel one another out. Natural selection seems a very logical way for a Creator to go about creating a world. On the other hand, natural selection is clearly the process that brought such a wealth of biological diversity in the world.

The only time in this book when my eyes glazed over (meaning that for a relatively experienced lay reader of science texts Dawkins’ explanations grew too technical) was in his discussion of various methods of dating—carbon dating, genetic dating, and so on. I also felt that his final chapter, a sentence by sentence analysis of the final paragraph of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, was a bit tedious in its belaboring of the obvious.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

This 1927 version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin shows how a director can skew the perspective of a source narrative to reflect his own interests and loyalties. According to the essay that accompanied the DVD, the director Harry A. Pollard considered Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel as Northern propaganda and did not want to show the South in a negative light. He therefore made most of the Southern slave owners in his film gentle and enlightened masters. The evil characters are of indeterminate geographical origin (Simon Legree) or are lower-class scoundrels.

Pollard’s version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin clearly portrays slavery as an evil institution: slave families are split up and sold, bad owners whip and abuse their slaves, the existence of light-skinned slave women implies sexual exploitation and abuse, and the slave master Simon Legree is abusive to slaves in every possible way. Although enlightened owners may treat their slaves in a kindly way, if they die or go bankrupt less benevolent owners can buy the slaves and change their lives dramatically.

In its portrayal of slavery’s victims, Uncle Tom’s Cabin invokes numerous racist stereotypes; it presents most slaves as simple, easily misguided, susceptible to temptation, and unintelligent. With one exception, the most sympathetically portrayed slaves are so light-skinned that they are hardly recognizable as of African descent. The exception is Uncle Tom, played by a black actor named James B. Lowe. His love of his family and his fidelity to his white masters, and his love especially of Eva, makes him a paragon of virtue—where virtue is construed as fidelity to the white owners.

At the center of the film are Eliza and her husband George. Both are light-skinned. Eliza is raised as a daughter by her owners. George is “rented” from his owner as some sort of engineer. They are virtuous and highly intelligent and possess all the civilized values and behaviors of their white masters. In fact, what the film praises about them is how much they are like whites. Moreover, they are played by white actors made up to faintly resemble light-skinned slaves. (Eliza, played by Margarita Fischer, the director’s wife, is described as “yellow skinned” by a man who has been hired to track down and bring her back after she has run away). The DVD essay explains that the use of white actors was intended to make the portrayal of slaves in love more palatable to the mostly white audiences.

Almost as soon as George and Eliza marry, his owner shows up and takes George away. When bankruptcy threatens Eliza’s owner, who has treated her as a daughter, he agrees to sell her young son along with loyal Uncle Tom. George spends the entire film searching for Eliza and their son. Eliza for much of the film is searching for their son too (he is lured away from her by a slave dealer and sold to another slave owner). She also must resist the lecherous advances of Simon Legree.

Contrasted against the virtuous and light-skinned George and Eliza are darker-skinned slaves who are shown as ignorant and unenlightened, though usually good natured.

The film frequently shows slave children in various comical and stereotypical situations, their wide white eyes prominently displayed. In one scene a group of slave children runs after a horse-drawn cart full of watermelons. They steal a melon and ravenously devour it in the middle of the road.

The film’s real racial attitudes are most clearly represented in the character of Topsy, an adolescent slave girl attached to Aunt Ophelia and friend to the saintly Eva. Topsy (portrayed in blackface by nineteen-year-old white actress Mona Ray) is mischievous and uncontrollable. She constantly dances around, plays tricks on Aunt Ophelia, bats her eyes, steals, and otherwise acts like a clown. The white actress’ portrayal of Topsy is remarkable in that it doesn’t even approximate the racist stereotype it is apparently trying to represent. It’s just weird. When Eva asks Topsy why she is so bad, Topsy responds that she is bad because she is black and no one can love a black person. Eva responds that she loves Topsy, and this brings about a major change in Topsy’s personality. When Eva dies, Topsy is grief-stricken because she says there is no one left to love her. Aunt Ophelia, affected by Eva’s death and Topsy’s grief, responds that she will love Topsy. This is a genuinely moving moment in the film. Yet it is also a perfect expression of the film’s racial iconography: the virtuous and civilized white girl whose purity redeems the benighted and unrestrained slave. In general, this film argues that whites must care for the incapable blacks who suffer the consequences of slavery.

A Face in the Crowd

We first encounter A Face in the Crowd (1956; dir. Elia Kazan) as what seems to be a film about the discovery and rise of a country music star whose sharp satiric humor and music might win him a place on the stage of the Grand Old Opry. In that sense, the film is about the rise and fall of an American hero, another tale of the American Dream.

The main character Lonesome Rhodes exploits the hillbilly image by suggesting in his music and his rambling radio and television monologues that down-home values—which include family and religious values—as well as his natural-born suspicion of government, bureaucrats, the wealthy, and the educated—give him a common ground for talking to and representing the interests of the common individual. On his Memphis television program, he develops this kinship by championing the cause of a poor black woman with eight children whose house has burned down. On his first show he invites his audience to send in contributions, no more than fifty cents, to help her buy a house to replace the one she’s lost. This championing of the downtrodden immediately cements Lonesome’s audience—which is mainly working class. It also wins him an African American audience. By the next week, his fans have contributed more than $18,000. On another broadcast he expresses sympathy for the hard work of housewives and mothers, suggesting that their men don’t appreciate them. This also brings him an audience of devoted women admirers, who are also attracted to his wild vigor and implied sexuality. His rugged good looks and his singing attract still another audience, mainly of younger women.

It’s easy to overlook the fact that Lonesome’s championing of the black woman would have been highly controversial in Memphis, TN, of 1957. Walter Matthau’s character says as much. Rhodes readily expresses his indifference to any social or cultural barriers or rules that tell him how to act or what to think. He’s a self-styled populist, and his populism helps him to win millions of listeners.

Gradually, however, A Face in the Crowd morphs into an exploration of the rise of the media, specifically of television, in American popular culture. It examines the power of the American media to shape and control public opinion. The film was made when the American television industry was still seeking to discover what its role might be in American culture. Budd Schulberg’s screenplay gives expression to the fear that media celebrities might use the new industry to gain control of public opinion, to sway the public mind and shape national events. The rise of such media stars in the 1950s as Billy Graham, the evangelist, and of Elvis Presley, whose songs and gyrations provokes audiences to Dionysian frenzy, provided some evidence that there was good cause for concern. This was a concern that had already been seen in other films, especially in Richard Rossen’s All the King’s Men (1949) and Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1940), where a newspaper magnate uses the media, including the newspaper chains he owns, to wield economic and political power.

Several historical factors inform this focus on media, politics, and public opinion. The 20th century was a period of demagoguery, when leaders on both sides of the Atlantic rose to fame and power on the basis of a populist political message and a dynamic media image. Father Coughlan, Marcus Garvey, Huey Long, George Wallace, and many others were American examples. Hitler and Mussolini and Stalin (in different ways) were examples from Europe. The film responds to the very real fear of the takeover of the American government by such a figure. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, fear of undue communist influence in the American government and right-wing political zealotry resulted in the rise of Joseph McCarthy, the senator who held hearings seeking to identity communist infiltrators in various corners of American government and culture, and whose reckless behavior destroyed numerous reputations and led to a low point in government.

Ultimately, although American politics now depend heavily on the media, things did not turn out in precisely the way that Schulberg prophesied. On the other hand, he was not that far off the mark. Candidates who look handsome and personable on screen tend to do better in the polls than those who don’t. There are exceptions, of course. John McCain, not the most photogenic fellow, did win the Republican nomination for president in 2008, even though he was running against the swarmily handsome Mitt Romney, former governor of Massachusetts. Barack Obama clearly profited from his dynamic speaking style and eager appearance, both of which came across effectively on the television screen. However, it’s doubtful he changed his entire personality, as Rhodes attempts to convince Senator Fuller to do in the film to attract voters.

A Face in the Crowd is also a hillbilly film, exploiting in the role of “Lonesome Rhodes” the comic stand-up career of Andy Griffith in the 1950s. Griffith, not a trained actor, plays the role of the self-styled and very self-aware hillbilly hick to the hilt. Even from his first appearance in the film, where he’s sleeping off a drunken spree in a small-town jail, he’s shown as a calculating fellow whose primary concern is “me, myself, and I.”

Patricia Neal plays a young radio producer who from the start is hoodwinked by Lonesome’s charm, down-home wit, and singing. Even at the end of the film, she’s still swayed by his influence, even after she knows he is a duplicitous manipulator of herself and of everyone else.

The film never really shimmers, in that sense that creates mystery and ambiguity and uncertainty and that makes a film or literary work memorable. Some might argue for shimmer in the final scene, where Rhodes bellows in desperate agony after Marcia. Yet up to this point the film has spent so much time pinning Rhodes down, making clear that we have no doubts about him or the forces that make him who he is, that the shimmer hardly matters.

A Face in the Crowd may have been an important influence on Robert Altman’s film Nashville, where an unseen candidate uses blaring loudspeakers, radio and television announcements, and rallies with country music singers to promote his populist political message. An important scene early in Altman’s film comes when the singer Barbara Jean arrives at the Nashville Airport to be greeted by throngs of adoring fans, high school hands, and baton twirlers. This seen is specifically reminiscent of the one in Face where Lonesome Rhodes judges a baton twirling contest.

Monsters vs. Aliens

To me the most amusing element of Monsters vs. Aliens (2009; dirs. Rob Letterman and Conrad Vernon) is how it references various sci-fi films from the 1950s (and later). One of the characters is taken from The Blob (1958, 1988)—he falls in love with a dish of jello. Another is from Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954). A third, a Vincent Price-like mad scientist, is the main character from The Fly (1958, 1986). And a huge moth is, clearly, from Mothra (1961). There are other allusions—the President of the United States performs his greeting to an alien spaceship on an organ (see Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1977). Another scene suggests The War of the Worlds (1953, 2005). And of course the huge spaceship that threatens to destroy the earth reminds us of Independence Day (1996).

The main character, a young woman suddenly transformed into a giant version of herself, suggests Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman (1958, 1993).

All these characters are comic animations. The plot is fairly unremarkable. All the characters band together to defeat an evil alien overlord who creates multiple clones of himself so that he can take over the universe. The suddenly transformed young woman must come to terms with her transformation. The various monsters who have been confined by the government for fifty years in a secret underground facility must adjust to their freedom.

Beyond the intertextuality—an expected component of most animated films these days—there is not much original about this film. But it’s fun to watch, and it’s interesting to see how the filmmakers borrowed key scenes from the films they’re referencing. The one scene I remember from the previews for the 1958 version of The Blob showed moviegoers running in panic out of a theatre, pursued by the huge protoplasmic beast—a comic version of that scene is here.

The Accountant

This short, forty-minute film (2001; dir. Ray McKinnon) features three male actors. Two of them portray brothers—the O’Dell brothers. One of the brothers stayed on the family farm, trying unsuccessfully to make a go of it. The other went to town to find his way—he’s dressed in a suit while his brother wears farm clothes. They’ve hired a financial consultant—an accountant—to assess the financial health of the farm. He drives up in an old jalopy, wears brogans and a severe, old fashioned suit. He has a ghastly nose and an ashen pallor. The first thing he asks is for a beer—not imported beer, which he scorns, but PBR. He drinks can after can, throwing each one down as he finishes. Then he asks for bourbon. He doesn’t use a calculator—he counts on his fingers and stamps his foot on the floor as he adds up the figures (“A man who won’t add his own numbers ain’t much of a man in my book.) He says that everything is in the numbers and can read the minute details of a man’s life in the numbers—the financial records--he leaves behind: “You can tell a lot about a person’s comins’ and goins’ if you know how to interpret the numbers.”

The accountant determines that the family farm is $277,452 in arrears and offers advice on how to save it: burn it down for insurance money. Make sure the dog and livestock die in the fire to avoid suspicion. Consider forfeiting a leg or two in an accident, again for insurance money. Consider murder.

As desperate as these measures are, the accountant’s goal is to save the family farm. That’s important above everything else—save the farm so that it can be passed down to the farmer’s two young sons. The message of this film is decidedly old school: pro-farm, anti-capitalism, anti-North, pro-agrarian. The accountant lectures his clients on how they’ve been victimized by “Hollywood, Wallstreet, Boston Market,” by “caricatures and stereotypes” of the South in such shows as “The Beverley Hillbillies” and “Dukes of Hazzard,” so that Southerners don’t even know what it means to be Southern anymore—one day, he warns, “one day your grandchildren will be eatin’ cornbread that’s sweet and drinkin’ ice tea that ain’t, and they’ll think that’s a Southern tradition.” When one of the brothers suggests that maybe they can sell the handwritten family logbook (passed down through five generations--“it's a tragedy”) as a book or a film, that maybe Billy Bob Thornton could make it into a movie, the accountant scoffs that Billy Bob’s not real, it’s just a Southern name like Jethro or Ellymae, and that he’s from the same state as Bill Clinton.

Donald Davidson could have written this script.

This film is a fable about the plight of the small-time farmer, the ravages of capitalism, the disappearance of Southern traditions and values. These are all well and good, and heartfelt in this film, but they’re not much more than platitudes—the film doesn’t give itself time to let them be anything else. In a longer film these pointed editorial lessons would weigh the story down. But The Accountant is just the right length.

This off-beat, whacky, droll, sad film is highly entertaining. Ray McKinnon as the accountant is an amazing character. The accountant may be the devil, or he may be the Lord, or he may be just a number cruncher. He does come up with a way to save the family farm, though it’s not what either of the brothers might have wanted.

Raintree County

The decade of the 1950s marks Raintree County (1957; dir. Edward Dmytryk) in numerous ways. The title song by Johnny Mathis, Johnny Greene’s sappy score, the concerns with madness, the blandly sanitized themes of race, the contrived and banal sentimentality, Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift. Taylor and Clift were fine actors, but Raintree County is not high on their lists of achievements.

Much of this film takes place in Indiana, where the eponymous county supposedly exists. The title refers to a mythical tree that grows somewhere in the swamp near Raintree. Early in the film, John Wickliff Shawnessey (Clift), just out of high school, stumbles into the swamp in search of the tree. He falls in the water and gets soaked. His friends make fun of him. The tree symbolizes his youthful idealism, the ideals and goals that he never quite achieves in his life.

There is so much about this film that is bad that I could waste pages on it. It’s a turgid, sloppy, illogical mess. The plot is shapeless. The film seems to have been shot largely on a set, with some exceptions, and it lacks the attention to authentic detail that gave Gone with the Wind and Jezebel whatever realism they may have had. But I am interested primarily in how the film portrays the Civil War, and in the character of Susanna Drake (Elizabeth Taylor).

The film is set just before the Civil War, towards which occasional faint allusions lead us. The war becomes an overt issue after John marries Susanna, a Southerner from New Orleans, and brings her back to Raintree to live with him. He announces to Susanna his sympathies with abolitionism (this never came up before the marriage) by asking if she has ever heard of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as if that novel neatly encapsulates the issue. After listening to campaign speeches by supporters of Lincoln, John decides that Susanna must free her two house slaves. He tells her that if she does not do so he will not return to the house. (This conflict between them is introduced rather suddenly, as if nothing led up to it or prepared us for it. The relationship between John and Susanna waxes hot and cold throughout the film, and there are often no reasons for the shifts in mood). Susanna does free the slaves, but at a party she is giving for John several of her Southern friends humiliate her by drunkenly mocking slaves. One of them blackens his face with ashes from the fireplace and in a racist and demeaning way ridicules black people.

The film presents the fraught relationship of Susanna and John as representative of the larger national conflict between North and South. But Susanna is full of dark passions, madness, and a mysterious past, while John behaves as if he is a kind of half-wit. He’s a moon-eyed aspiring poet. The equation doesn’t work. John somehow overlooks the beautiful and adoring Nell Gaither (Eva Marie Saint) and is seduced (willingly) by Susanna in a forest glade. She then leaves for New Orleans. But she later returns claiming to be pregnant, and John marries her. Throughout the long (it seemed long to me—everything in the film seems long) marriage, John is frequently tempted with Nell, who still loves him, but he remains faithful to Susanna. Nell is the saintly angel who remains chaste and faithful to John, even through his marriage to Susanna, while Susanna plays the whore. She is not literally a whore, but she is cursed with madness, a family inheritance, as well as with darker secrets. She deceives John into marrying her because she says she loves him too much to risk losing him. She at least on one occasion spends the entire day in a nearby town for suspicious reasons, and ultimately, at the height of the War, runs away to Louisiana with their son.

Susanna, whose parents died mysteriously in a plantation house fire, suffers from madness that is said to run in her family. But madness may actually be a metaphor that hides the possible secret that her mother may have been a black woman. One of the first pronouncements that Susanna makes in the film, an especially harsh one, is that anyone with a drop of black blood is by definition a black person. Yet she also speaks with extreme fondness of the woman who raised her, the woman with whom she often shared a bedroom and whom she describes as “a great lady.” This woman was black. She seems awfully confused about this great lady. We later learn that her father had fallen in love with this woman in the Caribbean, and that he had brought her back to Louisiana. It is implied that he was with her the night of the fire, and Susanna explains to John that she heard firecrackers going off in their bedroom. The implication is that Susanna’s mother killed her husband and the woman and then burned down the house. The larger implication is that Susanna is the product of her father’s love for the woman, and that her madness is the result of guilt, anguish, confusion, who knows what, over the questions of her paternity, of the possibility that she is part black, of the cause of the fire.

The curse that Susanna suffers, then (if I am right in these assumptions), is the curse of slavery, of racism, the selfsame curse that marks and condemns the South. Unfortunately, the film hints at Susanna’s parentage so faintly and euphemistically that it can do little to explore these possibilities.

In an odd scene early in the film, when John has gone South with Susanna to visit members of her family, the young couple stands on the porch of a ruined plantation house. The porch and columns are all that remain. This is the house where Susanna lived with her parents before they died in the fire. She at first tells John that she can’t remember anything about the fire because she was only three years old when it happened, but he later learns that she was actually nine and ultimately discovers that she knows more than she has been willing to reveal. In fact, the ruined plantation porch with columns closely resembles a photograph made by Eudora Welty in 1935 of the ruined Windsor Plantation. I wonder whether the filmmakers were aware of the ruins or of Welty’s photograph.

Prom Night in Mississippi

Prom Night in Mississippi (2009; dir. Paul Saltzman) is about the first integrated senior prom held at the only high school in Charleston, Mississippi, in 2008. The documentary does not blame or ridicule the community for taking time to catch up with the rest of the nation. In a modest way that avoids big claims, it shows how change and history don’t come to all parts of the nation at the same moment, and that what might have been dramatic and earth-shaking for one place three decades ago can be equally monumental in another place today.

By mostly relying on interviews with students and a few parents and school teachers and administrators, director Saltzman records the planning of the first integrated senior prom. The actor Morgan Freeman, a native of the town, was distressed that after so many years separate prom events continued to be held. He offered in 1998 to pay for a single, integrated event but the school declined. In 2007 he makes the offer again and is accepted. He appears briefly at the beginning and end of the film, which shows him making a visit to the high school to offer to sponsor an integrated prom.

The film suggests, and Freeman believes, that while the students want a single prom event, tradition, the school board, and a group of parents have forced separate events. The parents who opposed the single prom declined to be interviewed. Among the remaining parents, there is a range of views. The students express a range of views as well. Most claim not to be racists, though some agree that they don’t socialize with people of the other race either because they were raised not to do so or because the opportunity has never presented itself.

Freeman explains early in the film that he wanted the prom to serve as a catalyst for bringing students of different races together and getting them to socialize. All the black students, and many of the white students, express to Freeman their openness to the idea. But the film shows a lot of ambiguity in their attitudes, more among the white students than the black. Many of the white students worry about what their parents think about their black friends. One girl speaks of being physically threatened by her step-father. While all the students comfortably occupy the same gymnasium for the dance, for the most part the white and black students socialize separately. The film doesn’t show how other students react to the one mixed-race couple that attends the dance. As the end of the prom approaches, students seem to loosen up, there is more mixing and milling around, and we see a few white and black students (white males and black females) dancing together, and a more general willingness by most people in attendance to enjoy one another.

The film dramatizes how difficult social integration was, and can still be, and how it is difficult to make good on even the best of intentions. Even the most outspoken white boy in the film, who talks about his black friends and his disagreement with the racism of his elders, admits that he has never dated a black girl because he has never wanted to. Another white boy, who asked that his face be obscured and who uses a false name, implies that his parents would disown him if they knew he socialized with members of the black race. Those parents who disagree with the integrated prom organize a separate dance for white students only: many of the white students attend both events.

The father of the white girl who dates a black student describes himself as a “red neck” but claims that he is not prejudiced--he simply believes the two races shouldn’t socialize and talks about the different ways he has tried to keep his daughter from being with her black boyfriend. He admits that he cannot control what she does when she is not at home. In the end, however, he says that he will stick by her no matter what.

These are the true roots of racial progress, the father who through love of his own daughter comes to accept something fundamentally opposed to his upbringing.

Waltz with Bashir

The animated 2008 documentary Waltz with Bashir is beautiful and powerful. Why should such a beautiful film document such horrors? Its main character and narrator is also its director, Ari Folman, who builds the film around his efforts to reconstruct his repressed memories of the Lebanon War in 1982, in which he participated as a member of the Israel Defense Forces. He’s most concerned with remembering events concerning massacres of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, carried out by Christian phalangists in response to the assassination of the Lebanese president elect Gemayel Bashir.

Memory is a central subject. How do we remember what we remember, and why do we repress certain memories and retain others? In seeking answers to these questions, Folman interviews men who were with him on the evening of the massacre. They too, in their own ways, have repressed or distorted or revised their recollections. Gradually Folman’s memories emerge, but it is not until the final scene of the film that he recovers them fully.

Memories are repressed because of the horrors they contain. They are also repressed because of how close Folman was to the massacres, and of his feelings—implied but never explicitly stated—that he and his mates might have done something to stop them.

This is also a film about war. It rarely editorializes, though the scenes and words it contains are clear enough in what they convey. The film does not address the reasons for the Lebanon War or for the Israeli invasion—instead it focuses on moments and events of brutality and seems to view events not from the viewpoint of Israelis—it is, after all, an Israeli film, and Folman is an Israeli director—but rather from a pacifist viewpoint that does not incorporate national loyalties.

I did not realize until halfway through this film that Waltz with Bashir is a documentary. I thought it was fictional. But when I saw images of Menachem Begin, Golda Meir, and Ariel Sharon, I realized otherwise. Why would a documentary be animated? The animation helps to camouflage the atrocities—this is an intentional strategy. The music and the frequent shifts in mood-- from quiet introspection to brutal realism to humor—serve a similar purpose. As memories of the events gradually coalesce, the animated images become increasingly gruesome. At one point we see the execution of a family of Palestinians, including two young children. In the final scene, the animation changes to actual footage of the survivors of the massacres, of bodies stacked up in piles or covered with bricks. The final image is of the curls of a dead little girl, covered by the collapsed wall of a house.

The film begins with a dream narrated to the director by a friend who was involved in the Lebanese conflict, remembers—his dream is of a pack of vicious dogs running down the street. They come to a stop outside the window of the house where he lives. The dogs are his projections of guilt—in the Lebanese conflict, his assigned duty was to shoot dogs whose barking would warn Lebanese villagers of approaching Israeli troops. Another image the film repeatedly returns to is of three young men emerging nude from the ocean waters outside Damascus. As they approach the beach, flares illuminate the nighttime cityscape. The film repeatedly returns to this image, each time filling it out more. At the beginning of the film it is a beautiful scene with entrancing, Philip-Glass type music. (Max Richter composed most of the soundtrack). By the end of the film, these wide-eyed and naïve young men emerging from the sea confront the most horrific of scenes imaginable.

Hounddog

Hounddog (2007; dir. Deborah Kampmeier) takes place in a rural Southern landscape from around 1960. The vegetation is lush and green, with forests and overgrown fields. Children swim in a river. We see, often close to each other, ramshackle shacks and shotgun-type houses where blacks and poor whites live, and much larger, decorous white houses with columns. Farmers work the fields. Black men work with horses and socialize among themselves. Early scenes evoke an idyllic Southern past of rural and natural childhood innocence. They define the South in a series of stereotypical images, focused on a young girl named Lewellen. Even as these images are set in place, the film undertakes to undermine and also reinforce them. A boy lets a girl look at his private parts. He indignantly explains about a bruise on his thigh that “My daddy don’t hit me.” The girl shows a bruise on her leg that she says her daddy caused. The opening image of the film is a garter snake crawling up the braches of a tree. In the background, gradually coming into focus, two children are walking. The idyllic natural paradise, the two innocents, the snake in the garden—all the elements needed for a drama about loss of innocence and entry into adulthood.

Lewellen (Dakota Fanning) lives with her grandmother who, though loving, is severe and puritanical and tends to believe the worst of her granddaughter. (Piper Laurie plays the grandmother, reprising almost exactly her role as the mother in Carrie, 1976). The girl’s father is an indifferent and slovenly farmer who is having a relationship with the sister of his departed wife, who is either dead or a runaway--we don’t know which. The girl is friends with a young boy her age named Buddy. They swim in the nearby creek and exchange kisses in an innocent, experimental way. She is also friends with a black man named Charles (Afemo Omilami). He cares for horses, is a folk doctor, and plays in a small band with friends.

Lewellen is an obsessive fan of Elvis Presley. She does a passable imitation of Elvis singing “Hound Dog.” She gyrates and slinks around like Elvis on stage. Her grandmother tells her that Elvis sings Satan’s music but is content to listen to him singing gospel songs.

Is this a coming of age film in which Lewellen learns about the difficult realities of life? Is this a film in which a young girl who idolizes a famous singer gets to meet him? Is it a racial drama? Is it about class differences? Is it about sexual abuse? At one moment or the other it might be any one of these, or all.

Hounddog lacks focus and coherence. Lewellen and her friendship with Buddy and Charles give the film the unity it has. Only late in the film, when something terrible happens, does a plot seem to materialize, and even then it not well prepared for by preceding events.

The flaws in Hounddog, beyond those of incoherence, stem from its reliance on stereotypes and poorly developed characters. Lewellen’s immediate family is poor white, and this means a hodgepodge fusion of religious fundamentalism, freewheeling sex and sexual abuse, drunkenness, and general cussedness. The black man that Lewellen is friends with loves the blues, has a deep knowledge of folk medicine (he treats snake bites with serum he has cooked up on his own), and is possessed of a natural wisdom that enables him to advise her on her life.

Lewellen’s life is a continuing misery. Her grandmother is suspicious of her and wants to control all aspects of her life. Her father comes and goes, abuses the woman he briefly lives with, and after he is struck by lightning becomes simple-minded to an astounding extent (when Lewellen cuts her hair, he cuts his so that they will look alike—when he finds her missing from the house, he wanders out into the town, stark naked, looking for her). Her friendship with Buddy is an important part of her life, but he betrays her in a cruel way. Her aunt—her mother’s sister--abandons her, after promising never to leave.

For the most part the music of Elvis is incidental in the film. The girl’s love of Presley’s music is childlike and obsessive. It does give Charles the chance to explain to her that Elvis in singing “Hound Dog” is really singing a song written by and originally sung by Big Mama Thornton; he implies that it is possible for a white person to sing the blues, but this idea goes nowhere until the last scenes of the film. One night, while she is walking alone down a dirt road, a pink Cadillac driven by Elvis Presley passes her—he waves at her. Does she imagine this moment? Are we supposed to believe it real? It seems gratuitous.

Buddy wants to prove his love to Lewellen and promises to get her a ticket to a concert nearby where Elvis is performing. She holds him to the promise and refuses to talk to him until he finds her a ticket. He finds an older boy who says he will give her a ticket if she will sing “Hound Dog” and dance like Elvis for him. When he insists that she take off her clothes and dance naked, she agrees. He rapes her. A film that seemed to be for its first hour about the difficulties of a poor white girl’s life suddenly darkens and takes a severe turn, and never really catches up with itself.

Snakes and crab apples are important and obvious motifs. They signify loss of innocence. But snakes also signify the danger that is looming unseen in the tall grass that Lewellen’s grandmother warns her about—poisonous snakes lurk in the grass, she says. The thick grass and the snakes hidden there signify the dark and ominous dangers of adult life that Lewellen has encountered. She is so traumatized by the rape that she can barely speak, and lies unconscious on her bed. Snakes crawl through her window, slithering over and around her, until Charles somehow senses what is going on and comes into her house and rescues her. Snakes, he tells her, represent the inner life in her that needs to wake up and come out.

There is much in this film that makes little sense. It’s not impossible that a 12-year old girl would agree to sing and dance naked in front of an older boy she has never met—a boy who lurks menacingly in the dark shadows of a barn and whose face she can’t even see--but it’s certainly unlikely, and the film does not present Lewellen as the kind of imbecile who would agree to do something so stupid just for a concert ticket. Perhaps I overestimate the intelligence of 12-year old girls, or underestimate the strength of Lewellen’s desire to attend an Elvis Presley concert. Maybe the point here is that Lewellen is far more innocent and naïve than she seems. It is unlikely that in the rural South of 1960 a black man could enter the house and bedroom of a young white girl and carry her away unchallenged. Or that Elvis Presley would be driving a pink Cadillac down a dirt road.

When Charles coaxes Lewellen into singing the blues, bringing her inner self out, the song she sings is “Hound Dog.” Not the Elvis Presley version but the Big Mama Thornton version. I suppose this signifies that through hurt and suffering Lewellen truly discovers the source of the blues, which she sings on the basis of lived experience rather than of a commercial recording she might have heard on the radio. This scene in which Lewellen learns to sing the blues is presented almost as a kind of ritual—Charles and the other black men sit and watch, as if they know what is going on, as if they’re party to the cultic knowledge driving the scene. But it’s a poor way of resolving Lewellen’s problems and of bringing the film to some sort of point. Those wise old black men always know how to rescue the white folks. The underlying racism here is clear.

What’s worse, with all its straining for realism, Hounddog inexplicably seems obliged to provide a happy ending. The soror ex machina it resorts to is the unconvincing stuff of fairy tales.

Here we have another film in which black characters rescue white characters. This is the second such film Dakota Fanning has appeared in—The Secret Life of Bees was the other. With all of its problems, that film was more coherent and featured better acting than Hounddog. Fanning pretty much plays the same character she played in Secret Life, with various details and circumstances altered to fit the needs of the plot.

Hounddog recalls works by Erskine Caldwell as well as Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina.

Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University, by Louis Menand

In Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (Norton, 2010) Louis Menand traces the development of the American university over the past 150 years. He argues that the development of American universities has been governed by the same market forces as other institutions. The rise of the research university at the end of the 19^th century established the mold for the systems of higher education we have today. The formation of academic disciplines, of standards for admission to study and teaching in those disciplines, was the result of the professionalization of faculty in higher education, which in turn was the result of the rise of the research university.

General studies curricula were the direct result of the development of research universities, which saw their mission as one of preparing undergraduates to become graduate students and then professors in the disciplines in which they studied. The professionalization of faculty led to increased emphasis on how students who would one day become faculty members would be educated. One result was a movement to establish a general studies curriculum, based on the notion that there is a common body of knowledge that college students ought to have.

Menand observes that for more than a century scholars have argued over whether there is a specific body of knowledge students need to learn and, if so, what it might be. While he recognizes the value of a liberal education, he notes that the concept of educating students liberally has developed in such a way that practical knowledge and academic or theoretical knowledge have come to stand in opposition to one another: “The divorce between liberalism and professionalism rests on a superstition: that the practical is the enemy of the true. This is utter nonsense.” An adjustment in the nature of general education may therefore be needed.

The number of students graduating with liberal arts degrees has, in proportion to the whole, declined over the past century. Enrollments in humanities programs specifically have declined since the 1970s. One reason may be that students increasingly seek degrees identified with career goals rather than with the general pursuit of knowledge. Another reason (one that Menand advances) is that the humanities in general since the 1960s have become so fragmented and diverse that it is not always possible to know what “the humanities” actually are. Uncertainty as to what constitutes legitimate subjects and methods of study presents another challenge. Increasing diversity among the professoriate, students, and subject matter do as well. A crisis of self-doubt among humanists has resulted from their lack of confidence in being able to convince the public of the value of what they do (and even, I would add, from their inability to agree on just what it is they do).

The current unhealthy situation in the job market for humanities PhD graduates resulted from a number of factors, Menand argues. American institutions of higher education grew rapidly throughout the first half of the twentieth century. So too did the corps of faculty teaching in them. The number of students enrolled in colleges and universities reached a highpoint during the Vietnamese War because college attendance meant a draft deferment. The end of deferments and of the war saw the beginning of a decline in the number of students enrolled in higher education and an associated decline in the need for faculty. This decline has been going on, Menand says, for 25 years. (The correct number is more like 35 years—jobs were not plentiful when I was on the market in 1977).

As more Americans began attending institutions of higher learning, respect for these institutions began to decline. Menand marks the beginning of this decline as around 1960. It was accelerated by the Vietnam War, when many college professors were accused of radicalism.

Menand suggests that interest in interdisciplinarity has been a result of the desire of the 1960s generation of PhDs to change the system, to modify and even discard existing paradigms. But he contends that interdisciplinarity—the practice of teaching and conducting research outside and across established disciplinary boundaries—is really only another form of disciplinarity. He calls interdisciplinary “a ratification of existing arrangements.” The word itself—“interdisciplinarity”—acknowledges the legitimacy of established disciplines (which themselves are at most only about 150 years old). As soon as one’s teaching outside the usual disciplinary boundaries is accepted, then those boundaries stretch to include that which was once excluded. Or a new discipline develops. Interdisciplinarity runs the risk of dismantling the disciplines of those teachers and scholars who profess it. How truly interdisciplinary, therefore, do faculty really want to be? Interdisciplinarity enables scholars to cross established boundaries without seriously questioning their existence.

Menand observes, citing various data sources, that American professors tend to be on the liberal side. But only a small percentage identify themselves as radical, and most see themselves as mainstream and only moderately liberal. The concept of academic freedom developed from the deeply held conviction that academic inquiry needed to be objective and independent of political currents outside the university. Even so, Menand argues, surveys show that professors do not see a problem in letting their political or religious inclinations influence their research, and this raises the possibility that such inclinations also influence hiring and promotion decisions. This political homogeneity among the American professoriate tends to be self-replicating—one generation of PhD students is educated in the image of the previous generation, faculty tenure and promote the junior faculty most like themselves, and so on.

Menand offers an unpleasant and candid account of the current state of affairs in English departments, which are producing more PhDs than there are positions available. (He suggests that English departments are representative of the situation in many disciplines). Of all PhD students who enroll in English doctoral programs, only 50% complete their degrees, and of that number only 5% find positions in institutions like the one that awarded their degrees (that is, tenure-track institutions). Although many institutions are abolishing required courses, he notes that the one requirement that remains in place across the nation is first-year composition. These are the bread and butter of English departments, but for the most part composition courses are not taught by tenure-track or tenured faculty but by graduate students. Departments rely on and need graduate students to teach these courses (hence, logic suggests, it is not in the best interests of these departments to hasten graduate student progress towards degrees). Menand suggests that English departments are not organized to be doing what they are really doing, producing ABDs, not PhDs. He questions the notion that PhDs in the humanities should be encouraged to consider positions outside their chosen disciplines—if they want to go into business, for example, why didn’t they enroll in business school, where they could earn their degrees in a shorter time? (The average time to degree for a PhD student in the humanities is more than 9 years).

The most important point in this book is Menand’s contention that higher education institutions in America evolved in response to forces in the economic, historical, and cultural environment. Then these institutions tended to become self-justifying, conservative, and resistant to change. To remain vital, American institutions of higher education need to become more pliant, more willing to evolve, more intellectually diverse, more responsive to the society that supports and depends on them. In particular, they need to be trained to perform tasks for which current generations of graduate students are unprepared: “to teach their fields to non-specialists, to connect what they teach to issues that students are likely to confront in the world outside the university, to be interdisciplinary, to write for a general audience, to justify their work to people outside their discipline and outside the academy. If we want professors to be better at these things, then we need to train them differently.”

A Most Wanted Man, by John le Carré

A Most Wanted Man, by John le Carré (Scribners, 2008), may or may not be a typical le Carré novel—the only other one I know I have read is The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), and that was forty years ago. The new novel concerns a Chechen refugee who makes his way to Germany through various uncertain means, the efforts of a lawyer and banker to help him, and the struggles of German, British, United States, and other espionage/security agencies to learn about and take advantage of him. The motives of everyone in this novel are suspect and ambiguous, and there are no clearly virtuous or evil characters. There is much we do not know, and are not told, about the Chechen refugee named Issa. He may have terrorist connections, and he may not. What seems most likely, however, is that he is sincere in his desire to study medicine and make amends for the sins of his father, a Russian KGB agent. The best example of this ambiguity in character is the Islamic scholar Dr. Abdullah, who is widely respected for his writings and his good deeds, but who may have, through indirect means, been responsible in a minor and perhaps unwitting way for funding terrorists. This particular ambiguity may be something inherent in the Muslim world, given the complex and confusing ways charities and banks handle money. It is something the Europeans are more willing to live with than the Americans. The young lawyer Annabel Richter who befriends Issa is outraged at the persecution and torture he has suffered, but in deciding to champion his cause at what may well turn out to be the cost of her legal career if not her freedom it is clear that other motives drive her as well—particularly the dynamics of the family in which she grew up and her relationship with her father. The banker Tommy Brue who decides to give Issa money does so not out of concern for his situation but because he is attracted to Annabel, bored with his failing marriage, and irritated that his stodgy and upright father apparently allowed Russian money to be laundered through his bank. The espionage agent Gunther Bachmann is genuinely interested in helping Issa, Annabel, and Brue, but he also wants to defeat other agents and officials he has competed with in his career. Every character has conflicted motives and backgrounds.

Political factors and national rivalries become important forces as security agencies compete and argue with each other over how to handle Issa and particularly Dr. Abdullah. Despite their initial interest in Issa, he ultimately becomes a pawn in their plot to enlist Dr. Abdullah as a counter agent. It becomes clear ultimately that an individual’s innocence and guilt are not important to these agencies—what matters is how that individual might serve the needs of the moment, whether they concern a nation’s security or one official’s desire for one-upmanship over another. It also becomes clear that for these agencies individuals such as Issa or Abdullah don’t matter as human beings, and decisions that affect them are carried out with carelessness and indifference. Individuals are consumed and, potentially, destroyed by these competing, ruthless, and amoral interests.

A Most Wanted Man explores and illuminates differences between Western and Eastern (Muslim) cultures—in the relationships of men and women, in how different individuals think, in how they interact with one another. The gulf le Carré exposes is wide and deep, and he seems to believe (with good reason) that the West has made a poor effort to understand the Muslim world.

The focus in A Most Wanted Man is talk and discursive narration about what people are doing and thinking. There is little dramatic action, even intellectually, so that the novel can be tedious. But the final scenes are high in tension, and the final paragraphs are devastating.

Brewster McCloud

Robert Altman’s Brewster McCloud (1970) in ways is a precursor to Nashville (1975). It takes place in Houston and much of the action occurs in or near the Astrodome, at the time of the film a symbol of the city’s yearning towards cosmopolitan trendiness and economic power. The Astrodome is a symbol of the commercialization of sports and of late capitalistic excess. It occupies in the film something of the same role and function as the faux Parthenon in Nashville, where the Parthenon represents the city’s aspirations for prominence and culture beyond its reach. Brewster McCloud is notable for its weirdness, its peculiar lack of focus, and its seeming incoherence. It puzzled audiences and reviewers, who were prepared for something else following on the success of Mash (1970).

What this film has in common with the aforementioned examples is its contention that corporate America, capitalism, and commercialism in general are hostile to individual initiative, personal conscience, and the creative spirit.

Like Nashville, Brewster McCloud is set in the American South, or at the least on its western margins. The events in both films take place in cities associated at the time with the notion that the South, especially the urban South, would become the commercial and economic heart of the United States. Subsequent developments intervened. A long period of recession in the oil industry denied this hope to Houston, while Nashville fell behind the burgeoning economic engines of Atlanta, Birmingham, and Charlotte, though it remains today a healthy metropolitan area.

The Astrodome in Brewster McCloud is also a symbol of modern America. It’s the home of the city’s professional baseball and football teams. It’s adorned with commercial advertisements for various well known products. Altman drives home the symbolism of the Astrodome in a number of ways. Early in the film Margaret Hamilton, who played the Wicked Witch of the East in The Wizard of Oz, sings the national anthem in accompaniment with an all African-American high school band. She berates the band when it doesn’t play precisely as she wants it to, and finally the band members simply ignore her. The Astrodome is also where Brewster McCloud lives and where he works on the machine that he hopes will allow him to fly away. The name of the dome suggests the American space program, whose headquarters is in Houston—this link to Brewster’s aspirations is hardly coincidental. In the final scene, Brewster launches his flying apparatus into flight and, pursued by police and security guards, flies in circles around the interior of the stadium. When he cannot find a way out, he grows tired, falls to the ground, and is killed.

Brewster’s aspiration to fly connects him to Icarus who in Greek mythology flies too close to the sun and dies when his wax-fashioned wings melt as a result. His desire to fly and to leave the corrupting commercial world of contemporary America behind connects him to creativity, self-expression, and freedom. (Brewster’s death echoes Brueghel’s “Landscape and The Fall of Icarus.”) The woman who protects and counsels him (the film implies she is an angel; she is played by Sally Kellerman, who portrayed Hot Lips O’Houlihan in Mash) warns him against losing his innocence. He must remain pure and chaste. Ultimately, an agent of contemporary American commercialism, a tour guide in the Astrodome, played by Shelley Duvall, seduces him, and he loses his innocence and the protection of Kellerman as a result.

Much of the humor and satire in Brewster McCloud is broad and slapstick. Although there are elements of this clumsy and broadly drawn humor in Mash, the screenplay kept the film in focus, at least until the football game in the final scenes. Altman rewrote much of the original screenplay for Brewster McCloud, and according to many accounts there is much improvisation in the film.

For Altman, contemporary America is chaos, car chases, bureaucratic corruption, greed, commercialism, loud marching bands, and a compulsive conformist pressure against individual expression. These are the forces that foil Brewster’s aerial ambitions and bring him crashing fatally to the ground.

A subplot in the film involves a serial killer who leaves his victims covered with bird droppings. The victims turn out to be people who threaten Brewster’s plans to build a flying machine, who are cruel to birds, or who are simply offensive. One example is Margaret Hamilton’s character, Daphne Heap, who keeps a large outdoor cage of birds in the backyard. Another is the landlord Abraham Wright, who collects rent on substandard retirement homes and berates the tenants when they fall short in their payments. Wright (Stacy Keach) is a Scrooge-like old man with long stringy white hair. Confined to a wheelchair, he is pushed and chauffeured around town by Brewster. It’s unclear how he is killed, but his death shortly follows his outburst of anger over “Bird shit! Bird shit on my car!”

Birds are a central motif in the film. License plates of the major characters include the names of birds. Scenes of a professor (Rene Auberjonois) lecturing on birds are sprinkled throughout the film. The professor’s behavior becomes increasingly eccentric and extreme, until, finally, in late scenes he is behaving like a bird. Sally Kellerman’s character apparently has wings. She sometimes caws like a bird. And, of course, Brewster himself wants to take flight.

In response to the serial murders, the Houston police bring in a Los Angeles detective, Lieutenant Frank Shafft (Michael Murphy) to assist their investigations. As competent as he seems, at least in comparison to the locals, he’s no more able to find the killer. Car chases that go on for too long are one result—when Shafft accidentally drives his cruiser into a lake, he shoots himself. The incompetence of the police are another dimension of the governmental and economic institutions that conspire to oppress the individual.

Brewster’s role as the killer (he confesses it to Shelley Duvall, who tells the police) subverts any allegory we might want to find in the film. The notion of a carefree spirit who wants to fly away from the sordid limitations of the world and is also a murderer doesn’t make sense. No one actually tries to prevent Brewster from building his machine. It’s the fact that he is living illegally in the Astrodome, and that he will try to fly his machine in the Astrodome, that cause him problems. He is a trespasser there after all. His role as a murderer might have remained undetected had he not confessed to Duvall after they slept together. The obstacles that prevent him from finding freedom and achieving his dream are the obstacles that affect all humanity—our mortal human coils, the obligations and considerations of living in an imperfect human world. As flawed and corrupt as almost all the characters in the film are, they are not ultimately the anomalies. Brewster is.

The problem Altman explores here is the division between life and art, life and the ideal. It’s the division that Keats explores in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “Ode to a Nightingale.” Brewster wants to achieve the ideal, his dream of flight, but to do so he has to murder and otherwise deceive and dissemble and live an existence that involves no physical interaction with the rest of humanity. Life and art in this instance cancel one another out.