The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien

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

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

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

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 Drawing from interviews, documents, personal accounts published and unpublished, and published scholarship, Bruce Watson in Freedom Summer: The Savage Season That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy (Viking Adult, 2010)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

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

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

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

Inception

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Death at a Funeral (both versions)

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

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

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

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

Get Him to the Greek

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

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

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

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

Entropy is one diagnosis.

Tron: Legacy

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

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

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

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

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

Hallelujah

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Airships, by Barry Hannah

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

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

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

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

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

White Fang, by Jack London

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Black Swan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Easy A

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

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

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

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

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

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

Restrepo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Toy Story 3

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

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

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

The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia

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

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

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

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

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

Alice in Wonderland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Evolution of God, by Robin Wright

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Wolfman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

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

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

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

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

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

Dreaming in Cuban, by Cristina Garcia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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