Michael Moore's L.A. Times piece is sanctimonius as hell, but what do you expect? Moore sees himself a bit like that liberal priest in "Doonesbury"; people confide in him because
they, and the millions like them, have no voice. They don't get to be commentators on cable news like the bevy of retired generals we've been watching all week. (Can we please demand that the U.S. military remove its troops from ABC/CBS/NBC/CNN/MSNBC/Fox?) They don't get to make movies or talk to a billion people on Oscar night. They are the American majority who are being asked to send their sons and daughters over to Iraq to possibly die so Bush's buddies can have the oil.
Who will speak for them if I don't?
Greater love hath no man than this, to pick up an Oscar for his fellow man. There's nothing wrong with making a popular film where you are the star -- but please, none of this piffle about doing it for the people. I'm not buying it.
At least, anyway, not tonight -- just got back from Columbia where the tickets for Waiting for Columbine at the Nickelodeon were completely sold out. Kate and I went to eat, then tried to get tickets for tomorrow but the box office was locked. We got some ice cream and came home. Hopefully I'll catch this most bloggable film tomorrow evening, if I'm lucky. I have to get in line for tickets as soon as I get off work -- then come home, get Kate, go back.
Have I ever gone to this much trouble for a movie?
Sunday, March 30, 2003
Lots of ruminative treasures in Louis Menand's piece on Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station in the latest New Yorker -- even if, like me, you've never read the book.
We read histories for information, but what is it that we want the information for? The answer is a little paradoxical: we want the information in order to acquire the ability to understand the information.
...[W]hen Wilson began writing ÒTo the Finland StationÓ he believed in history, too. He thought that history had a design, and that the Depression was an event fully comprehensible within the context of that design: it was the long-predicted collapse of the capitalist order. ÒTo the Finland StationÓ is valuable as a window on the nineteenth century, but it is also a poignant artifact of the nineteen-thirties, a time when many people thought that history was something you could get on the right side or the wrong side of. It was an idea indistinguishable from faith, and Marx was one of its prophets.
We read histories for information, but what is it that we want the information for? The answer is a little paradoxical: we want the information in order to acquire the ability to understand the information.
...[W]hen Wilson began writing ÒTo the Finland StationÓ he believed in history, too. He thought that history had a design, and that the Depression was an event fully comprehensible within the context of that design: it was the long-predicted collapse of the capitalist order. ÒTo the Finland StationÓ is valuable as a window on the nineteenth century, but it is also a poignant artifact of the nineteen-thirties, a time when many people thought that history was something you could get on the right side or the wrong side of. It was an idea indistinguishable from faith, and Marx was one of its prophets.
R.W. Apple: No Shock. No Awe
With every passing day, it is more evident that the failure to obtain permission from Turkey for American troops to cross its territory and open a northern front constituted a diplomatic debacle. With every passing day, it is more evident that the allies made two gross military misjudgments in concluding that coalition forces could safely bypass Basra and Nasiriya and that Shiite Muslims in southern Iraq would rise up against Saddam Hussein.
Already, the commander of American ground forces in the war zone has conceded that the war that they are fighting is not the one they and their officers had foreseen. "Shock and awe" neither shocked nor awed.
With every passing day, it is more evident that the failure to obtain permission from Turkey for American troops to cross its territory and open a northern front constituted a diplomatic debacle. With every passing day, it is more evident that the allies made two gross military misjudgments in concluding that coalition forces could safely bypass Basra and Nasiriya and that Shiite Muslims in southern Iraq would rise up against Saddam Hussein.
Already, the commander of American ground forces in the war zone has conceded that the war that they are fighting is not the one they and their officers had foreseen. "Shock and awe" neither shocked nor awed.
Friday, March 28, 2003
The way is long but the end is near
Already the fiesta has begun.
The face of God will appear
With His serpent eyes of obsidian.
--Bob Dylan, Romance in Durango
Thats always the funny thing about Dylan -- you hear one of his songs for years and years and suddenly a verse or line or image just suddenly jumps out at you. The above lines come courtesy of CD of the day: --Bob Dylan, Live 1975: the Rolling Thunder Revue. It also brings back a floodtide of memories from Spring 1976, St. Petersburg, Fla., when I saw Dylan for the very first time, on the second leg of this tour. Front row seat, too. The enclosed booklet notes that the show had gone downhill by then, but I'll never forget it:
* Bob, introducing "It's Alright Ma," and dedicating it to the St. Petersburg Times, for some reason.
* Bob, introducing another song, saying "I'd like to thank Stephanie for the socks."
* Kinky Friedman with a dead fox on his neck, singing "I'm Glad to Be an Asshole from El Paso" and "They Don't Make Jews Like Jesus Anymore." Joan Baez in an orange fright wig sings back-up.
* Bob Neuwirth singing "Mercedes-Benz" in memory of Janis Joplin, for whom he had written it
* T-Bone Burnett.
* The extraordinary swaying reed known as Scarlet Rivera on violin.
* Roger McGuinn.
* A backdrop that appeared to be a Dylan painting of a crucified Christ.
* A fantastic closer of the whole mad crew singing "Blowin' in the Wind."
Already the fiesta has begun.
The face of God will appear
With His serpent eyes of obsidian.
--Bob Dylan, Romance in Durango
Thats always the funny thing about Dylan -- you hear one of his songs for years and years and suddenly a verse or line or image just suddenly jumps out at you. The above lines come courtesy of CD of the day: --Bob Dylan, Live 1975: the Rolling Thunder Revue. It also brings back a floodtide of memories from Spring 1976, St. Petersburg, Fla., when I saw Dylan for the very first time, on the second leg of this tour. Front row seat, too. The enclosed booklet notes that the show had gone downhill by then, but I'll never forget it:
* Bob, introducing "It's Alright Ma," and dedicating it to the St. Petersburg Times, for some reason.
* Bob, introducing another song, saying "I'd like to thank Stephanie for the socks."
* Kinky Friedman with a dead fox on his neck, singing "I'm Glad to Be an Asshole from El Paso" and "They Don't Make Jews Like Jesus Anymore." Joan Baez in an orange fright wig sings back-up.
* Bob Neuwirth singing "Mercedes-Benz" in memory of Janis Joplin, for whom he had written it
* T-Bone Burnett.
* The extraordinary swaying reed known as Scarlet Rivera on violin.
* Roger McGuinn.
* A backdrop that appeared to be a Dylan painting of a crucified Christ.
* A fantastic closer of the whole mad crew singing "Blowin' in the Wind."
Thursday, March 27, 2003
Wednesday, March 26, 2003
I've never heard a Dixie Chicks song in my life, and I'm a pro-war hawk -- but I'm about to become a fan of the group, if only because I can't stand the flag-waving groupthinkers arrayed against them. I like Michael Moore, too. Always have.
As you no doubt know by now, the Chicks' got into hot water with their generally Republican-voting legions of fans when singer Natalie Maines told a London audience, "Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas."
Naturally, record-burnings and boycotts were the result, as was the national discussion over who has the right to free speech in wartime. As is usually the case, the editorialists -- such as this one in the Montgomery Advertiser -- get the story all wrong.
...radio station owners and music buyers have every bit as much right to free speech as Maines. That includes not listening to or buying her music -- and urging others not to, either -- if they don't like what she said.
But that's not the story. The story is that their latest record is flying off the shelves -- look at the latest Billboard charts and then tell me who's really exercising the right of free speech.
As you no doubt know by now, the Chicks' got into hot water with their generally Republican-voting legions of fans when singer Natalie Maines told a London audience, "Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas."
Naturally, record-burnings and boycotts were the result, as was the national discussion over who has the right to free speech in wartime. As is usually the case, the editorialists -- such as this one in the Montgomery Advertiser -- get the story all wrong.
...radio station owners and music buyers have every bit as much right to free speech as Maines. That includes not listening to or buying her music -- and urging others not to, either -- if they don't like what she said.
But that's not the story. The story is that their latest record is flying off the shelves -- look at the latest Billboard charts and then tell me who's really exercising the right of free speech.
Tuesday, March 25, 2003
Okay, so you lost your nice cushy position in one of those tech industries that fell on its ass a few years ago. Jobs are scarce, and the few that are out there pay next to nothing -- provided you have extraordinary qualifications and extensive work experience.
What do you say? How about Fuck That Job?
What do you say? How about Fuck That Job?
"I've probably had more excruciatingly boring experiences in the cinema than anywhere else," writes Philip Hensher, which brings us to The Hours...
Monday, March 24, 2003
With three upset awards, The Pianist was the story of the evening at the Oscars -- this MSNBC story provides a clue as to why.
I'm conflicted about Polanski, as I've indicated here before -- he raped a child and got off scot-free -- and the fact that he couldn't be on hand for this career highlight is the least he deserves.
I'm conflicted about Polanski, as I've indicated here before -- he raped a child and got off scot-free -- and the fact that he couldn't be on hand for this career highlight is the least he deserves.
Friday, March 21, 2003
Thursday, March 20, 2003
Meghan O'Rourke in Slate goes Nicholson one better on the wimpering necrophilia of The Hours -- indeed, she nails it on the head as no other reviewer:
Woolf would hate the movie, which depicts her as a jaw-clenched nut job and designates its neurotic latter-day protagonists her spiritual heirs.
What would distress Woolf most, though, is the film's sentimentality about women and suffering and its suggestion that the abiding truth of Woolf's life and work was her madness.
The Hours ... revels in death and sickness and refuses to face loss in its sternest form. It promotes the hoary notion that illness gives us depth: Death—Woolf's, or Richard's—helps us all to "value life more," as the Woolf character in the movie puts it. The artists are sacrificed so that the rest of us ordinary (but sensitive!) people can live better. How extremely fortunate for us.
A-plus, Meghan.
Woolf would hate the movie, which depicts her as a jaw-clenched nut job and designates its neurotic latter-day protagonists her spiritual heirs.
What would distress Woolf most, though, is the film's sentimentality about women and suffering and its suggestion that the abiding truth of Woolf's life and work was her madness.
The Hours ... revels in death and sickness and refuses to face loss in its sternest form. It promotes the hoary notion that illness gives us depth: Death—Woolf's, or Richard's—helps us all to "value life more," as the Woolf character in the movie puts it. The artists are sacrificed so that the rest of us ordinary (but sensitive!) people can live better. How extremely fortunate for us.
A-plus, Meghan.
Great piece from Adam Nicholson on the hagiographic sentimentality of The Hours, which:
relies for its effects on the myth of the agonised and finally crucified artist, in much the same way that films about Van Gogh and any of the Romantics have always done.
Nowhere in the Virginia Woolf of The Hours is there any sign of what I know to be the talkative, unforgivingly sharp, intellectual, witty, funny, joking, gossiping, deceitful woman that emerges in her letters. That sometimes malicious, often light-hearted person, endlessly curious about the world and other people, either interrogating them about the details of their lives or behaving suddenly and intimately with great warmth and tenderness towards children - none of that sheer variability of mind, temperament and person is allowed to appear in the film.
relies for its effects on the myth of the agonised and finally crucified artist, in much the same way that films about Van Gogh and any of the Romantics have always done.
Nowhere in the Virginia Woolf of The Hours is there any sign of what I know to be the talkative, unforgivingly sharp, intellectual, witty, funny, joking, gossiping, deceitful woman that emerges in her letters. That sometimes malicious, often light-hearted person, endlessly curious about the world and other people, either interrogating them about the details of their lives or behaving suddenly and intimately with great warmth and tenderness towards children - none of that sheer variability of mind, temperament and person is allowed to appear in the film.
Tuesday, March 18, 2003
More old content I dug up that I thought I'd post:
I have just finished B.R. Myers article A Reader's Manifesto and my general impression is not good. I found it, on the whole, reactionary and disingenuous; it isn't a manifesto at all -- it's a philippic, or, to use a less literary term, a bitch session. It ought to be called "In Praise of Straightforwardness;" he yearns for an imaginary past where literature was more plot-oriented, less "wordy", but I daresay there isn't a sentence in the article that couldn't have been written anytime in the last 75 years, with a plenitude of examples. It would not be at all difficult to dig through the works of any of Myers' own heroes -- Proust, Conrad, Melville, James, Faulkner, Bellow (whom he cites for "verbal restraint"!)-- and come up with perfect examples of the purplish or the "tautological." What, for example, does Myers mean when he says that Annie Proulx's writing amounts to "fake Dos Passos, easy detail flung in for the illusion of panoramic sweep." If that isn't a perfect description of genuine Dos Passos, I don't know what is.
All Myers did was pore through a lot of books he couldn't stand, yanked out a few wriggling examples of wretched writerspeak, and decided today's literature is somehow typical of an anti-literary age. Yet Myers never really, convincingly makes a case for where today's fiction went wrong, let alone why.
I will grant, in fairness, that he made some worthy points along the way, and that he roasted a few writers to a nice turn -- especially Cormac McCarthy. But on the whole, I didn't trust Myers as a dependable guide; just a bitter one who had tired of the scenery.
For starters, I found his distinctions a little too easy.
Today any accessible, fast-moving story written in unaffected prose is deemed to be "genre fiction" -- at best an excellent "read" or a "page turner," but never literature with a capital L.
Ever heard of James Ellroy? Myers apparently hasn't. I'm not that crazy about Ellroy's staccato style of writing, but critics everywhere are more than willing to confer on him the title of artist, only in his case they speak of someone breaking the boundaries of his genre (in his case, lit noir.)
The only Annie Proulx I've ever read is what Myers quotes, and so far as I can tell he exaggerates her offensiveness. On a particularly petty note, he waxes wroth that Proulx thanks her children in the acknowledgements to Close Range for "putting up with my strangled, work-driven ways." "How can anything," Myers writes, "no matter how abstract, be strangled and work-driven at the same time?" To which I easily reply that if your ways -- as in, day to day writing habits -- are "work-driven," they will invariably stifle, choke you off or strangle you in other ways -- in Proulx's case, perhaps, spending time with the kids. Myers also cites a scene in Accordion Crimes where a woman's arms are sliced off by a piece of sheet metal and yet she manages to notice a good deal of the scenery at the same time. Again, I didn't find this all that odd; traumatizing events do have a way of slowing things down, and the most horrendous events in life can seem to happen in slow motion.
(Perhaps it is also worth mentioning -- just to show how easy this game is to play -- that Shakespeare himself penned a perfectly ridiculous similar scene in Titus Andronicus, in which Lavinia -- having been raped, had her tongue cut out and her arms hacked off -- appears before Marcus. While the audience screams "Call 911!" Marcus jabbers on endlessly: "Why dost not speak to me?/Alas, a crimson river of warm blood,/ Like to a bubbling fountain stirr'd with wind,/Doth rise and fall between thy rosed lips,/Coming and going with thy honey breath./But, sure, some Tereus hath deflowered thee,/And, lest thou shouldst detect him, cut thy tongue./Ah, now thou turn'st away thy face for shame!" No, Marcus -- she's going into hypovolemic shock.)
Myers point throughout is that writers today make up for their deficiencies as writers with obscure, "fancy-pants" language. He cites Oprah Winfrey's story of how she complained to Toni Morrison that she sometimes had to re-read Morrison's sentences. "That, my dear, is called reading," Morrison replied.
Sorry, my dear Toni, but it's actually called bad writing. Great prose isn't always easy, but it's always lucid; no one of Oprah's intelligence ever had to wonder what Joseph Conrad was trying to say in a particular sentence.
This is just the kind of bad writing that Myers accuses his select writers of applying to their fiction. Great prose isn't always easy -- meaning it is sometimes hard to read -- but it's always lucid -- which means "easily understood." I'm not sure what Myers is talking about here -- but it certainly does make one wonder what he thinks of the Quentin section of The Sound and the Fury or the "Oxen of the Sun" chapter of Ulysses or the second part of Goethe's Faust. Great prose is not always perfectly lucid -- at least, not in parts.
I have just finished B.R. Myers article A Reader's Manifesto and my general impression is not good. I found it, on the whole, reactionary and disingenuous; it isn't a manifesto at all -- it's a philippic, or, to use a less literary term, a bitch session. It ought to be called "In Praise of Straightforwardness;" he yearns for an imaginary past where literature was more plot-oriented, less "wordy", but I daresay there isn't a sentence in the article that couldn't have been written anytime in the last 75 years, with a plenitude of examples. It would not be at all difficult to dig through the works of any of Myers' own heroes -- Proust, Conrad, Melville, James, Faulkner, Bellow (whom he cites for "verbal restraint"!)-- and come up with perfect examples of the purplish or the "tautological." What, for example, does Myers mean when he says that Annie Proulx's writing amounts to "fake Dos Passos, easy detail flung in for the illusion of panoramic sweep." If that isn't a perfect description of genuine Dos Passos, I don't know what is.
All Myers did was pore through a lot of books he couldn't stand, yanked out a few wriggling examples of wretched writerspeak, and decided today's literature is somehow typical of an anti-literary age. Yet Myers never really, convincingly makes a case for where today's fiction went wrong, let alone why.
I will grant, in fairness, that he made some worthy points along the way, and that he roasted a few writers to a nice turn -- especially Cormac McCarthy. But on the whole, I didn't trust Myers as a dependable guide; just a bitter one who had tired of the scenery.
For starters, I found his distinctions a little too easy.
Today any accessible, fast-moving story written in unaffected prose is deemed to be "genre fiction" -- at best an excellent "read" or a "page turner," but never literature with a capital L.
Ever heard of James Ellroy? Myers apparently hasn't. I'm not that crazy about Ellroy's staccato style of writing, but critics everywhere are more than willing to confer on him the title of artist, only in his case they speak of someone breaking the boundaries of his genre (in his case, lit noir.)
The only Annie Proulx I've ever read is what Myers quotes, and so far as I can tell he exaggerates her offensiveness. On a particularly petty note, he waxes wroth that Proulx thanks her children in the acknowledgements to Close Range for "putting up with my strangled, work-driven ways." "How can anything," Myers writes, "no matter how abstract, be strangled and work-driven at the same time?" To which I easily reply that if your ways -- as in, day to day writing habits -- are "work-driven," they will invariably stifle, choke you off or strangle you in other ways -- in Proulx's case, perhaps, spending time with the kids. Myers also cites a scene in Accordion Crimes where a woman's arms are sliced off by a piece of sheet metal and yet she manages to notice a good deal of the scenery at the same time. Again, I didn't find this all that odd; traumatizing events do have a way of slowing things down, and the most horrendous events in life can seem to happen in slow motion.
(Perhaps it is also worth mentioning -- just to show how easy this game is to play -- that Shakespeare himself penned a perfectly ridiculous similar scene in Titus Andronicus, in which Lavinia -- having been raped, had her tongue cut out and her arms hacked off -- appears before Marcus. While the audience screams "Call 911!" Marcus jabbers on endlessly: "Why dost not speak to me?/Alas, a crimson river of warm blood,/ Like to a bubbling fountain stirr'd with wind,/Doth rise and fall between thy rosed lips,/Coming and going with thy honey breath./But, sure, some Tereus hath deflowered thee,/And, lest thou shouldst detect him, cut thy tongue./Ah, now thou turn'st away thy face for shame!" No, Marcus -- she's going into hypovolemic shock.)
Myers point throughout is that writers today make up for their deficiencies as writers with obscure, "fancy-pants" language. He cites Oprah Winfrey's story of how she complained to Toni Morrison that she sometimes had to re-read Morrison's sentences. "That, my dear, is called reading," Morrison replied.
Sorry, my dear Toni, but it's actually called bad writing. Great prose isn't always easy, but it's always lucid; no one of Oprah's intelligence ever had to wonder what Joseph Conrad was trying to say in a particular sentence.
This is just the kind of bad writing that Myers accuses his select writers of applying to their fiction. Great prose isn't always easy -- meaning it is sometimes hard to read -- but it's always lucid -- which means "easily understood." I'm not sure what Myers is talking about here -- but it certainly does make one wonder what he thinks of the Quentin section of The Sound and the Fury or the "Oxen of the Sun" chapter of Ulysses or the second part of Goethe's Faust. Great prose is not always perfectly lucid -- at least, not in parts.
"You see, Mr. Gittes, most people never have to face the fact. At the right time and the right place, they're capable of ... anything!" -- John Huston as Noah Cross in Roman Polanski's Chinatown.
Lately rediscovered notes:
Henry Adams
I am ill-equipped to discuss history very much at all, but I do read it on occasion, and one of my favorite American writers, Henry Adams, was by trade a historian. During his lifetime, he was primarily known for the massive History of the United States Under the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison -- considered something of a classic among those who have actually plumbed all 3,000 pages of it. Today, of course, Adams is known, if at all -- I suspect he isn’t any more a part of today’s American Lit curriculum than he was when I was in school -- for the two extraordinary works of intellectual biography he privately published in his declining years: Mont Saint Michel and Chartres and The Education of Henry Adams. One is positive, one is negative, and together they work like an electrical charge on the brain.
As old men will, Adams became increasingly self-introspective as he and the 19th Century he was born in reached old age. He -- and most of the people he knew -- seemed increasingly out-of-date, dwarfed by a period of progress both unmatched and unchecked. The Industrial Age bred not only change but a chaotic, fractured society -- one which had gone, as he put it time and again, from unity to multiplicity. History, which Adams had devoted his life to charting, suddenly seemed beyond his reach; it had become a “dynamic force” of such volatility that it required a physical scientist. In these books, Adams tries to trace the arc of history’s trajectory and his own role in it.
In the first, Adams visits the classic cathedrals of France to rediscover a 12th-Century world before the Enlightment or Darwin had played havoc with faith in God. Adams peers deeply not only into the sheer craft of these vast, meticulously rendered cathedrals -- the apse, the transept, the glass, the vaulting -- but the mind and world that produced them: the efforts of “man’s littleness to grasp the infinite.”
There’s an optimistic yearning in all this -- within the smooth, luminous writing there’s a prayerful desire for a time when, despite its limits, the vision of mankind could see beyond earthly boundaries. But the hopeful tone of this “Study in 12th Century Unity” gives way to bitterness in the Education, “A Study in 20th Century Multiplicity” that is one of the most eloquently sour books ever written -- a Boston Brahmin’s long and very jaded look back.
For one thing, the metaphor for infinity was different: the Virgin of the 12th Century had been replaced by the dynamo. Looking at the dynamo at the Exposition of 1900, Adams
began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm's length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring -- scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a hair's-breadth further for respect of power -- while it would not wake the baby lying close against its frame. Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force. Among the thousand symbols of ultimate energy the dynamo was not so human as some, but it was the most expressive.
Ultimately, Adams -- who pleads ignorance of just about everything all the way through the book -- posits the possibility that unity is multiplicity, since all matter is reducible to atoms and atoms may be nothing more than pure motion. Chaos is the only game going. History itself, rather than being a cause and effect sequence of events, begins to seem at the turn of the century to have assumed the nature of sheer force:
The motion of thought had the same value as the motion of a cannonball seen approaching the observer on a direct line through the air. One could watch its curve for five thousand years. Its first violent acceleration in historical times had ended in the catastrophe of 310. The next swerve of direction occurred towards 1500. Galileo and Bacon gave a still newer curve to it, which altered its values; but all these changes had never altered the continuity. Only in 1900, the continuity snapped.
Adams sees a modern world that has become a slave to its own progress: “Prosperity never before imagined, power never yet wielded by man, speed never reached by anything but a meteor, had made the world irritable, nervous, querulous, unreasonable and afraid.”
Nearly a century later, it is hard to imagine a work that is more prescient.
Henry Adams
I am ill-equipped to discuss history very much at all, but I do read it on occasion, and one of my favorite American writers, Henry Adams, was by trade a historian. During his lifetime, he was primarily known for the massive History of the United States Under the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison -- considered something of a classic among those who have actually plumbed all 3,000 pages of it. Today, of course, Adams is known, if at all -- I suspect he isn’t any more a part of today’s American Lit curriculum than he was when I was in school -- for the two extraordinary works of intellectual biography he privately published in his declining years: Mont Saint Michel and Chartres and The Education of Henry Adams. One is positive, one is negative, and together they work like an electrical charge on the brain.
As old men will, Adams became increasingly self-introspective as he and the 19th Century he was born in reached old age. He -- and most of the people he knew -- seemed increasingly out-of-date, dwarfed by a period of progress both unmatched and unchecked. The Industrial Age bred not only change but a chaotic, fractured society -- one which had gone, as he put it time and again, from unity to multiplicity. History, which Adams had devoted his life to charting, suddenly seemed beyond his reach; it had become a “dynamic force” of such volatility that it required a physical scientist. In these books, Adams tries to trace the arc of history’s trajectory and his own role in it.
In the first, Adams visits the classic cathedrals of France to rediscover a 12th-Century world before the Enlightment or Darwin had played havoc with faith in God. Adams peers deeply not only into the sheer craft of these vast, meticulously rendered cathedrals -- the apse, the transept, the glass, the vaulting -- but the mind and world that produced them: the efforts of “man’s littleness to grasp the infinite.”
There’s an optimistic yearning in all this -- within the smooth, luminous writing there’s a prayerful desire for a time when, despite its limits, the vision of mankind could see beyond earthly boundaries. But the hopeful tone of this “Study in 12th Century Unity” gives way to bitterness in the Education, “A Study in 20th Century Multiplicity” that is one of the most eloquently sour books ever written -- a Boston Brahmin’s long and very jaded look back.
For one thing, the metaphor for infinity was different: the Virgin of the 12th Century had been replaced by the dynamo. Looking at the dynamo at the Exposition of 1900, Adams
began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm's length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring -- scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a hair's-breadth further for respect of power -- while it would not wake the baby lying close against its frame. Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force. Among the thousand symbols of ultimate energy the dynamo was not so human as some, but it was the most expressive.
Ultimately, Adams -- who pleads ignorance of just about everything all the way through the book -- posits the possibility that unity is multiplicity, since all matter is reducible to atoms and atoms may be nothing more than pure motion. Chaos is the only game going. History itself, rather than being a cause and effect sequence of events, begins to seem at the turn of the century to have assumed the nature of sheer force:
The motion of thought had the same value as the motion of a cannonball seen approaching the observer on a direct line through the air. One could watch its curve for five thousand years. Its first violent acceleration in historical times had ended in the catastrophe of 310. The next swerve of direction occurred towards 1500. Galileo and Bacon gave a still newer curve to it, which altered its values; but all these changes had never altered the continuity. Only in 1900, the continuity snapped.
Adams sees a modern world that has become a slave to its own progress: “Prosperity never before imagined, power never yet wielded by man, speed never reached by anything but a meteor, had made the world irritable, nervous, querulous, unreasonable and afraid.”
Nearly a century later, it is hard to imagine a work that is more prescient.
Lately rediscovered notes from 1999:
The distance between us: Philip Seymour Hoffman gets down and dirty with Lara Flynn Boyle in Happiness.
Happy Now? Hardly
Every now and then, I watch the TV sitcom “Friends” with my 12-year-old daughter. If I’m lucky, the plot will be on the mild side of PG, and the antics of this group of beautiful young people will require from me no rejoinders, corrections, sighs of discomfort or fights for the remote. That usually isn’t the case -- the jokes are always about sleeping around, which I couldn’t care less about as an adult but which I tend to blanch at as a parent. Promiscuity on prime time TV has a way of looking hip, witty and wholesome. If there is a dark side to sex, the “Friends” have somehow failed to discover it -- there’s no despair, no anguish, no fear, and heaven knows no diseases. It’s just an endless source of cheery banter, fleshy goodwill and knowing laughs between pals. The child whose picture of love and relationships is shaped by this Disney version of it is in for a hard fall.
Would a young person be better served by watching Todd Solondtz’s Happiness? This is of course a non-issue, since I personally intend to put it out of my daughter’s reach until she is deep into her thirties, when she’ll be jaded enough to take it and “Friends” will be yesterday’s joke. But I question whether she’ll buy its premise then any more than her old man does now. This seamy semi-comedy from the director of Welcome to the Dollhouse is a virtual catalogue of middle-class sexual hang-ups, most of which seem inspired by the tabloids. It’s an anti-sitcom: the kind of deeply unfunny comedy where the laugh track is real, but the laughter sounds nervous and defensive, and eventually peters out altogether.
As you can guess from the title, it’s pretty depressing, not to mention cranky and puritanical. There are a fair number of orgasms in the movie, but not one cry of joy -- just weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth.
It’s the kind of film a repressed nun might make to convince herself to stay safe within the walls of the convent.
The story generally centers on the multiple connections and disconnections of the Jordan family, which range from the banal to the bizarre. Starting from the top, there’s the dad, Lenny (Ben Gazzara) who wants to leave if not exactly divorce his wife of 40 years, Mona (Louise Lasser) for a fling with Diane (Elizabeth Ashley.) The couple’s three adult daughters have it a good deal worse, and are in varying stages of denial. First we meet Joy (Jane Adams II) who is of course joyless -- an aimless musician who is no better at picking men than she is day jobs. Then there’s Trish (Cynthia Stevenson, in an apparent self-parody of her trademark insufferable cutesiness) who prattles on forever about how she “has it all.” Being the happiest character she is also the most blind, unaware that her successful therapist husband Bill (Dylan Baker) would rather rape their eleven-year-old son’s friends than sleep with her. The boy, Billy (Rufus Read) has his own troubles -- he wants to be able to ejaculate like all the other kids, so naturally he turns to Dad for advice on length over girth, and the finer points of caressing one’s self. The successful sister Helen (Lara Flynn Boyle) can have any man she wants, but the ease bores her -- she wants it raw and dirty, like the characters in her presumably best selling soft-porn novels. She finds the man of her dreams when she gets an obscene phone call from the guy down the hall, Allen (Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who is excellent). Unfortunately, he can only relate physically to himself. No wonder he ultimately hooks up with his neighbor Kristina (Camryn Manheim), who like him is overweight, unattractive, and desperate for love. She also has a murderous hatred for sex. Perhaps the most tender moment in Happiness is when these two crawl in bed, and turn away from each other. Welcome to the new frontier: one-night stands where nothing happens.
There are several images from Happiness that linger in the head after you’ve seen it, most involving masturbation or semen. The vital fluid -- which seems to be asserting itself as a major presence in movies today, from The Doom Generation to There’s Something About Mary -- is splattered in at least a couple of scenes, talked about ad nauseum between Bill and Billy, and constantly siphoned by Allen . Semen is the film’s McGuffin -- the thing everyone wants, in one way or another: to receive it, to be released from it, to be free of it forever. And of course freedom is exactly what it doesn’t deliver. When Lenny comes too early, Diane tells him not to feel guilty. “I don’t,” he replies, “I don’t feel anything.” He isn’t alone, of course. The people in this movie are shell-shocked survivors of their own private desire.
Solondz’s picture of family life as this swarm of worms coated with oily bourgeois charm made its debut in Welcome to the Dollhouse, wherein poor 11-year-old Dawn Weiner underwent one adolescent disaster after another. There’s a natural sympathy between the director and the Dawns and Billys of the world, born into families which will bequeath them a burden of bullshit and despair.
Unfortunately, I never really bought the whole package. Watching Happiness you never get the feeling you’re seeing the grimy truth peeled back from the layers of suburbia, just the director’s own somewhat angry vision of it, and like any film bred in anger it comes across looking thin and hollow. The characters seem less like people than they do cardboard representations of modern-day anomie and ennui. And so much of the film just seems punishing to sit through -- partly because the ugliness is so unearned. I am thinking here particularly of an irredeemably nasty scene at the end between the Bill and Billy -- one of several moments when I found myself praying for projection failure. To begin with, it struck me as completely implausible, and because it’s implausible, because it seems a nightmare located entirely within the brain of the director and outside of reality, even the reality of the film, I felt needlessly assaulted --which I can only guess was the intent. There is nothing like a film that takes a hard, close look at the truth we would all like to avoid; there’s nothing worse than one that wants to, and fails.
Because Todd Solondz’s obsessions are neither persuasive nor searching, I wonder about his future. How many audiences will be willing, after this and Welcome to the Dollhouse, to join him on one more masochistic trip through Depravity Lane?
I, for one, think I’ll pass.
P.S. No, I didn’t bother to watch Storytelling.
The distance between us: Philip Seymour Hoffman gets down and dirty with Lara Flynn Boyle in Happiness.
Happy Now? Hardly
Every now and then, I watch the TV sitcom “Friends” with my 12-year-old daughter. If I’m lucky, the plot will be on the mild side of PG, and the antics of this group of beautiful young people will require from me no rejoinders, corrections, sighs of discomfort or fights for the remote. That usually isn’t the case -- the jokes are always about sleeping around, which I couldn’t care less about as an adult but which I tend to blanch at as a parent. Promiscuity on prime time TV has a way of looking hip, witty and wholesome. If there is a dark side to sex, the “Friends” have somehow failed to discover it -- there’s no despair, no anguish, no fear, and heaven knows no diseases. It’s just an endless source of cheery banter, fleshy goodwill and knowing laughs between pals. The child whose picture of love and relationships is shaped by this Disney version of it is in for a hard fall.
Would a young person be better served by watching Todd Solondtz’s Happiness? This is of course a non-issue, since I personally intend to put it out of my daughter’s reach until she is deep into her thirties, when she’ll be jaded enough to take it and “Friends” will be yesterday’s joke. But I question whether she’ll buy its premise then any more than her old man does now. This seamy semi-comedy from the director of Welcome to the Dollhouse is a virtual catalogue of middle-class sexual hang-ups, most of which seem inspired by the tabloids. It’s an anti-sitcom: the kind of deeply unfunny comedy where the laugh track is real, but the laughter sounds nervous and defensive, and eventually peters out altogether.
As you can guess from the title, it’s pretty depressing, not to mention cranky and puritanical. There are a fair number of orgasms in the movie, but not one cry of joy -- just weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth.
It’s the kind of film a repressed nun might make to convince herself to stay safe within the walls of the convent.
The story generally centers on the multiple connections and disconnections of the Jordan family, which range from the banal to the bizarre. Starting from the top, there’s the dad, Lenny (Ben Gazzara) who wants to leave if not exactly divorce his wife of 40 years, Mona (Louise Lasser) for a fling with Diane (Elizabeth Ashley.) The couple’s three adult daughters have it a good deal worse, and are in varying stages of denial. First we meet Joy (Jane Adams II) who is of course joyless -- an aimless musician who is no better at picking men than she is day jobs. Then there’s Trish (Cynthia Stevenson, in an apparent self-parody of her trademark insufferable cutesiness) who prattles on forever about how she “has it all.” Being the happiest character she is also the most blind, unaware that her successful therapist husband Bill (Dylan Baker) would rather rape their eleven-year-old son’s friends than sleep with her. The boy, Billy (Rufus Read) has his own troubles -- he wants to be able to ejaculate like all the other kids, so naturally he turns to Dad for advice on length over girth, and the finer points of caressing one’s self. The successful sister Helen (Lara Flynn Boyle) can have any man she wants, but the ease bores her -- she wants it raw and dirty, like the characters in her presumably best selling soft-porn novels. She finds the man of her dreams when she gets an obscene phone call from the guy down the hall, Allen (Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who is excellent). Unfortunately, he can only relate physically to himself. No wonder he ultimately hooks up with his neighbor Kristina (Camryn Manheim), who like him is overweight, unattractive, and desperate for love. She also has a murderous hatred for sex. Perhaps the most tender moment in Happiness is when these two crawl in bed, and turn away from each other. Welcome to the new frontier: one-night stands where nothing happens.
There are several images from Happiness that linger in the head after you’ve seen it, most involving masturbation or semen. The vital fluid -- which seems to be asserting itself as a major presence in movies today, from The Doom Generation to There’s Something About Mary -- is splattered in at least a couple of scenes, talked about ad nauseum between Bill and Billy, and constantly siphoned by Allen . Semen is the film’s McGuffin -- the thing everyone wants, in one way or another: to receive it, to be released from it, to be free of it forever. And of course freedom is exactly what it doesn’t deliver. When Lenny comes too early, Diane tells him not to feel guilty. “I don’t,” he replies, “I don’t feel anything.” He isn’t alone, of course. The people in this movie are shell-shocked survivors of their own private desire.
Solondz’s picture of family life as this swarm of worms coated with oily bourgeois charm made its debut in Welcome to the Dollhouse, wherein poor 11-year-old Dawn Weiner underwent one adolescent disaster after another. There’s a natural sympathy between the director and the Dawns and Billys of the world, born into families which will bequeath them a burden of bullshit and despair.
Unfortunately, I never really bought the whole package. Watching Happiness you never get the feeling you’re seeing the grimy truth peeled back from the layers of suburbia, just the director’s own somewhat angry vision of it, and like any film bred in anger it comes across looking thin and hollow. The characters seem less like people than they do cardboard representations of modern-day anomie and ennui. And so much of the film just seems punishing to sit through -- partly because the ugliness is so unearned. I am thinking here particularly of an irredeemably nasty scene at the end between the Bill and Billy -- one of several moments when I found myself praying for projection failure. To begin with, it struck me as completely implausible, and because it’s implausible, because it seems a nightmare located entirely within the brain of the director and outside of reality, even the reality of the film, I felt needlessly assaulted --which I can only guess was the intent. There is nothing like a film that takes a hard, close look at the truth we would all like to avoid; there’s nothing worse than one that wants to, and fails.
Because Todd Solondz’s obsessions are neither persuasive nor searching, I wonder about his future. How many audiences will be willing, after this and Welcome to the Dollhouse, to join him on one more masochistic trip through Depravity Lane?
I, for one, think I’ll pass.
P.S. No, I didn’t bother to watch Storytelling.
Heard of a van that is loaded with weapons,
packed up and ready to go
Heard of some gravesites, out by the highway,
a place where nobody knows
The sound of gunfire, off in the distance,
I'm getting used to it now...
packed up and ready to go
Heard of some gravesites, out by the highway,
a place where nobody knows
The sound of gunfire, off in the distance,
I'm getting used to it now...
Monday, March 17, 2003
Standard lists of books I should have read by now always make me queasy. At this stage of my life, shouldn't the top three be in my dust by now?
My defense: I once bought a used paperback of Tristram Shandy but have never been all that interested in tackling it. I have, on the other hand, tacked Middlemarch a number of times, and always lose interest by page 98. I could stand to read
Great Expectations, but the sad fact is no one ever forced it on me in school. I'll probably read it sometime soon. Just this week I'm reading A Tale of Two Cities for the first time. No one ever made me read that either.
Never read any Graham Swift, either. I know and like all the rest on the list. Of these, the one I'd most look forward to reading again -- if only for easy pleasure it affords -- is Waugh's A Handful of Dust, a novel of wicked perfection.
My defense: I once bought a used paperback of Tristram Shandy but have never been all that interested in tackling it. I have, on the other hand, tacked Middlemarch a number of times, and always lose interest by page 98. I could stand to read
Great Expectations, but the sad fact is no one ever forced it on me in school. I'll probably read it sometime soon. Just this week I'm reading A Tale of Two Cities for the first time. No one ever made me read that either.
Never read any Graham Swift, either. I know and like all the rest on the list. Of these, the one I'd most look forward to reading again -- if only for easy pleasure it affords -- is Waugh's A Handful of Dust, a novel of wicked perfection.
Sunday, March 16, 2003
Saturday, March 15, 2003
Ever wonder what happens to comedians who ridicule the dictator of Iraq? The same thing that happens to graffiti artists who write "Fuck Saddam, his wife and daughters" in the men's room at the Baghdad Zippy Mart.
Nice Guardian profile about a comedy act I hope we all live to see.
Nice Guardian profile about a comedy act I hope we all live to see.
Friday, March 14, 2003
El (This Strange Passion) is one of a handful of masterpieces from Luis Bunuel's "middle period" of the 1950s -- long after his auspicious 1928 debut with Un Chien Andalou, and just prior to his great creative period of the 1960s.
From the time of his official "comeback" in 1950 with Los Olvidados, Bunuel worked steadily in Mexico and Spain crafting a series of what might be called "Surrealist melodramas." Genre films they no doubt were, but as was true with Douglas Sirk in America, they brought out the best in him. He turned them inside out.
"With El," he later told an interviewer, "I worked as I always did in Mexico: a film was proposed to me and instead of accepting it outright I tried to work out a counterproposal. Though my proposal was still commercial, it nevertheless seemed a better way of expressing some of the things I wanted to say."
Soap operas and melodramas were, after all, what that stalwart Surrealist phrase l'amour fou, or "crazy love," was all about. Bunuel took tales of heated love and thwarted desire and turned them into personal statements about obsession, repression, bourgeois propriety, Catholicism, and fetishism.
El, in fact, manages to get all this in the very first scene. During Holy Week, Don Francisco Galvan de Montemayor (Arturo de Cordova) is taking part in a Catholic foot-washing ceremony when he very suddenly falls in love -- with a pair of feet. The middle-aged Don Francisco is a wealthy businessman, a devout Catholic, and, we come to find out, still a virgin. The problem isn't that he can't find anyone; he's handsome, vigorous, confident and a sharp dresser. The problem is that no one has ever been good enough. He's a romantic purist. These beautiful feet, then, present a challenge. He's a believer not just in love at first sight, but at first and last sight; having held out for a lifetime for the woman of his dreams, he is committed to possessing her for eternity.
The feet belong to Gloria (Delia Garces), who resists his charm but is just fearfully attracted enough by his self-assurance to leave her fiance Raul (Luis Beristein) for him. Of course, she doesn't quite know what she's in for, but her wedding night gives her a good idea: no sooner does Don Francisco embrace her than he works himself into a jealous rage over the possibility that she loved someone before him. For the duration of their honeymoon, he tortures himself with paranoid fears that Gloria is being stalked by a man she barely knows. In the couple's married life, reconciliation leads to violence, arguments end with gunfire, and a day's peaceful outing concludes with Don Francisco's Vertigo-esque threat to pitch Gloria from the top of a bell-tower. Gloria's efforts to change the situation come to naught; the rest of the world, including her own mother, are too impressed by Don Francisco's devotion to ever see through him. Far from satisfying Don Francisco, love turns this professional control freak into a raving nut and his new bride into his prisoner. Fernando goes berserk; first in a clumsy attempt at suturing Gloria's vagina and then later in church, where his ordered world implodes before his eyes.
*****
"What happens with the cinema is that people have written and said a great deal about its technique," Bunuel told an interviewer in his later years. "There's a lot of hot air in all that: cinema is easy to do, and has no secrets ... The specialists solve the technical problems. To be a good director in the cinema is the same as being a good writer -- to have clear ideas, to know what you want to say and to say it as directly as possible."
This wasn't just the view of a wily old man, eager to blaspheme his own status as a sacred cow. Long before he got anywhere near a camera, film had always been for him a matter of simplicity, of pursuing a clean, uncluttered style that didn't rely on unneccessary effects.
"No one ever talks about the technique of films like [Buster Keaton's] College," he wrote in an early film review, "and it is because it is so indissolubly mingled with the other elements, that no one even notices, just as if you live in a house you do not take note of the calculated resistance of the materials which compose it." How easily one could say the same thing about so many of his own films, except that people did talk about his style; a style that was so effective because it eschewed "style" altogether. He made complex films that proceed with remarkable economy; so much so that it sometimes throws viewers off-guard, especially with his editing. Rather than a title-card that says "Six years later," he uses a "straight cut" that not only tests your alertness but gives the story an appropriately dream-like touch.
There is, to be sure, some fancy camerawork in his movies -- non-synchronous sound, freeze-frames, slow-motion, jump-cuts, and warped dream images were all things he either originated or toyed with, usually before anyone else -- but what really defines Bunuel is not the way he manipulated the lens but how he arranged images in a suggestive, even shocking way. We never actually see Don Francisco trying to stitch up Gloria, for example; we just see him him take a needle, thread, razor and rope into the bedroom. The suggestiveness of juxtaposed objects: key to dreams, key to the Surrealists, and the key reason why Bunuel's compositions are so distinct and recognizable. Will anyone ever forget the ants crawling out a hole in a man's hand in Un Chien Andalou? The poor blind street musician in Los Olvidados, staring into the face of a rooster? The laughing portrait of Christ in Nazarin? The group of beggars in Viridiana, having a pagan orgy to the strains of Handel's Messiah?
In time, Bunuel would have total freedom to choose his own mad projects and say everything he had only hinted at before. But as El reminds us, the hints themselves could be pretty damned powerful.El reminds us, the hints themselves could be pretty damned powerful.
Wednesday, March 12, 2003
If, like me, you still mourn the good old days of suck.com, take heart. Frequent Suckster Ana Marie Cox started her own blog: the antic muse.
Maybe it's the lay-out, but I think of Mizz Cox as the anti-Eve Tushnet, which should not exactly be taken as an anti-Eve dig. I really don't care if you're a conservative lesbian or a leftist wife so long as you write well and wittily.
Okay, so I'm lukewarm. Spew me.
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I'm afraid I have nothing much to say about Omoo, Melville's sequel to Typee. I find it quite boring. It's an episodic ramble through Polynesia -- "omoo" means "wanderer" -- and the many incidents Melville (now under the nom de plume "Paul") describes in so many blessedly short chapters are neither inspired nor amusing. I can't wait for it to end.
---------------------------
Listening throughout the day to the late, great Eric Dolphy, the multi-talented jazz instrumentalist -- equally at home on flute, tenor sax, clarinet, you-name-it -- who died in 1964 at the tender age of 36, amidst an extraordinary career as a straight session player, a vital component of Charles Mingus' band, and a remarkable solo artist.
This is the kind of wild jazz you either love or loathe. I don't know the first thing about music, but I think this is the kind of jazz they call "modal" which, if my own experience accounts for anything, means that it is effortlessly melodic, maddeningly repetitive, and also full of wild swooping squawks, squeaks and grunts -- you know, very much like Ornette Coleman. Indeed, these are the things I like most about it; if you're going to make some noise, make it adventurous.
--------------------------
Another perfect summation from Stanley Kauffmann, this time on Kurt Russell: "His acting seems made of cards that are well-thumbed."
--------------------------
God only knows what to make of Mel Gibson's new movie.
Gibson, long known as a conservative Catholic, turns out to be what one might call a fundamentalist Catholic, presumably one who looks on the Vatican with at least as much contempt and loathing as the Bob Jones crowd looks on the Southern Baptist Convention. From the surface of things, it looks as if Gibson's self-financed, -produced and -directed forthcoming film, The Passion, could be as controversial as The Last Temptation of Christ, although for entirely opposite reasons. A lot of people hated Scorsese's film because they thought it blasphemous; most notably in that -- in keeping with the Kazantzakis novel -- it considered the possibility of Christ having lust in his heart. Some people even thought the movie was part of a plot by "Hollywood Jews."
Those very people may be just the audience for Gibson's film; the Times article hints that the film's take on the crucifixion is that Christ was murdered not by humanity, but by Jews.
I'd like to think Gibson is beyond that kind of doctrinaire hatred, but that may be too much to hope for if his views are anything like his dad's. The elder Gibson comes off sounding like a certifiable anti-Semitic loon.
Is anyone going to see this picture? Who is going to distribute it?
Maybe it's the lay-out, but I think of Mizz Cox as the anti-Eve Tushnet, which should not exactly be taken as an anti-Eve dig. I really don't care if you're a conservative lesbian or a leftist wife so long as you write well and wittily.
Okay, so I'm lukewarm. Spew me.
---------------------------
I'm afraid I have nothing much to say about Omoo, Melville's sequel to Typee. I find it quite boring. It's an episodic ramble through Polynesia -- "omoo" means "wanderer" -- and the many incidents Melville (now under the nom de plume "Paul") describes in so many blessedly short chapters are neither inspired nor amusing. I can't wait for it to end.
---------------------------
Listening throughout the day to the late, great Eric Dolphy, the multi-talented jazz instrumentalist -- equally at home on flute, tenor sax, clarinet, you-name-it -- who died in 1964 at the tender age of 36, amidst an extraordinary career as a straight session player, a vital component of Charles Mingus' band, and a remarkable solo artist.
This is the kind of wild jazz you either love or loathe. I don't know the first thing about music, but I think this is the kind of jazz they call "modal" which, if my own experience accounts for anything, means that it is effortlessly melodic, maddeningly repetitive, and also full of wild swooping squawks, squeaks and grunts -- you know, very much like Ornette Coleman. Indeed, these are the things I like most about it; if you're going to make some noise, make it adventurous.
--------------------------
Another perfect summation from Stanley Kauffmann, this time on Kurt Russell: "His acting seems made of cards that are well-thumbed."
--------------------------
God only knows what to make of Mel Gibson's new movie.
Gibson, long known as a conservative Catholic, turns out to be what one might call a fundamentalist Catholic, presumably one who looks on the Vatican with at least as much contempt and loathing as the Bob Jones crowd looks on the Southern Baptist Convention. From the surface of things, it looks as if Gibson's self-financed, -produced and -directed forthcoming film, The Passion, could be as controversial as The Last Temptation of Christ, although for entirely opposite reasons. A lot of people hated Scorsese's film because they thought it blasphemous; most notably in that -- in keeping with the Kazantzakis novel -- it considered the possibility of Christ having lust in his heart. Some people even thought the movie was part of a plot by "Hollywood Jews."
Those very people may be just the audience for Gibson's film; the Times article hints that the film's take on the crucifixion is that Christ was murdered not by humanity, but by Jews.
I'd like to think Gibson is beyond that kind of doctrinaire hatred, but that may be too much to hope for if his views are anything like his dad's. The elder Gibson comes off sounding like a certifiable anti-Semitic loon.
Is anyone going to see this picture? Who is going to distribute it?
A New Musical Express article raises the question: just how do you say "I laid a gin-soaked barroom queen in Memphis" in Chinese?
The folks at kitchencabinet have some interesting but rather callous remarks on Shane and High Noon. My response:
I enjoy both films enormously -- and while your reductive comments are interesting and intelligent, they come across as rather horribly snotty. I mean, come on -- The Faerie Queen? That's not even a fair comparison. "Highly developed levels of meaning" aren't neccessarily what one yearns for in a Western film -- especially ones such as these, which draw so much of their strength from their leanness, their focus, and their single-mindedness of purpose. If you want an ambiguous Western, maybe you should have watched a Sam Peckinpah film or a Monte Hellman film or one by Anthony Mann -- but don't blame Stevens and Zinnemen for not being them. What grips the viewer in Shane and High Noon is the starkness of the situations.
You say: "There's almost nothing else to do while watching it but think about more complicated situations and issues." I'm all for the critical assumption that one's own objections to a work of art will be experienced by all others, but both these films show this view has its limitations. It's fair to say that almost no one watching these films for the first time is going to be wondering about "more complicated situations and issues."
You state that "Both deal with the battle in western towns for law and order but neither profits from the greater dramatic range that this setting makes available" -- I find the opposite to be true. Both films, especially Shane. employ landscape for dramatic purposes; I am thinking in particular of the low-angle shots of Ladd as he rides to the showdown with Jack Palance, and the ending as well -- where he is silhouetted against the sky.
I enjoy both films enormously -- and while your reductive comments are interesting and intelligent, they come across as rather horribly snotty. I mean, come on -- The Faerie Queen? That's not even a fair comparison. "Highly developed levels of meaning" aren't neccessarily what one yearns for in a Western film -- especially ones such as these, which draw so much of their strength from their leanness, their focus, and their single-mindedness of purpose. If you want an ambiguous Western, maybe you should have watched a Sam Peckinpah film or a Monte Hellman film or one by Anthony Mann -- but don't blame Stevens and Zinnemen for not being them. What grips the viewer in Shane and High Noon is the starkness of the situations.
You say: "There's almost nothing else to do while watching it but think about more complicated situations and issues." I'm all for the critical assumption that one's own objections to a work of art will be experienced by all others, but both these films show this view has its limitations. It's fair to say that almost no one watching these films for the first time is going to be wondering about "more complicated situations and issues."
You state that "Both deal with the battle in western towns for law and order but neither profits from the greater dramatic range that this setting makes available" -- I find the opposite to be true. Both films, especially Shane. employ landscape for dramatic purposes; I am thinking in particular of the low-angle shots of Ladd as he rides to the showdown with Jack Palance, and the ending as well -- where he is silhouetted against the sky.
Tuesday, March 11, 2003
January Magazine presents an admittedly shitty interview with Rohinton Mistry, whose Family Matters I glowingly reviewed last year. It does, however, have an interesting sidelight about Germaine Greer that I wasn't aware of. Dumb bitch.
Saturday, March 08, 2003
Promised Land
"Your mom has good taste."
So reads a recent e-mail from Hershel Parker, who apparently saw a note on this site -- or somewhere -- where I said that my mom had given me the first volume of his massive Herman Melville biography. I look forward to the book; for now, I continue to commit myself to an ass-backwards Melville reading program: very casual and at whatever pace I choose. Having started with Pierre and the later works, I have proceeded to the very beginning and will work my way up to where I first arrived. This way I wind up at Moby Dick.
Melville is a writer of great symphonic depths, and he's sometimes a dull one; Faulkner is the same way. People who push the limits can push your patiernce, too. Typee is neither a dull book nor a masterly one, but there's no question a master wrote it. Part of the excitement of reading it is that you know the author has greatness within his reach; it's lovely in and of itself, but there's also a sense you have of how those talents would blossom; you can see a style that has found itself and is ripening. You see someone born to write.
Typee is a superb book of travel and recollection and amused thoughtfulness, and it suggests the full, restless, unquenchable and unsatisfied spirit oif a writer who can never plunge deep enough into experience, and will tax his memory and imagination to the last dreg to bring his art into fruition. It has an easygoing but muscular style; casually philosophical and not that complex. It's the work of a young man, sticking to what he knows, drawing out of the material all he can, which is a lot.
The book is about life amidst a strange sort of paradise: a Tahitian society that is the opposite of 19th Century life, and of civilized life since. Melville arrived in such a place when he and a felllow sailor, Toby, ditched the ship Acushnet in 1842; in this purportedly true "peep at Polynesian life," Melville is Tommo and Toby is Toby and how accountably true the book is is, I suppose, anyone's guess. The island of Nukaheva where they arrive is one ruled by the most casual joys and easy amusements, a land of milk and honey, of manna, a land generously blessed with breadfruit for food and trees whose bark can be rendered into clothing. People don't wear themselves out with work or trouble themselves all that much with God; the Deity is somewhat iffy, religion as a formalized practice is largely unknown and the enforced customs and taboos seem to have been chosen at random. People run around naked, the sex (Melville suggests) is free and easy, and people are happy -- happier, certainly, than the missionaries who are so intent on civilizing them and the armies who exploit and terrorize them.
It's no wonder why Melville's debut was the most popular of his books in his lifetime. It describes in rich detail every custom, from how breadfruit is processed into food to the uses of tree bark to make cloth to the intricacies of using a shark's tooth as a tattooing needle. It's like a National Geographic special with a touch of Rousseau, as our narrator reflectively ponders whether this new world is more or less savage than the one he grew up in. Cannibals they are, but cannibals who only eat their enemies, and who only respond violently when their way of life is threatened: "Thus it is that they whom we denominate `savages' are made to deserve the title."
Among the characters are the servant Koro-Koro -- in whom one sees shades of Queequeg -- his father Marheyo, the chief Mehevi, and the thoroughly delightful Fayaway, a bare-breasted tropical houri:
How captivating is a Peruvian lady, swinging in her gaily-woven hammock of grass, extended between two orange-trees, and inhaling the fragrance of a choice cigarro!
But Fayaway, holding in her delicately formed olive hand the long yellow reed of her pipe, with its quaintly carved bowl, and every few moments languishingly giving forth light wreaths of vapour from her mouth and nostrils, looked still more engaging.
We floated about thus for several hours, when I looked up to the warm, glowing, tropical sky, and then down into the transparent depths below; and when my eye, wandering from the bewitching scenery around, fell upon the grotesquely-tattooed form of Kory-Kory, and finally, encountered the pensive gaze of Fayaway, I thought I had been transported to some fairy region, so unreal did everything appear.
I'll leave it to scholars to say where truth ends and imagination begins in Typee; whatever this book is, it unfolds like a dream.
Friday, March 07, 2003
PETA's new ad campaign is obscene -- that's the first and most obvious fact about it. The second is that it reveals a dogmatic mindset that is impervious to reason. The great tragedy of Hitler's camps is that human beings were treated like animals; worse than animals, in fact. The point of PETA's campaign appears to be that animals are being treated like humans -- an argument which not only doesn't have the same forcefulness, but reflects a philosophy that sets animals above humans. Typically, PETA's effort to express their supposed belief in the sanctity of life only reflects how little they value it beyond the chicken or rabbit level.
Elie Wiesel put it best in Thursday's Ventura County Star:
Wiesel suggested that PETA's campaign exemplifies perhaps his greatest disappointment in life.
"I am not afraid of forgetfulness," he said, referring to society's memory of what happened in the Holocaust. "I am afraid of banalization, of trivialization and this is part of it.
"Why I'm disappointed is ... if the Holocaust didn't change the world, what could change the world?" Wiesel said. "Hatred for minorities in certain cases, religious minorities, ethnic or national minorities, the disdain we feel for poor people, or AIDS patients -- we haven't learned that the 'other' is not the symbol of enemy to you."
Wiesel said PETA "defeats their purpose by exaggerating" and by producing "the banality of evil" in the campaign.
"They could simply say they're killing," Wiesel said. "What's wrong with the word 'kill,' that they are against killing animals? All right, then I could support them."
Elie Wiesel put it best in Thursday's Ventura County Star:
Wiesel suggested that PETA's campaign exemplifies perhaps his greatest disappointment in life.
"I am not afraid of forgetfulness," he said, referring to society's memory of what happened in the Holocaust. "I am afraid of banalization, of trivialization and this is part of it.
"Why I'm disappointed is ... if the Holocaust didn't change the world, what could change the world?" Wiesel said. "Hatred for minorities in certain cases, religious minorities, ethnic or national minorities, the disdain we feel for poor people, or AIDS patients -- we haven't learned that the 'other' is not the symbol of enemy to you."
Wiesel said PETA "defeats their purpose by exaggerating" and by producing "the banality of evil" in the campaign.
"They could simply say they're killing," Wiesel said. "What's wrong with the word 'kill,' that they are against killing animals? All right, then I could support them."
Wednesday, March 05, 2003
What I'm listening to -- the last great blast of the Velvets, a radio-friendly LP of typically dark songs that radio very typically snubbed. An additional disc to this set is the "alternative album" of Loaded -- a much looser, sloppier version of the final product. Wildly different in parts, and not usually better, except in the case of "New Age."
Tuesday, March 04, 2003
Monday, March 03, 2003
A few weeks ago, in preparation for a Book Club discussion of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, I re-read Heart of Darkness, as well as Achebe's famous essay.
Some notes from the time:
Feb. 5, 2003: "Conrad is, as always, like walking through molasses -- thick turgid style and I can't say I always followed it. Marlow in England one moment and on the Congo the next, gliding to the heart, etc. Read Achebe's essay on it, which is rubbish -- he thinks it's not a work of art because it's racist, which would exclude most works of art or a number of them anyway, from the beginning of time."
This was not the only point on which I disagreed. The other was Achebe's assertion that there's no "filter" between Marlow's point of view and Conrad's own. Marlow, he said, "seems to me to enjoy Conrad's complete confidence." Personally, I thought Conrad put some distance between him and his character, and that he deliberately created in Marlow a outsized narrator of some rawness, a slightly daft character, perhaps, whose visions of Africa were certainly true for him if not his creator.
I became growingly disappointed in the essay as I went on to read Achene's Things Fall Apart, which intrigued and surprised me. I thought the book was going to be a mere anti-colonial rant, but it was much more complex than that, as the African village in the book is hardly a haven of paradise -- in many ways, it is downright evil -- and the missionaries and government officials who upset their way of life are not stereotypical blundering do-gooders who have taken up the white man's burden. Some of them are actually decent people who make progressive changes.
In a most interesting piece in the London Guardian Caryl Phillips -- whose superb The Atlantic Sound is a remarkable journey into the African-American, African-English past -- interviews Achebe and finds himself revisiting and revising his own pro-Conrad views:
* But is it not ridiculous to demand of Conrad that he imagine an African humanity that is totally out of line with both the times in which he was living and the larger purpose of his novel? In his lecture, even Achebe wistfully concedes that the novel reflects "the dominant image of Africa in the western imagination."
* However, despite Achebe's compelling "evidence", I am still finding it difficult to dismiss this man and his short novel. Are we to throw all racists out of the canon? Are we, as Achebe suggests, to ignore the period in which novels are written and demand that the artist rise above the prejudices of his times?
* Achebe is right; to the African reader the price of Conrad's eloquent denunciation of colonisation is the recycling of racist notions of the "dark" continent and her people. Those of us who are not from Africa may be prepared to pay this price, but this price is far too high for Achebe. However lofty Conrad's mission, he has, in keeping with times past and present, compromised African humanity in order to examine the European psyche. Achebe's response is understandably personal.
Some notes from the time:
Feb. 5, 2003: "Conrad is, as always, like walking through molasses -- thick turgid style and I can't say I always followed it. Marlow in England one moment and on the Congo the next, gliding to the heart, etc. Read Achebe's essay on it, which is rubbish -- he thinks it's not a work of art because it's racist, which would exclude most works of art or a number of them anyway, from the beginning of time."
This was not the only point on which I disagreed. The other was Achebe's assertion that there's no "filter" between Marlow's point of view and Conrad's own. Marlow, he said, "seems to me to enjoy Conrad's complete confidence." Personally, I thought Conrad put some distance between him and his character, and that he deliberately created in Marlow a outsized narrator of some rawness, a slightly daft character, perhaps, whose visions of Africa were certainly true for him if not his creator.
I became growingly disappointed in the essay as I went on to read Achene's Things Fall Apart, which intrigued and surprised me. I thought the book was going to be a mere anti-colonial rant, but it was much more complex than that, as the African village in the book is hardly a haven of paradise -- in many ways, it is downright evil -- and the missionaries and government officials who upset their way of life are not stereotypical blundering do-gooders who have taken up the white man's burden. Some of them are actually decent people who make progressive changes.
In a most interesting piece in the London Guardian Caryl Phillips -- whose superb The Atlantic Sound is a remarkable journey into the African-American, African-English past -- interviews Achebe and finds himself revisiting and revising his own pro-Conrad views:
* But is it not ridiculous to demand of Conrad that he imagine an African humanity that is totally out of line with both the times in which he was living and the larger purpose of his novel? In his lecture, even Achebe wistfully concedes that the novel reflects "the dominant image of Africa in the western imagination."
* However, despite Achebe's compelling "evidence", I am still finding it difficult to dismiss this man and his short novel. Are we to throw all racists out of the canon? Are we, as Achebe suggests, to ignore the period in which novels are written and demand that the artist rise above the prejudices of his times?
* Achebe is right; to the African reader the price of Conrad's eloquent denunciation of colonisation is the recycling of racist notions of the "dark" continent and her people. Those of us who are not from Africa may be prepared to pay this price, but this price is far too high for Achebe. However lofty Conrad's mission, he has, in keeping with times past and present, compromised African humanity in order to examine the European psyche. Achebe's response is understandably personal.
Good piece from the folks at The Kitchen Cabinet on Almodovar's Talk to Her. Nice to read as I prepare to watch All About My Mother.
Great Jonathan Yardley piece on the late John Marquand leads to the following e-mail exchange.
Welch: Just thought I'd point this out -- the Library of America has yet to include Hemingway either.
Yardley: That's because Hemingway is still under copyright and I'm sure Scribner refuses to release him.
Welch: Just thought I'd point this out -- the Library of America has yet to include Hemingway either.
Yardley: That's because Hemingway is still under copyright and I'm sure Scribner refuses to release him.
Depending on your point of view, John Derbyshire, in his rather weird argument for the social values of Married...With Children, is either cynical or just brutally realistic. Quoting Orwell, he finds the show reflective of “the working-class outlook which takes it as a matter of course that youth and adventure — almost, indeed, individual life — end with marriage.”
Marriage is hell and always has been, he lets us know, but ours would be a poorer world without it:
For the principle underlying Married With Children — it would be too much to say that the show actually celebrated it, but it was there anyway — was the principle of duty. This is not a very fashionable principle in an age like ours, an essentially hedonistic age; but without some widespread sense of duty, of selfless adherence to custom and principle and social obligation, no civilization could persist for long.
He explains that in his native England people like this kind of thing -- harsh and unsentimental, which is why he claims never to have liked "The Simpsons."
To my way of thinking, though, the jokes in "Married ... With Children" were merely crass and cloddish; it was one of those sitcoms where you spent most of the half-hour yearning for comic relief. It was the kind of show the Simpson family might have watched while the rest of us watched "The Simpsons."
My letter to Derbyshire:
You've simply got to watch The Simpsons again. Everything you said about Married ... With Children is true of The Simpsons with the added distinction that it mocks virtually everyone and is funny on a regular basis.
At the risk of sounding un-American, I think Homer Simpson is the true American icon. You look at this filthy slob and lazy employee, this commonest of common denominators, this loving dad and faithful husband and you recognize it -- mostly in others, but also probably in one's self. Homer is the man who has devoted his life to always taking the easy way out. You look at him and think "You know, this isn't the best America has to offer, but it is something we offer. It's something we are."
Give it another look -- it's possibly the most vital artistic artifact of the latter third of the 20th Century. To the child in 3345 A.D. who wants to understand American life in the last ten years, I'd say look at The Simpsons.
It is us.
Marriage is hell and always has been, he lets us know, but ours would be a poorer world without it:
For the principle underlying Married With Children — it would be too much to say that the show actually celebrated it, but it was there anyway — was the principle of duty. This is not a very fashionable principle in an age like ours, an essentially hedonistic age; but without some widespread sense of duty, of selfless adherence to custom and principle and social obligation, no civilization could persist for long.
He explains that in his native England people like this kind of thing -- harsh and unsentimental, which is why he claims never to have liked "The Simpsons."
To my way of thinking, though, the jokes in "Married ... With Children" were merely crass and cloddish; it was one of those sitcoms where you spent most of the half-hour yearning for comic relief. It was the kind of show the Simpson family might have watched while the rest of us watched "The Simpsons."
My letter to Derbyshire:
You've simply got to watch The Simpsons again. Everything you said about Married ... With Children is true of The Simpsons with the added distinction that it mocks virtually everyone and is funny on a regular basis.
At the risk of sounding un-American, I think Homer Simpson is the true American icon. You look at this filthy slob and lazy employee, this commonest of common denominators, this loving dad and faithful husband and you recognize it -- mostly in others, but also probably in one's self. Homer is the man who has devoted his life to always taking the easy way out. You look at him and think "You know, this isn't the best America has to offer, but it is something we offer. It's something we are."
Give it another look -- it's possibly the most vital artistic artifact of the latter third of the 20th Century. To the child in 3345 A.D. who wants to understand American life in the last ten years, I'd say look at The Simpsons.
It is us.
Sunday, March 02, 2003
Saw Unfaithful this afternoon. Dynamite performance by Diane Lane -- that's the first thing about it anyone's going to notice. She's this mid-thirtyish wife who has a disastrous but highly charged affair with a younger man, and she goes well beyond the role; just puts her whole self into it, and fully conveys the range of emotional fragility: stop, don't stop, do it, don't do it, this is insane, let's do it again -- that whole rollercoaster of being addicted to something dangerous and forbidden and fulfilling. She has enormous guts as an actress and it really pays off.
The movie itself -- well, it's an Adrian Lyne film, which are all rather off-putting, mainly because of their look. Film for film, you recognize that same stylized claustrophobia, that same fashion ad aura in every scene. He's always real heavy on shadows to convey emotional tension, shadows and primo movie-star ass. I must admit the sex scenes in Unfaithful are very hot, which is something I don't always like admitting about other films of his I've seen. He likes to push the emotional tension and sometimes it works. It works more often than not on this go-round becsause of his lead actress. She's nominated for Best Actress and I hope she wins, though I suspect that honor will go to Nicole Kidman.
The movie itself -- well, it's an Adrian Lyne film, which are all rather off-putting, mainly because of their look. Film for film, you recognize that same stylized claustrophobia, that same fashion ad aura in every scene. He's always real heavy on shadows to convey emotional tension, shadows and primo movie-star ass. I must admit the sex scenes in Unfaithful are very hot, which is something I don't always like admitting about other films of his I've seen. He likes to push the emotional tension and sometimes it works. It works more often than not on this go-round becsause of his lead actress. She's nominated for Best Actress and I hope she wins, though I suspect that honor will go to Nicole Kidman.
Started reading Typee. I have this goal over the next little while (no set date) to read all of Melville, as well as Hershel Parker's bio (Mom delivered Vol. I for Christmas; maybe I can squeeze Vol. II out of Father's Day) and Lorant-Robertson's sadly out-of-print one (which I had to return to the library unfinished; the first 150 pages are beautiful though) and Newton Arvin's little book (months overdue from S.C. State Library, which thankfully does not charge overdue fees. I've kept books out for over a year.)
I've only gotten to page 75 of Typee, but it's a thoroughly absorbing adventure.
I've bitched and re-bitched, written and re-written my little review of The Hours. I now have this strong hankering to re-read the Woolf novel and to read Michael Cunningham's novel on which the movie is based -- if only to further test out and explore any thoughts on the issues the movie raised. Seeing the Vanessa Redgrave film of the novel wouldn't hurt either.
I've only gotten to page 75 of Typee, but it's a thoroughly absorbing adventure.
I've bitched and re-bitched, written and re-written my little review of The Hours. I now have this strong hankering to re-read the Woolf novel and to read Michael Cunningham's novel on which the movie is based -- if only to further test out and explore any thoughts on the issues the movie raised. Seeing the Vanessa Redgrave film of the novel wouldn't hurt either.
Saturday, March 01, 2003
Prelude to a kiss: Virginia (Nicole Kidman) and Vanessa (Miranda Richardson) do the soulful sisterly stare thing in The Hours
And the Oscar for Best Picture goes to...The Hemlock Society for The Hours!!!
I didn't buy The Hours. It's a movie with one point, but I'll break it into two. One is that suicide is a noble option from the crushing pressure of existence. The other is that if you're a sensitive soul, you're probably gay, that a heterosexual union is therefore by its very nature repressive, and that any option for escape -- especially suicide -- is an act of courage. It operates from a gay weltanschaung that says heterosexuality is lethal, death is beautiful and suicide is heroic. The movie is well-acted, well-made, and tells a complex story in an intriguing way. But It's bullshit, and I shifted in my seat nervously, rejecting it almost all the way through.
The movie intertwines three stories. One is that of Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman with her nose out of joint; like the other two principals she is made to look as unflattering as possible), who commits suicide as the movie opens. In flashback the familiar story of the doyenne of Bloomsbury is replayed: she and her husband, Leonard, have left London for rural England, where they set up Hogarth Press. Virginia is suffering from a variety of mental problems, which apparently inspires her to write Mrs. Dalloway, a rather Joycean novel about one day in the life of the society woman Clarissa Dalloway. Although the movie sets this episode in 1921, it gives the impression that the novel is her own suicide note; actually the real Woolf would not kill herself for another 20 years. Anyway. From there we glide to another pair of stories, one in the 1950s, when a housewife, Laura Brown(Julianne Moore) is reading Mrs. Dalloway and one in 2001, when Meryl Streep is living out the Woolf story; her character's name is Clarissa, and her ex-husband Richard (Ed Harris), a poet who is dying of AIDS, calls her "Mrs. Dalloway."
What do the three have in common, besides a book? Virginia, as we all know, took her own life and according to the movie death was about the only thing she ever talked about with any passion. Certainly, Leonard does not evoke passion, although there is love and concern between them; the only person that apparently really trips Virginia's trigger is her sister Vanessa (Miranda Richardson). Laura, thirty years later in some dull American suburb -- from the looks of it, the same gilded Douglas Sirkian cage that traps Moore in Far From Heaven -- has a dull marriage that is all "Father Knows Best" on the surface. Her husband (John T. Reilly. who seems to be getting trapped in these nebbishy roles) loves her, her son Richie loves her but, as if we couldn't guess from her thin, plastic smile, she hates the domestic life she's been pretending to love. She doesn't fit into Eisenhower America, and when her pal Kitty (Toni Collette) comes over, we begin to understand why.
Kitty is the very picture of 1950s complacency; she looks like the cover of a Butterick pattern. Kitty is another prisoner of domesticity, although she doesn't know it. She wants to have a child and can't; instead, as she tells Laura, the doctors have found a growth on her uterus. Instead of a growing foetus, she gets a growing cancer; a cancer that is clearly indicative of her sense of failure. As she tells Laura, she had always grown up to believe that you're not really a woman unless you bear children. As Laura comforts her, the two women wind up sharing a lingering mouth-to-mouth kiss. Laura, who has devoted most her day to baking a cake for her husband's birthday, to being everything Kitty thinks a woman should be, now decides she wants to die. The life Kitty wants is the life that is killing her.
And then there's Clarissa, some fifty years later, who has been living for some years with a girlfriend; in the spirit of "if you can't beat `em, join `em," she has left her gay husband to find her own gay self. Like her literary doppelganger, and like Laura, she is hustling about preparing for a party for the dying Richard; she is doing all of Richard's living for him, and he can't stand it any longer; he wants to let go of a life that has become a pain, a long procession of hours.
Virginia, Laura, Richard -- the woman who wrote the book, the woman who read it, and (as it turns out) the son of the woman who read it; all gay and all romantically fixated on death, more or less with the movie's approval. Someone has to die, Virginia announces to Leonard, speaking of her novel and her life. Why, he asks. So that others will value life more, she replies -- at which point I began to grimace. Do the perpetually unhappy have any recourse to this state of affairs? Well, yes, as we learn later; Laura saves herself by abandoning her family, which will turn her son against her for life. But hey, she explains later, she chose life -- another grimace from me.
I suppose on reflection I can up the movie's overall score a tad by noting that it doesn't try to resolve the fact that life is about choices and choices, such as Richard's eventual suicide, sometimes involve the pain of others. What I find harder to forgive is that the movie seems to dole out equal nobility to choosing to live or choosing to die, which is not only simplistic but seems to me almost cruel. Virginia Woolf was mentally ill and feared another nervous breakdown. Whatever one may think of her art, she was not a sentimentalist. Does it honor her memory to turn her into some kind of latter-day Ophelia?
"The Last Days of Ben Chester White" -- Jerry Mitchell's excellent Clarion-Ledger story ably places the event of the killing in the context of the times.
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