What Are those Three Little Pigs Really Afraid Of?

 

Odd that I had forgotten about “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.” An eccentric friend just posted a belated review on his website; I’m grateful for the reminder of something that was once very important to me. When I applied to take a film course back at Queen’s, I cited it as one of my three favourite movies; the other two were “Bonnie and Clyde” and “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

The best thing about it was of course the dialogue. I love me that snappy dialogue. I also find the classical unities compelling, here as in “High Noon,” or “Culloden.” That is, events in the movie take place in real time, centre around the same action, and do not jump (rather than move) to another place. This gives an immediacy, like watching news live as it happens. 

I also think the acting was a tour de force, by Burton, Taylor, and Dennis. Especially Dennis.

I have actually met the stage manager for the original run of the play on Broadway. He scoffed at the movie, on the grounds that Taylor was miscast and just did not have the talent to hold up her end as Martha. A cheeky claim, considering that she won a Best Actress Oscar for the role. I think she went all out to prove she was more than just a pretty face, and she succeeded. I suspect my acquaintance just resented the greater fame of the movie version, with which he had no association. “You haven’t really seen it done right if you haven’t seen my version.” Burton is always compelling to watch, and is ideally cast as a history professor.

Although it was Mike Nichols’ directorial debut, I am amazed by his framing. Especially when George goes for the gun; that plays a lot like Hitchcock, the way Nichols uses depth of field to show different things happening in the foreground and background, the swinging light, the gun as it is revealed from under an old carpet, the living room seen from George’s perspective returning, the reaction shots, Martha’s face in closeup. And I think Nichols uses this to make us think we are about to see a Hitchcockian turn, an actual murder. Damn fine.

Watching it all again now, the one thing that doesn’t work for me—is really the most important thing of all. The ending.  The problem is, you cannot kill an imaginary character. George and Martha are not facing the cold light of dawn; mourning someone who never really existed is just continuing the fantasy. And logically, since it is a story, and utter improbabilities have already been allowed, and breaking of all conceivable rules, it would be perfectly easy for either George or Martha to declare that the report of Sonny Jim’s death was, after all, mistaken. 

Perhaps that was supposed to be the point, that there is no way out for them or for us, that there is no reality, only stories, that Godot does not come.

But if so, if everything is fantasy, why get so worked up in the first place? Why all the drama? Why not Buddhist detachment? One is left feeling cheated. It seems to me there really has to be a hard reality, something worth concealing. But in the movie or the play, we do not get to see what it is. It cannot be the death of an imaginary son, and it cannot be something so pedestrian as not having been able to have children.

I think Martha and Honey are very powerful portraits of two types of narcissism. George and Nick act out two roles family members take to try to cope with narcissism. This is, I think, what really most hooked me on the movie back in the day. I remember having seen it at least three times by second-year Queen’s; no small thing back before VHS or the Internet. Having grown up in a dysfunctional family, I recognized these people, knew them well, and the chaos they brought with them. It felt liberating to see it all portrayed on a big screen for the world to see. 

And yet, in the end, we do not see where this all comes from, or how it ends.

Joker's Wild

The online buzz about the new Joker movie is at a level I have never seen before. It seems that it is in the crossfire of the culture wars. Leftist commentators hate it, so much that some are, being leftist, actually censoring the name in print. Supposedly this is because it might inspire violence. From the right. Violence from the left, of course, is not a problem. Rightist commentators praise it. Critics hate it. Fans love it.

I have not seen the film, and am not likely to see it in the near future.

However, from what I hear, I am unhappy about some of the messages the movie seems to convey:

1. that there is naturally a class conflict between the rich and the poor, that might ignite at any moment.

2. that poverty and abuse cause violence; violence is the expression of pent-up rage from the oppressed.

3. that the mentally ill are violent.

Number one above is a Marxist premise. This is the Marxist theory of class war. But it is at least as reasonable to see the natural interests of rich and poor as almost entirely the same. It is not helpful to stir up a fear of the poor among the rich on this basis; or, conversely, a hatred of the rich among the poor. It is no healthier than stirring up hatred against the Jews among the Aryans, by suggesting that open conflict might erupt at any moment. Do this, and it will inevitably be the weaker party that will suffer. 

Number two is twofold. The poor may be more likely to use violence, because they have less to lose by it, and fewer alternate means. But that is a secondary consideration; it is not the cause, and distracts from the real cause. Poverty does not lead to rage or violence against those who are better off; ask a Franciscan. Envy does. The rich are probably more prone to envy others: they probably became rich because they were more invested in accumulating things.

Most poor people are strictly non-violent and honest. Poverty cannot be the critical factor leading to crime.

The thought that experiencing violence makes one violent is worse. It is a way of blaming the victim. In fact, those who have themselves experienced violence or abuse are less likely to be violent towards others. Survivors of the Nazi death camps did not become serial killers.

And being told you are garbage does not make you feel more entitled. It is more likely to make you think you are garbage.

Murderous psychopaths emerge among those who have been pampered and spoiled, not the abused. Both serial killers and Nazis tend to be middle class.

Number three is worst. The mentally ill face enough utterly unjust stigma, on top of their unspeakable suffering. It is like blaming crime on the lepers. It has been demonstrated repeatedly, as this article reminds us, that the mentally ill are no more violent than the general population.

In fact, the genuinely mentally ill are dramatically less likely to be violent than the general population. This is obscured by the arbitrary act of defining “personality disorders” as forms of mental illness. A “personality disorder” is simply a conscious choice to do evil. Accept it as a “mental illness,” and there is no room left for human choice: nobody ever chooses to do wrong. And if you define “doing bad things” as a mental illness, you are of course going to find that the mentally ill do bad things. You are simply saying the same thing twice.

But this is most cruelly unfair to the genuinely mentally ill. It is like blaming Gandhi and the Jews for the Second World War.

Short Movie Reviews

On a recent looong flight following the Great Circle Route, I got more than my fill of recent movies.

As an art form, filmmaking is pretty moribund.

A few pocket reviews: 

The King's Speech was an actors’ movie: a star turn for Colin Firth, who copped an Oscar. But the script and plot were weak. The premise was weak. Nothing important seemed to be at stake. The King of England is, after all, a figurehead. You just have to stand nicely for photos and read speeches. It is hard to believe anyone might not be up to the job, and hard to feel sympathy. Okay, so George/Bertie had a stammer. Why not, if necessary, use a voice double for the speeches? It’s done in Hollywood. Who would really care?

And then the plot twist that George finds out that the therapist is not a doctor, and acts betrayed. Given that he did not advertise himself as a doctor, why would this be an issue? Why, in the first place, would anyone think that a medical doctor would make a good speech therapist? An acting coach obviously makes more sense.

It got really hard to care. One could admire Firth’s acting, but that does not make the movie work as a whole.

I really wanted to see Mary Queen of Scots, because like probably everyone else who say Brooklyn, I’m keen on Saoirse Ronan. I did not like the idea of her as a queen, but that seems unfair typecasting. But the movie was really offensive. Just racist and sexist propaganda falsifying history. Falsifying history is a special sort of crime. Elizabeth’s most trusted counsellor was made to be African, and her main lady-in-waiting Asian. This was ridiculously ahistorical, and needlessly distracting in a story that largely hinged on the distinction between English and Scottish ethnicity. It made politics prior to art. Odd that it would not matter, when it was recently so important that actors cast for Disney’s live-action Aladdin all be from the Middle East. Even though Aladdin wasn’t—Disney’s original animated Aladdin falsified this in the first place. The makers of Mary Queen of Scots were scoring some political point about the ethnic English having no claim to English history. Which is a profoundly racist conceit. Try saying that about any other ethnic group.

Ethnic Scots have more rights. Unlike the English court, there seem to have been no African or Asian Scots. Mary was even given a Scots accent, although she had lived her life in France. It’s wicked to be English, but it is good to be Scottish.

Both Mary and Elizabeth, being women, were of course portrayed as strong, brave, honourable, and without fault: while all the men around them were pathetic, weak, cowardly, and duplicitous. Even when Elizabeth orders the all-good and honourable Mary executed, she explains in an awkward stage whisper/interior monologue that she does not want to do it; she is somehow forced into it by circumstances. So much for being strong, when responsibility must be taken.

There is inevitably one exception to all the men in the movie being weak and duplicitous. An African character cannot have any moral failings, even if male. Lord Randolph stands apart by staying true to his sovereign. And he always counsels both honourably and wisely. Pity there weren’t more Africans and Asians in England at the time, or the whole mess might have been averted. 

They Shall Not a Grow Old, following the current fashion, was anecdotal history by ordinary people caught up in events. Do we have Studs Terkel to blame for this? To my mind, anecdotal history, this sort of “eyewitness history,” is of little value. Why do we study history? It is to draw lessons, as with a parable. “those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it.” Appeasement does not work; perseverance in the face of defeat can win through; early victory can turn into eventual defeat; don’t tax without representation; and so forth.

We get none of this with anecdotal history. None of us really needs to know how to survive in the trenches. All that is left is voyeurism, like chasing an ambulance to ogle the carnage from an accident. Or like a sideshow at the circus. Unlike traditional history, there is no plot, no development. Just one damned thing after another, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. The movie was a technical accomplishment, but no more.

Stan and Ollie leaned heavily for its appeal on recreating Laurel and Hardy’s most famous skits. So what? All the originals are available online on YouTube; and nobody does Laurel and Hardy better than Laurel and Hardy. It felt lazy and exploitative. And again, a bit of a star turn for the actors, trying to make you believe. You never did, of course, but you were constantly distracted by the performance: did that sound like Hardy? Did that look like Laurel?

The film also suffered from the laugh track. Audience reactions were consistently shown as wildly enthusiastic—roaring with laughter. Again, this felt lazy and exploitative; it felt like begging for laughs. Laurel and Hardy skits tend to be endearing and whimsical rather than laugh-out-loud funny.

So, Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly put in fine performances. If that’s the sort of thing you go to movies for, you’ll like this. But as a movie, it had nothing else.

The Simple Trick to Great Filmmaking--Or Writing

Marisa Berenson

It seems to me there is a simple and obvious difference between a good movie and a bad movie. A good movie leaves you with scenes, visuals, lines, that burn into your memory. This effect is so profound that sometimes I fear going to see a new film by a certain director, because I know there will be a part of my consciousness that I will never own again. A bad movie may hold your attention while it is on screen, but a few months later, you can remember nothing about it. Perhaps not even whether you have seen that movie.

This is what the great directors do. There are always memorable lines and memorable images.

The funny thing is that this in itself is a kind of formula, and not that hard to follow. A big part of this—and it applies just as much to good writing—is that a bad film follows all the conventions, and gives you just what you expected. A good film—or piece of writing—strives to give you something you do not expect. This is always what is memorable. George Orwell put it well when he gave, as one of his rules of good writing, “never use an expression or phrase you are used to seeing in print.”

To give one example, a bad movie will cast actors who are conventionally extremely good looking in the lead roles. Obvious enough, surely.

A good movie will instead cast actors who have an unusual appearance. If someone is conventionally extremely good looking, they will cast him in a character role—like George Clooney in Hail Caesar!, or Brad Pitt in Burn after Reading.

Then they will cast a character actor in the lead role, like Tim Blake Nelson in Buster Scruggs or Frances McDormand in Fargo.

Stanley Kubrick, with his photographer’s eye, was especially good at selecting lead actresses who were, although not extremely beautiful in the conventional way, entrancing to look at: Shelley Duvall in The Shining, Marisa Berenson in Barry Lyndon.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

The Coen Brothers' latest film is out; The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. It is an anthology of short Western tales.

This review from Forbes seems to be dominating the early search results: “The Absent Women of 'The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.'” It pans the movie because it does not feature enough female protagonists. It counts one, out of six stories. I count two, making it not so far off from strict sexual parity. Big deal. And this is hardly an aesthetic issue. Would one object to the Mona Lisa for a lack of male representation?

Featuring women any more prominently would also be a falsification of history. There was a general shortage of women on the frontier.

Moreover, the Western is a traditional male genre, just as romance is a women's genre. As the real West obviously appealed more to men than women, and for the same reasons, so does the fictional West. Men crave freedom; women crave security. The Old West and the cowboy life was all freedom and no security.

So why fake history and lessen the appeal of your movie to its natural audience to please people who will not go to see it?

The reviewer herself plainly does not like Westerns. She refers to them as “problematic.” But it makes no sense to write a review panning a Western film for being a Western film. Moreover, to write a movie review on that premise seems purely self-indulgent. Those who dislike Westerns do not need her review to know they dislike Westerns, and those who like Westerns get no value out of knowing she doesn't. So what's the point? She violates the first rule of good writing: write for the reader, not yourself.

The Coen Brothers like Westerns. They relish all traditional American culture, and the Western is the great American genre. Buster Scruggs is, among other things, an appreciation of the beauty of the Western landscape and of its Western culture: its stories, its songs, its style of dress, its style of architecture, everything.

The first tale in the anthology, “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” proper, makes this appreciation of artistic beauty plain: its hero assumes the existence of heaven on the grounds that, otherwise, “what are all the songs about?” That is, art is our glimpse of heaven. 

Something like the same point is made in the final scene of the second piece in the anthology, “Near Algodones.” About to be hanged, as the hood is pulled over his head, the protagonist spots a pretty girl in the watching crowd, and is distracted from his own death by her beauty. Beauty, then, can be our escape from present troubles, no matter how grave.

The beauty of the arts is represented prominently in the third piece, “Meal Ticket,” by a quadruple amputee who recites to small crowds in Western towns while his companion “the impresario” passes the hat.

But it is not art for art's sake, either, or beauty for beauty's sake alone. That is not the message. “Meal Ticket,” for example, clearly has a moral agenda. One of the pieces Harrison, the amputee, recites in his stock performance is the story of Cain and Abel. A moral lesson. And his relationship with his manager acts it out. His manager murders him when he calculates he can make more money with a chicken that can do sums. Art and the artist are associated now with morality. Moreover, bad people are people who cannot appreciate the moral lessons of art: the impresario obviously never took to heart the lesson of the Cain and Abel recitation. To him, art is only entertainment, like the calculating chicken, and only his meal ticket.

And, despite first appearances that the film is a series of unrelated stories, they are all tied together in the final piece, “Mortal Remains.”

Five characters are riding in a stagecoach. And some of them look familiar. One, a trapper, physically resembles the prospector we encountered in an earlier segment, “All Gold Valley,” played by Tom Waits. He also resembles him in his way of life, living alone with nature. Like the Waits character, he seems to have a tendency to talk to himself.

Another, a Frenchman, looks like an older version of a Frenchman we saw playing poker in the first episode, “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.” And this latter Frenchman indeed refers to his background as a poker player.

Two more characters, sitting together, are bounty hunters, accompanying a corpse. One of them is strongly reminiscent of the impresario from “Meal Ticket”: both are members of a team of two, both are Irish, both sing Irish folk songs, and they seem to share the trait of ruthlessness: he is the one who kills the criminal prey.

The central figure in this episode, however, seems to be an older woman, who does not remind me at least of anyone in any of the previous segments.

The vignette begins with one of the bounty hunters singing a song, “Has Anybody Here Seen Molly?” as the camera plays on her disconcerted face. The song he sings is an old English music hall song; but the original lyric is “Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?” It seems, therefore, to have been adapted to a feminine form for topical reasons, to refer to the woman present. In the song, “Molly” has gone missing.

During the trip, our “Molly” has some sort of an attack, in which she cannot breathe. The Frenchman beside her thrusts his head out the carriage window to ask the driver to stop. We see the driver's back, not his face. He will not turn around to show it. He is all in black, and keeps whipping the horses on to greater speed. The first bounty hunter explains knowingly that the driver never stops.

It seems apparent that the carriage ride is a metaphor for death; which relents for no one. “Fort Morgan,” their destination, is the afterlife, and the dark silent driver is the angel of death. The woman has died. Perhaps others in the carriage are also souls on their way to the afterlife, but she seems to have been pointed to in this regard. In the end, it is she specifically for whom the doors are opened.

Other passengers may then represent reflections on the meaning of life. The singing bounty hunter explains that, in his vast experience, at the time of death, the faces of the dying always suggest they are trying to figure it all out--trying to figure out what the point of their life was.

As soon as he finishes saying this, we see the woman's face, looking deeply concerned. As though she is trying to figure it out.

The journey ends at a hotel, seen in darkness, with no human forms visible either outside or within. When the characters open the door, there is a staircase visible, with bright light above: the afterlife.

And so each of the movie's episodes is presented in this final segment as a meditation on what life is all about. Their viewpoints are then recapped in the final episode by their representative characters; five characters, just as there were five episodes before this one.

The Frenchman gives the postmodern view, speaking for the first story, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs—postmodernism being, after all, a French concept. His idea is that life is a game. Everyone creates their own meaning, like a poker bluff, and nobody can know another's hand. One cannot judge nor draw any final conclusions. “We must each play our own hand.” A similar sentiment was expressed by the late Buster Scruggs himself.

Then there is the trapper, who holds that all people are alike--”people are like ferrets.” That is, life is all about satisfying our immediate animal desires, nothing more.

The impresario bounty hunter chimes in with the idea that there are two kinds of people: “hale and frail. Those difficult to knock to the floor, and those who wilt.” To him, then, life is a struggle for power over others. Very much the attitude of the impresario, it seems, in the “Meal Ticket” segment.

The woman herself expresses a religious view. For her too, there are two kinds of people: good and evil. This roughly echoes the attitude of the main characters in the segment “The Gal Who Got Rattled.” The protagonist is ultimately concerned with the morality of her own acts. When proposed to, her first question is whether her suitor is religious. In the original segment, the heroine is a deeply sympathetic character. Here, the Coens seem to be showing a less attractive side of religiousity, a sense of self-righteousness.

The bounty hunter who initially sang seems to represent the view of the pure aesthete, or the purely aesthetic appreciation of art. He loves to tell tales to entertain, but it is to distract so his partner can kill the listener. Not a flattering image of art. He makes no claim to truth, but only wants to observe for the thrill of it.

This does not seem to represent the Coens' own position on art. The figure is disturbingly amoral, and more than a little resembles the traditional portrait of Satan.

If there is a segment expressing the same point of view, it is “Near Algodones.” The protagonist in that story seems similarly purely aesthetic in his concerns, with no sense of any deeper morality. When, for example, about to be hanged for bank robbery, his final words are a complaint that the man who caught him was not playing fair in protecting himself with armour. When the hanging party is attacked by Indians, he ends up merely observing. About to be hanged a second time, he is distracted by a pretty face.

But the Coens do not seem to give us their own conclusion. Perhaps they do not have one.

Fatty Weinstein

Roscoe Arbuckle

I have not been following the Harvey Weinstein scandal. I try to make a point of avoiding Hollywood gossip. It is the sin of calumny. And usually cruel and unfair to the celebrities involved, who have a right to their private lives, which right is consistently violated in modern America. Nevertheless, it has been hard to miss headlines saying 35 women have now made accusations of sexual impropriety against Weinstein.

Assuming it is all true, and even if it is not, but is not disproven, might this not have a serious effect on the Hollywood culture? Especially since it conforms to a longstanding popular suspicion about “show people”? A prejudice that stretches back at least to the Middle Ages?

Since the 1960s, Hollywood movies generally have been wildly immoral in any conventional sexual terms. Lots of sex scenes. A larger message, I think, that it is simply right and proper to drop your drawers and satisfy your urges at will. Hey, doesn’t everyone? I cannot speak authoritatively on this, because for the past sixteen years or so, I have been raising kids, and my movie-going has been pretty much limited to films with family ratings. But I have to say I did not feel I was missing anything. Hollywood lost me in the 60s. I think it was 1970, and M*A*S*H that did it. It was the ugly, unsympathetic portrayal of Major Frank Burns by Robert Duvall, as a religious nut, while “Hawkeye,” a callous womanizer, was the hero we were all supposed to identify with. Then and since then, any thought of sexual morality seems to have been treated by Hollywood with contempt. 

And that was a long time ago.

When I was single, I only went to foreign, indie, and art house films. Most of which, yeah, were awful, but if there were going to be any gems, they were going to be here.

There have been indications for years that the public is fed up with this. Note, for example, the unexpected success of The Passion of the Christ. Note the sagging movie attendance over the past year, that was already news when the Weinstein thing broke.

This bubble may be bursting before out eyes. Now people will now see a sex scene on screen, and think “Ick! I wonder who she had to perform some sex act with to get this role? And I wonder what sex act it was?” And when they look at the male partner, they will see I nthe back of their minds a corpulant, grizzled Harvey Weinstein in the nude.

It kind of tarnishes the tinsel. It makes the willing suspension of disbelief seem tawdry and itself a disgusting act.

It may no longer be possible, or profitable, for Hollywood to be so casual about sex in film.

This, after all, has happened before. Fatty Arbuckle. The specific charges were not true, Arbuckle was acquitted in a court of law, but the mental image of Fatty Arbuckle crushing some starlet with his naked bulk was too powerful in the public mind. That scandal ushered in the prudish Hays Code.

And this presents a similar image.

I, for one, certainly do not lament this. Regardless of any moral issues, and there certainly are moral issues, putting an explicit sex scene, or blood and gore, in a film is just cheap thrills. Far better if the scriptwriters and directors have to invest in putting together a better story.

This is also why I believe that writing for children is almost always the best writing. You cannot fake it. The story and the characters have to be worth it on their own.

Inside Llewyn Davis

I have been reading a lot of reviews of the latest Coen Brothers film, Inside Llewyn Davis, which I recently saw myself. And I think everyone has it wrong.

Here are the interpretations I've seen:

1. The Coens are positing that nihilism may be the true nature of the world: everything is chaos.

2. Davis is a failed artist facing the tough decision to change his career.

3. Davis is feckless, irresponsible, and self-destructive.

First, let's clear the field:

1. One element of the film is definitely non-chaotic, and it is the one most crucial element: the music. Perhaps everything other than art is chaos.

2. Davis is based on Dave Van Ronk. The discouragements he faces are largely discouragements faced by Van Ronk himself in his autobiography. And Dave Van Ronk was a successful, not a failed, artist. The discouragements he faced are no worse than the discouragements most artists go through, even the very best. Moreover, we hear Davis for ourselves in the movie: he is quite good.

3. Feckless? Davis shows unusual concern throughout the movie over the welfare of a cat, even when the cat he has charge of is an anonymous stray. Although it turns out she has had sex with a variety of men, any one of whom might be the father, it is the impoverished Davis who takes responsibility and arranges and pays for his girl friend's abortion. He loses his temper a few times; but in a way that seems, in the circumstances as presented, natural and forgivable.

The original.

Interpretations two and three, I fear, are generated by the sadly common human tendency to blame anyone who is obviously suffering for their own predicament. Inside Llewyn Davis is certainly, as everyone agrees, a depressing movie.

But here's what it is really all about: the movie presents the world as it really is experienced by the typical artist, or anyone of an artistic temperament. Hence the title, “Inside Llewyn Davis”: you are seeing the world as the generic artist of the title sees it, from inside his head. And, as Keats once warned, there is no romance there: “the poet is the most unpoetical thing in existence.”

This is not just about how hard it is, objectively, to make a living in the arts. It is about the same for “successful” artists, like Van Ronk or the Coens. To resort to a common idiom, to the artist, life in the streets is like herding cats. Nothing outside of art ever works as it is supposed to. Nobody else ever seems to get the art. Notably, every time Davis performs a song, it is followed by some obvious letdown. Bud Grossman sees no money in it; his father, seemingly unaware, just soils himself; Davis gets called out after his encore and beaten up in the alley. Nobody hears the music he hears.

If that is depressing—well, there is a reason why almost all good artists are depressives.

And these reviews confirm the general truth: nobody seems to get Llewyn Davis.

Why TV is Getting Better

If the prison is no longer secure, perhaps Rick and the others could consider relocating here.

Not everything is going to hell in a handcart. Currently, I am eagerly anticipating the new seasons of Downton Abbey and the Walking Dead. Television is getting much more interesting than it used to be, and far better than movies currently are.

So it goes; these things come in renaissances. Suddenly one medium or another will be fermenting. Popular music and comic books had amazing runs in the 1950s and 1960s. Films were really good in the 60s and 70s. Poetry was strong in the 50s. A variety of arts seemed relatively strong in the 60s, and now most seem relatively weak.

One cause, as I have previously lamented here, and as such worthies as TS Eliot and Samuel Beckett have lamented long before me, is that art has become increasingly dissociated from religion. Do that, and art dies. But within this general trend, the sudden lunges forward of specific media seem to fit an old observation by Marshall McLuhan: when a medium becomes obsolete, it become art. This makes sense: it has lost its practical use, and so, if it is going to continue at all, it will be for aesthetic reasons, among those who love the medium for aesthetic reasons.

Radio became obsolete in the 1950s, with the advent of TV. Hence the rise of popular music, specifically rock and roll, as new message for that medium. Film faced a less immediate threat of obsolescence from TV, and so reacted less dramatically and over a more extended period of time: we had a good run of artistic film-making beginning in the fifties and running through the seventies, with Hitchcock, Kubrick, the French auteurs, Scorsese’s Godfathers, and so on. Look at a list of great films of the Seventies, and you will marvel at how much that is memorable came out in such a short period. Comic books in turn can be understood as print’s reaction to TV—more specifically, pulp fiction’s reaction. There had been an earlier wave of comics, of course, the “Golden Age” of Superman and Batman, which was pulp’s reaction to radio.

He was right about everything. He just spoke fifty years too soon.

One can go back in time for other examples. The printing press gave us Shakespeare: the great Elizabethan age of drama came just when people started to be able to read, and to no longer need public performance for any practical purpose.

TV seems to be at that point now, beaten out of its prior position as primary medium by the Internet. It is no longer the main source of news and entertainment. It is no longer for everyman, or for the biggest profits from the greatest number. Hence we get interesting drama like Downton Abbey and the Walking Dead, appealing to a more discerning audience.

Meanwhile, radio and comic books, as their obsolescence deepens, have lost their ability to sustain a large enough audience for pop art purposes. They have had to become yet more specialized in their appeal. No more top forty, and no more cheap, mass-produced comics. They are moving from pop art, like rock and roll, in the direction of “high art.” Which is to say, really, either old art in rerun, or, if new, relatively lifeless, gloomy, and academic art. Generally living on charity from the public purse.

There is a fine line here: if a medium is the most efficient available, you get trashy entertainment for the masses. But on the other hand, you need a large enough audience to sustain real art, or artists cannot afford to create. They go into politics or academics or accountancy instead.

It died to give the world rock and roll.

Film is an interesting case in this regard. TV made it obsolete in the 50s. Then computer-generated special effects made it rise from the dead—courtesy of Spielberg, Lucas, and Pixar. FX were too expensive and time-consuming for TV, and did not play nearly as well on the small screen, including the computer monitor.

For now, all there is to do is to enjoy TV; along with a predictable renaissance in traditional, 2-D animation, notably from Japan. And wait for the next media technology to again reshuffle the playing pieces.

For Greater Glory: Viva Cristo Rey!

It’s sad and it’s funny. Over the last couple of nights, I have been able to watch the recent movie “For Greater Glory: The True Story of Cristiada.” On Rotten Tomatoes, it scores very low among professional critics: one star, a rating of only 18%. Yet the audience rates it very high: 80% like it. That compares with 87% for Titanic, their top rental.

How can there be such a divergence of opinion between critics and the public? I think it reflects the culture wars. I think the movie critics are giving the film low marks entirely because they disagree with it politically and philosophically, and are probably not even self-aware enough to realize this is the case.

Let’s look at a few of the posted criticisms.

Roger Ebert writes:

“It is well-made, yes, but has such pro-Catholic tunnel vision I began to question its view of events. One important subplot involves a 12-year-old boy choosing to die for his faith. Of course the federal troops who shot him were monsters, but the film seems to approve of his decision and includes him approvingly in a long list of Cristeros who have achieved sainthood or beatification after their deaths in the war.”

Hmm… so being too pro-Catholic is “tunnel vision”? It could not possibly be the most accurate view of events? Even if his suspicions are correct, what do they have to do with anything? Getting the history wrong has never been a major issue with Hollywood, has it? Did anyone worry much about the accuracy of “Schindler’s List” or “Inglorius Basterds” (the latter, of course, entirely fictional)? And Ebert has no reason to doubt the history—he just cannot accept it ideologically.

And what is troubling about becoming or celebrating a saint? Surely Ebert is implying that there is something fundamentally wrong with ... being Catholic.

Rotten Tomatoes summarizes the film:

“It has laudable aspirations, but For Greater Glory ultimately fails to fulfill its goals due to an overstuffed script, thinly written characters, and an overly simplified dramatization of historical events.”

Hmm… “an overly simplified dramatization of historical events.” Sounds like Ebert's problem. Wasn’t “Saving Private Ryan” or “The Longest Day” a pretty simplified view of World War II? Didn't they only tell the story from one point of view? Wasn’t “First Blood” a pretty simplified view of the Vietnam War? Was that a major problem? No, it is not that the story is simplified. Name a Hollywood movie that is not white hats vs. black hats. What the critic is saying is that it is not okay to tell a story from the Catholic point of view. The black hats are not supposed to be the leftists and the secularists. The white hats are not supposed to be the Catholics.

“Thinly written characters”? The film shows obvious character development. The adult lead moves from atheism to joyfully giving his life for the Catholic Church. The child lead goes from throwing rotten fruit at the local priest to being canonized. This is “thinly written” to this critic only because it moves in a direction he does not expect and cannot understand, from doubt to faith. He imagines, I suspect, that it is only humanly possible to move from faith to doubt.

The Cristero Flag

The first review quoted on Rotten Tomatoes:

“As generic as the title, this historical drama spares no cliche in depicting Mexico's Cristero War of the late 1920.”

Generic? In fact, the film fits no current Hollywood genre. Cliched? The usual Hollywood fare is nothing if not clichéd. You can almost count on looking up at the screen at about the 1:10 mark and seeing some sort of car chase--a legacy of Mac Sennett and the nineteen teens. In a Hollywood film, you can tell within the first ten minutes of their first appearance who is going to die, and who isn’t, by the end of the film. Not here. One can go on and on.

This film defies almost any Hollywood cliché you could mention. Right down to relatively small details. It has, for example, the adult lead chomping on a cigar repeatedly; a thing so counter to prevailing mores and expectations that the producers saw need to add a disclaimer to the credits explaining that nobody made any money in the film from the display of tobacco products.

And so it goes. It is not that the critics are a bit off about this film. They are 180 degrees off. And yet I think they are on the whoel sincere in feeling there is something fundamentally wrong with the film as a film.

One sees this often in the world: large groups on given issues get things not just a little wrong, but 180 degrees wrong. And often not, it seems, willfully. I think it is strong evidence of the existence of a spiritual entity causing this--a permanent adversary of the truth, a Devil.

Go see For Greater Glory. The Devil does not want you to see it.

Never Let Me Go

Watched a depressing movie on a recent long flight—the only chance I get to see non-family fare. Not that I'm complaining; I doubt I'm missing much. But this movie, “Never Let Me Go,” based on a novel by Japanese-British author Kazuo Ishiguro, struck me as important. It was unrelentingly dire, as only Japanese or British things can be, lacking either the Christian certainty of redemption by the movie's end, or even the pagan Greek sense of an inevitability and a justice to the fall. Yet it was right in this case—that is, it was accurate to the realities involved. It was just very hard to watch, and very hard to recover from watching.

The story is science fiction, but set in an alternative present. Cloning has been discovered, in the 1950s, and, in a society cheerily confident that clones are not human beings, a generations or two of clones have been raised by the time of the movie specifically to supply replacement organs until they “complete”--i.e., die from it. In this way, society has extended the life expectancy of the average non-clone to a wizened century or more.

The move is, inevitably, told from the point of view of the clones themselves: befriending, sharing childhood fears, falling in love, being murdered by degrees. They show an eerie acceptance of their fate which is itself profoundly disturbing—there is no thought of revolt or true escape; only attempts to bargain around the edges. They are held in check in part, as the truly oppressed always are, by self-loathing. They inevitably buy in to the socially dominant view and even believe among themselves that they are not entirely real.

I am amazed that the movie ever got made—though not suprised to hear it ended its first run as “an undeniable financial disappointment.” Did the backers understand what it is about?

After all, what really did happen in the 1950s? The sexual revolution. The movie shows more or less exactly what has happened to a significant portion of the generations since then, their lives and futures systematically sacrificed to the pleasures of those elders already here.

Imagine, in the first place, if all those aborted children, between then and now, had instead been allowed to grow up and only been aborted when their internal organs became useful. The principle is the same, and it would in a way be both more morally justifiable and more humane. And of course, the victims of abortion are as completely powerless as those in the movie; there can be no thought of revolt or escape.

But it is not just the aborted who are in this position, either. It is all the children raised without fathers, thanks to all those no-fault divorces with big payouts to the Mom and restraining orders given on a woman's testimony alone. It is all the children raised without much if any parental attention at all, thanks to mothers off in the workforce fulfilling themselves and making the big bucks; just like the hopeless clones of the movie, parentless, in their state schools. Overly rich and unfunded pension schemes locked in by law are the least of this shameless exploitation of the young, though they have been in the news a lot lately.

Am I the only one who notices that this film is a documentary, and not science fiction? After all, nobody else seems to realize this about the similarly bleak 1984, and it's been around since 1948.

As for the film, I predict it will live more or less as long as the civilization does. The best movies rarely do well on their first run.

Alice in Chains

Apparently Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland is now breaking all box office records, pulling ahead of even Avatar.

I went to see it with my eight-year-old, and I did not like it any more than Avatar.

Artistically, it is a travesty of the original, like painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa. Sure, it's fair game to adapt what came before—Lewis Carroll did it himself. But the film has many unnecessary errors in detail which just a little care could have corrected, had Tim Burton and his crew cared either for the original work or the intelligence of their audiences. That they were not almost suggests a contempt for both. For example, all characters persistently refer to the dragon-like creature of the famous poem as “the Jabberwocky.” That, sans article, is the name of the poem; the creature, as the poem makes clear, is “the Jabberwock.” What harm in getting it right? Worse, the film even has the Mad Hatter recite the poem---incorrectly. He flubs the reference to the JubJub Bird. This makes no sense at all: the JubJub Bird even appears later in the film, and could have been introduced by this instead of appearing from nowhere. It is pure carelessness, and insulting in assuming no one will either know or care.

But then again, if anyone in the audience had actually read the poem, and the book, the film would automatically be in trouble. They would then know that the film's basic premise is wrong. It is that Alice has been brought back to Wonderland because she is predestined to slay the Jabberwock. Unfortunately, in the poem itself, even though nothing else is clear in it, it is clear that the person who slays the Jabberwock is male. “Beware the Jabberwock, my son.” “Come to my arms, my beamish boy!”

Stupid, ignorant; but then again, what could be more stupid and ignorant than the notion that everything in Wonderland is predestined, planned, controlled? That it all makes sense? This is the worst travesty of all, since it is so completely against the spirit of the original. Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland has a plot. A proper Hollywood plot, a battle between good and evil, a heated chase, at least a hint of a love interest, leading up to a climactic fight scene in which the supposed underdog inevitably triumphs at the last minute.

Excuse me; now I think I need to spew.

It is all completely predictable from the outset, and a workmanlike effort is made to fit all the pieces together for character motivations and so forth. This violates the essence of nonsense literature. What made the original Wonderland wonderful was that little matter of wonder: that nothing seemed to make any sense, there was no apparent reason for anything, one could not figure out anybody's motive, and none of the pieces ever quite fit.

All gone.

One moment of horror in the film is when the absurdly long nose of one of the Red Queen's courtiers simply falls off, without explanation, in the middle of a scene. The point, I suppose, is to suggestt that nothing in Wonderland is what it appears; but the immediate effect is to shatter finally and completely the willing suspension of disbelief on which a place like Wonderland utterly depends. Suddenly, one is watching a film, and suddenly all the makeup looks rather cheap and poorly done. And suddenly, one is intensely aware that someone is trying hard to manipulate you.

Where the original Alice was a seemingly inexaustible well of creativity and novelty, this sequel Alice, but for the high-tech visuals, is as conventional as canned tomato soup. There are no new bits of verbal or philosophical cleverness; instead, the film flogs to death a little joke that was a throwaway line in the original Alice, the Mad Hatter's unanswerable riddle “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” He repeats it at least four times in the film, then at last triumphantly announces that it has no answer. The point seems to be to remove all need of thinking from the audience, whereas the original Alice is wonderful for the complex thoughts it provokes.

A decent effort would have managed to come up with four new riddles, at least.

The film also, perversely, insists on forcing out a moral from the White Queen's perfect manifesto of nonsense, “Why sometimes I manage to believe six impossible things before breakfast.” This is actually presented as a profundity, a rule to live by.

It is like listening to a beautiful classic song sung by someone tone deaf. These people have no idea what the nonsense genre is about.

In place of wit or creativity, we are given cheap thrills: people swallowing disgusting Fear Factor brews, the Bandersnatch's eye popping out, the Jabberwock's head bouncing down stairs, even the inevitable 3D spear thrust directly at the audience. Then there is the tasteless, and tastelessly repeated, bit about Alice shedding her clothes each time she changes size, for example. Snort, har, har, nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Almost makes you ashamed to be an adult, that the filmmakers think this is going to keep you amused. In the original book, of course, Alice's clothes simply changed size with her. And why not, in Wonderland?

This is slightly more tasteful than it might have been given that Alice in this version is no longer a little girl, but nineteen years old. On the other hand, the age change introduces its own problems. The original Wonderland was, after all, entirely the creation of a seven-year-old's fantasy, and was a stunning insight into the world as experienced by a child. Having Wonderland endure to age nineteen, however, turns a touching childhood reverie into what looks rather more like a case of late adolescent onset paranoid schizophrenia. There's a bit of a problem of taste there too, methinks.

Yeah, go and see it. Just bring toast to throw at the screen.