Lance Mannion

Some keep the Sabbath by going to church and, tell you the truth, I get a little jealous sometimes

Pass this church just about every day as I run various errands and every time I go by I feel a little tug. Some part of me wants to stop in and say hi.

I’m not sure who to.

I don’t know anyone who belongs to this congregation. I don’t know anything about the church. It appears to be non-denominationally Protestant, but whether it has any broader affiliations I can’t tell. Their website is as spare and unadorned as the church building itself with barely more information on it than is in this photo. Doesn’t even give the pastor’s name. Sunday services are at 10:30. The office is open Tuesday and Thursday mornings and part of the afternoon and on Friday morning.  They have a food pantry. On the second Friday evening of each month they hold a “Prayer for Israel.” I wonder about that. Are they praying for Israel’s continued survival and well-being or for its conversion? Do they think they’re living in the End Times? No clue on the website. In tiny script way up in the top left corner there’s a citation. Paul’s letter to the Philippians. Chapter 2, verses 1-5. It’s one of those convoluted and ambiguous passages of Paul’s that have always given exegetes fits and put altar boys to sleep. This one is as Jesus-centric as you might expect from a church that feels it has to identify itself as “Christian,” but the gist of it is that we should strive to be as humble as Jesus was. Paul’s riff on the first shall be last.  So there’s a hint here that at this church you’re expected to do a little more than praise Jays-us and boast of your personal friendship with him to get into heaven. Still, prejudice and experience make me suspicious of these little, out of the way, unaffiliated “Christian” churches. Odds are there’s nobody in the congregation I want to get to know more than to say hi to.

On the other hand, the messages on the marquee change regularly and are always cheerful and welcoming, often amusing, sometimes genuinely witty, although usually they include a bad pun. But the pastor is clearly trying. I’d like to think he or she is being self-expressive and is like the messages, cheerful and welcoming and possessed of a sense of humor. Maybe the pastor’s somebody I’d enjoy saying more than hi to.

But probably not much more.

After all, the pastor and I wouldn’t have much business to conduct together, me being an unbeliever and not just uninterested in conversion but actively hostile to the notion and anyone who’d think to try.

But you know what? It may be that the person I feel like saying hi to isn’t the pastor but the pastor’s boss.

And HIS son.

I don’t believe in God but I remember believing in Him intensely enough that sometimes I forget I don’t believe. The memory of my former belief fools me into thinking it’s the actual and present thing. So I routinely backslide. The moment of doubt in the form of reflexive, remembered belief never lasts more than a moment. I quickly catch myself and drag myself to the Mourner’s Bench to testify to my lack of faith. But the fact is that I still believe in Jesus and Mary and in many of the saints as real people who used to walk the earth and whose teachings and examples are still inspiring, encouraging, and worth following and now and again I forget in their case too and catch myself thinking of them as still alive---up there, out there, in here, somewhere---and paying attention. And when I shake myself out of it, I feel their loss. I miss them. I still miss God like that sometimes too. I miss the company.

Even when I was a good little Catholic schoolkid and an altar boy---one of the world’s top altar boys, as a matter of fact---I didn’t believe God was involved very much in His children’s daily lives. He obviously didn’t answer all prayers. I couldn’t decide if it was because He wasn’t actually omnipotent, that in creating the universe He’d made a rock too big for even Him to lift, or if it was the Free Will thing at work, or if He just had other things to take care of, or if it was simply that His plan for the universe didn’t hinge on any of our individual happiness. Whichever it was, it didn’t stop me from thinking of Him as benign and, if not involved and constantly interfering, always sympathetic and ready to listen. 

I was skeptical of the catechism on the point of God’s having made me because he loved me. I got into trouble in first grade for asking Sister Mary Francis about that one. “How could he love me if I wasn’t born yet?” I wondered. She made me kneel down in front of the crucifix at the front of the room and pray for forgiveness for I was never sure what. I prayed, all right, for Jesus, Mary, and Joseph to save me from this crazy nun.  I never doubted, though, that God cared that I had been made.

I believed it mattered to Him when I was feeling hurt or scared or alone.

I believed this more strongly about Jesus and even more strongly about Mary.

That’s what I went to church for. Their company.

Over time I came to believe that that’s what everybody who went to church regularly went to church for. The company. But not the company of God or Jesus or Mary or the saints.

For each other’s company.

I still believe that. I believe that’s true of everybody who goes regularly to a temple, synagogue, mosque, shrine, or a circle in the woods.

And this is why I’m not an enemy of religion.

Yeah, right, Lance, say some of you who’ve noticed I don’t have much good to say about Christians.

I don’t have much good to say about the Catholic Church either or, at any rate, about its supposed princes.

But I’m not completely in agreement with those online atheists who seem to believe that all the world’s problems would go away if people would just get it through their heads that there is no God.

There are moments when I think the only hymn any of should know and sing is John Lennon’s “Imagine”, but those moments pass like the moments when I think I still believe in God. People don’t kill each other because of religion. They kill each other for self-interested reasons and then justify it by invoking their gods.  Take away the gods and they’d find other justifications or they wouldn’t bother justifying it at all.

There are forms of religion that are dangerous and destructive. It’s long past time to do away with the Abrahamic sky-god who has done nothing but cause 3500 years of trouble in the Mideast while he’s had fun inciting the believers of three versions of the same religion devoted to him to kill each other a over a patch of sand. People are adept at perverting the most benign of beliefs. There are militant killer Buddhists. And the Religious Right here has turned Christianity into a cult of enforced joylessness, ignorance, paranoia, and self-sabotage.

Still I don’t believe religion itself---the human habit of organizing around a common belief in a deity---is bad in itself. I actually see it as providing some good things.

One of the goods that religion provides is an argument against getting caught up in the mundane cares and concerns of our daily lives.

But nothing’s good that’s not also bad. The idea that this world and this life don’t matter as much as we think they do gets dumbed down into the idea that this world and this life don’t matter at all, which is very useful to the mountebanks, charlatans, and con artists passing themselves off as preachers and to the corporatists who run the Republican Party. There’s money to be made and power to be gained in convincing the suckers there’s no point trying to fix problems in this world because it’s all part of God’s plan, the point is to get to the next world, and whoever says otherwise---liberals and intellectual types mainly---that the problems of the here and now need to be fixed and can be fixed by us without God’s performing miracles and that we can and should be happy, is doing the devil’s work.

On the whole, I think the best way to show faith in God, if there is a God, and do His work is to pay attention to what’s happening in this world and not think too much about the next.

But I see another important good religion---really going to church or schul or temple or mosque---provides, what I said above, company, as a good it’s not my place or my wish to disparage, downplay, or discourage.

It’s not God believers are putting their faith in as much as it is each other. They are putting their faith in a community, not experienced as an abstraction, but physically. They need that. We all need that. We all need to feel we belong, that we’re involved, that we matter. We want to know others notice we’re there and notice when we’re not and care.

This isn’t something we can only get from going to church or should only get from going to church. We get it first and foremost from our families---or should get it from them and do if we’re lucky.  We get it from our neighbors. We get from the places where we shop regularly. We get it at the barber’s and the stylist’s. At the doctor’s and dentist’s. We get it from the local post office and library. We get it at our favorite bar, restaurant, diner, and coffee shop. We get it down at the garage, at the bank, at the town hall when we stop in to renew the sticker that lets us use the town dump. We get it at the town dump. Some of us still get it at the lodge or at the union hall. That’s one of the chief goods unions provide, in fact. We don’t matter to the bosses. We do matter to each other. Most of us though get it primarily from work, from being at work and from doing work.

And these days we seem hell-bent on depriving ourselves of each other’s company.

In the online Utopia we’re in a hurry to create the library is always open, the bank, the bookstore, the video store, and school and office too and isn’t that wonderful?  As if the whole point of anything and everything is an immediate material benefit.

We don’t go to the library just to look something up. We don’t go to the bank just to cash a check and go to the post office just to buy a stamp. We don’t go to work just to earn a paycheck.  And we don’t go to church just to worship whatever version of God gets worshiped there.

We go, I say again, for the company.

And this is what I’m reminded I miss when I pass by the Mid-Hudson Christian Church. It’s not anyone at that church I feel the urge to stop in and say hi to. It’s people at my church, my old church, my old churches, the one I grew up in, the ones we raised our sons in. And I shouldn’t say I miss the church. I miss the parish. I miss belonging to those communities. 

I could remedy this easily enough. It would be no problem to start going to our old church up in New Paltz again. It would take some pretending. I’d have to go through motions I now think of as dumbshow and nodding along in put on agreement with things that now strike me as childish nonsense. But I could do it. And I could sing along with the hymns or at least mouth along---I can’t carry a tune and I’d be embarrassed to offend the ears of people in the pews around me. I could stay for coffee and donuts after mass. I could attend the pancake breakfasts and spaghetti dinners and take part in the parish festivals. And maybe I’ll start doing that.

Someday.

Someday when I’m feeling hurt and scared and alone and need the company.

The First Commandment according to Senator Jim Inhofe: “Thou shalt not get in the way of my oil companies and their obscene profits.”

In truth, Oklahoma’s Senator Jim Inhofe speaks only for the oil industry that pays him to obstruct any attempts to address global climate change until every last dollar is made off of burning every last drop of oil on the planet.

But he likes to pretend he speaks for God. I doubt he believes in God or cares if He exists. I think he’s just a cynical demagogue.  But unlike most Christians he apparently reads the Bible and can quote chapter and verse. But it doesn’t matter what he believes himself. Inhofe knows the rubes and suckers he believes his voters to be believe and he’s willing to risk a divine smiting to rile them up with his holy roller routine.

God is still up there, and He promised to maintain the seasons and that cold and heat would never cease as long as the earth remains...The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous.

Let’s put aside the fact that no one’s prosing that we change what HE is doing “in” the climate. The imperative is to change what we’ve done to the climate.

God didn’t fill the air with greenhouse gases and God isn’t tooling around town in a Hummer and God isn’t refusing to admit what’s happening because that would mean having to make relatively easy changes in the way we live and cost the oil industry a little money.

Think about what Inhofe says God is saying.

“Go ahead. Be as selfish, self-indulgent, irresponsible, profligate, and greedy and destructive as you want. Burn the whole planet up. I’ll clean up your mess later. And if I don’t get around to it in time, no worries. You’re going to like what I’ve got waiting for you in heaven.”

And Christians have no problem worshipping this feckless idiot of a God.

Inhofe, by the way, thinks he disproved global warming by demonstrating on the floor of the United States Senate that it snowed enough in Washington D.C. in February that he was able to make a snowball.

And people in Oklahoma have no problem voting for this idiot of a Senator.

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By David Biello at Scientific American, How to Win Friends and Bamboozle People about Climate Change, a review of the documentary Merchants of Doubt.

Andrew Cuomo and the Teachers Lottery

People who love money don’t become teachers. People who do things because it will make them lots of money don’t become teachers. People who will become teachers because they might now and then win Andrew Cuomo’s proposed teacher lottery and pocket what only sounds like a lot of money are not people we want becoming teachers.

Back in January, I wrote a post called Andrew Cuomo remembers he’s a Democrat and his father’s son. I thought about titling this post “Andrew Cuomo forgets he’s a Democrat and makes his father spin in his grave.” The January post was in praise of some fine liberal sentiments he expressed in his State of the State speech. I was moved by the words and glad he said them but they didn’t make me like Cuomo more. He can talk like a liberal but he’s still not liberal enough. And in the same speech he managed to sound not liberal at all.

We are going to continue the transformation of our system and reward performance by creating a teacher excellence fund. It is going to be the first statewide teacher performance bonus program that actually rewards performance for teachers and incentivizes teachers who perform well. Teachers who are rated highly effective on their evaluations, which is the highest statewide rank, would be eligible to receive $20,000 as a bonus, in performance pay, which is on average 27% of their salaries. You want teachers who can perform and do perform? Then incentivize performance with a performance bonus and pay them like the professionals they are.

The teachers lottery Cuomo’s proposing isn’t a liberal or a Democratic idea. It’s Republican and conservative through and through because it’s based on the first and over-riding principle of Republicanism.

Money is everything.

People don’t do anything except for money…unless they’re fools.

But that’s how Republicans think. Doing things for the bucks leads to excellence because the measure of excellence is simply making a lot of bucks.

The principle breaks down like this. The right people, people like us, wearers of five-thousand dollar suits and occupiers of corner offices, and people who want to be like us, won’t work hard unless we---um, they---are paid gobs of money. Everybody else, the shiftless rabble, won’t work at all unless they’re terrified they won’t get paid any money at all.

Teacher lotteries---What Cuomo’s proposing used to be called “merit pay”. I call them lotteries because you win by hitting the right numbers and because luck plays a big role in whether or not you hit them: even “excellent” teachers can’t control what students land in their classrooms. Anybody who doesn’t understand how much having the right sort of students, students who are prepared and eager to learn, contributes to teacher “excellence” doesn’t understand how teaching works or what it really means to be an excellent teacher---teacher lotteries like the one Cuomo’s proposing for New York may look at first glance like the first aspect of the principle but they’re really expressions of the second because they always come attached to plans to make teachers terrified they won’t get paid anything. They start with the elimination of tenure, the breaking of teacher unions, the end of collective bargaining, and the scaling back and even elimination of benefits.

Cuomo wants all that too.

His fondest dream is to break the unions.

This isn’t because he’s a closet Republican, though. It’s because a born tyrant and can’t stand it when anyone stands up to him or gets in the way of his doing what he wants to do exactly the way he wants to do it.

It’s also because one way he truly is his father’s son is in holding a grudge on the old man’s behalf. Andrew Cuomo blames unions for making Mario Cuomo’s time as governor less than idyllic.

He has never seen unions as one constituency with interests a Democratic governor has to balance against others’. He sees them as his personal enemies. He sees all the other constituencies as his personal enemies too. Like I said. A born tyrant.

Back to the teacher lotteries.

In a system in which real bonuses are fairly awarded, every employee earns one or can earn one. The size of your bonus depends on how good a job you do. Excellent employees will earn higher bonuses as a matter of course. But that doesn’t prevent the less than excellent from receiving theirs. There’s incentive for everyone, the excellent, the very good, the good, the average to try to be better, and there’s a penalty for incompetence, but there’s no serious penalty for trying hard to be better but not being better enough or for failing to be better than the best. But teacher lotteries are winner take all. If you win, I lose. Teacher lotteries put teachers in competition with each other.

Putting employees in competition with each other is something law firms and sales offices do. Law firms and sales offices are not environments children should grow up in.

Good teachers work in cooperation with other teachers at their schools. Good schools unite teachers. Schools start to fail when teachers are left to go it alone. At such schools, good teachers work harder and desperately to make up for the schools’ failings and wear themselves out in the process. Average teachers just muddle along. And bad teachers just give up. At a failing school, there is no incentive for teachers to perform well except that which comes from their hearts. And hearts give out. Teacher lotteries don’t change that dynamic. They intensify it.  They dis-incentivize teamwork and collegiality. They incentivize an every teacher for her/himself attitude.

The lotteries are only affordable for the state if very few teachers can win them.  And few will. Most teachers aren’t excellent and are never going to be excellent, for the same reason that most people in every other line of work---including governing states---aren’t excellent. They’re human. Human beings on the whole are only as good at anything as they need to be to get by.  And this isn’t because they’re lazy and don’t try or aren’t incentivized to become more than human. It’s because people are born with a limited set of talents and, something else necessary to achieving excellence, energy. Most of us just aren’t physically strong enough. No incentive in the world can turn us into superhumans. And, although vanity prevents us from admitting it outloud or even to ourselves, at some level we know this about ourselves. We know what we’re good at and what we’re less than good at. We know our limits and how far we can push past them before we collapse or start screwing up because we’re just not excellent enough. So, never mind the incompetents, what happens when the good and very good but not excellent teachers realize they’re never going to win one of the lotteries?

Pretty much nothing different. The good and very good along with the incompetent go about their jobs as they’ve always done except maybe a little more dis-incentivized to try harder.

Basically, teacher lotteries don’t incentivize any one to excellence except the naive and deluded. The already excellent don’t need the incentive. They’re incentivized by their own talent, ambition, drive, commitment to their students, pride in themselves as professionals.

That’s what makes them excellent.

But how many times can an individual excellent teacher hit the lottery anyway?

Odds are not even once. But let’s say you are an excellent teacher and the odds and gods favor you and you hit it twice in your career.

That’s forty extra grand in the bank.

Your kid’s college education. Provided your kid goes to a state school and lives at home.

But average it out over the course of a thirty year teaching career.

That’s a bonus of $1333.33 a year.

That would be a welcome chunk of change if you’ve got a big credit card bill due or need to have the car repaired, provided you have it in hand when you need it, but it won’t make up for the raises you aren’t getting, the increased amount you have to spend on health insurance, the larger contribution you have to make to the privatized retirement accounts that will replace real pensions. But you’re not supposed to notice that the overall objective is to pay you and your less than “excellent” colleagues less.

Teacher lotteries are premised on “excellent” teachers being as driven by money as lawyers and salesmen and too stupid to do the math.

The real plan isn’t to increase the quality of public schools. The plan is to make them cost less to maintain. The plan is to pretend to be doing something for the schools when the real goal is to save the rich from paying taxes to send your kids to school.

And a key part of the plan is to pay teachers less while making them as fearful of losing their jobs as factory workers in right to work states.

Who’d want to become a teacher under those conditions?

I believe the honest “Reformers’” answer to that is Who cares? What does it matter? My kids aren’t going to public school.

And some would answer that way, the more brazen but thoughtful if cynical ones.

Most of the rest won’t answer. They’ll just do what dishonest politicians and business leaders always do when asked to explain themselves: pretend they weren’t asked the question, change the subject, or simply restate what they just said that needs explaining as if restatement is explanation.

Some, however, have another answer. Their answer is based on their not thinking of teaching as a profession. It their minds it’s basically volunteer work, community service, that any well-meaning, intelligent, but not exceptionally talented person can do.

That person, by the way, is in their minds a woman.

Teaching is women’s work and that makes it less important work. Easy work. Work that doesn’t require talent, skill, or real intelligence. Just a warm heart and an ability to keep the kiddies in their seats for a few hours a day while knowledge just seeps into their heads. Teachers aren’t professionals. They’re well-meaning amateurs.

And they should be paid accordingly and not expect anything more. Their reward is knowing they’ve done good.

And who would become teachers under those conditions? The people who should become teachers. Very nice married ladies whose own kids are grown and very nice young single ladies who need to make a respectable living until they get married and start having kids of their own and nuns, all of whom go into teaching out of the goodness of their hearts.

“Excellent” teachers are greedheads and innumerates or saints.

It gets worse.

The chief criteria for judging and rewarding excellence is test scores.

Excellent teachers are teachers whose students do well on standardized tests.

And this is the other part of Cuomo’s plan to improve New York Schools. He wants to make how their students do on standardized tests fifty per cent of teachers’ evaluations. Actually, it’s the main part of his plan. The teacher lottery is smoke and mirrors. It allows him to talk as if he wants to reward “highly effective” teachers. What he really wants to do is punish teachers whose students don’t measure up and punish schools whose teachers don’t measure up by taking jobs away from the teachers and money away from the schools.

Never mind the problems with judging students’ individual levels achievement and depth and breadth of knowledge and understanding by their test scores.

Never mind the problems this presents to teachers who have to teach to the test while still actually teaching.

And never mind the classism at work---the better prepared students are for school, the better they do on standardized tests, and, surprise, surprise, the best prepared students live in the richest suburban school districts where most of the parents are professionals with college degrees and that can afford to incentivize excellence by hiring it to begin with.

Test scores are how the bureaucrats who dole out the state and federal dollars measure the success and failure of schools and school districts. Higher test scores keep the money coming coming in. Schools that don’t “perform” are punished by having money withheld. Which means they have to cut their budgets. Which means laying off staff or not hiring needed replacements or, usually, both, thus incentivizing teachers who manage to keep their jobs by burdening them with overcrowded classrooms, the stress of having to compensate for the understaffing and diminution of resources---like crayons, glue sticks, and books---and the fear that they’re next. What this means on the administrative level is that superintendents and principals are incentivize to do whatever it takes to keep the money coming in.

Running a school becomes like running a law firm or a sales office. The bosses’ chief concern is to make money. And like bosses in any business they’re going to “encourage” their employees to work harder at the things that make the business money.

Grade school principals should not be made to inspire their teaching staffs by sounding like Alec Baldwin’s character in Glengarry Glen Ross.

You want to incentivize teachers, Governor Cuomo? Here’s what you do.

Pay them well enough that they don’t have to worry about money, give them job security, improve working conditions all around so they focus on their work and make the kinds of on-the-spot, independent, creative decisions that as professionals they are qualified to make without being afraid that making those decisions will cost them their jobs and without having their decision-making influenced by how much money they stand to make if they hit the jackpot.

The teacher lotteries don’t incentivize “excellence.” They incentivize doing it all for the bucks and as Thers says at Whiskey Fire:

The very definition of a terrible teacher would be someone flogging kids to get better test scores in order to make more money.

Outside law firms and sales offices, professionals get paid well to start and are given usually modest but reasonable raises based on their having performed well according to standards higher than just how much money they made for their employers and having made all their colleagues look like lazy incompetents. Bonuses are bonuses. Professionals get them in addition to raises not in lieu of them and certainly not in stingy compensation for cuts in pay and benefits.

I should be using the past tense. That’s how it used to be before the misers and thieves and sociopaths got control of all the money in the private sector. Now there are fewer professionals by that measure everywhere in every line of work and more wage and debt slaves.

The same misers and thieves and sociopaths want control of all the money in the public school systems. Cuomo wants to open up the safe for them.

He wants more charter schools.
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Homework, and, yes it will be on the test:

Thers’ whole post at Whiskey Fire, Andrew Cuomo: Let’s Make New York More Like Wisconsin.

This story by Will Bredderman at The Observer, De Blasio Education Chancellor Rips Cuomo Teacher Evaluation Proposal.

Teachers rally against Cuomo’s education plan by Bennet J. Louden at the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle.

And from Kenneth Lovett at the New York Daily News, Andrew Cuomo rips teacher unions as selfish 'industry' more interested in members' rights than student needs. But! Cuomo says claim he dislikes teachers is ‘nonsense’. (Jessica Bakeman, Capital.)

Don’t even bother asking Art the Wonder Dog to make the coffee

Lousy weather has caused delays and school closings around here all week. But this morning the sun’s shining and the roads are clear and all is merry and bright. Woke up at six-thirty and after checking the weather report and the Mannion guys’ school websites to see what was up, I immediately texted Uncle Merlin.

“School day! Up and at ‘em!”

He replied: “Ha! Got ya beat! Dog had me up at 5:59!”

So I texted back: “Good for Art. Since he’s so energetic this morning ask him to make the coffee.”

Uncle Merlin relayed the message.

This is the look I got back.

Art the Wonder Dog. Somewhere north of Boston. Six forty-five this morning. Friday. March 6, 2015.

Read your bible!

“Let the one among you who is without sin cast the first stone.” Jesus and the woman taken in adultery, one of the few bible stories I’ve been able to count on my students, even the Christian ones, to know off the tops of their heads.

Having lived most of my life in New York State with a couple of short stints in Boston and Iowa City and one other place I’m going to talk a little more about, I don’t know many Christians.

Of course I don’t mean Christians. I mean Christians.

Evangelicals. Pentecostals. Born-Agains.

Fundamentalists.

Most people I know are Catholics and Jews and members of the higher-churchier Protestant denominations---Episcopalians, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists.  Growing up I knew more Unitarians and Mormons than Christians. In fact, I’m just assuming I knew any Christians at all. Going over the first twenty-odd years of my life, before I ventured out to the Midwest, I can’t think of a single neighbor, friend, schoolmate, coworker, or casual acquaintance who was a Christian. It’s probable that all I really knew of Christians is what I learned from television and the movies, where they were usually depicted as caricatures or where, in the form of televangelists, they caricatured themselves.

The first two Christians who made a serious impression on my understanding of who and what Christians are were the contradictory figures of Jimmy Carter and Anita Bryant, and I quickly concluded that of the two, Bryant was the more representative, which means that I quickly concluded that most Christians weren’t very Christian at all.

There’s lots to be said about this. about Christians’ bigotry and hypocrisy and about my own prejudices and cultural snobbery, but the point I’m dealing with here is that until I got to Indiana I did not know personally anyone for whom their bible was the centerpiece of their faith.

Of course people I knew read it. Everybody read it. I read it. I had to study it for two years in grade school. The New Testament in fifth grade and the Old Testament in sixth. I posted about my sixth grade religious education back in December. It did not make me a biblical literalist.  One of my best friends was an Orthodox Jew and he studied the Torah, but that’s hardly the same thing as what Christians mean when they say, “Read your bible!” But for my less orthodox Jewish friends, us Catholics, and the Protestants I knew, the bible got read mainly on the Sabbath, during services. And for us non-Christian Christians, the Bible might as well have been just the gospels, some key passages from Isaiah and the letters of Paul, and the Book of Psalms.  Other than Isaiah and the Psalms, the Old Testament figured mainly as background.  It was the history into which Jesus was born. And as history we were taught it was suspect.

At any rate, I grew up thinking of the Old Testament as a collection of stories, some true, some true-ish in being allegories and fables, and some just plain fiction.

To the degree the Bible was the Word of God, it was because God inspired the people who wrote it. He did not give dictation.

If He had, he would have been more strict with the thousand of translators who have garbled it over the millennia.

It wasn’t until I lived in Indiana that I got to know people who could be called honest to God bible-thumpers.

I arrived in the Hoosier State at the time Christians there were trying to drive Ryan White out.

This reinforced my opinion that most Christians are not very Christian. But by that time I had come to accept that most people, of every faith and of no faith, stink and are stupid---a belief, as I’ve said many times here, that has made me more tolerant, open-minded, and forgiving in my dealings with my fellow man and woman---so I was willing to give the Christians I immediately began to meet and get to know the benefit of the doubt. Some them quickly proved they didn’t deserve it. I lived in Boston for four years, but believe me you haven’t heard a racist joke in all it’s pure ugliness until you’ve heard one told by a sunny, smiling Midwestern Christian who’s just assumed you are eager to add to your own repertoire.

I hadn’t encountered as virulent and blatant homophobia before either.

It was also cheerfully assumed I shared the hatred and would approve of its expression.

But many Christians I got to know were decent people, quite nice, actually.

Most of the Christians I got to know, though, were my students at Ball State.

Generally, they seemed fairly typical college kids. The main difference between them and all my other students then and since and the people I went to college and grad school with was how open they were about their faith and how it didn’t take much to get them to talk about it or write about it.

I tried to discourage them from writing about it. I told them I didn’t want to be in the position of grading their relationship with God. It could attract the wrong sort of attention from the Almighty. Didn’t stop them. They didn’t seem able to help themselves. It just crept in. It crept into class discussions and office meetings too. It was a feature of their casual conversation. Bringing it up and talking about it was as unselfconscious and routine as talking about basketball.  Well, almost. This was Indiana. So, one way or another, I got to know about their brand of Christianity. And I learned two things.

They all claimed to put great store in the Bible.

And none of them read it.

At least not since they were young children attending summer bible camps. And whatever they’d learned form reading it there, they’d forgotten.

The didn’t know the stories.

They didn’t know the story of Job. Or Lot’s wife. Or Samson at the gates. Or Judith. Or Esther.

The names of the prophets meant nothing to them.

Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, The Song of Solomon were just familiar words like the names of albums by bands they’d heard of but never listened to.

In one class, I drew blank stares when I mentioned Jonah and the Whale.

They knew Adam and Eve, Noah and the ark. Joseph and his Coat of Many Colors---but I think that was because of the musical not their bible reading---Moses, David and Goliath and David and Bathsheba but not David and Jonathan, and Daniel in the lions den.

That was about it for their knowledge of the Old Testament.

As for the New Testament, they knew the major plot points. They knew who Judas and Pilate were. But they couldn’t name all twelve apostles or say who was the one Jesus loved. They didn’t know about the two thieves crucified with Jesus. They knew about the woman taken in adultery although I’m not sure how many learned the lesson from that one. Some of them seemed to know or at least recognize the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son. Characters from other parables, not so much.   Despite their professed personal relationships with Jesus, the only words of his they could quote---paraphrase actually---were key passages from the Sermon on the Mount and the Golden Rule.  They certainly couldn’t cite chapter and verse. Some of them only knew John 3:16 as words and numbers on signs held up at football games on TV, and that one is supposedly the key to their faith.

I know this about them because they regularly demonstrated their lack of biblical knowledge in class. Our readings were full of biblical references and allusions that they didn’t get and I had to explain to them. I had tell them the stories. This was fun, tell you the truth. I love telling stories. But it seemed odd to have to tell Christians the stories of Salome, the Slaughter of the Innocents, the Temptation in the Desert, Peter’s three denials, and Saul on the Road to Damascus. And I wasn’t assigning lots of religious tracts. Biblical references run throughout American, English, and all of Western literature. We couldn’t get through a week without my having to take on the role of exegete. This was especially the case when I was teaching poetry. So, along with saving a marriage, the other good I might have done as a teacher was teach some bible-reading Christians what was in their bibles.

I don’t regard this as a religious or even spiritual good, although I like to imagine that some of them were inspired to go look the stories up and not just take my word for it and that they were surprised to read what Jesus actually said, especially about whatever you do to the least of his brothers and sisters and not storing up treasures on earth. Maybe a few of them even took a good look into the Old Testament and began to wonder what they were doing worshiping a bronze age sky demon with a fondness for genocide and mass murder. But the good I hope to have done is cultural.

In their ignorance of the bible they weren’t much different from the great majority of college students, then or now. I had to do the explaining and storytelling when I moved on to teaching at a prestigious liberal arts college back here in New York and I sometimes have to do it for my honors students at Syracuse.  Few if any of them are Christians claiming to practice a bible-centric religion. Doesn’t matter. I don’t think I should have to tell any American college students the stories of the Judgment of Solomon or Susanna and the Elders, or the parable of the talents, or why Jesus wept.

If I do, I want it to be because it’ll be on the test.

It wasn’t back in Indiana that I began developing my idea that the bible needed to be taught in school. It came to me during a discussion of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood in a seminar in grad school in Iowa when I was one of only three people in the classroom who saw that in what was happening to Hazel Motes O’Connor was retelling the story of Saul on the Road to Damascus and one of the three wasn’t the award-winning fiction writer teaching the seminar.

Like I said, all of Western literature is informed by the Bible as much or more than it’s informed by Greek and Roman myths and the fairy tales and folk tales of Europe. American literature in particular is infused with matters, tropes, symbols, metaphors, morals, lessons, and language that is biblical. The Bible---the Geneva and even more the King James---is a source, maybe the source, of the American language. We speak and write as we do thanks to people who taught themselves and their children to read from the Bible and who bequeathed us the idea of universal public schooling in which their version of standard English would be taught to everybody’s children. And there I was at the Iowa Writers Workshop in the company of people I thought aspired to follow in the footsteps of O’Connor and Melville and Faulkner and they didn’t recognize one of the most important stories from the New Testament? Hadn’t any of them read the Bible? How could they understand Wise Blood then? How could they know why Ishmael wants to be called Ishmael or appreciate the cadences of Faulkner’s prose?

Turned out most of them hadn’t read Melville or Faulkner either, so that was another problem. But that’s when I started thinking the Bible should be required reading along with the Iliad and the Odyssey, the tales of King Arthur, and the plays of William Shakespeare. Not to mention Moby-Dick, Absalom, Absalom!, and Wise Blood. If it can’t be taught in high school, then it should be required in college.

This has been proposed many times by many people before me and even implemented in places. It’s been opposed by people worried that it’s a way of sneaking religion into the public school curriculum and by people who worry that teaching the bible as literature will teach kids to think that’s all it is, literature, a collection of stories, folk tales, fairy tales, and myths no different from the stories, folk tales, fairy tales, and myths of any other culture. Exactly! That’s the point. Stories, folk tales, fairy tales, and myths matter because they tell the people within a culture what that culture is. They tell us who we are.

Bible literacy---not biblical literalism---should be the norm. And so I’m in favor of anything that spreads the Word or, rather, the words.

Well. Almost anything.

I’m not sure a Museum of the Bible funded by the folks at Hobby Lobby is a good way to go about this.

In Washington, D.C., construction is underway on the Museum of the Bible, an eight-story, $400 million enterprise funded by Hobby Lobby President Steve Green.

Green is a Pentecostal known for donating to conservative evangelical universities and developing a public school curriculum based on the Bible. After the craft store's controversial victory in this summer's Supreme Court ruling over contraception, some people worry the new museum will come across as evangelical propaganda. But organizers behind Green's latest venture say it won't be a memorial to evangelism.

The museum’s president, Cary Summers explained to a reporter for NPR’s Morning Edition, “"We want this to be highly engaging for people of all ages, all cultural backgrounds, all faiths, no faiths”. Martyn Oliver, who teaches religious studies at American University, is impressed by with what he’s seen of the museum’s collection of artifacts and texts and thinks visitors to the museum will get to view the bible as a text that like other texts is subject to rethinking and revising and reinterpretation, that is, as a work of literature and not “the literal word of God”. And Tim Krepp, a lapsed Catholic who apparently hasn’t lapsed into any other religion and who works as a D.C. tour guide and already has plans to make the museum a stop on his itinerary even though it won’t open for two more years, seems prepared to give visitors to Washington he’ll be showing around town a purely informational tour of the museum.

Based on all that, I can imagine the museum evolving over time into a real museum, a place for study and actual scholarship. I can even imagine it being taken over someday by the nearby Smithsonian.

I can imagine it but I don’t believe it will happen, even over the long haul, and I’m very skeptical that when it opens it will be as ecumenical as Summers is talking it up to be.

You could call me a Doubting Thomas.

Well, you could if you aren’t a Christian.

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You can read and listen to Rebecca Sheir’s whole story, D.C. Bible Museum Will Be Immersive Experience, Organizers Say, at NPR.

Images: (Top) Giovanni Domenico Tielpo: Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery. (Second down, left) Bartolemeo Cavorazzi: St. Jerome in His Study. (Third down, right) Vincent Van Gogh: The Good Samaritan, after Delacroix. (Bottom, right) Caravaggio: The Conversion of Saint Paul.

Weather Report. March 4, 2015.

7:30 PM. 36 degrees. Snow’s been melting all day. On 300, heading east. Smelled it before seeing it. First dead skunk of the season. The smell fills the car as I pass over and it stays with me for at least half a mile. I don’t mind. I feel bad for the skunk and wish the odor was due to his having sprayed a dog or a coyote and not his having been too slow crossing the road. But I’m glad for the skunk smell. It’s the smell of spring arriving at last.

American Sniper: “War puts lightning in your bones.”

Casualty of war: Navy SEAL Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) traveling with the dead in a symbolic moment from Clint Eastwood’s decidedly not pro-war war movie about the most lethal marksman in U.S. military history, American Sniper.

Chris Kyle’s first kill in American Sniper isn’t presented as a moment of heroism or of battlefield courage or even as a demonstration of superior skill. He and the Marines under his watchful protection aren’t under fire. He’s in no immediate personal danger. The target isn’t an enemy soldier and isn’t aware he’s a target. He’s walking down the middle of an open street, offering Kyle a clearer and easier shot than the deer we saw him kill early in the movie when he was around this target’s age, ten or twelve.

The target is a young boy.

He’s a dangerous boy. He’s carrying a grenade he intends to throw at the Marines.

Kyle thinks.

He can’t see well enough to be sure that what the boy’s carrying is a grenade. He isn’t sure that even if it is the boy intends to throw it at the Marines. Kyle has to make a decision. One of those horrific damned if you do, dead if you don’t decisions war forces on the soldiers who fight it.

Kyle decides to take the shot.

It’s the “right” decision.

Direct hit.

To his psyche.

It’s the first of the psychological wounds he’s going to suffer in the course of the movie.

He suffers the next one with his very next shot.

Also the “right” decision.

Kyle feels justified but he’s shaken. He doesn’t get his wounds treated, however. He denies they’re there. When he sets up to take his next shot he’s all business. Same with the next one. And the next one. And the next. In a quick montage we see Kyle make kill after kill. One right after another. We don’t see the circumstances of each shot. We only get glimpses of what he’s shooting at.  None of these killings is presented as heroic. None of them appears to come in the nick of time.  None of them appears to give him any satisfaction either as a soldier doing the job that needs to be done to defeat the enemy or as a skilled marksmen taking pride in a job well done. They’re just the job. Don’t hear that---“the job”---the way it sounds when it’s said by self-righteous characters on TV shows or even by real soldiers and marines forced into saying it by dumb questions from fatuous journalists. Hear it as simply the routine task at hand.

And with each kill we see Kyle become more and more used to the routine. He even begins to seem bored the way even people doing jobs they love and enjoy and take pride in can get bored with the routine. He becomes more detached, more unfeeling, to the point that he’s finally feeling nothing except physical relief when a shot’s taken. He has to hold a position for so long waiting for a clear shot that his muscles cramp up. After the final shot in the sequence, Bradley Cooper as Kyle simply relaxes his shoulders and rolls his neck to unkink it. It’s one of those small, perfect gestures that tell us everything all at once about a character and alert us to the actor’s brilliance, like the way Tommy Lee Jones sets his feet flat together on the floor as his character sits ramrod straight on a bench in the hall of the coroner’s office waiting to go in to identify his murdered son’s body in In the Valley of Elah or the way Sandra Bullock’s eyes widen just a fraction of a fraction of an inch when her character hears that the homeless young man her family’s taken in has never had a bed of his own to sleep in before in The Blind Side.

The roll of the neck is Cooper’s moment of brilliance. It tells us this is Chris Kyle’s moment of crisis.

Or rather it’s the moment when we should realize that Kyle is in crisis and American Sniper is going to be a movie about that crisis.

This isn’t the story of a war hero. It’s the story of a casualty of war.

From the discussions online, I take it that a lot of people who’ve seen the movie didn’t catch that moment or didn’t grasp its significance.

Let’s get this out of the way.

Clint Eastwood has directed a good war movie, taut, gripping, suspenseful, harrowing at times. But good war movies aren’t about battles and firefights and blood, guts, guts, and glory. They’re about men and women at war. They’re about people trying to remain human in the most inhuman conditions human beings devise. American Sniper focuses on one man and one woman at war: legendary Navy SEAL Chris Kyle---legendary for being the most lethal marksman in American military history---and his wife Taya (played by Sienna Miller) who, even though she never sets foot in Iraq, is forced to go to war along with him because combat zones are infinitely expandable and extend to include the families of the troops on the line no matter how far away from the fighting they are physically. Whatever wounds Kyle suffers, she and their children suffer. Taya and the kids are casualties of the war in Iraq too.

So American Sniper a war movie.

It is not a pro-war movie.

It’s not a particularly political movie.

The little politics Eastwood lets slip in are isolationist.

The only connection made between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq is chronological. The attacks happen and nineteen months later the war happens and Chris Kyle finds himself in Iraq. In between, he gets married. Eastwood makes no use of it for emotional effect, never mind using it to make a political point. It’s exposition. We don’t even see it happen. We see Kyle see it happen on TV.

Right Wingers who love American Sniper seem to think the movie vindicates and retroactively wins George W. Bush’s War in Iraq. Liberals who hate it seem to think Clint Eastwood remade The Green Berets.

Neither group seems to have seen the movie.

I’m sure they watched it. The Right Wingers, at any rate. Five or six times, many of them. The liberals talk more about what they’ve read about the movie than about the movie itself, so I don’t know their story. But I’m convinced that those people who did watch it didn’t see it. They sat in the theater, pointed their eyes at the screen, and then didn’t really take in what happens up there.

The war is never shown to be going well. It’s never shown to be doing any good. It’s not presented as serving any strategic purpose, never mind winning the war on terror. No Iraqis greet the troops as liberators. No schools get painted. No electricity is restored. No independent government is formed. No free elections are held. No one shows a purple finger.  Nothing Kyle and the other Americans do is seen to advance the causes of justice, freedom for the Iraqis, or democracy in the Middle East.  Nothing they do brings the defeat of Al Qaida closer or achieves even a modicum of revenge for 9/11. The Surge apparently happens but the result appears to be fewer Americans and more angry Iraqis with guns.

Kyle sees it as his responsibility to protect Iraqi civilians from “the savages.”  But the Iraqi civilians he meets aren’t grateful for his protection. They don’t see him as protecting them at all. Just the opposite. They blame him and all the other Americans for making them targets for the savages. As far as they’re concerned, all the Americans are doing is getting them killed.

When we first see him in Iraq the country is clearly broken and nothing changes after that except that each time he returns for another of his four tours of duty the cities look more desolate, the troops more isolated, the streets and rooftops more crowded with people out to kill them. 

All he manages to do is keep some of the Marines it’s his job to look out for alive to fight another day, which, we soon find out, means alive to die another day.

His most technically brilliant and remarkable shot is taken as a result of a mistake in judgment and brings about a near disaster.

With Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle, and now American Sniper on his transcript, Cooper is on his way to putting together a body of work that should rank him near the top of the current class of leading men straddling forty---Cooper, Leonardo DiCaprio, Christian Bale, David Oyelowo, Benedict Cumberbatch, Ryan Gosling (actually a punk kid at thirty-five), Matt Damon, Joaquin Phoenix. Matthew McConaghey. (Will Smith is forty-six. Robert Downey Jr. is forty-nine. Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt are fifty-two. George Clooney is fifty-three! How did that happen?) The clip shown at the Academy Awards meant to give an idea why Copper was nominated for Best Actor isn’t really a good example of his work in American Sniper. It’s the scene in which Kyle loses it in the hospital nursery after his daughter is born and starts pounding on the glass and shouting at the nurses on the other side to take care of his crying infant. Cooper delivers anything but a shouty performance. Except for that scene, he only raises his voice to be heard over the noise of the fighting and confusion taking place around him in Iraq.

At his most together Cooper’s Kyle is low-key, easy-going, and not particularly demonstrative, and when he begins to come unglued his---Kyle’s---way of acting like nothing’s wrong is to try to be more like his regular self. It doesn’t work. He doesn’t talk less but he says less. The going is not easy at all. Cooper lets us see the rage and frustration building inside him. But he makes sure we see that Kyle is trying hard not to see it.  As for demonstrative, when pushed or pressured for an emotional reaction to a situation or to something another character says his most expressive response is to go still as a stone.

A more representative scene---maybe the key scene---is also set stateside when Kyle is between tours. He’s in a garage waiting with his little boy for their car to be done and a young veteran of the war in Iraq who’s waiting for his car too recognizes Kyle as “the Legend.” He starts to gush, thanking Kyle profusely for what he did over there, for all the American lives he saved, and telling Kyle’s son what a hero his daddy is. Kyle tries to be polite. He fixes a sort of smile on his face. But we can see him going colder and colder. He’s looking at the vet but his eyes aren’t focused on him. It’s as if he’s trying not to see him. The vet lost a leg in the war and he lifts his pants cuff to show Kyle his metal prosthesis, Kyle stares at it blankly as if he has no idea what it is or why the vet thinks he’d be interested in seeing it. He makes a couple of compassionate-sounding noises but he doesn’t ask how the vet lost the leg or how he’s coping or express his sympathy with any sincerity. He doesn’t want to hear about it. He doesn’t want to talk about the war or its costs. He just wants to be left alone to go about his business as if nothing else but this has been his business all along.

It’s a more excruciating and embarrassing moment than the one in the hospital because at least there Kyle’s over-reaction is a reaction. It’s human. Here his reaction is to not have one and if it’s not inhuman it’s inhumane. It’s a chilling scene, Cooper’s best in the movie, and he hardly strings two words together during it.

Even when he’s talkative, Kyle’s not eloquent, but as he grows more inward and evasive, he borders on inarticulate. Eventually he gives up trying to make sense. He speaks in rearrangements of stock phrases, clichés, and bombastic non-sequiturs, reflexively avoiding saying anything that might reveal what he’s feeling or, more to the point, not feeling. This presents a problem for Eastwood he doesn’t completely solve: how do you tell a story about a character who can’t---because he won’t---speak for himself?

You have other characters speak for him. Taya and Kyle’s buddies have to tell us what’s happening to him, which they do by telling him what’s happening to him.

Kyle’s rote reply to anyone who asks if he regrets all the killing he’s done is to say that what he regrets is all the killings he failed to prevent. This is one way of saying he wishes he killed more people, but that’s not what he means. He means that he feels personally responsible for bringing every Marine and SEAL home alive and that’s why he won’t come home to stay. He can’t leave while he still has a job there to do.

His buddies are skeptical. They all want to go home. They no longer see any point to what they’re doing. One of his fellow SEALs suggests Kyle’s becoming addicted to war. Himself too. He compares what’s happening to both of them to when he was a kid and used to give himself a thrill by putting his hands on the electrified mesh of a neighbor’s chicken coop. The shock was painful but as soon as he could pull his hands away he’d grab hold again. “I think war’s like that,” this SEAL worries, “It puts lightning in your bones and makes everything else hard to hold onto.”

Taya will have none of it either. She’s worried the war is consuming him. “How long can you keep circling the flames?” she asks.  But she takes it further.

She thinks he’s betraying her and their children.

As far as she’s concerned, in marrying her he promised to put her and the family they were going to make together ahead of everything else. When he goes to Iraq the first time, she doesn’t like it but she understands he can’t disobey orders. But when he keeps going back, he’s breaking his promise again and again and again. Kyle claims as a motto “God, Country, Family.”  Taya’s motto is “Family!” The other two are taken care of when he takes care of that. His main responsibility, his duty, his job, is to stay here and take care of things at home.

Kyle, she insists, belongs here not in Iraq.

The inference is there to be drawn. Eastwood doesn’t draw it for us, but it’s there. By Taya’s lights, all our troops belong here at home taking care of their own and not over there.

As I said, I suspect people who think American Sniper is a pro-war movie didn’t see it. I also suspect they didn’t hear it.  At least, they didn’t hear her.

If they did, they didn’t realize that Taya’s speaking from the movie’s moral center. And I wonder if this is because she seems too ordinary to carry this much moral authority.

But I think Taya’s perfect ordinariness is what gives her that authority and that it’s the signature beauty of Miller’s performance.

Cooper does an excellent job of not being a movie star. He’s aged past his pretty boy phase and he’s now leading man handsome, but he knows how to downplay his looks, even work against them, even disguise them with his expressions. He reshapes his face with his muscles not make-up. For most of American Sniper he wears a beard but that’s not what does it. He’s bulked up all around for the part and his cheeks have that shiny beefiness you see in the faces of some ballplayers and cops who’ve spent too much unsupervised time in the weight room. He looks like somebody you might see in real life. But you wouldn’t take him for ordinary. He’s too big. Too imposing. You couldn’t pass by him without doing a doubletake. You couldn’t find yourself next to him without feeling you had to watch your step.

But Miller does an even more effective job of not being a movie star. She makes Taya someone you wouldn’t necessarily overlook but whose presence anywhere wouldn’t surprise you. In fact, someone you’d expect to see. She’s familiar in the sense that all the people we meet in our daily comings and goings are familiar. Even when they’re complete strangers we deal with them as if we’ve always known them because, in a sense, we have. They’re just like everybody else. Taya is just like anybody you’d meet on line at the supermarket, in the stands at your kids’ soccer game, coming out the door of the dentist’s office as we are going in.

You might notice she’s pretty but you wouldn’t do a doubletake. It’d just be one item in a list of things you’d notice about her and not necessarily the first item on the list. Before you’d call her pretty, you’d more likely say she was nice-looking. That is she looks like a nice person. Nice enough. But nobody special. Ordinary.

And what she asks of Kyle is ordinary.

Please listen to me. Pay attention to the kids. Chip in around the house. Be here when we need you.

Come home. Stay home.

Miller delivers her lines without sounding like a scold but without sounding like she’s mounting a soapbox either. She has Taya speaking with ordinary practicality. And it’s that practicality that makes her morally compelling.

The things she needs to be taken care need to be taken care of. They are the things Kyle needs to be taking care of. His thinking he needs to be in Iraq is his mistake. And it’s a mistake that amounts to a moral failure.

Now comes the spoiler that won’t be a spoiler if you know the real Chris Kyle’s story.

Kyle finally does come home to stay. He gets to spend a few years living an ordinary life---ordinary by Taya’s definition, being a loving husband and father, taking care of his own. Just before the war reaches over here to claim him at last, Taya tells him she’s proud of him and she doesn’t mean she’s proud of Chris Kyle the Legend. She means she’s proud of him as a husband and father. And that’s who the war claims, that’s what it takes away. Not a war hero. It takes an ordinary man away from his family.

That’s what war does in American Sniper.

All it does.

It takes away.

____________________________________

This has nothing to do with anything, and I’m sure other people have noticed it, but American Sniper starring Bradley Cooper is sort of our era’s Sergeant York, which, of course, starred Gary Cooper. Different times, different sensibilities, very different types of heroes, but I think our Cooper would have made their Cooper proud.

___________________________________

Extended tour: Goes without saying, the real Chris Kyle and the movie’s Chris Kyle are not the same person. And the real Kyle did not live an “ordinary” life after he left the Navy. From the June 3, 2013 issue of the New Yorker: “Chris Kyle, a decorated sniper, tried to help a troubled veteran. The result was tragic.”  In The Crosshairs by Nicholas Schmidle.

____________________________________

American Sniper, directed by Clint Eastwood, written by Jason Hall. Based on the book by Chris Kyle and Scott McEwan and Jim DeFelice. Starring Bradley Cooper, Sienna Miller, Luke Grimes, Jake McDorman, Kevin Lacz, Cory Hardrict, and Navid Negahban. Rated R. Now in theaters.

“Fascinating.”: Random thoughts on Leonard Nimoy, Mr Spock, the romance of Jim Kirk and Carol Marcus, and J.J. Abrams’ plot to ruin Star Trek

Editor's note, Monday morning, March 2: I don't really believe J.J. Abrams is plotting to ruin Star Trek. But I have issues. See the comments.

“Live long and prosper, Spock.”

“I shall do neither, for I have killed my captain and my friend.”

---Star Trek. Season 2, episode 1. “Amok Time.” Mr Spock’s and Leonard Nimoy’s best episode.

You probably don’t need me to tell you the news of Leonard Nimoy’s death. And there are plenty of tributes up all over the web already and there’s nothing meaningful I can add. But I do have a few thoughts, not so much about Nimoy himself or about Spock or even about Star Trek. More about what I think J.J. Abrams has been doing with Star Trek since he was handed the reboot, which is, basically, deliberately trying to ruin it for fans of the original series.

J.J. Abrams never liked the original Star Trek. He’s admitted this. He even seems proud of it.

But before we get to that, let’s star with Nimoy.

I imagine it’s a strange thing to be a famous actor, anyway. People love and admire you for your having impressed yourself on their imaginations as various someones who are not you. Must be stranger still to be famous for one particular not you. Everywhere you go people seem to think they know you intimately but the you they know is a character you played and that character is more real to them than the you standing right in front of them. And it must be terribly frustrating when one of those people to whom you are that character is someone you need to hire you to play a completely different character.  That’s the whole premise of Birdman, isn’t it?

There were probably times when Nimoy felt like Michael Keaton’s character in Birdman and found himself in the same emotionally and psychologically confusing state of hating and resenting the character who made him famous---who gave him his life at the same time as taking it over----as if Spock was a real person who’d deliberately stolen his identity and any chance at having a different, more artistically satisfying career. I know there were times when Nimoy tried to be done with Spock once and for all.

Clearly, though, he came to terms with his predicament, the downside and the very considerable upside. It probably helped that he was able to have a serious actor’s career apart from playing Spock---not a star’s career but one that he could take professional pride in. (See Sheila O’Malley on his performance opposite Ingrid Bergman in the TV movie A Woman Named Golda, R.I.P. Leonard Nimoy.) He was never reduced to the plight of his fictional counterpart in Galaxy Quest of having to earn his living signing autographs at Star Trek conventions, answering questions about life on Vulcan, and having to listen to supposed grownups intone “Live long and prosper” at him and expecting his approval. Whatever the state of his fortunes on television at any given period of what should have been the prime of his career, he continued to act seriously onstage. He directed. He had a successful second career as a photographer. He lived long enough to see science fiction and fantasy develop a broader and more intellectually and artistically respectable appeal so that going to conventions and meeting fans became a very different and I expect more satisfying experience than the one parodied in Galaxy Quest. And at some point he realized that being Spock gave Leonard Nimoy an authority he would not otherwise have had and he made intelligent use of that.

And all the while he apparently managed to be a warm-hearted, generous, kind, and generous human being.

It’s also helpful that Star Trek has turned out to be a significant cultural achievement, boldly going where no television series had gone before or, arguably, has gone since, into the world of of popular myth and legend. Star Trek is a part of our collective conscious and unconscious, influencing the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. And Nimoy himself had a lot to do with that.

It’s something when the President of the United States feels called upon to deliver a statement on the death of an actor at all, but it says something wonderful about the actor and his most famous character that the President could put it in the form of a joke just about everybody will get.

And while it was what Nimoy did on TV that made Spock iconic, I think it’s the movies, two of which Nimoy directed, that have kept the series alive and vivid in the popular imagination. That’s a tricky case to make. You could argue that it’s worked the other way, that people care about the movies because of the TV show. At this point it’s hard to sort that out and I’m not going to try here. The main thing is that all the movies starring the original cast are good movies. As good or better than any of the best sci-fi movies of their time. Well, except for one. But really the worst that can be said of The Final Frontier is that it’s like watching a mini-marathon of the weakest episodes from the original TV series strung together except with higher production values, and nobody involved embarrassed themselves, unless it was Shatner as the director. But he didn’t as the star. The “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” singalong at the end is goofy but it’s also kind of sweet and it says something true and heartening about the three friends---Kirk, Spock, and McCoy and Shatner, Nimoy, and DeForest Kelley---as they approached old age and were reaching the end of their adventures. The other four films---or five. I’m never sure if the first movie counts as a real Star Trek movie.---need no apologies.

Especially not The Wrath of Khan.

Seemed a lot of people among my online circle of friends and acquaintances honored Nimoy’s memory last night by watching that one. Fitting and proper. (Best comment I saw came from Rob Farley of Lawyers, Guns & Money:  “I've noticed, Chekov never really talks about the Putin period in Russian history.”) It contains Spock’s---and Nimoy’s---finest moment. It’s a heartbreaking scene, of course, and “I have been and always will be your friend” makes for a beautiful farewell from Spock to Kirk, from Spock to us fans---remember, Nimoy had announced he was not going to return for any more movies---and now, we like to imagine, from Nimoy himself to all he has left behind.

But that moment’s power depends on our understanding that Spock does die.

And not a comic book or TV show death.

He dies.

And he doesn’t come back.

The resurrected Spock of the subsequent movies is a different person.

I don’t mean he’s been changed by the experience of dying---which he doesn’t remember. He plants his katra in McCoy’s head before he goes into the chamber---and rebirth. I mean he is somebody else. Somebody other. He’s Spock transfigured. And I think Nimoy plays him so, and not just in the seemingly addled way of The Voyage Home. I also think Shatner plays Kirk’s scenes with him with a sense of loss and a touch of loneliness: Kirk feels the absence of his old friend and misses him even while rejoicing at having “him” back. But that’s beside the point right now. The point is it’s a powerful scene that means an awful lot to Star Trek fans and J.J. Abrams went out of his way in Into Darkness to try to take it away from us.

It starts with Carol Marcus and Kirk and their son David.

I can’t remember for sure if at the outset of The Wrath of Khan David knows Kirk is his father. I think he doesn’t or at least he doesn’t let on to his mother that he knows. I am certain he doesn’t like him. Partly it’s the intellectual’s jealous contempt for the man of action. Really it’s the born rebel’s dislike and distrust for what he regards as the embodiment of an unthinking, unimaginative, reactionary authority bent on maintaining the status quo that gives it its authority. What he doesn’t know is how much he and Kirk are alike. The Genesis Project succeeds---and then fails---because David is a chip off the old block and like Kirk can’t accept there’s such a thing as a no-win scenario. He does to the project what Kirk did to the Kabayashi Maru test at the Academy. He defeats the problem by cheating. This makes him partly responsible for Spock’s death and the agent of his rebirth.

This is why David a very significant character in the Star Trek universe even if The Search for Spock did make short work of him.

The question is how did David get in the picture to begin with?

You have to figure that by the 23rd Century birth control’s one-hundred percent effective. David can’t have been an accident. His birth must have been planned. This suggests that Kirk and Carol Marcus were planning to have a family together. To be a family.

They might even have been married.

I’m sure their youthful romance has been dealt with in at least one of the many novel tie-ins. I know it’s been handled in a comic book, although I have no idea where the writers took it.  But there must have been a couple of years when they were in their twenties when either Kirk tried to settle down and be a good family man or Marcus tried to live the life of the wife of a Starfleet officer and it made them miserable for a variety of reasons, mainly, I’d think, because it meant that either way both would have found themselves married to a person very different from the one they fell in love with.

Although it’s quick and easy to jump to the conclusion that Marcus fell for what females across the Star Trek universe fall for, Kirk the swashbuckler, it’s important to remember that Kirk was a nerd and a grind at the Academy and only got in touch with his inner pirate later. Marcus would have thought she was falling in love with a fellow science geek and have been surprised that he didn’t want to spend his days with her in the lab. He wanted to be “out there,” his guiding principle being “Second star to the right and straight on to morning.”

All of space was his lab.

But it’s also important to note that he would have had no doubt about what kind of person he was falling in love with. That’s why he fell in love with her. It’s established, first in the TV series and then in Wrath of Khan, that the two most important women in his romantic and erotic life were brilliant young scientists. Of course one of them turned out to be a mad scientist. But Marcus is serenely sane and sensible, responsible, diligent and dedicated but warm-hearted, self-aware, witty, and filled with and fueled by a generous sense of wonder. And whatever she might have thought Kirk was when they met, it probably didn’t take her long to figure him out. She knows what he and she were really like then and forgives them both for it, even likes them for it, and she knows exactly what he is now.

She has two key exchanges in The Wrath of Khan, one with David:

David: Remember that overgrown Boy Scout you used to hang around with? That's exactly the kind of guy...

Carol: Listen, kiddo, Jim Kirk was many things, but he was never a Boy Scout!

The other is with Kirk himself:

Carol: Please tell me what you're feeling.

Jim: There's a man out there I haven't seen in fifteen years who's trying to kill me. You show me a son that'd be happy to help. My son... my life that could have been... and wasn't. How do I feel? Old... worn out.

Carol: Let me show you something that will make you feel young as when the world was new.

In J.J. Abrams’ alternative timeline, Carol Marcus exchanges her scientific brilliance and interesting and likeable personality for sculpted abs. She also loses her independent spirit and becomes Daddy’s good little girl. And she bores Kirk.

The only time he notices her is when she strips down, that is, when she’s most like any of the hundreds of females of every variety of species he’s loved and left.

For all he’s interested in her, she might as well be Yeoman Rand.

Kirk doesn’t have the time this time. He takes a pass at making a pass and moves on to saving the galaxy yet again. So David doesn’t get born. Genesis never gets off the drawing board. Spock doesn’t die. And the best Star Trek movie is wiped out of the canon or, at any rate, stamped with a great big asterisk and a link to J.J. Abrams’ Wikipedia entry.

Did I mention that Abrams hates Star Trek?

I honestly think his object is to make Gene Roddenberry spin in his grave.

You can argue that what Abrams did with Khan accomplished this. But what the Khan plot of Into Darkness does is wipe out “Space Seed”, not incidentally one of the best episodes from the original series. As Abrams left things standing at the end of Into Darkness, Khan and his followers can still wind up marooned on Ceti Alpha V when its sister planet explodes laying waste to their home, bringing about the death of Marla McGivers who gets into the plot somehow, and setting Khan on his mission of vengeance. Possibly somewhere along the line Khan makes himself more interesting than Abrams made him---Carol Marcus isn’t the only character Abrams diminishes.---and memorizes Milton and Melville so if and when Abrams gets around to remaking The Wrath of Khan Benedict Cumberbatch can deliver the lines “He tasks me. He tasks me and I shall have him! I'll chase him 'round the moons of Nibia and 'round the Antares Maelstrom and 'round perdition's flames before I give him up!”

That’s presuming Abrams doesn’t blue pencil them out of the script for being “too cerebral.”

Abrams turned Carol Marcus into the babe and Khan into a standard issue action-adventure movie villain.

I thought that Abrams was going somewhere interesting with her in his first Star Trek movie, making her the one female in the galaxy who isn’t the least bit impressed or charmed by him. She’s immune to his roguish flirtations and annoyed by his swashbuckler’s devil-take-the-hindmost approach to life and command. She insists that he earn her respect by being every bit as good at his job as she is at hers, and she knows herself to be very, very good at whatever it is she actually does. That’s left a little vague, but gives her a lot more important work to do than Uhura had in the original series. It looks like she’s on her way to becoming Kirk’s Hermione Grainger and that the Big Three will be expanded to the Big Four.

But Abrams was working on something else at the same time and he dropped the Uhura as Hermione trope to make Uhura the girlfriend.

In Into Darkness that’s what she is and all she is.

She’s along for the ride, there to worry and scold and get into trouble she needs one of the boys to rescue her from, to be pretty to look at and prove that at least one of the nerdy boys is really a manly man smart popular girls secretly swoon over, and---her main job---to cheer the boys on.

Zoe Saldana is given more to do in any two minutes of Guardians of the Galaxy than Abrams has given her in his two Star Trek movies.

The Wrath of Khan came out in 1982, The Search for Spock in 1984, and The Voyage Home in 1986. But apparently the movie from that period that had the most significant influence on Abrams’ imagination as a budding filmmaker came out in 1985, The Goonies.

Abrams has a third Star Trek in the works but there’s hope.  He’s not directing and he’s hired new writers. And maybe he’ll be too wrapped up in his Star Wars reboots, where his arrested-adolescent sensibility isn’t as much of a drawback.

And amazingly and fortunately, Abrams hasn’t been able to diminish any of the Big Three, although he tried with Spock by having him save the day with his fists instead of with logic. But I think Abrams has been defeated---so far---by forces beyond his ability to control. Chris Pine has tapped into the essential Jim Kirk. Karl Urban is channeling the ghost of DeForest Kelley. And Zachary Quinto is simply more loyal to his friend and mentor Leonard Nimoy.

So I think it’s probably a good place to leave off here, with Quinto’s farewell tweet.

But I can’t resist. I have to finish with this:

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St. Vincent: Bill Murray as a holy wreck

It’s my birthday. It’s also family movie night. Seems appropriate then that we’ll be matching a movie about a grumpy wreck of an old man or, as I like to think of it, one of the best movies of last year that wasn’t nominated for an Academy Award featuring one of the best performances of his career by an actor who wasn’t nominated for an Academy Award but should have been: St. Vincent. Here’s my review from last fall.

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There but for the grace of God: Bill Murray as Bill Murray might have been in Theodore Malfi’s very Catholic but in no way exclusively Catholic comedy of forgiveness, St. Vincent.

Bill Murray looks like a wreck.

He’s playing a wreck, he should look like one. But in St. Vincent he doesn’t just look like one. He’s become one. This one. Vin McKenna. Heavy drinker. Heavy smoker. Sixty-something victim of a lifetime of bad habits. Murray looks like the wreck you’d expect a guy like that to look like. He acts like a guy who’s a wreck like that would act. Except that he doesn’t give any sign he’s acting. He’s being himself. And he’s a wreck.

What Murray does in St. Vincent is different from what Meryl Streep does in her movies. Streep uses herself as a canvass on which she paints incredibly lifelike portraits of other people. Look closely and you can always spot the artist at work. It’s different from what Philip Seymour Hoffman did. Hoffman found a way to turn every character into a version of Philip Seymour Hoffman. It’s a technique based on the ideas that situation and circumstances create character, that people are as alike as they are different, and much of who we are is determined by how we react to who and what are acting upon us. This is how leading men and leading women---movie stars---who are great actors tend to work and it’s what causes people who don’t know better to say “Oh he’s just playing himself again.” Because their characters look like movie stars playing them, people tend to see only the movie stars. Hoffman looked like a character so people would say he was a great character actor. Which he was. But here I think Murray is just playing himself.

But not the self his fans know. Maybe not the self anyone but Murray knows, that secret self we all have, the one we’re afraid to let anyone else see because we’re afraid they’d recoil in horror or disgust or contempt or hilarity, and Murray’s been brave enough to let that self show. It’s possible it’s a self Murray didn’t know was in him until he read the script. I don’t know, of course, but I imagine him saying to himself, I know this guy. I could have been this guy. In another life I am this guy.

The accent’s different, that’s all. Brooklyn not Chicago. Otherwise, Vin is Murray and Murray is Vin. Same born rebel as wiseguy attitude. Same subversive impulses. Same way of sounding sincere when he’s mocking you, same way of sounding like he’s mocking when he’s being sincere. Same insouciant refusal to care what others think of him and adjust his behavior accordingly. What Vin doesn’t have is the money and fame that allows Murray to get away with it. And he’s probably never traveled in circles where this behavior would make him a hero. More likely it’s always marked him as a trouble-making pain in the ass. But what he’s really missing and has never had is Murray’s luck.

Vin has had some luck. But it’s the luck of a survivor, not the kind of luck that makes you successful except in the sense you somehow manage to get by and keep going until the next set of troubles, sorrows, catastrophes, and failures come along.

The small graces and favors that attended Murray at the right time in the right place, the good things that happened, the bad things that didn’t, the family he was blessed with, the friendships he was able to make, the teachers who were there when he needed them, the sharp-eyed mentors who saw something in this kid, all the coincidental, accidental, and serendipitous moments that taken together determine our fate, all the luck---which the vain and conceited deny is luck and boastfully claim as the result of their own unaided and unsupported effort---Murray enjoyed, Vin missed out on.

The result is that after a life of probably daily struggle, disappointment, frustration, and reversal if not outright failure, he’s alone, broke, bitter, and worn-out, without anyone to call on for help or even moral support, and almost too tired and too full of self-loathing to care.

He can’t be bothered.

He can’t be bothered to look out for himself. He can’t even be bothered to dress properly. He can’t be bothered to concern himself about other people. He can’t be bothered to to take their feelings into account. He’s rude. He’s gratuitously insulting. He seems to go out of his way to offend people he needs on his side.

He’s selfish. He’s conniving. He’s opportunistic. He takes on a babysitting job because it’s an opportunity to make some money quickly without having to do real work for it. When he sees the boy’s mother is desperate, he takes advantage and charges her more than he can guess she can comfortably afford.

And it seems that all that’s keeping him going is stubbornness and spite.

He’s a physical and spiritual wreck.

And Bill Murray plays this guy as if he is this guy.

It’s a true There But for the Grace of God Go I performance. The Catholic version. Not the Calvinist version. The Calvinist version is a smug, self-congratulatory I’m favored by God with an underlying terror that that favor will be withdrawn without warning or apparent reason. The Catholic version is I’m lucky and the luck can run out but there’s no terror because the Catholic God never withdraws his favor. His son and his son’s Mother and an entire calendar of saints won’t let him. The Calvinist version blames the unfavored and disfavored. The Catholic version teaches the lucky to have pity and compassion for the unlucky. One is judgmental. The other is charitable. St Vincent, as if you couldn’t guess from the title, is a very Catholic movie.

Maybe the best Catholic movie ever made, after John Huston’s The Dead.

I don’t mean that it’s Catholic in the way of Going My Way or Song of Bernadette. There’s no idealizing of the One True Church or sentimentalizing of its communicants. I don’t mean it’s a religious movie. God is named but he’s not worshiped.  Faith doesn’t seem to motivate any of the characters, not even the ones whose business is spreading the faith.  And I don’t mean it’s a movie about Catholics doing Catholic-ish things. Nobody goes to Confession. Nobody goes to Mass. One of the main supporting characters is a priest, but he’s no Bing Crosby or Pat O’Brien or Spencer Tracy or Karl Malden or even a Montgomery Clift, and he’s certainly no Henry Fonda. He’s just a tired man trying to keep his spirits up and his faith in himself intact while doing a thankless job as best he can. The twelve year old boy Vin babysits, Oliver Bronstein, goes to a Catholic school but he’s not Catholic. He doesn’t know what he is. What religion to raise him in is another thing his divorcing parents failed to work out between them. “I think I’m Jewish,” he tells his teacher. His religious ed class’ final project is to research the life of someone who might be a living saint and present what amounts to a hagiography. But the pedagogic goal of the project seems to be for the kids to teach themselves how to use Power Point.

The stated goal is to learn what it means to be a saint. The movie’s take on this is that the first requirement of a saint is to recognize that we are all sinners, including the few of us who might qualify as saints, and to make allowances. Among other things, a saint is someone who understands and forgives.

I’m still enough of a papist to want to claim that as a Catholic theme. But it’s not particularly. What it is is humane.

Vin takes in Oliver because he’s desperate for cash. He’s reached the limit of his credit line on his reverse mortgage. His checking account’s overdrawn. He owes money right and left. If he had any savings they’re long gone. He’s broke and going broker. And we know how he got that way. He drinks. He smokes. He gambles. He goes to strip clubs and hires hookers. As Republicans keeping telling us, money problems are caused by defects in character. You’re broke, it’s your own fault. You screwed up, screwed yourself. Actions have consequences, live with them. And watching Vin self-indulge and self-destruct, it’s hard not to blame him, and because he’s such a jerk, it’s hard not to root for his continued downward slide. And maybe, we think---hope---it’ll wake him up, hitting bottom. Force him to change his ways. Though there’s reason to doubt a jerk like Vin can change.

But, like I said, this is a Catholic movie. The point isn’t redemption, it’s forgiveness. Director and screenwriter Theodore Melfi tries our patience detailing Vin’s unapologetic bad behavior and, scene in and scene out, tempts us to give up on him as a bad bet. But if we’re good Catholics---good Christians, good Jews, good Hindus, good Muslims, good Buddhists, good people, or at least kind-hearted people---we know to withhold judgment.

Oliver knows how to do this. In his experience, there’s always another side of the story, a side nobody’s telling. He knows that his mother’s story and his father’s story about the failure of their marriage don’t match up. More important, neither’s story matches what he’s seen for himself. It’s not that he’s that intuitive. He’s observant. And when he starts observing Vin, he starts seeing there’s a side to Vin’s story Vin won’t tell, maybe can’t tell, maybe because he’s too proud or too stubborn, maybe because it’s too painful, maybe because he sees no point to telling it---Vin’s least favorite expression is “It is what it is.” He hates it because he’s convinced it’s used as an excuse to refuse to try to help others: Wish I could help, but there’s nothing I can do….because I don’t want to do anything.  But can mean something else and that something else is Vin’s guiding philosophy: Things go wrong. There’s nothing you can do to change that. You don’t complain. You deal.---maybe because it’s a side Vin himself doesn’t see. In order to tell it, he’d first have to see himself in a different light. He’d have to think of himself as a different kind of person. A good person. Or a not too awful one, at least. And he’s never thought of himself that way. There used to be someone who thought of him that way and because he thought the world of her, he could think a little better of himself for her sake. But she’s not around anymore.

Oliver is, though.

Murray’s is the performance the movie’s built upon, but Jaeden Lieberher as Oliver makes St. Vincent work.

Although Vin becomes the subject of Oliver’s living saints project, if there’s a character in St. Vincent who’s anything close to a saint it’s Oliver. But there’s nothing particularly saintly about Lieberher’s performance. Nothing over cute or cloying either. Nothing nice. He makes no overt play for our sympathy or approval. His Oliver is just a decent, well-meaning kid who’s learned how to make the best of bad situations and the best way he’s found is not to hold other people’s mistakes and bad behavior against them. He takes them for what they are and hopes they’ll do the same for him. Not that he’s a doormat. There’s only so much he’ll put up with. It’s just he’s got enough to worry about without trying to fix people. It is what it is, is his philosophy too, but Lieberher doesn’t play this as resignation, cynicism, or surrender. It’s simply a realistic acceptance of how people are. And in his case it works to get people to reveal other, better sides of themselves.

Lieberher’s Oliver isn’t particularly insightful or empathetic. But he’s intelligent and he’s interested or he makes himself interested. Stuck with Vin for hours on end, dragged along on Vin’s errands with no regard on Vin’s part for the effect on a ten year old kid, having to spend time at the race track watching Vin lose, having to wait and watch while Vin makes unexplained but obviously painful visits to a nursing home, having to sit on a stool next to him when they stop off at Vin’s favorite bar on the way home and watch Vin not watch his drinking, Oliver distracts himself from his own loneliness and boredom by paying attention. He quickly starts to pick up on things. Nothing we haven’t picked up on ourselves already but Oliver puts them together so they add up to more than an explanation or an excuse for Vin.

Murray and Lieberher are terrific, separate and together. But Melissa McCarthy as Oliver’s harried and distracted mother, Maggie, an MRI technician who’s apparently much better at her job than she is at being a parent, surprised me. I still haven’t seen Bridesmaids and I don’t watch Mike & Molly. Up til now I only knew her from endlessly repeated trailers and television ads for Identity Thief andTammy. Judging by her work in St. Vincent, I expect she’s on her way to being what Bill Murray is, a great actor who happened to get started and establish a reputation playing clowns.

Maggie is a loving mother and a devoted mother and probably, under better circumstances, a very good mother, but under the current circumstances she’s failing Oliver and herself by indulging herself in the role of wronged ex-wife. And she was wronged. The movie doesn’t blame her for the breakup of her marriage. Her on his way to be ex-husband did her dirt. But he was a good father if a lousy husband and in fleeing the marriage she didn’t take Oliver’s feelings and needs into account. She didn’t have a plan. Now it’s causing everyone, including herself, extra hardship and pain. But she’s like her son in being able to make the best of bad situations and in being willing to treat everybody else---except Oliver’s father---the way she’d like them to treat her. McCarthy conveys Maggie’s basic decency while doing no special pleading in defense of her failings and she lets us see Maggie’s sadness, frustration, and fear while making clear her outward cheerfulness and hopefulness aren’t just defenses but real strengths, except when they’re weaknesses.

In St. Vincent, something similar is going on with Maggie as with Vin. Under other circumstances, some of Vin’s vices would be only mildly bad habits. And when we begin to understand his current circumstances, “vices” stops seeming like the right word. Under her current circumstances, some of Maggie’s better qualities, qualities that used to look like virtues have begun to look like, not vices, but worrisomely self-destructive character flaws. And this is the point. Since none of us can know when our own circumstances might change for the worse and what that change might bring out in us or damp down, we need to hold off on judging others whose luck has failed them until we know their circumstances, and keeping in mind that there but for the grace of God, maybe withhold judgment and do what we can in the way of offering the help and comfort we hope we’ll be offered when our own luck fails.

Depending on how you look at it, St. Vincent is a comedy with a deep undercurrent of sadness or a sad movie with a comic surface. Either way, its message is how life can be so funny you want to cry or so sad you can only laugh. This is a theme I think of as Jewish, based on what I observed in my friends and neighbors growing up. But really it’s like what I said about the Catholic themes.

They’re not particularly Jewish or Catholic.

What they are is human.

As Vin’s less than friendly neighborhood bookie, Terrence Howard expands upon a theme he began composing in The Butler: Sleazeballs I Have Known. Chris O’Dowd plays the Christian Brother who teaches religious ed at Oliver’s school and assigns the saints project, a kindly and faithful priest but somewhat discouraged teacher who deals with his students’ indifference and recalcitrance with an overt but ironically expressed hostility that makes them laugh at themselves before they can laugh at him. And Naomi Watts, overdoing it a bit with a Bad news for Moose and Squirrel accent, plays Daka, Vin’s stripper and prostitute Russian immigrant girlfriend who is better expressing her affections through anger and guilt-tripping than through sex. Daka is a devout mercenary but there’s nothing that says self-interest is incompatible with charity and Watts mixes Daka’s greed and generosity to create a plausibly decent person doing what she has to to get by while shielding herself behind a caricature.

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Penitential update: Instead of saying an Our Father and three Hail Marys, read Matt Fagerholm’s interview with St. Vincent’s director and writer Ted Melfi at rogerebert.com, Life is in the Middle.

“People live in the middle. I think everyone does. Good is on one side, bad is on the other side, and we live in the middle. What’s bad about Oliver’s father? He fell out of love with his wife and he cheated on her. Is that bad? Yeah, cheating on her is bad, but falling out of love isn’t bad. It happens. Maggie is not a good mom and not a bad mom. She’s a mom. There’s heaven and hell in everyone…

“It’s what Pope Francis is saying. He’s saying that the church is a hospital for those who are sick. People of every faith can come there and find help, support, food, love.”

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St. Vincent, written and directed by Theodore Melfi. Starring Bill Murray, Melissa McCarthy, Naomi Watts, Chris O’Dowd, Terrence Howard, Scott Adsit, and Jaeden Lieberher. Rated PG-13. Now on DVD and and Blu-ray and available to watch instantly at Amazon.

Hawaiian CARE package

Uncle Merlin’s been on Maui for the past couple of weeks. To apologize, he sent us a CARE package.

He forgot to include some sun, surf, sand, and warm weather. Probably in the next package.

Aloha!

Macadamia nuts. More macadamia nuts. Macadamia nuts dipped in chocolate. Various sea salts and spices, flown in fresh from Hawaii, having survived an 80 degree drop in temperature along the way. Kitchen at the Mannion Ranch. Wednesday evening. February 25, 2015.

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Please help replenish the travel fund

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Singin’ the Post-Oscar Best Picture My Favorite Wuz Robbed Blues

Going by the online discussions I’ve seen, I can’t tell whose hearts were more thoroughly broken by their favorite movie’s not winning the Academy Award for Best Picture, the fans of Boyhood or the fans of American Sniper. They seem equally indignant on behalf of their movie, though, and equally certain that history will acknowledge that theirs is a cinematic masterpiece.

The American Sniper zealots, Right Wing conservatives to a man-boy, apparently, point to the amount of money it’s taken in at the box office to prove that it’s a great movie because, as we all know, mass popularity determines artistic achievement, which is why every Rembrandt, Van Gogh, and Pollock has been replaced in museums by those big eyed children and Elvises on velvet.  Being Right Wingers, of course, they aren’t logical thinkers and they can’t do the math anyway, so they haven’t thought about what it says about those box office numbers that they’ve seen the movie five times and so has “everybody I know”.

The ardent Boyhood fans are sure Boyhood’s a cinematic masterpiece because GENIUS!

Not just Richard Linklater’s genius. Their own as well. Boyhood must be a work of genius because geniuses like them know genius when they see it.

I’m not talking about you. I know you love Boyhood for all the right, non-egocentric reasons. I’m only going by what I’ve seen online.

But, again just going by what I’ve seen online, Boyhood fans have been consoling themselves with the fact that the Best Picture Award has often gone to forgettable and even terrible movies and that many losers have become classics watched and loved by generation after generation. This is true. But I noticed that some of the Best Picture winners they point to as forgettable and terrible are movies I thought were pretty good, like Forrest Gump and Shakespeare in Love, two movies that appeared on my students’ lists of their favorite movies. For the record, the oldest of my students was born in 1993. Forrest Gump came out in 1994, Shakespeare in Love in 1998. Seems to be taking a while for those movies to get forgotten. I’d say that movies loved by adults who were infants and pre-schoolers when they were first released are making a good case for themselves to be called classics. Anyway…

I haven’t seen Boyhood and I doubt I ever will. I’m sure it’s very good. Might even be a cinematic masterpiece. I just don’t have any interest in watching a movie about a fairly ordinary middle-class white kid growing from six to eighteen. I lived through that myself and then watched two now young men I know pretty well and several of their friends and cousins live through it pretty much concurrently with the kid in the movie. Who knows, though. Maybe if it does prove to be a classic and twenty years from now it and I are still around and being talked about I’ll give it a chance, although I’m hoping by that time I’ll be in the middle of watching some more boys and girls I know working their ways from boyhood and girlhood to adulthood and have more engaging and important things to do with my time.

The Best Picture loser I think will last is The Grand Budapest Hotel. 

The Theory of Everything and The Imitation Game might be remembered too, depending on the courses of Eddie Redmayne’s, Felicity Jones’, Benedict Cumberbatch’s, and Keira Knightley’s careers. American Sniper is part of Clint Eastwood’s legacy. Bradley Cooper’s too.  Selma, I expect, will last but in an artistically dubious way by being a junior high and high school history class staple. Young people will come of age admiring, even loving the movie but not sure if they think it’s a good movie because it really is a good movie or if they think it is because they’ve been told it is, the way people are when it comes to the novel To Kill a Mockingbird.

It’ll also depend on the course of David Oyelowo’s career.

But to the degree The Grand Budapest Hotel’s place in movie history depends on the course of anyone’s career, it’s on Wes Anderson’s and he’s already established himself as one of the best directors-auteurs of the last twenty years, so people will be watching The Grand Budapest Hotel for a long time because it’s one of his. I think it’s his best so far. (I know people who will go to the mat for Moonrise Kingdom.) It might turn out to be his masterpiece. But never mind its place in movie history as a Wes Anderson movie. I think it’s a great movie just for its own sake. Not only because it’s a visual delight and a brilliant work of visual storytelling. It’s the second most quotable movie I know that doesn’t star the Marx Brothers.

Quotability is one of the qualities of a movie that keep it alive generation after generation.

I’m not saying Birdman won’t hold up over time. I was rooting for Grand Budapest but I didn’t think it was robbed. More to the point, unlike those heartbroken and outraged fans of Boyhood and American Sniper, I didn’t feel robbed.

But who’s to say. Time will tell, and all that.

The folks at Rotten Tomatoes decided to see what time has told by applying “Tomatometer science” to all eighty-eight Best Picture winners since the first Academy Awards were handed out and ranking them from worst to best.

You’ll see that there are a few stinkers on the list, some mediocre movies, some that have been forgotten, deservedly and undeservedly, a few that probably will be forgotten before much longer, but that most of those are where they belong, fairly low down on the list. But you’ll also see something else. The majority of movies on the list aren’t just unforgotten, they’re unforgettable. That is, they’re classics. There really isn’t much consolation to be found in claiming that a Best Picture winner won’t stand up over the long haul the way your favorite will.

Something that is consoling is to remember that it’s often happened that the winner of the award for Best Picture isn’t the best picture among all the nominees. In fact, it sometimes happens that when there are several excellent movies up for the award, the weakest wins. Which doesn’t mean it was a bad movie. Of course, another thing to keep in mind is that even more often it’s happened that what time has revealed as the best movie of a given year wasn’t even nominated.

My personal and biased prediction: Not too many years from now people are going to look back at this crop of Best Picture nominees and say, “They didn’t nominate Guardians of the Galaxy? What was wrong with those people?”

So, the Rotten Tomatoes list? At the top? The most quotable movie ever made, and that’s even if you include movies starring the Marx Brothers.

This one. Best Picture. 1944.

The line popped right into your head, didn’t it?

Click on the link for Rotten Tomatoes’ whole list.

Hat tip to Oliver Mannion who was rooting for The Grand Budapest Hotel too but is cool with Birdman winning.

It’s not derangement. It’s demagoguery.

They may sound crazy and stupid, out of their minds and out of control to us. But that’s not how they sound to their base. To the fearful and angry mob that has become the core of the Republican Party, demagogues like Rudy Giuliani sound like speakers of truth because they are delivering the truth as the mob sees it. Wants to see it.

So the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson is correct in describing what seems to be the case:

GOP power brokers and potential candidates surely realize that President Obama is ineligible to run in 2016. Yet they seem unable to get over the fact that he won in 2008 and 2012. It’s as if they are more interested in vainly trying to rewrite history than attempting to lay out a vision for the future.

And he’s probably right that’ll cost them a third Presidential election in a row.  But here’s the thing. It won’t cost any of the wannabes the nomination except in a reverse and perverse way because he doesn’t sound crazy and stupid enough to the Right Wing Republican yahoos who will vote in the primaries. And as for the general election, as much as it may cost them, it will cost them more if they don’t keep bringing the crazy because that’s what will bring out the base. Their best chance lies in some Democrats staying home while every Republican shows up. That’s why they’re committed to voter suppression and why they’re committed to sounding deranged.

Scott Walker’s mistake wasn’t failing to repudiate Giuliani’s demagoguery. It was not endorsing it and ramping up the rhetoric. He made the mistake of thinking he needed to sound somewhat reasonable to the Press Corps. Instead all he sounded was mealy-mouthed to Republican voters.  He’ll learn.

More to the immediate point, it doesn’t cost them elections at the state and local levels or elections for seats in the House of Representatives. And I think they’d rather win all those than be in the Democrats’ position of having the White House but still have to watch their achievements of the last hundred years undone piecemeal at the state level while they are thoroughly stymied in Washington.

It galls them that they don’t own the White House because they believe they should own everything. They are, after all, the real Americans and only real Americans should be President. But it doesn’t matter in terms of real governing power.

But one more thing. It doesn’t cost the demagogues anything personally. Just the opposite. It pays them. Pays them very well. Giuliani may be a laughing stock from our point of view. But he’s the one laughing all the way to the bank. Walker probably won’t get the Republican nomination but running for the Republican nomination is a lucrative career. Ben Carson is already making a bundle off of people’s wishful thinking. The money will really start rolling in when he formally declares.

And it’s not just Republican politicians who get rich off riling up the mob. The whole media apparatus is in on the killing. Anger, fear, hatred keep the suckers coming back for more, wallets and pocketbooks wide open.

I was surprised that Marco Rubio was the only Republican Presidential hopeful mentioned in Robinson’s column who flat out dismissed Giuliani’s “blunt language.” I mean I was surprised that he was the one. Actually, I was surprised that there was even one, let alone that it was him. But I didn’t think Rubio had it in him.

I’m not giving him too much credit for it, though.

It’s likely he’s simply aware that his base includes Hispanics and some of them may be willing to vote for a fellow Hispanic even if he’s a Republican but not one who insults the President they enthusiastically and overwhelming voted for. He has to run for re-election in Florida next year. And maybe it’s also a sign he’s concluded he’s not going to be President or , at any rate, that this coming election won’t make him President.

Let’s see how deranged he’s sounding come 2020.

Another tip of the hat to Mrs M.

You should read all of Robinson’s column, Deranged by Obama, Republicans are spouting nonsense, at the Washington Post.

“Rudy Giuliani, American Soviet”

The quotable Matt Taibbi on his belief in American exceptionalism:

I feel sorry for Rudy that he can't love this country the way it is. I love America even with assholes like him living in it. In fact, I'm immensely proud of our assholes; I think America has the best assholes in the world. I defy the Belgians or the Japanese to produce something like a Donald Trump. If that makes me an exceptionalist, I plead guilty.

Taibbi’s column at Rolling Stone, Rudy Giuliani, American Soviet, features an interesting sketch of life in Russia in the first few years following the disintegration of the Soviet Union and well-worth reading for that alone. But Giuliani and his fellow American exceptionalists and their narcissistic nostalgia are the focus. You should read the whole thing.

Tip of the hat to Mrs M.

Sean Penn, me, and the Twitter scolds

Birdman director-writer-producer Alejandro González Iñárritu accepting the Oscar for Best Picture at last night’s Academy Awards.

Sean Penn’s green card dig at his friend Alejandro González Iñárritu was boorish, insensitive, inappropriate, unfunny, kind of mean, and a real cheap shot. It was the kind of “joke” that only gets a laugh between friends who are in the habit of teasing each other. It’s not the kind of joke you should make in public especially when your friend's big night when he's just won his third Academy Award of the evening. Penn should have saved it for the party afterwards. Better yet, he shouldn’t have said it all and let his friend have his night. The fact that Iñárritu responded by giving Penn a big hug shows that Iñárritu is a gracious and forgiving friend and Penn is lucky to count him as one of his. So it was a rude and stupid thing to say.

But it wasn’t xenophobic or racist unless you believe that A.) only Mexicans get green cards and B.) Penn doesn’t want Mexicans to get green cards or anybody from anywhere to get them.

After Penn made his little not-funny, the scolds came out in force in my Twitter feed. Instead of listening to Iñárritu’s third great acceptance speech of the night, they tweeted their outrage at Penn, making sure all the world know that they knew better than Sean Penn, as if knowing better is the same as being better.

This is one of the things I dislike about Twitter. People use it as the opposite of a mourner’s bench. They stand up to testify about other people’s sins. Everybody does it. I do it. It’s typically human.  It feels so good to be morally superior, especially when we’re feeling morally superior to someone who is in many other ways our moral, intellectual, or professional superior.

And sometimes we are morally superior.

Sometimes.

Not enough times, probably, though.

After the Oscars were over I thought about this and tweeted:

Sean Penn raised $6 million for Haiti. I gave $10 to the Red Cross. I think I should keep my mouth shut.

— Lance Mannion (@LanceMannion) February 23, 2015

This got a vanity-satisfying number of I assume approving retweets, although I must keep in mind “RTs =/= endorsement”. Which, by the way, is foolish. Why are you RTing then? You can “ endorse” a tweet without agreeing with it. If you feel you need the disclaimer why not put it this way: “RTs =/= agreement” or, more directly and honestly, “sometimes I RT stuff just for the sake of discussion” or “Sometimes I just like to troll my followers” or “If I RT one of your tweets, it might be because I want the world to see what an idiot you are”?

Anyway, I got RTed. I also got scolded.

The theme of most of the scoldings was that Sean Penn shouldn’t be awarded a Get Away With Being a Jerk Free card just because he's a rich do-gooder. Doing some good in Haiti doesn't give him permission to behave badly at the Oscars.

And I was reminded that my being comparatively poor and decidedly not famous doesn’t mean I have no right to criticize the rich and famous.

Thank you. That’s good to know. Now I can start a blog.

I also had it pointed out that Penn didn’t raise that money for Haiti. He raised it for his NGO to spend in Haiti, and NGOs are a suspect way to deliver aid to stricken nations. They go through too many middlemen, they put too much money and power in the hands of outsiders, they don’t make enough of an effort to involve local governments and local businesses and locals, that is, the people who are trying to rebuild their lives. They tend to spend their money on showcase projects that yield immediate and relatively easy success but don’t do any longterm good or do good in the places that need it the most. They misspend the money or don’t spend it at all.  I don’t know how much of this is true of Penn’s NGO. Likely some of it, possibly much of it, I hope not all of it. But I don’t see that that matters to my point.

The question is, what was my point?

I made a half-hearted attempt to make it clear.

The tweet wasn’t about Penn.

It was about me.

It really doesn’t matter how much good Penn is doing with his NGO. It matters that I am not doing enough good with the limited resources I have.

I’m not talking about money.

I know about the widow’s mite.

There are ways of making the world better besides giving lots of money to charity or any money.

At the very least I can try harder to follow the the latest iteration of Do unto others:

“Try not make anyone’s day worse than it probably already is.”

I wish I could remember where I heard that so I could give whoever said it proper credit.

I’m not doing anything to make the world better by scolding Sean Penn for a bad joke in a tweet he will almost certainly never see.

I’m sure not doing it by parading my own virtue in front of other self-righteous paraders of their virtue.

What I’m getting at is that before I congratulate myself on being morally superior to the likes of Sean Penn I ought to work on becoming morally superior to me. I’m no saint and I'm not going to come close to becoming a candidate for canonization no matter how much I shape up before I hand in the lunchpail. But I can shave some time off my deserved long stint in Purgatory. Indignant tweeting about boorish movie stars who’d probably gotten a head start on the after-Oscars celebrating isn't going to do it for me, though.

At any rate, I hope that while they were furiously tweeting their indignation the scolds weren’t missing Iñárritu say this:

I want to dedicate this award to my fellow Mexicans, the ones who live in Mexico, I pray we can find and build the government we deserve, and the ones who live in this country who are part of the latest generation of immigrants in this country, I just pray they can be treated with the same dignity and respect as the ones who came before and built this incredible immigrant nation.

If the camera noticed him at all while Iñárritu was talking I didn’t catch it, so I don’t know what Penn’s reaction was. Probably somewhere between enthusiastic applause and jumping up and down, fist-pumping hooting, whistling, and loudly cheering.

Unless he was already backstage, buying drinks and waiting for his friend to join him so he could toast him with another round of bad, teasing jokes, in the goofy way guys do to avoid telling a pal we love him and are so happy for him our hearts are ready to burst.

Here’s the speech. Watch for the hug.

Iñárritu’s immediate response was the hug. Later he said he thought Penn’s dig was “hilarious” and he added, “Sean and I have that kind of brutal (relationship) where only true friendship can survive."

I’d call that pretty gracious of him.

I’d also call it a dig.

_____________________________

The fact about Penn and his NGO was pointed out to me by author and journalist Jonathan M. Katz whose book about the earthquake that devastated Haiti in 2010, The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster, is gripping, infuriating, heartbreaking, and edifying. Penn figures prominently in a not unflattering light.

Penn started giving the extend answer the secretary-general hadn't, and his delivery was everything Ban's wasn't: demonstrative, vivid, intense. You cold forgive all the swooning he had elicted: He was handsome, if weathered by forty-nine years on earth and seven weeks in Haiti, with tanned skin wrapped tight around hollow cheeks, blue-ink tattoos running over veiny, muscular arms, and a pair of aviator sunglasses dangling from his neckline. As Penn explained the details of camp life, he seemed to draw from his recent portrayal of Willie Stark, the charismatic but vindictive governor of Louisiana in Steven Zaillian's remake of All the King's Men---though where that doomed character seethed with 1930s southern populism, Penn in Haiti went for the argot of the modern NGO. "Another thing that I think has to be very clear is that a tarp is not a tent," he said, squinting in the midday light. "A tarp structure is not a tent. A tarp structure sits on dirt. This is toxic dirt. This is dirt which carries backteria. This is dirt which could carry in high numbers of life-threatening bacteria, very shortly." Finally he nailed his point: "This is a camp that should be relocated, as many of them should be, flood zones and so on---and frankly in my view, we have to work to understand how to address the relative unliveability, currently, of this city, if only for children. You know, every good deed today is another cancer patient tomorrow, from what they are breathing on these streets."

The actor set out parameters for relocation with confidence of a hardened field manager: outside Port-au-Prince (the old dream of decentralization). Not in a flood zone. "Large-scale urban camps with manufacturing, deeded lands for agriculture, the ability to build communities." It was an impassioned plea, unfraid to contradict U.S. policy---tarps were a measly solution---and impressively informed on squatters' needs, especially considering it came from a newly minted, recently arrived aid worker. But perhaps it wasn't so hypothetical after all? When the Population Fund spokesman asked if Penn was helping to choose the resettlement sites himself---and odd question for an aid worker, let alone a celebrity, when you think about it---Penn surprised me again by saying that he "had a meeting with President Preval the other day in Washington and he's extended the members of his government to us who can advise us on this. We're going to be shown some of these sites."

I was confused. Sean Penn had a meeting with Preval? In Washington?...Penn, who had been involved in politics for years as an advocate, seemed to be taking the next step: contributing directly to policy making...

Wild: A very small person alone in a great big indifferent world

Not just a pretty picture post card of a movie: Academy Award nominee Reese Witherspoon as the young author Cheryl Strayed making her lonely but determined way through a beautiful but less than welcoming landscape in Wild, Jean-Marc Vallée’s understated adaptation of Strayed’s memoir of her adventures hiking the Pacific Crest Trail.

One of the smartest things director Jean-Marc Vallée does in Wild, his film adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, is avoid turning passages of nature writing from Strayed’s book into pretty motion picture post cards.  He lets cinematographer Yves Bélanger do very little landscape painting with his camera. The gorgeous scenery is there---the California scrub desert. The mountain trails and mountaintop vistas. The Oregon rainforests. Crater Lake. Smith Rock. The raging Columbia River---along with the flora and fauna, but you have to look away from the action to see them. The scenery is scenery, background against which the story unfolds, a setting for the actors to play upon and work with. When he does give in and indulge in some nature photography it’s usually as much for thematic as cinematic effect. He’s placing his heroine in context as a very small person making her lonely but determined way through an indifferent even hostile if beautiful world.

This is actually in keeping with Strayed’s book. Wild, her recounting of the eleven-hundred mile hike up the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert to the Columbia River and the border of Oregon and Washington she took all alone in 1994 when she was twenty-six, is about a person not a place or a series of places. The hike was self-prescribed therapy for getting over her adored mother’s death. Although writers like John Muir and Henry David Thoreau are among her literary heroes and models, it wasn’t their books she carried in her backpack (and burned in clumps of finished pages in her campfire each morning to lighten her load as she went) and Wild is not like My First Summer in the Sierra or A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers in being a combination of travelogue and nature writing. Wild is a confessional. There’s plenty of fine travel writing and nature writing in the book, but the territories she maps and explores in greatest detail and with the most intense focus are her own heart and psyche. Strayed set out to walk herself out of a life that had become desultory, unhappy, and self-destructive and into a new and better one. It’s a journey into self and the outer landscapes she describes are reflective of inner ones she’s trying to come to terms with. Which may explain why the writer who came to mind when I was reading Wild was one I don’t recall her mentioning.

Dante.

Sue me, I’m an English professor.

Wild is Strayed’s Divine Comedy, her personal allegory of her confrontation with her sins and her ultimate redemption. Her Virgil and her Laura is the ghost of her mother. Well, except that she isn’t nearly as grandiose, pompous, religious, or humorless as Dante was. Her Comedy is comic. My point is that the passages of nature writing, which are excellent, vivid and illuminating, set up situations. They’re in there because they’re where something happened to Strayed and what caused some of those things to happen. They’re scenery. 

Another smart move Vallée makes---and for this one he has help from screenwriter Nick Hornby---is not to let Strayed tell his story---which, of course, is her story---for him.  It would have been easy, and must have been tempting, to have his star Reese Witherspoon, reading straight from the book, give voice over narration or for Hornby to have turned passages from the book’s narration into soliloquies for Witherspoon to deliver onscreen as if thinking out loud. That happens but a lot less often than Vallée could have gotten away with.

Either Hornby took a minimalist approach to adapting Strayed’s writing for the screen, using as few of her words as he could, even skimping on words you’d think would be most useful to someone writing a movie, words that Strayed exchanged out loud with other people—dialog!---or Vallée whittled his script down in pre-production, on set, or during editing.

The people Strayed describes meeting along the way are gregarious, talkative, open, and voluble. They give Strayed plenty of material to tell their stories with.  Transferred to the screen, they’ve become more reticent. With only two exceptions, the characters in the movie’s present are laconic, even taciturn---the characters we meet in flashbacks are chattier, but a lot of what they have to say is exposition---and they reveal themselves through dropped hints, gestures, affect, costume, and business. Often what they say is important for the tone not the actual words and when their words are important they’re important as signposts, trail markers, telling us where we are in the story at the moment and where the story’s headed next. In a silent movie, it would have been handled with a title card.   

For all much of the dialog matters, Wild might as well be a silent movie. For long stretches it is a silent movie. Witherspoon is alone on screen with no one to talk to but herself, which she does sometimes, but those are times when Strayed is either trying to amuse herself, reassure herself, or is just so tired she’s practically delirious. They aren’t times when Vallée needs her to talk to the audience to tell us what’s going on because he doesn’t trust us to get it from the images or because he failed to find a way to tell us with images.  He’s not afraid of silence. Silence is one of the trials Strayed had to endure on her hike. It was also an aspect---a condition, like the heat and the cold, and a physical feature even, as much a part of the landscape as the juniper trees---of the hike she came to appreciate as a beauty. He lets us feel the silence, lets it sink in.

Wild has an excellent soundtrack but Vallée has used the music as transitions not as cover.

And the third smart choice Vallée made was to ignore the movie star who’s at the center of his movie and focus on the actress.

Vallée puts Witherspoon to use. There are very few moments when he lets his camera linger on her looking beautiful because there are very few moments when she looks beautiful. And it isn’t just that she’s there to work at playing a character and not be photographed being a movie star. Vallée does photograph her---the same way he photographs the scenery. She’s part of the overall visual effect like the scenery and the props and costumes. He blends her in. Mainly, though, he makes sure we see Cheryl Strayed not Reese Witherspoon.

It’s similar to what he did with Matthew McConaughey in Dallas Buyers Club except in that one the effect was more dramatic because of the shock of the sight of McConaughey not being a movie star and our amazement at what McConaughey had put himself through in order to make himself not be a movie star.  In Wild, the shock is milder and occurs when it dawns on us that for a long time we’d forgotten we were watching a movie star, thinking instead we were watching a fairly ordinary person looking tired, dirty, hungry, and in pain.

And the smart thing Witherspoon does is let herself be used as a prop and as scenery.  Witherspoon was the boss on this set. She bought the rights to the book and produced the movie. Wild could be called a vanity production but if vanity was at work it was an artist’s vanity. Witherspoon the businesswoman needed a name above the title to sell tickets. But Witherspoon the filmmaker hired herself to act not to simply star.  A lot of what directors do onscreen and onstage is compose pictures within a frame. Action is created by changing the pictures. Often this is a matter of arranging and rearranging the furniture, so to speak.  Good actors understand that an important part of their job is to be part of the furniture.

The other important part of the job is to play a part.

The problem for Witherspoon there is she doesn’t have the juiciest part to play. That’s because Strayed is an observer. In the book, her main subject for observation is herself. Watching a character in a movie watch herself is potentially a snooze or two hours of increasing annoyance. (In adapting Strayed’s book for the screen, there’s the meta- complication arising from Strayed’s having written Wild nearly twenty years after the fact working as an established writer from the extensive journals she kept as a budding writer and putting herself in the position of watching herself watching herself.) It’s a real trick to make that interesting and effective onscreen without resorting to cinematic gimmickry. (See Roger Ebert on Adaptation.) Offhand, I can’t think of another movie that pulls it off. The trick for Witherspoon and Vallée was to make us observe Strayed the way Strayed observes herself in the book. And, damn, if the trick doesn’t work.

So Wild is well-directed, well-written, and well-acted in being under-directed, under-written, and underplayed. There are moments, many moments, that could have used more directing, more writing, and more acting and these involve the movie’s other characters.

I don’t know if this was a matter of casting. All the supporting actors are competent but few of them have a striking screen presence.  I’ll have to watch it again to be sure, but it seemed as if Vallée just wasn’t interested in their characters except as facts. Strayed left family and friends behind, she met people along the trail, here they are.

As I said, I think it was a good thing on the whole that Vallée and Hornby were sparing in their use of Strayed’s writing. But also like I said the people she met gave her lots of material to work with and she took excellent advantage. Strayed has a gift for literary portraiture (and caricature) and I think Vallée and Hornby could have taken better advantage of that and allowed characters to have a little more to say for themselves.

There are three notable instances when a character is allowed to get chatty and in both cases it would have been better if they’d been a little less forthcoming.  One is a road construction worker who gives Strayed a lift, a meal, and bed for the night in his and his wife’s trailer when she’s lost, hungry, exhausted, and on the verge of giving up. But his function is to be there as a function of the plot. The scenes with him emphasize the predicament Strayed has placed herself in as a young woman out in the wilderness on her own with no real plan and no idea of the trouble she’s facing.  So he’s only interesting in that he poses the question of whether he’s a threat or a friend, a question that’s going to keep Strayed guessing about everyone she meets the whole rest of the way. The second is a non-threatening, over-friendly, possibly deranged journalist who coming upon Strayed as she’s trying to hitchhike her way back to the trail after having wandered off it for a while mistakes her for someone on the bum. He doesn’t offer her a ride. He attempts to interview her for a publication called The Hobo Times.  He has a problematic interviewing technique, though. He doesn’t listen to a word Strayed says in answer to his questions. The scene is a comic set-piece and it’s fun but it goes on a little too long.  The third is a thirsty bowhunter who is also over-friendly but in the creepiest way. He is a definite threat and provides the movie with its most intense moment of suspense. The construction worker is played by W. Earl Brown, the journalist by Mo McRae, and the hunter by Charles Baker. All three have striking screen presences.

Of course someone else in the cast has a striking screen presence and that’s why she’s in the cast playing the part she plays.

Laura Dern.

Although she’s dressed down and has an eccentric beauty for a movie star, Dern is used by Vallée as a movie star. She’s luminous, she’s joyful and joy-inspiring, a delight to watch, and of course being a very good actress she does more than simply let herself be photographed but that’s her main purpose here. Vallée doesn’t photograph her as a movie star, though, but as someone who we can see would be a star in someone else’s life and whose presence would be sorely missed. And we miss her when she’s not onscreen. But I wouldn’t call her part a supporting character. It’s an extended cameo. In fact, it’s not so much a character at all but an object of desire. If you want to see Dern deliver an Award-worthy performance as a true supporting player, you should watch her in The Fault in Our Stars in which she plays another mother only this time roles are reversed. It’s the daughter who’s dying and the mother who’s going to be left to grieve and Dern is utterly heartbreaking in her determination not to give into her grief prematurely. That doesn’t have anything to do with her work in Wild, of course. What’s important in Wild is that she makes us understand why a daughter would need to do something drastic to get over the loss of such a mother.

I think the movie would have been better if Vallée had included a few more true supporting characters played by actors with striking screen presences but I feel I’m not conveying how much I enjoyed it while I was watching it anyway. It’s a fine movie that does a good job of being faithful to the book it’s adapted from while being something more than just a faithful adaptation.  Unlike Wild the book, Wild the movie is not a confessional.

By the way, think the Dante comparison was a little too much? Me too. How about Wordsworth? Wild the book is Strayed’s Prelude in prose, her account of her simultaneously discovering herself as the writer and person she is.

Wild the movie is an epic romance, a heroine’s journey told as a tale of adventure and escape, illustrated with the occasional pretty post card from the trail.

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Wild, directed by Jean-Marc Vallée, screenplay by Nick Hornby, based on the book by Cheryl Strayed. Starring Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern, Gaby Hoffman, Thomas Sadoski, Michiel Huisman, Kevin Rankin, W. Earl Brown, Mo McRae, Charles Baker, and Keene McRae. Rated R. Now in theaters.

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Stayed is available in hardcover and paperback and for kindle at Amazon.

Big Hero 6: “I am satisfied with my care.”

Haven’t we seen Robert Downey Jr doing this in the Iron Man movies, not to mention The Avengers? Why, yes we have, and that’s the joke: Tony Stark and the Avengers have nothing on Hiro Hamada and his team of scientists turned superheroes in the Academy Award nominated, Big Hero 6.

As cartoons featuring  innocent-as-a-child, self-sacrificing, highly-weaponized flying robots go, Big Hero 6 is no Iron Giant.

As cartoons featuring a team of superheroes learning to work together go, Big Hero 6 is no The Incredibles.

But as cartoons featuring innocent-as-a-child, self-sacrificing, highly-weaponized flying robots and a team of superheroes learning to work together that pay respectful but subtle tribute to The Iron Giant and The Incredibles go, Disney’s latest animated feature, Big Hero 6, is all its own good thing, very well-done, and lots of fun.

Big Hero 6 is based on a Marvel comic book but the animators weren’t religious about staying true to their movie’s graphic origins. (FYI, though: despite the stylistic differences between comic and film, Big Hero 6 is still a Marvel superhero movie, which means there’s a cameo by Stan Lee. You’’ll need to keep your eyes open for it. It goes by in a Quicksliver hurry. ‘Nuff said.) Visually, it’s ambitious. There’s a terrific amount to look at in every shot, if you look for it, which you’re not forced to. Probably, when it comes out on DVD if you freeze any scene for study, you’ll find frames that are as crowded with entertaining imagery as a painting by Brueghel, but as the movie flies by the foreground is as sharp, clean, vivid, and focused as the best hand-drawn Disneys and the characters and main action don’t get lost in any confusion.

For the most part.

The climactic battle gets a little messy. The destruction isn’t as wanton as in Man of Steel but it goes on too long to little effect except effect.

The artwork is such that the movie looks like itself and not like any or every other animated feature, although there’s just enough of a touch of Disney that references to Frozen and other Disney classics slip in without calling the wrong sort of attention to themselves and there’s not a little Pixar influence at work---just as a for instance, our hero Hiro Hamada’s Aunt Cass bears more than a passing resemblance to Mrs Incredible when she’s not extending herself.  Despite the cast’s including James Cromwell, Alan Tudyk, Maya Rudolph, and Damon Wayans Jr., the voice work is undistinguished, It’s the animation and the writing that bring the characters to life as individuals. My favorite of the supporting players would have been Fred, the rich kid science buff, comic book fanboy, and all-around bro who gives the team their most important superpower, the one Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne give to Iron Man and Batman: money. But the writers take the joke a little too far with him. So my favorite’s Wasabi (voiced by Wayans) who at first seems too fussy and cautious to be a superhero but who when pressed into action turns out to have the most superheroic temperament and to be a natural chief executive officer, a field commander who can be counted on to take charge of that part of the fight where the team’s leader can’t be because he’s out of commission or busy elsewhere taking care of a bigger threat: sort of an even straighter-arrow Scott Sommers to Hiro’s teenage whiz kid Professor X.

And the villain is awesome!

Yokai is visually imposing and truly frightening.  In a film laced with humor, laugh outloud funny in many places, Yokai is in no way a joke. The moviemakers treat him with complete seriousness. In fact, part of his terrifying effect is the way he defeats humor, driving it from his scenes, like Sauron brushing aside an attack by the elves, as if comedy is a force for good, the heroes’ incorporeal ally rendered hopeless and ineffective.  And even though both sets of Spider-Man movies aren’t Disney properties---or even Marvel movie properties, exactly---Yokai owes a lot to Alfred Molina’s Doc Ock in Spider-Man 2, carried along on striding tentacle-like machine legs, ankle-length overcoat billowing. Yokai is also a sly reference toThe Incredibles in that this is one villain who’ll never lose focus by being tricked into monologuing.

But the movie’s main hero,the innocent-as-a-child, selfless robot Baymax, who is a big hero but not, as I thought going in, because I wasn’t familiar with the comic book, the Big Hero 6 of the title---Big Hero 6 is the name of the team---gives Big Hero 6 its heart and soul.

Doing a near perfect imitation of pre-psychotic break HAL from 2001,Scott Adsit gives Baymax his voice, soothing, ingratiating, unexcitable, maddeningly reasonable, infuriatingly literal, and essentially clueless about how the humans he’s programmed to take care of think and feel.   Baymax was built to be a home health care device, a combination nurse and walking first aid cabinet---Baymax is activated by the sound of humans expressing physical distress and won’t deactivate until he hears his patient assure him “I am satisfied with my care.”---and much of the comedy involves Baymax’s insistence on being true to his programming even when the situation seems to require more of him than a calm bedside manner.  But Baymax’s best moments come when he doesn’t talk or when what he says doesn’t really matter.  He’s at his funniest and most himself when he moves. Delicate even dainty of touch, light on his feet despite his size and apparent bulk because he’s made of vinyl and deflatable for easy storage, always patient and careful and therefore not always quick to react, Baymax is a great silent movie comic.

That’s about it. I don’t have much more to say about the film. Regular readers will know how rare that is for me, how I can almost always find more to say about a movie. Wait till I post my review of Listen Up Philip. But, really, that’s it: it’s fun, go see it.

Oliver Mannion, who gives Big Hero 6 the thumbs up, thinks I could have gotten away with saying a lot less. He recommended a one-sentence review:

“I am satisfied with my care.”

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Big Hero 6, directed by Don Hall and Chris Williams, screenplay by Jordan Roberts and Daniel Gerson & Robert L. Baird. With the voices of Scott Adsit, Ryan Potter, Maya Rudolph, James Cromwell, Alan Tudyk, Damon Wayans Jr., T.J. Miller, Jamie Chung, Genesis Rodriguez, and Daniel Henney. 102 minutes. Rated PG. On DVD and Blu-ray February 24, 2015; available now to watch instantly at Amazon.

The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, and 2001: A Space Odyssey are available to watch instantly at Amazon.

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At RogerEbert.com, Craig Lindsay’s appreciation of the best cartoon featuring an innocent-as-a-child, highly-weaponized, self-sacrificing flying robot, which also happens to be one of the best animated movies of the last thirty years and maybe of all time: “The Iron Giant” to the rescue.

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“Open the pod bay door, HAL.”: HAL was not self-sacrificing.

Rudy the immigrants’ grandson wasn’t raised “like us” either

Let’s pretend for a moment that Rudy Giuliani is a less nasty, less duplicitous, less self-serving, less corrupt human being than he is.

I know, some of you will have a hard time pretending he’s a human being, never mind the other things. But let’s all be good in a way he can’t be bothered to be. In fact, let’s pretend he’s not just less all those things but more their opposites.  Let’s pretend he’s almost a decent guy.

We can’t pretend he is a decent guy because, besides its being too much of a stretch, I want to write about what he said about the President and a decent guy wouldn’t have said what he said.

So, we’ll pretend he’s just a run of the mill Republican yahoo politician who hates the President for the usual reasons shooting his mouth off.

Let’s start with this.

Giuliani is from New York City. Born and raised there. A large chunk of the country, mainly and especially people who live in places that vote Republican think New York City isn’t part of America.

In their minds New York City is a combination of the worst of Paris, Moscow, Bangkok, Tijuana, and Mos Eisley.

Definitely not part of the “real” America.

Next. Giuliani is Catholic. Nominally. The two divorces, three marriages, multiple adulteries, and his once having been pro-choice would earn him more than a few Hail Marys and an Our Father as penance if he ever went to confession.

Catholics were Othered by “real” Americans from the start. The country was settled by Protestants who thought of the Church of Rome as the enemy.  Even after ratification of the Constitution with the First Amendment, many real Americans wanted to ban Catholics from voting and holding public office. Almost 200 years later, John Kennedy still had to promise he wouldn’t take orders from the Pope if he was elected President. The Ku Klux Klan devoted itself to intimidating and killing African Americans but they were equal opportunity haters and had time and energy left over to make life miserable for anybody they regarded as not really white and American and that included Catholics.

As Bill Bryson writes in One Summer: America, 1927:

Nothing better captured the expansive spirit of detestation in the period than the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. Until recently moribund, the Klan burst onto the national stage in the 1920s with a vigor and breadth of appeal that it had nver his in its antebellum heyday. The Klan hated everybody, but it did so in ways strategically contrived to reflect regional biases, so that it focused on Catholics and Jew in the Midwest, Orientals and Catholics in the Far West, Jews and southern Europeans in the East, and blacks everywhere. At its peak, the Klan had five million members (some sources say eight million), and seventy-five members of Congress either belonged to or were openly associated with it. Several cities elected Klan mayors. Oklahoma and Oregon had Klan governors. In Oregon the Klan nearly succeeded in getting Catholic schools outlawed, and in many places Catholics were forbidden membership on school or hospital boards, and Catholic-owned businesses were boycotted.

There are still places where Catholics are regarded with suspicion and disdain and Catholicism is openly despised and most of those places are places that vote Republican. The only reason many conservative Protestants tolerate Catholics in their midst is that they see them as allies in hating on women and gays.

Then, of course, his last name isn’t Smith.

A case can be made that for a period of nearly sixty years---say from 1886, the year of the Haymarket Riot, to 1941, when Joe DiMaggio hit safely in 56 straight games---Italians were the most despised and vilified group of immigrants after Asians. Whatever “real” Americans are saying about Hispanics today, they said as loudly and emphatically about Italians back then.

Italians were dirty, lazy, irrational, licentious, profligate, stupid, and violent. They were born criminals, not just in being bootleggers and gangsters. Their politics were criminal. They were anarchists, communists, socialists---un-American. Anti-American! They were bomb-throwers, murderers, and terrorists. For a long time the Italians who dominated the popular imagination were Al Capone and Sacco and Venzetti.

Sacco and Venzetti have faded in real Americans’ collective nightmares but Capone’s still there. All the while he was growing up and well into his adulthood, Giuliani had to deal with the fact that when an Italian appeared on television and in the movies---or in the newspapers---it was as gangster.

When it wasn’t as some version of a happy-go-lucky but hapless organ grinder.

It probably didn’t help that Giuliani’s father actually was a gangster, although a very low-level one, but all Italian-Americans had to live with the fact that when most “real” Americans thought of Italian-Americans from New York City the first names that came to mind were Luciano, Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese and Lucchese, Gallo, and Gotti, not to mention Corleone.

The Sopranos are from Jersey but I doubt many people make the distinction.

What all this adds up to is that Rudy Giuliani is the last person who should be telling a roomful of “real” American bigots and yahoos that the President isn’t one of “us.”

More to the point, he should know that “us” isn’t us. There is no “us”, not as the people in the audience who cheered him define. There is only us. All of us.

And while there is a way to be raised “like us”, their “us”, which is as white, Protestant, and definitely not from New York City, there is no one way to be raised like us, because any way we are raised we are still part of us.  That’s what it means to be an American. That’s our exceptionalism. 

There is no other country in the world where you belong just because you want to belong.

At least in principle.

But usually in practice too.

Barack Obama’s bringing up was out of the ordinary, unusual even compared with most Americans’ and not just “real” ones, but not in his having a father who wasn’t born here and not in his having been born into a family that was “white” on one side and in the eyes of some “real” Americans not “white” on the other.

Rudy Giuliani isn’t like “us” either. He wasn’t raised like “us.” But the only people who’d hold that against him are people like the ones he was telling that the President doesn’t love America.

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Read Wayne Barrett, author of Rudy: An Investigative Biography, on the many ways Giuliani is nasty, duplicitous, self-serving, and corrupt, in this column for the New York Daily News, What Rudy Giuliani knows about love — a response to his 'doesn't love America' critique of Obama, and Juan Cole’s post comparing Giuliani’s upbringing to the President’s, Giuliani & Obama: Immigrant Families and Really Loving America, at Informed Comment.

For Your Consideration…

It’s Oscar Weekend here in Mannionville and the editors are gearing up for the Big Event Sunday with a Lance Mannion Movie Review Festival!  Here’s the schedule:

This morning: I’ve already reposted by reviews of Best Picture nominees The Imitation Game, starring Oscar nominees Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley, and The Theory of Everything, starring Oscar nominees Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne. Click on the links or scroll down.

The Imitation Game: Benedict Campbell’s Turing de force.

The Theory of Everything: A Brief History of Love.

This afternoon: my review of American Sniper should post.

Tomorrow: Wild and The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Sunday: Birdman and Big Hero 6.

Please leave your picks and personal favorites in the comments. If I had a vote? Best Picture: The Grand Budapest Hotel. American Sniper is my second choice. My sentimental favorite’s The Theory of Everything. Best Actor: Eddie Redmayne. Best Actress: Felicity Jones. Best Director: Wes Anderson. Best Animated Feature: The Boxtrolls.

By the way, Ralph Fiennes was robbed.

See you on the red carpet. I’ll be wearing L.L. Bean and J.C. Penney. You?