Lance Mannion

Drama critics only come out at night, up to no good

Lots of Oscar related movie reviewing below, but something new is being added soon.

Theatre reviews.

I’m going to start reviewing plays.

First up will be Double Falsehood, which is being produced by The Classic Stage Company where the acclaimed production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters is finishing it up its run this week.

I’ll be attending the show Sunday, March 20, and, I hope, post my review the next day.

Once upon a time I used to do this on deadline and could see a play that dropped its curtain at 11 and fly back to the newspaper office and have my review written and filed by midnight.

This is one of the reasons I like blogging.

Room for procrastination.

At any rate, if the plan comes together, I’ll be doing these once a month.  I’m very excited about it.  I think it’ll be good news for the blog and its reader, expanding the scope and interests of the one and adding lots more company to the other. 

More variety.  More fun.

Of course, it’s an added expense, so…you know…

If you enjoy what goes on here and are glad we’re back and would like to help keep the blog going strong and you can swing it, please consider making a donation.

Thanks to one and all for your encouragement and support, with extra thanks today to Jim Wolcott and Matt Zoller Seitz.

Oscar Week in Mannionville: The wounded family pride of the Pride of Lowell. A review of The Fighter

 

Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale as the real life brothers, the boxer Micky Ward and his once and future trainer Dicky Eklund in David O. Russell’s Oscar nominated The Fighter.

Christian Bale is so frightening to look at it The Fighter that I began to look forward to scenes of Mark Wahlberg getting his face beaten bloody in the boxing ring just to have something prettier to rest my eyes on.

Amy Adams in a crop top and cutoffs wasn’t relief enough.

Plus her character brings horrors of her own to the screen.

Bale is a scary sight thanks to the way he starved himself to a skeletal thinness to play Dicky Eklund, once a talented boxer who fought the likes of Sugar Ray Leonard---and may or may not have knocked him down---now a crack addict, thief, con artist, and cross for his brother Micky Ward (Wahlberg) to bear through life and in the ring.  Micky is a talented fighter in his own right, but Dicky has made himself his trainer, and mostly what he’s training Micky to do is restore Dicky to fame and glory.

But it’s not just that all his bones show through his pale and pasty skin.  Bale’s eyes pop wildly, his grin is too wide and sloppy with his lips turning inward as if reaching backwards to hold in the ill-fitting and broken dentures so they don’t fall out of his goofily gaping mouth.  His limbs flap.  His shoulders droop to the point where they seem to be about to let go of his arms and drop them like heavy luggage. His head bobs atop his long heron-like neck.  His thinned out hair is stiff and stands up all on its own to reveal a small, rectangular bald spot that looks as though it was the result not of normal hair loss but of a shaving from hospital orderlies struggling to hold him down while prepping him for shock therapy.

All this, wiping out all trace of the handsome and dashing Bruce Wayne from Bale’s Batman movies, is frightening enough to behold.

But what’s really scary is how thoroughly all trace of Christian Bale the movie star has been wiped out as well.

I can’t think of another case of a star disappearing so completely inside a character.

For all her wonderful transformative powers, not even Meryl Streep has managed this.  Streep is a portrait painter, using herself as her canvass.  She paints her characters onto the screen over herself, as it were, and you can always find her at the core of her portraits.

But the more you look for Bale in his Dicky Eklund the less of them you find.  You catch sight of Dicky at a glance and Bale will seem to be there for a second. But as soon as you focus your gaze, he’s gone.  It’s like seeing someone on the street and thinking it’s someone you know well but when you catch up to him it turns out he looks nothing like the person you mistook him for.

There may have been a resemblance but for the life of you you can’t find it now.

The talk is that Bale became Dicky Eklund so well that during filming around Eklund’s hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts---The Fighter is based on a true story---people who knew Eklund and saw Bale thought it was Dicky.

This happened despite the fact that Bale was playing Dicky as he was in the early 1990s and is nearly twenty years younger than the real Dicky Eklund.

Which adds a different kind of horror to watching The Fighter.

It’s hard to believe that a talented and intelligent and apparently decent-hearted human being could make such a wreck of himself and then, having do so, continue to crash into the same walls and drive off the same cliffs and, sadly and infuriatingly, plow into the same crowds of pedestrians over and over again.

It’s just as hard to believe that so many of the pedestrians seeing him coming don’t dive out the way but walk on out into traffic to meet him head on.

When the movie opens, Dicky is in freefall.  He’s like a cartoon character falling from the top branch of a tree and bouncing off each and every lower branch on his way to the ground.  The thing is he thinks he’s on his way up.  Every time he hits a branch he’s convinced the rebound is launching him back to the top. 

Amazingly, he seems able to convince most everyone watching him fall that he’s right.

Most of these people are members of his own family.  But since he seems related to half the population of Lowell by blood, marriage, and casual hookup, it’s as if he had the entire city rooting for him.  People cheer him on as if his determined self-destruction is the opposite and every predictable consequence a shocking bit of undeserved bad luck that can be countered by doing more of the same things that brought trouble the last time.

When you hit yourself over the head with a pipe and the pipe doesn’t break, the thing to do is hit yourself harder and then take pride in the effort.

His chief enabler is his mother, Alice, played by Melissa Leo with a relentless monomaniacal charm and the sympathy-engendering cluelessness of an inept villain who doesn’t know she’s a villain but is under the impression that every selfish thing she does is a an act of self-sacrifice worthy of a saint and martyr.

Dicky was supposed to be the family’s savior.  He was the one who was going to bring glory and riches to the whole tribe and despite all Dicky’s done that’s what Alice still expects of him and she insists that the whole family owes him as if he’s already accomplished everything she believes he will accomplish and wasn’t up to accomplishing.

As far as Alice is concerned, Dicky’s still the one.  He’s just going to do it now using Micky’s fists instead of his own.

Mixing up the needs and ambitions of one of her children with those of another is, in her mind, the way families work.  Her seven daughters, who follow her around like a chorus, are practically interchangeable, because from her point of view they are and ought to be.

Micky is meant to subordinate himself to Dicky.  But here’s the even more insidious part.  Hero and savior that he’s intended to be, Dicky himself is meant to be doing it all for the family.  The family is Dicky.  Dicky is the family.  In rising, Dicky (through Micky now) will raise them all.  In celebrating and subordinating themselves to him, the family is celebrating and asserting itself.

But that family is Alice’s family.

She is the mother.  They are her creations.  All of them, even Dicky, are extensions of herself.  There are no individuals among them, just facets of herself.  Dicky happens to be the surface that shines brightest to her eyes, that’s all.

It’s not that she uses her children to serve her own needs and ego.  It’s that she honestly doesn’t see that there’s any difference between serving her own needs and ego and taking care of her family and can’t see that her children might have needs and egos apart from hers.  To her, any children of hers who disagrees with her, who try to live as if they lives of their own they have to tend to instead of doing what she expects them to do, is betraying the family.

Dicky and his sisters don’t even notice this, let alone question it.  But Micky has noticed and he does question it, to the point of wanting to break free.

Fight his way free.

The fight scenes in The Fighter aren’t pretty, except as distractions from the domestic horror show and Christian Bale’s popping eyes.  These aren’t the greatest fight scenes ever filmed.  Director David O. Russell has shot them too realistically, at ring level.  He shows you what you’d see of a fight if you were the referee.  But they have a beauty and grandeur, apart from the beauty and grandeur of the sport itself---if you think boxing has any.  I do---and that beauty and grandeur lie in the fighters’ isolation.

The ring is the only place where Micky is free.  He’s removed from family and tribe and therefore free of the claims of kinship and blood.  He can be himself merely in being by himself.

His life, for however many rounds the fight lasts, is under his own control.

He wants some of that control outside the ring.

But he doesn’t know how to go about getting it.

Well, he does.  He just doesn’t like what he knows he has to do.  Break away from his family, particularly Dicky.

His conscience won’t let him do this.

Then he meets Charlene

Charlene is an absolute believer in people living their lives for themselves.  She has learned the hard way.  She works tending bar in a local watering hole, a job she regards as punishment, but a punishment she has earned for herself.  That’s important.  She went to college on a sports scholarship.  She ran track.  An injury cut short her athletic career but drinking and partying got her kicked out of school.  But she did that to herself.  And if she had the ability to wreck her life on her own, she must have the ability to rebuild it.

The same goes for Micky.

What they both need to do is mark the boundaries between their own lives and the lives of others and make those boundaries clear and uncrossable without permission and rules set for visitors.

In Charlene’s view, one of the cardinal sins is to do something you don’t want to do just to please someone else.  So instead of being charmed or flattered when Micky takes her to a foreign film for their first date, thinking that because she went to college she must have “intellectual” tastes in movies, she’s furious and almost ends their relationship right there.

Adams wears that crop top and those cutoffs well, but she wears them as if she’s willing herself to look good in them.  They are the self-assigned and self-designed uniform of her job.  Looking good in them earns her bigger tips and she needs to make the money if she’s going to make her way back onto the road to a better life.  But she wears them with a kind of perverse pride as well.  They are her Scarlet A but they are also the banner of announcing her future success.  Look at me now, while you have the chance, they say.  I know what I’ve done to myself, I know what I’ve become.  But I know what I’m doing for myself too.  I know where I’m going next.  I know what I will be.

She has stripped down for her fight against self-destruction people like the Eklunds call bad luck the way boxers like Micky Ward strip down for a fight in the ring.

Micky and Charlene recognize in each other fellow spiritual athletes.  They are both in a fight for their lives against the lives circumstances and other people’s expectations would force them to live.  They have complementary skills.  Micky can take a punch and punch back harder.  Charlene knows how to duck and weave.  Micky has the strength.  Charlene has the smarts. 

Charlene hires on as Micky’s moral trainer and they team up to take on Micky’s most dangerous opponents, his mother and brother.

The happy ending isn’t that Micky Ward becomes the champion fighter he was cut out to be.  It’s that in order for him to do so he and Charlene have to put Alice and Dicky in their proper places, which, ironically, turn out to be, for Alice, on her feet ringside cheering her younger son on and, for Dicky, back in his brother’s corner in time for Micky’s big fight.

The Fighter is about how family---and the movie takes a broad view of family, one that includes the whole tribe---can be both the worst and best things we have going for us.

Visit the real Micky Ward’s official website.

Oscar Week in Mannionville: Why I gave Black Swan the skip. Been there, done that, bought them breakfast.

I saw four of the five movies made by the directors nominated for the Academy Award for Best Directing this year.

David Russell’s The Fighter. Tom Hooper’s The King’s Speech.  David Fincher’s The Social Network. And Joel and Ethan Coen’s True Grit.

For a while I thought it was only fair that I should go see Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan.  But I just couldn’t make myself go.

I was afraid the experience would be too much of a nostalgia trip.

Watching dancers abusing their bodies and actresses experimenting with lesbian sex?

Those were my college years, man.

_______________

James Wolcott’s review of Black Swan didn’t have me rushing out the door to see it anyway.

Oscar Week in Mannionville: The wrong way to correct The King’s Speech

Preparing for the moment of truth in a movie that plays a little fast and loose with the truth.  Helena Bonham Carter and Colin Firth as Elizabeth and George VI in The King’s Speech.

The King’s Speech is mildly deceptive in its presentation of time passing and in that way distorts history to a bit.  For dramatic purposes, of course.

Superimposed titles and clues within the dialogue and in the backgrounds of scenes tell us that the story is unfolding over the course of fourteen years.  But the passage of time isn’t dramatized.  Fashions don’t noticeably change, the main characters do not appear to age, their young children do not grow up---actually the future Queen Elizabeth doesn’t even get born. In real life she arrived in 1926, a year after the opening scene of the movie; in the King’s Speech she just appears at some indeterminate point in time almost fully-fledged, at around eleven years old and stays that way right up until 1939 when the movie ends.

The effect is that the action of the story feels as if it’s taking place in a relatively short period of time, in the last few years or even months leading up to the Nazi invasion of Poland and Great Britain’s entrance into World War II.

This adds an element of suspense.  Will the eccentric but brilliant speech therapist Lionel Logue cure his royal patient, Prince Albert, whom he insists on calling Bertie, presently the Duke of York but soon (although not as soon as the movie makes it seem at the outset) to be King George VI, of his painful, humiliating, and paralyzing stutter in time to take over the throne from his feckless brother and inspire and lead the British people through their darkest days and into their Finest Hour?

Add to the time compression, director Tom Hooper’s choice of a color palette dominated by blacks and grays, the typical English weather of gray and grayer skies often filled with rain, the somber background music, the fact that nobody in England appears to ever have any fun except for Bertie’s older brother, the ridiculous and determinedly useless King Edward VIII and the Woman He Loved so much he gave up the throne for her, the horrid (as the movie portrays her) and horrifying Wallis Simpson, and the way Hooper and screenwriter David Seidler use Winston Churchill as the symbol of British courage and victory he became and not as the wily and slippery political maneuverer and manipulator he was and the suspense is incalculably heightened as it feels as if the Nazi threat is looming over England the whole time.  When the barrage balloons and gun emplacements and uniforms appear over and around London, you almost take them for granted, as if they’ve been there all along.  As far as you can tell from the movie, England was a nation on the brink for fourteen years.

Except, of course, as I said, it doesn’t feel like fourteen years are passing.  It feels as if Lionel Logue and Bertie are rushing to save the nation in the nick of time.

None of this bothered me when I watched the movie. None of it bothers me, thinking back on it.  And none of it bothers me now that I have read Isaac Chotiner’s objections to how in the movie history gets elided along with the passage of time.

But he has a point.

In a piece for the New Republic, Royal Mess: ‘The King’s Speech’ is an ugly distortion of history, Chotiner makes the case that the movie is “inaccurate, entirely misleading, and, in its own small way, morally dubious.”

Three “ugly distortions” riled Chotiner specifically.

The movie glosses over Edward VIII’s attraction to Hitler and the Nazis.

It completely reverses Churchill’s role in the political maneuvering that led to Edward’s abdication and George’s coronation.

And this, which Chotiner seems to think is the most egregious of the movie’s crimes against historical truth:

Bertie ascended to the throne at the end of 1936. Three years later, he gives the speech of the film’s title. In the time between these two events, the British government notoriously blundered and appeased the Nazis, most famously at Munich. Less well-remembered is that after Prime Minister Chamberlain returned from giving away a chunk of Europe to the Germans, he was immediately invited to Buckingham Palace to appear on the balcony with the King and Queen (the latter is now better known as the recently departed but beloved “Queen Mum”). This was both a violation of protocol—the Royals are supposed to stay out of politics—and an extraordinary endorsement of a prime minister whose foreign policy was disastrous. Much of the Labour Party was rightly furious. This despicable historical fact is less well-known than it should be, but the film fails twice—first, by not showing it at all, and, second, by implying that Bertie was staunchly anti-fascist from the start.

None of the movie’s fudging of the passage of time bothered me.  But that doesn’t mean that nothing bothered me about the movie.

I thought, and still think, that Edward---called David by his family before he became King---was given short-shrift as a character and it was strange that in a film packed with portents and dread of the rising Nazi threat  and in which one of the things were rooting for is for Bertie to be able to speak out against that threat, one of the more important things about Edward, his crypto-fascism, was dealt with in a few throwaway lines.

In The King’s Speech, it’s made clear from the first that David/Edward is not cut out to be a king, even of a country where the king’s role is largely ceremonial.   It’s a given of the movie that he ought never be allowed to wear the crown and in fact from the beginning his whole family, including his mother and father, are expecting that he never will be king.  They seem to think that his father will outlive him or someone, possibly David himself, will find a way to ease himself out of the picture.  It’s weighing heavily on Bertie’s conscience from the start that he knows his brother, whom he loves, should not be king but to work towards making sure that he doesn’t means working to make himself king.

There just isn’t enough of David in the movie for us to understand why everybody, including himself, thinks he would be a disaster for England, but by focusing so much on his obsession with Wallace Simpson and leaving out his political views, such as they were, the movie implies that whatever the flaw in his character that unfitted him for the throne it had more to do with his being enthralled by Wallis Simspon in bed than in thrall to Hitler in his head.

As Chotiner says, this makes him a ridiculous figure but not a particularly dangerous one, which he was.  And he continued to be one after he abdicated:

Edward VIII was an ardent admirer of Hitler and of fascism, and a proponent of appeasement long after Germany moved onto Polish soil and hostilities began in earnest. Edward lived in continental Europe with Simpson after abdicating; following the German invasion of France, he absurdly asked the Nazis to look after his house. Eventually, the British government convinced the couple to move to the Bahamas, where he became governor. The idea was to keep the pair far away from the Nazis so as to prevent Edward from cutting any deals with Hitler.

I would have liked to see a little more of this side of him, not just because it would have been more historically accurate to have included it, but it would have added to the sense of urgency behind Bertie’s struggle to make himself better fitted to be a king.

And I was disappointed by Churchill’s reduction to a symbol.  As Churchill, Timothy Spall growls and waves his cigar around convincingly, but for all he actually has to do or say Churchill might as well have been left out as a character and replaced by a portrait flashing the famous V for Victory sign carefully photographed to look over Bertie’s shoulder approvingly at key moments.

As for King George’s political blunder after Munich, I didn’t miss it because I didn’t know about it until I read Chotiner’s essay.  From that I can conclude one of two things.  Either my reading of the history of World War II isn’t as extensive or complete as I thought or none of the historians whose books I’ve read regarded it as all that important in the grand scheme of things.

I can see how it might have been very important.  Knowing the King of England gave his blessing to appeasement, Hitler might have been even more certain that he had been granted license to take as much of Europe as he wanted as long as he left Great Britain and her colonies alone.

But this is the underlying assumption of the neoconservative argument that appeasement caused the War, that if only England had stood up to Hitler right away, he’d have backed down, which I’ve always thought grossly underestimates Hitler.

The reason Churchill opposed appeasement was he thought war with Germany was inevitable, not that it could be avoided.

But this is open to debate, and the fact that it is open to debate is a good reason for Hooper and Siedler to have left the whole question out of the movie.

Chotiner writes:

The strange unwillingness of The King’s Speech to mention any of this is at least somewhat surprising for one reason: The actual arc of George VI’s character would make a fine and interesting movie. Just think: A king fights against a stutter and his dastardly, treasonous brother, while eventually sloughing off his old instincts for appeasement. He even overcomes his distaste for Winston Churchill—the politician who bent over backward for that very same brother—and lends his steadfast support to Churchill’s aggressive policy against fascism.

And he’s right.  That story would have made a fine and interesting movie.

It just would have been a very different movie.

And the difference wouldn’t be, as Chotiner seems to think, that one movie, the one he would have preferred to see made, was more historically accurate, intellectually challenging, and artistically sophisticated and complex.

The difference would have been that the two movies would have told very different stories.

I think more could have been made of Edward’s fascist leanings and Churchill could have been portrayed as less of a caricature.

But if the movie had gotten into the deeper questions underlying the abdication and appeasement, then that’s what the movie would have been about.  It would have been an historical epic or a realistic political thriller.  Either way it would have had Winston Churchill at its center.

A lot of time and attention would have had to go into explaining Churchill’s contradictory stands in both crises.

How was it that he was such a staunch supporter of Edward, whom he knew to be an admirer of Hitler, at the same time he was one of the strongest advocates for standing up to Hitler and preparing for war?

Chotiner’s ideal movie wouldn’t have had much room for the story of the friendship between Bertie and Lionel Logue.  It would have been too busy telling the story of the relationship between King George and Winston Churchill.

I was taken with The King’s Speech from the first shot of Colin Firth.  The pain and terror in his eyes is heartbreaking.  But that shot, and Firth’s expression, announce that The King’s Speech is about a man trapped in a personal hell and from there history, while never beside the point, is the background and not the focus of this particular man’s story.

That story tells of a good and noble man’s struggle against his personal demons and how he overcomes them with the help of another good and noble, although eccentric, man and the love and support of the good and noble woman who is his wife.

The King’s Speech isn’t an historical epic or a political thriller.  It’s an intimate dual-portrait of a friendship and a marriage.

Chotiner’s ideal movie, which I’d give the working title Abdication and Appeasement, not only wouldn’t have had room for Geoffrey Rush or anyone as Lionel Logue.  There’d have been no place for Helena Bonham Carter as the woman most of us know affectionately as the current Queen Elizabeth’s mother, the Queen Mum.

We would have been denied the pleasure of watching two now Academy Award worthy performances.

One of the persistent flaws in my own thinking and writing about movies is my tendency to judge a movie not on its own terms and merits but on how it measures up against the movie I would have preferred it be or the movie I think it might have been if the filmmakers had been smarter or had tried harder or had been more like…well…me.

Chotiner falls into this trap.

I think it’s an interesting question:  How much responsibility does art owe to history?  Some very great artists have answered, None at all.

We don’t know how aware Shakespeare was that his sources for Richard III were works of libel.  We don’t know if he’d have cared if he did know.  Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra are faithful to Plutarch and, as far as Shakespeare could have known, Plutarch was a reliable historian.  But Thomas Moore wasn’t.  His biography of Richard III was a work of pro-Tudor propaganda.  Shakespeare cribbed from Moore.  But do we really wish that he hadn’t and never written these lines:

But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinish'd, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity:
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain

Do we wish we could never watch Lawrence Olivier deliver them?

So my question for Chotiner would be, does he really wish we could never watch Geoffrey Rush and Helena Bonham Carter in these roles?

Another way to put this is, Would he rather have accurate history or great art?

He would probably answer there’s no reason we can’t have both, and I would agree, but with this difference.

There’s no reason both have to be in the same movie.

The King’s Speech as it is doesn’t mean that a movie like the one Chotiner would have preferred can’t or won’t ever be made.

It just means that it wasn’t.

We have only The King’s Speech to talk about, and it’s a movie that happens not to be about what Chotiner wishes it was about.

Which brings me to my final point.

Moviemakers have always given themselves permission to play fast and loose with history.  But that’s not because they’re irresponsible or they can’t be bothered or, as Chotiner seems to think was the case behind The King’s Speech, they’re too focused on pandering to a chosen audience.

It’s because to them movies are about…movies.

That is, particular movies may be incidentally about a number of things, history and politics included.  But mainly they are about what is up there on the screen for the audience to see and enjoy.

So a movie, whatever its story, can be about how that story is told more than about its particulars.  Or, whoever and whatever its characters are supposed to be, the movie will be about how those characters are portrayed.

Which often means that a given movie is about the actors’ acting.

The King’s Speech is a movie about Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush and Helena Bonham Carter acting together.

As history, it’s bunk.  As a story it’s a little overly romantic and sentimental.  As a work of filmmaking, it’s competent but not original or brilliant.

But as a movie about its stars acting it’s a work of rare beauty.

Oscar Week in Mannionville: The Asocial Network, rebooted

The Mannion guys voted to screen The Social Network as the feature for Family Movie Night tonight, so…

From October 5, 2010.

The Social Network is the near flawlessly well-told story of a sad and lonely social misfit who doesn’t like himself very much and dreams and schemes his way to becoming someone he thinks he’ll like much better.

At this point it’s tempting to write something along the lines of “Ironically, the thing he invents to make his dreams come true is a digital version of the kind of social networking he’s temperamentally incapable of navigating in the analog world” but actually Facebook, for what it is and what it does, doesn’t turn out to actually matter to the story.

Our sad and lonely social misfit might as well have been a chemical engineer who devises a method for extracting unobtanium and in a movie made in another day and age he would have been and we’d still have the same story with same moral, Money and fame won’t buy happiness.

Despite being about the founding of one of the newest next big things of our very modern moment, The Social Network is a rather old-fashioned piece of moviemaking.  It’s about its characters as people with feelings not as avatars of the dawn of the 21st Century and it just wants to tell their story and not the story of their and our times.  The title is a something of a quiet joke on anyone in the audience who is there to learn something cool about Facebook as a cultural, technological, or even money-making phenomenon.  The social network is the network of feelings that bind people together in the analog world.

I don’t know if the real Mark Zuckerberg is a sad and lonely social misfit who would give up everything he’s achieved in the last seven years if by doing so he could undo the mean and rotten thing he did that in a twist of fate turned out to lead to the founding of Facebook.  From what I’ve seen of him in the news lately, celebrating his tremendous gift to the Newark school system, he seems to be a man at peace with himself and his wealth and his fame.  But who knows what sins and self-doubts he’s confessing to online in anonymous blog posts supposedly written by a middle-aged accountant in Topeka.

It is hard, though, to imagine the movie’s Mark Zuckerberg enjoying anything, let alone his fame and fortune and the sense of having done some social good by giving away huge amounts of cash. It’s hard to imagine him giving any of his money away except as an attempt to do penance for a sin he still doesn’t quite understand how he committed or why it’s a sin.

As conceived by director David Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and played by star Jesse Eisenberg, the movie’s Mark Zuckerberg is about as close to an android as a human being can be.  He has no background, no family, no personal history dating back than more than a few weeks before the movie begins and he might as well have been built from a kit five minutes before that as born the usual way nineteen years earlier.

His frames of reference throughout the movie don’t extend back to any time before the movie’s opening scene and even in that scene he is hyper-focused on the present to the point that you wonder if he remembers how he happened to arrive at the restaurant he and his soon to be ex-girlfriend are not eating in because he can’t move on to the point of ordering dinner.  As far as he seems to know he winked into existence in that chair at that table, already supplied with a girlfriend he has apparently no clue how to talk to and with a set of problems that need an immediately solution.

Actually, it’s more the case that he appears to himself as a problem that’s been handed to him out of the blue and without context and with no connection or relevance to anything outside itself.  In short, like a problem in a textbook he’s opened to a random page.  And he sets to work solving it in the way he solves all textbook problems, by trying to write the perfect computer program.

It’s a weird moment as his girlfriend keeps trying to talk to him through his thinking out loud.  It’s almost as if she’s testing a Turing Machine or being tested by one and she, and we, begin to wonder if she is dealing with a human being or a very clever piece of software.

Mark does seem to be running a program that mimics life rather than responding to life as it’s actually being lived.  It’s as if he has been programmed---by another teenaged android---rather than taught or nurtured by loving human parents.  His software includes information on how human beings act and interact but vital code about how to complete those actions and achieve those interactions are missing or full of bugs.

The IF x THEN y ELSE z sequences in his logic routinely lead him to jump to the wrong next step and he self-sabotages the simplest social situations.  He has only two normally functioning human emotions---envy and regret.  But he has no concept of cause and effect.  He can’t foresee that he will regret what he’s about to say or do, and apparently can’t make associations between past and present and future.  He can’t predict that repeating a behavior that caused him regret in the past will cause him regret in the future.  This seems especially true when he is motivated by envy.

This Mark Zuckerberg is at the mercy of his buggy programming and consequently he often comes across as a mean little shit.  But he has several redeeming traits or lines of code.  He is programmed to know that hard work and brilliance can make up for a lot of personal shortcomings and he works hard and is brilliant in a disciplined way that is almost virtuous.  And, although he knows it’s important to make money and that making lots of money can make up for even more personal shortcomings, he isn’t programmed to like or want money.  Unfortunately, he isn’t programmed to understand how it works either.  This turns out to be another flaw in his ability to get along with human beings.  The Social Network may be the first movie in history in which the disdain for money is a root of all evil.

When the movie opens, Mark has only two friends.  One of them is his girlfriend Emily and he insults, alienates and humiliates her and makes her an enemy for life within the first fifteen minutes.  The other is a good-natured and too forgiving dorm mate, an economics major named Eduardo Saverin, who becomes Mark’s partner in the launch of the venture now known as Facebook, and Mark spends most of the movie insulting, alienating, and embarrassing if not humiliating Eduardo and working towards making him an enemy for life.

The android and computer programming stuff above---Zuckerberg as a Sim---is metaphor-making on my part.  I have no idea if the makers of the movie worked from the same metaphor as their model.  If I had to bet I’d bet that Fincher and Sorkin drew on stuff they’ve read about Asperger’s Syndrome for their conception of Mark.  If they did, they know enough about Apserger’s to understand that Asperger’s is not destiny.  Someone with Asperger’s is still responsible for what kind of person he is.  While one of the main and most emotionally trying traits of Asperger’s is trouble reading social cues leading to misinterpretation of any given situation at the moment with hurt feelings being the usual result, having Asperger’s doesn’t mean you don’t know that other people have feelings or that you are incapable of caring about their feelings.  And while someone with Asperger’s can be oblivious to how he is coming across to other people, at the moment, it doesn’t mean he is incapable of self-reflection or cut off from the kind of self-knowledge that leads to remorse, contrition, and redemption.

In other words, a person with Asperger’s still has a conscience and the ability to tell right from wrong along with the power and therefore the responsibility to do the right thing.

Nowhere in the movie is the word Apserger’s applied to Mark.  It’s clear that he has Asperger’s-like tendencies and shortcomings that make him practically hopeless in social situations, and we’re meant to sympathize with him because of that.  But we’re not meant to forgive him when he fails socially because he’s being a mean and arrogant little shit.

He should and does know better.  He knows right from wrong and often when he appears unable to understand another person’s point of view it isn’t because he can’t, it’s because he refuses to because their point of view is that he shouldn’t do what he wants to do.

Mark knows that envy is not a virtue, but he still allows himself to be driven by envy to point of suffering a severe case of Groucho’s “I wouldn’t belong to any club that would have me as a member” syndrome.

As I said, Mark understands that other people are impressed by money but he believes that they are more impressed by “cool” and the one thing he knows for certain about himself is that he is not cool.  As a corollary to this rather limited and limiting bit of self-knowledge he’s convinced himself that anybody that likes and approves of him can’t be cool either, and he wants nothing to do with anything or anybody that is not cool, not his girlfriend, not his friends, not Harvard University---how cool a school can Harvard be if it let Mark Zuckerberg in?

The Social Network gives us one of the most cinematographically gorgeous presentations of Harvard in movie history and yet whenever we see Mark on campus he is running through the grounds with his head down as if determined to get through there and out of there as fast as he can without having to waste a moment looking at the place or his fellow students.  It’s the perfect symbol of his refusal to appreciate anything that tries to suggest that Mark Zuckerberg as he is is worth appreciating.  And by the end of the movie this self-loathing seems to extend even to Facebook.

How cool can Facebook be anyway if it was invented by Mark Zuckerberg?

Jesse Eisenberg’s performance is merciless and relentless.  Eisenberg has perfected one of the most expressive deadpans since Buster Keaton and without a twitch of a facial muscle he gets us to see all sorts of emotions play themselves out within Mark---within him, not without.  He doesn’t let them out.---but it’s most expressive when it is at its deadest, when there is no way to read what he’s feeling because there is no feeling to read.

Eisenberg’s Zuckerberg has mastered the art of not letting his face betray his feelings because he’s learned from sad experience that whatever feelings he lets show are usually the wrong feelings for the situation.  We see this in the rare scenes when Eisenberg allows Mark a smile.

Those smiles are never humorous, never a response to pleasure or joy, never friendly, never pleasant.  They are crafty, sardonic, craven, and mean.

It’s no wonder Mark has learned to keep his face totally still.  When he lets it move it’s likely to invite a punch in the snoot.

But from time to time the deadpan expression isn’t a result of self-control.  It’s the warning of the shutting down of self.  Nothing’s going on on his face or in his eyes because nothing’s going on behind them.  Overwhelmed either by the situation, his problems, or other people’s feelings and their demands on his feelings, he has simply ceased to respond.  To get back to the android metaphor, the software he’s running has frozen and he needs to reboot.  In those moments, Mark isn’t only without a thought in his head.  He is a man without anything like a soul.  He is a machine that has quit functioning. 

Another less courageous actor might have used those moments when Mark is overwhelmed to make a play for our sympathy.  He’d have let us see Mark’s bafflement or his pain or his sense of helplessness at being lost.  Eisenberg makes us see nothing but Mark’s emptiness.

It’s horrifying.  And repulsive.  Or it ought to be repulsive.  How are we to stand a main character whose moments of intense feeling are moments of undisguised envy and moments of complete non-feeling, moments in which emotion is implied by its utter absence?

We stand him because Eduardo, his one and only friend, stands him.

As played by Andrew Garfield, Eduardo is practically the patron saint of friendship.  One of the movie’s themes is how hard it is to defriend someone in the analog world if that someone is steadfast, loyal, decent, and determined to love you despite yourself and your own efforts to be unlovable. 

Garfield’s performance is soulful and loving but not without irritation, anger, awareness, or even hatred when it comes to Mark.  And he is not self-effacing nor does he act with no thought of self-interest.  He has reasons for maintaining his partnership with Mark that cause him to forgive or at least ignore Mark’s worst behavior when mere feelings of friendship aren’t enough.  He wants to make back the money he has put up to get Facebook off the ground, he wants his investment to make him rich, but more than that he wants it to make him cool.  Eduardo is in his way as much of an outsider as Mark and he is driven by the same sort of envy based on self-loathing that drives Mark, although not as powerfully or as irresistibly.

Eduardo is in the position that could have been occupied by the movie’s hero.  But Garfield, and Fincher and Sorkin, recognize that Eduardo is too young, too naive, too callow, and too weak to be a hero.  Most of his weakness is due to his being young and in over his head.  But it is also due to his being a little too much like Mark in wanting not to be what he is.  It’s just that Mark wants to get away from himself while Eduardo wants to get ahead of himself.

Both of them are easy marks for someone who knows how to manipulate their self-loathing.

The Social Network is a movie without a hero but it is not a movie without a villain.

“Every creation story needs a devil,” a character tells Mark at one point when he is baffled that so many strangers seem determined to hate him.  The implication is that whatever the facts are there will be people who will set out to portray Mark Zuckerberg as the bad guy in the story of the founding of Facebook.  Those people, however, do not include the makers of this movie.  David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin have another villain in mind.

The Social Network presents Sean Parker, the co-founder of Napster, as the true founder of Facebook as a business and a cultural phenomenon.  As the movie has it, Mark Zuckerberg invented it but really had no idea what he had invented.  Parker is the one who saw the possibilities and knew how to realize them.  What makes him the villain of Sorkin and Fincher’s story is that Parker has no power to bring things about on his own.  His power resides in his talent for manipulating the greed and vanities of people like Mark Zuckerberg.  He gets them to do things they want to do but whose consciences or inhibitions or senses of self-preservation are preventing them from doing.

Which is how the devil operates, and as played by Justin Timberlake Paker is the personification of unholy, pretty much Satanic, combination of charisma and charm.

Parker enters the story at a point when are sympathies for Mark at pretty low and he arrives in a scene befitting another sort of movie’s hero, a roguish hero, but still a hero.  We meet him literally charming the pants off a girl he has already literally charmed the pants off the night before.  She is charming herself and, apparently, nice, and also, not incidentally very smart, yet here she is falling for Parker’s act twice, although we don’t know right away that it is an act, just as this girl, smart as she is, may never figure out that it was one.  And she probably won’t figure it out because she won’t let herswelf.  It would be too much of a blow to her vanity.

Charm is not a virtue.  It’s a talent for manipulating other people’s vanity.  The charmer can do that for no other reason than to make those people like the charmer, but he can also do it to make them like themselves.  It’s easier to enjoy someone else’s company if you’re enjoying your own, so the point of charming people can be simply to help everyone enjoy each other’s company, at least for the moment.  But the point---the purpose---can be to manipulate people into doing what you want them to.

If we never saw Parker in the movie again we’d think he was there to be the anti-Mark.  He is just as smart, more successful, at least at the time, Napster having had its moment of web glory as the internet phenomenon Facebook was only on its way to becoming, but he is wittier, self-aware and self-effacing, or at least self-mocking, less driven, more appreciative, and he appears to be nicer, kinder, and more interested in other people and far, far, far more concerned about their feelings.

Of course the movie can’t leave him there, and it isn’t long before we learn that the reason Parker is interested in other people and concerned about their feelings is that he understands that he needs to be in order to manipulate them, which as far as he’s concerned is what they’re for, to be manipulated for his own ends.

The social network, the web of feeling that binds people together, exists for Sean Parker to use to aggrandize himself.

As I said, Sorkin and Fincher aren’t interested in making a commentary on Facebook as saying something about the culture of our specific moment in time or about Facebook itself as a phenomenon.  But to the degree they do take a critical look at it either way it is through Parker and his manipulation of the analog social network.

There is this fact about Facebook.

It was invented in order to connect people with other people in order to use them for self-interested ends.

The point was advancement within Harvard’s elitist social structure, that is, when it wasn’t about getting laid.

As it expanded a point was still social and professional advancement, that is, again, when it wasn’t about getting laid.

Whether or not it’s why you are on Facebook, or even whether or not it’s why most people are on Facebook, it’s implicit, at least as a temptation, the idea that the social network exists as a means to self-aggrandizement and other people are there to be used for self-interested ends.

Of course, that’s not Facebook.

That’s human nature.

How many friends do you have and how cool are they and what have they done for you lately?

Oscar Week in Mannionville: Remembering your life by remembering a life you never led

You’ve got to watch this first:

That’s the trailer for an award-winning documentary called Marwencol by Jeff Malmberg.  Now some backstory:

Mark Hogancamp doesn't remember most of his life. It was kicked and beaten out of his mind by five thugs outside a Kingston bar 10 years ago. His face and skull were shattered that night, his body left in the center of the street outside the bar, where his assailants expected a passing car to finish their night's work.

But Hogancamp survived, in the barest sense of the word. The events, names and places of his past had become a tangle of blurred, mysterious images, unanchored to the narrative that had once been his life.

That night was an ending and a beginning for Mark Hogancamp. Out of the blood and pain and rage came a new double narrative, one that has given Hogancamp a new life.

Even more incongruously, it has made him an international film celebrity.

I read somewhere once an argument that we have no true selves.  What we think of as our “self” is an illusion or, it might be better to say, a construct we assemble every day out of the terabytes of memories we have stored in the neurons of our brains. 

I don’t remember “who” the writer said is supposed to be doing this if there is no “self” to construct itself, but it worked more or less this way.  That “who,” which is probably just a program running in the brain, writes a biography of a “self,” and through that process a “self” is written into being.  The self reads its own story---or watches its own movie---and is fooled into thinking that the story is a true one and that the main character actually exists as something more than just a body with a name blundering through life.

If that’s the the way it is, it’s easy to imagine how disease or injury can wipe away our sense of self.  Damage to the program that writes and re-writes the script can cause it to leave gaps in the story, jumble up events, confuse pieces of dreams or snippets from movies or books with actual memories, or destroy its functionability.

It can lose the ability to write a story that writes into being a coherent and recognizable self or any self at all.

What this suggests is that amnesia isn’t simply the loss of some or all memory.  No memories may be lost at all.

You might just be unable to put your memories together in a way that writes the biography of a self you recognize as yourself or as the self other people are telling you is yourself.

Hogancamp had to reconstruct the 40 years of his life based on a crazy quilt of other people's memories, shards of his own memory, random photos, a video of his wedding and journals he'd kept during those lost years.

What he discovered about himself disturbed and frightened him.

He had been a drunk. Alcohol — vodka by the water glassful — had ruled his life. He'd been married and divorced.

He had been homeless, living in a tent near his hometown of Marlboro in Ulster County.

He also discovered he'd had a talent — he could draw. He had worked for eight years designing showrooms for what was then Staff Lighting in Highland.

It would take Oliver Sacks to explain what happened, and what’s happening, to Mark Hogancamp.  Obviously, Hogancamp is missing significant memories.  But are those memories gone, wiped out by the trauma to his brain, or are they still there but hidden, stored away in some neuronal closet that the program that writes Hogancamp’s self can’t find or can’t open?

What’s fascinating to me, and a little discombobulating, is what Hogancamp does seem to remember.

My life.

At least that part of it when I wrote elaborate stories that my G.I. Joes acted out.

He also appears to remember every World War II movie and episode of Combat I ever watched.

And not only that, he remembers a war novel I wrote in tenth grade!

Hogancamp appears to be doing in the physical world with his G.I. Joes, Barbies, and elaborate dioramas is what, according to that book I read, that self-creating program does the psychic virtual world inside our heads---writing the biography of a “self”  that Hogancamp can present to the world and to “himself” as himself.

Then, one spring day in 2003, while idly watching some workmen renovate a house trailer, something moved Mark Hogancamp to pick up a piece of scrap plywood. Then another piece. Then a third. He stuck them together, formed what would become the cornerstone of a new life.

Without quite realizing it, Mark Hogancamp had begun constructing an alternate world, a new reality he eventually called "Marwencol."

Today, Marwencol is a small village, set in Belgium, that exists primarily — but not exclusively — in the mind and photographs of Mark Hogancamp.

The village is populated by his alter ego, Air Force Capt. "Hogie" Hogancamp, dozens of other foot-tall "action figures" of World War II-era men and women whose adventures Hogancamp dreams up, directs and documents in thousands of sequential photographs.

Each inhabitant of Marwencol has an individual personality and a role to play in an evolving storyline that Hogancamp develops with every passing day.

It's a world he created as he's struggled to retain the day-to-day world he lost to booze and human brutality 10 years ago.

Hogancamp is perfectly aware that the biography he’s writing for the flying ace he’s given his own name is not himself.  He is consciously and deliberately using the incredible amount of work and creativity that has gone into creating Marwencol as a form of art therapy.  It’s not clear from the article and the documentary’s website whether or not he expects to find clues to who he is really is---or was---in his Marwencol stories and if he hopes those clues will lead him to a full recovery of his past self.  I’m not even sure he wants that.  But he does see what he’s doing as a way of working through what happened to him and coming to terms with it and with the “self” he’s been told he used to be.

Again, I can’t really tell from the trailer and the newspaper article, but I think Hogancamp also knows that Marwencol has become an alternative life for him and he’s a somewhat ambivalent about that.

What I can tell is that Hogancamp remembers a lot of things, including things that I would have told you were my own memories until I saw the trailer.

There’s a quick glimpse of several Barbies skinny dipping, a sort of doll version of Renoir’s Bathers, if you ignore the Nazi soldier pointing a gun at them.  I didn’t ignore him.  I blanked on him.  I saw the naked dolls and the stream and thought, “What is a scene from my novel doing in this guy’s fantasy world?”

How, I was essentially wondering, can he be remembering my life?

It took only a moment’s thought to realize Hogancamp wasn’t remembering my life.  I was misremembering my life.  In my novel, which I’m pretty sure I never let anybody read and which is so deeply buried in some drawer or box at my parents’ house that I haven’t been able to find it since I packed up and left for college, which means that even I haven’t read it in a hundred years and probably hadn’t given it a thought in at least fifty, there is a skinny dipping scene.  Real people, not dolls.  But the girls are not surprised by a villain, they surprise the hero. 

The hero is up to his waist in a stream, washing off the blood and dirt and grime and smoke from an encounter with the enemy that did not go so well for that enemy, when along comes a group of pretty teenage girls.  And what else are a group of lusty young girls going to do in a novel written by a sixteen year old boy when they find a naked hero but strip off and join him for a swim?

It’s obvious how the scene in Marwencol could trigger my memory like that.  It’s more interesting to note that that the memory triggered a false perception.  I didn’t see the Nazi, didn’t see his gun, and didn’t read the scene correctly, because I was too busy “seeing” the seen from my novel.

But more to the point is that it’s still a case of Hogancamp and I sharing a memory.  It just happens that for both of us it’s not our own memory.

Not in a direct sense.

Almost certainly, the scene in my novel and the one in Marwecol were both inspired by memories of the same war movie or TV show or comic book.

Very little’s original unto itself in art, either in the art of geniuses or sixteen year old boys or damaged men trying to use art to put their lives back together again.  Creativity lies in the rearrangement of details. (Hogancamp’s attention to detail is astounding.)  Going back through the trailer and then looking at the photographs on the documentary’s website, I realized that not just the skinny dipping scene was familiar, just about every scene was.  I knew the story each photograph was telling at a glance.

I recognized all the characters.

Partly that was due to the photographs being set up as narratives.  The picture told the story.  But mainly it was due to the stories being well-known to me and probably in the same way they were well-known to Hogancamp.

We’ve watched a lot of the same movies and TV shows.

Hogancamp has been at work on Marwencol for ten years.  He’s had time to watch a lot more war movies, if he’s wanted to.  But I’m guessing he hasn’t needed to in order to find inspiration.

All his memories weren’t wiped out in the beating.  It’s impossible to say whether what’s missing is gone for good, but an awful lot remained.

But much of those memories weren’t memories of his own life, not in the sense of they’re being things he’d actually done.

He remembers his imaginative life.

What I’m getting at is that the “self” we remember, whether it’s a fixture within, the real deal us, or an illusion we have to recreate constantly, includes much that is not ours directly.

We incorporate into our “self” everything we experience.  Movies, books, TV shows, paintings, music and songs, stories we’re told by other people, conversations we overhear become part of our memory store.  But once inside no memory stays discrete.  Memories join and blend.  Pieces are left out or forgotten in recall.  Blanks get filled in reflexively. 

Given how much we take in, it’s amazing that we can remember any of it coherently and accurately, and the question is, Do we?  How trustworthy is a memory that is as full of fantasies as hard truths?  How do we keep the fantasies separated from the truths when we can’t even be sure which is which.  Do we really remember that day when we had to stay after school for something we didn’t do?  Or did that happen to somebody else?  Are we remembering a story we were told?  Are we remembering an episode of The Brady Bunch?  Are we remembering a bad dream we once had?

This is a question for an idle moment, before or after telling a story drawn from a long-ago memory.  It’s also a question for concerned doctors and family who’ve started to notice someone’s stories are starting to sound like someone else’s.  We can be pretty sure now that Ronald Reagan’s habit when he was President of telling stories from movies as if they were stories from real life was a sign of the onset of Alzheimer’s.

The main point is that our memories are a mix of fact and fiction and that the fictions can be just as important as the facts to defining who we are as “selves.”   We are not the sum of our stored memories, however; we are what we feel about those memories.

We can go to a movie together, like the movie to the same degree, remember every scene and line of dialogue just as precisely, but we will not have the same memories of the movie unless, impossibly, we attached the exact same feelings to each and every thing.  We would also need to arrange those memories inside us so that they were associated with the same other memories, which would mean that we would have had to have lived the exact same life.

We both have that movie committed to memory and heart, but we can’t remember it in the same way.  Different things will trigger memories of it, different other memories will follow, different feelings will rise and color our thoughts.

This is related to what I was trying to get at in my post the other day, Carbon-based Life Forms Over Computers for 100, Alex. 

Watson the computer doesn’t remember anything.  It just searches through a base of stored information.  It can be filled with all the same information that an individual has stored up over a lifetime.  Watson can “watch” every movie, “read” every book, “listen” to every song, and it still will not have that individual’s memory.  It won’t be a model of the individual.

Because it can’t feel anything about those memories.

And it would have to be programmed to lose track all the time.  It would have to forget details.  It would have to add details.  It would have invent memories.

And it would have to know which memories were important to that individual’s sense of being a particular “self.”

___________________

I feel I can’t make this point enough.  There’s not enough for me to go on to say what’s going on inside Mark Hogancamp.  He makes the point that Marwencol is his personally assigned and directed therapy, but I don’t know where he hopes it will take him.  What he’s built, though, isn’t a private little world.  He invites other people into all the time and he allows them to add their own chapters to the ongoing story of Marwencol.  I got a kick out of seeing the ways he’s altered G.I. Joes and Barbies to make them look like friends he’s invited in.

A project like Marwencol could have become an alternative life.  It’s easy to imagine someone losing track and starting to think the world he made was the world he lives in.  It’s easy to imagine because we’ve all heard that story or seen that movie.

It appears to me, though, that for Hogancamp Marwencol isn’t an alternative to his life.  It is his life.

This is what he does, this is who he is.  He is the builder of models and the teller of stories.

He is an artist.

_____________________

Make sure you read all of Jeremiah Horrigan’s profile of Hogancamp, Personal tragedy leads Ulster man to unique art form, in the Times Herald-Record.

The Oscar connection here is tenuous.  Marwecol the documentary has won a number of awards and prizes at various film festivals, but it wasn’t nominated for an Academy Award and it didn’t make Roger Ebert’s list of Best Documentaries of 2010.

Oscar Week in Mannionville: Meet the Winklevii

For fans of The Social Network’s Winklevoss Twins, from New York Magazine:

Virtual book and murder tour

“I can’t believe they hired us.”

“I can’t believe how little they’re paying us.”

“Because this is a job that requires a high level of education and compassion for your fellow man,” said Serge.  “It’s like teachers.  They know they’re decent folk who are going to do it anyway.  And when people are that virtuous, there’s only one thing to do under our system: shit on ‘em each paycheck.”

This isn’t a post about what’s going on in Wisconsin, but feel free to apply the above quote.

Just remember it’s a serial killer talking.

Serge Storms, the cheerful and creative vigilante murderer, who is the anti-hero of Tim Dorsey’s series of comic crime novels.  The quote is from the latest book, Electric Barracuda.

Serge and his sidekick, the almost always stoned except when drunk and then only because the last batch of drugs has worn off and the next hasn’t kicked in Coleman, travel the highways and biways of Florida not necessarily looking for wrongs to right but always on the lookout for wrong-doers to do in.  Also for souvenirs.  Serge is a collector of Florida kitsch and memorabilia.  Think the Lone Ranger and Tonto or the Green Hornet and Kato but with lots of time-outs for baking pot brownies, visiting historical sites, and engaging in wild and kinky sex---Serge is irresistible to certain types of crazy or criminally-minded women---and at the end of an adventure instead of the cops taking into custody a sheepish criminal to face a fair trail and just incarceration the coroner’s van hauls off a hideously but creatively mangled corpse.

Serge believes that the punishment should fit the crime and, since he’s also a talented artist, engineer, and amateur scientist, his victims tend to die in elaborately contrived traps and death machines Serge designs and builds himself, usually after a trip to one of his favorite places in the world, Home Depot.

Serge and Coleman mainly support themselves through various forms of theft.  Every now and then, though, Serge insists they take a legitimate job.

An honest day’s work will “cleanse the palette,” he says so that they can better appreciate the freedom their life of crime affords them.

The above quote is from the beginning of a scene where they show up for their first night of work on a new job.

This job is answering phones for a suicide hotline.

For a serial killer, Serge has many virtues.  He can be large-hearted and generous.  His victims are mostly criminals of the most dangerous and bloody-minded sort and they usually meet their bizarre, macabre, gruesome, and appropriately-devised ends when Serge comes to the rescue of their intended victims.  But he is, after all, a sociopath.  An inability to empathize is useful in his chosen career.  But it’s something of a handicap in his relationships with women and positively detrimental when trying to counsel someone at the end of their tether.

“…Because life is magnificent,” said Serge. “The problem is our wussy culture…stop crying…you’re conditioned to be weak and sniveling…you really have to stop crying…because it’s icky…So like on TV last night, I saw a commercial for ‘guilt-free dog treats.’ What the fuck? No wonder you’re screwed up…Hey, I’m screwed up, too, except you don’t see me calling a complete stranger on some hotline, droning on and on about how there’s no point anymore…When I said crying, I didn’t mean start screaming…You’re going to have to stop screaming…Jennifer?  Who’s that?…Well, no wonder she dumped you…Great, more screaming.  Now I understand why I’m the only person you can talk to---“

Click.

“Hello?…”said Serge. “Hellllooo? Anyone there?…Shit, disconnected.”

A deep appreciation for gallows humor is requisite for enjoying Dorsey’s books.

Something else that will help is checking in here this coming Thursday when this blog becomes a stop on Dorsey’s Virtual Book Tour.

I’m not sure how this is going to work.  Details are still being arranged.  I’m hoping Dorsey himself is going to show up to answer questions in the comments section.  What I hope you will do is stake out the comments and see if he does and if he does ambush him with a question or two.  The questions don’t have to be about Electric Barracuda .  I’ll take care of that.  So will the blonde who’s planning to be here too.  You can ask him about any of his other books, about writing, about writing about serial killers, about expecting readers to laugh at the exploits of a serial killing hero, about how he feels about Dexter muscling in on Serge’s turf, about the best off the beaten track bars in Florida---the Serge books are eccentric tour guides to the Sunshine State as Serge and Coleman are constantly on the run either to or from the scene of a crime and since Serge, a devoted native son, refuses to leave the state, their comings and goings lead them to every nook and cranny, swamp, beach, key, and orange grove where Serge always knows the best places to eat and drink, like the Nu Bamboo Lounge in Kissimmee and Captain Tony’s Saloon in Key West, the original once-upon-a-time Sloppy Joe’s where Hemingway hung out.

The tour officially stops here on Thursday but I’m planning to post my review of Electric Barracuda Wednesday evening so you can get a head start on the stake out.

Meanwhile, about Wisconsin…

Serge doesn’t just inflict his brand of justice on your typical criminals.  Drug dealers, mobsters, thieves, and murderers make up the bulk of Serge’s body count, but at least once a book he’ll take out the sort of villain the law either can’t touch or that the law actually helps commit crimes against humanity and nature, like shady real estate developers, crooked building contractors, and dirty politicians.  Some of these victims have real life counterparts, like the producer of Girls Gone Wild.

I might suggest to Dorsey that he model one on Governor Scott Walker.

I’m thinking the police find the body in an elementary school classroom.

Visit Tim Dorsey’s website.

____________________

Of course I recommend rushing right out to your local library or bookstore to pick up a copy of Electric Barracuda.  But if you can’t get away at the moment or you want to read it right now, the kindle edition is available from Amazon.

By the way, if you don’t have a kindle or a nook, you can download a kindle app for your PC, Mac, iPad, iPhone, or whathaveyou.

But libraries and bookstores are better.

Just saying.

Carbon-based Life Forms Over Computers for 100, Alex

Someone will have to explain it to me, because I’m not sure what Watson beating two humans on Jeopardy! proves, except that a supercomputer can store more information and retrieve it faster than a human brain, and I didn’t think there was any doubt left about that.

The fact that Watson gave Dorothy Parker as the answer (presumably in the form of a question) to a question (in the form of an answer) the right answer to which was The Elements of Style, interchanging an author with a book, that is, a human with a thing, suggests that Watson wasn’t thinking its way through the game, at least not in a human way.

It worked its way through using the If this then that process of elimination formula that’s been the basis of computer “thought” since the original Watson was still running IBM.

I know I’m missing something.

By the way, did Watson respond Who was Dorothy Parker? or What is Dorothy Parker?

Seems to me that this is a story because of what might have happened.  The humans might have beaten the computer.  This is the story that was being set up to be told.

And that story would have taught us what?

That at least one human could get at his store of trivia more quickly and efficiently than a computer?

Not exactly.

Humans don’t answer questions simply by accessing information stored in their brains.

They answer them by tapping into memories that may be stored anywhere in their bodies.

If I had been competing against Watson I’d have gotten the Elements of Style question immediately.  I’d have known the answer in my bones.

The bones of my hands.

I own the book.  I’ve held it in my hands.  I’ve read it through a dozen times.  I’ve assigned it to students.   The book’s existence isn’t just a fact to me, it’s a part of my physical experience.  It’s a part of me.

But not only have I read The Elements of Style, I have read just about everything else E.B. White wrote, Charlotte's Web, Trumpet of the Swan, Stuart Little, his essays, his Talk of the Town pieces for the New Yorker, Is Sex Necessary?, which White wrote with his friend James Thurber, another of my favorite writers most of whose work I have read and some of which I adapted for a play I produced and directed in college.

That last fact matters because of two things.

One, when I read a lot of White’s stuff I knew who he was apart from his being the writer of the particular piece I was reading.

Two, reading E.B. White reminds me of reading James Thurber and reading James Thurber reminds me of putting on the play and remembering that play always makes me picture the actress who played the unicorn in The Unicorn in the Garden and the very dainty and well-mannered way she plucked and ate a flower and remembering her might and probably has made think of The Elements of Style.

The Elements of Style isn’t just a book to me, it’s a piece of a real person’s biography and that real person’s biography is a piece of my autobiography.

This makes it something other than a stored fact in my memory and gives me many different ways of accessing it and recalling it that a computer can’t begin to even imitate.

All of those books, essays, and bits of occasional writing might have been “read” into Watson, but Watson would not have the memories of having read them and fallen in love with them.  They would not be part of Watson’s life, because, well, Watson, isn’t alive, of course.  But I mean that I read those books while doing other things with, in, along with, and only through my body.  They have a living presence in my memory because I lived my way through reading them.

I was a kid on vacation on Cape Cod when I read The Trumpet of the Swan.  I was a young aspiring writer looking forward to going off to college in Boston when I read the essays for the first time.  I was the father of two small boys sitting on the floor of a bedroom full of toys when I read Stuart Little out loud.

My memories of reading White’s work are tied in with my memories of the circumstances under which I read his work so that I can’t think of Trumpet of the Swan without also thinking of the ocean and walking up the hill from the house where my family was staying to the bookstore where my father bought us the book which ties Trumpet of the Swan to another book, The Hobbit, because my father read us that one on another vacation at another house on Cape Cod, this one in a room with a big picture window that looked out on the Bay and across it to Provincetown.

And I can’t think of Stuart Little without also picturing the play rug printed with race cars and roadways on the floor of the boys’ room in our house in Syracuse.

And I can’t read “Death of a Pig” or any of White's essays without also remembering how happy I was when I got to college and it turned out that the teacher of my first writing class there had put Essays of E.B. White on the reading list, one of only three books, the other two being Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album by Joan Didion, which means that my memories of White’s essays are connected to Didion’s essays too, as well as to the whole of my first year in Boston, which is when I met the blonde, which ties them to…well, the whole rest of my life.

This is why I say The Elements of Style is a part of me.  But, as I part of me, I can “remember” it if called upon in ways that Watson cannot.  I don’t have to run through my store of information, go through processes of comparison and elimination, and plug it into a formulaic answer as the one that fits, although I can do that sort of “thinking.”

I can get at it immediately and reflexively through countless associations that, isolated, would appear to have no connection to a little blue book on style and usage.

A drawing by James Thurber, a glimpse of the Pilgrim Monument in Provincetown lit up at night, a walk down a street in New York City , a Hot Wheels car turning up at the bottom of a box while I’m looking for something else, the touch of the blonde’s hand, laughing at Hugh Laurie as House getting off a wisecrack full of a very non-E.B. White-esque cynicism---Laurie played the father in the movie adaptation of Stuart Little.

None of this makes me “smarter” than Watson.  It certainly doesn’t mean that I could have beaten it on Jeopardy!  It doesn’t even mean that I would have been more likely to get that question right.  Watson’s train of “thought” was apparently on the right track.  There’s a connection between Dorothy Parker and the The Elements of Style.  Both Parker and E.B. White made their marks writing for The New Yorker.  Watson stopped too soon in its search through its store of information that must include cross-references between American authors and their published works.

Somewhere in Watson’s programming is a line of code with a bug that caused it to fail to distinguish between a book and a writer which I’m sure Watson’s human overlords have fixed already.

But I can make associations of a sort Watson can’t.  I can feel my to the correct answer by touching things along the way that have no connection to each other except that once upon a time I experienced them in ways that connected them.

It’s still a metaphor to say that a computer like Watson has a brain.  But such a brain as it has is very different from yours and my brains in that our brains are part of a body and travels with it through space and time and gathers all its information through that body.  We don’t store information that we acquire.  We sense it.

We touch it, smell it, taste it, see it, feel it. 

And in that way it becomes literally, physically part of us.

I have something Watson doesn’t have.

A body.

And that body gives me something else Watson doesn’t have.

I have a me.

Having at that me doesn’t make it more likely that I would have answered the question correctly than Watson could have.

It makes it more likely that I would have than another human being, somebody’s else’s me, might have, even somebody else’s me who was smarter and quicker-witted than my me.

The fact that we acquire information as part of our experiencing the world---as part of our being alive and living lives---means that some information is going to mean more to us than other information we have stored.  It will feel more important.

Computers, unless instructed to, do not privilege any pieces of store information.  Every thing they “know” is of the same importance to them, which is, really, of no importance.  A piece of information will become important relatively---relative to its usefulness in completing a given task, like answering a question on Jeopardy!

But because of when and under what circumstances I read E.B. White’s work, The Elements of Style isn’t just one of the thousand books I’ve read.  It’s tied to my first year in Boston and that privileges it among my terabytes of stored information in a way I’ll bet it’s not privileged among yours even if you think highly of it as a manual of style.

In fact, there are probably not too many people besides me who think of it is a sexy book.

You would have had to have it associated in your memories with other memories, such as coming back to your apartment late at night after working at a movie theater in downtown Boston and finding waiting up for you in your bed a pretty girl wearing nothing but one of your t-shirts.

Sexied that book up for you right there, though, didn’t I?

Wouldn’t have meant a thing to Watson to have that information added to its memory.

The Elements of Style is tied up with my personal history of love, work, and family.  It’s part of what gave me the me I have, the me that is definitely not you, no matter how much stored information we have in common, the sort of me Watson does not have.

If one of the human contestants had been able to beat Watson on Jeopardy!, the story the media would have told would have been John Henry’s, although probably without a heart bursting at the end, “Human beats machine.”

But that wouldn’t have been the real story.

The real story would have been:

A particular human being---that is, a specific me---was able to access memories and make associations that, as useful as they were in helping him win on Jeopardy!, mainly and most importantly revealed him to be the me that he is.

That is, the real story, would have been the biography of the human winner.

_____________________

Until a computer travels about through space and time in a “body” that “feels” the world, it won’t have a “me” like any me that we know.

Writers of speculative fiction can speculate about what sort of me it would have and when and how it would become undeniably a me.

At the moment, all I’m concerned with is that on Jeopardy! Watson did not demonstrate that it was even close to having a me.

But Ken Jennings did.

At the Atlantic, Ben Zimmer, the On Language columnist for the New York Times, makes the case that the real story---or one of the real stories---lies in the Simpsons reference Jennings attached to his Final Jeopardy answer:

“I, for one, welcome our new computer overloads.”

Of course, most everybody has latched onto that, enjoying it for its own sake but also as a kind of a moral victory of human being over computer.

Computers can’t get a joke.

Watson could and maybe did recognize the reference, could and maybe did note that Jennings intended it as a joke.  But Waston couldn’t feel the joke because Watson can’t feel anything.  Watson is still a thing, from our point of view---and even if we weren’t the only ones to have a point of view we would still privilege it over Watson’s or another thing’s point of view---to be human is better than being a thing.

Being a me is a victory in itself.

In channeling Kent Brockman, Jennings wasn’t just demonstrating that he’s a me in the way Watson can’t be, he was reminding all the humans watching of the particular and peculiar me-s they are.

But, says Zimmer, there’s a somewhat more objective truth at work here.

The difference between Watson and us me-s isn’t just that we have bodies and Watson doesn’t.  It’s also that we process the information those bodies take in as sensations into language.

Zimmer quotes one of Watson’s chief engineers arguing that Watson “understands” language to a degree no other computer before it could.  But Zimmer thinks Jennings has proved it ain’t so, at least for now:

But what would Watson make of this smart-alecky remark? The question-answering algorithms that IBM developed to allow Watson to compete on Jeopardy! might lead it to conjecture that it has something to do with The Simpsons -- since the full text of Wikipedia is among its 15 terabytes of reference data, and the Kent Brockman page explains the Overlord Meme. After all, Watson's mechanical thumb had beaten Ken and Brad's real ones to the buzzer on a Simpsons clue earlier in the game (identifying the show as the home of Itchy and Scratchy). But beyond its Simpsonian pedigree, this complex use of language would be entirely opaque to Watson. Humans, on the other hand, have no problem identifying how such a snowclone works, appreciating its humorous resonances, and constructing new variations on the theme.

All of this is to say that while Ken and Brad lost the battle, Team Carbon is still winning the language war against Team Silicon.

Read all of Zimmer’s post, Is It Time to Welcome Our New Computer Overlords?

Things they hate

Things Republicans feel obliged to hate just because Democrats like them:

Trains, teachers, cops, firefighters, clean air, clean water, trains again…

Jobs.

Jobs that could be shipped overseas but are currently held by Americans who expect to be paid a living wage.

Jobs that come with a government paycheck.

Jobs that are in any way connected with the words green or clean as in clean energy:

The Taylor Biomass Project would have to say goodbye to a loan guarantee that brought the project from dream to reality if the Republican spending bill advancing in the House of Representatives Wednesday becomes law.

House Republicans are proposing a continuing resolution for the 2010 budget that includes $100 billion in cuts to government programs, including $25 billion in Department of Energy loan guarantees, according to Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-Hurley. The bill increases funding for the Pentagon and military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Senate Democrats said they won't take up the measure, while President Barack Obama threatened to veto the measure. However, the two parties must hash out some budget compromise before March 4, when the current continuing budget resolution expires, or risk a government shutdown.

Montgomery businessman Jim Taylor said a rescission of the loan guarantee would halt a project that promises to create more than 300 construction jobs and 80 permanent positions.

Read all of Meghan Murphy’s story in the Times Herald-Record.

Visit the website of Taylor Biomass.

You don’t have to register to read a single, particular story on the Times Herald-Record’s website, but regular readers might consider registering since I routinely link to THR stories. Registration is free.

A clean, well-lighted video store

Updated. Scroll down below Lulu.

Our soon-to-be-out-of-business local video store. The lack of customers is due to the time of night, a few minutes before closing on a weeknight. Normally, as regular readers know, the place is full of people, which is part of the point of this post.

God forgive me, but I love living in the 21st Century!

I mean this is in the narrowest and most self-centered way, as in “Gee whiz, what would I do without a cell phone?” and “No, my netbook isn’t actually Gorilla Glued to my hand,” and not as if there’s no such place as Darfur and we’re living in a Paradise on Earth and all the poor people here don’t know lucky they are to have high-definition TV.

I mean very simply there are a lot of things---and I mean literally things, as in devices, gadgets, high tech toys for lucky grown-ups---that make my life a lot more fun than it would be without them and that didn’t exist for the greater part of my life I spent in the 20th Century.

And one of those things is Netflix streaming video.

One Mannion Family Movie Night not too long ago, the feature was Superman and afterwards young Ken and I felt like enjoying more adventures of the Man of Steel.  Thanks to Netflix, we did.  We streamed the Fleischer cartoons from the 1940s.

Last fall, when Tony Curtis died, in his honor, I streamed a double-feature of Beachhead and Sex and the Single Girl.

When I’m in a certain mood, needing to enjoy both virtual travel and vicarious gluttony, I stream selected episodes of Man v. Food.

Adam is my hero.

This week’s movie for Family Movie Night is Roxanne.

Guess how we’re going to watch it.

One thing I feel a little guilty about.

Apparently I’m contributing the demise of video stores.

People are losing their jobs because of me.

Almost as sad, other people are losing some clean, well-lighted places to go for company and other attendant pleasures, spiritual and physical, of living in the analog world.

Here in Mannionville, we have the most basic cable.  We don’t subscribe to any of the premium channels.  We’ve never watched on demand, never Tivo-ed.  There’s no satellite dish attached to our house.  We haven’t needed them.  We’ve had Netflix.  I don’t understand why our Netflix habit hasn’t contributed to the demise of cable companies, HBO, DirectTV, or TiVo.  We’ve only been bad for business for video stores.

What’s more, I don’t understand why video stores weren’t wiped out by any of those alternative delivery systems before the rise of Netflix or why video stores, which post-date cable, came into existence to begin with.

Maybe they were too busy ganging up together to close all the movie theaters. 

I seem to recall that going out to the movies was about to become a thing of the past at least three times since the advent of cable.  I’m old but not old enough to remember when television all on its three network lonesome was going to do the job.  I do remember when cable and VCRs were the future of motion picture entertainment.  After all, who was going to spend three dollars to go sit in the dark with strangers when you could wait a few months and watch the same movie for free, or essentially free, in the comfort of your own home with a bowl of gourmet popcorn you’d microwaved yourself in your lap?  That was just about the time of the rise of the multiplexes.

At any rate, I’m sorry our local video store’s closing, sorrier still if it’s really at all my fault, me and my reckless Netflix streaming.

It’s a nice store.  Clean, neatly kept, with a staff that’s friendly, helpful, and fairly knowledgeable---there’s never been anyone working there that I know of you could compare Antonini or Bergman films with.  But one twenty year old clerk could tell you anything and everything you’d want to know about the comedies of the 1980s and there used to be an assistant manager who made it her job to let customers know how bad every new horror film was and exactly what made each one bad---she’d watch them all before putting them out to rent, out of a combination of a sense of duty and compulsion.

And almost all the rest of the clerks you’d ever deal with kept up with what movies were coming out in the theaters and on DVD, who starred in what, which director made this or that, who and what had been nominated for the Golden Globes and the Academy Awards, and what was being posted at Rotten Tomatoes, so customers who with no idea what movie they’re looking for except that they saw an ad for it on TV the other night and it seemed to be about sailing and one of the stars was that young actor all the kids like these days could walk out of there happily with a copy of Charlie St Cloud in hand.

And, whenever I’ve been in, most of the other customers have been cheerful, friendly, polite, and sociable.

The store is---was---what all stores should be.  Not just a building in which to spend money on things but a place where we can enjoy the company of other people while we are spending money on those things.  We’ve all been in stores that aren’t places.  They’re just boxes full of things.  A place has an identity and a spirit.  People live in places.  They come alive in places.  In the boxes the other carbon-based life forms wandering about with us are either obstacles to our getting to the things or essentially extensions of the cash registers into which we put the money to pay for the things.  But the people we meet in places where we happen to need to go to buy things help make those things part of living and enjoying a life and not the point of living a life.

We need more places.

Blockbuster, the corporation, has been in trouble for a long time.  Netflix didn’t cause that trouble, it’s just been one of the reasons Blockbuster hasn’t been able to get itself out of trouble.  They had a CEO during the early years of the last decade who was an empire builder.  Blockbuster over-expanded and then the economy soured.  The empty aisles in so many of their stores weren’t due to regular customers switching to Netflix as much as there just not being enough regular customers with money to spend on renting DVDs anymore and Blockbuster suddenly couldn’t pay the rent, literally and figuratively.

So I’m not surprised our local video store’s closing.  But I am sad. I won’t miss out on watching movies, but that’s not the point. I’ll miss having it as a place to go for company.

Back in September, when Blockbuster filed for Chapter 11, I read an article that dismissed going in to a store to rent DVDs as “old-fashioned.”  And back in August, when a Blockbuster store in Washington DC put up its Going Out of Business sign I read this little bit of reportorial narcissism in article about the closing in the DCist:

To be honest, though, this kind of feels like writing about about the eight-track or laserdiscs or Pogs. At this point, is there really anyone who would have frequented a Blockbuster store who isn't already subscribed to Netflix -- or even Blockbuster's own DVD-by-mail service?

Now, you can buy groceries online, and that makes shopping at a supermarket or the corner bodega old-fashioned too.  So is actually going to a movie theater to watch a movie on a big screen, for that matter, and in fact it’s been the old-fashioned way to watch a movie for over sixty years.  Shopping for anything in a store is old-fashioned, as people have been doing it for millennia.

As for who isn’t already subscribed to Netflix or Blockbuster’s own online service, well, not everybody’s like the reporter and his friends.  Lots of people don’t go online to get their movies and don’t want to or can’t.

People without a computer or broadband.  People without a credit card.  People who don’t have significant amounts of free time to spend staring at a computer screen, scrolling through the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, following all the links from You May Also Like.

People who want to have a movie or a TV show to pop into the DVD player as soon as they get home or right after supper.

People who are looking for some company.  People who need to see a friendly face.  People who still think that one of the nice things about living in the world is the presence of other people.

People who don’t see others as a colorful backdrop to their lives but the very stuff of living.

“Guess who I ran into the other day!” isn’t just something to say so the family doesn’t have to eat in silence.  It’s a testimony of connection to the world, to a life outside. 

Somebody saw me.  Somebody heard my voice.  Somebody felt my existence.

And I felt theirs.

For twenty or thirty seconds, for half an hour, for the whole afternoon, we felt alive together.

We felt…

Human.

They want to be able to ask a clerk, “Is this good?”  They want to be able to say, “There was a movie came out a few years ago, I think it starred Nicolas Cage.  He played a weather man?” and they want to be able to say, if the clerk has been polite and cheerful and helpful, “The Weather Man!  Duh!”  They want to be able to turn to someone browsing the aisle along with them and say, “Have you seen this one?”  They want someone to turn to them and say, “You think my kids will like this?”

Bookstore, video store, hardware store, grocery store, doesn’t matter, they want to be surprised somewhere along the way and have to respond to the surprise by saying something along the lines of, “Well, fancy meeting you here!”

The other night, I’m in the video store, and in the drama aisle I meet a guy looking for one of his all-time favorite movies.  He’s in his 50s, pushing 60, maybe, with a long gray ponytail under his battered bill cap, a graying brown mustache, a black t-shirt, the sleeves tight on his biceps, jeans, motorcycle boots.  His arms are heavily and intricately tattooed.  Tattoos peak up from under the collar of his t-shirt.  His voice is deep and raspy, the voice of someone who’s smoked a lot, who’s had to yell a lot over the sound of machinery.  He’s elated when he finds his movie.

To Sir, With Love.

“Great movie,” I say.

“Have you seen Lulu lately?  She looks terrific.  You know, older, but in shape, slim.”

“She still singing?”

“Oh yeah.  I saw her on TV not that long ago.”

I can stream To Sir With Love for myself right now.

Where am I going to go to find someone to talk about Lulu with?

_____________________

In this New Yorker article from October 2010, James Surowiecki predicts the coming demise of Netflix.

Late update with no late fees:

Film prof, author, and blogger Chuck Tryon has written a thoughtful follow-up to my post.

Chuck’s book is called Reinventing Cinema: Movies in the Age of Media Convergence.

Netflix beware?  Redbox plans to get into online streaming.

You say ‘entitlement’ like it’s a dirty word

So, yesterday morning this column by Paul Krugman appears in our local paper.  Eat the Future.  And Krugman’s point is:

Republican leaders like to claim that the midterms gave them a mandate for sharp cuts in government spending. Some of us believe that the elections were less about spending than they were about persistent high unemployment, but whatever. The key point to understand is that while many voters say that they want lower spending, press the issue a bit further and it turns out that they only want to cut spending on other people.

Last night, I’m in our local video store, which is closing, by the way, but I’m going to deal with that in another post, and I get to talking about it with another disappointed loyal customer.  Guy around my age.  Naturally, the conversation turns to the economy.  We agree it stinks and it’s going to continue to stink for a long time to come.  Turns out, though, he knows how it could be fixed overnight.

Congress could make it all better if they’d just balance the budget.

He also knows exactly how the budget can be balanced overnight.

“Cut all that foreign aid.”

If I’d had my wits about me I’d have seen an Uma Thurman movie down the aisle I just had to go check out.

Oh, look, My Super Ex-Girlfriend! Time to watch that one again!

Instead, I said, reflexively, “You know what per cent of the federal budget goes for foreign aid?”

I expected him to come back with a wildly exaggerated figure.  Possibly the around 24 per cent this poll says most Americans guess.

Proving he’s not your average Tea Party type or other model of Right Wing Republican, he asks.

“How much?”

“Around one per cent.”

This stat is unfair to throw at people until you know what they mean when they say “foreign aid.”  Foreign aid is what we give to the United Nations but, loosely speaking, it’s also the money we spend propping up dictators like Hosni Mubarak.  The money for both come out of different lines in the budget.  So do they mean military aid, money spent on spies, UNICEF, or anything that has us paying for something going on there instead of here?

If they mean the last one then they are talking about a chunk of change significantly larger than that one percent of the budget the government itself classifies as foreign aid.

Generally, however, people use the term foreign aid like it’s a dirty word and they mean pretty much what they mean when they use other dirty words like welfare, and earmarks, and entitlements---money spent on undeserving poor people who look nothing like them or their neighbors.

This guy didn’t give me time to figure out what he meant.  But I could guess by what he followed right up with.

“And entitlements.  We need to cut way back on those.”

“Depends on what you mean by entitlements,” I said.

He knew where I was going.

“I don’t consider Social Security an entitlement,” he said quickly, “I paid into that.”

“You may not.  But the deficit hawks down in Washington do.  That’s what they’re talking about.  And Medicare.”

“Medicare’s another one we pay for,” he said, “I’m talking about things like food stamps, and those college grants for poor kids…”

“Look,” I said, “My Super Ex-Girlfriend! Time to watch that one again!”

Ok. I didn’t really say that. I did change the subject back to how we’re both going to miss coming to the store when it closes, because I didn’t think it would be polite to start shouting at a stranger in public about how I don’t want to hear anybody’s idea on how to balance the budget unless it involves raising their own taxes or cutting their own services.

The notion that if only the government would stop spending money that creates jobs jobs would be created defies logic, math, and history with the boldness of a madman who has decided he can fly and you’d think that two seconds of thought would kill it in the minds of any practical and reasonably intelligent people.  But people don’t give it two seconds’ thought, or even one.

Pushing the notion serves the interests of the rich who don’t want to pay any more in taxes---who don’t want to pay any taxes---and don’t give a damn how many other people are put out of work or who actually like the idea of putting lots of people out of work because it increases the pool of desperate would-be employees who will take any job no matter how low the pay or how few the benefits.

But it also flatters the prejudices of too many people who want to think that everything and anything that’s wrong with the world is the fault of other people.

Krugman blames Reagan---

How can voters be so ill informed? In their defense, bear in mind that they have jobs, children to raise, parents to take care of. They don’t have the time or the incentive to study the federal budget, let alone state budgets (which are by and large incomprehensible). So they rely on what they hear from seemingly authoritative figures.

And what they’ve been hearing ever since Ronald Reagan is that their hard-earned dollars are going to waste, paying for vast armies of useless bureaucrats (payroll is only 5 percent of federal spending) and welfare queens driving Cadillacs…

---I blame Reagan too.  But he was encouraging and exploiting a not particularly noble but all too common side of human nature, our reflexive and relentless need to believe that we can have our cake and eat it too, if only other people would quit being so mean and selfish.

There’s a school district near here that’s like just about every other school district in the United States these days, hurting for money.  The school board sees no way out of the mess except to make some deep cuts and one of the things the board has voted to cut is an elementary school.

There are only 150 students attending this school.  The other elementary school will be able to take them in without too much trouble and pain.  Some of the teachers and staff will have jobs at the other school too.

Parents aren’t happy.  They rallied to save their kids’ school, organized, and drew up an alternative budget that, to their credit, would have raised their own taxes, but the board didn’t think it would do the trick.

Here’s the thing.

This school district is in a Congressional district that flipped from Democratic to Republican last November.  The relatively liberal John Hall has been replaced by the more than relatively conservative Nan Hayworth who isn’t one of the Tea Party’s own but she’s smart enough to know what voters are running the Republican show these days and presents herself as a militant budget cutter.

And, as it happens, one of the reasons the school district is in trouble is that federal stimulus money it had relied on is going to run out.  One of the reasons it’s not in worse trouble at the moment is that it’s still getting some stimulus money.

According to the Times Herald-Record:

A one-time injection of roughly $850,000 in stimulus funds will maintain full-day kindergarten and the agriculture program — which will grow with the help of the local farming community — and keep two elementary library media specialists.

What this means is that the school district is now represented by someone who, if she’d been sent to Congress in 2008, would have voted against the stimulus and therefore, effectively, for putting the school district in the position it’s now in two years earlier.

I don’t know if many or any of the parents who tried to save the school voted for Hayworth.  But that part of the Congressional district went heavily for Republicans up and down the ballot, so it’s a good bet not a few of them did.

Some of those who did were expressing their general dissatisfaction.  Others thought they were voting for job creation and not necessarily based on the belief that the way to create jobs is for the government to put people out of work, just based on their frustration at the obvious fact that whatever the Democrats and the President were doing, it wasn’t enough.  It’s likely, however, that many of them voted for Hayworth  expecting that she would make sure that the only cuts would be to other people’s “entitlements.”

Whatever their reasons, they effectively voted to put themselves in the position they are in without any hope of more federal money coming their way to save their school district any time soon.

Unless, of course, the Republicans succeed in cutting that twenty-four percent of federal spending being wasted on foreign aid.

__________________

Read all of Alyssa Sunkin’s story on the school closing in the Times Herald-Record.

Follow the link to read the PBS NewsHour story on the foreign aid poll.

And don’t skip Krugman’s column, Eat the Future.

Editor’s choice: Soul Men

Originally posted June 19, 2010. Re-posted for James Wolcott, a fellow John Candy fan.

The Vatican’s official newspaper has declared The Blues Brothers a “Catholic classic.”

The Blues Brothers was the featured film for Mannion Family Movie Night a couple weeks back and when Oliver Mannion heard this news he asked, “Has the Pope seen the movie?”

Recently confirmed a Soldier of Christ, a marker in his spiritual development he does not take as seriously as his mother and grandmothers had hoped, Oliver feels he has a pretty good idea of what Catholicism teaches and it does not include endorsements of exchanges like this:

Elwood:  Shit.

Jake: What?

Elwood:  Rollers.

Jake: No.

Elwood: Yeah.

Jake:  Shit.

Good Catholics don’t swear that casually and they aren’t afraid of getting pulled over by the cops because they’ve got over a hundred outstanding warrants on them.

Once upon a time, good Catholics would have been told they shouldn’t enjoy movies with scenes like that in it.

Oliver would like to point out that on those grounds he is not a good Catholic.

“How can this be a Catholic classic?” Oliver wanted to know.

“Well,” I said, actually just as baffled, “It is a story of redemption, sort of.”

Jake and Elwood are criminals at the beginning of the movie and by the end of the movie they’re…still criminals.  Only with longer rap sheets.

But they are on a mission from God, a joke we’re meant to take seriously in that they are out to do a good deed.  They succeed too, and along the way they rescue their friends from various small, private Purgatories and defeat the forces of evil in the form of Illinois Nazis---Jake: “I hate Illinois Nazis.”  Makes you wonder what he thinks of Iowa Nazis.

They also commit a whole bunch of felonies.

Which they pay for.

They are arrested and go to jail in the end.

This makes The Blues Brothers very different from the other great nihilistic, anti-authoritarian John Belushi comedy of its time.  The gang from Animal House not only get away with the destruction they cause, they are in various ways rewarded for it.  Their only punishment is getting expelled but it’s been made plain that Faber College isn’t much of a school and being denied a diploma from there isn’t a real loss.

Plus, their antagonist, Dean Wormer, while objectively in the right---Delta House is a disgrace and its members are not gentlemen and scholars---is motivated by spite, ego, anger, and a personal desire for vengeance.  “Fat, drunk, and stupid” is no way to go through life, but it may be better than going through life angry, vindictive, and mean.

And Dean Wormer, who should be a symbol of liberal authority because he’s defending the cause of education (“Knowledge Is Good.”) has allied himself with the blatantly Nixonian forces of the bullies and hypocrites of Omega Theta Pi.

Otter, Boone, Bluto, Pinto, Flounder and the rest are allowed to do just about whatever they want because they are rebelling against the types of people who brought us Vietnam and Watergate.

Jake and Elwood are pursued by characters who like Wormer are motivated by anger and a desire for personal revenge, the two state troopers, Jake’s jilted fiancee, the country-western band the Blues Brothers stole the gig from at Bob’s Country Bunker, the Illinois Nazis.  But their pursuers also include John Candy’s character, the cheerful, good-natured, unflappable, and unenrageable cop from the state board of corrections.

Burton Mercer’s job is to put Jake and Elwood in stir, and he’s quite comfortable with the idea that that’s where they belong.  They’ve broken the law.  Jake’s violated his parole in numerous ways.  Mercer’s going to arrest them and it won’t bother him to do it.  But he doesn’t take it personally.  He isn’t offended by Jake and Elwood’s law breaking.  He takes what I believe the nuns taught me is a very Catholic attitude, which is not simply to hate the crime but love the sinner; it’s to not love the crime but understand it and forgive it while not excusing it.

Mercer likes the Blues Brothers.  He gets a kick out of them.  It’s not clear whether or not he knows they’re on a mission from God, but he certainly doesn’t believe he’s on one himself.  Vengeance, anger, and self-righteousness are not in his job description.  It’s not a good idea to let people stick up gas stations and drive their cars through crowded shopping malls but Mercer sees how it could happen.

I know I’m pushing it but Mercer isn’t in the movie just to give John Candy something to do.  He’s in there so he can be played by John Candy.

The Blues Brothers is the beginning of Candy’s too short career of playing genuinely happy and big-hearted men, men who are happy because they have such big hearts.  Burton Mercer is not Del Griffith and The Blues Brothers is definitely not a John Hughes movie, but there’s a connection.

All through Planes, Trains, and Automobiles Steve Martin’s character pities himself for having to put up with Del and the first big change in him for the better is when he begins to not mind having to put up with Del.  But at that point he’s congratulating himself for being such a swell and magnanimous guy.

The real change comes when he realizes what a difficult time Del has had putting up with him and that Del has actually been the more tolerant and forgiving one.

This is a thread that runs through Candy’s better movies.  Del, Uncle Buck, and Danny Muldoon are men willing to forgive you before you’ve done them any wrong.  They are flawed men, in need of forgiveness themselves, but that’s the point.  Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.  Treat others as you would be treated.  Love your neighbor as you love yourself.  “Love one another as I have loved you.”

I’m probably reading this backwards into his role in The Blues Brother, and he doesn’t have any lines that support it, but Candy’s Burton Mercer seems to me a person who understands the difference between penance and punishment.

Penance is what sinners do to make up for their sins and part of that is accepting their just punishment.

But Catholicism has a Sacrament of Penance.  It doesn’t have a Sacrament of Punishment.

Catholics aren’t taught to see themselves as sinners in the hands of an angry God.

They are taught that a sign that theirs is a loving God is his willingness to forgive them their sins.

Jake and Elwood are punished in the end, but they are also forgiven.

And they are rewarded.

There’s another important aspect of Candy’s character.  He’s the only one of Jake and Elwood’s antagonists who appreciates their music.

At the end of the movie Jake and Elwood are still criminals who have to pay for their crimes.  But they are also something they weren’t at the beginning of the movie.

Musicians.

At the beginning of the movie the band hasn’t played together for three years, not since Jake went to prison.  They need to reassemble the band to save the orphanage, but their reward for saving the orphanage is putting the band back together.

It’s important that Jake and Elwood do not get to perform as the Blues Brothers until they are in the actual act of saving the orphanage with their singing. 

Yeah, they sing at Bob’s Country Bunker, but they don’t sing their music and they can’t call themselves the Blues Brothers.  They’re the Good Ol’ Blues Brothers Boys Band.

The rest of the time they are part of the audience or the chorus or backup singers for other acts.

I know.  I’m making more of the movie than it deserves or would deserve if it hadn’t been declared a Catholic classic.  The plot is pretty much an excuse to string together car crashes and music videos by James Brown, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, and Cab Calloway.  But the excuse is a good one.  The music is important.

And part of the music’s importance is its ability to bring people together and get them singing and dancing.

The music is shared joy.

Catholicism is not an apocalyptic religion.  The early Church was.  Jesus’ return was expected any day now.

Any month now…

Any year now…

Any decade…

By the early middle ages Church teaching was responding to what had become pretty clear.  The end of the world  and the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven were probably a long way off.  Which meant there had to be something we’re meant to do with the time we have here on earth.  But what?

The answer I was taught was enjoy it.

And help others enjoy it.

Life is not one big party.  Life is pain and suffering most of the time.  We’re meant to take up our cross and follow him.  But we’re meant to do it cheerfully.

And we’re meant to help each other carry the load.  Simon of Cyrene isn’t a saint for nothing.

Catholicism, so I was taught, is a religion of shared pain.

It’s also a religion of shared joy.

When Calvinism took hold in England, its first order of business was to strip the joy out of the service and out of the church calendar.  No more music.  No more color and pageantry.  No more Christmas.

There’s a Puritanical streak in the Catholic Church and one of the maddening things about the Church’s perversity about sex is that this enforcement of joylessness is a case of the Church at odds with itself.

And of course the molestation scandal is about some men robbing children of joy and the Church hierarchs being fine with that.

This gets us into the question of who is the Church.  Is it us or is it the priests?  Is it Peter’s church or Paul’s?  St Francis’ or St Augustine’s?  Does it belong to the bishops who tried to sink health care reform or the nuns who tried to save it?

The Vatican newspaper doesn’t answer that.  All it says is that whoever else’s church it is, it’s also Jake and Elwood’s.

I hope that means that from here on out this will be included in the hymnals.

Follow the link to read the comments on the original post.

That’s because Republicans can’t do the math anyway.

And I don’t mean just the Republicans in Congress.  I mean voters who want the deficit sunk through massive spending cuts that only affect other people.

Paul Krugman on Republican magical thinking when it comes to cutting the deficit:

Republicans don’t have a mandate to cut spending; they have a mandate to repeal the laws of arithmetic.

Read all of Krugman’s column, Eat the Future, in the New York Times.

The universal laws of magic that allow grandmothers to climb mountains

But magic is never as simple as people think.  It has to obey certain universal laws. And one is that, no matter how hard a thing is to do, once it has been done it’ll become a whole lot easier and will  therefore be done a lot. A huge mountain might be scaled by strong men only after many centuries of failed attempts, but a few decades later grandmothers will be strolling up it for tea and wandering back afterward to see where they left their glasses.

---from Maskerade by Terry Pratchett.

Returning soon to a computer screen near you

Thanks to all who've been tuning in for the reprised posts (like yesterday's and Friday's) and the few new ones I've managed to write (like this morning's).  My hiatus is almost up.  Should be back in business by the end of the week.  I hope to be adding some new features to the blog in the months that follow.  More book reviews. More current movie reviews.  And---this is still in the works but it looks promising---play reviews.

If you've enjoyed what I've been doing here for the past six and a half years and would like to see the blog come back stronger than ever and you can swing it, please make a donation.  It'd be a help to the blog and a big help the blogger.

What’s a medal worth?

When young Ken Mannion was really young Ken Mannion, six years old and a Tiger Cub, his car won second place in the Pinewood Derby. It would have come in first but it took the bump at the end of the ramp hard and spun out just before reaching the finish line.  He was happy with having won all the preliminaries, though, and very proud of his second place medal which came on a red ribbon he could wear around his neck.

Not too long after that, we watched October Sky for one of our early family movie nights.  I’m not giving anything away by telling you that at the end of the movie Jake Gyllenhaal’s character wins a science fair and is awarded a medal for it.  After the movie ended, Young Ken hurried up to his bedroom, fished his Pinewood Derby medal out of his dresser drawer, and looped the ribbon around his neck.  He wore it for the rest of the night and it was only because he was too sleepy to protest that he let us take it off him before he went to bed.

Medals don’t mean much in themselves anymore.

Ken was given the one above at his karate tournament yesterday.  He was told it’s for being a first runner-up, but it’s more or less a medal for good sportsmanship.  Last year Ken took home the second place trophy for sparring.  This year he was eliminated in his first bout.  It was a tight contest with a tough opponent and finished with the score 2-3, with three no decision calls along the way, one of which could have gone Ken’s way, as two of the judges scored the round for him while the other three saw it as a draw.

He was disappointed, but he sincerely believes the guy who beat him was better and he learned a few tricks from sparring with a more skilled opponent.  One of the masters running the tournament hung the medal around his neck but Ken took it off as soon as he walked off the gym floor and handed it off to his mother to put in her purse.

What he wore with pride, and took home with him and took to heart, was the praise he received afterwards from two of his teachers from his dojo.

One told him that she was very impressed by some of his moves during his kata demonstration.  The other said he had never seen Ken spar as well as he did yesterday and that includes last year’s tournament.

And, in addition, he had fun and there was pizza in the cafeteria for all comers.

All in all, a good day.

For the Mannionville Daily Gazette’s blow by blow live sports report, see my Twitter feed.

Yesterday was a big day for Ken.  Today’s a big day for his brother.  It’s Oliver Mannion’s 15th Birthday!

Editor’s choice: Time catches up with all of us, even Cary Grant

Originally posted June 2010.

Cary Grant could still move pretty well for a guy his age in 1964.

He was 60 when he made Father Goose, this past weekend’s feature for Mannion Family Movie Night, and while the movie doesn’t require him to outrun strafing biplanes and hang from the cliffs of Mt Rushmore or climb drainpipes and creep across rooftops while eluding the gendarmes, as he was doing for Hitchcock a decade before when he could still move pretty well for a man in his 50s, he does have to dive for cover from strafing fighter planes, vault fallen trees, and catch a fish with his bare hands.

It’s not much, but because he could do it gracefully, fluidly, and with some agility and alacrity, and because he was in excellent shape, he gives the impression that he could do a lot more and if the script had called for it he wouldn’t have looked too ridiculous fighting it out hand to hand with a squad of Japanese soldiers.

He doesn’t look as though he’d have won with his flying fists and karate skills.  Just as though he wouldn’t have won by causing the soldiers to die of laughter.

One thing he can’t do is carry a gun.  In the several scenes in which he has to carry a rifle he holds it as if it’s an oversized rolled up newspaper he’s about to use to swat a very large fly, one-handed, at waist level, with no sign of its having any heft or that he expects any kickback if he has to fire it, which he’ll do without remembering to aim it.

But then Grant never got much practice carrying a gun, or wielding any weapons, over the course of his long movie career.  He probably has the lowest body count of any leading man in Hollywood history, if you don’t count ships he sunk in Destination Toyko, and he didn’t use a gun in that one, he did it with torpedoes.

Otherwise, he moves and acts like a younger and more active man, and you can almost believe he’s in his mid to late forties, instead of five years from collecting Social Security, which is helpful to enjoying the movie because his love interest’s played by Leslie Caron, who was nearly thirty years younger than he was.

Grant plays Walter Eckland, an expatriate ex-history professor hiding out from responsibility, civilization, and all demands on his time or sympathies in the South Pacific at the outbreak of World War II.  Eckland is coerced into helping the war effort by an old friend, an officer in the British Navy, played by Trevor Howard, who puts him to work as a frontline spotter reporting back to headquarters on the movement of Japanese ships and planes.

Eckland’s job is to sit alone on an otherwise deserted island with a radio and a pair of binoculars and watch the skies and the ocean horizon and hope the Japanese don’t figure out he’s there.

The job would seem to suit him.  Eckland is misanthropic, anti-social, and totally self-centered.  At the start of the movie he seems to believe he can ignore the war entirely and that the war will ignore him.  He’s also grown lazy and sloppy since he's left teaching and spending days on end in solitude with nothing he has to do, nowhere he has to be, and nobody he has to impress ought to be a dream come true for him.

But, minimal as it is, it’s still a responsibility and it’s still a connection to a society he has rejected.  Worse, it requires him to stay sober for longer stretches of time than he’s used to or can tolerate.

He has no choice, though, but to make the best of it.  Which he does, grumpily and under protest, until his island’s invaded….

By Leslie Caron and a company of schoolgirls.

Caron, as Catherine Freneau, a teacher and daughter of a French diplomat, and her charges have been stranded along the way trying to escape the Japanese advance.  Eckland comes to their rescue, reluctantly.  Plot complications in the form of the war prevent the Navy from rescuing Eckland from those he’s rescued and he’s stuck with their care and feeding.

He resents the intrusion, he resents the responsibility, and he resents Catherine’s insistence that he act as a respectable father figure for the girls.

Catherine is as prim and proper, neat and tidy, and respectable and responsible as Eckland is none of those.  Naturally, they fall in love.

After a period of hating each other during which Eckland, under the influence of Catherine’s example and the girls’ surprising affection for him, unconsciously grows back into someone more like his former self, responsible, caring, considerate, and sober.

Father Goose is a fun film and Grant and Caron make a plausible pair of potential lovers, as long as you accept that she’s playing a few years older than her real age so that she’s closer to forty than thirty and he’s playing a guy in his late forties, somewhat weathered by the tropical sun and rusting from the inside out thanks to his heavy drinking.

And you can accept this because, as I said, Grant moves so well.

But then Eckland shaves.

Removing Eckland’s beard was probably meant as a signifier that he had completely reformed.  Cary Grant with two week’s worth of stubble is a drunken bum.  Cary Grant clean-shaven is…Cary Grant.

At least, that’s how it was supposed to come across.

It’s not how it came across to me the other night.

Cary Grant unshaven looked like a character named Walter Eckland.  Walter Eckland beardless looked like an old man who used to be Cary Grant.

I can’t swear to it but I’m pretty sure Father Goose was the first Cary Grant movie I ever saw.  I don’t know exactly how old I was.  I have a habit of thinking that everything important that happened to me as a kid happened when I was nine.  And I might actually have been nine.  Safe to say I was somewhere around nine but no younger than seven and no older than twelve.  What I remember clearly is loving the movie.  It was one of my favorites for a long time afterwards.

What I don’t remember is thinking of Cary Grant as old.

At whatever age I saw it I would have been looking at a Cary Grant who was right around the age of both my grandfathers but I sure didn’t think of Walter Eckland, or Cary Grant, as grandfatherly.

I don’t think it was the case that I was less of an ageist when I was nine…or ten or eleven or however old I was.  I definitely thought of my grandfathers as looking grandfatherly.

I think it was partly that I just was more willing to accept whatever a movie required me to accept in order to enjoy it.  If the movie required me to believe that Cary Grant could take on Japanese soldiers and sweep a woman young enough to be his daughter off her feet than that’s what I believed.

But it was also that Cary Grant was Cary Grant and even as young as I was I understood that Cary Grant was different.

Time and he had an understanding.

If Father Goose was the first Cary Grant movie I saw, Operation Petticoat was the second.  I got to know Cary Grant as a somewhat gruff middle-aged (but not grandfatherly) man.  Seeing him as a young man, seeing him as what he was for most of his career, which had to wait until I was in high school and college when our family got cable and when I was able to see his movies on a big screen at second run houses and college film festivals, was a revelation.

And now, having seen all those movies, I can sort out his career chronologically in my memory, and understand that one of the great things about Grant was how gracefully he aged.

I don’t mean that he kept his looks and his hair and his figure longer and better than most normally mortal human beings are lucky enough to do.  I mean that if you watch him get older from Gunga Din and Only Angels Have Wings, through Notorious and His Girl Friday, and on through It Takes a Thief and North By Northwest, and then on up to Charade and Father Goose, you can see the way he altered his acting style, his habits of speech, his whole screen persona to work in the fact that he was getting older.

He was careful about choosing his movies.  There’s no Spirit of St Louis or Man Who Shot Liberty Valance in his filmography.  But it’s not just that he never tried to play any characters ridiculously younger than himself.  I see Eckland as in his late forties but the part could have been played as if he’s the same age as Catherine, and the reason I see him as older, although not as old as Grant was, is that Grant didn’t let himself try to make Eckland younger.  Eckland comes off as ten or fifteen years younger than Grant because Grant could move as if he was ten or fifteen years younger.  But he never slips up with an expression, a look, a phrasing of a line, or a gesture that reminds us of the truly young Cary Grant.

Other leading men and women have managed this, the ones who were good actors.  I just can’t think of any others who did it as well or who made the transitions as seamlessly.  Think of any of your favorites and odds are there’s a five or even ten year period when they were playing “young”---that is they were playing parts as if they were still the hot young romantic leads they’d been---when they should have already moved on.

Jeff Bridges!

That’s one.

There’s nothing that does more to make actors look old than trying to play young when they’re not and this includes having their characters do things that the actors themselves are clearly too old and stiff to really do, so please, Mr Ford, Mr Spielberg, no more Indiana Jones movies!

Walter Eckland is in his late forties because he was played by Cary Grant but Grant himself did nothing to make Eckland that young.  Grant just was that much younger than his real age.

Which I guess is why it came as such a shock to see him without the beard and realize that as slowly as it was coming upon him old age was coming.

Now of course I know that Cary Grant got old.  Very old.  He lived another twenty-two years and I saw him in his dignified, white-haired dotage on the Oscars and talk shows.  But that was the real Cary Grant.

Cary Grant, the screen presence, aged but he did not get old.

Grant did Father Goose for the fun of playing against his image.  He was looking for a part that would teach audiences to see him in a very different way so that he could start playing the kinds of character parts that formerly leading actors take on when they are closing out their careers.  But then he made only one more movie after Father Goose, Walk, Don’t Run, the one and only film in which he played a fatherly version of his former self.

A different thing from playing a father, by the way.

And he never played grandfatherly versions of his former self, as Clint Eastwood has been doing.

He never went on to play judges, generals, crime bosses, old college professors, or, well, fathers and grandfathers.

He aged gracefully and beautifully but he did not get old on screen.

As I said there are no embarrassments in his career like The Spirit of St Louis.  But there’s no Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, no Road to Perdition, no On Golden Pond.  Nothing like The Shootist or True Grit.  Nothing like Atlantic City or Local Hero.

There are only those few moments in Father Goose like the one on the beach just before the climactic Japanese attack when he looks over his arm at Leslie Caron and you can see it, around his eyes, along his jaw.

The fact that time catches up with all of us, even Cary Grant.

Follow the link to read the comments on the original post.

Editor’s choice: Robins Hoods

Originally posted June 8, 2010.

Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood is not the story of Robin Hood.

It’s a Robin Hood story.

Some of the time.

When it’s not Braveheart or Gladiator or Kingdom of Heaven or Lord of the Rings or Saving Private Ryan or The Lion in Winter.

For one brief, inexplicable, and borderline insane moment it’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but never mind.

It’s all those other movies for more minutes at a stretch than it’s Robin Hood and, actually, the best parts of this movie are when it’s The Lion in Winter, which is a problem because Robin Hood isn’t in any of those scenes.

I should say Russell Crowe isn’t in any of those scenes.  Robin Hood isn’t in other scenes that Crowe’s in.

Movies in which the best scenes are ones without the leading man and you don’t miss him usually star Adam Sandler.

When this movie is about Robin Hood---that is when the story is about the character named Robin Longstride behaving as if he might be or become Robin Hood, as opposed to behaving as if he’s Robert the Bruce, Maximus Meridius, Aragorn (Think it’s a coincidence that Aragorn’s also known as Strider?), or John Cleese---it works as the tale of a real man whose life and adventures became the basis from which the legend of Robin Hood evolved.  If Robin Longstride is to Robin Hood what David Crockett is to Davy Crockett, then Longstride compels our attention by the ways he is not like the Robin Hood we know and his story is intriguing for how circumstances and other people force him to act like our Robin.

That story might have made an interesting movie, if only Scott had been content to focus and tell it.

As it is, those parts of the movie are the parts I actually enjoyed.  I appreciated the Lion in Winter pastiches.  Robin Longstride is a worn down and disillusioned man who has lost all his self-respect fighting for a king who had himself become worn down and disillusioned and lost his self-respect and I liked the story of how this man who is barely more than a thug in his own eyes learns how to be noble and good and virtuous again by pretending to be someone else.  And of course part of my enjoyment was due to my knowing that the person Longstride is pretending to be is going to become yet another person, an even nobler and more heroic person, known as Robin Hood.

Unfortunately, Scott not only fails to give this story his undivided attention, he fails to finish it. 

Even if he had, though, that wouldn’t have been enough to make this a Robin Hood story for me.  What makes what’s there a Robin Hood story is the bloom that returns to Cate Blanchett’s cheeks.

I wasn’t looking forward to this movie and had resolved not to see it because I thought Blanchett and Crowe are far too old to play Marion and Robin.

Because he’s kept his hair and some baby fat in his cheeks he doesn’t look it, but Crowe is forty-six, the same age Sean Connery was when he played Robin Hood as an old man.

Old for his time, at any rate.

Even if he was younger, Russell Crowe would not look like my ideal Robin Hood.  My Robin cuts a more dashing figure.  He doesn’t look exactly like the thirty year old Errol Flynn, necessarily.  But he’s taller, lither, keener-eyed, sharper of feature and more given to smiling, charming, flirting, scheming, and joking his way into and out of trouble than any character Crowe has played at any age.

Basically, my ideal Robin looks like N.C. Wyeth’s version…

Crowe looks more like Howard Pyle’s Robin.  Brawnier, stouter of limb, broader of face, more of a brawler than a fencer, as likely to punch his way out of trouble as to think his way out and more tempted to.

Both Robins are highly intelligent leaders, inclined to rely more on their wits than on their skill with a sword or a bow and arrow.  Wyeth’s Robin looks to me like more of a schemer and a plotter.  He likes to make plans and see them through.  Pyle’s Robin prefers to think on the fly and enjoys making it up as he goes.

And both Robins have terrific senses of humor.  Wyeth’s Robin is wittier.  Pyle’s Robin prefers a good practical joke and tells ribald stories in mixed company and gets away with it.

And both Robins are more likely to smile and laugh out loud than any character played by Russell Crowe, including Jack Aubrey and Jim Braddock, the only two happy men I’ve seen Crowe play.

That doesn’t mean Crowe can’t do merriment, just that I don’t picture him as a particularly merry character.

He does do anger, however, a quality of Robin’s that is very important to Pyle’s version of the legend.  In many of the retellings, Robin becomes an outlaw by killing one of the king’s deer.  He either does it out of hunger or out of youthful exuberance or in solidarity with the poor and hungry of Notinghamshire, but he does it, he breaks the law, and the law is unforgiving.  But in Pyle’s version, Robin’s killing the deer is the prelude to his real crime.  He kills one of the king’s foresters.

It’s self-defense.  The man had bet that Robin couldn’t hit the deer let alone bring it down with a single arrow and he was so infuriated at losing the bet that he tries to kill Robin by shooting him in the back.  The arrow barely misses him.  Robin reflexively notches his own arrow and lets fly and that’s it, he’s a murderer---in his own eyes as well as the law’s.  He takes to the woods to escape his own shame more than any legal punishment.  He can’t face his own family.

Pyle’s Robin has a quick and fiery temper and a strong sense of guilt and Crowe has no problem portraying either.

But Pyle’s Robin commits this murder and becomes Robin Hood the famous outlaw when he is eighteen.

This is prologue.  Pyle picks the story up a few years later, but only a few, no more than ten, and so when the tales we know as Robin’s main adventures begin Robin Hood is in his mid to late twenties.

Pyle’s Robin, Wyeth’s Robin, Errol Flynn’s Robin, my Robin, practically everybody’s Robin is a young man!

His youth is part of the eternal attraction of his story.

Robin doesn’t swing from chandeliers, scale castle walls, drop from trees on the sheriff’s men just because it looks exciting on film.  He swings, climbs, leaps, pounces, and vaults every chance he gets because he can’t resist.  He’s too full of energy and exuberance.  And, besides, it’s fun!

Robin Hood doesn’t have to be a kid but he has to be young because his story is a summer’s tale.  It is always June in Sherwood Forest, even at Christmas.

By the way, Scott barely gives us a glimpse of Sherwood Forest.

Robin and his merry men are in the summers of their lives.  They are young but not kids, in their primes, at the peak of both their strength and their skills.  But more importantly they are free of responsibilities.  They haven’t started families yet.  They don’t own farms or shops.  (If they had them, they were taken from them by Prince John and the Sheriff.)  They are in their twenties, even the ones who get played by middle-aged actors in the movies, and you are never as free in your life as you are when you are in your twenties.  When you are younger, you are too dependent on other people.  When you are older, too many other people are depending on you.

The essential appeal of Robin Hood is his freedom and that freedom is inseparable from his youth.

In his review of Robin Hood, Anthony Lane looks into the question of the legendary Robin’s social status.  I thought the question was settled.  Robin Hood is an aristocrat, Sir Robin of Loxley or Robert Earl of Huntington, take your pick.  Lane points out that in the earliest known ballads and stories in which Robin appears he’s lower middle-class, a yeoman, from a family of farmers who owned and worked their own small estates.  He’d have had some political rights and not much money, although with reasonable expectations of acquiring more, as long as the crops come in and the king doesn’t decide to raise taxes and go to war, taking your sons and hired hands with him.

So, he doesn’t have much to lose when he takes to the woods as an outlaw and he has much to gain in the way of freedom and pleasure.

Somewhere along the way Robin picked up a title and a lot more land and money and in becoming an outlaw he gives up quite a bit.  He also changed the nature of his outlawing business.  He always robbed from the rich but he only shared with the poor, when they asked for help.  Charity work was a consequence of his turning outlaw.  When he became Sir Robin turning outlaw was a consequence of his charitable and democratic nature.  He sided with the poor and the downtrodden against his own class and the members of his own class brand him a traitor and set out to punish him.

The idea of someone rich and powerful taking sides against the rich and powerful is naturally very appealing to more liberal and democratic times and it’s worth noting that Douglas Fairbanks’ Robin Hood is a product of the Progressive Era and Errol Flynn’s Robin is a blatant New Dealer while Kevin Costner’s post-Reagan Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves turns the aristocratic part of the legend upside down by telling a simple revenge tale and putting the poor on the side of the aristocrat in his personal vendetta to get his money, land, and status back.  That isn’t all that makes Prince of Thieves a terrible movie but it doesn’t help to ask audiences to root for a Robin who is robbing from the rich in order to give to himself.

The reason for bringing up Robin Hood’s class background is that Scott’s Robin---Russell Crowe’s Robin---is emphatically not an aristocrat.

He’s not even a yeoman.  His father was a stonemason, which would have made him part of a rising urban middle class, but he was killed when Robin Longstride was a boy and Robin grew up an orphan fending for himself.  This is fine.  Legends are told one way for ages, then some storyteller or poet or balladeer or screenwriter adds a twist that catches on, and suddenly the legend is told a new way that audiences accept as if it was always part of the legend.  They even rewrite the legend in their own memory to include it.  If Scott’s Robin Hood had been a better and more likeable movie, we might have a new and different Robin Hood legend to tell for a while.

The point is that pushing Robin down the social ladder isn’t a violation of the legend and it had the potential of adding something interesting.  The movie implies that Robin and two of his merry men, Alan a Dale and Will Scarlet, have been living the life of the legendary Robin Hood for some time already when we meet them.  Longstride’s problem is that he has been living this life to no purpose except survival and, a born idealist, he wants and needs a higher calling.  He apparently thought he’d found it in signing on to King Richard’s Crusade, but this hasn’t worked out so well for Robin or the king.

Now, what does all this have to do with the bloom in Cate Blanchett’s cheeks?

When the usual sort of improbable plot twists force Robin Longstride to assume the identity of a dead nobleman, Robin is reborn.  Scott includes a symbolic baptism in case we’re slow on the uptake here.  What follows is Robin’s sentimental education.  He learns manners, politics, refinement, and, most important, empathy and responsibility.  He begins to see that he could have a life that has purpose.  He is, of course, learning how to be the Robin Hood we know from the legends.

And the closer he gets to becoming Robin Hood, the younger or at any rate the more youthful he grows.

His spirits lighten.  His smile broadens.  His eyes light up and his step quickens.  He isn’t about to swing from chandeliers or scale castle walls, but he moves with more energy and grace.  He even dances!

And in the process of growing younger he takes Marian---Lady Marian.  As she informs Friar Tuck, it’s a very long time since she was a maid---with him.

Marian has been as worn-down and worn-out and disillusioned by the war as Robin.  For all intents and purposes, she’s been living at home as a widow for ten years but unlike Penelope in the Odyssey she has given up waiting for her missing husband to return and buckled down to the grinding and soul-sapping task of trying to make her farms and fields pay, not an easy job when most of what it produces is taken by the crown to support the army.

Her heaviest burden, though, is her loneliness.  She has hundreds of people depending on her and not a single person she can depend on herself.

When Robin shows up at her door and, thanks to even more improbable plot twists, goes to work helping her run the estate, her burden is immediately lightened and her spirits lift.  She isn’t quite reborn too, but she is rejuvenated, and like Robin and along with him she begins to look and act younger.

Neither Crowe nor Blanchett are meant to be playing their true age.  I would peg Robin and Marian as about ten years younger than the actors playing them, Robin in his mid-thirties and Marian about thirty, which in the context of their time, would have put both of them well past the springtime and even the summer of their youth.  They are in the early autumn of their lives.  What they are granted in the movie is an Indian summer.

This is what makes the movie a Robin Hood story.

Robin Longstride and Lady Marian have their spirits refreshed by the telling of the adventures of Robin Hood.  Of course they don’t know that story and they certainly don’t know they are being used to tell that story, but the story affects them the way it affects everyone who hears it and loves it.  It makes them feel young and vital and good-hearted and happy and noble and heroic and, best of all, free!

It’s too bad that just as he gets this story underway, Scott lets himself be distracted by the sudden attack on Gondor by the orcs and the Scots rallying to repel them on the beaches of Normandy.

_______________

You’d never know it from this movie, but one reason Robin and his men are so merry in the legends is that they are living a comedy.

Think of his most famous adventures.  His first meetings with Little John and Friar Tuck, the archery contest, even the moment when the disguised King Richard reveals his true identity to the outlaws.  These are comic stories.  And Robin’s adventures end happily, with the rightful King’s return, good rewarded and evil punished, and Robin and Marian living happily ever after.  The story of Robin’s death is sad but it’s an epilogue.  And it happens when Robin is well into middle-age, almost an old man.  Forty, at least!

And the point of that story is to begin the story all over again.  See my post Robin’s Last Arrow.

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When good actors go bad

How’d it happen that John C. Reilly’s presence in a movie automatically makes it a must-miss for me?

Roger Ebert gives Cedar Rapids the kind of enthusiastic review that usually has me looking forward to seeing it.  But Reilly’s in it and I probably won’t even watch it when it comes out on DVD.

I don’t understand it.  I used to think he was a good actor.  Now I can put up with Jonah Hill and Seth Rogen and even Adam Sandler with more equanimity.

Although a movie with Hill, Rogen, and Sandler?  Not that I have to worry about such a thing.  I mean, who’d waste their time making that movie?

Maybe it’s not him.

Maybe it’s the movies he’s made since somebody decided he was funny.

I mean, what was the chance I would have gone to see Cyrus anyway?

How about you?  Who keeps you out of the cineplex?

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“Plenty of seats outside.”

Just back from picking up some light bulbs.  Nice to have an excuse to go to the hardware store that isn’t to buy tools, parts, or supplies for a major repair job.

Sun’s out.  No wind.  Pretty day.  But cold.  Stopped in at the coffee shop to refuel and warm up.  Owners’ daughter had a text book open on the counter.  Biology.

“Pre-med?” I ask.

“Nursing,” she says brightly.

“Good,” I say, “The world needs more nurses.”

She agrees.

That settled, I take my coffee over to a table and sit down.

“Who let him in here?”

New customer has come in the door.  Older guy, in his sixties, but big and hearty, with a full head of white and gray hair.  I don’t know him but for a second I think he knows me.

“I’m not sure I want to stick around, not with him here.”

But him is not me.  Him’s another customer, who has been so quiet and still I forgot him was here.  Another older guy, older than the first older guy.  Seventy or so.  He’s sitting at two tables pulled together with yesterday’s newspaper spread out across them.  He’s wearing his hat, a red plaid woolen bill cap, the kind I thought was old-fashioned when my grandfather wore them.  He doesn’t look up from his paper or, as far as I can tell, acknowledge the first older guy at all.

The first man doesn’t press it.  He goes to the sideboard to pour himself a coffee and then steps up to the counter to pay.  Notices the owners’ daughter’s text book.  He reads the caption on an illustration.

“Duo-do-odd-and-em?”

I suspect him of mispronouncing it on purpose to be funny, but the owner’s daughter corrects him with a smile that’s going to make her future patients pushing the call buttons by their bed every chance they get, even if it means she comes running with a needle.

“Duodenum.”

He tries again.  Comes closer.  “Duo-odd-den-um.”  They both laugh.  He says.  “Even if I could say it, I couldn’t tell you what it is.  My wife and my son talk about this stuff all the time and I’m lost.  You’d think by now I’d have picked up some of it.”

He guesses what she wants to ask.

“My son’s a doctor.”

“Oh!  What’s his specialty?”

The man has to think.  He knows but doesn’t know, that is, he knows what his son studied in med school but isn’t sure what to call it or how to explain it.  “D.O.?  Something?  Osto…osteo…?”

“Osteopathy?”

“Sounds like it.  He works mainly in the ER these days though.”

“That’s what I want to do!”

“What kind of doctor are you going to be?”

“I’m in nursing.”

He nods.  Asks her if she’s ever heard of a Doctor So-and-so?  She shakes her head.  He seems surprised.  “Very famous.  One of the best in the country.  My son was working in the hospital morgue one time.  Some terrible multiple murder had happened and they had the bodies in there, taking the organs out, trying to figure out what happened.  This doctor breezes in, takes over, sizes everything up at a glance, delivers his opinion off the cuff, which turns out to be right, breezes out.  Nurse asks my son if he knows who that was.  My son says no.  The nurse says it’s Doctor So-and-so.”

The owners’ daughter waits politely for the point, punchline, or moral.  There doesn’t appear to be one.

“I don’t know how he does it.” Man means his son. “There’s only once he admitted it got to him.  Woman backed her car over her baby.”

The owners’ daughter winces.  I wince.  The second older guy keeps reading his paper.

The first man continues, “When it’s an adult or an old person, that’s one thing.  But a baby!  You wonder, you know?”

He abruptly decides it’s time for him to take his coffee and sit down.  He says, “Excuse me.  I think it’s time I go bother this fellow for a while.”  Half-turns towards the other man in the plaid cap.  “You know you’re reading yesterday’s paper, don’t you?”

The other man doesn’t look up.  Says, “Expected to see you Saturday night.”

“Saturday.  What was Saturday?”

“Pancake supper.”

“Saturday?  I can’t go out on Saturday night.  Saturday’s date night.  I have to stay home and keep the wife happy.”

The man in the cap doesn’t react.  The first man continues to lean on his elbow on the counter, taking sips from his coffee.  The owners’ daughter has gone back to studying.  The first man gets tired of waiting for the man in the cap to react to the date night joke.  He says, “No.  Saturday we couldn’t go out.  We were both two sheets under the table.”

That’s what he said.  Not three sheets to the wind.  Two sheets under the table.  But he didn’t mean three sheets to the wind anyway.  He and his wife weren’t drunk.  They were sick. 

“We had the green apple two-step.”

The man in the cap responds in the same way he’s responded to everything else the first man has said, by not responding.

The first man says, “You ever had the green apple two-step?”

Again, nothing from the man in the cap.

“You ever eat a green apple?”

The man in the cap says, without looking up, of course, “Only ones supposed to be green.”

“Green apples give you such a belly ache,” the first man says, for the benefit of the owners’ daughter, “When we were kids we used to fill up on them.  Man, were we sorry.  That’s what it was like for the wife and me.  The green apple two-step.”

The man in the cap doesn’t offer any sympathy.  “So, what about next week?”

“What about it?”

“Oyster dinner.”

“Is that next week?”

“The Nineteenth.”

“Probably all the tickets are pre-sold by now.”

“I hear there are some left.”

The first man pushes himself away from the counter.  “You know what?  I’m going to sit down here with you now.”

The man in the cap doesn’t make any moves to clear some space.

The first man says, “Not that I want to sit with a miserable old cuss like you.  There’s just no other place to set down.”

The man in the cap says, “Plenty of seats outside.”

And he doesn’t look up.

Editor’s choice: Trying to remember to count my blessings

Originally posted March 3, 2010.  I don’t think I’ve lived up to my resolution very well.

Here in Mannionville, or pretty much anywhere, 2009 wasn’t exactly a barrel of laughs, and 2010 doesn’t look to be a whole lot more fun so far.

When things start to wear on me, I try to remind myself that, bad as it gets, there’s always someone who has it worse, because that’s what my mother taught me to do.

And when I forget, life has a way of making me remember it.

Back in the fall, when I was fighting my way through another bout of self-pity, my father-in-law had a stroke. He’s recovering pretty well although his right leg is never going to be strong enough to support him again and his best hope is that he’ll soon be able to ditch his walker for a cane.

Not too long after that, Uncle Merlin lost his father.

Things evened out a bit in November and early December, but I was getting gloomy again around Christmas, which is when one of favorite librarians had a stroke, far more catastrophic and incapacitating than Father Blonde’s and it’s still not clear how well she’ll be able to recover except that it won’t be very well. 

And this morning I said hello to a neighbor I hadn’t seen in weeks and asked him how he’d been.

“I being treated for prostate cancer,” he said.

I know people who have lost their jobs.  I know people who are dealing with divorce.  If somebody isn’t sick themselves, somebody they’re close to is.  The blonde’s aunt has a degenerative lung disease.  My aunt’s cancer has recurred.  A good friend’s father has Alzheimer’s.

There are young men and women marching off to Afghanistan and Iraq.  There are their mothers and fathers who have to watch them march off.  There are people who have to live in Afghanistan and Iraq.

There are a lot fewer people living in Haiti.

And I’m bummed because the basement sprung another leak?

Well, yeah, I am.

I’ve been counting my blessings, reminding myself that there are people who have far greater troubles, but so far that hasn’t plugged the hole in the foundation or taken an inch of water off the floor.

I still need to get down there with a mop and a wet-vac.

The wet basement’s a metaphor, by the way.

It’s a commonplace to say that someone’s so wrapped up in his problems he can’t think about anyone else.  But sometimes that’s like saying someone’s so swept up in the rapids he can’t see the shoreline.  We can hug problems to us like blankets and get tangled up in them.  So to speak.  But generally problems wrap us up, like pythons.  Or it might be better to say, rather than our getting wrapped up in them, they get wrapped up in us.  They get inside us.

We worry.  We’re anxious.  We’re uneasy.  We feel sick. Worry and anxiety don’t just cause spikes in our blood pressure, sour stomachs, headaches, weariness, illness.  They are higher blood pressure, ulcers, pounding heads, exhaustion.  They are dis-ease.

We have no other way of feeling our feelings except to feel them, and, boy, doesn’t that sound glib?  But it’s a fact.  We don’t just live inside our bodies, we are our bodies, and our bodies have to do all our experiencing for us, including our mental and spiritual suffering.  When our thinking gets un-well, our bodies feel it.  We get sick.

Works the other way too, because our brains are stimuli processing machines.  All we know of the world, really, is the part of it touching our bodies, which means all we know is what’s happening to us physically.

Our body gets sick then that’s what our brains know.  Sickness.

I could tell you “I’m feeling a little stressed today,” but I could say, more accurately, I am stressed or I am under stress because what is happening---what I’m feeling---is exactly what steel feels when it is stressed. 

I’m being pushed towards my breaking point.

I may be a long way from it.  I may be built to withstand a lot more stress.  The point is that the stress is a physical fact.  It’s not an abstract outside force.  It’s as measurable a change in my skin as in the skin of an airplane or the hull of a submarine.

I’m using me as a stand-in for you here.  And for him, and her, and them.  And me.  For all of us corporeal beings.

Counting blessings, remembering there’s always someone who has it worse, these are distractions.  Simply ways of telling ourselves not to pay so much attention to our selves’, our bodies’ dis-ease.

But we are still sick.

Times are hard.  That’s literally true.  The stresses and strains of the Recession are hard upon us.  They rub, they weigh us down, they wear us down.  We’re tired, we ache.  We slog around with pain in our hearts and minds that are like pains in our heads and backs and stomachs and legs because they are pains in our heads, backs, stomachs, and legs.  We’re sick, we’re diseased, and we’re infectious.

Telling ourselves to count our blessings, remember the people who have it worse off, maybe this doesn’t work to make me feel better, but it should make me think before I open my mouth to complain, make me feel foolish about what I’m about to say, make me shut up and stop whining.

I think I’ve fallen into a habit of complaining on the blog.  Not just about home repairs and annoying trips to the big box store and not being rich, and that’s what all my posts about money and the economy come down to, I’m not rich.  I hear a whine underneath everything I write about politics too.  I’m tired of it.

No, I’m not about to stop.  And there is a lot to complain about anyway.  What I’m going to try to do is write more.

At least, write more about stuff that doesn’t inspire me to whine but makes me feel like---well, not necessarily standing up to cheer, but to say, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

I’m going to try to be more like Kurt Vonnegut’s Uncle Alex.

And now I want to tell you about my late Uncle Alex. He was my father’s kid brother, a childless graduate of Harvard who was an honest life insurance salesman in Indianapolis. He was well-read and wise. And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, ''If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.''

That’s my new year’s resolution.  I don’t make new year’s resolutions on January 1.  I make them on February 28, because that’s the date I started my very first new year on.  My resolution is to try to notice when I’m happy and write about more of the times I do.

Won’t make me happy, but at least it won’t contribute to making you feel sick.

Unless I get all sappy and goofy about it.

Then I’ll probably whine about how I’m not whining enough.

February 9, 2010.  Father Blonde continues to do well, although he still needs his walker.  My neighbor’s and my aunt’s cancers are in remission.  The librarian recovered to an degree that amazed her doctors but she hasn’t returned to work.  Times are still hard, the basement’s still flooded, that’s still just a metaphor, but I have blessings to count and I keep trying to remember to count them.

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Editor’s choice: Iron Nerds

Originally published May 12, 2010.

Iron Man 2 opens with a threat posed by a villain solving an engineering problem.

And the movie heads into its climax with the hero’s hope for saving the day depending on whether he can solve a physics problem in the nick of time.

  In between there’s the usual contemporary action movie’s overdoing the exploding cars, sky high eruptions of flames, shattering plate glass, and screaming crowds stampeding the wrong way if the object is to escape the mayhem created by the clash of the heroes and villains.

But there’s enough fake science, fantasy engineering, real and someday soon to be real high tech wizardry to make Iron Man 2 one of the all time great nerd epics, ranking up there with Apollo 13, Enigma, and the first Iron Man, which was almost from start to finish a series of questions on a professional licensing exam with an ethics section that Tony Stark had to struggle to ace.

Back in college I had a friend who was training to become an engineer and as his senior year approached he was growing increasingly worried that all the best jobs in his field involved making what he called death machines.  In the first Iron Man, Tony Stark is confronted by the the evil he’s unleashed by never having given making death machines for a living a thought, and in Iron Man 2 he’s suffering from the emotional and spiritual toll of having assigned himself sole responsibility for deciding who gets to own what death machines and how many they get to have.  Stark brags to a Senate Committee that he’s privatized world peace, but what he’s really done is personalize it.  He’s made it all about him.

He’s a powerbroker, not a peacemaker.

It turns out he’s just as self-centered, self-indulgent, self-satisfied, and self-destructive in his heroism as he was in all his behavior back when he was just a millionaire playboy.  He’s made a vice out of his virtue and it’s literally killing him.

In a pair of movies about the moral crises of a brilliant but psychologically flawed scientist and engineer, the fact that he’s a superhero is incidental, that is, it’s the incident that solves the dilemma in the first movie and provokes the crises in the second.  So it makes sense that, except for a brief sequence in the first film, we never see Iron Man in action as a superhero.  In scenes where taken out of context it would look as though he’s engaging in superheroics, what we’re really seeing is Tony Stark using the suit as a weapon of self-defense.

Iron Man is not out saving the world.  Tony Stark is desperately trying to save his own ass.

The villains---Obadiah Stane, the terrorist leader Raza, Ivan Vanko (I can’t recall if he’s ever identified as Whiplash even in the in-jokey way Stane gets to be Ironmonger), and Justin Hammer---aren’t nice people and they have committed crimes, but the crime they’re intent on throughout their movies is the murder of Tony Stark.  The civilians who are threatened by their plots and schemes are pawns, bait, and collateral damage.  The villains aren’t interested in them.  And they don’t care about Iron Man as Iron Man. 

Unlike the usual comic book villains, they don’t want to get the superhero out of the way in order to pursue their evil plans for world domination or whatever.  They don’t even need to.  They want to kill the spoiled son of a rich inventor for purely personal reasons.  Iron Man is a problem---another engineering problem---that has to be dealt with before they can take out Tony Stark.  Destroying---dismantling---Iron Man is just shooting the gun out of Tony’s hand when they’ve got him cornered at last.

This is how it’s supposed to be.  Iron Man 2 isn’t so much a sequel.  It’s the next chapter in a story that began with Iron Man.  It’s the second of the Avengers movies.  Or the third.  Depends how The Incredible Hulk is figured in.  I don’t think that’s been decided yet.  The Incredible Hulk might be a side-story.  The Two Iron Man movies are definitely part of the main storyline though and the story is the story of the formation of a team of superheroes led by Marvel’s noblest and most self-less hero.

Without Captain America there can be no Avengers, and one of the reasons for that, Iron Man 2 implies, is that without Cap there will be no Iron Man.

At the end of the first Iron Man Stark tells the world, “I am Iron Man.”  But he’s not.  Not yet.  There is no Iron Man, not even by the end of Iron Man 2.  “Iron Man” is just a weaponized suit of armor anybody can wear to almost the same effect, as Stark’s buddy James Rhodes proves when he suits up as War Machine.

In the first movie, Tony Stark realizes that he’s been less than a decent human being and decides to change his ways.  But his solution turns out to have been to dress up and pretend to be a superhero.  He’s changed his job description, changed directions, but he has not changed his ways.  He’s still the same jerk he was at heart and that’s why being Iron Man is poisoning him. 

It’s as if the suit, knowing it was made for someone better to wear, is rejecting the person inside it.

During the course of Iron Man 2, Stark begins to have an idea of what he needs to do to become a truly decent person---someone worthy of Pepper Potts’ love---but he’s a long way from having learned how to be a true superhero, a true conveyed by Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury’s good natured irritation with Stark and Scarlett Johansson as the Black Widow’s deadpan moral disapprobation.  She acknowledges Stark’s charm and sex appeal with the same coldly objective amusement a tough professor might show towards a brilliant but roguish student just before she turns him in to the dean for cheating on an exam.

Tony Stark is going to have to learn how to be a hero before he can be part of the Avengers and there’s only one person Tony Stark has ever learned from.  His father.  Who is dead.

Ah…but what we learn in Iron Man 2 is that there is a connection between Howard Stark and Captain America.

Time for a confession.

I liked Spider-man and Daredevil, but when I was a kid my favorite Marvel superhero was Captain America.  Some affections never die and I can’t tell you how much it means to me that Cap is the hero of Marvel’s Civil War or that he died making the sacrifice he made.  I knew he wouldn’t stay dead, but I kind of wish he had because it would have been a fitting end for their noblest hero.

So maybe I’m projecting my wishful thinking, but I think that even more overtly than the coming of Superman was a subtext of The Dark Knight, the crucial subtext of Iron Man 2 is the coming of Captain America.

There’s a scene that is played as a throwaway I’d cite as my evidence but describing it would spoil it.

It will be interesting to see if it’s also a subtext of Thor.  There’s another egomaniac who needs to learn a few things from Cap.

Chris Evans, who will be playing Captain America, is going to have his work cut out for him.  He’s going to have to be as likable and compelling as Robert Downey Jr. but he won’t have the jokes, the toys, or the wildness to play with.  Downey will probably help him out.  As he showed in The Soloist, Downey knows how to step back and let another actor take the screen, and he also has the ability to add texture and depth to another actor’s performance---Jake Gyllenhaal’s best scenes in Zodiac are his scenes with Downey in which Downey somehow creates a circle of light around Gyllenhaal, surrounding him with his dark intelligence and eccentricity to make the bland naivte of Gyllenhaal’s boy-man character shine.

We’ll see.  A lot is going to depend on what Evans does in The First Avenger.

    Neither Iron Man movie is possible to think about apart from Downey’s performance.  There’s too much that’s fine about his portrayal of Tony Stark to go into here but I want to note how beautifully he conveys Stark’s intelligence as always a matter of physical expression.  Stark can’t stand or sit still because he thinks with his body and he is always thinking.  In this Downey is more Sherlock Holmesian than he is when he plays Sherlock Holmes.  Lesser actors would look like they’re merely fidgeting. Downey makes you see the information flowing through his skin to and from his brain even when he’s doing something as simple as reaching for a screwdriver.  The other, complementary aspect of this is his focus.  Everything moves when he’s thinking except his big dark eyes.  Also, thanks to the wonders of CGI, Downey is able to show Stark at work as a scientist as if he was a painter and so scenes in which he isn’t really doing anything more physically interesting than using a calculator have a grace and a beauty that makes being the biggest geek in the world look as sexy as being Mikhail Barishnikov in his prime.

Mickey Rourke gets all of his acting out of the way in the first ten minutes of the film.  Samuel L. Jackson is Samuel L. Jackson.  Don Cheadle’s a fine actor but I didn’t buy him as Jim Rhodes.  Then, I didn’t buy Terrence Howard in the part either.  I think it’s just that the script didn’t give either actor much of a character to play.  Gwyneth Paltrow is my girlfriend in an alternative universe so I’m not objective enough to judge her performance.  Scarlett Johansson doesn’t add very much to a part that’s mainly just an opportunity for a stunt woman in a catsuit to show off.  And Sam Rockwell struggles mightily and usually successfully to make funny a character who isn’t written as funny as he needed to have been in order to be as funny as director Jon Favreau seems to think we’ll find him. 

What this gets down to is what is obvious.  Iron Man 2 is Robert Downey’s movie even more than Iron Man was his movie.  The best performance in Iron Man 2 that isn’t by Downey is delivered by Gary Shandling!

Shandling plays a United States Senator who is onto Stark.  Senator Stern is oily, smug, conniving, probably corrupt, and amusing because he’s genuinely amused by Tony Stark.  Shandling gives Stern a sense of humor that almost offsets all his less likable traits.  Stern knows that he’s right about Stark’s selfishness but he also knows when he’s been bested and to admire Stark, a little, for besting him.

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An aside that I couldn’t figure out how to work into the actual post:  How geeky cool is it that four of Marvel’s signature superheroes got their powers or enhanced their abilities through their skill at using a slide rule?  Besides Tony Stark, there’s Reed Richards, Bruce Banner, and, nerdiest of them all, Peter Parker.

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Avengers assemble!  Of course the original post didn’t include this:

Or this one either:

By the way, why is Natalie Portman starring in every movie being made these days?

The President goes a-courtin’'

Updated.

This is a first for me, but I’m going to take the CEOs’ side here.

Mr President, it is not the job of businesses to save the economy. 

It may be in their interest to help save it, but their job is to keep their businesses going by making money, and one way to make money is to keep down costs by not spending on things you don’t need, like extra labor.  Mr President, workers are a cost.  Any benefits they receive are a cost.  Just because a business has the money on hand to cover the cost doesn’t obligate them to incur that cost, except maybe to give a family member a job.

What you’re asking businesses to do is a form of noblesse oblige.

We don’t go in for that much here because…we don’t have a noblesse.

Supposedly.

We have a democratic government.

Which means that we, the people, do for ourselves what the nobility used to be expected to back when people thought it was a good idea to set a few people up as rulers of everyone else.

In a democracy, the government, that is, the people, take care of things like saving the economy themselves.

A good way for them to go about doing this is to create jobs for themselves.

You know, by building roads and schools and post offices and dams and stuff?  And then by maintaining and repairing those roads and schools and post offices and dams and stuff.

The country isn’t in dire need of more store clerks and delivery truck drivers.

It is in dire need of teachers, fire fighters, police officers, and---driven any highways lately?---road construction workers and bridge builders.

Not jobs businesses create or should be expected to create.

Businesses create jobs when the workers they have on hand can’t keep up with the demand for the businesses’ products and services.

There isn’t the demand.

Too many people are out of work.

Too many people who have jobs are underpaid and in debt.

Their government should be doing things to change that.

Instead, you’ve ordered a hiring freeze.

No jobs there.

Your too small stimulus is petering out.

There go more jobs.

You’re planning to cut spending.

I’m guessing that’s not going to happen just by buying a cheaper brand of paper clips for government offices.

Good bye to more jobs.

The economy is in trouble but a lot of businesses aren’t, because those businesses know better than to spend money on things they don’t need, like workers to fill orders that aren’t coming in!

Mr President, you’re asking businesses to take on responsibility for the economy in way that requires them to be irresponsible about their business.

There are, however, to ways to make them contribute to saving the economy.

One is by increasing demand for their products and services by creating workers with money to spend on those products and services.

The other is to tax them.

All that extra cash businesses are sitting on?

Tax it.

Then use those taxes to create jobs.

Oh wait.

You just lowered their taxes, didn’t you?

Then I guess you really can’t do anything but beg them to act like the nobility of old.

Which sort of grants them the status of the nobility of now.

Um…

Mr President, with all due respect, is that how you see them?

Updated to report that the President reads this blog and thought this up and added it to his budget overnight, just to make me happy:

Obama to call for $53B for high-speed rail.

Editor’s choice: Dirty sexy naked poets

Originally posted April 16, 2010.

In celebration of National Poetry Month, Emily Dickinson’s Victoria’s Secret spread:

The blonde assures me The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson is a good novel, but I can’t bring myself to read it.  I’m not interested in Dickinson’s love life.  Falls into the “Things I Don’t Need to Know” department.

But maybe I should force myself to read it as a necessary corrective.  I’ve known more than a few poets and academics, male and female, who’ve admitted to serious crushes on the Belle of Amherst and I’ve never been able to see it.  Every time I get a glimpse of that winsome little middle-aged neurotic in the white dress peeking out from around the corners of one of her poems, spying on my reading the way she eavesdropped on the conversations of guests she refused to meet face to face, I get queasy and put the book back on the shelf.

Maybe if I could see her as a vibrant and vital young woman burning with sexual fires she couldn’t quench because her society and times wouldn’t allow it, if I could think of her as she might be today, not a quasi-cloistered, virtually unpublished poet, but a soaring lyricist performing her own songs in clubs and bars, singing over the heads of the dancing fanboys and fangirls in the audience to the as yet unmet soul mate she knows is out there in the shadows, the only one who truly understands (I probably shouldn’t be listening to Little Boots right now), I would have a new and stronger appreciation for her poetry.

Sex, adultery, scandal touched her family and her circle, so why not her too?  And she did write one of the great poems about masturbation, although some people insist it’s only about flowers.  Go figure.

I tend my flowers for thee—
Bright Absentee!
My Fuchsia's Coral Seams
Rip—while the Sower—dreams— 

Geraniums—tint—and spot—
Low Daisies—dot—
My Cactus—splits her Beard
To show her throat—

Carnations—tip their spice—
And Bees—pick up—
A Hyacinth—I hid—
Puts out a Ruffled Head—
And odors fall
From flasks—so small—
You marvel how they held—

Globe Roses—break their satin glake—
Upon my Garden floor—
Yet—thou—not there—
I had as lief they bore
No Crimson—more—

Thy flower—be gay—
Her Lord—away!
It ill becometh me—
I'll dwell in Calyx—Gray—
How modestly—alway—
Thy Daisy—
Draped for thee!

I’m someone who’d rather think it’s about flowers.  I just think it’s better that I don’t know it isn’t.

Maybe if I read the novel my appreciation for her work might increase.  But, based on past experiences with too much information, I’m afraid there’s an even greater chance I won’t be able to read her ever again.

Couple months back I wrote a post called Writers I have known and loathed that was mostly about one writer I’d come to loathe.  He was the author of a couple of short story collections I admired but when he came to Iowa when I was in grad school there he showed himself up as such a complete jerk that I couldn’t stand to see his name on the cover of a book anymore, and I haven’t read a thing he has written since.

Something similar but even more disappointing happened when a poet I’d recently become a big fan of came to visit.  Iowa was where I finally “got” poetry.  An offhand remark another poet, who was on the faculty at the time, made in one of my classes my first or second week there triggered something in my brain and suddenly I could do something I’d never been able to do, read a poem.  This was thrilling and for the next few weeks I read nothing but poetry, which confused my fellow fiction writing friends no end.  And while I was on this poetry jag, this first poet, a Pulitzer Prize winner, came to read.

Before he arrived, I bought a collection of his poems and devoured it.  It was terrific stuff!  The best I’d read so far.  I couldn’t wait to meet him.

He visited my class first.  He was tall, shambling, dirty, disheveled.  His hair was greasy and uncombed and he wore a wrinkled and soiled-looking seersucker suit the pants of which were torn from below his left knee up to his hip.

Not that I took much notice of that.  He was a poet, after all, and while all the students and teachers on the poetry side of the Workshop seemed to find time for showers and a regular change of clothes, I’d known plenty of artistic types who had issues when it came to grooming and personal hygiene.

Wasn’t until I realized that his fashion statement wasn’t the result of a temperamental indifference to the dictates of cultural norms but an intense devotion to whiskey.

He was hungover.

And it was one of those hangovers where you’re still half in the bag but sober enough to feel terrible and anticipate how even more terrible you’re going to feel when you sober up completely.

Made him a little grumpy.

He opened up the floor to questions and I jumped right in.  His collection included several longish poems that were in effect short stories and naturally, as an aspiring writer of short stories who couldn’t (and still can’t) write a short story, these had caught my attention, and I started to ask him how he went about distilling a narrative down to fifty odd lines.  He cut me right off.

“Oh, I don’t write those kind of poems anymore,” he growled and moved on to look for the next hand up.

Gotta admit.  I was hurt.  And embarrassed.

But I was over it by the time I went to his reading that evening.

So was he.  He wasn’t grouchy anymore.  He was ebullient.

Ok, he was probably drunk.  But the point is he was in a much better mood and gave a very entertaining reading, which I’ve since learned is something very few writers can actually do.  He even read a couple of the short story poems I liked.

And then he announced he was going to read a new poem.

It’s a little long, he warned us.

It’s more of a short story than a poem, he said.

I’m proud to say I did not heave my copy of his book at his head.

He was still wearing the same grubby suit, by the way.  Someone had given him a couple of safety pins to close the rip in his pants.

That was a disappointing encounter but that’s not the whole reason I haven’t been able to read his poetry since, even though I’ve held onto that book.

Some while after that I found my way to the work of yet another poet, a woman I’m not about to name for a reason you’ll understand in a minute.  I liked her poetry too and started asking around the Workshop if anybody knew her because I thought she’d be a good person to invite to come read.

Turned out several people knew her.  Many more knew of her.  She was somewhat notorious.

Ok, from here on this post is not for children and may not be safe for work.

According to my sources, this poet, although admittedly talented, had not achieved the success and acclaim she’d achieved at her at the time young age solely because of her talent at writing verse.

She had another talent, highly valued by other, older, influential male poets.

She gave great head.

She was the blow job queen of the American poetry scene.

This wasn’t simply gossip, I was told.  She was proud of her talent and boasted about it.  Apparently, besides being the reason she was invited to so many workshops and writers colonies, it was the highlight of the their time there for other attendees---the poet would announce ahead of time which of the older male poets she intended to go down on and then afterwards, late at night, around the campfire, as it were, regale people with the details.

She wore a rubber band around her wrist all the time, my sources said, that she removed and used to enhance the pleasure of the man and of herself.  She liked the moment to last.  And this is where the Pulitzer Prize winning poet returns to the narrative.

The young woman poet was not discreet, as you can tell.  She named names when she boasted of her conquests, and she named the Pulitzer Prize winner as one of her great disappointments.  She liked a challenge and he didn’t present her with one.

It was all over in a sec with him.

“Comes on a dime,” she supposedly said.

I’ve never been able to read any of her work ever since either.

So, I think I’ll keep my image of Emily Dickinson as it is, because I don’t want to risk having to give up this:

There came a wind like a bugle;
It quivered through the grass,
And a green chill upon the heat
So ominous did pass
We barred the windows and the doors
As from an emerald ghost;
The doom's electric moccasin
That very instant passed.
On a strange mob of panting trees,
And fences fled away,
And rivers where the houses ran
The living looked that day.
The bell within the steeple wild
The flying tidings whirled.
How much can come
And much can go,
And yet abide the world!

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Sunday morning.  My mentioning of the poet at Iowa whose offhand comment tripped some switch in my brain that suddenly let me know how to read a poem so that I understood it, reminded Bill Nothstine that once upon a time when he and the world were young he had missed a chance to have the art of writing explained to him by an offhand remark by a famous writer.  Read his post The 120-second thunderbolt.

Bill dropped a note, too, asking me what that poet---whose name I won’t drop here because I don’t want to risk anyone confusing her with either of those other two poets, although I will tell you that she’d just had a baby she and her poet husband had named Emily after guess who---had said.  Bill admits he still doesn’t “get” poetry and he was hoping that poet’s remark would open things up for him that way it had for me.  I had to tell him that for the life of me I can’t remember what she said.  All I remember is that she was discussing one of her poems and I had book opened to that poem when she said whatever it was she said.  As I wrote to Bill:

I had the book in my hand and was looking at the poem and I swear it was like a scene in a movie where a character is staring at some ancient runes that suddenly rearrange themselves on the stone tablet and become English words.  One second I was looking at an indecipherable arrangement of symbols and the next I was reading a poem.

Sorry, Bill.  But maybe this post by my friend, the poet Steve Kuusisto, will help.

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