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April 22, 2013. Saw 42 yesterday and was planning to write a review today. But since I spent a good part of the day down in the basement sloshing about in water up to my ankles, I didn’t get to it. Tomorrow then, I hope. Meantime, for some Jackie Robinson lore to bridge the gap…here’s a post from March of 2005. The great sportswriter Roger Kahn was reading from his then new book Beyond the Boys of Summer: The Very Best of Roger Kahn up at a now gone bookstore up in New Paltz and he had some good stories to tell, including these three about his friend, Number 42:
March 12, 2005. Still letting Roger Kahn do most of the work on the page this week. If you're keeping count Kahn gave me, so far, this post,this post,this post, and this post. I'm about done riding on his coat tails though. After today, I think I'll get one more free ride out of him and that I'll have to go back to doing my own writing. Unless I can find some one else as good as Kahn to steal from.
When Kahn was covering the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1950s, he became friends with Jackie Robinson. Robinson was a prickly character. He famously kept his temper on the field in the face of terrible taunts, insults, and out and out threatening behavior on the part of fans, opposing players, and even some sportswriters who openly rooted for him to fail and minimized his achievements when they wrote about him.
Kahn was one of the few writers Robison liked and trusted.
The other night Kahn told three stories about Robinson. Couple illustrate how Robinson could be prickly. One shows what he had to be prickly about.
One time Robinson was blowing off steam in the locker room, spouting about something that bothered him and arguing with Don Newcombe, Brooklyn's star pitcher and one of the first black players the Dodgers brought up after Robinson. Newcombe, who had a less volatile temperamnet than Robinson, lost his patience with him and shouted across the locker room, "Robinson you're not just wrong! You're loud wrong!"
Some writers, like I said, rooted against Robinson and disrespected him in their stories and columns. But others liked him and wanted him to succeed, either because they wanted the integration of baseball to succeed or because they wanted the Dodgers to win or just because they recognized that Robinson was a great player and they loved the game and when you love the game you love to see it played well. Still, Robinson's relationship with sportswriters even with ones who were on his side could be tense.
One day Kahn and Robinson were talking about this. Robinson wished things were different. Kahn suggested that it might help if Robinson showed some appreciation for the favorable stories written about him. "You could maybe thank some people once in a while," Kahn said.
Robinson fumed at that.
"Thank them? For what? I'm the one stole home! They wouldn't have anything to write about, I didn't do that!"
Now, here's the story those stories set up.
One time the Dodgers were playing the Cardinals in St Louis, which was, Kahn said, the heart of the old Confederacy as far as the integration of baseball was concerned.
The Cardinals are notorious because Enos "Country" Slaughter tried to lead the team in a boycott against the Dodgers in 1947, the year Robinson started with Brooklyn. It's one of the dark spots on Stan Musial's reputation that he didn't stand up to Slaughter and may even have been planning to go along with the boycott, although he later apologized to Robison for the episode and for the Cardinals' treatment of Robinson. St Louis was always one of the toughest places for Robinson, for his whole career.
So there they were in St Louis, in the mid 1950s, Robinson a long-established star at this point, clearly at the height of a Hall of Fame career, and in the middle of the game the Cardinals' manager, Eddie Stanky, stands on the lip of the dugout, dangling a pair of shoes by the laces, and calls out to Robinson who's out on the field, "Hey, boy, gimme a shine?"
Robinson, of course, kept his head and didn't respond. But after the game when he got back to his hotel, the colored hotel he and the other black Dodgers had to stay at when they traveled to St Louis, he called Kahn at his hotel, a white hotel, and asked him what he thought about what Stanky had done and said.
Kahn, who'd been up in the press box, hadn't seen or heard the incident. Robinson told him.
Robinson said, "I been in the majors seven years now. It's time for this shit to stop!"
Kahn said, "You want me to write it?"
Robinson, who could be loud right as well as loud wrong, yelled, "Course I want you to write it! Why the fuck you think I called you up?"
So Kahn wrote it.
And filed it.
And his editor killed it.
The editor told Kahn, "We cover sports here, not race relations."
Back to the future: As I said, I hope to post the review tomorrow. Without giving too much away about the movie, though, Eddie Stanky was with the Dodgers in ‘47 and it’s interesting to note the role he plays in the movie’s plot, in light of Kahn’s story.
Working up my review of The Hobbit: The Unexpected Journey. Should post just in time for Christmas. Meantime, please enjoy this post from October 2010, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Middle Earth, which I wrote when I learned that Martin Freeman would be playing Bilbo Baggins. Turns out, I guessed right about how good he’d be and in what way he’d be good as the Hobbit.
You’ll note I did not predict that Benedict Cumberbatch would be playing the villain in the next Star Trek.
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The only person for whom the house was in any way special was Arthur Dent, and that was only because it happened to be the one he lived in. He had lived in it for about three years, ever since he had moved out of London because it made him nervous and irritable. ---from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.
This hobbit was a very well-to-do hobbit, and his name was Baggins. The Bagginses have lived in the neighborhood of The Hill for time out of mind, and people considered them very respectable, not only because most of them were rich, but also because they never had any adventures or did anything unexpected: you could tell what a Baggins would say on any question without the bother of asking him. This is the story of how a Baggins had an adventure… from The Hobbit: or, There and Back Again by J.R.R. Tolkien.
“Nothing ever happens to me.”---Doctor John Watson.
Got a big kick out of Sherlock on PBS' Mystery! Sunday night and got another big kick out of it last night when I watched it again online. I’ll be writing about it, but right now I just want to mention how much I particularly enjoyed Martin Freeman’s portrayal of Watson.
I’ve always been happy to see youthful, intelligent, active, determined, and even dangerous Watsons, even before Jude Law got into the act. It’s the plodding, middle-aged Watsons I’ve always had to adjust to. Robert Duvall and James Mason were fine in their ways. But the only way I was able to accept the change from David Burke to Edward Hardwicke was to tell myself that Watson had been worn down by grief, care, and boredom during the three years he thought Holmes was dead. Conan Doyle’s stories seem very clear on this. Watson is a young, romantic adventurer and the only reason many of the refined lady clients Holmes is rude to stick around to continue to confide in him is they’re intrigued and charmed by Watson.
Watson needs to be young and active because Holmes is younger and more active and an older man just couldn’t keep up.
Before Jude Law met Robert Downey Jr, Ian Hart played a youngish and slightly raffish Watson to twodifferent properly youngish Sherlock Holmeses.
So I wasn’t surprised to see an active, determined, and dangerous Watson. What took a little getting used to was seeing an active, determined, and dangerous Martin Freeman.
As the melancholy and passive-aggressive Tim on the British original of The Office and then as Arthur Dent in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, his biggest movie role to date (a bigger one’s on the way, and that’s where this post is actually headed), Freeman made a strong play to have his picture put in the dictionary as the illustration for the definition of diffident.
Activity, determination, and danger were present in those characters mainly as qualities Tim and Arthur hated themselves for lacking. Both men were moved to whatever degree of boldness they could manage by their love for smarter, braver, more active women who you had to suspect were attracted to them because they reminded them of puppies they’d loved when they were little girls.
Jude Law’s Watson has it well over Freeman’s Watson in the departments of activity, dangerousness, and charm. mainly because he exists in a Guy Ritchie universe---and because he’s played by Jude Law---but Freeman’s Arthur Dent is a lot farther away from Freeman’s Watson than Freeman’s Watson is from Jude Law.
So Freeman’s Arthur Dent did not prepare me for his Watson.
He, Freeman’s Dent, did prepare me for Freeman’s next big movie role though. In fact, he made it seem like perfect and inevitable casting.
After all, Arthur Dent is a hobbit.
Think about it. How hobbit-like is it when you’re whizzing back and forth across the universe, bouncing through space and time, solving the secret of life, the universe, and everything, to have as the primary thought occupying your mind, “Where can I get a good cup of tea?”
Actually, Arthur and hobbits grew out of the same caricature of the non-London-dwelling, British middle-class. Dents and Bagginses are homebodies, live and let live sorts, who prefer the company of a small circle of friends and relatives, happy just to be warm, well-fed, and comfortable in their own homes, without any wish to go adventuring.
Arthur and Bilbo are yanked out their doors and set on their respective roads to adventure by forces beyond their control and that they never suspected existed.
The comparisons end there, except in identifying similarities in their roles as the main characters in archetypal heroes’ journeys, and those depend on which version of Arthur Dent we’re talking about, the Arthur of the books, the Arthur of the radio shows, the Arthur of the television mini-series, or the Arthur of the movie. Douglas Adams was constantly tinkering with his own story. Basically, however, Arthur and Bilbo are alike in learning that they have talents, skills, resources, and virtues they never knew they had because their previous quiet and boring lives didn’t require them.
Neither one completes the hero’s journey in unmitigated triumph. Bilbo’s task is left for Frodo to finish and it takes him three more books to finish it in.
But those similarities are the result of plot points, not character.
The difference between Arthur Dent and Bilbo Baggins is that although Arthur is like a Baggins, Bilbo isn’t. Not deep down. He has too much Took in him.
As I was saying, the mother of this hobbit---Bilbo Baggins, that is---was the famous Belladonna Took, one of the three remarkable daughters of the Old Took, head of the hobbits who lived across The Water, the small river that ran at the foot of The Hill. It was often said (in other families) that long ago one of the Took ancestors must have taken a fairy wife. That was, of course, absurd, but certainly there was still something not entirely hobbitlike about them, and once in a while members of the Took-clan would go go and have adventures. They discreetly disappeared, and the family hushed it up; but the fact remained that the Tooks were not as respectable as the Bagginses, though they were undoubtedly richer.
The uncontrollable force that yanks Bilbo out the door and sets him on the road to adventure is his own pride. He’s infuriated and roused to action when the dwarfs scoff that he’s not up to the job Gandalf’s recommended him for.
There’s no Took in Arthur Dent. He’s pure Dent, through and through. Mr Prosser, the civil servant in charge of bulldozing Arthur’s house for a bypass, is tormented by memories of fire, violence, and blood he’s inherited from his distant ancestor Genghis Khan, but apparently Dents have spent millennia dreaming of tea.
When the situation demands it, Arthur is capable of acting heroically or at least bravely. But usually he deals with the situation by trying to reason with it or with whatever sentient being that’s brought the situation about and dragged Arthur into it.
Arthur’s typical line of argument is that since he, Arthur, has no business being where he is, does not want to be where he is, and is only where he is because of a galactic-sized mistake, he, Arthur, and the situation have no basis for engagement and they should part company immediately with he, Arthur, allowed to continue on his way unharmed and unbothered to find his way home. Which of course is part of the problem. Arthur can’t go home. His home and the planet where his home was have been obliterated to make way for an interstellar bypass.
Arthur never quite gets his head around the fact that the Earth has been destroyed. So he never adapts. He often makes do but he never resigns himself to things as they are. He persists in acting as if, if he walks far enough and in the right direction, he will eventually walk home. Which, in the books, he more or less does.
This is admirable, but it’s not heroic.
Bilbo, on the other hand, has no trouble adapting to life on the road to adventure.
He does a fair share of complaining and wishing he was back in the Shire, safe, warm, and well-fed in his hole at Bag’s End. But in his encounters with the trolls, with Golem, with the goblins, the spiders, the elves, and finally with Smaug, he’s active, resourceful, determined, and even dangerous. He quickly gets down to the business of saving the day as if he was born to be a hero. Which, as Gandalf knew, he was.
And that brings me back to Freeman as Watson.
If his turn as Arthur Dent prepared me to see him as a hobbit---he even looks like a hobbit---now his Watson has prepared me to see him as a hero.
When we meet Watson in the first episode, A Study in Pink, he’s home from the war in Afghanistan and apparently wishing he’d never left for that particular adventure. But he soon shows that Mrs Hudson is wrong, he’s not the sit at home type. As one shadowy character says, correctly, “You are not haunted by the war, Dr Watson. You miss it.” This Watson is an adventurer by nature.
He may look like a Baggins. But there’s a lot of Took in him.
As they sang the hobbit felt the love of beautiful things made by hands and by cunning and by magic moving through him, a fierce and a jealous love, the desire of the hearts of dwarves. Then something Tookish woke up inside him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves, and carry a sword instead of a walking stick. He looked out of the window. The stars were out in a dark sky above the trees. He thought of the jewels of the dwarves shining in dark caverns. Then suddenly in the wood beyond The Water a flame leapt up…and he thought of plundering dragons…
The song that wakes up the Took in Watson and calls him to adventure has only one line, slightly rewritten for the series, and I’ll quote the original:
So you think that you've got trouble? Well, trouble's a bubble, So tell old Mr. Trouble to "Get lost!".
Why not hold your head up high and, Stop cryin', Start tryin', And don't forget to keep your fingers crossed.
When you find the joy of livin' Is lovin' And givin' You'll be there when the winning dice are tossed.
A smile is just a frown that's turned upside down, So smile, and that frown Will defrost. And don't forget to keep your fingers crossed!
What do you mean you don’t know the tune? Of course you do.
It’s stuck in your head now, isn’t it?
That the show’s theme song was a song with lyrics is something I learned from reading Dick Van Dyke’s memoirs, My Lucky Life In and Out of Show business. I also learned the lyrics were written by Morey Amsterdam who played Buddy Sorrell on the show.
Something else I learned was that Van Dyke’s lover and companion for thirty-five years was Michelle Triola, the plaintiff in the infamous Lee Marvin palimony suit. Which means that I learned that for thirty-odd years Van Dyke wasn’t married anymore to his wife, Margie. That bit of news had passed me by. Of course at the time it became news I wouldn’t have been paying attention. I probably thought I knew everything I needed to know about Dick Van Dyke.
He was the head writer for The Alan Brady Show. He and his wife Laura lived with their son Ritchie at 148 Bonnie Meadow Road in New Rochelle, New York. Their best friends were their next door neighbors Jerry and Millie Helper. He grew up in Danville, Illinois, had a brother named Stacy who sleepwalked and played the banjo, often at the same time, and served in the Army and was stationed at Camp Crowder where he was boxing champ of his barracks and where he met and fell in love with his future wife, Laura Meehan, who was a seventeen year old dancer with a USO troupe when they married. He was a brilliant comedy writer but didn’t consider himself a real writer and worked on and off on writing a novel.
Before you “Oh, Rob!” at me, I know. But I’m sure I’m far from the only fan of The Dick Van Dyke Show for whom Rob Petrie and Dick Van Dyke might as well be the same person.
The confusion is actually built into the show. The Dick Van Dyke Show’s creator, chief writer, and guiding spirit, Carl Reiner not only gave Rob Petrie pieces of Van Dyke’s biography, including the brother who sleepwalked and played the banjo. He worked important aspects Van Dyke’s personality into Rob’s.
There are differences. For instance, Rob is a bit of a klutz because Van Dyke wasn’t. Rob had a tendency to bump into things, trip, stumble, fall , touch hot objects, knock things off shelves, break things (like a tooth or a violin over his head), and otherwise expose himself to pain and embarrassment because Van Dyke was a brilliant physical comedian and Reiner and the other writers were always on the lookout for an opportunity to show off his talent for making pain both funny and as graceful as a dance by Fred Astaire, who was a Van Dyke fan, by the way.
And five or six years of Dick Van Dyke’s life weren’t given to Rob Petrie (which makes Rob five or six years younger than Van Dyke), so Rob didn’t have time between getting out of the Army and starting work on The Alan Brady Show to travel the country as a peripatetic nightclub comic, turn down a contract offer from a “manager” who was actually a front man for the mob (although at one point Rob, Buddy, and Sally were asked to write a monologue for a mobster’s nephew who wanted to break into show biz), put in several stints on live television, local and network, and get his big break starring in a Broadway musical which led to his getting his own sitcom whose devoted fans mistook him for the character he played to the point that they believed he was actually married to the actress who played his TV wife.
Another difference between the two men is that Van Dyke is the more spiritual and for a long time the more conventionally religious. He is also the more politically engaged. There are hints that Rob and Laura are nominally Catholic, but they seem to spend Sunday mornings at home and the only time I recall their going to church was for Laura's cousin’s wedding. When he was young, Dick Van Dyke was a regular attendee at whatever Dutch Reformed Church was nearby and when he was working in television and then on Broadway in New York City he found time to teach Sunday School.
How many young actors teach Sunday school? How many young actors are awake on Sunday morning?
Rob was involved in various worthwhile local causes and even ran for city council. But Van Dyke shared a podium with Martin Luther King, campaigned for Gene McCarthy, spoke out against the War in Vietnam, and cheerfully and proudly declares that of the Presidents he’s met, and he’s met four of the nine who served since 1963, Barack Obama is his favorite.
At eighty-five, Van Dyke seems to have scaled back some of his political and social activism, and he eventually drifted away from organized religion. (The drift began when he quit the church he belonged to because the board of elders balked at inviting members of the congregation of a neighboring black church to their services.) But he is still curious and thoughtful on the subject and reads and re-reads books on theology, spirituality, and philosophy. What exactly he thinks and what questions he wants answered, however, are left somewhat vague. Van Dyke shies away from self-examination and self-reflection whenever things threaten to become intensely personal. He does that on almost every aspect of his life, including the biggest difference between himself and Rob Petrie, which I’ll get to.
One more difference, not as big but still important considering that this is a book review. Rob is a writer not an actor, and he writes a lot like Carl Reiner. If he wrote his autobiography, it would be more like Reiner’s My Anecdotal Life than like Van Dyke’s My Lucky Life. Which, it almost goes without saying, means it would be funnier. But it also means that it would be a writer’s book and writers, because they can’t help themselves, tend to see everything as a story. A comedy writer, like Rob or Carl Reiner, will see it as a funny story.
Van Dyke has a sense of humor and, obviously, knows how to tell a joke, and he writes well. But he isn’t a storyteller. He knows he has a story to tell and diligently sets about telling it, but it’s one big, long story, the story of his life, and he tends to treat major events and minor incidents, the things that happened to him and the things that he did, as pieces of the larger narrative rather than as stories or anecdotes in their own right. For instance, a visit with President Bill Clinton in the Oval Office that Reiner and Van Dyke made together takes up half a chapter in Reiner’s book but gets a couple of paragraphs in Van Dyke’s. Now, that visit is really Reiner’s story to tell because the focus is on how the President and Reiner’s brother Charlie hit it off (and Reiner tells that story beautifully), but Van Dyke doesn’t even mention that Charlie was there. The point of telling us that he met President Clinton is that it happened.
And that’s how the book goes. This happened, then that happened, and then the next thing happened. There’s something very journalistic about My Lucky Life and I mean that it often reads like an extended magazine article (think The New York Times Sunday Magazine not TIME or The New Yorker and definitely not People or Entertainment Weekly, earnest, thorough, informative, not particularly stylish but not trivial, chatty, or phonily personal either) but also that it reads like a fleshed out journal.
Readers used to contemporary memoirs being confessionals might find themselves perplexed by how little confessing Van Dyke does. There’s much recounting and accounting but not much in the way of revealing or unveiling. One thing happens after another because that’s how it went, and along the way, as the players in his life make their entrances and their exits, we’re introduced to the people Van Dyke got to know, professionally and personally.
Gene Hackman makes a cameo appearance as the annoying kid cousin of Van Dyke’s best friend back in Danville, tagging along after Van Dyke and his high school buddies, two of whom weren’t, apparently, Donald O’Connor and Bobby Short, even though they were in the same class.
Walter Cronkite storms in, demanding to know why Van Dyke is firing him from the morning talk show they’re working on together, Van Dyke hosting and Cronkite delivering the news.
Cary Grant stops by to admire his tailoring and offer him a part in That Touch of Mink and to this day Van Dyke can’t understand why he turned it down.
Fred Astaire slips onto the set of Bye Bye Birdie unnoticed just for the pleasure of watching Van Dyke dance.
Pierre Salinger, President Kennedy’s former press secretary, enlists him in his ultimately losing campaign for United States Senator from California.
Warren Beatty calls and not just refuses to take no for an answer but refuses to even hear it and so Van Dyke winds up cast in Dick Tracy despite himself.
He meets and becomes friends with Stan Laurel and Buster Keaton. Harold Lloyd wants him to play him in a movie version of Lloyd’s life, a movie I wish had been made instead of The Comic, a rather strange tribute to Laurel, Keaton, and Lloyd that gives aspects of all their careers to a a fairly unlikeable character named Billy Bright.
Frank Sinatra makes dinner but refuses to sing. Debbie Reynolds tells Van Dyke he doesn’t know beans about making movies. Cloris Leachman does her best to help him quit smoking cold turkey. Michelle Obama gives him a big hug and declares that The Dick Van Dyke Show is still her favorite of all time, a statement President Obama is on hand to confirm. The President also asks Van Dyke to teach him some moves.
Julie Andrews, Chita Rivera, Carol Burnett, and Angie Dickinson sing, dance, mug, and slink their way onto his life’s stage to, pointedly, not have affairs, despite what some people assumed, and become instead Van Dyke’s very good friends.
After a while, a pattern becomes noticeable. All these famous people come and go without being the subjects of stories. Van Dyke doesn’t tell stories about them. It’s more as if he’s showing us their photographs in the family album and then, hurriedly, turning the page. And then it begins to dawn that he’s deliberately avoiding telling stories and even that not telling stories is part of the point.
Of course, what I’m saying is that this is a show business memoir that is surprisingly lacking in gossip.
And it begins to seem to be the case that it’s because Van Dyke doesn’t have any gossip to dish.
A theme of the book is that Van Dyke deliberately tried not to live a life that would make him a topic of gossip or a witness to others making themselves topics of gossip.
Not that he would dish it if he had to dish. Van Dyke comes across as someone who wouldn’t say anything about an enemy let alone a friend that he wouldn’t say to their face and that he hadn’t cleared with them first to see if they minded if he said it. Even the dead are protected by his inherent tact and discretion and compassion.
There are exceptions and one of them is the great character actress Maureen Stapleton who we learn was eccentric, phobic, and, when she’d had too much too drink, and she drank too much too often, sometimes carrying fortification in a paper bag on the set, inclined to making clumsy plays for other women’s husbands in front of those women.
About Stapleton Van Dyke does have a story to tell and he tells it. During the filming of the movie adaptation of Bye Bye Birdie, in which Stapleton was playing Van Dyke’s mother, despite being his exact same age, thirty-eight at the time, Van Dyke and his wife, along with Stapleton and another Bye Bye Birdie co-star, the acerbic character actor Paul Lynde, went to a party at the director’s home, at which Stapleton got drunk and embarrassed herself and her friends in a variety of ways before winding up naked in the director’s swimming pool and calling on all the other guests to join her.
Not the most salacious or scandalous of tales, but just about nobody else in the book is shown at so much less than their best as Stapleton in this instance, and the question is why her?
The answer is that it’s the party Van Dyke is writing about not Stapleton, he just appears to have decided he couldn’t write about it honestly without telling us what Stapleton got up to or down to. Possibly if he could have thought of way to disguise her he would have, but there may not have been any point, either because the story’s well-known and oft-told in Hollywood or because Stapleton herself was in the habit of telling it. The important thing is that that was the Van Dykes’ first Hollywood party and while it wasn’t their last, it was their introduction to a side of the movie business and celebrity-hood they resolved never to become part of.
But there’s another reason for his telling the story. Stapleton, along with Lynde, who, although he didn’t wind up naked in the pool, also wasn’t on his best behavior at that party, and Dean Martin, shown arriving drunk on the set of Van Dyke’s next movie, What a Way to Go!, were what Van Dyke thought alcoholics looked and acted like, which is why it took him so long to recognize the alcoholic who was threatening to ruin his life.
Himself.
That’s that big difference between Dick Van Dyke and Rob Petrie I was talking about.
In his acknowledgements, Van Dyke thanks his collaborator, Todd Gold. But that’s the only credit Gold is given. There’s no “as told to” or “with” on the title page implying that Gold was a true co-author if not the actual writer. There’s something about the writing that suggests Van Dyke did most of it himself. There are no signs of a ghost writer’s touch. No rhetorical effects, no narrative or dramatic surprises. No mixing it up for variety’s sake. One sentence is crafted like the last. Paragraphs are neat, well-ordered, exemplary, but too much so. This isn’t prose you’d pay someone to write. It’s prose you’d pay someone to correct or, rather, to make sure was as correct as you intended and worked hard to achieve. And from the impression Van Dyke gives of himself, I think he wouldn’t have undertaken the book if he hadn’t felt he could do most of the work himself. This would have to be his book, as in his job to do, his responsibility to meet. This was a book written out of a sense of duty.
I’m not sure who all he feels he owes this duty to. His children, obviously, his grandchildren and great-grandchildren. His fans. But also, I think, to his ghosts. His parents. Michelle Triola, who died of lung cancer in 2009, just as he was setting out to write the book. Margie, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2007 and with whom he appears to have felt still married in a strange but still deeply loyal way until the end of her life. His grand-daughter Jessica, a budding poet who died of Reye’s Syndrome when she was only twelve.
The first epigraph in My Lucky Life is an exchange between Van Dyke’s comic idols, Laurel and Hardy, from their movie Block-Heads:
Stan: You remember how dumb I used to be?
Ollie: Yeah?
Stan: Well, I’m better now.
But as a second, he’s chosen to quote himself:
If I’m known for giving people decent entertainment and raising good kids, that’s all right. I’ll have lived a good one.
With that, of course, he’s setting himself up to be judged. With the Laurel and Hardy quote too. He has to show us. Has he lived a good life by his lights and is he better now?
As I said, My Lucky Life isn’t a confessional, either in tone or effect, but it is an accounting. Van Dyke has given himself the job of honestly laying out the facts of his life that would allow readers to judge whether or not he has led his life the way he intended to live it, and honesty requires him to face up to the ways he failed at that. He did, after all, cheat for years on his wife and then leave her for the other woman, and he was an alcoholic---emphatically was. Van Dyke is not a graduate of AA, he dried out on his own and doesn’t feel compelled to say is an alcoholic, not after nearly thirty years of sobriety. But his point isn’t that he overcame his drinking problem but that he had one and he counts himself lucky that it didn’t destroy him.
That’s the other reason Maureen Stapleton appears in the book the way she does. It’s not her that Van Dyke wants to call attention to her as much as to her behavior that night, self-abusive, self-destructive, because it portended a way Van Dyke’s life could have gone, should have gone.
That he was able to get away with so much that so many alcoholics can’t---a stellar career of uninterrupted work, a happy family life, a lifelong reputation as a good, decent, responsible and reliable adult---is one of many reasons he considers himself to have been lucky.
My Lucky Life isn’t just a title. It’s a statement of one of the book’s main themes.
Van Dyke writes with a healthy dose of humility. But although he’s a humble man, he’s not a falsely modest one. He’s aware of his considerable talents. He knows what he was able to do and he knows its value. He believes the work speaks for itself. He’s willing to give himself credit where credit is due, but only in order to share it. He knows the difference between himself and his idols like Stan Laurel and Buster Keaton and Carl Reiner. And an honest accounting of his life requires him to show how lucky he was in having met and been able to work with so many people who were, by his lights, more talented and more dedicated and more deservingly successful in their ways than he was.
So he’s emphatic that he owes his having had any sort of show business career at all to his first partner, Phil Erickson, who almost literally dragged him out the door to take their act on the road. That he was able to enjoy and depend on a relatively calm and normal family life is due to his having been lucky to have met and married Margie who saw to it that their children grew up happy and fairly well-adjusted. He was also lucky to have Margie there to help and support him when he faced up to his drinking and set out to stop. His Tony Award-winning performance in Bye Bye Birdie was, as far as he’s concerned, pretty much all the doing of the director and choreographer Gower Champion who saw something in Van Dyke he didn’t see in himself and brought it out onstage. Mary Poppins couldn’t have been what it was without Julie Andrews and Walt Disney and the composing and songwriting genius of the Sherman Brothers. And, of course, The Dick Van Dyke show was, when you got down to it, Carl Reiner’s show.
But even as he’s expressing his gratitude to people, Van Dyke maintains a detachment and reticence as if he’s afraid to say any more about them because he’ll wind up saying too much and revealing things about them, and about himself, he doesn’t believe it’s his business to reveal.
There are, however, a few individuals for whom his feelings are so great that they carry him away despite himself and cause him to open up in ways that not only enliven the book but fill it with joy. One is Triola, another is Margie, and a third is Reiner, who comes across here (and almost everywhere else I’ve heard or read about him) as everybody’s over-achieving, too good to be true big brother who is successful at everything he does, including and especially at loving you and taking care of you in exactly the way you want and need to be loved and taken care of.
Another is, hilariously but also touchingly, Van Dyke’s co-star in my second favorite Dick Van Dyke movie, Lt Robin Crusoe U.S.N. No, not his leading lady, Nancy Kwan. The actor named Dinky who played his sidekick, an astronaut Crusoe finds marooned on the island he washes up on.
Well, not an astronaut, exactly.
An astro-chimp.
Van Dyke and Dinky hit it off on the set and developed, Van Dyke persuasively insists, a real friendship. Dinky gets almost as many pages devoted exclusively to him as Carl Reiner, a fact I like to think Reiner has noted and takes pleasure in pointing out every chance he gets. One of the more heartwrenching scenes in the book is when Van Dyke and Dinky say good-bye for the last time in the zoo where Dinky has been, you want to say, imprisoned.
But the person who rivets Van Dyke’s attention, the one who makes his heart and his prose soar, the one who makes him happiest to write about, is Mary Tyler Moore, with whom he is still, after fifty years, madly, wildy, and joyfully in love. And she with him.
Theirs is and has always been a completely innocent and Platonic love affair. The two seem to have been made for each other, although neither---they were each married to other people when they met---would ever have done anything about it. But they couldn’t help letting their feelings show when they were on camera as Rob and Laura. And it wasn’t just as if, like their fans, they confused themselves with the characters they played, at least for the time they were playing them. It was, and still is when you watch, as if they were and are in touch with that alternative universe where Rob and Laura are real people, where it is still and always will be 1961, and Sally and Buddy have come over for dinner and they and Laura and Ritchie are waiting for Rob to arrive home a little late from work, and that ottoman is in exactly the wrong, which is to say, the right place.
In the movie, he played golf and he was incredible. We also played poker. One day he was sick. I think he had a temperature of 103. In the scene, we were playing cards. He was supposed to be able to see my cards in the shaving mirror behind me. Amazingly, he looked up and smiled on cue. But the second that [Byron Paul, the director] said Cut, he would groan and lie down, ill.
I turned to the trainer and Byron. I wanted [Stewart, the trainer] to help him and Byron to praise him. This chimp was a pro.
The downside was that when he misbehaved, the trainer took him away and hit him. I hated that. In one scene, I came sliding down a coconut tree, but I startled Dinky, who was seated at the base of the tree. I saw all of his hair suddenly stand on end. So did Stewart. He balled up a chain he kept with him and threw it at the chimp. He saw the look on my face. It was one of surprise and anger.
“He would’ve attacked you,” he explained.
I never got used to that part of working with the chimp. To me, he was a doll. I forgot that he was an animal being cajoled, if not forced, into performing acts that did not come naturally to him. Later I heard he was doing a Tarzan movie in Mexico and bit an actor in the face. I was told the actor picked him up and pinched him, an in turn Dinky nipped his face. That was the end of his film career.
He was ten years old, so he was pretty close to retirement anyway. After I heard he’d been placed in the Los Angeles Zoo, I went there to see him, knowing he had been raised in a house---he had never been in a cage. When I got there, he was sitting in the middle of a large circular pen. It was outdoors, but it was still a cage---and I saw the effect it had on him.
I called out his name. He looked up and recognized me immediately. He ran over as close as he could. I could tell from the expression on his face that he was asking me to get him out of there. It looked like he was saying, I’m in here with a bunch of monkeys. Take me home.
The whole visit upset me. I knew he thought that I had come to take him out, which I would have if it had been possible.
A reconstruction of the little house on the prairie depicted in the novel by Laura Ingalls Wilder at the Little House on the Prairie Museum in Independence, Kansas, one of the stops along the way in Wendy McClure’s new memoir, The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie.
On my desk sit several library copies of the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder and I can’t sit down to work or even walk by without a twinge of guilt.
I checked them out to have on hand to refer back to while I was reading Wendy McClure’s The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie , and I’ve been doing that, going back and forth from McClure’s book to Wilder’s books like a responsible book reviewer and blogger ought to. But I keep thinking of the little girl who can’t read them while I have them.
I don’t know if I’m preventing her from re-reading her favorites or if I’m getting in the way of her discovering books that will become her favorites. I don’t even know if she is a little girl. I’m sure there are little boys who love these books too. I just haven’t met any. That includes my own sons who, despite being voracious readers from a young age with expansive tastes and a willingness to follow the adventures of female protagonists, never showed any interest in the wanderings of the Ingalls family.
But even if there are boys out there who are missing the books I have out of the library, I think the Little House books are girls’ books, not in their being about “girl” things, but in their being special to girls because they are so much about being a girl. They are about being a daughter and a sister and, eventually, a young wife. And, although nothing particularly or explicitly is made of it, they are about navigating through the world from inside a body that happens to be female.
I knew this about these books, knew they were special, special for girls, long before my sisters read them. I knew it without, as far as I recall, having read them myself when I was young. I don’t even remember being aware that they existed when I was a kid. But I must have known about them. I must have read them or some of them or parts of at least one of them. How else would I have known, known both that they were so well-written and that they weren’t written for me, not the way Tom Sawyer and Treasure Island and The Last of the Mohicans were written for me. Not even Farmer Boy, the one book without Laura, the one with a boy as its main character, was written for me. How’d I know? I just did. Somehow I knew about them and understood what they were when the TV series premiered and I knew that show was different and in a way lesser.
So I’m not surprised that a little girl who loved the Little House books has grown up to write her own book about how much those books meant and still mean to her.
For a while I had a close imaginary friendship with the Laura of On the Banks of Plum Creek, who felt closest to my age in those books. I was eight or nine; I had knowingly conjured her up to talk with her in my head. I daydreamed that she’d shown up in the twentieth cenruty and I had to be her guide…
…I wanted to take Laura to North Riverside Mall. In my mind I ushered her onto escalators and helped her operate a soda machine. I took her with me on car trips and reassured her when the station wagon would pull onto the expressway ramp and accelerate to a speed three times faster than the trains she rode, faster than she would have ever imagined a human being could travel. It’s okay, Laura, I’d tell her.
But Wendy McClure’s The Wilder Life is more than a nostalgia trip in the guise of a literary appreciation.
It’s McClure’s journalistic account---part memoir, part travelogue, part nostalgia trip---of her attempts to reconnect with the world the Little House books had created in her imagination and the little girl who was her heroine and imaginary friend and to discover how much of that world was real and reachable.
It starts with an almost accidental re-reading of Little House in the Big Woods, indirectly inspired by her mother’s death from cancer. From there, McClure moves on to re-reading the whole series and then the books Wilder wrote that were not part of the series and the columns she wrote for a local newspaper and the books and short stories written by her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, who was for a time the famous author in the family, biographies, scholarly appreciations, a travel book called The Little House Guidebook---a guide to all the Ingalls family homesites, of which, if you only know The Little House on the Prairie through the TV show, you’ll be surprised to learn there are many, the Ingalls moved around a lot, usually to leave another bout of bad luck behind---which McClure gives the subtitle “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Driving Out to Remote Locations in the Upper Midwest to Find Your Childhood Imaginary Friend But Were Afraid to Ask,” and even a cookbook. The next thing we know, McClure is buying a butter churn off eBay and churning her own butter in the kitchen of her apartment in Chicago and baking recipes from the cookbook. McClure is pleased to report that her Vanity Cakes didn’t turn out half-bad.
One of the things McClure is surprised to discover in her outside reading is that Laura Wilder played around with the chronology of Laura Ingalls’ life. In reality, Wilder was too young during the time her family lived in the little house on the prairie to remember what happened there, so she made herself older in the telling of The Little House on the Prairie. In other words, that book is more of a work of fiction than McClure believed it to be and finding that out caused her to wonder how much of the other books were made up as well.
Her curiosity makes her more determined to take the next step in her plan to connect with Laura World. She sets to visit the places where Wilder lived as a girl and see for herself if what Wilder says Laura saw is there to be seen.
Her trips take her to all the sites of all the places Laura calls home in the Little House books and to a couple of places she lived that don’t get mentioned in the books and finally to a home that is the subject of one whole book but where, significantly, Wilder herself never lived or ever even visited.
Along the way McClure visits museums, observes a Laura Ingalls lookalike contest, spends a night in a covered wagon not sleeping through a tremendous and terrifying prairie thunderstorm, learns that there is a deep divide between Laura fans who grew up loving the books and those who grew up knowing only the TV show---although she was just the right age for it, McClure says she never watched the show when she was a kid and doesn’t even remember connecting it to the books she loved, despite the shared title---interviews various people with their own professional and personal reasons for wanting to connect with Laura World, and buys herself half a dozen sunbonnets of the kind she wished when she was a girl she could wear or rather not wear, like Laura, with the bonnet fallen off the back of her head and the ribbons flying as she ran through the tall prairie grass. And, along the way, her researches and explorations, require her to dabble in anthropology, archaeology, meteorology, cartography, psychology, and even theology, dabbles McClure recounts with both humor and purposeful attention.
Three of the liveliest and most enlightening (for McClure as well as for her readers) sections of The Wilder Life deal with side-trips she makes, two to places not directly connected to the Little House books while the third is connected psychologically.
A visit to American Girl Place has McClure observing that one of the things she loved about the Little House Books was the thing-ness of it all, the “stuff” that helped make up Laura’s world. Looking at all the stuff available to buy to help make up your American Girl doll’s world, McClure observes:
Something about [the displays of stuff], with their images of doll-sized treasure, always buoyed me. I loved the simplicity these miniature things evoked, the way they called to mind uncluttered lives where each carefully crafted object shone with significance. Kristen’s quilt, Molly’s locket---they exuded something of the same aura with which things in the Little House books appeared; I could see them with a bit of the charmed sight of Laura World. On some level I recognized that things on display at the American Girl store purported to be as cherished as Ma’s china shepherdess, Charlotte the rag doll, and the butter mold with the carved leaves and strawberry.
She also considers the question of whether or not the Laura of the books is a tomboy. McClure emphatically concludes she was not. And she reluctantly admits a sneaking admiration for the quintessential mean girl, Nellie Oleson or at least a covetousness towards Nellie’s stuff.
McClure’s professional and feminist approval of the books for sale at American Girl Place had me wishing there was such a store for boys.
The second side-trip is to a farm where the couple who own it and work it offer weekend workshops in “homesteading” crafts and skills such as weaving, canning, soap-making, and blacksmithing. McClure goes to get a more hands-on sense of what it was like to live the life of pioneers in post-Civil War America. She’s stunned and a little frightened to discover that most of the other people visiting the farm that weekend are Christian fundamentalists and End-Timers there to learn how to survive in a post-apocalyptic America that they’re actually looking forward to.
The third side-trip isn’t to a place so much as into a personality, that of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane.
It occurs during McClure’s visit to the one house still standing that Laura Wilder could truly call home, the farmhouse in Missouri where she lived out the bulk of her life as an adult with her husband Almanzo and where she wrote the Little House books, which, I was surprised to learn, she didn’t begin to do until she was in her sixties.
Rose was already a successful and well-known author, journalist, and political activist in her own right at that point and it’s a matter of cantankerous debate how much help she gave her mother in the writing of the Little House books, with some Rose partisans arguing that she contributed so much that she deserves credit as co-author. Rose herself never claimed any more credit than the records indicate she deserves---she was her mother’s first and most vigorous editor and her writing teacher, but, when all was said and done, the Little House books were Laura Wilder’s creations not Laura and Rose’s. Still, McClure finds herself deeply intrigued by Rose, who, she concludes, must have been a difficult character for anyone, including her mother and father, to get along with. Despite her fame and her success, Rose appears to have spent her life unsatisfied, uneasy, and unhappy with herself and to have borne an undefined but lifelong grudge against her mother whom she nonetheless loved, was devoted to, and devoted herself to helping turn into the famous author she became.
It’s also at the Missouri farmhouse where McClure gets the best sense of what it was like to live the life of Laura. But it’s the wrong Laura! The grown-up and very real writer Laura Wilder, not the girl who was the creation of that writer.
McClure’s travels take her to Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, and South Dakota where she visits the sites of Laura’s many homes or where those sites are supposed to be. As I said, none of those homes are still standing. McClure has to content herself with recreations of the log cabins and shanties and sod house and none of them quite do the trick. One of the sadder moments in the book is when McClure finds herself string wistfully at a dip in the prairie where the dugout featured in On the Banks of Plum Creekprobably was.
It turns out that McClure comes closest to finding what she’s looking for during a visit to a house she came close skipping on her tour.
As a girl, McClure found it easier, and somehow more natural and more fun, and even comforting, to identify with the deprivations and hardships of Laura’s still happy girlhood than with the ease and contentment of Almanzo’s happy boyhood. As a grown-up, her feelings towards the Wilders bordered on resentment.
Pa and Ma Ingalls struggled to put food on the table and keep a roof over their family’s head and were not always or even routinely successful at it. Mr and Mrs Wilder were adept at whatever they turned their hands to and were rewarded for their efforts. Laura grew up learning how to make do or do without. Almanzo grew up having to learn when to say when. The Ingallses almost never had enough of anything. The Wilders were always on the brink of having, comparatively, too much. This didn’t make them pretentious, show-offy, smug, or self-satisfied. The Wilders were not only rich, or at least relatively rich compared to the Ingallses, they were good.
Strangely, and to her chagrin, it’s while she is in the homey yet for its time well-appointed and well-stocked kitchen of the Wilder farmhouse that McClure feels her affinity with Laura most strongly:
With all its over-the-top dinner scenes and constant allusions to the Wilder family’s good fortune, literal and otherwise, Farmer Boy wasn’t really the smug when-I-was-your-age sermon I’d originally made it out to be, but more of a wistful dream conjured up by a woman who’d spend much of her life enduring deprivation. It was a love letter to the original promise of success and prosperity that had so eluded her husband in his adulthood, when, like countless other settlers, he’d found out the hard way that the farming methods from back East were no match for the dry land of Dakota Territory.
Suddenly it all made sense---Farmer Boy was Laura Ingalls Wilder’s own Laura World, an ideal realm she’d imagined, a homesickness for this place she’d never been or seen. On my trip west I’d been trying to get to the furthest reaches of a word I thought I knew. Without even expecting it, I’d found the most secret and remote part of it here. I knew it wasn’t the house itself, here in this almost impossibly green and lush countryside; it was more that this place marked the spot in the other world, designated the place where this amazing Farmer Boy, the Child Who Always Had Enough, lived in Laura’s head…
At a certain point in her book McClure has to give up looking for Laura, feeling that she’s come as close as she can and thinking, forlornly, that the harder she tried, the more distant from Laura and Laura World she was feeling. And at that point, The Wilder Life stops being about McClure’s attempts to connect with the spirit of Laura Ingalls or even with the little girl McClure was, the little girl who loved Laura. It might be more accurate to say that the book stops appearing to be about either of those themes and it becomes openly about what it’s been about all along, a middle-aged writer named Wendy McClure writing about being Wendy McClure. We leave Laura World for Wendy World. And to put it bluntly, Wendy World isn’t going to be as interesting to readers who are reading The Wilder Life in order to visit Laura World.
Wendy World is a world of relative privilege and carefully protected privilege, at that. McClure was able to write The Wilder Life because the McClure Life is a writer’s life. Writing is McClure’s job and visiting the museums and window-shopping at American Girl Place and teaching herself how to churn butter are things she needed to do to do her job. But from the outside it might look as though she’s being paid to take little vacations and indulge a hobby. Nice work if you can get it, but it means Wendy World contrasts mightily with Laura World in a very important way---the Ingallses were not privileged. They were mostly either poor or living on the brink of poverty. Their lives were full of risks that they took out of necessity and desperation. The natural and logical connection you’d expect a grown-up following Laura’s family’s trail to inevitably make would be to the grown-ups in Laura World, to Ma and Pa Ingalls. You’d expect---ok, I expected---that it would begin to weigh on McClure how lucky she was not to have been born Laura or a Laura, that she’d have something to say about how hard Charles and Caroline Ingalls had it, how hard they had to work just to put a single meal on the table while she’s free to waste entire days churning butter (in a churn she bought off eBay without, apparently, much worrying about where the money for it would come from) just for the fun of it.
It doesn’t happen. McClure never relates to Charles and Caroline as fellow adults. They remain to her Ma and Pa, with poor Ma seen as something of a humorless killjoy and quiet scold. In the end, McClure presents herself as resolutely and possibly perpetually a daughter.
She finishes her travels and the book vaguely disappointed with the whole experiment and I can’t help feeling that the disappointment stems from her avoiding the obvious conclusion---that the reason she could not reconnect with Laura World in the way she’d hoped was the same reason her namesake from Peter Pan couldn’t return to Never-land.
This really isn’t any of my business and it only mars the last chapter or two of what has been for the most part a fun and likeable book. It just seems to me the obvious place to have gone with it and McClure needed somewhere to go. She hasn’t come up with any other ending and after the trip to the last Ingalls landmark the book doesn’t conclude so much as just wind down.
What did bother me all the way through The Wilder Life was that McClure didn’t take more opportunities to let us to hear the voice of Laura Ingalls Wilder.
There are places in the book where a direct quote from one of the Little House books would not only fit in nicely but positively cry out to be included, and when McClure writes her way right on by those places it’s as if we’re watching a scene in a musical in which the leads build up to a song and then decide not to bother to sing it.
The wind was blowing steady and strong. Not a cloud was in the huge sky, and far and wide on the immense land there was nothing but shimmering light passing over the grasses. And down wind came the sound of many men’s voices, singing.
The teams were coming into camp. In a long, dark, snakelike line as they came over the prairie, horses plodding side by side in their harness, and men marching, bareheaded and bare-armed, brown-skinned in their striped blue-and-white shirts and gray shirts and plain blue shirts, and all of them were singing the same song.
They were like a little army coming across the vast land under the enormous sky, and the song was their banner.
Laura stood in the strong wind, looking and listening till the last of the column came into the crowd that gathered and spread around the camp’s low shanties, and the song blurred into the sound of all their hearty voices. Then she remembered the water pail in her hand. She filled it from the well as quickly as she could, and ran back; slopping water on her bare legs in her hurry.
That was from By the Shores of Silver Lake. The most direct way to connect to Laura Ingalls’ world is through her own writing, but if McClure had done that, if she’d stayed home and read her way through the series for us, The Wilder Life would have been a very different sort of book, a work of literary criticism instead of journalism. But, considering her continual frustration at not being able to find Laura in the museums at the vanished homesteads, it’s a bit surprising that she doesn’t take another tack and try to find Laura in the landscape that Ingalls wrote about with such passion and attention to detail.
Despite her love for the outdoor world Wilder depicts with such loving detail in her books, McClure keeps looking for Laura World inside. There are good reasons for this, one being that Wilder was as passionate about the interiors of her world as she was about the exteriors and her descriptions of those snug, cozy, and above all safe places, full of love and shared joy, are among the best things she wrote. (Little House in the Big Woods and The Long Winter are largely inside books.) Another, of course, is that it’s inside where the stuff that drew McClure into Laura World---the oil lamps and corncob dolls and strings of onions and Ma’s china shepherdess---the touchable things that could provide her with a physical connection to Laura herself were to be found inside.
But the interiors don’t exist anymore. The exterior world, the landscape, does. And the best field guide to it was written by Laura Ingalls herself.
This is what has always jumped out at me from Ingalls’ writing and probably what I thought would interest my sons about the books, her skill at evoking a sense of place, of capturing how the weather was, how it felt to stand in the prairie grass or under the trees in the big woods of wade into Plum Creek.
If you’re going to put yourself in Laura’s place, stand where she stood, then it makes sense to compare what she says she saw to what you’re looking at and note what’s changed and what’s still there.
And since McClure says that part of what drove her out to the woods and the prairie and the banks of the creek was to see how much of the world Wilder wrote about was real, it’s even more baffling that she doesn’t show herself testing what Wilder wrote against what’s actually out there.
I wondered about this. I wondered if it was simply that McClure thought that her likely readers wouldn’t need to have quoted to them passages they knew by heart, although I don’t know anyone who doesn’t enjoy hearing their favorites read back to them again and again. I wondered if she assumed that they’d be reading her book the way I was, with Wilder’s books within reach. I wondered if it was the case that she was afraid that if she started she wouldn’t be able to stop. I certainly could understand that.
It turns out to have been a question of rights.
Under the fair use laws, writers of more scholarly works are freer to quote liberally from their sources than writers of books intended for more popular audiences like The Wilder Life.
But since I didn’t know that while I was reading The Wilder Life, the missing quotes---missing as in I missed them---had me asking some questions. What does McClure, as a writer and editor, think of the books and of their author’s talent? Does she like them as books? Does she think Wilder could write? Maybe McClure thinks the yeses she’d answer to those questions are such givens it would be redundant to bring them up. After all, if the writer whose travels she’d been following was Mark Twain, how often would she have had to stop her narrative in its tracks to tell us, That Sam Clemens, boy, could that guy write!
But I think the authors of children’s books need all the puffing they can get because a lot of adults take it for granted that writing for children and young adults is a lesser art form.
I think Wilder could write, beautifully.
Wilder’s plain, naturalistic prose of mostly unadorned declaratives is appropriate to the story of a country girl who grew up with little in the way of material comforts and had to make do by taking comfort in whatever she did have and find happiness in the company of her little family and delight in the sensual beauty of whatever small plot of ground her father was homesteading for what was usually an unsettlingly small time.
But it’s far from artless. And it reminds me of the another author’s deceptively simple style, a writer who was her daughter Rose’s near contemporary, a writer who was pretty good himself at telling how the weather was.
I assume you’re reading this with a copy of In Our Time within easy reach so you can leaf through to Big Two-Hearted River and see if you can’t find passages that remind you of this one from Little House in the Big Woods:
After awhile there was sunshine in the woods and the air sparkled. The long streaks of yellow light lay between the shadows of the tree trunks, and the snow was colored faintly pink. All the shadows were thin and blue, and every little curve of snowdrifts and every little track in the snow had a shadow.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to return some books to the library. Somebody’s missing them.
Excerpt: Wendy McClure on Nellie Oleson’s evil superpowers.
All hail Nellie Oleson, New York-born daughter of a Walnut Grove mercantile proprietor, later the most exquisitely dressed country girl in Dakota Territory! With her utterly scrumptious nastiness she completes the spectrum of Little House girlhood types, from good Mary to not-so-good Laura to bad, bad Nellie. from the moment she’s introduced she gets right down to her bratty business, wrinkling her nose, sticking out her tongue, and yanking hair.
Fine, so it’s not much of a repertoire---even by nineteenth-century school-yard standards these seem like awfully basic moves. What really gives Nellie her evil superpowers, though, are the enviable shiny details of her life---her ribbons and lawn dresses and wax dolls and candy sticks---all of it paraded before Laura and Mary when they visit her awesome carpeted house in the “Town Party” chapter of On the Banks of Plum Creek. While I’m fond of the sweeping prairie grassed of my Laura World, somewhere in my sub-conscious dwells a Nellie World, too.
Which, well, looks an awful lot like American Girl Place. Though while Nellie Oleson is exactly the kind of girl who would own an American Girl doll, had they existed during her timek, she herself could never be an American Girl character. Really, one of the most brilliant things about the American Girl marketing concept is that Felicity, Kristen et all are like nice Nellies, friendly girls who wouldn’t yank their possessions away from you, the way Miss Thing in Plum Creek snatched back her doll from Laura…A visit to American girl Place always satisfies the secret hope that I used to have reading that chapter as a kid---my wish that Laura would just suck up a little and try to work things out with Nellie so she could play with her stuff. (Pathetic, I know.)
A rip-roaring tale of high adventure featuring cowboys, Indians, outlaws, gunfights, robbery, murder, and million dollar gold strikes that all happens to be true.
The boom town of Skagway, Alaska at the time of the Yukon Gold Rush.
The Floor of Heaven is a history of the gold rush as seen through the eyes of three men who were there, on to get rich digging for gold, one to get rich by stealing from men who were there to dig for gold, and one to track down and throw into jail men who got rich by stealing from the men who got rich digging for gold.
The man who got rich by digging for gold was George Carmack, whose strike at Bonanza Creek set off the stampede to the Klondike.
The man who got rich by stealing was Jeff “Soapy” Smith, a gambler, con artist, violent thug, gang leader and criminal mastermind with ambitions to make himself a respectable citizen. I’d call Smith a real-life Al Swearengen, except that Al Swearengen was a real-life Al Swearengen.
The third man was Charlie Siringo, a Pinkerton agent who became famous as “The Cowboy Detective,” although very little of his detective work over a long and successful career as a lawman involved any cowboying.
Quick summary: In the mid-1890s, the three men head north to Alaska. Siringo, who has a gift for undercover work, is out to solve the mysterious robbery at a gold mine. Carmack, whose lifelong ambition is to find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow his father wasted his life chasing, sets out as a prospector but comes close to settling for a life as an Indian chief. And Smith, on the run from the law, sees in Alaska’s wide-open and virtually unpoliced frontier all kinds of opportunities for a man of his particular talents to make easy money. Eventually, the trio’s separate paths to adventure intersect, with guns drawn on all sides.
The Floor of Heaven is, as advertised above, a rip-roaring tale of high adventure featuring cowboys, Indians, outlaws, robbery, murder, and million dollar gold strikes told with verve, humor, and charm by Blum,a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, a former New York Times reporter twice nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and the author of other true tales of adventure and mystery, including the Edgar Award winning American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, and the Birth of Hollywood and The Brigade: An Epic Story of Vengeance, Salvation, and WWII.
The hero of The Floor of Heaven is Charlie Siringo. This is partly due to the fact that Siringo was a heroic character. But it’s also due to his having made a second career for himself as a writer of rip-roaring tales of high adventure that happened to be true and featured himself as the main character. All three men, Siringo, Carmack, and Smith left copious written records of their lives, but Siringo wasn’t only the more talented writer, he was the more interesting human being, as well as the most decent. All three were intelligent, brave, and energetic, but Carmack and Smith were emotional drifters; on the one hand they were ambitious, on the other they didn’t care. They weren’t so much driven as pulled forward by their dreams, and when you get right down to it, their dreams, although grand in scale, were fairly trite and dull. They wanted to get rich and without having to work hard to do it. Carmack did work hard, and it’s actually amazing how hard and how much he put himself through physically, but he didn’t expect to have to work hard for long. Any day now, he was going to find the mother lode and then he’d be done with it. Smith kept himself busy with schemes to get rich without doing any honest work, but while some criminals are fascinating in their criminality, Smith’s mind seems to have been mostly elsewhere. He and Carmack lived in their dreams, so when Blum has to bring one or the other of them front and center in his narrative and we are made to see things happening from their points of view, there’s a certain fading of focus, a lack of clarity and immediacy. Carmack and Smith just weren’t paying close enough attention.
Siringo, however, was all attention. He wouldn’t have survived as an undercover detective otherwise. He didn’t just see everything clearly, he took it all in, in detail, and if he couldn’t see its immediate importance, he filed it away as potentially useful. The result is that he’s given Blum more to work with when the point of view shifts to Siringo’s. But it’s also the case that he was a good-natured, outward-looking, and open-hearted human being. He liked people, even the ones he was out to put in jail, and he was interested in what made them tick. These are qualities that helped make him a good detective, but they also made him a livelier and more entertaining writer. Plus, he led an adventurous and exciting life. So it’s not surprising that things perk up mightily whenever Siringo takes over the story.
We meet him as a young cowboy, top hand on a cattle drive that has just rolled into Dodge and getting into a bar fight, that he loses, with the sometime lawman, sometime gambler Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp’s friend and first boss. We follow him into the company of Pat Garrett and a target-shooting contest with Billy the Kid and from that adventure he and we move on to his courtship of the beautiful, dark-eyed Mamie Lloyd and his decision as a married man and new father to settle down and leave off riding the range for steady work as a small businessman. He opens a cigar shop, that does well, an ice cream and oyster parlor, that does better, but he starts to grow restless. Siringo was ambitious too, but not for money. He wanted work that made the most of his talents and brains. He was a successful shopkeeper but the work didn’t engage his full attention or need all his considerable energy. He talked his way into a job with the Pinkerton Detective Agency, helped clean out their corrupted and incompetent Denver office, and took on his first undercover assignment, infiltrating a gang of outlaws in order to track down a murderer. Then Mamie suddenly got sick and died and Siringo went into an emotional tailspin that he attempted to pull himself out of by taking an assignment in the far north. He went undercover again to solve a series of robberies at a gold mine and it was while working this case that he first met up with George Carmack, whom he initially suspected of being in on the robberies. But he figures out who the real robbers are, realizes they’ve already hightailed it, and sets out in pursuit, which requires him to become not so much a cowboy detective as a sailor detective. He searches for the thieves up and down the coast of the Alaskan panhandle, plying the waters in an overloaded and less than seaworthy canoe. Along the way he shoots it out with a whale.
Hand to God.
Eventually, he crosses paths again with Carmack and with Soapy Smith.
Blum has chosen to tell his story in the limited third person. When the action shifts from one of the main characters to another, the point of view shifts too and we see things strictly through that character’s eyes. Although he had plenty of other sources, his main sources were his three main characters and it appears that long stretches of his narrative are rewritings, paraphrases, and summaries of their writings. It’s hard to say how good a writer Siringo was because Blum rarely quotes directly from his, or either of the other’s, writing, but it’s clear he knew how to structure a story and if he wasn’t a particularly introspective man he was a sharply observant one. He understood that people told you a lot about themselves by gesture and habit as well as by word and, since he defined himself to himself by what he did more than by what he thought and felt and then redefined himself by writing about what he did, we get a pretty good sense of him as a person and of the people he dealt with. I suspect that his impressions of George Carmack are more reliable than Carmack’s own impressions of himself. But then Carmack seems to have been careful not to have formed any definitive impressions of himself.
Carmack left behind a voluminous personal correspondence and an autobiography (that went unpublished in his lifetime), but he had a habit of sentimentalizing, romanticizing, and idealizing his feelings. He wasn’t just ambitious to be rich. He dreamed of being a certain kind of rich and successful man, and in the letters he wrote as a young man he took pains to present himself as if he was steadily on his way to becoming that sort of man and---although, again, I can’t be sure because as I said Blum rarely gives us direct quotes---if in his autobiography he was more honest about what sort of young man he’d actually been, naive, often foolish, floundering, lost in his own dreams, he was still prone to romanticize and sentimentalize his adventures. In short, Carmack doesn’t come across as the most reliable source on the subject of George Carmack. And since he was something of a loner and inclined to keep an emotional distance between himself and other people---possibly because he was afraid that they're versions of reality would impinge on his dreams---he doesn’t come across as the most reliable source on the subject of the people he dealt with either, even those he most cared about. Consequently, when other characters enter his sections of the story, they tend towards caricature and Carmack’s interactions with them play like the melodramas that were popular on the music hall stages of the period and that would soon provide the plots of countless silent movies and then talkies and then TV westerns, which is ironic since it was Siringo who wound up in Hollywood and whose exploits provided the plots for countless movies.
I have to point out that this isn’t actually a flaw in The Floor of Heaven. In fact, it’s part of its charm. It’s a reminder of how the reality of the Wild West, of which Alaska was the last frontier, blended with the legend and that the truth could be more outrageous and exciting than the fiction. Plus, in a roundabout way it gives us insight into Carmack as a character that Carmack couldn’t relate honestly and directly about himself.
And, despite his self-romanticizing dreaminess, Carmack was smart and practical and perceptive in his way. He knew what he was doing when it came to prospecting. He could hunt and he could fish and he could use an ax and a saw. Blum relies on him to tell us how things got done on the Alaskan frontier and to show us what the place was like---big, beautiful, empty---how the land lay---not flat---how the weather was---generally cold---and how the people lived---on the edge. Through him his eyes Blum shows us how to survive an Alaskan winter, how to build a snug cabin, how to catch a salmon, how a few men went about digging out a million dollar mine. In one of the book’s most thrilling sequences, we follow Carmack up the dangerous mountain pass that was the most direct route into Yukon from the American side and which over time as the rush sent thousands up the trail became lined with the bones and rotting carcasses of overworked pack animals and every step of the way marked a spot where someone who had tried the ascent ahead of you had collapsed in exhaustion, pain, or despair. And if his life wasn’t as full of incident as Siringo’s, he had his share of adventures.
He started out in life as practically an indentured servant to his brother in law, tending sheep in the mountains of California. During the long, lonely hours he consoled himself by composing bad poetry and dreaming of gold. He joined the Marines to get away and the Marines sent him to Alaska. Up there he determined that Alaska was where he was going to strike it rich, and as I said, although he was a dreamer and prone to losing himself inside his dreams, he was also practical and smart. He decided that before he’d go stampeding out into the wilderness hunting for gold he’d learn how to survive out there first and he picked as his teachers the people that knew the place best, the Indians. He ingratiated himself with the Tlingits who lived around his Marine camp and got to know them and their ways so well that he was more comfortable among them than among his fellow white men. Later, on his second go-round in Alaska, after having deserted from the Marines, when his luck was running so bad that he temporarily gave up his dreams of finding gold, he lived with other Indians, a tribe of Tagish, who adopted him as one of their own. He took and Indian wife, they had a child, he went on a vision quest (and had an actual vision), and tried to satisfy himself with ambitions of becoming a chief of the tribe.
Then one day his old dreams of gold returned. He picked up his shovel and ax and pan again and set out. Led by his instincts and trusting his knowledge gained from past experience, he wandered up a tributary of the Klondike River, dipped his pan in the running water, and came up with something shiny and yellow. He named the creek Bonanza Creek and set to work. It wasn’t long before he knew he had found it, the true mother lode. Word got out, thousands headed for the Klondike, the gold rush was on, but Carmack was already a rich man and growing richer with each shovelful of dirt he dug.
That’s when he caught the attention of Soapy Smith.
Smith had come to Alaska because the once Wild West of the lower forty-eight had finally become to civilized to tolerate his presence. He had run out of places to run to when too much law and order made it impossible for him to do business anymore. He was an organizational genius, though, and in each new town where he’d set up shop, he’d quickly assemble a gang of thieves and thugs with a variety of criminal skills and talents, buy himself political influence, pocket a lawman or two or three, open up a saloon and a whorehouse, take control of a large share of the local gambling, and soon be at work fleecing all and sundry. He repeated the pattern twice in Alaska and he was pretty much running the town of Skagway when George Carmack struck it lucky.
You can see what I mean about Smith being a real-life version of Deadwood’s Al Swearengen, and for all I know he really was like the character so brilliantly played by Ian McShane. Smith must have been possessed of a dark intelligence and he was a dangerous man, capable of terrible violence when angered. But it’s hard to say from Floor of Heaven what he was really like, which isn’t a failure of talent as a writer on Blum’s part. Siringo and Carmack wrote enough and wrote well-enough to give Blum plenty of material to develop their points of view. Smith didn’t write an autobiography. He wrote many letters to his wife whom he kept out of the way back in Kansas, but there was a lot about himself and his life out west and up north he couldn’t tell her, partly out of fear that a letter might go astray and wind up in the hands of the law, but partly out of a game of pretend he and his wife were playing with each other.
Smith apparently dreamed of the day when he’d have earned enough money from his criminal enterprises that he could afford to go completely legit. He longed to be a respectable and upstanding citizen and he and his wife often wrote to each other as if that day had already arrived. The Jeff Smith who appears in many of the letters, then, is a fabrication and a rather banal and dull character to boot. But what’s really disappointing about this phony is that he doesn’t know many of the details of Soapy Smith’s crimes and depredations and he wasn’t intimately acquainted with members of Soapy’s gang, which is too bad because it would have been interesting to have a peek into the individual personalities of men with names like Slim-Jim Foster, Old Man Tripp, the Moonfaced Kid, Fatty Green, Kid Jimmy Fresh, Yank Fewclothes, and Yeah Mow Hopkins.
Smith routinely made the papers, but the journalism of the times favored sensationalism over insight and facts were what reporters and editors needed them to be to fit their stories, if you can imagine that. A character named Soapy Smith would make headlines, but neither journalists nor their readers cared how how closely that character resembled the real person it was based on. The things he did were thrilling in that they stoked readers’ fears or inflamed their imaginations. Why he did what he did was easy enough to explain. He was a villain and a scoundrel. What else did you need to know?
While Siringo’s and Carmack’s adventures would make a good movie or movies---and Floor of Heaven has been optioned by Fox 2000---the parts of the book focusing on Smith seem to be straight out of the movies, background and set up to Dodge City or Destry Rides Again, and rather than coming across as the main player in his own story, Smith often seems at a loss, going through the motions, while waiting for Errol Flynn or Jimmy Stewart to stride onto the scene and kick start the plot into motion. Unfortunately, since this is history not the movies, the hero doesn’t appear to confront the villain until the final act.
But it’s not just with Smith that Blum’s narrative strategy causes a problem. As I said, Carmack, while observant and perceptive, was not particularly insightful, but Siringo, despite his talents as an observer and reporter of his own life, isn’t necessarily always reliable. Smith, of course, couldn’t sign his own name without working a lie into it. But Siringo wasn’t under any compunction to be a hundred percent truthful. He was writing for an audience that wanted rip-roaring tales of adventure not introspective memoirs and they appreciated writers who didn’t let the facts get in the way of a good story. There’s reason to wonder if from time to time Siringo gave into the temptation to embellish, so it might have been helpful if Blum hadn’t been so wedded to the limited third person and allowed himself to break away now and again to quote outside sources that could have told us things Siringo and the others couldn’t have known or supported some of their more astonishing adventures.
There’s another problem in that I don’t know whom to blame when Blum’s writing starts to take on the flavor of the dime novels of the period. I suspect that while he was trying to convey the sense of Siringo’s character as Siringo portrayed it himself Blum allowed himself to be infected by Siringo’s prose style. Since Siringo was working within the conventions of the bestsellers of the day, he probably felt he had to make himself sound like what his readers thought a real cowboy sounded like. The result is occasional eruptions of corniness that the writers of Gunsmoke would have been embarrassed to work into dialog for Festus. People don’t think or feel or believe they have to do something as often as they are “of a mind” to do it. They rarely guess, figure, conclude, decide, deduce, or reflect. They “reckon”. Siringo doesn’t reach for his gun or his pistol or his revolver or his weapon; it’s always his “Big Colt.” Blum grows way too fond of this locution to the point that he might just as well have started calling the gun “Ol’ Betsy.” In the course of just a few pages we read that someone has no “hankering” for gold and someone else wants no “truck” with Indians. There’s “plumb foolishness” all about, folks who fall into conversation get to “jawing,” things cost “a pretty penny,” and fifty bars of gold weigh “near on” three hundred pounds. You can’t help feeling that a durn tootin’ is going to “roll into town” any minute. It never does, although durn makes its way onto a page by its lonesome and we are bushwacked by a tarnation. I kept wishing for signs that along with all his other research Blum had read the works of two great writers from the period who happened to be in Alaska around the time as Carmack and Siringo and Smith and chronicled their own adventures, one in his fiction and one as a continuation of his nature writing, Jack London and John Muir. He also might have benefited from having episodes of Deadwood on in the background while he was writing. All the wild and prodigious and wonderfully creative cursing on the show was there to disguise the fact that the characters all spoke their own unique and lyrical versions of great Nineteenth Century prose and poetry, proving week in and week out they were the contemporaries of Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Stephen Crane, and Henry James, whose works they might have read along with if not instead of the novels of Ned Buntline. For a flavor of how people in the second half of the 19th Century actually thought and wrote, it would be better just to strip the c-words out of any of Al Swearengen’s speeches.
None of this amounts to a fatal flaw nor should it or will it get in the way of an overall enjoyment of the book. It’s just a reminder of how rich and varied the literary history---fiction and non-fiction---of the West is. Anyway, if I want to read John Muir or Jack London, I can read John Muir and Jack London. As a matter of fact, I did. I had a lot of fun re-reading Klondike Tales and Travels in Alaska alongside The Floor of Heaven. Blum’s book is a welcome addition to that section of my bookshelf. A rip-roaring tale of high adventure that happens to be true and highly entertaining as well.
In the early morning, he woke up stiff and aching. He came out of his ten, his boots crunching against the fresh layer of of ground frost, and for the first time he had a good look at the mountain he intended to climb that day. The camp lay in a broad basin, and from this perspective the Chilkoot stood out from the surrounding peaks. It seemed to rise higher and more steeply, and the sunlight glinted with harsh menace off the green-iced glaciers that fortified its walls. It would be impossible to cross, George suddenly moaned to himself. He’d barely taken a single step, but the muscles in his thighs and calves were still throbbing from yesterday’s ordeal. Yet how could he dare to give up, to turn around and go back? But would that be any less of an embarrassment than surrendering half-way up the mountain? Or, worse, falling to his death, his body lost forever, shrouded each passing year by snow and more snow?
Then George saw the Indians hoisting their huge sacks---one hundred pounds each!---onto their backs. And they Day brothers, too, had lit their cob pipes and were raring to head off. George knew he could not be the only one to quit. He was, he chastised himself, too close to his lifelong goal to give up. So in a tremendous burst of will, he lifted his pack to his back, adjusted the leather shoulder straps, and joined the others.
It was four miles uphill to the summit, and George had not gotten far before it became clear to him that he was locked in a battle to the death: Either he would cross the Chilkoot into the Canadian Yukon or he’d die trying. Even if he didn’t have the heart, it was no longer possible to turn back.
The snow was thick underfoot. Icy boulders as big as street cars needed to be traversed. The wind shrieked. A mammoth overhanging glacier reflected the sunlight like a prism, dazzling hues of turquoise, sapphire, and rose bouncing off walls of sheer ice, blinding him, while the huge glacier itself seemed poised to come crashing down at any moment. He sweated under his heavy coat. His socks dripped rivulets of ice. His pack ground down hard on his back as if he were carrying the broad trunk of one of the sturdy evergreens he’d only days before admired. After two miles, the line of bone-weary men reached a flat-ledged slope. The Indians lowered the packs from their backs. It was a signal to rest.
George could now see the pass’s white-tipped summit. It was tantalizingly close. Nevertheless, he decided he could walk no father.
He was right. When the line moved forward for the final ascent, he found himself bent over, climbing in an awkward hunched fashion rather than walking upright. A snow-covered rock slide blocked the trail, and the only way up the increasingly steep path was to pull himself over one icy boulder after another. His legs were cramping. His fingers were numb. In his wet, slick boots, footholds were slippery and brief. By the time he found the muscle and ingenuity and the will to get over the rock slide, all pride belonged to another life. Crawling on all fours like a beaten animal, George reached the summit…
The Adventures of Tintin is out on DVD this week. It’s our feature for Family Movie Night. Here’s my review from December.
Captain Haddock and our hero, the boy reporter Tintin, survive their latest brush with death just in time to begin another one in Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson’s exhilarating motion-capture cartoon adaptation of the Herge comic books, The Adventures of Tintin.
Billions of blistering blue barnacles! Steven Spielberg has turned Tintin into a Steven Spielberg movie!
There’s action galore. Stunts that if they weren’t performed by cartoons would make your head spin. Well, actually, they do make your head spin even though they’re performed by cartoons because you can forget you’re watching a cartoon while you’re watching this cartoon, that’s how smoothly these motion captured characters move and how realistically rendered and colored the backgrounds against which they move are. There’s comedy in the midst of grave danger. Grave danger behind the comedy. A plot that runs away with itself so fast you pant to catch up and don’t have time to notice how slight and ridiculous it is. And throughout there are tributes, shout-outs, and homages to the movie serials and Sunday comics that fired the imagination of the young Spielberg--Flash Gordon, Terry and the Pirates, Prince Valiant, The Phantom---as well as to Spielberg’s own movies, and…um…Tintin.
In fact, The Adventures of Tintin is as good an Indiana Jones movie as Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade. In parts, it’s as thrilling and new as Raiders of the Lost Ark. Throughout, it’s much,much better than Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and a reminder that as great as the young Harrison Ford was what made the Indy movies was the spirit of adventure that infused them, and that spirit was a boy’s (and girl’s) spirit. Indy’s movies, the Saturday serials and Sunday comics and the boy’s own adventure novels that came before, Jules Verne, the works of H.G. Wells, Jack London, Mark Twain, and Edgar Rice Burroughs that inspired Spielberg and George Lucas, Tintin---Herge’s comics and this cartoon---present a world in which a kid’s dream of what adult life ought to be like comes true. There may be an actual kid up on the screen, filling the frame, or driving the story, or there may not be (although all the adults are really overgrown children), it doesn’t matter. What matters is that it’s a world in which it’s possible for a kid to be a hero.
That Spielberg, with help from another great lover of boys own adventures, Peter Jackson, has done directly with Herge and Tintin what he’s done allusively in the past with Verne and Wells and Milt Caniff is one way of looking at it.
Another is that the movie is Spielberg’s way of saying, “It may not have all started with Tintin, but it might as well have because it’s all there in Herge’s comics.”
This raises two competing questions.
Will you enjoy the movie if you’re not familiar with the comic books?
And…
If you’ve loved and enjoyed the comic books will the movie disappoint you?
The editors of the Mannionville Daily Gazette answered both questions through practical experiment. We took two of our nephews and our two sons to the movie. The nephews, ages 17 and 13, had only a passing introduction to the comic books which came from our two sons, ages 18 and 15, who grew up reading the books and own almost the entire collection (for some reason they’re missing a couple, Explorers on the Moon and Tintin in Tibet, but they’ve read both). All four boys enjoyed the movie for its own sake. The nephs said they never felt left out or left behind. Young Ken and Oliver Mannion say they were thoroughly caught up and rarely thought of the comic books, but when they did they generally appreciated the changes Spielberg and Jackson had to make for the sake of turning three books---mostly The Secret of the Unicorn but with significant portions of The Crab With the Golden Claws and touches of Red Rackham’s Treasure---into one movie and making that movie their movie.
I didn’t grow up reading Tintin. The trade paperback editions of the comic books weren’t available in the United States until the mid-1970s and I didn’t come across them until the 1980s and didn’t begin to appreciate them until the Mannion boys found them and took them to heart. This doesn’t mean I have only an adult’s or a parent’s fondness for them. I recognized right away what I would have loved about Tintin if I’d discovered the comics at the time I was discovering Treasure Island, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and the Hardy Boys.
The movie felt mostly true to the spirit of the books but I was baffled and annoyed the first time I saw the trailer and realized that the movie would not look like the books. But watching the movie I understood why Spielberg and Jackson chose not to make a straight-forward animated version of the comics.
One of the beauties of Herge’s drawings is how motion is implied. Characters (and machines---cars, planes, boats, rocket ships, Professor Calculus’ inventions) are caught on the fly, their direction and momentum felt through posture, angle, and relation in space to other people and objects “moving” in other directions and at different speeds. Send Tintin and his friends and enemies actually running, falling, leaping, careening around corners in cars or on foot, staggering from a blow or (in Captain Haddock’s case) too much to drink, or just shaking a fist or holding a sore head and you’ve already erased much of Herge’s art from the frame. Herge’s genius was in seeming to do on a page what he couldn’t do on a page. Do it on a screen and you’re not doing what he did. A cartoon movie that tried to look like the comic books would be missing what gave the comic books their look.
Why the motion capture? Just because, I guess. Why this style? Why a cartoon at all? Why not a live-action movie with the look and feel of a cartoon, like Mary Poppins or Robert Altman’s Popeye? Spielberg and Jackson have done the opposite of Disney and Altman. Instead of a live-action movie that looks like a cartoon, they’ve opted to make a cartoon that looks like a live-action movie or at least as close as they could come while retaining the freedom from gravity and the laws of physics and biology cartoons offer. They make an in-joke of this, finding a way to suggest that the movie isn’t based on the comic books but that the comic books are based on the movie’s reality. Early on, Tintin sits for his portrait by a sidewalk sketch artist whose drawing of Tintin looks exactly like Herge’s Tintin. The artist, as it happens, looks like Herge.
The things I didn’t like about the animation had nothing to do with it not recapitulating Herge’s style. The characters’ bodies move well but their faces are practically dead. Most of them look like they’re wearing false noses and prosthetic chins and, in some cases, whole masks, as if they’re actors dressed-up and made-up to look like their comic book counterparts. The exceptions are Tintin himself, who looks amazingly and disconcertingly like Neil Patrick Harris, and his dog and sidekick Snowy. Snowy is the most vital character in the film He’s even more active and adventurous, bolder and braver than he is in the comic books. In fact, he’s the second greatest canine action-adventure star of the young 21st Century, the first being Gromit of Wallace & Gromit. So it makes sense that in a marvelous little set-piece of a chase scene, Snowy gets to act out the most direct reference to Indiana Jones.
The movie’s Captain Haddock was a real disappointment to me. Not only is his face wooden and mask-like and unpersonable---in the comic books, Haddock’s very beard is expressive---he’s…punier than he ought to be. Herge’s Captain Haddock has more than a touch of Popeye’s Bluto about him. He’s tall, broad-shouldered and barrel-chested and he’s handsome, in his way, when his hair and beard are combed. Spielberg and his artists have not only shrunk him as a physical specimen, they’ve diminished him as a character as well. Herge’s Haddock is a comic character but the comedy arises from his anger and from the language he uses to express it. Haddock has his own peculiar poetry. Otherwise, though, Haddock is a hero in his own right. He is the books’ second lead and the relationship between Haddock and Tintin is like the one between Han Solo and Luke with no Princess Leia around to make them both act like grown-ups. When he’s introduced in The Crab With the Golden Claws, he’s a clownish drunk, but as he sobers up he quickly reveals himself as a familiar archetype of myth, legend, books, and film, the disgraced warrior restored to form thanks to the example and friendship of the pure-hearted hero. He becomes the true heir of the swashbuckling pirate-hunter Sir Francis Haddock.
When we meet him in the movie, he’s a clownish drunk, but also a blubbering and pathetic one, and the pathos, the blubbering, the clownishness, and the drunk jokes go on much too long. Eventually, he rises to the occasion and gives signs that if the planned sequel gets made he’ll assume his role as heroic second lead, but in this movie he’s more like the buffoonish sidekick accidentally saving the day.
I’m told by both nephews and sons that I’m all wet on this.
At any rate, there is one way the movie definitely doesn’t measure up to the comic books.
The Adventures of Tintin is an enjoyable thrill-ride, but basically it’s one extended chase scene and eventually it loses itself in the chase. Story, plot, characters, and coherence disappear under the constant barrages of action, gunfire, explosions, and crashing machinery. Chases, and fisticuffs and gunplay, are regular features of the comic books, but the point of all the running around is, in the end, to get somewhere, usually home. And the only way to come home is to have beensomewhere else. The wheres matter in the comic books.
Herge was assiduous about keeping Tintin up to date and over the course of time televisions, jet planes, and rocket ships made their way into his plots. But Tintin is still a product of the late 1920s and early 30s, a time when the ubiquity of cars and airplanes was opening up long-distance travel to everybody. Suddenly, anyone with the price of a tank of gas or a ticket could rush out their front door and in a very short time be somewhere else, somewhere new and exciting for their never having been there before.
In the books, Tintin’s adventures take place in specific places. Those places may have fictitious names and be designed according to contemporary prejudices and populated with stereotypes, but they were still recognizable as real places, places it would be possible for young readers to visit someday. Herge had to be economical in his use of detail, but he was a diligent and dutiful researcher and the details he chose to include to suggest a place were exact.
The movie’s backgrounds are fuller, more detailed, and busier, but they don’t evoke specific places. They are generic movie studio sets. Tintin and his friends don’t encounter these places, they merely move through them, quickly, and only have to deal with them as obstacles or opportunities.
But in the comic books, they visit these places. Part of the excitement is in going with them to this jungle, down that river, into the heart of this city, or up that mountain. One of the most thrilling panels in all the books shows Tintin and Snowy in a small motor boat making its way across a choppy sea towards Black Island looming ominously out of the water. No human enemies in sight, no threat of violence except from the sea itself. All there is, pulling Tintin towards it and us along with him, is the question, What’s out there?
When you get down to it, even more than he is a reporter and a detective and an action-adventure hero, Tintin is an explorer, and the adventure for him and for us his fans, begins, not with fisticuffs and gunplay, chases, and exploding machinery, but with just getting out the door.
The Adventures of Tintin, directed by Steven Spielberg, featuring Daniel Craig, Jamie Bell, Andy Serkis, Nick Frost, and Simon Pegg, now available on DVD and to watch instantly at Amazon.
One of my favorite books from last year, My Korean Deli by Ben Ryder Howe, is now out in paperback, so I’m reposting my review from April 2011.
Often while reading My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store by Ben Ryder Howe, I half suspected that Howe’s favorite parts of his own book were the ones portraying him as dangerously incompetent to his family’s fledgling business.
My Korean Deli is a memoir of Howe’s first years in his second career as a small business owner. In the late fall of 2001, with the ashes and smoke of 9/11 still settling on New York City, Howe, a senior editor at the literary magazine The Paris Review, and his wife Gab, a burned-out lawyer, bought a convenience store in Brooklyn with Gab’s mother Kay, a feisty, energetic, hard-headed, stubborn and prickly Korean immigrant, but, fortunately for Howe and Gab, also a sharp-eyed and practical and savvy and tough businesswoman.
[S]ince we opened the store we’ve been getting extorted by our snack food distributors, Mr. Yummykakes and Mr. Tortilla Chip, who’ve been trying to strong-arm us into buying more merchandise than we need and “forgetting,” if we don’t honor their demands, to make scheduled deliveries, or claiming we haven’t met their quotas (which are much lower than what they actually want us to purchase). As a result, some of our shelves have gone empty, and customers are asking where their favorite foods are. It’s a game of chicken, and much to the consternation of the snack food thugs, who probably thought they could walk all over this roly-poly Asian grandmother manning the day shift. Kay hasn’t blinked. In fact, she’s banned some of them from the store. My mother-in-law knows all the distributor’s tricks, whether it’s dumping eight dollies of the new and soon-to-be discontinued no-calorie beer next to the cash register and driving away before we can open the boxes, or sticking us with a freezer full of ice cream that got too warm in the back of the truck. (Refrozen ice cream has the texture of snow dislodged from the underside of a delivery vehicle.) Besides being fierce, she’s paranoid and inexhaustible, a scammer’s worst nemesis.
But while he shows Gab to be almost every bit as feisty, energetic, stubborn, and practical as her mother---there’s a moving section in which Howe describes Gab getting up in the middle of the night during the worst blizzard in New York’s history and sneaking out of the house they share with her parents in Staten Island to take the ferry to Manhattan and walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, braving fifty mile an hour gusts of wind on the walkway, to open the store and by doing so probably saving the business---Howe has a lot of fun portraying himself as, at least during their first months in operation, weak, dreamy, dithering, the slowest of the slowest slow-learners, and otherwise practically, and at times, worse than useless.
There’s even something sort of appealing about cashier work---the enviable hand-eye coordination, the mental stamina, the unflappable cool during a rush. So for the next half hour I attempt to prove that I can work the register as fast as anyone, resulting in a succession of over-rings, nineteen dollars in extra chane for a grateful customer buying cigarettes, a decaf coffee served light and sweet instead of regular and black, as requested, and a turkey sandwich that never even gets made (the customer eventually walks out, cursing.)
Finally, Kay nudges me aside.
“You go stock,” she says.
He’s bullied by sales reps, accidentally offensive to regular customers, afraid of employees, hopeless with money, and prone to bouts of food snobbery that compel him to stock items regular customers won’t buy, don’t attract the number of new customers Howe dreams of attracting, and cost far more than the struggling little business can afford to keep sitting around not selling on its shelves.
Howe is a witty writer and skilled at shaping scenes for comic effect and depicting people as comic characters in a way that maintains their dignity and humanity and decency, if they have it, or indecency if they happen to be creeps, jerks, thugs, or any of the many and various types of weirdoes who wander New York City. It happens that Howe is good at writing comedy because he appears to have a comic view of life, so he doesn’t actually see many of the indecent types or rather doesn’t see many people as indecent.
It’s not that he sees everybody as good. There are certain delivery men and sales reps and city health and safety inspectors he’s convinced are evil and out to do the world harm. It’s that he sees people as fundamentally overwhelmed by life and generally thwarted and he understands how desperate they can be for the little things, the small pleasures and tiny and temporary victories, that get them through the day. Getting through a day is how you get through life. As the owner of a Brooklyn deli and clerk in his own store Howe is in the position to be useful to people, and to be used by them, to help them gain those little things.
Sometimes this means serving them bad coffee he hates the smell and taste of and wants to replace. Sometimes this means standing there stone-faced after he’s replaced the bad coffee with something he thinks is better while a customer yells at him for raising the price on a cup of that new coffee a dime. Sometimes---well, one time---it means allowing himself and his car to be hijacked by an employee he’s looking for an excuse to fire and taken out for a hamburger at White Castle.
New Yorkers spend a lot of time in delis. It’s not uncommon for us to see the same customers walk through the door five or six times a day. Some people act as if our store is part of their home and come in wearing pajamas or stroking an iguana; some stroll through the aisles for an hour while having an intimate phone conversation at the top of their voice. The way these people act has a desperate adolescent “look at me” quality, and at the same time there’s a certain haughtiness, an attitude of “What, didn’t you hear? This is New York. Get over it.” And, of course, they’re right. What would New York be without bad behavior? And where would people be without delis?
To New Yorkers a convenience store is essentially a public place, more like a park than, say, a private restaurant. Not long ago a customer came in and asked me to throw away an empty soda can. Then she started giving me garbage from her purse, and then she went out to her car and started bringing me fast food wrappers and coffee cups. I was starting to feel like I had a Department of Sanitation sticker on my forehead and was thinking about saying something nasty, but I held back. It’s better, I’ve learned, to take people’s trash when they hand it to you, because the alternative is to pick it up yourself off the street later.
Ok, there’s a parable there.
A lot of what Howe writes is kind of sad, when you think about it, but sadness is bound up in the comic. You laugh because what else are you going to do? Sit down and cry?
All this can be read as part of the story. The question is, what story? The story of an up to now coddled and privileged young man carried comfortably through life by a family background of intellectual achievement learning how to be a practical and competent and hardworking businessman? The story of a man whose family came over on the Mayflower being drawn into the dynamic immigrant experience of contemporary New York City and being melted into the the melting pot almost four hundred years after his family arrived, a reverse-form of assimilation? Howe’s ancestors were actual Pilgrims. Gab was born in Korea. My Korean Deli can be read as the story of how in the persons of a descendent of some of the original immigrants and a child of some of the most recent newcomers to America the nation has been constantly renewed and reinvented and re-energized by strangers arriving in a strange land.
But one of the many things I liked about My Korean Deli is that Howe doesn’t try to tell a story. If Howe had shaped his story into a story he might have driven it towards a moral that was either too small and personal---MY Korean Deli---or too broad and heavy with social and historical meaning---My KOREAN Deli. What Howe does instead is simply chronicle, episodically and anecdotally, his and his family’s progress as small business owners. Here is what we had to do, here is what we did, here’s what we forgot, here are some things we did right, here are things we did wrong, here are things that happened as a result, here are some of the people we had to deal with, and here, if you’re interested, are some of the lessons we learned along the way.
There are lessons to be drawn, about life in these United States, about work, about money and how it works, about the immigrant experience, about the purpose of government, about the place and value of relationship between art and bad coffee in a democracy (seriously), even about how to run a small business. But you have to take away those lessons for yourself. Howe doesn’t force them on you, even if they happen to be lessons he’s learned himself in the course of running the deli and writing the book.
The lessons are there on the shelf for you to choose from, as it were. You can grab a bag of corn chips or you can reach for the tofu jerky. You can pick up a week’s worth of groceries or leave with just a lottery ticket or a cup of coffee. It’s up to the customer. Howe doesn’t push. One of the things he’s learned is how not to push, although he has learned how to sell. Different things. But those are his lessons. You’re not required to buy.
So…any lessons that follow are lessons I picked up for myself and not necessarily ones you’ll take away with you, any more than if you and I went in to Howe’s deli at the same time we’re going to come out with the same kind of candy bar, although if you didn’t get a Three Musketeers or a Reese’s we have no more to say to each other.
At the heart of the book, of course, is the immigrant experience, that part of it lived out by one Korean woman and her immediate family, at any rate.
Howe wisely holds off on giving us the details of his mother-in-law’s past and how Kay came to be living on Staten Island and going into business in Brooklyn with her lawyer daughter and WASP son-in-law. He establishes her as a character in her own right, and an American type, before she can possibly be reduced to a sociological case study. When he finally gets around, about halfway into the book, to recounting Kay’s history, it turns out to be a mixed tale of struggles and successes followed by failures and more struggles that is both exhausting and demoralizing to read. It’s almost impossible to believe anyone, even someone as strong and energetic and forward-looking as Kay could have survived it.
It’s of course a story of strength of character and willpower of the kind complacent conservatives like to point to as examples of the way it should be done as they vote to cut another section out of the safety net and shut the door on immigrants who haven’t yet had the chance to live out their own version of Kay’s story. Kay is admirable and a good example to all of us, represented in the book by Howe himself, who doesn’t learn from her example so much as become infused with her spirit the way he finds himself smelling of the odors of her cooking and not minding.
But to get at the theme of how immigrants have reinvigorated America we have to leave the deli in Brooklyn for the Manhattan townhouse where The Paris Review has its offices.
Howe had to do a lot of jumping back and forth between the deli and his job as an editor and the narrative jumps with him and so George Plimpton is introduced into the book as a character almost as pivotal as Kay.
Writer, journalist, editor, and sometime actor, Plimpton was legendary among writers and intellectuals for running the Paris Review. At one time he was (and still should be) famous for his books about his attempts as an amateur athlete to try out life among professionals, in football (Paper Lion), baseball (Out of My League), hockey (Open Net), boxing (Shadow Box), and golf (The Bogey Man). Later in his life he was mostly famous for being sort-of famous. This is the point at which My Korean Deli picks him up.
Howe paints an affectionate but not always flattering portrait of Plimpton and the Paris Review, the two being practically inseparable. The magazine is Plimpton’s soul and spirit at work. The trouble is that the idea of what work is and what it’s for has become as unfocused, eccentric, and directionless as Plimpton himself.
Howe admired Plimpton (who died in 2003, and I don’t think I’m giving anything away by telling you his death figures in the book) who was in his way in his day as indomitable of will and full of energy and purpose as Kay. But when he enters the book he’s already grown old and tired and, sadly, a bit dotty, not yet senile, but far from being able to keep his eye on the ball as keenly as he used to and still needs to be able to do.
Howe calls Plimpton a dilettante in the best sense of the word, but when we meet him he seems dillettantish in the more idiomatic way, and the magazine and its staff come across as reflections of him, Howe included. The magazine isn’t failing but its glory days are long past and there’s a general unease among the young editors. They sense that things need to change or the review is going to degenerate from a pale imitation of its former self into a curiosity, a kind of quarterly published museum piece recreating the literary life of America in the first few decades after World War II for nostalgic intellectuals of a certain age.
You’re ahead of me here, right, and have already grasped the symbolic implications?
Howe assumes readers will be ahead of him too, so he doesn’t bother to draw the obvious conclusions for us. He’s content to treat the juxtaposition of his life at the deli and his life at the magazine as a coincidence, which it is. It just happens to be a representative coincidence. Life in the United States is a matter of such juxtapositions occurring on every block, in every town, within families.
There were a couple of things I had to work out when I started reading My Korean Deli. One was my upstate notion of a deli. Where I come we call a convenience store a convenience store. A deli is either a restaurant that specializes in sandwiches or a sort of butcher’s shop that sells mainly cold cuts and will make you a sandwich if you ask or both, and usually the owners are Jewish or German, usually both. I had a hard time getting past the Jewish connotations and putting aside happy memories of growing up in a Jewish neighborhood the word conjures up for me. But then I decided Howe doesn’t want readers to get past them. The word is Jewish. And Brooklyn, Queens, New York City Jewish at that.
Which brings me to the other thing I had to work out. Where to put the emphasis when I read the title.
Was it MY Korean Deli, which as I said would suggest a more personal story? Was it My KOREAN Deli with the story being about immigrants and the immigrant experience? Or was it My Korean DELI so that the title includes a bit of a joke, as in, that’s funny, you don’t look Jewish? Or was it on all three words to point up the melting pot idea, WASP, Asian, and Jew blending together?
I finally decided, though, that there’s no special emphasis because there’s nothing special being said. My Korean Deli is a simple statement of fact.
There is nothing to it that a deli can be Korean or that either can be owned by a WASP.
This is New York City, this is America. This is what we are. This is how we are. We’re all mixed up here together and somehow the mixing works. We recognize our differences and our similarities and we are proud of them and we try to shrug them off. We’re a nation of strangers trying to get along according to the not very organizing principle that everybody’s equal, everybody matters, there’s no special emphasis or at least there’s not supposed to be.
When you get right down to it, My Korean Deli isn’t so much about the immigrant experience it is as about the democratic experiment.
And the experiment works best when we take an essentially comic view of life, when we see each other as just trying to make it through the day so that we can make it through tomorrow, when we see our job as helping each other find those small pleasures and little victories that get us through the day.
The reward has been that after being a spaz my whole life---I’m a socially nervous person and always will be---I have an almost greater comfort with strangers than I do with people I know well. Standing there all day not knowing who’s going to come in text or what they’re going to say, you have almost no choice except to become a bit more easygoing, to trust more. It’s a good thing. Everyone should work at a checkout counter for some part of their lives.
How sorry you think Jonah Hill is that he did 21 Jump Street now? Hill is nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Moneyball. Brad Pitt is up for Best Actor. And Moneyball’s contending for Best Picture. Three reasons for re-posting my review from the fall as part of Oscar Week in Mannionville.
Brad Pitt as Oakland Athletic’s general manager Billy Beane alone with his thoughts and his ghosts in Bennett Miller’s movie adaptation of Michael Lewis’ account of Beane’s struggles to guide the A’s back to the playoffs after losing their best players to free agency, Moneyball.
Although set during the Oakland Athletics’ 2002 drive for the American League West’s division championship, Moneyball is no more about baseball than The Social Network is about social networking, Charlie Wilson’s War is about, well, Charlie Wilson’s war, A Few Good Men is about life as a United States Marine, or---to add a film that wasn’t written by Aaron Sorkin---The Ides of March is about politics. Like those other movies, Moneyball is a character study of a not particularly heroic or exceptional man faced with what appears to be an insurmountable challenge.
That challenge---creating a billion dollar business out of thin air and in thin air, arming a small guerrilla army fighting a proxy war against the Soviet Union, building a championship ball club that can compete with the New York Yankees with a payroll less than a third of the Yankees’---may be interesting in and of itself, but for the purposes of the movie it matters mainly in the way it put stresses on the protagonist and reveals his strengths and weaknesses.
Brad Pitt stars as the A’s general manager Billy Beane who, after three of his team’s best players say goodbye to Oakland to sign on with richer, more competitive teams for bigger bucks than Oakland can afford to pay, has to figure out how to replace their bats and their arms on the cheap.
The A’s just don’t have the dough to go after stars in the free agent market. Those three departed players---slugger Jason Giambi, potential superstar outfielder Johnny Damon, and star closer Jason Isringhausen---have signed with new teams for a combined salary that’s only five million dollars less than Oakland’s entire payroll! The team seems doomed to fill in with journeymen and farm hands.
But then Beane has a chance meeting with Peter Brand, a recent Ivy League grad with a degree in economics who’s working as an assistant to the assistant general manager of the Cleveland Indians. Brand (played straight by a surprisingly adult Jonah Hill) shoots down a deal Beane has worked out with the Indians and Beane corners him and wants to know why. Brand turns out to be a computer geek and a wizard with numbers and he explains that most baseball insiders---scouts, coaches, general managers---consistently look at the wrong things when judging players. An in-depth look into the statistics will often reveal strengths and weaknesses that insiders overlook or undervalue. The A’s, Brand says, don’t need to replace Giambi or Damon. They need to replace the runs Giambi and Damon produced, and since there are a lot of different ways to score runs, there are a lot of different types of players, a lot more players, worth signing, including, and considering Oakland’s financial constraints, most helpfully, players every other team has written off.
The trick is identifying the right players, but all Beane needs to do, Brand says, is look at the numbers.
Beane hires Brand on the spot to look at the numbers for him.
And that is about the end of baseball as baseball’s place in the plot of Moneyball. From here on out, the focus is on Beane himself facing down demons from his past, facing up to past failures, personal and professional, and, although working as hard as he can to make his plan work, readying himself for the likelihood that he’s going to fail, again.
Beane is a former major leaguer himself, a once upon highly-touted prospect, drafted by the New York Mets in the first round in 1979, who was unable to live up to his potential. There was a simple reason for that. He had no potential.
He had reached his peak as a baseball player during his junior year in high school. He had never learned to discipline himself at the plate. He had never learned to discipline his temper. He was emotional and easily carried away, qualities that later helped wreck his marriage. His weaknesses, as a ballplayer and a person, were there to read in the numbers.
No one looked at the numbers.
The scout who signed Beane admitted he hadn’t looked at Beane’s stats from his senior year.
The Mets expected more, sooner, of Beane than they did of another outfielder they’d drafted ahead of him the same year.
Beane played major league ball for five full seasons and parts of two others. He bounced from the Mets to the Twins to the Tigers to the A’s, finishing his career in Oakland with a lifetime average of .219.
Having failed as a professional ballplayer, failed as a husband, half-convinced he’s failing as a father to his precocious and sensitive daughter, and so far unsuccessful in doing the job he believes he was hired to do, put together a pennant-winning ballclub, Beane is beginning to wonder if he’s been kidding himself and everybody else all along. He’s suspecting that he’s a cheap fraud.
All these years later, questions still nag at him. How could the scouts have been so wrong? Were they wrong? Had his coaches failed him? Or had he failed himself?
And just what does he think he’s doing now? Has he learned from his past or is he trying to make up for it?
These questions are part of an argument he’s having with himself and he keeps it mostly to himself. From time to time Pitt lets it creep into his voice and into his the attitudes towards other characters, but mainly he lets us see it taking behind his eyes.
Pitt’s Billy Beane isn’t the same sort of career-defining performance as George Bailey was for Jimmy Stewart or Doug Roberts was for Henry Fonda. But it’s the first in which Pitt shows that such a performance is in his near future. It’s his first as a certifiable adult, responsible for the younger characters in his charge and therefore responsible for the younger actors playing them. It’s the first movie he has had to carry on his own. Almost always in the past, Pitt has been paired with another star, often a bigger star, or he’s been part of an ensemble and not always the main character in that ensemble.
And he’s without a convoluted or gimmicky plot to hide in and has to do without the eccentricities of character he has relied on to distract audiences from how beautiful he is and make them pay attention to his character as a person apart from the movie star playing him. He’s there on the screen as just himself---well, as a regular guy who happens to look and talk like Brad Pitt---with nothing but Sorkin’s dialog and his own intelligence and talent to protect him, and he does just fine. It’s a deft, smart, understated, and admirably modest performance. He’s comfortable within himself in a way I don’t recall him ever quite being before, which is ironic because one of the things he does very well here is show how uncomfortable Beane is within himself.
Pitt’s Billy Beane has no self-importance. What’s happening to him matters to us because it matters to Beane and Pitt has us liking and rooting for him, and one of the things we like about him is that he keeps things in perspective. Beane is under no illusions that he’s curing cancer or bringing about world peace, or even revolutionizing baseball, which is to say that Pitt doesn’t allow any self-righteousness or special-pleading to creep in and carry him away. Beane is doing his job in the only way he can think of to do it successfully, but he’s well aware that if he’s saving anybody by doing it, it’s only himself. The immediate consequence of his failing will be he’ll get fired and that’ll be the end of his career in baseball, a very big deal to him but not to anybody else, not even to his daughter or Brand. They’ll be sad for him but they’ll get along just fine. Nobody else will care. Beane knows that and he doesn’t expect them to. A bigger concern for him is that he may not care himself.
This is the central question of his life at the moment, whether or not he’s worth caring about.
Pitt has Beane turning this over in his mind, ruefully, wistfully, but with hardly any self-pity, and what could have been a cliched portrait of a overgrown boy in mourning for his lost youth Pitt turns into a portrait of a once upon a time lost youth with no time to waste mourning his lost youth because he has to do his damn job as a grown man.
That’s why I say Moneyball isn’t about baseball. It’s a workplace dramady about a decent and well-meaning boss, quietly coming to the end of his rope, who has to steer his little ship of fools through a storm he’s accidentally sailed them into and has to take a desperate gamble to bring them safely to shore. Pitt could be playing any one with a small crew to skipper, a lawyer, a doctor, a police sergeant, an army lieutenant, a firehouse captain, the owner of a department store, or the captain of a boat.
It’s a little odd how Moneyball makes being the general manager of a major league baseball team look like an ordinary middle-class white collar job.
But even though it isn’t about baseball doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of baseball in it. Director Bennett Miller captures the atmosphere of the game and the business almost off-handedly but surely. The actors playing his ballplayers not only look and act like ballplayers they can play. That’s because many of them were and are ballplayers. Former major league shortstop Royce Clayton plays the free-swinging All-Star Miguel Tejada. Stephen Bishop who plays the aging slugger David Justice spent time in the Atlanta Braves farm system where he was known as Young Justice because in looks and style of play he resembled Justice. And Miller does a skillful job of blending simulated plays and events with clips from the real deal.
And of course the question that drives the plot---Are Beane and Brand right in trying to build a winning ballclub the numbers?---is a baseball question.
It’s not just his own self-doubts Beane has to overcome. His ideas and decisions are resisted within the A’s organization, first, and most vocally by Beane’s team of scouts---a hilarious Greek chorus of old baseball hands, some of them actual major league scouts, who seem to be holding a contest to see which of them can spout the most and most hoary baseball cliches. But his most serious opponent is the A’s manager, Art Howe.
Philip Seymour Hoffman, looking more like a real baseball manager---and more like Art Howe, for that matter---than the real Art Howe, plays Howe with a self-satisfied smirk and a malicious glint in his eyes that, if it’s possible for an expression to be an act of libel, ought to have the real Art Howe suing Hoffman, Miller, and the movie’s producers.
In refusing to start the players the numbers have told Beane to acquire or play them the way the numbers say they should be played, Howe seems to be deliberately sabotaging the team’s chances to make the playoffs. Neither the script nor Hoffman’s performance tell us if this is what Howe’s up to or why he’d do that. We can’t tell if it’s a gambit in contract negotiations. Howe is looking for an extension of his contract. We can’t tell if it’s a matter of pride. Beane is Howe’s boss but there’s an understanding in baseball that general managers leave the handling of the players and the day to day managing of games to the manager and his coaches. We can’t tell if it’s that Howe just doesn’t agree with Beane and trusts his own judgment more than he trusts computer spreadsheets. We can’t tell if he’s just not smart enough to follow the plot. Hoffman plays him, cagily, as a guy who’s maybe too cagy for his own good.
Doesn’t matter.
What matters is Howe as symbol of the old guard determined to hold onto their game.
There’s not enough of Hoffman in the movie. Some people would say there is never enough of Hoffman in any movie he’s in. But I suspect that he was able to film all of his scenes in one day and may have done it as a favor to Miller who directed him to his Academy Award in Capote.
There is, however, almost enough Jonah Hill. There are some people who would say there is always way more than enough Jonah Hill in any movie he’s in. If that’s true, it’s because his directors have a habit of overusing him or using him in ways that show up his weaknesses and not his strengths. They need to look at the numbers.
As Peter Brand---who is based on a real-life person who asked the producers to change the name, not because he was offended by the way he was portrayed, but because he was concerned that people he had to deal with in real life would expect him to be like the character in the movie---Hill plays his first certifiable grown-up. He’s a young man, but still a man not a boy, and his endearing insecurities, flubs, hesitations, and self-imposed humiliations are funny but not because they make him a loveable goofball but because we’ve been there. Brand is a smart, ambitious, talented young man who has to get older in a hurry and learn on the run. He stumbles because he’s running fast, uphill, over terrain pitted with hidden mole holes and bumpy with rocks and riven by gullies and streams he has to leap without breaking stride. No wonder he falls flat on his face so often. But he’s learning the whole time and Hill lets us see that.
Hill’s importance as a supporting actor is in playing the one person who believes in Billy Beane. But Brand’s importance as a character is established by Beane’s believing in him, and Hill makes it clear why Beane would.
With luck, Moneyball will convince Hollywood to stop using Hill as a minor clown and start casting him as a serious actor who, among other things, can do comedy.
Moneyball, directed by Bennett Miller, starring Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Robin Wright, is available on DVD and to watch instantly at Amazon.
Our feature for Family Movie Night tonight. If you want to watch with us and don't feel like rushing out to find a Redbox, you can stream it from Amazon.. Here's my review from October.
Police Sergeant Gerry Boyle takes time off from investigations into murders and drug dealings in his district in the wild west of Ireland to relax with a couple of friends, although with Boyle it seems to be more a matter of his having to force himself to take time off from relaxing with friends to investigate crimes. Brendan Gleeson, as Boyle, with Dominque McElliogott and Sarah Greene in the comic thriller The Guard.
It’s better we don’t know.
Director-screenwriter John Michael McDonagh’s comic thriller The Guard is like an Elmore Leonard novel transported straight to the movie screen. In fact, it’s so much like an Elmore Leonard novel that I’m half-tempted to call it the best film adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel not based on any actual Elmore Leonard novel.
It’s set in the modern wild west of Ireland, County Galway, instead of Miami or Detroit but it has many of the other signatures of a Leonard novel. A matter of fact, almost casual, but somehow not cynical attitude towards violence, crime, and corruption. A plot centered around a crime that isn’t clever, romantic, spectacular, or at all unusual, that is only interesting because of the murder and mayhem that might result. A comic take on human nature that has us laughing at things we know ought to appall us and sympathizing with characters we know we ought to fear, loathe, and despise. It’s very Leonard-esque of McDonagh to have us sort of liking a character who’s already murdered another character we liked and is about to try to kill the hero and even have us feel a little sorry for the mope while we’re taking anticipatory satisfaction in knowing he’s going to get what’s coming to him and how he’s going to get it. Villains who are charismatic and intelligent and at the same time really dumb. Other villains who are dumb but at the same time unexpectedly intelligent. And a protagonist whose relationships with law and order, goodness and righteousness are at best problematic.
The unironically white-hatted U.S. Marshall Raylan Givens (now of the TV series Justified, where he’s grown more morally conflicted, but originally of the novels Pronto and Riding the Rap, where he plays second lead to the bookie Harry Arno) is an anomaly among Leonard’s heroes and something of an inside joke between Leonard and his fans as he’s been clearly roped in from one of Leonard’s westerns. More typical---and to my mind the best---of Elmore’s anti-heroes is Chili Palmer, the leg-breaker turned movie producer in Get Shorty.
In The Guard, McDonagh gives us an Irish cop, Sergeant Gerry Boyle, who is to put it mildly, no Raylan Givens, at least not at first glance. Or second or third glance either. Boyle seems to take little interest in his job, doesn’t care one way or another about the citizens he’s sworn to serve and protect, can hardly be bothered to investigate a murder in his jurisdiction, spends his days off enjoying the company of prostitutes he pays to wear police uniforms and “arrest” him, is deliberately obnoxious, provocative, insulting, and racist---“I’m Oirish, sar. Racism is part of me country.”---isn’t above taking drugs off a corpse for his personal recreational use, and when a young officer from his squad disappears he treats the matter as if it was somebody else’s problem that will probably go away if he just ignores it.
Another way The Guard is like a Leonard novel is that its story is carried along mainly through dialog. Leonard doesn’t give his readers much in the way of description or exposition. McDonagh doesn’t spend time setting up pretty pictures. Galway being Galway, some breathtaking post card shots appear now and again, probably not accidentally but only incidentally. Like Leonard’s, McDonagh’s characters rarely shut up, and also like Leonard’s they talk to each other not to us. Since they know things about each other and what’s going on, they don’t waste words exchanging what’s to them old news for our benefit. The three bad guys know the logistics of the cocaine shipment they’re plotting. Boyle and his superiors know why they dislike and distrust each other. Boyle and his mother know the nature of her illness, her course of treatment, the ups and downs of their relationship over the years, what happened to his father, and what it was like to have had her for a mother and have raised him as a son. They don’t need to go over it all again with just so that we know it too. They give clues and drop hints, but by the by, and we’re left to infer as best we can.
On top of this, Boyle has made it practically a religion to keep things to himself. His reply to a murderer’s taunt---Murderer: How many moorders have ye had in the last twenty-foor hours? Boyle: That’s for us to know and you to find out.---might as well be his life’s motto. He’s not about to tell us any more than he’d tell a moorderer and there’s a lot that’s for him to know and us to find out. This means that questions about characters’ pasts, the details of their plots and schemes, their connections with one another, and what they know or don’t know about what’s happening to them and around them don’t get answered, including one big one left hanging at the end.
And like I said up top, it’s better that we don’t know.
There’s a big difference between a typical Leonard novel and The Guard, though. Leonard’s male leads, no matter how morally, ethically, or legally compromised, are still leading men who can be played in a movie by the likes of George Clooney,John Travolta,Owen Wilson,Burt Reynolds, and Robert Forster. Gerry Boyle is played by Brendan Gleeson and the only handsome thing about him is his hair. When he bothers to comb it.
In the person of Gleeson, Boyle is fat, dough-faced, a bit jug-eared, and deep into a grouchy middle-age. Gleeson is tall and blocky and he gives the impression that he can be an immovable object but he doesn’t let on whether he can also be, like Mad-Eye Mooney whom he played in the Harry Potter movies, an irresistible force as well. We hardly ever see him in motion. McDonagh usually places him already in the frame at the beginning of scenes and leaves him standing or sitting still throughout. When he does move, we mostly see him from the shoulders up or in a quick glimpse as he slides into the frame from the lower corner. We’re left to judge Boyle entirely by Gleeson’s face, and, saints presoorve us, what a face himself has!
It’s an amazingly expressive mug, although for a good deal of the movie Gleeson uses it to express amusing and subtle variations on irritation and annoyance. Another frequent expression is bewilderment. What tends to bewilder him is why other people are offended or appalled by the offensive and seemingly dumb things he says. But how much of this is an act? Several times other characters tell Boyle they can’t decide if he’s as dumb as he appears or if he’s pretending, and his eyes will light up with mischief. We can guess what he’s thinking: That’s for me to know and you to find out. But Gleeson plays it cagey with us too. We know he’s not dumb, but he won’t give us enough to let us judge just how smart he is. We also know that the offensiveness is a gambit to keep others off-balance and to push them away emotionally. He doesn’t want to make sympathetic connections if he doesn’t have to. Gleeson brogue thickens when Boyle’s playing dumb or deliberately trying to piss someone off. But that’s it. Besides the brogue, the only other thing he gives us to go on in trying to decide what’s really going on inside his head is his grin.
He has a grin like an elf drawing an inside straight in a poker game with Santa with the sleigh and all eight reindeer in the pot.
I really wanted to make a leprechaun joke there.
But Boyle never shows us his cards. We can’t tell for sure if he’s bluffing. Which puts us in the same predicament as FBI Agent Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle) who’s come over from the United States to coordinate an attempt to intercept a cocaine shipment with the Irish police---The Guard of the Irish Peace, in English, Garda Síochána na hÉireann, in Gaelic, the Garda, for short. The FBI’s information is that the coke will ship out of Boyle’s district, so Boyle should be a key part of the investigation, if not at least nominally in charge of it. But some hotshots from Dublin have come up to take over, pushing Boyle to the sidelines, much to his relief and delight---there’s that grin again, hinting that Boyle has won another hand. But for some reason, Everett ignores the Dublin hotshots and keeps reaching out to Boyle for help.
It could be that like us, Everett has no one else to latch onto. The Dublin hotshots seem impressed by Everett, or at least by his status as an American and an agent of the FBI, and willing to follow his lead. But either he has decided not provide it and distance himself from them or they were pretending obeisance and once the investigation got underway they distanced themselves from Everett. It could be that like us he can’t believe that Boyle is as dumb and reflexively rude and offensive as he appears and Everett’s convinced that sooner or later Boyle’s going to reveal himself as the good, smart, and tough cop Everett needs him to be. We don’t know. McDonagh doesn’t show us. Everett doesn’t explain. So it could be that there is no good reason. Everett may be playing his own game of poker.
Cheadle makes Everett the straightest of straight arrows. He allows makes him a bit of a prig and a bit of a pris. And that raises all sorts of alarms.
No FBI agent worth his salt---and no character played by Don Cheadle---could be this fussy, this humorless, this naive. He couldn’t be so clueless as to wear that suit with that shirt to a meeting in a pub with a fellow law enforcement officer who’s already made his lack of respect for him clear. And with that handkerchief too? And when Boyle insults him, again, this time by assuming Everett grew up in “the projects,” Everett’s indignant reply, that he comes from a “very privileged background” sounds as put on as Boyle’s brogue. We’re left to wonder how good a good guy he’ll turn out to be when the inevitable showdown arrives, the same thing we’ve been wondering all along about Boyle.
We know how bad the bad guys are.
The trio of villains, a couple of Irish thugs, Liam O’Leery and Francis Sheehy, and a cooler-headed more thoughtful English thief named Clive Cornell, who insists he has a no heavy-lifting clause in his contract, dress, act, and talk as if they routinely re-watch Guy Ritchie movies, Pulp Fiction, and The Long Good Friday for tips and pointers on how to be bad guys and they laugh at each other’s jokes, applaud each other’s crimes, and admire their victims’ and intended victims’ courage and skills as if they are in fact watching themselves in a movie.
I suspect McDonagh of admitting to his own influences through them.
O’Leery (David Wilmot) is the craziest of the three but he has his pride and it’s important to him that his cohorts understand that he’s been clinically diagnosed as a sociopath not a psychopath, even if he can’t explain the difference himself. Cornell (Mark Strong) is the most self-aware, which makes him seem the smartest, but the way he’s aware of himself is that of an actor playing a role he’d rather not have been cast in. He can’t bring himself to put his whole heart into it, but as a professional he’s going to do it justice and see it through to the end, although he doesn’t seem to have thought out exactly what that means. Sheehy (Liam Cunningham) is the leader but mainly by virtue of being the only one of the three paying attention to the crimes they’re committing. O’Leery is too easily distracted by the moment. Cornell is too busy studying his part. Sheehy is left to keep their plans on track. But even he loses focus from time to time.
There’s a real possibility with these three that the crime won’t come off. Which isn’t good news because if they go off the rails it will be to do something worse.
They’re a trio of clowns, but what makes them funny is what makes them dangerous. They are more intelligent, more articulate, and more reflective than the garden variety gangster. But that just gives them the ability to fool themselves into thinking they are smarter than they are. Whenever they reach the limits of their actually quite limited intelligence they are as surprised and frustrated as dogs who’ve run up against an invisible fence. They get angry. And violent.
Boyle is on the other side of the invisible fence, standing grimly and inscrutably just beyond the limits of their intelligence.
There’s one more thing we don’t know about Boyle, how much of what we’re seeing of him, the grouchiness, the indifference, the itch to insult and provoke, and the moral and ethical failings, is him and not his way of dealing with his growing sorrow. Boyle is a sad man because his mother, the one person in the world we know he cares for, is dying.
Here’s a big difference between The Guard and Elmore Leonard’s novels. Most of Leonard’s novels feature a strong, active, intelligent, and beautiful female lead and love interest who can be played in the movies by the likes of Diane Lane, Jennifer Lopez, Ann Margaret, Rene Russo, and Pam Grier. The Guard has a strong, intelligent, and active to the degree a woman dying of cancer is able female lead, but she’s not beautiful (although you can see that she was and her eyes are still gorgeous) and she’s not the romantic interest, although she is part of a kind of love story.
Fionnula Flanagan plays Boyle’s mother, Eileen, and at first glance she seems too refined and frail a bird (even discounting her illness) to have given birth to this rough, burly, surly beast of a son. But it turns out they share the same sense of humor and the same tendency to keep the world at a safe distance by mocking and provoking and playing not dumb exactly but not quite all there. And we can see where he gets his poker face. Eileen keeps her cards close. She won’t let on even to her son what she’s feeling or thinking about what’s happening to her. Her fear, her sadness, and her worries about him and what will become of him without her, have to be inferred by Boyle himself as well as by us. Flanagan, though, allows Eileen one moment of complete honesty and openness, although it’s expressed through a lie.
The two have gone out to a pub, at her request, to listen to music not to drink or even talk, and at one point Eileen reaches out to caress Boyle’s cheek. This is one of the very few times we see them touch.
She tells him he’s been a good son and says “You never gave me a moment’s trouble.”
Boyle replies, “Aw, ma, you know that’s not true.”
She smiles.
“Just for tonight,” she says, “Let’s pretend it is.”
Flanagan delivers the line with a mix of grace, affection, and wicked wit that gets a laugh at the same time it breaks hearts.
But that’s what comedy is, isn’t it? You laugh because what else are you going to do? Scream in horror or weep.
The Guard is a comedy like that.
New feature. The blonde’s one-sentence review: “What a delightful little film!”
The Guard, directed by John Michael McDonagh, starring Brendan Gleeson, Don Cheadle, Mark Strong, Liam Cunningham, David Wilmot, and Fionnula Flanagan, available on DVD and to watch instantly at Amazon.
Saw The Muppets this afternoon and as usual Amy Adams was too cute for words and as usual that didn’t stop me from liking her or the movie. But two of Amy Adams’ co-stars from Sunshine Cleaning have cameos in The Muppets, Emily Blunt and Alan Arkin. Reminded me I liked that movie. So, from August 2009:
Two beautifully realized and revealing moments in Sunshine Cleaning that bring important characters fully to life and neither one involved the stars of the film.
One doesn't even involve an actor.
Sunshine Cleaning stars Amy Adams and Emily Blunt as Rose and Norah Lorkowski, two sisters who start a business cleaning up the bloody messes left at crime scenes and in the aftermaths of accidents, and one of those moments is a flashback to when the sisters were little girls and they discovered their mother's body after she'd committed suicide. The girls come into the house from playing outside in the sprinkler. Rose, the eldest, is in the lead and she realizes something is terribly wrong before she sees what's the matter. She continues on ahead (with the camera behind them) but as she goes her right arm swings around to reach back towards her sister and her hand opens up to hold Norah back. This reflexive protective gesture of the big sister's towards the little one instantly becomes the defining gesture of their lives and we understand from it why in the movie's present, with Rose in her thirties and Norah getting there, neither young woman has much of a life of her own.
Rose has devoted herself to taking care of Norah at her own expense, but she's done it by pushing Norah back---by "protecting" her from the worst life throws at people, she's protected Norah from life itself. Norah can't navigate in the world because Rose has never let her learn how to.
Meanwhile, Rose, who at one point complains that she's not good at anything, is shown to have been really good at the kind of self-sacrifice that is really self-punishment. She's been sabotaging her own life for years because she feels she failed at the most important job she was given. That gesture of protection came both too late and with not enough strength. She believes that she should have protected Norah by having saved their mother or by having made everything all right afterwards.
By the way, the connection between the work they're doing and Rose's guilt and Norah's inability to face up to life is clear to the point of being trite, but what's good about the way Sunshine Cleaning deals with it is that it doesn't deal with it. It leaves it entirely unremarked upon. Rose delivers a little speech to a gathering of old high school friends about what she does and what she likes about the work that brings her close to stating the obvious---"We come into people's lives when they have experienced something profound and sad and...we help."---but the sweetness of Adams' delivery coupled with the way she plays it makes this the moment when Rose realizes that she reallydoeslikethe work and she's proud of herself as a businesswoman; the psychological ramifications don't even seem to cross her mind, and the obvious remains unstated.
The other moment, the one that doesn't involve an actor but still brings a character to life, occurs in the house the sisters have come to to clean up after another suicide. The bodies are always gone before they arrive, and usually there are no survivors there to deal with, only cops or landlords. This time they meet the elderly widow of the old man who killed himself. She takes Rose into the house to show her where her husband did it and all along the walls and on the doors and on the appliances we see Post-it Notes, many stuck one on top of another, and although we haven't been told anything about the dead man, not even that he shot himself, we know him and we know why.
The camera closes in on just one of the notes, mainly to show us that the man wrote the notes himself to himself. At first I thought this was his last note, but thinking it over I've decided it might very well have been his first. It's a note reminding him to tell his wife he loves her.
The note isn't about saying good-bye. It's not about death. It's about living and what's important. It's a note to Rose and to the audience.
Sunshine Cleaning is a note to the audience reminding us that people whose presence in our lives are determined and defined by their functionality---maids, store clerks, waitresses, lab technicians, among others---people who we take for granted and often just ignore are real human beings with feelings and thoughts and dreams and sorrows and, by the way, but not trivially, special talents and skills that make them good at what they do, that make them useful not just functional. It's the kind of low-key, understated character comedy-drama that has not much more reason than to make us like and understand its characters as a way of making us like and understand other real people and ourselves, and as that kind of a movie Sunshine Cleaning does a pretty good job. Screenwriter Megan Holly and director Christine Jeffs have steered away from the darker aspects of their own story and are perhaps a little too determined to make sure that we like Rose and Norah and their father Joe, played crustily but affably by Alan Arkin, and the result may be a little too much sweetness and lightness for some. I didn't mind it, except in the few moments when characters let loose angers that they haven't been hiding as much as they've had them excised, and then things start to feel forced and actors who've been underplaying their roles beautifully suddenly seem to be overacting desperately, which is an extra flaw in a movie that has as its main other reason for demanding our attention the pleasure of watching its stars act like actors and not like movie stars.
Sunshine Cleaning is the first movie since Junebug I've seen Amy Adams play a real human being in. I haven't seen Julie & Julia yet. In Doubt and Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day she played "characters," realistic fictions that closely resemble real human beings but which couldn't exist outside of the stories they were created to help tell. In Enchanted she played a cartoon, literally, a Disney princess come to life, and she was brilliant, but, you know, a cartoon, and in Night at the Museum 2: Battle for the Smithsonian she attempted to repeat the trick by bringing what was essentially a cartoon version of Amelia Earhart to life, but she had a weak script and a lesser director to work with, plus I didn't think anybody could have found for her a less worthy love interest than Patrick Dempsey until I saw Ben Stiller practically yawning through all their scenes together. And in Charlie Wilson's War she's completely wasted in a part that doesn't require her to do anything but stand there and listen attentively while Tom Hanks has a good time hamming it up.
Adams makes Rose not just someone you could meet in real life but someone you feel you have met.
Didn't surprise me to see Adams pull this off. It shouldn't be surprising when actors we've thought were really good in one thing show by being really good in something very different that the reason they were good in the first thing is that they are good actors. (That one was as hard to type as it probably was to read.) Adams is helped, though, by her looks. She is very pretty, but in an ordinary way. If it wasn't for her red hair, it would be possible to overlook her in a crowd. Not easy, but possible, and you might not look twice, if you were in a hurry.
Emily Blunt, however, is not overlookable or look pastable. Her features are more striking and she's four inches taller and built along more heroic lines. So what's most surprising about her appearance in Sunshine Cleaning is that she appears at all. It was inspired to cast her as someone who is convinced she's not worth a second glance, possibly not even a first, and who goes out of her way to make sure that's the way it goes. Rose's over-protectiveness has undermined Norah's self-confidence to the point that she's accepted that she's not fit for grown-up life. She's handicapped by her own and Rose's low expectations, and she's learned to co-operate with Rose in the job of keeping Norah safe by keeping her pushed back. She is always in retreat, and one sign of this is her choice of clothes and hair style and use of make up, all of which are applied to present a "character" to the world that people will see and react to in place of the real Norah. Instead of a beautiful and intelligent young woman, she sends out in her stead a sullen and incompetent overgrown adolescent.
And there's something else at work within her. Norah has some little, secret ways of keeping her mother alive in herself, but all she really knows about her is that she was beautiful and that somehow her beauty contributed to the sadness that destroyed her, possibly by giving her expectations of a grander, more glamorous, more exciting life. Norah's downplaying of her beauty, her denying it, is a way of preventing herself from developing great expectations. Norah would rather expect nothing, and is generally relieved when that's what she gets.
Blunt doesn't convey Norah's low self-esteem, hopelessness, and contrived immaturity just by dressing down and letting her unkempt hair fall across her face. She carries herself like the most awkward of teenagers, all arms and legs going ever which way. She gallumphs when she walks, slouches deeply into cushions when she sits, and is as droopy and loose-limbed as a scarecrow when she stands still. There's really no hiding the fact that Blunt is beautiful but she makes Norah someone there's no way you could convince is beautiful, not as beautiful as her sister, at any rate, so what's the point of even trying?
There's one other movie star in Sunshine Cleaning playing a real person in a departure from what has become his routine role as schlumpy stoner sidekick, but I'm not going to tell you who, in case you want to be surprised like the blonde who didn't recognize him, even though he's one of her favorites, and she was flabbergasted when she read his name in the end credits.
Sunshine Cleaning is available to watch instantly at Amazon.
Captain America: The First Avenger is out on DVD this week so naturally it’s our feature for Mannion Family Movie Night. I never did get around to writing a regular review, but this post rating the previous entries in the Avengers series pretty much takes care of it, I think.
Kind of a long one. If this is too much comic book stuff for you, click on the link to take you to yesterday’s post on Marc Chagall’s upstate idyll, “Where do you put a painting like that?”
Easter egg alert: Click on the images for video clips and more fun and surprises.
You may have noticed that not a lot of blogging went on here over the last seven days. Kind of a crazy week with too much time spent in the car and not enough time spent in groovy coffee houses, so I haven’t been able to focus my thoughts for the formal review of Captain America: The First Avenger I’ve wanted to write. And my thoughts may not get focused. We’ll see. In the meantime, here are few quick points.
If you like this sort of thing, you’ll probably like this sort of thing. If you’re a fan of the Captain America comic books you’ll probably get a kick out of the movie. I’m a fan of Cap’s from way back and I was mostly thrilled. A few changes in the canonical story disappointed me and I think they could have handled a very important plot point in a way that would have been more moving. But some additions more than made up for that, particularly the idea that Steve Rogers wasn’t just skinny and sickly before he got injected with the Super Soldier serum and the introduction of Tommy Lee Jones’ character. And if you’re already emotionally invested in the Avengers series of movies that’s unfolding, this one fits in nicely and does the job it needs to do of helping to set things up for The Avengers.
The question is, then, how does it stack up against the other movies in the series so far? There are now five, Captain America, the two Iron Man movies, Thor, and The Incredible Hulk. I’ve decided to do what I hope will be a helpful point by point comparison that might answer the question. I’m leaving The Incredible Hulk out of it because, truthfully, I don’t remember it very well, and doesn’t that tell you something, but also because I’m not sure how much of it still figures in the overall scheme of the series now that Ed Norton has been replaced as Bruce Banner by Mark Ruffalo. For purposes of discussion, I’m also leaving out Iron Man 2 except for those aspects that can be treated as part of Iron Man.
So, with the usual warning about possible spoilers, here goes:
Plot.
Like it matters. All three have the essentially the same plot. Evil mad genius schemes to take over the world, our hero gets his powers just in time to stop him. All three are origin stories, however, so it’s best to compare them on their merits in telling that story. Therefore:
Origin Story.
Captain America. Little guy with a big heart wants to fight Nazis during World War II, becomes big guy with bigger heart and fights Nazis.
Thor. Jolly but arrogant and self-indulgent Norse god loses his powers and is banished to Earth for acting like a spoiled brat, mouthing off to his father, and, incidentally, nearly starting a war between the gods and the frost giants. Has to learn humility by living as a mortal and learning to make pancakes. Falls in love, sacrifices self, gets powers back, kicks some more frost giant butt.
Iron Man. Arrogant, selfish, self-indulgent but still roguishly charming billionaire arms dealer and engineering genius Tony Stark builds a metal suit equipped with high-tech weaponry to escape from terrorists, finds he gets a kick out of wearing the suit and playing at being a superhero. Spends a lot of time working out glitches in the suit and figuring out how the hero thing works, which adds some laughs of a kind the other two heroes’ stories lack. Plus Stark is the only one whose personal story isn’t finished with his becoming a hero. Cap’s second personal story, that of a man out of time and essentially without a country, doesn’t pick up until The Avengers movie.
Advantage: Iron Man.
Hero/Leading Man.
Captain America: As Captain America and Steve Rogers, Chris Evans had the toughest job. Cap is so good, so noble, so pure of heart, and so gosh darned earnest, how do you not play him as a prig and drip? By learning from Christopher Reeve’s Superman and believing in your hero completely and trusting that the audience believes in him completely already too, then add a dash of humor. Evans’ Cap isn’t the kind of hero who cracks wise, but he appreciates and responds warmly to the sense of humor in others. He delivers his hokiest lines as if he means them but he doesn’t expect to convert anyone; he just hopes they’ll understand that he means what he says. And Evans is already giving others their due, stepping back to let them take the screen when it’s their time to hold it, which will serve him well when the actor he has to share the screen with in The Avengers is Robert Downey Jr., who is also generous towards his fellow players. I expect they’ll work well together.
Thor. Thor is the only one of our three heroes who gets to show (and show off) his personality while he’s in action as a superhero. Tony Stark basically becomes a robot as Iron Man and Steve Rogers is any noble officer leading the charge in any war movie ever made. But Thor is at his best when he’s in a fight and Chris Hemsworth has a ball displaying a born swashbuckler’s grace, charm, and style, but with the right degree of steely-eyed menace in the eyes above the grin that ought to warn any adversary they don’t stand a chance.
Hemsworth looks suitably mighty, particularly when shirtless, but he carries his god-like beauty lightly and gives Thor an appealing touch of humility even in his vanity. He is, as a good swashbuckler should be, witty, wittier than Captain America, at any rate, but like Cap he’s no wiseguy and his sense of humor shows itself best in his appreciation of others’ humor. His Thor is affable, gregarious, and enjoys the company of mortals as well as that of his fellow gods and goddesses. He is quick to see the best in human beings. Which is what happens when he meets his love interest-to-be, Jane Foster. He immediately appreciates her intelligence and scientific ambitions and he respects and admires her before he falls in love with her. When she talks about her work, he listens. He truly is a prince among gods. More importantly, he’s a gentleman and he is kind.
Evans and Hemsworth are both very good and either one could be the top pick here, but…
Iron Man: Robert Downey Jr. as…Oh hell. As the captions in the Marvel comics often said, Nuff said.
Advantage: Iron Man.
Villain.
Captain America. Hugo Weaving looks awesome as the Red Skull and does a fine job caricaturing every Nazi officer in every vintage World War II ever made when the Red Skull is in his guise as Johann Schmidt. But here as in the comics, the Red Skull is basically a male version of the Wicked Witch of the West and spends most of his time delivering threats and screaming “Fly! Fly!”at his winged monkeys.
Thor. The movie doesn’t take enough advantage of Loki’s potential as a mischief-maker, but Tom Hiddleston still manages to convey a sense of mischief being made. As I wrote in my review back in May, his best trick is his expression of Linus-like sincerity. But he’s also witty, eloquent, charming, and extremely intelligent (more a matter of Hiddleston’s performance than anything the script gives him to do or say), admirable qualities that he uses to manipulate Thor and the frost giant king like gullible children. Within the plot, Loki functions in the role of mad genius bent on world---or otherworld---domination, but he isn’t merely power-mad. He is motivated by jealousy and spite and the Cain-like need to punish his brother Thor for being their father’s favorite, but he doesn’t see himself this way. He sees himself as acting as Asgard’s savior. In the old comics and the cartoon series Loki was basically a cackling madman in the manner of that other comic book mischief-maker, the Joker. In the movie, Loki doesn’t cackle. In fact, several times he is on the verge of tears. There’s a sadness at the core of Hiddleston’s performance. He does love both his father and his brother even as he’s made them his enemies. There’s a nobility to him, and more than a trace of heroism. He could have been a true prince among gods, if only he didn’t want to be king.
Iron Man. As Obadiah Stane, Jeff Bridges’ best trick is being Jeff Bridges. We know from the first we shouldn’t trust him, he’s a little too much himself, too affable, too laid back, too good-humored, plus his head’s shaved like Lex Luthor’s, and we can see from the get-go that his interests are not the same as Tony Stark’s. But we can’t help hoping we’re wrong about him. After all, he’s Jeff Bridges, the goodest of good guys. Then as the movie progresses and it becomes undeniable that Stane is up to no good, he grows all the more menacing for still being Jeff Bridges. Affably, good-humoredly, and completely relaxed about it, he’s plotting mass murder and world-wide violence and mayhem. It’s terrifying, until…
He disappears into his role as mad genius bent on world domination and becomes just another Bond villain. He’s pretty much gone from the movie as a character from that point and this is before he actually disappears inside his giant metal suit and is replaced by an avatar in the video game that is the movie’s climactic battle sequence.
Advantage: Thor.
Love Interest.
Captain America. As Agent Peggy Carter, Hayley Atwell is heavy on the red lipstick, light on heart. I don’t think this is Atwell’s fault. Unlike Thor’s Jane Foster and Iron Man’s Pepper Potts, Agent Carter---and Agent is practically her real first name in the movie. Peggy’s an afterthought.---was invented for the movie, so Atwell doesn’t have a comic book icon to play with or play off of (Editor’s note: I’m somewhat wrong about this. Peggy Carter’s not an iconic character like Pepper and Jane but she’s in the comic book’s continuity. She’s been re-invented for the movie though. See Tony Dayoub’s comment.) and she isn’t given anything to do that couldn’t have been done as well or better by Bucky Barnes or Howard Stark. In fact, considering that the friendship between Howard Stark and Captain America is going to be a source of tension between Cap and Tony Stark in The Avengers---at least, it had better be---it would have made sense to give more of Atwell’s role in the plot to Stark. Well, except for the smooching and the tight red dress. Atwell wears that better than Dominic Cooper probably would have.
Thor. Jane Foster is played by Natalie Portman, which not too long ago would have given Thor the immediate advantage. But in the last year the problem Portman has been faced with in playing a character is that her character is being played by Natalie Portman. It’s become a lot harder to see the character for the movie star. This problem is solved for her by the fact that her character is as intelligent as she is.
Portman’s defining trait as a star and America’s new movie sweetheart is her radiant smile. She simply beams with joy. But she also appears to be one of the smartest young actors at work today and smart is what Jane Foster is. Jane’s a scientist, wrapped up and happy in her work, with a lot to think about besides developing a romance with Norse gods who have fallen to earth. It helps that the script has given Jane more to do than fall in love with Thor. Agent Carter has a job but that job is pretty much all about supporting Captain America (Carter is the sternest looking cheerleader in movie history) and being at hand for Cap to fall in love with her. And Iron Man’s Pepper Potts pretty much lives to be in love with Tony Stark. Jane Foster has a job that requires her to think about other things and when the time comes for her to think about Thor romantically, she can still think about other things---she is capable of being interested in Thor as a man and of still focusing on the scientific questions his presence poses. One of the things that impresses her about Thor is that he is able to talk about her work on her level.
Then there’s that smile. Jane doesn’t need Thor to make her happy. She enters the movie happy. Happy in her work, happy with herself, and happily single. Falling in love makes her happier but it doesn’t save her. This is why Thor falls for her. She is independent, self-reliant, and emotionally self-supporting. If she needed saving in any way, Thor couldn’t fall in love with her because she’d be to him what other mortals are, which is essentially his children. Jane saves other people. She is in her small very human but still very admirable way a heroine.
Iron Man. I’m biased here. Besides the fact that Pepper Potts has one of the best names in the annals of comic book leading ladies, Gwyneth Paltrow has always been my movie girlfriend (Uma understands). Still, although unlike Portman’s Jane Foster, Pepper Potts has no life outside of her love for Tony Stark, Paltrow makes it clear that within those boundaries, Pepper has made room for her to be a person in her own right and that this is something she’s chosen for herself and something she can walk away from, something she has to wait for Iron Man 2 to prove but it’s definitely there to be proved in her performance in this one. And then there’s the party scene in which she wears a backless dress…
Still, as a character Pepper is mainly defined by her role as Tony’s love interest.
Still, there’s that backless dress…
Advantage. Thor, slightly.
Sidekicks.
Captain America. Except for Bucky Barnes, who is nothing like the Bucky of the comic books, a good thing---this Bucky is Cap’s right hand man, Little John to Cap’s Robin or Tonto to his Lone Ranger instead a of a more useless and goofier Robin to Cap’s Batman---and Neil McDonough as Dum Dum Dugan, who looks like the comic book drawings come to life, right down to the expression in his eyes, the Howling Commandos aren’t much of a presence. The rest of the team are distinguishable only as the black guy, the French guy, the British guy, and the Japanese-American guy.
Thor. Like Loki, the Warriors Three are under-utilized here, but, since I suspect more will be made of them in Thor 2, the movie does a good job of introducing them as distinct and interesting characters worth our having a real rooting interest in. They’re types lifted practically whole from The Three Musketeers. Hogun is Athos, the coolly dangerous leader simmering with tightly controlled rage. Fandral is Aramis, the suave and seductive charmer. Volstagg is Porthos, the boisterous braggart and glutton. But while they aren’t given a lot to do, they are given enough to do to establish themselves as characters who exist as individuals apart from their jobs as Thor’s back-up. Each gets to toss of a few good lines and each is given a moment to shine as himself.
Iron Man. Iron Man doesn’t have any true sidekicks, which is part of the point.
Stark treats the woman who loves him as a sidekick, a big part of the point. His best friend, Jim Rhodes, the future War Machine, comes closer to being an antagonist, which again is part of the point and which comes seriously into play in Iron Man 2.
Hap Hogan, who ought to be his sidekick, barely rises above flunky here, although he gets a promotion in Iron Man 2, and that also is part of the point.
Basically, Jarvis and the other robots who help him in his lab are the closest things he has to sidekicks, and that and the fact that they are actually things are also big parts of the point.
Oddly, Pepper Potts gets a sort of sidekick with Clark Gregg’s first and establishing appearance as the seemingly mild-mannered SHIELD agent, Phil Coulson.
Advantage: Actually, thematically, Iron Man, but dramatically and cinematically and just for the plain fun of it, Thor.
Star turn by old coot movie legend eating up scenery as grumpy and critical father figure.
Captain America. Tommy Lee Jones is at his craggy, grouchy, sardonic best as Cap’s commanding officer, Colonel Chester Philips. His common sense and his training and experience tell him that the scrawny runt Steve Rogers is not up to the job of becoming a super soldier, but he can’t help liking the kid---that he likes him is one of the reasons he wants Rogers out of the program; he doesn’t want the kid to get hurt---and he trusts the judgment of the scientist in charge of the program, Dr Erskine, more than his own. This puts him at odds with himself for a good part of the movie, a situation that makes him grumpier and funnier. After Rogers becomes Captain America it appears on the surface that Jones doesn’t have anything left to do except be grouchy and deliver one-liners, but Jones’ real job from there on out is to believe in Captain America so that we think, If this grumpy old cynic accepts Cap at face value then we should too.
Thor. Mostly a matter of Anthony Hopkins as Odin having fun giving himself notes on how, when the time comes, he won’t be playing King Lear. Otherwise, he’s there to project the kind of moral authority that it’s not only not wise to defy but also wrong to defy so that the audience nods in agreement when Odin banishes his son for his vanity and his stupidity. “Thor is disobeying Anthony Hopkins? Well, then, of course, he should have his hammer taken away from him, the dope!”
Iron Man. This is tricky because he’s also the Villain. But one of the things that Jeff Bridges does that makes Obadiah Stane a great villain is play him exactly as if he wasn’t the villain. Even if he wasn’t an out and out bad guy, Stane would still treat Tony with the same mixture of affection and criticism, give him the same sort of bad advice, and work to take the company away from Stark, although, he would claim, for Tony’s own and the stockholders’ benefit. So Bridges as Stane fits the role of critical father figure but as such he doesn’t add as much to the movie as Jones and Hopkins do to their movies. It’s like how in TV and movie mysteries the murderer turns out to be somebody we were supposed to think was a good guy but we knew from the start was the killer because of Ebert’s rule of the Economy of Characters. We feel shortchanged. Plus, as I said above, as soon as Stane reveals himself as the bad guy he stops being interesting as a character because he stops being a character. He’s just a plot device.
Advantage: Captain America.
Great Character Actor as warm-hearted scientist mentor and supportive father-figure.
Captain America. Underplaying the part beautifully, Stanley Tucci’s main job as Dr Abraham Erskine is to make us see Steve Rogers as Captain America before he becomes Captain America. Erskine believes that the serum he developed only works if the person injected doesn’t need it to become a hero. The important thing is that the subject is a good man---Tucci puts a world of emotion into that little word, good---and Erskine has found in Rogers that good man. Beyond that, Tucci has some very nice throwaway laugh lines, although he earns most of his laughs with subtle gestures and his expressive eyes. And he gets a good death scene that he makes into a great one with another gesture and a smile.
Thor. Actually, as Erik Selvig, Stellan Skarsgard plays this role to Natalie Portman’s Jane. He’s more of a potential father-in-law figure for Thor and in that role his job is to assure us that Thor is worthy of Jane’s love and therefore that he has learned his lesson and changed his ways. Other than that, he’s there to be a human being Thor treats with kindness and respect.
A good drunk scene, no death scene.
Iron Man. Dr Yinsen’s job is slightly different than Erskine’s and Selvig’s. They are there to assure the audience that the heroes of their movies are heroes. Yinsen, played by Shaun Toub, has to make the hero into a hero. Erskine’s serum only brings out the hero in Steve Rogers and gives him the power to act as that hero. Thor is also a hero already, what he needs to learn is how to be a good man. But Tony Stark is a selfish jerk. Yinsen makes him into Iron Man, first, by saving his life, then, literally, by helping him build the suit, then by instructing him in how to stop being a selfish jerk and become a better person, and, finally, by charging him with the mission of making up for his past sins and becoming a protector of humankind instead of a destroyer.
And Yinsen is different from Erskine and Selvig in another way. He has his own demons to contend with. He is not simply a warm and benign father figure, he’s a conflicted and flawed character in his own right.
Terrific death scene.
Advantage: Iron Man.
Supporting players and secondary characters.
Captain America. Lots of points scored here by Dominic Cooper who as Howard Stark delivers a double-dose of fun with simultaneous impersonations of Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes in The Aviator and Robert Downey Jr as Stark’s son Tony. Then there’s Toby Jones as Peter Lorre…I mean as Dr Zola, the Red Skull’s nervous mad scientist sidekick and Richard Armitage as the Third Reich’s most physically resilient secret agent.
But the movie loses points for not including Agent Coulson, which it could easily have done. There’s one scene he should have been in and another he could have been in just for the hell of it. And he could have been there in spirit in the form of his own grandfather, either as one of the Howling Commandos or as an adjunct to Agent Carter. In fact, Agent Carter is basically a female Agent Coulson, so he could have been there as his own grandmother or great-aunt, although it probably wouldn’t have been a good idea to have had her played by Clark Gregg.
Thor. Offers not one but two beautiful starlets in roles that give them lots more to do than be beautiful starlets and in fact lets them not be beautiful but simply themselves, well, their characters---Jaime Alexander as the warrior goddess Sif and Kat Denning who as Jane Foster’s unhelpful assistant Darcy provides the kind of plucky comic relief usually given to a guy. You can sit through the whole movie without noticing or caring that they are beautiful. And neither one is defined by her relationship with a man. They are defined by the jobs they have to do and how well they do them, which in Sif’s case is excellently and in Darcy’s somewhat less than excellently.
Idris Elba makes a redoubtable Heimdall, Colm Feore radiates wicked intelligence through layers of blue laytex as the frost giant king, and Clark Gregg turns up again, this time showing the side of Agent Coulson that makes Coulson one of SHIELD’s top agents and Nick Fury’s go-to guy on the Avengers Project.
Iron Man. Besides Agent Coulson, virtually none, unless you count the terrorist leader Raza, who barely rises above a caricature, and the journalist, who’s basically eye candy and barely has anything to do beyond being bare or at least bare-bottomed for an instant.
This is one point where Iron Man 2 goes Iron Man one better. Clark Gregg returns as Coulson and he’s joined by Sam Rockwell as Tony Stark’s egomaniacal but desperately needy and insecure rival scientist and businessman, Gary Shandling as a posturing United States Senator who can’t help getting a kick out of Tony Stark even while despising him, and Scarlett Johansson whose presence as cat-suited eye-candy is part of her character’s arsenal of secret weapons. But this is also an aspect of Iron Man 2 that can’t be used to inform a discussion of Iron Man since none of the new characters’ plot lines are prefigured in the first movie.
Advantage: Thor.
There you have it. Oliver Mannion gives extra points to Thor for best use of special effects. Young Ken Mannion says Captain America has the best action scenes. I award extra points to Iron Man for best cameo appearance by Samuel L. Jackson.
Somewhere in all the above’s buried a review of Captain America so I don’t think I need to write a formal one, but time and mood will tell.
By virtue of having the best leading man and doing the best job of telling its origin story, Iron Man would get the nod as best of the movies in the series so far. But it is also the best written and the best directed and has the funniest jokes. It’s a good movie, all on its own. In writing this post I think I’ve persuaded myself that I liked Thor just a bit better than I liked Captain America. I know a lot of critics thought Thor was dull, and Captain America is definitely not dull. I had fun and as I said above so did the little kid inside me who was a big Captain America fan. And it left me really looking forward to The Avengers.
WARNING. DO NOT PLAY THIS CLIP IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN CAPTAIN AMERICA. MAJOR, MAJOR SPOILERS.
Thor is our feature for Family Movie Night, but that's not the main reason I'm reposting my review. Ken Levine, writer-producer-director of Cheers and MASH and other TV shows, has posted his review and it's eerie how closely his parallels mine, except that HE HATED THE MOVIE!
Since I liked Thor, I respectfully disagree with Ken, but I thought his review was funny. A bunch of his readers weren’t as amused.
Also, Facebook pal, college professor and chicken wings connoisseur Chris Galdieri found a post he figured I’d like, and he was right. Turns out that some things I thought should have been included in the movie were included in the movie---like Thor doing a little more to prove he’s learned his lesson and Loki being more mischievous. They got cut. But some of these deleted scenes are on the DVD.
Anywho…for your re-reading and chicken wing and pizza dining pleasure:
Chris Hemsworth as Thor prepares to bring the mighty while Tom Hiddleston as Loki practices his best trick of achieving a Linus Van Pelt level of sincerity in a scene from the new movie based on the Marvel Comics adventures of the Norse thunder god.
Not enough Loki making mischief. Not enough Don Blake doing good deeds---serving one plate of pancakes shouldn’t be enough to earn your way back into Asgard. And not enough Kat Dennings.
As the Norse trickster god Loki, the Mighty Thor’s not as mighty but a lot slipperier brother, Tom Hiddleston comes close to walking away with the movie. If he’d been given a little more to do, audiences might even have forgotten Anthony Hopkins was in it, never mind Natalie Portman. But I think director Kenneth Branagh and his team of screenwriters should have taken the risk. Compared to the first Iron Man, which so far is the best of the series of movies based on the Marvel Comics heroes who will eventually assemble together as The Avengers, Thor, the movie, is somewhat lacking in a sense of humor and a sense of fun. That’s in keeping with the spirit of the comic books when I was a kid. That’s no longer the case, I’ve been informed by current fans, especially since the addition of Thor’s merry band of swashbuckling sidekicks, the Warriors Three, who, happily, are in the movie, making merry, buckling their swashes, and providing some of the fun and humor. And I’d better be clear. Thor isn’t humorless or without fun. I just think there could have been more and Hiddleston and Loki represent an opportunity missed.
Branagh and company count too much on our knowing Loki’s role in the myths. We’re told Loki’s a trickster and we believe it because Hiddleston looks like he’s capable of all kinds of mischief, with his best trick his ability to look as sincere as Peanuts’ Linus about to tell us what Christmas is all about. I would have liked to hear him deliver a speech on the true meaning of Yule. But maybe the filmmakers were afraid a couple more witty speeches and a couple more scenes of Loki reaching into his bag of tricks for the sheer mischief of it and the movie would have had to have been re-titled Loki.
As I said, I think they should have risked it and I think they’d have gotten away with it, because, good as Hiddleston is, I don’t think he could have taken the movie away from its star, Chris Hemsworth.
Hemsworth handles the mighty-ing well, with the requisite amount of thundering and storming and hammer-throwing. What’s surprising is how well he handles the charming.
Charming? Thor? Definitely not in keeping with the spirit of the comics when I was a kid. But, again, my in-house experts inform me, things have changed. Still, a charming thunder god is a novelty to us old-timers.
We expect Thor to be a natural when it comes to battling frost giants and---after he’s lost his hammer and his divine powers---mixing it up with agents from S.H.I.E.L.D. We don’t expect him to be a natural at whipping up a batch of pancakes and graciously playing waiter to set of mortals who are pretty clear that they don’t believe he’s a god and think he’s a nutcase. We don’t expect him to understand and sympathize with a young scientist’s devotion to her vocation or share her enthusiasm for her theories or be able to follow her thinking and even help her solve some problems. We don’t expect him to be able to do the science and the math and have fun while he’s at it. And we don’t expect him to treat her middle-aged mentor with kindness and respect and to understand that the man’s irritation and resentment and suspicion are signs of his fatherly concern and affection or see him instinctively make an effort to draw some of the older scientist’s fatherly feelings towards himself.
Hemsworth handles all this, including the plate of pancakes, with intelligence and wit and infectious good-humor, and even when he’s not fighting he moves with an old-fashioned movie star’s grace. You can think Errol Flynn but you should and can also think Cary Grant, Clark Gable, and Gary Cooper as well. Hemsworth has more than a touch of the swashbuckler and acrobat and he’s got a bit of the roguish song and dance man in him and some cool cowboy to boot.
If you’ve read the comic books or seen the trailer, you know the set-up, but even if you don’t I’m not spoiling anything by telling you that through his “arrogance and stupidity" the vain and rash young thunder god nearly starts a war up in Asgard, the Norse gods’ home and the Vikings’ heaven. To punish him, Odin, Thor’s father and Asgard’s king, (Hopkins, pulling the same trick he pulled in The Mask of Zorro of coming across as cooler and deadlier than the movie’s actual young hero), strips Thor of his godhood (Basically, he takes away his superpowers.) and exiles him to earth where he will have to learn humility, self-restraint, and how to use his head and consult his heart before acting if he’s to earn his way back into heaven.
Thor’s time on earth include some of my favorite scenes in the movie, but I wish there’d been a little more done with them, not just for the fun of it, but because Thor seems to have too easy a time of it learning his lessons.
The movie suggests that Thor has the heart and the decency to adapt himself to his situation, that is, he knows how to be polite, he knows how to put people---and presumably gods, elves, and dwarfs too---at their ease. He’s been to Midgard (earth, to us non-ancient Scandinavian pagans) any number of times and it might have been fun and amusing to know when, where, and why. Whenever it was, it wasn’t recently, and wherever it was it wasn’t the United States. Thor likes humans and has insight into what makes us tick, but he isn’t well versed in the manners and mores of 21st Century America. He has a few things to learn about how to deal with the traffic---obey the lights and use the crosswalks---and the proper way to compliment the coffee at the local diner and ask for another mug---hint, you shouldn’t literally need another mug---and that pet stores aren’t stocked to equip banished Norse deities who need to ride heroically to the rescue at a moment’s notice---few pet stores sell giant eagles large enough to carry a six-foot seven inch thunder god.
But Thor needs to learn that a side of himself he takes for granted to the point of forgetting it’s there is actually his best side. That’s where Don Blake could have come in.
Old school fans of the comic will remember that Odin didn’t just make Thor human, he made him live as a human and as a particular human, a doctor named Don Blake. The movie makes an inside joke out of that. Time and plot constraints meant that the movie couldn’t delve deeply into that part of Thor’s origin story. But more could have been done with the Don Blake idea. It goes without saying that Thor is a great warrior, even without his hammer and superpowers, but in order to become a superhero and mankind’s protector, he needs to learn how to be protective.
Of course, Thor feels kindly and protective towards the young scientist. For one thing, she’s played by Natalie Portman and who wouldn’t feel kindly and protective towards Natalie Portman (besides Darren Aronofsky)? But she’s also the love interest. And it follows that Thor would feel kindly and protective towards her friends. What we should see is Thor feeling kindly and protective towards strangers.
It wouldn’t have taken much to show that, just a couple of scenes of Thor not just pretending he’s a doctor named Don Blake but actually having to act as if he is Doctor Don Blake. I don’t think they’d have needed to take it so far as to show Thor delivering a baby, but a we should get the idea that Thor has to spend some time as Don Blake doing good deeds and getting to like it, both doing the good deeds and being a decent human being.
What Thor finally does to win back his godhood is fairly convincing, on the mythological level. It would have had more of a pay off on the dramatic level if we’d seen him working towards redemption in a more human way so that his moment of truth, while a win for him as a god, is a loss for him as a man, and a loss for us too. As much as we want Thor back as Thor, we should miss having him around as Don Blake.
Ok, so not enough Loki making mischief, not enough Thor as Don Blake. Now about not enough Kat Dennings.
As Darcy Lewis, the young scientist’s less than helpful student assistant (Older scientist: “I thought you’re a science major.” Darcy, with an unspoken duh at the end: “Political science.”) Dennings is adorable and funny. She’s smart about not being smart. Darcy’s not a ditz, but she’s lazy. She’s paying attention with only half her mind. The rest is…elsewhere. Nowhere in particular, just otherwise engaged. The part of her that’s here would rather not be. Darcy’s a character it must have been tempting to go to for easy laughs, and I guess it’s good Branagh resisted. It’s probably better to have just not enough of her than just a little too much.
In her short interactions with Hemsworth, Thor treats Darcy with kindness and amusement and with the kind of adult respect she has to grow up a little more to actually deserve, and Dennings lets us see that really does need to grow up and that she might actually manage to do it…someday.
And she wears her glasses very well, in a way that makes you jealous of whoever’s going get to be the one who takes them off for her.
But the best thing she does is give Natalie Portman something to play off of.
Portman is the clear favorite to replace Julie Roberts as America’s movie sweetheart. But that puts her in danger of having happen to her what happened to Roberts. Roberts is a good actress whose fans and directors stopped expecting to act. They were happy if all she did was smile her way winsomely through a movie and too often that’s all she did. Portman does a lot of winsome smiling in Thor, most of it around Hemsworth. It’s around Denning that she gets to act.
As Jane Foster (originally Don Blake’s nurse in the comic books, an astrophysicist here), Portman stars as her first bone fide grown-up. Her doctor character in No Strings Attached is really some screenwriter’s wistful memory of the theater major he couldn’t get up the nerve to ask out back in college and her ballerina in Black Swan is most definitely a daughter. Jane is a fully-fledged, independent, self-reliant, competent adult. Portman doesn’t have to strain to pull this off or reach for any actor’s tricks to make us forget the manic pixie side of her. She can even smile winsomely whenever a winsome smile is called for. All she has to do is field whatever Dennings tosses at her and lob it back gently. As worked out together by Portman and Dennings, grown-ups are the people who teach the Darcys of the world how to be grown-ups, mainly by example, but also by expecting them to act like grown-ups while at the same time being quick to understand and forgive them when they don’t.
A grown-up, as Portman plays one, is kind and patient and protective towards those who aren’t yet as grown-up as she is, which makes Jane as good an example for Thor as she is for Darcy.
Thor is the fourth in the series of movies that will center around next year’s The Avengers. The other three are Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, and Iron Man 2. The fifth, Captain America: The First Avenger, comes out in July. As I said, Iron Man is the best so far and the best by a long shot. But Thor is a solid second. It’s intelligently and heartfeltingly directed by Branagh, who seems to have been inspired more by King Lear and his own film adaptation of Henry V than by the comic book or the myths. But he maintains a light touch and doesn’t try to oversell the high drama or the potentially tragic. Thor is a well-made and exciting action-adventure movie whose hero happens to have superpowers, and what makes it good is that Branagh never forgets that all the fighting and chasing and blowing things up, along with all the attendant special effects, are meant to serve the story, not the other way round. (I especially liked it that he gets the required embedded ad for the video game out of the way in the first twenty minutes instead of using it for the movie’s climactic battle, which is what happens in The Incredible Hulk and Iron Man II, turning the endings of both those movies into great big noisy messes.) Branagh keeps his focus, and ours, on his actors and their characters.
And he doesn’t just rely on the fine work of his leads. Branagh gives the whole of his attention to his talented and likable supporting cast too.
Stellan Skarsgard plays Jane’s mentor and surrogate father with the a nice mix of paternal indulgence and professional detachment. He’s affectionate without getting sentimental, irritable without losing sacrificing any of the affection. Ray Stevenson, Tadanobu Asano, and Josh Dallas as the Warriors Three, along with Jaime Alexander as the warrior goddess Sif (in the myths an enigma, in the comic books Thor’s lady love, here more of a spunky kid sister), make a formidable team, playing with and off each other nicely. Colm Feore sparkles icily with wicked intelligence through god knows how many layers of make-up and cgi as the king of the frost giants. And Idris Elba is suitably stentorian and immovable as Heimdall, the guardian of the Rainbow Bridge of Asgard where the booming heavens roar and we behold in breathless wonder…whoops. Sorry. Got carried away there.
Only Rene Russo, as Thor’s mother, the goddess Frigga, isn’t given much to do. So that’s one more thing there’s not enough of, Russo swinging her sword and slicing and dicing frost giants.
Special mention has to go to Clark Gregg in his third go-round as S.H.I.E.L.D Agent Coulson whose job here is the same as it was in the two Iron Man movies, which is to keep a spoiled brat superhero in line. Superheroes don’t impress Coulson. They’re amateurs. If it weren’t unprofessional, he’d let himself get irritated by their childish and selfish misbehavior. But he’s good at keeping his feelings under wraps and settles for talking to them with a stern patience as if after enough repetition it will sink in that they’ve all got some serious work to do and while showing off one’s superpowers is fun in the proper time and place, now isn’t that time and this isn’t the place.
Coulson gets of a good zinger at (an offscreen) Tony Stark/Iron Man’s expense that pretty much sums up Coulson’s feelings. In Iron Man 2, Gregg established that Coulson’s ideal superhero is Captain America, and it’s too bad Gregg wasn’t in The Incredible Hulk and can’t be in the Captain America movie, unless it’s as Coulson’s grandfather---it’s set during World War II---because Gregg is now the connection tying the first four movies to Captain America by being, essentially, Cap’s representative. Captain America is, after Spider-man, who is his own show anyway and so maybe shouldn’t count, the Marvel superhero. The point of the Avengers as a team is that it brings together Marvel’s most arrogant, self-centered, and go-it-alone heroes---Iron Man, Ant-Man, Thor, and, sometimes, the Hulk---to make them all better heroes and better people/gods/monsters by their having to follow Cap’s lead and example.
Which brings me to poor Chris Evans who’s playing Captain America in the series.
Evans was going to have a hard enough time holding his place on screen next Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man.
Now he’s not only got to deal with Downey, he’ll have Chris Hemsworth charismaticking all over the screen. If Evans can still make himself the star of The Avengers, as he should be if they’re doing the movies right, he’s mightier than Thor, more invincible than Iron Man, and more incredible than the Hulk.
Viewers’ advisory: As fans of the movies have learned, you need to stay all the way through the credits!
3D vs 2D and Mannion vs. Ebert: We saw Thor in 3D. We had no choice. I don’t like 3D. It gives me a headache and adds nothing to most movies. So I was going to recommend you see it in 2D if you can. But Roger Ebert saw it in 2D and he hated it! It’s like he saw a completely different movie. Weird.
Not exactly Bulfinch but handy all the same: MTV has posted a guide to all things Thor. Be warned. Major spoilers.
Also: Wev McEwan has a few choice things to say about certain people’s problem with the casting of Elba as Heimdall, and a few things to say that I should have said about Dennings and Portman’s scenes together, and she agrees that Branagh wasted Rene Russo in her Thor Thread.
Real life astrophysicist Adam Frank blogs about the convergence of myth and science in Thor in a post for NPR.
And, because I brought it up and I don’t want to be the only one with it stuck in my head---
I’ll be talking with Steve Kuusisto about blogging as a literary form at One this afternoon, March 7, in the University of Iowa’s English-Philosophy Building. I’m reposting this old post from my very first month of blogging and the one below, A whole passel of swoopers, because they touch on some of the points I hope I’ll get to make today. So, by way of an introduction to this afternoon’s event…
Longfellow had a blog.
Really.
Somewhat cut off from everyday German student life, Longfellow and [his pal Edward Deering] Prebble diverted themselves by producing their own four-page, quarto-sized, handwritten newspaper...Mildly ribald in tone and full of student jokes, it was intended not for their families but for a small circle of male Portland intimates. Longfellow did most of the writing and drew the many illustrations, and Preble added comments or filled in the blank spots...
...Much of the text---snippets from their reading in several languages, allusions to politics back home, odds and ends of student lore---has lost its bite, but illustrations reveal Longfellow's unsuspected gift for caricature.---From Longellow: A Rediscovered Life. Charles C. Calhoun.
Snippets from their reading. Allusions to politics. Odds and ends. Small circle of readers. Sounds like a blog to me.
Calhoun goes on to describe the tone of Longfellow and Preble's newpaper.
"The satire is coarse, the humor sophomoric, the anger real."
Yep. Definitely a blog.
The New York Times Magazine has a piece on the rise of The Blogs. I'm not going to link to it because everyone of the blogs I'm linking to below links to it. The focus of the piece is on liberal political blogs, which is what you'd expect from the Times. If the Times can find a way it will convert its Sports section to politics, the way it has its Books section. But the celebrification of left (sort of left, anyway) bloggers has right wing bloggers hopping mad, according to Jesse over at Pendagon.
These are people who think that Al Gore thinks he invented the Internet and that proves Gore is crazy who now think that they both invented the blogosphere and simultaneously destroyed the Death Star known as the old Liberal Media, blowing it up with Grand Moff Rather still aboard.
Darth Koppel escaped but they'll track him down and rescue him from the dark side in Episode VI.
(I suspect Berube of being an android constructed by a super-intelligent alien race who've sent him to earth to humiliate all Earthling academics, writers, and would-be satirists, as well as fathers who think they're doing a good job, and middle-aged weekend jocks, with his preternatural brilliance, energy, good humor, devotion, and hockey prowess. But my friend Steve Kuusisto has met the guy and says he appears to be human, just way smarter and more productive and energetic than the rest of us, which makes him even more insufferable.)
But my favorite response has been Matt Yglesias', naturally, because his opinion comes closest to my own.
...one good thing about the piece [sez Matt] is that it starts to bring out the extent to which there isn't much to say about blogs per se. It's a kind of technology that's used in wildly variant ways, as demonstrated by the enormous differences between Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo, and Wonkette. These sites are united, more or less, only in virtue of being produced by blogging software and by being popular. But we understand that a bestselling cookbook, a National Book Award winning novel, and Lies and The Lying Liars Who Tell Them don't have a great deal to do with each other all in virtue of being books.
The implicit by-the-by here is that blogs aren't anything but a content delivery system. That is, they're a way for people with a lot on their minds, and the arrogance to think that lots of other people want to hear it, to get the words out.
There's been a lot of breathlessness about the revolutionary nature of the internet, of the web, of personal webpages, of blogs.
(Or to put it the way it might appear on Typepad or Yahoo:
Internet>World Wide Web>Personal Web Page>Blog>Lance Mannion)
But little of the panting commentary takes into account that what we're talking about here is a lot of flashy new technology built around a component that's a result of a very old technology. There's a human being at every keyboard, doing what human beings have been doing from the beginning, buttonholing their neighbor and shouting into his ear, "Hey, pay attention to me when I'm talking!"
Longfellow and his friend's newspaper used the technology of the day to deliver content to their friends back home. Printing presses and packet boats and human beings working for the post office. I think what Ben Franklin and his brother were doing with their printing press was producing a blog. Poor Richard's Webpage. If the technology had been available in the 18th Century Hamilton and company would have produced the Federalist Blog. And St Paul was blogging to the Ephesians and the Colossians and the other ians.
In the beginning was the word.
And the word became pixels and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.
The delivery system is a million times faster and the interface a lot prettier, of course. But I'm not sure that blogs are all that more efficient than broadsheets. In fact, there are times, when I'm staring glumly at my traffic stats, when I think that I'd be better off printing these entries on my Inkjet, going downtown to stand on a busy street corner, and handing them out to everyone passing by. At least some of them might read them before throwing them away.
In Timequake, the book by Kurt Vonnegut I'm just finishing up reading, Vonnegut says there are two kinds of writers.
Swoopers and bashers.
He's a basher, he says.
"Swoopers write a story quickly," Vonnegut says, "higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn't work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they're done, they're done."
"Writers who are swoopers," he says, "find it wonderful that people are funny or tragic or whatever, worth reporting, without wondering why or how people are alive in the first place.
"Bashers, while ostensibly making sentence after sentence as efficient as possible, may actually be breaking down seeming doors and fences, cutting their way through seeming barbed-wire entanglements, under fire and in an atmosphere of mustard gas, in search of answers to the eternal questions: 'What in heck should we be doing? What in heck is really going on?'"
Vonnegut says that in his experience most bashers are men and most swoopers are women.
I like the words. They strike me as useful and apt. Vonnegut doesn't explain their etymology, but it sounds to me as though swoopers are writers who like to get things done in one fell swoop, while bashers spend their working days bashing their heads against imaginary brick walls trying to shake loose one decent thought or one perfect word.
But as catch-all categories they don't work for easy sorting of the writers of my acquaintance. For one thing, my swoopers and bashers don't divide along gender lines. For another, the bashers I have known and loved have seemed more intent on bashing their way toward an ideal of poetic beauty than on discovering the answers to any eternal questions.
Vonnegut, of course, has known more writers, and more great writers than I have. He can talk off-handedly about a casual conversation he had with his old cronies and colleagues Nelson Algren and Jose Donoso
I have known some talented writers, but I can't claim that any of them are in a league with Algren and Donoso.
Still.
My old crony and once-upon-a-time colleague Tom Bailey has recently published a very fine novel calledThe Grace That Keeps This World.
I would say Tom is a basher.
My friend Steve Kuusisto, the poet and memoirist, has a new collection of essays coming out this fall. It's called Eavesdropping. The cover photograph alone is going to sell a lot of copies.
Steve's a swooper.
On the other hand, because he's legally blind, Steve has to work very slowly, dictating his poems and essays to his computer, which gives him plenty of time to bash his head against imaginary brick walls.
Tom, however, is a human dynamo, and does everything at six times normal speed. I pity any brick walls he bashes up against, imaginary or solid. He must do a fair amount of swooping just because he can't put the brakes on quick enough to give himself time to bash.
As Vonnegut himself might say, and does say, often, in Timequake, whatever.
The point is that if Vonnegut hadn't told me what category he put himself into I'd have called him a swooper.
I've been a fan of Vonnegut's writing since I graduated from the Hardy Boys. Vonnegut, Mark Twain, and Allistair MacLean were my first grown-up writing heroes. Yes, Allistair MacLean. The Guns of Navarone Allistair MacLean. Come on. I was 14. So I've been reading Kurt Vonnegut since the dawn of time and I thought I knew my man.
Apparently not.
Timequake, though, however much bashing Vonnegut had been doing up until 1996 when he wrote it, strikes me very much as a swooper's book. It is written higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way, except that Vonnegut doesn't seem to have gone back over it quite as painstakingly as he might have. There's a lot in it that is just plain awful and doesn't work.
It's not been dull or felt like a waste of time to read, I have to give it that.
Vonnegut calls Timequake his farewell to writing novels. It's a strange confection, made up of pieces salvaged from what would have been his last novel if he could have forced himself to finish it, a book put out of its misery in mid-progress that Vonnegut refers to throughout Timequake as Timequake I, the pieces connected by snatches of autobiography, musings on contemporary events and art and culture, political opinionizings, brief sermons, jokes, summaries of imaginary stories by Vonnegut's alter-ego the imaginary science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, bits of literary criticism, reminiscences about writers and normal people he has known, random observations about life, the universe, and everything, and the occasional attempt to answer the eternal questions: What in heck should we be doing? What in heck is really going on?
Thinking about this the other day, after suffering another case of intellectual whiplash brought on by Vonnegut's suddenly dropping his pursuit of one idea and making a sharp turn around a corner in his brain to speed off after another new thought, I asked myself if I'd ever read anything so determinedly, maddeningly, and enjoyably higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum before.
And it hit me.
I read stuff like that every day. Online. They're called blogs.
Timequake is a blog.
A decade ago, back when even the pioneers of the wide-open cyberspaces hadn't heard the word---they called what they were doing e-journals or, simply, webpages---Vonnegut had come up with a blog that he had mistakenly written with a typewriter on paper instead of on a computer keyboard with bytes of code.
Yep, I decided, it's a blog.
I thought about this a little more.
Wait a minute.
It's my blog!
Some of you may have heard that Michael Berube has asked Amanda and I to fill in for him while he's on vacation. When Michael asked, I jumped at the chance. I've been looking for more opportunities to demonstrate to the world what a blockhead I can be. Plus I thought it would be fun to share blogging space with Amanda. It would be almost, kind of, sort of, well, not really at all like but let a guy have his dreams, can't you, going out drinking and dancing with her. This post is my hello to Michael's readers, and I've cross-posted it over at his place, which is why what follows is going to sound to you folks redundant and oddly addressed, as if I'm looking at you but not speaking to you, as if I'm talking to an invisible party guest standing just off to your left
In his going-away post last week, in which he announced his upcoming holiday from blogging and warned you that Amanda Marcotte and I would be taking over this space for the couple weeks he plans to be away re-charging his batteries, Michael wrote about the hostility some toilers in the traditional media feel toward blogs and bloggers. He speculated that their ill-will and spite are motivated by fear. They see bloggers doing what they do, faster and in many cases smarter than they do it, stealing their readers while subjecting them to a kind of criticism they've never had to face in their careers.
Michael listed some bloggers he thought could do, and in fact are doing, a better job of political writing than many of the celebrity pundits and journalists bobbing their heads on the Sunday morning talk shows and wasting ink and paper for the likes of the New York Times and Washington Post.
Graciously and too generously Michael put me on the list.
While it is true that I am smarter about politics than, say, Joe Klein or Richard Cohen, I am smarter the way I am smarter about baseball than some particularly boneheaded managers. But that doesn't mean the Yankees should put me in the dugout and let me run the team day in and day out.
But even if I was smart enough to write for the Times or the Post day in and day out, that wouldn't be what I'd want to do, and it isn't something I try to pretend I'm doing on my page.
One of the mistakes critics of blogs in the traditional media make is that they judge blogs as if they were all one type of thing, and that one thing is what they themselves do in print and on the tube.
Some bloggers are trying to be pundits and journalists, and doing an excellent job of it. Ezra Klein andJosh Marshall, to name two of the obvious and best examples.
But most of the bloggers I like and admire are doing something else, something more along the lines of what Vonnegut is up to in Timequake.
In A Scream Goes Through the House, Arnold Weinstein writes, "My view of art is quite at odds also with the electronic network that stamps our age, because the Internet culture, however capacious it might be, is also largely soulless and solipsistic---informational rathar than experiential---when contrastred with our engagement with art."
Weinstein, being a professor of literature, recommends literature, and the arts in general, as the antidote to the soullessness and solipsism of the Internet culture. But I think that the bloggers I read most often are the ones who use their blogs to write their way through the informational to the experiential, who try to turn what is impersonal and overwhelming in the constant wave of information that comes to us through our computer screens into something intimate, coherent, comphrehensible, human. It sounds too high-flying to call them artists. But it is accurate to call them writers.
Judged as strings of editorials and op-ed pieces, a great many blogs make absolutely no sense, and it's no wonder traditional media types are contemptuous. But judged as works in progress akin to what's happening in Timequake, it's easy to see what bloggers like Shakespeare Sister,Nancy Nall,Neddie Jingo, Amanda, The Heretik, and Michael are up to. They're writing.
Most bloggers are swoopers because they have to be. The demands of the space and time and their readers' limited opportunities for paying attention make them have to write short and write quick, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way, but without much chance to go back and take out what is just plain awful or doesn't work.
They all have to do some bashing along the way, though, because while it's wonderful how funny or tragic or whatever---worth reporting---the doings of our fellow human beings are, everybody has to ask from time to time, just what in heck is really going on. But some bloggers among the passel of us swoopers are more basher-like than others.
I'm kind of a swooper's swooper. This means that I tend to move from one subject to the next, higgledy-piggledy, etc. I don't often know what I'm going to post about when I sit down to write. I write a lot about politics, but I write as often, or more often, about movies or what I just watched on TV or what happened to me when I went to get a cup of coffee the other morning.
At any rate, I'm very grateful to Michael for asking me to sub for him, but I can't make you any promises about what you're going to find here from day to day.
I can warn you about a couple of things though.
I have a bad habit of multiple-part postings. In fact, I've already got a follow up to this one in mind, although I'll try to keep the meta-blogging down to a minimum.
And---and I know this is going to come as a big disappointment to a lot of you---there will be no hockey blogging.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
Thursday night. Pie and coffee at the Metro Diner after Monster Throwdown at Symphony Space. Good pie. Good cup of Joe. Couple in the booth behind mine having an intense discussion about the future of their relationship. Theme is that he better shape up if the relationship is going to have a future that extends beyond the arrival of their check.
She’s doing almost all the talking. Her voice is tight but low and level and I can’t pick up everything she says. Gist seems to be that he needs to learn to be more sensitive to her feelings when they are out in public. He did not treat her well at the movies tonight and managed to ruin the movie for her. She was enjoying it. He wasn’t. Not sure but it sounds as though he vented his dislike throughout and then made fun of her for liking it when they met some friends in the lobby afterwards.
Hard to say if anything is sinking in because he’s so quiet. Then she makes a tactical error. She tries to use a friend’s boyfriend’s bad behavior as an object lesson. This sends the conversation spinning off in the wrong direction because now he feels he can speak up. He has a funny story to tell her about that friend. Isn’t long before they’re laughing together. For the moment, they’ve moved on. Now the subject’s his hair. They both agree he needs a haircut. But Mr Sensitive has misread her mood. She’s still angry. Suddenly she says, still keeping her voice down but not as much---
There’s a strong Freudian thread running through the Donmar Warehouse production of Hamlet starring Jude Law now playing at the Broadhurst Theater in New York.
But not the expected one.
Law’s Hamlet isn’t working through any Oedipal conflicts and there are no repressed incestuous urges inspiring his verbal and physical assaults on his mother in the scene following his accidental murder of Polonius. Hamlet is driven by a general homicidal rage unleashed by the unfortunate old man’s death. When Hamlet crouches over his terrified mother it’s in the posture of a berserk warrior about to deliver the coup de grace to a fallen enemy whose identity doesn’t matter to him and who is interesting to him only as a target for his bloody-minded fury. All he says about his mother and his uncle is just ranting. He’s barely listening to himself. It’s only the arrival of his father’s ghost that snaps him out of it. Otherwise Gertrude would just have been the second victim of a mass murder that would have ended the play two acts early.
This is one angry Hamlet.
A murderous rage has been driving him since the ghost’s first appearance and it’s been growing but until he stabs Polonius it has expressed itself in…jokes.
Which is where Freud makes his entrance.
Hamlet is a witty young man, but Jude Law is the first actor I’ve seen who’s recognized that Hamlet’s preferred forms of humor are forms of hostility---sarcasm, insults and put-downs, and verbal practical jokes in which he takes what other characters say and turns their own words back on them to make them look foolish in the literary equivalent of pulling their chairs out from under them as they go to sit down.
This is is not the melancholy Dane of legend sighing through speeches in which he wishes for death and contemplates suicide. As Law plays him, his defining speeches aren’t the more famous “Too too solid flesh” and “To be or not to be” blank verse soliloquies but the short prose speech to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern:
What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
“Quintessence of dust” is a punchline. The speech is a NOT joke, as in People are amazing---NOT. Life is worth living---NOT. Your existence matters to me---NOT. Hamlet sets up his friends (and the audience) to expect a prettily worded and high-minded point and then slaps them in the face with his blunt cynicism.
Two themes from Freud cross at this point in Law’s performance. Freud famously elaborated on the connection between humor and anger and aggression. But he also defined depression as anger turned inward.
Law’s Hamlet isn’t melancholy but he is suffering from depression as Freud described it.
Hamlet arrives on stage in the second stage of grief. He’s angry at having lost his father, but he’s angrier at the fact that nobody else seems as angry about it as he is. The world is going on as if his father had never existed. The two people besides Hamlet himself who should be most devastated, his father’s wife and his father’s brother, have not just gotten over their loss in a hurry, but by getting married have pretty much written the old king out of their lives. Their former relationship went through him and was defined by their connection to him. Hamlet believes that that old relationship should continue exactly as it was even without the king there, which is the same as believing that time should have stopped with his father still alive. He wants the world to revolve around his father in death just as it did, or Hamlet thinks it did, in life. Gertrude and Claudius have decided that life belongs to the living and Hamlet is furious. His first speech is practically a temper tantrum.
Seems, madam! nay it is; I know not 'seems.' 'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, Nor customary suits of solemn black, Nor windy suspiration of forced breath, No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, Nor the dejected 'havior of the visage, Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief, That can denote me truly: these indeed seem, For they are actions that a man might play: But I have that within which passeth show; These but the trappings and the suits of woe.
There is a staggering amount of vanity in this speech. Hamlet is saying, Look at how cut-up I am! This is the way all of you should be. What’s wrong with you? a question that can always be rephrased as See how right I am!
Stripped of its poetry down to its bare meaning its an almost childish outburst, snippy, arrogant, and demanding of attention, pity, and admiration.
Basically, it’s something you’d expect out of a spoiled teenager who thinks he has all the answers adults are too stupid or corrupt to have figured out.
But that’s what Hamlet is.
Ignore all the references that place his age at around thirty. Those are there to explain why a middle-aged man is playing the part. Hamlet, as a character, makes the most sense, and earns and deserves our sympathy, only if he’s seen as being very young, nineteen or twenty at most.
(And after all he is a student at a time when young men went off to college at fourteen.)
Hamlet is at the borderline between adolescence and adulthood. He hasn’t worked out his place in the world yet, which means he hasn’t worked out an identity of his own yet either. He is still defined to himself by his place in his family and by his relationships to his father and mother, both of which have been obliterated by his father’s death, shattering his sense of self. Actually, he seems to have over-identified with his father to the point that he may have had no sense of himself at all except as his father’s son. And he can’t imagine that any one else has a sense of themselves apart from their relationship to the old man, which is why he can’t understand how his mother hasn’t vanished into her grief the way he’s vanished into his.
With his father gone, Hamlet is lost to himself. We don’t know if he could have overcome his grief and made his own place in the world, because the Ghost comes along and gives him a job to do, which is to go on being what he always was, the dutiful son, his father’s shadow and surrogate, with no ego of his own.
The Ghost really is rather selfish.
Hamlet’s assignment is essentially to remain trapped inside his grief, to give up any thought of coming to terms with it and moving on, to in fact end his own life as independent actor just as it’s beginning and take on the role of walking dead man.
Now Hamlet has a reason not just to be angry about his father but to be angry at his father.
I’m don’t know how much of this figured in Law’s thinking when he worked out his interpretation of the role, but it is the case that in the text Hamlet’s first real jokes come after he meets the Ghost and are directed at the Ghost and Law doesn’t deliver them with the comic affection he could have and what Hamlet is doing when the Ghost returns to interrupt is getting Horatio and Marcellus to swear that they will go along with his plan to put off acting on what the Ghost has told him.
Hamlet cracks wise to avoid saying flat out that he intends to disobey, at least to an extent and for a while, his father and not become the immediate tool of the dead king’s vengeance.
But such a good son can’t be angry at such a paragon of a father, can he? He can’t defy him.
Much has been written to discredit the old notion that Hamlet’s fatal flaw is his indecisiveness and I don’t need to rehash it here, except to note that once Hamlet decides to kill his uncle, all hell breaks loose. His “indecision” has kept him and everybody else alive. His “decisiveness” proves fatal.
But this Hamlet is damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t. He spends his (actually short) period of indecision stewing in conflicting angers. He is angry at the Ghost, suspecting it might really be a demon tempting him to commit murder, and he is angry at himself for doubting his father and disobeying him; he is angry at his mother for obvious reasons, and he is angry at himself for being angry at his mother. He can’t make a decision because whatever decision he makes might very well be wrong.
He is thwarted every which way and it frustrates the devil out of him and his frustration adds to his anger. Unable to act, he acts out. He makes jokes.
And this makes people think he’s crazy.
And that’s the---sorry about this one---the funny thing. Except for the spectacle he makes of himself in Ophelia’s bedroom, the main symptom of his “madness” is that he’s turned into a comedian.
A question actors and directors tackling Hamlet have to answer is just how real Hamlet’s madness is. One way to answer that is that in order to pretend to be mad Hamlet has to loosen his grip on reality and slowly or suddenly, depending on where you locate the point in the text, reality slips from his grasp. And that’s sort of the way Law and director Michael Grandage go.
Their Hamlet doesn’t go crazy, exactly. He’s driven nuts by everybody’s studied determination to ignore his madness.
No one laughs at his jokes. No one is provoked, except Ophelia, who knows when she is being made fun of and who is hurt by it. But she doesn’t actually acknowledge anything specific he says. She just knows he’s being mean to her and, in this production, she goes off to pout.
The adults respond to his “madness” with fixed smiles and banalities meant to calm him down. The more they humor him, the more determined Hamlet is to get a rise out of them. His clowning grows more desperate and antic. His jokes turn coarser, meaner, uglier.
And still nobody reacts. Not to his face, at any rate. Behind his back Claudius arranges to ship him off to England, at first just to get him out of the way because he’s become so annoying.
And by this point Law has let his Hamlet become that annoying, putting the audience on Claudius’ side at least when it comes to this decision.
(Claudius puts us back on Hamlet’s side by then deciding that hustling Hamlet out of the country isn’t enough and plotting to have him killed.)
Although Hamlet’s sarcasms, insults, put-downs, and other forms of verbal abuse are aimed at other characters, he turns out to be the only one who suffers any effects from his jokes. The others are protected by their conviction that he’s mad so they don’t have to take anything he says seriously.
But Hamlet keeps trying and he wears himself out in the process. After a while, it begins to seem as though Law’s beating himself up, with each wisecrack and bit of clowning rebounding on him like a blow and leaving him looking bruised and stunned. You’d think he was his own main target.
And you might be right.
Law doesn’t try to play Hamlet as a twenty year old, but he gives him an essential boyishness that explains the way both his joking and his scheming get out of control. He may not be a kid, but he is naive and inexperienced when it comes to things like murder, revenge, and making bargains with ghosts who may be demons. He’s had little experience in acting on his own, his life before the play apparently having been a relatively placid and conventional one, his career path set for him by traditions and duties he never questioned, let alone thought to rebel against.
Suddenly, here he is, a secret rebel against everything he once thought right and proper, plotting treason and murder.
He’s in undiscovered country for him and he gets lost immediately. And Law captures a sense of a little boy lost, desperately looking around for landmarks and other clues to the way out or at least forward, expecting help to arrive in the form of some grown up who can guide him, frightened to find himself alone and dependent on his own inadequate self, furious that he’s been put in this situation through no fault of his own, and furious at himself for not being able to rise to the moment.
If you’ve been following Doonesbury, you know that apprentice CIA “asset” Jeff Redfern, son of Rick Redfern and Joanie Caucus, hasn’t been having a good month.
Joanie: Jeff shot down a helicopter? All by himself? How terrifying for him to…to…The Taliban don’t have helicopters, do they?
Rick: The Taliban don’t have socks.
It was an accident. Could have happened to anyone, says Jeff. He was at a wedding in a village up in the mountains when the helicopter, carrying a USO troupe coming to entertain the troops in the area, appeared to the cheering of the crowd below. Jeff decided to celebrate in what he thought was traditional tribal fashion by firing his automatic rifle into the air and put a round through the helicopter’s gear box.
Rick: I cannot believe this kid! How could we have raised such a total screw-up?
Joanie: Well, at least he didn’t kill anybody.
Rick: Joanie, could you possibly set the bar any lower.
If you think Rick is a little harsh there in calling his own son a total screw-up you aren’t a regular reader of the strip.
It’s hard to tell how old the main characters are since Garry Trudeau himself doesn’t seem to know anymore. He’s been letting them all age but not in real time like Gasoline Alley. Joanie ought to be pushing 80 by now, but she appears to be only in her early to mid-60s. I think she was meant to be in her 40s when Jeff was born, which would make him be in his 20s now. He’s only a few years out of college. He dropped out but like his former roommate Zipper and the original Doonesbury gang he might have been on the 7 or 8 year plan so he could be in his late 20s. I take him to be about 22, 23.
Too old to be a kid. Young enough, though, to be excused for not being a full-fledged grown-up.
The history of domestic life is full of screw-up sons who continued to trouble and disappoint their parents well past the age when they should have developed some common sense, adult competence, and the ability to cross the street on their own without getting hit by a bus or causing accidents as cars brake and swerve to avoid them in their oblivious pursuit of some goal vital to their immediate satisfaction.
And there have been enough late bloomers among these hapless and foolish hobbledehoys that the type has been a staple of comedy since the Greeks.
In the usual plot arc these guys are saved from permanent irrelevance and adolescence by meeting the right girl. They snap to and grow up on the spot as soon as she says “Yes, I will marry you, Osgood!”
Which leads to another staple of comedy, the stodgy and grumpy and threatening (to young men) successful older man who turns out to have been a total screw-up or juvenile delinquent in his own salad days.
P.G. Wodehouse’s stories and novels are as crowded as the gallery at the stock exchange with this type of old man, like Sir Watkyn Basset and Sir Reginald Glossop, to name just two, who were as feckless, wild, thoughtless, blockheaded, carefree, and as nice and decent-hearted when they were as young as Bertie Wooster and his friends from the Drones Club are in the books’ present.
Jeff has become Doonesbury’s resident Drone.
But with this difference.
I don’t get the impression that Trudeau is as fond of Jeff or as forgiving towards him as Wodehouse was about Bertie and Bingo Little and Freddie Widgeon. Just the opposite.
Trudeau seems to me actively hostile to Jeff.
And I don’t think it’s the case that Trudeau is reacting to his own creation after the fact, as if mistaking Jeff for a real and autonomous human being; it feels as though he uses Jeff in order to work out his hostility towards a real and autonomous human being.
Could be I’m over-identifying.
I’m pretty sure that conversations like the one between Joanie and Rick took place nightly at the old Mannionville homestead when I was between the ages of 18 and 25 or so.
But Trudeau has done this before, grown apparently hostile towards a character and then brought that character back again and again for the sole purpose of being shown up as a jerk and a fool.
Trudeau didn’t treat Mark Slackmayer’s greedhead dad or even Richard Nixon with as little sympathy he does J.J.
Even before she ran off with Zeke, Duke’s useless and parasitical caretaker, J.J.’s role had become mainly to behave badly, mixing selfishness with self-delusion with self-righteousness in various combinations to make Mike’s life a regular adventure in humiliation.
At the beginning with J.J. it was the case that Trudeau was satirizing a type, the self-indulgent, self-involved minor artist who mistakes his or her adopting of the latest fads and trends for an independent artistic “vision.”
There came a point, though, when Trudeau’s attitude towards J.J. appeared to switch from satirical to judgmental, when J.J. seemed to do things she did because, well, she would.
J.J. was no longer a victim of a cultural foolishness she had bought into along with a lot of other types like herself. She was consciously and deliberately acting on impulses she had every reason to know would hurt both herself and Mike.
This is true to life in that there are people who realizing they have been accidentally hurtful and destructive double-down. They become even more hurtful and destructive in order to punish either themselves or the people that are mad at them for their past bad behavior who, they feel, should have either forgiven them or saved them.
I’ve believed for a very long time that Garry Trudeau has been doing something more than turning out a brilliant comic strip. He’s writing the satirical novel of our times, working more in the vein of Anthony Trollope in the Barsetshire and Palliser novels and The Way We Live Now and Anthony Powell in his Dance to the Music of Time than in the vein of…well…Garry Trudeau when he started out.
I’d have thrown Evelyn Waugh in there with Trollope and Powell except that Waugh is angrier and more judgmental and more of a prig towards his characters than either of them, even as Trollope and Powell seem more aware of the broader range of human frailty and folly. For Waugh, bad behavior is mainly defined as what other people do to offend people like him. For Trollope and Waugh, bad behavior is what we all do as a matter of course along with the good. And that is generally Trudeau’s opinion too.
J.J., then, was Trudeau’s most Waugh-like character.
And now I’m wondering if that contempt has been shifted towards Jeff.
Like a family curse.
Here’s the thing.
Jeff is J.J.’s half-brother.
Here’s another thing.
The two of them share a trait---a habit of letting grandiose dreams carry them away---with the character who is becoming the heroine of the strip.
J.J. and Jeff are Joanie’s children. Alex is her grand-daughter.
I have no way of knowing if Trudeau has been thinking anything about the question of nature versus nurture. None of the three seem to have inherited much from Joanie, but maybe there are things about Joanie’s selfish jerk of a first husband, Clint, we don’t know enough about. Clint raised J.J., but Jeff was raised by two of Trudeau’s favorite characters, Joanie and Rick, while Alex was raised by two other favorites, Mike and Kim.
But here is an example of the way the comic strip has become novelistic. In novels characters routinely double and shadow each other. (By the way, this often happens without their authors’ being consciously aware of it. Writers make a lot of choices because they feel right.) As J.J.’s daughter and Jeff’s niece Alex can be expected to share some family traits. She naturally resembles them in some way, just as she’s inherited her father’s nose.
But resemblances aren’t recapitulations. On Alex, that nose is cute. And it is a symbol of her inherent decency. Alex is a beautiful young woman but not because she is a traditional beauty. She’s beautiful because she is who she is.
And it’s the same with the character traits she’s inherited from J.J. Both mother and daughter have artistic temperaments and a tendency to dream big too fast. In her head Alex was accepting the Academy Award for her documentary on Lacey Davenport before she’d shot her first interview (and she was filming it on her cell phone without seeing any problems with that) and she sees her boyfriend Toggle as a rich and powerful force in the music industry even though his one professional gig so far has been as a substitute assistant sound engineer for series of GPS voice-overs.
But Alex has a practical side that Jeff lacks and J.J. only exhibits when her back’s to the wall. And she is far more self-aware and self-judgmental than either of them. She not only knows when she’s screwing up, she expects herself to screw up. Her dreams may be self-aggrandizing but her realistic opinion of herself is, if anything, too harsh and limiting. She is easily carried away but she is also a little too quick to pull herself back.
If Jeff and Alex are each other’s shadow, then it may be that Trudeau isn’t just beating up on Jeff for the sheer, mean pleasure of getting something out of his system.
He’s using Jeff’s goofiness to highlight what is good and endearing in Alex while allowing us to keep in mind that she, like all of us, can be frail and foolish in our ways.
I just hope that at some point soon we find out that when he was a young war correspondent in Vietnam Rick accidentally caused an air strike to be called in on B.D.’s platoon’s position.
In her review of the HBO miniseries, The Pacific, The New Yorker television critic Nancy Franklin says that in the collective imagination World War II was fought almost entirely in Europe. Americans seem to have practically forgotten the bloody island-hopping battles that the Marines and the Army fought to pave the way for the invasion of Japan, literally---pretty much the first thing we did after securing an island was build a landing strip for the bombers and cargo planes that would be taking off to bomb and then supply the next island. Unlike what happened in Europe, we didn’t arrive so much as liberators but as construction crews. Objectives were chosen on how useful they would be on the route from here to there. Which is why Peleliu was a horrific mistake, practically a war crime committed against our own troops. Nevermind that it was a victory. It was out of the way.
But Peleliu and the rest of the campaign in the Pacific Theatre, Franklin says,
…[have] essentially been reduced to two events and one iconic image: the attack on Pearl Harbor, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the photograph of marines raising the American flag on Mt. Suribachi, on Iwo Jima.
I’d add MacArthur returning to the Philippines, PT-109, and kamikazes.
I’m not sure how right Franklin is about the receding of the Pacific in our collective memories in relation to the War in Europe. Right now I’d say the collective memory isn’t very focused on any part of any past war because the collective conscious, and conscience, is dealing with the fact that at the present moment we are at war.
And the Pacific was her father’s war. He fought on Guadalcanal. Naturally the war in the Pacific can’t be as vivid in the imaginations of people without a personal connection. And for most Americans alive right now, the War, the whole War, in both theatres, is their grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s war. That’s a way of saying that for most people it belongs to ghosts.
What that means is that few people can feel the War with the intensity Franklin feels it. That doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t remember it.
But for the sake of argument, and for the sake of my having something to write about, I accept her point. Put average Americans on the spot and demand they come up with five things they know about World War II and the odds are that all five will be about Europe, unless one is Pearl Harbor or Hiroshima.
Franklin suggests some reasons for this, but before I get to them I want to suggest a big one, maybe the biggest one, and get it out of the way.
For most of the people you ask one of the five things on the list is going to be the Holocaust.
Over time, as battles and place names and the stories of heroes have grown hazier in the imagination and even been dropped from the history books, the systematic murder of 10 million people in Europe has come more and more to define World War II in our minds.
Compared to that, what happened in the Pacific, except for what we did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is going to seem as remote and routine an example of human folly as the Napoleonic Wars, of interest to historians and hobbyists but of no more importance than any other example of wholesale slaughter you can name.
That the camps were at the end of the roads so many of our troops in Europe were fighting their way down gives their battles a moral and psychological urgency that makes it easier---and maybe more comforting---to identify with those GIs than with the Marines in their apparently pointless hells on Okinawa, Tarawa, and Peleliu.
Back to Franklin. She thinks that the problem with remembering the Pacific began during the war itself, and it had a lot to do with Americans’ Eurocentric thinking and imagination:
It’s not that the war in the Pacific hadn’t been written about or depicted on film; “Guadalcanal Diary,” for example, a war correspondent’s account of the battle that began in August of 1942, was published in 1943, before the Japanese had even finished evacuating the island, and the movie version came out later that year. Still, Americans in the forties were more likely to look toward Europe when thinking about the war; it was what they knew and understood, because it was where most of them were from. They didn’t have to look at a map to know where France was. Guadalcanal was a different story. Virtually no one had heard of it before 1942, and even some of the military higher-ups had trouble pronouncing it at first.
In short, Europe was home or if not home then the next parish over, while those bloody, godforesaken, ugly little rockpiles in the Pacific might as well have been on another planet.
They couldn’t feel as real to us even when the telegram arrived with the news that a son or a brother or a husband had died on one of them.
But I think there’s more to it than that. (I’m sure Franklin does too but she had to get on with writing her review of The Pacific and I’ve got nothing else better to do at the moment.) The two theatres were covered in the news very differently because they were fought very differently according to their different strategic goals.
Some of the island battles went on for days and days, some went on for weeks, and a few lasted for months, but in between those battles there were long lulls in the fighting while we prepared for the attack on the next island. From what I’ve heard and read, boredom was the unifying factor among the troops stationed over there. The War in the Pacific could disappear from the hometown newspapers and the news reels for weeks at a time.
The fighting in Europe was constant from the day Patton landed on Sicily until a few days before he rolled into Berlin.
It should be noted that at the outset Americans had reason to be glad not to be reminded of what was happening in the Pacific. The war there began with a series of humiliating American defeats. At Pearl Harbor and in the Solomons and the Philippines. We started the war by almost losing it.
And four years later it wasn’t pleasant to think about how we ended it either.
Then there’s the fact that from 1942 through 1943 and on into 1944 the War in the Pacific was just that, in the Pacific. It was a naval war or at least the most important battles, the ones that actually decided the outcome, were naval battles…and air battles. Midway was fought and won by sailors and Navy pilots.
When looked at in that way, as a war between two great navies, the big bloody land battles on Tarawa, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa---the last two fought in the shadow of the the now inevitable victory in Europe, and in the shadow cast backwards from the future by the anticipated invasion of Japan, making them seem both like warm-ups and after-thoughts---were Naval operations.
This is why I’d say that although the first image of the war in the Pacific that ought to come to mind is of a terrified Marine trying to claw a foxhole out of volcanic rock it’s more likely to be of a kamikaze’s Zero shot down in the nick of time spinning into the ocean in the middle distance.
So the fighting in the Pacific was already being seen in long shot, when it was not being thought of as taking place off stage, while it was going on.
It would be no wonder then that hazy images and memories would begin to fade faster.
But people, as a people, “remember” themselves through the stories they tell each other and Americans tell their stories mainly with movies and television.
In the 1940s and 50s and into the early 60s Hollywood turned out a bunch of great war movies set in the Pacific. Sands of Iwo Jima. Halls of Montezuma. Heaven Knows Mr Allison. Run Silent, Run Deep.They Were Expendable.Mister Roberts, a war movie, by the way, in which the main enemy on screen is boredom. And, of course, From Here to Eternity, reinforcing Franklin’s point about the few specific things we remember about the war in the Pacific.
Something changed in the 60s though. War movies in general became less popular, and I’ll get to why in a bit, although I’m sure you know. The ones that did get made were mostly set in Europe.
And on television there were two popular series set in World War II. One was a serious and relatively realistic drama about soldiers fighting their way across France. The other was a comic fantasy about a gang of sailors scheming to make money and have a good time on their little island paradise in the South Pacific and sometimes interrupting their partying to put out to sea in their PT boat to sink a Japanese ship or two.
On Combat the enemy was almost always seen up close and often appeared as main characters in the story. On McHale’s Navy the enemy was largely invisible. The only Japanese who appeared as a featured character was a prisoner of war who was happy to be out of harm’s way and had become a willing and enthusiastic member of McHale’s gang of con artists.
What I think had happened was that as the Japanese became more and more our friends and allies it became harder and harder to remember they were ever our enemies. It became unpleasant to remember they were our enemies. Remembering the War in the Pacific requires remembering hating the Japanese.
It also requires remembering our guilt for what we did to end the War.
But in Europe we were never at war with our friends the Germans. Not in the same sense as we were at war with the Japanese. We were at war with the Nazis.
It is still easy, and kind of satisfying, to hate Nazis.
Which brings me to one last and defining difference between the War in Europe and the War in the Pacific.
Adolph Hitler.
There is too much to say about Hitler’s evil here, so I’ll settle for this for now. Hitler is simply a more fascinating character than Hirohito, Tojo, or any of the Japanese warlords and not just because of the immensity of his evil.
The war in Europe is the War Against Hitler and the War of the Holocaust and the war in the Pacific is, as I said, just another bloody war in comparison.
Now for my final thought.
Getting back to the stories we tell ourselves in the movies, in the 60s it became impossible to make a war movie that wasn’t in some way a commentary on the war that was being fought at the moment.
Set a war movie in the South Pacific, put your Marine heroes in the jungle up against an Asian enemy and, well, you didn’t have a movie about World War II.
And the same thing happens within our collective imagination. We can’t think of the one without immediately jumping to thinking of the other.
In between World War II and now the United States fought two wars on that far side of the world, both against Asian adversaries.
Korea is sometimes lamented by its veterans as the forgotten war.
There’s no danger that anytime soon we’re going to forget Vietnam.
______________
Correction: This post originally included an anecdote about how John Kennedy and his crew were on a mission to fight boredom when PT-109 was rammed and sunk. Regular reader RalphH wrote in to correct me. See his comment and follow this link to the Kennedy Library’s page on JFK’s wartime service and what happened to PT-109.
by Douglas Adams.
by J.R.R. Tolkien.
. is out in paperback. My 
than like Van Dyke’s My Lucky Life. Which, it almost goes without saying, means it would be funnier. But it also means that it would be a writer’s book and writers, because they can’t help themselves, tend to see everything as a story. A comedy writer, like Rob or Carl Reiner, will see it as a funny story.
as well as paperback from Amazon.
. Here’s a repost of my review from last June, A little book about the little books about the little houses on the prairie and other places.
.
, the one book without Laura, the one with a boy as its main character, was written for me. How’d I know? I just did. Somehow I knew about them and understood what they were when the TV series premiered and I knew that show was different and in a way lesser.
, who felt closest to my age in those books. I was eight or nine; I had knowingly conjured her up to talk with her in my head. I daydreamed that she’d shown up in the twentieth cenruty and I had to be her guide…
, indirectly inspired by her mother’s death from cancer. From there, McClure moves on to re-reading the whole series and then the books Wilder wrote that were not part of the series and the columns she wrote for a local newspaper and the books and short stories written by her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, who was for a time the famous author in the family, biographies, scholarly appreciations, a travel book called The Little House Guidebook---a guide to all the Ingalls family homesites, of which, if you only know The Little House on the Prairie through the TV show, you’ll be surprised to learn there are many, the Ingalls moved around a lot, usually to leave another bout of bad luck behind---which McClure gives the subtitle “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Driving Out to Remote Locations in the Upper Midwest to Find Your Childhood Imaginary Friend But Were Afraid to Ask,” and even 
. The next thing we know, McClure is buying a butter churn off eBay and churning her own butter in the kitchen of her apartment in Chicago and baking recipes from the cookbook. McClure is pleased to report that her Vanity Cakes didn’t turn out half-bad.
. The most direct way to connect to Laura Ingalls’ world is through her own writing, but if McClure had done that, if she’d stayed home and read her way through the series for us, The Wilder Life would have been a very different sort of book, a work of literary criticism instead of journalism. But, considering her continual frustration at not being able to find Laura in the museums at the vanished homesteads, it’s a bit surprising that she doesn’t take another tack and try to find Laura in the landscape that Ingalls wrote about with such passion and attention to detail.
are largely inside books.) Another, of course, is that it’s inside where the stuff that drew McClure into Laura World---the oil lamps and corncob dolls and strings of onions and Ma’s china shepherdess---the touchable things that could provide her with a physical connection to Laura herself were to be found inside.
as well.
by Howard Blum, is now out in paperback. Here’s my review, slightly revised, from May 2011:
and 
.
and 
alongside The Floor of Heaven. Blum’s book is a welcome addition to that section of my bookshelf. A rip-roaring tale of high adventure that happens to be true and highly entertaining as well.
this week. It’s our feature for Family Movie Night. Here’s my review from December.
at Amazon.
by Ben Ryder Howe, I half suspected that Howe’s favorite parts of his own book were the ones portraying him as dangerously incompetent to his family’s fledgling business.
), baseball (
), hockey (
), boxing (
), and golf (
). Later in his life he was mostly famous for being sort-of famous. This is the point at which My Korean Deli picks him up.
and to 
at Amazon.
. Here's my review from October.
and 
, where he plays second lead to the bookie Harry Arno) is an anomaly among Leonard’s heroes and something of an inside joke between Leonard and his fans as he’s been clearly roped in from one of Leonard’s westerns. More typical---and to my mind the best---of Elmore’s anti-heroes is Chili Palmer, the leg-breaker turned movie producer in 
.
at Amazon.
, the book by Kurt Vonnegut I'm just finishing up reading, Vonnegut says there are two kinds of writers.
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.
right now), I would have a new and stronger appreciation for her poetry.
than in the vein of…well…Garry Trudeau when he started out.
in there with Trollope and Powell except that Waugh is angrier and more judgmental and more of a prig towards his characters than either of them, even as Trollope and Powell seem more aware of the broader range of human frailty and folly. For Waugh, bad behavior is mainly defined as what other people do to offend people like him. For Trollope and Waugh, bad behavior is what we all do as a matter of course along with the good. And that is generally Trudeau’s opinion too.
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