Lance Mannion

The 124th New York State Volunteers

What’s a parade without Civil War re-enactors?

Members of the 124th New York State Volunteers muster for the town’s St Patrick’s Day Parade. Sunday. March 17, 2013.

Horses not wearing the green

Our town’s St Patrick’s Day Parade forms up on our street. 

Fortunately, no one thought to dye their coats green.

In front of the Mannion Homestead. Sunday, March 17, 2013.

Twice-Told Tales, received opinion, and the pernicious influence of The West Wing: Reality-based non thinking. Part Three.

Here’s Part Three. One more part to follow.  Part One is here.  Part Two here.

Backing up here to get a running start at catching up with where I left off at the end of Part One.

Generally, people don’t argue the facts. Or with the facts or to get at the facts. We don’t even argue ideas. We argue in favor or our opinions. We champion what we already believe, and it’s usually the case that we believe something because it confirms something else we need to believe, usually that “I’m right to think what I think and live as I live.”

Read a blogger or a pundit approvingly citing a “new study” and you’re probably reading a sentence that should have been written more honestly as “Here’s a study that proves everything I already know about how the world works is right, so there!”

Or to put it another way. We’re in the habit of believing what we need to believe in order to justify what we want to do.

But beyond that, an awful lot of what we know we know we don’t really know. There isn’t even anything there to know. It’s just something we think. It’s something we picked up somewhere and let stick in our heads, and we continue to think it only because we’ve never thought about it since we first thought it---we haven’t bothered to re-submit it to any tests against the facts---or because it’s convenient to think it. It’s as I just said. It confirms something else we know we know.

I just finished reading Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden--from 9/11 to Abbottabad by Peter Bergen. It’s a pretty good book, well-written, informative, factual, or at least I trust that it is factual. Bergen has a good reputation as a journalist. His previous books on al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden were well-received and, as far as I know, haven’t been shown up as bunk. And Manhunt tracks with other things I’ve read on the subject, including Mark Bowden’s The Finish: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden, which I read just before starting Manhunt.

So, I was reading along with interest, trusting I was getting the facts, enjoying the book as history, journalism, and an adventure story, when I ran headlong into this, Bergen’s explanation for why a Democratic President seemed as aggressive and determined about the use of force as only Republican Presidents are supposed to be:

Perhaps [President Obama’s] views on national security had to do with when he came of age. Obama was the first major American politician in decades whose views about national security weren’t deeply informed by what he did or didn’t do in Vietnam. Too young to have served in Vietnam as the senators John McCain and John Kerry did, he was also too young to have avoided service in Vietnam as Dick Cheney, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush had. For Obama, Vietnam was a nonissue, and it is possible this fact contributed to his greater use to his willingness to use military power in comparison to an older generation of Democrats. It took Clinton two years to intervene in Bosnia, which was on the verge of genocide, whereas it took Obama only a week or so to intervene in Libya in the spring of 2011, when dictator Moammar Gadhafi threatening large-scale massacres of his own population.

At first glance, this might come across as plausible but commonplace. After all, we know that not just liberals but the U.S. Military high command was traumatized by the war in Southeast Asia. “No More Vietnams” became not just a rallying cry for antiwar protesters. It became part of the basis of our foreign policy. It is, essentially, the Powell Doctrine.

But two things pulled me up short here.

A flash of memory and a longstanding prejudice.

Here’s the prejudice:  Any use of events or issues from the 1960s to explain anything, including events and issues from the 1960s, is pure shinola.

I’m not about to defend that.  I don’t recommend it.  I’m not apologizing for it either.  It’s just one of those things I think without thinking.  What matters is that it made me stop reading and start arguing.

What are you saying, Bergen?  Shadows of Vietnam were why it took Bill Clinton two years to send troops into Bosnia?

We know that, do we?

How do we know?

That’s when the memory kicked in.

Here’s what I remembered. The Bosnian Civil War began in 1991.

Bill Clinton inherited our policy in Bosnia from George Herbert Walker Bush.

And Bush’s policy was based on several factors, including that, unlike his son, the first President Bush wasn’t keen to wage one war on top of another---he didn’t want to commit U.S. troops and resources to another war so soon after the Gulf War--- but mainly on Bosnia’s being seen as a Europe’s problem and it’s being up to the Europeans to solve it. The Europeans were saying so themselves.  The UN was brought in, but NATO was to stay out of it, so that we’d stay out of it, so that the Russians would stay out of it. It wasn’t Vietnam that was weighing on people’s minds.  It was World War III.

That’s what I remember.  Not what I know. I know what Bill Clinton says decided his approach to Bosnia, because I looked it up in his autobiography:

My own options were constrained by the dug-in positions when I took office. For instance, I was reluctant to go along with Senator Dole in unilaterally lifting the arms embargo, for fear of weakening the United Nations (though we later did so in effect by declining to enforce it). I also didn’t want to divide the NATO alliance by unilaterally bombing Serb military positions, especially since there were European, but no American soldiers on the ground with the UN mission. And I didn’t want to send American troops there, putting them in harm’s way under a UN mandate I thought was bound to fail.

Sounds to me as though Clinton wanted to send in our troops right away and that what took two years was not his having to exorcise any ghosts of Vietnam that might have haunted him but his having to untangle the diplomatic knots created before he took office. Once that was taken care of and Bosnia became a NATO operation, we went right in.

What’s more, a few years later, when Kosovo was on the brink of genocide, the only thing that slowed Clinton’s decision to send our bombers into the air was resistance from the Republicans who controlled Congress.  By this point, all the GOP cared about was running Clinton out of town.

As for Vietnam being a nonissue for President Obama, that may or may not be so.  What is so is that his administration’s military strategy in Libya was modeled on Clinton’s success over Kosovo.

It’s a theme of Bowden’s The Finish, in which Bowden is generally admiring of the President’s decision-making in dealing with al Qaeda and going after bin Laden, that he’s been able to act more forcefully because he has more  and better forces at his command.  Vietnam has nothing to do with it, not because the President came of age that much later but because he became President after technological and tactical advances had improved the reliability and effectiveness of drones and special ops to the deadly degree they’ve now achieved. When President Clinton went after Osama bin Laden he had to throw cruise missiles at him and hope that bin Laden didn’t see them coming and was still in the general vicinity when they arrived.  President Obama had the option of sending a single, small drone that would have fired a pencil-sized missile to kill bin Laden.  He chose not to because there’d have then been no body left to prove to the world that we’d gotten him.  When President Carter ordered the attempt to rescue the hostages in Iran, the military practically had to invent the kind of commando unit that has since evolved into the Seals and Delta Force.  On the night Seal Team Six went into Abbottabad, about a dozen similar missions were underway in Afghanistan, Waziristan, and Yemen.

However the Vietnam War might have shaped their characters and thinking, the fact seems to be that both President Clinton’s and President Obama’s approaches to using military force were mainly based on the diplomatic and military exigencies of the specific moments when they had to make their decisions. 

My point isn’t that Bergen doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It’s that here it doesn’t appear he’s talking about what he knows. He’s writing about something he thinks and passing it along as if it’s something he knows.

It happens. And if it happens to someone like Bergen, a meticulous, diligent, professional journalist of long practice and experience, it could happen to anyone. It does happen to anyone.  It happens to anyone who writes and argues for a living.  Most political analysis, op-ed writing, and blogging is a matter of passing along thoughts as if they are facts.  It’s a hazard of the job.  The writing’s often done in a rush.  We have deadlines.  We have other commitments. We have colds, backaches, stomach bugs, ulcers, mosquito bites, the flu.  There isn’t time to check and re-check every little fact.  Maybe we do a quick google. Maybe we run down to the library or reach over to the bookshelf to pull down one book, scan the index, skim a chapter or two. Maybe we do the most unreliable thing of all and ask a colleague or a friend, “Hey, does this sound right to you?”  Mainly, though, we rely on our memories of stored facts.  And we pride ourselves on our memories. “I have a head for the facts,” we brag to ourselves.  “If it’s in here,” we say, mentally tapping our foreheads, “It’s in there for a reason.”  The reason being that smart guys and gals like us wouldn’t bother to remember it---wouldn’t bother to know it---if it wasn’t true.

To the consternation, chagrin, and infuriation of the Washington Press Corps, one of the goods the rise of blogging did was spread news that critics of political journalism had been trying to get across for decades---there’s a narrative. Journalists don’t go out and uncover stories as much as they go out and cover the story they’ve already told themselves over lunch or at parties or while passing time on the campaign bus. And that story is concocted out of a shared store of memories of past campaign narratives, skimmed articles and books, retold conversations with “reliable” sources, lessons drawn from high school and college history and political science classes twenty, thirty, and forty years in the past now, shopworn anecdotes, received opinions, badly digested polls, gossip, the plots of movies and television shows, alcohol-fueled flashes of insight, untested and unthought-through theorizations and sudden inspirations by people who haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in a week, facts everybody knows---a fact being something everybody on hand knows to be a fact without having to check it with Siri---the occasional, actual fact, and even some intelligent and original reporting uninfluenced by the narrative.

It doesn’t matter how smart, how skeptical, how diligent, how intellectually disciplined any individual reporters are. For almost all of them, including the best, their chief research tool is some explicit or implicit variation of the question, “Does this sound about right to you?”

Naturally, members of the press corps have not been happy to have had this pointed out. Naturally, many denizens of the blogosphere have been more than happy to do the pointing out.

But bloggers concoct their own narratives too and out of the same sort of gumbo of shared memories and “facts”.  (Don’t get me started on the influence of The West Wing on the the left side of the bandwidth’s understanding of how politics works.) We like to think we’re dealing in facts, that even when we’re just giving an opinion, we’ve got the facts to back us up. But, really, when it comes down to it, we’re just telling stories.  

This isn’t because we’re just as bad as the Beltway Insiders.  It’s because we’re just as human.

This is how human beings think.

People don’t naturally or easily think in carefully constructed debating points or in bar graphs or mathematical proofs.  We think in stories.  And when we debate, discuss, argue, or exchange ideas, we exchange stories, although sometimes we do it at the top of our lungs or through clenched teeth.

We may have facts to back ourselves up, numbers, math, science. But we don’t usually use them.  Instead, we tell stories about there being these facts.  We tell stories about how other people have gathered and interpreted them.  And these stories aren’t even stories we’ve created ourselves.  They’re stories we’ve been told, almost always by people who were told them by others who were told…you get the idea.

The personal narratives that make up out thinking are made up of twice-told tales and received opinions.

We didn’t think a lot of what we think we think.  We just heard it someplace.

Many people will read Manhunt and not even have that paragraph register.  It registered with me because of my prejudice.  But others will take it in without a second thought, because they already know it, know what I mean?  Others will read it and it will lodge in their brain because it tracks with something they know from somewhere else or because it confirms one of their prejudices.  And others will read it and nod and file it away in a mental drawer because, well, Peter Bergen put it in his book and he wouldn’t have put it in there if it wasn’t true, would he?

And at some point, somewhere, these facts will be passed along, in an op-ed, in another book, in a blog post, in an argument in a bar.  Bill Clinton was skittish about using force because of his draft dodging youth during the Vietnam War.  Barack Obama has no qualms about it because his cohort of late Baby Boomers was spared having to worry about the war.

Now here’s the thing.

I’m fairly certain that Bergen is passing along an opinion up in that paragraph. And I’m willing to bet it’s not his opinion.  I mean that it’s not original with him.  It’s something he heard somewhere. After all, it’s based on something I’ve heard somewhere.  We’ve all heard it.  Many times.   I’m not certain he doesn’t know that’s what he’s doing.  He opens with a seemingly cautionary “perhaps,” but that might be hedging. Still, he may have sources that back him up, interviews with President Clinton or President Obama or with people close to them who know to what degree Vietnam figured in their decisions.  I’m surprised he doesn’t list Clinton’s autobiography in his bibliography, but how smart am I to trust a politician to give a straight-forward, non-self-serving version of any event in his career?

I know, because he’s said it many times, that Clinton still feels guilty over his failure to intervene in Rwanda.  It could be that in describing how he handled Bosnia he’s implicitly excusing how he didn’t handle Rwanda.  He could be trying to polish his legacy by balancing off a failure with a success.  And if Vietnam did figure in his thinking as a drag on his willingness to use force, how certain is it he would know it?  Perhaps he was not conscious of it and still wasn’t when he sat down to write My Life.

And then that paragraph of Bergen’s seems to be contradicted by points Mark Bowden makes in The Finish, but, although, like I said, a reason I trust the overall factuality of Manhunt is that it tracks with the story as Bowden tells it in The Finish, a reason I trust what’s in The Finish is that I had the story confirmed by having immediately followed up reading it with Manhunt.

And another reason I trust what’s in The Finish is that I read and enjoyed and trusted other books by Bowden.  Black Hawk Down.  Killing Pablo.  The Best Game Ever.  And that last one I trusted because it expanded upon a story I already knew from a comic strip I read in Boy’s Life when I was around eight or nine.

So I don’t trust Bergen on this. But I can’t trust Clinton either.  And I probably shouldn’t trust Bowden as much as I do.  In short, I don’t know enough to know Bergen is wrong.  I only know enough to make think he might be.

It’s possible Bergen doesn’t know what he’s talking about.  But it’s even more possible that I don’t either.

Possible?

Probable.

But this is what marks me as a card-carrying member of the Reality-based Community and helps pay my dues.

A healthy dose of self-skepticism and a, I hope, cheerful willingness to be proven wrong.

End of Part Three.  Part Four on the way.  Yes, there’s going to be a Part Four. But that should be it.  I appreciate your putting up with this.  I’ve had a logjam of posts in my head and I need to write my through this to unjam it.

Assuming what we assume we know we know: Reality-based non-thinking. Part Two.

This is Part Two of Three Four.  Part One is here.  Moment of self-doubt here. Based on some of the comments on Part One, I feel like I have to point out that, although I’m being critical, skeptical, and a bit cynical, I am working my way towards a defense of the Reality-based Community.

Kevin Drum knows stuff.

Everybody who reads his blog knows this. Of course he knows stuff. And he thinks about stuff. He’s a smart and thoughtful guy.

Sometimes, though, he mixes up what he thinks with what he knows.

Happens to the best of us.

Happens to the rest of us.

Happens to the me of us more than I would like or like to admit.

Sheryl Sandberg has written a book.  Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead.  Sandberg is the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook. When Mark Zuckerberg says jump, Sandberg makes sure everybody jumps the right height and the right distance in the right direction and comes down on the right spot.  Among other things, her book offers advice to women on asserting themselves at the office.  The world needs more women in positions of influence and power, and Sandberg believes that if young women follow her example at least some of them will rise to those positions and from there they can help make the world jump to a better place.

At least, I think that’s what’s in her book.  I don’t know. I haven’t read it.  I have read a lot about it.  Mostly by women who didn’t like what Sandberg had to say in her book.  Or rather what they thought she had to say.  Most of them hadn’t read Lean In.  It hadn’t been released yet.

Boiled down, it seemed to me, their main objection was that, as far as they knew, Sandberg hadn’t written the sort of book they thought she should have written.

Other women came to Sandberg’s defense.  Sandberg had the right to write any sort of book she wanted, they said, not that they knew what sort of book she’d written either. They hadn’t read it for the same reason the first set of women hadn’t.  But they were pretty sure that whatever Sandberg had written, there was a message in it that needed to be taught and Sandberg was just the person to teach it.

What it came down to, though, was that both sides were made up of a lot of smart and thoughtful people who knew what was in a book they hadn’t read.

I noticed that the actual release of the book wasn’t followed by many blog posts, op-eds, or reviews in which writers on either side revised their initial judgments or stepped up to declare how right they’d been.

Probably this was because editors and producers decided the subject had been pretty well exhausted already.  No more page views in it.  No ratings increases.

But I knew better.

I knew that what had happened was that people in both groups realized that Lean In turned out to be what it always sounded like to me, another version of a sort of memoir a certain type of reader can’t get enough of, another How to be Me by a corporate careerist preaching a gospel of self-aggrandizement and self-enrichment through climbing the corporate ladder, this one being a little different in that the author appears to have more of a social conscience and more self-awareness than the usual perpetrators of these straight to the remainder table soporifics.

See, I knew what was in the book already too.

At any rate, as far as I know, Kevin Drum hasn’t presumed to know what’s in Lean In without having read it.

He does know something though.

He knows that CBS’ Norah O’Donnell wouldn’t have asked a man the same questions she asked Sandberg when she interviewed her on 60 Minutes this past Sunday.

This passage from tonight's 60 Minutes interview with [Sandberg] was striking:

Norah O'Donnell: You know, Sheryl, people are going to say, "Oh she's got a charmed life, She went to Harvard. She's a billionaire."

Sheryl Sandberg: Yep.

Norah O'Donnell: "And she's telling me what I should do?" Do they have a point?

Sheryl Sandberg: I'm not trying to say that everything I can do everyone can do. But I do believe that these messages are completely universal.

....Norah O'Donnell: And for those who say, "Easy for you to say?"

Sheryl Sandberg: It is easier for me to say this. And that's why I'm saying it.

Can you imagine anyone posing questions like these to Richard Branson or Jack Welch? Last I looked, they were pretty rich too, and they've also written bestselling books providing advice on business and life. Nobody ever asks them why they think they can offer advice to the masses from their lofty perches, but apparently it feels natural to ask Sandberg these questions just because her primary audience is other women…

Makes sense to me.  Except…

These are exactly the sort of questions guys who write the sort of book Sandberg appears to have written get asked.  They’re old standards.  The first question even the most gullible customer lining up at the wagon to buy the snake oil asks is How do I know this will work for me?

All those guys must have been asked variations of that question every time they sat down for an interview.

Of course I don’t know this.  I don’t have the transcripts handy and my memory doesn’t serve because, as I’m sure I’ve made clear, the subject bores me silly so any memory I have of those guys being interviewed is a memory of when for some reason or another I couldn’t change the channel.  Even so, my memory is pretty good, but it’s not so good I can remember every question asked and answered in every interview I caught in passing God knows how long ago.

And I’d bet it’s the same for Drum.

I doubt he has the transcripts handy either.  If he did any googling, he’d have probably put it in his post.  His memory may be way better than mine, but it’s probably not that good.  And, in fact, since he’s only human, whatever memory he does have of any of those interviews has probably been…emended…by the assumption that questions like that wouldn’t have been asked.

We’re very good at “remembering” what it’s convenient for us to remember.

Drum's post isn’t a statement of something he knows. It’s just something he thinks.

He has good reason to think it, based on things he and we do know.

We know women in the public eye are subjected to different standards.  We know they are patronized, that their opinions are trivialized and marginalized, we know they’re treated (and dismissed) as more emotional and reactive than men, as less logical, less practical, less intelligent.  We know that if they are young and attractive, like Sandberg, they’re sexualized and in that way demeaned and dismissed as unserious.  We know that women who resist this sexualization, either deliberately and consciously or because they just don’t fit the prevailing standards for sexy, are blamed and derided, insulted, mocked, and openly despised and attacked as if it’s their job and their responsibility to be young, pretty, charming, deferential, and willing to at least give the impression they’re open to, you know, the possibility.

We know women are discriminated against generally and more specifically on the job.  We know they are denied promotions, raises, and perks that their male coworkers receive as a matter of course.  We know they’re expected to defer to their bosses and take orders without complaint in a way the men around them aren’t and wouldn’t stand for.  We know they have their ideas stolen when they aren’t outright dismissed.  We know they’re harassed and we know that harassment isn’t about sex, it’s about asserting male dominance and often the goal is to drive them from the workplace.

We know all this happens.

And we know it happens not just in the business world but in areas that ought to be and routinely congratulate themselves on being more enlightened---academia, the sciences, the arts, the comic book and gaming communities, the liberal blogosphere.

But how do we know it?

We know because we’ve seen it happen.  The women among us have had it happen to them, time and time again.  The men among us have watched it happen.  Sometimes we’ve even made it happen or let it happen by not speaking up or by not even noticing.  All of us have read about it.  Heard about it.  There are studies!  I can’t point to any at the moment. I don’t have any copies handy.  I can’t remember any specifics.  But I’ve read them or at least read about them, so I know they’re there and I know what they show.

So we know!

And if it happens in that many other cases, then we can assume it’s happening in this one.

Probably.

Maybe.

It’s a good bet, at least.

Anyway, if it’s not happening here, it happens often enough that it might as well be, so I’m not really wrong if I talk about it as if it is happening even if I don’t know that it is.

Right?

Here’s the thing.

Much of what we know, we don’t know, we just believe. We accept it, usually without thought.

There may be lots of good reasons for believing it, but that doesn’t change what’s going on.  We’re treating an opinion as if it’s a self-evident fact.

We do this.  By we I mean people.  Our thinking is lazy and besides there are only so many hours in the day.  If we had to think everything through we’d never get out the door in the morning.  We have to make decisions based on what we know, even though we know that a lot of what we know we don’t really know.  We just assume.

And we have bad habits of mind.  We over-privilege our own experiences. We are all subject to confirmation bias.  We treat coincidence as causation.  (That last one’s the basis of all religion.)  We reflexively defend our egos and argue not about what’s happening but about what we want to happen or need to be happening to flatter our vanities and advance our self-interests.

And those of us who are politically minded have the really bad habit of applying our political beliefs as if they are scientific theories, proven beyond question and universally descriptive and prescriptive.

What Kevin Drum saw happening in that 60 Minutes interview with Sandberg might very well have been happening, but not in the way he thinks.  It might not have been in the questions themselves that the double-standard was being applied against Sandberg but in O’Donnell’s tone or in her attitude or in her eyes.  It might have been in a single, quick nod of the head or raising of an eyebrow or recrossing of a leg.  Drum might have seen right but assumed wrong.

His assumption being that he knew what was going on based on stuff he remembered and not on what he was seeing and hearing at the moment, privileging his base of knowledge over his own instincts, a common mistake among intellectuals and another form of temptation for members of the reality-based community.

We don’t just think that because we respect the facts we have the facts. We think that if we think something, believe something, know something it must be based on our stored knowledge of the facts.

It can’t be based on something so fleeting as a casual observation or---ha!---a momentary impression.

Can it?

End of Part Two.  Don’t worry I’m getting there.  Part Three is on the way.

Photo courtesy of CBS. Here’s the transcript and a link to the video from the 60 Minutes interview with Sandberg.

Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg, published by Knopf, is available from Amazon in hardback and for kindle.

I don’t know nuthin about nuthin

Washington Crossing the Delaware by Larry Rivers (1953). Courtesy the Museum of Modern Art, New York City.

Every day I learn I don’t know anything even when I’m in the middle of learning something new.

Yesterday I learned about the painter Larry Rivers.

Now I feel like I know too much about him.

But I didn’t learn about him only from that Vanity Fair article.  I was reading Robert Sullivan’s My American Revolution, an enjoyable, John McPhee style exploration of the landscapes of New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania where the main action of the War for Independence was concentrated. Sullivan looks at what’s there now, tells about what was there then, and chronicles what happened in between.  For the chapter I read last night, he visited the spot on the Delaware River where Washington and his troops pushed off from to begin their assault on Trenton.  Sullivan writes about the copy of Emanuel Leutze’s iconic painting of Washington Crossing the Delaware displayed in the museum there and about the yearly re-enactment of the crossing and in between he writes about Rivers and his painting Washington Crossing the Delaware, which I’d never seen or even heard of.

So I googled.

Googling turned up the Vanity Fair article.

But it also turned up this.

So I read this:

Now that our hero has come back to us
in his white pants and we know his nose
trembling like a flag under fire,
we see the calm cold river is supporting
our forces, the beautiful history.

To be more revolutionary than a nun
is our desire, to be secular and intimate
as, when sighting a redcoat, you smile
and pull the trigger. Anxieties
and animosities, flaming and feeding

on theoretical considerations and
the jealous spiritualities of the abstract
the robot? they're smoke, billows above
the physical event. They have burned up.
See how free we are! as a nation of persons.

Dear father of our country, so alive
you must have lied incessantly to be
immediate, here are your bones crossed
on my breast like a rusty flintlock,
a pirate's flag, bravely specific

and ever so light in the misty glare
of a crossing by water in winter to a shore
other than that the bridge reaches for.
Don't shoot until, the white of freedom glinting
on your gun barrel, you see the general fear.

And that was the second poem by Frank O’Hara I read yesterday. I read the first much earlier in the day, while noodling about the internet, reading stuff that had nothing to do with Larry Rivers, George Washington, or even Frank O’Hara.

The first O’Hara poem was also about painting.

It’s called “Why I Am Not a Painter.”

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES

Frank O’Hara I did know about.

But I didn’t recall having read either of those poems.

And I didn’t know he was considered a brilliant art critic or that he worked at the Museum of Modern Art or that he was friends with Larry Rivers (which, how could I, since I didn’t know Larry Rivers was there to be friends with).

So I learned a lot of stuff yesterday.

About Larry Rivers. About Frank O’Hara. About George Washington. About the American Revolution. About the New York School. About hanging out at the Cedar Tavern in the 1950s and about how drinking there was different from drinking at the White Horse Tavern.

Mostly, though, like I said, that I don’t know anything.

The facts we know we know aren’t all the facts there are to know. Sometimes they’re not even facts: Reality-based non-thinking, Part One.

On my last post, Silent Cal and That Old-time Republican Religion, I led off with:

Right Wingers are in the habit of believing whatever they need to believe to justify whatever it is they want to do.

The left is hardly immune from this.

Among the temptations besetting us members of the Reality-based Community is the temptation to believe that because we respect the facts we have got those facts.

And we do. Some of them, some of us, some of the time.  But we need to remember that along with the facts we have got other things.

Biases.

Preconceptions.

Prejudices.  Vanities. Bad memories.

Hopes. Dreams. Illusions. Passions and desires.

All these things get in the way of our seeing the world for what it really is and tend to lead us into believing it’s what we wish it to be.  They lead us into ignoring the facts we have or that there are there for us to obtain.  They lead us into selectively choosing facts to support our version of reality.  They lead us into misinterpreting and even misrepresenting facts.  They lead us into thinking that things that aren’t facts are. 

You remember how in the last few weeks before the election half the Village Press Corps went to war against the New York Times’ Nate Silver because he had the geeky arrogance to insist that the numbers---the facts on hand---tended to show that what was happening in the world at large was very different than what was going on in the world as journalists and pundits were describing it to themselves and each other at the backs of the campaign busses and around the lunch tables of their favorite DC watering holes.  Liberals and Democrats all along the left coast of Blogtopia [Editor’s note: credit as always to skippy] rallied around Silver.  But it didn’t require much cynicism to see that many of Silver’s stalwarts were only on his side because in his version of the world the President was on his way to winning re-election.  They trusted Silver’s math because it proved what they wanted it to prove not because they’d tested it themselves and found it worked.  Most of them couldn’t have begun to do the math themselves.

They didn’t have the facts.

They had faith.

I should say we, because I’m talking about myself as well.

We know math works, but that doesn’t mean we know how to do it ourselves.  We have faith, though, that people like Silver who do it for a living know what they’re doing.  When they show us their results, we trust that they didn’t forget to carry a 1 or misplace a decimal point and we trust that if they did goof up other people who can do the math will pipe right up to correct the error.

Something else we have. Trust.

We trust in the experts or at least trust that there is such a thing as expertise.  We trust the professionals. We trust the scientists, mathematicians, historians, doctors, and engineers.

We have favorites. Favorite writers, favorite teachers, favorite journalists, pundits, analysts, and bloggers.

We trust that they are smart and know what they’re talking about because we trust ourselves to recognize smart people to trust.

We assume that their opinions are based on facts and their interpretation of those faces is correct, and then we take a perilous leap.

We accept their interpretations and opinions as facts.

We have friends.  Smart friends. They wouldn’t be our friends if they weren’t smart, right? So we trust that when they tell us about something they know, it has a basis in fact. We have relatives and coworkers, and some of them are smart and we trust what they tell us and some of them are idiots and we know to distrust everything they try to tell us, even when all they’re telling us is the time of day.

Our intellectual relationship with reality is filtered and buffered.  Our knowledge of the facts is often, at best, second-hand, more often third, fourth, and fifth-hand.

Generally, people don’t argue the facts.  Or with the facts or to get at the facts.  We don’t even argue ideas.  We argue in favor or our opinions. We champion what we already believe, and it’s usually the case that we believe something because it confirms something else we need to believe, usually that “I’m right to think what I think and live as I live.”

Read a blogger or a pundit approvingly citing a “new study” and you’re probably reading a sentence that should have been written more honestly as “Here’s a study that proves everything I already know about how the world works, so there!”

Or to put it another way. We’re in the habit of believing what we need to believe in order to justify what we want to do.

But beyond that, an awful lot of what we know we know we don’t really know.  There isn’t even anything there to know.  It’s just something we think. It’s something we picked up somewhere and let stick in our heads, and we continue to think it only because we haven’t thought about it since we first thought it---we’ve never bothered to re-submit it to any tests against the facts---or because it’s convenient to think it.  It’s as I just said. It confirms something else we know we know.

I just finished reading Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden--from 9/11 to Abbottabad by Peter Bergen.  It’s a pretty good book, well-written, informative, factual, or at least I trust that it is factual.  Bergen has a good reputation as a journalist.  His previous books on al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden were well-received and, as far as I know, haven’t been shown up as bunk. And Manhunt tracks with other things I’ve read on the subject, including Mark Bowden’s The Finish: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden, which I read just before starting Manhunt.

So, I was reading along with interest, trusting I was getting the facts, enjoying the book as history, journalism, and an adventure story, when I ran headlong into this, Bergen’s explanation for why a Democratic President seemed as aggressive and determined about the use of force as only Republican Presidents are supposed to be:

Perhaps [President Obama’s] views on national security had to do with when he came of age. Obama was the first major American politician in decades whose views about national security weren’t deeply informed by what he did or didn’t do in Vietnam.  Too young to have served in Vietnam as the senators John McCain and John Kerry did, he was also too young to have avoided service in Vietnam as Dick Cheney, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush had.  For Obama, Vietnam was a nonissue, and it is possible this fact contributed to his greater use to his willingness to use military power in comparison to an older generation of Democrats.  It took Clinton two years to intervene in Bosnia, which was on the verge of genocide, whereas it took Obama only a week or so to intervene in Libya in the spring of 2011, when dictator Moammar Gadhafi threatening large-scale massacres of his own population.

Two things pulled me up short here.

A flash of memory and a longstanding prejudice.

End of Part One. Part Two is here.

Saint Silent Cal and that Old-time Republican Religion

Revised and updated. Tuesday morning, March 5, 2013.

Calvin Coolidge, 30th President of the United States, looking as though he’s on the verge of doing something he’s not remembered for doing much of while in office, smiling. Photo of Coolidge with four men of the Osage nation after the signing of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 courtesy of Wikipedia.

Right Wingers are in the habit of believing whatever they need to believe to justify whatever it is they want to do.

You don’t need me to tell you this, but this is why their attitudes towards science, medicine, history, economics, military and foreign policy, religion, politics, and, well, just about everything, are…flexible.

They are convinced that the world as they see it inside their heads matches the world as it exists everywhere else, including inside other people’s heads, and if they think it, it must be so.

When we liberals flatter ourselves that we belong to the reality-based community, we aren’t claiming---or we shouldn’t all be claiming---that we base our thinking on facts and facts alone and that we have those facts at our fingertips and can explain global warming or qualitative easement or the evolution of the constitutional debates over the Second Amendment or whatever off the tops of our eggheads. Truth is, most of us don’t know the facts and we can’t do the math ourselves. But we accept that the facts are out there, that the math does work, and the world as it exists inside our heads and the world as it actually is can be very different worlds indeed. Reality as we conceive it to be, wish it would be, and are maybe even striving to make it be is not necessarily as the facts show it to be. What it comes down to is that we work from the assumption that there are a lot of people who are smarter than we are, who can do the math and have a better grasp of what’s really going on because their job and their vocation is to study the world as it really is and we’d better take their research into account when we’re trying to figure out how to order and run the country, from deciding what and how to teach our children in school to dealing with a slumping economy to confronting global climate change.

But Right Wing Republicanism, which is basically the only brand of Republicanism left, has become like a religion and it takes its cues from the Fundamentalist brand of religion practiced by most of its base. Right Wing Christians believe in a purely personal relationship with Jesus and Right Wing Republicans believe in a purely personal relationship with reality.

Not surprisingly the two often amount to the same thing.

Things are as I believe them to be because Jesus tells me so.

Trouble arises when reality and belief collide. When this happens to liberals, we (most of us), adjust our thinking to accord with reality. Or we try, at any rate. Right Wingers adjust reality.

Considering how much Right Wingers believe that directly contradicts reality as revealed by the known facts as opposed to what is revealed to them by the God inside their heads, they have to adjust constantly. Must get exhausting. There must be times when they feel too tired to manage any more denial, dark nights of the conservative soul when they are tempted to give in and say, You know, up may really be up and down may really be down, the sky is blue, and the earth probably does go around the sun.  No wonder so many of them rely on their media outlets---FoxNews, Rush and other blabbermouths of hate speech radio---and their preachers to pat them on the heads and reassure them that it’s all right, there is no reality but that which they choose to believe in on any given day.

Believe it or not, though, and I’m sure there are facts and figures and the math to back this up, there are Right Wingers who aren’t content to be ditto-heads. They have enough residual respect for education that they accept that facts do matter and that those facts are more likely to be found in books than in the spoutings and shoutings of TV and radio personalities or they are at least aware that other people are impressed when you can tell them “I read this in a book…” So they buy and read books.

Lots and lots of books. Only the biggest blockheads among them are satisfied quoting chapter and verse from Atlas Shrugged. Problem is, despite their good intentions and intellectual pretensions, they’re still Right Wingers in the habit of believing whatever they need to believe in order to justify whatever they want to do, and if you just go wandering off into a library or a Barnes and Noble and willy-nilly start plucking books off the shelves because you like the cover or are intrigued by the title or have heard of the author or, God forbid, read a review in the New York Times, and are otherwise careless or reckless in your reading, odds are at some point you’re going to read something suggesting the reality you need to believe in isn’t reality at all and that might cause you to wonder if what you want to do, which you’ve justified by the exigencies of your alternative reality, may not be a wise or a productive or a moral thing to do.

So, the elders and inquisitors of the church have sanctioned an industry devoted to publishing books that detail and describe alternative realities. The most obvious, and most obviously aimed at the simple-minded, are the ones pushing an alternative political reality in which liberals are doing what Right Wingers are doing in this reality. But there are alternative economics. Alternative science. Alternative religion---somebody needs to show that when Jesus said those things about selling everything to follow him and storing up treasures on earth and rich men and needles’ eyes he meant “Make your bundle fast and let me tell you how!” and when he said suffer the little children to come unto him he meant our children, everybody else’s children can just go suff!

And then there are the alternative histories.

This one is very important since one of the biggest embarrassments conservatives face is that they have been on the wrong side of American history since the Mayflower dropped anchor. How comforting to know that there is another version of American history in which that is not how things went.

One of the popular Right Wing alternative historians is Amity Shlaes, who is not by training, trade, or calling an historian at all. She’s a diligent and dedicated propagandist. Her signature work to date is The Forgotten Man, a “history” of the Depression that proves the New Deal didn’t work by treating the New Deal as a coherent program designed from the get-go to end the Depression, which Shlaes reduces to simply a problem of massive underemployment and depressed stock prices, in short order, and since the Depression hadn’t ended by the conclusion of FDR’s first term and in fact (and here Shlaes resorts to actual facts, although very carefully cherry-picked ones) unemployment went up in 1938 and stocks stubbornly refused to rise to their pre-Crash highs, the New Deal failed. [Editor’s note: See update below.]

Just for the record, the New Deal wasn’t a program designed to reduce unemployment. It was a whole bunch of experiments and ad hoc and catch-as-catch-can measures put together in haste in order to save the country from complete economic and political collapse. The New Deal became more programmatic as time went on as it was seen what worked and what didn’t and why, but that took until most of the way through FDR’s second term, which brings us to this.

When some conservative tries to tell you the New Deal didn’t end the Depression, World War II did, point out that our war effort was the ultimate New Deal project, run by New Dealers guided by what they had learned from putting the New Deal together and getting it working over the past decade.

But back to Shlaes.

As I mentioned, Right Wing Republicanism has become like a religion, and you can’t have a church without a communion of saints. Ronald Reagan is the rock upon which they’ve built their church, but he’s looking a little lonely in his shrines, not least because the facts of this reality are catching up to his reputation. More saints and martyrs to the cause are needed to distract the skeptical and give doubters reassurance that there’s more to the faith than Reagan-worship. To this end, Shlaes has now moved from writing alternative history to hagiography.

She has just published a biography promoting the canonization of Calvin Coolidge.

Turns out the President usually thought of as the dullest, coldest, least interesting man to hold the office in the 20^th Century was a political genius. His genius being in knowing how to keep the government out of the way of rich men out to make a buck.

Throughout the past Presidential campaign, I harped on my reason for fearing and loathing Mitt Romney more than I’d feared or loathed any other Republican who ran for President in my lifetime. Romney, I wrote again and again, was the first person to run for President who believed that the whole purpose of life was the accumulation of wealth. He saw and valued people solely as economic units, including himself, and judged them by how much they contributed to the accumulation of wealth. As far as he was concerned, people were owners or they were employees and from the point of view of the owners employees are either resources to be exploited or costs to be controlled, either things or abstractions, but no matter which still entries on a spreadsheet that must show a profit’s being made.

People, seen like that, are a problem. Not a nice notion on its own but antithetical to a democratic society. Mitt, I meant to imply, as I railed, ranted, and raved, was the first Presidential candidate who was running against democracy.

Maybe I should have given more thought to Silent Cal.

In the reality I grew up in, Coolidge was a minor figure, an accidental President defined by who he was not, the Presidents on either side of him on the classroom walls, Harding and Hoover, famous for doing nothing that made other Presidents great, posing in cowboy hats and Indian war bonnets without cracking a grin, counting the days until he was out of office, assiduously paying no attention as the Roaring 20s roared their way towards Black Tuesday.  The great restraint Shlaes presents as his cardinal virtue I understood as a form of moral turpitude. He couldn’t be bothered to care.

But it’s Shlaes’ mission to make us take to our hearts the budget-cutting, tax-cutting, deregulating Coolidge, this embodiment of austerity in all its meanings and applications, this skinflint, this cheap-tipper, this money-obsessed, frigid fogey about whom it can easily be surmised that when he pissed he pissed congealed ice, as a saint and a hero and a political role-model for our time.

Reviewing Shlaes’ book in the New York Times, Jacob Heilbrunn, author of They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons, cautions not to be dismissive of Coolidge himself, whom he calls “a more astute politician than the easy scorn of his contemporaries suggested”. But Helibrunn sums up Shlaes overall thesis as “flapdoodle.”

What makes Coolidge a fascinating character, however, aren’t his bromidic phrases and vapid homilies, designed to reassure a public unsettled by rapid social and economic change; or his loyalty to his vivacious wife, Grace; or his taciturnity or any of his other personal qualities. Rather, it is that he represented the right’s first sweeping counterrevolution against liberal Republicans in a battle that continues down to the present. What Shlaes’s biography underscores is the fantastic tenacity with which the party still adheres to the ossified pre-New-Deal-era economic doctrines enunciated by Silent Cal…

No, Coolidge was not single-handedly culpable for the economic calamity of the 1930s. But neither can he be safely extracted from the ruin that followed his presidency. Quite the contrary. Coolidge was the pre-­eminent cheerleader for the economic nostrums that led to the crash. His opposition to regulation allowed Wall Street and the banks to engage in rampant speculation and insider trading, practices that were not curbed until Joseph Kennedy was appointed head of the new Securities and Exchange Commission by Franklin Roose­velt to ban the very practices he himself had employed. So deep was Coolidge’s antipathy to any form of government action that he even viewed his gifted secretary of commerce and successor Herbert Hoover with a measure of contempt, calling him the “wonder boy” because he fell into the progressive Republican camp.

Another by the way here.  Now they don’t like Hoover either and not because of his failure to deal swiftly with the Depression.  Back in the 80s there was an attempt by conservative historians---and back then there were some conservative historians. Conservative scientists too.---to rehabilitate Hoover’s reputation.  But that attempt turned up the fact that, despite his stubborn resistance to act progressively as President when faced with the Depression, mostly because he couldn’t bring himself to imagine just how bad things were and how much worse they were getting, over the course of a long and successful career in business and public service he showed himself to be more of a progressive than a good church-sanctified Republican is allowed to be.  So he’s been excommunicated for the same sins as Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower, thinking that government might be an effective tool for making people’s lives better.

Back to Heilbrunn, Coolidge, and Shlaes. Heilbrunn concludes his review of Shlaes hagiography with this:

With yet another tribute about to appear — “Why Coolidge Matters,” by the former Claremont Institute fellow Charles C. Johnson, will be published in March — Coolidge will surely continue to enjoy a comeback on the right. Yet his actual record shows that he was an extraordinarily blinkered and foolish and complacent leader, no less than George W. Bush before the stock market plummeted in 2008. The bogus nostrums that Coolidge touted have directly led either to enormous deficits during the Reagan era or to outright catastrophe during the Bush era. Shlaes never stops to ponder the abundant literature chafing at and exposing the conformity and avarice of the Roaring Twenties, but the prosperity offered by Calvinism has always proved as elusive as the promise of the green light that Jay Gatsby watches at the end of Daisy’s dock. Conservatives may be intent on excavating a hero, but Coolidge is no model for the present. He is a bleak omen from the past.

The current Republican Religion divides, not neatly, into three sects, united by the paranoid belief that liberalism is the Whore of Babylon intent on taking away their freedom. 

There are the Tea Party crazies, whom it would be better to call Right Wing Reactionaries.  These are the self-flagellants out to protect their freedom to cut off their noses to spite their faces as long as it means those people won’t benefit from any good the government might try to do.

There are the Right Wing Fundamentalist Christians who want the freedom to hate whomever they feel God tells them to hate and to deny themselves and all the rest of us any joy we might find in life outside a church pew.

Then there are the Right Wing Corporatists.  These are the orthodox and establishmentarians of the Party.  They aren’t the loudest and they don’t get the attention they deserve, but they run things because they have the money.  And that’s what they’re about.  Money and the freedom to rake it up by the sack-full.  They want the freedom to make as much money as they can any way they can without having to give a damn about anybody else.

And they might be the least reality-based of the three.

All three believe that world works by magic.  The Right Wing Reactionaries believe that all the benefits of a living in a liberal society are just there to enjoy without their having to pay taxes to maintain them.  The Fundamentalists believe God is among us right now, working his will, arranging things to work out for the best according to His divine plan.  But the corporatists believe that if we’d just let the greediest, most selfish, most rapacious, and most ruthless among us do whatever they want to make a buck, a just, ordered, secure, and prosperous society will inevitably result and thrive to the benefit of all.

The Republican Party was founded as an anti-slavery party, of course, but it was also, and not incidentally, a pro-labor and pro-farmer party as well.  In northeastern cities, the white working class, who were mostly Democrats, tended to fear the prospect of freed blacks as a threat to their jobs and wages.  But in the west (which included that part of the country we now think of as the Midwest), working men and women and small farmers saw slavery itself as a threat.  Not only couldn’t they compete with slaves when it came to wages, people understood that anyone depraved enough to find a moral justification for enslaving black people wouldn’t have to stretch their thinking much to find a justification for enslaving white people too.  But still the protecting and privileging of wealth and the promotion of the owner class as the nation’s natural ruling elite were a part of the party’s DNA from the beginning.  East Coast capitalists and industrialists joined right up, some motivated by their heartfelt hatred of slavery, some by self-interest, many by both, but as a group they began to throw their weight around from the get-go.  Wasn’t long before they were running the whole show.  And it wasn’t long after that before a rivalry began between those of the elite who thought having lots of money obligated you to take care of people who had very little and those who thought having money obligated you only to making more money.

We know which faction won out.

Took them about a hundred and twenty years.

But they’ve pretty much run the Theodore Roosevelts, the Eisenhowers, the George Romneys, and the George Herbert Walker Bushes out of the party.  The corporatist wing is a church of latter day little Mitts.

It’s way, way, way too early to waste time speculating on who will be either party’s nominee in 2016.  But I’m willing to bet that the Republicans won’t be nominating Chris Christie, for a variety of reasons, one of the chief ones being that in his response to Hurricane Sandy he showed that he thinks that government exists to make people’s lives better, a heresy that will cost him the favor of the bishops of the corporatist wing of the church.

Whoever gets the Republican nomination, though, will be a true believer.  He or she will try to portray themselves as a second-coming of Ronald Reagan, of course, but what will really send the white smoke billowing up the chimney is if the supplicant has demonstrated a habit of fervent prayer before the shrine of the newly canonized Saint Calvin the Silent.

_________________________

Updated to better reflect the history of this reality:  I’ve oversimplified Shlaes’ attempt to rewrite the history of the New Deal in The Forgotten Man.  Eric Rauchway, an actual historian, does the necessary in-depth and reality-based analysis and debunking in this article for Dissent, New Deal Denialism.

Anne Hathaway: Life has killed a dream

What I’m getting at is that Fantine’s suffering isn’t exposition. It’s the heart of the movie.

Anne Hathaway doesn’t have a strong enough voice to sell I Dreamed a Dream as a song by itself.  But she has infused her Fantine with what it takes to sell it as an expression of her character’s anguish.

An anguish that’s fed with self-loathing.

Fantine has been failed by the man who seduced her and then ran out on her and their child.  She has good reason to suspect she’s being failed by the people she’s paying to take care of Cosette.  She’s failed by the women she works with who ought to be her friends and protectors but who, because of a system of every man and woman for his or herself that has turned the people against each other, see her as competition to be eliminated. She is failed by the man who is, abstractly, her benefactor, Valjean, who, in his new identity as the benevolent and beneficent Mayor Madeleine, is so caught up in the business of being a good employer and philanthropist he has lost sight of the individuals in his employ and in his care.  And she is failed by fate---or is it God?---when a chance arrival distracts Valjean at the moment Fantine is most in need of his help.  But finally and most heartbreakingly she fails herself.

Fantine knows who is to blame for her troubles and to what degree, they’re at fault, but she can’t help faulting herself most at all.

Hathaway’s performance is more than a matter of letting her hair get chopped off and submitting to be photographed at unflattering angles.  She fills Fantine’s eyes and then her face and ultimately twists and racks her whole body with the growing pain and terror of a soul turning against itself.---from my Second Miserable Thought: The hell she’s living.

Amy Adams: Disenchanted

The possibility that he’ll revert to whatever it was he was enrages and repels his wife Peggy too (played by Amy Adams with a frightening chilliness I’ve never seen from her before).  Of course if he reverts, she’ll revert along with him, and that makes her all the more determined to control him, keep him going, and drive Quell from their inner circle.  If this was a fairy tale, we’d discover that the Dodds are a pair of enchanted toads desperately afraid that the magic allowing them to pass as human would wear off any second and Quell would be the Jack who comes along to steal their gold and break the spell.---from my review of The Master, Caution: Genius at Work.

Daniel Day-Lewis: The better angel of our nature

I’ve got nothing to add.

Denzel!

It's one heck of a performance. As Whip Whitaker a commercial airline pilot who hasn't lost the swagger or the the recklessness of his days as a Navy fighter pilot and who just to keep himself sharp flies his jetliner as if he was still in the cockpit of an F-14, when he's not so hungover or drunk or high he has to leave all the work to his co-pilot and take a nap in the cockpit, Washington is very good. He's very good a lot.   John Gatins’ screenplay makes sure that he doesn’t lack for opportunities to be very good.  The script will give him a chance to be very good in a scene and one scene later he'll be called on to be very good again.  Sometimes he gets to be very good twice in the same scene.

You're getting the picture, right?

Flight is a showcase for Denzel Washington to the point that his being very good becomes the point of the movie.

---from my review of Flight, Don’t Drink and Fly.

Joaquin Phoenix: He yam what he yam and that’s all that he yam

I’m not kidding about Popeye. As Quell, Phoenix goes through much of the movie with one eye squinked shut, his nose hooking over his twisted lip and toothless smile, talking out of the side of his mouth in a croaking mumble.  He even stands with his hands on the back of his hips, hunched slightly forward, with his chin cocked, the way Popeye sometimes did in the Fleischer cartoons.  In addition he has reduced himself to skin and bone, somehow taken several inches of his height, and willed every touch of leading man handsomeness out of his face. Often he looks like a young Darren McGavin. Other times he looks more like Abraham Lincoln than Daniel Day-Lewis in Spielberg’s upcoming biopic.  It’s a very weird physical performance, considering Quell is supposed to be irresistible to young women.---from my review of The Master, Caution: Genius at Work.

Philip Seymour Hoffman: Making himself up as he goes along

In contrast, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performance as Lancaster Dodd is relaxed, smooth, and almost totally without gimmick.  It’s the most natural portrayal of a completely artificial man you’ll probably ever see.  The founder of a quasi-religion and self-help movement vaguely resembling Scientology, Dodd is an obvious fraud, such an obvious fraud, in fact, that it’s hard to believe anyone, even a madman like Quell, would buy the snake oil he’s selling.  But he’s also such a genial and charming rogue and is enjoying his own con game so much that people can’t help wanting to join the fun.  Nobody, not even Dodd, knows what’s going to happen next. Brought back from a hypnotic “trance” in which Dodd has supposedly placed her in order for her to re-experience a past life, one of his dupes or disciples---same difference---eagerly prompts him for the right responses to his questions as if she’s afraid she might spoil the game by making up the wrong answer. Dodd’s own son tells Quell that Dodd is making it up as he goes. But that’s part of the fun.

But along with the fun and games, Dodd is making something else up as he goes or, rather, somebody.  Himself.

It’s more than that Dodd is caught up in his own con to the point of forgetting it is a con.  He is the con.  That is, the object of the whole charade is to create the persona of Lancaster Dodd.  Dodd calls his movement the Cause.  But the Cause is the cause of his existence.  It brings him to life.  We don’t know what would happen to him without it, if people stopped believing in the Cause and in him, except that he would cease to be Lancaster Dodd, and whatever not being Lancaster Dodd is, Hoffman lets us see that it’s horrible enough to terrify him in moments of doubt and repellent enough that the slightest doubt on the part of any disciple enrages him.---from my review of The Master, Caution: Genius at Work.

Alan Arkin: “If I’m going to make a fake movie, it’s going to be a fake hit.”

Argo is an ensemble piece.  Affleck is undoubtedly the star and his character is the hero, but although it’s a star’s part, it requires him not to do a star turn.  The job he’s given himself is to be the calm center around which the craziness swirls.  He builds a sheltered space where we can stand with him and watch and think along with him.  In fact, much of his performance is watching and thinking.  The showier work is left to others, with Goodman and Arkin getting the best of it and having the most obvious fun.

As Chambers and Siegel, they make a dueling but amusingly complementary pair of cynics.  Different types of cynics.  Chambers is the good-natured, forgiving type, amused by other people’s foolishness but grateful for it because it allows him to lead his two lives as artist and spy.  Goodman plays him with an almost permanent grin as if he’s on the brink of bursting into a hearty laugh that will give away the whole game. Siegel is a cynic of the self-loathing kind whose disdain for humanity in general begins with disdain for himself in particular.  Siegel has himself convinced that he’s not doing anything worthwhile with his life. It’s a feeling leftover from his glory days an intelligence officer in World War II.  Making movies, even award-winning ones, just doesn’t compare to fighting Nazis.  But like most movie cynics he’s a closet romantic and an idealist and, while profanely and grumpily expressing reluctance, he jumps at the chance to get back to meaningful work.  Since he’s played by Alan Arkin, however, he’s even grumpier and more profane in his idealism than in his cynicism.---from my review of Argo, The best bad idea we have.

Oscar Weekend in Mannionville

Going to be nearly non-stop movie blogging from here until Sunday night, as the editors of the Mannionville Daily Gazette and Mother’s Home Sampler gear up for the Academy Awards, starting below with a reposting of my review of Hollywoodland, the movie that back in 2006 saved Ben Affleck’s career and so gave us Argo.

I’ve only seen five of the ten Best Picture nominees: Argo, Lincoln, Les Miserables, Zero Dark Thirty, and Silver Linings Playbook, and, oddly, I’ve written a formal review of only one of those, Argo.  Lincoln, ZD30, and Silver Linings I’m saving for when they’re out on DVD and show up as features for Mannion Family Movie Night. Les Miz I feel I’ve taken care of with my Seven Miserable Thoughts.  Just for the record, I’m rooting for Argo because it’s Oliver Mannion’s favorite movie of the year, I think Zero Dark Thirty was the best directed of the lot but Kathryn Bigelow was robbed of her nomination so that’s that, and, to my own surprise, I enjoyed Silver Linings Playbook most of all.

Daniel Day-Lewis makes Lincoln a special case. The movie’s greatness as a movie is inseparable from the greatness of his performance and giving it the Best Picture Award would be like giving him two Best Actor Awards.  Maybe he deserves the two.  He definitely more than deserves the one he’s going to get.

But more stuff planned besides reposts of past reviews planned so please stay tuned!

Return to Hollywoodland and the return of Ben Affleck’s career

I’ll be reposting my review of Argo when we watch it for Mannion Family Movie Night in a couple of weeks, but in honor of its nomination for Best Picture and in protest of Ben Affleck's being robbed of a nomination for Best Director, I'm reposting my review of Hollywoodland,the movie that probably revived Affleck's career after the disasters of Pearl Harbor, Daredevil and Gigli threatened to turn him into a laughingstock. Come to think of it, that might have inspired his performance as Reeves, with whom I suspect he felt a sense of kinship, one fake superhero to another.

Ben Affleck as George Reeves as Clark Kent with Lorry Ayers as Phyllis Coates as Lois Land in an uncanny recreation of a signature moment from the The Adventures of Superman. Aflleck’s sad, sympathetic portrayal of Reeves makes 2006’s Hollywoodland worth watching and not just for Superman fans.

There are four excellent reasons for you to watch Hollywoodland that have nothing to do with whether or not it's a good movie, which it isn't.

One.  You grew up watching The Adventures of Superman and George Reeves, whose story the movie tries to tell, will in your heart of hearts always be your Superman even though Christopher Reeve, Dean Cain, and Tom Welling have all been much better at being Superman, not just by looking better in the red and blue but by being better actors than Reeves ever was, the modesty of his talent being one of the saddest facts about him in Hollywoodland.

And because Reeves is your Superman you've always been confused and saddened by his suicide and wondered what happened?  How could Superman have killed himself?

Two.  You've been secretly rooting for Ben Affleck to find a part that shows why back when Good Will Hunting was making him famous people said he was the one with a real acting career ahead of him, Matt Damon was just a pretty face who'd go nowhere fast.

Three.  You are fascinated by the period and a movie that perfectly recreates the clothes, the cars, the colors, and even the look of people is right up your alley.

Four.  You are madly in love with Diane Lane.

I happen to fall into three out of four of those categories.  Except for the cars and Marilyn Monroe, the 50s don't offer me much to look at.  There are lots of good shots of cars in Hollywoodland.  No shots of Monroe.

The story of George Reeves as Hollywoodland tells it is the story of a nice enough guy, blessed with good looks and charm, who dreamed of being a movie star and wound up a television star instead and couldn't make himself be happy with that.  Reeves' sad decline begins with what should be the best time of his life.  He meets Toni Mannix, who becomes the love of his life, and he gets the part of Superman, which makes him one of the most famous and most looked up to men in America.

But Toni is older than him by a decade and she's married---to a rich and powerful studio executive.  All the money and the power is on her side, and Toni can't help but make Reeves feel this all the time.  She doesn't do it meanly; she intends to be doting and supportive.  But her favorite term of affection for him is "my boy," she lavishes money and gifts on him in ways that make him feel more bullied than taken care of, and she's so desperately needy and jealous that she can't bear the thought of other women desiring him even as an image on a movie screen---the movie implies that she sabotages his film career in order to keep him from becoming famous to anyone but her and that the reason she's so happy when The Adventures of Superman becomes a hit is that all his adoring fans are children.

Meanwhile, Reeves can't enjoy his newfound stardom because to him it's not real.  It's a cruel parody of what he'd dreamed of for himself.  In his view, which is the view of old time Hollywood, there's no such thing as a television star.  Television is the lowest form of hack work.  And being a star on a kiddie show?  He's not even a cowboy or a private eye.  He's a cartoon.  He feels like a clown in the Superman suit.

And, as Affleck plays him, Reeves is an intelligent man with a sense of irony that works hard on his ego and pride.  He sees the enormous difference between himself and the heroic character he plays and between what he really is and what his young fans think he is and it makes him laugh, derisively, at himself.

The more people admire him, the more he despises himself.

Affleck makes Reeves one of the most likable male characters I've seen in a movie in a long time.  His Reeves is a genuinely nice guy, charming, aware of his charm, but never full of himself, and never pressing.  He captures the inner turmoils of a man who is driven simultaneously by a movie star's vanity and a small town boy's modesty and humility.  He wants to be the center of attention and he wants to defer to everyone around him and make sure they are having a good time and see that their feelings aren't hurt.

Affleck's Reeves is often perfectly still, perfectly composed, seemingly so comfortably at rest because he wants to go too many different directions at once and doesn't dare move---he can't move without tearing himself into pieces.

Affleck worked hard on getting down Reeves' mannerisms and the cadences of his speech.  He doesn't do an impersonation.  He suggests Reeves more than he becomes Reeves.   He makes his Reeves a character, one who happens to be a lot like a real person named George Reeves, but who is nonetheless a creation of the actor playing him and a "person" in his own right.

There are moments, though, when Affleck looks uncannily like Reeves, particularly when he is dressed as Clark Kent on the Superman set.  He has managed to capture Reeves' smile perfectly, and there's a moment when he looks into the camera and winks, as Reeves used to do at the end of too many episodes, when Affleck disappears into the part so completely that I had to double check to make sure the filmmakers hadn't gotten too clever by half and replaced the shot with a sequence from the real TV show.

Diane Lane is excellent as Toni.  It's disconcerting to see the most beautiful 40 year old in the movies playing a fading beauty of 50 losing her looks too quickly to age and booze and cigarettes and unhappiness.  Her Toni is a fragile, spoiled, neurotic with no inner resources to call on to save herself from that last assault on her beauty, except one---she is ferociously determined to be happy with "her boy."  Of course it's that quality of her love for Reeves that makes him feel crushed and un-manned.

It's also that quality that gives Toni an edge of malice.  Her love is selfish and she's prone to expressing it with more anger than affection.  Her neediness takes the form of a threat.  She can't let go of her boy and she'll be damned if he manages to shake himself loose from her.

Lane's biggest challenge in the part is to keep Toni from coming across as a castrating shrew while still suggesting that she's capable of the ultimate form of castration if that's what it takes to keep George in line.  She would just as soon kill him as let him sleep with another woman.

This is an important part of Toni's character but only because it's necessary to keeping the conceit of the movie going.

Hollywoodland isn't a biopic.  It's a murder mystery.  A strange sort of murder mystery.  One that makes itself operate under the constraint of truth.  Hollywoodland wants to tell a story of what might have happened---What if Superman didn't kill himself?  What if he was murdered?---while not breaking with what did happen.  There's no real evidence that George Reeves didn't kill himself.  There's only speculation based on some odd behavior on his part in the weeks before he died and some stupid behavior on the part of his drunken friends and fiancee who were in the house with him that night.

So Hollywoodland takes the opposite tack of your standard movie murder mystery.  It starts from the assumption that Reeves was murdered and then sets out to prove that he wasn't.

To do this, the totally fictional character of a private eye played by Adrien Brody is introduced.  The movie's narrative proceeds on two tracks: the present, in which the private eye, hired by Reeves' estranged mother to prove that her boy (the two most important women in Reeves' life refuse to acknowledge that he's a grown man) was murdered, and the past, beginning the night Reeves and Toni meet and fall in love and ending, three different times in three different ways, on the night Reeves died from a gunshot wound to the head.

It doesn't work.

Not because there's anything intrinsically wrong with the idea.  In fact, Reeves' real story is too slight to be worth a whole movie.   It doesn't work because the moviemakers let their device for telling Reeves' story become more important than telling Reeves' story.

Brody's character, Louis Simo, is the lead.  His story is meant to parallel Reeves' in a way that the movie never makes persuasive.  Simo dreams of being a famous detective the way Reeves dreamed of being a movie star and like Reeves Simo can't be happy with the milder forms of happiness life has allotted him because he's too focused on the wonderfulness his own dreams keep promising him.  Reeves had Toni and Superman.  Simo has a pretty and understanding ex-wife who still loves him, despite being frustrated and angry with him, and a young son who looks up to him as if he is Superman.

Simo's investigation is meant to be redemptive.  Symbolically, he is investigating his own life and uncovering the mystery of his own unhappiness.  Ultimately he comes to see that he's doing to himself what Reeves did to himself.  The question is will he be able to pull back in time to save himself or will he wind up dead like Reeves?  Simo's story, then, is presented as being more important than Reeves' because its outcome is still in doubt.  All the suspense that the movie gins up is over whether or not Simo's going to get himself killed.

Simo's being a fictional character running around among real people who lived through real heartache and loss turns out to turn us off to him and turn us against him---he's a constant intrusion.  One of the most touching characters in the movie is Reeves' long time agent, Art Weisman, movingly played by Jeffrey DeMunn as the most doting and adoring of surrogate fathers, and the scene in which Simo interviews him and we're presented with Weissman's real grief contrasted with Simo's fictitious cynicism works to underscore the mystery plot's artificiality.  We bleed for Weissman while wishing Simo would just disappear from the movie.

Also, unfortunately, unlike Reeves, Simo isn't a decent, likable guy.  He's a jerk.  A would-be tough guy who mistakes heartlessness for realism and treats everybody, including his 10 year old son, as just another schemer with something to sell him.  And Brody doesn't do anything to take the edges off.  If anything, he adds splinters to the edges and rusty nails.  He makes Simo not just the kind of guy you don't want to brush up against for fear of getting a nasty cut.  He makes him the kind of guy who, if you do bump into him, gives you an infection.

I'm saying he's dirty.  Not dishonest, although that's implied.  Dirty as in filthy minded.  He thinks the worst of everybody and it's made his soul a cesspool.

He's not even a particularly good detective.

So he's not somebody whose ultimate redemption we've got a rooting interest in.

At any rate, because the movie tries to have it both ways and tell a fictional murder mystery and a true to the facts biography of a suicide, there's more psychology than plot in both halves of the story, and both halves finish with a big, So what?

Hollywoodland would have been better if the filmmakers had had the courage to throw the facts right out the window and turn Reeves' death into a murder and its story into a true Who Done It---although, if Simo was still slated to be the detective, I'd have prefered a true Who Will Do It with the detective plot left out entirely.

Thinking about it as that kind of movie, it seems to me that in that case the main character of the movie would have had to be Toni not Reeves.  The story being told would be that of a middle-aged woman whose sense of betrayal by her less than deserving lover leads her into madness and murder.

Which sounds to me like a very 1950s sort of movie.  And that reminds me.  I was just being flip when I said the 50s don't offer much to look at but beautiful cars and Marilyn Monroe.  Among the great things to look at from the 50s are the films of Douglas Sirk.

Siren, what do you think?  The alternative Hollywoodland I described?  Would it have made a good vehicle for Sirk?

I know this.  It would have made a great vehicle for Diane Lane.

Originally posted February 9, 2007. Click on the link to read the comments from then, including the Siren’s answer to my question about Sirk.

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Film critic and blogger Carrie Rickey asks, Would you choose Ben Affleck as Entertainer of the Year?

Hollywoodland.  Directed by Allen Coulter.  Screenplay by Paul Bernbaum.  Starring Adrien Brody, Diane Lane, Ben Affleck, Bob Hoskins, and Molly Parker. 2006. Available on DVD and to watch instantly at Amazon.

So long and thanks for all the fish…

Photo courtesy of ABC World News.

Waiting for our order to come up at the pizza joint.  ABC News on the TV on the wall.  Watched a story about dolphins and how ceteologists think they’ve learned that dolphins call each other by name.  At least I think that’s what the story was about.  As soon as I saw the pictures of dolphins on the screen I stopped listening to the TV and started singing this song in my head.

I hope it was only in my head.

Sing along with me?

Coping with the cold

Moving from one hot drink…

…to another…

…to yet another this morning. 

Temperature here at the Old Mannion Homestead 19 degrees. Wind chill bringing it down to near zero.  Hope it’s warmer where you are or you have access to as much coffee and hot chocolate as we have.

Mom and Pop Mannion’s kitchen, six-thirty this morning.  Bruegger’s Bagels, nine a.m.. Barnes & Noble, closing on noon.  Monday. February 18, 2013.

Competence

Solved a problem relating to the car and my commute. I never feel a sense of achievement and competence when I solve a problem.  Best I manage is a feeling of relief that now I’ve got that one behind me I can move onto the next and the hope that the consequences of whatever way I’ve screwed up will be minor and not show up right away.

Commuting with tweeters

Some mornings Twitter is a good way to catch up on the headlines.  Other days it’s like being on a packed subway full of people who got a lousy night’s sleep and haven’t had enough coffee on their way to work at jobs they hate.

In order to write fiction, you need to know what an automat is

My students aren’t just learning how to write fiction, they’re also learning about all kinds of other stuff, like...

Hold on. I need to put that differently.

Let’s try this:  Because writers are supposed to write what they know, they need to know, well, everything, so in order to learn how to write fiction my students are learning about all kinds of other stuff, for instance, the history of the great migration of African Americans out of the South, the menu at In-N-Out Burger, the biblical allusion that opens Moby-Dick, automats.

This week for their writing exercise I have them looking at some paintings by Edward Hopper, picking out a person in a painting of their choice, and turning that person into a character in a story.  One of the paintings is Automat.  Turns out many of them knew Hopper already and could even name at least one of his paintings.  Guess which one.

So they’d heard of Hopper.  But none of them knew what an automat is.  Always a helpful instructor, I gave them the clip below as visual aid.

Apparently, automats were like saloons in the Old West. You couldn’t be in one long before a fight broke out.

 

The movie is Easy Living, starring Jean Arthur, Ray Milland, and Edward Arnold. Preston Struges wrote the screenplay. Sturges is someone else my students need to know about.

Something I want to teach myself, making a regular comeback out of the line “Hire a hall.”

____________________________

Other paintings by Hopper they can use:  Gas. Tables for Ladies. Office at Night. New York Movie. First Row Orchestra. Conference at Night. New York Office. Second Story Sunlight.

I’d pick Conference at Night myself. What about you?

Some tortured thoughts on Zero Dark Thirty

Jessica Chastain as Maya, the dedicated past the point of obsession CIA analyst whose emphasis on spy-craft over torture guides her in directing the hunt for Usama bin Laden in Kathryn Bigelow’s not, as far as I could see, pro-torture movie, Zero Dark Thirty.

Major spoilers coming!

Finally saw Zero Dark Thirty Sunday.  No review yet, but as the title of the post says, I’ve got a few thoughts.

First is, Wow!  Kathryn Bigelow knows how to make a movie!

Second, she didn’t make a pro-torture movie.

At least, I didn’t see a pro-torture movie.

I went in afraid that’s what I was going to see.  An awful lot of critics and pundits I respect, along with several United States Senators and some highly experienced veterans of the intelligence field, reported that they saw a pro-torture movie.

Like I said, I didn’t.

Neither did Mrs M.

What we saw was so much not a pro-torture movie, in fact, that I wondered if all those critics and pundits had actually seen a different movie.

I wondered if Bigelow, stung by the criticism, had re-cut the film since its initial release.

Doesn’t appear she did.

What I think then is that either I need to go back and see it again to find out what I missed or those critics and pundits missed a significant fact about Zero Dark Thirty themselves.

It’s a movie.

I don’t mean that as in It’s just a movie.

I mean that a movie is a story told through pictures and those pundits and critics weren’t looking closely enough at the pictures Bigelow was putting together to tell her story.

And I suspect it’s because they were too distracted listening for speeches that were never delivered.

There are no big anti-torture speeches in Zero Dark Thirty.

There is a background shot of President Obama on 60 Minutes explaining why he’s banned torture as an interrogation technique. I thought it was a key image.

But more to the point there are no pro-torture pictures.

There are no pictures showing torture working.

All the pictures add up to the message that torture did not work.

It’s shown not to work.  It’s shown to fail, horrifyingly and spectacularly, again and again and again.

All of the torture scenes are confined to the first act of the film.  Almost all the torture is conducted by Maya’s superior, Dan.  In the longest and most horrific torture scene, Dan isn’t demanding a name.  He wants a day of the week!  Dan isn’t after Usama bin Laden. Dan is after information that will help stop impending terrorist attacks.

He doesn’t get it.

Almost immediately after comes a scene of a spectacularly bloody terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia.

There are four major and successful terrorist attacks in the first act.

Saudi Arabia. London. Islamabad. Camp Chapman in Afghanistan where Maya’s friend and colleague Jessica is killed.

All the torture ends with the beginning of Act Two.

So do the successful terrorist attacks.

The second act is when the hunt for bin Laden begins in earnest, because now it’s Maya’s show.

Zero Dark Thirty isn’t about how we got bin Laden or how the President got him or how the Navy Seals got him.

It’s about how Maya got him.

Dan has gone home.  Jessica is dead.  The CIA station chief is about to be recalled.  Maya is pretty much on her own now and that means she gets to do things her way.

Her way is to play traditional spy games.

Intelligence gathering.

Detective work.

Asset manipulation.

In short, tradecraft.

Bigelow puts it up on the screen in big letters.

Maya's hunt for bin Laden starts really rolling with the serendipitous discovery of a file that’s found because people are going back through old intelligence from lines of investigation that got sidetracked by the fixation on torture to prove Iraq had WMD and ties to al-Qaeda.

Bigelow doesn’t flat out remind us, but she expects us to remember that getting bin Laden was never a priority for the Bush Administration.

Going to war with Iraq was.

Missing the file---misplacing it, actually---is explained as “human error.”  That’s a euphemism for “criminal negligence.”

From here on out, the work Maya and the team she directs is all surveillance and information gathering and old-fashioned legwork.  Her team tracks down a lead and then follows his SUV to bin Laden’s compound.

When he hears that the compound’s been identified, President Obama’s National Security Advisor wants proof that bin Laden is there before recommending any action to the President.  Dan is on hand to regret that he can’t “interrogate” any detainees.  Maya is certain bin Laden’s there, but her superiors don’t know how they can prove it.  Ok, says the President’s man, prove it’s not anybody else. 

Maya and her colleagues go to work again, gathering more intelligence, chasing more leads, doing research, employing tradecraft to eliminate possibilities to the point that it just has to be bin Laden hiding out there.

Act Three is the assault by the Seals.

So it goes like this:

Act One:  Torture doesn’t work.

Act Two: Let’s try it Maya’s way.

Act Three: Maya’s way works.

At any rate, that’s how it went in the movie I saw.

But I don’t get how those pundits and critics saw a different movie, except, like I said, that it’s as a I suspect.  They didn’t see the movie Bigelow made because they were too mad at her for not making the explicitly and didactically anti-torture movie they wanted to hear.

The scene critics accusing Bigelow of making Zero Dark Thirty pro-torture or at least insufficiently anti-torture tend to point to as their evidence is the one in which Dan and Maya trick a prisoner into finally giving up some information.  Their point is that the trick seems to depend on the prisoner’s having been tortured and so indirectly torture is shown to have helped lead to bin Laden.  But they’re missing the story again.  This is Maya’s story and the trick is her idea!  Dan has no ideas except to drag the prisoner back for another round of beatings and humiliations and near-drownings. Maya is changing the approach and in the process beginning her move towards taking over the manhunt on her terms which is to reject torture and emphasize “tradecraft.”

Maya does try her hand at torture, sort of. Basically, she authorizes an underling to give a prisoner the old third degree. But it’s half-hearted and ineffective and, if I’m remembering right, she doesn’t try it again.

Some people have complained that in the scenes of Maya studying the images of tortured prisoners on her computer monitors she doesn’t express her disgust and revulsion.  I think her disgust and revulsion are written all over her face but along with her dedication, her diligence, and her focus---we’re seeing an intelligent mind at work trying to glean as much information as she can from what she has to work with.  Her focus at the moment is on getting bin Laden, not on making the case for us that torture is wrong.  But to complain about this is to miss that Maya is not the only one looking at those images.

We’re seeing them too.

And what we’re seeing is bound to remind us of Abu Ghraib and nobody except the likes of Rush Limbaugh is not going to be disgusted by that, and I think it’s a safe bet that Bigelow did not make Zero Dark Thirty to please Rush Limbaugh.

Writing for the New York Review of Books, Steve Coll complains that the torture scenes are insufficiently repulsive---They sure repulsed me, but maybe Coll has a stronger stomach.---and they’re journalistically inaccurate because Dan uses techniques that weren’t used by the professional torturers at black sites but by the out of control amateurs at Abu Ghraib.  Well, yes.  But that’s sort of a big clue right there.

Coll also makes this point:

The film’s Ammar is depicted as a doomed man who will spend his entire life behind bars without resort to lawyers or justice. In an early interrogation scene, Maya pulls off her black mask before entering to face the prisoner because Dan assures her that Ammar will never be free to menace her. We are invited to appreciate Ammar’s subjugation.

That seems like a woeful mis-seeing of that scene to me.

First of all, if Bigelow is inviting us to appreciate his subjugation, she must think we enjoyed watching him subjugated, that we want to go back into the interrogation room along with Dan and Maya, and that we’ll get satisfaction from watching the whole thing replayed and also that we expect thqt this time Dan will get his answers.

I think you have to have been still out in the lobby buying popcorn during the initial interrogation scene to think Bigelow meant anything other than for us to be disgusted and sickened by the torture.  If we were invited to appreciate anything, it’s Ammar’s pain and fear.  We’re intended to sympathize with him in that he’s a fellow human being in terrible distress.

And we’re expected to see from the start that Dan is going about things all wrong, morally and practically.

But the scene outside when Maya takes off the mask is about Dan emotionally blackmailing her into going back in with him.  He tells her there’s no shame if she chooses not to, but of course there is.  He’ll report back to Langley that she’s not tough enough for the job if she doesn’t go back in.  She’ll be recalled right then and there and, as the movie plays out, we see that if that had happened, bin Laden would not have been found.

The point here isn’t torture, yea or nay?  It’s Maya, hooray!

If anything, it’s not that Zero Dark Thirty is insufficiently anti-torture, it’s that it may be a little too pro-Maya.

It might be that I need to see it again.  I wouldn’t mind.  In fact, I would very much like to, not just to see if I mis-saw it, but because it is a very, very good movie.

But I can’t help it.  I can’t help thinking that those who saw it as pro-torture missed the story. They weren’t watching for a story.  They wanted a sermon or at least an op-ed piece.  But Bigelow wasn’t interested in moralizing.  She worked from the assumption that her audience would be made up of grown-ups who wouldn’t need to be told torture is wrong and who’d know how to watch a movie.

________________________

Definitely read:

All of Coll’s post at NYRB, ‘Disturbing’ & Misleading.

Also, though: Mark Bowden at the Atlantic, ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Is Not Pro-Torture and bontemps2012 at Daily Kos, Cheney's Folly: Zero-Dark-Thirty Depicts How Torture Cost Us 7 Years in the Hunt for UBL.

Elementary, my dear Watson, if that, indeed, is who you are!

Lucy Liu as Joan not John Watson doing what she does too often on CBS’ updating of Sherlock Holmes, Elementary, fade in the background while Holmes gets down to work. 

“Come, Watson! The game is afoot!”

Following up on my post from last week, Elementary! He’s elementarily not my ideal Sherlock Holmes: From time to time, in the original Sherlock Holmes stories, after Holmes has asked (ordered) Watson to join him in an investigation, Watson will make polite noises turning him down, saying he doesn’t want to get in Holmes’ way. Watson is a modest man and well aware that Holmes doesn’t need to have him along. In fact, very often, Holmes doesn’t let him come along or even tell him he’s about to go out on a case without him.

But Holmes is certain to reply something along the lines of Stuff and nonsense! Actually, his most famous reply to one of Watson’s polite refusals is “I am lost without my Boswell.”

This is Holmes’ way of telling Watson that he does need him and, more importantly, wants him along. It’s a statement of affection. He needs and wants Watson along because he’s a good friend.

He needs and wants Watson’s company.

But, as a purely practical matter, let’s ask. Where would Holmes be without his Boswell?

Pretty much in the same fix as Jonny Lee Miller’s Holmes in Elementary. A little lonely, a little less confident, but basically functioning as well as ever as a detective. Mainly, though, not lost but incomplete.

Miller’s Holmes doesn’t need his Boswell but he’d be better off with him…I mean, her.

Sorry. From what I’ve seen, Lucy Liu is not Watson. I don’t know who she is. Apparently, neither do the show’s writers, which means Liu doesn’t know who she is either. She’s trying to figure it out without the writers’ help but she’s struggling. Whoever she is, though, it’s not Watson.

It’s not because they’ve made Watson a woman. That’s not even new. Two TV movies in the 1980s had female Watsons. So does one of my favorite movies from when I was kid, They Might Be Giants. And plenty of TV Holmes avatars and manqués have had female Watsons. Monk and Sharona and then Nathalie. Castle and whoever he’s paired with. The best played Watson to the best Holmes avatar, Vincent D’Onforio’s Bobby Goren of Law and Order: Criminal Intent was Kathryn Erbe as Detective Alex Eames, who is a number of things Doyle’s Watson is and Lucy Liu’s isn’t, among them, independent, capable, and confident enough in her own skills and intelligence that it’s truly persuasive that she’s impressed by Goren and impressed enough to ignore his weirdness and that he’s far from her idea of an ideal partner. She makes us think that if Eames can put up with and even like this guy, then he must be worth putting up with and even liking, a very Watson-esque thing for her to do. All Watsons have the job of helping us appreciate the great gifts and see the humanity of their Holmeses.

So, it’s not the gender change. It’s the career change.

Doyle’s Watson and just about every Watson who’s followed is a former Army surgeon. Liu’s character is a former surgeon.

She’s quit medicine out of guilt at having lost a patient on the operating table.

Her confidence shot, her career over, she’s more or less adrift. But she’s on the lookout for something to do that will give meaning back to her life, and in this her situation is somewhat similar to that of Doyle’s Watson when we first meet him.

At the opening of A Study in Scarlet, Watson has come home from Afghanistan traumatized by his wounds and his experiences in the war there and still suffering the effects of a tropical fever that nearly killed him. His military career’s over but he’s having trouble getting a civilian one going.

I had neither kith nor kin in England, and was therefore as free as air–or as free as an income of eleven shillings and sixpence a day will permit a man to be. Under such circumstances I naturally gravitated to London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained. There I stayed for some time at a private hotel in the Strand, leading a comfortless, meaningless existence, and spending such money as I had, considerably more freely than I ought.

Then he meets Holmes.

Soon he has moved into 221B Baker Street and is helping Holmes---or at least accompanying Holmes---on an investigation that exhilarates him and brings him back to life. By the end of the novel he’s not practicing medicine again---that doesn’t happen until after the next book, The Sign of Four, and it’s due to his having met, fallen in love with, and married Mary Morston---but he’s snapped out of his depression and ready to begin work on his second career, the one that will make him and, more importantly, Sherlock Holmes famous.

“I have all the facts in my journal, and the public shall know them.”

Effectively, then, the first person Sherlock Holmes saves with his detective work is Watson, something the BBC’s Sherlock brings to the foreground in its first episode. In Elementary, this appears to be working itself out more slowly and subtly and with an ironic twist. Holmes is saving Watson by drawing her into his work as a detective but she thinks she’s saving him.

But this is where and why the career change works against her achieving real Watson-osity.

Before he returns to medicine, Doyle’s Watson is paying his bills with his army pension. Elementary’s Watson is paying hers by taking work as a “sober companion.”

The central conceit of Elementary is that exactly what Doyle’s Watson worried would happen happened. Holmes’ habit of alleviating his boredom between cases with seven percent solutions of cocaine became a habit. This Holmes is a recovering addict. His move to New York is part of his recovery. He’s left behind bad company and old haunts, presumably like the opium den in The Man With the Twisted Lip, to start his life and his career over, clean and sober. His father---not his brother Mycroft---paid for the move and his rehab, which, as I mentioned in my previous post, I don’t like, because it defines Holmes as a son, a child. But now Daddy Holmes is paying Watson to keep an eye on his kid, see he doesn’t fall into old ways and take up with the wrong friends, drag him to his support group, and nag and scold and lecture and plead with and badger and boss and bully and emotionally blackmail Holmes to keep him from backsliding.

This makes Watson two things, besides annoying, no other Watson is or has been.

A glorified babysitter.

And an employee.

This is a significant and as far as I’m concerned damaging change.

The popular conception has Holmes and Watson joined at the hip, with Watson playing a definite secondary and supporting role. But that notion is Watson’s own doing and a sign of his innate modesty. It’s how he presents himself in the stories. In fact, he has an independent and successful life of his own. And this is key to our appreciating Holmes.

Time to back up a bit and ask the question, Why does Holmes need Watson?

At the most practical level it’s simply that Watson has useful knowledge and experience Holmes lacks. His medical skills and training come in handy particularly at a time when forensic medicine was still a developing field. Doyle’s Holmes and Watson frequently arrive at a crime scene where no competent pathologist is at work. If there’s a local coroner around, it’s usually the case that he’s never seen anything like this before. A 21^st Century Holmes, though, shouldn’t face that problem. If the local forensics unit can’t answer a question, there’s always the internet. On the BBC’s Sherlock, Benedict Cumberbatch’s Holmes needs his Doctor Watson because, unlike Jonny Lee Miller on Elementary, he’s not a quasi-official member of the police department and has no authority with the technicians on the scene who therefore aren’t obliged to answer his questions or show him any evidence they’ve collected. On top of that, he’s alienated practically the entire department. He doesn’t like them and he doesn’t respect them, especially not their supervisor Anderson. They don’t work fast enough and they have a bad habit of interrupting Holmes’ thinking by offering their own (wrong) interpretations of the evidence, when they actually find evidence or evidence Holmes recognizes as having real importance.

Liu’s Watson’s medical training occasionally makes her useful at a crime scene, but so far it’s usually been a matter of her saving Holmes the trouble of asking one of the police medical officers at the scene or taking out his cell and googling for a fact. And they’ve made him such a walking encyclopedia that often he tells her what she out to be telling him, leaving her nothing to do but confirm he’s correct. At least, though, they haven’t had her sputter a 21st Century American version of “By Jove, Holmes! How the deuce did you know that?”

And it’s damning that Holmes never introduces her as Doctor Watson. It’s always “Joan Watson” or “Miss Watson.” Also, he never calls her his “colleague and associate.” She’s just his associate and he says it in a way that makes it sound like a synonym for assistant. In other incarnations, Doctor Watson’s title opens doors and loosens tongues for Holmes. Being able to introduce his friend and colleague Doctor Watson---or as often happens being introduced himself by Doctor Watson---confers an authority and respectability and an air of professionalism people might not be inclined to grant an amateur private consulting detective, if they can even conceive what such a creature might be. But they’re used to talking freely to doctors and answering their most probing and intimate questions. Elementary’s Holmes doesn’t need help in that way. After all, he’s basically a cop. In real life, he’d be flashing a badge. Watson needs his stamp of legitimacy. She’s allowed on the scene and tolerated because she’s with him.

There’s more to it.

As a doctor and former soldier, Watson has a breadth of experience and acquaintance that’s different from Holmes’. Holmes, who, nevermind the popular conception, has friends besides Watson and his own extensive social circle, but most of those friends and acquaintances belong to London’s underworld, the part of the city he most often visits when he leaves Baker Street. He doesn’t know people who aren’t connected with the criminal side of life. When he meets so-called respectable people of his own class and station it’s usually because somehow or another they’ve been drawn into that world.

But Watson, the doctor, is used to dealing with people in distress not of their own making, and he has learned to treat most everybody the way he treats his patients, with…patience, a virtue Holmes does not practice regularly, and with kindness, tact, and sympathy. He know when and how to employ diplomacy, to show respect towards people Holmes is disinclined to respect, and in short to be polite and charming. Which frees Holmes to be rude and obnoxious or at least less than ordinarily civil. More to the point, it frees Holmes to concentrate on a problem while ignoring the distractions presented by the person with the problem. This, of course, comes most into play when that person with a problem is a woman.

And Watson’s bedside manner, so to speak, is not incidentally a form of information gathering, something else Holmes relies on Watson for. Watson is an extra pair of eyes and ears, and by temperament and training, he’s able to pick up on things Holmes might miss.

After all, he is a trained observer and collector of evidence. Doyle didn’t make Watson a doctor just because he was a doctor himself. Doyle saw his medical schooling as an education in scientific thinking. Watson is every bit the scientist Holmes is. Watson may not be brilliant but he is intelligent and his intelligence is educated and developed by training, experience, and continual practice. This makes him useful to Holmes in another and maybe the most important way.

Watson is someone Holmes can talk to, because Watson can keep up.

Never forget that the reason we can follow Holmes’ line of deduction (if only after the fact) and grasp how he’s solved a case is that Watson has followed it and grasped it and explained it to us.

Holmes can think out loud in front of Watson, try out theories on him, ask him questions he’s asking himself, because, knowing that Watson’s following right along and expecting him to ask intelligent questions back and taking in Watson’s own observations helps him focus and work his way through a problem. Holmes isn’t always polite about acknowledging this. In fact, he can be downright insulting---

“Really, Watson, you excel yourself,” said Holmes, pushing back his chair and lighting a cigarette. “I am bound to say that in all the accounts which you have been so good as to give of my own small achievements you have habitually underrated your own abilities. It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it. I confess, my dear fellow, that I am very much in your debt.”

He had never said as much before, and I must admit that his words gave me keen pleasure, for I had often been piqued by his indifference to my admiration and to the attempts which I had made to give publicity to his methods. I was proud, too, to think that I had so far mastered his system as to apply it in a way which earned his approval. He now took the stick from my hands and examined it for a few minutes with his naked eyes. Then with an expression of interest he laid down his cigarette, and, carrying the cane to the window, he looked over it again with a convex lens.

“Interesting, though elementary,” said he as he returned to his favourite corner of the settee. “There are certainly one or two indications upon the stick. It gives us the basis for several deductions.”

“Has anything escaped me?” I asked with some self-importance. “I trust that there is nothing of consequence which I have overlooked?”

“I am afraid, my dear Watson, that most of your conclusions were erroneous. When I said that you stimulated me I meant, to be frank, that in noting your fallacies I was occasionally guided towards the truth.

---but he does acknowledge it and he counts on it.

If Watson sometimes seems not to have much to say in reply to Holmes’ monologing, it’s because he’s also smart enough to know his own limits and when to keep his mouth shut so as not to interrupt Holmes when he’s on a tear.

Liu’s Watson is not smart in that way.

She’s not particularly smart in any way Doyle’s Watson and other Watsons are.

I blame this on the writing, not on Liu’s acting. She’s just not given any smartness to play. Going by the stuff the writers have her saying, it’s easy to forget she is---was---a doctor, and a gifted one, according to a former colleague who can’t understand any better than we can why she’s given up her career to play nurse to a rich man’s spoiled brat of son. As far as we can tell, when she practiced she paid less attention to her patients as individuals with feelings than Holmes, any and every Holmes, does to clients. All her knowledge and experience of human nature seems to have been acquired during her time spent in the field of self-help. Her language is the language of self-help and recovery. She says things like:

“That relationship stabilizes him…”

“I just need to re-open those lines of communication…”

And:

“If I feel you’ve compromised his sobriety…”

No wonder Holmes doesn’t talk to her. He talks at her. She’s an excuse for him to soliloquize. Often he seems to be talking to keep her from talking. And why wouldn’t he, if what he’s going to hear out of her is stuff as banal and devoid of independent thought as that?

On top of this, she’s intrusive.

Years go by before Watson learns Holmes has a brother. That’s because he’s too much of an Englishman to pry into a friend’s personal life. Liu’s Watson won’t stop prying. She’s convinced that he needs to dredge up his past in order to achieve the kind of emotional self-awareness necessary to recovery. Other Watsons admonish their Holmes to show some feeling or at least remember that other people have feelings. This Watson is constantly encouraging her Holmes to get in touch with his own.

To be fair, the writers know this is part of her problem. They know they’ve made her a pill. In a clever bit from this past Thursday night’s episode, we see Holmes at his support group relating to his fellow addicts not the latest news from his road to recovery or details from his past struggles with his addictions but the facts of a case he solved back in London, when he was, as it happened, coked out of his skull. Sherlock Holmes fans would recognize the case as an only slightly updated retelling of The Crooked Man. Watson finds this an appalling breach of group etiquette and at the end of the episode, dragging him back to another meeting, she says, scoldingly, “You’re not going to talk about some old case. You’re going to share something real…” depriving us of the real pleasure of hearing him re-tell, as he’s threatening to do, the adventure of The Blue Carbuncle.

Now, here’s where Watson’s not being a doctor and working at a dead-end job that reduces her pretty much to a stand-in for Holmes’ father, whom for the moment the show’s producers are keeping off screen---presumably until they can persuade Christopher Plummer to guest star---makes her less than useful not just to Holmes but to us the audience.

Considered purely as a literary device, Doyle’s Watson does several things for us readers. First, he keeps us out of Holmes’ head. We never get to read Holmes’ thoughts directly, which means we never see him working at being brilliant, we only get the results of his brilliance and thus the mystery and surprise of that brilliance is maintained. Next, Watson as the teller of tales provides us with a point of view that is warm, humane, sympathetic, insightful emotionally as well as intellectually, colorful, and literary. We know what the stories would be like if they were told from Holmes point of view---not stories. They’d be dryly scientific case studies, of interest only to other professionals, like his monographs on tobacco ash, tattoos, 160 separate ciphers, and---Holmes being a world-class violinist as well as a great detective---the polyphonic motets of Lassus. Although Holmes routinely criticizes Watson’s prose style and his taste for the sensational, the romantic, and the dramatic in his accounts of their adventures at the expense, Holmes feels, of the scientific, we sense that Holmes is secretly glad that it’s Watson doing the writing and not himself, recognizing that Watson’s “sensational” stories are better for business and Holmes’ reputation than his own accounts would be and, perhaps, enjoying the way they humanize himself to himself. But, finally and most importantly, seeing that this smart, decent, independent, highly competent and successful doctor is impressed by Sherlock Holmes tells us that it’s right for us to be impressed by him too and, at the same time, seeing that this smart, decent, independent, highly competent and successful doctor is often baffled by what does not baffle Holmes allows us to not to feel bad about being baffled ourselves---in fact, we can enjoy our bafflement just as much as Watson does his.

But Liu’s Watson does not have an independent, self-contained, successful life of her own. In what we see of her life apart from Holmes’, she’s not capable. She’s barely a grown-up.

She’s…

…a self-doubting daughter convinced she’s disappointed her mother.

…a lonely single woman looking for love and failing at the dating game.

…a sulking professional failure, a former doctor who can’t get over her one mistake that proved she’s not perfect.

…a put-upon renter about to be evicted from her rent-controlled apartment until Holmes comes to her rescue.

We’re not impressed that this screw-up is impressed by Sherlock Holmes. We’re astonished that she can stand to be alone in her own company. It’s no wonder that as her term of employment is nearing its end she’s scheming to stay on his sober companion. She’s even lying to him and his father about the progress of his recovery.

This may be part of the producers’ plans for the development of her character. Watson needs to reclaim a life of her own and she may be on track to do it through her admiration and affection for Holmes. He’s inspiring her. But it’s not promising that she doesn’t seem inspired to get back into medicine. She’s not contemplating opening her own clinic somewhere. What she seems attracted to is the idea of working with Holmes as a partner in crime-solving. I suppose the producers think that in this way she’ll become his equal. But she can’t be his equal unless he’s not really Sherlock Holmes. By definition, Holmes has no equal as a detective. But even if she does learn his methods and how to apply them, she will still have no real life of her own apart from his. At best all she’ll be is a junior detective.

Doyle’s Watson and every real Watson who’s followed is not Holmes’ equal as a detective, but he’s his equal in other ways and even his superior in some. He’s not Holmes’ partner in crime-solving because the world’s greatest detective does not need a partner, not even a junior partner.  Watson is Holmes’ partner in adventuring.

This brings me back to my point in my previous Holmes post. The reason Jonny Lee Miller hasn’t convinced me his Sherlock Holmes is the Sherlock Holmes is that so far he hasn’t shown enough of that side of Holmes, the adventurous, swashbuckling, freebooting, violent and dangerous side. Almost all original stories centered around wild and violent and romantic adventures that had swept up Holmes’ clients and other characters and there was always the chance that if they weren’t careful or if their investigation went awry Holmes and Watson would be caught up in the wildness and the violence themselves. This happens in a number of the stories and, Watson tells us, has happened on cases he hasn’t written up yet and, apparently even more frequently, on cases Holmes tackles alone.

Where would Holmes be without his Boswell? From what we can tell, working more often in secret as a late Victorian combination of James Bond, Indiana Jones, and Batman.

So Holmes has to be prepared to turn into an action-adventure hero at any moment, and part of his preparation is to call on Watson. This is the real way Holmes needs Watson. He depends on him to have his back in a fight.

Don’t forget, throughout most of the stories both Watson and Holmes are still young men.

Watson is brave, dogged, quick-witted, keen-eyed---he may not observe according to Holmes’ lights, but he can see what’s coming at them---and unflinching. When Holmes suggests he bring his trusty service revolver along on a case, it’s not because Watson owns a gun. It’s because he’s good with one.

Like Holmes, Watson, the war hero, is a dangerous and potentially violent man.

This is one of the reasons I get such a kick out of Jude Law’s Watson in the Guy Ritchie-Robert Downey Sherlock Holmes movies. Downey’s Holmes is an exaggeration of Doyle’s Holmes. But Law’s Watson could be dropped as is into a more traditional adaptation---say one starring Jonny Lee Miller---and Law wouldn’t have to hardly change anything except to shave closer.

The last three episodes of Elementary---The Red Team, The Deductionist, and A Giant Gun, Filled With Drugs---have allowed Miller to show a more dangerous side to his Holmes. He’s not as much of swashbuckler as he is a thug, more Daniel Craig as opposed to Pierce Brosnan in his inner Bondness. But he’s capable of inflicting pain and damage on the bad guys and willing to put himself in danger, not for danger’s sake but out of sheer ruthlessness and a desire to punish the villain.

Liu’s Watson, however, has not shown any sign she’d be useful in a fight, not even to call 911. She’d drop her cell or discover she’s forgotten to charge it. In A Giant Gun, Filled With Drugs she does manage to help out by knocking out the bad guy while his back is turned by smashing a plaster bust of Napoleon over his head, reaching for the nearest literary allusion because no flower vase is handy. And this takes so much out of her that right after she collapses into bed and sleeps for six hours. So she’s not exactly the kind of partner in adventure Holmes can depend on to have his back.

She’s not dependable in any way, in fact, except in the way she keeps offering to be and urging him to take advantage of, as a friend Holmes can open up to, and we can only hope he never takes her up on the offer.

Ok. It’s network television. The target audience isn’t obsessive Holmes fans like me. It’s fans of TV detective shows looking for something fun to cap off their Thursday nights. If you miss Monk, miss House, and can’t get enough of Castle and The Mentalist, Elementary will fit the bill. And things might change. In fact, as I’ve said, there are signs they are changing. We don’t need to find out that Liu’s Watson has her own Army issued .45 in her sock drawer or that she has hidden martial arts skills that like Kane she’s Zen enough to keep in check until pushed too far. I really hope she doesn’t. I would love it if the writers could find ways to show that she is brave, stalwart, capable, and in her own way dangerous than just by having her turn out to have been one of Charlie’s Angels.

_______________________

Nicol Williamson was the first Sherlock Holmes who looked and acted like my ideal Sherlock Holmes, and his Watson, Robert Duvall, was the first Watson who was at all close to my ideal Watson. David Burke and Edward Hardwicke were both excellent Watsons but they were something of a step back in being more decidedly middle-aged. An unsung but fine and youthful Watson was Ian Hart who played Watson to two different fine and youthful Sherlock Holmeses, Robert Foxburgh and Rupert Everett. But I was thrilled when I saw Jude Law in the part. That, I said, is my Watson, well, except for the homo-erotic sexual panic. And he’d still be my all time favorite Watson, but now Martin Freeman has come along.

Freeman’s Watson, who besides having the advantage of working with what may be the best Sherlock Holmes ever, is Watson through and through, dependable in every way every Holmes needs his Watson to be, including having his back in fight. Despite looking like a hobbit, Freeman’s Watson is every bit as dangerous as Law’s. This has been dealt with comically---

 

 

But it’s demonstrated to ruthless effect in the very first episode when Watson takes aim and shoots a murder in the back and then coolly shrugs it off without remorse or regret.

The first person Cumberbatch’s Holmes saves is Watson. But ever since they’ve pretty much kept it even.

Previous post, essentially Part One of this post: Elementary! He’s elementarily not my ideal Sherlock Holmes.

Two feet and counting

Hope those of you in the path of the storm are ok.  Looks like the worst of it passed us by.  But not too far to our east they got socked.  Two feet North of Boston, with more on the way, Uncle Merlin reports. He sent along this picture.  Melrose, Massachusetts.  Saturday morning.  February 9, 2013.

Elementary! He’s elementarily not my ideal Sherlock Holmes

Mostly it’s the forehead, but Jonny Lee Miller, who plays Sherlock Holmes in the CBS television series Elementary, looks more like Sherlock Holmes than any Sherlock Holmes I can name.

More than Benedict Cumberbatch. More than Jeremy Brett. Certainly more than Robert Downey Jr.

But also more than Ian Richardson, Peter Cushing, and Christopher Plummer. Even more than Basil Rathbone.

I know. That last one, blasphemy.

Also, I know. I’m leaving out somebody important. I’ll get to him later.

When I say Miller looks like Sherlock Holmes, I mean he looks like how I pictured my ideal Sherlock Holmes whose image my imagination pieced together out of Sidney Paget’s illustrations for Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories, what I gleaned from the stories themselves, and my own wishful thinking about what I’d look like when I grew up: very tall, very lean, with a very high forehead, a very sharp nose, blue-eyed, fair-haired, and…young.

The last was important to my conception of Holmes and not just in helping me identify with him. Every Holmes I’d seen on TV when I was a kid---that would have included Rathbone, Cushing, and Stewart Granger, an undeservedly forgotten Holmes but to my mind then disqualifyingly white-haired---looked to me like an old man and I knew from the stories, where I encountered Holmes first, that he was in his twenties when he began his career as the world’s first and only private consulting detective and still only thirty-seven when he apparently went over Reichenbach Falls with Professor Moriarity.

But as much as he looks like Sherlock Holmes as I’ve always imagined him, he hasn’t convinced me he is Sherlock Holmes.

In fact, of all the Holmeses I’ve mentioned and the one I haven’t yet, he’s the least convincing Holmes. Downey is more like Holmes, even though his Holmes is something of a joke, the joke, being, however, the answer to the questions, What if Holmes and Watson were more like the sides of themselves that only occasionally show in Conan Doyle’s stories, usually in references to cases Watson hasn’t chronicled yet but from what little Watson tells us we can guess are much more adventurous, dangerous, violent, and outlandish than any of the stories on hand? What if instead of being the staid and proper Victorian gentlemen they’re usually portrayed as we get to see them as a pair of swashbuckling soldiers of fortune, not just the prototypes for a long line of movie and TV and mystery novel detectives but the precursors of James Bond?

That side of them is in the stories. Holmes can wield a sword, he’s a crack shot with a pistol, and he’s a master of martial arts. He has actually been a spy on Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Even the part of the first Downey Holmes movie you might have thought was an outrageous invention by director Guy Ritchie, Holmes “relaxing” by taking part in a bare-knuckle prizefight, is inspired by a moment in The Sign of Four. Holmes, we find out, has been an amateur boxer and good enough that one of his old opponents, a professional named McMurdo still thinks Holmes missed his true calling when he left the ring to take up detective work.

“Very sorry, Mr. Thaddeus,” said the porter inexorably. “Folk may be friends o’ yours, and yet no friend o’ the master’s. He pays me well to do my duty, and my duty I’ll do. I don’t know none o’ your friends.”

“Oh, yes you do, McMurdo,” cried Sherlock Holmes genially. “I don’t think you can have forgotten me. Don’t you remember that amateur who fought three rounds with you at Alison’s rooms on the night of your benefit four years back?”

“Not Mr. Sherlock Holmes!” roared the prize-fighter. “God’s truth! how could I have mistook you? If instead o’ standin’ there so quiet you had just stepped up and given me that cross-hit of yours under the jaw, I’d ha’ known you without a question. Ah, you’re one that has wasted your gifts, you have! You might have aimed high, if you had joined the fancy.”

“You see, Watson, if all else fails me, I have still one of the scientific professions open to me,” said Holmes, laughing. “Our friend won’t keep us out in the cold now, I am sure.”

I don’t think his name gets said in the movie, but according to IMDB, the boxer Downey’s Holmes defeats with a trick of a handkerchief is McMurdo.

Physical strength, athleticism, a capacity for violence even a relish for it, and a love of adventure and danger for their own sakes are intrinsic to Benedict Cumberbatch’s portrayal of Holmes. Holmes’ brother Mycroft spells it out for Watson and us in this exchange from A Scandal in Belgravia.

Jeremy Brett’s Holmes may not ever have aspired to be a pirate, but there’s a roguishness to him that suggests he’d be sympathetic to the pirate’s point of view and would have made a good one if he’d wanted. Brett was fifty-one when he took on the part---Cumberbatch was thirty-four when he started---and he knew better than to try to play Holmes young. But his Holmes is a man in his prime, still vigorous, and full of pent-up physical energy, which often shows most when he’s at his most still. It’s the stillness of a big cat, relaxed for the moment but always prepared to pounce. So it isn’t surprising that his Holmes can straighten out a bent fireplace iron, knock down a local bully in a bar, scale walls and climb drainpipes, and, as he does at the beginning of The Final Problem, take on and fight off three of Moriarty’s hired thugs in a scene that, with a little strategic slow-motion, could have come right out of Guy Ritchie’s movies, and it’s a scene that’s not entirely made up for television. At the beginning of the Doyle story, Holmes shows Watson the knuckles he bloodied punching a club-swinging goon in the mouth in the course of escaping a string of Moriarty-plotted attempts on his life that afternoon.

While we’re on the subject, Basil Rathbone---who made The Hound of the Baskervilles when he was forty-seven---couldn’t help inspiring images of swashbucklers and pirates, swordplay and feats of derring-do in his audience, since it was movies like The Adventures of Robin Hood and Captain Blood that made him a star. Of course, he played villains in both and in more than his fair share of other movies, but that was also an attractive feature of his Holmes. It added a sinister cast to his character. Which fits. As Doyle’s Holmes himself likes to point out, he’d have rivaled Moriarty as a master criminal if he’d turned his talents to crime, an idea Holmes seems to think is a recommendation.

But I’ve seen no pirate in Miller’s Holmes. No swashbuckler. I get no sense of any pent-up physicality. His Holmes vibrates but with a nervous energy that seems fueled more by caffeine and sugar than a sign of eager muscles demanding to be put to use. A 21st Century Londoner living in contemporary New York City, Miller’s Holmes is something of a hipster, which is fine. Doyle’s Holmes is a “bohemian,” and bohemians were sort of the hipsters of their day. But Miller’s Holmes looks to be in about the same physical shape and about as likely to spring into violent action as any average frequenter of Brooklyn coffee houses on a Sunday morning engrossed in the Times Style section and still a chai latte and a third biscotti shy of operating at peak performance.

Miller gives his Holmes a number of very Holmesian qualities and puts his own, attractive spin on them.  He’s persuasively brilliant.  We can see he’s keenly observant, clearly taking in everything Holmes would take in, including all that he’ll decide can be disregarded.  He wouldn’t, as Downey’s Holmes does, claim to see “everything.”  That would be a waste of effort. But he is seeing.

He’s witty. Every good Holmes has a wicked sense of humor.  He’s a quick and crafty liar.  He knows when and how to play games with witnesses, suspects, the police, and anyone blundering into his way or tries to interrupt his thinking while he’s pursuing a clue. He’s brusque past the point of rudeness, but he’s not wholly insensitive.  It’s just that when he’s focused and at work, his thoughts run away with him and his mouth.  He enjoys being a difficult character and even seems to think it’s one of his charms.  He talks a lot for someone who’s said to often go days without speaking. In fact, he’s something of a motormouth.  But that’s in keeping with Doyle’s Holmes, who, for all he pretends otherwise, enjoys explaining himself and discoursing on his methods and past cases.

But he just doesn’t strike me as sufficiently dangerous.

Or danger-addicted.

He’s not inactive. In fact, he can hardly sit still. And he’s not physically timid. He hasn’t done anything like it in the episodes I’ve watched, but I can imagine him climbing out a window and out onto the ledge of a high-rise apartment to test a theory, just as Cumberbatch’s Holmes does in The Blind Banker. But I see him doing it because he has to and not for the thrill of it as well, as Cumberbatch’s Holmes also does. Miller’s Holmes has strength he can muster when needed and he can be violent and to effect. We see him swing a police baton the way Doyle’s Holmes sometimes does his walking stick, with the confidence that comes from lots of practice and the determination that comes from an intent to cause real damage.

Depressingly, in this case he’s not motivated by practical necessity. He does it for that most clichéd and disingenuous TV detective show tropes---revenge for a crime committed against someone he loves---which writers employ to permit their heroes anything while still making a claim on our sympathy.

He could do more of this. It’s just that he’s not been required to. And that’s what I’m getting at. For all his lapses into lethargies and long periods of silent meditation, Doyle’s Holmes is a man of action, a swashbuckler with a touch of pirate, because his stories require him to be.

Doyle’s Holmes and Watson travel in a fictional world where the violent, the macabre, the bizarre, and the borderline supernatural are routine. While many of the stories are, on the surface, realistic in a 21st Century literary sense and some are even humorous, and the mysteries and crimes in them are somewhat tame---A Scandal in Bohemia, The Blue Carbuncle, The Red-Headed League---most of them at least hint at much darker and dangerous realities. They might start out in a puzzler as seemingly comic and inconsequential as in A Case of Identity but any one of them might turn into The Sign of Four and send Holmes and Watson out into the night and the fog to dodge poison-tipped blow darts and shoot it out with the villains boat to boat during a chase down the river. In short, a lot of what happens in the Guy Ritchie-Robert Downey movies are only exaggerations of what happens in the stories. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes are adventures, romantic action-adventures, and Holmes and Watson are action-adventure heroes.

Arthur Conan Doyle didn’t set out to invent the modern detective story and, apparently, quickly lost interest in Holmes, even as Holmes grew in popularity. He even grew to resent him, which is why he killed him off in The Final Problem. The Holmes stories were getting in the way of his writing the kind of adventure tales he preferred to tell and on which he thought his reputation as a writer would be made. Consequently, he routinely used Holmes as an excuse to tell one of those sorts of stories.

So Doyle wasn’t writing about puzzling out mysteries and solving crimes. At the center of most of the Holmes stories is a romantic adventure tale that may include a crime but is more likely building towards one and Holmes and Watson have to work fast to prevent it. They are often coming to the rescue and to do this Holmes usually, but not always, has to puzzle out a mystery. It’s interesting and amusing that Holmes figures out that Doctor Roylott is using a trained swamp adder as a murder weapon, but it’s important that Holmes is there in the nick of time to beat back the snake and save the girl.

For this to matter, we have to care about Helen Stoner as an intended victim and about Roylott as a villain. (By the way, there’s never a doubt that he is a villain. Few of Holmes’ cases are whodunits. Most are howdidtheydoits or howdotheyplantodoits or willtheygetawaywithits.) This means she and he have to matter as characters in a story that matters. It's the same for the heroes, heroines, victims, and villains in the other adventures.  They matter because the story matters. The story matters because they matter. You can look at it either way. What it amounts to is that Holmes and Watson are characters in their adventures, quite often supporting characters, arriving like the cavalry as those adventures are reaching their climaxes.

If we weren’t afraid for Helen Stoner, if we weren’t afraid of Doctor Roylott, it wouldn’t strike us as such an impressive feat on Holmes’ part when he figures out what the speckled band is. If we didn’t come quickly to like and admire Irene Adler and develop a rooting interest in her outwitting Holmes, his tricking her into revealing where she hid the photograph would be just that, a neat trick. If we weren’t made to fall half in love with Lady Brackenstall ourselves, it wouldn’t worry us that every bit of evidence Holmes turns up points towards her lying about the circumstances of her husband’s murder.

The stories matter. The characters matter. The mysteries are secondary. And many of the stories are sensationalistic. Doyle's influences include more than Poe’s Dupin and his influence extends beyond Agatha Christie and Rex Stout. Doyle crosses over into high Kipling---The Sign of Four, The Crooked Man---or gives in enthusiastically to the influences of Wilke Collins and his fellow Scot Robert Louis Stevenson---The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Resident Patient, The Creeping Man, The Sussex Vampire. Sometimes---The Dancing Men, The Gloria Scott, Wisteria Lodge, and The Greek Interpreter---he’s paving the way for Jack London and Joseph Conrad.

Of the eight episodes I’ve seen, only two have had plots like those kind of stories. In an episode titled Dirty Laundry, Holmes investigates the murder of a woman who turns out to have been a member of a sleeper cell of Russian spies living as an average American family in the suburbs. I know. Shades of The Americans, right? But Elementary got there first and, besides it’s based on a real and recent news story. And Doyle would have approved of the plot.  Holmes finds himself drawn into the world of spies and international intrigue in a number of stories, including The Second Stain, The Red Circle, and The Bruce Partington Plans. But in those adventures, the real stories belong to the people caught up in the intrigue.  In Dirty Laundry, what the spies were up to barely matters. Holmes is never in danger of being drawn in to their adventure because there isn’t any adventure.  Their story is just the background for the puzzle the writers have given Holmes to solve.

Thursday night’s episode, The Red Team, was about a conspiracy to kill off all the members of a federal counter-terrorist study group that had devised an unstoppable plan for devastating New York. (It’s telling, though, that the title isn’t an allusion to The Red-Headed League.) It came closer to providing Holmes with an actual adventure.  The characters almost came to life in their own rights and their story was almost a story.  But in the end it was about solving another puzzle and what story it had was a continuation of the revenge trope that excuses the hero for everything.

The show’s writers seem to think we’re interested in Holmes only because we enjoy his being brilliant, But in their struggles to contrive problems for him to solve that require him to be brilliant, they over-complicate the plots, pile on the red herrings, play games with suspects and motives, and, when all else fails, kill off another character in order to give Holmes more clues to chase, making Holmes less of brilliant deductionist than an indefatigable multi-tasker, the opposite of Holmes’ approach in the story which is always to narrow his focus. By the end they’ve tied their stories into so many knots that there is no way for Holmes to be brilliant enough to figure it all out because it can’t be figured out, it can only be described. It’s left to Holmes to explain it to us in a way that makes it seem that he solved the case by the simple trick of reading ahead in the script.

What the writers forget---or failed to observe in their reading of the stories---is that Holmes’ brilliant deductions are often a matter of a single, but simple close observation. He’s noticed something that’s easily overlooked by others---the dirt on a shop assistant’s knees, the dog that did nothing in the night time. And when Holmes explains it, Watson or someone is bound to respond something like, “But that’s so obvious. Why didn’t I think of that?” The suspense isn’t in our wondering if Holmes will solve the problem or how he we will solve it---we know he will and we know when he does our own response will be the same as Watson’s. Part of the fun is chuckling over our own obliviousness.---the suspense is in our worrying that he might not solve it in time.

And the tension comes from the problem’s having been set by a particular person.

Even in the stories where Holmes’ detective work is more central, it’s not a one-man show. Holmes is matching wits with someone at least smart enough to challenge Holmes’ intelligence for a time. There’s a war of wills going on between Holmes and whoever it is, and although sometimes we can’t see his adversaries right away, because they’re as yet unknown or they are offstage and have to be chased down or, at least in one case, dead and, in another case, apparently dead. The point is that an adversary is an active and intelligent character worth Holmes’ time and energy. They don’t need to be and rarely are up to Moriarty’s level, but they have enough in them to present Holmes with a challenge that’s more than solving a puzzle.

Again, this makes them interesting characters in their own rights and gives them stories of their own. In Elementary this has been the case in one case. In the other episodes I’ve seen, the adversary has been only an explanation for the puzzle he or she has supposedly presented Holmes with, as if the writers are always working backwards, starting by saying, “This is a neat mystery we’ve concocted. Now what kind of person would do this?”

So the bad guys don’t matter because they’re just devices to explain the plots, and it’s the same with the victims, who are usually dead from the beginning anyway. And Holmes’ clients don’t matter because…he doesn’t have any clients.

Correction. He has one client. The police.

This Holmes is not a private consulting detective. He’s a full-time consultant for the NYPD and his cases are brought to him by the police, which is a significant change from the usual convention of Doyle’s stories. Many of Holmes’ most intriguing cases are brought to him straight by the victims or intended victims and this means they get to speak for themselves and immediately involve us in their distress.

On Elementary, however, we hear about them second-hand, from the mouths of cops in the voices of and words of cops delivering a report. It’s distancing and it has the effect of reducing them to plot devices in stories that are all about Holmes being brilliant, which, as I’ve pointed out, turns out to be trouble for the writers.

I don’t know why the show’s creators felt they had to give their Holmes this quasi-official position. It’s not true to the stories and it’s not original. Instead of connecting him with Doyle’s Holmes, it makes him just another in a line of TV detectives. Monk, Psych’s Shawn Spencer, Castle are “consultants” to the police too. In fact, Doyle’s Holmes would find this idea offensive. Holmes is routinely insistent that he did not work for the police. He’s a freelancer’s freelancer, a freebooter even, a soldier of fortune (I’m back to the swashbuckling.) and he demands a privateer’s freedom to conduct his business as he sees fit and not as the Law requires. And if that means doing things that are extra-legal or illegal---breaking and entering being one of his favorite tactics---that’s all to the best. More than that, he wants the freedom to choose his own cases. Most of all, though, he wants the freedom to decide for himself whether or not to hand someone over to the Law for punishment.

“…My sister thinks that I am going mad. Sometimes I think that I am myself. And now–and now I am myself a branded thief, without ever having touched the wealth for which I sold my character. God help me! God help me!” He burst into convulsive sobbing, with his face buried in his hands.

There was a long silence, broken only by his heavy breathing, and by the measured tapping of Sherlock Holmes’s finger-tips upon the edge of the table. Then my friend rose and threw open the door.

“Get out!” said he.

“What, sir! Oh, Heaven bless you!”

“No more words. Get out!”

And no more words were needed. There was a rush, a clatter upon the stairs, the bang of a door, and the crisp rattle of running footfalls from the street.

“After all, Watson,” said Holmes, reaching up his hand for his clay pipe, “I am not retained by the police to supply their deficiencies. If Horner were in danger it would be another thing; but this fellow will not appear against him, and the case must collapse. I suppose that I am commuting a felony, but it is just possible that I am saving a soul. This fellow will not go wrong again; he is too terribly frightened. Send him to jail now, and you make him a jail-bird for life. Besides, it is the season of forgiveness. Chance has put in our way a most singular and whimsical problem, and its solution is its own reward. If you will have the goodness to touch the bell, Doctor, we will begin another investigation, in which, also a bird will be the chief feature.”

So…no adventures or potential adventures, no stories only plots, no real deductions only obviously scripted exposition, no clients, no worthy villains, no real characters besides Holmes and Watson and the police, not even any sense of time and place. Too much can be made of the theatrical trappings of Doyle’s Holmes’ Victorian London, the fog, the gas lamps, the top hats and hansom cabs and cockney voices calling out in the dark. But Holmes lives in a particular place and he knows it inside and out, because he has to in order to do his job, and he knows it in more ways than geographically. He knows its characters and its character. New York City as a particular place doesn’t figure in Elementary hardly at all. It’s a generic city and its crime scenes are generic, a hotel laundry, a bank, a beach, a hospital, a corporate boardroom, an airport hangar, all of which for all we see and hear and for all it matters could be and might as well be in Boston, or Chicago, or Houston, Miami, Los Angeles, or Honolulu, anywhere that’s Big City, USA.

It all adds up to this. Jonny Lee Miller hasn’t convinced me that his Sherlock Holmes is Sherlock Holmes because so far he hasn’t appeared in anything like a real Sherlock Holmes story.

That could change, quickly and easily enough. I hope it does. As I’ve said, Miller’s Holmes has many Holmesian qualities and the swashbuckling side of him might show itself if he’s ever given a real adventure. And he has other traits that weren’t part of Doyle’s Holmes but which has become standard, thanks to that one Sherlock Holmes I didn’t name up top. Nicol Willaimson.

In The Seven Percent Solution (written and directed by Nicholas Meyer in 1976), Williamson made Holmes manic, neurotic, and more than a touch paranoid. He also made him dashing, overtly swashbuckling---the movie’s climax is a swordfight between Holmes and the villain on top of a moving train---and, if not young, youthful.

The Seven Percent Solution has finally been re-released on DVD and New York Times has a good article about how Williamson is The Holmes Behind the Modern Sherlock.

Of course, Williamson was playing Holmes as a drug addict, so some of these qualities are signs of his being coked out of his head. Brett’s and Cumberbatch’s are recreational users. Miller’s Holmes isn’t using. He’s in recovery. Which brings me to a couple other things that keep me from accepting Miller as the Sherlock Holmes.

He’s young, yes. The youngest Holmes yet, even though Miller is several years older than Cumberbatch. But he’s not young in the sense of being a young man. He’s young in the sense of being boyish. And not just any sort of boy. A little boy lost.

Doyle’s Holmes appears to have no parents. His only family is his brother Mycroft. We don’t know if Miller’s Holmes has a brother but he most definitely has a father. A very stern and demanding one. We haven’t met him yet but his presence is felt in that Holmes’ recovery is being paid for and overseen by his father. So instead of Holmes being in the position of an independent grown-up, he’s essentially a teenager who’s been grounded and who’s always looking for opportunities to sneak out of the house and have some fun.

He even has a babysitter to outwit and avoid.

You’ve probably noticed I haven’t mentioned someone very important to every Holmes. I’ll get to him…I mean her…no, both, him and her in a follow-up post. But for now it’s enough to know that Miller’s Holmes’ Watson is a stand-in for Daddy Holmes.

And if that’s not enough, Holmes’ addiction isn’t due to a habit of self-medication that got out of control.

He was driven to it by heartbreak and grief. Someone near and dear to him was murdered and he can’t forgive himself because he failed to save her.

It’s not much of stretch to play Holmes as psychologically damaged in some way. But I cannot accept as Sherlock Holmes a Sherlock Holmes we’re meant to feel sorry for.

CBS is showing a new episode tonight after the Super Bowl. I’ll be tuning in. There’s still a chance the show will grow on me and that Miller’s Holmes will grow up. I hope so, because, again, he still looks the most like my Sherlock Holmes.

 

Elementary, starring Jonny Lee Miller, Lucy Liu, Aidan Quinn, and Jon Michael Hill, airs on CBS, Thursday nights at 10 PM Eastern time, 9 Central.  A new episode will air tonight after the Super Bowl.