I’m well accustomed to the contemporary impetus to hyper-contextualize art and literature—to pull the work down out of the space of the ideal, and tease it apart, qualifying or disqualifying it not by locating any intrinsic Quality (i.e. value, typically of a formal kind) but by revealing the historical and political machinations that, in the mind of the contemporary academic, somehow spring forth art and literature almost in spite of the artist or writer (as opposed to the traditional view, in which the artist or writer births his or her work by a kind of inspired and partnerless parthenogenesis).
Dabbling in extreme relativism myself at times, I fully understand this impulse (though by the nature of the writing here you see that I am ultimately against it). That said, I was always certain that this inclination to contextualize was safely trapped in the (wishy-washy) humanities. The colder realm of science, for example, would be immune to this obsessive historicization, because science moves forward as scientists discover new facts, and subjectivity and feelings don’t enter the lab. But reading Amundson’s book revealed to me that science is just as prone to this kind of infestation.
Amundson is a philosopher and a historian of biology, not a biologist proper, and it is the cross-pollination of these fields that allows this academic parasite ingress to what appears to be science. But in spite of its title, this is not a science book at all. Amundson offers none of his own laboratory research to demonstrate the viability of his argument (I won’t even call it a hypothesis). Instead, he recounts the history, beginning in the 19th Century, of biology’s attempt to understand the process by which life forms are generated. Highly polemical and peppered with as many unnecessary philosophy terms as science terms (woe to the reader who confuses “ontology” with “ontogeny”), Amundson frames that history as an as yet unresolved argument between developmentalists and geneticists (or proto-geneticists, for those 19th Century Darwinists who believed in adaptation, though they were uncertain of its mechanical means).
As a layperson who hasn’t thought about these things since AP Biology in high school ten years ago, my ultimate response to this argument may sound naïve to Amundson or a reader who has something invested in this controversy. But it seems to me that the development v. selection question is moot; both are valid and it simply depends on the direction in which one faces. The developmentalists, who demonstrate that fetuses of various species temporarily show homologous structures, have located a vestige of an inter-species relationship that fully supports the adaptationists’ belief that species diverge by mutation. Likewise, the adaptationists’ understanding of evolution on a population-level leaves room for the individual ontogeny to be the bearer of that evolution. Amundson admits that this is ultimately a chicken-and-egg question.
But if it is, why has he gotten his skivvies tied up in such a sweaty knot? For more than 250 pages, Amundson rather testily challenges primary and secondary sources, scourges certain 20th Century scientists for misreading certain 19th Century scientists, and creates a bogey man out of the Evolutionary Synthesis. In his concluding chapter, he then waffles a bit and concedes that it is awfully hard to make a case for the developmentalists inside the framework of the Evolutionary Synthesis (after he has spent so much effort discrediting that Synthesis!). Perhaps if he were an actual scientist Amundson would be pragmatic enough to make his argument with data, rather than (often opaque) rhetoric, and I might be more inclined to join his cause. As it stands, I’m still uncertain as to whether his cause even exists outside of his own academic paranoia.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Monday, September 7, 2009
The Meeting at Telgte, by Gunter Grass
My dad sent me this book, an extremely elite thought experiment that envisions a meeting of the premier 17th Century German poets during the negotiations at the end of the 30 Years War. Gathering from far-flung regions of the country, the group finds their intended lodgings filled with loitering soldiers and stacks of paper outlining battle plans and failed treaty attempts, but allow an educated and foppish con-cum-highway-man to find them alternative lodgings in a nearby town—Telgte—at the inn of a surprisingly learned and adventurous wench (“The landlady, though undoubtedly a trollop, was nevertheless an extraordinary woman.”*)
Once there ensconced, the poets conduct their meetings, a few days’ symposium during which they sit in a circle and take turns reading their work for comment by the others. The reader sits in a chair of “honor” beside a potted thistle. The highly specialized and spirited conversation circles around their desire not only for political peace, but peace of language—a standardizing of their varying regional tongues—and arguments over poetry’s vocation (religious hymns or bawdy songs).
I don’t imagine anyone, oh, “normal,” would really like this book, and yet I found it completely fascinating and hysterical, and immediately thought of three friends who would as well. They are all poets, though. . .
*From page 15, this may have been my favorite sentence in the book, and is a prime example of Grass’ pitch-perfect sense of humor
Once there ensconced, the poets conduct their meetings, a few days’ symposium during which they sit in a circle and take turns reading their work for comment by the others. The reader sits in a chair of “honor” beside a potted thistle. The highly specialized and spirited conversation circles around their desire not only for political peace, but peace of language—a standardizing of their varying regional tongues—and arguments over poetry’s vocation (religious hymns or bawdy songs).
I don’t imagine anyone, oh, “normal,” would really like this book, and yet I found it completely fascinating and hysterical, and immediately thought of three friends who would as well. They are all poets, though. . .
*From page 15, this may have been my favorite sentence in the book, and is a prime example of Grass’ pitch-perfect sense of humor
To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account, by Saul Bellow
I had hoped for a more personal travelogue from Bellow in To Jerusalem and Back, with its subtitle “A Personal Account,” but found it (as thoughts on Israel so often are) bogged down by dissenting voices arguing piddling details over who was where first, and when “first” was, who killed how many when and where, whether this border should be here or there, and, because of its Cold War context (Bellow published the memoir in 1976), what roles Russia and the US are to have in the country’s future.
There are scattered gems in which the author describes a meal on the airplane next to a young Hassidic Jew, a friend’s relationship with his dog, which even goes with him when he ships out to sea as an engineer, and imagines a secret tape recorder hidden underneath the dinner table at which he sits across from Kissinger. But the bulk of words are given over to statistics, and he-said-she-said, and who is entitled to what.
Bellow is a graceful intellectual, and visits the country as an interlocutor rather than a polemicist. That said, he never commits to any proposed solution to this problem, which has as its very simple root a refusal by two groups to share—land, government, culture, and their god, who is quite obviously the same god. Since seeing the country myself ten years ago, my only response has been pure bewilderment that the religious icon hasn’t been removed from the nation’s flag, that it hasn’t been rechristened with a non-partisan name, that the students haven’t been fully integrated, by force if necessary, and taught to love and respect each other, and speak each other’s languages, along with English or French or some other objective third, shared tongue that would become the national language.
Bellow writes at a time when Israel’s first generation of leaders is passing on, but the country is still quite populated by Jews who lived through the Holocaust. In spite of history’s horrors (and I write as a person whose maternal grandfather lost his entire family to the camps before he grew into a man), the insistence on a Jewish “homeland” is preposterous to me; I suppose I am an American first—I hold the separation of church and state more sacred than any spiritual tenet.
There are scattered gems in which the author describes a meal on the airplane next to a young Hassidic Jew, a friend’s relationship with his dog, which even goes with him when he ships out to sea as an engineer, and imagines a secret tape recorder hidden underneath the dinner table at which he sits across from Kissinger. But the bulk of words are given over to statistics, and he-said-she-said, and who is entitled to what.
Bellow is a graceful intellectual, and visits the country as an interlocutor rather than a polemicist. That said, he never commits to any proposed solution to this problem, which has as its very simple root a refusal by two groups to share—land, government, culture, and their god, who is quite obviously the same god. Since seeing the country myself ten years ago, my only response has been pure bewilderment that the religious icon hasn’t been removed from the nation’s flag, that it hasn’t been rechristened with a non-partisan name, that the students haven’t been fully integrated, by force if necessary, and taught to love and respect each other, and speak each other’s languages, along with English or French or some other objective third, shared tongue that would become the national language.
Bellow writes at a time when Israel’s first generation of leaders is passing on, but the country is still quite populated by Jews who lived through the Holocaust. In spite of history’s horrors (and I write as a person whose maternal grandfather lost his entire family to the camps before he grew into a man), the insistence on a Jewish “homeland” is preposterous to me; I suppose I am an American first—I hold the separation of church and state more sacred than any spiritual tenet.
The Sea Wolf, by Jack London
The Sea Wolf is everything I ever dreamed Moby Dick would be, but could never access through Melville’s barrier of whaling arcana. London gives us the battle between raw will and acculturated ethics straight-up, with enough clarity of syntax to allow a high school freshman access to the philosophical debate roiling under the castaway-meets-mutiny adventure.
Wolf Larson, captain of a seal-hunting ship, is all raw will: a self-made man with the body of a beast, ruthless in business, surprisingly well-read, but a materialist with no belief in the ephemeral notions of the soul, afterlife, or morality. He sees the ethical inclinations of narrator Humphrey Van Wyden, a gentleman writer and critic shipwrecked during a pleasure cruise and pulled on board the Ghost (Larson’s ship), as one of that man’s many weaknesses, along with his inability to earn his own meals through physical labor.
Rather than returning him to shore, Larson gives Van Wyden the moniker of Hump and puts him to work at the bottom of the ship’s ladder, as cabin boy and helper to the cook. Perhaps because of Van Wyden’s intellect, he develops a connection with Larson against his will, so that as the crew becomes increasingly mutinous and key men are lost to violence, Hump soon finds himself Mr. Van Wyden again, as First Mate. He has now learned not only to work for his meals, but to work the ships sails and navigational equipment, and he and Larson alone navigate the Ghost through a storm when all the other men are out on their sealing boats. All this time, he has spent nights arguing the nature of man with Larson, who continues to maintain that Larson’s ethics are mere weakness.
The deux ex machina comes with another castaway—the beautiful Maud Brewster, a poet and critic herself—who had been out sailing for her health when Larson’s crew saved her from her storm-smashed ship. Again, Larson refuses to return her to shore; clearly he has sexual designs on her, but Van Wyden is taken himself, and takes it upon himself to be her protector. Ironically thanks to his training through Larson’s brutality, the narrator is now equipped to steal a small sealing boat, load it with provisions, and escape with the willowy, frail Maud in the middle of the night. For days they paddle through hopelessly cold conditions until a tiny and uninhabited islet comes into sight.
There, they make house, combining knowledge Van Wyden picked up from other sailors with memories of shipwrecked characters in their favorite books. London is still obviously grappling with whether man is more mind or more creature. Though the house they build has two rooms, and Van Wyden is very clear about his passing nights alone in the beached boat until the second room is built, he admits to loving her, and finds himself referring to her as “my woman, my mate” in his most secret, silent thoughts.
The final challenge comes when Larson’s Ghost runs up on their islet, with no crew but Larson himself (all men lost in a run-in with his equally ruthless brother, Death Larson). Ravaged by unbearable headaches, blinded, and soon deaf, his body breaks before his will does, and he continues to try and foil the couple’s attempts to escape with the Ghost, cutting their repaired rigging, destroying the sails, and even setting his own bed on fire. But against all physical odds, using mathematics, engineering, and his new found will, Van Wyden gets the ship in working order just as Larson takes his dying breath. The couple sails the ship away from the islet after burying Larson at sea, and are soon rescued by another vessel.
There is something rather indulgent about reading such a straight-forward examination of the human condition; Melville buried his battle in the murkiest encyclopaedic ephemera, and pure philosophy would shy away from giving credence to Larson’s physicality. Though the captain is established as the hero’s tormentor and nemesis, we find ourselves sympathetic to Larson all the while. When Van Wyden is able to succeed precisely because he has absorbed some of Larson’s tendencies—physical strength, sexual desire, and most importantly, a confident will—London is condoning that antagonist’s convictions. But when that purely physical being expires by literal bursting in his brain, and Van Wyden is triumphant in his love, London tempers those convictions with humanist responsibilities.
Wolf Larson, captain of a seal-hunting ship, is all raw will: a self-made man with the body of a beast, ruthless in business, surprisingly well-read, but a materialist with no belief in the ephemeral notions of the soul, afterlife, or morality. He sees the ethical inclinations of narrator Humphrey Van Wyden, a gentleman writer and critic shipwrecked during a pleasure cruise and pulled on board the Ghost (Larson’s ship), as one of that man’s many weaknesses, along with his inability to earn his own meals through physical labor.
Rather than returning him to shore, Larson gives Van Wyden the moniker of Hump and puts him to work at the bottom of the ship’s ladder, as cabin boy and helper to the cook. Perhaps because of Van Wyden’s intellect, he develops a connection with Larson against his will, so that as the crew becomes increasingly mutinous and key men are lost to violence, Hump soon finds himself Mr. Van Wyden again, as First Mate. He has now learned not only to work for his meals, but to work the ships sails and navigational equipment, and he and Larson alone navigate the Ghost through a storm when all the other men are out on their sealing boats. All this time, he has spent nights arguing the nature of man with Larson, who continues to maintain that Larson’s ethics are mere weakness.
The deux ex machina comes with another castaway—the beautiful Maud Brewster, a poet and critic herself—who had been out sailing for her health when Larson’s crew saved her from her storm-smashed ship. Again, Larson refuses to return her to shore; clearly he has sexual designs on her, but Van Wyden is taken himself, and takes it upon himself to be her protector. Ironically thanks to his training through Larson’s brutality, the narrator is now equipped to steal a small sealing boat, load it with provisions, and escape with the willowy, frail Maud in the middle of the night. For days they paddle through hopelessly cold conditions until a tiny and uninhabited islet comes into sight.
There, they make house, combining knowledge Van Wyden picked up from other sailors with memories of shipwrecked characters in their favorite books. London is still obviously grappling with whether man is more mind or more creature. Though the house they build has two rooms, and Van Wyden is very clear about his passing nights alone in the beached boat until the second room is built, he admits to loving her, and finds himself referring to her as “my woman, my mate” in his most secret, silent thoughts.
The final challenge comes when Larson’s Ghost runs up on their islet, with no crew but Larson himself (all men lost in a run-in with his equally ruthless brother, Death Larson). Ravaged by unbearable headaches, blinded, and soon deaf, his body breaks before his will does, and he continues to try and foil the couple’s attempts to escape with the Ghost, cutting their repaired rigging, destroying the sails, and even setting his own bed on fire. But against all physical odds, using mathematics, engineering, and his new found will, Van Wyden gets the ship in working order just as Larson takes his dying breath. The couple sails the ship away from the islet after burying Larson at sea, and are soon rescued by another vessel.
There is something rather indulgent about reading such a straight-forward examination of the human condition; Melville buried his battle in the murkiest encyclopaedic ephemera, and pure philosophy would shy away from giving credence to Larson’s physicality. Though the captain is established as the hero’s tormentor and nemesis, we find ourselves sympathetic to Larson all the while. When Van Wyden is able to succeed precisely because he has absorbed some of Larson’s tendencies—physical strength, sexual desire, and most importantly, a confident will—London is condoning that antagonist’s convictions. But when that purely physical being expires by literal bursting in his brain, and Van Wyden is triumphant in his love, London tempers those convictions with humanist responsibilities.
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Books: The Professor of Desire, by Philip Roth
At twenty I must stop impersonating others and Become Myself, or at least begin to impersonate the self I believe I ought now to be. 12
Another classic Roth read, less obscene than Portnoy's Complaint, but more sexually frank than American Pastoral, The Professor of Desire chronicles the romantic coming-of-age of David Kepesh (who becomes a literature professor, fixated on the tender Chekov, the stymied Kafka, and a suite of other authors who focus intently on his own obsession with loveless life's impossibility). Kepesh moves from sweaty tangles with a high school cheerleader through a sadomasochistic menage-a-trois with two Swedish girlfriends to a dysfunctional marriage with an exotic beauty and a penultimate bout of depression before finally settling in with a healthily attractive, generous and kind, simple grade school teacher. He wants to believe that he'll at last be happy, but he feels the seeds of dissatisfaction with his good, scrubbed girl.
I love Roth for his blatant honesty about those feelings for which we are often ashamed, his willingness to admit that we are dissatisfied creatures who rarely know a good thing when we see it and, if we do, find it impossible nonetheless, for whatever petty reason (in this case, it's that clean Claire lacks even the most basic kinks of his Swedish lover, kindly refusing to fellate him, though she wants to bear his child). Kepesh takes Claire to Europe to exorcise his old lovers' ghosts, and, to a degree, it works. But there remains that threat of dissatisfaction, of having tasted too much to be happy with any one flavor, of being too comfortable with seeking to sit still once he's found.
Another classic Roth read, less obscene than Portnoy's Complaint, but more sexually frank than American Pastoral, The Professor of Desire chronicles the romantic coming-of-age of David Kepesh (who becomes a literature professor, fixated on the tender Chekov, the stymied Kafka, and a suite of other authors who focus intently on his own obsession with loveless life's impossibility). Kepesh moves from sweaty tangles with a high school cheerleader through a sadomasochistic menage-a-trois with two Swedish girlfriends to a dysfunctional marriage with an exotic beauty and a penultimate bout of depression before finally settling in with a healthily attractive, generous and kind, simple grade school teacher. He wants to believe that he'll at last be happy, but he feels the seeds of dissatisfaction with his good, scrubbed girl.
I love Roth for his blatant honesty about those feelings for which we are often ashamed, his willingness to admit that we are dissatisfied creatures who rarely know a good thing when we see it and, if we do, find it impossible nonetheless, for whatever petty reason (in this case, it's that clean Claire lacks even the most basic kinks of his Swedish lover, kindly refusing to fellate him, though she wants to bear his child). Kepesh takes Claire to Europe to exorcise his old lovers' ghosts, and, to a degree, it works. But there remains that threat of dissatisfaction, of having tasted too much to be happy with any one flavor, of being too comfortable with seeking to sit still once he's found.
Books: The Old Gringo, by Carlos Fuentes
There's something Under the Volcanoish about The Old Gringo, which is as nostalgic and lonely, even though it's stone-cold sober. And unlike Terra Nostra, the other Fuentes novel I've read (and loved), The Old Gringo is far from epic. Instead, it's a short, bittersweet flurry of repressed emotions, opening at the scene of the old gringo's burial, and flashing back to the days leading up to his death; he came to Mexico purposely to die, clean-shaven, neatly dressed, and carrying Don Quixote, which he intends to read before he does. He plans to do this by joining Pancho Villa's army of rebels.
Instead, he meets a young American girl, come to Mexico to act as Governess for an aristocratic family. The night of her arrival, the rebels set fire to the hacienda and the aristocrats escape. She and the old gringo have an instant, pained connection (he suddenly considers living, so that he can protect her; she is fatherless and refuses to go home). But she has made a bargain with the covetous General Arroyo, the man whose army the gringo has joined on its way to join with Villa. She sleeps with him to save the gringo's life from Arroyo's fire. The gringo, who has come to Mexico to die, has outshone Arroyo with his bravery, which the General cannot tolerate.
The gringo understands Mexico and the corrupt Arroyo in a way that the young girl refuses; patently American, she insists on staying on to do her "duty"—instructing the Mexicans in English "reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic" as well as ethics. Insisting that the locals must learn to respect personal property, she orders the destroyed hacienda rebuilt, and places one of the aristocratic family's few remaining treasures—a string of pearls—out on display. She is devastated when they are stolen, despite Arroyo's explanation: the wrongdoing was her own, by creating temptation.
Her ultimate duty, though, is to the gringo, and she leaves Mexico after Arroyo finally shoots him, claiming the old man as her long-lost father. But Fuentes doesn't give us the resolution that she has learned anything or become healed. Like the Consul's wife in Under the Volcano, this woman is hazy, a kind of light-infused shadow. The story is not hers. But neither is it fully the gringo's, with his obsession with his own father, or Arroyo's, with his landowner's papers that he cannot read, being illiterate. The book starts, ends, and is filled throughout with the repetitive pattering voices of the Mexican soldiers fighting with Arroyo, General Frutos García, Innocencio Mansalvo, the boy Pedrito, and the witch-like La Garduña, who gossip about the old gringo, who he was, and what he was doing in Mexico. We have little access to their pasts, futures, or interiors either, but their voices set the tone that makes the book the dream that it is.
Instead, he meets a young American girl, come to Mexico to act as Governess for an aristocratic family. The night of her arrival, the rebels set fire to the hacienda and the aristocrats escape. She and the old gringo have an instant, pained connection (he suddenly considers living, so that he can protect her; she is fatherless and refuses to go home). But she has made a bargain with the covetous General Arroyo, the man whose army the gringo has joined on its way to join with Villa. She sleeps with him to save the gringo's life from Arroyo's fire. The gringo, who has come to Mexico to die, has outshone Arroyo with his bravery, which the General cannot tolerate.
The gringo understands Mexico and the corrupt Arroyo in a way that the young girl refuses; patently American, she insists on staying on to do her "duty"—instructing the Mexicans in English "reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic" as well as ethics. Insisting that the locals must learn to respect personal property, she orders the destroyed hacienda rebuilt, and places one of the aristocratic family's few remaining treasures—a string of pearls—out on display. She is devastated when they are stolen, despite Arroyo's explanation: the wrongdoing was her own, by creating temptation.
Her ultimate duty, though, is to the gringo, and she leaves Mexico after Arroyo finally shoots him, claiming the old man as her long-lost father. But Fuentes doesn't give us the resolution that she has learned anything or become healed. Like the Consul's wife in Under the Volcano, this woman is hazy, a kind of light-infused shadow. The story is not hers. But neither is it fully the gringo's, with his obsession with his own father, or Arroyo's, with his landowner's papers that he cannot read, being illiterate. The book starts, ends, and is filled throughout with the repetitive pattering voices of the Mexican soldiers fighting with Arroyo, General Frutos García, Innocencio Mansalvo, the boy Pedrito, and the witch-like La Garduña, who gossip about the old gringo, who he was, and what he was doing in Mexico. We have little access to their pasts, futures, or interiors either, but their voices set the tone that makes the book the dream that it is.
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Books: The Last of the Mohicans, by James Fenimore Cooper
One can’t help wondering what, in 1826, Cooper intended in writing The Last of the Mohicans. Its heroes and villains are clearly enough demarcated that he may simply have sat down to write a good adventure, and the twelve-year-old boy looking for tomahawks and rifles and canoes and caves and battles to the death, complete with scalping, won’t be disappointed. But this is also a highly romantic novel—not in its attentiveness to the negligible love story, but in its depiction of the American Indian, a sort of super-human sub-human, who is elevated above the white man by a pre-societal skill set. To a degree, Cooper aggrandizes the abilities of the natives of all the tribes—including the enemy Iroquois—but the clear epitome of heroism here is the adolescent Uncas, the second-to-the-last-Mohican, who wanders the woods not with his tribe, which has been demolished, but with his father (the Last, after Uncas’ death in the novel’s last pages) and the white-turned-native Hawkeye, who serves as interlocutor for the pair of Mohicans and the English sisters whom they spend the duration of the novel rescuing.
There are moments when Cooper seems to be advocating for equality; the wise (but less beautiful) older sister, though she refuses to marry the villain Magua when he offers her “death or my wigwam,” seems to have a respectful admiration, bordering on affection, for the heroic Uncas, despite their differences, one which he reciprocates. At the novel’s end, when they both lose their lives, it is understood by all that she will join him in the Native afterlife, rather than proceeding to the heaven of her own people (the concept of multiple, segregated afterlives being one worth a masters’ thesis in and of itself). And yet, they could hardly be allowed to couple in waking life, and so the living couple that does marry is, of course, the younger sister, trembling and blonde, and the young General, valiant and dull-witted. Does Cooper mean to say that we’ve killed everything self-sufficient, wise, just, and organic, and built our current society on empty beauty, empty valor, shallow good intentions, unconscious self-indulgence?
There are moments when Cooper seems to be advocating for equality; the wise (but less beautiful) older sister, though she refuses to marry the villain Magua when he offers her “death or my wigwam,” seems to have a respectful admiration, bordering on affection, for the heroic Uncas, despite their differences, one which he reciprocates. At the novel’s end, when they both lose their lives, it is understood by all that she will join him in the Native afterlife, rather than proceeding to the heaven of her own people (the concept of multiple, segregated afterlives being one worth a masters’ thesis in and of itself). And yet, they could hardly be allowed to couple in waking life, and so the living couple that does marry is, of course, the younger sister, trembling and blonde, and the young General, valiant and dull-witted. Does Cooper mean to say that we’ve killed everything self-sufficient, wise, just, and organic, and built our current society on empty beauty, empty valor, shallow good intentions, unconscious self-indulgence?
Movies: Born To Be Bad
The deliciously evil female is a character missing from films in last 50 years, perhaps because no one could possibly top Joan Fontaine’s Christobel in Nicholas Ray’s 1950 Born To Be Bad, or perhaps because women are too busy managing their careers these days to bother with wealthy husband stealing.
To be sure, there aren’t many saps like Curtis Carey (Zachary Scott) around any longer—a big-eared, kind-hearted magnate deep in love with the capable, attractive, and ethically-sound Donna Foster (Joan Leslie). A man so prone to self-doubt and susceptible to the machinations of the pretty vultures around him (not only Christobel, but also her main gay, the type-cast-but-brilliant-nevertheless Gobby Broome (Mel Ferrer), a society portraitist cast from a Jamesian mold) wouldn’t survive long in today’s business world.
But even if the plot and its stakes are dated, and the characters terribly typecast (the central group is rounded out by writer/adventurer Nick Bradley (Robert Ryan), the tough-talking romantic whose raw masculinity ensnares Christobel’s passion), the film is fantastic, filled with arch one-liners, choice bit-parts (an insistent jewelry salesman; a sickly great-aunt), and a punishing ending for the gold-digger (who keeps the furs and the convertible, but has to give back the key to the house). I have a soft spot at the movies for things I can’t stand in real life.
To be sure, there aren’t many saps like Curtis Carey (Zachary Scott) around any longer—a big-eared, kind-hearted magnate deep in love with the capable, attractive, and ethically-sound Donna Foster (Joan Leslie). A man so prone to self-doubt and susceptible to the machinations of the pretty vultures around him (not only Christobel, but also her main gay, the type-cast-but-brilliant-nevertheless Gobby Broome (Mel Ferrer), a society portraitist cast from a Jamesian mold) wouldn’t survive long in today’s business world.
But even if the plot and its stakes are dated, and the characters terribly typecast (the central group is rounded out by writer/adventurer Nick Bradley (Robert Ryan), the tough-talking romantic whose raw masculinity ensnares Christobel’s passion), the film is fantastic, filled with arch one-liners, choice bit-parts (an insistent jewelry salesman; a sickly great-aunt), and a punishing ending for the gold-digger (who keeps the furs and the convertible, but has to give back the key to the house). I have a soft spot at the movies for things I can’t stand in real life.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Movies: Bu San (Goodbye, Dragon Inn)
I had this DVD in my possession before I finally watched it, on my laptop, in bed, the motor’s heat radiating into my thighs as dusk fell to dark out the picture window in front of me. Ironically, this ultra-intimate viewing seemed ideal for this slow and quiet film, a kind of Tarkovsky treatment of a Wong Kar-wai subject, in which a semi-incapacitated young woman drags her leg down long hallways and an isolated young man, afflicted with either Asperger’s or latent homosexuality, sits uncomfortably in a mostly-empty movie theater, always surprisingly near to the few other moviegoers. It’s ironic, of course, because the film is about a movie theater, its big, vacuous space, a vaguely unpleasant cavity between damp concrete slabs, as so much of China seemed to be when I was there (and when I procured this DVD, which I did not watch until now).
Tsai Ming-liang is known for these long, quiet shots, which make us as uncomfortable as the woman with the limp, or the man subjected to the sound of a vixen in the row behind him, shelling sunflower seeds between her teeth. Whether one finds this titillating or tedious depends on one’s patience and state of mind; I’m certain that, had I watched this film with someone else in the room, or in a theatre filled with shifting bodies, I would have loathed it. Tsai’s melting reds and greens are as beautiful as Wong's, but In the Mood For Love, with its similarly quiet and repetitive sequences, draws us to its characters (enabled by its haunting string theme, which, though it repeats constantly, never wears). We don’t feel much of anything for Tsai’s characters—they are pariahs, really, which is why they are there in the first place, cleaning out the stalls of the bathroom, lurking in the hallways, waiting in the projection room, dreamless, deadened. They are unpleasant people, detached from their own longing.
Tsai Ming-liang is known for these long, quiet shots, which make us as uncomfortable as the woman with the limp, or the man subjected to the sound of a vixen in the row behind him, shelling sunflower seeds between her teeth. Whether one finds this titillating or tedious depends on one’s patience and state of mind; I’m certain that, had I watched this film with someone else in the room, or in a theatre filled with shifting bodies, I would have loathed it. Tsai’s melting reds and greens are as beautiful as Wong's, but In the Mood For Love, with its similarly quiet and repetitive sequences, draws us to its characters (enabled by its haunting string theme, which, though it repeats constantly, never wears). We don’t feel much of anything for Tsai’s characters—they are pariahs, really, which is why they are there in the first place, cleaning out the stalls of the bathroom, lurking in the hallways, waiting in the projection room, dreamless, deadened. They are unpleasant people, detached from their own longing.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Books: Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates
Either screenwriter Haythe and director Mendes were more faithful to the novel than I credited them with being, or I completely lack imagination for, reading Revolutionary Road seven months after watching the movie, I could only project the film’s images in my mind’s eye. Months ago, I insisted DiCaprio was miscast, but reading every mention of Frank Wheeler, I could only see his pliable features. I distrusted Daisy’s foresight in bringing a pack of cigarettes up the hill with her in the midst of her worst argument with her husband, but there it is on the book’s page, so I saw Kate Winslet’s face briefly blow in the flame’s amber light.
I had also trusted the proclamations of male readers that the book’s sympathies skewed male, to Frank Wheeler’s professional dissatisfaction and self-loathing, but when reading it for myself, found it to be as much a tale of women’s woe as the film was. The FDA first approved the oral contraceptive pill in 1960; Yates published Revolutionary Road in 1962 about a couple whose lives are literally destroyed by the responsibility incurred by unplanned pregnancies in the 1950s.
Frank Wheeler is not a particularly likable character. April Wheeler is not particularly likable either, but nor is she quite as dislikable as Frank. Though she was as complicit as he in the formation of their mistake (allowing a brief affair evolve, via a series of mounting emotional white lies, into a marriage), she had the foresight to suggest aborting their first pregnancy. And so, at least she kept her wits about her, and wanted to make logical choices in the face of reality. Facing the same opportunity at the outset of their third pregnancy, Frank Wheeler fights tooth and nail to keep the child, until, winning at last, he locks himself in the bedroom with a bottle of whisky, realizing that he doesn’t even want that third child, probably didn’t want the first two, and fought for them only with the instinct of protecting his manhood. This is someone I cannot respect, and I rarely side with the girls.
Radical ethics aside, I was surprised to be a bit let-down by the book, just as I was surprised to be let-down by the movie. Yates’ writes with facile distaste, such haughty, smug prose, rather like a contemporary, American, Evelyn Waugh (arch Waugh of satires like The Loved One, not of the devastating Brideshead Revisited).* I didn’t much care for the plight of the bright young Wheelers, or anyone in the book, for that matter, except perhaps the hapless Shep Campbell, who thinks he loves April, is used by her one night, and then has to comfort her husband when he himself is reeling from her death. Only his emotions, perhaps because of their naïvete, feel genuine. The insightful madman, John Givings, whose proclamations came so cutting in the film’s otherwise blithely elegant chatter, seems equally blithe in the book, nearly as resigned to the “hopeless emptiness” as the Wheelers.
*April’s flashback to a scene in which her Gatsby of a father gives her the plastic horse charm off a bottle of cologne or liquor because he forgot to bring a gift is, it seems, a flashback to an Evelyn Waugh novel, unless Yates is relying completely on the Fitzgeralds for inspiration.
I had also trusted the proclamations of male readers that the book’s sympathies skewed male, to Frank Wheeler’s professional dissatisfaction and self-loathing, but when reading it for myself, found it to be as much a tale of women’s woe as the film was. The FDA first approved the oral contraceptive pill in 1960; Yates published Revolutionary Road in 1962 about a couple whose lives are literally destroyed by the responsibility incurred by unplanned pregnancies in the 1950s.
Frank Wheeler is not a particularly likable character. April Wheeler is not particularly likable either, but nor is she quite as dislikable as Frank. Though she was as complicit as he in the formation of their mistake (allowing a brief affair evolve, via a series of mounting emotional white lies, into a marriage), she had the foresight to suggest aborting their first pregnancy. And so, at least she kept her wits about her, and wanted to make logical choices in the face of reality. Facing the same opportunity at the outset of their third pregnancy, Frank Wheeler fights tooth and nail to keep the child, until, winning at last, he locks himself in the bedroom with a bottle of whisky, realizing that he doesn’t even want that third child, probably didn’t want the first two, and fought for them only with the instinct of protecting his manhood. This is someone I cannot respect, and I rarely side with the girls.
Radical ethics aside, I was surprised to be a bit let-down by the book, just as I was surprised to be let-down by the movie. Yates’ writes with facile distaste, such haughty, smug prose, rather like a contemporary, American, Evelyn Waugh (arch Waugh of satires like The Loved One, not of the devastating Brideshead Revisited).* I didn’t much care for the plight of the bright young Wheelers, or anyone in the book, for that matter, except perhaps the hapless Shep Campbell, who thinks he loves April, is used by her one night, and then has to comfort her husband when he himself is reeling from her death. Only his emotions, perhaps because of their naïvete, feel genuine. The insightful madman, John Givings, whose proclamations came so cutting in the film’s otherwise blithely elegant chatter, seems equally blithe in the book, nearly as resigned to the “hopeless emptiness” as the Wheelers.
*April’s flashback to a scene in which her Gatsby of a father gives her the plastic horse charm off a bottle of cologne or liquor because he forgot to bring a gift is, it seems, a flashback to an Evelyn Waugh novel, unless Yates is relying completely on the Fitzgeralds for inspiration.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
