A Guilty Pleasure?

I repost this every year, for the obvious reasons. Siskel and Ebert used to have a feature they called "Guilty Pleasures" in which they talked about movies that they loved despite the fact that they are frankly not artistic masterpieces. This is one of mine. I am sure Hallmark with be re-airing it multiple times between now and Christmas - it is one of the best things they have done. I recommend setting your DVR! (It is also available on DVD.)

This must be one of my favorite movies. Deborah says I've seen "The Christmas Card" (Hallmark, 2006) more times than Vertigo, which is true. By a factor of five or six. She thinks my love of it may be an early sign of approaching insanity.

There is I suppose an interesting question here. It would be hard to deny that I am an educated person. I have taught film at the university level many times, and published on it as well. Why have I watched my DVD of this Hallmark made-for-TV movie so many times?

Part of the reason is purely personal and idiosyncratic. It was filmed entirely on location in one of my favorite places on Earth, beautiful Nevada City, California. (Imagine a pristine New England village moved to the foothills of the Alps.) It is odd that NC has seldom been used as a film location, and except for this film has never "portrayed" itself.

Also, it is the last film made by Lois Nettleton, one of my favorite actresses.

In my defense (aside from the fact that I am not the only one who loves this little film): Though it is a Hallmark feel-good show, it is probably the best one ever. It is almost certainly the most watched, and Edward Asner was nominated for an Emmy for his role in it.

More important, for me, is the fact that NC is perfectly cast and very effectively used for its role in the film. Sgt. Cody Cullen (John Newton) is the sort of person who would be happiest in a place where he can put down roots, enjoying friends and family, with little need to ever wander far from home. But his father is killed in Vietnam when he is a child, and his mother, emotionally shattered, dies shortly after he graduates from high school. He joins the army, thinking that it will be the family he has lost. But people keep dying around him. When he receives a Christmas card as part of a church cards-for-service-people program from the home town of a dead comrade, killed in a rocket attack in Afghanistan, he reads it compulsively until it nearly falls apart. Before long, he comes back to the states and meets the woman who wrote the card (Alice Evans), struggling with the question of whether to reveal to her that for a while now he has been obsessed with the thought of her and her town, the perfect putting-down-roots place, Nevada City.

...

Below is the Joany Kane (right) the writer of "The Chrismas Card" when just this year she visited Nevada City for the first time. For some reason, Hallmark has only produced one more script by Kane though, as she told me in an email exchange, she has submitted a number of others. On the left is the current mayor of NC. Over Herronor's shoulder you can see a picture of NC's historic National Hotel, which appears in the movie. (Hat-tip for picture to the Nevada City Union.)

BTW, here is an article about the lumber company where the work-related scenes of the movie were filmed. Folks who scouted possible locations found that most lumber mills in the area consisted of corrugated metal buildings that were not very photogenic. At last they found this "historic" mill that still does things "the old-fashioned way."

The Mystery of the English Riots

I've been struggling to understand the arson, looting, and senseless violence in England over that last four days. That sort of behavior is so alien to me that this is like understanding beings from another planet. This article, though tainted by the shortcomings of the author's Tory priorities, seemed helpful to me. He says, in effect, these people are not from another planet, they are from the future. The may or may or may not be from your future. For sure they are out of a futuristic novel and movie call A Clockwork Orange. Say hello to Alex and his droogies!

The idea is that the system, one of the wealthiest welfare states on Earth, has created a large underclass of young people with no marketable skills and little or no interest in being productively employed, kept in useless idleness on the dole.

The distinguished political philosopher John Rawls claimed that if we arrange social institutions so that inequalities are in the interest of the least well-off people this will boost their self-esteem because it will show that we care about and value then. He never went into just what institutions fill this bill (with commendable humility, he figured he is not qualified to do this, not being an economist) but it seems to me that for this particular point, he would have to accept as an example of such a system getting a monthly check in the mail of money taken from the most well-off people. The stuff the system gives them, just for being the worst-off brings a convincing message: you are good.

No it doesn't. The message it carries is more like: "So sorry you can't seem to fend for yourself! Well, here's some stuff produced by people who, unlike you, can fend for themselves. Hope things start lookin' up for you! Cheers!" How self-esteem-boosting is that?

Rawls was a brilliant man, but he was a rotten psychologist. Much better were Dostoyevsky (in Notes from the Underground), Nietzche, and Erich Hoffer. These people would tell you that people don't get a sense of dignity and self-worth by being paid for nothing. They get it from a sense of efficacy (that is, power), and this can only come from their own action. And if for some reason they can't or won't act constructively, then they will act destructively, if only to prove that they are still human beings and have to be taken seriously.
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Update: For an interpretation similar to the above-linked article (but in the leftist Guardian) see this.

Rhapsody in Blue

The other night we watched Rhapsody in Blue (dir. Irving Rapper, 1945). It was really quite good.

It was a special treat to see Oscar Levant playing himself. He must have written many of his own lines: "I've got a date with my insomnia [trans.: it's time to go to bed]" "If it wasn't for Gershwin I could've been a pretty good mediocre composer." And then there is:

Oscar: If I had your talent, I'd be a pretty obnoxious fella. What do you call yourself?
George: George Gershwin. It's my real name.
Oscar: Mine's Oscar Levant. I'm thinking of changing it.

Levant's style of humor is unique. Generally, it's the sort of thing that is usually called "self-deprecating," but with a difference. Usually one deprecates one's own intelligence and virtue. In his case, it is mainly his own happiness and health that he deprecates. His trademark is the wry comment on his multitudinous neuroses.

A few years ago I purchased a copy of his autobiographical A Smattering of Ignorance. Maybe I'll read it now!

The musical numbers were beautifully done. As you can see in the above clip, they perform "Rhapsody in Blue" whole! I can't think of another studio-era Hollywood movie that depicts an entire performance of a symphonic movement. True, they seem to have cut some of it (this version is three minutes longer) but even Bernstein sometimes did this piece with cuts, so I am still impressed.

The storyline was less impressive, even though the great Howard Koch, author of my favorite movie ever, was involved. But I can't blame the writers that much. Gershwin was this workaholic who wrote a lot of memorable music, had a decade-long romantic relationship with a female composer whom he never married, and died suddenly at 38 of a brain tumor. Not a lot of a story there. Worse yet, he had a happy childhood and was a nice person who didn't quarrel with people. To get some kind of a story going, they invent a mentor for him, a wise old composer who dies during the Rapsody concert, and two fictional women, both of whom he loves. That, plus worries about whether he will offend both the critics and the public by combining jazz with classical music, and painful symptoms presaging his early death, are about all the dramatic conflict we get.

Robert Alda's performance as Gershwin is sincere and affecting. But what makes is all worth watching is the music -- and the lovably crotchety Oscar.

The Atlas Shrugged Movie

I remember the trailers for the movie based on Nabokov's scandalous Lolita. The tag line was "How did they make a movie of Lolita!?" The answer was that they changed the title character from a barely-pubescent girl to a teenager, thus gutting the story of everything that was really shocking and offensive about it.

Thank God the people who made Atlas Shrugged, Part I did not do that. In this I think their small budget worked in their favor. Big budget movies are made by cowards who cringe in fear of losing money by being controversial. A big Hollywood budget with high production values would have killed this thing as dead as John Edwards' presidential ambitions.

The greatest thing about this film is that it was made at all. Sitting in a theater we have been in countless times, Deborah and I were both thinking "Oh my God! I can't believe what I am hearing! Did that character really say what I think she said? Omigod omigod!" (In the comments section of his blog, animation legend Eddie Fitzgerald told me, "I kept expecting the police to come in and shut the film down.") The story of how they managed to slip past the media Borg will probably make an interesting book some day.

Some comments on specific aspects:

Script: I've seen some comments on the web that say that every line of dialogue is from the book. This is completely wrong. The dialogue has been to a significant extent re-written, as it probably should have been. Book dialogue is not movie dialogue. However, some of my favorite lines from Part I are preserved intact ("He said you bore him, Mr. Taggart"). The longest philosophical speech in it lasts, I think, less than thirty seconds. It, though, seems to be word for word from the book, and that, too seems right to me.

Casting: Nobody looks like I imagined them when I read the book. I found out in recent years that Rand said that with the philosopher Hugh Akston she had in mind someone like Ortega y Gasset. This is actually how I had always imagined him: older, balding, dignified. The actor who plays him in the film is nothing like that. I guess I don't mind it, but they clearly weren't even trying for that kind of faithfulness to the text. Making Eddie Willers black was an interesting touch.

Acting: Very good. The biggest single acting challenge I think was projecting sexual chemistry between Dagny and Rearden in business meetings where they were clearly focused on other things. Taylor Schilling and Grant Bowler carry it off with taste and style.

Production values: The things that had to look great (the John Galt line ride and the Wyatt oilfied fire) do look great. Other things (eg., the Taggart Transcontinental Building and Wyatt's house) are skimped on. It has the production values, I would say, of an extremely good made-for-TV-movie.

Cinematography: Very good. There is a fair amount of tight camera work to hide skimpy production values, but that's as it had to be.

Pacing: Very fast. Almost too fast, in a movie that is supposed to make you think.

Overall: As AR says in another context, it's had its face lifted, but not its spine or its spirit.

Who is Charlie Sheen and Why is He Exploding Before Our Eyes?

I once shocked Noel Carroll by telling him that I never, ever watch a movie just because I like some actor in it. Apparently, even Noel, one of the most brilliant film theorists around today, suffers from the delusion that actors are artists.

I think of them as sock puppets that certain artists -- writers and directors -- use to express their passions, their ideals, and their visions. It is true enough that the great actors -- Garbo, James Dean, the early John Barrymore -- are also brilliant at expressing passions and ideals, but they are the exceptions. And look at Sheen's IMDB page. Take away the movie sequels, the voicework, the TV sitcom, and there isn't much left. This is not Barrymore we are looking at here. This is an ordinary person -- but with one huge, fatal difference.

I've always been a freak-fancier myself and before I became a professor had more than my share of insane friends. (Professors aren't allowed to be insane.) Watching Sheen's interviews this week brought back a lot of old memories. They are not pleasant memories. We are seeing a sight I have seen before: a human mind disintegrating before our eyes.

If Sheen had a boss who terrifies him and $10,000 in credit card debt, he would be in better shape than he is. Unfortunately for him, he has infinite amounts of everything. There are no hard constraints on his behavior. He has all the ordinary appetites and urges, and for all practical purposes an unlimited capacity to satisfy them. So instead of merely disintegrating, he is exploding.

I think this is why so many highly successful actors have such screwed up lives. They are ordinary people, with no more wisdom and insight than most have, but with no constraints on their behavior. Most actors -- the ones who are not hugely successful -- are not like that at all. But their life-circumstances are like yours and mine and not like Sheen's. They have to get along with others. They have to figure out how to pay their bills and taxes. We are always under a certain amount of pressure to figure out what the right thing to do is and do it. The pressure is so constant that we don't usually even notice it -- until we see a life in which it is virtually absent, such as Sheen's.

Note also that, compared to other lines of work that involve rare skills and talents, acting requires very little self-discipline and self-control. If you have a basic knack for it, it is a very easily-acquired skill. Learning to play the violin, or mastering calculus, are incomparably more arduous. Even professional violinists must spend many lonely hours, week in and week out, in front of a music stand, developing and maintaining their skills. Actors don't have to do that. If actors learn self-discipline, it probably won't be from the "work" they do.

I think what is happening to Sheen is sad, and that the proper reaction is not laughter or even anger, but pity.

Peace through Coke!

This was my favorite of yesterday's Superbowl commercials. Maybe I'm just a a sucker for the message of peace and understanding through sugary soft drinks.

I also loved the surrealist juxtaposition of Napoleonic-era uniforms and the obvious radio tower in the near background. Also the volcanic cinder cone in the distance.

Also, there's the music! As economist David R. Henderson pointed out to me on Facebook, the majestic music track is the Sarabande from the Harpsichord Suite #11 in D Minor by Handel. Old George Frederick sure know his way around a minor key!

Stanley Kubrick used this piece for the main titles in Barry Lyndon. I think it also appears in a fatal dueling scene later in the picture.

Happy Ayn Rand's Birthday Everybody!

This clip is from "Love Letters," a film she wrote for Hal Wallis (dir. William Dieterle, 1945). She didn't write the original story, but selected it from several that were offered her. The theme: "you cannot live a lie."

My favorite Rand quote: "Those who fight for the future live in it today."

[Hat-tip to Michael Richard Brown for this clip.]

New Edition of Huckleberry Finn Cuts the N-Word ...

Language warning: Offensive words will be mentioned, though not used, in this post.

... and, as this article explains, we don't mean "nonesuch." It replaces all 219 occurrences of "nigger" in the book with "slave". It also replaces "Injun" with "Indian".

The responsible party is Alan Gribben, a professor of English at the Montgomery campus of Auburn University.

One of the arguments in favor of the Bowdlerization that I have seen attributed to Prof. Gribben is, in my humble opinion, shockingly silly. In the above-linked article he is quoted as saying "Race matters in these books. It's a matter of how you express that in the 21st century." He says he is simply "updating" the book. This seems to mean that, because language changes, Mark Twain should be forced to speak our way.

Prof. Gribben is a teacher of literature: his job is to educate young people in the way others use the English language, especially people in the alien, sometimes-creepy world of the past. The soul of this process is the student extending her or his mind to see things from the other person's point of view. This is especially important when the other person seems off-putting to us and, yes, that includes people who have bad thoughts and do wrong things. There are several sorts of reasons why this mind-expanding process is crucial, and some of them are ethical reasons, having to do with respect and the overcoming of arrogance.

A more serious argument is one that has the sympathy of the author of the above article. Gribben's main concern, obscured by his talk of "updating" Twain, is that schools, out horror at fictional characters who casually say "nigger," are taking it off reading lists:*

... if this puts the book into the hands of kids who would not otherwise be allowed to read it due to forces beyond their control (overprotective parents and the school boards they frighten), then maybe we shouldn't be so quick to judge.

It's unfortunate, but is it really any more catastrophic than a TBS-friendly re-edit of "The Godfather," you down-and-dirty melon farmer?

There is an interesting issue here. How is replacing "nigger" with "slave" so that more schools will assign Huckleberry Finn different from replacing "motherfucker" with "melon farmer" so that "The Godfather" can be on a station that children might see?

The first thing to say about this is that our culture at present does not treat these two cases alike. Gribben is innovating. So it is at any rate not obvious that they are alike.

Second, there are a couple of obvious differences between the cases. One is that the controversial one is about education. If you can't see how that makes a difference, please re-read the third paragraph of this post. (And don't skip anything this time.)

The other obvious difference has to do with the point of the Bowdlerization in each case. In all of them we are, like the original Bowdlerizer, trying to protect someone from something. There are reasons to protect small children from a too-early exposure to a) sex and b) violence. Do these reasons apply in the Huck Finn case?

I don't think so. For one thing, students are not going to be reading Huck until high school, when they are plenty old enough to handle "nigger," along with material that is more shocking than that. If I were showing "The Godfather" to a high school class in film history or film criticism, I would think it is very important that "motherfucker" stay in the movie, along with ever shot in all the gruesome murders. (Again, see third paragraph.) If a student convinced me that s/he is really too sensitive for this sort of material, I would let them do an alternative assignment. As to the film itself, either show it or don't show it. Teaching a mutilated version of "The Godfather", just because of the rough language and shocking violence, is not a legitimate third alternative.

In addition, it makes a big difference what you are protecting people from. In the "Godfather" case we are protecting children from a too early exposure to certain things, mainly violence. "Motherfucker" is violent language, intended to hurt and shock. The thing about the use of "nigger" in Huck Finn is that it doesn't seem to be used in that way at all. It just feels like it to us. What we are protecting people from is the effort of moving from "to us" to "for them." In other words, we are protecting them from having to learn something. Teachers should not be protecting young people from things like that.
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* Notice that these two arguments, both of which are attributed to Prof. Gribben in the press, lead to completely different conclusions. If the Updating Argument is right, then the old "Huckleberry Finn" is unsuitable to the Brave New World of the 21st Century. It has simply become a wrong book. Down the memory hole! On the other hand, if the Reading List Argument is right, then it only follows that we can Bowdlerize the text to protect the delicate sensibilities of American teenagers. [Insert snarky comment about American teenagers here.] As far as that is concerned, maybe the old version can stick around, to be read by adults who can take it. So, maybe -- not down the memory hole.

Rock and Roll vs. Collectivism

This is an interesting Soviet propaganda film. Back in the day (the date is not given) young Russians would hang out behind the giant Gum (pron. "Goom") department store, selling pirated records of American rock 'n' roll music. They had figured out how to duplicate them by making impressions into discarded X-ray plates.

This little film is an attempt to shame these youngsters out of participating in this fascinating -- and of course forbidden -- little sub-culture.

What I find interesting is the nature of the argument they give: Aren't you ashamed of yourselves -- doing this instead to being out there building a hydroelectric dam "for the people"!

This is why that system was doomed. No system can survive if the source of motivation upon which it relies is the willingness of the people to devote their lives to an anonymous herd of strangers.

As long as people retain a shred of self-respect, they will devote their lives primarily to their own happiness and to that of individuals they actually know and have some reason to love.

Freedom of Speech, According to John Waters

In the segment that begins at 6:40, the always-interesting John Waters becomes possibly even more pro-free-speech than I am, by saying "you should be able to yell 'fire' in a crowded theater."

Come to think of it, I guess I agree with him there. As far as the fundamental issue of principle involved -- the issue of what our rights are -- I think it is both true and important to say that you should indeed be able to yell "fire" in a crowded theater.

After all, what offense am I committing, exactly, if I do falsely yell fire and start a panic? I would be committing exactly the same offense if I simply threw the fire alarm switch, with the same results but without saying a word. This simple fact shows that, the right is that is violated by shouting fire is not a right against being harmed by another person's speech. It has nothing to do with speech or freedom of speech.

But surely, under normal circumstances, the person who maliciously causes a panic is violating a right. What right is that? Consider another little thought experiment, proposed by Walter Block years ago in one of the most thought-provoking books ever written: Before you enter the theater, you can see, printed very clearly on the ticket, the following warning:

TONIGHT'S PERFORMANCE IS A PRESENTATION OF THE MASOCHIST'S CLUB. AT ANY MOMENT DURING THE SHOW, SOMETHING MAY HAPPEN THAT WILL CAUSE A PANIC. INJURIES AND EVEN DEATH MAY RESULT.

Meanwhile, I have devised a plan to do something -- far more clever and imaginative that yelling fire or throwing a switch -- that will send you and the others flying for the exit before you think Wait! Stop! We've been tricked! What fun!

Obviously, no one would do this, but I would say that this bizarre, crazy arrangement would not violate the rights of the bizarre, crazy adults who agree to enter into it.

This mere theoretical possibility shows that Oliver Wendell Holmes was wrong when he first made the "shouting fire" point in Schenck v. U. S. His point was that the government can prohibit speech with a certain content (in the Schenck case, criticism of military conscription) simply on the ground of the physical consequences of that content -- the "clear and present danger" it creates (in Schenck, danger to the government).

The right that is violated by falsely shouting fire is a contractual right, and the most important single feature of contractual rights is that they can be altered by mutual consent.

Under ordinary circumstances, I should be punished for falsely shouting fire, but the reason for this has nothing to do with the government's alleged right to censor certain messages on the ground that they are inherently "dangerous." One way to make this point is to say, as John does, "you should be able to yell 'fire' in a crowded theater."

Who is Barack Obama?

Dinesh D'Souza has written an article that has a lot of people practically screaming with rage. It purports to explain the inner workings of Obama's mind. Here is a sensible account of some of the reaction. The basic idea is that BHO is channeling his father's "anti-colonial" conviction that the rich and prosperous of the world (including of course rich nations) got that way by talking it away from others, so that taking it away again is only justice.

The consensus among the screamers seems to be that the article is racist, or something like racist. I honestly don't quite get what the screaming is about. They keep using words like "loathesome" and "reprehensible," which aren't very informative.

However, I can see how BHO can drive people to concoct some tenuous theories about him. As others have pointed out, the man is a cypher. There are a number of things about him that just do not compute, at least if I am doing the computing.

Here is a guy who has written two books about himself but, on the other hand, will not allow all sorts of primary documents about himself to be revealed. The "long form" birth certificate -- the one that brings out the crazies -- is just one example, and not in my opinion the most interesting one. His grades at Occidental, Columbia, or Harvard Law have never been released either. Neither have his SAT, LSAT, and other test scores. We don't know what unsigned articles and notes he wrote when he was on the Law Review. There is no record of any scholarly publications from his time as a U. of Chicago adjunct lecturer, though admittedly this must be because no such publications exist. He was unique among presidential candidates in that he never did release his medical records. With the cooperation of Princeton University, his wife's senior thesis was kept out of public view until he was safely elected president, while his own on the other hand has not been released to this day. We know what it was about (the Soviet Union, as I recall) but that's about all we know.

For reasons known only to himself and his closest advisers, he has always refused to give the American people the sort of information that you and I have released over and over again, when we applied to college, applied to law school, applied for a job, or changed doctors, etc., etc.

Obama is a mystery, and the fact that he is partly a mystery of his own making only compounds, squares, cubes the mystery.

They say in the famous last shot of Queen Christina, the director told Garbo to clear her mind of all thoughts. As the camera moves in for a tight close-up, the audience reads its own confused feelings into that blank, receptive face. Maybe BHO is like that: people's reactions often tell you more about themselves than about him. As to what he really is, maybe it's like what Gertrude Stein said about Oakland California: "There's no there there."
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As to D'Souza's thesis: for a sensible, non-screamy refutation, see this.

Harvey Pekar: Long Live the Crappy Government Job!

Saddened to hear of the death of Harvey Pekar, writer, raconteur, and subject of the brilliantly innovative HBO movie, American Splendor (2003), I've been watching my DVD of the movie again. Here's a thought you won't read anywhere else:

This time around, this movie strikes me as a window on a rapidly receding past. Note that the crappy job Harvey's stuck in -- and pathetically grateful to have -- doesn't even exist any more: taking care of paper files in big metal drawers and yards of metal shelves in the basement of a government hospital. Nowadays that stuff is all on computers, and the job would go to a somewhat more skilled person.

When I was a hippie, I knew longhairs who worked for the Postal Service, not because they felt a calling to wear shorts and carry bags full of Sears catalogues, but because the USPS didn't care if you had long hair. Their customers may not have liked it, but as a government bureau they didn't have to please their customers.

This is the niche in the socio-economic system that Harve occupied. The film begins with the real Harvey telling us that he has always worked at sh*t jobs, lived in sh*t places, and with women who treat him like human garbage. A lot of the charm of the film, and of Harvey's books, is enjoying the ironic tension between a) his intellectual brilliance, b) the gritty crappiness of his immediate surroundings, and c) the gross, obvious character flaws that bring about (b) in spite of (a).

Has anyone noticed the contribution to our culture that was made by that vanishing institution, the crappy government job? Here is a guy with a set of skills and interests that are not highly marketable (jazz critic, expert on comic books and the kind of blues records that only eccentric white people listen to any more) and massive failures of patience and self-discipline that prevent him from getting very far with his formal education (otherwise he might have pursued his goofy obsessions in a university and actually gotten paid for it).

How to avoid a life of utter frustration? One classic solution, admittedly imperfect, was the undemanding but unrenumerative government job (or UDURGJ for short). It enabled a person like Harve to go home at the end of the work day, his mind un-cluttered by any complex or worrying problems like the ones that come up in other people's work day, and un-exausted by any backbreaking physical labor, free to pursue his private obsessions as just that -- private. Meanwhile, the UDURGJ makes it possible for Harvey to make a real contribution to the economy and to be remunerated in a way that is appropriate to his meager contributions (ie., not much). The arrangement is meager, yes, but honorable.

From what I have read, this sort of job seems to be vanishing fast. Thanks to increasing unionization, more and more government jobs have better pay and much, much better perks than similar jobs in the private sector. (Not to mention that precious government job security!)*

Maybe you are thinking, what's wrong with Harve getting better remuneration? Wouldn't that be a good thing from his point of view? Well, I don't think so. If you take the UR out of the UDURGJ, I doubt that this job will go to someone like Harvey. If the job is really worth a lot, it will attract people who are a lot more marketable than him. Why would anyone, even the government, hire someone with Harvey's obvious emotional problems, character flaws, and complete lack of credentials, when for the same (exorbitant) price they can get someone who is a lot more bright-eyed and bushy-tailed? Those unions must be pricing guys like Harvey right out of the market.

With the disappearance of the crappy government job, we will lose a haven for dreamers, misanthopes, and misfits, for the stunted, the botched, and the mangled-by-life. I don't know about you folks, but that describes some of my favorite people. As a recovering hippie myself, I will miss them!


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* News flash: I just heard an interview with the mayor of San Jose CA, on why they are firing their (unionized) city janitors and hiring private (but also unionized) ones: the government ones cost twice as much as the private ones. Their government janitors get about $80,000 a year [including perks] plus about 17% "for time off" [now there is an interesting concept!], or just under $100,000 per year, or around $50 per hour. That's fifty bucks for an hour of buffing the floor and swabbing the toilets.

R and R

This is a scene cut from the original Fantasia.

David Kramer posted it over at LewRockwell.com with no explanation except for a title: "American Popular Entertainment, 1940."

Yes, vast, profound changes have come since then, changes in popular taste and in the practices of artists. The latter changes of course had a lot to do with the triumph of artistic modernism.

Anyway, enjoy this little key-hole view of what popular culture used to be like.

BTW, for you non-birders out there, the bird depicted above is the great white heron, which is actuallly the same species as the great blue (Ardea herodias). Great whites are only found in extreme south Florida, but we have plenty of great blues here in Wisconsin, including a few who do their fishing in a pond a half a block from my house.

An Offensive Video?

[Note: As Will S. kindly pointed out in the comments, this video has been yanked due to a copyright complaint. You can see it excerpted in this news show clip, but of course the excerpt completely lacks the emotional whallop of the original video. A shame.]

This is 89-year-old Holocaust survivor Adolek Korman dancing with his grandchildren at various Holocaust related sites: Dachau, Theresienstadt, the Arbeit Macht Frei gate of Auschwitz, the memorial at the site of the Lodz ghetto, the cattle cars, the synagogue that Hitler had intended to make into a museum about the extinct race of the Jews.

This video brought tears to my eyes. Many people though claim to be (and I have little choice but to believe them) angered and offended by it.

I saw it as something like dancing on Hitler's grave (which unfortunately is not possible). None of the people you see here would exist if he had managed to force his vision on the world.

What, I can only wonder, is the view of those who are offended?

That perfect evil should be an object of inverted reverence, like a photographic negative of the reverence that is due to perfect good?

That it is a sin to celebrate that you survived when so many did not?

That survivor guilt is not a mental health problem but a moral duty?

I wish Mr. Korman another 89 years, this time with nothing but peace and plenty.

(Hat-tip to David Kramer.)

Why Don't I Like Naked Love Scenes in Movies?

According to this story, the actor Neil McDonnough (I know him from the memorable series, Band of Brothers) has been fired from ABC's new series, Scoundrels last week for refusing to do an explicit love scene with Virginia Madsen.

The reason? He's a family man and a Catholic, and he's always made it clear that he won't do sex scenes. And ABC knew that.

I'm not quite sure why, but I've never really liked explicit sex scenes in a legitimate narrative film. They have always given me this slight cringing feeling of "too much information." By "legitimate narrative film" I mean to exclude hard core pornography. That I actually don't mind at all.

Is this an unusual reaction? I really don't know for sure. I notice that, even in this age of anything goes, full frontal nudity is still rather rare in American movies. I'm told that it is much more common in European movies, but I would be willing to bet that most of the film industries in the world fall far short of the European in this respect.

W. C. Fields famously said "never work with children or animals." The obvious reason for that, I suppose, is that you never know what the damn things are going to do next. Another would be that, as long as you are on screen with a kid or a hippopotamus, the audience will not be looking at you. They will be looking at the kid or the hippo.

Sex, for human beings, especially in cultures that still have some standards of modesty in dress and behavior, is emotionally extremely powerful. If you put full frontal nudity on screen, you had better be sure that this person's pubic hair is the most important thing in the shot, because the audience will be unable to see anything else. Similarly, explicit eroticism is tremendously distracting from everything else.

In pornography there is of course nothing to be distracted from: no plot development, no characterization, no interesting dialogue, no symbolism, no subtle emotional cross-currents, etc., etc. Hence there it works completely differently. In fact, the material that would be so distracting is the very thing you are there to see.

Speaking of working with kids, take a look at this clip, from the British TV series, "Outnumbered":

Some Like It Hot

Here is a slide show of never before seen photos from the set of Some Like it Hot, surely one of the greatest comedies in film. They were taken by a journalist who visited the work in progress at the Hotel del Coronado near San Diego.

They make curious viewing, if only because they are in color and the movie itself was black and white. It's a little like seeing what it would have been like as a color film.

It really is a perfect movie -- everyone in it is the greatest at what they do and at the top of their form. Monroe especially was never better. And what a love-goddess she was! Sexy but not skeevy -- that's right folks, it can be done!

Writer/director Billy Wilder was always one of my favorites. An Austrian Jew, there is something deeply Viennese about his point of view: "Situation hopeless, but not serious." Behind his gloom there is always something of the light-hearted spirit of Viennese operetta.

Remember the last line in the movie. Osgood Fielding III (Joe E. Brown), on being told that his new wife not only has loose morals and drinks too much but -- is a man! "Well," he says, "nobody's perfect!"

I once heard Bill Rothman argue that Wilder's work is cold-hearted and devoid of compassion. I think that's how it looks if you miss the humor in it, the Viennese fatalism-overcome-by-humor.

One of the things that are funny about the last line is that it implies that being male is an imperfection, a theorem that the film has esatblished by that time with almost mathematical certainty.

Wilder takes the corniest comedic trick in the book -- men in drag, the stuff of desperate-for-a-laugh USO shows -- and turns it into a vast scherzo of variations on gender, gender boundaries, and above all gender as a boundary. Es lebe die Kunst!

Avatar vs. Ben Hur

A comment someone made on an earlier post about Avatar suggested to me the idea that it might be interesting to compare these two films, thinking they might reveal something interesting about the filmic cultures of their times. Both were huge eye-popping spectacles that relied heavily on special effects. Both were sufficiently in tune with their times to win many Academy Award nominations and make tons of money. Both were frankly mass entertainment and not high art, but both had some pretensions to moral seriousness. I re-watched Ben Hur. Here is part of what I came up with.

Ben Hur is a movie with a clear moral and thematic center. The very first words we hear are those of a voice-over narrator (he turns out to be Belthasar, one of the Three Magi):

In the Year of our Lord, Judea - for nearly a century - had lain under the mastery of Rome. In the seventh year of the reign of Augustus Caesar, an imperial decree ordered every Judean each to return to his place of birth to be counted and taxed. The converging ways of many of them led to the gates of their capital city, Jerusalem, the troubled heart of their land. The old city was dominated by the fortress of Antonia, the seat of Roman power, and by the great golden temple, the outward sign of an inward and imperishable faith. Even while they obeyed the will of Caesar, the people clung proudly to their ancient heritage, always remembering the promise of their prophets that one day there would be born among them a redeemer to bring them salvation and perfect freedom.

There are two groups of characters: the Romans and the Jews. The clash between them is consistently depicted as a clash between ideas: the Romans represent power and the Jews represent freedom. The main dramatic conflict is between two former friends: the Roman Messala, whose first lines declare that he is "in command," and the Jew Judah Ben Hur, who eventually tells Messala, "I tell you the day Rome falls there will be a shout of freedom such as the world has never heard before!"

Power and freedom are connected in this film with other ideas. The Roman Governor Sextus tells Messala of a carpenter's son who "teaches that God is near, in every man." Messala replies with the authentic Roman view, that "there is divinity in only one man." Power means inequality, while freedom rests on the equalizing effects of Christian love.

Power also rests on fear. When Messala unjustly condemns Judah to the galleys and his mother and sister to a dungeon, he does so as a power play: "By condemning without hesitation an old friend," he says, "I shall be feared." In addition, just as freedom comes with love in this film, so power uses hate as a resource. As Quintus Arrius says to the enslaved Ben Hur: "Your eyes are full of hate, forty-one. That's good. Hate keeps a man alive. It gives him strength."

Such are the ideas expressed in Ben Hur. What about Avatar?

To tell you the truth, I wrote the above paragraphs six weeks ago, and didn't know how to go on. Since the Academy Awards are tonight, I thought I should force myself to finish this post. The best I can do, though, for Avatar, is a sort of laundry list of notions:

1. One should love one's planet (or, as in the case of Pandora, satellite).
2. Greed is bad.
3. Hunter-gatherer tribes are good.
4. Business corporations are bad.
5. Military forces are bad.
6. One should not take the property of others, at least if it is the collective property of a hunter-gatherer tribe.

Two things strike me about these two constellations of ideas. a) While the first group is at least half-way interesting and might deserve some further reflection, this is clearly not true of the second group. And that is because b) the second group consists entirely of cliches. We have heard them all a million times before and there is nothing interesting or clever about what Avatar does with them.

I am not saying that communicating ideas is something that any movie has to do. But if its makers do choose to do this, then standards of intellectual clarity, originality, and profundity come into play. Measured by these standards, obviously, Ben Hur kicks Avatar's butt.

To Kill a Mockingbird

I've just re-watched this movie, and listened to the highly enlightening audio commentary by Alan Pakula and Robert Mulligan (the producer and director).

First off, I'm afraid I have to be the crotchety curmudgeon because the one thing that pops into my head is: they don't make them like this any more.

Well, it's true, they don't. So shoot me.

Beyond the obvious fact that it's in black and white: The pacing compared to today's movies is very leisurely, without rapid cutting and with rather sparse camera movements. The story and the mood are given plenty of time to build up. The sountrack is very quiet, compared to today's films. Nowadays filmmakers seem to live in fear that the audience would fall asleep without the constant presence of a crackling, bustling Foley track and thudding music. In TKaM, even Elmer Bernstein's music track is quiet, and all the more powerful for that, proving that even in music, less is more.

There are three violent deaths in the film, but the only one that happens on screen is the shooting of a rabid dog.

In the whole movie, there is only one special effects shot: the one in which Boo carries the injured Jem to the house. The sparkling, moonlit leaves had to be superimposed on him in the printer.

For a Hollywood movie, there are very few closeups, and when they come, they pack a huge whallop. Again, less is more.

Chefs say that the simplest food, with the fewest ingredients, can be the most impressive, but only if you do everything perfectly. These guys did everything perfectly.

This could be one film where you could make a case that the real auteur is not the director but the literal author -- the person who wrote the screenplay. Like Rod Serling, Horton Foote learned his craft in the Golden Age of live television drama (Playhouse 90, etc.). This produced a lot of writing characterized by ideas and serious issues and a zero level of spectacle. A number of the actors were live theater actors brought in by Foote, which is why so many of them are unfamiliar faces (something that adds greatly to the realism of the film, for me). Mercifully, Gregory Peck was the only one in the cast who was a star at the time (it was the film debut of both William Windom and Robert Duval).

One thing I first noticed on this viewing was the highly effective way Peck's summation speech to the jury was presented. Except at the beginning and the end, I'm pretty sure there are no reaction shots of the jurors at all. Instead, we see Peck from the jury's point of view. He leans toward us, almost as if he were speaking to the movie audience itself. We have the impression that we hold the life of the accused man in our own hands, and through this issue must wrestle with the injustice of the world. There are a number of factors that make this one of the greatest single speeches in any film. The understated-but-brilliant camera work and editing are among the less obvious ones.

Like I say, less is more.

Avatar's Success Explained by Science!

Despite my earlier snarky comment, I do recommend you see Avatar, if you are one of the two or three who haven't already seen it -- though only if you see it in 3D. Seeing Avatar in 2D would be a waste of time, money, and probably brain cells (because I am pretty sure you leave the theater more stupid than you go in).

Well, Jonah Lehrer, the nice young man pictured here, has an interesting piece in Wired that suggests an explanation for the success of this movie. In fact, it potentially explains a much wider phenomenon. Ever since the premier of Star Wars in 1976, I think I've noticed a dieing out of thought-provoking, intellectually interesting movies, and a growing abundance of stupifying gobs of eyeball candy like Avatar. I can remember the day when they could make a quiet, didactic think-piece like Twelve Angry Men and actually make money. It's hard to imagine anyone doing that today.

Lehrer's explanation is suggested by an experiment by a series of experiments. The first one:

The experiment was simple: they showed subjects a vintage Clint Eastwood movie ("The Good, The Bad and the Ugly") and watched what happened to the cortex in a scanner. To make a long story short, the scientists found that when adults were watching the film their brains showed a peculiar pattern of activity, which was virtually universal. (The title of the study is "Intersubject Synchronization of Cortical Activity During Natural Vision".) In particular, people showed a remarkable level of similarity when it came to the activation of areas including the visual cortex (no surprise there), fusiform gyrus (it was turned on when the camera zoomed in on a face), areas related to the processing of touch (they were activated during scenes involving physical contact) and so on.

Across the audience, these regions of the brain "clicked together" in scenes that triggered them. What about the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that is associated with logical analysis? Well, that's just it: there was no clicking together there.

Subsequent work by Malach and colleagues has found that, when we're engaged in intense "sensorimotor processing" - and nothing is more intense than staring at a massive screen with Dolby surround sound while wearing 3-D glasses - we actually inhibit these prefrontal areas. The scientists argue that such "inactivation" allows us to lose ourself in the movie:

Our results show a clear segregation between regions engaged during self-related introspective processes and cortical regions involved in sensorimotor processing. Furthermore, self-related regions were inhibited during sensorimotor processing. Thus, the common idiom ''losing yourself in the act'' receives here a clear neurophysiological underpinnings.

The idea is that movies, especially the eye-popping kind enabled by new technologies really do rot your brain. This could explain the progressive stupefaction of film that we see today.

Or, the process could be even broader than that, something that is built into cultures of certain sorts. Arguably, what I see happening to movies has happened before, long before moving pictures were invented:

The games of the circus and the amphitheater absorbed the interest and coarsened the taste of the public, and drama died in the arena, another martyr to Roman holidays.Through emphasis on acting and scenery rather than on plot or thought, the drama gradually yielded the stage to mimes and pantomimes.

Source: Will Durant, Ceasar and Christ, Volume 3 of the Story of Civilization.

L'Affaire Polanski: Artistic Privilege?

"If Shakespeare returned to the earth to-morrow, and if it were found that his favourite recreation was raping little girls in railway carriages, we should not tell him to go ahead with it on the ground that he might write another King Lear."

George Orwell, "Notes on Dali"

When the great film maker Roman Polanski was arrested in Switzerland for a crime he committed three decades ago (he pled to sex with a minor, but the victim's grand jury testimony would indicate it was coerced -- ie., plain, ordinary rape) my first reaction was to think that the case ought to be dismissed, for a number of reasons.

But everyone I respect among the people who have taken a stand on the issue (including Eugene Volokh, Megan Mcardle, and Nick Gillespie) have taken the "do the crime, do the time" position. I have only found one person on the other side for whose legal and moral judgment I have much respect, and that is Anne Applebaum. (Sorry, but the French Minister of Culture, along with novelists and Hollywood glitterati who are solidly backing Polanski do not count. And Applebaum's judgment is tainted in this case by the fact that she is married to a Polish politician who is actively lobbying for the Polanski, who is of course of Polish ancestry.) This gives me pause.

Let me comment on just one of the issues involved here. Should Polanski get some special consideration because he has created some cinematic masterpieces? Artsy cognac-sipping Europeans say yes. Prudish American Philistines say no. I guess I have to agree with the Philistines on this one.

Beethoven's friends, it is true, put up with his making potty jokes over dinner, along with much worse behavior, because they loved his music and loved him for creating it. On the other hand, it was still true that he was a jerk. (To see him at his worst, read this.) The jerky behavior and the sublime music were traits of the same person. He was both of these people, and many others besides. That's what human beings are like: complicated.

If you are deciding whether to accept a dinner invitation, or buy a ticket to a concert or a movie, you have to weigh the good and the bad and make your own decision. On this issue I side with the artsy types. I love the arts and creative people in general. I would give up a lot to have dinner with Beethoven, fart jokes and all.

But that's only relevant when I am spending my own time or money. If the legal system is involved, that is a completely different matter.

Here it is not a matter of disposing of what rightfully belongs to me, but of the rights of the weak and the innocent. We have no right to dispose of that because we think Chinatown was a great movie.

If Richard Wagner, not satisfied with writing insane anti-Semitic rants like Das Judentum in der Musik, had attacked a Jewish girl, I would have said (though very regretfully, I admit), "do the time," even if it meant he would never complete The Ring.

We knew all along that we would have to give up something in order to have a world where basic rights are protected. Like freedom, justice isn't free.
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Breaking news: The French government seems to be turning around on this issue.