becektt's hundredth anniversary

From a a beautiful essay in The New York Review on Beckett, this quote from Beckett's second novel, Watt:

Personally of course I regret everything. Not a word, not a deed, not a thought, not a need, not a grief, not a joy, not a girl, not a boy, not a doubt, not a trust, not a scorn, not a lust, not a hope, not a fear, not a smile, not a tear, not a name, not a face, no time, no place, that I do not regret, exceedingly. An ordure, from beginning to end.

why jane austen was such a good judge of human nature...

Nothing illustrates the almost unlimited European capacity for self-praise than this article in the Los Angeles Times (which I found through this Kevin Drum post). Isn't it neat! -- that while ostensibly praising the American capacity for optimism, Europeans lose no opportunity to congratulate themselves on their "darkness" or "realism" or whatever it is they possess. This quote speaks for itself:

But there is something else too, a quality that is quintessentially American, Scolik said. "In American programs, people have problems, serious problems. In 'Grey's Anatomy,' people are dying, it tells you that life will be very, very hard, but at the very end they get a little hope and there is a way to get through," he said. "In German shows, which we also get on Austrian television, it is mostly a hopeless situation, it is too heavy."

And it only goes to show what I've long believed, that Jane Austen is an unmatched observer of human nature:

"Oh!" cried Miss Bingley, "Charles writes in the most careless way imaginable. He leaves out half his words, and blots the rest."
"My ideas flow so rapidly that I have not time to express them--by which means my letters sometimes convey no ideas at all to my correspondents."
"Your humility, Mr. Bingley," said Elizabeth, "must disarm reproof."
"Nothing is more deceitful," said Darcy, "than the appearance of humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast."
"And which of the two do you call my little recent piece of modesty?"
"The indirect boast; for you are really proud of your defects in writing, because you consider them as proceeding from a rapidity of thought and carelessness of execution, which, if not estimable, you think at least highly interesting." [emphasis mine]

on god, mourning and ... racism

Three great pieces from TNR.

James Wood takes on Professor Harold Bloom's new book.

This essay by Rochelle Gurstein, on mourning, stayed in my mind, particularly her final paragraph. Commenting on Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking with C. S. Lewis' A Grief Observed and Donald Hall's volume of poetry Without she says:

Didion's story, then, has reverberations with Lewis's, in that hers, too, reveals how the will is humbled through the experience of suffering. And so by the end of her story she is prepared to accept her husband's words: "You had to go with the change." Given Didion's resourcelessness, which is endemic to this pragmatic and therapeutic age, she has no choice but to find comfort in this rather paltry common wisdom. But, then, without Lewis's spiritual reach or Hall's aesthetic amplitude, is it any wonder that the contemporary experience of grief rarely gets beyond varieties of psychological adjustment?

And finally, Ryan Lizza does an amazing hatchet-job on the Republican 2008 presidential hopeful George Allen. For readers who actually read the whole thing, stick around till the end for a moment that could have been straight out of a Todd Solondz movie. Here it is, in case you don't want to read the piece.

Now the pin seemed even worse. Why would a young man with such a sensitive understanding of Southern racial conflict and no Southern heritage wear a Confederate flag in his formal yearbook photo?

I finally ask him if he remembers the pin, explaining that another of his classmates had the same one in his photo, a guy named Deke. "No," Allen says with a laugh. "Where is this picture?" He leans forward over his desk and tightens his lip around the plug of Copenhagen in his mouth. "Hmmm." He pauses. He speaks slowly, apparently searching his memory. "Well, it's no doubt I was rebellious," he says, "a rebellious kid. I don't know. Unless we were doing something for the fun of it. Deke was from Texas. He was a good friend. Let me think." He stretches back in the chair, his boots sticking out from underneath his desk. "Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. I'll have to find it myself." Another pause. "I don't know. We would probably do things to upset people from time to time."

He stammers some more, says he saw Deke in an airport recently. "I don't know, I don't know," he continues. "It could be some sort of prank, or one of our rebellious--we would do different things. But I remember we liked Texas."

UPDATE: More on George Allen's race problem at TNR here.

on film actors and the stage.

I started reading David Edelstein when he was the film critic for Slate; then he left (or they fired him or something) and joined New York Magazine and I keep reading him (and Slate too -- amazing how we become loyal to people and things we never even know). He has a style of criticism I like, intensely expressive and very personal, a style that obviously descends from the great Pauline Kael. (Edelstein calls himself a "Paulette"). It is a style I wish I could write in. Fastidious literary critics don't like the Kael style since it is clearly imbued with what the New Critics called the "affective fallacy" -- the idea that a piece of art can be explored in terms of the feelings or emotions it arouses in a critic (or anybody else, for that matter). They have a point but Kael is such a joy to read -- so thought-provoking, so annoying, so intensely literary -- that one has to fall under her spell.

In the recent issue of New York, Edelstein has an essay on Julia Roberts' first stage performance, in a Joe Mantello-directed production of Richard Greenberg's Three Days of Rain. I had the opportunity of seeing Greenberg's Take Me Out on Broadway (also directed by Mantello) and that production, with its magnificent performance by Denis O'Hare, introduced me to Greenberg's style -- talky, literary but where language is stretched to breaking point and where words, simply by their presence and their layering, attain heights undreamt of. Edelstein's analysis of Roberts in her first stage-role is not entirely unexpected: Julia is still, well, Julia but she's not quite at home on the stage.

UPDATE: Reviews of Three Days of Rain at the Post and the Times say much the same thing.

(I had the same experience when I saw Ewan McGregor, the man who lit up Moulin Rouge with his voice and the abosolute sincerity of his performance, in a West End production of Guys and Dolls. It's not the McGregor does a disservice to the play, it's just that he's upstaged by all the seasoned theater veterans around him -- who are so at home in their bodies and so good at making their bodies and their voices lenses into the souls of their characters).

two great philosophers disagree...

It's always interesting to find find two philosophers disagreeing -- here Andre Glucksmann and Ronald Dworkin. The issue? Yes, you guessed it: the Danish cartoon controversy.

Here's Dworkin in his thoughtful essay on The Right to Ridicule

Muslims who are outraged by the Danish cartoons note that in several European countries it is a crime publicly to deny, as the president of Iran has denied, that the Holocaust ever took place. They say that Western concern for free speech is therefore only self-serving hypocrisy, and they have a point. But of course the remedy is not to make the compromise of democratic legitimacy even greater than it already is but to work toward a new understanding of the European Convention on Human Rights that would strike down the Holocaust-denial law and similar laws across Europe for what they are: violations of the freedom of speech that that convention demands.

Here's Glucksmann on the same:

Offence for offence? Infringement for infringement? Can the negation of Auschwitz be put on a par with the desecration of Muhammad? This is where two philosophies clash. The one says yes, these are equivalent "beliefs" which have been equally scorned. There is no difference between factual truth and professed faith; the conviction that the genocide took place and the certitude that Muhammad was illuminated by Archangel Gabriel are on a par. The others say no, the reality of the death camps is a matter of historical fact, whereas the sacredness of the prophets is a matter of personal belief.

This distinction between fact and belief is at the heart of Western thought. Aristotle distinguished between indicative discourse on the one hand, which could be used to reach an affirmation or a negation, and prayer on the other. Prayers are not a matter for discussion, because they do not state: they implore, promise, vow and declare. They do not relate information, they perform an act. When the Islamist fanatic affirms that Europeans practise the "religion of the Shoah" while he practises that of Muhammad, he abolishes the distinction between fact and belief. For him there are only beliefs, and so it follows that Europe will favour its own.

Whom do I agree with? In this case, I have to go with Dworkin, his essay almost convinced me that self-restraint is the right thing to do.

essay updates

I remember when I read this article back in the NYT magazine some weeks ago, feeling that there was something I didn't quite like about it. In the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley expresses it more eloquently than I could have:

In certain precincts occupied by certain members of the American intelligentsia, it has for some time been quite the fashion to ferret out racists in one's familial woodpile and then to write books about them. The ostensible purpose of these books is to provide intimate, confessional evidence of the degree to which racial prejudice has infiltrated every conceivable corner of American life. Their obvious if unstated purpose is to show how the (white) author has triumphed over his or her sordid ancestral inheritance to become a person of impeccable credentials on matters racial. Though all due modesty and claims of imperfection are expressed, the reader is expected to stand and cheer as, at book's end, the author's heroic achievement is revealed in full.

I had posted earlier about Daniel Mendelsohn's fine review of Brokeback Mountain. Producer James Schamus responds to Mendelsohn, in what I must say, is an extraordinarily dishonest letter.

I am not radical enough to insist that it was the film-makers' duty to market Brokeback Mountain as a "gay" film; after all, their first priority is that the film does well, that it recover it's costs. If that involves toning down the gay elements in the publicity stills, so be it. But surely there's nothing wrong in admitting that; the only ones offended will be radicals and the film is good enough to appeal to everyone. But Schamus insists on having his cake and eating it too -- he name-drops terms from queer theory, just to appeal to people who believe in it, and he talks about the "universality of love". But the best line has to be this:

And it is true that we have marketed the film primarily as an epic, sweeping romance between two men, and do not append the words "gay" or "homosexual" to our marketing blurbs for the movie (although you never saw a poster or ad telling you that either Titanic or The Bridges of Madison County was the "greatest straight love story of all time").

This is a breathtaking statement. Of course, the fact that the word "straight" isn't used to describe Titanic does not mean that the movie doesn't advertise its straightness. (There is the fact that the only people who use the word "straight" or "heterosexual" are gay men; straight people don't really think of themselves as straight). I will only quote Mendelsohn's response here and then get off the topic once and for all:

With breathtaking disingenuousness, given his ostensible commitment to queer theory, Mr. Schamus suggests that Brokeback shouldn't advertise the sexuality of its characters any more than straight mainstream films do. But of course, those films do advertise, relentlessly, the heterosexuality of their characters—as even a quick glance at the posters used to advertise, say, Titanic and The Bridges of Madison County will confirm. There, one can see what is, after all, the standard visual representation of erotic love between two people, which is a clear image of two yearning lovers embracing. One wonders why, if Focus Features is so open, proud, and celebratory of its film's homosexual love story, such an image is utterly absent from its print and TV ads for the movie—just as the open, unashamed, and insistent use of the word "gay" is absent from the producers' promotional rhetoric, starting with the pages—any and all of them—of the press kit.

Finally two fascinating articles from the Post and the Times here and here.

Quote of the day

Majikthise talking about the responses to Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell

What if it became widely accepted that religions are the biological equivalent of masturbation--"hacks" that we have learned to perform on our own bodies to achieve transcendence on demand?

I plan to put up a detailed post on Dennet and Breaking the Spell soon (not that I've read the book but there are just fascinating issues lurking there).

on environmentalism

In a fine review of Michael Grunwald's The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida and the Politics of Paradise, which traces the vexed environmental history of Florida, Greg Easterbrook ends with some thought-provoking words:

Closing this fine book, I had a small complaint and a big complaint. The small one is that The Swamp takes numerous potshots at the developers and amusement-park builders who crowded into Florida, but dodges an important aspect of economic growth that affluence makes possible: environmental protection. Townhomes can be tacky, and freeway congestion is infuriating; but the global population is expanding, and people must live somewhere. If environmentally destructive development (which is the story of most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) makes possible environmentally clean development (which has been happening roughly since the mid-1980s), the outcome is high living standards plus a respect for nature. And that is a good outcome.

My big complaint is that Grunwald's analysis of human interaction with the Everglades reflects what I once called the Fallacy of Environmental Correctness. The Swamp presents the pre-European-contact condition of Florida as correct in some first-causes sense, while implying that all human tampering with the Everglades was an offense against the proper order of things. Since the human lifespan is less than a century, we tend to think of environmental conditions as fixed. Yet when they were first seen by the conquistadors in the sixteenth century, the Everglades were just the latest variation on an endlessly changing natural landscape, created rather recently in geological terms and certain to be altered many more times in the future, whether humanity acted or not.

Not that long ago, much of North America was buried under an ice sheet, and what is now the Everglades region was drastically different. Step back further, into the Oligocene Epoch, and North America was arid, with no marshlands to protect. Step further back and Earth's temperatures were much higher than today; the birds of the current Everglades could not have lived at Florida latitudes in hotter prior eras. Or think about the future: even were there no Homo sapiens, a few thousand years into the future, the Everglades are sure to transform in unpredictable ways. There is no "correct" condition for a land area or biosphere. There is only the condition that happens to obtain at the moment. Given that humanity arises from the natural scheme, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with our monkeying around with nature. Some of this monkeying fulfills our purposes as moral and historical agents--if it is done wisely, as Michael Grunwald has persuasively shown.

Quote of the day:

Dana Stevens in Slate:

Finally, one open question to both of you: Why is Heath Ledger's performance in Brokeback Mountain considered a leading role, while Jake Gyllenhaal's is relegated to the status of 'supporting'? They share roughly equivalent portions of screen time, and Gyllenhaal certainly has more lines, if only because his character is far chattier than the taciturn Ennis Del Mar. It's hard to imagine one of the two leads being similarly dissed in a love story between a man and a woman. Is this just because the academy wanted to avoid pitting the two men against one another in the best actor category? Or is Gyllenhaal smiting his forehead right now for agreeing to be cast as the bottom to Ledger's top?

Hee hee.

where is bin laden?

The Washington Post's latest Sunday Outlook Section has some good essays on Osama Bin Laden. A brief summary from Slate's indispensable Today's Papers:

Ahmed Rashid affirms there that Bin Laden is hiding in Pakistan, where the government isn't doing enough to catch him. Besides offering a monetary reward, which they don't need since money is not scarce, officials aren't doing enough to convince Pashtuns to stop hiding him. Peter Bergen explains why it has been so difficult to catch Bin Laden and emphasizes that capturing him is still important, even if it's just for psychological reasons. He also theorizes that Bin Laden might not really be on the run, as is often speculated, but might, in fact, be hunkered down somewhere. John Brennan says that the United States is focusing too much on Bin Laden's strategy, which is terrorism, and not enough on his vision of global domination.

Some interesting sections from Brennan's article, which has some good points:

Bin Laden has also insidiously convinced us to use terminology that lends legitimacy to his activities. He has hijacked the term "jihad" to such an extent that U.S. and other Western officials regularly use the terms "jihadist" and "terrorist" interchangeably. In doing so, they unwittingly transfer the religious legitimacy inherent in the concept of jihad to murderous acts that are anything but holy. [...]

Leaders of Islamic countries, organizations and local communities have most of the burden, as well as the best chance, of steering Muslim hearts and minds away from bin Laden's world vision. Yet while most distance themselves from his terrorist acts, their penchant for engaging in fiery rhetoric castigating the West helps breed greater intolerance of non-Muslims. The wide disparity between the haves and have-nots in the Middle East also fuels the fires of Islamic activism.

on neoconservatism

In the recent NY Times Magazine, Francis Fukuyama, in another one of his thoughtfully-written pieces renounces neoconservatism. Not that this is a surprise: there was Fukuyama's very public spat with Charles Krauthammer over the Iraq war, Fukuyama's resignation from the the editorial board of The National Interest and and the launch of The American Interest, and his increasing criticism of the Iraq war.

Some interesting points he makes:

If there was a single overarching theme to the domestic social policy critiques issued by those who wrote for the neoconservative journal The Public Interest, founded by Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Bell in 1965, it was the limits of social engineering. Writers like Glazer, Moynihan and, later, Glenn Loury argued that ambitious efforts to seek social justice often left societies worse off than before because they either required massive state intervention that disrupted pre-existing social relations (for example, forced busing) or else produced unanticipated consequences (like an increase in single-parent families as a result of welfare). A major theme running through James Q. Wilson's extensive writings on crime was the idea that you could not lower crime rates by trying to solve deep underlying problems like poverty and racism; effective policies needed to focus on shorter-term measures that went after symptoms of social distress (like subway graffiti or panhandling) rather than root causes.

How, then, did a group with such a pedigree come to decide that the "root cause" of terrorism lay in the Middle East's lack of democracy, that the United States had both the wisdom and the ability to fix this problem and that democracy would come quickly and painlessly to Iraq? Neoconservatives would not have taken this turn but for the peculiar way that the cold war ended.

He then goes on to offer the following interpretation of his famous book The End of History and the Last Man:

Many people have also interpreted my book "The End of History and the Last Man" (1992) as a neoconservative tract, one that argued in favor of the view that there is a universal hunger for liberty in all people that will inevitably lead them to liberal democracy, and that we are living in the midst of an accelerating, transnational movement in favor of that liberal democracy. This is a misreading of the argument. "The End of History" is in the end an argument about modernization. What is initially universal is not the desire for liberal democracy but rather the desire to live in a modern — that is, technologically advanced and prosperous — society, which, if satisfied, tends to drive demands for political participation. Liberal democracy is one of the byproducts of this modernization process, something that becomes a universal aspiration only in the course of historical time.

"The End of History," in other words, presented a kind of Marxist argument for the existence of a long-term process of social evolution, but one that terminates in liberal democracy rather than communism. In the formulation of the scholar Ken Jowitt, the neoconservative position articulated by people like Kristol and Kagan was, by contrast, Leninist; they believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support.

This is indeed strange for me. It is more than 8 years since I read his book but what impressed me most was his philosophical argument about the inevitability of liberal democracy (or at least a form of it), through Hegel via Alexander Kojeve. It turns out though that liberal democracy is a by-product, not the driving force. Could I have read the book wrong? Or was I just carried away by my first true brush with philosophy? (I remember being impressed by the sheer elegance of it all, to explain the entire edifice of human civilization by just three human characteristics: Need, Reason and Thymos).

ASIDE: Fukuyama mentions a book (there's also a documentary) I read recently, Arguing the World. I recommend the book highly. Here's something from the great Daniel Bell (The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism) says in one of his interviews (a little soppy but I don't know why, it moved me a little):

Optimism is a philosophy, pessimism is a character trait. It’s hard to talk about visions. If you have a creed, if you have a belief system, the vision flows out of that. I don’t have a particular belief system. To the extent that my optimism overcomes my pessimism, I would say it’s a recurrent belief in the idea of utopia. What is against utopia? Against utopia is arcadia. The dream of a golden past.

The history of the Jews has never really been a golden past, the history of the intellectuals has never been a golden past. So arcadia may be a false hope, it’s a nostalgia. Utopia’s always an openness, a possibility. I believe in utopia as a kind of aim, a vision, while also mindful of the risks. Utopia represents ideals, and how can you live without some sense of ideals? It’s a necessary way of living. I remain, still, purely a utopian.

ASIDE II: I also highly recommend Mark Lilla's two wonderful essays on the work of the philosopher Leo Strauss here and here.

ASIDE III: Fukuyama's essay on The End of History that appeared in the National Interest can be read here. The full version of his criticism of Charles Krauthammer The Neoconservative Movement can be read here.

some essays for the week.

Some great essays appeared this week.

In The New Republic, Amartya Sen analyzes the uses and abuses of multiculturalism.

Thomas Nagel reviews K. Anthony Appiah's Cosmopolitanism and also his The Ethics of Identity. (Extract of Cosmopolitanism in the NYT magazine here). The review is a succinct summary of Appiah's book. Some passages that I thought were worth chewing on:

Appiah poses the societal question this way: "What claims, if any, can identity groups as such justly make upon the state?" His answer, basically, is "none." Groups have no inherent moral standing; their importance depends on their importance to the lives of individuals. Appiah resists Charles Taylor's claim that the value of a culture is not derivative from its value to individuals, but the reverse.

Whatever may be the political implications, I think that he is here taking ethical individualism too far, and that Taylor is on to something important. When a language and its literature, or a musical or artistic form, or even a cuisine or a game, dies out, so that no one is able any longer to appreciate or to practice it, something valuable has gone out of existence. This cannot be explained by the harm to existing individuals, all of whom will have other things to do and other ways to flourish. Even though the lost element of culture could have continued only in the lives of individuals, its absence is not a loss to them if they do not miss it. It is the recognition that its disappearance would be a loss nonetheless, though a loss to no one, that motivates some of the strongest desires for cultural preservation, however quixotic. (I sympathize completely with the lament of a classicist I know that students at Oxford are no longer required to write Greek and Latin verse.)

Appiah shares with Mill an insistence on the value of social diversity to permit the flourishing of different individuals, and a distaste for uniformity. But like Mill, he thinks this means that some forms of diversity should not be tolerated: "It may be that many of us value diversity not because it is a primordial good but because we take it to be a correlative of liberty, of nondomination. But if autonomy is the sponsoring concern, the diversity principle--the value of diversity simpliciter--cannot command our loyalty." So he is not sympathetic to the kind of anthropological relativism that supports the protection of traditional group practices even if they impose serious disadvantages or inequalities on some members of the group (often its female members, as with arranged early marriage). And he denies that the mere legal possibility of exit from such a group is sufficient to immunize it from societal oversight to protect the individual rights of its members. The right of exit is not enough to cancel the constraining power of strong communal identities. What the state should do, however, depends on how fundamental the competing claims are: Appiah would not require the Catholic Church to admit women to the priesthood.

Appiah is also unsympathetic to preservationism: the obligation of a society to help identity groups, cultural or linguistic, to ensure their survival into succeeding generations--which goes beyond its obligation to see that present members of those groups do not suffer discrimination or persecution. Individual autonomy trumps group preservation, just as it does in the case of arranged marriages.

And this one:

Appiah is very good on the confusing issue of the "neutrality" of the state in a pluralistic liberal society. Since this is an evaluative concept, it cannot mean general value neutrality, but must mean neutrality among a certain subset of values and practices based on a non-neutral evaluative premise. Appiah believes that a requirement of equal respect for individuals underlies such neutrality as liberalism requires--among religions, conceptions of the good life, sexual mores, and so forth. But respect for individuals and their autonomy will rule out respect for identities that undermine it, and the liberal state, while it will not engage in the formation of souls to a single standard, will try to impose through education and public forms of equality the conditions for pluralistic self-realization.

Equal respect is required of the state, but not of individuals, whose personal associations and communal identities essentially involve exclusive attachments without which life would be impoverished and abstract: "A radical egalitarian might give his money to the poor, but he can't give his friends to the friendless." Or, "to put the matter paradoxically: impartiality is a strictly position-dependent obligation. What is a virtue in a referee is not a virtue in a prize-fighter's wife."

Finally Nagel quotes Appiah himself on this:

Identity is at the heart of human life: liberalism ... takes this picture seriously, and tries to construct a state and society that take account of the ethics of identity without losing sight of the values of personal autonomy. But the cosmopolitan impulse is central to this view, too, because it sees a world of cultural and social variety as a precondition for the self-creation that is at the heart of a meaningful human life.

Nagel ends on this dismal note:

Appiah believes that the accumulation of changes in individual consciousness brought on by communication and mobility is already propelling us along this upward path. He rejects by implication the "clash of civilizations" as the global drama to which we are all condemned. I hope the future will prove him right, though the experience of our time makes me wonder. Episodes such as the recent widespread and violent reaction to a few cartoon depictions of Mohammed prompt the grim reflection that it took centuries of bloodshed for the West to move from the wars of religion to its present roughly liberal consensus. We may have to wait a long time.

Finally, Leon Weiseltier, in his typically melodramatic fashion, takes on Daniel Dennett's new book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. I don't much care for Wieseltier's scorched-earth sarcastic (and slightly melodramatic) style myself, but since he's penned this essay as an outraged believer, it seems to suit the issue just fine.

About me

Brokeback Mountain -- again!!

Daniel Mendelsohn, always penetrating, (his review of Tony Kushner's Angels in America, is one of my favorite pieces of contemporary criticism), points out the flaw in the reception of Brokeback Mountain:

Because I am as admiring as almost everyone else of the film's many excellences, it seems to me necessary to counter this special emphasis in the way the film is being promoted and received.

For to see Brokeback Mountain as a love story, or even as a film about universal human emotions, is to misconstrue it very seriously—and in so doing inevitably to diminish its real achievement. Both narratively and visually, Brokeback Mountain is a tragedy about the specifically gay phenomenon of the "closet"—about the disastrous emotional and moral consequences of erotic self-repression and of the social intolerance that first causes and then exacerbates it.

The New Red Cross advertisement...

Seth Stevenson analyzes the latest American Red Cross ad in Slate.

The ad itself goes like this:

A young guy delivers a monologue. "When I found out my jeans were made using child labor in sweatshops," he begins, "I wrote a letter to the company saying, 'Reconsider your labor practices.' " He goes on to tell a convoluted tale about his efforts to change the world—and how they are thwarted at every turn. Ultimately, he argues, his attempts to stop child labor will—in an indirect fashion—eradicate the rain forest, kill off indigenous tribes, and impede cancer research. A tag line fades in: "Saving the world isn't easy. Saving a life is. Just one pint of blood can save up to three lives. Give blood."

Stevenson asks:

Since when do charities bash the competition? Imagine a spot arguing that Ethiopian orphans are more worthy than Somali orphans. That tsunami victims are more worthy than Katrina victims. Wouldn't happen. Yet this ad argues that giving blood is a better choice than advocating on behalf of those child laborers. It presents do-gooding as a zero-sum game.

Point taken. But the ad has a point too. Activism is rarely as simple as activists make it sound. When one is protesting a systemic injustice, nothing is really as cut-and-dried as it looks, unless of course one is using the easy language of simple moral criticism. Consider the twin thorny issues of child-labor and sweat-shops. Michael Kinsley argues (very convincingly, I think) that it is one thing to ask governments to restrict imports that have been made with child and/or unpaid/low-paid labor. It is quite another to argue that working-conditions in developing countries be changed altogether, which is what some of the protestors against sweat-shop labor seem to imply. After all, as Kinsley tersely puts it: It is no favor to be forbidden to take advantage of your poverty, when poverty is the only thing you have.

Unforgettable moments...

The New York Times has a section called “Unforgettable Moments” where its three critics, describe what they feel is an unforgettable moment in the movies this year. Manohla Dargis describes a scene from David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, A.O. Scott goes for Jeffrey Wright’s barbecue scene in Stephen Gagan’s Syriana (more on this in subsequent posts) but the tour de force is by Stephen Holden describing, in his own words, a vignette from Rodrigo García"s Nine Lives. I’ve heard a lot about Nine Lives, in particular about the lovely performances of all its leading ladies, notably Robin Wright Penn. But Holden has condensed his unforgettable moment marvelously; he gets its flavor across but also conveys how much more unforgettable it would be seeing it on screen. Read it. (Also read Holden’s review of Nine Lives here). 

Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain

To misquote Madeline/Judy writing to Scottie in Vertigo: And so I finally saw Brokeback Mountain . After months of hearing about the movie, after months of wondering how it would be, whether it would work or not, I saw it. It was, as they say, an anti-climax.

The story goes back a year or two. I remember reading, perhaps two years ago, that an Annie Proulx short story about "two gay cowboys" (or rather, their doomed love story) was about to be filmed. There was enormous speculation: which two actors would "risk their images" for the two lead roles? (Clearly this is one of the most fatuous lines of inquiry that I've ever encountered. This Caryn James article is a perfect example of utter silliness). Who would be the director who would add his own name to this enterprise? Would the studios go through with it? What about the sex? How would they film it? Would people see it? And on and on and on.

Sometimes when one's questions are answered, it takes the piss out of the whole thing. There is a "buzz" around Brokeback Mountain now. It's been raved about to death. It's an Oscar contender, perhaps the leading Oscar contender. It's been proclaimed to be a film about "universal love" (as opposed to "simply a gay love story"), even as a "paean to masculinity". Frank Rich wrote a predictable editorial in the New York Times making the "rash prediction" that the movie would play well in the heartland. People around me who would never have heard about Brokeback Mountain now want to see it. I should be feeling happier -- I certainly know I am -- but the feeling remains. Something has been lost. Our film has become simply our film.

It wasn't so a year ago. I read Proulx's short story then, (after hearing that it was going to be filmed). Having never read Proulx before (and I only managed to read one other story in that collection), the prose seemed different, relying almost entirely on formal restraint. Her words fall over one another but they are careful words, always stoic, never sentimental. The story's power was in its afterglow, its capacity to remain in mind long after the words have been forgotten. It was meant to be savored, to be thought about, and perhaps read again. Ang Lee's adaptation is scrupulously faithful to Proulx&# 39;s story in most respects. It also adopts completely Proulx's tone -- her detachment -- that makes the afterglow of her story so poignant.

That is a tragic mistake. Lee does everything: he shoots the breathtaking landscapes perfectly, exacts excellent performances from his actors, keeps the spirit of the story intact but he is never able to make the story come alive, never able to take us into Ennis's or Jack's heads. Brokeback Mountain is too distanced for its own good, far too aesthetic, too controlled, and perhaps even too intellectual. The formal restraint, the careful distance, may be to people's liking but I wish Lee had done it differently. I wish that, like the best of Douglas Sirk's films, he had poured out his characters' repressed emotions into the background score, into the beautiful Montana backdrops and gone deep into them, bringing out in vivid, detailed colors what they only hinted at.

But Lee is a tasteful director. He is also studiously unsentimental, or tries to be. When he lets go, as in Ennis's scene with Jack's grieving parents, the effect is marvelous; the restraint works. Perhaps Stanley Kauffmann has a point: Lee's Taiwanese background and his American training make him uniquely sensitive to filial relationships (his endearing The Wedding Banquet is one of the most lovely portraits of parental grief and disappointment). But in most other scenes Lee's camera only observes, never participates. This is not to say that Brokeback Mountain is a bad film. God, no. But it never moved me as much as it could have. Who knows, perhaps that's a good thing. Emotion is a tricky thing, hard to balance, hard to restrain; perhaps restraint is the best course.

Heath Ledger, who has been praised to the skies for his performance, is certainly restrained as Ennis. Stephen Holden of the NYT compared Ledger's turn to the best of Penn and Brando. As a comparison, this is bizarre. Penn and Brando are flashy actors. If anything, the template for Ledger's performance Nick Nolte's Wade Wodehouse in Affliction . Ledger is good, I'll grant him that and God knows, he has tried hard. But he is less-than-convincing because his persona precedes him. He is always Heath Ledger with the twinkle in his eye and the smile on his lips -- his personality hovers over his character's. The opposite is true of Jake Gyllenhaal, who on first appearances seems to be miscast. He is a far cry from the buck-toothed short jaunty Jack Twist of Proulx's story. But the spirit he has created on-screen, with that woebegone face and the hangdog look, is authentically Jack Twist's. Jack waits for Ennis eagerly, gives unselfishly and dreams radiantly if in futility; Gyllenhaal captures him perfectly. his performance makes Ledger's (well-acted) final scenes truly poignant.

For both actors, even if not for Ang Lee, Brokeback Mountain is a triumph.

And yes, if it does manage to win the Oscars, I know I'll be happy.

On Warner Herzog's Grizzly Man

In TNR, Christopher Orr has an interesting take on Warner Herzog's latest documentary, Grizzly Man. While I don't agree with it, it's worth reading. Orr believes that Grizzly Man is only "ostensibly" about Timothy Treadwell, a man who spent thirteen summers in the wilderness of Alaska, living in close proximity to grizzly bears and who ultimately was killed by one of them. The documentary, in fact, reveals more about its maker Warner Herzog: a man who embodies a "cold, rationalistic" view of the universe (as opposed to a sentimentalized view) and yet, is tender-hearted enough to desire that his views not infect others, that his pessimism not interfere with their desire for transcendence, their belief.

It is the fervor of Treadwell's belief, more than the particulars of his circumstances, that seems to fascinate and perplex Herzog, the cultured European rationalist. For him, nature is cruel and cold and desolate. Surveying a gorgeous glacier near Treadwell's site, Herzog muses, "This gigantic complexity of tumbling ice and abysses separated Treadwell from the world out there. And more so, it seems to me that this landscape in turmoil is a metaphor of his soul." Responding to Treadwell's "sentimentalized view" of nature after the discovery of the dead fox, he declares, "I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder." (Whose soul is supposed to be in turmoil here?) Near the very end of the film, he confesses, "And what haunts me is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature." This conflict between Treadwell and Herzog, between delirious belief and cultivated nihilism, is at the core of Grizzly Man.

I happen to share Herzog's view, expressed in the film, that nature is cruel and cold and desolate. When Herzog makes the statement near the very end of the film, that "what haunts me is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature", the camera has zoomed in on a bear's face and the sight is chilling. Animal faces don't really have expressions, it is as much a mistake to read too much into a dog's cute face as a bear's stony visage, but I felt sorry for Treadwell at that moment, sorry that the animals he loved so much could never reciprocate, were, in fact, not very capable for caring much for any one.

When Herzog declines to share with his viewers the final recording of Treadwell and his girlfriend's death, Orr finds in it evidence that Herzog is an "anti-evangelist":

He (i.e. Herzog) does not want Jewel (or us) to share his pitiless vision of the universe, whether because he himself has doubts or because he thinks a comforting lie is preferable to the horrible truth. He is an anti-evangelist for his own nihilism.

But it makes no difference really -- the bears' faces, the pitiless version of nature that comes through in the footage, the rain, the cold, the hardship, they all have already told the tale. Herzog is merely sparing us the horror of hearing Treadwell's pitiable cries; cries that would have robbed Treadwell's transcendent footage of its sheen, and in fact, would make Treadwell into the kind of tragic figure that he wasn't and never wanted to be. Indeed Orr's article, more than anything, convinces me that Treadwell did, in fact, find a kind of transcendence ("a chance to touch something purer, simpler, more divine") in living in the wild. (Or as Foucault would have put it, he looked upon it as a "limit-experience").

On another note, Orr finds it "remarkable" that Treadwell was able to spend "many hundreds of days" without being attacked by a bear. In fact, he goes on as far as to suggest that Treadwell, in fact, had found a way to co-exist with nature, what killed him wasn't nature itself but a deviation from the routine, the "way" that he had found. That's an interesting thesis but Treadwell's footage makes it clear that it wasn't so. Treadwell ventured dangerously close to the bears and I am inclined to attribute the fact of his survival to pure luck. There are moments in his footage -- excruciating moments -- when it appears (to me) that he was dangerously close to being attacked. That he wasn't was probably a mix of providence and his own ingenuity. One might almost call it a quirk of nature, if only the term wasn't so ironic.

Noah Baumbach's Kicking and Screaming

Noah Baumbach’s 1994 début Kicking and Screaming quickly put me into a skeptical mode—the mannered college types, straight from Whit Stillman, minus the sweetness that Stillman brings to his characters, the witty, too witty dialogue, with its multiple layers of irony; it was all too conspicuously indie—but as the movie moved into its final third, I found myself, to my great surprise, blinking back tears. All along, Baumbach had been working, in his own talky way, to a moment of truth, of post-collegiate life and in the movie’s final moments he hits it, undiluted by irony.

Grover and Jane, in only their second meeting are both intoxicated in a “townie” bar and sharing a moment. As Jane prepares to leave, Grover tells her (apparently she has an appointment with a shrink):
He: I just hope we feel the same way after this moment. After the alcohol wears off. You’ll talk to your shrink; I’ll go back to my friends. I just hope we keep this.
A lovely pregnant pause. And then she: It’s not as dramatic as all that. I mean we’ve got some time. Most of our life, in fact. What do you think if we had a proper love-affair—do you think it’ll last?

This line, in a calculatedly mannered flashback (each flashback starts with a freeze-frame of Jane, since we are obviously viewing her through the prism of Grover’s memory), the fact that the audience knows that Grover and Jane will break up, and be miserable without each other, the perfect pause and the lines themselves weave together perfectly. For me, it was a moment of connection. Later on, Grover decides to join Jane in Prague, in a spur-of-the-moment decision, he has a wild monologue with the ticket-clerk, where he pleads with her to give him a ticket, so that later on he can remember this moment as the time he chose to go to Prague; chose, that is, in full living breathing consciousness, in a spectacular moment of being alive. Josh Hamilton delivers the monologue with his eyes literally shining, his face flushed; when he realizes he doesn’t have his passport and the clerk gently suggests that he could go the next day, Grover makes a bitter face; the moment has passed.

The idea that life is a series of moments, when one is alive is not new and Baumbach’s schematic is a little too structured for my liking. Here, for instance, is Michael Cunningham in The Hours.

Yes, Clarissa thinks, it’s time for the day to be over. We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep—it’s as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we’re very fortunate, by time itself. There’s just this consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we’ve imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning, we hope, more than anything for more.

Through some mysterious alchemy, some strange weave of his dialogue and his actors, Noah Baumbach has given this passage a marvelous cinematic expression.

UPDATE: Matt Feeney has an article up on Slate today about Baumbach's Kicking and Screaming and Mr Jealousy. About Kicking and Screaming, he writes something that's remarkably close to what I wrote--about why the film resonated with me. Here's an extract from his piece:

In a recent interview in New York magazine, Noah Baumbach says that his new film, The Squid and the Whale, represents a mature turn in his filmmaking: "I wanted to make more emotional movies that were less about being clever." This seems to be a gentle cut at his first two efforts, Kicking and Screaming (1995) and Mr. Jealousy (1997). Baumbach, not unlike the characters in his films, is being unfair to himself. Sure, these movies have a talky, sophomoric cleverness, and they take on the themes—post-college paralysis, romantic jealousy—that apply most to people in their late 20s. You can see why Baumbach, now 37, might view them as artifacts of a shallower, sillier stage of life. But, like the openly autobiographical Squid, Baumbach's Kicking and Screaming and Mr. Jealousy are acutely, almost unbearably, personal and emotional films.

And then:

Maybe Baumbach thinks it's just him, but the fantasy of the spunky beauty with the darling overbite who sits across from you in your creative writing seminar and vivisects your short stories but then later admits that they show real talent and then falls in love with you is pretty much universal among male English majors. Baumbach makes this familiar, almost fantastic, story resonate with several deft touches. While the film's primary action takes place in the limbo of the year after graduation, the romance is told in flashbacks of the previous year, styled in a way that evokes the wistful quality of romantic memory. They begin in black-and-white freeze frame, then take on color, and then roll into slow motion before coming fully alive. Baumbach deepens these squirmy courtship scenes with perfect music. (For a time, I wished I were a filmmaker just so I could put Freedy Johnston's "The Lucky One" in one of my movies, but then Baumbach beat me to it.) The nicest touch, though, was finding Olivia d'Abo for the role of Jane. D'Abo's had a checkered career, heavy on straight-to-video action movies, but Kicking and Screaming shows her to be an inventive and charming comic actress. If you still don't have a face to put to your creative-writing-seminar fantasy, rent Kicking and Screaming.

Read the whole piece; I am going to rent Mr Jealousy soon, I think.

Guilty Pleasures

Matt Feeney has a great article in Slate about his "guilty pleasures"--trashy movies that he loves to watch at home when the multiplex gets too funereal. He includes Double Jeopardy, The Devil's Advocate, Cruel Intentions and Wild Things. I haven't seen Double Jeapordy myself but of the rest of three, the only one that I love is Wild Things, with its double-double-double-double crosses and the steamy sex (Aah, Matt Dillon...). I saw The Devil's Advocate in the cinema-hall back in college and I still haven't come around to the view that the movie actually has a point, beyond the grandstanding Al Pacino and the bland Keanu Reeves.

I enjoyed the beginning of Cruel Intentions when the effiminately handsome Ryan Phillipe and the carnal Sarah Michelle Gellar's characters trade sexually charged barbs (yes, as in incest). But once Reese Witherspoon's sanctimonious virginal goody-two-shoes character enters the scene and the movie throws in its lot with her, and the rakish Phillipe actually falls in love with her (as opposed to simply jumping into bed with his sister and having wild incestous sex), I just lost it altogether. The movie that began as great fun--an adult romp--turns melodramatic and all moral. It bothers me--this siding with the moral virgin. After all, why couldn't the Gellar character, with all her appetites, have triumphed? But no, the Ryan Phillipe character is made to suffer moral pangs and so is the audience, whether it wants to or not. Naah, I hated the way director Roger Kumble turned what should have been a blackly comic sexually charged teen-movie (sort of like Wild Things) into a sob-fest.

Enough ranting. Let me move on to my guilty pleasures--movies that I see time and time again simply because I love them. The pleasure isn't actually "guilty" because most of these movies wouldn't be considered "trash" at all. I have a rather sentimental attachment to them and watch them because--well, because they make me laugh and cry. So, without further ado, here's the list

Moulin Rouge
The Last Days of Disco
Shakespeare in Love
The Opposite of Sex
Far from Heaven