Smells Like Teen Angst

Title: Rebel Without A Cause

Rating: 4 Stars

Well, I’ve watched Marlon Brando’s signature role in Streetcar Named Desire and I’ve watched Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun, so I decided to finish the trifecta of 1950s heart throb uncompromising misunderstood method actors by watching James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause.

First, a word about the cast. Sure, you have James Dean (playing Jim), Natalie Wood (playing Judy), and Sal Mineo (playing Plato). How about Mr Magoo (Jim Backus) as Jim’s father? How about Paul Drake (William Hopper) from the OG Perry Mason (which is especially weird since I just saw Raymond Burr in A Place in the Sun) playing Judy’s father? How about The Chief from Get Smart playing an understanding policeman? Best of all, how about a very young Dennis Hopper playing a teenage gang member named, I kid you not, Goon?

My ignorance of this film is best illuminated by the fact that I had no idea that Tommy Wiseau 100% stole his “You’re tearing me apart!” line from James Dean emoting teenage angst at his parents.

The plot starts with our three troubled teenagers, for different reasons, all landing at the police station. Jim is drunk. Judy has violated curfew. Plato, much more disturbingly, has killed some puppies.

It quickly turns out that the three of them have severe parental issues. Jim’s mom is domineering while his father, who Jim looks up to and is desperately seeking guidance from, is weak (at one point in the film is actually shown wearing an apron, which I’m guessing in 1950s argot pretty much puts him in lipstick and a wig).

Judy wants to be close again to her father, but apparently her father has decided, since she is now 16 years old, that she no longer deserves any attention from him. In fact, he angrily slaps her on the cheek when she gives him a little peck of a kiss. Is there some hidden child abuse trauma here lying just below the surface?

Plato’s parents are just not there. He’s being raised by live in help. They send him money to sustain himself. He tells different stories about why they’re not around. Plato ends up latching onto Jim and Judy as some parent figure equivalents.

Jim has been in trouble before.  The solution that his parents have come up with is to change towns whenever he gets into too much trouble. I have no idea what his father does that allows them to just immediately uproot periodically and go off to parts unknown.

Jim’s first day at school goes poorly. There’s a gang of young toughs that Judy hangs out with. They immediately start harassing Jim. Jim gets into a knife fight with Buzz, the leader.

Buzz challenges Jim to a Chicken Run. This is a race in which they each ride a beat up car as close to a cliff ridge as they can get before throwing themselves out of the car before it plummets over the edge. Jim gets out, but Buzz gets caught on the door handle and plunges to his death with the car. Anyone remember the tractor scene from Footloose?

Judy, who was dating Buzz, seems to get over Buzz’s death pretty quickly. Jim, Judy, and Plato all go to a deserted mansion. Buzz’s gang, out to take vengeance on Jim, show up at the mansion. Plato shoots and wounds one of the gang. He runs away with the police in hot pursuit. Jim and Judy find Plato and convince him to turn himself in. When Plato comes out to surrender, the police shoot him down.

Jim then introduces Judy to his parents. Again, I’m not kidding. That’s how it ends.

First things first. You can certainly see how this film set the template for all future teenage angst films and how James Dean is the template for all future tortured, sensitive, misunderstood teenagers.

I’ve written about the Hays Code before, the strictures that it places on the film, and how directors get around them. In this film, the strongest sexual chemistry is between Jim and Plato. Mineo was told to act towards Dean just like Wood does. Hence, Plato’s feelings towards Jim are palpable.

James Dean came into this film on the heels of East of Eden. He’s already a star. In fact, he’s such a huge star at this point that the studio heads agreed to film it in color. The director, Nicholas Ray, was so impressed with James Dean that he allowed him to improvise significant scenes in the film, much to more traditional actors’ (like Jim Backus) dismay. Here you see method acting in all of its glory and excess.

Nicholas Ray was apparently a piece of work. He had an affair with Natalie Wood during the filming. He was 43 and she was 16. There were rumors that he had a similar relationship with Sal Mineo (aged 15). Dennis Hopper, as a reminder, played a character named Goon. It was apparently a larger role but, when Ray found out that Hopper was also having an affair with Wood, Ray cut most of Hopper’s lines.

It’s interesting to contemplate James Dean’s career. He did some television work and a couple of uncredited film roles, but his entire body of work essentially consists of three films: East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause, and Giant. He arrived in Los Angeles in April 1954 and he died in a car crash in September 1955. It was such a short time to establish a legend.

The film is good and it surely set patterns that have been followed by many subsequent films. Just like A Place in the Sun, Rebel Without a Cause was on the earlier AFI top films list and was dropped off the revised list. Just like A Place in the Sun, I concur with that decision. It’s an important film but it wouldn’t be on my top 100 films list.

Perry Mason is the DA?

Title: A Place in the Sun

Rating: 3 Stars

Having recently completed watching all 100 films on the 2007 AFI Film List, I decided to take a look at one of the films that was on the 1998 version of the list but had fallen off when it was updated.

I picked A Place in the Sun because I knew literally nothing about it. I’m not sure if I’d even heard of the title before, let alone its plot or even what kind of film it is. I did see that it starred Montgomery Clift. I’d at least heard of Clift but really knew nothing about him. I’m pretty sure that I’ve never seen him act before.

Having now watched it, I concur with the AFI on this. I can see why it made the list in 1998 but I can also see why, after a bit more introspection and time, that it really no longer has a place on it. One of the purposes of a film is to entertain. To be honest, this film, although right at 2 hours long, is a bit of a slog. It’s pretty slow paced.

It’s a retelling of Theodore Dreiser’s novel, An American Tragedy. For those unfamiliar with it, it tells the story of a young man that was raised in poverty. He’s driven to escape it anyway that he can. He gets a job as a bellhop. A rich uncle recognizes him and offers him a lowly job in a factory that he owns. The young man is trying to use every opportunity to make his way into society. However, in his loneliness, he takes up with a young woman at the factory and she becomes pregnant. At the same time, he and a rich heiress fall in love. The young woman insists that he marry her. Desperate, he plans to kill her by drowning her in what appears to be a boating accident. At the last moment, he loses his nerve and can’t do it. However, she accidentally falls off the boat and drowns anyway. When the body is found, all evidence points to him having murdered her. He gets convicted even though he is innocent of the crime and is executed.

Full of illicit sex, a failed attempt at an abortion, and rich people living large while poor people can barely survive, this 1925 novel was perfect for its time. This was in the middle of the flapper era where hedonism among the young rich ran rampant in the wreckage of ideals shattered by WWI. The gap between the very rich and everyone else was ever growing (not even close to where it’s at now, for those interested in such things), so the ultimately futile attempt that the young man makes to bridge the gap was probably always hopeless. Margaret Sanger started what turned out to be the precursor of Planned Parenthood in 1921, so the relative frankness of the sex matched its time as well.

Even though the book was written in 1925, the 1951 film was made under the decidedly more puritanical time of the Hays Code. There was no way that the film could be as frank as the novel. Even so, the illicit sex between the young man, George Eastman (Montgomery Clift) and the poor young woman, Alice Tripp (Shelley Winters) is made pretty explicit, even if very subtle. Similarly, without mentioning the word abortion, when Tripp talks to a doctor, it’s pretty obvious why she is there. Without violating the Hays Code, it does successfully communicate what is happening.

This puts me in mind of another film released in 1951, A Streetcar Named Desire. That film needed to be able to communicate the sexual immorality of Blanche, the sexual orientation of Blanche’s true love, the crude sexuality of Stanley, and Stanley’s rape of Blanche. There was no way that this could be done overtly, but Elia Kazan was able to communicate these themes in other subtle ways.

In fact, having both of these films released in 1951 is pretty amazing. Not only for very mature themes that previous US films couldn’t touch, but also for the incandescent nature of the male leads. I wrote about this before, but if your only perspective of Marlon Brando is his roles in The Godfather or Apocalypse Now, you will be blown away by Brando in Streetcar. He exudes sexuality and power. He lights up the screen.

Clift’s performance is different than Brando’s. Don’t get me wrong. Clift is without a doubt movie star handsome. In fact, he and Elizabeth Taylor (playing the rich socialite young woman) are together one of the most beautiful couples I’ve ever seen on film.

However, Eastman is not a figure of power. He’s a nobody trying to be somebody. Despite his ambition, he is at the whim of nearly everyone. He’s at times sullen and morose. He sometimes has to let things happen to him and he just has to take it. Despite the fact that Clift is actually 31 in 1951, he plays Eastman like he’s an aimless 19 or 20 (in fact, Elizabeth Taylor is 19 in 1951). James Dean apparently worshipped Marlon Brando, but I see more of Montgomery Clift in James Dean than I do Brando. He’s a young man that resents the way that the world has treated him, wants to change it, but isn’t sure how.

Going to a film in 1951 and seeing Brando’s and Clift’s breakout performances in a theater must have been a transformative experience for critics. They ushered in the method style of acting that, seventy years later, has essentially taken over the art. They were both nominated for Best Actor Academy Awards that year. They both voted for each other but the traditional acting of Humphrey Bogart carried the day with The African Queen.

Clift’s life did not end well. Having become an established movie star, he had a serious car accident in 1956 (only a year after James Dean’s fatal one). The pain from the accident left him addicted to pills and alcohol. His health quickly deteriorated and he had trouble with his lines or even showing up on set. He was in the film The Misfits. This was Marilyn Monroe’s last film, and she said about him, “he’s the only person I know who is in even worse shape than I am”. He died in 1966 at the age of 46.

In my opinion, A Place in the Sun is not a great film. It is a significant film. It pushed the envelope on how to portray sensitive subjects. It highlighted the real class issues that exists in American society. Along with Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift’s performance ushered in a new style of acting that still is the dominant form today.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. The title of the post. In Eastman’s trial where he is convicted and sentenced to die, the prosecuting attorney was…Raymond Burr. Yes, Mr Perry Mason himself! Seeing Raymond Burr intimidate, cajole, and harass the hapless defendant Eastman caused serious cognitive dissonance in my brain.

The Death Of A Party

Today I filled out my primary ballot. Since I live in Washington, this is done via a mail-in ballot. All elections in Washington state are done this way. Not only is it way more convenient, it allows you to actually spend time with the ballot. You can go through it with the state provided voters’ pamphlet.

It’s kind of weird to me that, first of all, voters’ pamphlet aren’t available in all states. Apparently only sixteen or so states are legally required to create one. It gives space for all candidates and initiative sponsors (and opponents) to state their positions. It’s really quite helpful.

I’m also surprised at how relatively uncommon mail-in ballots are nationally. In Washington state, you could individually sign up to receive all ballots in the mail starting in 1991. Washington state moved to all mail-in ballots in 2011. I haven’t stepped into a polling place for decades. In all that time, I think that I might have missed one off year initiative ballot or something like that.

Given that, I’m amazed at the number of hoops that people in other states have to go through. In many states, you need a ‘valid’ excuse (and living in a pandemic does not count). It appears that really the only valid excuse is hospitalization in many states. Considering the fact that it seems that low voter participation is a much larger problem in US elections than the microscopically minuscule examples of voter fraud, this seems problematic.

But I digress.

Washington state has a relatively few number of state wide elective offices. This year neither of the senate offices are up for election. That leaves about nine state wide offices.

One of the state wide offices is Insurance Commissioner. There is only one Republican candidate running against the Democratic incumbent.

His statement reads (in part):

I am an autistic savant who has extensive knowledge and the many of the abilities of the President Reagan and President Jefferson Presidencies that I will incorporate into running the OIC externally like the Reagan Administration and internally (within WA) as the Jefferson Administration (sic)…I would fill the roles of Ronald, Nancy and Nixon, and Mr Kriedler would be assigned the role of Carter and Mr Welti would be Gerald Ford.

…I have found 168 Honorable Insurance Agents all of whom are more qualified than myself to each serve in 1 hour increments as Internal Insurance Commissioners of Washington state.

Another of the statewide positions is Commissioner of Public Lands. There are three Republican candidates running against the incumbent Democrat.

For one of the Republican candidates, his Community Service states, in its entirety, “I’ve never been in jail”. His statement reads (in part):

I like environment protection. I don’t like fires…President Trump says we need to rake our forests to clean up debris that exacerbates fires and that’s where I intend to start.

Well, all righty then. Primaries brings out at least one kooky candidate. Let’s take a look at another guy. His statement says (in part):

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. If elected, I will direct an independent, state funded study of the effects of 5G cell-phone towers upon living things. My research indicates that this radiation is killing trees, birds, honey bees, human life.

I will stop chemtrails in Washington state. I am against Bio-mass for electricity. I am against the use of wind power…I am against the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, eugenics, Satan, New World Order.

I get it, Insurance Commissioner and Commissioner of Public Lands are not exactly springboards to national office, but is that really the best that you could get?

This is a symptom of a larger problem in Washington state. The Republican party simply cannot compete at a statewide level. A Republican hasn’t been elected governor of the state since 1981. They’ve lost the last nine elections. Considering the current set of candidates in 2020, it looks like the streak is going to extend to ten.

And honestly, with really only one notable (and honestly, electorally suspicious) exception, none of the elections have really even been that close.

The problem is that the Republican base is located primarily East of the mountains. They certainly have a stronghold there, but it is, especially compared to the metropolitan Puget Sound, sparsely populated. Over half of the state’s population is in the three counties that comprise metropolitan Puget Sound.

The center of this is Seattle. Like most urban centers, it has become overwhelmingly Democratic. In fact, to give the general election some meaning, the mayoral position was changed to be nonpartisan since the Democratic candidate always won. Even so, it’s not exactly a mystery what the party affiliation of a candidate is. The last Republican candidate to win a Seattle mayoral election was 1964.

From this much stronger stronghold, the Democratic party dominates statewide. Both US senators are Democrats and neither have been particularly challenged the last couple of election cycles. The last Republican senator was elected in 1994. Seven of the ten US representatives are Democrats. Two of the three Republicans are in Eastern Washington districts.

Here’s the thing. I’m a pretty progressive guy, so on the one hand this should make me happy, but really, I’m a supporter of the two party (at least) system. If the Republicans insist on running candidates that have no chance of winning, then, in the long run, it hurts both parties.

It obviously hurts the Republicans since they have such limited chance to effect the Washington state agenda. I also thinks it hurts the Democrats. It makes them lazy, complacent, and unimaginative. After all, am I going to vote for the guy that wants to be the Nancy Reagan of the Insurance Commissioner office? I’m captive to the party.

All hope is lost for the 2020 election. In a state like Washington, running on the same ticket as Donald Trump is a death sentence.

I can only hope that in the aftermath of 2020 that the Republican party will strive to figure out a way to crack the nut of trying to make inroads into the metropolitan Puget Sound electorate.

I don’t like having only one option.

O.G. Rom Com

Title: Emma

Rating: 5 Stars

It’s really good that I’m so secure in my masculinity (ahem) that I’m not at all afraid to admit that both my favorite novel and my favorite film of the year so far is a frothy romantic comedy written by a nineteenth century spinster.

I honestly don’t know what it is about Jane Austen. Relatively little happens in her novels (not a single ticking bomb, no nudity except for the occasional glimpse of an ankle, no screaming fits of madness). People barely ever even so much as raise their voice. Emma, in particular, is basically about a supremely self confident and yet horribly inept matchmaker. She tries and fails to set up matches. She upsets matches that are clearly for the best. She doesn’t even know that she herself is in love until it’s almost too late.

The image that I keep coming back to is a precious little ornate jewelry box that a young woman of means would keep her most precious keepsakes in. That is the novel Emma. Since I just reviewed the film a couple of months, I’ve already previously described the plot. Click here to read that post.  The novel is written with precise care. The characters are exquisitely drawn. The comedy is layered in perfectly. The romance builds to its inevitable conclusion.

One reason why it seems so strange that it draws me in is how foreign the world of Emma is. Written in 1816, it is a scarce two years after Waterloo. It’s four years away from the War of 1812. It’s only some twenty-five years or so away from the French Revolution. A lot of crazy stuff is happening in the world. None of that creeps in here. There is no political turmoil.

It’s all drawing rooms, carriage rides, and picnics. The main characters are nearly all young and wealthy. There are servants to tend to their every need. The men do not need to work. A woman’s role here is to get just enough education to allow her to make a match that hopefully elevates her ever so slightly from her current situation.

This is pretty standard fare for Austen. What makes Emma unique is that the eponymous heroine stands apart from that. Her father is extremely wealthy. Having only a sister, Emma stands to inherit the estate. Given her financial independence and her devotion to her father, she has no intention of ever marrying. That leaves her not only outside the normal path for women but puts her into a position of being the puppet master of her local society. She is a very big fish in a very small pond.

This leads her to trouble. With only the occasional disapproving lecture from Mr Knightley, she has carte blanche to engage her stratagems. The two things that keep her from being malignant is that her schemes always unravel (to the lasting ill effect of no one since everyone ends up happily married by the end) and her essential goodness leads her to sincerely regret her actions and to make amends.

The film captures all of this. If anything, and I know that this is a hot take, the film is an even richer experience. I wrote about this earlier, but Anya Taylor-Joy as Emma is wonderful. She perfectly captures the politely blank expression that an upper class English woman must have in social settings and yet still manages to convey all of Emma’s emotions through ever so slight motions of her eyes, eyebrows, and lips. She is the perfect Emma.

In fact, the casting all around is wonderful. Bill Nighy was born to play the ridiculous, hypochondriac, yet still somehow lovable Mr Woodhouse. Mia Goth plays Harriet Smith, Emma’s protege. She plays her with the perfect mixture of amazement, innocence, and joy.

Also, as an added plus to the film, it highlights the classism of English society during that time. The very rich live in a fantasy world. They live in unbelievable elegance and comfort. Mr Woodhouse and Emma live in a fabulous mansion and estate. Mr Knightley lives by himself on an even larger estate and mansion.

Within all of that elegance, these elites are essentially helpless. They can’t even get dressed without help. Their every whim is immediately satisfied by voiceless, nameless servants.

They’re also almost sterile in their desires. For instance, every meal and snack is populated with mounds and mounds of fabulous, delectable food that is either consciously ignored or barely picked at. They can only profess their love for each other in the most indirect of methods.

I know that Jane Austen isn’t the inventor of the romantic comedy. I think that I’m on pretty firm grounds when I say that she perfected it.

Punching Up Shakespeare

Title: A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Rating: 5 Stars

In my attempts at trying to find interesting things to do while I’m semi-trapped at home, I received an e-mail from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. I’ve written about them before. They are one of a very small number of world class theaters that regularly perform Shakespeare’s plays. They’re right up there with the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Toronto and The Globe Theater in London (which could break my heart by permanently closing due to the coronavirus).

I’ve been to the OSF at least three or four times. I’d made somewhat tentative plans to go back again this year. Of course, the world then came to an end and all such plans went up in smoke.

The e-mail notified me that, for their own evaluation purposes, the OSF had videotaped a couple of this season’s now cancelled plays. For a fairly modest fee, I could stream one.

One of the plays was A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s a silly, lighthearted play that, according to legend, was authored as a wedding entertainment. Hungry for entertainment myself, I dutifully paid my $15.

The last time that I saw this play, I wrote about the plot. I really don’t want to do it again and it is a play written some 425 years ago, so the plot is pretty stable. If you need a refresher, click here.

The big difference between this production and the last production is scale. The production that I saw in Seattle was put on by Fern Shakespeare. It is a tiny little playhouse (there might have been thirty people in the audience) and its budget is minuscule (I think that my VIP ticket was around $15).

The OSF is world class. The playhouse and the stage is one of the finest that I’ve seen. The actors are all top notch. It’s not unusual to see actors that have been part of the OSF company for more than ten years.

The Fern experience has the simple charm of people putting on a show just for the love of theater while OSF is like watching people operating at the top of their game.

One of the challenges with Shakespeare is making it your own. After all, the plays are over 400 years old. A play as popular as Midsummer has been performed many thousands of times over the years. Unless you’re trying to do some ultra traditional Ren Faire kind of staging, how do you make it relevant? Given Shakespeare’s reputation has a master stylist of language, how much do you really want to fuck with it?

Well, if you’re the OSF, the answer is, a fair amount. The director wanted to emphasize the very light nature of the comedy. He did so by inserting music into the play. Puck sang a couple of songs. Lysander walked around with a guitar that he’d strum. Helena had a banjo. None of this is in the source.

In fact, the play started, not with a prologue, but the actor playing Helena doing crowd work. She explained that the play was a work dedicated to love. She then asked for a raising of hands for married couples. She winnowed down the hands to zero in on one couple in the audience that had been married some 55 years. This might seem unusual but the average age at these plays skew, ahem, a little on the higher side. She got some basic information about them. At the close of the play, she then sang a song specifically for them. Since the play concludes with three marriages and the King of the fairies reuniting with his queen, celebrating a very long marriage seemed appropriate.

The two women at the heart of the main plot, Hermia and Helena, stole the play. These are large comedic roles as, much to their frustration, their respective beaus Lysander and Demetrius fall into and out of love with them. Both women made very good use of the silliness. As sometimes happens with Shakespeare’s comedies, the male protagonists were both overshadowed. They just seem a little dull. Why are these vivacious women pining for such milquetoast men? At least when it comes to his comedies, Shakespeare just seems to write better roles for women.

As in the last streamed play that I watched, it was absolutely no substitution for a live performance. The sound quality at times was sketchy (in all fairness, I was warned before I bought the ticket). Even so, it was quite enjoyable and well worth it.

The experience did emphasize how much I do miss live theater. It’s completely unknown when we will feel safe enough to attend a play again, but given our country’s direction, it’s not going to be anytime soon.

Wear your mask. Social distance. Wash your hands. It’s really not that hard.

Give Someone Else A Chance

I have relatives and old (primarily Facebook) friends that are not friendly to the liberal causes. They’re the ones that regularly mock Biden’s cognitive ability and yet fail to realize that their conquering hero hasn’t been able to speak in complete sentences for some years now. They especially fume at the fact that Biden has declared that his vice presidential pick will be a woman with a pretty strong preference for a woman of color. Tokenism, they shriek!  Affirmative action, they bellow! What about all of those more qualified white men being passed over, they ululate!

Just for fun, I decided to take a look at the data. I know that evidence based analysis has fallen out of favor, so I hope that you will indulge me.

To start with, I threw out the first three presidential elections. Those weren’t elections in the modern sense. The first two elections were basically coronations of George Washington. The third election had the nascent formation of political parties but there wasn’t really a concept of a slate of candidates (ie a President and a Vice President running together).

So, I’m counting the election of 1800 as the first modern election. It featured Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, so it wasn’t exactly the smoothest of events, but after ironing out a kink or two, it has served as the pattern for all future elections.

Starting in the year 1800, I took a look at every person that has ran for either President or Vice President on a major party ticket. In most election years, there were only two parties. There were a couple of exceptions that I accommodated.

There was the chaos of the 1824 election where there was not one, not two, not three, but four distinct slates of Democratic-Republican candidates (this was the infamous corrupt bargain that later led the country to the Jacksonian age).

The 1860 election was equally chaotic. Again there were four distinct sets of candidates trying to convince voters that they had the unique nostrum to heal the nation of its slavery woes.

The 1912 election featured Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party. Finally, I also counted George Wallace’s third party run in 1968 since he carried a significant number of Southern states.

I then took all of these president / vice president candidates and removed all duplicates. For instance, FDR is only counted once, not four times.

When I added up all of the realistic candidates that could have been President or Vice President, I came up with 165 people.

Of that 165, what was the demographic breakout? Well, there was Barack Obama, the sole person of color. There were three white women (Geraldine Ferraro, Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton). That leaves us with 161 white men.

What does that mean in terms of percentages? 97.5% of all candidates were white men. 1.8% were white women. 0.6% were black men. 0% were women of color.

Are we suggesting that in the 216 years of modern presidential elections, that there were zero women of color that were qualified to lead this country? Or that white males were always the best qualified (I’m looking at you Millard Fillmore, Warren Harding, James Buchanan, and Franklin Pierce)?

Of course, I know the silliness of what I’m arguing. Black people weren’t even considered citizens until the passage of the 14th Amendment in 1868. Women of any color weren’t allowed to vote at the federal level until the 19th Amendment in 1920. It’s going to be really hard to be President or Vice President if you’re not considered a citizen and/or not allowed to vote.

Still, black people have been citizens for about 150 years and women have been able to vote for 100 years. Why haven’t there been more candidates?

Again, not exactly a trick question. With Black Codes passed right after the Civil War and the establishment of Jim Crow, there was never anything approaching racial equality. Similarly, even after the vote, women were still discriminated against at the federal level. For example, they weren’t allowed to even serve on federal juries until 1957. That is only one example. There were many, many other ways that women lacked equality.

Women and persons of color didn’t even have the most barest of chances for such high office until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Given that, probably the most extreme earliest chance that a woman or a person of color had a chance to be a major party candidate was probably in 1972.

So, from the year 1800 to the year 1972, the only possible demographic to be President or Vice President was a white male.

What do you call a job where race and/or sex is a prerequisite? Affirmative Action. For at least the first 172 years of modern political elections, the Presidency was an affirmative action program for white males.

Knowing all of this, I have no problem with a candidate in the year 2020 saying that maybe it’s time to give someone else a chance.

 

Wha’s That Noshin’ On My Laig?

Title: Jaws

For some reason, lately I’ve been in the mood of reading a book and then watching a film adaptation of it. With Jaws being on the AFI list of best films and I hadn’t seen it in a long while, I decided to give it the same treatment.

I’m not sure how much people remember what a huge deal Jaws was when it came out. It was the first really big blockbuster of the 1970s. It seemed to play forever. The graphic horror of it was shocking. There were reports of people running out of the theater, throwing up and passing out.

I remember seeing it in a drive-in with my brother. Before it started, I was worried that I might throw up in his car. I did get scared but managed to preserve my dignity.

Watching it now, it all seems so tame. The explosion of blood when the kid on the raft gets attacked is still shocking, not only because of the blood but also due to violating the unwritten rule that while it’s OK for children to be threatened, the expectation is that no harm comes to them.

Similarly, the novel Jaws also caused a sensation upon release. It was on the NY best seller list for something over forty weeks. When released as a paperback, millions of copies were immediately sold. Ultimately, some twenty million copies of Jaws were sold world wide.

So, how do they compare?

The plot is more less the same. Brody (Roy Scheider) is the sheriff of Amity. A woman gets attacked by a shark and he wants to close the beach. Vaughn (Murray Hamilton), the mayor of Amity, intercedes because shutting down the beach will economically doom Amity. Brody acquiesces and other people are killed by the shark. Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), an ichthyologist, arrives so that he can research the shark. Brody, Hooper, and the irascible skipper Quint (Robert Shaw) go out to hunt and kill the shark.

What’s the major difference between the novel and the movie? Well, in the novel, pretty much all of the characters are assholes.

In the film, Brody is a transplant. He’s a New York City cop who burned out and now just wants to live a more tranquil life here in this beach town. He loves his wife Ellen (Lorraine Gray). The townspeople treat him suspiciously because he’s not considered one of them.

In the novel, Brody is a life long resident of Amity. He’s the one that treats non-residents with suspicion. Convinced that they’re all snobs, he’s actively rude to other people. He’s rude to his wife. Aware that he’s married above his station, he’s suspicious of Ellen. He’s especially suspicious of Hooper, who’s much more educated than he is, much richer than he is, and has known Ellen since they were both children.

In the film, Ellen is kind of a nonentity. She’s a pretty generic loving wife and mother. She apparently had a bigger part but much of it ended up on the cutting room floor (the filming of Jaws was problematic to say the least).

In the novel, it turns out that Brody was right to be suspicious of her. Ellen was born of wealth but fell in love with Brody. They got married and had three children. On the surface, all seems to be well. However, she is a cauldron of discontent. She sees all of her childhood friends continuing on with their luxurious lives while she feels trapped in the small town married to an unambitious man that makes a small salary.

When Hooper comes into town, her discontent reaches full flower. She essentially throws herself at Hooper and for the one and only time in her married life, spends an afternoon in a motel room with another man.

I have to say here that Benchley should never write a sex scene. First of all, men writing women has become a meme. Benchley is such a good example of this. Ellen’s thoughts and actions simply don’t make sense. The rape fantasy scene is particularly egregious. His description of the sex act, which includes Ellen watching Hooper’s eyes bulge out so far that she’s afraid that they’re going to pop out, is, quite simply, insane.  It’s the weirdest sex scene that I’ve read since Stephen King had a 11 year old girl pull a train in It.

Hooper, in the film is kind of an odd duck. Charming in a goofy manner, he’s really only interested in the shark. His interest in Ellen appears only friendly. In the novel, Ellen basically only has to drop a hint and he is immediately all over her. His overt pretentiousness is grating. His affair, combined with Brody’s suspicions, makes for uncomfortable boat rides when the three men do set off in search of the shark. Oh yeah, spoiler alert for a 45 year old novel, Hooper, unlike in the film, comes to a bad end.

There’s not a lot of difference between the film and novel Quint. Quint’s pretty gruff in both. Just to raise his asshole factor a bit, in the novel Quint does do things like cutting up a still living shark so that it will feed upon itself and is preserving a dolphin fetus to use as future bait.

Quint’s most famous scene in the film is him relating the anecdote of surviving the sinking of the USS Indianapolis. It was several days before the surviving crew could be rescued. As they waited, floating in the ocean, many sharks came to feast on the survivors. Since this scene was partially written by Shaw, it’s not surprising that it does not appear in the novel.

As in the film, Quint also comes to a bad end. However, in the novel, it’s much more of an overt Ahab ending. By the end of the novel, Quint has become obsessed with the shark, talking to it as he would to his mortal enemy. As he harpoons it, his leg gets caught in the rope and he drowns as the shark plunges into the depths. Very Ahab indeed.

Finally, there’s the mayor Vaughn. In the film, he’s just worried about tourism. In the novel, he’s somehow involved in a mafia scheme that’s dependent upon summer tourist traffic. When the tourists disappear as a result of the shark attacks, he becomes a despondent alcoholic and moves away in disgrace.

The film simplifies all of this nonsense. In hindsight, all of this additional plot seems unnecessary and maybe even detrimental. In fact, as Spielberg put it, when you read the novel, the characters are all so unappealing that you find yourself rooting for the shark. Even though an argument can be made that, by removing all of this complexity, Spielberg put a Hollywood spin on a much richer story, I think that, in this case, the complexity obfuscated the simple person against animal (monster) narrative that is really the heart of this story.

In case you’re wondering about the title of the blog post, apparently Benchley struggled mightily with finding a title for the novel. One of the bonus parts of the edition that I read included a list of discarded titles (of which they were many and varied). Peter Benchley’s father, Nathaniel, was also an author. He jokingly suggested “Wha’s That Noshin’ on my Laig?” as his entry.

I think that title would have made both the film and the novel much better.

 

From Boone City To The Emerald City

Title: The Age of Illusions

Rating: 3 Stars

This explains how American values have changed from the Cold War era to the post Cold War Era. Bacevich believes that these changes led to the US finding itself lost and it also explains the election of Donald Trump.

He first starts with the Cold War values. These are best summarized by the film The Best Years of our Lives. Filmed in 1946, it is about three WWII veterans coming back to their home town of Boone City and their troubles adjusting to civilian life.

US priorities during this time were to preserve values, fight communism, and consume material goods. What’s meant by values are those typically held by straight, white Christian men. Stable marriage, intact families, love of God, and good honest work is what every real American wanted to strive for.

During the Cold War, there was no questioning the belief that the US was in an existential fight for its survival. At the conclusion of previous wars, there was an immediate draw down of military. Although the military was nowhere near the size that it was while fighting WWII, there was still large numbers of armed forces both here and abroad. Nuclear weapon research continued apace. Even though nominally at peace, few questioned the need for the US to continue to stand aggressively in the face of communism.

During WWII, the US grew to become a manufacturing behemoth. No longer required to produce war materials at such prodigious scale, manufacturing was re-tooled for the production of consumer goods. Material consumption was widely encouraged to keep the manufacturing engine humming.

Once communism fell in 1989, these values were revisited. With communism in ashes, Francis Fukuyama predicted the end of history. The US democratic / capitalist system had proven itself superior and the US, now thought of as the indispensable nation, was the sole remaining superpower.

From that period arose four new US priorities, hopefully leading us to a wonderful Emerald City. These priorities are globalization, the US as the militarized global leader, individual autonomy, and the power of the presidency.

Each of these has, some twenty-five years later, become problematic. Globalization, although it can certainly be argued has led to greater wealth, has led to great inequality and a loss of hope for those that have been left behind.

The US faith in its role as the great military power has led it to become lost in forever wars. Since US is an all volunteer army, its enlistees are invariably from those that have been left behind economically. Since the children of the elite largely do not serve, as long as there are a relatively few number of casualties, there is little incentive in exiting these wars.

The growth of autonomy has led to an embrace of values that are dramatically different than those embraced by Boone City. Gays serving in the military, gay marriage, Black Lives Matter, and a general decline in church attendance are all things that the traditional Christian, straight, white male will look askance at. Others of course see it as  society finally widening out its lens to accept a much broader range of behaviors and beliefs. Bacevich, a conservative himself, pretty clearly doesn’t approve of some of these developments, but his point in this context is that this growth of autonomy has led to a wide divergence of beliefs that at one time was fairly monolithic.

As the sole remaining superpower, it was assumed that its head, the President, would lead the world. Bacevich argues that neither Bill Clinton, George W Bush, nor Barack Obama measured up to this task. Clinton with his moral foibles and insistent third way of politics led to small achievements. Bush, wanting to be a different kind of conservative, ended up having his entire presidency hijacked by 9/11 and his response to it. Obama, having to start his presidency by trying to rescue the economy, was never able to truly embark on the change that he was envisioning. Not only that, but having accomplished most via presidential orders, it was a simple matter for Trump to roll much of it back.

With none of the Emerald City promises materializing, the people were ready for a change. That change came in the form of Donald Trump.

Bacevich thinks that, despite the Strum und Drang of the Trump presidency, that really not a lot has changed. Sure, there have been near daily dramatic crises that the media has no doubt hyped (and in so doing leading it to massive profits). Despite that, not much has really changed. Yes, there was a tax cut, but as usual it went primarily to the wealthy elite. Yes there are now more conservative justices on the court, but the rule of law does not appear endangered. Such promises as building a wall, bringing manufacturing back to the US, and making the US a God fearing country again have largely fallen away.

Bacevich wonders how dramatically different a Clinton Presidency actually would have been. He compares Trump and Clinton to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Not by any means central characters, they are simply swept along by events in the play.

In Bacevich’s opinion, the issues that loom largest in the future of the US are the rise of China, the impact of technology on our lives, and the continued effects of climate change.

Taking on these challenges will require us to discard our current set of post Cold War priorities and adopt new ones. Doing so will force us to abolish our current centers of power (ie Wall Street, Silicon Valley, DC lobbyists) that benefit from the current status quo.

Such change does not happen voluntarily and it does not happen from the top down. Could the current protests that we’re seeing result in a generation of Americans willing to take on these challenges?

If so, then maybe we’ll owe a debt to Donald Trump after all.

Still Waters Run Deep

Title: The Night Manager

Rating: 4 Stars

I recently watched the BBC serial The Night Manager. It’s based upon John Le Carre’s novel, so I also took the opportunity to read it as well.

The BBC serial hued pretty close to the source. Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston) is a night manager in a hotel in Cairo. A woman named Sophie Alekan (Aure Atika) asks him to keep some documents for safekeeping. He sees that they are documents about illegal arms dealings by Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie). Appalled by this, he secretly turns them over to the British intelligence service. Roper and his customer immediately learn that the papers have been turned in and suspect Alekan as being the source. Pine tries to protect Alekan and in so doing, the two fall in love. Alekan is brutally murdered, leaving Pine shattered.

Years later, while still working as a night manager but now in Europe, Pine and Roper cross paths again. Seeing an opportunity for revenge, Pine recontacts British intelligence. The British agent, Angela Burr (Olivia Coleman) recruits Pine on a very dangerous mission. He is to try to infiltrate deeply into Roper’s organization, gain his trust, and gather enough information on Roper to forever place him behind bars.

The bulk of the plot is the interplay between Pine and Roper. Will Roper trust Pine? Will Pine successfully manage the very deep game that he’s playing? Roper’s love is a woman named Jed Marshall (Elizabeth Debicki) who finds herself falling for Pine. Will Pine be able to save Marshall or will she end up just like Alekan?

I enjoyed both. The BBC serial was composed of six parts. Each part was about one hour. This was a good length. Adapted films of novels such as Le Carre’s are usually quite truncated. His novels are richly plotted with all kinds of twists and turns. You simply can’t do justice to one of his novels in a two hour film (I’m looking at you Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy). With six hours, Le Carre’s plot can unfold out with its complexity intact.

Another big advantage to the series was its excellent casting. Hiddleston was simply perfect as Pine. Pine has to be charming yet distant, handsome yet liked by all, seemingly eager to please yet hiding rage just under the surface, and seemingly floating effortlessly while working hard. Hiddleston managed all of this perfectly.

Similarly, Roper has to be perfectly charming yet brutally ruthless, endlessly suspicious yet trusting of Pine, and has to be the kind of person that treats the world revolving around him as just a matter of course. You can probably argue that Laurie can play a role like this in his sleep. Regardless, he does outstanding work.

The series major upgrade to the novel is in the character of Angela Burr. In Le Carre’s novel, this character is actually a man named Leonard Burr. Le Carre’s novel is, for the most part, populated by white men. The series took several opportunities to add diversity, which added additional richness. Burr is pregnant (to accommodate Coleman’s real life pregnancy). Just having a pregnant woman instead of the usual generic white male character is itself interesting (you can’t help but to feel extra squirmy when she finds herself in danger). Coleman, as she usually does, brings great complexity to the character. Burr ends up a much more interesting character in the series than in the novel.

One of my small beefs about the novel (and that probably kept it from getting five stars) is the ending. Having invested many hours of reading, the ending just kind of fizzled out. I don’t need an ending where everything is wrapped up in a pretty bow, but this ending, in particular, left me feeling unsatisfied.

The ending of the series is different than the novel. It’s a better ending, but, if anything, it seemed to try to make up for the somewhat desultory ending of the novel by having some unrealistic literal fireworks at the end.

So, to sum up, neither one really stuck the landing.

I enjoyed both, but I’d have to say that this is one of the rare times when the cinematic version of a novel not only met the original text but exceeded it.

Doesn’t Anyone Want To Get Killed With Me?

Title: High Noon

Rating: 2 Stars

This is such an interesting film to me. It’s considered, along with The Searchers and Shane, as one of the great Westerns.

It stars Gary Cooper as Marshal Will Kane. Immediately after his wedding to Amy (Grace Fowler), he turns in his marshal badge. Technically his replacement isn’t due until the next day, but the townspeople tell him it’s OK to knock off a day early and to head out of town to start a new life as a peaceful shopkeeper.

As he’s heading out, he hears that the notorious outlaw Frank Miller, who’d previously terrorized the town until Kane had captured and sent him to jail, has been paroled. He has sworn revenge both on the town and on Kane and appears to be heading back to town to face Kane.

Kane leaves town but his conscience gets the better of him. Despite the protests of his Quaker wife Amy, he comes back to face Miller and his gang. He spends the rest of the film trying to find some townspeople to deputize to help him take on Miller. For various reasons, no one in the town is willing, so he must face the Miller gang alone in a final shootout.

There’s several things going on here that I found interesting. First of all, this was written in 1951. I’ve written about this before here. This was during the height of McCarthyism and the HUAC hearings. Seeking to identify the communists running amok in Hollywood, many people were called to testify and ordered to name names. If you refused to name names, you were blacklisted. If you named names, you were considered treacherous and would be ostracized by the Hollywood community.

In this environment, seemingly unrelated films were made that danced around this subject. Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront was about the bravery of testifying. Dalton Trumbo’s Spartacus was about the bravery of refusing to.

High Noon’s screenwriter, Carl Foreman, was called and refused to testify. He was blacklisted and ended up moving to Britain because he knew that he could no longer work in Hollywood.

Understanding that makes the film’s themes more obvious. Even when everyone is telling Kane to run away and leave town, Kane is steadfast and grimly determined to do what he thinks is right, even at the cost of his own life. Kane looks with contempt upon the townspeople as they come up with various increasingly pathetic excuses to avoid facing Miller’s gang. It’s obvious that if they all simply stood together and fought as a unified force that Miller’s gang would stand no chance. However, with each person thinking of their own self interest, individually they lack the courage to do what is transparently the right thing.

What is the right thing for Kane to do here? Sure, he was the marshal, but he’s not one anymore. He married his wife knowing that she was a Quaker. Not only is she a Quaker, but having personally seen her brother shot dead, she has a special hatred of guns. It can only be assumed that his retiring from the lawman’s life implied that he made some kind of commitment to her. This is the nineteenth century, so he and his wife should be able to disappear pretty easily into the West. After all, there is no Facebook or Google Maps. He literally married her and promised himself to her a mere hour ago or so.

Is his now expired vow to the town somehow stronger than his marital vow? Or could it be that he only begrudgingly gave up the gunfighter life that he really loves just because his wife demanded it and he happily took up the opportunity for gun play once it presented itself again? Will this be a pattern for the two of them going forward?

How about Amy? As mentioned, she is a Quaker who has a personal hatred of guns. However, at a critical time when Kane is in danger, she picks up a gun and shoots one of the bad guys in the back. Is this a heroic moment for Amy? Is her love of Kane greater than the devotion of her religion? What does that say about Kane that literally in their first hour of marriage, the pacifist Amy is already shooting a man dead?

It’s an odd film to be considered a Western classic. For the bulk of the film, nothing really happens. It’s mostly conversations that Kane has with various townspeople to get them to join him. One person agrees but once he understands no one else is joining, promptly bails. Kane is laughed out of the bar. The people that want to help him is a one eyed drunk and a fourteen year old boy, both of whom he sends away. His deputy actually does appear competent, but they get in a fight and Kane knocks the deputy unconscious.

He breaks into a church service to recruit deputies. This somehow devolves into some kind of town hall debating society where the pros and cons of helping Kane are discussed. Keep in mind that Miller’s gang is literally in town as this is going on. They are waiting for Miller’s train, whose arrival is imminent. I’m not really sure if this is a Robert’s Rules of Order kind of moment, but nope, we have to have extended discussion. This gets ludicrous. One person stands up to say that this is really the fault of people up North and they should handle it. Ummmm, the gang is in town, plans to shoot Kane dead and then terrorize the town as it used to, and you want to wait for the appropriate authorities?

Let’s talk a bit about Grace Kelly. When filming starts (in 1951), Kelly is 21 years old. Gary Cooper is 50 years old. The character Kane is supposed to look beaten down, so they’ve done nothing to make Cooper look younger. He looks every bit his 50 years old. The age difference is problematic, but shockingly enough, is par for the course for Kelly’s career.

Kelly was only active in film a couple of years before retiring at age 26 to become the Princess of Monaco. Most of her films had relationships with much older men. In addition to High Noon, in Rear Window, she was 24 and Jimmy Stewart was 48. In To Catch A Thief, she was 25 and Cary Grant was 51. In Dial M For Murder she was 24 and Ray Milland was 47. In her Oscar winning role in The Country Girl, she was 24 and Bing Crosby was 51.

Could studio executives really not imagine Grace Kelly actually being with a man her own age?

The film was OK. Knowing the background behind it makes it more interesting. Having seen it a couple of times, I guess that I’m just having trouble understanding how watching an increasingly frustrated and sweaty man walk around town trying to drum up a posse makes for a classic Western.