Pretentious Art House Flick Platonic Ideal

Title: Breathless

Rating: 2 Stars

When I try to come up with my Platonic ideal of an art house film, I list several attributes. First of all, it has to be subtitled. I think of the film as being French. It’s an initial entry into some avant garde movement. There’s sex. There’s interminable conversations. There are some innovative film techniques. There are pretensions to intellectualism. There’s a world weariness to it. Your initial thought after the final scene is, really?

And, oh yeah, everyone smokes. And not just any cigarette, but one of those European cigarettes that just billow smoke. You know the kind. The kind whose second hand smoke will shorten your life by seven minutes.

Well, I think that I found my Platonic ideal.

Since I’ve discovered that many of the Criterion Collection films are on HBO Max, I’ve been bingeing a bit on foreign films. I’ve now seen several Japanese, French, and Italian films. The topic of this post is the French film Breathless.

Breathless is a 1960 film by Jean-Luc Godard. It is one of the early examples of the French New Wave movement (check!). It was in French (check!) and subtitled (check!).

The story is of Michel. He’s a dangerous criminal. He steals a car and when a policeman catches him, he shoots and kills the policeman. Now a target of a nationwide manhunt, he hunts down a girlfriend in Paris, an American named Patricia. He manages to hole up in her apartment while the police search all over for him. The police catch on to Patricia’s relationship with Michel. At first she protects him, but ultimately understanding that their relationship is doomed and not wanting to go down with him, she betrays him to the police. This leads to a very long chase scene at the end of which, while breathless, he is shot. As he lies dying, Michel says that the whole scene makes him want to puke. Patricia asks the police what he said and one responds to her that Michel said that she makes him want to puke. Why did the policeman intentionally give the worse possible interpretation to her? No wonder Patricia looks confused. The ending left me confused (check!).

While hiding out in Patricia’s apartment, the two kind of have something that looks like how sex might be interpreted in 1960 (check!). They have interminable conversations about their feelings for each other (check!). They smoke so many filthy cigarettes that they can barely see each other (check!). Hilariously (at least to me), as Michel lies dying, he’s puffing on a cigarette (double check!).

One of the times that Patricia leaves the apartment is for a reporting assignment. Apparently, a French author has just released a book and is conducting a press interview. A group of reporters (including Patricia) surround the author and fire deeply philosophical questions to him that he offhandedly responds to. We’re talking meaning of life kind of questions. One of the questions was what he wanted to accomplish in his life. The author’s response is “to become immortal, and then die”. The insouciance with which he made that statement made me laugh so hard. I’m not even sure why that interview is even in the film, but it was intellectually pretentious AF (check!).

After Godard completed the film, it was way too long. Usually when that happens, the film maker cuts scenes. Godard did not want to do that. Instead, he sharply edited each scene. For instance, in a conversation, instead of the camera smoothly moving between the two people talking, instead the film cuts abruptly between the participants. He does this throughout the entire film. In so doing, he essentially invented the jump cut (check!).

If you think about the plot, it should be full of adventure. Here’s a dangerous man on the run from a nation wide police hunt. The police are bearing down upon him. He’s desperately trying to save his own skin. As he’s doing so, he finds himself falling in love with a woman. It sounds like it’d be an action packed film, but no, it moves at a nearly languid pace. No one seems to be really trying all that hard. There’s a sense of weariness to the whole affair (check!).

So, there you go, Breathless hits all of the marks of an art house film. Unfortunately, hitting all of the marks did not make it entertaining.

8 Years Or Bust

I’m guessing that my stress around the 2020 Presidential election is manifesting itself through constantly thinking about Presidential trivia.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about one term Presidents. Lately, I’ve been thinking about their opposite. Is there any pattern to those Presidents that successfully served for two consecutive full terms? In our current time, it’s pretty much considered a given that a President is somehow considered a failure unless they serve two full terms. This belief has led us to the point where a President barely even has a chance to catch a breath before starting to campaign for reelection. In fact, I believe that Donald Trump started his reelection campaign within a month of his inauguration.

So, in our history, how common is it for a President to complete two consecutive terms in office? Once you take a look at it, you see some interesting things.

Let’s start with the special cases. As seems to be always true when talking about Presidents, Grover Cleveland is special. He served eight years in two nonconsecutive terms. He gets bonus points in that he actually won the popular vote three times (lost the electoral college one of those times). He and FDR are the only Presidents to have won a popular vote more than twice. Let’s also throw out the Presidents who were elected twice but died during their second term, thus not completing the full eight years. Abraham Lincoln and William McKinley meet those conditions.

Excluding those, the first pattern occurs in the early history of our country. Let’s call it the Parade of the Virginians. Four of the first five Presidents were from Virginia. They all served eight years. They are George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe. For the 36 year period of 1789 through 1824, 32 year of the years were led by a President that served a full eight years. The non Virginian John Adams is the only exception to this.

This kind of makes sense. Virginia, along with Massachusetts, was considered a leader of the revolution. Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. James Madison wrote a good chunk of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. They were a tight knit group. Their opposition, the Federalists, imploded, so they didn’t have a lot of competition. That was a unique time in history where a small group of men could dominate Presidential politics.

Let’s skip ahead and talk about current times. Amazingly enough, you see the same pattern. Let’s call this the Parade of Media. Not counting Donald Trump, since the jury’s still out on him, four of the last five Presidents served the full eight years. They are Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W Bush, and Barack Obama. The only exception during this time is George H W Bush. Just like at our country’s founding, for the 36 year period from 1981 to 2016, 32 of the years were led by a two term President.

This time there’s no state or even party pattern. Two are Democrats and two are Republicans. Presidents came from California, Arkansas, Texas, and Illinois. I honestly don’t know why incumbents have such an advantage right now. I can make a guess. Starting with Reagan, politics in general and Presidents in particular have figured out how to maximize the use of media. Whether it’s as simple as Reagan’s message of the day or the toxic slurry that Trump pumps out, they have figured out how to manipulate the media to ensure that Presidents are always on the front page. Granted Trump is a special case and these are ‘special’ times, but just count the number of mentions that Trump gets in the media versus Biden. Even on the so-called liberal media sites, it’s not even close. With Trump being the incumbent plus the media chaos that swirls around him, Biden for the most part is lost.

So, the beginning of our Democratic experiment and its current state (a completely different ongoing experiment) have generated a lot of consecutive two term Presidents. Am I making something out of nothing. Are two term Presidents the norm?

Well, for all of the rest of the Presidential elections, the 156 year period between 1825 to 1980, there were a grand total of five Presidents that served two consecutive terms. They are Andrew Jackson, Ulysses Grant, Woodrow Wilson,  Franklin Roosevelt (who gets credit for being elected to four consecutive terms but only lived for a couple of months in his fourth term), and Dwight Eisenhower.

That seems weird. We have four Presidents in the first 36 years. We have four Presidents in the last 36 years. And then only five Presidents in the 156 year period in between? What’s going on?

Well, first of all, mortality. No President died in office until William Henry Harrison, in 1841. The last President to die in office was John Kennedy in 1963. In fact, while no Presidents died during the two 36 year periods, eight Presidents died during that middle 156 year period. Weirdly enough, it’s not like they died in clusters. They were very evenly spaced, which lowers the probability of completing two terms. Every President that was elected in a year divisible by 10 from 1840 to 1960 died in office (ie 1840, 1860, 1880, 1900, 1920, 1940, 1960).

There are some odd cases. Taft got robbed by Teddy Roosevelt. If Roosevelt hadn’t run as a third party candidate, in all likelihood Taft would have cruised to reelection. I’ve already mentioned that Cleveland got screwed over by the electoral college. In my previous post, I’d mentioned that some Presidents only wanted to serve one term (Polk, Buchanan, Hayes). Nixon was well along on his way to a landslide reelection victory and didn’t need to have anyone break into the Watergate Complex, thus dooming his second term.

So, what does it all mean? What does it mean to the prospects of Trump’s reelection?

I have no idea.

Everybody vote!

That’s A Hard Pass On The Red Pill

Title: Antisocial

Rating: 4 Stars

Our country is in a difficult place. Over half of the members of the Republican Party believe that the QAnon theory is mostly or partly true. If you’re lucky enough not to have been exposed to it, it’s a bat shit insane theory that Donald Trump is successfully waging a war on some Deep State that is attempting to enslave us. It links in with Pizzagate. Robert Mueller was in cahoots with Donald Trump and his report was going to blow the lid off of the deep state. Needless to say that didn’t happen. Lack of predictive accuracy has had no discernible impact upon the wide spread belief.

Many, if not a majority of White Americans, now believe that white people are the most oppressed minority in the US. Accordingly, there is no shortage of hatred of Muslims, Jewish people, and immigrants.

How did we end up here? That’s the subject of Marantz’s book. I gave it a pretty high rating because is it interesting, well researched, and, considering the fact that Marantz is a Jewish mainstream reporter hipster from Brooklyn, pretty brave when you think of the places that he went and the people that he talked to.

He breaks his work into sections. In each section, he focuses on one topic or one person. He opens the night of Trump’s inauguration, with the DeploraBall, the party where the main internet personalities who were so instrumental in meme-ing Trump into the Presidency, celebrated their new found power. Another section discuss Emerson Spatz, a fairly anonymous, highly intelligent, moderately successful internet entrepreneur seemingly only interested in creating clickable content with absolutely no regard for its quality. Another discusses the social media companies and their techno-utopian ideal that all content should be free and that somehow, magically, bad content will go away while the quality content will rise to the top. Other sections deal with more famous alt-right figures like Mike Cernovich and Mike Enoch. One section deals with a woman that became seduced by the alt-right movement but was able to pull herself out of it.

While well written, it was maddening to read, thus hard for me to rate. There are a set of players in the alt-right world that are simply only financially driven. They have no core beliefs. If it makes them just a little bit richer, they would have no problem burning the country down.

Another set of players are the true believers. As profiled here, they are typically unusually intelligent but seemingly completely lacking in human empathy. They latch onto an abstract political theory that seemingly explains everything. Armed with this dogma, they then completely tunnel reality to force it to match their theory.

In a country this size, there are always going to be people like this. After all, there are people that still think that 9/11 was an inside job. Previously, there was really no way for them to connect with each other or to disseminate their views widely.

In steps the social media companies. Marantz talks specifically about companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. These are all companies founded by young white men who had no historical context at all for what they were doing. If they thought about it at all, they assumed either some libertarian view of ideas competing in the marketplace or thought of themselves as building some utopian global community. Not only did they not see themselves as gatekeepers, but they specifically wanted to destroy the previous such bastions.

We are left in a world where a guy in the basement doing a live stream is not inherently different than a national news organization. Now theoretically, this sounds like something that not only is not bad but is a positive good. After all, media consolidation is a real problem. Freedom of the press is really only free if you own the press. Here, everyone uses the same press.

But.

There are reasons why national news organizations evolved as they have. Responsible news organizations have fact checkers. They print corrections. Journalism is a skill. It requires expertise. Journalists have a set of ethics.

I’m certainly not saying that these legacy news organizations don’t have biases of their own or that they also aren’t profit driven. I am saying that, in a democratic country, the press has an awesome responsibility to report facts and stories with as much rigor as possible to make sure that the people are as well informed as possible.

In our current world, that seemingly has fallen by the wayside. We have grifters telling you anything that you want to hear as long as it gets you to buy their vitamin supplements. We have obsessed true believers preaching their inanities at a global scale. We have social media companies shrugging their shoulders and claiming to be helpless.

Reading this book was hard. It’s probably sometimes hard to tell from my blogging, but I’m actually an optimistic person. Yes, the country has, to say the least, a checkered history, but I believe, to quote Martin Luther King, the arc of history bends towards justice. Even though I do believe that, the arc doesn’t bend on its own. We bend it. We are the justice.

Giving the global megaphone to people that have no interest in justice makes me question whether or not we will be able to continue bending it.

Hollywood Southern Gothic

 

Title: Devil All The Time

 

I got very excited when I saw that a film version of the novel The Devil All The Time was coming out. Pollock’s collection of short stories, Knockemstiff, and his first novel, The Devil All The Time, inhabit the same universe. Located in a very rural part of Southern Ohio, his works are populated by all kinds of misfits trying to make their way through each day. Those two works are the finest examples of Southern Gothic that I’ve found. I wrote a blog about Knockemstiff called Literary Throat Punch. I still stand by that title as a description of what I’d just read.

 

Donald Ray Pollock himself has an interesting backstory. I went to hear him talk on a book tour and I wrote about him in a blog called Walter Mitty Does Transgressive. This is also another title that I stand by. He spent his career working at a paper mill. Late in life, he decided to take up writing. He didn’t quit the paper mill to write full time until he was fifty. Looking at him, he definitely looks more like a white collar paper mill employee than a writer that imagines scenarios involving tortured crucifixions and married couples taking serial killing road trips.

 

It’s a lot to try to describe the plot of The Devil All The Time. I’d advise you to check out the dozen or so paragraphs on its wiki page. I guess that you can say the center of it is Arvin. His father Willard is a WWII vet with horrible combat memories. Willard finds some normalcy when he falls in love with Arvin’s mother Charlotte. During that time Willard teaches Arvin a -very- rough form of justice that Arvin takes to heart. That normalcy falls away when Charlotte gets cancer. Willard becomes obsessed with prayer to bring her back. When that fails, he kills himself and Arvin is left to be raised by his grandmother.

 

In the meantime, his grandmother Emma is raising another child named Lenora whose mother has been murdered by her father. Lenora, devoutly religious and innocent, is seduced by the new preacher Teagardin. When she finds herself pregnant, Teagardin scornfully rejects her. In despair, she commits suicide. Arvin finds out that she was pregnant, and becomes intent upon revenge.

 

Meanwhile, Carl and Sandy periodically go out on vacation road trips. They pick up male hitchhikers. Sandy, with Carl’s encouragement, seduces the hitchhikers. Carl then tortures and kills them. An avid photographer believing that he’s creating real art, he poses the hitchhikers and has accumulated a large macabre portfolio.

 

Sandy’s brother, Lee Bodecker, is the corrupt sheriff of the town. Desperate to keep the graft going, he will do anything to stay elected.

 

Arvin, as some kind of inadvertent angel of justice, will come into contact with all of these sinners, and justice will be served.

 

That’s a very short synopsis. I’m leaving out many major events and characters. I think that you get the idea.

 

In true Southern Gothic form, all characters are shown shorn of civilities. These are hard, tough people used to both inflicting and receiving violence. This genre is not for the faint of heart. You will be confronted with the ugly bestial nature that is normally hidden from view. Even the protagonists have a brutal code of honor that must be followed.

 

Religion takes a hit in both the novel and the film. Preacher Teagardin is both lecherous and also simply a bad preacher. Unmentioned above is that Lenora’s husband (that killed her) is also an itinerant preacher. The two most devout people commit suicide. Willard slices his throat on his altar.

 

I really enjoyed the novel. On Goodreads, it’s one of my relatively few five star reviews. Although I enjoyed it, the film  doesn’t quite measure up to the novel.

 

It suffers from a couple of issues. The first is that it tried to accommodate nearly all of the plot threads in the novel. The novel has some half dozen threads spanning some twenty years. This could have been done in a multipart series. In a two hour twenty minute film, there just wasn’t enough time. Having read the novel, watching the film was kind of like watching the CliffNotes version of the novel. If I hadn’t read the novel, I’m not sure how well I would have been able to follow the plot of the film.

 

The second major issue is that the actors are just too pretty. The characters in Southern Gothic novels have led hard lives. They’ve prematurely aged. They have horrible, rotten teeth. They have sallow skin. The makers of the film understand this and they tried. Robert Pattinson does good work as Preacher Teagardin. Tom Holland is good as Arvin. Although they’re good, at the end of the day I just couldn’t see Pattinson as the dissolute preacher and Holland as the tough luck but hard as flint Arvin.

 

This might just be a problem with translating Southern Gothic novels to film in general. I’ve seen cinematic versions of Larry Brown’s Joe and Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God. Although I enjoyed both films, they both seemed to lack the seamy grittiness of their respective novels.

 

I’d recommend watching the film. If you enjoyed watching it, then if you haven’t already, I’d recommend that you sample the literary works of Donald Ray Pollock, Larry Brown, Jordan Harper, Frank Bill, Tom Franklin, and Harry Crews.

 

Catcher In The Baguette

Title: The 400 Blows

Rating: 4 Stars

So, I’m now at the pandemic isolation stage of watching clusters of semi-related foreign films. I’ve just wrapped up watching some Kurosawa films. I’m now apparently into French films from the 1950s. I’m guessing that needlepoint will be next.

First of all, The 400 Blows is a hilariously mistranslated title of the film. Sure, that’s the literal translation of the French film title (Les quatre cents coups). What is completely lost is that that phrase is actually a French colloquialism to raise hell. If you’re expecting someone to be punched in the face 400 times or, I don’t know, to blow up 400 balloons, you’re going to be sorely disappointed. In fact, even the movie poster seems to be purposefully misleading. There’s a clenched fist thrusting out as if there will be 400 blows and the tag line is “Angel Faces hell-bent for violence”. I’m not sure if skipping school, plagiarizing Balzac, and stealing a typewriter are all gateways to murderous mayhem, but what do I know?

Antoine Doinel is a young boy in Paris. He consistently gets into trouble in school. He does such dastardly things as pass around a magazine and writing on the school walls.

He and his parents live in a tiny apartment. It’s clear that they don’t have a lot of money. His father seems pretty nice enough, if a little weak. His mother seems to have it in for him, regularly criticizing him for seemingly minor infractions.

One day he sleeps in and will be late for school. Wanting to avoid getting in trouble, he and his best friend Rene decide to skip the entire day. The next day, when his teacher asks for his excuse, Antoine claims that his mother has died. It turns out that that excuse is not exactly bulletproof. His parents come down in a rage and pull him out of class. Here we start to first hear talk of sending him off to a reform school or a military school.

His mom offers him money if he wins an essay contest. Instead of writing his own essay, he plagiarizes from a Balzac novel (and yes, as all malcontents tend to do, he legitimately worships Balzac to the point of having a shrine to him that he lights a candle for). Again, this is not exactly a foolproof plan and he gets caught. Antoine decides to run away from home. He needs cash to set out, so he decides to steal and then pawn a typewriter from his father’s office. Unfortunately, typewriters can be easily traced so no pawnbroker will pawn it. Antoine tries to return the typewriter but gets caught. This is the last straw for Antoine’s parents. They turn him over to the police. The police send him off to a treatment / reform school for troubled teenage boys.

There we hear some of Antoine’s background. It turns out that his father is not his father. His mother got pregnant and then married a man that was willing to give the child his name. His mom resents Antoine because she never was able to have the career that she wanted. There are often conversations, overheard by Antoine, between his mom and her husband about how their life would be better without Antoine. They often leave him alone at home. In fact, they once went off one Christmas without him. Antoine feels alone and alienated in what should be his home.

While playing soccer with the other students, Antoine manages to steal away. He runs and runs. He finally ends up at a seashore for the first time in his life. What will Antoine’s life be after this? It’s left to the viewer to imagine.

I enjoyed watching the film. If you’re watching the film in 2020 with no knowledge of its place in cinema, you’ll be pleasantly entertained by it. Films like this become more interesting when you understand how significant it is to those films that follow it.

François Truffaut, the director of the film, started off as a film critic. He really despised French cinema of its time, finding it hidebound and ponderous. He was so loud and proud in his criticism that essentially he was told to put up or shut up.

The 400 Blows is Truffaut showing France (and the world) the future of cinema. To his credit, everyone was actually pretty amazed by it. It won several awards at the Cannes Film Festival.

What was so great about it? First, it put the director in control. Historically, directors were pretty much just executors. The producers (and this was true in Hollywood as well) were the ones that actually controlled the film industry. Truffaut started the idea of the director as auteur. The director chooses the actors, can change the script, set the scenery, and influence the cinematography. The director drives the final film product. A decade or so later, this caused a revolution in Hollywood when directors like Coppola, Spielberg, Scorsese, and Lucas, inspired by Truffaut, were able to put their own stamps on their films.

The 400 Blows did several things that seemed new. The final scene of the film is a freeze frame on Antoine. This is done everywhere now (speaking of influences on American cinema, think of the final shot in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver), but The 400 Blows is one of the first instances of it. Scenes took place on live streets (as opposed to a controlled lot). Lighting was much more naturalistic. Cameras were no longer fixed. They were handheld and could move throughout the scene in all dimensions. The dialog was much more natural. Improvisation was encouraged. In fact, the most significant part of the film is the therapist’s interview of Antoine as he describes his home situation. This was taken directly from the young actor’s (Jean-Pierre Léaud) screen test where he was improvising from Truffaut’s prompts.

The end result is that you end up with a film that really doesn’t feel like a cinematic experience. It feels like you’re just watching a young man and his struggles in a series of unvarnished moments.

This doesn’t seem revolutionary now. Any number of coming of age or character studies that come out of the independent cinema today will have this look and feel. It’s interesting to be able to go back into history and to watch the film that was the patient zero for so many films today.

Positing A Jacob’s Ladder Scenario

Title: I’m Thinking of Ending Things

Rating: 4 Stars

Charlie Kaufman just wrote and released a film for Netflix. There was no way that I wasn’t going to watch it. In fact, I’m surprised that I waited an entire week before finally viewing it. If anyone is going to watch it but hasn’t yet, spoilers are ahead. It’s really hard to write about a Kaufman mind fuck without going into details.

Jake and his girlfriend (sometimes called Lucy, sometime called Lucia, sometimes called Ames) are on a long road trip to meet his parents for the first time. As they drive, she is thinking of breaking up with him. When he interrupts her reverie, he seems to somehow be strangely aware of her thoughts. They engage in philosophical discussions. She recites a poem that she has written.

They arrive at his parent’s house. They sit down and have dinner. Jake’s mother seems strangely on edge and is nervously frantic, much to Jake’s disgust. Jake’s father seems to be somewhat befuddled.

Jake’s girlfriend wants to go home because she has work that needs to be done. Along with her name, her job also changes. She is, at various times, described as a painter, a physicist, and a gerontologist. Even though she’s in a hurry, she ends up upstairs, downstairs, and in the basement doing various activities. Jake’s mother and father change as well. Sometimes they are relatively young, sometimes they seem closer to older middle aged, and sometimes they are positively geriatric.

All along, as this plays out, there are scenes with a high school janitor interwoven. You see him clean the hallways, watch a musical rehearsal, and, while having lunch, watching a scene from a movie.

Jake and his girlfriend finally leave the house. On the way home, they stop to get some ice cream. They stop at the high school to throw away their uneaten ice cream. Jake goes in to talk to the janitor. He takes such a long time that his girlfriend goes in to look for him. Instead of him, she meets the janitor. There is a sequence where an idealized version of Jack and his girlfriend interpretively dance a version of a beautiful, romantic relationship. At the end of the dance, an idealized version of the janitor kills the Jack dancer.

The janitor finishes his shift and appears to have some kind of breakdown. He seems to have visions. One of the final visions is Jake, late in his life, accepting a Nobel Prize and then breaking into a song. At the end of the song, the crowd jumps up and gives him a standing ovation.

As this is happening, Jack and his girlfriend both seem to be quite erudite. This appears to be misleading. We discover that the poem that the girlfriend supposedly wrote is actually from a poetry anthology. They have an extended discussion of the Cassavetes film A Woman Under the Influence. The girlfriend gives an extended critical analysis of Gena Rowland’s performance. I don’t know where I heard this, but apparently it’s a full quotation from a Pauline Kael review of the film. One of the scenes with Jake and his girlfriend is a pretty exact copy of the scene that the janitor was watching on his break.

What does all of this mean? My interpretation is that Jake is the janitor. From the looks that high school students give him, it appears that the janitor is considered to be a bit of a creep. He probably lives alone. This is not a knock on the job of being a janitor, but I imagine that Jake once had more ambitious dreams for himself.

Jake (the janitor) is now dying. In his dying moments, he’s trying to realize an alternative life for himself. Naturally he’s visualizing a woman that he could have fallen in love with. Since this woman is not real, she can have various names and various occupations. There could be a couple of different stories of how they met. Since he is alone, even in his imagination he has trouble picturing how to have a successful relationship. The fact that the girlfriend, even in his fantasy, is somewhat dissatisfied is proof of that. He probably lived with and tended to his parents for their entire lives, thus leading to the confusing and conflicted relationship that he has with both of them. All of this is Jake the janitor trying to make sense of his final living moments.

Of course, with Kaufman, I could be totally wrong. In a previous blog post, I’d written about Kaufman’s mind fuckery. Where does this rate on that scale? It seems to be a different kind of mind fuckery. This seemed to me to be more David Lynch territory than Charlie Kaufman. I still think that Adaptation wins the Kaufman mind fuckery award.

Regarding the blog post title, one of my favorite podcasts is How Did This Get Made. It stars Paul Scheer, June Diane Raphael, and Jason Mantzoukas. Every other week they deconstruct some poorly or awkwardly made film. They ‘posit’ theories all of the time. One of the favorite theories that they like to posit is called Jacob Ladder’s scenarios. For those that haven’t seen Jacob’s Ladder, that film’s great reveal is that the entire film are the dying thoughts of the main character.

In my humble opinion, I’d like to posit that I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a classic Jacob’s Ladder scenario.

The Japanese Phoenix

Title: Embracing Defeat

Rating: 5 Stars

I did not know much about postwar Japan. I thought that I might as well use this Pulitzer prize winning history as a way to fill the gap. In so doing, I became truly fascinated by the subject.

I knew that Japan had lost WWII (duh!). In the aftermath of WWI, Germans, although soundly defeated, were able to convince themselves, due to relatively minor damage on the home front, that they really hadn’t lost the war. They felt betrayed by their government. These feelings of betrayal led directly to Hitler’s rise. Accordingly, the Allied forces made sure to pretty much lay waste to Japan. The nation needed to be rebuilt. Also, I knew that Douglas MacArthur, in charge of forces in occupied Japan, never a humble man, positively reveled in his role as the Supreme Commander.

As I found out reading this, that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface. It’s such a massive work that it’s difficult for me to provide a relatively succinct summary. I’m just going to spew out some interesting things that I learned and see how it goes.

Japan was nearly completely laid to waste. In the aftermath of the war, it wasn’t clear how the government was going to feed, clothe, and house its people. Making this task even harder was that, according to the surrender terms, that the government had to pay for all costs of the occupation. Therefore, while its people were quite literally scrabbling for food, the Japanese government was having to pay for such things as home remodels (eg adding a swimming pool) so that the US soldiers could live in comfort. Even low level officers had maids and other servants.

Japan, with no experience in surrendering, did not know what to expect. Their only baseline was what they demanded of the nations that had surrendered to them. One of the more notorious actions that the Japanese military imposed upon Korea was comfort women. This is fairly well known now, but comfort women were Korean women conscripted to become sex slaves. Worried that the US would impose a similar burden on them, immediately after surrender, the Japanese government actually started setting up an organization of Japanese comfort women. These would be women that were already prostitutes or were similarly seen as somehow fallen. They would give themselves up for the good of their country and to protect the ‘good’ women of Japan.

True to his nature, Douglas MacArthur set himself up on a god like plane essentially equivalent to Emperor Hirohito. In fact, in all of the years that he was in Japan, only sixteen Japanese people ever met him more than twice. Despite that, forever after, he claimed a unique understanding of the ‘oriental’ mind.

In the early days, there were opportunities to radically reshape Japan. Occupation forces preached the twin concepts of de-militarization and democratization. Japanese citizens, having seen first hand the misery of their fifteen year military dictatorship, took to these concepts with alacrity. The Japanese citizenry turned almost immediately from militarism to liberalism. In fact, a number of significant reform were made. The parliamentary Diet was empowered. Women’s rights were dramatically improved.

The main groups that actively fought against the military dictatorship were the Communists and the Socialists. During that time, many of them were imprisoned or exiled. Once released and back home, they were justifiably treated as heroes for having stood up against the dictatorship. Holding a prominent place in politics, they began to drive even more radical change. At the same time, the relationship between the US and the USSR had deteriorated into The Cold War. Accordingly, the US, in the form of the occupation forces, began to sideline the Communists and the Socialists and to keep in power many of the conservative politicians that held significant positions in the previous military government. In fact, an accused war criminal ended up serving as one of the early postwar Prime Ministers.

It is odd that the US occupation forces were able to force democracy in a top down authoritarian manner. The Japanese were in the process of amending their existing constitution to meet the criteria spelled out in the surrender agreements. MacArthur got wind of this and decided to step in. He gave his staff ten days to write a new Japanese constitution. Working desperately round the clock and with absolutely no input from the Japanese, they were able to complete the draft. The Japanese cabinet, the group that had been diligently figuring out what constitutional changes should be made, were called in, presented the draft document and told to use it (they could amend it). Shocked at this behavior, the cabinet nevertheless took it and presented it to the Diet for debate. I believe that it was pretty much accepted as is with minimal changes. Since its adoption, it has not even once been amended.

Assignment of war crime responsibility was a significant objective of the occupation forces. The first thing that is interesting was that Hirohito’s potential responsibility was immediately taken off of the table. This doesn’t make a lot of sense. In my mind, I’d always thought of Hirohito as some figurehead that played no role in the war. This was not true. He took part in planning sessions. He made recommendations. He signed the actual declaration of war. He was the head of state. There’s almost no question that he held ultimate responsibility. The occupation forces tried to make the point that the Japanese would rise up and fight to the death to defend their emperor. This was not true. As mentioned above, the Japanese felt so bitter at suffering their defeat that getting rid of the emperor that lorded over all of it would not strike them as unreasonable. MacArthur thought he could rule more effectively if he operated behind the screen of Hirohito’s royalty. All of the accused war criminals agreed to shield Hirohito from blame.

The war crime trials themselves are interesting. First of all, it was conducted in something like four languages. During testimony, at the end of every sentence, everyone would stop to allow the translation to complete. The trial moved at a snail’s pace.

Some of the charges were obvious. For those cases where an officer was accused of ordering torture, abuse of prisoners, or other beyond the pale crimes, there was no problem with justice being rendered.

Some of the charges were a bit more problematic. One of the charges that Japanese political leaders were accused of was depriving a nation’s people of choice of government. This was specifically regarding the Japanese occupation of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. This was just a bit difficult because Indonesia was a territory ran the by the Dutch, Malaysia by the French, and Singapore by the British. Claiming that by overthrowing a European colonizer that Japan was depriving the indigenous people of the land the choice of their government is just a bit of a stretch. It could certainly be argued that, if that actually is a war crime, then the Dutch, French, and (especially!) the British had a much longer history of such crimes.

Questions were also raised of crimes against humanity. Was what the Japanese did really worse than such war events as the mass firebombings of Tokyo and the dropping of two atomic bombs?

One last thing to discuss is the Japanese economy. For most of the postwar period, the Japanese economy was sputtering along. The conversion from wartime to domestic manufacturing was moving along slowly. Various economic programs that were introduced were only partly successful and, in many cases, made things worse. Bizarrely enough, the event that saved the Japanese economy was the Korean War. With Japan being the nearest modern manufacturing country, the US granted Japanese manufacturers huge orders for material. This jump started the Japanese economy and allowed innovations like Deming’s quality initiatives to take root and proliferate. Not a few Japanese were discomforted by the fact, although their constitution precluded military action and that their military government had earlier committed atrocities against Korea, that their economic strength was reconstituted on the back of a war in Korea.

Whew! This was a long post and there’s so much more that I could write about. If you’re at all interested in how a country that was devastated by defeat can manage to rebuild itself with the help of the country that vanquished it, you’ll have trouble putting down this book.

You Can’t Fight City Hall, Unless You’re Dying

Title: Ikiru

Rating: 5 Stars

Continuing on my Akira Kurosawa kick, I watched Ikiru, another of his classics. What made this one stand out for me was that this was the first one of his that I’ve watched that is not a samurai film. It is set in contemporary Japan. That is, in 1952, when Japan was nearing the end of the American occupation and was still in the process of being rebuilt.

For the past week or so, I’ve been reading Embracing Defeat. It is the Pulitzer prize winning history of Japan in the aftermath of its surrender at the end of WWII. It discusses the seismic cultural, political, social, and economic shocks that it went through as it dealt with its defeat and its occupation by what the propagandists had been describing, quite recently, as the devil Americans.

Reading about how Japan adapted to their situation while also watching a contemporary telling of that story made for compelling viewing.

Ikiru is the story of a mid level bureaucrat named Watanabe. Watanabe has been a career city hall official for thirty years. His job apparently consists of stamping papers and passing complaints on to the next bureaucratic organization. There is a group of women wanting to clean up standing sewer water and to convert the land to a park. He immediately forwards them on to the next organization. You watch the women as they get shuffled from one organization to the next nearly endlessly. They finally end up at the deputy mayor, who plies them with silvery words but then ignores them.

Watanabe plods along. He is a widower. He raised his son. His son, now an adult, seems to look at him as more of a cash cow than a loving father. Watanabe seems neither happy nor sad, but just continues to exist.

He has stomach pain. He goes to the doctor. He finds out, indirectly, not from the doctor, that he has stomach cancer and that he has at most a year to live. Now he seems lost.

He ends up a restaurant in conversation with another man. The man decides to show him a good time. They go out to dance clubs, strip joints, and a piano bar. There Watanabe sadly sings a romantic ballad.

The next day he decides that the night life is not for him. He meets a woman, a co-worker that is quitting her job to pursue her passion. She seems constantly excited, full of energy and life. Watanabe perks up when he’s with her and begins to spend as much time as he can with her. She becomes suspicious of his motivations. When she finally gets him to admit that the reason why he is with her is because her excitement fills him with excitement, she tells him that he needs to find his own path.

After thinking about it, he decides that, with his last remaining months, that he will get that park built that the women earlier in the film demanded. By the time the park has been built, he is dead.

At his funeral, his story is told in flashbacks. He resolutely fought every bureaucratic hurdle that he encountered. Knowing that he had nothing to lose, he refused to concede. Finally he cleared all of the hurdles and got the deputy mayor’s approval. As the park was being built, he collapsed. However, he lived long enough to see it completed. On his last night, as snow fell in the park, he gently swung on a swing, sadly singing that same ballad. It was there that his body was found.

His story inspires all of his co-workers to decide to seize the moment, to do great things, and to no longer be just another cog in the bureaucracy. Of course, by the time the next morning comes, they’ve all come to their senses and they are once again mindlessly stamping documents and forwarding complaints to the next department.

In this film I was able to see so much of what was described in Embracing Defeat. There was a formidable bureaucracy seemingly bent upon passing on responsibility. As a result of the American occupation, there were dance bars and strip clubs. Many Japanese women, newly emboldened, aggressively exercised their freedoms. Hedonism, instead of mindless service to the emperor, became ascendant. In this changed environment, familial relationships like between father and son underwent change. As the state began to rebuild from its ashes, organized crime rose to fill the void. I saw all of this in action while watching Ikiru.

Through it all, Watanabe looks back with regret upon a life that he now sees as wasteful. I can only imagine that many Japanese, in the late 1940s, must have looked upon their fifteen year military misadventure with similar feelings of regret. At one point, Watanabe wants to commit suicide, but much to his shame, even though he knows that he’s dying, he can’t summon the courage to do so, thus demonstrating the lack of honor that so many must have felt having once promised to give their lives to the state.

I didn’t know what to expect from a non-samurai Kurosawa film. Once more, he has surpassed all expectations.

Musings Of A 20th Century Man

Title: The Unhappiness Of Being A Single Man

Rating: 4 Stars

I’ll never know the answer, but it’s an interesting thought experiment to try to guess who the future literary critics, many centuries from now, will identify as the author that most represented the twentieth century.

Will it be the authors that wrote the grand epics? Candidates could be Marcel Proust writing In Search of Lost Time or James Joyce writing Ulysses or Thomas Mann writing Magic Mountain.

Perhaps the critics will think of that century as a bunch of inward looking navel gazers? In that case, candidates could be Philip Roth writing Portnoy’s Complaint or Karl Ove Knausgaard writing My Struggle.

Maybe it’ll be the post modernists? Lining up here would be David Foster Wallace writing Infinite Jest or Thomas Pynchon writing Gravity’s Rainbow or William Gaddis writing Recognitions.

As much as I love them, I’m guessing that the least likely to be considered the timeless great will be the post modernists. They seem reminiscent of, and I can’t remember his name now, of one of the great Elizabethan theater critics. He was considered witty, intelligent, and incisive. Unfortunately, he’s unreadable now. His criticism is written in such deep Elizabethan in-jokes, slang, and hyper-local references that his commentary is impenetrable today. Do you really see anyone reading Gravity’s Rainbow, three hundred years after WWII, and trying to make sense out of it? Or about the now incredibly funny but probably soon to be tortuously cryptic references in Infinite Jest? The problem with writing even great novels that live in the immediate now is that they will probably only continue to live as long as the immediate now is remembered.

FWIW, my vote for the author that will be remembered as the great writer of the twentieth century is Franz Kafka.

From the perspective of a couple of centuries hence, what will people think of the twentieth century? This is the century of mass war, mass death, unimaginably large governmental bureaucracies, and unimaginably large corporations. In the face of that, we feel alienated and lose our sense of self. In this unimaginably (again, that word!) large machine that our culture has become, we are nothing more than a faceless cog in it as well as a numbed consumer of it.

Kafka, stuck working at an insurance job, was only able to write in the evenings. His job involved investigating personal injury liability claims. From those claims he saw first hand the corporate maw literally grind its workers into pieces by chewing off fingers and limbs. He died young and essentially forgotten.

Most people, for very good reason, know his novels. There is The Trial, where the narrator is arrested by unnamed officials for unnamed crimes. The narrator spends the entire novel trying to navigate a hostile and opaque bureaucracy to resolve his case. The Castle is the story of a land surveyor that has been summoned to perform a job for the castle authorities. Similar to The Trial, the narrator finds himself thwarted at every turn as he tries to find out how to even get started.

A challenge to Kafka’s novels is that he was an inveterate tinkerer. Neither The Trial nor The Castle is in a finished state. This leaves the reader rather unsatisfied (although an argument can be made that this is actually the appropriate state to be in when considering the twentieth century).

If you are such a reader, you should consider his short stories. They represent, if only in a microcosm, a complete expression of Kafka.

In this collection, there are around two dozen such stories.

Some of the short stories are indeed very short. Several are only a paragraph. Even such stories are well formed and complete.

One common attribute to these stories is humor. Even in tales of alienation, the stories are often quite funny. The eponymous entry is a one paragraph story of the travails of being an adult single man. As an example of such a species, I found it hilarious. In The Truth About Sancho Panza (another one paragraph story), Kafka posits that Panza is actually the cause of all of Don Quixote’s quests and follows him around just for his own amusement.

His stories often veer into the absurd. In The New Lawyer, a firm has just hired a, yes, new lawyer named Dr Bucephalus. For those of you a little light on your Greek history, Bucephalus was Alexander The Great’s horse. With Alexander The Great dead, there is no leader taking the Greeks into India for conquest and no need for violent raids, so Bucephalus needs a job. He studied for the law and the law firm, out of sympathy for him because his previous career is now lost, has taken him on.

In the Penal Colony, prisoners are occasionally sentenced to death. In this world, they are quite literally sentenced. The prisoners are strapped down. A very complex, now failing machine, hovers above them. The machine then stitches into the body the literal death sentence for which the prisoner has been convicted.

Given Kafka’s life story, it’s probably not surprising that he has a couple of stories of obsessive artists. There is A First Heartache, a trapeze artist that refuses to ever come down from his trapeze. There is A Hunger Artist, about a circus performer that people crowd around to watch him starve himself.

Kafka’s work is full of alienation, anxiety, dread, and helplessness in the face of the faceless.

Welcome to the twentieth century!

Heil Tramp!

Title: The Great Dictator

Rating: 4 Stars

This is the fourth Chaplin film that I’ve seen fairly recently. I’ve also seen Gold Rush, City Lights, and Modern Times. It’s interesting to watch Chaplin’s evolution over the course of these films.

Gold Rush, filmed in 1925, is the earliest. It’s a fairly simple set of scenes. It stands out because some of these set pieces are quite funny. The most famous ones include the one where, desperate for food, he eats his own shoe, and the New Year’s Eve dinner where he puts on a show of dancing bread rolls.

Next, in 1931, is City Lights. This was the first silent film that I’d seen that actually looked and acted like a feature length film. There were interesting characters. The plot, more than just a series of vignettes, built up over time. The film no longer was just a vehicle to string humorous scenes together.

Modern Times was made in 1936. With this film, Chaplin was no longer interested in just entertaining. He used the film to communicate beliefs. Rife with messages ranging from the dangers of industrialization, mechanization, poverty, and the criminalization of poverty, Chaplin was using his artistry to educate and advocate.

Now, in 1940, comes The Great Dictator. This was his first true sound film. Also, he apparently swapped out his cinematographer. If so, it really shows here. Unlike his earlier films which visually had the appearance of conventional silent films, this, even though still black and white, definitely had the visual appearance of a more modern film.

Technically, my blog title is not correct. Chaplin does not play the tramp here. In fact, he plays two roles: Hynkel, the fascist leader of a country named Tromania, and a Jewish barber.

Yeah, he’s not exactly being subtle here. Hynkel clearly is a stand-in for Hitler. He got the inspiration for the film when someone told him that his tramp character looked like Hitler. Hynkel’s closest advisors are Garbitsch (Goebbels) and Herring (Goring). His fellow and competing fascist dictator is Napaloni (Mussolini). Herring is clumsy, fat, and buffoon. Garbitsch is cold and weasels around. Napaloni is a blustery and proud braggart with a jutting chin. Hynkel, when talking to his people or when he loses his temper, yells and screams in pseudo German.

One plot thread is Hynkel’s dream of world domination. He intends to invade neighboring Osterlich, that is, unless Napaloni beats him to it first. Unfortunately, he needs a loan to finance the invasion. Despite his hatred and oppression of the Jewish people, he has to get the loan from the Jewish Banker, Epstein. Desperate for the loan, he agrees to start treating Jewish people with respect. This causes them to raise their hopes that finally they can be happy in their country. Once Epstein refuses Hynkel the loan, the Jewish reprisal is swift and furious.

Chaplin’s second character, the Jewish barber, served in WWI. At the conclusion of the war, he lost his memory and is confined to a hospital. Many years later, he manages to escape from the hospital and is shocked at how the treatment of Jewish people has deteriorated in Tromania. Resisting, he is captured and sent to a concentration camp.

Tromania invades Osterlich. Hynkel is due to make a triumphal speech in its capital. Through a case of mistaken identity, Hynkel is believed to be the barber that’s just escaped from the camp and the barber is believed to be Hynkel. Speaking as Hynkel at the capital, the barber uses the moment as a plea for world peace.

The film is actually quite funny. Despite the somewhat heavy theme, much of the comedy is slapstick that would be at home in a Three Stooges sketch. Men are hit over the head with frying pans. Chaplin falls through skylights.

Despite not being dressed like the tramp, the barber is very much a tramp-like character. He is fundamentally sweet and sincere. He looks upon the world with innocence. Paulette Goddard, just as she did in Modern Times, does luminescent work as Hannah, the barber’s love interest.

Having said all of that, it is, in hindsight, problematic. Let’s put aside the Jewish banker trope, which is a different kind of problematic in its own right. More fundamentally, the film treats Hitler as kind of a slight figure of fun. They show him lightly dreaming of world domination. Speaking perfect English and then having him lapse into flustered, nonsense German when he loses his temper makes him almost seem like a sitcom caricature (“one of these days, Alice…”). The storm troopers terrorizing the Jewish ghetto are at most one step removed from Keystone Cops. They are constantly being outwitted and reduced to sputtering rage.

This trivializes Hitler and the Nazis. In Chaplin’s defense, this is exactly what he intended. He thought of Hitler as a small, silly man and was hopeful that his film would cause other people to see him so. In 1940, people weren’t aware of how horrible the concentration camps were (not to mention the death camps to follow). In his much later autobiography, Chaplin admitted this and said that, if he’d known otherwise, that he would have never made this film.

There you have it. The Great Dictator is a very well made film that is quite funny. Historical events has relegated it to a place where it can no longer be considered one of Chaplin’s great films.