Portrait Of An Artist As A Movie Star

Title: Age of Cage

Rating: 4 Stars

This isn’t a biography per se. Instead, Phipps does a survey of all Cage films and places them within the largest context of changes that the film industry has gone through over the past four decades. He does include some biographical detail, but nothing more than what you’d find on Cage’s wiki page.

Cage certainly has the reputation of being a wild man actor, marrying lots of women, being seemingly obsessed with Elvis Presley, and making and spending fortunes on a bewildering number of homes, castles, and just plain old fashioned weird artifacts. We’ve all heard how he got deep into IRS trouble and had to make a number of schlocky films to dig himself out.

If you can somehow manage to ignore all of that, take a breath, and take a look at his oeuvre, you might be surprised by what you find.

First of all, the sheer length of his career is amazing. His film debut was a blink and you might miss it appearance in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. It was released in 1982, when Cage was a mere 18 years old. Here we are in 2023. He’s now 59 years old, and he already has three films planned for 2023 and three more in 2024. That’s some 110 films in a bit over forty years. For an actor that’s willing to take as many risks as he has, that’s pretty impressive longevity.

The number of films made is not the only impressive facet of his career. He has managed to work with an impressive set of directors. Are you ready for this list? There’s Francis Ford Coppola (Uncle Francis to Cage) in Rumblefish, Brian De Palma in Snake Eyes, David Lynch in Wild at Heart, Oliver Stone in World Trade Center, Werner Herzog in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, John Woo in (Face/Off and Windtalkers), Ridley Scott in Matchstick Men, the Coen Brothers in Raising Arizona, Spike Jonze in Adaptation, Joel Schumacher in 8MM, Michael Bay in The Rock, and Martin Scorsese in Bringing out the Dead. That’s just the A-list directors. He’s also worked with such less famed directors such as Norman Jewison and John Dahl, among so many others.

The main thesis of this book is that the morphing of Cage’s career over the years actually reflect larger trends in the film industry. When you think of more conventional long running movie stars such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, or even Tom Cruise, ultimately they end up at a point in their film career where they just settle in and stay. Early in his career Tom Cruise was more adventurous in his career choices but there reached the point where he totally committed to action hero. Similarly, Johnny Depp took on all kinds of interesting (and occasionally bizarre) roles until he got comfortable collecting very large Captain Jack Sparrow paychecks. So far, for forty years, Cage has resisted this temptation.

In the 80s, when Cage was first coming onto the scene, teen sex comedies were all the rage. Cage made films like Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Valley Girl. The next big trend was independent films. Here we see Cage in films like Raising Arizona and Red Rock West and Leaving Las Vegas. Next up was Hollywood blockbusters. For a while there, with films like The Rock, Face/Off, and Con Air, Cage was the king of such films. Heck, he even appeared in several animated films that were hits (the Croods and the Spider-verse). Even during his dark period where he lost much of his commercial appeal, with the rise of Video on Demand (VOD), the mostly forgettable Cage films that he did make were serving that market. As Hollywood continued to morph, Cage’s career morphed along with it. About the only trend that he seemed to have missed was superhero films. It wasn’t due to lack of trying. He nearly made a Superman film and he did star as the Marvel comic character Ghost Rider. Unfortunately, it was a year before Iron Man was released, so Ghost Rider was never integrated into the cinematic Marvel universe.

Even now, in the last couple of years, he is still making interesting films, a couple of which I’ve already written about. Pig is a story of loss and grief told via the mechanism of a kidnapped truffle hunting pig. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is a post modern comic masterpiece that has to be seen to even be described.

By the end of the book, you no longer care about the tabloids reporting his eccentricities. You understand that Cage is an artist that is always looking to do something new, different, and challenging.

Meanwhile, Tom Cruise is getting ready to release the seventh and eighth Mission Impossible films.

Foodies Gotta Foodie

Title: The Menu

Rating: 5 Stars

Hawthorn is an exclusive restaurant. It’s on an island that is only approachable by boat. It only has one seating per night. The seating can only accommodate about a dozen guests. The staff live on the island and are completely subservient to the chef. The chef, Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes), is a world famous culinary genius with an absolute commitment to his craft. For this night, the chef has a special menu planned.

The guests are an eclectic bunch. There’s a bunch of tech / finance bros looking to get loud and drunk. There’s the washed up actor (John Leguizamo) looking to find a way to possibly resuscitate his career. There’s the pretentious restaurant critic known for her career breaking acerbic reviews. There’s the elderly couple that are regulars at Hawthorn. And then there is the hyper eager amateur foodie Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) and his date Margo (Anya Taylor-Joy). Their relationship is a bit muddled because they don’t seem to know much about each other (he doesn’t even know her last name) and maybe her name isn’t even Margo.

As the evening unfolds, the menu courses become stranger. Some expose the foibles and crimes of the guests. One course exposes the financial fraud being committed by the tech bros. During one course, the sous-chef commits suicide as part of its presentation. The customers are horrified but are told that they can’t leave. Their culinary evening is turning into a nightmare.

We see most of this through the eyes of Margo. She is the only one there that can see that the emperor has no clothes. When they are served a bread course consisting of no bread, while all of the others are proclaiming the ironic genius of this act, she is calling bullshit and declaring that she’s hungry. Slowik knows that Margo does not belong here. She was a last minute replacement after Tyler’s previous relationship ended. Even as Slowik regrets Margo’s presence, he knows that she can’t not be part of the events of the night.

What is Slowik’s purpose here? Who, if anyone, will survive? What are the secrets that have compelled each guests’ presence?

Since it’s a new release, I don’t want to ruin it with too many spoilers. In case you can’t tell from the above summary, it’s a black comedy horror film. As you can tell from my rating, I loved it. This is one of those relatively rare films where I repeatedly laughed out loud.

There might be a highly personal reason why I loved this film so much. I don’t share a lot of personal detail in this blog, but know that I am not a foodie. When I was growing up in a working class neighborhood, eating in our car at Arby’s counted as a big dinner out for my family. Even now, I enjoy burger joints and diners with cranky waitresses of a certain age over haute cuisine.

However, many years ago I was in a long term relationship with a hard core foodie. Even minor meals were complicated by the fact that she hated eating ‘useless’ calories. She and I once planned a weekend vacation in Napa just to eat at Thomas Keller’s French Laundry. We even planned a Nordic vacation that included a local Swedish plane flight and then an hour long taxi ride to get to some remote part of BFE Sweden just to eat at Magnus Nilsson’s Fäviken. Hell, once we even went to a Michelin starred restaurant located on an island accessible only by boat.

So, I could one hundred percent relate to this film. The things that it skewers are things that are, at best, only fairly minor exaggerations of things I actually witnessed. I was there at single seating dinners with probably less than 20 guests (yes, these were insanely expensive, especially compared to the diner with the cranky waitress of a certain age). I was there when the chef (or sous-chef) would stand in front of all of us and carefully describe the very specific details of each of the twenty or so courses that we were about to be served. With each serving, the waiter would stop by with their very specific recommendation of a wine pairing and why, in detail, it was such a perfect match. Sure, no sous-chef committed suicide in front of us, but at the French Laundry, my partner and I were invited back to the kitchen, where the staff worked in absolute seriousness, silence, and sterility.

So, having that background, this film was boundlessly entertaining. I was especially taken with Tyler. His eagerness, obsequiousness to the chef, over analysis of every dish, even his surreptitious photos (including slapping Margo’s hand away as she reached for the food and possibly spoiling his shot) were spot on for the foodies that I have known. The restaurant critic with her toady of a dinner partner was wonderful. From my days in tech, I’ve known tech bros dropping money on something that they can’t appreciate just because they can. In fact, I heard an anecdote that Thomas Keller was once called in, at a very high price I’m sure, to design an evening dinner for a group of wealthy tech bros. As the evening progressed, Keller became so disenchanted with their boorish behavior that, for one course, he sent in a six pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Far from chastened, apparently the bros clapped in appreciation.

In short, I thought that I’d seen the best comedy of the year when I watched Nicholas Cage’s brilliant The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent but, possibly for the very personal reasons that I’ve just described, The Menu might have actually surpassed it.

The Incidental Mass Murderer

Title: The Talented Mr Ripley

Rating: 5 Stars

I hadn’t read this book in decades. Over the past year or two, I’ve developed a deeper appreciation for Patricia Highsmith. Rereading this novel deepened this appreciation even more.

This novel is basically Highsmith’s version of Henry James’ Ambassadors. In both, a wealthy parent is worried about a son that is apparently wasting his life in decadent Europe. In both, they send a person out to convince the young man to return home and to take up his preordained place back in the States. In both, instead, the person that they send ends up being seduced themselves by the romantic antiquated dereliction of Europe.

What makes the two novels different is that, while James uses it as an opportunity for a deeply sensitive comparison of the stunted American life to the broader, more romantic European life and the struggle of the ambassador between duty and desire, Highsmith uses it as an introduction of her most popular and durable character, the murderous sociopathic Tom Ripley.

Tom Ripley is in New York, kind of running from the law doing a half hearted IRS scam, when Herbert Greenleaf runs into him. Thinking that Tom is a close friend of his son Dickie, he bores Tom with his description of Dickie idling off in Italy, striving to be a mediocre painter, when he has a bright career ahead of him at the shipyard that Herbert runs. Tom is disinterested but his ears perk up when Herbert mentions that he’d be willing to send Tom to Italy, all expenses paid, to try to convince Dickie to come back home.

Knowing that the police might be nipping at his heels at any moment, Tom sees this as a great opportunity to escape. He agrees to go to Italy, even though he barely knows Dickie.

Once in Italy, after some initial fumbling, Tom becomes good friends with Dickie. Tom falls in love with European life. He does not want to go back to the States. Dickie has his own trust fund that can sustain him indefinitely. Tom hopes that he can ingratiate himself with Dickie and that they can live together in Europe. To Tom’s dismay, it becomes increasingly evident, even with Tom’s best efforts, that Dickie is beginning to lose interest in him. Being one of the often bored idle rich, Tom is just no longer amusing to Dickie. Once Dickie catches Tom wearing his clothes, it’s only a matter of time before Dickie abandons Tom.

A half formed plan begins to develop in Tom’s head. Tom and Dickie are about the same size and bear a certain resemblance. Tom is a gifted mimic. Perhaps he could kill off Dickie, forge Dickie’s trust checks, wear his clothes, and become Dickie? Once the idea comes into his head, he seems compelled to act. In a boat far off shore, he kills Dickie, throws him overboard, and scuttles the boat. He heads back to Dickie’s place, packs all of Dickie’s things, and heads off to Rome as Dickie.

From that point on, he has to be two steps ahead of everyone. Dickie’s kind of girlfriend, Marge, is looking for him. Dickie’s good friend Freddie catches onto Tom’s game (as can probably be guessed, this is not great for Freddie’s long term health). The Italian police are asking a lot of questions. Dickie’s father, along with a private investigator that he’s hired, have arrived in Europe. He has to, at the drop of a hat, assume the identity of either Dickie or Tom. As his crimes, violent or not, continue to accumulate, he expects to be arrested at any moment.

This expectation is what makes this novel great. Ripley is, in fact, not some genius mastermind two steps ahead of everyone else. He’s at best half a step ahead desperately having to make spur of the moment choices. Most of his actions are simply leaping at opportunities as they arise. Switching back and forth between Tom and Dickie causes so much confusion among all involved that they don’t know what to think. At any moment it appears that Tom’s lies will be exposed but he continues to barely just escape. Murder is never far from his mind. At one point, Tom stands over Marge with a shoe just waiting for her to make the connection that will force Tom to beat her to death.

Speaking of Marge, here is another troublesome female Highsmith character. I’ve written about this before (here). Highsmith was a bisexual woman that apparently preferred to be around men but have sex with women. Women in her novels usually do not come off well. Marge seems to actually be fairly innocuous. Tom simply can’t stand her. He sees her as clingy, simpleminded and vacuous.

Tom’s sexuality is also in question. Is he in love with Dickie? If so, is it sexual love? Does Dickie respond? It’s pretty clear that Marge thinks that Tom is gay and is trying to seduce Dickie. On the one hand, Tom seemingly has no interest in women at all. His one relationship with a woman in New York is successful precisely because neither one of them desire the other sexually. He does have an attraction to Dickie, but it’s not clear that it’s sexual. Given Tom’s sociopathic tendencies, is he even capable of love? Given Highsmith’s own struggles with her sexuality, leaving Tom’s sexuality open is an interesting choice.

As I was writing this, I did a quick search of my blog and realized that, way back in 2017, I’d actually re-watched the film and wrote about it here. Having written close to 900 of these posts, I guess that I can be forgiven the fact that I’ve forgotten about this post. It is interesting that I apparently enjoyed watching the film as much as I enjoyed reading the book. I do remember that the acting and the casting in the film was first rate.

Living In Interesting Historical Times

Having watched Kevin McCarthy struggle to get elected leader of the House, it’s amazing to me that, once again, we’re witnessing something that hasn’t happened in a hundred years. It’s been that long since a Speaker was denied a first ballot election. As a history geek, I’m finding the times that we live in now endlessly fascinating. I know that I’ve written about some of these before, but I just can’t keep some of these things out of my head.

Here is just a small subset of some of the bizarre oddities that I’ve witnessed. Most of these are Presidential things just because of my obsession with all things Presidential.

Our country has been under our current state of government for over 230 years now. In that entire time, there has been a grand total of four Presidential impeachments. Three of them (Bill Clinton and the Donald Trump double) have occurred in the last twenty-five years.

There has been forty-six Presidents. Only one of them was forced to resign. That would be Richard Nixon back in 1974.

Of those same forty-six Presidents, only one of them became President without earning a single electoral vote. That would be Jerry Ford, named Vice President by Nixon after Spiro Agnew’s resignation and then elevated to President once Nixon resigned.

There has been only two father / son combinations that were elected President. The first was John Adams and John Quincy Adams. The second was George H W Bush (1988) and George W Bush (2000).

In our long history, there has been a grand total of one President that was not a white male. That of course would be Barack Obama.

There has been a total of two Presidents that were at least 70 years old at the time of their inauguration. That would be Donald Trump and Joe Biden. When you consider that you’re not even allowed to be a commercial pilot once you turn 65, it seems amazing that we think it’s wise to elect senior citizens to a job that requires stamina and decisiveness at any moment during a 24 hour day.

In 230 years of Presidential elections, there have been only five times that the elected President won the electoral college while losing the popular election. I’ve seen two of them (George W Bush and Donald Trump). The other three were in the nineteenth century. George W Bush won the deciding state Florida by a grand total of 537 votes. Keep in mind that over 100 million votes were cast in 2000 and the effective difference between the two candidates was those 537 votes.

OK, fine. Here are some insane non Presidential tidbits that have happened recently.

Our national Capitol has been under attack only twice (the Confederates threatened during the Civil War but never really got close). The British sacked it in the War of 1812 and then came the 2019 Inauguration insurrection.

The last (and only other pandemic in our history) was the Spanish Influenza way back in 1918. I remember my naïve beliefs in the early days of the pandemic that, considering how better educated and smarter we are now, we’ll deal with it so much better than our ancestors. Three years of watching people take horse medicine and inject bleach instead of simply taking the free vaccinations has left me wiser and more depressed about our future viability as a species.

It’s been 75 years since the last major power European land war. It makes me wonder if Putin has read much history. Having just read an exhaustive history of World War I, as I watch what’s going on in the Ukraine, I can’t not make comparisons between Putin and Tsar Nicholas II.

In the last fifteen years, I’ve seen our economy almost completely collapse twice. Our banking / finance institutions teetered on the brink of systemic failure during the 2008 housing crisis. Books about that time make for truly horrifying bedtime reading. During the Covid recession, unemployment went to 15% almost overnight, the economy contracted at the fastest rate in 75 years, the S&P had the quickest 10% drop ever recorded, and bizarrely, at one point, oil futures was selling at a negative number (sellers were willing to give buyers money to take the oil off their hands).

This is kind of an odd thing. In my time, we’ve seen ever increasing wealth inequality. Exhibit A would be Elon Musk. However, it’s fascinating that, in a little over a period of year, Musk’s net worth has declined by 200 billion dollars. What makes this amazing is that the first person to even be worth 200 billion dollars was Jeff Bezos, and that first occurred only in August of 2020. Not even two and a half years later, Musk managed to lose 200 billion dollars. Like I said, amazing.

Maybe all of this oddity is typical for a life of any length. After all, my grandmother was born before the Wright brothers flew and lived to see people walking on the moon and a Mars rover sending pictures back to Earth. Even so, I can’t help but think that I ended up in some bizarre time line where nothing makes sense.

How do I get out of it?

The Gods That Walk Among Us

Title: Glass Onion

Rating: 5 Stars

I was going to title this blog Eat The Rich, but then I checked and realized that I’d already titled three previous posts with that title. I guess that probably says something about me, so I decided to change it up a bit.

For those totally out of the loop, this film is part of the Knives Out universe. It’s a pretty loose universe. About the only thing connecting the two is Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), a strangely accented expert detective of some Southern heritage. Since the director / screenwriter Rian Johnson has a multi-picture deal with Netflix, there will apparently be a series of Knives Out films. I’m guessing that this will turn out to be this generation’s equivalent of Agathe Christie’s similarly accent challenged detective Hercule Poirot.

In this film, billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton) has assembled what appear to be his close friends and fellow ‘disrupters’ to a weekend vacation. He promises that the entire week will be spent playing a murder mystery where he himself will be the murder victim (all in good fun, of course).

His invited friends include the swollen men’s right advocate social influencer Duke (Dave Batista), the former supermodel and now fashion designer Birdie (Kate Hudson), the state governor Claire (Kathryn Hahn), and Bron’s lead researcher Lionel (Leslie Odom Jr). Also invited but who no one expected to appear is Bron’s estranged ex-business partner Andi (Janelle Monae). Even more unexpected is the appearance of Blanc, who Bron did not invite. Someone apparently made a copy of Bron’s invitation and sent it to Blanc.

As Blanc investigates, he discovers (as usually happens in such mysteries) that all is not how it seems. All of these people owe their fame and position due to Bron and they all, to one level or another, resent it.

Now, from here on out there will be spoilers (it’s kind of hard to talk about this film without a bit of spoilage), so if you want to watch it with no hints of how the film unfolds, you should probably stop reading now.

Blanc, realizes that Bron, by inviting people that he thinks are his friends but that actually might mean him harm, has put himself in danger. To alleviate that threat, Blanc, to Bron’s obvious annoyance, effortlessly solves the planned murder mystery, which was supposed to last the entire weekend, in mere moments. Bron doesn’t believe that anyone would want to hurt him until Duke drops dead after drinking what is apparently poison from the glass meant for Bron. In the ensuing chaos, Andi is shot dead.

Now Blanc has two murders to solve and still needs to keep Bron out of danger. Of course, Blanc will not let us down.

As a mystery, it’s cleverly plotted with many twists and turns. The characters are interesting and well acted. The rating of any film in which Daniel Craig adopts a Southern accent immediately improves. All of this alone is enough to give the film a high rating.

What gives it an even higher rating is the socio-political statement that it makes. One is that wealth corrupts. The other is that there is zero correlation between wealth and intelligence.

Let’s discuss the first one first. Wealth corrupts. Claire is a progressive, smart governor that is completely beholden to Bron. To stay in his good graces, she’s willing to approve a potentially dangerous power plant in her state. Lionel is clearly a brilliant scientist, but his job now pretty much appears to manage whatever insane idea Bron dreams up. Knowing that Bron’s energy idea is potentially very dangerous, he’s not willing to risk his position to stand up to him. Duke is willing to sexually offer up his girlfriend to Bron if that means that his videos will be promoted on Bron’s media channel. Birdie’s willing to take the blame for a sweat shop manufacturer that was created by Bron. All of these people, no matter what their initial idealism might have been, have allowed their values be corrupted by Bron’s immense wealth.

This isn’t real groundbreaking stuff. Where the film excels is showing exactly how, beneath the suavity, new age philosophizing, and intellectual pretensions, that Bron is an idiot. He simply is not a smart man and he has no judgement or discernment. He regularly misuses words. His glass onion house is an architectural monstrosity. His beautiful boat dock is essentially nonfunctional. His art objects are almost breathless in their tastelessness. His one of a kind prized car (this does not appear in the film but I read about it elsewhere) is a real car but one that no real exotic car purist would ever consider owning. Basically, he’s an idiot fraud that is so far up his own asshole that he doesn’t even know it.

In this film, Blanc plays the little boy who calls out the emperor wearing no clothes. In his own way a brilliant genius himself, he is manifestly offended by this brain dead poseur that stands naked before him.

Why this is important is because that is the time in which we now live. We worship billionaires. If someone is successful in one area, then that means that they must be brilliant in all areas. We breathlessly await their pontifications on any and all subjects.

That is how we ended up with a man becoming president despite having quite literally no experience or expertise or even a grade school level understanding of how government works. Acting like a successful businessman for several years on a reality television show was enough to convince many that he possessed superior intellect. People thought that Trump was playing five dimensional chess when he was actually just playing checkers by shoving the pieces up his nose.

Now we have Elon Musk. Considered some kind of super genius because of PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX (SpaceX was the only company that he actually founded), he has acolytes that think that he can do no wrong. Apparently getting a random idea to buy Twitter, he later tried to back out, but eventually was pretty much legally compelled to purchase it. Now running Twitter, advertisers are abandoning it in droves. He’s trying to drive revenue with a subscription service. Hmm, let’s see, a company whose whole economic model relies upon content creators voluntarily offering up their content for free now wants to charge those content creators to continue to offer up their content for free? Well, good luck with that. I’m not saying that Musk is as dumb as Bron. What is apparent is that skill running a company like SpaceX might not translate to the completely different business of running a successful social media platform.

What was most amazing to me was when Musk’s text messages were published as a result of a legal discovery process. He was surrounded by people telling him what a genius level visionary he is. By giving him exactly the kind of feedback that he wanted to hear, they all were clearly angling for their turn at the cash trough.

This is the timeline that we live in and Glass Onion does a great job of capturing it. Glass Onion and Don’t Look Up should be locked away in a time capsule for future generations to understand the truly stupid time in which we’re currently living.

What Do The Ants In The Ear Mean?

Title: Blue Velvet

Rating: 5 Stars

Let me remove the mystery of the post title right away. Apparently there are people (a diminishing number I’m guessing, since the film is over 35 years old) for whom your opinion / relationship to the film Blue Velvet reveals something important about yourself to them. Some 30 years ago or so, a young woman that I was interested in getting to know better asked me if I saw Blue Velvet, and when I said that I did, she asked me that very question. Now I have no recollection of what I said, but whatever I said must not have been tremendously impressive because I never really did get to know her all that much better.

Last week, for some reason, What Did Jack Do popped up in my Netflix recommendation list. For those that have never heard of it, I think that you should stop reading this immediately, go over to Netflix, and watch it. It is maybe twenty minutes long. The entire plot, if you want to call it that, is David Lynch playing a homicide detective interrogating a capuchin monkey in a train station. Yes, you read that right. The monkey answers Lynch’s questions using, shall we say, pretty basic CGI. As with all Lynch films, I’m not sure how I’m supposed to feel about it, but in this case I found it quite amusing. Anyway, seeing a Lynch short film inspired me to re-watch his now classic Blue Velvet.

For a Lynch film, the plot is actually quite straightforward. Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) is a young man home from college helping to run the family’s hardware store during his father’s illness. In a field, he stumbles across a human ear (and yes, there are ants crawling around in it). From this beginning, Jeffrey stumbles into the dark side of Lumberton, his apparently bucolic home town. And dark side, it is. He encounters a distressed woman (Dorothy, played by Isabella Rossellini) with an apparently kidnapped husband and child and she seems to enjoy being beaten. There is the evil drug dealer (Frank, played by Dennis Hopper) who happily beats Dorothy as he inhales nitrous oxide.  There is Frank’s underworld gang members, including Dean Stockwell as Ben, Brad Dourif as Raymond, and Jack Nance (he of Eraserhead fame) as Paul. Jeffrey discovers all of this as he tries to solve the mystery behind the ear and as he falls in love with the daughter (Laura Dern as Sandy) of the local police detective. This sets up a final showdown between Jeffrey and Frank.

So, what do I think? Well, it’s in the category of neo-noir, which as a rule I enjoy. The film is visually quite dark. I watched it on my laptop and there were a few scenes in which I was squinting. I believe that Lynch did this to contrast the brightness of the idealized small town with the darkness of its underbelly. The scenes with Sandy are all bright, cheery, and neat while the scenes with Dorothy are darker, dismal, and just a bit creepy.

There seem to be a number of themes here that seem to cross Lynch films. As I’ve already said, there’s the contrast between the nostalgic seemingly innocent surface of the town with the vicious sexuality and brutality of Frank’s world. This contrast also exists within Jeffrey. Jeffrey is the college boy that comes home just to take care of things for his ailing father. On the one hand, Jeffrey is clearly attracted to Sandy (even as he’s stealing her away from her football playing boyfriend), ensnares her in his investigative schemes, and confesses his love to her as they dance and softly kiss. Sandy has a virginal purity to her that Jeffrey respects. On the other hand, Jeffrey voyeuristically watches Dorothy be abused by Frank while hidden in her closet. Once Dorothy discovers Jeffrey hiding, they almost immediately fall into a passionate sexual relationship. Although initially hesitant, at her imploring Jeffrey ultimately does strike her while the two have sex. After, tortured by his guilt as well as by his pleasure, he weeps. 

A theme that also recurs in Lynch films is dual identities. The yellow man that is Frank’s partner turns out to be Sandy’s detective father’s partner. Even more so, there’s a mysterious well dressed man that seems to be running things. At the conclusion of the film (fine, spoiler alert), the well dressed man turns out to be Frank in disguise. By the time Lynch makes Lost Highway, he’s having two completely different actors playing the same character with absolutely no explanation for the change. He seems quite interested in discovering the layers that lie beneath our social constructs.

Also as I was watching this, maybe because I just re-watched Eraserhead sometime this year, I noticed a mechanical feel to the town’s underbelly. Frank meets the yellow man in some apparently abandoned factory building. Frank brutally beats Jeffrey (after first smearing lipstick all over his face and then kissing Jeffrey) in front of what appear to be oil derricks. At various times in the film, you distinctly hear mechanical noises. Again there is the contrast. In the idealized part of the small town, all is quiet and peaceful while the hard, dirty work of industry is performed in its underbelly. Eraserhead seems to be completely set in this industrial environment. Either it’s set in a dystopian time/place where there is no idealized adjacent small town or it’s so far removed from the ideal that it’s not reachable from it.

So, although it’s extremely unlikely to ever happen again, if someone asks me what does it mean that ants are crawling around in the severed ear, at least now I have a better answer (I think). Either the ants are a metaphor for the inevitable decay that is omnipresent in any human condition or it is simply a Lynchian image designed to provoke feelings of disgust or disquiet.

Last One Standing Wins

Title: Ring of Steel

Rating: 4 Stars

As I wrote a couple of days ago, I’ve been reading Ring of Steel, a World War I history written from the point of view of the Germans and the Austro-Hungarians. As I was reading it, I was comparing it to The Rising Sun, the World War II history written from the point of view of the Japanese. Did it rise to that level? Well, not quite, but still it was pretty good.

One reason why I didn’t enjoy Ring of Steel as much could very well be the nature of World War I. Even though the war took place over more than a four year period, it was only in the beginning months and the ending months that any significant movement really took place (especially in the Western Front).

Don’t get me wrong, there was major actions that resulted in hundreds of thousands of casualties (like Verdun, the Somme, and the Brusilov offensive), but despite mass expenditure of men and material, it didn’t really change the strategic position much.

It really did become a war of attrition and will. Would the British blockade of the Central Powers (along with their own incompetence in food management) starve them out? Would Germany’s U-boat open warfare starve Great Britain? Would all of the territory destroyed or lost break the will of France? As various national separatists movements (eg Pole, Czech, Slovak, Ruthene (ie Ukrainian)) began to rise up, would it break up the Austro-Hungarian empire? Which nations would run out of men willing to die first?

In 1918, it became a foot race. With the Russian revolution bringing about the disastrous (at least to the Russians) Brest-Litovsk armistice, the Germans could concentrate their military might upon the Western front. On the other hand, with the US declaration of war, the Allied forces were preparing to receive a couple of million more men and virtually unlimited material.

The Germans gambled it all on one more push. Convincing the soldiers that victory was now finally within their reach, they had one last spring offensive. Although, from a territory point of view, it was wildly successful, Watson’s opinion is that the offensive was not executed with any strategic objectives in mind. The mastermind behind it, Ludendorff, thought that an overwhelming force alone would just destroy the Allied powers will to fight.

Although battered, the Allied forces did not collapse. As they have all along for the previous four years, they took the brunt, retreated, regrouped, and fought back. The German army, having their dreams of ending the war with one final push turn into a nightmare in front them, effectively collapsed. It was the German army that lost their will to fight. Impregnable positions that they’d held for years fell. The impervious Hindenburg line proved to be quite pervious.

Ludendorff, knowing that his army was lost, had something close to a nervous breakdown. After for months repeating the line that victory was in his grasp, he went to the recently formed civilian government and told them that an immediate armistice was required to prevent a complete collapse of the German state. The German government, shocked, took immediate steps. A couple of weeks later, Ludendorff had a change of heart and told the government that he wanted to still keep fighting. Having lost their confidence in him, they had him removed. This change of heart is what led Ludendorff, years later, to claim that the civilian government had betrayed the German people (the knife in the back). It was clear that the German army was defeated and the only question remaining was how many more people needed to die for that fact to be acknowledged.

That’s kind of the war story. As I said, this book didn’t really focus so much on specific battles as much as on the government and the people of the Central Powers (specifically, Germany and Austria-Hungary). Fair warning, this book is not for the faint of heart. It’s around 600 hundred pages of inside Central European baseball. Due to many factors, Central Europe is a bewildering stew of territory, nationalities, and budding nationalities. You’re going to read about a lot of places like Galicia, Bohemia, the Congress Poland, Moravia, and Bukovina. It’s a lot to wade through. In so doing, I was rewarded by learning many new things about World War I, as well as Central Europe itself.

Here are some of the random facts that I learned. 

There was an idea in war known as elan. This can be thought of as the fighting spirit. All countries, at the start of the war, seemed to think that their soldiers possessed this spirit in abundance compared to other nations. This led to the full on frontal attacks on another line. The thinking was that the defenders would be terrified by the oncoming warriors and would take to their heels in panic. This might have happened in earlier times, but in the time of machine guns and mortars, all it meant now was that thousands of soldiers would die. Elan was one of the first casualties of the war, at least among the soldiers that were actually doing the fighting. Generals far behind the lines still seemed to think otherwise.

The area of what we now think of as Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus have been struggling for national recognition since well before World War I. Some nationalities saw the war as an opportunity to gain their freedom. Interesting, the Tsar specifically refused to recognize Ukraine because he thought that they were Russian (in fact, called them little Russians). Isn’t it interesting (or tragic really) that over one hundred years later, the modern day Tsar of Russia still refuses to recognize the existence of an independent Ukrainian nation?

The one truly bad decision of the war was Germany’s decision to unleash open submarine warfare. It really had no chance to work. They didn’t have enough U-boats. A lot of shipping was sunk, but once the British organized themselves into destroyer supported convoys, the rate of loss plummeted. Even at the height of the crisis, the British were able to come up with alternatives to the goods and foods that they were missing. They were never on the cusp of starvation. The only end result of open submarine warfare was the entrance of the US into the war. The Germans knew that this was a likely outcome, but thought that it would take a long time for the Americans to ramp up their peacetime army and, in the meantime, the British would starve and be forced to capitulate. Once the Americans started arriving on shore, it was pretty much game over.

Another fact that I wasn’t aware of was that, even though the armistice was in negotiation and it was clear that the war was over, the German navy, who had been bottled up and rendered impotent over the course of the war, decided to head out for one last major engagement. Again, everyone knew the war was over. The German naval officers knew that as well. They just wanted to have one battle to prove their worth so that, after the war, they could justify a naval future for themselves.

Well, it didn’t pay off. The battle didn’t happen. The navy dispersed its fleets to separate locations in Germany. This proved to be a horrible mistake. The sailors, knowing what their officers were going to do, rose up in revolt. Their revolt spread in the various locations that the navy had been dispersed. This led to a general uprising that ultimately led to the abdication of the Kaiser. The navy’s decision for this one last pointless engagement was one of the main contributing factors to the collapse of the German empire.

Austria-Hungary comes off as just grossly incompetent at all levels. First of all, it was Austria-Hungary that triggered the global war by insisting upon throwing its weight around by attempting to punish Serbia. Even though it was a polyglot of people, languages, and customs, people initially did rally to the Emperor. However, much of that dissipated when the government, fearful of uprisings, threw many local leaders (politicians and priests) into jail. Hungary had much more agriculture than Austria but refused to share. Their military leadership was strategically incompetent. They had a chance to negotiate a separate peace with the Allied Powers with even some possible gains in territory but decided to go down with the German ship. After the death of the beloved Emperor, the new Emperor, although well meaning, was indecisive and feckless.

Despite the fact that very little of the war was actually fought in Germany, the Germans believed that there were fighting a war of defense. They just couldn’t understand how they were losing the public relations campaign. The Germans were branded with the label of brutality. Due to their invasion of neutral Belgium, atrocities that were committed in Belgium, their use of slave labor, and their use of unrestricted submarine warfare, this reputation is deserved. Before we pile on too much, it has to be acknowledged that the Allied Powers were doing much the same. The treatment of the people in lands conquered by Russia was abysmal. The British embargo of all ships coming to the Central Powers was designed specifically to starve their population.

OK, once again I’ve written too much. Although dense and occasionally difficult to wade through, I did find that the Ring of Steel offered a perspective on World War I that was new to me.

Chester Arthur, This Is Your Moment

Probably not surprising to anyone, I’m still thinking about the book Accidental Presidents. I’m still entertained by some of the things that I learned about Vice Presidents that took over upon the death of a President. Just to get the thoughts out of my head, I thought that I’d write something about one of those forgotten and almost lost to history Vice Presidents that accidentally became President. 

The man of the hour is Chester Arthur. He took office upon the death of James Garfield. I kind of mentioned in the book review that the relationship between the two was awkward. It was a bit more than that.

In the 1870s and 1880s, the Republican Party was broken up into factions. Chester Arthur was part of the Stalwarts faction. This was basically the party of patronage. Run by big bosses like Roscoe Conkling, they were all about handing out patronage in exchange for power and votes. Chester Arthur was basically considered Conkling’s lap dog. In that role, Arthur was put in charge of the Port of New York. At that time, it was considered the top job for handing out patronage.

In opposition to the Stalwarts were the Half Breeds. Led by James Blaine, they wanted to enact civil service reform. In the election of 1880, neither the Stalwarts (who nominated US Grant for a third term) nor the Half Breeds (who nominated James Blaine) were able to gain a majority. After some 36 ballots, James Blaine, as a compromise, nominated James Garfield (much to Garfield’s shock, who had no idea that he was about to be nominated). Not considered a fire breathing member of the Half Breed faction, Garfield was considered acceptable to the Stalwarts. As part of the price for their support, they did manage to get the Stalwart Chester Arthur the Vice Presidential nomination.

So, Garfield wins the nomination and promptly begins to enact civil service reform. Here’s where it gets interesting. His own Vice President, Arthur, overtly worked to sabotage his agenda. Imagine that. Your own Vice President was, from his perch overseeing the Senate, actively stopping progress on your highest priority. It’s clear that Arthur was actually still essentially Conkling’s lapdog. 

In July of 1881, a scarce four months after his inauguration, Garfield was shot. Tortured and debilitated by what passed for 19th century medicine, he died in September. His assassin was a seriously deranged man named Charles Guiteau. Among other things, Guiteau considered himself a Stalwart. In fact, as he was being led away after having shot Garfield, Guiteau apparently said, “I am a Stalwart and Arthur will be President”.

Well, that’s awkward. Can you imagine being Chester Arthur? The person that just assassinated the President said that he did it in your name. Probably the only other person that can relate is Jodie Foster (for those wondering, John Hinckley tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan to impress Jodie Foster).

The problem was that, Guiteau’s obvious insanity not withstanding, the Stalwarts were so opposed to what Garfield was attempting to do that Guiteau’s statement was believable. People actually thought that the Vice President was involved in a conspiracy to assassinate the President. The only person that would find that believable now is Oliver Stone (for those wondering about that, check out the Stone film JFK, where the film posits a deep state conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy that included Lyndon Johnson).

Here’s the thing. Chester Arthur never wanted to be President. In fact, it was about the last thing that he wanted. He’d never held elective office in his life. All he really wanted out of life was to wear nice clothes, eat good food, and maybe hand out a few jobs to his friends. He was not exactly a deep, ambitious thinker with a vision for his country. When he learned that Garfield had been shot, he just about had a nervous breakdown. He broke down in sobs. During the period while doctors were torturing Garfield to death, Arthur refused to act the part of the President. In fact, even as Garfield was dying, Arthur was in a state of denial. He was just about as far from Al Haig as possible (OK, for the last time, I promise, for those wondering, after Reagan was shot, Secretary of State Alexander Haig barged into a conference and said that he was in control, despite the fact that, according to the succession amendment, he was actually fourth in line (after VP, Speaker of the House, and President Pro Tempore)). Having this responsibility thrust upon him was just about his worse case scenario.

Amazingly enough, against all odds, the apparently corrupt nonentity Chester Arthur rose to the challenge. Pledging to carry forward Garfield’s mission, he did exactly that. Even though a Stalwart, he passed the first civil service reform act despite the best efforts of his now erstwhile friends. His administration embarked on an effort to start building up the declining navy (the so-called ABCD ships). He tried to make progress on civil rights. One of the blemishes on his record was the passing and his signing of the Chinese Exclusion Act. At least give the lawmakers credit during those days of at least using accurate titles for their bills (yeah, I’m looking at you Inflation Reduction Act or, even worse, Patriot Act).

He actually had some dreams of earning a term on his own. Unfortunately, he soon realized that he didn’t have enough support in his party to get the nomination. Even worse, while President, he was diagnosed with a serious disease that he tried, with not great success, to keep secret. He ended up dying in 1886, so he wouldn’t have survived his term anyway.

If that had happened, then Arthur would be an even more interesting trivia question because he would have been the first (and, so far, only) Vice President to be seceded by his own Vice President.

Stumbling To Ten Million Dead

I guess that I’m in a World War I groove. Having watched both the 1930 and the 2022 All Quiet on the Western Front films and having read the novel, I’m now reading a history of World War I. This one is called Ring of Steel. It’s unusual in that it is written exclusively from the viewpoint of the Entente Powers (the Germans and the Austro-Hungarians). I’m only a couple of chapters in. So far, I’ve enjoyed it. A bit over a year ago, I read The Rising Sun. In a similar manner to Ring of Steel, it’s an excellent history of World War II from the perspective of Japan. I have hopes that Ring of Steel will rise to that level as well.

The first chapter went into the causes of World War I. I’ve now read several WWI histories and, to this day, its cause confuses me. It’s not like WWII. From a purely American perspective, its causes are simple. Hitler was evil and the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. End of story.

How do you explain the origins of WWI? Sure, the Archduke of Austria-Hungary was assassinated by Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serbian nationalist. Still, does that really explain it? Franz Ferdinand was relatively unpopular, Princip was all of nineteen years old, and if anything, the assassination was an amateurish comedy of errors.

It makes even less sense when you understand the cost of WWI. Seventy million men were mobilized to fight. Ten million people were killed. In Germany, some 86% of all men between the ages of eighteen and fifty served. Populations were displaced. Communities were destroyed. Ultimately, four empires (Russia, Austria-Hungary, Ottoman, and German) disintegrated. Some of these were many hundreds of years old. There has to be more to it than Ferdinand and Princip.

And there is. Since Austro-Hungarians and the Germans were pretty much the belligerents, the opening chapter does a good job of laying out each nations’ motivations.

Let’s start with Austria-Hungary. Ruled by the Habsburgs, they were a link to the ancient Holy Roman Empire. However, by the year 1914, it was in trouble. Already broken up into two parts (ie Hungary and Austria), those two parts were themselves composed of many other ethnicities. There were Poles, Serbians, Bosnians, Ruthenians, Tyrolians, and so many others. Although all did feel some loyalty to the Emperor, they also were striving for their own governments where they could speak their own languages. The Austro-Hungarians tried to give these individual factions freedoms, but there was only so much that it was willing to do. As a result of the two Balkan Wars, the Ottoman empire was slowly but surely withering away. The Austro-Hungarians were concerned that a similar fate awaited them.

In the meantime, Serbia was undergoing change. Previously, the king of Serbia was nearly a vassal to Austria-Hungary. However, the king was brutally assassinated (people basically broke into his palace and tore him apart). The new government was actively trying to create a Greater Serbia. It just so happens that a chunk of this Greater Serbia happens to be inside Austria-Hungary. Therefore, even though Princip was a Bosnian, Austria-Hungary naturally thought that Serbia was behind the attack on the Archduke.

Being so much larger than Serbia, Austria-Hungary saw this as a good opportunity to throw its weight around in the Balkans and teach Serbia a painful lesson. Also during same time, Russia, since it lost a war against Japan and had been thwarted by the English in the Middle East, had apparently nothing better to do than to meddle in the Balkans. Not imagining that Russia would actually be willing to go to war over Serbia, Austria-Hungary thought that by issuing a brutal ultimatum to Serbia and then having Russia stand down in humiliation would be a great way to reduce Russia’s influence in the Balkans.

It nearly worked. Austria-Hungary gave an uncompromising set of demands to Serbia that effectively would have neutered it. The Serbian government was just about to accept the terms because they knew they had no chance militarily against the much larger country. At the last minute, Russia sent a message to Serbia that it would support them.

That was it. The Serbian sent back a response knowing that it would be deemed unacceptable. Austria-Hungary felt that it had no choice since there was no way that a great power could back down from a lesser power. It felt it must go to war.

Germany had a different problem. A relatively new country, it was recognized as the great continental military power. However, it felt trapped. It was surrounded by enemies such as France and Russia. Russia, especially, was in the midst of greatly increasing the size of its military. Germany tried to increase its navy to be competitive with England, but England, alarmed by this, engaged in its own naval build-up. So, even though it was the great military power on the continent, Germany felt that its dominance was in decline. It was only a matter of time before the enemies on its borders could overwhelm it. In its view, it was better to fight a war now rather than years later from a position of weakness.

Even though Austria-Hungary was considered the weakest of the great powers, it was the only country that Germany was able to establish an alliance with. It therefore felt obligated to support Austria-Hungary. At a crucial moment when Austria-Hungary was having some misgivings about war with Serbia, Germany sent a message of support. So, what could have been a punitive war between Austria-Hungary and Serbia now included the additional great powers of Russia and Germany.

Germany knew that Russia had an alliance with France. It thought that it could win a war if it was just limited to those two countries. Knowing that England did not have a formal alliance with Russia but did have one with France, Germany hoped that England might decide to sit it out. This was not to be. 

A final problem was each country’s mobilization plans. Russia was incapable of performing a partial mobilization. Even though it only wanted to threaten Austria-Hungary, by executing a complete mobilization, it also seemingly endangered Germany. Once Russia mobilized, then Germany needed no further encouragment to mobilize itself. In fact, since Russia mobilized first, the German population believed that it was only defending itself.

So, yes, even though the assassination of an unpopular crown prince by a nineteen year old seemed an unlikely cause, it did result in Austria-Hungary threatening Serbia, Serbia being backed by Russia, Germany backing Austria-Hungary, France backing Russia, and England backing France.

Four years later, ten million people are dead.