When Movie Quality Was Measured By Body Count

Title: The Last Action Heroes

Rating: 4 Stars

It’s the late 1970s. Our country is still recovering from the turbulent 1960s, our ignominious withdrawal from Vietnam that shook our faith as a superpower, and the Watergate scandal that destroyed our trust in politicians.

The 1970s featured the visionary auteur showing us the corruption of our time. Think of Scorsese and Taxi Driver. Think of Coppola and Godfather Part II. Or Cimino’s Deer Hunter.

What were we to do? Well, clearly it was time to elect Ronald Reagan as our cowboy President and for American films to start waving that flag and to start killing people.

The Last Action Heroes is about that interesting time. Apparently we had our fill of carefully made, smaller, independent films and we wanted explosions starring indestructible men with large muscles.

Since I was a teenager in 1980, I was smack dab in the middle of all of that. Of course, the two polar stars of this time were Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The book doesn’t stop there. It also includes profiles of Chuck Norris, Jackie Chan, Dolph Lundgren, Bruce Willis, Steven Seagal, and Jean-Claude Van Damme.

It really started with Stallone and Rocky in 1976 and Rocky II in 1979. The story of a maligned, underestimated palooka boxer who, when unexpectedly given a chance, makes the most of it and electrifies the world was exactly the kind of film that American needed to get it out of its doldrums.

Stallone flailed trying to build a career that was not Rocky. When he finally broke through with the Rambo films, First Blood in 1982 and Rambo: First Blood Part II in 1985, he became the movie star hero that Reagan America demanded.

Apparently America wanted even larger men. Arnold Schwarzenegger definitely fit that bill. He burst onto the scene with the Conan films The Barbarian in 1982 and The Destroyer in 1985. Sandwiched between those two was the role that he was born to play, The Terminator.

At that point, the fight for alpha dog was on. It was an interesting battle. The book paints Stallone as painfully insecure. He wants people to see him as a creative, intellectual artist and not just the meatball Rocky or the brutal Rambo. Unfortunately, his choice of films left much to be desired. Films like Rhinestone, Tango & Cash, Cobra, and the infamous Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot proved that he was limited, especially when it came to comedy. With a few exceptions, Rocky and Rambo was going to be his path to greatness.

Schwarzenegger, on the other hand, had a nice run of films. Not only the awesome Terminator 2, but there was also Commando, Predator, Running Man, Twins, Total Recall, and Kindergarten Cop. These were all giant hits. I remember seeing all of them in the theater. Interesting, Schwarzenegger is portrayed as so self-confident that he appears to be almost free of ego. To improve himself, he willingly took direction, observed other actors, and was willing to risk failure and rejection in his quest to be the king of film. This willing to take risks might have been one of the reasons why he was able to succeed at comedy when so many of his fellow action hero peers failed.

Proving that, in Hollywood, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, several others became, with various levels of success, action heroes. Chuck Norris was a legitimate martial artist that won world championships in Karate. Encouraged by Bruce Lee, he took the plunge into acting. Although never the level of Stallone or Schwarzenegger, he did manage to star in several profitable films, including several set in Vietnam where, apparently American now wins the war? Somehow, along with Rambo, films that took out significant numbers of Vietnamese was somehow therapeutic to America’s wounded psyche. Of all of the action heroes, Norris comes across as the calmest and most level headed. However, like Stallone, he was never able to figure out how to do comedy.

Steven Seagal is drawn here as just being weird. Portraying himself as some mysterious, mystical man, he allowed all kinds of unconfirmed rumors to circulate around him. He had a couple of years where his relatively low budget films were successful. Desperate for more action film hits, he was able to convince a studio to greenlight a film that he essentially wrote and directed. Needless to say, it was a disaster. Once again, we see an action hero for whom comedy is apparently a completely foreign language. Proving this point, Seagal is, infamously, Lorne Michael’s least favorite SNL host.

One action hero who did get comedy was Bruce Willis. In Die Hard, he was the first one that actively played against the type of the invincible, muscle bound hero. Watching the film, Schwarzenegger began to see the end of his reign. Although Willis certainly starred in other films (eg Fifth Dimension, Pulp Fiction, Unbreakable, Armageddon), he’ll always be known as John McClane.

Another man that understood comedy was Jackie Chan. Unfortunately, other than the Rush Hour films, Hollywood never really gave him much of a shot. I remember seeing Supercop in the theater and being absolutely astounded by his stunts. Although acknowledging the danger of Hong Kong films, Chan held the action heroes that used stuntmen and, even worse, CGI, in contempt.

Jean-Claude Van Damme is portrayed as a hungry young actor willing to do anything and say anything to become a star. He made use of every opportunity that came his way. Never a huge star, he reached about the same level as Norris or Seagal. Unfortunately, his high octane lifestyle led to many marriages and a cocaine addiction. He now seems to be proceeding a bit more sedately.

I’m not sure why Dolph Lundgren made this list. Yes, he was a great Soviet boxer villain in Rocky IV, but who can name other films he was in? His action hero origin story is certainly interesting. He did make other films, but he was never again close to the level of success from Rocky IV.

What I don’t understand is how Tom Cruise did not make this list. Was he just a hair too young? After all, if you want a military jingoistic film, then you can’t do better than 1986’s Top Gun. Are the Mission Impossible films too cerebral? Was there a minimal body count threshold that his films did not meet? Perhaps because, especially in his early days, he showed a versatility unmatched by any of the other action heroes.

Speaking of body count, apparently when Stallone and Schwarzenegger were trading off doing action films, the film producers would keep track of body count to make sure that the current film exceeded the body count of the previous. Apparently they went even a bit more phallic and there were tales told of comparisons between knife sizes used in Stallone / Schwarzenegger films.

This book might have a bit more meaning to me since I was around when much of these stories unfolded. If you want a really interesting compare / contrast experience, I’d advise first reading Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (I wrote about it here), a book about the serious, angsty development of the 1970s auteurs like Scorsese, Spielberg, Coppola, and Lucas. Follow that up with this book about the bombastic, macho, jingoistic action films of the 1980s and 1990s.

You can then decide if we, as a species, are evolving or devolving.

Hitchcock On The Couch

Seeing that Hitchcock’s film, Marnie, was about to leave Netflix, I decided to give it a watch. It’s kind of an odd film.

Tippi Hedren is Marnie. She occasionally gets a job at a business, hangs around long enough to figure out how to rob it (eg get the safe combination), robs it, and then disappears. After a job, she goes to visit her mother, who seems strangely distant to her.

Getting the itch again, she gets a job at Rutland Publishing. There’s only one problem. The owner, Mark Rutland (Sean Connery), was a client at the previous business that Marnie robbed and recognizes her. Intrigued, he encourages the manager to hire her.

Sure enough, Marnie is up to her old tricks and robs the company. Mark tracks her down and says that he knows who she is. He says that he’s already replaced the money that she stole and will not turn her in if she agrees to marry him. Yes, you read that right. Trapped, she agrees.

On their honeymoon, Mark discovers that Marnie hates and fears all men. She loathes being touched by them. At first sympathetic, later there is certainly an implication (implication because this is a Hays Code era film) that Mark rapes Marnie. The next morning, she attempts suicide but Mark saves her.

Their marriage is off to a rollicking start. Mark also finds out that Marnie is terrified of thunderstorms and the color red. She is a serial liar. Despite all of that, Mark, for some reason, is still infatuated with her. He begins to read abnormal psychology books in an attempt to understand her. She angrily resists all attempts to be psychoanalyzed by him.

The mystery becomes clearer when Mark discovers that Marnie’s mom, of whom Marnie has claimed is dead, is actually alive in Baltimore. Mark forces Marnie to visit her mother. During a dramatic thunderstorm, her mom recounts the childhood tragedy that unlocks the reasons behind Marnie’s phobias and hatred of men. Perhaps the unlocked memory will now allow her to move on.

The film was kind of meh. This film was the first time that I really saw the impact that German Expressionism had on Hitchcock. The cinematography was full of interesting shadows and angular backgrounds. Since German Expressionism came of age in the 1920s, it was interesting to see it expressed in technicolor.

Although very different women, this film reminded me of his earlier film Rebecca. Both involved a sexually naïve woman essentially being bum rushed into marriage, while at the same time, another woman actively tries to destroy the marriage.

On the not so good side, the acting was wooden. Hedren did good work as the icy socialite in The Birds. Here she is in over her head trying to convey all of the emotional and psychological complexities of Marnie. Similarly, Connery is lost portraying Rutland. He is not convincing in expressing his love for Marnie or expressing exasperation at her many lies. At least at this point in his career, he simply doesn’t have much emotional range beyond chiseled good looks.

The portrayal of Rutland in 2023 is problematic. I kind of wish that I had a time machine to watch it from a 1964 perspective. I’d guess, from that perspective, that Rutland is a good guy. Sure he forces her into marriage, but he has her best interests at heart, right? After all, he does it all for love.

Looking from 2023, he’s a problem. He forces her into marriage. He pretty clearly rapes her when she rejects him. She pleads with him to let her go but he refuses. With no psychological experience, he forces her to relive her foundational traumatic memory. Connery’s infamous remarks about the occasional need to slap women make many scenes in this film now uncomfortable.

Now that I’ve watched many Hitchcock films, one of the main things that I was thinking about as I was watching is how seemingly obsessed he was with psychology. I’m not talking about subtleties like themes or settings. In many of his films, the psychology is front and center.

Here is just a sampling:

Marnie: I know that I just talked about it. The film is rife with phobias, dreams / nightmares, neuroses, repressed memories, and sexual dysfunction. Connery is seen reading several psychology books and discourses at length with Marnie about her need for psychiatric attention. At one point, they even do a word association exercise.

Spellbound: A good chunk of this film actually takes place at a mental asylum. The main characters are all psychiatrists. One of the characters even kind of looks like Sigmund Freud. Characters have phobias and amnesia, all of which is explainable and, ultimately, curable through psychological means.

Rope: This one might be a stretch but the two murderers, especially Brandon, suffer from Narcissist Personality Disorder. This is best exemplified by Brandon’s claim that he is a superman somehow above murder. This continues on until the one person who Brandon wishes to impress above all others angrily rejects him premise.

Vertigo: This, as well as the next one, are the most famous. After a traumatic experience, Scottie Ferguson now has a severe fear of heights. It is only through experiencing a different traumatic experience that Ferguson can overcome his fear.

Psycho: This is the clearest example. After all, the film literally ends with a psychiatrist’s extended exposition of the case of Norman Bates and his mother.

There’s some other, not quite so obvious, examples that I could reference. I’m thinking of films such as Frenzy and Strangers on a Train.

I don’t know enough about Hitchcock to understand if he was particularly interested in the study of psychology or if he just happened to be plugged into the cultural zeitgeist of the time. It was clearly a subject that he found himself returning to many times.

These Never United States Of America

Title: Break It Up

Rating: 4 Stars

Everyone has heard of The Civil War. I remember visiting Foyle’s. It’s one of the more famous book stores in London. It’s spread over something like five floors. As I was perusing the history section, I was interested / amused to see an entire book case devoted to the American Civil War. Not just one book or a shelf; it was an entire book case.

The mythology of The Civil War is pretty set. The South was very protective of the practice of slavery. They were convinced that the radical abolitionists would somehow assume national power and would immediately abolish slavery. Accordingly, over a period of decades, the South made various threats to secede whenever they felt that their peculiar institution was under threat. With the election of Lincoln, even though, being a strict constitutionalist,  he was not against abolishing slavery where it was already being practiced, the South saw it as the mortal threat and promptly seceded, before he was even inaugurated.

With Lincoln firmly committed to preserving the Union, it took a bloody four year battle costing 620,000 lives to end the secession threat. The extinguishing of that solitary secessionist threat cemented the idea of The United States as one people.

What if I told you that that wasn’t the only secessionist threat that the US has faced? What if I told you that the United State is, right now, pretty much as disunited as it ever has been?

That’s the thesis of this book. For the rest of this post, I’m going to list the various attempts at secession that various factions of our country has attempted.

I know that people today are aware of the red state / blue state divide or the rural / urban divide. This is more than that. These are people seriously talking about splitting the country up. They had plans. Some had constitutions. If this seems odd to you, I’d strongly advise you to read American Nations, by Colin Woodard (I wrote about it here). Woodard’s thesis is that we’re not just one American nation but eleven, each established at different times by different people for different reasons. Our history can be understood as these various nations battling each other for national supremacy. If you understand that, then the various attempts at secession begin to make much more sense.

Onto the various attempts at rebellion or sedition. Rest assured that this is by no means a complete list.

Did you know that, in 1777, Vermont broke free of New York and declared itself an independent republic? It was a sovereign entity for fourteen years. Its constitution was the first one among the states that abolished slavery. It joined the United States in 1991.

A recurring theme in our history is western territories thinking that they are being ignored or, even worse, abused by eastern governments. Around 1776, portions of western portions of Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and Virginia decided that they had enough and created a new territory called Westsylvania. This effort continued off and on until 1782.

After the Revolutionary War ended in 1783, all was not well. The army, ill treated during the best of times, was now no longer being paid and promised pensions were not funded. An anonymous letter was circulated among army officers stationed at Newburgh that could be interpreted as encouragement for a military coup. In an emotional address, George Washington was able to suppress the rebellion.

During that same time, and for similar reasons, 400 Continental army soldiers surrounded the building where the congress met in Philadelphia so that their demands could be heard. The congressmen escaped through a back exit.

In 1786 there was Shays’ Rebellion. After the Revolutionary War there was a shortage of hard currency. Forcing people to pay hard currency was a severe hardship, especially for the rural population. Lacking access to currency, rural farmers were losing their farms and their other possessions. Thousands of them formed an impromptu army. They marched to an armory to get weapons. A hastily arranged state militia met them there and drove them away.

If you think that, in 1789, all of the colonies were excited about becoming a big old united country, let’s start with the first words of the Constitution. “We, the People” makes a bold unifying statement. Well, that wasn’t the first draft. The original draft said “We, the People of the States of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (yes, that was it’s original name), Connecticut, New-York, New-Jersey, etc” (I’m too tired to write it all out). I think that’s hilarious. From the get go, no one really wanted to swear allegiance to this larger institution.

When the Constitution was approved, it was not the Southern states that were the most opposed to it. New York barely approved it. When approving it, New York, Virginia, and Rhode Island all explicitly reserved their right to secede.

The Whiskey Rebellion started in 1791. A tax on whiskey was seen, once again, as an affront upon the western population by eastern governments. Westerners used whiskey as a medium of exchange. This led to an armed insurrection and several battles. At one point, Washington himself, as President, was in the field to inspect the army. The rebellion was eventually suppressed.

In 1803, alarmed that the Louisiana Purchase might dilute their power, leaders from New York, New Jersey, New England proposed a Northern Confederacy with Canadian provinces.

In 1805, on the run after shooting Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr ended up in the West. Under at best murky circumstances, it would appear that he had at least some idea of breaking off some of those territories and forming a new country with himself, naturally, at the helm.

The War of 1812 was unpopular in the Northern states. Specifically, the New England states actively opposed the war via smuggling, tax boycotts, and anti-recruitment riots. Meetings were held to discuss secession.

I’d never heard of some of the secession movements. For instance, who has heard of the Republic of Indian Stream? In 1832, in northern New Hampshire, there was a border dispute between the United States and Canada. Sick that London and Washington couldn’t figure it out, the very few settlers that lived there declared the sovereign and independent Republic of Indian Stream. They had a constitution, levied taxes, and established courts and schools. In 1835, the settlers agreed to annexation to the United States.

OK, this post could go on forever. There’s so many more that I could talk about. There’s the secession threats that rose out of the Fugitive Slave Act. There was the brilliant idea that the Southern states had of, instead of letting Texas into the US, joining the Texas Republic instead. California and Utah, disgusted at political antics that they were witnessing from afar, gave serious thoughts to creating their own respective countries. Wanting to distance themselves from the rabid abolitionists of New England as well as the brutal slave holders of the deep South, a Central Confederacy composed of the mid Atlantic states and the border states was proposed. There were attempts to establish New York City as an independent free city.

Even today, there are varied attempts to secede. Some are ethnic. There have been proposals to create a Black American republic. Given the fact that so much of our land once belonged to Mexico, there have also been attempts to create a new country for Hispanic Americans. There was even a proposed nation exclusively for women.

Among the states, at various times, there has been secession saber rattling from the likes of California and Texas. Once independent, Vermont occasionally makes noises about going it alone again. In my old neck of the woods, there is an active movement proposing the new country of Cascadia, composed of British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon.

I know that a country that has been around for coming up on 250 years seems somehow indestructible. This book makes the very real point that it has lasted this long almost by happenstance. There are an everchanging sea of forces that is tearing at it.

I was listening to a podcast that makes the point that change always seems to be impossible until one day, it suddenly happens. So it would seem with the United States. There is nothing inevitable about the states, with their so many differences, staying united.

What If Lincoln Had Lost?

I’m currently reading Break It Up, by Richard Kreitner. I’m sure that I’ll write more about it later, but his thesis is that the Civil War wasn’t some weird historical anomaly. In fact, there have been many, many secessionist movements in US history. So far, I’ve found this book to be quite fascinating.

What inspired this post is a question that Kreitner posed in his book. What if Abraham Lincoln had lost the Presidential election in 1860? For presidential geeks, the idea seems kind of silly. After all, the Democratic party had become hopelessly split over the question of slavery. In 1860, they fielded two candidates, Stephen Douglas representing the Northern Democrats and John Breckinridge representing the Southern Democrats. To make matters even worse, there was a fourth candidate running representing the Constitutional Union party. This was John Bell and his entire platform was based upon saving the union, regardless of cost or compromises.

Given all of that, the Republican party was the only unified party in the field. Sure, Lincoln wasn’t going to win too many states in the South, but as long as he held the North, given its much larger population, it seemed inevitable that he would win the Presidency.

However, Kreitner mentioned a historical tidbit that I’d never heard. Desperate to keep Lincoln from winning a majority in the electoral college, in New York the three other presidential candidates formed a fusion party. If this fusion party had won in New York, then Lincoln would have been denied a majority in the electoral college. In fact, Lincoln only won New York by a couple thousand votes.

What would have happened if the fusion party won New York?. Well, with no majority winner in the electoral college, the election would have been thrown to the House of Representatives. For those of you not up on your election arcana, the representatives of each state get together and decide which candidate their state will cast their vote for. Yep, each state gets one vote.

If that’d happened, the Republicans would have gotten a plurality of states but would have been short of a majority. Given the deep schism between the Republican party and the other parties, there would have been no path for the Republicans to get a majority of states.

So what happens then? Here it gets weird. It would fall to the Senate to elect a Vice President. The Vice President would then serve as the acting President until the House chose a President (again, an unlikely prospect). The Vice President could have served as acting President for potentially a significant period of time.

Because of the makeup of the Senate at that time, the Southern states were dominant. Senators could only choose from the two top vote-getters in the Vice Presidential electoral college. They would have not chosen Hannibal Hamlin, the Republican candidate, and would have elected the Democratic Joseph Lane, a notorious pro-slavery sympathizer.

So, what would have happened? Northerners would have felt that the election had been stolen from them from a pro-slavery federal government. Kreitner goes into detail about this, but ever since the founding of our country, there was sporadic and significant Northern secessionist activities. In many ways, the federal government was controlled by the Southern states and many times Northerners had been forced to make compromises to mitigate the Southern secessionist threats. This could have been the straw that broke the camel’s back.

In that case, there would have been a secession crisis, but it would have been the Northern states that would have seceded.

How would the Southern states have responded?

On the one hand, you might think that they would just say good riddance. After all, they’d been talking secession for decades, convinced that, with King Cotton, that they’d be a significant world power on their own.

However, if the Northern states seceded, they would be sharing a long border with a country adamantly anti-slavery. Thanks to the Fugitive Slave Act, Northern states were compelled to return escaped enslaved persons back to the South. Sure, some Northern states actively nullified this law, but the federal government did step in and enforce this law when the local government refused to.

If separate countries, the Fugitive Slave Act would no longer apply. The Southern states would share a several hundred mile border with a country that would actively and aggressively encourage enslaved people to escape their slaver and come live in freedom. There was no effective way, especially in 1860, to keep enslaved people from voting with their feet and crossing over what would have been a very porous border. Southern leaders actively feared this scenario. This was one of the reasons why, as much as they threatened secession over a period of decades, they didn’t act on it until Lincoln’s election.

Given that, would the Southern states have felt compelled to engage in a Civil War to keep the Northern states from seceding?

Maybe, but if they did, they would have faced the same problems that they faced in the actual Civil War. The Northern states had significant more population than the South. The North had significant more manufacturing capacity than the South. Unlike during the actual Civil War, Southern soldiers would have done most of their fighting on Northern soil. As horrible as it was, fighting on Southern soil gave the Confederate soldiers special incentive to fight. That would have been lost. Instead, the Southern soldiers, most of them not slaveholders themselves, might have seen the war as an explicit fight to preserve slavery. That would have discouraged their fighting motivation even more.

So, in an alternate reality, Lincoln loses and a Southern President is chosen despite the Republicans clearly winning the popular vote. That, in turn, infuriates the Northern states and they decide, no more compromise and they secede. The Southern states, knowing that they probably can’t conquer the Northern states, allow them to create a new republic. This republic, adamantly anti-slavery, actively encourages enslaved people to escape to their country. The Southern states, unable to prevent the deluge of their escaping enslaved population, eventually understand that their peculiar institution can no longer stand. They voluntarily end the practice of slavery. They come up with some mechanism to compensate slave owners for their ‘property’ (after all, in this scenario, cotton is still king and the Southern states are getting fat off this export, so coming up with such a compensation is doable). Slavery ends without 600,000 soldiers dying.

Who’s to say what would have actually happened, but I find this counterfactual fascinating to contemplate.

The Inspiration For Birdemic

Title: The Birds

Rating: 4 Stars

OK, the blog title is a silly joke, even though it is true. In case you don’t know, there was a real film named Birdemic and it was directly inspired by Hitchcock’s The Birds. The joke is that Birdemic is consistently rated one of the worst films of all time. I can’t remember if I’ve seen it or not. If I have, it was probably because it was a film featured on the hilarious Mysterious Science Theater 3000. Costing about $10,000 to produce, it is famous for bad acting, bad dialog, bad sound, and bad CGI.

Hitchcock’s film is none of those (although, since it was made in 1963, watching it in the year 2023, the special effects are pretty simplistic). Every couple of months or so, I watch a Hitchcock film that either I’ve never seen before or that I haven’t see in decades. I have seen The Birds. I think that I last watched it maybe forty years ago. I do remember Mel Brooks’ parody of the film in a scene from High Anxiety, where a terrified man was bombarded by bird poop.

In case you live, I don’t know, in a cave in some remote part of Africa and have never heard of it, the plot of The Birds is quite simple. Tippi Hedren plays Melanie Daniels, a young impish heiress. Rod Taylor plays the lawyer Mitch Brenner. In San Francisco, Mitch plays a trick on Melanie. In return, Melanie decides to head up to Bodega Bay (where Mitch lives) to return the favor by secretly giving a gift to Mitch’s younger sister Cathy (Veronica Cartwright). Mitch catches Melanie in the act and the sparks begin to fly between them, much to the chagrin of Mitch’s mother Lydia (Jessica Tandy).

After spending the first third or so setting a pretty conventional rom-com tone to the film, it changes suddenly when the birds start attacking. First, one bird attacks Melanie and gives her a scratch. It escalates quickly. The birds infiltrate and attack everyone at Lydia’s house. The next day, Lydia finds her neighbor dead. Cathy’s schoolhouse is attacked and the children barely get away. The town is soon under siege. The birds attack Lydia’s house again and this time nearly kill Melanie. Spoiler alert for a sixty year old film, Mitch, Melanie, Lydia, and Cathy pile into a car and drive away. As they drive away, they are completely surrounded by birds watching them. On the radio are reports of other cities under attack. At the end of the film, it’s not clear what the future holds for the four, let alone human civilization because, as a very convenient ornithologist says, who just happens to be in the diner when Melanie is discussing her attack, there are some 100 billion birds in the world. If they were to rise up, it’s no sure thing that humans would win out.

First thing first, even though at the time the film was shocking, it’s really not that scary watching it through 2023 eyes. Hitchcock is known as the master of horror but horror has gotten so much more intense, vivid, and gory that the older films really just don’t shock. Of his films, only Psycho continues to be the one that still kind of freaks me out, even though I’ve seen it many times.

One reason it’s not that scary is that, well, quite frankly, the birds aren’t that scary. It might be one thing if it was eagles or falcons attacking. The birds attacking here are ravens, seagulls, and sparrows. Especially when the attacks start, all you really need to defend yourself is a baseball bat. They just weren’t that threatening. Granted, in the later scenes, when it appears that there are thousands of birds, that could get kind of intense. Even so, by that time everyone is aware that the birds are going wild.

One thing that seems to hold across many horror films is that these films would be much shorter and less bloody if the characters didn’t make obviously bad choices. In this case, Melanie is kind of asking for it. She hears wings flapping upstairs. She goes upstairs to investigate. She identifies that the flapping noises are coming from the other side of a closed door. Hmmmm, let’s see. There’s murderous birds outside on a rampage. I hear bird wings flapping on the other side of the door. What should I do? Ummm, I don’t know, maybe reinforce the door? Nope. She opens it, leisurely looks up at the ceiling and sees a hole in the roof. Perhaps I should quickly slam the door shut? Nope. I’m going to just stare at the hole in the roof until the birds fly down and start slashing at my face and arms.

An interesting choice that Hitchcock made was not to assign any reason for the birds’ behavior. The film mocks the ornithologist who confidently states that it’s impossible for birds to organize and attack when, five minutes later, they do precisely that.

Not assigning a reason of course leaves it up to interpretation, including interpretations that I’m sure never crossed Hitchcock’s mind. In the year 2023 with climate change and the mass extinction of species, it’s difficult not to have thoughts that the attacks are some kind of response by nature against the transgressions of humans. Humans are highly adaptable apex predators who kill and destroy anything they want. Nature’s best hope to defend itself might be to have an entire genus of animals rise up and coordinate attacks.

Perhaps the apparently motiveless manner of the bird attacks is Hitchcock’s version of a zombie apocalypse. One of the reasons that zombie attacks are so scary is the fact that the zombies are mindless and numberless. All of our human clever thinking is useless when faced with a relentless, countless horde.

I would probably be amiss if I didn’t at least mention that Hitchcock abused and terrified Tippi Hedren with actual bird attacks. Along with Stanley Kubrick’s horrible treatment of Shelley Duvall in The Shining, Hitchcock’s treatment of Hedren is one of the most infamous examples of a director’s abuse of power over women. Hopefully this kind of behavior is no longer tolerated.

In any case, I found it to be fun, entertaining, classic film.

Poverty Anywhere Is A Threat To Prosperity Everywhere

Title: Poverty, By America

Rating: 5 Stars

This is a fierce polemic. It’s a call to action. The thesis is that poverty is not an inevitability. The fact that the US, despite being the wealthiest nation in the entire history of humanity, has such a significant share of its citizens living in poverty is a choice. Such large amounts of people living in poverty is the result of explicit policy choices. Since having so many people living in poverty actually benefits those of us who live in more fortunate circumstances, we are, at the least, tacit in our approval of these policies.

Desmond’s previous book, Evicted (written about here), was much more personal / anecdotal in its structure. He embedded himself with people always seemingly on the edge of eviction. It was a heartbreaking read.

Instead of just focusing his lens on the housing problems in Milwaukee, here he takes a much broader, national look at poverty. In doing so, he simply bludgeons you with, again I have to use the same adjective, heartbreaking facts.

Here’s just a few things that I learned.

The poverty line for an individual is $6,380. The poverty line for a family of four is $13,100. Can you imagine feeding, clothing, and housing a family of four on barely a thousand dollars a month? Well, 18,000,000 people live below this poverty line.

Even worse, there is an even more desperate form called the absolutely poor. These are the people that you hear about globally that subsist on $1 a day. Seriously, a country with a 23 trillion dollar GNP can’t have anyone living at that level, right? Well, in a developed nation, the equivalent value is $4 a day (not even $1500 a year). In the US, 5.3 million people are classified as absolutely poor.

There are 1.3 million homeless children.

OK, that’s bad, but things are getting better, right? I mean, think how much wealthier our country has gotten over the last fifty years. There can be no question that we’re doing a much better job of eliminating poverty, right? Well, the poverty rate in 1970 was 12.6%. In 2019, that number had plummeted all of the way down to, checks notes, 10.5%.

We already give so much money to the poor, right? Why can’t they just spend the money that we give them wisely? Families that qualify for cash assistance only receive, on average, 22 cents out of every dollar in actual cash. Depending upon the state, some of that money is diverted to faith based marriage services, abstinence only sex education, and anti-abortion pregnancy crisis centers. Most infamously, Mississippi paid Brett Favre 1.1 million dollars for speeches that he never gave.

Well, we can’t raise the minimum wage, right? That’ll just increase labor costs which will actually depress employment. Not only that, it’ll increase the price to the consumer and drive inflation up, right? Interestingly, economists used to not believe that. It was George Stigler, in 1946, that first proposed it. Stigler did not actually use empirical data to bolster his argument. It was essentially a thought experiment. It turns out that there have been cases where, for example, one state raised its minimum wage while a neighboring state didn’t. In such real world scenarios, Stigler’s effect either was not seen or was quite minimal.  After all, a McDonald’s worker in Denmark makes twice as much per hour as an American worker without an equivalent difference in Big Mac price.

If you’re broke, you should just go out and get yourself a job, right? Get off that couch! It turns out that most Medicaid / SNAP (ie food stamps) recipients worked full time for at least part of the year. Yes, corporations use government programs like these to keep from having to pay higher wages or to provide full time employment . 1/7 of all Dollar General employees are on Medicaid. Wal-Mart, as part of its employee onboarding program, steers new employees to federal programs to provide them assistance. You know, instead of actually paying them a living wage.

Well, if you don’t make much money, you can make up for it by renting in a cheaper neighborhood, even if it does have higher crime and worse schools, right? Shockingly enough, rental profits are higher in poorer neighborhoods than richer ones. I’m not talking higher rates. I mean actual higher profits. Landlords in poorer neighborhoods average $300 a month profit per unit while landlords in wealthy average $250.

If you’re poor, all you have to do is to open up a savings account and just save a little each month, right? That’s great until that unplanned expense comes in unexpectedly and you end up overdrawn. Immediately penalties start kicking in. Even worse, those penalties build on top of each other and suddenly you’re down a couple of hundred dollars just because you were overdrawn. Banks made $11.68 billion in such fees. 84% of those fees were paid by 9% of the customers. Their average account balance was less that $350.

So, don’t bother with banks. Just go down to the local check cashing place, right? Well, in Texas, a two week $300 loan can have an APR of 664%. 80% of payday loans are extended, keeping the cycle going.

Can you feel how angrily I just typed the preceeding paragraphs? I was absolutely pounding on my keyboard.

Let’s take a look at the other side. Let’s talk now about the welfare that the middle class enjoys.

Do you have a house? Do you have a mortgage deduction? Do you have children that want to go to college? Have you started a 529 plan for them? Do you work for an employer that offers you health insurance? Well, guess what, these are all devices that keep you from paying your fair share of taxes. If, instead of a tax deduction, you actually got a monthly government check (which amounts to the same thing), you’d be receiving a pretty sizable handout.

You don’t think so? Well, homeowners that make less than $20,000 got $4,000,000 in mortgage deductions. Homeowners that make more than $200,000 got $15,500,000,000 in mortgage deductions. On the one hand, that’s not surprising. People that don’t make much money aren’t going to buy houses, and if they do, they’ll be cheaper. On the other hand, a cohort that makes more than ten times the salary of another garners over a thousand times more benefit. That’s staggering. Ironically (and perhaps unsurprisingly), voters who claim a mortgage deduction are more like to oppose housing subsidies.

We’ll do anything to protect the value of our house. Even in liberal cities (like my old hometown Seattle), homeowners will proudly fly Black Lives Matter flags in their houses but once there’s talk of multifamily housing or subsidized housing being planned in their neighborhood, all of a sudden they’re the ones screaming at local council meetings and hiring lawyers to stop all progress. As a result, restrictions are in place in 75% of residential lands that mandate that only detached single family houses can be built.

If you take a look at all subsidies (not just housing), you’ll find that the top 20% of our population  receives 40% more subsidies than the lowest 20%.

Well, what can we do? The government is already spending so much money. We’re practically broke as it is. We can’t just eliminate poverty, right? In 1955, government spending as part of the GDP was 22%. In 2021, government spending was, check notes again, 17.6%.

Desmond estimates that eliminating poverty would cost $177 billion. That’s a lot of money, right? It’s been estimated that there is an estimated $1 trillion in tax fraud.

When a certain political party wants to cut IRS spending, understand what they are doing. I know that they use scare tactics to try to convince you that an IRS agent will be peering through your window just looking for an excuse to haul you off to jail.

Here’s the thing, the IRS doesn’t care about you. In fact, if it was up to them, they’d just automatically calculate your bill and send it to you (like other countries do). It’s companies like Quicken that make money off of you that prevent that from happening.

No, they’re after the extremely wealthy people and huge corporations that are utilizing every shady trick in the book to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. In this war, the corporations have tanks and the IRS agents have squirt guns. I’m personally offended that, while I’m diligently paying my taxes, such entities manipulate the tax code however they see fit and happily skip away scot free.

Throughout this book are bumper sticker aphorisms that exactly sum up our current state:

• “Private opulence and public squalor”
• “Socialism for the rich, free enterprise for the poor”
• “Better choices do not lead to economic security; economic security leads to better choices”

And yes,

“Poverty anywhere is a threat to prosperity everywhere”

This is an essential book.

The Running Man, By Michelle Alexander

Title: Chain-Gang All-Stars

Rating: 4 Stars

For those too young, The Running Man was a 1987 film. It was loosely (very loosely) based upon a Stephen King (writing as Richard Bachman) novel.

Set in an American totalitarian dystopian future, the plot revolved around a game show. A number of violent convicts (known as runners) are set loose. They are chased by stalkers. If the convict can survive being chased, they get a pardon and a vacation. This is a top rated show where viewers cheer on the stalkers as they hunt down and kill the runners.

This film had the potential to force a discussion on important socio-political-economic issues. In the film, you see the power that a police force can wield. We see how, through the use of mass media, the state manipulates desperately poor, powerless people to root for state violence, even if it’s directed against people that are themselves effectively powerless. In an example of great (gimmick) casting, the legendary Richard Dawson (the famous kissing Family Feud game show host) stars as the show’s amoral ringmaster.

However, the protagonist is played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Especially in 1987, if Schwarzenegger is starring in a film, then you’re going to get a Schwarzenegger action film. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an entertaining action film, complete with picaresque killings and witty aphorisms. It’s just that, from an intellectual perspective, it could have been much more. It started going down that path, but eventually it fell into the action film rut.

For those that do not know Michelle Alexander, she is most famous for writing the nonfiction book, The New Jim Crow. It’s a searing indictment of our current justice system. She describes, in heartbreaking detail, how, without ever explicitly mentioning race, we’ve managed to imprison an entire generation of brown men. Reading The New Jim Crow will leave you alternately heartsick and enraged.

So, what would happen if you crossed the film The Running Man with Michelle Alexander? Well, you might come up with something close to Chain-Gang All-Stars, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah.

We’re set in some near term future where corporations are running our prison system. Since Adjei-Brenyah refers to actual corporations that have actually built and managed private systems, it’s not much of a stretch.

In this setting, there are a number of chain-gangs representing different conglomerated prison complexes (eg one gang represents Attica / Sing-Sing / Auburn prisons in New York). Each member of a prison-gang is considered a link in the gang. Periodically, in live television feeds, members from different gangs face off in a fight to the death. Those that win survive to fight another day. As a convict becomes more successful, they move up through the ranks from Rookie to Survivor to Cusp to Reaper to Harsh Reaper to Colossal and finally to Grand Colossal. There can only be one Grand Colossal. If a Grand Colossal survives long enough, they can become Freed (ie pardoned). In the history of the games, only one convict has ever been Freed. There is another condition known as low freed, in other words, killed in battle. As a convict moves up in rank, they get access to better food, weapons, armor, and lodging. It’s a statement about the brutality of the prison system that prisoners voluntarily sign up for this program, even though they know that it will end in their televised death.

The current Grand Colossal is Loretta Thurwar. Most prisoners have a catchy nickname, but she refuses. In her link is a Harsh Reaper about to become Colossal known as Hurricane Staxxx. Hurricane and Loretta are lovers that are trying to change the system by enforcing a code of ethics within the chain-gang. The corporation is attempting to break that by creating a new rule that two Colossal rank prisoners cannot be in the same chain-gang. This means that, shortly, Thurwar and Staxxx will have to meet and fight to the death.

Outside of this is an organization fighting to shut down the competition. They consider the spectacle to be barbaric and the entire corporate based correctional system to be evil. Although they start off as fringe, by the end they are gaining power and visibility.

Where The Running Man focused on the violence, here the focus is much more on the issues of social justice. As Adjei-Brenyah develops his story, he includes footnotes referring to the current correctional system that proves that his fictional world is really, at best, a slight exaggeration of reality. For example, he includes the story of George Stinney, an astonishing 14 years of age, the youngest documented American to be executed in the twentieth century. Executed in 1944, his conviction was vacated in 2014.

His footnotes include more than just anecdotes. He includes facts about the indiscriminate use of solitary confinement. He discusses the use of tear gas for crowd control even thought it is outlawed by the Geneva Convention, of which the US is a signatory. He documents that 2,272 out of every 100,000 Black men are incarcerated compared to 392 out of every 100,000 white men.

Even as he hits upon his theme of social injustice, he does not forget that this is an action novel. The characters are clearly drawn with high emotional stakes. The action sequences are tension-filled. The comparisons between the profit seeking corporations and the prison abolitionists are sharply drawn.

This is a novel that I found myself compulsively reading that also highlighted important social issues that need to be brought forth.

Existential Dread Rom Com

Title: Groundhog Day

Rating: 4 Stars

I know it’s weird. Writing about a very popular film that’s been around for thirty years seems to be a waste of time. We’ll see.

For the five people that haven’t seen the film, Bill Murray stars as weatherman Phil Connors. Bitter and self-involved, he is forced to go to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, for the annual Groundhog Day celebration. His caustic attitude negatively affects everyone he meets.

Something happens though. Trapped in Punxsutawney due to an unforeseen snowstorm, when he wakes up the next morning it is Groundhog Day again and the same events happen to him again. When he wakes up the next morning, it’s still the same. Phil is trapped reliving Groundhog Day, possibly forever.

After the initial shock, Phil begins to test the limits of his situation. He binge eats, he seduces women, and gets in high speed chases with the police. All happen with no consequences. He just wakes up the next morning and starts all over again.

Eventually he focuses all of his efforts on seducing his young producer, Rita (Andie MacDowell). Slowly, he learns all of her favorite things so that he can share them. When she learns that she majored in nineteenth century French literature, he spends time learning French until he can quote French poetry to her. Ultimately, it all comes to naught when she always ends up rejecting his advances.

Depressed, Phil becomes suicidal. Despite many attempts, he still always wakes up to relive the day. Eventually on one of the days Phil is able to convince Rita of the loop that he’s in. She convinces him that he should start treating the trap that he’s in as a gift. Taking her words to heart, he stops focusing on himself or what he can gain and instead begins to find ways to help others.

Eventually (spoiler alert for a thirty year old film that everyone has already seen and that is probably playing on some network as I write this), Rita and Phil share a day where Rita sees all of the wonderful things that Phil does. Phil is a changed man and Rita falls in love with the new Phil. This breaks the loop. Phil and Rita can look forward to a lifetime of happiness together.

All of that is well and good, but, for the legions of my readers, this is all known. Why am I writing about it now?

First of all, as I was watching Groundhog Day, I flashed back to the book Dark Matter, which I read a while ago (and wrote about here). The crux of Dark Matter was the concept of multiverses. This is the idea that reality is not a linear progression. Instead, think of reality as an unimaginably complex tree. Every decision that we make sends us down a specific branch. Each branch represents the state of the universe based upon the decision that you just made. All of these universes coexist simultaneously but we’re only aware of the branch that we are currently on.

I don’t know if multiverses were even a thing in 1993 (I know that I wasn’t aware of them), but every Groundhog Day unfolded differently as Phil made his different choices. It’s not an exact mapping, but as I was watching the film I was trying align it with this concept.

Even though released in 1993, it felt very much like a lightweight, frothy comedy from the 1980s. As I watched the film, it took me back to films like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Caddyshack, Trading Places, 9 to 5, Ghostbusters, Big, and Beetlejuice. There’s just something about the bright and shiny but somehow false cinematography that places it in that era.

Seeming so lightweight, it makes the existential dread underlying the film interesting to me. Imagine for a moment if you were actually in the shoes of Phil, having to live the same day over and over, possibly for eternity. Apparently, the original idea in the script was that Phil spent 10,000 years reliving Groundhog Day. The director, Harold Ramis, walked that back. He gave various answers but eventually landed on between 30 to 40 years. Film nerds did some analysis, and based upon how many days we actually see Phil repeat as well as how long it would take for him to achieve some of the skills that he mastered (eg speaking French, playing the piano, ice sculpture), the consensus estimate is the weirdly precise 33 years and 350 days.

Can you imagine repeating the same day for 34 years? How fast would it be before you became suicidal? or sociopathic? The dread that Phil must have felt every morning when he first opened his eyes and knew that he was about to relive the same day once again must have been overpowering.

But then again, at some level, aren’t we all Phil? Look at me, I worked for 33 years at one company. Sure, during that time I worked on hundreds of different projects in a wide variety of environments for a couple of dozen different managers. Still, though, every two weeks I received a paycheck from the same employer. All of the projects were in software. Would an alien watching me from above or a person looking back from some distant future really be able to discretely identify the differences in my various work statements? Wouldn’t they just think that I was just living the same day, day after day?

Maybe that’s why I ended up writing about a thirty year old film that I first saw in a theater. I’m sure that I didn’t think any deep thoughts when I first watched it. I probably just thought of it as a typically silly Bill Murray film (those were the days of silly Bill Murray films like Ghostbuster, Stripes, and Caddyshack).  Re-watching a film thirty years later, after all that you experienced in the previous decades, can hit you differently.

Picking Up The Pieces Of A Very Broken Nation

Title: Aftermath

Rating: 3 Stars

Can you imagine what it must have been like? It’s April 1945. You’ve been mesmerized by a hypnotic leader for over ten years that has promised you a thousand year empire. You’ve been at war for six years. After experiencing amazing initial success, things have turned. You suffer nightly bombing raids. Getting food is ever more difficult. Perhaps you’ve been drafted and have fought under horrific conditions. Perhaps you’ve been captured by the Soviets and are now more than half dead as a result.

Now, your charismatic leader, Adolf Hitler, is dead. Your house is a pile of rubble.  Food is nowhere to be found. Millions of foreign workers, treated little differently than slaves, have been cut loose and are wandering around the country. Your husband has returned home but is an empty shell of the man that he once was. You find out that your Jewish neighbors have all been murdered. All nations look upon you as unquestionably evil and hold you responsible for the global devastation that has been wreaked upon the world.

Aftermath, by Harald Jähner, covers the history of Germany from 1945 – 1955. Having read the excellent Japanese postwar history, Embracing Defeat (read about it here), I had high hopes. Alas, Aftermath did not rise to the level of that history, but I still found it interesting and informative.

Perhaps learning from their WWI mistake where Germany was defeated without imposing the devastation of defeat upon Germany, in 1945 there was no question that Germany was defeated. Half of the German population was dislocated. There were millions of non German displaced persons roaming around Germany. A huge percentage of buildings, including housing, was destroyed. Rail systems were inoperable. Many people were grouped together living in cellars. Some forty percent of German men born between 1920 to 1925 never came back from war. Germany borders were changed when it surrendered. This in of itself caused massive population migrations.

One interesting aspect is how fast parts of German culture bounced back. Some of this had to do with the fact that since there was very little food to purchase, they had some disposable income to spend on surprising things. A number of dance clubs opened in Berlin within a month of the surrender. Orchestras were giving concerts in damaged structures in the early months. A number of German filmmakers took advantage of the German hellscape to create films that were classified as rubble films (Trümmerfilm). Similarly, there was rubble literature (Trümmerliteratur). After the oppressive Nazi regime, artists could suddenly express themselves, even if under desperate conditions.

I usually think of German people as being somewhat homogeneous. With the collapse of the German government and the massive population displacement, schisms appeared. There is the obvious Catholic vs Protestant differences. There were also differences between the conservative rural and the more liberal urban population centers (sound familiar to anyone?). Various subcultures were geographically segregated and had developed their specific local customs in isolation over a period of centuries. With German population on the move, suddenly these came into conflict with each other. These German subcultures judged each other harshly, held each other’s cherished traditions in contempt, and tried to levy various levels of blame for the war upon each other.

In the early months after the surrender, food was a critical shortage. Ration cards were distributed. Even the face value of these ration cards were of insufficient calories for an adult. What made the situation even worse was that there was such a food shortage that people weren’t even able to cash in their ration cards. Rural farms were producing goods but there was no reliable transportation to get the food to the starving people. This led to a thriving black market. In turn, this led to a culture of mass criminality for the typical German consumer just to get enough food to survive.

The Allied governments had to step in. They provided a massive amount of food aid to the German people. What really turned the corner was the issuing of a new currency that effectively reset the German economy.

With the dearth of men, German women stepped up in the days after the surrender. It was women that formed the first clean-up brigades that started clearing cities of debris. With men gone so long during the war, women accumulated many additional responsibilities. With the men coming back from war so physically and psychologically damaged, there was substantial conflict when the men tried, however ineffectually, to reassume their place of prominence in a household now being run by independent women.

One thing that the Allied occupying forces were worried about was guerilla warfare. Considering the fact that, up to the surrender, Germans were desperately still fighting, even to the extent of sending their children off to slaughter, this seemed to be a legitimate concern. Strangely enough, once a local government surrendered and the Allied forces occupied an area, all German resistance immediately faded away. Instead (well, except for the Soviets and their brutal vengeance), German citizens greeted Allied forces in a friendly manner.

Because of these security concerns, Allied forces had strict rules against fraternizing with the German citizens. Given the friendliness of the citizenry as well as the relative wealth of the soldiers, these rules were almost immediately violated.

One final interesting idea brought out was war guilt. Not only were many Germans reluctant to acknowledge the Holocaust, but they preferred to paint themselves as the victims. After all, they did suffer severe hardship during the war. Many refused to recognize their participatory role in the Nazi government and its evil deeds. In the years after, many people tried to obfuscate or offer up rationales for their party membership. Even in the immediate years following, although Nazism was universally condemned, some German politicians still took pretty extreme antisemitic positions. It was only when the children of the war generation came of age that they insisted upon a true reckoning and judgment of their parent’s actions.

As I’ve said, it was an interesting book. However, and I can’t say rather this is a product of the original text or the translation, it was a bit tedious to read. I simply was not as engaged as I was when I read Embracing Defeat.