19th Century Rom Com Queen

I haven’t done this in a while. I read a book and then immediately watched a film adaptation of it for the purpose of doing a compare and contrast. I read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and then followed up with its highly acclaimed 2005 film version (called Pride & Prejudice; seriously, for some reason they swapped out the ‘and’ and replaced it with an ‘&’ #shrug). I did a similar post for one of Austen’s other novels, Emma (written about here, where I made a similar Rom Com joke in the blog post title).

For those not up on your classic romantic comedies, the novel is centered around Elizabeth Bennet. At the beginning of the novel, the Bennet family is somewhat in a tizzy. The family is composed of five daughters. They are all either at a marriageable age or rapidly approaching it. Worse, the Bennet estate is entailed such that only male heirs can inherit it. Mrs Bennet is worried that Mr Bennet is going to drop dead and leave them all homeless. She must get all of her daughters married before this disaster can strike.

Luckily for all, a young, wealthy, charming, and very marriageable Mr Bingley rents a mansion nearby. He appears to be immediately smitten by Jane, the eldest Bennet daughter. He is accompanied by the even wealthier if much more dour Mr Darcy. Unfortunately, except for Jane and Elizabeth, the Bennet family makes a poor impression on Mr Darcy. It’s not hard to see why. Mrs Bennet is shrill and overbearing. The two youngest daughters are vapid and only interested in flirting with soldiers. Mr Bennet is at best bemused by his daughters and willingly lets their bad behavior go unchecked. This is not to mention that, as far as the elite go, the Bennet family are not very elite. Even though Mr Bennet is a gentleman, the family is in a lower class than Mr Bingley, so the match is not suitable anyways. Mr Darcy manages to break up the burgeoning romance.

Despite all of this, Mr Darcy finds himself increasingly attracted to Elizabeth and awkwardly proposes to her. Furious that he broke up the romance between Jane and Mr Bingley and deceived as to his true character, much to Mr Darcy’s shock, Elizabeth rejects him.

Meanwhile a soldier named Wickham (the man who cast false aspersions upon Mr Darcy’s character) seduces the youngest daughter Lydia. The two of them run off together without the benefit of marriage. This is a tragedy for the Bennet family. The scandal around one sister will reflect poorly upon the rest of the sisters and affect their marriageability. A now much nicer, more considerate Mr Darcy leaps into action to bribe Wickham into marrying Lydia and removing the stain of scandal from the Bennet family.

Will Wickham marry Lydia? Will Jane and Mr Bingley manage to get back together? Will Elizabeth be able to see past the distant coldness of Mr Darcy and find true love? Do you need to even ask these questions?

First of all, the film. It is a very faithful remake of the novel. Although I started off not appreciating the casting of Keira Knightley as Elizabeth, by the end of it I was sold. She was a fun, compelling Elizabeth.

I had more trouble with Matthew MacFadyen as Mr Darcy. Some of that is a natural result of me so closely identifying him with as Tom Wambsgans from Succession. Clearly, since the film was made about fifteen years before Succession, that is not his fault. However, I just had trouble thinking of him as the romantic leading man.

Beyond that, I had trouble with Mr Darcy’s character journey from cold, pretentious jerk to caring, loving man. Honestly, I had a bit of trouble with that in the novel, but at least in the novel there is a bit more bridging and exposition in the novel that explained this transformation. That was missing from the film. In the film, it was nearly as if one scene he was a jerk and the next scene he was perfect. It was a bit jarring.

I also think that the film treated the novel just a bit too solemnly. After all, this is a frothy romantic drawing room comedy. The film should have a light heart. It ended with the requisite happy scene of a couple living happily ever after, but the serious weight of most of the film took away from the lightness of the novel. For instance, Donald Sutherland played Mr Bennet with a gravity that just didn’t sit right with me.

One thing that is always amusing to me as I read / watch a period novel such as this is when the characters talk about how poor they are and how they might end up penniless. They say this as there are maids cleaning their rooms, a cook making their meals, and gardeners making sure their lawn is beautiful. As a privileged, upper middle class American who also happens to regularly clean his own toilets and make his own meals, sometimes it’s a bit hard for me to emphasize with their suffering.

So, I enjoyed both the novel and film but, at least for me, the novel was significantly better than the film.

If you really want the real Jane Austen novel / film experience, I strongly recommend Emma. I personally much preferred the novel Emma to Pride and Prejudice. In terms of film, the 2020 film Emma (actually Emma. with a period at the end of the title for some reason) is one of my favorite films of any genre. It exactly captures the feeling of reading the novel and the casting of Anya Taylor-Joy as Emma and Mia Goth as Harriet is perfect.

The Donkey Was The Best Actor

Title: Au Hasard Balthazar

Rating: 2 Stars

Au Hasard Balthazar completes my viewing of the top twenty-five films in the BFI Sight and Sound poll. Unfortunately, it did not exactly leave me enthusiastically looking forward to the next twenty-five. This is especially true because one of the those films is Shoah, a nine hour film about the Holocaust. I’m going to have to dig deep on that one.

Au Hasard Balthazar (which translates to Balthazar, at random) is a film about a donkey named Balthazar. We follow him from when he’s just a little foal until his tragic death. He changes owners several times in his lifetime. Some love them while others beat and mistreat him.

It starts when the young boy Jacques and his siblings find him, adopt him, and name him. One of Jacques’ sisters dies. To get away from the grief, Jacques’ family moves away and leaves the farm to the local schoolteacher. The teacher’s daughter is Marie, who also happens to be Jacques’ sweetheart. Jacques promises to come back to her when he grows up. The teacher gives Balthazar away to another farmer, who abuses him. Eventually Balthazar escapes and runs away back to the now older Marie.

Although Marie’s father is a good farmer, he stubbornly refuses to keep receipts or to keep records. This leads to serious legal and financial difficulties. Once again, he gives away Balthazar, this time to a baker.

Balthazar is abused while delivering bread. The man making the deliveries is a local thug named Gérard. He regularly beats and kicks Balthazar. One day, Marie sees Balthazar on the side of the road and stops to see him. Gérard sees her there and assaults her. Somehow this causes Marie to fall in love with him. She abandons her parents and lives with him.

Balthazar is neglected to the point that he is near death. An alcoholic named Arnold takes Balthazar and nurses him back to health. Balthazar runs away and joins the circus (really!). Eventually Arnold finds Balthazar and claims him back. Arnold inherits a fortune. He throws a big party to celebrate. He gets very drunk. As he’s riding home on Balthazar, he falls off, hits his head, and dies.

Balthazar next ends up with a miller, whereupon Balthazar is once again abused and overworked. The miller eventually lets Balthazar go back home. Marie also returns home. Jacques finally comes back and confesses that he still loves Marie. Marie agrees to be with him. Before she can do that, she says that she needs to go back and have a final goodbye with Gérard. When she does, Gérard and his gang beat her and leave her naked.

This experience leaves Marie either dead or psychologically broken (it’s not clear). Soon after, Marie’s father dies. Gérard and his gang steal Balthazar to help them smuggle goods. The border police catches them and chases them away by shooting at them. The next morning, we see that Balthazar has been shot. He dies surrounded by sheep.

Yep, that’s what’s going on in apparently the twenty-fifth best film ever made.

This is considered the great film by Robert Bresson, one of France’s most acclaimed directors.

Let’s first talk about Bresson’s style. He preferred that his actors, um, not actually act. In fact, he had a preference for using amateurs for his roles. He apparently would force his actors through many, many takes to strip away all actorly mannerisms until all that was left a flat, affectless delivery.

You definitely see that here. At times, Marie is violently, sexually abused but still gives a flat, unaffected performance. The vicious, violent Gérard expresses no emotion. Even after Marie’s mother has seen her daughter violently assaulted, the death of her husband, and the loss of her farm, she just stolidly continues on.

These unmannered performances is the reason for the blog title. There are several shots of Balthazar as he experiences the pain of his life. He is just stolidly accepting of all that life gives him. Of all of the performers, Balthazar probably gives the performance that best meets Bresson’s style.

All of these flat performances in turn left me feeling unaffected by the tragedy of events. It didn’t feel like an acted film. At best, it seemed like a table read of a film script. That very well could have been Bresson’s intent.

The message from the film could very well be that we are all Balthazars. We are all swept up in events much larger than ourselves. We are little more than donkeys that have very little control over anything. Whether we experience joy or pain is not up to us. Like Balthazar, all that we can do is to endure.

Fair enough, but the end product was a ninety minute film that felt like it lasted four hours. There’s at least one more Bresson film on the list (Pickpocket). It’ll be interesting to see if I come away from that viewing with a different feeling.

Don’t Mess With The Diner Owner

Title: A History of Violence

Rating: 5 Stars

This was going to be a post about two films. For some reason, I started thinking about the director David Cronenberg. He has directed such an interesting, varied set of films. Are you interested in films based upon novels considered unfilmable? Well, check out Naked Lunch and Crash. Are you interested in body horror, films that feature body transformations, infectious diseases, and the like? Well, then you already know about Cronenberg because, with films such as The Fly and The Scanners, that is basically his wheelhouse. Psychological thrillers is what you’re feeling tonight? Step right up to Dead Ringers, the very odd story of, I kid you not, twin gynecologists.

In the middle of all of this, Cronenberg made a couple of what appear to be straightforward gangster films. These are the films that I was interested in watching. I watched Eastern Promises and A History of Violence. I was going to do a compare and contrast of the two films and see what interesting similarities that I could tease out.

I’m not going to do that.

Don’t get me wrong. Eastern Promises is a very good film. It’s an apparently realistic look at how the Russian mob operates (at least in 2007). A 14 year old girl gives birth to a baby and then dies. The midwife tries to find the girl’s relatives so that they can raise the baby instead of the state. The girl leaves a diary, written in Russian. In getting it translated, the midwife discovers that the young girl was being forced into prostitution by the Russian mafia. Not only that, but the diary exposes a secret that the head of the Russian mafia will do anything to keep concealed. Viggo Mortensen is a chauffeur for the mafia. With icy cold eyes and a ruthless demeanor (he chops fingers off corpses without pause), he seems to be a remorseless killer. However, things are not exactly as they seem.

It’s a good film. It’s a dark, bloody, gangster film.

On the one hand, A History of Violence seems to also be just a gangster film. However, I think that it’s actually something much more.

The film opens with two men that appear to be psychopathic killers. As they leave the hotel, they thoughtlessly murder the clerk, a maid that just happened to wander in, and a young girl. This is apparently just what they do as they wander from town to town.

In a small town, Tom (Viggo Mortensen again) runs a local diner. He’s married to Edie (Maria Bello) with a teenage son and a young daughter. They seem to be the perfect small town family. One day the two psychopaths come in, lock the diner, and plan to rape a woman and kill everyone in the diner. Tom, in a blur of action, gets the drop on the two and kills them both. Shaken, he just seems relieved that the danger is over.

The news of a small town diner owner taking on, killing the two psychopaths, and saving multiple lives goes viral. News stations from a wide area come down to interview Tom, despite his obvious reluctance.

One day soon after, three men show up at the diner. Cold, dangerous men, they insist upon calling Tom Joey. Tom claims to have no idea what they’re talking about. The three men begin to follow Tom’s family around. It comes to a head when the men kidnap Tom’s son and will only return him if Tom agrees to get in the car with them (probably to his certain death). Tom again demonstrates skills in the art of violence and manages to kill two of them before being shot by the third. Just as the third man is about to shoot Tom, Tom’s son kills the man with a shotgun blast.

In the hospital, Tom confesses to Edie that he really is Joey. Joey was a murderous gangster. Years ago, Tom resolved to essentially kill Joey and start life anew as Tom. Shocked that everything that she knew about him was a lie, she is horrified at Tom.

Now sleeping in separate rooms, Tom gets a call from Joey’s brother Richie (William Hurt). Since Joey left under unacceptable circumstances, Richie wants Joey to come home to face the consequences. If he doesn’t, then Richie will come to him with the implication that Richie will go after his wife and children. It’s clear that Richie wants to kill Joey. Joey/Tom cannot put his family at risk, so he feels that he has no choice but to go see Richie.

Will Tom/Joey be able to escape his past? Is his marriage and family irretrievably broken?

What I find most interesting about the film is the clue not all that subtly hidden in the film title. This is a history of violence. Many of the myriad forms of violence can be found in this film.

There’s the stranger danger random killing of the two sociopaths. There’s the vigilante style violence of Tom’s killing of the two sociopaths. There’s the self defense killing when Tom’s attacked. There’s the family protection violence of Tom’s son killing Tom’s attacker. I did not mention that Tom’s son is bullied at school. The bullying finally reaches the point where his son acts out in a truly vicious manner. Both the bullying and the violent reaction to the bullying are other forms of violence.

Then, of course, there’s the original act of violence. Just like Cain and Abel, you have brother killing brother. When (spoiler alert for seventeen year old film) Tom manages to kill Richie, this ends the cycle of violence that started with that first brotherly murder.

All of this is done in a crisp ninety minute film. I’ve watched several films lately that have tested my patience a bit with two and a half to three hour run times. It’s refreshing to have a director create a film that deals with such large issues in an accessible manner in a concise run time.

I’m not sure how much further I’m going to delve into Cronenberg’s oeuvre, but I have to say that I was impressed with Eastern Promises and very impressed with A History of Violence.

What’s In A Name?

For those of you not into baseball, currently the Philadelphia Phillies are playing the Atlanta Braves in the National League Division Series. If the Phillies win tonight, they move on. Otherwise, it’s on to game 5. A couple of years ago, I moved to the greater Philadelphia area, so I’m moderately rooting for the Phillies. Being from and spending so much of my life in Seattle, my allegiance is probably to the Mariners, but given the fact that they are one of the few teams never to have made it to the World Series, even that allegiance isn’t really all that strong.

Anyway, for some reason, I stumbled upon the fact that the Phillies and the Braves are two of the major league teams that have been around the longest. The Atlanta Braves trace all of the way back to 1871. The Phillies started back in 1883. It struck me as interesting, if not amazing, that a sports team has been in continual existence for over 150 years. The other thing that struck me was, isn’t Phillies kind of a dumb name? I mean, should the Seattle Mariners be known instead as the Seattlelites? Or did the Cleveland baseball team miss a golden opportunity when they changed the team name from the racially insensitive Indians to the Guardians? Should they have been called themselves the Clevelanders? Or the Clevies?

This thinking sent me down a bunny hole. I went off in search of strange baseball names throughout history. I’m not talking about minor league teams (I’m looking at you, Savannah Bananas). I’m talking about strange names of teams that played in the National / American major leagues.

Let’s talk about some of the original names. In the early days, they were not really very creative. Basically, they just looked at their uniform, pointed at something, and said let’s call ourselves that. Hence, we got the Boston Red Stockings (nope! they did not become the Boston Red Sox but became the Atlanta Braves), the Chicago White Stockings (you’d think they’d now be the Chicago White Sox but no! they became the Chicago Cubs), St Louis Brown Stockings (kind of gross, how did their stockings turn brown but yes, they’re now the St Louis Cardinals), the Cincinnati Red Stockings became the Cincinnati Redlegs which became the Cincinnati Reds (give them credit for staying with the whole red motif), and the Brooklyn Grays (which ultimately became the Los Angeles Dodgers).

You might be wondering how the Boston Red Stockings became the Atlanta Braves. What series of name / town changes made that transition happen? Well, spoiler alert, it’s a long, torturous path. Over the last 150 years, the team name changed from Boston Red Stockings to Boston Red Caps (decided to look up instead of down apparently) to Boston Beaneaters (what?) to Boston Doves (what??) to Boston Rustlers (what???) to Boston Braves to Boston Bees to Milwaukee Braves to Atlanta Braves. Whew!

How do we even unpack that? Beaneaters kind of makes sense. Boston is known as Beantown. Recent immigrants to Boston were apparently heavy bean eaters. But Doves? Well, apparently they changed their uniforms from red to all white and the team owner name was Dovey, hence they became the Doves. How did the Doves become the Rustlers? In 1911, a man named William Russell led a group of investors to buy the Boston team. Like Dovey, he couldn’t think of a better name for a team than to name it after himself.

OK, enough about the Braves. Let’s talk about another really old team, the team now known as the Chicago Cubs. They went through much fewer name changes, but at one point were known as the Chicago Orphans. Seriously, WTF? For a time, a player named Cap Anson was Chicago’s player / manager. Now, you probably have to be a baseball geek to know this, but Cap Anson is actually a legendary hall of fame player. In 1897, the club cut ties with Cap Anson. Here’s the thing. Cap Anson’s nickname was Pop. So, when their Pop left the team, the remaining players became known as the Orphans. It’s not absolutely clear how they ended being called Cubs, but the most common story is that a couple of sportswriters were complaining about the difficulty of writing articles about a club with a name like the Orphans. After a short brainstorming session, they landed on Cubs. If true, that’s a pretty boring origin story.

Let’s next talk about Dodgers. Now in Los Angeles, they started in Brooklyn. Originally known as the Brooklyn Atlantics (hey look, we’re next to an ocean!), they morphed to, among other names, the Bridegrooms and the Superbas. What? Strangely enough, they adopted the name Bridegrooms because several players on the team got married at about the same time. Superbas is even more random. They got a new manager named Ned Hanlan. At the time, there was a popular vaudeville group named Hanlan’s Superbas. Now, Ned Hanlan was not in any way related to the Hanlan of the Superbas, but the team just decided to adopt the name Superbas. Weird, but OK. What does Superbas even mean? Superba is a Latin adjective meaning superb. So, yes, there was, at one point, a major league baseball team whose name came from a dead language no longer spoken.

In case you’re wondering how they came up with the name Dodgers, the clue is that at one time they were known as  the Trolley Dodgers. Trolleys ran all around Brooklyn. Keeping out of their way (ie dodging) was apparently a Brooklyn pastime. I’m not sure how many trolleys are running in Los Angeles (not to mention the lack of Lakes that the name Lakers would seem to indicate).

Now let’s talk about the Phillies. Once known as the Quakers (which makes sense considering how prevalent Quakers were in Philadelphia), they quickly adopted the moniker of Phillies. The closest thing that I could find to how it got its name was that the Phillies owner, Al Reach, said that “it tells you who we are and where we’re from”. OK, but I don’t know, it would seem that the Philadelphia part of the team name Philadelphia Phillies already kind of fulfills that function.

It does get a bit more interesting. When the Phillies started in the National League, they replaced an existing team. The team that it replaced was Worcester. Worcester was considered too small of a city to warrant a major league team, so it was given the boot.

The name of the Worcester team? The Worcester Worcesters.

Who Will Next Drink From The Poisoned Speaker’s Chalice?

If you’re a member of the US House of Representatives, I’d have to imagine that striving to become the Speaker is a goal that many representatives have. After all, you get secret service protection. Since the rules of the House leave so little power to the minority party, as Leader you get to dole out the plum assignments and to set the House agenda. It’s an impressive amount of power. Even cooler, the Speaker is second in the presidential succession, right after the Vice President.

When I was growing up, the Speaker was a nationally respected office that most treated with gravitas. Well, it’s fair to say that this has changed over the last thirty-five years. Over that period, there have been nine Speakers. Only one of them has so far emerged from it unscathed. Let’s take a look at each Speaker.

Kevin McCarthy: Unsurprisingly, McCarthy is the person that inspired this post. He is a text book example of being careful what you wish for. Clearly, becoming Speaker has been one of his life goals for quite some time. With a very small majority and with some ten of his fellow Republicans that are much more interested in bomb throwing than governing, it took fifteen ballots just to get elected (the longest election in a century). In getting elected, he made several compromises that essentially made it easy for any small group of representatives to remove him from office. Their opportunity came only nine months into his speakership. A very small subset of Republicans seemed hellbent on shutting down the government. After having exhausted every other possibility, McCarthy reached across the aisle and passed a continuing resolution to keep the government running for 45 more days. Reaching a bipartisan solution was apparently a heinous enough act to warrant an uprising that ended up costing McCarthy his Speaker position. After suffering through the ignominy of having to suffer through 15 votes to even get elected Speaker, he suffered the double (triple?) ignominy of being the first Speaker to lose his job in the middle of a legislative session. Be careful what you ask for.

Nancy Pelosi: Of the nine, Pelosi comes off best. No matter what you think of her politics, she was an amazingly effective leader. Often working with small majorities, she managed to work with Presidents George W Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden to get large, important acts of legislation passed. This is not even mentioning the fact that she was the first female Speaker, an milestone all in of itself. Even so, she’s paid a price for being Speaker. Given her advanced age, there was a minor ruckus when she was elected in 2021. Before getting their vote, the younger representatives basically forced her to commit to a transition plan for the next generation of leaders. Also, being a woman with progressive views has made her a huge target for extremist Republicans. One price of being that target is that her husband was brutally attacked with a hammer and then later our lovely ex-President Trump made jokes about the attack.

Paul Ryan: Ryan had the reputation of being the smart conservative. That’s a bit sad since, unlike Ryan, most of us grow out of our Ayn Rand objectivist days by the time we’re twenty-five. Be that as it may, he had a pretty high reputation among the beltway pundits. He reached his peak sharing the presidential ticket with Mitt Romney in 2012. Upon losing, he resumed his congressional seat. When John Boehner resigned (see below), the Republican majority was so fractured that there wasn’t an heir apparent. Ryan was more interested in policy than the political arm twisting of being Speaker, but under pressure, he agreed to take it on. He was doing OK navigating the troubled waters until Trump was elected. It’s fair to say that Trump broke him. Whatever else he is, Ryan is, by all accounts, a decent person not prone to lying. That alone put him in Trump’s crosshairs. After two years of trying to get legislation passed while also trying to balance the mercurial Trump, Ryan resigned both as Speaker and his seat. It’s fair to say that his time as Speaker during Trump’s term left his reputation as the intellectual wonk of the Republican party in tatters.

John Boehner: Boehner was the classic back slapping, hard drinking, cigarette smoking, occasionally weepy political pol. He was definitely an ardent conservative but he was also a politician that understood the art of compromising. With the rise of Tea Party Republicans and their take no prisoners philosophy during the Obama administration, being a politician that understood the art of compromise left Boehner out of step with his fellow representatives. It reached the point where he just finally had enough. In 2015, not even an election year, he announced that he was resigning both as speaker and his seat. I’m guessing that might have been one of the happiest days of his life.

Dennis Hastert: Hastert was a colorless politician that succeeded the much more flamboyant Gingrich (see below). He served as Speaker for eight years. When the Republicans lost the House in 2006, he lost the Speakership and ended up resigning from the House shortly thereafter. Except for some unsavory financial improprieties that left him a much richer man than when he was first elected to the House, his reputation was fairly unscathed. That is, until it was discovered that, decades ago, when he was a teacher / wrestling coach, he’d allegedly abused some of his wrestlers and then illegally paid them off. He ended up pleading guilty to the finance charges and spent a year in prison. Interestingly enough, Jim Jordan is one of the leading candidates to be the next Speaker. Jordan was a wrestling coach at Ohio State and he has been accused by some wrestlers of turning a blind eye to sexual abuse that was taking place during his time there.

Newt Gingrich: Gingrich is most notable for being the first Republican Speaker in forty years. It was his Contract With America that served as the blueprint policy that swept the Republicans into power. He’s most famous for being an extremely pugnacious, no holds barred political fighter. His reputation started to suffer when he admitted that one of the reasons that he pushed to shut the government down was because he wasn’t treated with sufficient deference when he was on Air Force One. He later pushed hard for Clinton’s impeachment. However, it blew up on him when, during the 1998 midterm elections, the Republicans expected to make significant gains but actually lost seats due to national disgust of an obviously political impeachment. The disgrace resulted in him resigning the Speaker and his seat.

Tom Foley: Foley has a special spot in my heart since he’s from my home state of Washington. From what I remember, he was a politician of no special note. Unfortunately for Foley, what he will be remembered for is actually losing his congressional seat while serving as Speaker. He was the first speaker in something like 130 years to actually lose his seat while Speaker.

Jim Wright: Wright succeeded the legendary Tip O’Neil. He was known as kind of snake oil salesman smooth operator. That reputation didn’t help him out much when it turned out that his chief legislative strategist was a man that, years ago, attacked a woman with a hammer and a knife and left her for dead. Sentenced to fifteen years, he served twenty-seven months, got a job at the house and worked his way up the ladder. If that wasn’t bad enough, there was shady dealings concerning inflated book sales and a plum job given to his wife. With a House Ethics Committee investigation underway, Wright resigned as Speaker and his seat. He was the first Speaker to resign as a result of a scandal.

There you have it! Quite a rogues gallery. With the exception of Nancy Pelosi, every Speaker going back to 1987 either ended up in prison, lost their congressional seat, resigned in disgrace, or resigned due to utter frustration.

If there’s a common through line here, it’s Newt Gingrich. He pushed the investigations into Jim Wright. His Contract With America caused the Republican wave that washed away Foley. His own abrasive shenanigans brought down his Speakership. Gingrich endorsed Hastert’s bid. His take no prisoners, never negotiate, the Democrats are the enemy philosophy has infected the entire Republican party and left Boehner, Ryan, and McCarthy unable to legislate effectively.

So, who will be the next Speaker? Will the Republicans elect another wrestling coach with sexual misconduct allegations in his past? Or the person still receiving treatment for blood cancer who has actually claimed to be David Duke without the baggage (yes, the KKK Grand Wizard David Duke)? Or maybe bring back McCarthy? Or even crazier, can someone like the bipartisan centrist Problem Solvers Caucus somehow come up with a nominee that would get bipartisan support (it’s kind of sad that this option is by far the least likely)?

Who knows? If history over the last thirty-five years tells us anything, whoever ends up seating in the Speaker’s seat shouldn’t get too comfortable.

How A 1700s Anglican Evangelist Birthed Trump

Title: American Demagogue

Rating: 4 Stars

From the book’s introduction, here is it’s definition of a demagogue: a politician or ruler who incites his audience through appeals to emotion, denigration of his enemies, blatant lies and insults, and impossible promises of a greater world to come. Does that sound like anyone we know?

The book’s subtitle refers to The Great Awakening. I was expecting to see more of a thru line from the great rabble rousers of that time to the leaders today that are still playing from the same playbook. Some of these connections are made, but it was not exactly what I was expecting.

For that reason, I knocked it down a star. Having said that, make no mistake about it, this is actually a very interesting read on the subject of The Great Awakening. I have to confess that I did not know very much about it. If pressed, I might have mumbled something about Jonathan Edwards and his very famous sermon with quite possibly the greatest title of all time: Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. Other than that, I didn’t really understand what it was all about.

By the time 1740 or so rolled around, religion in the colonies was getting stale. Church attendance was going down. People were paying lip service to faith but generally speaking, weren’t putting much effort into their acts. The priests seemed to be more concerned with toeing the church doctrinal line and giving lifeless sermons from repurposed notes than the business of saving souls.

Weirdly enough, it can be said that the spark of The Great Awakening was lit by, of all people, the deist Benjamin Franklin. Deep in a competition with another publisher, he was looking for an edge. He heard about a nonconformist priest named George Whitefield that was a huge draw in England. Whitefield was planning a visit to the colonies. Before he arrived, Franklin arranged to publish Whitefield’s journals and to publish his sermons once he arrived.

Whitefield’s writings proved to be quite popular and inspired much curiosity. Once he arrived in the colonies and began preaching, he was a revelation. Whitefield was not interested in boring, memorized, and stern lectures. His sermons were performed with no notes. He would pace the stage like Mick Jagger. When he told a story, he acted out all of his parts. When he arrived in 1739, he was still in his mid twenties.

He proved to be a sensation. He drew large crowds everywhere he went. Sometimes, as much as half of a town would show up just to hear him speak.

This kicked off the Great Awakening. Soon, he met another priest Gilbert Tennant. Tennant, frustrated at the backsliding of his believers, believed in scaring the bejesus out of people. His sermons were full of talk of hell, damnation, and how evil and corrupt the typical believer was. Not only that, but he attacked those who taught differently. Whitefield incorporated this talk of damnation into his already dramatic sermons. In addition, his sermons were not focused on the usual topics of ethics and good works. Ideas such as rationality and logic proved to be anathema to this new method of sermonizing. It was all about emotionally overwhelming his parishioners.

This approach proved to be a sensation. Where previously sermons were typically received with quiet contemplation, now the parishioners fainted, screamed, and writhed in torment.

Whitehead and Tennant inspired an entire new generation of priests. Out was gatekeeping and orthodoxy. One positive development from this was entire groups that were previously excluded from religious practices were now included. Women, Native Americans, and Blacks (both enslaved and not) now found active roles in their faith. In fact, the Great Awakening exposed the class struggles that were underlying the times. In the great religious divide, the upper class / privileged elite gathered around the established churches (the Old Lights) while the poor / oppressed followed priests like Whitefield (the New Lights).

One consequence of challenging orthodoxy is that you can very easily lose control over your movement. After all, if you say that the rules don’t apply, then what’s keeping other people from saying that your rules don’t apply to them? Priests like James Davenport rose up that were much more extreme than Whitefield. Among other things, Davenport held book burnings that offended his religious beliefs.

Priests like Davenport made attacking the New Lights much easier. As is typical, a counter revolution was quick to rise up. Despite attempts by more conventional New Light priests, they began to be associated with the radical priests. Since the Old Lights still controlled the power structure, they were able to essentially defrock priests as well as pass secular laws that effectively prevented New Lights from openly practicing their faith. The reaction to the Great Awakening was so strong that priests like Whitefield were attacked while they were preaching. Whitefield was almost beaten to death. In another unsavory incident, chunks of cat were hurled at him.

Despite this reaction, a very real case can be made that the New Lights ultimately ended up dominating. For instance, as shocking as it is to believe, the Old Lights used scripture to justify slavery. In fact, Jonathan Edwards, that great moral condemner of sin, owned a slave. Considering that oppressed people like slaves were an important part of their constituency, the New Light priests were adamantly anti-slavery. Their teachings inspired the abolitionist movement.

Jonathan Mayhew was a priest that stood against many of the religious teachings of the New Light but was very sympathetic to their social beliefs. Although he discarded the Calvinist teachings that were so central to the New Light, he became a vocal advocate for the cause of the colonists against the British crown. Priests like him were instrumental in moving the colonists from their generally passive acceptance of British rule to a more aggressive demanding of their rights.

Samuel Adams, so crucial to the early days of the burgeoning revolutionary movement, attended Harvard with Mayhew. Like Mayhew, he was disinterested in the religious dogma of the New Light but was a strong advocate for the rights of all colonists in opposition to the remote British crown.

It is not an exaggeration to say that, without the Great Awakening, the American Revolution would not have unfolded as it did. The thirty years or so before the Declaration of Independence was a period that encouraged the colonist population to challenge those traditional powers that previously subjugated them.

So, what does this have to do with Trump? Well, depending upon the historian, there have been anywhere between three and four awakenings in American history. In each awakening, a new generation of evangelists arise that believe that the current religious practices have become staid or stale. A new generation of firebreathers rise up to reenergize faith. For instance, the Second Great Awakening brought out the Latter Day Saints and the Seventh Day Adventists. Christian Science and Jehovah’s Witnesses came out of the Third Great Awakening. The debated Fourth Great Awakening took place between the 1960s and 1980s and brought about the rise of conservative fundamentalist churches like the Southern Baptists.

Now we are in the 2020s. Church attendance, even among those that proclaim their faith, is significantly down. The probability of another religious based awakening seems pretty remote. Despite that, there is a hunger among people that feel abused, ignored, and/or neglected by the current power hierarchy. This hunger feeds a need to rebel. This in turn creates an opportunity for someone that at least pretends to empathize with them and at least pretends to advocate overthrowing the status quo (ie the Deep State). If no religion steps in to fill this void, there is an opportunity for a secular leader. For better or worse (spoiler alert, it’s for worse), it appears that Donald Trump is that leader.

Chaplin Mais Oui

Title: Playtime

Rating: 3 Stars

Continuing to work my way down the BFI Sight and Sounds Best Films list, I landed upon Playtime, coming in at number twenty-three.

This is another interesting choice. It’s a French film released in 1967. It’s not really a silent film but there’s very little dialog. Or I should say, little understandable dialog. There are a lot of characters and they do talk to each other, but more often than not, the dialog is taking place in the background. Granted the film is French and I don’t understand French, but the background babble spoken sounded to me like the language spoken in the SimLife video games.

There really is no plot to speak of. There really isn’t a protagonist. At best, the film can be described as a series of vignettes.

The film is set in Paris. If there is a main character, it would be Monsieur Hulot, played by Jacques Tati, who also wrote and directed it. Hulot was a popular recurring character in Tati’s films.

The first vignette is at an airport. A tour group of Americans gets picked up and escorted onto a bus for a whirlwind tour. Worried about not losing anyone, the guides continually keep a headcount. One young woman in particular, Barbara, seems to wander off on her own, only to be called back by her friend.

In another vignette, Hulot has a meeting scheduled in a very modern office building. Through a series of misadventures, he keeps missing the person that he’s supposed to meet. Instead, he kind of wanders around the building. At one point, he ends up in a modern office exhibition where such wonders as a noiseless door and a Greek column that is actually a waste bin are demonstrated.

As the day progresses, he continually meets people that he served with in the army. One such man coerces Hulot to visit him and his family at his apartment. We never enter the apartment. Living on the ground floor, their large windows are open to the street. Looking through the window like a voyeur, we soundlessly watch the action inside. Unbeknownst to Hulot, the person that he was supposed to meet at the office lives right next door. Hulot finally makes his escape and once again just barely misses the man he is to meet.

Hulot continues on with his night. A fancy restaurant is having its grand opening. Its only problem is that it’s not really prepared. They are still putting last minute touches to the décor. The architect is still wandering around with his plans. Despite that, they open their doors. Almost immediately, problems begin to crop up. A dance floor tile is loose. The kitchen window is too small for the trays of food. The chairs have sharp edges that causes the waiter’s clothes to rip. As the night moves on, they start to run out of food. Some decorative structures begin to fall. The action becomes more frenetic. Into this, the doorman, yet another of Hulot’s army buddies, sees him on the street and coerces him to come inside. The American tourists, including Barbara, also come to the restaurant. A rich, brash American essentially takes over a section in the restaurant and stages his own party, in so doing he throws Hulot and Barbara together.

Finally, everyone leaves the restaurant. Hulot, wanting to commemorate their night together, gives Barbara a small gift. She opens it when she gets back on the bus. The bus heads back to the airport.

Seriously, that’s about the gist of it. So, what’s it doing on the BFI list, especially at number twenty-three?

Well, here’s my guess.

Hulot represents the Paris of old. He’s a dapper, unfailingly polite, quiet man living in the chaos of the modern age. He seems to always be a step or two behind, but by now he is used to it and is pretty unperturbed by being so.

The office building and the restaurant are examples of modernity. The office cubicles and their interlinking hallways resemble nothing more than a maze. People scurry through it like mice.  The brand new conveniences that the office exhibition is so proud of are technically impressive but ultimately seem pointless. Do we really need a door that doesn’t make a sound even if you slam it? How important is it to have headlights on your vacuum cleaner? The exhibition is full of improved mousetraps when the old mousetrap seems to be working perfectly fine.

The restaurant looks sleek and impressive. Scratch below the surface just a little and all of the fine examples of the modern age shows their pointlessness. The elaborate ceiling decorations in the bar block the bartender’s vision. The air conditioning system leaves customers either sweltering or buffeted by cold air. Facades are effortlessly knocked over. Floor lights flicker on and off, causing people to trip on stairs.

What Tati seems to be saying is that the modern age in which we live seems to be all nice and shiny and operating with clockwork precision. However, even the slightest test of this system leads to its collapse. One of the last scenes is the bus travelling to the airport. It all starts with perfectly, impressively synchronized traffic flow. Once the traffic flow is even modestly impacted, all vehicles are immediately trapped in an immovable traffic jam.

Tati’s cinematic style is quite interesting. As I’ve said, the dialog is relatively unimportant. Tati focuses on sound effects to great comedic effect. For instance, the chair cushions make a very specific sound when a person sits and then stands up. Throughout the film, the sounds are exaggerated and, for me, was a consistent source of amusement.

Another feature of Tati’s film is his choice to never use closeup camera shots. The entire scene is always in the shot. Since usually there are many people in the background doing interesting and often amusing things, it’s actually challenging to stay focused on the main actors in the scene. This is a film rich in action that I’m guessing would reward multiple viewings.

As for the blog title, as I watched a near silent French film deal with the issues of a man feeling a bit out of place in his current day, I flashed back to Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times.  Considering that I gave Playtime only three stars, you can probably guess which film I prefer.

Although I found Playtime gently enjoyable and I found myself laughing several times, the non-narrative nature of the film made its two hour run time seem much longer than it was. If I was in charge of the BFI, I certainly wouldn’t consider it as one of the top twenty-five films ever made.

Sci-Fi Dystopia Coming To Pass

Title: Parable of the Sower

Rating: 5 Stars

It’s interesting to me to read predictive books from the past. For instance, way back in 1980, I read The Book of Predictions. It was a compilation of predictions from scientists to psychics to artists. I’ve long since lost the book and don’t remember many specific predictions.

Now that we’re sitting in the 2020s, it’d be interesting to see how accurate those predictions would be over forty years later. I’m guessing not so much. From what I remember, most predictions were way off base. There were people predicting that, by now, we’d be part of some interplanetary federation. There were others predicting that we’d be working a sixteen or twenty hour workweek. Some were predicting that we’d have defeated all diseases by now.

That brings me to Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E Butler. Written in 1993, it’s set in the years 2025 through 2027.

In 2025, global warming has hit California hard. Parched, it only rains every couple of years. Water is an expensive, precious resource. Local government is nearly nonfunctional. People don’t even bother calling the police or the fire department. If you’re middle class or above, you live in walled compounds. You walk around openly carrying guns to deter theft. In the relatively rare circumstances when you travel outside of your compound, you travel in a group heavily armed. Once outside, the desperately poor just stand at the side of the road and emptily stare at you as you pass by. There are gangs that you have to be wary of. At night time, a watch has to be maintained because those criminal gangs will climb over your compound to steal, burn houses, rape, and murder. There are drugs on the street that, when consumed, compel people to commit acts of violence and arson. Some people, desperate for security, apply to join so-called company towns. Well fortified and guarded, these towns offer people the possibility of food, shelter, and employment. However, the companies effectively own the town and pay in company script that barely covers shelter and food. You become indebted to the companies, at which point you can never leave. It’s yet another form of slavery.

Now coming up on eighteen years of age, this is the world in which Lauren Olamina lives. Although relatively well off in her neighborhood’s compound, due to her mother’s drug abuse, she is a sharer, feeling hyper-empathy for other people’s wounds. In this desolate world, left to her own thoughts, she begins to visualize a new religion based upon the radical thought that God is change. Since all she’s known is the change of deterioration, her religion, which she calls Earthseed, emphasizes taking charge of the change and making your own change happen. Thus, the possibility exists that you can shape God yourself.

One night, whatever relative peace she feels is shattered when her neighborhood walls are violently breached. Within minutes her neighborhood houses are ablaze and all of her neighbors are under attack. She escapes but when she comes back shortly after, only two other of her neighbors are still alive.

The three of them pack up whatever supplies and money they have and begin to trudge north to Oregon or Washington, where there is at least the possibility of jobs that pay money and less expensive water. Given the mass influx of people coming, both states have armed forces dedicated to keeping Californians out. On their way, they encounter many dangerous people and situations. Also, Lauren begins to proselytize Earthseed. Over time, the group of three expands and her beliefs begin to take hold.

Reading it in 2023, a scant two years before the setting of this novel, allows me to analyze how prophetic Butler was. Obviously, we don’t quite live in the dystopian hellscape that Butler writes, but it’s still pretty impressive. Clearly, climate change is now wreaking havoc in Southern California. Most years there is very little rain but then one year comes along in which rain is torrential. Out of control fires are always a concern. Wealth inequality is a serious issue. Upper middle class and richer seem to think that the best approach to dealing with it is hiding in enclaves and pretending that the poor don’t exist. Many communities treat police with well earned suspicion. They either seem unhelpful to the real problems of the community or themselves, through the use of force, contribute to the problems. To many, the federal government seems remote. At the same time that it launches successful space missions, it seems to not be able to deal with the chronic problems within its borders.

Race is also a factor in Butler’s world. Butler, a Black woman, populates her world with many characters that are people of color. Just like our world today, people of color have little faith that any government or other power will be the source of any positive change.

Lauren’s father is a lay minister. Grounded in religion, Lauren identifies its problem. In conventional religion, God is an all powerful, awe inducing force. Having a God like that leaves its followers passive to the suffering that is being inflicted upon them and around them. By redefining God to be change, this creates an active religion. Through individual work or through collective effort, change can be effected. The God of change can be shaped. This is a much more positive, activist approach to living a life.

As I’ve probably written about before, I’m not really a huge fan of sci-fi. However, I thought that Parable of the Sower was brilliant. The characters were strong, the dystopian world was clearly and believably rendered, and the positive nature of Earthseed was inspiring.

Uncle Sam’s Racist Daddy

Title: Empireland

Rating: 3 Stars

This book is kind of a new experience for me. When I read books that talk about state misbehavior, it is pretty much always about the good old USA. As a US citizen, I find myself feeling angered and/or mortified reading about my country’s history.

Well, this is something different. This book is about national bad behavior, but this time the nation in question is Britain. Due to that fact, I was able to keep some emotional distance while reading about its horrible past.

Britain certainly has some horrible behavior in its past. Sanghera not only describes some of the most horrific acts, but then also discusses how those actions in the past still reverberate in modern British culture.

Most people already know this, but the extent of Britain’s rule was, at one time, amazing. At its peak, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the British Empire consisted of a quarter of all land and ruled over 400 million people. There were multiple phases to the British Empire spanning from around 1700 to about the year 2000. John Oliver made a joke about how many independence days that have been created as a result of colonies freeing themselves of the British empire. Wikipedia has a list of countries that were once ruled by Britain. It is quite an impressive list. A very partial list includes India, Canada, United States, Iraq, Grenada, Guyana, Kuwait, Maldives, Sri Lanka, Sierra Leone, and Uganda. Considering the fact that the list includes both Afghanistan and Zimbabwe, it is literally an A to Z of countries.

All of this land was ruled by a small island nation. That fact is kind of astounding. To this day, many in Britain view the empire days as good ones. After all, it was Britain that outlawed the slave trade in 1807 and outlawed slavery in 1833. Unfortunately, before that, Britain dominated the slave trade. Her ships were responsible for the transport of millions of slaves (and the death of so many in transit). Even after outlawing slavery, Britain happily continued to trade with slave nations. Its entire textile industry was, up to the Civil War, completely dependent upon cotton from the Southern states.

So you’re thinking that slavery was a necessary evil and that Britain had no choice but to trade with slave based economies. Well, it goes beyond slavery. It probably is not that shocking to realize the British government, um, had to break a few eggs to make and keep this empire omelette. Here is just a few of a whole litany of horrific acts.

The island of Tasmania had a thriving indigenous society. Britain decided to start using it as a penal colony. The resulting influx of white settlers proceeded to obliterate the indigenous people. When the indigenous people tried to fight back, Britain used their actions as a pretext for what can only be called a genocide. Within a matter of years, nearly all indigenous people were killed.

How about using starvation as a political tool? For instance, during the Irish potato famine, millions of Irish either died or left. During this disaster, Britain still required Ireland to meet its food export commitments. So, Ireland was forced to deliver food to Britain at the exact same time that its population was starving. A similar thing happened in India. Again, while millions of Indians were starving to death, India was forced to continue to export food to Britain. Some government leaders even saw this as a natural winnowing process of surplus native lives.

Britain developed a great love of tea from China. Britain did not have a lot to export to China. To avert this grave trade imbalance, Britain exported opium. China, quite understandably, objected to massive amounts of an addictive drug being forced upon it. China passed an opium ban. This led to the quite frankly named Opium Wars. Britain sent in its navy to protect the drug smugglers. It was an easy victory that not only enabled the opium trade but the resulting treaty is how Britain acquired Hong Kong. A disastrous (for China) Second Opium War was fought against Britain and France. This ushered in what China has called The Century of Humiliation.

Britain fought several wars that could only be called punitive in nature. Specifically, the wars fought in Tibet and Ethiopia were ultimately little more than looting expeditions. In both locations, booty was basically piled up into a big pile. An auction was then held. Perhaps not shocking, officials of the British Museum were often the big bidders.

By now, the British Museum houses some eight million objects. It contains relics that were taken from countries that consider them to be priceless cultural artifacts. Most people know about the Elgin Marbles. Other countries such as Egypt and Benin have also requested that their precious artifacts be returned. What makes this even more unconscionable is that 99% of all of the objects that the British Museum possesses is not even publicly shown. They are hidden away in storehouses.

So, where does this leave Britain today? First of all, in teaching British history in their schools, there are notable gaps. In many schools, the idea of the British Empire is really not even taught. It’s like there’s a period of several centuries of history where the unifying thread isn’t even acknowledged.

This blindness has unfortunate consequences. Some forty percent of British subjects think that the empire was a good thing.

This has also led to some pretty overt racism. White British citizens look askance at the people of color that have thronged their borders. This is unfortunate because the ancestors of many of these were explicitly encouraged / invited to immigrate to Britain. Not only that, but as subjects of the British Empire, they had a legal right to immigrate.

Sanghera’s own parents were encouraged to come to Britain. Sanghera was born in Britain, attended a very prestigious public school, and graduated from a college at Cambridge. He is about as British as you can get. Yet, on many occasions he feels like an alien in his home country.

As I read this book, I understandably found similarities to the American experience. Like American, many British have a love it or leave it attitude towards their country. Somehow, mentioning actual historic events make you anti-British and the Conservative government takes active steps to keep these negative events out of education. In the US, I see parallels to states attempting to somehow deny the evils of slavery.

As long as countries like the US and Britain refuse to face the tragic facts of their history, we will not be able to move forward.