A Few Horror Movies in Review

The Exorcist
The Omen
Children of the Corn
Rosemary's Baby
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

One must first give up the idea that horror movies are scary. The lights get dark, the soundtrack fades back, perhaps the camera is framed wide or goes seemingly out of focus: a jump scare is sure to come. The real monsters are almost always regular humans. Horror moves in contemporary genre conventions, and if you know the decade the movie was made, you can predict a lot of the beats. (The Omen shares a lot with The Last Wave, and no wonder.) Evil children seem a lot less scary when you know actual children. If you accept the idea that there are nonphysical forces that sometimes might have malicious intent but also that the world is full of strange and random things that happen for no reason, there's really nothing too unusual or to be frightened of. (I do not discount the possibility of malevolent things, but I also don't believe Babylonian demons are doing possession of random people or that Satanic cults are trying to bring about the antichrist for some reason; these scary dimensions just kind of fall flat).

For a long time I've heard people talk about how terrifying The Exorcist is, which left me unprepared for a movie that is almost entirely people talking about problems occurring offscreen. My wife immediately found the feminist angle--young girl going through physical and emotional changes treated by others as a hostile threat--whereas for me it was more about the ability to carry on in faith despite doubts. Contra a common reading of the film, the victory is not hollow but manages to the end of a disaster as well as possible.

Rosemary's Baby, well, I can't believe that guy turned out to be a creep who sexually assaulted powerless women and girls. It's sort of like horror Godard--all that attention to lived female experience, perceptively drawn, but in service of degrading women just because. Still a good film.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers has a somewhat incoherent metaphor at its center--don't think too carefully about what the pods are doing or why, it makes no sense--but really does emphasize how having capital-A Actors and directors committed to a stylish vision and People Who Know How To Make A Movie Look Like A Movie gets you almost the entire way to greatness.

A thought on parenting

I spent a lot of my life hiding, or at least obscuring, my political opinions. It didn't do to share them much in grad school, where it might have limited my career options. Nor was it a good idea to share them when teaching, because students often had the (incorrect) idea that if they simply repeated my opinions back to me they'd get an A. Nor also as an HR professional, for reasons I hope are obvious. 

A related skill I picked up in grad school is the tendency to be protective of my opinions, to hold them a little contingently, to be aware of ways they might be attacked and prepare against those, to allow graciously for people of good will to differ.

It was sometime around 2020 that I realized I could not do any of this with my family, and especially my kids. They will learn their values from somewhere, it may as well be from me, and I owe it to them to say what I actually believe without qualification or fear of the consequences of saying it. 

(Thus a summer study of WWII with my eldest child, which had many aims, but above all to instill "it is never morally acceptable to kill another human being" as a core tenet of morality.)

Adventures in Reading: Still Not Sure About Dickens edition

Stanislaw Lem, Solaris
Lem famously hated both film adaptations of Solaris. Reading the book, it's not hard to see why: the book is about the inability to communicate that would have to form the core of interaction with an alien species, and neither movie is about that. It's difficult to see how any movie could be about that (the final conversation scene in My Dinner With Andre excepted), and like any good science fiction property, there's enough other good material in the premise to make Tarkovsky's movie work. 

The most provocative idea in the book is that the search for alien life has nothing at all to do with what might be out there, but is rather entirely about holding up a mirror to our own humanity to find out what makes us special. It makes sense, on a level: we'd like to learn something about ourselves and don't mind using someone or something else to do it. In this way we can make sense of why there was a Space Age, which lasted into my childhood, but now there is not: the hope that there might be something out there curdles, gradually, into the reality that there's probably nothing, and the limits physics imposes on us--the vast distances of space, hostile conditions, the omnipresent radiation that would more likely sooner than later kill anyone who could overcome the first two--and the only thing this particular mirror can reflect back to us is our smallness and fragility.

 

Goethe, Elective Affinities
Now here's a really weird one. A Romantic-age nonmonogamus dream constantly and thoroughly undermined, from the German genius who (I discovered) kept a wife and a mistress and many other lovers besides. Mannered and stylistically romanticist and so very much not for everyone, but interesting.

 

Jaroslav Hasek, The Good Soldier Svjek
The novel has begun to suggest the possibility that Svjek might not actually be a little slow, but intentionally trying to prevent himself from ever having to fight. An unfinished novel, alas, so we'll never know.

Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend
400+ pages in and still not certain whether I'm going to finish it, a real step down from the top David Copperfield-Oliver Twist-A Tale of Two Cities-Bleak House top tier.

Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah
If I never encounter another 100+ page party scene again in my reading life, I'd be fine with it. The section on how car travel works compared to walking or traveling by train was interesting, because it's pretty much a complete inversion of how we think about it now (for Proust it's the car that allows you to see things spontaneously as they are and connect together what would otherwise seem disparate, which I think is how no one experiences it these day).

Disney and Abbas Kiarostami, two great tastes that taste great together

Disney's Haunted Mansion
Taste of Cherry, dir. Abbas Kiarostami

Taste of Cherry is about a taxi driver who is contemplating suicide. He has encounters with several people throughout the day, in which he attempts to recruit a volunteer to see if he is alive after his potential attempt, or, if he has decided to kill himself, to shovel some dirt on his body. The first, a solider, is too scared to do it. The second, a cleric, refuses for religious reasons. The third, once suicidal himself, accepts the task and tries, lightly, to talk the taxi driver out of it. Then it's night, the taxi driver is in his potential graver, it starts to rain, it cuts to black... and then the film switches to videotape footage of the shooting of the movie. It's a meta comment on the filming process, blah blah blah, it intentionally does not resolve the plot, blah blah blah. If you've seen one metafictive discussion you've seen them all.

At Disney, we went on the Haunted Mansion ride. Someone kept getting up out of the car, and the ride was stopped three times. Each stoppage had an in-character request from a voice to sit back down, followed by a blown-out speaker with a cast member not even attempting to stay in character telling everyone the ride would resume when everyone was seated. The ride itself was fine, even very well done, but the constant interruptions ruined whatever small chance it had of feeling immersive and thus, even for a moment, real.

And that provided me the critical perspective I needed for Taste of Cherry. The movie is ostensibly about whether to kill oneself or not, a common enough trope in romantic and existentialist literature. The third person the taxi driver talks to does some work at softening his resolve to commit suicide by pointing out some of the nice things about the world, but I do think the metafictive ending is key: a few people who are good at pretending, some careful work by director and crew, and most importantly the brain of the person watching it, all combine to make something real and moving and meaningful out of the fakest of things: that's the real magic, that's the thing life gives you, that's something that can never be replicated. 

Scenes from Disney, part I

On a long bus ride from resort to Magic Kingdom, a man holding forth, loudly, to relatives (one assumes) about his philosophy of parenting, how important his son is to him, etc etc. Never once looks at, talks to, or interacts at all with said son over the 30 minutes of the bus ride.

Currently Reading: Fugue States

Thomas Bernhard, Old Masters
The thing about close reading is that it's a skill you acquire for life. The other thing about close reading is that it will sometimes show up when you don't otherwise expect it.

I had attempted Bernhard 15 or so years ago, and found the meandering sentences to require too much work for too little payoff. So my expectations were low going in to Old Masters, except that it involved people mostly talking about art, a subject I am comfortable indulging in at great length. As I read, I had the distinct feeling of having encountered this style of writing before. Since my last attempt I 'got into' Henry James and Proust and Javier Marias: long sentences and minimal plotting were no longer technical issues I could not overcome. 

It's with Marias in particular that this Bernhard novel seemed to have an affinity, the way in which certain words, phrases, and sentences would repeat at regular cadences. But in Marias the words function as a motif that runs throughout the novel--there is one idea and the plot and characters and observations return to it because memory has shaped all of those events, and their telling, around that idea. In Bernhard, one set of words, ideas, and concepts would arise, repeat for awhile, and then fade out of the text never to return. It was less of a motif and more of a fugue. Which makes sense, because the main character is a music critic lecturing on the history of the fugue. Score another one for close reading.

 

Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance
One thing that I think is genuinely difficult for people to realize is that in whatever state we find ourselves, people have been there before. 

In volume II of The Aesthetics of Resistance, Weiss leaves aside the artistic analysis that was a major feature of part I. Instead, he dedicates a lot of time to Bertolt Brecht and a play he is gathering research for on Margaret I of Denmark and opposition to the Hanseatic League in the century following, in the 15th and 16th centuries. The limits of my research access mean that I can't confirm any of this as historically accurate, but Weiss was there in Stockholm with Brecht in 1939-1940 and they both knew each other, and Brecht started a lot of things that were never finished, so who knows?

But a large section of the book is devoted to Denmark's attempts to fend off the Hanseatic League, and subsequent uprisings in Sweden, set alongside similar events in attempting to fend of Nazi Germany when no one is quite prepared to oppose them. A reminder, I suppose, that it's less "history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme" and more "the past isn't dead. It's not even past." If you were looking for a vague message of encouragement, you could do worse than realizing humanity can survive and win in unpropitious circumstances. 

Currently reading, lol lmao edition

Jaroslav Hašek, The Good Soldier Svejk
So far, it makes for quite the companion piece to The Radetzky March. The latter is elegant, haunting, really driving into how the world was and what was lost. Svejk, on the other hand, kept the satire under constraint for 80 pages or so and is now "lol, lmfao, can you believe these idiots thought this war was a good idea?"
With distance and the diminishment of time, moral judgments can become hazy, and there's a morally lazy tendency to believe that things were complicated back then and we shouldn't judge. But as I emphasize to the kinder, there is always, at any time, someone who is there and writing and perfectly well aware that a wrong thing is wrong. So this particular novel seems to be.

Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend
Friends, I don't know if I'm going to be able to keep this one up. Lots of memorable characters, sure, but no clear indication of how they're going to interact, except that the dead person whose death kicks off the story is obviously not dead. The only mystery here is whether it's worth 600 more pages to find out.
(Getting paid by the word remains undefeated, as always with Dickens. I will say there is a certain sharpness to some of it that can be pleasing--he has a way with words and images--but there's just so much of it, and all in the same tone.)

Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah
One must have a tolerance for very long party scenes, but at least this one has Some Things Happening. In particular, there seems to be a retrenchment around Dreyfus' guilt even though it has been mostly established that he was fraudulently convicted in the first place. I can't say I exactly enjoy reading about people justifying to themselves the poor treatment of an innocent man because they would otherwise have to revisit their political and social beliefs, but I find it to be more persuasively written than I might have ten years ago.

Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance
We're in Sweden now, in early 1939, and trying to figure out how to be politically active in a state that is trying to prevent anyone from doing anything political, closing potential humanitarian loopholes, and deporting people like it's their job. As above, I can't say I enjoy it, but I can confirm its essential accuracy.

Final thoughts on Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries, a year in the making

Uwe Johnson, Anniversaries

1. A friend advised me years ago not to read this book. We were discussing her undergraduate degree, which was in German Language and Literature, and my budding interest in the German language. She described it, not incorrectly, as a pretty uninteresting book that goes on and on and spends more time than you might expect simply reporting the contents of that day's New York Times.

2. This might be the first time I have identified with the older characters rather than the point-of-view one. Some of it is a factor of how the story is told: Cresspahl, the father and then grandfather, is younger than I am when the 1930s portion of the story begins. The fact that he ends up older than me is just the linear passage of time. But it's also because his dilemma is a little more relevant to me: he sees clearly in the early 1930s that Germany will involve itself in another war and pretty clearly not long after that that Germany will lose, and begins planning for it. "Preparing your family for a near-term potentially catastrophic future" is not an idle place to find one's mind these days. 

It was harder to see, initially, that Gesine is doing the same thing with her daughter: in the face of the relentless U.S. propaganda machine, she tries to move Marie into seeing that there's not so much difference between how communist governments handle their people and how the US handles its people; you can stave off a problem for today, even for a long time, but not forever.

3. I did, in the end, learn about the circumstances of how Cresspahl died and how Marie's father became her father (handled circumspectly, as one might expect in a mother talking to their child), but darned if it wasn't in the last 30 pages of 1600.

4. I liked it.

5. The goal of reading this book was to do something very different than I normally do: the book is a series of daily entries over a year, and I read each day in order on the relevant day. (Plus or minus some time for traveling.) I have read many books in many different ways, but this was a first, spending over a year in continuous effort and not letting myself go further ahead. The book leaves a tremendous wake that multiple other novels at the same time do not really fill. I could do this once, I did it, I will never do its like again.

On Dirty Hands and thought experiments more generally

I will admit I have always found the central argument of Michael Walzer's "Political Action: On Dirty Hands" to be compelling. Morality and ethics are different, though related. One can be in a situation where there are no morally acceptable options available; one must still choose. I accept the criticism of ticking time bomb scenarios that they do not occur in real life, that torture in particular is not a reliable route to information. Indeed, the difficulty with most dirty hands scenarios is that people will, inevitably, try to make their decision into not-a-dilemma: there was really only one thing to be done, so it must be ethically and morally right, so there is no need for guilt or bad conscience. 

Over the summer I did a World War II study with my eldest child, and we ran across an example here, beginning at 47:30, about the bombing of Cleves, described by the person who ordered it. It's a pretty straightforward scenario: order the bombing of Cleves and ensure support for the Allied crossing of the Rhine (but also destroy an ancient city and certainly condemn hundreds or thousands of people to death), or decline to order it and let your own troops be killed by enemy soldiers who continue to occupy the well-defensed high ground. In the short excerpt he describes the decision, which seemed easy, and the after-effects that are still with him 20 years later: nightmares, and the feeling of being a murderer. 

Which is to say: the point of dirty hands is that you end up with dirty hands. You are free to do something immoral under duress, but the cost of is forever feeling guilty about something you cannot take back or undo (and you feel guilty because you are guilty). If you refuse, or are unable, to feel bad about what you've done, dirty hands can't apply.