Jane Austen remains one of the single most beloved and oft-read novelists in the English language, her novels the subject of countless adaptations, her characters familiar even to those without the patience to read of them, but her six novels, handful of unfinished novellas, and juvenilia don't hold out long. Though Austen's appeal is rather unique, intimately tied to a subtle, sardonic sense of dry humor and a perfect grasp of the follies of even the most sensible people, I offer to the forlorn Austenite seven novels that might procure her some little consolation:
Evelina - Fanny Burney
Burney's work was hugely significant to Austen - her second novel, Cecilia, supplied the title of Pride and Prejudice - and her first novel is a monumental achievement, both for its wit and charm and for the fact that its success proved that women, too, could write masterful fiction. Evelina is an epistolary novel and bears the stamp of Samuel Richardson's influence. It follows the fortunes of its titular heroine, a young naïve whose mother's scandalous elopement and grandmother's even more disreputable liaisons threaten her social standing and her marital prospects. Though Burney had an infallible nose for the idiocies of fashionable society and an ironic sense of humor to mock them, today one is struck by the frustration and yearning expressed in her descriptions of the indignities, fear, misunderstandings, and perils that attended even the most privileged of young ladies in the eighteenth century.
Tom Jones - Henry Fielding
A delightfully convoluted romp through the bedrooms, alcoves, and haystacks where the roguish Tom takes his pleasures, Henry Fielding's magnum opus follows the titular rascal as he discovers the true nature of his parentage. Since he is illegitimate, he cannot inherit his foster father's estate nor marry the lovely young Sophia Western, a paragon of virtue fond of the latest music, Handel, though her father begs her to leave off such modern noise. Though a veritable gold mine of historical commentary that ranges across British politics, religion, morality, and sexual politics, the novel is worth reading, more importantly, because it is pure fun.
Letters from a Peruvian Woman - Françoise de Graffigny
This novel first published in 1747 is often credited as the first feminist novel: and it does, indeed, venture a scathing critique of misogyny, racism, social hypocrisy, and the evils of enslavement to fashion and reputation. It is narrated by a Peruvian princess, kidnapped by Spanish colonialists and subsequently captured by the French. To make her separation from her homeland, her people, and her fiancé Aza more bearable, Zilia keeps a diary of sorts, recording her impressions of the strange and bizarre customs of this new land, France. Brilliant, acidly sarcastic, but also heartbreaking and wistful, Letters from a Peruvian Woman is a singular work of genius.
Les liaisons dangereuses - Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
Though sex is just as dangerous a pastime in Austen's universe, it is carefully veiled in removed narration; after their elopement, Lydia and Wickham are not seen again until they are married, while poor Colonel Brandon's ward never appears at all. Laclos, far from clinging to propriety, crooks a nastily satirical eyebrow at morality and proceeds to expose the seamiest, most scandalous sex games of dissipated aristocratic life. Desperately bored and with no occupations but gambling, balls, court appearances, and operas, the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont amuse themselves by challenging each other to ever crueler feats of treachery, seduction, and social ruination. If Austen is like a cup of perfectly brewed tea, Laclos is like a glass of delicately poisoned cognac.
The Mysteries of Udolpho - Ann Radcliffe
This is the novel that so fired the delirious imagination of Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey, the ur-novel of the Gothic realm and a must-read for the Austen devotee. The orphaned Emily, shut up in the forbidding and possibly haunted castle of Udolpho, lives through a series of chilling horrors as she fends off the advances of the Count Morano, favored by her aunt and her sinister Italian aristocrat husband, and pines for the dashing Valancourt. Though meandering and often anticlimactic, The Mysteries of Udolpho may yet undergo a rise in popularity since it offers many of the terrifying, titillating delights of films like Crimson Peak and television series like The Tudors.
Indiana - George Sand
Indiana is barely more than a child when she is married to the elderly Colonel Delmare; the consequences of this socially sanctioned, but otherwise wildly unsuitable mismatch propel the tragic events of this 1832 novel. Politically cogent, righteously fiery, and yet exquisitely, almost daintily written, Indiana is an extraordinary first novel. George Sand sets part of her book in the French colony of Île Bourbon; Indiana's foster sister, Noun, is of mixed racial descent and her sympathetic portrayal is highly unusual for a work of this period.
Maria; or the Wrongs of Woman - Mary Wollstonecraft
Left unfinished after her death from complications after childbirth, Wollstonecraft's radical feminist novel demolishes in systematic fashion nearly every argument one could make in favor of the institution of marriage. The heroine has been shut up in an insane asylum, modeled on Bedlam, and deprived of her child, the result of an attempt to leave her husband, who gambles, frequents prostitutes, brings them to destitution, and repeatedly rapes her. By illustrating the extent to which the extension of male power over women could be abused, Wollstonecraft both made an unanswerable case and rendered herself quite unpopular in her own time. Though Austen herself was no radical feminist, the creator of Wickham, Willoughby, and Crawford might likely have felt sympathy with poor Maria.
Tuesday, December 26, 2017
Thursday, December 7, 2017
The Metropolitan Opera Should Not Be Another Casualty of Sexual Abuse Allegations
Something unexpected is occurring in the world right now. Abusers are being named and shamed and people are actually giving a damn. In politics, business, sports, journalism, entertainment, the arts, and many other fields, powerful men are being accused of sexual assault and the victims are being given some credence, their allegations taken seriously, and in a few cases, criminal investigations have been opened. This isn't the first time this has happened, but never before have so many people come forward and demanded justice. Unfortunately, we haven't figured out what that justice should look like. In the case of those who hold political office, the loss of that office seems like an obvious step, though, in the political realm, abusers are not being taken down as easily in other areas. In the arts and entertainment industries (though hardly all areas - the gaming industry has been suspiciously absent from the headlines), abusers are losing their jobs, being stripped of awards and honorary degrees, being ejected from professional organizations, and having their projects suppressed, censored, or canceled. Few are actually being brought up on charges and the very real power that significant wealth and connections wield has not been stripped from the majority. But, good work has been started: a policy of total non-tolerance for sexual harassment, abuse, and assault is being brought to bear.
That doesn't mean that justice is actually being served. So what if these hugely privileged men lose a few privileges? There has been a general attitude that these men are 'finished' professionally, but that remains to be seen. The charges against Roman Polanski, merely to cite the most notorious case in Hollywood, have been proven in court, but he not only remains at large: he's continued to make films which critics have embraced, films that have earned profits and awards. A new attitude is emerging, at least for the present, that demands that abusers' work be shunned, ignored, or even destroyed. The point of this is to punish the abuser, to deny him access to the cultural conversation. But, punishment is one thing, redress another and reform yet another.
The question really does arise: who benefits from the repression, destruction, or cancellation of projects associated with these vile men, who have abused their positions of power in many cases for decades? It would be one thing if the projects that were being taken down were clearly vanity projects (like, at this point, every tiresome, repetitive film that flat-footedly quotes Bergman Woody Allen makes), but the projects that are endangered are not, generally speaking, vanity projects, with the possible exception of I Love You, Daddy, the creepy secret film Louis C.K. premiered at the Toronto Film Festival.
Killing television series, films, production companies, periodicals, and arts organizations of all stripes doesn't solve any problems. Is punishing one (horrible, unacceptably abusive) person worth the simultaneous punishment of everyone who, for whatever reason, is involved in those projects? That seems to give these powerful abusers even greater power, since it treats their very image as so toxic, and so powerfully toxic, that it cannot be borne, rather than diminishing their power by refusing to grant it to them anymore. It's true that some creative situations have been found: Kevin Spacey's scenes in All the Money in the World has simply been excised and replaced with new scenes, with Spacey's character played by Christopher Plummer. But that kind of solution can't be applied when the project in question is an institution. And that is the case for the Metropolitan Opera.
Already speculation swirls on the fate of the Met, following allegations of pedophiliac abuse supposed to have been perpetrated by music director emeritus James Levine. These allegations have been the stuff of the rumor mill in the classical music world for decades. Everyone I know and knew in classical music, not to mention I myself, had heard gossip about Levine. It was common knowledge - this is the refrain we are hearing again and again as more and more allegations are lodged. It's true that Levine had a special relationship with the Met, a particularly intimate one, since he was not only its music director, and a popular one with donors, for decades: he became its representative face, almost its ideogram.
Levine is retired, so removing him from his position is impossible, though his formal title of music director emeritus could be redacted. An attempt at erasure, which has been the approach taken by NBC with Matt Lauer, could be made, though it would require erasing the Met's whole history from 1976 on, and with it all the contributions made by all the great conductors, musicians, composers, librettists, and production designers that have worked at the Met. Any real punishment, beyond the merely symbolic sort of retracting awards and so on, will have to come in a court of law in the form of charges. Whether that will happen depends on many factors. Changes to the Met are inevitable anyway, as the new music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, takes up the reins.
If the allegations against Levine are true - and I follow a policy of believing the victims rather than the alleged perpetrator in such cases - then he should be held accountable, to the full extent of the law. But, the loss of the Met would be incalculable, an annihilation of a crucial foundation stone of culture in the United States. The Met is one of the last employers of musicians, dancers, choristers, and those who work on sets, costumes, and backdrops that provides regular work, with good salaries. It is the only opera house to operate on a full season, scheduling more than twenty operas and two hundred performances a year. Its broadcasts on radio and in cinemas permit access to world-class opera to the entire country. American culture cannot bear that loss.
It is tempting, in the midst of so many horrifying, heart-breaking stories of suffering, to zealously silence, censor, destroy. We have to approach each case with delicacy, not for the sake of these men, but because we risk harming others in our eagerness to punish abusers who fully deserve punishment. Those men don't deserve the power to take down people innocent of wrong-doing, artworks that were the fruit of collaboration, or institutions that produce and support the vitality of culture.
That doesn't mean that justice is actually being served. So what if these hugely privileged men lose a few privileges? There has been a general attitude that these men are 'finished' professionally, but that remains to be seen. The charges against Roman Polanski, merely to cite the most notorious case in Hollywood, have been proven in court, but he not only remains at large: he's continued to make films which critics have embraced, films that have earned profits and awards. A new attitude is emerging, at least for the present, that demands that abusers' work be shunned, ignored, or even destroyed. The point of this is to punish the abuser, to deny him access to the cultural conversation. But, punishment is one thing, redress another and reform yet another.
The question really does arise: who benefits from the repression, destruction, or cancellation of projects associated with these vile men, who have abused their positions of power in many cases for decades? It would be one thing if the projects that were being taken down were clearly vanity projects (like, at this point, every tiresome, repetitive film that flat-footedly quotes Bergman Woody Allen makes), but the projects that are endangered are not, generally speaking, vanity projects, with the possible exception of I Love You, Daddy, the creepy secret film Louis C.K. premiered at the Toronto Film Festival.
Killing television series, films, production companies, periodicals, and arts organizations of all stripes doesn't solve any problems. Is punishing one (horrible, unacceptably abusive) person worth the simultaneous punishment of everyone who, for whatever reason, is involved in those projects? That seems to give these powerful abusers even greater power, since it treats their very image as so toxic, and so powerfully toxic, that it cannot be borne, rather than diminishing their power by refusing to grant it to them anymore. It's true that some creative situations have been found: Kevin Spacey's scenes in All the Money in the World has simply been excised and replaced with new scenes, with Spacey's character played by Christopher Plummer. But that kind of solution can't be applied when the project in question is an institution. And that is the case for the Metropolitan Opera.
Already speculation swirls on the fate of the Met, following allegations of pedophiliac abuse supposed to have been perpetrated by music director emeritus James Levine. These allegations have been the stuff of the rumor mill in the classical music world for decades. Everyone I know and knew in classical music, not to mention I myself, had heard gossip about Levine. It was common knowledge - this is the refrain we are hearing again and again as more and more allegations are lodged. It's true that Levine had a special relationship with the Met, a particularly intimate one, since he was not only its music director, and a popular one with donors, for decades: he became its representative face, almost its ideogram.
Levine is retired, so removing him from his position is impossible, though his formal title of music director emeritus could be redacted. An attempt at erasure, which has been the approach taken by NBC with Matt Lauer, could be made, though it would require erasing the Met's whole history from 1976 on, and with it all the contributions made by all the great conductors, musicians, composers, librettists, and production designers that have worked at the Met. Any real punishment, beyond the merely symbolic sort of retracting awards and so on, will have to come in a court of law in the form of charges. Whether that will happen depends on many factors. Changes to the Met are inevitable anyway, as the new music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, takes up the reins.
If the allegations against Levine are true - and I follow a policy of believing the victims rather than the alleged perpetrator in such cases - then he should be held accountable, to the full extent of the law. But, the loss of the Met would be incalculable, an annihilation of a crucial foundation stone of culture in the United States. The Met is one of the last employers of musicians, dancers, choristers, and those who work on sets, costumes, and backdrops that provides regular work, with good salaries. It is the only opera house to operate on a full season, scheduling more than twenty operas and two hundred performances a year. Its broadcasts on radio and in cinemas permit access to world-class opera to the entire country. American culture cannot bear that loss.
It is tempting, in the midst of so many horrifying, heart-breaking stories of suffering, to zealously silence, censor, destroy. We have to approach each case with delicacy, not for the sake of these men, but because we risk harming others in our eagerness to punish abusers who fully deserve punishment. Those men don't deserve the power to take down people innocent of wrong-doing, artworks that were the fruit of collaboration, or institutions that produce and support the vitality of culture.
Monday, November 27, 2017
The Small Literary Golden Age of 1945
1945 saw the publication of Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi and Uomini e no by Elio Vittorini in Italy, Animal Farm by George Orwell and Brideshead Revisted by Evelyn Waugh in Great Britain, "The Aleph" by Jorge Luis Borges in Argentina, and The Age of Reason by Jean-Paul Sartre in France. It was also, for a confluence of serendipitous happenings, a banner year for a veritable bounty of books I loved in childhood. Such a rich variety of children's books, or gently probing books for adults, might seem in retrospect strange for such a year, a year of so much death and horror, the dropping of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the beginning of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps and the Nuremberg Trials, the division of Korea into American and Soviet-occupied zones, a year of suicides and bombardments and mass rape. Or perhaps it's not so strange. Children are born and grow up even amid the most hideous of atrocities and outrages and it is in those times and places especially that such worlds of magic, solace, yearning, and joy are most needed. Here are eight novels, all published in 1945, that shine a light of comfort in dark times.
Pippi Longstocking - Astrid Lindgren
Pippi Longstocking is a rollicking, joyous children's novel, without a shred of sentimentality, but born of isolation and physical misery: Lindgren began telling her sick daughter stories about the red-haired, super-strong Pippi to help her through pneumonia and wrote them down as a novel after she was confined to the house with her own injury. The books (for the success of the first Pippi book led to a series) are irreverent, direct, and obdurately silly and Pippi is an early, though anarchic, feminist role model for small girls, for she tears through conventions of femininity with a devil-may-care attitude.
The Small Rain - Madeleine L'Engle
L'Engle's debut novel was written for adults, but by the '80s and '90s, when I was discovering her work, her reputation rested on her young adult novels and most people discovered her writing for adults only after devouring those works for younger readers. The Small Rain follows Katherine Forrester from her neglected childhood, abandoned by a traumatized mother to a flamboyant Broadway-actress aunt, to the beginnings of womanhood. Katherine aspires to a career as a pianist and much of the novel concerns her search for kindred spirits who can understand the profound need for music that both sustains and torments her.
Strawberry Girl - Lois Lenski
Lenski became something of an embattled figure among parents and librarians because of her refusal to coddle children, especially privileged children, from the upsetting truths of poverty and social oppression. Her mission was to foster social compassion in children and she chose to do so by rejecting the sugar-coating that her detractors insisted was due to the innocence of (privileged) childhood. Strawberry Girl, along with Indian Captive, is one of her best books, set in the early twentieth-century in Florida, among poor 'Crackers' (the word is hers - these books are not politically correct by today's standards). In this novel, young Birdie becomes entangled in a family feud, the result of a fundamental conflict between a strawberry farm and free-range cattle grazing.
That Hideous Strength - C.S. Lewis
The last, and best, in Lewis's science fiction trilogy, That Hideous Strength manages to be both an Arthurian saga and a dystopian thriller creepy enough to unsettle even with the glut of dystopian fiction we're bombarded with today. Lewis paints a bizarrely gorgeous imagining of a possible post-war England, in which budding academic Mark Studdock takes a post at the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments, despite their odd interest in a wood rumored to be the burial place of Merlin and his wife Jane's fears following terrifying nightmares of a severed head. Of all the books on this list, this one is most obviously a child of the war, but one that succeeds in making a hopeful and forward-looking plea for education and against totalitarianism.
Heaven to Betsy - Maud Hart Lovelace
The fifth out of ten in the Betsy-Tacy series, which began publication in 1940, Heaven to Betsy brings its young literary aspirant and her friends into adolescence. Lovelace recreates a lost, innocent world, reminiscent of the late Victorian fantasy of Lady and the Tramp, romping through sing-alongs, picnics, ouija board divinations, and fudge-making. Betsy has her kerfuffles - her taste in boys leads to heartbreak and she decides to change her church denomination - but the point of these novels is not plot. Rather, they are like scrapbooks of a happy, privileged, enviable young womanhood, their characters vivid and lively, and their crisply articulated encouragement of a girl's ambition enough to leaven them when they get too sugary.
The Pursuit of Love - Nancy Mitford
There is a whole delightful comedic genre dedicated to nutty English aristocrats and Mitford was a master of that genre, what with being a rather nutty aristocrat from a truly bonkers family herself. Though the book is buzzy and frothy as champagne, Mitford sneaks in a good bit of political commentary, with her characters mixed up in the Spanish Civil War and the French Resistance. Though the romantic, tragically inclined Linda is the heroine, far more memorable are her Uncle Matthew, a 'Kraut'-hating aristo who so dearly loves to hunt that he substitutes his own children when he can't get hold of a fox, the Bolter, so-named for her habit of scampering off to a new man when the latest has gotten boring, and Davey Warbeck, a hypochondriac writer.
The White Deer - James Thurber
Thurber's high fantasy tale of magical transformation, questing, and true love recalls William Goldman's The Princess Bride, successfully mixing an aloof satire and clever word-play with a poignant and sincere fairy tale reminiscent of Andersen and Perrault. The three sons of King Clode, two hunters and a poet, set out to win the love and hand in marriage of an amnesiac princess, transformed from a white deer. Richly imagined and remarkably original given its Medieval trappings, The White Deer is enchanting.
Stuart Little - E.B. White
E.B. White's first children's novel follows Stuart Little, a slightly pretentious mouse born to a human family, who sets out on an adventure to find his best friend, a white bird named Margalo. The book's ambiguous ending resulted in my toddler self throwing a terrific tantrum, as I couldn't bear not knowing what happened next, but as an adult, one is struck by White's evocation of a lived life, a strikingly realistic texture in a novel about a mouse who carries a cane as a fashion statement and drives a car that has an invisibility switch. Though not on a par with his masterpiece, Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little is an odd, whimsical, meandering story, of the kind the best sort of parent might make up at bedtime.
Pippi Longstocking - Astrid Lindgren
Pippi Longstocking is a rollicking, joyous children's novel, without a shred of sentimentality, but born of isolation and physical misery: Lindgren began telling her sick daughter stories about the red-haired, super-strong Pippi to help her through pneumonia and wrote them down as a novel after she was confined to the house with her own injury. The books (for the success of the first Pippi book led to a series) are irreverent, direct, and obdurately silly and Pippi is an early, though anarchic, feminist role model for small girls, for she tears through conventions of femininity with a devil-may-care attitude.
The Small Rain - Madeleine L'Engle
L'Engle's debut novel was written for adults, but by the '80s and '90s, when I was discovering her work, her reputation rested on her young adult novels and most people discovered her writing for adults only after devouring those works for younger readers. The Small Rain follows Katherine Forrester from her neglected childhood, abandoned by a traumatized mother to a flamboyant Broadway-actress aunt, to the beginnings of womanhood. Katherine aspires to a career as a pianist and much of the novel concerns her search for kindred spirits who can understand the profound need for music that both sustains and torments her.
Strawberry Girl - Lois Lenski
Lenski became something of an embattled figure among parents and librarians because of her refusal to coddle children, especially privileged children, from the upsetting truths of poverty and social oppression. Her mission was to foster social compassion in children and she chose to do so by rejecting the sugar-coating that her detractors insisted was due to the innocence of (privileged) childhood. Strawberry Girl, along with Indian Captive, is one of her best books, set in the early twentieth-century in Florida, among poor 'Crackers' (the word is hers - these books are not politically correct by today's standards). In this novel, young Birdie becomes entangled in a family feud, the result of a fundamental conflict between a strawberry farm and free-range cattle grazing.
That Hideous Strength - C.S. Lewis
The last, and best, in Lewis's science fiction trilogy, That Hideous Strength manages to be both an Arthurian saga and a dystopian thriller creepy enough to unsettle even with the glut of dystopian fiction we're bombarded with today. Lewis paints a bizarrely gorgeous imagining of a possible post-war England, in which budding academic Mark Studdock takes a post at the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments, despite their odd interest in a wood rumored to be the burial place of Merlin and his wife Jane's fears following terrifying nightmares of a severed head. Of all the books on this list, this one is most obviously a child of the war, but one that succeeds in making a hopeful and forward-looking plea for education and against totalitarianism.
Heaven to Betsy - Maud Hart Lovelace
The fifth out of ten in the Betsy-Tacy series, which began publication in 1940, Heaven to Betsy brings its young literary aspirant and her friends into adolescence. Lovelace recreates a lost, innocent world, reminiscent of the late Victorian fantasy of Lady and the Tramp, romping through sing-alongs, picnics, ouija board divinations, and fudge-making. Betsy has her kerfuffles - her taste in boys leads to heartbreak and she decides to change her church denomination - but the point of these novels is not plot. Rather, they are like scrapbooks of a happy, privileged, enviable young womanhood, their characters vivid and lively, and their crisply articulated encouragement of a girl's ambition enough to leaven them when they get too sugary.
The Pursuit of Love - Nancy Mitford
There is a whole delightful comedic genre dedicated to nutty English aristocrats and Mitford was a master of that genre, what with being a rather nutty aristocrat from a truly bonkers family herself. Though the book is buzzy and frothy as champagne, Mitford sneaks in a good bit of political commentary, with her characters mixed up in the Spanish Civil War and the French Resistance. Though the romantic, tragically inclined Linda is the heroine, far more memorable are her Uncle Matthew, a 'Kraut'-hating aristo who so dearly loves to hunt that he substitutes his own children when he can't get hold of a fox, the Bolter, so-named for her habit of scampering off to a new man when the latest has gotten boring, and Davey Warbeck, a hypochondriac writer.
The White Deer - James Thurber
Thurber's high fantasy tale of magical transformation, questing, and true love recalls William Goldman's The Princess Bride, successfully mixing an aloof satire and clever word-play with a poignant and sincere fairy tale reminiscent of Andersen and Perrault. The three sons of King Clode, two hunters and a poet, set out to win the love and hand in marriage of an amnesiac princess, transformed from a white deer. Richly imagined and remarkably original given its Medieval trappings, The White Deer is enchanting.
Stuart Little - E.B. White
E.B. White's first children's novel follows Stuart Little, a slightly pretentious mouse born to a human family, who sets out on an adventure to find his best friend, a white bird named Margalo. The book's ambiguous ending resulted in my toddler self throwing a terrific tantrum, as I couldn't bear not knowing what happened next, but as an adult, one is struck by White's evocation of a lived life, a strikingly realistic texture in a novel about a mouse who carries a cane as a fashion statement and drives a car that has an invisibility switch. Though not on a par with his masterpiece, Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little is an odd, whimsical, meandering story, of the kind the best sort of parent might make up at bedtime.
Wednesday, November 22, 2017
12 (Very Old) Movies for 'Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries' Fans
The Australian series, Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, has just about everything I look for in a television show: a period setting - the Roaring 20s, Melbourne-style - and a liberated, confident heroine, a jazzy score and gorgeous costumes, vintage cars and airplanes, zippy dialogue, a to-die-for cast of characters that we laugh with and not at, homages to silent movies and Erté, and clue-strewn mysteries. In short, the show is a hoot. Though there are other television series one might recommend, like Poirot and The Bletchley Circle, the show's creators, not to mention the author of the original novels, Kerry Greenwood, have clearly watched their share of old movies and there are dozens that friends of the fabulous Phryne Fisher would love. Here are twelve that I particularly recommend:
Les vampires (1915)
This serial by Louis Feuillade is jaw-dropping. The titular Vampires are the members of an underground criminal organization, their crimes both brutal (the first episode is entitled "The Severed Head") and fiendishly clever (a pen with deadly poison in place of ink plays a key role), their style both ethereal and reminiscent of Edvard Munch's agonized, satanically inflected paintings, especially Vampire: the Vampires and their pursuers race up and down the sides of buildings, scamper across rooftops, up chimneys, and down wells, clad in black catsuits and balaclavas. Les vampires is high art pulp, anticipating Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse the Gambler.
The Marriage Circle (1924)
Ernst Lubitsch would later remake this silent film as a musical with Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald with One Hour with You; this first version, starring an especially waxily moustached Adolphe Menjou, is a treat for several reasons, even if the remake is better. For one thing, it's a supreme example of how utterly superfluous dialogue can be, even for Lubitsch, who came to be known for his frothy, sparkling wit. Menjou spices his portrayal of the dashing, but put-upon doctor with a soupçon of vileness, while his wife Mitzi, the feral Marie Prevost, wrapped in slinky nothings edged in lace, is an explosive, extravagant eruption of sex. Lubitsch managed to laugh at the censors in every film; in this one, he's fairly roaring.
Pandora's Box (1929)
Phryne Fisher's look, especially her sleek, black bob, was obviously inspired by Louise Brooks, who gave her most iconic performance in this magnificent melodrama directed by G.W. Pabst. Brooks plays Lulu, a sexually insatiable flapper who inspires satyr-like obsessions in men and women alike, obsessions that revolve around possessing her, a supremely liberated being. Violence punctuates Lulu's life, driven as much by the logic of economic need (and greed) in an imploding capitalist society as by desire for her body. Pandora's Box is a gorgeous phantasmagoria of Weimar-era cabaret-ready fashion, experimental sexuality, and the moral chaos unleashed by innocence and thoughtlessness.
Piccadilly (1929)
Happily restored in 2004, Piccadilly is an atmospheric melodrama that picks at the wounds at the intersections of class, gender, and race. Though she didn't receive top billing, the stand-out star is Anna May Wong, as Shosho, a Chinese dishwasher whose erotic dancing tosses her into the spotlight of the Piccadilly Circus, a London nightclub leaking money after its main act, a dancing partnership, breaks up. There are surprisingly subversive layers in the otherwise conventional thriller plot, in large part thanks to the subtle performance of Wong, who injects a tacit, but crystal-clear narrative of ambition, fury at being demeaned because of her race and gender, and pain at the costs of getting the accouterments of a luxurious life, knowing she'll never be more than an exotic object in the world she lives in. Look for Charles Laughton, in an odd cameo as a dissatisfied diner, and Cyril Ritchard as a seedy hoofer.
Diary of a Lost Girl (1929)
Another collaboration between G.W. Pabst and Louise Brooks, Diary of a Lost Girl is a crime drama from the point of view of a rape victim, set in a world that sees her as sinful and wanton. Too sophisticated to be a straightforward morality tale and mesmerizing from the first frame, the film follows Thymian (Brooks), a coddled bourgeois innocent whose untroubled life is shattered by her father's smarmy assistant. Remarkably, the film succeeds in positing a moral that, in a less lucid and unromantic film, might cloy, but that works precisely because Pabst has depicted the world in all its colors, its brutalities and its beauties.
Night Nurse (1931)
Night Nurse is insane. It contains everything - and I really do mean everything - that we assume was simply never depicted in a film before the '70s: sex, drugs, nudity, unrepentant criminal activity, child abuse, swearing... you name it, it's here. Pre-code darling Barbara Stanwyck stars as the titular nurse, tough, yet tender-hearted, supported by a wise-cracking, often scantily clad Joan Blondell, and a sinister, moustache-less Clark Gable, cast very much against his expected type at the beginning of his career. The plot is a tad absurd, but this is grade-A pulp, a thrilling, ridiculous ride into a world where doctors and gangsters unite to defeat a nefarious scheme involving trust fund babies.
Mata Hari (1931)
This highly fictionalized biopic of the notorious exotic dancer who spied for Germany stars Greta Garbo, who elevates a pedestrian script with the lazy assurance of a cat batting a bit of hanging yarn. Opposite her Ramon Navarro preens, but has the glamorous looks to get away with it. The real reason to watch Mata Hari, though, is the parade of dazzling costumes draped on Garbo's alluring frame: her gowns and hats drip with metallic beading, sparkling gems, glittering brocade, her negligée is trimmed with fur, silks and satins shimmer in glossy, dreamily lit nitrate. One might crook a satiric eyebrow at certain bends in the plot, but the fashion is ravishing.
Shanghai Express (1932)
Revered by cinema buffs for its astonishingly gorgeous chiaroscuro cinematography by Lee Garmes and James Wong Howe, Josef von Sternberg's erotic drama set in civil war-ravaged China is a showcase for Marlene Dietrich and Anna May Wong, ravishing in costumes by Travis Banton. The murky plot involves the sex trade, gambling, espionage, opium addiction, and racial politics (plus, some very veiled, but quite alluring suggestions of lesbianism), but the plot, tangled and fascinating as it proves on a first viewing, recedes in importance compared to the sheer glory of the light on Dietrich's cheekbones, shimmering behind black tulle, feathers, and satin.
Trouble in Paradise (1932)
A superlative masterpiece by Ernst Lubitsch, Trouble in Paradise features another of his famously steamy love triangles and stars Miriam Hopkins as a glam pickpocket, Herbert Marshall as an elegant con man, and Kay Francis (in her very best role) as a chic - and very rich - perfumière. Thievery, it turns out, pays very handsomely, though a startlingly moustached Edward Everett Horton does his best to get in the way. Impossibly witty, this is a film to watch with a champagne flute in one hand and a diamond bracelet adorning the other.
Me and My Gal (1932)
This delicious, but unfortunately very difficult to find, movie stars Spencer Tracy as a cocky policeman whose heart has been captivated by saucy, street-smart waitress Joan Bennett. A rare gangster film of the era with a straight cop as the protagonist, Me and My Gal nevertheless cultivates an anarchic, effervescent sense of humor, reminiscent of everything amusing and nothing irritating in French farce. It was a huge flop when it was released in 1932, but the years have been very kind to it and it deserves a prominent place in director Raoul Walsh's filmography.
Pépé le Moko (1937)
The ruggedly sexy Jean Gabin stars as the titular criminal mastermind in this proto-noir set in the Algerian Casbah, where director Julien Duvivier proves that blinding sunshine in twisting, narrow alleys can be as tensely atmospheric as fog, mist, and cloud-strewn skies. Pépé lurks in the labyrinth of the Casbah, knowing that Inspector Slimane (Lucas Gridoux) can never sniff him out, but the wily inspector espies an opportunity in Gaby (Mireille Balin), a lovely but slightly seedy woman, mistress to a wealthy man, and intrigued by the elusive Pépé. Pépé le Moko is Duvivier's masterpiece, a thrillingly suspenseful romance and a dreamily romantic crime thriller.
The Lady Vanishes (1938)
The last film Alfred Hitchcock directed in Great Britain before he moved to Hollywood, The Lady Vanishes is an Agatha Christie-esque mystery set on a train, with a veddy English sense of humor. The lady who vanishes is the cozy, constantly knitting Miss Froy, played by Dame May Whitty, who, incidentally, would have made a truly spiffing Miss Marple, while the vivacious Margaret Lockwood, a wide-eyed English tourist, searches ever more frantically for her. The cast is terrific, the standouts being Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford as oblivious cricket enthusiasts, and the plot snaps to like a mousetrap.
Les vampires (1915)
This serial by Louis Feuillade is jaw-dropping. The titular Vampires are the members of an underground criminal organization, their crimes both brutal (the first episode is entitled "The Severed Head") and fiendishly clever (a pen with deadly poison in place of ink plays a key role), their style both ethereal and reminiscent of Edvard Munch's agonized, satanically inflected paintings, especially Vampire: the Vampires and their pursuers race up and down the sides of buildings, scamper across rooftops, up chimneys, and down wells, clad in black catsuits and balaclavas. Les vampires is high art pulp, anticipating Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse the Gambler.
The Marriage Circle (1924)
Ernst Lubitsch would later remake this silent film as a musical with Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald with One Hour with You; this first version, starring an especially waxily moustached Adolphe Menjou, is a treat for several reasons, even if the remake is better. For one thing, it's a supreme example of how utterly superfluous dialogue can be, even for Lubitsch, who came to be known for his frothy, sparkling wit. Menjou spices his portrayal of the dashing, but put-upon doctor with a soupçon of vileness, while his wife Mitzi, the feral Marie Prevost, wrapped in slinky nothings edged in lace, is an explosive, extravagant eruption of sex. Lubitsch managed to laugh at the censors in every film; in this one, he's fairly roaring.
Pandora's Box (1929)
Phryne Fisher's look, especially her sleek, black bob, was obviously inspired by Louise Brooks, who gave her most iconic performance in this magnificent melodrama directed by G.W. Pabst. Brooks plays Lulu, a sexually insatiable flapper who inspires satyr-like obsessions in men and women alike, obsessions that revolve around possessing her, a supremely liberated being. Violence punctuates Lulu's life, driven as much by the logic of economic need (and greed) in an imploding capitalist society as by desire for her body. Pandora's Box is a gorgeous phantasmagoria of Weimar-era cabaret-ready fashion, experimental sexuality, and the moral chaos unleashed by innocence and thoughtlessness.
Piccadilly (1929)
Happily restored in 2004, Piccadilly is an atmospheric melodrama that picks at the wounds at the intersections of class, gender, and race. Though she didn't receive top billing, the stand-out star is Anna May Wong, as Shosho, a Chinese dishwasher whose erotic dancing tosses her into the spotlight of the Piccadilly Circus, a London nightclub leaking money after its main act, a dancing partnership, breaks up. There are surprisingly subversive layers in the otherwise conventional thriller plot, in large part thanks to the subtle performance of Wong, who injects a tacit, but crystal-clear narrative of ambition, fury at being demeaned because of her race and gender, and pain at the costs of getting the accouterments of a luxurious life, knowing she'll never be more than an exotic object in the world she lives in. Look for Charles Laughton, in an odd cameo as a dissatisfied diner, and Cyril Ritchard as a seedy hoofer.
Diary of a Lost Girl (1929)
Another collaboration between G.W. Pabst and Louise Brooks, Diary of a Lost Girl is a crime drama from the point of view of a rape victim, set in a world that sees her as sinful and wanton. Too sophisticated to be a straightforward morality tale and mesmerizing from the first frame, the film follows Thymian (Brooks), a coddled bourgeois innocent whose untroubled life is shattered by her father's smarmy assistant. Remarkably, the film succeeds in positing a moral that, in a less lucid and unromantic film, might cloy, but that works precisely because Pabst has depicted the world in all its colors, its brutalities and its beauties.
Night Nurse (1931)
Night Nurse is insane. It contains everything - and I really do mean everything - that we assume was simply never depicted in a film before the '70s: sex, drugs, nudity, unrepentant criminal activity, child abuse, swearing... you name it, it's here. Pre-code darling Barbara Stanwyck stars as the titular nurse, tough, yet tender-hearted, supported by a wise-cracking, often scantily clad Joan Blondell, and a sinister, moustache-less Clark Gable, cast very much against his expected type at the beginning of his career. The plot is a tad absurd, but this is grade-A pulp, a thrilling, ridiculous ride into a world where doctors and gangsters unite to defeat a nefarious scheme involving trust fund babies.
Mata Hari (1931)
This highly fictionalized biopic of the notorious exotic dancer who spied for Germany stars Greta Garbo, who elevates a pedestrian script with the lazy assurance of a cat batting a bit of hanging yarn. Opposite her Ramon Navarro preens, but has the glamorous looks to get away with it. The real reason to watch Mata Hari, though, is the parade of dazzling costumes draped on Garbo's alluring frame: her gowns and hats drip with metallic beading, sparkling gems, glittering brocade, her negligée is trimmed with fur, silks and satins shimmer in glossy, dreamily lit nitrate. One might crook a satiric eyebrow at certain bends in the plot, but the fashion is ravishing.
Shanghai Express (1932)
Revered by cinema buffs for its astonishingly gorgeous chiaroscuro cinematography by Lee Garmes and James Wong Howe, Josef von Sternberg's erotic drama set in civil war-ravaged China is a showcase for Marlene Dietrich and Anna May Wong, ravishing in costumes by Travis Banton. The murky plot involves the sex trade, gambling, espionage, opium addiction, and racial politics (plus, some very veiled, but quite alluring suggestions of lesbianism), but the plot, tangled and fascinating as it proves on a first viewing, recedes in importance compared to the sheer glory of the light on Dietrich's cheekbones, shimmering behind black tulle, feathers, and satin.
Trouble in Paradise (1932)
A superlative masterpiece by Ernst Lubitsch, Trouble in Paradise features another of his famously steamy love triangles and stars Miriam Hopkins as a glam pickpocket, Herbert Marshall as an elegant con man, and Kay Francis (in her very best role) as a chic - and very rich - perfumière. Thievery, it turns out, pays very handsomely, though a startlingly moustached Edward Everett Horton does his best to get in the way. Impossibly witty, this is a film to watch with a champagne flute in one hand and a diamond bracelet adorning the other.
Me and My Gal (1932)
This delicious, but unfortunately very difficult to find, movie stars Spencer Tracy as a cocky policeman whose heart has been captivated by saucy, street-smart waitress Joan Bennett. A rare gangster film of the era with a straight cop as the protagonist, Me and My Gal nevertheless cultivates an anarchic, effervescent sense of humor, reminiscent of everything amusing and nothing irritating in French farce. It was a huge flop when it was released in 1932, but the years have been very kind to it and it deserves a prominent place in director Raoul Walsh's filmography.
Pépé le Moko (1937)
The ruggedly sexy Jean Gabin stars as the titular criminal mastermind in this proto-noir set in the Algerian Casbah, where director Julien Duvivier proves that blinding sunshine in twisting, narrow alleys can be as tensely atmospheric as fog, mist, and cloud-strewn skies. Pépé lurks in the labyrinth of the Casbah, knowing that Inspector Slimane (Lucas Gridoux) can never sniff him out, but the wily inspector espies an opportunity in Gaby (Mireille Balin), a lovely but slightly seedy woman, mistress to a wealthy man, and intrigued by the elusive Pépé. Pépé le Moko is Duvivier's masterpiece, a thrillingly suspenseful romance and a dreamily romantic crime thriller.
The Lady Vanishes (1938)
The last film Alfred Hitchcock directed in Great Britain before he moved to Hollywood, The Lady Vanishes is an Agatha Christie-esque mystery set on a train, with a veddy English sense of humor. The lady who vanishes is the cozy, constantly knitting Miss Froy, played by Dame May Whitty, who, incidentally, would have made a truly spiffing Miss Marple, while the vivacious Margaret Lockwood, a wide-eyed English tourist, searches ever more frantically for her. The cast is terrific, the standouts being Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford as oblivious cricket enthusiasts, and the plot snaps to like a mousetrap.
Thursday, November 16, 2017
'Strong Women' Will Not Be the Answer
The past year has been a painful one, a year in which powerful men proved that the gains made by women are capable of being eroded, undermined, ignored, or reversed. The most prominent industries have been studded with high-profile cases of serial sexual assault, both state and federal courts have taken steps to eviscerate a woman's right to choose, and the world, globally, must daily face orange-tinted evidence of the worst of American prejudices.
Though the rhetoric is not new to this year, the call for art and entertainment featuring 'strong women' has intensified as the occasional sprinkle of salt in the wound has become a veritable saline flood. It would be lovely if an answer to sexism and misogyny could be unearthed in privileging one quality in fictional characters, or fictionalized depictions of real people, but if it were that easy, we wouldn't still be living in the world we live in.
On the one hand, strength is a very useful quality for any human being, and that's been true since the first australopithecus conked a saber-toothed tiger on its noggin. It's especially useful for women, who consistently face greater violence, merely by virtue of existing as women, than men do. Fantasies of strength enable an illusion that systemic violence can be overcome, one poke in a domestic abuser's eye and kick to a rapist's groin at a time, but these are fantasies that ignore the reality of the imperfectable human body. They trade the facts of the body, its vulnerabilities and weaknesses, for the dream of a body in flawless mechanical order.
Our heroines, the ones that get praised as signs of political progressiveness, better reflect our fear and terror that we're not making progress than genuine progressive movement forward. Wonder Woman is the quintessential example, but 'strong women' as a trope has become so reified that it's a searchable genre on Netflix. The problem with using strength as a signifier of feminist progress is that it places all responsibility on individuals, while paying no heed to systemic injustice except as a purveyor of traumas that are overcome. 'Strong women' are survivors of their traumas, they 'kick ass,' they're 'fierce' and 'badass' and 'frickin' awesome.' 'Strong women' don't need to be rescued, despite the fact that real women (like real men) do, regardless of their strength, often need rescuing.
The Manichean logic of a feminism of strength is to simply oppose patriarchally mandated feminine weakness with a feminist mandated feminine strength. And in so doing, most women are either forced to conform to a feminist set of standards, or be excluded entirely. By focusing on exceptions, the Wonder Women who, by whatever combination of luck, natural gifts, and determination, succeed where most fail, the standards of patriarchy are not annihilated, but simply put upside down.
Fictional characters can't be equated, one-to-one, with living, breathing women, but our critical treatment of fictional characters reflects one prismatic facet of our general attitudes towards the female. Feminist culture, no less than the larger, uglier, dog-eat-dog patriarchy that surrounds it, won't listen to the voices of those women who betray a weakness. Hillary Clinton lost the election and now we can't seem to stop telling her to shut up. The silencing of women who fail to live up to the Wonder Woman standard has become a salient feature of feminist discourse and activism, fueled by this rhetoric of 'strong women.' I can think of no more alarming sign of the movement's deterioration. As long as a sick woman, a fat woman, a woman who cries easily, a woman who can't get past her traumas, a woman who loses, a woman who needs, a woman who fails, can't be feminist by definition, feminism is just another face for patriarchy. As long as we insist that only 'strong women' can be our heroines, only 'strong women' our icons, feminism fails.
Though the rhetoric is not new to this year, the call for art and entertainment featuring 'strong women' has intensified as the occasional sprinkle of salt in the wound has become a veritable saline flood. It would be lovely if an answer to sexism and misogyny could be unearthed in privileging one quality in fictional characters, or fictionalized depictions of real people, but if it were that easy, we wouldn't still be living in the world we live in.
On the one hand, strength is a very useful quality for any human being, and that's been true since the first australopithecus conked a saber-toothed tiger on its noggin. It's especially useful for women, who consistently face greater violence, merely by virtue of existing as women, than men do. Fantasies of strength enable an illusion that systemic violence can be overcome, one poke in a domestic abuser's eye and kick to a rapist's groin at a time, but these are fantasies that ignore the reality of the imperfectable human body. They trade the facts of the body, its vulnerabilities and weaknesses, for the dream of a body in flawless mechanical order.
Our heroines, the ones that get praised as signs of political progressiveness, better reflect our fear and terror that we're not making progress than genuine progressive movement forward. Wonder Woman is the quintessential example, but 'strong women' as a trope has become so reified that it's a searchable genre on Netflix. The problem with using strength as a signifier of feminist progress is that it places all responsibility on individuals, while paying no heed to systemic injustice except as a purveyor of traumas that are overcome. 'Strong women' are survivors of their traumas, they 'kick ass,' they're 'fierce' and 'badass' and 'frickin' awesome.' 'Strong women' don't need to be rescued, despite the fact that real women (like real men) do, regardless of their strength, often need rescuing.
The Manichean logic of a feminism of strength is to simply oppose patriarchally mandated feminine weakness with a feminist mandated feminine strength. And in so doing, most women are either forced to conform to a feminist set of standards, or be excluded entirely. By focusing on exceptions, the Wonder Women who, by whatever combination of luck, natural gifts, and determination, succeed where most fail, the standards of patriarchy are not annihilated, but simply put upside down.
Fictional characters can't be equated, one-to-one, with living, breathing women, but our critical treatment of fictional characters reflects one prismatic facet of our general attitudes towards the female. Feminist culture, no less than the larger, uglier, dog-eat-dog patriarchy that surrounds it, won't listen to the voices of those women who betray a weakness. Hillary Clinton lost the election and now we can't seem to stop telling her to shut up. The silencing of women who fail to live up to the Wonder Woman standard has become a salient feature of feminist discourse and activism, fueled by this rhetoric of 'strong women.' I can think of no more alarming sign of the movement's deterioration. As long as a sick woman, a fat woman, a woman who cries easily, a woman who can't get past her traumas, a woman who loses, a woman who needs, a woman who fails, can't be feminist by definition, feminism is just another face for patriarchy. As long as we insist that only 'strong women' can be our heroines, only 'strong women' our icons, feminism fails.
Monday, November 6, 2017
Can the Epistolary Novel Survive?
What will happen to the epistolary novel in the age of email? Will it slip into the past, just as letters have? Or will it find new life? The novel in emails is not an epistolary novel, for emails are to letters what 300 is to The Aeneid: comparable in only the most superficial sense. The heroes and heroines of the new epistolary novel will be eccentrics, characters uninterested in conforming to the usual customs, or to be more contemporarily customary, trends, and unable to adjust to the hyper-evolution of technological change.
More than once I've come across a 'witty' article, listing off all the novels that would end on the first page if the characters had access to the technology that we have today. Jane Austen heroines discover their potential suitors' misdeeds on social media, Dickens's Pip finds out just who has destined him to great expectations before he's so much as bought his new London suit, Hamlet gets prescribed anti-depressants, and so on. Aside from the joke being rather obvious - haha, the past was different than the present - what these sorts of critiques, if I may deign to call them so, miss is the forest for the decidedly trite trees. The limitations and freedoms of any particular age are not simply tending to the now. What the epistolary novel accomplishes that no other form can is the relaying of specific relationships of specific characters with the illusion that the author has disappeared entirely. The characters speak, unmediated - though of course that lack of mediation is a trick, a sleight of pen, and conscious of their own speaking, shaping their discourse according to their interlocutor.
What we mean today by technology - mostly the internet and devices that connect to the internet and collect and store data - connects us more closely, but only in a superficial sense. Modernity has given rise to tools of immense communicative power and has equally created a culture of alienated, atomized individuals. The person who sits down and writes a letter, dares to write a letter, refuses to be deluded by the promises of instant connectivity, refuses to leap straight to the destination without making the journey. The person who writes a letter is not taken in the delusion of living in the future, in a pious superiority over the past.
The epistolary novel, then, if it is to survive into the twenty-first century and beyond, must be the medium of the few, the stubborn, the introspective, those who are unafraid of being out of the gaze of the many in order to seek communion with the few. The epistolary novel, once the province of blistering social satire, sentimental agony, the busy comings and goings of being in the world, must retreat to a new realm, that of the misanthrope, the cynic, the skeptic, but also the kindred spirit, the bosom friend, the rebel who genuinely doesn't care about appearing rebellious. This genre that exposed the hypocrisy, greed, and lasciviousness of a doomed class (Les liaisons dangereuses), that cleaved through snobbery, racism, and misogyny to deal the first blows of the feminist cause (Letters from a Peruvian Woman), turned over the seamy underbelly of sadomasochistic desire and terror (Dracula), shrieked the agony of an impossible love (The Sorrows of Young Werther), ran shivers up and down our spines and set detectives on our trail (The Woman in White), this revolutionary genre must seek its defiant course away from the mainstream, away from the proliferation of thoughtless, split-second exchange, and find its own, strange, singular way forward and into the unfamiliar future.
More than once I've come across a 'witty' article, listing off all the novels that would end on the first page if the characters had access to the technology that we have today. Jane Austen heroines discover their potential suitors' misdeeds on social media, Dickens's Pip finds out just who has destined him to great expectations before he's so much as bought his new London suit, Hamlet gets prescribed anti-depressants, and so on. Aside from the joke being rather obvious - haha, the past was different than the present - what these sorts of critiques, if I may deign to call them so, miss is the forest for the decidedly trite trees. The limitations and freedoms of any particular age are not simply tending to the now. What the epistolary novel accomplishes that no other form can is the relaying of specific relationships of specific characters with the illusion that the author has disappeared entirely. The characters speak, unmediated - though of course that lack of mediation is a trick, a sleight of pen, and conscious of their own speaking, shaping their discourse according to their interlocutor.
What we mean today by technology - mostly the internet and devices that connect to the internet and collect and store data - connects us more closely, but only in a superficial sense. Modernity has given rise to tools of immense communicative power and has equally created a culture of alienated, atomized individuals. The person who sits down and writes a letter, dares to write a letter, refuses to be deluded by the promises of instant connectivity, refuses to leap straight to the destination without making the journey. The person who writes a letter is not taken in the delusion of living in the future, in a pious superiority over the past.
The epistolary novel, then, if it is to survive into the twenty-first century and beyond, must be the medium of the few, the stubborn, the introspective, those who are unafraid of being out of the gaze of the many in order to seek communion with the few. The epistolary novel, once the province of blistering social satire, sentimental agony, the busy comings and goings of being in the world, must retreat to a new realm, that of the misanthrope, the cynic, the skeptic, but also the kindred spirit, the bosom friend, the rebel who genuinely doesn't care about appearing rebellious. This genre that exposed the hypocrisy, greed, and lasciviousness of a doomed class (Les liaisons dangereuses), that cleaved through snobbery, racism, and misogyny to deal the first blows of the feminist cause (Letters from a Peruvian Woman), turned over the seamy underbelly of sadomasochistic desire and terror (Dracula), shrieked the agony of an impossible love (The Sorrows of Young Werther), ran shivers up and down our spines and set detectives on our trail (The Woman in White), this revolutionary genre must seek its defiant course away from the mainstream, away from the proliferation of thoughtless, split-second exchange, and find its own, strange, singular way forward and into the unfamiliar future.
Sunday, October 29, 2017
Book Review: Claire-Louise Bennett's "Pond"
Claire-Louise Bennett's Pond is an extended riff on interiority. One might be tempted to say female interiority, but by that logic, we should talk about Beckett's male interiority, or Proust's, or Joyce's. The femaleness of the narrator pops out at us because of the world we live in, while she herself remains stubbornly uncategorical. Described both as a novel and a short story collection, Pond isn't really either, but it's not not those things. It's a liminal work, one that deadpans its way into the cracks and fissures between consciousness and subconsciousness and taps almost uncomfortably deeply into the more swollen parts of the psyche.
There is no plot and hardly anything in the way of even an isolated event. We are firmly embedded in the hyperconscious and unapologetic mind of a person for whom solitude and contemplation constitute the fabric of life; she gardens haphazardly, paints her bathroom, reads Die Wand, irons a boyfriend's shirt, tries to order oven knobs that are no longer being manufactured, and takes long, solitary walks. She lives in an ancient cottage, alternately cozy and ramshackle. Perhaps an academic, she gives little insight into her professional life, few friends or lovers acquire names, and she remains difficult to picture. Narrative is denied; thought is both substance and structure. It is not so much that we are listening to a stream of consciousness, but rather that we woke up one fine day inside of this woman who applies the most rigorous intellectual reasoning to domestic life and shows only the quirkiest, most gimlet-eyed concern for what other people think, or really her concern is more like curiosity, a wondering inquiry into whether someone will do something or react in a particular way and whether she can compel that action. When she throws a party, she is distressed when a person other than the one she imagined sits on an ottoman. Or, perhaps 'distressed' isn't the right word.
The right word might be 'nettled.' The emotional tenor of Pond tends to hew closely to the sorts of feelings that we experience daily, but rarely grant much importance. Instead of shrugging off passing observations, dreams, strange and seemingly uncompelled imaginings, the tiny sensations that together add up to a realization that one is alive, the narrator leans in, hard, and confronts them, examines them with microscope or telescope, her choice of closeness or remoteness as much whimsical as anything else.
This sort of writing by anyone will be prone to accusations of navel-gazing and pretension. When the writer is a woman, it will be prone to even harsher accusations of frivolity, self-indulgence, and insipidity. Given the politically charged atmosphere, a defender of this 2015 debut might try to erect a shield of feminism; they wouldn't be completely wrong - it is still quietly revolutionary for a woman to live alone, to treat boyfriends as pleasing but relatively unimportant, to pursue her own, unsanctioned course - but they also wouldn't be completely right. Pond is a slantways book. It is a book in which vegetables, pond scum, cows, bikes, and blankets drift almost into the way of being characters, while people take on the semblance of leaves blown by the wind, dirt clinging to a boot, radio music carried on the air: notable, but no more important than things. Food, both prepared and eaten, the intrusions of animals into human space and humans into animal space, cleaning, both the body and the abode, are the most overt themes.
In essence, this strategy of slippage is a rebellion against "appearing to be located... that's what I object to, and somehow wish to dispel." It is a book that takes place in a specific cottage, in a specific network of country lanes, ponds, cow pastures, highways, gardens, and grocery stores, and the narrator herself is unquestionably specific, and idiosyncratic in her tastes. But, she won't stay still, either physically (her peregrinations are one of the threads by which the reader follows her) or mentally. Restlessness dominates. This quality allows the book to evade genre distinctions, without forcing a rejection of any particular genre, but it also allows the narrator to elude capture. We can't see her, but there's an uncanny, almost queasy feeling that she can see us. This discomfort, this slippage between being seen and being heard keeps the book insistently liminal, insistently not and yet not not. This is why the sign that marks the pond 'Pond' so irks and irritates the narrator, because "invariably this vital process is abruptly thwarted by an idiotic overlay of literal designations and inane alerts so that the whole terrain is obscured and inaccessible..." The narrator, though conscious of the potential violence that accompanies every woman, like a second heart beat, will not be designated, will not be the subject of warnings, but by the same token, she will erect no flag and storm no enemy. Definition destroys as effectively as an executioner's ax. Pond is murkily undefinable, but it hides in its depths fascinating, wiggling creatures, spiky reeds that puncture or break, rich earth where treasure is buried.
Saturday, October 21, 2017
The Rewrite of a Canonical Novel This Reader Wants and Needs
From the critically acclaimed - Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea being the preeminent example - to the pop hit - Gregory Maguire's Wicked, not to mention everything else he's written - the rewrite of a canonical novel from the point of view of a secondary character, usually understood as somehow badly served by the text that is, of course, equally the site of the character's origin, has become a genre unto itself. Some authors even beat their scions to the chase and write their own rewrites, like Veronica Roth, whose Divergent trilogy has an appendage in an additional novel from the point of view of the love interest, a fourth book about a character nicknamed Four, entitled... Four. In part, this drive to deconstruct and reconstruct classic narratives has an obvious political impetus, whether post-colonial, feminist, sex-positive, body-positive, queer-positive, or whatever other valence the author might write from. But, the fact remains that many of these efforts are also ways to cash in on the craze for intellectual property, especially IP in the public domain.
Given that these novels generally respond to readers' frustration over the way a particular character is represented, I would like to throw my hat in the ring, as a frustrated reader, and offer to whichever novelist will take the challenge the rewrite of a canonical novel that I most want to read:
Authors, wordsmiths, scribblers, where is the novel written from the point of view of Miss Barker's cow? Elizabeth Gaskell devotes a mere two paragraphs to this fascinating and tragedy-stricken character in Cranford. This unfortunate cow belongs to the spinster, Miss Barker, who loves her like a daughter, but is unable to save her from losing all her hair in a lime pit. We never learn the name of this poor, benighted beast, only that she was possessed of "wonderful milk" and "wonderful intelligence" and can take a little comfort in the pajamas that her benefactress Miss Barker sews for her. Oh poor cow of Alderney origin! Oh poor cow, deprived of her own voice! Oh poor cow whom "the whole town knew and kindly regarded," who was pitied and smiled at in her misfortune! Oh woe is cow! Where is the novel that will restore to us this cow's story, so simply sketched by Mrs. Gaskell, who was more concerned with telling the tales of spinster ladies?
You think I am joking, but really, in this topsy-turvey age of imminent disasters of the bleakest sort, isn't a novel about a bald cow in grey flannel pajamas exactly what we need?
Given that these novels generally respond to readers' frustration over the way a particular character is represented, I would like to throw my hat in the ring, as a frustrated reader, and offer to whichever novelist will take the challenge the rewrite of a canonical novel that I most want to read:
Authors, wordsmiths, scribblers, where is the novel written from the point of view of Miss Barker's cow? Elizabeth Gaskell devotes a mere two paragraphs to this fascinating and tragedy-stricken character in Cranford. This unfortunate cow belongs to the spinster, Miss Barker, who loves her like a daughter, but is unable to save her from losing all her hair in a lime pit. We never learn the name of this poor, benighted beast, only that she was possessed of "wonderful milk" and "wonderful intelligence" and can take a little comfort in the pajamas that her benefactress Miss Barker sews for her. Oh poor cow of Alderney origin! Oh poor cow, deprived of her own voice! Oh poor cow whom "the whole town knew and kindly regarded," who was pitied and smiled at in her misfortune! Oh woe is cow! Where is the novel that will restore to us this cow's story, so simply sketched by Mrs. Gaskell, who was more concerned with telling the tales of spinster ladies?
You think I am joking, but really, in this topsy-turvey age of imminent disasters of the bleakest sort, isn't a novel about a bald cow in grey flannel pajamas exactly what we need?
Tuesday, October 17, 2017
How One Vocabulary Word Demolishes the Integrity of "A Quiet Passion"
The long-gestating Emily Dickinson biopic, A Quiet Passion, garnered significant critical acclaim upon its release in 2016, with Terence Davies's direction, Cynthia Nixon's performance, and the film's overall 'poetic sensibility' earning especial praise. Whether one likes this film or not depends heavily on the viewer's tolerance for a distinctly artificial cinematic structure, far closer in feel to a theatrical performance in a stuffy, small room than the usual sumptuous opulence of a period piece. I could easily imagine an Emily Dickinson biopic remaining fixed within the four walls of the Amherst home where she lived, eventually, as a recluse, but in fact, Davies's film follows Emily to a concert and a schoolroom.
Rather than attempt to recapture the texture of everyday life, the fairly unruffled and uneventful unfolding of a unmarried woman's life in a small town, nineteenth-century setting, the film is made up of a series of tableaux vivants, scenes that function as miniature, but complete, dramas. For instance, the conflict of Dickinson's brother's desire to enlist during the Civil War and her father's adamant opposition plays out in one, long, elegantly structured scene. These dramatic set pieces are book-ended by interludes of montages of sunshiny flowers and bees, the narrow staircase, a pen scratching across a scrap of paper, and gauzy curtains, with Nixon narrating Dickinson's poetry.
I personally found A Quiet Passion all but intolerable and was frustrated by this greatest-hits approach to a poet who somehow both staunchly and elliptically resists definition. But, an antipathy to style, while it can have a solid and critically argued basis, largely comes down to a matter of taste. Davies's screenplay has a bigger problem and it becomes apparent with one historically absurd vocabulary choice.
In a scene in which Dickinson establishes her belief in proto-feminism and the abolitionist movement, Davies has her say, "Every fight about gender is a war." In part, such statements are symptomatic of a common rehabilitation of figures from the past. Dickinson, constantly misquoted or misunderstood, a beloved mainstay of literary Instagram, is folded into an easily digestible, twenty-first century feminist and anti-racist ideology. By putting twenty-first century into her nineteenth-century mouth, the need for mediation is side-stepped. It's undeniable that Dickinson was unconventional and rebelled against many of the strictures that held women captive to the whims of their male relatives. It's equally undeniable that she would never, under any possible circumstances, have said, "Every fight about gender is a war."
That's because Davies, politically correct to a fault, has Dickinson say "gender" instead of "sex." This piously panders to millennial feminism. The word "gender" did not acquire its current usage until the 1970s and the definitive split between "gender" as self-identity and "sex" as biology is even more recent. Although Judith Butler's extraordinarily influential Gender Trouble questions the rigidity of those definitions, her assertion that gender and sex are constructed rather than inherent has become increasingly accepted, at least in liberal communities.
These are ideas that have not place in Emily Dickinson's world. In that world, the nascent feminist movement operates on an assumption that sexual difference - undifferentiated from gender difference - entitles women to certain rights and protections. Later generations would make the claim that women are entitled to rights and protections, regardless of sexual difference. The distinction between gender and sex is incoherent gobbledygook in the nineteenth-century context.
One could say that I'm nit-picking, that to claim that the use of one word demolishes the integrity of the whole film is an overreaction. Perhaps. But, this kind of usage collapses all of history into two categories: acceptable and unacceptable and presumes that what is current is somehow always fundamentally more correct than what is past. In order for Emily Dickinson to be politically acceptable, she has to be a soothsayer, capable of reading the next century's seminal works of feminist and queer theory without loosening her corset stays. This does Dickinson a disservice, this does feminist history a disservice, and frankly, it reveals a naive feminist positivism that permits the worst sort of condemnatory discourse, dividing all people into good people, who use the latest correct terminology, and everyone else, the people who good people are supposed to silence and shut down, rather than engage with and debate.
The choice of the word "gender," over the historically accurate "sex," renders A Quiet Passion emblematic of the historical blindness and hard-lining that threatens to calcify feminist discourse into a rigid set of applied standards. The poet who wrote of the past, "Her faded ammunition/Might yet reply," the poet who insisted that "To fight aloud, is very brave/but gallanter, I know,/who charge within the bosom,/the cavalry of woe," deserves to be met on her own terms, not ours.
Rather than attempt to recapture the texture of everyday life, the fairly unruffled and uneventful unfolding of a unmarried woman's life in a small town, nineteenth-century setting, the film is made up of a series of tableaux vivants, scenes that function as miniature, but complete, dramas. For instance, the conflict of Dickinson's brother's desire to enlist during the Civil War and her father's adamant opposition plays out in one, long, elegantly structured scene. These dramatic set pieces are book-ended by interludes of montages of sunshiny flowers and bees, the narrow staircase, a pen scratching across a scrap of paper, and gauzy curtains, with Nixon narrating Dickinson's poetry.
I personally found A Quiet Passion all but intolerable and was frustrated by this greatest-hits approach to a poet who somehow both staunchly and elliptically resists definition. But, an antipathy to style, while it can have a solid and critically argued basis, largely comes down to a matter of taste. Davies's screenplay has a bigger problem and it becomes apparent with one historically absurd vocabulary choice.
In a scene in which Dickinson establishes her belief in proto-feminism and the abolitionist movement, Davies has her say, "Every fight about gender is a war." In part, such statements are symptomatic of a common rehabilitation of figures from the past. Dickinson, constantly misquoted or misunderstood, a beloved mainstay of literary Instagram, is folded into an easily digestible, twenty-first century feminist and anti-racist ideology. By putting twenty-first century into her nineteenth-century mouth, the need for mediation is side-stepped. It's undeniable that Dickinson was unconventional and rebelled against many of the strictures that held women captive to the whims of their male relatives. It's equally undeniable that she would never, under any possible circumstances, have said, "Every fight about gender is a war."
That's because Davies, politically correct to a fault, has Dickinson say "gender" instead of "sex." This piously panders to millennial feminism. The word "gender" did not acquire its current usage until the 1970s and the definitive split between "gender" as self-identity and "sex" as biology is even more recent. Although Judith Butler's extraordinarily influential Gender Trouble questions the rigidity of those definitions, her assertion that gender and sex are constructed rather than inherent has become increasingly accepted, at least in liberal communities.
These are ideas that have not place in Emily Dickinson's world. In that world, the nascent feminist movement operates on an assumption that sexual difference - undifferentiated from gender difference - entitles women to certain rights and protections. Later generations would make the claim that women are entitled to rights and protections, regardless of sexual difference. The distinction between gender and sex is incoherent gobbledygook in the nineteenth-century context.
One could say that I'm nit-picking, that to claim that the use of one word demolishes the integrity of the whole film is an overreaction. Perhaps. But, this kind of usage collapses all of history into two categories: acceptable and unacceptable and presumes that what is current is somehow always fundamentally more correct than what is past. In order for Emily Dickinson to be politically acceptable, she has to be a soothsayer, capable of reading the next century's seminal works of feminist and queer theory without loosening her corset stays. This does Dickinson a disservice, this does feminist history a disservice, and frankly, it reveals a naive feminist positivism that permits the worst sort of condemnatory discourse, dividing all people into good people, who use the latest correct terminology, and everyone else, the people who good people are supposed to silence and shut down, rather than engage with and debate.
The choice of the word "gender," over the historically accurate "sex," renders A Quiet Passion emblematic of the historical blindness and hard-lining that threatens to calcify feminist discourse into a rigid set of applied standards. The poet who wrote of the past, "Her faded ammunition/Might yet reply," the poet who insisted that "To fight aloud, is very brave/but gallanter, I know,/who charge within the bosom,/the cavalry of woe," deserves to be met on her own terms, not ours.
Tuesday, October 10, 2017
Film Review: "The Girl in White" (1952)
Director John Sturges's most famous films - Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, The Great Escape, Bad Day at Black Rock, The Old Man and the Sea - are quintessentially masculine films about violence, prejudice, the bonds formed by men in confined spaces with each other and with nature, and dogged heroism in the face of despair. It's thus quite a surprise to see his name in inky curlicues scroll by in the credits of The Girl in White, a biopic of one of the first women surgeons in America, Emily Dunning Barringer. The film's steadfast and clear-eyed condemnation of the facilely paternalistic chauvinism that Emily experienced only heightens the surprise.
June Allyson is perfectly cast as Emily, anchoring the film emotionally without a single one of her famous crying scenes, and she is supported by Arthur Kennedy as her colleague and love interest and Mildred Dunnock as the female doctor who acts as her mentor. Based on Emily Dunning Barringer's more prosaically entitled memoirs, Bowery to Bellevue: The Story of New York's First Woman Ambulance Surgeon, the film is a textbook example of the Hollywood biopic, dutifully showing us a formative inspirational experience, a series of successes and setbacks, and, of course, a romance, repeating the formulas that earned Madame Curie, starring Greer Garson, seven Oscar nominations a decade earlier.
There's no question that The Girl in White lacks significant conflict, with a plot that can boast predictability more than anything else, but this isn't a film that attempts to draw the viewer in with suspense, thrills, or theatrics. Instead, it's a quiet, unassuming, but staunchly focused chronicle of one woman refusing to back down before sexism. Emily's superior phlegmatically explains to her that women shouldn't be doctors since they tend to mix up emotions and facts, her lover complains as he proposes marriage that he doesn't want to come home to find out his wife is out on a house call, a colleague insists that for three thousand years, the only medicine any woman has ever practiced is midwifery. This sort of casual, soberly expressed sexism doesn't make for stirring drama, but it does enforce a sense of how deeply ingrained assumptions about women's capabilities and duties were at the beginning of the twentieth-century. The locus of the film is its emotionally calibrated dissection of the barriers that women doctors faced and this alone renders it an unusual, and precious, document of feminist history, however romantically interpreted.
That feminism, however, hearkens back to the feminism of the narrative's time, the suffragette movement that would ultimately win the vote for women in 1920. This was the movement that campaigned for women to have the right to divorce their husbands without losing custody of their children, to attend universities and earn advanced degrees, and to control their own earnings. The Girl in White is all but free of the common markers of twenty-first century feminism. Emily's victories are painstakingly and gradually earned as she proves herself a surgeon as capable as her male colleagues. The highs are not so very high, and the lows are not terribly low, but The Girl in White manages to be an uplifting experience without turning the world on its head, as though sexism could be defeated by one woman doctor's rescue of a dying patient. It is a sentimental film, in the very best sense of the word. I can think of few films of this period that offer a similarly wholesome, cleanly romantic pleasure, though it certainly has much to offer to happy readers of Anne of Green Gables and its sequels, My Brilliant Career, or Louisa May Alcott's Work. Today, we may not blink an eye at the idea of a woman doctor - after all, even the conservative Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer could make a film in 1952 that insists on the absurdity of barring women from medicine - and that fact ought to guarantee The Girl in White a place, if a minor one, in the cultural record of the victories that feminism has won.
June Allyson is perfectly cast as Emily, anchoring the film emotionally without a single one of her famous crying scenes, and she is supported by Arthur Kennedy as her colleague and love interest and Mildred Dunnock as the female doctor who acts as her mentor. Based on Emily Dunning Barringer's more prosaically entitled memoirs, Bowery to Bellevue: The Story of New York's First Woman Ambulance Surgeon, the film is a textbook example of the Hollywood biopic, dutifully showing us a formative inspirational experience, a series of successes and setbacks, and, of course, a romance, repeating the formulas that earned Madame Curie, starring Greer Garson, seven Oscar nominations a decade earlier.
There's no question that The Girl in White lacks significant conflict, with a plot that can boast predictability more than anything else, but this isn't a film that attempts to draw the viewer in with suspense, thrills, or theatrics. Instead, it's a quiet, unassuming, but staunchly focused chronicle of one woman refusing to back down before sexism. Emily's superior phlegmatically explains to her that women shouldn't be doctors since they tend to mix up emotions and facts, her lover complains as he proposes marriage that he doesn't want to come home to find out his wife is out on a house call, a colleague insists that for three thousand years, the only medicine any woman has ever practiced is midwifery. This sort of casual, soberly expressed sexism doesn't make for stirring drama, but it does enforce a sense of how deeply ingrained assumptions about women's capabilities and duties were at the beginning of the twentieth-century. The locus of the film is its emotionally calibrated dissection of the barriers that women doctors faced and this alone renders it an unusual, and precious, document of feminist history, however romantically interpreted.
That feminism, however, hearkens back to the feminism of the narrative's time, the suffragette movement that would ultimately win the vote for women in 1920. This was the movement that campaigned for women to have the right to divorce their husbands without losing custody of their children, to attend universities and earn advanced degrees, and to control their own earnings. The Girl in White is all but free of the common markers of twenty-first century feminism. Emily's victories are painstakingly and gradually earned as she proves herself a surgeon as capable as her male colleagues. The highs are not so very high, and the lows are not terribly low, but The Girl in White manages to be an uplifting experience without turning the world on its head, as though sexism could be defeated by one woman doctor's rescue of a dying patient. It is a sentimental film, in the very best sense of the word. I can think of few films of this period that offer a similarly wholesome, cleanly romantic pleasure, though it certainly has much to offer to happy readers of Anne of Green Gables and its sequels, My Brilliant Career, or Louisa May Alcott's Work. Today, we may not blink an eye at the idea of a woman doctor - after all, even the conservative Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer could make a film in 1952 that insists on the absurdity of barring women from medicine - and that fact ought to guarantee The Girl in White a place, if a minor one, in the cultural record of the victories that feminism has won.
Friday, September 29, 2017
9 Great Works by Women Philosophers
Philosophy as a discipline has historically been and is still a highly male-dominated field and every few years it seems some prominent male philosopher claims that there simply aren't any great female philosophers. How wrong such men are! Far from there being few women philosophers, there are far more than could be represented on a short list such as the following. One could add works by Hypatia, Hildegarde von Bingen, Heloise, Moderata Fonte, Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Montessori, Rosa Luxemberg, Audre Lorde, Shulamith Firestone, Rosi Braidotti, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous - and those are just the first names that spring to my mind. The following nine volumes are ones that I recommend for both their intellectual rigor and the subtle and variegated beauties of their diverse literary styles; all traverse a wide range of scholastic fields, from political theory to theology, photography to existentialism and more.
On Revolution - Hannah Arendt
Drawing on the taxonomy of human activity she set out in her earlier The Human Condition, Arendt compares the French and American revolutions, ultimately asserting that, contrary to the work of Marxist philosophers who generally favored the French example, the American revolution was the successful revolution, and the one to emulate. Though I strenuously disagree with her argument myself, since I would contend that Arendt's rather flippant dismissal of the role slavery played in this revolution of men who claimed to believe in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness while owning slaves diminishes the strength of her position, there is no denying that On Revolution is a forceful, thought-provoking, and incisive work of political theory, one as fascinating and useful for those on the left as on the right.
The Ethics of Ambiguity - Simone de Beauvoir
Though her most famous text is The Second Sex, Beauvoir made other important contributions to both feminist and existentialist philosophy, most of them significantly underread. While her lover and erstwhile mentor Sartre announced a plan to formulate a system of ethics based on the existentialism laid out in his Being and Nothingness, it was Beauvoir in the end who did so in The Ethics of Ambiguity. Rejecting transcendent or independent moral imperatives, Beauvoir locates the possibility of an existentialist ethics in the fact of human freedom; the ambiguity of this freedom lies in the fact that human beings are both subject and object, both actor and acted-upon. While I am not wholly convinced by her argument, Beauvoir's book confronts the thorny problem of a post-Holocaust, post-Hiroshima ethics for a modern, alienated world and is one of the essential texts of existentialist philosophy.
Garments Against Women - Anne BoyerOn Revolution - Hannah Arendt
Drawing on the taxonomy of human activity she set out in her earlier The Human Condition, Arendt compares the French and American revolutions, ultimately asserting that, contrary to the work of Marxist philosophers who generally favored the French example, the American revolution was the successful revolution, and the one to emulate. Though I strenuously disagree with her argument myself, since I would contend that Arendt's rather flippant dismissal of the role slavery played in this revolution of men who claimed to believe in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness while owning slaves diminishes the strength of her position, there is no denying that On Revolution is a forceful, thought-provoking, and incisive work of political theory, one as fascinating and useful for those on the left as on the right.
The Ethics of Ambiguity - Simone de Beauvoir
Though her most famous text is The Second Sex, Beauvoir made other important contributions to both feminist and existentialist philosophy, most of them significantly underread. While her lover and erstwhile mentor Sartre announced a plan to formulate a system of ethics based on the existentialism laid out in his Being and Nothingness, it was Beauvoir in the end who did so in The Ethics of Ambiguity. Rejecting transcendent or independent moral imperatives, Beauvoir locates the possibility of an existentialist ethics in the fact of human freedom; the ambiguity of this freedom lies in the fact that human beings are both subject and object, both actor and acted-upon. While I am not wholly convinced by her argument, Beauvoir's book confronts the thorny problem of a post-Holocaust, post-Hiroshima ethics for a modern, alienated world and is one of the essential texts of existentialist philosophy.
Though not technically a work of philosophy, Boyer's incisive, anti-capitalist, feminist prose poetry lends itself seamlessly to an application as theory and I say 'seamlessly' with intention: for, among the central themes that Boyer treats are the intersections between sewing and writing for women. As rooted in a Kansan landscape of strip malls, used clothing shops, and unemployment bureaus as the bird and tree-strewn dreamscapes one might anticipate in poetry, Garments Against Women can be fiendishly brilliant, lucidly analytical, lyrically lovely, and, not rarely, slyly funny. Boyer questions why the sewing of a dress, or the baking of a cake, is different, if it is different, from writing a poem, and why the question can only truly be posited when the sewer, baker, and writer is a woman. This book has proved of enormous theoretical value to my own work on feminism and the woman writer and I highly recommend it.
Gender Trouble - Judith Butler
Though Butler has long since moved on to new realms of theoretical inquiry, must crucially in Frames of War, Gender Trouble is probably the most significant American philosophical text of our age, the most influential, the most widely read, and certainly among the most misunderstood. Butler sets out to contest the monolithic universalism of even the concept of woman as unquestioned up until that point (1989) in feminist, and anti-feminist, thought. The book thrust the definitive wedge between sex and gender, two concepts unlikely to be sewn together again, arguing that gender, unlike sex, is inherently performative. Feminism, queer theory, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, and not a few social and political movements underwent a transformative chemical reaction on contact with Gender Trouble.
This Sex Which Is Not One - Luce Irigaray
In this collection of essays, Irigaray works towards dismantling the phallocentrism that contaminates all forms of discourse, whether spoken or written, wrestling with thinkers such as Marx, Freud, and Lacan, and covering a wide range of subjects, including the economic exploitation of women as objects of exchange and the divergence between male and female eroticism. Irigaray's work is firmly situated within a Marxist feminist discourse that was never especially comfortable for American feminists, but the barbed fury that courses through her sinuous sentences and the opalescent beauty of her style, abstract and yet rooted in the body, should suffice to persuade contemporary students of feminist theory to read her with avidity, if not agreement.
The Illegitimacy of Jesus - Jane Schaberg
This controversial work of feminist theology made Schaberg something of a pariah, though her credentials as a scholar of scripture were impeccable. The Illegitimacy of Jesus argues, through a close reading of the Gospels and other Biblical texts, that Mary was raped and thus conceived Jesus illegitimately. The miracle of Jesus's issuance from a poor, violated woman signals the true extent of Christian redemption. Such a reading of the infancy narratives is, obviously, revolutionary and thirty years after its original publication, the book provokes impassioned, litigious debate. It also, however, opens up a space wherein the experience of women can be not only thought, but felt, in theology.
Regarding the Pain of Others - Susan Sontag
Deeply indebted to Woolf's Three Guineas, this book, the last Sontag published before her death, concerns whether photography can be used to prevent, mitigate, or stop violence, or if its limits inure us to depictions of violence, thus desensitizing us as we confront an ever greater volume of images, delivered at ever faster rates. As always, Sontag refuses simplistic answers, neatly squaring a circle: war photography is almost unbearably important, as evidence, as historical record, but its utility is severely limited, for no matter how moved we may be by a devastating image, without living through the horror framed in the photograph, we cannot understand. The photograph permits us to know, in a limited, imperfect sense, but never to really empathize in the profound way that is demanded by the suffering of the victims of war. Sontag was perhaps never more rigorous, painstaking, or morally demanding.
The Simone Weil Reader
Weil's importance as a philosopher, theologian, and mystic is astonishing in light of the fact that she published only a handful of essays during her lifetime, dying at age thirty-four, though she managed to contribute new concepts to philosophy, Christian theology, and Marxist political theory. This collection, edited by George A. Panichas, includes her most celebrated pieces, including her "Spiritual Autobiography," a lucid and self-critical testament to her conversion, "The Iliad or Poem of Force," an extraordinary and gorgeously written analysis of force in the classical world that ascends to a poetically enunciated but uncompromising political theory as applicable to Vichy France as to Troy, "Factory Life," an emotionally uprooting and clear-eyed account of her time working at the Renault factory, and selections from Gravity and Grace, a cryptic and spiritually exhilarating set of notes or aphorisms.
Three Guineas - Virginia Woolf
Woolf's anti-fascist, pacifist, feminist polemic, published in 1937, ties the fight against the encroachment of Hitler, Mussolini, and all their supporters inextricably to the fight against the patriarchal oppression of women. The book is written in the form of a letter to a philanthropist who seeks a financial contribution to his anti-war efforts, a request that Woolf finds she can only answer by addressing the question of women's education and employment. Exquisitely calibrated, blisteringly ironic, and imbued with the urgent despair stirred by the sight of photographs of the corpses left by Franco's forces in Spain, this slim volume is a crucial text of both feminist and political theory.
Woolf's anti-fascist, pacifist, feminist polemic, published in 1937, ties the fight against the encroachment of Hitler, Mussolini, and all their supporters inextricably to the fight against the patriarchal oppression of women. The book is written in the form of a letter to a philanthropist who seeks a financial contribution to his anti-war efforts, a request that Woolf finds she can only answer by addressing the question of women's education and employment. Exquisitely calibrated, blisteringly ironic, and imbued with the urgent despair stirred by the sight of photographs of the corpses left by Franco's forces in Spain, this slim volume is a crucial text of both feminist and political theory.
Friday, September 22, 2017
The One Taboo "Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed" Won't Touch
The anthology, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids, edited by Meghan Daum was hailed as "hugely significant" (The Atlantic), "provocative" (Vanity Fair, The Rumpus), and "searing" (The Washington Post, The Huffington Post) when it was published in 2015. And indeed the book tackles one of the most stubbornly entrenched taboos of our society: the choice to remain childless.
The essays in the collection range from rather academic surveys of data harnessed to an argument, like those by Laura Kipnis and Jeanne Safer, to lyrical memoirs of childhood, like those by Courtney Hodell and Sigrid Nunez, and harrowing accounts of trauma, like M.G. Lord's essay, or sarcastic humor pieces, like Geoff Dyer's. Any childless person will be familiar with the enraging circumstances every childless woman, and not a few childless men, encounter on a regular basis and the usual arguments and reasons that people whip out when justifying their choice of childlessness. For the open-minded parent, some of these essays might reach for "hugely significant," "provocative," and "searing," but for your average thoughtful, childless person, the theme ends up being a bit of yawn, though some of the essays are fun reads.
In her introduction, Daum declares that her intention was to prod us, as a society, to "stop mistaking self-knowledge for self-absorption - and realize that nobody has a monopoly on selfishness." But there's one taboo that neither Daum nor any of the sixteen contributors dares to confront straight on: none of them are prepared to state, or defend those who state, that they plain and simple don't like kids.
Essay after essay presents the reader with a protest that each of these writers loves kids, but decided, for various and sundry reasons, not to have their own. Here we find the sore spot, the social bruise, that no one dares to palpate. Only one writer comes close and - quelle surprise! - that writer is Geoff Dyer, a straight man. He vehemently demolishes every argument in favor of parenthood with a sarcastic flourish. He complains about the grossness of the entitled little brats who frequent the fancy school in his neighborhood, but moderates his tone for the state school kids who gratefully accepted his used tennis balls.
That's the closest this book gets to acknowledging that you're not a monster if you don't like kids.
A brief, incomplete tour of protestations of adoring the wee ones:
"Let no one say that I didn't spend the equivalent of a year's college tuition hauling my beloved niece and two nephews to the movies regularly during their formative years, bribing them into good behavior with pricey buckets of popcorn and gallons of soda. Let no one say that I didn't do my best to imbue them with my values... and subtly shape them in my image, a project that continues to this day... 'Who's your favorite grown-up' I wheedle..." - Laura Kipnis
"Meanwhile there are a lot of kids in my life. I have six nieces and nephews and I am the godmother of my best friend's son and daughter." - Kate Christensen
"I have friends who are in grammar school, and my favorite movie date for the past six or seven years is presently a junior in high school." - Michelle Huneven
"What I do know is that I have nieces and nephews whom I'm proud to see growing into interesting, thoughtful people. I have friends whose children I adore - even children I haven't met yet... I call all these buns-in-ovens 'Porkchop,' and I look forward to passing along my own wisdom and being part of their lives." - Danielle Henderson
Blech, where is the vomiting emoji when you need it? I could have drawn at least one similar quote from every essay but Dyer's, attesting to each author's love for children. In Meghan Daum's introduction, she baldly embraces the taboo, writing, "We do not hate children (and it still amazes me that this notion is given any credence). In fact, many of us devote quite a lot of energy to enriching the lives of other people's children, which in turn enriches our own lives."
There, in stark black and white, a big, enormous, flashing sign that says: "We're not evil because we like children! We like them, we really, really like them!" There's the taboo that these seventeen childless writers didn't even try to dismantle. Rather, they retrenched behind it. Childless people aren't selfish, shallow, and self-absorbed, it's implied, because they still love children. They just don't have any of their own. But what exactly is so terribly wrong about not loving children, or even hating children? This collection would have had a much better claim to being "hugely significant," "provocative," and "searing," if just one of these writers had had the chutzpah to consider whether loving a child really is a prerequisite for being a human being worthy of being heard, recognized, and respected in our society.
The essays in the collection range from rather academic surveys of data harnessed to an argument, like those by Laura Kipnis and Jeanne Safer, to lyrical memoirs of childhood, like those by Courtney Hodell and Sigrid Nunez, and harrowing accounts of trauma, like M.G. Lord's essay, or sarcastic humor pieces, like Geoff Dyer's. Any childless person will be familiar with the enraging circumstances every childless woman, and not a few childless men, encounter on a regular basis and the usual arguments and reasons that people whip out when justifying their choice of childlessness. For the open-minded parent, some of these essays might reach for "hugely significant," "provocative," and "searing," but for your average thoughtful, childless person, the theme ends up being a bit of yawn, though some of the essays are fun reads.
In her introduction, Daum declares that her intention was to prod us, as a society, to "stop mistaking self-knowledge for self-absorption - and realize that nobody has a monopoly on selfishness." But there's one taboo that neither Daum nor any of the sixteen contributors dares to confront straight on: none of them are prepared to state, or defend those who state, that they plain and simple don't like kids.
Essay after essay presents the reader with a protest that each of these writers loves kids, but decided, for various and sundry reasons, not to have their own. Here we find the sore spot, the social bruise, that no one dares to palpate. Only one writer comes close and - quelle surprise! - that writer is Geoff Dyer, a straight man. He vehemently demolishes every argument in favor of parenthood with a sarcastic flourish. He complains about the grossness of the entitled little brats who frequent the fancy school in his neighborhood, but moderates his tone for the state school kids who gratefully accepted his used tennis balls.
That's the closest this book gets to acknowledging that you're not a monster if you don't like kids.
A brief, incomplete tour of protestations of adoring the wee ones:
"Let no one say that I didn't spend the equivalent of a year's college tuition hauling my beloved niece and two nephews to the movies regularly during their formative years, bribing them into good behavior with pricey buckets of popcorn and gallons of soda. Let no one say that I didn't do my best to imbue them with my values... and subtly shape them in my image, a project that continues to this day... 'Who's your favorite grown-up' I wheedle..." - Laura Kipnis
"Meanwhile there are a lot of kids in my life. I have six nieces and nephews and I am the godmother of my best friend's son and daughter." - Kate Christensen
"I have friends who are in grammar school, and my favorite movie date for the past six or seven years is presently a junior in high school." - Michelle Huneven
"What I do know is that I have nieces and nephews whom I'm proud to see growing into interesting, thoughtful people. I have friends whose children I adore - even children I haven't met yet... I call all these buns-in-ovens 'Porkchop,' and I look forward to passing along my own wisdom and being part of their lives." - Danielle Henderson
Blech, where is the vomiting emoji when you need it? I could have drawn at least one similar quote from every essay but Dyer's, attesting to each author's love for children. In Meghan Daum's introduction, she baldly embraces the taboo, writing, "We do not hate children (and it still amazes me that this notion is given any credence). In fact, many of us devote quite a lot of energy to enriching the lives of other people's children, which in turn enriches our own lives."
There, in stark black and white, a big, enormous, flashing sign that says: "We're not evil because we like children! We like them, we really, really like them!" There's the taboo that these seventeen childless writers didn't even try to dismantle. Rather, they retrenched behind it. Childless people aren't selfish, shallow, and self-absorbed, it's implied, because they still love children. They just don't have any of their own. But what exactly is so terribly wrong about not loving children, or even hating children? This collection would have had a much better claim to being "hugely significant," "provocative," and "searing," if just one of these writers had had the chutzpah to consider whether loving a child really is a prerequisite for being a human being worthy of being heard, recognized, and respected in our society.
Thursday, September 21, 2017
Film Review: "Polina"
Polina, directed by Valérie Müller and choreographer Angelin Preljocaj, is ostensibly a film about a classically trained ballet dancer finding her artistic voice. She achieves this by giving up a chance to join the Bolshoi Academy in Moscow and wafting off to France with a boyfriend who previously deflowered her on a heap of tutus. In fact, Polina is the story of a woman for whom dancing is a form of self-expression rather than an art form.
Polina, played as a young woman by Anastasia Shevtsova, wears a perpetual pout, grim, sullen, and inexpressive. She drifts, between silence and insolence, practice and idleness, ambition and apathy - indeed, it's a wonder so many people try to stick with her. Though the camera lingers lovingly on her puffy lips and her wide blue-green eyes, it's hard to say whether that physical surface refuses to yield its psychological secrets, or if there aren't any secrets there to hide.
Little insight is given into just why Polina feels so stifled as a dancer. She complains that she's sick of "mindlessly executing other people's choreography," but what neither she, nor the filmmakers, seem to realize is that the mindlessness is not soldered onto the performance of other people's choreography. The mindlessness is all Polina's, her boredom, her vacuous disengagement, her sullen refusals to cooperate: none of that is to be found in the ballets that she studies with teacher after sympathetic teacher. Her move from ballet to modern dance is framed as liberation from an overly disciplined, ego-erasing classical technique. I could buy this if the little bits and pieces of choreography that we get to see - there isn't a single, uninterrupted dance sequence in the entire film - weren't so derivative, so blatantly in line with what modern dance is, and has been, for decades, which is surprising given that Preljocaj is quite a respected choreographer. It's impossible to glean why so many people believe in the talent of this incessantly reluctant dancer, since the dancing that the expressions of the actors insist is so moving is... okay, not bad, pas mal.
To be fair, blame for this choreographical failure should also be apportioned out to cinematographer Georges Lechaptois and editors Fabrice Rouaud and Guillaume Saignol. Close-up shots, perhaps a legacy of the graphic novel source material, preponderate, claustrophobically cutting off the tops of heads and the tips of chins. The obviously hand-held camera bounces and wavers through shots of static, seated actors, not so severely as to make the audience queasy, but enough to be distracting. The dances suffer most egregiously as a result, with frequent cuts to teary-eyed observers watching the dances chopping up every choreographed scene. Full-length shots are exceedingly rare and, when we get them, seem accidental, the roving camera falling to right or left just enough to squeeze in those feet. No dance will ever look especially impressive on film unless the camera shows us the whole body. An outstretched arm here, a hand on a gauzily wrapped waist there, an upturned face, these offer nothing more than a vague shadow of a movement, body parts rather than a body.
If the film is meant to be a critique of the stuffiness of classical ballet in favor of the freedom of modern dance, which is, true, somewhat more open-minded towards new, and especially female, choreographers, that critique is both shallow and too vehement. Preljocaj himself switched from ballet to modern. He started working with such lights of the modern dance world as Merce Cunningham - in 1980. I could buy Polina's change in allegiance if the film took place a hundred years ago, during the cataclysms of the birth of modernist ballet, or even during the '80s, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, but modern dance is already more than entrenched within establishment dance. The vapidity of Polina's balletic rebellion lies in the total lack of artistic risk involved in the decision to move to modern.
However, maybe Polina shouldn't be considered a dance film, but rather a coming-of-age drama in which the heroine just happens to be a dancer. Her rebellions against her teachers, her slow, painful drop from the Bolshoi to street-dancing in Paris, her self-consciously adolescent self-abuse, then become illustrations of the malaise of being young, relatively talented, and poor. As such, the film offers the pleasures of much young adult literature, both endlessly self-pitying and insistent on the pursuit of 'art,' an art that at bottom isn't about the perfection Polina's Russian maestro (Aleksei Guskov) tells her all artists pursue, but working out the personality kinks that the child of a social worker, rather than a smuggler, might work out in therapy. The dialogue is littered with the sort of generically mystical bromides that are supposed to be deep; for example, "Don't dance. Show me what it's like to look at God."
As a whole, though, Polina is too earnest to be pretentious, too studiously and naively serious. The fact that Polina smiles twice in the entire film illustrates how desperately lacking in a sense of humor both she, and the film, are. While it's true that perhaps the greatest modern choreographer, Pina Bausch, exhorted us to "dance, dance, otherwise we are lost," she also had enough a twinkle in her eye to choreograph an en-pointe piece in which the ballerina danced with veal in her toe shoes. The despair in Polina is unleavened with either the smallest speck of laughter or joy or the withering gravitas of an intellectually grounded postmodernism. Adolescent dancers going through an angsty period might connect with this film, but for the rest of us, it's a slog.
Polina, played as a young woman by Anastasia Shevtsova, wears a perpetual pout, grim, sullen, and inexpressive. She drifts, between silence and insolence, practice and idleness, ambition and apathy - indeed, it's a wonder so many people try to stick with her. Though the camera lingers lovingly on her puffy lips and her wide blue-green eyes, it's hard to say whether that physical surface refuses to yield its psychological secrets, or if there aren't any secrets there to hide.
Little insight is given into just why Polina feels so stifled as a dancer. She complains that she's sick of "mindlessly executing other people's choreography," but what neither she, nor the filmmakers, seem to realize is that the mindlessness is not soldered onto the performance of other people's choreography. The mindlessness is all Polina's, her boredom, her vacuous disengagement, her sullen refusals to cooperate: none of that is to be found in the ballets that she studies with teacher after sympathetic teacher. Her move from ballet to modern dance is framed as liberation from an overly disciplined, ego-erasing classical technique. I could buy this if the little bits and pieces of choreography that we get to see - there isn't a single, uninterrupted dance sequence in the entire film - weren't so derivative, so blatantly in line with what modern dance is, and has been, for decades, which is surprising given that Preljocaj is quite a respected choreographer. It's impossible to glean why so many people believe in the talent of this incessantly reluctant dancer, since the dancing that the expressions of the actors insist is so moving is... okay, not bad, pas mal.
To be fair, blame for this choreographical failure should also be apportioned out to cinematographer Georges Lechaptois and editors Fabrice Rouaud and Guillaume Saignol. Close-up shots, perhaps a legacy of the graphic novel source material, preponderate, claustrophobically cutting off the tops of heads and the tips of chins. The obviously hand-held camera bounces and wavers through shots of static, seated actors, not so severely as to make the audience queasy, but enough to be distracting. The dances suffer most egregiously as a result, with frequent cuts to teary-eyed observers watching the dances chopping up every choreographed scene. Full-length shots are exceedingly rare and, when we get them, seem accidental, the roving camera falling to right or left just enough to squeeze in those feet. No dance will ever look especially impressive on film unless the camera shows us the whole body. An outstretched arm here, a hand on a gauzily wrapped waist there, an upturned face, these offer nothing more than a vague shadow of a movement, body parts rather than a body.
If the film is meant to be a critique of the stuffiness of classical ballet in favor of the freedom of modern dance, which is, true, somewhat more open-minded towards new, and especially female, choreographers, that critique is both shallow and too vehement. Preljocaj himself switched from ballet to modern. He started working with such lights of the modern dance world as Merce Cunningham - in 1980. I could buy Polina's change in allegiance if the film took place a hundred years ago, during the cataclysms of the birth of modernist ballet, or even during the '80s, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, but modern dance is already more than entrenched within establishment dance. The vapidity of Polina's balletic rebellion lies in the total lack of artistic risk involved in the decision to move to modern.
However, maybe Polina shouldn't be considered a dance film, but rather a coming-of-age drama in which the heroine just happens to be a dancer. Her rebellions against her teachers, her slow, painful drop from the Bolshoi to street-dancing in Paris, her self-consciously adolescent self-abuse, then become illustrations of the malaise of being young, relatively talented, and poor. As such, the film offers the pleasures of much young adult literature, both endlessly self-pitying and insistent on the pursuit of 'art,' an art that at bottom isn't about the perfection Polina's Russian maestro (Aleksei Guskov) tells her all artists pursue, but working out the personality kinks that the child of a social worker, rather than a smuggler, might work out in therapy. The dialogue is littered with the sort of generically mystical bromides that are supposed to be deep; for example, "Don't dance. Show me what it's like to look at God."
As a whole, though, Polina is too earnest to be pretentious, too studiously and naively serious. The fact that Polina smiles twice in the entire film illustrates how desperately lacking in a sense of humor both she, and the film, are. While it's true that perhaps the greatest modern choreographer, Pina Bausch, exhorted us to "dance, dance, otherwise we are lost," she also had enough a twinkle in her eye to choreograph an en-pointe piece in which the ballerina danced with veal in her toe shoes. The despair in Polina is unleavened with either the smallest speck of laughter or joy or the withering gravitas of an intellectually grounded postmodernism. Adolescent dancers going through an angsty period might connect with this film, but for the rest of us, it's a slog.
Wednesday, September 13, 2017
A Feminist Rebuttal to Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century
I've become increasingly wary of ranking works of artistic and cultural value as ranking has become increasingly central to the way criticism functions and is understood. Rarely is a consensus ranking particularly interesting, since consensus irons away the fascinatingly idiosyncratic choices that an individual might make. What we agree on is far less thought-provoking than differences of opinion. However, consensus rankings can be a powerful illustration of sociocultural dynamics in the literary world precisely because they demand a certain degree of agreement.
One fascinating consensus ranking is Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century, a list of the top hundred books that 17,000 French respondents nominated in response to the question, 'What books have remained in your memory?' One interesting aspect of this list is that it isn't a list of the 'best' books of the twentieth century, but rather a list of the most memorable. A memorable book could, in theory, be memorably bad, though judging from the list, most respondents chose well-respected, critically acclaimed books.
Out of the hundred books on the list, only twelve were written by female authors. The choices range from major feminist texts such as Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own and Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex to experimental novels by Marguerite Duras and Marguerite Yourcenar and a mystery by Agatha Christie, as well as essential works that witness the horrors of totalitarian regimes, such as Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl and Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism. The range among this small percentage of the list is impressive; far less impressive is the ratio of female authors to male. Had the list been limited to books by male authors, it would have been essentially the same list; the same cannot be said for the reverse.
Thus, I propose to offer alternatives to the books chosen by the respondents of Le Monde's poll. For each book written by a man, I choose a comparable book written by a woman. The original choices are in brackets and all of my choices not originally written in English are available in translation, unlike some of the books from the poll. Without snubbing the books written by male authors - many of which, such as Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita and Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, are favorites - I hope this exercise serves to remind us that the canon is, and should be, elastic. While one hundred is a nice, round number, no scientific law insists that only that many and no more can be considered the most memorable of the twentieth century.
1. Chéri by Colette [The Stranger by Albert Camus]
2. HERmione by H.D. [In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust]
3. The Giver by Lois Lowry [The Trial by Franz Kafka]
4. Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt [The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry]
5. The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck [Man's Fate by André Malraux]
6. The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing [Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline]
7. Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse [The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck]
8. In Diamond Square by Mercè Rodoreda [For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway]
9. Precious Bane by Mary Webb [Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier]
10. The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf by Kathryn Davis [Froth on the Daydream by Boris Vian]
11. The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
12. Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein [Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett]
13. This Sex Which Is Not One by Luce Irigaray [Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre]
14. Wise Child and Juniper by Monica Furlong [The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco]
15. Prison of Women by Tomasa Cuevas [The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn]
16. Map: Collected and Last Poems by Wisława Szymborska [Paroles by Jacques Prévert]
17. Collected Lyrics by Edna St. Vincent Millay [Alcools by Guillaume Apollinaire]
18. Ruddy Gore by Kerry Greenwood [The Blue Lotus by Hergé]
19. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
20. Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture by Sherry B. Ortner [Tristes Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss]
21. Herland by Catherine Perkins Gilman [Brave New World by Aldous Huxley]
22. The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin [Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell]
23. The Book of Dragons by E. Nesbit [Asterix the Gaul by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo]
24. Progress of Stories by Laura Riding [The Bald Soprano by Eugène Ionesco]
25. Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls by Mary Pipher [Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality by Sigmund Freud]
26. The Abyss by Marguerite Yourcenar
27. Delta of Venus by Anaïs Nin [Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov]
28. Orlando by Virginia Woolf [Ulysses by James Joyce]
29. Arturo's Island by Elsa Morante [The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati]
30. Lust by Elfriede Jelinek [The Counterfeiters by André Gide]
31. The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy [The Horseman on the Roof by Jean Giono]
32. Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill [Belle du Seigneur by Albert Cohen]
33. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy [One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez]
34. To the North by Elizabeth Bowen [The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner]
35. Reeds in the Wind by Grazia Deledda [Thérèse Desqueyroux by François Mauriac]
36. Eloise by Kay Thompson [Zazie in the Metro by Raymond Queneau]
37. Seasoned Timber by Dorothy Canfield [Confusion of Feelings by Stefan Zweig]
38. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
39. Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala [Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence]
40. Anne of the Island by L.M. Montgomery [The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann]
41. Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan
42. Suite française by Irène Némirovsky [Le Silence de la mer by Vercors]
43. In Pursuit of the English by Doris Lessing [Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec]
44. The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey [The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle]
45. Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil [Under the Sun of Satan by Georges Bernanos]
46. The Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton [The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald]
47. Women at War by Dacia Maraini [The Joke by Milan Kundera]
48. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath [Contempt by Alberto Moravia]
49. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
50. I Love Dick by Chris Kraus [Nadja by André Breton]
51. A Few Green Leaves by Barbara Pym [Aurélien by Louis Aragon]
52. Restoration by Rose Tremain [The Satin Slipper by Paul Claudel]
53. The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington [Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello]
54. In a German Pension by Katherine Mansfield [The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Bertolt Brecht]
55. Catherwood by Marly Youmans [Friday by Michel Tournier]
56. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle [The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells]
57. An Interrupted Life and Letters from Westerbork by Etty Hillesum [If This Is a Man by Primo Levi]
58. The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley [The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien]
59. Les Vrilles de la vigne by Colette
60. Geography III by Elizabeth Bishop [Capital of Pain by Paul Éluard]
61. My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin [Martin Eden by Jack London]
62. The King's General by Daphne du Maurier [Ballad of the Salt Sea by Hugo Pratt]
63. The Laugh of the Medusa by Hélène Cixous [Writing Degree Zero by Roland Barthes]
64. The Kitchen God's Wife by Amy Tan [The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum by Heinrich Böll]
65. On Fortune's Wheel by Cynthia Voigt [The Opposing Shore by Julien Gracq]
66. Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag [The Order of Things by Michel Foucault]
67. The Moon by Night by Madeleine L'Engle [On the Road by Jack Kerouac]
68. The Wonderful Adventures of Nils by Selma Lagerlöf
69. A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
70. Mara and Dann by Doris Lessing [The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury]
71. The Ravishing of Lol Stein by Marguerite Duras
72. Selected Poetry by Emily Dickinson [The Interrogation by J.M.G. Le Clézio]
73. Tropisms by Nathalie Sarraute
74. The Story of My Life by Helen Keller [Journal, 1887-1910 by Jules Renard]
75. Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen [Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad]
76. Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés [Écrits by Jacques Lacan]
77. Diaghilev's Ballets Russes by Lynn Garafola [The Theatre and Its Double by Antonin Artaud]
78. The Group by Mary McCarthy [Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos]
79. The Archivist by Martha Cooley [Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges]
80. Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner [Moravagine by Blaise Cendrars]
81. Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain [The General of the Dead Army by Ismail Kadare]
82. Obasan by Joy Kogawa [Sophie's Choice by William Styron]
83. 19 Varieties of Gazelle by Naomi Shihab Nye [Gypsy Ballads by Gabriel García Lorca]
84. The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith [The Strange Case of Peter the Lett by Georges Simenon]
85. Kinky by Denise Duhamel [Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet]
86. Angel by Elizabeth Taylor [The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil]
87. I Had Seen Castles by Cynthia Rylant [Furor and Mystery by René Char]
88. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers [The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger]
89. The Scapegoat by Daphne du Maurier [No Orchids for Miss Blandish by James Hadley Chase]
90. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling [Blake and Mortimer by Edgar P. Jacobs]
91. Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid [The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke]
92. Friend of My Youth by Alice Munro [Second Thoughts by Michel Butor]
93. The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt
94. The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter [The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov]
95. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford [The Rosy Crucifixion by Henry Miller]
96. Sudden Rain by Maritta Wolff [The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler]
97. New and Selected Poems by Mary Oliver [Amers by Saint-John Perse]
98. Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding [Gaston by André Franquin]
99. The Liars' Club by Mary Karr [Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry]
100. The Third Eye by Mollie Hunter [Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie]
One fascinating consensus ranking is Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century, a list of the top hundred books that 17,000 French respondents nominated in response to the question, 'What books have remained in your memory?' One interesting aspect of this list is that it isn't a list of the 'best' books of the twentieth century, but rather a list of the most memorable. A memorable book could, in theory, be memorably bad, though judging from the list, most respondents chose well-respected, critically acclaimed books.
Out of the hundred books on the list, only twelve were written by female authors. The choices range from major feminist texts such as Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own and Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex to experimental novels by Marguerite Duras and Marguerite Yourcenar and a mystery by Agatha Christie, as well as essential works that witness the horrors of totalitarian regimes, such as Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl and Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism. The range among this small percentage of the list is impressive; far less impressive is the ratio of female authors to male. Had the list been limited to books by male authors, it would have been essentially the same list; the same cannot be said for the reverse.
Thus, I propose to offer alternatives to the books chosen by the respondents of Le Monde's poll. For each book written by a man, I choose a comparable book written by a woman. The original choices are in brackets and all of my choices not originally written in English are available in translation, unlike some of the books from the poll. Without snubbing the books written by male authors - many of which, such as Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita and Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, are favorites - I hope this exercise serves to remind us that the canon is, and should be, elastic. While one hundred is a nice, round number, no scientific law insists that only that many and no more can be considered the most memorable of the twentieth century.
1. Chéri by Colette [The Stranger by Albert Camus]
2. HERmione by H.D. [In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust]
3. The Giver by Lois Lowry [The Trial by Franz Kafka]
4. Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt [The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry]
5. The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck [Man's Fate by André Malraux]
6. The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing [Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline]
7. Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse [The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck]
8. In Diamond Square by Mercè Rodoreda [For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway]
9. Precious Bane by Mary Webb [Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier]
10. The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf by Kathryn Davis [Froth on the Daydream by Boris Vian]
11. The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
12. Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein [Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett]
13. This Sex Which Is Not One by Luce Irigaray [Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre]
14. Wise Child and Juniper by Monica Furlong [The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco]
15. Prison of Women by Tomasa Cuevas [The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn]
16. Map: Collected and Last Poems by Wisława Szymborska [Paroles by Jacques Prévert]
17. Collected Lyrics by Edna St. Vincent Millay [Alcools by Guillaume Apollinaire]
18. Ruddy Gore by Kerry Greenwood [The Blue Lotus by Hergé]
19. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
20. Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture by Sherry B. Ortner [Tristes Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss]
21. Herland by Catherine Perkins Gilman [Brave New World by Aldous Huxley]
22. The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin [Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell]
23. The Book of Dragons by E. Nesbit [Asterix the Gaul by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo]
24. Progress of Stories by Laura Riding [The Bald Soprano by Eugène Ionesco]
25. Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls by Mary Pipher [Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality by Sigmund Freud]
26. The Abyss by Marguerite Yourcenar
27. Delta of Venus by Anaïs Nin [Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov]
28. Orlando by Virginia Woolf [Ulysses by James Joyce]
29. Arturo's Island by Elsa Morante [The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati]
30. Lust by Elfriede Jelinek [The Counterfeiters by André Gide]
31. The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy [The Horseman on the Roof by Jean Giono]
32. Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill [Belle du Seigneur by Albert Cohen]
33. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy [One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez]
34. To the North by Elizabeth Bowen [The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner]
35. Reeds in the Wind by Grazia Deledda [Thérèse Desqueyroux by François Mauriac]
36. Eloise by Kay Thompson [Zazie in the Metro by Raymond Queneau]
37. Seasoned Timber by Dorothy Canfield [Confusion of Feelings by Stefan Zweig]
38. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
39. Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala [Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence]
40. Anne of the Island by L.M. Montgomery [The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann]
41. Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan
42. Suite française by Irène Némirovsky [Le Silence de la mer by Vercors]
43. In Pursuit of the English by Doris Lessing [Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec]
44. The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey [The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle]
45. Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil [Under the Sun of Satan by Georges Bernanos]
46. The Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton [The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald]
47. Women at War by Dacia Maraini [The Joke by Milan Kundera]
48. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath [Contempt by Alberto Moravia]
49. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
50. I Love Dick by Chris Kraus [Nadja by André Breton]
51. A Few Green Leaves by Barbara Pym [Aurélien by Louis Aragon]
52. Restoration by Rose Tremain [The Satin Slipper by Paul Claudel]
53. The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington [Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello]
54. In a German Pension by Katherine Mansfield [The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Bertolt Brecht]
55. Catherwood by Marly Youmans [Friday by Michel Tournier]
56. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle [The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells]
57. An Interrupted Life and Letters from Westerbork by Etty Hillesum [If This Is a Man by Primo Levi]
58. The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley [The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien]
59. Les Vrilles de la vigne by Colette
60. Geography III by Elizabeth Bishop [Capital of Pain by Paul Éluard]
61. My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin [Martin Eden by Jack London]
62. The King's General by Daphne du Maurier [Ballad of the Salt Sea by Hugo Pratt]
63. The Laugh of the Medusa by Hélène Cixous [Writing Degree Zero by Roland Barthes]
64. The Kitchen God's Wife by Amy Tan [The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum by Heinrich Böll]
65. On Fortune's Wheel by Cynthia Voigt [The Opposing Shore by Julien Gracq]
66. Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag [The Order of Things by Michel Foucault]
67. The Moon by Night by Madeleine L'Engle [On the Road by Jack Kerouac]
68. The Wonderful Adventures of Nils by Selma Lagerlöf
69. A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
70. Mara and Dann by Doris Lessing [The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury]
71. The Ravishing of Lol Stein by Marguerite Duras
72. Selected Poetry by Emily Dickinson [The Interrogation by J.M.G. Le Clézio]
73. Tropisms by Nathalie Sarraute
74. The Story of My Life by Helen Keller [Journal, 1887-1910 by Jules Renard]
75. Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen [Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad]
76. Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés [Écrits by Jacques Lacan]
77. Diaghilev's Ballets Russes by Lynn Garafola [The Theatre and Its Double by Antonin Artaud]
78. The Group by Mary McCarthy [Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos]
79. The Archivist by Martha Cooley [Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges]
80. Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner [Moravagine by Blaise Cendrars]
81. Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain [The General of the Dead Army by Ismail Kadare]
82. Obasan by Joy Kogawa [Sophie's Choice by William Styron]
83. 19 Varieties of Gazelle by Naomi Shihab Nye [Gypsy Ballads by Gabriel García Lorca]
84. The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith [The Strange Case of Peter the Lett by Georges Simenon]
85. Kinky by Denise Duhamel [Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet]
86. Angel by Elizabeth Taylor [The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil]
87. I Had Seen Castles by Cynthia Rylant [Furor and Mystery by René Char]
88. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers [The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger]
89. The Scapegoat by Daphne du Maurier [No Orchids for Miss Blandish by James Hadley Chase]
90. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling [Blake and Mortimer by Edgar P. Jacobs]
91. Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid [The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke]
92. Friend of My Youth by Alice Munro [Second Thoughts by Michel Butor]
93. The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt
94. The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter [The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov]
95. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford [The Rosy Crucifixion by Henry Miller]
96. Sudden Rain by Maritta Wolff [The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler]
97. New and Selected Poems by Mary Oliver [Amers by Saint-John Perse]
98. Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding [Gaston by André Franquin]
99. The Liars' Club by Mary Karr [Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry]
100. The Third Eye by Mollie Hunter [Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie]
Wednesday, August 30, 2017
Film Review: "The Purple Rose of Cairo"
As a general rule, I'm not a fan of Woody Allen. I find his neurotic self-absorption and flippant yet pretentious sense of humor all but unbearable and rarely find him as witty, clever, or innovative as many critics seem to, so I went into The Purple Rose of Cairo with no little skepticism.
The premise of the movie - a movie character walks off the screen and into the arms of a sweet girl in the audience - essentially reverses the plot of Buster Keaton's Sherlock, Jr., in which a projectionist dreams himself and the girl he loves into the movie he's showing. Mia Farrow plays a waitress, Cecilia, on the outs with her boss, married to a lout who spends all his time on dice, and who, more than anything else, loves the movies. The Great Depression is in full swing and the movies that bring a smile to her face are musicals and pictures about high society people in exotic locales. Then one day, the character of Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels), "honest, dependable, courageous, romantic, and a great kisser," walks off the screen because he's fallen in love with Cecilia and wants to be real.
Allen plays down the fantastic element of this premise, with copious dialogue from the vast majority of characters commenting on the impossibility of a fictional character walking around in the real world and expressing outrage and astonishment. The porousness of the screen is never explained, but once the Hollywood actor who plays Tom (also Jeff Bridges) arrives to try to corral his double back into the movie, Cecilia has to decide between the real and the imaginary. Her choice is predictable, but Allen denies us the expected Hollywood happily-ever-after. Those sorts of endings are only for the movies.
In essence, The Purple Rose of Cairo is an extended riff on one joke. Sometimes it works brilliantly, particularly with the scenes of the movie-within-the-movie's characters alternately panicking and whining because they can't continue the picture. Van Johnson, star of studio pictures like In the Good Old Summertime and The Last Time I Saw Paris, has a delicious, and easy-to-miss cameo as one of the disgruntled characters. However, Allen, though he may be known for his 'witty' dialogue, doesn't have a perfect ear for the the snappy, slang-ridden writing of '30s cinema. A clunky self-consciousness steals into a lot of the lines in the movie-within-a-movie, which is too obviously a pastiche and never convinces as a real hit picture. The best lines are less willfully cartoonish and quite quotable: "I just met a wonderful new man. He's fictional but you can't have everything;" "I'm sorry. It's written into my character to do it, so I do it;" or "I don't get hurt or bleed, hair doesn't muss; it's one of the advantages of being imaginary." The movie is most convincing, not to mention most fun, when Allen uses a softer, lighter touch, in a totally different register than, say, the zany slapstick of Sleeper or the arch flippancy of Annie Hall and Manhattan. But even in this more bittersweet mode, The Purple Rose of Cairo feels wafer-thin, like a short film extended to feature-length.
In part, this is because the movie drags in an element of intellectual theory - implicit references to Pirandello, Deleuze, and Kracauer - that it can't quite bear. The movie's structure depends on a strict demarcation between the real and the fictional that a body can pass over as though going through a door, but the two worlds never actually fuse or collide: the boundary is stable. While ostensibly examining the blurring of reality and a fictive world, The Purple Rose of Cairo actually enforces the stark difference between the two. Many of the wittier lines rely on this; for instance, someone points out that, in the movie-within-the-movie, the champagne is really ginger ale. (Some of the clunkier plot elements, such as Tom Baxter's fake money, do as well.) Yet, even the earliest film theories and philosophies have subtler things to say on the issue of the 'real' vs. the cinematic. All Allen really does is point out the commonsensical difference and the fact that a real person can't inhabit a fictive world for long. Heck, Keaton's film is vastly more intellectually complex.
Allen also shoehorns a critique of religion, attempting to make it dovetail with a confused notion of the screenwriters as gods, which is both philosophically muddled and badly integrated into the film as a whole (though in one moment, rather funny - when the movie-within-the-movie's priest insists that nowhere in the Bible does it say a priest can't be imaginary). Cecilia brings Tom to a church as part of his education in the real world and where he ends up getting beaten up by Cecilia's irate husband. This scene occurs in a church in order to set up Tom's later naive line about "thinking about very deep things." Tom is a wee bit of an airhead, but what he's saying about the screenwriters as gods is actually supported by and large by the movie, rather than criticized, or even complicated. There's something grating to me about a critique of religion that is so flat-footed and intellectually vacuous, a potshot that veers off into nothing.
Even so, there are more things to like in The Purple Rose of Cairo than to dislike: the jazzy score by Nick Hyman, Diane Wiest in a small, though glam role as a red-lipsticked prostitute, the evocatively sparkling sets and costumes for the movie-within-the-movie. It's a relief to have Allen kept off-camera and it's a pleasure to look at such a meticulous recreation of a small New Jersey town in the '30s. While I wouldn't go anywhere near calling The Purple Rose of Cairo a masterpiece, I would call it the high point of Allen's career.
The premise of the movie - a movie character walks off the screen and into the arms of a sweet girl in the audience - essentially reverses the plot of Buster Keaton's Sherlock, Jr., in which a projectionist dreams himself and the girl he loves into the movie he's showing. Mia Farrow plays a waitress, Cecilia, on the outs with her boss, married to a lout who spends all his time on dice, and who, more than anything else, loves the movies. The Great Depression is in full swing and the movies that bring a smile to her face are musicals and pictures about high society people in exotic locales. Then one day, the character of Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels), "honest, dependable, courageous, romantic, and a great kisser," walks off the screen because he's fallen in love with Cecilia and wants to be real.
Allen plays down the fantastic element of this premise, with copious dialogue from the vast majority of characters commenting on the impossibility of a fictional character walking around in the real world and expressing outrage and astonishment. The porousness of the screen is never explained, but once the Hollywood actor who plays Tom (also Jeff Bridges) arrives to try to corral his double back into the movie, Cecilia has to decide between the real and the imaginary. Her choice is predictable, but Allen denies us the expected Hollywood happily-ever-after. Those sorts of endings are only for the movies.
In essence, The Purple Rose of Cairo is an extended riff on one joke. Sometimes it works brilliantly, particularly with the scenes of the movie-within-the-movie's characters alternately panicking and whining because they can't continue the picture. Van Johnson, star of studio pictures like In the Good Old Summertime and The Last Time I Saw Paris, has a delicious, and easy-to-miss cameo as one of the disgruntled characters. However, Allen, though he may be known for his 'witty' dialogue, doesn't have a perfect ear for the the snappy, slang-ridden writing of '30s cinema. A clunky self-consciousness steals into a lot of the lines in the movie-within-a-movie, which is too obviously a pastiche and never convinces as a real hit picture. The best lines are less willfully cartoonish and quite quotable: "I just met a wonderful new man. He's fictional but you can't have everything;" "I'm sorry. It's written into my character to do it, so I do it;" or "I don't get hurt or bleed, hair doesn't muss; it's one of the advantages of being imaginary." The movie is most convincing, not to mention most fun, when Allen uses a softer, lighter touch, in a totally different register than, say, the zany slapstick of Sleeper or the arch flippancy of Annie Hall and Manhattan. But even in this more bittersweet mode, The Purple Rose of Cairo feels wafer-thin, like a short film extended to feature-length.
In part, this is because the movie drags in an element of intellectual theory - implicit references to Pirandello, Deleuze, and Kracauer - that it can't quite bear. The movie's structure depends on a strict demarcation between the real and the fictional that a body can pass over as though going through a door, but the two worlds never actually fuse or collide: the boundary is stable. While ostensibly examining the blurring of reality and a fictive world, The Purple Rose of Cairo actually enforces the stark difference between the two. Many of the wittier lines rely on this; for instance, someone points out that, in the movie-within-the-movie, the champagne is really ginger ale. (Some of the clunkier plot elements, such as Tom Baxter's fake money, do as well.) Yet, even the earliest film theories and philosophies have subtler things to say on the issue of the 'real' vs. the cinematic. All Allen really does is point out the commonsensical difference and the fact that a real person can't inhabit a fictive world for long. Heck, Keaton's film is vastly more intellectually complex.
Allen also shoehorns a critique of religion, attempting to make it dovetail with a confused notion of the screenwriters as gods, which is both philosophically muddled and badly integrated into the film as a whole (though in one moment, rather funny - when the movie-within-the-movie's priest insists that nowhere in the Bible does it say a priest can't be imaginary). Cecilia brings Tom to a church as part of his education in the real world and where he ends up getting beaten up by Cecilia's irate husband. This scene occurs in a church in order to set up Tom's later naive line about "thinking about very deep things." Tom is a wee bit of an airhead, but what he's saying about the screenwriters as gods is actually supported by and large by the movie, rather than criticized, or even complicated. There's something grating to me about a critique of religion that is so flat-footed and intellectually vacuous, a potshot that veers off into nothing.
Even so, there are more things to like in The Purple Rose of Cairo than to dislike: the jazzy score by Nick Hyman, Diane Wiest in a small, though glam role as a red-lipsticked prostitute, the evocatively sparkling sets and costumes for the movie-within-the-movie. It's a relief to have Allen kept off-camera and it's a pleasure to look at such a meticulous recreation of a small New Jersey town in the '30s. While I wouldn't go anywhere near calling The Purple Rose of Cairo a masterpiece, I would call it the high point of Allen's career.
Monday, August 28, 2017
Is Bridget Jones a Feminist Character (And Does It Matter)?
Helen Fielding's hit novel, Bridget Jones's Diary, and its subsequent film adaptation directed by Sharon Maguire and starring Renée Zellweger are unquestionably popular, with sequels both literary and cinematic extending Bridget almost into a franchise unto herself. Online feminist response to characters like Bridget Jones tends to be divided between fans of romantic comedies and chick lit and detractors who condemn such genres as a priori anti-feminist. The first group points to Bridget's relatability and the flaws and imperfections that nevertheless don't exclude her from the possibility of exciting, sexually satisfying relationships. The second group points to Bridget's preoccupations with her romantic status, weight, and food intake and sees her as self-involved and in thrall to patriarchal social imperatives, while her narrative arc is defined by a modern iteration of the marriage plot.
Both critiques are fair and both are, in a way, correct, but each rests on an assumption that feminism dictates a particular way of being for women, and especially female characters, assumed as role models and mirrors. The contradiction lies in diverging understandings of what feminism means and what it should accomplish, but despite their opposite conclusions, the two viewpoints both suffer from an ideological fallacy.
Champions of Bridget Jones subscribe to a feminist imperative to represent women as 'real people,' that is as flawed people, without punishing them for their imperfections. This means, in practice, that these characters exist in narrative universes that are highly traditional in structure, but in which they do not abide by the traditional standards of femininity. These deviations, however, tend to be superficial and slight, for instance, clumsiness or a habit of saying the wrong thing at the worst moment. The character must be imperfect, but also likable. From this angle, Bridget is feminist because her success, in this case romantic in nature, is not circumscribed by the character traits that mark her as flawed. Her ultimate happiness is a reward for being herself, proof that one needn't be a Barbie doll to get a modern-day incarnation of Mr. Darcy. She is, at base, a nice person, her worst quality arguably flightiness, and this is enough to make her worthy.
Detractors instead subscribe to a feminist imperative to represent women as they should be and the world as it should be. As a result, a feminist character must consciously reject societal expectations of how women ought to behave, feel, and think. A feminist story cannot revolve around men, especially men as romantic partners. From this perspective, Bridget Jones's Diary as a whole is anti-feminist because the narrative traces Bridget's romantic involvement with men and Bridget herself isn't feminist because her ultimate goals - a sexy boyfriend, a thin body, a demeanor that reflects 'inner poise' - are subservient to the larger social expectations that women confront. Instead of declaring and actually believing that she doesn't need a man to be happy, Bridget really does want a relationship and only occasionally expresses feminist beliefs, rarely acted upon.
Both camps share two fundamental problems, though each approaches them from the opposite direction. The first issue is judgment. In both cases, a female character is judged by an imposed standard derived from feminist ideology. But, whether the preference is for representations of (superficially) flawed women who get the guy or liberated women who have no need for men and can take them or leave them, a judgment is made. As soon as that happens, an impulse towards freedom and liberation for all women is confined to a small, special class of women - those who attain success and happiness, whether it involves a man or not. This doctrine is disastrous politically, but not especially insightful as far as literary or film criticism is concerned. If Bridget Jones is going to be held to such high standards, whether getting the guy of her dreams or rejecting the romance she actually wants to prove a political point, then feminism is transformed into yet one more form of oppression for women. Freedom of choice is withheld; feminist credentials are issued or denied according to how well or not a woman has met ideological standards. Judgment is both a dubious critical device and a nasty political one. Since we tend to view characters, rightly or wrongly, as proxies, models, or mirrors, condemning a character for failing to be a feminist is another way of punishing women who don't fall into line.
The second issue is whether or not romantic relationships with men can legitimately be the primary focus of female characters', and by extension women's, lives. This is a very old debate, that can be traced directly back to the earliest feminist discourses, including some materials from the French Revolution. The issue turns on the function of stories and whether one believes they ought to show reality or a projected and hoped-for possible reality. It might be nice to allow for both types of stories and to consider, on an individual basis, whether a given story is depicting one or the other. The truth is that for many women romantic relationships with men are a primary focus for at least a period of their lives. If we punish women for that, we're no better than the billions of men now and throughout history who consider themselves entitled to punish women who don't make those relationships a primary focus. If feminism opens up new doors for women, it's debatable whether it should also close other doors in the process.
In the end, whether one believes Bridget is a feminist character because she's relatable, likable, and romantically triumphant or that Bridget is not a feminist character because her needs and desires are directed principally towards appearing attractive to and attaining a relationship with a man, this sort of evaluation risks creating a parallel set of rigidly enforced standards for women, as suffocating and unyielding as the insidiously evolving standards of patriarchy. Rather than simply checking a box, 'yes' for feminist, 'no' for everything else, feminist criticism ought to be a subtler examination of how and why feminism operates, or fails to operate, in the cultural sphere. If it's merely a matter of sorting the goodies from the baddies, then feminist criticism, far from revolutionary, is following exactly in patriarchy's footsteps.
Both critiques are fair and both are, in a way, correct, but each rests on an assumption that feminism dictates a particular way of being for women, and especially female characters, assumed as role models and mirrors. The contradiction lies in diverging understandings of what feminism means and what it should accomplish, but despite their opposite conclusions, the two viewpoints both suffer from an ideological fallacy.
Champions of Bridget Jones subscribe to a feminist imperative to represent women as 'real people,' that is as flawed people, without punishing them for their imperfections. This means, in practice, that these characters exist in narrative universes that are highly traditional in structure, but in which they do not abide by the traditional standards of femininity. These deviations, however, tend to be superficial and slight, for instance, clumsiness or a habit of saying the wrong thing at the worst moment. The character must be imperfect, but also likable. From this angle, Bridget is feminist because her success, in this case romantic in nature, is not circumscribed by the character traits that mark her as flawed. Her ultimate happiness is a reward for being herself, proof that one needn't be a Barbie doll to get a modern-day incarnation of Mr. Darcy. She is, at base, a nice person, her worst quality arguably flightiness, and this is enough to make her worthy.
Detractors instead subscribe to a feminist imperative to represent women as they should be and the world as it should be. As a result, a feminist character must consciously reject societal expectations of how women ought to behave, feel, and think. A feminist story cannot revolve around men, especially men as romantic partners. From this perspective, Bridget Jones's Diary as a whole is anti-feminist because the narrative traces Bridget's romantic involvement with men and Bridget herself isn't feminist because her ultimate goals - a sexy boyfriend, a thin body, a demeanor that reflects 'inner poise' - are subservient to the larger social expectations that women confront. Instead of declaring and actually believing that she doesn't need a man to be happy, Bridget really does want a relationship and only occasionally expresses feminist beliefs, rarely acted upon.
Both camps share two fundamental problems, though each approaches them from the opposite direction. The first issue is judgment. In both cases, a female character is judged by an imposed standard derived from feminist ideology. But, whether the preference is for representations of (superficially) flawed women who get the guy or liberated women who have no need for men and can take them or leave them, a judgment is made. As soon as that happens, an impulse towards freedom and liberation for all women is confined to a small, special class of women - those who attain success and happiness, whether it involves a man or not. This doctrine is disastrous politically, but not especially insightful as far as literary or film criticism is concerned. If Bridget Jones is going to be held to such high standards, whether getting the guy of her dreams or rejecting the romance she actually wants to prove a political point, then feminism is transformed into yet one more form of oppression for women. Freedom of choice is withheld; feminist credentials are issued or denied according to how well or not a woman has met ideological standards. Judgment is both a dubious critical device and a nasty political one. Since we tend to view characters, rightly or wrongly, as proxies, models, or mirrors, condemning a character for failing to be a feminist is another way of punishing women who don't fall into line.
The second issue is whether or not romantic relationships with men can legitimately be the primary focus of female characters', and by extension women's, lives. This is a very old debate, that can be traced directly back to the earliest feminist discourses, including some materials from the French Revolution. The issue turns on the function of stories and whether one believes they ought to show reality or a projected and hoped-for possible reality. It might be nice to allow for both types of stories and to consider, on an individual basis, whether a given story is depicting one or the other. The truth is that for many women romantic relationships with men are a primary focus for at least a period of their lives. If we punish women for that, we're no better than the billions of men now and throughout history who consider themselves entitled to punish women who don't make those relationships a primary focus. If feminism opens up new doors for women, it's debatable whether it should also close other doors in the process.
In the end, whether one believes Bridget is a feminist character because she's relatable, likable, and romantically triumphant or that Bridget is not a feminist character because her needs and desires are directed principally towards appearing attractive to and attaining a relationship with a man, this sort of evaluation risks creating a parallel set of rigidly enforced standards for women, as suffocating and unyielding as the insidiously evolving standards of patriarchy. Rather than simply checking a box, 'yes' for feminist, 'no' for everything else, feminist criticism ought to be a subtler examination of how and why feminism operates, or fails to operate, in the cultural sphere. If it's merely a matter of sorting the goodies from the baddies, then feminist criticism, far from revolutionary, is following exactly in patriarchy's footsteps.
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