Pet peeves

One pet peeve of mine is the expression “one of the two or three most.” That’s what you say when you want to sound more specific than “one of the most,” but without being specific specific!  When I see the expression “one of the most” I assume it’s in the top three anyway, rather than fourth or fifth.

Another one is the American expression “left-liberal.” While “the conservative right” is redundant, “the liberal left” is an oxymoron.

Another is the misuse of the adverb “literally.” It’s supposed to mean, “This sounds like hyperbole, but it’s straightforward.” But people add it to hyperbole just to give it emphasis, as in “Kim Kardashian was literally drowning in silk!” No, she wasn’t.

I also dislike redundancy.  Some years back the Chile correspondent for The New York Times insisted that the nation before Pinochet seized power was “a backward banana republic.”  Not only is this a wrongheaded analysis—Chile before 1973 was one of Latin America’s more liberal, stable societies—it’s redundant! (How can a banana republic not be backward?) This is a case of rhetorical redundancy, better suited to The New York Post.

I found another example in The New Yorker.  That magazine used to have high standards, but it slipped badly after Tina Brown took over as editor.  I remember one article mentioning that a presidential candidate was “soundly thumped.” Can you be thumped unsoundly?  This is the sort of redundancy that the old magazine would have caught!  But it’s more a case of “trying too hard” redundancy.

Other pet peeves of mine are movie cliches.  Like when a character learns important information by eavesdropping from the other side of a closed window. (Have you ever tried to listen to a conversation through a pane of glass?  Near-impossible!) Or when one character starts saying “Let me explain…” but the other character cuts him off with “I’m not listening!”  In real life you should just launch into your explanation right away and not give anyone the chance to refuse to listen….  And of course there’s the young woman who’s being pressured into doing something she doesn’t want to do (usually involving sex), but she’s too weak to say no!

I hate TV cliches even more.  Like “the forgotten breakup.” Two characters breaking up can be a nice dramatic way to end an individual episode.  But the show’s structure may require them to stay together, and reconciliation is a lot harder to write.  So what the writers do is wait a couple of episodes and then have the two of them back together with no explanation!  In other words, they forget that there’s been a breakup… (I’ve seen that one in even the best shows.) Or an episode where one character has a promising opportunity that’ll mean leaving town and no longer being part of the group.  Unless the character’s really being written out, however, he’ll end up staying after all, often for reasons that aren’t very convincing.  Another is one is having a character behave like a bigger jerk than he usually is, to the point of being out of character, all so he can suffer comeuppance later on…

I also dislike movies and TV shows where the foreign dialogue isn’t subtitled and you have to try to guess what they’re saying!  I liked the original miniseries of Shogun back in 1980, but I would have liked it more with subtitles for all the Japanese talk.  Unfortunately, movie studios and TV networks assume that the mass audience hate to read more than they hate confusion…

And I can’t omit micromanagers from any list of my pet peeves!  But I mustn’t continue all day.

Life in the fast lane

 Life in the Fast Lane

Life in the fast lane is something I know little about.  I was going to write about the Kardashian family, whose “reality TV” show—I’d rather call it “unreality TV”—is titled Keeping up With the Kardashians, with the implication that they live life in the fast lane.  But I haven’t actually watched the show, so I can only talk about what I’ve heard.

The Kardashians reflect the success of relentless, shameless self-promotion in the age of inattentiveness. (Like fellow reality TV star Donald Trump…) I saw this photo of the family blowing kisses on the red carpet once, and what got to me isn’t that they don’t know if they look ridiculous, it’s that they presumably don’t care if they do!

Some people particularly despise the Kardashian mother Kris Jenner:  they feel that she’s pimped her daughters! (She reportedly suggested that Kim redo her notorious sex tape with better lighting.) But they say she has a serious drinking problem, so we shouldn’t envy her.  When you have a problem like that, good fortune in other respects may not count for much.

The thing about the Kardashians is, if you say anything about them, you’re just encouraging them…

So I’d rather talk about the 20th century, which arguably started in 1914 with the Great War, and ended in 2020 with the Covid epidemic.  Remember Charles Dickens’ opening passage in A Tale of Two Cities? “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” This is what I’d say about the 20th century:

It was the worst of times, it was the best of times.

It was the age of crimes against humanity; it was the age of human rights.  

It was the age of ecological disasters; it was the age of environmentalism.  

It was the age of world wars; it was the age of peacekeeping.  

It was the age of epidemics; it was the age of vaccination.  

It was the age of the refugee; it was the age of the immigrant.

It was the age of communism; it was the age of social democracy.  

It was the age of overpopulation; it was the age of birth control.  

It was the age of corporations; it was the age of trade unions.  

It was the age of Ronald Reagan; it was the age of Jimmy Carter.  

It was the age of sexism; it was the age of women’s rights.  

It was the age of movies and TV; it was the age of mass literacy.  

It was the age of superpowers; it was the age of newly independent nations.  

It was the age of Pius XII; it was the age of John XXIII.  

It was the age of homophobia; it was the age of gay rights.  

It was the age of oppression; it was the age of liberation.  It was the age of racism; it was the age of civil rights.  

It was the age of the SUV; it was the age of the ambulance.  

It was the age of conformism; it was the age of individualism.  

It was the age of preventive detention; it was the age of civil liberties.  

It was the age of fear; it was the age of hope.

It was the Age of the Fast Lane.

Racehorses

  Loud noises can make me jump, literally.  I thought of that the other week when I saw this online footage of a couple of horses galloping through the London streets.  They were with the famous Household Cavalry, whose horses are usually tightly disciplined.  But these were near a construction site where they dropped a heavy load from a big height, and the noise was enough to spook them!  (I’m glad I’m not a construction worker who has to deal with such noises.) By the time they were subdued, they’d damaged a bus and a taxi.  I certainly would want to be in their way.  

Some years back there was a fire at the stables near the Woodbine racetrack, and dozens of racehorses rushed out into the neighbourhood.  Imagine looking out at your front lawn and seeing a scared horse there!  I wouldn’t know how to calm one down.  I guess I’d feed him an apple and a carrot and hope for the best.  I’ve heard of horse whisperers, who have a natural sense of what a horse is feeling.  What a great talent that must be…

I remember seeing the movie Missing… some 40 years ago.  Directed by Costa-Gavras, it’s about Jack Lemmon investigating his son’s disappearance during the 1973 coup where the Chilean army overthrew a democratic communist government. (Lemmon was best known for comedy, but he gives a solid dramatic performance here.) One of its images was of a riderless horse running through the street during the coup.  Such images address our deep-seated fears—what’s to prevent every horse from running away and going wherever he feels?  I also think of the spooked horse in Picasso’s mural “Guernica.”  That painting depicts the chaos that followed a fascist-terror bombing, but it isn’t chaotic itself:  everything works together for the overall image.

Here’s a fortune cookie message: “You believe whatever people tell you.”

Waterfronts

I’ve seen the 1954 movie On the Waterfront several times.  Marlon Brando plays a longshoreman and former prizefighter who ends up testifying against union racketeers.  It won quite a few Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Brando. (This was the same year he played the biker in The Wild One.) It was based on a true story, except that in real life the racketeers won!

Elia Kazan directed it from a Budd Schulberg script.  He’d recently testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee and named suspected communists, destroying their careers to save his own.  Some people view the movie as an apologia for his informing on them!  It wasn’t easy for Brando to do the film:  his sister Jocelyn had been an actress herself, until she became a victim of the Hollywood blacklist. (There was controversy decades later when they gave Kazan a lifetime achievement Oscar.)

What do I think of the movie?  On the one hand, parts of it are great.  The most famous scene is the one with him and his brother Rod Steiger in the back of a car remembering the fight where Brando was pressured to take a dive.  But my favourite scene is the one on the rooftop with Brando and Eva Marie Saint.  I like the detail where he tries on her glove.  What makes the Brando character interesting, paradoxically, is that he isn’t very articulate. (When a character gets too articulate, he becomes the writer’s mouthpiece.)

On the other hand, parts of it are lame.  Leonard Bernstein’s score is surprisingly weak.  The priest played by Karl Malden is pretty hard to take.  The dialogue isn’t perfect.  There’s a line, “You know how a union meeting works—you go in, you make a speech, you go out and the lights go out.” It’s a memorable line, but unfair to the union movement, at whose meetings they’ve often discussed important things.  And I could do without this exchange:

“My life ain’t worth a plugged nickel if I squeal!”

“How much is your soul worth if you don’t?”

And then there’s that conclusion where he says to the racketeers “Without a gun, you’re nothin’!” The racketeers give him a beating, but that just turns the longshoremen against them.  So a bloodied but unbowed Brando leads the others into work.  Instead of beating him, those racketeers would have been smarter to ignore him.  Then they would have won, like in real life.

But overall, it’s pretty good. 

UFOs

 

I’ve never seen a UFO. (I don’t look at the skies much.)

Back in the 1950s and ‘60s there was a UFO craze connected to Cold War paranoia.  One example is the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, combining science fiction with film noir in a story of aliens who come to earth and take over people’s bodies.

I remember seeing this 1960s British puppet animation show Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons when I was young. (The same people did Stingray and Thunderbirds and Joe 90.) The Mysterons were a people on Mars who’d kill earthlings and take over their bodies.  Fighting against them were a secret agent organization called the Spectrum, where every agent was named for a colour, like Captain Blue or Captain Green. (They were commanded by Colonel White.) Captain Scarlet was an agent whose body the Mysterons tried to take over, but he wasn’t quite dead, and he ended up indestructible.  So every episode he’d get shot or crushed or blown up or something, but he’d be back in the next episode.  Sort of like Wile E. Coyote.  There were also these lady pilots called Angels who’d fly off to rescue the agents.  And there was Captain Black, an agent who did get taken over by the Mysterons.

It had a theme song that went:

Though the Mysterons plan to conquer the earth,

This indestructible man will show what he’s worth!

There was something odd about these British puppet dramas.  You know brutalist architecture, like the Robarts Library?  These were like the brutalist school of kiddie cartoons.  Captain Scarlet would feel at home in the Robarts Library…

You know the Hong Kong action movie star Chow Yun-fat?  Something about him resembles Captain Scarlet!

Anti-communism

  Remember Diane Keaton’s 1970s movie Looking for Mr. Goodbar?  One review called it “anti-religion, anti-women, anti-sex, anti-everything!”

You could say I’m an anti-anti.  I’m anti-antianger,  anti-anti-Muslim, anti-antidivorce, anti-antihiphop, anti-antirevolution, anti-antipacifism, anti-antipermissiveness…

And anti-anticommunist!

I recall back in the 1990s an interview with Saul Bellow in The New Yorker. (This was The New Yorker under Tina Brown, who’s always been deferential to The Big People.) Bellow got pretty self-indulgent in his later years, and in this interview he said he couldn’t imagine what motivated the anti-anticommunists, except for residual Stalinism.

A few weeks ago my history movie watch party showed a movie about Dalton Trumbo, showing the lives ruined by the anti-communist Hollywood blacklist.  I guess that Saul Bellow had no empathy for those people, not to mention the victims of Washington’s anti-communist crusade in places like My Lai and El Mozote.  One might ask, what motivated anti-antianticommunists like Bellow, if not residual McCarthyism.  What it comes down to is that Bellow wanted communism to be the issue and not anti-communism…

In 1981, at the time when the Polish government cracked down on the Solidarity labour movement Susan Sontag asked “In the early 1950s, which gave a more reliable picture of the Soviet bloc, Reader’s Digest or The Nation and The New Statesman?” Yet The Nation and The New Statesman didn’t mislead their readers about the communist order, they just ignored the communist atrocities that the rest of the American press were pointing our. (Reader’s Digest reported what the rest of the press was saying, because that’s their job!) Big deal…

What’s far more important than that is that Reader’s Digest got anti-communism wrong, while The Nation and The New Statesman got it all too right.  When Reader’s Digest ignored anti-communist atrocities, they often weren’t ignoring something that the mainstream press was reporting on anyway.  In many cases, they’d only be reported by magazines like The Nation and The New Statesman.  

Unlike Saul Bellow, I think that anti-communism should be the issue.  Stalin and Mao may have killed tens of millions, but the USA’s anti-communist crusade killed millions in places like Vietnam and Central America, and some estimates surpass 10 million.  Notice that while the Soviet Union and China largely murdered their own people, Washington largely murdered people in the Third World—out of sight, out of mind.  And don’t let people present the Cold War as a World War II-style “good war”:  the Soviet Empire collapsed largely because of its internal weaknesses.

The Cold War left a noxious legacy in the USA itself.  Blacklistees weren’t the only victims, the very rule of law was undermined!  Ronald Reagan clearly should have been impeached, but Washington let him get away with his war crimes. (I’m not just referring to the failure of Congress; in the wake of the Iran-Contra revelations the mainstream press launched a big attack on… the Democrat candidates to succeed Reagan, whom they nicknamed “The Seven Dwarfs.”) The legacy of Reagan getting away with it is that successors have repeated his offences!

Anti-communism created much of the ugliness in today’s world.  The anti-communists have a lot to answer  for and shouldn’t be allowed to hide behind “The communists were worse”!

THE GREAT RACE

 

The other day at my Friday night watch party for historical movies, I showed The Great Race.  It’s a 1965 slapstick epic directed by Blake Edwards, which I first saw in a cinema when I was four. (We were living in Brighton, England, and saw it on my brother’s birthday.) It isn’t the first movie I saw—I’m certain I’d seen the Disney comedy The Monkey’s Uncle several months before—but it was one of the first.

The story goes literally all over the place:  it’s very loosely based on an actual 1908 automobile race westward from New York City to Paris.  It features the cartoonishly dashing daredevil hero Leslie the Great (Tony Curtis, in a parody of his past hero roles), the cartoonishly sour villain Professor Fate (Jack Lemmon, cast against type), and the cartoonishly militant suffragette reporter Maggie Dubois (Natalie Wood—this was a time when a woman demanding equal rights with men was considered comedy gold).  Leslie wears White and Fate wears black, and their cars are the same colors.  Leslie and Maggie get into a “battle of the sexes” comedy, which you don’t see much today—the last one I recall is Julia Roberts’ The Runaway Bride, and that was over twenty years ago!  (No points for guessing they’re in for a romantic ending.) Peter Falk has the funniest role as Fate’s often-unreliable stooge.

The story structure isn’t complicated.  After the race starts they head west to a frontier town, leading to a big saloon-fight set piece. (Filming a large-scale brawl has the same problem as filming an orgy—they have to be staged and filmed in an orderly way, so they’re bound to look like something staged and orderly.) Then they cross from Alaska to Siberia on an iceberg.  

Then they come to a Ruritanian kingdom where Fate’s resemblance to a feckless king about to be crowned (Lemmon has a double role) leads to his getting kidnapped by a baron and a Prisoner of Zenda-Graustark type adventure.  We’ve seen all this before, but that’s kind of the point.  It all culminates in a huge pie-fight set piece. (Maggie spends most of this sequence wearing little more than a corset—Hollywood movies in the mid-1960s were a bit on the meretricious side.)  In the end, when they reach Paris, Leslie proves his love for Maggie by letting Fate win the race, but Fate proves a sore winner and uses his car’s cannon to knock down the Eiffel Tower.

How good is the movie?  Well, it’s all quite cartoonish. Some of the gags are funny but it’s very hit-and-miss, and the overall tone is frantic and shrill. (The movie’s dedicated to Laurel and Hardy, who did a lot more with a lot less.) Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines came out about the same time and does that epic slapstick more successfully.  That version benefited from having Terry-Thomas as the villain, and this movie could have used Terry-Thomas as Fate or even as the Ruritanian baron.  The real stars are the classic cars driven by Leslie and Fate.

I’ve seen it several times, but I probably wouldn’t be interested in it except for what I remember seeing that first time.  The opening credits sequence is done in the style of early silent movies, and I remembered that it opens with a card saying “Ladies, kindly remove your hats.” (At the age of four, I could already read!) Early cinemas actually had cards saying that, because back then ladies often wore big hats that obstructed the view of those sitting behind them.  The crowd in the opening fairground scene looked really huge to someone my age.  And the scene where Leslie sneaks into the baron’s castle and has a sword fight with him scared me witless!  I’m the sort who treasures early memories…