Armistice Day

  I’ve seen a few war movies lately, stuff like George Clooney’s Monuments Men. (I knew that the Nazis had stolen a lot of important art, but not that they’d destroyed so much—though I wasn’t surprised.) While westerns tend to celebrate the individual man of action, war movies are about teamwork.  I was thinking that the Star Wars movie Rogue One was like a war movie, but to explain this fully I’d have to spoil the ending!

Of course the war movie genre has its notorious cliches.  Like the unit who say “The hell we retreat!,” then they stay and fight and achieve a stunning victory. (Just once I’d like to seem stay and fight and instantly get wiped out…) Or the tough sergeant who pleads to the wounded soldier “Don’t die on me!” Or the soldier who says just before the big attack, “Who wants to live forever?” (Sounds good to me.) Or the POW telling the Japanese torturers, “All you’re getting from me is my name, rank and serial number!”

In her historical novel The King Must Die, Mary Renault mentions that November is the traditional month for human sacrifice.  I know this because William Manchester cited her at the end of The Death of a President, his 1967 history about Kennedy’s assassination.  He suggested that November 22 was one of several famous deaths that happened in that month.

Why do I mention this?  It occurred to me that November is an appropriate month for Armistice Day, considering that what we’re remembering is people being sent off to risk and often sacrifice their lives to serve the interests of their community.  That isn’t so different from ancient times, though now they’re sent to defeat other nations rather than to appease pagan gods.

Of course it’s important for a nation’s citizens to recognize the difficulties and sacrifices of their soldiers, even when they’re sent into the wrong wars. (Perhaps especially then!) But we do them no favour by pretending that a wrong war was actually right, that the criminal aggression they were ordered to carry out was actually a “just war.” In the USA, since the Vietnam War in the 1960s, there's been a tendency by the politicians at the top of the pyramid—I’m including the top generals—to hide behind the same soldiers they’ve put in harm’s way! “If you’re against our war, you’re against the boys fighting it!”  The truth is that most antiwar dissidents felt nothing but sympathy for the millions of GIs sent into ‘Nam, and many were motivated by wanting to bring them home while they were still in one piece.  One antiwar poster said “Support our troops—bring them home!”

American naval hero Stephen Decatur said, “Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong!” This was the start of the slogan “My country, right or wrong.” Yet Decatur did implicitly recognize that the USA could be in the wrong, and it shouldn’t be considered “anti-American” to point this out when it happens. (On the contrary, surely it’s in a nation’s true interest to recognize its fallibility.)  Too many people are implicitly saying “My country is never in the wrong, and if you say it is you’re unpatriotic!”

After 9/11 some Americans talked about moral clarity, but took it to mean “We’re the Good Guys, and our enemies are the Bad Guys!” Such “moral clarity” is just self-serving group loyalty based in doublethink, as George Orwell would surely recognize.  It leads society into the dangerous rationale, “We’re right and they’re wrong, therefore everything we do to fight them is automatically right.” That’s putting the cart before the horse:  it’s only when we do the right things—or at least avoid doing wrong things—that we can consider ourselves to be in the right.

My idea of true moral clarity is in Martin Luther King’s quote, “Every morning before we’ve finished breakfast, we are in debt to the farmer.” It should be about recognizing your own responsibilities and failings, not rationalizing your aggressions.

Predictable vs. Unpredictable

 

It’s funny about sex appeal.  Ever see this Italian actress Asia Argento? (Daughter of horror movie director Dario Argento…) She isn’t the most beautiful of actresses, but there’s something dynamite about her—the feeling she gives off that you don’t know what she’ll do next!  And that’s sexy. 

I’m not an expert on male sex appeal, but I suppose that young Marlon Brando in the 1950s must have exuded that feeling too. (Women, am I right?)

On the other hand, some actors are predictable.  Like Tom Bosley, who played Richie’s father on the Garry Marshall sitcom Happy Days.  He wasn’t a particularly bad actor, but you knew exactly how he’d act every time you saw him!  And in the TV sausage factory that produces 23 episodes per year of every prime-time show, such consistency is what producers often want.

Of course, TV shows are often predictable.  I was watching the World War II miniseries The Winds of War online just for Robert Mitchum. (He was too old for his role, but his performance grew on me.) There’s a scene in it where he’s playing chess with a German general.  I said to myself, “The German will put Mitchum in check, but Mitchum will end up pulling off a checkmate,” which (spoiler) is exactly what happens!

I saw the first part of an episode of Welcome Back, Kotter once—like Happy Days, it’s one of those shows featuring high-school students played by actors who are obviously over 21.  In this episode one of the Sweathogs got an after-school job in an antique shop handling precious Tiffany lamps.  Though I only saw that first part, I somehow knew that some Tiffany lamps were going to get smashed! (The audience would be disappointed otherwise.) If anyone’s seen that episode, tell me if I was wrong…

Movies can be predictable too.  I mentioned that Garry Marshall was the creative force behind Happy Days, and he went on to direct movie features.  He started out making sitcoms, but he never really stopped.  Consider his sequel to The Princess Diaries.  Ann Hathaway’s mother is a queen who wants to marry her off because she’s concerned about a pretender to her throne, who happens to be young, handsome and single.  I think we all know how the problem will be solved in the end….  It’s a case of the “idiot plot” where characters stumble around for the whole movie trying to figure out things that were perfectly obvious to the audience from the start.  Otherwise, the plot’s central problem would get solved too soon for a feature-length film!

The Eagles song “Hotel California” has incredibly predictable rhymes:

How they dance in the courtyard

Sweet summer sweat

Some dance to remember

Some dance to…

…preset?  …abet?  …offset?  …sublet?  …beget? (That one almost makes sense.)  …regret?  …upset?  …pirouette?

And people can be predictable, especially the young.  When I was fourteen I joined a swim team.  When I bicycled down to the swimming pool for practice, I’d pass by this group of boys, and the second they saw me they’d always stop what they were doing and jeer at me. (If it had just been one guy, he probably wouldn’t have bothered, but in a group together they felt empowered.)  What bothered me was that they were so predictable:  this didn’t happen most of the time but every single time!  It was like running a gauntlet.  There were guys like that in school—the moment they saw me that would remind them to start talking about me in a particularly unflattering way, as if I weren’t there!  Of course, they were making a point of dissing me in my presence:  status in school, like prison and the military, is often a zero-sum game where people can’t think of any way to raise theirs except at the expense of someone else’s.  And they really seemed to be enjoying it.

All this did get to me.  It bugs me when grownups say to kids, “Don’t let it bother you.” In my view, what they’re really saying is, “Your feelings are the weak link here.  It would be so nice if you just didn’t care…” Even worse is “You’re too sensitive!” It’s true that in my youth I was unusually thin-skinned.  But to me, that’s saying, “We can’t expect other things to be different, but we can expect you to force yourself to be less sensitive, or to keep your feelings to yourself!” But I’d better stop before I go an all day about it…

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!