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Pia Mater, Dura Mater

It’s Mother’s Day, so I thought I’d say a few words about our mum. I use “our” instead of “my” ‘cause I’m also speakin’ on behalf of my brothers, too. Our mother was an odd mixture of a proper English lady and a street tough.

Her father was Irish, but she was born in England after the pandemic (the one with the Spanish flu, not Covid-19.) Her adulthood coincided with World War II, when many retreated to the Underground (subway) tubes when the air raid sirens would sound.  She declined to join her fellow Britons, saying that if she were to die, she’d prefer that it not be in the Underground. During this war she would meet and marry the US serviceman who would bring her to the US.

Money was plentiful in the household, at least until the day the spigot turned off.  Bill collectors called the house demanding payment. “All right,” she told one particularly obnoxious collector.  “I’m coming to your office to dump the payment on your desk – all in pennies!”

This is Mother Jones, not our mum. So sue us!

The school we attended brought back the old-fashioned paddle thinking that corporal punishment was the way to make the boys toe the line (this practice did not extend to the girls.) My younger brother fell victim to the paddle’s blows and our mum went to the school to have a word with the Assistant Principal. She told him that disciplining her children was her purview, not his. He insisted that he was within his rights to paddle the boys if they stepped out of line. “How old are you?” she asked. The AP did not see why his age was relevant. “I have another son who is around the same age as you,” she said. “If you paddle one of my sons again, the same thing will happen to you.” The startled Assistant Principal accused her of threatening him. She concurred with this assessment.

The lesson that our mother taught repeatedly was the necessity of non-capitulation to people who would push others around. However, the thing I most remember about her is her toughness in the face of her own death. In her mid-eighties her health declined suddenly and she was hospitalized. During one of my visits, she looked at the various monitors connected to her.

“Let it all go!” she said.

“Let all what go, Ma?” I asked.

“All of it!” she responded.

She seemed to be telling me that she didn’t want to prolong her life by heroic measures. I teared up a little. She would have none of it. “Oh, come on now,” she said.  “Let’s not play silly devils.”

She entered home hospice and died soon after. Her sons planned her memorial service – no priests, no trappings of religion. Our mother had been religious, but institutions did not impress her.

Do I present our mother in a warm, nostalgic light? Have I created a mythologized version of her? Certainly. That same toughness of spirit could be maddeningly exasperating at times. Nevertheless, her refusal to capitulate to others’ terms stays with me.

Were she here today, I’d say “Happy Mother’s Day, Ma!” She would dismiss this by opining, “Mother’s Day is a holiday in which forced tribute is paid.“  She would then add, “I want none of that.” That’s our mum.

Andy Warhol Looks A Scream

Netflix has 7 part series about Andy Warhol. I’m not a big Andy Warhol fan – I always found his art a bit cold. At the same time, I’m not not an Andy Warhol fan. I started watching the series ’cause I was intrigued and wanted to find out what made the guy tick.

The series is based on the Andy Warhol Diaries, edited by Pat Hackett. Warhol started keeping a diary, but soon stopped writing it himself – he spoke with Hackett every morning via telephone and dictated the diary to her. The documentarists, with the approval of the Warhol Foundation, synthesized Warhol’s voice, thus we hear the entries as Warhol himself may have read them.

In the first episode, we learn that Warhol (family name Warhola) left Pittsburgh in 1949 and headed for New York. Warhol’s voice talks about walking up 7 flights of stairs with his sketches. It’s mentioned that Warhol was an artist for Glamour, Vogue, and Harper’s Bazaar, we see a few magazine covers, a few shots of illustrations of women’s shoes, and next thing ya know, it’s the 60s and Warhol is a sensation.  Wait, what? What happened during intervening years before Warhol made a name for himself?  The series never really explores this.

Then there’s the part where Warhol is shot, nearly fatally. (The fact that Warhol survived is almost miraculous – he had to wear a surgical corset for the rest of life.) Myself, I wanted to know more about the motives (if any) of his would-be assassin, but this angle went unexplored. I then read that the woman who shot him was later diagnosed with schizophrenia and shot Warhol because he had apparently lost her copy of a play she wanted him to produce. The play was so vulgar that Warhol thought he was being set up for entrapment.

The documentary explores the men in Warhol’s life, particularly Jed Johnson and film executive John Gould. Warhol seems to have crafted an image of himself as a celibate (he was not) gay man, perhaps to appear non-threatening to the rich and powerful into whose circles he was invited. Warhol received many commissions from wealthy patrons for warholized images of themselves. (I decided that the man had sold out.  My daughter Violet then pointed out that during the Renaissance, most artists made their living from rich patrons, so in that regard, he was in good company.)

In 1971, David Bowie met Warhol at the Factory (and would later play him in a film), but if this was mentioned, I sure missed it. The series says nothing about the song “Andy Warhol” from Bowie’s album “Hunky Dory” or what its subject thought of the song. I had to rely on Wikipedia to learn that Warhol apparently hated it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Warhol_(song)

The later episodes deal with Warhol’s collaborations with graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, the AIDS crisis of the 80s and Warhol’s death in 1987 after gall bladder surgery. The series would have made a great, say, three to five part series. Instead, it’s stretched over 7 episodes, but oddly, sometimes it’s what’s left out that’s puzzling (his aforementioned early career and the attempt on his life, for example.) I felt it could have been more tightly edited.

I didn’t come away knowing what made the guy tick, but that is not a fault of the documentary.  Warhol emerges as a shy man who nevertheless sought the limelight, a profoundly lonely and a not particularly happy man. He is a study in contradictions – an artist whose work was too raw and too underground for the mainstream (discussing Warhol’s early films, John Waters, no stranger to controversy himself, points out “you’d go to prison for that.”)  He hobnobbed with the wealthy and powerful. His pop art images were ubiquitous and made him a household name in the 1960s – decidedly not underground. I’m going to try to figure it all out over a bowl of Campbell’s soup…

“The Menu”, Mayhem, and Me

I haven’t written anything here in over a year, so this post essentially recalls this defunct ol’ blog to life. I like to talk about film, and the last one I saw is “The Menu”, starring Ralph Fiennes and directed by Mark Mylod. I deliberately avoided reading anything about the film before writing this, but I saw it described as a “black comedy horror film.” That seems about right, ‘cept to me, it’s a little light in the comedy department and a bit heavy on the horror (and the nihilism, which I’ll get to later.)

The film begins with a group of gourmands boarding a boat to the fictional Hawthorne Island. (Perhaps a reference to Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose “House of the Seven Gables” deals with a curse on a family? Tune in tomorrow to Reading-Too-Much-Into-It Theater to find out.) where Chef Slowik (Fiennes) has his restaurant. (Is Slowik a play on “slow wick?” Tune in tomorrow …) We get our first glimpse of the characters, including Tyler (Nicholas Hoult), a foodie wannabe and his date, Margot (played by Anya Taylor-Joy, whose wide eyes look like they were drawn by a Disney animator.)

Once on the island, the diners are given a tour by Elsa (Hong Chou), Slowik’s right-hand woman. The chef’s assistants live in a cramped Quonset hut and endure a grueling daily schedule (think Julia Child Meets Jim Jones.) This gives us our first inkling that things on the island are just a mite odd. Once the meal begins, things go from quirky, to weird, to downright unhinged as each course is served.

She’s not gonna take your guff, Mr. Fiennes!

I’ll get to the point; with any film, the question comes down to, “Did you like it?” I am forced to say no, I really didn’t like “The Menu”, despite having liked it in part – Fiennes always turns in a good performance, Taylor-Joy steals the movie, and there’s some great interplay between their characters; Margot is not cowed by Slowik and lets him know it. Truth to tell, though, I found the film, well, nihilistic. I’m not a fan of movies that paste on an upbeat ending, but “The Menu” is an overcorrection. Yes, I know, there are elements of satire in the film, which could be viewed as a commentary on those who bust their asses for a living and those who (in this case literally) consume the results of their labor. Nonetheless, in the end, nihilism is nihilism.

Maybe the real issue is that I’m just not in the target audience of this film, which I imagine to be a younger, hipper, horror-loving crowd. Perhaps it’s that the film has a gaping ”so-what?” factor. If you watch the film in its entirety, notice your reaction at its end. Mine was something like, “So what? I’ve watched this picture to its conclusion, endured a cinema of cruelty, and this is where we end? There are ultimately no surprises here. I figured it’d end on a note like this halfway through the movie. You’ve pursued a nasty premise to its nasty conclusion and the result is lighthearted and fun. (Just kidding – it’s actually nasty.)

As always, don’t take my word for it – your reaction may be completely different.

The Sycophant in the Room: An Open Letter to U.S. Representative Tim Walberg

Dear Tim,

Hi there! I thought I’d post this open letter to you because I know from experience that it does no good to write to you – you invariably respond with a form letter that ignores the substance of the original letter. (Don’t get me started about your telephone town halls – they’re a joke! ) To get to the point, Tim – your January 6 challenge to certifying Biden’s win was a craven act of sycophancy.

As Trump-enablers go, you’re a second-stringer, maybe even third string. You lack the notoriety of fellow Trump lackeys like Jim Jordan and Devin Nunes in the House and Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, and Lindsey Graham in Senate, but in challenging the vote certification, your obsequiousness was first rate!

• 

  Nice fish, Tim!

The form letter I received on January 21 makes a vague reference to “irregularities and the overstepping of state laws” in the 2020 Presidential election, but you seem curiously reluctant to be specific. You must know that of 62 lawsuits challenging the results of the 2020 Presidential election, 61 were dismissed. The only lawsuit that the Trump team won failed to change the result of the Pennsylvania election – Biden still won the state. Trump’s own Justice Department stated that no serious fraud had occurred. Coming from William Barr, the quintessential Trump enabler, that says a lot. As I write, Chris Christie (hardly a liberal) said the same on TV this morning.

After the debacle, you attempted to cover your own arse. On your Web page you wrote: “I strongly condemn this reprehensible behavior and call for all violence to cease immediately. Everyone who illegally breached U.S. Capitol grounds should be held fully accountable for their lawlessness.” What did you think was going to happen, Tim? Well before the election, Trump was selling the humbug that he could lose only if the voting process were rigged. Egged on by Trump’s incessant repetition of this lie (not to mention his incitement to insurrection on Jan. 6), the more violent members of Trump’s base stormed the Capitol. You aided and abetted the lie by stating beforehand that you’d object to the vote certification and by doing so even after the violence had occurred.

I would imagine that you want your constituents to forget your collusion in this tawdry affair. No doubt you want your vote against the Violence Against Women Act and your endorsement of birtherism to be forgotten as well. (In 2010, you called for measures “up to and including impeachment” if Obama did not reveal his birth certificate, which he had done in June 2008.) Though you may want to bury these things, my goal is the opposite – I would like to keep your actions in the minds of your district’s voters should you decide to run again in 2022.

Lastly Tim (and this question extends to the Republican party at large), why have you been so willing to fawn on Trump? You got a taxpayer-funded ride on Air Force One for which Trump may have expected your fealty in return, but if so, it doesn’t seem worth it. Trump may run again in four years, but that’s not guaranteed – with all the lawsuits he’ll be facing, it’s not impossible (though admittedly unlikely) that he’ll be in the slammer come 2024. And sure, Trump can do no wrong with his diehard base, but some former enablers are not so enamored of him now – I note that Moscow Mitch McConnell has already cut him loose. He knows that Trump can no longer help him confirm judges (including the 10 who received a “not qualified” rating from the American Bar Association.) He also knows that some corporations are pulling contributions to lawmakers who objected to the certification. MMM’s ability to follow the money is inversely proportional to his ethics – if he’s ditching Trump, so should you!¹

Well, I’ve said most everything I wanted to say, Tim. I gotta admit though, I’ve been wrong before – I didn’t think a con man like Trump could clinch the Presidency to begin with. I also didn’t foresee that some lawmakers would shed their integrity to be Trump’s willing stooges. I was wrong on both counts.

Your reluctant constituent,

Harry Calnan

1. Update: On January 6, 2021, M³ stated, “The voters, the courts, and the states have all spoken. If we overrule them, it would damage our republic forever.” Today (February 13, 2021), Moscow Mitch voted to acquit Trump. It seemed for a while there that Mitch was developing a late-blooming moral compass. No such luck.

Lurching Through Longmire

Blood platelet donation takes about two hours. With a needle in both arms, you can’t read a book, so the Red Cross came up with a brilliant solution – donors can watch Netflix as the platelet machine whirs. Last summer a nurse in a hijab prepared me for donation while I perused the Netflix offerings. When it came time to place the needles, I still hadn’t decided. “Ah”, she said, “That’s the trouble with Netflix – no one can decide what to watch. Here’s a show about a sheriff. He has a Native American friend that he’s known since childhood – you might like it.” With that, she started the first episode of “Longmire”, a show I’d never watched. I was about to protest that I hated crime shows, I disliked Westerns, and I preferred movies over TV shows. As I was not the only donor this busy nurse needed to take care of, I decided that I’d watch an episode or two of this show even though I hadn’t chosen it. I watched the first episode, and most of the second, until the machine dinged and my donation was complete.

Back at home I turned on Netflix and finished the second episode. Over the days and weeks that followed, I stuck with the series. Walt Longmire (Robert Taylor) is your basic laconic Harrison Ford type, sheriff of the fictional county of Absaroka Wyoming. His best friend is Henry Standing Bear (Lou Diamond Phillips), owner of the local watering hole.

I stared to really get into the show – there’s tension between Walt’s office and Mathias (Zahn McClarnon), the sheriff on the local Cheyenne reservation. Mathias has a bee in his bonnet ’cause Walt sent his old boss Malachi (Graham Greene!) to prison for corruption.  Walt is not one to bend the rules unless it’s absolutely convenient, but in time the two develop a grudging respect. But wait, there’s more!  Jacob Night Horse (A. Martinez) wants to build a casino, a move that Walt’s late wife opposed. If that wasn’t enough, one of Longmire’s deputies, Branch Connally (Bailey Chase), is running against him for sheriff.  Walt’s other deputies are Victoria Moretti (Katee Sackhoff), who has come to Wyoming to escape her past in Philadelphia and Archie (the Ferg) Ferguson (Adam Bartley), a hapless chap that Walt hired as a favor to the Ferg’s father.

OK, I watched the show and all, but there were elements that bugged me – as the series went on I was never comfortable with the not-so-subtextual sexual tension between Deputy Moretti and Longmire. This seemed particularly creepy in light of the fact that Longmire’s daughter Cady (Cassidy Freeman) is approximately the same age as Moretti and because of the boss/employee dynamics involved. Yes, I’ve read that this tension plays out in Craig Johnson’s novels upon which the series is based, but that doesn’t make it any less creepy.

Cut the creepy stuff, willya?

On the positive side, I liked the episodes where Lou Diamond Philips became a Zorro-like character and the ones where Graham Greene figured prominently.  The latter makes a really good bad guy. At times, the show contains elements of magical realism, as in the works Gabriel García Márquez.

You’re a heckuva bad guy, Graham!

If you decide to watch the series, avoid the last episode like the plague (or at least the part after all the gun-fightin’.) In my humble opinion, the final episode makes the unwise decision to tie up all the story lines into one big happy ending. I wanted to gag.

All in all, Longmire is a mixed bag – the show seldom achieves greatness, but it frequently achieves pretty-goodness.

Mulholland Drive: A Lynchian Labyrinth

David Lynch is not usually my cup of tea, but when my adult daughter suggested I view Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive”, I decided to take the plunge. I’d seen “Eraserhead” in my 20s but I don’t recall leaving the theater with a song in my heart. I’d also seen “The Elephant Man” (1980) and liked it well enough. Dune (1984) was the only other David Lynch film I’d seen, and that one had been a misfire from the word go. I was too chicken to see “Blue Velvet”, “Wild at Heart”, or “Lost Highway”, but what the heck, “Mulholland Drive” it would be.

“This movie sure is weird”

This is a film that is more fun to talk about than it is to actually watch. That sounds like a criticism, but I honestly don’t mean it that way – it is really fun to discuss this film with others after viewing it. It’s a film that’s hard to pin down. One could say that it is a psychological drama, or perhaps a hodgepodge of film genres (gangster films, Hitchcock thrillers, mysteries, musicals, Westerns.) You could call it a disjointed tale with kitschy symbols (keys, boxes, a surreal theater) and other scenes that have little relationship to the story(ies) of its two main characters. Is the first part of the film a dream that Naomi Watt’s character Betty Elms has in the “real” world of the second part of the film? At one point, I thought of Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil.”

On the other hand, that may be taking this film too seriously. Is the film just an intriguing put on? There are several darkly funny scenes that are tangential to the main drama. In one, a man describes a frightening dream he has had while sitting in the very restaurant that the dream took place. In another, a semi-competent hitman bungles the job and has to improvise. What the heck is Lynch doing?

Maybe the answer is that Lynch is doing both – the darkly comic scenes and the story of the films two female leads are both part of the fabric of Lynchland. I never watched the “Twin Peaks” television series, but I remember avid fans describing lovingly photographed shots of donuts on trays as an essential part of the whole Twin Peaks experience, along with dancing little people and the White Lodge.

The principal actors, Naomi Watts and Laura Harring both turn in strong performances, especially Watts, who is called upon to change the most radically. I also enjoyed seeing the final film performance by Ann Miller (Easter Parade.)

Mulholland Drive is a troubling, dark film and I didn’t exactly like it, per se. At the same time, I definitely didn’t hate it. The film is, among other things, an unsentimental look at Hollywood. In one scene, Watt’s aces her audition. After she leaves, the filmmakers are jubilant – they’ve found their leading lady. We then learn that the picture has almost no chance of actually being made. That’s show biz.

CEOs and Spaghetti Westerns

As I write, the spread of the Covid-19 virus might be slowing in the US (but the government will probably conclude too soon that the danger is over and reopen things prematurely, causing a second wave.)  I thank my lucky stars every day that I have a job that lends itself to working at home and I’m still employed.  I even feel kinda guilty about it.

Nevertheless, one gets a mite cranky being cooped up, so I’ve decided to write a cranky dis piece.  I’m worried that expressing negativity about anything will result in a karmic boomerang blast back at me. Nonetheless, I’ll be dissing a group that (in my humble opinion) doesn’t get enough dissing: CEOs. Now, Lord knows that there a lot of thing that these folks do that’s annoying, but I’m going for the low-hanging fruit – CEO e-mails (and posts by others about the CEO.)

I wish CEOs would understand that the last thing that we, the peons that work under them want to do is read their lengthy e-mails or posts. I used to work at Engulf and Devour until they spun off our division to More of the Same, Inc. The E&D PR machine was always putting out updates about the great things that the CEO was doing, the conferences she attended, and her “Q and A”s consisting of softball questions from fawning underlings. I don’t know who read these –  I just skipped past ’em on the company Web Site as I searched for information that I really needed.

The More of the Same’s CEO is in his way even worse with his rambling weekly e-mails.  The collective click he hears weekly is the sound of a thousand employees deleting unopened the malarkey he puts out. (He even has a site where he keeps the past malarkey that he put out.)

The 3 types of CEOs

 

Here are a few guidelines, CEOs:

1. Never put out an email longer that a few lines. Don’t hold forth about the symposium you attended, the wise insight you had, or the amusing anecdote about what happened when you were in Europe. We peons don’t care – we’re going to drop it in the bit bucket. (Of course, an uncomfortable corollary might be: Never put out a lengthy blog post about lengthy CEO posts.)
2. The only two things we do care about are
   a.) We’re all getting fat bonuses
   b.) we’re all being sacked.
   Nothing in between remotely interests us.
3. Don’t bother with corporate “jam sessions” or “focus groups”, where you ask for employee feedback unless you’re prepared to actually listen to your employees. I participated in one where the consistent feedback was that we employees lacked fundamental resources to do our jobs – we had to support our product’s interoperability with 3rd party software without having those software products on the premises. The company’s report about the “jam session” bore little resemblance to the actual feedback. Do that only if you want your employees to conclude that you’re disinterested in what’s really going on.
4. Don’t tell us how hard Phil Jones and Sue Smith worked on the Acme deal. We don’t know who they are and we don’t care.  Ditto Acme.
5. OK., this one’s not a CEO thing, but I’ll toss it in: Get rid of the corporate swag page on the company web site (the one hawking T-shirts, duffel bags, coffee mugs and the like.) If you give us a company t-shirt for free we might wear it to paint a wall or mow the lawn, but we’re not about to plunk down good money for stuff with the company logo on it.  We’re offended that you think we would.

Well, there you have it CEOs.  Though I doubt any of you read this blog, you can’t say that no one told you. And by the way, our lack of interest in this material actually has a silver lining – we’re reading the e-mails that we need to read to in order to do our jobs – anything else is nice, but ultimately fluff.

—————————————-
I had never seen “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” in its entirety until recently, and I must say I enjoyed it.  For no particular reason, this film is 3 hours long.  Its principals display a level of marksmanship that isn’t humanly possible (who could consistently hit a rope with a bullet from a hundred yards away?) and Eli Wallach’s over-the-top performance is fun to watch. Wallach’s “Tuco” continually refers to Clint Eastwood as “Blondie”, though no one in makeup seems to have got around to dyeing Eastwood’s hair.

Sure, it’s violent, but it manages to be entertaining.

Zombies, Mobsters, and Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman”

Everybody and her brother has already reviewed Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, and here’s my two cents. In my humble opinion, The Irishman is a good movie but not a great one. As history, it is dubious. As cinema, it’s not bad.

I would be remiss without mentioning the film’s use of technology, which has been a boon to filmmakers (but a curse to some audiences – it’s made the interminable Transformers films possible), allowing them to rejuvenate older actors though CGI wizardry. Scorsese employs it to his advantage here in his flashback sequences.

Back to the film – to me, movies about mobsters have the same problem that movies about zombies do; they’re not interesting characters. Zombies are inarticulate, they lumber around, and they eat your brain if they catch you. Mobsters are inarticulate, they’re chauffeured around, and they kill you if you cross them.

You guys just aren’t interesting

Robert DeNiro plays Frank Sheeran, a member of the Teamster’s union (and friend of Jimmy Hoffa) who tells his story to an unseen interlocutor. Scorsese begins the film with one of the long tracking shots that he also used in “Goodfellas”.

The story is then told in flashbacks as Sheeran, mobster Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci), and their wives begin an automobile journey to the Detroit suburbs, ostensibly to attend a Bufalino family wedding. The weekend happens to coincide with Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance.

Frank is apparently someone who wants to be liked, especially by mobsters; the film’s early scenes depict his willingness to pilfer sides of beef and act as a mob enforcer to ingratiate himself into the exciting world of Bufalino and his mob pals. Ever the eager beaver, Frank soon adds arson and murder to his resume, further establishing his credentials.

At length, Frank becomes the friend and confidante of Jimmy Hoffa, and the film kicks up a notch as Al Pacino enters the scene. I originally had my doubts about the casting of Pacino as Hoffa. Several actors have now played Hoffa, including Robert Blake (in the TV movie “Blood Feud”) and Jack Nicholson (in Danny DeVito’s “Hoffa” – a misfire of a film, though Nicholson’s performance was solid.) Everything I have read about Hoffa suggests that he was a man with little sense of humor, and I thought that Pacino’s performance would be too expressive. Pacino walks the line, acting larger than life and delivering lines that are funny without seeming to have the slightest clue that anything he says is humorous. Pacino delivers.

I’m gonna skip over the stuff about Hoffa’s disappearance for two reasons: 1.) I don’t want to spoil the film for you and 2.) as I’ve mentioned, the film’s accuracy is somewhat dubious – Scorsese is apparently more interested in telling a good story than he is in telling the literal truth.

The film is ultimately about the ravages of time – after Frank and Russell get sent to the big house (but not for their involvement with Hoffa’s disappearance, they’re in the joint for other stuff), we see their wizened forms as they play bocce in prison (with Pesci bowling from a wheel chair.) These once dangerous men are now pathetic old men. Frank gets out and ends up in a nursing home. In these scenes, Scorsese seems to be saying that the tritest thing that one can say is in fact the most profound: crime doesn’t pay.

“A Clockwork Orange” is brilliant cinema. Don’t watch it.

OK, after many months, this blog is now back from being a defunct blog to an actual blog again. The subject of this go-round is Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange.” I’m not going to recap the story or setup what happens in the film, as I think that those points are well-known by now.

In high school I borrowed the novel by Anthony Burgess from a classmate. When I returned the book, he naturally asked what I’d thought of it. I remember saying that I found it a little troubling that the main character had not changed at the end. He responded that everything was cool in the film version. “In the last scene, he’s f**ckin’ this girl,” he told me. Apparently, redemption happens through coitus. Years later I learned that the U.S. publisher had excised the novel’s last chapter, in which the narrator Alex indeed changes. I subsequently saw the film at a strip-mall theater that showed mostly offbeat films (John Waters’ “Pink Flamingoes” was representative of the theater’s usual fare.)  At the time, I viewed the film mostly in terms of its cinematic technique, which I found breathtaking. Over the years though, I’ve come to have reservations about the film, to the point where I wonder what Kubrick what thinking when he made it.

Got milk?

When asked what drew him to the story, Kubrick responded that the language, the characters, and pretty much everything about the novel intrigued him. The film begins with the famous close-up of a leering Malcolm McDowell with his eyes fixed on the viewer. The camera then dollies back, revealing Alex’s friends and the environs of the Korova milk bar. All the while, a synthesized version of Henry Purcell’s “Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary” plays in the sound track while Alex’s narrates. It’s an effective opening scene and others follow.

OK, so I won’t argue that the picture isn’t masterfully made (the balletic fight with Billy Boy’s gang, the high-speed orgy set to the William Tell Overture, the point-of-view shot as Alex jumps out a window, the film’s use of music, etc.)  It’s just that over time, I’ve come to see it as problematic.

Part of my new-found reticence is no doubt a reaction to revelations in the news about powerful men harassing, and even sexually assaulting women who worked under them. Against this backdrop, it’s hard to watch the film without feeling extremely uncomfortable. Adrienne Corri, who plays Mrs. Alexander in the film, appeared in many roles. She is best known however, for the brutal rape scene in “A Clockwork Orange.” When I re-screened the film to write this entry, I found I had to skip this scene.

If you read the book in addition to watching the film, it’s clear that Kubrick added erotic elements that are absent from the novel. In the scene where Alex kills the “Cat Lady”, erotic canvases hang on the walls (and the notorious rocking phallus sculpture is near the door.)  Not sure why Kubrick felt he needed to add those, but they’re there.  What’s up with that?

And what of that surrealistic scene at the end of “A Clockwork Orange”, the one that my classmate found so redemptive? Well, it turns out he was right – in a way.  The film ends with the implication that Alex has become less violent than he was at the beginning of the story, though it is only an implication. The final shot depicts Alex’s reverie of cavorting with a woman. It is the only scene in the film where a sexual encounter seems consensual, not forced. That’s something, I guess.

In the end, I’ve come to think of ACO as a film that is brilliantly made, but with a main character who is so abhorrent that watching the film is a deeply unpleasant experience.

This-is-neither-here-nor-there-deparment – Upon viewing the film again, I noticed that Patrick Magee as the writer delivers a performance that’s way over the top, especially in the later scenes where he takes Alex in, not realizing that Alex is the brutal criminal who visited his home earlier.  So over the top is Magee’s performance that I was amazed that I’d failed to appreciate how absolutely unhinged it really is. It kinda works, though.

Outlander Is Looking Tired (and Its Ethics Are Somewhat Elastic)

Outlander (or Droughtlander, so-called because of the long gaps between seasons) is in its fourth season, the penultimate episode of which will air tonight.  I’ve written about the show each season, but it now seems like a bit of a chore.  I mean, the series is OK and all, but it’s been kinda boring this time around – it makes Barry Lyndon look like The Fast and the Furious.

 

Are you guys gettin’ tuckered out?

North Carolina before the American Revolution just isn’t as exciting as, say, the intrigues in France of the second season, when our protagonist was running around Paris in décolleté fashions, hobnobbing with royalty, trying to prevent the battle of Culloden, and the like.  This season, Clare meets George Washington and takes out a guy’s ruptured appendix in the same night (and without getting blood on her elaborate  gown.)  Well done. Nonetheless, something isn’t the same.  Part of this may be that us viewers have to get used to Clare becoming a supporting player in a series that is ostensibly all about her.  This season, Clare’s daughter Brianna has made the leap backward in time and so has her sort-of husband Roger. The youngsters have to some degree taken center stage, and perhaps that takes some getting used to.  Clare and Jamie don’t even appear in one of the episodes (though, to be fair, the younger couple manage to carry the story just fine. )

Even when Clare and Jamie appear, the ol’ excitement isn’t there (like nearly getting burned at the stake for being a witch as happened in the first season – that was intense.)  This time around, Clare spends the better part of an episode nursing Lord John Grey though his bout with the measles while Jamie hangs out with John’s (really, Jamie’s) son.  Sure, I get it – sometimes there needs to be a transitional episode and not every segment of the story has to be full of “Damn the torpedoes!” moments.  Nevertheless, conflict is the stuff of drama, and we masses must have our bread and circuses.

The other thing that I noticed (and maybe my beef here is more with Diana Gabaldon, the author of the novels on which the series is based rather than the screenwriters) is that Jamie and Clare’s ethics seem to get stricter and/or looser depending on the situation at hand.  In an early episode, the time-crossed couple end up at a plantation run by Jamie’s aunt Jocasta. Auntie wants Jamie to take over the running of the place, but our heroes are so disgusted by the mistreatment of the slaves and the abject racism that they pass up the offer. Why?  Would they not be in a position to root out and dismiss cruel overseers, improve living conditions, transition the workers from slaves into de facto tenant farmers, and in time free them outright?  The episode depicts how the law itself was used to ensure that slavery remain entrenched, but still, it seemed to me that this avenue remained unexplored because the plot requires Jamie and Clare to accept a tract of land in North Carolina granted by the British crown.  Anyhoo, given the fact that they’re so repulsed by the cruelty that is the plantation’s very underpinning, why do they send the pregnant Brianna to live with Jocasta while they seek Roger, who has been sold to a tribe of Mohawks?  (That’s a longer story – I won’t go into it.)  I mean c’mon guys – if you’re so bogued out by the cruelty of the plantation, don’t send your daughter to live there even temporarily ‘cause you’re in effect turning a blind eye to the very thing you quite rightly despise.  Sheesh!

As usual, I don’t know where I’m going with this and I’m off in the weeds.  I guess in the main, the show seems to be losing steam and I have the impression that everyone involved is getting a little bit tired of doing it.