I read the new Sirenia Digest to-day which contains the new Caitlin R. Kiernan story "The Beholder's Share". I think it's one of the best stories ever to have appeared in the Digest. It's a first person narrative describing a pair of lovers' encounter with a sinister stack of antique books. As someone who collects antique books myself, I could really dig it. It contains references to H.P. Lovecraft's "Haunter of the Dark" though I also found myself thinking of "The Uncommon Prayer Book", an MR James story I read recently. "The Beholder's Share" does a great job of conveying an impression of distorted reality and memory.
Lately I've had a frustrating tendency to fall asleep during movies, even movies I'm enjoying. I knew it was going to happen last night so I deliberately chose a movie to fall asleep to, 1953's Angel Face. It's nice just being in the presence of Robert Mitchum and Jean Simmons as they perform a well written scene together. I'd forgotten Herbert Marshall has a supporting role in the film. I'd just recently watched him in Four Frightened People from almost twenty years earlier. Few actors gracefully transition from leading roles to supporting roles. Edward G. Robinson had to be coaxed into accepting the supporting role in Double Indemnity and it turned out to be possibly the best role of his career, certainly the one that's most remembered to-day. It still amazes me that Marshall had such a long acting career with a concealed false leg.
And last night I dreamt that I poured a lot of J&B scotch into a Glenlivet bottle. Don't know why.
I dreamt this after watching what many consider to be the worst episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. 1989's "Up the Long Ladder" really feels like three episodes awkwardly pasted together. The best of the three is the shortest in which Worf suddenly collapses on the bridge and Doctor Pulaski lies for him because he's embarrassed to admit he fainted. In gratitude, he shares a Klingon tea ceremony with her. The tea is deadly to humans so Pulaski takes an antidote. I really wondered what the tea tasted like.
Then it's downhill as the episode gets caught up in a plot about two ancient earth colonies: one filled with rural Irish stereotypes and the other filled with clones. One of the Irish stereotypes is a beautiful, angry young woman who flirts with Riker by constantly telling him she needs to wash her feet and asking him just where the hell a woman can do that on this fancy Starfleet ship. It's made clear she's looking for a husband yet the two inexplicably have a one night stand without a complaint from her.
Here's the moment where I fought the urge to stop watching the episode:
Yet, as bad as that plot is, I have to give the prize to the clone plot. When Riker and Worf see four identical women on the planet, they immediately assume they're quintuplets while anyone watching will immediately say, "Clones." Pulaski secretly tests one with a tricorder and there's this idiotic moment where she says, "Clones!" And then everyone takes turns saying "Clones."
It's like going into McDonalds and saying, "French fries? French fries? French fries."
When Riker and Pulaski are cloned against their will, the two of them immediately execute their nearly fully formed adult clones with phasers. This unauthorised cloning was done to perpetuate the colony, the people of which are no longer interested in sexual reproduction. When it's decided that the two colonies should combine, the clone colony with the Irish stereotype colony, Pulaski tells them every woman will be obliged to have children with at least three different men to ensure genetic diversity for the survival of the colony. The episode sadly concludes before it can deal with that heavy kettle of fish.
X Sonnet 1921
Restrictive nights combine the dreams of bats.
A timer shrieks, alerting certain rocks.
A book conceals a rack of headless hats.
The day concludes with cries of bootless socks.
A speechless song could not traverse the years.
Absorbing rainy time was spongy snow.
Consuming gods withheld Poseidon's beers.
A tiny brocc'li heart begins to glow.
The angry orc could only prove the elves.
Outrageous dwarves were drawn to snowy dames.
A line of books has bent the cheesy shelves.
Expanding pictures broke the rotten frames.
With little hope, the sun prepares its tea.
At dawn, horizons fell beneath the sea.
There were lots of whales and walruses in my dream last night. First, I dreamt I was with someone, I don't know who, on an enormous, soggy beach on a gloomy day. It was a very flat beach with lots of smooth puddles mirroring the sky. We were talking about walruses suffering from some kind of malignant genetic mutation and as we spoke I started seeing what looked like slugs, about a foot long each. It was just three or four and they were hard to see, their brown skin roughly the same colour as the sand. I followed one as it disappeared into a mound about the height of my chest. I peered inside and could just make out the thing nervously writhing.
In my other dream, I was at an enormous water park that encompassed an area of sea just offshore about the size of a small town. It was a stormy day and the waves were very high but no-one seemed especially concerned about our tour boat. From there, me and a group of friends beheld a series of whales kept in massive mason jars that were partly submerged.
After we went home, I rounded up another group of friends and took them to see the same whales in big jars. I guess this all could've been because I was reading Moby Dick again yesterday.
Jack Nicholson is checked in to a mental institution and his skills as an amateur therapist quickly outshine the nurses and doctors in 1975's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The film certainly has a valid point even if it does stack the deck a bit.
The administrative staff aren't even convinced Randle McMurphy (Nicholson) is as crazy as he would have them believe. He may be feigning mental illness entirely to avoid prison labour, having been convicted for having sex with a fifteen year old girl. His charisma and provocative antics rapidly win the sympathy and loyalty of the inmates over the consummately starchy Miss Ratched (Louise Fletcher). When Randle successfully gets the other inmates to vote to have the World Series shown instead of listening to Ratched's sedate classical selections yet again, she's compelled to change the voting rules so that even inmates who are clearly incapable of comprehending the vote must also be counted. Naturally, this only shores up more loyalty for Randle.
The movie's trajectory is pretty clear from the beginning but it's certainly true to life. A lot of critical thought about the film is concerned with the nature of true madness but I don't think it presents a fair argument on that. Randle takes them all out for a fishing trip and there's miraculously not even one significant mishap. What if there had been, as likely would've been the case? Would that have proved Randle wrong and Ratched right? No, because the real argument isn't about who's mad but about who's genuinely concerned for his or her fellow human being. Randle intuitively knows that providing the inmates with opportunities to gain a sense of self-worth will be more constructive than Ratched's philosophy of mental and physical sedation.
The film has a great cast. Both Nicholson and Fletcher are great and the supporting cast is flawless, featuring Will Sampson, Brad Dourif, Christopher Lloyd, Danny DeVito, and Scatman Crothers.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is available on The Criterion Channel.
Cutie Street, a Japanese idol group that formed last year, asks, "かわいいだけじゃだめですか? " Is just being cute inadequate? Not if cuteness is what you seek and it seems to have satisfied the 31 million people who have viewed the video in the past four months.
This was one of five or six groups that students recommended to me recently. On the flipside are groups like Creepy Nuts and Mrs. Green Apple, the latter now having enjoyed ten years of stressing out Japanese English teachers who are trying to get students to refer to married and unmarried women alike as "Ms."
As someone who's never been convinced that words attaching significance to gender or marital status are inherently bad, I say, long live Mrs. Green Apple.
But is cuteness enough? I suppose it ought to be. But I also like violent video games and savoury foods so maybe I'm a lost cause.
I remain grateful to the student who recommended Sabrina Carpenter to me last year. Her career really seems to be taking off, or at least the old guard celebrity elite in America seem to think so. She had a duet with Paul Simon at the recent Saturday Night Live anniversary show and she recorded a new music video for her song "Please Please Please" with none other than Dolly Parton sharing vocals.
I was talking to someone yesterday about how much I used to dislike pop princesses like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilara. With Sabrina Carpenter, Taylor Swift, Carly Rae Jepson, and others, we seem to be in a much better era of pop princesses, which is I guess is one way the 21st century has improved on the '90s. There had to be at least one improvement, you know.
X Sonnet 1920
No dancing dollar woke the jolly bird.
Corruption spurned a sweetened halter top.
Resentment builds another loaded word.
And gangsters hoard a vital staple crop.
A desert day obscured the winter morn.
The takers trudge ahead to find a test.
Another group of figures sure were born.
A school will bulge with Mother Gaia's best.
Excessive plants have broken glass and clay.
The pots were made by stingy folks and worms.
A ruthless snow obscures the brilliant day.
But savage fighters take the angry terms.
A paper fight will cut the tiny thumbs.
A vacuum god will snort the trail of crumbs.
I couldn't help thinking of this joke from Futurama when I was watching "Pen Pals", a 1989 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It has to be among the episodes that most spectacularly fail at showing the android Data as incapable of emotion. He intercepts a transmission from a little alien girl on a technologically undeveloped world threatened by volcanic destruction. Data seems to have very little compunction about soliciting Picard to violate the Prime Directive, the Federation rule that prohibits contact with intelligent species who have not achieved space travel. The whole episode hinges on Data's pity for the girl and willingness to transgress any rule to save her and her planet, which it turns out is on the edge of destruction. Which is sweet but, you know, hardly in character.
The episode has a minor subplot with Picard showing off his horseback riding skill to Troi which really felt like something Patrick Stewart must have lobbied for.
It's worth remembering that Picard is being so affectionate with an entirely AI generated animal. Sometimes Star Trek didn't even know when it was being prophetic.
Star Trek: The Next Generation is available on Netflix.
Oh, you didn't think I was finished talking about Lost Highway with yesterday's entry, did you? I feel like I could talk about it forever.
I wonder if many people have considered the possibility that Lynch looked at Mr. Eddie (Robert Loggia) as a heroic character. For all his bluster, the only person we actually know he killed was Marilyn Manson, who may have been a demon. There's the tailgating scene and certainly he's excessively violent there. But I remember an interview with Michael Anderson on the first Twin Peaks season one DVD in which he talked about riding with Lynch and witnessing someone tailgating him. Lynch shrugged it off but Anderson commented that the tailgater was such an asshole that he would have been furious had he been in Lynch's shoes. Then, years later, Anderson saw that scene in Lost Highway and figured Lynch got his revenge. After Lynch and Michael Anderson, who was the dwarf on Twin Peaks, had a falling out, Lynch made a scene in the third season of Twin Peaks in which Agent Cooper nearly rips off a dwarf's hand, egged on by a talking cgi tree that took the place of Anderson in the role. So Lynch was not above indulging in cathartic violence vicariously through his characters.
Loggia believed he got the role as Mr. Eddie because he gave a memorably violent audition for Frank Booth, the role that Dennis Hopper eventually played in Blue Velvet. But Frank is utterly amoral while Mr. Eddie clearly has a kind of moral code. Mr. Eddie was a gangster but consider how the Mitchum brothers, the two gangsters on the third season of Twin Peaks, turned out to be heroic characters. So I think it's possible that Lynch considered Mr. Eddie a better man than Fred Madison. After all, Renee certainly seems to be happier with Mr. Eddie.
Following on from what I said yesterday about Lost Highway and surveillance culture, I remember when I watched the movie with my grandfather he mentioned that the prison you see Fred in, in which guards on a catwalk above could look down on the prisoners in cells without ceilings, was an actual prison design implemented in France.
I suppose I would be kind of remiss for not mentioning the panopticon, the prison designed so that prisoners would never know whether or not they're being watched at any given time. Michel Foucault famously used the panopticon has a point in discussion about modern discipline and it was used in the 1984 film version of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Of all the songs on Lost Highway's famous soundtrack, it's The Smashing Pumpkins' "Eye" that best connects with this idea.
I think my favourite track is Nine Inch Nails' "Perfect Drug", though, even though it's barely in the movie. Mark Romanek's music video for it is still amazing.
1997's Lost Highway is probably about a conflict between perception and reality. I say probably because the one thing everyone agrees on about it is that it's open to interpretation. In fact, it demands interpretation if you want it to be coherent at all. Which, honestly, it doesn't need to be. You know you can enjoy a movie for mood and aesthetic alone and Lost Highway certainly fits the bill.
I've certainly interpreted it plenty of times over the years but great art is always alive, always ready to twist around and change on you. The movie's different because I'm different, to paraphrase Bruce Willis' character in 12 Monkeys when he was watching Vertigo. It's impossible for me to watch Lost Highway now without thinking about surveillance culture in Japan, where I've lived for the past five years. While stalking and illegally recording people are both crimes in Japan, the punishments for them are often light and meaningless and camera technology has advanced and proliferated so rapidly as to be beyond anyone's control. It's not just men secretly recording women, either. Camera technology is advancing in a collective culture for which people maintaining a communal perspective on the activities of one another was already fundamental. The existence of love hotels is testimony to this fact. A dating couple can't expect privacy in their own homes thanks to the constant presence of gossiping neighbours. Even at the love hotels themselves, doors lock guests in when other guests are in the hall, because even there there's a chance of gossiping witnesses.
In light of this, it's hardly surprising that kids are increasingly saying they want to be VTubers, Virtual YouTubers, when they grow up. Why devote yourself to this life where your community is constantly poised to reduce you to walking meat when you can create a beautiful artificial life, tailored entirely to your tastes?
That brings me back to Fred Madison. Every interpretation of Lost Highway highlights that line, early on, when he's asked why he hates video cameras. "I like to remember things my own way . . . How I remembered them. Not necessarily the way they happened." The common interpretation of the film is that the reason the events it depicts are filled with logical problems is that we're seeing Fred's distorted memory. The video tapes that mysteriously turn up on Fred and Renee's doorstep force Fred to see the reality that he would prefer to avoid in favour of his creative memories.
One question I rarely see addressed is over the identity of the person behind the camera. Most people, myself included, assume it's the "Mystery Man" played by Robert Blake, an apparently supernatural entity who demonstrates his ability to be in two places at once or appear and disappear at will. Some people interpret the Mystery Man as a manifestation of Fred's conscience. But if the video tapes are meant to represent unfiltered reality, that can't be true. I generally feel the Mystery Man is meant to be an actual demon, possibly from the Black Lodge if Lost Highway is set in the same world as Twin Peaks. Another thing people tend not to talk about is Marilyn Manson's cameo in the film's climax, surprising considering how significantly the film frames the scene. When Mr. Eddie asks, "What do you guys want?" it's video of the snuff film in which Manson is apparently killed that the Mystery Man shows Mr. Eddie in response. After this, the Mystery Man, not Fred, shoots and kills Mr. Eddie. My interpretation has long been that Manson's character is another demon and the Mystery Man is seeking revenge for his death, using Fred Madison as an instrument of that revenge. Consider how visually similar Manson and the Mystery Man are. Both have shaved eyebrows, white face paint, and dyed black hair.
The Mystery Man may not be merely a symbol within the story but you could take him as one in the more traditional sense of storytelling. He's a demon like Saint Augustine talked about, one feeding a perspective of violence to Fred, pulling at a thread in Fred's psyche. Another thing I'm surprised people don't talk about is just how violently Renee is murdered. Director David Lynch said that he was inspired by the O.J. Simpson trial and Simpson's murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown. Brown was murdered very violently, stabbed multiple times and her throat so deeply gashed as to nearly decapitate her. That's still not even close to what was done to Renee who in the video is shown to be torn in half, her entrails stretched across the floor, and her leg and arms severed. How and why Fred did this are two questions I'd think everyone would be asking.
The woman being torn in half is likely to remind anyone aware of Hollywood history of the infamous Black Dahlia murder. Elizabeth Short was similarly mutilated though her murderer went to the further extremes of leaving her body naked in a public place and carving a Glasgow smile on her face. It's hard not to see the Dahlia murder as a form of demented artistic expression in which the killer used Elizabeth Short's body to make something new. The act itself seems not only to be a denial of Short's dignity and desires but a comment on that denial. He reduced her to meat and a parody of woman, a parody of the idea that a human being can be anything more than meat.
As Shakespeare's King Lear put it;
O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous.
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man’s life is cheap as beast’s. Thou art a lady;
If only to go warm were gorgeous,
Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear’st,
Which scarcely keeps thee warm.
Lost Highway is bookended by "I'm Deranged", a song by David Bowie from his Outside concept album which tells the story of a future where artists frequently kill and mutilate people as a form of artistic expression. So I think it's reasonable to assume this was on Lynch's mind.
The video of Fred with Renee's mutilated body is not just forcing Fred into a perspective, it's forcing Renee into one, too. In reality, a human being is blood, flesh, and bone. It's in our minds that we have more than nature needs, where we create personae and sort the narratives of our lives. Some people interpret Fred's preference for subjective reality as an inherently bad thing but David Lynch did not share this view. In an interview about the film, Lynch said,
"So it just shows you how you remember things is not necessarily the way it actually happened. But it's the way you remember it and it's maybe even more valid than the actual thing in some ways." Fred is unbalanced and subject to "psychogenic fugues". But his mind is also the one that perceives the beautiful "This Magic Moment" sequence and the "Song to the Siren" sequence, both cases where Renee, in the form of a character named Alice, is at the centre of exceptionally beautiful filmmaking. The mind may be led astray, but it's also what ennobles our existence. When one considers that, it makes sense that the Mystery Man is both the agent of objective reality and Fred and Renee's ultimate destruction.
Here's what I honestly think happened. At some point during his first term, Trump had a conversation with Putin about how powerful countries used to go out and conquer new territory and why don't they do that anymore? Putin said with his military power he could easily do just that and Trump replied he could do it purely with real estate transactions. Putin scoffed and so the two men made a bet; Putin would conquer all he could militarily, beginning with Ukraine, and Trump would get all he could by negotiation. That's what I think's happening. Trump's making bids for so many countries because he has to make up for lost time.
Maybe that's why I was in the mood to watch Disney's Pocahontas last night (incidentally, Pocahontas is Trump's nickname for Elizabeth Warren because she mistakenly claimed to have Native American heritage). It's the movie with an Australian playing an Englishman with an American accent. It's certainly funny watching such a nakedly leftwing movie starring a man who I heard deny evolution on Joe Rogen a few days ago. Mel Gibson is truly nuts and it's fascinating watching him talk, watching his eyes roll around like a girl speaking tongues for a Salem witch trial. I still say Passion of the Christ is a terrible film, not for its ideology but because it does things like illuminate night scenes with massive floodlights.
Disney's Pocahontas is really sexy which always makes the movie a pleasure to watch. Though maybe less credit ought to go to Glen Keane than is generally given because of how realistic the proportions of the characters are in that movie and how much they resemble the live action models.
It's almost rotoscoping.
Happy Valentine's Day, everyone in this time zone. I could've watched It Happened One Night on The Criterion Channel but I chose poor dated little Pocahontas as my Valentine instead. Maybe I have a soft spot for misbegotten art. It's still edifying, or it ought to be, that Disney thought Pocahontas was going to be the big hit and The Lion King, which was made at the same time, was going to be just a little side project. Hollywood underestimating America's conservatism is nothing new.
X Sonnet 1919
Revealing toys deserve an extra paste.
Connexions break before the bot can walk.
Your morning choc'ate primes your better taste.
Magenta jelly hearts can warmly talk.
The loving coat conducts his dame to court.
Beginning dances blot the soggy card.
The walls were pasted thick with floral sort.
Expensive wine was used to pay the bard.
Her feet were cut with brazen diamond rings.
A rocky floor was thus her battlefield.
The whiles a drunken local crooner sings.
Absurdist dreams do jagged princes yield.
As sharpened crystal hearts would pierce the ball
Her triumph saged the kingdom's boozy fall.
One of the things I love about living in Japan is the wind. It gets really strong and eerie. It kind of kept me up at 2am, though. Something was banging around, hopefully nothing important.
It a nice follow up to a nicely creepy episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation I watched, a second season episode called "Time Squared". The crew of the Enterprise comes across a Starfleet shuttle and when they bring it aboard they find it's in fact an Enterprise shuttle complete with its own Captain Picard unconscious inside. But there's something wrong with both vessel and man. The latter can't regain consciousness though he appears oddly panicked. I like how Troi is brought into the episode by significantly walking into frame after the copy Picard is wheeled off in a gurney. She confirms it's really Picard.
Polanski says the second Picard is "out of phase" somehow. I wish this episode had better technobabble. I know "out of phase somehow" isn't what her tricorder readout says. What exactly are we talking about?
Anyway, it's a good episode. There were a few moments that seem tonally off from what the show became in later seasons and I got a kick out of them. There's a scene were Troi and Polanski debate about Picard's mental fitness that was really awkward and premature but somehow enjoyable for that.
Star Trek: The Next Generation is available on Netflix.
Rebellious Japanese teenagers deal with the presence of Americans and American culture in 1956's Crazed Fruit (狂った果実). The film has a similar flavour to American delinquent movies which dealt with teens in a world of changing cultural and familial dynamics. Crazed Fruit has a mostly average ensemble cast with the exception of a terrific performance from a young Ishihara Yujiro who sells the drama and suspense excellently.
Ishihara plays the elder brother of innocent young Haruji (Tsugawa Masahiko). It's Haruji's innocence that draws the eye of beautiful young Eri (Kitahara Mie).
Director Nakahira Ko uses rapid editing and expressionistic lighting to establish the fast, hedonistic lifestyle of the "sun tribe" (太陽族) boys who even count an American boy named Frank among them--actually played by Okada Masumi whose father was Japanese and mother was Danish. But he passes as American well enough in the movie.
Ishihara's character, Natsuhisa, immediately deduces there's something more to Eri than meets the eye when he dances with her and she doesn't recoil from his closer embrace. It turns out she has an American husband twice her age. Natsuhisa, now concerned for his little brother, confronts her about this and she explains that her relationship with Haruji is meant to make up for youthful experience she was robbed of when she was compelled to marry the American. The situation is a direct commentary on a phenomenon of Japanese and American intermarriage occurring in Japan after World War II and more broadly on fears concerning an erosion of Japanese cultural values and life patterns. Considering the film's noted similarity to American delinquent movies of the period, the problems experienced by these teens may have been more universal than the filmmakers realised. It functions as a good suspense drama in any case.
Crazed Fruit is available on The Criterion Channel.
I read the latest Sirenia Digest to-day which has the new Caitlin R. Kiernan story called "DARKNESS, ON THE FACE OF THE DEEP". It's another nice, gloomily atmospheric piece.
Like many of Caitlin's stories for the Digest, it consists of dialogue between two lovers. It's told in first person by a writer who's gone to stay at a seaside cabin while working on a novel. Strolling on the beach one day, the writer sees something strange and elects not to inform anyone. I'd say it's ultimately a story about communication and how much responsibility one has for their isolation. With the gloomy beach setting, it could've been an Ingmar Bergman movie.
I watched Lost Highway on Sunday, planning to blog about it on Monday but realised I have too much to say about the film. So I've been reading and watching analyses of it made by others in preparation for a much longer essay I'll probably write this coming weekend. Unsurprisingly, most of the videos covering it on YouTube regurgitate the same observations. One of the few unique takes I came across argued that Fred Madison's derangement comes from his bitterness at being a terrible saxophone player. It was no joke. You may not like the song, "Red Bats with Teeth," and it's deliberately designed to be abrasive, but only a highly competent saxophonist could handle it.
I blame the analyst's lack of exposure to avaunt-garde music.
To-day's a holiday here in Japan and I've already squandered most of it playing Skyrim. I've been playing with another modded companion character, this one a really impressive piece of work called Ashe: Crystal Heart. In addition to a number of innovative gaming features, Ashe has easily the best voice actress I've heard in any mod so far. Which is no surprise since she's a working professional named Anna Rust who has appeared in numerous films and television series. She even has a Wikipedia entry. Skyrim modding is getting out of hand and it's great. I reiterate; this is a totally free, user made mod.
It comes from a modder called Martimus who also made the Serana Dialogue Add-On. And, like that mod, the writing is sometimes too cheesy and effusive. But most of it is good enough and Anna Rust's performance boosts it considerably.
Last night I dreamt that Disney took over the world and things got worse and worse by slow degrees. People were prohibited from taking in any media from outside the company and even unedited versions of Disney's own past catalogue. There was a woman who somehow smuggled in goods in her big orange Spanish skirt. It may or may not have been due to this that Disney next demanded everyone's clothes. In our large, brightly lit rooms with walls painted with blue skies and clouds, people were ordered to pile their clothes in the middle of the room under constant surveillance. Somehow I kept a DVD copy of The Return of the King: Extended Edition hidden.
I guess I've always had a kind of love/hate relationship with Disney. I'm fascinated by their best work but put off by their aggressive corporate identity. When I came up with Boschen and Nesuko in junior high school over thirty years ago, the tyrannical Zai'Pi Corporation was based on Disney. In one of the novels I wrote but never published, Nesuko even talks about her conflicting feelings about Zai'Pi, how she remembered loving the animation as a child yet it sits oddly beside the devastating impact the company had had on her life. To be sure, she, and I, had worse problems.
A man goes great lengths to redeem his name from the charge of cowardice in 1939's The Four Feathers. Every source I read on this film sees fit to mention it is "widely regarded as the best of numerous film adaptations of the 1902 novel" it's based on. I've never read the novel nor seen the other adaptations but the 1939 film is damned good.
Directed by Zoltan Korda and actually filmed on location in Sudan and England, it concerns the Mahdist War from the end of the 19th century. Harry Faversham (John Clements) comes from a military family who has pressured him all his life to join the ranks. Only, when it comes to it, it turns out all their stories of bloody war and people shamed for cowardice has had the unintended effect of convincing him to bow out entirely. He seems to think he can do so without any shame and explains to his fiancee, Ethne (June Duprez), in a calm and even slightly enthusiastic tone that he can stay home and build a family with her.
How do you sympathetically show a woman disappointed that her man is not going off to war? With great restraint and an intensely beautiful actress. Deprez in her soft blue gown and magenta lipstick has no reaction but to cast her eyes down in some visible confusion. Harry's three best friends are more strident, each sending him a white feather with obvious symbolism. Ethne won't give him one but Harry bitterly takes one from her fan in ironic self-reproach. That makes four.
After his friends have gone and Harry seems basically separated from Ethne, he regrets his actions and takes the extraordinary measures of going to Sudan and disguising himself as a mute local worker. So begins his adventures that culminate in a terrific sequence where he leads a young Ralph Richardson, one of the three friends who sent him feathers, through the desert after he'd been blinded by sunstroke.
Those looking at this film through a modern lens might deplore the implicit approval for British colonialism, though it would be hard to argue the British were morally in the wrong in this conflict. But I suspect the most jarringly antiquated cultural aspect is in its celebration of bravery. For decades now, placating fear has been more encouraged than overcoming it with emphasis on therapy and sketchy pseudo-psychological concepts like trigger warnings. I sometimes feel I'm one of very few people left on earth who still dislikes cowardice. The imperative to avoid difficult issues and uncomfortable confrontations that has now been deemed a virtue seems to me detrimental to a society's ability to properly function. As John Milton put it, "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race."
So I found The Four Feathers a deeply satisfying film. Ralph Richardson gives a great performance and you can see how carefully he studied the mannerisms of the blind to play his part.
The Four Feathers is available on The Criterion Channel.
Netflix needs a feature that keeps track of when I fall asleep during a show. I fell asleep during the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode called "The Dauphin" and woke up in the middle of the next one, called "Contagion". I woke up and Geordi LaForge was tumbling about in a turbolift and I had no idea why. It occurred to me it would be kind of a great prank if an entire 45 minute episode consisted of just that with no explanation.
I went back and watched "The Dauphin" properly, and I'm glad I did because it has a very brief cameo by Madchen Amick I'd forgotten all about. Actually, I probably hadn't watched the episode since 1989 and therefore had no idea at the time she'd be on a show I loved called Twin Peaks.
Wesley Crusher falls in love with the beautiful title character who, along with her governess/nursemaid, turns out to be a shapeshifter. Oddly, when the Dauphin wants to follow Wesley's advice and stay aboard the Enterprise instead of carrying out her destiny to live on a hell world the rest of her life, Picard doesn't even consider granting her asylum. He just tells Wesley to stay away from her. That's sloppy writing. I feel like a couple seasons later, the writers would immediately take that as an opportunity for a conundrum.
The episode really drops the ball by keeping her mission vague. It's hard to decide how selfish she's actually being.
Star Trek: The Next Generation is available on Netflix.
X Sonnet 1918
A thousand steps were melted down to lumps.
To swallow stone, the titan brews a shake.
Ignoring signs, the driver heeds the bumps.
The ladies gather wheat and yeast to bake.
The taste of chalk was packed with message love.
As hand in hand, the perfect lovers eat,
They form a vision like a sugar dove.
Affection's ribbon holds the cattle meat.
A proper meal includes a course of fat.
And happy salt and oil round the man.
But lovers spare but little love for that.
From rolling balls of chocolate, Indys ran.
Discovered love was writ on ancient scrolls.
'Twere chips of grain that filled the screening bowls.
A grown woman poses as a twelve year old to get cheaper train fare and winds up in a military officer's cabin in 1942's The Major and the Minor. This was the first American film directed by Billy Wilder and he hit the ground running with one of the cleverest and most engaging comedies of all time.
Ginger Rogers plays the minor, Susan "Su-Su" Applegate, and Ray Milland is the major, Major Philip Kirby. What innocent days the 1940s were when a guy like him thinks it no more than an amusing lark to invite a 12 year old girl he just met to sleep in his cabin on the trip from New York to Iowa. I was surprised, though, how believable Ginger Rogers, who was 31 at the time, was as a twelve year old. The only one she doesn't fool is Lucy (Diana Lynn), the twelve year old sister of Philip's fiancee, but the two immediately become comrades.
It's a funny and insightful moment when Susan uses cutesy lingo to inquire whether Lucy's goldfish would die and Lucy cuts her off, telling her to "drop the baby talk." Susan's able to fool the adults because she gives them exactly what adults expect of a twelve year-old; guileless innocence. Naturally, Lucy knows better. Lucy has a whole chemical lab set up to open her sister's mail without detection. She has cigarettes hidden under her couch, which she politely shares with Susan. Susan's whole mission of deception aligns perfectly with Lucy's normal routine. That's one of the marks of great comedy, or great art; to show you something strange and then cause you to realise it's perfectly normal at the same time.
Of course, romance must somehow blossom between Susan and Philip. The movie's almost entirely from Susan's perspective and it's not hard to see why she would fall for the kind-hearted guy, though the movie's a little awkward at explaining how he might eventually see her as a woman. Before that, though, Susan has to contend with all the cadets at the academy who, despite their youth, are no more angels than Lucy or Susan.
The Major and the Minor is available on The Criterion Channel in their Love in Disguise playlist.
American politics are really pathetic at the moment. I was thinking yesterday about Trump's executive orders and contrasting it with the swirling cloud of disaster around Emilia Perez, the 2024 Oscar frontrunner with thirteen nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actress. It already cleaned up at the Golden Globes and Cannes. All this despite being on no reputable Best Films of the Year list and being widely reviled by people of all political stripes. Its star, transwoman Karla Sofia Gascon, has been cancelled after old tweets of hers were dredged up that have been called racist and Islamophobic. So much for her being a poster child for the trans-community. It's been said before--Republicans seem to be able to hold their noses and stand behind Donald Trump but the Left can't stop paring down every leader and symbol in a quixotic quest for purity.
Of course, a president and a movie are two different things but both ought to be judged on their own merits. I hate prejudice and clique mentality equally, regardless of political affiliation.
It's so weird that the trans community has become a political football when you consider what a tiny percentage of the U.S. population it is. For the Right, they've become a scapegoat, primed for the role by misguidedly aggressive advocacy by the Left. I'm thinking of a few months ago when there was a Twitter controversy over a Japanese McDonalds commercial everyone loved of a mother and father and their baby enjoying french fries contrasted with an American ad of an angry obese transwoman saying, "Stop killing us." I don't want to tell people trying to seduce Americans into eating fast food how to do their jobs but it would've seemed obvious to me they weren't doing themselves or the trans community any favours with the latter ad.
I found myself thinking of the Restoration in 1660 again. Somehow, the republic of competing brands of Puritan gloom and doom and members of Parliament unable to see past their personal interests became less appealing than a decadent royal family who would open the playhouses and let people enjoy a cynical comedy like The Country Wife with said character being played by a woman. Meanwhile, not all of Charles II's interests were the people's, but at least he was able to get things done.
The hatred of transpeople goes beyond scapegoating, though. It's a figurehead for a wider fear of strangeness. Jordan Peterson, like JK Rowling, is a leading voice on this and, like Rowling, I like some things Peterson has written on other topics. But in a number of his YouTube videos, Peterson has mapped a trans-psychological progression involved with children not being normalised properly by society. He talks about how children can pretend to be spacemen and horses but, as they age, they're supposed to be shown the error of their ways by a society that resists acknowledging them as whatever they wish without merit. I recognise the utility of sounding boards, tough love, and unvarnished advice. But I also value strangeness and idiosyncratic thinking. Great artists are guilty of both and average artists can at least be interesting if they learn how to value these qualities in themselves. Anyone can. It seems to me that's the kind of thing conservatives should get behind but the hypocrisy of them advocating mavericks and condemning freaks is nothing new.
For more on the Interregnum Parliament, check out John Milton's History of Britain, Book III:
