Through the Doors of Time

Last night I finally had time to read the newest Sirenia Digest, which is part two of Caitlin R. Kiernan's Living a Boy's Adventure Tale. It was good. Part of it continues the tense situation arising from a bad leg injury in prehistoric times. Other parts are interesting found text style things, reminding me of The Secret History of Twin Peaks. I particularly enjoyed a podcast Caitlin wrote with a host adept at the poetic stylings of Morning Zoo DJs. I haven't listened to many podcasts, I hope there really are some like that.

I'm really sleepy to-day after two nights of staying up too late. It's not exactly insomnia. Last night I just fell into a spiral of watching things. I watched an episode of The Boys on Amazon Prime and an episode of Spy Family on Netflix. So far Spy Family is much more interesting but The Boys has its good qualities. I'm in the middle of season two, struggling a little to stay interested. The Boys is good when it lampoons modern superhero movies but it gets really dumb when it tries to tackle politics. It aspires to be kind of a combination of Watchmen and Punisher but it's more like The Tick if it'd been written by Bernie Sanders zealots.

Spy Family is the latest craze among the junior high school students here in Japan. Like Kimetsu no Yaiba, I find it has surprising depths. Beneath its Mr. and Mrs Smith-ish premise is a real commentary on the interplay between intimacy and psychological distance that exists in Japanese households. It's not hard to see why young teenagers in particular love this series.

After that, I found myself watching Nine Inch Nails, Tool, and Smiths videos and then finally I started watching The Long Haul again. God, Diana Dors is just perfection in that movie.

The Wonderful Spirit of Time Travel

In 1918 a man shows up at the dilapidated London flat of a poor single mother and offers her a job as caretaker of a haunted manor. He doesn't tell her it's haunted, he entrusts this knowledge only to her two elder children. He's a lawyer and a ghost himself; he's The Amazing Mr. Blunden, which also happens to be the title of this delightful fantasy film from 1972.

Elmer Bernstein composed the score which has a wonderful, distinctively 70s charm to it with its rapturous strings and brass as Lucy (Lynne Frederick) and Jamie (Garry Miller) explore their enormous, creepy, and partly fire damaged new home. It's not long before they do encounter ghosts--a pair of children much like them, Sara (Rosalyn Landor) and Georgie (Marc Granger), from exactly a hundred years earlier.

It's arguably more of a time travel story than a haunting story but, then again, the implicit connexion between the two concepts is fun. It kind of reminded me of Inland Empire.

Sara and Georgie are being terrorised by their half brother's mother in law, Mrs. Wickens, played by Diana Dors.

One of my all time favourite actresses, Dors was well past her bombshell years, though she was only 40. On the one hand it's admirable she was willing to take these roles when so many former leading ladies would insist only on more flattering parts. On the other hand, it must have been liberating to be able to play such over the top characters as this and the brash matriarch she played on the sitcom Queenie's Castle. And, yeah, I'd still go out with her, even in the Mrs. Wickens getup.

The Amazing Mr. Blunden is a simple enough story about kids versus cruel adults while also having some intriguing and aesthetically pleasing subtext to its concepts. The form Mr. Blunden's (Laurence Naismith) buried conscience takes occupies a fascinating part of the story, especially since it turns out he has very little screentime. He's kind of a free-floating psychological preoccupation that outlived his physical body. I love it. I also love the method of time travel shown in the film, which is revealed to Sara and Georgie by the house's apparently sentient library.

It's a potion, the ingredients for which must be strained through a muslin cloth. Amusingly, Sara and Georgie test it on Mrs. Wickens first to make sure it's not poison.

With a cast that also includes James Villiers, Madeline Smith, and Graham Crowden, it's a fun film with a lot of atmosphere. Lynne Frederick is particularly good, the point of view character for much of the film. The Amazing Mr. Blunden is available on Amazon Prime. You could do worse for something to watch on Christmas--though only the beginning of the film is actually set during Christmas, most of the action occurs during April of 1918 and 1818.

Twitter Sonnet #1185

The eggs of ducks were blue as ships in space.
The careful paint would still escape the pod.
A grid between the suns creates a face.
There's nothing darker dwelling here or odd.
The hammocks creak and sway in inky seas.
Tomatoes lined the battlement and watched.
A drop of rain was just a cloudy tease.
A blade of grass was but a flower botched.
In constant glowing hands the sky was held.
In braided breads the ghosts were growing great.
The greatest lump in truth was soundly frelled.
A mob of ghosts would batter down the gate.
A cable carried out a hundred years.
Electric shows react with water tears.

True Love or the Currency of Debt

You don't need to be Machiavelli to see that the realms of politics and business are filled with opportunists, people who use the language of friendship and loyalty merely for their own gain. But now and then I suppose there must be a poor sucker who believes everything courtiers say and such a one is Shakespeare's Timon of Athens. Written by Shakespeare probably in collaboration with Thomas Middleton, I don't hate it but it's not one of my favourite plays, and maybe that's why I don't mind Jonathan Miller's direction in the 1981 BBC production. It's certainly helped a lot by a performance from Jonathan Pryce in the title role. An actor who's uniquely talented at coming off as simultaneously elegant and foolish, he sells this production's interpretation of Timon as a man who goes from an extreme, fervent love for humanity to an extreme, absolute misanthropy.

This is the only production from the BBC Television Shakespeare I've seen so far to have padding--a very long sequence where we watch Timon's dinner guests happily eating without audible dialogue helps to stretch this very short play to almost two hours. It's a very simple story, it feels rather like one aspect of King Lear stripped of all the others--Timon is a wealthy nobleman who gives away all his wealth and then, when no-one lends him money when he's exhausted his resources, he becomes a ragged hermit who spends his days bewailing the fundamental greed and cruelty of all humanity. Timon then becomes a less plausible figure than Lear and his circumstances lack the dimensions of family and character development for the potential betrayers.

But Timon's simplicity allows it to more comfortably support a diversity of interpretations. In the play's introduction to the Norton Shakespeare, Katharine Eisaman Maus points out that Timon's boundless generosity is a means of glorifying himself; "Timon's generosity is entangled with a desire for mastery. By always giving, never receiving, Timon attempts to force his beneficiaries into an endlessly grateful and therefore subordinate role." This seems to agree with Ralph Waldo Emerson's interpretation of the character--Wikipedia quotes from one of his essays; "This giving is flat usurpation, and therefore when the beneficiary is ungrateful, as all beneficiaries hate all Timons … I rather sympathize with the beneficiary, than with the anger of my lord Timon." Well, that's Emerson, for you.

Such an interpretation has to deal with Timon's expressed desire at the feast, "I have often wished myself poorer, that I might come nearer to you: we are born to do benefits. And what better or properer can we call our own than the riches of our friends?" Of course, Timon has basically purchased the right to sermonise so--few, aside from the Cynic Apemantus (Norman Rodway), would dare argue with him at this point. Interpretations could be equally justified in choosing to portray Timon as aware or unaware of this fact even as he speaks.

Miller's production definitely seems to subscribe to the latter point of view, which I think is better, and Jonathan Pryce speaks of his love for his fellows with an almost frighting fervour. With his wide eyes, odd bashfulness, and suppressed nervous energy, he seems as though he's at a banquet where he's to be married to everyone else in the room.

This madness makes the first part of the play fit well with the scenes where Timon has lost everything and greets every human being with loud anger and suspicion. This guy has only two settings and it's Pryce's ability that prevents him from being merely a tedious joke--I felt bad for him even as his wailing hit absurd heights.

One of my favourite actresses, Diana Dors, turns up briefly as one of the prostitutes Timon meets. He delivers to her and her colleague his impressively malicious speech extolling venereal disease:

. . . down with the nose,
Down with it flat; take the bridge quite away
Of him that, his particular to foresee,
Smells from the general weal: make curl'd-pate
ruffians bald;
And let the unscarr'd braggarts of the war
Derive some pain from you: plague all . . .

It's too bad she never appeared in a larger role in one of the BBC Television Shakespeare productions. She would've been a good Mistress Quickly or even Lady Macbeth.

Twitter Sonnet #1142

A vetted new surprise emerged at last.
Confetti lives as colours worms're dyed.
For future vigour eat a great repast.
In truth to sleep we down have never 'lied.'
In pools of Listerine the teeth'll bathe.
The dentist kept away the apples killed.
Incomp'rable the orange emerged unscathed.
Brazil a brave and new Miranda willed.
Foreshadowed dirk dispersed at owl's call.
The only cooling spot won't win the day.
A fleet of embers flew to light the fall.
A cart of folded rugs'll pave the way.
In plenty, coin ennobles blazing sand.
The banks of grains reform a sun's demand.

The Hyde Solution

Is it necessary for our well being to commit rape and murder? The vast majority of us would say no but Henry Jekyll takes it as read in the extraordinary 1980 BBC adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. With a great performance by David Hemmings in the title role and several wonderful supporting performances--including Diana Dors and Clive Swift--this adaptation's perspective on sex and society clearly and cleverly reflects the punk groundswell of its day.

It begins with Jekyll seemingly addressing us directly before we realise he's recording a monograph. He puts forth the familiar theory about human beings being composed of a good and evil duality but then he directly says, "If the twin sides of my nature could be separated then the unjust could go its own way without disgracing its more upright twin." What? So the idea isn't to get rid of evil so much as to make sure he can have his evil cake and eat it too. It brings the concept a little closer to Dorian Gray at heart--goodness is imputed to be an entirely superficial thing even by the most virtuous. So ingrained is the concept of an abstract morality governing all things that characters in this story don't even consider that it could be related to real actions or conditions. Jekyll figures he's going to be under the evil column anyway for the impossible to anticipate shifting goal post of "good" so he may as well see himself as a murderer.

This is the first one I've seen to directly connect this with Protestantism. When Utterson (Ian Bannen) speculates that Henry has some past sin or disgrace haunting him, Lanyon (Clive Swift) dismissively replies, "There speaks the voice of John Calvin."

I'm always happy to see Diana Dors, one of my favourite actresses, and I knew without having to look she'd be playing the brothel madam. We meet her ensconced behind a beautiful elevated desk like a judge. An appropriate impression because this version amusingly portrays Jekyll as a regular visitor already--he pays to have prostitutes beat him. Presumably for Original Naughtiness.

Jekyll and Hyde both talk about how the moral duality also might exist in women and this is reflected in Jekyll's fiancee, Ann Coggeshall (Lisa Harrow), who unlike the ciphers of earlier versions seems like a very good match for Henry. She's shocked by the suggestion of improprieties but also leads the men on one of the sadly enduring displays of Victorian hypocrisy, the slum tour.

This version combines the Suave Hyde with the Wolfman Hyde. Hemmings gets heavily made up as Jekyll so he can look younger and more handsome as Hyde but in the transition sequences, and when things start to go wrong, he gets more hair and weird teeth.

As in the novella, there's absolutely nothing to suggest that there's anything but a cosmetic difference between Jekyll and Hyde, Hyde merely representing Jekyll under the cloak of anonymity and, in this case, with better looks and a charm that comes with self-confidence and ease of manner. So his insistent belief that he has become two separate people seems especially mad, just as unvarnished as Boris Karloff's version in the Abbott and Costello movie but much more disturbing in this context.

This is a Hyde who preys on children, too, in ways much worse than trampling them. He takes one twelve or thirteen year old girl back to her hovel where she regularly sells her body, talks to her in a broad, amiable manner like a TV presenter before cheerfully telling her to undress. I had to wonder, were the makers of this film trying to say something about Jimmy Savile? In any case, they manage to say something much bigger about society with the casual revelation that Hyde is far from the first to abuse her in this way.

Another of Hyde's victims is Jekyll's housemaid played by Toyah Willcox with a nice, understated simmer. She can't read and Hyde tricks her into taking mescal--which is also a component of his potion in this film. Someone who commented on one of my earlier reviews, Evan S Ent, told me that the formula for mescaline is written on Jekyll's chalkboard in this version, which would explain why the first transformation sequence has the inverted colours and other camera effects associated with drug trips in other films. I suppose it's possible the whole film after that first dose is one long hallucination. I'd hope so, for a lot of people's sakes.

Twitter Sonnet #1107

A silver shadow traced a fabric bird.
A stencilled night behind the curtain sleeps.
The paint not dry the morning reads the word.
A nodding bowler boards the train it keeps.
The early metal pings for walking phones.
Across a marble street the blind've blinked.
Betimes the shuffling egg could make the bones.
Preserve a brain of grapes beneath the rink.
The ancient face remakes the new to back.
A timely flame appeared a cent'ry gone.
As punching cards dissolve to painted wrack.
A pigment gave a sun to canvas dawn.
A shiny mustard bullion fills the hold.
The endless columns do resemble gold.