Oh, The Blog Posts I'll Never Write! Part 3

The time has come again to lay off my blog and focus on other projects. As usual, however, I’ve been turning over some posts and won’t be able to rest until I get them out there at least in rough form. So here is Part 3 in my “Oh, The Blog Posts I’ll Never Write!” series.

 

Good Muslims / Bad Muslims

I’ve been wanting to post an account of a trip I once took from Belfast to the Sahara Desert via Casablanca and back again via Madrid--all in two weeks. It was a fairly hard-core trip, with no tour guide, no itinerary, and little money. During that time, strangers scammed my travel companion and me for money (with tales of U2 tickets that never appeared) and others helped us out of jams (when we got stranded on the edge of the desert).

I did not see this live in Marrakesh:

 

Although I have had other experiences in Northern Africa and the Middle East, and more intimate experiences with Muslims, that trip comes to mind whenever I run across the debate about Islam, because I would assume that most of the people I encountered on that trip were Muslim. Some treated us poorly indeed, but there is no doubt in my mind that those who helped us did so out of a sense of hospitality at least partially derived from their religion. A student named Aziz stuck with us through some tight scrapes and eventually let us crash at his place. The most common forms of Islam, like many other religions, generally encourage treating others with kindness.

I suppose the point of this post would have been that Muslims are just like anybody else, which is to say they are complicated. It should be impossible to have the debate about good Muslims versus bad Muslims without feeling dumber for it--although the times do call for that debate. Personally, I'm even uncomfortable analyzing the issue as I am now because talking about Muslims as them compared to us is othering and hard to pull off without sounding condescending.

 

Who Sticks In the Knife?

Another post I had planned springs from a personal ordeal I’ve been going through. I suddenly found myself in a big international mess due to my tax preparer doing everything wrong for a couple years. One of the ways I alleviate stress is by viewing matters through the framework of ideas, and in this case I felt like Friedrich Nietzsche (as always) and Franz Kafka were relevant.

One of the many soul-crushing aspects of international tax problems is that they take forever to sort out and the sorting is labyrinthine. Imagine if your survival depended not on running through a giant maze as in The Maze Runner, but on filling out endless forms, negotiating tax laws, paying endless bills, making frantic phone calls, and biting your fingernails. The System is coming down on you hard, according to its own secret principles, and will do so again whenever it feels like it.

You are utterly powerless.

Along the way, it occurred to me that despite the injustice of it all, no one was concerned with the morality of it: the gears of interlocking apparatuses were simply grinding away. A great deal of the modern world is like this. The totally administered society, to borrow a phrase from Herbert Marcuse, dispenses with morality in favor of impersonal systems in which no one is accountable for what is right. Each person is a functionary who need only do their job according to the rules, much like--to take a dramatic example--Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt’s face for the banality of evil.

I thought Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals might shed some light on this, but I’ll never find the time to review that right now. But I also thought of Franz Kafka’s The Trial (free here), about a man named Josef K. who wakes up one morning to find that he is on trial. He never learns his crime or how he can defend himself, but as he spends more and more time trying to satisfy the Law (previous post), his life falls apart. Eventually, he gets the death sentence and the courts send a couple goons to drag him out to a quarry and execute him with a butcher knife. Curiously, however, neither of the goons wants to do the deed, for that would be taking too much personal responsibility, and that is exactly what the systems governing us--and we when we work for them--want to avoid. They would prefer the illusion that we somehow did it to ourselves:

The repulsive courtesies began once again, one of them passed the knife over K. to the other, who then passed it back over K. to the first. K. now knew it would be his duty to take the knife as it passed from hand to hand above him and thrust it into himself. But he did not do it…

Hopefully, I will escape the knife, but other projects demand my attention. Projects within projects within projects. . .  So for now this blog is on a slowdown.

 

 

Related posts:

Oh, The Blog Posts I'll Never Write! Part 1

Oh, The Blog Posts I'll Never Write! Part 2

Classic Movies: Three Levels of Experience

For some time now, I’ve noticed that I enjoy recent Hollywood movies less and less. Movies I watch because they are in genres or franchises I love--like The Dark Knight Rises, Prometheus or Skyfall--continue to impress, but other movies usually leave me uninterested. Meanwhile, I’ve been increasingly drawn to classic movies. I eventually realized that this was because the experience of older movies is multilayered in a way that new movies can’t provide.

The most obvious level of experiencing an old movie is the immediate experience based on its content, the way you would experience any movie. You follow the story, identify with characters, marvel at special effects, get swept up in the score, admire the performances, and so on.

One old movie that captivated me recently was Gaslight (1944). The fragile Paula, played by Ingrid Bergman, marries a devilishly tall-dark-and-handsome smoothy and the two move into her childhood home. However, she soon begins--so it would seem--to misplace items, forget appointments, and notice strange phenomena that no one else does, such as the lights dimming. Her husband, increasingly exasperated with her hysteria, suggests she is going crazy. But is she? Isn’t there something suspicious about her husband’s behavior? Isn’t it almost as if he is orchestrating her episodes for some purpose we cannot yet guess?

The movie provides plenty of excitement simply through its content. You are drawn deeper and deeper into Paula’s emotional unraveling, you are engrossed by Bergman’s performance (for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress), you come to loathe the villain for his villainy, you wonder if the young detective will figure it all out in time, and you are on the edge of your seat until the denouement. At this level of experience, this old movie provides nothing more than and just as much as a good thriller from recent years.

But we experience the classics on another level that we cannot experience recent movies: From our standpoint today, we experience them as representatives of the past.

One need go no further back than the 1980s--say The Breakfast Club (1985) or Pretty in Pink (1986)--to begin feeling out-of-time, but then to watch Saturday Night Fever (1977) or The Hustler (1961) or The Seven Year Itch (1955) is to feel increasingly as if you are in a foreign land. By the time you reach the 1940s and 30s, you are like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz (1939), only in reverse, moving from Technicolor to a bizarre and magical world of black and white. Watching silent films is like peering at another planet through the grainy and flickering lens of some queer, lighted telescope. Can these people up there on the screen really be members of the same human race I am used to? They look and behave so differently!

Every time I watch The Wizard of Oz, I wonder why no one talks like Judy Garland anymore. Women with that particular accent are common in older movies, but I’ve never heard anyone talk like that in my lifetime. To take another example, I always find it odd in the MGM Marx Brothers’ movies how they’re a weird mish-mash of genres--like vaudeville--with slapstick next to musical numbers next to drama and so on, as if film was viewed as an omniverse of previously existing art forms. In Anatomy of a Murder (1959), the prosecution raises as an example of Laura’s moral laxity how she moves when she plays pinball. Anatomy of a Murder is a gritty movie even today, but how quaint that pinball and how one plays it could be seen as dangerous and sinful! These are all examples of how a movie can stand out for characteristics that have passed into the past.

Seen across the gulf of time, the classics are very strange.

The third level of experience is where it gets really interesting. No longer are we simply experiencing a classic movie for its content, or viewing it as a curious relic from times gone by. Instead, we now see it through the eyes of its contemporaries. We assume, as best we can, the standpoint of movie-goers in the early to mid 20th Century and experience the movie as they would have at the time, as if viewing the past from the past.

A good example is Morocco (1930), which I watched just a couple days ago for the first time. In an early scene, Marlene Dietrich performs in a nightclub. She’s dressed in a men’s tuxedo. The quiet that descends over her audience immediately casts over you the viewer a sense for the gender roles being toyed with. When she flirts with a lady in the audience and even plants one on her lips, its thrilling and shocking today just as it would have been back in 1930 when the movie first screened. It doesn’t matter that I’ve seen James Franco and Sean Penn kiss in Milk (2008) or Scarlett Johansonn and Penelope Cruz kiss in Vicki Cristina Barcelona (2008). By then, the old dominant ideas of gender and sexuality, while still not entirely gone today, had long been played with in the public arena, sometimes to the point of boredom. The scene in Morocco is exciting now because it was exciting then.

This isn’t to say that Hollywood movies today are somehow inferior, only that because they are recent they lack levels of experience that movies acquire after having aged for a while. Next on my list is Notorious (1946). More Ingrid Berman, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. I expect it will be engaging on all three levels of experience.