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.

Review of Clockwork Angels: The Novel by Kevin J. Anderson

As a long-time fan of Rush, I was excited when I heard that the progressive rock group’s new album, Clockwork Angels, would be a concept album. Then came word that fantasy and science-fiction author Kevin J. Anderson was writing a novel based on the album’s lyrics, which spin a steampunk odyssey conceived by Rush lyricist and drummer Neil Peart. I pre-ordered a copy and when it arrived, quickly read it from cover to cover.

Clockwork Angels: The Novel, tells the story of Owen Hardy, an apprentice apple farmer in the land of Albion. A ruler called the Watchmaker organizes every aspect of life in Albion with mechanical order and regularity, so that each citizen need merely follow the path laid out before him or her. This is the Stability, according to which “Everything has its place, and every place has its thing.”  Owen Hardy fully expects to settle into his predetermined course, but he also dreams of life outside his village, and upon an invitation from a mysterious stranger, he runs away, runs afoul of the Watchmaker’s law, and travels to other lands, encountering carnies, thieves, wreckers and the Watchmaker’s antithesis, the Anarchist.

Anderson’s prose is uninspired but possesses a simple elegance perfect for a story that is essentially a long parable. He puts just the right amount of flesh on the lyrics to highlight the concept of free will steering a course between Order and Chaos. Summaries of the novel make it sound like the typical Bildungsroman of which the fantasy genre has way too many, but despite my low tolerance for dreamy-boy-goes-out-into-a-world-of-adventure stories, this one never struck me as cliché and I was never bored. 

In part, the conceptual work of Peart is to thank for that. More than once as I read, I caught myself thinking that I was grateful that a musician (and a drummer, no less), rather than a novelist, had created this story and its setting. Rush’s music and Peart’s lyrics have always had their own distinct taste, and that comes across in the novel. Fans of the music will recognize the philosophical motifs Peart has woven into Rush’s lyrics over the years--and many of those lyrics are sprinkled throughout the text. (On first reading, I caught quotes from as far back as 1975’s Fly by Night.)

I can’t help but relate the novel to my other recent reading. The Watchmaker’s Stability can be described as a “totally administered society,” a phrase that appears often in Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction. The Frankfurt School of philosophers believed that in a totally administered society, whether that of Stalinist Russia or capitalist America, there is little room for true individuality. The totally administered society has ways of keeping us in our place. 

The Anarchist of Clockwork Angels represents the exact opposite--total lawlessness--although with his wild appetite for destruction, he is more of a nihilist of the negative sort portrayed in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed (The Devils). While he possesses a certain evil charm at first, in the end he is no more likeable than Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky, the slimy catalyst for ill deeds in The Possessed. In their crusade against the strictures of society, both are perfectly willing to destroy lives, but they have nothing positive to offer in place of what they tear down.

The beauty of Clockwork Angels is that Owen Hardy chooses neither the Watchmaker nor the Anarchist. In the words of the old Rush song “Freewill,” he chooses not to decide. He chooses to make his own way through life, with all the uncertainty, mistakes, suffering, and joy, that such a messy pilgrim’s progress entails. Owen's life with the Magnusson Carnival Extravaganza is one apart from the ideologies of the Watchmaker and Anarchist, who would impose themselves upon him and use him for their own purposes.

A final word about the book itself apart from the story. Clockwork Angels: The Novel is full of perks for the bibliophile. It has numerous full-color illustrations by long-time Rush album artist Hugh Syme, and they are among the most impressive I have encountered since I was in the sixth grade poring over the illustrations by the Brothers Hildebrandt in The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks. The back of the book includes the lyrics to Clockwork Angels: The Album and an afterword by Neil Peart, with photos from a hiking trip on which he and Anderson, friends even before this collaboration, brainstormed for the novel. 

I have actually never been much of a fan of Kevin J. Anderson, but this book has made me reconsider. On his website, AnderZone, he says that Neil Peart’s favorite work of his is The Saga of Seven Suns series, so I have placed the first book, Hidden Empire, on my Long List of Books to Read.

Final Comments on Slavoj Žižek's In Defense of Lost Causes

A year after starting it, I have finally finished reading Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s In Defense of Lost Causes, which looks for something of value in revolutionary terror. The book held much more than I could grasp, so rather than attempt an in-depth analysis of it, I will merely post a third, and perhaps final, note (first one, second one) by commenting on Žižek’s program for reinventing “the ‘eternal Idea’ of egalitarian terror.”

In Defense of Lost Causes is a long and involved philosophical, psychoanalytical, political and cultural critique of the ideologies, methods, successes and failures of revolutionary movements from the French Revolution up through today’s Leftist thought. As such, it touches on a wide range of issues, but in its final pages it comes to focus on “the threat of ecological catastrophe.” The last page of the first edition lists four points with regard to addressing this challenge, with the suggestion that they may be of use in other areas as well.

The first of the four points is egalitarian justice. Žižek gives as an example of this all nations, whether developed or developing, being made to obey the same rules with regard to environmental regulations (carbon emissions, etc.). I agree. Developing nations are sometimes allowed laxer standards and some developed nations like the U.S. simply do as they please without regard for international protocols while other nations vigorously tackle environmental challenges.

The second point is terror, which Žižek describes as “ruthless punishment of all who violate the imposed protective measures.” This is the most problematic of the four points. For many, the whole premise of the book--finding what is good about some of the worst scenes in human history--is disturbing. For Žižek openly to recommend terror would seem to confirm their worst suspicions, especially when he includes in his recommended terror “severe limitations on liberal ‘freedoms.’” 

While it is clear, however, from examples throughout the book that for Žižek not all terror must be violent, he does speak almost approvingly of an execution committed by Che Guevara for the cause of revolution. It is hard to pin Žižek down on exactly what specific actions he recommends as defensible terror, and it occurs to me as I write this that this is a flaw of the book. Its analysis is endless, but precise prescriptions are fleeting and vague.

The third point is voluntarism:

“(the only way to confront the ecological catastrophe is by means of large-scale collective decisions which run counter to the ‘spontaneous’ immanent logic of capitalist development.”

This returns to a theme that Žižek and others like French philosopher Alain Badiou, to whom In Defense of Lost Causes is dedicated, develop fascinatingly and convincingly. Capitalism is the enemy and we have, to our detriment, all accepted its logic. Some of Žižek’s passages explain how even capitalism’s opponents must speak its language, thereby acknowledging its victory.

Is capitalism the enemy? This is not something I have made up my mind about. The evils of capitalism are plain to see, but there are forms other than the no-holds-barred capitalism that holds sway in the U.S. and is quickly claiming souls the globe over. There is French economist Michel Albert’s Rhine capitalism, Bill Gates’s creative capitalism and China’s state capitalism. Žižek expresses skepticism about such halfway measures, and perhaps he is right. Perhaps only a radically new order has any real emancipatory potential.

The fourth and final point is trust in the people: “the wager that a large majority of the people supports these severe measures, sees them as its own, and is ready to participate in their enforcement.” He even goes so far as to say we should welcome the reinstitution of informers. The language is inflammatory, but his example is the corporate whistle-blower, indeed an informer of sorts. 

The world does not need a citizens’ thought police such as neighbors turning on neighbors and children reporting their parents as in George Orwell’s 1984, but it does need more gutsy vigilance committed to obedience to just law. The BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 would not have happened if more government watchdogs had taken their jobs seriously and more employees of BP had been willing to turn on their employer and coworkers.

In Defense of Lost Causes is a cornucopia of ideas that encouraged me to review Heidegger, learn about the Cultural Revolution, rewatch Casablanca, listen more to Shostakovich and Prokofiev, and start reading about Critical Theory. It’s a book I will be thinking about for some time, and while I should reread it, I am more likely to dig into Žižek's other books first.

Julian Assange Is President Obama's Pussy Riot

“There is unity in the oppression. There must be absolute unity and determination in the response.”
--Julian Assange, Sunday, August 19, 2012

Two days after three members of the Russian feminist collective known as Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in jail for hooliganism, Wikileaks founder and editor-in-chief Julian Assange appeared on the steps of the Ecuadorian embassy in London to make a speech drawing attention to the United States and Britain’s political persecution of him. While following these events in the news, it occurred to me that Julian Assange is in some ways President Obama’s Pussy Riot.

Of course, the main difference between the situations is that we have good reason to believe that the persecution of Pussy Riot is the result of personal vindictiveness on the part of Russian president Vladimir Putin, or at least of the corrupt system of his making, whereas the persecution of Julian Assange is one of vast governmental tradition of long standing and has little to do with the whims or personal malice of President Obama or Prime Minister David Cameron.

The two persecutions, however, are similar in that of government cracking down on individuals who have embarrassed it by bringing before the public what the government would prefer remain unsaid. Pussy Riot, by shouting anti-Putin messages in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow drew attention to the church’s collusion with a political leader. Julian Assange, through documents released by Wikileaks, has made the dirty deeds and dishonesty of Washington available for anyone with a computer to see.

It seems that my blogs often come around to Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, and again I am reminded of something I heard him say in a YouTube video in which he appeared on stage with Assange. We all know that our governments are involved in shady schemes and lying about it. Nobody doubts this. But when someone presents that in an undeniable manner, it’s a scandal. Our governments, as well as many who know their governments are guilty, would prefer that the crimes stay covered up, albeit openly.

What a joke that soon after Assange’s speech, the White House issues a warning to us not to allow Assange to divert us from the charges of sexual assault against him. I cannot speak to these charges against Assange--they should be addressed--but is there anyone who seriously doubts he would not be the center of an international brouhaha if it were not for the political implications of his journalism?

At the end of his speech, Assange raised three problems that need addressed: the ongoing incarceration without trial of Army Private Bradley Manning, the sentencing of the Bahrain Human Rights Centre president Nabeel Rajab for a Tweet, and the sentencing of Pussy Riot for their performance. To these, we should add the political persecution of Julian Assange. We must not allow the government to silence voices of truth.

Virginia Lee Burton's The Little House and the Fall of Being

At the bookstore the other night, my wife picked up a children's book by Virginia Lee Burton titled The Little House. Later that night, while my son bounced around me and did everything but pay attention, I read it aloud to him and found it to be a work of surprising depth.

The Little House is about a little house in the country. She lives a happy life watching the seasons come and go, the heavenly bodies pass overhead, and the people go about simple, quaint lives. But over time, the Little House is swallowed by a city. Massive buildings rise all around, cars and trains pollute the air with fumes and noise, and the people are busy and stressed. The Little House falls into disrepair and is no longer happy. At the end, however, the Little House gets a new owner, who moves her back into the country where she is happy once more.

For children, the book no doubt has a happy ending, but I found it to be a sad one. The whole premise of the book is that cities swallow and destroy the countryside. The Little House is sure to once more find herself swallowed by an urban jungle. "Progress" is a one-way affair. She may not be able to run next time, or may have no place to run to.

I was surprised recently upon reading a description of the Luddites of 19th-Century England to find that I understood why they broke into factories and smashed the equipment. They were seeing their jobs taken away, and jobs mean food, housing, education, health and self-esteem. Their entire way of life, with its pleasures, was being taken away. The best they could hope for in the years to come was to become a cog in the machine, performing some miniscule task in the division of labor that anyone else could perform just as well.

The Little House, however, hit me most instinctively on a different, broader level, a level that goes beyond the bad effects of urbanization and increasing dominance of technology. I felt as if it represented how change over time results in the loss of something dreadfully important, the passing of a Golden Age, whether that Golden Age is a past time in one’s own life (summers as a child, hanging with friends in high school, dating in college, etc.) or a historical period before one was born (the Roaring Twenties, La Belle Époque--to take examples from Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris). We each carry around the idea that there once was a time when life was, so it seems to us now, so much simpler, happier or meaningful. So much richer.

The city--in the broader sense of a total Fall in the quality of being--comes for all of us, just as it will my son. After finishing the book, I wished, not for the first time, that I could somehow spare him all the indignities time has in store for him. I will have to console myself that there are joys as well, and like the Little House at the end of the book, one sometimes finds a respite.

Once again she was lived in and taken care of.
The stars twinkled above her. . . .
A new moon was coming up. . . .
It was Spring . . . .
and all was quiet and peaceful in the country.
--The Little House

Forgotten Calls for Equality for All

I stumbled across a gem from Dover Publications the other day that is a collection of revolutionary writings from such diverse thinkers as Thomas Jefferson, Lenin, Gandhi and Mao. Reading these primary texts on revolution, I was struck by the concern they all express for equality--a concern that has largely disappeared from American discourse.

We might expect such concern from the orators of the French Revolution, which began the process of raising the Third Estate (the commons) to a modern representative legislature and which ended with the beheading of the Bourbon dynasty, and they deliver. Point 10 of the “Analysis of the Doctrine of Babeuf” declares that “The end of the French Revolution is to destroy inequality, and to reestablish general prosperity.” 

The preface to the "Analysis" identifies Francois Noel Babeuf as one of the founders of French socialism. His manifesto was accepted by his group the Society of Equals, but he was one of many to be executed by the government later.

Leave it to the anarchists, however, to go even further. Pierre-Sylvain Marechal’s “Manifesto of the Equals” was so radical in its call for equality that, according to the same preface, even Babeuf’s Society of Equals would not endorse it:

“Let there be no difference now between human beings but in age and sex! Since all have the same needs and the same faculties, let there be for all one education and one standard of life! They are content with one sun and the same air for all, why should not the same portion and quality of food suffice for each? . . . Open your eyes and hearts to the fullness of joy. Recognize and proclaim with us THE REPUBLIC OF EQUALS.”

Another anarchist included in the collection goes so far as to blame God for inequality-- and for Mikhail Bakunin, God and State often go hand in hand, to Man’s detriment:

“For, if God is, he is necessarily the eternal, supreme, absolute master, and, if such a master exists, man is a slave; now, if he is a slave, neither justice, nor equality, nor fraternity, nor prosperity are possible for him . . . if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.” (from God and State)

Even Lenin, a figure much feared in the popular politics of the West, displays a moving concern with equality, and is ready with specific measures. One such measure in “The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution” is equal wages for all--bureaucratic officials and the average worker alike. 

In “Declaration of Rights of the Working and Exploited People,” Lenin and the Provisional Government declare that the fundamental aim of the Republic of Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies is “to abolish all exploitation of man by man, to completely eliminate the division of society into classes.”

I am reminded of one of my favorite quotes from George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, which describes his experience fighting with the communist P.O.U.M. in the Spanish Civil War: “Socialism means a classless society, or it means nothing at all.” 

Homage to Catalonia contains alluring descriptions of the egalitarian society that actually existed in the early months of the revolution:

“Many of the normal motives of civilized life--snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc.--had simply ceased to exist. . . ‘Smart’ clothes were an abnormality, nobody cringed or took tips, waiters and flower-women and bootblacks looked you in the eye and called you ‘comrade.’”

Yet in America today--a nation generally believed by its citizens to be founded on equality--passionate calls for equality are largely absent from the narrow left-right spectrum embodied by Democrats and Republicans. The far left is reduced to making grand pleas for equality that it knows the media, politicians, big business and the populace will ignore.

In mainstream debate, you may hear about equality with regard to specific civil rights issues--equality before the law, say for gays and lesbians in marriage; equality between the sexes, say in executive pay; equality between races, say when a public figure makes a gaff touching upon race; and so on ad infinitum--and you may even hear about economic inequality and the need to help those in need through charity and welfare, but calls are lacking for positive preventive action, for significant reform of the system, to establish equality across the board.

As a culture, I think we don’t even want equality anymore. We have accepted the capitalist assertions that the playing field is level and that people rise or fall according to their merits, even though we all know that the system plays favorites and the rise to success is often inversely proportional to competence.

Besides, we like our hierarchies. They're flattering. We can always point to someone beneath us to whom we are superior, while believing that we deserve and may indeed someday attain a higher spot in the order of things.

We certainly want to avoid the mistakes of the past in creating a new social reality, but I am coming to agree with Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek's assertion, in In Defense of Lost Causes, that there are parts of revolutions past that are worth reviving. The crises of capitalism are many, and in addressing them, we should remember to call for, to insist on, greater equality for all.

The Limiting of the Libido in Post-Production Code Hollywood

About a year ago, just after I started this blog, I posted a note on Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek’s book In Defense of Lost Causes (blog). Soon after, I put the book aside unfinished and embarked on a series of books in philosophy and revolutionary history to help give me the background knowledge I needed for understanding Zizek’s book. Now I have returned to it and have been inspired with another note.

One characteristic of Zizek’s thought is how quickly he turns to analysis of movies to illustrate his points. In the section titled “Stalinism Revisited,” when discussing censorship and artistic expression, he takes an example from Casablanca, which I reviewed for this blog.

Ilsa (played by Ingrid Bergman) goes to visit Rick (Humphrey Bogart). She knows that he hates her for abandoning their romance years before but begs him to give her papers of transit so that at least her husband Victor Laszlo, an important member of the resistance against the Nazis, may escape the city. When Rick refuses to budge, Ilsa breaks down in tears and reveals that she still loves him. They embrace. Fadeout to airport tower. Fade back to Rick, who says, “And then?” Then Ilsa explains why she left him.

Zizek says that this scene is striking because of what he calls “inherent transgression.” The film breaks its own rules, so to speak. It tells us clearly that during the fadeout to the tower, Rick and Ilsa definitely did it. All the signs are there: they embrace before the fadeout, we all know what such fadeouts mean, Bogart is smoking a cigarette afterwards, etc. The film also sends very clear signals that they did not do it: the conversation picks up right where it left off, both characters are fully clothed, Bogey still sounds hostile, etc. This allows the film to satisfy the Motion Picture Production Code of the 1940s and at the same time tell us a story that encourages our imagination to insert screwing.

The prudishness of the Production Code and the movie-makers’ skirting of it may strike us as quaint and amusing today, when so many movies contain overtly sexual content, but it occurred to me that our movies are in some ways actually more restrained.

Movies today can show more than they used to, but the current ratings system and cultural mores result in movies that are surprisingly tame for all that they proclaim themselves to be sexy. Tasteful montages of unidentifiable swathes of skin moving slowly are the norm for sex scenes, but since they are showing the act, usually missionary, little is left to the imagination. The libido must enjoy its movies in the narrow space between what isn’t allowed and what is explicitly shown. The old movies, in showing little, were able to suggest much.

One of Zizek’s claims is that despite the horrible repression of the Stalinist years, they also “saved what we understand as the humanity of man,” because rather than insist on the total destruction of dissidence, dissidence was often allowed as long as it was internalized. You could hate Stalinism as much as you wanted, you just couldn’t say so.

In the same way, we might say that the Production Code, despite the restrictions it must have put on artists, kept sexy infinitely alive by keeping some things secret. We will never know exactly what Rick and Ilsa did that night in Casablanca, but it can be as hot as we want.