Hannah Arendt’s essay on space flight and humanity is a meditation on the impact of technē on us. It was written in 1962 long before smartphones, tablet computers, medical wrist bands, iWatchs, slave cameras, iris identification, bio inserts, and the like. Yet with a few changes it anticipates this world now, more than fifty years since she typed it. (Yes, as readers of biographies know, she typed the first several drafts of all her works herself.)
The changes would de-emphasize space flight with all the gadgetry and gizmos that go with it to protect the person and extend the astronaut’s ability inside the machine of a rocket, lander, or gravity suit. Instead of this kind of technology, it would refer to digital layers that now beguile and enfold us.
To make these digital technologies work, we have to cooperate with them, just as astronauts had to do with their equipment. We have to care for them. We patiently wait for them to boot-up. We keep them in cool environments so that they do not overheat. We feed them electricity, sometimes in carefully regulated doses to keep the batteries charged. We present ourselves to them in ways they can recognize, accept, and respond to whether that it through a keyboard or stylized gestures. We keep them charged up. We keep updating the app software. We discipline ourselves to work with the devices. (No one calls them machines, though that is what they are.)
The more the technology does for us individually, the more willing we are, one-by-one, to meet it halfway, or more.
It all fits into the smartphone which fits into a pocket. Smaller and smaller gets the smartphone, so small soon that…. Use the imagination.
In some places now a person has a single telephone number that incorporates both a fixed landline at home and a mobile number. Once that number is mine, it remains mine even if I move to another home. That number is me … and I am that number. Like it or not, I am my telephone number even if I don’t resemble it.
Imagine the day when that telephone number merges with my Social Security Number, with my tax file number, with my Medicare number, with my VISA card number … That day will come. (Pause to think of all those totalitarian nightmares of dystopian and science fiction writers.) In fact, in this scenario the metadata is me in all important aspects. Publicly no one needs to know my idiosyncrasies, opinions, or needs, all that counts is the relevant bar coded number to scan.
In the face of these temptations, Arendt urges readers to reverse Descartes, to ‘I doubt, therefore, I am.’ How that translates to digital technology, that is the question for today. She did not have to face that question directly since the space technologies that fascinated her, were not consumer goods. There was no iGravity Suit. But as always what she meant was to think, not to react, but to think. Reacting is easy, thinking is hard, slow, and sometimes wrong.
The full integration of these digital technologies will erode, compromise, limit, and, perhaps, destroy our humanity. We will slowly and voluntarily become Borg. I may never resemble my phone number but I am nothing but that number, despite my vanities. I published an earlier piece along these line as ‘The beast that blushed: on modern manners,’ ‘Spectrum, Sydney Morning Herald,’ 30 September 2000, pp. 6-7. (Speaking of vanities.)
No, she did not refer to the ‘Borg,’ bio-mechanical creatures who inhabit the fictional world of ‘Star Trek.’ But they may exemplify her conclusion in some way. Her fascination with technology traces to homo faber in her book ‘The Human Condition’ (1958).
Arthur Eddington once said it was foolish to suppose that he resembled his telephone number, it is said, but I found no text to support it.
Author: Michael W Jackson
Miss Fisher’s costume collection. Recommended to fans of the Honourable Phryne Fisher Mysteries.
The exhibit is still on, details at this web site. Cut-and-paste it into a browser.
http://www.nationaltrust.org.au/nsw/MissFishersCostumeExhibition
If you are not a fan of Miss Fisher, get a life and become one. Start with this web link.
http://www.phrynefisher.com
Off we went by City Rail to Circular Quay Station and downstairs to Wharf 5 got the Rivercat to Parramatta all on the Blue Card.
The Parramatta River wends its way inland and the ferry ride takes about 90 minutes with a dozen stops, including Darling Harbour, Abbortsford, Cabarita, and Parramatta where the ferry turns around and we disembarked. What a smooth and quiet way to travel and how different is the perspective on Sydney from the water. We passed many marinas along the way, and truth to tell some trash in the river.
As we ascended the wharf there was a young woman offering maps and she recommended that we go along the river to Government House. (I assume she is a council employee to promote tourism, and for that I thank the council.)
I had planned to walk through the streets but we quickly accepted the advice of local knowledge. We took the aboriginal walk along the river which was itself informative and good-spirited in laying out the past without recriminations, and in about 20 minutes we were at the original Government Farm which is now a park and there on a low bluff was Government House.
All new to me. Our tickets were scanned and we entered. Fabulous! We saw a similar exhibition at Ripponlea in Melbourne last year, and enjoyed it. When I read about the Sydney exhibition it seemed to include more, and since a day trip to Parramatta by ferry had long been on the to-do list, the exhibition triggered it.
So many hats, many of then cloche in the 1920s manner, and fifty or sixty frocks, coats, ski wear, and more. The volunteer docents were friendly and helpful. The Muzak was 1920s. This exhibit included some of Jack’s gear, whereas the Melbourne exhibit did not. The balance between his and hers in the display was about that of department store between men’s and women’s wear: 1 to 100. There was one Jack fedora, one overcoat, one business suit. End. But Phryne Fisher is such a corker, who can deny her the rags?
The building itself is worth seeing, built by that visionary Governor Lachlan Macquarie.
He built for the future, the distant future. But his vision has come true now that Parramatta is the demographic centre of Sydney.
We had a fine time. And then it was time for lunch! Fish cakes for me and salt-and-pepper squid for the child bride in restaurant on the grounds. Perhaps the stables once.
Taking advantage of the Blue Card’s all-purpose use, we walked to the shopping mall, bought some salmon for dinner and then took City Rail, an express, to Central and changed for Alpha Prime, aka Newtown. A much quicker return.
It was a 10,000+ step day and it was hot and sticky. Time for a treat! On the way home from Newtown Station we stopped at Gelato Blue and indulged in that Italian vice. Yum! Anything to get another stamp on my loyalty card.
I read three or four of Kerry Greenwood’s Miss Fisher novels years ago, and I was pleased to see them come to the screen. And what a coming! Brilliantly realized. Well plotted, period detail perfect with all those clothes (and hats), automobiles, locations like Ripponlea, and the rush to the future of the 1920s with the advent of Art Deco. Then there is Miss Fisher herself, magnificently realized along with the dour Jack and her team, Mr. Butler, Dot, and the two taxi drivers, Bert and Cec for the heavy work.
For a much more serious take on post-World War I Melbourne in a krimie see the novels of Carolyn Morwood, like Death and the Spanish Lady (2011) and Cyanide & Poppies (2013). They are contemporary to Miss Fisher but much darker and they are very well done.
“La grande bellezza” (2013) Recommended that viewers make up their own minds.
When reviewers do not know where to start a review, they sometimes start by slagging off at other reviews. In that spirit I recall a review of an exhibition of Impressionist paintings complaining that it was too French; another that faulted a film about cricket for too many references to cricket. Then there are film reviews that find Hollywood movies so American. I can say, without fear of contradiction that ‘The Great Beauty’ is very Italian. That is why we went; to see some of Italy without the travel.
‘La grande bellezza’ poster
The film features that greatest of Italian film stars: Roma itself.
The other actors, fine though they be, are supporting players to this great star with its architecture, its lavish art works, its vistas, its history evoking buildings, it inspiring sunsets and ravishing sunrises, its profligate statuary, its intimate chapels and by-ways, its grande boulevardes, its…. Well, one sees the point by this time, or will never see it. The film is a paean to Roma.
Jep, played superbly by a very serious actor Toni Servillo, has frittered away his talent as a novelist along with his humanity, by living the indolent life Roma offered him with a spacious apartment overlooking the Colosseum, bedding so many willing women that he has long since lost count, rising at 3 pm on many days to party the night away. His being is certainly light in the sense of Milan Kundera’s ‘the lightness of being.’ To reach for another metaphor, it is the ‘feathered life,’ as the Aztecs offered their sacrificial victims before the knife. I read it as a character study but he could be taken as an exemplar of the milieu in which he swims, and thus the film offers some social criticism, too.
Sounds familiar? Yes, ‘La Dolche Vita’ (1960) comes to mind and there are many fountains. By the way, ‘La Dolche Vita’ is thirty (30) minutes longer than ‘La grande bellezza,’ which is listed at 142 minutes. Yet it held our attention as did ‘La Dolche Vita.’ Confession, one also thinks Silvio Berlusconi who defies parody. Then there is Fellini’s own ‘Roma’ (1972) with the Master’s taste for disconnection and the grotesque.
‘La grande bellezza’ has many tributes to Federico Felllini in its tableaux, its return to the sea, and — it has to be said — the dwarf, who here is a real person, not a circus prop, and even a giraffe, a knife thrower, performance art, and on and on.
Jep at 65 is bored, bored, bored, bored; he is also sometimes boring. He lives like a king, dresses like a prince, wanders the haut monde with nary a care in the world, except the dawning realization of his mortality. Jaded, cynical, and worn he is, yet he is not bitter, not angry, not a victim. But he is defeated. He wrote one novel forty (40) years ago, yet he still occasionally meets people who quote from it. He brushes off their admiration and when they ask him about another, second novel he is so long-practiced at diversion that the question does break his emotional skin. Instead he writes witty fluff for a newspaper which must pay him way over the odds so he can afford all those perfectly tailored 3,000 thread-count suits he wears.
It is all trip and no arrival. Much happens, but nothing matters. A tourist faints. Is that part of the story? It is not part of Jep’s story, no, but it is part of Roma’s story. A young man is killed in a car crash, or kills himself by crashing his car and either way drugs may have been involved. His life does not go on, but Roma’s does. One of Jep’s girlfriends dies and he hardly notices. He goes on … for now. Roma goes on forever.
In addition to the gorgeous photography of Roma in its many faces there is a wondrous array of music — some ethereal, some energising, some reassuring, and some that sounds like a train wreck — in the soundtrack, and all the Milano style in the clothes on the actors. Though in Roma the Milano labels would be cut out. Eye and ear candy supreme.
For the viewer it is two and half hours spent following a camera around Roma over the shoulder of a wastrel named Jep. The camera is at times sinuous, at other time inert, then it seems to dart through the air, or float over the Tiber. However, Jep, no fool, is completely self-aware and perhaps he may yet try to write another novel, but probably not. It makes no matter to Roma.
Tony Servillo as Jep
I refered to Toni Servillo as a serious actor because I have seen him many times before, including as the very humane detective in ‘The Girl by the Lake’ (2007), a surprising story of what people will do for love. He also directed ‘Propaganda’ (1979) and ‘Guernica’ (1985). Both as serious as the titles suggestion. Though he smoked enough cigarettes in this film to reduce his chances of doing much more work.
“Hannah Arendt” (2012) * * * * Recommended
Who is the greatest philosophy of the Twentieth Century?
Before reacting with answers, think about the question. The question implies there are many philosophers from whom to choose, after all ‘greatest’ is a superlative that is the third is a series: great, greater, and greatest, and before that the very good, good, and so on. Taking the question in that light several names come immediately to mind: Bertrand Russell for ‘Principia Mathematica’ (1910) and his other technical studies of knowledge, language, and logic; Jean-Paul Sartre for ‘L’étre et le néant’ (Being and Nothingness’)(1943) and the essays that led up to it; or even — in the German world — Martin Heidegger for ‘Sein und Zeit’ (Being and Time) (1927). Maybe even Richard Rorty, ‘Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature’ (1979). Remember the honour is the ‘greatest’ and that excludes both the great and the greater, like Michel Foucault, John Rawls, Roberto Unger, Martha Nussbaum, and more.
But what if we re-phrase the question? What if we ask ‘Who was the only philosopher in the Twentieth Century?’ That question requires us to think about what we mean by ‘philosopher.’
Hannah Arendt is my answer. If by ‘philosopher’ we mean someone who makes sense of life, then she is in a class by herself. Always was, always will be. She was the only philosopher in the Twentieth Century. This sense of the word ‘philosopher’ is what Aristotle meant by it.
It has taken two generations for the dust to settle on the story that lies at the centre of this film, for her life and works to be appraised in their own light, not against national priorities, political necessity, ethnic identity, ideology, the lust for revenge, blind emotion, crowd mentality, etc. In this context the film, by letting her words and ideas speak for themselves, is a tour de force. And more. Here’s a word one does not see often: magisterial.
With clever staging and segmenting of the story, Arendt’s singular voice is heard just enough to show how penetrating her thought was, and how naively courageous she was in pursuing that thought where it led. Publish and be damned!
She did publish and she was damned! Lifelong friends from childhood (and as an Jewish exile émigré she had few of those left to lose), genial neighours, editors, professorial colleagues, personal friends until then, shunned her. The hate mail, obscene phone calls, attacks on her husband, and her ever loyal intern multiplied, threats from Israel’s Mossad, a deathbed denunciation by an uncle, (her only living relative thanks to the Holocaust), feces smeared on the door of her apartment, and so on (the film omits as much of this as it includes of all this, details to be found in the biographies), none of these stopped her.
Give her the Socrates Medal for putting Truth before all else.
In the film, her greatest sin is the passing remark (ten pages of 300 in the book ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’) that in some cases some leaders of Jewish communities co-operated with the Nazis as the Final Solution was implemented. These leaders calmed their followers, tried to slow the process by working with it, took over the administration of death at its zero point, selected their fellows for transportation on those railroads run by Adolf Eichmann and his ilk. Indeed this very point was made in passing during the Eichmann trial which is why she reported it.
It is this factual observation that lit the atomic bomb that almost destroyed the ‘New Yorker’ magazine where her articles on the Eichmann trial appeared. To wash this linen in public was the sin that had no atonement, not that she was ever about to atone. It was to blame Jews for their own destruction. It was to betray Israel. It was to blaspheme Judaism. It was ….
Her second sin was to believe her eyes. She saw Eichmann as a nobody, a nothing. How then to reconcile the equation with on one side the unbelievable evil of the Holocaust and on the other side this insignificant nobody? The Darkest events of Dark Times were not committed by John Milton’s magnetic Satan of ‘Paradise Lost’ (1667) nor by Johann Goethe’s breath-taking Mephistopheles from ‘Faustus’ (1808). Instead, Eichmann was just what he appeared to be, everyman, anyman, noman. Just a man, not the raging beast of Baal. Evil could work through such a man. Though there is no denying, and she certainly did not deny it, that there were evil men and women in Nazism, but they worked much of their evil through everyman and anyman. A very fine, if harrowing, empirical study is Christopher Browning, ‘Ordinary Men’ (1992). But this too was unacceptable because if a nobody could destroy Jews then Jews were… weak, or should have resisted, or something…
What the film elides, though there is an early reference for the cognoscenti, is that Arendt’s ‘On Totalitarianism’ (1951) argued the unpalatable case that every means, device, and tactic used by the evil dictators Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin and their many imitators in Europe, had been developed, tested, applied, refined, implemented, and perfected by the Enlightened Western European colonial powers in Asia, and most of all in Africa, and, in truth, in Australia, too. Selective murder, denigrating humanity, rape upon rape, displacing populations, mass murder, separating families, slave labor, industrial-scale cruelty, brutality for fun, group punishments, dehumanizing victims to themselves, genocide, all of these are well documented in colonial history long before 1939. Every colonial power made use of these atrocities. Though she is careful to distinguish between the degrees of evil among the colonial powers, while she is ruthless on the collective guilt of the peoples of those colonial powers who did not (want to) know the evils done in their names in far away places that produced the riches that we still see today in a city like Brussels.
What the Twentieth Century dictators did was to repatriate those practices to Europe. They invented nothing. But brought to new levels the technologies of destruction perfected in the colonies. (By the way this return from the peripheries is just what Michel Foucault detected in other social institutions at a lower level.)
Even generous reviewers have found it hard to work up much enthusiasm for this film about ideas with virtually no action, though there are enough tensions to produce heart attacks, fist fights, and brain aneurisms all around, and to ruin more than one career. Apparently this is not enough to hold the attention of even a sympathetic reviewer. Admittedly, the film also features much thinking time when Arendt broods on what she has seen and concluded, and sees how all those other journalists who were there have trumpeted the conclusions they took with them. They react; they do not think. Thinking takes time and this director respects that and expects her audience to have the attention span to cope with it. Amen!
The film integrates black and white film footage from Eichmann’s trial and it is essential. Because, at least to this viewer, it confirms everything Arendt said.
Adolf Eichmann
It is unmistakeable. No re-enactment, not even I suspect by the great Swiss actor Bruno Ganz, could do it better, and Ganz even briefly made Hitler seem almost human in “Der Untergang‘ (Downfall) (2004).
Barbara Sukowa offers a superb performance. She projects a laser intelligence that burns through all the irrelevancies thrown in her path. She dominates the camera when she sits silently in a crowd watching Eichmann testify as she seems to suck out of the air his every word, twitch, tic, hesitation. It is a remarkable sequence in which she alone seems alive to what is there before all but she alone sees him for what he is – nothing. It is a scene that is repeated in the press room among the cynical and jaded journalist there seeking sensationalism, and finding it. They react. They are satisfied with the prejudices they came with, but she, silent and still, is not. Though she is silent and still she is more alert, alive, and active than any of them because she is thinking, and they are not. So said Plato of Socrates’s silences.
Margarethe von Trotta is a very experienced director and I found her ‘Das Versprechen’ (The Promise) (1996) which mirrored the Cold War history of Berlin in a love story memorable for its compassion. She also made ‘Rosa Luxemborg’ (1985) and ‘Katrina Bluhm’ (1975). Both of these I found heavy-handed.
But for this film she deserves her own medal for taking it and conceptualizing it in a way that could be filmed, and then selling the project to those that supported it.
Hannah Arendt
In the film nothing is made of Arendt’s most important book ‘The Human Condition’ (1955) and most important essay ‘The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man’ (1963). There is nothing else Iike either.
The official website for the film which is in German but there is an English translation button.
http://www.hannaharendt-derfilm.de
Alain Resnais (1922-2014)
When Alain Resnais died a few weeks ago I stopped to think about his films, well to be exact, the ones I have seen.
Recently when browsing ‘Le Monde’ I saw another tribute to him and that prompted me to be more systematic about my own recollections. I put them in three categories: (1) compelling, (2) entertaining, and (3) undecided.
1. Compellng does not always mean comprehensible.
‘Nuit et Brouillard’ (1955)
A very short film (22m), believe it or not, a lyrical meditation on Nazi death camps from the German ‘Nacht und Nebel’ in Wagner’s Rheingold where it is magic spell, but it became a code for extermination. The many enemies of the Reich began to disappear into the ‘Night and Fog.‘ Understated and cryptic.
‘L’Année dernière à Marienbad’ (1961)
Everyone tries to figure our what it all means, and like James Joyce it may mean nothing at all but it is gorgeous to look at it.
‘Muriel’ (1963)
Though not a word is said about the Algerian War (torture, genocide, coup d’état, betrayal, treason, lying, cover-ups, assassination, a putsch) and yet its shadow falls across everything. Long silences. Social dysfunction. Unspoken and unspeakable guilt and shame.
‘Providence’ (1977)
John Gielgud writes a novel which Dirk Bogarde Ellen Burstyn, and David Warner are living, or are they? An ode to the creative process of the novelist.
2. Entertaining is not always funny.
‘Le guerre est finie’ (1966)
The most acessible and explicit of his films, an absurdly romantic vision of a communist cell plotting against the Franco government, but Yves Montand burns with conviction.
‘Pas sur le bouche’ (2003)
A musical comedy is a real change of pace for the master at 81 years of age; it is fast and furious. ‘Not on the lips’ is the title.
3. Undecided.
‘Hiroshima mon amour’ (1959)
War is bad, atomic war is worse, yes, I got that much but as for the rest, it is too deep for me.
He made a lot more films, I see from the Wikipedia filmography.
Blancanieves (2012)
Missed this film during its short theatrical release in Sydney, but noticed it in Civic Video après le gym the other day. There was only one copy on the shelf.
It is a very clever and daring film. Silent and in black-and-white, so that means 95% of those under 40 will ignore it. On the other hand, because it is silent the language barrier is lower and the title cards are far fewer and easier to read than subtitles.
The film transplants ‘Snow White’ to Seville 1925 in the milieu of bullfighting and bullfighters. The usual suspects are present: the evil step-mother, the helpless father, the seven dwarfs who are aspiring bullfighters. It all hangs together though Snow White as a bullfighter takes some getting used to.
By the way, the bullfighting sequences make it very Spanish but are filmed very carefully for an international audience, i.e., not cruel or bloody.
In addition to the step-mother, Snow White also has to deal with a corrupt and incompetent press and a manipulative and scheming promoter. It is a lot for a fairy tale to deal with, but she does well, despite the downbeat end.
The Brothers Grimm would approve.
Technical note, the black-and-white in this is not monochrome. Believe it or not monochrome film stock is far more expensive than colour these days. The technical notes on the official web site it was shot in colour and then it was developed as black-and-white, I think it says that. Some will notice this film lacks the subtly of monochrome which offers a world of greys. Whereas in this film, and perhaps it fits the story, everything is either black or it is white.
Milan Kundera, ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ (1984)
In anticipation of a trip to Prague, I read some Czech literature, starting with this one.
Milan Kundera
I liked the proposition that life is light, and knowing that causes anguish. ‘Lightness’ means that life is produced by chance, accident, coincidence, mistakes, and so on. It all could just as well be otherwise. There is nothing profound, fated about what happens. Our individual lives are nothing much and we might as well enjoy what we have since there is nothing deeper to it, no world-historical meaning, no kismet, no divine plan. Just living and breathing, as Karenin, the dog, does. Lightness = liberation.
Only when Tomas and Tereza shed all their past lives and move to the country where the high point of the day is a walk in the woods with Karenin do they find happiness together. Though by then they are both so worn and defeated, she by weightiness and he by lightness, that they are barely aware of it.
But knowing that life, that one’s own life, is trivial and insignificant can disturb some. In reaction they search for weight, for meaning, in political action, in religious conviction, in martyrdom, in intellectual snobbery, in technical argot that excludes others, and so on.
There is much food for thought here. Moreover, sprinkled throughout the book are ruminations on the consequences of the Prague Spring of 1968, the subsequent Russian intervention, and the reactionary Czechoslovak regime that followed. Tomas and Tereza flee and then return, and that seems a kind of fate and the consequences are certainly heavy. Life may be light but the weight, like gravity, is always there. It cares not whether one denies it.
Tomas falls from social grace, from a skilled and valued surgeon, to a general practitioner, to a pharmacist, to a window cleaner, to market gardener. Evidently Czechoslovakia had so much educated talent it could afford to train its window cleaners to be surgeons.
Tereza’s fall is lateral, from budding photographer who documented the Prague Spring and then the Russian intervention to tell the world of the hopes of the former and the crimes of the latter, only later to realize her pictures meant to celebrate Czechoslovak courage and fortitude were used by the Secret Police to identify victims. She tried to be heavy in taking the photographs and discovered the law of unintended consequences took over. It is the one law we all obey.
I cannot say I enjoyed reading the book. Though the substance as adumbrated above is compelling, the storyline seems, more often than not, an adolescent idea of life with Tomas and his parade of willing women who never seem to want anything from him but an hour of sex which is completely light in that it never has any consequences. An endless supply of them seems to await only his nod. That is the major key in the novel, and that no doubt explains why the film was made, an excuse for a parade of sex. That project would appeal to the boys with arrested development who dominate the film industry.
That and the side tracks with Franz and Sabina, and some pontifical interpolated pages detract from the momentum of the novel.
Equally, the fractured timeline that moves back and forth on itself is metaphysical but not motivational to the reader.
It is indeed a modern novel with its broken and curled timeline, its unreliable narrators (Tomas and Tereza, among others), its inconsistencies, its multiple points of view, and its abrupt shifts of place, as well as time.
Tried to read it before and lost interest in one of the sidetracks. The film passed in front of my eyes on a long flight once.
Robert Sheckley, The Status Civilization (1960)
I read a lot of science fiction, and I certainly read novels by Sheckley though I have no recollection of reading this one. The title that chimes with me is ‘Journey Beyond Tomorrow.’ Though the cover reproduced below is familiar.
I saw a copy of ‘The Status Civilization’ last month, in of all places, The Museum of Democracy in Canberra. In the once parliamentary library in the Museum there were a number of utopian and dystopian novels. (I thought them out of place in absence of any books on the subject of the Museum – democracy.)
The name Sheckley meant something to me so I put the Dogs of Amazon to work in tracking down a copy. A lot of 1950s science fiction is now being reprinted so we can re-visit them and I got a copy and read it in a day. It is slight book of little more than one hundred pages.
It posits a world consistent with Thomas Hobbes’s state of nature with some shadowy political institutions. The motif is familiar, Philip Dick, ‘Clans of the Alphane Moon;’ Mack Reynolds, ‘Equality;’ John Carpenter, ‘Escape from New York;’ and more.
The plot twist at the end was mildly amusing but quite inconsistent with all that had gone before, making the whole broken-backed. The point was how easy it is to misperceive a distant reality, and maybe that made more sense at the height of the Cold War than it does now.
Still it was a tonic compared to James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses!’
Details at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Status_Civilization
Nebraska (2013) * * * *
We had to see it, and see it we did. It is King Lear in worn jeans with grease under the fingernails.
For plot details see the Internet Movie Database entry at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1821549/
Or the official web site: http://www.nebraskamovie.co.uk
What I liked about it included, the wonderful cinematography that made the Sandhills seem almost alive in the background of the long drive.
But even better was the slow and steady camera survey of the ruined and wrecked Woody’s face in confusion, despair, determination, loss, repose, fatigue, purpose. Bruce Dern is center stage and mostly silent while the camera follows the emotions across his face.
Viewers may remember Bruce from ‘Coming Home” (1978) or ‘Silent Running (1972). If not, they should!
Having yielded reluctantly his kingdom to age, like Lear, Woody tries to reclaim it a little of it in that lottery scam.
One of his two sons, having nothing better to do makes the futile trip with him. During the drive this son, David, learns many things, some about himself and some about his irascible, volatile, not very loving or lovable father. And he meets many very nice people and a couple not so nice. Such is life.
David sees in Woody lost opportunities, mistakes, quiet achievements that no one knows about but his wife Kate, who wants to stomp Woody more often than not but destroys those others who might criticize or take advantage of him. All in all, it gives David a lot to think about in his own life, about 40, going grey, bunking alone in a motel room.
The other son, Ross, seems completely self-centred, and yet when he is needed, he is there. Capped with a marvelous scene when the two brothers momentarily return to their youth, communicating preternaturally, and off they go to get that damned air compressor. They learn next time not to take quite so literally what is said by someone diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
Well, maybe not diagnosed, for when a well-meaning stranger asks David if Woody has Alzheimer’s he replies in the payoff line of the movie: ‘No, he just believes what people say to him.’ It is such a gem I thought, in my perfect hindsight it should have come later to cap it off.
The most powerful scene? Several come to mind, but none can beat Kate, Woody’s long suffering wife, when she bellows down the ravenous relatives who think Woody has indeed won the lottery. Jane Squibb as Kate blows their hair off, and the eyes of her two adult sons pop when she does.
I could not find an image of this scene, but here she is pensive.
But even more moving is the short drive down the street with Woody at the wheel of a new truck with an air compressor in the back. Redemption without a word.
Some critics, seeking always to be critical, which is usually translated as different if not perverse, suppose the director, writer, producer Alexander Payne is mocking the people who inhabit this story. I heard that a lot regarding his earlier movie ‘About Schmidt’ (2002) and let it go through to the keeper since the very assertion betrays an incomprehension so deep no remedy applies. It is a conclusion only a critic could draw.
This is not the country of Bill ‘The-Cheaper-the-Shot-the-Better’ Bryson.
Payne shows us a world, complete unto itself. It is light and dark, and within its confines, it has good and evil, too, but they shade into and out of each other. It is life.
I did not know Hollywood still made movies about real people, living real lives. It is a pleasure to see it is. Made by adults for adults.
I have no doubt that higher being Roger Ebert would put all thumbs up for this one.
Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist. 2d ed. (1982, 2007)
I read this biography in the American Presidents program I set myself. Eugene who? A president? He was a presidential candidate in 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920, and my program extends to candidates, too. Some unsuccessful candidates, like William Jennings Bryan, are far more interesting than some successful candidates, e.g., Grover Cleveland. Both were Debs’s contemporaries.
The book sets Debs (1855-1926) in the context of his time, which was the Age of Robber Barons after the Civil War and reached national proportions from the late 1870s. In Debs’s experience this New Dawn played out on railroads and the unions of railway workers.
From the spread of the Iron Horse to the 1850s railroads were locally owned and managed. They usually came about from the combined capital and labor of men in a few small towns, hence the names of early railroads like ‘The Achison, Topeka, and Santa Fe’ or ‘The Kearny, Grand Island, and Hastings Line.’ Businessmen in the three towns would pool their money and borrow from local banks to raise the investment capital and to hire and train labor from the same three town to build the railroads connecting their three towns. In boom times many did this and there were perhaps as many as 5000 of these independent railroads in the United States. See Steven Salsbury, ‘No Way to Run a Railroad’ (1982) for background.
Each railroad was a small business where the owners knew all the workers and vice versa, sat next to them in church on Sunday, stood by them at parades on the 4th of July, and sent their children to the same local schools. Accordingly, employer paternalism assisted workers, and workers made an extra effort to bolster their own towns’ fortunes for their employers. What was good for the Achison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad was good for Achison, Topeka, and Santa Fe and all those who live in those towns and work on that railroad.
This was the world that Debs entered as a high school drop out. (His bourgeoise parents wanted him to stay in school but he wanted the pocket money, and his strong will prevailed.) His aptitude for office work soon took him off the locomotives. Once he became a clerk, he also did the same work for the rail brotherhoods, these were philanthropic combinations that offered services to railwaymen, usually those injured, many started as funeral insurance funds. They worked closely with the paternalistic owners, and were often tougher on dubious claims than were the more socially distant and benevolent owners. Debs soon became a leader in these self-help associations, which were the seeds of trade unions.
Though there was much rail there was no national network, and there were few connections because gauges differed, the rolling stock was often locally made and so distinctive if not idiosyncratic, and so on and on. Despite the thousands of miles of track, it was still difficult and expensive to ship something from Omaha to Boston. Enter the Robber Barons. When recessions and depressions hit, they bought up these local lines cheaply and began the slow and expensive process of unifying the equipment, the organizations, the accompanying telegraph, and the labor practices. They took the ownership and control of railroads out of the hands of locals. Head office was now in New York City in the conglomerate that Was J. J. Hill, and not in the next pew on Sunday, or in the next chair in the barbershop.
Injured railwaymen, and there were many, were cast aside and newly arrived immigrants who would work for less were taken on, and in turn disposed of when they were injured. Try the Frank Norris novel ‘The Octopus’ (1901) for the gruesome details, far beyond the horrors of Stephen King’s imagination.
In this context the railway brotherhoods (firemen, brakemen, linemen, telegraphers, engineers, etc – these divisions among railway men proved to be as much the problem as the hostility of the Robber Barons) gradually moved to trade unions, the relationship between labor and owners becomes formal, attenuated, and belligerent, the conflict between those already there and immigrants added violence to the equation.
When conflict is unavoidable, per Salvatore, Debs shows an intellectual inconsistency and moral weakness in seeking compromises with the forces of darkness (CAPITAL) to deliver real, immediate, and tangible benefits to union members. Heaven forbid! He is as bad as these Sewer Socialists of Milwaukee who concentrated on building a clean and safe city for workers, eschewing class conflict for sewer lines and trams to carry labour to work, not to protest again capital. It is no wonder that these Wisconsin socialists have been nearly written out of left history.
Debs’s persistent effort to promote reform rather than launch a revolution, his willingness to ally with William Jennings Bryan and Teddy Roosevelt in the mainstream of electoral politics, his effort to use the ballot box rather than direct action or violent strikes, his penchant for citing Thomas Jefferson, Walt Whitman, or Harriet Martineau and not Karl Marx bemuses Salvatore, and is offered as evidence of Deb’s naiveté. Such is the view from Olympus.
Debs was a tireless labor organizer and speaker. The very few quotations from auditors that make it into these pages suggest he hectored, badgered, and brimstoned his audiences.
H. L. Mencken said he spoke ‘wth a tongue of fire,’ and I guess that is what he meant. Mencken is not cited in this book, though he was surely the shapest observer of his time, and he certainly had the serpent’s tongue himself.
It is sadly true that Debs was jailed, and sometimes beaten up by thugs in the employ of CAPITAL. But it also true that at times agents of wicked CAPITALISM asked his advice, deferred to him, and treated him with respect.
In time he became involved in the Populist backlash that the Robber Barons generated, igniting at the end of those railways in the Middle, North, and South west. He was mooted as the presidential candidate of the nascent Populist Party in the 1896 Presidential election, but Debs instead nominated William Jennings Bryan. To comrade Salvatore this flirtation with Populism and alignment with Bryan are proof absolute that Debs was dopey.
In 1912 he got 900,000 votes or 6%. This was the high water mark. The votes had no effect on the outcome: Woodrow Wilson won. Debs was last, behind both Teddy Roosevelt whose one-man party finished second and the Republican incumbent William H. Taft who finished third. But each campaign allowed this man, born to the priesthood, to preach across the nation. Though he was a very intense speaker, the book hardly mentions the campaigns.
Instead the book offers minute accounts of the faction fights, splits, divisions, competing agendas of the ever smaller number of socialists as each group sought perfection. Why did Socialism fail in the United States? That is a question often asked. The answer is right there. The search for perfection is the enemy of doing some good. Here’s an experiment to answer the question. Put three self-proclaimed Socialists in a room and close the door. A day later there will be five parties. The next day, eight splits. On the third day a revolt. [They never make it to the seventh day of rest.] See Seymour Martin Lipset, ‘Why socialism failed in the United States’ (1954), which is not cited in this book.
Debs seems to have changed over the years and been willing to change his mind, but the author regards that as a failing. Debs also seems to have been a hard man to like. Cold, distant, jaded with time, and thin skinned to criticism from fellow socialists. In 1900 his VIce-Presidential running mate Job Harriman, despised him and left for a four-week tour of Europe to visit socialist conventions rather than campaign for or with him.
Hmmm. That is commitment to the New Jerusalem but not today. Just the man for the job was this Job. He later found the workers’ paradise at Llano in the Mojave desert above Los Angeles where land was cheap for many good reasons, and when the apple was eaten in that paradise the group split he led some diehards to Louisiana to New Llano, a site I visited in 2004.
Debs had spoken vaguely himself of workers’ colonies in the West where the dreaded and dead hand of CAPITAL did not reach. But when Harriman tried it … [Guess!] …. Debs objected, and so did most other socialists. This was not the way to paradise.
I often wondered why our author or why Debs himself did not turn to the most insightful student of American democracy ever to grace a page: Alexis de Tocqueville. He would have had no trouble in explaining the failure of Socialism. The promise of freedom, the promise of individualism, even if only partly achieved is irresistible. In family pictures of immigrants from Bohemia, Schleswig, Bratislava in Nebraska in the 1880s they are dressed — to my eye — in rags, sitting in front of crude dugouts, with animal dirt in evidence, yet these people glow with pride. They own themselves in a way they never could have done in Europe. Promise fulfilled! Serfs no longer.
Slave-pay, barbaric work practices, grinding existence, a barter economy, hunger, are second place to that self-realization. A Robber Baron is a small thing in this light.
Debs never thought out a position on race. But he was early, loud, and consistent on women’s suffrage. Full marks on that one.
He was arrested during World War I for objecting to a war of nationalism while Woodrow Wilson was president. Though Debs was arrested by local authorities after the United States Attorney-General declined to prosecute a man for speaking his mind and doing so very carefully to avoid violating the law of the land. But a Federal District Attorney hungry for limelight proceeded anyway, and secured a conviction after stacking a local jury, while Debs seems to have welcomed this relief from pressures of the endless, unproductive, increasingly bitter faction fights which made martyrdom look good.
He was in a federal prison during the 1920 election when he got 915,00 votes, or 4% of the total.
Certainly a striking campaign button. The Debs Foundation offers replicas for $3.
Debs married young and grew apart from his wife who lived in their family home in Terre Haute Indiana which he visited on his coast-to-coast travels once or twice a year. He was hard drinker and this ruined his health, as did the nervous pressure of constant conflict among the self-styled socialists, and the rigors on nearly continuous travels. He was a frequent patron at brothels, and in later life, while remaining married, co-habited with another woman who seems to have admired him in a way his wife never did.
Being a secular man, I suppose, Salvatore spends not one word on the largest and most pervasive social force of that time and place, Religion. Did Debs have religion? Did he attend church? If not, did he express atheism or agnosticism? Unknown.
The Russian Revolutions of 1917 inspired many and they split the Socialist atom once again to create the American Communist Party, e.g., Emma Goldman, John Reed, Earl Browder. That was the end of Socialism. Debs himself was a spent force by then and let it slide from his prison cell.
He was jailed in Atlanta from 1917 to 1921, when President Harding, no doubt in his usual alcoholic stupor, pardoned him.
Having opened with references to Debs’s contemporaries William Jennings Bryan and Grover Cleveland, let us return to them. Debs was certainly the intellectual and moral superior to Cleveland however one defines these terms. He knew and saw more American life than Cleveland, and he had more contact with and learned from people he met, unlike the bumbling recluse Cleveland. Yet he seems a remote preacher shouting down from a pulpit compared to Bryan, who liked people whether in ones, or twos, or thousands and seemed to speak with rather than yell at them. Bryan’s message was God’s love and social cooperation, while Debs offered that brimstone of Socialist perfection that admitted of no exceptions.
In sum, he is a man born to the priesthood, who created, accepted, nay, welcomed his own martyrdom. In this portrayal he seems much less interesting than Herbert Hoover, Sam Houston, or Teddy Roosevelt.
For the Salvatore, Eugene Debs is the ectoplasm in which changing social forces played out.
‘Ectoplasm’ is the word for Debs in these pages, because the author treats him like a specimen on the slide of history, and not as a living, breathing, thinking, learning person. This is social science as biography, and least we forget, social science is about social forces that shape and make individuals. That is called Structure with a capital “S” in the lecture halls of universities. Hence the reference above to religion as a social force of the age.
When biography writers establish some distance between themselves and the subject, it affords them scope to be honest about the weaknesses as well as the strengths of the subject, but Salvatore’s distance is measured is astronomical hindsightyears. Salvatore knew all along that the Robber Barons were coming, that the conflict between capital and labor was foreordained by Brother Marx, Karl not Groucho, that class conflict would be the words to live by, and so on.
He disdains the rather dim Debs who had to learn some of these lessons through his skin. Debs, not Salvatore, was the one beaten on picket lines, but it is Salvatore who knows how Structure led to this beating. Salvatore’s Lefter-than-thou hindsight nearly buries Debs the man beneath an avalanche of class analysis jargon. I began to suspect that the book started life as a PhD dissertation in which the premium goes to the theoretical framework and not the data, the man in question.
Before conceding too much to Salvatore and his ilk, note that Karl Marx said that history makes man, but that also man makes history. It is a reciprocal equation, social forces make us what we are, but the script is broad, blunt, and imperfect and in those imperfections we Lilliputians make social forces what they are. Social life is an endless editing of the social script. I am using the metaphors of Brazilian political scientist Roberto Unger’s very original and generally neglected ‘Plasticity into Power’ (1987). (Do not be fooled by the long, laudatory entry in Wikipedia; his work is seldom cited in the halls of political science or law).
There is no question here, no tension in this book: Debs is a billiard ball bounced around by social forces he only vaguely perceives. But which forces Salvatore can name in an instant, such is the alacrity of a good student who knows all the words and little of lived-meaning in the life-world. (Apologies but I thought I would throw in some Germanic jargon from Martin Heidegger just to show that I could.)
Other presidential biographers smell the feet of clay in their subject without squeezing humanity out of them. Robert Caro’s distaste for LBJ is palpable in Volume II but he also finds Lyndon to be larger than life and sui generis, fascinating for it. Nothing is sui generis in the pages of this book. All is explained by social forces, which reduce to the evils of CAPITALISM. Get it! If not hand-in your class consciousness card at the door on the way out.
The book does not ever even try to bring him to life. Ectoplasm is a stain on a slide. It is the first biography I have ever read without a human subject.
After plowing through these pages I will seek relief in some pleasurable, escapist reading: Let it be Inspector Pel!