Riot of Spring

 

Centennials usually mark political events. But today, May 29, 2013, marks the hundredth anniversary of a cultural event: the premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet, The Rite of Spring, performed by the Ballets Russes at the Théatre des Champs Elysées in Paris. That performance became the stuff of legend, having occasioned – or said to have occasioned – a riot or near riot.

In a Teaching Company course about Stravinsky, Robert Greenberg relates, among other things, that the sight of a group of ballerinas bending their heads to the right inspired shouts of “Get a dentist!” That detail made its way into Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky, a 2009 movie by Jan Lounen that centered on an affair between the two. But the affair may be a legend, and the riot, or at least the scale of it, may also be.

In a piece at the Huffington Post last week, William Robin reported on a conference at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow where, among other things, the historical reality of the “riot” came into question.

Tamara Levitz offered an analysis of the violence pregnant not only in The Rite's scenario but also in its reception. The 2013 celebrations of The Rite have embraced the somewhat historically-tenuous idea that it provoked a riot at its premiere, a fact that has obscured the forgotten, real riots of the 20th century. In fact, as Levitz pointed out, the victory of the conflation of The Rite with a riot can be attributed to impresario Serge Diaghilev, whose marketing ploy in engineering the scandal at the premiere has helped guarantee the work its legendary status today.

Diaghilev was certainly a master showman, but in previous productions of novel works by Stravinsky and others, he had let the music speak for itself. Perhaps contemporary as well as later accounts of the riot were exaggerated, but it is hard to believe that they were entirely made up, or that the whole thing was somehow stage-managed. Yet in one sense, it doesn’t matter: the important thing is that The Rite of Spring changed the course of classical music. Other composers like Beethoven had changed the course of music before, but for a single work to achieve that was truly epochal.

The ballet is being restaged today, or its music played, all over the world. The centennial performance at the Theatre des Champs Elysées itself by the Mariinsky Ballet from St. Petersburg, is among those using the 1913 choreography of Vladislav Nijinsky, revived by the Joffrey Ballet in 1987. It was thought irretrievably lost but was reconstructed after years of research, primarily by Millicent Hodson, who pieced it together from clues in original prompt books, contemporary sketches and photographs, and the recollections of those still living who had taken part, including Marie Rambert (who had worked with Nijinsky). Here (copy and paste link) is the complete Mariinsky performance:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IrZLZeU0Dc

For 1913, the choreography was as revolutionary as the music itself, and had at least as as much shock value. But it was abandoned in later productions, and other versions replaced it – several are being performed this year. Stravinsky himself tinkered with the score a number of times, but hardly as much as Walt Disney in Fantasia (1940), where the virgin sacrifice story was replaced by imagined prehistory, especially the age of the dinosaurs:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3VqcTDf6l4

If nothing else, Fantasia proved that Stravinsky had made it as a popular composer: it’s hard to imagine that Disney would have found any use for the music of other musical experimentalists like Alban Berg or Arnold Schoenberg. Nearly four decades later, John Williams quoted the opening dance of The Rite of Spring in his score for Star Wars, beginning at 1:03 in this clip:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9IV5u9iwuQ

Four years before that, however, Nino Rota had quoted the same passage in “Duca di Wurttemberg,” one of the pieces for Federico Fellini’s Casanova. Rota was known for his melodic scores for other Fellini movies, and such international hits as The Godfather. But he was a long-time friend of Stravinsky, and wanted to pay him homage. The clip below is from a performance that looks like a recording session for Fellini’s Casanova, but isn’t – the orchestration for the film was a bit different, and the singer in the version used there was a man:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iAC9S90UHY

Stravinsky’s influence on classical music was being felt much earlier, as witness The Miraculous Mandarin, a ballet composed in 1918-24 by the Hungarian Béla Bartok. It scandalized the audience and was banned in Germany after its 1926 premiere in Cologne. Small wonder, based on its scenario: two tramps use a seductive woman to lure victims in order to rob them. But when they try the same thing with a wealthy Chinese, he becomes obsessed with the woman; the tramps try to kill him several times, but he won’t die until she embraces him. Only disconnected excerpts of the ballet itself appear to be available online, but here’s one of those, followed by the entire score:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvMckpF-yk8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Fg4nknc-6I

Bartok had previously composed a ballet called The Wooden Prince (1916) that was more traditional in story and melodic music, but he later turned to an aggressively rhythmic style of music more in the vein of Stravinsky, including two piano concertos that were more percussive than melodic, and orchestral pieces like Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste. Yet, with his fellow countryman Zoltan Kodaly, he was also involved in collecting Hungarian folk music – not just gypsy dances – that could be incorporated into classical music.

Although it wasn’t obvious to Parisians in 2013, much of the score for The Rite of Spring itself had its roots in Russian folk music. Folk music had been made use of before, but it had generally been prettified; Stravinsky focused on the essence of what was then called “primitive” music, although it wouldn’t be politically correct to call it that today. Latin American composers soon began mixing classical music with elements of native music, as with Brazil’s Heitor Villa Lobos, whose Choros No. 10 (said to have been a sensation at its Paris premiere in 1926). The first part incorporated bird calls; the second, shown below, segues from native rhythm into a haunting melody based on the popular Brazilian song “Rasga o Coracão” – and the singers (especially the women) really get into it: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UnVmG-DDhY

In Mexico, Silvestre Revueltas’ Sensemaya (1937) was inspired by a poem of the same name by Cuba’s Nicolàs Guillèn, which evokes an Afro-Caribbean ritual killing of a snake. Revueltas’ piece is purely orchestral, although there has been a choral adaptation in recent years. And the piece is used in the movie Sin City by Robert Rodriguez, who said it had influenced the rest of the score:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZO2VkKKR7o

Arlington Road (1999), directed by Mark Pellington, deals with paranoia and conspiracy, which are much in the public consciousness these days. But its first scene, in which we see a boy on a bicycle who has somehow been seriously wounded, and is rescued and taken to the hospital by a neighbor who has no idea what that will get him into, is yet another example of the influence of Stravinsky on popular music. Nothing to do with folk music this time, or specifically The Rite of Spring, but Angelo Badalamenti embraces the method of Stravinsky (with electronic music for the driving rhythms) in “Bloody Boy,” which segues into a piece by British techno band Lunatic Calm called “Neon Reprise.” For some reason, the clip below is incorrectly credited to another movie, The Beach, on which Badalamenti also worked:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhgFRhe6oSY

Strangely, one composer least influenced by The Rite of Spring was Stravinsky himself. He had already taken the ballet world by storm with The Firebird (1910) and Petrushka (1911), and for all the controversy surrounding Rite, it had a good run on tour. But then something happened: the Great War, now known as World War I. After that dreadful conflict, people wanted to return to normalcy – Stravinsky among them, turning to neo-classicism. His first postwar ballet for Diaghilev was Pulcinella (1920), inspired by 18^th Century music. That sort of music was played fairly straight in the first part, but he took comic liberties with it in later sections, one of which features an orchestral Bronx cheer. One modernist element was costumes by Pablo Picasso, but this production has dispensed with all or most of those:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFNl6D75Jxo

From neo-classicism, Stravinsky turned after World War II to serial composition, a form that follows a strict mathematical logic but doesn’t relate to the way most people actually experience music, as witness The Flood (1962), based on the Biblical story of Noah and the Ark:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ogzi7QGy63g

Only once during all these years did Stravinsky return to the kind of music that had made him Stravinsky. Oddly enough, it was during World War II, when he was tinkering with the score of Rite, that he began work on his Symphony in Three Movements, which premiered in 1946 and shows the obvious influence of his earlier work:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIgur3mNCQ8

But think of all the other music we would never have heard but for Stravinsky, because it would never have been composed. Critics have seen his more subtle influence in works as varied as those of Francis Poulenc and Aaron Copland (At a New York Philharmonic retrospective on Stravinsky’s work and influence I attended many years ago, among the works featured one evening was Poulenc’s Concerto in G minor for organ, strings, and timpani (1938).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7051SGd0Hzs

I can still remember that the program notes included an anecdote about Stravinsky. I can’t vouch for its authenticity online, but the story went that somebody had described Poulenc to Stravinsky as “eclectic.” Stravinsky was said to have responded: “Eclectic? The man’s a kleptomaniac.”

Plagiarism may be a sin, but inspired kleptomania may be a virtue in the arts.

Flight from Reality

Flight (2012), which stars Denzel Washington as an airline pilot who’s an alcoholic and a cocaine addict, is meant to be a story of redemption. That, and the fact that Washington delivers a stellar performance (Roger Ebert called it “one of his very best.”), garnered the movie rave reviews and a couple of Oscar nominations.

What the reviews seem to have missed was how contrived the movie was. It was the first movie Robert Zemeckis, still perhaps best known for the Back to the Future series, had directed in some 12 years. Perhaps that, and the fact that neither he nor his screenwriter John Gatins had any experience with serious drama, accounts for this.

The story itself is preposterous from the start. “Whip” Whitaker, the pilot, awakens in Orlando after a night of booze and sex with one of his airline’s flight attendants, Trina Marquez (Nadine Velazquez, who gratuitously gets to show off her naked body). He’s late to get to the airport for a flight to Atlanta, so he snorts some coke to re-energize himself for the task at hand.

It’s a rough take-off because of severe weather, but Whip brings it off. There’s worse to come, however, for on the approach to Atlanta the plane goes out of control (It turns out at the end to have been mechanical failure, due to the airline’s failure to replace a worn jackscrew that is essential to pitch control.). In an undeniably powerful sequence, Whip , completely calm and showing no effects of booze or coke, manages to get control of the plane by flying it upside down for a while, then makes a rough landing in a field. Of 102 “souls” on board, only four passengers and two crew –one of them Trina – are killed.

Gatins told the Los Angeles Times that his script was “loosely inspired” by an actual Alaska Airlines crash in 2000. There too there was a broken jackscew, and there too the pilots flipped the plane over in hopes of making a safe landing. Only they didn’t; there were no survivors. And those pilots were presumably clean and sober, whereas Whip was not only full of coke and alcohol when he boarded the plane, but downed a couple of bottles of vodka while in flight. Can we believe that for a moment? Yet we are later told that the National Transportation Safety Board did simulations with other pilots – and none of them managed to save the plane.

Whip is hailed as a hero, but the NTSB has to hold a hearing to determine the cause of the crash, and a blood sample taken from him at the hospital shows he was off the charts. Enter his union rep Charlie Anderson (Bruce Greenwood) and lawyer Hugh Lang (Don Cheadle). No problem, they say; Lang can have the toxicology report thrown out on technical grounds. All Whip has to do is stay off booze – and be ready to give false testimony at the hearing. And at first he seems to be complying. Retiring to a farm left him by his grandfather, in order to steer clear of the press, he throws out all the beer and liquor there. And yet the man who gives him a lift there is his drug dealer Harling Mays (John Goodman) – as sleazy a character as they come.

Whip’s demons return. He hooks up with a woman he met in the hospital, Nicole Maggen (Kelly Reilly) – herself an addict and alcoholic, who’s way behind in her rent and without any job offers except for a porn film. Whip tries to connect with his ex-wife and son, but they’ll have nothing to do with him, knowing his ways. He soon falls off the wagon, but when Nicole manages to get back on it and join Alcoholics Anonymous, even inviting him to attend a session, he won’t come clean about being an alcoholic, and sneaks off to continue boozing.

By this time, he’s driving Charlie and Hugh to distraction, and you have to wonder why they put up with them. They look increasingly sleazy themselves as they try to save his ass in a meeting with airline executives. It’s one thing for Lang to have taken care of the toxicology report; we read about lawyers doing that sort of thing all the time. But now he and Charlie are becoming increasingly complicit in suborning perjury, and incidentally giving lawyers and union reps a bad name. To keep him sober, Charlie puts him up at his own apartment a week before the hearing, and for the night before, for no obvious reason, they check him into a carefully guarded (by a rent-a-cop) expensive hotel room with nothing but soft drinks and juices in the fridge. Everything’s taken care of…

But talk about diabolus ex machina! There’s a door ajar to the next room, which is well-stocked with booze. Charlie and Hugh find him dead drunk the next morning. What to do? Call in Harling, of course! Just how they know how to reach him isn’t clear, but he knows how to get him ready for his testimony: have him snort coke, the same thing he did to get “ready” for the flight. So there he is, before friendly examiner  Ellen Brock (Melissa Leo), seeming perfectly sober as he denies having been drunk on the flight or having any problem with alcohol or drugs. But there’s still the business of the empty vodka bottles found on the plane (because of turbulence there was no drink service for passengers). It turns out that Trina’s blood test showed she had been drinking, and Ellen invites him to finger her for having drunk that vodka.

And all of a sudden, after all his lying and evasions, Whip suddenly has an attack of guilty conscience. He refuses to blacken Trina’s name, and confesses everything – to the consternation of Charlie, who tries to object (He isn’t even the lawyer! And he only objected when Whip told the truth, not when he lied!). Here is the movie’s moment of redemption, its moment of truth. But there has been so much contrived falsity in the events leading up to it that it doesn’t have the ring of truth. We are supposed to feel for Whip in the epilogue, where he’s in prison and sharing what he’s learned from his experience with fellow prisoners. But that too rings hollow, given the context of a story that seems to ignore the ghastly irresponsibility of his behavior before and during the flight, and seems to sympathize with his lapses afterwards.

Zemeckis and Gatin obviously had good intentions. But we all know what can be paved with good intentions.

Fifty Seconds of Fame

We had some visitors last fall, a TV crew from the Japanese network NHK. They were doing an episode about communications satellites for Cosmic Front, a show devoted to space technology and space exploration. Since my father John R. Pierce played a major role at Bell Labs in the development of communications satellites with Echo and Telstar, they wanted to interview me. The show was broadcast Dec. 13, and here’s how the English language NHK site described the pioneers it celebrated:

Two extraordinarily talented men, communications engineering expert John Pierce and aeronautical engineering specialist Harold Rosen, put all their weight behind the program, and achieved enormous leaps in communications satellite technology in only three years. They also embarked on developing groundbreaking satellites that allowed stable communications: geosynchronous satellites that from the ground seem to hover over the Earth, as depicted in the science fiction novels of the time. In 1964, Syncom 3, the world's first geosynchronous satellite, relayed television images of the Tokyo Olympics from Japan, in the Far East, to the rest of the world. In this episode of Cosmic Front, we explore the dramatic story of the engineers who used meticulous calculations and unlikely ideas to turn space into a communications highway.

I was in college, or home for the summer, during the run-up to Echo (which was just a balloon, off which test phone calls between Goldstone, California, and Holmdel, New Jersey, were bounced in 1960); and Telstar (an active satellite, over which the very first intercontinental broadcasts were transmitted in 1962). I remember witnessing both, but I really didn’t know a lot of the background because my father didn’t talk about it much, and he and my mother broke up in 1961.  I actually knew a lot more about two other people who promoted the idea of communications satellites – George O. Smith and Arthur C. Clarke.

During and just after World War II, Smith had published a series of stories called Venus Equilateral in Astounding Science Fiction. These were collected in a 1947 book edition, which has a cover diagram showing the location of the communications satellite, placed at the Trojan position in the orbit of Venus to relay radio messages between Venus and Earth. This was a manned space station, and the problems that it faced – such as reaching a ship in space instead of another planet – were treated as practically insuperable. This was before masers. It was also before transistors; “high” technology in sf was still giant vacuum tubes. Clarke and my father both read Smith’s stories in Astounding, and I remember my father having a the book – I ordered a copy of the same edition to show the NHK people, and a shot of that made in into the episode.

Clarke was inspired to write a piece for Wireless World in 1945, proposing a geosynchronous communications satellite. I was familiar with that, because Clarke has referred to it in other writings, including a magazine piece (for Playboy, I think) about how he lost a billion dollars by inventing Telstar but failing to patent the idea. I wasn’t aware of my father having done anything of the sort before Echo until I read The Idea Factory, a history of the Bell Labs by Jon Gertner, in which John R. Pierce figures quite prominently. It turned out that he’d drafted a short proposal in 1954, and a longer one in 1959. But it was only when we watched the DVD of the NHK show Jan. 17 that we got to see the first, dug out of the Bell Labs archives, dated July 26, 1954, and signed by my father. That was the high point of the DVD for me.

I may have been a disappointment to Chinami Inaishi, Los Angeles representative of NHK, and the crew she brought to our home Oct. 18. They wanted more of the “inside story” of Echo and Telstar than I knew, and wanted me to talk about what it was like to be the son of such a famous man. The thing is, when I was a child, I didn’t think of him as a Famous Man – famous men were presidents and movie stars and people like Albert Einstein. And my father didn’t talk shop much at the dinner table; I remember hearing about traveling wave tubes, but not about transistors, although he gave them their name and was the supervisor of the team that created them – Walter Brattain, John Bardeen and William Shockley. I remember we visited the Brattains once or twice when I was a kid, but I didn’t have any idea at the time who he was. Just a friend of my father’s.

Anyway, I ended up with maybe fifty seconds on the screen at most; from the visual context (my voice was overdubbed, like the voices of nearly everyone else interviewed, by the Japanese translation), it must have been mostly about how we had the first TV in our neighborhood in 1947 because of our Bell Labs connection. They asked me about science fiction, and I think I spoke well about that, but there wasn’t room for it. But I can’t complain: how many people get on national TV (here or in Japan) at all? There were amusing things in the show as it aired, such as re-creations of crucial events that involved my father and others – only the actor playing my father looked nothing at all like him.

But there was another key player, who kept showing up in archival photos and re-created scenes, some with my father. I didn’t know who he was, but could make out that he must be the man behind Syncom, the first geosynchronous communications satellite. After watching the DVD, I did a Google image search for “Syncom and Inventor” – and up  popped one of the stills used in the show. It was Harold Rosen, born in 1926. I knew he had to be pretty old, yet in amazingly good health, because there are scenes of him shot by NHK working out at Muscle Beach and on a rowing machine, as well as talking about his part in communications satellites. Wikipedia says he still consults for Boeing on  design of new satellite systems. What a man!

Isn’t the Internet wonderful!

After the Oct. 18 interview, Marcia and I had dinner with the NHK people at a local Japanese restaurant. I wanted to show my appreciation for Japanese culture; among other things, I mentioned Twilight Samurai (2002), set about the time of the Meiji restoration, when the one-time warriors had gone into business. Of course, the NHK people didn’t know what I was talking about, based on the English title. But one of them got out his mobile and looked it up (the original title is Tasogare Seibei (たそがれ清兵衛).

      

      Aha! He liked it too.

Isn’t the Internet wonderful!

Getting into a Bad Hobbit

As I write this, Peter Jackson's movie adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (1937) - or rather, the first part of it – is a runaway hit.

That bodes well for Jackson, who has taken a gamble by turning a short children's novel into a trilogy on the model of The Lord of the Rings. But it doesn't bode well for the art of cinema. What could have been a charming movie is turning into a bloated monstrosity. I had been afraid of that from the outset, but some people I respect had praised the first installment, so I decided to give it a chance, but...

The best parts are those that are true to the book – the arrival of Gandalf and a dozen dwarves at Bilbo's home, and the riddle game with Gollum. Bilbo's reluctance to go adventuring, the comedy of his playing host to the dwarves and his being won over against his better instincts come right off the pages. So does Bilbo's duel of wits with Gollum – not the original 1937 version, but Tolkien's revision from 1951, when he was working on LOTR and making Gollum's ring the center of the quest in that epic rather than the handy invisibility gimmick it had seemed before. Only the scene is marred by a technical glitch that muffles some of the words.

Jackson, who took over as director (He had already been producer.) from Guillermo Del Toro after Del Toro left on account of lengthy delays occasioned by legal wrangling and other problems, was dead set on tying The Hobbit even more closely to LOTR as an epic of mythic import. But there simply isn't enough of that in the novel, so he had to pump it up by padding the canonical scenes unmercifully and adding new scenes that weren't in the story to begin with but allude to LOTR. There will be even more new material from the LOTR appendices in the second and third Hobbit movies.

Of course, an epic requires an epic hero, and that may be why Jackson made Thorin Oakenshield, described as only "enormously important" by Tolkien into a heroic-looking figure like Aragorn in LOTR, nothing like typical dwarves in appearance. Oddly enough, however, Thorin doesn't act the part as much as you might expect. Neither does Gandalf act much like a great and powerful wizard.

This begins with the scene where the dwarves are captured by the trolls. Thorin is helpless and Gandalf is nowhere to be seen. Yet in the novel, it is not Bilbo but rather Gandalf in hiding nearby who, using ventroloquism, gets the trolls to arguing among themselves until the rising sun turns them to stone. When the heroes are attacked by goblins in the troll cave, Gandalf kills several of them with magical pyrotechnics, and later frees the dwarves and Bilbo by the same means – Thorin then makes short work of the goblin king with one of the swords he had recovered in the troll cave.

In the movie, the struggle with the goblins (orcs) goes on and on and on, and their cavern looks like a theme park set or something out of a cartoon – Bilbo and the dwarves fall into it through a chute, and thereafter it seems to consist mostly of catwalks across which they must scramble to escape. Twice most of our heroes fall what must be a hundred feet, but aren't even scratched. “Well, that could have been worse,” Thorin says, as if it were some sort of a joke. As sf-fantasy critic Darrell Schweitzer put it on Facebook, they're like toons; nothing can hurt them. Except that they presumably aren't fireproof; they're trapped in a blaze in a pine forest after Gandalf (his first act of magic in the movie as opposed to the novel) ignites pine cones to toss at pursuing goblins. In the book, it was only their allies, the giant wolves called wargs – the goblins came along later to set fire to the tree where the dwarves, Bilbo and Gandalf had taken refuge. And the tree was never hanging over a precipice, either – nobody has to fall or jump through the air onto the eagles.

Other examples of pumping up abound. In the novel, the battling stone giants are seen only in the distance; our heroes aren't actually on one of them and thus in dire peril. They only stop overnight at Elrond's house; Galadriel is never seen, and Gandalf doesn't have a skull session with Saruman and Radagast. That skull session in the movie isn't in itself intrusive, but Jackson insists on turning Radagast, a minor character even in LOTR, into a player. Only his "powers" include psychically healing a hedgehog. And in what has to be the most idiotic sequence in the whole movie, we must endure watching him race across the rough and snowless countryside, pursued by goblins, in a sleigh pulled by giant bunny rabbits. It's as if the director were thumbing his nose at the whole mythology of Middle Earth.

Well, Jackson has already turned Middle Earth, at least the Hobbiton part of it, into a theme park back in New Zealand. Three movies may bring in more tourists and well as tripling box office and later DVD sales.  And we can also imagine all sorts of spin-offs – dragon toys, elf toys, maybe even Radagast bunny sleigh toys. There's nothing subtle about movie tie-in merchandising. But art can be very subtle, and the first installment of The Hobbit is so unsubtle that I've seen some online comments that Jackson simply isn't capable of subtlety, or that he doesn't have any respect for Tolkien's material. And yet he is, and has – or at least he once did.

The Lord of the Rings film trilogy was true to the vision of its source. There wasn't a false note in the portrayals of Frodo and the other hobbits, of Gandalf and Saruman, Aragorn and Arwen, dwarves and the elves, the riders of Rohan, even the ents. And the story not only moved, but was moving from start to finish. The quest itself is shown as the stuff of tragedy as well as triumph, for it leaves Frodo as a stranger in a familiar land where he can find no peace. And who can forget Jackson’s faithful renderings of such iconic scenes as Aragorn raising a ghostly army of oath-breakers, the madness and despair of Denethor, or the heroism of the warrior woman Eowyn?

It was also visually stunning, not only in its use of landscapes that had a sense of place, and in the designs of Moria, Gondor and the other locales, but in such brief yet telling scenes as the heroes passing the Sentinels of Númenor on the Great River. That is one of the scenes put up on YouTube, and there are a number of others. But perhaps the best is one that doesn't come from the letter of Tolkien and yet is true to the spirit of Tolkien. In The Return of the King, Frodo and Samwise are seated on thrones and praised with great praise. Not very cinematic, but Jackson knew how to create a scene that is truly cinematic – as the hobbits (including Merry and Pippin, who have fought heroically in the defense of Gondor) begin to pay homage to Aragorn (now King Elessar) and his bride Arwen on the ramparts of Gondor:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URmQXIeVpN8

There have been a lot of movies about the nobility, or the supposed nobility, of olden times. There was little of any true nobility in the lords and knights of those times; nobility, it seems, is something we can believe only in fairy tales. But it that one scene, Jackson showed what it should have been, and might be in some better world than ours. Would that he had remained as true as that vision…

Thoughts on Abraham Lincoln, Inspired by the Movie

Warning: this may be only wishful thinking on my part. But it turns out that Tony Kushner, who wrote the screenplay for Lincoln, shares that wishful thinking, if only wishful it be. My wife and I saw the movie Sunday, and we both thought it was terrific. I have a few quibbles about it, but not with its historical accuracy in the literal sense – Kushner really did his homework, as he explained in an interview Nov. 15 with Dave Davies of WBRU radio in Boston. It was in that same interview that I found he shared my wishful thinking.

We know the history of Reconstruction after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Andrew Johnson followed Lincoln’s policy of malice towards none and charity towards all; by the end of 1865, he had approved new governments in the former Confederate states, nine of which showed apparent  good faith  by ratifying the 13^th amendment. As far as Johnson was concerned, they were back in the Union. But the Radical Republicans won a two thirds majority in Congress in 1866, and quickly moved to impose Radical Reconstruction: only the most extreme measures, they believed, could bring political and social justice to the South and eradicate the legacy of slavery. And they had grounds for suspicion of white Southerners; a number of states had adopted “black codes” to restrict the rights of freedmen.

Under Radical Reconstruction, the white governments of ten Southern states were replaced by military governments, which created voter rolls that enfranchised blacks and disfranchised any whites who had supported the Confederacy. The new state governments elected in 1867 were controlled by Republicans, and enacted progressive measures like universal public education and public works. But they were also soon mired in blatant corruption, as in appropriating millions for railroads that were never built, with the funds ending up in sticky fingers. Taxes skyrocketed, and some states went bankrupt in all but name. The old planter class resented property taxes based on the actual value of their land; before the Civil War, they were hardly taxed at all, because they could declare the value of their land and nobody would dispute them. But working people and the poor also suffered. While a number of blacks held office, they were largely pawns of the carpetbaggers and scalawags who waxed fat from Reconstruction. Only, it was the blacks who were blamed by white conservatives for all their real and imagined sufferings, and were singled out for brutal vengeance by the White League and the Ku Klux Klan.

Out of all this came the legend of the Lost Cause and the Redemption, which led to draconian Jim Crow laws, disfranchisement of blacks, decades of lynchings, and all the rest. That legend was the subtext of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of A Nation (1916), which was based on a 1905 Thomas Dixon novel called The Clansman, and led to a revival of the Klan; and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936) – her celebration of the Klan was cut from the 1939 movie version, but the Legend of the South as some sort of idyllic paradise before the War remained. The white conservative view of Reconstruction was accepted almost universally in the North as well as the South; one the few dissenters (among whites, at least) was Howard Fast, whose Freedom Road (1944) was made into a movie in 1979. But as a Communist  – he won a Stalin Peace Prize in 1953 – Fast had to hew to the absurd Marxist premise that the freedmen and poor whites, who together made up the overwhelming majority of the Southern population, were proletarian brothers in arms – and thus inexplicably done in by a handful of vengeful planters. Perhaps the only 20^th Century novelist to write honestly about Reconstruction was Frank Yerby (himself black, although most of his readers may not have known it) in works like The Vixens (1947), which portrayed the carpetbaggers as crooks and the Redeemers as callous murderers.

Would things have been any different had Lincoln lived? And just what did Lincoln have in mind? That has become a matter of some controversy among historians, given that in 1862 he had seriously proposed that freed blacks be sent to Latin America. There had already been a movement to return blacks to Africa; that was the origin of Liberia, and Lincoln had supported that before the war. During the war, there had even been an attempted settlement in Belize. Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave who became a black leader, regarded the colonization plan a betrayal, and some revisionist historians seem to think it was Lincoln’s Final Solution to the problem of what to do with freed slaves  – although noting that perhaps it was only because he feared Southern whites would never accept free blacks. But his secretary John Hay wrote that he had “sloughed off” that idea in 1864, and there is no mention of it in his final public address, delivered in front of the White House April 11, 1865, just after Lee surrendered; rather, he held out hope that whites and blacks could live together, although it would take time to achieve political equality.  He gave the example of Louisiana, where the whites had embraced the Union and accepted emancipation – clearly criticizing Radical Republicans who opposed recognition of the new government:

Some twelve thousand voters in the heretofore slave-state of Louisiana have sworn allegiance to the Union, assumed to be the rightful political power of the State, held elections, organized a State government, adopted a free-state constitution, giving the benefit of public schools equally to black and white, and empowering the Legislature to confer the elective franchise upon the colored man. Their Legislature has already voted to ratify the constitutional amendment recently passed by Congress, abolishing slavery throughout the nation. These twelve thousand persons are thus fully committed to the Union, and to perpetual freedom in the state--committed to the very things, and nearly all the things the nation wants--and they ask the nation’s recognition and its assistance to make good their committal. Now, if we reject, and spurn them, we do our utmost to disorganize and disperse them. We in effect say to the white men "You are worthless, or worse--we will neither help you, nor be helped by you." To the blacks we say "This cup of liberty which these, your old masters, hold to your lips, we will dash from you, and leave you to the chances of gathering the spilled and scattered contents in some vague and undefined when, where, and how." If this course, discouraging and paralyzing both white and black, has any tendency to bring Louisiana into proper practical relations with the Union, I have, so far, been unable to perceive it. If, on the contrary, we recognize, and sustain the new government of Louisiana the converse of all this is made true. We encourage the hearts, and nerve the arms of the twelve thousand to adhere to their work, and argue for it, and proselyte for it, and fight for it, and feed it, and grow it, and ripen it to a complete success. The colored man too, in seeing all united for him, is inspired with vigilance, and energy, and daring, to the same end. Grant that he desires the elective franchise, will he not attain it sooner by saving the already advanced steps toward it, than by running backward over them? Concede that the new government of Louisiana is only to what it should be as the egg is to the fowl, we shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it.

There is scant reference to this address in Lincoln, which mentions only that he wanted to limit the black franchise, at least initially, to the most intelligent – and those who had served in the Union Army. But to advocate voting rights for any blacks at all was revolutionary in 1865. But the film portrays our 16^th president as both a man of principle and a man of what would later be called realpolitik. He wanted the 13^th Amendment passed as a matter of principle, but didn’t shrink at arm-twisting and backroom deals to get the votes he needed in the House. The Hampton Roads Conference, where he met with Confederate leaders to talk “peace,” was the price of getting Preston Blair, a prominent Democrat, to lean on other Democrats – by fair means or foul. Chances are that Lincoln considered it just a ploy; the movie seems to suggest that the outcome of the war was still uncertain at the time, but in fact the Confederacy was clearly on the verge of military collapse. If its leaders seriously expected any concessions from Lincoln, they were delusional. In any case, here is how Kushner summed up the situation in his interview with Davies:

I think that what Lincoln was doing at the end of the war was a very, very smart thing, and it is maybe one of the great tragedies of American history that people didn't take him literally after he was murdered, the inability to forgive and to reconcile with the South in a really decent and humane way without any question was one of the causes of a kind of resentment and the perpetuation of alienation and bitterness that led to the quote/unquote "noble cause" and the rise of the Klan and Southern self protection societies and so on. The abuse of the South after they were defeated was a catastrophe and led - helped lead to just unimaginable, untellable human suffering. So had Lincoln not been murdered and had he really been able to guide Reconstruction, I think there's good reason to believe that he would have acted on those principles because he meant them.

Maybe I’m delusional. Maybe Kushner is delusional. Maybe things would have turned out just as badly if Lincoln had lived and his policies been pursued. In our history, we know how long it took for blacks to regain the “scattered contents” of the cup of liberty dashed from their lips. It surely could have been no worse in that other history that never happened.

pierce07446@outlook.com

Patterns, and Authenticity

Another birthday, and I’m stuck away from home on account of Hurricane Sandy. Not that Marcia’s folks in Virginia aren’t great hosts, but I miss our own home and hearth (even if the latter hasn’t seen a fire for 15 years!) in New Jersey (Not to worry; the house came through fine, it was just dark and chilly after the power went down Monday night.). As I was working on this post, we got word that power is back up at home, at least in our neighborhood. We’ll heading back tomorrow, but that’s a day after my birthday.

So here’s my 71^st birthday post. I have a subject that’s been bugging me for years. It has to do with knowing things without knowing how we know them. Like, I’m sure you can tell the difference between a waltz and a tango, but if you aren’t musically trained, as I am not, you can’t explain just what that is. You’d be even harder put to try to explain the difference between a traditional Strauss waltz like “An Artist’s Life” (which I first heard as a child, when it was the theme of a TV show where Jon Gnagy gave art lessons):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEi1cyqKFvA

And a post-Strauss era variation like Aram Khachaturian’s “Masquerade” waltz:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xgmmb8NUIL0

There’s an element of irony or nostalgia for a more innocent time, I think, in the latter, but how is that expressed in musical terms? There seems to be a similar contrast between a classic tango, Gerardo Matos Rodríguez’ “La Cumparsita:”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sx26OP1ac1k

And Angelo Badalamenti’s “Kiss All Around It” for Jane Campion’s film Holy Smoke:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-V3X1IS7Lk

It’s a matter of pattern recognition; we can sense the musical patterns of the waltz and the tango, and variations of them. But it becomes more subtle with some patterns. Consider Miklos Rozsa, who scored a number of movies like The Thief of Bagdad, Spellbound and Quo Vadis. From his name, if you know anything about ethnic names, you know he was Hungarian. That didn’t show up in his movie music, but it is obvious (to me, at least) in his concert music, like his Violin Concerto, composed for Jascha Heifetz (Link here doesn't work ditectly, but you can copy the URL to Google and it should play):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TC6kQvRgy4

I hadn’t even known about his classical music until a couple of years ago. But the thing is, if I’d heard this piece without knowing its composer, I would have recognized it as Hungarian immediately. That’s because I had known the music of Zoltan Kodaly and Bela Bartok for decades. Can you sense the kinship Rozsa’s piece has to Bartok’s Piano Concerto No. 3?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2OP2M2rxR4

Somebody with musical training could explain it all very easily. It’s only my ignorance that prevents me from doing so. But in other contexts, there are terms we understand, or seem to understand, without reference to standard definitions. Take words like “stylish,” “heart” and “class” as applied to the arts – including film, some examples of which I want to look at here.

Someone of my acquaintance, just who I can’t remember for sure, once described one of the short films in a series called The Hire as “stylish.” The Hire was produced by BMW as a showcase for its cars, and starred Clive Owen as the Driver, a free-lance agent who took on (usually) dangerous missions. The films were not advertorials or infomercials; they were intense short stories. They’re still available on YouTube, and below I offer links to four of the best (the directors’ names are in parentheses) – “Ambush” (John Frankenheimer), “The Follow” (Wong Kar-wai), “Ticker” (Joe Carnahan), “Hostage” (John Woo):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKYUtUw-8ig

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIHGT8vWleQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBdOaIiz60I

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dcmn32s6ZSQ

But what’s “stylish” about these films? Online dictionaries aren’t much help. Merriam Webster defines the word as “conforming to the current fashion; modish.” Google has two definitions: “1. Having or displaying a good sense of style: ‘these are elegant and stylish performances.’ 2. Fashionably elegant.” These come closer to the meaning my acquaintance had in mind, and what has long been my own sense of the term. When we admire a woman’s choice of dress as “stylish,” we surely don’t mean that she is a mere fashion slave. I find most popular fashions silly, even ugly; and yet once in a while in a department store I’ll see a gown that has that elusive sense of style – simple but elegant. And that’s what the BMW films have: a sense of style, or rather senses of style – you can see how each of the directors has put his own stamps on his work, even working within the limitations of what seems at first a pure action format. That’s “stylish” in the best sense.

Chances are that few of you have heard of Ted Kotcheff, although he is executive producer of the Law and Order franchise. Fewer still are likely to be familiar with The   Winter People, his 1989 romantic drama. And the official trailer, while accurate in the narrow sense, is misleading in a broader sense.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXJgxvKDVR4

The Wikipedia entry offers a few more details:

Wayland Jackson, a widower with a young daughter, moves to a small, impoverished mountain village in North Carolina, circa 1934. They are taken in by Collie Wright, a single mother, and she and Wayland soon fall in love.

Wayland is a clockmaker whose ambition is to build one for the center of town. His life and Collie's, however, are threatened by family members from the evil Campbell clan, one of whom is the father of Collie's baby and intent on getting his child back in any way, even if it means murdering the couple. Cole Campbell is found dead, and his relatives demand that Wayland and Collie be held responsible and give up the child.

A review by Dawn@Wyoming.com at Amazon.com puts more stress on the dual nature of the story:

With his clock making skill, Russell's character is able to bring hope to the town by restoring the clock in the church steeple. The restoration of the clock, like the relationship that develops between the Russell and Mc Gillis characters, bring light to an otherwise dark world with little hope.

Exactly. The Winter People is a movie with heart. But what is “heart?” It isn’t the kind of sloppy sentimentality some might mean by it. I think it has to do with the hearts of the characters being true, and their true hearts guiding their actions. Wayland has a sense of mission, and a true sense of decency. Collie is no stereotypical “fallen woman,” but one of the most truly decent women you’ll ever see on screen. As for other inhabitants of the Appalachian community, another review by Connie of Albany, Georgia, disputes those who might think their characterization is over the top:

Perhaps when some see the performances as cheesy or over acted they've never actually met any mountain folk, and thusly are insistent that the histrionics are over played. If you have been to the mountains and can feel the spirit of them then I think you will love this picture. It is about the give and take, the act of forgiveness and of course true love.

Some of Kotcheff’s other work shares that kind of heart. Although he may still be best known for First Blood, which unleashed Rambo on the world, he had nothing to do with Sylvester Stallone’s sequel. Instead, he made Uncommon Valor, which starts with the very same premise of Americans having been left behind in Vietnam – but instead makes an intelligent and even moving story out of it. Perhaps even more surprising is “Weekend Pass,” an episode he did for Red Shoe Diaries – a short-lived series devoted to soft-core erotica aimed at women’s tastes, or at least what the producers thought were women’s tastes. Kotcheff’s episode, involving a military woman who finds love on leave, was the only one I ever saw that was about heart rather than tease.

What was 1965 important for? One thing was Diana Rigg’s first appearance as Emma Peel on The Avengers. She changed the way millions of men thought about women, and she did it with class (copying and pasting the link into Google Search still works despite the YouTube ban):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ve9N9oaXU18

Class? No, we’re not talking Marxism here. And by “class,” we surely don’t mean the kind of class consciousness the British aristocracy once prided itself on. Jane Austen wrote a lot about people of that class, and made it clear that she thought a lot of them didn’t have any.

“Showing stylish excellence” is one of Google’s definitions of “class” as an adjective; one of Merriam Webster’s definitions of the noun is “the best of its kind,” but when we use “class” in reference to a phenomenon like Emma Peel, it’s more like the state of showing stylish excellence. And it can show itself in unexpected places. We’ve had a spate of superhero movies in the last few years, and some have been good, like The Dark Knight. But superheroine movies have generally been duds – for that very lack of class. One exception is only a partial one: Scarlett Johansson’s brief turns as The Black Widow, as in this montage from Iron Man 2:

http://www.youtube.com/watcth?v=oD-Uwv8NAQw

It’s like Emma Peel reborn. Sure, she’s sexy as all get-out, but she’s no bimbo, not even a Bond girl. She can kick ass, but she isn’t just an ass-kicker. She has self-confidence and a sense of her own worth, but she is never vain or boastful. She’s got class.

It occurs to me that “stylish,” “heart” and “class” as used here, and as I believe they are understood by a number of you reading this, are all aspects of authenticity. That’s a word which has been much abused by cultural critics, or at least counter-cultural critics, who seem to believe that only anti-social behavior is “authentic.” We have cults devoted to everything from gangsta rap to writers like William S. Burroughs. But we have a crying need for genuine authenticity, an expression of authentic human values, and I think we can find that in some, if far from all (Jersey Shore? Keeping up with the Kardashians? Blecch!) popular culture.

One recent example: The Hunger Games, the book and the movie. It’s a story with style and class and heart. I wish I could find a link to one of the most emotional scenes in Gary Ross’ film adaptation, faithful to Suzanne Collins’ novel, in which the heroine Katniss honors a fallen opponent by laying flowers on her body. That has as much to say as any of the more overt scenes about Katniss’ attitude towards the inhuman games in which she has been forced to fight by a cynical autocracy that relies on them as “entertainment” in much the same way that the Roman emperors used bread and circuses to maintain their power.  Collins and Ross know what authentic humanity is about. We need more of that kind of authenticity in our culture.

pierce07446@outlook.com

Close Encounters of a Heretical Kind

What can you say about a classic science fiction movie, one that’s so classic it’s become practically iconic.

Turner Classic Movies featured Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) last night. I’d seen it a few times before, when it first came out, when Spielberg issued the special edition three years later, and when it was on TV before. My wife Marcia had never seen it, although she had seen Spielberg’s E.T. (1982).

Film historian and TCM host Robert Osborne and Drew (“Alligators in the sewer” in E.T.) Barrymore were there to introduce the movie and comment on it afterwards, and they made some obvious points: that it told an intimately human story which wasn’t overwhelmed by the special effects (spectacular as they were), and that it showed the aliens as benevolent – nothing like the death-ray armed invaders of The War of the Worlds. True, sort of, as far as it goes, but how far does it really go?

From Wikipedia, we get this basic background:

Close Encounters was a long-cherished project for Spielberg. In late 1973, he developed a deal with Columbia Pictures for a science fiction film. Though Spielberg receives sole credit for the script, he was assisted by Paul Schrader, John Hill, David Giler, Hal Barwood, Matthew Robbins, and Jerry Belson, all of whom contributed to the screenplay in varying degrees. The title is derived from ufologist J. Allen Hynek's classification of close encounters with aliens, in which the third kind denotes human observations of actual aliens or "animate beings." Douglas Trumbull served as the visual effects supervisor, while Carlo Rambaldi designed the aliens.

Spielberg had actually been obsessed with the idea since childhood; Wikipedia relates that he had made a film called Firelight as a teenager in 1964, and incorporated some of its scenes shot-for-shot into Close Encounters. He was clearly enchanted with UFO mythology, even though he was never a Believer, and that mythology is at the heart of his big screen version, which made it into the National Film Registry 30 years after it was a blockbuster hit.

You all know the basic story. Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) works for the power company in Muncie, Indiana, when there’s a mysterious blackout associated with UFOs. He and other locals see them; the cops even give chase to them. Not only that, but the aliens terrorize a single mother, Jillian Guller, in her home – and make off with her four-year old son Barry. Meanwhile, we have already learned that a French scientist, Claude Lacombe (François Truffaut) has been investigating mysteries like the return of World War II-era planes that had vanished with their pilots, and a musical phrase shouted from the sky to a crowd in India. Lacombe persuades the U.S. government to broadcast those notes into space, and the aliens respond with the latitude and longitude for the Devil’s Tower in Wyoming. Roy and others in Muncie become obsessed with drawing or modeling the Devil’s Tower, and when the government orders the area around the landmark cleared on the basis of an imaginary nerve gas link, Roy and a few others see the Devil’s Tower on TV and realize that they have been Summoned. Roy and Jillian make it to the site (though Roy seems to get there in record time by car and we never learn how Jillian manages it) where the alien Mother Ship is scheduled to touch down. The aliens return Barry, and all those missing pilots from decades-past abductions, who haven’t aged at all. And Roy gets to join the pilgrims the government has recruited for a journey to the alien homeworld.

None of this hangs together.

In the first place, those “benevolent” aliens start by playing what can be called, in the most charitable terms, a series of malicious practical jokes. They don’t make an open landing and open appeal to humanity, as Klaatu did when he landed his flying saucer in Washington, D.C., in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1950). While Klaatu was a nice guy, his basic message was, “Support peace or we’ll kill you.” But what’s the basic message of the aliens in Close Encounters – “We want to get acquainted?” How does throwing  scares into people and even abducting them square with that? Yeah, Jillian does get her son back (miraculously not traumatized by his abduction) – but what about all those pilots, who were torn from their loved ones, from the world they held dear and everyone they knew there? And just what’s the aliens’ game now – they’re dealing officially with the government, but first they were planting dreams about the Devil’s Tower in people who have encountered their scout craft, disrupting the lives of those people without giving them any help in reaching the landing site in Wyoming.

Osborne and Barrymore conceded that Roy’s wife Veronica and their children disappear from the screen after they leave the Neary home to live with Ronnie’s sister (Roy is really crazy now, modeling a huge Devil’s Tower in their living room.). They just aren’t part of the “human” story any more. We aren’t supposed to care what happens to them. Roy’s already lost his job, and Ronnie doesn’t have one – not likely to get one, either; this is 1977, and she was a stay-at-home mom. Well, she’s got excellent grounds for divorce (desertion), but are the aliens going to have Roy send alimony and child support? Does Roy even give a shit about that? He’s involved in what may be a budding romance with Jillian, but at the end he doesn’t give a shit about that, either. And there’s no rational reason for adding Roy, who’s had no preparation or special qualifications, to the group of pilgrims at the very last minute.

There are all sorts of other anomalies. Like, the first full communication with the aliens involves the Mother Ship at the end – there wasn’t any conversation before that about the logistics of the meeting, or protocol for choosing the pilgrims? And what was that religious rigmarole for the pilgrims at the end? Is the tall thin alien an adult and the rest children, or are they really different species? When they interfere with electricity and electrical appliances in Muncie, they also get non-electric things like mailboxes to jump about – how does that compute? And what purpose does the little red dot that follows the scout craft serve, besides just looking cute? Was there any reason to cast Truffaut, other than to look cool by having a famous French film director on board? Translation in his scenes slows up the story. And is he really running things in Wyoming, as he leads Roy to believe? If not, who is? And after all the effort to keep them away, nobody even appears to be startled when he and Jillian join the crowd awaiting the mother ship.

Spielberg was doubtless trying to be true to UFO mythology, and to childhood fantasies of alien contact. One could defend Close Encounters as being metaphorical or as an exercise in surrealism – two popular dodges in cultural criticism. Wikipedia also cites heavy Judeo-Christian symbolism. But symbolism alone can’t carry what is put before the public as a realistic but fantastic story. Science fiction writers do this kind of thing all the time, but they know something Spielberg doesn’t get, or at least didn’t in 1977: when you set up a fantastic situation, you have to think things through, you have to give your sf scenario an internal logic.

While Close Encounters may still be a classic as purely a visual spectacle and an exercise in suspense, and for a stellar performance by Dreyfus, it isn’t any better as an sf film than klutzy efforts like J.J. Abrams’ reboot of Star Trek. In a more pretentiously blatant example James Cameron, whose name is almost as big as Spielberg’s, showed in Avatar that he simply doesn’t understand that terrific special effects and an Uplifting Message should be part of a story that actually makes sense. 

Thanks to Marcia for raising new points and commenting on others for this post!

Comment: pierce07446@hotmail.com (For some reason, I can’t figure out, the system won’t let people comment here.)