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The Clock is Ticking

What better way to distract oneself from pandemic woes than reading or watching tales of apocalyptic destruction? I mean, psychological gains from downward comparisons are real!(And yes, today’s musings are long, but then a rainy weekend awaits….)

The earliest apocalyptic writings, found in Jewish, later Christian biblical chapters at least promised that if one only behaved according to proscription there was a flicker of hope. There might be if not rescue then at least redemption after a period of despair.

More modern fare written about apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic scenarios provided scintillas of optimism through either the survival of appropriately tough heroes/heroines or the promises of miraculous scientific advancements that enabled new beginnings. Here is a list of some of the best, each in their own way trying to impart lessons of caution, all urgently linked to an existing world we choose to ignore at our peril. Some I read were Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003,)Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006,)José Saramago’s Blindness (1995,) Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993.) I’d add the latest Joy Williams’ novel, Harrow,(2021) to the list, but it is a hard, hard read. They are all bleak. Importantly, instructive. It is no longer about (the) God(s) punishing us, but our own greed and negligence causing humanity’s destruction.

And then there is Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves (2015,) a book I devoured. The moon, falling apart for inexplicable reasons, showers earth with its disintegrated pieces, leaving what’s left of humanity to scramble for an alternative home in the universe, in caves or on ocean floors. 5000 years later they have survived by the billions somewhere out there, still mired in the same old conflicts that riled humanity, with issues of race, power and war as central as ever. It is a fascinating tale of adventure and a deep dive into systems, technology, genetics and associated philosophical issues.

If you don’t have the patience to read some 800 pages of this and also prefer your virtue-signaling served with a dollop of humor, you might turn to the movies instead. I saw two over the last weeks that deserve consideration, one of them quite funny. (Spoiler alert – I will discuss endings. Shall we say, any remaining optimism has fallen by the wayside, with the speed and gravity of cosmic debris…)

The first one is Adam McKay’s (The Big Short, Vice) new film Don’t Look Up. The story is simple on the surface: a large comet is approaching earth, threatening to obliterate it completely upon impact within 6 months and some days. The astronomers who try to warn are treated as Cassandras, first ignored then exploited for political purposes. The world looks away – a “Don’t look up” movement literally suggesting an ostrich’s behavior can save you – wasting time when potential measures could have mitigated the disaster, including a businessman who controls the government and wants to mine the comet for industrial materials. The comet hits, the world is destroyed, the evil politicians and the businessman, a cross of Jobs/Musk/ Zuckerberg escape to a planetary world where they are eaten by dinosaurs.

Along the way, everything that is a current political issue in the face of existential danger, be it pandemic or climate change, is skewered with dark satire and smart irony. And that is what the film is really about, rather than an extinction event per se: The role of a divided nation, the influence of mass media, the function of the entertainment world with musical superstars, technological industries, science denial, social media influencing, capitalism run berserk, political manipulation for corrupt purposes, all undermining possible rescue. (David Sirota, one of Bernie’s speech writers, was responsible for the script.) The film allows you to laugh a lot while being utterly depressed about the plausibility of its depictions. It also makes you feel part of a “we” who understand what is said as well as who is ridiculed (“them,”) making for an astonishing sense of community while you’re sitting there watching alone on your couch.

Well, so it was for me and half of the reviews I read (author and journalist Michael Harriot called it a documentary, only half in jest, Naomi Klein strongly recommended it.); the other half was scathingly critical, and many of my family and friends were giving up on the film before they were half-way in, being unmoved by the over-the-top one-liners and attempts at humor while messaging that we are doomed if we leave measures against potential destruction (climate change is clearly the intended allegory) in the hands of politicians instead of scientists. My simple mind, meanwhile, just giggled.

One could indeed argue that the film’s allegorical use of a comet, a higher fate threat, papers over the fact that climate change is manmade. I see that choice, however, as a smart one. It allows not-yet committed viewers to think through the costs of passivity without being turned off by feeling immediately guilty. Here are some thoughts by the film’s director.

The second apocalyptic tale I watched was a Korean series, also on Netflix, called The Silent Sea. It contained no humor and was utterly long, yet fascinating for its philosophical implications. Here the world is ravaged by climate change and water life-threateningly scarce, distributed via a hierarchical system imposed by authoritarian regimes. A group of engineers and scientists are sent to a research station on the moon to retrieve some mystery samples produced in a facility which was seemingly shut down by a radiation accident. A parallel mission by yet another evil industrial imperium is set to interfere, having planted two of their own among the research crew, starting to kill the good guys. It turns out the samples are of lunar water, a substance that can replicate itself to unending streams of liquid if finding a living host, yet ultimately lethal to humans who will drown in their own lungs when infected with it by a mere touch.

We learn that the government did illegal human research and cloning with children, scores of whom died in the course of trying to find a usable water replicator to rescue all of humanity. All but one, that is, a girl who has developed DNA to resist the infectious parts, acquiring some super powers along the way. She and the two female members of the retrieval team, a doctor and a scientist, are the only survivors of the mission in the end, rescued but flying off to an unknown fate of further experimentation on earth. Maybe humanity will be saved by the magical self-producing liquid, but at what cost?

The series is offering a plethora of important issues, from economic inequality that can kill you, to the ethics of scientific experimentation for a larger cause, the sacrificing of some for the greater good, or the saving of the world left in greedy hands that want to profit off it. Yet all of them are only subtly presented, with few suggested resolutions, leaving the viewer intellectually scrambling and frightened without the release provided by laughter.

So who is reached by the message shared by both tales, that the clock is ticking towards these kinds of scenarios? That a grim fate awaits unless we make some hard decisions now? We know what the solutions are regarding mitigation of a climate catastrophe; we also have some measures against threats of falling debris via the Planetary Defense Coordination Office (a NASA offshoot.) I doubt, though, that climate deniers will respond to the warnings, if they listen to them at all – why should they, when they are the targets of scorn? How should the rest of us act, those already aware of multiple existential risks? As I write this the CDC just declared that those infected with Covid could end quarantine after 5 instead of 10 days and without proof of a negative test so that employer demands can be met. Aren’t we shrugging it all off in great resignation, feeling powerless to do anything?

And those of us who accept the apocalyptic premises, do we enjoy laughing on the sofa while watching our imminent demise? Sort of “might as well,” while resigning into learned helplessness? Or are we subtly pushed into assumptions that science will have the means to rescue us if we only let it (with the Koreans at least acknowledging the huge, really unacceptable price one pays for potential discoveries?) Have we given up on wrestling it out of the hands of monopolies who hold the power, helplessly skewering their founders with condescension and scorn as a last ditch attempt to make ourselves feel involved?

I don’t have the answer. Or maybe I fear them to be in the affirmative. I do know that I was happy for laughter, so rare these days, perfectly aware that it involved gallows humor.

I did also “look up,” and around on my walk through a snow dusted landscape last week, hiking LaTourelle Falls.

Music today is from Leo Janacek’s satirical opera The Excursions of Mr. Broucek to the Moon. Full version here.

Excerpt in better sound quality here.

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Hope is a discipline

Hope doesn’t preclude feeling sadness or fear or anger or any other emotion that makes total sense. Hope isn’t an emotion, you know? Hope is not optimism. Hope is a discipline… we have to practice it every single day.” – Mariame Kaba

I will write about the amazing scholar, prison abolitionist and activist Kaba on another occasion. Today I want to use her guidance, quoted above, to offer a few recent examples out of my “hope exercise bag,” so we can enter this week with a smile on our faces.

  • Over 40 camels barred from Saudi “beauty contest” over Botox! Organizers of the 6-year old competition are on top of tampering! All 143 attempts! No more inflated body parts, stretched with injections or rubber bands! No more braiding, or cutting, or dying the tail of the camel! Camels were x-rayed, subjected to ultra sounds and genetic analysis, to ensure true beauty wins fairly (to the tune of $ 66.000.000 no less.) There’s hope!

  • Delay wins the day! Hundreds of thousands of bees survived being buried under volcanic ash for over 50 days after the volcanic eruptions on the Canary island of La Palma. The owner of the hives had not yet collected the summer honey before the volcano erupted last September. The bees were able to sustain themselves with their own honey, after sealing themselves in by creating a resinous material called propolis. This “glue” is created by mixing saliva and beeswax with secretions from sap and other plant parts. There’s hope ! Procrastination isn’t always bad and spit, wax and honey can save you. Be prepared!
  • The cure for seasonal depression discovered! Acquire a Moomin rug and all else will fall into place (or at least you land on something soft if you fall…) There’s hope! My Moomin addiction is constantly served by new creations. (And no, I do not own this rug; it was meant symbolically. I do have a Moomin bag, though!)
  • The antidote to hate in this world is remembering its victims as one way to prevent more harm. This is not the funny kind of hope, but the real hope I strive for when practicing the discipline. In awe of the film maker Güzin Kar, with gratitude to the New Yorker that picked the short film up in this country. There is hope when people remember. (And this one probably one that Mariame Kaba would approve of.)
Remembrance (The Refugees’ Dreams – 2016)

Or at least there are glimpses that we can, should, must hold onto until real hope returns, as instructed by Adam Zagajewski, who died last March. A huge loss to the poetry community.

Try to Praise the Mutilated World

BY ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI

TRANSLATED BY CLARE CAVANAGH

Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June’s long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You’ve seen the refugees going nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.

What’s Left Behind (The Refugees’ Dreams – 2016)

There is your Monday grab bag, now go and look for the silver lining, your song of the day!

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C. G. Jung in the Wild West

“Deliver my soul from the sword; my darling from the power of the dog. Save me from the lion’s mouth: for thou hast heard me from the horns of the unicorns.” Psalm 22:20-21

If you want to see The Power of the Dog, Jane Campion’s newest film now playing on Netflix, without prejudice, hints or spoilers, stop reading right here. Peruse this screamingly funny review of Christmas Movies instead, and come back to the blog once you have been seduced by Campion’s latest.

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Full disclosure, I used to be an avid Jane Campion fan. The director and screen writer, who earned degrees in anthropology and sculpture in addition to one in film studies, has always struck me as the perfect mix of intellectual powerhouse and visual artist who knows how to use space, color, atmospherics in ways that doubled and tripled the impact of her already intense plot lines. The Piano and more recently the 2 part series Top of the Lake count among my favorites, for visual magic as much as feminist approaches to the conflicted states women experience when they try to free themselves from patriarchal violence and restrictions.

I also watched a lot of Westerns. The strange, far away America came to the German TV screens, still black and white in the 1960s, with visions of John Wayne’s law and order and the Cartwright family in Bonanza (I almost choked on my coffee when I read the Wikipedia description that the show was “known for presenting pressing moral dilemmas.” The only dilemma I encountered was when we 12-year-old girls fought over who had first dibs on Little Joe…)

In the 70s I was drawn into Spaghetti Westerns. I used to watch them late at night in a small, smoke-filled movie house in a suburb of Hamburg, together with like-minded students who were exploring socialist politics and enchanted with the Westerns’ subversion of the American genre’s archetypes and the films’ revolutionary messages, particularly in the Zapata movies. These parables using the Mexican Civil War at the turn of the century as a vehicle for left-wing optimism and dreams fit right into the late 60s, early 70s in Europe when we had a lot of hope for change. As did Ennio Morricone’s film music, a constant on the turntable.

Many decades later, I saw Brokeback Mountain in the movie theatre (which I rarely went to, always worried that exposure to a large screen would emotionally overwhelm me – I like my films on a computer screen that helps me modulate my reactions.) And I am not averse to filling sleepless hours with unassuming commercial fare like Longmire. There, I admitted it.

And now comes The Power of the Dog, a Western by Jane Campion. Stellar acting, brilliant camera work, a languid story told in chapters, almost like a dream that slowly, unstoppably, turns into a nightmare. Think psycho-drama against a backdrop of the Rocky Mountains, with every Jungian archetype conceivable and clever symbolism to boot, gloves, ropes, scissors, traps and ominous landscapes included. Then share my surprise when myth-buster Campion, champion of strong, self-determined women, falls right back into depictions that are conventional female stereotypes, while focusing on the complicated, tortured souls of men. The only woman who lets her hair hang down, is one who is dead – miraculously growing golden locks in her coffin, or so it is reported, as if Rapunzel meets Snow White, no further prince needed.) There is an insensitivity to women who are depicted as violated or objectified that felt jarring, going against expectations set by Campion’s previous oeuvre.

The basic story describes the fate of four people. Two adult brothers own a successful ranch in Colorado in the early 1900s. One is a Yale-educated classicist who is the quintessential Western cowboy, toxic masculinity and all. The other is a reserved, politically aspiring businessman, who might soon climb into the ranks of robber barons or state politicians. Their shared bedroom is emptied, when the business man, George (Jesse Plemmons,) decides to marry a widow with a teenage son. Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) is aghast at the change in the household and does everything he can to taunt and torture the newcomers, deemed gold digger and weakling, respectively.

Rose (Kirsten Dunst), who was a perfectly competent restaurant owner and former piano player in a movie pit, shrinks from the limelight she is thrown into when having to host important people. Moreover, she is deeply hurt and frightened by her brother-in-law’s meanness and slowly descends into serious alcohol abuse. Her husband hovers protectively when he’s there, although he seems to vanish increasingly from the scene the more the triangular tensions become apparent. Rose’s son Pete (Kodi Smit-McPhee) also does everything imaginable to protect his mother who lost her first husband, his father, when he committed suicide.

We soon learn that cowboy Phil was shaped by an intense relationship with his mentor, Bronco Henry, with likely homoerotic leanings, or at least unconscious desires. It is hard work for Phil to suppress his longings, particularly when he is surrounded by display of male beauty right out of Thomas Eakins’ or Henry Scott Tuke’s paintings.

Thomas Eakins The Swimming Hole)
Henry Scott Tuke The Sunbathers

The teenager discovers this and makes use of this knowledge when he meticulously and cautiously plans to get rid of the tormentor to ensure his mother’s happiness. Letting himself be taunted as a “faggot” and a “Nancy” by the ranch hands, he stirs something in Phil that leads him to envision a relationship like he had with his mentor, now roles reversed. He wants to toughen up the waif-like youngster, rope him in, projecting onto him the possibility of ending loneliness. We see Phil change in front of our very eyes from bullying macho to vulnerable loner exhausted from repressing his sexual inclinations.

The boy, on the other hand, so seemingly vulnerable, stiff and thin, with a glaring lack of detectable sensuality, turns out to be made of steel, something that his father had always feared. He kills wildlife without hesitation, does autopsies to learn about biology, systematically gets the necessary tools and ingredients to kill with impunity, and eventually claims his target. His overarching desire to help his mother is not matched by any insights into what she wants or fears, just driven by his own interests, including a medical career with access to decisions over life and death.

A key scene where he walks amidst catcalling cowboys to inspect a nest of magpies gives it pretty much away. The symbolism of magpies does not just include extreme intelligence and trickery, it also stands for self-awareness. Magpies are the only non-mammals that pass the mirror test, a way to assess if an animal has self-awareness. Pete knows who he is and what he wants, no conflict between his conscious and unconscious, so prevalent in the rest of them. Dressed always in the black and white of the (NZ) magpies, with a similarly elongated shape that we mistake for a scare crow, he is the master of everyone’s fate.

While we still cringe at his executioner’s demeanor that grants a last cigarette to the condemned, smoked in alternation by Pete and Phil like a post-coital ritual that was never enacted, we soon wonder why he peruses the biblical verse exclaimed by Christ himself during cruxifixction, calling for help from the Almighty. “Deliver me from the power of the dog,” the pull of Satan’s seduction, “save me from the lion’s mouth,” the threat to Rose’s happiness, he’s dealt with all of them like a higher power himself.

The film does not just employ the various tropes of Jungian psychology, the ideas of persona and shadow, of anima and animus, or the concept of contrasexuality that was quite progressive for its time. The idea that masculinity and femininity can be contained in one person, and not correspond to being male or female, is really the focus of the narrative set in a world that abhorred that concept.

C.G. Jung was also steeped in biblical knowledge – his father was clergy, his mother came from a long line of theologians – but saw the bible more as describing psychological processes rather than revealing G-d’s word. So ending the story with a verse that refers to a cry for help at the same time that that help was delivered (as evil act, no less) is really something of a horn of the unicorn, something mysterious, inexplicable, rare.

So is Campion’s wizardry when it come to dropping clues. If the film was a dream, an analyst would have a field day. Maybe the Jungian dream analyst Campion repeatedly visited during the film shoot would agree. The symbolisms sure made my brain work, while my eyes feasted. Now can we please go back and use the director’s considerable skill-set to model for us the empowering of women? Psalm 22 could be of continued usefulness to set the stage:

But I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised of the people. Psalm 22:6

Here is an official review.

Here’s the soundtrack. Composed by (Radiohead’s) Johnny Greenwood, with clear echoes of his fascination with Krzysztof Penderecki. Beautiful music.Disquieting too, like so much in that film.

Photographs from the American West, although not Colorado, which I still haven’t seen, nor have I visited New Zealand where the film was shot.

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Fables and Fairytales

Today’s cinematic adventures hail from West Africa and South Korea, respectively. One is a film, the other an extended TV series (the latter weird enough that you might shake your head when contemplating what I spend my time on. So be it, I’ve surprised you before.)

The Unknown Saint by Alaa Eddine Aljem is a wistful fable set in the Southern desert of Morocco. You need a bit of patience for this quiet piece; its drawn-out arc echoes the languishing and stillness in a drought-stricken West-African village. It is also extremely funny, kind of a shaggy dog story, reminding me of the French Jaques Tati movies of yore with their loving humor satirizing humanity’s foibles. Three separate story lines eventually intersect. A thief buries his loot before being apprehended by the police. Released from prison some time later, he finds the site covered by a shrine erected by villagers who are bilking the faithful who come to be healed for their money. Misadventures during attempted loot retrieval ensue. The second line concerns a young doctor and his male nurse finding friendship in shared boredom, spurred to playing tricks on the villagers by freely consumed rubbing alcohol (in a Muslim society.) And lastly there is the devoted relationship of son and father who remain isolated after their neighbors all move away to be closer to the fake shrine. In the end that devotion is rewarded and the good as well as the bad receive their just desserts.

(I spent 3 months traveling in a van in Morocco in 1971. Without a camera, to my eternal regret. Photographs today are the closest approximation to the landscape of the Atlas mountains that I could come up with, taken in Death Valley, CA.)

I want to say it is a sweet (if male-centered) movie, but that doesn’t do justice to the thoughtfulness around questioning religion (and substitute worship of money) or around demonstrating reverence towards faith. In fact, that would short-change not just the thoughtfulness but the courage, given that we are talking about a Muslim filmmaker’s critical take on religion, making fun of religious rules, and making light of digressions. The visuals are glorious if you find desert scapes appealing – I’ve been there and the emptiness of the landscape is no trick by a clever director of photography. The acting is stellar, particular by some of the side kicks who aren’t too busy to look as beautiful as they come. The absolute dead pan wit that lurks unexpectedly around every corner alone makes it worth watching this film. It’s a small gem.

How to begin to describe It’s ok to not be ok, hailed by the NYT as one of the best international TV series of 2020? Written by Jo Yong and directed by Park Shin-Woo, this romance, mystery, fairy-tale and contemporary culture criticism rolled into one is a clever, clever concoction of genres. More importantly, it takes up the topics of neurodiversity (autism) and psychiatric labels (anti-social personality disorder) and gently upends negative preconceptions without moralizing. Across its 16 episodes (don’t worry, you’re saved by the bell, the streaming ends on August 9th I believe) we are introduced to about every archetype in existence and lured into complete acceptance of blurred boundaries between reality and fiction (including a mix of cartoon visuals among the real-life acting.)

Fairy-tales play a major role in the plot, the complicated romance between a fairy-tale writer (princess/sleeping beauty) and an orderly at a psychiatric hospital (prince/a frozen one right out of Andersen’s snow queen…) being just one. There are evil queen mothers and nurturing fairy god mothers, wise men and power hungry kings, true friendship, true love, jilted ladies, and another hero coming out of left field, saving the day while always having been perceived as the simple child. There are castles frozen in time, and ghosts looming. There are side kicks, and side plot lines, outlandish fashion outfits for the heroine and copious amounts of comfort food every 2 seconds.

Our emotionally frozen hero is the guardian of his autistic adult brother, sacrificing his own life to care for one he perceives to be vulnerable, suppressing his ongoing rage of having been pressed into this service after his mother was killed. Our heroine, given to malice and cruelty, is in reality a victim of parental abuse and traumatic experiences. Their budding relationship amounts to a healing journey across interminable obstacles, endured by the viewer rapt in the radiant physical beauty of these two characters. You come for the mystery and the beauty, but you stay for the sense of extended family connections benevolently including you into an ever widening circle of characters, many of whom reside in one of the major locales of the series, a psychiatric hospital that might as well be a country club. Unconventional psychiatrists know what to do, successful publishers of fairy-tale books don’t. Heroes think they are needed, when they aren’t. Autism that seemingly forces dependence on others becomes a non-issue when artistic talent provides a road to independence.

It’s a romp, but one that makes you think, with often intensely framed scenes of visual beauty. It is also utterly devoted to happy endings, which I, yes, crave. It does what movies are supposed to do: it moves you. And it has a costume designer who would be welcome to look at my closet should I ever venture out into the world again…. then again It’s ok to not be ok is an appropriate approach to one’s wardrobe as well. I think.

Traditional music from Morocco today.

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Satire and Drama

In lieu of actual travel I have lately been gorging on foreign films set in different continents. A slice of Africa, bits and pieces of Europe, a view of New Zealand and Korea, all available at the push of a button (Netflix and Amazon Prime, alas.)

I might have picked them for their differences in locale, but ended up contemplating them for their similarities along other dimensions, family ties being one of them. So here is my best shot at comparative movie reviews, with two discussed today, the other two in the next installment. (And if you want to watch true travel movies, here is a list.)

Let’s begin with two films from England and New Zealand, that treat the relationships between cousins and the effects of parental abandonment in very different ways while simultaneously acknowledging the lasting damage done to children’s souls.

The Pursuit of Love is a 3-part BBC adaptation of a 1945 novel by Nancy Mitford, which skewered the foibles of English gentry, a barbed satire of class and gender relations, xenophobia, and a paean to english fortitude against German War aggression. (“Utter, utter bliss,” was the book’s reception by the Daily Mail at the time.) Written and directed by Emily Mortimer, the film is visually slick time travel, surely appealing to fans of Howard’s End, or Bridgerton, or any other BBC production that revels in period costumes and an excess of upper-class decoration, even if the acting here is quite over the top. It has some tricks up its sleeves, though, one of them the incorporation of modern (pop/rock/country)music that hits the spot and another the interspersing of historical footage showing war-time conditions.

The storyline in the film focusses on two cousins who grow up together, one abandoned by her mother early in life, the other caught in an aristocratic household where education is anathema and male dominance rules. Their friendship sustains them but is also a cause for bitterness and competition since each sees in the other what they themselves lack. Clinging to fairy tale beliefs that love will rescue them – love and marriage being the only escape routes open in any case – they throw themselves blindly into fraught relationships and pay the price in respective ways. Sins of the older generation – parental abandonment among them – are reenacted by the next, and in the end women and daughters, struggling for freedom or caught in convention, all loose.

The film tries to draw attention to Mitford’s early descriptions of women’s fates in a society that punished female independence by dividing women into madonna and whores. Some insightful observations on how their wings are clipped from the start are, unfortunately, later superseded by a pat on the back to the faithful wives and mothers who stick to their lot after all. Here and here are two different mainstream reviews.

It’s eye candy for the highbrow set and was, admittedly, a pleasant diversion for this middlebrow viewer even though it lacked the biting quality of the novel. A bit of melodrama goes a long way on nights too hot to fall asleep…

Instead of binge-watching, one might as well use the time to read a biography of the Mitford sisters, since the adapted novel was a roman-à-clef, loosely based on the Mitford family constellations. There are (too) many books to choose from, depicting the choices these sisters from a minor aristocratic British family made, from going full fascist, with Hitler as wedding guest, joining communist movements, becoming novelists and journalists, running an enterprising country estate as a business that catered to historical nostalgia. I recommend Laura Thompson’s The Six – The Lives of the Mitford Sisters. It describes in detail how of the six sisters three became Nazis, one a socialist journalist after a bout with the Communist Party, one a liberal satirical novelist who informed on her Nazi sisters, and one a duchess. The psychological role played by sibling rivalry is cleverly explored in this biography.

In contrast, Cousins, a film from New Zealand directed by Ainsley Gardiner and Briar Grace Smith (who wrote the underlying novel) is one that I cannot recommend highly enough. It follows the intertwined fates of three cousins from a Maori background whose lives are upended by racism, colonialism, greed and just tragic blows of fate. “Who needs another dark story?”, you might be thinking right now, but let me assure you the darkness is balanced by light and there is a peacefulness that descends from true emotional attachment and love that buoys your belief in humankind. Well, it did for mine. It is also cinematically as lush as they come, with landscape and interiors greatly impacting the mood of the film, with none of the staged feeling that you got when contemplating yet another flower-laden British dining room, 800-thread count linen closet or fox hunt from Pursuit of Love.

The three cousins are represented by three actresses for childhood, young adulthood and older age each, and it is often hard to decide which one of the nine makes the strongest impression, they are all so glorious in how they convey their character. One of the cousins, Mata, product of a mixed marriage, is forcibly taken away from her Maori mother and deposited in an orphanage by her disappearing White father. “Adopted” by an exploitative woman, she spends her life unable to overcome her losses, eventually descending into mental illness and homelessness. She is allowed one summer away from the orphanage as a child with her extended indigenous family, bonding with two cousins who try to find her for the rest of their lives after she is forced to return to slave-like conditions. The two cousins have diverging paths as well – one escapes an arranged marriage and becomes a lawyer fighting for Maori rights and treaties, estranged from her family because of her insistence on making personal choices. The other steps into that marriage contract and ends up being the happy mother of a growing brood of children in a good relationship with her husband, preserving the land of her ancestors against multinational corporations, and eventually welcoming the abandoned cousin home when they locate her by chance.

The topic of stolen children, exploited and forced into a White culture, is, of course, timely. The issue of loss of family and loss of culture creating such pain that it leads to loss of self, as evinced in the inability of Mata to connect to reality in later life, is also a contemporary topic when you look at forced migrations and the plight of all those displaced by circumstances. The problem with stolen land and treaties is one all too familiar to American viewers as well, or should be.

But the real force in this film comes from the sources of love and caring that stretch across generations. For every brutal encounter there is an act of kindness, by strangers and family alike, for every inch of distance to the past created by Mata’s fall through time there is an act of determination to fulfill the promise once made to her: we are coming for you to bring you home. For every competitive streak between the other two cousins, there is an act of solidarity when it comes to prop up a united front against evil. You leave with a vision of healing, not literally displayed but offered as a possible act of imagination. It will stay with me for a long time.

Music today is from NZ composer/singer Warren Maxwell who wrote the score for the film.

Photographs hark back to the satire’s style of “more is more” when it comes to flowers (as well as acting.) Some pretty English roses among them, photographed in years before the drought descended.

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Mismatch

“Worth watching for the cast (period drama heaven), and the bonnets and cloaks and corsets and all the rest, but it ultimately fails to deliver where it most matters.”…. “Effie Gray can effie off.”

My kind of movie review.

Yup, I did watch Effie Gray on Netflix over the weekend. Another wasted hour plus of my life, though not completely without pleasure given the visual splendor of the scenery in Scotland and Venice, of all places, and the magic of whoever was responsible for costumes.

Or maybe not totally wasted. It did make me think how intelligent people like Emma Thompson (I’m a fan,) who wrote the script and also plays a supporting role in the movie (with more facial expressions in her short appearances than Dakota Fanning, our heroine, musters in the entire film – come to think of it, she had 2, one with tears, one without) manage to ignore the deeper truth while fixating on one that fits with the Zeitgeist.

Ok, that was too long a sentence. Let me be more succinct. Effie Gray (1828 – 1897) was the love interest – at age 12 – of noted art critic, writer and complex human being John Ruskin (1819 – 1900.) Married to him when she was 19. Rejected by him in all and every aspect of marriage for the next 6 years. She rails against his parents who have an unhealthy hold over him (they were first cousins who married each other), and a Victorian-era establishment that tells women they have to accept their lot. She risks the downfall of her bankrupt parents who are dependent on Ruskin’s generosity, and insists on the passivity of a meek adorer, the painter Millais – eventually, in one big feminist swoop she fights for the annulment of the marriage due to her husband’s unwillingness to consummate it.

Success! Against all odds! (Eventually she marries Millais and has 8 children with him and manages his career quite successfully, even getting back into the good graces of the Queen. We are not granted viewing the happy ending in the movie. Nor the comeuppance awaiting Ruskin, either. The movie pretty much bombed, needless to say.)

The whole marriage dissolution was a huge scandal in its time, but the film provides only subtle hints, if that, at what was going on, so little spark in any of the characters, that you wonder what the fuss was all about. A young woman putting her foot down, when most didn’t? Ok.

The problem could be solved by focusing on the real center of the whole debacle – Ruskin – but we don’t want to give much more time to dead white males, do we? So we cast about some pseudo-Freudian hints (his mother gives her grown-up son a bath/ he flees the room when seeing an adult female naked for the first time in his life/ he takes a creepy interest in a 10-year old young sister, etc.) and then celebrate Effie’s courage.

Ruskin’s marriage cannot be understood outside of the context that, after Gray left him, he fell in love, truly, deeply, again with another child, this time aged 9, Rose La Touche. He proposed to her when she turned 18, she had him wait for 3 more years, and then refused. Her early death a few years later threw him into mental illness and steep decline. The whole topic of idealized purity and virginity by a repressed man in repressive times, his longing obsessively channeled into his admiration and support for pre-Raphaelite painting style, and later into religious conversions, would explain so much more than just being depicted as an emotionally frigid villain who is turned off by his wife’s pubic hair.

The controversy over potential pedophilia – biographers and critics at least agree he did no engage in sexual relations with children or, for that matter, anyone else, – distracts from the intellectual riches of the man, also not exactly spelled out in the film. Ruskin wrote hundreds of essays and books, breaking ground both with art criticism and later with radical views on political economy and social reform. He was revered by the Greats of his time, from Tolstoy to Proust to Gandhi, from T.S.Eliot to Ezra Pound; his work influenced Le Corbusier and Gropius, and more painters than I can list. His engagement for workers’ rights (though insisting on continued hierarchical structures of society) was quite progressive.

Not that the courage of the historical Effie Gray shouldn’t be admired. But the complexity of the psychological and societal interactions cannot and should not be reduced to what we are served here.

Should have read a book about Ruskin or Gray instead. Here are some to choose from – take your pick.

Photographs from Venice since they show some of the same views from the movie. Or maybe the building look all alike…..

Millais’s painting of the death of Ophelia from Hamlet is one of the most famous Pre-Raphaelite works. The first music embracing Shakespeare that came to mind was Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. Here is the overture, composed ca. 25 years before the painting.

One of my Venice montages (2015)

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Leaving Mizraim

First they were confined to slavery in Egypt, then to wandering in the desert.

Now Jews around the world celebrate Passover Seders on Zoom or Skype, confined to their dwellings. I have not decided whether it is helpful to draw the parallels to prior suffering – and the fact that it was overcome – as is custom during the service around the Seder table. Or if it is just reminding us that history repeats itself, and the sense of prevailing danger and unstoppable evil never ends.

Luckily we can distract ourselves with poetry.

Bracha Meschaninov, a South African Jew who moved with her family to New York state, published a poetry collection, Tender Skin, over 20 years ago that focusses on daily Jewish life. The simplicity of her poems hides the depth of the ideas, almost cunningly, as if she is not allowed to reveal her true intellectual strength.

This in turn, brought to mind two films I can recommend, (diametrically opposed to the life that today’s poet embraces.) Unorthodox is a Netflix production loosely based on an autobiography by Deborah Feldman, describing a young Hasidic woman’s escape from her marriage and the confines of the communal system she lived in. One of Us , also on Netflix, is a documentary following several young people who made the same decision and paid extreme prices for trying to find their own way. It is a remarkable film, without the glitz that the Netflix series managed to add – although the main actress’s performance is stellar and worth alone to watch Unorthodox. If you have bandwidth only for one for this topic, choose One of Us.

Back to Pesach – here is something that feels probably quite familiar to several of us:

Pesach

House cleaned
more or less
kitchen surfaces covered
more or less
food ready
more or less
an experience of redemption
more or less

The Seder

We chewed the hand-made bread
of redemption
and wine specially made
children primed for performance… performed
and wonderful guests came and prayed
yet his eyes were sad and her skin showed strain

We left Mitzraim
but in pain we stayed.

And here is the fitting musical accompaniment sent by a friend.

Chag Sameach!

And here are the traditional songs with explanation.

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BY NECESSITY

TIMES ARE HARROWING for people trying to protect Indigenous ancestral land and prevent accidents from pipeline spillage that would poison and pollute the regions’ land and water. The movement is taking place on many fronts, several of them cultural and artistic, including an Oregon-produced documentary film, Necessity: Oil, Water, and Climate Resistance, that focuses on the work of climate activists on the front lines and movement lawyers involved in supporting that struggle. And last week a group of Native American leaders and community allies in Portland gathered at the Port of Vancouver to protest the dangers of the continued use and expansion of pipelines, and alert us to what is going on farther north.

The Wet’suwet’en people in northern British Columbia, trying to stop construction of the Coastal GasLink pipeline (CGL,) were arrested by Canadian police and tactical teams in the dark of night by militarized police with night vision and automatic weapons, their camps destroyed and media hindered on filming and reporting the police action. The BC Supreme Court granted the company behind the Coastal GasLink project, TC Energy, an injunction to continue construction activities and issued an enforcement order for the RCMP to clear the area.

“TC Energy says it reached agreements with 20 elected First Nation bands along the pipeline’s route and has the necessary permits to build. It has hailed the Coastal GasLink project as a way to create jobs and bolster economic development. But Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs, who under Indigenous law hold authority over approximately 22,000sq km of land, say they never gave Coastal GasLink their consent to move ahead with the project.”

Protests are an urgent summons during a time when the 2019 UN Climate Change Summit failed to deliver, and scientific predictions of how fast we are approaching a point of no return are growing more dire by the day. The summons try to reach those who deny the dangers (or the very existence) of the climate emergency, those who ignore it and those who are giving in to helpless passivity in the face of it.

Cathy Sampson-Kruse, a Umatilla Tribal Elder
Paul Che oke ten Wagner of the Vancouver Island Saanich Tribe

Those who are determined to raise awareness about the crisis, call for change, at a minimum, of our behavior, or, more urgently, of our whole system of relating to nature and each other. They are forging alliances across a whole spectrum of organizations and participants, setting aside differences in ideology and strategic approaches, and join forces to rescue this planet in whatever fashion is still possible. By necessity.

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NECESSITY: OIL, WATER, AND CLIMATE RESISTANCE is a locally produced documentary film, directed by Jan Haaken and co-directed by Samantha Praus, that focuses on the work of climate activists on the front lines and movement lawyers involved in supporting that struggle.

Here is a trailer of the feature length film, that describes what is at stake for the health of our waters and the populations that depend on them.

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THE FILM INCLUDES conversations with lawyers who are central in protecting those who protect the waters. The conversations make it clear what is involved with organizing the movement and defending those who are accused of crimes around protest actions or to be made an example by the legal system to alert those who are contemplating joining the protest movement. One of the defenses under consideration is the Necessity defense, which states that when all legal and political means are exhausted it might be necessary to engage in non-violent illegal action to prevent irreversible harm.

One of the lawyers is Tara Houska, whose incisive opinion piece, My Culture is not Super Bowl Entertainment, was published on Super Bowl weekend in the New York Times. It called out the lasting damage done to Native Americans with the exploitation and degrading of their culture, particularly during the Super Bowl. The continuing use of mascots, and the nostalgic racism transmitted with stereotypes of the fallen noble savages is dehumanizing, and it hurts every new generation of Native American children, never mind their parents who have to live in a world with systemic suppression of opportunities to right the historical wrongs.

Tara Houska, Couchiching First Nation Anishinaabe

People like Houska, an Ojibwe from Couchiching First Nation, are changing that. As a tribal attorney, the Campaigns Director of Honor the Earth, co-founder of Not Your Mascots, a non-profit committed to eradicating Native stereotyping, and founder of the Giniw Collective, she pushes back, fights hard and smart, and is central to building alliances with those who can and want to be supportive. Here is Houska in a TED talk on the Standing Rock resistance movement.

One of her statements during the interview struck me as particularly important. Roughly paraphrased, as best as I remember: as allies, non-Native Americans have to learn to listen and respect that there is knowledge and wisdom regarding goals and strategies to combat environmental destruction and other consequences of climate change. As survivors of genocide, indigenous people all over the world have accumulated strength and insights that should not be superseded by Whites rushing in and thinking they know the next best tactic to achieve shared goals. Leadership in coalitions needs to be assigned to those whose very existence is threatened by potential environmental disasters.

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IN THE INTENSIFYING conflict between industry and climate protesters, SLAPP suits abound. These are Strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPP)  that are intended to censor, intimidate, and silence critics by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense until they abandon their criticism or opposition. These are in some ways only place holders, until state legislatures get their ducks in a row to pass laws that make anti-pipeline and other protest activities a crime. Since 2017 18 states have put forward legislation criminalizing protest, constitutional rights be d-mned. West Virginia, as just one example, has hearings today, February 10, on industry-drafted legislation (HB 4615) that would make peaceful civil disobedience against gas pipelines and other fossil fuel projects a felony.

Luckily there are experienced people one can turn to for issues concerning civil rights. One of them is Lauren Regan, a founding member and executive director of the the Civil Liberties Defense Center (CLDC) based in Eugene, OR, which supports “movements that seek to dismantle the political and economic structures at the root of social inequality and environmental destruction. We provide litigation, education, legal and strategic resources to strengthen and embolden their success.”

As a trial lawyer she handles state and federal criminal defense, SLAPP defense, grand jury resistance, and federal civil rights litigation against police and government agencies for violating the rights of activists and organizations – 3000 cases across the last 15 years together with her staff attorneys.

Lauren Regan, Executive Director at the Civil Liberties Defense Center

Here she is in a podcast where she talks about surveillance of social movements. (It starts out with very loud music, be warned, but then goes to normal decibels…)

The topic of alliances, in all their strength and challenges, came up in our conversations here as well. You cannot swoop in and take over what are the existential fights of certain groups. To achieve trust, furthermore, and create a blueprint for constructive collaboration, you need to connect and build relationships before crisis hits. That means extensive and longitudinal involvement between and learning from allies, so that a structure is established that carries everyone through when the need arises.

Given the potential increase in actions around climate resistance movements, this is something to be acknowledged.

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NECESSITY: OIL, WATER, AND CLIMATE RESISTANCE, depicting the efforts and challenges of the resistance movement, was selected by the Doc Society NYC for their Inaugural Climate Story Lab as a film about climate resistance that could make a difference. The non-profit organization, with their mission “dedicated to the impact of art and the art of impact,” supports the production of documentary films and helps to connect them to global audiences.

Their partnering with the NECESSITY project makes it feasible to produce a film series featuring different regions where Indigenous and non-Indigenous allies confront the fossil fuel industry. The documentary series will educate about the front lines of climate resistance, including lessons that climate activists are learning about legal tactics and various rights and risks associated with the calls in the movement for acts of civil disobedience. Bearing witness – one possible contribution to climate activism in joint efforts to protect the planet.

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Sound Description

Sometimes a piece of writing makes me drool. This, for example:

“The piece of music I have in mind lasts only forty-five seconds, which is shockingly brief measured against the inner world it evokes. In what I now know is a fragmentary motif, a few lowing bass notes rise like bubbles from the bottom of a pool, becoming increasingly ragged as they approach the surface. They get close enough to one another to imply melancholy harmony before they dissipate. The riff repeats only once, a little more achingly. Then the bass hands its figurative duties over to a dulcimer, whose jaunty fatalism carries the mood forward even as a more deliberate structure begins to eat away at the oceanic resonance of those bass notes. As the bass recedes into a supporting role, providing squiggly accents at odd intervals, a mental image slides back into inaccessibility too. In my memory, the soundtrack, by Henny Vrienten, to George Sluizer’s 1988 film The Vanishing, was an expanse of fretless bass only, mournful and spare, diaphanous and purplish, like neon light filtered through glass bricks. I feel a spasm of disappointment in realizing its magic is more contained than I recalled, that the film’s music on the whole is not remarkable enough to justify a soundtrack album in which I could wallow between viewings.”

Jaunty fatalism, oceanic resonance…. now wouldn’t you have liked to coin those terms? The short essay goes on to describe the actual affinity to The Vanishing beyond loving the introductory music: a longing for time spent without supervision, without fulfilling expectations of constant busyness, of “a reflexive drive to busyness defined my experience of free time as a terrifying void to be filled, a wish for blithe indifference to the internalized requirements of managerial bureaucracy,”(another winner!) (The film refers to a young French couple going on vacation before crisis erupts, evoking French cinematic history of all those aimless hours spent in Provençal town squares and at Mediterranean beaches.)

Loitering, in other words, seems to be a thing of the past. And even if you manage to take a bit or a lot of time off work, the space that opens is filled with: sound. Books on Tape at the elliptical. Music in your headphones while doing routine tasks like ironing or the dishes, or folding the laundry or cooking. Podcasts while taking a walk. I think the last one irks me the most – how are you going to hear yourself think, which is what walking allows you to do in the most effective ways possible? Never mind being connected to the soundtrack of nature that happens during walks in the woods, or connected to humanity which happen if you walk the city? From the New Yorker essay, linked above:

There, it becomes apparent that writing and walking are extremely similar feats, equal parts physical and mental. When we choose a path through a city or forest, our brain must survey the surrounding environment, construct a mental map of the world, settle on a way forward, and translate that plan into a series of footsteps. Likewise, writing forces the brain to review its own landscape, plot a course through that mental terrain, and transcribe the resulting trail of thoughts by guiding the hands. Walking organizes the world around us; writing organizes our thoughts.

Writing might organize the thoughts, but walking actually improves the content of them – there are numerous studies now that show that creativity and problem solving is enhanced because of free floating attention and spurious environmental stimulation during walks. That will not happen if your attention is focused on following Chris Hayes’ arguments.

Another way of looking at it:

On my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society. But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village…What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something other than the woods?
Henry David Thoreau, 1862, in an essay entitled “Walking”

I, personally, hold it with Virginia Woolf and spend my afternoon in solitary trampling. That description is as sound as it gets.

If you don’t have time or have trouble walking, then listen to this: Mendelsohn’s music here was inspired by hiking the Hebrides.

Photographs are from the Tuscany countryside. As close to dolce far niente as I’ve been on my journeys.

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DEAR DADDY

The short clip below has been around for some years now, watched by millions of people. It is an appeal by a to-be-born daughter to her father, to create an environment where she does not have to deal with male condemnation, aggression and violence. Think of it what you will – I believe you will join me in feeling irritated by the comments that can be found after the video.

This is a random sample, and typically amplified by almost 1000 likes in the last of the ones above, for example, ranting against “toxic femininity and the cult of victimhood.”

I think they should all be forced to watch at least two of the movies listed below, to get their heads straightened out. Some of the films I could link to, the others can be found on Amazon, if you have a membership there. All have central characters that are strong women or girls, defying the odds, refusing to be silenced in coercive environments.

Persepolis (2008)

The Passion of Joan Arc (1928)

Whale Rider (2002)

Mustang (2015) (Turkey)

Desperately seeking Susan (19850

Nine to five (1980)

Wendy and Lucy (2008)

The Piano (1993)

The Witch (2016)

And then there is The Little Mermaid. The movie, not the H.C.Andersen tale. A recent article in The Smithsonian argues that this was a revolutionary feminist film 30 years ago.

“The central story of The Little Mermaid is, of course, 16-year-old Ariel’s identity crisis. She feels constrained by her patriarchal mer-society and senses she doesn’t belong. She yearns for another world, apart from her own, where she can be free from the limits of her rigid culture and conservative family. Her body is under the water, but her heart and mind are on land with people. She leads a double life. She is, essentially, “in the closet” (as symbolized by her “cavern”—or closet—of human artifacts, where the character-building song “Part of Your World” takes place).

When Ariel ventures to tell her friends and family about her secret identity, they chastise her and tell her she must conform. She must meet her father’s expectations, sing on demand, perform for the public and give up all hopes of a different life. Her father, King Triton, even has her followed by a court official. In her misery, Ariel flees to the sea witch Ursula, the only strong female in the entire film and thus Ariel’s only female role model. At this point, the movie becomes truly subversive cinema.”

Ok, Ursula is gender fluid, empowering and dishes out this or that feminist advice. But she also teaches Ariel “how to get her man” with tricks and make-up, and the movie ends with a happy end, girl gets boy. The original mermaid’s suicide was not something American audiences would have tolerated. So let’s not add it to the list of compulsory movie watching for misogynists. I think we have enough contenders, as is.

Photographs today are some strong girls, captured in 2013 at an interdenominational Peace Camp. What would I give to see what has become of them 7 years later.

Così fan tutte, misogynist for some, a forerunner to feminism for others, shall be today’s musical selection.

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