The Books: A Collection of Essays, ‘Charles Dickens’, by George Orwell

Posted on February 5, 2013 by sheila

On the essays shelf:

A Collection of Essays, by George Orwell

Orwell’s essay on Dickens is a monster. It could be a small book. Dickens is one of my favorite authors, and Orwell’s essay is essential reading, one of the best things ever written about Dickens. It includes observations such as this, which I think is just so right on:

No one, at any rate no English writer, has written better about childhood than Dickens. In spite of all the knowledge that has accumulated since, in spite of the fact that children are now comparatively sanely treated, no novelist has shown the same power of entering into the child’s point of view. I must have been about nine years old when I first read David Copperfield. The mental atmosphere of the opening chapters was so immediately intelligible to me that I vaguely imagined they had been written by a child. And yet when one re-reads the book as an adult and sees the Murdstones, for instance, dwindle from gigantic figures of doom into semi-comic monsters, these passages lose nothing. Dickens has been able to stand both inside and outside the child’s mind, in such a way that the same scene can be wild burlesque or sinister reality, according to the age at which one reads it.

That has been exactly my experience but I certainly couldn’t put it into words like that.

Because this is Orwell we are talking about it, his essay on Dickens also has a political component. Dickens wrote a lot about the poor, obviously, and the plight of those with no power in society: women, children, the destitute. Because of this, socialists (of which Orwell was one) tried to “claim” him as one of their own. Orwell’s response is: “Not so fast …” The essay opens with an anecdote about Lenin seeing a production of Dickens’ The Cricket on the Hearth and walking out in disgust, finding the “middle-class sentimentality” intolerable. Lenin actually understood Dickens better than the socialists in Orwell’s day who wanted to turn him into some kind of class revolutionary. Orwell looks at the issue from all sides. It is a fascinating critical and political/social analysis. For example:

In Oliver Twist, Hard Times, Bleak House, Little Dorritt, Dickens attacked English institutions with a ferocity that has never since been approached. Yet he managed to do it without making himself hated, and, more than this, the very people he attacked have swallowed him so completely that he has become a national institution himself.

Orwell breaks down how that occurred. He observes that Dickens did not write about the famous “proletariat”. He did not write about agricultural laborers or factory workers, the heroes of Socialist thinking. He wrote about bourgeois people: shopkeepers, bar owners, lawyers, innkeepers, servants: These are middle-class people, albeit with a grotesque edge. Dickens obviously had a social critique in his work, but unlike more proselytizing writers, he did not offer solutions, so much as present the problem. How is Oliver Twist saved? By one of those coincidental plot-points that operates so often in Dickens, where he is removed from the squalor of the streets into the glory of a wealthy neighborhood. This is written by a man who sees the issues but doesn’t really propose what we all should DO about them (besides notice that there are issues and sometimes the mere act of noticing is the most important step). Additionally, if you look closely at Dickens, as Orwell points out, “there is no clear sign that he wants the existing order overthrown, or that he believes it would make much difference if it were overthrown.” So why were socialists trying to claim him then?

If Dickens had a solution for the problems of the world, it would be something along the lines of: “Please be more kind and understanding towards one another.” This is not solely a political statement; it is more of a moral one, a Christian one. Dickens was a deeply moral writer. How David Copperfield is treated is abominable. But the system itself is not really called into question, at least not in any way that proposes a solution. Orwell criticizes Dickens for not proposing solutions, but he also sees him in a context that is revelatory. Orwell does not think a novelist has the same goal as a politician or social activist. It’s not Dickens’ job to say, “Here is what we should do about the poor.” But it is interesting that the most popular writer in English history (save Shakespeare) would be so easily claim-able by so many diverse groups as a propagandist for their cause. You can imagine the fun Dickens might have had with these groups, were he alive to know how his work was being utilized. Dickens pointed out the ills in English society, in the same way that William Blake did. And yet he did so in a way that somehow maintained the status quo at the same time. William Blake was far more of a revolutionary than Dickens was. “The whole system STINKS” was basically Blake’s point in his devastating poems about child chimney sweeps. Dickens has other concerns.

Orwell is fascinating on A Tale of Two Cities, but again, he points out that the scenes of the Terror in France only take up a couple of chapters. The rest of the book involves clattering London streets, nice little apartments, shops and inns, and carriages. The Defarge couple hang over that book like a guillotine, reminding us of the horrors of revolution (Madame Defarge is one of Dickens’ most brilliant creations). By the time Dickens was writing, the romantic idea that the French revolution was about “liberte, egalite, and etc.” was long over. The guillotine got rid of that. Napoleon got rid of that. Dickens’ description of the mob violence in the French Revolution is still frightening to read today, because you can see what madness it is. Interestingly enough: the social and political critique that led to the French Revolution were predictive of 20th century causes that would erupt Russia, China, Africa, etc., into violent revolutions, some which burned out quickly (granted, leaving millions dead in some cases), others which morphed into something even more monstrous and long-lasting. But behind those revolutions was the idea that “the way life is set up right now is unfair: why do so few people hold so much wealth? Let’s spread it around a little bit.” This was in operation with the French Revolution, too. Cathedrals and mansions were commandeered by the people. Wealth was supposed to change hands, collectively, from the wealthy to the peasant class. It was only fair. It was also a horrible horrible idea. Society’s ills run deeper than money. Because wealth provides opportunities, the wealthy were often the people who knew how to do shit, and without their expertise, the peasants floundered. We saw this in Russia, in China. Once you cut off the past so violently, once you say to an entire class of people: “You are no longer welcome”, you cut off possibility. This was Edmund Burke’s famous critique of the French Revolution. It horrified him. Yes, there was unfairness in the distribution of wealth, but the solution was not to tear down the institutions themselves. That would be a disastrous decision. Burke was right, as we saw in France, in Russia, in China, in Iran, and on and on. Dickens understood that element of the French Revolution, and also understood the fearsome underbelly of revolutions which produce terrifying personages such as Robespierre. Once the purges begin, they are nearly impossible to stop: at one point does a whole culture say, “Okay. We can stop purging now”? Once you cut off the heads of your own monarchs in a public square, all bets are off. Everyone is going to go down eventually. Dickens’ book, especially with the inclusion of Madame Defarge, really gets that.

So to the socialists who think Dickens is one of them, Orwell says, “Come again? Have you read Tale of Two Cities? You think he approves of revolution? What author have YOU been reading?”

Dickens is pretty contemptuous, overall, about the English education system. Schools suck, in Dickens’ world, which was probably an accurate reflection of what was going on (and something Orwell would clearly relate to, as we saw in his essay about his experience in an English boarding school). Again, though, Dickens proposes no solution. He was not formally educated himself. Schoolmasters and teachers were ridiculous figures to him, pompous, cruel, unfair, and worthy of parody. It’s hard to find a good example of a teacher in Dickens’ work, which speaks volumes.

Orwell speaks of Dickens’ refreshing lack of nationalism, another reason why socialists wanted to claim him. Orwell makes the accurate observation that Dickens does not “exploit” the “other” in his works. His books clamor with people from all different walks of life, Irishmen, Scotsmen, Englishmen … and all emerge as human, albeit often ridiculous. But we’re all ridiculous, to some degree. He is not in service to the King, or to England. He is a humanist. He does not wave a flag. This may not be as easily seen today, or it may not be seen as very important, because questions of nationalism are not as paramount as they were in the 30s and 40s, when nations were behaving like a bunch of lunatics. I’m not saying we’re out of the woods yet. But the time in which Orwell was writing, as well as his socialist Marxist background, informs his analysis in a way that is quite interesting. Orwell finds Dickens’ lack of patriotism refreshing. (It’s also probably one of the reasons why Dickens’ books have traveled so far and lasted so long: they are not rooted in a time and place, they do not read as propaganda for a cause, as so much of the literature done by Dickens’ contemporaries does. Dickens’ books are about people, not politics.) I absolutely love this section:

The fact that Dickens is always thought of as a caricaturist, although he was constantly trying to be something else, is perhaps the surest mark of his genius. The monstrosities that he created are still remembered as monstrosities, in spite of getting mixed up in would-be probable melodramas. Their first impact is so vivid that nothing that comes afterwards effaces it. As with the people one knew in childhood, one seems always to remember them in one particular attitude, doing one particular thing. Mrs. Squeers is always ladling out brimstone and treacle, Mrs. Gummidge is always weeping, Mrs. Gargery is always banging her husband’s head against the wall, Mrs. Jellyby is always scribbling tracta while her children fall into the area — and there they all are, fixed for ever like little twinkling miniatures painted on snuffbox lids, completely fantastic and incredible, and yet somehow more solid and infinitely more memorable than the efforts of serious novelists. Even by the standards of his time Dickens was an exceptionally artificial writer. As Ruskin said, he “chose to work in a circle of stage fire”. His characters are even more distorted and simplified than Smolett’s. But there are no rules in novel-writing, and for any work of art there is only one test worth bothering about — survival. By this test Dickens’s characters have succeeded, even if the people who remember them hardly think of them as human beings. They are monsters, but at any rate they exist.

While the political critique is fascinating, Orwell also analyzes Dickens on a purely literary level, and it is such a joy to read. (He is always a joy to read.)

As I said, the essay is a multi-piece monster, and should be read in its entirety, but here is a wonderful excerpt.

A Collection of Essays, ‘Charles Dickens’, by George Orwell

What is more striking, in a seemingly ‘progressive’ radical, is that he is not mechanically minded. He shows no interest either in the details of machinery or in the things machinery can do. As Gissing remarks, Dickens nowhere describes a railway journey with anything like the enthusiasm he shows in describing journeys by stage-coach. In nearly all of his books one has a curious feeling that one is living in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and in fact, he does tend to return to this period. Little Dorrit, written in the middle fifties, deals with the late twenties; Great Expectations (1861) is not dated, but evidently deals with the twenties and thirties. Several of the inventions and discoveries which have made the modern world possible (the electric telegraph, the breech-loading gun, India-rubber, coal gas, wood-pulp paper) first appeared in Dickens’s lifetime, but he scarcely notes them in his books. Nothing is queerer than the vagueness with which he speaks of Doyce’s ‘invention’ in Little Dorrit. It is represented as something extremely ingenious and revolutionary, ‘of great importance to his country and his fellow-creatures’, and it is also an important minor link in the book; yet we are never told what the ‘invention’ is! On the other hand, Doyce’s physical appearance is hit off with the typical Dickens touch; he has a peculiar way of moving his thumb, a way characteristic of engineers. After that, Doyce is firmly anchored in one’s memory; but, as usual, Dickens has done it by fastening on something external.

There are people (Tennyson is an example) who lack the mechanical faculty but can see the social possibilities of machinery. Dickens has not this stamp of mind. He shows very little consciousness of the future. When he speaks of human progress it is usually in terms of moral progress — men growing better; probably he would never admit that men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be. At this point the gap between Dickens and his modern analogue, H.G. Wells, is at its widest. Wells wears the future round his neck like a mill-stone, but Dickens’s unscientific cast of mind is just as damaging in a different way. What it does is to make any positive attitude more difficult for him. He is hostile to the feudal, agricultural past and not in real touch with the industrial present. Well, then, all that remains is the future (meaning Science, ‘progress’, and so forth), which hardly enters into his thoughts. Therefore, while attacking everything in sight, he has no definable standard of comparison. As I have pointed out already, he attacks the current educational system with perfect justice, and yet, after all, he has no remedy to offer except kindlier schoolmasters. Why did he not indicate what a school might have been? Why did he not have his own sons educated according to some plan of his own, instead of sending them to public schools to be stuffed with Greek? Because he lacked that kind of imagination. He has an infallible moral sense, but very little intellectual curiosity. And here one comes upon something which really is an enormous deficiency in Dickens, something, that really does make the nineteenth century seem remote from us — that he has no idea of work.

With the doubtful exception of David Copperfield (merely Dickens himself), one cannot point to a single one of his central characters who is primarily interested in his job. His heroes work in order to make a living and to marry the heroine, not because they feel a passionate interest in one particular subject. Martin Chuzzlewit, for instance, is not burning with zeal to be an architect; he might just as well be a doctor or a barrister. In any case, in the typical Dickens novel, the Deus Ex Machina enters with a bag of gold in the last chapter and the hero is absolved from further struggle. The feeling ‘This is what I came into the world to do. Everything else is uninteresting. I will do this even if it means starvation’, which turns men of differing temperaments into scientists, inventors, artists, priests, explorers and revolutionaries — this motif is almost entirely absent from Dickens’s books. He himself, as is well known, worked like a slave and believed in his work as few novelists have ever done. But there seems to be no calling except novel-writing (and perhaps acting) towards which he can imagine this kind of devotion. And, after all, it is natural enough, considering his rather negative attitude towards society. In the last resort there is nothing he admires except common decency. Science is uninteresting and machinery is cruel and ugly (the heads of the elephants). Business is only for ruffians like Bounderby. As for politics — leave that to the Tite Barnacles. Really there is no objective except to marry the heroine, settle down, live solvently and be kind. And you can do that much better in private life.

Here, perhaps, one gets a glimpse of Dickens’s secret imaginative background. What did he think of as the most desirable way to live? When Martin Chuzzlewit had made it up with his uncle, when Nicholas Nickleby had married money, when John Harman had been enriched by Boffin what did they do?

The answer evidently is that they did nothing. Nicholas Nickleby invested his wife’s money with the Cheerybles and ‘became a rich and prosperous merchant’, but as he immediately retired into Devonshire, we can assume that he did not work very hard. Mr. and Mrs. Snodgrass ‘purchased and cultivated a small farm, more for occupation than profit.’ That is the spirit in which most of Dickens’s books end — a sort of radiant idleness. Where he appears to disapprove of young men who do not work (Harthouse, Harry Gowan, Richard Carstone, Wrayburn before his reformation) it is because they are cynical and immoral or because they are a burden on somebody else; if you are ‘good’, and also self-supporting, there is no reason why you should not spend fifty years in simply drawing your dividends. Home life is always enough. And, after all, it was the general assumption of his age. The ‘genteel sufficiency’, the ‘competence’, the ‘gentleman of independent means’ (or ‘in easy circumstances’)— the very phrases tell one all about the strange, empty dream of the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century middle bourgeoisie. It was a dream of complete idleness. Charles Reade conveys its spirit perfectly in the ending of Hard Cash. Alfred Hardie, hero of Hard Cash, is the typical nineteenth-century novel-hero (public-school style), with gifts which Reade describes as amounting to ‘genius’. He is an old Etonian and a scholar of Oxford, he knows most of the Greek and Latin classics by heart, he can box with prizefighters and win the Diamond Sculls at Henley. He goes through incredible adventures in which, of course, he behaves with faultless heroism, and then, at the age of twenty-five, he inherits a fortune, marries his Julia Dodd and settles down in the suburbs of Liverpool, in the same house as his parents-in-law:

They all lived together at Albion Villa, thanks to Alfred . . . Oh, you happy little villa! You were as like Paradise as any mortal dwelling can be. A day came, however, when your walls could no longer hold all the happy inmates. Julia presented Alfred with a lovely boy; enter two nurses and the villa showed symptoms of bursting. Two months more, and Alfred and his wife overflowed into the next villa. It was but twenty yards off; and there was a double reason for the migration. As often happens after a long separation, Heaven bestowed on Captain and Mrs. Dodd another infant to play about their knees, etc. etc. etc.

This is the type of the Victorian happy ending — a vision of a huge, loving family of three or four generations, all crammed together in the same house and constantly multiplying, like a bed of oysters. What is striking about it is the utterly soft, sheltered, effortless life that it implies. It is not even a violent idleness, like Squire Western’s.

That is the significance of Dickens’s urban background and his noninterest in the blackguardly-sporting military side of life. His heroes, once they had come into money and ‘settled down’, would not only do no work; they would not even ride, hunt, shoot, fight duels, elope with actresses or lose money at the races. They would simply live at home in feather-bed respectability, and preferably next door to a blood-relation living exactly the same life:

The first act of Nicholas, when he became a rich and prosperous merchant, was to buy his father’s old house. As time crept on, and there came gradually about him a group of lovely children, it was altered and enlarged; but none of the old rooms were ever pulled down, no old tree was ever rooted up, nothing with which there was any association of bygone times was ever removed or changed.

Within a stone’s-throw was another retreat enlivened by children’s pleasant voices too; and here was Kate . . . the same true, gentle creature, the same fond sister, the same in the love of all about her, as in her girlish days.

It is the same incestuous atmosphere as in the passage quoted from Reade. And evidently this is Dickens’s ideal ending. It is perfectly attained in Nicholas Nickleby, Martin Chuzzlewit and Pickwick, and it is approximated to in varying degrees in almost all the others. The exceptions are Hard Times and Great Expectations— the latter actually has a ‘happy ending’, but it contradicts the general tendency of the book, and it was put in at the request of Bulwer Lytton.

The ideal to be striven after, then, appears to be something like this: a hundred thousand pounds, a quaint old house with plenty of ivy on it, a sweetly womanly wife, a horde of children, and no work. Everything is safe, soft, peaceful and, above all, domestic. In the moss-grown churchyard down the road are the graves of the loved ones who passed away before the happy ending happened. The servants are comic and feudal, the children prattle round your feet, the old friends sit at your fireside, talking of past days, there is the endless succession of enormous meals, the cold punch and sherry negus, the feather beds and warming-pans, the Christmas parties with charades and blind man’s buff; but nothing ever happens, except the yearly childbirth. The curious thing is that it is a genuinely happy picture, or so Dickens is able to make it appear. The thought of that kind of existence is satisfying to him. This alone would be enough to tell one that more than a hundred years have passed since Dickens’s first book was written. No modern man could combine such purposelessness with so much vitality.

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Corn Neck Road, Block Island

Posted on February 4, 2013 by sheila


Taken January, 2010

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It Ain’t Heavy. It’s Just Melancholy.

Posted on February 4, 2013 by sheila

I am reading two books concurrently, one on my various bus and train commutes, and the other before I go to bed, that are rather interesting in terms of melancholy. I’m not one for self-help books (although there are exceptions), and I find a lot of “self-help” present in things not labeled as such. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. They have everything in them. They are like the Psalms in the Bible. Open a page randomly, and something in a passage will reach out to your own experience, reflect it, illuminate it, confirm that you are not alone, you not the first to feel such things, you have company.

I read Joshua Ferris’ extraordinary first novel Then We Came to the End in 2008. It’s one of the best novels I’ve read in years (and certainly one of the best FIRST novels I have ever read). Then We Came to the End received a lot of praise. How could this young author follow up such an awesome debut? His second novel is called The Unnamed, and my sister Siobhan, who had told me to read Ferris’ book had told me a little bit about the second. The main thing I remember her saying is, “It’s really sad.”

And it is. The sadness is relentless. The Unnamed tells the story of a partner in a successful law firm, wife, kid, home in Connecticut, who is afflicted by the desire to walk. He could be in the middle of a trial when the affliction comes over him, and it doesn’t matter: he will turn, walk out of the courtroom and continue walking until he collapses. He walks miles and miles. He gets frostbite. Toes are amputated. His wife is devastated. They go to specialists, they consult yogis and crackpots, he has to wear a helmet at one point to monitor his brain waves. No one knows what it is. Is it physical? Is it neurological? His wife, desperate, handcuffs him to the bed, so that at least he will be safe. But that is not a sustainable solution. I haven’t finished the book yet. It is short but it feels long. This is not entirely a complaint, although I do want to put this poor man out of his misery. This is a sentiment I relate to, and find disturbing – also, one might say, triggering, and I have been doing my best to avoid triggers. The Unnamed, so far, is the brutal journey of a man who cannot stop walking, and it destroys his career, his marriage (although the wife hangs in there, she starts drinking as a coping mechanism), and also the possibility of any relief. If they can’t tell you what’s wrong with you, if it can’t be seen on a CAT scan, then what are you supposed to do? In this, the book feels like a long metaphor for depression, or melancholy (a word I prefer).

The following passage is one of the best I’ve read, in terms of describing what it actually feels like, to be overtaken by depression, as William Styron called it in his memoir of madness Darkness Visible: “the despair beyond despair.”

He was informed that Jane was on vacation and wouldn’t be returning for another week. Did he care to speak to a different broker?

“How nice,” he said. “Where on vacation?”

“I want to say Paris, but don’t quote me,” said the voice. “The south of France, maybe?”

He stood in the snow-patched prairie with the ice-blue brook running toward the rafting centers and trailer parks, far from the south of France, far from Paris, and a wave of death washed over him. Not biological death, which brought relief, but the death that harrows the living by giving them a glimpse of the life they’ve been denied. Its sorrow was a thousandfold any typical dying.

The other book I am reading is The Anatomy of Melancholy, by Robert Burton. First published in 1621. I had heard about it. People reference it all the time. But it’s, like, 40,000 pages long. Who is gonna read it? Well, clearly many people have. It went through five printings (or something extraordinary like that) in Burton’s lifetime. It’s still in print today. It is gigantic, it is true. But it’s amazing how readable it is, how almost CHATTY it is. I will have more to say about it, but I am tearing through it. His references are daunting (he is a curator of quotes, that’s for sure), and his interest in the affliction of melancholy, something he is open about suffering himself, although he says that no man will ever go through life without being touched by it somehow. Nobody can escape. It is a medical book in many ways, which is really interesting, because it talks about the “humours” and all that. It is a grand accomplishment, and often quite funny. The preface, which runs 124 pages, is satirical (Burton was a big fan of satire, and his other published works are satirical in nature). It goes into the causes of melancholy, the “catch-22” theory of life: that life is crazy in and of itself, and so of course everyone is crazy, and the one sane person who stands up and shouts, “THIS IS NUTS. LOOK AT HOW WE BEHAVE” will be seen as the craziest of them all. So it’s a given that Melancholy afflicts all, to some degree. He has a 5 page treatise on “if you don’t like what I have to say, then don’t read it”, which made me laugh because he does go on and on in almost a defensive tone, addressing his readers and potential criticism in a “let’s cut you off at the pass” kind of way. How many bloggers out there have railed at their own readership, saying, “This is free content. If you don’t like it, don’t read it.” I myself have said such things. Or, more accurately, if someone moans about how they don’t like one post I’ve written, I will say, “Is the scroll function broken on your computer?” I have never gone as apeshit as this blogger, who was rightly criticized for her ridiculous essay. Seriously, hon, if people criticizing you bothers you that much, then stop writing publicly. Honestly. Or, close the comments section. You should be glad that people are reading you at all, frankly. But it made me laugh, Robert Burton’s insistence that if you don’t like what he has to say, then no one is forcing you to read it. Some things never change.

Who knew that a giant tome about “Melancholy” could be so entertaining. It’s actually a page-turner. Who knew??

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The Books: A Collection of Essays, ‘Such, Such Were the Joys …’, by George Orwell

Posted on February 4, 2013 by sheila

On the essays shelf:

A Collection of Essays, by George Orwell

While I admire and love both 1984 and Animal Farm (and have done so, really, since I was first introduced them, in junior high and high school), it was when I was introduced to George Orwell’s essays that I really started to understand the sheer scope of what he accomplished. His scope is broad: he wrote about Dickens, Kipling, about boys’ magazines, about politics and language. As a member of the police in colonial India, he saw first-hand what colonialism/imperialism meant and looked like (His “Shooting an Elephant” is an essential essay on imperialism and what it DID). His political journey is well-known, so I won’t go over that in detail here. Like many of his generation on the Left, the Spanish Civil War was a wake-up call (for those willing to be awakened) and he spoke out about it, wrote a book about it, and was shunned by his more ideologically “pure” comrades. The 20th century, in many ways, is the story of various political ideologies which, when taken to their inevitable extremes, are revealed to be justifications for almost anything, for any horror: genocide, murder, assassination, poverty, oppression. But that was not at all clear in the wild winds of the 1930s, and it took a very clear mind, an autodidactic mind, an independent thinker, to look around him and say, “This is no good. No good at all.”

Nobody congratulates you for proving them wrong. Nobody congratulates you for being right first, before everybody else comes around. Christopher Hitchens’ book Why Orwell Matters goes into those political divisions in terms of Orwell: how the Left see him, how the Right see him, how is “used” by both sides, while both sides conveniently forget the elements that do not line up with their ideology. Orwell does not fit into a neat political box. He was a Marxist. But he also wrote one of the greatest books about totalitarian thinking of all time. Those who say something is “Orwellian” often confuse the matter, conflating the book with the man, as in: he approved of totalitarian thinking. “Orwell” = Fascism. An amazing thing.

But Orwell was a journalist at heart. A thinker and an observer. Personal.

For example, this essay today.

It is a grueling and bitter personal essay about his years in an English boarding school. Christopher Hitchens (again), in his memoir Hitch-22: A Memoir, has an entire chapter about the English boarding school experience, and how it is difficult to get Americans to understand it, since we don’t have that tradition here. Poet W.H. Auden compared the English boarding school to a “totalitarian regime”, and that is just one of many many (many!) quotes from 20th century writers who opened up about what it was like in those places: the hardship, the bullying, the sexual abuse, the horrible food, the beating – and what such deprivation did to the boys who experienced it. It was designed to break a child’s spirit and independence.

Hitchens writes, in Hitch 22:

One of the most awful reproaches in the school’s arsenal of psychological torture – Orwell catches it very well in his essay “Such Such Were the Joys” – was the one about one’s sickly ingratitude: the selfish refusal to shape up after all that had been done on one’s behalf. Of course I now recognize this as the working model, drawn from monotheistic religion, where love is compulsory and must be offered to a higher being whom one must necessarily also fear. This moral blackmail is based on a quintessential servility.

Orwell’s honesty in “Such, Such Were the Joys” is still a high watermark in the way-too-clogged personal essay genre. This is how you do it.

Orwell starts the essay with the sentence:

Soon after I arrived at Crossgates (not immediately, but after a week or two, just when I seemed to be settling into routine of school life) I began wetting my bed. I was now aged eight, so that this was a reversion to a habit which I must have grown out of at least four years earlier.

His descriptions of the terror, the confusion, the shame, are searing to read. Even here, when describing his own childhood experiences, Orwell is always – always – a political writer.

A Collection of Essays, ‘Such, Such Were the Joys …’, by George Orwell

It is curious, the degree – I will not say of actual hardship, but of squalor and neglect, that was taken for granted in upper-class schools of that period. Almost as in the days of Thackeray, it seemed natural that a little boy of eight or ten should be a miserable, snotty-nosed creature, his face almost permanently dirty, his hands chapped, his nails bitten, his handkerchief a sodden horror, his bottom frequently blue with bruises. It was partly the prospect of actual physical discomfort that made the thought of going back to school lie in one’s breast like a lump of lead during the last few days of the holidays. A characteristic memory of Crossgates is the astonishing hardness of one’s bed on the first night of term. Since this was an expensive school, I took a social step upwards by attending it, and yet the standard of comfort was in every way far lower than in my own home, or indeed, than it would have been in a prosperous working-class home. One only had a hot bath once a week, for instance. The food was not only bad, it was also insufficient. Never before or since have I seen butter or jam scraped on bread so thinly. I do not think I can be imagining the fat that we were underfed, when I remember the lengths we would go in order to steal food. On a number of occasions I remember creeping down at two or three o’clock in the morning through what seemed like miles of pitch-dark stairways and passages – barefooted, stopping to listen after each step, paralysed with about equal fear of Sim, ghosts and burglars – to steal stale bread from the pantry. The assistant masters had their meals with us, but they had somewhat better food, and if one got half a chance it was usual to steal left-over scraps of bacon rind or fried potato when their plates were removed.

As usual, I did not see the sound commercial reason for this under-feeding. On the whole I accepted Sim’s view that a boy’s appetite is a sort of morbid growth which should be kept in check as much as possible. A maxim often repeated to us at Crossgates was that it is healthy to get up from a meal feeling as hungry as when you sat down. Only a generation earlier than this it had been common for school dinners to start off with a slab or unsweetened suet pudding, which, it was frankly said, “broke the boys’ appetite”. But the under-feeding was probably less flagrant at preparatory schools, where a boy was wholly dependent on the official diet, than at public schools, where he was allowed – indeed, expected – to buy extra food for himself. At some schools, he would literally not have had enough to eat unless he had bought regular supplies of eggs, sausages, sardines, etc.; and his parents had to allow him money for this purpose. At Eton, for instance, at any rate in College, a boy was given no solid meal after mid-day dinner. For his afternoon tea he was given only tea and bread and butter, and at eight o’clock he was given a miserable supper of soup or fried fish, or more often bread and cheese, with water to drink. Sim went down to see his eldest son at Eton and came back in snobbish ecstasies over the luxury in which the boys lived. “They give them fried fish for supper!” he exclaimed, beaming all over his chubby face. “There’s no school like it in the world.” Fried fish! The habitual supper of the poorest of the working-class! At very cheap boarding-schools it was no doubt worse. A very early memory of mine is of seeing the boarders at a grammar school – the sons, probably, of farmers and shopkeepers – being fed on boiled lights.

Whoever writes about his childhood must beware of exaggeration and self-pity. I do not want to claim that I was a martyr or that Crossgates was a sort of Dotheboys Hall. But I should be falsifying my own memories if I did not record that they are largely memories of disgust. The overcrowded, underfed, underwashed life that we led was disgusting, as I recall it. If I shut my eyes and say “school,” it is of course the physical surroundings that first come back to me: the flat playing-field with its cricket pavilion and the little shed by the rifle range, the draughty dormitories, the dusty splintery passages, the square of asphalt in front of the gymnasium, the raw-looking pinewood chapel at the back. And at almost every point some filthy detail obtrudes itself. For example, there were the pewter bowls out of which we had our porridge. They had overhanging rims, and under the rims there were accumulations of sour porridge, which could be flaked off in long strips. The porridge itself, too, contained more lumps, hairs, and unexplained black things than one would have thought possible, unless someone was putting them there on purpose. It was never safe to start on that porridge without investigating it first. And there was the slimy water of the plunge bath – it was twelve or fifteen feet long, the whole school was supposed to go into it every morning, and I doubt whether the water was changed at all frequently – and the always-damp towels with their cheesy smell: and, on occasional visits in the winter, the murky sea-water of the local Baths, which came straight in from the beach and on which I once saw floating a human turd. And the sweaty smell of the changing-room with its greasy basins, and, giving on this, the row of filthy, dilapidated lavatories, which had no fastenings of any kind on the doors, so that whenever you were sitting there someone was sure to come crashing in. It is not easy for me to think of my schooldays without seeming to breathe in a whiff of something cold and evil-smelling – a sort of compound of sweaty stockings, dirty towels, faecal smells blowing along corridors, forks with old food between the prongs, neck-of-mutton stew, and the banging doors of the lavatories and the echoing chamber-pots in the dormitories.

It is true that I am by nature not gregarious, and the W.C. and dirty-handkerchief side of life is necessarily more obtrusive when great numbers of human beings are crushed together in small space. It is just as bad in an army, and worse, no doubt, in a prison. Besides, boyhood is the age of disgust. After one has learned to differentiate, and before one has become hardened – between seven and eighteen, say – one seems always to be walking the tightrope over a cesspool. Yet I do not think I exaggerate the squalor of school life, when I remember how health and cleanliness were neglected, in spite of the hoo-ha about fresh air and cold water and keeping in hard training. It was common to remain constipated for days together. Indeed, one was hardly encouraged to keep one’s bowels open, since the aperients tolerated were Castor Oil or another almost equally horrible drink called Liquorice Powder. One was supposed to go into the plunge bath every morning, but some boys shirked it for days on end, simply making themselves scarce when the bell sounded, or else slipping along the edge of the bath among the crowd, and then wetting their hair with a little dirty water off the floor. A little boy of eight or nine will not necessarily keep himself clean unless there is something to see that he does it. There was a new boy named Hazel, a pretty, mother’s darling of a boy, who came a little before I left. The first thing I noticed about him was the beautiful pearly whiteness of his teeth. By the end of that term his teeth were an extraordinary shade of green. During all that time, apparently, no one had taken sufficient interest in him to see that he brushed them.

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The Blue Kite (1993); Dir. Tian Zhuangzhuang

Posted on February 3, 2013 by sheila

It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.
— Mao Zedong

Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Blue Kite is both an intimate story about the everyday life of a family, and the story of The Great Leap Forward and The Cultural Revolution in China. What is miraculous about the film is how we feel the madness of that time in Chinese history (literally: madness), while rarely leaving the small community where the family lives. The film takes place in a two-block section of Beijing called Dry Well Lane. Great events outside the lane impact daily lives: the opening scene shows a young couple about to get married when the news comes over the radio that Stalin has died. Their wedding has to be postponed for 10 days. One of the old ladies in the community murmurs, “Who is this Stalin person?” When the couple do get married, they stand before a poster of Mao Zedong. The Blue Kite is filled with reminders like that of how much the state infiltrated people’s lives.

But these people do not seem downtrodden or cowed in the beginning of the film. The marriage ceremony, between Lin (Liping Lü) and Shaolong (Pu Quanxin) is a joyous occasion. Their families are thrilled, the two love one another (the scene of their wedding night where he hoists her up on his back and twirls her around until she is dizzy is moving and sweet), and while the marriage ceremony includes a group singing of a revolutionary patriotic song, what is in the hearts of those present is personal, grateful, and happy. The fever of revolutionary madness has not started to rise, although there are chilling signs of what is to come. For the most part, they live their lives in peace with their neighbors, the children play outside, getting into mischief, people share food and gossip. They don’t have much, but the community is a caring one, bound together by tradition and family.

Lin and Shaolong have a child, nicknamed Tietou (it is he who narrates the film), and he is played by a series of extraordinary child actors, natural and unselfconscious. Tietou seems like a real child: he has tantrums, he gets into everything, he cries, he is totally lovable and yet there are times when Lin is exasperated: “You little troublemaker!”

Lin is a teacher at a primary school and Shaolong is a librarian. The extended family, grandmothers and uncles and aunts, are all highly involved in Tietou’s life. We can see how things are starting to shift. We hear radio broadcasts in the background, and we see posters on all walls exhorting the people to “rectify” their views, to submit to Party discipline. Unlike other films portraying revolutions and crackdowns, like, say, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, or, Reds, there are no scenes with massive crowds undulating across giant squares holding posters and banners. The Blue Kite always remains intimate. The revolutionary committees who march around, banging drums, and handing out orders from the leadership are neighbors. There’s a confrontation with the landlord of the small block of buildings where Lin and Shaolong live. All property is to be confiscated by the State, no more private ownership. The landlady, upset, says that her property is already owned by the State, and she has lowered the rents, and she has done everything she is supposed to do. “All righty then, thank you, have a great day” is basically the response, although that will change, devastatingly, over the course of the film. The revolution eats its young, as we know. Once that ball starts rolling, it is very difficult to stop, and the series of purges of those who do not hold “correct” beliefs is no less awful just because it is predictable.

And, as happened in Stalin’s Russia, every citizen becomes complicit in The Terror. That was part of the “success” of the revolution (if you think like Stalin, that is), because it incorporated guilt, shame, and shared experience. It is easier to dominate citizens if their collective spirits are broken. So: it is your revolutionary duty to report on those you suspect to be harboring counter-revolutionary views, or “Rightist” views, or whatever view is out of favor. If you do NOT report it, then you will find yourself suspect as well. Even if it’s your father, your wife, your child. Russia made a national hero out of a young boy who denounced his parents in the 1930s.

We start to see suspicions erupt in the family in The Blue Kite. Lin’s sister (Xiaoying Song) is a True Believer, and everything she says sounds canned and programmed: “This is the beauty of socialism … we have teachers and students working in factories now!” When her brother snarks, “Yes, and the metal they make is only good for scrap ..” she warns him to never speak like that outside of the house.

The Rectification Project (revolutions have a tendency to make normal words with positive connotations sound frightening: Purge. Cleanse. Rectify. Correct.) is a Communist Party directive: companies and individuals need to report on counter-revolutionary activity in their midst. There are self-criticism ceremonies in schools and workplaces, where individuals are “encouraged” to stand in front of their colleagues and admit where their thinking is wrong. The watching group responds in kind, hurling abuse at the person in front of them. It’s horrible. Shaolong’s boss at the library gathers together all of his employees and says, “I’m not saying we have a quota to reach …” A chilling comment, because obviously there is an unspoken quota: If you say that your workplace is completely free of incorrect attitudes, you will be seen as automatically suspect. During this company meeting, Shaolong leaves for a second to go to the bathroom. When he returns to the room, he is faced with a silent group of staring people. Later, Lin says to her husband, “Why did you choose that moment to go to the toilet?”

Shaolong is denounced, and sent to a labor camp (“far far away”, narrates Tietou). He dies in the labor camp, a “tree fell on him”. His body is never returned. We remember that warm smiling man, whirling around his new bride, the man who made a blue kite for his young son. Yes, the blue kite got caught in the tree, but Tietou remembers that kite. He barely remembers his father, but he knows that that kite was representative of his father’s love for him.

The program of agricultural collectivization is a brutal one, and every citizen is now required to work the fields at the huge collectivized farms for three months of the year. Lin volunteers, leaving Tietou at home in the care of his grandparents and his kindly Uncle Li (Xuejian Li). We also get to know another uncle, who was in the Army until his poor eyesight blocked him from advancement. He is dating a young woman, Zhu Ying, (Hong Zhang) a rising star in the Party, an actress working in a propaganda arm of the Party. She is a sweet woman, smiling and open, and nervous about meeting Lin (“I wanted to meet you first, because he talks about you so much”). Trouble arises when she balks at one of her duties: she is required to “dance” with the upper echelon Party members at various events. If I am reading between the lines correctly, “dance” is another word for “have sex with”. She is reprimanded in a frightening scene with her superior, who, up until that point, has been one of her champions, applauding her realistic acting in the revolutionary dramas they put on, and treating her like an equal. She is given a warning. Later, in a quiet scene with Lin, over the sleeping Tietou, Zhu Ying whispers to Lin, “I’m so scared.” She senses that something is coming. She’s right. She is arrested (and given no reason why) and is led out of her place of work in handcuffs as her co-workers (former friends) jeer and cheer.

The next time we see her she is in prison, when her boyfriend, now wearing dark glasses to protect his eyes, goes to visit her. She is no longer the pretty pigtailed woman wearing a spic-and-span khaki uniform, holding Tietou and trying to make a good impression on her potential new family. Her hair is messy, she has dark circles under her eyes, and she speaks in a low defeated voice, saying to the man she loved, “Please forget about me.”

Lin marries “Uncle Li”, who has been such a good friend and support to her and Tietou following Shaolong’s death. He had worked with Shaolong at the library and is tormented with guilt because he had written up a report denouncing some of his colleagues, Shaolong being one of them. He confesses this one night to Lin, and Lin says she already knew, Shaolong told her, and also told her to not blame Li for his actions. A moment of forgiveness and grace in an unforgiving world.

The Blue Kite is seen through the eyes of Tietou, and so much of his life is taken up with childhood concerns (albeit important to him): the totally unfair fact that his parents won’t get him the firecracker he wants for New Year, beating up a pal at school for making a derogatory comment about his mother, acting out when he doesn’t get his way. He says matter-of-factly, in his narration, “We made it through the three years with no food …”

The Cultural Revolution begins to enter its lunatic phase. A teacher is dragged out of Tietou’s school by her own students, and her hair is cut off in front of the cheering crowd of children. Tietou tells his mother proudly, “I spat at her.” Lin slaps him across the face. The landlady of Dry Well Lane is punished for “hoarding” flour from her rations to make a full pot of dumplings. A neighbor turned her in. Uncle Li collapses and dies of malnutrition. Education is no longer valued. The entire nation is now forced to work hard labor, in factories, camps, and fields, to get the country industrialized. Tietou thinks it’s kind of fun, because school is no longer about boring learning. They just mess around all day, and throw rocks through the school windows. Lin marries again, this time not for love, but to protect herself and her child. She is set up by her True Believer sister (who, naturally, by the end of the film, has found herself on the chopping block – we must never forget that Madame Defarge loses her head in the end, too) with a wealthy party official. A gleaming car comes to pick up Lin and Tietou at Dry Well Lane. It is the first time either of them have been in a car.

Up until this point, the action has rarely left Dry Well Lane. Dry Well Lane has dirt paths, small houses, and is an enclosed community. People cook in huge pots on their front stoops. It is in Beijing, but you would never know it was a modern world. Seeing Lin and Tietou suddenly living in a huge house, with a curving stairwell and bay windows, is jarring. It’s interesting, too: in Dry Well Lane, whatever work you did was valued, because it added to the common good. This is not a comment on socialism, but a comment on being surrounded by extended family. Women cooked, men fixed things, it all worked. Perhaps it is a sentimental view of gender roles, but it was so much a part of the early sections of the film that I didn’t notice it. But suddenly, in the big house, Lin is relegated to drudgery status. Tietou refers to her, his own mother, as “the maid”. While it may be nice to have a big house, and amenities like running water, it’s seen as a pretty poor tradeoff. Lin and Tietou are removed from the comforting blanket of grandmothers and kindly uncles who stop by to fix things. They are isolated.

A strength of the film, though, and perhaps the most stinging critique of the Cultural Revolution, is that there are no Bad Guys here. The Bad Guy is the Revolution itself. (There’s a reason why The Blue Kite was banned in China.) The Revolution forces otherwise moral people to behave in an irrational and immoral manner, spitting on their teachers, turning in their loved ones, and hardening up their softer impulses. The party official Lin marries is a cold guy, perhaps, not openly loving, and it is a marriage of convenience for both of them. But in a key scene, he confides in Lin and Tietou that he has been denounced at work and he feels an arrest is imminent. Therefore, they must divorce, so that Lin and Tietou will be saved from the taint of their association with him. He is a moral man. He says, “I’ve grown fond of the kid, even though he doesn’t like me. But it’s okay. Kids are like that.”

The acting in Blue Kite is wonderful, and there were moments when I found myself thinking, “God. I really like all of these people.” This may seem like a trite observation, but it is one of the reasons why the film works, and why it is so cumulatively devastating. It focuses on the small, the everyday rhythms of one family, and the long relentless fingers of political reality, touching them all. It is difficult at times to get a grasp on just how harrowing certain historical situations were, the Great Terror in Russia in the 1930s (and many people in the West are still in denial about how bad it was. Robert Conquest, when his book The Great Terror was re-issued with confirmation that he had UNDER-estimated the numbers of those killed, wanted to re-title the book this), and the Cultural Revolution of the late 50s and 60s in China. The numbers are daunting and don’t seem real. Entire cultures went berserk. Revolutions like that act like a fever, they need to burn themselves out. But in the burning-out process, millions of people died.

Stalin famously said, “One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.”

The Blue Kite works because when the family we have come to care about is ripped apart, we understand that the experience we are seeing, specific as it is, is representative of the “statistic” of “millions” of others. We weep for Lin and Uncle Li and Tietou and Shaolong. We have gotten to know them. In this sense, The Blue Kite is an enormously angry and political film, although the overall tone is not angry at all. It’s tender, mournful, nostalgic (for childhood, for family), and observant of human behavior and relationships. The film understands that a little boy who has lost his father will always keep a torn blue kite hanging over his bed, even though he doesn’t remember his father who made the kite, even though he is now a teenager, and maybe too old for kites.

When the world goes insane, it is good to remember that there was once a time, not too long ago, when flying a kite with your father was possible, when it was possible to be happy.

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It’s a Beautiful Day In the Neighborhood: Fred Rogers

Posted on February 2, 2013 by sheila

Todd VanDerWerff has an extraordinary appreciation of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood over at the A.V. Club, which is essential reading. There are amazing clips, too, sprinkled throughout, including Mr. Rogers’ appearance on The Tonight Show, with Joan Rivers hosting. We were a big Fred-watching household (and Sesame Street too), and Todd’s piece brought me to tears multiple times. He really gets at the unsettling and riveting (in today’s fast-paced world) peace of the show, and Mr. Rogers’ quiet and un-preachy moral authority.

Please go read the whole thing.

Here is a small excerpt, but there is more where that came from:

Since Rogers’ death, there’s been a movement to add him to the secular canon, the very small group of people whose cultural influence was used almost entirely for good, whose lives were untouched by scandal. What’s unusual about Rogers is just how well he lives up to sainthood. He was married to the same woman his whole life. He never smoked nor drank. He was a vegetarian, and when pushed to condemn homosexuals or people of non-Christian religions, he would simply say that God loves everyone just as they are. Rogers, a Presbyterian minister, is one of the best arguments there is for Christianity as a positive force in American culture, and his unobtrusive religious influence underpins everything in the series without calling attention to itself.

In a famous Esquire profile of Rogers, Tom Junod boils down what makes him special: astonishment. Somehow, through the long process of growing up, the process that beats cynicism and ironic detachment into so many of us, Rogers was capable of holding onto childlike wonder and curiosity. Returning to the series as an adult, means being confronted with who you once were and all you have lost in the process of becoming who you are. This was often the experience for adults who were lucky enough to meet Rogers, after having grown up with him on their television screens. Junod reports both on his own interactions with the man and the interactions he witnesses while following him around New York City in the course of researching the profile. And there are numerous videos where talk-show hosts struggle to hang onto what’s left of their composure in front of the whole weight of Rogers’ sincerity.

Chatting about it on Twitter, MC, from the wonderful Happy Thoughts, Darling, wrote: “I’m not even v. religious, but I truly feel he was a conduit for something holy & great. A wonderful man.”

It is a sentiment I cosign wholeheartedly. For instance, watching the following famous clip of Fred Rogers testifying before the United States Senate Subcommittee on Communications in 1969, making the case that funding should not be cut for the brand-new PBS. The Senator in question (a tough-guy Rhode Islander, naturally) starts off cranky, and openly so. He shows that he is barely tolerating the situation. “Would it make you feel better if …” But watch what then happens. And watch what happens to Senator Pastori. Watch the transformation. You can see it occur in the Joan Rivers clip in Todd’s piece too. Watch how her energy changes. People would try to meet him with cynicism, because sincerity and earnestness makes people feel uncomfortable. (As Todd suggests, this is because we have come so far away from the children that we used to be. There is a shame factor when you encounter someone so incorruptible.)

And please, if you read anything this week, read Todd’s piece.

Posted in Television | 11 Comments

Stuff I’ve Been Reading

Posted on February 1, 2013 by sheila

Offline reading has to do with
— Elvis
— depression
— PTSD
— war

In other words. The usual.

But here are some things I’ve been reading over the past week.

— My friend Jayne is so talented, and she’s been busy making window quilts for her home. Check out the results!

— Riveting interview with lone wolf cartoonist Natalie Dee (I’ve been following her for years). She’s fascinating, and her comments on chronic depression were heartening – but also her sense that girls were not welcome in the comics world. This vibe started for her young, but it has carried over into her adult life. People do have a way of letting you know that you are not welcome in the boys’ club. They won’t link to you, they pretend you don’t exist (“maybe if we don’t link to her … she’ll just … go away? Ya think?”). It’s stupid, backwards, and I love Natalie Dee’s straight-talking about it. I also love her words on work ethic and producing. It makes me think of George Carlin’s comment, “You gotta wanna.” You want more people to read your stuff? Then work hard to create better stuff. Update more, or update less (and more carefully). Work your ass off. Stop whining. I loved that element of her conversation. I relate to it.

— Tomato Nation has one of the best commenting sections on the Web. Take a look at the last Vine column, and what happens in the comments and you’ll see why. We are not alone.

— Ready to go down a rabbit hole? I’m serious. If you follow all of the links in the post I am about to highlight, hours of your life (perhaps weeks) will go down the tube. I know. I followed them all. It is riveting. It is an abyss, and a time-suck. Highly recommended. Here you go. I love Colleen Doran. She speaks the truth.

— This story killed me.

— Every February, my friend Odie devotes his site, Big Media Vandalism to “Black History Mumf”, as he calls it. A wealth of content. Too much to list. Just keep reading. Are you familiar with Odie’s writing? If not, you better well should be! In this introductory post, written by the great Steven Boone, Boone sets up “Black History Mumf” for us, and also relates a tale, as told by Odie, of something a woman said to Odie when he emerged from The Passion of the Christ. I am still laughing.

— I love the site The Art of Memory. I never know what I will find there. These images are so beautiful and soothing.

— Haunting eerie photographs of the car park theatre in Detroit (a scene in 8 Mile was filmed there). Terrible, and yet beautiful.

— “I don’t care if people call me a radical, a rebel, a red, a revolutionary, an outsider, an outlaw, a Bolshevik, an anarchist, a nihilist, or even a left conservative, but please don’t ever call me a liberal.” — Norman Mailer

— A hell of an essay.

Posted in Miscellania | Tagged | 6 Comments

Curfew: A Masterpiece in 19 Minutes

Posted on January 30, 2013 by sheila


Shawn Christensen, Fatima Ptacek, in “Curfew”

I called it.

Curfew, 19 minutes long, which I saw at the Tribeca Film Festival this past year, is a masterpiece. Here is my review.

Curfew is nominated for an Academy Award this year in the Best Live Action Short category. Directed by Shawn Christensen (as well as written by, and starring), Curfew is a whimsical piece of condensed poetry and pain, a love letter to New York City and New York movies, entertaining, gorgeously shot, with a sucker-punch of an ending. I loved every second of it, and am so pleased to see it racking up awards on the festival circuit, culminating in an Oscar nom. For a short moment there, I was the only person who reviewed it.

Here is the interview I did with Christensen about his film.

Posted in Directors, Movies | Tagged , , , | 9 Comments

06/05 (2004); Dir. Theo van Gogh

Posted on January 30, 2013 by sheila


Director, Theo van Gogh

On November 2, 2004, Dutch film director Theo van Gogh (his great-grandfather was Vincent van Gogh’s brother, Theo) was killed in broad daylight by Dutch-Moroccan Mohammed Bouyeri. Van Gogh was cycling to work, and Bouyeri shot him eight times, killing him, before stabbing him in the chest and trying to cut off his head. 06/05 was van Gogh’s last film before he was killed. It is a fictionalized account of the May 6, 2002 assassination of controversial Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn.

The violent deaths of both Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh confirmed the faultlines that had already been threatening to derail the usually peaceful and tolerant Netherlands. Overrun by North African immigration, the country’s social services were straining to handle the influx. This was deeply painful for the culture – the Netherlands prided itself on its liberal policies and its peaceful atmosphere (and, conversely, was haunted collectively by its WWII behavior). But the immigration numbers were astronomical (surely a compliment to The Netherlands: so many people want to move there) and while it was clearly an issue, nobody quite knew how to handle it. It was a social no-no to say anything critical about immigration, or about the fact that the immigrants were not assimilating themselves into the liberal culture. Pim Fortuyn strode right into the center of that debate and spoke out strongly, saying at one point, “The Netherlands are full.” He created his own party. He was seen as overwhelmingly right-wing, although some of his policies contradicted that. He was openly gay, and during one televised debate with a Muslim cleric he “queened” it up on purpose, drawing the wrath of the traditional Muslim who called him horrible homophobic names. Fortuyn pointed to that episode repeatedly afterwards, saying, “This is the attitude we are letting in to our country. This is a Trojan horse, people.” He inspired hatred and revulsion on the one side, and also passionate love on the other side. During a press conference, someone threw a custard pie at him. It was a media circus. Fortuyn was killed just weeks before the 2002 election, again in broad daylight, right outside a radio station where he had just given an interview. Volkert van der Graaf, an animal rights activist and environmentalist, was the killer, and he said he killed Fortuyn because Fortuyn was turning Muslims into “scapegoats”, a common refrain at the time. We have problems in our society, yes, but let us not blame it all on the outsiders. Because isn’t that what we did in WWII with our Jews? Let us not go down that path again. The murder of Pim Fortuyn ignited The Netherlands (but the worst was yet to come). People poured into the streets to mourn him, to watch his funeral motorcade go by. A leader had never been assassinated in their country before. The news anchors were openly baffled: “This is not who we are … what has happened to us …”


Pim Fortuyn

Naturally, in the wake of Fortuyn’s death, conspiracy theories erupted about van der Graaf. He was said to have murdered someone else as well, although there was little proof. People wondered if he was in the employ of Dutch intelligence services, who had a vested interest in keeping Fortuyn out of power. (Ironically, in The Netherlands, you cannot remove someone off the ballot so close to the election, so Pim Fortuyn was still running for office, posthumously.)

Immigration is clearly a hot topic. We see how controversial it is here, and it was certainly true in The Netherlands, a much smaller country. I remember talking to a guy in Ireland during the Celtic Tiger boom, and he was saying that for the first time in Irish history, people were moving THERE to pursue opportunities. For the first time in Irish history, they had to deal with people of other cultures coming to their nation. It was not an easy transition. There was racism, resentment. Are immigrants taking our jobs, etc. Most of the Irish people I talked to took a positive view of the new development: it was good for Ireland, it meant Ireland was standing on its own two feet financially (well, THAT was short-lived). “Immigrants bring with them a lot of energy,” one guy I talked to said. “Just like the Irish people brought a lot of energy to America. So I don’t think it’s a bad thing.” Still: these are potentially ugly topics, and xenophobes can hijack the conversation, and it is difficult to talk about things rationally. Pim Fortuyn crossed that boundary, referring to Islam as “backward”. He wanted no part of that backward culture influencing the liberal and open and tolerant country that he loved. He would say, “I’m gay. Only in The Netherlands could a gay man rise as far as I have.”

All of these political issues interested Theo van Gogh, a film and TV director, known for railing against the political correctness that had infiltrated his culture (he was a notorious chain smoker among other things). He wanted to say what could not be said. He saw which way the wind was blowing, in his mind, and he went at it through his art. He was vocal, loud, writing op-ed columns about immigration and Islam and tolerance. He befriended Dutch-Somali politician and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She had a harrowing childhood in Somalia, and her family had fled, living in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Kenya. She sought political asylum in The Netherlands in 1992. She was a feminist and activist, creating women’s organizations, and spoke out against Islam. She made some friends, she made more enemies. Her background was such that she brought the authority of experience with her, including female circumcision. She’s written books (I highly recommend all of them – she’s incredible). Like Pim Fortuyn, she strode right into the center of the immigration debate in The Netherlands. Although she had benefited from the openness of the Netherlands’ asylum policies, her critique was with the immigrants who refused to Westernize and assimilate. She would berate women who wore the veil. She called people stupid. She could be imperious and tyrannical in her attitude: you were either with her, or you were against her. She loved the West, it had saved her. She would say that The Netherlands could not afford to allow in giant numbers of immigrants who benefited from the social services but refused to accept the Western way of life. Hirsi Ali was not just an activist. She ran for office, and was elected a member of the House of Representatives in 2003.


Aayan Hirsi Ali

In 2004, Hirsi Ali teamed up with van Gogh to make Submission, a short film critical of Islam’s treatment of women. She wrote the script. In the film, you see images of beaten women, violence against women, alongside passages from the Qur’an justifying the vicious treatment. In the most controversial image, there is a woman in a see-through burqa and she has Qur’an passages written on her visible skin. The film provoked outrage (as it clearly was meant to do).

Van Gogh was murdered after Submission was shown on television, and Hirsi Ali received death threats (although for her that was probably nothing new). The murderer had left a note on Van Gogh’s body which basically said, “Aayan Hirsi Ali, you’re next.” Hirsi Ali went into hiding.

Ian Baruma wrote a book about the murder of Theo van Gogh, which I highly recommend: Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance.

These events have changed The Netherlands forever. It has opened up a conversation (at the very least) about who they are, what they want to be, and what they don’t want to be. But it’s a wound, a national wound. They are now a country where such horrible events have occurred. Ian Baruma’s book is really about the struggle for the soul of The Netherlands. Whether or not you agree with Pim Fortuyn’s views, it is certainly not “cool” that a man could be killed for his views. And the brazen murder of Theo Van Gogh was, in many ways, worse. Politicians expect a certain level of danger. Artists should be protected. This would be like someone stabbing Aaron Sorkin on a Soho street at 10 in the morning because they didn’t like the message of a West Wing episode. It was horrifying, on a national and spiritual level. Even if you were more “liberal” than Van Gogh, even if you disagreed with his views, it was absolutely outrageous that he would be murdered for them. Again, the refrain: This is not who we are. No. This is not who we are.

Ironically, the murder of Theo van Gogh in many ways ignited the opposition against immigration (primarily against North African immigrants – anyone else was welcome to come). “If this is how you people behave in our civilized country, get the hell out.” It’s ugly. It remains unresolved, something to be fought out in the courts. Those horrible years, however, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, is a wound, a break with the past, an abyss. Once you cross that line, things can never be the same again.

Van Gogh’s film 06/05 is a political thriller (with a kick-ass opening), and a fictionalized account of the assassination of Pim Fortuyn. In Van Gogh’s version, shady CIA guys with New York accents meet with members of the Dutch intelligence agencies, discussing who should follow in the wake of Fortuyn. The main issue is the development of the JSF (Joint Strike Fighter). The United States (in 06/05) is looking to build the plane, and have reached out to The Netherlands to be their main contractor. This has caused a lot of controversy with the people of The Netherlands: nobody wants to be in bed with the Americans, and nobody wants to participate in the military-industrial complex. It would tarnish the soul of the nation, etc. Pim Fortuyn, in Van Gogh’s version, was AGAINST the JSF deal, and it is suggested in the film that that was why he had been assassinated. Successors were chosen by a joint-committee made of CIA Americans and their Dutch counterparts, based only on whether or not the candidate could be made to go along with the already-developing very lucrative JSF deal.

This is the background. These scenes are filmed in a breathlessly hothouse conspiratorial manner. At one point, after the Dutch guys basically say to the CIA guys, “This is all about money for us. We want that JSF contract”, one of the CIA guys says to his colleague, “I thought we were supposed to be the bad guys.” The script leaves something to be desired.

06/05 is a personal story as well. There is a photographer, Jim, (played by Thijs Römer, who is wonderful) who happens to be taking photos of a TV actress outside the radio station on the morning Pim Fortuyn is assassinated. His photos of the TV actress contain all this evidence, of cars, and shady individuals strolling by in the background. (Isn’t that convenient!) He is a paparazzi photographer, looking for a break into the news. He starts to feel that something fishy was going on there that morning. Why was the SWAT team right there, the second after the shooting? Doesn’t this mean that somehow, someone high up was in on it? Jim has a complicated love life, with ex-girlfriends and an ex-wife, and a teenage daughter who lives with him on his houseboat on occasion. He’s a bit of a loser, but something about this Pim Fortuyn thing doesn’t seem right to him. He stares at the photos of the TV actress, zooming in on license plates and faces in the background, trying to put it together.

He is the lone wolf investigator, and in this 06/05 is reminiscent of the great paranoid thrillers of the 1970s, with one man of integrity up against a corrupt conspiratorial world.

His photographs lead him to Ayse Him, a Turkish-Dutch woman, who has a shady background. She works for the Green Organization (implicated in Fortuyn’s death), and it turns out she flew to Istanbul on the morning of Fortuyn’s death. What could that mean? Ayse, played by Tara Elders, a beautiful and natural actress, is the other lead of the film. Her boyfriend is a fellow Turk, Erdogan Demir (played by Cahit Ölmez), and the two have a shared culture, but also a shared disdain for the people of the Netherlands. They are sweet and polite to the nosy Dutch next-door neighbor, but behind closed doors they speak dismissively of the people in the country: “They are believers with no God. They are the worst,” says Erdogan. The suspicion goes both ways. The next-door neighbor is sweet and smiling on the surface, but the second Ayse and Erdogan walk out of earshot, she refers to them both as “the Turks” to her husband, in a tone that leaves no doubt as to her feelings.

Jim’s investigation is dangerous and brings him all kinds of trouble. He is followed. His teenage daughter is attacked. His boat is ransacked. He gets threatening phone calls. All of this spurs him on.

Theo van Gogh uses actual news footage throughout. The screen is crowded with voices, the chattering classes on every television, agonizing over these events. People huddle in bars watching the televisions, tears streaming down their faces (or, conversely, laughing uproariously). We see Pim Fortuyn’s press conferences, and television interviews. We see him hit with a custard pie. We hear his comments. He is allowed to speak for himself. There isn’t much talk on the ground-level, with Jim or Ayse or anyone else, about what Pim Fortuyn meant. We see the tortured news casts following his death, with anchors and op-ed people struggling to make sense of what has happened. It’s a collage. Theo van Gogh worked with collage a lot, in his other work. As a photographer and film-maker, clearly the IMAGE of things was interesting to him. How do we put the images together? There are many shots of Jim just staring at his computer screen, sucking on a lollipop, squinting closer, zooming in, pondering, contemplating, trying to understand. A collage is not meant to be literal.

Part of the problem of 06/05 is that it is not meant to be literal, and yet it is filmed in a very literal way. It’s gripping, and there are some terrific sequences (the opening is one of them, with Jim photographing the young TV actress, as giant events conspire around him), but this is not really about the murder of Pim Fortuyn, although it is purported to be such. I suppose you could say that it is similar to Oliver Stone’s JFK (a movie I admire, although I do not take it as truth). It comes from the mind of a conspiracy-theory nut, who senses vast political movements in shady dark rooms, moving people around like chess pieces based on whether or not they are useful. It is an attractive attitude, it somehow lessens one’s agency in events: “Look, you can’t fight such corruption. They’re bigger than us!!” But Pim Fortuyn’s assassination is fascinating, in and of itself. It would have been interesting to see Theo van Gogh stick to the events as they occurred. There are times when 06/05 plays like an episode of Criminal Minds. At the very last second, numerous times, someone shows up to divert (or create) disaster, through an almost-psychic putting together of the clues. There were a couple of times when I rolled my eyes. Of course the daughter leaves a message on her father’s voice mail saying her boyfriend made a CD-Rom copy of the incriminating images at the very moment that the bad guys happen to be at Jim’s house, ransacking his life, and searching his computer for the images in question. And of course the daughter gives her boyfriend’s address in her voice mail message, so that the Bad Guys can immediately go to that address. There’s a lot of that in the film. It detracts from its power.

Because it is powerful.

It’s worth it to see the opening, filmed in a quick-cut fashion, with Gabriel Rios’ “Broad Daylight” playing over it. Jim and his TV actress have a sexually bantering photography shoot, but we see a man in a red cap walking with purpose down a sidewalk, we see an intense man waiting in a nearby car, we see cars pull up all around, there are two men standing randomly on a sidewalk chatting, but it seems that they are waiting for something. This sequence goes on for some time, and it has a lot of energy and tension. The editing is an important part of its success, the juxtaposition of images, the putting-together of separate characters, similar to the collage-effect of the Pim Fortuyn footage throughout the rest of the film. Once we get down to business, after the opening, and we have to listen to Ayse and Erdogan talk, or we have to watch Jim deal with his teenage daughter, the film deflates a little bit. The secret meetings of the CIA ops and the Dutch intelligence ops come from the mind of a breathlessly paranoid man, and they don’t work. They scream, “LOOK AT THESE VILLAINS.”

There is still a film to be made about the assassination of Pim Fortuyn. 06/05 remains interesting because it was the final film in Theo van Gogh’s career, but its problems detract from the message. Van Gogh was reckless in many ways, but, similar to the immigrants who used the openness of the society in order to pursue their own goals, Theo van Gogh pushed the boundaries of what his country would tolerate, because he believed in freedom of expression. He would not be bullied, persecuted, or silenced. Of course, he was silenced, by the gun of Mohammed Bouyeri. I suppose his murder proved the point he had been trying to make.

It is a terrible situation. 06/05 is not a perfect film, by any means, but it is certainly worth seeing (as is the rest of Theo van Gogh’s work). This was an artist, killed, as Gabriel Rios sings over the opening sequence of van Gogh’s final film, in “broad daylight”. Outrageous.

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Imagining Elvis: From Lester Bangs to Quentin Tarantino to Scott Walker

Posted on January 29, 2013 by sheila

When Lester Bangs died, he left behind many writing fragments, including long lists of book ideas. One of the ideas was a book about people’s fantasies about Elvis. He wanted to talk to writers, musicians, regular people, and ask them what their Elvis fantasies were, no matter how outrageous. (After all, Bangs wrote a 10-page phantasmagorical dream-nightmare about exhuming Elvis’ body, eating the decaying medication left in Elvis’ stomach, so that he could then BE Elvis and see what it felt like to walk around as that guy for a day.) Bangs understood that Elvis Presley lived in our imaginations, more than anywhere else. I am sorrowful that this book never came to be.

Unlike any other star I can think of, except for Marilyn Monroe and, perhaps, James Dean, Elvis does not exist on a real plane in our culture. There are other stars who cast long shadows once they pass from the earth, but very few enter into the realm Elvis inhabits. Elvis’ realm seems to be relegated mostly to dead kings, prophets, pharaohs, and strange holy men like Rasputin. They live on as spectres on some other plane in the collective consciousness, they act as projector screens for hopes or disappointments or anger. In the most extreme cases, their impact is divorced from meaning. The very fact someone fantasizes something about Elvis (whatever it might be) has a lot to do with what he meant, either artistically, sexually, spiritually. Posthumous Marilyn Monroe has a different issue. Her beauty and sexuality and sheer power of image is so recognizable that the Image has won the war. She IS the image. This is why I encourage people who are not familiar with, you know, her acting, to take a look at it again. Watch Clash By Night, Don’t Bother to Knock, Bus Stop. So many people in Hollywood are gorgeous. It can’t be just that with her. Monroe is significant to people, and the vast social/ideological gap between some of her defenders (Norman Mailer and Gloria Steinem – really?) speaks to the meteor-like impact she had on the culture. Her death magnified the impact.

Elvis is in a similar position, although something more mystical is going on with him. People still believe he is alive, for example. People flock to his home on his death-day and light candles and moan and walk around in circles. This does not happen on Marilyn Monroe’s death-day, although it is commemorated by film fans who loved her. Elvis helped create the current-day culture, but he also transcended it. He is Everyman. Being Everyman is close to being No Man. He is all things to all people – positive and negative – you can project anything you want onto him – which can be dismaying if you want to talk about him and his work in a serious way. His sexpot-rebel image (and his almost otherworldly beauty) detracted from the seriousness of what he was doing (and this detraction was part of his slam-dunk success and domination as a performer). Teenage girls understood him better than male music critics a decade later. Elvis’ attitude towards his work and career mirrors the attitude of the old-school movie stars, Bogart, Cooper, Wayne: they could not have been more serious about what they were doing, but they never wanted to be caught taking themselves seriously.

The “cult” surrounding Elvis erected itself immediately following his death. It was as though people suddenly understood the irreplaceable nature of his gift. There will always be a sense of loss surrounding him, in the way there is around River Phoenix, Kurt Cobain, Billie Holiday, a host of others. They seem to grow in their absence.

Nobody has grown in absence like Elvis. It is why I avoided trying to write about him for so long. The ground is too well-trod for anyone to say anything new. (I no longer believe that. Important to note: I do not write about Elvis from a place of nostalgia. I don’t have nostalgia for him. I didn’t experience his career in real time. I’m interested in him purely from the present moment.) As the years pass, the Elvis Cult has taken up much of the oxygen in the How We Talk About Elvis conversation. The post-Elvis-death phenomenon is unique, and if you want to find comparisons you must go, as I said, to politics and dead kings or assassinated leaders, whose “legacy lives on” in statues, names carved into buildings, hieroglyphics, and Image standing in for Meaning.

Fantasies about Elvis are an important part of understanding him. This was true from the start. People were too freaked out by the screaming moaning teenage girls to ask, “Hmmm, maybe we shouldn’t mock these girls as freaks? Maybe they’re onto something?” Those who love him, who wish he lived longer, have stories they still wish to hear, they have a desire to insert Elvis into their own narratives.

Rachel Weisz said that when she was lonely as a little girl, she would sometimes talk to Elvis. Quentin Tarantino wrote an entire script where the main character is haunted by Elvis, and this ghostly Elvis gives inspirational speeches, telling him how awesome he is. There are comic books where Elvis is imagined as a superhero. There are libraries of Elvis erotica. Elvis alternate history stories. I myself wrote an Elvis alt-history for Annie West’s book What If? : A retired journalist from Dublin sent me a wonderful piece of fiction he wrote, imagining Elvis went on leave in Dublin, Ireland, and played an impromptu show at the Royal Theatre under the pseudonym Seamus Murphy. Wonderful. Elvis can take a lot. It’s flexible. You need a strong backup to protect you? That’s Elvis. You need a shoulder to cry on? There he is. You need a new Cadillac? Elvis will provide. You need a sexy guy to encourage you to let your Freak Flag fly? There’s Elvis.

His death left a gap. The gap is filled with fantasies.

When Elvis died, one of his producers said, “It’s like someone just came up and told me there aren’t going to be any more cheeseburgers in the world.”

This is an extraordinary statement and remember, this was from someone who knew him.

This is the “sui generis” distinction that I keep mentioning. There are many people who are talented and greatly missed. But the Elvis-tier people seem inevitable, they fill a void just by showing up (Keith Richards said, on hearing “Heartbreak Hotel” for the first time as a teenager: “I’d never heard of Elvis before. It was almost as if I’d been waiting for it to happen.”) Even if you want to tear these figures down, you still have to admit that the fact you want to tear them down, means their pedestal is stable. James Joyce had that effect on literature, Irish and otherwise.

Elvis’ “sex thing” was undeniable, but it – as a phenomenon – was not taken seriously (then or now). Or, to put it another way, it was taken very seriously but merely as something to dismiss, make fun of, judge, shut DOWN. Because when girls decide to like something on their own, the male-driven establishment usually does not like it. But nobody at the time made the connection between the girls screaming and writhing and rioting and, oh, the conformity and sexism of their time, the expectations of domesticity put on girls from birth. Perhaps Elvis came along and blew back the doors, blew off the walls and roof, showing the girls they could maybe want a little bit more, be more, express more, at LEAST until they retreated behind the picket fence. Ever think of that? Ever think that maybe Elvis’ overall message of “Isn’t it fun to jump around, isn’t sex fun and nothing to be ashamed of?” resonated on such a deep level with these girls because they were trapped in Home Ec. classes and expected to want very little from life outside a husband/babies/refrigerator? Nobody made the connection at the time. Of course the “establishment” was shocked, horrified, and, more than anything, NERVOUS that women decided they “wanted” this grease-monkey from Memphis. If girls were just allowed to choose what they wanted, then what did this mean for the rest of us?? Back when Elvis first exploded, it was seen as a menace to society. We take this for granted: his records were smashed by outraged DJs and pastors, restaurant owners were by racist town leaders to ban Elvis from jukeboes, Elvis was denounced from pulpits and op-ed pages, and then finally he was “tamed” by the Army, and assimilated into the giant mainstream of not only his own generation, but the one that came before, and the one that came after.

Unfortunately, because women’s fantasies are either exploited or made fun of, the sexual aspect of Elvis’ appeal has never been adequately discussed, or even given credence. (I am talking mainly about the accepted critical narrative, in terms of Elvis. The fans always got it, male and female, and Elvis’ colleagues, in music and movies, always got it too.) Other musicians at the time had no problem naming the sexually appealing aspect of Elvis’ career (“He is the best-looking man I have ever seen,” Carl Perkins reportedly said to Scotty Moore after he first met Elvis), but the critics had a harder time (and, to some degree, still do). Most music critics were male. The sexual mania unleashed by Elvis seemed alien and off-putting (if they were straight, that is. John Waters said he first knew he was gay, as a little boy, when he saw Elvis gyrate on the Ed Sullivan Show), and they unwittingly (and, in some cases, consciously) participated in the shaming-of and dismissal-of the women reduced to puddles. The response of these women was somehow not serious to pontificating male critics. “Yes, yes, women would run at him throwing bras at him, and demolish his cars with lipstick phone numbers … yes. But that’s not really a serious response to the Man and his Music, so we accept it occurred, but we are not really CURIOUS about this element of his success. Because, let’s face it, as men it’s a little embarrassing to see women carry on this way.” I am putting words in people’s mouths, and I try not to do that normally, but in this case, the ABSENCE of serious discussion about women’s fantasies about Elvis is quite striking, especially considering the size of his following. Again, I have to give Lester Bangs credit. He was a straight male. He had no compunction, in his obituary for Elvis, saying:

He was the only male performer I have ever seen to whom I responded sexually; it wasn’t real arousal, rather an erection of the heart, when I looked at him I went mad with desire and envy and worship and self-projection.

Women, so instrumental in making Elvis famous in the first place, get their due in Bangs’ piece:

That night in Detroit, a night I will never forget, he had but to ever so slightly move one shoulder muscle, not even a shrug, and the girls in the gallery hit by its ray screamed, fainted, howled in heat. Literally, every time this man moved any part of his body the slightest centimeter, tens or tens of thousands of people went berserk. Not Sinatra, not Jagger, not the Beatles, nobody you can come up with ever elicited such hysteria among so many.

I hear no scorn or contempt there. I hear humor (and God help us if we don’t have senses of humor about our fantasies and the fantasies of others), but not contempt.

All of this is to reiterate my original point: Elvis (in life, and more so in death) occupies a unique place in the realm of dreams and fantasies. There is music to listen to, movies to watch, work to be discussed. All of this could keep us occupied for decades. But keening through and above the more prosaic discussions is the knowledge that Elvis – no last name necessary – has transcended The Real. This occurred during his lifetime, because of the scope of his fame, and how blocked-off he was by the publicity machinery (no interviews, no talk shows, nothing EVER for free). Elvis was one of the most accessible and vulnerable of performers, and yet one of the most withheld and secretive figures. People knew where he lived. They knew the address. They could swing by and get glimpses of him riding horses behind the Graceland gates, or diving into his own pool. But what did people know about him? Not much. Colonel Parker’s decision to limit Presley’s exposure was a gamble and it paid off twenty-fold (although the damage to Presley’s psyche was enormous). Colonel Parker was not a romantic, and he didn’t really care for Elvis’ music all that much. But he watched girls tear apart a theatre in Florida to get to Elvis and he knew he wanted “in” on that runaway train.

In a way, Colonel Parker, in all his grotesque huckster “charm”, understood that Fantasy was the most important part of Elvis’ persona and career: if he could somehow keep the audience’s Fantasies about Elvis alive (by limiting exposure, by never giving the audience enough of Elvis), then Elvis could have a long and lucrative career. Now. Elvis died at 42. Of course, it would be great if he were still with us, but that’s not what happened. However. Very few people remain “at the top” for as long as Elvis did. There are those who scorn the movie years, and I think I’ve made it clear what I think about them. But the money talks. Those movies were successful. Those movies were hits. Elvis was the top-paid box office star for the majority of the 60s, in a decade of the biggest downturn in audience numbers in Hollywood history. Colonel Parker got him good deals, true, but still: a good deal cannot make audiences flock to movies like Harum Scarum (as they did, in droves). A good deal cannot make something like Viva Las Vegas or Blue Hawaii the hits they were. Colonel Parker, an unsentimental con man, was also a Huckster of Dreams. He was P.T. Barnum for the post-WWWII set. He recognized that women tearing apart a theatre bathroom with their bare hands to get to Elvis were representative of a giant shift in American youth culture. He may not have understood it or approved of it, but he knew it would make millions of dollars, as it did. Hard to believe, but many people at the time could not see what was coming. They thought the explosion of rock and roll was a fad. They thought it would go away. They hoped it would.

People often wonder: “Why Elvis??” There were so many other good performers around him at the same time, coming out of Memphis and other areas of the South. Many of them had excellent runs, and many of them became enormous stars in their own right (Johnny Cash). Elvis, with his exotic beauty, his sexuality, his voice and performer’s instinct, was the perfect repository for the yearning dreams of a particular demographic (said demographic just happened to be unprecedentedly enormous in the post-WWII boom). The fact that Elvis was a good Christian boy, a Mama’s boy, a Southern gentlemen with impeccable manners, was part of the Fantasy. He was dangerous onstage, polite off. He embodied sexual freedom, and yet he treated women nice. He was “safe”. This is what the male critics sometimes miss, because they are not all that interested in the meaning of/purpose of Female Fantasy. Elvis’ fan base was enormous, crossing every line there is. But it was when so-called “good girls” from middle-class families started sneaking out of the house in droves to go see him that the newspapers took notice. (Eminem: “Hip hop was never a problem in Harlem / only in Boston / after it bothered the fathers of daughters starting to blossom”) As long as Southern white trash boys stayed in honky-tonks, nobody cared what they did. Love him or hate him, Elvis brought the honky-tonk to the mainstream. And his offstage persona was safe enough that “good girls” could pour themselves into Elvis Fantasy-Land without any fear. It was the combo: he was sexy and sexual AND polite and sweet, this was the revolution, the paradigm shift. You could be both. He insisted what he was doing was not vulgar. Okay, Elvis, whatever you say. BUT: I think he was speaking the Truth there, and it was a de-stabilizing truth: what he was doing onstage was sexual, but sexuality was not vulgar. Can you feel old thoughts and forms cracking apart? Ironically, Elvis was not a big women’s libber. But you don’t have to be a progressive Democrat to understand sex is fun and natural, enjoying it is nothing to be ashamed of.

It is worth it to quote Lester Bangs again:

Elvis Presley was the man who brought overt blatant vulgar sexual frenzy to the popular arts in America (and thereby to the nation itself, since putting “popular arts” and “America” in the same sentence seems almost redundant). It has been said that he was the first white to sing like a black person, which is untrue in terms of hard facts but totally true in terms of cultural impact. But what’s more crucial is that when Elvis started wiggling his hips and Ed Sullivan refused to show it, the entire country went into a paroxysm of sexual frustration leading to abiding discontent which culminated in the explosion of psychedelic-militant folklore which was the sixties.

I mean, don’t tell me about Lenny Bruce, man – Lenny Bruce said dirty words in public and obtained a kind of consensual martyrdom. Plus which Lenny Bruce was hip, too goddam hip if you ask me, which was his undoing, whereas Elvis was not hip at all, Elvis was a goddam truck driver who worshipped his mother and would never say shit or fuck around her, and Elvis alerted America to the fact that it had a groin with imperatives that had been stifled. Lenny Bruce demonstrated how far you could push a society as repressed as ours and how much you could get away with, but Elvis kicked “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window” out the window and replaced it with “Let’s fuck.” The rest of us are still reeling from the impact. Sexual chaos reigns currently, but out of chaos may flow true understanding and harmony, and either way Elvis almost singlehandedly opened the floodgates.

Elvis was public about how he didn’t drink or smoke. He was deferential towards people in authority, older people, and women. This deferential attitude was part of his upbringing, something Northeast critics could not get a handle on. His image was so rebellious, but Elvis’ rebellion did not have to do with tearing down establishment symbols, it had to do with personal freedom, doing what you want to do, expressing what was in your heart (and groin). He wasn’t Jack Kerouac. He wasn’t Marlon Brando in The Wild One. He didn’t propose some social ideological program. It was all much simpler, and therefore more universal.

When he was drafted, he went without one public word of complaint. Uncle Sam was bigger than Elvis. Uncle Sam had been good to Elvis, it was only right Elvis should give back. To put humble good-boy sweetness alongside burlesque gyrating pelvis is still powerful enough to generate comment today. It’s assumed one side must be a lie or an act. Both sides were true. Nothing was an act.

The thing about Fantasy is no one can tell you yours is wrong. Who would say to Rachel Weisz, “No, you shouldn’t have imaginary conversations with Elvis. You should be having imaginary conversations with Galileo. Much better.”

Fantasy also has to do with sex, obviously. Granted, it’s difficult to talk seriously about sex, and, in general, I prefer my sex talk with humor mixed in. Sex is human and normal. Let’s all calm down. But sex fantasies are important when seen in a cultural context certainly, but also on a personal level. They can heal, reveal, provide catharsis, make lonely people feel not so alone. Quentin Tarantino, as a sexually inexperienced nerdy young guy obsessed with comic books, kung fu, and grindhouse movies, imagined (in True Romance) a ghostly Elvis following the main character around, saying, “Clarence, you’re all right.” Clarence doesn’t want to fuck a man, but if he had to fuck a man, he’d fuck Elvis. I mean, this is a joke, of course, and not a really funny one, but it’s getting to the root of what goes on with fantasy.

I have been thinking a lot about imagining Elvis, mainly because my trip to Memphis was so filled with solitude, silence, letting my thoughts off leash Memphis was grey, cold, eccentric, and steeped in history. It is a place of ghosts and memory.

I mourn Lester Bangs’ thwarted book about Elvis Fantasies, because I find how people think and fantasize fascinating and revealing. Healing, as well. Whatever we fantasize, we connect on the level that is above The Real.

My brother recently alerted me to a terrifying song written by Scott Walker called “Jesse”. Jesse, is, of course, the name of Elvis’ stillborn twin, a missing brother who haunted Elvis all of his days. What if he had had a brother? What would have changed? Were they identical? How wild would that be: to have one of the most sui generis performers of the 20th century have an identical twin walking around out there? Elvis having a sense of Destiny, of being Chosen, picked out, makes perfect sense.

In “Jesse”, September 11, 2001 is taking place in Elvis’ head, it is a nightmare he is having. In Scott Walker’s fantasy, the fantasy of Elvis merges with the “story” of September 11. Elvis sees the planes coming, sees the devastation, and sits and talks with Jesse about it. Elvis crawls on his hands and knees. He is the last man left on earth. He has survived. Words do not do the experience of the song justice. Halfway through listening I yearned to escape the song itself.

The lyrics:

Nose holes caked in black cocaine
Pow! Pow!
No one holds a match to your skin
No dupe
No chiming
A way off miles off
No needle through a glove
Famine is a tall tower
A building left in the night
Jesse are you listening?
It casts its ruins in shadows
Under Memphis moonlight
Jesse are you listening?
Six feet of foetus
Flung at sparrows in the sky
Put yourself in my shoes
A kiss, wet, muzzle
A clouded eye
No stars to flush it out
Famine is a tall tower
A building left in the night
Jesse are you listening?
It casts its ruins in shadows
Under Memphis moonlight
Jesse are you listening?
Pow! Pow!
In the dream
I am crawling around in my hands and knees
Smoothing out the prairie
All the dents and the gouges
And the winds dying down
I lower my head
Press my ear to the prairie
Alive, I’m the only one
Left alive
I’m the only one
Left alive
I’m the only one
Left alive
Alive
I’m the only one
Left alive
I’m the only one
Left alive
I’m the only one
Left alive

The New York Magazine review of Scott Walker’s album on which this song appears says:

On The Rising, Bruce Springsteen wrote about 9/11 from the point of view of firefighters and horrified bystanders. Toby Keith (“Courtesy of the Red, White, & Blue [The Angry American]”), Neil Young (“Let’s Roll”), and the Wu-Tang Clan (“Rules”) gave us the outraged, ass-kicking-patriot perspective. The Beastie Boys (“An Open Letter to NYC”) rallied to celebrate New York. Scott Walker writes about 9/11 as a nightmare Elvis Presley is having.

On “Jesse,” the third track on Walker’s new album, The Drift, Elvis is sitting on the Memphis prairie in the moonlight, talking aloud to his stillborn twin brother, Jesse—as he would often do “in times of loneliness and despair,” according to Walker’s sleeve notes. Elvis is dreaming about the planes smashing into the Towers.

It starts with an ominous drone. A bass guitar throbs darkly (which, says Walker, represents the planes approaching). Then Walker slowly, deliberately whispers, “Pow, pow” (which, he says, represents the planes hitting the Towers). A disembodied guitar riff from “Jailhouse Rock” floats menacingly. Drums never arrive. At last, Walker floats into the song with his deep, rich baritone: “Nose holes caked in black cocaine . . . ”

(“Pow!”)

(“Pow!”)

After six more minutes, and images of Elvis crawling around on his hands and knees, “smoothing out the prairie / All the dents and the gouges,” the music dies, and he’s left wailing: “Alive / I’m the only one / Left alive / I’m the only one / Left alive.”

It is devastating. And, against the odds, convincing: By the end of “Jesse,” Walker has somehow fused his unlikely subjects. You imagine the Towers as a stillborn twin: the ultimate phantom limb, an ever-present void in the skyline, an ache that never goes away.

How we imagine Elvis, as I said, says more about who WE are than who Elvis was. Elvis Presley was just a man, a human being who lived on this earth, who was talented and ambitious, as well as genetically blessed with beauty, and who seemed to behave as though he knew he had no time to waste while here on this planet. We can talk about why that was, and what it was in Elvis that gave him such unshakable confidence in himself partnered with a sense of urgency.

But sometimes hearing how people Imagine Elvis reveals far more about who he actually was, and who he continues to be.

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