A Coffee in Berlin, a German film, directed by Jan Ole Gerster (his first feature) swept many of the major awards at the 2013 German Film Awards. I am not sure what kind of release it will be getting in the US. Probably pretty limited. But God, I loved it. It’s funny in a way that hits that sweet spot for me. I guffawed throughout. Uproarious, but in a subtle very strange way.
If you can, seek it out.
I was waiting for this, and here it is. My good pal Odie Henderson, and fellow Rogerebert.com contributor, who helped moderate the QA with Spike Lee at Ebertfest following the screening of Do the Right Thing (in which, of course, Ruby Dee appeared) has written a gorgeous and detailed tribute to Ruby Dee. The last paragraph made me cry.
Pioneering actress and civil rights activist Ruby Dee has passed away at the age of 91. The New York Daily News has a comprehensive obituary detailing the sheer scope of this woman’s life, she who was working almost right up to the end. Decorated, celebrated, hard-working, with some unforgettable performances, Ruby Dee was one of those courageous dogged women who carved out an incredible career for herself at a time when the roles for black women were few and far between. She and Ossie Davis, who passed away in 2005, were married for 57 years: they worked together, acted together, protested together, and made a memorable and beloved team.
Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee
She starred with Sidney Poitier in A Raisin in the Sun, in the original Broadway production (a groundbreaking moment in terms of the portrayal of African-Americans appearing on the main stage of Broadway, written by not only an African-American, but a woman), as well as the 1961 film. And anyone of my generation remembers her in the monster phenomenon that was Roots. Of course she (and her husband) were also unforgettable in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (Mother Sister!) and Jungle Fever.
Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis in “Do the Right Thing.”
She was finally nominated for an Oscar for her role in 2007’s American Gangster.
Ruby Dee at Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington, August 28, 1963.
Just 4 days ago, Audra McDonald won her astonishing 6th Tony Award, making her the most decorated actress in the history of the awards. She won for her portrayal of Billie Holiday in Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill. McDonald closed her emotional speech with these powerful words of acknowledgement: “I am standing on Lena Horne’s shoulders. I am standing on Maya Angelou’s shoulders. I am standing on Diahann Caroll and Ruby Dee.”
I hope Ruby Dee heard those words.
Rest in peace.
On the essays shelf:
Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens
How do you “explain” Rebecca West? Especially to those who haven’t heard of her? Never mind the fact that it’s so strange and wrong that her name doesn’t resonate at the same frequency as, say, George Orwell. Her work is equally as important as his (and he was a great admirer of her). Her most famous book is, of course, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
There were many bright minds who focused on getting rights for women, and the vote, and equal pay, and birth control, and etc. We’re talking 1910, 1911, etc. West’s name would already be in the history books for her involvement in that struggle. But it was her gigantic book on Yugoslavia (over 1000 pages long) that made her name. How many people have read it though? The length alone! She knew herself that nobody would read it (nobody meaning “almost nobody”). Of course people DID read it, and it’s considered a classic, but still, it’s one of those books that many people are aware of but have not taken the time to read. Speaking as an enormous Rebecca West fan, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon deserves its reputation, is well worth the time it takes to get through it (it took me 5 months), and is a towering staggering achievement, and any other cliche you want to pull out. You can’t even believe the book exists. One woman wrote this?
Not only does it predict much of what went down in the Second World War, but it also predicts 1989, for God’s sake, the crackup of the Soviet Union, and the immediate craziness that started up in that area once the Russians were out of the picture. Not too many people were predicting a Milosevic in 1936. But she did. Granted, she was blatantly pro-Serb. She hoped for a leader to rise that would “save” these poor people, but she couldn’t have imagined he would be a monster as big as the monsters she already despised. You can’t win ’em all.
Still, the prescience of the book borders on the downright spooky.
She didn’t get everything right. She would never have predicted how much Communism would “take” in the area, post-WWII. It was a peasant land, deeply religious, illiterate in the main. Not fertile ground for the intellectualized theory that came out of a pampered bourgeois. But it did take. There would be a Tito. The book is valuable for its Cassandra-like properties as well as her potent and insightful way of putting into words her love for the place (she writes as though it is an ongoing love affair). I’ve written a lot about Rebecca West over the years, and have been itching to pick up Black Lamb and Grey Falcon again, especially after re-reading the following essay which was Christopher Hitchens’ introduction to a new release of the book. It’s a doozy.
There should be no surprise that Hitchens would be not only a fan of West, but a scholar of her work as well. West is not just a cool clear-eyed journalist (although she CAN be – read the section on the assassination of Franz Ferdinand: it is not only grippingly told, but exquisitely researched): she writes her impressions, of landscapes, people, smells, sights … at the same time that she is diagnosing societal “problems” (weak word) with a scalpel. It is not just HOW she writes that is compelling. It is the AMOUNT she is able to see. Hitchens himself strived to reach the ability that West had. He admits it openly. Anyone who emulates her work feels almost despair about it … could I ever be that good? Robert Kaplan has based his entire career (well, that’s an exaggeration – but at least he started out that way) on trying to follow in her footsteps, his first “hit” being Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History
She was a fascinating and complex individual, with a pretty wrenching personal life, a long and mostly sexless marriage (albeit content, in a way, after the mindfuck of a relationship she had with H.G. Wells), and a hellatious and litigious and terrible relationship with her son (whom she had, out of wedlock, with Wells). Her son sounds (sorry) like a wretched individual. West was completely harassed by him in the final years of her life, and spoke about it openly in an interview she gave to the Paris Review. She was also, famously, one of the “witnesses” in Warren Beatty’s Reds.
There’s a new biography out of West. I have read mixed things about it. She’s one of those people who doesn’t fit into a nice little box. Current feminists may have a hard time with her because she was so swept away by various abusive relationships with men (H.G. Wells being the main one who comes off like a sociopath seen through her eyes). Well, whatever, she’s not the first or the last strong dame to pick the wrong guy. She also thought that focusing primarily on domestic hearth issues (i.e.: division of housework, baby-making, child-rearing, relationship/sex) was one of the ways women kept themselves out of the public arena. She called such women “idiots” (in a famous passage in Black Lamb). (West’s brutality towards women is nothing compared to her feelings about men, however, especially when she turns her cold eye onto men in power.) So, you know, nobody gets off scot-free. And then lefties feel uneasy about her, because she attacks their sacred cows, so effectively that she leaves them absolutely no defenses. And then righties have a hard time because she was a Socialist and, oh no, a feminist too. These are all the reasons I love her. Her champions come from both sides of the political fence – a fact it is important to keep in mind. That was the deal with Orwell, too. Nothing like a Socialist to give the most blistering critique possible of what Socilaism became under Stalin. Orwell was MIGHTY in this regard, like Arthur Koestler was, and so is Rebecca West.
West writes about so-called “male” topics, politics and war, but she doesn’t try to hide the fact that she is writing from a female perspective. It’s bold. I admire her so much.
The other thing about West is that growing up as she did, surrounded by Socialists and pacifists, she started to get the feeling, during the 1930s, that everybody was barking up the wrong tree. As Germany began to swell into something monstrous again, she began to examine the sick-ness and corruption at the heart of the various governments trying to look the other way and placate, appease. She came to understand that there were precious “things worth fighting for.” That pacifists were cowards. There are so many quotes from her books that cut like a knife through the prevarications of more cautious “intellectual” individuals.
She did not go to Yugoslavia repeatedly to criticize. She fell in love with it (with the Serbs, in particular). She fell in love with the clash of civilizations there, the proud-ness of the peoples, and the sense that this was a great crossroads of humanity. What happened here? What WILL happen here? She could not get the place out of her mind. The book is an exhaustive research project (the mind boggles – and she also wrote it/published it within a couple of years of her first trip. Looking at the length of the book you might think she had been working on it for her whole life.) West’s prose pulsates with passion and sexuality, her appreciation of the male form, the strapping peasants in their colorful outfits and boots. It is one of her distinctive qualities as a writer. Just prior to her first trip to Yugoslavia, she had a hysterectomy, at age 42. Her sexual life had been chaotic and, in many ways, painful. Her relationship with her husband was peaceful and supportive, but a bit boring too. (The relationship lasted.) She was in a pretty wild state, emotionally, as she embarked on her journey, grieving the hysterectomy and what it represented, grieving a lot, grieving for Europe, which appeared to be marching towards war. All of that is IN her writing, one of the reasons the book still feels so damn alive.
She went to Yugoslavia, accompanied by her husband, and they had a guide, a Jewish Serb named “Constantine”, who was a real guy named Stanislas. Stanislas attempted to rape Rebecca West during their travels a couple of times, events she recounts in absolutely horrific detail in one of her letters home. She spent almost the entire trip avoiding being alone with him, and then literally getting into wrestling matches with him. None of that is in the book, of course. She needed Constantine. He had “access”. He spoke all the languages. Christopher Hitchens is very interesting on Constantine/Stanislas. He is a huge “character” in the book, as is his terrible racist German wife. In the wife you can see the rise of Nazism and German ambition and German love of purity. She’s a nightmare. Hitchens’ piece (which is 40+ pages long) is fascinating, both as a work of literary analysis as well as political analysis. He also, flat out, loves Rebecca West. One of my favorite observations from him is after he describes a quick character sketch from West in Black Lamb. Hitchens says:
“Against this latter woman West deploys a rhetorical skill that is perhaps too little associated with feminism: the ability to detect a pure bitch at twenty paces.”
Ha.
And if you haven’t read West’s book, all I can really say is: I know it’s long. I know. But just pick it up and start it.
Here is an excerpt from Hitchens, where he discusses the various ways the “lambs” and “falcons” of the title enter West’s text.
Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens
About halfway through the narrative she is in Belgrade, and finding, as many lovers do, that her new inamorata is beginning to remind her just a little too much of her previous ones. The men in the hotel bar, and the hotel itself, are making Yugoslavia’s capital into an emulation of some imagined bourgeois ideal, replete with modern architecture and up-to-date ideas of businesslike cleverness. Soon, she begins to feel, the food will become indistinguishable as well. The hotel will “repudiate its good fat risottos, its stews will be guiltless of the spreading red oil of paprika …. I felt a sudden abatement of my infatuation with Yugoslavia …. I had perhaps come a long way to see a sunset which was fading under my eyes before a night of dirty weather.” Disillusionment and banality menace her on every hand, and the false jollity at the bar is mounting to a crescendo, when
the hotel doors [swung] open to admit, unhurried and at ease, a peasant holding a black lamb in his arms …. He was a well-built young man with straight fair hair, high cheekbones, and a look of clear sight. His suit was in the Western fashion, but he wore also a sheepskin jacket, a round black cap, and leather sandals with upturned toes, and to his ready-made shirt his mother had added some embroidery.
It is as if an Englishman, raised on the romance of the Western and pining in a phony tourist saloon in Wyoming, were to see the saloon doors swing open and hear the jingle of true cowboy spurs …
He stood still as a Byzantine king in a fresco, while the black lamb twisted and writhed in the firm cradle of his arms, its eyes sometimes catching the light as it turned and shining like small luminous plates.
So there is still hope that traditional, genuine, rural society continues to pulse away, under the gaudy patina of commerce and affectation. However, the next time we encounter a black lamb we are in Macedonia almost four hundred pages further on, and this time West is not at all so sure that she likes what she sees. The Muslim peasants are converging on a large rock in an open field, and the rock is coated with coagulating blood and littered with animal body parts:
I noticed that the man who had been settling the child on the rug was now walking round the rock with a black lamb struggling in his arms. He was a young gypsy, of the kind called Gunpowder gypsies, because they used to collect saltpeter for the Turkish army, who are famous for their beauty, their cleanliness, their fine clothes. This young man had the features and bearing of an Indian prince, and a dark golden skin which was dull as if it had been powdered yet exhaled a soft light. His fine linen shirt was snow-white under his close-fitting jacket, his elegant breeches ended in soft leather boots, high to the knee, and he wore a round cap of fine fur.
Again, one notices West’s keen eye for the finely featured man and for his apparel. But this time, the ambience strikes her as brutish and disgusting – even alarming.
Now the man who was holding the lamb took it to the edge of the rock and drew a knife across its throat. A jet of blood spurted out and fell red and shining on the browner blood that had been shed before. The gypsy had caught some on his fingers, and with this he made a circle on the child’s forehead …. “He is doing this,” a bearded Muslim standing by explained, “because his wife got this child by coming here and giving a lamb, and all children that are got from the rock must be brought back and marked with the sign of the rock.” … Under the opening glory of the morning the stench from the rock mounted more strongly and became sickening.
Sunset in Belgrade … sunrise in Macedonia – and suddenly the evidence of “authenticity” seems to contradict itself. This is a difficulty that recurs to West throughout her explorations.
The gray falcon comes to her on another field of sacrifice: this time the plain of Kosovo on which Prince Lazar of Serbia saw his forces divided by betrayal and slaughtered by the Turks. An antique Serbian folk song, translated on the spot by Constantine, begins the story thus:
There flies a grey bird, a falcon,
From Jerusalem the holy,
And in his beak he bears a swallow.That is no falcon, no grey bird,
But it is the Saint Elijah…
This sky-borne messenger brings to Prince Lazar (or “Tsar Lazar,” as the poem has him) a choice between an earthly kingdom and a heavenly one: a choice that he decides in a way that West comes to find contemptible. Her two chosen images, therefore, are neither symmetrical nor antagonistic but, rather, contain their own contradictions. It is important to know at the start what she registers throughout and at the conclusion: that feeling that some English people have always had for a patriotism other than their own. Byron in Greece had a comparable experience, of simultaneous exaltation and disillusionment, and even as West was making her way through the Balkans, English volunteers in Spain were uttering slogans about Madrid and Barcelona that they would have felt embarrassed to hear themselves echo for London or Manchester. Many of them were to return disappointed, too.
“The enormous condescension of posterity” was the magnificent phrase employed by E.P. Thompson to remind us that we must never belittle the past popular struggles and victories (as well as defeats) that we are inclined to take for granted. Two things are invariably present in Rebecca West’s mind and, thanks to the lapse of time, not always available to our own. The first of these is the realization that an incident in Sarajevo in June 1914 had irrevocably splintered the comfortable and civilized English world of which she had a real memory. When she says “The Great War,” she means the war of 1914-1918 because, though she can see a second war coming, there has as yet been no naming of the “First” World War. The next is her constant awareness that men decide and that women then live, or die, with the consequences of that decision making. The first assault on the Yugoslav idea had been made by the hairless demagogic Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio – the man who borrowed the phrase “the year of living dangerously” from Nietzsche, though West did not know this – and who had led the wresting of Trieste and Fiume from Yugoslav sovereignty in 1920. This piece of theater and bombast was the precursor to Mussolini’s March on Rome, and caused West to reflect:
All this is embittering history for a woman to contemplate. I will believe that the battle of feminism is over, and that the female has reached a position of equality with the male, when I hear that a country has allowed itself to be turned upside-down and led to the brink of war by a totally bald woman writer.
Useless for a male critic to interpose that Joan of Arc apparently had a full of head of hair, or that Dolores Ibarruri (“La Pasionaria”) was even then making strong men shed hot tears for the ideals of Joseph Stalin – or that neither of these ladies was a writer or poet in the accepted sense. One simply sees what she means.
And, very often, one has exactly no choice but to see what she means, and to respect her intuitions as well as her better-reasoned insights.
Directed by Tony Wharmby
Written by Cathryn Humphris & John Shiban
Nietzsche wrote,”When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.” I thought of that while writing the re-cap. “Dead Man’s Blood” is an abyss. The longer I look at it, the more it looks back at me, the deeper it goes. The associations are dizzying. To use another image, it’s a Hall of Mirrors. It works so well because the mirrors are so omnipresent that the endless reflections actually become reality (something that doesn’t happen in more awkward episodes). That dizzying effect could be seen as a metaphor for what it is like to live in the Winchester family. Are you seeing yourself in the reflection? Or are you seeing someone else’s version of you? Are you you? Or are you just an extension of your dad, your brother? The abyss quality of “Dead Man’s Blood” is reflected in the look of the episode which is often so dark you literally cannot see what is happening. It’s darker than the pilot. Vampires are nocturnal. So are the Winchesters. The Winchesters may not be the “Undead” but they squint in the sunlight too.
The Winchesters fight all kinds of beings but when they fight vampires, things get twisty psychologically. You can isolate all of the vampire episodes and see that, down to the disturbing one in Season 9 (one of the sickest SPN episodes ever). Vampires are symbolic, in ways that other monsters are not. There are a couple of reasons why that might be, but I prefer to let it just swim around un-named in the abyss. Because I am still seeing things and finding things in the vampire episodes. They are still revealing themselves to me. I think one of the things that happens is that vampires were once human beings, so it’s not as easy to label them as “Other,” because they look and talk like us. Also they operate as families. They run in a pack. They have fierce loyalty and even love for one another. “Dead Man’s Blood” sets that up right away. Every time there has been a confrontation with a vampire on this show, it is impossible to ignore the fact that what we are seeing in the vampire world is just a dark mirror of what is going on in the human world. And Sam and Dean, alternately, get caught up in that Hall of Mirrors too. Repeatedly. Vamps reflecting your own past, your own pain. The concept of “watching” is used a lot in “Dead Man’s Blood.” “You like to watch, don’t you? Me too,” says a vampire to his victim. Looking on as violence occurs, looking on as sexual assault occurs, what it means to watch, what it means to be the watcher, especially when what you are watching is happening to a family member … it shows up repeatedly and disturbingly in “Dead Man’s Blood.”
I’m not a huge vampire person, although I’ve read Dracula, of course, and recently had a lot of fun reading The Historian (I love that the scared mom in “The Kids are All Right” falls asleep on the couch reading that book). I’ve read the Twilight books. I’ve read Anne Rice. And there are almost too many vampire films to count. F.W. Murnau’s 1922 film Nosferatu is still terrifying today.
You know Serge Ladouceur has seen Nosferatu. I mean, that’s a “shadow”, isn’t it. That’s the Shtriga, too.
Vampires tap into a deep pool of desire and repulsion. They are scary, but not like werewolves or vengeful spirits are scary. Vampires bring with them sex, and submission, as well as the possibility of eternal life. Over the years, vampires have changed and morphed, as stories do, to fit the times. They became associated with Satanic forces (hence the idea that you could repel them by holding up a cross). But vampires are a reflection of the needs/fears/desires of people at any given time. You know us by our vampire lore, basically. So in Twilight, they become a glamorous symbol of self-sacrifice and the difficulties of chastity (I mean, it sounds ridiculous, and it is, but there you have it). As Dean observes in “Twihard,” vampires like that are a little bit “rapey”. Vampires have always been a little bit rapey. They take down their victims by biting the neck, an erotic image, something that Twilight dwells on explicitly. Eric Kripke et al. were conscious of the over-saturation of vampires in today’s culture but knew they wanted to include them in the series. So the challenge was how to make them “theirs,” to distinguish them from Twilight, obviously, but also from other references. So how do they do that? Bluntly, with John informing his sons, “Most vampire lore is crap.”
The structure of the episode is full of mystery. It withholds information from us, from scene to scene to scene. Sometimes we go 4 or 5 scenes where questions are posed and NOT answered. Like the Colt, for example. The Colt hovers over the action from the teaser, and we have zero idea why, and the episode is patient enough to make us sweat it out. The characters, at all points, know more than we do. They also keep secrets from one another. But the overall effect, of information withheld, is disorienting. You want to know what John’s plan is. You want to know what he’s thinking. And, of course, isn’t that just how Sam and Dean feel? There’s a lot here about information itself: who has it, who controls it, who is in charge of it. This leads below to one of my “digressions” about cults and how they operate, an enduring interest of mine.
Gena Rowlands’ introduction speech to Angelina Jolie’s receiving of the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the 2013 Governors Awards. Jolie was one of three recipients, and unfortunately, they separated out these awards from the actual Oscar ceremony, a mistake, I think. But let’s not focus on that. Gena Rowlands is my favorite actress. I am so happy that Criterion asked me to write something about her for their upcoming release of Love Streams. I had no idea that she and Jolie were friends, and when this clip surfaced, I watched it avidly like some sort of forensic psychologist. Gena has that effect on me. How perfect that they are friends. It makes no sense, it makes perfect sense. Gena Rowlands’ speech is old school, with the glass of wine on the podium. Her glamorous hair and nails, her glasses, her lipstick. She always looks fabulous. And I love that she always, always, no matter the occasion, has her own sense of timing. She speaks with her own rhythm, always.
And I think my favorite line in her speech is:
“And she has to keep that smile on Brad’s face …”
Old-fashioned. And true. I love the delighted laughs from Pitt and Jolie at the comment.
And just in case you didn’t see Jolie’s speech, it’s a doozy.
In regards to Maleficent:
[SPOILERS TO FOLLOW]
Early in the film, Maleficent is betrayed by her childhood friend and first love. In order to become King, he knows that Maleficent must die. So one night, when they’re sitting by the stream, peaceful and happy, he feeds her poison that knocks her out. While she is asleep, he cuts her beautiful huge wings off, and brings them back as a trophy to show he has done the deed. Later, much later, she awakes. She is not sure what happened. She doesn’t know she has been drugged. But slowly, with dawning horror, she realizes/senses that something is different. As she sits up, she feels the lack, the absence. She crooks her head over her shoulder to glance at her back, and we see the stumps jutting out of her back where her wings used to be. What then happens is a cry of pain and anguish so piercing, and so real and agonized, that I recoiled from it, almost physically. She screamed out her loss, and her terror, and the moment went on … and on … and it was, frankly, unbearable. I never recovered. That wound haunted the rest of the film. There is all kinds of resonance there, all kinds of associations, with the casual brutalization of women’s bodies, and her cry of pain echoes all of that. I don’t believe in assigning biographical meaning to fictional roles: it is a huge pet peeve of mine in much writing about actors. “He was abandoned by his mother – therefore all of his roles explore that.” Please. Acting is make-believe. Much of it comes from the imagination. Learn a little bit about the craft of acting before you spout off. However, it is certainly true that we, in the audience, bring knowledge to the theatre – that’s part of how we respond to stars (sometimes it works in the actor’s favor – other times, like with people wrapped up in tabloid nonsense, it is a detriment – we can’t dissociate ourselves from the tabloid stories.) But Jolie screaming and crying, in a manner so real it’s almost amazing that the moment made it into the movie, it’s that upsetting, made me think of her double mastectomy. I mean, it’s impossible to not think of it. I didn’t think of her real-life surgery DURING the moment, because what was going on with her onscreen was far too all-encompassing for me to think much of anything. But afterwards, when I couldn’t get the moment out of my mind, I thought about it. I want to be clear that I am not assuming she “drew on” that experience in creating the role, or any such malarkey. I have no idea. She’s an actress. She uses her imagination and her empathy and Stanislavski’s “magic if”, whatever you want to call it, to do what she has to do in any given part. But it was a powerful moment on multiple shifting levels, and it is something she obviously would be at least aware of.
Fairy tales are specific and yet universal. And Jolie’s moment there was both specific and universal. It was specifically itself (Maleficent wailing out the loss of her wings, as well as the betrayal of someone she trusted), and it was also operating on that universal plain (This is what happens. This is what we fear. This is what is out there.) Very few actors today can maneuver fearlessly and easily on that plain of both specificity and universality. Back in the day, the Golden Age day, actors were more comfortable in that realm, at least the great ones were. Stories were written tailored to their respective personae. The John Waynes and Katharine Hepburns and Jimmy Cagneys and Barbara Stanwycks. It’s the ability to be both totally alive in the moment and also totally aware of the archetypes/icons/images you are bringing to each role, and how your persona fits into that. It is a consciousness of who you are, and that is just not the style of acting anymore. The style of acting today, the work that gets most congratulated, has to do with transformation and being different from role to role. Jolie is not about that. And she’s smart to resist the trend.
Angelina Jolie has always reminded me a little bit of Joan Crawford in that respect, and that is a total compliment.
Like Crawford, she manages her career and her image like a pro. Like Crawford, she understands her persona to such an intimate degree that her choice of roles has rarely been “off”. There are a couple of misses, but in general, Jolie is on top of her own material. She doesn’t work a lot. So many of these young actresses today work too damn much. I get the anxiety of why they do that, and I understand the impulse, and, granted, very few of them have the weirdo wattage that Jolie does. Jolie is very careful about what she appears in, just like Crawford was (in her heyday, that is), and also understands who she is. I’m not talking about her personal life. I don’t care about that stuff, and it’s part of her genius that I don’t care. All I care about is the work. Who are you as an actress? How do you work? How do you use your work to express yourself?
Maleficent is not a perfect film, and I didn’t like what they did to the actual story of Maleficent (meaning, how they wrapped it up). But the middle section of the film, after that horrifying moment of awakening without wings, when she descends into bitterness, rage, and then comes to understand and embrace her own evil, is fascinating. Entertaining. Every move, every gesture, every flicker of the eye, is both planned and organic. (Not to be tried by amateurs.) It is a highly choreographed performance and yet feels completely conscious and alive. She has this way of making little sniffing sounds of disdain or a little “hm” to herself when she sees something interesting, or annoying, or a situation that she could manipulate. She slits her translucent bright green eyes, assesses it all, and murmurs to herself, “Hm,” none of her features moving. This is extremely intricate work. This is an actress in TOTAL control of the effects she wants, and yet the performance still is not mannered, artificial. How do you be in control without seeming like you are in control? Again, amateurs shouldn’t even attempt it.
To quote Sean Connery on playing James Bond, “It is a role for a professional.”
Indeed. She kills it.
Obvious Child, a first feature, lives up to the buzz it generated at Sundance. It’s really good. It’s my kind of movie. It’s all about behavior. There’s a plot here, for sure. But the thrill is how much space it leaves for its characters. Highly recommended. New Yorkers, it’s playing at the Anjelica.
On the essays shelf:
Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens
In a June, 2007 piece in The Guardian, Christopher Hitchens reviewed Dispatches for the New York Tribune: Selected Journalism of Karl Marx
He sent begging letters to Charles Dana, asking for a salary raise. He couldn’t afford to buy newspapers at the rate they were paying him. But the Tribune turned him down. Without that outlet, Marx began to turn to his other interests, the result of which took monstrous form in the 20th century, but which certainly came out of a clear-eyed understanding that something STINKS in the way it is set up, with the little guy being purposefully squeezed out of his piece of the pie. And not just pie, for God’s sake. Food. Water. Shelter.
One of the things that is almost completely forgotten about Karl Marx (especially by those who hate Socialism in their 21st century “understanding” of it that they are blinded to or flat out unaware of the nuances of its founders’ downright humanist views) is how pro-America he was, at a time when almost nobody shared that view. America held up the torch for liberty, freedom, possibility to Marx, and he paid very close attention to what was going on there. He had never been to America. But he looked on from London at the War Between the States, and wrote a series of pieces that still resonate today with the prescience of a guy who had no “dog” in that fight but could see clearly what was RIGHT. He was an activist as well, not just a writer. He was one of the few people writing at that time who championed Lincoln, especially among the chattering classes in Britain who were afraid of what would happen if the cotton trade dried up, which, of course, was connected to the slave trade, which everyone had an interest in. Marx’s pieces on the Civil War stand alone, in their moral and ethical clarity. He was a lone voice. He was right about so much. He was pro-Lincoln, pro-Union, and pro-get-rid-of-the-bullshit-Southern-economy. Fascinating, especially when you consider that on the other side of the coin was the industrialist North.
Hitchens gives other examples of Marx’s prescience, especially when regards to Britain’s policy in India. Many of the things Marx worried about eventually came to pass 100 years later, almost exactly as he said they would. So, you know: boy was no slacker.
Here’s an excerpt from the section having to do with Karl Marx’s writing on the Civil War.
Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens
If you are looking for an irony of history, you will find it not in the fact that Marx was underpaid by an American newspaper, but in the fact that he and Engels considered Russia the great bastion of reaction and America the great potential nurse of liberty and equality. This is not the sort of thing they teach you in school (in either country). I beseeched Wheen to make more of it in his biography, and his failure to heed my sapient advice is the sole reproach to his otherwise superb book. Now James Ledbetter, himself a radical American scribbler, has somewhat redressed the balance by reprinting some of Marx’s most lucid and mordant essays on the great crisis that preoccupied Greeley and Dana: the confrontation over slavery and secession that came near to destroying the United States.
In considering this huge and multi-faceted question, Marx faced two kinds of antagonist. The first was composed of that English faction, grouped around the cotton interest and the Times newspaper, which hoped for the defeat of Abraham Lincoln and the wreckage of the American experiment. The second was made up of those Pharisees who denied that the Union, and its leader Lincoln, were “really” fighting a war for the abolition of slavery. Utterly impatient with casuistry, and as always convinced that people’s subjective account of their own interests was often misleading, Marx denounced both tendencies. Henry Adams, the direct descendant of two presidents and at that time a witness of his father’s embattled ambassadorship to London, wrote in his celebrated memoirs that Marx was almost the only friend that Lincoln had, against the cynical Tories and the hypocritical English Gladstonian liberals. Surveying the grim landscape of the English industrial revolution, he wrote, in The Education of Henry Adams, that it “made a boy uncomfortable, though he had no idea that Karl Marx was standing there waiting for him, and that sooner or later the process of education would have to deal with Karl Marx much more than with Professor Bowen of Harvard College or his Satanic free-trade majesty John Stuart Mill.”
Marx himself, in reviewing a letter of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s to Lord Shaftesbury (and how splendid to have the author of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon seconding the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin), ridiculed the smarmy arguments of papers such as the Economist, which had written that “the assumption that the quarrel between the North and South is a quarrel between Negro Freedom on the one side and Negro Slavery on the other, is as impudent as it is untrue.” The Lincolnians, it was generally asserted, were fighting only for the preservation of the Union, not for the high-sounding cause of emancipation. Not so, said the great dialectician. The Confederacy had opened hostilities on the avowed basis of upholding slavery, which meant in turn that the Union would be forced to tackle emancipation, whether its leadership wanted to or not. See how he makes the point in so few sentences, and shows that it is the apparently hard-headed and realistic who are in practice the deluded ones: “The question of the principle of the American Civil War is answered by the battle slogan with which the South broke the peace. Stephens, the Vice-President of the Southern Confederacy, declared in the Secession Congress that what essentially distinguished the Constitution hatched at Montgomery from the Constitution of the Washingtons and Jeffersons was that now for the first time slavery was recognized as an institutional good in itself, and as the foundation of the whole state edifice, whereas the revolutionary fathers, men steeped in the prejudices of the eighteenth century, had treated slavery as an evil imported from England and to be eliminated in the course of time. Another matador of the South, Mr. Spratt, cried out: ‘For us, it is a question of founding a great slave republic.’ If, therefore, it was indeed only in defense of the Union that the North drew the Sword, had not the South already declared that the continuance of slavery was no longer compatible with the continuance of the Union?”
Written in 1861, this cut like a razor through the can’t of the pseudo-realists, while not omitting a good passing slap at the luckless Mr. Spratt (remember that Marx was teaching himself English as he went along). As war progressed, Marx and Engels were to predict correctly that the North would be able to exert industrial power as against Dixie feudalism, that iron-clad ships would play an important role, that the temporizing Union generals such as George McClellan would be fired by an impatient Lincoln, and that an emancipation proclamation would be required as a war-winning measure. For good measure, Marx helped organize a boycott of southern slave-picked cotton among British workers, and wrote and signed a letter from the International Workingmen’s Association in 1864, congratulating Lincoln on his re-election and his defeat of the anti-war Democrats. No other figure of the time even approached his combination of acuity and principle on this historic point, which may contain a clue as to why the American Revolution has outlasted the more ostensibly “Marxist” ones.
Nothing like New York when a storm approaches. Yesterday the air was muggy and thick. I walked uptown to the screening room, and started feeling whooshes of cold air careening in from the west. Storm a-coming. The light was ominous and glamorous (see above). I missed the rainfall, being in the screening room (perfect timing), and my walk back home to the bus was cool and beautiful. And I saw a gigantic rainbow over all of Manhattan on my bus ride home.
Jessa Crispin, aka Book Slut, has been writing a lot about the term “spinster” lately, and her posts have been fascinating. I saw Maleficent the other day (more to come), and I’ve been thinking a lot about it, in conjunction with Crispin’s writings on spinsters. Her posts have been a perfect supplementary text to the movie and Angelina Jolie’s performance.
In today’s post over on Book Slut, Crispin calls for a “spinster library,” books/movies that celebrate or at the very least portray the potential power of the unmarried woman. Even in something ultimately tragic like The Heiress (based on Henry James’ Washington Square) what we see is that her “spinsterhood” is actually better than the alternative she was offered, if you think about it. She is now free. It is a terrible freedom, yes, but at least she now lives in truth, at least now she can see clearly, she is free from the societal ties that bind. She had been under-estimated her whole life. She had internalized that under-estimation. But not by the end, oh boy. She finally realizes her own power. She uses it. She is free. Go read Crispin’s words, she said it better than I could.
Crispin is working on a new book and she quotes an excerpt from it, which made me think of Maleficent, again:
In Celtic fairy tales, there are two roles for women: the bride, and the hag. The bride, she is so very beautiful that men give her what she needs. She moves directly from the protection of the father to the protection of the husband. She wants not. But god, is she boring.
The hag is the rejected, ugly creature. The woman who has to make herself wise, or just passively die on the side of the road waiting for someone to offer aid. She works for what she acquires, she seeks and finds wisdom through struggle. And she may know all of the secrets and understand everything that goes on around her, including the movement of the heavens and the language of the fish in the river and which god you need to talk to for which problem, she will always be physically repulsive.
No wonder the hag is forever trying to mess with the bride. No wonder she says, “Fuck you little girl, here have a poisoned apple.” To just have the world on offer, rather than fighting and kicking and biting for it. And then to take it for granted, to just sit there waiting for it to come to you, for disrespecting it in that way, fuck that girl. Poison her, put her in a tower, pull her beautiful hair.
