Trump Emulates Goldfinger

Since I hardly read any fiction now but have still been watching films, I decided to write about films today. When I was growing up, I regularly watched films and often walked to the RKO or Loew's theaters in nearby New Rochelle on Saturdays to see them. Since I haven't been able to find new ones that I like, I am continuing to watch old ones. When Dr. No was released in 1962, I went with my family to the Pelham Picture House to see it. I liked it at the time and still liked it when I watched it recently. I particularly like Sean Connery as James Bond compared to the others who have played that part. Ian Fleming was not a great writer, but he had an upper-class English background, and Bond, as played by Connery, is one of the classiest people I've ever seen in a film. In that film, Ursula Andress isn't bad either as Honey Rider. I also rewatched Goldfinger, which was released in 1964. I didn't enjoy that as much but still thought it was good. I realized that Donald Trump must also have seen that film, and I just read that it made an immense impression on him. Auric Goldfinger in the film is a fat, Germanic millionaire with Nazi connections who loves gold and being wealthy. He also likes to play golf and cheats in order to win. And he places little value on human lives. Sound familiar?

I know that this isn't a favorite topic of my readers, but I have to say that, based on my readings, human behavior is generally quite predictable over a lifetime once you understand a person's childhood and upbringing. As I wrote earlier, many people my age or older are climate change deniers. That even includes otherwise intelligent people like Freeman Dyson. Since I have been forced to pay attention to Trump for ten years now, and also grew up in the New York City area, it is very easy for me to see where most of Trump's ideas came from. Because of his narcissism, he has always wanted to be a public celebrity. The underlying problem is that he has no real talent in anything. He would have loved to hang out with Rat Pack members like Frank Sinatra, but Sinatra hated him. Over time, he could only attract B-Team people like Kid Rock and Hulk Hogan. Many people, such as Jeffrey Epstein, and current members of his cabinet, such as Steve Witkoff, are primarily second-tier financial opportunists. I don't think that he could be close to the tech bros, and they are mainly interested in manipulating him for their personal benefit. But Trump's worldview is obsolete across the board. Because he has little knowledge of world history or science, he can't grasp that the 1960's are over: there will never be a resurgence in the oil industry, manufacturing jobs in the U.S. are ancient history, and corruption and stupidity lead to unstable world economies. I suspect that his "grand strategy" may have been to steal oil from Venezuela in order to create a new supply so that he could bomb Iran. That's how stupid he is. My favorite scene in Goldfinger occurs near the end when, as Bond and Goldfinger scuffle over a gun while being flown in a jet piloted by Pussy Galore, a window is shot out and Goldfinger is sucked out by the pressure drop.  

Another thing I've noticed from watching old films is how certain aspects of sexuality were altered because of the status quo. Apparently Ian Fleming's Pussy Galore character in Goldfinger was a lesbian. Fleming thought that lesbianism was the result childhood experiences and could be "cured." So, in the novel, Bond "cures" her with his manliness. In the film, Bond does succeed, as always, but the lesbianism is ignored. This cleaning up of scripts was even more conspicuous in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) if you compare it to the stage version (1955). From watching only the film, you would think that it was mainly about family succession, with Big Daddy approaching death, and Brick's depression about the death of his friend, Skipper. It helps to know that Tennessee Williams was gay, and that the main undercurrent was the sexuality of the men. Apparently Brick and Skipper had a sexual relationship and were either gay or bisexual. There are also suggestions that Big Daddy had been bisexual earlier in his life. Homosexuality was so suppressed when I was growing up that I rarely ever heard about it. A better understanding of Tennessee Williams is now making me think that some of my high school friends may have been gay or bisexual (I'm not).

Éric Rohmer: A Biography V

I did finish the book, though it does not quite live up to my biographical ideals. There is a great deal of information provided about Rohmer, but nearly all of it is in the strict context of filmography. He made a large number of films, and I've only seen a fraction of them. Toward the end of his life he worked on The Lady and the Duke, a historical drama set during the French Revolution. Unlike most of his films, it had a significant budget and a large crew, and, while it received positive reviews, it seems forgotten today. Of the films that I've seen recently, I'll just mention my favorites. I'd say that A Summer's Tale is my favorite, because it draws excellent performances from the actors, and the subject matter is one that Rohmer obsessed over for his entire career: the relationship between the sexes (before LGTBQ came along). For me, Rohmer is one of the few filmmakers who portrays women whom I find interesting. This is displayed in their perceptiveness and complexity, and is something that you don't generally see in films, particularly in American films: for that matter, those characteristics often seems nonexistent in American women. My second favorite is probably Claire's Knee, which, besides the beautiful scenery, includes interesting young and older women and good dialogue. The Jerome character and Claire's boyfriend, Gilles, seem self-centered to me, as do many of Rohmer's male characters. I guess My Night at Maud's is my third favorite. It suffers from being in black-and-white, and I don't really identify with the male protagonist, Jean-Louis, who is a devout Catholic. Maud is really the only interesting character, though she doesn't get much screen time. Jean-Louis ends up marrying Françoise, a Catholic who had been having an affair with a married man. There is an interesting twist at the end if you watch carefully. Five years later, Jean-Louis and Françoise go to the beach with their young son and run into Maud. Apparently Françoise and Maud know each other and are not on particularly good terms. After briefly talking to Maud and Françoise separately, Jean-Louis realizes that Françoise had been having an affair with Maud's husband just before she met him. Another film that I like, perhaps not as much, is A Tale of Autumn. This features Béatrice Romand and Marie Rivière, two solid Rohmer long-timers. It is a little unnerving because the subject is middle-aged dating, an unsettling subject for me, but it has a happy ending. It also features a new young actress, Alexia Portal, who is rather strong-willed and brushes off her philosophy professor, who is pursuing her. In the other Rohmer films that I've seen, there were things that I disliked that were not offset by other features. In many of his films, Rohmer recorded the background sounds himself, and there are often very loud roosters in the morning. There can also be very loud insects on summer days.

The major deficiency of this book is that Rohmer's private life is practically invisible. You don't really find out about how well he got along with his wife and children or whether he maintained a good rapport with his brother. In a practical sense, he seems to have been a workaholic who spent very little time at home. This may simply be a manifestation of Rohmer's personality, but it could also be an intentional effort by Rohmer to prevent his family from knowing about his work life. Over the years, he became extremely close to Marie Rivière and Françoise Etchegaray, and Françoise never met his family until 2009, when he had a stroke. While Rohmer may not have been involved in any extramarital affairs, I think that the absence of information about his family life disqualifies the book from being categorized as a biography. It might also have been interesting to know more about his brother, René Schérer, who wrote about Charles Fourier, the utopian theorist who had been popular with George Ripley, Ralph Waldo Emerson's transcendentalist friend.  

Éric Rohmer: A Biography IV

Rohmer's filmmaking career was extremely long, with his first major film releasing in 1967 and his last in 2007. It is confusing to follow his development, but, to some extent, he followed a pattern in which his early theme in the late 1960's was relationships between men and women, his middle theme in the late 1970's was more complex dramas set in Napoleonic and medieval times, and in the 1980's he returned to his 1960's themes. Part of the confusion has to do with the fact that none of his films were made in an industrial environment like Hollywood, and Rohmer's development as a filmmaker at his own pace reflects a transition from amateurism to professionalism without much external assistance. During most of his career, his films were made under extremely spartan conditions that would not be tolerated by most actors or cinematographers. He did all of the writing and casting himself and was generally incapable of raising the funds necessary for larger productions. I think that this was largely related to his introverted personality and penny-pinching habits. He seemed to prefer to do everything on a modest scale. Toward the end of his career, he had name recognition and a large assortment of supporters who had worked with him over the years, and, to some extent, his late films may be construed as better-made representations of his earlier films, though, because he was much older then, there are more middle-aged characters.

Far into the book, the authors are beginning to make more interesting comments about Rohmer. In the making of The Green Ray (1986), Rohmer hired Françoise Etchegaray as a supervisor. Under a tenuous agreement, his frugal tendencies precipitated a reaction:

These temporary conditions did not fail to create certain tensions. Especially when Rohmer, at the end of a lunch with volunteers playing secondary roles, quibbled about paying for their meals and ended up leaving the restaurant after furiously throwing the bill on the table. The next day, Françoise threatened to abandon everything if he persisted in acting like an ill-tempered miser.

She was the first to dare stand up to him, and that did not necessarily displease him. She was the first, especially since Barbet Schroeder with a willingness more complete than Marie Bouteloup's, to go to great lengths to realize the great Rohmerian dream: working from day to day, with the means at hand, without worrying about the constraints of traditional production (assistant, scriptwriter, work schedule) and freely adapting to circumstances.

There is also discussion as to whether Rohmer was politically incorrect. On the surface, he appears to have been: minorities are not featured in his films, women may seem to behave subserviently, and all of the characters belong to the bourgeoisie. The only thing that he seemed to have going for him was an interest in environmentalism. From my perspective, he had a right to explore in his films life as it was while he was growing up. As someone who grew up far from Paris and was born in 1920, I think that he is allowed to have some 19th century characteristics. For the most part he was apolitical, and his brother, René, described him as "a ferociously independent anarchist." To this I would add that, although some of the men in his films might be described as male chauvinist pigs, the women stand up to them quite well. Rohmer's women are often more thoughtful, observant and articulate than the men, who sometimes seem a little out of touch with reality, especially in his early films. I particularly like A Summer's Tale (1996) in which three young women and one young man have encounters in which they are all on equal footing. If you watch many Rohmer films, it becomes obvious that he absolutely adored women, and they are the centerpieces of his films. He is never attempting to transform them into dutiful housewives.

I am nearing the end of the book and will make one more post.

Éric Rohmer: A Biography III

I am finding that, although the French New Wave was a movement, it was not coherent compared to, say, Impressionism. The Impressionists exhibited together during the Belle Époque, and their paintings are now exhibited in museums all over the world, whereas the French New Wave occurred briefly during a less-affluent period. It was built from an existing medium and merely added slightly different styles, whereas Impressionism represented a permanent replacement of formalism in painting and a transition to modernism. Moreover, film is a more transient form of art than painting and doesn't lend itself to exhibitions in museums or purchases by art aficionados. Since the early 20th century, film has been an industry, and "art films" such as those made by Éric Rohmer constitute only a tiny segment.

As I read, I am slowly forming a more complete picture of Rohmer. In 1974 he said in an interview:

I have in reality three activities: (1) the cinema; (2) teaching cinema, which is a kind of theoretical reflection; (3) a more open pedagogy, teaching through cinema. I did that for educational television, and now I am doing it on the service of research. I am very happy with this triple vocation, because I don't want to confine myself in a personal universe that is pure fiction. I seek to retain, in every possible way, contact with the world.

This doesn't explain his choices of subject matter, which I think can be understood with a look at the available biographical information. There is evidence that he would have preferred a university position and felt that, to some extent, he was a failure for not obtaining one. That is what his mother would have preferred, and he let her believe that he was still a schoolteacher right up to her death in 1970. He also gave his sons no encouragement to enter the film industry. On some level, he always seemed to think of it as a disreputable field.  

As the authors of this book suggest, Rohmer's second full-length film (1969), My Night at Maud's, was in fact highly autobiographical. He was a conservative Catholic who wanted a Catholic wife. In the film, this is slightly intellectualized by a discussion between the characters regarding Pascal's Wager, but it is one example of his hidebound religious and social views. In his first full-length film (1967), La Collectionneuse, the protagonist, Adrien, engages in a lot of self-deception regarding the sexually promiscuous Haydée until he finally gives up on her at the end. In his fourth full-length film (1972), Love in the Afternoon, Frédéric avoids pressure to begin an affair with Chloé and decides to remain faithful to his wife. In his third full-length film (1970), Claire's Knee, Jérôme gets to know the young Laura but isn't attracted to her. When he meets Claire, also quite young, he is attracted to her. Since he is about to leave and get married, he elects to sublimate his attraction by focusing only on her knee to resolve the tension. It is probably fair to say that there is a little of Rohmer in each of these four male characters.

As far as Rohmer's film career is concerned, his popularity gradually increased among critics after Claire's Knee and My Night at Maud's. In 1976 he shared the Jury's Special Prize in Cannes for The Marquise of O, awarded by Tennessee Williams, but was not present that day. Taxi Driver won the Palme d'Or. In 1986, he won the Golden Lion in Venice for The Green Ray. Even so, he never had high box office sales by industry standards.

One topic that isn't mentioned at all in this book is Rohmer's influence on Woody Allen. Allen was an early admirer of Rohmer and to some extent copied his style. He liked the emphasis on conversation and the interactions between men and women. However, it isn't necessarily easy to see Rohmerian characters in short, talkative, neurotic Jewish New York men and their Waspy girlfriends. 

I should finish this book within a couple of weeks and will make some additional comments on the Rohmer films that I've seen and what I like and dislike about them.

Éric Rohmer: A Biography II

At the time of his marriage, Rohmer was editor-in-chief of Cahiers du cinéma, one of the leading film magazines in Paris, and this provided most of his income. His own experimentation with filming was done on the side with what became his production company, Les Films du Losange, co-founded with Barbet Schroeder in 1962. His preferred cinematographer became Nestor Almendros. Everything changed in 1963 when, due to financial losses at Cahiers du cinéma he was fired and replaced by Jacques Rivette. He does not seem to have been prepared for that and briefly considered returning to school teaching. However, by then he had two sons, and his wife didn't work, and he preferred to keep the family in Paris. As far as I've read, in November, 1963, he began to make short episodes for educational television. 

If you have been reading this blog much, you may have noticed that I make an effort to keep the dates straight in order to get a good picture of the sequence of events. In some biographies that information may be listed at the end of the book and makes this a little easier. However, when you are looking at a "movement" – particularly in the arts – the sequence of events can be quite murky, and this book does little to remedy that. Rohmer produced short films in 1962 and 1963, but his full-length films didn't begin to release until 1967. In the context of the French New Wave, Louis Malle and Claude Chabrol had released full-length films in 1958, François Truffaut and Alain Resnais in 1959 and Jean-Luc Godard in 1960. So, technically, Rohmer's films fall at the tail end of the French New Wave. He was primarily a journalist during the first few years. This isn't necessarily crucial knowledge, but in order to understand how the aesthetic aspects of a movement evolve, it would be useful to at least have detailed descriptions of the motifs and styles of the directors over time and the extent to which they influenced each other. I am not finding this book very helpful in that respect.

Ironically, I first learned of the importance of dates while studying Impressionism in Paris in 1995. The instructor, Jean Lancri, University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, always stated the birth and death years whenever he mentioned an artist. This may be a little tedious, but it is a good way to avoid mistakes, such as considering people to be contemporaries when that was not possible.

Other than this criticism, the book is quite readable, and I am hoping that greater detail will be provided when I get to Rohmer's major films.

Éric Rohmer: A Biography I

This book, by Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe, is my current reading project. I like most of the Rohmer films that I've seen and wanted to understand him better. What I've found is that all human activities, including the arts, exist in ecosystems. It isn't always easy to recognize this, particularly when you live in a dominant ecosystem whose participants presume that it is the best of its type in the world. When it comes to the arts, Americans tend to think, or are trained to think, that box office sales, value at auction, copies sold, crowd size, number of followers, etc., are indications of success. However, that is just a current sociological phenomenon here and is unlikely to hold up over time. What I find is that various motifs and styles surface and disappear all over the world all of the time, and to understand them properly requires a lot of work. In the arts as in the biological world, the ecosystems are ultimately what determine the success of individuals. Often, when evaluating a work of art, it is best to start with the ecosystem. I think of classical music as an example. First there was Bach in Germany, then a musical cult developed in Vienna and was led successively by Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven. I think that if Vienna hadn't developed as it did as a musical center, you may never have heard of Beethoven. In the case of Éric Rohmer, I find that his particular ecosystem is not entirely familiar to me, as I have not paid much attention to the French New Wave. However, it does appear to be a distinct artistic and cultural movement, and I will attempt to discuss Rohmer in that context.

Éric Rohmer was born Maurice Henri Joseph Schérer in Tulle, in south central France, on March 21, 1920. His grandfather had moved to Tulle from Alsace-Lorraine, where he had worked as a gunsmith, following its annexation by Germany in 1870.  He married a Tulle woman, and they had one son, who was Rohmer's father. His father worked as a notary's clerk, and the family belonged to the middle class and were conservative Catholics. Rohmer had a brother, René, who was two years younger. They were close, and René grew up to be gay. They were both good students and enjoyed the arts. Rohmer had little exposure to film but staged theatrical productions at home while he was growing up. He studied in Paris for entry to the École normale supérieure in Paris and passed the written exam but failed the oral exam in 1939. He tried again in 1940 but failed. At that point he was drafted into the French army for physical work. He was discharged from military duty on January 31, 1941 and wasn't sure what to do next. He eventually decided to move to Paris, where his brother, René, was studying for the École normale supérieure. When the Germans retreated from France in 1944, there were severe reprisals against Nazi collaborators, and this seems to have traumatized Rohmer. Simone de Beauvoir describes this period in The Mandarins. She was twelve years older than Rohmer, but they had similar postwar experiences.

Rohmer never succeeded at gaining entry to the École normale supérieure. Instead, he earned a license-ès-lettres and was only qualified to teach Latin and Greek in a secondary school. René, on the other hand, entered the École normale supérieure at the age of twenty-one, which led to a brilliant career in philosophical research. René entered the same "mandarin" class as Sartre and de Beauvoir, but was not a close friend of them. This all had a psychological effect on Rohmer but didn't damage his relationship with René. However, within the Schérer family, René was considered the brains. In the greater scheme of things, it's probably just as well, because Rohmer's career was more interesting. One of the factors that interfered with his academic success was probably his shyness, because in those days aggressive students like Sartre and de Beauvoir were the model. I'm probably a little prejudiced on this because I've never had any desire to study French philosophy. In any case, René went on to have a successful career, despite once being charged with "inciting minors to debauchery." For that matter, Sartre and de Beauvoir were always a little depraved.

The relevant details in this book are a little slim, but Rohmer did work as a teacher for a few years and had a job near Paris. In the early 1950's, the film craze that led to the French New Wave gained momentum. All of a sudden there were countless film clubs and film journals. Rohmer wrote articles and was exposed to the new directors, such as Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol. I'm not sure exactly why Rohmer chose to use a pseudonym, but it may be that he didn't want to upset his mother, who was extremely conservative and had a low opinion of films. The actual films didn't appear until the late 1950's. Most of them were markedly low-budget. Rohmer seems to have been completely inept when attempting to make his first film, and I enjoyed this anecdote from Claude Chabrol:

Intending to make a film of Les Petites Fille modèles, he thought it would be a good idea to seek his actress in the parc Monceau. Imagine the scene: this tall, skinny, dark-haired silhouette wearing a cape, slithering silently down the garden paths with a package of candy in his hand. When he liked a little girl, he beckoned to her, saying: "Come here, little girl, I'm going to tell you a lovely story." After using this ploy for three or four hours, naturally he got himself arrested by the park guard. In his absolute innocence and entirely cinematic passion, he didn't understand why the cops hauled him off to the police station.

Some of the inspiration for the French New Wave came from Alfred Hitchcock. Rohmer enjoyed It Happened One Night, by Frank Capra. There was also an interest in Paris of American authors such as William Faulkner and John Dos Passos. Rohmer enjoyed the works of Balzac.

Rohmer's shyness may have impeded his romantic life. This was resolved as follows:

One Saturday evening in December 1956, at a dance at École des Mines, this very shy man had the nerve to approach a young brunette who was herself very reserved, and whom he had "spotted" (one might think we are already in My Night at Maud's). In doing so, Rohmer, who had never been very bold with girls, suddenly made good on a wager he had made with his friend Jean Parvulesco: "This evening," he had told him, "I will meet my wife." Her first name was Thérèse. She came from a good family in the north, having been born in Cambrai. She had been carefully brought up, was a practicing Catholic, and was twenty-seven years old. They began seeing each other. On July 13, 1957, Maurice Schérer married Thérèse Barbet at the church in Paramé, near Saint-Malo, where the young woman's family owned a vacation home. Rohmer, established in his profession, married, and aged thirty-seven, looked for an apartment for himself and his wife: his bachelor life was definitely over and he left, after fifteen years of Bohemian renting, his furnished room in the little Hôtel de Lutèce on rue Victor-Cousin.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

I just watched "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" for the first time in many years and thought I'd write about it today. The film seems to be a little different from the novel, perhaps because it may be based on a play that had been based on the novel. This makes the main characters sharply-focused, and the acting and directing skills necessary to make it were a little more demanding than in the case of most films. The popularity of films and plays can be social phenomena in themselves and in some cases bear little relation to the intentions of the author. When I was in college, the Samuel Beckett play, "Waiting for Godot," was wildly popular and had made Beckett famous; reading about it now, it seems that the play became popular primarily because viewers read their own meanings into it, and those meanings were not ones intended by Beckett, who, before that play, had been an obscure Irish writer. When I saw a college production of it, it didn't make much sense to me. A similar phenomenon can occur with films, and I don't think that Ken Kesey, the author of the novel, particularly approved of the film. Popular films and plays can take on a life of their own in relation to the intent of the original author, and, as I've said, I think that the best literary works shouldn't have film versions. However, I think that Kesey was a run-of-the-mill participant in the Beat movement, which, though it played an important role in American arts from the postwar years up until the 1960's, doesn't have much of a discernable legacy in the present. There may still be some surviving elements in jazz, in writers such as László Krasznahorkai, the Hungarian, in Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet, who died in 2021, and perhaps even in the early music of Bob Dylan, but for the most part the Beats are ancient history already.

I think that this film may have an added dimension because, as I wrote earlier, the director was a Czech, Miloš Forman. Jack Nicholson may have been given the part of Randle McMurphy based on his participation in the film "Easy Rider," released in 1969. That film, I think, though a low-budget one, contains anti-establishment elements that could be said to carry over into "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." Forman came from an anti-totalitarian arts environment in the Eastern Bloc, working roughly in the same tradition as Milan Kundera and perhaps some of the early Soviet dissident writers. Being a dissident in Eastern Europe is quite different from being a dissident in the U.S.: Alexei Navalny, an enemy of Vladimir Putin, recently died at the age of forty-seven, whereas Bob Dylan, who once wrote protest songs, is now eighty-three years old and a multimillionaire. 

The story line of this film is fairly simple. McMurphy is a prisoner in Oregon who had been found guilty of having sex with a minor, though he had denied knowing her age. Not liking prison, he was able to get himself transferred to a psychiatric hospital. His ward at the hospital is managed by Nurse Ratched, who has been maintaining an orderly environment with strict rules and a regular medication schedule for patients. The patients have a diverse range of psychiatric symptoms: some have severe symptoms and clearly could not function on their own in society, whereas a majority are relatively normal and are there as a matter of personal choice. Nurse Ratched administers a ludicrous group therapy session in which several of the patients don't have the slightest idea what is going on. McMurphy completely disrupts the environment by developing relationships with some of the patients and encouraging them to be more adventurous. One day, he and a group escape by stealing a bus and then stealing a boat to go fishing in the Pacific Ocean. He also arranges to bring along one of his girlfriends. Later, he sets up a large party after hours, with two of his girlfriends and a lot of booze smuggled in. One of his friends, Billy Bibbit, who has a terrible stutter, ends up sleeping with one of the girlfriends. When Nurse Ratched arrives in the morning, the ward is in shambles, and she finds Billy in bed with the woman. After she threatens to tell Billy's mother, he commits suicide by slitting his throat with a piece of broken glass. McMurphy becomes enraged and attempts to strangle Ratched, but he is pulled off her by the attendants.

In the course of his stay, McMurphy develops a close relationship with Chief, a tall Native American who has been pretending to be mute and deaf. When McMurphy realizes this, they begin to talk in private. He plans to escape with McMurphy at some point. After the strangulation incident, for which Ratched gets a neck brace, McMurphy is taken away. It isn't clear what happened to him until the end. He is returned to the ward at night. When Chief sees that he has been lobotomized, he suffocates him with a pillow and then breaks out by lifting up a large sink and throwing it through a window. In the final scene, he is shown running toward a forest.

Although I suppose that there are several ways that one might interpret this film, I prefer to see it as a critique of how American society employs thought control techniques in order to maintain a docile conformity in American life. While McMurphy does have some antisocial tendencies, in this film he engages his community in a way that they mostly appreciate and from which they benefit. This appeals to me because I have always been annoyed by the mindless conformity within the U.S. I think that this view of the film is supported by the fact that the hospital staff decides that McMurphy has to be permanently disabled by brain surgery when they could simply have returned him to prison. I think that some viewers make out Nurse Ratched to be a heartless villain, whereas I see her as an ordinary American who is just doing what she thinks is her job, which happens to encourage conformity and limited self-expression. If you ever wonder why political developments follow the direction that they do in this country, you can find clues in this film. So, overall, I still think that this to be one of the best American films, which includes the script, the acting and the filming.

Absurdist Social Criticism

After reading a long string of nonfiction books, I usually begin to crave some good fiction, and, as you know, I always have trouble finding it. I thought that I would attempt to explain how I came to develop my particular literary taste, because I don't actually know anyone whose taste is the same as mine. I was extremely late to develop any literary preferences and only began to when I was most of the way through college. I was more affected by film, and the film that had the greatest impact on me was Dr. Strangelove (1964); this was followed by One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975). In the interim, I came across some early Soviet fiction and was impressed by Mikhail Bulgakov in "The Fatal Eggs" and his novel, The Master and Magarita. When I was thirty-six, I read Lorrie Moore's short story, "How to Be an Other Woman" and thought that was good. Later, when I was about forty, I read Middlemarch and thought that it was the best novel I'd ever read. Through these works, I think you can get a sense of what interests me.

Dr. Strangelove, in addition to falling clearly within the absurdist tradition, contains a critique of government, and it finishes with an explicit statement of where its ineptitude can lead. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest features the antics of a funny subversive and the horrific incompetence of a mental hospital. This is probably Jack Nicholson's best performance, which helps, but I think it is a significant fact that the film was directed by Miloš Forman, a Czech. I read the novel, by Ken Kesey, and didn't find it nearly as good. The Master and Margarita is evidence of a talented writer living under a totalitarian regime and making fun of it as a consolation, while weaving in deeper human themes. "How to Be an Other Woman" describes in humorous terms how a woman might come to understand her relationship with a man who is engaged in a series of infidelities, and, as part of the collection, Self-Help, parodies advice books. Compared to the others, Middlemarch seems more like a straightforward novel, but it contains much subtlety, and, because it was written in the English tradition, it skewers English society in ways that some readers may not recognize. While George Eliot always maintains sympathy for her characters, Edward Casaubon is clearly a foolish, self-centered intellectual who wastes time on an implausible grand theory; Rosamond Vincy is a fatuous bourgeois; Nicholas Bulstrode is a pious hypocrite – etc. This novel portrays English society in the Midlands of the 1830's and dissects it, showing both its strengths and its weaknesses, and does this with a delicate touch, while at the same time highlighting the relevant human foibles. The novel was written well before absurdism became a genre, but there is some unobtrusive social criticism. 

What I think you find in these works is astute social observation, and in most of them a critique of the reigning powers. In Dr. Strangelove, the American government, in effect, brings the world to an end. In One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the hero is lobotomized. In "How to Be an Other Woman," the narrator leaves you with the feeling that male-female relationships are like an infinite regress stacked against the female. In Middlemarch, humanity is seen to exist on a fragile basis over which people have little control, thus, in the end, the central characters, Dorothea Brooke and Will Ladislaw, go on to lead unexceptional lives, in contrast to Dorothea's high aspirations. 

In these works, I generally found close social observation and brainy critiques, and I don't often find comparable ones. Since I wasn't born in the U.S., I have always been skeptical of American ideology, and it is rarely questioned here. The early Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, including Poland, Romania, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, on the other hand, were better environments for the flourishing of intellectual dissidents. Although Czeslaw Milosz's literary works were hardly radical, in his book, The Captive Mind, he outlined the rather intense psychological pressures that intellectuals were forced to endure. Comparatively, American intellectuals have never experienced any duress, and they have lived their lives in obscure corners of this capitalist utopia, hardly making a dissenting peep. Most American novels, as far as I know, consist only of basic storytelling, and, these days, are often about the experiences of groups adapting to the prevailing culture, without questioning it much. The literary atmosphere, rather than being energized by angry dissidents, is mellowed by M.F.A. programs that groom writers for the publishing industry. If a novel were actually interesting, it probably wouldn't be a bestseller.

As far as American fiction is concerned, I'm tired of trying the latest wunderkinds, such as John Kennedy Toole, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, George Saunders and Lauren Groff, but I suppose I'll keep an open mind and attempt to read some future ones. As it is, I think I've wasted enough time on them already. It is ironic that with so much material readily available in the U.S. – a completely corrupt and incompetent president, a seriously dysfunctional federal government, rampant gerrymandering, unaddressed climate change and the botched handling of the coronavirus – writers can't do a better job. 

In recent years, I've been making stabs at Michel Houellebecq and László Krasznahorkai. Houellebecq has some of the characteristics that I like, but he has too many flaws. Foremost, he doesn't write perceptively about people, and his plots are always a little harebrained. The Map and the Territory, when read carefully, is a critique of the art market. However, because Houellebecq's writing is sloppy and his style is deadpan, many readers may not realize this. Submission was obviously the result of Houellebecq's desire to exploit fears that Islamic forces are affecting life in France. As in his other novels, all of the characters lack psychological nuance. It is easy for me to differentiate Houellebecq from works by people whom I think are good. I would guess that, though possessing some talent, he is in this for the money. Krasznahorkai is a better bet, because he hasn't sold out completely in order to make as much money as possible. In his case, he is one of the best writers ever to capture some of the complex psychological aspects of being human. For most readers, he would be too obscure, and they would be unable to appreciate his Kafkaesque qualities. Krasznahorkai's limitations are related to the fact that what he really knows well is Hungary, which, at this point, is hardly representative of most of the developed world. What I find is that he is one of the most psychologically astute writers, and that he, more than any other that I know, understands what it feels like to live in a repressive ideological state, which, frankly, is what the U.S. is, once you understand the nature of capitalist institutions. For this reason, I have chosen to read Krasznahorkai's latest book, Chasing Homer. I thought that his short story, "The Last Wolf," was one of the best I've ever read, so this is worth a try. Of course, Krasznahorkai is virtually unknown in the U.S. For example, Satantango, one of his best-known novels, currently has163 reviews on Amazon.com, whereas Lauren Groff's latest novel, Matrix, has 1171. Apparently, deciding whose fiction to read depends on your social media. Needless to say, I don't and never will have Facebook or Twitter accounts.

Winter Sleep

We watch many films in the course of evening entertainment. Most of them are so unmemorable that I don't bother to write about them. Yesterday we finished the very long Winter Sleep, which is a Turkish film directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. It has much to its credit, so I'll say something about it.

The film is set in Cappadocia and is based on the short story "The Wife" by Anton Chekhov. Its main feature is strong character depiction with exploration of complex interpersonal relationships, but the cinematography is also excellent and displays some of the natural beauty of this area in central Anatolia. The protagonist, Aydin, is a retired actor from a wealthy family who owns a hotel. He entertains himself by writing articles for a local newspaper and is working on a history of the Turkish theater. His attractive wife, Nihal, is much younger. His sister, Necla, who was recently divorced, also lives with them.

The drama centers around Aydin's family, with internal conflicts brought out by an incident with one of Aydin's tenants on a separate property. It becomes apparent that Aydin thinks like an elite patriarch and takes little interest in the concerns of those around him. He often assumes that he knows what's right and avoids direct interaction. Most of his dirty work is done for him by his assistant, Hidayet, without his involvement. Necla initially compliments him on his journalistic efforts but later berates him as self-absorbed and condescending. Nihal, we learn, is highly idealistic and deeply wishes to help the unfortunate in the community. Aydin is indifferent to Nihal's charity work and skeptical of her group, and this adds a tension to their relationship. Finally Aydin attempts to make amends with Nihal by giving her a large cash contribution for the charity. Nihal misjudges Aydin's aggrieved tenant, Ismail, and secretly gives him the entire contribution in person, only to enrage him: he proceeds to burn the bills in front of her.

All three of the family members have weaknesses that emerge during the story. I think American viewers may tend to typecast Aydin as the bad guy, but the others have equally serious deficiencies. While Aydin is aloof and patronizing, Necla is unduly sharp-tongued and inconsistent in her positions. Nihal, though well-intentioned, is obviously naive about the world. The film, I thought, only touched on the problematic marriage of Nihal and Aydin, but a short story would not have offered enough space for further development. Overall it seemed balanced and evenhanded and did not seem to take sides with any of the characters.

One of the reasons why I like the film is that it contains dialogue that reminds me of my family. People speak up and don't hold back: my mother did that as do my sisters to a lesser degree. When I recall this, I feel as if Americans live in an emotionally stunted world and hardly know how to communicate at all. There is a downside to such expressiveness, because it can be destructive, illogical and pointless, yet without it people sometimes seem dead. When people never express their thoughts, they are at risk of becoming disconnected from the world. Culturally speaking, certainly this affects what a country has to offer in the arts. To my way of thinking, both England and the U.S. display a notable lack of emotional range in their arts, and this is one of the factors behind my theme about the inferiority of American fiction. Growing up here, I didn't find much to like in literature until I came across the Russians. Lacking a suitable cultural basis in their environment, American writers may be doomed to careers in which they are applauded for churning out puerile prattle. It is telling that Winter Sleep won the Palme d'Or in Cannes yet was not nominated for an Academy Award despite clearly being one of the best films released in 2014.

Critics

Not long ago I watched the Robert Hughes documentary The Mona Lisa Curse. I can't convey the extent of my affinity for Hughes; I grew up in New York during the period discussed and in fact first saw the Mona Lisa at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1963, which is Hughes's point of departure. The main idea of the film is that money has destroyed the art world by transforming art into an investment for the wealthy, controlled by dealers who are out to make a profit. To me, Hughes is a model critic: he knows his subject well, is passionate about it, and has the courage of his convictions. I can't say that I always agree with him, but, unlike most critics, he has useful knowledge to impart. At the end he directly challenges an ignorant, wealthy art buyer, which is not something that you often see these days. It is telling that this was not shown in the U.S. when it was released. Like Hughes, I am appalled by the art world, and I have completely lost interest in modern art. As far as I know, Hughes, who died in 2012, has no successor.

What strikes me is the apparent absence of critics like Robert Hughes. Not only do they seem to have disappeared from the world of paintings, but they seem to be in thin supply across all of the arts. Criticism seems to have become a self-serving job for whoever manages to obtain one. As mentioned in an earlier post, Lorrie Moore's short story collection, Bark, which documents her continued stagnation and decline as a writer, nevertheless received many favorable reviews. The book was shortlisted for The Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, which, thankfully, it lost. I can't understand how anyone with good literary judgment could have recommended it. Where were the critics?

I don't follow architecture, but was gratified to see that Martin Filler, the architecture critic for the NYRB, recently got his comeuppance. He usually has little of value to say, and he tends to write biased articles. However, in this instance he was called out by the Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid, who forced him to make a retraction. Filler works under an editor who feigns intellectual substance but is more precisely a graying impresario presiding over a decaying literary publication. Though I don't know enough about Zaha Hadid to say anything in her defense, I appreciate the steps she took to bring accountability to Filler.

In recent years I have had to develop convoluted, time-consuming methods to determine what art, fiction, music or film I might enjoy partaking in. I have found that reading a review - or several reviews - is no guarantee that I will have sufficient information to determine whether I would find a particular work worth reading, hearing or seeing. Thus, after a concentrated effort over a number of years, I now refrain from wasting my time on reviews, except to read them for entertainment.  My expectation is that if something of great artistic merit should materialize, I may only come across it by accident. What does this say about the value of critics?

Money has obviously corrupted the visual arts, but what about the others? It seems that it has done damage there too. If there is any good new fiction, I haven't seen it, though I must confess to liking Houellebecq's The Map and the Territory, which, not coincidentally, is a satire of the art world; Houellebecq may have been influenced by Hughes. The same goes for music, which, as far as I can tell, is going nowhere. Film is a more problematic area to sum up, because it seems to have become the central art form of our time. Thus, auteur directors such as Éric Rohmer, Stanley Kubrick, Roman Polanski and Milos Forman have become de facto major artists, while mainstream directors such as Steven Spielberg and James Cameron have enormous box office success and still gain the approval of most critics. Film critics are showing us their penchant for touting the blockbusters: that's where the money is. It is easy to understand why a critic might not be effusive about Éric Rohmer, yet in my opinion he is one of the best filmmakers ever, even with his limitations.

Films

Since our main form of entertainment during the evening is watching films on Netflix, I thought I'd say something about films for a change. Actually, I got burnt out on them, because when you watch several per week they become a blur. The fact is that in any given year there are only going to be a couple of new films that I consider to be of any value beyond simple entertainment. The better films become less memorable when crammed in between others. In some ways films were more effective when you only went out to see them a few times a year.

Two that we watched recently were Nebraska and August: Osage County. You could probably classify both of them as black comedies, though they are not as black or as imaginative as Dr. Strangelove, my all-time favorite. Nebraska is about an old drunk living in Montana who, based on junk mail he received, thinks he won a sweepstakes for a million dollars and wants to go to Lincoln, Nebraska to pick it up. To a casual observer, this would be the less interesting of the two films, because the characters are ordinary and unglamorous. However, the characters and dialogue, plain as they are, are perfect, and this may well be Bruce Dern's best acting performance ever. August: Osage County started as a play and is about a dysfunctional family living in Oklahoma. The mother is a pill addict with oral cancer and the father is an alcoholic poet. Things end badly. It reminded me a little of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which I found to have more interesting dialogue. The family dynamics are explored, but predictably, as you would expect in an American theatrical production. The only revelation of any value that I noticed was that the women were stronger than the men: Meryl Streep, in one of her better performances as the mother, and Julia Roberts, as the eldest daughter, in perhaps her best performance ever. The alcoholic father is played by Sam Shepard, whose brief appearance is good, but I have to say that his involvement in any production is a warning sign to me because of his relentless pursuit of false Americana.

Nebraska is more faithful to the way Americans think and feel, and it captures how they live in the Great Plains and Midwest without satirizing or sentimentalizing them. There is little of the distortion and condescension and none of the surrealism that one might expect in a Coen brothers film. The screenplay is unadorned and straightforward, but uncannily precise. The same cannot be said of August: Osage County, in which everything feels derivative. Overall, I didn't find that the characters added up. They were an intelligent group of people who for unknown reasons elected to live in a cultural backwater with high temperatures and no air conditioning. The men were weak and the women were strong: so what. I think the constraints that are placed on American theatrical productions significantly narrow the scope of their subject matter. I sense a formula here: family dysfunction is in; snarky dialogue is in; failed poet is in; down-home country living is out. August: Osage County, in sum, is a product contrived to suit the tastes of well-heeled urban American theatergoers.