“Testament of Youth” (2015) occludes politics for romance

I’ve got to maintain my blog silence in order to finish writing this damn book, but I saw Testament of Youth last night and have been spluttering ever since.

Now, this is a very pretty and very sad film. And the first part of the film follows the real-life Vera Brittain’s memoir nicely — in which she fights her way into Oxford University against her father’s wishes, and along the way (against her own wishes) falls in love with her brother’s friend Roland — only to have war break out in 1914. As she remembered it later, the war initially “came to me not as a superlative tragedy, but as an interruption of the most exasperating kind to my personal plans.” She spent the war’s aftermath trying to come to terms with the meaning of that war and the multiple tragedies it unleashed. Testament of Youth remains one of the most powerful and important feminist/pacifist/intellectual reckonings of that era and that generation.

But this film focuses, instead, on how pretty these people were, and how sad it is when someone dies. Other than a brief moment at the end when Brittain (Alicia Vikander) speaks up on behalf of peace and postwar reconciliation at a raucous political meeting, the film skims over or skips everything that really mattered to the real-life Brittain — her relationship with Winifred Holtby, her agonizing efforts to make sense of the war, her political and feminist work — to a postscript that assures us that she found someone else and married in 1925.

Oh, no no no, this film is all heartbreaking scenes at railway stations and all manner of men gazing at Vera longingly. That’s right: instead of a powerful political assessment, this film is simply a woman’s weeper, made for repetition on the Lifetime channel.

You can say that I was ruined for this film because I’d read the book. In fact, my very first induction into the magic of the BBC world of miniseries came in the early 80s when my mom and I sat ourselves down every Sunday night to watch the 275-minute version of Testament of Youth starring Cheryl Campbell. (Does anyone know how I can get that series on a region-1 DVD?) But even if I was a total novice to the subject matter, this film is empty of anything but aesthetic pleasure and pathos.

This should have been the movie for me: a female lead! based on a feminist text! a period drama with great clothes! But no matter how many tears I shed during the screening, I found myself increasingly exasperated during the film’s final third to the point that my jaw dropped when it ended before any of what mattered to the real-life Brittain made it in.

I’ll give it this: the clothes are fantastic. Really, I wanted to run my hands all over those beautiful fabrics. But more problematic: it has the worst male lead ever. Kit Harington as Roland is .

Okay, back to writing things that result in book contracts, promotion, etc. Apologies for going AWOL, friends, but I’ve got to get some work done!

Siri Hustvedt’s breathtaking “The Blazing World” (2014)

Can you please run out and read this right now, so we can talk about it?

It’s so good. This is what I wanted Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs to be, although it never quite rose to those heights. Like that book, it circles around a woman artist (why so many good books recently about women artists?) 

The novel proceeds as if an editor has compiled all the relevant information about a late female artist who, after her death, has been revealed as the artistic genius behind three celebrated shows, each purportedly the work of male artists. Her journals, interviews with her friends and critics, and other documents show that Harriet Burden arranged with those male artists for them to “wear” her art as if it was theirs in order, ultimately, to show the pervasive male bias of the art world.

But Harriet is far more than your typical cranky middle-aged woman who perceives bias. This book explores all aspects of artistic celebrity to show that this isn’t just feminist bitchiness but a true uncovering of how we — as a culture — see art through the artist (or, dare we say, through the author). Harriet’s agonizing frustration at her treatment is so astute that by the time I finished the book I wanted to start all over again. She is my favorite protagonist in months and months and months — and I’ve read some great books during this time.

Take, for example, her assessment of one of the artists she uses as a mask for her own work:

It is so easy for Rune to shine. Where does that effortlessness come from? He is so light. I am earthbound, a Caliban to Ariel. And I must watch his weightless flights over my head, while I lurk underground with brown thoughts that roil my guts. “Himself is his own dungeon.”

God, I loved this book, which just shines brighter and brighter like a blazing world from beginning to end. Read it and tell me what you think.

Female buddy movies: “Set It Off” (1996)

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my mini-marathon of female buddy movies, it’s that these films are not inherently feminist (I’m looking at you, Romy and Michele) except insofar as they feature women at the center. But the best ones offer both feminist critiques of male domination and a vision of what happens when you push women to the edge.

If F. Gary Gray’s Set It Off doesn’t quite rise to high filmic art, it makes for perfect marathon material, especially after seeing Thelma and Louise. The themes in both films match up — these films show women who’ve been jerked around by men, bosses, the police, and the system — but become even more critical when they treat Black women rather than white. Their rage is all the more justified because they’ve been fighting two battles, not just one.

If any of them who should have made it out of their housing project, it’s Frankie (Vivica A. Fox), whose immaculate straight hair, professional wardrobe, and talents as a bank clerk have won her raises and promotions at her job. But when one of the guys from the neighborhood shows up at her teller’s window and initiates a bank robbery, she tries to talk him out of it — a conversation that the police and the bank manager see on the security video later. How can they know she wasn’t involved as an inside man? Of course they fire her, and refuse to offer her a reference.

Just like that, all those years of professionalism go down the drain. Worse, she’s reduced to working alongside her lifelong friends cleaning office buildings in downtown LA during the night shift.

Each of them has a story like this one. T.T. (Kimberly Elise) struggles as a single mother to pay for childcare on her lean income. Cleo (Queen Latifah) is openly gay and has developed the tough persona of one who deals with homophobia on a regular basis. And then there’s Stoney (Jada Pinkett). It’s bad enough that she’s willing to do anything to find the money to fund her brother’s entry to UCLA. But then he gets shot and killed by police, mistaken for one of the project’s bank robbers, and all the police can do is apologize weakly.

In other words, the film’s setup follows that of Thelma and Louise: it highlights the ways that women get beaten down by men — sexually, economically, psychologically — and have so much of their potential taken out from under them. But there are marked differences between those earlier white women and Set It Off‘s Black women. Whereas Louise is able to get thousands of dollars from her own bank account, these four have nothing. When you add racial discrimination to gender bias, the women’s rage is all the more infectious.

Frankie knows exactly how to respond: rob a bank. She knows how banks work; she knows how to avoid the mistakes made by the guys in the project who got Stoney’s brother killed. Most of all, she’s clearheaded about the morality of it. “We’re just taking away from the system that’s fucking us all anyway, y’know?” The main question, after their first hit goes fast and furious and they escape with thousands of dollars, is how many more banks to rob.

In the meantime, Stoney gets hit on by a slick banker (Blair Underwood) while casing the joint. Keith is tall, rich, educated, and good-looking. A Harvard grad. With a glamorous apartment. She struggles on their dates to hold him at arm’s length — why? Is it because the attraction is so one-sided? because she’s worried he’ll learn about the grittiness of her life and her job as a cleaner, or about her sideline as a bank robber?

I’m not sure, but I’d like to say Stoney’s hesitation springs from Keith’s patronizing tones — his “I’ve got the wind at my back” cockiness, his overly slippery eagerness to transform her into Pretty Woman, to “take her away from all that.” No one can convey that kind of motivational ambivalence better than Underwood, who could win a nationwide contest for Guy I’d Most Like To Date Who’s Most Likely To Have An Evil Side. At one point he even takes a detour on their way out so he can buy her a glamorous dress and shoes. On their dates, he asks Stoney loaded questions like, “Do you feel free?” “I don’t feel free,” she replies. “I feel very much caged.” And clearly her dates with him don’t help.

But to be fair, the bank jobs don’t help, either. They start fighting amongst themselves, allowing them to reference Thelma and Louise and The Godfather and thereby raise questions about how it will all end.

I’ve already mentioned that Set It Off doesn’t climb to high art, but what it does achieve is a far more powerful indictment of racial & gender discrimination than in Thelma and Louise, and a conclusion that (like its predecessor) goes places you wouldn’t expect. In fact, I began to realize that the film’s weaknesses reflect the same kind of low expectations from Hollywood that are turned into themes in the film. For all those reasons I urge you to hunt down a copy (not easy! I had to inter-library loan mine) and watch it as a double bill with T&L to get another glimpse of the female rage made possible by feminism in the 1990s.

In retrospect, Set It Off and Thelma and Louise reflects that great, pre-ironic feminist moment in film when narratives could evoke the enraging, impossible constraints placed on everyday women. It reminds me of the most disturbing aspects of Susan Douglas’ Enlightened Sexism, which describe how media began to undermine the feminism with ironic winks at the audience while peddling old-fashioned sexism. Can I just say, again, that I miss the old-fashioned female rage?

Waking up with Claire Messud’s “The Woman Upstairs” (2013)

After agonizing a while about yesterday’s angry/ desperate post on a guerrilla response to rape culture, I opened up a new novel last night.

After reading the first five pages of Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs, I want to kiss her on the lips. Here’s how it begins on p. 1:

How angry am I? You don’t want to know. Nobody wants to know about that.

I’m a good girl, I’m a nice girl, I’m a straight-A, strait-laced, good daughter, good career girl, and I never stole anybody’s boyfriend and I never ran out on a girlfriend, and I put up with my parents’ shit and my brother’s shit, and I’m not a girl anyhow, I’m over forty fucking years old, and I’m good at my job and I’m great with kids and I held my mother’s hand when she died, after four years of holding her hand while she was dying, and I speak to my father ever day on the telephone –every day, mind you, and what kind of weather do you have on your side of the river, because here it’s pretty gray and a bit muggy too? It was supposed to say “Great Artist” on my tombstone, but if I died right now it would say “such a good teacher/ daughter/ friend” instead; and what I really want to shout, and want in big letters on that grave, too, is FUCK YOU ALL.

Don’t all women feel the same? The only difference is how much we know we feel it, how in touch we are with our fury. We’re all furies, except the ones who are too damned foolish.

And with that, I’m now 5 pages in and feel as if I have a new best friend who’s also a Betty Friedan version of those visionary doomsayers of days of old, who looks a little disheveled perhaps but then lapses into otherworldly trances like Sybill Trelawney in Harry Potter and scares the shit out of you. Just wait till you read (on pp. 4-5) what she means by The Woman Upstairs (and those of us whose first thought was Madwoman in the Attic are on the right track).

This is going to be scary and awesome, like having to run through a house on fire. I feel like I’m being tugged by the hand by my new unfiltered visionary friend, and I might have to dedicate the afternoon to her.

…in which “The Great Gatsby” (2013) makes two critics quote great lines at one another

American teenagers still get marched through F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) early in their high school careers, told that it’s a classic. I hadn’t read it since then, so it was a revelation during the past few weeks to find how much I remembered its contemplative mood. Gatsby is still as inscrutable, and Daisy as shadowy as I remember. It’s a beautiful, evasive book punctuated with moments of the most beautiful prose and clarity of insight — all the better for being so slim and accessible to high school kids.

Told through the eyes of Nick Carraway, a well-to-do Midwesterner whose job selling bonds has landed him a house out on the shores of Long Island Sound, the story fixates on Carraway’s fantastically wealthy neighbor, Jay Gatsby. Rumors fly about him: he might be an Oxford man, or a murderer, or perhaps just a liar. As if to cultivate those tales, Gatsby throws lavish parties and uses oddly unpopular expressions like “old sport.” But as we learn early on, part of this is a show for the benefit of Nick’s cousin Daisy Buchanan, who lives with her lout of a husband across a small bay. Daisy and Gatsby had a short romance years ago when he was a poor serviceman stationed in her hometown of St. Louis. Famously — memorably — Gatsby stands at the edge of his property in the evenings, gazing out across the water to the green light at the end of the Buchanans’ pier, longing for her and hoping that his new wealth and status might be enough to win her back. 

Jack Clayton’s 1974 film with Robert Redford, Mia Farrow, and Sam Waterston emphasized the gauzy, sun-lit aspects of the tale, and the grandeur of Gatsby’s house, but critics generally felt the film was better at conveying the surface appearance of the tale than the book’s melancholy soul. The New York Times’ Vincent Canby famously complained that “the sets and costumes and most of the performances are exceptionally good, but the movie itself is as lifeless as a body that’s been too long at the bottom of a swimming pool.” It may have got the 1920s/ Jazz Age look right, but it failed to capture the classic Americanness of this story.

All the more reason for a new interpretation. With Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan, and Tobey Maguire in the three core roles, does Baz Luhrmann’s much-anticipated film achieve what Clayton’s could not? I sat down for a chat about the film with film critic and blogger JustMeMike, with whom I’ve analyzed films in the past — most recently Zero Dark Thirty.

JMM: Great question, Didion. Upon publication in 1925, the book sales were tepid: about 20,000 copies sold in the 1st year following publication. In contrast, the book has sold about 405,000 copies in the first three months of this year. And that number would not include the copy I bought late in April, after not being able to acquire one from my nearest public library.

But before we launch into a discussion of the film, I’d like to point out that the cost of this film was in the West Eggish neighborhood of $127 million. One would have to be quite creative to spend that much money on a movie. And just think of the clothing and accessories tie-ins with Prada, Tiffany & Co, and Brooks Brothers. I don’t think I’ll be trotting off to Brooks Brothers to pick up a straw boater at $198 a pop. How about you? Will you be going in for the 1920s look?

Didion: As long as I can score a new tiara, I’ll be all set. You know how us professors get paid so lavishly that a visit to Tiffany is, like, yawn.

So I’m curious, JMM — tell me your thoughts about the relationship between book and film. Obviously, literary adaptations are always tricky; directors want to make films that anyone can see, from big fans of the book to those who’ve never read it. Do you think Luhrmann succeeds?

JMM: Yes, he succeeds. As you said above, Gatsby is inscrutable which to me means that it is subject to many interpretations — almost as many as the number of bits of confetti and streamers that fell during the Gatsby soirees.

I think the transfer of the literary to the screen was well done. Especially if you consider that the charm of the book is less the story, and more the excellence of the writing.

Didion: I agree with you in part. I felt Luhrmann succeeded with the overall look and the vividness of the characters — no one is going to say, as Canby did about the previous version, that this is lifeless — but I disliked the hyperactive melodrama of the film. It missed, to me, the book’s soul: its narrator’s desire for something real behind all that glitz.

JMM: Yeah. In the film, the Carraway character was either in awe or watching with stunned amazement — or twirling a glass in his hand — but isn’t that what makes the book so difficult to film? The charms of Nick are all his internal discoveries rather than something he actually does?

Didion: That’s exactly right. Nick wants to believe that Gatsby really is “worth the whole damn bunch altogether,” as he shouts to Gatsby across the lawn. But the film doesn’t quite show us that Gatsby is anything more than an imperfect invention. Luhrmann couldn’t quite commit: are we supposed to attach to Gatsby? or are we supposed to see through him, and thus become aware of Nick’s naivete?

JMM: That’s a tough question. The story opens with Gatsby as a mythic person; no one knew his reality. Including Nick who befriends him. Didn’t Lurhmann (and Fitzgerald) go out of their way to make Gatsby mysterious as well as the subject of gossip? If so, can we call Carraway naive?

Didion: I suppose this is what makes the book so endlessly appealing to high school English classrooms! It allows kids to scrutinize the difference between surface appearance and the person within.

One of the things I loved about the book was Nick’s voice throughout: his eagerness to believe that Gatsby and Daisy really felt a true love for one another. Nick is the only character who wants to reveal his true self, and to believe that Gatsby is truly good on the inside, even when the whole crowd lies, hides things, and/or reveals their untrustworthiness. So I’m disappointed by the over-the-top emotional melodrama that Luhrmann laid on top of everything. Luhrmann’s style worked so well for me in capturing the excesses of the 1920s, but just fell down utterly when making me care about the characters — Tobey Maguire’s Nick included.

JMM: Well I will certainly agree about Gatsby being good. His problem was that he was a dreamer who couldn’t let go of the past. Daisy — not so good. Tom Buchanan not good at all. But Maguire’s Carraway is more of a Greek chorus, a chronicler, a reality mirror to Jay Gatsby’s unreality. Was it Maguire’s dull characterization of Carraway, or was it the script, or simply the way that Lurhmann directed? I can’t say for sure.

What I can say for sure is that I was quite involved with the melodramatic last two-thirds of the film, much more so than during the razzle-dazzle first third.

Didion: Really?!? Well, this might be our most substantial disagreement! I loved the film’s big middle — its second act — but the final act had me rolling my eyes.

You clearly didn’t like Maguire as Nick. I’m more on the fence. What better actor alive could capture that innocence, and the pleasure of entering into the excesses of the super-rich of the 1920s? I was less interested in the way that Luhrmann created a frame for the film — Nick, months later, installed in an asylum for nervous exhaustion and alcoholism, trying to capture the causes of his illness for a psychologist. Maguire was neither very good in those scenes, nor did the director use them in a way to compel the audience’s connection to the character.

I will say that Luhrmann’s casting was great. Every single character looked the part — I mean, damn, Carey Mulligan! Elizabeth Debicki as the golfer/socialite Jordan Baker! and even that shiny, tanned, and slightly creepy face of DiCaprio’s as Gatsby — it all looked exactly right.

JMM: Loved the casting myself. Except that I didn’t buy that Tom Buchanan and Carraway were classmates. Meaning Edgerton and Maguire looked about 10 years different. Maybe it is less about Maguire’s performance that gave me cause for concern. I’ll refer back to the statement I made earlier about Carraway’s charms being internal.

The framing device worked for me because it gave them a way of getting the words on the screen. Whether the sanatorium aspect was good or bad isn’t a major point for me.

But back to the casting. Many have said that Leo was a bit too old for the role. Maybe. But his tan and his weathered look come from his lifestyle and stress. I liked the way Leo brought out Gatsby’s loss of confidence when he first meets (re-unites) with Daisy in the Carraway cottage. And her fluttered look perfectly matched his.

Didion: Argh! I hated that scene! It didn’t work for me AT ALL. It was all so overdone … like a kabuki version of anxiety. And all the extended leadup to the actual meeting between Gatsby and Daisy — it went on forever — took away from what the scene should have done, which is to cement in Nick’s mind that these two share perfect, long-lost love.

JMM: Well I’ll agree to disagree. But that came from the book didn’t it? Gatsby leaving, going outside and standing in the rain until he was drenched. Beyond that, that scene had the one laugh-out-loud moment in the whole film. When Gatsby asks, Is everything okay, You have all you need for the tea? And Nick replies, “Well maybe more flowers….”

I also wonder about the “cementing”. Is it is Nick’s mind or ours?

Didion: Certainly in Nick’s mind, but isn’t that anchored to our minds as viewers? Don’t we need to believe, even for a moment, that Gatsby and Daisy aren’t just glossy pretty people, but truly in love — even if the film later throws some of that open to question?

That’s why I found the scene so needlessly goofy. I wanted it to show another side of Gatsby; to show that he wasn’t all self-assurance and polish. But this scene went for cheap laughs rather than more depth to his character. It made me think that Luhrmann is, above all, just a ham-handed director who can’t manage a single minute of emotional subtlety.

JMM: About Lurhmann, I won’t disagree with ham-handed. I won’t disagree with lacks subtlety — but I must give him props for showmanship, hype, and marketing — care to venture down that road for a bit?

Isla Fisher as the blowsy Myrtle

Didion: I’m completely down with you there. Which brings up another topic: the soundtrack, and especially the confluence of musical genres in the film (dotted with hip hop by Jay-Z, who also served as executive producer for the soundtrack).

The scenes of crazy parties are just awesome. No subtlety needed. And although I was a little taken aback when the Jay-Z’s song “100$ Bill” blasted underneath those scenes — because I love 1920s music and hoped to hear more of it — I ultimately loved the whole thing. The music also includes new interpretations of 1920s songs as well as covers of Amy Winehouse, Beyoncé, and others, altogether creating the most lush soundtrack I’ve heard in years. Loved it. And I was so glad to see those great party scenes on the big screen.

JMM: Yes the music worked for me too. I think the press has made far too much of the inclusion of hip hop, but coming out of the theater I only remembered two pieces of music — Lana Del Rey’s “Young and Beautiful” which was Daisy’s theme, and the famed Gershwin opus “Rhapsody in Blue.”

The party music was great — and would have been pleasurable no matter what.

Didion: Can I ask you about Carey Mulligan’s portrayal of Daisy for a moment, and in general the film’s view of women? I thought she was wonderful, of course — but we never learn much more about her. She functions more as a figment of Gatsby’s imagination than as a real, three-dimensional person. Let’s not forget how utterly absent her daughter is from the story. One of the things that affected me was Daisy’s comment that she hopes her daughter grows up to be “a beautiful little fool,” because a fool is “the best thing a girl can be in this world.”

JMM: Great thinking Didion. I’m with you completely. It is a scary part of the story. It is one thing for Daisy to be like that, and she was, and another thing for her to wish that for her little girl. Realistically, I think all the female characters came off badly in the book — even Jordan. But as we can see from both the book and the film, there are no likeable characters. Daisy was all surface, she not only hadn’t any depth, but I think we were supposed to see that immediately.

When we first meet Daisy and Jordan, Fitzgerald describes them like having the weight and substance of balloons. They flutter and quiver and so forth. Fitzgerald made it a point to make them lacking substance.

“They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house.”

Didion: Oh, JMM, I love that catch — I’d forgotten that beautiful description in the book. Fitzgerald had little interest in giving them much weight. In fact, that line of Daisy’s about her daughter being a fool is the only glimpse we have of her dissatisfaction with her lot; otherwise she appears committed to being a fool, mostly at least.

Jordan is a bit more interesting; the book suggests that she might not be such an honest sportswoman. And in the film Elizabeth Debicki’s huge eyes and tall dancer’s frame make her tower over Tobey Maguire in a way that was always mysterious and evocative. But this isn’t really a film about female characters except as love objects for the men in the story.

JMM:  True. Let’s move to another smaller venue — the underground club behind the barbershop door where they went for lunch. Did you like Amitabh Bachchan as Wolfsheim, or did you feel this was a role incorrectly cast?

Didion: Loved the speakeasy scene, and Bachchan was perfectly cast as Wolfsheim — but (and this is a big but) Lurhmann cut out most of what made Wolfsheim such a crucial character.

Now, there are good reasons to cut it out: the book is unapologetically anti-Semitic, and racist in ways that only get a slight gloss in the film. On reflection, I’m not sorry that Luhrmann decided to cut down the book’s nasty white supremacy and the cartoonish portrayal of Wolfsheim as Gatsby’s main man.

So Bachchan doesn’t get much of a chance here, but his whole appearance — his unnervingly sparkling eyes — was ideal for the part. How about you?

JMM: I’ve seen many films with Bachchan and I knew what I was going to get from him. I think Lurhmann cast him as Wolfsheim because it would help market the film internationally — and also because who else might have been considered — Mandy Patinkin?

As for the racist and anti-Semitic remarks — I thought there were plenty of them included in the film to make the point, so even if Lurhmann cut back volume wise — he didn’t soft-pedal those topics in any way.

Another point — didn’t they include enough mysterious phone calls to have us consider that Gatsby was indeed involved in shady doings. And then once they’ve done this, who do we meet at the parties but NY celebs, senators, congressmen, and even the police commissioner was at the speakeasy — so I don’t think Wolfsheim needed any more depth on screen for us to see.

Didion: So this brings me to my last question: about the film’s use of 3D. Even though I’d sworn to myself that I’d skip seeing the 3D versions of film (after Tintin, which was meh), I nevertheless forked out the extra few bucks this time. And… big disappointment.

Now, I get it that Luhrmann’s filming ethos is summed up with, “why not?” But I think the 3D not only failed to add anything, particularly during the lush party scenes, but it detracted for me from the attractiveness of the set and costumes overall. I’d strongly recommend that people see it in 2D.

JMM: The 3D was added in not because of “why not” but because of the revenue stream. This was strictly a marketing decision and a gimmick. As you said if anything it was unnecessary at best, and a distraction at worst. The difference between the 2D ticket and the 3D at my theater was $5. So I think that was behind it.

As was the music. As was Bachchan.

I’ve a question: Do you have a favorite quote from the book/film?

Didion: I’ve been thinking about that. And honestly, I must admit that it’s not the beautiful famous final line of the novel, which Lurhmann uses here (to his credit): “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” A gorgeous line, but so self-conscious.

I had a whole pile of lines I loved in the book — they appear only occasionally in the midst of Fitzgerald’s generally sparse prose. But I think my favorite might be, “In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”

JMM: That is a line filled with beautiful imagery. The one I liked best came on the next to last page. “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

Of course that is why we love the book. About the book and the film version — a thematic question — Lurhmann’s showed this at least three times. — workers with pick-axes working on the mounds of ashes. Is this indicative of a heaven (the palaces and mansions and the party-life) and indicative of a hellish existence — real life with work and sweat? I mean is this at the core of the story, or is it the more surfacey — the old money versus the new money that is one of the base themes? Any thoughts on that?

Didion: Loved the way he created the old optician’s billboard, of a god/death watching over this hellish middle place of sweat and hard work. But the scenes of workmen toiling just seemed, again, like a cartoonish Broadway set.

Your broader question still troubles me. Does the film do enough to satisfy me in capturing the snobbery of old-money types like Tom Buchanan? And the striving desire of new-money types like Gatsby for a glamorous object like old-money Daisy, whose voice “sounds like money”? No, but then our culture is much less concerned about old money than theirs was. I was also a little disappointed that the film didn’t make much of the divide between East Coast society and the Midwesterners (Nick, Daisy, Gatsby) who have arrived there — that is, arrived from a more innocent place.

JMM: Maybe because in the 20s there was so little new money, and the old money wasn’t that old. Tom was a Midwestern guy too. I also recall that Daisy’s mother, at the party, told Daisy about all the “eligible” soldiers attending — rather than the number of good looking men. So even though that party wasn’t an East Coast affair — it still had its own version of snobbery.

I believe that Lurhmann could not do too much with the old money vs. new money because there weren’t any characters (except Tom and Daisy) to represent it with any kind if depth.

Didion: One of my Facebook friends said recently, with a bit of self-deprecation, that she loves anything Luhrmann does because it’s so pretty and shiny. “It’s art, not history!” she proclaimed to haters like me.

If I were to sum up my feelings about the film, I’d say that Luhrmann’s gift for creating shiny, pretty things is prodigious but ultimately I want more emotional depth. I’m glad I saw it on the big screen for those amazing party sequences, but I will never see it again.

JMM: Strong words, Didion! I want to ask for a one word description of how you felt when leaving the theater.

Didion:  Honestly, I felt a bit alienated by the film. Part of this is appropriate — that is, we’re supposed to be appalled by Tom and Daisy’s carelessness toward everyone around them. But neither did I feel especially upset by Gatsby’s end; I just hadn’t learned to care about him the way I ought to have. Although I appreciated Lurhmann’s eagerness to show us Fitzgerald’s fine prose — appearing as actual words on the screen — that final line about “boats against the current” remains opaque enough to me that I’m still not sure I know how to feel about it. So yeah, “alienated.”

How about you?

JMM: For me, I think a phrase rather than one word — and it goes back to Gatsby’s delusional behavior. Despite his lack of a reality — I still loved him — hated the Buchanans. Gatsby was a mystery — the Buchanan’s weren’t. So it is far easier for me to admire Gatsby than them. But having said that, I won’t call him heroic or anything like that. And yes, his ending isn’t anything that creates despair in me either. When I left the theater, I was positive about the film.

Didion: Can I ask whether you like Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge (2001)? Because I’m wondering whether this film will appeal more broadly than to the longtime Luhrmann fans who love his “shiny, pretty” things.

JMM: Thought you’d never ask. As for Moulin Rouge, I could only get 30 minutes into it before shutting down my DVD player. Gatsby wasn’t like that for me because I had just read the book. Moulin Rouge had no history for me — other than my travels to Paris. But I never finished it. I’m not a fan of Luhrmann’s but I do appreciate his skills. Or maybe I’ll say that Luhrmann can certainly spend money and make a fabulous looking recreation of another era.

I have Luhrmann’s Australia still unwatched. Guess I’ll be getting to that one soon.

But you know, The Great Gatsby is still an iconic American novel — so I do expect another film version down the road.

Didion: That made me laugh, because I watched maybe 20 minutes of Moulin Rouge before quitting, too! All that overwrought singing and Ewan MacGregor and Nicole Kidman looking at one another like speed freaks … not for me. I will say that this film is just not nearly that spastic.

It’s been a million years since I saw his Romeo + Juliet, which I liked at the time. I will never, ever, ever watch Australia, however.

JMM: And I’ll probably never watch Romeo + Juliet.

Didion: JMM, this has been a pleasure as ever. Even more so because I got to comb over some of the best prose in the book, and engage in the back-and-forth with such a worthy collaborator. Even though I’m more negative about the film than you are, I’m still glad I saw Luhrmann’s version of the Jazz Age onscreen. And I’m looking forward to planning another conversation with you sometime this summer!

JMM: Thank you Didion: It is always fun to work with you. I can safely guarantee that our next viewing won’t be a Luhrmann film. Until the next time — thanks!

Introvert’s paradise: “The Hedgehog” (2009)

Grading completed. Committees survived. The inevitable debriefings afterward — which often take as much time as the meetings themselves — turn out to be not painful, overly gossipy, or derisive about certain colleagues’ intelligence. I breathe a sigh of relief as I retire to my house for winter break.

Last night I made baked ziti (talk about comfort food! it’s that pinch of nutmeg in the ricotta/ spinach/ artichoke heart mixture) and made holiday cookies for tonight’s neighborhood party. In short, it’s almost like living a normal life again.

And I watched a film. A real film, not the comic pablum my partner has demanded for the past few weeks. Mona Achache’s The Hedgehog is the filmic rendition of Muriel Barbery’s wonderful The Elegance of the Hedgehog (L’Élégance du herisson) which I loved reading a couple of years ago. The film has won a pile of awards and deserves every one of them, even as I insist the book is still better.

The story is an introvert’s paradise: a meeting of the minds between a bespeckled, smartypants 11-yr-old named Paloma (Garance de Guillermic) — who despises her bourgeois, clueless family — and Renée (Josiane Balasko), the dowdy, gruff 50-something concierge who manages the apartment building full of rich families. That Paloma sees something in Renée is saying something about the little girl’s powers of observation. Even better, she describes the older woman as much like a hedgehog: prickly on the outside, but inside she is elegant, intelligent, surprising.

With her Japanese pen and ink, Paloma renders her discovery, along with her namesake:

Renée does a great deal to maintain her disguise. She keeps her TV on when she’s likely to be approached by the building’s residents, all the more to confirm their stereotypes about the working-class individuals who take positions as concierges. But secretly she keeps a closed, book-lined study where she retires with a refined cup of tea and sits with her blissed-out cat, Leo.

One day she blows her own cover. Upon being introduced to a new building resident — the white-haired Kakuro Ozu (Togo Igawa) — she mutters, “Happy families are all alike.” Ozu immediately responds with its companion line from Anna Karenina: “But every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Moreover, he guesses that her cat is named for Tolstoy.

Why doesn’t she want them to see who she really is? It seems obvious to those of us who are also hedgehogs. She has worked out a deal with the world, and it allows her to experience a rich inner life. It also reflects her belief in the impermeability of class divisions: no matter how elegant her thoughts, the well-heeled residents of her building will never acknowledge it. Her disguise allows her to blissfully read a difficult, mind-expanding text while eating a perfect bar of dark chocolate.

Her tentative friendship with Paloma changes that. Not to mention the gentle but insistent expressions of interest from Ozu, the new resident.

I still hate the ending, and I’m mixed on the fact that the film emphasizes the perspective of Paloma rather than Renée, but what a delight this film is. Quiet, funny, and full of great female characters — a perfect midwinter treat.

Can you tell? My own delight in hedgehogness is beginning. Ahhh, winter break.

Thoughts on the election, forgetting, and The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)

I don’t know about you, but this was one of my major responses to the election:

Yup, we’re still in 2012. Collective sigh of relief.

But I keep thinking back to Margaret Atwood’s dystopian The Handmaid’s Tale, written during that period of evangelical upswing, the mid-1980s. I hadn’t read the novel since I was a teenager, but picked it up again this fall as the birth control and rape conversations were flying fast & furious. The book is every bit as good as I remember, but for different reasons: whereas what I remembered was the horrifying future Atwood imagined, what I’d forgotten was the interior experience of its protagonist.

Because I think what is so chilling about this novel is how they got there, and what they forgot along the way.

Her name is Offred, and I beg you to read the novel just to find out how she has come by that awkward name. We never learn her real name. Offred’s job in this Christian future is to get pregnant on behalf of the high-ranking couple to whom she has been assigned. Like the story from Genesis in which Rachel cannot bear children for her husband Jacob, Offred has been selected to serve as the vessel for her master’s sperm and the baby that will be assigned to her mistress.

According to every single message within society, Offred’s subject position is God’s will.

As horrifying as that is, it’s worse to find two other crucial elements to the novel. The first is that she has forgotten how to live that other life, the life that existed before this new regime. For example, she encounters  a group of Japanese tourists who stare at them and want to take photographs:

I can’t help staring. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen skirts that short on women. The skirts reach just below the knee and the legs come out from beneath them, nearly naked in their thin stockings, blatant, the high-heeled shoes with their straps attached to the feet like delicate instruments of torture. The women teeter on their spiked feet as if on stilts, but off balance; their backs arch at the waist, thrusting the buttocks out. Their heads are uncovered and their hair too is exposed, in all its darkness and sexuality. They wear lipstick, red, outlining the damp cavities of their mouths, like scrawls on a washroom wall, of the time before. 

I stop walking. Ofglen stops beside me and I know that she too cannot take her eyes off these women. We are fascinated, but also repelled. They seem undressed. It has taken so little time to change our minds, about things like this.

Then I think: I used to dress like that. That was freedom.

That’s what I worry about: that we are forgetting that making our own decisions about our bodies is both legal and a guarantor of women’s political and social equality. Instead, we’re getting used to a vast cultural and governmental apparatus making decisions for us. We’re getting used to entertaining seriously the notion that abortion is something to be debated — that it is inherently suspect, dangerous, traumatic. Not just abortion: also birth control. Also how to define “rape.”

We are forgetting what it feels like to reject those views. Texas women who undergo state-mandated trans-vaginal ultrasounds when they seek abortions are learning to forget that this is not necessary. Women who vote for libertarian candidates learn to think that those candidates’ views on state-mandated anti-abortion policies aren’t abhorrent and inconsistent with their political/ economic views. We’re told daily about the new varieties of legitimate or forcible rapes. We’re learning that birth control is the new battleground — that maybe The Pill and the IUD ought to be taken away from us.

The second chilling this about the novel is Offred’s fuzzy memories of the years before — how they looked past the ways their society was changing:

We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.

Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it. There were stories in the newspapers, of course, corpses in ditches or the woods, bludgeoned to death or mutilated, interfered with, as they used to say, but they were about other women, and the men who did such things were other men. None of them were the men we knew. The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable. They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives. 

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print.

It’s mid-November, the worst of the crazies were not elected, but are we in 2012? The article in The Onion is not so sure. At the end, its interviewee explains that “while she was grateful upon learning what year it was, she had to admit that living in the year 2012 was still quite frightening.” Amen to that. Let’s not forget it.

Directing all my rage at Slate’s logrolling of “The End of Men”

I’m having one of those weeks. I’ll spare you the details, except that I somehow managed to orchestrate a perfect storm of incoming papers from students, crazy bad news about tenure decisions for important friends, and a long delay in getting reimbursed by my university for moving expenses. 

In response, I’d like to direct my rage at Slate.com. Why does this online journal feel it necessary to play such a major role in logrolling the new book, The End of Men, by its own editor-writer Hanna Rosin? Does it feel no conflict of interest considering that Rosin’s husband is the journal’s senior editor, David Plotz? Does this journal, owned by the Washington Post, have no journalistic credentials to uphold?

Here’s how it looks for the past 6 days:

• Friday, Sept. 14: Alyssa Rosenberg (why, Alyssa?) writes “The End of Men, Fall TV Edition.”
• Friday, Sept. 14: Rosin’s friend Emily Bazelon writes “Why Feminists Fear The End of Men,” an angry retort to a highly critical review of the book in the NY Times Book Review by historian Katherine Homans. (That’s right: let’s blame feminists, which is Slate’s bread and butter.)
• Tuesday, Sept. 18: Rosin posts three separate pieces entitled, “What Happens When the Wife Earns More?” drawn from the book.
• Wednesday, Sept. 19: Rosin appears on the Slate podcast, “The Slate Culture Gabfest,” to discuss the book with colleagues who, although ordinarily quite dependably intelligent and critical, refuse to ask hard questions.
• Wednesday, Sept. 19: June Thomas writes “The End of Men, TV Titles Edition.”

That’s right: 6 days, 7 articles. (Two of which appeared before noon today.) If only the rest of us who write books had the ability to transform one’s professional journalistic job into an in-house publicity machine.

Let’s not even mention the many other times Rosin has received logrolling attention from its staff for the same material in the past, including plugs by her husband on the podcast “The Slate Political Gabfest,” plugs for her public talks including a TED talk, plugs for her original and controversial Atlantic Magazine article that earned her the book contract, and on and on.

I can barely stand to read her arguments, which all too often take some kind of anecdote — the story of a couple in Alabama who have seen the husband’s income decline as the wife’s grows — and then extrapolates this as some kind of world-historical shift. Even worse, she cherry-picks hard evidence such as employment figures and ignores other evidence in order to hammer it into the shape of her overall argument. And worst of all, her title: The End of Men, as reviewer Homans puts it, is not a title but a sound bite utterly misleading about her argument.

After spewing all my righteous bile about Slate’s failure to act professionally with regard to one of its own editor/ writers, perhaps I should add one tiny note of relief: at least Rosin is engaging in political-cultural criticism, unlike Monday’s article about how hard it is for women with small waists and big breasts to find a bra. Seriously. Slate: the online journal equivalent of listening to teenage girls’ conversation at the mall. Kill me now.

“Snow White and the Huntsman” (2012): where do I begin?

Charlize Theron’s clothes are awesome. Like the silver-coated small-animal bones strung together in a headdress than hangs down onto her forehead:

Also, the Dark Forest is really cool, and the dwarfs are excellent.

Otherwise, Snow White and the Huntsman is a big mess of over-writing and confused themes that looks great (terrific CGI, creative ideas behind it) but feels incredibly shallow.

Now, I could complain about all manner of things, like Kristen Stewart’s acting (my friend M mused wryly as we walked out of the theater: “I sure hope Kristen Stewart never gets stuck in a paper bag”) or the preposterous notion that she is “fairer” than Charlize Theron’s evil queen Ravenna.

But let’s not be small.

Instead, let’s complain about the writing, because this film is confused (not unlike Stewart, above). What is this film about?

The original tale, as it comes to us from the Brothers Grimm, is a pretty simple catfight faceoff between an evil queen who wants to be the prettiest and a good, innocent girl whom everyone loves, especially the dwarfs. Queen puts girl to sleep with poisoned apple. Girl gets kissed by prince, and their marriage ends the evil queen’s reign. (In one particularly horrific version I still remember from my childhood, the queen gets punished by having to wear a bewitched pair of iron shoes that force her to dance until she dies. I always wanted to know why, if Snow White was so nice and all, did she permit that punishment?)

In short, the original doesn’t really leave much room for a feminist reading unless you are prone to wishful thinking, or if you are a clever writer of fan-fic. Mostly it’s a tale of men taking care of the delicate Snow White — various dwarfs and princes and whatnot — while she talks to fawns and bluebirds and perhaps sings a song. Feminist it’s not.

Snow White and the Huntsman wants to turn Snow White into an action hero. Or perhaps I should say that at some point in the writing process someone said, “What would happen in she kicked some ass?”

The writers didn’t really follow through, however. Except for that one scene in which Snow White makes a very nice running & sliding move down a drainpipe to escape from Ravenna’s castle.

Mostly she’s dragged unwillingly toward bravery, leadership, and violence by helpful men. When the Huntsman (Chris Hemsworth, aka Thor except with a Scottish accent and darker hair this time) helps her slog through the awesome Dark Forest, he slices off her ridiculously long gown to miniskirt/ thigh level to help her move.

So helpful to have those men around for their quick thinking, because no way would that have ever occurred to this Snow White.

It’s not that vestiges of a feminist vision behind the film aren’t still in evidence, but they mostly emerge from Ravenna’s mouth and/or her backstory, which are actually kind of interesting. “I was ruined by a king like you, my Lord. Men use women,” she tells Snow White’s father on their wedding night. If that seems like a kinky thing to tell your new husband, she follows it up by offing him in short order. Later, when she meets the Huntsman, Ravenna says ominously, “There was a time when I would have lost my heart to a face like yours. And you, no doubt, would have broken it.”

Of course, beyond this level of man-hating there isn’t much sisterhood. Mostly Ravenna spends her time sucking the youth out of pretty young girls … because the youth-and-beauty theme still predominates.

Helpful information: the film was co-written by three men with all-over-the-place resumés: John Lee Hancock (The Blind Side, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, A Perfect World), Hossein Amini (Wings of the Dove, Killshot, Drive), and Evan Daugherty, who has no films under his belt at all.

Now, I’m not a robot: like anybody else, I’m perfectly willing to watch Chris Hemsworth affect a Scottish accent and get sweaty and dirty as he protects Snow White.

I just had a hard time when the Huntsman tells Snow White that she needs to take on leadership in raising an army to fight the queen, and she demurs … until that magical kiss raises her from the dead and she finally assumes the role of leader —

— only to give the Worst. St. Crispin’s. Day. Speech. Ever. Let’s just say that Kenneth Branagh will not be looking to Stewart to star in any forthcoming interpretations of fiery Shakespearean heroines, at least any characters that have lines that don’t need to be mumbled.

There’s also a very confusing plotline in which Snow White is proclaimed to be “life itself” despite the fact that she brings death and destruction wherever she goes. Oy vey.

In other words, whatever impulse motivated the writing of this film (that is, beyond the impulse to create narrative set pieces in which the CGI experts could make shit look cool) ultimately falls apart because the whole thing is a mess.

What I realized after witnessing so many potentially feminist plotlines dissolve into anti-feminist helpless girl and/or catfight scenarios was that this is the quintessential statement of what media critic Susan Douglas calls “enlightened sexism” — the film makes gestures to feminism to calm us down, to remind us that it’s not a retrograde tale like the original fairy tale, but it makes those gestures merely to brush them aside and assert the same old sexism as ever. Indeed, it sells sexism to women under the guise that this sexism is somehow feminist.

In the end, it doesn’t matter that Hemsworth is a hunky bit of all right, nor that the dwarfs are enacted by an utterly delightful assortment of great actors (Ian McShane, Bob Hoskins, Toby Jones, Eddie Marsan, Nick Frost,  Ray Winstone, Johnny Harris), nor that Charlize Theron makes the best bad guy ever, nor that her clothes are so great, nor that the CGI is so watchable.

What matters is that we’ve been sold another bill of goods in the form of that red apple, people. And once you take a bite, you drop into such a deep sleep that you’ll be mistaken for dead.

‘Scuze me while I give this book my full attention.

In January of 2011 I picked up Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and could not put it down except to post an ecstatic comment about how good it was. It quickly became the book I most frequently handed out as gifts to my friends. Bechdel, the cartoonist best known for her strip “Dykes to Watch Out For,” as well as for her minimum-standard feminist criteria for seeing a film, subsequently termed The Bechdel Test, is an amazing memoirist/ graphic novelist.

Fun Home is a memoir of Bechdel’s young life told in graphic novel format – especially trying to parse out her difficult, mercurial father whose gayness stayed secretive and whose death remains mysterious.

So when I heard last fall that she planned a similar book to plumb her relationship with her mother … well, let’s just say I placed an order for the book immediately. It’s no wonder I raced to finish yesterday’s piece on maternal ambivalence and We Need to Talk About Kevin, for the subjects are twinned. It’s like the most perverse Mother’s Day idea ever. I caught a glimpse of one panel from the book, a panel that hints at the relationship between the author and her mother:

So yeah, ‘scuze me while I throw myself into Bechdel’s pages. I’m turning off the phone, curling up with the blanket and a cup of tea, and letting these images and wry, terse text carry me on a psychological rollercoaster ride – to kiss the sky, and experience my stomach drop out from under me.