Middlemarch

1

The column exists, above all, to retain reading experiences like George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-2). I was recommending it before I finished, feeling only a little temerity doing so. (A leettle.) It fills in a large gap in my knowledge of the 19^th century novel and lives up to its status as one of the greatest in English. My first comparison was to another famous writer of intimidatingly thick fictions who lived and died in the same century, Charles Dickens. His books are action-packed, move with seemingly boundless energy, and teem with characters that generally don’t reveal anything that isn’t known from the outset. Eliot is almost his opposite.

The setting is Middlemarch, a sleepy village in rural England where everyone knows each other. There are too few villagers for the novel to teem. As for what they spend the novel doing, it’s about as ordinary as it gets: A carriage ride. Sitting before the fire. Sitting in the library. Sitting down to a meal. I don’t mean a richness of the ordinary either, as in Chekhov or Carver or Munro. Externally, one can even say, a somewhat melodramatic plot development notwithstanding, it’s banal. And, at about 800 pages in the Oxford University Press edition, it’s a well-known challenge. Summarizing it, however, unlike say Don Quixote or Moby-Dick, presents another, less well-known challenge, since reducing Middlemarch to a single sentence would banalize rather than tantalize. A fellow student once asked a teacher why she liked a movie so much and she responded: “It’s about…life.” One can imagine an enthusiastic reader, at a loss for how to describe the novel’s appeal, settling, perhaps defeated, for a similar line: it’s about lives. To get more specific: It’s primarily about a group of young people, their hopes and fears and expectations, as well as the relationships they form with each other, about how their lives unfold as they age and how, in one way or another, they fail to be who they’d wanted to be. I’ll borrow the emphasis too: it’s about lives. Little may happen externally but that’s because the novel is largely concerned with what’s going on internally—not with the mind of an individual, difficult enough to present persuasively for the reader, but a group of minds, a group of distinct people, including their most tortuous and, as Cynthia Ozick describes them, gossamer thoughts with stunning precision. It’s one of the reasons why George Eliot is the sort of writer who gets deified.

 

2

Searching the archives of the New York Review of Books, I found an old piece by Harold Bloom in which he praises Middlemarch as highly as everyone seems to. Though there’s more to like in it than not, when he says she lacks a “comic sense,” I must disagree. One of the novel’s most memorable side characters is the good Mr. Brooke, who could never figure out the puzzle of woman. His conversation, rambling and littered with verbal tics, is a reliable source of amusement throughout:

‘Young ladies don’t understand political economy, you know,’ said Mr. Brooke, smiling towards Casaubon. ‘I remember when we were all reading Adam Smith. There is a book, now. I took in all the new ideas at one time—human perfectibility, now. But some say, history moves in circles; and that may be very well argued; I have argued it myself. The fact is, human reason may carry you a little too far—over the hedge, in fact. It carried me a good way at one time; but I saw it would not do. I pulled up; I pulled up in time. But not too hard. I have always been in favor of a little theory: we must have Thought; else we shall be landed back in the dark ages.’

The narrator refers to these contributions as “motes from the magistrate’s mind” and his style as “scrappy slovenliness.” Not only does Eliot create a comic figure, the novel has a surfeit of tart lines of commentary.

A man’s mind—what there is of it—has always the advantage of being masculine,—as the smallest birch-tree is of a higher kind than the most soaring palm,—and even his ignorance is of a sounder quality. Sir James might not have originated this estimate; but a kind Providence furnishes the limpest personality with a little gum or starch in the form of tradition.

Indeed, she herself was accustomed to think that entire freedom from the necessity of behaving agreeably was included in the Almighty’s intentions about families.

There are characters which are continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them. Their susceptibilities will clash against objects that remain innocently quiet.

In fact, Eliot seems to imbue a character, Mary, with, among other shared qualities, her comic sense:

At the age of two-and-twenty Mary had certainly not attained that perfect good sense and good principle which are usually recommended to the less fortunate girl, as if they were to be obtained in quantities ready mixed, with a flavour of resignation as required.

The second comparison I made is to Jane Austen, who Eliot admired. The earlier canonical figure has a quality that’s typically associated with the true comic writer: she’s merciless. In Middlemarch, Eliot proves that she could satirize if she wanted to. But her starting point takes an entire novel for Emma to even consider momentarily: she has mercy and exercises restraint.

 

3

Most every piece of writing I’ve encountered on Middlemarch reserves a few words of distaste, and only distaste, for Mr. Casaubon. His main offense is his total inadequacy as a husband, his cold treatment of his younger wife, Dorothea. Their relationship, in an image: “Mr. Casaubon kept his hands behind and allowed her pliant arm to cling with difficulty against his rigid arm.” There doesn’t seem to be a trace of sexual attraction between them and the marriage is probably never even consummated:

With all her yearning to know what was afar from her and to be widely benignant, she had ardour enough for what was near, to have kissed Mr Casaubon’s coat-sleeve, or to have caressed his shoe-latchet, if he would have made any other sign of acceptance than pronouncing her, with his unfailing propriety, to be of a most affectionate and truly feminine nature, indicating at the same time by politely reaching a chair for her that he regarded these manifestations as rather crude and startling.

He’s a stiff with no warm feelings to spare for her. He never thinks about what it’d take to be a good companion or at least to make the mismatch tolerable. What he wants is a loyal assistant with no opinions of her own for a wife. And he seems to have no idea what sort of man and husband that would make him.

But the narrator, it must be recalled, doesn’t share the common reaction: “For my part I am very sorry for him.” Though he isn’t a young person when the reader first meets him, he’s another character that represents the theme of a failed life but of a particular kind: the writer who can’t write. This, despite living in a theoretically ideal situation for such work, with no financial worries, no housekeeping or childcare responsibilities, a well-stocked library, and peace and quiet on a fine property. (In reality, a life of perfect comfort is unlikely to be conducive to a writer’s best work.) After 30! YEARS! AH! of lonely joyless toil (or “preparation”), he’s got nothing but an enormous mess to show for it. To escape this dire situation, take stock of it honestly and decide whether writing is something one really wants to do. If not, as awfully disappointing as ending nowhere near the goal may be, one can accept the loss with the dignity of honest effort and lessons learned while starting—and enjoying and even feeling grateful for—the search for more suitable work. Or, since it may be too late for someone of Mr. Casaubon’s age and he can afford it, a relaxing retirement. But if one must press on with the writing despite the impasse, being open to criticism and experimenting with a new approach would be necessary to make real progress on that front, the old approach having proven, to anyone thinking clearly, sub-optimal. Instead, Mr. Casaubon chooses doom: aversion to criticism, undue paranoid defensiveness, stubborn pride, blindness. His health suffers, and not merely from old age, one suspects. He has no friends and his enemies grow in number (in his mind though perhaps, as a result, in reality too). And he gets married only for it to be another source of self-inflicted torment: harder to cling to delusions around a witness to one’s vain gestures.

He’s spent his life shut away, laboring himself dull over an ostensibly intellectual endeavor. One piece of evidence: his twisted logic, his last, desperate hope as he approaches death, is to suddenly thrust his life’s work onto a woman he barely spoke to—actually, a woman he could barely stand speaking to—about his work or anything else, assigning her the task of somehow making sense of The Key to All Mythologies and organizing it into a final form. Eliot has mercy on him by not piling on more of the evidence that would surely be obtainable in his decades-long, utterly futile pursuit. And Middlemarch is capacious and multiform enough to contain an unforgettable glimpse into a writer’s hell without getting bogged down. Mr. Casaubon could easily be satirized—think of Max Beerbohm’s story, “Enoch Soames”—but Eliot takes him seriously and makes his fate sad, not in the condescending way the word is regularly employed today, as a synonym for “pathetic,” but truly sad. And she merely suggests that it goes further, otherwise it’d be excruciating, scary, and possibly would bog down the novel. She doesn’t plunge the reader into his hell. (There are other books for that.)

I waited to see what would become of the mess he left for his wife to clean up but, kind as Dorothea is, even she forgets about it. Turns out the narrator never mentions the fate of Mr. Casaubon’s work at all. 30 years into the trash heap, presumably. Initially thinking it was a glaring oversight, now I think of it as another act of polite discretion. Thus, the unloved Mr. Casaubon’s failure is the novel’s most complete and silently poignant. 

 

4

Compassion is indispensable to anyone seeking to live a humane life. And it comes up often in relation to literature. Some writers claim to want to be compassionate, piously at times, and, one gathers, only on the page and maybe only with the intention of being perceived as wise and highminded. The exact meaning, however, hasn’t been settled, and it’s always at risk of becoming a husk. One dubious form of compassion is a rule that says with enough attention to an individual’s background and circumstances, anyone can be raised or lowered and finally brought to near parity with everyone else. Disobey and one is to be admonished as biased, cynical, insensitive, superficial, cheaply satirical, unforgiving. I reject this—too indiscriminate, lazy and misleading in its overreliance on gray shades, potentially neglectful of those who are vigilant about overcoming the worst of themselves, too close to that dangerous precept, “love thine enemies.” Eliot evinces another, more realistic, more congenial form of compassion: attention to the individual paired with discernment, which results in grades of sympathy. She loves Caleb Garth. It isn’t hard to see why. He has a legitimate fault, though as is sometimes the case with such people, it’s bound up with what makes him lovable, hardly diminishing one’s esteem and affection for him. Mr. Casaubon certainly has his unpleasant side but, familiar with the difficulties of the intellectual life as a writer herself, especially as a woman of this period, and without scanting his flaws, Eliot emphasizes his fruitless, solitary, all-consuming struggle, his stunted existence. After all, he harms himself far more than anyone else and gets less than nothing out of it. Words of opprobrium from readers are justified but may be gratuitous. With Mr. Brooke, Eliot has her fun but it’s not harsh because, though he amiably conveys some noxious views, he’s unintentionally clownish and doesn’t mean harm. But characters like Peter Featherstone or Mr. Raffles live to test everyone’s patience, delight in causing harm, which is also true of certain people. One may call them one-dimensional but they’re not broadly sketched and, moreover, there are aspects of a person so repugnant that they drown out nearly everything else about them. Still Eliot finds an alternative angle from which to view them: their vulnerability in the face of death.

Compassion is taking care to think about how other people live, notice and feel something of their pain and suffering, and weigh everything about the whole person or, if further information is unavailable, assume that there’s more to the story. It’s sufficient to be considered compassionate for honestly giving everyone a fair chance in this way. However, that doesn’t mean, in the final analysis, that a person, once given that chance, will overcome his or her worst side, his or her most heinous crimes, or that he or she should automatically be forgiven. The reader isn’t forced into an awkward embrace.

So Eliot exemplifies real compassion. She expands her interest to a crowd of lives, without sacrificing discrimination. Occasionally she interjects to insist on our own fallibility. And, like Dorothea, she’s understanding:

The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character.

Eliot is no goddess: she doesn’t set a standard beyond the reach of mere mortals, isn’t oppressively holy and unreasonably or dangerously or impossibly objective. Better yet, she’s human and intelligently subjective.

           

4.5

Easy to throw the word “compassion” around, quite hard to practice. The many guises of human weakness together constitute one explanation why there is and always will be a dearth. Diabolism is another. Putting it at a further disadvantage are defensible modes of thinking that are difficult to reconcile with it: Reasonable suspicion, earned contempt, due paranoia. I’m not revealing much by saying I’m less inclined to search for or stress extenuating information if someone gets hostile with me for no good reason or makes my life needlessly harder. Seems only fair.

Perspective matters: If I were peering from the outside with no connection to anyone at my job and being highly generous, I could present the reader with a balanced view of my current boss—his amenable moments, the fact that he's on the clock many more hours than should be tolerated in our society for this line of work to support his kids, the way he usually seems dazed he’s so tired. But then he’s in no way similarly considerate of my situation as an underpaid essential worker whose job is doing everything (since there isn’t a janitor or a security guard). When pressed directly about questionable things he does and says or doesn’t say, he tends to respond unwaveringly with irrelevancies and fatuities (when he responds at all). Point this out, rudely or not, and he stares blankly (he may as well have his mouth open and drool running down his chin). He has an opinion about how many times the bathroom should be used during a shift. He’ll complain about an employee moving too slowly and, in the same breath, moving too quickly. He’s incompetent, irresponsible, and “well wadded with stupidity.”  One of the worst managers I’ve ever had, who creates problems where most others know not to and will never take a share of the blame for himself. He does his part to make this a shit job and there’s little chance he’ll be held accountable and formally punished, much less fired, though he has the authority to do so to others. In fact, his mediocrity will probably be rewarded by the (proudly anti-union) company. Fantastic job, warm body. By treating him gently, I’d be inaccurately describing my experience as an employee for the sake of sparing an undeserving person with power (miniscule though it may be). Or to take another, different example from work: A former coworker is capable of being polite and friendly and doing his job adequately. But by refusing to weigh everything about him properly, with a sense of urgency, including all the times he displays erratic, wildly inappropriate behavior, the manager ignored the potential danger he is to himself and others. Being clear about who someone is and responding properly isn’t merely an abstract literary consideration. It can be a matter of safety, of life and death.

In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election as president, one common criticism against the left was that it lost because it failed to think about—to have compassion for—the problems that most affected Trump voters. Does the most loyal Trump voter give any thought to the struggles faced by leftwing voters? Policy proposals from the left include: Universal healthcare. Demanding an increase in the federal minimum wage. Better regulation of drug prices. Treating climate collapse as a grave threat demanding sensible emergency measures. And so on, all of which would apply to and benefit everyone, Trump voters included. A meaningful argument can and should be had about the policy details. But if the proposals themselves should be rejected, an argument against them and for another set of policy proposals that address those issues, backed up by fact and sound reasoning, similarly taking everyone’s well-being into account, and able to withstand scrutiny as a viable alternative, would be the expectation from the opposition. However, since such arguments don’t exist on the right, what the US voter gets from them instead is: some mention of the routinely discredited theory that giving handouts to needy millionaires and billionaires will eventually heal the nation, otherwise known as trickle-down economics, vilification of LGBTQ+ people and immigrants, attacks on basic rights, climate change denialism, cheers for political violence, and significant support for a Republican frontrunner for president whose grand alternative is vowing “retribution” for an election he has no evidence was stolen from him and, on that basis, committed an act of treason against the country he wants to lead, which he still congratulates himself for. On the state and federal level: Will the system hold? Will democracy, our semblance of it, survive? There’s no such thing as compassionate authoritarianism.

Sigmund Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents, rages bitterly (and humorously) against the Christian precept "thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself”:

"Not merely is this stranger in general unworthy of my love; I must honestly confess that he has more claim to my hostility and even my hatred. He seems not to have the least trace of love for me and shows me not the slightest consideration. If it will do him any good he has no hesitation in injuring me, nor does he ask himself whether the amount of advantage he gains bears any proportion to the extent of the harm he does to me. Indeed, he need not even obtain an advantage; if he can satisfy any sort of desire by it, he thinks nothing of jeering at me, insulting me, slandering me and showing his superior power; and the more secure he feels and the more helpless I am, the more certainly I can expect him to behave like this to me. If he behaves differently, if he shows me consideration and forbearance as a stranger, I am ready to treat him the same way, in any case and quite apart from any precept. Indeed, if this grandiose commandment had run 'Love thy neighbor as thy neighbour loves thee,' I should not take exception to it. And there is a second commandment, which seems to me even more incomprehensible and arouses still stronger opposition in me. It is 'Love thine enemies.' If I think it over, however, I see that I am wrong in treating it as a greater imposition. At bottom it is the same thing."

He wrote these words as the Nazis ascended to power.

 

5

Middlemarch provides more evidence that the flaws of the total novel are inherent to the form. For a while there I thought Eliot might pull it off but, alas, there’s a noticeable drop in quality in the final book of the novel, which includes a climactic scene of powerful cheesiness. (The aroma suggests Berkswell but the taste contains strong notes of Cornish Yarg.) With that number of pages, such novels are part records of waning stamina. I don’t have as much of an issue with Eliot’s interjections: at times she explains her approach, coming off as slightly too eager to defend herself, but on the whole I find them illuminating and lightly metafictional (as opposed to emphatically or strenuously metafictional). Allow me to add this. But these are quibbles. I recommend it again with the confidence that comes with having actually finished the book.

DA at the Movies, June 2023

Zola, Janicza Bravo (2020, now playing on Tubi)

A woman named Zola, in her day job as a waitress, takes an order from a female customer, Stefani, who commends her on her breasts. The customer is so taken by her, in fact, that she goes to the kitchen area, where she isn’t allowed, to continue talking. The women become fast friends. They text. (Zola’s boyfriend stares at her as she looks down at her phone. “Are you listening to anything I’m saying?”) They confide in each other. They use the word “bitch” to refer to each other in a friendly way. By night the two women work as strip club dancers. One day Stefani calls Zola about driving down to Florida to perform for a weekend. Amused, Zola asks: “We’re already planning hoe trips together?” She presses Stefani for more information and at first she’s evasive. But finally she gives Zola enough to satisfy her. She’s picked up by Stefani, her boyfriend, and another man, the driver, who doesn’t introduce himself. Eventually Zola learns that there’s more to the trip than she’d been led to believe, prompting her to start using the unfriendly (classic?) meaning of bitch.

But this isn’t strictly a tense crime film. It’s more of a realistic horror comedy, neither element diminished by the other. It's a frightening situation and Bravo, in her debut film, doesn’t stint on the uglier aspects of this precarious lifestyle: racism, intimidation, violence, sexual assault, human trafficking. And yet it’s undoubtedly a hilarious situation too. It takes an unconventional approach to storytelling, integrating aspects of modern communication, namely social media. The screenplay is based on a viral Twitter story. One risk is that it’d come off as merely anecdotal, with nothing more to say beyond: wasn’t that crazy? To an extent, it does come off as if someone is recounting everything she can remember about her long crazy weekend: slightly disjointed, a string of details and revelations without necessarily careful development, an abrupt close. These rough parts and a few others are compensated for, however, by the seriousness with which the director treats her subject, the danger that these women are in (though only one seems to fully grasp it), the squalor. 

The whole cast deserves applause. Riley Keough, as Stefani, is good enough—superficially charming, casually manipulative, giving no thought whatsoever to the consequences of her actions—to overcome one’s sense that she’s a bit too Hollywood to convince as a woman living this sort of harrowing and none-too-profitable life, though she doesn’t entirely capture the real woman quoted in the movie itself. My personal favorite is the star, Taylour Paige, whose reactions alone are enough for me to think back on and laugh about. Some priceless alchemical mix of fear and stinkface. Though there’s no fear when the audience last sees her.

A new addition to my personal movie canon. Needless to say: not for kids or the easily offended.

 

Man on Wire, James Marsh (2008, now playing on Hulu)

An example of a life that quite readily lends itself to biographical treatment: Philippe Petit chose to live it risking death, and in rare fashion, as a specialist in wire walking. Although Man on Wire isn’t a thorough account of the whole life. It’s about him up to a certain age and the stunt that would make his name. In 1974, at 24 years old, Petit walked on a wire he and his crew strung between the then-unfinished World Trade Center towers.

One aspect of the richness of biography are the stories within the story, the savory particularities that are less likely (or less savory for being purely functional) in a narrowly focused, plot-driven or fictionalized work. He’s 17 when the idea for his grand stunt comes to him, at the dentist’s office, reading a newspaper piece about the building’s construction. Consumed with it, he tears the piece out and leaves before receiving treatment. Years later, after Petit makes it to New York from his native France, he’s secretly inspecting the tower when he steps on a nail. He’s laid up in bed for three days. Then, getting around on crutches, he discovers that they make him appear vulnerable and unsuspicious. Guards hold doors and help him. So he keeps using them even after he’s healed. One neat directorial decision is a moment of alignment: the music stops and the story ends on a photograph of Petit, standing on top of the tower, balancing a crutch on his forehead.

(However, the documentary falls short of five-stars due to other small decisions.)

Years ago, I read about a musical group that, as a stunt, parked a truck in the middle of an LA freeway and performed on it. They were arrested and, as far as I know, no one protested the injustice. A headline: “Horrible band causes horrible traffic jam to promote horrible song.” Like that horrible band, Petit has no official sanction. A notion about our society tickles me: some things are technically illegal but, in this case, the only person who’s likely to get hurt is Petit and his accomplices are welcome to back out at any time—so come on! Don’t be a square bear. Scheming that is in no way dastardly. Exceptions to the law for imaginative and wondrous and fairly responsible violations.

His ex-girlfriend, in a talking head interview, gets emotional talking about it. His best friend, in his interview, tears up at the memory and stops speaking. A guard who was there to stop him becomes transfixed in something he realizes is like nothing he’d ever seen before and would never see again. As the cops take him away, reporters breathlessly ask him: Why? I chuckled but I’d been thinking the same. The planning, the time and money investment, the devotion of his assistants. To what end, really? A moment? Petit responds: “The beauty of it is that I didn’t have any ‘why?’” I understood beforehand that this would be an impressive, awe-inspiring feat. But Man on Wire proves him right about that and more, showing the beauty of the vision, the process, and the act.

Under arrest, Petit balances a cop’s hat on his nose.

 

Terminator 2, James Cameron (1993, available on Netflix)

Subtlety isn’t generally associated with the action movie genre but, watching possibly the greatest action movie of all time yet again, I think that’s precisely what separates James Cameron’s Terminator 2 from most every other I’ve watched. Others have met, perhaps even exceeded, his standard for the obvious part: explosions, special effects, gripping vehicular chase sequences. The difference is what connects them.

A reminder of the plot: In the future, there’s a cataclysmic war between humans and killing machines. The leader of the human resistance is John Connor. He reprograms one of the machines, a Terminator, and sends it to the past to protect his teenage self. Meanwhile, the machines send an advanced version of the Terminator, the T-1000, to the past to kill John Connor. In the past, the teen John Connor (Edward Furlong, in a remarkably assured debut performance) informs a friend that his mother is in a mental institution. After surviving the first movie, she’d been training and targeting those responsible for creating the killing machines that would threaten to destroy humanity when she’s caught. John believes she’s crazy and nurses hate for her. But when the Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger, recently forced to address sexual misconduct allegations) arrives and saves his life, he realizes everything she’d been saying was true.

The first thing to appreciate in what happens next is quality plot development: John is hit by guilt. Now he wants to rescue her. A transition to the next action sequence that makes perfect sense for the future leader of the resistance. But before the audience is rushed off to that, one of the movie’s major themes is established when the Terminator says no. Relying purely on machine logic, John’s sudden demand makes no sense: his mission is to protect him and he’s willingly making that mission harder. There’s a standoff between them, marking the line between human and inhuman.

The same scene, in the parking lot, continues. John Connor wants to check on his foster parents. He walks to a nearby pay phone. But he doesn’t have a quarter, so the Terminator smashes it, sending the quarters within streaming out. A lesser movie wouldn’t see the opportunity to do something with this. Connor could have just taken a quarter and called. Instead, Cameron gets a laugh, underscores the Terminator’s machine thinking and strength, and builds the pair’s relationship. Three things where there could have easily been nothing. These freighted moments are embedded throughout.

So often I’ve made it to the credits and felt empty even when I’ve been given precisely what was advertised. The answer: One-dimensional moviemaking. Too much blank space, weight and emotion an afterthought. Terminator 2 is an exceedingly rare example of a multiplicity in the action genre.

 

Brain Damage, Frank Henenlotter (1988, almost gone from the Criterion Collection)

It’s a comedy horror movie that, along with his earlier Basket Case, makes me more wary of self-consciously campy cinema. A man wakes up feeling strange. He discovers blood in his bedsheets. He experiences a euphoric hallucination (gets super high). When he enters the bathroom, the tub has been filled with water. He tells the intruder to come out. What responds is a talking penislike creature. It wishes to make a deal: it’ll excrete the chemical that got him high if he’ll escort it outdoors from time to time so it can feed. The man agrees. When high, he doesn’t notice that the creature feeds on human brains. What makes the movie campy is that it’s low-budget, shlocky, and heavy on wooden acting and dialogue. Practically the whole movie is a wink to the audience, which is another way of saying that there’s no serendipity. The ancient drugpushing penis monster started singing and I wasn’t entertained. But there are a couple of elements that can be taken at face value: Henenlotter’s use of visual effects to depict the euphoric high and the drug addiction theme. In the latter case, it’s not much: the desire for the drug high can override morality. Digging beneath the camp, thinking it might be cover for a more profound idea, I’m twice left cold.

 

The Thing, John Carpenter (1982, available on Tubi)

An ancient alien creature has been discovered buried in ice and awakened. It absorbs and imitates other life forms and now it’s hidden among the men in a camp in Antarctica. Awareness of its presence instantly spreads a sense of paranoia, a perspective that sometimes gets belittled but, in this instance, as in others, is perfectly defensible. One is in imminent danger but doesn’t know when the monster will strike, what shape it’ll take, or who can be trusted. Loneliness, unchecked paranoia, and an overpowering sense of doom lead to panic, baseless accusations, and impulsive violence that would only be doing the monster’s work for it. Before chaos and madness engulfs them, however, reason intervenes, setting up the central conflict: some of the men try to orient themselves with the facts and devise a plan for identifying and destroying the true threat.

The movie takes a varied approach, working as much with sustained uncertainty and dread as repulsive body mutations and blood. It doesn’t continually feed the audience gory scenes, letting the viewer imagine what happens to certain members of the crew and providing effective (as opposed to cheap) shocks when the reveal comes.

From the director of such movies as Escape from New York and They Live, I get a strong sense of political commentary, however oblique. Though there are only men in the film, one is soon put in mind of nations: first the Norwegians, then the Americans. One way to view it is as a story about the potential breakdown of civilization. With this in mind, the anonymity of the characters works in its favor, making it easier to imagine oneself in their shoes. Carpenter preserves pace without a loss.

The first time I watched the movie, back in college, I guessed, based on the ending, that it was adapted from fiction (from a short story, to be precise, but it was actually based on a novella—another form that works on compression, so damn! I am always, at the very least, partially right). I’m sure it would leave some viewers dissatisfied but I think it’s shrewdly ambiguous. Despite the best of efforts, undertaken on the fly, perhaps no one will be saved. Even so, I’m not left paralyzed by despair. It’s a pessimistic but realistic possibility. Yet every time the monster is stymied and forced to retreat even momentarily, I inwardly pumped a fist.

To top it off, the score was done by Ennio Morricone.

 

Jade, William Friedkin (1995, almost gone from the Criterion Collection)

The movie, a dreadful erotic thriller, has a little something for every ridonculous movie fan: Intrusive music that alternates between thunderstorm melodrama and silky sexy travesty. Gratuitous nudity. Questionable acting choices. Laughable cuts. Distracting visual allusions to the title. Dangling plot threads. A headache-inducing degree of incoherence. And one of the greatest lines of ridonculous dialogue. David Corelli (played by CSI: Miami’s David Caruso) is inspecting a crime scene, in a bedroom. He opens the mini-fridge, then turns away, contemplating its contents before solemnly exercising his powers of deduction: “Cristal, Beluga, Wolfgang Puck: It’s a fuckhouse.” Though I wondered why he never flashes a badge or a gun, I still had no idea Corelli isn’t a cop until I read about the movie afterward. (He chases a murder suspect in a car, conducts what appears to be an interrogation, is always accompanied by cops, who tend to lead murder investigations….) Parts of it can be singled out and enjoyed.

But running through the whole movie is a blatant and rather sickening misogynistic streak. Three of the four roles played by women (half of which are insignificant) include one whose screen time is basically reduced to performing oral sex on a male character out of nowhere. Another woman gets scratches and bruises on her face that may or may not have been sustained while in police custody. She’s a prostitute threatened into speaking up without a lawyer present and treated like a hardened criminal. Not the slightest hint of a moral qualm about that or anything else. Later, she dies brutally. And the woman in a starring role plays a would-be femme fatale who’s no more than a conveniently duplicitous sex object passed between male characters and the victim of the movie’s nasty ending. The attitude behind Jade is too chilling to ignore or wave away as another product of ineptitude. It’s trash: too trashy to be wholly fun.

Studies in Ridonculousness: No Brakes

Canonically terrible movies don’t necessarily start that way. Some begin passably enough and only gradually fall apart. Some flip a switch, the drop in quality hilariously fast and shocking. Replicas, a cheap sci-fi thriller directed by Jeffrey Nachmanoff and starring Keanu Reeves, is the kind of terrible movie that doesn’t manage to get through scene one without doing something wrong. A scroll through its page on Rotten Tomatoes shows near-universal exhaustion and disdain among those pesky reviewers: important clues for ridonculous movie adventurers such as myself. I was amused but also fascinated. Terrible movies can put in sharp relief how much a good filmmaker does right.

Awestruck string music typically plays when something uncanny is depicted onscreen: superpowers, futuristic technology, alien cities, and the like. It’s the musical equivalent of the oohs and aahs that are the desired audience response. Usually I barely notice the convention. However, I noticed it here because it perplexed me, playing while neuroscientist William Foster (Reeves) does nothing more than swipe at a screen. The screen is projected onto the air, which is slightly if unimaginatively advanced, I suppose. But it’s hard to tell what this is accomplishing with regard to his experiment to transfer a dead person’s consciousness to a robot seated before him. Taken by itself, the visual effect doesn’t appear much different than playing Woodoku on a phone. When the transfer is complete and the robot comes to life (briefly, so to speak), it may as well have been done using Claymation, so jarring is the chintzy artifice.

Keanu Reeves, one of the greatest action stars of all time, isn’t the center of the action but the drama. Without explosions and gun-fu, he never quite comes off right: impassive, muted, awkward, tone-deaf. Consider the scene after the opening. The experiment is botched. Afterward, William's boss tells him the program is soon to be shut down and he’ll be out of a job. “This is my life’s work,” William says flatly. It soon ends with him saying “oh shit” and running out the door, as if he accidentally left the stove on. One would expect him to be radiating misery and preoccupation, unless he’s a more optimistic or eccentric or slippery sort. But no, the crumbling of his life’s work simply appears to be of little consequence.

He arrives home to his wonderful family as they prepare for a trip. He and his wife, Mona, played by Alice Eve, have a conversation about…the morality of William’s work, I believe. (It goes by in an instant and is as quickly forgotten by everyone involved, audience included.)

The family is on the road when a storm breaks out and they’re nearly hit by an oncoming truck. Mona suggests getting off the road to wait it out. William ignores her, as if he’s driving alone. Moments later the car hits a fallen tree branch and careens through a barrier and over the side of a cliff, into a body of water. Everyone dies except William who, aside from some blood splashed on his forehead (possibly not even his), is completely unscathed. The normal reaction would be to call for emergency medical care. Silent anguish. Crippling guilt. Maybe tears. But William, previously displaying no signs of madness, sees an opportunity in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy to experiment on his family and turn them into clones. He calls an assistant from his laboratory, Ed, to come and help him, no questions asked. When the assistant, played by Thomas Middleditch (an actor I've since found was accused of sexual misconduct) arrives and learns what’s going on, he suggests calling “the police or somebody.” After this bit of token resistance, he agrees to drag four dead bodies from the site of an accident in the middle of a stormy night and transport them to William’s house.

Ed: “What if something horrible happens?”

William: “Who gives a fuck?”

That’s not what William says but I feel it better reflects the movie’s attitude toward the implications of his experiments.

Ed, again with no further resistance, goes on to commit another major crime by stealing technology worth millions of dollars (and somehow walking out with it) and setting it up in William’s basement. But there aren’t enough vats for every member of his family, so he’s forced to choose one of his children to leave out of the experiment, though not before trying to delegate the terrible decision to his assistant, who refuses, finally putting his foot down in this one minor matter. And that’s not enough for one night! William also decides it’s a bad idea to preserve the memory of his youngest daughter in the rest of his family’s minds, so he deletes her in them and sets about erasing any evidence of her existence in the house.

The next morning, Ed, somehow rested and rather unshaken, leaves saying, “good luck.” Just another end of the day at the office.

And so on through nearly two hours.

All action thrillers contain a measure of absurdity, which is either part of the fun or beside the point. Take, for example, another Keanu Reeves movie I watched on Tubi recently, Speed (1994). Absurd in many ways yet there’s balance, as it does a number of things successfully, by standard measures: A memorably over-the-top concept (a bus armed to blow up if its speed dips below 50 mph). Surprise casting (Jeff Daniels as a cop, huh. Dennis Hopper, what the? Cameron! [Alan Ruck.] The guy [Carlos Carrasco] from Blood In, Blood Out! aka Miguel’s Citizen Kane). Charming side characters, who eventually turn the speeding bus into an impromptu party to celebrate ingeniously averting death repeatedly, a mood that infects the viewer. In a vivid, sprawling Los Angeles, CA. Sustained tension, even as the movie gets more and more pleasurably absurd. And Keanu Reeves at his best. It was only during this latest viewing that I remembered how the villain, an elderly man whose revenge motive doesn’t make a whole lot of sense (though what sense did the Unabomber make?), who’s somehow planting sophisticated bombs in conspicuous locations unassisted and largely undetected, is otherwise knowledgeable of every single move the police make to stop him, asks for a surprisingly unsupervillainous sum—a few million dollars, to support himself adequately in his old age—and is fooled by false bills that burst blue paint in his face. (The canvas bag they’re contained in doesn’t have a $ sign on it.) Perhaps this is true of other such action movies, but especially here one can imagine, at least vaguely, easier, less costly ways to resolve this situation. Instead, the crazed bombing campaign and the operation to stop him causes extraordinary chaos, including: countless car accidents on the freeway, a destroyed bus, a destroyed passenger plane, and a subway train wreck. Mass injuries, lives lost, 8- or 9-figure property damage! It was costly but it was, by conventional measures, an adventure. Neither can be said of Replicas. The concept is basic sci-fi. Everything else about it tips entirely toward (pleasurable, unplanned) absurdity, placing it firmly in the category of the ridonculous: Its attempts to establish tension. Its indifference toward logic and moral conflicts and probably sound science. Its special FX and action. Its practically non-existent characters. Best of all, those constant twists, up to the very last image.

Ed the assistant (his life!) says: “Let’s pump the brakes on the crazy train.” First of all: This is about 45 minutes into the movie, well after departure. Second: It's a crazy train. There are no brakes on a crazy train. The ride ends, as Keanu Reeves showed us decades ago, when you run out of track.

The Answer Has Finally Arrived: Be Cooler

     Will Lloyd, writing for the New Statesman with his collar popped (one hopes), diagnoses the problem with today’s “literary man”:

The irrelevance of male literary fiction has something to do with “cool”. A few years ago Megan Nolan noted – with as much accuracy as Woolf on these men in Mrs Dalloway – that it might be “inherently less cool” to be a male novelist these days. Male writers, she continued, were missing a “cool, sexy, gunslinger” movement to look up to.

Despite the claim of Woolflike penetration into the pathetic gender, it’s unclear precisely what's meant by cool. After all, there’s a simple definition and there’s the subjective standard. Women writers apparently meet his standard. So what is it? In any case, he does provide a couple of relatively more precise examples of what it’s not, in the form of uncool bestselling modern writers, one of whom, loyal readers will recall, I became intimately familiar with recently. And he reminds readers that the currently unfashionable Ernest Hemingway was once considered the standard of male cool, overlooking something that would give him a clue as to the ultimate value of his subject: Times change and what was once cool, sooner or later, rightly or wrongly, is going to be far from it, because fashions and loci inevitably change with them. Jazz was once synonymous with cool. Now most people don’t know anything about it, won’t deign to sit through it. My first encounter with the word “misogyny” was as praise in the pages of Rolling Stone, when the publication esteemed the Rolling Stones’s Aftermath for its “misogynistic cool.” A line like that probably wouldn’t slip by unnoticed in a major (centrist or leftwing) publication today. A later generation will define itself by rejecting what was once cool, labeling it antiquated, oldfashioned. So, in a way, it doesn’t matter if Lloyd elaborates on his image of cool because whatever it is won’t be. No one and nothing in history has ever sustained that status in the wider world.

Nor does Lloyd enlighten the reader on why it matters to be cool in the first place, or why men are too inept to write anything of literary merit without a living paragon of cool to shepherd them. This implies that a living paragon to all younger, aspiring women writers does exist, the unanimous model and inspiration and shepherdess for them all. In his lack of fine distinctions, Lloyd is paying these writers less of a compliment than it would at first seem.

I haven’t banished that word from my vocabulary. It makes for a good dry monosyllabic response. Sometimes, depending on the situation and my degree of wonder or approval, I spell it with upwards of six o’s. It has its uses. As does its opposite: I've been known to find things uncool too. However, when faced with what I consider to be a great work and a great writer, searching for the words to convey my enthusiasm and admiration, to settle on “cool” would be glib at best. “Cool,” as a concept taken seriously, is better fit for more self-obsessed pursuits like branding and influencing.

Almost all the writers I think of as models are dead. And there isn’t a single one I desire to emulate in every way, down to style of dress. In an imagined meeting between us, it’d surely make things awkward, especially as one gets older. And it’d kill any chance of being original. And it’s a better tribute not to dare. My model, my guide of guides, is necessarily a composite figure, with parts that aren’t me cut out, and imbued with qualities derived from men and women. In the future, this could extend to people who identify as neither. Some of those qualities include: Bravery. Intelligence. Scrupulousness. Humor. Compassion. “Cool”: fine as a casual compliment, tawdry compared to the higher virtues.

A satire: the man who, fearful of his irrelevance and the irrelevance of all male writers, takes up the mantle of cool.

For someone so confident and unsparing in his ridicule (a ridicule devoid of irony) of the sad and deluded and uncool (who could easily be man or woman or neither), the quality of Lloyd’s argument—a straw man, a glaring factual error, general shakiness due to lack of support—is surprisingly poor. Quite uncool of him. Was he wearing a pair of aviator shades when he wrote this? Dizzy from the AXE body spray fumes? Use responsibly!

And, no, I don’t secretly care about cool.

Swept

     “Hey. Hey bro. Do you know where the ladder is, I—hey! Where are you…?”

“Thank you. Thank you, bro.”

“Can you check me out?”

"Thank you, bro. Just getting something to eat. I’m bout to go on my break.”

“Hey, you don’t have to clean, I’ll clean, it’s too early to clean. I can clean in twenty minutes. You need to work on the rolltainer in the back. You need to put away all that dirt [bags of potting soil], bro, I mean….”

“Hey, you don’t get a break, bro. You started at six-thirty. I saw.”

“Hey, you need to tell me if you’re going to take a break. I’m busy. I need to watch the register.”

“Hey, you don’t have to do that [put away the dirt]. Just clean and do recovery. On the shelves.”

“I said you don’t need to do that. Bro. BRO! Man, this guy doesn’t listen.”

“Hey. Hey bro. Can you clean? I want to get out of here on time, bro.”

“Hey bro. How long is it taking you to sweep? You want me to sweep? Hey, hey BRO!”

“Hey. Hey BRO! You’re just gonna leave that broom there? That’s your broom. You need to, like, put it away. No one wants to clean up after you.”

“HEY! I asked you to lock the door! Now someone just walked in here! I mean, bro, I want to get out of here on time, bro.” The columnist heard his name called but, having chosen silence this shift, didn’t reply. Locking the front doors is something he never does. He’s not even 100% sure how to lock the doors. He’d ask but….

The columnist refers to the notebook that lists tasks for the night. Once finished with each task, he’s written “finished” next to it. Notice he hasn’t crossed out each task on the list as he finishes. That’s because his coworker doesn’t understand what crossing something out on a list means. He suspects it’s an attempt to obscure the writing and get out of work, giving him no choice but to start yelling. This coworker, if it hasn’t already been made clear, is the authority figure on site.

The manager has written something the columnist hasn’t seen before: that he should be ready by the time his coworker is ready. He takes between five to ten minutes after lights out. Reasonable, he thinks, for someone working right up until then, which would be the typical expectation for the closing shift at a job. Nevertheless he must have received complaints. This could only mean: be ready at the exact same time as the person he’s working with or earlier, despite not knowing when exactly someone will finish. But he takes heed. A minute later and the coworker he’s paired up with tonight will start yelling.

The columnist stands reading about gold mining in South Africa in The New Yorker, ready to leave.

“Hey. Are you gonna put away the broom? That’s your broom, bro. You left it there.”

“Hey. That broom is still there. Can you put away that broom? You left that broom there, right? That’s your broom, bro!”

“Hey! Your broom! Put away your broom! Are you listening? Hey! Man.”

“Man! I mean, bro! Your broom! It’s in the back! That’s your broom, bro! I don’t know what’s up with this guy. You crazy, man.”

“Put away your BROOM! That’s your BROOM! You left it there, right? Man, I’m calling [manager]. We’re not leaving til you put away that broom. I really don’t like working with you, for real, for real. Voicemail.”

“He’s here right now. He’s just standing there. Hey! Put away your broom! He won’t put away his broom.”

After he returns to the back, the columnist picks up the notebook and writes in the margin beside the list of tasks: [Coworker] yells a lot.

“If you wanna go home, go home, bro. It’s like you don’t want to be here, bro. I don’t get you.”

“You should leave. Just unlock the door and leave. This guy. Won’t put away his broom. I don’t know why they put us together.”

“Man, let’s get out of here. Unlock this door. You ready? What’s going on? Unlock this door. You can go home early. I hope I never work with you again.”