A Decent Factory

Finding myself reading, once again, the film criticism of Stanley Kauffman from the year 2005, and coming across a review of a documentary called A Decent Factory, about a Nokia cellphone assembly factory in China, I paused at a passage in which Kauffmann poses a challenge to one of Karl Marx's better-known observations on Labor. Kauffmann mentions the working conditions in the factory:

"As far as the workers' comments are concerned, the only complaint we hear is about the food, which they find poor. They often slip out at night to buy food. And one woman reports a fight that another of the women had with a rough-tongued female supervisor. The one true grievance we do not hear from any of the women: we learn it from one of the bosses in a matter-of-fact way. The average pay is only about half the legal minimum wage. The factory had been built in China because labor is cheap, and it is being further cheapened. When the inspectors later report this fact back in Finland, management promises to do something about it.

"As the film progresses, expectation of exposé dwindles. Half salary is hardly a trifling matter, but the factory seems well enough run and is apparently a haven for some of the young women whose homes are a lot less attractive. Why, then, is the picture chilling? Because it is a calm reminder of an inevitability. The sight of long lines of young women doing tiny bits of attachment work or packing hour after hour, day after day, is saddening. The fact that the factory conditions are decent, as the title says wryly, makes it even sadder. Marx said that the alienation of labor--the gap between the worker and his work--is an evil of capitalism, but this is too limited: factories like this one flourish everywhere under every system. Marx's percept is not a charge against a system but a condition of modernity. Thousands of factories around the world where the attaching and packing go on and on--it's like Chaplin's Modern Times without Charlie."(1)

I'm not certain whether or not Kauffmann is being disingenuous here. He knew enough about Marx's idea of alienation to recognize it in the Nokia factory, but he must've known that China is only nominally a Marxist society. Finland (or, for that matter, the USA) is closer to being a Marxist society that communist China. Besides, China has embraced market capitalism on an unprecedented scale in order to expand its economy. This has created, as Marx predicted, enormous inequalities in China that didn't exist before - inequalities between people who want nothing more than a decent life and people who want impossibly more than they will never need.

Marx put it succinctly: a worker in a capitalist society "does not fulfil himself in his work but denies himself, has a feeling of misery rather than well-being, does not develop freely his mental and physical energies but is physically exhausted and mentally debased. The worker, therefore, feels himself at home only during his leisure time, whereas at work he feels homeless. His work is not voluntary but imposed, forced labour. It is not the satisfaction of a need, but only a means for satisfying other needs."

Marx knew that as long as the nature of work, which reduces the worker himself to a commodity, remains the same, work will forever be reduced to an utterly depersonalized and soul-destroying repetition of manual tasks. Almost seven years ago, I wrote about Oscar Wilde's brilliant pamphlet, which is utterly forgotten today, "The Soul of Man Under Socialism":

Wilde's vision of Socialism is unorthodox and often unrealistic. At times, when he discusses work and the freedom from work that he believes Socialism promises, he sounds like Eric Hoffer's remark about the modern "worldwide revulsion for work. To the new generation, 'la dolce vita' is not a life of plenty but a life of as little effort as possible."

Wilde believed that some time in the future all menial labor will be performed by machines, and men and women would be completely free from toil, suffering, and pain. He seems to think that work itself, and not just the motive behind it, will be eradicated under Socialism. I don't think that any socialist thinks this way. Work, which is mostly mindless toil, even for the middle class, will attain its true purpose once the motive behind it (making a living) is changed. Work, I think, is essential to living when it places the individual in the position of realizing that he is not simply an individual, but a part of a huge organism that is more than the sum of its parts. Soldiers find this out, whether they serve in combat or not. And its why they are willing to lay down their lives. They recognize probably more directly than anyone else the meaning of human brotherhood.

Marx elaborates: "Let us suppose that we had carried out production as human beings. Each of us would have, in two ways, affirmed himself, and the other person. In my production I would have objectified my individuality, its specific character, and, therefore, enjoyed not only an individual manifestation of my life during the activity, but also, when looking at the object, I would have the individual pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective, visible to the senses, and, hence, a power beyond all doubt. In your enjoyment, or use, of my product I would have the direct enjoyment both of being conscious of having satisfied a human need by my work, that is, of having objectified man's essential nature, and of having thus created an object corresponding to the need of another man's essential nature ... Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature."

Wilde concludes his essay in quite uncharted territory:

"It will, of course, be said that such a scheme as is set forth here is quite unpractical, and goes against human nature. This is perfectly true. It is unpractical, and it goes against human nature. This is why it is worth carrying out, and that is why one proposes it. For what is a practical scheme? A practical scheme is either a scheme that is already in existence, or a scheme that could be carried out under existing conditions. But it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to; and any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish. The conditions will be done away with, and human nature will change. The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development."

Wilde even defends his "scheme" against the charge of Utopianism:

"A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias."


(1) Stanley Kauffmann, The New Republic, July 4, 2005. It is well known that Chaplin had "communist sympathies." In Modern Times, there is a scene in which a truck carrying a load of lumber passes him and the red flag hanging off the end of the load falls on the ground in front of Charlie. He picks it up and, waving it, chases after the truck. Just then a large group of communists waving their red flags rounds the corner and marches right behind Charlie. The police arrive and Charlie is arrested.
(2) "A Brotherhood of One" May 10, 2012.

Just the Facts, Ma'am

Finding a new (old) essay by Dwight Macdonald I've never read before is always an event in my life. The fact that Macdonald wrote voluminously on just about every subject that caught his critical eye makes the search for all of his individual pieces that much harder. In the essay "The Triumph of the Fact" he examined how facts have gradually come to dominate Americans' lives, at the expense of some rather more precious things:

"Our mass culture—and a good deal of our high, or serious, culture as well—is dominated by an emphasis on data and a corresponding lack of interest in theory, by a frank admiration of the factual and an uneasy contempt for imagination, sensibility, and speculation. We are obsessed with technique, hagridden by Facts, in love with information."

He begins this wide-ranging (11,000+ word) essay by pointing out something that can be found in the very first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, that will come as something of a shock to fans of the Benedict Cumberbatch television series or the Guy Ritchie films:

Soon after he started sharing quarters in Baker Street with Sherlock Holmes, young Dr. Watson was shocked to find that his brainy friend was an ignoramus:

Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naïvest way who he might be or what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican theory and of the composition of the solar system. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled around the sun appeared such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.

“You appear to be astonished,” he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. “Now that I do know it, I shall do my best to forget it.

Holmes then develops a rather bogus theory about the brain being like an attic with a fixed capacity. “Depend upon it,” he concludes, “there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.” This is too much for the good doctor:

“But the solar system!” I protested.

“What the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently. “You say that we go around the sun. If we went around the moon, it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”

Macdonald then asserts that "Holmes's attitude is American" - but of the old fashioned kind, like Ben Franklin's. Dr. Watson, a physician, was a perfect foil to Holmes's kind of intelligence, relying on the collection of facts to back up his conclusions. Watson is, after all, the amanuensis who wrote all the Holmes stories (with the considerable help of Arthur Conan Doyle).

But Macdonald isn't trying to change anyone's mind about the genius of Sherlock Holmes. He is trying to demonstrate how our American preoccupation with facts is eclipsing another approach to the world around us. As to Holmes's willful ignorance of the Copernican solar system, Macdonald goes so far as to agree with him:

"There is something magnificent about this carrying the principle of utility to its logical conclusion. And Holmes was right to insist that the only good reason for acquiring any knowledge, even of whether the earth goes around the sun or the moon, is its utility for the individual knower. But his idea of utility was too narrowly practical. Like Holmes, I know little about the physical sciences and am not curious to know more— pace Sir Charles Snow—but my lack of interest is due not just to their irrelevance to my professional needs but, more important, to my feeling that they aren’t useful to me in a broader sense, one which Holmes’s logic doesn’t recognize—they don’t appeal to my kind of mind and feelings. Others do find the physical sciences “useful” in this sense, as I myself find literature and history and philosophy “useful,” and so they are rightly concerned to know that the earth goes around the sun rather than the moon. (I do happen to have picked up that particular bit of information somewhere, but in general, when the solar system is on the agenda, I feel like echoing, “What the deuce is it to me?”)(1)

Holmes is purely a work of fiction, but in creating him, Doyle did something to detective fiction that transformed it completely. It's no accident that an American writer, Poe, invented the detective story, "the only literary genre" Macdonald asserts, "whose point is the discovery, by scientific method, of a Fact (whodunit?)". But the circumlocutions through which Holmes arrives, as if by a miracle, at the solution of the most mysterious crimes are in defiance of the common rules of crime detection. His famous powers of deductive reasoning are the fruit of lightning inspiration, insight, imagination. The route he follows in order to arrive at a solution to the most seemingly complex problems can't be mapped - if it could, then anyone could be a Sherlock Holmes by simply following the same steps. That is the scientific method. Yet Watson discovers that his flatmate at No. 221b, Baker Street has abundant practical knowledge on some subjects, but it is undisciplined and "unsystematic," whereas his knowledge of philosophy, astronomy, literature, and politics is nebulous. Though he seems to possess vast intellect, Holmes is not, strictly speaking, much of an intellectual. He is demonstrably closer to being an artist.

As Macdonald concludes,

A hunter looks at a wood in one way, an artist in another. The latter’s eye takes in every twig, branch, trunk, shadow, color, highlight, etc. The former’s eye also records all this data, but his mind rejects everything except the particular Fact (brown fur, speckled feathers) it is looking for. The hunter knows what he will see (or rather, what he hopes he will see) before he looks. Since the artist’s aim is to render the wood in itself and as a whole (he may do it by three lines, as in a Chinese landscape, or by a Dutch proliferation of detail) his problem is how to be conscious of everything. The hunter’s problem is just the reverse: to be conscious of only what he has decided, in advance, to see. The same distinction could be made between the way a Wordsworth looks at a field and the way a farmer looks at it.

We Americans are hunters rather than artists, a practical race, narrow in our perceptions, men of action rather than of thought or feeling. Our chief contribution to philosophy is pragmatism (pragma is Greek for factum); technique rather than theory distinguishes our science;[9] our homes, our cities, our landscapes are designed for profit or practicality but not generally for beauty; we think it odd that a man should devote his life to writing poems but natural that he should devote it to inducing children to breakfast on Crunchies instead of Krispies; our scholars are strong on research, weak on interpreting the masses of data they collect; we say “That’s just a fact” and we mean not “That’s merely a fact” but rather “Because that is a fact, there is nothing more to be said.”

This tropism toward the Fact deforms our thinking and impoverishes our humanity. “Theory” (Greek theoria) is literally a “looking at” and thence “contemplation, reflection, speculation.” Children are told: “You may look but you mustn’t touch,” that is, “You mustn’t change what you look at.” This would be good discipline for Americans, just to look at things once in a while without touching them, using them, converting them into means to achieve power, profit, or some other practical end. The artist’s vision, not the hunter’s.

One of the things that Macdonald wrote that I remember most often is his debunking the Latin saying "De gustibus non est disputandum" or "There's no arguing about taste." Macdonald asked the simple question, "if you can't arvue about taste, what CAN you argue about?" You can't argue with facts. It's why so many people probably prefer them to expressions and demonstrations of taste. 

(1) Then there was George Bernard Shaw's argument: "I have pointed out on a former occasion that there is just as much evidence for a law of the Conservation of Credulity as of the Conservation of Energy. When we refuse to believe in the miracles of religion for no better reason fundamentally than that we are no longer in the humor for them we refill our minds with the miracles of science, most of which the authors of the Bible would have refused to believe. The humans who have lost their simple childish faith in a flat earth and in Joshua's feat of stopping the sun until he had finished his battle with the Amalekites, find no difficulty in swallowing an expanding boomerang universe."

The Queer One

Writing recently about the film My Left Foot, I found the following passage in the book written by Christy Brown, who was disabled by cerebral palsy when he was still a baby. When his mother noticed something was wrong with him and she consulted doctors, 'They assured her that nothing could be done for me. She refused to accept this truth, the inevitable truth - as it then seemed - that I was beyond cure, beyond saving, even beyond hope. She could not and would not believe that I was an imbecile, as the doctors told her. She had nothing in the world to go by, not a scrap of evidence to support her conviction that, though my body was crippled, my mind was not. In spite of all the doctors and specialists told her, she would not agree. I don't believe she knew why - she just knew, without feeling the smallest shade of doubt... Finding that the doctors could not help in any way beyond telling her not to place her trust in me, or, in other words, to forget I was a human creature, rather to regard me as just something to be fed and washed and then put away again, Mother decided there and then to take matters into her own hands. I was her child, and therefore part of the family. No matter how dull and incapable I might grow up to be, she was determined to treat me on the same plane as the others, and not as the "queer one" in the back room who was never spoken of when there were visitors present.'

Those words of Christy Brown's, 'the "queer one" in the back room,' were chilling to me because I encountered just such a person myself a few years ago. I was momentarily visiting the house of a neighbor here on my Philippine island. I use the word "house," but it was a shack made out of whatever materials were available - part plywood, part corrugated roof (used for one wall), part bamboo, etc. The roof was thatched grass. There was no furniture, there were three rooms for what I thought was five people: a woman named Maricel and her husband and their three small children. But all the while I was sitting there in that impossibly small sala, unbeknownst to me, there was another occupant, Maricel's eldest daughter, who was lying quietly concealed in the back room. From what I managed to find out later, this child had had cerebral palsy as a baby and suffered the same disabling effects as Christy Brown. Except this child, named Christina, hadn't the advantage of a mother who was confident enough in her intelligence to not hide her away from the world, depriving her of an education and the prospects of a full life. This was also true of people with other disabilities. I knew two more people in the village, a man and a woman, who were deaf and who never married - as if there was a fear that the disability would be passed on to their children.

In one of the stories in the second volume of Turgenev's wonderful A Sportsman's Sketches, the narrator describes an encounter that is so strange, one feels that it must have been based on the author's experience. Out hunting one morning, the narrator looks for some momentary shelter from a sudden rain shower:

"I turned along this path; I reached the beehive. Beside it stood a little wattled shanty, where they put the beehives for the winter. I peeped into the half-open door; it was dark, still, dry within; there was a scent of mint and balm. In the corner were some trestles fitted together, and on them, covered with a quilt, a little figure of some sort.... I was walking away....

'Master, master! Piotr Petrovitch!' I heard a voice, faint, slow, and hoarse, like the whispering of marsh rushes.

I stopped.

'Piotr Petrovitch! Come in, please!' the voice repeated. It came from the corner where were the trestles I had noticed. I drew near, and was struck dumb with amazement. Before me lay a living human being; but what sort of a creature was it?"

He then describes to us from whom - from what - the voice was coming:

"A head utterly withered, of a uniform coppery hue--like some very ancient holy picture, yellow with age; a sharp nose like a keen-edged knife; the lips could barely be seen--only the teeth flashed white and the eyes; and from under the kerchief some thin wisps of yellow hair straggled on to the forehead. At the chin, where the quilt was folded, two tiny hands of the same coppery hue were moving, the fingers slowly twitching like little sticks. I looked more intently; the face, far from being ugly, was positively beautiful, but strange and dreadful; and the face seemed the more dreadful to me that on it--on its metallic cheeks--I saw, struggling...struggling, and unable to form itself--a smile."

He discovers that the person lying there in the shed is a woman named Lukerya: "I did not know what to say, and gazed in stupefaction at the dark motionless face with the clear, death-like eyes fastened upon me. Was it possible? This mummy Lukerya--the greatest beauty in all our household--that tall, plump, pink-and-white, singing, laughing, dancing creature! Lukerya, our smart Lukerya, whom all our lads were courting, for whom I heaved some secret sighs--I, a boy of sixteen!"(1)

She describes to him how she came to be as she was, transformed by her "misfortune." She had gone out in the moonlight to admire a nightingale and had a bad fall. She says that she felt something had broken inside her. She took to her bed and slowly changed into the "creature" he saw before him.

Ever since I first read the story decades ago I have been haunted by that woman lying alone for days and weeks in a shed where her family, at a loss about what to do for her, had placed her, looking in on her every day. Reminded of her by Christy Brown, I read the story again. I managed to locate, simply by typing the names "Lukerya" and "Turgenev" in my search engine, an article online from the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine that offers a diagnosis of Lukerya's condition: "We have come to the view that Lukeria's features are all consistent with scleroderma (systemic sclerosis) of the diffuse type." The authors also offer insight into the impact that Lukerya's condition had on her psychological state. Starting with her description of her state of mind, which is unusually cheerful given her circumstances, they concluded that:

"It is noteworthy that despite the chronicity and disabling
nature of her condition, Lukeria displays none of the expected
behavioural features. Indeed, the narrator is amazed by 'the
almost gay manner in which she was telling her story, without
groans or sighs, never for a moment complaining or inviting
sympathy.' She gets enjoyment from helping the orphan girl to
learn singing: '“I've been teaching her and she's picked up four
songs already.”' She uses such distractions to cope with her
disability.'“Yes, I sing songs, the old songs, roundelays, feast
songs, holy songs, all kinds! I used to know many of them after
all; and I haven't forgotten them.”' She demonstrates a strong
internal locus of control as well as valuing interaction with
other people. She tells us that 'people must help themselves'.
Lukeria also uses reverie as a form of coping:

'“Sometimes I lie by myself like I am now—and it's just as if
there was no one on the whole earth except me. And I'm the
only living person! And a wondrous feeling comes over me, as
if I'd been visited by some thought that seizes hold of me—something
wonderful it is....It comes out like a cloud and pours its rain
through me, making everything so fresh and good.”'

This is an example of 'dissociation'—a term that embraces minor
events such as day-dreaming through to more extreme states where
individuals 'remove' themselves mentally as a coping mechanism.
Dissociation can be a positive experience for individuals coping
with trauma or other distress. Dissociation permits the isolation of a
traumatic experience until the individual feels able to cope with it."

The striking aspect of this research paper is its thoroughness. If you look at the credentials of the first two contributors of the report, they speak to their specialties in physical and psychological illnesses. The third name, Nigel North, is followed by a homely "PhD". Mr. North's contribution to the report is its literary content, which has significant bearing on the broadness of its scope. He provides for us some valuable background on the writing of the stories in Turgenev's Sportsman's Sketches:

"Although Living Relic was not published until 1874 (to raise
funds in a year of famine in Russia), it almost certainly relates
to the times described in A Sportsman's Sketches published
between 1847 and 1852, and therefore before the emancipation
of the serfs. Turgenev, born in 1818 and brought up on his
mother's estate at Spasskoye, south of Moscow, was aware of
the injustices of life for the serfs under the Tsarist regime. His
experiences at Berlin University made him an advocate of
progress in the Western European mode.

We have presented Turgenev's Lukeria as a likely case of
scleroderma/systemic sclerosis. We do not know that Turgenev
had any special interest in medical matters (although he is
certainly able to laugh at doctors' expense in this tale), or of
any acquaintance of his who had this type of illness. But his
description is so precise and life-like that we feel it must have
been based on someone he knew. Scleroderma had been
described at the probable time of writing (1850–1870)—
especially in French publications although the earliest
known description is Italian. The systemic nature of the
diffuse form of the disease was not recognized until the 20th
century.

While Turgenev's stories are much loved because of their
intriguing descriptions of his characters' personalities and
their interactions with one another, his Sportsman's Sketches
threw into relief the plight of the unenfranchized serfs of
Russia at that date and what westernized minds saw as
appalling social injustice. Turgenev was consequently regarded
as subversive and was effectively exiled to France. In Living
Relic , however, Lukeria's plight results not from social injustice
but the vagaries of nature; indeed her 'owner' (Pyotr's mother)
arranges for her to see a doctor and offers hospital treatment.
Turgenev's epilogue for the story, whether the suffering was
manmade or natural, was taken from his fellow-Russian poet
Tyutchev's stanza: 'Homeland of suffering: thou art the land of
Russia'."(2)

Not just Russian serfdom, but poverty and ignorance resulted in the isolation of Lukerya from society. Neither knowing what afflicted her nor what on earth to do with her, she was put away in an isolated shed, just as Maricel's daughter was put away in "the back room." In the U.S., such persons would be provided with the proper care that would grant them as full a life as they were able to live. To deny them that would arouse an outcry of protest. But we Americans enjoy the luxury of a rather more humane view of people with disabilities. Or so we like to pretend.


(1) Constance Garnett's translation.
(2) "Turgenev's 'living relic': an early description of scleroderma?" by Richard M. Ellis FRCS FRCP, Rupak Moitra MRCP, and Nigel North PhD, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Aug 2005. The article can be found here.

Christchurch

America is such a relatively new place, especially the farther west you go, that you can often find yourself living in a community, or a part of a community, that is barely as old as you are. They have the strange feel of transient places, and the people who live there are itinerant, having moved there for a job or to start their lives afresh with a new family. I have lived in a few such communities, in Colorado and Alaska.

In New England, an old part of America, there are old places where people have been living for centuries. But because such places are in rural parts of the country, remote from large cities, or because they are poor communities in inner cities like Boston, parts of them are abandoned and fall to ruin. Robert Frost was a New Englander, though he was born in San Francisco. His poetry has strong associations with New England, and Amy Lowell, a member of a very old New England family, wrote about New Englanders in her review of Frost's second book of poems, North of Boston:

"What is there in the hard, vigorous climate of these states which plants the seeds of degeneration? Is the violence and ugliness of their religious belief the cause of these twisted and tortured lives? Have the sane, full-blooded men all been drafted away to the cities, or the West, leaving behind only feeble remainders of a once fine stock? The question again demands an answer after the reading of Mr. Frost's book... Mr. Frost has reproduced both people and scenery with a vividness which is extraordinary. Here are the huge hills, undraped by any sympathetic legend, felt as things hard and unyielding, almost sinister, not exactly feared, but regarded as in some sort influences nevertheless. Here are great stretches of blueberry pasture lying in the sun; and again, autumn orchards cracking with fruit which it is almost too much trouble to gather. Heavy thunderstorms drench the lonely roads and spatter on the walls of farm-houses rotting in abandonment; and the modern New England town, with narrow frame houses, visited by drummers alone, is painted in all its ugliness. For Mr. Frost's is not the kindly New England of Whittier, nor the humorous and sensible one of Lowell; it is a latter-day New England, where a civlization is decaying to give place to another and very different one... His people are left-overs of the old stock, morbid, pursued by phantoms, slowly sinking to insanity."

In his last great, flawed, poem, "Directive," from his 1947 collection Steeple Bush, Frost described what his world had come to:

Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.


Since last Friday, when news of the mass shooting in New Zealand broke, I've been watching the images of the mourners and the flowers left at the places in Christchurch where the victims had fallen. Such killing sprees are a routine occurrence in America, but now they seem to be spreading, along with the racist doctrine that inspires them. But New Zealand is reacting to their mass shooting differently. Cearly, something extreme needs to be done in response. And it's getting done. It's a marvel, really, to watch how a society based on some of the same principles as our own, with even some of the same liberties, is dealing with an atrocity that is the "new normal" in the USA. America is a new place but New Zealand, which became an independent nation in 1907, has something it can teach us.

In his book, New Hampshire, Frost included poems that seem to follow me wherever I go. I returned to one of those poems over the weekend:

IN A DISUSED GRAVEYARD

The living come with grassy tread
To read the gravestones on the hill;
The graveyard draws the living still,
But never any more the dead.

The verses in it say and say:
'The ones who living come today
To read the stones and go away
Tomorrow dead will come to stay.'

So sure of death the marbles rhyme,
Yet can't help marking all the time
How no one dead will seem to come.
What is it men are shrinking from?

It would be easy to be clever
And tell the stones: Men hate to die
And have stopped dying now forever.
I think they would believe the lie.

My Left Foot

Back when assisted suicide was occupying a lot of attention, a play was produced on Broadway in 1978, and then adapted to film in '81, called "Whose Life Is It Anyway?" It was about as extreme an argument for the "right to die" for an otherwise helpless person, paralyzed from the neck down, on life-support perhaps indefintely, who has decided that he wants to die. The film, starring Richard Dreyfus, wasn't easy to sit through, and not just because of the prevailing fatalistic tone (we know how the story ends). But I wonder if Christopher Reeve had seen it, too, and what he might have said about it after a riding accident in 1995 left him similarly paralyzed. I commented elsewhere about the heroism of Reeve, how he made a mockery of the asininities behind comic book superheroes. He showed more strength and courage in his last days than Superman, Spiderman, and the X-Men put together.

But Reeve was paralyzed by a riding accident. What about the people who were born with incapacitating disabilities, like cerebral palsy victims? Jack Kevorkian, the notorious "Doctor Death" who was prosecuted repeatedly for his participation in assisted suicides, once admitted that he knew people born without arms or legs who had more of a will to live than most fully-equipped, perfectly ambulatory people do. This will, or determination, to not be prevented from living a full life by a lack of mobility, to overcome physical shortcomings and disabilities of all kinds, is a blow struck against misfortune (and what used to be called fate) as well as a source for great storytelling. Telling his own life story, in his own words, with his own toes on his left foot, the only one of his extremities that he could control, was Christy Brown's great achievement (he was also a novelist and a gifted painter - with his foot!), and the Jim Sheridan film My Left Foot (1989) is a moving, funny, defiant kick in the balls of disability.

The first thing we see is his electric typewriter. Then a bare (left) foot appears and dexterously removes a standing record from its sleeve, places it on a player's spindle, turns it on and puts the needle down. Pausing the turntable, then letting it go ("Un'aura amorosa" from Mozart's Cosi fan tutte), we follow the camera up to his face, as he looks defiantly at us for a moment ... and the story begins. On his way to receive an honorary award, a convoy of white Rolls Royces glides up to a house in Crumlin, a suburb of Dublin, to carry Christy and his whole family to Trinity College.

Christy Brown was a marvel. No one has been quite able to explain why English literature is populated by so many Irish geniuses. Swift, Shaw, Wilde, Joyce, Flann O'Brien, Brendan Behan, Benedict Kiely, Colm Toibín. Christy Brown occupies a place in their company, but how he got there sets him quite apart. He was a victim of cerebral palsy as an infant that left him unable to walk or control his limbs. His poor family couldn't afford "special needs" treatment or formal education. He was kept at home, loved by his family, but until the age of five when it was discovered he had a perfectly normal intelligence, he was thought to be as mentally disabled as he was physically.

Ireland is a thoroughly Roman Catholic country. The church became ingrained in their national character because it was one of the things that distinguished the Irish since the 16th century from their English occupiers. One of the unfortunate consequences of this was the enormity of Irish families, because the Church prohibited the use of contraceptives (it still does). Christy was one of thirteen children.* But it was the unified strength of the support of his family, especially after the death of their father, that is one of the salient ingredients of this beautiful film.

The Irish cast of heretofore unknowns - outside of Ireland - is, except for Fiona Shaw as Christy's carer, perfect. Especially wonderful is Brenda Fricker as Christy's mother - a woman for whom the word "indomitable" was coined. She is the one who makes the scene of the discovery that Christy can write (the word "Mother", but as Christy tells it, he wrote only the letter "A") so very touching, when, in any other actor's hands, it could've been so treacly. She cries, but they are the tears of overwhelming pride in a child she always believed in. Ray McAnally, as Christy's father, is the perfect combination of a poor man's bull-headedness, but also his pride in the only things he managed to produce in abundance, his children.

But it's Daniel Day Lewis who deserves the highest praise in a role that so many actors seek but so few are capable of playing. With Sheridan's help (they would work together again in two more films, In the Name of the Father [1993] and The Boxer [1998]), Day Lewis clears away every bit of potential sentimentality into which playing such a role threatened to sink him. I am always wary of films that portray the lives of people who are physically impaired. Too often, the actors use it as an excuse to show off their laziness by leaning too heavily on our natural sympathy for them. Think of Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman. However much that script (by Bo Goldman) tried to make him into a prize asshole, he winds up tugging at your heart strings, whatever the hell they are. Sheridan is helped abundantly by Christy's story, which he sticks to faithfully, structuring scenes around their unfolding when a nurse assigned to escort him at the award ceremony reads My Left Foot. By never once asking for our pity, Christy gains our greatest sympathy.

Happy Saint Patrick's Day.


* In his own words, Brown gives us his family's tally: "I was born in the Rotunda Hospital, on June 5th, 1932. There were nine children before me and twelve after me, so I myself belong to the middle group. Out of this total of twenty-two,
seventeen lived, but four died in infancy, leaving thirteen still to hold the family fort.

Stagecoach

Something bad is happening to John Wayne and, by extension, to the history and culture of which he is a part. A 1971 Playboy interview was unearthed recently in which the Duke voiced some predictable opinions about politics, the war in Vietnam, and the state of American culture. Wayne was in his 60s and he had a dim view of the youth culture ("hippies"), the anti-war protests, and the film Midnight Cowboy. He also expressed views that were racist and homophobic, which has led some younger readers - bless them - to immediately strike Wayne's name from their list of American heroes. 

In his Guardian piece on the subject, Caspar Salmon quotes the late Roger Ebert: "the film’s attitudes toward Native Americans are unenlightened. The Apaches are seen simply as murderous savages; there is no suggestion the white men have invaded their land ... Ford was not a racist, nor was Wayne, but they made films that were sadly unenlightened.”(1) 

First of all, Roger Ebert has no business apologizing for the alleged sins of John Wayne and John Ford. That is not in his job description. I don't share the views that John Wayne has been called out for, 48 years later (I'm sure there were plenty of people who disagreed with him then), but John Wayne was speaking for himself - not a representative of a country or a party or a group. And he was perfectly free to say whatever he wanted on any subject under the sun. The asininity of this kind of crying over spilt milk makes me wonder how many American "heroes" would stand up to such standards if they were examined in the harsh light of today? What made All in the Family such a funny and important television show in 1971 (the same year of Wayne's Playboy interview) was that it gave Archie Bunker a stage on which to clearly and unapologetically express his reprehensible views. But producer Norman Lear and Carroll O'Connor himself knew that, while most of their audience was laughing at Archie Bunker, some of them were laughing with him. Somehow it was more acceptable - and palatable - in 1971. So why isn't it today, considering how much more informed and "enlightened" we think we are?

Anyone with rudimentary experience, the slightest contact, with history must realize after awhile that the people who lived in the past demand the simple application of some context when we try to understand them, the things that they said and the choices they made. In many cases, it's the only way we can make sense of the past. The incomprehension of the young at what was acceptable in the past, at so many things that cause (sometimes justifiable) outrage today, is an injustice to the past. In many cases, we fall short of their standards of intelligence and civility, so how can we expect them to conform with our standards?

Now that I've got that out of the way, let us consider John Ford's classic film Stagecoach. The 1930s was an important decade for Ford. He had applied his filmmaking skills to a broad spectrum of subjects and earned considerable critical acclaim, so that by the time he returned to a genre that he helped establish as a staple of American film in the 1920s, a genre that was, until the 1960s, exclusively American, he was ripe for a masterpiece.

In the opening credits, the musical direction is attributed to Boris Morros: "Musical Score based on American folk songs adapted by ..." and it lists five names. Against a bright sky, we see a stagecoach cross the frame, followed by a troop of uniformed riders. The music is familiar, including (somewhat incongruously) "I dream of Jeannie with the light brown hair". But then we see another group of riders, indians with long hair and bandanas - and rifles, and the music switches to dums and ominous minor chords - the same music used in countless Westerns whenever "hostiles" are shown. When the action begins, two riders are approaching a military outpost (in Monument Valley, which was protected as a national park, but Ford was permitted to film there as long as they left no permanent traces). Inside the command post, the news arrives that the hills are full of Apaches and are under the leadership of "Geronimo".

When the stagecoach arrives in town, we are introduced to the principal actors in the drama: Buck, the stagecoach driver (Andy Devine); Lucy Mallory (Louise Platt) on her way to join her husband; the notorious gambler Hatfield (John Carradine); Doc Boone (Thomas Mitchell), who quotes (garbled) Marlowe as he is being evicted and can't control his drinking; Dallas (Claire Trevor, who got top billing in the credits), who gets kicked out of town by the Law & Order League for reasons that are left to our imaginations; the marshall (George Bancroft); and Gatewood, the bank manager (Berton Churchill) who embezzles the miners' payroll for himself. We hear of the Ringo Kid early on, wanted for busting out of jail, but he (John Wayne) doesn't appear until well into the journey to Lordsburg (18 1/2 minutes into the film, and one of the greatest entrances ever). The coach is full, but since the hills are full of Apaches, the Ringo Kid is a welcome addition. He sits on the floor of the coach.

Lucy gives birth enroute, having concealed her delicate condition from everyone, especially the Hays Office, Dallas turns out (like we didn't expect it!) to have a heart of gold, Ringo proposes to her, the embezzling bank manager is nabbed in Lordsburg, and Hatfield, for all his notoriousness, turns into a nobleman - even though he was on the verge (before taking an Apache bullet) of executing Lucy rather than see her defiled by the "savages."

Andy Devine isn't yodeling nearly as much as he did as he grew older. John Carradine finally got a plummy role he could sink his teeth into (he reminded me of Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday in Tombstone). And John Wayne, who wasn't yet a star, was never more beautiful than he was in Stagecoach. Ford made him a star, just as Kurosawa did for Mifune. The chase scene, shot on the Bonneville salt flats (I once drove across it myself) lasts almost a full six minutes and is still exciting - Yakima Canutt's stunts are still unsurpassed. David Lean must've been thinking of it when he conceived the crossing of the Nefud Desert in Lawrence of Arabia. And when the scene with Bogart and Claude Rains at the end of Casablanca was done, how can anyone not have remembered the end of Stagecoach? Ringo and Dallas ride away in the wagon, leaving Curley and Doc Boone in the street.

Curley: Doc, I'll buy you a drink.
Doc Boone: Just one!

And Gatewood's bilious speech about the government, "America for Americans!" "the government must not interfere with business!" "reduce taxes!" and "what this country needs is a businessman for president!" - lines that are so presciently full of shit, coming from such a crook and coward, how could anyone not hear him and laugh out loud about our present president?

Ford made some Westerns that were more conventional (Fort Apache, probably his most boring) and others that were less conventional (The Searchers, for better and worse, stands way out). Probably because of its bigger budget, Stagecoach fits into the former niche. But for a few nice touches here (the beauty of his framing of interior scenes at mid level - ceilings! ceilings!) and there (the lighting and noise of Lordsburg at night), I find it hard to place it among his best films. I know well enough that calling a film a "classic" can be both a tribute and a kiss of death. (The only thing I don't like about Turner Classic Movies is its middle name.) The occasional process shots, done on a sound stage with rear-screen projection or merely backdrops of landscape or sky, are feeble, especially after going to all the trouble of Monument Valley.

But it's hard to resist this 80 year old film, even with its hideously Shermanesque view of native Americans (according to Sherman, the only good one was a dead one). The irony is that Ford gave them employment when he shot on location, despite the stereotypical roles he gave them as well as at a great deal less than scale as extras. But what would history be without irony?



(1) "Should we be surprised by John Wayne's racist and homophobic views?" The Guardian, 20 February 2019.

Song of the Prairie

On seeing a puppet show - probably Punch & Judy - Oscar Wilde said, "What an economy of means! And an economy of ends!" I'm certain that the puppet films of Jiří Trnka would change his mind. A painter, sculptor, and illustrator, Trnka (1912-1969), turned to making "puppet films" at the age of 33, and over a career spanning just 18 years he made a handful of delightful films. Given the amount of time it takes to shoot just a few minutes of stop-motion animation, most of his films he made were shorts, but he also managed to make several feature-length films, including The Czech Year (1947), The Emperor's Nightingale (1949, released in the U.S. in 1951 with a narration spoken by Boris Karloff), an animated version of Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier Svejk (1955) and A Midsummer Night's Dream (1959). Trnka was directly involved in the creation of his "puppets," but he also designed the settings and backgrounds of his films. The figures themselves don't speak (though they sometimes sing), and their facial expressions rarely change, which simplifies the animation process. Trnka's films attracted attention for their unique artistry, but also because they were different from Disney's animation in their use of human figures.

Just after making The Bass Cello in 1949, an adaptation of a Chekhov story, Trnka made Song of the Prairie, a 21-minute tribute to American Westerns, and a sweet upstaging of John Ford's Stagecoach (1939). One of the things Sergio Leone taught us is how easily the Western film could be boiled down to its essential elements. How a certain landscape (desert, a single building or cluster of buildings on the edge of the wilderness), a railroad track and a train (even if the train whistle was all wrong), cowboy regalia (the hat, the boots, the gun belt, perhaps the chaps), and, perhaps the most important element, the silence, could be used as signals, indicators, around which nothing much needs to happen, can add up to an entire film. An evocation of a genre, without the slightest authenticity. Figures from fantasy. What we also learned from Leone was that Hollywood, where the genre had originated, had been doing the same thing for decades - relying on stock figures, props, costumes, and stories that dealt out morality in either primary colors or black and white.

80 years later, the figures that appear in Stagecoach, Ford's first great Western of the sound era, have become archetypes: the Andy Devine coachman, the Thomas Mitchell alcoholic, the John Carradine card-sharp, the John Wayne hero. They all appear in Song of the Prairie. A stagecoach is pulled along by a team of four horses, two men sitting atop, a pipe-smoking driver and another man riding shotgun, who never stops drinking from bottles of whisky under his seat, tossing empty bottles along the route, with a conspicuous black case conspicuously marked with the word GOLD, and two passengers inside, a large bewhiskered man who remains asleep throughout, and a lone woman, who knits a large sock and who stabilizes the tottering sleeper now and then. A bird flies alongside, chirping, and the woman sings with it. The men atop, and even the horses, turn to watch, enchanted by her song. They are soon joined by a lone rider, who sings, ducking as empty whisky bottles fly past (John Wayne's Ringo Kid doesn't sing, but Gene Autry and Roy Rogers did). The woman hands a red book to the rider, riding alongside the stagecoach. He throws it in the air and shoots his pistol at it, the coachman catches it when it falls and passes it back to the woman inside. Still singing, she holds out the woolen sock she's been knitting and he takes it. Holding it aloft, the rider waves goodbye to her with his hat, his clever horse spinning triumphantly. On the pages inside the book are bullet holes in the shape of a heart.

The stagecoach arrives in a darkened canyon. The stagecoach stops when a man appears on the trail. He climbs aboard and charms the woman with a card trick. Night falls. The crew and passengers adjourn at a farm house. A coyote sings plaintively in the distance (an English horn). Trnka turns the card sharp into the villain, and the attackers of the stagecoach into Mexicans, and they are after the gold. It is guarded by the heavy-drinking coachman, who is sleeping it off atop the stagecoach. He has run out of whisky, so the bandit poisons one bottle and offers it to the guard. He drinks it down, and the only ill effect the poison has on him is that when he spits whatever his spittle hits is vaporized.

The next morning, the stagecoach continues on its journey. The bandits attack on horseback and the woman cries for help. The singing cowboy hears her and gallops to the rescue, tracking the stagecoach by the many empty whisky bottles along the trail. He arrives on the scene in time to see the villain riding away with the woman across his saddle. The hero shoots all the bandits and chases the card-sharp into the canyon. Trnka creates enough surprises to make the hero's triumph both exciting and funny.

Having seen the end-credits of Coraline (2009), I knew how many people (more than 500) were involved in its making, but, being old-fashioned I suppose, I sought out one person, or perhaps two, in the credits to whom I could assign ultimate credit for the film, if only in my own head. I am not an auteurist, but I've grown comfortable with the idea that, generally, every film can be attributed to a single guiding intelligence, whether it's a director or a writer or a producer. I may be completely spoiled, but my ideal in the case of stop-motion animators is Jiří Trnka.

Best Served Cold

It's hard to believe, but it has been almost a month since offhanded comments made by actor Liam Neeson in an interview with The Independent caused worldwide consternation and even raised questions about the future career of the actor. To refresh our 25-day-old memories, here is what Neeson said when he was asked where he found the revengeful rage exhibited by his character in a new film called Cold Pursuit.

It begins as an explanation of how his latest character turns to anger. “There’s something primal – God forbid you’ve ever had a member of your family hurt under criminal conditions,” he begins, hesitantly but thoughtfully. “I’ll tell you a story. This is true.”

It was some time ago. Neeson had just come back from
overseas to find out about the rape. “She handled the
situation of the rape in the most extraordinary way,”
Neeson says. “But my immediate reaction was…”
There’s a pause. “I asked, did she know who it was? No.
What colour were they? She said it was a black person.

“I went up and down areas with a cosh, hoping I’d be
approached by somebody – I’m ashamed to say that –
and I did it for maybe a week, hoping some [Neeson
gestures air quotes with his fingers] ‘black bastard’
would come out of a pub and have a go at me about
 something, you know? So that I could,” another pause,
“kill him.”

Neeson clearly knows what he’s saying, and how shocking it is,
how appalling. “It took me a week, maybe a week and a half, to
go through that. She would say,‘Where are you going?’ and I
would say, ‘I’m just going out for a walk.’ You know? ‘What’s
wrong?’ ‘No no, nothing’s wrong.’”

He deliberately withholds details to protect the identity of the
victim. “It was horrible, horrible, when I think back, that I did
that,” he says. “And I’ve never admitted that, and I’m saying it to
a journalist. God forbid.”(1)

The reaction - you'll recall - to these words was swift and unanimously negative. I saw it myself here on the other side of the planet, in my Facebook news feed, and on CNN. It was so swift, in fact, that Neeson found it necessary to appear on Good Morning America the very next day (Tuesday) to reassure us that, according to The Washington Post,

“I’m not racist. This was nearly 40 years ago . . . I had never
felt this feeling before which was a primal urge to lash out.”

The actor added that he believes he would have gone
through with his plan if the opportunity arose, but that he
would have reacted the same way if the rapist had been
white because “I did want to lash out, yes, because my
friend was brutally raped and I thought I was defending her
honor.”

“If she had said an Irish, or a Scot, or a Brit, or a Lithuanian,
I know I would’ve felt the same effect. I was trying to . . .
stand up for my dear friend in this terrible medieval fashion,”
he said. “I’m a fairly intelligent guy, that’s why it kind of shocked
me when I came down to earth after having these horrible
feelings,” he added. “Luckily no violence occurred — ever.
Thanks be to God.”

Neeson said he thinks people can unconsciously harbor
racist thoughts. “We all pretend we’re kind of politically correct.
I mean, in this country, it’s the same in my own country, too, you
sometimes just scratch the surface and you discover this racism
and bigotry, and it’s there,” he told [Robin] Roberts.(2)

However misguided Neeson's remarks were, how he meant them to be taken and the way they were taken by everyone who heard them were poles apart. In the Independent interview, he spoke about his childhood, growing up in Belfast, Northern Ireland. (He's now 66, so he was 18 in 1970.)

“I come from a society – I grew up in Northern Ireland in the
Troubles – and, you know, I knew a couple of guys that died on
hunger strike, and I had acquaintances who were very caught up
in the Troubles, and I understand that need for revenge, but it
just leads to more revenge, to more killing and more killing, and
Northern Ireland’s proof of that. All this stuff that’s happening
in the world, the violence, is proof of that, you know. But that
primal need, I understand.”

Neeson had a tough upbringing. He's a tough guy. He has certainly been playing tough characters for the last ten years of his career, even though they look and - more significantly - move more easefully than he can (he said he was giving up action films in two years - four years ago). He was doing a junket - a day-long marathon of short interviews with dozens of journalists from all over the world plugging his latest movie in release. He was maybe a little tired of answering the same question for the umpteenth time and he tried to pull out of himself something a little more personal than the same old answers he had already supplied a dozen or more times. His story, if true, is truly terrible. If he had encountered a "black bastard" when he went on his rampage - a rampage that, astonishingly, went on, he said, for a week, "maybe a week and a half" - would he have carried out his vengeful plan and, if he had been confronted, beaten the man to death?

Neeson reminds me of something I read a long time ago, not at the time it was published (I was 4 years old), but some years later. In 1962, Miles Davis was interviewed by Alex Haley for Playboy. It was an eye-opening conversation. Haley asked him, "Do you, in your position as a famous Negro, meet prejudice?"

Davis : I told you, someway or other, every Negro meets it, I don't care who he is! . . .

Haley : Have you always been so sensitive about being a Negro?

Davis : About the first thing I can remember as a little boy was a white man running me down a street hollering "Nigger! Nigger!"

Davis was speaking from a life experience as a "negro" (he was 36 in 1962). What he wanted us to know was how a decade of success and fame as a world-renowned jazz artist didn't matter a damn when he walked down the street anywhere in America.

Late in his life Davis gave Jet magazine a further glimpse of what his experience had taught him: "If somebody told me I only had an hour to live, I'd spend it choking a white man. I'd do it nice and slow."(3) How was this statement reported in the press? Did it shock or surprise anyone? Notice Davis didn't specify an individual white man. Any white man would do. He wasn't in a rage over some isolated incident. It was his reaction, his response, to a lifetime as a black man in a racist society.

But how is his statement different from Liam Neeson's? Wasn't Davis a racist?


(1) "Liam Neeson interview: Rape, race and how I learnt revenge doesn’t work Exclusive: Sitting down with Clémence Michallon to discuss his latest action film ‘Cold Pursuit’, the actor recounts a disturbing incident from his past," by Clémence Michallon, The Independent, February 4, 2019.
(2) "‘I’m not racist’: Liam Neeson expounds on comments that he wanted to kill a black person to avenge friend’s rape," by Sonia Rao and Travis M. Andrews, The Washington Post, February 5, 2019.
(3) Jet, 25 March 1985.