The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky

After writing for sixteen years for Fortune, Time and The Nation, James Agee, whose first love had been movies, wrote the narration and dialogue for the nonfiction film The Quiet One (1948). Having published a long, flattering essay for Life about John Huston, he was invited by Huston in 1950 to join him in California to work on film scripts. Agee adapted the Stephen Crane story "The Blue Hotel," which Huston liked, but chose not to accept (the script was later published and can also be found here). It was while he was with Huston that Agee suffered his first heart attack. Agee drank heavily, and so did Huston. But Huston liked living a hard physical life as well, and he may have pushed Agee too hard. Once Agee had recovered, Huston persuaded him to write the script for The African Queen (based on the book by C. S. Forester). Prior commitments prevented him from working with Huston to adapt Moby Dick a few years later. One of those commitments was The Night of the Hunter (1955).

In 1952, Huntington Hartford, heir to the A&P fortune (1) and patron of the arts, produced the "anthology film" Face to Face, based on a rather odd pairing of stories by Joseph Conrad ("The Secret Sharer") and Stephen Crane. Crane's "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" is a charming story about Jack Potter, a small town marshall who impulsively marries a young lady in San Antonio and, abashed at not telling the townsfolk about her and wanting to avoid embarrassment, he tries to sneak her back to town. Unfortunately, at the very moment he arrives with his bride by train, the town drunk, Scratchy Wilson, has gone on a rampage and is looking for the Marshall, who alone has had the ability to disarm him.

Agee wrote the script for the film, directed by Bretaigne Windust. It takes up only about a third of Face to Face, which is all the time it needed. Robert Preston plays Jack Potter. Never known for his subtlety, he is perfect playing the assured, resolute town Marshall, whose tenderness toward his bride is conveyed in small looks and gestures.(2) Marjorie Steele plays the bride, and she is probably the reason the film was made, since she was Huntington Hartford's second wife at the time. He helped her movie career along as long as he could until he gave up in 1960 and divorced her. But she is excellent as Jack Potter's bride - a role that is otherwise nebulous in Crane's story. She contributes to the mystery of just exactly how and why the two of them got married in San Antonio. Scratchy Wilson is played by Minor Watson, who had a long and prolific career that started at the Essanay Studio in 1916. Some clever camera work introduces us to him drinking a bottle of whisky and cleaning his pistols, preparing to "settle" things once and for all with Jack Potter. Agee himself appears in a small role (Dwight Macdonald called the role "the town drunk") in the Yellow Sky saloon.

Agee's script invents a few funny details not in the slight story, such as Scratchy actually scratching himself in his first scene (how else did he get the name?), shooting the preacher's doorbell so that it gets stuck ringing, and, at the film's conclusion, walking away from his confrontation with Potter, Scratchy looks at his pistols (while everyone watching holds their breath) and, instead of holstering them, he merely drops them on the ground.

Dwight MacDonald called the film "a delightful short comedy". It's delightful for its giddiness - it is Fred Zinneman's self-reverent High Noon spun around on its axis - Jack Potter, marshall in Yellow Sky, doesn't know that his nemesis awaits him there and that he is planning to shoot him just as soon as he appears. But, unlike Gary Cooper in High Noon, who goes around town, accompanied by that prodding song, "Do not forsake me, o my darlin'," searching for reinforcements, Potter confronts Scratchy unarmed. And instead of Grace Kelly lighting out on a wagon when zero hour draws nigh, Potter's bride is standing right beside her husband when he meets Scratchy.

The production certainly has a backlot look to it, with housefronts instead of real houses, and all the paraphernalia of a Western town without the usual rough justice and the moral rectitude of it. In its gentleness, the film is exactly what Stephen Crane would maybe have intended it to be: a send-up of all the dime novel Westerns so popular from 1860 onwards, that promoted a purely fictionalized image of the American West for the consumption of Easterners in cities starved for excitement. Crane would examine the effects of this fictional image more seriously in his longer story, "The Blue Hotel," set in a Nebraska town on the verge of the West, as close as a "Swede," his imagination filled with dime novel delusions, would ever get to the genuine article - even if the genuine article had disappeared completely by the 1890s, when Crane wrote the story. James Agee's script for "The Blue Hotel" is so rich in details of blocking and camera placement, it's a wonder it remains "unproduced."(3)

James Agee had done so much writing-to-order for so long, sometimes unsigned, that when he finally had the time to write as he pleased, he almost didn't know where to begin. His work on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men went largely unheralded (the necessarily oversized book, to do justice to Walker Evans's great photographs, was finally published by Houghton Mifflin), and his only novel, A Death in the Family, was left unfinished. That leaves us an early volume of poetry, his voluminous film writings and his film scripts. The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, now all but forgotten, is a beautiful short film, deserving of preservation and restoration, quite separable from The Secret Sharer, that occupies the rest of Face to Face.

Dwight Macdonald wrote a moving tribute to Agee when A Death in the Family was published. His long essay includes the following paragraph:

"James Agee died in 1955 at the age of forty-five. He died of a heart attack in a taxicab, and the platitudes about 'shock' and 'loss' suddenly became real. A friend I had for thirty years respected intellectually and sympathized with emotionally and disapproved of temperamentally and been stimulated by conversationally had vanished, abruptly and for good. I had always thought of Agee as the most broadly gifted writer of my generation, the one who, if anyone, might someday do major work. He didn’t do it, or not much of it, but I am not the only one who expected he would. He really shouldn’t have died, I kept thinking, and now this posthumous book makes me think it all the harder."


(1) A&P, the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, was the largest grocer chain in America in the 1950s.
(2) Preston played the father who is killed in a car accident in the 1963 film adaptation of Tad Model's play All the Way Home, which was a stage adaptation of James Agee's novel A Death in the Family.
(3) The story was adapted in 1974 to a television film by Harry Mark Petrakis and directed by Czech filmmaker Jan Kadar. Except for the vivid performance by David Warner as the Swede, its alterations of Crane's story were unnecessary and the film is now in limbo where it belongs.

Breech Birth

Lillian & Dorothy Gish

For the past few years, a political movement has been gaining momentum in the world that is best known as "populism," but which could be more accurately described as "illiberalism." One of the major driving forces behind the movement has been a strong reaction against political correctness, an aggressive kind of radical liberalism that takes liberal values to altogether absurd lengths.

The May 4 issue of the Toledo Blade ran the following story:

"BOWLING GREEN — The longstanding Gish Theater is no more. Bowling Green State University trustees Friday afternoon voted 7-0 to remove the Gish name from the campus theater following student calls to do so, according to a university spokesman. For more than 40 years, the theater has honored actresses Dorothy and Lillian Gish. Members of the college’s Black Student Union questioned the theater's name because Lillian Gish is particularly well-known for starring in The Birth of a Nation. The film is a 1915 D.W. Griffith-directed silent-movie tribute to the Ku Klux Klan that is credited for reviving the white supremacist group. It also found that while the Gish sisters 'do not appear to have been advocates for racist or exclusionary practices or perspectives,' the content and historical impact of an actor’s work should be taken into account. The task force also stated it could not find documentation that Lillian Gish ever denounced the themes of the film or distanced herself from the director or his views."

According to the university spokesman, “We struggled with historical issues in today’s time and I think that, at the end of the day, that's what universities are all about ... As a public university we engage in these discussions and debate. While not everyone will agree with this decision, I know, this is what makes strong democracy. We listen to each other, learn from each other and move forward.” (1)

Oh, how they must have struggled! It is a well-worn fact that the pioneering D. W. Griffith film The Birth of a Nation (1915) tells the story of the Civil War from the slave-owner's side and has a powerful propagandistic aspect. As I put it ten years ago on this blog, "The case for the movie as a motion picture landmark is secure, but its content is compromised by its distortions of both history and morality in the portrayal of a 'heroic' antebellum South filled with cheerful slaves and slave owners cavorting in a bucolic paradise, destroyed by the greed and envy of Yankees. The heroes of Griffith's movie are the Ku Klux Klan, riding to the rescue in the film's last reel ... When it was released it was a sensational hit, and made Griffith a fortune. This was due largely to the riots the film's screening provoked and the refusal of some major cities to show it simply in the interests of public order. It also inspired lynchings, an activity that usually needed no provocation in many places in America. It was attacked in the press and Griffith was labelled as a racist. In response, Griffith was inspired to make his next blockbuster, the extravagant and simple-minded Intolerance (1916). Lillian Gish continually defended 'Mister Griffith,' as she called him against the charge of racism. But the film tells a very different story."

Lillian Gish needn't have bothered trying to defend Griffith. It shouldn't have come as a great surprise that the first American film to argue, convincingly, for the artistic potential of the film medium should have been such an electric reminder of America's Original Sin. Griffith was a major artist of the 20th century, but the stories that he decided the new medium should tell were at least 50 years old when the film that practically invented Hollywood was made. The Birth of a Nation stands like some monument to an outdated understanding of why the Civil War was fought. And, like so many other such monuments, like the one for Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, its legitimacy as a historical statement is being questioned. I have already expressed my own opinion on the subject of monuments to Confederate heroes. They stand not as reminders of our sins, but as rebukes to the outcome of what many Southerners still call the War Between the States, a war that, for them, hasn't concluded.

The Birth of a Nation is, if you will, a magnificent work of propaganda - comparable to Leni Riefenstahl's love poems to Hitler, Olympiad 1936 and Triumph of the Will. When Griffith died so ignominiously in Hollywood in 1948, James Agee, himself a Southerner, got carried away enough to write this about him:

"Even in Griffith’s best work there is enough that is poor, or foolish, or merely old-fashioned, so that one has to understand, if by no means forgive, those who laugh indiscriminately at his good work and his bad. But even his poorest work was never just bad. Whatever may be wrong with it, there is in every instant the unique purity and vitality of birth or of a creature just born and first exerting its unprecedented, incredible strength ... There is not a man working in movies, or a man who cares for them, who does not owe Griffith more than he owes anybody else." As generous and well-intended as some of Agee's words sound, he was incapable, in 1948, of seeing just how far we have come from Griffith's attitudes in the seventy years since.

But why should Lillian Gish be held responsible for it? She was an actress who, like hundreds of others, appeared in the film, collected her fee, and moved on to her next project. (As much as I am appalled at the sheer waste of acting talent lavished on trash like the Harry Potter movies, Star Wars, Game of Thrones, and the superhero movies, it's impossible to blame the actors, for whom they are nothing but [extremely] well paid gigs.) Gish was from Ohio, where Bowling Green State University is situated. Griffith was the son of a Confederate colonel who had a score to settle with the United States. Doubtless, Gish was utterly oblivious of Griffith's agenda in making The Birth of a Nation. He himself was incapable of seeing its broader implications and would never have dreamed how we react to it more than a century later. In 1969, Stanley Kauffman could write, "Trotsky's famous remark about Celine is that he 'walked into great literature as other men walk into their homes.' In aptness of genius, at least, the same can be said of Griffith and film. By now it's a commonplace that he gave the new medium its grammar; he also gave it many of its aspirations. What we see, first and fundamentally, in Griffith is a change of mind toward film that epitomizes - precedes - a huge cultural shift. At first he was ashamed of being associated with 'flickers'; he was a theatre actor and playwright, and he wanted to remain one. Within five years he had become oracular and evangelical on the subject of film ... The right man had come along at the right historical moment, and the result was a fury of creation that helped refashion the culture of the entire world." (3) All of this is just what any cinephile would say in any final assessment of Griffith's legacy to film. But the people who wanted Lillian Gish's name expunged from their campus were most definitely not cinephiles.

Needless to say, the BGSU spokesman was correct in admitting that not everyone agreed with their decision. Film historian Joseph McBride eloquently expressed his disdain for the decision in an essay published by Bright Lights Film Journal last Tuesday titled "Political Correctness Run Amok: Life and Lillian Gish at Bowling Green State University , Ohio." Expressing his understandable outrage at the decision, he wrote, "A university should be a place where the history of the arts is studied with care and perspective and the debate over artists’ legacies should be allowed to flourish, rather than a place where, as too often happens today, we try to obliterate from awareness the controversial aspects of our troubled history." (4)

Clearly, nobody has time for careful debate. Ours is an era of political intolerance, exacerbated by the election of a devisive and clumsy fool as president who seemed, during his campaign, to deliberately try to lose by spouting utterly stupid, sexist, racist statements, insulting every standard of civility. He continues to do so practically every day. And instead of provoking unanimous revulsion for him, tens of millions of Americans saw him as the Last White Hope and voted for him. As a reaction to his appeal to the lowest, commonest denomination, the rest of America is acting just as petulantly by demanding the immediate expulsion of every suggestion of disagreement or variation from the new draconian standards of correct behaving and correct thinking and correct expressing. As I suggested above, it is engendering a backlash that appears to be sweeping the world. It's getting to be difficult to imagine a positive outcome.

(1) Toledo Blade.
(2) James Agee.
(3) Stanley Kauffmann.
(4) Joseph McBride. McBride mentions in his essay that Quentin Tarantino denounced John Ford as a racist for his having appeared as a Ku Klux Klansman in The Birth of a Nation. This business of singling out actors for having appeared in a film that has fallen out of the Zeitgeist's favor reminds me of how Hitler went after actors who had appeared in Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel. One of them, Kurt Gerron, fled Germany to France, and thence to Holland. When the Nazis invaded, he and his family were taken first to Theresienstadt, where he was forced to make a film painting a cruelly false picture of life in the camp for foreign consumption. As soon as it was finished, Gerron and his family were shipped to Auschwitz and killed.

Holography: Addendum

Sunday I was watching a Discovery program called Rocky Mountain Railroad (10 years in the tropics has made Canada look like paradise) and a man in his early twenties, enthusiastic about his job with Canadian Rail, rolled up his sleeve to show off his employee number, what looked like eight digits, tattooed on his forearm. All I could do was shake my head. Think of all the numbers, social security and bank accounts and PINs, that we all have to memorize. The young man admitted that his job is very important to him, and that he plans to make a lifelong career out of it. But even this doesn't excuse him. No one but an idiot who has never heard of the Nazi concentration camps, in which inmates had their prisoner numbers tattooed on their forearms, would get a tattoo of their employee number, social security number, or a girlfriend's cell number on his forearm. Do a Google search for "who had numbers tattooed on their forearms?" You won't see a photo of that Canadian guy.

So I gave the kid a little credit, but not much, by thinking that maybe he got the tattoo in all innocence, that he did not know about the tattooed forearms of concentration camp inmates. But that doesn't pardon him either: knowing about those inmates' tattoos and getting a tattoo of your own anyway; or living 74 years after the end of the war against fascism that someone in your family, a grandfather perhaps, took part in and not know anything about those tattoos? It's unlikely that the young man has not seen one of the X-Men movies. In the very first installment, set in "Poland 1944," the boy who would grow up to be "Magneto" notices the tattoos on the forearms of the prisoners. Does it ultimately matter where we get our information, as long as we are informed? As I argued in my previous post, I have to believe that it does.

In his relentlessly shattering book, If This is a Man, Primo Levi recounts his "Initiation" into his life as a prisoner in Auschwitz:

"Häftling [prisoner]: I have learnt that I am a Häftling. My number is 174517; we have been baptized, we will carry the tattoo on our left arm until we die.

"The operation was slightly painful and extraordinarily rapid: they placed us all in a row, and one by one, according to the alphabetical order of our names, we filed past a skilful official, armed with a sort of pointed tool with a very short needle. It seems that this is the real, true initiation: only by "showing one's number" can one get bread and soup. Several days passed, and not a few cuffs and punches, before we became used to showing our number promptly enough not to disorder the daily operation of food-distribution; weeks and months were needed to learn its sound in the German language. And for many days, while the habits of freedom still led me to look for the time on my wristwatch, my new name ironically appeared instead, its number tattooed in bluish characters under the skin.

"Only much later, and slowly, a few of us learnt something of the funereal science of the numbers of Auschwitz, which epitomize the stages of destruction of European Judaism. To the old hands of the camp, the numbers told everything: the period of entry into the camp, the convoy of which one formed a part, and consequently the nationality. Everyone will treat with respect the numbers from 30,000 to 80,000: there are only a few hundred left and they represent the few survivals from the Polish ghettos. It is as well to watch out in commercial dealings with a 116,000 or a 117,000: they now number only about forty, but they represent the Greeks of Salonica, so take care they do not pull the wool over your eyes. As for the high numbers, they carry an essentially comic air about them, like the words "freshman" or "conscript" in ordinary life. The typical high number is a corpulent, docile and stupid fellow: he can be convinced that leather shoes are distributed at the infirmary to all those with delicate feet, and can be persuaded to run there and leave his bowl of soup "in your custody"; you can sell him a spoon for three rations of bread; you can send him to the most ferocious of the Kapos to ask him (as happened to me!) if it is true that his is the Kartoffe/schalen-kommando, the "Potato Peeling Command," and if one can be enrolled in it."

Numerology

I turned 61 today - or yesterday. I live in the Far East, but my thoughts are somewhere in North America. A friend wished me a happy birthday and then said "come home". I will, I will. But first there's this rough patch to get through, this unnecessary detour. It's unavoidable, can't be helped. But for now, time to reflect on my progress.

Poets always put a patina on it, getting old, I mean. Like découpage. Two poets I have long admired talked about the common perceptions of age, without really feeling them in themselves. Thomas Hardy saw how his spirit, still willing, had to contend with his flesh, which had altered:

I look into my glass,
And view my wasting skin,
And say, ‘Would God it came to pass
My heart had shrunk as thin!’

For then I, undistrest
By hearts grown cold to me,
Could lonely wait my endless rest
With equanimity.

But Time, to make me grieve,
Part steals, lets part abide;
And shakes this fragile frame at eve
With throbbings of noontide.

Hardy felt betrayed, by the changes in others and the changes in his physical appearance. But the incongruity of his still youthful passion against the image in his mirror was too much for him, too absurd to accept. Only one can be true, but which one?


Philip Larkin, who was a great admirer of Hardy, felt deeply the difference between his life and the lives of others; a disconnect between what was expected of his life and what his life had amounted to. Not by regret, but by the refusal of others, people he once knew, to imagine their own lives otherwise.

‘Dockery was junior to you,
Wasn’t he?’ said the Dean. ‘His son’s here now.’
Death-suited, visitant, I nod. ‘And do
You keep in touch with—’ Or remember how
Black-gowned, unbreakfasted, and still half-tight
We used to stand before that desk, to give
‘Our version’ of ‘these incidents last night’?
I try the door of where I used to live:

Locked. The lawn spreads dazzlingly wide.
A known bell chimes. I catch my train, ignored.
Canal and clouds and colleges subside
Slowly from view. But Dockery, good Lord,
Anyone up today must have been born
In ’43, when I was twenty-one.
If he was younger, did he get this son
At nineteen, twenty? Was he that withdrawn

High-collared public-schoolboy, sharing rooms
With Cartwright who was killed? Well, it just shows
How much ... How little ... Yawning, I suppose
I fell asleep, waking at the fumes
And furnace-glares of Sheffield, where I changed,
And ate an awful pie, and walked along
The platform to its end to see the ranged
Joining and parting lines reflect a strong

Unhindered moon. To have no son, no wife,
No house or land still seemed quite natural.
Only a numbness registered the shock
Of finding out how much had gone of life,
How widely from the others. Dockery, now:
Only nineteen, he must have taken stock
Of what he wanted, and been capable
Of ... No, that’s not the difference: rather, how

Convinced he was he should be added to!
Why did he think adding meant increase?
To me it was dilution. Where do these
Innate assumptions come from? Not from what
We think truest, or most want to do:
Those warp tight-shut, like doors. They’re more a style
Our lives bring with them: habit for a while,
Suddenly they harden into all we’ve got

And how we got it; looked back on, they rear
Like sand-clouds, thick and close, embodying
For Dockery a son, for me nothing,
Nothing with all a son’s harsh patronage.
Life is first boredom, then fear.
Whether or not we use it, it goes,
And leaves what something hidden from us chose,
And age, and then the only end of age.

Ah, but Larkin was afraid of dying - not so much death as the moment when he would die. He anticipated it, just as Shakespeare had in Sonnet 73:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed, whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourish’d by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.

And Shakespeare died at 52! "Death is but the shifting wind that fills the living sail." I wrote these words when I was 20. How did I know it at 20? "The idea is to die young as late as possible," wrote the anthropologist Ashley Montagu. And Oscar Wilde's lovely line, "The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young." And poor Oscar was dead at 46!

I feel myself to be exactly the same at 61 as I was at 20 - as I was at 10! One's age is unimportant.

Machiko Kyo

When news of the death of Doris Day broke on Monday, I felt inhibited to comment on it. Then I learned yesterday that Machiko Kyo had died on Sunday, and I was moved incalculably more by the news of her death. Let me explain why. I watched Doris Day in movies throughout my boyhood and I have to admit that she exuded somewhat of a "goody-two-shoes" image, too wholesome and maternal. In short, sexless.  She was perfect for the era, I suppose, an era of scrupulous obsequiousness in American film. Not one of the movies she appeared in - yes, not even Hitchcock's remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much - caused a ripple in the cinematic ocean. I remember items like Please Don't Eat the Daisies, Yours, Mine and Ours (1968) and her TV show (1968-1973), which used her popular rendition of that insufferably chipper song "Que será, será," with lingering nausea. Only later did I learn of her career as a singer during the Big Band era. She had a singing voice identical to her image: sunny, cheerful, and completely bland.

Ordinarily I wouldn't be writing any of this if Day's death hadn't completely upstaged that of Kyo, whose immortality is assured by her appearance in a handful of magnificent Japanese films: Rashomon, Ugetsu, Floating Weeds, and The Key (aka Odd Obsession). These films will be treasured for as long as the film medium is around. She will also be remembered for minor roles in Mizoguchi's Red Light District and Teshigahara's Face of Another. I suppose everyone who saw her in these films, men and women, was a little in love with her.

But something else italicizes the death of Machiko Kyo, and it was the same at the death, in 2015, of Setsuko Hara. She takes with her yet another large piece of cultural history - the legacy of the Japanese film, once a booming industry that, in the space of a few years in the late 1990s, seems to have vanished. Since then, only a handful of films, most of them directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda, have kept the glory of the Japanese film fresh in people's minds. Kurosawa, Ozu, Mizoguchi, Naruse, Kobayashi, and Imamura are names that are prominent in every cinephile's memory, standing proudly alongside Renoir, Fellini, Bergman, Ray (Satyajit, not Nicholas), Antonioni, and Buñuel.

I will remember Kyo from her first breathtaking appearance in Rashomon, when a sudden breeze blows her veil away from her face as she is riding past Toshiro Mifune sitting under a tree. I will remember her as the ghost Lady Wakasa in the mesmerizing Ugetsu. And I will remember her as the actress, already relegated to "mature" roles in her group of Kabuki actors in Floating Weeds. Of course, there is the difference that these three films are towering works of art to which she contributed her beauty and grace. The word "exquisite" is overused when Westerners write about certain aspects of Japanese culture. Machiko Kyo justifies the renewal of the word.

So it's goodbye to Doris, but au revoir Machiko.

Holography

Strange. Avengers: Endgame is inching towards the all-time #1 position in box office revenue, and the movie is becoming inescapable even on web sites devoted to cinephilia - the love of film. I haven't seen any of the Avengers installments and I cannot imagine ever wanting or needing to. I try not to be a puritanical critic, depriving others of the pleasure they derive from films I don't like. But when serious critics devote precious space to the examination of a franchise like Fast & Furious or Star Wars or any of the DC or Marvel products, I wonder what criticism is coming to. Do some of them feel compelled to comment on them because they're being pressured by commercial interests to do so? Are they getting death threats from fans because they are choosing not to be counted among the flock - i.e., herd? Even Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, the utterly mindless aggregation of movie ratings from all available sources, is occasionally attacked by fans who don't like it when a majority of critics dislikes a particular blockbuster.

What no one seems to realize is what every real critic has always known: that there is no connection whatever between popular success and critical acclaim. Just last week I was kicked out of a Facebook Film group because I went and asked a (very) serious question of the forum's founder. I avoid such forums for the simple reason that they are not devoted to cinephilia at all but to fandom. Henri Langlois coined the term "cinephage" for film fans who "devour" every movie that comes along without applying any discriminatory standard that might distinguish the good ones from the bad ones. A fan is someone who is suspicious when a cinephile spends too much of his time (or what they consider too much) responding negatively to a great majority of films. If they truly love films, shouldn't they be expressing more of that love?

This is a headache that afflicts every serious critic. Randall Jarrell, who was the greatest poetry critic of his age, was often attacked for not approving of so much of the poetry that was published in the 1940s and '50s. His response was that a critic's job is to love the light, which obliges him to also hate the dark. And Jarrell was famous as much for the severity of his hate as for the power of his love. But a phenomenon that he didn't address was the ability to distinguish what one likes, for personal reasons that are otherwise unaccountable, and what is demonstrably good. This is the problem from which too many contemporary critics suffer. One can like something one knows is bad. Occasionally I like hot dogs, but I know what they're made of and I wouldn't attempt to argue that they're good food. Yet, time and time again, film critics who should know better are trying to convince me that because they like something it must be good.

But last week, when I was kicked out of a Facebook group, I had entered a discussion about Avengers: Endgame because the group's founder used the curious words "holocaust memories". He was arguing that what these kinds of movies (superhero or comic book movies) needed was a script writer who could add depth to the subject, who could in effect, distract us from its flimsy source material. A comic book's greatest drawback, for a filmmaker, was its emphasis on its illustrations over its ideas. While the illustrations, or "graphics," offer filmmakers valuable indications of how the film should look, the stories are hopelessly primitive. What caught my interest, however, were the words "holocaust memories" (perhaps deliberately, he didn't capitalize the "h"). In the X-Men films, there is a character named Magneto who first discovered his powers when he was a boy sent with his parents to a Nazi concentration camp in Poland. The boy is separated from his parents, who are then herded by guards toward a towering smokestack. The boy objects to being separated from his parents and cries out to them as barbed wire gates are twisted and bent open by some invisible force - the boys mutant power to move and manipulate metal objects from a distance. As I wrote about the scene in a post I made in December 2009 (see Comic Book Movies): "The scene is used merely to introduce the character who later becomes known as "Magneto." This outrageously self-serving attitude, which appropriates one of the most terrible periods of human history merely to introduce a level of seriousness to its subject shows how these films cannot even touch seriousness without falling to pieces."

One of the things that the latest CGI has inadvertently accomplished is exposing the inherent stupidity of the underlying ideas of the superhero movies. Despite CGI's exponential advancements over movie special effects of the past, the ideas behind the superhero movies haven't advanced much further than their comic book origins. They have become the perfect embodiment of Henry de Montherlant's old criticism of Hollywood movies, that exhibit "a perfect technique in the service of cretinism."

So the comment I posted on the Facebook film group page was, "Are you OK with using the Holocaust [capital H] in a superhero movie?" A few moments later I received notifications that my comment had been "liked" and that the group founder had replied to it. Shortly after that, however, the notifications disappeared, along with the link to the forum. I had not only been kicked out of the forum, but I was blocked from acquiring access to it. In trying to provoke discussion on what I think is a serious issue with a superhero movie, the discussion was abruptly ended and I was peremptorily shown the door. What I wasn't given the chance to say was that there are people who say that the Holocaust should never be the subject of a book or a play or a poem, least of all a film. Yet there are great books and plays and poems and even films that have taken on the subject, with compelling results.

The last survivors of the Holocaust are now in their eighties and older. Last week it was reported that half of millennials in a recent poll could not identify Auschwitz in photographs. Clearly the incredibly important job of keeping the Holocaust fresh in people's memories must be left to artists, not to the makers of superhero movies.

The Heraldry of Being

When I consider the heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which Thou hast ordained;/What is Man, that Thou art mindful of him? 
Psalm 8


I spent the last Saturday of April, the 27th, helplessly enduring a 12-hour power outtage in my apartment on Biliran Island. I had been warned more than a week in advance, so I was prepared for it. But how does one prepare for twelve hours in the middle of what is known hereabouts as "summer," when temperatures by day are in the nineties, without the relief of even an electric fan? I adapted years ago to living without air conditioning. It's pleasant to enter an air conditioned drugstore in town, or the Western Union office to wait for a money transfer from my brother, or the one fast food joint, and feel the coldness of the air, close to twenty degrees cooler than the air outside. But I learned how to live without it a long time ago.

In preparation for the power cut off early in the morning, I got out of bed an hour early, cooked rice in my electric cooker, filled a thermos with boiling water for coffee, and charged the batteries in my cellphone and my tablet. When the power shut down shortly after 6 AM, I opened all my windows, plugged my ears, and went back to sleep until after 8.

Despite my having hundreds of ebooks, my traveller's library, I always reserve the experience of reading an actual book for special occasions like power failures, which are practically a fact of life in the Philippines. So, since I have a small contingent of books, some hardcover some paperbacks, and since I spent the previous power outtage in the company of John Cheever (see "Oh What a Paradise It Seemed"), I opted for the contemporary of Cheever whom he regarded as the greatest writer of American fiction, Saul Bellow - the Penguin Collected Stories (2001). Having already read the first two stories, "By the St. Lawrence" and "The Silver Dish," I skipped "The Bellarosa Connection" and opened the paperback to "The Old System."

The story begins in the here and now where Dr. Samuel Braun wakes late on a December Saturday and, after his ablutions, goes to his kitchen, in which his remembrances of two older cousins, Isaac and Tina, occupy his otherwise lonely afternoon. They were the only two people he really loved - "For whatever use or meaning this fact might have within the peculiar system of light, movement, contact, and perishing in which he tried to find stability." The story he tells is banal - Tina on her deathbed abandoning an absurd family grudge against Isaac. But he finds himself amazed, as I too was amazed, at how deeply it moved him.

Dr. Braun remembers them, his uncle and mother, from their coming to America, and his older cousins. "A vision of mankind Braun was having as he sat over his coffee Saturday afternoon. . . . Silent, with silent eyes crossing and recrossing the red water tank bound by twisted cables, from which ragged icicles hung down and white vapor rose, Dr. Braun extracted a moment four decades gone . . ."

Dr. Braun has vivid memories of his cousins, and in particular a sexual encounter with Tina when he was a boy sick in bed with a fever. Tina, who was always obese (she once, without knowing it, sat on a kitten and smothered it to death), envelops the boy with her naked overabundance, which he recalls with mystified pleasure. (The story was first published in Playboy.) But shortly after the war, a quarrel arises between Isaac and Tina when Isaac needs three members of the family, with himself as the fourth, to contribute $25,000 each so that he could buy up a disused golf course and develop it as a shopping center. On the day the transaction was arranged to take place Tina and the others renege on their share, and Isaac has to come up with the $100,000 himself. He does it - the land is his, and Isaac gets rich.

But this is not the real cause of Isaac and Tina's estrangement - the reasons are far less explicable than either wants to admit. "The quarrel between Tina and Isaac lasted for years. She accused him of shaking off the family when the main chance came. He had refused to cut them in. He said that they had all deserted him at the zero hour. Eventually, the brothers made it up. Not Tina. She wanted nothing to do with Isaac." One begins to wonder what it is about these cousins that would inspire Dr. Braun to reflect so movingly on his love for them. Still, "Dr. Braun had given up his afternoon to the hopeless pleasure of thinking affectionately about his dead."

"For several years, at the same season, there was a scene between them. The pious thing before the Day of Atonement was to visit the dead an to forgive the living - forgive and ask forgiveness. Accordingly, Isaac went annually to the old home. . . . These annual visits to Tina continued until she became sick." Cancer. Terminal. Still, Tina refuses to see Isaac. This is a terrible breach of propriety, that Tina and Isaac should not be reconciled before she dies. "Cousin Tina had discovered that one need not be bound by the old rules." Finally, she relents, but only on condition that Isaac pays her $20,000.

"In Dr. Braun's opinion, his cousin Tina had seized upon the force of death to create a situation of opera, which at the same time was a situation of parody. As he stated it to himself, there was a feedback of mockery. Death the horrid bridegroom, waiting with a consummation life had never offered Life, accordingly, she devalued, filling up the clear light remaining (which should be reserved for beauty, miracle, nobility) with obese monstrosity, rancor, failure, self-torture."

Isaac goes to see his rabbi to confirm his resolution to do what he knows he must do. Then he gets the money from his bank and puts it in a briefcase. (The briefcase is a nice touch. $20,000 doesn't justify a briefcase.) He goes to the hospital, up to her room, hands the briefcase to his brother, Mutt, and waits. "Because he could not stand still, he moved down the corridor, hands clasped behind his back. . . . He was sixty years old. He knew the route he, too, must go, and soon. But only knew, did not yet feel it. Death still was at a distance."

As if remembering all of this in sequence, telling the story in the here and now inside his head, "And Dr. Braun, feeling with them this work of wit and despair, this last attempt to exchange significance, rose, stood, looking at the shafts of ice, the tatters of vapor in winter blue." Tina allows Isaac to enter. They are too overcome by sorrow and love to restrain themselves. They embrace. The story ends in tears. And Braun wonders about all of it in a paragraph of heartbreaking and astounding puzzlement.

"The Old System" closes with a return to equilibrium, to the here and now: "When Dr. Braun closed his eyes, he saw, red on black, something like molecular processes - the only true heraldry of being. As later, in the close black darkness when the short day ended, he went to the dark kitchen window to have a look at stars. These things cast outward by a great begetting spasm billions of years ago."

So I, sixty years old (sixty-one a week from Thursday), on a different Saturday, the hottest day of the year, deprived of any relief from the heat, reading a story set in "the short end of December", overwhelmed by the weight of that same heraldry of being, abstracted momentarily in exalted language. The question in the psalm quoted above (also quoted in the story) is a rhetorical one. It doesn't require an answer. But Bellow answers it.