Detour

I have somehow managed, until the age of sixty-one, to avoid the subject of the film noir. At the outset, I feel obliged to say that I am not a fan. The origin of the term and its elaborate definition is, of course, entirely French. They were discovered and applied by American critics long after the genre had disappeared. I don't want to go into what defines film noir, as codified by Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton in their "seminal" book Panorama du film noir Américain 1941–1953, but over my lifetime I've seen a good number of films now classified as film noir, whether I knew it or not. The problem with such classifications (which is really what "auteurism" is all about) is that they fail to make the films to which they are applied any better than they were before the concept was invented. The films were unremarkable - and unpretentious -, cheaply-made B-movies when they were first released, and no amount of puffery has made them any better.

One could argue that there are better examples of film noir, made with more money, bigger stars and higher production values, but that is beside the point. Detour (1945) is cited as one of the most perfect examples of the genre precisely because it was made cheaply and in a hurry, with a no-name cast, by an Austrian-born director who arrived in Hollywood with F. W. Murnau and who refused to leave. Edgar G. Ulmer's career as a director went on a lengthy detour of its own because of his dalliance with another director's wife. That director was the nephew of Carl Laemmle, the head of Universal, and they blackballed Ulmer's chances of ever taking part in a major production. By the time Detour was made, he had become a fixture of skidrow production companies, one of which was called Producer's Releasing Corporation, whose acronym became better known as Pretty Rotten Crap.

Prior to watching my copy of Detour, I watched the introduction to the film that aired on TCM's Noir Alley, hosted by Eddie Muller. Believe me, such an introduction, while attempting to entice viewers who aren't fans of such a film, was almost enough to talk me out of watching it at all. Muller spoke about the film's schlock elements like they were cardinal virtues and how, once he had first heard about Detour when he was a teenager, he eagerly awaited seeing it, before home video or cable channels existed, on some late night TV broadcast. This kind of obsessive fandom was harmless as long as it wasn't taken too seriously. But then postwar French film critics, who were doing everything they could to trash the generation of French film directors who might have had any connection whatever to the defeat of France in 1940 and the four year German occupation, and who alternatively attempted - unsuccessfully, I believe - to elevate American pulp literature and movies to a level of High Seriousness, seized on the deceptively more adult, and more cynical crime melodramas of the Forties and Fifties. By now, thanks to the intervention of French film criticism (which includes the auteur dogma), American university students can write a PhD thesis on some of the worst Hollywood melodramas of the film noir era that turns them into profound cultural documents like Winesburg, Ohio or The Great Gatsby.

Al (Tom Neal) is a hitchhiker who stops at a greasy spoon in Reno. When a trucker puts a nickel in a jukebox and it plays the song, "I Can't Believe That You're in Love With Me" (played by Artie Shaw), Al lapses into reverie of when he was a piano player in a New York club where he and a singer named Sue (Claudia Drake) were in love and planned to get married. Out of nowhere, Sue announces she's going to California, leaving poor Al to play solo at the club. Again out of nowhere (the film has an unhealthy disrespect for plot), Al decides to hitchhike across the country to be closer to Sue. He makes it as far as the Arizona desert where he's given a ride by a well-dressed guy named Haskell (Edmund MacDonald) in a convertible. Haskell tells him about a woman he gave a ride to not long before who left bloody scratches on his hand. And he keeps having to pop little pills every now and then. After stopping at a roadside diner, Al takes over the driving while Haskell sleeps. When it begins to rain, Al needs some help putting up the convertible top, but Haskell doesn't respond. Because he's dead. So, in the driving rain, Al does what anyone else would do - he takes Haskell's wallet and his driver's licence in case he gets stopped by a cop (licences didn't have photos on them in those days), changes clothes with the corpse, hides it in the brush by the side of the road and keeps on driving to LA. Just as his plan to take his masquerade only as far as San Bernardino is underway, enter Vera (Ann Savage) - the same she-devil who scratched Haskell's hand. Al gives her a lift and within minutes she recognizes the car as Haskell's. Al confesses to robbing him when he found out he was dead, and Vera decides to blackmail him all the way to LA. After a few utterly predictable twists, the movie returns us to poor Al in the Reno diner, whose voice-over narration takes us up to the abrupt conclusion to this mercifully short (68 minutes!) thriller.

Once, when François Truffaut adapted the David Goodis pulp thriller Down There in 1960, a trash novel was transformed into a refreshingly personal, idiosyncratic work of film art. When Truffaut was asked by Charles Thomas Samuels "[Why do] you usually adapt trash novels to the screen?" his response was clever in a Cahiers du Cinema way: "I have never used a trash novel or a book I did not admire. Writers like David Goodis and William Irish have special value, and they have no counterparts in France. Here detective story writers are rotten, whereas in America writers as great as Hemingway work in that field ... So you see, I don't film trash." The fact is, Truffaut used trash as a jumping off point for a brilliant film.

Truffaut, as the originator of the auteur policy, insisted that a film's underlying material was less important than its treatment in the hands of a true film auteur. So, ostensibly, they can create something that demonstrates, in Truffaut's words, "a personal vision of life or of cinema." Detour poses the question: did Edgar G. Ulmer triumph over the severe limitations of his material or was he defeated by them? Detour has cheapness stamped all over it. About 80% of it was shot in a studio, including the many "process shots" of the actors in a car driving down a highway that's projected onto a screen from behind (so that what's in front of the screen doesn't cast a shadow on it). Among Detour's many gaffes is seeing two actors, both wearing big hats (de riguer in 1945) breezing down a highway in a convertible with its top down. (In one scene, Tom Neal is driving at night, struggling to stay awake, while Edmund Macdonald sleeps with his hat resting over his face.) Or Neal hitchhiking and then climbing into the driver's side of a truck or riding beside a driver with the wheel on the right side of the car. The film had to be reversed to maintain continuity and make it look like Al was going in the right direction - right to left (west), according to the superimposed map. All of the elements of the film that were already formulaic in 1945 seem especially tired under Edgar G. Ulmer's direction. So, how could something so cut-rate as Detour wind up with such a following of devoted fans? 

In his negative review of Sydney Pollock's film version of Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses Don't They?, Stanley Kauffmann examined the curious history of the novel's publication history:

"When the book was published, it had a fair sale, but when it was subsequently published in France, it was a critical and commercial sensation, and Horace McCoy not very well known here became an outstanding American writer there. My own impression is that his French success was one more example of old-style inverse anti-Americanism. To praise what was second-rate and brutal about America, like facile gangster films, was a way of patronizing." (1)

I recall a college professor in the late 1970s trying to explain how Jerry Lewis, generally regarded as the worst sort of movie fool, was revered by French critics. He said that, to the French, Lewis's bumbling idiot character was seen as the quintessential American: uncouth, uncoordinated, incoherent - always smashing into things and screaming. That was how the French saw Americans.

In his beautiful memoir, My Last Sigh, Luis Buñuel wrote:

"While we're making the list of bêtes noires, I must state my hatred of pedantry and jargon. Sometimes I weep with laughter when I read certain articles in the Cahiers du Cinema, for example. As the honorary president of the Centre de Capacitación Cinematografica in Mexico City, I once went to visit the school and was introduced to several professors, including a young man in a suit and tie who blushed a good deal. When I asked him what he taught, he replied, 'The Semiology of the Clonic Image.' I could have murdered him on the spot. By the way, when this kind of jargon (a typically Parisian phenomenon) works its way into the educational system, it wreaks absolute havoc in underdeveloped countries. It's the clearest sign, in my opinion, of cultural colonialism."

If a movie could be made by a machine, it would look something like Detour. Everything is perfunctory, from Tom Neal's painted-on five o'clock shadow to the impenetrable Manhattan fog outside the Break O' Dawn club to Ann Savage mugging hysterically to live up to her made-up name. Nothing reminds me more that Hollywood was a movie assembly line - what D. W. Griffith, without a trace of irony, once called "a Detroit of the mind." In this respect, Detour is rather terrifying. Remove every element of original thought or conscientious craft from filmmaking and you'll wind up with something like it. It is industrial grade entertainment, made for an audience that, by 1945, would go to the movies no matter what was playing. Producers knew it. Detour is the result. What perplexes me is the awful obviousness of this. I've heard the phrase "it's so bad it's good" used in connection with many things over the years, always to things that have no practical use. Because who would buy a bad television, a bad washing machine, or a bad automobile unless it was a defective lemon advertised as a good one? In that case people would get their money back or call the police. Not so with innumerable bad movies like Detour now being held up as masterpieces. It was Pretty Rotten Crap in 1945, and now it's a Pretty Rotten Classic. In 1992, Detour was selected as one of 100 American films for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". A 4K restoration by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences premiered in Los Angeles at the TCM Festival in April 2018, and a Blu-Ray and DVD of the film was released in March 2019 from the Criterion Collection. The French are having a good laugh.


(1) Stanley Kauffman, Figures of Light (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).
(2) Luis Buñuel, My Last Sigh, translated by Abigail Israel (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983).

Zandy's Bride

From virtually the very beginning, in 1922 when, at the invitation of Mary Pickford, Ernst Lubitsch left his native Germany and moved to Southern California to make the film Rosita, successful foreign filmmakers have found the Hollywood pilgrimage irresistible. Lubitsch was followed, in no particular order, by F. W. Murnau, Victor Sjöström, Mauritz Stiller, Fritz Lang, Jean Renoir, Rene Clair, Max Ophüls, Michelangelo Antonioni, Milos Forman, Roman Polanski, Ivan Passer, Jan Kadar, Bill Forsythe, Louis Malle, Paul Verhoeven, Lina Wertmüller, Phillip Noyce, Peter Weir, Fred Schepisi, Lasse Hallström, Denis Villeneuve, Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro G. Iñárritu ... the list is depressingly long. Lubitsch enjoyed a long and fruitful (in both commercial and creative terms) career in Hollywood. A majority of the others did not. For most, it gave their incomes a boost, but it took a significant toll on their art. Some of them managed to return to their native countries, with sad results. Their subsequent films failed to pick up the thread that they dropped upon going west.

The Swedish filmmaker Jan Troell (pronounced like Noël), who routinely directs, writes, photographs, and edits his films, is an exception to this dismal rule. The international success of his two-part epic film The Emigrants/The New Land (1972), about a Swedish family's migration to America in 1850 was noticed sufficiently by Warner Bros. that he was offered to direct a script based on the novel The Stranger: A Novel of the Big Sur by Lillian Bos Ross. Troell didn't like the script and turned it down, but on reading the novel, part of a Big Sur Trilogy, he was impressed enough by it that he found another writer, Marc Norman, to adapt it. Troell called the film Zandy's Bride (1974).

The "story" of the film is, despite the rewrite, unremarkable: Zandy Allan, a cattle rancher in Big Sur, needs help running things, but instead of looking to hire extra hands, he opts for a mail order bride from Minnesota. He finds an ad in a newspaper classified section:

RESPECTABLE spinster, American stock, wants life in the West. Wishes to marry. Reply P.O. Box 192, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

He puts on a clean, ill-fitting white shirt and rides all the way down to an incongruous outpost smack on the coast where the woman from Minnesota, Hannah Lund, has just arrived by stage. After sizing each other up, he chides her for lying (by 7 years) about her age, telling her she's "on the long side of child-bearing."

Immediately we are faced with incongruity. The leads are Liv Ullmann and Gene Hackman. Ullmann had shown up to act in the film, whereas Gene Hackman showed up to be Gene Hackman. In every film he's exactly the same, no matter how he's dressed or what he's saying. Ullmann is given so little to work with, but you can see her working with it, filling out her period costume like she's been dressed like that all her life, assured, responsive, engaged with her role and the "West" that Troell introduces to us. She makes us wonder what drove her to place that ad. Gene Hackman interests us only so far as his actions divulge, and his limitations are visited upon Zandy.

The two are married then and there, and after the long ride back up the mountain Zandy stables the horses and returns to the house to find Hannah passed out in bed in her traveling clothes. There follows a scene that makes it very hard for us to like Zandy much further. "I got the right!" he screams as he violently rapes her. The following morning he acts like what transpired either didn't happen or was unimportant. He spends the day with his cattle and returns to find some improvements to what Hannah calls his "pigsty." Gradually they wear each other down - she growing tougher, he growing gentler. The result is, of course, no surprise, but the progress to the film's anticlimax holds a few surprises. Some beautiful scenes unfold as Zandy becomes captivated by the beauty of Hannah, reminding me how, for about a decade, between Persona and The New Land, everyone seemed to be in love with Liv Ullmann. Jordan Cronenweth does capture some lovely images: of Zandy and Hannah at table, lit by the light coming off a basket of wildflowers on the table between them, or Zandy watching in admiration as Hannah brushes her long blonde hair by the firelight. Cronenweth certainly might have had some guidance from Troell, or indeed from George Oddner, who is listed in the end credits as "consultant to Jan Troell". Some things, however, don't work so well. Like the scene in which Zandy engages in hand to claw combat with a not very large black bear. The bear-mawling of Leo DiCaprio in The Revenant, albeit abetted by CGI, has set an impossibly high bar for any such scenes.

Troell was promised that he could also operate the camera, but the American cinematographers' union threatened to fine the appointed director of photography (Jordan Cronenweth) $500 every time Troell touched the camera. The result of depriving Troell of access to the camera, which introduced more cooks to the kitchen, is what really prevented Zandy's Bride from getting off the ground. “The biggest difference for me about working in America was the number of people around the camera. In the centre, it’s the same, the relationship between the director, the actors and the camera." (1) Troell started in film as a cinematographer, and he had operated the camera in his four feature films in Sweden. Forced to block only actors (deciding where they should stand in relation to the design that isn't his own), instead of his camera taking part in the blocking must have been crippling for Troell. The photography of his Swedish films is a marvelous voyage of discovery for the viewer.

Zandy's family - father, mother, and a brother - are introduced, only to give the viewer a good idea where Zandy learned about domestic violence. A Mexican woman, Maria Cordova (played by Susan Tyrrell, who was misidentified as "Maria Cordova" in The New York Times review of the film)(2), with whom Zandy has a history, gives the story - and Zandy - an excuse to go astray from Hannah's story, which is the reason the film exists. At least Tyrrell doesn't subject the viewer to her usual crazy lady schtick, for which she was nominated for an Oscar in John Huston's Fat City (1972).

Zandy's Bride gave me the feeling that what attracted Troell to the story's possibilities in direct human terms was precisely what turned critics away from it. You find yourself waiting for something to happen in the film and then you realize what happened went right on by without your noticing it: the gradual action of one force upon another, each resistant to the influence of the other, in which the trajectories of both are eventually altered. The notion that Zandy's Bride is somehow in the tradition of a Western is more than a little silly when you remember that Troell accomplished one of the greatest sequences on the theme of the West in The New Land, when Karl Oskar's brother Robert and his slow-witted friend Arvid trek all the way to California to strike gold, to encounter only death and disappointment. Troell's camera showed us no sweeping vistas, no Monument Valley horizons, no sense of immensities except what the face of Eddie Axberg, who plays Robert, discloses. It is all up close, through the mud and the dirt and the pain, with a bare minimum of dialogue and a handful of other actors. Yet it says so much more about the tragedy of the West than a thousand Westerns.

Zandy's Bride got some positive notices, but not enough with which to build a Hollywood career. Troell returned to Sweden none the worse for his experience. The most significant reason for Troell's failure in Hollywood was much more fundamental than his lack of control over the camera: a filmmaker's nationality is essential to his work. Remove him from his native soil and native language - his ethos - and he is more than simply uprooted. He has lost his frame of reference, his ability to navigate the strange new world around him. Troell returned to Sweden to make Bang! (1977), and finished Hurricane (1979), which Roman Polanski was hired to direct before his sexual predilections ended his own Hollywood career. While making Hurricane, Troell met the Swedish journalist, Agneta Ulfsater, who would become his wife. So Troell emerged the winner from his encounter with Hollywood.



(1) Troell to Michael Dwyer, "A Life Calling the Shots," The Irish Times, May 21, 2009.
(2) Howard Thompson, The New York Times, May 20, 1974.

After Apple-picking

I was drawn to a particular poem last month after watching a documentary film about Robert Frost. This is the poem:

AFTER APPLE-PICKING

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree 
Toward heaven still, 
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill 
Beside it, and there may be two or three 
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough. 
But I am done with apple-picking now. 
Essence of winter sleep is on the night, 
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off. 
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass 
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough 
And held against the world of hoary grass. 
It melted, and I let it fall and break. 
But I was well 
Upon my way to sleep before it fell, 
And I could tell 
What form my dreaming was about to take. 
Magnified apples appear and disappear, 
Stem end and blossom end, 
And every fleck of russet showing clear. 
My instep arch not only keeps the ache, 
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round. 
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend. 
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin 
The rumbling sound 
Of load on load of apples coming in. 
For I have had too much 
Of apple-picking: I am overtired 
Of the great harvest I myself desired. 
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch, 
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall. 
For all
That struck the earth, 
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble, 
Went surely to the cider-apple heap 
As of no worth. 
One can see what will trouble 
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is. 
Were he not gone, 
The woodchuck could say whether it's like his 
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on, 
Or just some human sleep. 

I heard Frost recite this poem in the documentary in his dry, unemphatic way, and saw Richard Wilbur and Seamus Heaney discussing it. Heaney called it "Frost's Ode to Autumn. In fact it's the one place where he surrenders to the wood." The woods appear and reappear in several of Frost's poems; the best-known are probably "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" and "Come in".

Certain that I'd encountered the poem before many years ago (when I read it much less attentively), reading it again was like reading it for the first time. It measures up to what Frost wrote in the introduction to his Collected Poems: "Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride all its own melting. A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being. Its most precious quality will remain its having run itself and carried away the poet with it. Read it a hundred times: it will forever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went."(1)

Right away, I could see that the poem was not one of Frost's easier poems. There are two Robert Frosts, and the difference between them goes much deeper than poetic success or failure. It must have been deliberate, since he noticed that some of his poems got a great deal more attention from readers than others, and who better than Frost knew that they were not always his most important poems. In his 1963 essay on Frost, "A Momentary Stay," Irving Howe addresses this:

"It might be convenient, but is also a dangerous simplification, to draw a sharp line between his popular and superior poems. The two have a way of shading into one another ... in his small number of distinguished lyrics ... the archness and sentimentalism have been ruthlessly purged; he is writing for sheer life. To read these poems, as they confront basic human troubles and obliquely notice the special dislocations of our time, can be unnerving—for they offer neither security nor solace. They are the work of a poet who, without the mediation of formal thought or religious sentiments, gives close and hard battle to his own experience. They seek to capture those moments when we confront experience in its bareness, observing some natural event or place with a pure sense of the dynamics of reception. They set out to record such tremors of being in their purity and isolation: as if through a critical encounter with the physical world one could move beyond the weariness of selfhood and into the repose of matter. But Frost, now supremely hard on himself, also knows that the very intensity with which these amounts are felt makes certain their rapid dissolution, and that what then remains is the familiar self, once again its own prisoner. Approaching a pure state of being, these lyrics return with the necessity of shaped meaning. And in their somewhat rueful turning back to the discipline of consciousness, the effect is both painful and final: they conclude with the reflection that the central quandary of selfhood, that it must forever spiral back to its own starting point, cannot be dissolved."

"After Apple-picking" is a very odd Frost poem, one that is so ambiguous as to invite different conclusions about its meaning. Only recall what Amy Lowell wrote when the Frost collection North of Boston was published in America in 1915: "The charming idyll 'After Apple-picking,' is dusted over with something uncanny." That "something" is not easily identified. On its smooth surface, with a lilting cadence and rhyme, the poem describes how very late in the year, the speaker has finished picking nearly every available apple from his apple trees. He is so weary from his labors that he wonders if he might sleep the whole winter, like the woodchuck (who is already hibernating in his hole). But he was already tired, he says, when he began picking in the morning. Like the world around him, he is winding down toward something more than simply "human sleep." The grass is hoary with frost. The snow will come soon.

If "After Apple-picking" is Frost's Ode to Autumn, it doesn't fall easily in line with an idyll like John Clare's "To Autumn":

Come, pensive Autumn, with thy clouds and storms
And falling leaves and pastures lost to flowers;
A luscious charm hangs on thy faded forms,
More sweet than Summer in her loveliest hours,
Who in her blooming uniform of green
Delights with samely and continued joy:
But give me, Autumn, where thy hand hath been,
For there is wildness that can never cloy –
The russet hue of fields left bare, and all
The tints of leaves and blossoms ere they fall.
In thy dull days of clouds a pleasure comes,
Wild music softens in thy hollow winds;
And in thy fading woods a beauty blooms
That’s more than dear to melancholy minds.

A mind must be melancholy to prefer Autumn to Summer. At the close of "After Apple-picking," does the speaker, as Seamus Heaney claims, "surrender to the wood"? I have written before about two other poems by Frost, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and "Come in," in which the speaker is momentarily beguiled by a presence in a wood. "In many of Frost's poems," I wrote a year ago on this blog, "the voices of nature can be heard addressing him directly. But the things they tell him aren't at all what one might expect - like the thrush calling him to 'come in' to the woods at dusk or the beguiling beauty of a snowy woods that he stops to admire, until his horse pulls at his harness to remind him of his promises." The weariness of which the apple-picker speaks isn't simply physical. The sleep to which he is leaning, and the dreams he predicts will visit him, speak of a long year (a long life) coming to its close. It would be going too far, in this case, to say that what the speaker is going to is death. As Heaney says, it would rob the poem of all of its sensuous life.


(1) Robert Frost, "The Figure a Poem Makes."

A Tale of Two Dutertes

Last week I wrote about Arthur Koestler's efforts to get inside the headquarters of the fascist rebels in Spain in 1936. He believed that it was the only way anyone outside Spain would ever get a clear understanding of what was happening, since none of the liberal newspapers in  Europe did. The role of a foreign journalist inside such places of conflict and confusion can sometimes be vital. Since the election of President Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines in 2016, I have sometimes felt like a foreign correspondent observing the extraordinary events that have taken place here. But, unlike Spain in 1936-38, or Germany after the election of Hitler as Chancellor, it seems that observers outside the Philippines have a far different, and clearer, view of events than ordinary Filipinos do.

Like the 2018 midterm elections in the U.S., which was branded as a referendum on Trump (and Trump lost), the election on May 13 here in the Philippines is a referendum on the current president, Rodrigo Duterte, whether or not anyone dares call it that. Duterte's six-year term in office is only halfway over. And if it is true that all of the congressional, gubernatoral, and mayoral races around this far-fung archipelago were a referendum on Duterte, the Philippine sitting president, unlike his American counterpart, achieved a resounding mandate. Despite a significant drop of more than twenty per cent in the president's public approval rating, it is still at a healthy 60 percent. A majority of Filipinos are convinced that Duterte, or "DU30", is the best man for the job. But they are not exposed to foreign media coverage of Duterte's performance, which is overwhelmingly negative. Which brings me to the central puzzlement: which of the two widely divergent interpretations of Duterte's performance in office is closer to the truth - the one in the Philippine domestic media that paints him as a bold and courageous champion of the people or the one in every international news outlet that paints him as a thug and a virtual dictator?

There is a long tradition of press freedom in the Philippines, but as vocal critics of Duterte's murderous drug war over the past three years have gone down, one by one, both political rivals killed in "ambushes," and elected officials, like Senator Laila de Lima, being arrested on manufactured charges and placed in "detention," it has become increasingly clear that the Philippine press is playing it safe. On any given day, camera crews from the nightly network news dutifully follow police engaged in "buy-bust" (aka sting) operations in the streets of Manila, nabbing tiny amounts of methamphetamine (called "shabu") or marijuana (both classified as "dangerous drugs") and a handful of pesos, and putting the pathetic faces of those arrested (when they aren't killed outright) on national TV. Meanwhile, Maria Ressa, one of the most distinguished Filipino journalists and editor of the online news organization known as Rappler, has been arrested on one charge after another, including libel and embezzlement, but they have not stopped her open criticism of Duterte's strong arm political tactics. Shelley named poets the unelected legislators of the age, because they alone have the freedom to tell the truth. Journalists, belonging to the Fourth Estate, have the same freedom and bear the same responsibility.

Who is Rodrigo Duterte? Now 74, he comes from a prominent provincial family in the far south of the country. He was educated as a lawyer and became a prosecutor for the city of Davao, a sprawling city on the southern coast of Mindinao, the largest of the Philippine islands, was elected vice mayor and then mayor of Davao. He served as mayor an unprecedented 22 years. Like most provincial politicians, Duterte ruled Davao with absolute impunity. We were given a terrible glimpse of such impunity in 2009 by what is still called the "Ampatuan Massacre," in which more than 50 people, mostly journalists, were gunned down when someone other than a member of the ruling clan challenged their monopolization of power and tried to file a certificate of candidacy in an upcoming election. He sent his wife to file the certificate and she was among those killed, along with her unborn child. Ten years later, the people who ordered the massacre, as well as those who carried it out, have never been prosecuted. One pathetic member of the Ampatuan family, named Zaldy, was tried and convicted. He was likely singled out because he drew he shortest straw.

Duterte organized "death squads" and even took part in their patrols of Davao City, randomly gunning down perceived lawbreakers. Human rights groups documented 1,400 deaths from 1998 to 2016. Despite Duterte's claims that he made Davao the safest of Philippine's major cities, it still has the highest murder rate and rape rate in the country. When he was elected president in May 2016, confident in his prowess as an enforcer of the law, he told followers he would make the Philippines drug free in six months. When six months had passed, he said he need another six months. Now, after three years have failed to see the Philippines made drug-free, questions are being raised about the success - or lack thereof - of Duterte's drug war.

What astonishes me is how clearly ignorant of foreign affairs Duterte has revealed himself to be, that he could think he could get away with his killing squads in Manila while the whole world was watching. Whenever Duterte and his tactics are criticized by foreign governments, as they were when Barack Obama was the American president, Duterte's reaction exposed his total ignorance of the proper role of a world leader when basic human rights are violated anywhere on the globe. But, of course, the Philippines is not in any position to judge the human rights records of any other nation. The International Criminal Court in The Hague initiated an investigation into Duterte's Drug War, that has accounted for as many as 5,000 deaths since he took office. He responded to their investigation by withdrawing the Philippines' membership in the ICC, but the investigation, we are told, will continue. Clearly, foreign pressure has demonstrated to Duterte that Manila is not Davao, and that he can no longer continue his "slaughter" (his word) of Filipinos, users and dealers alike, involved in the drug trade with impunity.

Clearly, what has happened is that the murderous methods of Philippine provincial politics have been visited on the national government. Soon after taking office, a "hotline" was set up for people to call to report "government corruption." Except it sounds like life in Nazi Germany, in which ordinary citizens were encouraged to inform on one another if they noticed they were doing or saying anything that was critical of Hitler. And once the "extra-judicial killings" (EJK) of drug dealers and users was underway, Duterte promised every policeman that he will protect every one of them from prosecution for violations of the law. Rumors ("tsismiss" in Tagalog) suggests that the primary motivation of voters last month was fear of the EJKs. Drug use has declined because dealers and users don't want to be slaughtered.

Despite his tough talk, the president is now visibly frail and barely ambulatory. He can't exit or enter a vehicle without assistance. Rumors have been flying for months about his health problems. Despite his failing health, his party's gains in the May elections will probably embolden him to double down on his drug war tactics. His foolish promise to eliminate the drug trade in the Philippines (which he couldn't do if he lived a thousand years) is bound to end in failure. As long as he doesn't address the causes of drug use and addiction, he is doing nothing but stand on the roof of the presidential palace and piss into an oncoming typhoon. And his piss is being blown right back in his face.

It is easy to remind oneself that the Philippines is a small, poor, and insignificant country. Duterte is counting on international indifference to the slaughter of Filipinos by Filipinos. He is counting on our "compassion fatigue" as well as our notoriously short attention span. Justice within the Philippines is next to impossible. It must come from without.

Tear Down Reading Gaol

"Prison life makes one see people and things as they really are. That is why it turns one to stone. It is the people outside who are deceived by the illusions of a life in constant motion. They revolve with life and contribute to its unreality. We who are immobile both see and know."

Excerpt from the Preface of De Profundis

I know not whether Laws be right,
Or whether Laws be wrong;
All that we know who lie in gaol
Is that the wall is strong;
And that each day is like a year,
A year whose days are long. 

"The Ballad of Reading Gaol," Part V by Oscar Wilde


Two BBC News articles, from May 30 and June 6, reported that a building now derelict that was formerly known and utilized as Reading Jail faces an uncertain future: "The Ministry of Justice (MoJ), which owns the Grade II listed jail, announced last month it would sell the site. It said it was working with the local authority to look at alternative uses for the site, including housing. It added it wanted the site to 'get value for money for taxpayers'."

This news item would not have attracted attention (it wouldn't have been in the news in the first place) if a cell in Reading Jail hadn't been occupied between 1895 and 1897 by Oscar Wilde, imprisoned at hard labor for "gross indecency" (i.e., homosexuality, which was illegal in England until 1967). Now people and groups in Reading and around the world are trying to have the site protected as some kind of national heritage center.(1)

The same day I read the BBC report, Reuters News Service issued a report that "Public education officials in Colorado are considering a plan to tear down and rebuild Columbine High School, saying the site remains a “source of inspiration” for potential gun violence 20 years after a mass shooting there left 15 people dead."(2) Strange, how different people in different places think so differently about the disposition of sites of great suffering and injustice. Reading Jail is becoming a place of pilgrimage for LGBT people, just like Oscar Wilde's tomb in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. But it appears that, because of their interest, the derelict old jail may soon be protected from demolition and turned into a tourist attraction.

Look at the remaining buildings at Auschwitz in Poland. It was the location of a Death Camp at which the Nazi Final Solution sought to, and nearly succeded in, exterminating every European Jew. The whole complex is protected and no one would think of pulling it down. It seems to me that Reading Jail, too, stands there rather like the remaining buildings at Auschwitz - as a monument to injustice and human suffering. But the injustice carried out upon Oscar Wilde in that place, irrespective of the totality of the suffering that was carried out there upon all of its far less famous inmates, whom Wilde describes in moving detail in his great long poem, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol," that was written and published in France after his release, is personal, applicable to one man, and not to the more than one million people who perished at Auschwitz.

George Orwell once wrote that "The first thing that we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up. If it stands up it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp."(3) The Nazis tried to destroy the evidence of their crimes, but they didn't have time enough to complete the task. The preservation of the Nazi concentration camps (as well as the labor camps and death camps) as reminders of human depravity has its own special importance, especially when half of the millennials recently polled could not identify Auschwitz from photographs.

I think there is something distastefully fetishistic about the campaign to preserve Reading Jail - something sadomasochistic, like the Christian symbol of the cross, which is an instrument of torture. But if we could consult Oscar Wilde himself about the issue of the disposition of Reading Jail, is there any doubt that he would enthusiastically recommend what the people in Colorado are considering - that the offending structure should be razed to the ground? And that perhaps the site should instead be devoted to joy in the form of a peaceful park or a children's playground? A plaque should be all that is necessary to remind visitors to the site of what once stood there, commemorating its historical (and literary) importance, without having to go to the ridiculous expense of maintaining the decrepit building, which must by now be in danger of collapse.


(1) "Campaigners fight to save Oscar Wilde prison in Reading". Between January and March 1897, Wilde wrote "De Profundis" ("from the depths"), a letter to Sir Alfred Douglas.
(2) Reuters.
(3) "Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali," George Orwell: Essays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002).

Darkness at Noon Reboot

And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

W. H. Auden, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats"

The writer Arthur Koestler had a nose for trouble, a willingness to confront it, and an odd confidence in his own safety. In 1936, when a rebellion against the Republican goverment of Spain broke out, and frustrated in his attempts to learn exactly what was happening, he decided to go to Spain - not to the relative safety of the Republican-held regions, as many foreigners were doing, but to what was then the capitol of the rebellion in Seville. At the beginning of his book, A Spanish Testament, Koestler described the extraordinary atmosphere of July 1936. When the democratically-elected government in Spain began to move to the Left and enact reforms that threatened land ownership and the authority and freedoms enjoyed by the Roman Catholic church, an organized rebellion commited to toppling the government arose with General Francisco Franco as its leader and military and material support from fascist Germany and Italy. But coherent news from Spain was either not forthcoming or was incomplete. Koestler explains:

On July 18th, 1936, when the Franco revolt broke out, it looked at first as though the revolt had proved abortive and that the Government was master of the situation throughout Spain. Then the news grew more and more alarming. By the end of a week it was clear that there was to be a civil war of long duration, with possible European complications. We greedily devoured a preposterous number of newspapers ... The part played by the Press in the Spanish affair was from the outset a most peculiar one. The rebels refused to allow a single correspondent of any Left-wing or even liberal newspaper into their territory, while correspondents of liberal newspapers with pronouncedly Right-wing views were equally unwelcome on the Government side. Thus a state of affairs was rapidly created whereby, roughly speaking, the Right-wing newspapers had correspondents only ont he Franco side, and the Liberal and Left Press only on the Government side. The communiqués from the respective headquarters were grossly contradictory, and almost as great were the discrepancies between the telegrams sent by thec orrespondents on both sides, for whom a drastic censorship, furthermore, made it impossible to send out unbiased messages.

"The Spanish Civil War," Koestler concludes, "had, as it were, infected the Press of Europe ... In these circumstances, as a journalist of liberal convictions I was bound to be tempted by the idea of getting into rebel territory." So, with credentials supplied by a newspaper, Koestler embarked two days later from Belgium on a ship bound for Spain. He tried to infiltrate the rebel stronghold in Seville in order to get the scoop on their activities. He was informed on by a former German colleague who recognized him and he escaped, bringing with him proof that Mussollini and Hitler were supplying the rebels with arms and personnel.

We are not living in the 1930s, when there was nothing but newspapers and radio to disseminate information (or disinformation). Nor can we argue that every news service in America is either Left, Right or Center, as they were in Europe in the '30s. George Orwell told us that "history is written by the winners," simply because what happened in the Spanish civil war is still a subject of controversy because the Government version of events was supplanted by that of the fascist rebels. And as writers like Jorge Semprun, in his script for the beautiful Alain Resnais film La Guerre est finie, pointed out, the war was still being fought thirty years after it was officially over. In some ways, it is still being fought more than forty years after Franco's death because it is now a war for the truth.

Today, there is such a multitude of sources and media outlets, on television and online, that it is simply not possible to be completely ignorant. No one today would be in the same position that Arthur Koestler was in, trying so desperately to know what is happening in any particular place of conflict that the only way to find out is to go there himself. And yet, what is happening in the civil war in Syria is far from certain. Assad's greatest victory is outlasting our curiosity about his massacres of his own people. We are suffering from what is being called "conflict fatigue" - but it's really nothing more than the usual apathy.

An even worse fatigue is afflicting people today - "information fatigue." Then the problem isn't the medium, but the message. It is no longer an issue of how one is informed but by whom one is informed. Not only are we now supposed to be wary of everything our government tells us, but the political agenda of media outlets, with billionaire ownership, is putting whole swaths of the population deliberately in the dark and keeping them there. It is not the media's job to comfort us and tell us only what we want to hear - even if what we want to hear is lies. Last week, NBC reported the reaction of a woman who is an admitted Fox News viewer to the revelation that the Robert Mueller report contained information that implicated President Trump for obstruction of justice. “I was surprised to hear there was anything negative in the Mueller report at all about President Trump. I hadn’t heard that before," the woman told a reporter. "I’ve mainly listened to conservative news and I hadn’t heard anything negative about that report and President Trump has been exonerated.”(1)

While I watch CNN as my primary source of news, I also get news reports from Reuters, NPR, the BBC, and The Guardian - all liberal news sources ("liberal" in the broad sense used by Koestler, synonymous with "free"). My political leanings are Leftist, so my perspective on national news in the U.S. is, accordingly, Leftist. But the news itself is presented as politically neutral. Some people, particularly on the Right who insist there is a "liberal bias" in news reporting, will probably call this a naïve expectation. But if the mainstream media is Leftist, then so, I'm afraid, is American culture. It is Leftist because the prevailing cultural attitudes are progressive instead of reactionary. If pressed, most people will profess a belief that society can improve and is improving. The good society lies ahead of us, not behind us as reactionaries believe. We have not gone too far but not far enough.

But something akin to the political atmosphere of 1936 is upon us. The same polarization of viewpoints that Koestler encountered has been happening in the American Press for several years, and has accelerated since the election of Donald Trump in 2016. He went after support from a demographic group of Americans who felt ignored or overlooked and, because of his appeal to what most concerns them (whatever it is or the liberal media might think it is), they rallied behind him and keep on rallying, despite overwhelming evidence of his incompetence. He pulled off one of the biggest cons in history. The head of the Democatic National Committee announced last month that Fox News reporters will not be invited to upcoming debates. The 2020 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination will formally begin next February. Nine months later voters will go to the polling stations to vote for which version of history will be told. You don't need Arthur Koestler to tell you it's going to be messy.


(1) The full report is here.

Claude Goretta

The Swiss filmmaker Claude Goretta died on February 20. As sometimes happens, news of the death of an artist I admire, a writer, musician, or filmmaker, reaches me late here on my island that time overlooked. I didn't get the news about Goretta until last week. Fortunately, someone at The Guardian knew something about film and had a memory longer than a gnat's to recall how Goretta had, more than forty years ago, made at least one film for the ages. In my memory, The Lacemaker (1977) invites revisitation, and amply rewards it.

The Guardian obit is replete with the biographical details one is accustomed to find: "born 23 June 1929; died 20 February 2019." (89 years, 8 months) But it is skimpy with insights into the man. For that, an interested cinephile will have to turn to what interviews are available online. Along with Alain Tanner (who, undeservedly, got the most attention) Goretta rode the New Swiss Cinema (was there an Old Swiss Cinema?) for as long as it lasted - less than a decade it turned out. Goretta emerged from Swiss television in the late '60s and returned to it in the late '70s. The last production of his that I have seen was an excellent biography of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (who was from Switzerland) called Les Chemins de l'Exil (1978). Then - nothing. I never heard of him again - not until last year when I found a short film he made with Alain Tanner in London in 1957 called Nice Time, and also located a film he made in France in 2000 called Thérèse et Léon, an affectionate portrait of Léon Blum, French prime minister of the doomed 3rd Republic, and his wife. It reunited Goretta with Dominique Labourier, who played Gérard Depardieu's wife in Pas si méchant que ça (1975). Goretta's reputation, however, rests squarely on three films, L'Invitation (1972), Pas si méchant que ça (Not as Bad as All That, stupidly retitled The Wonderful Crook by its American distributor) and his masterpiece, La Dentelliére, The Lacemaker. All three were Swiss/French co-productions, which enabled Goretta to use French actors, Jean-Luc Bideau, François Simon (son of Michel Simon), Gérard Depardieu and especially Marlène Jobert and Isabelle Huppert. It also ensured that his films would be seen in the wider, French-speaking world.

In The Invitation, co-workers let their hair down at a party, with consequences that are somewhat predictable (it anticipated Bruce Beresford's much more biting Don's Party). If The Invitation showed more promise than substance, Pas si méchant que ça delivered, but with a very light touch. Gerard Depardieu is Pierre, the son of a furniture maker who gets in over his head when his father becomes ill and he has to take over the running of the company. He discovers that the company is in serious debt and, rather than close down and lay off all its employees, he resorts to a life of crime - robbing a bank, a post office, and a supermarket. And instead of finding customers to buy the furniture his factory turns out, he trucks it to deserted waste ground and incinerates it. Pierre is attracted to Nelly, a postal employee (Marlène Jobert), after he traumatizes her in an attempted robbery. He settles into a double life, with no apparent conflicts. But the police are soon on his trail and, inevitably, they catch him.

Goretta wrote an original script for Pas si méchant que ça, but for his next next film he relied on a script by the author of an award-winning novel. The Lacemaker is a wonder in so many ways. Its subject is a shy, innocent young woman who works in a hair salon in Paris. So disarmingly unspectacular, more still and unhurried than a Dardennes Brothers film, it is one of the best films of the '70s. That Pascal Lainé chose to make Béatrice (or Pomme to friends) the center of the universe for the whole length of a novel was a challenge, but Goretta's even greater accomplishment of giving - gifting - the length of a film production of weeks and dozens of people to her is even more amazing. Young(ish) filmmakers eager to capitalize on the modest success of their first feature efforts would never turn to such an unshowy, unassuming, utterly tender and attentive portrait of a young woman deeply damaged by her first contact with heartlessness, an apple bruised by life, by an experience that everyone else, it seems, treats so casually, so callously. Heartbreak? It's to be expected. The world will never align with our fantasies, with romance novels. Life always falls short of the ideal. When François, an upper class young man with whom Pomme has fallen in love, learns that she is a patient in a psychiatric hospital, and visits her there, and comes away knowing how deeply his thoughtlessness had hurt her, he is moved to tears. And so is the viewer.

So why, then, did Goretta sink into obscurity after such critical success? The answer isn't hard to discover. François Truffaut made an even bigger critical splash with his first three films, but as gratifying as this recognition surely must have been for Truffaut, it didn't make him very much money, and it didn't get him any closer to becoming what he evidently most wanted to be - a professional filmmaker with an assured future ahead of him. To achieve that, Truffaut had to forsake the world of little art films for more consciously commercial products.

The same can be said of a filmmaker who was more of a contemporary of Goretta's. Jean-Jacques Annaud made two films, La Victoire en chantant (known as Black and White in Color in the US) and Coup de tête, that got him enviable critical attention, but very little else. So he absconded into international productions starting with Quest for Fire, and, while managing occasionally to make a good film (like The Lover), the artist who made those first marvelous films hasn't been seen since.

I don't think Goretta compromised himself. I simply think that a reputation for small, quiet, unspectacular films like The Lacemaker wasn't the most promising way to establish one's career. He made twenty-five films after The Lacemaker, short films and features, most of them for Swiss television. Like the Guardian obit says, "Much of Goretta’s subsequent film work, including his second adaptation of a Ramuz novel, Si le Soleil Ne Revenait Pas (If the Sun Never Returns, 1987), remained little known outside francophone countries." We need to be reminded now and then that our access to even the finest film work is contingent on forces quite beyond the fairest or most sensible control. Now that he is gone, perhaps more of Claude Goretta's films will be more accessible. It can only contribute to our esteem of this fine filmmaker.