Stocks and Bonds

I am not a fan, but I have seen all but the last two of the James Bond films. I shall probably get around to seeing them soon, since even here in the Philippines they are hard to avoid.* For a critic, they are very low on the scale of films that warrant attention. but they are always there, like an old neighbor who is so trapped in acquisitiveness that he can never resist buying all the latest, "cutting edge," noisy and useless gadgets that wake you up too early on Sunday mornings but always draw the attention of the pretty girls on the block.

There are six Bonds. The five former Bonds are still around, but only one of them has outlasted and outshone the role: the man who created the role on film; the man who is still the original Bond; the one who first uttered the words "My name is Bond. James Bond" before they became the running gag they have long since become; the man to whom the other five Bonds are mere imitations. I mean Sean Connery,of course. Some have argued that Bond must always be reinvented for new eras and new generations, that there was a Bond for the 1960s, for the '70s and '80s, for the '90s, and now one for the new millennium. But you cannot reinvent something that is patented. And James Bond was patented in his first five films: all the characters, the formulae, the gadgets, the cars, the villains, and the girls. Everything since is simply unoriginal and exist only for the sake of the franchise.

The Bond patent was so successful that when parodies began to appear in the '60s, it was difficult to tell precisely what was being parodied and who was parodying whom.** Those first five Bond films (Dr. No, From Russia With Love, Goldfinger, Thunderball, and You Only Live Twice) contain all the ideas that the series was capable of expressing. After them, new faces and ever-flashier and redundant representations of violence exposed an obvious battle fatigue that has made whatever effectiveness they may have been reaching for moot. Since the mid-1970s, the films didn't even have to be entertaining. They are like post-John Belushi SNL. Whenever I watch SNL today, and groan, I console myself with the knowledge that it doesn't have to be funny any more. But It will still be there ten years from now. SNL and the Bond films are just further proof that our culture is sold on the childish notion that all good things must . . . go on forever.

(Some Bond trivia: the perfect Englishman, whom Ian Fleming modeled on himself, has been played by only two actual Englishmen, Roger Moore and Daniel Craig. The others were Scots [Connery], Australian [George Lazenby], Welsh [Timothy Dalton], and Irish [Pierce Brosnan]. Hooray for the United Kingdom?)

* I passed a teacher's house last week here in my barangay, fighting off all the stares and the mutterings of "'Cano" and "hey Joe", when a voice from the past drifted by me. It was the unmistakable voice of Sean Connery. As I was walking past an open door (all doors are open during the day), I glimpsed a TV screen on which Thunderball was playing, with Adolfo Celi walking onto a yacht and Sean Connery right behind him.

** The best of them were the two Flint films, with James Coburn.

These Colors Don't Run

My last unit in the U.S. Army was the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment at Fort Carson, Colorado. Fort Carson happens to be one of the few attractive army posts in the country. Situated in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, in the shadow of Cheyenne Mountain, where NORAD lies, I served out the last year and a half of my military service there. In early 2000, my unit was deployed to Bosnia for six months, which meant that, since the Bosnia mission was an international affair, every one of us in the unit had to have a small American flag patch sewn on the right shoulder of our BDUs.

On examining these patches, many of us wondered why the flag was backwards. When it is normally represented in two dimensions, the flag is supposed to look like it is flying from a pole on the left, with the stars in the upper left corner. On our uniforms, the flag was represented the opposite way, with the stars on the upper right. It was explained to us that if the flag were made the usual way, it would make us appear to be moving backwards, i.e., retreating. Since the U.S. Army never retreats, the patches were designed to show that we were always advancing.

Except, of course, when we were lying down, either on our backs or our stomachs, in which case we would appear from the flag's attitude to be ascending into the air or burrowing into the ground. And even in the impossible actuality of our retreating, or making what is now known as a strategic withdrawal, the flag would still make us look as if we were advancing - but to the rear.

As most Americans already know, the flag must be destroyed, according to tradition, if it touches the ground or is otherwise defiled in some way. I had always understood that the manner of its destruction was supposed to be fire, but since burning the flag has long since become a statement of protest and a deliberate provocation*, the official ritual of flag destruction has taken on rather elaborate and methodical details. (I was told these details by an Army reservist I met in Iowa, who had himself performed the ritual.) The flag must first be disassembled: the thirteen stripes and fifty stars must be removed one by one. When finished, the flag has been reduced to its component parts - seven red stripes, six white stripes, a blue field with fifty holes, and fifty individual white stars - and it is ready to be burned. Not all at once, in a pile, but one piece of cloth at a time.


Early one morning in May 1988, on the parade ground at RTC Orlando (long since closed), I had my first opportunity to salute the flag. We recruits were being instructed in drill and ceremony, when a bugle call was sounded over the loudspeakers on the base, giving everyone who is out-of-doors a few moments to face the site where the flag is being raised. Our company commander brought all eighty of us to attention and turned us around so that we were facing a small building behind which a tall flagpole was standing. And when the national anthem started blaring from the loudspeakers, he ordered us all to salute. As the national anthem played, I felt like I was at the Olympics and had won a gold medal, since only the gold medal winner's national anthem is played. It was an indescribable mixture of pride and what I can only call glory. It was probably the most emotional salute of my life, except for the one I gave to another flag, three months later, that was being folded over my father's remains on Fort Jackson, South Carolina.


*What anti-U.S. protesters around the world never seem to realize is that a piece of cloth painted to look like an American flag - is not an American flag. So burning it has nothing more than symbolic value.

Butt-Pirates of the Caribbean

As if we needed it, here is yet another chapter in the seemingly endless annals of withering estimates of male sexuality, which is quite plainly predatory and opportunistic. 

James Hamilton-Paterson (not to be confused with the best-selling mediocrity James Patterson) seems to suggest, in this excerpt from his beautiful book The Great Deep: The Sea and its Thresholds, that piracy - particularly the extreme variety that flourished in 17th-century West Indies - was a consequence of a lack of women.

"A good example of a highly specialized social group living in extreme circumstances is that of seventeenth-century English pirates in the Caribbean. It was described recently [1983] by a scholar who, in default of extensive documentation (for they were not great diarists) elegantly deduced by a series of negative proofs how their lives had to have been. His thesis is that these buccaneers were practically all homosexual and that their piratical activities were sustained by their sexual relationships, much as the Spartans' valor was. He cites as determining factors the generally lenient prevailing attitudes to homosexuality in England at the time and the way in which apprentices were drawn or press ganged extensively from the bands of boy vagrants ('great flockes of Chyldren') who roamed the country and whose group identification, for their own protection, was exclusive. Furthermore, the population of the British West Indian islands was then almost entirely male, an imbalance enhanced by transportation. 'The single certainty is that the only nonsolitary sexual activities available to buccaneers for most of the years they spent in the Caribbean and almost all of the time they were aboard ship were homosexual.' (1) Very few pirates ever married, it seems, and those who did were uniformly unlucky with their women (and vice versa, one would imagine). Blackbeard, William Dampier, Bartholomew Sharp and other pirate captains jealously guarded their favorite boys, while all aboard took advantage of a form of male bonding discreetly named matelotage. It is a great pity there is such a dearth of contemporary documents, although vivid details do emerge. Captain John Avery was known as Long Ben, 'not because of his height.' Add to all this the occasional bouts of derring do and the frequent orgies of drinking when every soul aboard from captain to ten-year-old powder monkey was stone drunk, and by contrast to the solidarity of outlaw life afloat, that of 'straight' life (in both senses) ashore would have seemed dreary indeed. It is strange to think that, but for the lack of a few hundred women in the West Indies, piracy might have assumed quite different patterns or even have been suppressed entirely by privateers."

Strange indeed! Anyone still smiling at Johnny Depp's Keith Richards turn as the pirate Jack Sparrow in the dreadful Disney Pirates of the Caribbean movies might now be wondering what plumbing Keira Knightley was hiding under that dress. But maritime history is rich in such anecdotes. Richard Hough suggested in his great book Captain Bligh and Mister Christian that one possible explanation for Fletcher Christian's decision to lead the crew of the HMS Bounty in mutiny was Bligh's unwelcome homosexual advances during the homeward voyage from Tahiti. And it was Winston Churchill who was supposed to have said, "Don't talk to me about naval tradition. It's nothing but run, sodomy and the lash."

Hamilton-Paterson should've read a review that George Orwell wrote of a book called Walls Have Mouths by W.F.R. Macarthey: "The most dreadful chapter in this book is the one entitled 'Notes on Prison Sex Life'. It gave me such a shock when I read it, for it suddenly revealed to me the meaning of a conversation of years earlier. I once asked a Burmese criminal why he disliked going to jail. He answered with a look of disgust and the single word, 'Sodomy'. I thought then that he merely meant that among the convicts there were a few homosexuals who pestered the others, but what Mr. Macarthey makes clear is that in prison, after a few years, almost every man becomes homosexual, in spite of putting up a fight against it. He gives a horrible account of the way in which homosexuality gradually overwhelmed himself, first of all through the medium of his dreams."

I think Orwell, who was a terrible homophobe, got it wrong. It is not that all men are inherently gay, and that only the right (or wrong) circumstances will bring it out. It is not even that all men are bi. Freud may have (famously) pointed out that there is only one libido that serves both men and women, but the message is painfully clear to me: for men, anyone may serve as a sex-object, any orifice may be enlisted to satisfy the libido - depending entirely on the degree of their personal delicacy. This is a far more chilling estimate of male sexuality than either Hamilton-Paterson or Orwell imagined.

(1) B.R. Burg, Sodomy and the Perception of Evil. English Sea-Rovers in the Seventeenth Century Caribbean (1983)

[Postscript: The new dispensation explains the behavior of pirates (and prisoners) as "Situational Homosexuality" - not homosexuality at all, but the male response to a situation in which vaginas are conspicuously absent.] 

Children's Games

Reading some passages from Moritz Thomsen's Living Poor more critically, I can see differences between the people living in Rio Verde, Ecuador, and those living here in my Philippine barangay, that have tempered and solidified both my understanding of poverty and of Thomsen's Peace Corps experience. He wrote that he "began to be aware that in the town there was scarcely a moment when a baby's crying didn't fill the air. . . . Like a revelation, I suddenly realized that these screams were the screams of human beings learning about poverty. They were learning about sickness and about hunger; they were learning in a hard school what they could expect from life, learning to accept their destiny and the futility of revolting against it. They were being twisted and maimed. They were being turned from normal human beings into The Poor." After growing somewhat inured to the sound of screaming children here, I am more convinced that screaming is what children do - it's their only means of communicating anything. I hear laughter, too, and screams of pleasure from children as young as two and as old as ten. But there is sometimes an occasional forced note, as if they were trying too hard to have fun.

My experience of poverty here has been more varied than Thomsen's. The Peace Corps would never send a volunteer to my barangay. It simply isn't that far gone for such assistance. Thomsen wrote about the children of Rio Verde: "After the age of six they are ready for life, and as for being poor, they know all about it; there isn't a thing they don't know. There are no more tears. They play quietly, gravely in the dirt before their houses, and there is something terrible in their eyes, a kind of blindness."

Part of the sadness of childhood, for the children that I see every day, is how they notice what life has done to their mothers and - when they are still around - their fathers, and how they begin to realize that the same life is waiting for them as well. But there is still time for them to be children.

Watching poor children play is a revelation, not of the desperate shortage of toys, but of how necessity is the mother of invention. For all those Americans who contribute to the U.S. Marine Corps' annual Toys for Tots campaign, I would like them to see how these children create games out of nothing, out of thin air, out of cupped hands, out of rubber bands, aluminum cans, whatever they can lay their hands on. I have watched them find a flat surface, dirt, cement or stone, place an object like a scrap of paper or plastic in front of them, cup their hands together, palms down, and slap the ground beside the object so that the displaced air blows it a few inches away from them. The children gather in groups of two or three and slap the ground in unison to see who can move the object the farthest. The sound of their hands slapping the ground can be heard from twenty or thirty yards away.

Or they will put stones inside an aluminum can and make it into a percussive instrument. Making noise becomes a game. But seeing how rusted the cans are, and the jagged edges of their open lids, I wonder sometimes if the object of their play is to see which of them will contract tetanus first. Some children have actual toys, like hula hoops, plastic guns that make clicking noises when you squeeze the trigger, and toy trucks. But since there are too few to go around, and since these children always play in groups, the toys are soon broken or abandoned.

Around the age of ten, something happens to the children. They are halfway between childhood and adulthood, and they pause, as if on a brink. They grow more serious, more aloof from the others, less spontaneously joyous, but also less prone to tears or cries. If they are boys, they play basketball or work more with their fathers, fishing or chopping firewood. Their play becomes rougher, more violent. But mostly they act as if nothing in the world could possibly relieve their boredom. They have lost the faculty of discovering wonder all around them. It is painful to watch.

But if they are girls, they will spend more time with their mothers and sisters, cleaning, cooking and washing clothes. There is always work for women to do here. And you will never see them with a doll. What use are they when there are real babies that need to be fed and washed and loved everywhere you look? And unless the girls are lucky enough to find something else to occupy them like school or a job as a maid in the city, they too will be having babies soon enough - as soon as some boy, who cannot even afford a condom, in a country that should be airlifting them to these provinces by the millions, can overcome their fear and fill their ears with lies and their minds with fantasies of love. The worst thing about it is that every girl knows there really isn't much of a choice.

But their childhood is still there, and will always be something so much more for them than what it was for some of us from more privileged circumstances (even if it may not have felt so privileged when we were living it) - a time of heedless days, of endless play, and games that are never so serious that the rules cannot be changed so that even the losers can sometimes win.

A Tale of Springtime

[Since 2000, I have had the pleasure of contributing to the Melbourne Cinematheque's Annotations on Film. I would volunteer to write about a film that they were scheduling, as long as I had access to it on DVD, sometimes without having seen it yet. This put me in the precarious position of being committed to write about a film whether I liked it or not. Since I was writing a "scholarly" piece rather than a critical one, I could keep my opinion to myself and simply introduce the film to an unsuspecting audience. Or so I thought. Luckily, this happened to me only once, when I had to write about Eric Rohmer's 1990 film A Tale of Springtime. Rohmer had always interested me because his films were never easy to like. So I wrote my annotation without ever having to admit that I thought little of the film. It did, however, teach me something more about Rohmer.]



A Tale of Springtime

If someone could've witnessed, since earlier this afternoon, everything I've done and said, even they wouldn't understand the meaning of the situation.
– Jeanne in A Tale of Springtime

Eric Rohmer (b. 1920) has been making films for more than 50 years, but he is known internationally for the films he has made since 1967. Shot with a 16mm camera, La Collectionneuse (1967) was the third of his “Six Moral Tales” (the first two were short films), a series that established him as one of the most distinctive voices of the French New Wave. His style has been called “lapidary” by the late Pauline Kael, and he definitely has an eye for the minutiae of things and an ear for the ironies and double-meanings of the French language (1).

The critical and commercial success of his completely unostentatious little films has enabled him – through the auspices of his own production company Les Films du Losange – to experiment with two extraordinary literary adaptations (of Heinrich von Kleist's The Marquise of O… [1976] and Chretien de Troyes' Perceval le Gallois [1978]) as well as launch two more series of his inimitable and elegant films in the 1980s and 1990s – the “Comedies and Proverbs” and the “Tales of the Four Seasons”.

A Tale of Springtime is, appropriately enough, the first of Rohmer's “Tales of the Four Seasons”, and bears out its title with a portrayal of incipient love. It also reveals, somewhat playfully, how impossible it is to force love to conform to our designs. Jeanne is a high school philosophy teacher who meets Natacha at a party in Montmorency. Since neither of them knows anyone else at the party, they strike up a conversation.

Jeanne shares an apartment in Paris with her boyfriend, who is out of town. But he's left the apartment in a shambles and Jeanne stays just long enough to take some clothes and two books with her – Plato and Kant. She then stops at her own apartment, but her cousin Gaelle is using it with her boyfriend, who is on furlough from the military.

Natacha lives with her father, Igor, a 40-year-old reluctant bureaucrat. But he rarely turns up – or so she assures Jeanne – since he lives with his 20-year-old girlfriend, Eve. Since Jeanne has no other preferable place to stay the night, she gives Natacha a ride home and stays at her place. Whether by accident or design (and even Rohmer's accidents are part of his pattern), Igor comes home the following morning while Jeanne is in the shower. Complications ensue, which form the crux of Rohmer's tale.

A subplot is introduced when Natacha tells Jeanne the story of her missing necklace, implicating both her father and his girlfriend in its disappearance. This little mystery is solved near the film's end when Jeanne finds the necklace by accident, and Natacha's explanation for its sudden reappearance absolves both her father and Eve. But only such solvable mysteries find such easy resolutions in Rohmer's universe.

With his very first shot – of Jeanne walking out of the Lycee Jacques Brel – Rohmer informs us that we are going to spend some time in the company of cultivated people. But by making Jeanne a philosophy teacher, Rohmer elicits most of the film's conflicts, along with some interesting dialogue. Jeanne tells Natacha that, instead of pedantically preaching about absolute truths, for her philosophy is the art of “thinking about thought”, that what she tries to instill in her students is the ability to “think about thinking”. Over dinner, she assures Igor and Eve that most of her students are from the working class, and yet they find it embarrassing to get a bad grade in philosophy. “It's like saying they're unable to think”, Jeanne insists. “We can brag about being bad at math, but not philosophy.” Yet all of Jeanne's thinking can't protect her from her own self-deception.

One of Rohmer's themes in A Tale of Springtime is that nobody wants to allow anything to run its natural course – they're always trying to force things to happen. Consequently there is a disconnection between his characters' thoughts and their feelings. They seem too aloof to surrender to a powerful emotion. When Igor asks Jeanne if she is madly in love with her boyfriend, she answers quite directly, “How could I be? I'm not mad.”

This exchange occurs in Igor's house when he and Jeanne are left alone by Natacha's sudden departure with her boyfriend. Jeanne and Igor play a rather silly game that quickly turns serious – Jeanne grants Igor three wishes, to sit beside her, to hold her hand and to kiss her. It all seems so mechanical until Jeanne decides things have gone too far and insists on leaving.
Against the intensity of his dialogue, Rohmer plays out his tale in wondrous locations. The places themselves are exquisite – Parisian rooms from some displaced ancien régime converted none too carefully into functional homes (2). And they are invariably lined with overstuffed bookshelves – masterpieces of bookbinding, if nothing else. But Rohmer's people don't keep ideas like pets. For them, ideas are to be contested, at every opportunity.

Rohmer's people suffer personal spasms that don't cause ripples beyond their immediate vicinity. But within the framework Rohmer has made for them, his microcosm, every spark – the slightest word or gesture – can change the course of their lives. Rohmer's dramatic strategy is to bring a group of disparate characters together, watch them react to one another, and have them splinter off again in different directions. He watches as fates intersect and then alter their courses accordingly - such is Rohmer's own dialectic.

(1) From his carefully wrought dialogue you could conclude that Rohmer's twin fixations are philosophy and eroticism. These fixations are often surprisingly juxtaposed.

(2) As usual, there is no set designer listed in the film's credits, suggesting that Rohmer used real people's homes, with “real” décor.

My Night at Eric's

I have always found the work of Eric Rohmer, who turned 89 this year, more than a little boring. Except for The Marquise of O... (1976), which is his masterpiece and quite unlike all his other films, his foremost quality is an intellectualized sensuality, where the one invariably nullifies the other. Since he is a somewhat lightweight intellectual, Rohmer is much better when he lets sensuality get the upper hand, as he did in La Collectionneuse (1967), Chloe in the Afternoon (1972), Pauline at the Beach (1983) (thanks to the beautiful Arielle Dombasle), and My Night at Maud's (1969)

Another quality of Rohmer's work is irony: how knowledge is often withheld from the most knowledgeable; how the truth is most elusive to those who pride themselves on their honesty; and how happiness is sometimes the product of self-deception. Rohmer knows that it is good not to be wise in the ways of others or in one's own.

Jean-Louis, played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, works for Michelin in Clermont, but is not adapting well to his new surroundings since his return from Vancouver and Valparaiso. He notices a pretty blonde in church (Marie-Christine Barrault), who also notices him. Then he runs into Vidal (Antoine Vitez), a friend he hasn't seen in fourteen years. Through Vidal he meets Maud (Francoise Fabian), a beautiful divorcee who, after an evening of banter on love and marriage, impulsively invites Jean-Louis, after the tipsy Vidal has gone home, to her bed. How Jean-Louis responds to her invitation sets in motion events that will change the lives of three people.

In one sense, the film is an argument against Catholicism. Rohmer's lengthy church scenes, while they made me squirm nearly as much as I did every Sunday when I was a boy, cleverly illuminate the drama of looks and gestures going on between Jean-Louis and the blonde, Francoise. And other looks and gestures between Francoise and her co-conspirators, Vidal and Maud, provide glimpses of a much broader drama that Rohmer leaves unspoken.

It is, after all, that unspoken drama that contributes an intriguing dimension to My Night at Maud's - the intersection of disparate lives, libidos, and egos, their reactions, and the resumption of their personal trajectories. Something happened at Maud's. Even Maud talks about that night with unabashed nostalgia. Near the end of the film, Jean-Louis refers to it as "that evening," and Maud corrects him: "Evening? Night, you mean. Our night." By so italicizing that wintry night in Clermont, in which two people attract, but ultimately fail, each other, Rohmer comes close to the rueful, fate-streaked universe of the Alexandrian poet Cavafy:


The Afternoon Sun

This room, how well I know it.
Now they’re renting it, and the one next to it,
as offices. The whole house has become
an office building for agents, merchants, companies.

This room, how familiar it is.

Here, near the door, was the couch,
a Turkish carpet in front of it.
Close by, the shelf with two yellow vases.
On the right—no, opposite—a wardrobe with a mirror.
In the middle the table where he wrote,
and the three big wicker chairs.
Beside the window was the bed
where we made love so many times.

They must still be around somewhere, those old things.

Beside the window was the bed;
the afternoon sun fell across half of it.

...One afternoon at four o’clock we separated
for a week only... And then—
that week became forever.


Rohmer makes that moment between Maud and Jean-Louis into a legend, making My Night at Maud's such a moving and personal experience, one of those lovely films that are fixed for us in a moment of time, the first time we saw it, but which grows on subsequent viewings.

Godawful

[I have written far too many product reviews over the years, in the somewhat safe capacity of a consumer advocate. (It is, after all, the role that film reviewer's fulfill most of the time - informing the public of films that will give them the most for their money.) I got my hands on a copy of Colin MacCabe's Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy, and I was immediately struck by the book's unbelievably reverential tone. One of the reasons I have never taken "film scholars" seriously is because their standards are all over the place. Jean-Luc Godard was an influential critic and a founding member of the French Nouvelle Vague. He is also one of the most overrated filmmakers "of all time," as film scholars like to put it.]






The Viewer Over My Shoulder

For anyone who is only marginally curious about the vacillating fortunes of Jean-Luc Godard, which has dimmed to virtual darkness since the 1960s, Colin MacCabe's book Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy contains very little that is useful and a great deal that is both confusing and misleading. MacCabe is blessed with intimate knowledge both personally and professionally of Godard, and doesn't hesitate to demonstrate this. What he fails to demonstrate to this non-convert to Godard is precisely anything that might sway me from the conviction, cultivated over 30 years, that - at best - Godard was politically stupid,* technically incompetent and artistically bankrupt from beginning to end - an end which MacCabe is anxious to prove is as much the end of European culture as Dante's Divine Comedy was its beginning (he even cavils that this "is no exaggeration.").

Such admiration as this would be charming if it were to any degree justified. A little objective discrimination, presuming Mr MacCabe still believes in such things, would've been far more welcome. This book, however, is founded on the premise that Jean-Luc Godard (a co-founder of the French New Wave) is a film artist of unprecedented importance. That this premise is sheer flapdoodle tends to deflate most of the points Mr MacCabe attempts to make about Godard, or Film, or European culture for that matter.


*For example, Vernon Young reported at the time that, in organizing the protest that led to the cancellation of the Cannes Film Festival in 1968, Godard did so not in the name of Marxism, Leninism, or Maoism, as expected, but Stalinism!