Freedom of speech, of the press, the right to a trial & to assemble & protest peacefully

Point and Shoot, Martha Rosler

Dear Friends and readers,

As anyone who has watched TV in the last few months, read periodicals of any sort, read articles on the Internet, knows freedom of speech. of the press, and the right to assemble are just now under relentless, fierce, shameless attack. A push back and defense has been mounted since the exposure of the long time partly privately contracted out surveillance programs of NSA. Its instruments are many, but the one I want to focus on here is the Patriot Act, with its business section, which makes legal the demand for three months from the US security and intelligence apparatuses to require that companies with records of their customers’ phone conversations or emails hand them over en mass — to be kept, researched, or acted upon by the gov’t agency as it sees fit. This includes direct arrest, long-term imprisonment (if it’s deemed by the people involved what this gov’t agency “needs”) without trial. The immediate method pursued ruthlessly and increasingly openly is to threaten the people who provide the sources of information journalists need to reach and publish information.

There have been many articles and talk on the public media as well as demonstrations on behalf of the importance of retaining these rights and exposing the fallacies of “national security” justifications. The first I want to center on here which I doubt has had that much circulation concerns the cut off from legal redress by people who don’t have money to defend themselves either for a short or longer time by the de-funding of agencies like public legal aid. In the London Review of Books issue of 35:11, May 9th, 2013, Francis Fitzgibbon, a barrister, describes how this has been done and justifed in the UK where the same sort of assault on the public has been going on for about the same three decades. I’ll copy out his opener:

A fundamental shift in the relationship between the government and the governed is taking place: by restricting access to the law, the state is handing itself an alarming immunity from legal scrutiny. There are several aspects to this: the partial or total withdrawal of state financial support for people who lack the means to pay for legal advice and representation; and for those who can pay, a restriction on which kinds of decision by public bodies can be challenged.

Fitzgibbon’s point is the people who run the state are working to allow themselves to do what they want without the public they are said to be working for knowing what they are doing. The American version of this is Norman Solomon’s open letter to Diane Feinstein informing her that the bill of rights exists

Rather than call for protection of the Fourth Amendment, you want authorities to catch and punish whoever leaked this secret order. You seem to fear that people can actually discover what their own government is doing to them with vast surveillance.

The second has many varieties but the central point over and over is to highlight that the companies doing this work are often private contractors with political agendas (rightest, pro-corporate rights and militarist, which of course the companies often are, e.g., Blackwater, Bouz Allen Hamilton) and to reveal typical uses made of information gathered by agencies. The information is used for on behalf of the interests of those people who network with the company’s people. I can’t find just now an article which described how a private contractor took information about the private lives of individuals in a liberal democratic campaign and leaked it to the republicans and helped enable the Republicans to win that campaign. (I’m not a reporter by profession.) So I’ll use this one by Jacob Chamberlain which focuses on the lack of oversight and accountability for what is done with this information.

I think it important not to get caught up with personal attacks or defenses of the people who bring such information to reporters, be it Julian Assange (who I grant does not bother go to reporters but releases information directly onto the Internet), Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden. Or the reporters themselves: Glen Greenwald and the Guardian, Laura Poitras; before them Daniel Ellsberg and the New York Times. These names and news organizations are only the people who have caught the public eye. The criminalization (and demonization or mockery) of those who reveal what should be and is in morality criminal behavior is what we must keep our eyes on. The three I’ve named have revealed the gathering of files by the most powerful agencies of the gov’t. I don’t know the names of the sources of the AP press that were garnered a couple of weeks back under a legal court order.

Less known but still sufficiently individualized are animal rights activists who have gone to jail for long term prison sentences (including the experience as routine of the torture of solitary confinement) as “eco-terrorists”. Across the south where corporate groups have taken power in state governments laws have been passed to define as criminal anyone filming what happens in corporate farming.

Of interest to me in particular (as someone who values her freedom of speech which here on the Internet amounts to freedom of the press), there has been scapegoating of people disseminating information which under the increasing Draconian interpretation of copyright in order to attack the freedom to connect to others through the Internet since 1995. Most famous here is Aaron Scwartz, literally bankrupted and hounded to death. The threat of many decade-long punishments for a minor infraction was used there: it’s become commonplace in the last 20 years for prosecuting attornies to terrify people into cooperating by menacing them with near-life imprisonment.

The very right to a trial is threatened over and over again and is denied in the case of Middle Eastern people. If the Obama administration genuinely had information which could prove that Anwar el-Alwaki was plotting to kill US citizens, they could easily have captured him in the small village he lived in and brought him to trial. They chose instead to murder him because they have no such evidence; he was a figure preaching against the US empire’s interests and had a large following. The murder of his son and outrageous reply that he was not being a good father caring for his son so that’s why the boy died is analogous to the incident which opens Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities where the aristocrat runs over a small child in the street and then mocks the grieving father by accusing him of not being a good parent.

The criminalization of those who expose criminals is seen in what has happened to the men who outed the Steubenville rapists. This coheres with the determined attempt to control women’s bodies for the sake of men: compulsory pregnancy for women, no recourse to help if you are raped is fundamentally helped when Deric Lostutter who exposed the Steubenville rapists is himself sent to prison for 10 years exposing them. This is an attack on the Internet too.

We saw what the right of peaceful assembly was worth in this country when we watched on TV the violent destruction of the Occupy movement. These cohorts of terrifying armed groups of men were most recently seen on the day after the Boston marathan bombing; the lack of aide for people who need it on the same day a Texas factory exploded. I wrote about this too: Wild and cruel in Texas and Boston.

I want also to make the connection between companies who seek to frack our environment (and use water as part of what is under threat) and journalists who can expose what fracking is. This affects all of us directly; last night I read a blog by a friend on Barnesville and Fracking in whose community individuals who don’t understand how this will destroy the environment (or if they do) have decided to sell out and escape elsewhere. I want to be able to write a blog on the film Gaslands without worrying who will read the blog inside a private contractors’ access to materials where someone can search out anyone writing about fracking.

It may seem that for now the right to vote has been reaffirmed by the US courts but powerful people in whose interests it is to curtail the right to vote have deep pockets; the NAACP is continually at work to fight the efforts of ALEC and its contributors like the Koch brothers, but we can see today in North Carolina the ruthless attempt to silence people in order to take from them any right to protest when their jobs are cut, their pensions destroyed, health care access denied and any redress in the form of throwing those out of office who are doing this. The right to vote itself has been nullified by gerry-mandering, by the unlimited amounts of money corporations are able to allocate without reporting it, by disenfranchising many people who go to jail (and there we have mass incarceration of black men).

A couple of nights ago my husband made fun of David Brooks on PBS reports defending extending war into Syria (against the ever intelligent humane Mark Sheilds). Brooks’s (apparently) unassailable argument against Edward Snowden’s action was he was disloyal to those who gave him a job. Jobs are very hard come by which pay well and thus crucial of many desperate and unemployed people: the federal gov’t has maintained a steady silence under Obama against any program simply creating jobs to do social good which would employ people.

Thus inane talk like Brooks’s matters. The immediate impetus for this little blog essay is in fact a TV CNN news show I was forced to listen to last night. CNN is among those TV channels boomed at people in waiting rooms. I heard the most transparent nonsense about the next 9/11 being a nuclear threat and that if the gov’t does not track everyone someone with a bomb will make 9/11 look like candyland. And then, said this person, there will be a tremendous reaction implying literally the people of the US will rise up in crazed wrath, but meaning that the gov’t will really crack down on everyone. It was a veiled threat. The news person behind the desk was all avid listening. See The Terror Con:

Defending Friedman’s column, Keller wrote Sunday:

“Tom’s important point was that the gravest threat to our civil liberties is not the NSA but another 9/11-scale catastrophe that could leave a panicky public willing to ratchet up the security state, even beyond the war-on-terror excesses that followed the last big attack.”

So it’s the panicky public’s fault and not the ill-informed work of establishment journalists like Friedman, who led the charge to war with Iraq based on phony claims about terrorism.

I could go on but have said enough. I’ll close now with Tariq Ali’s classic (in some circles) Street Fighting, recently republished,

with a new introduction surveying the increasingly successful shutting down of public schools, privatization of of public service broadcasting, silencing of the press and control of mass media that way, re-engineering the economy in such a way as to live the middle class life people had been enjoying, many went into massive debt, and others simply to make ends meet or pay medical bills, and an overhaul of the tax system which creates artificial deficits that are used to make as a norm

precarious economic arrangements that product insecurity … and a reserve army of employees rendered dociele by these social processes that make their situations precarious, as well as by the permanent threat of unemployment. This reserve army exists at all levels of the hierarchy, even at the higher levels, especially among managers. The ultimate foundation of this entire economic order placed under the sign of freedom is the structural violence of unemployment, of the insecurity of job tenure and the menace of layoff that it implies.

When I was young, the 1960s, jobs were a dime a dozen; interviews were perfunctory. Rent for apartments was cheap. These things have changed because starting in the 1970s powerful groups in this and other countries have worked successfully to re-engineer the social order. And now they want to shut us up, cut us off from one another. There was an attempt to close the open Internet last year spearheaded by the movie industry; it failed, but another group of lawyers, politicians and individuals within corporations will be back to try again. As of the 1970s, the situation has been as Pasolini described in the earliest 1930s during the rise of Nazism:

oh unfortunate generation
you’ll weep, but lifeless tears
because perhaps you won’t even know how to return to
what, not having had, you couldn’t even lose;
poor Calvinist generation as at the bourgeoisie’s origins
adolescently pragmatic, childishly active
you sought salvation in organisation
(which can’t produce anything but more organisation)
and you’ve spent the days of your youth
speaking the jargon cif bureaucratic democracy
never departing from the repetition cif formulas,
for organising can be signified not through words
but through formulas, yes,
you’ll find yourself using the same paternal authority,
at the mercy of that ieiffable power that willed you against power,
unfortunate generation!
Growing old, I saw your heads filled with griif
where a confused idea swirled, an absolute certainty,
an assumption cif heroes destined not to die -
oli unfortunate young people, who’ve seen within reach
a marvellous victory that didn’t exist!

– Piero Paolo Pasolini

Ellen

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Ronald Colman & A Tale of Two Cities

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known. — Last sentence of 1935 and Dickens’s ATOTC

Ronald Colman as Sydney Carton in the closing moments of the 1935 MGM A Tale of Two Cities

Random Harvest — like Lost Horizon the film may be “read” as anti-war

Dear friends and readers,

When I was 12 or 13 my screen idol was Ronald Colman. I remember my love for him best in A Tale of Two Cities and Talk of the Town, which in the way Million Dollar Movie (Channel 9, local NYC metromedia station) operated in the 1950s I saw every night for 5 nights and all day Saturday and Sunday each time they were scheduled. At the time I used to tell anyone who would listen (not many, probably just my father) that were I to tell any of the girls in school my heart-throb was Ronald Colman, they’d stare and ask me, who’s he? Girls my age then loved Frankie Avalon, Frankie Valli (The Four Seasons). Looking back I guess I never told anyone lest I appall anyone.

Not that Colman was not — as well as self-contained, strongly ethical, seeking personal fulfillment, sad, wistful, noble, deeply disillusioned, looking away ironically, quizzically, averted eyes — beautiful in the 1920s in the way of matinee idols. This may still be seen in the 1935 film when he talks with Lucie in the garden in a scene which in the novel may correspond to Dickens’s idealization of his relationship with Ellen Ternan (for whom he had brutally ejected his wife just as he was writing A Tale of Two Cities):

Around that time I managed to watch the 1937 Prisoner of Zenda and just loved Colman’s gay and bitter ironies and thought him so alluring as a swashbuckler against Barrymore, Jr (I’ve not forgotten their thrilling sword fight down a turning stairway over a cliff uttering with many a bon mot at one another);; I saw a much mangled censured version of Lost Horizon which I also read (Hilton’s novel), and then decades (when I was in my later 50s) later replaced some years ago in my memory by reading buying a re-digitalized, newly restored (to an original version not seen in the theaters) DVD (complete with commentary and features) at the same time as I added to my repertoire Random Harvest (1942 MGM, also based on a Hilton novel); his very last performance of Othello in a 1948 Universal adaption of Othello, as actor and character, A Double Life. There is a worth while analysis of Random Harvest in Brian McFarland’s Novel into Film:

and of Under Two Flags (with Claudette Colbert and which I’ve never seen) by Victoria Szabo (“Love on the Algerian Sands: Reviving Cigarette”) in Women at the Movies, Adapting Classic Women’s Fiction to Film, ed. Barbara Tepa Lupack:

Adapted from Ouida’s (Louise de la Ramee) novel

I’ve even managed a totally silent DVD of the 1925 Romola where Colman played a tenderly brother-type (not in the novel) to the heroine.

The trouble is I know these few films do not begin to cover those Colman acted in. While it’s true he sued Samuel Goldwyn for insinuating he was a depressive alcoholic and was neither (at all), I’ve learned that the suit helped his career. He was being given shallow silly parts, cliched roles, and he was quickly scooped up by MGM and Fox and went on to do some of his best work in the later 1930s. The books to read and peruse are the somewhat hagiographic R. Dixon Smith, RC: Gentleman of the Cinema, and the encyclopedic Ronald Colman: A Bio-bibliography by Sam Frank.

Still, after watching the 1935 A Tale of Two Cities, and liking it better each time (though it is anti- the French revolution) I put this still from the film on the wall. It is Colman as Carton standing outside the Darnay home looking in (a sort of Stella Dallas):

I’ve now bought myself a re-digitalized 1938 Paramount The Light that Failed (Colman as Rupert Kipling’s failed painter) and await the DVD from Amazon eagerly).

with Ida Lupino, a dual Snake Pit

***************

I watched the 1935 MGM ATOTC as well as the 1958 Rank ATOTC — with Dirk Bogarde as Sydney Carton and the 1989 mini-series ATOTC, with James Wilbry as Carton, scripted by Arthur Hopcroft (who scripted the 1988 BBC Bleak House) because with a few people on Inimitable-Boz, I’d been reading & discussing Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities

I had last read it in my senior year in high school so that’s 41 years ago, and yet as I read parts I remembered them. This time I’m finding it a seriously flawed book. Again and again there are long astonishingly insightful and indeed prophetic passages on endless unjust imprisonment; state-fomented paranoia; torture and humiliation of people then murdered by the state, and then psychotic madness of people do tortured (Dr Manette’s fits); an understandable crazed need for revenge after a life of ravaging injustice (the knit, knit, knit chapter) — but then these are not rooted in any sound analysis of the history of the era, or human nature as it is, but instead we get a melodramatic story. We see a man try to change his identity because he rightly cannot bear the one imposed on him (Darnay), but we are given no reason for, no understanding of Carton’s depression, alcoholism, despair. He is a character without a past, no context. How did Carton end up Striver’s jackal. We are not told.

We see this abysmally poor man’s child run over and grief jeered at — no wonder Gaspard seeks to murder the killer-blight on his life and all those around him.

But then a history of the time would emphasize these new principles and from what I’ve read of Carlyle he certainly does. Carlyle’s French Revolution (a possible source) is very hard reading — at least I find it opaque. The style is madness.

The question would be, how does a novelist dramatize these ideas? what plot-situation or dramatic scenes can convey them? Hugo resorts to outright chapters of idea- and history. I like these very much and think he carries it off splendidly, but now English translations of his Les Miserables actually put these in the back of the book, as if they were appendices and it’s hard to figure out where they came. One forgets they are there so forgets to read them.

Dickens’s story tends to criminalize the people making the revolution – as they are the perpetrators of the false trials of Darnay. They are presented as crazed and only a couple of anecdotes and stories produced to justify why they are seething with fear and rage. Darnay is Carton’s double and he figures a modern alienation: he does not want the identity imposed on him; he attempts in good faith to build a new life, but finds he cannot escape the past, his roots, his property even, and those around him will not let him escape what his uncle did before him.

As to the films: I watched the 1935 ATOTC twice and the 1958 ATOTC with Dirk Bogarde in the leading role, it shone. The 1958 film is a close imitation of the 1935, step-by-step influenced, but the changes were often deviations into something less believable and fudged (meaning the politics of the film). Especially the characters of Sydney Carton and Miss Manette. 1958: Dirk Bogarde was directed to play the part of an alcoholic who has given up on life without quite saying why; the typology really feel into a ne’er-do-well Skimpole (from Bleak House). Since I’ve seen Bogarde playing greatly (Night Porter, The Servant) I know he was directed into this. Elizabeth Allen believed in her role in 1935 and had an intense sort of femaleness; poor Dorothy Tutin (1958) was embarrassing as Lucie Manette; she didn’t believe the character for a moment and was told to make her voice high.

Colman really played the part of a depressed man, disillusioned by all he’s seen. gayly, poignantly ironic — he was typed this way in other films (Lost Horizon) and as I wrote at one point in his career sued the studio for insinuating this was his real character in life and broke his contract (he had some courage and integrity). The actors in 1935 were closer to Dickens’s world and were better at the grotesques, especially I admit Edna May Oliver and the woman enacting Madame Defarge as well as Basil Rathbone as her evil nemesis who destroyed her family.

From the totally wild self-abjecton and tender chapter of Sydney declaring his love, a chapter undermining masculinity, i 1935 they carried it off, especially since in the 1935 movie it was followed up by slight montages and vignettes suggesting in fact their relationship deepened and was part of their mutual lives for a few years to come. The dialogue reappears even in 1989. Hopcraft just didn’t drop it.

Not that there were no moments in 1958: Leo McKern was the lawyer attacking Darnay, and Donald Pleasance a young Barsad, the spy. Both films are hurt by the excess of sentiment and filming at studio lots. The 1958 could have been more political; it was eschewed, but the individual portraits hit home: the 1958 Mr Manette put me in mind of the prisoners now starving to death in Gitmo, there for more than 11 years, many innocent of any crime but being in Pakistan and poor and known to be leftist in sympathy during the time the bribing scheme was on. The prisons too — they brought to mind our own huge prison industry and people put away in solitary confinement for years and years.

1989: Although the film with James Wilby as Carton and Serena Gordon as Lucie was probably more effective for a modern audience, it was inferior to the 1935. Again it hinges on Carton: John Wilby actually played it as something like a gothic wanderer: he was filmed as a Byronic type. Unlike both Colman and Bogarde, the alcoholism was marginalized.

Wilby plays the role as the outsider, the man who does not belong, a man apart, alone

The real problem with this character seems to be is he’s absolutely socially unacceptable to a wide audience and only the 1935 group had the nerve and only Colman the ability to play it.

It’s as if with each new version the film-makers departed more from the first try by getting rid of every good touch in the ’35 movie: one of my favorites is when (1935 movie) the people are jeering at Colman and others in the cart, and laughing at him especially, the actor says, “don’t laugh, and some words about the nature of the person or what’s happening there the man doesn’t understand.” Coming from Barsad that’s one of the finest moments in all 3 films.

Hopcraft was the writer and he wrote the 1988 Bleak House and that was excellent yet here he falls into the trap of having the actors do these fake semi-Frenchified voices and behaving in this stilted manner to indicate their Frenchness. It reminds me of the way Arab people are often represented on TV, as “different.” (A rare one not to do this was Prime Suspect). The harm to the movie was incessant. Hopcraft had moderned Esther Summerson by giving her some real characteristics of anger and resentment, and also pro-activity; nothing like that here, though unlike either previous Lucie at the film’s end Serena Gordon seems to realize she has done Carton in and at least looks some regret and memory of him.

This is actually the last close-up shot of the 1989 film: Lucie in the carriage

I expect the movie-producers were afraid of offending as this is a book that’s well known. I feel the book itself got in the way. OTOH, no more of this stigmatizing of the “mob” as in 1935 and 1958, more incidents were invented to make us understand the rage and fear of the people in charge of the terror, not a lot but something.

The 1958 and 1989 film were afraid of imitating the 1935 and this too got in the way. Bogarde did have a consistent fulfilling final moment: in accordance with his character, he is not eager to go, rather passively letting things happen than (as with Colman) reaching out (to the seamstress).

Bogarde as an apprehensive Carton

In 1989 we don’t see Wilby mount the scaffold, and the film ends with the carriage trundling away and the over-voice is the Christian “I am the Resurrection and the Light.” While that’s in the novel, it’s not the ending, and to put it last is to make Christian what is a part suicide scene: Carton seeking oblivion, peace, not redemption.

No one is redeemed in Dickens’s novel; it’s deeply pessimistic and as Colman mounts the scaffold (see the still prefacing this blog) we know the reason we do not hear catcalls is Miss Pross has murdered Madame Defarge. Jerry Cruncher, like Dickens’s Flintwich, beats his wife mercilessly, is the Resurrectionist of the book and bleakly parodies all the deaths. He conducts parody of the corpses of the ancien regime, and the corpses of the reign of (more intense because more crowded) few years to come. What is it Jay Gatsby says to Nick Carraway at the close of The Great Gatsby? “Tell me, old sport — what are we going to do with all these corpses on our hands?”

The ancien regime mutilated them. Jerry digs them up and sells them. Resurrectionist — a dark parody of I am the resurrection and the life, no? The US throws them out to sea.

***************

I know I’ve not written much since May 2nd (Disability Studies). I’ve been both busy and have lacked the heart to write much since My busyness has included finishing two powerful long novels by Trollope (He Knew He Was Right and The Way We Live Now read alternatively) and then carrying on reading three more remarkable novels by Anthony Trollope, the last very long (Framley Parsonage, The American Senator, Phineas Redux). I’m doing some fascinating reading about the use of maps, about the presentation of the city through plot-designs and action which emerge from how space is mapped in these books and hope to write about this soon.

I return to Colman to say to equate him with the “old-fashioned silver-screen gentleman” is to underestimate him. He had gone to a boarding school and started a good education, but was forced to leave school at 16 when his father died suddenly; while working at an office job, he turned to dramatics as an amateur by the time he was 22. For 18th century lovers, he is said to have been able to trace his family tree directly back to George Colman. He fought in World War One, a Ypres, and was very badly wounded. He limped all his life afterward and part of his acting was to disguise this.

As the reporter waiting for his plan in Lost Horizon (this too is on one of my workroom walls)

Ellen

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Margaret Thatcher: Ding Dong the witch isn’t dead

Listen and watch Tony Harrison’s filmed poem, V

‘My father still reads the dictionary every day./He says your life depends on your power to master words.’ — Arthur Scargill,
Sunday Times, 10 January 1982

V stands for Victory, Victim, Versus

Dear friends and readers,

She was a blight on us all — but unfortunately only an extreme version of the kind of people ruling most countries today. Like Reagan, she had a facility for saying something that seemed true, but was specious, that would be quoted and people would say “yes,” not realizing what she was endorsing was the worst and most rotten aspects of our experiences of life.

An important article by Andrew O’Hagan (“Maggie,” New York Review of Books, 60:9 [May 2013]:18-20). What O’Hagan does is show continually how in specific individual human terms Margaret Thatcher’s acts either destroyed some specific person’s hope, daily useful activity, job, opportunity or were responsible for killing literal people, destroying the houses or communities they lived in, e.g., the night she had the Belgrano sunk — outside the acknowledged waters of war (then there were limits to war’s purview) — 323 people died.

Maggie

It appears to be open to all, non-subscribers as well as paper and on-line subscribers, but lest you cannot reach it or do not feel inclined to click, some key paragraphs:

It was an impressive work of social engineering but ultimately a dreadful one. She created a population that is more dependent and less productive. She made us more individual but less cooperative. It must have looked heroic on paper or in the essays of Milton Friedman. But what she did was incredibly coarse in practice: she ground the unions down but left workers with no alternative form of self-esteem or protection, and the result, today, is a workforce of the alienated. She boasted of setting people free but British working people have never been more enslaved to the whims of fashion, corporate greed, and agism than they are now. A young person from a former mining community where there might have been classes in the evenings and a sense of propriety, decency, modesty, and community can now only hope for a place in “the zone”—the world of the “haves”—by winning a celebrity contest or by thriving on the black market …

All the kids in my class were given a small bottle of milk every day at mid-morning. It was nice to drink the milk, but nicer, in some larger way, to learn that you lived in a country where the government your parents paid their taxes to cared about you that minutely. Thatcher stopped the milk. It seemed new, the thought—promulgated by Keith Joseph, Norman Tebbit, and, chiefly, Margaret Thatcher—that people who didn’t want to strive and become better than their neighbors were totally lacking in spirit.

At first it seemed like a small philosophical problem: older people, hard-working people, contented people, sick people would argue that they didn’t have to be winners. They didn’t want to do better: they were quite happy to do fine. They liked being like other people. It squared with their sense of belonging and with their idea of what made British life stable. My mother worked in a youth club and Thatcher closed it down …

The summer before going to university I got a job with the Manpower Services Commission, at the Job Centre, working the front-line desk with the unemployed. It was 1986 and I’ll never forget those lines of men coming up to the desk to inquire about their suitability for work. There were no jobs. They could try for something in a bar or a hairdresser’s, but fifty-year-old men weren’t going to get those jobs and I was instructed not to send them for interviews. Norman Tebbit, one of Mrs. Thatcher’s proudest and crudest lieutenants, told them to “get on your bike and get a job.” And here they were, skilled tradesmen with thirty-five years’ experience, asking if I could put them forward for a job they weren’t going to get collecting glasses in a bar. Mrs. Thatcher came up with various schemes, such as Restart, where the unemployed would be called in and interrogated about what they were “actively” doing to seek work. And I was told to talk to each of the men about the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, by which the government would give them a grant to start up their own business. The notion that some people are simply not entrepreneurial was lost …

Most important for US readers:

She couldn’t hold the nation together, indeed she drove it apart, and that is because she didn’t really believe in the nation except as a sentimental or martial entity. That’s the strangest legacy of all about Maggie: if you listen to those who loved her and thought she was manifestly right, you find, after a while, that you are with people who don’t know their own country and don’t like it either. They think they like it because they don’t like Europe, but in fact, they abjure both. They like their own lives, of course, and their own kind, but they imagine the rest of Britain is mainly an unspeakable place of aliens and scroungers

When Romney and his ilk talk of the 47% they are saying that to them most of the US are scrounges and aliends. When the Republicans and their allies try to limit the vote, they are acting out of the conviction only a tiny percentage of people who live in the US are of their kind (well-to-do, white) and all the rest not quite human. Obama is an illegitimate president because his skin color is wrong.

Ellen

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PCA/ACA: abortion & feminism today; Girls & West Wing; Bronte, an 18th century actress, Grimke’s Mara & the gothic

In 1939 Wuthering Heights: Geraldine Fitzgerald played Isabella Linton, but the film-makers did not have the interest, insight, or nerve to present the range of abuse we see in the book

Dear Friends and readers,

My third and final blog report from the PCA/ACA conference held here in DC. For the first, on serial storying and soap opera, see The Way We Watch TV Now).

Here are panels and papers on women’s issues (abortion, motherhood, careers), recent feminists (Vera Brittain), Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Ann Wrighten, an 18th century memoir of an actress who moved from London to the US, Angelina Weld Gimke’s radical novel, Mara Lena Dunham’s Girls and Aaron Sorkin’s TV show, West Wing. These discussions include the best and worst papers I heard.

**********************
I begin with the women’s issues sessions.

The best and worst were seen as the conference began, Wednesday, 1:15 pm, in session called Motherhood/Fatherhood (1127). Vicki Toscano, a working lawyer, gave a superb paper on the current legal particulars of abortion law and controversy today. Popular anti-abortion propaganda are being transformed into (or regarded) as science and accepted as parts of laws. Anti-abortion laws increasingly exploit the post-modern idea that what is scientific fact is nothing more than culturally driven beliefs. At the core is the idea that a woman upon becoming pregnant, conceiving is a mother. Women are told lies that there is a risk of infertility and must be psychological damage is they have an abortion. The claim of a risk of breast cancer is untrue (and though she didn’t say it the same pattern of turning myth into science is seen in attempts to coerce women into breast-feeding). Explicit moral language is increasingly made part of laws.

Toscano began with Roe v Wade, 1973. The court found a fundamental right to privacy was violated when all abortion was illegal, but that in the case of pregnancy that right was not absolute. the 1st trimester there need be no regulations; during the 2nd trimester to protect women’s health you can regulate the procedure. Once the fetus can survive, is a baby in potentia (there is disagreement when precisely this is) then the state’s interest in saving the child can trump the mother’s desires. Increasingly then a woman has the right to an abortion only if her life is jeopardized: it seems the fetus feels pain at 30 weeks but machines can detect a heart-beat after a few weeks and if you multiply the fetus a thousand-fold you can make a woman feel there’s a baby there.

In Planned Parenthood versus Casey (1992), the court turned away from the fundamental right to privacy, and instead said a woman’s right to an abortion is part of he right to liberty; it becomes a 14th amendment issue. The decision did away with the three trimester turning points; now the state has the right to protect the unborn from the moment of conception as long as it’s not am undue burden on the mother. The court has never found any obstacle to be that substantial that it gets in the way. States began to express a preference for childbirth over abortion. The state can insist on teaching women about abortion; the limitation is the information must be truthful, not misleading, and relevant. For no other medical procedure is there this demand for a 24 hour waiting period while the woman is told information about their abortion.

Then in 2007 in Gonzales versus Carhart legislation outlawing partial birth abortion (intact D & E) was upheld. The law now had a constitutional obligation to intervene, with a concern for the fetus or baby’s life and no exception made for the woman’s health. Congress decided that if there is any serious health risk cited by anyone, that must be taken into account. Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent said the court deprives women of information and the right to make an autonomous choice. The pro-act reasonings included the idea a woman’s place is in her home.

Most importantly what’s happened lately shows a disregard for the mother’s life and well-being, a preference to save or force a baby on a woman no matter if she risks in the process. Women are increasingly being put into jail as pregnancy is in effect criminalized (especially when a woman is unmarried). We are returning to attitudes that undergirded accusations of maternal infanticide.

Ellyn Lem and Timothy Dunn discussed Anne Marie Slaughter’s “why Women can’t have it all” as if for most women in the US having it all means high professional success and fulfilling family life (husband, children). They went over the Internet controversies, saw Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In as a reply. They really defended both books as serious discussions of women’s lives and conflicts, typical enough lives with admirable values that may be held up as examples.

No one can fault their ultimate general comment that the workplace must have central institutional change to allow women who want to to be part-time at home mothers or wives. But the relevant perspective was that of the tenured college teacher who is dissatisfied because she is not making a huge sum, or on a crucially powerful committee, or is guilty because she leaves her children with a nanny for long hours at a time. Most women make small salaries and must struggle to make ends meet together with their husbands; they have no hired help. Or they are the hired help. They get part-time wages for full-time work. No benefits. The sad value of this session was to see that in these books taken at face value, feminism has become a movement for the few women who can afford to hire other women to take care of their homes and children. Feminism also takes on board neoliberalism, and in Sandberg women urged to imitate the anti-social anti-caring characteristics of men in the workplace.

I offered the idea both texts are irrelevant to most women’s lives; that supposed re-structures of work-days leads to people becoming part-time employees and a plunge in salaries with no benefits. I did not say (as I do here) the whole discussion was in unacknowledged bad taste.

Vera Brittain later in life — she did in her memoirs also chronicle women’s lives in her fiction-memoirs

Liz Podniecks’ paper on Vera Brittain showed that Brittain challenged an attitude that said women must marry and have children to be fulfilled. Brittain was an outspoken pacificist and feminist who argued that women must be employed for money outside the home to be fully adult fulfilled women. In her Testament of Youth she exposed and denounced the barbarity and uselessness of patristic wars. She herself did marry, but kept her name (unusual for the time); Winifred Holtby lived with Brittain and Brittain’s husband and helped a series of hired nannies to take care of Vera’s children. In her writing Brittain continually attacked the “useless” woman, the woman who has nothing serious to do when her children go to school; they vicariously live through their children, are dependent. Once a woman has a good job and home she can stop over-emphasizing the importance of emotional relationships which are not central to the real business of life. They are (in truth) secondary to the way society is structured.

It may be true that some middle class women live pampered lives once their children grow older; and certainly sentiment is not the driving force behind how we order our lives. But this paper, as put, was also elitist at core. It is not a matter of choice for most women. They do not want to be dependent; many cannot get near a good paying job, and thus do find their highest satisfactions in their family’s shared lives. What worried me about this paper was the next inference would be to get rid of women’s right to live on their husband’s social security if he should predecease her when she spent her life as his wife, working at home for him and his and her children and herself mostly without pay. This would force women to work outside the home, many in menial work which given men’s present reluctance to help with housework and take inward responsibility for children would give many women an endless burden. (Pass ERA and the supreme court with its identification with employers would be only too glad to do this; Republicans would be overjoyed to get rid of social security for a good chunk of the population.) For many women it’s asking too much when they are not born to the kind of people that lead to good colleges, degrees, jobs.

To be fair to Brittain, I’ve read her Testament of Youth and know it’s a deeply humane text.

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Cast of Girls: Allison Williams, Jemima Kirke, Lena Dunham and Zosia Mamet

Well, after the above, the only other women’s issues session I went to was an early Saturday afternoon “Gender and Media Studies” (4427, 1:15 pm) which I attended to hear a paper on “Girls” as well as “West Wing,” the first of which I’ve seen and the second never watched but was curious about.

I found Nikita Hamilton’s paper touching. An African-American young woman, she loves Girls and was determined to justify its lack of black and working class people, it upper middle class stance (the girls are supported by parents, don’t worry about losing jobs) to downplay what she admitted was its neo-liberal stances (“they do regret materialism”). she basically argued that this was a slice of life sufficiently realistic and reflective of young women’s problems today. Her valiant try reminded me of how I sometimes justify Downton Abbey as being for community, showing compassion for its characters (“intelligent dialogue”); so many of us find that we love programs in the popular media which are arch-conservative and exclude us. It’s hard to admit to enjoying racist texts which are rightly attacked as suc (e.g., Gone With the Wind is) on the grounds that this is what is on offer, where fine talents are allowed play. To say the more liberal, inclusive, socialist story is just not told. Ms Hamilton discussed the third season where Lena has a black boyfriend who is (natch) a Republican and it doesn’t last past two episodes. She said the use of a “float” magically powerful female black character (as is found in Sex and the City in recent formulations) is not much better.

Martin Sheen as the bully president, Allison Janney as his right-hand Hillary

I would have liked to believe Olivia Kerrigan’s thesis that West Wing is liberal economically and seriously alert to class privileges as well as mildly feminist but from her anaslysis of the three central women characters (all in elite positions, from a Hillary Clinton first lady, to her secretary, to a press agent), it seemed to me this program supported the point of view I heard expressed in session 1127. The program’s male hegemony (comically exposed) irritates & limits the women characters only in small symbolically grating ways. I’ve seen a video which does show the central male (president) as a bully mocking an educated women (naturally with that horrifying thing, the equivalent of a bluestocking sign, the English Ph.D.) but as explained to me we were to admire that man so I came away thinking the program reinforces our elitist hierarchical corporate society with its endorsement of competition as central to social life. Older feminist movies with actively strong career women types like Rosalind Russell (or Jean Arthur) had neither the bullying males nor the anti-intellectualism I’ve glimpsed in this series,and they evinced a genuinely social conscience towards people outside the elite world.

Two other papers briefly: Angelita Faller analyzed a group of commercials for home alarms and showed that they assume women want to be raped, black men are very dangerous, white men good protective heroes, and women living alone are not safe. Jose Feliciano brought out underlying challenges to mainstream conventional heterosexuality in MTV videos, discussing the bisexuality of stars like Lady Gaga. See my super-numinosity.

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If nothing else, the papers on imaginative works from a feminist point of view vindicated literary studies. Asked to study finer imaginative works, the presenters did bring out sustainable critiques of the way society is organized, gives women a raw hard deal, victimizes them, complete with examples of a few women who did manage fulfilled lives despite this.

I’ve three sessions, but only four papers to cover, as (shocking) in one of them only one person out of a planned three or four showed; in another the other two papers were written in an abstract jargon impossible to understand, read at top speed and appeared to be about embarrassingly poor texts; and in the third only two papers were about women issues.

Felicity Jones as Catherine Morland at the Abbey (yes one of the four includes on Northanger Abbey)

I’ll begin with the best (or maybe only) literary paper in the conference I heard: Andrea Brittany Brannon’s paper on domestic violence in Wuthering Heights (Friday, 3305, 11:30 am).

It was a relief and delight to hear Ms Brannon defend and sympathize with Isabella Linton as the novel’s centrally abused woman. Through this character we see how male power is privileged and unquestioned; how easy it is for the male to disvalue and put his wife in the wrong (how dare she disobey him?): Isabella begins as a woman who enacts her society’s version of impeccable behavior to becoming someone who cannot cope with the smallest difficulty. Bullying has reduced to marginalization; she is Heathcliff’s way of getting back. She wanted him for the same glamorous sexed-up reasons Helen wants the upper class Arthur in Anne Bronte’s Tenant of Wildfell Hal, but unlike Anne’s novel where we live the experience of abuse through Helen, here we see it through Nellie’s conventional eyes: Isabella is therefore become a slattern without self-respect, and if weak, deserving the cruel treatment of the easily irritated. Heathcliff tells Nellie how Isabella comes to him shamefully clinging. We may see her struggling to apply the only social behavior she knows and finding it useless to help her, inappropriate in her situation. We see her physically punished and banished with him playing the rightly scolding parent. She cannot leave for she has nowhere to go — in the case of Helen she turns to her brother. Isabella’s brother, Edgar, her one male relative with power to help, is angry at her for marrying Heathcliff and abandons her to Heathcliff. So the patriarchy fails her.

Isabella Lindon Heathcliffe (Sophie Ward) from the 1992 Wuthering Heights (glimpse of Ralph Fiennes as Heathcliff from the side)

Ms Brannon pointed out we do have Isabella’s letter, the only narrative in the book which comes to us unmediated by Nellie or Lockwood, but most readers don’t pay attention to this counter-move against the romance of Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliffe. The 1992 movie with Ralph Fiennes is a rare Wuthering Heights to dramatize the next generation and second part of the book where Isabella appears. Most reviewers if they mention Isabella at all blame her (the victim). Ms Brannon made a good case for regarding Isabella as a relevant portrait of domestic abuse today. Isabella is a woman with no access to legal protection. Ms Brannon conceded the novel is problematic as clearly Emily Bronte does sympathize with Heathcliff as the underdog and violence in this novel seems more than accepted as a source of power.

This was the session which was supposed to have paper on Little Women and the Civil War, one on Daisy Miller as a feminist hero and no one came. So there was plenty of time for a good discussion. There were about 5 audience members. Some, like me, said, they had never liked Wuthering Heights as much as the other Bronte books. I thought that Emily Bronte truncated the Isabella story too much, did not realize she was onto some powerful material here. Those who had liked the book when they were young did fall in love with the wild romance.

Angelina Weld Grimke (1882-1958) (African-American playwright)

For the papers on an 18th century actress who reinvented herself, Ann Wrighten, a powerful early 20th century black woman writer, Angelina Grimke, and Northanger Abbey and A Christmas Carol as gothics, see comments.

Ellen

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No: a piquant perspective on a serious political election

Pablo Larrain shooting his film

Dear friends and readers,

“No.” Just say no is not all that easy. I recommend heartily as educational as well as absorbing this film about a serious revolution from the perspective of a real plebiscite able to oust Pinochet because the military and powerful let it happen: the man and his clans, flunkies, thugs were just too murderous and destructive … it’s treated from the perspective of campaign commercials. Links to the real commercials show the film is accurate enough. One drawback is the man who made the film is a close relatives of people high up in Pinochet’s gov’t so the superficiality and cynicism of it comes from his rightist take.

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I write to recommend hurrying out to see Pablo Larain’s No, a film about a serious revolution from an unusual, perhaps shallow and cynical and disillusioned, or at least piquant perspective. I went to see it because it starred Gael García Bernal

René Saavedra (Bernal) with his son on his shoulders, next to him the socialist (or communist) leader, Urrutia (Luis Gnecco) who recruited him to make campaign commercials

I remembered Bernal as central to the power of a great political film, Even the Rain about a real-life attempt to by brutal cruelty privatize and charge huge prices for water in Columbia. I wrote a blog explaining why it was a must-see film.

In comparison, No has significant flaws outlined here: One Prism. The unusual perspective is that a transformative plebiscite which formed the legal engine for ousting a brutally cruel fascist military dictator, Pinochet (mass murderer, torturer) is treated from the perspective of campaign commercials. Certainly these were significant and important in explaining to the largely uneducated population of Chile why they should vote No when they were given the choice of continuing Pinochet or begin the arduous uncertain process of building a democracy. You might think it’s obvious the best choice is to get rid of such a state-leader terrorist, but it’s not. What will replace him? What are you voting for? “No” is such a negative word to push a lever on. But these were the loaded terms the Pinochet establishment offered to have an election on.

Those who wanted to overturn Pinochet had 15 minutes of TV time at night, the first TV time anyone outside the Pinochet (and US) groups had had any access to the public. When Rene is hired, things are not going well for the democrats because their commercials are too pessimistic; they show what has been, the horrors, they universalize and validate individual people’s memories, but as seen in vignettes voters vote their narrow interests and they are interested in their future. Some were afraid of retaliation; that the election would be rigged, and a win would not be allowed and torture and killing would ensue for those who voted for democracy.

Police Squads are everywhere in the film

Political argument is not easily understood. Rene concocts films which are the equivalent of selling coca-cola by images of happiness, rainbows, silly pictures of people soaring on skates, sexily dressed women dancing. But it begins to work and then we watch a battle of commercials as the other side run by Rene’s ex-boss, Guzman (Alfredo Castro) makes similar commercials mocking, riffing, refuting, imitating Rene’s.

Guzman

It’s cynical because the message is you can only persuade people by vacuous nonsense. It omits months of hard registering votes, years of gradual dangerous organization, the full political and economic context. It’s no coincidence the director is Larrain descends from two prominent right wing families who supported Pinochet. But while as usual in these political films, we are given a few elite men get together to save a country, it undeniably true that the commercials used pop methods and were important. Larrain’s movie does imitate them. But the suspense of his movie results from the very real threats from the regime the movie-making team are seen to deflect avoid, luckily escape from, and equally the movie’s message could be, do what you have to to get progress going. if the average person is not attracted to listen to gravity, to careful literal argument, does not want to remember the grief of horrifying losses, then give them happy coco-cola images.

Further, it’s not true that all the images in the films made are dancing girls and jumping young men. Passing by our eyes are silent images of what was and the treat: one struck me was a film of a tank threatening to mow down a little girl in its path. We get slow motion shots of police cracking down on the heads of peaceful protestors with hard-wood batons. We see wrenching grief, abysmal poverty — fleetingly but there as reminders. We see real footage of actual political events blended in with the fictional ones, seemingly seamlessly. And the film shows that on that last day Pinochet tried to present a miscount of the vote, and declare victory when he had lost, but that he could not get away with that because important military leaders had gone over to the side of democracy.

As I watched I remembered that Even the Rain had been about the making of a movie too. The movie was to be about Columbus and the crew hired local peasants at peon wages; a parallel to the harsh and relentless exploition of Colmbia’s people is seen in the story of Columbus told. So you might say that No takes one part of the matter of Even the Rain and develops it more thoroughly. All the talk about film-making, the watching of the making of these films is intriguing: Try Freedom. Less Filling. Tastes Great!. After all campaigns are centrally important in who wins an election.

There is a sub-story, a romance where Rene’s wife is an active political operative who has a male lover and lives apart from him. She is in fact the only individualized woman in the film. Yes this is another movie of a world run by men, with token women used as weapons against one another, there as sex objects or mothers and aunts mainly. When she is clapped into jail, and Guzman as a favor to Rene, engineers her release, Rene is grateful to Guzman.

Here Rene is hurt and lonely but does not know how to win her back.

Their son lives with him, and is who he must protect from marauders for the gov’t. At the end of the film Rene is not that happy. His life has not been fundamentally changed, for individual improvement goes slow. He even goes back to his original job making commercials for a corporation to sell soda.

But I felt this refusal to offer meretricious joy was part of the film’s strength. As Obamacare kicks in provision by provision, it helps this or that person this or that way. If Medicare is whittled away, it will take a few years for large porportions of the people to feel the new pain, new costs, renewed exclusion, and it’s hard to connect someone’s early death directly to a loss of coverage since much that occurs in human life has several causes.

Yes it can be read as susceptible to a right-wing frivolous superficiality, but here history is defeating this. Gradually some Latin and Central American countries are throwing off these military dictators put in power by the US, neo-liberal regimes, and opting for social democracy and in countries like Venezuela the improvement in people’s lives as a result of elections speaks for itself.

So while not a unqualifiedly great film, go see this attempt to commemorate and dramatize an aspect of the political experience of reforms (and set-backs to reforms) today. By seeing it you register a vote for making more adult political films.

Ellen

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On behalf of Anthony Trollope’s 34 years of earnest effort for a public post office

General Post Office, St Martin’s-Le-Grand, completed 5 years before Trollope started working there in 1834

Dear friends and readers,

Written on behalf of 34 years of Trollope’s life in public service on behalf of a corruption-free post office: This is prompted by a brief column in this week’s Progressive Populist where the writer opens by with the strawman question, Was it he who killed the post office?. As Leonard points out, this is another area where the Republicans have smelt they can take a public trust and turn it into a an engine for a coterie of rich and well-connected people to fleece large groups of people in need of a service which hitherto or in the last 100 years has been turned into a non-profit which works hard to serve people at little cost, paid for out of taxes structured progressively. Far more taken from the rich than the middle or poorer classes. The Republicans and their allies among corrupt democrats are working at destroying public schools in the US and the post-office by what’s called privatizing

A few data points:

• As a result of a law passed in 2006 that required the postal service to prepay — in just one decade — the next 75 years of future retiree health benefits, “of the $15.9 billion the postal service lost last year, 70% — $11.1 billion — was in future health-care payments.”

• The same 2006 law “prevents the postal service from raising prices for first-class or standard mail by more than the Consumer Price Index, regardless of fuel prices, regardless of what the mail actually costs to deliver.”

• “If you pulled out the pension prefunding payments and an accounting loss on worker’s compensation liability, the real operating loss, according to Lazard’s projections, was only $900 million a year. In a $60 billion company, that’s just 1.5%, and holding fairly steady in a flat economy.”

• The Postal Service’s two main competitors, FedEx and UPS, have spent over $100 million lobbying Congress over the last five years to restrict the postal service from being able to truly compete while at the same time ensuring that both companies can exploit postal service infrastructure.

It is true that in this case they feel they can get away with it as so many fewer people feel dependent on the post office, and indeed do use it less. There is also a strong racist element. The post office (like other federal gov’t places) has been a place that hires black and Asian and Latino people and is looked down upon by many in the white population of the US. Crassly put it, they are not related to the typical post office worker.

IN Trollope’s case precisely what Trollope worked for was to to have a place where no corruption could enter — in his Autobiography he describes scenes of himself in Ireland charging down on people in the country who had been taking money for delivering letters and demanding that others provide addresses of pillars and offices for people to use.

Trollope was a civil servant who thought of letters as objects entrusted to his care, each and every one of which should arrive unscathed and in a timely fashion to where or to whom it was directed. He wrote of his early years in Ireland:

it was the ambition of my life to cover the country with rural letter-carriers. I do not remember that in any case a rural post proposed by me was negatived by the authorities; but I fear that some of them broke down afterwards as being too poor, or, because in my anxiety to include this house and that, I had sent the men too far afield … I would ride up to farmhouses, or parsonages, or other lone residences, about the country, and ask the people how they got their letters … In all these visits I was, in truth, a beneficent angel to the public, bringing everywhere with me an earlier, cheaper, and much more regular delivery of letters.

Trollope is the only nineteenth-century English novelist to recognise a failure of imagination in the expectation that letters magically turn up on breakfast tables.

If he did not invent the pillar to put letters in, he was part of a team of people instrumental in the practical setting up of such stations.

When he visited the US, he found that the US post office was used as a trough for flunkies of politicians — every 4 years a lot of people were fired and the friends and clients of the winning party put in. He inveighs against this as bringing in ignorant people who had no idea and little interest in what the work was about.

If the PO privatizes, you’ll get another thing Trollope hated: favoritism. Trollope said jobs should be given security on the strict basis of seniority (how many years in), any thing else would lead to favoritism and discrimination on behalf of one’s coteries and associates.

He was passionate about his job and letters too (as an artist in his novels), and it may be said paradoxically quit when he was overlooked for promotion so hurt and grated upon was he. He also did think he could support himself by writing full-time and wanted to, but the politics of the office were partly responsible for his quitting before he would have been entitled to a pension. In later life his widow would need a special pension to carry her through in later life.

Saint Anthony, Joyce called him in Finnegan’s Wake.

Gari Melchers (b. 1860), Penelope (1910)

If the Republicans have their way, Penelope will pay a lot more for her letters, and get far worse service.

The larger picture, again with reference to Trollope: specifically, The Way We Live Now, where Trollope’s central character, Melmotte is a crook who uses the speculative money market already there in the later Victorian era: Melmotte is a money-dealing banker, lying continually about what moneys he has on hand, falsely presenting what is the value of the investments he offers. He used to be seen as an instance of Robert Maxwell (British crook calling himself financier and getting away with it), but now we have a host of CEOS in the US and UK we can see Melmotte an instance of.

Dominating symbolic prison of Dickens’s novel (opening of 2008 mini-series)

Dickens’s Mr Merdle of Little Dorrit comes in here. The Marshalsea was known as a debtors’ prison; Wm Dorrit is there for debt; the second half of the novel when for no work Mr or Wm Dorrit ever did he is suddenly fabulously rich is about the irrational working or functions of money when money is not a direct result of work or goods produced but the result of speculative markets. Mr Merdle’s suicide suggests a deep sickness of the soul; since we are not allowed any insight into his mind we are deliberately left to guess, but obviously oodles of money, the symbol of the best success in this society which all admire is shown wanting. We may infer guilt from losing money of all those people, deep shame at his loss of status (a reason for suicide found repeatedly in Trollope among male characters, and a reason Barbara Gates in her book on Victorian suicides instances as one understood as something men did in the era), perhaps (Davies in his film dramatizes his) disgust and some core of honesty appalled at what his wife thinks is good social life.

The difference is today or in real life few (or none) killed themselves in 2008; instead shamelessly they engineered deals with heads of gov’ts to supply the losses of themselves and their supposedly rich customers with the hard-earned dollars and tax money of the average person — which was to be paid for by cutting all social services further, destroying gov’t jobs, salaries, benefits.

And you can go to jail for debt today once again, indirectly. I’ve read about the mechanisms but haven’t it to hand this morning. Read John Lancaster in the London Review of Books on this.

Trollope had a highly unusual perceptive mind and his insight into The Way We Live Now (how people were learning to pull money to themselves without producing any goods or services or hard work) was unusual. Today in 2013 most of us still have trouble understanding derivatives –or what happened in 2008. If more understood, the use of the “deficit” to further cut services and people’s salaries & benefits and by so doing lower the standard of living of the average to make them supine would not happen as people would understand this is a false stalking horse

Ellen

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Downton Abbey 3:4: “We all live in a harsh world, but at least I know I do”

Ethel: “Mrs Hughes said we all have lives to lead but that isn’t true I’ve got no life I exist but barely … No I don’t, I don’t have a life … “

Opening still of Anna (Joanna Froggart) understanding there’s again no letter from Bates

2nd sequence of shots: Bates (Brendon Coyle) made to understand there’s again no letter from Anna

From last stills of episode: juxtaposed superimposed montage moments of both with their cherished letters

Dear friends and readers,

This was a another powerful episode. Framed by interwoven sequence of the unprovoked abysmal misery of our its first shots, Anna again not receiving any letters from her husband in prison (“it’s been weeks”) and (the 2nd sequence) Bates in line made to understand there is nothing for him, and its last shots, first Bates, then Anna, and then both superimposed as they read their letters and feel the presence of the other through the power of letters, it presents four direct attacks on vulnerable in effect powerless people, the attack orchestrated as much by the person the attacked person finds him or herself turning to as the people who mounted it — because they could.

While (as with many novels seeking a wide readership), enough is given the viewer to take the establishment point of view in each of the crisis confrontations and side with the person disdaining, scorning, excoriating, depriving the vulnerable down-and-out person, the way each is presented and the ceaseless reinforcement (one of Downton Abbey‘s strength is its lack of subtlety) of the super-comfortable (supposed at least identifying with) privileged rich type, the whole emotional trajectory of the circumstances we are given (Ethel gives up her beloved child, Tom sick with worry yet frantic to avoid the prison the episode makes clear will be a horror, even if it doesn’t end in torture or execution) makes us side with the wounded, those the very structure of the society as such, its norms turns into a victim.

Occupying (what a wonderfully resonant word this has become) the climax-into-denouement position (just the place where Edith was humiliated in the previous part), we have the powerful encounter of Ethel again with her son’s grandfather who seems to regard her as subhuman. Like Edith’s, we could say the moment has been building for at least a season. In this episode after yet more shots of Anna’s desolation, Mrs Crawley approaches Mrs Hughes to tell her that Ethel wants to see them; phase 2 gives us the scene between Mrs Hughes and Mrs Cralwey’s at Mrs Crawley’s house where Mrs Bird, the housekeeper treats Ethel like someone contaminated and the two older women concede that Ethel has been driven to where she has no future (nothing can be a goal) and agree to ask the Bryants to see her and her son again; culminating in phase 4 Ethel’s walk to the house with the child, the scene where she gives him up rather than take the meagerest of stipends all the while watched, and the close of her walking away and both women now to help her cope say she did the right thing. Here Mrs Crawley’s face is enough to show it ought not to be:

Ethel (Amy Nuttal) in the blurry distance Mrs Crawley (Penelope Wilton), Mrs Hughes (Phyllis Logan) just out of view

“There’s no turning back now for Ethel” says Mrs Hughes. And she’s partly right. It’s not that Ethel has no life, but that she has a lousy one. Because there was no decent job for her outside service.

In the same phase 4, we finally learn that the reason Anna and Bates are suffering is simply that the warden had taken a dislike to Bates. Perhaps he seemed too unhurt, too steely, well, as a mate tells him, the warden now dislikes Bates’s mate, and so means to plant evidence in a cell against Anson. Bates asks the man why he is helping Bates; the man says he detests Anson too. Certainly breaks any providential patterning, no?

Less centered, but given far more and lengthy scenes is the flight of Tom and then Sybil Bransom from Ireland during the early days of the troubles (it’s 1921 now). There is a problem here. Film is a surface art and makes it effects rapidly but we are 1) not given enough to experience with Tom why for him such places as Downton Abbey

are different for me. I don’t see charm and gracious living. I see something horrible …

There perhaps needed half an episode or at least a montage of the hovels the Catholics live in, some sense of the lack of any right or power for Catholics to change the law and situation. Probably Fellowes despite demurs and self-defenses (in the second book produced by his daughter, The Chronicles of Downton Abbey, he responds to critics trying to show he is not the reactionary neanderthal they have been describing) cannot accept that if not direct violence the threat of it, felt, is what makes entrenched orders compromise, give up some of their luxuries and in Lord Grantham’s shocked tones about “private property” attacked (!) there is an incisiveness even the Dowager fails to inflict.

Fellowes nonetheless shows us how Grantham not shows a complete lack of imagination except when it comes to the wealthy’s suffering (as does his daughter, Mary). It’s very irritating the way Grantham lights into Tom — no understanding of what the Anglo-Irish did at all, no memory it seems and excoriates him as a coward for his leaving Sybil behind but then we discover Grantham is seriously undermining the family by not facing up to his real income. During the course of the episode Matthew discovers the huge sums he has given into Downton will be lost because of Grantham’s mismanagement (too big a staff is part of it). We have seen seen how unscrupulous both Mary and the Dowager were to get their hands on yet more of Mrs Leveson’s “late husband’s money” as she puts it. If Grantham does not know he is “in a harsh world,” it’s because he’s laid his hands on money he never earned. Matthew does not dare it seems bother him and uselessly goes to the Dowager; Julian Fellowes says in The Chronicles he has made Lord Grantham a dullard.

Tom is outnumbered. Like Ethel, all around him reject him, including Sybil who he had to lie to about going to his political meetings. She cannot understand his desire to return to Ireland and help. “Our child” she cries in these solemn tones. Unlike Grantham, Tom expresses some remorse, gratitude (but then he needs these people). This thread opens in medias res with Sybil phoning Edith from a public phone and Edith not beginning to comprehend, but unlike Mary and her mother has a vexed fretting face

Sybil (Deborah Findley Brown) phoning

Edith (Laura Carmichael) offered “reasonable” explanations by Cora, her mother and Lady Mary

The man we have just seen fleeing a policeman on a bike in the dark

Tom in flight

interrupts the fine dinner the family is offering the bishop (with nearly full staff, two men, Alfred supposed to be head footman ends up competing with the new lower footman, James, who will serve meat and who the vegetables). The counterpart to Mary’s imperturbable savoir faire and quick lies to the bishop (a “silly” man at the door) grated; this kind of hypocrisy, the covering up is in the kitchen given over to Mrs Hughes. Thomas observes Tom had no money (“he hadn’t got it for a cab”)

Mrs Hughes: ‘Maybe he [Tom Bransom] fancied a walk?’
Miss Obrien: ‘Yes that’s it I should think he loves a night’s walk in the pouring rain without a coat’

Miss Obrien (Siobhan Finneran) with Mrs Hughes again just out of sight, Daisy (Sophia McShera) in blurred position

It’s insufficiently appreciated how Mrs Obrien plays a similar role to the Dowager (Maggie Smith), maybe because the lady’s maid’s riposte have a bite or gravitas the Dowager’s lack. In The Chronicles Fellowes insists he loves Miss Obrien at the same time as he insists he’s got the type of woman who became a lady’s maid right. Not having his background I can’t say. We was offered by an intelligent member of one of my listservs this insightful analysis:

The older woman is Lady Grantham’s personal maid, and apparently wishes the lady were dead, for when the lady is on the point of death, this servant is so seized with guilt and remorse over
wishing her dead that she tends her tirelessly night and day (at least that is how I remember it). This servant really is the prostitute with the heart of gold. She really does buy into a social order, in her heart of hearts, in which the the lord and lady mimic the role of kind and queen–mystical creatures that is sinful to wish dead.

On first viewing I thought the low point came in the fourth thread: Edith goes to her grandmother (will she never learn?) for empathy, to be told “quit whining” (a favorite word for Charles Krautheimer, among the most odious of the “intellectual” republicans); this from the woman whose mockery made Strallan crumble and reinforced that humiliation scene. In the book Fellowes makes his parallel of Anna with Edith explicit. He begins with how Mr Bates is a much older man, also lame. Fellowes does not go on to say that Anna is not driven away because she is not regarded as equally valuable, equally able to “get something better” in the marketplace, but that’s a central difference between them.

I don’t mean to be too solemn about the Duchess or offer an analysis appropriate to a Victorian novel. She is a comic type. I concede the Dowager cannot do much harm while everyone is so rich, but were anyone to follow her advice they’d lose any hope of an authentic existence. Her candid honesty about her motives and behavior is that of the jester. It’s to be noted we told nothing about her earlier life — compare Trollope’s Aunt Stanbury (He Knew He Was Right) whose earlier life is thoroughly gone into

Fellowes understands that we are not intended to take the Duchess like a character in a novel; Downton Abbey is closer to a filmed play. In the scene where Tom is called upon to explain how he could have sided against the people in the great house (Mary says she came out with the daughter!), the Countess persists in her witty idea that the Irish were quite right to burn such a hideous house down.

The dowager saying no one ever liked that house (Maggie Smith)

Lord Grantham: ‘This is not helpful, mama.’

Edith does come up trumps by writing to a newspaper against the disapproval of everyone around her (like Tom and Ethel). “Thank you for the vote of confidence” says Lady Edith to her father who settles the question of her attempt to be a writer to newspapers with “she’ll never be published.” Unexpectedly her article is published,even with a comment. Chance? it hit the right spot that moment.

Matthew congratulates Edith, but like his mother his willingness to buck the powerful and stand up for what he perceives is good is limited. In the scene with Mary in the nursery she wants to turn into their sitting room, his gestures, intonation, facial blenching reminded me of Robert Bathurst playing Strallan.

Matthew (Dan Stevens) losing out against the oblivious Mary (Michelle Dockery)

**************

So what does it all add up to? Am I arguing that after all Downton Abbey is subsersive art. No. I am showing how it works and why it grips those of us who watch on.

Very few shots of the abbey in this part and always in the shade, looking dank at the bottom

The way to understand a film is to capture the shots one by one. The shot is the word of the film, and the sequence of stills the sentence. Meaning arises from a Barthes-like response to mise-en-scene, which is worked on arduously from teams of people in production and costume design, the director, the actors, each nuance studied. Fellowes has no text he is adapting, and reminding me very much of another politically conservative adapter who did books apparently close to Fellowes’s heart, Trollope’s Pallisers, Fellowes has little filmic intertextuality. We can’t find out what is the ethical perspective as we can from some films by looking t other films comparatively and it is not sophisticated filmically. Few flashbacks, hardly any voice-over. The montage which ends Part 4 is unusual. Historical accuracy in it is used to provide enough verisimilitude but the way we are brought into the world of films is through readily available archetypes which cut through its veneer of a past into the present of the viewer.

Here and there in The Chronicles (as Fellowes did in the first book, The world of Downton Abbey) Fellowes does cite a book or an actual case or story in a newspaper at the time. Bates and Anna’s story is partly founded on a real life trial of a man named Harold Greenwood accused of poisoning his wife to death with arsenic who as gotten off by a brilliant lawyer — and Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles (pp. 237-38).
But these only give local direction.

What it does not do is deliver simplistic cant on how to live or how to take our lives. And much that is there can be extrapolated this way and that.

In this part new threads and new characters move into the community. A handsome new footman, Jimmy Kent, whom Thomas is clearly attracted to, and who has been used to having women (it seems) “beg” him to stay with them

“You know what women are” Jimmy Kent (Ed Speleers) is saying to Mr Carson who replies he expects he does not the way James does

Daisy wanted a servant “underneath” her to do the hard work, but Alfred who Daisy fancied is attracted by her — maybe the way women are is more complicated than Jimmy surmises

They fit the themes of 3:4 as a whole. When you have little of what many people want or admire, you can be sideswiped by the very event you longed for. Jimmy for nothing he ever deserved is taken on. Told by Carson one of the candidates is handsome, sight unseen, without a second thought, Lady Mary says oh do take him on, such fun for the maids. But not much for Alfred who finds himself displaced. Thomas looks charmed too (so no snake-like attacks from his corner). When the two are serving at table and Edith says we must not let Alfred be overshadowed by the new butler, Carson sententiously replies:
“Hard work and diligence weigh more than beauty in the real world, my lady.”

We’ll let the Dowager have the last word here:

“If only that were true.” Amen.

Ellen

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Les Miserables: from Hugo parables for our time

Clear away the barricades/And we’re still there! (Thenadiers) …

But the tigers come at night/with their voices soft as thunder … (a lyric in one of the quieter songs) ….

There’s a pain goes on and on. Empty chairs at empty tables. Now my friends are dead and gone …

The 2012 film had last year’s Occupy movement in mind

Ensemble, Signature Theater, DC/Virginia 2008

Dear friends and readers,

Christmas day we (Jim, myself, Laura & Rob, and Izzy) went to see the musical movie version of Hugo’s Les Miserables, directed by Tom Hooper, an adaptation for commercial film of the original book by Claude-Michel Schonberg and Alain Boubil, Englished and made Dickensian by James Fenton and Wm Nicolson (lyrics Herbert Kretzmer), produced by at least 9 people, some original (Cameron Mackintosh), some film types (Eric Fellner), featuring most notably and successfully Hugh Jackman as Jean ValJean, Anne Hathaway as Fantine (Izzy said later that after a while all she had to do was she Hathaway and she began to cry):

Raped, stripped, her very teeth taken from her

Daniel Huttlestone as Gavroche (this Artful Dodger provided the most unexpected totally alive moments of the production),

Eddie Remayne as Marius and Aaron Tveit as Enjolras, the young revolutionaries on the 1832 barricades (representing the 1870 uprising which was put down with more killed than in the whole of the 1792-3 so-called Terror), Samantha Barks as Eponine were as a group stronger and more effective than the first quarter or so of the film. I suspect Hooper felt more at home with them than the wildly romantic pursued Valjean. He changed Fantine to be sexual in lieu of a gamine — for me this did make Hugo’s tale relevant for women. Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen as the Thenadiers were faultless but over-directed into exaggerated grotesquerie, and Jim felt that their lines, some of the rawest most powerful in the whole piece, were placed so as to lose the central impact they were meant to have.

Thenadiers with young Cosette

I found Tom Hooper’s production of intense interest as film, as an instance of what contemporary computer, non-naturalistic and symbolic theatrical, on location, close-up and aggressive film-making can tremendously effect. I’d like to see it again to study how the camera was daringly used to turn the vision of the novel into world-as-nightmare.

The music is as stunningly piercing as ever: I was again unbearably moved by the destruction of Fantine, the heart-break of Eponine, the nobility of Jean Valjean and the soaring revolutionary defiance of Marius and Enjolras. At first I thought Marius the actor who played Bingley in Joe Wright’s P&P (2005) and Enjolras, Elliot Cowan as Darcy in Dan Zeff’s Lost in Austen (2008), both deeply appealing types.

The film’s Eponine (Samantha Barks) dying in Marius’s arms — both elegant, white, archetypal mainstream in looks

By contrast, Jim said no one could sing (!) and they all held their notes too long, Hugh Jackman was miscast (not so) and the whole production (which he said serious reviewers all agreed with) “a mess,” but apart from Russell Crowe who tried hard but just could not get up the seethingly pro-murderous law-and-order evil of Javier I thought them all stirringly effective and recognized that we had here a typical faithful BBC production. I’ve read about 3/4s of Norman Denny’s translation of Hugo’s novel, and unlike the musical, this film adaptation seemed to go through the book phase-by-phase. I don’t say the film had the original coherence, taste, brilliance of Hooper’s Daniel Deronda for the BBC (2002) or even the poignancy of The King’s Speech (2011), but it not intended to be subtle, but rather to sock its cri de coeur of the disenfranchised and powerless to wide varied audiences, and make huge returns in money.

Jackson as Jean Valjean, the tender-hearted caring for Fantine, promising to bring up Cosette, her daughter

********************

I know I need say no more as so many have already, since there have been so many reviews not only on this musical film (among them Miss Izzy), and the many productions, French, the original London, the Broadway one, various intermediary as well as concerts versions, but the straight dramatic films and the musical version Jim thought and still thinks the outstanding best, Eric Schaeffer’s Signature version, with Greg Stone the closest to Hugo’s conception of Jean Valjean I’ve seen:

and Felicia Curry as an inspired Eponine type:

But I think we can contribute to the ongoing conversation about Les Miserables. We have now seen or perhaps I should say heard the musical four times. Jim did once read about and attempt to sort out the original pre-production show from its first staging and I’ve also read Notre Dame de Paris (in French this time), and Hugo’s powerful anti-capital punishment novella (The Last Day of a Condemned Man (an English translation). And I watched two recent “straight” films.

Alphonse LeGros, Le Repas des Pauvres (cover illustration for Hugo’s novel)

The soul in darkness sins, but the real sinner is he who causes the darkness (Denny’s translation of Hugo)

*********************

Before the musical was ever produced it was changed to include an overt providential patterning, religious emotionalism, and images of family types sticking together, with the Thenadiers as hypocritical aberrations we are expected to be amused by.

Jim:

Thirty years ago, Alan Boublil and Claud-Michel Schonberg decided to write a musical adaptation of Hugo’s Les Misérables. By 1980, they had a demo tape, themselves the sole performers: voice and piano. They took it to London and got sufficient backing for John Cameron to orchestrate what they had written and to record it with actual performers. This record is commercially available: call it “the French text.” Both Cameron Macintosh and James Nederlander of New York were interested in producing it, with changes. Nederlander actually optioned it, but the option lapsed.

By some later point in time Macintosh had talked Trevor Nunn into directing it. He brought in the RSC and John Caird. Herbert Kretzmer was hired to write the English lyrics, after James Fenton’s attempt was abandoned. The Macintosh/Nunn/Caird/Kretzmer collaboration was produced, first by the RSC as part of their London season at the Barbican, then by Macintosh in the West End, in 1985. Call this “the English text.”

Three major changes mark strong differences between the French text and the English text: the English text is more religious; the English text is, if anything, conservative politically where the French was more à gauche (to the left); the English text is a much bigger show. Nunn seems to have been responsible for the religious emphasis. The French text had scarcely mentioned God: a couple of “God knows how” sort of phrases and two mentions in Jean Valjean’s final lines, closing the piece.

La lumière, au matin de justice,
puisse enfin décapiter nos vices
dans un monde où Dieu pourrait se plaire
s’il décidait un jour de redescendre sur la terre.

Cosette, aime-le
Marius, aimez-la
qui aime sa femme
sans le savoir, aime Dieu.

Nunn added the scene with the Bishop of Digne; the scene where Jean Valjean wrestles with his conscience: “Who am I”; “Stars”; “Dog eats dog”; “Bring him home” and the dreadful scene where the spirits of Fantine and Eponine flank Jean Valjean as he dies (memory claims they were even dressed in white, but memory is unreliable and sometimes exaggerates for effect).

I add that Hugo is anti-clerical; the priests who harbor Valjean are pariahs and despised by all the other church people we meet. There is no afterlife. “Les Miserables” means not just the wretchedly poor but miserable in a more general sense and includes the outcasts, underdogs, rejected of society, and radical critics and rebels (who often do very badly economically and socially). Take, Book 2: Book 2, “The outcast.” The opening sequence of the movie follows this — prison for no crime at all, cruelty in a long sentence, hounding afterward with no forgiveness or any opportunity to be a productive member of legal society.

In case anyone might think this kind of thing can’t happen, he or she need only read a newspaper or journal article about who goes to prison in the US, for what, for how long, the typical use of extreme solitude (which Atul Gawande in a persuasive article in the New Yorker argued is a form of super-expensive torture): very long prison sentences, no reprieve, for small crimes having to do with drugs. Inside may be a step up for some, but it’s very bad socially. Women’s prisons are even worse than men’s, for they are subject to sexual harassment, parted from their children ruthlessly. Meanwhile bankers steal billions, flout the law and are not even brought to trial.

But the musical takes Hugo in the direction of Thatcher’s 1980s:

Jim:

Some of the depoliticizing between the French and English versions may have been unconscious, the result of removing specifically French references. In the French text, the students are carefully organizing coordinated risings:

Au Pont au Change, toutes les sections sont prêtes
Grantaire attend à la Barrière du Maine
les sculpteurs, les marbriers
tardent à se joindre à nous
mais les maçons de Montreuil
seront tous au rendez-vous

In the English text, they seem to take it on themselves to rise, because who wants to confuse the audience with the masons of Montreil. But “Empty chairs and empty tables”, added for the English text, clearly condemns the students: “Don’t ask me/What your sacrifice was for.” More, Javert, in the French text, is not really to be taken seriously. In the English text, thanks to “Stars”, he’s the second leading man.

Nunn also made Les Misérables a grandiose show. DCist in its theater preview wondered how Signature would fit it into “much smaller quarters than usually house the famous turntable-style set.” Nunn had added choruses, he added scenes, some, like “Turning”, quite unnecessary. Nunn justified “Turning” on the grounds that the women didn’t have enough to do otherwise. Of course he then used the revolving set to manage the quick scene changes. All these changes made the show worse.

I don’t mean to say that in all aspects the English text is worse than the French text. Many of Kretzmer’s lyrics are much better than those of Boublil/Schonberg. The bridge of “I dreamed a dream”, for example: “But the tigers come at night/with their voices soft as thunder.” There is nothing remotely like that in the French text. The best line in the show, from Madame Thénardier, I’m sorry, Mme. La Baronne Thenard, in “Beggars at the feast”: “Clear away the barricades and we’re still here” (perhaps the profoundest line in contemporary theater), was added. “Beggars at the feast” is the reprise of “Master of the house” which bulks up and makes rollicking — and Dickensian. Nunn had directed Nicholas Nickleby — “Devise d’un cabaretier” where Thénardier complains he is one “qu’une destinée contraîre a planté dans ce canton” and thus has become, perforce, an innkeeper)

The 2008 production had La Boheme not Dickens A Tale of Two Cities in mind

Jim had gone up to Eric Schaeffer, to say this Signature production was better than the London production we had seen years ago. “This sounded better than it was, since the London production had left me rather cold.”

Jim:

Schaeffer managed, in the Signature production, to minimize these changes. He could do nothing with the religion and politics that are baked into the English text. One cannot not sing “Stars” or “Bring him home.” And Javert did take the penultimate curtain call. But he could and did de-emphasize at least some. The business with the saintly Bishop of Digne went quick. In the final scene, Fantine and Eponine sang with Jean Valjean, but they stayed on catwalks leading to the stage (and neither dressed in white).

And he made the show intimate. The MAX theater is a black box. For this production it seated around 250. It was set up as a thrust stage, with two catwalks leading to the corners of the box, screened at the back. Sliding doors in the screen allowed mass movements onto the stage (for choral entrances or the barricade). The orchestra (two winds, five brass, three keyboards, guitar, bass, two percussion) was set on a balcony behind the screen, the conductor’s image on two screens visible from the stage. The audience, then, was on three sides. No more than six rows on any one side. Every member of the audience was closer to the cast than any member of the audience would have been in a conventional proscenium theater with the orchestra in a pit between the audience and stage.

In this setting, he brought out the quiet elements of the score. There are many. Of the 28 numbers, a majority are either soliloquys or conversations. We eavesdrop, up close, on them. The actors eavesdrop with us. In “A heart full of love”, Eponine is on the catwalk, members of the audience on either side of her, as she overhears Cosette and Marius (the same location, exactly, as she will occupy in the second act finale). She is suddenly lit as she reacts. We do not know how long she has been there. She is us. And we sympathise. Schaeffer doesn’t shrink from the noisier numbers. “Master of the house” is duly rollicking. He accepts the Dickensian parallels: Cosette in Paris reminds us of no-one more than Lucy Manette.

But the heart of this production are the quiet lyric pieces: “I dreamed a dream”, “Who am I”, Fantine and Jean Valjean’s duet around her deathbed, “Stars”, “In my life”, “A heart full of love”, “On my own”, “A little fall of rain”, “Drink to me”, “Bring him home”, Javert’s suicide, and, yes, the second act finale.

******************

To conclude,

There have been 19 (!) film adaptations, most recently a French mini-series with Gerard Depardieu as Valjean and John Malkovich as Javert, and in 1998 an English, with Liam Neeson as a noble Jean Valjean; Geoffrey Rush as Javert (hard and steely), Uma Thurman as Fantine (the raped Cecile in Les Liaisions Dangereuses), Hans Mathisen as Marius (deeply felt), Ann-Marie Duff (wry, realistic) the last two also in Davies’s adaptation of Dr Zhivago. Depardieu practically stands for France (remember Martin Guerre) and Malkovich (Valmont, Jekyll-Hyde) has had a long career playing evil types; the English cast shows the connection between Zhivago and Hugo. Five translations into English are available.

The story, characters, events are a parable for our time.

To turn it into a film musical with the whole repertoire of montage, location, psychological in-depth acting is to make it more available to everyone. On Christmas day almost every seat in the auditorium was taken. We were just in time and had to sit in the front row.

I remember that in London Patti LuPone sang Fantine, but she was far away — we were in the back of the orchestra. Anne Hathaway is right on top of us, close up, the story made utterly contemporary. When she sang the pain goes on and on I found myself remembering my own anguish. I was rooting for Enjolras all the way.

ENJOLRAS

Do you hear the people sing?
Singing a song of angry men?
It is the music of a people
Who will not be slaves again!

(I wish).

Izzy is right. You need not see this version probably. Jim is right too: perhaps another would be more thrillingly sung. This was over-produced and not controlled enough. But I would say not only don’t miss it, but also read the book, go on to Notre Dame de Paris and then The Last Day in the Life of a Condemned Man. Les Miserables‘ vision is more than of the wretched of the earth; he shows how such wretchedness is made deliberately and what it feels like to be hunted down, scorned, fearful, alone. Don’t skip the supposed digressions (Waterloo for example): the history, analysis of how society is organized into exclusionary cliques, the skewed values of church and courts passionately laid out and as relevant today as ever.

Ellen

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Thoughts on men and women in cyberspace: getting at the experience itself apart from physical local space (2)

‘They are surely happy,’ said the prince, ‘who have all these conveniencies, of which I envy none so much as the facility with which separated friends interchange their thoughts.’ —Samuel Johnson, Rasselas

… still, saved as we all are by some comfortable feeling of superiority from wishing for the possibility of exchange, she would not have given up her more elegant and cultivated mind for all their enjoyments — Jane Austen of Anne Elliot, Persuasion

What the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently: “you say that we go round the sun. if we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”—— Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet

Emma Thompson as Carrington in the 1995 film of that name, Jonathan Pryce as Lytton Strachey, scripted & directed by Christopher Hampton, adapted from Michael Holroyd’s biography — today she’d be on the Net, and a laptop might be in front of him too

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve had several thoughtful responses and have been moved to write again taking on a new aspect of the topic, or at any rate, a different perspective and emphasis.

I wrote my paper in 2006 and would like to think there has been progress in the area of understanding cyberspace experience itself as well as how cyberspace impacts on physical local (so to speak) space and vice versa. That people continue to try to understand the first, the interaction between physical/local space and what happens in cyberspace is so; this morning I saw a Call for Papers whose subtitle is “The Digital Turn” and its interest is how cyberspace is affecting book history studies; what they are after is how power relationships are changing and thus what’s written about. They are not concerned with cyberspace experience in and of itself. People who are those who would not be interacting with others the way they do if not for cyberspace and are listened to (say bloggers who are political but not hired by conventional newspapers or political organizations) are partly to blame for this, for that’s how they justify their presence on the Net. They are there for influence and social connection. To be sure, the latter is a strong part of why all people are on the Net, but it does not go anywhere near far enough in understanding what happens here.

And that’s hard. It’s one thing to say that content is only part of what’s happening and maybe not the most important, especially surface content; it’s another to try to articulate what are the equivalents to physical of what’s happening that influence content and make people behave on the Net the way they do. It’s easy to describe this through connection. Women learn early on to fear violence and humiliation; ergo, they are afraid, and rightly for them safety is the central issue. For men not so much; my experience here is men say (in off-list communications is where you learn this sort of thing) they don’t trust the other person posting; they can know too little for sure about them unless they’ve met them face-to-face or have some certain history about them and know this is their identity. This trust connects to holding onto a job and promotion and pride (saving face) — issues central to manliness, respect as a man as understood by our society.

And it’s not hard to take what is known about women’s psychology growing up — the real importance of intimate friendship as a support mechanism — and try to see how this works. The woman one commenter mentioned who pretended to be a male is escaping these continual influences or pretends she is. This woman was apparently (someone known to all) a tenured professor. I suggest therefore she is also successful because she is credentialed high. Katha Pollit has that and it makes a big difference in how people react to her postings on the Net.

Two responses were about false identities on the Net. One friend I know revels in games where he says that in fact these false identities are aspects of ourselves that we get to be, or act out (using the common life is a stage metaphor) there where we can be them nowhere else. Another inveighed against it when the identity was presented as real on a list-serv or blog. Said she was “very offended,” a phrase I note that is not much in use in physical local space but is a common way of beginning a debate or quarrel with someone on the Net. It’s put in polite terms but what it means was “you piss me off” or “how dare you,” a stance people don’t dare face-to-face unless they are willing to take the argument very far (into something physical or vengeful).

I do dislike intensely the false identities on the Net but know from the get-go, in its origin, people immediately began to take advantage of that, and a lot of people appear to love it. Those who play games don’t seem to care in the least that what they are doing will have nothing to do with what happens in real space. At least they hope so. (Sometimes they are caught up and find they are badly hurt in the real world because they have believed a false identity). I find it to be cheating, a fundamental lying but that’s because I want experience on the Net to count, though it need not in regular physical space to count.

The reality is there are a whole group of peculiar circumstances on the Net not replicated in regular physical space which are at work (how is it she speaks to me? knows something, though not much, of me? she does), elements which keep some people from posting (all these unknown make them nervous) and which encourage others to post (I’m more comfortable and freer when I am not looking at someone’s face, can speak so much more freely). The largest is it’s a writing space; you have to have a writing self, love writing and not be bothered with revealing this self which is a more private self than the social one.

In my paper the best book was Technology and Women’s Voices: Keeping in Touch (ed. Chris Kramarae) and after that Women@Internet (ed. Wendy Harcourt) because they really genuinely looked at women — for example, that we are so much less technically educated, so much more uncomfortable with technology — but both and (from the title you see this) Communities in Cyberspace essays (ed Marc C. Smith and Peter Kollock) include one on women tenants empowering themselves to fight a local landlord) (are often most on about how cyberspace and regular physical space interact. A slew of individual essays in periodicals were very good too but I no longer remember which was most helpful. For me whose identity is partly that of an academic these were Jill Arnold and Hugh Miller, “Same Old Gender Plot? Women Academics’ Identities on the Web,” paper presented at Cultural Diversities in/and Cyberspace Conference, University of Maryland, 2000; Jill Arnold and Hugh Miller, “Academic masters, mistresses and apprentices: gender and power in the real world of the web,” Mots Pluriels, 19 (October 2001).

My husband Jim taught Information Technology: he’d have 1 or 2 women to 11or 12 men every time. Conferences are 90% male and the women there are often in personnel. The kind of talk men indulge in as social grease is highly sexist and makes women uncomfortable. Men don’t want these women there so they can carry on that way.

I concluded that the internet was an equivalent of the railway in the 19th century in changing our world because I took on that aspect too. People using the railway did not get to say where it would stop or how be organized. That’s what women are today still.

But today I want to begin to dwell on another aspect, one as or more crucial. You can see it’s ignored because most photos on the Net are of people apart from their home environment, on a laptop, shown in business places, out on the street (buying hotdogs as a joke), and mostly with other people around, people in rows with laptops. That’s not accurate. Yes the cell phone has become a little computer in our hands, but that’s someone phoning someone else, acting pragmatically most of the time, killing time too, distracting themselves as with crossword puzzle. It’s not computer cyberspace experience that leads to blogs, websites, web-rings, list-servs.

Much of that time on the Net is spent at home, alone outside (it can be a common room, a library, a coffee place where you can sit for hours), ensconced in an individualized environment.

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People’s computers and laptops are at home, an essential part of the whole environment, but just one part

It needs someone or a group like that of Freud and his early disciples to really delve this new area of life, new way of communication. A great deal of what people write is about how a newspapers and communities in regular conventionally organized physical space are impacted by someone who has the courage to break social and political codes, manners, and tell real truths or falsehoods on the Net. It’s not just a matter of finding analogies for family life. Maybe it seems impossible to do but in the 1880s it would have seemed crazy to come up with Freud’s theories and nowadays it’s all commonplace and some of it essential to understand what happens to us. My intuition tells me we have to begin with a new experience of solitude (with others there and not there), how this is recuperative. Then how people feel when they are alone in the pre-cyberspace way, and how much this empowers some when they know they are alone (and hence as women in the immediate sense safe) and how these feelings are transformed into something new. What kind of person does it empower? why? what has been their background to make them feel so? we have to get over dismissing the very real urge of people to be asocial at crucial moments of their lives.

We need to think about how much we can reach on the Net and why it is so vital to keep it un-exclusive. How much information and insight one can have in a day by reading on the Net it would not just take years of books to have, but would not be in books. What are the conventions of postings, list-servs, blogs, webrings that make them so different from what is put into still unchangeable print.

We need to think about why face-book where people do identify themselves and form small but distant groups is so enjoyable. Not scold people and despise them as delusional. They are not. We need to understand the dysfunctional nature of a lot of physical local life and how hollow it can be, impossible to find any satisfaction in. What happens at twitter? Why is this place important to the people doing it, not the important people outside the Net quoting and writing about it.

We need to be frank and examine the hurts people experience on the Net. What are the specific circumstances each time? how did the relations unravel when they would not have in physical local space apart from not being face-to-face. What was allowed and what came out? What were the results? If we cannot tell them aloud to others on the Net individually, think individually and then generalize.

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Finally, two people, one the same as the above, brought up the issue of gender lying. Both women. I wonder if men would bring this up. It’s a separate issue. She said to watch a woman, say Sally, pretend successfully to be a man, discuss football, sex as a man, be aggressive and be respected (and perhaps help Sally’s life outside the Net) made her want to be a man intensely. It is possibly true that a woman can and experience power because on the Net she can have an imaginative experience of being a man, and in cyberspace that’s as good as physical experience. There is such a thing as internet sex. For my part, I would never want to be a man, never have. I don’t know how usual or unusual that is for someone who is a feminist. I don’t care that being a woman gives me much less power in most areas because my experience is this particular lack is not much worse than my class (which I saw robbed me from the time I could understand my environment), who I was born to, how little money or connections I had in growing up or after.

It’s not just the old Austen saying (Anne Elliot) that we like ourselves best after all and do not want to trade (see epigraphs at the top of the blog). It’s that I know myself fundamentally as a woman that’s what I want to be. I do think of myself first as much a woman as a person. Frankly (Rhett Butler stuff) I’m relieved that I never have had anyone tell me I had to support a family, had to have a certain kind of job to do so. I’m glad to have options women are given like staying home if I have another source of income beyond marketplace work remuneration. I’m glad to be free by option of having to do well in social interaction to rise to power. It’s not expected of women and they can survive without it and (if they have brains) even now when masculine values have taken over women’s worlds, can still ignore or cast it aside. I dislike and reject some of the disadvantages. I felt under no obligation whatsoever to have children. But then I basically regard life as in itself meaningless and all these things are unreal and one can if lucky pick and choose — and can try insofar as each of us can (what are our genes, where born, to whom, what gender, race, class). Like Woolf, I see that women don’t have identities in the same way at all as men; our gender cuts across all these and cuts us off from much power that comes with this or that identity.

But then gentle reader I do prefer women’s books to men’s, women’s films, women’s poetry.

Ellen

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An Iconic Lincoln

Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln

Gentle reader,

See it. Don’t miss. It’s riveting, suspenseful (we get to watch an election vote-by-vote — without computer, without Fox News — what more American?), gritty. People every once in a while insult one another gleefully. Says Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens to a racist conservative democrat I don’t believe in equality because I know you, you idiot, bigot, loud-mouthed animal are not my equal; I just want everyone to be equal before the law, even you. Of course there’s a myth wrapped up in that as there are many in the film you have to think about later, such as the idea that real liberty for black people was won with the 13th amendment. The film has the usual flaws of such films (e.g.,like Amazing Grace; “history as progress narrative“). Still it has much to deliver. If you don’t want to bother read on, that’s what I have to say tonight. The rest is why and how the film is good and where are some flaws.

I can’t know what you’ve read about Spielberg’s Lincoln (Anthony Lane’s “House Divided“?), screenplay Tony Kushner, focusing on Lincoln’s determined effort to have his Congress pass the 13th amendment to the US constitution, outlawing chattel slavery. I’m writing about the film because I was very moved by it — along with (it seemed to me) most people in a heavily crowded mixed-race auditorium at my local semi-art cinema in Northern Virginia. I might have said “despite its iconic material” but know it’s because of the iconic nature of its material that in this year 2012 this story, these characters are quickened with wrought up life. What US child has not been exposed to scenes of civil war carnage, the millions dead, the bloody bloody battles, the archetypal figures of Lee all formal frozen elegance and Grant taking off his hat at Appomattox. Lincoln? You cannot do such scenes ironically or as comedy. Are we still not fighting the civil war in our other present damaging wars? This is a movie about us today, about racism, about whether you believe in equality of all (whites against whites too); its issues have not yet been resolved it seems. When near the close Jackie Earle Dailey as a weasel-like Alexander Stevens, negotiating for the confederacy will not concede that it’s not a question of two countries at war but one in dire conflict, nor that anyone has the right to free “the property” of the confederate wealth, we are hearing a variant of this year’s unspoken elite-control versus egalitarian-liberty, Romney/Ryan-versus-Obama/Clinton clashes.

Historical films worth seeing are about today in disguise and present their issues ambivalently. I thought this would be like in type to two season’s ago The King’s Speech, a mini-series inside 2 and 1/2 hours, film adaptation (of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals) with Lewis taking the Colin Firth eloquent hero role. It’s not. After all these mini-series are a British form. This is not an intellectual’s film — though it helps if you know your American history, the more about this period of the civil war, these individuals the better: such as Stevens was beaten viciously so that he was nearly crippled, had a black mistress-housekeeper, Lydia Hamilton smith [played by S. Epatha Merkerson) he loved dearly. It’s like wholesome American TV: Ken Burns stuff.

Tommy Lee Jones as Stevens

Also it helps to know your cinema. Film-makers like to quote. This one quotes The Talk of the Town (1942). At the close of the forever unforgettable TOTN after Ronald Colman’s risks his career appointment as a justice to the supreme court, and gets the position, we see him walk away from home (from the back) from the POV of his endlessly loving, smiling older independent minded male black valet who has just made sure Colman is wearing the right jacket, so at the close of Lincoln, we watch Lewis walk away from home on the fatal night of his assassination (yes Spielberg neglects no buttons) from the POV of William Slade as his endlessly loving, smiling older male black valet who was never a slave and has just tried to make sure Mr Lincoln wears his gloves. This kind of worshipfulness of the great (white noble) man by the superior (black intelligent) “everyman” is still with us. We also have an obligatory scene between Lincoln as great (white) man taught by an ordinary (black) person, this time a woman, Gloria Reuben as Elizabeth Keckley, Mary Lincoln’s “colored” maid: Mrs Keckley encourages Mr Lincoln to go on with his determination to pass the 13th amendment after his wife has such raged against his refusal to try to make peace above all and at any price because now their son has enlisted.

The Lincoln family (Mr, Mrs, her maid) at the theater

There are still far too few black people in the film. It’s too much a small group of white men saving the world (something one finds in many a commercial historical film). Lincoln opens on Lincoln talking to two black men, one of whom I recognized as the powerful black male lead of Small Island, David Oyelowo. He did not appear again after the initial scene, opening scene where Lewis was Lincoln as Henry V listening to the men who fight:

Oyelowo wants to know why black men are paid less

Izzy told me biopics often begin with the death of the central figure. One of the mistakes of this film was to fast forward at its close to Lincoln’s death so we could then have a retrospective drenched in nostalgia and loss where we see and hear at long last one of Lincoln’s many stump speeches delivered to a huge crowd. I’ve read these. They have much Biblical language, but are simple direct passionate denunciations of slavery, eloquent defenses of equality (in the mode of Burns’s “a man’s a man for aye that”). I’d hoped we’d have more of them and earlier. The choice was rather to show us Lincoln at home (undoing Mary’s corset, arguing fiercely with her over their son, reminiscing and looking forward to the traveling future they would not have), Lincoln with his cabinet, with his son, with his hired band of half-drunk bribers, one-on-one with this or that person. Or alone, at a distance, privately ruminating. He is all height, a concave shadow, who walks awkwardly as if he doesn’t want to take up the space his body needs, his hands oddly strength-less.

No one can say that Lewis’s performance is one of impersonation as we have no tapes of Lincoln, only the words of his speeches, what he and others wrote down about him in life, his writing to be read — these Lewis delivers with an understated held-back, soft, low startlingly (if you remember his usual cut-glass accent in Room with a View, his cockney in My Beautiful Laundrette) western American set of vowels circa 1860; his whole posture is of laid back, withdrawn power brought forth fully when periodically force is called for. It does work because none of the speeches are wooden lines of narrative or ideas fed the audience in the way of BBC/PBS style mini-series costume-historical film drama. The character talks naturally. He can pronounce, but he is also witty (“joyful to be comprehended” he mutters at one point to James Spader as Bilbo who anachronistically greets Lincoln with “I’ll be fucked” what are you doing here?),

Spader as Bilbo in the House

He is conflicted, deep in thought, worried, austere and icy too. at moments I wondered if Lewis had Obama in mind.

It may be taken as a rebuff to Obama since central to what happens is how Lincoln will not give in. He will pass the 13th amendment before ending the war lest the peace legalities find his Emancipation Proclamation does not apply post-war situation. He fights and fights hard, using all weapons, from a crew of coarse bribing networker-enforcers who bully, pressure, manipulate to get the necessary votes. When Lincoln is needed in the last days, he’s there in the thick of it, finding out individuals and persuading them. As Obama often has failed to and so given up what he should not have or not gotten what he should.

Too much radiance, too much plaintive music. Far too little sense of history as a group of forces. Ang Lee’s Ride to the Devil did that (also civil war), and somehow Lee managed to avoid cliched scenes (he’s not American himself), but Ang Lee’s film was trashed by the studios (they did not advertise it) and it flopped. Sally Field as Mary Lincoln made too dense or again too seething. But it has to have the rhetoric debates, the scenes of corpses, the songs, the lines of men in blue or grey.

I’ve an idea Spielberg made the film because the matter is iconic.

But there are also some funny moments, and wry jokes here and there (Kushner wrote it): Lane caught Mary Lincoln’s just think “four more years in this terrible house”. I loved Lincoln’s fondly told long-drawn out gentle joke-y tales, with their indirect relevance. When Lincoln moves into gnomic poetry mode, and David Stratairn as Steward beyond patience, exasperated into complaint, cries aloud “I have no idea what you are talking about,” I laughed aloud. I laughed aloud several times in the movie when no one near me did.

So go and you too can get to appreciate the jokes no one sitting near you does.

Ellen

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