From the Scripts and Voice-over commentary: Downton Abbey

Susannah Buxton, Costume designer for Downton Abbey

Caroline McCall, Assistant Costume Designer (from Feature on Season 1 DVD)

Dear friends and readers,

Last night I find myself again regretting that the older Poldark films have never been produced on DVDs with features with talk from the film-makers and actors; there has been no voiced-over commentaries with slowed-down parts, or any of the kind of commercial paraphernalia a sociological event best-seller of the Poldark type have begun to accumulate around them since the later 1990s. Here we do have some real use for the fandoms who might be said to serve as a tangible target for money-making on the Net. Beyond Graham’s Poldark’s Cornwall, only part of which was about the mini-series, the only book produced was Robin Ellis’s Making Poldark, now in a third reprinting, most of it the same text he originally produced (it has autobiographical additions and better stills).

From recent DVD feature on The Haunting (see review)

It may be much of the original cast is now dead (most of the principals are), but I’ve listened to and watched a DVD of the 1963 Robert Wise film of Shirley Jackson’s Haunting, where what was left of directors and writers and the cast produced intelligent insightful features and voice-over commentary — I took substantial notes on how the film was made. I suspect Poldark as a film still suffers from its original labeling as “swash-buckling soap opera,” and its not having had a widely-prestigious and single auteur type (instead many directors, writers, directors). By contrast, Downton Abbey now has had at least two books (The World of, The Chronicles of) and the first of three projected scripts produced.

Extras dressed right, intermingling make for fuller seeming reality (The World of discusses the making of such scenes)

Since I last wrote about Downton Abbey I’ve re-watched all the parts of the first season, read the playlets or scripts for all but the seventh part of the first season, and begun slowly to re-watch the parts again this time with voice-over commentary. Here is a little of what I’ve learnt about the power of these films (and by extension other costume dramas). I should say that I can stay up to all hours watching, absorbed, interested, enjoying them more; they take my mind off my recent intense anxiety. Reading the scripts reveals unexpected depths and parallels; cut scenes add much; Fellowes’s notes are ironically instructive. The voice-over commentary and especially watching the film move slowly gives you a chance to see how carefully each shot was cut, shaped, contextualized. We get the personal urges of Fellowes again and again — perhaps that’s the key to the strength of this and other films, this psychosocial projection drama.

************************
The scripts in general

The pathos of Molesley’s father so grateful is seen in several of the older lower class males (Matthew’s father)

Gwen the parallel figure who needs encouragement

Part 1 as I said was introduction, by Part 6 I saw that hours that seemed centrally silly (it ends on the flower show) when read silently and slowly as with a novel, come out touchingly suggestive. Much of what’s omitted hurt the programs: when in Part 4 Miss Obrien brings Daisy to confide what happened in Mary’s room (how soap opera this kind of sentence is) in the program the camera cuts away. We know what Daisy has to tell. In the script Edith is very kind to Daisy; we hear here how Daisy has been suffering under the harassment and insults of Mrs Patmore and how in need of some comfort she is (quite apart from seeing the dead corpse pulled along), and Edith does provide this. It’s double edged as Edith now (understandably I think) wants to get back at Mary for needling her over Strallan and Matthew but it is real and a parallel to Sybil helping Gwen.

Matthew comes out as ambiguous throughout, far more questionable at times, in his mockery of Edith and his sidling up to Mary; he is as complicit and collusive in this penultimate part (supposedly unimportant) flower show hour as his mother with her overt pressuring of Violet to give up the prize. The Chronology of DA emphasizes origins of characters and how Fellowes sees them. As Matthew moves away from his supposed love, Lavinia, he has a peculiar expression on his face:

Ever harboring guilt, Mary appeals to his less noble side

In several skeins of interweave it’s not too much to see that there is a Chekhovian rhythm to this hour as written up (like some of the earlier film adaptations, say 1983 MP) which is wholly lost in the actual realization’s quick pace.

Staring at and covering the corpse

Conspirators

Part 3 is hectic: This is the one where Lady Mary goes to bed with Pamuk and he drops dead while (presumably) trying to fuck her. It is also the one where Gwen’s desire to be a secretary is outed by Miss Obrien exposing the typewriter which Mrs Hughes says Gwen has no right to keep in Gwen’s room. The room is not Gwen’s, not even the bed she sleeps in is hers in private. We also have Mr Bates trying to escape the mean teasing and attempts to fire him by wearing a contraption that is torture.

In Fellowes’s notes he shows he realizes Mary is dense (he mentions her surprise anyone could not want her), but he is more concerned he says that viewers wrote in because they thought what was implied was (wait for this) Pamuk buggered Mary (!). Lines had been left out about her losing her virginity and what to do about it and so now he was sorry these were left out. My sense that people hardly ever say what they think and what is presented as mainstream thinking is utterly shallow was confirmed. I admit I had not thought of that – that he forced anal intercourse on her would have hurt and shocked her perhaps and she would not have so regretted the loss — but did think maybe we were to see Pamuk could go with men or women and that’s really why he was with Napier.

This time I’m confirmed in the idea that Mary is a real horror, cold and mean (she could care less about what Gwen is doing with her life) and Pamuk a cad. The irony is that Mary doesn’t see that Napier was a good candidate for her, showing really she doesn’t deserve him. I felt again for Edith, though she shows no compassion or concern for anyone but herself – as Sybil does trying to help Gwen who really despairs in her heart anyone will want her as a low person originally. In his notes to this scene Fellowes confirmed he was aware that the lower class person would not dream he or she could succeed and thus probably would not. It did seem to me the throwing away of the awful contraption is the equivalent of getting rid of the corpse of Pamuk and somehow connected to the typewriter — all sources of guilt, harassment.

Gwen after having been berated, told she had no right to have this in her room, ostracized, takes away her offending property

In the script to the fourth part, Fellowes thinks the film-makers omitted the whole of the scene below. But watching I find they hadn’t. I begin to wonder how much he worked on his notes — fact-checking is non-existent that I’ve seen. But at any rate I scanned it in because I found it touching. Maybe it was intended to omit it and the last minute put back. t was “not needed” — as part of the action. I reprint it to show that the plays as written in this book show 1) the show was not conceived by Fellowes as tongue-in-cheek at all, and 2) they all thus far make Grantham our hero of decency, fairness, even egalitarianism of a paternalist sort. It anticipates Lord Grantham believing Bates innocent later on, and when Bates returns from prison telling him to take some time off, rest, read books, go into the library:

Upon being invited to take books out and read them, Branson becomes animated and tells his favorites

3 INT. LIBRARY. DOWNTON. DAY.
Robert is working, with Pharaoh at his feet. Carson enters.
CARSON: You wanted to see the new chauffeur, m’lord.
ROBERT: Yes, indeed. Please bring him in.
Carson nods and a young man, in his thirties, appears. This
is Tom Branson. He is attractive and polite. Carson leaves.

ROBERT: Come in, come in. Good to see you again …
Branson, isn’t it?
BRANSON: That’s right, your lordship.
ROBERT: I hope they’ve shown you where everything is?
And we’ve delivered whatever we promised at the
interview?
BRANSON: Certainly, m’lord.
ROBERT: Good.
Robert nnds him rather an interesting character.
ROBERT: How did you first come to be a chauffeur?
BRANSON: My father was a tenant of Mrs Delderfield’s and
I was apprenticed to the chauffeur there. But he’d been
a coachman and he didn’t have much feeling for cars. In
the end, the mistress asked me to take over.
ROBERT: Won’t you miss Ireland?
BRANSON: Ireland, yes, but not the job. She was a nice
lady, but she only had one car and she wouldn’t let me
drive it over twenty miles an hour. So it was a bit …
well, boring, so to speak.
Which makes Robert laugh. Branson looks around.
BRANSON: You’ve got a wonderful library.
The remark does not offend Robert but it does surprise him.
ROBERT: Are you interested in books?
BRANSON: Not in books, as such, so much as what’s in
them.
A reading chauffeur? Unusual. Robert thinks for a moment.
ROBERT: You’re very welcome to borrow books, if you wish.
BRANSON: Really, m’lord?
He is astonished and delighted. Robert nods.
ROBERT: There’s a ledger
use, even my daughters.
room’s empty.
BRANSON: Do all the servants enjoy the same privilege?
ROBERT: I suppose they could, although I doubt they’d
avail themselves of it. Carson and Mrs Hughes sometimes
take a novel or two. What are your interests?
BRANSON: History and politics, mainlyROBERT: Heavens.* Well, when you come
back, you should
start looking in that section, there.t
Carson has reappeared at the door.
ROBERT: Branson’s going to borrow some books. He has my
permission.
CARSON: very good, m’lord.
Does Carson approve? Probably not. He looks at Branson.

*********
Typical notes by Fellowes:

The Irish troubles were a hot topic throughout this period, much more even than in the 1970s. We remember the Suffragettes and the emergence of the unions, but in fact if we’d been alive at that time the front page would have been dominated by Ireland, so here Branson is bringing those troubles to Downton. Because, by this stage, the show had developed its own method of dealing with these things. We don’t usually introduce famous characters like Lloyd George or Curzon or De Valera, but we allow our characters to refer to political events and scandals and things that were happening. To achieve this, to make the Crawleys and their servants aware of what was going on, I had the idea of bringing in an Irish chauffeur who was political and a republican. He is not active, in the sense of being a freedom fighter, but he is energetically pro-independence for Ireland. It seemed to me that such a chap would allow us to talk about the topic without its seeming contrived. I also thought – although only vaguely when I was writing this episode – that we might have a cross-class romance at some point and so it seemed a good idea that he should be young and handsome, whether or not we actually did anything with it. The actor who plays Branson (Allen Leech) had worked with me and our producer, Liz Trubridge, on a film I wrote and directed, called From Time to Time. He impressed us both and he had a kind of gritty, very real sort of good looks, as opposed to the face of a film star, which is more useful in this kind of drama.

I was sorry they cut this section, when Robert invites Branson to borrow books. It was taken from Below Stairs by Margaret Powell, whose memoirs of a life in service have just been reissued, for which I wrote the preface. She takes a fairly jaundiced view of the world but she was operating in smaller
households than Downton, where she was only one of two or three servants and they worked like dogs. But, once, she does go to a grander house on a temporary basis to replace a cook, and there all the servants were encouraged to borrow books from the library. When I read it, I thought it was rather a
nice touch and quite Robert’ish. Since I knew it was based on truth I was looking forward to being attacked but in the event it was cut. Naturally, Carson can’t bear the idea.

Carson as seen in the scene below

BRANSON: Is that all, m’lord?
ROBERT: It is. Off you go and good luck.
Branson goes, leaving master and butler alone.
ROBERT: Well. An Irishman with an interest in politics …
Are we mad?
CARSON: I could always bring in fire drill for the staff.
ROBERT: Thank you, Carson.
They share the moment.
ROBERT (CONT’D): He seems quite a bright spark after poor
old Taylor.
Carson is not prepared to volunteer an opinion. Yet.
ROBERT: I always thought he was happy. Why did he want
to leave?
CARSON: I believe it was Mrs Taylor, m’lord. She felt
cut off. She wanted to live in a town.
ROBERT: But running a tea shop? I cannot feel that’ll
make for a very restful retirement, can you?
CARSON: I would rather be put to death, m’lord.
ROBERT: Quite so. Thank you, Carson.
with a glance at the dog, he returns to his letter.

Lord Grantham amused

I liked the joke too, now this tea-shop part was omitted

One of the many things I like about serial storytelling is how a later part harks back to the earlier. In Part 4 we also get the slowly developing love of Anna for Bates; we saw her pity for him, her respect, her bringing him a tray when she and he thought he was fired, and she watched him cry; now in this episode he brings her a tray during her bad cold and in the script we can read the scene slowly.

It’s through this syntagmatic (is the word) development that these series gets their depth. Of course it contrasts to Mrs Hughes giving up her love, Daisy making an error in falling for the lesser man, Thomas. All brought together in the moment of ferocity when Bates threatens Thomas for needling and mocking William, that foreshadowing the reality of his pent-up violence … he is the one real justfiably angry man of the series.

The script to Part 6 is a deepening of the seriousness and suggestivity of the Scripts 1-5. You really feel for example how the relationship between Branson and Sybil has a genuine basis in their natures, their predilections, his reading (John Stuart Mill you now see), her ideals. Talking seriously:

The show does not have enough time and is in a way — however paradoxical this is — too effectively presented dramatically. You lose the hidden novel in the quick-paced creamy-pop appeal that all the filmic techniques project.

******************
Downton Abbey 1:1: from the voice-over commentary

Crowborough frantically rifling Thomas’s drawers in search of their love-letters; POV the naive Lady Mary

Bates coming upon them, ironically offers to let them investigate his room, upon which Lady Mary apologizes out of her habit for doing so when she’s in the wrong

As I wrote, it was not until I watched very slowly, this time having read the script, clicking and snapping on the stills and then studying them (the way the film is put together) that I realized the real motive for the Duke of Crowborough’s visit was to go up to that attic and snatch back his love letters to Thomas Barrow.

In the case of this series, part of my absorption is a kind of fascinated horror at what the whole thing reveals about what audiences like, what they think when they are watching — for in the scripts Fellowes includes many notes telling of what viewers have written to the film-makers. The commentary has
Fellowes and his partners (the producer for season 1 and director of this part) continually upholding this fantasy world as good and wonderful and real (so from the point of view of understanding the film dead wood), a kind of bland hypocrisy, their “job” whatever hype is expected they’ll utter.

Fellowes is the best of the three because he really believes in what he is presenting and is unashamed. Amid or sometimes after his fatuous kinds of naive statements he will suddenly say what he intended to do in a scene, comment on how he sees the actors, what they are doing, why this one is dressed this or that way (costume so important in costume drama). Two examples, when near the close Anna visits Bates with the
tray of food all three suddenly say these are their ‘favorite pair’ and there is suddenly a discussion of the lighting, the words (which insist he’s going to be fired), the depth of feeling in the scene, the lighting. As important in these
over-voice commentaries, the scene moves much slower.

The paired scenes sandwiching this are of Crowborough getting the naive Mary to take him to the servants’ quarters so he can find and get back his letters to Thomas and Thomas’s visit as a footman to Crowborough’s room. The latter is the first place in the whole hour all formality is dropped and we get two human
beings confronting one anther for real.

Plain talking, natural gestures (Crowborough)

I don’t believe it was the two males’ ideas to kiss so lovingly, but at any rare they do it so touchingly and yet we know how no humane feeling lies beneath it (so a contrast to the Bates/Anna scene in the attic which just precedes it — see first two stills) and again light, words, gestures and it’s the real climax of all the scenes in the part — and it undermines all the fatuity about how the show supports the order in front of us.

Fellowes also confirmed for me that Miss Obrien is really meant to be the person who had no belief in this system and hates it. He does not like her for this at all, and thinks it condemns her. But we may think differently even if we don’t
like her personally. He described Maggie Smith as a kind of crow in this part: also exposing the humbug but from her self-interested perspective. He kept pointing out how often she is in black with black hats.

Fellowes saw in this hat an allusion to a hawk

He personally finds Elizabeth McGovern very pretty as an older woman and remarked on this as they watched the last bedroom scene.

While she is often in black (they are all supposed partly in mourning), not always, and I could see he liked her as a simulacrum of an older wife he could quite imagine himslf “having” …

Ellen

Read Full Post »

Recent Popular Fiction & Film: more & openly disabled characters; the effect of fandoms

Society is no comfort/To one not sociable — Shakespeare, Imogen, Cymbeline, IV:2, 12-13

The Walking Stick: Deborah (Samantha Eggar) badly lamed leaning on Leigh (David Hemmings) (1970, Eric Till, Winston Graham, George Bluestone)

Dear friends and readers,

Disabled characters have increased in numbers in popular fiction & film in the last quarter century. Has there been a genuine increase in sympathetic empathy and understanding, any real help offered such people or acceptance as a result. It would seem not. I link these two phenomena to the growth of fandoms in cyberspace and elsewhere and how they effect the development of programs and series of fictions. Why there are there. I exemplify briefly with the way disabled characters from Sondheim’s Passion to Winston Graham’s mystery and Poldark novels are treated, and more at length in Downton Abbey, from Fellowes’s himself to the indifferent to hostile commentary on him & Anna, the head housemaid who loves him.

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

A spin-off from both the APA/ACA and ASECS conferences: in both there were roundtable panels on “disability studies: I feared not enough would be said in the more casual talks these roundtables offer to take up enough time and the audience would be called upon to talk, and then feared I’d reveal myself too much or get too involved. I have seen academic people present themselves as interested in isabilities and found that they were not, except as an abstract topic; worse, if I probed I discovered the people were just as strong for enforcing “normalcy” (on behalf of “success”), just as prejudiced (not taking a whole personality into account, not being willing to critique their definitions of success), fearful and/or nervous in their reactions. I worried I’d feel angry or know intense dismay.

So I didn’t go, and now regret this because what I did do was take down names of journals, books and periodicals with disability studies for today. First off I learned that in the last quarter century there’s been a huge increase in the number of disabled characters in popular fiction. It might be the disabled characters were always there in mystery-crime fiction, though not acknowledged, as villains or victims, but not being acknowledged, presented as freaks, or evil, or reprehensible in some way. But this is a big change to presenting people with disabilities in a sympathetic or seeming sympathetic way. Nowadays disability is also popular in historical fiction and romance. So that I noticed so many disabled characters in Winston Graham does not show originality on his part, but rather a following of a zeitgeist.

I won’t cite the names of the articles or journals separately unless someone asks for these (in the comments) which is most unlikely, just describe generally. Most were studies of texts or art in the close reading humanities way today (looking sociologically, how they function in society). Basically there were two schools of thought: one argues that the new wave of appearances of disabled characters is not increasing any real understanding or sympathy for people with disabilities because 1) at the end the disabled person is forcibly or seemingly willingly co-opted into the “normal” world, made to seem “normal” and the point is to defuse the person as a threat, on the way the emphasis in portrayal is the disability itself with full utterly varied richness of people ignored; it’s voyeurism; and 2) we see very little progress in the outer world for funding, real acceptance, or even understanding in wider circles of people. The other argues that the spread of such depictions does help; little by little the stories make people no longer ignore the disabled, no longer erase them altogether, and does gradually work up sympathy and we may hope for change.

When Anne Elliot (Amanda Root) wants to visit the crippled Mrs Smith (Helen Schlesinger), her father rages at her with open disgust for her “queer” tastes (from the 1995 BBC Persuasion, Roger Michell, Nick Dear)

Then there are essays on particular works or authors or sub-genres: how disabled people are presented in romance; how presented in mystery-crime stories (where they’ve long been an unacknowledged central type, either as villain or victim); in later Victorian gothic. The way they are discussed in non-fiction case histories, which sometimes turn out to be obtuse fictions which promulgate single-minded freakish stereotyped views, e.g., Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night which invites voyeurism. Once in a while a particular writer or work is found which increases understanding and sympathy. The value of these is if you want to do such studies they show you how to do and what’s said, and give you insights.

Two good books are worth noting: Women with Disabilities, ed. Michelle Fine (and others). Fine’s the one who’s done intelligent candid studies of how women who have been raped are treated, women’s studies. The kind of character includes is Fosca in Tarchetti’s book (now called Passion from Sondheim): I’ve noticed again and again women who are presented as disabled are eroticized, made beautiful but for the disability which then adds to their alluringness (and the kick of having sex with them in the imagination apparently). Another is more historical and crosses gender, class, ethnicity: Rosemarie Garland Thomson: Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring disability in American literature. The truth is many people still believe in disabilities only if they are physical.

Fosca from Passion, made plain not crippled (yet this came from a website mocking the addictive love affair)

From what I’ve read thus far I think the those who say this increase in visibility has not led to a gain in empathy or understanding are right. Even when the novel does not enforce normalcy, readerships insist on misreading the fiction to emphasize a happy ending at the close — happy being equivalent to assimilation and erasure. From what I’ve seen in real life — the cutting off of funding, the cutting out of Aspergers from the DSM (Diagnostic Statistical Physicians Manuel), and the increase in coercive techniques & drugs among psychologists again those who say more visibility has not helped are right. No one really has a mechanism for helping such people gain self-sustaining employment for or proposes helping older adults socially for real at all.

Misreading in terms of the readers’ own identity needs, to throw off a threat of anything unknown or new leads me to the other related topic I heard discussed at the conference and want to consider again. Next time (if there is one for me at either conference), and if I have a chance to go on panels about fandoms, fanzines, I will. The book here is Textual Poachers by Henry Jenkins.

Fandoms are one aspect of different ways of life in the Net that are reactions the increasing anonymity and loss of community in US life, the impoverishment of individuals and high unemployment rate so that people come onto the Net to find community, meaning when there is nothing where they live. These groups replace religious communities too, can be a religious community, and they are real. It’s another instance where the idea that what happens on the Net is not real is false. In the 1950s Richard Hoggart wrote a book called The Uses of Literacy where he argued that TV was being used to create “imagined communities” which through propaganda and loyalty to shows inculcated in people Tory reactionary values; again people at a loss, people left out, communities devastated by global capitalism; the book was re-issued during the 1980s Thatcher years.

But it’s not true that these are imagined and unreal communities. These groups of people active and aggressive; authors ignore them at their peril. They meet outside the Net when they can and influence where they can. They will punish, ostracize, exclude the person who takes a different view and attack that. I have found it very painful to deal with such people; actually I can’t, don’t know how to. They can be group bloggers. They can be seen whirling to some extent around mini-series programs, Games of Thrones say or Downton Abbey.

How do you recognize a fandom. It’ll be a message board where anonymity is enforced, and thus no one held accountable. No personal relationships can develop easily. In the case of films or TV, the re-doing of bits of films in YouTube videos to change the original meanings of scenes to fit what the fans want and posting of these. They can be embarrassing. Fierce conversations which a given aggressive individual will not give up. I’d say worse than some of what happens on Austen-l only it’s moderated so the two or three people moderating immediately shut up whoever has said what they don’t agree with (they were particularly fierce over sex), “community” activities centered on the actors and stars of the films and a whole range of sociological or psychological phenomena having to do with inventing a fictional identity. They do meet outside the Net when they can. A pre-screening of the new Sherlock in a New York movie-house brought fans from around the country to meet in the movie-house, see their movie, eat and talk together afterward.

A deeply sexual shot: Robin Ellis and Angharad Rees about to go to bed together as Ross and Demelza Poldark (1975 Part 7)

Examples include Harry Potter, Batman, Dr Who, Star Wars, long-running TV programs. My experience has been with the Winston Graham Society webpage, really a message board dedicated to discussing two of the famous stars from the first mini-series: Robin Ellis and Angharad Rees (although she’s dead now). I had read in Graham’s autobiography this group succeeded in damning a 1996 film and making it impossible to go on; a paper I heard at ACA showed that the group influenced the second season of the films. I was told by one woman my discussion of disability, violence and sex in Graham’s fiction “deeply upset” her so how dare I? No one should write about this series what could upset her, no details allowed. I had notice how many disabled (often autistic) characters Graham has in his Poldark and mystery novels; how he studies alienation (Marni) and individual loss sympathetically and wanted to discuss this. The shattering of one of the heroines from continual marital rape; the reality the hero rapes one of the chief heroines and the son they have, neglected and over-indulged (anything but taken care of) after her death grows up disturbed and lonely enough to reach out for an orangutan as a companion. Forget it.

Facebook pages dedicated to famous stars or authors identified as conservative and classic, or with some ethnicity or doctrine. The audience for Austen’s books is leavened because it includes different types of people, academics and heritage industry and there’s a lot of money to be made on sequels and conferences and tourism so the fandom cannot invent this world of its own and control the material. Austen has prestige, her texts are not considered trivial and worthless in the way of say Star Trek and other texts around which fandoms whirl. These groups dislike any criticism of their author; they will justify or excuse or explain away the smallest unfavorable remark. Their identities have become involved, their egos, their self-image. They build whole worlds around their texts & shows.

Tellingly, for people interested to see if popular fiction that has a wide enthusiastic audience can function to increase the sympathetic imagination, the fiercest hostile responses come from any assertion that the fetishized material explores sexuality or gender in unconventional ways, has an ambiguous or sad ending, shows the hero to be less than admirable (violent for example, politically radical).

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

I’ll end on the treatment of disability in Downton Abbey, the first season. Since I think I do not misread, I cannot tell what the misreading would be precisely, probably in the direction of scorn or dismissal or somehow turning the disability into what’s normal if “unwanted,” as Sir Anthony Strallon was treated in the third season, or silence, as the man with the heinously disfigured face was in the second — both given over to the program-scapegoat, Edith.

In the first part of Downton Abbey, the lamed Mr Bates is almost fired because few will accept his disability: most take it as a blemish on community, insist he will not be able to do his job, a few ridicule him, a couple (that’s enough) tell false tales; Lord Grantham almost fires him but his decency and better self seeing the cruelty and injustice of the act, keeps him on at the close of the hour.

In the third part, Mr Bates still driven by fear he’ll be fired, tormented by cruel jeering or physical gestures (as when Miss Obrien trips and humiliates him) buys an instrument of torture to make himself walk more straight. As the hour wears on we see Bates in pain, leaning over in agony, having a sour expression, indeed not be able to do his job. (In the context of the hour’s juxtaposition, the parallel is the ejection of Pamuk’s corpse from Lady Mary’s room after he half-rapes her; both are trash which ruin the body and probably spirit of the character.) Finally Mrs Hughes, the housekeeper insists on seeing what is wrong with Mr Bates, and he shows her his leg, now covered with blood and sores from the contraption on it.

As ever Fellowes is on the side of the mainstream: we next see the pair by the side of a river on the property. Mr Bates has agreed to throw the thing away. The lesson Mrs Hughes instructs Mr Bates to remember is: “I promise I will never again try to cure myself, I will spend my life happily as the butt of others’ jokes and I will never mind them.” Mrs Hughes: “We all carry scars Mr Bates, inside or out, you’re no different than the rest of us, remember that.” Mr Bates: “I will try to that I do promise.” And then he hurls it off, and she cries “good riddance.’

The part about not trying to cure oneself is good — autism month should be called autism acceptance month. The group of articles I have include two arguing the higher ends of autism include people who are in many ways more gifted than the average and would not have to consider themselves disabled if others didn’t ostracize and punish them. And Mr Bates is doing his job fine. But the second part half-blaming Mr Bates and saying it was he who considered himself different is the narrow cold-shouldering mind of the establishment speaking, demanding in effect (were he autistic) that he be neurotypical and leads to people purchasing such contraptions or having painful useful dangerous operations. Stiff upper lip. Never admit to anything.

Mr Bates and Anna (Joanna Froggart) end of Part 5: he getting into cart

As far as I could tell from reading the fan’s responses to the hour, they were sympathetic to the obtuse and mean Lady Mary; in his notes to the script Fellowes exclaimed against letters to him decrying a supposed buggery — the people couldn’t endure that Lady Mary should lose her virginity (hymen) so they jumped to the conclusion buggery had occurred and this was why the man had a heart-attack (!). (How revealing of silent suppositions this is.) And on-line people quickly tired of Mr Bates — by the second season as homely and a “sob-story” (“passive-aggressive” was a favorite phrase)and felt excruciated when (they felt) asked to identify with Anna, for they would not have fallen in love with Mr Bates as she slowly does for his intelligence, integrity, good nature, refusal to kowtow or forsake his dignity, good heart (of which we see instances).

A friend wrote:

Mrs. Hughes’s comment that ‘we all carry scars’ nags me, however. Who is the “we?” On the first glance, I’d take it to be a universal statement–the series shows that everyone, upstairs or downstairs, has their problems, but I’m not convinced it is a universal “we.” (I’m sure Fellowes meant it to be.) Is the “we” the servants? However, whether or not Mrs. Hughes “we” is universal, this leads me to think that disability plays out differently between servants and masters — Matthew’s Hemingwayesque war wound, leaving him “crippled” and impotent, is a parallel to Mr. Bates’ disability — both
are physical and both call into the question each man’s ability to do his primary “job” — in Matthew’s case of course, to “make the heir,” but one has a miraculous cure and the other not …

Yes. Who is the we? In the case of the servants, they have no buffer or support to help them if they are rejected, so they must conform and if they cannot, must not complain.

I was told again and again how my blogs on Downton Abbey took “a different view,” and at times (especially around the character of Edith whose scapegoating I exposed) attacked. Twenty years from now attitudes will have frozen and it will be hard to talk freely to those still remembering (many will no longer but move on). I never did discuss disability in Downton Abbey. I should have. So have made up for that now.

Ellen

Read Full Post »

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.

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

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.

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

Read Full Post »

Downton Abbey 3:3: cruelty so raw it took my breath away

Edith (Laura Carmichael) having a hard time breathing as she realizes the humiliation in store right then

Letting go

Exhaustion defeat

Dear friends and readers,

So what was it? What had this character done wrong to have unleashed at her such a level of spite, of raw humiliation that I’ve never seen equaled in kind before — and I’ve been watching mini-series for some 40 years? Before the whole community, people she must live with, a fever pitch of rejection. The question to ask is, Why is this character scapegoated so?

Jane Eyre’s horror when Rochester’s brother-in-law interrupts her wedding to Rochester to say there is an impediment, Rochester had a wife now living, pales before this. Nothing to it.

I’ve long been puzzled at the way Lady Edith Grantham is sneered at, mocked, by Downton Abbey audience members. Fellowes, again knowing writer that he is (remember he wrote Gosford Park, one of the most intelligent of the great house movies I’ve seen, to expose the hypocrisies of professed motives), has been feeding this maw for three seasons. For three seasons I’ve seen it emerge again and again. In little things: Elizabeth McGovern as Cora Lady Grantham is directed to roll her eyes when Edith speaks; Maggie Smith as the dowager and Michelle Dockery as Lady Mary Princess grimace knowingly. In the first Edith gave away that her sister, Mary, had been in bed with one of the show’s several lout-lords who died at the abbey; in the second Edith drawn to, fooled by a man masquerading as a hideous cripple. I thought perhaps Fellows had decided he’d whip-lashed Edith enough when in 3:1 he had Robert Bathurst as Strallan courageously break the taboo which allows mean tricks and expose one played on Allen Leech as Tom Branson by another lout-lord.

I mistook. I should have realized that the intrusive domineering demand that Edith not consider this man by the Dowager was an important sign. I’ve never liked Lady Bracknell (Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest), a witty bully, upon whom (Edith Evans) Maggie Smith may intuitively have modeled herself. Amusing cynic yes, like one of the old women Anthony Trollope is ever defending. She has the crass nerve to get up and insist what is happening is right and thus disable Strallan further (he crumbled because he overheard her making fun of his prowess to the chaplain):

She’s one of many in the DA world who thinks she has intimate rights over other people subject to her authority (some behave as if many others have intimate rights over them). The dowager couldn’t stand Strallan so Edith is thrown away with him. So what is wrong with him? Aristocrat, monied, kind, perceptive, offering “quite enough happiness” for Edith to be going on with (Lord Grantham’s words).

This gives us our first hint: what is wrong? he’s said to be too old and he’s got a crippled arm, masks, masks for not saying for he’s not manly enough, not macho enough, weak.

He fails to perform masculinity adequately. There you have it. And Edith, why is she a butt? She fails to perform femininity adequately. Jim was telling me tonight that he reads a blog which argues that the real electric power of DA (for those who are addicted) is it’s camp, and tonight he read there the offhand comment that some ludicrous star, inexplicably wrong in her garments, was dressed in the Edith Grantham style. Not Lady Mary Grantham. Not Lady Sybil, now Mrs Bransom (Deborah Findley Brown). Though they all dress alike.

Tom all awkwardness, Sybil turned dowdiness itself

So this hint is not sufficiently explanatory. This is not the first time I’ve asked myself what fuels the need to ridicule this young woman?

As I have before I hunted in three very good books on women’s films I have: Tania Modleski’s mongraph Loving with a Vengeange; and edited collections of essays by Marcia Landy (Imitations of Life) and Christine Gledhill (Home is Where the Heart Is). This time I wouldn’t give up. In previous hints I’ve found Miss Sarah Obrien (Siobhan Finneran): the villainess, spiteful domineering old maid; in 3:1 and 3:2 I tried to ignore her reversion to this role but in 3:3 she is not only wearing the ugliest of thick-cloth witch-like dresses, her face made up to look like pancake, her hair terrible. She is all menace. Daisy (Sophie McShera) tells Moseley she wouldn’t want Miss Obrien to be angry at her. In this episode Miss Obrien was outwitted by Thomas (he has also returned to smirking bad gay guy, narrow envious gay man Rob James-Cellier) who foolishly thought he could make her lose her job by telling (the now trembling) Molseley (Kevin Doyle) she meant to leave and directly Molseley to offer a relative as new lady’s maid to Lady Grantham.

I found Anna — long suffering, self-sacrificing nurse type. Mrs Hughes (Phyllis Logan), everyone’s well-meaning mother.

Trawl, trawl, trawl and then I saw it. Tania Modleski had it: no heroine is allowed to admit openly she longs to marry.

Is not this Edith’s flaw? in the first episode she became a Lawrentian-style farm girl to allure a man (whose wife put a stop to that). She wanted to love the crippled man. And what does she say when lying in her bed afterwards: not that she has missed a dreamed-of precious life, but that both sisters are married, one is pregnant and probably the other is. We have enough to see she does like him, but that’s not the emphasis here.

She wore her heart on her sleeve. She was open. She is indiscreet. Worse: she is inept at manipulation. She breaks code & for that and her exposure of the game she cannot be forgiven. Loneliness is a laugh among Judith Butler-style performers. Did anyone in her family, anyone downstairs feel for her? Anna Smith Bates (Joanne Froggart), in some ways an alter ego; it’s no coincidence Anna is Edith’s shadow in the last we see of Edith in this episode:

She tells Anna she wishes she had another life (something Anna ought to wish for if she had any real value for herself and her time)

Score high for Fellowes. I put it to my reader this scene will be remembered and imitated. It’ll be spoken of. You thought Downton Abbey was running out of dazzle, did you?

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

Mrs Hughes and Lesley Nichol as Mrs Patmore hestitate before going into doctor’s office

I had meant to show how each separate episode in a good mini-series will have its own structure and set of themes. I showed patterns in 3:2. Here, then we are looking at themes. As it’s a hidden dialogue (overheard) that defeats Strallan so this is an episode rife with hidden information and lies which have power to hurt, often enough known by people who do not realize their power. Thomas lies to Molseley and inconsistently Cora, Lady Grantham does not give Miss Obrien a chance to explain herself (“I am very hurt by your behavior”) while being all fairy-godmother goodness to Phyllis Logan as Mrs Hughes (“we will keep you” if you should become too ill to work). Daisy alone knows that Lavinia Swine (Zoe Boyle) sent a letter to her lawyer on the day she was dying and blurts it out, thus enabling Lady Mary to pressure Matthew to accept a legacy the family needs. Mrs Bartlett (Claire Higgins) may know the truth of Bates’s wife’s last hours. In the prison a friend warns Bates (Brendan Coyle) that a weapon has been planted in his bed and the police told; he is able to wrest it out of his bedding and hide it before the police rush in to search.

And so it goes. Lies, secrecy, silence — central themes in women’s books ever since Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.

Preposterous scenes of virtue — central to women’s romance since heroic 17th century romance and rife in opera. So Matthew cannot bear to accept his legacy and when persuaded to, Lord Grantham will not take the money but share the abbey with his son-in-law who admits he likes living there. Isobel Crawley (Penelope Wilton) teaching sleazy sarky prostitutes to use sewing machines while they jeer at her. Fellowes’s disdain and hostile depiction of the lowest vulnerable members of society is not compensated for by Ethel Parks’s shame when she comes in for help (naturally not for herself) and again flees rather than tell her secret.

What are men and women allowed to do is presented as a genuine question. Not reveal their appetite, as Anna tells Daisy that makes men flee:

The lobster is a part of the mise-en-scene — perhaps a joke version of vagina dentata?

Not take it upon yourself to criticize the arrangements of those above you Mr Carson tells Miss Obrien’s naive nephew, Alfred (Matt Milne).

Of course this is drivel as a serious investigation of how to live your life. It is really what you want that shapes your choices. Edith did want to marry Strallan and be mistress of his estate, have his children. Now she wants another life but cannot see her way to any other. Lady Mary wants to stay princess of Downton and Mr Carson her butler. Lord Grantham does not want to lose face or status. Matthew no longer seems to want the independence he once did, and Tom Bransom has begun to wear dinner jackets — they both appear to want to please their wives.

IN Downton Abbey we can measure the characters by what they want at this point. Miss Obrien wants to get back at Thomas for insulting her as someone who was never asked to be married (how does he know she ever wanted to?) and threatening her job.

As usual I warm most to Mrs Hughes who appears to want to live on, quietly, with dignity, as self-supporting as her world will let her be. I would warm to Isobel Crawley if (like Edith but for very different reasons) her work were not the subject of such ridicule.

What kind of life do you want to live is a serious debate found in Victorian novels. When Jane fled Rochester, she was forced “to build a life.” When Mrs Crawley is trying to reach Ethel, she wants also to be frank (like Edith is intuitively) and uses the word “prostitute” of how Ethel is surviving, and says “you should know this is true of every woman who has come here to rebuild their lives and I’m helping them, and is re-echoed mockingly:

(A camp picture?)

That’s right. Why not come in and help us rebuild our lives?

I understand the sarcastic laughter. People act in terms of particulars, of their own landscape, and if they don’t have access to a milieu that allows for fulfillment on middle class terms, they don’t get it. So Ethel says, “That’s not why I’m here Mrs Crawley. That is I am … what you said but I don’t want help, not for myself but … ” and unable to face whatever it is, she runs off again. It’s not so bad with Edith as say Mrs Bartlett (a laundress) or these unskilled women or Ethel. Isobel says over dinner what Edith needs is something useful to do.

But it has been a viscerally searing day for her, and my goal in this blog has been to investigate why Edith is the episode scapegoat.

Ellen

Read Full Post »

Joe Wright and Tom Stoppard’s Anna Karenina: a theatrical triumph

Stiva Oblonsky, Anna’s brother (Matthew MacFayden) and Kostya Levin, the 2nd major contrast to Anna (Domnhall Gleeson)

Anna Karenina (Keira Knightley): a cut off promotional shot (not in film) of her in a long red robe, filmed from afar (as described); she’s fulfilled the promise of Bend It Like Beckham, Pirates of Carribean (2003), The Duchess (2008)

Friends, readers, if you see one extravaganza of costume, virtuouso acting, stunning shots, from a brilliant book, let it be Wright and Stoppard’s Anna Karenina. Stoppard and Joe Wright have translated Tolstoi’s masterpiece into a filmic masterpiece which uses a theater combined with far shots on location (contradicting what is led into and out of) and substituting stylized comedy and at times operatic rushes of scenes for Tolstoi’s realism, with a great deal of effective help from Keira Knightley (she ought to get the Oscar for this), Matthew MacFayden (is there a type left he has not played), Jude Law as Karenin (another actor who escapes typing and as the unimaginative yet intense and idealistic husband searingly hurt is not recognizable)

Law dissolves into the blackness of this brooding shot;

and luxury casting for minor parts (Olivia Williams as Stiva’s mother; Shirley Henderson as a very nasty woman at the opera who humiliates Anna for sitting by her in a box; Michelle Dockery as the frozen friend who will be seen with Anna anywhere, everywhere because society is all:

What made it was Stoppard’s use of the theater (to be expected from Stopppard, given his oeuvre) together with Wright’s Lawrentian sexual drenching and effective juxtapositions of crashing and still scenes. The film opens in a theater, ends in one; at the same time into the theater (which is again and again redone) is projected the most realistic of happening, people, animals events and they are used with striking insight and effect. Sometimes the characters are wandering about in a deep backstage where they meet other characters and suddenly the scene switches to a real house, or field, or street or the train. Then inside the theater Anna walks into a blended home environment and is asking permission of Karenin to visit her incorrigibly promiscuous brother, Stiva, in order to persuade Stiva’s many-timed pregnant wife, Dolly –

After Anna goes to live with Vronsky, Dolly (Kelly Macdonald), says she wants to invite Anna to hers, but she does not — utterly conventional and kindly throughout and this a normative moment, common film-making

– to forgive him. Anna then walks out into a train, powerful real, a trip where she meets Vronsky’s mother. This first one ends suddenly someone throwing himself or be mistake getting caught under; we return periodically to the train station and of course end there is a terrifyingly held moment as she stands there just before the final leap.

Here’s a six-minute clip offered by Wright online to show his film: his theatrically staged sequence.

The film’s worst flaw is seen here: the wooden acting of Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Vronsky until about half-way through the film when he seems to become an electrifying center of whole scenes — as when he drives a horse across a stage too roughly, the poor animal falls with a crash, moans, groans, and as Vronsky T-J shoots the beast. The character is so real in the novel, so fully examined, as a shallow man whom Anna imagines to be this brilliantly deep feelingly true person. In Tolstoi, Anna’s is a bitterly ironic illusion. It’s Karenin who has the depth of feeling. After conquest, Vronsky grows bored and Anna becomes frantic with her losses.

Perhaps the film-makers thought this paradigm nowadays would not be liked so they made Vronsky really in love. He is driven to throw Anna off when the society’s treatment of them and her suspicions of him because he is accepted and goes about with beautiful women still tear them apart. T-J may have been picked because he is nearly as beautiful as Rupert Freud (he was that type). Anna pretends not to care about the ostracizing, but she does. She misses her son. Where T-J is effective is after Anna (as it were) goes mad and he can match her inner wildness with a distraught aggressive sensuality.

So as the movie progressed, the whole experience of film-making may have engulfed T-J and he came up to it. He did what he needed to do in the scene where he furiously and meanly drives a horse to the ground and then shoots it to death. This is the most savage scene in the film and montage, placement, are intended in filmic ways to make a woman stop and think before marrying a man such as Vronsky.

Keira Knightley has become a great actress and Matthew MacFayden has again proved himself one as insouciant comic Oblonsky. She is actually somewhat heavier than she used to be. She now has upper arms. Her wardrobe is just spectacular. More than that it’s aesthetically right in so many scenes.

One stands out in my mind: she’s in a scarlet red robe standing by a window, everything else dusk or grey and white light. She’s smoking and staring out the window. Vronsky In some of the traumatic scenes beginning in the last quarter her face begins to take on a new look. You would not recognize her. I long to see it again the way I did her in The Duchess. I’d say The Duchess (based on Amanda Foreman’s take on the life of Georgiana Spencer) was self consciously feminist and that came out of the material adapted.

Here the material might be called proto-feminist: the point is made repeatedly that Anna cannot escape Karenin, she cannot take her child; it is she who is ostracized, she who is powerless to act freely. An emphatic contrast is
made between her brother, Oblonsky whose casual adultery with a governess (of course fired) the film opens with; she visits his wife, Dolly (Kelly MacDonald) and with no trouble really gets Dolly to forgive him, and by the end of the film Oblonsky is back having affairs again. Neither his appetite or job is at all disturbed until the last moment of the film, when he and his again devoted forgiving and pregnant wife have Levin and his wife, Dolly, to stay with them. We see Stiva (of all people) grieving behind a door.

It’s not Tolstoi’s novel, and some of departures were those I expected: the moralistic Levin story is made tertiary. Levin is your salt-of-the-earth character. In Stoppard’s version Levin has much to learn from Kitty who when she first saw him was a shallow ancient regime flirt. Levin who works alongside his peasants (troubling them by so doing according to Tolstoi) would have ejected his alcoholic brother, who have been bankrupted by gambling, especially with his ex-prostitute wife. After Kitty realizes Levin’s “worth” and marries him, and comes to the farm, Kitty sponges down the brother with the help of this “whore” and she and her sister-in-law become linchpin types within a family and agricultural system. This is Tolstoi stuff, minus any concern for reform.

The medium itself throughout, reasserting itself: a theater:

Are we on stage? in the lobby? in a street with snow? it’s a fantasia

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

But for me Anna’s story is what matters: she is the rebel; she is not a cow, not a sowing instrument. She wants an individual life, companionship, conversation and yes good sex.

In these novels, a long period of erotic awakening turns into a similar slow burn of disillusion and then, despairing, self-destruction. Amidst this we keep our souls alive.

To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive. — R. L. Stevenson

I doubt if in Tolstoi Anna stands for these principles. I read the novel as I do Lafayette’s Princess de Cleves where the princess has fallen for a Jungian animus. Vronsky is a type descending also from Austen’s S&S (Willoughby), and includes motifs like Trollope’s Burgo Fitzgerald’s cruelty to his horse in CYFG? signalling what he would be to a wife or mistress.

The whole paradigm originates in the 18th century and is usually presented as a warning lesson for the awakened woman. This is how Roger Shattuck in his Forbidden Knowledge sees it. He inveighs against the alternative view which urges women and men to liberate themselves. Recent women’s novels use the paradigm to show women’s lack of freedom, e.g.,. Sarah Waters’ (Affinity); A. S. Byatt’s Possession. When gone into personally with no imposed lessons it’s still verboten, and you can find women novelists using pseudonyms; one great one is an Italian novel, the pseudonym, Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment.

One long swoon

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

I expect that Wright and Stoppard are hoping to have this Xmas hit (remember The King’s Speech?), to win over Les Miserables. I did love the costumes and far shots. This is a favorite, again a cut-off shot from the Net but in the film we see a wide scene of a platform, snow, mist, hear the sounds, and then zero in on her in that outfit:

It’s not happening as yet in my local moviehouse. The theater was only half full. Why? it’s a woman’s story as told, not a man’s. Recently I’ve watched a series of films by women: Agnieska Holland’s The Secret Garden and Washington Square were among them. Again, both make explicit the tabooed point of view that is left implicit in the original text and by viewers sometimes overlooked or denied, with a far greater delicacy of approach. Here is a more delicate moment which might make us remember a cutting painful scene in Emma: Wright and Stoppard opt for playfulness; Levin and Kitty try to reach one another through alphabets:

Kitty (Alicia Vikander) and Levin

What makes this a male film out of a male book? In Tolstoi is the great sympathy Wright gives the conventional male (that’s why Levin survives into the film too). In this clip that Wright authorized on line we have both males, Vronsky and Karenin; in Tolstoi it’s Anna who is contrasted to Levin; here the contrast is Vronsky (macho promiscuous male) versus Karenina (Mr Knightley under great strain in an amoral court world). The film ends with Levin and his wife sitting down to dinner with Oblonsky (who has to retreat for a moment) and his and Karenina who ends up in the meadow with his and Vronsky’s child, with Anna under the ground.

Shall we feel for male who holds society up, Karenin or the male who disrupts it, Vronsky? and it’s not fair that Stiva, however he loved his sister, gets away with it. (D. H. Lawrence stuff; see also Atonement). By contrast, Tolstoi’s book is with Anna (ultimately the most moral character in the book) and Levin (the second most, on a conventional plain) as his tragic and hard-working poignant cynosures; they are sincere, authentic. They do not resign themselves like Oblonsky’s wife Dolly.

It is a woman’s film because it dwells on women, how they look, we are invited to gaze at them again and again as women and as men.

I’ve never read the whole novel. As with Moby Dick where I skipped alternative chapters: I was so irritated by Levin I passed all chapters with him as focus. That left me with a much slenderer novel, half the structure. I’m also not sure whose text I read, who was the translator. Nowadays that makes me ashamed — not the reading every other chapter.

This film makes me want to read the whole novel, slowly, or listen to a great reader read it. Does anyone know of any powerful great reader who has done this on MP3s available generally?

Ellen

Read Full Post »

Full circle: journeys in biography & historical romance

Some people say that life is the thing, but I much prefer reading.” — Logan Pearsall Smith

“I have lost friends, some by death… others through sheer inability to cross the street. — Virginia Woolf

Hans Holbein, possibly Katherine Howard (fifth wife of Henry VIII)

Dear friends and readers,

Do you find, gentle reader, that you sometimes remember the very first books you ever loved or read and realize that on some level you are still delving there? The first adult books I ever read — taken out of the adult library with an adult card were fat thick biographies of Renaissance queens. I still see the sturdy dull brown covers (they were recovered older books) of 2 books one on Margaret de Navarre and one on her daugjhter, Jeanne d’Albret. Many years later: how many years did I spend reading, researching Renaissance women, writing about them? I’ve now read Margaret’s long inward meditation Dante-like journey poem, Prisons, in an English translation, her spiritual “chansons” in French and literary critical books, one on her and Vittoria Colonna compared (Silvia Laura Ansermin), others on the Heptameron, especially good, Patricia Francis Chokalian, Rape and Writing in the Heptameron, and one of the most vivid insightful books on a Renaissance woman I’ve ever found, Francois Kermina’s Jeanne d’Albret: La mere passionnee d’Henri IV, and what I felt was its cousin Kermina’s study of Madame Roland or la Passion Revolutionaire.

It seems to me that part of my graduate study and the first 20 years of reading and writing after I left graduate school which culminated in my translations of Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara and my student of Renaissance women’s life-writing is another coming full circle.

A modern imagined idea of Sally Hemings from some contemporary descriptions, probably idealized

Well, I’ve been unexpectedly hooked by a book I can’t recommend but will blog about when I’ve finished it: Cynthia Kierner’s Martha Jefferson Randolph, Daughter of Monticello, the oldest white daughter of Thomas Jefferson by his first wife, Martha Wayles Skelton. It’s remarkably readable, and reveals sufficiently a particular life of an 18th century gentlewoman at the same time as it consistently omits much about the second central player, Jefferson himself: his political vision as well as his private life apart from his white family and public life: the relationship with the woman who had she not been African-American and his slave might have been called his second wife: Sally Hemings. Sally certainly lived enough years with and bore many children by him.

I’m intrigued by a relationship I can’t delve: one of the first semi-adult books I remember reading, around age 10, was a slenderish (novella-length) biography meant for say an adolescent, Patsy Jefferson. I can’t recall the author. It was not a “young adult fiction” (or non-fiction), of the sort publishers produce today, deliberately written to a niche, simplified prose and somewhat naive realities, but a real reading book but in the young adult section of an old-fashioned library (in the Bronx where I grew up), one of several rows of books picked out by librarians. Many years later I picked up a copy of another book very like it, which I also read, slightly later (I was 11) LouAnn Gaeddert’s All in All, a biography of George Eliot. Produced by Dutton, I reread it when I found it and showed it to my older daughter, who alas did not show much interest. It is really suitable for a young adolescent or teen; it’s relatively frank telling of George Eliot’s life and career, how she left her father over a religious crisis, went to London, fell in love with Lewes who could not marry her, went to live with him, built a career, and when he predeceased her, her second marriage and death not long afterward. It even has some mild literary criticism.

I don’t know that I’ve come quite full circle with Patsy since what I have in my hands also and will read next is Annette Gordon-Read, The Hemingses of Monticello: the story not only of Sally, but of her mother who was a slave and had many children by Jefferson’s first wife’s father. These children all called Hemings are the subject of this arduously researched book. It’s both books that I need to read and I think I need to because I want to return to what I began when I was 10 and now read a fully adequate or adequate book on this Jefferson’s daughter — and second common-law enslaved wife.

Many years after All in All I can say that having read all Eliot’s fiction, a lot of her non-fiction, several biographies, her life-writing in various forms and lots of literary criticism, plus watched a number of great film adaptations, I fulfilled what I began when I read Gaeddert’s book.

Jodhi May as Mirah Lapidoth in Andrew Davies’ 2002 film adaptation of Eliot’s Daniel Deronda — May consistently appears as precisely the heroine type I bond with again and again — from Sarah Lennox in Aristocrats to Anne Boleyn in a fine BBC film

None of this is part of the reading I keep planning will be my whole occupation over this fall. I just couldn’t resist Patsy as over the years I’ve not been able to resist George Eliot, the Brontes, Austen, Renaissance queens and literary women, all begun when I was young.

A corollary is that I find I am very disappointed by women who write books with male heroes at the center. Reading about the gender fault-line in tastes this week I came across the common or at least familiar idea that women are willing to make the cross-over and read books with men at the center as happily as they do women at the center and enjoy identifying easily with the heroes while men are often not willing to make the cross-over. Some men are not just embarrassed to admit they enjoy women’s books and identify with women’s heroines (not just read them as one would about an erotic object); they genuinely cannot or will not enter into a book with a female at the center.

In my experience, as limited as it is (for how many friends have I had with whom I discuss this sort of thing and are willing to be truly candid), I’ve found a lot of women like me. I strongly strongly prefer a novel with a woman at the center and have found I often like them best when the book is written by a woman. You can get men who come close to writing heroine’s texts or whose heroes have a feminine sensibility, can encompass female obsessions, needs, roles (Trollope, Henry James, E.M. Forster, LeCarre) but I find I often find a greater satisfaction when this kind of novel is by a woman (say Gaskell or Oliphant). I don’t make the cross-over in movies with ease either.

And yet I’ve fallen in love with these historical Poldark fictions by Winston Graham where he has males at the center as much and more than his females, intelligent, complex characters. I identify with his males too. In the last Poldark, Bella Poldark I found I recognized my own kind of self-destructive needling of people and social awkwardness stemming from a background of rejection by one parent and over-possession by the other: Valentine Warleggan. How can this be? I want to understand. My idea is to explore historical fiction, long a favorite with me but also romance and mystery and how these two latter popular kinds blend in with historical fiction. I’ve already done some of this with my reading of Jerome de Groot and Helen Hughes, but I’m not satisfied. Why these books? of course I know it’s something individual in me that a chord is hitting, and that he keeps hitting it in his major characters and their fates. Can I find someone who comes near to discussing this chord as it comes out in historical fiction or these kinds? If nothing else, I’d be able to predict what book I should read next and not waste my little time left.

So I began again with Pamela Regis’s book about what’s called “romance novels” for women. Suffice to say I discovered that (what I already knew) while Graham has some romance patterns, his books do not at all fit into Regis’s notion. Still in reading the first half of Regis’s book I thought Pamela Regis did make visible a pattern that is true to many heroine’s texts, one most feminists overlook.

Regis suggests there are 8 essential motifs or events/occurrences found in romance novels that she defines as a heroine-centered novel about the falling in love and courtship of a woman which ends happily in marriage. According to her, this plot-design allows for the reading traveling with the heroine from innocence into maturity. The stages are: first a definition or description of a society (often flawed, disordered); the meeting of the heroine with the hero; a barrier which keeps them apart; an intense attraction; a declaration of love; a point where all is despaired of (ritual death); then recognition (that you are all in all to one another, you have found your deeply congenial mate); and, lastly, betrothal. The text (or film) can end here, but three more paradigmatic events often recur: the wedding, dance or fete, which brings all the characters together; the exiling of a scapegoat who represents the worst norms of behavior (e.g., in Austen’s P&P Wickham), and someone who behaves very badly converted to agree to the marriage of the central pair sufficiently (again in Austen’s P&P, Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Miss Bingley, just).

I cited Austen’s P&P twice. Regis declares Austen’s P&P the most perfect romance novel ever written, and it seems clear that she just about derives her paradigms from this novel. Not altogether as her examples from the 18th and 19th century include Richardson’s Pamela, Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Forster’s A Room with a View.

I am bothered by several troubling elements in her book. First, she insists that the romance novel have a happy ending. If it does not, it cannot be a “good” or successful one. It will not have done its “job” or performed its “function.” The same idea was produced in Janice Radway’s famous study of romances as read by ordinary women in a mid-western commnunity. Thus DuMaurier’s Rebecca (courtship can also occur after a marriage) and Mitchell’s GWTW cannot be “good” romance novels as their endings are qualified. I cannot see this. I agree with Regis and others that a marriage at the close of a book need not be an imprisonment at all: it can provide real liberty within the terms a real society offers, contentment, security, peace. But I do not see that one must have a happy ending. It seems not to be important at all to Regis what are the particular inward values a novel promulgates (like the trade of virginity for high status in Pamela). I prefer a sad ending to one that is not believable or one based on ugly values the couple will then embody in their lives (be these competition, exploitation, greed, pride whatever).

This reminds me of how I’ve read repeatedly that good mystery novels are escapist and comfort book. To the contrary, when I’m really involved in a mystery novel where characters I care about are at risk of harm (murder, rape), I feel all anxiety, not comfort. I rise from a Susan Hill novel disquieted about society — as I should be, given norms of aggressive behavior allowed. What I like is the qualified happy, unhappy or making do ending.

Jodhi May as the feminine lesbian in Tipping the Velvet (Andrew Davies’ film from Sarah Walters’ marvelous romance novel)

Last in the last part of Regis’s book her examples of 20th century romance novels are all poor and trite: she suddenly shows herself enamored of glamor, of alpha males, accepts rape, does not at all demand complex psychology, will not tolerate truly vulnerable, sensitive, distressed hurt heroes or heroines who at the close are worldly failures.

So one must take the 8 stages and the three optional paradigms apart from the rest of Regis’s perspective and use them to understand genuinely humane, intelligent complex romances. For myself I have to have a definition of romance much wider than the courtship pattern, one which includes other patterns of woman’s lives after marriage and if they don’t marry at all. It must only have a happy ending that is warranted and one that does not celebrate meretricious or unexamined values. With this corrective, I find myself thinking back to so many of the novels by women (and men) with heroines at the center which I’ve loved very much and understanding their structures much better.

I have begun Ford Madox Ford’s famous Fifth Queen: about Katherine Howard and it seems to me superior to Hilary Mantel’s two-prize winning historical fictions set in the Renaissance, centering on the earlier Tudor courts and Thomas Cromwell. This Cromwell has fascinated fine minds: like Bolt for his Man for All Seasons.

I do need companionship and am finding in these books companionship and explanations for why I do find it here. I was not able to lead the 20th century careerist modern woman’s life nor am that of the socially active mother or wife, and these eras (pre-20th century) before the recent constructions of these roles emerged offers me women who feel the way I do. Friends. Instead of writing this blog I could’ve told you a personal story, reader, that ended badly for me, but that kind of thing is supposed to be reserved for my Sylvia blog and after all it is too painful and too much about cyberspace experiences for me to be able to do it.

I find myself reading today, more than 56 years after I was born and I first began to read books meant for adult and semi-adult readers, the same kinds of matter I read from the time I started reading, only I take a much more knowledgeable, sophisticated and I sincerely hope enlightened approach.

Ellen

Read Full Post »

Dennis Potter’s Cream in my Coffee & Curran & Nyswaner’s Painted Veil (out of Somerset Maughn)

Peggy Ashcroft in her fifties (promotional photo)

Kitty (Naomi Watts) and Edward (Walter Fane) floating down the river (2006 Painted Veil)

Dear friends and readers,

Here am I trying to keep my word and make shorter blogs. I’ve two movies to urge you to see. Rent them at Netflix or buy or download from Pirate Bay and luxuriate in the beauty of the photography and depth and sensitivity of what’s presented: Dennis Potter’s rightly valued 1980 Cream in My Coffee and John Curran and ron Nyswaner’s wrongly ignored Painted Veil (a film adaptation of a Somerset Maugham novel).

In the first case you want see more Potter-scripted films of the 1980s, and in the second you will long to read Maugham’s novel.

Jean now old, first near close up (Peggy Ashcroft, 1980 Cream in my Coffee)

I am now able to say a Dennis Potter film can be as stunningly powerful as people say. He is a much praised (adulated) script writer of the 1980s in BBC and other British TV films and plays. I had tried two films, both with great actors: in the first I found Bob Hoskins continually breaking into song, as a working class man holding up his pride against great odds, half-broken puzzled, seemingly bewildered, yet continually breaking out into song. In the second Michael Gambon (the great Gambon Ralph Richardson calls him — and certainly nothing comes up to his Squire Hamley in Davies’ 1999 Wives and Daughters out of Gaskell), Gambon anticipated the time I saw him on stage doing a Becket play. I realized Beckett plays hate drama; they are set up so actors can do so little. In that one Gambon was imprisoned in a can; in the Potter he was swathed with bandages in the last stages of dying life in a hospital. A situation rich, but it was like watching Beethoven making some music instruments can hardly play. Yet in both I was unbearably moved.

This time the script was doable and utterly fulfilled.

Here the great presence is Peggy Ashcroft: it takes a while to realize we are watching the same couple. First Jean and Bernard, when old coming back to one of these genteel style elegant hotels that are so endemic in British novels and plays (especially plays, think Separate Tables) when he is very old, ill, dying and she a woman cowed for many years by his irascible bullying and hard nasty spiteful even tongue, picking at her:

First of series of photos panning hotel and beach (Cream in my Coffee)

Then series of photos of elderly couples

Then from one to another versions of youth

Sitting in room (Ashcroft and Lionel Jeffries)

Second, as young Jean and young Bernard over 40 years ago they had stolen away for a weekend before they married, apparently very much in love, soft focus photography

.
(Peter Chelsom as Bernard, Shelagh McLeod as young Jean)

Placed against the second older version we slowly begin to see how what was to come – an embittering life — is anticipated, but also how it could not quite have been predicted. Like life too much is enigmatic. We see during this time the young Bernard despises the young Jean partly for her lower class origins and partly for coming away with him before marriage. Young Bernard’s father is killed in an accident during the three days (bad luck) tehy are away, and he returns home to a narrow repressed somehow very English lace and there is this dreadful scene with his harridan mother who wants to control him and prevent this marriage. How she scorns Jean.

(Martin Shaw as glamorous matinee idol singing songs like “You’re the cream in my coffee/you’re the salt in my stew … “)

But while young Bernard is gone, young Jean succumbs to the kindness, and aggressive romantic words and gestures of the orchestra singer, a cad type. Lonely, feeling herself denigrated and uncomfortable, she gets “squiffy” (very drunk) and is half-coerced (but only half) into spending a long pleasurable night with him – more than any she ever had with Bernard. When Bernard returns, there’s no sign he guesses and yet …

The life to follow he has gotten back.

The bitter ironies, poignancy, plangency, occasional comedy of the two relationships and what we glimpse about the hotel, by the pool, on the beach are caught in songs whose lyrics comes out as on the spot precisely awful. You’re the salt in my stew. Right. Lots of these 30s to 40s songs. Fast forward and instead of creamy violins and big band we have hard rock and they are just as ironic, just as false.

The way each place is filmed, the dialogues just reeked to me of England and English people of a certain milieu. I need to see it again and read an essay I have on Potter’s films, but will tell a joke Jim and I had.

I said to him, we never went to such a place when we lived there. It was beyond us. We didn’t have the money. When we returned 20 years later or more (1990s), we were way beyond that and would know it’d be miserable snobbish and somehow tawdry in all its efforts. We went to Landmark recreations — a joke too time capsules and all that. He stopped and said he has never known anyone who went to such places. Did they ever exist? are they a myth that captures something in English class ridden minds?

*******************
Why do Edwardian stories and films seem to speak home to us? Forsyte Saga (which I’m watching the 1967 version of over these two months now — 26 one hour parts — about which I’ll be blogging soon), Downton Abbey, Upstairs Downstairs. Maughn’s post-colonial Painted Veil is a brilliant epitome of this subgenre.

In part the greatness of the film is sheer photography: breath-taking beauty in China, especially of waterways, slow montage, background French music, evocative:

What it’s about is two people finding themselves as they journey “out” into a wild natural place and leaning some humility and tolerance; the triangle is contrasted to another couple, disillusioned ugly man, Waddington (Toby Jones, as great as Gambon) who lives with a native girl, in a kind of retreat from the world both came from — with records from the 1950s. This anticipates or imitates (depending on whether you are thinking of Greene’s novel or the recent film with Michael Caine), The Quiet American. Edward has left his cushy job in England to do research in China and she can get no one to marry her so she follows him.

Toby Jones as Waddington explains how he came to live there, and how the girl he loves was rescued from a short life of beating and prostitution

I’m writing about this partly because I’ve seen it so mis-described. A denigrating way of describing hero and heroine dominates all blurbs: “shunned by scientific research husband,: wife “ignites passionate affair;” or “British medical doctor trapped … in loveless marriage with faithless wife …” We do have the Maugham triangle of the selfish woman who takes over the shy young man and seems set to destroy him. But this is not what happens at all. We see his science is a form of self-gouging and how she turns to want to help him, the school (Diana Rigg is a nun running the place), the helpless women, all the diseased people. We see the way the tribal leaders are murderous towards one another and so no help can come from there:

One of her stations of the cross

One of his

It ends in tragedy — reminding me in its savagery of Before the Rains. This is like Paul Scott: while written by a white man, it is a take from a point of view that shows the European corrupt. She gets to go back and gives birth to a child; we last see her rejecting the old life, her old lover, and walking with the child away. Older now than when I read the book, Of Human Bondage (blotted out in my memory probably by the film’s take and Bette Davis as Bitter Destruction with Leslie Howard in the abject role), and aware Maugham was homosexual (he lived in south France with his partner).

I’d like to read the book and then re-see film. We’ve said we’ll do it on Trollope19thCStudies. Alas it was a flop, so no features or voice-over commentary.

An intense psychological investigation in the context of sharp disillusioned picturing of snobbish colonialism, it’s a heroine’s text, Watts turned a perhaps misogynistic story into one of a heroine coming of age (she was one of the producers).

Ellen

Read Full Post »

This year’s Woody Allen: To Rome With Love

Antonio (Alessandro Tiberi) a young husband cut off from his wife, and Anna aka Milly (Penelope Cruz), a prostitute who has substituted for her (2012 To Rome with Love)

Dear friends and readers,

This year’s Woody Allen, To Rome With Love is a pleasing film. It’s cheerful yet melancholy; we are presented with a array of artificial stereotyped couples who play musical chairs among themselves and other characters in scenes of mortification, confusion, anxiety, distress such that I was continually either uncomfortable and or worried what would happen to one or another of them. The central paradigm which repeats over and over is of a character in a situation or saying something which ought to be and is shameful which few around them recognize, and they themselves only intermittently. It seems this is a good thing too or none of us’d survive.

On a searingly hot afternoon to sit in a cool dark theater and watch his cameramen take loving shots of familiar older streets, houses, and stairs in Rome (he must have paid a lot for the Spanish steps), as these paradigms dissolve into the person coping the film manages to convey a world-weary odd relief. The situations become a kind of game, fun even (see the nerve this character has, what that character gets to do or see), and yet incident after incident seems to have roots in a curious despair. The couples all return to those they started out with because they might as well, and anyway life’s chances will surely now and then once again give give all of us an opportunity to fuck, walk, cook, eat and drink with, someone else momentarily more interesting.

Monica (Ellen Page) and Jack (Jesse Eisenberg) trying to cook up a gourmet meal together before they go off to a car to betray Sally, Jack’s live-in girlfriend and Monica’s best friend

It’s not the best Woody Allen film I’ve ever seen, and I’m not going to patiently go through the four sets of couples, two lone male confidants and wise advisor, and one lone female and whore, and their stories. Certainly it’s better than last year’s Midnight in Paris which I thought ludicrously over-praised. Like that, it’s an aging male’s wet dream. Jim often says he cannot understand how it is that when he reads many a male book or sees a male film it’s just filled with these females beautiful or not who are dying to jump into bed with all the males in sight, and when they do, are ever so ecstatically pleased. He seems to be on the wrong planet or these females are on another street from those he walks. It just never happens to him and he’s just like other males. How can this be? This is a film filled with such women. And it’s not really fun when people you are attached to are sexually or otherwise unfaithful.

The real Milly (Alessandra Mastronardi) near going off to bed with the famous actor Luca Salta (Antonio Albanese) she’s just met because she got lost (her cell phone fell through a street grate)

A gesture is made to remember the depression engulfing much of the world’s people when Woody’s daughter’s fiancee, Michelangelo (Flavio Parenti) sticks up for the importance of unions. But mostly everyone is rich and untroubled about how to pay for anything. When Woody nags, tempts, maneuvers his prospective son-in-law’s father into singing operatically in a shower on stage in front of mass crowds at opera houses because only when he sings naked in a shower does his voice soar, there is not a smidgin of difficulty making this happen. A young architect said to be living according to idealistic goals with a female studying for a degree live in a bounteous flat on a lovely little corridor of a street with tons of free time.

Jack buying vegetables and flowers with live-in girlfriend Sally (Greta Gerwig)

All somehow detached. The reviews of the opera Woody puts on describe him in Italian as an “imbecile” and in character Woody reads this aloud. Because he knows no Italian he is chuffed. Allen also comments self-reflexively on his own film, its internal audiences and maybe us watching it all.

Judy Davis as Phyllis, Woody’s wry patient wife, spending life by his side

He has made some great films recently: genuinely satiric and grave ones, Vick, Christina, Barcelona and You will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger. This one seems in some sequences an attempt to get back to his early films with their wacky sequences of events that don’t make logical or realistic sense but are hilarious. The spirit somehow is not high enough to make these moments come off.

John wisely advising Jack with the coliseum in the background

What’s here instead is a kind of witty wry self-dialogue. Woody is there himself and as two other men. Alec Baldwin as John plays a sold-out aging architect who has made tons of money building soulless stadiums and buildings and he takes to following our young architect, Jack, around and telling him from several points of view what a fool Jack’s making of himself, how Monica is a liar, a phony, a poser, pretending to know great literature when he knows famous lines, and when at the close of the film she deserts him without a second’s thought because a role in a play has come through Baldwin nearly says, “what did I say?” Jack returns to Sally and Alec goes back to the street corner where he and Jack first met and walks on his way.

As Leopoldo, Roberto Benigni plays a man made senselessly famous for several weeks, each of his daily doings and small acts made subjects for intense reporting, famous because he’s famous and during much of the movie seeming to try to escape the wild noisy argumentative Italian crowds, though not here

With Monica Nappo as his wife whose runs in her stockings are oo-ed over

He too has a Woody-Allen surrogate, male accompaniment who tells him when he is lonely after the world moves on: it’s better to be miserable and a celebrity than miserable and invisible (or some such words). At least then you didn’t have to wait on line.

Don’t go expecting a lot, just two hours or so of inspiriting humane entertainment. Woody is clearly for us all enjoying enjoying what there is to enjoy from life as far as we can and feels for all those mortified by the laughter and dumb applause of audiences — they, we are as imbecile as he has become. He may have put himself into the movie because he looks so feeble. The father of his prospective son-in-law whom Woody tries to rescue for an opera career is a mortician and fictional Woody keeps telling Phyllis how he has these dreams of death and she keeps saying, nonsense, nonsense lots of time left. (Still he hates “turbulence” periods in planes.) The singing mortician is wiser than his tempter and at the close of the film returns to his niche in his family group in the world.

As I say do all the characters return to where they are comfortable when they started out, e.g., the young couple leaves Rome where they had hoped for some splendid promotion. Antonio just couldn’t hack the pretenses wanted. He doesn’t like football. Anna has her compliant customers (the creme de la creme of society) waiting morning, noon, and night — as I say this is fantasy. The weakest point was the young heterosexual glamor couple, Woody’s supposed daughter, Hayley (Alison Pill) and her fiancee, Michelangelo (not Michael but Mickel) who we began with:

But they are soon put at the margins. You can almost measure the success of an Allen film by where this fatuous normative blond and her escort are in the film (they are central to Midnight in Paris and Matchpoint). I think of them as the wooden romance couple at the center of Walter Scott’s fiction and never can understand why Allen finds it necessary to pander by keeping them among the presences in his films.

When I remember back to the great films by Allen in the past (Love and Death, Stardust Memories, Purple Rose of Cairo, Annie Hall come to mind) I realize we were not bothered by this fake normativeness because Allen was the hero. He is too old now, even too old to pass as this heroine’s father, and he knows it.

I didn’t go with Izzy; she is not drawn to Allen (though she liked the Gemma Jones film). My neighbor from across the street and I have become friends and we went together. She is a woman near my age, and it did seem to me most of the people in the audience (however full) were older people. Woody is winding down and he does make a better film when he has a different type of male than himself (say Javier Bardem) or genuinely believable woman at the center.

Ellen

Read Full Post »

Mildred Pierce 2011: starring Kate Winslet: A woman’s life and a bad seed

Two shots of Kate Winslet as a sensually relaxed and then alertly vibrant Mildred Pierce during the first night’s tryst with Guy Pearce as Monty Beragon (Todd Haynes HBO mini-series, Mildred Pierce, 2011

The alluring presence of the subversive male, Monty Beragon — the last thing he’d think of doing is supporting any family (Guy Pearce that first night) – he does have some of Clark Gable’s quality, only more deliberate

Dear friends and readers,

For a couple of weeks now a movie has gotten to me where I live. I’ve been more personally engaged by the HBO mini-series adaptation of John M. Cain’s 1941 Mildred Pierce (written/directed by Todd Haynes) than I have in a long while. I watch mesmerized, sometimes feeling so depressed about myself, sometimes unbearably moved when Kate-Mildred has done some emotionally painful act I would never allow myself to do but have thought of, citing her and using stills from the movie when I wanted an example women’s married and love life, and motherhood and career troubles. See “A small typical history” and my response to the (silly) Anne-Marie Slaughter essay, “Why women still can’t have it all.”

I read John M. Cain’s novel and discovered that the movie follows the literal surface of the book closely, and faithfully conveys some of its themes, but goes far beyond it in presenting a coherent examined account of the heroine’s experience, and then I watched the famous 1945 murder-mystery film noirish version with Joan Crawford as Mildred (screenplay by a team that included Wm Faulkner, Ranald MacDougal, Catherine Turner, directed by Michael Curtiz)

Parallel scene of Joan Crawford as Mildred on her first night with Zachary Scott as Monty: note how reluctant, coy, clearly pained to go through with this is Crawford)

The 2011 is a compassionate but unsentimental dramatization not (as Jeanine Basinger says in her wonderfully perceptive A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930-1960) of a central conflict a woman who driven to a career experiences between the demands of that career and wife- and motherhood, but rather her difficulty in creating for herself an authentically fulfilling existence sexually and as a mother, given the rotten values or norms those around her either enact instinctively and which she unwittingly passes onto her daughter.

This blog will be an account of watching the 2011 mini-series as it unfolded; a second will deal comparatively and concisely with the 1945 film and Cain’s other novels turned into 1940s film noir and women’s films; a third blog will review Jeanine Basinger’s book.

*********************
Part I:

Mildred during her job search: it’s not yielding any job, much less income to support herself and girls and house

Bert (Brían F. O’Byrne) about to be kicked out: he’s done all he can with the lawn, and means to visit his mistress

I watched the first of this six hour adaptation of McCain’s novel late last night. McCain may not be a genius of the Joyce type, he doesn’t soar even occasionally in the way of Mantel, but he is a striking mirror of US life in the early and mid-20th century. He’s rather like James Jones who wrote Some Came Running, John O’Hara (Butterfield 8); Gore Vidal remarks that these books mirror the loneliness, anonymity, and inculculation of excruciating class and money inferiority used as a knife edge to drive oneself to workaholism and social-networking in US life; the success and glamor are false; boredom, self-regard, a kind of glumness and fear of death characterize these novels. Mildred Pierce differs from all the others in that the woman at the center is not a femme fatale, the story is centered in her experience (and thus proto-feminist), and when at the end it’s clear something has gone very wrong in this family, it’s not her fault. It’s just the way things are. I’d say the most striking thing about the book is its lack of reflective thought.

For the story of the 2011 film, see the story of Cain’s novel, Mildred Pierce. Except for some 1) white-washing (in the book Mildred embezzles money from her publicly-sold restaurant company’s stock and in the 2011 film she does not) and 2) more importantly the way the mother-daughter becomes central and supersedes the story of Mildred’s infatuation with Monty and Bert’s quiet or implicit rivalry with Monty — the film’s events and plot-design are those of the novel.

It’s Kate Winslet’s movie. She is in every scene. In this segment, she is instead simply trying to hold onto her integrity and not go down in the world and how hard it is.

We open with her cooking cakes and husband out in the garden. He comes in, honey I’ll be late for supper. It emerges he’s seeing a woman and she is very angry, they fight and he leaves, suitcase in hand, taking the car with him. What now? We watch her try to cope and seem very quiescent, not hysterical at all. She has no training for money-making jobs. WE see these abrasive encounters with employment agency people who tell her she’s got to be realistic, no one wants her, these are hard times, no opening for receptionists, and as for salesladies they are paid on commission. She is humiliated by the way she’s treated — rightly — by one encounter with this rich woman who wants her as a submissive housekeeper, who tries to control her every movement and is gratingly nasty. Slowly we watch her lean to accept a position as a waitress.

Wally

Wally Burgan (James LeGros), her husband’s “friend” realizes the husband has left. Mildred’s friend and neighbor, Lucy Gessler (Melissa Leo), the confidant (with confidants like this who needs enemies?) gives her advice on how to manipulate this man to want to marry her. Don’t let him take you out, then you owe him; cook for him.

Lucy

She obeys and ends up in bed anyway. He’s no beauty and the realism of the sex makes Girls look glamorous. They are awkward, the encounter doesn’t go on for long, afterwards they bicker about how he tried to cut her husband out, but he is supportive.

She has two daughters, Ray, a sweet young child (Quinn McColgan) and Veda (Morgan Turner), who has been taught by Mildred to think the world of herself, and (alas) now disdains her mother: this is a place the film does not depart from conventions. She is the ultimate sweet mother trying to protect her children,and probably caters to them too submissively, presents a false picture of their world.

Mildred explaining to the older daughter, Veda (here Morgan Turner) where Dad has gone, and that he’s not coming back

It’s important to see that in this and the next part there is a real love shown between Veda and Mildred. They do more or less cooperate. Veda does want her mother’s approval; she also wants to look up to her mother.

Arriving for a humiliating interview at a great house (Part I); this experience drives her to take a position as a waitress in a lunch-restaurant

One flaw throughout is that Mildred’s her mother and father are kept at a distance from her as if they exist to take the kids for weekends. Realistically they would be a strong presence and influence outcomes. Similarly Bert’s parents exist to complain and insinuate that Mildred is not a good mother (where was she the night Ray got sick) and take Bert in.
But perhaps the film is mirroring today in the US, 2012, the disjunctions in extended families.

***************
Part II

Thinking about what’s to come

The first job offer; Ida as we first see her and she first sees Mildred

Unexpectedly, as I came to the climax of Part 2 I felt depressed. While there were some sequences I’d love to watch again and again (such as Mildred’s first encounter and weekend escape with Monty to his beach-house), almost obsessively, the total effect was to make me feel bad about myself and at the same time feel that what I’ve experienced is common.

Cain’s is a mainstream book and this self-consciously a mainstream film. It’s as if it’s a self-reflexive imitation; one can see this in the perfection of the costumes; the actors have been instructed to seem to imitate 1940s types in movies. (Upon watching the 1945 movie I realized they did not; they are 2011 types dressed up in 1940s clothes and talking 1940s slang and sentiments, but what they do and their expectations and taboos are those of 2011.

Now we watch Mildred’s slow climb to success. After she refuses to kowtow to the rich lady, she takes that job as a waitress and begins to do well. She’s still making and selling pies to neighborhood people, and she notices how bad the pies at are the restaurant. Enlisting the help and friendship of Ida (Mare Winningham), the woman who hired her, Ida and she maneuvers the restaurant owner to buying her pies. When this success brings in more money, she hires Lettie (Marin Ireland), a woman like herself in class and type, to help and comes home to find that woman in her uniform. Her darling older daughter, Veda (a New Yorker reviewer feels that in Cain’s book this older daughter, Veda is presented as a bitch) has insisted Lettie wear one of the uniforms Veda found hidden in a pile of clothes. This recalls the woman who was trying to boss, humiliate and hire Mildred as her housekeeper.

Veda is really trying to humiliate and bully her mother (exposure is not going to stop the mother from working as her money is going to support Veda’s singing and piano lessons), intimidating her. It takes Mildred considerable time to break through the taboos and accuse the girl of needling her and then the girl is insolent and she spanks her.

Bert, Mildred’s husband has begun to visit and looks yearningly at Mildred, and in one visit Veda plays the same trick of bringing out the liquor bottle she knows her mother is drinking to show the mother up to the mother. By the end of the scene, though, Mildred is lying to Veda, and saying she has a plan to open a restaurant and is doing this job temporarily as a way of studying them. This sickened me because it means Mildred buys into her daughter’s values of despising people in uniforms. Yet I’d hate to wear a unifor, and this is the first movie I’ve seen that I can recall where the reality that such things are status-losses is brought out openly.

Then we get some fairy tale: by a flick of the hand, Wally the husband’s ex-friend who is Mildred’s on and off not very passionate lover seems to have a free property going for nothing (fairy tale here) and gives it to Mildred to fix into a restaurant. Mildred must get a divorce in order not to be liable for Bert’s debts and lo and behold, the divorce is gotten. She takes Bert’s car from him, and seems to wrest the house too. But much of this is Mildred’s own enterpreneurship; we see her work out what her restaurant should look like; her buy things, her calculating costs as she goes to vendors for foodstuffs:

The businesswoman

Montage, time passing, and Mildred’s on her last day of work before throwing herself into running her own restaurant, when a very attractive male shows up, Monty Beragon, and it’s lust at first sight for both. The scenes I said I’d watch over and over come in here. She meets him after she leaves (apparently forever) and we see them in a convertible, then at the beach, then swimming, then making love. To me an alluring sequence also done utterly believably with him as vagabond-smart-aleck. I loved the release.

Alas she comes home to discover younger daughter in hospital. Of course she’s blamed with a “where were you?” Husband, in-laws there. Slow melodrama where child comes near death, seems saved, but then dies. Yes her daughter dies, and she was not there for the first night. But for the next two she is, and the child dies because they have not the medicine to save her. The child gets pneumonia from having been taken to the beach by her grandparents. Mildred stays all night and the third part closes on her going home to older daughter, crawling into bed, hugging and clinging to her.

Nonetheless, and it’s central to see this: Mildred is winning as the world understands it and is supposed admirable: loving mother, responsible at her job, entrepreneurial. Jeanine Basinger says women’s films are centered on a supposed inexorable conflict of love, marriage, and motherhood on the one side, and career on the other. Not this film: were it not for her career, her family would have gone under.

This is where I felt bad: I thought to myself how little money I’ve ever made. And when I went to bed, I said as much to Jim who replied: “making money is not important in life” or maybe it was “it’s not important to make money in life.” There’s much more important things (words to this effect). That helped. The movie got to me in other words.

Veda, the older daughter in the film is not a bitch, but rather what Mildred wishes she could be, and Kate Winslet as Mildred is proud of her. And I understood that.

**********************
Part III:

Christmas presents once she is making some money, but not enough to buy the piano Veda would prefer

A friend suggested to me that the movie falls off about mid-way. Not for me. We now watch Mildred at long last succeed after very hard work; she is helped by Ida, her waitress friend from the restaurant she was at who becomes a sort of junior partner; also by Lucy, her best friend who urges her to take on liquor in her restaurant once prohibition is over. The best friend becomes her bartender.

She is vitriolically anti-Roosevelt. That’s interesting and in character. Those who fail deserve to, they are losers. Look at her.

Emotionally she is more and more under the thumb of Veda, her older daughter, somehow subject to that girls’ sneers and utterly selfish demands and there’s a powerful mother-daughter scene where she has failed to give the girl a fancy piano for Xmas and the girl disdains her.

Monty, the sexy boyfriend is turning out not to be such a wonderful thing. He has a name, a famous family, part of a Hollywood crowd and initially helps her restaurant as a numinous person there, but as time goes on he becomes a drone, making no money, living off her and he makes no pretenses of love and after a while it does get on her nerves. Worse, he talks about her condescendingly and sexily with Veda behind her back.

At one point Monty accuses Mildred of having no friends; certainly she has no wide circle. I think that’s common for working to lower middle Americans. What time do they have? What do they have to offer others that they want? In the US there is no sense of community outside family and church is a ritual. The best friend is possible if the woman does not change, does not move and her friend stays in the same socio-economic circumstances That’s increasingly uncommon.

The part ends with him attempting to soothe her into acceptance of him by rape (so he calls his brand of sex) and her breaking free and driving home in a storm, almost getting herself killed and entering the house to tell her daughter she can have that piano.

********************
Part IV

Mildred again contemplative (a favorite scene for me), from towards the end of Part 4

Then walking and talking with Lucy, her friend

One of the themes brought out in Part Four is women’s friendship. Lucy, Mildred’s neighbor, remains a stalwart support. Ida (Mare Winningtom) the waitress who helped her to her first job and now start her restaurant, has become her partner. Mildred now has 4 outlets! One very fancy one near a beach. We see Mildred and her now best & longtime friend walking on the beach together, arms around one another for a moment. Monty the sexy man (guy Pearce) seems long gone as Part 4 opens. But Mildred’s husband remains in touch; we are not old how he supports himself

Evan Rachel Wood is clearly cold, hard, a luscious femme fatale

The flaw in the book transferred to the film is the daughter becomes a version of The Bad Seed, a film and book of the 1960s where the US false worship of children is put into reverse and parents get back at all they have done for children who were ungrateful, or grew up to be small, mean, cold by reading a book and seeing a film on a purely vicious child. Willam March’s book as movie and play operated as a form of release. Here the girl is too bad, and the efforts of Wood and Haynes to now and then show the girl feeling some remorse are not enough to keep a needed realism.

This segment’s focus and climax is Mildred’s estrangement from Veda, the daughter. The decision was made to have an older actress (Evan Rachel Wood) suddenly play Veda older and I’m not sure it works. Veda is the scheming ruthless amoral woman. She has gotten involved with a group of young people who can give her access to movie part, one is a rich young man, it happens the son of the woman who so humiliated Mildred years ago when Mildred applied for a job as a housekeeper with her. The woman visits Mildred and she is astonished at the accusations the woman is throwing at her, and knows nothing. We can see how her face freezes, her teeth are are guards of her rigidly held jaw:

Turns out Veda has been having an affair with the young man and it emerges is faking a pregnancy, so with the help of old Wally (who helped Mildred to own the building she made her restaurant success in) suing this woman. Mildred is horrified, they fight, the girl insults her egregiously and shows she despises her mother. She is not capable of much love. Mildred means to throw her out and demands she leave, and then thinks the better of it (as she did her husband), but (like the husband) by this time the girl has left.

Estrangement. I was very moved. Mildred “can’t stand it” and actually tracks the girl down and drives to the apartment house Veda lives in and watches her come in. I would not have allowed myself to do that.

Mildred watching from her car, trying to hide her presence

Veda is also becoming a success. She had the grand piano, training lessons in playing and singing and as the episode ends she is on the radio singing opera. Mildred did all she could to foster this girl’s pride and talent and her hard work has won out, only she is not allowed to join in. Mildred’s husband is in contact with Veda, and he takes Veda to her own beach restaurant to listen to Veda sing on the radio.

At the close of Part 4 Bert and Mildred have not changed so very much; she is startled to see her daughter’s name and picture in the paper

The Part ends with Mildred walking off to a bannister in her fanciest restaurant to look out at the ocean. She looks intense but we are not given any access to her thoughts: pride (she would), depression, what? Haynes seems to be the kind of film-maker who regards voice-over as effeminate. A loss to his film.

***********************
Part 5

In the expensive bedroom, in expensive clothes Mildred has provided, she looks down at her arrogant daughter

Much of Part 5 was unexpectedly weaker than what came before — except the very ending. This was partly because it followed the book and the book does degenerate into this fierce conflict between the daughter and mother. Mildred tries to reach Veda by going to the prestigious teacher-orchestra leader Mildred had hired in the first place, but he laughs at her, and then, seemingly by chance, she meets up with Monty again.

They renew the love-making (in appealing scenes) and she allows him to persuade her to buy his old family mansion. Mildred and Monty marry. They give a party for “swells” and this brings Veda back: she sings there, moves in with her mother and allows her mother to pay for everything. We see Mildred between Bert, the husband, still faithfully there (and now living with his parents, his mistress having returned to her husband, now doing much better), and Monty at the Carnegie Hall watching her daughter solo perform before a huge audience seemingly entranced. Mildred is ecstatic, but we see she is neglecting her business and spending money on the house, daughter, Monty that should be spent on the business. Ida tries to reach her to do something about her business, but Mildred evades Ida.

The shit hits the fan: the men (all men) controlling the shares tell Mildred she must sell her house, stop milking the business, and her lawyer-friend, Wally, tells her she must demand Veda contribute substantially to expenses. She fears asking. She knows in her gut her daughter does not love her, but she must ask. She begins with Monty and quickly the situation blows up when she discovers (as we are to suspect) Monty has become Veda’s lover and they are knowingly fleecing her. Veda scorns her, needles her, openly jeers.

Veda: the scene is melodramatic, theatrical, rather like an opera

Monty opens up to characterize Mildred as using him, as herself disgustingly ambitious, ruthless, horrible it seems. He was her slave it seems. She is so enraged she tries to strangle her daughter, but does not manage even permanent damage on her throat.

Cut to the ending where we see Mildred has had to give up the largest parts of her business to Ida and Wally. She is still doing well, but no longer pretending to be a member of the super-rich. She has divorced Monty, remarried Bert, and they are moving back to their original Glendale house. They are given a party on their return the day of their marriage. Old friends there, including Ida, apologetic for having taken over parts of the business. Mildred understands. Mildred looks disappointed that Veda hasn’t come. Why she expects this is beyond me.

But Veda does come, stands outside in an expensive outfit on her way to NY to resume her career and does seem to look at her mother, herself waiting for some last renewal or memory of their relationship.

As Mildred last sees Veda

The attempt at goodbye, a reconciliation, ends in another scene of insults from Veda, and now bitter recriminations from Mildred who at long last says good riddance. Monty is waiting for her in NY.

Bert pulls Mildred away and says to Mildred: “to hell with Veda,” at long last validating this long-needed idea, and the the last words of the novel and film are “stinko” they will drink until they are so drunk they know oblivion. What makes this moving is the pair look very like what they did when the movie opened: they are wearing the same sort of clothes. And Winslet’s eyes fill with tears. She cannot forget some profound sense of loss. In Cain’s novel this sense of desolation is presented as just the way things are and the mood is flat. With Winslet’s yearning face, the thwarted aspiration and dreams remain

So the last part has its moments and especially in the opening scenes, the first renewal with Monty and thisclose. The depth of feeling that Winslet has endowed her character with, the sense of Mildred’s kindness, goodness, love for her daughter, the honesty of her ambition — it was not her idea to have the mansion — all carry it. As she takes up her drink, we hear over the screen a creamy rendition of Judy Garland singing: I’m always chasing rainbows …”

At the end of the rainbow there’s happiness,
And to find it how often I’ve tried,
But my life is a race, just a wild goose chase,
And my dreams have all been denied.
Why have I always been a failure?
What can the reason be?
I wonder if the world’s to blame,
I wonder if it could be me.
Chorus:
I’m always chasing rainbows,
Watching clouds drifting by,
My dreams are just like all my schemes,
Ending in the sky.
Some fellows look and find the sunshine,
I always look and find the rain.
Some fellows make a winning sometime,
I never even make a gain, believe me,
I’m always chasing rainbows,
I’m watching for a little bluebird in vain.

So I was again caught up.

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

Kate Winslet as Mildred cooking — something she is seen doing periodically for the first four parts

The finest parts of the film were Mildred’s slow build up of a career after throwing her husband out, her friendships with other women, her intensities of love and ambition for her children. The prosaic rhythms of slow-unfolding is central to its strength.

Winslet is aware she is enacting scenes from women’s lives. As Jim and I cleaned our house this past Friday, and I put on my house-cleaning clothes I thought of Mildred. When we sat together in our living room over the week, I remembered Mildred. The Christmas scenes from the movie brought back painful disillusionments and fraught disappointments.

It’s more up- than downbeat. Mildred has a real (corny I know) heart. That she’s a good cook is symbolic in the film. She’s good at love-making. She utterly gives of herself to everything she does over and over. Kate Winslet does play varied roles, but in many underlying her presentation of whatever character (from Marianne in S&S to April Wheeler in Revolutionary Road), however twisted, however shaped by a genre or director (as in mysteries or a Polanski film she did), she projects a fine generous soul

Ellen

Read Full Post »

On re-rereading books, re-rewatching movies slowly, recurring characters. Naivetes behind spoiler alerts.

I am glad that I have ended my revisal of this dreadful scene. It is not to be endured — Samuel Johnson, Othello [Desdemona. But half an hour! Othello. Being done, there is no pause. Des. But while I say one prayer! Oth. It is too late. Smothers her.]

I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already.” Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time

1988 Pan edition (1st one I read for 1st time)

2009 source edition (the one I could get into the book store for my students and which I have now read with them twice)

Dear friends and readers,

An important side topic emerged on one of the Yahoo reading listservs I am grateful to be a member of, Inimitable-Boz, where a group of people are reading Dickens’s Bleak House, a few it seems for the first time, and most for far more than the 2nd or 3rd: why do we re-read a book, how does the pleasures of rereading, and re-rereading differ from the first reading.

It came out of one of these inevitable (it seems) protests from someone that as I am reading this book for the first time, I must not be told anything about what I have not yet read yet, which behavior I have learnt since coming onto the Net is regarded as a “spoiler” and must be labelled “spoiler alert.” Honestly as far as I was conscious of this I never came across this idea before the Internet, but since has become so familiar to me that I know many a reader protests in puzzlement against introductions and prefaces to books (carefully prepared for them by a publisher, paid for) and which [honored, respected] behavior may be found carried to the extreme of not allowing someone to describe a film at all before attending, lest knowing something “spoils” it for this person. Admittedly this last is an extreme response that I’ve seen trotted out by people mostly in order to silence any talk about films that might be serious, or prevent anyone from asking or discussing with the person some thoughtful or content-rich reaction.

One member of the listserv sent along an insightful column by Stanley Fish where for once (usually I dislike the personality he projects too strongly to read anything he writes), I felt grateful to Prof Fish for explaining the obvious: “What Do Spoilers Spoil”. What distresses me is the demand often has a chilling effect on sharing, talking about, and enrichening our experience of books.

Among the points Fisher makes that I want to repeat:

In August 2011 two researchers at the University of California at San Diego reported (in the journal Psychological Science) that in a controlled experiment, “subjects significantly preferred spoiled over unspoiled stories in the case of both … ironic twist stories and … mysteries.” In fact, it seems “that giving away … surprises makes readers like stories better “perhaps because of the “pleasurable tension caused by the disparity in knowledge between the omniscient reader and the character.

and

The positive case for spoilers is even stronger if you are persuaded by those who argue, in the face of common sense, that suspense survives certainty. This is called “the paradox of suspense” and it is explained by A. R. Duckworth: “1. Suspense requires uncertainty. 2. Knowledge of the outcome of a narrative, scene or situation precludes any uncertainty. 3. [Yet] we feel suspense in response to fictions we know the outcomes of

I like when Prof Fish talks of different kinds of pleasures, as the one you have on a second time reading when you know what’s going to happen and can see so much more the ironies and how things are working out, appreciate the skeins of imagery and also his theory of a paradox of suspense even when you know. I experience that — or I’d call it a paradox of engagement. I had begun rereading Winston Graham’s Warleggan for the third time the other night. I came upon the long terrible (hard to read) sequence where Francis Poldark, a major character, one beloved by me, who when not simply (justifiably) angry, depressed, embittered, suicidal, is man with gifts to be cherished, a tender heart,when he dies – slowly — hanging in the end to a nail to prevent himself drowning while he waits for people to realize he’s gone missing and come and rescue him. I knew he was going to die, had not made it. It didn’t matter. I suffered just as much reading the text, maybe more and felt the last lines as keenly — though the first shock or surprise was over.

I leave my reader to go over and read Fish to see how this is.

Equally dismaying, if you take these protests seriously, you are not allowed to talk of anything in the book, story or characters as that’s not yet known. There is, I submit, an inexorable intransigent anti-intellectualism at work here. I should not tell stories revealing how blank some students can be but one a propos comes to mind: I had a student last term who when she realizes I had read Sense and Sensibility more than once looked just amazed. Really. “Why did I read it more than once? whatever for? I knew what was in it.” What can one say to this? I can’t make up my mind if it was faux naivete, surely it was. Or was she coying me, quizzing, mocking at some level.

And yet those wanting to talk are made to feel they are sociopaths trespassing.

Another member of Inimitable-Boz suggested

Spoilers ought to be with mutual consent. Otherwise they can be received as deliberate aggressions. The first pleasure of discovery is like (male or female) virginity. Once lost it is for ever. Why do we re-re-read? perhaps it is to recapture what we nevertheless know is lost for ever. Or is it in order to experience better what we missed or did ill the first time?

I find the demand for spoiler warnings intimidating, aggressive in itself, imposing on others one kind of reading and making you avoid discussing the book as a whole seriously. The solution of everyone reading the book first before even beginning is in fact the one way you can avoid stifling discussion. But that’s unrealistic in terms of realities of people’s way of using cyberspace reading groups (it’s a way to get oneself to read a book in the first place for some). I wonder how much discussion people have after the book was read and closed or movie seen and ended. My feeling is people like to discuss a book while they are reading it.

There’s also this: an author will often not tell us something explicitly but expect us to know it. He or she may not tell it explicitly so we will respect the character may, enjoy the paradox of suspense more or certain ironies. For example, Jane Austen does not tell us until near the end of Northanger Abbey that General Tilney has not imprisoned his wife in chains and left her half to starve. She expects us to know that Mrs Tilney is really dead, died 9 years ago, this is not a cover-up story. Thus when Catherine goes wandering about the abbey looking for her it’s funny. She is absurd. Austen doesn’t tell us explicitly in order for us to empathize with Catherine’s upset and distress. In Bleak House we we are expected to know who the disguised woman is (Lady Dedlock) and by Chapter 5 what her relationship is to Esther Summerson (her long-hidden mother) and who Nemmo is: the father. Dickens doesn’t tell us explicitly.

I did have students in my classes who expressed disappointment and dismay when it turned out that Mrs Tilney would never be on stage. One of them said to me, you said Mrs Tilney is an important character. Yes, that does not mean she has to be alive. These are unsophisticated readers who have not gotten into the conventions. I know that Woodcourt will be the hero who loves Esther shortly after he comes on the stage and Dickens expects me to know this. It’s not giving anything away to talk about it. In the case of Lady Dedlock she is powerful and upper class and she makes Joe’s life a misery after she leaves him. We are to see her ignorance about these sorts of things. I suggest the novelist gets that paradox of suspense Fisher talked of, plus that if it were made explicit we would not respect the characters in the same way. It gives them a distancing integrity; we take their views seriously, now Lady Dedlock wants to remain secret; she is disguised.

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

On to re-reading & recurring characters.

1988 Pan edition (the 1st one I read for the first time

2009 Source book (the more appropriately illustrated Pan 2008 for Demelza is not available here in the US)

I’m just now struggling — gentle reader, truly struggling — to fit in the Poldark novels by Winston Graham and the 1975-78 two season mini-series film adaptations as part of my serious reading this summer while doing two linked projects on Jane Austen. I’ve discovered I must carve out 1 1/2 to 2 hours every couple of days genuinely to go beyond where I’ve gotten to take in the novels more fully. Or I’m going through grazing the surface and not taking in the structures and rich content specific to each book. As to times, I’ve probably read Ross Poldark four times, Demelza three, Jeremy Poldark three, and Warleggan twice (all written just as WW2 was ending to 1953); the second quartet, The Black Moon, Four Swans, The Angry Tide (1973-77) merely twice each, with the later quartet, The Stranger from the Sea, The Miller’s Dance, The Loving Cup, The Twisted Sword (1981 into 1990) and coda, Bella (2003), once each (see handy list).

I don’t re-read just to experience better what I missed before or read ill last time. Maybe that is true for a second or third reading but after a while one doesn’t experience that. I don’t re-read to recapture the surprise either. (In life I’m not particularly keen on surprises, dislike them in fact and reassure my students all the time we will not have any surprises in our class and I will work hard to ensure your grade is no surprise to you. [I know that's not possible for all students as some delude themselves.])

I re-read simply because I love the presence in the book, the author implicit there, or the characters, or the world that’s created and want to experience it again.

I say of Austen she never fails me. It would take a lot of words to say what I mean by that but that’s why I reread now — even when I’m tired of her, and sometimes think her very narrow and even over-rated, when she irritates me. I’ve just started Trollope’s Kellys & OKellys; I’ve read about 2 times I think and it’s not failing me at all. I’m just gaining strength as I read; it’s like iron in the blood. Some books make me feel better. I’ve read a number of Trollope’s Barsetshire and Palliser novels countless times. I love Mr Harding as he appears in his first novel, The Warden, comic-tragic political fable. And I love his trick of recurring characters.

In Trollope and other novelists who write very long novels of social critique peopled densely, there’s the phenomenon of recurring characters. By that is meant a character who exists in one novel turns up in another – and what’s more they fit. So, for example, Dolly Longestaffe (a cynical useless drone type male who lives off others and does nothing himself) is first seen in The Way We Live Now but then turns up at the racecourse in The Duke’s Children (an entirely different book in spirit mostly except this one sub-plot where suddenly there’s Dolly). I’m not talking about series of cycical novels (sometimes called romans fleuves) for then the story is kept going and so the characters naturally are evolving too. Modern detective fiction uses the central detective who is the focus of novel after novel and he or she comes with other characters.

To distinguish Trollope’s art from Dickens’s, it would be rather say if Esther Summerson from Bleak House would re-appear in say Our Mutual Friend to offer Lizzie Hexam advice. We would know for sure this would be very good advice. In Trollope’s Miss Mackenzie Lady Glencora Palliser shows up running a successful auction. She would. In Ayala’s Angel, the hunting set are a bunch of characters we first met in The American Senator. They live nearby. Mr Harding turns up in the very late Kept in the Dark as a sort of joke. Someone wonders if he has married a harridan, and we know it is just not possible.

Readers often love this. They get a great kick out of some favorite or memorable character recurring in another novel by the same author.
What I’m getting it is how real Trollope made his world to him and how interconnected: a vast oeuvre which he writes bits off of in different moods, then you would or might see this phenomenon, but we don’t do we? Asked how many novels or books he had written, Trollope replied he’d written 88. Some such number in the 80s. He did not say I wrote 47 novels, so many short stories, so many this or that. But 88 stories. I think he really did see his work as continuous and the novels interconnected even if they are not set up say like Proust’s or Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time.

It’s not cheapening characters to do this — or not necessarily but they come out of the “larger context that defines them …” (Bob’s phrase over on Inimitable-Boz). Now Winston Graham has made a world of 12 novels with the same central evolving characters for the first 7. And I’m drawn to nearly all the central characters quite intensely, but especially Ross, Demelza, Dwight Enys, Jud, Elizabeth Chynoweth, Francis Poldark, Drake Carne, Mowenna Chynoweth.

This feeling is not true for me for Dickens. I don’t go to him for this. I like Andrew Davies’s two adaptations and Sandy Welch’s Our Mutural Friend because they correct and improve and turn Dickens’s into an experience I can return to again and again. I’ve taken Davies’s film adaptation, Little Dorrit with me on trips the way I do some novels, in order to get me through bad patches. I find travel very difficult and vacations also a strain, a displacement.

The experience need not be a novel. I feel this way about Samuel Johnson who is his best in his life-writing and essays.

It can happen for just a specific book that grabs one over and over again. For many women including contemporary African-American this seems to be true of Gone with the Wind (Margaret Mitchell’s central woman’s historical novel classic of the mid-20th century turned into The Wind Done Gone). Jane Eyre. For me Byatt’s Possession. Some are so intense or painful it’s hard to read them a second time but I do. My husband has read Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time countless times. He never tires of all 12 books.

Some people can feel this way about a movie or a film-maker (Bergman never fails my husband; we go to all the Bergmann films.) Some filmmakers are highly uneven. I find this to be true of Woody Allen.

There are books written about reading that talk about this: Maureen Corrigan’s Leave Me Alone I’m reading really ought to be called Rereading.

Then another person commented:

Ultimately, as far as I am concerned, I reread or re-reread because of a drive to understand human experience, which, in the last analysis, is my experience. If the issue of identity and self identity has any meaning, it lies here. Who am I? means what values do I stand on and embody through existence AND what urges and drives push me on consciously and unconsciously in the present world.

Reading, re-reading, re-re-reading and so on matters to me too, in this way and also re-seeing, re-watching, and then watching again very slowly (using the vlc media player so I can slow down the film and capture stills and take down words). Where am I in the fiction or whatever it is is an important question and what does this text bring home to us. This past week I saw a magnificent performance of Britten’s Peter Grimes (HD opera transmission from Teatro alla Scala, Milan, with mostly British cast). What matters here? what are the artists showing us too? Then I went home and reread the Crabbe and then wrote a blog so as to understand what I had experienced and also express it. Get it down.

But I think we have to take into account something irreducibly personal. The book or books and the author works at some level into our deeper personal experiences, background, belief, longings and soothes or teaches us what over and over it helps us to be reminded of. Or have articulated for the first time, and then again and again.

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

Nell Blaine (1922-1996), Summer Interior with a Book

Some people say that life is the thing, but I much prefer reading. — Logan Pearsall Smith

Books are our friends too. I read to be with like spirits. Contra this is the idea we must not re-read for there are so many yet unread a first time. Life is short and soon we’ll die. Also when we re-read a long time afterward (or even a shorter) we may be so disillusioned, dismayed by what we liked.

I tell myself it’s a fatal puritanic (using the word in its ordinary condemning sort of sense, self-flagellation) super-work ethic kind of outlook that has to as a kind of appetite somehow get as much “new” experience as we can before we die. We must not waste time. (Self-improving for me does include listening to books in my car; I started partly because I hated the waste of time in the car, the hours driving my daughters and driving to and fro to work; the whole world outside NYC where I can’t buy a milk without getting into my car.) I have that impulse I must learn something new.

It’s silly. New experiences come from older known things and facts do not necessarily enrichen us. Facts are constructs too. Last night I finally found a book I can read at night! Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. I caught myself saying to myself I can read this because I know all this already, and wishing I could read instead a book in Italian by Elsa Morante. But what do I mean know all this already — Tudor history. I don’t know what she has to offer me in her vision and she is just superb in recreating a living world at the opening of the 16th century.

I too have had the experience of disliking a book I once liked. Sometimes I can get sick of Austen. It’s more coming back at another time in life or in the world. We see the earlier work differently. It’s that way for me with Richardson’s Grandison. I find I have no patience for it, and once I loved it, wrote a long chapter in my dissertation on it.

There I suggest no use fetishizing a book. We don’t fetishicize people. If we don’t like to go clubbing any more and indeed dislike what we see, well we’ve gone on. Though I admit I like to remember reading as something special.

It’s revealing what we long to re-read. Sometimes such longings (favorite books from when we first began) bring us back to our original selves before we became so “adult” and we find our primal emotions and what counts to us again.

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

Joshua Reynolds, His niece, Theophila Palmer re-reading Clarissa

On Eighteenth-Century Worlds someone is reading Richardson’s Clarissa for the first time and sent in a passage by Clary she found riveting, significant:

Oh, my dear, ’tis a sad, a very sad world! -While under our parents protecting wings, we know nothing at all of it. Book-learned and a scribbler, and looking at people as I saw them as visitors or visiting, I thought I knew a great deal of it. Pitiable ignorance!-Alas! I knew nothing at all!

I responded that I have a matching passage which I keep in a sort of online commonplace books:

What a world is this! What is there in it desirable? The good we hope for, so strangely mixed, that one knows not what to wish for! And one half of mankind tormenting the other, and being tormented themselves in tormenting…

I liked hers; it had a moral turn in it of fighting back (implied), of at least having the salutary gain of knowing more. I added it to my commonplace book.

I first read Richardson’s Clarissa (in the Angus Burrell abridgement) at age 19-20 (I was older than 18, probably some 2 years older). It gripped me like some disease, a fever in the blood. This is the third edition and it does include some dazzling letters by Lovelace; said to have been written earlier but kept out because he thought they blackened Lovelace too strongly. Rather they are so colorful, such ripe fairy tale fantasies of exhilaration in triumph and escape that they make Lovelace more appealing, though if you think about it even less capable of any feeling for others. I began not to look in corners lest I see Lovelace lurking there. Then I reread it in graduate school in the unabridged Everyman edition. On this 5 year later re-reading I did a talk in a class and then a paper where the teacher suggested I had a dissertation topic here and he would be my advisor. Robert Adams Day was the man’s name, now dead, he died more than 10 years ago now. I did the dissertation and called it Richardson, Romance and Reverie (about the special super-alert pictorial-dramatic visions a poet must conjure up to write a novel).

I didn’t make up my mind then but after another year of graduate study and more courses in the 18th century I decided I would not “do” the Renaissance after all, but the 18th century and make my dissertation Clary.

I read Clarissa countless times while doing my dissertation and also read _Grandison_ at least twice through. Then coming onto the Net I lead a group reading the book in 1995 — we did it according to the calendar in the novel. Started January 15th and ended December 18th. Some days the texts were so long it was very hard to read it all in the time allotted. It was after that I made this region of my website. Just scroll down and you’ll see the postings.

I’ve re-read Clarissa twice since, two years ago and the year before that. I did a paper defending the film adaptation and finally dealt directly with what for me counts centrally in the book and makes it relevant today: its treatment of rape. I’ve not tried to publish either beyond this. Why drive myself up a wall to please some editor and have to change (ruin partly) my work when if anyone wants to read and to learn whatever there is to from the paper, it's there. I also put up the proposals with them and some of my findings about the scenes and letter relationships. Always it’s the letters, the relationships between them that the final keys or clues to the book lies somehow.

Now this last time (two years ago) while I see all Anna Howe’s flaws and inadequacies, I began to like her — especially since Nokes’s movie. I also was very moved by the visit of HIckman to her. The movie is utterly inadequate on Hickman. Male made movies often cannot get themselves to do justice to the sensitive ethical man. Nokes hired a tough-looking actor but did not present the inner core of Hickman’s character at all. At the same time his substitute of Belford for Colonel Morden as the man who murders Lovelace in the climactic duel is brilliant, just right.

And this time through book and film I was with Clary all the way fighting Lovelace after the rape. His attempts at further rapes. I loved when she ran away and when she kept saying no, she will not be coopted by anyone. She's not even for rent for anyone.

Infamy? to give way to them is to conform to rules made up by evil-minded people and then you surely will be destroyed by them when you put yourself in their narrow grasps. I have ever rejoiced for her when she died — not that I believe in any afterlife or God but that she knows oblivion at last. Is safe.

The film of course emphasizes the intense grief and waste and ends on the stone. The heart of the film, the basic unit of the grammar is the still picture.

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

2008 Pan Jeremy Poldark (the only one of this text I have)

1988 Pan Black Moon (my favorite of my two Black Moons)

So, gentle reader prepare yourself for more meditative accounts of the Poldark and other re-read and re-listened to books, books not necessarily fashionable at all, and detailed accounts of Downton Abbey the second season and Poldark and other mini-series and good films. As long as I can get up the energy …

Ross (Robin Ellis) and Demelza Poldark (Angharad Rees) on the night before he must return to prison for the trial (Poldark Season 1, Part 9, no equivalent scene in Jeremy Poldark)

I do love these films. The central heroes & heroines are gentle at heart. I can put myself to sleep dreaming of them and their landscape which I long to visit.

Ellen

Read Full Post »