PCA/ACA conference: TV soap opera and serial story-telling; or, The Way We Watch TV Now

Shoverdose: @lizzieskurnick’s word for binge-watching a TV series.

Humpty Dumpty: ‘You see it’s like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word … [Lewis Carroll] For instance, take the two words “fuming” and “furious”. Make up your mind that you will say both words, but leave it unsettled which you will say first … if you have the rarest of gifts, a perfectly balanced mind, you will say “‘frumious’.

‘Nowadays people curate their experience of TV and cinema films’

Mr Bates (Brendon Coyle) quietly crying — fired because a disabled man (Downton Abbey, Season 1:1)

Anna Smith (Joanne Froggart) come to comfort the just fired Mr Bates — saying “Tell us how you are getting on …. ” Downton Abbey 1:1) — it is true that we remember this subliminally in the 3rd season whey she & Bates are happy in Scotland

Dear friends and readers,

Among the many unusual subjects treated seriously at the recent American Popular Culture and American Culture Association country-wide conference in DC, was that of soap opera and serial story-telling. This phenomena on TV and in film was treated in sessions on it; in British Popular Culture (which includes mini-series); in Gender Studies on TV ( made up of programs with a serial arch, e.g., Girls, West Wing); and some of the many sessions on film adaptations.

This is a blog about who and how people watch soap operas and serial dramas nowadays; how people participate as fans on the Internet: very differently since we have all these new technologies which put us in control. We curate our experience of TV. Passionate fans influence and shape what they watch if it becomes popular. I offer a new word: shoverdose (show-overdose). I summarize a few papers on specific serials, including those on the CW channel, Days of Our Lives, an older Police Procedural, Downton Abbey, and Poldark and in these you will find summarized characteristics found in soap operas and serial story-telling.

I admit I don’t have any summaries on Jane Austen mini-series — that’s because I didn’t hear any papers on Austen mini-series. I admit to shoverdosing: on the 1995 Ang Lee & Emma Thompson’s Sense and Sensibility; Andrew Davies‘s Little Dorrit and Sense and Sensibility; the 1981 Brideshead Revisited; lots of people have shoverdosed on Davies’s 1995 P&P and Fay Weldon’s 1979 P&P, Simon Raven’s The Pallisers.

So on soap opera and serial story-telling, how we watch these nowadays and a few of them: Two sessions on specific soap operas, one on the Poldark novels versus the two mini-series and Downton Abbey and a paper from a Film session on war films. First I’ll cover how people experience soap opera or serial story-telling on TV today and then specific serial dramas.

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On Saturday, 9:45, Soap Opera II (4201) featured two papers, Marion Wren’s “Short Attention Span Theater: The Cultural Status of TV serial narratives in a Post-network era” and MJ Robinson’s “Curatorial Culture and the Future of Serialized TV.”

Wren asked, How do we watch TV? Jessica Helfand has argued that the Internet media has turned people into skimmers, people who multi-task, and skim an article while doing many other things on-line. The result is “narrative deprivation:” people have ceased to deep read.

Pessimism and anxiety lies behind such formulations. For example, Helfand does not take into account the phenomenon of binge watching (sometimes referred to as shoverdose — show overdose) which the availability of DVDs and all sorts of ways of controlling and time-shifting our watching has enabled us to do. Someone sits down and watches a whole season of whatever program he or she wants over several extended hours. This is diametrically diferent frmo the way audiences once watched serials and TV.

She suggested that advertisers have only the crudest methods and points of view on the audiences for such soap operas and serial TV and films. They regard viewers as so many eyeballs and when they can try to count them. So Downton Abbey drew 7.9 million for the 1st instalment of the 3rd season. One element in its success is its framing as “legacy,” as “heritage,” as elite and upper class. Therefore that it becomes the object of obsessive viewing is legimitized. Its upper class content and status as quality drama makes it a form of aspiration. This is what the branding did in this case. In previous sociological events of this type it was Jane Austen (the 1995 P&P), elite books and quality drama (Brideshead), historical heritage and regional cults (Upstairs, Downstairs, Cornwall for Poldark whom Graham said was first likened to GWTW).

Ms Wren then turned to examine what we know of the behavior of fandoms that surround such experiences. Henry Jenkins has written about them in Textual Poachers. Jenkins wrote that these fans are not assive; they are a participating culture; they are creative and extend the universe of the show to fit their preconceptions. They work at this, once upon a time by forming clubs, traveling to sites, writing fan letters, now by blogging, tweeting, again traveling to meet one another, by illegal downloading, by using web 2.0 media (I saw that in Poldark where fake videos misrepresenting the mini-series were made). They influenced the author and later seasons by their aggressive demands and insistent views. Both the makers and the viewers may be said to conspire together to often emphasize surprise to mystify the experience, to guard outsiders and one another from showing their what is the real motivation and need served. Viewers invent legitimizing narratives. The audience are communities to be exploited.

I was reminded of Richard Hoggart’s older book on The Uses of Literacy. He argued way back in the 1950s that TV was used politically; to persuade people they were part of imagined (= unreal) communities who espoused a group of values, values which were in this way proselytized for.

The real problem is to turn this into a business model to make as much money from it as possible. Ms Wren mentioned that AMC did not like when fans came onto twitter as faux characters; they felt this was plagiarism and maybe the fans would make money themselves. Twitter was told to pull such tweets and it did. The fans got very mad and AMC let them go back online as a form of on-line advertising because they did see the unlikelihood most fans would make any money.

Ms Wren seemed to want to suggest that binge watching, tweeting creatively about such a serial is depth viewing. But is it? What do the fans write? They write narratives and stay on the surface and miss much of the nuance of what itself is not subtle. OTOH, shoverdose is such a denigrating word and I know that immersion in a script, close study of parts of a mini-series (the juxtaposed shots) and its course texts and intertextuality yields as much depth of knowledge and understanding as any George Eliot novel.

By “Curatorial Culture” Ms MJ Robinson meant how viewers today can organize, select, arrange their own programming: “nowadays people curate their own experience of TV and cinema film.” In the past 5 years what has happened to TV watching resembles what happened in the 15 years to music listening and the last decade to journalism. TV watching used to be top down: the executives chose when you would watch, and you had to stay within the patterns of airing set forth by the channel. TV now can be consumed at any time, any where on a variety of machines. TVs come with “apps”. On YouTube viewers make their own movies. There is such a behavior as “churning:” people join briefly to watch whatever is the promotional offering and then unsubscribe.

Thus the Nielson family viewer ratings which the TV larger channels still cling to (partly they don’t want to know how few people might watch a program or who they are or even what is preferred for real) are hopelessly outdated. The “televisual has become an undifferentiated landscape.” What happens is programmers are fighting for audience shares that they do not know how to translate into direct revenue. Or they are trying to monetize the serial watching in new ways. For example, Netflix did a deal with a Norwegian company to release 8 episodes of a very popular serial, but it was set up in a way that forced the viewer to watch them sequentially.

The aim is to find out when content is used and attach an advertisement to the use. There was always a problem predicting popularity which often increases slowly. So Seinfeld had ratings in the basement in the first season and in the second, soared. The Poldark mini-series was at first ridiculed. Now the difficulty is much greater. On the Internet you find an increasing number of “apps” where to watch a program you have to click on “facebook” first (or twitter or some other social media place) and that way you are counted.

Companies keep their data to themselves. Netflix does not release its the ratings it has from its rentals publicly. There are laws against cable companies mining their data; your privacy is protected unless you are thought to be part of Al Quaeda. They’ve never been able to predict with any ease what the public will make a cult about next.

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Helen Mirren as Concerned Cop (Prime Suspect, Season 6)

Soap Opera II at 9:45 also had a paper on a channel dedicated to soap operas for teenage girls, and Soap Opera III at 11:30 (4301) papers on what made a commercial success, a specific mainstream program breaking taboos and types of programs not seen as soaps but have the same characteristics.

A brief survey of the serials discussed. Kayti Lausch discussed the CW channel and its teen serials, i.e., Gossip Girls, Vampire Diaries (any title with the word “diary” in it is aimed at girls), Secret Circle, Melrose Place, The Beautiful Life. Voice-over also identifies a show as for women. In type they are very like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The characters are often mean to one another and there is a lot of conventionalized sex. The characters are rarely at work or school, and when they are there, their interest is not in their work; there is little for the young women to do, and every week there’s some sort of party.

Melissa Ames suggested that when the content really reflects the mood and of a given era the serial is a success. The problem with this is you end up offering a tautology as an explanation, e.g., since this show demonized the rich was a success its era was one where the rich were propagandized against. She described repeating typical stories: revenge is popular, melodramatic deaths, mistaken identities, the fragility of loyal love, tawdry trials, and of course the family is central. She suggested the programs she studied shows any sense of shared sacrifice has faded, people blame victims, escapist content preferred. She had in mind programs like Dallas, the Sopranos, Games of Thrones, Mad Men and Downton Abbey.

Kimberly Smith discussed the introduction of gay characters into The Days of Our Lives. Gay characters had been seen in soap operas from 1991 on, but Days of Our Lives made Sonny Kiriakis, a character central to the series, a member of one of the primary families, and Will Horton, a son of another family fall in love. Ms Smith screened a powerful scene where Horton’s father comes in to object and is clearly intensely hostile, and another where the two lovers behave sentimentally and emotionally the way heterosexual couples are often filmed. Some of the fans protested hysterically but enough accepted to make this pair of characters a staple of the show.

Roberta Brody described a specific serial called Law and Order, which has since had a number of imitations: it did not tell the personal lives of the police; the story was tightly organized, a new case or set of characters brought in for each episode; little back story even for the central case; it’s an ensemble cast (so costs less as there is no star salary); heavily event-driven, with abrupt closings. These share elements with soap operas: melodrama (provocation, pangs, and penalties); themes include heinous rimes, victims who are victims but if they have committed a crime are punished; a conflict of duty and personal feeling; hidden babies, rejected children, rebellious teenagers at risk; poor choice of partners (husbands, wives); substance abuse, mental illness, and loneliness for central characters. She went over a typical story. Her thesis was that the soap opera elements are rarely acknowledged and part of the reason for the series’ success.

I asked if these had evolved in Police Procedural like Prime Suspect and Five Full Days where we do learn about the detectives’ lives, and have feminist themes. She insisted that these “new” kinds of Police Procedurals did not belong to “proper” Law and Order programs; had been influenced by PBS or BBD mystery series. I asked if the Law and Order programs had been aimed at men, and instead of answering this, she said that when it was discovered men watched more than women, women were added to the permanent cast.

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Dan Stevens as Matthew Crawley, officer, saving one of his men, another man waiting to help (Downton Abbey 2:1)

I heard three papers on Downton Abbey. The first, by Joanna Abtahi, was one of three on depictions of WW1 in Film and History (Thursday 9:45 am, 2244). She said DA was the first season presented as frivolous escapist fare which climaxed suddenly in the Earl of Grantham declaring the nation is at war. The second season saw a dramatic transformation. This character-driven drama now presented itself as accurate. She presented the view of the great war as a useless waste of millions of life, futile, with the ordinary man seen as indispensable as simply the “conventional usual view;” and argued that DA was countering this with the idea that the war created meaningful experiences, showed that the patriarchy was concerned for the social order, with the community pulling together in the face of “great peril.” Matthew’s behavior shows he deserves his authority; The snobbish selfish Mary becomes care-worn, Sybil a nurse who runs off with Branson, Thomas hitherto a villain, an understandable man, who destroys his hand to escape death on the battlefield, and cries over a suicidal patient. She suggested that the program suggested today the UK is more trustful of its government (! — ignoring the huge strikes against the destructive Tory elite gov’t).

John Greenfield and Janice Blandford gave papers on Downton Abbey in “British Popular Culture 4 (Thurs, 1:15 pm, 2420) which startled me: they took the program at its surface value and did not critique its values; Ms Blandford seemed to think the portrait of Robert Grantham (she called him Robert) was realistic. Ms Blandford bought into Edith as vicious, Daisy as dutiful and therefore gaining an obliged new father who helps her “assert herself.” Robert feels the “way elite people then felt about their estates” (high idealism); upholding the social order right and good. Mr Greenfield claimed in the 3rd season Robert (he also did not call the character Lord Grantham) is humiliated and defeated in the 3rd season (victim of new technology and world); Mrs Hughes is strong in the way she befriends Ethel and defies Mr Carson; Edith has become a feminist; a gay plot came to the forefront (! — it has been there all along); Tom transcends his old role; it all ends on “the exhilarating [?] birth of the child.” The death of Matthew he thought must’ve prompted shouts of “swerve” “swerve” across “the nation.” He conceded the woman servants were oppressed.

The reality is Lord Grantham remains in charge throughout and only he has the power to make the police go away and not arrest Matthew. He says he values Matthew for his cricket-playing.

Mr Greenfield discussed serial story-telling in a Freudian way. He suggested its serial production allowed for twists and turns and multiple plots and death, and that Fellowes has mastered the form and uses it captivatingly. He quoted Linda Hughes and Michael Lund on the serial novel in Victorian magazines: pleasure may be discharged again and again as female sexuality is supposed enjoyed (as opposed to male which does not practice sustained arousal).

I raised my hand and said, “lets imagine Anthony Trollope seeing this series. He’d laugh raucously. Great houses are political linch-pins where wheeling and dealing and patronage goes on. As to all these abstractions, he’d see through it as unreal.” I described Trollope’s fiction which Fellowes has been influenced by but where Fellowes’ mind is fuzzy and narrowly aimed; Trollope is precise with wide and thorough knowledge of his era.

Robin Ellis as Ross Poldark returning from the rape of Elizabeth (Poldark, 1975-76, Part 15)

Julie Taddeo’s paper (in the same Thursday session on British Popular Culture) was on the treatment of women in the Poldark worlds’ she compared the way Ross’s rape of Elizabeth was treated in TV mini-series as opposed to the Poldark novels. For a summary, see continuation in comments section.

Ellen

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No: a piquant perspective on a serious political election

Pablo Larrain shooting his film

Dear friends and readers,

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

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

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

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

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

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

Police Squads are everywhere in the film

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

Guzman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ellen

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Returning to Trollope via maps, televisuality & Australia (!)

David Suchet as Melmotte facing them all (from Davies’s 2001 TWWLN adaptation — in the last phase Suchet has in mind Charles Laughton’s moving performance as Quasimodo)

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve returned to Trollope with a plunge. A writer for our time. Like Dickens, a geographer of our imagination, utterly televisual (via Andrew Davies), and aptly post-colonial.

Over the past two weeks I’ve been reading his (magnificent panoramic) The Way We Live Now and his brilliant psychological-social masterpiece, He Knew He Was Right. I had begun them once again (I’ve read both at least twice) and gotten about one-third of the way through each when I wrote a proposal for a paper to be part of a collection of essays on British Historical Costume Drama on TV (from The Forsyte Saga to Downton Abbey), and though I’ve not had an absolute acceptance, it’s as near as firm yes as one can get. The only doubt will be if the group can get enough essay proposal to go forth for a fat volume.

Donald Pleasance played the character whose presence began for Trollope his Barsetshire novels: here he plays his cello (1982 BBC Barchester Chronicles, Alan Plater)

It would not be due until next fall, but my problem now is my proposal for Mapping Trollope was accepted by Sharp, and that will be due mid-summer. To map Trollope, to delve his re-creation of London, the mythic Barsetshire, the counties of Dillborough and surrounding areas from The American Senator (Ayala’s Angel), to say nothing of Barsetshire country (which includes both series, Barsetshire and Pallisers), I shall have to read in detail, taking down specifics from several very long novels. I know from experience the whole picture of Barsetshire first emerges in Doctor Thorne, that the chronology of the Barsetshire and Palliser books is more or less consistent and the mapping say of TWWLN fits into that of the Pallisers. And I did want to include the careful mapping of Western Ireland in Trollope’s 5 Anglo-Irish novels and two stories (consistent with the Phineas books), which are no where well enough known.

One world Trollope.

On top of this from my trip to NYC to listen to a lecture at the NY Trollope Society by Prof Nicholas Birns on Trollope’s La Vendee as historical fiction, I’ve again come into contact with this generous scholar who years ago (really) encouraged me to send him a paper on Trollope’s travel books for his Antipodes: a Global Journal of Australian/NZ literature. He told me he loved my book (I never forgot that), especially the Irish sections where I argued for the central importance of Ireland in Trollope’s life and work. I found myself unable to write the paper because at the time I didn’t understand post-colonial theories and perspectives, and the only thing I could think of was descriptive and that meant (I felt) going to Australia. Jim won’t listen to that (cost, distance), and how could I begin to spend enough time anyway.

Walhalla, Victoria 19th century print

Since then I’ve learned about post-colonial theory (see my blogs on Christopher Hodson’s Acadian Diaspora and Diasporic Jane and Indian films) and have been able to come up with a perspective which would enable me to discuss say the relationship between Trollope’s travel book, Australian and New Zealand and his novels set in Australia — without going to Australia, or if I did for a relatively short time (I do long to go). On line I’ve done that for his American Senator and North America, which we read in conjunction with one another on Trollope19thCStudies when it was still Trollope-l.

Trollope’s section on New York City and American culture as fuelled by a worship of money ever relevant (see this week’s New Yorker column, George Packer reading TWWLN).

I told him my idea for “On Living in A New Country: Inventing an Australian Identity” (a play on Patrick Wright’s On Living on an Old Country), and he seemed to like it very much, and more or less told me I could be on his pane, “The Australian Trollope,” in a coming Trollope conference. Yes a group of Trollopians are not waiting another 25 years to get together again (see Exeter conference), and in fall of 2015 plan to meet in Belgium at the University of Leuven. If I did that it would mean reading another set of long Trollope books but some new (and to me) interesting Australian literature which I have grown to love. I should say I was once part of a group looking to publish on Trollope as traveler (this was 10 years ago) when I read AngloAustralian novels (e.g., Henry Kingsley’s Geoffrey Hamlin) and Australian & New Zealand famous classics (Marcus Clarke, For the Term of His Natural Life, and Jane Mander’s The Story of a New Zealand River, Ethel (Henry Handel) Richardson’s enormous trilogy, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony.

Holly Hunter and Anna Paquin as Ada and Flora McGrath (1993 The Piano, Jane Campion)

The rest of my blog summarizess my proposal to discuss the film adaptations of TWWLN and HKHWR (“Andrew Davies’s Televisual Trollope”) and throws out a few ideas for “On Living in a New Country.”

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“Andrew Davies’s Televisual Trollope” will include two great artists, Andrew Davies as well as Trollope. I will show that

in Andrew Davies’s adaptations of Trollope Davies developed sophisticated televisual techniques expressively to convey Trollope’s interior monologues, epistolarity, and panoramic plot-designs and Trollope’s themes of delusional sexual paranoia and anxiety, and economic corruption. TWWLN and HKHWR rely on filmic epistolary sequences, montage, flashbacks and voice-over; Davies also breaks naturalistic conventions to allow for characters directly to address the TV audience, and for the TV screen to picture emblematic allegories. We will also see that Davies engages with Simon Raven’s famous 26 part Pallisers to replace a cynical patriarchal Tory implied author with a humane, liberal feminist one, and while so doing, critiques Trollope’s texts from a feminist and Oedipal standpoint ….

Mr Gilson overpowered by Arabella French’s chignon, and getting back when she says she will do anything he bids her including of course removing it: modelled on one of Marcus Stone’s illustrations (from Davies’s 2004 HKHWR)

The first part of the paper will examine the filmic art, themes, character types, plot-designs of TWWLN and HKHWR as a similar pair: since not enough films made from Trollope in close proximity have survived, Davies cannot (as with his Austen or Dickens films) conceive of these as part of a subgroup of author-connected films. Instead they belong to Davies’s own political satiric type films made from socially-concerned novels … In the second part how scenes and dialogues in TWWLN allude to scenes in Raven’s Pallisers to comment both on Raven’s and Trollope’s work. I will also show that Davies brightens and makes much gayer and more hopeful the perspective of HKHWR by imitating the décor and kinds of gentle caricature created in the Barchester Chronicles

For “On Living in a New Country” my idea would be to follow Trollope’s unusual (so I think) trajectory of dramatizing colonialism not from the angle of the higher echelons but from that of the desperate lower middle, working class person and family, or the angle of the younger son who is not the heir. It’s such people he tells his fiction about, and it was to them he directed his Letters from Liverpool.

In the part of Australian and New Zealand just on New Zealand where he visited the Maoris and went swimming with a group of them, we have Trollope as Bohemian (sort of), but (and now this is vague) I recall I thought he was prophetic in looking forward to how ethnic politics would work out, how these would be a core of conflict, that they would seem to replace class- and money-based politics. (It was an analogous foresight to those found in his Anglo-Irish novels about how communities react to outsiders, the use of scapegoats, and collusive officials.) Trollope saw that the person or people who live in a “new” country (so they see it) have to evolve a new identity, one connected to the old one, but different and while in his novels (John Caldigate) he warns out “gentlemen” could fall to lower ways of life, he was very enthusiastic about this new identity.

20th century illustration for Trollope’s John Caldigate (originally called Mrs John Caldigate)

I was amused to find that Robert Hughes actually ends his great book The Fatal Shore (one of the great books of the 20th century; it can stand alongside Primo Levi’s If this be man) by quoting Trollope’s graphic portraits of two men kept in prison for a very long time. I did want to produce a paper. I remember seeing a film at the time, The Proposition, which seemed to me to go into the areas I was interested in from an angle of high violence — and “Aaron Trowe” (the protagonist villain share’s Trollope’s initials, AT) is a story of high violence; so too Harry Heathcoat. Here’s a wikipedia article on the Australian film The Proposition just about this group of people, which starred Emily Watson and Ray Winstone.

The Stanleys (very much the sort of couple Trollope writes about).

TMI? If you were wondering what I’ve been reading while watching all these films and going to operas, what thinking about and why, there you have it. Next up will be a blog on Trollope’s novels HKHWR and then (separately) the TWWLN

Ellen

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

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

Dear friends and readers,

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

A few data points:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ellen

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Downton Abbey 3:7: to give way to them is to conform to rules set down by the evil-minded; or, Orphans of the Storm?

Alfred: ‘It’s about a wronged women who survives in a wilderness through her own wits and courage’
Miss Obrien: ‘Blimey they’ve stolen my story …’
Mrs Hughes smiles quietly at her.

Miss Obrien (Siobhan Finneran), Mrs Hughes (Phyllis Logan) smiles

Thomas (Rob James-Collier), tense, endangering himself

Thomas: ‘As for a defense what can I say? I was very drawn to him and I got the impression that he felt the same way … I was wrong Mr Carson: It seems an odd mistake to make Thomas.’
Thomas: ‘When you’re like me, Mr Carson, you have to read the signs as best you can and because no one dares speak out …
Mr Carson: I do not wish to take a tour of your revolting world
Thomas: ‘… No …’

Dear friends and readers,

This blog is not on the two hour mix that was shown on PBS Sunday night; I rather watched 3:7 as shown on BBC this past fall so I could experience the theme, patterns and tones, the climax and ending intended. Later this week I’ll watch 3:8 and write about that in its own right. I enjoyed 3:7 as I have a number of this season’s parts because there was something valuable unexpectedly brought forward climactically that undermined accepted ugly norms (as when the cruel trick played on Tom Bransom in 3:1 was exposed) and overdone rituals (weddings). Fellowes really exposed childbirth’s dangers and then paid attention to a character type often overlooked: paradoxically the mother figure who you would think in a women-centered soap opera form would get a lot of respect (they don’t).

After the drama of Sybil’s death and the Duchess (Cora)’s grief Fellowes wrote a quiet part, no high drama climactic scene; instead threaded through were continual identifications with characters, a couple of whom we have been led to feel alienated from whose full basis remained deliberately withheld or unstated. The movie whose title we are not told (I suspect Fellowes had a particular one in mind), with Lilian Gish (Orphans of the Storm) is the allusion that gives us the part’s perspective.

Anna (Joanne Froggart) and John Bates (Brendan Coyle) smile at Miss Obrien’s allusion

So, to begin with the 1st thread: cheer replacing plangency when Mr Bates returns, his lifted spirits to see Anna given the family car to pick him up:

He sees Anna there waiting for him

Then the kind welcome by the other servants, the reassurance of Lord Grantham who tells him to take “a rest,” “stay in bed,” “read books” (you see what I mean about unexpected). But Mr Bates is worried how he will support himself now; and Anna a little anxiously takes him for a walk to anticipate a plain brick attached cottage on the estate (someone else has to move out) for them.

Their future home

Next the continued risk of being thrown out in the streets (=the wilderness) that Ethel endures. The Duchess thinks to argue Mrs Crawley out of keeping Ethel as a servant on the basis of narrow minded (evil I called them in my header) scorn which might just reflect badly on the Granthams, but when the Dowager sees that is not going anywhere with Mrs Crawley switches tactics to assert how unhappy Ethel is in her present place (and picks up Mrs Hughes’s support), about which Mrs Crawley shows she is not fooled:

Mrs Crawley: ‘Oh nonsense she couldn’t give tuppence about Ethel or anyone like her.
Duchess: ‘You’ve been reading those communist newspapers again …

No she’s not, nor is Bransom a “Marxist” as Lord Grantham asserts when he hears Bransom’s plans for equity for the tenants.

Ethel is unhappy even if she’s learning to cook well — we are allowed to hear this spiteful slur by the Duchess upon Ethel defending her new skill:

Ethel: Nowadays one must have a skill …
Duchess: but you seem to have so many …

We know she enjoys her quips

Ethel suffers in the streets:

Ethel (Amy Nuttall) puts her basket down: cooking well is after all not enough

But it’s more than the nasty cuts she receives; when Mrs Crawley comes home from Downton, she finds Ethel sitting brooding. She needs more than minimal safety. We need to break these chains of shame that imprison and ostracize and isolate us. That’s what Ethel is put through: shame, imprisonment, isolation, risk of the streets too.

The strongest moment is the sudden revelation of the fear, anxiety, and need the homosexual Mr Barrow (he cannot get people to call him that) feels when he’s tried to reach someone and found himself rejected in a kind of hard-faced anger and flees in the night back to his own bed.

I can’t prove this but have a feeling we are intended to think Jimmy Kent (Ed Speleers) protested too much. He has a way of asserting he wants to go out with Daisy (Sophie McShears), but doing nothing about it; of saying he wants to dance with her, when it’s Alfred who turns out to be actually willing. He was eager to tell Mr Carson he was someone his aging mistress went after; when we first see him in this season, he’s washing a half-naked body and presented as intensely boyishly attractive. And the parallels between himself and Thomas are suggestive: neither it seems has parents, siblings, any family. Thomas reacts to this information by suggesting they share a loneliness, but their shared family-less state is the quiet point.

Upstairs shows displacements — they are more protected from the storm. The estate agent, Jarvis (Terence Harvey) is pushed out (we do not say sacked of middle class positions). Carrying on the feminization of Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens), with Mary (Michelle Dockery) even laying on top, being the aggressor when we see them in bed (not infrequently in this and the last couple of parts), we see he blames himself for Mary not yet being pregnant. For a man who is the heir and has supplied tons of money to Lord Grantham he takes an oddly subaltern position. Mary will not promise to support him against her father. It does give him some complexity (as well as his five o’clock shadow). Cora (Elizabeth McGovern) carries on with some quiet needling of her obtuse Lord and Master (Hugh Bonneville) with a worn smile.

The two of them

The ending was gratifying — and believable. Tom’s brother is brought in to show how much Tom has begun to identify with the haves and powerful. It could be that a young man is married into a family from a low station and his real talents recognized becomes a central help. It’s an old story in fact. And that he managed to baptize his daughter Catholic another. Sometimes the Duchess’s interventions work — it’s her idea that they take Tom on this way; he’ll go back to being Bransom as steward too.

The community re-forms itself

For me the weak moments was the one easy success. It’s just not probable that an editor of a newspaper would eagerly wine and dine (as far as journalism is concerned), a nobody like Edith (Laura Carmichael); her piety towards her father (all the three daughters are Daddy’s girls) does not suggest exactly fiery columns to come. I grant Edith-Laura is now dressed as prettily as Lady Mary-Michelle has been throughout the seasons:

I counted 3 tasteful alluring hats: a wide black straw hat, a cloche with a beaded gold band, the above number, and 1 scene of her looking at her image in the mirror in a most gratified way.

Apart from anything else, the easy success didn’t fit the mood of the piece which was (as I say) otherwise ambiguous. I’ll capture it in a visual image — as film should convey itself through aural and visual image: Ivy (Cara Theobold) and Alfred (Matt Milne) walking home in the dark:

My header is a line not from Downton Abbey as it’s too generous-minded and brave to come out of Fellowes’s conservative wary mindset. It’s a statement the hero of another popular mini-series (the Poldarks) makes to a young woman who is about to deprive herself of companionship. Fellowes is however perceptive, he is writing in this form, and the man who wrote Gosford Park could be found in 3:7, for the kind of content I’ve discerned her is typical soap opera or on-going multi-plot narrative forms. To quote Robert Allen on this: The journey forward is not only deferred, but also halting rather than continuous. There are continual gaps in the narratives, and alterations in horizons. The consequences of an action are more important than the action itself (especially as it ripples out to affect others), and small particular things matter. It’s an elusive form of art and fitting that a movie we hear of gives us our clue.

Ellen

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Downton Abbey: a note on Grantham & Grantchester

Ford Madox Brown (1821-95), Hampstead from my Window (1857)

Dear friends and readers,

A brief note for Americans like myself who are not aware of the birthdays or birthplaces of British politicians who have become symbolic figures after they exercised power in an ostentatiously as well as felt way politically.

I did not know that Grantham was the name of the place Margaret Thatcher came from (as it’s put). Her father was “a local worthy” who ran a small business. That it’s a compliment to Mrs Thatcher and at the same time an allusion meant explicitly to alert us to the political allegiance of its author.

Jim not only said, oh yes, but immediately went on to suggest that the mood and atmosphere of the mini-series as described to him (he does not watch TV) brought to mind some lines from Rupert Brooke‘s 1912 poem “The Old Vicarage, Granchester,” which ends with these lines:

Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
Deep meadows yet, for to forget
The lies and truth and pain? …. oh! yet
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?

The whole poem is online.

If the whole poem were like that, it’d indeed capture a central motif of Fellowes’s Downton Abbey, only Brooke’s poem is a kind of pastoral as satire on male muscular Christianity with some misogynistic lines thrown in here and there (“And Ditton girls are mean and dirty”) with scorn for lower class people so egregious (“folks in Shelford and those parts/Have twisted lips and twisted hearts”), that I’m tempted to say it’s ironic with the poet keeping his distance from his narrator, but I think the escape into a deep meadow and landscape world before industrialization, pre-Capitalist is at times serious, and then again mocking: “And when they get to feeling old,/They up and and shoot themselves I’m told) …

John Betjeman, Brooke is not (to be explained on my Sylvia blog this Sunday).

I don’t know if I’ve emphasized how surprising it is that there is so little filmic intertextuality in Downton Abbey. It does not imitate, borrow, allude to other mini-series; this is unusual nowadays as well as it’s rare use of montage and almost complete lack of flashbacks, voice-overs, filmic epistolarity (letters ready by characters using voice-over). What intertextuality there is (confirmed in the second volume on the series, The Chronicles of DA) is textual: Bates’s story was suggested to Fellowes by a news article and an Agatha Christie story.

So I suggest he may also have remembered or had in Brooke’s Grantchester in mind when he chose the name Grantham. I’ve chosen a couple of mid-Victorian idealizing watercolors for this blog whose typology is behind what we see of landscape (not a lot, again surprisingly for a mini-series of this type) in DA.

Perhaps the reader will recall the shot of Lady Sybil plotting Gwen Dawson, the maid who escaped to an office job in the first season, where they are in an old-fashioned wagon riding together and pass under a half-ruined arch in a vast green landscape:

Alfred Wm Hunt (1830-96), Finchale Priory (exhibited 1862)

Ellen

P.S. I’m not really surprised by the lack of filmic intertextuality, filmic sophistication and/or dream landscapes. These are part of the ways in which Fellowes has carefully kept this mini-series broad and popular in its approach & therefore appeal.

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Quartet: Dustin Hoffman’s music-filled mansion

To show affection is to comfort oneself — From Kobayashi, Bonsai Miniature Potted Trees

“The convivium alone … rebuilds limbs, revives humours, restores spirit, delights senses, fosters and awakens reason. The convivium is rest from labours release from cares and nourishment of genius; it is the demonstration of love and splendour, the food of good will, the seasoning of friendship, the leavening of grace and the solace of life.” Letter 42 to Bernardo Bembo, in The Letters of Marsilio Ficino, Vol. 2 (London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 1918), p. 51, Ficino

We last see Beecham house [Hedsor house], home for retired musicians, lit up at night

Our principles as we last see them

Dear friends and readers,

On our way to this film Izzy and I expected another The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, another comic treatment of elderly people coping with retirement, old age, the onset of illnesses which precede death, having only a short time left. It is that and like Best Exotic Marigold, it has a superb cast, one of whom at least (Maggie Smith) has become familiar to many as the wry Dowager in Downton Abbey. Or (I thought) it might be like the Abbey with a central mansion-house, surrounding woods, sequences of intelligent dramatic interaction, and it is that too — Dustin Hoffman as director practices the slow pace, glowing use of sun- and moonlight. The doctor figure, Lucy Cogan (Sheridan Smith) even resembles Joanne Froggart (Anna Smith Bates) in accent, gestures, stalwart charity:

Presiding good faery

But there the resemblance ends. The inner core of Best Exotic is irretrievable disillusion and real problems making ends meet. Unlike Downton, Quartet is not a defense of hierarchy. It’s not the house that’s wonderful; it’s what goes on in it. Quartet is a semi-egalitarian fairy tale: Two opera singers whose marriage went sour decades ago meet, after intensely painful encounters (which however don’t go on for that long), find they still love, miraculously sing the quartet from Rigoletto with precisely the same people they once sung it with to a highly charitable audience willing to buy tickets to help rescue the enterprise from bankruptcy.

Sissy (Pauline Collins) and Jean Porter (Maggie Smith)

Wilf (Billy Connolley) and Reggie (Tom Courtney)

What makes us accept this improbable fluff is a continual playfulness which emerges in all sorts of deprecating jokes about old-age (and sex, and incapabilities, and dignity), everyone making music all over the house as they work towards their fund-raising gala.

Harry (David Ryall), Nobby (Ronnie Fox), George (Trevor Peacock) singing “Are you having any fun?”

Perhaps a clue to the serious moral feel of the piece is in the real pathos in some of the people: Pauline Collins captures a sharp note of need in the way she is so eager for everyone to like her and get along. Michael Gambon is amusing as Cedric, the impresario-dictator who bullies her with ease, but he has not given up his older role yet.

Michael Gambon and Dame Gwyneth Jones seriously evaluate for the gala

The movie is about aging: it’s about being true to what you were despite decrepitude. Not to worry you are not as beautiful, cannot do what you did the way you once did. Let go. Return to it as best you can. Remember. And the credits reinforce this by showing us the musicians and singers in the movie next to photos of them 40-50 years ago, and ending on our principles.

It’s not all opera; there’s music hall. Once a week, Reg lectures to young people in the area about his music and they teach him about rap, hip hop and perhaps rock n’ roll too (though that’s old hat here). He says opera is all about the music, about expressing the inner self, and reprehends how it has been captured by the rich, and set up to intimidate. We see residents dancing all sorts of dances, young people jumping into the bushes (to make love), the doctor smokes on the side quietly in the greenhouse. But the music is mostly opera, mostly Verdi, and Quartet may be regarded as a celebration of operatic song.

For once the trailer is not a mis-characterization except of course the film is altogether quieter for long stretches to allow for relationships to develop, people to fall sick and learn lessons in forgiveness, humility, not to omit kindness:

Maggie Smith is not just a jokester (which she is too much of in Downton), but a lonely woman looking for friends (as are they all) and something with which to replace what’s lost; Smith’s talents not given much play in Downton Abbey come out here (see her Bed Among Lentils for these on brilliant moving display).

The movie based on a play by Ronald Harwood; there is apparently a retirement home for musicians in Italy, Casa Verdi, where (like this Beecham house, named after a benefactor, Sir Thomas Beecham) each year a Verdi gala is put on. The quartet in question, with which the film ends in celebration is from Rigoletto.

Izzy and I arrived just as the movie was starting and had to sit 4 rows from the front: the auditorium was crowded. People applauded when it was over, and the credits begin to roll.

I recommend going. It just avoids the cliches of admirable facing-up in the face of adversity to evoke human and bitter moments. I was all anxiety lest everyone not make it to the last scene. You might say this is Dustin Hoffman’s Act 2 of Last Chance Harvey. There we had the 50 year old couple going for a long-night’s romantic walk; here we have the 70 to 80 year olds not able to do that anymore so making music and singing while there’s still time left. This is Hoffman’s vision of his art now:

Move over Woody Allen and Julie Delpy (Two Days in Paris).

[Pray excuse the intrusive ad-words]

Ellen

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

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

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

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

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

Dear friends and readers,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sybil (Deborah Findley Brown) phoning

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

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

Tom in flight

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“If only that were true.” Amen.

Ellen

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Thoughts on women and men in cyberspace: social dynamics on the Net (1)

Dear friends and readers,

We’ve gotten into a for once (well to me) enlightening thread on a Women’s
Studies list-serv (WMST-l). It began over in Wompo (women’s poets) and slid
across lists because Katha Pollitt is on both list-servs and got irritated
with a couple of contentious threads which had turned into quarrels (still
mild), at which one woman complained at the contention and said she would
get off or fall silent. Katha’s posting was (to me) a form of scolding: she
basically said men’s way of being in cyberspace is superior to women’s
because supposedly they don’t mind quarreling in public. She wrote in terms
that were insulting to women, but attention catching. By mistake she put this posting onto Women’s studies where the people are more reasonable — it’s a more academic style list with more women academics on it.

I’m very interested in the realities of women in cyberspace and how theirs differs from men’s behavior. Obviously, I spend enormous amounts of time on the Internet, and my experiences here have helped me to mature, become more socially active (go to conferences, meet with friends) I wrote a paper on this which the listowner of WMST-l put on line as part of a permanent set of papers. I’m so bad at nuts and bolts I can never reach my paper over there, so for those who want to see (or read it later) , here it is on my website: Women in Cyberspace.

I had the courage to counter Katha on Wompo and nothing reasoned in response to my posting was sent. Instead I got misspelled mild jeering (using CAPs). At the close of my last posting, I just said, “Come, go ahead, abuse me … ” And one woman did, but the thread died after that.

Katha had said to ignore the posting on WMST-l and two of her friends (women
with credentials like hers, Marge Piercy among them) backed her on this,
but what she wrote was significant. Here is the core:

Before the internet, I never believed the truism that women have trouble disagreeing openly because they place such a high value on harmony, fitting in, not standing out. Having been on numerous women’s lists I see how true this is. They ALL have the same dynamic: sugary mutual admiration, with occasional outbursts of snark that cause conniptions. Yerra makes a personal remark, Joyce slaps her down by appealing to ‘the spirit of the list,” Yerra takes her marbles and goes home. On a coed list, or a mostly male list, a slightly snarky remark would have just been one of those things that happen. A reprimand would be be read as impossibly stuffy, and a threat to leave would be a joke.

I’ve been on wom-po for ages, and let me tell you,with all the mutual flattery (complemented by back channeling of expostulations and eye rolls) and self congratulation for our female wonderfulness it’s pretty boring. I barely take part any more, This is a list so scared of open discussion that “political” posts have to be labelled so the frailer flowers can avert their petals and the illusion of harmonious sisterhood be preserved. Oh no, someone mentioned abortion rights! help!

Can we please put on our big girl panties and talk about things like grownups?

Katha

I want instead to cut to the quick, the sudden idea I saw. I often say that the content of a posting is only part of what’s happening the way the content of our words in physical space is only part of what’s happening. For the first time I was able to see how the posting itself functions differently (than say all the stuff that is added on in real space). It’s that we see the posting primarily as either by a man or either by a woman. That comes first. The way writing is primarily seen as either by a man or women (that’s why 90% of what is published in mainstream publications is by men).

Second, the reason men can quarrel openly and not get upset really is they
fundamentally respect one another as men. They can insult and jeer and yet
they are respected and respect one another. I put it that we women don’t
fundamentally respect one another as women. We are taught not to. We may
respect a credentialed woman but she is still a woman. A male homosexual is
respected as a man and identifies as a man first. Lesbians are at the
bottom of a heap of gender types because they are also women.

The books I cited in my first posting tell how much friendships mean to women growing up, how badly women feel betrayed when their friend goes off with boyfriends or drops the other woman for her new “family” or connections. How it hurts. The sense of betrayal.

So when women quarrel it’s not childish.

And the results of quarrels — as the results of rape or any complaint are differently for men than women. Women are punished when they complain and the results of quarrels they are taught will be bad. They will lose the respect of important connections. The punishment meted out will be denied; it will be presented as reasonable behavior. This is where masochism comes in. Women seem to be masochists and accept what happens because they find if they don’t things get worse for them.

My Women Writers Across the Ages, a Yahoo list-serv carries on discussing feminism calmly is we have so few men, the men here are a congenial bunch who agree with feminist values. And a woman list-owner. All of this is highly unusual.

Women quarreling in cyberspace are often quarreling because one or both feels her gender has been betrayed.

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

Conversation, Susan LaMonte

If anyone wants to read the more essay-like email versions:

1) I don’t think there’s anything wrong in the way women behave differently from men on lists — as I don’t think there is anything wrong with the women behave differently in life. To find the male model preferable is to prefer a whole host of values and norms that at least some of us have wanted to not to be the prevailing code. The classic and still important book on this is Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice; also about why women quarrel so bitterly, Lyn Mikel Brown, Meeting at the Crossroads: Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development;and Girl Fighting: Betrayal and Rejection

Women complain how we never seem to make any progress. Well there are these three books which analyze the phenonomena that Katha has castigated/scorned without looking to see why women behave like this except to imply “coward” or silly emotional creature who bores me. Cyberspace experience is obviously only analogous to real physical life, physical encounters where names and all sort of information are there right away to make the others accountable. Not only empathy and understanding is required to understand why women need moderators on lists, thrive better in some lists than others — it might be recalled that men simply refuse to get onto lists run by women often and get off certain kinds of list-servs that attract women. Does that mean those women’s lists don’t count or are inferior? Men simply disdain what is not consonant with how they are encouraged to behave in our society.

My study of women in cyberspace which is written in a way that looks to find ways to enable women to cope with the experiences they find on lists which are often analogous to what puts them at a disadvantage in life. It should also be remembered women don’t forget what happens in real life — like rape (frequent). I’m upbeat, constructive as that’s what’s wanted in social and public life:

I seek to present material to help us think about what are the obstacles to women using cyberspace effectively, and what can be done to construct cyberspace experience so as to make it more appealing, hospitable and usable for women.

Here though I will break code again and say that indeed the public encounters in front of a whole group of people, most unknown, with no way to manipulate the encounter to your set of values or norms (feminocentric) is analogous to rape (virtual) because it’s public and people looking on are in the position of voyeurs (the term lurkers is a telling one here).

Another aspect I don’t bring up in the paper is that women value friends, they value contacts; they don’t want to lose them, and given their real knowledge of other women’s psychology and their own plus experience of men, they retreat into silence as the really wisest way to cope given the present misogynistic environment. When will we ever stop celebrating the war mentality (which aggression, competition and the rest of what has been put before us as better and more fun)?

WMST-l itself is a list run by women, with women moderators, it has the typical list of rules one finds in women’s lists (not men’s) which are resorted to and I like it because of this and much else.

How are individual women to be heard is the question.

On Wompo I miss Annie Finch’s explicit point of view in how she saw this list as a place for women where women’s values and norms and experiences and knowledge would prevail.

2) The second email adding to original points:

I want to speak again to this one. Much as people still try to deny this, what happens in cyberspace matters — people might acknowledge various govt’s reactions to whistle-blowers, bloggers, privately-sent emails (one-to-one) emails. It also is increasingly central to local affairs. I had thought not to since Gail Dines reiterated what I was going to repeat with more details. That saying women have just got to accept aggression won’t do since many forums in cyberspace replicate the realities of physical space. Men are in charge. I was forced off a listserv (Inimitable-Boz @ Yahoo) last week, and I’m no melting flower on list-servs (or blogs or other venues in cyberspace). It did become impossible to stay because what was implied and not spoken about what I had been writing and what was explicitly said simply ignored everything I had said and the explicit talk became rawly insulting (the attempt was made to shame me), not just snide or a matter of innuendo. The terms of the aggression were misogynistic but if I dared use that word or any like it, I’d be laughed at as a foolish feminist.

Where men are not in charge but constitute the working majority of those who post (and in cyberspace when men become numerous on lists they have been shown to become the active members with only a couple of women maintaining a presence), the same sort of thing occurs, perhaps more muted if at least one of the list-owners is herself a woman. The gender matters. The woman can be very different politically but I’ve observed and experienced nonetheless she will understand and give crucial support to the women poster (sometimes, not
always). It’s like Republican women are mostly pro-choice, and they vote
for shelters for women and children.

We don’t accept the terms in which rape is discussed which (as we saw a
couple of summers ago) allowed in at least three high profile cases, the
case to be dismissed (the Muslim housekeeper in NYC who was raped) or
humiliated and lose her case (the young executive who was intoxicated and
made the mistake I’d call it of phoning the police) and the supreme court
fining parents whose daughter accused frat young men of raping her. We
don’t say we’ve just got to accept this. We try to alter the basic understanding of what’s happening.

It is not a matter of putting “on our big girl pants and talking like grownups.” I talk like a grown-up all the time, even to my cats. The phrase was an irritant.

So I’ve come on this second time because I want also to counter it first
under the aegis of the idea that “older women” are to be assumed to behave
differently in this than younger ones necessarily which is dismissive or
that anyone was being childish. It assumes the problem is the deference of
older woman. I’m not deferent. Another aspect of this particular thread is
some of us come on with more credentials. Not quite the same thing as being
a man (nothing beats that — I’m sarcastic here) but part of power plays. I
speak to Katha the way I do to others — or Barbara Bergson or anyone with
more credentials. This fault-line of age versus youth divides and conquers
us again. In a way being older and who I am and am not frees me (like
Janice Joplin line, freedom’s just another word for nuthin’ left to lose”).
The paradigm of the second wave is implicitly brought in here, but it was
in the second wave people used the word “liberation” and talked about sex
openly. I got myself into trouble (get myself) because I’m not deferent to
men.

And second, women do squabble a certain way but it’s not because they are
childish. The understanding of quarrels and their meaning is different from
men’s. The way women treat one another as girls, what their friendships
mean to one another and how they disrespect one another on lists is different from men’s. I suggest at some level men respect one another as men fundamentally. And women often do not respect one another fundamentally as women. All of us are taught not to – by the society. Look at ads for a start. And they feel betrayed, angered really.

Third, women’s experience of the results of quarrels very different. Third
and fourth wavers (if there is a fourth wave), post-feminists experience
punitive results which teach women silence is the wise policy because of
self-interest works the same. The punitive nature of the result is
frustratingly denied the way rape is called a false accusation (as in you
consented). That’s one of the sources of so-called masochism.
I’ll cut off here as I’ve gone on far too long but I feel these points are
important and need to be dealt with, even if solutions are not easy to see.

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

Of course most of the replies either ignored my points or saw what I wrote in quite different terms, but one I did think useful for what I was saying.

I think history has given us TWO inadequate models for dealing with conflict, each model loosely associated with a gender role, but available to anyone. In life, we probably all “mix and match” elements of these two inadequate models. On the one hand, there is the “feminine” style of handling conflict (conflict avoidance; conforming to the “feminine” gender role by avoiding direct expression of aggression while channeling aggression into “mean girl” behaviors such as gossip, isolation, manipulation of alliances and social status, etc.). On the other hand, there is the “masculine” style (handling conflict in ways that deny the value of interdependency and rely on inequality/hierarchy; fighting verbally or physically to avoid shame and loss of status by shaming the opposing point of view).

Both of these ways of handling conflict are inadequate. They temporarily stifle conflict rather than truly resolving it, so the conflict usually resurfaces and becomes part of a cycle. There are other, more constructive ways to handle conflict that can lead to better resolutions. Conflict should be seen as a positive and inevitable product of equality. Conflict is inevitable; the only question is how we handle it. If a group can resolve conflict only by silencing it or by creating inequality (“I’m right, you’re wrong, so shut up; your point of view has no place here”), the group has failed. We are products of our culture and our culture has tried to teach us that conflict is threatening to us personally and to our social order. And it has tried to train us to turn to authority figures (ultimately the police or the state) to resolve our conflicts rather than teaching us the skills to resolve them in ways that strengthen us individually while also enhancing our ability to function collectively.

There are occasionally conflicts where logic alone can reveal a “right” and a “wrong”; a “winner and a “loser.” But deeper, more intractable conflicts are not just rational disagreements. They reflect some damage done to the communal bonds holding people together, and mending that damage often requires attention to things such as the quality of communication, and the creation of a group dynamic trusted by all. When Audre Lorde says that our culture has “misnamed difference as a threat to unity” and when she envisions “the creative function of difference in our lives,” I think she is talking about what feminism could potentially contribute to our understanding of conflict and conflict resolution (micro- and macro-) if we look for alternatives to the two inadequate, gender-coded models of conflict “management”/irresolution.

Leah Ulansey

Ellen

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An Iconic Lincoln

Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln

Gentle reader,

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

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

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

Tommy Lee Jones as Stevens

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

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

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

Oyelowo wants to know why black men are paid less

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

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

Spader as Bilbo in the House

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ellen

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