Two Cheers for Equality

Just when I was about to sink my teeth into the BBC's "100 Greatest British novels," I came across another, far more dubious list - "A Year With Women: 103 Essential Films By Female Filmmakers" published last August. In principle, I am all for women directing films. If they can manage to make films that are at least as good as the vast majority of films directed by men, that would certainly not be saying very much at all for "female filmmakers." Judging by the 103 films on this list compiled by the eponymous "cinemafanatic," a self-styled "cinephile to the max," women are more than capable of making films at least as bad as men.

While I will admit to seeing roughly half of the 103 films on the list, the admission doesn't give me much satisfaction. Wading through this field of weeds, I found a few actual flowers amongst them, like The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola), Vagabond (Agnes Varda), Away from Her (Sarah Polley), Frida (Julie Taymor), and The Ascent (Larisa Shepitko). As for the rest, does it matter that films as bad as Ishtar, The Night Porter, The Piano, You've Got Mail, and Wayne's World were directed by a man, a woman, or a moviola?

Last December 7, BBC Culture contributor Jane Ciabattari presented the results of a poll of 82 book critics that listed the 100 greatest British novels ever written. Here is the Top 25:

1. Middlemarch (George Eliot)
2. To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf)
3. Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf)
4. Great Expectations (Charles Dickens)
5. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
6. Bleak House (Charles Dickens)
7. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
8. David Copperfield (Charles Dickens)
9. Frankenstein (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)
10. Vanity Fair (William Makepeace Thackeray)
11. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
12. Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell)
13. The Good Soldier (Ford Madox Ford)
14. Clarissa (Charlotte Bronte))
15. Atonement (Ian McEwan)
16. The Waves (Virginia Woolf)
17. Howards End (E. M. Forster)
18. The Remains of the Day (Kazuo Ishiguro)
19. Emma (Jane Austen)
20. Persuasion (Jane Austen)
21. Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)
22. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (Henry Fielding)
23. Jude the Obscure (Thomas Hardy)
24. The Golden Notebooks (Doris Lessing)
25. White Teeth (Zadie Smith)


The first noticeable problem with the BBC list is the insistence on ranking, which is an utterly philistine practice. The second problem is that three people were responsible for nine out of the twenty-five novels. Last summer I commented on another literature poll, the 100 Best Novels Written in English, sponsored by theguardian.com, that was conducted by one person, Robert McCrum, instead of a consortium. I expressed enough distaste for McCrum's list, and the general stupidity of such lists, but compared to the BBC's list, McCrum's now looks far more impressive and authoritative. McCrum refused to rank his 100 choices, presenting them - beginning with Pilgrim's Progress - in chronological order, and he limited each author to a single book, which now seems remarkably fair. If Jane Ciabattari had employed the rule, six of the titles on the list - Mrs. Dalloway, Bleak House, David Copperfield, The Waves, Emma, and Persuasion - would have to be replaced by others. The results would have been more challenging and less objectionable.

One more obvious problem is the definition of "British," which is not as narrow as the poll's guidelines pretend. If Heart of Darkness, The Good Soldier, and The Remains of the Day, novels written by men born - respectively - in Poland, Germany, and Japan, are British, what is Ulysses, especially since Ireland was British until 1946?

I won't bother you with the first 25 of the 103 Essential Films By Female Filmmakers, since you and me and everyone we know have never seen many of them. I've only seen half of them and, according to some websites, I am what is known as a "film scholar." Prominent among the 103 are the names of the better-known women directors like Elaine May, Agnes Varda, and Sofia Coppola. Just about every one of Coppola's films is on the list, which is a good indication of the sad dearth of women directors.

On the occasion of Kathryn Bigelow's win as Best Director at the Academy Awards a few years ago, I wrote a post for this blog devoted to the woman whom I still regard as the finest woman director to date - Lina Wertmuller. Even if they hated Wertmuller, it would be impossible for film critics to disregard the accomplishments of Wertmuller. After all, they included Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, which is, however skillfully made, a loathsome film. While Wertmuller's politics are far to the Left of Riefenstahl's, I think that the reason she is now ignored has alot more to do with her treatment of women, which orthodox feminists long ago dismissed as reinforcing stereotypes.

In the "comments" section of the 103 Essential Films, someone pinted out Wertmuller's conspicuous absence from the list: "This is a great list, but really, no Lina Wertmueller? I realize it is hard for Americans to get a foreign vibe, but this woman is a genius and worth taking a look."

The comment moved "cinemafanatic" to respond - lamely: "I think the availability (aka lack thereof) of her work in the US on DVD/Blu has really lessened her impact on younger generations. It's a shame her films are [not] more accessible." Baloney. What about Chantal Akerman, Maya Deren, and Celine Sciamma, whose films are at least as hard to find as Wertmuller's?

I think Wertmuller is neglected because her films concentrate on often unsympathetic male characters and the women who are drawn to them. And because of Wertmuller's refusal to approve of their actions. The hero of Seven Beauties is a former pimp who survives a German concentration camp by summoning the strength to copulate (there is no better word for it) with the obese female camp commandant. The hero of Swept Away is a stupid Neapolitan deck hand whose superior strength and skill allows him to dominate a particularly useless rich woman with whom he is stranded alone on an island. The hero of Love and Anarchy is a foolish, spotty-faced provincial whose sole chance at being an anarchist hero is through an absurd and hare-brained plot to assassinate Mussolini. Because Wertmuller has a jaundiced view of human beings, men and women, her complex, powerful films are difficult for critics to pigeonhole. Her star rose and set in a painfully short arc in the mid-70s. No sooner had we been surprised by the appearance of The Seduction of Mimi in 1976 than we were disappointed by the big-budget, all-star Blood Feud in 1980. Until the invention of video, films were permitted very brief shelf-lives. If no one recalls Lina Wertmuller's films, it's the fault of film critics, not audiences.  

Date Due

I do not know, and I have never claimed to know, anything about being an editor of creative or scholarly writing, but I think that uttering the word "plagiarism" in the precincts of a book or magazine (or ezine) publishing office must be like yelling "fire" in a crowded theater.

Bored last week (the week between Christmas and New Year's, the quietest week of the year), I went on a Google search for my favorite plagiarist, Bert Cardullo. On page 2 I found something about a newly published book of his whose title made me nearly choke on my leftover eggnog. The link led me to the website of a small literary press - whose name I withhold out of what is probably misplaced fairness - where I found the book, Persistence of Vision: The 21st-Century Film Criticism of Stanley Kauffmann, edited by Cardullo, published last January. Accompanying a description of the book's contents was a blurb from Gary Bettison from a review of the book published at Senses of Cinema.

The article was like a perfect storm for me - a combination of benign climatic conditions that produce a destructive gale. The article combined the work of Stanley Kauffmann, the man who was for decades the doyen of American film criticism, with Cardullo, who is becoming a by-word for literary thievery, with Senses of Cinema, the very website at which I published in 2007 the first public notice of Cardullo's plagiarism.  

In the interests of the truth, that most elusive of chimeras, I contacted the director publishing house, expressing my outrage that Cardullo should bestow on himself the honor of editing the work of a man from whom he stole on repeated occasions. The director (who shall remain shameless) responded by saying that she doesn't plan on publishing a new book with Cardullo, but that I shouldn't make such formal accusations of plagiarism to a publisher "without solid proof." We went back and forth more than a dozen times about my proof before I realized that I was whipping a dead horse.

Her replies to my insistence that she had published the work of a well-known plagiarist were disingenuous, I think, of even a "small press" (her words) publisher. Evidently bothered by my use of the words "make money," the publisher defended herself by informing me that the pittance that such "academic books" earn is scant justification for plagiarism. Then she asked me if I had contacted Yale University Press and all the other publishers Cardullo has taken advantage of.

I explained that publications prior to the exposure of Cardullo's plagiarism were outside my reach, but that I regard it as open season for publications of books made since his exposure. I told her that "there is little I can do about the publishers over whose eyes Cardullo has already pulled the wool, so to speak."

Then she told me a little about her job as an editor and that there has to be "solid proof" of plagiarism "in the specific book" already published before they can withdraw the book from print. So even if someone proves that an author has committed plagiarism before, it doesn't disqualify all of his books from consideration for publication. I asked her, if she owned a gallery and someone had informed her that a painting on her wall was the work of a known forger, would she leave it hanging there? To this she wrote, "If I spent an enormous amount of time designing the frame and room etc. for a work by somebody that might have forged other works of art and after I hanged them up somebody said he might have forged stuff before and I hadn't made money for all my work - I'd do what I'm doing now and that's not get any more works from the artist but also not throw away all my work. My design etc. isn't a forgery and you should have some respect for a publisher's work."

So, to paraphrase, I shouldn't interfere with her work with such trivial information about the questionable integrity of an author's work that she has published and I should mind my own business. And to top everything off, she told me that only an author who is a victim of Cardullo's plagiarism has a legitimate grievance. If I spend $700 for an Apple i-phone, only to discover that it isn't a genuine i-phone but a cheap Chinese knock-off, it's only Apple that has a reason to complain?

My business, she then brought to my attention, was akin to an "obsession" with Bert Cardullo, that I was "on a mission" to destroy the man's career and that I might consider seeking therapy. In my last (I promise) email to her, I told her that, given the negligible results of my efforts to inform both publishers and the public of Cardullo's crimes, I wished I had left the Cardullo book I found so many years ago on the shelf at the Anchorage Public Library where I found it. Without realizing it, I was echoing that marvelous thown-away line spoken by Claude Rains near the end of Lawrence of Arabia. Playing the role of Mr. Dryden, he is asked what he thinks about the end of the war in the desert in which Lawrence had played such an important but thankless part. With classic airy resignation, Rains says, "Well, on the whole, I wish I'd stayed in Tunbridge Wells."

The Penalty Box

"I went to a fight last night and a hockey game broke out."
(Rodney Dangerfield)

It is easily the most thankless task for an expatriate to have to explain to uncomprehending foreigners the behavior of some of his more exceptional countrymen. Not to come across as disloyal, yet doing his best not to misrepresent or excuse them, it too often becomes necessary for him to be dismissive or to downplay what is clearly objectionable or, in the eyes of a foreigner, intolerable.

I watched President Obama's "Town Hall Meeting," which aired on CNN on January 7 - except I watched in on Friday morning here in the East Asia. It reminded me, as all such cozying up to Americans in their living rooms by sitting presidents does, of FDR's "Fireside Chats," broadcast on American radio in the 1930s. Quite skilfully, Roosevelt tried to explain to Americans some of the extraordinary reforms that were being implemented that were intended to alleviate the hardships of the Great Depression.

Similarly, Barack Obama was attempting to calm some of the fears of Second Amendment proponents, who regard his executive actions on incremental gun control as direct assaults on their Constitutional right. I found the program impossible to watch, since I am extremely skeptical of the president's ability to change anyone's mind that he isn't trying to take away their guns or that he is not in favor of further tyrannical encroachments on their liberties.

I am in the habit of drinking my morning coffee(s) while catching up on whatever news events transpired overnight, and for the past few years I have watched events unfold in the States from what has become an increasingly uncomfortable distance. My Filipino housemates have by now grown inured to my exclamations of outrage at the announcement of sometimes heartbreaking "breaking news." They have routinely heard me, just moments after turning the television on, saying "holy shit!" or "Jesus Christ!" at yet another mass shooting, and have learned to gauge the extremity of the event when they hear the words, usually uttered gravely, "oh my god!"

Now that the shootings have become a terrible routine in America, attempts by my foreign friends to get some sastisfactory explanation for them out of me have waned as they saw how incapable I was of ever being able to do so. Nevertheless, I've tried to frame for them the kind of explanation that is somehow analogous to other comparable outrages.

I remember when, in 1990, I watched Saddam Hussein invade Kuwait and, as armies of a coalition opposing that invasion readied themselves to push him out of Kuwait, he threatened to use the foreigners stranded in Baghdad - mostly diplomats and reporters - as "human shields" when the imminent "Desert Storm" was unleashed. There was a terrible moment when, in front of television cameras, Saddam brought out an American family and tried as gently as he was capable to embrace a boy who was perhaps ten. The boy was obviously terrified of Saddam. When I first saw the video, it was on NBC's Today Show. Fred Rogers, of Mr. Roger's Neighborhood, was on the show and he was asked how he would explain that video to children. He surprised me, and took my breath away, when Rogers said simply, "I would tell the child that we do things differently here."

We do things differently in America. That's how I try to explain to my foreign friends why some Americans cling so tenaciously - and childishly - to a completely outdated amendment to their constitution. But when I'm in a generous mood I try to explain the actions of my countrymen like this -

In 1998-99 when the NBA Player's Association failed to reach an agreement with the team owners, there was a lock-out that drove many fans to despair and some others away from the sport in disgust. With no basketball games to be aired during prime time, the TV networks and cable sports channels looked around for a suitable alternative to basketball. The only other professional league sport that was available during that time of year (October to May) that was relatively familiar to American sports fans was the National Hockey League.

So the networks and sports channels aired professional hockey games for a few weeks, hoping that basketball fans would take to them. Hockey is the national sport in Canada, and there have been teams in American cities like Boston, New York, Detroit, and Pittsburgh for decades. The popularity that hockey has enjoyed in the States, however, never presented the NBA or the NFL with serious competition.

When the initial reactions of fans to the introduction of hockey to prime time telecasts came in, it became clear that professional hockey simply wasn't ready for prime time. So television producers approached NHL owners and coaches and presented them with a suggestion: if they could somehow try to control or eliminate what they called the "Gonzo element" of pro hockey - i.e., the violence - they could attract (at least as long as the NBA lock-out lasted) a much broader audience.

The NHL owners and coaches politely considered the suggestion. Then they politely informed the TV producers that if they did anything to control the violence in hockey, they would drive away their diehard fans, the ones for whom the Gonzo element is what is most distinctive and vital about the sport.

America, I tell my foreign friends, wouldn't be the same country, for the better or the worse, without its Gonzo element.

Mutatis Mutandis

For my first post of the new year, I wanted to do more than make a fresh start. Going through some old emails recently that I'd saved to a gmail account back in 2005, I came across the following email that I sent to a friend nineteen years ago. I had been in touch with a mutual friend who gave my email address to him. He asked in his subject line, "Are you the Dan I used to know?" 



Subj: The Dan you used to know?
Date: 96-12-09 19:01:14 EST 
From: Asiahand 
To: J*********@iri.org


John,
I read your message the very day, in fact just two hours after, you sent it. This long it's taken me to frame a reply. What follows is everything I am prepared to divulge for now regarding your friend Dan Harper, who sometimes mentioned your name to me during my brief acquaintance with him. I last saw Dan Harper on May 31st 1995. My first meeting with him occurred just two months prior when I happened to attend his wedding in Balibago in the Philippines. He had arrived in the Philippines earlier in March after his detachment from the Navy in Okinawa. He had managed to separate overseas rather than return to the States, which he frequently assured me was unthinkable. I was one of only two other Americans at the wedding, which is probably why we wound up getting acquainted.

I had been living in Balibago with a girlfriend for more than a year, overstaying my visa by several months. This would eventually have resulted in an expensive fine and maybe a stay in jail if I ever decided to leave the country. I was totally broke, living off the generosity of my girlfriend,her family, and a handful of fellow expatriates - Australians - for whom I performed occasional business transactions which I won't specify here.

My prospects of ever leaving the country were remote, until I met Dan. He was "disaffected," to use his own word, with the States, and wished to remain in the Philippines for as long as he possibly could. He had some cash, but it was dwindling rather quickly what with the expense of his wedding and reception (food and drink for 100+, his wife's gown, etc.) and his wife's extravagances. He felt quite swept away by the whole experience.

We became drinking buddies as the weeks went by and his 90-day visa slowly elapsed. His wife wanted him to return to the States and apply for her own immigrant visa (every Filipinos' dream). Dan tried repeatedly to persuade her to let him stay and support himself on the GI Bill benefits he could draw by attending the local university in Angeles City. I knew many ex-servicemen who were doing this - $400 a month is a king's ransom in parts of the Philippines. But she stonewalled.

After another month of this, we came up with a plan to save both our skins. Dan and I were sitting in a bar called Margaritaville on Fields Avenue (sorry, but the details are significant) along what used to be the perimeter of Clark Air Force Base, abandoned since the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in '91. We had played a little pool and were just wasting the rest of the afternoon in the shade of the bar, sipping San Miguels and watching the traffic on Fields pick up as evening fell. This was a full-time activity for alot of expats.

Dan was staring at the barmaid when he started telling me how there was nothing more in the world he wanted right then than to climb aboard a banana boat and head south somewhere, to "disappear." He looked at me and I knew he wasn't joking. He pulled a scrap of paper out of his wallet and handed it to me. I unfolded it and found a handwriiten poem - "The Voyage to Secrecy" it was called. It had something to do with wanting to go to a place where you could never be found again. I asked Dan if he'd written it, but he said he only wished he had.

We spent the evening coming up with a plan: he and I would switch identities - he assuming my dead-end life in the Philippines, and I going back to the States. Though we were far from look-alikes, there was never any question of taking over each other's lives. Once the switch was made, he would cut all ties with whomever he and I knew in Balibago and "head south," just as he said. I would simply use his passport to get home on the cheapest flight available.

His wife wasn't to know, but I was to proceed with her immigrant visa anyway and get her to the States. She arrived here in Colorado last June 20th. She was surprised to see me and thought it was all a joke for the first few weeks. Now she doesn't seem to mind, and we've grown rather close. Filipinas are nothing if not practical.

The last time I saw Dan was the night of May 31st, as I said before. He had arranged a bus ticket to Manila for me and enough cash to get me to the airport, that's all. I made arrangements for my sister to collect me once I arrived Stateside. All he had was a rucksack with clothes and a few books - everything he figured he needed in his new life. He asked me if I wanted his dress blue Navy uniform, but I declined. I'll never forget his last words just before I boarded the Philippine Rabbit bus: just a simple "goodbye and good luck."

He smiled and walked off toward MacArthur Highway. I never saw or heard from him him again - unless it was a postcard I got on what was his 38th birthday last May. On the card was a typical tourist photo of a pretty young Filipina in native dress. The postmark was from Jolo on the island of Sulu way down where the Philippines meets Borneo. The message was a line from the Old testament: "And the Pharoah said unto Joseph: forasmuch as God hath showed thee all this..." Nothing else. It wasn't signed.

I know this must sound more than a little daft. I figure Dan would've wanted you to know the whole story. I still don't know if you're quite prepared to believe it. I'm alive and I'm here in the States thanks to Dan and I'm telling you now: Believe it!


"Dan"


What my friend couldn't have known was exactly how much I wanted this fantasy to be true. I was out of the Navy, living with my sister in Aurora, Colorado, and my wife, who had arrived from the Philippines in June, was living with me. From the day of my departure from the Philippines after I married her until her arrival in the States with a visa it had taken 385 days, due to two government shut-downs and my wife's indecision about abandoning everything she had known to come and live with a man she barely knew. Then there was the strain of three people living under the same roof of a small two bedroom apartment. I was working a dead-end job, facing the realization that I had committed to myself to a life I didn't want.

Four months after I sent this email I joined the Army. Clearly, I was looking for a way to regain what I had lost in the Navy, which was, believe it or not, a sense of freedom and a position of strength from which I could get a better look at my life. After six months of training, the Army sent me to Korea, unaccompanied. It was this second separation that broke what was left of my marriage.

I got out of the Army in 2000 and got out of my marriage in '01. Not knowing exactly what to do with my life, I drifted for the next five years until I hit on the idea of going back to the Philippines. After everything that had happened to me, there was still, it seemed to me, this parallel life of mine going on somewhere in the Philippines. I had found happiness there and expected (foolishly) to find it again. I went back in November 2007. In early 2008, I boarded a bus instead of a banana boat and went south. I didn't go as far as Sulu, "way down where the Philippines meets Borneo," but I came far enough to find myself, still there - here - after almost eight years, effectively lost.  The poem I used to carry in my wallet, written by Norman Cameron, asked the question, "How many days the voyage to secrecy?" The speaker of the poem wanted nothing more than to get lost. I accomplished it. But now I want to be found again.

I have led a hazardous life these eight years. I have lost nearly everything, and, in so doing, I have discovered precisely how much I possessed in my life in the States. What seemed directionless then seems amazingly purposeful to me now. And now I want it back. Before I can make a fresh start, I have to stop. 

Lamentable

So I am left
To mourn (without a chance of consequence)
You, balanced on a bike against a fence;
To wonder if you’d spot the theft
Of this one of you bathing; to condense,

In short, a past that no one now can share,
No matter whose your future; calm and dry,
It holds you like a heaven, and you lie
Unvariably lovely there,
Smaller and clearer as the years go by.

Philip Larkin, "Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album" 18 September 1953



Regarding film, which is my eternal return, an event has taken place this month - appropriately at the year's end - that has signaled a sad transition. It was the announcement of the death, at the age of 95, of Japanese actress Setsuko Hara. The sadness that the event awoke in me is part of a very long and, for film, very arduous journey.

Hara, whom the late Donald Richie adopted as "our Setsuko," was the last of a generation, a very great generation, of people whose enrichment of their culture through their work in film is inestimable. Although I lived for awhile in Japan and for a time immersed myself in Japanese literature, from Lady Murasaki to Kenzaburo Oe, it is primarily and most powerfully through its films that, over the years, I have got to know Japan. 

I wrote about Hara, who became known as the "Eternal Virgin," more than a decade ago for Senses of Cinema. She appeared in her first films during the war, even becoming a pin-up girl for Japanese soldiers, and emerged after the war as a favorite actress of both the veteran Ozu and the young Kurosawa, although she represented for the two masters quite different types of Japanese heroines. For Kurosawa she was, in his initially overlooked but now treasured film, No Regrets for Our Youth, a new Japanese woman, emancipated and headstrong. But it was for Ozu, in what are regarded as his late masterpieces, Late Spring (remade a decade later, also with Hara but in the role of the abandoned parent, as Late Autumn) and especially Tokyo Story, that she played the perfect daughter, the loving and long-suffering object of Ozu's paternal adoration. 

Ozu died in 1963, and shortly after that Hara unceremoniously withdrew behind a veil for the last fifty years of her life. She became a curiosity, the subject of wild rumors - as anyone might become who revokes all the fame and glamor that so many others seek and can only dream of. She silently retired at a time when Japanese film was in a crisis, when filmmakers like Shinoda, Oshima and Imamura were finding new ways to see a new Japan. But Hara would live long enough to witness an end, but not - I hope - the end, of Japanese film as we once knew it, and film production in Japan given over almost exclusively to anime, a peculiarly Japanese brand of animated films.

I remember an essay from the Seventies by Richie that was inspired by something he witnessed in a Tokyo subway. Commuting in a typically jam-packed subway car, Richie saw a young man standing, with one hand on an overhead strap to keep himself from falling to the floor as the train hurtled to its destination and the other hand gripping a thick paperback manga - a hugely popular Japanese comic book. The young man was holding the manga within six inches of his face and he was wearing headphones. So here, Richie commented, was the new Japanese citizen: completely cut off from the world around him, absorbed by the music blasting in his ears and a quasi-pornographic comic book in his face. 

Hara must have looked at the anime phenomenon in Japanese film as Donald Richie did, as an incalculably lamentable moment in which the Japanese chose to stop looking at themselves, to avoid clear and honest representations of themselves and their lives in films and to turn instead to an entirely manufactured, artificial place, some of which reveals great artistry, but which also asks us to look away from life, away from an image of ourselves that we can give to succeeding generations.

Watching as the Japan that Ozu, Kurosawa, Kinoshita, Naruse, Toyoda, Kobayashi, and Yamada brought to such vivid life walk so determinedly into the sunset has been intensely sad - and even sadder for Donald Richie and Setsuko Hara who belonged to that world and knew every square kilometer of it.

The people who loved their world enough to have created such an imposing monument to it - Tokyo Story, Ikiru, Repast, Kaseki, and The Eel, among so many others - are now all gone and there is no one prepared to take their place. It isn't just people we have lost, it's the world - a real world and not a pretend universe of idealized fantasy figures - they, or someone like them, might have showed us that is also lost. 

Christmas Past

So often, through the years, my Christmas Spirit arrives too late. I'm all set for the Big Day, or so it seems, but whatever it is I'm supposed to feel - that I'm ready to feel - doesn't arrive on time. Days later, as if my internal clock or calendar is slow, I will hear a particularly wistful Christmas carol or some cable network repeats a Christmas movie, and I will find myself wishing I could bring it all back. 

But I can't. And then there is the last week of the year to be faced, the strange limbo between Merry Christmas and Happy New Year that someone has aptly named Twixtmas. And I'm made painfully aware that I will have to wait for next year's holidays to try again to align myself with the prevailing spirit of the time.

There is an especially harsh story by Hans Christian Andersen called "The Fir Tree" in which a tree is enjoying his young life in the forest when he is suddenly cut down and taken into a big house where he is propped up and decorated with cakes and candles and a golden tinsel star. He is now a Christmas tree, and he is delighted and amazed at the people dancing around him on Christmas Eve. But afterward he is taken up into a dark loft and thrown in a corner. There he entertains some rats with the story - the only story he knows - of Humpy-Dumpy. But then the rats leave him there and never return. He waits there in the dark for what seems to him a long while.

'"I will take good care to enjoy myself when I am brought out again." But when was that to be? Why, one morning there came a quantity of people and set to work in the loft. The trunks were moved, the tree was  pulled out and thrown — rather hard, it is true — down on the floor, but  a man drew him towards the stairs, where the daylight shone. "Now a merry life will begin again," thought the Tree. He felt the fresh air, the first sunbeam — and now he was out in the courtyard. All passed so  quickly, there was so much going on around him, the Tree quite forgot to  look to himself. The court adjoined a garden, and all was in flower; the  roses hung so fresh and odorous over the balustrade, the lindens were  in blossom, the Swallows flew by, and said, "Quirre-vit! My husband is come!" but it was not the Fir Tree that they meant. "Now, then, I shall really enjoy life," said he exultingly, and spread out his branches; but, alas, they were all withered and yellow! It was in a corner that he lay, among weeds and nettles. The golden star of tinsel was still on the  top of the Tree, and glittered in the sunshine. In the court-yard some of the merry children were playing who had danced at Christmas round the  Fir Tree, and were so glad at the sight of him. One of the youngest ran and tore off the golden star. "Only look what is still on the ugly old Christmas tree!" said he, trampling on the branches, so that they all cracked beneath his feet. And the Tree beheld all the beauty of the flowers, and the freshness in the garden; he beheld himself, and wished he had remained in his dark corner in the loft; he thought of his first youth in the wood, of the merry Christmas-eve, and of the little Mice who had listened with so much pleasure to the story of Humpy-Dumpy. "'Tis over — ’tis past!" said the poor Tree. "Had I but rejoiced when I had reason to do so! But now ‘tis past, ‘tis past!" And the gardener’s boy chopped the Tree into small pieces; there was a whole heap lying there. The wood flamed up splendidly under the large brewing copper, and  it sighed so deeply! Each sigh was like a shot. The boys played about in  the court, and the youngest wore the gold star on his breast which the Tree had had on the happiest evening of his life. However, that was over now — the Tree gone, the story at an end. All, all was over — every tale must end at last.'

The tree, torn from the forest, has known the happiness of Christmas Eve, only to expire in flames when Christmas is past. The sorrow of the end is contained within the happiness of the beginning. It is a cycle that pagans celebrated with their winter festival, the cycle of life, death, and re-birth - an idea that Christianity borrowed from them and which is celebrated, though altered and muddled, at Christmas.   

Nature is so abstracted in us today that, although we harvest forests of trees to be dragged into our cities and into our homes at Christmas, we no longer understand what they mean.

Robert Frost knew:

CHRISTMAS TREES
(A Christmas Circular Letter)

The city had withdrawn into itself
And left at last the country to the country;
When between whirls of snow not come to lie
And whirls of foliage not yet laid, there drove
A stranger to our yard, who looked the city,
Yet did in country fashion in that there
He sat and waited till he drew us out
A-buttoning coats to ask him who he was.
He proved to be the city come again
To look for something it had left behind
And could not do without and keep its Christmas.
He asked if I would sell my Christmas trees;
My woods––the young fir balsams like a place
Where houses all are churches and have spires.
I hadn’t thought of them as Christmas Trees.
I doubt if I was tempted for a moment
To sell them off their feet to go in cars
And leave the slope behind the house all bare,
Where the sun shines now no warmer than the moon.
I’d hate to have them know it if I was.
Yet more I’d hate to hold my trees except
As others hold theirs or refuse for them,
Beyond the time of profitable growth,
The trial by market everything must come to.
I dallied so much with the thought of selling.
Then whether from mistaken courtesy
And fear of seeming short of speech, or whether
From hope of hearing good of what was mine,
I said, “There aren’t enough to be worth while.”
“I could soon tell how many they would cut,
You let me look them over.”

“You could look.
But don’t expect I’m going to let you have them.”
Pasture they spring in, some in clumps too close
That lop each other of boughs, but not a few
Quite solitary and having equal boughs
All round and round. The latter he nodded “Yes” to,
Or paused to say beneath some lovelier one,
With a buyer’s moderation, “That would do.”
I thought so too, but wasn’t there to say so.
We climbed the pasture on the south, crossed over,
And came down on the north.

He said, “A thousand.”

“A thousand Christmas trees!––at what apiece?”

He felt some need of softening that to me:
“A thousand trees would come to thirty dollars.”

Then I was certain I had never meant
To let him have them. Never show surprise!
But thirty dollars seemed so small beside
The extent of pasture I should strip, three cents
(For that was all they figured out apiece),
Three cents so small beside the dollar friends
I should be writing to within the hour
Would pay in cities for good trees like those,
Regular vestry-trees whole Sunday Schools
Could hang enough on to pick off enough.
A thousand Christmas trees I didn’t know I had!
Worth three cents more to give away than sell,
As may be shown by a simple calculation.
Too bad I couldn’t lay one in a letter.
I can’t help wishing I could send you one,
In wishing you herewith a Merry Christmas.




I am an atheist, but I am not so bigoted that I would deprive others of what religion obviously gives them. As the one-time longshoreman and philosopher Eric Hoffer put it, "Belief passes. Having once believed never passes." Although I can't say I ever actually believed (I simply went along with what my parents wanted), I can recollect something that I felt when I prayed, and when I sang hymns along with others in church, or when I simply sat quietly (how else does one sit in a church?), while my mother lit candles and prayed or went to confession. The last time I attended a Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve was with my mother and sister in 1996. I was in Korea for Christmas in '97, and my mother died in '98.

I watched a recent interview on the BBC with the Irish novelist Colm Tóibín , who also lost his religion somewhere along the way. He claimed that he finds it impossible to listen to Bach without feeling something other than his reaction to the beautiful notes, something that, he said, can only be called "spiritual." 

This is funny to me, because what I hear when I listen to Bach is math - a wondrously beautiful mathematical equation swirling around me. Since I was not much good at math, Bach - and every other baroque composer - isn't one of my favorites. Perhaps when I listen to Mahler or to John Coltrane I get closer to the feeling Tóibín mentioned. But isn't he talking about aesthetic "beauty"? Certainly the symmetry of a great work of art, of a great poem, can put one in mind of the divine - but the divine what? 

Whatever spirituality may be or from wherever it may come, I think that it has something to do with a desire for some kind of self-transcendence, for belonging to something more, something greater than ourselves or greater than the sum of all our separate selves. Christmas seems (or used to seem) like an immense communal celebration. But there were always people who felt left out of the festivities, either because they weren't married or had no family. Just think of poor Charlie, the elevator operator in John Cheever's story "Christmas Is a Sad Season for the Poor." After telling all of the tenants whom he meets in the elevator on Christmas Day "I think Christmas is a very sad season of the year," he explains:

"It isn't that people around here ain't generous - I mean, I got plenty of tips - but, you see, I live alone in a furnished room and I don't have any family or anything, and Christmas isn't much of a holiday for me."

The tenants in Charlie's Manhattan apartment building feel so sorry for him that, one by one all that morning, they ring for him to come by and get some of their food and drink - every conceivable food and alcohol. And Charlie takes all the dishes and glasses and bottles downstairs to the locker room and eats and drinks so much on his breaks that, by that afternoon, he is so drunk that he terrifies one of his elevator passengers ("Strap on your safety belt, Mrs. Gadshill! We're going to make a loop-the-loop!") and she complains to the superintendent and gets Charlie fired on Christmas Day.

A hundred years ago, Thomas Hardy, a deeply pessimistic poet and novelist, expressed the strange longing that I sometimes feel at Christmas in his poem "The Oxen":


Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
“Now they are all on their knees,”
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
“Come; see the oxen kneel

“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,”
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.


Faith was something that Hardy probably once felt, but in 1915, and for a long time, it was missing from his life. Yet, in this poem, Hardy feels that, especially at Christmas, something is lacking in him, something he once felt, if only when he was a child. 

In the first verse in chapter 11 of Hebrews, Saint Paul writes that "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." For many, faith is all the evidence they need. For others, it's the hope that inspires it that falsifies faith. Ah, if only wanting and having were the same thing! Then I would be home with my sister in snowy Alaska, instead of where I am - an uprooted fir tree, lost among the tinkling palms for yet another tropical Christmas.

Paths of Glory

There is a curious history to Paths of Glory. The film that Stanley Kubrick made in 1957 was adapted from a novel by Humphrey Cobb. Cobb (1899-1944) was an American who enlisted in the Canadian army in 1916 and fought in France in the First World War. His novel, published in 1935, was based on an actual incident. The novel had no title when it was submitted for publication, so the publisher held a contest to find an appropriate title and the winner suggested the words from Gray's elegy.

Another book about the First World War called Paths Of Glory existed before 1935, a collection of journalism written for the Saturday Evening Post by an American named Irvin S. Cobb (1876-1944). The earlier book, published in 1915, makes no mention of the incident on which Humphrey Cobb's novel concentrates. The two Cobbs were not related, although both of them wrote for Hollywood films - Irvin wrote titles for silent films and some of his Judge Priest stories were adapted to the screen by John Ford, and Humphrey wrote the script for the Humphrey (!) Bogart film, San Quentin - and both men died in New York City in 1944 within 45 days of each other.

In 1957, when Stanley Kubrick was hired by Dore Schary at MGM to work on film scripts, Kubrick remembered reading Humphrey Cobb's novel and he suggested it to Schary. When Schary showed no enthusiasm for it, Kubrick bought the rights to the book from (Humphrey) Cobb's widow. After writing a script with Calder Willingham, Kubrick and his producer James B. Harris showed it to Kirk Douglas, who saw its potential for his own company Bryna Productions. Douglas got distribution backing from United Artists, and shooting of the film Paths of Glory was scheduled for locations in Bavaria. According to Douglas, when Kubrick arrived in Munich at the Bavaria Filmkunst Studios for the shoot, he showed Douglas changes he had made in the script. Douglas told him to stick to the script he approved.

Being an American film director in the 1950s presented Kubrick with two problems - how could he be successful and keep himself independent of the Hollywood system, and how could he avoid becoming just another exception - like Orson Welles - that proved the rule? Kubrick did the opposite, quietly making a name for himself in America before finding a way, with Lolita (1962), of getting himself out of America altogether. Establishing his production company, Hawk, Ltd., in the UK, it was there that Kubrick produced his best work and where he resided until his death in 1999.

During the making of his film version of War and Peace, King Vidor claimed that he had an advantage over Napoleon when he staged the battle of Borodino for the film, since he was in command of both the French and Russian armies. Battle scenes have occupied the creative resources of some of the greatest filmmakers, quite understandably because of their extreme visual impact. Shots of dozens, sometimes hundreds of people doing violence to one another are unlikely to leave any viewer feeling ambivalent about them. Film is a kinetic art - hence the word cinema. Our eyes are attracted irresistibly to movement. And what could possibly be more kinetic in a film than a battle scene?

The trouble with battle scenes for the filmmaker is precisely their ability to thrill. Even when, as in Apocalypse Now, a filmmaker tries to show that war is of its nature insane, he often succumbs to the spectacular qualities of combat. If one were to ask viewers of Apocalypse Now to name their favorite scene, I doubt that many would fail to name the famous morning helicopter raid, with speakers on board the helicopters blasting Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" and a deranged Colonel telling us how the napalm smells like victory.

While he wasn't exactly a pacifist, Kubrick was avowedly anti-war. He tackled the subject of war head-on in Paths of Glory and Full Metal Jacket, both set amidst two conspicuously futile wars. The First World War had been tackled before in American films, most notably in King Vidor's The Big Parade and Lewis Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front. Kubrick used a German military adviser, a Baron no less, to help him re-create the trench warfare depicted so vividly in Paths of Glory. The trenchworks and the terrain of No Man's Land (the cratered, barb-wired stretch of land between the enemy trenches) that the production constructed reminded me of Siegfried Sassoon's lines from his poem "Aftermath":

Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz—
The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?
Do you remember the rats; and the stench
Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench—
And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?

The scenes also make one aware of how immobile and unchanging the war had been for two years. Having been a soldier myself (although I never saw combat), watching the battle scenes in Paths of Glory is tough going, even after watching it for the fourth time.

But what makes the scenes most effective is Kubrick's avoidance of the worst mistake that so many directors make in such scenes: momentary departures from the perspective of the soldiers to a panoramic, or bird's eye, view. Even Steven Spielberg committed this error in Saving Private Ryan during the landing scene when he cut away to show us the view of the beach from a German pill box. Kubrick twice shows us a periscopic view of the French lines during his battle scene, but it was used to show us what General Murot sees from the safety of his command post in the rear.

It is 1916. After two years of fighting that has resulted in staggering casualties and a virtual strategic stalemate along a front stretching from Belgium to Switzerland, two French generals conceive yet another offensive to take a position known as the "Ant-Hill." General Murot, who sees it as an opportunity for promotion, goes directly to the front line to inform Colonel Dax, commander of a battalion holding the position closest to the objective of the plan. Dax objects to the plan but assures the General that he will lead the attack himself. When the attack takes place, and the Ant-Hill is not reached by the French soldiers, Dax discovers that many of the men in his battalion never left their trenches. When Murot learns of this, he orders the artillery battery to open fire on their own lines, but a radio operator refuses to relay the order to the guns. Murot demands that a hundred men from the battalion be shot for cowardice, but he settles for just three. Colonel Dax, a former defense attorney, volunteers to defend the three soldiers, who are chosen at random. But the trial is a sham and the men are sentenced to death. When Dax is offered General Murot's position, he angrily refuses it and he is told that the men of his battalion are being ordered back to the front.

The film has serious weaknesses. The acting is uneven because there were two different kinds of actors in the film. George Macready and Adolphe Menjou, crusty old Hollywood veterans, do their best with their roles. They were both expert at playing villains, except that their roles in Paths of Glory were based on actual people in actual situations. Their performances make this a little hard to believe. When they are onscreen with actors whose concentration is on their characters rather than the camera, they seem unreal.

But the two generals they play are quite good at reminding the viewer of what every soldier knows: that they are being commanded by old men who have neither knowledge nor interest in the hazards they endure daily. When it is agreed that some of the men will be court martialled for cowardice, General Murot wants a hundred men shot. He's talked down to twelve before he then proposes just three. The numbers are a clear reminder of Genesis, in which Abraham talks to the Lord, who "sat in the tent door in the heat of the day." He tells Abraham that Sodom and its inhabitants is to be destroyed, but Abraham asks him if within the city he can find fifty righteous would He "spare the place." The Lord agrees. Then Abraham talks him down to forty-five, then forty, then thirty, until he gets to ten.

Watching Kirk Douglas, who celebrated his 99th birthday on December 9, it's easy to see what attracted him to the role of Colonel Dax. We're reminded that it's his film when we see him for the first time, shirtless, showing off a physique he was evidently proud of. His impressive pecs are almost as famous as his cleft chin.

Paths of Glory is a powerful indictment of the stupidity and ambition of the commanders who were prosecuting the war, but it does not go easy on the common soldiers, either, who are represented as sometimes courageous but also incredibly thick, even sheepish when ordered to go "over the top" to almost certain death. Some of the soldiers are played by actors whom Kubrick directed before and since, like Joseph Turkel and Timothy Carey (despite Carey's being fired during the shoot). They're familiar faces to Kubrick fans, but their acting is noticeably off. When Carey starts bawling when he learns he is to be executed, I wondered what kept Kubrick from firing him sooner. 

Some of the film's irony is unnecessarily pointed. The music under the opening credits is the Marseillaise. I remember reading a review by Truffaut that contemptuously mentioned an inaccuracy in the comportment of the soldiers (Truffaut served in the French army). What Truffaut didn't know was that, by law, the uniforms and comportment of soldiers in a film cannot be a hundred per cent accurate. And I could be wrong, but I find it hard to believe that a firing squad would have been conducted smack in front of a chateau in which the general staff in headquartered.

Then there is the ending, which occupies the final six minutes of the film. There was, according to Kubrick's producer, James Harris, to be a "happy ending" that was actually in the novel and was put in the script. The ending that was shot wasn't exactly happy, but was so oddly inconsistent with the grim tone of the rest of the film that some critics (correctly, I think) regarded it as a cop out.  Many others, however, think the scene is some kind of affirmation of humanity. 

In the closing scene, a crowd of French soldiers from Colonel Dax's regiment is drinking noisily in a tavern. Dax stops outside the tavern and looks inside. The owner of the tavern appears on an improvised stage above the tables and introduces a pretty young girl. The men react predictably with whistles and jeers. Calling for quiet, the man explains to the soldiers that the girl is German. The tavern owner tells the girl to sing, so she sings the only song she can think of - a sentimental song about a German "hussar." The effect of her quiet, amateurish singing brings tears to many of the soldiers eyes and many of them join her, humming the tune. Dax looks at the ground, knowing that the men are soon to return to the front, tells his adjutant to let them alone for a little longer, then turns and walks away.

The scene is so inconsistent with everything that comes before it that it almost seems transplanted from another film. The only excuse for its existence is the fact that the German girl, identified as Susanne Christian in the credits, became Christiane Kubrick, Kubrick's wife, shortly after shooting was completed, and they remained married for the rest of Kubrick's life.

Paths of Glory is much more than just an above-average Hollywood film. It is an achingly vivid, nervy, and highly original look at war. And Kubrick would expand on what he learned about shooting combat scenes in the assault on Burpleson Air Force Base in his masterpiece Dr. Strangelove, the ultimate statement about the madness of Mutual Assured Destruction (M.A.D.).