I knew something was up when, in the opening scene of the film, an actor was playing the guitar but he really knew how to handle that guitar.

“Once,” which was written and directed by John Carney, is a low-budget ($160,000) Irish love story that deservedly won a slew of awards. The film features musicians Glen Hansard (a first-rate musician who has played with the Irish rock band The Frames) and Markéta Irglová as struggling Dublin musicians who fall in love, creating the atmosphere for their encounters with the music that they wrote and performed both in the movie and in real life (all but one of the many songs performed during the movie were written and performed by Hansard and Irglová. Carney knew of Hansard because Carney had played bass guitar in a band with Hansard prior to becoming a film director.

Anyone who has ever had the opportunity to make high-quality music with someone with whom they have a romantic urge knows a secret that I’m a bit hesitant to share: playing music really can be better than sex. Director John Carney knew that the music-making between the two costars had to be the focus because, in this film, the music carried the romance on several levels. The intensity of the romance was palpable throughout the film, especially during an early scene where the costars “borrowed” a music store as a scene for their first jam.

My wife Anne sings and plays the flute (no, not at the same time!) and I play guitar and sing. We’ve performed together as musicians–we thus know a thing or two about the intersection between romance and music. We arranged for Netflix to send us this DVD. We watched it tonight and we both thought highly of it. We were astounded at how incredibly personal the film was. I didn’t know anything about the actors until after the video had finished playing, but then we watched some of the special features and were amazed. It was only then that I realized that Hansard had almost no acting experience prior to this film and that the beautiful Czech Markéta Irglová had absolutely no acting experience. As it turns out, Hansard recommended Irglová for the part. Prior to this project, Irglová and Hansard had worked together as musicians (she plays guitar and piano).

Consider this: How often do you see an award-winning film starring two adults with almost no acting experience? In an interview, director Carney claims that “anyone can act,” but that it is a matter of bringing it out. He succeeded in bringing out the costars’ inner-actors by carefully setting the moods for each scene, drawing on lots of improvising during the shooting and utilizing lots and lots of carefully crafted hand-held video.

Fate assisted Carney in bringing out the chemistry between the actors in “Once.” The 37-year-old Hansard and the 19-year-old Irglová started falling in love with each other while this film was being shot. Carney recognized one of his roles, then, as trying to disguise some of these intense natural feelings between the actors, rather than trying to concoct them. Of course, the film gives us some complications along the way, enough to keep the film interesting.

The end result was phenomenal, and it didn’t hurt that the music was so musical. I’m not trying to be silly with his comment. So very often, music is assembled and cranked out rather than performed from the heart. It is for this reason that there are many terrific musicians with basic musical skills who are better musicians than professionals with higher-level technical skills. The ability to play from the heart is thus the great leveler of musicians.

I certainly won’t spoil the plot for any of you who might want to rent this fine video. When you’re done watching it, though, I guarantee that you’ll think of the characters as real life people who are still living their lives across the Atlantic Ocean. This video seemed so real that the actors commented that they have been approached by quite a few people (subsequent to the film’s release) who asked about how things were going these days, as though this fictional drama were a real-life documentary. Not that anyone could blame them for the confusion . . .

This morning I went to see the third installment of the Shrek movies. It was a 10 a.m. dollar show at a dying mall. As the escalator lifted me from the bowels of parking, my ears were assaulted by all manner of high pitched vocalizations. Apparently, every summer day care facility in the area decided that a morning movie was a good idea.

Armed with warm popcorn and a heavy flannel shirt, I picked the one theater of the three showing this film at this time that seemed less crowded and to have a higher ratio of authority figures to little darlings. It is July, so the warm shirt is a necessity in these venues.

This movie is better than the first sequel. Of course, the graphics and controls have evolved. But the story and characters seemed less forced. We are not talking high art, after all. There were plenty of wild takes, pratfalls, and flatulation jokes to keep the young-uns amused. There were also enough cultural references to both our modern world and to the various fairy tale universes to keep the adult intellect from nodding off.

But I was inspired to write this because of the audience. I hadn’t been to a kids movie with mostly kids since I was one of them. There never was a moment of silence from the audience. But to the credit of the herders, nannies, and moms, the dialog was only rarely drowned out. Some babies cried, some toddlers whined, and elder siblings sometimes forgot the public setting and began narrating along, until shushed. It really wasn’t too bad, once I accepted the inevitable. I’m about as adaptable as a cat, that way. Grudgingly.

I will have to see the movie again, in a venue where I can hear the nuances of the voices.

Schrecklichkeit? A German word that translates to “fearsomeness”.

I’ve been following the reviews of the Ben Stein “Expelled” movie since it was first shown. Many of them properly criticize it for its many inherent cinematic flaws. Others angrily take it to task for its clear violations of sense or sensibility. There is also ExpelledExposed.com, the not-mentioning of which I get chided for every time I post about this movie.

Then there are some who applaud it for “speaking the truth” and “opening conversations”. On my second post about this movie, I asked people to send me links to any non-negative review coming from sources outside of the Discovery Institute (Answers in Genesis, EvolutionNews.org, etc). I suspect that there is now an effort afoot to produce as many positive reviews as there are negative ones, in order to keep things “fair and balanced” online.

After the initial spate of bad reviews by reputable critics, various Christian columnists have been lauding it for exposing the religious suppression of the “Scientific Theory of Intelligent Design” and especially the efforts of reviewers (and scientists, and “W” appointed conservative judges) to associate this “scientific theory” with the openly religious (and mostly equivalent) ideas of Creationism. Bad intellectuals, bad experts.

But, what is this Scientific Theory? Well, an idea has to have 3 elements to qualify as a scientific theory :

1. Explain all currently and previously observed facts in the category of interest in terms of natural laws.
2. Describe what facts, if discovered, would prove it false.
3. Make predictions about future (as yet undiscovered) measurements or discoveries, and suggest how these might be found.

As near as I can tell the Scientific Theory of Intelligent Design misses on all three counts. (more…)

I want to share with everyone a passage from the opening of the movie The Gods Must be Crazy. This silly 1980s movie provides a very oversimplified, idealized image of African Bushmen, but at the same time gets its label of modern westernized man spot-on. This excerpt from the film’s opening narration always makes me pause and consider the needless complexity of modern life:

“…Here you find civilized man. Civilized man refused to adapt himself to his environment. Instead, he adapted his environment to suit him.

So he built cities, roads, vehicles, machinery. And he put up power lines to run his labor-saving devices. But he didn’t know when to stop.

The more he improved his surroundings to make life easier, the more complicated he made it. Now his children are sentenced to years of school, to learn how to survive in this complex and hazardous habitat.

And civilized man, who refused to adapt to his surroundings, now finds he has to adapt and re-adapt every hour of the day to his self-created environment.

For instance, if it’s Monday and 8:00 comes up, you have to dis-adapt from your domestic surroundings…and re-adapt yourself to an entirely different environment. 9:00 means everybody has to look busy. 10:30 means you can stop looking busy for 5 minutes…And then, you have to look busy again. Your day is chopped into pieces. In each segment of time…you adapt to new circumstances.

No wonder some people go off the rails a bit.”

Re-reading this part of the script really gets my mind a-brewing, thinking about all the wasteful, stress-inducing things we do to make life “easier”. More on this soon.

If I were asked to divide the world into two groups of people, I would flatly refuse. It is extremely unfair, I would argue that it would be absurd to divide humans, as ineffably complex and diverse as they are, on the basis of one quality or trait. But then again, that would just be me being politically correct. I actually believe that on some level, all of us tend of categorize people into two groups on the basis of one overarching quality. We tend to empathize with individuals who ‘have’ that quality, and believe that the world would be a better place if everyone were like them. For some this ‘vital’ quality is hard work, for others humility, and for some others, it may be looks, or a sense of style. The quality that I regard as most important is the ability to be affected by your surroundings.

I have to come to realize that I have always tended to view the world as consisting of two groups of people. The first group consists of individuals who only concern themselves with the interests of their own selves and that of the immediate circle of family and friends. These individuals do the work that is expected of them, and have no interest or concern for people who are not directly related to them. The other group, whose members I admire, consists of individuals who feel connected to and, hence, are affected by the larger environment they live in.   They take a keen interest in their extended surroundings. Some of them even have a sense of moral obligation to alleviate humanity and human condition as a whole. I term people who belong to the former group as ’shallow’ and people who belong to the latter group as ‘humane’. Lately though, I have noticed, in many instances, an inexplicable overlapping of these two groups. Some people are so difficult to categorize into either of these groups that I have begun to question the very foundation of my system of assigning worth to individuals. Are the “humane” people of today genuinely humane, or are they merely a more fashionable manifestation of an all-pervasive shallowness?

In this context, I would like to mention two movies which dwell on moral ambiguity amidst urban decadence, the first being French film director Jean-Luc Godard’s classic 1960’s movie Masculin Feminin. A fragmented and frustratingly abstruse movie, the movie documents (and comments on) the attitudes among the French youth in the 1960’s, is universal in its significance.  The filmmaker’s thoughts are equally valid for any youth almost anywhere in the developed or developing world today. The movie is about the doomed relationship between Paul, a young, politically aware, conscientious, idealistic man, and Madeleine, a girl who is an ardent consumer of pop culture, whose conscience has been rendered inactive by the self-indulgence encouraged by the consumerist culture around her. Through most of the movie, Madeleine is shown to be an insouciant creature. An aspiring pop-singer, she generally sports a blank expression on her face, inert to almost any problem around her, and most of her time is spent in combing her hair and applying make-up.

It would be easy to think that the director uses these two characters to represent the two ends of our modern moral spectrum: Paul, as an “ideal” human being, someone whom we must aspire to be like, and Madeleine as a symbol of urban decadence, the modern automaton, devoid of soul. But that is not the case, as the director is equally critical of both characters. The criticisms levelled against Madeleine, the quintessential consumer of modern capitalism, may have seemed unique in the 1960’s, but by now are commonplace in social and cultural criticism. She is a self-obsessed, vacuous woman who, despite her lack of intelligence and talent, manages to find success as a pop star.  This woman represents the modern individualistic and anti-communal notions of success. In a striking segment of the film entitled “Interview with a consumer product”, Paul interviews a young teenaged girl who has been chosen as the face of a fashion magazine. The girl has no qualms in admitting her ignorance of almost all political events around the world. Yet, she admits she is drawn towards rebels, and dislikes ‘yes men’. The last point made by her is quite telling.

In this context, I would like to reference another movie, “Network”, directed by Sidney Lumet in 1976.  (more…)

I don’t know anything about bodybuilding, or I didn’t until I watched Raising the Bar 2, a brand-new documentary by Mike Pulcinella (Mike wrote it, shot and edited it).  Mike often submits comments to this site, and we have corresponded by e-mail a number of times.  A couple weeks ago, Mike asked me whether I’d be interested in watching his new documentary, and I jumped at the chance.  Based upon Mike’s many comments to this site, I know him to be a thoughtful guy. I knew that he must’ve found something worthy of his time in this freakish-seeming endeavor of “bodybuilding.” 

In this documentary, Mike follows his brother Dave Pulcinella (and Dave’s significant other, Jenn Emig) as Dave trains for and competes in high-level bodybuilding competitions.  Before you jump to the conclusion that this is just some guy following his brother around with the camera, take a look at the trailer for “Raising the Bar 2,” available at Mike’s site. As you will see, Mike is a skilled filmmaker and storyteller and he is careful to make sure that this story retains real-life texture.  Mike’s edits are crisp and the soundtrack works well.  As for the storytelling, this kind of video could only have been accomplished by a filmmaker who had gained the complete trust of the participants.  In sum, this documentary is not always a glowing endorsement of Dave.

The documentary was compelling on several levels.  First of all, viewers will have an opportunity to see what is really like to compete in the sport of bodybuilding.  Full disclosure: before I saw this film, I thought that this sport was freakish.  I still think the sport is freakish, although I have now been reminded that the participants are real human beings and they are not physically or emotionally homogenous.

The sport ostensibly involves bodies, of course, bodies as machines, but as Dave Pulcinella comments, “It’s always a mind game.”  How could it not be?  After all, while the competitors are working up to the actual competitions, they must repeatedly force-feed themselves enormous amounts of food–Dave jams down 18 chicken breasts each day, to go with apparently endless numbers of eggs.  Simply hauling home the food from the grocery store would seem sufficient to build up muscles.

So why do these people participate in the sport?  Maybe the answer can be found in a joke often told by bodybuilders:

Q: How many bodybuilders does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A:  Three.  One to screw it in and two to say “Dude, you’re huge!”

The documentary moves us toward Dave’s participation in the Masters National Competition in Pittsburgh.  As you can imagine, there are ups and downs along the way.  Simply watching the workouts is exhausting.  What was surprising to me is that sculpting one’s body in such extreme ways requires a tremendous amount of planning and discipline.  It’s not like you can just go to the gym a few times a week.  (more…)

Some of us of are having a discussion in another thread about military recruitment strategies. Personally, I think those of us opposed to the war should be directing our energies toward counter-recruitment rather than accepting the poverty draft as a fact of life. We should also do everything we can to support AWOL and deserting soldiers who have experienced the futility of our presence in Iraq firsthand. If you know anyone in the military who wants to get out, please give them the GI rights hotline number: 1-800-394-9544 and the GI rights web site: http://girights.objector.org
This leads me to the title of this post: a documentary about the last real revolutionary working-class social movement in this country’s history: the GI movement against the Vietnam war.
From the Sir! No Sir! website:

In the 1960’s an anti-war movement emerged that altered the course of history. This movement didn’t take place on college campuses, but in barracks and on aircraft carriers. It flourished in army stockades, navy brigs and in the dingy towns that surround military bases. It penetrated elite military colleges like West Point. And it spread throughout the battlefields of Vietnam. It was a movement no one expected, least of all those in it. Hundreds went to prison and thousands into exile. And by 1971 it had, in the words of one colonel, infested the entire armed services. Yet today few people know about the GI movement against the war in Vietnam.

You can watch the theatrical trailer here, the extended 12 minute trailer here, and the punkass crusade counter-recruitment spot here.

Worms are fascinating critters.  There’s no getting around it.  Or maybe they’ve just seemed fascinating, ever since I first read Gary Larson’s hilarious 1999 book, There’s a hair in my dirt!  A Worm’s Story. 

Now, though, worms have made it to the big screen.  Last week I took my two young children to a movie called “How to Eat Fried Worms.”  We all enjoyed the movie, which provided some lessons on eating earthworms, as well as a lesson or two on getting along.  Click here for more information on the movie, which features a large cast of youngsters, along with Tom Cavanagh and Kimberly Williams.

There’s an interesting side story here. I was surprised that the book on which the movie is based has been the target of censors: 

Because of the novel’s content, the idea of eating worms as part of a bet is thought to be disgusting by some, it has been the frequent target of censors and appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000 at number ninety six.

Amazing, eh?  But back to the main topic of my post. I’d like to tell you the story about how I ate worms . . . but I can’t.  I didn’t even come close. 

Watching “How to Eat Fried Worms” reminded me of the time I was visiting Guangzhou, China in 2001 with my wife and our newly adopted daughter.  We were traveling with a large group of adoptive parents, accompanied also by a translator who recommended that we eat at a very nice restaurant in town.  I don’t recall the name of the restaurant, but I do remember that you could choose from a wide variety of dishes, including some specialties involving worms and bugs.  In fact, the live worms and bugs were on display at the front of the restaurant.  You could pick out the worms and bugs (or snakes or lobsters or other critters) and the chefs would then prepare them. 

Here’s a photo I took at the time.

As you can see, customers could select worms, beetle-looking bugs and other types of bugs.  I really wanted to try out some of these exotic foods, but there was absolutely no one in my group that was encouraging me. In fact, the suggestion that I might eat anything out of the ordinary was met with horror and gasps.  I remember looking at my wife for encouragement.  She didn’t try to dissuade me, but she gave me a look I interpreted as “do you expect me to ever kiss you again if I have to watch you eating worms?”   Bottom line:  I wimped out.  We did order a deep-fried pidgeon, which was presented with its head still on.  Yes, it tasted like chicken. 

While sitting in that restaurant that night, I remembered something a friend named Tim once told me: Morality starts with what one puts in one’s mouth. (more…)

I’m guessing that, based on this piece in Slate.com, Christopher Hitchens wasn’t impressed with Gibson’s apology.

There’s a lot to dislike about Gibson. He is given to furious tirades against homosexuals of the sort that make one wonder if he has some kind of subliminal or “unaddressed” problem. His vulgar and nasty movies, which also feature this prejudice, are additionally replete with the cheapest caricatures of the English. Braveheart and The Patriot are two of the most laughable historical films ever made. (Englishmen don’t form picket lines outside movie theaters when “stereotyped,” but still.) He has told interviewers that his wife, the mother of his children, is going to hell because she subscribes to the wrong Christian sect (a view that he justifies as “a pronouncement from the chair”). And it has been obvious for some time to the most meager intelligence that he is sick to his empty core with Jew-hatred.

This is not just proved by his twistedly homoerotic spank-movie The Passion of the Christ, even though that ghastly production did focus obsessively on the one passage in the one of the four Gospels that tries to convict the Jewish people en masse of the hysterical charge of Christ-killing or “deicide.”

Bill Maher agrees: alcohol didn’t cause Gibson’s outburst against jews.

Yes, liquor releases demons, but I want to know why the demon in Mel Gibson is hatred of the Jews to begin with . . . He, I believe, at least fights with himself about this. But he’ll never win as long as he’s so religious, because, I hate to tell you, the disease isn’t alcholism, the disease is religion.

In the days of the Hollywood studio system, films were classified as “A” or “B” pictures: the former were the studio’s prestige projects, the latter generally shorter and produced cheaply and quickly. Ironically, sometimes “B” pictures are more interesting today because they were less subject to studio control (due to their lesser prestige and expense): a clever director or producer could fly under the studio radar, so to speak, and include material that would never have been allowed into an “A” picture. 

A good example is the work of the producer Val Lewton, who declined the opportunity to produce “A” pictures for RKO in order to preserve his creative freedom.
 
Think for a moment: of all the Hollywood movies you have you seen which were set in the Caribbean, Latin America or the United States, how many acknowledged the role slavery played in the historical development and current social conditions of that country? Probably not many, but the topic was included in the 1943 “B” picture,  Lewton’s I Walked with a Zombie (1943). In this, Lewton was ahead of his time, and perhaps ahead of our time also.

I Walked with a Zombie (1943) is a retelling of Jane Eyre set on the fictional Caribbean island of Saint Sebastian. The story concerns Betsy Connell (Frances Dee), a young Canadian nurse who has taken a job on Saint Sebastian to care for the wife of a wealthy planter named Paul Holland (Tom Conway), who has lost her mind. The coachman who brings Betsy from her ship to the plantation does not hesitate to tell her of the historical relationship between the Hollands and the Black people (including himself) of Saint Sebastian:

“Holland’s a most old family, miss.  They brought the colored folks to the island.” He later refers to:

“. . .the enormous boat brought the Long Ago Fathers and the Long Ago Mothers of us all, chained to the bottom of the boat.”

He’s polite enough to not add “to work as slaves to create the wealth which the Holland family enjoys to this day” even though it is

obviously true. This isn’t a didactic picture, and the coachman is not delivering a speech: instead, he is a resident of Saint Sebastian, tipping off a newcomer about something every else on the island already knows.  The film’s central symbol is a ship’s figurehead statue of St. Sebastian run through with arrows, also referred to as “Ti-Misery” (“Little Misery”).  As Holland explains to Betsy:

“… it was once the figurehead of a slave ship.  That’s where our people came from.  From the misery and pain of slavery. “

Holland also explains the island custom of crying when a child is born, which seems peculiar to Betsy, as a heritage of slavery:

“For generations they found life a burden. That’s why they still weep when a child is born — and make merry at a burial.”

The Hollands are a leading family of the island, but they are also cursed,  and Mrs. Holland’s illness is the symbol of their decay. The source of that curse is the heritage of slavery: it made them rich, but also corrupted them and cut them off from other people By the end of the film the depths of Holland family’s corruption is revealed, and two of them are dead, one murdered by an arrow pulled from the Saint Sebastian statue.

I’ve always been a fan of Val Lewton films, and I recently discovered a “new” one which can be enjoyed for reasons which go beyond the Lewton trademark cinematography and low-budget creativity. The Ghost Ship (dir. Mark Robson, 1943) was pulled from theaters almost immediately after its release due to a copyright dispute, and has only recently become available on DVD.  It’s not the greatest Lewton film: indeed, the dialogue seems at times to have been written by Ed Wood’s only slightly smarter brother. But the theme expressed in The Ghost Ship is as relevant today as it was in 1943: the madness of authoritarianism.

The plot of The Ghost Ship concerns the progressive madness of Will Stone (Richard Dix), captain of the Altair, and the realization of, and triumph over, this madness by Tom Merriam (Russell Wade), third officer of the Altair. At first, the captain seems a pleasant fellow, although he does seem to have an obsession with cleanliness and some extreme ideas about authority, including one memorable dinnertime speech when, speaking of the crew, tells Merriam “I have the rights over their lives”. Strongly stated but perhaps not unreasonable, thinks Merriam: after all, a ship’s captain must be a figure of authority, because he is ultimately responsible for the ship and the lives of everyone on it.

As the plot develops, however, it is made clear that the captain’s authoritarianism is a manifestation of his progressive insanity. Further, challenges to his authority only exacerbate his condition. Stone interprets his “rights” literally, and a remarkable number of the ship’s crew meet their deaths in circumstances which implicate him. As the bodies pile up, however, the remaining crewmen refuse to acknowledge that anything is wrong; in fact, Merriam finds himself shunned after unsuccessfully bringing charges against the captain.  

A leader who demands blind obedience, who causes the deaths of others and refuses to consider that this might be wrong, who apparently hypnotizes those around him so they do not react to his crimes, who exists in isolation with no checks on his behavior: does this remind you of anyone? Always a recipe for disaster, in Germany in the 1940’s and in America in 2006.

I don’t think the political implications of The Ghost Ship are accidental. Its script was adapted by Donald Henderson Clarke from a story by Leo Mittler: the latter was a film director in Austria before emigrating the U.S. I can’t find much information about him, but judging from his surname and national origins I would guess that his departure from Austria was necessary to ensure his continued existence. So Mittler would have had personal experience with the madness of authoritarianism, and he expressed it in this screenplay.

Interestingly, Mittler’s most notable contribution to Hollywood may be that he wrote the story which was adapted for the screenplay Song of Russia (dir. Gregory Ratoff, 1944). This film, a lavish but otherwise innocuous melodrama involving a romance between Robert Taylor as an American conductor and Susan Peters as a Soviet pianist, was later denounced by HUAC as pro-Soviet propaganda.

The Vatican is going a little too crazy about The Da Vinci Code, it seems.   The Vatican’s claim is that the movie is “full of calumnies, offences and historical and theological errors regarding Jesus, the Gospels and the Church.”

It would seem that in a work of FICTION, errors of this sort, even flagrant errors, wouldn’t do nearly the damage to the Vatican as would the constant earnest claims (by other religions) that Rome is in error.   If this is the problem, though, the future promises many more senseless holy wars.

Or maybe the Da Vinci Code does something even worse than contradict the Vatican.  Perhaps The Da Vinci Code will suggest to movie-goers that the Bible itself has a history. 

In my mind, that would be a good thing.   The thought that the Bible didn’t drop out of a cloud, pre-translated to English, might send a lot of people back to actually investigate that history.   It might convince some believers to investigate the history of the Bible with the same vigor that they display when they investigate vacation packages, insurance rates or Barry Bonds’ physique.  Instead of just pecking away at the literature within, a random verse at a time, the movie might stagger Believers to take a big picture look at the Bible.  Perhaps movie-goers might even get serious enough about investigating Bible history to read works such as Bart D. Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus : The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (2005).

Once the movie prods them into beginning personal evidence-based inquiries, Believers might start to seriously question the unquestionable truths of the Good Book. 

That could explain why the Vatican is so incredibly angry.

Further to Sarah’s post about films that help make sense of George Bush’s presidency, another film that should be required viewing for anyone trying to make sense of Bush’s America is the movie, “Wag The Dog.”  As entertainment, it’s a disappointing movie; but, as political commentary, it utterly anticipates George Bush’s presidency.

The movie, released in early 1998 (note the proximity to the beginning of Bush’s first presidential campaign), is set in modern times, and is about an American president running for re-election.  A scandal occurs immediately before the election that threatens to cripple the President’s campaign, but before the scandal can undermine the President’s chances, his political advisors realize that the best way to win re-election is to divert public attention away from the scandal by creating an even bigger story:  a war.  So, they set out to manufacture a war. (more…)

There are certain films which should be required viewing for anyone trying to make sense out of life in George Bush’s America. One is Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957), shot in black and white on a budget of less than 1 million dollars. 
 

Paths of Glory is set in 1916 on and near the French front lines during World War I.  The film uses two principal venues: the French trenches and surrounding battleground, and a palace which serves as the officers’ field quarters. The French commander General Broulard (Adolphe Menjou) orders a senseless and suicidal assault on a German position referred to as “The Anthill”. After the assault fails, Broulard orders three men court-martialed  for cowardice, to serve as an example to the others. Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas), who led the assault, is appointed to defend them, although the verdict is a foregone conclusion.
 

The main thing about General Broulard is that he doesn’t get his hands dirty. He doesn’t get down in the trenches, in fact we never see him outside the palace. He does not even attend the court-martial. Broulard has mastered the art of reaping all the rewards of being commander without coming anywhere near personal discomfort himself, and without having to acknowledge the results of his orders. 
 

Broulard could not function without a subordinate to carry out his bidding, a role fulfilled by General Mireau (George Macready). Mireau is more of a battlefield commander than Broulard, but his vanity and ambition easily outweigh his concern for the troops: the hint of a potential promotion convinces him to agree with Broulard’s plan to attack the Ant Hill. However, Mireau later learns, much to his surprise, that his loyalty is not reciprocated, and Broulard does not hesitate to sacrifice him when it becomes expedient to do so.
 

Dax is the heroic figure in the film, who strives to maintain regard for human life in the midst of a brutal war and in the face of obliviousness, incompetence and inhumanity from his superiors. Most significantly, he refuses to play along with Broulard in order to promote his own career, a fact which genuinely surprises Broulard who apparently can comprehend no other motivation for action. The crux of the film is a slightly surreal sequence in which Broulard is summoned out of a formal ball by Dax, who tries to get him to stop the execution of the three scapegoated men. Dax appeals to reality and simple humanity, while Broulard uses his privileged position to ignore both:
 

Dax: The attack was impossible from the start. The general staff must have known that.

Broulard: Colonel Dax, we think we’re going a good job running the war. You must be aware of the fact that the general staff is subject to all kinds of unfair pressures from newspapers and politicians. Maybe the attack against the Ant Hill was impossible. Perhaps it was an error of judgment on our part. On the other hand, if your men had been more daring, they might have taken it. In any case, why should we have to bear any more criticism than we have to?

Of course, if no one can know anything, there is no reason to try to make the world a more just place. Because who can say what justice is? Who can say what anything is? This line of reasoning is pleasing to generals quartered in palaces and displeasing to soldiers sent to meaningless deaths.
Unfortunately, I’m not sure we have a Colonel Dax in the United States at the moment: if we do, he’s not getting much airtime. But I bet you can think of a parallel for General Broulard. Hint: I’m thinking of someone who spent the Vietnam War defending Texas from Oklahoma. And any future General Mireau’s may want to take note: just because you put out for your boss, don’t assume he’ll protect you when it counts. Not if throwing you over the side will save his own neck.
 

Paths of Glory was released a week after David Lean’s Technicolor blockbuster The Bridge on the River Kwai. Lean’s film won the Academy Award for Best Picture while Paths of Glory did not get a single nomination, which leads me to conclude that Hollywood had no more taste for social criticism in 1957 than it has today.
 

Sarah Boslaugh

Continuing to sort out my thoughts from the recent Popular Culture Association convention in Atlanta, I recall a discussion about whether the movie Brokeback Mountain told a universal love story or whether the point of the movie lay in its specificity. I think that’s the sort of question which doesn’t have an answer, but can tell  you a lot about the person asking and/or answering it. 

I’m assuming that anyone able to access the internet to read this post is familiar with Brokeback Mountain the movie. While I enjoyed the movie, I didn’t think it was so all that: to me it was a story about denying your innermost self, with tragic consequences, set in a more scenic part of the country than is typical for such stories. But I’m more interested in Brokeback Mountain the phenomenon, in particular the way that people react to the movie and what that can tell us about American culture early in the 21st century.

One comment in many mainstream reviews (i.e., not in the gay press) of Brokeback was that it told a “unversal” story. I have a feeling that the reviewers thought they were paying the film a compliment. But what they were really saying, from their positions of power within the mainstream culture, was that the most important fact about a film about outsiders was that it could appeal to insiders, i.e. to people located solidly in the mainstream. In fact, if people can classify a story as “universal” they can overlook the specificity of the characters, in this case two men in love with each other who could not find a way to live in their society and express that love in a sustained manner.

Well, that reminds me of discussions about whether someone’s behavior was “too Jewish” or whether the most important thing for a deaf person was to be a really good lipreader so hearing people were not reminded of their difference. Fortunately we’ve moved beyond those two examples, at least in polite society, but apparently it is still acceptable to refuse to acknowledge the reality of same-sex love, banishing it to the ether with the label “universal”.

And here’s a question for the someone with internet access and some time on their hands: how often do minority publications refer to stories about the dominant culture as universal, and how many times do mainstream publications refer to stories about minorities as universal? I think the answer will demonstrate that the “universal” label is a declaration of power by the dominant culture which allows it to negate the reality of those minorities by simply failing to acknowlege their specific existence. 

Sarah Boslaugh