Months
of local derby dearth ended last night with the NJRD (New Jersey Roller Derby)
All Stars on its home track in Morristown hosting the Black Rose Rollers All
Stars from Hanover PA. The bout didn’t disappoint. It was hard-fought between
two well-matched teams who repeatedly traded the lead. Despite fancy footwork
by #44 Maulin Rouge in and #123 Bacon 4 Mercy in early jams, both encountered
fierce blocking that limited gains on both sides, even during power jams. Black
Rose overcame an NJRD early lead, and at 10 minutes in the score stood at NJRD
21-Black Rose 26. At 20 minutes Black Rose led by 22 points. With notable jams
by #12 Shannanigunz and #352 Olive Havoc the half-time score stood at NJRD
86-Black Rose 97.
11
points is not much of a spread in derby and both teams returned to the track
energized in the second half. Maulin Rouge fought through brutal defenses to
close the gap to 93-97. A successful jam by #13 Sukkubus Strixe recaptured the
lead for NJRD. #908 Jeno-go-go in a multiple pass jam expanded NJRD’s edge
132-97. Olive Havoc returned the favor, putting Black Rose ahead once again
145-147. NJRD clawed back in front and built up its advantage for the rest of
the bout. Sukkubus Strixe skated as final lead jammer adding the last points of
the match for NJRD. Final score of NJRD 208
- Black Rose 164.
MVPs
Deja Blue and BrieAnn Jam for Black Rose
Rosa
Ruckus and Shannanigunz for NJRD
There
are few sports as fun to watch. If the reader has his or her doubts, I
recommend giving it a try.
In past reviews I’ve proposed the curious state of
contemporary gender relations as a possible reason that romantic comedies –
once the prime staple of Hollywood – haven’t done well with critics or
audiences since the beginning of this century. By and large, folks are too
cynical to buy into the premise anymore. They buy into infatuation, which
pretty much everyone has experienced, but that is different from romance of the
romcom sort (it is likely to be one-sided for one thing) and is broadly acknowledged
as something likely to end badly. The successful cinematic exceptions are
telling. Something outlandish is introduced to the plot to explain the romance,
which apparently is otherwise inexplicable: a character is a time traveler (Kate and Leopold), the lovers have a
psychic connection (In Your Eyes),
they’re too young to know any better (Moonrise
Kingdom), or they’re actually mentally ill (Silver Linings Playbook). With their screenplay for Playing It Cool,Chris Shafer and Paul Vicknair approached
the problem (not very successfully) by writing a meta-romcom about a
screenwriter who is stuck midway through a romcom script because he thinks all
the romcom clichés are no longer credible. Even Disney has gotten on board. Frozen, Brave,and Maleficent are at best dismissive
of romance; the males in these flicks are feckless (Phillip and Kristoff), oafs
(Merida’s suitors), or downright evil (Stefan and Hans).
The cynicism reflects the changing way in which
people live – especially in the prime youthful movie-going demographic. This
clearly shows up in the waning of marriage. The marriage rate is lower than it
ever has been. The median age of first marriage for those who bother at all is
higher than it ever has been. Not just formal marriage but all types of
committed relationships are less common. According to Gallup, “Young adults are
not simply swapping marriage for living together, but rather [are] less likely
to be making the more serious commitment associated with moving in together –
whether in marriage or not.” A lot of this may have to do with the declining
fortunes of men. According to Time, median
male wages in real terms are down 20% since 1980; young men make up only a
third of current college undergrads. Most young guys are, in short, lousy
prospects, and according to a 2012 Pew study “a secure job” still topped the
female list of requirements for a partner. Only the upper-middle-class and
wealthy minority of men and women still get married in large numbers, and they
tend to do so with each other. (This exacerbates class differences, but that is
a matter for another blog.) Never mind committed relationships, Millennials don’t
even date as much as Xers and Boomers did at their ages. None of this is
fertile soil for the presuppositions of romcoms. Audiences still might have the
same romantic fantasies as they always did, but they find it harder to “suspend
disbelief” for two hours while indulging them; what they see on the screen just
isn’t consistent with their own experience or expectations.
Nonetheless, I’m up for seeing how filmmakers try
to deal with modern cynical audiences, so on Monday I went to see How to Be Single, currently in theaters.
A major *Spoiler* is included below, so those for whom that matters may wish to
stop reading. There are several overlapping plots – all distinctly from a
female point of view – but the central story is that of Alice (Dakota Johnson),
who feels she never has experienced being truly single. She always has been in
some relationship. So, she tells her boyfriend Josh they should take a break
from each other. That way, if they do end up back together, they won’t blame
each other for having missed out on life. Alice moves to Manhattan where her
sister Meg is a single-by-choice OB/GYN. Alice meets Robin (Rebel Wilson) at
the law firm where she gets a job as a paralegal. It doesn’t take much
freewheeling casual sex for Alice to decide the experiment is over; she
contacts Josh to resume their relationship but discovers he meanwhile has met
someone else whom he plans to marry. Robin, who embraces carefree excess as a
lifestyle, tries to push Alice to do the same. Alice’s NYC romances, including
with a single dad, don’t work out. There are subplots with Robin, with Meg who
decides to have a child by artificial insemination and then meets a younger
man, and with Lucy (Alison Brie) who methodically seeks out the perfect partner
with social media. Tying the plots together is Tom the bartender who offers
string-free sex and a little male perspective.
Alice’s epiphany (the reason for the spoiler alert
above) comes when she realizes that she has not been learning how to be single;
instead, she has kept trying to become part of a couple. Being single is
something you do alone: it doesn’t mean you don’t have friends; it doesn’t mean
you don’t have dates; it means you have no responsibilities to anyone but
yourself. That’s a pretty cool thing at any time, but especially in one’s 20s. The
final scene has Alice watching and savoring the sunrise alone in the Grand
Canyon, something one can do at a whim when single, but which is a hassle when
not. Adult singledom is a great and free period of life; for some of us it is
the only one we ever want.
How to Be
Single is by no means a great movie or even a particularly good one, but I’ll still
give it a thumbs up for trying out a romcom ending that suits the times.
Not as relentlessly raucous as Rebel Wilson's lines might indicate:
Thomas Jefferson showed some insight when he listed
among inalienable human rights “the pursuit of happiness.” Not happiness, mind
you. He didn’t perceive any right to that: only to the pursuit of it.
That is just as well, since repeated surveys show
that citizens of the nation he helped create have been growing unhappier for
more than 40 years. This feels correct to me: I personally remember people
smiling a lot more four decades ago than today. My anecdotal evidence has the
support of the Harris Poll, among others. A few years ago a report from the
National Bureau of
Economic Research got quite a bit of press from its conclusion that
women in the US are not only less happy than they were in the 1970s but are
less happy than men – in the 1970s they self-reported as happier than men.
Those who care about such differences may note that the gap has narrowed again.
According to Professor Jean M. Twenge (well-known for her studies of
Millennials), since 2010 men’s happiness has plummeted, too; so, now there is
little difference between them and the gals.
All those statements are vast generalizations, of
course. As always, there is a range of individual differences. There always are
people who are cheery by nature or grumpy by nature, and no amount of fortune
or misfortune seems to alter their fundamental dispositions. Yet there is such
a thing as a zeitgeist, in which folks on average may be more or less cheery.
There are also different kinds of happiness. Wealthy people (unsurprisingly)
report themselves happier in a general way than do poor people in the same
country. Yet if you ask “Are you happy today?” or “Were you happy yesterday?”
there is no difference at all in the responses of the rich, the poor, or those
in between. What the rich really mean when they report being generally happy is
that that they feel more secure. Security is definitely a valuable thing, but
it does not translate into day to day cheerfulness. On any given day a rich
person is as likely to be depressed as a poor one, and we live day by day.
Furthermore, the wealth effect works only within nations. Populations of
wealthier countries do not self-report as happier than those of poorer ones.
For what it’s worth, the cheeriest populations (on that daily basis) are in
Central and South America. The US rank is 33, which frankly is higher than I
would have guessed.
Studies led by Twenge of 1.3 million Americans
from 1972 to 2014 indicate an age correlation to happiness, and it is one that
has changed over time. Four decades ago happiness rose pretty steadily with
age. No longer. Nowadays, Millennials under 30 are a cheerful bunch: they are
the one group happier than their age-counterparts were in the 1970s. People
over 65 are pretty happy, too, as they were then. Those in between, however,
are more miserable than they ever have been. Twenge speculates that Millennials
feel good about the high expectations instilled into them until they realize
they won’t be met. While a substantial minority of Millennials do in fact wind
up with extraordinary salaries and lifestyles, the majority underperform to put
it mildly. Most of their lives turn out not so amazing after all, and they take
it hard. The folks presently 30-65 (older Millennials, all Xers, and younger
Boomers) have not had a good four decades, at least by their own judgment – and
not just economically.
Twenge doesn’t much address the happiness of
senior citizens, but the curious complacency of this group has attracted the
attention of psychologists for over a century. One might think the nearness of
death would make them fearful or depressed, but it doesn’t. My personal opinion
(as someone who will be in the age category soon enough, thank you) is that
this is related to Loss Aversion, which is the economic and psychological
principle that people dislike losses far more than they like equivalent gains.
This makes no sense in standard game theory, but it is how people behave. It is
why stock market crashes happen in a matter of days (or hours) while booms are comparatively
slow motion affairs lasting months or years: people scramble to sell in falling
markets in order to limit their losses but buy much more hesitantly into a
rising one. (“Animal spirits,” to use Greenspan’s term, do inflate bubbles, but
bubbles rarely just deflate again: they pop.) We fret about potential losses,
not only of property but of pride, social standing, friends, and so on. The key
word is “potential”: we’re pretty good at accepting inevitable loss once we’re
convinced it is in fact inevitable.
I remember a local judge back in the 1970s who was
a friend of my dad. When diagnosed with terminal cancer he underwent a complete
personality change. Formerly of conservative demeanor, he took to dressing in
white suits, opining on art, and being a “character.” Why? Because he had
nothing to lose. So what if anything he said or did damaged his career or his
status? With a far bigger loss inevitable, the rest hardly mattered. He simply
stopped giving a damn and was happier for it – for the 18 months or so he
survived. Most seniors don’t have as clear-cut an expiration date as he had,
but they know it isn’t so very far away. They don’t have as much reason to fear
loss other than the inevitable one, so they worry less.
Are there any lessons in this for the unhappy
30-65 crowd? Yes. In the grand scheme of things, we aren’t here for much longer
than our elders. Maybe that thought can help us not give a damn, too.
YA (young adult) dystopias are all the rage and
I’ve delighted in my share of them. Sometimes, however, one feels the urge to
leave one’s inner teenager behind while still contemplating the ride to hell in
the proverbial handbasket. My urge was satisfied last week by Angela Carter and
Vladimir Nabokov. There are a handful of novelists whose prose is so artful
that one suspects even their shopping lists are a joy to read. Carter and
Nabokov are among them. Both write with a richness and complexity that are fine
dining compared to YA fast food. I have enjoyed both over the years, but
somehow had missed two dystopic servings until now.
**
In Angela Carter’s scifi The Passion of New Eve (1977), the young Englishman Evelyn grows up
with an enormous crush on silent film legend Tristessa. All grown up, he moves
to New York for a professorship, but his timing is awful. American civil
society is collapsing. Crime in New York is beyond rampant while identity
politics escalates into full-blown civil war along lines of race, gender, and
ideology. California secedes, at least according to the proclamation of one of
the warring factions there. Evelyn’s job vanishes. He nonetheless finds time to
become involved with a pole dancer named Leilah whom he uses and callously
abandons. He drives west to escape her even though a flight back to the UK surely
would have been wiser.
In the Western desert Evelyn is captured by an
armed band of women who are worshippers of Cybele – and skilled bio-engineers.
They take him underground to meet the Mother, their leader, who surgically has
turned herself effectively into Cybele. There, Evelyn is re-engineered into a
woman – not just superficially but fully functionally. She is able to bear
children, which is what the Mother has in mind for her. Evelyn, renamed Eve, is
an extraordinarily beautiful and feminine woman at that; with her deep
understanding of male fantasy, she is effortlessly alluring, which proves to be
very much a mixed blessing. Eve escapes the Mother only to be captured again,
this time by a Charles Manson-ish lunatic named Zero who lives on a desert
ranch with his sycophantic young wives. Zero is sterile and somehow has got it
into his head that this is the fault of Tristessa, the silent film goddess who
had been Evelyn’s boyhood crush. Tristessa is still alive and lives nearby in a
bizarre glass house. Zero and the gang including Eve invade the home, but while
torturing Tristessa the homophobic Zero is shocked to discover Tristessa is
actually a man. Eve escapes again and more adventures follow including warfare
in LA, a re-appearance of Leilah, and an encounter with an old senile drunk
woman who might be a vision of Eve’s future.
Angela Carter is often called a feminist writer,
but, to steal a line from Wolfgang Pauli, that is “not even wrong.” Sex is at
the core of all her fiction, but in a complex way that is deeper than politics.
It is clear she sees power in femininity even where it seems to be absent. Zero
seems to keep his women literally enthralled, for example, yet they outnumber
him eight to one, so he doesn’t do so by force; only Eve is held by force, and
she only by the force of the other women. “But his myth,” Carter writes,
“depended on their conviction; a god-head, however shabby, needs believers to
maintain his credibility. Their obedience ruled him.” She says something
similar in her non-fiction The Sadeian
Woman and the Ideology of Pornography (1978), which is sympathetic both to
Sade and porn. Angela Carter died in 1992 at age 51.
**
Bend
Sinister (1947) by Vladimir Nabokov is far less surreal even though it is
set in the imaginary city of Padukgrad in an unnamed country with heavy Slavic
and Germanic influences. The official ideology of the state is Ekwilism, a quirkily metaphysical blend of fascism and communism, which Nabokov viewed as two sides of the same
coin. In the name of community and equality the state is tyrannical in ways petty
and grand. The protagonist, philosophy professor Adam Krug faces it all sardonically,
whether he is stuck on a bridge because the guards at each end dispute his privilege
to pass or if he is threatened with execution.
Krug knew Paduk, leader of the totalitarian "Party
of the Average Man," when they were both schoolboys. Paduk wants Krug, an
internationally respected philosopher, to endorse him and his party. Krug
resists until his son David is taken into custody and threatened. Krug gives
in, but through sheer bureaucratic incompetence rather than malice the wrong
David is returned to him. It turns out the right David was killed while in
custody. Paduk makes Krug another offer: he will release 24 political prisoners
(including some of Krug’s friends) if he will co-operate.
There is a grim graveyard humor to Krug. It is a
coping mechanism probably best understood by those who have lived in such a
regime. There is no happy ending except for a reminder by Nabokov that this is
fiction. This, too, is a grim joke, for in the 1940s it wasn’t so very
fictional – nor is it in some spots today.
**
While teen angst is all very well and good, both
of these books provide some grownup and thoughtful dystopian visions.
Recommended.
Not all writing is of a piece. There is no
guarantee that a writer who is good at one genre will be good at another. An
essayist might have no talent for short stories. Though song lyricists and poets
seem to do something very similar, that something isn’t exactly the same for each and
there is remarkably little crossover as Steve Allen amply demonstrated six
decades ago by reading rock lyrics
as though they were poems. A writer of science textbooks might write terrible
novels. A skilled novelist might be an uninspired screenwriter, e.g. F. Scott
Fitzgerald. Some authors can and do cross genres successfully. One has to grant
the novelist Faulkner his success with the screenplays To Have and Have Not and The
Big Sleep. Gore Vidal wrote well in any format. But they are more the
exception than the rule.
So, I had no high expectations for a scifi novel
written by Albert Brooks, whose thoughtful comedic screenplays I’ve enjoyed in
the past. Yet, he transitions pretty well in 2030: The Real Story of What Happens to America. Brooks originally
envisioned 2030 as a screenplay but
decided the fx budget alone would be bank-breaking, so he opted for a novel
instead.
Since before I was born, doomsayers have warned
that “our children” would face dire consequences from the ever ballooning
national debt. Every now and then the US federal debt becomes a major political
issue but the issue always fades as disaster fails to materialize for one
generation of children after another. Yet, consequences, if not a disaster, are at least being felt in the current
generation. As interest on the debt takes an ever larger share of the budget, the
federal government simply doesn’t have the money to do what politicians of
either the Right or the Left want it to do. The military is smaller than at any
time since the (short-lived) near-total demobilization after WW2 while new
infrastructure and social spending stalls for lack of cash. Tax increases, even
if politically possible and whether narrowly or broadly based, cannot possibly keep
up with already built-in entitlement and pension commitments and with growing
interest on the existing debt. Elected officials of any ideology have
surprisingly little room for real maneuver; they can make a difference only at
the margins and usually for the worse. All of this has an impact on the
economic circumstances and prospects of Millennials. The US is far from alone
in this self-imposed bind.
In Brooks’ 2030,
federal debt service alone eats up 3 trillion dollars per year – a number which
might not be far off from reality. Meanwhile, in this near-future, cancer and many
ailments of the elderly are at long last defeated; this sounds wonderful but it
means that the elderly population grows and grows with Boomers (my people) in
particular likely to hang on to 120 while chewing up ever more health care
expenses, social security, and whatever remains of the federal budget – and by
their numbers dominating political power. Effectively, young people pay for all
this with low wages, enormous private debt, high taxes, mandated purchases, and
a far lower standard of living than their parents and grandparents. The young
begin to respond violently; extremist youth groups and “lone wolves” launch
terror attacks against the old. There already was no money to deal with ordinary
expenses and the effects of climate change, but when the Big One hits
California, as it will one day, doing 20 trillion dollars in damage and
collapsing insurance companies, federal leaders are in a quandary. China is the
only country with the resources to lend that much money but is not willing to
do it. Brooks presents all of this via several parallel stories about
individuals. Primary characters include a young woman struggling with her
father’s expenses, a rich (and therefore personally unaffected but
ideologically committed) young terrorist, a billionaire who made his fortune on
health cures for the old, an assisted suicide doctor, lobbyists for AARP, a
survivor of the California ‘quake, and the President and his staff. I might be
making this sound like a polemic, but it is not. The stories are told with
Brooks’ characteristic low-key fatalistic humor. He ends (very mild *spoiler*)
on an upbeat note, which is probably the screenwriter overwhelming the
novelist: Hollywood endings and all that. But that is a minor complaint – if
indeed it is a complaint – about an otherwise well-executed scifi novel.
Boomers are no strangers to the Generation Gap. We
invented the term. We were ungenerous to our parents in the 1960s, and overly
sappy when we started to lose them in in large numbers in the 90s. Our parents
grew up in the Depression and fought the Second World War; they’d had enough
excitement from those experiences and wanted nothing more than security, a Cape
Cod home with a picket fence, and a Ford in the driveway. The radical social
changes (very much including shifts in gender roles) of the 1920s-40s not only
stalled but were reversed in the 1950s. We didn’t cut them much slack for this.
The Boomers’ 60s rebellion against it was very much needed, but we failed to
acknowledge just how much our rebellion was financed by the surpluses created
by our parents. We haven’t left similar surpluses to the generations after us, so
if they aren’t angry at us perhaps they should be. Millennials expect a lower
standard of living than we had – the first time this has happened in US history.
Whether this leads to the sort of conflicts in Brooks’ 2030 remains to be seen. They are not inevitable, but they are credible.
Any author who chooses “aliens invade earth” for
the plot of a book or a screenplay displays a either courage or hubris, for it has
(as the phrase goes) “been done.” HG Wells’ 1897 novel War of the Worlds alone has been brought to the screen more than
half a dozen times. Coming up with some original twist or perspective is
getting ever more difficult. Wave after wave of new fictional aliens continue
to wash over us nonetheless. Some presently are doing just that in theaters in the
suitably titled The 5th Wave, based
on the Young Adult novel of the same name by Rick Yancy.
In YA fiction, dystopias are the order of the day.
Teen readers don’t seem to view their futures as very bright – or at least they
have no patience for fiction that does. Whether they are right about that or
not (there are credible arguments either way) novelists such as Suzanne Collins
(The Hunger Games), Veronica Roth (Divergent), and James Dashner (Maze Runner) have tapped into their
sentiment as have the movies based on them. They also tap into distrust of
adult authority and disgruntlement at a world with too many rules. The
protagonists, naturally enough for YA fiction, are teens – and nowadays they usually
are young women. (F. Paul Wilson’s Jack
series is one of the few to buck that trend.)
Chloe Grace Moretz plays the protagonist Cassie in
the film adaptation of The 5th
Wave. When the alien party-crashers arrive at earth they trash the house.
They want the whole planet for themselves, but they want to scrape off the humans
while still leaving the place livable. So, after killing off a bunch of humans in
four massive but not planet-destroying ways, they turn the survivors against
each other in order to exterminate the last of them. Cassie just wants to survive
all of this and to reunite with her little brother from whom she was separated. As for romance, YA films – other than deliberately raunchy comedies – struggle with the current
paradigm of gender relations among young people in which male initiative in
romantic matters is problematical. The screenwriters for The 5th Wave handle this playfully. The two young men to
whom Cassie is attracted consist of one who is clueless and one who longs for
her but who is a paragon of restraint. In one scene there is a reversal of the
old trope of a male character voyeuristically peeking at women bathing in a
lake: Cassie hides in the bushes and spies on the pretty bathing Ethan (Alex
Roe). The guys in the movie who do ogle without comment a hard-nosed young
woman soldier (not Cassie) are appropriately punished by her.
Moretz is an appealing and competent young actress
who is no stranger to off-beat parts, e.g. Hit Girl in Kick-Ass, the vampire in Let
Me In, a werewolf in Dark Shadows,
and Carrie in the remake of Carrie.
By comparison her character in The 5th
Wave is almost normal, and she handles it about as well as it can be
handled. The film doesn’t try to be deep in any way and it doesn’t explore epic
themes other than the heroine’s journey, which is hard to avoid in the
circumstances. Nonetheless, it is an enjoyable adventure/disaster flick with likable actors.
The 5th
Wave is not near the top of the best YA dystopia list: The Hunger Games still occupies top spot. But it’s not at the
bottom either. It is reasonably good workaday scifi: not great but not awful. Two sequels
are planned, though ticket sales, as always, will determine the ultimate fate
of the series.
One of the better animated features to come out of
Pixar (parent company: Disney) in 2015 was Inside
Out, now available on Netflix and DVD.
Plot: Young Riley tries to adjust to her new life
when her parents, who have their own reasons to be stressed, move from
Minnesota to San Francisco. We see personifications of five emotions (Joy,
Fear, Anger, Disgust and Sadness) vying for control of the console in her
brain. The part of her that is Joy struggles to dominate the controls, and in
particular to sequester Sadness, but Sadness cannot be controlled so easily.
Sadness starts touching core memories. When Joy tries to intervene, both get
lost in the inner structure of Riley’s mind. In their absence from the command center, control is handed
over Fear, Anger, and Disgust. Riley becomes surly and erratic, and her
personality is damaged. Can Joy and Sadness find their way back?
The message, of course, is that we cannot repress
any natural human feeling without consequences. We have to learn to integrate
them all into our personalities. Accordingly, Inside Out is more thoughtful than most animated films, but since
it is aimed primarily at kids – and be warned that it most definitely is aimed
at kids – it is a simplified and sanitized version of the real internal war
inside each of us.
Moving beyond Disney for a moment, it is a curious
development that perceptions of the human psyche among so-called intellectuals
are more apt to be shallower today than they were a century ago. They tend
today to be thoroughly politicized, and there are few better ways to drain a
subject of real significance. The insights of Nietzsche and Freud are tossed
aside whenever they offend political correctness, which they do at every turn.
(Camille Paglia adds the Marquis de Sade to those two as another key
philosopher; having read the bulk of his surviving work, I see her point, but
I’m not quite ready to pay homage to a practicing… well… sadist.) Lately we
even have re-invented thoughtcrime, from which Fred and Sig had done so much to
free us by acknowledging both the arbitrary origins of morality and the
predatory aspects of our underlying natures. There are no thoughtcrimes, only
crimes of action. Nietzsche: “I laugh at those who think themselves good
because they have no claws.” The fact that we can be predatory (and are aware
of the fun in it) doesn’t mean we have to be; the capacity is what makes
refraining from using it noble. In Civilization
and Its Discontents Freud explicitly argued that thwarting the death
instinct’s destructiveness was necessarily a cause of individual unhappiness
but was the worthwhile price of civilization.
A version of Inside
Out that featured a Freudian struggle between the libido (Eros) and the
death instinct (Thanatos), among other motivations, might make an interesting
flick, though it surely would not be for kids. Strangely, one film series that
does include primary characters with complex personal motivations is Star Wars despite the simplistic
Manichaean universe which they inhabit, but that is a matter for another blog:
perhaps a matter for someone else’s blog.
So, given the age range for which it is intended,
I’m still giving Inside Out a Thumbs
Up.
