Unforbidden

When Paleolithic painters scrawled images on cave walls 20,000 years ago, critics viewing them by torchlight argued about whether they enlightened or corrupted society and about whether they should be censored. We don’t know that for a fact, of course, but since critics have argued about art in this way since there have been written records, it is not a big stretch to suppose they did so earlier as well. There always has been tension between supporters of unfettered artistic freedom and supporters of… well… fetters. Moralists see it as a choice between decadence and decency – sometimes between outright evil and decency. Moralists of a different stripe see the choice as prudery versus liberty. Beneath this tension is the more basic question of the purpose of art. Does it have a purpose? If so, should art uplift or simply reveal?

Decadent art?

The dramatic arts, when they came along, moved to the center of the debate. In the 5^th century BCE Euripides was regarded by conservative Athenian critics as decadent – even dangerous – compared to his elders Aeschylus and Sophocles. Sophocles himself remarked, “I depict men as they ought to be. Euripides depicts them as they are.” Indeed, though Sophoclean characters have their tragic flaws, there is a core of nobility in them. Euripidean characters, by contrast, at their cores are likely to be adolescently voyeuristic (Pentheus), cruelly vengeful (Phaedra), callously opportunistic (Jason), or murderous (Medea). Even Aristophanes, who was pretty edgy himself, satirized Euripides in The Frogs.

When drama moved to the movie screen the tensions remained unresolved. They are to this day. 100 years ago censors (acting sometimes through force of law and sometimes through social pressure) typically framed their objections in religious terms. Today the objections are more likely to be ideological, but whether the concern is cosmic sin or secular political correctness, the effects (and one supposes the underlying impulses) of censorship are similar. Neither side in the debate gets the upper hand permanently. Nannies and libertines trade off ascendency from one era to the next. One very special era in movie history was that of the early talkies (1927-1934) when censors were largely ignored: the pre-code era.

In order to head off regulation by Congress the Motion Picture Association adopted a self-regulatory production code in 1927 and updated it in 1930, but the studios in practice didn’t pay heed to it prior to 1934. Faced in that year with a more serious threat of legal restraints, The Motion Picture Production Code (commonly called the Hays Code) began to be broadly enforced by the studios. The code states, “No picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin.” A long and detailed set of rules for following the code (describing, for example, how married couples may be depicted in a bedroom and how long a kiss can last) soon developed alongside the code itself. All but a few of the restrictions would find support from PC censors today, albeit for differently stated reasons. Directors found ways to push the envelope, of course. In Notorious (1946) Hitchcock famously got around the 3-second limit for on-screen kisses by having Grant and Bergman kiss repeatedly over 3 minutes, but never more than 3 seconds at a time. Still, the code remained a real force until the mid-1960s. Prior to then, many of the most interesting movies ever made were pre-codes.

The better of the pre-code films portray people as they are, which uplifting and PC films do not – at least not in any rounded fashion. Fundamentally well-meaning people have dark sides: they can scheme and cheat. People who are fundamentally villains can be kind and generous in any number of ways. Pre-code characters have that complexity. They are human. Once again, that is in the better films; every era generates its share of garbage, and the pre-code era is no exception. A marvelous DVD series of films from this period is the Forbidden Hollywood Collection. I have owned for some time the first two volumes which contain such B-classics as Baby Face and Night Nurse. Last week I added Volume 3 to my shelf and binge-watched its six movies. All six are directed by William “Wild Bill” Wellman, best known for Wings (1927), The Public Enemy (1931), A Star is Born (1937) and Nothing Sacred (1937). The films in Volume 3 are nothing so ambitious. They are small films, but are interesting nonetheless, not least because they mostly deal with ordinary people:

Other Men's Women (1931)

Best friends Bill and Jack are fireman and engineer on a railroad locomotive. Bill is single and devil-may-care while Jack is married and responsible. When he makes an extended visit to Jack’s home, Bill and Jack’s wife Lily (Mary Astor) form a mutual attraction. Trouble ensues, but not in a simplistic way. There are mixed motives, unintended consequences, and guilt all around.

The Purchase Price (1932)

Night club singer Joan Gordon (Barbara Stanwyck) breaks from her underworld lifestyle and her gangster lover Eddie by changing her name and answering a mail-order bride ad posted by a farmer in North Dakota. As one might imagine, Joan doesn’t adjust readily to country life. Her husband Jim (George Brent) is handsome but frequently behaves as a stubborn jerk. Their marriage accordingly gets off to a rough start and is a long time being consummated. To complicate matters, Eddie tracks her down and shows up at the door.

Frisco Jenny (1932)

Jenny (Ruth Chatterton) was raised in what nowadays would be called a “gentleman’s club” owned by her father at the turn of the century. When the 1906 earthquake hits, the club is destroyed, her fiancé and her father are killed, and she finds she is pregnant. Jenny gives up her child but keeps track of him over the years while she achieves criminal prosperity by running a prostitution ring and later by running alcohol. Her son becomes the DA. Not knowing she is his mother, he prosecutes her on capital charges.

Midnight Mary (1933)

As Mary (Loretta Young) awaits the verdict of her trial for murder, we see in flashback Mary’s journey from falsely arrested teenager to prison inmate to cavorter with gangsters. A wealthy lawyer falls for her and tries to change her life, but her past catches up with her, as pasts tend to do.

Heroes for Sale (1933)

Presumed killed in a raid on a German position in WW1, Tom (Richard Barthelmess) is actually severely wounded and captured. After the war he returns home addicted to morphine (from his treatment in a POW hospital) and finds that another soldier has taken credit for his heroics. He gets clean and tries to make a new start in Chicago. He does well and marries Ruth (Loretta Young). Then Ruth is killed in labor unrest and Tom is falsely arrested and convicted. Upon his release Tom takes to the road as a hobo.

Wild Boys of the Road (1933)

In the Depression, high school sophomores Tom and Ed hop a freight train out of their Midwestern small town so as not to burden their unemployed parents. They meet many kids their age who are doing the same, and they team up with a runaway named Sally. They are traveling in search of work, but wherever they go the kids face violence (including sexual assault) and unwelcoming police. When they get to New York, an opportunity arises but a run-in with the law complicates matters.

None of these films is unforgettable, but every one is a solid argument on the side of the artistic libertines. Thumbs Up.

Clip from Frisco Jenny: in pre-quake 1906, night club hostesses relieve customers of cash

On a Day Like Today

Nothing lasts forever. We certainly don’t. The oldest fully documented human lifespan (that of Jeanne Louise Calment) was 122 years: 1875-1997. There have been claims of longer lives. Tom Parr of Shropshire supposedly died at 152 in 1635 after overindulging as a guest of Charles I. Odds are, though, he had claimed the birth record of his grandfather as his own because he enjoyed the notoriety of being old and hale. Record-keeping was hit-and-miss in the day, so it was an easier deception to pull off then. Even if accurate, however, 152 is short enough in the scheme of things.

Many people externalize fears about our own personal deaths by contemplating the end of humanity instead. Hence the popularity of apocalyptic literature, which in religious and secular forms is as old as literature itself. In his book The Day It Finally Happens, Mike Pearl writes, “But a certain breed of science nerd seems to take actual comfort in an ultimate and inevitable apocalypse – or if not comfort, per se, then a certain gleeful, misanthropic relish.” Indeed. Pearl doesn’t relish such thoughts, but they do preoccupy him. Pearl describes himself as suffering from an anxiety disorder that prompts him to be a writer: “it fills my head with ideas but I hate the ideas.” As a “coping strategy” he writes a Vice column “How Scared Should I Be?” for which he researches the actual risks of his various fears coming true and what the consequences would be. He finds the process soothing somehow even when the risks turn out to be rather high. The Day It Finally Happens discusses a score of those hateful ideas.

Some of his chapters truly do involve high order calamities such as nuclear war and the next supervolcano eruption. Others do not: for example “The Day the UK Finally Abolishes Its Monarchy.” That day, which he gives a 5 out of 5 plausibility rating, will not herald the end of civilization in the UK or anywhere else. (I avoid the subjunctive in deference to his possibly debatable 5/5 rating, at least anytime soon.) It will end the name “UK,” which will be replaced by a United Something-Else, but other peoples have survived the transition to a republic, and so will the Brits. Also unlikely to be world-ending is “The Day Humans Get a Confirmed Signal from Intelligent Extraterrestrials.” Whatever one thinks of his 4/5 plausibility rating for this one, such a signal most likely would be a stray indecipherable transmission from hundreds of light years away (or much much farther) thereby making any meaningful two-way communication impossible. More Heaven’s Gate-style cults might spring up here and there (invest in Nike?), but it is doubtful much else would change. Some chapters discuss two-edged swords, such as “The Day Humans Become Immortal.” This is a pretty good day from an individual standpoint, but were it to happen (he gives it a 3/5 plausibility rating, though not in this century) even a tiny fertility rate would crowd out the planet in short order. Actually, even if we somehow ended all deaths from aging and disease, we would not be immortal. Assuming we otherwise remain human (no cyborgs or engineered invulnerabilities), we will have fatal accidents, and sooner than one might think. Actuarial tables show that it would be the rare human who survives much beyond a millennium. (Population still would be a problem even so.) 1000 years is pretty good, though, Voltaire’s warning about lifespans in Micromegas notwithstanding. I’ll take it.

As mentioned, some of Pearl’s scenarios are legitimately scary such as “The Day Antibiotics Don’t Work Anymore” and (given the dependence we already have on it) “The Day the Entire Internet Goes Down.” Yet, Pearl is (despite, or because of, his anxiety disorder) fundamentally an optimist. All of his scenarios would be hard on at least some of us. A few would be widely horrific. Yet, none is an utter extinction event. His researches show that nuclear war, climate change, and supervolanoes are all survivable by some. This comforts Pearl. “I feel a very strong sense of revulsion when I imagine my entire species literally going extinct,” he explains. “Don’t you? If you don’t, I’m not sure we can hang…”

I’m not sure we can hang. I don’t dispute his survivability assessments for his scenario list. I just am sure there will be worse days than the ones about which he writes – including one that ends us all. Whatever we do or don’t do to our climate in this century, for example, earth in the longer term has lethal plans of its own. There was once a mile of ice piled on top of where I am sitting right now, and there will be again one day. Civilization will be a little tough to maintain in this spot. (No jokes, please, about whether civilization exists in New Jersey at present.) Astronomical events have all but wiped the slate clean on earth in the past and will again. The sun itself has a limited life span, and the planet will become uninhabitable long before the end of it. I don’t really worry much about it, and not just because probably none of these things will happen in my lifetime. If there were some way to collect the bet, I would bet our machines will outlive us. They have a better chance of surviving off-world for the long term – though, again, not forever. That’s OK. We accept our own ends. Why not Our own End? We’re here now. That counts for something – maybe everything. Right now, I quite literally smell the coffee. I’ll go pour a cup.

Skeeter Davis – The End of the World

Well, Maybe Not the Eve

1965 was one of the more notably transformative years for me personally. The year one turns 13 is for most people: one falls from the apex of childhood to the lowliest rank of teenager, a change commonly driven home by the start of high school. It was the year I became very self-conscious in both good and bad ways. Much of the “feel” of the year is still very real to me. I have many strong sense memories from the year including smells from such various sources as horse stalls, mimeograph paper, and (permeating nearly all interior spaces) tobacco smoke. My favorite album that year was Animal Tracks. (I still like Eric Burden and the Animals; I caught a concert by the septuagenarian last year.) To my classmates back then I pretended my favorite was Highway 61 Revisited because that was a cooler answer. I did, in fact, like that album (and Dylan in general), but not as much as more straightforward rock. (A quick look shows that the vintage Highway 61 Revisited vinyl is still on my shelf.) My first fumbling attempt at a flirtation was deliberately ignored or honestly unnoticed – either is possible. Meantime the world was turning on its head. To be sure, I was aware of the cultural milieu to the extent someone that age ever is, but it seemed normal to me. The fish, as the adage goes, does not notice the water in which it swims.

My mom noticed. I remember her saying in 1968 that in the previous few years “the world just went crazy.” This was from someone who had been a teenager during World War 2. Still, I knew what she meant. (By then I had evolved a little beyond a fish apparently.) The presuppositions of the very Leave It to Beaver era of my childhood (I even looked a little like Jerry Mathers) had shredded – quickly. Anyone who lived through the 60s knows just how distinct the two halves of the decade were. 60-64 were just the 50s amped up a little. “The Sixties,” as we usually think of them, were the second half of the decade, which spilled over into the early 70s. A minor example of the shift: compare the Beatles albums Meet the Beatles (64) and Sgt Pepper (67).

My mom’s assessment (stated somewhat more academically) is shared by many from across the philosophical spectrum.  Nicholas Leman, Professor at Columbia University, says that the 60s “turned as if on a hinge” in 1965. George Will independently uses the same hinge metaphor. Charles Murray in Coming Apart identifies the year as the moment when the country began to…well…come apart in the ways that are all too obvious today. Cultural critic Luc Sante (The New York Review of Books) comments that western culture reached some sort of peak in 1965 and has been in decline since. Even crime became qualitatively different (see my review of Evil by Michael H. Stone and Gary Brucato) as standards shifted. Major social changes don’t really happen without a prelude, and the roots of The Sixties are discoverable in the subcultures of The Fifties if you look for them. Nonetheless, politically, socially, and culturally the country reached a tipping point in ’65, and from there the rapidity of change was dizzying. We are still dealing with the aftermath in innumerable ways.

James T Patterson aims to capture those twelve months in The Eve of Destruction: How 1965 Transformed America." The author, who was a 30-y.o. (as in don’t-trust-anyone-over) professor at the time, has a perspective different from mine (not a criticism, just an observation) but does a pretty good job covering many of the key elements. The title refers to a 1965 hit song that never would have charted just a year or two earlier. Patterson details a busy year for national and world events. President Johnson openly committed US combat troops to Vietnam thereby missing the last chance to avoid Americanizing the war. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 (outlawing public and commercial discrimination “because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin”) and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 took hold and promised real improvements. Yet on the street there were racial confrontations in Selma and all out riots in Watts. Great Society programs coupled benefits with unintended social consequences. Patterson writes of the role of youth culture, of student organizations such as SDS, of the generation gap, of the credibility gap, of sexual politics, and of the environmental movement. The easy confidence about the future that had been so much a part of American psychology for a century fled as political divisions deepened in ways that haven’t healed since.

The book is worth a read. If I have a reservation, it is the short shrift he gives to the apolitical (and, some would argue, more important) aspect of the counterculture that flowered (bad pun intended) mid-decade: the part about personal enlightenment and alternate ways of living. Timothy Leary: “When the individual's behavior and consciousness get hooked to a routine sequence of external actions, he is a dead robot, and it is time for him to die and be reborn. Time to ‘drop out,’ ‘turn on,’ and ‘tune in.’" This, admittedly, was a Revolution that failed (regrettably) in broader social terms, but it still has a legacy that matters on another level.

Why care about 1965 in 2019?  There is always something to be learned from watershed moments of the past. As Professor Joseph Wittreich (not Mark Twain despite the common misattribution) remarked, history doesn’t repeat but it often rhymes. A little prep work helps us to sing along.

Thumbs Up on the book – not way up but up.

Barry McGuire – Eve of Destruction (1965)

Have Not

From movie commentaries, I knew that the 1944 film To Have and Have Not bore almost no relation to the 1937 novel of the same title other than featuring a fishing boat owner named Harry Morgan and the prevarication “Ernest Hemingway’s” in the promotional material. The movie is set in Martinique in 1940 when the island was still controlled by Vichy France. Not an adaptation, it is basically Casablanca reset in the French Caribbean though the dynamic between 19-y.o. Lauren Bacall and 44-y.o. Humphrey Bogart is different (on and off film) from that between Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in the earlier film – so different that Bogie and Bacall became an item and eventually married. Even that gossipy aspect of the film makes a better story than the novel.

Hemingway is a towering figure in American letters, though the quality of his work varies a lot. (Whose doesn’t, one might fairly ask.) I’ve enjoyed most of his short fiction and a couple of his novels, but struggled to get through others despite his well-crafted sentences. When at long last I picked up To Have and Have Not last week, it was a struggle. Nor was this just my own reaction. After slogging through it, out of curiosity I checked the 1937 review by J. Donald Adams in The New York Times. He writes, “The expertness of the narrative is such that one wishes profoundly it could have been put to better use... Mr. Hemingway's record as a creative writer would be stronger if it had never been published.” Indeed.

Harry Morgan, married with children, is presented as a Have-Not even though he owns a charter fishing boat. In addition to legitimate jobs he smuggles contraband and people between Havana and Key West. He is crude, abusive, obnoxious, and racist, even by 1930s Florida standards. I suppose this is to reinforce his representation as a common man, but if the intent is thereby to make him sympathetic (could that possibly be the intent?) it backfires badly. A rich Have recreational fisherman charters Harry’s boat but cheats him of his fee. This leaves Harry stuck in Cuba without money, so he traffics with criminals and revolutionaries, commits murder to keep an illegal job on track, and undertakes to smuggle Chinese illegal immigrants into the United States. Instead, he bilks the Chinese and strands them on a Cuban beach. Somehow we’re supposed to feel sorry for him when things go bad at the end because he’s a Have-Not. We don’t. (At least I hope most readers don’t.) The Haves in the book are reprehensible, yet Harry behaves far worse than any of them. Further, he doesn’t take responsibility for his actions because of his social position. Hemingway was influenced at the time by the Marxism of his compadres in the Spanish Civil War, but if the intended message was pro-working class it comes across almost backwards.

Recommendation: Be kind to Ernest and skip this book. Opt for A Farewell to Arms or For Whom the Bell Tolls instead. Or watch the movie (screenplay by Jules Furthman), which is quite good.

All That Glitters Is Not Silver

A couple weeks ago I advised passing on the latest blockbuster and walking down the multiplex hall to the indie film with three or four viewers. I neglected to follow my own advice when Under the Silver Lake was up against Avengers: Endgame last spring, but I made up for it yesterday by spinning up a DVD of the flick. *SPOILERS* of a sort follow, though more regarding the film’s subtext than text.

Anyone seeing this movie without any prior knowledge of it is likely to think right at the outset, “Oh, a David Lynch movie.” It’s not. The director is David Robert Mitchell (It Follows) whose homage to Lynch is so close as to be initially distracting; fortunately, enough transpires on screen for that reaction to fade.

The protagonist Sam (Andrew Garfield) is jobless, behind on his car payments, and facing eviction. He makes no effort at all to rectify this. So, at first glance he is a slacker loser. Yet this is not quite right. He is energetic and diligent at pursuing his interests. Those interests just don’t include the banalities of everyday responsibilities. He is charming enough to do very well with the ladies (including Riki Lindhome) despite his impecunity. He has enough boyish charm to keep viewers in their seats, too, even though he is often creepy and sometimes villainous. He spies on a topless middle-age neighbor even (driving home the Freudian element) while talking to his mother on the phone. When kids vandalize his car he punches them – hard. We see him commit homicide; granted, the fellow had shot at him, but retreat was very much an option. There is a dog killer stalking the neighborhood, and (though the killer is not identified) there is reason to wonder if he is Sam.

Sam’s real interest is a common one in our secular world: a search for meaning beyond just drudgery and paying bills. As a friend remarks to him, “Where's the mystery that makes everything worthwhile? We crave mystery, 'cause there's none left.” Not everyone handles nihilism well; they frequently find some obsession (politics is a favorite) to divert themselves from it. Sam wonders if there is a conspiracy of in-people who run the world for their own benefit and have access to deeper revelations that they keep to themselves. This is his obsession. He begins to see secret codes everywhere by which the insiders communicate with each other. Some of his hypothetical codes are crazy even in the context of the movie (e.g. Vanna White’s eye movements), but some turn out to be real, such as messages recorded backwards on popular music. When a neighbor Sarah (Riley Keough) with whom he has a flirtation disappears, a symbol is left behind on the wall of her apartment. Sam’s investigation of her disappearance gives him real leads to the conspiracy, thereby putting himself and others in danger.

The movie makes no mention of the Illuminati, but in the real world there are people with views similar to Sam’s who do believe in them. Suppose they exist. Suppose that underneath their worldly machinations there is an occult purpose. What if, after arduous effort, you discovered the secrets of the Illuminati only to find they are as credible as those of the Nike-wearing Heaven’s Gate guru? Depending on one’s mindset, the revelation could be shattering.

FYI, there are a lot of self-referential hidden codes in the movie, but none of them are important. (Animal images share first letters with the title, for example.) Only bother with them if you enjoy puzzles of that kind for their own sake.

This surrealistic noir is definitely not for everyone. Yet there is more to it than will be found in the CGI battles of the spandex superheroes who dominate the box office.

Thumbs Up