Movies for a Socially Responsible Layabout

Plagues generally affect the populace unequally. Not all. The Antonine Plague (probably smallpox) of the 2nd century CE infected commoners and aristocrats alike including the emperor Marcus Aurelius himself. The germ theory of disease did not yet exist then, but it was well understood that contact with a person who had it was dangerous. (There was some notion it was carried by odors.) Galen, the leading medical scholar of the age and Marcus’ personal physician, repeatedly excused himself from any town, home, or location where the plague was present until he was actually ordered to attend to Marcus. He prescribed aged Falernian wine (you still can buy Falerno Bianco if you wish), which didn’t help but probably didn’t hurt. It perhaps kept that very philosophical emperor even more philosophical until the plague killed him. Most ancient and medieval plagues were urban events, so fleeing to the countryside was usually an effective way to escape. Not always. The Black Death was spread by flea-bearing rats, and rats were as happy in country homes and barns as in cities; this accounts for the unusually high death toll at a time when the population overwhelmingly was rural. Yellow Fever was very nearly an annual event in New York City during the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. In the footsteps of Galen, many New Yorkers believed that alcohol was prophylactic, though they resorted to stronger stuff than white wine. Wrote Dr. G. H. Smith about the 1819 outbreak, "Never, I believe, was drunkenness so common."

The morbidity rate for Covid-19 is nothing comparable to that of any of those diseases. It is high enough, however, to have prompted the recent steps to block its spread. The effects of the virus on those who get it varies enormously: scarcely noticeable in some people, life-threatening in others. For the uninfected, the “social distancing” measures also vary in effect. For some of us the measures make little difference in our daily routines; if we are in an “essential” business other than health care we continue to go to work as usual. (One should note that "nonessential" businesses at some point become essential to keeping the essential businesses running – they can't defer white collar services and rely on warehouse stocks of replacement items forever – but we are not yet there.) For a small number of us (especially in health care) our work load has soared. The rest of us remain at home doing chores, reading, writing (some write blogs, I’m told), watching movies, and worrying about money. Films such as 28 Days Later are probably not among the prime movie picks.

My own DVD pick this weekend was Volume 4 of Warner Brothers’ Forbidden Hollywood pre-code classics. The pre-codes were films made before 1934, the year the studios began to enforce the Hays self-censorship code. They are often edgier than any mainstream movie for the next 30 years. This volume contains the following:

1.      Jewel Robbery is a romance tale with William Powell as a gentlemanly, dashing, and roguish jewel thief in Vienna. During a jewelry store robbery he attracts Kay Francis who enjoys romances beyond her relationship with her aristocrat husband. This is a well-regarded movie by most modern viewers and reviewers, though I’m not really the audience for it. I didn’t dislike watching it, but I’m not likely to rewatch it. The 1932 reviewer for The New York Times was also tepid about the movie, and even rude about the female lead: “Kay Francis, who can be a good actress, is a definitely bad actress opposite Mr. Powell, and that may be part of the reason why Jewel Robbery with its several endowments is only mild.”

2.      Lawyer Man with William Powell and Joan Blondell. Well-meaning but ambitious Powell runs afoul of the city’s political machine when his weakness for pretty women makes him accept the wrong client. Rather than stay defeated, he goes to work for the machine in order to get political clout and become DA. The ends justify the means. Thumbs Up. Not way up, but still up for its non-simplistic morality.

3.      Man Wanted. This time Kay Francis is the hardworking editor of 400 Magazine. She has an open marriage with her polo-playing playboy husband. She takes a fancy to her new secretary David Manners who has a fiancé whom he sometimes remembers. Once again, Thumbs mildly Up.

4.      They Call It Sin. The central character’s adoptive parents do anyway. Small town girl (Loretta Young) discovers that she is the daughter of a showgirl, not of the fiercely uptight couple who raised her. She goes to New York to get into show business, is cheated by a producer who steals her original song, gets into a complicated love triangle, and becomes ensnared in an attempted murder investigation. All that melodrama in 69 minutes. Not bad though, in a B-movie sort of way.

I’ll defer commentary on this weekend’s books to the next post. I’ll have time. I’m not going anywhere it seems.

Trailer Man Wanted

Harleen Casts a Shadow

When very young, pretty much all one experiences is contemporary popular culture – except in school where the other stuff rarely is made remotely appealing. Over time this changes, not least because the popular culture of our youth (cars, films, music, et al.) eventually gets designated “classic” and joins the “other stuff” taught in schools. For us it then requires some effort to be less than entirely clueless about things a teenager assumes “everybody” should know. Accordingly, for the past few decades there have been some books, TV shows, movies, bands, and such that I at least sampled simply because they were a significant part of contemporary culture. Not every faddish phenomenon gets a look. I just couldn’t bring myself to watch Twilight, for example, when it was a thing. But to this day I try to sample enough of the current offerings to remain at least intermittently part of the conversation when pop culture comes up at the dinner table. (Not that people sit at the same table at present, unless the requisite six feet apart, due to the pathogen that shall not be named.) Often the samples are distasteful, but sometimes I’m pleasantly surprised. That was the case with a graphic-novel (ordered for the reasons above) that came in the mail last week.

Despite the box office failure of the recent Birds of Prey movie, the comic book villain Harley Quinn remains one of DC’s most popular and potentially bankable characters. Potential is merely that, however, so I didn’t have high expectations for the revamped origin story in Harleen by Croatian author Stjepan Sejic. I was delighted to discover a well-written, well-drawn, intelligent, adult-oriented presentation that never disrespects its readers by dumbing itself down. A proper screen adaptation of this would rival the recent Joker.

Carl Jung is never mentioned by name in the comic, but many of his views are inherent in the plot. Jung talked of the shadow self, meaning the hidden side of one’s nature including dark elements that we don’t display in civilized society (unless we are sociopaths). Rather than denying its existence, suppressing it, or trying to excise it (Dr. Jekyll’s mistake), Jung emphasized the importance to psychic health of integrating the shadow into one’s whole personality. Don’t hand the shadow the keys to the car, but accept without guilt that it will always at least be a passenger. It’s OK, in a simple example, to enjoy Dexter without taking up the character’s hobby. Failing to integrate the shadow risks having it unhealthily emerge, especially under provocation. Thirty-year-old psychiatrist Dr. Harleen Quinzel, despite her academic awareness of the unconscious and subconscious, hasn’t come comfortably to terms with those aspects of herself. Harleen is narrated by Harleen herself.

Dr. Quinzel has a theory about desensitization and loss of empathy in “normal” people that might be useful in treating not only them but even extreme psychopaths. She developed it from interviews with soldiers accused of excesses in combat areas. Her work attracts the attention of the Wayne Foundation, from which she receives a grant to conduct further research at Arkham Mental Hospital where several high profile Gotham villains including Joker are under lock and key. She neglects to mention (inappropriately but understandably since it would jeopardize her access) that she already once met the Joker on the street when she just happened to be a bystander on the scene of one of his chaotic crimes. In a brief encounter he pointed a gun in her face but didn’t pull the trigger. (“Maybe my gun was out of bullets,” he says with a grin when she asks him about it later.) She also neglects to mention that when Batman arrived at the scene of that same incident, she found herself caught up in the vengeful enthusiasm of the mob of onlookers as he violently subdued Joker – her shadow peeked out, in other words. The memory of this shakes her self-image and her confidence in her own nature.

She proceeds with her research even though Harvey Dent (not yet Two-Face) and other law enforcement professionals insist to her that the sociopaths in Arkham are irredeemable. Dent highly offends her by calling the criminals in there “animals” and monsters. (Joker nonetheless agrees with him: “In the end at least the cops are honest. They see us as monsters because we are just that.”) Joker is a master manipulator and even bribes a guard to get copies of Quinzel’s research so he can use it to his advantage with her. Quinzel is neither naïve nor a fool however. She is a highly capable shrink. She knows exactly what Joker is doing. His words get to her anyway because they speak to doubts she already has about herself. They induce her to recognize her own dark animalistic fantasies (and she uses the word “animal”). She herself grows desensitized in the fashion predicted by her thesis.

Importantly, Quinzel is not Joker’s victim. He may be a manipulator, but she consciously allows him to be one. Though conflicted about it, she chooses to let hidden aspects of herself surface and to engage in ever more inappropriate behavior, conventional morality and political correctness be damned. At every stage, she herself chooses to embrace her dark and wild side and, while she is at it, Joker. The final moment when she goes fully over the edge, however, is [not quite a SPOILER but nearly one, so stop reading if you wish] during a mass breakout from Arkham when in a moment of stress she kills to protect Joker. This isn’t quite a spoiler because it was foreshadowed in earlier narration about Dent and herself: “It’s kind of funny…All of our big words and moralizing and yet within five months we would both become murderers.”

For a graphic novel/comic book, this is an utterly impressive work. Thumbs Up.

Opeth - Harlequin Forest

“Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.” – Ogden Nash

History can be written from almost any perspective. There are lengthy histories of rust, salt, cod, germs, weapons, and horses, among many other narrow topics. The better ones often contain remarkable insights into wider general history. One pleasant example that arrived in my mail recently is A Short History of Drunkenness by Mark Forsyth. There are other more comprehensive histories of alcohol, but this is on drunkenness, which is a much more specific thing. In our ever more humorless society, some might take issue with Forsyth’s lighthearted tone even when discussing criminal or self-destructive behavior. For those who still can laugh at the human condition while nonetheless taking it seriously, however, the tone is just right.

Venus of Laussel

Humans consumed alcohol before they were, strictly speaking, human. Our great ape cousins love to get buzzed on overripe fruit, which naturally ferments to an alcohol content equal to beer. Our ancestors surely were no different. Modern humans used their bigger brains to learn how deliberately to ferment fruits and grains early in prehistory. The 25,000-year-old Venus of Laussel shows a woman knocking back a horn of something. A drinking horn is an inconvenient vessel for water. Historical peoples didn’t use horns for that, but until the past few centuries they were widely used for beer or wine. (You still can get one if you wish.) It’s a good bet the lady was tying one on. The Laussel folk and their contemporaries were at the mercy of the seasonal availability of fruits, honey, and grains in the wild however.

This suggests an answer to the mystery of why humans started farming. The hunter-gatherer lifestyle provides a healthier and more varied diet for less work. (Once farming is established it becomes a trap as anthropologist Jared Diamond has noted; the reasons for that are beside the point here where the question is why start at all.) Given that traces of alcohol are found on the very oldest shards of prehistoric pottery, one altogether serious hypothesis is that grains were planted and harvested in order to guarantee a steady supply of beer.

The oldest monumental stone construction site in the world is at Gobekli Tepe in present-day Turkey. It dates back to the end of the last ice age and, astonishingly, was built by nomad hunter-gatherers. There are 40-gallon (150-liter) stone tubs on the site with traces of oxalate, which is formed when you mix barley and water to ferment beer. The area was rich in wild grains at the time, but if you are going to erect a monumental stone beer hall for a Mesolithic Oktoberfest, you probably want to be doubly sure you can brew enough beer to serve all the clans who show up. “And so in about 9000 BC we invented farming because we wanted to get drunk on a regular basis.”

Prehistory being…well…prehistory, all that is speculative, but it is based on compelling if sparse evidence. Once we are in historical times there is no longer any doubt. One of the earliest Sumerian records, other than business contracts, is a poem of praise to Ankasi, goddess of beer, which includes a recipe for making it. Ancient Egyptians annually celebrated the Festival of Drunkenness (exactly what it sounds like) in honor of the goddess Hathor. Dionysus, god of wine in ancient Greece, had a dark side to him (as brilliantly depicted in Bacchae by Euripides), but was honored at symposia where wine literally made people philosophical. Forsyth notes the development of different fermenting and distillation processes over the centuries and the role of drunkenness (not just imbibition but getting sloshed) in history up until the current day. He describes what it was like to visit such various establishments as a Sumerian tavern, a medieval English alehouse, a frontier saloon, and a speakeasy.

Alcohol bans were attempted in many times and places – notably China and pre-Columbian Mesoamerica – but they never succeed as intended. The prohibition of alcohol in Russia (!) enacted by Nicholas II in 1914 might have done more to bring down the Empire (both from resentment and loss of revenue) than anything the Germans did in the field. The bizarre American era of Prohibition also gets its due mention in the book, as does the complicated response to alcohol in different Islamic countries.

Just as a side note (not mentioned by Forsyth), the 45 US Presidents (if you don’t count the 8 under the Articles of Confederation but do count Grover Cleveland twice according to convention) were for the most part a bibulous bunch. A few including Lincoln, Taft, and Carter were very light drinkers. A few including Jackson, Pierce (who died of cirrhosis), Harding, and Lyndon Johnson were hard drinkers. Truman started the day with a shot of bourbon. (So did my paternal grandfather as it happens.) The only teetotalers were Fillmore, Hayes, GW Bush, and Trump. Fillmore and Bush, however, drank heartily in their younger days. It is not clear there is any correlation between consumption levels and successful presidencies.

Dionysus retains his dark side, of course; alcohol abuse can be devastating to oneself and others. Yet, Dionysus, Hathor, and Ankasi aren’t going anywhere. Historically, respectable drunkenness has been a social affair to honor the gods, celebrate public events, or engage in bonding with friends. Solitary drunkenness on the other hand generally has been regarded with suspicion. As bars, pubs, and nightclubs shut down for the duration of the Covid-19 outbreak there is likely to be much more suspicious behavior. Unlike the buying frenzy one sees in aisles with toilet paper and cleaning products, however, the aisles in liquor stores so far seem calm. We’ll see if that changes as the shutdown drags on. 

George Thorogood and the  Destroyers – I Drink Alone

All in All I Preferred Disco Fever – and I Hated Disco Fever

On this site I largely avoid overt discussion of news events or politics. There is a surfeit of sites that discuss (or more commonly rant about) little else, so my voice amid their din isn’t much missed. Besides, there is so much else about which to scribble – into which scribbles I then surreptitiously can insert my world views. Sometimes, however, a direct encounter with current events cannot be evaded. They might lasso you from the most unexpected direction. A lasso that snared me this week was tossed by E.R. Hamilton Bookseller.

Earlier this year I much enjoyed the mystery novel Icarus by South African author Deon Meyer (my brief review of it is in a February post) and decided to try something by him in another genre. This was before the border closings and the virally induced Wall Street panic of the past two weeks. I opted for his 2016 novel Fever. I never put much stock in synchronicity but Carl Jung soon had a chuckle anyway. From the brief catalogue description I knew only that Fever was a post-apocalyptic novel. (I wrote one of those myself.) It arrived in the mail and then lay on my desk for a while, but I opened it this past Monday specifically to divert myself from the news. What ends the-world-as-we-know-it in the book? The title gives a strong hint. An intensely rapidly spreading disease kills 95% of the population in a matter of months. The remaining 5% are immune, but the breakdown in civilization takes its toll on a large portion of them, too. What virus did all this? The narrator writes, “Corona viruses were quite common…In the mango tree there was a bat, with a different kind of corona virus in its blood.” Sigh.

The primary narrator (there are several others) in the novel is Nico Storm. He and his father Willem have survived the Fever and they try to re-establish a functioning community from other refugee survivors. Predatory gangs and internal divisions (politics never cease even amid an apocalypse) make it difficult. Furthermore, there are mysterious helicopters that are seen and heard on rare occasions, and they might be key to a deep secret. The characters learn that if there is anything more dangerous than humans who have shed the shackles of civilization and released their animal natures, it is civilized visionaries willing to use any means to achieve “good” ends. Thumbs Up on the book: the hate implied in the blog's title is for COVID-19.

In real life we have seen apocalyptic cults and societies who might well applaud outcomes like those in Fever, be they natural or manufactured. The doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo, responsible for the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995, actively worked to produce chemical and biological weapons to bring about the end. In the US the extreme pro-environment Church of Euthanasia doesn’t advocate homicide, but it does promote suicide. (Motto: “Save the Planet: Kill Yourself.”) According to the founder Reverend Chris Korda, “the four pillars of the Church of Euthanasia are suicide, abortion, cannibalism and sodomy. The Church only has one commandment: Thou Shall Not Procreate. All four pillars help reduce the population.” Korda adds, “We're only tangentially interested in the fate of the human species, but we're most interested in the fate of the planet we happen to inhabit and dominate... so our support of those pillars is both symbolic and actual.” The church’s website used to list painless methods of suicide, but, because of civil litigation concerns, these were removed.

1918 flu epidemic

Up until very modern times, diseases repeatedly knocked back the world’s population, sometimes drastically. In his classic work Plagues and Peoples historian William H. McNeill convincingly argued that pathogens determined the fate of empires more often than arms did. (Napoleon, for example, still might have had to retreat from Russia, but he would have done so with an intact army were it not for typhus.) In the last few centuries, however, better health and medical care broke populations free of the risk of large die-backs on ancient and medieval scales. The most devastating pandemic in relatively recent times was the 1918 influenza spread around the world by returning soldiers. It killed 650,000 people in the US and 50,000,000 worldwide. Yet even these vast tolls didn’t dent national and global population totals.

COVID-19 won’t dent them either. Nor is it on track to be anything like the ‘18 flu. I’ll still try to avoid making its personal acquaintance of course. As for synchronicity, the other book that arrived in the same package as Fever was A Short History of Drunkenness by Mark Forsyth. Whether or not that foreshadows any events in my household, who is to say?

Devil Doll – Fever

Unkindest Cut of All

Consider a murder mystery in which the motive is inheritance or insurance money. You’re probably thinking, “What, another one?” This is such a commonplace trope in novels, films, and TV that there is a page dedicated to it at Tvtropes.org. (I toyed with an inheritance theme myself in my short story Cold Dishes.) It is an easy type of mystery for a writer to set up because a motive is self-evident and conflicts of interest among survivors are certain. Sometimes the script isn’t a mystery at all but rather a suspense drama: the audience wonders if the perpetrator (revealed in the early scenes) will get away with it. Columbo episodes are in this category. Double Indemnity (1944) set the big screen standard for the murder-for-insurance plot, and it is still hard to beat. Another subset of the genre is one in which multiple heirs to a fortune are all suspect when the matriarch/patriarch is murdered. Typically the soon-to-be-departed wealthy character has announced to the soon-to-be-suspects an intention to change the beneficiaries of a will or insurance policy; the murder occurs before the change can be made. There is usually a wild card, which is to say someone with a motive other than financial. Just a few among the multitude of productions of this type these are Another Thin Man (1939), Agatha Christie’s Murder, She Said (1961), and even an episode of Joss Whedon’s scifi series Dollhouse (“Haunted” 2009). The trope is so well-worn as to invite parody, but a surprisingly straight-up old-fashioned entry to the genre is 2019’s Knives Out, which spun up in my Blu-ray player a few days ago. It proved the concept still has legs when scripted well.

Knives Out has a stellar cast including Daniel Craig, Jamie Lee Curtis, Chris Evans, Toni Collette, Riki Lindhome, Ana de Armas, and Christopher Plummer. While the movie is not played for laughs, there is dark humor in the whodunit’s characters and situations. Premise: wealthy mystery writer Harlan Thrombey dies of an apparent suicide by self-inflicted knife wound the night of his 85th birthday party at which his disreputable family was present. The police are ready to dismiss the death as suicide, but private detective Benoit Blanc (Craig) has been anonymously hired (with an envelope of cash) to look into it. He has doubts.

The movie cost $40,000,000 to make (moderate by today’s standards), and most of that went to actors’ salaries. Otherwise it was modestly budgeted. It has earned over $300 million to date, showing that comic book superheroes in spandex immersed in insanely expensive fx are not essential for a commercially successful film. A good script alone still works. Only Once Upon a Time in Hollywood grossed more money in 2019.

Murders for insurance or inheritance are not so rare in real life as one might imagine – note 21 examples listed by JRC Insurance Group on its website. None of the schemes in that list display any sign of the intelligence typically shown by perpetrators in movies. Police were not fooled though it sometimes took time to assemble proof. (It is possible, of course, that intelligent schemers are not so much absent from real life as uncaught.) Occasionally, multimillion dollar estates are at stake as in the movies, but more commonly there is shockingly little money to be gained by the schemers. A local NJ murder case last year was over $10,000. (In a departure from the usual movie setting of a country mansion, Killer Joe [2011] with Matthew McConaughey and Juno Temple was set in a trailer park and depicted a more realistically tawdry murder plot for a paltry payout: a good movie but not for the puritanical or squeamish.) While the overall homicide rate in the US has dropped precipitously in the past 40 years, it is not clear that this particular type of cold-blooded murder has joined the decline – just something to consider before announcing an upcoming change in your will to your heirs.