Yearly Archives: 2009

June 7, 2009

D’Indy: Symphony on a French Mountain Air for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 25 (1886)

Vincent d’Indy (1851–1931)
Symphonie sur un chant montagnard français (Symphonie cévenole), op. 25
composed: 1886 (age 35)
first performance: Paris, March 20, 1887 (Marie Bordes-Pène, Orchestre de Concerts Lamoureux/Charles Lamoureux?)

dIndy.jpg
I don’t have the date of this photograph but based on other dated photos, he looks to be about the right age here. The headline on his newspaper says “L’Art Moderne,” which is pretty cool. Though it does seem likely that either he or the photographer rigged that up on purpose.

#13:

475.

1. The fact of this piece being on the “Essential Canon” list.

When the Medtner concerto came around, I said “If nobody knows a piece, it’s definitionally not in the Essential Canon, quality be damned,” and I stand by that. But in this case, though the quality of the piece may in fact be lower, I have more sympathy for the inclusion of an obscure work, because there was a time when it wasn’t obscure.

Monsieur d’Indy does not make even a single appearance in the 1001 Recordings list, and recordings of his works — not to mention performances — are truly few and far between. Even in this, the Era of The Long Tail, d’Indy manages to be decidedly obscure. And yet I’m almost certain that his was one of the lucky names on the “timeline of classical music” poster that my piano teacher had on the wall. Almost every classical musician knows that Vincent d’Indy is a famous composer — but nobody knows his music. How can this be?

A strange thing about classical music culture — about any “museum” culture — is that because it’s all about the past, there’s no clear criterion for what’s obscure and what’s mainstream, despite the fact that these concepts are central to the way the subject is discussed. As I said the other day, Wozzeck is obscure if you’re asking the population at large, but it’s mainstream if you’re asking people who are into classical music. (Heck, Don Giovanni is obscure if you’re asking the population at large.) L’incoronazione di Poppea is obscure if you are asking people who aren’t into pre-baroque music, mainstream if you’re asking people who are. But this starts to get silly. If you’re into Johannes Ockeghem (d. 1497), the Missa prolationum is totally mainstream.

The only reason I’ve heard of the pieces just mentioned is because they’ve been included in histories I’ve read, which means that someone thought they were relevant from a historian’s perspective. They are thus “mainstream” for music students. But this has all become a sort of an abuse of the concept of “mainstream.” Whatever Missa prolationum is to me — mainly: something that I’ve heard of — it’s certainly different from being essential to me, or culturally prevalent in the present day. (Of course, no classical music is actually prevalent in the present day — except for Carmina Burana and Flight of the Valkyries). The problem is that the distinction has been blurred between history and culture. Which, as I’ve said elsewhere, hasn’t been good for culture.

The question is, what does it really mean to claim that something is canonical? Is it a claim about the current consensus, the past consensus, or (what it usually seems to be) a claim about what the consensus should be and would be, if only we weren’t living in such benighted times?

At [the very old, very monied American university I attended], there is a concert hall built around 1914, in which a hall-of-fame of inscribed composers’ names runs overhead. The list is rigged so that the composers appear in approximate chronological order, but also so that HAYDN MOZART BEETHOVEN SCHUBERT CHOPIN fall directly over the stage. We students occasionally poked fun at this frieze for its irritating, inflated implication that “this is a temple and these are its gods” — but most of the snickering was reserved for the fact that the list ended with “… TSCHAIKOWSKY FRANCK BRAHMS.” Franck, eh? We would chuckle about how the smug old-schoolery of 1914 had shot itself in the foot: Franck, it had become clear in the intervening century, does not belong in that company, not at all. Who listens to Franck anymore? And who really likes it when they do?

Probably the unlucky person who had to come up with the list of names back in 1914 figured that Franck, who’d been as dead and adulated as Brahms and Tchaikovsky for more than 20 years, was a safe bet as an all-time great because he had followers (Chausson and, in particular, d’Indy, who was still alive and going strong), and followers mean a future. The “Franck school” would surely continue to be seen as the great turn-of-the-century movement in French music. Debussy had his admirers, sure, but where could that kind of gimmicky experimental stuff really lead? Besides, inscribing a living composer’s name on the walls of the temple would be sacrilege; it would demean the frieze by associating it with actual, flawed human beings.

So Franck’s name went up on the wall. But then, of course, starting just minutes after the gold leaf was set, the 20th century took culture by the hair and swung it around a few times until its neck was good and broken. In the process, all kinds of bits and pieces went flying into oblivion, and the Franck school, sadly, was among them. Even now, almost 100 years later, the scavenger hunt to pick up all the scattered fragments (and make them available for download) still hasn’t completely located the remains of Vincent d’Indy.

So: is d’Indy in this list because if it weren’t for the flaying of the canon (1914–1989) he might well still be in it? Or is he just in this list because historical music is music history, and music history tells us that Vincent d’Indy was, in his day, a prominent composer? I think the latter, but I am sympathetic to the logic of the former.

If any piece of d’Indy’s ever looked like it was going to make it into orbit, it was this symphony, which apparently maintained a place in the third-tier repertoire rotation well into the 20th century. It may even still have had some life in it after World War II, at least among French conductors. But at some point it finally bowed out. Rest in peace, Vincent d’Indy’s greatness.

But lo, what’s this? Culture’s skin has been stitched back on, its broken neck repaired with a couple of bolts, the corpse zapped with some kind of eerie blue lightning, and now it breaks free from its restraints and lumbers about — alive! Alive! It’s come back from the dead! “ME POST-POST-MODERN!!!” it bellows. “ME LOVE ART!!! ALSO SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE!!!! AND IPHONE!!!! ALSO GAUGIN!!! AND HONEYMOONERS!!! VINCENT D’INDY KIND OF AMAZING!!!! ALSO MORTON FELDMAN!!! AND MOZART!!! NEW STAR TREK MOVIE GOOD TOO!!! OMG YOU MUST TRY SPIDER ROLL!!! WHERE YOU WANT TO GO TODAY????”

Doesn’t it bring tears of joy to your eyes, to know that our long cultural nightmare is over?

2. This piece itself.

Admirable but flawed. Its flaws — “quirks” might be a kinder term — are a part of the same personality that gives it its appeal, and couldn’t be edited out if you tried. Like a sculpture made of pockmarked, pitted stone; if it had been carved of some smoother, more delicate stuff, it would have to be a different shape and would create a different impression: it would become some other work. This work is pockmarked and how could it be otherwise? The form and texture and substance create a sense together, and they share, among them, an imperfectness.

That in itself puts limits on how prominent this piece might ever become; it is an “interesting” piece and thus will always be off the most beaten path.

The piece is something of an experiment in instrumentation; it tries to incorporate the piano into the orchestral texture in a role that is prominent but several notches less so than in a concerto. I’m not particularly impressed with M. d’Indy’s accomplishment in this regard. He mostly seems to use the piano as though it were a loud harp, which isn’t really what it is. The percussive quality of the attacks isn’t really taken into aesthetic account, I don’t think, and many of his devices just don’t read well at all — like the instrument’s first entrance, where it bubbles out of the depths, thoroughly muddying the bass melody it’s supposed to color. Too much of the piano part, in my opinion, is standard filigree: arpeggio, scale, and repeated-note business, which no doubt requires careful practice but isn’t particularly interesting to the player, the composer, or the listener. The burden is really on the conductor, in this piece, to make the meaning and sense come to the fore.

And the sound engineer. The orchestration is full of odd colorful touches, but the intricacies are inconsistent and not always well-judged. A good deal of it gets swallowed up and ends up just sounding mushy, at least on the several recordings I was able to find. But it’s possible that some recording studio cheats to isolate the instruments could turn the piece into a delightful, flowering soundscape, which is how I bet Vincent imagined it.

The piece takes a “naïve” outdoorsy folk tune — it sounds like Hobbit music to me — and derives some of the material in each movement from it, audibly and directly. The symphony is also, as a whole, an attempt to do justice to the mountain-dwelling, nature-basking, stream-rippling spirit of the tune. On the most superficial level, this means sparkling waterfall arpeggios in the first movement, pastoral repose in the second movement, and bounding rabbits or something in the third movement. These sorts of things feel pretty stock, and in some ways, all the busy learnedness of the symphony pales next to the touching naïveté of the simple tune it is struggling to emulate and magnify. The tune is heard naked in the opening measures, and they’re probably the most memorable part of the whole piece.

But there is definitely a touch of beauty threaded through the work. It’s a little elusive, but there is something sensitive and real in there. And yes, it — whatever it is, down there in the poetic subconscious — has something to do with being out in the fresh air on a mountain. The piece is fluid but not limp; it has purpose. Quietly. That took some familiarity for me to hear.

The first movement is based on a proud-sounding “this fresh air does wonders for the constitution” type theme with a strong contour (up, then down!) but unfortunately no particular melodic outline to speak of — and then a nice flowing-grace-and-lightness 2nd theme very much a la Saint-Saëns. I have warmed to both of these, but the introductory ur-theme is still more effective than either.

The second movement is the best. The melody is lyrical and songlike but spun out in irregular conversational phrases; poetry in a flexible meter. This is where d’Indy comes the closest to achieving something of his own in the flavor of the folk tune. The chromatic B theme falls nicely in between fairy-tale and genuine uneasiness. On the first few listens, I thought I could do without the bombastic recapitulation, but having gotten to know it better, I see that it’s not so confident as it seems (the snaky second theme is lurking under it) and I’ve come to enjoy the whole course of the movement. I also like the watery pool where the movement finally slows to a stop: the sparkles that close the movement are in a sense completely gratuitous, and that’s what makes them particularly vivid for me.

The third movement is built over a bouncy diminution of the main melody, which never fails to sound lame to me, but the swooning second theme is pretty catchy 19th-century-style, and once the march-of-the-dwarfs-y snippet of movement 2 appears, the whole ending is peculiar good fun.

In the coda (around rehearsal letters U through X) there’s a metrical eccentricity. A new condensed version of the melody is heard in 8th notes, first in 2/4 and later in 3/8. In between, it’s heard twice as 6 bars of 3/8 plus 1 bar of 2/4. Over this, the composer writes “Même mouvement. (Les croches conservent toujours la même valeur.)” In other words, the 8th notes are constant. If performed that way, as written, there is a fun juxtaposed-meter effect, where the melody from the 2/4 section continues to recur, but the accompaniment begins to syncopate playfully against it, in 3/8. The single inserted bar of 2/4 is a temporary reconciliation between the two elements, but eventually the new 3/8 feeling wins over. This is catchy and propulsive and leads very satisfyingly to the climax.

But in all 4 of the recordings I heard, performed by people who should most certainly have known better, instead of keeping the 8th notes constant as requested explicitly on the page, the conductors keep the bars constant through the meter change, which means that when it launches into 3/8, there’s just a relaxed triplet feeling, and the 2/4 insertions come off as either a hiccup or a place where the record skips — which is a weird and intriguing effect, but clearly not the one d’Indy had in mind. Why would there be a hiccup in the music at that point? That obviously doesn’t make any sense! And yet Charles Munch and Paul Paray just forge ahead. I found this bewildering.

I mean, am I crazy? Those guys probably knew what they were doing, right? Even though it sounds bizarre, and even though it says something else in the score? I think niceties of rhythm and meter just weren’t top priorities for several generations of musicians. I don’t know why, but that seems to be the way it was.

Incidentally, this experiment in metrical modulation reminds me very much of the similar metrical experiment at the end of the Saint-Saëns symphony, composed the same year, which was also badly negotiated on most recordings. The Saint-Saëns is obviously the closest genetic relative to this piece that we’ve seen thus far, but I also hear some relationships to the much later Ravel concerto, both in particulars (compare the opening themes) and in the general textural impression. But Ravel’s is endlessly smooth and charming, whereas d’Indy feels a fair bit mustachioed and professorial.

But however odd and dated the essence of the thing, it is also sincere, intelligent, and heartfelt. I really did like it, by the end. I’d gladly listen to more d’Indy. But I’d go to the score sooner, next time. This little pocket of musical style really is more lost than others, and I don’t totally trust performers to know what it’s about.

Dubal said to try

C. Collard, Radio France Philharmonic Orchestra, Janowski: Erato 2292-45821-2-ZK
Henriot-Schweitzer, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Munch: RCA 09026-62582-2

Nope, didn’t hear those, though the samples of the latter that I heard just now sounded better than anything I did hear. I heard

François-Joël Thiollier, National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland/Antonio de Almeida (1994?) (1st movement here)
Louis Nagel, Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra/Rico Saccani (date?) (tracks 1–3 here)
Marguerite Long, Concerts Colonne/Paul Paray (1934) (which I found here)
Robert Casadesus, New York Philharmonic/Charles Munch (1948) (which I found here)

None of these is completely satisfying. The musicianship is more thoughtful on the older ones, but the crackly sound is a real impediment in trying to navigate the orchestration. I guess I’ll recommend the Munch one because there it is for the downloading, and it’s lively. And I’m obligated to boost the New York Philharmonic.

Scores! Including the full score and the 2 piano score.

This felt like a really awkward, clumsy draft, this entry, but right now I’d really like to be able to think about something else rather than feel obligated to go back and edit. [Your wish is granted.] Hooray!

May 8, 2009

Danton’s Death (1835)

Georg Büchner (1813–1837)
Dantons Tod (1835)
translated into English as Danton’s Death (1971) by Victor Price

#18:

930: Danton’s Death

This was a satisfying morsel of seriousness, like a dark piece of meat. This is exactly the sort of theater I would never buy tickets for: historical, political, grim, long. But on the page and in my mind, it impressed me with its consistent intelligence. Every moment brings a new idea, either in content or form. Büchner wrote it at the age of 21, never having written for the stage before (and possibly never having seen a play?), and it feels wonderfully free from the influence of theatrical standard practice.

It’s clear that he wrote because he was personally invested in the issues (being a cynical revolutionary himself), not because he considered himself “an artist.”

Many writers seem to write principally because they are writers. The occupation and habit of writing demands subject matter, rather than the subject matter demanding its being written. Their desire to communicate is merely a habit, not an imperative. This state of affairs isn’t inexcusable, but once I recognize it, I often lose interest. I want to be caring about the same thing the writer cared about, feeling the same way he felt. If he was thinking about writing more than about life, chances are so will I. The catch is that passionate, unwriterly writing is usually ineffective; writers, unfortunately, are generally the only people who write well.

Here we have a rare and invigorating case of an author motivated more by his subject than his craft, and yet still having an excellent and original talent for that craft. Or at least for literary art. It’s not clear how realistically Büchner was thinking about theatrical productions. This play calls for a really huge cast (30 named roles plus assorted others), many of the characters making only one appearance each. It contains several heavily populated scenes requiring a large stage, and also many extremely short scenes that demand quick changes. Obviously, these things are all possible, but in combination they create the impression of a play written to be produced in the imagination rather than by paid professionals. Considering how heady and depressing it is, it’s awfully expensive. Not a promising combination from a business perspective.

It can be produced, and has been — not during Büchner’s brief lifetime, of course; not for many decades afterward — but at heart it’s not really crying out to be performed, at least not to my mind. It’s really just literature that happens to be written down as drama, I think because Büchner felt that the form of drama closest approaches the artistic ideal of recreating life. This piece borrows the notation of drama to be something rather different, a different kind of literature — just like that chapter of Ulysses that is written like a play but is manifestly unperformable.

I just read someone’s blog saying that Büchner invented cinema aesthetics 70 years too early: his successions of very brief scenes read like edited film. One succession, in fact, is like a reverse cut, where the scene set outside the prison wall, with a character seen in the prison window, is followed by the scene inside the prison, with the same character looking out the window. This is a neat point, but of course what Büchner was writing was not cinema because it couldn’t be. It was his own fresh aesthetic, driven above all by his desire to be true to life and not to convention.

Here’s an excerpt, in which Büchner decries the mass audience that lacks the imaginative capacity to comprehend sincere and conscientious portrayals of life, such as… this play. How right he was! This speech would not get anywhere near that audience for years. If a writer describes a tree falling in the forest, but nobody ever reads it, is it still standing?

CAMILLE. I tell you, if they don’t get things in wooden copies, all neatly labelled, in theatres, concerts, or art shows, they’ve got neither eyes nor ears for them. But carve a puppet, show them the hole where the string goes in, give it a pull so that its joints creak in blank verse with every step it takes — and then, what character-drawing, what verisimilitude! Take a little scrap of sentiment, an aphorism, a concept, dress it up in coat and trousers, give it hands and feet, paint its face and let it attitudinize through three acts till at the finish it gets married or blows its brains out — and lo, idealism! Fiddle out an opera that bears as much relation to the ups and downs of life as a clay pipe blowing bubbles to a nightingale — high Art. Turn people out of the theatre and on to the street — and oh dear me, how pitiful reality is! They forget God Almighty for his bad imitators. Creation, red-hot creation thunders and lightens in and around them at every moment; they hear and see nothing. They go to the theatre, they read poems and novels, they grimace like the puppets they find in them and turn up their noses at God’s creatures. ‘My dear, how commonplace!’ The Greeks knew what they were talking about when they said that Pygmalion’s statue came to life but bore no children.

DANTON. And artists treat nature as David treated the murdered Septembrists when they were thrown out of La Force on to the streets. He sketched them in cold blood and said: ‘I’m catching the last spasm of life in these scoundrels.’

[He is called away.]

CAMILLE. What do you say, Lucile?

LUCILE. Nothing, I so love watching you when you speak.

CAMILLE. Do you listen as well?

LUCILE. Of course!

CAMILLE. Well, am I right? Do you really know what I said?

LUCILE. To tell you the truth, no.

That deflated after-beat demonstrates what makes the play so brilliant. Büchner’s essayistic speechifying, which is always fascinating in its own right, is never allowed to forget that it too is just part of a real, fallen world, in which the pretensions of essayistic speechifying pale next to the love and pain and confusion around them. This is, in fact, the philosophical point of the play; just causes and noble actions are important, revolutions cannot be ignored, but they reduce life and death to political currency, and anyone who can see that death is another sort of thing entirely is bound to become disenchanted. A revolutionary with his eyes open will always be a cynic about his own cause.

What’s exceptional here is that Büchner takes equally seriously both the politics and the undercurrent of anti-politics. There’s no writing off the political intrigues of the plot as just so much breast-beating; everything that happens is very important for both the characters and for their country; but neither is there any writing off the sense that it is all an ugly, deluded game. Danton’s ambivalence is genuinely Büchner’s and it becomes ours as we take it all in. That, I think, is a great achievement. It’s so easy for a work of art to purport to struggle with philosophical issues even as it sits comfortably within larger and more fundamental philosophical assumptions. This play refuses to get comfortable; it lives right within the issues that drive it.

Among the major speeches of the play, most of them by boasting, feuding, scheming revolutionaries, there is one very earthy, personal one given to a whore, which ends on this remarkable note:

MARION. … Other people have Sundays and week-days, they work six days and they pray on the seventh. Every year they look forward to their birthday, and to the New Year, and they feel sentimental. I don’t understand all that. I know nothing about divisions or changes. I’m all of a piece, just one big longing and clinging. I’m a fire, a river. My mother died of grief. People point their fingers at me. That’s stupid! The only thing that counts is what you enjoy — bodies, holy pictures, flowers, toys. The feelings are just the same. Enjoy yourself — that’s the best way to pray.

This is really Molly Bloom incarnate, 80-some years before her time. The whole play feels like an outburst of very modern philosophical clarity, from an isolated soul who came to it with no particular help from the culture around him. I’m not enamored of “genius” any more than any other artistic mode d’être, but in this case I found the aesthetic self-sufficiency of the work and its author very compelling.

What, I can say raison d’être and modus operandi but I can’t say mode d’être? Well, screw you. And anyway, it’s still not actually what I mean. I really want a word for the type of story that is told about a given person — a mode of being talked about or dramatized, a pre-packaged quasi-narrative identity that can be imposed by a historian. “Tortured genius,” or “renaissance man” or “free spirit,” or “ahead of his time” — each of these is a what? They’re all a little phony because they’re all blithely reductive. Word suggestions please.

I wanted to say something about how naturalism is relative and the speeches aren’t actually “realistic” at all to the way people talk. The atmosphere created by playwriting that is observant about life but is artificially dense with thought always reminds me of Shakespeare, but surely that’s because I haven’t read enough plays. Though the introduction does seem to think drawing connections to Shakespeare is specifically merited here. So… there, I said something. The shorter the better.

A lot of standout lines and moments — I want to mention that the deeply evil speech that Saint-Just makes to the assembly, in particular, is absolutely riveting — and a richly idiosyncratic overall conception makes for a very satisfying read. But even knowing that, I’m not sure I would want to see this performed. I’m not sure it makes enough deliberate enough use of time — real, tangible time, sitting-in-a-crowd-in-the-dark-being-quiet time — that it wouldn’t just feel like a cruel way of turning this intriguing text into a tedious ordeal. There are plenty of very good books that I wouldn’t want to hear performed aloud. I think this might be one of them. Stage directions be damned.

But of course I don’t know — a good director could easily surprise me. I have an open mind and would like to sample a production on video or radio, except there doesn’t seem to be any easy way of doing so. There is a fairly well-regarded opera of Dantons Tod, which seems to have been a career-maker for composer Gottfried von Einem. Oddly enough, you can listen to most of it right here (a few tracks are missing). I actually got the score out of the library and followed through about half of it. The adaptation seems respectable and thoughtful, certainly, and the music seems fine… but I think I just don’t speak opera. As with Richard Strauss a few months back, I don’t know how to listen to a succession of moments of little to no inherent drama each being given big-time musical emphasis. This may well have to do with my mongrel musical upbringing, as I was saying earlier this week. But to go there would be really and truly off topic. Halt.

I got out the ratty library copy above even though they also had two successively cleaner and newer reprints, because 1) more fun to get something that reminds me of the 70s than something that reminds me of the bookstore, right? and 2) the new editions, being offset from the old edition, had slightly thicker, weightier letters. I bet if they cared about it, the technology exists to reprint old editions without any detectable loss of fidelity. But they obviously don’t care, and so they print these ever-blurrier editions, even though the crisper, more delicate letterforms are always more satisfying. AM I RIGHT, PEOPLE?

I’m thinking of building this observation into my standup routine.

Actually I think Demetri Martin already has, right after his hilarious bit about n factorial, and his brilliant riff about how 3 looks like a backward E, and his sestina about how awesome a perfectly sharpened pencil is. That shit cracks me up.

But seriously folks, Demetri Martin is probably a cool guy. I’m gonna end this entry before anything else happens.

May 8, 2009

Disney Canon #19: The Jungle Book (1967)

disney19-title.png

ADAM That was the most charming case against miscegenation I’ve ever seen. “Would you want your daughter to marry a panther?” That was creepily of its time.

BROOM I don’t think that’s what that meant.

ADAM That’s what it meant in every other context when people said things like that. I’m not saying that’s what it meant here. I just thought it was funny.

BROOM Several times I thought about how it’s easy for us to see things that are “inappropriate.” Like that they shouldn’t be rubbing their balls on things. But I must have watched this movie many times as a kid — so much of it was familiar this time — and I never thought “look, he’s rubbing his balls!” Or that it was too weirdly intimate for Mowgli to be lying on Baloo’s belly.

BETH That didn’t really seem inappropriate.

BROOM Well, we were snickering at it, but there’s really nothing there.

BETH You don’t think the animators thought about it?

BROOM No. I just don’t think it was there at all. And I definitely don’t think that they thought of it in racial terms. I don’t think that the jungle was “the wrong kind of people” and the human village was “the right kind of people.” I don’t think there was any sort of “typing” going on.

BETH It did seem less racial than, say, Dumbo did.

BROOM I think the avoidance of any characters who were even remotely black meant that they had, by this point, learned their lesson.

ADAM Um, except the orangutans!

BROOM They weren’t black! As you said, they were like the guys who sing “Gee, Officer Krupke.” Very pointedly so, instead of being black like they would have been in any other Disney movie.

ADAM I thought that the orangutan king was, like….

BROOM He was Louis Prima! He’s Italian.

ADAM I don’t know.

BETH He seemed to be black.

BROOM Yes. He’s Cousin Louis because the voice is actually Louis Prima.

ADAM Okay. I thought it was funny that Disney’s response to the 60s — that finally kicked in in 1967 — was…

BETH Ringo?

ADAM It was like Dobie Gillis. They tried to do the Beatles, but their Beatles were singing barbershop. They obviously said, “let’s get some of this crazy 60s stuff in,” but they had no idea. Their understanding of what 60s culture meant was, like, beatniks.

BETH I don’t know. To do what they did, I think they couldn’t have been clueless.

ADAM It was like, “hey, these people are on Ed Sullivan, and they have mop-like hair and British accents!” and that was about all they got.

BETH The barbershop singing was weird.

BROOM I was wondering what kind of song they were going to sing, because if they sang a Beatles-style song, it seemed like that would be taking it too far. And when they started singing the barbershop, I thought, “this is a good move.” The quartet turns into something else so that we don’t have to be distracted thinking about the Beatles the whole time. I thought that the electric bass in the underscore while they were talking was already heavy-handed enough. Did Bagheera remind anyone else of Captain Picard?

BETH Yes! I was going to say that! He looks like him and talks like him.

ADAM I liked the shaggy style of the drawing here, with stray lines. It looked like an animated sketchpad.

BROOM That’s because they used xerography or something to transfer the drawings directly to the cells. But you liked it?

BETH I like that too. You don’t?

BROOM It’s a sign of them cutting costs. But when I was a kid, it was just “a look,” and I guess I did like it. I certainly liked this movie a lot when I was a kid. I think it has two of the catchiest songs in the Disney canon in it.

ADAM What’s the other one?

BROOM “I Wanna Be Like You” and “Bear Necessities.”

BETH When the snake’s eyes get crazy…

BROOM “Trust In Me?”

BETH … no, I’m just asking about the scene — that didn’t scare you? I feel like that totally would have scared me.

BROOM Really?

ADAM It would have scared me more if Bagheera hadn’t been as exasperated by it.

BROOM I don’t remember the first time I saw it, but I remember watching it and knowing it already, and I knew that Kaa was ineffectual. Even though he gets right to the place where he could eat Mowgli, both Shere Khan and Bagheera are more powerful than he is.

ADAM Why does Shere Khan let him go if he knows that he has Mowgli?

BROOM I think that when he lowers his middle down, the trick actually works. Shere Khan is actually surprised that he’s able to do that.

BETH I thought Shere Khan was a great villain character.

BROOM He’s excellent. It’s a shame that he’s only in about five minutes of the movie.

ADAM Yeah. He’s so authoritative.

BETH He’s just like James Mason in North by Northwest, I thought. “Your next role will be playing dead; you’ll be quite convincing.”

BROOM That’s right. I like that his power comes in being so calm the whole time. I like when he puts out his claw and quietly squeezes Kaa’s neck. That’s a good bad-guy show of force. But I think the movie — even more than Sword in the Stone — is just episodic, just a series of encounters with characters, some of whom have songs. Well, I guess they all have songs, but some of the songs suck.

ADAM The orangutans to me were pretty charismatic, and Baloo is pretty entertaining — he’s the first stoner in a Disney movie.

BROOM He’s not a stoner, he’s just a vagabond. I remember really liking Baloo in the same way I liked the scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz — as “the guy who likes you! He’s so nice to you!” It’s a very warm feeling, and Phil Harris’s voice is very inviting to a kid — though now I hear a little more sleaze in it than I would have heard then.

ADAM He has a Yogi Bear quality.

BROOM Yeah, but more warm, more avuncular.

ADAM You can see in him the Hanna-Barbera-ization proceeding apace.

BROOM What does that mean to you? Just a cheapening, all-around, or something else?

ADAM Sort of a jauntier, cheaper animation style, and a jauntier cast of characters; less moralizing and more slapstick.

BROOM Some of the slapstick was pretty shoddy.

ADAM When the temple collapses, it’s like the temple collapsing in a Scooby-Doo cartoon.

BROOM That’s true.

ADAM [imitates Hanna-Barbera “scrambling feet” sound effect]

BROOM Right. The slapstick was generally well-animated, but a lot of it was pretty lazy stuff. Like someone being snapped backward and slamming into something. And the timing was very much for kids. I guess Sword in the Stone was like that too. I feel like The Jungle Book has a little more human warmth than The Sword in the Stone, which is probably why I liked it better. Bagheera and Baloo felt like nice guys.

ADAM Although it’s a shame that when he leaves his wolf family, it’s like, “oh well.”

BROOM It’s true. His parents don’t mean anything to him.

ADAM And then when he leaves Baloo and Bagheera, it’s like, “so much for that!” He leaves them for that little minx.

BROOM Yeah, the really sexy ten-year-old.

ADAM That’s the clip that I’d seen in a Disney Valentine’s Day special, which is really creepy.

BETH It is.

BROOM She’s explicitly seducing him, even though they’re just ten-year-old kids. And her really big eyes that she bats at him. She looks like that creepy shot in Lion King where the girl lion looks up at him and it’s a little too sexual. I thought that Mowgli looked like Bobby Hill. He had a very simplified flat face.

BETH I liked his face. I thought he was cute and easy to watch. A lot of times I think kids’ faces look obnoxious.

ADAM I appreciated that we didn’t have to endure the backstory of how he got into the jungle.

BROOM Right. It doesn’t matter. “He got abandoned by his parents. There are no emotions in it; go with that.” There are almost no emotions in the whole movie.

BETH Well, fear.

BROOM Just momentary fear, maybe. But even the final, serious, scary-landscape, actual-threat-of-death fight scene is still just about being bonked on the head.

BETH Yeah.

ADAM “Easygoing” is what I would call this movie.

BROOM I remember it being very appealing when I was a kid. Yes, it’s very superficial.

BETH Even if Baloo isn’t a stoner, it feels like it was made by people who had done a lot of pot.

BROOM Oh, I don’t think so. I think it was all the same old men who had done the other movies.

BETH Really? Even the music? A lot about it seemed so 60s-y.

BROOM I think the association of that aesthetic with drugs and hippies is just retrospective. I think a lot of people in the 60s were just having the same lives they had in the 50s, with a different soundtrack.

ADAM I think the orangutans were clearly pot-smokers. And I think Baloo was clearly a pot-smoker.

BROOM I don’t think pot was a factor here at all. Baloo was just a moocher, a well-meaning good-for-nothin’.

BETH But he might have tried drugs at some point.

BROOM His defining characteristic was his advice to Mowgli: “Don’t go out there looking for things that you don’t have; just give up and settle for the bare necessities.” I don’t think he was saying “space out.” He was just saying “don’t expect anything.”

ADAM Hakuna matata.

BROOM “Hakuna Matata” is exactly the same scene; it’s obviously an attempt to do this song again. “Bear Necessities” really is a standout song for me. It’s really very catchy. The patter about the prickly pawpaw — “put the paw and the claw with the pawpaw” or whatever — when I was a kid, I thought it was just the fun of saying crazy words in rhythm. This time I heard that he was actually saying things that made sense, and the idea of doing a tongue-twister break seemed almost embarrassingly corny to me now. Anything else to say about the big picture here?

BETH About the ideology?

BROOM I don’t know. Sure, if you’ve got something.

ADAM The ideology is like, “cool it.”

BETH “Go with the flow.”

ADAM “Breeze it, buzz it, easy does it: keep cooly-cool, boy!”

BROOM That’s about keeping cool and not losing your cool; but nobody here was going to lose their cool. Even Bagheera, the serious one, the prude, isn’t really a prude. At the end you think he’s going to be flustered and say “I can’t sing this song!” but instead he immediately joins in.

ADAM It’s like nobody meant any of it, for the whole movie. And that’s sort of comforting.

BROOM Which is what all Disney movies were like at that point. All those Herbie movies… there’s no threat of anything.

BETH You were just saying this. That you like encountering old live-action Disney movies on TV because there’s no threat of having to deal with anything.

BROOM I don’t remember saying that.

BETH At the beach.

ADAM Can we read the review? I have to go. Sorry, Emma.

BROOM No, she’s happy about that. I was going to say at the beginning of this conversation that this viewing was a little more distracted, because Beth was falling asleep and Adam had work emails coming into him as we watched, but that it turned out the movie could handle it. The movie didn’t demand anything of us. There’s no investment to be made in it; it’s just a series of diversions.

[we read the original Times review but have nothing to add]

disney19-end.png

May 3, 2009

Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 1 in C Major, Op. 15 (1795; rev. 1800)

Classical Canon random selection #12:

124

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

Opus 15: Piano Concerto (No. 1 in C major)

composed: 1795, revised 1800 (age 25, 30)
[although recent scholarship suggests composition may have been as early as 1793, age 23]

published: 1801
first performance: December 18, 1795, Redoutensaal, Vienna
[recent scholarship, again, thinks perhaps that concert featured the “Concerto No. 2,” and this one was actually premiered in 1796 on tour, in Berlin, Pressburg (Bratislava), or Pest (Budapest)]

dedicated to Princess Barbara Odescalchi (née Countess von Keglevics)

That’s two Beethovens in a row, if you’re counting.

I have a whole bunch of these Classical Canon pieces to respond to but I’ve been held up because I just don’t have much to say about this one. But that’s okay, right? Isn’t it okay not to have much of a response to something?

I guess. But the obligation to write is supposed to be my incentive to up the ante. When you put some shoulder into in it and push upstream against lazy, duck’s-back indifference, you almost always find something. Not finding anything is usually just a symptom of passivity. So going with my shrug feels like a cop-out, even if it’s sincere.

But some things are more shrug-worthy than others.

When we say that something has made no particular impression on us, what we mean is that the impression was already made on us, earlier in life, by something else. Everything makes an impression on a blank-slate newborn, but as the impressions build up, the mind begins to construct categories, and then subcategories, and so on and so on. And then it finds itself here, as me, listening to a piece and thinking, “yeah, this just sounds like some classical-era music,” and then trying to listen closer, and thinking, “yeah, this just sounds like a classical-era piano concerto,” and then — let’s skip to the finish here — “yeah, this sounds like an early Beethoven piano concerto.” That’s a sub-category in which there are only two items. And yet it still feels like a category and not an identity.

A talking point that I’ve brought out in several conversations past: how many Road Runner cartoons are there? Yeah, Wikipedia says 45, but that includes a bunch of latter-day nonsense; the ones you’d ever see on TV end around 40, and that includes a whole series of shoddy, cut-rate ones from the 60s. The Chuck Jones ones, which are the only ones you actually think of when you think of Road Runner cartoons, number only about 22. The point is: some fairly small finite number.

Yeah, believe it or not, I’ve used this as an example before. So, it’s not a great one; so sue me. I still think of it when I think of this issue of type versus exemplar. There is no amount of specific familiarity with those 22 cartoons that I could gain and not still think of Road Runner cartoons as a type, an unbounded set. Or so I suspect. I’m not going to try.


I have come to accept that in listening to music, I am personally most sensitive to kinetic qualities: how much energy it’s exhibiting and how, what happens to movement, whether it’s gathering force or dissipating, smaller impulses driving larger ones, etc. My memory of music I’ve only heard a few times will frequently trick me by replacing harmonies, melodies, or rhythms with other ones that “accomplish” the same thing, kinetically, because that’s what I’ve identified as essential. That kind of awareness comes without any thought or effort, and is quite full. But for me to become sensitive to the particularities of line, or harmony, or form, beyond their most aggressive features, requires either strenuously willed attention, or a score to concretize everything so I can work with my eye and not just my flaky ear.

Or I have to hear a piece many, many times, until every detail has wormed its way into my memory. But that kind of knowledge feels a little superficial in its own way — when you care about some accidental squeak on a recording as much as you do about the sequence of notes, your familiarity is not specifically musical. John Cage would say otherwise, but I think he’d be wrong. You can become very familiar with a recording of a person’s voice speaking in a language you do not understand; that’s different from becoming very familiar eith the text being spoken. Objectively and cognitively different in type, not just character. Being able to hum my way through a piece still doesn’t mean I “get it,” just like being able to walk the route to elementary school didn’t mean I knew anything about the geography of my hometown.

Without evidence to the contrary, I’d assume that everyone experienced music this same way: motion and texture above all, then tunes, then everything else. It just feels so inevitable to me. But I know it’s not so. Beth, for one, remembers melodies very accurately after only one or two listens, and is amazed how often I — “a musician!” — sing back melodies incorrectly, subconsciously recomposing phrases in ways that feel to me “functionally equivalent” to the originals. To her ear there’s nothing “equivalent” about it; I’m just getting them wrong, period. But her memory for accompaniment and rhythm seems to be vaguer than mine.

It seems likely that these kinds of predilections are determined by the musical languages to which we are exposed as children, just as our ability to distinguish phonemes seems to correspond to the language we are brought up speaking. An English speaker has a hard time learning to hear and speak Mandarin vowel sounds (right?) but no baby brought up speaking Mandarin has any serious problem. Maybe. On the other hand, people’s precision of enunciation varies greatly within the same culture. Beth’s brother, who grew up in the same household, lets all his phonemes melt together without apparently hearing it or caring; she doesn’t. So there’s probably some genetic component as well. For what it’s worth, I know many fine musicians who are terrible mumblers, and many actors who can very attentively and carefully mimic speech patterns but not musical ones. Yeah, I know, that’s a whole other bicycle of fish.

I personally grew up hearing a mix of classical music, theater music, and pop — and most importantly, of course, TV — but pretty idiosyncratic selections from each. Most people with classical music in their lives seem to have been exposed to various composers and pieces approximately in proportion to their general cultural prominence, but my exposure was mostly based on what my father’s casual, eclectic interest happened to have focussed on in any given month. I heard Mozart and Beethoven, but only a few pieces by each. I probably heard more pieces by Bartok than by Mozart. There was no obvious way for me to know that the five or six Mozart sonatas that I knew were actually to be understood in the context of a whole coherent musico-linguistic culture circa 1785 in Austria, whereas Bartok came from a time of iconoclasts — he was surrounded by influences but no true contemporaries. In my childhood, I recognized that each composer had a personality that united their pieces, but otherwise each piece stood alone. The fact that Mozart and Beethoven had sort of similar styles, all things considered, was if anything a count against them both. Why write more of that kind of stuff when we already have the 10 pieces that I know?

Pop music was similar. I never sought it out and never put on the radio, so I just heard the albums my parents bought and listened to — a couple every year but not a lot more. Plus the extra copy of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band that they let me play on my Fisher Price turntable. As with classical, I didn’t have a full enough spectrum of material to form a sense of a shared language. Other than the basic chords and rhythms, each band seemed to be coming from its own universe. The only genuinely whole musical “culture” I knew was the TV, which probably accounts for stuff like this being in my brain today.

The point of this digression is that I think whatever strengths my musical mind developed were those that were useful in distinguishing this range of musical fragments from one another. The musical culture to which I and nobody else belonged (well, except maybe my sister, for a while) was the one which contained a few isolated pieces by the Beatles, and Bartok, and Mozart, and the theme for the evening news, and only a few hundred other things.

Every spoken language emphasizes different kinds of discrimination — our American-English ears don’t seem care too much about a lot of vowels, but we place greater emphasis than the rest of the world, it seems, on distinguishing our “R” from other sounds near it — and the same is true for musical cultures. Beethoven and Mozart wrote for listeners who were apparently expected to care very much about the character of line, even at a very small scale. Most of their listening was presumably to virtuoso vocalists whose elaborate flourishes were the point. Even after a bachelor’s degree and several decades of attentive listening, my ears almost always just hear “music that believes in flourishes,” which is sufficient to distinguish it from, say, the 3-2-1 Contact Theme, and mostly disregards the specific flourishes, just like we all mostly disregard the difference in character between the decorative gook growing on the front of the one dollar bill (classical, leafy, modest), and the decorative gook growing on the back (baroque, sinuous, alien). We just see “dignified, intricate old-timey decoration.” And part of us always will, no matter how many design classes we take.

I must accept that before I put on my “18th-century-make-believe” helmet and hunker down hard with a score — and even afterward — I am going to hear Beethoven in competition not with Albrechtsberger and Hummel (who?) but with Debussy and Prokofiev and “Theme from the Jetsons” and “Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite!”

This problem is — OBVIOUSLY — the main reason why classical music is hard to popularize nowadays, but nobody wants to talk about it because there’s no solution other than to give up on all but a very few pieces from any given era.

One of my esteemed music professors once played a Bach “surprise” cadence on the piano and ostentatiously savored how wonderfully spicy and shocking it was, and then bemoaned the fact that today most people need to be beaten over the head to elicit any sense of surprise, and attributed it, with an Ivy League shake of the head, to “the coarsening of our culture.” Which is, at face value, actually a very good metaphor for what’s happened, but he didn’t mean it that way — he meant that these horrible people today are getting more and more vulgar and lowdown, ugh. I said that I thought it was simply because we’ve been exposed to contexts where that chord isn’t shocking at all; that if we heard that very same chord progression in a work by Schoenberg, we would have been principally struck by how uncharacteristically bland and rote and old-fashioned it was. These things are all contextual, and we aesthetes and aficionados are all play-acting, to a degree, when we pretend to live in those contexts, whereas the coarse people around us who admit not to being surprised by a totally characteristic “surprise” are just being honest. And he had absolutely nothing to say to that. We just went on to something else.

I think. It’s possible my memory has distorted the moment, to make me more of a lonely prophet of sincerity in a vale of pretension. Thanks, memory!

This is all to say that this piece is hiding behind some other pieces from around 1800 that I already know, and won’t come out no matter how much I coax it. Here, kitty kitty. Even if I commit the whole thing to memory, will it ever really come out?


My recent entries here have been long and dull and it’s because I haven’t been writing as much lately. Juices need to be gotten flowing. A lot of this is, I suspect, like reading the loop-de-loops of someone getting a dry pen started.

So I’m going to be bold and just end it here. Wait, what about, like, Beethoven’s Concerto No. 1? You can listen yourself if you want. It’s a decent but unremarkable piece based on decent but unremarkable material. It’s not in the 1001 Recordings list and more power to them. I think David Dubal just wanted to list all five concerti because Beethoven’s such a damned demigod.

Honestly, it’s better than this entry lets on. You might like it.

Dubal told me to listen to:

Fleisher, Cleveland Orchestra, Szell: CBS M3K 42445
Schnabel, London Symphony Orchestra and London Philharmonic Orchestra, Sargent: Pearl PEA 9063
Arrau, Dresden Staatskapelle, Davis: Philips 422149-2

I hit the Schnabel, not the others.

I listened to
Murray Perahia, Concertgebouw Orchestra / Bernard Haitink (1985)
Artur Schnabel, London Symphony Orchestra / Malcolm Sargent (1932)
Rudolf Serkin, Philadelphia Orchestra / Eugene Ormandy (1965)
Melvyn Tan, The London Classical Players / Roger Norrington (1988, on period instruments)
Sviatoslav Richter, Boston Symphony Orchestra / Charles Munch (1960)

Man, that’s a lot! Who knew. I don’t remember which ones I liked; it was a long time ago.

Maybe someday my conscience will come haunting me and I’ll force myself to have more thoughts specifically about this piece, but that seems highly, highly unlikely.

May 2, 2009

Doctor Zhivago (1957)

Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)
Доктор Живаго (1957)
translated into English as Doctor Zhivago by Max Hayward and Manya Harari (1958)

Roll #17:
1748: Boris Pasternak.
1749: Doctor Zhivago

I had been writing a tremendously long entry about this book over many days, but I started to feel nauseated looking at it so I just now wiped it clean. From the top again, boys, this time with feeling, and don’t drag!

I’ll start with the confession: I’m not as proud of this reading as I have been of my others in this series. The book took me by surprise by turning out to be hard. It’s sort of a stealth hard book. You don’t realize what it demands of you until you’re halfway through. I get the impression that some critics have had a similar experience and settled for sizing it up in a superficial way, emboldened to do so, I’ll bet, by the existence of the movie. But it’s not a superficial book. It is an ambitious work of art that asks to be taken seriously. It aims high. Or wide, anyway.

The difficulty is that there are several things going on here, braided together and alternating, and while it’s easy enough to track them separately, it’s not clear how to synthesize and unify them. The descriptive imagery, the historical panorama, the philosophical digressions, the love story, and the life story are all in complex negotiations with one another for airtime. Given 550 pages, they each get enough room to have their say, and they manage to coexist stylistically without too much jostling. But the things they’re saying don’t seem quite consistent with one another. The ungenerous way to resolve the resulting complexities is to conclude that Pasternak didn’t have enough control for so large a work, wasn’t a natural novelist and so ended up writing something philosophically and aesthetically diffuse. It’s also possible that he thought of internal tension and heterogeneity as aesthetically valuable; rich soil for the mind — this certainly seems to be an attitude shared by many poets. The other possibility that I have to consider is that the various elements do resolve into a coherent field of meaning, but that I just haven’t seen how.

On the one hand we have something a bit like The Plague: people’s lives are overturned and threatened by great tidal forces beyond their control, and our good doctor goes among them trying to do the right thing and live according to humble principles, a heroic figure of humanism in a vast landscape of cruel abstractions. But a revolution is not a plague from above; it is a congregate expression of human will. The panorama of struggle and suffering through which Zhivago wanders is the product of his society, not of indifferent nature. Of course it’s admirable that Zhivago loves life, but surely so too do the desperate people around him; the real question is, what is this mess and how did they end up in it? All Quiet on the Western Front, which I read recently but didn’t write about, was about the inhumanity of war but also about the nature of war. It took it upon itself to address “what is this mess and how did we end up in it?” But Zhivago, and Doctor Zhivago, with its poet’s-eye-view of the world, seems skeptical of any kind of analysis, anything that would have a whiff of sociology or history about it. The only “big picture” Pasternak is willing to show us is the alien force of fate, manifested as a dense web of meaningless coincidences that intertwine all these lives; the big picture is a realm of inscrutable mystery.

Zhivago is an intellectual but his beatific humanism is old-school Russian: a little lyricism, a little Christianity, a little mysticism, a little folk. Fairy-tale-ish. That sort of thing, warm and loving though it may be, is no match for a force like the revolution. And Pasternak acknowledges as much: Zhivago’s life taken as a whole is pretty depressing, and after his family and then his mistress are torn from him by circumstance, he declines and dies in a kind of emeritus irrelevance, having had no real impact on events. But it’s also clear that Zhivago’s writing of poetry is meant to be seen as a heroic act. His poems capture the spark of humanism on the page and are like a seed of the human spirit, waiting to be reborn in society, or something.

To me, at least, the realistic descriptions of people starving, freezing, murdering one another, etc. etc. make the idea of poet-as-hero seem awfully flimsy. Isn’t this sort of romanticization of art and intellectualism just as ideological and removed from real life in its way as the sloganistic politics the book laments? The final paragraph, suggesting vaguely that perhaps from these poems, a new day will dawn in the cold Soviet Union, just seems like pie in the sky.

Seeing as Zhivago pretty much is Pasternak, it’s a little self-aggrandizing, as is the fairly overt implication that Zhivago is a Christ-like figure, his pure spirit having died for Russia’s sins. Also distasteful is the fact that the whole book, from a certain point of view, is a justification — sanctification, really — of cheating on your loving wife with the pretty blonde you met at work. The universe conspires to make Zhivago do it, of course, but the romance-novel aspect of the book starts convincing us that it’s fated and desirable long before it is morally excusable. And it’s Pasternak’s universe doing the conspiring, after all. Supposedly his wife and his mistress knew each other and got along well in real life.

Just as Zhivago embodies the values of the old-school Russian thought, the book is a throwback to (or a holdover from) the old-school Russian novel. Not having read War and Peace (which I suspect is the major forebear to Zhivago in substance and form), I feel ill-equipped to guess at Pasternak’s intentions — whether he was writing the only way he knew how, or was making a point by resurrecting a dead style, or was explicitly writing a modern echo of the classics, or what. But I suspect that such distinctions are different in Russia, where Tolstoy and Pushkin still play a far more central, scriptural role in contemporary national pride than, say, Melville and Twain over here in the US. On the issue of style, taste and anachronism, I was reminded of Rachmaninoff, whose music is often dismissed as over-the-top kitschy sentimentalism, but who was actually quite a serious and tasteful composer doing subtle things; he just happened to be one of the last men standing, still working within a frame of reference that was all but extinct, that favored heightened emotion and the intensification of beauty. Likewise, Doctor Zhivago has more than a touch of the soapy melodrama in it, but it comes by it honestly, by way of the craft of an earlier time.

I think. Then again sometimes Rachmaninoff does sound a little cheap even to me. And sometimes I had my doubts about whether Doctor Zhivago was really any more dignified or deep than the movie version that overshadows it. The question remains open. An AMC classic Hollywood movie can be “real art” too, if it’s done well enough. Maybe this book was that kind of achievement?

That Pasternak was a poet shines through very clearly, both for better and for worse. The images are conveyed with force and distinction; the prose, even in translation, is strong and rewarding. Most of the individual scenes are quite fine, and even the soapy, melodramatic stuff was full and well-crafted enough that I got into it. But the relationship between part and whole is always oblique, unstated, as in a poem, and so the whole never quite gelled for me; the murk never quite cleared. And I’m not going to read it again to make better sense of it, though I almost certainly would. It’s just too damn long. Since that’s my choice, I will in good faith grant that it’s entirely possible that this book is not flawed, but rather very rich, and that I have fallen short in exploring it. Probably that’s true… to some degree.

It is a worthy and impressive book. But my gut tells me that my problems with it were its problems, and this is my site, so what I say goes.

I am moved by the formal idea of having the book end, but then to offer, as postlude, Zhivago’s poems. We’ve watched the man’s whole life and seen how these poems represent only the briefest few days of oasis in his existence, and yet here they are, still burning with the life of those few days on the page — apart from, but bound to, the book of his life. I was braced to be deeply moved by the poignancy. But, sadly, the poetry suffers in translation more than the prose and the experience is underwhelming.

I’m also interested in Pasternak’s attempt to write poetry “by Zhivago,” an issue discussed in the comments way back here. I think he does all right. But there’s still a sense of distance between the character in the novel and the author of this poetry, since the only thoughts we’ve heard in Zhivago’s head have been quite directly expressed, and yet here he is being oblique and allusive. Perhaps that’s simply what it is to be a poet? Or perhaps Pasternak hasn’t played the role of Zhivago quite well enough? Once again I’m not sure how to evaluate.

Introduction in this edition by John Bayley is very good, I thought, and makes a fine case for the book. But it should come with a spoiler warning!

Here’s a choice passage for you — the pivotal scene where Zhivago writes. But of course this is actually Pasternak the poet describing inspiration and the writing process, and it has a satisfying “Inside the Actor’s Studio” quality.

Last night he had tried to convey, by words so simple as to be almost childish and suggesting the directness of a lullaby, his feelings of mingled love and fear and longing and courage, in such a way that it should speak for itself, almost apart from the words.

Looking over these rough sketches now, he found that they needed a connecting theme to give unity to the lines, which for lack of it fell apart. He crossed out what he had written and began to write down the legend of St. George and the dragon in the same lyrical manner. At first he used a broad, spacious pentameter. The regularity of the rhythm, independent of the meaning and inherent of the meter itself, annoyed him by its doggerel artificiality. He gave up the pompous meter and the caesura and cut down the lines to four beats, as you cut out useless words in prose. The task was now more difficult but more engaging. The result was livelier but still too verbose. He forced himself to even shorter lines. Now the words were crammed in their trimeters, and Yurii Andreievich felt wide awake, roused, excited; the right words to fill the short lines came, prompted by the measure. Things scarcely named in the lines evoked concrete images. He heard the horse’s hoofs ringing on the surface of the poem, as you hear the ambling of a horse in one of Chopin’s ballades. St. George was galloping over the boundless expanse of the steppe. He could watch him, as he grew smaller in the distance. He wrote in a feverish hurry, scarcely able to keep up with the words as they poured out, always to the point and tumbling into place of themselves.

The resulting work is one of the poems that appears at the end of the book, but the same tight meter that made it exhilarating to write surely also made it very difficult to translate well, and the English version, at least, doesn’t make any very great impact. Sadly.


Oh, hey, look, someone made a movie out of this book I just read, even though it seems like nobody ever reads it! Hey, it’s got really high production values! I get to see all the scenes I just read come to life! Cool!

I had never seen it before — who ever wants to watch a sweeping epic, really? — and pairing it with this reading was ideal, since I was able to focus on the execution, which I think is the movie’s strong suit, rather than the content. I’m just not sure what this story is worth to anyone.

I was very impressed with the adaptation; respectful and thorough but also streamlining, clarifying. Of course, it clarifies the political question by falling decidedly against the revolution in a way the book never does; a few “bad guy” moments are added in that make all the difference. But it never goes outside the bounds of the book’s spirit; it just retouches it so that ambiguities are washed away. Having Evgraf narrating in flashback to the daughter, and having Zhivago’s poems be “the famous Lara poems,” both are, I thought, cleverly unobtrusive ways of giving a roundness to the form that the book never provides.

Music was a little silly. Good casting though — Rod Steiger was a more interesting Komarovsky than the one in the book. Alec Guinness gives a much-needed sense of wisdom to the whole endeavor. Klaus Kinski is in it!! Julie Christie is a lot less of a person than the Lara in the book but that’s how movies work — the prettiness is the message, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan. Likewise, Omar Sharif does exactly what he needs to do as our protagonist by smiling a little and having watery eyes, and that feels like it does justice to the book, which I think is exactly what’s wrong with this material.

Hey, who here wants me to stop talking about Doctor Zhivago? Show of hands? Okay then.

April 21, 2009

Thought about Charles Ives

A train of thought as succinctly as I can record it, hopefully.

Just looked at a score by a contemporary composer, as made available on his website. It included quotations from several works of classical music — works that are reasonably famous to a subset of the classical-music-aficionado community, but not to the general public. The piece as a whole was an homage, of a sort, to Charles Ives, and the use of quotations was part of this larger stylistic “quotation” of Ives.

This depressed me, because this composer is a moderately well-read voice in the “classical music is dead! long live classical music!” crowd, who believe they are carrying classical over the cultural divide and into a new era of diverse, enlightened, youthful, hip, 2.0, blog, internet, not-your-father’s, ipod, cool, yes, radical, dude.

I am skeptical of this crowd despite my sympathy for their aims because I don’t think they have any clue how deeply your-father’s they are. They are only thinking outside the innermost of many tightly nested boxes.

Seeing this score fed into my skeptical displeasure because it had been reflexively composed on the assumption that its audience would be versed in the canonical hall-of-famery of classical music; that they hang out within its halls and that references to hundred-year-old works would be ready references. The inherent incestuousness and provincialism of writing music that daydreams about the classical playlist obviously hadn’t been on the composer’s mind; he was being genuinely and artlessly incestuous and provincial when he wrote it. His province being the museum; the archives of greatness.

These people essentially live in a museum. The non-museum-dwelling public says “We’d really rather not have anything to do with people who don’t see why it’s crazy to live in an old museum,” and the museum-dwellers retort, “But it has new acquisitions all the time! Come hang out with us in the contemporary wing! It’s hip!”

At least, I thought, Charles Ives himself quoted music that he had come by legitimately, as part of his living culture and community. His music quotes the tunes he heard at church or from the town band or being sung by his friends.

But then I thought (this is the thought!), “no — Charles Ives was being cramped and meta, too.” Why didn’t he just write the kind of tunes he grew up with and loved? The biographical information seems to be clear that he did it because he didn’t want to think of himself as a wuss, and pretty tunes are for pansies. All his innovations are an effort to distinguish his work — which deals with life, philosophy, experience — from “music,” the stuff which one hears people playing out in the world, the stuff which he lovingly disdained by snipping it up and quoting it in his compositions.

Mr. contemporary composer – do you like that piece that you just quoted? Is it satisfying and meaningful to you as music? Then why don’t you try to write something like that and share something like that experience with others? Ah, because what you’re moved by is not the music itself but the fact and fame and history and connotation of that music. “Music,” the thing with a name, the academic field, the subject heading, the area of the bookstore, the repertoire, the society. Everything but the thing that existed before the name, music itself. What you aspire to write, then, is not quite music per se, but “a contribution to the world of classical music.” And this is what Ives was doing too. He was a musician who thought musicians were pansies, so he did everything in his power to make what he was doing be some other kind of contribution to the world of music, but still be made out of notes and sound and the impressions they leave.

This is what I usually feel I am encountering when I hear new music or go to a contemporary art museum – not music or art itself but submissions to the world of art. “This is part of ‘art’!” the artists seem to be saying, loud and clear – they’re always very sure about that. But many of them seem rather embarrassed about the business of being a wussy painter or whatever, and so are finding other ways in.

Ives now appears ahead of his time, compositionally, because he happened to have the personal hangups that, after the Wars, high culture would develop as a whole.

It all just seems so adolescent.

I wrote this a month ago and thought I’d fix it up later. Here it is later, I just read it again for the first time and it seems fine to me. Post.

April 11, 2009

Disney Canon #18: The Sword in the Stone (1963)

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ADAM Beth, I think you should go first.

BETH Because I said I used to like it?

ADAM Yeah.

BETH I was thinking about why I liked it so much when I was 13 or 14, and I think it’s because it feels modern, in a way that everything prior to it did not. And I think that’s because the characters are more modern. Merlin, in particular, seems easier to relate to than any prior Disney character, for me.

BROOM Including Pongo and Perdita?

BETH Yes, obviously that’s similarly modern.

ADAM More than the negro crows?

BETH Yes.

ADAM Well I been done seen ’bout everything.

BETH Also, it’s always active. Even though essentially the same thing happens three times; the same story gets played out when he’s a fish, a bird, and a squirrel. Well, I guess the squirrel one was a little different.

BROOM How do you mean that you can relate to Merlin because he’s “modern”? He just seemed to me like an archetype of the addled, absent-minded professor character.

BETH I think it was something about the dialogue.

ADAM It’s self-referential, in a way that the others aren’t.

BETH Yes — it’s more knowing, and felt more influenced by Warner Brothers. Not that there’s always a lot of dialogue in Warner Brothers cartoons — but the scenarios. The squirrel scenario seemed like a Warner Brothers setup.

ADAM It seemed like a Pepé Le Pew scenario.

BETH And there were two Wile E. Coyote scenarios. The whole thing just felt a little saucier than other Disney movies.

BROOM And how do you feel about that now? When you were 13, your values were: the sassier and the more… what’s a word for what Warner Brothers cartoons are as opposed to Disney?

ADAM Wiseacre.

BROOM … the more wiseacre the better. But how do you feel about that now? The same way?

BETH No. I don’t think that this was a great work, but it was entertaining to me in the same way. I understood why I was entertained by it. It never lapses, I felt.

ADAM It’s striking to me that this is the first explicitly moralistic one. Disney movies today are all about “here’s a theme, and we’re going to hammer on it.” Like Lilo and Stitch, you may recall, is like: “Mahalo means family, and family means no one gets left behind!” Do you remember that?

BROOM I’m impressed! [Ed. “Ohana” means family; “Mahalo” means thank you]

ADAM And this also had a clearly defined moral that carried through from the beginning to the end, and all the episodes were about illustration rather than narration, in a certain way.

BROOM “Develop your intellect and you will go places.”

ADAM Right, which is an odd message for this movie, since he actually becomes king through divine quirk. He displays no kingly qualities whatsoever.

BROOM Did you ever read The Once and Future King, upon which this is based?

ADAM No.

BROOM I don’t think I finished it, because it was too long and boring for me as a kid, but because it was the source for this movie I did read a bunch of it.

ADAM Are there squirrels and everything?

BROOM Yeah, he turns into a bunch of things, but it’s not comic like this. He spends a long time as a hawk. His education is an education in the natural ways of the world; he becomes one with everything. It’s this sort of hippie-spiritual idea, that Merlin introduces him to the rhythms of the earthworm and the eagle…

ADAM “The Circle of Life!…”

BROOM Yes, that’s exactly it. [Ed. Actually more like “The Colors of the Wind”] That’s the education he needs to be a true leader of men, to have been to the heights and the depths of everything. Whereas here they just took it as the framework for slapstick.

ADAM The movie claims that book-learning is important, but they don’t actually want to trouble us with more than one sentence of book-learning.

BROOM Well, oddly, Merlin disdains actual book-learning, when Archimedes tells Wart to read a huge pile of books. That’s not the kind of education this movie is espousing.

ADAM But Merlin does put the books in his bag first, and clearly believes in them. He says “You need to learn English! and History! and Geometry!”

BROOM Merlin represents that philosophy, in opposition to the medieval brutes — Sir Kay and his father — but then Archimedes is beyond that, he’s too formal and pedantic. Putting the curlicues on your capital C isn’t the point of education.

ADAM The movie struck me as sort of slipshod, coming to it now.

BROOM That’s how I felt too, but I didn’t want to jump on it right at the top of the conversation.

ADAM For a lot of these others, I have some received childhood imagery that bolsters my impressions, or provides them with some sort of scaffolding, but here I was without that.

BROOM You had really never seen this before.

ADAM I had only seen the last bit, from when Hobbes comes down with mumps through to the end. I think I’d seen Merlin coming down in Bermuda shorts.

BROOM Hard to shake that image.

BETH It reminds me of Back to the Future.

BROOM You’re right, it is like Back to the Future. So much so that it’s almost like the end of Back to the Future is a reference to this. And Doc Brown basically is the Merlin from this movie.

BETH Yeah. Which maybe is part of why I liked it. Because it reminded me of Back to the Future.

BROOM In terms of things that show up elsewhere: the “oh no here comes a pike to eat us!” scene happens exactly like this, underwater with fish, in Little Mermaid and Finding Nemo, and possibly in other movies. I guess it sort of happened in Pinocchio already, but it wasn’t quite the same. There was something specifically familiar about the particular way this scene played out. “Here comes the bad guy animal from this region of the world! Get it stuck trying to go through a small hole! Now put a spike between its jaws!” Is this the first place where that sequence of stuff happened? I guess Popeye must have been doing stuff like that back to the 30s.

BETH Yeah, it must be in other cartoons.

ADAM There are only so many ways to disable a predator animal that aren’t gruesome. I mean, he could have put the arrow in its eye! That’s what I was hoping he would do.

BROOM Luke Skywalker puts a spike between the jaws of the Rancor in Return of the Jedi.

ADAM That wouldn’t actually work in real life, would it?

BROOM You think it could flick it away with its tongue? I don’t know.

BETH I think it would work.

ADAM If the spike were actually lodged in the roof of its mouth, that would be different.

BROOM I think if a fish with long jaws had something wedged in there vertically, it would probably have some trouble with that.

ADAM I had a children’s book in which Madam Mim featured. But it had nothing to do with the story of Arthur, as far as I could discern. She was just a stand-alone character. I forget how they defeat her in the end, in the children’s book. Truly, that was not something I had thought about in years and years until that image came on screen.

BETH I found the wizard’s duel sequence really funny.

BROOM As a child and now?

BETH Yes.

ADAM Why didn’t Merlin just go straight for the germ thing? That’s obviously a dominant strategy.

BETH I think it hadn’t occurred to him.

BROOM I think he had ideals about playing fair and was trying to do it the way it was meant to be done.

BETH He was also a little slow to come up with ideas.

ADAM He should have become a fatal virus.

BROOM I knew, when he was a crab and snapping at her snake popping out of the hole, that eventually something else was going to come out of the hole, but I couldn’t remember what, and that sense of foreboding was exciting. Even as a kid, after you see the head keep popping out, you know that they’re going to change it up on you.

ADAM Sir Kay is pretty brutish in a way that is not appealing.

BROOM I’m glad that you feel that way. I really am.

ADAM That I’m not attracted to him?

BROOM Yeah. You’re pretty much always attracted to the Gaston character.

ADAM Even for me, Kay is a little too loutish.

BETH I thought they did a nice job maintaining the characters when they changed into different creatures. All the Mim creatures looked like her.

BROOM That was well done in that it wasn’t overdone. The fish didn’t look like Wart’s face on a fish.

BETH No, but it had his personality.

BROOM He basically looked just like Nemo.

ADAM The idea that they would resolve the kingship with a tournament — or that it would have lain open for so many years that they could have forgotten about the sword — although obviously they didn’t forget about it…

BETH The stone was pretty cleaned up, when he got there, from how it looked at the beginning.

BROOM Yeah, Adam pointed out that the vines had been taken away.

ADAM … that all seems historically implausible to me. It’s more likely that a brutal civil war would have come about.

BROOM In Robin Hood — at least in the Disney Robin Hood, coming up shortly — a tournament like that is held for the hand of the king’s daughter, right? Is that less historically absurd?

ADAM I don’t know.

BROOM Oh, but it’s a trick, isn’t it? It’s a way of luring Robin Hood.

ADAM I can’t wait for that!

BROOM It’s two or three from now.

ADAM What’s next, Jungle Book?

BROOM Yes. The Jungle Book is the last one during Walt Disney’s lifetime. Though, honestly, the rhythms and feeling of this one…

ADAM It’s as if he’s already dead.

BROOM It really is.

BETH It is. It’s the new style of animation — of children’s entertainment in general.

BROOM 101 Dalmatians felt like, “wow, look what we came up with! It’s great! The movie doesn’t totally hang together — but look at this new look and style and attitude we came up with!” And here it immediately already felt like, “the formula is in place, let’s turn out another one.”

ADAM It felt like budget cuts. It was so drab.

BROOM And so many repeated bits of animation. Even as a kid, it’s a drag to see him drop the plates twice in exactly the same way. Or when he’s goggle-eyed at Merlin at the beginning: the first time, it’s funny, but then a minute later when they use it again to fill time, it’s depressing. The whole movie gave me the impression that there was no big picture for any of the artists anymore. I thought the directing was weak, and there were a lot of places where scenes fell flat, or dragged, moments that weren’t worth anything to anyone.

BETH There was a lot of drag.

BROOM Real care seemed to have been put into it only on the scale where a single person was working on his own — like in the backgrounds. Each background, created by an individual artist, was interesting. Or the animation evaluated on a really small scale; like, when he scratches his head or something, the quality of the animation of an individual action was always good, but it didn’t necessarily play into any larger value, any pacing that would make it worth anything to the audience.

ADAM Yeah.

BROOM I was reminded of something that I think I showed you, Beth — I saw an interview with John Williams recently, when I was looking through his movie score stuff online, and someone asked him how he thought his style had changed over the forty years of his career, or whatever it’s been, and he said, “I think that now I know more, but it’s less durable.” And I felt like that’s what we were seeing here. All kinds of technical things had been learned; they had polished and worked all kinds of stuff that would have been sloppier back in the Pinocchio days — I criticized how Geppetto looked, and I stand by that — here the people didn’t have any of those problems; they were really solid; they rotate through space and always look perfect. But…

ADAM To what end?

BROOM They know more… and it’s less durable.

ADAM Is this squirrel scene the first time we’ve seen the “amorous fat lady” as a joke?

BROOM No, of course not. In Sleepy Hollow there was the amorous fat lady who wanted to dance with Ichabod Crane, who was exactly like that.

ADAM I forgot all about that. The character of course is in “Pirates of the Caribbean,” the ride. So I was curious.

BROOM It seemed a little unnecessarily rough that they gave her black whiskers and a gap between her front teeth.

ADAM The matronly squirrel?

BROOM She looked like a man.

BETH Yeah, she was ugly.

BROOM She didn’t need to be that ugly for it to be funny.

ADAM What are we to make of the lesson that love consists of, you know, misdirected obsession? That’s only a little piece of love!

BROOM I remembered feeling very bad for the squirrels when I was a kid… and now I see that they totally want you to. The end of the scene is all sad violins and the weeping squirrel. And I don’t know why! It’s a very weird emotion they’re nursing there. I don’t know what they were going for.

BETH What is anyone learning from that?

BROOM Adam, you were cowering behind the pillow through the whole sequence; do you want to say something about it?

ADAM It was really uncomfortable!

BETH And extended. They just keep going and going with it.

ADAM He’s kind of a jerk to her, and she still saves him from the wolf. And it’s just creepy! Maybe I see it as a metaphor for being in the closet.

BROOM Howso? Oh, that she can’t understand why she means nothing to him, and he’s saying “you don’t understand what I really am”…?

ADAM Yeah. I’m joking. Not totally. I’m mostly joking. But it’s just the creepy mismatch of it that makes it uncomfortable.

BROOM I wasn’t thinking of it as a metaphor for being in the closet, but…

ADAM I wasn’t either, to be honest.

BROOM … but just as male-female relations. I mean, obviously it wasn’t about human-squirrel relations; it was about male-female relations, and the females were the ones who had no idea what the men really were. And then when the men pop out of the bushes in their true forms, the women scream in uncomprehending terror. And the men say, “Now do you understand?” What does that translate to? It doesn’t mean anything, hopefully! Other than that if you turn into a squirrel, squirrels will be upset.

ADAM I call attention to the fact that the only women in this movie are those squirrels and Madam Mim and the dishwasher woman. But of course there are no sympathetic males either. Everyone’s unpleasant, really.

BETH Well, Arthur.

ADAM Except for Merlin and Arthur.

BROOM And you’re supposed to be okay with Archimedes and his curmudgeonly ways.

BETH I am.

BROOM And of course the deep-voiced man at the tournament!

ADAMGive the boy a chance!

BROOM I wanted to talk a little more about Madam Mim. I said “this is like Psycho” because they’re in the middle of a chase and you’re invested in whether he’ll get away, and then suddenly he falls into this evil woman’s lair. It’s also like in Pulp Fiction when they end up in the torture room in the middle of a different story.

ADAM Right.

BROOM But anyway — is she a type? Is she like people in any way? Or is she just a crazy thing? Her delight in being a hag is just absurd, right? There’s no way for me to align that with any other character in anything.

ADAM She’s a little bit like Hagatha on The Smurfs. Do you remember her? [Ed: internet says “Hogatha]

BROOM I guess I remember there being a character who was like that.

ADAM Well, she’s actually not like that, because Hagatha — if you don’t remember — wanted to use the Smurfs to make face cream. Because she thinks it will make her beautiful, which is sort of a miserable delusion, and they defeat her by giving her this mud bath that they tell her is going to fix her skin, but the mud hardens on her face and they push her down a hill. Which also has its own gender issues.

BROOM When Madam Mim briefly turned into “beautiful lady,” I was struck by how 60s she looked. She looked like a Jules Feiffer drawing.

BETH She did. Her nose was upturned.

BROOM And she had pointy boobs.

BETH Yeah, exaggerated curves.

BROOM She looked like a Jules Feiffer semi-parody of what a beautiful lady is supposed to look like.

BETH But Arthur seemed a little bit titillated.

BROOM It wasn’t clear to me why he was staring.

ADAM He liked it!

BETH I think he did.

BROOM Maybe, but the animator seemed to be making fun of the whole notion of this “beauty.” But I guess that was so that she would still seem like Madam Mim.

ADAM Did Bill Peet do “The Reluctant Dragon”?

BROOM “The Reluctant Dragon” — you mean the cartoon from the 40s that you didn’t watch? What do you mean?

ADAM Oh. No. Did he?

BROOM I don’t know. He was a story man for a long time.

ADAM I wish I could remember what the Bill Peet book was that I’m trying to think of.

BROOM The Caboose that Got Loose was the one that I had. But there were others. There was one about a moose, maybe?

ADAM Yeah, I don’t know. [Ed.: Droofus the Dragon?] I don’t have much else to say about this movie. It was ramshackle.

BROOM Yeah. It felt like a chintzier product.

BETH It didn’t have as much class as I thought it had.

ADAM Sorry to rub your nose in it as an adult.

BETH So what, though? As kids entertainment it was fine.

BROOM It was definitely kids-ier. In the first section, when it was all about how he meets Merlin and how Merlin comes to his house, I was pretty sad about how lame it was, and how low their standards for storytelling had gotten. But then when it turned into a lot of gimmicks in a row, I thought, “all right, fine” You get to watch him fall, you get to watch someone get clonked on the head. Fine.

ADAM At least it’s not Bongo.

BROOM Right. They’ve done worse.

BETH Oh, it wasn’t that bad, guys.

BROOM It wasn’t.

ADAM It was fine.

BROOM It was just very superficial. And it was the first one where the moral felt, as Adam said, like an ingredient in a formula rather than like part of the conception of the movie.

[we read the original New York Times review]

BETH He really liked it.

BROOM Yeah, he was totally into it.

ADAM Unaccountable.

BROOM An unequivocally positive review. And why not, I guess. But just as we’re saying that the era has turned these films into more of a kids’ thing, the review treats it as more of a kids’ thing. In the 40s, the reviews were all about “what is Disney and his team of artists up to?” That’s stopped.

ADAM It didn’t even get a stand-alone review; it was in a package right under “The Best of Cinerama.”

BROOM I feel like the story of how that happened to Disney and animation, how it got trivialized, is not being told by this survey of just the feature films. We’re watching the features and saying “this one is dumber, how did that happen?” It happened in between. Something about kids’ entertainment, and culture in general.

BETH Well, the Mickey Mouse Club started up in the 50s.

BROOM Yeah, television changed the flavor of these things.

BETH The brand of Disney changed, and the focus changed.

ADAM Now it’s all about, like, Annette Funicello’s boobs.

BROOM The final joke in this movie was almost an acknowledgement that the movies are just secondary to television, now.

BETH It definitely was. Which maybe was a complaint?

BROOM I don’t know. It just seemed to be shrugging and saying, “So whaddaya gonna do? Movies are dumb now. The end!”

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March 28, 2009

Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales

Roll 16: 1040 = Edgar Allan Poe
1041 = Poetry and Tales
1043 is The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Well, I read that too.

This was quite an undertaking.

Prior to this self-assignment, I had read:

of the poetry: The Raven, The Bells, and Annabel Lee
of the tales: MS. Found in a Bottle, Berenice, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Masque of the Red Death, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Gold-Bug, The Black Cat, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, The Sphinx, The Cask of Amontillado, and Hop-Frog
as well as The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.

And possibly a few others, when I was young, that left little impression.

That (minus The Sphinx and maybe also Hop-Frog, and plus Ligeia, William Wilson, The Murders in the Rue Morgue and maybe The Conqueror Worm) seems to me to a fine list of Edgar Allan Poe’s truly “canonical” contributions to literature. Of course there’s room for debate. But the scope of that selection is about right: about 15 famous stories and poems. Beyond its fuzzy borders lies the rest of his output, and the rest of his output is clearly auxiliary. It is very much “other work by Edgar Allan Poe.”

No matter how revisionist and even-handed you want to be, you must accept and embrace that “The Raven” and “Literary Life of Thingum Bob” are two entirely different classes of cultural artifact, just as you must accept that Edgar Allan Poe is a different category of personage from Alfred B. Street, the poet whose work “Winter” occupies the same position in the March 1845 issue of The American Review that “The Raven” did in the February issue.

Ah, but doesn’t The Canon make mistakes? Isn’t the cultural consensus really just a hodgepodge of received wisdom, a big game of “telephone” with nobody at the other end? Doesn’t a lot of this stuff get famous for silly reasons, and then get considered important just for being famous? Aren’t there some treasures in the attic and some lemons in the Louvre? Yes, undoubtedly, there are some. For some people that’s an exciting notion; for others distressing.

When you dig into the other work, the stuff that didn’t pass the Test Of Time, you tend either to hope either that the Test Of Time will turn out to have been rigged (that if it weren’t for the hanging chads, Alfred B. Street would be in the Library of America and Edgar Allan Poe would be languishing deep in google books) or conversely that the forgotten works will be reassuringly bad and the Test Of Time will be vindicated. Which outcome you hope for depends on your personality and your politics.

Sadly, you don’t usually get either kind of satisfaction. I already wrote once about the bitter fact that unspecial, unloved works are generally perfectly good. The larger, even more disheartening truth is that the same goes for the special, loved works. They’re perfectly good. But seen in context and out of the historical limelight, it becomes clear that in pretty much every way, they’re exactly like their siblings. Transcendence is something that happened to them, not something they were born with.

They were born with something, of course, because they lived on where their siblings didn’t. They survived because they were fit, and that fitness is very usually, if not exclusively, related to quality, as we’d like it to be. But Time isn’t a critic; it’s just an evolutionary pressure. Its selections, like evolution’s, are real, significant, and also arbitrary. Are elephants better than mammoths because they’re still around and mammoths are gone? In one sense, yes. But nobody really cares about that sense.

Reading a very well-known story in the context of the author’s complete corpus – loved and unloved alike – can be a little like following a cool friend to his family reunion and suddenly recognizing that his “cool” is just a mannerism shared by every uncle and grandmother in the room, and it isn’t actually cool at all. A third dimension comes into focus, which is humanizing, and to humanize is to diminish.

Or: It can be like seeing the other portraits of Christina Olson and realizing that the famous yearning young woman in “Christina’s World” is actually a 55-year-old cripple crawling pathetically, and that the painting has never tried to disguise that – it’s about that. Despite being famous as something else entirely. (Isn’t it? Isn’t it in waiting rooms because people think it’s a picture of a pretty girl with big dreams, like Belle? I may be wrong.)

Anyway, “The Pit and the Pendulum,” for one, is – all anthological pomp aside – clearly none other than a pulpy piece of dated hackwork, churned out to make a few bucks by feeding a public’s prurient interest in first-person narratives of torture, the more outlandish the better. It’s the 19th-century equivalent of Saw IV, both in aesthetic ambition and cultural significance. “Sensation stories,” they were called, and the phenomenon had been around for years before Poe’s career began. In fact, Poe himself wrote a satirical piece, “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” mocking the formulaic horrors and flimsy pretensions of these junky staples of magazine writing: “Should you ever be drowned or hung, be sure and make a note of your sensations — they will be worth to you ten guineas a sheet.” Etc. This is followed by a parody example, in which his ditzy narrator gets stuck while peering through a hole in a clock face and is very slowly decapitated by the sharpened minute hand, all the while narrating with prissy detachment. It’s an amusing piece (certainly one of the most successful of EAP’s many attempts at comedy, most of which are clumsy and bizarre) but from our standpoint, the snarky disdain rings a bit insincere, seeing as the author is after all Edgar Allan Poe. But how was he to know that in 150 years he’d the only remembered practitioner of this ubiquitous, trashy genre?

That story, “The Scythe of Time” (later dryly retitled “A Predicament”), is a joke – but the swinging blade from “The Pit and the Pendulum,” written four years later, is entirely serious. Or is it? Maybe it’s indulgently campy fun? Or was Poe perhaps sneering cynically from behind his pen, as he served the rabble the slop they deserved? The question of Poe’s personal taste and intent is crucial to a modern reader contending with the fact of his work’s canonization despite its close familial resemblance to the lowest of pulp. The question was crucial to Poe too, because his ego was at stake.

From my point of view, the best defense of Poe’s work is the enlightened dismissal of standard high/low assumptions; the idea that a comic book about aliens can potentially be a great work of art, just as a symphony about the brotherhood of man can potentially be a piece of junk. The best executed of Poe’s stories have a thrilling quality of dim lighting and claustrophobic portent; the savor they offer is full and lasting. There is no more to be asked.

But despite its elegance, that’s a very recent idea, and one that’s still hard for even the most liberal-minded to sustain consistently. It certainly wasn’t available to Poe, at least not to the part of him that worried about things like taste and reputation. And he did worry, at some level. Here he is in his preface to his own anthology, “The Raven and Other Poems”: “In defence of my own taste… it is incumbent upon me to say, that I think nothing in this volume of much value to the public, or very creditable to myself. Events not to be controlled have prevented me from making, at any time, any serious effort in what, under happier circumstances, would have been the field of my choice.” The preferred field being, of course, real poetry – e.g. whatever kind of poetry you the judgmental reader think is respectable.

The following, I believe, is the crux of it. Here is a friend, calling Poe out in a letter: “Some of your bizarreries have been mistaken for satire — and admired too in that character. They deserved it, but you did not, for you did not intend them so.” And here is Poe’s response: “You are nearly, but not altogether right in relation to the satire of some of my Tales. Most of them were intended for half banter, half satire — although I might not have fully acknowledged this to be their aim even to myself.”

“Nearly, but not altogether right,” eh? “Most of them,” eh? Not even to yourself, eh? What you see here, readers, is petty weaseling of the most childish sort, the specialty of the very lonely.

I believe that Poe was a certain pathetic type that we’ve all met: the chronic misfit who, desperate for affection from the human social system that has marginalized him and whose workings he cannot intuit, careens wildly from calculated idiosyncrasy to calculated conformity, hungry for whatever approval he can get but untrainably clueless about how he is perceived. He was, in short, a difficult nerd.

He was the orphaned child of two actors (the Poes), raised by a well-meaning couple (the Allans) who didn’t know what to make of his immoderate nature as it emerged and who left him feeling unloved. He was a trench-coat type by the time he got to high school, and then a willful “character,” drinking and gambling to flamboyant excess, by the time of his stint at UVA. Inspired by the fashion for Byron, he proudly nurtured his most “passionate” tendencies, writing barely coherent, over-the-top poems of visionary yearnings (“Al Aaraaf” is quite an ordeal), burning bridges with the Allans and everyone else, and generally flattering himself that he was a true poet let loose on the world. Then suddenly he finds himself 21 years old, living at his aunt’s house with no prospects and no friends. So he starts entering writing contests, turning out stories that follow various standard middlebrow/sensationalist models but are totally convoluted by his many and conflicting desires to impress – trying to show all at once that he is loftier than the material and disdainful of it, that he is superior to other writers of such stuff and is beating them at their own game, that he is widely read and learned, and that he is an original and independent thinker. Occasionally he forgets himself, however, and manages to write in a state of relative unselfconsciousness. In this state he is naturally driven to indulge his actual and unfashionable sense of fantasy, which, true to his nerddom, is elaborately developed and totally immune to the doctrines of taste.

He writes indefensibly tasteless stories like “Berenice” with obvious relish and commitment, and then deludes himself when confronted, saying that this is the sort of thing the market demands. His career begins to move along and he starts writing snotty reviews in approximately the persona of Comic Book Store Guy, mercilessly trashing books for syntactical errors and irrationalities. He drinks constantly and sloppily, argues loudly with everyone. He has absolutely no idea whether what he’s doing is being a hack or the greatest genius who ever lived, is worried that others know, tries to pre-empt them either way. He marries the only human being he has ever felt close to, his much younger cousin. He suspects that, in the many hours spent alone in his head, he has figured out the deepest secrets of time and space, and starts hinting at them in his writing, hoping someone will notice. He writes “The Raven,” which, when it becomes incredibly popular but as a novelty rather than as a profound work, embarrasses him enough that he feels the need to concoct a “how I wrote The Raven” piece in a professorial mode, making very clear that the poem was no more than a calculated exercise in pleasing the masses.

He loses jobs, shows up drunk for important interviews, sabotages his one distinguished invitation to appear before an audience by reading his unbearable teenage “Al Aaraaf” (Because he actually thinks it’s his only “good” work? Because he doesn’t know and wants to find out? Because he is terrified of people and has no clue?) – and generally doesn’t get anywhere in life despite his steadily expanding reputation. He writes to his wife, as she is dying: “My darling little wife you are my greatest and only stimulus now to battle with this uncongenial, unsatisfactory and ungrateful life.” She dies. He is totally lost. Then he too dies, unexpectedly, while on a trip meant to help him put some of the pieces back together, quite possibly the random victim of thugs.

This is all less than conjectural; it’s just an impression. But reading a man’s life’s work is like reading a man’s life, and whether I’m right or wrong, I certainly feel like over the past year with his book I’ve developed some sense for Poe the man, as though I’ve been in his company and have learned to anticipate his rhythms. This social experience was what made the process difficult. The reading itself was fun; it was the man, the sad, stunted man, that wore me down. The way one feels spending time with a truly maladjusted loser – no matter how warm you try to be, the hopelessness of their social problems eventually becomes oppressive and dispiriting.


In the early poems, Poe opposes vital Fantasy to numbing Science, but at first the conflict is just adolescent self-promotion: his poet’s soul longs for the unearthly, while the fools around him content themselves with drab reality. But somewhere along the way — around the time of the 1831 collection of poetry — he recasts the issue as something less egocentric and more valuable. From the bloggy “Letter to B__” that opens that collection:

[Coleridge] goes wrong by reason of his very profundity, and of his error we have a natural type in the contemplation of a star. He who regards it directly and intensely sees, it is true, the star, but it is the star without a ray — while he who surveys it less inquisitively is conscious of all for which the star is useful to us below — its brilliancy and its beauty. . . . .

Poe intends to get at the nature of experience by intentionally investigating things neither directly nor intensely. He wants to write about the twinkling that will not submit to analysis because it is actually in the eye rather than the star; the things that to the mind seem external but to science seem internal. This standard leads him in a good direction, away from whining and epics, and toward the eerie and psychological. It is essentially the de-romanticization of the romantic aesthetic – still about the seraphs and shades of the mind but no longer so enamored of the individual whose mind it is.

By the time he ends up reusing this very metaphor of the star ten years later in The Murders in the Rue Morgue, there is no longer any implied opposition between the rational and the irrational approach. Poe puts the metaphor in the mouth of his detective hero Dupin, who is simply advocating against the narrow and restrictive approach of the police in favor of a more wide-ranging, imaginative investigation — but one that is still proudly rational. Science, Poe seems to have realized with some pleasure, is simply right. The uncanny does not oppose science but lives within it. In fact, only Dupin’s aggressively rational approach allows him to reach the entirely creepy conclusion that a raging orangutan mutilated the victims. Spoiler, sorry.

This line of thought could be extended, and we could say even broader things about Poe’s body of work — that it is about the rise of science in the popular imagination, about the intersection between industrial materialism and fashionable romanticism, etc. etc. But to say things like this is to get away from the work — these sorts of analyses describe history above and beyond Poe, leaving him as a mere individual bobbing in the greater current. And if we’re only going to use him to get away from him, why read him at all? The real thing is to talk about the work itself, from within its own world.

And, unfortunately for me, that was a depressing world.


While I was going through it, I felt like the best thing I could offer in the end would be to point out a few of the more interesting “lesser” works.

Morella is sort of a first pass at the more-famous Ligeia, but the overall effect is somewhat less feverish and the gimmick a little creepier, to my mind.

Eleonora is yet another pass at similar material, this time particularly overcooked in style, but ending on an unexpected note of weird transcendence that I found striking.

The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion is a destruction of Krypton sort of thing — sci-fi apocalyptic, 100 years before sci-fi apocalyptic became culturally resonant and thus popular. Interesting to see one century’s preoccupations anachronistically explored in the previous century’s style.

The Colloquy of Monos and Una is, to me, the most eerie and interesting of Poe’s several works set in the heavenly ether-world where dead souls dwell. It’s a long crypto-scientific description of the dissolution of a consciousness after death, reduced gradually from being to non-being over eons. It’s weird, and is a good way to dip a toe into a whole realm of Poe’s output — the mystico-scientific stuff that falls somewhere between crackpot philosophy and crackpot poetry.

• The Philosophy of Furniture is not properly a tale, but it has a poetic bent to it, which I guess was enough for the Library of America people. It’s ostensibly an essay on the effects of tasteful interior architecture and home decoration, but it turns into a long, almost fetishistically loving description of an imagined room.

• The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall finds Poe more or less inventing science fiction, to my mind — focusing on the excitement of the technical and pseudo-scientific details, rather than any overall romance, in his description of flying a hot-air balloon directly upward all the way to the moon. This he bookends, perversely, with some silly-name zaniness and a roly-poly moon-man who seems, in combination with the balloon, like a clear precursor to Oz. It runs overlong and isn’t much of a story, but definitely an intriguing curiosity.

The Man of the Crowd has a sort of Kafka flavor about it – a little more urban and noir-ish than usual, and more overtly philosophical than others. Though perhaps a bit confused.

Okay, that’s plenty.


So Bloom says Poetry and Tales and then in a separate entry Essays and Reviews, and those are the titles of the two Library of America volumes. They also offer a one-stop Poetry and Tales and Selected Essays paperback, which is what I bought and read. Its footnotes are pretty bare-bones and during “Al Aaraaf” I felt a little at sea, so I sprung for the Norton Edition seen above as a supplement. Unfortunately, it’s the worst sort of reflexive PC academic mushwork, offering strenuously noncommittal commentary on worthless topics like Poe and race, or Poe and politics. All the information relevant to actually reading the works seems mostly undigested — paraphrased with minimal comprehension from other scholars, or from encyclopedias. The selection isn’t bad, but neither is the selection in the Barnes & Noble Poe, I’d imagine. Don’t buy the Norton edition.


Let’s wrap this up with some pictures. The mustachioed, greasy-haired, grim-looking man you see on the cover above, and on bookstore café walls the world over, is Poe in the sad final years of his sad little life. Apparently for most of his life he didn’t look like that. In the interest of encountering the “real” Poe the way I felt I did, here he is being less of an icon, more of a person.

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This is the portrait that was said, by those who knew him, to best resemble him.

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And this is the earliest known photograph of him, from around 1843.

Who is that guy? Just some guy we don’t know. I spent some time getting to know him and I assure you, it was depressing. The superficial relationship I had previously, to an abstract icon of a man’s head and moustache, and to some stories detached from any particular time, place, or personality, was ultimately a more nourishing one for me. And I expect to get it back now that I’m finally done writing this long-ass entry about this long-ass book.

Everyone, I shout to you from the trenches: The Masque of the Red Death is exactly whatever you got out of it when you were eight years old. There’s nothing to see here. Move along.

March 9, 2009

Disney Canon #17: One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961)

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ADAM Visually, that was my favorite one.

BETH I agree.

ADAM The story was a little flat, but visually it was top-notch.

BROOM Yes. The designs of the still imagery, and also the lively way that they animated it, starting with the opening credit sequence, were all gratifying.

BETH And they way they used color was very sophisticated, I thought.

ADAM They decided to be cartoony again. For real. It was like the Sleeping Beauty cartooniness taken to a jauntier and more confident level. And it was a more cheerful subject, so it was more befitting.

BROOM There’s no reason for this to necessarily be a more cheerful subject than Sleeping Beauty; it was just directed more cheerfully.

ADAM It was about dogs! Everyone loves puppies.

BROOM I felt like this movie made Lady and the Tramp feel like a warm-up. It sort of ate up Lady and the Tramp. What does Lady and the Tramp have going for it over this? This had more dogs and more events.

BETH It was surprising to me that they chose to do another dog movie so soon after Lady and the Tramp.

ADAM Lady and the Tramp must have been a hit.

BETH I guess so.

BROOM I liked seeing all the Lady and the Tramp characters in their brief cameos, but it also made the point to me that we don’t really want to see them more than that. What do they have to offer us?

ADAM I liked Peg!

BROOM Well, you’ll be happy to know she made it out of the pound and is now in a store window.

ADAM In England.

BETH Fifty years later.

ADAM I thought that the puppies were not all that well characterized. It got irritating when Rolly kept saying that he was hungry.

BETH Yes.

BROOM “One of them will be fat!”

ADAM My bias in coming to this is that I don’t remember having seen the movie as a kid more than once, if that, but I read the book about a dozen times. I loved the book.

BROOM I’ve never read it. What is it like? Is the plot like this?

ADAM The plot is the same but there’s more incident in the book. I seem to remember an incident where they stop and are fed by a kindly old man who feeds them buttered toast… but maybe that’s in “Lassie Come-Home.” I don’t know.

BROOM It seems like the idea here, at least in the movie, is that animals take care of animals.

ADAM Right. Well, that’s why I’m not sure. I have to check. Anyway, a couple more of the puppies have personalities. The puppy that gets nursed back to life is like albino, and it’s sort of weaker than the others, and I think it’s called either “Cad” or “Pig.” [ed. – Cadpig].

BROOM They didn’t follow through with that character in the movie. Just the event of its being nursed back to life after being pseudo-stillborn was strange.

ADAM It just sort of was there and they didn’t do anything with it.

BROOM Not even that it didn’t connect to the plot, but just the life-and-death stakes of it, when he’s rubbing it to see if it will live or not. There’s a lot on the line there, while the rest of the movie was very frothy.

ADAM Well, I mean, the puppies are about to be brutally murdered! They’re within seconds of being brutally murdered. It doesn’t feel quite as frightening as that, though. Also in the book, Cruella has a husband, and they get arrested at the end. Here there’s no reason to think that Cruella’s not going to come back and continue to menace them. In fact, she must hate them now that she’s the target of this popular ballad. And they buy Hell Hall at the end of the book, and paint it white, and it becomes their country home.

BETH That’s cool. I wish that had been in the movie.

BROOM You did like that book by Dodie Smith.

ADAM There’s another book by Dodie Smith?

BETH It’s called “I Capture the Castle,” and it’s just delightful. It’s about a poor family who happens to live in a rotting castle.

ADAM There’s another part at the end, where all the puppies come in, and they call up all of the hotels in London – the Savoy and the Ritz and everyone – and have them send over steaks. Much of my idea of what England was like came from this and Paddington Bear. Not very accurate. But this did have a lot more real London-iness than Peter Pan.

BETH Yes.

BROOM Absolutely. They mentioned all the locales and actually made it look like those places.

BETH They did. It looked like Regent’s Park.

BROOM Hampstead Heath you couldn’t really see. But Primrose Hill I recognized. I was struck by how television was a recurring theme here. It was sort of showing how Disney had embraced television.

BETH But it was also criticizing it.

BROOM I don’t know if it was. It had a relationship with television that was complicated. There was a whole scene of the family sitting around watching TV…

ADAM Which was pretty wholesome.

BROOM Yes, like that’s where the family comes together, that’s their hearth, and it was sincere about that.

ADAM But then Lucky almost loses his life to television addiction.

BROOM Well, television is what saves them too, because dopes watch television, and that’s how they have time to escape. Also, surely whatever show “Thunderbolt” was supposed to be, it was clearly a Disney-produced show. Essentially they were watching “Davy Crockett.” And I’ll repeat what I said, for two years from now, or whenever it is that we get to Bolt: Was that Bolt?? I mean, it was a TV show with a superhero dog called Thunderbolt. We’ll find out!

ADAM Do you think that the Colonel and the Sergeant were a gentle satire of British military pig-headedness in the First World War?

BROOM I don’t know if it was a satire; I think they were just pulling stock characters. The addled British officer…

ADAM And the clever staff sergeant? We’ll see that again in Dr. Strangelove.

BROOM Yes, exactly. That was the Peter Sellers character, right?

ADAM I’ve never seen it.

BROOM You’ve never seen Dr. Strangelove?

ADAM No.

BROOM Well, yes, it was like that guy.

ADAM Beth, what was your favorite of the many lovely visuals?

BETH I’m not sure. What was yours? Let me think about it.

ADAM I think the way that they portrayed the city with line and patches of character that spilled over line was really lovely.

BETH I loved all of that. I guess my favorite was the city when they had the neon signs flashing. I kind of wish the “Kanine Krunchies” sign wasn’t in that.

BROOM It was part of the joke. I liked the “Kanine Krunchies” TV ad.

ADAM The dogs themselves, while perfectly adequately animated and pretty acute, were nothing magical. It was the backgrounds that I thought were really amazing. And Cruella herself.

BROOM I have to say that I thought that faces of the dogs and Roger and Anita – well, Anita wasn’t always dead-on, but Roger and Pongo and Perdita had expressive but convincing heads. The three dimensions of their heads were perfectly handled; you felt there was a solidity to them. Whereas Cruella de Vil, actually, I thought looked good as a still, but they didn’t really know how to manage her head in three dimensions quite as well. Her mouth would get a little crazy; she looked a little erratic, I thought.

ADAM But you kept getting distracted by the swishings of her coat.

BROOM Yes. Most of the animation on her was in her coat because her face wasn’t so expressive, I thought.

BETH When we first saw Anita, I thought, “they’ve done the perfect female face.” I thought she looked pretty, and smart, and looked like a real person. That was in that first scene. But then later, I thought, “Wait! She got less pretty somehow!”

ADAM The scene where he’s watching the animals and their matching humans go by was my favorite scene.

BETH Yeah, that’s great.

BROOM I thought the first half of the movie was a lot better than the second half.

BETH Once the people disappear…

ADAM It took a lot of effort to get them out and into Hell Hall. The chase really had no incident other than just stock chase stuff. Basically, when the other eighty-four dogs come on the scene, the animators seemed to get exhausted by that, and not a lot happened.

BROOM Yeah, I agree with that.

ADAM There wasn’t a lot of clever animation with the puppies. Either they all went in single file or they were all massed in clumps, but there wasn’t anything really clever with them.

BROOM Back to the design: I think this was a really impressive job of reinventing the Disney movie, the Disney animated look, for a new time.

ADAM Right. There’s no sense in which this is a gold-leafed book being opened.

BROOM They sort of took some steps in this direction with Sleeping Beauty, but it didn’t really mesh so well with the material.

BETH Here everything fit together.

BROOM They really hadn’t had a sense of matching their era since 1940, basically. Dumbo felt natural. The 50s had an in-between quality to them. Not that I didn’t really enjoy Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan. But it felt now like obviously they had to reinvent their product, and they did, cleverly. And I think this is going to get them through…

ADAM What’s next?

BROOM The Sword in the Stone

BETH Which I love.

BROOM The Jungle Book, and then The Aristocats

ADAM I’ve never seen any of these.

BROOM … and then Robin Hood. And those are all in a pretty consistent style with each other.

ADAM The jaunty era.

BROOM Right! And I think Robin Hood is the last one that people really like in that style – well, I guess the Winnie the Pooh movie, too. And then you get into The Fox and the Hound and The Black Cauldron, and those movies are sort of the descendants of the style that we saw inaugurated here, but it doesn’t feel right anymore. It’s the late 70s and the early 80s and somehow that’s not quite right. And they didn’t find a new feel that suited its time until Little Mermaid. I think finding the tone and style for One Hundred and One Dalmatians took real inspiration, and I’ll bet when audiences went to see it they immediately identified it as right. I bet if Don Draper took his kids to see this, he would have thought it was great.

BETH You said that they needed to reinvent this style, but don’t you think that they were being influenced by other animation that wasn’t Disney animation?

BROOM Like UPA? Mr. Magoo and all that? Well, I’m sure they were. All the things here that we identified as very 60s, it’s not like they all originated in One Hundred and One Dalmatians. But I’m saying that “the Disney animated feature” was a branded product…

BETH You’re saying it took balls to go in that direction?

BROOM Not just balls – it’s not obvious how to apply these things. You can know what the elements are and still not know how to make them work for your product. Like now, I would argue.

ADAM I think Disney’s lost its way in the face of Pixar. They don’t have the confidence of just doing two-dimensional animation any more.

BETH They never seem confident. That’s true.

BROOM I think there’s a challenge in simply matching the times. There’s all this stuff out there; you could do any number of things that looked “2000s-y” and everyone would know that it was from the 2000s, but whether it felt like it made sense and worked and was satisfying, and at the same time was “a Disney animated feature” – that takes inspiration.

ADAM Right. You could go, like, Emperor’s New Groove “young adult sarcastic,” or you could go “futuristic technology / CGI,” or…

BROOM I gotta say, I thought The Emperor’s New Groove was pretty successful as what it was.

ADAM And Hercules was pretty much the same thing.

BETH I haven’t seen them.

ADAM I think you’ll like them a lot.

BROOM I don’t know. Hercules I think might in retrospect might seem a little shrill in a 1997 way.

ADAM So 1990s Disney movies all seem sort of shrilly moralizing, to me.

BROOM Whereas this had no moral content whatsoever.

ADAM Other than just, like, “don’t murder puppies to turn them into coats,” which is pretty straightforward. It was pro-puppies and pro-family.

BROOM It was pro-domestic cuteness. A particular kind of being cute with each other at home.

ADAM And it was anti- a sort of exaggerated, like… you sort of imagine that they went to Vassar together, in America.

BROOM Yeah, exactly. We’re always talking about “what does this movie say about how to be” – when Roger is singing the Cruella de Vil song to tease Anita about Cruella coming over, and then when she’s there he’s upstairs playing the trumpet at her – that was a kind of teasing based on a particular sense of the family unit. “There’s just us at home, and when that lady comes over that I hate, I’m going to tell you in code that I wish it was just us and our little unit.” It definitely had a different sense of interpersonal relations, based on the insular world of their home. When they had to go out into the world, it’s inherently an adventure. Though there are people who are nice to them.

ADAM Cruella is like a crazy rich women’s-libber woman gone mad.

BROOM I don’t think women’s lib has anything to do with it.

ADAM She’s not political, but…

BROOM I think she’s like Grey Gardens. I think she’s like a socialite who lost it and has no idea what to do with herself other than get crazier.

ADAM She’s a woman addled by too much money and too little anchoring responsibility, and, indeed, lack of children, and that allows her to become untethered from moral notions, which… is gendered, to some extent.

BROOM Oh, it’s gendered, but I don’t think it has to do with feminism at all.

ADAM Well, I don’t know. She’s like a 20s-style feminist; she smokes and she is sexually confident, you know.

BROOM Yeah, but I don’t think “feminist” is the right word for that.

BETH And she’s the boss of two men.

ADAM Right: two stupid men. And in the book she has a weak husband. Roger later explains that Cruella was strong and evil, and her husband was weak and evil. This is his explanation of why it’s just that they should both go to prison.

BROOM You see her bed and it’s clear that she’s one of these people who wants to think of herself as leading a luxurious, glamorous life.

BETH She looks like Barbara Stanwyck in Sorry, Wrong Number.

ADAM Yeah, with the pink curlers and her wonderful phone.

BETH That phone is great.

BROOM I don’t think it has to do with her being an empowered person at all.

ADAM But there’s certainly an obsession in these last few Disney movies with “unbridled womanness.” That’s what Maleficent is, and that’s what Cruella is too.

BROOM I think she’s very similar to Maleficent.

ADAM Right; it’s when women go wild, you know. It’s not about politics.

BROOM I don’t think it’s about domestication versus wildness; I think these women are people who became delusional when they lost the milieu to which they want to belong. She wants to be at some party where everyone is swooning “Oh, Cruella!” – she wants to be among sassy sophisticates, but for some reason she has absolutely no community and is just clutching at things like furs that represent that world to her.

ADAM But the movie made fun of all kinds of women untethered from domestic life. Basically that whole parade of women at the beginning with their dogs. I understand why they all have to be women, because they have to be potential mates…

BROOM That’s also why they’re all single.

ADAM They’re all single and they’re all pathetic in their own way!

BROOM The painter lady was a caricature, but I don’t think she was supposed to be pathetic.

BETH I think she was.

ADAM She’s painting a landscape in a park! That’s ridiculous!

BROOM What’s ridiculous about that?

ADAM There’s this concept of Sunday painter ladies, which dates back to, like, the 1910s, as being a ridiculous image.

BETH And they made her very unattractive.

BROOM Well, that’s why he didn’t want to go with her! She was the wrong breed of dog.

ADAM Admittedly, he’s ridiculous too, but in a much more sympathetic way.

BROOM His wife is more sympathetic than he is.

ADAM That’s because she’s so submissive. She’s not submissive, but…

BETH She’s agreeable.

ADAM The scene of them bantering, where Cruella’s coming over and he’s teasing her – I thought that was a really nice image of what it’s like to be part of a couple. Moreso than most Disney movies, where the parents are just non-entities.

BROOM But that’s exactly what I was saying; it’s something modern. I don’t think the idea of being annoyed at your bantering couplehood being interrupted by company is one that had been celebrated this way for too long – but maybe I’m wrong; maybe it’s in Trollope or something and I just haven’t read it. It seemed like a very contemporary ideal of what you get out of a relationship. Also, there’s just the blatant and obvious point being made by the movie, where it asks “what kind of person, i.e. what kind of dog, do we want to be?” You don’t want to be a little Scottie, and you don’t want to be big sheepdog, and you don’t want to be a poodle! Instead of saying that you want to be, say, Thunderbolt, this movie was endorsing a different attitude – not exactly “hipster,” but…

ADAM Definitely not hipster.

BROOM No, but it’s an idea that still appeals to people now, that you are going to be sleek and intelligent and attractive but you’re going to have spots, and that’s the ideal. I feel like the movie was saying, “let’s not want to be Golden Retriever people.” It was saying, “don’t we all really want to be Dalmatians?” An obscure, yet attractive breed. Let’s be interesting. You hear Pongo’s voice right at the top, urbanely saying, you know, “I used to live in this flat in London,” or when he says that thing about “we lived in a little place that was small but just right for couples starting out.” It felt like a cosmopolitan sort of fantasy – something close to what I think is still alive in Brooklyn as an ideal for how to live. And I don’t think that would have been saleable in a cartoon movie prior to 1961.

ADAM But in the end we will give that up, and move to East Hampton with our ninety-nine children.

BROOM I know, but it was a kind of comfortable pseudo-Bohemianism.

BETH It was. Because he was an artist trying to be commercial.

ADAM It’s like the happy version of Revolutionary Road.

BROOM But he was an artist only in his actual business; he was Bohemian in a way where you could still have all of the comforts of a really nice flat, and look good and not be weird in any way. He was an artist, a composer who nonetheless smoked a pipe and looked basically like a 50s dad.

ADAM Interestingly, in the book he’s not a songwriter; he did some kind of service for the government during the war and is living on a permanent pension, and they give him this flat as a reward for his wartime service.

BROOM That is interesting. When was the book written?

ADAM Don’t know.

BROOM The fact that the social stuff I’m talking about was added in the Disney rewrite just bears me out, because I’m saying it couldn’t have dated from much earlier.

BETH It also gives a reason for the Cruella de Vil song to exist. Which is very catchy.

BROOM I’m not sure it’s really a good enough reason, or a necessary one; they could just start singing it for no reason if they wanted. But it does add a lot of charm to the way the song fits into the movie.

BETH It makes it diegetic.

ADAM Good word.

BETH I wanted to say – maybe I’m harping on this too much, but going back to what I said about Anita looking so much different when we first were introduced to her. She’s wearing this – while not fancy like the poodle lady – very fancy, expensive outfit, and seems to have a career and a life. And then she just became the domesticated, kind of frumpy version of herself.

BROOM I don’t think she was frumpy.

BETH Not frumpy, but she suddenly wore an apron all the time.

BROOM Housewife-y.

BETH Yeah.

BROOM I thought she still looked good. But she looked more glamorous in the park, certainly.

ADAM [reading from Wikipedia]: “Mr. Dearly is a financial wizard who has been granted exemption from income tax for life, and has been granted a house in the outer circle of Regent’s Park as a favor for wiping out the government’s national debt.” Sorry, I got that wrong. The book is 1956.

BROOM Of no interest to American audiences at the time. Oh, so it was quite a recent book.

ADAM Also, I had forgotten about this, but Pongo’s wife is named Missis, and Perdita is another lost dalmatian whom they recruit as a wet-nurse for the puppies.

BROOM Yeah. It makes no sense for her to be called Perdita here. I remember thinking that “Perdita” must just be a regular name, and not until I read “The Winter’s Tale” did I put it together that it means “lost” and nobody would want that name.

ADAM [reads more from the book’s Wikipedia article…] So that would explain why “one hundred and one” is more than just a jaunty number. They’re a flat one hundred, and then there’s a surprise Dalmatian at the end.

BROOM It is a jaunty number, though. So how about those opening credits, showing all the different departments with a related visual. Is that a first? That’s something that happens all the time nowadays. I guess we’re just watching Disney cartoons, and all this stuff is also going on in every other movie, but at least in our little survey, it felt like a delightful first.

BETH Yeah, it was satisfying.

ADAM I liked her “C. D.” hubcaps.

BETH That car was pretty funny.

BROOM That reminds me; there were some unusual special effects. When the car ran into the snow, it was pretty clearly drawn over film of real snow, but so was the car itself, I think. The way it was manipulated in three dimensions, I think they must have had a model car that they filmed.

BETH Maybe.

BROOM There were several three-dimensional things that they moved so perfectly, and that’s the kind of thing that in the past has always been clunky. It’s very hard to do. I think they filmed more things, and a couple times with the people, Roger especially, it seemed very clearly to be based on film footage.

[At this point the program recording us froze, unbeknownst to us, and we didn’t realize it until after reading the New York Times review and returning. But I think we were pretty much done at this point. If the participants have anything they’d like to add or reconstruct, please do so in the comments. Thank you.]

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February 22, 2009

Disney Canon #16: Sleeping Beauty (1959)

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BETH The colors! It’s like they discovered fuchsia for the first time. I found it delightful, and I thought they were being very daring.

BROOM Did this movie invent that green and purple were the colors of evil? Was this the first place those colors were used for that purpose? Because that really stuck around. It’s so effective.

ADAM This movie was almost exclusively attractive visually.

BROOM That’s right. And it’s almost enough.

BETH Almost.

ADAM They totally abandoned lushness and went for “zap! pow!” flatness and quasi-abstraction. And it was great, visually.

BETH Even though she was kind of ugly.

ADAM And it was like they abandoned their commitment to doing real people. All the people were sort of like Hanna-Barbera. He had a sort of Prince Valiant look to him.

BROOM Well, I think this came before the Hanna-Barbera cartoons that you’re thinking of. And the designs of the people were certainly flat, but the animation of them was pretty strong throughout. It felt like attention had been given.

ADAM Have we seen swashbuckling like that before? Well, I guess in Peter Pan.

BROOM That was sort of comical swashbuckling, not sincere swashbuckling like this at the end, which was a little confused. So what is the problem with this movie? What’s lacking?

BETH The problem is that you can’t relate to anything for a really long time.

ADAM And nobody’s motivations make any sense.

BROOM Yeah. The script just doesn’t work. They obviously have a problem, because the story is just “A curse was placed on her, and on her sixteenth birthday, despite their efforts, the curse came to pass, but then the prince came and saved her.” They decided to put the longest delay in between the morning of her sixteenth birthday and the evening, and they made it be about the dress, and the cake… just artificial delays, because the story doesn’t have anything to offer.

BETH And it’s artificial suspense anyway because we don’t know her or care about her.

BROOM She is not the protagonist of the movie. It’s really all about Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather.

ADAM Yeah. I expect the princess to be a cipher, but here, even the prince was a cipher.

BROOM You mean the other way around?

ADAM No. I don’t mean personality-wise; I mean that I expect at least the prince to have some… “will to being” – some… what’s the word I’m looking for? it’s a word that starts with “A.” Not “action,” but…

BROOM I don’t know. It was striking, especially after you pointed it out, that all his heroism at the end basically consists of looking on while the little fairies do fairy stuff around him.

ADAM I pointed out during the screening that he’s thoroughly emasculated, because they turn the arrows into flowers, and guard him with a rainbow.

BROOM Even the climactic moment when he stabs the dragon, even that is done for him by the fairy. I know, she doesn’t exactly throw it.

BETH She blesses the sword.

BROOM Yeah, the second before he throws it.

ADAM Maleficent is sort of the hero of this movie. She’s the only person with any force of personality.

BROOM She’s the only character that you look forward to her being onscreen again. Everyone else just comes and goes, but you wait for the scenes with her, because you know they’re going to be fun. That’s a brilliant costume she’s got. Is there any historical precedent for wearing horns like that? Weren’t there those medieval headdresses that had round turret things? I know that’s not really what she was wearing, but maybe it’s a jumping-off point.

ADAM She is truly frightening. She’s much more frightening than anything we’ve seen. Except maybe the hag, way back in Snow White.

BETH She also says outright that she is evil.

BROOM She calls on “the forces of hell.” Strong stuff! Her little posse of demons was straight out of “Night on Bald Mountain” from Fantasia. I felt like her type and level of scariness was comparable to that. That, I think, is still scarier overall. But the nightmare scene when Maleficent manages to get Sleeping Beauty to a spinning wheel is still awfully strong.

ADAM It’s awful. When her face falls blank. I don’t think that’s what happens in the Charles Perrault story. I think she somehow convinces her to try her hand at spinning. That’s not as effective as the zombie bride approach.

BROOM Which emphasizes the arbitrariness of the curse being based around a spinning wheel. This movie has no spinning; it has nothing to do with spinning wheels. She’s just walking through these abandoned hallways in this abandoned tower, looking for the room that is the absolute center of evil, where she’s going to touch this totally arbitrary talisman. That’s a scary setup. And the music in that sequence, which I guess is from Tchaikovsky, is really effective.

ADAM It’s notably not over-the-top, “eeeevil!” music, because it’s by Tchaikovsky.

BROOM There’s something classical about the way that it’s scary, which I found very gratifying there. Whereas I didn’t think that the Tchaikovsky worked in a lot of the other places, especially comic scenes. A lighthearted passage by Tchaikovsky doesn’t really match up properly with ineptly baking a cake. The level of stupidity just isn’t low enough.

ADAM I think this is the most arbitrarily fairy-tale-like of all the movies. It’s the one where people’s motivations matter the least and the abstract arc of the fairy tale is the most important, and I think that makes sense to pair with Tchaikovsky, a sort of abstract, classical soundtrack that comes from above.

BROOM It all came from above. The design came from above, too. It’s all stylized. Every layer of the movie is artificial. But I think that works just fine for kids. I don’t think a kid would have a problem with this movie the way we did. Except for maybe the “Skumps” scene.

BETH Then why did we both dislike it as kids?

BROOM I didn’t say I disliked it.

ADAM Well, why did you dislike it?

BETH I think it was because I didn’t know who anyone was, except for the evil person, and I wasn’t into evil as a kid. Right before we started, you did say that you didn’t like it.

BROOM Maybe I didn’t. I do remember that when I was a kid, I felt like it was my personal observation that this one looked flat and not as lush as the other movies. And that wasn’t as satisfying. I don’t think the idea of a facade of stylized lacquered figures was of any interest to me as a kid.

ADAM When the thorns come up, and they’re like “THORNS!” “THORNS!” – it’s awesome.

BROOM Almost every background is beautiful and striking.

BETH I thought maybe they were utilizing color so boldly because they knew that kids wouldn’t be into the story, and they were trying to get them involved aesthetically.

BROOM My understanding was that they threw everything they had at this and wanted it to be their biggest, boldest, greatest…

ADAM …extravaganziest…

BROOM …Cinemascope spectacular. [ed.: not Cinemascope, “Technirama”]

BETH Which it certainly was. It was just amazing, visually.

BROOM It was just the story, the timing. A real misjudgment to make the “Skumps” scene be all about how they’re getting drunk, and that the jester, or the troubadour or whatever, gets drunk. That’s not good comedy for kids!

ADAM I don’t think the queen says a single word in the entire movie.

BETH At the end I think she says something.

BROOM Like, “oh, darling.” Did Philip’s mother die between the opening scene and the present day? At the beginning, his father and mother walk him up to the cradle, and then later his mother’s not around.

ADAM Interesting.

BROOM And is Philip going to look like his dad when he grows up?

ADAM Aurora had a sort of hard-bitten look, I thought, when she was a lass, that was not pretty. She could not have melted butter with that face.

BETH No. The gift of beauty did not take.

BROOM Well, obviously, she was beautiful by a different standard. She was a different type of beauty from what we’ve seen before, for a different era, intentionally.

ADAM She was a quivering blonde the way Renee Zellweger is.

BETH It wasn’t even 50s-ish.

BROOM You didn’t think she looked exactly like the cartoon woman in an advertisement, saying, “Look at my new stove”?

BETH No. I thought she had more of an 80s teenager in a Ferrari kind of look.

BROOM She had kind of a wry, spoiled look.

BETH Yeah.

BROOM But that was the whole attitude of the movie. It was like, “if you’ve got a kidney-shaped table in your house, this is the fairy tale for you.”

BETH I guess.

ADAM It was hard for me to concentrate every time the three fairies said, “Rose,” because it sounded just like Blanche, Dorothy, and Sophia calling for Rose.

BROOM It seemed cheap that all three of the fairies were just variations on the fairy godmother from Cinderella, with the same features. All three of them were basically the same as each other.

ADAM Maybe they felt badly for only giving the fairy godmother two minutes of screen time in Cinderella.

BETH I felt like Aurora’s costume was like a rip-off of Cinderella’s peasant costume.

ADAM She was the worst, most featureless princess.

BROOM I’m surprised at you guys. If I had to live with one of the princesses, I wouldn’t necessarily pick her, but I can recognize that she had beauty of a sort.

ADAM I didn’t say she was the ugliest of the princesses; she’s just the most generic, there’s nothing about her that is memorable.

BETH I could draw her, right now, but only because we just watched it. No-one ever wants to be her.

ADAM She’s like the David Souter of Disney princesses.

BETH She did look pretty when she was asleep.

BROOM In the fake drawing? I thought she looked way better in real life. I was surprised when she woke up and you said, “now she’s not pretty anymore.”

BETH She looked like Gwen Stefani. She’s so angular.

BROOM A lot of people seem to think Gwen Stefani is hot. I personally think Sleeping Beauty looked better than Gwen Stefani.

BETH Okay!

BROOM I’m just saying, she was a certain type that some people are into. I thought it was interesting that she didn’t have any real character, yet they imbued her face with an implied attitude.

BETH It was just, like, “sporty girl.”

BROOM Yes, that’s right. She was sort of Sporty Spice.

ADAM Yeah: “the Spice you don’t care about.”

BROOM There’s one that we care about? Which one? “Baby Spice?”

ADAM Which is the black Spice?

BETH Scary Spice.

BROOM A bit of racism embedded there. Just this side of “Jungle Spice.” But anyway, Sleeping Beauty didn’t have any actual attitude, it was just a look. Which ties into what I’ve wanted to say, to go a little deeper here, I felt like the surfaces and the background and the color scheme – everything that made this movie stylized – were all somehow philosophically of a piece with her superficial veneer of having an attitude, even though there was nothing there. The style suggested worldliness. There was nothing worldly about her or anyone else in the movie, and yet she had it in her eyes. It seemed like the movie was made for a public that wanted to be…

BETH Sophisticated?

BROOM Yes, exactly.

BETH I see what you’re saying, and I agree with you. If she had looked like Snow White, it wouldn’t have meshed with the rest of the visuals. She would have been out of place. Even Cinderella would have; anything prior.

ADAM Was Cinderella a redhead? I have so much trouble remembering.

BETH She was like a strawberry blonde.

ADAM Sleeping Beauty is ironically the most generic-looking of the princesses, but nobody cares about her. Did you even know her name? “Aurora?”

BETH I tried to memorize it but I still keep forgetting it.

BROOM Nobody would have thought to name a princess “Aurora” prior to 1959. That was probably a very stylish name for them to give her.

ADAM “Princess Jennifer.”

BROOM You know the character in Shrek is “Princess Fiona,” and that seems like either a joke or a reflection of 2001, when Shrek came out. And I don’t think it was a joke, I think they just thought it would be a nice name for a princess. At no time earlier would they have named the princess “Aurora.”

BETH and ADAM: Right. [ed. We sure are wrong about this! It comes straight from Tchaikovsky, who derived it from Perrault]

ADAM It sounds like the name of a modern vacuum cleaner. It’s of a piece, era-wise.

BROOM So that’s the larger thing I wanted to find a way of saying. Even if her face hadn’t looked the way it did, something about the design in general… Even the little bad guys, the little trolls, had a certain…

ADAM Dean Martin at the Copacabana?

BROOM No – they were designed as disposable beings for us to laugh at. Their pig-noses and overbites were less fond; they were animated with less sympathy. There’s something warmly human in the earlier movies, in Snow White, where every flower deserves to be given a blush of beauty, where here the attitude was different: “if we’re going to a place of evil, let’s just make it as vile and nasty as possible.” There was a sleazy material quality to it. I can’t think of better adjectives. But everything in the movie had a harder spirit.

ADAM I did want to say that I thought the evil queen’s plot was brilliant. She’s going to keep the prince in prison until he’s an old man, and then let him rescue her when he’s gray-bearded and weak. It’s fabulous.

BROOM Is she still going to be sixteen when he rescues her, or is she going to be one hundred in her bed, too?

ADAM I think she’ll be sixteen.

BROOM Either way, it’s pathetic.

ADAM He truly is emasculated. She’s going to wait until he’s impotent and cannot consummate true love’s first kiss.

BROOM And then she says something sarcastic like “True love conquers all! Ha ha ha ha…” and the unspoken correction is “Really, it’s death that conquers all. You will age and die.”

ADAM Sucks. Enchanted is actually most directly based on Sleeping Beauty, if you’re curious. Down to the chitter-chattering with the animals. I know that Cinderella does that too, but she doesn’t talk with cardinals, say.

BROOM This was the most mockery-worthy animal friendship scene thus far.

ADAM I think you guys would enjoy Enchanted, having now seen all these. Or maybe wait until the end of this run. You’ll like it. I mean, it’s stupid. It’s Amy Adams playing Sleeping Beauty and Susan Sarandon playing Maleficent. Who, incidentally, I only recognized from Annie Hall, not from having seen this movie as a kid.

BROOM Where he says that he had a crush on her instead of on the princess.

ADAM Right.

BROOM So let me just restate: they kind of look the same. She has a big chin to show that she’s evil – and horns, and makeup – but, otherwise they have very similar features.

ADAM She’s not unsexy.

BETH No, she’d be a sexy, hot, evil woman.

ADAM You don’t see many Maleficent costumes, but she has a sort of dominatrix quality.

BROOM I think part of the reason people wouldn’t go to a party as Maleficent with cleavage showing is because…

BETH No-one would know it was Maleficent?

BROOM I think if you have the horns, you’re set. No, because of what I was saying before, because her castle isn’t somehow a kinky fantasy. There’s nothing appealing about it.

ADAM That’s true, she lives among, like, rotting bones.

BETH Yeah, it really is like hell.

BROOM I like that you see her sitting on her throne, and all that’s going on is the demons dancing an endless devil dance around a fire, constantly.

ADAM The witch’s sabbath dance. It’s got to be lonely to be Maleficent, because your only companions are a crow and those moronic demons.

BROOM It’s funny when Fauna – or whoever – says, “I don’t think she’s very happy.” Funny because the movie doesn’t let itself go that deep with anything else. Are those the first truly moronic henchmen we’ve seen? Because that’s going to be another trope for the ages.

ADAM Actually, you know where I learned the word “henchmen” was in playing the computer game version of The Black Cauldron, so I assume there are more henchmen coming. What’s the next one?

BROOM 101 Dalmatians.

ADAM Okay. That’s sort of an “after the sack of Rome but before the Dark Ages” kind of movie.

BROOM This was the sack of Rome.

ADAM This was the day before the sack of Rome.

BROOM This was their biggest-budget movie, and I think it did not do as well as they’d wanted. And they couldn’t budget as much as they did for this ever again. In the next one I believe they start using a process where they somehow print the pencil drawings directly onto the cel, which is much less labor-intensive and cheaper, and you can see all the pencil-y lines. This is the last one done the old way.

ADAM And when did Mary Blair die?

BROOM I don’t think she died until much later, but she left Disney and had a sad life, according to that book I have. But these designs were all by Eyvind Earle.

ADAM It didn’t look exactly like Mary Blair, but sort of like a fantasia on Mary Blair. Small F.

BROOM Well, speaking of the big-F Fantasia, I was glad to see that when they pulled out all the stops, even in 1959, that still meant certain kinds of abstraction that I really didn’t think were ever going to come back. When they give her the gifts, for example, it spins up into an effect, up in dreamland.

ADAM You liked that the last shot is them dancing on a cloud?

BROOM I mean, god knows what Bosley’s going to think of the sentimental stuff, but I have a nostalgic attachment to those remnants of what they’d been doing 30 years earlier.

ADAM When is the last bejeweled storybook?

BROOM I don’t know. We hadn’t seen a live-action book in a long time. I think that may have been it.

ADAM Mulan opens with a fortune cookie.

BROOM That may be true, unfortunately.

[We read the New York Times review]

ADAM That’s basically right.

BROOM Well, it wasn’t right when he said she looked like Snow White.

BETH I think he meant her costume. Her costume does look like Snow White’s.

BROOM It looks like Cinderella’s.

ADAM Does Snow White wear the thing with the arm puffs when she’s a peasant, or when she’s a princess?

BROOM Uh… all the time.

BETH I think when she’s a peasant.

ADAM Snow White looks to me like Betty Boop. Not like Lana Turner.

BROOM Snow White seems like she’s somewhere between the ages of 13 and 25. And Sleeping Beauty seemed like she was somewhere between the ages of 20 and 40.

BETH No, no, no. I would say 18 and 28.

ADAM Who would play the live-action Sleeping Beauty? Amy Adams was their answer, but who would be like the original?

BROOM Amy Adams is actually sweeter than Sleeping Beauty.

ADAM Speaking of Lana Turner, I would have her be played by…

BROOM … Lauren Bacall?

ADAM No. Who was the woman in L.A. Confidential?

BETH Kim Basinger?

ADAM Yeah.

BROOM That doesn’t make any sense.

BETH Keira Knightley has an angular face, but she’s not right. She could play the witch, maybe.

BROOM They’d be played by the same person. That’d be the Freudian version. Prince Philip’s mother disappears and then reappears in the form of these two women, the good and evil in womankind.

ADAM I meant to say earlier that Prince Philip even to me is not attractive. He’s just a Ken doll. Not even. He’s utterly a cipher. I’ll have to wait for the fox Robin Hood comes along.

BROOM So back to the issue of these movies teaching kids how to be people: would you show this movie to kids today? Do you think it teaches anything about how to be people? Do we endorse what it teaches?

ADAM There’s no one in this movie whom I would want my child to emulate in any sense.

BROOM But I don’t think it invites that. Who would anyone want to be like?

ADAM Do you want your kids to hear that the three gifts bestowed upon a princess are beauty, song, and resistance to death?

BETH Sleep, essentially.

BROOM In terms of the storytelling and texture – you said at the end, “this is like a video game.” It had a more materialistic attitude toward even the elements of fairy tale stories. That’s what I’ve been saying here.

ADAM Their love is manifest in a cake and a dress, and the main drama is the color of the dress?

BROOM More than that, that there are no emotions in this movie.

ADAM Even her parents have essentially no feelings whatever about Aurora.

BROOM The fetishization – the surface refinement – of these symbols like “the evil castle” or “the beautiful forest” has been brought to this even wilder extreme of comic book intensity. You know, when you watch He-Man and every single shot is ridiculous…

ADAM “By the power of Greyskull!…”

BROOM Exactly. Is the problem with invoking “the power of Greyskull” that it’s not a compelling concept, or that it’s so over-the-top – that the gap between my real life and that operatic level of craziness is so great? I felt like this movie went straight for something more inflated and dubious than before. Like at the end, when the evil queen shouts “you’ll have to deal with me and all the powers of hell!” and then transforms into a mile-high dragon

ADAM Doesn’t that happen in something else?

BROOM A lot of things. It happens at the end of The Little Mermaid, which seems sort of like a reference to this. The sea-witch turns into a giant version of herself.

ADAM No, that’s not it. Haven’t we seen this already, where the villain turns into something and then is slain in that form?

BROOM I think of that as essentially “the Sleeping Beauty thing.” And that she’s this woman who thinks she’s hot stuff but is completely isolated, this lonely vamp, and then the true form of this character is revealed as a fire-breathing dragon – that seemed a little misogynistic to me. It’s one thing for the villain to be a woman, and it’s another thing for her to say “let me show you what I really am: HHHHHH!!” [breathing fire]

BETH That’s surprising. I really wasn’t feeling it that way.

ADAM Actually, she could be played by Sigourney Weaver.

BETH Perfect!

BROOM Because she’s tall?

BETH Because Sigourney Weaver does evil very well!

ADAM She’s commanding.

BROOM Don’t you think Sigourney Weaver should be playing Michelle Obama?

BETH No. She’s way too old.

BROOM Every time I see Michelle Obama, that’s what I think.

BETH That’s weird.

BROOM You don’t think she looks like Sigourney Weaver?

BETH No!

BROOM Well, she does. They both have underbites and are really tall.

BETH No, they have very different vibes. They emanate different sensibilities.

BROOM You think Sigourney Weaver is like a dragon and Michelle Obama is not.

BETH Yeah, a little.

BROOM Well, I don’t think of any woman as being like a green, fire-breathing dragon.

BETH No one’s like a dragon! But Sigourney Weaver is more like a dragon.

ADAM Maybe the princess should be played by Reese Witherspoon.

BETH Yes! I like this casting.

BROOM I don’t know. There was, as Beth said, something 80s-y about her. I’m trying to think who the person would be.

BETH The girl who was in Sixteen Candles

ADAM Molly Ringwald?

BETH No, no, the blonde one.

BROOM You know who could play her? Daphne from Scooby-Doo.

ADAM Yeah, actually. I had a big crush on Daphne on Scooby-Doo.

BETH Who doesn’t?

BROOM You sure it wasn’t a sublimated crush on Fred?

ADAM No, I didn’t have a crush on Fred.

BROOM He could have played Philip. Who played Daphne in the movie?

ADAM Sarah Michelle Gellar.

BROOM Oh, well, that doesn’t work at all.

ADAM Fred was played by Freddie Prinze, Jr.

BROOM Right. I don’t remember who played Velma.

BETH Not America Ferrera.

BROOM Velma should have her own show now. A live-action show all about Velma grown up.

BETH Called “Velma”?

BROOM Yeah. She’d live in an apartment. It’d be about her crazy neighbor.

ADAM Is it animated?

BROOM It could go either way.

ADAM Is she a lesbian?

BROOM No, she’s not. I don’t think she was. She’s just sad. She doesn’t have a boyfriend.

BETH I really think she was a lesbian.

ADAM When you transcribe this, you can probably leave off this whole thing about Scooby-Doo casting.

BROOM I don’t know; it’s sort of entertaining. My sister might like it, if she gets this far.

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