December 5, 2013

La cantatrice chauve (1950)

Eugène Ionesco (1909–1994) [born Eugen Ionescu]
La cantatrice chauve (anti-pièce) (1948-50)
translated by Donald M. Allen as The Bald Soprano, Anti-play (1956/8)

I rolled 1351. This is on line 1350, the first Ionesco.

I think I could direct this one pretty well. Clarification: In my experiences observing theatrical directors I’ve learned that directing is 10% imagining how things should go, 70% dealing with people to try to get things to go that way, and 20% coming to terms with what ends up happening instead. When I say I could direct this one pretty well, I just mean the first 10%, the fun part. I guess I really mean that I could imagine this one pretty well. And I did. I imagined real performances, and blocking and lighting and sound and everything. I put on a good show in my head.

I was able to do this while “sight-reading,” as it were, because this show is pure nonsense. I didn’t need to know where it was going because the construction is musical and self-generating. It has no rational arc or goal-oriented forces. It is simply in formal motion. It spools out. That’s not to say that it was written that way; it functions improvisationally but it surely required careful editing and shaping to maintain that impression.

To refer to the brain hemispheres again (I know, I need a better terminology for this), this one was for R. Some might even say that the play is R thumbing its nose at L – that’s more or less the index card version of Ionesco – but to my mind, R just doesn’t have any reason to thumb its nose. Nonsense is its own impregnable kingdom. It has no enemies.

L says: I could easily dig into this, just like I could easily dig into anything, but goddammit I need a break – seems like everyone’s L does – and this is clearly it. Take it away R, while I crawl into this hammock with an umbrella drink. Knock yourself out.

R says: this is like a full one-act’s worth of Exploding Penguin Sketch. Or any other Monty Python bit with the shrill housewives (“pepperpots”) whining absurdities. It might be interesting to work out a chain of historical influence that encompasses both Ionesco and Monty Python — or not. Or the ahistoricity of absurdity. Or something. Might be interesting… for L! For my part I just think it’s great to see people sitting in a room saying things to each other BUT SILLY.

The premise here is the stilted, inane world of the “Thank you, my name is Mr. Smith” sample sentences in language courses. That’s plenty premise for me!

If you tell a four-year-old that there’s a kangaroo in the refrigerator, the four-year-old will say “NO THERE ISN’T!” with great glee. Four-year-old me at least. I’m not sure why, but somehow it’s delighting to have occasion to check in with one’s knowledge that there isn’t a kangaroo in the refrigerator. Perhaps because it’s such comfortable knowledge; unlike many worrisome things in the world, this one isn’t even slightly uncertain. And because the kangaroo and the refrigerator are both friendly currency. It’s not like there’s a demon in the refrigerator. The Bald Soprano is all about unthreatening everyday this-and-that, except it’s all SILLY! NO THERE ISN’T! YOU’RE BEING SILLY!

The more important reason that kids are delighted when adults are silly is because adults aren’t generally silly. To stage a play that says, deadpan, “It’s pretty silly to put on a play, isn’t it? BANANA!” offers the audience a similar gift: the acknowledgment of shared innocence, which is to say shared absurdity. Isn’t that why nerds love Monty Python, ultimately? Because the cruel intricacies of social interaction are being openly acknowledged — by people with British (i.e. grown-up) accents, no less — to be a senseless charade, a kangaroo in the refrigerator.

(Nerds, of course, no longer need Monty Python these days — and I get the impression Monty’s remarkably long prominence is finally in real decline — because internet interaction offers an RPG-style escape into the discrete, away from all that bewildering nudge-nudge R-style business of face-to-faceism. Nobody wants reassuring satire about something they are already committed to eliminating from their lives. You got 19 likes! Level up! With friends like these, how could the dead parrot sketch possibly ease anyone’s pain? Face-to-faceism’s sins are so quaint and human compared to the Brazil of Facebook; I feel like talking to that mild and personable pet shop owner would be a rare and relaxing pleasure. Who isn’t pinin’ for the fjords?)

Okay, now go back to before the parenthetical and get ready to pick back up from where we were.

So: It seemed clear to me that Ionesco was up to the same sort of thing. Toward the beginning there is a prolonged sequence of Mr. and Mrs. Martin realizing the exceedingly obvious with surprise, an inch at a time. When the scene finally reaches a sort of endpoint (they conclude that they know each other and are married to each other), the maid emerges to address the audience and reveal, also at pointless length, that the impossibly obvious conclusion they have reached is secretly not so after all (because one of their outrageously obvious realizations was actually mistaken, for an absurd reason). When the maid is finally finished with this announcement she does a false exit only to return and conspiratorially add the tag: “My real name is Sherlock Holmes.” The profound inanity of this punchline, carefully placed at the end of a long descent through what already seemed entirely inane, is, I think, at the core of what the play does. To me it says: the infantile is the real, and to get the benefit of it we are going to have to strip down through your embarrassment, by stages. A “groaner” like “My real name is Sherlock Holmes” must be earned and then endured so that it can be surpassed on the road to purity. Sign me up!

And the play does end, as it must, in a pure state of inanity, a chaos of everyone on stage shouting language gobbledygook that has been calculated not just to be senseless and stupid but to be embarrassingly so, which is to say bracing and cleansing for those who need a cleanse, and delightful for those who are just waiting for the adults to finally let down the facade, if only for a moment. Here the facade is down:

Mrs. Martin: Silly gobblegobblers, silly gobblegobblers.
Mr. Martin: Marietta, spot the pot!
Mrs. Smith: Krishnamurti, Krishnamurti, Krishnamurti!
Mr. Smith: The pope elopes! The pope’s got no horoscope. The horoscope’s bespoke.
Mrs. Martin: Bazaar, Balzac, bazooka!

So that all seemed clear to me, and I know exactly how to direct it/perform it in my imagination. It is not, however, how Ionesco seems to be played or understood generally, and this pains me. So I’ll let L handle the rest:

Harumph harumph. Broomlet Book Club undersecretary “Maddie” was moved to go searching for insight into the peculiarly niggling footnotes about discrepancies in the first production that pepper the text (e.g. after the direction for Mr. Smith to sniff for a smell of burn: “*In Nicolas Bataille’s production Mr. and Mrs. Martin sniffed too.”) and came across this article about its director Monsieur Bataille, which she forwarded to me. It gets at the heart of the interpretative matter:

“When we first read the play, we played it as a comedy,” the director recalls. “But our great discovery was that it lost all of its vitality when played for laughs. So we went against the comedy, playing it as tragically as possible.”

Bataille’s company virtually stumbled upon the Absurdist style…

…”Ionesco,” Verdier says as Bataille pauses, “is very sensitive, you see, about Nicolas being his discoverer, even though he really is. Nicolas found the key to the subtext under the absurd surface of the text, and this had a profound influence on Beckett, (Harold) Pinter and (Edward) Albee.”

The 80-year-old playwright and the 66-year-old director have carried on a friendly, but sparring relationship, as if wary of being too linked to each other…

That is to say: the director and his cast found they weren’t up to selling the comedy as written, so instead they sold the gimmick of willful mal-performance. And then lo and behold willful mal-performance turns out to be so strange and disorienting a thing that the audience’s anxieties of incomprehension kick in and soon enough there is a smell of eager pretension on the air.* The audience is unable to maintain the impression that they are seeing what they are actually seeing — that being: a wholly perverse non-delivery of a play — and so they begin to suspect mysterious depths, that there may be something rare and fine and difficult at hand, something with subtext, something high. Not the genuine absurd — how childish that would be! — but rather Absurdism, a thing one can smoke and be French to with ease. Absurdism goes on to be installed as a whole emperor’s new aesthetic in theater departments everywhere. And Ionesco, seeing his cavalcade of bracing silliness converted into a beret-wearing cipher that does just the opposite of what it was meant to do — i.e. coddles pretentious avant-gardism rather than detonating it in googly-eyed embarrassment — registers his horror in what seems to me an admirably resigned way: by inserting disdainful footnotes in the play’s own mode of pointlessness. (*In Nicolas Bataille’s production, the audience sniffed too.)

Of course Ionesco was an undiscovered young nobody when he wrote this, and its success made him Ionesco, even if that success was on terms he never intended. So did he later sell out and cater to the berets? Or perhaps make peace with them? That I don’t know. I haven’t read his other works. (Well, I read Rhinoceros in high school but that was a long time ago.)

Yes, the above is just speculation. But at its heart is an observation I will stand by:

The magic of theater is mostly ritual and situational and applies to anything done under theatrical circumstances. It is not particularly dependent on intention or even execution. This is why terrible performances tend to be either excruciating or campily wonderful, but rarely indifferent: because the magic works, and its power, for good or for evil, cannot be denied. This affords tremendous leeway to theater artists, as even their most indulgent and senseless experimentation will seem vaguely potent under the lights. “I don’t know what this is but it’s interesting!” is the motivating principle behind a great deal of theater art. Part of that interest, part of what attracts an artist to a choice, is the impression of secret meaning. But since the audience isn’t privy to the process, they will have the sense that the artist actually has that secret meaning in hand and is teasing them with it. In fact what the artist has actually done and understood is frequently shallow beyond the audience’s will to imagine. (Especially at these prices!)

It is very difficult to sustain an awareness that something seemingly rich, deep, and challenging is actually just a smoke bomb chucked in the magic machine by someone else’s anxieties, or someone else’s impish whim. (Much easier to struggle struggle struggle to understand and then smile a Mona Lisa smile, chuckle knowingly, and light another cigarette.) But one should cultivate a capacity for this awareness, because it relieves one’s own anxieties. And cigarettes are bad for your health.

I guess this applies to all art.

R: Silly gobblegobblers, Trix are for kids! R out! (throws down mic)

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December 3, 2013

40. Armageddon (1998)

directed by Michael Bay
story by Robert Roy Poole and Jonathan Hensleigh, adapted by Tony Gilroy and Shane Salerno
screenplay by Jonathan Hensleigh and J.J. Abrams

criterion40-title

Criterion #40.

Armageddon is a movie about where an asteroid that is going to hit the planet Earth and so NASA scientists and experts decide they make a plan which is to send heros to space and he blows up the asteroid. It stars Bruce Willis is the hero and Ben Affleck the good guy, his friends are Steve Buscemi and Liv Tyler. There is also a fat guy and a black guy! I would recommend it for Americans and for people who just like to see a good time, get the popcorn ready, its gonna be a big one! :)

Seriously I think its good when a movie doesnt take itself too seriously otherwise it can be boring, its not a lecture. Lighten up people lifes too short.

Its stupid how much bonus stuff they put on here, 2 discs!? I mean who cares. Michael Bay who directed it seems really proud, gimme a break. Hey Mike if you dont care about what eggheads think why did you want to be a criterion collection, GOTCHA! Even I could of made this movie if you gave me a billion dollars THATS WHY ITS AWSOME so get over yourself Michael Bay.

In one part the government is like “so will you do it” and Bruce Willis is like “yes, oh just one more thing we dont want to pay taxes ever again” hellz yeah

btw if your like me and you like saying hellz yeah more than just once, dont worry, there are definitly a bunch of other good places you can say it too. Actually they made the movie work so that you can be saying it the whole time if you need to. hellz yeah

I know its weird when Ben Affleck puts cookies in Liv Tylers pants and says thats why the world is worth saving, you have to just roll with it. Its not suppose to make sense, thats why its real its like when people are in love. At the end Ben Affleck says I love you to Bruce Willis no homo but seriously it is sad. Is it dusty in here lol

A lot of parts of this movie seem like whatever theyre saying they were making it up doing whatever they want, on the commentary Ben Affleck says they were. I like it I think that shows that they are real guys and not all stuck up about script lines like Sir Kenneth Brainagh or something. Yeah its dumb, its the kind of movie youd like to have a beer with. Even if it does kinda go on on and on. Your gonna need a bigger popcorn! B)

Inside of the criterion box says “this dvd would not have been possible without the generous support of Michael Bay” NO SHIT, lol again

Some people reading this review are probly like “yo this is the low road, I dont get why you wouldnt take this opportunity to say something trenchint about Armageddon it could be fun, cultural critique bla bla” suck it haterz, Im not here to turn everything into a new york times documentary for you. Michael Bay basicaly says it all on the commentary let me type the actual words he said…

“You know, this movie was criticized by the critics quite a bit, and the thing that’s amazing — most critics are 45 years old, on the average, and… I remember, I was watching an esteemed LA Times critic sitting in a theater full of 800 people and he didn’t know that I was there, and I was watching him. And he literally looked like he had a scowl on his face. And I’m telling you the audience… 12 times cheered. And I don’t think he liked that. I think the audience nowadays is not listening to what critics are saying. Especially for these type of movies. These are entertaining movies. This is a movie where you’re supposed to just lose yourself and be entertained. And we’re not doing anything more than that. And there’s nothing wrong with movies that just go for entertaining an audience. And the thing is, I knew this movie would have an audience, I knew this audience would be a huge audience too, and it really caught middle America – big time.”

hellz yeah need I say more I didnt think so.

ps oh shit I forgot the music! hehe. this is the music during the credits that comes between aerosmith and some chick singing leaving on a jet plane. it goes from basicly the credit for first assistant sound editor to the credit for lead scenic painter. its by Trevor Rabin from Yes so you know its gonna rock, prepare to have your ears blown away! first theres the Titanic irish flute to remember how great America used to be in the 90s (and before) and I guess also Liv Tylers upper lip, then comes the hero march that kicks ass, put it on next time your saving the world B) It also sounds like football. I like it for when Im working out or cleaning to feel like Im Bruce Willis. It rocks pretty hard, trust me, youll hear it! Then at the end there is some asteroid music like for a news report or something, look out! Then that chick starts singing so I faded out, you better get the CD if you want to hear the rest, worth every penny trust me B)

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November 22, 2013

Disney Canon #52: Wreck-It Ralph (2012)

disney52-title

ADAM It seems appropriate that on the day of the New York Marathon, we’ve completed our own marathon. I think we may be the only people we know who can say that we’ve seen all of the Disney Animated Canon films in chronological order.

BROOM I think that’s correct. You have several times said “We must be the only people in the world…!” which I don’t think is true. “Only people we know” I do think is true.

BETH Only people in the world who have recorded conversations after each viewing.

BROOM I’m the only person in the world who does a lot of the things I do. It’s a good way to be.

BETH I agree.

BROOM I think this was a good thing to do.

ADAM So what does this say about 2012?

BETH It was hard not to keep thinking about Snow White and how different the world was when that came out.

BROOM I’m going to request that we not make this the valedictory conversation, because we’re going to do that as its own event.

ADAM Do we have to rewatch everything first?

BROOM I’m preparing a retrospective post that we can read to refresh our memories, and then we’ll all discuss. But let’s talk about Wreck-It Ralph (2012).

ADAM I was delighted by this movie when I saw it in the theater, and I continue to be delighted by it. Even if it is Pixar-ified.

BETH Overall I really liked it. I have kind of mixed feelings and I’m trying to work those out quickly in order to discuss.

BROOM I don’t have mixed feelings, I just have unenthusiastic positive feelings. It was good enough. There were things that I was disappointed weren’t in it because they would have made for a better movie.

ADAM Such as?

BROOM It was formulaic and not in a gratifying way. It reminded me of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: “We’ve already exhausted all actual interest in the premise. What’s left is to work out these technicalities of plot.” In this movie, I really don’t care about who wins the race, or whether the girl is a glitch. I care about what it’s like in the world of video games. That’s the main appeal of this premise. But they just handled that in the style of, guess what! Monsters, Inc. and Toy Story. The secret world of video games is… a big bustling workplace with a tramcar, just like in Monsters, Inc. (and a lot of other things). “Yup, that’s what video games are like too. And now that you know that, you have to watch a story. And we made up this story.” They could have focused on charm, but it seemed like they were focused on other things sort of out of plot-necessity. Which is how I felt about Harry Potter toward the end of the series.

ADAM I thought there was plenty of charm here. Did you play Mario Kart?

BROOM Not much. I recognize the style of game.

ADAM You might have enjoyed it more if you’d played Mario Kart. It had all of the characters who play Mario Kart, but it was also clever…

BROOM I enjoyed when they played the actual games; I enjoyed when he was in his game, and then the shooter game, and then when they were racing at the end. But most of the movie consisted of him and Sarah Silverman trading quote-unquote banter, and it was neither here nor there. To me. In my heart.

BETH Did you like the making-the-car scene?

BROOM I just felt a little bit outside of the sense of investment that would have made any given thing that they did actually fun. I mean, it looked the part. For a kid watching, it looks fantastical. It’s certainly one of their craziest movies.

BETH Yes, but not really, because it falls in with the culture of the time. It’s not crazy, it’s how things are.

BROOM Another thing that came to mind was the second Lord of the Rings book (and movie) where I was invested in the real story, of the ring and the quest, and then suddenly the narration goes: “In the kingdom of Rohan, the king is under a spell and his daughter doesn’t know what to do.” And I would feel this sinking feeling, because who cares? The story becomes about how your story bumped into this other story. And that’s how this was constructed too. Wreck-It Ralph, the title character, is going to go in search of his medal!… but what’s it really about? Sarah Silverman vs. the King of Cartoons in some other place. Oh, okay…

ADAM I don’t know. What did I like about it? I felt generally warm towards the characters — maybe not so much towards Sarah Silverman, but towards John C. Reilly. I thought their borrowings from the real world, their Shrekisms, were actually clever and amusing. And I thought it looked visually pleasurable to watch. “Sugar Rush” was over-the-top in a way that was satisfying; it was a mix of Mario Kart and Candyland that felt instinctively right to me.

BETH Yeah, it felt like a real game.

ADAM And I thought Jane Lynch was wonderful. And I thought whatsisname from 30 Rock was also pretty wonderful.

BETH Jack McBrayer. He was, but he was just being Kenneth.

BROOM That’s what he’s got.

ADAM That was pretty wonderful! It was amusing!

BROOM I would rather have seen a movie about him and Ralph relating. More than what we ended up seeing which was mostly about “Sugar Rush.”

BETH I was distracted by thinking about who voiced each character, more than I have been in previous movies.

ADAM Because they didn’t just sound like themselves, they were playing themselves.

BROOM And they all looked like them, too. Except for Jane Lynch, but close enough.

BETH She kinda did.

ADAM They weren’t playing themselves, they were sort of playing their own most famous characters.

BETH Yeah, exaggerations of themselves.

ADAM Did you know that [spoiler] was [spoiler]? Did you care?

BETH I didn’t know. I should have known.

BROOM I guess that was my favorite payoff in the plot. I should have seen it coming.

BETH It’s formulaic.

ADAM There were a lot of funny little quips that made me smile. Like that the police crullers were named Wynnchel and Duncan.

BROOM I liked the way that the donuts were animated.

ADAM I liked the way that the king involuntarily giggled, even when he was being menacing.

BROOM Well!…

ADAM Oh right, this is where the homophobia comes in. Go on.

BETH So. According to [guy who is the source of this objection, not present], apparently — this went over my head while watching the movie — apparently Ralph grabs the king and calls him a “Nelly wafer.”

ADAM That’s true, I noticed that. That was right after the “I see you’re very fond of pink.” “It’s salmon!”

BROOM Right. So that’s [this guy’s] objection.

ADAM Well, he’s not wrong! I mean, those things did happen.

BROOM But the king character, who, I believe [this guy] described as having gay-stereotype effeminate mannerisms… he was explicitly Ed Wynn as the Mad Hatter or the guy on the ceiling in Mary Poppins. He was doing an Ed Wynn impression and so they animated him that way. I thought the idea of such a character being the king of candyland was a stock way of signifying that you’re in a [Ed Wynn lisp:] “crazy plathe where everything ith funny!” And while that may for all I know be in some extent derived from gay stereotypes…

ADAM Then why did they have to have the pink joke?

BROOM You could say that some of those jokes were tasteless, but the gist of [this guy]’s objection was “Disney is supposed to be a gay-friendly company and this is deeply shocking; it’s like having a racial slur in your movie…”

ADAM Well let’s be clear: it’s only a little bit, but it’s unmistakable. I definitely noticed it. Now I’m not saying the whole way they did the character was a gay stereotype. The character seemed equally as much like James Woods as Hades in Hercules.

BROOM You keep saying he seemed so “Jewish,” which I’m not sure I agree with.

BETH He seemed, you know, New York-y.

ADAM Well, that’s what that means!

BROOM I remembered that [this guy] had complained about the king character and how he was handled. So when he appeared, I thought, “Is there a real type of person who acts like this?” “Sure, to a point.” “So was it offensive when the Mad Hatter was like this?”

ADAM It’s not the same thing. I don’t think [this guy] is wrong. I don’t think it overwhelms the movie, but it’s clearly there. And it is true that Disney has this habit of having effeminate — or gender-non-conformist — villains. Ursula was like that, and Uncle Scar was like that.

BROOM But if we’re going to discuss this not on archetypal principle but on the terms of the movie, let’s acknowledge that in the movie it turns out [spoiler alert?] that his inner nature is not really like this, that it is a mask being worn to fit in with the candyland environment. The environment is the explanation for why he acts like that. It’s not that he’s carrying around some sexual identity that makes him act that way; it’s part and parcel of the world he’s a part of…

ADAM But we don’t know that until the very end. A child walking away from this movie is not going to think “oh, he was actually [spoiler].” He’s the king of candy!

BROOM We immediately understand things about him upon seeing this character, and they don’t have to do with his inner life. We know the Mad Hatter is mad, we know he belongs in Wonderland [Ed Wynn voice:] “becauthe he’th a crathy perthon and crathy people talk like thith!” Historically, is there a gay stereotype somewhere under that? There might be, but we’re going layers deeper than what I am ready to be offended at.

ADAM If they hadn’t had those two jokes in there I could agree with you.

BETH Those jokes flew over my head! I mean, I did hear the salmon thing.

BROOM I certainly didn’t hear him say “Nelly wafer.” Did he really say “Nelly” and not “Nilla”?

ADAM It wouldn’t make sense if he said “Nilla Wafer”. And that’s only a pun on “Nelly.” [ed: The script says “Nillie Wafer” and I can confirm that John C. Reilly does in fact pronounce it this way, though the vowel goes by very quickly and it could easily be misheard as “Nelly.” ADAM’s point about its function being the same holds.]

BROOM Yeah.

ADAM I thought it was funny when he said “he only glazed me!” and then he giggled.

BROOM I think part of the joke about the pink is [spoiler discussed at length]. Now, if he had said “pink ith fabulouth!” that would have been one thing. But what he says is, “It’s salmon, it’s salmon!”

ADAM I’m not endorsing the view, but neither am I dismissing it.

BROOM The joke about him not wanting to identify with pink is only offensive if you assume that he’s not just talking funny but is secretly gay, that this funny talking is a clue to something deeper.

ADAM That’s not true. If a straight male character has to come out in a dress for some reason in the plot, and somebody else says, “Nice dress, bro”…

BROOM Mm-hm, like in Mulan.

ADAM … the character doesn’t have to be gay for it to be a gay joke.

BROOM What I mean is that to make jokes about people being uncomfortable going outside their gender boundaries is not necessarily homophobic.

ADAM I declare a truce on this subject.

BROOM Good. None of us actually cares about this.

ADAM What do you think about this candyland being this noir underworld?

BROOM When was that?

ADAM Just that it’s this place with a dark secret in its underbelly.

BROOM I would have liked more of that, what you’re describing.

ADAM I thought that was funny.

BROOM I liked the aliens infesting candyland under the surface. I wish there had been more mash-ups like that! That was the whole promise of the movie.

BETH But that would have been overwhelming. There were so many possibilities.

BROOM I really expected that this movie was going to build up to a frantic jumping-from-one-game-to-another climax.

ADAM You mean Roger Rabbit style. As a child, the experience of seeing Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny in the same frame was so overwhelming.

BROOM I thought that at least Mario was going to show up! I thought, like, he would have to go to the bathroom and the plumber would be there…

ADAM Yeah, for some reason Mario didn’t actually appear in the movie, he was just mentioned.

BROOM It was like bragging, “we are allowed to mention him!”

ADAM Bowser was in it. And they had a Nintendo right-right left-left B-A…

BROOM That’s Konami.

BETH That’s right, all Konami games have that, but it was on a Nintendo controller.

BROOM But let me go back to my big disappointment. I want you guys to speak to this. I was looking to experience the new fantasy of “what kind of world do video games live in”? That’s what Tron was trying to do 30 years ago. And then I just got — it glazed me right at the beginning when it became clear that it wasn’t going to be anything I hadn’t seen before. It was just gonna be more Monsters, Inc. Part of the magic of video games is that they already do suggest a strange world with a quality all its own — which in no way reminds me of some massive industrial train-station mega-workplace. That just seemed so done and lame to me.

ADAM Well, I’ve never seen Monsters, Inc., so…

BETH Yeah, me neither.

BROOM Well, well! It’s just like that! All right, then maybe you can’t speak to this.

ADAM It’s interesting to think about it in terms of Roger Rabbit, because none of these are games that children in this demographic would have played. So it’s got a sort of nostalgia flavor to it. When I watch Roger Rabbit I think “it’s all my friends!” But these games — what 8-year-old has played Rampage?

BROOM Well, Rampage is not in this movie. They just borrowed the look, sort of, for Fix-It Felix.

BETH Well, maybe they are playing it because their dad has a console that plays old games, like the Wii…

BROOM On their phones! I thought this movie was maybe going to end on an iPhone. “They unplugged the machine but guess what! We live again! For $2.99!”

BETH I think old games are alive and well in the homes of young children because of our generation.

ADAM Maybe. It did seem like this was more for parents of our generation than for children.

BETH It did.

BROOM I mean… there’s a lot of problems with this. The ending they actually had was, “seems like we’re ‘retro’ now!” That was tacked on and hard to believe. Arcades like that are going out of business. “And I can see Sugar Rush from here…” The whole thing seems so thin. That’s the emotional ending? That he can see Sugar Rush, this made-up game? I’m not moved by that. The script was weak.

BETH I thought the script was kind of weak. I thought that ‘getting a medal’ was very flimsy as an excuse for pretty much everything that happened. But I just went with it. It was fast-paced, for one of the longest movies that we’ve watched.

ADAM You didn’t experience pleasure watching this?

BROOM I did experience pleasure on a mild level. It did feel long to me, in the middle. I didn’t enjoy Sarah Silverman’s character. The wise-crackingness, which I guess was supposed to be the ‘attitude’ of her game, wasn’t worth anything to me.

ADAM The attitude of our time!

BETH It was the pluckiness that she was required to have in order to live.

ADAM Why are you so insensitive?

BROOM And the resolution of her story that she’s not really a glitch, she’s the star of the game, but she likes being a glitch so she continues to glitch… and players love it after all? I don’t know what that is. There’s no moral. It’s every possible ending smooshed together.

BETH No. The moral is: be yourself.

BROOM Be yourself, even if that’s not who you are and someone made you into that by abusing you, when you’re actually a wizard Harry.

BETH Accept who you’ve become.

ADAM I thought it was super-scary at the end, when he turns into the hybrid bug.

BROOM That was overly scary.

BETH And when Ralph was about to commit suicide on Sarah’s behalf.

BROOM Eh. His revelation that he’s a bad guy and that’s good didn’t really fit. He was doing a heroic thing in some other universe. It has nothing to do with accepting yourself as a bad guy.

ADAM Do you think little kids know what happens if you put a Mentos in a Diet Coke?

BETH Well, they’re gonna try.

ADAM For that matter, do I know what happens if you put a Mentos in a Diet Coke?

BETH I think some fizzing.

ADAM It fizzes, probably.

BROOM If you told me the premise of the movie, that we’re following the bad guy from a video game on his quest of self-discovery, I would expect a more interesting story. About really coming to terms with who you are. Not a story where you happen to clean up the mess in someone else’s world and then you’re happy at the end. They missed the boat. It should have been about his relationship with Jack McBrayer.

ADAM But that would have been so boring.

BETH No, I think they could have made it interesting. I’m with you. I think they were struggling about what stuff to put in.

ADAM I think it should have been them sitting across a table in a therapy room talking about “what does it even mean to be a hero?

BROOM To be really accurate, nothing should have changed because video games don’t change. They should have showed us the same game over and over and we should have heard his thoughts.

ADAM And it should have been just sort of an exploration of ennui.

BROOM But really, I think it should have worked like The Emperor’s New Groove, where the good guy and the bad guy have to go on adventure together, and their relationship, which is the source of the problem, gets worked out through the adventure. That would have been more meaningful to me. And skipping around from game to game is the joy of this concept, so putting most of it 20 minutes in and then being done with it was a mistake.

ADAM Did you watch that horror movie with John Ritter?

BROOM Was that a horror movie? I was thinking of that!

BETH I don’t know it.

BROOM The parents end up stuck in TV.

ADAM They’re being pursued by some malevolent force through every TV show. And he ends up in Three’s Company and it’s a big joke. I’ve only seen the trailer.

BROOM Me too.

ADAM It’s called… um… like Change the Channel or something like that.

BROOM Right, Remote Control (1990) or something like that.

BETH Poor John Ritter.

BROOM Wreck-It Ralph. It is what it is.

BETH I think as children’s entertainment in 2012 it was perfectly benign.

BROOM But as with Two Boys [per a prior discussion], I feel like the price of picking something “hot” is that you have to really have legitimate insight into that thing. Video games have this mixed reputation: on the one hand they’re big business and kids love them, and on the other hand there’s a soullessness to them and their culture. Like the Jane Lynch character: is that a good role model for anyone? why does she have to be wearing this breast-tight metal suit? Etcetera. All of the issues with what’s a little skeevy and weird about video games — the obsessive quality they have — these are things people think about when they think about video games. And the Disney humanist finding-yourself thing doesn’t immediately seem like it will fit with that. And instead of addressing it and making a case, they glossed over it. They glossed over any interest there could have been in making video games the subject matter.

ADAM It should have been a Platoon-style meditation on war set in Call of Duty. In an army hospital in a first-person shooter game.

BETH It’s easy to think of sequels to this, though. There’s a lot to plumb.

BROOM The fact that he’s from an innocent time and now things are less innocent: yes, he gets threatened by all the bugs, but it could have been a real thematic element…

ADAM And then he has bug flashbacks in his game.

BROOM I just thought it would have been interesting if something about the innocence of the old game was held up as a good thing. I guess at the end they go “they like us now.”

ADAM I mean, Felix marries Jane Lynch.

BROOM There’s something strange about that, is there not?

ADAM It’s just because she’s three times his size.

BETH And a lesbian in real life and he’s gay. That’s the stuff that was distracting me.

ADAM And they’re friends with Q*bert.

BROOM It was strange. When Ralph is torturing the sucking candy by sucking on him, if you think about the saliva eating away at him, that’s a horrible torture. It’s really horrific.

ADAM I don’t have much else. Eddie enjoyed it!

BROOM I’ll bet. It’s very lively.

ADAM Kinetic.

BETH Colorful. It does contain worlds that you experience fully. Like “Sugar Rush” was its own thing, and the tower was its own thing. And I as a kid would have kept thinking about it that way. “I want to go back to that apartment building and see it again.” I just want to see the crowds in the stands yelling. I feel like it was fully realized in its setpieces.

ADAM And is Snow White that great a story? Honestly.

BROOM It’s a better story than this.

ADAM It just has this aura of timelessness that makes it seem better. I mean, talk about formulaic!

BROOM I don’t know which direction the satire goes here. Are you saying that no-one should complain about anything? Or do you mean what you’re saying?

ADAM I don’t know.

BETH Let’s go to dinner.

BROOM Where do you want to go?

BETH I don’t know. Yay we did it!

ADAM No, we have to read the review.

BROOM Oh right.

ADAM I can’t believe we almost forgot that. Then we would have had to start from the beginning!

[we read it]

ADAM Well! I guess A.O. agrees with me!

BROOM The number one reader reviewer agrees with me. So we have nothing to say to that? So this will end with the transcript saying “we read the New York Times review and have nothing to add”?

ADAM That’s all, folks!

BROOM That really is all. So what’s gonna happen next is…

ADAM Are we gonna make a dialogue about Frozen after we see it?

BROOM Sure. But I think before that we do a wrap-up. That’s not out for three or four weeks, right?

ADAM Yeah. But that’s cutting it pretty close.

BETH Maybe we should. Maybe we should wait to see Frozen.

ADAM And then finally we’re in real time. I mean, we’re in real time now, but…

BROOM Okay, fine.

BETH And then after that we’ll discuss the entire series.

disney52-end

Comments (2)

September 30, 2013

Disney Canon #51: Winnie the Pooh (2011)

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BROOM Given our project, this is a fascinating artifact. Don’t you think? It’s surprising that they made this movie and distributed it to theaters. Surprising for several reasons, some of which are critical and some of which are just historical. The effort to do honor to the old values and old properties of Disney, and the effort to make it up-to-date — which together were so dissonant and such a failure — felt indicative of where things are in 2011, culturally. When earlier movies made attempts to recapture “the old Disney,” I had the cynical sense that they just didn’t know how anymore. Now it’s like they so utterly don’t know how anymore that they’re very specifically doing an entirely different thing in its place.

ADAM [dubious ‘tude take] “O-kay…?”

BETH I think the choice of Zooey Deschanel to be the singer is indicative of the attitude they were taking toward this: “Let’s be twee! This is Winnie the Pooh, it’s inherently twee, so let’s play that angle! Christopher Robin is like the perfect hipster kid!”

BROOM Are you saying that about Christopher Robin’s portrayal, or the portrayal of his bedroom?

ADAM His bedroom was awfully steampunk.

BROOM It was like Zooey Deschanel album art.

BETH It was like the Wes Anderson version of Christopher Robin’s bedroom.

BROOM Where did we get this couch from?

BETH Room and Board.

BROOM It was like that.

BETH I don’t know how to take what you’re saying.

ADAM Well, I happen to have Zooey Deschanel right here… I haven’t thought of my meta-criticism yet, but can we talk about how dull it was?

BROOM Very dull.

BETH It was 53 intolerable minutes. Except for the Backson song on the chalkboard, which was obviously their “Pink Elephants” moment.

ADAM They were obviously bored, because they had these two — not just one, but two — flight-of-imagination fantasy sequences.

BETH Two Dumbo moments.

BROOM The second one was more like Alice in Wonderland.

ADAM That was obviously all that was getting them through the day. There were eight people credited for story in this movie. The original Winnie the Pooh movie was three different stories from the original books. This one was kind of a mashed-up version of two or three different stories, but they didn’t really fit together.

BROOM The thing with Eeyore’s tail is a story; the thing with them making a trap for something —

ADAM The heffalump.

BROOM — is a story. The idea of “The Backson” being something that got Christopher Robin, because he wrote “back soon,” is something.

ADAM The thing where they make tracks around a tree and then they get freaked out by them… I think that had been in the first movie already.

BETH Ugh.

BROOM The movie was dull because it had no flair, no charm, and the animation was very pedestrian.

BETH The animation sucked. It was Saturday morning cartoon shit.

BROOM It looked like one of those straight-to-DVD movies. You know, like Sleeping Beauty 3: Beauty’s grandchildren are having trouble with their pets!

BETH That’s why it was hard to believe it was released in theaters.

BROOM It all felt like the straight-to-DVD production package. Which would make sense of it. Maybe that’s what it was produced to be, and then they decided “hey, let’s put this one in theaters.” I don’t know.

ADAM Did the first movie have all those typography-interaction jokes, too?

BETH I think it did.

BROOM In a much milder way.

ADAM It had a couple.

BROOM I thought the first Winnie the Pooh movie was okay, but Adam, you thought it was unacceptable. You complained that they had made Winnie-the-Pooh an asshole, that they had completely betrayed the charming childlike spirit of the originals. And I thought you were overstating it a bit. But here everything you said seemed to me true.

ADAM Actually, this time I thought the characters’ personalities were closer to what I recall from… I won’t say the books, but from the Saturday morning cartoons.

BROOM It was like the Saturday morning cartoons, in which the characters’ personalities were nothing like in the books.

ADAM Winnie-the-Pooh was sort of self-centered here, but he did still seem like the Winnie-the-Pooh of the books.

BROOM He was like Homer Simpson here! His honey dream was like Homer Simpson going to the land of chocolate.

BETH But don’t you think that Jim Cummings did a great impression of Sterling Holloway?

BROOM Yes! I was impressed.

BETH That was my favorite part: marveling at how well he did the voice.

BROOM I think he’s the same guy who did it in the 80s and 90s on the cartoon show. But all the other voices were terrible! I mean, Craig Ferguson as Owl was terrible, the Rabbit guy was terrible…

ADAM The Tigger guy was okay.

BETH No.

BROOM No. The original Tigger had a great voice!

ADAM I don’t know, I’d have to watch them side by side.

BROOM And I don’t think what you say about the characters was true at all. The strength of the first movie is its really rich character animation. Rabbit is kind of a Bert, kind of a curmudgeonly nerd, and Owl’s pomposity is real and internalized, it’s not just a thin veneer on an idiot. And Piglet is meek and honorable, he’s sort of like Linus, whereas here he was just, like, They Killed Kenny.

ADAM They all had pretty unappealing personalities, it’s true.

BROOM They didn’t really stick to character consistently, either. Why did we have to see Rabbit doing a bunch of ninja shit and everyone putting on helmets and doing a montage of military cliches? And Piglet doing Indiana Jones, or whatever that was…

BETH Yeah, it was Indiana Jones.

BROOM It’s this really offensive desperate grabbing at other stuff.

BETH I feel like that one was an in-joke, because it was very quick…

BROOM “In” for whom?

BETH For the animators. “We’re so bored that let’s put an Indiana Jones reference in this.”

BROOM Then they’re so lame! Did you guys sniff Chicken Little behind this at all? Because I did. I had that sense.

ADAM It wasn’t as bad as that.

BROOM No, it wasn’t, it was much better than Chicken Little, but I had that sense of nerd-world.

BETH I wasn’t thinking of it that way.

ADAM I mean, I see what you’re saying, now. Like, Chicken Little is Piglet.

BROOM This Piglet. If you asked, in 2011, what property Disney should make into their next movie, nobody would have said “they should make a Winnie the Pooh movie in the spirit of the 70s one.” It seems so completely not to fit with the times.

BETH I was thinking, what age of child would accept this?

ADAM This seemed to be for very little children.

BETH Very little, like three- or four-year-old kids.

ADAM It was so boring. And all of the gestures towards, like, “Cowabunga!” were not enough to make even six-year-olds want to watch this.

BROOM What age were we when we watched the Winnie the Pooh TV show? Seven or eight, right? You just accept stuff, on Saturday morning. I checked in with that part of my brain a couple times: “If I was just watching this while I ate cereal, would it be fine?” And the answer was: “… yeah, basically.” But here’s something that I wouldn’t have liked even if I was just eating cereal: Winnie-the-Pooh’s honey wet dream is gross and creepy. Like, honey is gross. That he eats it with a full fist has always been gross. It’s bright yellow, it’s putrid, and he sticks his fist into this opaque yellow honey and it goes all over his face, this has always been gross, and then they went and made a whole world of it.

ADAM It’s true.

BROOM And he swam in it. He would be drowning. It was awful.

ADAM And the physics didn’t work at all. He went into the pot and it oozed out, but then actually the level was like a foot below that.

BROOM Those psychedelic things — when I was a kid, it would be like, “wow, this is heady stuff… if everything was honey, how would you, like… sleep?” I’d start wondering “if he goes off that way, would he go forever? And it would still be honey?” That’s what a kid gets into, and in this scenario, the answers to all those questions were horrific. And the fact that Pooh was just reveling in all that horror shows how unsympathetic he is.

BETH I don’t agree with that!

ADAM I remember as a kid watching the Yellow Submarine movie — do you remember “Nowhere Man,” where they’re in that blank space?

BROOM Yes, that’s the epitome of what I’m talking about.

ADAM It actually did trouble me as a child.

BROOM I think it was supposed to, there. I feel like Winnie-the-Pooh’s real honey fantasy ought to have been him in his cozy house, surrounded by all the honey he wants, because he’s like a little British child who wants sweets. Not some kind of Yellow Submarine hallucination…

BETH That’s for the animators, again, because they wanted to play.

BROOM It’s just a wrong move. Like everything else here.

ADAM It all feels like the Finance department. Some business school graduate was like, “What properties haven’t been sufficiently monetized?” And then they were like, “Okay, I guess we can squeeze some more out of this.” And then the animators were like, “What?”

BROOM Well, that’s the purely cynical explanation. I was saying, I think there’s some other kind of thinking at work too, in, say, the Zooey Deschanel thing. “Hipsters really like the innocence of childhood. The innocence of childhood really appeals to people right now, it’s really in. But we have to put a little bit of Go the Fuck to Sleep edge on it.”

ADAM Peter Rabbit on a skateboard!

BROOM When the animation first kicked in and the music started, and it was clearly twee-ified — “Let’s Get Quirky!” or whatever that SNL skit is — I thought, “Oh, I see! Might this possibly work?” And then 20 seconds in I thought, “I don’t think it’s gonna work.” And then there were 54 minutes left.

BETH It’s sad that that was the second to last movie.

BROOM Well, they’ll go on! Life goes on.

BETH I know.

BROOM “It’s sad that this is the present day,” you could say.

ADAM This is Barack Obama’s America.

BETH We’ll have to address that in a wrap-up conversation.

ADAM I don’t know that this necessarily reflects just the degradation of the culture — though surely it does, to some extent — but also, it’s trying to work within this, like, wheezing tradition…

BROOM That’s what I’m saying about straight-to-DVD. If you went to visit Eddie, and they were like, “we bought him this stack of DVDs,” and it was like, The Legend of Tinkerbell…

ADAM I’m sorry, you mean Tinkerbell: Pixie Hollow Games.

BROOM Very good, Adam! And whatever the others are: Lady and the Tramp 2, Lady and the Tramp 3, Oliver and More Company, whatever these things are. If you watched one, you’d think, “yeah, I kind of expected it to look like this.” Like a Saturday morning cartoon that goes on a little long, and is cheery, and has second-rate songs.

BETH And jokes.

BROOM And that’s what this was. It’s just that in this series, we keep saying, “this is what they’re making for kids now?” In fact they’re making all sorts of different crap for kids now.

ADAM Surely this had the lowest box office of any Disney animated movie in the last few years.

BROOM Nobody remembers this movie having happened.

BETH I don’t think they promoted it very much.

BROOM Not on the same scale. Basically, it’s strange that it’s on this list. It’s on a different scale.

BETH It doesn’t feel like it belongs.

BROOM And we’ve said that a couple other times. What are the other times?

ADAM Make Mine Music.

BROOM That’s right, in the 40s.

BETH There were 70s ones that felt out of place, too.

BROOM The first Winnie the Pooh, which was a compilation of shorts. And The Rescuers Down Under had that same feeling of “You didn’t really mean that, did you?”

ADAM Why are shorts so boring? If this had been three shorts I would have been even more annoyed.

BROOM Some shorts are good. All right, you want an answer? I think they appeal to a different kind of attention — more of a you’re-eating-cereal attention — which lasts for about eight minutes, happily. You think: “look at that! look at that! look at that!” And then after eight minutes, you think: “Why? Why is this still going on?” And a short can’t answer that question, because it wasn’t built to answer that question. And that’s what was so annoying about this script; that’s why there were all those story people working on it. They wanted to keep the feeling of episodic shorts, but to also have a long arc.

ADAM By which we mean that Pooh’s stomach has to disgustingly growl for 45 minutes.

BROOM Things that we liked: I liked that he sang a duet with his growling stomach.

BETH I did too. I was ready to be charmed based on that song.

BROOM I was already disturbed that the faces were so inexpressive, by the time that song kicked in. The first Winnie the Pooh has that sketchy, 101 Dalmatians look, where you see the pencil lines, and it has a real artistry to it. If Owl turns around and thinks, there’s a lot of cared-for character in every aspect of it. Here it had that dull, flat, spiritless quality. Rabbit was the only one with any skill to it, and then I saw it was done by Eric Goldberg. He’s one of the few names I know anymore; he’s been there a long time.

ADAM I like that Christopher Robin sounded like Kate Middleton’s sister.

BROOM You said something like “It’s Hermione!” That was how he sounded, like baby Daniel Radcliffe. “We found a kid who has a delightful English voice! And no acting skills!”

ADAM [horrible English accent]: “It’s so broad! Et was sewwww brawwwwd!” It didn’t sound like any English person that I’d ever met. It sounded like an English socialite who — you know those girls with the fascinators at the royal wedding? That’s how I imagine they talk.

BROOM Other things we liked?

ADAM …No. Nothin’.

BETH The beginning, I guess. When you said you liked how it looked already, at the very very beginning, I thought, “Yeah, this is nice.”

ADAM You liked that they got the original Pooh doll out of the Victoria & Albert museum?

BROOM They clearly didn’t.

ADAM They said they did.

BROOM The original Pooh doll looks like a ratty little thing, it doesn’t look like this Pooh at all.

BETH Can I say something I really didn’t like? When his stomach suddenly burst open and stuff started coming out! What was that??

BROOM It was disturbing. That’s an element in some of the stories that his fluff comes out and he needs more fluff, but for them to throw it in for just one second like that was like Alien.

BETH It was really upsetting to me.

ADAM Do we think this has any larger social implications than just “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold”?

BROOM You know, we watched a lot of shitty cartoons as kids. We didn’t think twice about whether the center was holding. If we watched an episode of Gummi Bears now, we’d go: [deadpan] “Wow. I really hope those bad guys don’t get the Gummiberry juice to the castle.”

BETH This was better than Gummi Bears.

ADAM It’s true; I went back and watched some Different Strokes the last time I was at the Museum of Television and Radio. They were all really bad. I think the trouble is just when you work in an emaciated form.

BROOM Feature animation?

ADAM Well, Disney feature animation has all these constraints and baggage around it.

BROOM This didn’t really live up to any of those constraints.

ADAM I agree with you, but wouldn’t it have been better if they had just said, “We’re making Howl’s Moving Castle.” Or “We’re making the first Pixar movie,” which was not beholden to anything. And you can already sense now that the Pixar movies start to feel like they’re kind of straitjacketed by expectations. But that was not the case with the early ones.

BROOM Do you think that’s an artistic reality? Or just an reality imposed by the suits?

ADAM I think it’s a partially artistic, partially commercial reality.

BETH I think it’s self-imposed by the animators by what they see works, and what they get accolades for.

BROOM That’s what I thought was going on here. I thought this project had plenty of room, within it, for so much more artistry than they brought.

ADAM You need infusions of fresh blood from outside the form. Part of why Little Mermaid works and seemed like a rejuvenation is because it has this unabashed Broadway thing. And you’ll see that the next one has this unabashedly Pixar-y thing that makes it feel, you know, livelier.

BROOM Even though that is now a 20-year-old thing.

ADAM But it’s the high-low cross, in this case. Where Disney is the high and Pixar is the low.

BROOM I don’t think anyone sees it that way. I think it’s more like “I’m an Apple and I’m a PC.”

ADAM Fine, if you want. Old money, new money. But wouldn’t it be cool if they did a Disney movie that had, like, a Japanese anime infusion in it?

BROOM That was what Atlantis was supposed to be. That didn’t work.

ADAM Well, more stylishly than that. Like, someone who had actually seen a Japanese anime more than once.

BROOM Yes, I do.

ADAM Or what if they let, like, Chris Ware art direct a Disney movie?

BETH During the sequence of the Backson chalkboard animation, I thought, “You could just make a whole movie that looks like this. Maybe you should, because that would be more fun than what we’re watching. And who’s stopping you?” Maybe the suits. But maybe the artists too. It’s not even on the table.

BROOM I like what I’m hearing here. I’m always looking for how to be a better conservative, because they’re essentially conservative, but you’re saying “be radical.” And yeah, it would be great if they were radical.

ADAM Yeah. Some Mary Blair, some something. This just seemed like running on fumes.

BROOM Do you think it has to do with hiring practices? Because who was Mary Blair? Just some artist that they hired. It’s not like they were desperate for fresh blood; it was just part of who they had on staff. Now they hire these people who went to CalArts expressly to be able to do the thing. There truly was the sense of no ideas here, right?

ADAM and BETH Yes.

BROOM As a given. As the baseline. This is why we’re holding up Lilo and Stitch, which is, you know, okay.

ADAM Not that great.

BROOM But we were excited because it seemed like someone had an idea. Just putting watercolors in the background of that movie washed out your eyes: Ah! Something!

ADAM Yeah. I agree. This seemed like it had no possible non-corporate motivations.

BROOM Just a few days ago Beth and I watched, for my second time, the Wallace and Gromit feature-length movie, Curse of the Were-Rabbit. It’s cute. And in the making-of material, someone says that he admires the movie because, quote, “You can’t write charm.” Charm is about sensitivity to all these little touches, and to create something that runs on charm takes great care. And they had done that. I absolutely agree; that’s what makes those Wallace and Gromit movies work: they care about all the things that add up to charm. And that’s what Winnie the Pooh is supposed to be! And it was like they gave it to, you know, swine.

BETH The animators didn’t relate to that.

BROOM I thought the background artists did okay. In emulating the style of the original illustrations.

BETH It’s an easier task. Because you don’t have to draw character.

ADAM I think this was the writers’ fault, primarily.

BROOM I think the fault was spread around pretty evenly.

ADAM Why would you take it upon yourself to rewrite this material? It’s like, “More Alice! Let’s do more stuff with Alice!”

BROOM Alice Down Under! Alice in Space! Alice Planet!

[we read the New York Times review]

ADAM I imagine that if I had had to review Piglet’s Big Movie, I would have been similarly grateful for this.

BROOM It does give some perspective. All right, comparatively, this was a valiant effort to return to quality. But this is what I’m saying about classy conservatism. So sad that this is the classy version. Also, this mention of the jokes with the typography reminded me that I wanted to say: I didn’t like the payoff that they climbed out of the hole on the letters of the book. That joke doesn’t make sense within the scheme of the movie. It’s just stuff. It isn’t satisfying or meaningful or clever.

ADAM They totally forgot about the jump rope, by the way. You’re right, this is better than, like, The Cat in the Hat. You remember that?

BROOM The live-action one, with Mike Myers?

ADAM Yeah. It could be worse. It could clearly be worse.

BROOM Yes, all kinds of things can be worse than other things.

ADAM But the fact that this was bad even though they were trying to, you know —

BROOM First world problems, guys. First world problems.

BETH I have nothing else.

BROOM Here’s something important to say: one left. One left.

ADAM [drum roll sound]

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Comments (4)

September 27, 2013

Le Misanthrope (1666)

Molière (1622-1673) [born Jean-Baptiste Poquelin]
Le Misanthrope (1666)
translated by Richard Wilbur as The Misanthrope (1952–54)

490. That’s in the middle of Molière’s list, so I read the first work listed. Not sure why that’s the rule, but it is. The Misanthrope, and Bloom specifies the Richard Wilbur translation.

I bought this one. I thought this was something I would feel good about owning, and, in the moment, I liked the way it looked. Beth thinks the cover is tacky, what with the gradient and the fake signature and all, but those very things remind me of comfortable times (i.e. 1993).

I’ll begin by noting once again that plays are short. I can’t stress this enough. We’re not talking about a novel, here. We’re talking about an hour or two.

Richard Wilbur points out in his introduction that Molière’s plays are particularly self-sufficient as texts, such that “a mere reading-aloud of the lines, without any effort at performance, can provide a complete, if austere, experience of the work.” This was borne out. I read the play aloud with a partner (we even made a gentle “effort at performance”) and it charmed — right before our eyes, not just in some imagined theater.

Wilbur’s introduction also notes that maintaining rhymed verse in the translation seemed to him mandatory, essential to Molière’s wit and tone. I don’t know the original but I daresay he did an excellent job. The text is clear and graceful and all sorts of wit lands very nimbly.

We read it aloud with complete rhythmic fidelity to the meter — not robotically, but faithfully in a fluid way — which I found extremely congenial to the tongue and to the ear. And Wilbur’s point about its contribution to the wit is exactly right. The buoyancy made it all delectable.

Not for the first time, I couldn’t help but think: why aren’t Shakespeare’s plays performed this way?

Why are we so afraid of rhythmic speech? It’s something like the aversion to “Mickey-Mousing” in incidental music; there’s this idea out there that strong rhythm makes things tasteless or absurd. As though if the iambs bounce too much, it’s undignified – certainly undignified for, say, Shakespearean Tragedy. But isn’t that just a form of the classic embarrassment of the sensual? Shame at dancing, shame at music, shame at the flesh, shame at art itself? Dance is only absurd in a context of repressing the dance.

What’s so undignified about doggerel, really?

I think that somehow over time we’ve come to think of metered rhyme as something only fit for jest because we wrongly feel it best to try to set “real thought” apart and keep it separate from our art. As though to guard against a threat: that if mere pleasure were to get inside a thought, the senseless vigor would contaminate its rigor.

But obviously that isn’t true; it’s just what art’s supposed to do! The more you integrate the mind — the more the rational’s combined with stuff that stimulates the senses — the more acute experience is. The rational part only gains from someone having taken pains to render it in dancelike verse; it doesn’t make the logic worse, but rather gives it heft and bite, and at some level makes it right.

The dance conveys that thought is good, the joy of being understood, and this can only elevate the author’s sense, and give it weight. And that’s why we should hear the rhyme and feel the iambs keeping time, instead of merely glancing down and with a Harold Bloom-y frown commending Shakespeare’s “splendid song — but to perform it would be wrong.” The notion that in Shakespeare’s plays the rhyme and rhythm are just ways of flaunting discipline and skill — essentially a test of Will — and aren’t to be heard, per se, but only sensed in some vague way, while being willfully obscured by actors who feel reassured by pulling out that standard trick of alternating slow with quick, and taking stabs at “naturalism” by running roughshod through the rhythm — this notion makes no sense to me as anything but anxiety. And yet I know it’s very hard to find productions of The Bard performed in full iambic lilt, where Hamlet singsongs without guilt.

But someday I might see, I hope, a staging of The Misanthrope that honors all the rhymes, as we did, in which I think we succeeded. It wouldn’t be the same in prose, as Richard Wilbur clearly knows.

Or knew, rather.

That tired me out so I think I’m about done here.

The Misanthrope is about the impossibility of absolute sincerity and the grotesqueness of rampant insincerity. It brings up these issues swiftly and elegantly, gets a few laughs with them, sets up some light dramatic conflict with them, and then ends, setting the matter back down without undue moralizing. For this restraint I greatly admire it. The question of sincerity is for each of us to struggle with individually; there’s plenty bite enough in the fact that the philosophical questions are real and timeless (despite the “urbane” subject matter, this stuff is entirely as accessible today as it was in 1666). I found the work far more thought-provoking than I would have found some kind of lesson play on the same subject.

Well, for the duration anyway. Of course afterward I just went on to the next thing and stopped thinking about The Misanthrope. I guess if it had some kind of horrible catharsis and an overbearing moral, I would have been more inclined to wrestle with it in my mind for days afterward.

But that would have been my anxiety at work, clinging to the discomfort as it tried desperately to set right what can’t be set right. You can get people to think about your art by shoving something dismaying in their faces, but that’s the low road. So again, I admire this for going the high road. It comes from an unanxious milieu, a bewigged world of ephemeral grace and wit, and I feel not just soothed but heartened by that soft touch. “For the duration” is a perfectly natural and reasonable amount of time to think about something.

Like I said, plays are short.

I haven’t done excerpts for plays up until now, but why not. I think people like the excerpts. It makes this site a little less blatantly like me talking to myself about something nobody else actually knows about. (Except for Maddie, who so far continues to follow along. Oh, and in this case also except for my reading partner. Never mind, there are plenty of you who’ve read this. But here comes an excerpt anyway.)

This is the first passage that made me chuckle aloud. Alceste, our misanthrope, crusader against hypocrisy, has said that he will not hold back from frankly stating his beloved Celimene’s faults.

ACASTE
I see her charms and graces, which are many;
But as for faults, I’ve never noticed any.

ALCESTE
I see them, Sir; and rather than ignore them,
I strenuously criticize her for them.
The more one loves, the more one should object
To every blemish, every least defect.
Were I this lady, I would soon get rid
Of lovers who approved of all I did,
And by their slack indulgence and applause
Endorsed my follies and excused my flaws.

CELIMENE
If all hearts beat according to your measure,
The dawn of love would be the end of pleasure;
And love would find its perfect consummation
In ecstasies of rage and reprobation.

ELIANTE
Love, as a rule, affects men otherwise,
And lovers rarely love to criticize.
They see their lady as a charming blur,
And find all things commendable in her.
If she has any blemish, fault, or shame,
They will redeem it by a pleasing name.
The pale-faced lady’s lily-white, perforce;
The swarthy one’s a sweet brunette, of course;
The spindly lady has a slender grace;
The fat one has a most majestic pace;
The plain one, with her dress in disarray,
They classify as beauté négligée;
The hulking one’s a goddess in their eyes,
The dwarf, a concentrate of Paradise;
The haughty lady has a noble mind;
The mean one’s witty, and the dull one’s kind;
The chatterbox has liveliness and verve,
The mute one has a virtuous reserve.
So lovers manage, in their passion’s cause,
To love their ladies even for their flaws.

As with the rest of the play, this is, like a good modern standup routine, not only funny but also resonant. Where should tact end? Who is really being mocked here? I laugh in part because I don’t know. Everyone equally, I’d like to think.

Anyway, good going, random.org. That’s-a more like it.

See below for the Maddie report, I hope.

Comments (1)

September 18, 2013

The Playmaker (1987)

Thomas Keneally (b. 1935)
The Playmaker (1987)

2084: The Playmaker, the first-listed (though second-written) of two selections by the Australian novelist Thomas Keneally, the other being his calling-card work, Schindler’s List (original Australian title Schindler’s Ark, 1982). Library copy of the American first edition, from the closed stacks.

This reading assignment happened to fall during a time when I’ve been actively trying to get my right and left brain to renegotiate some of their basic arrangements — a strange process and one still ongoing — and in trying to write it up I have found myself struggling to do justice to the essential bihemisphericity of my response. (This is my third attempt at writing this entry.) So this time we’re trying a new gimmick. Take it away, boys.

R: The Playmaker sounded dull and unpromising when I first read what it was (a fact-based novel about the staging of the first play ever performed in Australia, by penal colony prisoners in 1789) because I distrust historical fiction — it’s usually boring and misguided — and I especially distrust regional fiction. If you’re in a bookstore on Cape Cod and they’ve got a bunch of a locally-published mystery novels about Cape Cod (likely featuring cats and/or ghosts), you definitely don’t buy and read them. So ditto Australia, am I right?

But all the same, in my excitable innocent way, I harbored the hope that this would turn out to be some kind of hidden gem that I could recommend to people. The magic random wheel had spun me a modern but forgotten novel by a writer widely heard of but not widely read. Wouldn’t that be great, if it was great?

When the library called it up from the closed stacks (always a dramatic moment!), I felt like the jacket (as well as the dimensions, the heft of the book) was encouraging. It looked and felt appealingly like a book that was great in 1987 and then unfairly forgotten by cruel fashion. I had good times with library books of similar charisma in 1987; maybe this would offer suchlike good times! Look at that type design! Look at that weird, oh-so-book-cover-y bargain-basement-Magritte painting!

Even the interior offered coy charms: the title page is made to look like it’s printed on a curling theatrical poster, and then you turn the page and see the same poster again but now advertising the play to be performed by the prisoners. Then more novelty frontmatter: a “dramatis personae” and a list of “The Players” enumerating all of their crimes and sentences. Dull to read, admittedly. But I, R, can’t help but get excited about gimmickry. God help me I’d probably be reading Marisha Pessl or some shit if it wasn’t for the old ball-and-chain L. I love me some toys.

But there the toys ended, more or less. (Unless you count the weird two-page prologue(?) that follows, about which more later.) The novel proper started and suddenly it was exactly the book I feared, a boring and misguided historical novel about things I don’t care about, and one that failed to show me how or why to care about them.

Still, I reminded myself: I, R, am kind of timid and ignorant by nature and tend to have a sour-grapes response to everything foreign at first, until suddenly it seduces me. Lots of people love historical fiction. Maybe I just need to stick around and I’ll get drawn in by some kind of unforeseeable magic. Stories about staging plays are usually fun, after all.

But it wasn’t, and wasn’t, and wasn’t, and I truly had no interest in it other than holding it physically, and I had to force myself to go through with reading it. And then as I neared the end, I realized that I kind of had finally developed a faint but real interest in it.

It wasn’t that I found it appealing, exactly. It was sort of the thing I warned myself when reviewing a bad video game years ago on this site. I quote my younger self: “And yet, and yet, every game has its ‘thing going on.'”

This was a book, I’d been reading it, and at some point, the space within me where this book took place had been revisited often enough to have its own discernible flavor. I started to have spontaneous impressionistic thoughts about the subject matter. Huh, I thought, there is something sort of fascinating about the tenor of life in a young but established colony, after the immediate challenges of the elements and the natives are no longer overwhelmingly pressing, and people have to face the subtler challenge of fleshing out their sense of prosaic existence, of normalcy. The challenge not of living in some alien environment, per se, but of feeling that one lives there. I can relate to the troubling quiet of that problem.

“Hey,” I thought, “that’s basically the point of the book, I think! And here I was sort of musing on it – not dutifully, but organically and with a feeling of wonder! (Albeit mild!) So I guess at some level this book was working on me after all!” But only faintly. Still, to be honest, when it ended, my initial dismay had yielded to that old standby, benign indifference. I felt game: sure, why not.

All reading is sort of pleasurable, even reading something I don’t really care about at all. So sue me, I just like holding books and looking at the words and finding out what they say. Yes, of course, sometimes it’s a lot better than just that, but when it’s just that, who am I to complain? I’m R and life is just a bowl of cherries!

L: Well, that’s sweet and all but let’s be clear. This book is a godawful dud, awkward and tone-deaf and mismanaged every which-way. It is glaringly unworthy of inclusion in Harold Bloom’s list and is, I would say, the most thoroughly unrewarding of the 30-odd selections that “The Western Canon” has dished up for me. (Ezra Pound was a big drag too, but at least at the end I could say I read Ezra Pound, right? I read The Playmaker and all I got was this stupid T-shirt!)

The writing is such a dreadful performance of telling rather than showing that I often felt I was reading not a novel itself but someone’s rambling recounting of the events in a novel: “and then, and then.” Synopsis at 1:1 scale, the way an IMDB review might be written by an enthusiastic shut-in.

The author simply has no knack for prose. My sense was that he is probably a nice, enthusiastic, earnest person with a weak sense of humor and a weak sense of himself. At times I felt the uneasy embarrassment one feels in the presence of people entirely unqualified for their jobs. Even if one accepts “graceless delivery of information” as his style, the scheme of that delivery is itself often ill-calculated. The salient data for each lifeless character are re-stated over and over and over, as though assuming an amnesiac reader. The occasional clumsy gesture toward writerly panache, the shift from pure gray to bruisy gray-purple, only throws the vast flatness into relief. Bas-relief. I would characterize the style as “hopeless dullardry.”

Keneally’s skills and apparent interests all seem to lie at the earliest and most private phase of a writer’s work: the research, the synthesis of multiple historical sources, the devising of a framework for grafting personal observation and quasi-narrative onto pure documentary. (He’s written a long string of these histories-as-novels; I think it’s all he does. The latest one just came out while I was reading this.) And I’m comfortable granting him that there is something basically respectable in the bones of the work that undergirds the book.

But the failure of style is so utter and insurmountable that it’s not at all clear how to account for Harold Bloom’s having included this book on his list, even rashly, seeing as his entire raison d’etre is aesthetic snobbery. Possibilities are: 1) he never read it but liked the sound of what it was about; 2) he read or saw the play that another writer adapted from it, which has the reputation of being a sturdy and viable work, and assumed the novel was the same; and/or 3) he is friends with Keneally somehow. Or 4) he just screwed up completely and confused it with some other book. I mean, I guess I have to consider the possibility that 5) Bloom would dispute what I’ve said here about the style. But in the face of the evidence I find that very hard to sustain.

One of the major things the book wants to get across is that being in Australia, in 1789, was like being on the moon — unthinkably far away from the known world. He gets this across, characteristically, by stating it outright, in passing, hundreds of times. I will now gather his epithets for Australia starting at the beginning of the book (p. 25) until we all get sick of it.

p. 25: “this new penal planet”
p. 27: “this vast reach of the universe”
p. 30: “this new earth”
p. 34: “this outermost penal station in the universe”
p. 35: “this far-off commonwealth and prison”
p. 41: “this new penal commonwealth”
p. 52: “this strange reach of the universe”
p. 52: “a miraculous reach of earth”
p. 52: “the new planet”
p. 53: “this particular new world”

That’s enough. He keeps up this pace and this degree of variation until the outermost reach of this 352-page book.

Now for a real excerpt, and your chance to judge for yourself. Let’s see if I can find a paragraph or two that seems to encapsulate things, without digging unfairly hard for something bad.

Okay here’s what I picked, the start of Chapter 8. This is utterly characteristic, and, I feel, more than fair to Keneally because this is a scene with a basic and immediately comprehensible appeal: We’re witnessing the very first read-through of the play by the all-convict amateur cast. Sounds potentially good, right? You might well have expectations for the comic way this scene could go, Bad News Bears style. Or then again you might have expectations about more serious and dramatic things a scene like this could reveal. Nope. Neither. It’s not that kind of story (i.e. one that works). It’s “history”! In the sense of “high school history textbook”: a list of things that happened, grayscale with occasional spot color sidebars courtesy of Corbis Images.

Let’s just jump in here in the middle – I’m not going to explain who everyone is because if you had read the book up to this point you might still have trouble remembering anyway. Which is no doubt why he feels it necessary to name and explain who everyone is every time they are mentioned.

Ralph was soon depressed, though. He had gone to such lengths to cosset everyone’s sensitivity in the matter of having Nancy Turner the Perjurer as Melinda. But reading her lines she showed a shyness she had not exhibited as a lying witness in Davy Collins’s courthouse. “Welcome to town, cousin Silvia,” she mumbled. The happy and arrogantly artistic state the men’s performance had put him in now vanished. H.E. and Davy Collins would forgive him for using Nancy Turner the Perjurer if she were a dazzling Melinda. Those frightful Scots, Major Robbie Ross, H.E.’s deputy in government and commander of the Marine garrison, and his crony Jemmy Campbell, might even be appeased. But they would blame Ralph if Turner were poor, and their blame would be of the furious variety.

But his sweet, composed thief, Mary Brenham, saved the balance of his hopes by expanding before his eyes into Silvia, the way Arscott had expanded into Kite. It was the mystery again. It was the word made flesh. She took fire at the lines: “I need no salt for my stomach, no hartshorn for my head, nor wash for my complexion; I can gallop all the morning after the hunting horn and all the evening after a fiddle. In short, I can do everything with my father, but drink and shoot flying; and I am sure I can do everything my mother could, were I put to the trial.”

At “put to the trial,” she thrust her right thigh forward mannishly. It was sublime. Gardening could not match this, unless the turnips spoke back to you in the tongues of angels!

Huh? What the hell is this? Are you kidding me?

No. Nobody is kidding you. Not unless the turnips are speaking back to you in the tongues of comedians. Ho ho ho.

R: Shrug.

So, like I said, I was going to tell you about that two-page prologue.

Floating between the frontmatter and chapter one there’s this enigmatic, non-chronological, in media res prologue. It has no heading or anything to explain in what spirit it’s to be read. The main character of the book is Ralph, and the prologue starts with “First Ralph heard again how…” and then we have a sort of anecdote recounted, involving several other characters, but not Ralph. “First” before what? we wonder. Why is this scene special? we wonder. When will we understand? we wonder.

We understand on page 276, because the entire passage is repeated, but now completely in context, where it makes sense. Something is about to be told to Ralph by his ailing friend, but first Ralph hears again… this anecdote. A-ha! we think. Now what was enigmatic is meaningful. I have been drawn into the circle; I have met these characters and I understand the dynamics. I have earned this understanding and this familiarity, and now I comprehend the pall of pathos that hangs over this story. It all fits together. Things had all happened as they must. Fate. Something.

This came at around the point in the book where I was realizing that I was getting something out of it after all, and it fit nicely with that. I think I’d encountered this device of a premonitory repeated passage before, but usually in more fantastical writing. Here it took me by surprise and charmed me. It was pretty much one of my favorite things about reading this otherwise bland book.

Then later, when L was trying to find old reviews of the book online, we came across this. Pretty good punchline!

There’s probably some kind of lesson about art in there.

Broomlet.com super-fan “Maddie from Minnesota” contacted to our offices some time ago, asking humbly if she might be allowed to join the Western Canon Book Club of The Damned as a Junior Canonette. When this selection came up, I extended that opportunity to her, and, tragically, she took it. Upon completing The Playmaker she sent me some rather L-ish comments and invited me to include them in the entry proper, but I think it would better to let her express herself below. Especially now that she’s read all this text I just wrote.

Over to you, Maddie!

Comments (6)

August 20, 2013

Disney Canon #50: Tangled (2010)

disney50-title

[Warning: thorough spoilers. As has often been the case in these discussions. But this one I’m thinking maybe you haven’t seen yet.]

BROOM This project is fifty!

BETH I thoroughly enjoyed it and thought that it was one of the better structured stories that we’ve seen in a really long time. The script was really smart. But I didn’t like a lot of the micro- level things. The jokes felt too 2010 and I think won’t age well, and will seem kind of obnoxious in the future. But maybe in a charming way, the way that The Sword in the Stone seems charming in its 60s-ness.

ADAM The humor has kind of a Monkey Island quality, to me.

BETH He looked like Guybrush!

BROOM It felt like a video game in a lot of ways. A couple of which I like, and many of which I don’t.

BETH Visually, I have very mixed feelings about it. I thought her eyes were distractingly, wrongly big. He looked fine, so I don’t understand why they had to do that to her.

BROOM Because she is, and I’m making quotes here, “pretty.” It’s important for pretty characters to have giant eyes.

ADAM What did you think of her manic-pixie-dream-girl haircut at the end?

BROOM I was thinking, “everyone in the audience knows that can’t be done with just a single slice.” Spoiler alert!

ADAM I agree with you about the story. I think the fact that many of the characters had semi-plausible psychological motivations – as opposed to “we must get the MacGuffin” – was satisfying. And the mother’s psychology actually seemed convincing to me, something that a teenager might empathize with.

BROOM But that’s exactly one of the things that… Let me first say that I had mixed feelings about this movie, and I’m not sure that just expressing both halves of it will encapsulate my reaction; I think I need to resolve my thoughts and I haven’t yet. It’ll take me some thinking about it.

BETH But you should just do what you always do and say everything.

BROOM I’m going to. I’m just prefacing this by saying that I don’t think my final judgment of this movie will be as split as I feel right now. During the movie my opinion was on a roller-coaster both superficially and analytically, and now that I’ve seen the whole thing I’m trying to figure out what that adds up to. And I don’t know. But one of the things that I thought was potentially problematic – when I hear myself say this maybe I’ll find out whether I think it was really problematic – was that a teenager could identify with being manipulated by a parent, but this turned out to be the false-parent witch character! They made a point of having them say “I love you” to each other, which we as sensitive children are able to recognize as a bullshit “I love you” that a witch forces you to say. But then the fact that we can recognize this relationship in our real relationships with our parents… I don’t know what we’re supposed to take away from that. It’s weird to have a mother-daughter relationship that is completely false in a movie for kids.

BETH I think it wasn’t completely false. I think there was some real love; I think they had gotten to a place where Rapunzel loved her mother for real, and the mother loved Rapunzel in her needy insecure way that a lot of mothers exhibit.

ADAM Yeah. When she says she’ll go get Rapunzel special stuff for her paints, that was really affectionate.

BETH I think that was real.

BROOM Well, what you’re describing is the relationship from “Into The Woods,” which this is clearly patterned after. And by the way, it seemed clear to me that they knew that their target audience overlapped too much with the audience for “Into the Woods” to copy it exactly. So I figured the difference will be in how it ends. And it just ended with a standard villain death. It did not end with any kind of ambiguity about whether she had ever felt real love.

ADAM Well, this is a Disney movie!

BROOM But that’s exactly why it’s weird to have them saying, “I love you,” “I love you” and then suddenly say “oh wait no, you were a witch, you were a phony mother all along!” It’s weird. Like I said, I have to work this out. While watching I was worrying about kids seeing this, that the next time their parents were manipulative, they’d worry “are you really my parents? do you really love me?”… but then I thought, “calm down, kids work this stuff out better than that kind of paranoia gives them credit for.” But now that I’ve seen it all the way to the end, I’m not so sure what they’d work out.

ADAM That stuff’s all over Grimm’s fairy tales.

BROOM But Grimm’s fairy tales aren’t “contemporary,” and full of attitudirific dialogue to show you that “hey, it’s your awesome world, kids.” Fairy tales are safe exactly because they take place in a fairy tale world!

BETH But this is clearly a fairy tale.

BROOM It is, but her manipulation was not fairy tale. That’s why I say it’s so obviously patterned on “Into the Woods.” The real Rapunzel story is that she’s kept imprisoned in a tower. This idea that she and the witch have a sort-of-mother-daughter relationship is not implicit in the fairy tale.

ADAM But that’s much more interesting than just “she’s kept in a tower,” right?

BROOM It is interesting. But in “Into the Woods,” the use of it is toward this thematic idea that all family relationships are imperfect, have darkness in them, and you’re going to be alone at some point. This movie started there and then just developed toward an ordinary villain relationship. “You want me to be the bad guy? I’ll be the bad guy.” So the ambiguity got washed away in a weird direction. I don’t really know what the upshot of that is. I have to mull over it.

ADAM I think Eddie would have liked the funny dialogue in this. It was just knowing enough for a child. It had that same “Tiny Toons” knowingness quality that I often extol.

BETH Part of what’s funny is just the tone. And I think kids can get that it’s “hey hey!” funny even if they don’t understand it.

ADAM It’s funny just that a big axe-wielding executioner is a mime. And it’s funny also that Guybrush Threepwood is rolling his eyes during the funny song. And that the horse and Flynn keep elbowing each other.

BETH I thought the horse was a great character.

ADAM It was cute but menacing.

BETH It was actually a character.

BROOM I don’t want to be the crank, but that stuff you just talked about is the stuff that I didn’t like. I thought, “this is everything about Broadway that I don’t like.” And I’m not just talking about the songs. It’s the way the characters were presented, and the way the dialogue was presented.

BETH I didn’t like that either. I was just saying I could understand that kids would respond to that.

BROOM During that “we’re tough guys but we’re singing about our dainty dreams” song, my thought was… You know, whenever I type these up, I think, “why do I always have to say ‘my thought was’ and then an entire paragraph in quotes? I just should say it now. ‘My thought is this now!'” But the reason I do this is because I don’t know if it’s my thought anymore. I just know that it was my thought half an hour ago.

ADAM This is a testing forum.

BROOM Yes. So. I was thinking, quote, “this would be funny if it wasn’t telegraphed. And a kid would get this perfectly well even if it wasn’t telegraphed.” If a big guy acted dainty, that would be it, it would already be funny. Instead of a song with the lyrics “Even big guys have dainty dreams! My dream is dainty! My dream is dainty too!” and everyone else rolling their eyes and signalling “boy is this weird!” The whole song was that. I wasn’t able to be amused by it at all, because it spoke everything. As much of the movie did. And I thought, “little kids don’t actually need that. They’re not doing it just to be clear to kids; they’re doing it as a stylistic choice.” Which is what I don’t like about Broadway, the idea that telegraphy is of course the only possible mode.

ADAM Yeah, I didn’t like that chameleon that kept, like, “pointing” the jokes after they were made.

BROOM I didn’t mind the chameleon. I thought, “hey, the chameleon’s motions are pretty small. Kudos to them for keeping them small.” What I didn’t like was that the movie started with [sings forcefully:] “Here’s your hero! She’s a kid like you! It’s a Broadway show!”

BETH But the mom’s Broadway song was really good!

ADAM It was great. It both sounded good and had great lyrics.

BETH It was really Broadway, but I really thought it was effective.

ADAM Kudos to them for going back to their theater-fag roots. It really does work well with unashamed fairy tale. This was sort of unashamed fairy tale in its structure and resolution…

BROOM So let me say what I liked about it: the fairy tale. I believe the story of the movie’s development was that they were developing it as a beautiful fairy tale story, but then at some point decided “this isn’t going to be Rapunzel, it’s going to be TANGLED!!! And she’s gonna say ‘like’ a lot in the lyrics! And it’s gonna have ‘tude!” And I thought that element was strong at the beginning, and then sprinkled in various key places throughout, but the bones of the movie were actually not an attitude movie. And I enjoyed that movie, the straight story.

BETH That’s what I was saying. That the script, on a macro level, was great.

BROOM I mean, I don’t think it was special. Just that it worked well enough and I was willing to watch it.

ADAM But it did work.

BROOM At the end, she could have cured him…

ADAM It’s okay. It’s better for her not to have the magic hair.

BROOM I know, I’m saying he could have cut it right after she cured him.

ADAM That would have been a little too legalistic.

BROOM It would have been a better choice. Like, if you were there.

ADAM But it would have been in implicit violation of her promise. Maybe it wouldn’t have been her fault, but she would have broken the promise.

BROOM When she was making the promise, I was wondering, “is the moral of this movie going to turn out to be ‘go ahead and break your promises to your parents, if they’re evil!’?” When she said, “I never break a promise,” I thought, “well, promising never to leave this tower isn’t good for you. Screw the promise!”

BETH I had that thought. I also thought, “Oh, they’re going to let him die! That’s great!”

BROOM I also thought he was going to die.

BETH I was completely okay with that.

ADAM Nope. There was a second form of magic that you didn’t know about.

BROOM I liked that, because that happens in Grimm’s fairy tales, that tears fall and have a magic power that has not been announced previously. I thought, “Great! Now kids have seen that in a movie.” I also liked that the magic was pure pagan sun magic. It had nothing to do with artifacts or spells. “The sun dropped a droplet of magic. Here we go.” I was down with that.

ADAM I thought her look was really great. She looked a little like Bernadette Peters, in a distracting way.

BROOM Donna Murphy we’re talking about?

ADAM Yeah. You mean Mother Gothel.

BROOM Well, that’s the Bernadette Peters role.

ADAM Oh, she is? I didn’t know that.

BROOM You’ve never seen “Into the Woods”? When you see it, you’re going to go, “oh, Tangled kind of ripped this off.” Big time. Like, when the mother sings, they must have had a meeting and said, “so the mother has to sing the song from ‘Into the Woods,’ but it can’t be the song from ‘Into the Woods,’ she has to sing something distinctly other than that.” So what was this song?

ADAM “Mother Knows Best.”

BROOM The song in “Into the Woods” is “Children Must Listen.” The world is dangerous and children must listen. It’s the same except it’s not funny there. The songs here almost all had a quality of “it’s in quotes, folks!” that I don’t think contributes to anything other than what you mentioned, Adam, that sense of knowingness, which I think is just a shame! It hurts my heart that this was going to be a fairy tale, so why did she have to have Bratzed-up lips at all? I know it was just a little bit, but why at all?

ADAM But, like, “Be Our Guest” has that same lyrical ridiculousness. And so does “Under the Sea,” and all of the songs we really like from the last twenty years.

BROOM Well, both of those are straight-up celebrations of whatever they’re about.

ADAM But there are ridiculous puns about the dancing flatware.

BROOM The point of both of those songs is “what’s going on is great.” This movie didn’t have that kind of song, quite. They had that scene where they danced around in montage. I kind of liked that scene.

BETH Yeah, that was a good scene.

BROOM I thought the look of the animation also had that “Attitude!” “Attitude?” “Attitude.” “Attitude!” “ATTITUDE.” “Attitude!” on-and-on snappy quality.

ADAM You didn’t like that montage of quick cuts where she’s trying to force him into the cabinet at the beginning?

BETH I did not.

BROOM I just didn’t like the spirit of that, that pervaded.

ADAM That’s just cause you’re old, man. You’re a fuddy-duddy.

BETH That’s exactly what I don’t like about it either.

BROOM I mean, the CGI has this sterility to it already. They need to do everything they can to actually humanize it, not go in this other direction.

ADAM Okay, there were some things – like the Thunder Mountain Railroad sequence – that I could have done without; that was a little too much. But I thought she looked good, I thought he looked good, I thought her hair looked really good and moved around in a satisfying way. I thought those lanterns were over the top but actually very pretty.

BROOM I got used to the way the characters looked after they had finally had a couple of scenes that were just story and being direct about what they wanted as characters. As soon as it got to the scene in the firelight where they start being honest with each other, and then the mother shows up and sets up her scheme, I thought, “I can watch this now! A plot is happening!” But when they were introducing the characters and they way they did that was just a lot of “hey I don’t know about you but I’ve got a quip to say…” followed by the ‘tude face, which a person can’t actually make but I’m trying to make. I’m trying to make my eyes get bigger on one side than the other. Anyway, that stuff is not character! Kids get so much of that already! That’s what’s so heinous about Bratz.

ADAM No no no, Bratz is not that.

BETH Bratz is much worse than that.

BROOM Bratz is just the extreme form. “If your lips look like this, then you’re done.” This movie is kind of like, “If you go like this [‘tude] and then go like that [‘tude] and then do a take like this [‘tude]… then you’re done.” I appreciated it when he said “I’m a big phony and I actually have these other feelings.” But she never got around to saying, “Hey, I’m a big phony too; I don’t know how I learned to be such a wiseacre since I live all alone.”

BETH That she was essentially socially normal was not believable.

ADAM Okay, come on. Also that her hair was not trampled and dirty after she went through the forest. Let’s have some suspension of disbelief here, people.

BROOM She was socially normal for a theater girl. The obsession with sarcasm.

ADAM She wasn’t that sarcastic. She had a kind of nerdy innocent that I thought was charming. She wasn’t actually completely socially adept. And I did really like the scene of her giggling and then crying and then giggling and then crying. I thought that was amusing and sort of apt.

BROOM It would have been okay if I’d believed in her core, that she was grounded. That’s the point of having an “I want” song at the beginning of these things – which they kind of did, but it was such a teeny-bop kind of song…

BETH And it was also very “Part of Your World.” But much worse.

BROOM That’s what I mean by the “I want” song. But her yearning song didn’t show her heart. It was just this very poppy “So then I cook a meal, I paint the walls again, and I wonder when I’m gettin’ out of this place!” It’s basically all like that, so it never answers the question it’s supposed to, which is “What is it like to be you? What do your feelings feel like? They don’t feel like that song. Nothing that you’ve done is what it feels like to be you.” So half of the movie just had this very surface-y quality to it. During which I was just thinking, “Oh god, it’s everything I hate about Broadway and video games…” And then suddenly it felt like they were genuinely telling a story, and I relaxed.

ADAM It was a well-executed Broadway-slash-video-game.

BROOM I feel like good execution would be a movie where I was just sucked in and didn’t feel this way.

BETH I was pretty sucked in.

BROOM From the beginning?

BETH Yeah. I mean, I was thinking, “these jokes are not my style; I’m not finding them funny.”

ADAM But at least they weren’t fart jokes. Honestly.

BETH I felt like I could look past that stuff.

ADAM Rapunzel was authentically girly but still convincingly heroical. I don’t know, man, I think that your anti-contemporary dyspepsia is coloring your opinion.

BROOM What was the last one we saw? I didn’t feel this way about it.

ADAM We didn’t really like The Princess and the Frog.

BROOM Well, I didn’t feel this way about it.

ADAM Well, there was no ‘tude in The Princess and the Frog.

BROOM Right, so it’s not just a contemporary thing, it’s a particular way of being.

ADAM And then we criticized it for being wooden and politically correct!

BROOM Well, that’s a different issue!

BETH How can they win?

BROOM I’m just saying, it’s not like I have a one-note complaint. It’s specific to what I just saw. And I want to reiterate, for parts of it I was like “oh, now it’s working.”

ADAM So what was your single favorite element?

BROOM I think… when they got to the kingdom and were just dancing around, I had a nice moment. “This scene is about whatever it feels like.” I enjoyed that, and I would have enjoyed that as a kid. I think I liked that sequence the best.

ADAM I really liked Mother Gothel. I mean, I’ve never seen “Into the Woods,” but I thought she was just fresh and clever. This movie reminds me strongly of [Kendra Koppelmeyer].

BETH I was thinking about [Kendra] a lot!

BROOM When I said “normal for a theater person,” I was gonna say something about [Kendra].

ADAM Sorry, [Kendra]. Don’t use her last name in the transcript.

BROOM I’ll transcribe it as, um…

BETH [K], period.

BROOM I’ll just make up a different name.

ADAM But put it in brackets to make it clear that it’s not what we were really saying.

BROOM “Kendra.”

ADAM The mother seemed really stage-mother-y to me in a way that was satisfying. I mean, I guess she was vaguely related to the agent character in Bolt.

BROOM That’s what you said during Bolt.

ADAM I cited this movie?

BROOM You said “wait til we see the mother in Tangled.” I’m not sure I see the connection there.

BETH I’m not sure I do either.

ADAM Well, I do, because apparently I’ve cited it twice without remembering. I don’t know, the sort of manipulative fake sincerity. Maybe that speaks to me for some reason, I don’t know why.

BROOM I feel like the wonder of this scene we’re looking at on the menu screen now, the tower in the hidden valley, is…

ADAM This frankly looks more like the Black Cauldron video game.

BROOM Yes, some fantasy world. And the part of me that enjoys that sort of thing is a part that has no interest at all in attitude and a lot of quips in this mode. They’re motivated by a kind of phoniness – he admits! The character admits as much in the movie, which was an interesting thing to have happen.

BETH But the movie was still doing it.

BROOM The movie was still living that way. I wanted the movie to sit at a campfire and open its heart and say, “I’m actually just a fairy tale. I just act like I’m a hip kids’ movie because I feel like I have to, like no one would like me if I was just a fairy tale.” And then we could say, “I like you better this way.”

ADAM I don’t know man. I mean, this is a commercial enterprise. It’s like you want it all to be Maurice Sendak or something.

BROOM You can try to caricature “a nice fairy tale movie” as some kind of extreme thing to want…

ADAM Not “extreme,” but…

BROOM Look, I liked The Emperor’s New Groove, I liked —

ADAM The Emperor’s New Groove was full of ‘tude.

BROOM That’s what my point is.

ADAM I see.

BROOM I’m not incapable of enjoying jokes. None of the jokes in this movie made any of us in this room laugh out loud. They were all jokes that we already know. They were being done to the form, which works for kids because they can go, “I know this form! I know this!”

ADAM Eddie wouldn’t know those jokes.

BROOM I bet he would. I bet watching this he’d feel like, “I get it! Because the big guy sang a little song!” “He hit him with the frying pan!” The frying pan felt like such a story-doctored thing. “Okay, we’re going to put a wacky element in and string it all through the movie, for no reason. How about they all hit each other with frying pans?”

BETH I agree with what you’re saying. And then I’m thinking, “well, I just watched 100 minutes, which is a really long movie, without thinking ‘man, I can’t wait for this to be over,’ which is so frequently what I think when I’m watching these.” And so how do I reconcile that? I didn’t like the attitude but… the movie was pretty good!

BROOM Like I said at the beginning, I’m of two minds and I’m not sure how they’re going to work it out. The other mind is: oh, that was fine. It’s pretty. At first I thought it looked like Barbie dolls, but then I saw that no, it looks better than that. I don’t know how this is all ultimately going to land for me.

ADAM To me this is the most satisfying one since Lilo and Stitch.

BROOM Interesting.

ADAM I mean, that’s a pretty low bar, but still.

BETH This is up there for me, too. Not because I connected with anything. I just felt respect for the execution of this story.

BROOM That may be right, that it’s the most satisfying one since Lilo and Stitch, which is not inconsistent with all of my reservations about it, nonetheless. Because what else is even in the running? It’s better than Treasure Planet.

ADAM It’s better than Bolt, it’s better than Home on the Range…

BROOM For me it’s not too far from Bolt. This was a little better because the story started to feel a little richer toward the end.

ADAM I thought it was distinctly better than Bolt.

BETH I liked Bolt. I think it’s better than Bolt but not significantly.

ADAM Well let’s see what A.O. Scott had to say.

BROOM Is there anything that we usually talk about that we haven’t touched on?

ADAM Sexual orientation? There is no sexual orientation in this movie – well, maybe the big guys all doing the dainty things. But that is such a hackneyed gag that it really has no —

BROOM There you go!

ADAM I mean, it is a hackneyed gag! I’m not suggesting that it’s not. That’s what I mean by Monkey Island humor.

BROOM Monkey Island is like a stick-puppet show. It’s like “we made things move on a computer! We made pixels look like people sort of! So what should we make them say? ‘Wah wah wah! Joke! Punchline!'” It’s a Punch and Judy show; of course they’re hackneyed jokes. Whereas here, it’s supposed to be this wonder-world that we lose ourselves in. So my standard is going to be higher. That’s what I mean about the fantasy landscape. Enjoying that is like losing myself in wonder. Which is definitely what they wanted me to do during the… paper towel scene, what were those?

BETH Lanterns.

BROOM It looked like a lot of rolls of paper towels. And they basically had me! I was really on the edge of being able to feel awed by that.

BETH I thought that was a lovely scene.

ADAM Yeah. That was a very effective use of the CGI.

BROOM Beth, it’s funny to me that you are saying this was so palatable to you. Because you know I’m trying not to think about your thoughts all the time. But when I was thinking, “oh, this is all hateful Broadway stuff,” the thought arose, “and you know if you hate it, Beth really hates it. She can’t stand Broadway bullshit.” But I told myself, “don’t even go there. If she’s pissy afterwards, fine.”

BETH But I surprised you.

[we read the New York Times review]

BROOM I agree the narration was no good. And that lame stuff at the end was just one of a hundred things they could have ended the movie with.

ADAM It’s like the ending of When Harry Met Sally. Actually, the movie reminded me as much of anything of Misery. There’s a scene at the end where the Kathy Bates character bakes him a cake to celebrate finishing his novel, and it has that same Stockholm syndrome-y sweet/horrifying quality.

BROOM Which is why I am dubious about your answer to me that, “no, they really did love each other in some sense.”

ADAM But that’s it. If they didn’t love each other in some sense, it wouldn’t be horrifying. That’s a necessary element of it being jarring.

BROOM Well, I think that’s why we say “Stockholm syndrome,” so that we don’t need to call it “love, like the love a parent has for a child in a Disney movie.” It’s horrifying at the level where even adults don’t “go there.” So I can’t really believe that this movie wanted us to go there and say “that was love, but love also sometimes consists of a witch abusing you.” I just don’t think that was here.

ADAM Well, kudos to you, Disney, for drawing inspiration from a beautiful Fragonard painting.

BROOM The Fragonard element is, I would say, faint.

ADAM Attenuated. But it is lovely. And they didn’t ruin it.

BROOM They didn’t ruin Fragonard?

ADAM Or Rapunzel. The end.

disney50-end

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August 13, 2013

Stevie Smith: Collected Poems

Stevie Smith (1902-1971) [born Florence Margaret Smith]
Collected Poems (1975)

[The new backend doesn’t offer me the ability to freely resize the thumbnails, which is why these are a little bigger than earlier ones.]

1578 is Stevie Smith, who is represented by one entry on the list: Collected Poems.

The attractive New Directions edition, on the left, came from the library, but once it became apparent that this was to be a long haul, entailing many renewals, I went in search of a purchasable copy, and lo and behold found the UK Penguin edition above, used, which under the cover turns out to be exactly the same book in every way.

That being a book of 591 pages and nearly as many poems, most of them extremely brief, with very casual cartoon drawings sprinkled in the empty spaces on nearly every page. Some of them relate fancifully to the content of the poems; many simply do not.

Here is an arbitrary page to give you a sense. Imagine more or less this x 600.

Smith-samplepage

What sort of a thing is this?

The Thurber-ish doodles contribute to an impression: that certain wit of not straining to be witty, perhaps not even being witty enough, because one is too splendidly content. Like what The New Yorker once was, an extreme dryness of pleasure that attests (by omission) to a wonderfully wet world. (Not actual dryness of course, but mock-dryness, ostentatious restraint to accentuate inalienable wealth of spirit.)

And some of it certainly partakes of that. But it is also something simpler: just some doodles. And just some poems.

I enjoyed reading Ammons because it was a psychological record. So too Thomas, though a grimmer one. And so too this. Complete collections of poetry feel more like something that was done rather than something that was made; a byproduct rather than a product. These words on the page are here because of certain moments in time, moments in which an individual was making a case for his/her spiritual legitimacy and personhood. The poetry is a residue of the function of the psyche that testifies “I am full and real.”

It is celebrated that Stevie Smith’s fullness and realness was eccentric, distinctive. To quote from the back cover: “… wholly individual… idiosyncratic … weird … new … bizarre …” But the more I shaded toward what seemed to me the spirit of the work itself, the more I felt that she was interested in her thoughts not because she considered her mind (or her self) thrillingly quirky, but simply and honestly because they were her thoughts. To me this was utterly sympathetic, and not particularly eccentric. Isn’t it rather worthless, as a critique, to note that something is eccentric – essentially, that it is different from the things that it is not? Once the horizons of other possible writers faded from view (there were no other possible writers within the limits of this book) the notion of eccentricity became useless.

(Though I did find myself falling back on it when asked to describe what I was reading. I would like to hold myself to a finer standard of saying what I really feel, but I’m not always up to that challenge.)

I mean, compared with what we expect of poetry, yes, her style and spirit make her deeply eccentric… as a poet. But as a person how eccentric is this, really? And what is a poet if not a person?

She certainly has recurring preoccupations (death, loneliness, the English, pets, fables and fairy tales) and in many of the poems has definite things to say. But for me the strongest impression was left not by the things thought or said but by the ease in thinking them and commitment to saying them, whatever they might be. It is hard for me to imagine that she did much revision. Nothing gives the sense that it has been “worked” in the least. The impression is simply of a genuine personality flexing naturally, in the implicit faith that writing is no more and no less than this.

And is it? Well, self-fulfillingly enough, I am grateful to have been in the company of exactly this, a deep self-trust, at least so far as this function of poem-making goes. It is contagious. Yes, we come to feel, of course it is good that she should write these things. It is good for her that she should write them, and it is good for me to be in the company of someone doing things that are good for her. This may have been a morbid life but it was also, it seems clear, a smooth one. The quality and character of that smoothness seemed like highly valuable instruction.

The first notes I jotted down last year about my reaction were that her style was characterized by “laziness, but a sort of salutary laziness.” In retrospect that sounds like a symptom of philosophical confusion. Stevie has helped clear up some of it. There is nothing “lazy” about writing many hundreds of poems.

[I thought and wrote similarly ambivalent things after reading Beckett. There has always been something simultaneously inspiring and intimidating to me about the profound composure, the lack of anxiety or “propriety,” in the way such writers take overt and unapologetic pleasure in being themselves, thinking their thoughts, and writing what they will. With Beckett I felt – and I still feel even in this moment – an urge to describe it as an “elitist” or “pseudo-aristocratic” mien, but where is that notion coming from? Not a part of me that is helping me. I must reject it. What such people exhibit is simply well-being and self-respect. To resentfully call it decadence is to consign oneself to the ghetto of the soul.]

[For a Stevie Smith example, listen and consider the following bagatelle of condescension: The Celts. Rather than taking some sort of imaginary offense, I would prefer to recognize that this is simply one woman being sincere and taking obvious pleasure in her sincerity. Listen to the joy in her voice as she says such things! How enviable!]

In the end I come away mainly with a sense of emotional texture and space, just as one comes away from visiting another household with a sense of its particular spiritual premises. Stevie Smith’s poetry and R.S. Thomas’s poetry and A.R. Ammons’ poetry really have nothing at all in common, but living with them has had in common that all were social experiences, a visit of the soul to someone else’s home. One samples the special valences of all their unspoken things: the weight of the rugs, the depth of the brown of the bookcase, the edges where two wallpaper patterns meet, the puddles of darkness left by the arrangement of lamps, the particular curlicues on the ends of their silverware. Smells deep in the furniture, that these people live inside and will never quite smell.

The cover of the Penguin edition up there gets right to the point. Look at where we’re visiting! A sitting room both strange and lovely and sad and spooky and ordinary and perhaps a bit tiresome too. But very real and lived, which is the charm that goes beyond charm. I have benefited from her room being so real, even while I didn’t know what to make of a lot of her decor. But after all it’s not for us, it’s for her; we’re just guests.

I will say this about reading complete corpora: it takes a long time. I thought at first that since the poems were all so short and whimsical I could just breeze through this book, but that was naive. Really getting to know someone takes a while; there is no quick way about it. In this project, 2008 was the year of Edgar Allan Poe. 2011-12 was the year of R.S. Thomas. 2012-13 has now been the year of Stevie Smith.

The next time I roll something like “Complete Poetry,” I may decide to make a special new dispensation to roll again for a second selection to read concurrently. Poetry needs to be read in parallel with other things; it insists on gaps.

Anyway, we’ll have to wait see about that, because that isn’t what happened this time around.

Examples for you.

First of all, you can hear several more readings on soundcloud, including this one, of her most famous poem, with a fine general self-introduction that basically jibes with my impressions above; and this goofy one.

A good majority of the poems could be considered self-portrait, in some degree. I’ve chosen this one to represent her because the morbid strain is much more subdued than elsewhere and thus easier to wrap one’s heart around. Not to say that that’s our responsibility.

In My Dreams

In my dreams I am always saying goodbye and riding away,
Whither and why I know not nor do I care.
And the parting is sweet and the parting over is sweeter,
And sweetest of all is the night and the rushing air.

In my dreams they are always waving their hands and saying goodbye,
And they give me the stirrup cup and I smile as I drink,
I am glad the journey is set, I am glad I am going,
I am glad, I am glad, that my friends don’t know what I think.

And to wrap things up, here’s one for Harold Bloom, from whose shadow this project takes its silhouette if not exactly its spirit, and who chose this book for his list despite its having this poem in it. Though who knows if he’s ever read it.

Souvenir de Monsieur Poop

I am the self-appointed guardian of English literature,
I believe tremendously in the significance of age;
I believe that a writer is wise at 50,
Ten years wiser at 60, at 70 a sage.
I believe that juniors are lively, to be encouraged with discretion and snubbed,
I believe also that they are bouncing, communistic, ill mannered and, of course, young.
But I never define what I mean by youth
Because the word undefined is more useful for general purposes of abuse.
I believe that literature is a school where only those who apply themselves diligently to their tasks acquire merit.
And only they after the passage of a good many years (see above).
But then I am an old fogey.
I always write more in sorrow than in anger.
I am, after all, devoted to Shakespeare, Milton,
And, coming to our own times,
Of course
Housman.
I have never been known to say a word against the established classics,
I am in fact devoted to the established classics.
In the service of literature I believe absolutely in the principle of division;
I divide into age groups and also into schools.
This is in keeping with my scholastic mind, and enables me to trounce
Not only youth
(Which might be thought intellectually frivolous by pedants) but also periodical tendencies,
To ventilate, in a word, my own political and moral philosophy.
(When I say that I am an old fogey, I am, of course, joking.)
English Literature, as I see it, requires to be defended
By a person of integrity and essential good humour
Against the forces of fanaticism, idiosyncrasy and anarchy.
I perfectly apprehend the perilous nature of my convictions
And I am prepared to go to the stake
For Shakespeare, Milton,
And, coming to our own times,
Of course
Housman.
I cannot say more than that, can I?
And I do not deem it advisable, in the interests of the editor to whom I am spatially contracted,
To say less.

You know, I thought I was going to end it there but I just came across this Believer article on Stevie Smith by David Orr, and now I have a couple last musings about Monsieur Poop.

The Believer article is basically in agreement with me about what we might get from Stevie Smith. But there is something frustrating to me about the fact that Orr sees no alternative but to write it in a way that does not get that very thing. His language of appreciation has to work and work and work its way to being able to articulate that Stevie Smith’s lack of workedness is valuable. If he had really found his way to it, wouldn’t he have taken it to heart?

Plainspoken sincerity is made of win! Best. Way. Of Communicating. Ever.

(I see what you did there.)

Yeah, I know, my little joke is pretty far off to one side – “plainspoken sincerity” does not describe Stevie Smith, and Orr’s hypocrisy is obviously a different one. But the principle is the same. (Anyway, letting my joke veer way off to one side is just me letting myself be. WWSSD?)

Here’s what I’m saying, and I think what Stevie was saying about Monsieur Poop. Most critical writing is inherently defensive, such that it doesn’t actually touch what it embraces. Harold Bloom ostensibly embraces Stevie Smith because here she is on his list of worthy works. But he clearly, in word and deed, does not embrace what she stands for and believes in. So what sort of embrace is it? And who really needs that kind of embrace when you can have the real kind?

And if you are writing criticism exactly because you can’t have the real kind of embrace, because you’ve gotten too uptight, why would you chose to write criticism at all? To try to keep alive something authentic you remember from your youth? How dreadfully sad.

Is it possible to be truly touched by something that you don’t dare to resemble? I don’t think it is.

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August 4, 2013

URGENT BULLETIN

2008. Vice magazine interviews Harold Bloom.

Vice: I was hoping to talk first about The Western Canon.

Harold Bloom: Do you mean the whole category, or what I wrote about it?

I mean your book.

But can we make an agreement? Let’s forget that damned list.

Ha. Do you mean the appendix in the back of the book that lists all the canonical works?

The list was not my idea. It was the idea of the publisher, the editor, and my agents. I fought it. I finally gave up. I hated it. I did it off the top of my head. I left out a lot of things that should be there and I probably put in a couple of things that I now would like to kick out. I kept it out of the Italian and the Swedish translations, but it’s in all the other translations—about 15 or 18 of them. I’m sick of the whole thing. All over the world, including here, people reviewed and attacked the list and didn’t read the book. So let’s agree right now, my dear. We will not mention the list.

It’s a deal.

I wish I had nothing to do with it. I literally did it off the top of my head, since I have a pretty considerable memory, in about three hours one afternoon.

It does seem like the sort of thing that a publisher would ask for to make the book more palatable to a casual reader.

It doesn’t exist. Let’s go on.

I am posting this exactly 1 minute after first discovering it.

My first reaction is: this doesn’t affect my project in the least. It has always been absurd and I’ve always cheerfully acknowledged its absurdity. Any endeavor must be yoked to some absurdity or other; I picked this one in full awareness of its arbitrariness. The point has never been that the illustrious Lord Harold Bloom hath delivered this Most Correct List unto us and I am therefor devoting myself to it. My attitude is, rather, that I found this very very long and varied list of all sorts of literary works. A list long enough to provide me foundation for a habit. Lists like this come from all sorts of places. I picked the longest one I could find online. Done.

But no question, his asserting that his list doesn’t exist sure felt like a slap in the face when I read it just now. That hurts my feelings. Yes it does exist Harold! Harold!

I don’t doubt that he’s embarrassed about it and wants to disown it. But go back and read the interview again, and between the lines. He is not saying that the whole idea of such a list is wrong. He is saying that he wrote it in a arrogant, lazy way and doesn’t want to have to answer for that — so let’s just not speak of it. This is an egotist’s evasion, which throws out the baby with the bathwater.

“I left out a lot of things that should be there and I probably put in a couple of things that I now would like to kick out.” Dude, I can assure you, I already knew that. Everyone already knows that. You’re not saying it was a flawed project, you’re just saying your work has flaws. So instead of disowning it, you could go make revisions, improve it. But you don’t want to.

This brings me to my second reaction: the reason he doesn’t want to is because list-making is a losing game. He doesn’t want his list to be “reviewed and attacked,” as it always certainly will be, because he doesn’t feel that he can win those battles and (relatedly) doesn’t think they’re important. I sympathize. But that’s exactly why I think the notion of a “Western Canon” itself is so absurd. That which one feels cannot be successfully defended in its particulars, one ought not to be pompous about in the abstract. There is a hypocrisy here.

In the rest of the interview, as usual, he comes off as an absolutely unbearable prig. In addition to insisting that his own list doesn’t exist, he also asserts us that James Wood doesn’t exist. “He just does not exist at all… There’s nothing to the man.” He wrist-flaps through a whole exchange on his utter, utter non-awareness of James Wood. It makes sense to me that Mr. Bloom would feel very threatened by anyone else entering his playpen and picking up his toys. He seems comfortable only when posturing to look down from a very, ah-very, ah-very great height – to the point of clownishness, my dear – which suggests that he is terrified of having actual peers. I personally have never felt that the notion of an “anxiety of influence” is particularly compelling or important, but I’m not surprised that it would be to Harold, who seems to operate according to a parallel anxiety.

So anyway, this has no bearing whatever on what I’m doing. The proof is in the reading, and so far the success rate has been very high. Though I do have my doubts about this one that I just started. (The one that I just finished will be written up soon.)

Comments (3)

July 22, 2013

Disney Canon #49: The Princess and the Frog (2009)

disney49-title

ADAM It was a little too impeccable.

BROOM Visually?

ADAM In general. It was so carefully regional and carefully politically-correct-but-not-too-politically-correct. It was just careful. I thought it livened up at the end, but the first half seemed a little dead.

BROOM I felt the same way. Once it started to be about the stupid technicalities of the plot, that’s when I had something to care about. Moreso than at the beginning, when it just felt like the obligatory setup of a typical Disney story. And that’s sad. You should get to care about something more than just how the rules of the magic kiss work.

BETH I was disappointed, but I actually liked the first twenty-five minutes or so. I liked that it was about someone who had real-world dreams. She wasn’t a princess. I liked that she wasn’t striving for something imaginary.

ADAM [whispers] And she was black!

BETH That’s something that we can get into – though I don’t know if I feel like getting into it — why it is that the black lead character is the earthiest, most grounded heroine in the Disney oeuvre.

ADAM Well, is she really, or is Lilo?

BROOM That’s true. Of course she and her sister were about as “black” as they’d done before.

ADAM Truly, this is the promise of Barack Obama’s America.

BROOM No kidding! But they must have been making it before that.

ADAM Doesn’t everyone have an idealized black friend? Like, in their mind? Okay, let me refine that before you put it in your blog.

BROOM No shame, keep going.

ADAM I mean, of course, the heroine who was very stylized and rendered and characterized but not too characterized… I sort of felt this originally when we had the family in The Emperor’s New Groove and they were homey — but just a little bit off — but in a homey way. The good characters have just been getting more and more good in a focus-group way.

BROOM Don’t you feel that Pocahontas was the worst of that, and now we’ve been going the other way?

BETH What about Brother Bear?

ADAM I’m not talking about the glorious PC-ness of Pocahontas. In the 90s, you would have a commercial where there were three white dudes and their black friend, and they’d be like, “hey guys, wooo!”

BROOM “Wazzuuuup!”

ADAM Exactly, and then in the 2000s, you’d have commercials where all the friends were black, but it was just as much of a “gotcha” post-racial thing, just a little bit more subtle. To me this was that.

BROOM All right, well, I’m going to go further into offensive territory.

ADAM That’s because you have a pseudonym on this blog.

BROOM You can have a pseudonym! Starting now!

ADAM “Mike”?

BROOM How about “Dustin”?

ADAM “Laetitia.”

BROOM When I see portrayals of black characters in children’s fare like this, I have the same skepticism that Adam has, and I think it’s because I sense that…

ADAM … it’s no accident.

BROOM … that it’s medicine, condescending medicine from white people. Because it must be, because we all know that what black people would really do is feed themselves shit.

ADAM Whoa, whoa, I wasn’t going to go there.

BROOM I’m saying it’s subconsciously racist of us, that this is where our skepticism seems to comes from. I recognize myself feeling like, “I could believe that black people would make and enjoy things that denigrate black people,” but when it’s healthy and benign like this, I find myself thinking, “hm, this seems like it must be the work of condescending white liberals.” That cynicism is problematic. When I see something that seems like it would probably be perfectly good for a little black girl to watch, I tend to think, “well, this is obviously white people being presumptuous.” I’d like to get past that.

ADAM But this isn’t for little black girls, it’s for little white girls.

BROOM Well, what makes you say that? This is my point.

ADAM That’s where the “medicine” quality comes from.

BETH I think it’s for everyone, really.

ADAM Can’t we just accept Disney’s medicine? “You tried with Belle, you tried with Pocahontas, you’ve been trying for a long time.” She didn’t even have a dead mother, this time!

BROOM Don’t you see this and Mulan as different from Pocahontas? Pocahontas was not made for a Native American audience. Such people don’t exist as an audience, as far as Disney is concerned. That was purely a sanctimonious guilt trip movie, for the conquerors. But Mulan and this are intended for the Asian and black audience. In a foolish way, but still.

ADAM Oh, I think this is for the white audience that voted for Barack Obama.

BETH I think it’s for the white audience and the black audience.

BROOM Let’s look at the non-politically correct elements. The fact that the bad guy was like every pusher-man pimp stereotype…

BETH He looked like Samuel L. Jackson.

BROOM He looked like Prince to me. But the character was like Sportin’ Life, the bad guy from Porgy and Bess. An old standard negative black caricature.

ADAM But he had more heart to him than Tiana and Naveen did. They just seemed so careful that they lacked vigor.

BETH I agree.

BROOM But that’s why I’m saying they weren’t written “to show white people what black people are like.” I mean, yes, I think they thought it would work both ways, for both audiences.

BETH It wasn’t The Cosby Show.

ADAM It wasn’t as lively as The Cosby Show. Bill Cosby was very gifted at characterizing. This just felt a little wan to me. How many “New Orleans details” can we throw into this? How much gumbo was there in this damn movie? And Mardi Gras beads and streetcars…

BROOM In these movies, when the Rescuers go down under, of course it’s going to be some stupid stereotyped version of Australia…

ADAM But this was even more lavish and quote-unquote “authentic” than the Rescuers’ Australia.

BROOM Yes, this was much better than that. It made New Orleans seem warm and appealing – in fact I was thinking that it might make kids want to go to Mardi Gras, and then the parents will have to say, “no, we’re not going because it’s not actually like that.”

ADAM Was this movie begun before or after Hurricane Katrina?

BETH Absolutely after. Maybe they thought it would be a boost.

ADAM A tribute.

BROOM I’d guess this idea had been kicked around for a while; New Orleans seems as promising a place to set a movie as “down under” or “the old west.” Speaking of which, for much of this movie I felt about the same as I did about Home on the Range. Until it started getting sort of moral at the end. As for the racial aspect, I guess I was relating it to that George Lucas movie…

BETH The one about the Tuskegee airmen.

BROOM Red Wings? [ed.: Red Tails]

ADAM The one that was sunk by its piety?

BROOM The movie he made, he George Lucas, to help black culture. He who is now married to a rich black woman. I don’t know if that qualifies him as a princess…

ADAM Who’s he married to?

BROOM Some successful black businesswoman from Chicago.

ADAM Oprah?

BROOM It’s not Oprah. You can look her up. Anyway, that he made this movie essentially from a condescending white person’s point of view, but a well-meaning one, and I felt like there was the same kind of queasy well-meaningness here. And we ask, “well, why should Disney deserve to be well-meaning?” At first I had the same skepticism that you had: “Oh sure, a beautiful black family that has no characteristics.” Other than that they love each other.

ADAM And are hardworking.

BROOM Hardworking, serious people who happen to be poorer than their extremely spoiled white friends.

BETH But they love life, they love people, they love food…

ADAM But that white girl…

BETH Honey Boo Boo.

ADAM She was spoiled but she had a good heart too. In some ways she was a more interesting character, because she wasn’t Anastasia and Drizella.

BETH She wasn’t a wicked stepsister; she was bratty but loving.

BROOM She was obviously totally spoiled, and they weren’t going to moralize about it.

ADAM And I also liked the voodoo man. He was different from other Disney villains in a way that was interesting. And I kind of liked the slapstick-y ethnic-caricature Cajuns, who remind me of the slapstick-y ethnic-caricature Irish types of sixty years ago.

BROOM The bad guy assistant to the prince was more like one of those characters. He was the same guy who brings the kids to Pleasure Island.

ADAM No, he was an exact replica of someone more recent than that.

BETH He was like someone from Cinderella.

ADAM He had the same voice and the same look as… someone from Aladdin, maybe. That exact character was in one of them, recently, down to the buck teeth. I’ll have to think about it.

BROOM Well, when you read your own words, maybe you’ll think of it. Anyway, I do think there was something interesting about where the movie went when it came time for a moral. Because Tiana kept saying “I’m hardworking; you can’t just wish for things.” And then the lesson was kinda, like…

BETH “No!”

ADAM “You can just wish for things!”

BROOM … “Maybe you should dream a little.”

ADAM Lighten up a little bit!

BETH Relax!

BROOM The spoiled girl and the spoiled guy are both good-guy characters. This is not going to be a movie about how you have to work all the time. The star that he thinks is a firefly is not a firefly, and you are not doing him any good by telling him that. He is happier than you.

ADAM Couldn’t they have waited one year until the following Mardi Gras, when presumably that same girl was going to be the princess again?

BROOM Or couldn’t he have gone to find another princess? His parents probably know some princesses. They might have cut him off, but if he writes home to say “I’ve been turned into a frog; can you get me a princess?” they probably would want to help.

BETH I don’t think he can write, because he’s a frog.

BROOM You got me there.

ADAM Do you think we can find an angry commentator saying that Mama Odie is a magical negro character in a way that is deeply problematic?

BETH Yeah, sure we can find one!

BROOM The whole movie was a magical negro. I mean, she provided her services to other magical negroes; they help each other out.

ADAM Was Naveen black? Or was he just foreign?

BROOM He was of mixed and/or vague race. Which is to say he was from Maldonia.

BETH I don’t think he was “black.”

BROOM I think he was North African slash Mediterranean.

ADAM Well, that was super-progressive of Daddy LeBouff in 1912.

BETH I would say 1920.

ADAM The newspaper splash was “Wilson Elected,” at the very beginning.

BROOM And then she ages.

ADAM Oh, right. So it’s like 1923. Well, that was very progressive of Daddy LeBouff in the 20s.

BETH To even patronize the black establishment.

BROOM To go to her restaurant at the end?

BETH No, at the beginning. He went into the diner. Everyone there was black except for him.

ADAM Well, he just liked the beignets.

BROOM Is it true that New Orleans has always been a little more progressive and mixed? Isn’t part of the point of setting this in New Orleans that black people were genuinely less marginalized there than in other parts of the country?

ADAM The stereotype has always been that in the south, they would “let you get close, but not let you get high,” and in the north it was the other way around; there was no social intimacy with blacks but there were fewer impediments to their success.

BROOM I thought New Orleans was a little pocket with a slightly different racial culture.

ADAM Did this remind you of True Blood?

BROOM I’ve never watched True Blood. It reminded me of The Secret of Monkey Island.

ADAM That voodoo was super-scary!

BROOM Way too scary. When his face changed into a skull-clown during his song… I love it, now, as a grown-up, I find that kind of thing exciting. But way too scary.

BETH I was thinking minimum age 12.

ADAM When he gets dragged to hell in the cemetery? That’s scary!

BROOM Well, he did owe some kind of debt to Papa Legba or whoever. Going back to Mama Odie. I thought her hideousness was interesting, interesting that they had gone there. She reminded me of the dwarf-y old lady who comes to save the house in Poltergeist —

ADAM He was the Mad Hatter! Sorry, but, of course! He was the Mad Hatter.

BROOM I don’t know about that. But at least you found what you wanted to say.

BETH Mama Odie looked to me like the witch from Snow White.

BROOM Really? The craggy “here’s an apple” witch?

BETH Yeah, but much more saggy.

BROOM She looked like her skin was falling down, a droopy falling-apart face.

BETH I thought it was calling back to that a little bit. Just sayin’! All right, I guess we’re all inaccurate.

BROOM So the moral was in her song, which is that it’s not about what you want, it’s about what you need, which is different. And that getting what you want is not actually important, and it’s just going to get in your way.

BETH I liked that moral.

BROOM It’s a complicated moral, because these movies are all about what you want!

BETH I thought, “what is a kid supposed to make of that song?” Tiana says, “I just need to work harder and get my restaurant,” and Mama Odie is like, “God, no! You don’t understand!” As a kid I would be really confused by that.

BROOM I think a kid would understand it, and not be puzzled the way you are now, because they wouldn’t be looking for a moral. I think as a kid the takeaway would have been clear to me. Tiana’s nice and all, and her commitment to work is obviously good for her, but: she’s never danced!? She doesn’t know love!? She needs to be happier! And we all know that. I appreciated that they trusted kids to get it. On the other hand it is confusing because all the other movies that resemble this don’t say the same thing. They say that “what you want” is your storyline.

ADAM [singing] “I wanna know…”

BROOM And also: she still got her damn restaurant at the end.

ADAM That’s true, she did.

BROOM The ending seems to be that they have to settle for just being frogs and being happy, and getting married in the woods, but then of course by magic it all works out that they get what they want too and that’s the real ending. It’s a complicated problem. Because if it had ended with them staying frogs, like Brother Bear, I would have found that totally annoying.

ADAM Where did they get all the money for the wedding?

BROOM The wedding in the woods?

ADAM No, the second, fancy wedding, with the carriage.

BROOM That we saw suggested during the credits?

ADAM I guess the parents came over, so maybe they just sprang for it. But do you think the parents were satisfied being served by their son, the prince, as a waiter in a restaurant?

BROOM He was a “featured dancer,” I would say. And ukelele player.

BETH I thought the backgrounds were gorgeous.

BROOM Yeah, that’s really what I got out of it. A kid watching this would get atmosphere out of it, and sure, so did I. I thought it was redundant with a lot of other movies. I know I’m saying the message was a little unusual, but otherwise it seemed to be copying a lot of things from other movies outright.

BETH Don’t you think it was winking homage, a lot of the time?

ADAM They had Cinderella’s carriage in the first shot.

BETH And they had Cinderella’s dance shot.

BROOM I mean, the whole Cinderella thing happened… I was kind of bored in the first half because it was so thorough in being familiar.

ADAM When she was a waitress and then an actual, literal prince arrived, I was like, “oh really??” Couldn’t she just have been a metaphorical princess, for the Disney princess line? No.

BROOM Not for the rules of the magic. Though I don’t think voodoo really cares about princes and princesses. I liked the scary voodoo gods.

ADAM The shadows? They were terrifying.

BROOM Straight out of Fantasia.

ADAM I liked that they pulled Naveen by grabbing his shadow.

BROOM You know, it was fun! I didn’t mind it so much.

BETH I didn’t really like it! But good for you!

BROOM It didn’t really work. But I’ve been teaching myself to watch them the way a kid who enjoys them watches them. And as I get closer to that, it gets simpler. “Was this a picture book?” Sure. When you flip through a children’s book, the question is, are the pictures spaces that you can sort of zone into? Sure, these were! It was like Thomas Kinkade, inviting me into all these cozy lights.

ADAM It had the nourishing attention-to-detail of American Girl Place.

BROOM There was an American Girl quality to it.

ADAM Which is not actually satisfying, because it’s too careful.

BETH I’ve had easier times getting into the past couple movies, I think because the heroes were male. And in this one I initially was relating to the character, and then when it started seeming like a mess to me, I was like, “Oh, I can’t connect to this anymore.”

BROOM You have higher standards for the ones with female characters.

BETH I guess it’s just that since I invested part of myself in it, I wasn’t able to watch it the way that you were just describing.

ADAM And then you were like, “All you’re good at is cooking? Why can’t you do archery? Lean in, girl!”

BROOM That’s how everything was for me for a long time. When I read Proust in college, I thought, “this is amazing because it reminds me of thoughts I’ve had, about life!” because that was one of the first times that I’d had that experience. Prior to that, I took almost all movies with the attitude of, “Obviously none of these people is like me! That’s absurd! Of course not! Of course I’m not ‘invested’ in this! I’m watching a movie!” And I think that a lot of the offense that one can take against a Disney movie is some form of “what about me? And what about reality?” Well, guess what! It doesn’t work that way.

BETH I know! But because my initial thoughts were, “Oh, this is so much more about reality than usual!” I was let down by where it went.

ADAM Well, you’ll be pleased to know the next one is about a struggling web designer. It’s mostly about font choice, actually.

BETH Great!

BROOM It’s called Lilo and Beth. Songs? Randy Newman? Thoughts?

ADAM They were good. True to form, but they totally worked.

BETH They didn’t jar.

ADAM I did not feel jolted out of the action.

BROOM I thought the first song was the weakest, and that hurt my impression of the movie. “Almost There.” That’s not a very specific hook.

ADAM Was that the first one? Wasn’t there a “New Orleans” one before that?

BROOM Oh, that’s right, that weird montage of all the characters that we didn’t know yet. At the end, you said, “That was super-complicated!” And it was. Now, in retrospect, I understand that we saw the Shadow Man eyeing John Goodman because he had a plan to kill him and take over the town. But I didn’t follow that at the time.

ADAM Well, it wasn’t a very good plan.

BROOM Now we’re going to institute a new feature that I call “Predict the New York Times Review.”

ADAM I think the New York Times review is gonna be just like what we said. It will be generally praising but a little bit eye-rolling.

BETH I think it’s going to be 80 percent positive.

BROOM I think it’s going to be very positive, because this was the return to traditional animation after they said they were never going to do that again.

BETH It was super-lush. I thought the colors were wonderful. I enjoyed looking at it.

ADAM It was very pretty.

BROOM So I think it’s going to say that it’s great that they’re doing this again.

[we read the review]

BETH Ooh! That was harsh.

ADAM That was a little more cynical than even I felt.

BROOM Boy, I got that wrong.

BETH We all did.

ADAM I mean, it does feel focus-grouped. I think you will be satisfied when you see the next one that it feels a little bit fresher than this.

BETH So this is really just four years ago.

ADAM This is the year that Barack Obama was inaugurated. It was a different time. More hopeful.

BROOM [reads from this article about objections raised before the movie’s release, up to this paragraph:

“Disney obviously doesn’t think a black man is worthy of the title of prince,” Angela Bronner Helm wrote March 19 on the site. “His hair and features are decidedly non-black. This has left many in the community shaking their head in befuddlement and even rage.”

]

ADAM Well, in fairness, she has a point. What if the guy had been tall and nappy-headed? It would have been a slightly different affect.

BROOM I don’t think you can make a legitimate point by saying, “This character is not black so clearly Disney doesn’t believe that a prince can be black.” That’s not reasonable.

BETH I guess if you’re following the argument that everything in this movie is focus-grouped, then it is reasonable.

ADAM I mean, she does have very straight hair.

BROOM We have these phony conversations. At any time, any interest group can stand up and say, “well, Disney hasn’t yet made a movie with Palestinians in it who are just ordinary characters. They obviously don’t think Palestinians deserve to be a prince and a princess.”

ADAM Come on, come on! Disney obviously was willing to reap the PR benefit of having the “first black princess.” And then the first black princess looks like a white girl with some black, sort of —

BETH I don’t think so!

BROOM She didn’t!

ADAM She has very straight hair, and very Anglo features.

BETH I don’t think her features are very Anglo.

BROOM I think her features were convincing as —

ADAM Well, she doesn’t look like Precious.

BETH Should she??

ADAM Well, you know what I mean.

BROOM I don’t know what you mean!

BETH On the subway ride home tonight, you’re going to see a lot of black women with beautiful features and straight hair.

ADAM Okay, but fast-forward four years to the debate about Brave. Where in the movie version of the character, the girl has this frizzy red hair, and then they lost heart and made her thinner and have straight hair, particularly in the action figurines. I mean, this stuff matters! And if you’re gonna try to get points for progressivism, you deserve to be faulted for things like this.

BROOM It matters in a game, exactly, of point-giving. Here’s something else from this article:

Donna Farmer, a Los Angeles Web designer who is African-American and has two children, applauded Disney’s efforts to add diversity.

“I don’t know how important having a black princess is to little girls — my daughter loves Ariel and I see nothing wrong with that — but I think it’s important to moms,” she said.

BROOM cont. That’s right! It’s always all to save the children, the children, the poor little children. And then of course Disney wants to show that they’re good guys, they want people to think of them as good guys… How do you feel about the proposal that Ender’s Game the movie be boycotted because Orson Scott Card has written articles against homosexuality? Does that make sense to you?

ADAM I haven’t really followed it, I don’t know the details.

BROOM Someone posted on Facebook today linking to an opinion piece arguing that boycotting Ender’s Game is not a good response to Orson Scott Card’s homophobia — and it got this thread of furious Facebook responses: “This is bullshit!” “This guy should think before he writes.” All this anger because they’re so excited to boycott a movie.

ADAM This is a debate that goes back T.S. Eliot…

BROOM What’s the T.S. Eliot connection?

ADAM He was a raging anti-Semite. Should we not read T.S. Eliot? But this is a different question. This is not about “who is the shadowy creator behind this?” This is about “what are the images that are being put forward for public consumption, and being valorized as somehow a step forward?” So, okay, yes, she’s black, but she’s also wasp-waisted and super Anglo-looking! It just strikes me that it’s, you know, two steps forward, one step back. I get where people are coming from with a comment like that.

BROOM All right. Well, I can get where people are coming from and still think that they’re wrong. The question is whether there is such a thing as “forward.” I think that a lot of this rhetoric is falsified. And when you say it’s not about the shadowy creator, well, the quote in the article about “Disney clearly doesn’t think a black man can be a prince” — that is about a shadowy creator, an imagined enemy figure.

ADAM All right, let me say something different, which is that if we’re trying to score these in terms of progressivism, which maybe is a dubious —

BROOM Okay, but before you finish that: are you? Do you want to score things in terms of progressivism?

ADAM I’m saying, to the extent that that’s the game that we’re being invited to play, and clearly that’s the game that Disney wanted us to play, because that’s how they were building buzz for the movie, I think Lilo and Stitch is a much more quote-“progressive” movie than this is. And a much more radical departure from their normal mode.

BETH Yes. That was a radical movie.

ADAM Lilo and Stitch was a crazy, cool movie, and it’s a shame that it’s not more prominent. In retrospect it seems much more appealing to me than it did before.

BROOM Would you agree with this?: that anyone who says “Give us points for being progressive!”, it hardly matters what they’re doing — they’re not being progressive.

ADAM Well… no. Because sometimes, whatever token thing you’re doing is valuable. If there were a movie about, like, gay princes who had a relationship, I would be super-tickled, no matter how horrible the movie was in other ways. Even if they were body-dysmorphic, and white, and gender-conformist.

BETH But don’t you know people who actually look like that in real life? Why are they supposed to make a character who is not appealing? It seems like what you’re saying is, “Let’s make her look like Precious because that’s real.” But what’s real is everything.

ADAM But they’re inviting us to pat them on the back, so we might as well —

BROOM Well, they’re inviting us to pay them money. And the fact that we want to pat ourselves on the back for boycotting the bad guys and doing business with the good guys is a game that we buy into, that we create. Yes, of course, if I had to go into kids’ entertainment, and they told me, “you know, the moms will be up in arms unless you do this!” Then, sure, I’ll do that. That’s not the same as being proud of myself first and then begging you to love me.

ADAM Well, okay, let me a different proposition, which is that if Disney films did not have totemic cultural power, we wouldn’t be doing this exercise in the first place. For better or worse, their actions are scrutinized. When they replace a fat woman chasing a pirate with a fat woman chasing a pirate holding a pie, we’re entitled to ask, “is that really a legitimate change?” And that’s sort of what they’re doing here. They’re inviting us to consider this in explicitly political terms. And so it’s only fair to take them up on that invitation.

BROOM Okay, but you sort of made a lateral move there. They have totemic power as what they are, which is things for kids to watch. And the mode in which kids watch them is not evaluative, it’s just receptive. Which is why it’s powerful. But then there’s a separate thing, which is the adults looking in critically on the choices. Curriculum review. “Oh-ho, I see you’ve got in your curriculum that you’re going to read Cry, The Beloved Country.” The kids who actually read it have a basically innocent experience. I think sometimes we predict what it’s going to do them and we get it wrong. When an administrative decision is made, that’s an entirely different thing from the actual power the product ends up having. So I think that a lot of the conversation about what power these things have is phony, on both sides —

ADAM I would like to know how my nephews react to this movie.

BROOM You’ll find out.

ADAM I’ll find out. It would not surprise me to find that Eddie had a Tiana doll. I don’t know that I need to carry this torch all night. I mean, I don’t know how committed I am to this position, but that is, I think, the rejoinder to what you’re saying.

BROOM All right. Three to go.

disney49-end

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