Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 33

Halloween Horror

It being Halloween month (yes, I celebrate Halloween all month), I was going to list my "greatest horror films of all time," but quickly realized that too many of them are universally popular: do you really need to be told that I think HALLOWEEN, THE THING, HELLRAISER, ALIEN, and A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET are great flicks, or that I take shameless, fear-filled joy in watching the FRIDAY THE 13TH series -- at least until the fourth or fifth installment? Let's face it: so much of movie-reviewing is simply restating the obvious, and trying to sound clever while you do it. So, to hell with that. Instead, I am going to give you a list of horror films which I consider either minor classics, overlooked gems, or films not normally thought of as belonging to this genre which I believe deserve honorable mention within it.

Here they are:

THE KEEP (1983). Michael Mann's least well-known movie, THE KEEP died a quick and quiet death at the box office when it was originally released, but has developed a loyal cult following since. The story of a troop of German soldiers who occupy a deserted castle in Rumania during WW2 and accidentally awaken its sole, supernatural occupant, this film is a positive feast of horror-movie atmosphere, making lush use of fog, shadow, and light, as well as a wonderfully atmospheric electronica score supplied by Tangerine Dream. Jürgen Prochnow is terrific as the decent, conscience-troubled German captain who cannot understand what is killing his men; Gabriel Byrne rocks as the terrifying SS officer sent to assist him; Ian McKellen and Eva Watson play Jewish folklore experts brought to the Keep against their will to aid the Germans, and Scott Glenn appears as a mysterious and very reluctant hero. The film suffers badly from terrible editing -- the original cut was three hours and the studio hacked it to about 1:45, causing Mann to largely disown the finish product -- and there are a host of other issues, including a barely comprehensible plot, but for me, this one is all about the atmosphere. Seldom has a horror movie lookedso much like a horror movie.

THE HIDDEN (1987). Okay, strictly speaking this isn't so much a horror film as a mad, mad mash of action and sci-fi, but it has enough elements of horror to get a pass. THE HIDDEN is the story of a quirky FBI agent named Gallagher (Kyle MacLachlan) and a hard-bitten LAPD detective named Beck (Michael Nouri) who team up to investigate a series of hyper-violent crimes committed by ordinary people with no prior history of criminality. Twisting and turning through black comedy, buddy-buddy cop convention, science-fiction and outright horror, THE HIDDEN pits our ill-starred heroes against a bank-robbing accountant in a stolen black Ferrari, a hospital patient who won't take no for an answer from anyone, a stripper who carries a machine gun in her purse, and a dog that kills his owner. Yep, you read that right: in this film you never know who, or what, is going to flip its lid and go on a vicious spree of theft and violence, and the fun is in watching the unflappable Gallagher and the baffled Beck try to cope. It also features a host of familiar character actors and perhaps the best car chase in the history of cinema.

BLACK CHRISTMAS (1974). Often credited as the first slasher film, this movie deserves a much stronger endorsement, for it is anything but a forgettable massacre of acting-school dropouts: in fact, it's one of the most terrifying films I've ever seen. Basically, it's about a lunatic who stalks a group of college girls who have elected to stay in their snowbound sorority house over the holidays -- but the story runs much, much deeper than that. Mingling psychological horror and unbearable suspense with outbursts of sudden violence, we are introduced to several subjects who might -- or might not -- be the killer, as well as well-formed characters we actually give a damn about (Margo Kidder is especially brilliant as a profane love-'em-and-leave-'em type with a lethal wit). A movie that is without gore or nudity and almost completely without blood, BLACK CHRISTMAS remains utterly relentless from the very first frame to the oh-God-anything-but-that ending, and invented a number of what would later become horror movie tropes. It also deeply influenced its better-known descendants, HALLOWEEN and WHEN A STRANGER CALLS. To be blunt, I watched this movie for the first time when I was 35 years old and spent the night propped up against the wall of my bedroom with a 9mm pistol on my nightstand, listening to the sound of my own heartbeat. It also features John Saxon, who later appeared in two of the NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET films.

IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS (1995). John Carpenter gave us HALLOWEEN, THE FOG, THE THING, PRINCE OF DARKNESS and THEY LIVE, so it can be forgiven if you've never heard of his somewhat less successful take on the H.P. Lovecraft mythos. MADNESS is the story of John Trent (Sam Neill), a cynical insurance investigator who has been hired by a publishing magnate to locate their most profitable author, a reclusive horror-writer named Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow, again!), who has vanished while writing his latest novel. Neill suspects the whole disappearance is a publicity stunt, but after reading Cane's Lovecraft-style novels he begins to be troubled by horrible nightmares, and at one point is even attacked by Cane's agent, who has evidently gone insane. Believing Cane has left him a "map" to his location hidden in the covers of his novels, Trent dutifully proceeds to rural New Hampshire to dig up Kane, but is shocked when he finds himself in the supposedly fictional town of Hobb's End, where Kane's novels are set. A series of bizarre incidents with the townspeople rattle Trent badly, but he's still convinced everything he's seeing is a show arranged by the publisher to promote sales..at least until people begin to die violent deaths right in front of him. Murder, however, is the least of Trent's problems, because it seems as if the terrible nightmares he's been having are actually coming to life. People are turning into monsters, time is shifting out of phase, and reality itself seems to be conforming to the events of Kane's latest novel. But can any of this actually be happening? And if it is, how can he prevent the demented author from "writing" the unhappiest ending of all? MADNESS, while by no means a great film, combines a few good jump-scares with a mind-bending plot and an oddly satisfying, tongue-in-cheek climax. Plus, it's got David Warner, too, who cut his horror-movie teeth on THE OMEN.

DAGON (2002). Another spin on Lovecraft, this time directed by Stuart (RE-ANIMATOR) Gordon, this is a surprisingly well-crafted lower-budget horror film. The story begins on a boat off the coast of rural Spain. A stock market tycoon played by Ezra Godden (evidently chosen for his resemblance to Jeffrey Combs) is vacationing with his hot Spanish girlfriend Barbara and their friends Vicki and Howard. Paul has been having weird dreams set underwater and featuring a mysterious but terrifying girl, which distract him and cause him to quarrel with Barbara. A sudden storm drives their boat onto some rocks and injures Vicki, forcing Paul and Barbara to head inland for help. Arriving at the desolate, run-down, storm-swept town of Imboca, they part ways and both rapidly discover that the inhabitants of the town are fishy...literally. Barbara is kidnapped by a mysterious priest while Paul escapes a mob of what appear to be only partially human townspeople and encounters an old drunk named Ezequiel. Ezequiel, the town's only completely human resident, knows the grisly secret behind the transformations of the townsfolk from peaceable, churchgoing fisherman into monsters who skin outsiders alive and perform gruesome sacrifices to appease a mysterious ocean god: but Paul is more interested in finding his lady love and getting away. When he encounters...literally...the girl of his dreams in town, however, he begins to wonder whether Barbara or the strange, half-human named Uxia is the woman is where his final destiny lies. DAGON is not a masterpeice, but it largely delivers the goods. The cast is small, the decayed, doomed, dark-and-stormy night atmosphere is right out of a Resident Evil video game, and it relies very heavily on innuendo and setup rather than gore for its scares...until it doesn't, whereupon it delivers some of the most gruesome moments I've ever seen in a horror film: a man literally flayed alive as he quotes scripture. The best horror films often amount to nothing more than "good people in a bad situation" and that is definitely the case here.

NEAR DARK (1987). "Bill, that's the worst idea I've ever heard!" So said Lance Henriksen to Bill Paxton when the latter tried to sell him on the idea of a "vampire Western." Fortunately, Henriksen agreed to read the script for NEAR DARK, and the rest is horror history. Granted, this movie flew well under the radar when it was released, but like THE KEEP it has grown a strong cult following; unlike THE KEEP, however, it really is a fine movie in its own right. DARK takes the familiar tale of a group of murderous drifters traveling the dusty backroads of the American heartland and gives it a vampire-shaped twist. Throw in romantic tension between a hot female vampire and a naive farm boy (Adrian Pasdar) she wants to initiate into the group, and you have the setting for entertaining, and occasionally jarring, mayhem. In addition to having the bonus of re-uniting three core members of ALIENS (Henricksen, Paxton and Jeanette Goldstein) as decidedly unglamorous vampires, it features assured direction by a then-unknown Kathryn Bigelow and a lot of snappy, and often very humorous, dialogue, such as when the Henriksen is questioned about how old he is and replies, in true Henriksen deadpan-fashion, "Well, let me put it this way. I fought for the South." After a brief pause he adds, as if revealing an important secret, "We lost." They may have, but you won't if you dig up this bloody little gem.

I SAW THE DEVIL (2010). I call this a "wash your brain" kind of movie, in that after you see it, you sort of want to...well, wash your brain. As a former member of law enforcement I know all the horrible things human beings can do to each other, and most of them happen in this shattering Korean film. A combination of suspense, horror and action, DEVIL pits a vengeance-obsessed cop (Byung-hun Lee) against the relentless serial killer (Min-sik Choi) who murdered his pregnant wife. Sound familiar? It is, until 45 minutes in, when the cop captures the murderer, leaving you to wonder where the hell the rest of the story can go. Basically, it goes to hell. Lee decides he is going to play a brutal game with his nemesis, letting Choi go only to hunt him down again and again, each time administering more sadistic punishments. The serial killer, who is no slouch in the sadism department (his best friend is a cannibal), retaliates by targeting Lee's nearest and dearest, until the tit-for-tat cycle of violence escalates to an apocalyptic degree. A terrifying look at what happens when a good man gives in to savage impulses, and a bad man refines his own to Satanic levels, I SAW THE DEVIL is not a movie you can easily forget -- even if you try. And Min-sik Choi is one of the most terrifying villains I have ever seen on screen.

THE WICKER MAN (1973). I freely admit that by the time I'd gotten an hour deep into this movie I very nearly turned it off. It was so bizarre, so deliberately weird, and so inexplicably filled with singing that I couldn't grasp what the hell was happening or why I should care. Only my affection for its stars -- Edward Woodward and Christopher Lee -- kept me going, and I'm damned glad it did. THE WICKER MAN is the story of a British policeman named Howie (Woodward) who flies out to the remote, clannish, half-forgotten Scottish island of Summerisle, to investigate the disappearance of a young girl named Rowan Morrison. Almost immediately upon landing he begins to suspect the tight-lipped islanders aren't telling him everything, but his frustrated investigation rapidly yields one piece of very disconcerting information: on Summerisle, Christianity is dead and Celtic Paganism is the one true faith. Howie, a devout and somewhat self-righteous Christian, is revolted by this, and by the wanton sexuality of the island's female population. Encountering the island's de facto ruler, Lord Summerisle (Lee), Howie gradually begins to suspect that Rowan Morrison may not have been murdered as he first suspected, but may in fact have been kidnapped preparatory to some Celtic ritual of human sacrifice. Determined to save Rowan's life, he searches the island from one end to the other without success, before deciding on an even more radical plan of action: he will infiltrate the "cult" by masquerading as one of them. Only then will he discover the answer to the question that brought him to Summerisle and has now placed his life in jeopardy: what the devil happened to Rowan Morrison? The last half-hour of this movie is a gradual screw-turning of suspense, culminating in the most shocking end to a film since the original PLANET OF THE APES.

INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1978). Whenever I get depressed about the spate of remakes, reboots and "re-imaginings" coming out of Hollywood, one of the films I can use to buck myself up is Philip Kaufman's 1970s take on the old 50s horror classic. INVASION begins with a lab inspector from the department of health in San Fransisco (Brooke Adams) beginning to notice some unpleasant changes in her live-in boyfriend. She's also noticed a weird new type of flower blossoming all over town, and has even taken a specimen to the lab for analysis. She confides in fellow health inspector (Donald Sutherland), who has an unrequited crush on her, but Donald simply recommends she go speak with his close friend, a glib Dr. Phil-type psychologist played by Leonard Nimoy. The doc remarks that a number of people have come to him in recent weeks expressing feelings that the people they know are NOT the people they know, but have changed in some inexpressible way. They look the same but appear emotionless and cold. When Sutherland's other friends (Jeff Goldblum and Veronica Cartwright) discover hard evidence that people are in fact being "substituted" via a weird and horrible process related to the mysterious plants springing up over town, the evidence vanishes and our gang of reluctant heroes tries to raise the alarm, only to discover that that the substitutes have already insinuated themselves in key positions all over town, and have identified the gang as threats to their nebulous agenda. Some of them just want to escape the city, but Sutherland realizes that unless these "plants" are cut off at the root, the invasion will soon spread its tendrils across the country...and the world. Although this movie suffers from needless exposition and some ragged plot holes, it's pretty damned gripping and works immensely hard -- and succeeds! -- in ramping up the paranoia that drives the story. "Horror" is defined as the anticipation of a terrifying outcome, and the outcome of this movie is pretty goddamned terrifying.

EVENT HORIZON (1997). Paul W.S. Anderson is probably nobody's favorite director, but then again, neither is Jack Shoulder, and he directed THE HIDDEN, so perhaps this was his Buster Douglas moment. In any event, Anderson hit an inside-the-park home run with this exercise in sci-fi horror that again gives us the pleasure of Sam Neill's company. Sam plays a recently widowed scientist who (just to add to his woes) designed the Event Horizon, a lightspeed-capable spaceship that disappeared on its maiden voyage seven years earlier. At the opening of the film, a signal has been received from the missing ship, and a rescue craft commanded by a flinty Lawrence Fishburne is dispatched to the furthest regions of the solar system to investigate, with Neill as his unwanted scientific advisor. Discovering the Horizon orbiting Neptune, they board the ship only to find it a sort of haunted house in space: the original crew is missing, and each member of the rescue ship begins to experience terrible hallucinations, which lead to gruesome consequences. When the rescue ship is damaged in an explosion, the now-stranded team begins to realize that the experimental drive Neill created to achieve faster than-light-travel has done a lot more that cheat the laws of physics: it's opened something...or awakened something...or pissed something off. And that something has elaborate and God-awful plans for the crew. EVENT HORIZON does with skill and a certain grim panache what hack and schlock directors try and fail to do with such numbing regularity: it disturbs the audience as opposed to merely disgusting them, by creating well-drawn characters we give a damn about and placing them in an unbearable mess.

There they are. Ten movies which, if nothing else, will serve to remind you of what bloody month it is. Oh, and if anyone has any under-the-radar horror films they've discovered over the years, please feel free to let me know.

This Life Lesson Brought To You By the Police

In January of 2002, just a few months before I resigned my position as a parole officer for the 19th Judicial District of Pennsylvania, I arrested a hooker with the improbable name of Moonbeam Riddlemoser. I initially thought the first part of her handle was a street tag, but no, not a bit of it, her parents had actually named her Moonbeam. Perhaps this small act of artistic cruelty contributed to her addiction to crack and the prostitution she engaged in to pay for it; I never knew. What I did know was that I had promised her mother that, before I left to take an investigative position in the District Attorney's Office, I would get her daughter off the street.

This proved to be a little easier said than done, for though the town I worked in was not very large, it seems as big as Manhattan when you are trying to serve a parole warrant on someone with no fixed address, who has no particular desire to be found. Nevertheless, it came to pass that one bright cold day in January, with snow laying thick on the ice that lay even thicker on the potholed streets and shattered pavements of what passed for downtown, I found myself standing outside a motel room which reliable sources informed me contained the bundle of joy known as Moonbeam Riddlemoser.

Accompanying me -- and this is actually the crucial part of the story -- was a city detective named Ashley White. If there is a prototypical police detective in film and fiction -- the cynical, vulgar cigar-chewer in the stained and crumpled suit and worn-out brogans -- Ashley White was the precise opposite. He was a friendly, soft-spoken man in his late 30s who dressed casually, doted on his family, brewed his own beer and tended to avoid profanity. If memory serves, it was Ashley who had tracked Moonbeam down; allowing me to take the collar was an act of professional courtesy, mingled with charity, on his part, for he knew about the corny but reasonably sincere promise I'd made to Moonbeam's mom.

We found the Beam in bed with a john (a "trick" in street parlance), a still-warm crack pipe lying on the nightstand next to them. The john was only too happy to take the pass we gave him and hustle out the door into the freezing cold winter air while still half-dressed -- I will never forget the sight of his very black skin contrasting absurdly with his white cotton tube socks, which he had worn with him to bed -- but the girl was going with us. In handcuffs.

I ought to note here that, outside of my training and various refresher courses, I handcuffed very few people in my brief (26 month) career as a parole officer. It was almost never necessary. Parole violators, on my caseload anyway, were a remarkably placid, docile lot, content to turn themselves in on command or surrender meekly to the deputy sheriffs I sometimes brought with me as muscle when taking the field. Though I carried handcuffs as part of my field equipment, they were really more ornamental than useful, like my acrylic raid jacket or the soft body armor I wore beneath it. Today, however, I had to use them to restrain Moonbeam before her ride to County Jail, and it was not as easy a task as it sounds. People tend to think of crackheads as cadaverous and weak, lacking the strength even to lift the pipe to their cracked and blistered lips; in my experience most of them were, if anything, overweight. Perhaps I caught them in the earlier stages of addiction. In any case, Moonbeam must have weighed a good, well-fleshed 150 lbs, and she still had the strength and sass of youth. Wrangling her, even after the cuffs were in place, was not an easy task. I can vividly remember how she kept trying to twist away from my guiding hand as we marched down the icy steps of the motel's exterior stairwell to the parking lot below: I was terrified that she would slip, crack her head open, and sue the city for everything in its coffers, including my next 20 paychecks.

I didn't start to relax until we had her loaded into the Arrestmobile -- an almost unbelievably old sedan with a shitty radio hanging from the dash, an iron grille separating the front from the back seats, and an enormous whip antenna, rather like the mast of a ship, which nodded on the trunk, threatening to put someone's eye out. I drove; Ashley rode shotgun, and Moonbeam glared at both of us from the rear passenger seat. With the roads a fusion of snow and ice, we proceeded to the jail at a sluggish pace, which gave Moonbeam plenty of time to vent her spleen at both of us. The ensuing conversation went something like this:

MOONBEAM: What I want to know is who gave me up? Who the fuck told you I was at that hotel? 'Cause I know you didn't find me your damn self.

ME: There are people who care about you that want you off the street. Leave it at that.

MOONBEAM: Awwww, shit! You don't mean Moms, do you? Fuck! My Moms told you? I can't fuckin' believe it! Fuckin' bitch! Fuckin' selling me out!

ME: Maybe she thinks jail is better for you than smoking crack and sucking cock for a living.

MOONBEAM: Who the fuck is she to tell me to do anything?

ME: She's your mother.

MOONBEAM: Fucking snitch is what she is! Bitch snitch! Piece of shit slut!

ME: You're the one that lets complete strangers fuck you for money so you can buy crack. Maybe you ought to ease up on the judgements. Your mother loves you. She doesn't want you getting AIDS, or gang-raped, or murdered, which is exactly what is going to happen to you if you stay on the street. Is that so wrong?

MOONBEAM: Bitch. Slut. Fink. Slut. Cunt.

This went on for the rest of the journey. I kept trying to get Moonbeam to grasp the fact that behind "Moms" seeming act of betrayal lay the purest of motives -- a mother's love. I also tried to get her to understand that a life of hard drugs and peddling ass had no future at all, and not much of a present, either.
She was having exactly none point none of it, and I grew extremely angry at her obstinacy, possibly because in my own way I, too, am a very obstinate son of a bitch. Truth be told, the time I shoved her into the hands of the corrections officers at County, I could scarcely fill out the paperwork, so badly was my hand shaking from the desire to close around her windpipe. But the paperwork was eventually finished, Moonbeam disappeared into the Women's Wing of the jail, and Ashley and I climbed back into the Arrestmobile to make the long, slippery trip home.

As I've said, the detective was a gentle sort, and not prone to cartoon cop behavior such as browbeating less experienced officers for stupidity. After waiting a decent interval, he simply said, in a calm, relaxed voice -- as if he were commenting on a more efficient way to sharpen a pencil:

"Miles, you can't fix in a half an hour what took twenty-five years to break."

I don't remember another thing about the day in question. A few vague images, perhaps; a sort-of memory of closing the file on Moonbeam Riddlemoser and informing Moms that her daughter was safely in the iron bosom of the County Jail. What Detective Ashley White told me, however, I remember as vividly now, fourteen years later, as on the day he said it, not just because it is one of life's harshest and most fundamental truths, but because it is a truth which runs contrary to everything I had been previously taught.

You see, like most Americans, I was deeply if subconsciously influenced by the morals and structure of the television shows I watched while growing up. And on television, everything, even the stories with unhappy endings, came in a neat 25 to 53 minute package. Problems were introduced, quantified, grappled with, and resolved, all in a series of short, commercially-punctuated acts. Processes which in real life might take days, weeks or months, ran their course in the space of a single hour or half-hour, with the neat and slightly brutal efficiency of an oven or an assembly line. The heroes on TV, whether comedic or dramatic, could and did fix what was broken within the tight parameters of a script, and even when they failed to fix it per se, they always obtained closure. By sheer repetition I had inculcated the belief that the quick fix was not only possible, but actually standard operating procedure. My frustration with Moonbeam stemmed largely from the fact that the tactics of television had not worked in the real world. I could not and did not "fix" Moonbeam with a half an hour of tough love, impassioned speeches and cold logic. In fact I made no impression at all. Whatever had led her to the crack pipe and the condom had taken years; it could not be reversed in the time allotted to an episode of Three's Company.

This might seem pathetically obvious to you, but to me it came as a cold and nasty shock, for it also exposed a second and much larger lie to my naive eyes: belief in the climactic ending.

Have you ever noticed that in most epic stories, whether penned by George Lucas or J.K. Rowling or J.R.R. Tolkien, there is at the climax a final and enormous battle between the forces of good and the forces of evil? This apocalyptic fight, in which both sides throw in all their chips and commit their last reserves, may be many years in the making, but when it finally occurs it is reasonably swift and the very definition of decisive. One side is completely triumphant, the other utterly defeated, and the war comes to an unambiguous and final end. And I do believe that there resided in my mind, until I was at least 29 yeas old, a belief that this sort of denouement was actually possible in real-life situations. It was the logical extension of the other belief, that complex problems of long standing could be knocked down with a solid half-hour of intelligent effort.

It's worth noting that in real life struggles, there are certainly decisive moments, but they almost never bring the conflict to an immediate close. The outcome of the American Civil War was almost certainly decided at Gettysburg, but the war dragged on two more bloody years, with the majority of the killing and dying coming after, and not before, those terrible three days in Pennsylvania. Likewise, the decisive battles of WW2 did not bring that conflict to a close; indeed, the majority of the killing lay on the other side of Midway and Stalingrad. It's like that in our everyday lives, too. We may win decisive battles, but those decisions do not necessarily bring an end to the fighting. Sometimes, in fact, they simply signal the beginning of it. Had my words somehow reached Moonbeam Riddlemoser, had I somehow found the right phrase to shock her into the realization that she had to change her ways if she wanted to survive, all the heavy lifting would have lay in her future -- kicking the cocaine habit, shedding her "friends" on the street, repairing relationships within her family, learning to live within the law. That journey would have taken months, years, possibly a lifetime. And television shows, like illusions, don't last a lifetime. After the lights are switched off and the cast and crew go home, the basic struggle continues, off camera, in the dark, where nobody but you and God can see it. It's ugly and inglorious, and neither Rowling nor Lucas nor Tolkien will write much about it, but it's where the war is won.

Or lost.

Movie Mistakes that Drive Me Nuts (They're in Books, too).

Not long ago I was watching an old Clint Eastwood movie at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. A strange film, mainly remembered now as the flick which introduced both Michael Cimino and Jeff Bridges to the world. Anyway, there is a sequence rather early in the story, in which Eastwood and Bridges and confronted by two hit men wielding revolvers with silencers screwed to their barrels. As I sat there, stuffing fistfuls of popcorn into my mouth, I rolled my eyes to the extremely ornate ceiling of the movie theater (it looks like an ancient Egyptian tomb) in disgust. Why? You cannot attach a silencer to a revolver. That is to say, you can, but the act is pointless. The noise of a revolver is emitted from area around the cylinder, in other words out the sides of the weapon, and not through the barrel, as in, say a 9mm or .45 pistol. So, in effect, you are silencing the wrong part of the pistol. Silencers on revolvers, though common on television and seen even in a couple of old James Bond movies, are simply an example of lazy-ass production design by people who couldn't be bothered to do research, or whose idea of research was watching, well, old James Bond movies. When you consider how much money goes into making a film, how many people are employed on them, and how many of those well-paid employees have no other job than to get the little details right, it's aggravating as hell. To me, anyway.

This got me thinking, as I drove home, queasy from the trash bag of popcorn I had just washed down with a bucket of Coke, about how there are, in fact, no such things as silencers. Not, at any rate, in the way they are depicted by Hollywood. A silencer's true name in the trade (by which I mean the intelligence community, the military and law enforcement) is a "suppressor." The reason for this is that guns are so goddamned loud that to actually silence them would require a device about the size of a fire hydrant, which also weigh nearly as much. (It must be remembered that even a small-caliber pistol is essentially a miniature cannon.) A suppressor, as the name suggests, reduces the amount of noise a gun makes when it goes off; it does not eliminate it completely. That "thwit!" noise you always hear in movies when somebody plugs somebody else with a "silenced" pistol is pure fantasy. A suppressed pistol is at least as loud as balloon bursting and possibly as loud as a small firecracker. Maybe the CIA has a super-duper grade of suppressor that is no louder than a handclap in an enclosed space, but even this device suffers from a shortcoming which exposes yet another aggravating mistake encountered in film. The bottomless silencer.

Assault on Precinct 13 is an early John Carpenter movie in which the bad guys wield submachineguns fitted with suppressors that hardly make a sound. Since this plot element, is key to the story, it can and should be forgiven; however, in the flick the baddies use their guns like water cannons, and at the end of the film they are just as eerily quiet as at the beginning. In real life, even the highest-grade military-level suppressors lose their efficacy with increasing speed as each bullet moves through the device. This is because the baffles which absorb the sound decompress further with each explosion, which means after just a few shots the suppressor is so much dead weight. Put another way, "silencers" get noisier the more they are used, which means using them like squirt guns is not an option.

Hollywood is replete with technical advisers of every sort, so it crazes me still further how often detective shows and cop movies blunder on other details of this kind. For example, not too long ago I saw a forensics show in which the techs were dusting a doorknob for fingerprints. Doubtless a few cases have been cracked in this manner, but for the most part, in my day anyway, crime scene techs didn't bother dusting doorknobs. By the very nature of what they are, knobs are so smeared by thousands upon thousands of overlapping prints that getting usable ones impossible, or damned near. (Ditto the button panels in elevators) In the same show, which is to say the same series, a guy gets knocked unconscious and, after waking up, shakes his head and recounts all the events leading up to the moment he was kayoed. In reality, nobody hit hard enough to get sent into dreamland will be able to remember anything for about a half an hour before the lights went out. In fact, in real life, people who claim to have been knocked out who tell police they can remember every detail beforehand usually become suspects from that moment forward, because the cops knowthey are lying.

Police. Is there a profession, except for doctor or lawyer, which has more representation on television and in film? And yet the writers, or the production designers or the technical advisers on these shows, are always blundering on simple details. Like having detectives given the rank of "sergeant" (because it sounds tough) but having no supervisory responsibilities. Or having lieutenants and captains investigate cases personally, like Capt. Jim Brass on CSI. Lieutenants and captains don't investigate shit. They supervise others. And those others, those detectives, never just work one case. Every homicide detective in a big city has multiple outstanding unsolved murders on his caseload. They juggle all of them simultaneously.

But novelists are hardly exempt from these mistakes, either. In the horror novel The Relic, a New York cop working security detail at a museum on a Friday night finishes his shift, but is eaten by a monster on his way out the door. Nobody notices anything even happened to him until Monday morning, and even then, when he doesn't show up for work, nobody is particularly alarmed. What the fuck? Policemen don't go home when their shifts end; they return to their station house for roll call, inventory their squad cars, do any outstanding paperwork, change clothes. A cop leaves his detail and never shows up at the station house, the whole freaking NYPD would be out looking for him. In that same novel, an FBI agent is described as working alone and wearing a flashy red vest. In real life FBI agents almost never go anywhere alone; they work in pairs, like Mulder and Scully, and no FBI agent in the history of the Bureau has ever worn a red vest. Ever. Ever. J. Edgar Hoover once had a clerk fired for wearing a red vest; agents wear conservative gray or dark blue suits. And they refer to themselves as specialagents, not agents.

Some blunders in film and fiction, like the silencer on the revolver, have become so ingrained that they have acquired a certain legitimacy even though they are nonsense. Stories in which Mafia dons speak like Oxford dons are incredibly common. Again, what the actual fuck? Show me a Mafia boss in this country who can speak two sentences without betraying the fact he dropped out of 9th grade and I'll show you a penguin that can fly. Mobsters make a worse hash of the English language than tweenage girls Snap-chatting at the mall. Granted, one or two have been articulate in their own rough-spun way -- Paul Castellano comes to mind -- but none of them can refrain from saying "fuck" for more than half a sentence, which kind of spoils the intellectual effect.

Oh, and on the subject of the Mafia -- nobody uses the word "don" except journalists. The heads of crime families are called "boss" or, in the familiar, "bo." And the Families are not, as a rule, hereditary dynasties. Leadership is not passed from father to son, except in rare cases where the son is of high rank and viewed as capable of doing the job -- and even then such a move can cause resentment, which in Mafia circles is expressed with car bombs. As for the scene in The Godfather (both the book and the movie) where one of the bosses says he pays his people extra so they don't get involved in drugs -- huh? what? Mafia soldiers do not get paid by their bosses. Quite the opposite. The Mafia is a pyramid scheme. Money flows up, not down, and there are no exceptions to this rule.

Certain writers are repeat offenders in the category of sloppy research. The most notorious is probably Stephen King, who has freely (and cheerfully) admitted his failing in this area. But I can never read a book of his which features spooks, cops or soldiers without cringing. Referring to the butt of a pistol as a "handle" is egregious, as is calling a weapon a "carbine rifle" (sort of like calling a car a "sedan-coupe") or referring to a CIA agent as, well "a CIA agent." (CIA people are called "officers"; "agents" are the foreigners who work for them.) And no, "terminate with extreme prejudice" is not and never has been official terminology in the cloak-and-dagger set. When you hear this phrase in a movie or read it in a book, you can be damned sure the writer did his research on Netflix. As much as I have mocked Tom Clancy over the years for his personality failings, jingo patriotism and terrifyingly naive belief in the power of bombs to settle arguments, he was, by and large, a fucking trouper when it came to cracking the books.

As for war movies and war novels, man, I am not even going to touch that right now. I can't, or this blog would be longer than the Oscars.

Contrary to what you may think by this point, I don't want to come off self-righteous here, for I am certainly not without sins of my own in this area. The best short story I ever wrote, "Roadtrip," originally contained a sequence in which a woman shot a police officer with a silenced revolver. Only many years after I'd penned it did I realize my mistake. Likewise, in another short, "Shadows and Glory," which made the rounds on the literary prize circuit back in the early 1990s, made a cartoon blunder in regards to some historical details about Nazi Germany. And these mistakes were hardly unique. I can think of at least three more works of mine which make easily-avoidable errors, without even trying. But the embarrassment these errors caused did make me keener not to repeat my errors, and I wish to hell that movies with budgets large enough to finance small wars, and writers who can afford to hire entire universities to do research for them, would pay a little more attention to details. Because in my experience, it's the details that sell the story.

Otherwise, the next time I'm at a movie I might choke on my popcorn, and what an enormous loss that would be to us all.

Hitler's Hollywood: The Movies of Nazi Germany, Part 2

As promised -- or threatened -- I have returned for the first of my reviews of Nazi Cinema. I have decided to start with two sharply contrasting films, not in spite of their differences but because of them. I am hoping, with these analyses, to demonstrate the breadth of "Hitler's Hollywood" in terms of tone and subject matter. Also to settle the question of just what sort of popular entertainment was made for the German people during the Nazi years (1932 - 1945). After all, the issue of just what sort of art can be produced under censorship is a complex one: few people have broached the subject since George Orwell. Was Nazi cinema noisy and bombastic and full of militarism and overt propaganda, or was there a subtler approach, one which allowed for artistic merit?

Our first film is called ICH KLAGE AN. It was released in 1941 and directed by Wolfgang Liebeneiner. The story begins with the effervescent and life-loving Hanna Heyt (Heidemarie Hatheyer) celebrating the appointment of her research-scientist husband Thomas (Paul Hartmann) to a professorship in Munich. When Hanna injures her arm slightly during their dinner celebration, however, the injuries don't heal, so Thomas calls in a former romantic rival of his, Dr. Bernhard Lang (Mathias Wieman) to perform an examination. To everyone's horror, Lang, who is still in love with Hanna, diagnoses her with multiple sclerosis. Thomas immediately throws himself into researching a treatment for the progressive and fatal disease, which is steadily robbing Hanna of all the quality of her life; but when his efforts come to nothing he begins to seriously contemplate granting her wish for euthanasia, even though the law forbids it. Lang is militantly opposed, and Thomas' decision to give his wife a fatal dose of morphine ultimately lands him before a court of inquiry (somewhat similar to a British police court or an American coroner's inquest). There Thomas' actions and motives are scrutinized and some evidence is presented that may exonerate him -- but without a clear decision as to the morality of assisted suicide. But Thomas isn't having it: refusing to grant anyone an easy way out, he demands to be tried solely on the basis of whether his actions were right or wrong, and its upon this verdict that his fate rests. The film ends ambiguously, with Thomas demanding directly of the audience that he answer the question raised in the inquiry: should he have killed his wife, or not?

IMDB's review of this ICH KLAGE AN calls it "morbid melodrama," but I no longer trust any official reviews of Nazi-era films, since the reviewers inevitably confuse enjoying a film produced by the Nazi government to mean the viewer is in sympathy with its ideology and methods. I myself found the film deeply moving and extremely dramatic. The direction by Wolfgang Liebeneiner is crisp and assured, the performances are absolutely first-rate and the script is tight and beautifully written. The lovely Heidemarie Hatheyer delivers an award-worthy performance full of charm and pathos. Hartmann and Weiman are also superb as the rival doctors. Margarete Haagen is also excellent as Hanna's housekeeper/surrogate mother, the loving Berta, as is the always-reliable Christian Kayssler as the judge. This film won the prestigious (at the time, anyway) cinematic award the Biennale Cup in 1941, and I believe deservedly so. It's at least as good, and probably considerably more gutsy in its subject matter, than most American and British films shot at the same time. The film was a commercial success and seems to have had an appreciable impact on the ordinary German's attitude toward euthanasia.

ICH KLAGE AN translates from German to English as "I Accuse" and it is an appropriate title for the film. On trial for his life, Thomas Heyt ultimately accuses his accusers of cowardice and hypocrisy for being willing to condemn fellow human being to indefinite physical suffering merely to spare themselves moral anguish, and he asks the audience to render its own judgement on his actions. In other words, this film was designed to open a dialogue as to its subject, and I believe it does just precisely that. What surprised me was the even-handedness with which the movie explores the idea of euthanasia itself. Religious, moral and ethical arguments against it are all brought to bear and given, I believe, at least the pretense of a fair hearing. There's little doubt where the movie itself lands, but it does not subject the anti-euthanasia crowd to ridicule. For a Nazi-sanctioned film, it's surprisingly fair.

Now, it would be remiss of me to ignore the fact that I ACCUSE is viewed today as a softening-up bombardment in the Nazi campaign to desensitize its population to the idea of state-sanctioned euthanasia. As the review of the film on the back of the DVD points out, the idea here is that the state ought to become involved in euthanasia, relieving individuals of the moral agony of killing their own loved ones. And in fact this is precisely what the Nazi state did with their hideous "T-4" mass euthanasia program, which saw 100,000 mentally ill Germans gassed or poisoned as an act of "racial hygiene" under Hitler's rule (though it ought to be mentioned here that "racial hygiene" was a concept the Nazis borrowed from us: the sterilization of the mentally ill was a common practice in the U.S. up until the 1940s; Hitler and his men simply took it the next logical step, as they did all the racial-biological theories they got from Britain, France and America).
This brings the greater question as to whether any artistic merit can be drawn from a film used in such a manner, but I should like to table that question until the end of this review series, when it can be answered in full. For the moment I will simply say that I ACCUSE is a remarkable and gripping drama, far superior to what I was expecting in every respect.

The second movie is WUNSCHKONZERT, directed by Eduard von Borsody and released in 1940. "Wunschkonzert" translates to "request concert" and it is worth noting at the start that the musical request show was actually a German invention, with the "Wunschkonzert für die Wehrmacht" (Armed Forces Request Show) being one of the most popular radio programs in Germany once the war began. It is also worth noting that this film, while containing some serious dramatic elements, is essentially a romantic comedy and markedly different from ICH KLAGE AN in every way. Finally, and in the tradition of other German films of this period, "Request Concert" is actually a number of stories which interweave around a single unifying idea, theme or incident. This style of film-making, called "fractured narrative," is common on today's television but less so in contemporary films, and takes a little getting used to.

Our story begins at the Olympic games in Berlin in 1936, where the lovely Ilse Werner (Inge Wagner) meets and falls in love with air force (Luftwaffe) lieutenant Herbert Koch (Carl Raddatz). After a whirlwind courtship they plan an engagement, but he soon receives orders to go to Spain, where the civil war is raging, as a military adviser to the Fascists. The mission is top secret, and thus Koch is forced to abandon his flame without explanation. Eventually she becomes close to another Luftwaffe pilot, Helmut Wilker (Joachim Brennecke), who also befriends Koch without realizing they are in love with the same woman. As war breaks out the pilots fly together in combat, neither knowing the other is in love with Ilse.
At the same time, there is an extensive sub-plot about a unit of German infantrymen going into battle in France, which involves not only their various loved ones at home, but two bumbling soldiers who are sent to Berlin to perform a ditty of their own composition for the Wunschkonzert. As the story goes on, each character's destiny is affected and to some degree decided by their decision to request songs.

As the title implies, WUNSCHKONZERT is not so much about the individual characters in the film per se as the way their lives are tied into, and ultimately effected by, the popular request show. The fate of the two star-crossed lovers, Herbert and Ilse, actually turns on the Olympic fanfare he requests of the program; and in another sequence, the fate of a German infantry squad is decided by one soldier's rendition of a Beethoven song on an organ he finds in a burning French church. There are also performances by real-life celebrities of the day, including the Berlin Philharmonic and Marika Rökk, arguably THE pin-up girl of the Nazi era next to Lale Anderson. The film is also strong on the theme of men performing their duties in wartime while their women (moms, wives, sweethearts, sisters) wait anxiously at home, and how the music unites them. If all this seems a bit corny, one must remember that this film was released in 1940, and is not measurably sappier or more contrived than British or American romantic war movies of the same era. In fact, I would unhesitatingly say that WUNSCHKONZERT is one of the best WW2-era movies I've yet seen, featuring a skillful balance of romance, propaganda, music, history, and war-movie action, which give the modern viewer a fascinating, if idealized, view of popular culture in Nazi Germany. The acting is good, there are an unusual number of obstacles for the young lovers to face in their quest to be together, a splash of intrigue with the Spanish Civil War angle, a certain amount of pathos, and some entertaining Laurel & Hardy-style moments involving the two bumbling soldiers and a captured pig. Like all movies of this type, it tends to blur its focus on the main element of the story towards the end in favor of a grand, all-inclusive climax, but aside from that I had no major complaints. I was also especially impressed by the brief battle sequences which take place in a ruined French town. German audiences were impressed, too: the film was seen by 20 million people in the Third Reich (population: 80 million) and made a fortune for the UFA Film studio.

Believe it or not, though hundreds of feature films were released in Germany during WW2, only twenty or so actually dealt with the war which was taking place at the time, following Goebbels' undoubtedly wise decision that what the people of Germany needed was distraction from the war and not reminders of it. This stands in fascinating contrast to Britain and America, who cranked out war movies nonstop and kept them going long after the war itself had ended (I would argue we are still doing this today). And because of this, WUNSCHKONZERT is just as valuable as historical evidence as it is an entertaining flick in its own right. Like all Americans I grew up on a steady diet of WW2 movies which seldom, if ever, gave even the slightest thought of what the enemy was like -- what he wanted, what he was feeling, why he was fighting, and what was waiting for him when he put away his rifle and went home. WUNSCHKONZERT puts faces and names and hopes and dreams on the dreaded, faceless Nazi soldiers, and it's perhaps no big surprise that these things weren't a helluva lot different for guys named Gotthard, Wolfgang and Johannes than they were for the Joes, Mikes and Bobs of the war. And one of those things was entertainment. As a German song of the pre-war period refrained: "All I want is music! I don't need anything else!"

In closing I will say that my initial impression of Nazi-era cinema was much more favorable than I expected. I ACCUSE is a fine, well-crafted drama whose propaganda, to quote on reviewer, was "virtually subliminal." REQUEST CONCERT, while more overtly patriotic (it was shot during the war), was also an enjoyable movie, blending romance, comedy, music and battle -- though it succumbed, at the end, to the urge to become a full-on propaganda piece, and abandoned its characters in the process.

I will return next week to examine two more movies. And please keep in mind I intend to discuss the greater, contextual morality of these films when this review series is finished. Auf Wiedersehen.

My 30 Day Week

I have just completed experience of having worked thirty days in a row on a production gig, and it worth noting the progression of my mental and physical state during that time, if only as a laboratory example of the old scientific principle that All Work And No Play Makes Jack A Dull Boy.

The following is composed of quotes taken from my journal during the month of August. I have removed all details which would infringe on my nondisclosure agreements, redacted the names of individuals, and deleted a few of my more, uh, colorful comments. Everything else is as it was written.

The first five days passed more or less normally, being, of course, a normal work-week.

Day 6: "Working on Saturdays has a slightly surreal feel to it. The knowledge of obligation is there, but not the psychological weight that makes an ordinary workday so oppressive."

Day 8: (my birthday) "Forty-four wheels around the sun. Isn't that what I always say this time of year? Yet today I can't say as I feel anything at all. When you wake early, exercise, and work all day, every day, one more day of it doesn't feel like anything out of the ordinary. And it wasn't."

Day 9: "Ten hours in the tinpan, and very dull and exhausting hours at that. I slept poorly because of the birthday drinks, struggled out of bed a little after seven, and somehow managed to get to the pool by ten of eight. A gruff-voiced lesbian coach, like a bad stereotype out of an episode of The Simpsons
was giving instruction to five lanes full of students, and none too happy to see me, but I still managed 26 minutes of very hard swimming before I had to leave. I felt tired the moment I walked in, and as the day wore on, bored, fat, flatulent and fed up. When I say 'fed up' I don't mean disgruntled or angry or ungrateful or even irritable, just physically sick of sitting and playing monotonous games in front of a camera all goddamn day. I forgot my phone, too, and my ass was asleep half the day, or so it seemed."

Day 10: "When is this going to stop? That was all my tired, bored, numb brain could think at some point around the tenth or eleventh hour of work today. How much is enough? When do we get to go home? All my earnest and heartfelt prayers to 'give me work, dammit!' have been answered with such resounding force that I can barely lift my face to the storm, so to speak. This is another way of saying I was fourteen hours in the tinpan and have the numb ass to prove it."

Day 18: "Life has become a monotonous blur, a sort of Groundhog Day in which any detail which variates on the theme becomes outstanding simply by virtue of being different, and never mind if it is intrinsically interesting."

Day 19: "What a lousy day. Not lousy for me personally; just a shamefully lousy performance by the crew of bumbling fuck-ups my employer has hired to serve as foot soldiers for this interminable project.
I swam for a good solid half-hour this morning, trying to concentrate on my surroundings -- the blue skies, the palm trees, the cool clean feeling of the water, even the sound of my own labored breathing as I paddled along laboriously behind my kickboard. (It isn't easy, when you live as deep in your head as I do, to be aware of your surroundings, or to appreciate them.) After the swim, I ate a quick meal in the kitchen and sank into the first available chair. Unfortunately this chair was next to E., a fat, long-haired, drawling-voiced idiot who loves the sound of his own voice and rakes my nerves raw every time he speaks. I was made further uncomfortable by M., who hates E. even more than I do and seemed to be on the verge of beating him senseless, so at the first opportunity I slunk away so I wouldn't have to witness an assault -- or participate in in it! The day passed very quietly until about dinnertime. Unfortunately it took us two and a half hours to get the shot afterwards because the cretinous, submoronic lackwits hired by Casting cannot take direction. The director, who is normally very polite and even-tempered, was growing more and more frustrated and, I think, embarrassed by his inability to get any of them to do what they were told. My temper was sorely tried, and I'm not even directing the fucking scene! T. shares my low opinion of these poltroons, and supposedly they will not be returning after this weekend -- which, of course, I am now scheduled to work. At this point I have recovered from the near-breakdown I had on the Sixteenth; my emotional needle has ascended from the pits of despair to a sort of hardened plateau where I feel neither lows nor highs. I know that my next check, which I will get just before the end of the month, will be a hefty one, but I'm also too flattened mentally to appreciate it just now. When all the smoke clears and all dust is settled, I know I will be supremely grateful for the opportunity to make 20% of my normal yearly income in the span of three weeks: but for now I am incapable of anything except putting one foot in front of the other."

Day 20: "Christ and Christ and Christ. Not sure I can take much more of this, and yet I must. It's not the work, which is easy in itself: it's the bloody goddamned grind. The sameness, the monotony. The Möbius loop. I wake up. I piss. I feed Spike. I let Spike outside. I cook and eat breakfast. I pack. I bring Spike inside. I turn on Classical KUSC and double-check the locks. I drive to Park La Brea by way of Avon Street and Burbank Boulevard and Hollywood Way and Olive Street and Barham and Cahuenga (West) and Mulholland Drive and the Outpost Road and Franklin and La Brea all the way to Sixth Street and then to the entrance of Park La Brea. The fat security guard hands me another pass and I park. I get two towels and a locker and change and shower. I swim with one eye on the clock -- a lap of freestyle, a lap of breast-stroke, a lap of kickboard, repeat. Chlorine stings my eyes. I try to appreciate where I am and what I am doing. The last minute strikes: ten-thirty antemeridian. Out of the pool. Into the shower, again. Into my clothes. Hair fixed. To the car, down Sixth Street, up Fairfax to Sunset to the studio garage. Into the studio. The bathroom. Then the cap room. Then the kitchen. And then it begins: make the coffee, eat the pear, drink the water, sit down in the chair. Choreograph, rehearse, crash, shoot, crash, rehearse, shoot, shoot. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Same faces, same smells, same routines, same conversations, same fantasies and daydreams and distractions. All the same, right down to the frustrations with the laptop (new) and the internet (slow). I couldn't wait to get the hell out of there. Tomorrow is Sunday, and another day in the tinpan. Forever in the bloody tinpan. I can't stand it for much longer. The nerds are on my nerves x10 x10: it takes so much restraint not to get ugly. But somehow I have to hold on and endure the prosaic dullness of it all."

Day 21: "Something joyous happened today at work, something quite wonderful enough to mitigate the harassed morning I had, and the nausea I suffered in the evening as a result of some bad food I ate for lunch. E. the Mouth got fired. I haven't written much about him in here; indeed, I haven't had time to write much about anyone in here. E. was the fattish, pale, dead-eyed, long-haired jackanapes whose droning, whining voice resounded all over the set lo, these last five or ten days and who raked my nerves interminably during that time --and not just mine. Evidently his bullshit accumulated to the point where even the long-suffering production staff had had enough. When M. told me this, I was dazed with joy, because goddamnit, I really was dreading being around him for another five days -- worried I'd snap and say something that would get me canned. The fucker is just intolerable. And now I don't have to tolerate him anymore. It's remarkable how little things like this -- the surgical removal of assholes, to use some rather unpleasant imagery -- happens in life. Normally the single spoiled apple spoils the bunch, and keeps spoiling it. But not this time."

Day 22: "Thirteen hours in the tinpan. What can one say about it? In spite of everything -- every trick and device I could muster to pass the time at hand -- I reached levels of boredom that tested the mettle of my soul. Iit was just a sevencourse serving of the same old shit. Ernst Jünger said that boredom was "pain diffused over time" and he was correct. It is painful to be bored for the course of a whole day -- miserably, interminably bored, and on top of bored, frustrated."

Day 26: "The last few hours were very dull, with tempers getting short and voices getting loud, and I've been informed that they want me to work the weekend and be on standby Monday as well. Will it never end?"

August 29 (morning): "'Today ought to be the last real day of shooting.' So they tell us. I know, I know; we've heard this song before, right? Think I know the sheet music at this point."

August 29 (night): "I've seldom been so vocally disgruntled in my life around people whose opinion of me has a direct bearing on my economic future, but when I get in that mood there is no shutting me off."

August 30: "We wrapped tonight at 10:48 pm, bringing the Siege -- the longest in my experience -- to its climactic end. I fled the building, said goodbye to the crew, drove to the bank and deposited a fat check in my account, and then came home to a disgruntled cat. No parades, no speeches, no tickertape: just a sink full of dirty dishes, a hamper full of dirty laundry, and silence."

And that, folks, is why I'm running behind on this blog, which is supposed to appear at least once a week. I have worked some gnarly production gigs in my day but this was the gnarliest, at least in terms of the sheer endurance required. And yes, I am using "gnarly" in a sentence. The Valley Girl slang popularized by Fast Times At Ridgemont High and just as quickly ridiculed and forgotten, has never died here. I on the other hand probably will, if I ever have to do this shit again.

Hitler's Hollywood: The Movies of Nazi Germany

When I was in college I wrote my history thesis on the popular music of Nazi Germany. It was a subject that required a lot of research, a lot of listening and much tedious translation of German to English -- no mean feat for a guy who took only two years of that language in high school. Nevertheless, it was a rewarding task, and the experience left me with a hunger to know more about everyday life in the Third Reich. The war movies I'd grown up on, and the many academic books and firsthand accounts I'd read when I got older, had told me much about the politics, economics and war policy of this strange and fantastical country: they had told me nothing whatever about its artistic by-products. What sort of music did the Nazis listen to? What sort of newspapers, magazines and novels did they read? What sort of art did Germans produce under Nazism? And finally, what kind of movies did they make?

Two things must be understood before this last and most fascinating question could even be addressed, much less answered. The first was that Germany, prior to the rise of Hitler, had a rich moviemaking tradition, and the German people were passionate filmgoers, even during the ugliest period of the Great Depression. Though America, then as today, was the undisputed king of international cinema, Republican Germany was not far behind, especially in the European market, and in the technical arena was in some areas actually ahead: in 1932, when Hitler became chancellor of Germany, he thus inherited a huge and highly sophisticated studio apparatus, complete with famous actors, experienced directors and sophisticated equipment. He had much at his fingertips, but he was also keenly aware that his public was fickle, well-educated and had high expectations as to the quality of their entertainment.

The second factor worthy of consideration is that that Nazi Germany was not merely a dictatorship, it was a totalitarian state in the true sense of the word. As Otto Dietrich wrote in his post-WW2 memoir, Hitler's claim to omniscience may have been faulty, but his claim to omnipotence was not. Hitler had a passionate interest in all things related to art and culture, and established a vast and complex bureaucracy to oversee every aspect of German cultural life: the Reichkulturkammer. This many-tentacled beast, which was controlled by Hitler's right-hand man Joseph Goebbels, had absolute power over film production: no movie in Germany (and later, Occupied Europe) could be written, much less financed, produced or distributed, without his express permission. Goebbels was a fanatical Nazi, in some ways more fanatical even than Hitler, and when I began my initial study of Nazi cinema I naturally expected movie production under his oversight to be a sort of assembly-line of violent, jingoistic propaganda, designed to inflame passions and hammer home the core Nazi values of nationalism, aggression, discipline, obedience and loyalty to the blood community. Being something of a fan of 1930s and 1940s movies of American and British manufacture, I knew well how shallow, vulgar, bloodthirsty and cardboard-patriotic Allied cinema was before and during the Second World War. Nazi Hollywood, I imagined, must be a thousand times worse. What sort of movies did Hitler make? I wanted to know. Were they noisy and bombastic, full of militarism and racism, utterly lacking in subtlety? Or was there intelligence and cleverness in their approach? Did they show any respect for their audiences, or simply cram ideas down their throats like so many fistfuls of Raisinettes? Most importantly, did they hold up as films? Did they actually entertain? Would an audience voluntarily pay to see them? It is notoriously difficult even for dictatorships to get people to attend films that have no merit: any number of political strongmen have discovered that most human beings will endure years of starvation and slave labor at gunpoint more readily than they will a boring 90 minute movie. A totalitarian state can burn books, but it cannot force people to read them -- cannot, at any rate, force them to like what they read. Mein Kampf outsold the Bible in Germany for more than a decade, but almost no one read the fucking thing. Was it the same for German filmgoers?

Something like a thousand movies were shot during the twelve years that Hitler held power, which is nothing if not a testament to the fact that Germans, in addition to sharing with America their national symbol (the eagle), share with us a national obsession -- celluloid. What I propose to do over the next few weeks is to examine a small fragment of that mass which I feel is representative -- the films in my own, slowly expanding personal collection of Nazi cinema. Among them are:

I Accuse - a story about the morality of euthanasia for terminally ill patients, whose motivation may have been to "soften" the German public to the idea of state-sanctioned mercy killings

U-Boats Westward! - as the title suggests, a tale about a submarine crew after the outbreak of WW2

Germanin: The Story of a Colonial Deed - a harshly anti-British tale set in Africa before and after WWI

Shock Troop 1917: An elite German infantry unit endures a year at the front during WWI

The Crew of the Dora - A movie about the crew of a German bomber, which has the unique distinction of having been shot in Russia, France, Germany and North Africa, all during WW2

Over All In the World - A film about a group of Germans caught outside Germany when WW 2 breaks out, and how they return to the Fatherland

GPU - An obvious, ironic and (not surprisingly) uncredited inspiration for a certain Tarantino film starring Brad Pitt, pits a vengeful woman against the Communist agent who murdered her family

DIII 88 - Young German air force pilots grapple with life, love and maturity on the eve of WW2, while an aging veteran wages his own struggle against failing health and the desire for one last glorious mission

Request Concert - The story of two star-crossed lovers who meet at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, get separated by the Spanish Civil War, and re-unite thanks to the world's first musical request show

Stukas - An out and out war movie about a squadron of dive-bomber pilots during the battles of France and Britain in 1940

Pour le Merite - A sweeping saga spanning 20 years between the end of WWI and the Nazi takeover in Germany

Cadets - A historical picture, based on a real-life event, about a group of tween-age German military cadets who, in the 1700s, took up arms against Russian invaders

Hans Westmar & Storm Trooper Brand - two films, both based on real-life stories, about Nazi Brownshirts i.e. "storm troopers' and the struggles they went through getting Hitler into power

Hitler Youth Quex - Another "true life" tale, about a young boy who embraces Nazism and pays a very high price for it

Militiaman Bruggler - A war movie set in 1917, about a simple Austrian soldier who gets swept up in the events of WWI

In addition to these I also plan to examine many non-war films (sci-fi, romance, comedy, musical, spy stories) and period pieces such as "Gold," "Uncle Kruger," "Linen From Ireland," "Titanic," "My Life For Ireland," "The Great King," "Kolberg," "Baron Munchausen," "The Rothchilds," "Jew Suess" and others. In some cases it will be necessary to reference non-Nazi era cinema as well, i.e. German films shot between 1919 - 1932, or even American or British movies from the same era, because in certain cases Nazi-era movies were shot as "answers" to these productions. (For example, "Militiaman Bruggler" was the Nazi take on a pre-Nazi film called "Mountains in Flames," which contained themes of reconciliation and international brotherhood which the Nazis could not stomach.) I am particularly interested in the themes of these movies -- whether political and racial messages were woven into the text or subtext of the scripts.

I hope to have my first set of reviews up within a few days. And of course in the mean time I plan a completely frivolous blog about the fact that I have been at work for nineteen goddamn days in a row.

Drunken Thoughts at Midnight on my Birthday

Tonight I made it from the Egyptian Theater on Hollywood Boulevard to my home in Burbank in precisely fifteen minutes. This will mean nothing to anyone who doesn't live, or hasn't spent significant time, in Los Angeles, but it made me feel pretty damned good. Because at the precise moment I got into my Honda, which is still ash-grey from the massive Sand Fire we had here a week ago, the clock struck midnight and it became my birthday. And zero traffic and green lights almost the whole way back, making for a swift smooth easy ride, constitutes as good a birthday gift as I could hope for.

I am not precisely sure when my expectations for birthdays began to narrow. I believe that it may have been when I turned twenty-five, and my car insurance rates plummeted. Prior to that moment there were milestones everywhere: my tenth birthday (the first with two digits); my thirteenth birthday (my first teenage b-day); my sixteenth, which was technically if not actually Sweet; my eighteenth, which technically if not actually brought manhood; my twentieth, which signaled the end of my teens; and my twenty-first, which gave me the legal right to do something I had been doing illegally for years, which was drink alcohol. After twenty-one the horizon became decidedly more boring. What did I have to look forward to now, agewise? Well, my car insurance payments would drop drastically at twenty-five if I could only avoid tickets and accidents between now and then. That seemed a very sober, a very boring, a very adult reward. No strippers. No streamers. No fountains of absinthe. Just a smaller bill. A little less stress on the wallet. A little more cash to spend on gas and groceries and utility bills. As Colonel Potter used to say on M*A*S*H -- "Wonderbar!"

Today, right now, I am 44 years old. I was told today, by someone who had absolutely no motive to lie and very little tact, that I don't look a day over 37, and I believe this to be true. A lifetime of avoiding adult responsibility and manual labor both have a preservative quality which I believe is underrated. Nevertheless I am 44, and the tug of nostalgia I felt tonight at the flicks merely served to confirm this fact. I attended a double feature at the famous Egyptian Theater -- two Clint Eastwood movies shot in the 1970s. I am old enough to remember the 1970s quite well -- the enormous cars with eight-cylinder engines, the Afros and muttonchop sideburns, the plaid bell-bottom trousers, the big medallions gleaming from within thickets of chest hair, the telephones with their curly cords and rotary dials, the knob-and-button televisions with their rabbit ears and choice of exactly five channels (ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, and one local station)...I remember it all, and very much more. But there is no point in trying to communicate the atmosphere of that particular time: as Orwell once wrote, either you were there, in which case you don't need to be told, or you weren't, in which case telling you about it would be useless. I remember, in 1989, talking to an ex-Marine who had lost an eye on Tarawa atoll in 1944 or 1945. He described to me in vivid detail how, during hand-to-hand fighting on the beach, a Japanese officer had hacked him open with a samurai sword, and how he had beaten the man to death with his M-1 carbine, which was either empty or had jammed. This same man lost his eye in a grenade explosion moments later, and woke up on a landing craft hauling a heap of dead Marines to a hospital ship just offshore. Some sailors noticed him moving and dragged him out of the heap of mangled, bloody, fly-covered corpses, and called for a doctor. His life was saved, but his parents had already been notified of his death. They had to be re-notified that he was in fact alive, and on the same day they got this notice they received another, telling them that their son, the Marine's twin brother, had been killed in combat somewhere else. I remember this conversation vividly: it took place in a restaurant near the National Press Building in Washington D.C. Yet at the same time it is just a story. I don't know what it is like to wade 100 yards through chest-high water under machine-gun fire, or fight another man to the death with my bare bleeding hands, or to lose a twin brother, or wake up half-buried in dead bodies with one of my eyes missing. Some experiences are incommunicable.
Middle age is one of them. When you are twenty-four years old, having a complete smokeshow of a girl thrust her phone number into your hand unsolicited is worthy of note. When you are forty-four, getting from Hollywood to Burbank in fifteen minutes, instead of the usual thirty, is worthy of note. The scale is a sliding one, and it slides downward.

Do not think I am feeling sorry for myself. I look pretty good. I'm healthy. I'm strong. I'm active. I can do everything I want to do. My two sources of income are playing video games for money and book royalties, and in a few days -- it was supposed to be today, but life intervened -- I am going to release my second novel and a collection of short stories. I have it pretty goddamned decent. I am just very much aware that the simple things -- the verysimple things, have greater weight for me now, as a middle-aged man, than they did when I was a young one. Perhaps that is a good thing. Perhaps it is not a lowering of standards but an increase in the capacity to appreciate life -- that is to say, the very act of being alive. This morning, when I was hiking around the Hollywood Reservoir, I encountered four turtles and three deer and a whole host of birds -- gulls, ducks, cranes both jet black and egg white. Not one of those creatures needs to be told the meaning of life. Not one of them has to take Prozac or Valium or see a shrink or go to church to answer the questions of existence. They don't have to ask any questions because they already know the answer, that the meaning of life is to live it.

I know this, too; but I forget sometimes. It's easy to forget. So many things conspire to make me forget. Like alarm clocks, and traffic, and the rent payment, and the sort-of job, and the sort-of girl (there's always a girl, sort-of or not), and the parking ticket I forgot to pay but just remembered now, this second, as I sip cheap whiskey and tap these keys. There are so many petty logistics on the journey I forget the fucking destination -- which is not death, but life. Living. Existing. Being here, now, doing this. The scale may slide downward, but as any veteran rollercoaster jockey will tell you, it's the downward arc that sells the ride. Perhaps what middle age has over youth is simply the ability to appreciate. Not to lust, desire, imagine, demand or expect; but simply to appreciate.

I want you to do me a favor. I want you to take a moment for yourself and think about where you are in life, what you are doing, and what you really want to be doing right now. Where you want to go, and how you want to get there. Disengage from the bullshit, the everyday, the devilish details that suck up most of your time, and realy consider. Really be.. Just for a moment. Think. Ponder. Contemplate. Dream. And remember that you were not just born to pay taxes, buy products and die. You are here to live.

Humor me. It's my birthday.

Beyond 1984: Orwell's Other Novels (II)

As promised, I have returned late this Tuesday night to wind up "Orwell's Other Novels" by examining two of his very best: KEEP THE ASPIDISTRA FLYING and COMING UP FOR AIR.

KEEP THE ASPIDISTRA FLYING (1936): Written only a year after A CLERGYMAN'S DAUGHTER, this novel shows for the first time an inkling, if only a remote one, of the events brewing in Europe which would eventually lead to the Second World War. I do not mean that it has anything whatever to do with war or makes any mention of contemporary European politics; simply that its protagonist has a vague awareness that the civilization in which he lives is about to be blown to hell with bombs -- not that he doesn't welcome the prospect!

Gordon Comstock, at the age of thirty, is already a decisive failure. The grandson of a robber baron who died with £50,000 in the bank, Gordon makes slightly less than £2 a week working in a flyblown bookstore in the dark and anonymous heart of London. Once he was an up-and-coming writer at an advertising agency, the last hope of a family of losers who squandered Gran'pa Comstock's fortune and left him with nothing but a legacy; but he threw all of that away to become a full-time poet. Gordon had a theory, you see: that no artist could make art when kneeling before what he calls "the money god" (i.e. capitalism). Therefore he would "chuck up" his well-paying job and work in a bookstore by day, while writing scintillating poetry at night, all the while smug in the knowledge that he had not sold out to the almighty dollar -- or rather, the almighty pound sterling. Only after he has quit and begun to embrace life on not-quite £2 a week does he come to the horrifying realization that without money -- in other words, without tobacco, hot food, comfortable lodgings and access to women -- he cannot summon up the creative energy to write. At the same time he is bitterly disappointed that his girlfriend, Rosemary, will not sleep with him, and that he cannot see his rich friend Ravelston more than once in a fortnight because good-hearted old Ravelston will inevitably offer to buy him dinner or loan him money, and the only thing worse than being offered charity is the temptation to accept it.

The plot of ASPIDISTRA is quite simple. Gordon "has made war on money," believing this to be the only ethical thing for an artist to do, and he is determined to carry his war to the poorhouse and, if necessary, the grave. At the same time, his war on money has rendered him so poor -- "so down at heel," as Orwell puts it -- that when he stumbles home from his seventy hour a week bookstore job, he has no energy to do anything but furtively brew a cup of tea, read a Sherlock Holmes story, and go to bed. Everyone in his life -- sister Julia, girlfriend Rosemary, friend Ravelston -- is nagging him to take a different course, but to Gordon, poverty is synonymous with credibility. If he cannot actually be an artist, he can at least starve like an artist, and go "down into the muck, into the sub-world where decency (capitalist respectability) was impossible." When Rosemary gets pregnant, however, Gordon must make a choice -- pay for an abortion (something he regards as an abomination), leave her to raise the baby alone so he can continue to make war against the Money God, or sell out and return to the British equivalent of Madison Avenue, to write jingles for soap, perfume and breakfast cereal.

ASPIDISTRA is a vivid, occasionally black-comic and often deeply depressing look on the effects of poverty on an intelligent and well-educated man. There is scarcely a social humiliation which Gordon does not experience because he lacks money, and, being English, humiliation is to him much worse than physical pain or even death, (Orwell writes an excruciating chapter in which Gordon recklessly spends money to impress a snobby waiter at a second-rate hotel restaurant), and yet it is the gritty, everyday details which really stick: Gordon's landlady forbids him to brew tea in his room, so he must do it on the sly, listening at keyholes and dumping the used tea-leaves down the toilet as if committing a crime. Gordon desperately wants a beer and some companionship after twelve hours in the bookstore, but he is too embarrassed to pay with his sole coin, a threepenny bit, which is traditionally given to children with their Christmas pudding ("How can you buy anything with a threepenny-bit? It isn’t a coin, it's the answer to a riddle.") Gordon takes Rosemary to a high-class restaurant, is brutally snubbed by the waiter, and spends his entire wad of cash trying to save face, only to discover he has not enough money to pay for their trip home.

There can be no doubt that the reason why ASPIDISTRA rings so true as a story is because Orwell lived every moment of it in his real life: the dirty, shabby clothing, the perpetual shortage of cigarettes, the filthy meals taken in third-rate little restaurants, the dingy furnished rooms presided over by nosy, mean-minded landladies, the sexual starvation, the endless stream of rejection letters, the ghastly Friday-night loneliness, and worst of all, the constant social snubs. Hemingway once famously quipped that "a man shouldn't write what he doesn't know" and Orwell knew this subject like the back of his ink-stained hand. It is true that ASPIDISTRA has a few issues: Gordon, though sympathetic in some ways, is not always very likeable, and it is true that most of his woes are self-inflicted, which will make it hard for some readers to care about his fate. Orwell, too, repeats his main themes too often in the narrative and perhaps contrives to humiliate Gordon one too many times, just as he did John Flory in BURMESE DAYS. On the whole, however, this picture of artistic near-poverty in the middle 1930s is as timely today as when it was written.

COMING UP FOR AIR (1939): The last of Orwell's "other novels" is also his best. It is at once an almost heartbreakingly nostaglic portrait of life during the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, a stinging commentary on "modern" (meaning pre-WW2) English life, and a dire warning about the future -- a terrifying future Orwell would later discuss with nightmarish clarity in his masterpiece, 1984.

George "Fatty" Bowling is an insurance salesman who lives in the inner-outer suburbs of London. He has a nagging wife, two pain-in-the-ass kids ("Unnatural little bastards!" he calls them), and mouthful of false teeth. As his nickname implies, he's also extremely fat. To add to this list of woes, George also suffers from a strange condition, which he calls "a hangover from the past." Lately, as his marriage has become more intolerable and the shadow of world war has fallen over Britain, he has begun to obsess more and more about his childhood in Lower Binfield, an idyllic market town on the Thames River where he grew up around the turn of the twentieth century. At the same time, he broods incessantly over visions of postwar Britain: "It's not the war I'm afraid of," he says over and over again. "It's the after war." He's convinced that the civilization he grew up in, which is already dying, will be finished off once and for all by the conflict and replaced, in its aftermath, with something which is the precise opposite of his fondly-remembered childhood world -- a world where things like the radio, the bombing plane, the secret police, and even motor cars were not only unknown but unimaginable. George develops a longing to "get back into the past," and, when a lucky bet at the racetrack puts £17 (three weeks' pay) into his pocket, he decides to sneak away from his wife and family for a week and return to Lower Binfield, which he hasn't seen in twenty years. George wants to know if, in a world as noisy, crowded, uncertain and anxious as the one he lives in now, it is still possible for a man to catch his breath and find peace.

COMING UP FOR AIR is a remarkable novel in two separate ways. Orwell's reconstruction of small-town life in the late 1800s-early 1900s (the very heart of the late Victorian-early Edwardian eras of which we spoke in the last blog) is so wonderfully atmospheric and evocative that you would swear you were right there, amidst the smell of Sunday soap and hay, beer and horse-droppings. This was the time of Orwell's own childhood, and while he makes it clear that life was in many ways harder in 1901 than 1939, he also makes it clear that it had something 1939 lacked: an inner peace that came from the belief that the world you lived in would survive you -- that everything you believed in and loved was in essence immortal, even if you were not. I could quote endlessly from the boyhood-young adulthood chapters of this book, passages on fishing, making mischief, cutting school, laboring in a shop, reading adventure stories, and so forth, but a single passage, in which George observes his mom making dinner, will probably be sufficient: "I used to like to watch Mother rolling pastry. There's always a fascination in watching anybody do a job which he really understands. Watch a woman -- a woman who really knows how to cook, I mean -- rolling dough. She's got a peculiar, solemn, indrawn air, a kind of satisfied air, like a priestess celebrating a sacred rite. And in her own mind, of course, that's exactly what she is. When she was cooking, all her movements were wonderfully precise and firm. In her hands egg-whisks and mincers and rolling pins did precisely what they were meant to do. When you saw her cooking you knew that she was in a world where she belonged...So far as meals and so forth went, ours was one of those houses where everything went like clockwork. Or no, not like clockwork, which suggests something mechanical. It was more like a kind of natural process. You knew that breakfast would be on the table tomorrow morning in much the same way you knew the sun would rise...Our meals were ready on the tick. Enormous meals -- boiled beef and dumplings, roast beef and Yorkshire, boiled mutton and capers, pig's head, spotted dog and jam roly-poly, with grace before and after...Sometimes the heat of the fire, or the buzzing of the bluebottles on Sunday afternoons, would send her off into a doze, and at about a quarter to six she'd wake up with a tremendous start, glance at the clock on the mantelpiece, and get into a stew because tea was going to be late. But tea was never late."

In addition to his past, however, George gives a swift if deadly assessment of modern (1930s) life in Britain -- a place ruled by anxiety over money and fear of unemployment, with the rich getting steadily richer while the middle class fight desperately to remain middle class while hanging over an abyss of poverty. The disillusionment of Bowling after he returns from WWI and discovers "nobody wanted to pay me two thousand a year to sit in an office with streamlined furniture dictating letters to a platinum blonde" turns into a kind of grim horror as he realizes jobs that pay even a pound a week are scarce, and that he will have to fight tooth and nail to get one, much less keep it. Yet the really astonishing quality of the novel is its unexpected, farseeing political angle. Fatty Bowling's view of the postwar future is terrifyingly similar to that of 1984, and shows how long Orwell was meditating on the idea of a totalitarian ultra-state (he didn't write the latter novel until 1949) -- a world of "slogans and colored shirts and voices over the loudspeakers and crowds screaming about how much they love the Leader even though deep down inside they hate him so much it makes them want to puke." Though this fear is in the background of the story and is not its focus, it forms a sort of shadow, like the shadow of the coming world war, which chills George and perhaps adds impetus to his desire to escape back into the warmth of the past.

I have tried in these last two blogs to give the reader a sense of George Orwell before he came to fame and immortality, when he was a struggling young writer often living in, or on the fringes of, real poverty. I have also tried to explain how his early novels are quintessentially English in character, and chronicle a class of people -- specifically a timber merchant, a clergyman's daughter, a failed poet and an insurance salesman -- who make up a strata of English society which many other "quintessentially English" writers ignored, or otherwise rendered in purely comic fashion. In doing so -- in tackling the anxiety and humiliation of poverty, and the things it drives human beings to do to themselves and to others -- Orwell managed to achieve something which Charles Dickens and Jane Austen did not: specifically, he managed to write about people who, rather than being fascinating specimens of an extinct era, occupy at once an entirely foreign and yet hauntingly familiar world.

Beyond 1984: Orwell's Other Novels (I)

George Orwell has never gotten his proper due as a novelist. That may seem like a strange statement to make about the man who wrote ANIMAL FARM and 1984, but the truth is that if pressed, most people would be unable to name any of his other fictional works. I have always regarded this as a minor tragedy, because many literary Anglophiles (and there are millions) have no knowledge that he is one of the most quintessentially English writers of his time -- perhaps of all time. As I have said elsewhere, Americans have an abiding fascination with England during the Victorian and Edwardian Eras -- that is to say, from 1837 until about 1914 -- probably because the peculiar atmosphere of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle is more or less constant during that period. It is an atmosphere, as it were, of oysters and brown stout, pipe-smoke and drawing rooms, officers in red coats and gold-crusted collars, and women in hobble skirts murmuring poetry over cups of black tea. It is an atmosphere based partially on fantasies of wealth, class status and complex social etiquette, and partially on the hard reality of the British Empire -- the military and economic superiority which allowed Britain to rule the world for so long that no one could imagine that rule would ever end. But it did end, and certain authors -- Siegfried Sassoon and Evelyn Waugh, for example -- expressed a distinct nostalgia for it in their own novels, which might be called "transitional" in that they are clearly written from the perspective of those who are looking back, and fondly, on the Victorian-Edwardian past. Orwell, however, looked at the British decline from an entirely different angle: the angle of the ordinary man buffeted by circumstance, and this is at once a clue to why his novels are less popular than those of the afformentioned, and why they are perhaps more important.

It must be said that Orwell stood for anyone or anything during his all-too-brief life (1903 - 1950) it was for the common man; yet at the same time he refused, unlike nearly all of his left-wing peers, to romanticize the poor or those he considered even worse-off than the poor: the "out at elbow, down at heel" lower middle class. Orwell knew only too well the coarseness, vulgarity and willful ignorance of Britain's professional soldiers, factory workers, farm laborers, clergymen's daughters, door-to-door salesmen, office clerks and suchlike -- yet he believed, and persuasively argued, that those struggling unfortunates possessed a basic humanity that was lacking in their social superiors -- as he put it: "At least they have blood and not money in their veins."

The four novels I intend to examine here were written between 1934 - 1939, a period when the British economy was stagnant, huge sections of the populace lived in abject poverty, and "the slump" -- the Great Depression -- still lingered, like the nagging effects of a terrible sickness, in the minds of the lower middle class, filling them with apprehension for the future. I propose to examine the first two here, and the following two in next Tuesday's blog.

BURMESE DAYS (1934): This semi-autobiographical novel is set in Burma in the 1920s. The protagonist, John Flory, is a lonely, embittered and deeply conflicted man. In public he plays the role of a "pukka sahib" -- the typical white capitalist-imperialist who guzzles whiskey, sleeps with colored whores and keeps servants who refer to him as "most holy god." In private, however, he is an eminent hater of British imperialism who admires Burmese culture, despises his fellow pukka sahibs and maintains as his best friend a black doctor. Trapped by the "code of silence" which binds all white men's tongues in the East, as well as the stultifying, zero-culture anti-intellectualism of his fellow whites, Flory longs to find a woman with whom he can share his seditious, anti-British thoughts and his love of native culture. When young Elizabeth Lackersteen, the lovely and seemingly cultured neice of one of his fellow sahibs, arrives fresh from Paris, Flory believes his moment has arrived. He aggressively courts Elizabeth, but is hampered by two separate obstacles -- a "native dispute" which embroils his friend the doctor and which forces him to choose whether he will abandon the man or break the pukka sahib code and be ostracized by his fellow whites...and the yawning gap between his soft-focus perception of Elizabeth Lackersteen and the much harder, crueler reality.

BURMESE DAYS is in many ways a remarkable book. Orwell wrote that Rudyard Kipling gave us our only real literary picture of British India during the late 19th century; he might have been surprised to realize that he himself may have given us our only real literary picture of that same place during the 1920s, by which time the bloom was off the imperialistic rose and Britain could no longer pretend (though in fact, it did try very hard to do so) that the Empire had any purpose except economic exploitation of colored races and their lands. Although it is a violent damnation of imperialism and the racism by which imperialism is justified, there is much more to DAYS than screed. Orwell explains in beautiful detail how imperialism seduces the poor and lower middle class Englishman (a person who, by rights, ought to side with the native against the exploiter) by offering him a lifestyle which would be as far beyond his reach in England as London is from the moon. At home, Flory would never amount to more than a dismal clerkship at £75 a year; in Burma he can live the lifestyle of a country squire, complete with whiskey, servants, horses, and even shooting excursions in the country. He can, in effect, jump classes -- something impossible in his own country, where his prospects are rigidly defined from the moment of his birth. All he must do in exchange is surrender his intellectual freedom and his conscience, knowingly participate in the robbery of the native peoples, and betray his "greasy nigger pals" whenever they come into conflict with a white man.

DAYS also explores the darker side of English snobbery in the form of Elisabeth, whose brief taste of the good life via an upper-crust boarding school attended during her teens has given her aristocratic pretensions she intends to achieve at any cost -- save that of acknowledging the "natives" are human beings. Indeed, some of the most stinging dialogue in the book comes either from Elisabeth or her equally snobbish aunt, who laments that the natives, increasingly restive under British rule, "are getting almost as bad as the lower classes back home." ("Surely not as bad as that!" replies her husband, in horror.) Orwell's thesis seems to be that snobbery is a form of racism within one's own race and ethnicity -- an artificial line drawn between those who rule and those who serve. This line, phony thought it may be, must be drawn because without it the position of the ruling class becomes morally indefensible. And if this is true, then the logical extension of snobbery, when coupled with imperialism, is racism: simply another way of justifying the exploitation of one group of people by another.

While by no means a perfect novel -- Flory, for example, seems to be almost pathologically stupid when it comes to Elisabeth's true nature -- it is probably his most vividly written, and, being semi-autobiographical, rings with authenticity throughout. In the end, BURMESE DAYS, though set entirely in Burma (save for a few brief flashbacks to London and Paris) is a superb commentary on how the English imprisoned half the world, not so much with cannons or cavalry, but with snobbery and racism -- and how that snobbery and racism often turned back upon them, chaining their minds and souls into a lonely and sterile silence.

A CLERGYMAN'S DAUGHTER (1935): Orwell's second novel, though clumsier in approach than his first, is significant in a number of ways. Firstly, it features the only female protagonist in any of his books. Second, it is the first of his novels which deals directly with poverty, specifically the uniquely English form of poverty known as "shabby genteel" which sees "respectable" people of "good family" who have no money but retain their sense of social superiority even when staring economic ruin dead in the face. (It is also something of an expose, albeit a scattershot one, of other forms of poverty which Orwell himself had experienced firsthand -- that of itinerant workers, for example, and exploited schoolteachers.) Lastly, though set in the same year it was written, the book is quite timeless in its feeling: aside from occasional references to cars or buses it has an atmosphere which could belong to any year from about 1899 onward. Whether this was deliberate or not I don't know, but it lends to that timeless sensation which I mentioned above -- a feeling that the Britain of now is also the Britain of then -- and tomorrow as well.

DAUGHTER, as the title implies, is the story Dorothy Hare, the attractive but sexless only child of a snobbish country vicar whose mixture of arrogance and bad business sense have left their family, and the parish in which they live, on the edge of the financial abyss. The Rector, as he is known, is one of Orwell's best creations: an Oxford-educated man of the cloth who is also as thoroughgoing a bastard as you are likely to encounter. Viewing nearly everyone in his congregation as scum ("This is a valid sacrament," he seemed to be saying. "And it is my duty to administer it to you. But remember that I am only your priest, not your friend. As a human being I dislike and despise you.") he treats them as such, and harbors little affection even for Dorothy, whose devotion to God and her father are equally sincere. Indeed, Dorothy is introduced to us as being almost an indentured servant: she keeps house, handles the church's finances, runs numerous groups and committees, sees to the parish poor and sick, organizes town festivals and plays for the schoolchildren, bathes in cold water and jams herself with a needle every time she has an ungrateful thought. Indeed, she works so hard that she has a complete mental breakdown and wakes up in London, penniless, wearing a dirty dress and possessing no memories of her former life. This begins a long series of misadventures that initially see her picking hops in the countryside as an itinerant laborer, then living among the London homeless, and finally scratching out a living as a schoolteacher in a prison-like girls' school run by a pitiless widow whose only concern is extracting school fees from her pupils' parents. As Dorothy's memory slowly returns, she realizes that her deep religious faith has not returned with it, and that the scandal surrounding her departure may prevent her from ever returning home. She must try to find meaning in a world unsupported by her old pillars -- family and God.

As I said, this book has a rather clumsy structure, and there is a distinct, Victorian-like artificiality in some of the events which ruin and redeem Dorothy Hare: the end of the book is crippled by a tendency to rectify most of Dorothy's problems in a manner more reminiscent of Charles Dickens than George Orwell. Nevertheless, it is well worth reading. The sequences between the Rector and Dorothy in the opening chapter, which drive home the mentality of the shabby genteel -- in essence, "we" are better than "they," and therefore things like debts, a dwindling number of parishioners, or the fact the church is falling to pieces don't matter -- are a case study in the power of snobbery to blot out harsh reality -- in this case, that the Rector, despite his titled cousin (a baronet) and his Oxford education, is only a few years from the poorhouse. The chapter about hop-picking in the countryside is beautifully written and shows that the plight of migrant workers never changes, his device of writing the "homeless on the streets of London" chapter in play format is brilliant if unorthodox, and Dorothy's experiences at the girl's school are simply appalling: Orwell lays bare, as with a meat cleaver, the fraud of paid education and the snobbish motives which lay behind it. One walks away from A CLERGYMAN'S DAUGHTER feeling not only as if one has seen the disgusting underbelly of English society in the 30s, but the suffering of those "respectable" people who, a generation removed from their money, still cling to their snobbery -- which, in essence, is all they have.

Next Tuesday (or before) I will wind up this analysis with KEEP THE ASPIDISTRA FLYING and what I consider Orwell's true masterpiece, COMING UP FOR AIR.

Book Review: Ernest Hemingway's "Winner Take Nothing"

Unlike all other forms of lutte or combat the conditions are that the winner shall take nothing; neither his ease, nor his pleasure, nor any notions of glory; nor, if he win far enough, shall there be any reward within himself.

Such is the dedication Ernest Hemingway wrote for WINNER TAKE NOTHING, a grim, cynical, occasionally black-humorous collection of short stories which, if they achieve nothing else, grant us an insight into the author's particular way of looking at the world. Hemingway had a racketing youth that took him all over America and Canada and later, Europe, and the extent of that experience -- as a reporter, an ambulance driver during WWI, a correspondent living in Spain and France, and as a glorified beach bum in Florida -- is reflected in these tales, some of which are now considered classics of American literature. There are some losers in this bunch, and a few more that never quite add up to the sum of their parts, but by and large this collection demonstrates why Hemingway's short stories are still considered masterpieces of observation on the human condition. Some of the standouts are:

"After the Storm" -- An American dockyard thug, having stabbed someone in a bar fight and then fled on a boat, encounters a just-sunken passenger ship after a violent storm and tries to perform a little impromptu salvage.

"A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" -- A short, poignant tale about a drunken insomniac in Paris, and the two waiters who wish he'd just go home.

"The Sea Change" - A selfish young man tries to talk his pregnant girl into an abortion. (This tale is significant in that the word "abortion" is never used in the story.)

"A Way You'll Never Be" - This story, set in Italy in WWI after a bloody battle, introduces Nick Adams, a recurring character in Hemingway's shorts who was clearly based upon himself.

"A Day's Wait" -- A black-comic short about a boy who believes he is dying of fever.

"A Natural History of the Dead" -- One of Hemingway's finest short stories, it begins as a cool, almost scientific treatise on death and then deteriorates, quite deliberately, into a personal reminiscence about war.

Love him or hate him, Hemingway was one of the most important writers of the last few centuries, at least in the English-speaking world, if only because of his influence on modern language. Prior to his rise to fame in the 1920s, British-American prose tended toward a more ornate, almost baroque style that tended to favor those with education. Hemingway's own style, very carefully developed under the tutelage of Gertrude Stein, was friendly even to barely literate people, massively increasing his popularity, and his earthy, worldly, cynical take on life, and willingness to tackle subjects hitherto smothered in silence, fit the disillusioned mood of the period in which he found his fame. WINNER TAKE NOTHING is aptly named, because Hemingway's view of life was unremittingly bleak, though punctuated with coarse humor and just a tinge of sentimentality. It is the work of a man who believed that life broke the good and the bad impartially, and that while it may have punished vice, it seldom rewarded virtue. It is the work of a man who believed that victory was difficult to obtain and, having been obtained, inevitably rang hollow. In short, it is the work of a depressive misanthrope with a distinct taste for cruelty. And yet it must be said that Hemingway probably took more pleasure from life than his tough-guy code was willing to let him admit, and his fascination with what George Orwell called "the process of life" -- eating, drinking, fighting, hunting, fishing, traveling, making love -- is part of what makes reading him worthwhile. Man, he once said, can be destroyed but not defeated, and there is enough of that defiant attitude in WINNER TAKE NOTHING to make the reader take something positive away from it -- something, as it were, from Nothing.