Paul Vitols's Blog, page 32

Rosemary's Baby: not just any date-rape

Paul's History of Cinema Festival last night brought us to mid-1968 with Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby, written by Polanski from the novel by Ira Levin. While watching Polanski's sure-footed interpretation of the story I had a new feeling: after 3 years of viewing movies chronologically from 1916 on, I finally felt I was watching a modern or contemporary film. In almost every detail of its production, from the understated realism of the characterizations to the unabashed naturalness of the young couple's married life to the excellent cinematography and technical credits, the movie could have been made anytime in the last few years and shows virtually no trace of being 43 years old. It confirmed my respect for Polanksi as one of the best filmmakers of all time.

(Warning: this post contains serious spoilers, so read no further unless you've already seen the movie or read the book.)

The idea for the story is excellent. A pair of newlyweds, Rosemary (Mia Farrow) and Guy (John Cassavetes) moves into a spacious Manhattan apartment left vacant by the death of its previous tenant, an 89-year-old woman. The old building has a history of tragic and horrible events such as suicides and even, it's alleged, cannibalism. Various remodelings of the building have left the young couple's apartment with only paper-thin walls separating them from their neighbors, the 70-something Castevets, played by Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer, who are friendly, urbane, interesting, and seemingly enchanted with the young couple. They start to socialize with each other a lot.

Rosemary, who's eager to start a family with Guy, starts to find Mamie and Roman Castevet too intrusive, but Guy is delighted with them and also excited that his acting career is starting to take off. There are some disturbing turns. For one thing, a young woman who befriends Rosemary, and who has been living with the Castevets as a a kind of protegee, is found dead, having jumped from their apartment window while the Castevets were out. Another is that Guy gets an important role when the first pick for that role suddenly and inexplicably goes blind.

One night, Rosemary, eating a chocolate mousse prepared by Mamie, is drugged into a stupor, and in a sequence of dreams or nightmares she is bound naked on a table while a naked coven—led by Roman and Mamie Castevet, and joined by Guy—looks on. And there she is taken and impregnated by the Devil.

The rest of the story has Rosemary piecing together what's going on, and gradually coming to realize that she is dealing with witches. When she reaches out for help to outsiders, they disappear or die. But she continues to believe that the child she carries was engendered by Guy, until the climax of the story, when Roman Castevet, now frank about his leadership of the coven, advises her that the child is Satan's. When Roman urges her to mother her child, Rosemary approaches the black-draped cradle and starts to look with maternal love on the devil-spawn that we, the audience, never actually see.

I'd seen the movie before, but this time I was excited by the dark parallel to the gospel story of the birth of Jesus. Roman tells Rosemary outright that Satan has chosen her to beget his only-born son, making her an anti-Mary. But unlike the impregnation of Mary, which occurred via her ear, Rosemary's was achieved carnally, essentially by date-rape. Her child, presumably, will be the Antichrist (born on 28 June 1966, according to the movie), which in turn means that the Apocalypse is nigh.

But these topics are not addressed directly in the movie, and indeed although the storytelling was in the main very good (I watched alertly and with interest all the way through its 136 minutes), I felt that the story was a bit underpowered and that it did not really end satisfactorily. When Rosemary finally realizes fully what has happened, she grabs a carving knife and crashes the meeting of the coven around the black cradle. Is she going to slash somebody (as Catherine Deneuve did in the last Polanski film we watched, Repulsion)? No. When she finds out who the real father is, she drops the knife. And Roman is successful in awakening her maternal concern for the child, even though he is a monster. Her husband is already on board, having sold his soul for career success.

The final shot of the film is of Rosemary's face looking down on her child, her expression softening, accepting. She's not going to have a normal life or a normal family, but she does have a child, and maybe there is indeed something seductive about being such a VIP mother, even if you're a Catholic girl from Omaha. If she gets with the program, she will have the forces of darkness working with her, at least for now. For no doubt she will be killed, discarded, or eaten once her usefulness is over.

Rosemary has done her best to escape the clutches of the coven, but they've corrupted or destroyed all her allies. A pregnant woman, she's too small and too weak to battle such cosmic forces arrayed against her. Still, a different heroine might have gone down fighting, and not let herself be co-opted, whatever the price. I was hoping she was going to stab the child, this monster gotten on her by force and by fraud, this creature that had been draining her life and causing her pain throughout her pregnancy. Then she would have had to face the revenge of the coven, of the Devil himself—what would have happened then? Would God have intervened? If not, why not? Or is the prophecy of Antichrist too potent to allow of such improvisation now? I think the story should have answered these questions.

Instead we have a story of corruption. A good and decent young woman, abused and exploited by evil people, including those she loves and trusts, decides that if you can't lick 'em, join 'em. And no doubt that is what the great majority of us would in fact do; it may also be the very reason that the Devil lured Rosemary to his operatives in that old coven-roost in Manhattan. But in order to test the values at play in the story, you need to have a character who holds her value very dear, who won't compromise it.

This movie, I think, is in the ancestral tree of the 1984 movie The Terminator, in which an ordinary young woman (Sarah Connor, played by Linda Hamilton), finding herself the target of a terrifying cosmic girl-hunt conducted by superhuman adversaries, digs down and finds heroism within her. True, her enemies are not trying to corrupt her, only kill her, but for the great majority, the fight goes out of us when we see that the odds are overwhelmingly against us. We surrender; it's too hard.

But in Rosemary's Baby I got the feeling that Rosemary had caved in and let down team Humanity. As her husband Guy had been bought with career success, so she had been bought with the mother-infant bond. Has she been seduced by a feeling of specialness, of being a VIP? Has she been won over after all by the charisma of Satan? Those elements might be in there, but my feeling at the end was that these things were not the important part; the important part was simply mother-love, conquering Rosemary's feelings of outrage, injustice, and horror. If she had been a regular rape victim who had come to love the resulting offspring, that would be a sign of her nobility, because the child himself would be innocent. But you can't say that here. Somehow this Devil's spawn is in on the scheme, as much a part of the conspiracy, as guilty, as the father and his minions. He's availed himself of the services of Rosemary's womb, and now he needs more—and she's willing to provide it.

Satan here has successfully corrupted the maternal instinct. For is not goodness exactly the ability to say no to instincts when they will lead to harm? And is not being a slave of instinct the mark of brutes—the creatures from which we distinguish ourselves as human beings? So when humans use the "instinct" excuse, they are affirming their brutality.

That would mean that a devil-worshipper is an ex-human, a human who has voluntarily given himself over to going with instinct, choosing this as his ultimate value instead of goodness.

At the end of this story, Rosemary, fighting the good fight up to the end, caves in. I can't help but wonder what a different, more heroic woman might have done in her place. That's the story I really want to see—and I'd be all the more delighted if it were Roman Polanski telling it.

sketchbook: two days in December 2011

TUE 6 DEC 2011 3:15 pm HATZ SALON

A grotto of warm light looking out on the cool gray light outside. Chestnut-colored wood of this high little table: it supports a potted poinsettia and a fluffy Father Christmas figurine. Plangent bass of the music on the sound system: quavering vibraphone: busy high-hat.

Three different conversations: couple of male voices, the rest female. Triple electronic beep when the glass door opens. A young guy saunters in, skinny with a gray tuque pulled tight over his head.

"I was wondering if any walk-ins were available."

Jill, the receptionist, takes him away.

Islands of clutter on an expanse of tawny tile, all mottled and smoked. Little reception table is on casters; reception chair on casters; full coatrack on casters.

SAT 10 DEC 2011 ca. 3:00 pm LONSDALE UNITED CHURCH BLOOD CLINIC

At the refreshment table in the church basement: a big room with collapsible tables and chairs set out on the old linoleum tiles, laid in squares of 9 to checkerboard the floor with brick-red and burgundy. The tables are draped with red plastic cloths (blood-colored?). One wall, the west, is faced with windows, mostly hidden behind fabric partitions that have been numbered 1, 2, 3, and 4. Outside: cedar-trees on this cold drizzly day.

In 1964–5 I attended a kindergarten down here.

A murmur of gentle voices, almost all female. Blood donors and blood-donation volunteers are nice people. A squad of three teenage Asian girls solicitously attends to the refreshment needs of the donors—and the donors politely nibble little individual packs of cookies and little juice-boxes.

two films: apes past, present, and future

In 1968 two science-fiction movies were released that were destined to become classics: Planet of the Apes and 2001: A Space Odyssey. I remember being affected by both of them when I saw them in the movie theater at age 9. On the weekend Kimmie and I watched them as part of Paul's History of Cinema Festival. I enjoyed them both more than I remembered and more than I expected.

Although the movies are very different, they share a key theme, namely, the question of human nature: what is it? For anytime a story features important nonhuman characters, like the apes in Planet and the computer Hal in 2001, it is posing this question by getting us to look at how those characters resemble people and how they do not.

(Spoiler alert: I will be talking about story details including the endings of these movies, so read on only if you've seen them or otherwise don't mind spoilers.)

Planet of the Apes, written by Michael Wilson and Rod Serling, and directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, was adapted from a novel, La Planete de singes by Pierre Boulle. (Boulle, by the way, was also the author of the novel The Bridge on the River Kwai, which David Lean made into an excellent movie in 1957.) The novel was translated into English as Monkey Planet, which I read sometime, I think, in my teens. I don't remember too much about it, only that the hero-narrator flies to a distant planet that he calls Soror ("sister") because of its strange resemblance to Earth—except for the fact that it is dominated by apes. The movie version of course ended with the famous revelation that the "planet of the apes" was in fact Earth, thousands of years after a human-induced nuclear holocaust had caused human and ape to undergo ecological role reversal. This I thought was a brilliant idea, not only making the story all the more relevant to a contemporary Cold War audience, but also adding a lovely layer of irony to the title—for who are the "apes" whose planet this is, or was?

Despite its vigorous action scenes, I found Planet of the Apes to be a rather cerebral movie. Through the long first act, which has the three marooned astronauts trekking through lifeless desert, their sarcastic skipper, Taylor (Charlton Heston), spends his time mocking and taunting his crew for their idealism and sorrow over the death of their female crewmate. (I was interested to note that the space mission in Planet of the Apes used the same "hibernaculum" idea that 2001 used for keeping the crew in suspended animation during their long flight.) Later on the main scenes occur as dialogue-intensive exchanges of ideas in places like the apes' laboratory, a courtroom scene in which Taylor is the defendant, and at an archaeological dig at the seaside during the story's climax. The writers clearly wanted to focus on the idea content of the story.

And what does the story say? The astronauts first find a single plant, and then soon discover a lush forest, complete with wild, semi-clothed, mute human inhabitants. When the astronauts peeled off their suits to dive into a refreshing pool here, I was struck by the Eden imagery.

But suddenly the humans are running scared from an unknown predator: horse-mounted apes with rifles and nets. Taylor is shot in the throat and separated from his companions, one of whom, it later turns out, is killed and embalmed as part of a museum exhibit, the other lobotomized. Taylor, while recuperating in a zoo cage, becomes a special object of study for two young dissident ape scientists (Kim Hunter and Roddy McDowall). When he recovers his voice he demonstrates that he can not only talk but also reason, and thus seemingly disproves the prevailing ape dogma that humans are incapable of civilization. To the dogmatic rulers (the ginger-haired orangutans), things would be more convenient if Taylor and his friends simply disappeared, but the young scientists help him escape (with his new girlfriend, Nova, played by former Miss Maryland Linda Harrison).

The apes here embody many human failings, from their callousness and cruelty toward the helpless humans to their complacency, dogmatism, and dishonesty. So are these somehow necessary characteristics for the occupant of the top of the food chain on planet Earth? Or did we just set the apes a bad example? The apes are ridiculous with their pomposity and swagger (especially since their technology is rather on the low side—kind of like Gary Larson's depictions of how dogs print); but then again, who are we to laugh?

The most humane characters are the young scientists (Taylor is never really more than an indignant prisoner). They seem to suggest that it is age and status, more than, say, species, that lead toward the systematic practice of injustice and its pompous rationalization.

In 2001 we have a much more serious effort. Indeed, this time while watching it I formed the definite opinion that it is a work of genius.

Which is not to say that it's necessarily particularly enjoyable or even totally successful on its own terms. What I mean is that it is a work of uncompromising individual vision, fashioned according to the maker's own criteria of value, and not offered primarily in order to please an audience, even though I have no doubt that Stanley Kubrick wished it to do so and the movie has apparently grossed $57 million. The movie was apparently inspired by Arthur C. Clarke's short story "The Sentinel"; the screenplay credit is simply "Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke" with no mention of the story.

In just a few scenes over its 2.5-hour length, the movie shows the entire unfolding of human destiny from pre-human to human to superhuman. It is this feature in my opinion that makes the movie epic, rather than the sheer vastness of its scale in time and space.

On this, my 5th (I think) viewing of the film, I felt I understood it better. This movie has apes of its own, in their own Eden—this time the arid waste of East Africa. Two groups of apes are contending for a muddy waterhole. One group is pushed off by the other, and to that pushed-off group appears, one dawn during a new moon, a smooth charcoal-colored slab standing upright before them. The apes are awestruck, and one ape reaches out first to touch the monolith. Soon after, this ape, while playing with a tapir skeleton, forms the idea of using a bone as a club. Voila: the birth of technology, and, by extension, of humanity.

Now armed, the apes push their rivals off the waterhole, and our inventor clubs his opposite leader to death in the process. The implication is that he has now, like Cain, also invented murder. When he throws the bone aloft in triumph, it morphs into an orbiting satellite, and the movie leaps across 4 million years to the Space Age.

This club inventor is the world's first genius. According to Arnold J. Toynbee in his A Study of History, civilizations grow through only one cause: the activities of geniuses, and then only if they are able to persuade their less talented fellows to follow along. Otherwise, every society, and every person in it, merely repeats gestures and methods already invented. This function of the genius is, according to Toynbee (and to others, like astrologer Liz Greene), the fundamental meaning of the Greek myth of Prometheus. But in 2001 the real Prometheus appears to be the alien monolith, which (or who) inspires the ape to its first act of creativity. The story seems to be saying that the human race and its civilization were not created on Earth from scratch, but were passed on by another civilization from elsewhere like the Olympic flame, ultimate source unknown.

The bulk of the movie concerns the Jupiter mission, in which the shipboard computer Hal, himself in turn a human invention, stops taking orders from his human bosses and starts murdering them instead, becoming a techno-Cain.

The mission skipper David Bowman (Keir Dullea) is able to neutralize Hal and goes on to become the lone human to experience the final epiphany of the monolith, which appears to bring about his own rebirth as a kind of superman.

The movie is a tremendous tour de force, and has its longueurs and problems. (Kimmie at the end said she doesn't need to see it again.) But this time while watching I did not see it as merely an interesting and demanding science-fiction movie, but as a work of genius, and such works are always necessarily in a class by themselves.

The Graduate: the time to act is now

On Sunday night I loaded up the latest entry in Paul's History of Cinema Festival: The Graduate, written by Calder Willingham and Buck Henry from a novel by Charles Webb and directed by Mike Nichols. I'd seen it once before and knew that I liked it, but, as with all the best movies, it proved to be even better than I'd remembered. I wound up rating it 9/10 on IMDb.

Considered racy and daring at the time for a mainstream movie, The Graduate was, according to Wikipedia, the highest-grossing movie of 1967 ($50 million) and one of the highest-grossing movies of all time up to that point. Its success was deserved.

(Spoiler alert: I will be discussing details of the story, including the ending. Read on only if you've already seen the movie or otherwise don't mind spoilers.)

The story was well designed. Twenty-year-old Ben Braddock (Dustin Hoffman), arriving home to his parents' after graduating from college, in uncertain what he wants to do with his life, although he gets much advice from his parents and their friends. One of those friends is 40-something Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), wife of Ben's father's law partner. With cool, worldly determination she sets out to seduce young Ben, and before long succeeds. Soon he's embroiled in a clandestine, sex-only affair that they carry out at the local Taft Hotel. It's all new to Ben, who is by turns shy, outraged, guilt-ridden, and turned on.

The major complication occurs when Ben, pushed by his parents and Mr. Robinson, goes on a date with the Robinsons' beautiful daughter Elaine (Katharine Ross), and falls in love with her. Mrs. Robinson, who has forbidden him to see Elaine, now becomes Ben's enemy, and works to get Elaine married off to her longtime boyfriend Carl. The climax of the movie has Ben racing to find where the wedding is taking place (a church in Santa Barbara) and crashing it spectacularly. The couple has already been pronounced married, but nonetheless the bride decides to run away, and they board a crowded bus, dutifully paying their fares, to ride off to an unknown future.

It is a classically structured 3-act story with a main plot (the affair with Mrs. Robinson) and a subplot (the romance with Elaine). Act 1 of the main plot begins when Mrs. Robinson shows up at Ben's bedroom to ask him to drive her home from his parents' party (thrown ostensibly in Ben's honor). In a tense, comic sequence of scenes she adroitly gets him to do her bidding, driving her home, even helping her undress until she is naked, when Mr. Robinson's unexpected return home gives Ben a chance to flee.

But Mrs. Robinson has left Ben with a standing invitation to have sex with her, and he is not able to resist for long. In another tense, comic sequence he calls her from the Taft Hotel and they wind up taking a room and consummating their affair, ushering in act 2 of the main plot. Incidentally: how do you tell when you're in act 2 of a story? Answer: when the main situation, usually the advertised situation, of the story has come about. A one-line description of The Graduate would be something like, "a young college grad is seduced into an affair with his father's partner's wife." In the 1985 movie Witness with Harrison Ford and Kelly McGillis, act 2 has arrived once "a tough city homicide detective, on the run from corrupt, murderous colleagues, takes refuge in an Amish community and falls in love with a young widow there." Or again in Tootsie, another Dustin Hoffman movie: act 2 has arrived when "an unemployed and unemployable actor, to prove he can really hold down a role, gets himself cast at a successful soap opera—as one of the female leads."

Essentially, act 1 is the path by which the situation of act 2 is brought about. Most of a well-designed story consists of act 2, in which the consequences of the story situation work themselves out. In The Graduate, these consequences are mainly about how the world's—that is, his parents' and Mr. Robinson's—efforts to pair Ben up with Elaine exert pressure on his relationship with Mrs. Robinson. When the subject of Elaine comes up, Mrs. Robinson's cool, blasé anomie suddenly turns into fierce hostility: Ben has unknowingly tripped over something she actually cares about.

But what exactly is it that Mrs. Robinson cares about? At first it seems that she's trying to protect her daughter from the now corrupted Ben Braddock, but of course there is the deeper fear that their affair will come to light at some point, tossing a grenade into Mrs. Robinson's unsatisfying and boring but also easy and socially prestigious life. But Mrs. Robinson's vehemence seems to point to something deeper. She doesn't beg and plead with Ben; she orders him and extracts a promise from him that he'll have nothing to do with Elaine.

A ray of light is shone on this dark question right at the moment of maximum climax in the story. When Elaine, in her bridal gown and having already kissed her new husband Carl, sees Ben passionately declaring his love for her, she rips herself away from Carl and runs to join Ben. Her mother hisses at her: "It's too late!" and Elaine hotly replies, "Not for me it's not!" And there friends we have the emotional ticker of the story. Mrs. Robinson envies her daughter for her youth and potential, and this envy has turned her into a well-poisoner: one who, if she can't have the water herself, poisons it so no one else can have it.

This is exactly on the topic of the movie's theme, which has to do with making the choices that carry one from youth into adulthood. Ben Braddock, the graduate, doesn't know what he wants to do with his life, with his new adulthood. Mrs. Robinson gives him something to do—something "adult." But it's not really Ben's choice; he's merely the plaything of a bored, middle-aged woman. Mr. Robinson, interestingly, in his few scenes with Ben, tells him repeatedly to enjoy himself and do what he wants—that's what Robinson himself would do if he could be young again.

Mrs. Robinson has chosen to live a facade, and as a result she is a depressed alcoholic. But instead of trying to steer her own daughter away from such a fate, she actively steers her toward it. For Mrs. Robinson was no doubt herself married in a similarly nice, bourgeois setting to a similarly nice, bourgeois man. Elaine sees through it, and most interestingly it's after she says "I do." She's about to break a vow that was made with her mouth and not with her heart. The time to act is always now, and it doesn't matter what's already happened—not even your commitments, if those commitments were made in a state of ignorance. For, in the words of Khalil Gibran:

Life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

Elaine needed to see her mother for what she was before she could make an informed choice, a conscious choice.

There is a mythic dimension as well, as with any good story. For Ben is the hero who must free the princess (Elaine) from the dragon (Mrs. Robinson) who holds her captive. The psychologist Erich Neumann showed how this mythic dragon is no other than the Mother in her destructive aspect. Ben has to pit himself against society and Church in order to liberate the princess.

All in all, an excellent story, well told. The 60s stylishness of the movie, its hip content, and its atmospheric Simon & Garfunkel music add flavor, but they are not what make the movie the absorbing and successful thing that it is. Those things place it in its time; but its story lifts it out of time into the eternal present.

sketchbook: Sunday 27 November 2011

SUN 27 NOV 2011 7:35 a.m. BRACKENDALE

In the dark and quiet of morning at my sister's house. Kimmie reads a magazine on the sofa opposite. A clock ticks quietly above and behind me. Outside there is the heavy rush of rain. The loudest sound is the whir of the fridge. A black-and-white cat sits on the carpet near my feet, staring ahead enigmatically, sometimes looking up at me expectantly. It drove off the other cat, the gray one, in a brief spat on the same piece of carpet.

Satan by Jeffrey Burton Russell

Satan: The Early Christian Tradition by Jeffrey Burton Russell

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In this second book in the series that began with The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity, Jeffrey Burton Russell picks up the story of the Devil where the New Testament left it and carries it on to the time of St. Augustine in the 5th century.

The "story" he's telling is actually that of the development of the "concept" of the Devil, a term that he is at pains to distinguish from that of "idea". For Russell, while an idea "is intellectual and closely defined, a concept includes the affective as well as the analytical and has hazier boundaries". He thinks that a concept changes over time, remaining current and valid only so long as people find it useful. A concept may or may not correspond to something in objective reality.

I'm not sure that I accept Russell's distinction between ideas and concepts, but he does make clear how he uses these terms, so I was fine with it in reading the book. One interesting point is that Russell himself believes in the Devil, in Satan, as a really existing person who is responsible for the evil in the universe. This means that the author has some serious skin in the game of this subject, and it more than explains why he has devoted at least four volumes to examining the history of Satan. For if there really is such a being as Satan, surely there could be few facts as important in all our lives—and our post-lives.

But Russell doesn't spend time trying to convince the reader of Satan's existence. He merely leaves us with the question of why people are gassed to death in concentration camps and why children are napalmed. If we believe in God even hypothetically, then we've got a problem explaining those things. Instead, Russell traces those historical figures who have been the most influential in fleshing out our image of Satan, sketching in their diabology and examining the logical and doctrinal problems raised by their positions. For any picture of Satan creates logical problems. As God came to be seen as all-good, then the cause of cosmic evil had to be outsourced. That role went to Satan. But, as Russell observes, blaming Satan for the existence of evil doesn't really work, because God created Satan, and presumably Satan cannot operate without God's permission or acquiescence. If the universe is truly run by God, then the buck stops with him, no matter how many intermediaries there may be in the cosmic bureaucracy.

The church fathers and their theological successors all grappled with the problem in various ways. Russell outlines the teachings on Satan of the apostolic fathers, the so-called apologetic fathers who succeeded them, Irenaeus, Tertullian, the scholars of Alexandria, the monks of the desert, and finally the great theologian Augustine. These thinkers shifted back and forth with questions about whether Satan was the serpent in the Garden of Eden, and if not what their relationship was; whether Satan was involved with the story of the Watchers, an early account of angels falling to Earth; whether demons are in fact fallen angels; when Satan fell; what sin caused him to fall; and so on. As orthodoxy was gradually defined, some of these thinkers would find themselves anathematized, the upstanding Christian of today becoming the heretic of tomorrow.

Augustine, fighting off educated pagans and heretics, developed the most comprehensive and systematic theology, including an account of Satan. As Neil Forsyth says in his book The Old Enemy, Augustine finally created a coherent Christian theology that was able to withstand the attacks of critics from all sides, and it was built around the ancient myth of the enemy of the king of the gods. But Augustine was still not able to make it entirely consistent, and he wavered between a free-will and a predestinarian view of the human spirit. The question remains unresolved today.

Even though I'm very interested in this topic material, I find Russell's style dry and lacking in humor. Evil is a grim topic, but that doesn't mean the prose needs to be grim. But he doesn't flinch from the difficulties and contradictions in the idea, and lays out the various logical issues clearly and comprehensively. Even though I found the reading a bit tough my copy of the book is now heavily highlighted.

Evil acts occur all the time; we perpetrate them ourselves. Why? It's a really good, important question, and for millions of people right up to the present day the answer has a name: Satan. And if he isn't real, then he's doing a damn good job for someone who doesn't exist.

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The Devil by Jeffrey Burton Russell

The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity by Jeffrey Burton Russell

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

(I originally posted this review to Amazon.com in April 2008.)

Drawing on many different sources, the author suggests how the concept of the Devil as used in the New Testament took shape.

Clearly, some reviewers of this book on Amazon were very disappointed with it. They did not find what they were looking for. Speaking for myself, I pretty much did. Russell takes some pains early on to say that his work is part of the history of concepts, and even spends time distinguishing this from the history of ideas—a distinction that I found to be a bit pedantic and, for me, unhelpful.

However, in the rest of the book I mostly found what I hoped to find: an inventory and discussion of the ideas and images that contributed to the concept of the Devil as he appeared in the Judeo-Christian world by New Testament times.

Since the Devil came to be known as the source and personification of evil in the world, Russell starts off very well by discussing what he means by "evil": the immediate and unjust suffering of an individual. For Russell this is an immediate and visceral experience, not a philosophical conclusion or theological category. We know evil when we see it, and there's no mistaking it.

Having set these terms of reference, Russell goes on to discuss how evil and its related mythological characters were portrayed in various ancient societies, from India to Iran to Mesopotamia to Egypt, among others. Along the way he shows how various characteristics were eventually echoed by the Biblical portrait of the Devil. For example, in Egypt the god most identified with evil was Seth, killer of Osiris. Seth was pictured as red, the color eventually taken on by Satan. Seth was also "twinned" with Horus in a close antagonism, as the Devil eventually came to be regarded as the dark "twin" of the good God.

Russell is clear that these links are only suggestive. There is no way of knowing exactly how ideas arrived at the minds of the writers of the ancient texts, or how they combined there. Rather, the ancient writers, having a need to explain or demonstrate certain things, reached into the bank of images and ideas of which they were aware, and made use of those that fit their purpose. Over time the Devil gradually took shape, acquiring more definite features as his role in the evolving theological system developed.

Here and there Russell makes declarations or assumptions that are not necessarily backed up by authority. He declares, for example, that in ancient Egypt and ancient Greece there was one God who manifested in the multifarious guise of the gods of mythology. It's not clear to me how true this is, or in what sense.

He also refers to "the God" and "the Devil" as near-universal concepts for many cultures, underlying specific figures such as Yahweh and Satan. Again, it's not clear to me that there really is a universal concept underlying these different manifestations.

However, these ideas are not unreasonable, and I was certainly willing to entertain them in order to engage with Russell's argument. The author did a lot of homework and a lot of thinking in preparing this book, and for me earned some credit. The idea of gods' appearing as twins or doublets in the process of unconscious contents' becoming differentiated en route to consciousness is intriguing, plausible, and backed up by the thinking of Jung and Erich Neumann, among others.

There is a certain diffuseness to the book that comes from the fact that ideas usually cannot be linked with certainty. The process is probabilistic. Russell assembles myths, images, ideas from various places, and there is a feeling that he is preparing to launch into a more definite account which never actually happens. Or maybe it does happen—in the subsequent books of the series.

In this one, the outlines of the Devil appear gradually, as though he were walking slowly toward us out of a fog.

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Bonnie and Clyde: the shape of things to come

In November 2008 Kimmie and I changed our regular Saturday-night DVD viewing. Having till that point watched movies in series picked by me with themes like "romantic comedies" or "movies of the 80s", we decided to embark on a more ambitious project. Thus was born Paul's History of Cinema Festival: an attempt to see all the best movies ever made, in chronological order, starting with D. W. Griffith's 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation. We wound up fast-forwarding through the last half of that, since it's 187 minutes long—quite a haul for a silent drama. We were also startled to find the movie to be about the heroic origin of the Ku Klux Klan, a theme so politically incorrect today that I couldn't help enjoying it.

It's three years on and we've stepped up the pace by watching not one but two movies a week, on Saturday and Sunday nights. We've made it to 1967. I've been meaning to start blogging about them, and now finally I will. First up: last night's feature, Bonnie and Clyde, directed by Arthur Penn and starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. I thought it was pretty good, and wound up rating it 8/10 on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), but I also decided I wouldn't need to see it again, and therefore rated as a C in my own system, meaning, roughly, "seen it enough, thanks". A rating of B means "willing to see it again"; a rating of A means "top quality, thoroughly excellent".

On Twitter this morning I posted this tweet:

Watched "Bonnie and Clyde" (1967) last night: detached, violent, eerily relevant. My #IMDb rating: 8/10.

The credited writers were David Newman and Robert Benton, but I noticed during the opening credits that Robert Towne had a credit of something like "special assistant to the producer". Now the producer was Warren Beatty himself, and I knew that Towne was—or at that date would become—a major screenwriter; and sure enough, in checking IMDb I found that Towne was an uncredited writer on the show. Putting it together, my guess would be that Beatty brought Towne in to do a rewrite of the script, and was prevented for some reason, possibly contractual, from giving him a writing credit. That's just a guess. In looking at Towne's IMDb profile I see that he did a lot of uncredited work.

The writing was quite good and the movie itself well made. For me the story did not have the tension that it should have, but built along the lines of acquiring more members of the gang, making bigger bank heists, and getting into progressively more ferocious shootouts with the law, until finally they're betrayed and led into an ambush in which the lawmen don't stint on machine-gun rounds. Exit one pair of good-looking bank robbers from the earthly plane.

The adjective detached from this morning's tweet refers to Arthur Penn's directorial style, which I'd noticed a couple of months ago while watching The Miracle Worker, the film version of the award-winning Broadway play that he had also directed. There seems to be a clean, architectural coolness to his style. There is a feeling of watching movement or violence or passion, and the director is watching it with you. His style feels calm, unhurried, and objective, as well as aesthetic and mature. There's a feeling of head rather than heart, and that tends to be uninvolving.

Next: violent. The movie is that, and I seem to recall (I was 8 years old when it was released) that it was notorious for that and gained a "restricted" rating for violence alone (there is no sex or nudity in the show). There is lots of shooting and some blood, but in all the violence seems kind of antiseptic. The most graphic and moving instance of violence is late in the movie when Bonnie and Clyde are both shot in an ambush (not the climactic one). There is some sense of the terrible suffering inflicted by these people and these weapons, but very soon afterwards the two attractive characters are sporting light, clean slings and all is soon well again. People are shot in the movie, people die, but there is a sense that it's merely for story, and not so much a matter of human suffering.

Finally: eerily relevant. For me one of the most powerful scenes in the film was early on, before the recently united Bonnie and Clyde have begun their crime spree. They've spent the night in an abandoned house, and are startled in the morning when a stranger, a farmer, suddenly catches them by surprise. Clyde pulls a gun on the stranger, who turns out to be no other than the former owner of the house. He has pulled up in his truck with his family to give the place one last look, for, as a sign nailed over the front declares, the place has been repossessed by the bank, and they are leaving, maybe, like the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath, for California. For it is 1932 and the Great Depression is on them, whether people know it yet or not.

Clyde, who's taken a couple of shots at the bank's sign, offers his gun to the farmer to take a shot. The farmer, diffident and stoic, at first declines, but then, urged by Clyde, accepts and takes a single shot at the sign. He shyly enjoys it, and calls over a black farmhand to also take one—which he does. Having thus revenged themselves harmlessly on the bank, they get back in the truck and drive away.

This scene was a wonderful and original creation, well written, well acted, and well directed. But it moved me for a further reason, and changed the way I viewed the rest of the film. That vacant, derelict house, with the foreclosure sign nailed over its front window, was a picture of America again today. And the forces that created that depression, and dispossessed simple people of their homes, could turn a shy, God-fearing farmer briefly into a gun-wielding outlaw. And they were the same forces that created Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, young poor people, barely employable, with few prospects and an inchoate feeling of social wrong. They could never earn nice cars, but they could steal them; they could never live like bankers, but they could steal some—a little—of the bankers' money. Inequitable economic forces acting slowly over a long time destroyed the social contract, and two symptoms of the resulting disease are Bonnie and Clyde.

Those inequitable economic forces have now been acting for a still longer time. The symptoms are erupting around us, and growing worse. Bonnie and Clyde is not a story about the past; it is about the present and the future. In pursuing their career of lawless, heedless greed the Bonnies and Clydes are not rebelling against the authorities of their society, they are following their example.

sketchbook: Saturday 12 November 2011

SAT 12 NOV 2011 12:40 p.m. IN THE CAR

Parked in the lot outside Michael's craft store while Kimmie shops. Quick rattle of raindrops falling like rice-grains on the roof. Windshield misted over with lobes of fog, making the gray day even more indistinct: it's disappearing behind the cataract of condensation.

The inside of the car is all gray too: gray padded dashboard, gray padded steering wheel, smoke-gray upholstery, gray carpeting, gray floormats imprinted with wet boot-treads and sprinkled with little maple-leaves and tan fir-needles. Kimmie's collapsible umbrella lies on the floor: black with pink polka dots; her black polar-fleece gloves lie on the passenger seat, palm to palm in a gesture of prayer.

The world outside is almost completely befogged now. The hulks of other parked cars rest stoically like boats in a marina. Next to me one car pulls away, its taillight a lone red star in the dimness. And another gray car slips into place immediately behind it like the next customer at a drive-thru.

why this office is a poppy-free zone

The democratic state has seldom been tempted to undertake the burdens of empire without suffering from a discordance between its domestic and its foreign policy. Again and again, Thucydides describes the efforts of the Athenians to reconcile their imperialism abroad with democracy at home.

The deeper peril for democracy seems to lie in the effect of war upon its institutions and on the morality of its people. As Hamilton writes in The Federalist: "The violent destruction of life and property incident to war, the continual effort and alarm attendant on a state of continual danger, will compel nations the most attached to liberty to resort for repose and security to institutions which have a tendency to destroy their civil and political rights. To be more safe, they at length become willing to run the risk of being less free."

I typed these words this morning from the concluding paragraphs of the introductory essay to the Great Idea of Democracy in volume 2 of the Britannica Great Books of the Western World: The Great Ideas. I was chilled as I typed them, even as they seemed especially fitting material for Remembrance Day.

This problem of reconciling imperialism abroad with democracy at home remains as acute today as it was in the time of Thucydides in the 5th century BC. And, as Mortimer J. Adler says in that same introduction:

The denouement of the Peloponnesian war, and especially of the Syracusan expedition, is the collapse of democracy, not through the loss of empire but as a result of the moral sacrifices involved in trying to maintain or increase it. Tacitus, commenting on the decay of republican institutions with the extension of Rome's conquests, underlines the same theme. It is still the same theme when the problems of British imperialism appear in Mill's discussion of how a democracy should govern its colonies or dependencies.

And it's still the same theme today with the American empire. According to Chalmers Johnson in his excellent Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire:

A decade after the end of the Cold War, hundreds of thousands of American troops are stationed on over 61 base complexes in 19 countries worldwide, using the Department of Defense's narrowest definition of a "major installation"; if one included every kind of installation that houses representatives of the American military, the number would rise to over 800.

That was in 2000; the numbers will be higher now. So it is an empire of garrisons rather than an overt expansion for Lebensraum, which the United States does not need. And the reason? Overtly, it will no doubt be close to that enunciated by President Jimmy Carter in his State of the Union address in January 1980:

An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.

Here you have the rationale: the idea of defense shifts from defense of your country to "defense" of its "vital interests". And what are those? In Carter's speech he was talking about oil from the Persian Gulf "region". But one's vital interests are wherever one says they are.

The Wikipedia article on the Carter Doctrine includes this interesting point:

In "The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power", author Daniel Yergin notes that the Carter Doctrine "bore striking similarities" to a 1903 British declaration, in which British Foreign Secretary Lord Landsdowne warned Russia and Germany that the British would "regard the establishment of a naval base or of a fortified port in the Persian Gulf by any other power as a very grave menace to British interests, and we should certainly resist it with all the means at our disposal."

(Incidentally, I regard The Prize as one of the best nonfiction books I have ever read.)

In 1903 Britain was the world's dominant imperial power. Now they've been reduced to the status of helpers ("stooges", I suppose, in Communist-speak) of the dominant imperial power (earning Tony Blair his "poodle" tag), a status shared to some extent by Canada. Our "me too" military actions such as the invasions of Afghanistan and Libya help provide consensual cover for the key actor, and also entitle us to a share of any spoils.

In Blowback and the other two books in his trilogy on the American empire, Johnson warns of the growing degradation of America's democratic institutions by militarism—an observation that apparently places him in a line of similar commentators stretching back to Thucydides.

In another very good book, "Exterminate All the Brutes", author Sven Lindqvist shows how the tension between the civilized, lawful society at home and the brutality of the imperial frontier warps and damages the perpetrators of empire. The title of his book is taken from Conrad's The Heart of Darkness, and represents Kurtz's final word on his civilizing mission to Africa. You need to be made of stern stuff, as Winston Churchill was, to be able to slaughter darkies by the thousand in Africa and then come home to sip tea with the ladies. Most men, including Kurtz, can't step back and forth over that line; for them it's a one-way trip to hell—a hell of which they are the lords.

Imperialism and human rights don't mix. It turns out people don't like being invaded and occupied, don't like garrisons of foreign soldiers in their cities. They don't value your interests as much as you do. They resist and thereby invite liquidation. Or sometimes you just make mistakes like blowing up wedding parties. It's unfortunate, but you have to accept these things when your interests are at stake.

Yes, I was lucubrating on all this while Kimmie and Robin headed off into the rain to attend the Remembrance Day observances at the cenotaph in Victoria Park nearby. I don't attend Remembrance Day celebrations and I don't wear a poppy. It's not because I don't appreciate Canada's armed forces, because I do; or that I don't feel sorrow at the death and suffering that they have endured, because I do. And it's not because my father and his mother, as Latvian refugees in Germany during World War II, had to dodge Allied bombs and bullets, and barely escaped with their lives, although they did.

No, it's because "honoring the glorious dead" and "supporting our troops" are some of the most cherished slogans of a militarist regime, and some of its best propaganda tools. It wasn't my idea to send Canadian troops to Afghanistan to find out why it's called The Graveyard of Empires, and it never would be my idea. My idea of supporting the troops is bringing them home for good, and letting them stand on guard here. Speaking for myself, I'd feel a whole lot more secure with Canadian forces in Canada rather than assisting in the American imperial project.

One slogan I feel more sympathy with is "lest we forget". But I'm afraid that the fact that a Chalmers Johnson, 2,500 years later, has to repeat the message first enunciated by his ancient colleague Thucydides, means that we have yet to learn the thing that we shouldn't forget.