Author Archives: disinterested spectator

Alice Adams (1935) and Stella Dallas (1937)

It is only natural to want nice things, and provided a man comes by them honestly, people will approve of his efforts to obtain them.  (I am using the masculine gender here merely for ease of expression.)  If he works hard to make more money so that he can own his own home, that is just part of the American dream.  To that end, he may pursue an education in hopes of finding employment for which he will be well paid.  In so doing, his socio-economic status will be enhanced, for that is largely a function of income and education level.

But getting into the upper class is another thing entirely, for achieving that depends largely on being accepted into it by those that already belong, something that is not readily forthcoming for someone trying to ascend from the lower ranks, whom the elite are likely to regard as an upstart.  Nor will his efforts to rise to the upper echelons of society be met with approval by those in his own class, whom he obviously deems not good enough for his association.

Given this disapproval coming from both classes, we might expect one of two outcomes in which the protagonist in a story is a social climber:  either he will be punished and come to an unhappy end, or he will learn to accept his place in the world, finding contentment thereby.  More often than not, however, this proves not be the case when the protagonist is a woman.  Or rather, she is punished in the middle of the movie, but ultimately rewarded, in which case social climbing is not repudiated, but rather is seen to have paid off.

Two movies that exemplify this principle are Alice Adams (1935) and Stella Dallas (1937).  These movies have many things in common.  For one thing, they were both made around the same time.  For another, their titles refer to their respective female protagonists.  Both were remakes of silent films, Alice Adams (1923) and Stella Dallas (1925).  Both were based on novels written just after World War I, 1921 and 1923 respectively.  But most importantly, both are thematically related in the way the women in these movies, both coming from working-class families, are motivated by a desire to become upper class by marrying into it.  In each case, there is a mother who wants this for her daughter:  the daughter being the protagonist in the former; the mother, in the latter.

The title character of Alice Adams, played by Katherine Hepburn, is a young woman who lives in a small town named South Renford. At first, it appears to be the strangest small town you ever saw, because everyone seems to be rich except the Adams family. Alice gets invited to dances and parties for the upper class, but she cannot afford to dress the way they do. The upper-class men never ask her out, so she has to coerce her brother Virgil to escort her. At the dance, the men prefer to dance with women of their own class, and as her brother deserts her, she is left alone and comes across as a wallflower. In other words, we never see other young women of working-class background for her to be friends with, and we never see working-class men asking her out for a date. What an odd town.

Of course, we know that this cannot be. No town is like that. In fact, there are bound to be far more working-class families than rich ones: young women of her own class to be friends with; young men of her own class to fall in love with. Now, in one sense, we do  see a few people that are working class aside from those in the Adams family, miscellaneous shopkeepers and workmen for instance.  And there is Virgil, who prefers working-class companions to those Alice wants to socialize with. However, all those of his class we see him with are black:  we see him shooting craps with black servants, and at the dance, he greets the black bandleader, who in turn is happy to see him. It is left to us to infer, I suppose, that they know each other from a nightclub where black musicians provide entertainment for white working-class patrons, whom we never actually see.  In any event, we may assume that Alice never goes to that nightclub, where she might meet people in her own class. In fact, she is mortified when Virgil says “Hi” to the bandleader.

This association between Alice’s brother and African Americans is presumably twofold.  First, we do not expect Alice to socialize with black women or to date black men.  So, the more we think of the working class in South Renford as being composed of African Americans, the more we are induced to forget about her having any chances of finding love and friendship within that class.  Second, given the attitudes toward African Americans in 1935, the more the working class is associated with them, the more undesirable that class seems to be.

In any event, Alice is a big phony. And yet, we know we are supposed to feel sorry for her. To a certain extent we do. We all know how young people desperately want things that really do not matter, and it is painful to watch her suffer so from pretending to be something she is not, especially when we also know that she could be happy if she just let all that go. In fact, that is why we never see young women of her own class inviting her to parties or young men of her own class asking her out. If we did, and she snubbed them, we would have no sympathy for her. But by making it look as though she lives in a town where there are no opportunities for her in her own class, absurd as that is, we are more forgiving of her pretensions.

At the dance, Alice meets Arthur (Fred MacMurray), who seems to be quite taken with her, but she is just as much of a phony with him as with everyone else. It is hard to understand what he sees in her.  Later in the movie, Alice invites Arthur to have dinner at her house, for which purpose Malena (Hattie McDaniel) is hired, another black representative of the working class in South Renford.

But while we are trying to overlook Alice’s affectations as the folly of youth, we discover that her mother, apparently in her fifties, is just as foolish as Alice in such matters. Instead of encouraging Alice to stay within her class, she berates her husband for not making more money so that Alice can continue to socialize with the town’s upper crust. So much for the wisdom that supposedly comes with age.

Alice’s father is recovering from a long illness. His boss, Mr. Lamb, continues to pay him a salary and holds his job open for him, and her father wants to go back to work there when he gets better. But Alice’s mother pushes him to go into business by starting a glue factory, based on a formula that actually seems to belong to his boss, inasmuch as Alice’s father discovered it on company time.

What we are hoping for is that Alice will realize how wrongheaded she has been. Instead, the movie justifies her. Virgil gets into a jam and steals $150 from Mr. Lamb, whom he also works for, probably to pay off a gambling debt to some of those black servants he was shooting craps with. In other words, we can no longer admire Virgil for being content to fraternize with those in his class, thereby making it seem right for Alice to avoid such people as unworthy.

Anyway, with Alice’s father stealing the glue formula and Alice’s brother stealing the money, Mr. Lamb shows up at the Adams house to let them have a piece of his mind. It all looks pretty grim. But Alice tells him that it is all her and her mother’s fault for pushing her father to make more money. Mr. Lamb is magnanimous, willing to let Alice’s father have his job back when he gets well, willing to give them time to pay back the $150, and willing to let Alice’s father share in the profits from the glue formula.  But we should note that while Alice explains why her mother pushed her father to start a glue factory, which is so that she could have social status and be happy, she gives no indication that her desire to hobnob with rich society was an unworthy goal.

Ultimately, she has learned nothing. We had hoped that she would quit being a phony, make friends with women in her own class, and fall in love with a man who is also from a working-class background. But no. The movie rewards her vanity by having Arthur fall in love with her and want to marry her. Because he is one of the elite, and presumably has plenty of money, she will get what she always wanted, inclusion in the upper class of South Renford.  Now she can be the real thing.

We see two principles at work here that make Alice’s desire to be upper class somewhat palatable:  there don’t seem to be any opportunities for her in her own class, for it appears to be practically nonexistent; and through her brother’s example, her own class is portrayed as something any reasonable person would wish to get away from.  Together, they allow Alice’s punishment to be mild and temporary, while bringing her love and happiness in the end.

Barbara Stanwyck plays the title character of Stella Dallas.  This movie is a little more realistic in that we are aware of the fact that there are plenty of working-class folks in Stella’s town of Millhampton, Massachusetts, many of whom work in a mill, including her father and her brother.  We see mill hands saying hello to Stella as they walk by, but she is indifferent in her response to them.  Like Alice’s brother, Stella’s brother is content to be working class, but Stella has set her sights on Stephen Dallas.  We learn from a brief glance at a newspaper clipping that Stephen was a man who came from an upper-class family.  His once-millionaire father ended up penniless and committed suicide, leaving his son nothing.  Stephen had hoped to marry Helen Morrison, his childhood sweetheart, but given his sudden misfortune, he simply disappeared, leaving a note saying that he was going to try to make a new life, which he apparently succeeded in doing, inasmuch as he has become the advertising manager at the mill.  As a result of his disappearance, however, Helen has since married another man.

All this information is given to us in a matter of seconds, but let’s think about it for a little longer than that.  By having Stephen simply disappear, the movie avoids putting Helen in a bad light.  We are allowed to think that she would have married Stephen anyway.  After all, with his Harvard education, he could have supported her with a decent middle-class job like the one he got at the mill.  Through his action, he is basically saying that he regarded himself as being unworthy of her, which is a kind of reverse snobbery.  As a result, we are not surprised that when Stella manages to get him to marry her, he will come to think of her as unworthy of him.

But that’s only after they get married.  While they are just dating, Stella tells Stephen that she wants to improve herself, to do everything “well-bred and refined.”  “And Dull,” Stephen replies.  “Stay as you are. Don’t pretend.  Anyway, it isn’t really well-bred to act the way you aren’t.”  Of course, when people say, “Just be yourself,” they usually have no idea what they are encouraging.  They want you to be the person they imagine you to be, not the person you really are, which you have been at great pains to conceal, and rightly so.

Anyway, when they get married, that changes everything.  Stella quits trying to improve herself, and Stephen becomes embarrassed by the way her working-class background keeps surfacing.  She wears costume jewelry, and she uses bad grammar—Stephen pulls a long face when she says “further” when she should have said “farther.”  After she has a baby, she is not weak and bedridden the way any decent, upper-class woman would be, but rather her quick recovery is downright shameless and low class.  Stephen is appalled.

The night they get back from the hospital, she discovers an invitation to go to a dance at the River Club, a club for the elite that Stella has long wanted to belong to, and she prevails upon Stephen to attend.  At the dance, she meets Ed Munn (Alan Hale), a racetrack tout, popular with the upper class on account of the tips he provides them.  Ed and Stella really hit it off, because he is the sort of man Stella should have married.  He introduces her to some of the richest people in town.

After the dance, Stephen tells her he has been promoted to a position in New York, and that she will have to try extra hard to behave appropriately when they get there.  Needless to say, that ticks her off. She tells Stephen that she wants to stay in Millhampton, now that she has finally become a part of that town’s high society.  This leads to their separation, during which time she continues her friendship with Ed, which is completely innocent, but which makes Stephen suspicious and scandalizes Millhampton society.  As a result, Stella’s daughter Laurel is ostracized, as when the upper-class mothers of the children invited to her birthday party suddenly send excuses for being unable to attend.  Stephen becomes reacquainted with the now-widowed Helen and they start seeing each other regularly, but because they do so with decorum and refinement, no one in New York holds that against them.

Of course, if Laurel were to make working-class friends, there wouldn’t be a problem, although Stella would undoubtedly discourage that.  In any event, we are not supposed to think about that, just as we were not supposed to think about the opportunities for love and friendship in the working-class milieu for Alice Adams.  Because Laurel’s social opportunities in Millhampton have supposedly been foreclosed, once we suppress all thought of her opportunities among the working class, Laurel ends up spending a lot of time with her father in New York.  In so doing, she acquires the polish her mother lacks.  And she makes a lot of upper-class friends.  Meanwhile, Stella has become so garish and loud in manner and dress that she is a parody of a floozy, and Ed has become a drunken slob, the result, apparently, of his unrequited love for Stella.  In other words, we are presented with a picture of the working class that is so tawdry and repulsive that no one born into it could reasonably be expected to be content to remain there.

Both principles that worked to justify Alice’s desire to be admitted into the upper class are at work here too, only they apply to Stella’s daughter:  social opportunities among the working class appear to be nonexistent, and being working class is depicted as so awful that we cringe at the idea of Laurel being trapped in it.

Stella finally realizes what upper-class people really think of her. She gives Stephen a divorce so he can marry Helen, and so that Laurel can live with them and have all the advantages of an upper-class life.  Laurel remains faithful to her mother, but Stella pretends to reject her so that she will live with her father, telling Laurel that she and Ed are going to get married and live in South America, and that she doesn’t want to be bothered with her anymore.  Eventually, Laurel marries a rich young man, as Stella watches outside in the rain, after which she walks away, knowing that they will live happily ever after, because it is on account of her sacrifice that her daughter will now be upper class.  It is this sacrifice on the part of a mother for her daughter that is the central idea of Stella Dallas, but that sacrifice makes sense only if being a member of the upper class is such a wonderful thing that it justifies the estrangement of mother and daughter, who will never see each other again.

The moral of these two movies, then, is that if you are a working-class woman and you try to become a member of the upper class, people will spot you as a phony, and you will be humiliated.  But if you persevere and manage to pull it off by marrying up, it will bring love and happiness, as it does to Alice directly, with the connivance of her mother, and to Stella vicariously, through her daughter Laurel.

But don’t try this if you are a man.  Men that are social climbers, especially those that marry up, are seldom vouchsafed such happy endings.  In From the Terrace (1960), Paul Newman’s character marries up, but he then comes to realize that there are more important things in life than being upper class, allowing him to find happiness by marrying for love.  The title character of Barry Lyndon (1975), however, never renounces his social-climbing ambitions, and for him things end badly.  But Lyndon is only miserable.  In A Place in the Sun (1951), Montgomery Clift’s character tries to marry up and gets the death penalty.

Rich and Strange (1931)

Rich and Strange is a second-rate movie, made all the more disappointing by the fact that it was directed by Alfred Hitchcock.  We expect more from Hitchcock, so we feel let down when we watch one of his inferior films.  However, this is frequently the case with his earlier efforts.  Nevertheless, I found the movie interesting because of its attitude toward love and marriage.

Fred and Emily are a married couple.  Fred is disgruntled.  He is tired of his job, the routine of domesticity, and the kind of entertainment afforded him and his wife by the radio and the movies.  Emily appears to be satisfied with their situation, but Fred is frustrated that he cannot provide for her properly.  But mostly, he wants the “good things of life.”  There is a painting of a ship that he points to, indicating that he wants adventure.  He is irritated that Emily seems so content, thinking she ought to want more.  In his exasperation, he flings something at their cat to get him off the table.  Finally, he concludes, “I think the best place for us is a gas oven.”  Needless to say, Emily is appalled, noting that they have a plenty of food and a roof over their heads.  And needless to say, Fred is not impressed.  This is a reversal from what we usually see in the movies, where it is the nagging wife who is dissatisfied and wishes her husband could make more money so that she could have nicer things.

A common plot point in a fairy tale is for someone to get his wish, only for things to go terribly wrong.  Presumably, the point is to make us content with our lot.  In any event, as in a fairy tale, a letter arrives from Fred’s uncle, who has decided to give Fred an advance on his inheritance so that he can travel and enjoy life to the full.  He and Emily set sail from England, heading first to France before eventually ending up in the Far East.

On board the ship, Fred gets seasick, leaving Emily enough free time to make friends with Commander Gordon, with whom she soon falls in love, though hesitantly.  Fred finally recovers, meets a princess, with whom he soon falls in love without any hesitation whatsoever.  He is so obvious about it that Emily forms an even stronger attachment to Gordon.

And it is here that we get the first indication that this movie has an unusual attitude toward love.  Emily asks Gordon if he has ever been in love, and he replies, “No, I can’t say that I have.”  Gordon is played by Percy Marmont, an actor who was about thirty-eight years old at the time, so we can figure that Gordon is supposed to be a man in his thirties as well.  The idea that a man could reach that age never having been in love is preposterous.  So, we have to assume that what most of us would call “love,” this movie would dismiss as puppy love, infatuation, or simply lust.  In other words, this movie has an idealistic notion of love, from which vantage point it is assumed that the only way for a (heterosexual) man to still be a bachelor in his thirties would be if either he had never truly been in love, or if his true love was unrequited, something he never completely got over.

At the same time, Emily espouses a grim view of love.  She says that because she loves Fred, she wants him to think well of her, but because he is so clever, he frequently makes her feel foolish.  In other words, he belittles her with his “cleverness.”  She goes on to say that love makes people timid.  They are frightened when they are happy and sadder when they are sad.  Everything is multiplied by two, such as sickness and death.  That’s why she is so happy with Gordon, she says, because he is not clever, and if he were to tire of talking to her and excuse himself, it would not be a big deal.  They agree that it is lucky they are not in love.  But then she concludes that love is a wonderful thing.  In other words, love justifies all the misery it puts people through, which is an essential feature of this movie’s sentimental notions of love.

Things eventually reach the point where Fred and the princess are going to run off together, and Emily is going to leave Fred and marry Gordon.  But Gordon makes the mistake of telling Emily how much he despises Fred, that he is a sham, just a “great baby masquerading as a big, strong man.”  He then goes on to mention that the “princess” is actually an adventuress who wants Fred only for his money.  That brings out Emily’s pity.  She leaves Gordon to go back to Fred, noting at one point that a wife is more than half a mother to her husband.

When she gets back to their room, she finds Fred and the princess making arrangements to leave.  Speaking sotto voce, the princess tells Emily she was a fool not to go with Gordon, for then both women would have benefited, after which she leaves, ostensibly to let Fred and Emily speak to each other alone.  Now, Gordon may have made a mistake bad mouthing Fred to Emily, but she turns around and not only tells Fred what Gordon said, but also that she realized he was telling the truth, so that’s why she came back to him.  When she repeats to Fred that Gordon said he was a sham and a bluff, Fred says he ought to smash him.  But Emily says that Gordon wouldn’t be afraid of him because he knows that Fred is a coward.  The reason she came back, she says, is that she now realizes that all along she had dressed up his faults as virtues, and that he would be lost without her.  Well, Fred would have to be the cowardly worm Emily says he is in order for him to remain married to her after she said all that.

Meanwhile, the princess takes off with £1,000 pounds of Fred’s money (about $80,000 today).  Almost broke, they catch a cheap ship to get back home, but it almost sinks and they are abandoned.  However, a Chinese junk comes along, the crew of which are intent on salvage.  Fred and Emily board the ship.  One of the crew gets tangled up in the lines, struggles, and then drowns.  The rest of the crew simply watch, with no one making a move to help him.  Back in those days, it was believed that people in the Orient were indifferent to the suffering of others, and this movie reflects that notion.

While Fred and Emily are on the Chinese junk, a woman has a baby. From the way they look at each other, there seems to be the suggestion that Fred and Emily are inspired to have a baby themselves, now that they are reconciled. Back home, Fred wonders whether they can get a “pram” (baby carriage) up the stairs, and Emily responds that they are going to have to get a bigger place anyway, presumably because they will need an extra bedroom.  So, it looks as though the baby is a done deal.

But I could not help wondering, “Whose baby is it?” The movie is not explicit about how far these two went with their philandering, although one gets the sense that Fred and the “princess” went all the way, while Emily and Gordon never went beyond kissing. But with these old movies, so much is left to the imagination that it is hard to tell.

Then again, even if we assume that Emily and Gordon did not have sex, I can’t help but wonder how long it will take Fred to start wondering whose baby it is.

And in any event, if Fred gets so irritated with their cat, what is he going to be like when the squalling baby arrives?

Are we really supposed to regard this as a happy ending?

Is Hate Innate?

In the aftermath of the violence in Charlottesville, Barack Obama quoted Nelson Mandela in a tweet:

No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.

In addition, Nikki Haley issued an email to her staff condemning the hatred in that same event, noting that “People aren’t born with hate.”  These remarks are in response to President Trump’s failure to unequivocally condemn Nazis, Klansmen, and white supremacists generally, who are undoubtedly filled with hatred for blacks and Jews especially, but for anyone who is not white or not Christian.  But what caught my attention here is the fact that Obama and Haley were not content merely to condemn hate; they went further and insisted that we are not born with hate.

Presumably, they suppose that by denying the innate existence of hate, they are making some kind of case against hatred. However, as they do not explicitly make that case themselves, it is left to us to try to figure out what they have in mind and what they suppose it proves.  Hopefully, their point is not that babies do not emerge from the womb filled with hate for people of a different race or religion, for that would be a simpleminded argument against a position that no one has ever held. Rather, the only interesting question is whether people are born with a disposition to hate, an emotion that will become manifest under certain circumstances.  In other words, the question is whether people are born with a natural inclination to have feelings of enmity toward those who are different. Therefore, let us be generous and suppose not that Obama and Haley were making a case about what the newborn baby is thinking and feeling before the umbilical cord has even been cut, but rather that they are saying that there is no innate disposition to hate which may express itself as the child grows up.

Obama and Haley would seem to be of the same frame of mind as Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  In his book Émile, Rousseau averred that “all is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things, all degenerates in the hands of men.”  In an earlier work, Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality among Men, he argued that it is civilization that has corrupted man; for in a state of nature, he is noble and good. For writing such things, Rousseau was accused of impiety by the archbishop of Paris, because his assertion that man is basically good contradicted the doctrine of original sin, which held that man was basically evil. The question as to whether man is basically good or evil is not the same as the question as to whether man has a natural inclination to love or to hate, but they are close cousins.

Given that Obama and Haley do not believe people are born with a disposition to hate, we do not know, unfortunately, whether they believe that people are born with a disposition to love.  But given the readiness with which a baby comes to love its mother and the universal tendency for people to fall in love later in life, hopefully they do accept that at least love is innate.  But to say as much for love, yet deny the same for hate would be bizarre.  In defending the doctrine of original sin, St. Augustine pointed out that if babies had the size and strength of adults, they would be monsters.  In his Confessions, he says:

Who can recall to me the sins I committed as a baby?  For in your [God’s] sight no man is free from sin, not even a child who has lived only one day on earth….  If babies are innocent, it is not for lack of will to do harm, but for lack of strength.

I have myself seen jealousy in a baby and know what it means.  He was not old enough to talk, but whenever he saw his foster-brother at the breast, he would grow pale with envy….  Such faults are not small or unimportant….  It is clear that they are not mere peccadilloes, because the same faults are intolerable in older persons.

It may be that Obama and Haley are trying to say in their incomplete way that while indeed people have innate dispositions to love and to hate, the object of their love or hatred is not inherited but acquired.  In the old days, when marrying well was an important goal for young women, it was often said that they went to college to get their MRS; for while no one can be taught to love one person rather than another, it is nevertheless true that we tend to fall in love with someone we are around a lot rather than someone we run into only occasionally.  Love, that is to say, cannot be taught, but it can be encouraged and abetted.

In a similar manner, hate cannot be taught, but it can be encouraged and abetted. But only up to a point.  My grandfather belonged to the Ku Klux Klan. My father never joined, but he would have fit right in.  And he used to say, regarding the Jews, that Hitler had the right idea.  Raised in the Jim Crow South, I was taught not to use the water fountains or restrooms marked “Colored.”  I observed the rule much in the same way that I used the silverware at the dinner table in the proper manner. But my heart was never in it.  I have often thought that many of us in the Jim Crow South really did not believe in segregation, but we went along with it in order not to incur the wrath of those who were filled with hatred for blacks. So when integration was finally imposed on the South, it met with no resistance from people like us. Had all whites hated blacks, the Civil Rights movement would have failed. But as the haters were in the minority, it succeeded.  The main point of all this, however, is that while I was taught to hate blacks and Jews, I never did. In other words, people are born with varying dispositions to love and to hate, and those dispositions can be stronger than the influence of education.

Presumably, then, Obama and Haley wish to emphasize the goodness of man and the importance of education in their remarks.  It is an optimistic ideology, for if hate is not innate and if education is efficacious, then we can all look forward to a future in which racism and other forms of discrimination no longer exist.  But I doubt that “love comes more naturally to the human heart than hate.”  It all depends on the heart. Hatred will always be with us, for many people are born with a natural disposition to hate those who are different, and that disposition can be easily reinforced through education and friendship.

Musings on the Market

One of the frustrating things about politics is the sense of futility one gets.  I live in Texas, a winner-take-all state that always goes Republican in a presidential election.  I live in Houston, which has gerrymandered districts in which incumbents almost never lose, mostly because they are never even challenged. The inevitable result is apathy, a reasonable attitude to have regarding something beyond one’s control.  I manage to overcome this apathy just enough to vote the straight Democratic ticket, but that is about all.  As most of the people I play bridge with are Republicans, the opportunity does arise occasionally for a discussion of politics. Theoretically, there is the possibility that a nice argument might persuade someone to reconsider his political views, but as a practical matter, it never seems to happen.

In many ways, one also gets a sense of futility when it comes to the economy. As with politics, there is nothing I can do about America’s fiscal policy or the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve, and there is nothing I can do about whether Obamacare will be repealed or whether there will be tax cuts for the rich, except to become more apathetic.  As with politics, I can engage in discussions of economics with the Republicans I play bridge with, though without any hope of persuading anyone to my point of view.  Occasionally, when my partner and I are down by over a thousand points, I will casually remark between hands that I think it would be a good idea to raise taxes and cut defense; for my Republican friends are not apathetic, and there is the hope that my offending comment will be so disturbing as to throw them off their game.  I actually think it has worked once or twice.

Unlike voting in an election, where there is the nagging feeling that that one’s vote does not count, one’s vote when it comes to personal finances can have consequences of great significance.  Far from producing a feeling of apathy, making decisions about one’s own money can produce a great deal of anxiety and insomnia. You can read all the books you like, allowing others to persuade you to invest your money one way or another, but when it comes to time to buy or sell, you don’t have to persuade anybody.  The stakes are high, and you are on your own.

In one sense, I am quite fortunate.  The amount of money I have saved in combination with my Social Security checks is adequate for the necessities and a few luxuries.  So far.  There is a lot of longevity in my family, so even though I am seventy years old, I may have to support myself for decades. And that means that if I make a mistake with my money, I may find myself facing a hard old age.

Until recently, I had been rather sanguine about my investments.  The stock market had been advancing nicely since 2009, and the dividends I had been collecting had been giving me a warm feeling of security.  But then things started becoming worrisome.  The stock market, by many metrics, had become overvalued. The “Trump bump” made it even more so.  The Federal Reserve had started raising interest rates, and they are talking about unwinding their four-and-a-half trillion dollar balance sheet.  And then, on March 4, 2017, Trump tweeted that Obama tapped his phones and that Obama was bad or sick. That was the proverbial last straw.  I said to myself, “This will never end well,” and on Monday, March 6, I sold every share of stock I had.  But now, instead of those nice dividends, the interest I get having all my money in a money market fund is less than one percent, which in turn is less than inflation, giving me a real return that is negative.  So, instead of worrying about a bear market, I now have to worry about declining principal.

Anyway, among the Republicans I play bridge with, there are several retired financial advisers.  One in particular made the usual arguments, to wit, that no one can successfully time the market, that I won’t know when to get back in, that buy and hold has worked over the long haul, and so on, arguments that I have been familiar with and accepted for forty years. And since, according to my calculations, the gains in the stock market since I got out plus dividends I would have received amount to an opportunity cost to me of five percent, this financial adviser has been giving me a none too subtle raspberry for the last five months.

Of course, financial advisers are biased.  Even if a financial adviser knew that going to cash was the right thing to do, he could never recommend such action to his clients.  After about six months to a year of being in cash, receiving a paltry interest rate, which would be more than swallowed up by fees, it would likely occur to a client that if his money is just going to sit there in a money market fund, he doesn’t need a financial adviser at all. Then, after the passage of another six months or so, after the client had moved on to another financial adviser, who would have put him right back into the stock market, suppose that same stock market began a precipitous forty or fifty percent decline.  The original financial adviser would finally be vindicated, but it would be too late; for having lost all his clients owing to prudence, however justified, he would have long since had to find another line of work.

For the most part, having your money in the stock market is the right thing to do. Buy and hold, dollar cost averaging, reinvesting dividends—all these things pay off over the long haul.  So, financial advisers are basically doing the right thing by keeping their clients in the stock market.  But what occurred to me in all this is that what is appropriate for someone who is young or even middle age may be completely inappropriate for someone who is retired.  Actually, this is an established principle, which is why people are advised to put increasing amounts of their portfolio in bonds as they age. Would that I could!  But the interest on even long term bonds is pretty paltry right now, thanks to all that quantitative easing. Moreover, if interest rates rise, as surely they might, those bonds will lose value, and so there may be just as much risk in ten-year bonds as in the stock market.

The thing is, when I was working for a living, I could regard a decline in the stock market with dispassion.  I didn’t need my investments to live on, because I had an income.  In fact, I would continue putting my savings into the stock market and reinvesting dividends, because, as they say, the stock market was going on sale. But that is no longer true.  Now, I must dip into my savings to fund my retirement. And that creates an uneasy feeling.

My bridge partner has been retired for about a year now, and she is talking about going back to work.  It is my impression that she has plenty of money, much more than I do, in fact, but I think I may know the reason.  After a lifetime of adding to her savings, she is now bothered by having to make monthly withdrawals from her nest egg.  Like me, I am sure she has recalculated her finances to reassure herself that she will have enough money to last the rest of her life, even if she lives to be a hundred-and-three years old.  But drawing down on one’s savings is spooky, and she may need the feeling of security that income from employment brings.

The financial adviser who has been giving me raspberry for getting out of the market says that all I need to do is keep five years’ worth of living expenses in cash and invest the rest. That used to be my thinking.  And since I retired in 2007, just before the Great Recession, it is well that I observed that rule. But five years is not always enough.  Depending on the index you use (Dow Jones 30 or S&P 500) and depending on whether you just look at the nominal values or reinvest dividends and adjust for inflation, if you had money in the stock market in the late 1960s, it would be anywhere from fourteen to twenty years before you broke even.  If you had money in the stock market in 1929, it would be somewhere between twenty-five and thirty years before you got your money back.  And if you were in the Japanese stock market in 1989, then today, twenty-eight years later, you would still have lost half your money.

Let us be conservative and pick the least amount of time from these three examples, which is fourteen years.  That would mean that if I had five years’ worth of living expenses in cash and the rest in the stock market, then after five years I would have to start selling my stocks at depressed prices and continue to do so for the next nine years, almost guaranteeing that I would run out of money, if I lived another twenty or thirty years.  And God forbid that a Great Depression or Nikkei scenario of twenty to thirty years of depressed prices should be my fate.

The way I see it, there are three phases to saving and investing. In the beginning, there is the saving phase.  For the first few thousand dollars you save, it doesn’t matter what return you get.  The important thing is that you are saving the money, even if it just sits in your bank account.  The second is the return on investment phase, where the amount of return you get is important in order to benefit from the miracle of compound interest.  Third, there is the capital preservation phase, where keeping what you have is more important than getting a return.  That is where I am right now.  If there is never another recession or bear market in my lifetime, if this bull market goes up and up forever, and if I have to suffer raspberries from that financial adviser every time we play bridge, at least I will not run out of money (barring some catastrophe, like my having a stroke and having to go into a nursing home).  But if I got back into the stock market now, and if a bear market like any of the three I mentioned should occur, I would soon be impoverished.

From this I dare to generalize.  The baby boomers have had an impact on society and the economy from the time they were born owing to their overwhelming numbers.  Of those that are now retired, many of them will be in my shape: maybe a little better, like my bridge partner; maybe a little worse. But they will be as sensitive to and as fearful of running out of money as I am. They may be in the stock market now, desperate for yield, but the need of retired baby boomers to get out of the stock market will be much greater when it starts to go down in a big way than when they were still working for a living and could better stand the declines. In other words, the mega-bear market I fear may be exacerbated by the fact that many baby boomers have so much more to lose by being in the stock market now that they are retired, and thus will be more likely to panic and sell everything as the market descends.

Whenever I read essays on investing, there is often a disclaimer at the end that has something to do with the essay not being advice to invest this way or that.  I suppose the purpose of it is to keep the author from being sued.  I guess I should do the same.  I wrote this essay merely to put my thoughts down on electronic paper and present them to others for their consideration and possible amusement.

The Green Pastures (1936)

It is impossible to watch The Green Pastures simply as a movie.  We cannot help but think of it as an artifact, an historical document reflecting attitudes toward African Americans in the 1930s, inasmuch as this movie has an all-black cast.  Furthermore, the movie is religious in nature, reflecting the understanding that African Americans had of Christianity back then; or rather, the understanding that whites had of the understanding that blacks had of Christianity:  for certainly, this is a movie for white audiences primarily and black audiences only incidentally.  This means that our attitude toward Christianity will intrude on our viewing of this movie just as much as our attitude toward representations of African Americans.

The underlying assumption about African Americans in this movie is that they are a childlike race, holding simple, naïve beliefs.  The movie begins on a Sunday morning, when the children are rounded up for Sunday school.  The preacher tells the children about how things all began, and as he does so, the camera closes in on the eyes of a child, just before the movie presents us with a representation of what was going on in Heaven before the Creation.  In other words, what we are seeing is to be understood as doubly childlike:  the conception of Heaven held by a child belonging to a childlike race. Moreover, the child is a girl, and prejudice against the female intellect may also be at play here, further intensifying the idea that what we are about to witness is foolish, but adorably so.

Presumably, it is this childlike mentality through which Heaven is depicted that permits us to see what no other Heaven movie has dared reveal:  the Face of God.  In all the other Heaven movies, we see only an administrator or some such.  Sometimes we get to see God here on Earth, typically in satires or comedies.  In serious movies, say those of a biblical nature, we are usually limited to just hearing the voice of God or to seeing an angel delivering God’s message.  But to my knowledge, it is only in The Green Pastures that we get to see what Jehovah looks like when he is in Heaven.  In other words, he looks like Rex Ingram.

Heaven as imagined by those in the Sunday school is one in which the angels seem to be having one long picnic and fish fry.  Presumably there is sex in Heaven too, because there are little angel children running about and references to mammies.  And there is even dancing on Saturday night.  I know what you’re thinking.  How could there be a Saturday before the Creation?  But this is just one of the many anachronisms and impossibilities in this movie, which go with the presumed simple faith of the poorly educated “Negro.”  In fact, watching the stories of the Bible told anachronistically is part of this movie’s charm.  It is worth noting that even though all the angels are black, their wings are white.  I guess the association between white and goodness on the one hand and black and evil on the other was too strong to be resisted, even in a movie like this. Angels with black wings would look like demons from Hell.

A more serious question might be the following:  with Heaven being such a wonderful form of existence, why would God create an Earth full of sin and suffering?  But that is a question one could raise without ever having seen this movie.  We cannot expect this movie to solve the problem of evil when theologians have been struggling with that for centuries.  Rather, I prefer to focus on what I believe is a novel answer provided by this movie to a problem that has bedeviled many a Christian.  The Jehovah of the Old Testament is a god of wrath and vengeance, whereas the Jesus of the New Testament is a god of love and mercy.  This would make sense if Jesus were literally the son of Jehovah, distinct from his father.  But as we know, Jesus and Jehovah are one and the same.  Of course, in Revelations, the final book of the Bible, Jesus and Jehovah are united in the way they deal out death and destruction, condemning vast portions of mankind to eternal suffering in Hell, more cruel and bloodthirsty than Jehovah ever was by himself in the Old Testament.  But most people prefer a conception of Jesus as being a god of forgiveness.

Well, in this movie, after years of wreaking havoc on a sinful mankind, drowning most everyone and starting over, only to see people degenerate again into their sinful ways, Jehovah gets fed up and decides to abandon these worthless humans to their misery.  However, there is this man called Hezdrel, who is also played by Rex Ingram, whose preaching is giving Jehovah a headache, so he goes down to Earth to see what is going on.  Hezdrel says that people no longer believe in a god of wrath.  Now they believe in a god of mercy.  Jehovah asks him where he got the idea of mercy from.  Hezdrel answers, “Through suffering.”  Jehovah goes back to Heaven to reflect on the matter.  He realizes that the only way for him to become the god of mercy that people now believe in is if he suffers himself.

You can almost imagine Jesus saying to himself while growing up:  “Wow, this being a human being is a lot harder than I thought.  Life is just full of misery and suffering.  From now on, I’m going to be more sympathetic to these poor creatures that I created a long time ago.”  And then when he gets nailed to the cross and really finds out about the horrors of existence, he becomes even more determined to be merciful in the future.  In other words, Jesus did not die on the cross for our sins; rather, he suffered on the cross so that he could have some empathy.

Though not explicit in the movie, one might infer from this that suffering in general is not justified as punishment for sin, but rather is necessary for having feelings of compassion.  And so, the misery inflicted on the African slaves in this country and the mistreatment of their descendants under Jim Crow was a blessing:  if God benefited from such suffering, so too did his children.

Now, for all I know, there is some theologian I have never heard of who advanced this theory a long time ago.  But its presentation in this movie is the first I’ve ever heard of it.  Not that I’m buying it, of course, being the atheist that I am, but at least someone has finally tried to explain how Jehovah and Jesus could possibly be the same god.

Movies about Life after Death

The movie Ghost (1990) is only one of umpteen movies I have seen that might have precipitated this essay, but this one is as good a place as any to start.  My objection to movies of this sort is that the discovery that there is life after death on the part of the protagonist fails to make the profound difference in his thoughts and feelings that one would expect.  The number of movies about life after death are far too numerous for an exhaustive survey, so only a few of the better known ones will be discussed as representative.

There are three ways in which the soul can survive the body:  (1) the soul goes to a place for the departed (Heaven or Hell, for example), (2) the soul is reincarnated in another body, or (3) the soul wanders the Earth as a ghost.  And for each of these ways, there are movies in which the protagonist discovers the reality of such.  The perplexing thing is the way in which the protagonist that makes the discovery is remarkably unaffected, except insofar as his knowledge of life after death helps him in matters that concerned him before the discovery.

As for movies in which the protagonist discovers that the soul goes to an afterworld when the body dies, I covered this subject at length in my essay, “Heaven in the Movies.”  In that essay, I noted that in the movies Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) and its remake Heaven Can Wait (1978), when the protagonist discovers that Heaven exists, he is unimpressed.  All he cares about are the worldly pursuits that mattered to him when he was alive.  He never takes a moment to reflect upon Eternity.

I suppose the idea is that they have believed in God and in Heaven all along, so it is no big deal to them to have the existence of God and Heaven confirmed.  In other words, whereas an atheist like me might be expected to stand there in astonishment and to say to himself, upon being sent back to Earth, “I must change my life,” for ordinary people who already believe, it is no big deal.  But that is a facile view of human nature.  Religious people only half-believe what they hope is true, and it is this combination of half-belief and hope that constitutes the essence of faith.  A religious man would be just as impressed by the discovery that Heaven exists as any atheist, and upon being sent back to Earth to continue his life, as is the case in these two movies, this new knowledge would be just as life-transforming for him as for an atheist.

In reincarnation movies, the discovery by the protagonist that he has been reincarnated leaves him similarly unimpressed.  Of course, when people are reincarnated in the movies, they always manage to come back to life as white middle-class Americans in good health, never as untouchables in India who are forced to rummage around in a garbage dump to find something to eat.  Be that as it may, in Chances Are (1989), all the protagonist cares about when he realizes he has been reincarnated is distancing himself from the girl he is attracted to, who was his daughter in his previous life, while hooking up with her mother, who was his wife in that previous life, but who is now old enough to be his mother.  But after an angel gives him a syringe-full from the River of Lethe, he forgets that the girl is his daughter and has sex with her instead.  I guess it doesn’t matter that their souls are committing incest as long as those souls inhabit genetically unrelated bodies.  But the main point of all this is that the only effect the knowledge of reincarnation has on the protagonist is the way it complicates his sex life.

At this point, it might be noted that the movies I have presented as examples have all been comedies, and that I am taking things way too seriously.  Now, if I had laughed while watching these movies, that would be different.  But when a comedy fails to make me laugh, the absurd premises of such a movie become painfully obvious.  I have heard that some people actually did think these movies were funny, however, so I guess for them, these movies worked.  Perhaps the reason they were able to enjoy these movies is that they really do not believe in life after death themselves, and so they don’t expect the protagonist to take it seriously either.

Whereas movies about Heaven or reincarnation tend to be comedies, movies about ghosts tend to be taken more seriously, especially since ghosts take us into the genre of horror movies.  And this brings us to the movie that started this essay, which is Ghost.  In this movie, Sam (Patrick Swayze) is murdered and becomes a ghost.  He realizes his girlfriend Molly (Demi Moore) is in danger, and thus he does his utmost to keep her from being killed as well.  When he finally saves her from Carl (Tony Goldwyn) by fighting with him until Carl is accidentally killed (and dragged down to Hell by demons), he is then able to join the blessed in Heaven, his mission here on Earth having been accomplished.

At the expense of being once again admonished for taking these movies too seriously, I cannot help but wonder why he doesn’t just let Molly die so that she can join him in Heaven.  I mean, if there really is a Heaven in which we dwell in eternal bliss, who needs life on Earth?  Why drag out the misery of existence when the joys of Paradise await?  There are good things about life, to be sure, but not even the best of life could possibly compete with the happiness that awaits.

There is one movie about ghosts, however, that has the transformative effect on a man that we would expect, and that is A Christmas Carol (1951).  A greedy miser is visited by three ghosts who show him the error of his ways.  Seeing his greed and selfishness from the aspect of eternity horrifies him.  From then on he wants to do whatever he can to help others, to bring a little happiness to his fellow man.  This is one movie about life after death that makes sense.

Night Moves (2013)

Three eco-terrorists, Josh (Jesse Eisenberg), Dena (Dakota Fanning), and Harmon (Peter Saarsgaard), are tired of just talking about the environment, so they decide to blow up a dam in Oregon.  After they blow up the dam, it becomes clear that their idealistic act was naïve and worthless.  Their friends, unaware that Josh, Dena, and Harmon were the ones who blew the dam up, dismiss the whole thing as theater, because the river has twelve dams, so nothing has been accomplished.

As the movie progressed, it became clear that we would not see the dam being blown up.  This was probably for two reasons.  First, there are budgetary considerations.  One gets the feeling that this is a low-budget feature, and it is simply cheaper to let us hear the sound of the explosion as they drive away from the river rather than film a spectacle.  It reminded me of a guy I knew who was much younger than I and therefore used to modern movies.  He was complaining about an old movie he saw once, and I quickly realized he was talking about They Live by Night (1948).  He said, “These guys are planning a bank robbery, and the next thing you know, they are driving down the road listening to a news report of the bank robbery on the radio.  Today, the bank robbery would be the main part of the movie.”  But this was a low-budget film noir, and letting us hear about the bank robbery they just pulled off must have been cheaper than actually filming it.

However, there was something about the style and tone of the movie that also made one suspect there would be no grand, spectacular scene of the dam bursting, water pouring through the valley, tossing boats and cars every which way, and people screaming as they are pulled under the current.  In fact, it is part of the basic idea of this movie that Josh and Dena never really thought things through, that it would be impossible to blow up a dam without someone being killed.  They find out, as is appropriate for a story about guilt and paranoia, that someone has died at the same time we do, when they read about it in the newspaper.  And the fact that it is just one person rather than several was good too.  One death is enough to cause Dena and Josh to become guilt ridden.  Less is more.

Unfortunately, on a couple of points, the movie could not resist a turn toward the melodramatic.  First, when they get in the truck to drive away from the river, they have trouble starting it.  That is such a cliché that I was hoping that wouldn’t happen before they even got in the truck.  Oh well, at least they got it over with quickly.

A second point, however, was most unfortunate.  Dena becomes so guilt ridden that it becomes clear that it is just a matter of time before she turns herself into the police and confesses everything.  To stop her from doing this, Josh murders her.  Josh tells Harmon over the phone that it was an accident, which would have been fine, if he had pushed her and she fell down and struck her head.  But he strangled her, and that is not something one does accidentally.  In any event, this murder accomplishes nothing.  Along with some circumstantial evidence, the fact that Dena has been strangled will make it obvious to the police that Dena and Josh are the eco-terrorists they are looking for.  Therefore, Josh has to take it on the lam.  The murder would make sense only if it would keep anyone from knowing about the fact that they destroyed the dam.  But if Josh is going to have to flee the area and go into hiding anyway, then what is the point of the murder?  Better would be to simply disappear without killing Dena.  In that case, whether she talked or not would not have made much difference, and if she didn’t spill her guts, the possibility would remain open for him to return.

Just as a melodramatic spectacle of a dam blowing up would not have been in keeping with the style and tone of this movie, so too was Dena’s murder out of place.  But maybe the difference was budgetary after all:  it doesn’t cost much to film a man strangling a woman.

Arrival (2016)

Linguist Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams) has a baby girl, raises her through her childhood, and then suffers through the heartbreak of finding out that her daughter will die of an incurable disease at a young age.

Then twelve flying saucers land in different parts of the world.  People start panicking and governments begin mobilizing, which I suppose is only natural.  But let’s face it.  If they wanted to kill us, then given their advanced technology, there wouldn’t be anything we could do about it.  Be that as it may, because of Banks’ language skills, Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker) shows up in her office to enlist her in translating the language of the aliens.  Weber plays her a snippet of the aliens talking, which lasts just a few seconds, and he asks her what she makes of it, as if anyone could translate a completely alien language from such a small sample.  I was hoping her reply would be, “He said, ‘Take me to your leader.’”

Banks says she would have to interact with the aliens in person to be able to communicate with them.  Weber refuses and says he is going to Berkeley to see if Dr. Danvers will work for them instead.  Banks says, “Before you commit to him, ask him the Sanskrit word for war and its translation.”  Is this a trick question?  The translation of the Sanskrit word for war has to be “war”; otherwise, it’s not the Sanskrit word for war.  Presumably, she is talking about the etymology of that word, which is “gavisti,” rather than its translation.  In that sense, I suppose you could say that the “translation” of the Spanish word for pregnant is “embarrassed,” for example.  Anyway, the whole point of this is Banks’ way of letting them know that Danvers is second rate.  When Weber finds out that Danvers thinks the translation of “gavisti” is “an argument,” whereas Banks knows that it is actually “a desire for more cows,” Weber knows that he must give in to her demands to meet with the aliens.  Thank goodness Weber didn’t enlist Danvers for the job!  With his second-rate language skills, he might have caused an intergalactic incident.

On her way to the aliens in Montana, she meets Dr. Ian Donnelly, a theoretical physicist.  He quotes from the preface of one of her books, “Language is the foundation of civilization,” and then tells her she is wrong, because, as he puts it, “The cornerstone of civilization isn’t language, it’s science.”  I guess this is the movie’s way of introducing some kind of science-versus-the-humanities conflict into the story, but we cannot help but feel we are being manipulated into being on Banks’ side, for it is beyond obvious that you can have language without science, but you cannot have science without language.  And just in case we missed it, the point is further driven home when they arrive at the place where Banks is going to get some facetime with the aliens so she can learn how to speak Alienish.  Donnelly asks if the aliens have responded to things like Fibonacci numbers.  Weber has to point out to him that they are still working on the responses to the word “Hello.”

However, even Weber seems a little obtuse on this point.  He later complains that the vocabulary list that Banks has constructed has words like “eat” and “walk,” which he calls grade school words.  Didn’t he take a foreign language course when he was in school?  We all know that you have to start off with common words like “eat” and “walk” in the beginning, that you have to learn how to say things like, “Where is the library?” before you can start having complicated discussions about whether the aliens intend to kill us.  Once again, the movie forces us to identify with Banks, because everyone else in the movie seems to be a little bit thick.

Now, it seems to me that if the aliens have the technology to travel light-years across space, they have the technology to receive our television broadcasts, by which they could have learned to speak English before they ever got here.  But the problem with that, according to the movie’s version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, if the aliens learned to speak English, it would rewire their brains, and the next thing you know, they would become rational like us.  That would never do.  So, Banks has to learn Alienish, which will rewire her brain so that she can grasp the mystical premise of this movie, which has something to do with the Eternal-Now and the Oneness-of-Allness.  This is why, presumably, their written sentences are basically circles with curlicues.  Our sentences have a beginning and an end, but the circular expressions of their thoughts defy such a linear manner of thinking.  I guess you might call it circular reasoning.  Anyway, the practical consequence of this mystical premise is that the future has already happened.  In fact, the aliens are helping us now to become One with each other so that three thousand years later, we will help them.

Furthermore, what we saw at the beginning of the movie is actually what will happen later after she marries Donnelly, and all the flashbacks she was having about her daughter were really flashforwards.  In one of those flashforwards, she tells her daughter that Daddy became angry and said she made the wrong choice, after which he divorced her.  The choice in question had to do with her deciding to have a child even though she knew the child would die from a rare, incurable disease.  My guess is that he said something like, “Why the hell didn’t we go to a fertility clinic and get the bad gene removed?”  But that would just be the same old, rational, scientific, linear way of thinking that comes from speaking English.

When Is a Good Man not a Good Man? When He Is a Family Man.

It sometimes happens in watching a movie that one will be struck by something that others may not even notice, something that had it been edited out and left on the cutting-room floor would never have been missed. So it is with the movie 99 Homes (2014).

The movie is set sometime after the bursting of the housing bubble.  It is a time when there is more money to be made evicting people from their homes than building new ones.  In particular, Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield) is a construction worker who can no longer find work building homes, and as a result, he and his family are evicted from theirs for failure to make mortgage payments.  On the day of their eviction, Nash tells Rick Carver (Michael Shannon), the real-estate broker in charge, that he was born in that house. This being said by a man in his twenties, such a house would normally be paid off by that time, which means he probably refinanced the house along the way to help pay the bills.

The Nash family, consisting of Nash, his mother, and his son, quickly put as much of their stuff as they can into their pickup truck and wind up at a cheap motel in the bad part of town.  When he realizes his tools were stolen by the crew that moved his stuff out to the curb, he goes back to his house and gets in a fight. Because Carver needs someone with Nash’s fierce determination to assist him in evicting people, he offers him a job.

At first we believe that Nash will simply be helping Carver do stuff that is legal, however unsavory it may be.  But soon we find that his job also involves scamming the banks and the government, stealing appliances and air conditioners so that Fannie Mae will give them a check to put the stuff back in the house they took it out of.  This makes Nash a little uneasy, as it does us, but bankers have always been fair game in fiction. The idea of the banker foreclosing on the widow with a baby because she is late with her last mortgage payment has been the stuff of melodrama since the nineteenth century, and those who rob banks to get even are romanticized. Nevertheless, when Nash’s mother finds out what he has been doing, she takes his son and goes to stay with her brother, “Uncle Jimmy.”

Eventually, it becomes more than just cheating the banks and the government. When Frank Greene, a homeowner whose family is about to be evicted, threatens to foul up a multimillion dollar deal for Carver by contesting his eviction, Carver gives Nash a forged, backdated document to take to court. Nash really becomes conflicted by this, because this is cheating a family just like his own.  He decides not to deliver the document, but the court clerk, who is in on the deal, snatches it out of his hand and gives it to the judge, who approves the eviction.

This leads to an armed standoff, where Greene fires warning shots from inside his house.  Nash steps out from behind a car and walks onto the grass with his hands up and tells Greene that he cheated him with a forged document. Greene surrenders, and we get the sense that with Nash providing evidence, Carver will soon be heading to prison.

That is the movie in a nutshell.  But an offhand comment made in the middle of the movie caught my attention.  Carver asks Nash why he isn’t married, to which Nash responds that he doesn’t have time for it.  “I don’t trust a man who’s not married,” Carver says.  “Nobody does.”  At first, that would seem to be a preposterous contradiction.  Carver, as we have seen, is not only ruthless in evicting people from their homes, but he is also willing to break the law to do so. He also cheats on his wife.  But then we realize there is no contradiction here. He is not saying that married men are more trustworthy than single men, but rather that they are so regarded.  In other words, a single man might be just as trustworthy as any married man, but it is a fact of human nature that people are more likely to trust a man who is married than one who is not. Carver would prefer that Nash be married, because it is easier for a married man to cheat people than it is for a single man, owing to this prejudice in favor of the trustworthiness of the former over the latter, however misguided that may be.

Well, that would account for the rest of mankind, but why would Carver be more likely to trust a married man when he knows from the example of himself just how misplaced such trust can be?  That leads to a paradoxical distinction between two different kinds of trustworthiness.  Some men can be trusted because they are basically good, and some men can be trusted because they cannot afford to be good.  As Tallyrand said, “A married man with a family will do anything for money.”

If this is what Carver has in mind, that a married man burdened by the responsibilities of a family will not be able to afford the luxury of doing the right thing and therefore can be trusted to do the wrong thing when necessary, then Nash actually is effectively more like a married man than a single one, in that he has his mother and son to support.  (We gather that when Nash was young, his girlfriend got pregnant, had a baby, and then took off, leaving the child with him.) In fact, it is only after his mother and his son go to live with Uncle Jimmy, where they will have food and shelter no matter what happens to him, that Nash is free to do what is right.

In general, whether one is married or has a family without actually being married like Nash, one is not as free as a single, unattached person to do all the things he or she would like, whether for good or ill.  We tend to think of the bachelor as someone who is more likely to indulge his vices or commit crimes, with good reason, I fear, but it is also true that anyone who aspires to be a saint will find family life to be a hindrance.

This is undoubtedly what Jesus had in mind when he said, “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26). You are not supposed to divorce your wife, of course (Matthew 19:19), but you are supposed to hate her.  That might be said of a lot of married men, unfortunately, but I doubt if for religious reasons.  In the parable of the Great Banquet, a rich man invites a lot of people to have dinner with him, which I suppose is analogous to Jesus inviting people to enter the Kingdom of Heaven with him. An excuse offered by one man for declining the invitation was, “I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come” (Luke 14:20).  In a pinch, a man might be better off castrating himself:  “For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother’s womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it” (Matthew 19:12).

Obviously, Jesus was addressing his remarks to men rather than to women, not only because women cannot be eunuchs, but also because he says that a man must hate his wife, not that a woman must hate her husband. Notwithstanding this oversight, women are capable of becoming saints just like men, though there are more officially recognized male saints than female.  On the other hand, from a casual perusal of the movies, it would seem that women make better movie saints than do men.  St. Joan of Arc, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, and St. Bernadette get lots of screen time, whereas the only male saint to get that much attention from movie producers is St. Francis of Assisi.  They all pretty much have in common the fact that they are single.  Elizabeth Bayley Seton had been a wife and mother, but one suspects that she would never have made it to sainthood had she not been widowed.

Traditionally, bachelors have always been looked upon as being of doubtful character, in part because they were suspected of homosexuality.  Even when that was not the issue, however, there was the sense that there was something wrong with them.  Of course, by “bachelor” I mean a man who not only has never married but has never lived with a woman as well.  I once knew a couple that had been living together for seven years and had a three-year-old child, but they still counted themselves as being single.  If possession is nine-tenths of the law, cohabitation is nine-tenths of being married, even when common-law status is not invoked.  With women, on the other hand, it has traditionally been different, as if they were more to be pitied than censured.  The “old maid” was usually thought of as a woman unable to attract a man, and the “spinster” was a woman forced to support herself for want of a husband.

The idea of a man being so spiritual that he rises above his sexuality is part of the awe afforded to priests.  The Protestant version of the priest, who likely is married, may strike us as more dependable and down to earth, but he no longer seems special the way a Catholic priest does.  However, it is the entanglements of marriage that really get in the way of one’s spiritual aspirations.  So, what does a man or woman do who wishes to become a saint only after having become married? As a rule, I suppose one gives up the dream of becoming a saint owing to one’s family obligations.  But there are a couple of movies that suggest that abandoning or neglecting one’s family is permissible and even laudable.

In the movie The Boy with Green Hair (1948), Peter Fry (Dean Stockwell) is a war orphan because his parents died during the London blitz of World War II trying to help war orphans.   This is premised on something supposedly noble, but which is in fact quite irritating. When Peter was very young, his parents left him with an aunt so that they could help the war orphans in London. Even if one of his parents felt the need to participate in the war effort, say, the father, we would expect the mother to stay with her son and take care of him; but they both figure they have more important things to do than raise their own child. When the aunt gets word that Peter’s parents are dead, she passes him on to other relatives who don’t want him either. This continues until he ends up with his grandfather (Pat O’Brien).

We are supposed to think of those relatives as being cold and selfish, but after all, they did not bargain on having to raise someone else’s child. It is actually Peter’s parents who are selfish. They are that strange breed of do-gooder who becomes so enamored with the idea of saving the world that he neglects his own family. Without pausing to be sure that Peter would be raised to maturity by a loving relative happy to take care of him if they died in the war, they just dumped him on his aunt and took off.

There is one moment in the movie when Peter concludes, correctly in my opinion, that his parents cared more about other children than they did him, but the movie insists that he is wrong, and at the end Peter is seen as understanding that they really did love him and that what they did was right and good. As insistent as the movie is in this regard, it still leaves us with a feeling of revulsion for parents who would abandon their child so they could devote themselves to some higher purpose.

Another movie along these lines is Magnificent Obsession (1954).  The movie is based on a karmic principle explained by analogy with electricity.  The way it works is that if you do good things for people without letting other people know about it, and you refuse any attempt on their part to repay the debt, you build up a spiritual charge of good karma that rewards you. If you allow them to repay the debt, the spiritual force is discharged. Most people are grounded, never accumulating a charge, because they allow people to return the favor. If you tell other people about your kindness or charity, the spiritual force will dissipate, as with a wire without insulation.

The story begins when the reckless behavior of the rich, irresponsible playboy Bob Merrick (Rock Hudson) inadvertently causes the death of Dr. Wayne Phillips, a man who had been initiated into the secret karmic principle. Dr. Phillips was such a good man that he used up all his income and borrowed against all his assets to do good deeds, leaving his wife, Helen (Jane Wyman), and his daughter, Joyce (Barbara Rush), nothing.  You might be appalled that Dr. Phillips did not provide for his wife and daughter in the event of his death, that he was so caught up in the idea of helping strangers that he neglected his family, grabbing up all the good karma for himself while his wife and daughter are left destitute. And yet, the movie insists that we are to admire Dr. Phillips.

Being a good man and being a good family man may be two different things.

Nocturnal Animals (2016)

The twentieth century is when art became ugly.  Oh, I’m not talking about the kind of art that philistines like me enjoy.  I’m talking about that highbrow, elitist art consisting of ridiculous paintings, nonsense novels, discordant music, and weird foreign films.  By the twenty-first century, the novelty of ugliness had begun to wear off a bit, but it can still be counted on to appeal to those who believe that an appreciation of ugliness is the mark of refinement.

Nocturnal Animals is not a weird foreign film, of course, but it could pass for one.  Right off the bat, the movie presents its highbrow bona fides by displaying disgustingly obese, naked women, dancing in place, in what turns out to be an art exhibit.  The woman who has arranged all this is Susan (Amy Adams).  Her life is as ugly as her art show, notwithstanding all the opulence in which she dwells.  Her husband cheats on her.  She can’t sleep.

She receives in the mail an unpublished novel from her ex-husband, Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal).  I don’t suppose I have to tell you that it is an ugly novel.  It is about a man named Tony, also played by Jake Gyllenhaal in Susan’s mind as she reads the novel.  Just in case we might wonder if she is projecting by making this identification between the author and the protagonist, there is an earlier discussion between Susan and Edward when they were married, presented in a flashback.  She criticized something he wrote, telling him he needs to write about someone other than himself.  He says all authors do that.  They don’t, of course.  As Nietzsche once said, “Homer would never have created an Achilles or Goethe a Faust, had Homer been an Achilles or Goethe a Faust.”  But in this case, Edward has created a Tony because he is a Tony.

Anyway, in this novel, Tony, his wife, and his daughter are traveling across west Texas when they are waylaid by a bunch of psychopathic punks.  The movie wallows in the misery of a family being brutalized, resulting in the rape and murder of the two females.  With the aid of a lawman named Andes, who is dying of lung cancer, Tony is able to track down the killers.  Andes kills one of them, and Tony kills the other.  However, the one Tony kills lives just long enough to hit Tony in the head with a poker, blinding him.  Tony staggers outside, falls, and accidentally shoots himself, resulting in his death.

In reading the novel, Susan is deeply moved, even more than she was moved by watching a bunch of naked, four-hundred-pound women jiggle their decaying flesh.  Why is she moved?  Well, it probably has to do with the abortion she had after Edward got her pregnant.  She never meant for Edward to find out, but for some reason he just happens to show up at the abortion clinic just as she finished having it done.  So, you see, the death of Tony’s daughter corresponds to the death of Edward’s aborted child.  And the rape and murder of Tony’s wife corresponds to Susan’s infidelity, because turning Susan’s voluntary lust and betrayal into a gangbang rape is Edward’s imaginary revenge against her.  And just as Edward knows that he is weak, Tony is too weak to save his wife and child.

The death of Tony in the novel corresponds to Edward’s suicide, the novel being one long suicide note, which basically says, “You ruined my life by rejecting my love.”  This is not made explicit, but it is obvious.  When Susan emails Edward, saying she wants to see him, he emails her back, agreeing to meet.  She goes to a restaurant, but Edward never shows up.  Of course not.  He’s dead.

For people like me, this is an ugly novel within an ugly movie.  No wonder it got rave reviews.