Author Archives: disinterested spectator

Wilson (1944)

Having finished watching Wilson, I decided to compare it with other biopics of American presidents.  I was surprised how few presidents have had movies made based on their lives.  Abraham Lincoln gets the award for having the most, and he is the only president so featured prior to Wilson save Andrew Johnson.  After Wilson, there is a movie about Andrew Jackson in the early 1950s, and that is just about it until we get to the 1960s when American culture underwent radical change with the movies following suit.  And needless to say, movies about presidents after Nixon and the Watergate scandal would never be the same.

Regarding the pre-1960s biopics of American presidents, it is clear why they are so few in number.  They are insufferable, being both boring and cloying.  Notwithstanding all the money that was spent on the elaborate sets in making the movie about Woodrow Wilson, it is completely lacking in entertainment value.  Nothing bad about Wilson is depicted.  For example, we don’t find out anything about what a racist he was.  But those who produced this movie were not content simply to omit anything even slightly negative in his character.  Like those who made movies about Lincoln during this period, they felt compelled to go way beyond mere omission and make the case that Wilson was no mere ordinary mortal, but rather was too good for this world, on a moral and spiritual plane high above his contemporaries, all but canonizing him for sainthood.

The Dollars Trilogy (1964, 1965, and 1966)

I was in college when I saw an advertisement in the newspaper for the movie For a Few Dollars More (1965).  The tagline was as follows:  “The man with no name is back…  The man in black is waiting…” So, it was obviously a sequel.  I wondered how I could have overlooked the first movie, whatever its name was, but in any event, I decided to wait until I saw the first one before watching the second.  Finally, a friend of mine, who had just seen The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), and who had also seen For a Few Dollars More, said the movies, all of which were directed by Sergio Leone, were unrelated as to story, so I should just watch whatever was available.  As result, I ended up seeing the movies in reverse order, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly first, For a Few Dollars More second, and A Fistful of Dollars (1964) last.

I must admit, I was a little disappointed.  Compared to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, which was rich in style and story, A Fistful of Dollars seemed to be cheaply made, which, as a matter of fact, it was.  But eventually, it became one of my favorite movies.

Years later I read that the movie was an unofficial remake of Yojimbo (1961), directed by Akira Kurosawa, which led to a lawsuit by Toho, the Japanese film company that produced it.  While this movie itself had its antecedents, such as Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key and Red Harvest, which in turn were preceded by The Servant of Two Masters, an eighteenth century play by Carlo Goldini, the almost scene-for-scene duplication of Yojimbo in A Fistful of Dollars made me wonder how Leone’s lawyers could have defended their client with a straight face.  In any event, the lawsuit may have had something to do with why For a Few Dollars More showed up in the local theaters where I lived before A Fistful of Dollars did.

The basic idea in Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars is that of a man playing two warring factions off against each other as he seems to be on one side and then the other as suits his purposes.  In A Fistful of Dollars, the central character is played by Clint Eastwood.  I had never seen a Western where the hero had a beard, wore a poncho, smoked a cigar, and rode a mule, but there he was. Eventually, this character, who would also appear in the sequels, would become known as “the Man with No Name,” but here he is given the nickname “Joe” by the coffinmaker, a generic name for an American.  In For a Few Dollars More, his name is Monco, but after the idea of the Man with No Name caught on, the scene where a sheriff refers to Eastwood’s character as Monco was snipped out of most prints, although a later scene where he is so referred to is not.  In any event, both scenes are in the DVD.

The principal character in Yojimbo, played by Toshirô Mifune, does not seem to have a name either, though he allows himself to be called Sanjuro Kuwabatake.  This feature seems to have originated with the Continental Op stories, of which Red Harvest was one, for that character has no name either.  It is the culmination of a tendency of having the hero be devoid of a family and not a part of any community.  Being a bachelor, he would have neither wife nor children.  There would be no reference to his parents, presumed to be dead, if we thought of them at all.  But as a man gets his name from his parents, the idea of a man with no name would seem to imply that he never had any parents, as impossible as that is.  At one point in A Fistful of Dollars, after Joe has been hired by the Rojos brothers, he is given a room to stay in and told to make himself at home.  “I never found home all that great,” he replies, “but thanks.”

By the 1980s, heroes in the movies would start having all sorts of stressful family connections.  I could list many examples, but I’ll stick to just one, which is Unforgiven (1992), where Clint Eastwood stars in a Western in which he is a widower with two young children.  We gather that he used to be someone similar to the Man with No Name, but who was then domesticated by a wife that reformed him, getting him to settle down and raise a family on a small farm.  I guess the idea was to make the movies more relevant for the baby boomers, who were all saddled with family complications themselves.  But back in the old days, it was assumed that audiences wanted to forget about all that by identifying with a completely unattached hero.  It all depends on what you want from a movie, relevance or escapism.

Joe is a hired gun who drifts around looking for someone to pay him for his services. Soon after arriving in San Miguel, a small Mexican town, he finds out that there are two rival factions, the Rojos and the Baxters: the former making their living dealing in liquor; the latter, guns.  Smugglers periodically load up on the guns and liquor and take them north across the border, where they sell them to the Indians.  That was a nice touch.  There was nothing like that in Yojimbo, where the rival factions deal in silk and saké, for the simple reason, I assume, that they don’t have Indians in Japan. But here in America, it was standard in the movies that Indians could not hold their liquor.  It was often illegal to sell it to them because they would get drunk and go on the warpath. And in this case, they would be outfitted with the guns that were also being illegally supplied to them.  In other words, whereas the evil in Yojimbo is confined to just the town where the action takes place, in A Fistful of Dollars, it extends well beyond San Miguel, even reaching into another country.

Both families want complete control of the town, and Joe hires out first to one side and then to the other, making more and more money as he does so.  At that level, he is completely amoral. However, he forms a friendship with Silvanito, the owner of the saloon, who tries to get Joe to leave town before he ends up being killed like so many others.  Silvanito corresponds to Gonji in Yojimbo. One of the hallmarks of a Leone movie is humor, and the difference between these two characters is an example of that.  Whereas Gonji is just an angry man, always complaining, Silvanito is amusing, using his dry wit to provide a running commentary on the situation in San Miguel.  In fact, that is a difference between the two movies in general, Yojimbo being serious, even angry in its tone, while A Fistful of Dollars, hardly a comedy, continually causes us to smile, if not laugh, at some of the scenes and dialogue.

Joe also becomes friends with Piripero, the coffinmaker, who makes a good living providing coffins for all the men who get killed in the feud between the two families. And Joe also takes pity on an innocent family, in which the wife is held as a sex slave by Ramón Rojos (Gian Maria Volentè).  Joe helps that family escape, but is almost killed as a result.  In the end, the Rojos wipe out the Baxters, and then Joe kills the Rojos. Inasmuch as Joe gave all his money to the family he rescued, he is no better off than when he first arrived in San Miguel.  But that’s all right, because he will simply move on to another town, where he will find someone willing to pay for his services.  In other words, the two friends and the business about the family aside, Joe is still an amoral hired killer.

In Yojimbo, Sanjuro has a nobler motive.  He tells Gonji that the town is full of men that deserve to die.  If he can figure a way to kill off all these men, the town will get a fresh start.  In A Fistful of Dollars, however, all Joe cares about is getting paid as a hired gun. It is perhaps a subtle difference, but it is nevertheless a shift in the amoral direction.

In Yojimbo, all the fighting has to stop when a government official arrives, so we have the sense that there is such a thing as law and order in this region, this town being an exception.  In A Fistful of Dollars, on the other hand, the law is both worthless and corrupt.  When Joe kills four of Baxter’s men for refusing to apologize to his mule, but actually to prove to the Rojos what he is worth as a hired gun, Baxter shows Joe his badge, saying he is the sheriff.  Joe tells him that since he is the sheriff, he should see to it that the dead men are put in the ground.  Then he turns his back on him and walks away.  Furthermore, Ramón and his men massacre a company of American soldiers, has his men put on their uniforms, and then they massacre a company of Mexican soldiers that were planning on buying guns from the Americans. Therefore, not even the armies of either country have much of an effect on what takes place in San Miguel.

It was the amoral quality of this movie that was the most problematic for the censors when the movie needed to be edited for television after ABC bought the rights to broadcast it in 1975.  The censors were old hands at bleeping out bad words, snipping out nudity, and reducing or minimizing scenes of violence, but these standard techniques were not enough.  No matter how much of the violence was suppressed, the amoral character of the Man with No Name still came through.

Then someone came up with a clever idea.  Instead of cutting stuff out, why not add stuff in?  So, taking advantage of the fact that smugglers in the movie were buying guns and liquor in San Miguel and selling them to the Indians in the United States, an additional scene was filmed in which some guy, dressed up to look like the Man with No Name, is let out of prison on condition that he will work undercover for the United States government, with the job of eliminating the two rival gangs of San Miguel. Legitimate government agents have gone there previously, but they have all been killed.  It is Joe’s job to pretend to be a hired gun who cares about nothing but money. If he succeeds in eliminating the Rojos and the Baxters by playing off one side against the other, he will receive a pardon for his crimes.

To those who were familiar with the movie, it was obvious that this preliminary scene was not part of the original.  For one thing, Joe’s poncho was too long.  And why would a prisoner be allowed to wear a poncho anyway, along with his boots, cowboy hat, and cigar?  At one point, we see a close up of Clint Eastwood’s face, which is clearly taken from a scene in the movie.  But usually the Eastwood replacement keeps his hand on his cigar while he smokes it so he can conceal his face.  He is told by Harry Dean Stanton, the warden, not to talk, so the censors didn’t have to worry about faking Eastwood’s voice. Finally, when this fake Joe is given his pistol, the barrel is longer than the one used in the movie.

Notwithstanding all these clues, a lot of people thought this was part of the original movie.  Another of Sergio Leone’s movies, Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), had had a lot of footage cut out for theatrical release in the United States, much of which was added back in when it came to television. As a result, it was thought by many that something similar had happened here.  It even fooled Peter Bondanella, who refers to this added scene as if it were part of the original movie in his book Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present.  At least, that’s what he wrote in the first edition in 1983.  Whether he has corrected it in subsequent editions, I cannot say.

What really fascinated me about this extra footage was that even though I knew it for what it was, it contaminated my viewing of the rest of the movie.  I couldn’t get the thought out of my head that Joe was really not just a hired gun, but actually an undercover agent.  In fact, some of the dialogue in the movie almost seemed to encourage the idea.  For example, at one point, Ramón says of Joe, “I don’t like that Americano.  He’s too smart just to be a hired fighter.” When I heard that, I involuntarily thought, “He’s right.  Joe is actually working for the United States government.” Many years have passed since then, and I have seen the movie many times during those years, but to this day, when I hear Ramón deliver that line, that involuntary thought pops into my head.

On the subject of censorship, real or imagined, Eastwood once said that prior to A Fistful of Dollars, the Production Code did not allow the man shooting a gun and the man being shot to be in the same frame, but that Leone was the first director to film such scenes.  Many critics have accepted this assertion of Eastwood without question and have repeated it as if it were gospel.  And indeed, when we do see such scenes in Leone’s movies, where the man shooting the gun is in the same frame with the man being shot, the impact is much greater than when they are filmed separately, as is the case in most movies.  But Eastwood was wrong.  Perhaps he was thinking of Rawhide (1959-1965), a television show he worked on where such a restriction may well have been in force.  But not so with the movies. There are numerous examples of earlier Hollywood movies in which the man shooting and the person being shot are in the same frame, but here are just a few from some of the more well-known films:

This Gun for Hire (1942):  Early in the movie, Raven (Alan Ladd) and a blackmailer are in the same frame when he shoots him. At the end of the movie, a cop shoots Raven, and they are both in the same frame.

The Big Sleep (1946):  When Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) shoots Canino (Bob Steele) several times, they are both in the same frame.

High Noon (1952):  Will Kane (Gary Cooper) shoots Frank Miller and, before that, two of those in his gang, and each time he is in the same frame with the man he is shooting.

Shane (1953):  Wilson (Jack Palance) shoots Torrey (Elisha Cook, Jr.) in the same frame. And in the final shootout in the saloon, Shane (Alan Ladd) shoots Ryker (Emile Meyer) in the same frame as well.

Rio Bravo (1959):  There are so many scenes in this movie in which the shooter and the person being shot are in the same frame that it is not worth listing them all. In the first one, someone is shot at pointblank range.

The Comancheros (1961):  In the opening scene, Paul Regret (Stuart Whitman) kills a man in a duel in the same frame. Later on, Captain Jake Cutter (John Wayne) shoots several men in the same frame.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962):  When we find out who really shot Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin), we see Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) shoot Valance while in the same frame.

The Manchurian Candidate (1962):  We see Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) shoot another soldier in the head in the same frame during a flashback. Later, Shaw shoots his wife in the same frame as himself.

Speaking of the impact of seeing a man firing his pistol and another man getting shot in the same frame, Leone managed to make these scenes seem realistic, even though Joe’s skill with a gun seems unbelievable when we think about it later.  Early in the movie, he beats four men to the draw, while in the final showdown at the end of the movie, he beats five men to the draw.  Of course, Joe is a professional gunfighter, who probably spends several hours every day working with his gun.  As that friend I referred to above remarked, the men he kills are “just a bunch of North Side punks that strapped on a gun.”  In any event, the scenes seem realistic at the moment we watch them.  By the 1970s, however, there began a trend toward silliness.  Terence Hill’s Trinity character did stuff with his pistol that we didn’t believe for a minute, and we weren’t supposed to.  Leone himself, much to my chagrin, even contributed to this trend in My Name Is Nobody (1973).

As noted above, there were several features of this Man with No Name that were unusual for a Western hero:  a cigar, a beard, a poncho, and a mule.  The poncho turned out to be more than just a matter of style.  In Yojimbo, after Sanjuro has demonstrated his unequaled skill with a sword, halfway through the movie one of the gang members shows up with a pistol.  Naturally, we wonder how a man with a sword will be able to cope with that.  In the final scene, Sanjuro throws a knife, hitting the man with the pistol in his arm, after which he uses his sword to finish him off.

In A Fistful of Dollars, there is a scene where Joe and Ramón are using a suit of armor as target practice. Ramón says to Joe, “When you want to kill a man, you must shoot for his heart and a Winchester is the best weapon.”

Joe replies, “That’s very nice, but I’ll stick with my forty-five.”

To this Ramón says, “When a man with a forty-five meets a man with a rifle, the man with the pistol will be a dead man.”

This scene establishes three things:  the man with a pistol will be at a disadvantage against a man with a rifle; Ramón believes that to kill a man, you must shoot for the heart; and that suit of armor would be no defense against a gun, since it is full of bullet holes.

In the final showdown, Joe walks down the street while Ramón repeatedly shoots at him, aiming only at his heart, as Joe closes in.  Joe falls when the bullets hit, but then rises again, reminding Ramón to aim for the heart, or he’ll never stop him.  Finally, when Ramón is out of bullets, Joe reveals a solid piece of iron hidden underneath his poncho, a possibility that never occurred to Ramón because the suit of armor in his house was ineffective against bullets.  And that’s when we realize the purpose for this odd piece of clothing, the poncho.  It was put in the movie so that Joe would have a way of concealing the iron armor.  Although not needed for that purpose in the sequels, it became iconic, making its way into second and third parts of the dollars trilogy, right along with the cigar and beard. As for the mule, we never saw him again.

Several critics have argued that the Westerns made after the end of World War II, through the 1950s, and into the first couple of years of the 1960s, reflected the the attitudes of Americans during the Cold War. For example, one might see High Noon (1952) as an allegorical criticism of the way people that were blacklisted in Hollywood were abandoned by their friends, or regard The Magnificent Seven (1960) as justifying American intervention in third-world countries for their benefit.  If so, we might see A Fistful of Dollars as expressing a revulsion against the Cold War, seeing both American Imperialism and Soviet Communism as equally corrupt and exploitive. While the servant-of-two-masters theme antedated this attitude concerning the Cold War, some of the popularity of A Fistful of Dollars may be attributed to the timely way this theme resonated with the growing cynicism regarding this conflict between the superpowers.

The Rojos, the Baxters, and Joe constituted a three-way conflict.  Perhaps this inspired Leone to have another three-way conflict in the sequel, For a Few Dollars More.  In this case, Monco (Clint Eastwood) is a bounty hunter, or, as is said in the movie, a “bounty killer.”  He competes with Colonel Mortimer (Lee Van Cleef), another bounty hunter, hoping to cash in by bringing in El Indio (Gian Maria Volentè) and his gang. Mortimer is also motivated by revenge.  His sister shot herself while Indio was in the act of raping her, something that still haunts Indio.  Only by smoking marijuana can he get some temporary relief from that trauma.

This was the last time someone that was truly evil in a movie smoked a marijuana cigarette.  Since then, if a character in a movie smokes marijuana, we are supposed to like him, something I discussed more fully in an earlier essay, “Movie Marijuana.”  A possible exception is the television series Narcos (2015-2017), in which we see Pablo Escobar, a pretty evil character, regularly smoking weed. However, there is another drug dealer in that show, Gacha, who doesn’t smoke marijuana, and he turns out to be really evil by comparison.  So, everything is relative.

The prologue said, “Where life had no value, death, sometimes had a price.”  And so we see, at the end of the movie, when Monco is piling up the bodies of Indio’s gang into a wagon, adding up the amounts each corpse is worth. Mortimer has gotten his revenge and doesn’t want it spoiled by profiting from the killing of Indio, so he leaves it all to Monco.  At first, Monco is wondering why the sum does not reach the total he was expecting.  But then, upon hearing a noise, he turns and kills the last bad guy, bringing the account into balance.  Referring again to Westerns as reflecting attitudes by and about Americans, this might be a comment on capitalism, which values the worth of a man in terms of dollars alone.

In A Fistful of Dollars, the Man with No Name profits by hiring out to the two sides of a conflict.  In The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, the Man with No Name profits by avoiding, as much as possible, the conflict between the North and the South during the Civil War.  This seems like a good idea, given the way this movie depicts the war as not just killing men, but also crippling them.  This theme of avoiding the war fit right in with the one being fought at that time in Vietnam, where many young men did all they could to avoid being drafted.

Prior to the release of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, whenever a bunch of people in a movie embarked on a project to obtain a great deal of money, something always went wrong. In some cases, the project was illegal, and given the Production Code in force at the time, the criminals had to die or be arrested, as in The Asphalt Jungle (1950).  In It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), the treasure hunters are not criminals, but the buried treasure was stolen loot, so they all had to be arrested in the end. But even when the enterprise was entirely legal, there was an unwritten rule that it must fail, that trying to become rich in some quick and easy way, without holding down a regular job, was wrong and must not be rewarded. For example, in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), there was nothing illegal about the three men prospecting for gold, but it had to fail nevertheless. When the two surviving members of the team realize that all their gold has been lost, they laugh about it. Presumably, even when the search for money was legal, it had to fail, the movie’s way of telling us we should be content with our lot. One slight exception is King Solomon’s Mines (1950 et al.). The people in the movie do manage to keep a handful of gems, but the vast treasure is lost for good.  Another exception might be For a Few Dollars More, since Monco does get to collect the bounty on all those men he killed.  But in that case, being a bounty hunter is his profession, and he is just making a living.

But then came The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Three men set out to find buried treasure, and something incredible happens: the treasure does not turn out to be worthless Confederate bonds; it does not blow away in the wind; the men pursuing the treasure are not arrested; and only one of them dies, leaving the other two alive to split the loot. Nothing like that had ever been seen in a movie before, and the violation of the taboo against that sort of thing was exhilarating.  The idea that rapacious capitalism is restrained by some kind of karmic principle, thwarting those who would try to get more money than they deserve, met its end with this movie.

This amoral ending was perfectly in line, however, with all that had come before in that movie. Were it not for the advance notice provided by the tagline, “For three men the Civil War wasn’t Hell. It was practice,” as well as some pictures we see during the credits, we would not even realize that the movie was set in the Civil War when it begins. And it is only gradually that we become aware of the war, because it really does not seem to concern the three principal characters:  the Ugly, Tuco (Eli Wallach), is a bandit; the Good, Blondie (Clint Eastwood), is a bounty hunter; and the Bad, Angel Eyes (Lee Van Cleef), is a hired killer.

Here again, we have a three-way conflict, but different from those in the first two dollars movies.  In addition to the two moral categories, the Good and the Bad, we have an aesthetic category, the Ugly. Tuco, who personifies this category, and is something of a trickster figure, steals the show.  He is scroungy, and yet, he is something of a dandy. He uses a pink parasol to protect himself from the sun when he and Blondie and traveling through the desert.  He dips a little snuff from the snuffbox he lifted from a corpse. When he takes a bath, he makes sure it is heavily scented. And, when this movie came out in the late 1960s, there were those who said, “Tuco runs like a girl.”  But those were less enlightened times.

A parenthetical note:  Eli Wallach was a Jew that often played Italians, as in Baby Doll (1956); and in Westerns, he played Mexicans, as in The Magnificent Seven and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.  It’s fortunate that these movies were made before it became unacceptable to cast someone in a role with an ethnicity other than his own, for then Wallach would have been restricted to playing only Jewish characters, and we would have been deprived of some great performances.  

In any event, the Bad is unequivocally evil, but the Good is hardly a saint. We mainly know Blondie is the Good because the words “the good” appear under his image in a frozen frame.  But we also know he is the Good because he is tall and handsome.  Like the Ugly category, the Good is partly aesthetic, and only partly moral.  This three-way opposition of moral and aesthetic categories apparently met a need of the understanding, for we still hear people using this phrase that is the title of this movie to this day.

This three-way opposition ends in a fantastic three-way gunfight.  Prior to that climax, each man pursues his own business with no interest in the war. Where the war does get their attention, they are repelled, as when Tuco looks at the wounded men in a mission, many of whom are missing limbs, or when Blondie says he’s never seen so many men wasted so badly.  In additional footage seen only in the Italian version, Angel Eyes, referred to as Setenza, is pained by what he sees in another place of refuge for the wounded.  And when this psychopath feels someone else’s pain, that is pain indeed.

Only when they find out about buried Confederate gold does the war take on significance for these three men, especially when Blondie and Tuco need to cross a bridge to get to the cemetery where they know the gold is buried in one of the graves. There are Yankee soldiers on one side and Confederate soldiers on the other.  Every day, there are two battles for that bridge, which the commanding officer of the Yankees, a captain, refers to as a slaughter.  The movie makes an interesting comment about the importance of alcohol in war.  We have all heard about how Ulysses S. Grant was an alcoholic, whom Lincoln kept in command even though he was aware of Grant’s drunkenness.  In the Italian version, this movie makes the point, through the mouth of the captain, that only by getting drunk is it possible to send so many men to their deaths.  In other words, it was not despite his drunkenness that Grant was so successful in war, but because of it.  Through encouragement from the captain, Blondie and Tuco blow up the bridge so that the soldiers will leave the area, which has as an incidental byproduct the result that the pointless daily slaughter is brought to an end.  But essentially, as they pursue the gold, Blondie, Tuco, and Angel Eyes walk through the war as if they were walking through a room.

At the risk of going too far with the idea that Westerns reflect the values and attitudes of contemporary America, is this not the way most of us relate to war nowadays? While those in the military go off to other countries to fight, the rest of us remain at home, pursuing our material interests with little thought given to the soldiers that are crippled or killed. When we do see some of that on the nightly news, we shake our heads, either in disgust or pity, and then have dinner.

After Blondie kills Angel Eyes in the three-way gunfight, Tuco realizes that Blondie unloaded his gun the night before. Since they have yet to dig up the grave with the gold in it, Blondie says, “You see, in this world there’s two kinds of people, my friend, those with loaded guns, and those who dig.  You dig.”  That pretty much captures the essence of slavery, which is what the Civil War was all about.  It turns out that the gold is buried in a grave marked “Unknown.” This grave with no name is a fitting coda for the last movie featuring the Man with No Name.

“Morning Joe” Needs a Divorce

For a long time now there have been rumors about a romantic relationship between Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, cohosts of Morning Joe.  I never gave those stories much credence. When a man and woman spend a lot of time together for whatever reason, then if they seem to be physically suited to each other, we naturally put them together sexually in our imagination.  So even if we never play cupid in deed, we often do so in thought.  However, when Mika disputed a point Joe was making a couple of weeks ago, he said she was being “rude” and “snotty.” That’s when I said to myself, “I guess those rumors must be true.”  As it turns out, they plan to get married.

Let me confess that I am a naïve bachelor who does not always understand all the wicked ways of the world.  Not only have I never been married, but I have never lived with anyone either, save when I was growing up and living with my parents, whose screaming arguments provided at least some secondhand knowledge as to what marriage must be like.  It is hard to escape the conclusion that there is something about marriage that releases us from the norms of polite conversation, allowing people to say vicious things to each other that they would never dream of saying even to people they dislike.

The question that poses itself to me is this:  Is it the sexual nature of a relationship that allows people to feel they can be rude to each other, or is it is the fact that they live together?  I have never had a roommate, so I cannot say how simply living with someone would affect my sense of etiquette regarding him. And in any event, people rarely have the same roommate for very long. Similarly, I never had a girlfriend for more than a couple of years before she would break up with me, so I cannot be sure about the effect that sex has on polite behavior over a long period of time.

There are plenty of people that are either married or living together, but they are not likely to be completely forthcoming about any discord between them behind closed doors, even if I had the bad taste to come right out and ask them about it. One does get hints, however.  When I used to go dancing, I found that it was not uncommon for a married couple to have dancing partners other than each other. Those that did not could often be seen quarreling on the dance floor.  I play bridge a lot now, and there too have I found that married couples tend to have partners other than each other. Mind you, dancing partners and bridge partners will often become lovers and may even marry; but when the marriage comes first, it is less likely to lead to such partnerships.

I once had a girlfriend who decided to go back to college and get a degree. Sometimes she would have classes in the morning and then again in the afternoon, with a couple of hours to kill in between.  She lived too far away from the campus to go home, but my apartment was much closer.  So, I gave her a key so that she could use my place to have lunch and study while I was at work. Because she brought her own lunch, she would clean up her containers afterwards.  But when she was through, she would leave a sopping wet steel wool soap pad in the bottom of the sink.  The first time that happened, I simply squeezed the pad and put it back in the soap dish at the top of the sink, thinking no more about it.  A couple of days later (her classes were on Tuesdays and Thursdays), there was the soap pad again lying in the bottom of the sink sopping wet.  When it happened a third time, I knew this was no mere oversight, but a serious character flaw.

So, did I say anything to her about it?  Absolutely not.   I loved her with all my heart, and our romance was nothing but sweetness and light.  Why would I want to spoil the good feeling between us over a lousy soap pad? True, I probably went through soap pads a little more often than had previously been the case, but men have shelled out a lot more money than that for the sake of love, so who cares about a few extra bucks now and then?  And yet, the thought occurred to me: How long would I tolerate that sopping wet soap pad in the bottom of the sink if we were married?  This was a complete counterfactual, of course, but the question intrigued me nevertheless.  I could not say from experience, but intuitively I suspected that eventually in this hypothetical marriage, I would have reached the point of not being able to stand it any longer. At some point I would have felt compelled to ask her not to leave the sopping wet soap pad in the bottom of the sink and would she please squeeze it out and return it to the soap dish where she found it!

All to no avail, of course, because you cannot change someone after you marry him or her.  The net result would have been a source of contention and irritation between us.  So, why would I have introduced this discord into our marriage when I was prudent enough not to do so when we were just lovers? If the latter would have been unwise, so too would be the former. And yet, I somehow just knew that there was no way we could stay married for twenty or thirty years without the subject of those soap pads coming up. It simply could not be endured!

Reflecting on this, I concluded that when a man and woman are not lovers, they unconsciously are aware that they might be someday, and thus they are on their best behavior, even if they never consciously intend to date each other.  And even if they do become lovers, they remain for a while on their best behavior lest they foul their little love nest by quarreling.  But as the passion wears off, people get to the point that they just don’t care about being nice anymore. Lovers not living together can simply break up or even just drift apart, and roommates can move out, but married couples don’t have the same easy options, and thus the pressure builds up.

I used to work at a department store that had a policy about married coworkers. If two people in a store got married, one of them had to transfer to another store. Presumably, no one wanted to have to listen to a squabbling married couple.  And I understand that in gambling casinos, married couples are not allowed to play at the same poker table, probably for the same reason.

And so it is that it would probably be for the best if either Mika or Joe left Morning Joe and found employment elsewhere. Sure, they got past the “rude” and “snotty” business.  Perhaps that is what led Joe to propose to Mika, as if to make up for being so hateful.  But that won’t last.  Morning Joe is my favorite talk show, but I shudder to think how things will unfold as the years of marriage wears them down.

Inside Llewn Davis (2013)

The Coen brothers have made a movie about a self-important, obnoxious bum who sponges off people because he believes he was meant for better things than holding down a job.  But such a movie, without any frills, would immediately be dismissed as irritating and boring.  And so it needs some frills.

First, they decided to make this bum a folk singer.  They had previously made the movie O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000), which succeeded with people that liked the music, although it failed miserably with anyone that did not.  So maybe they figured this movie would appeal to people that like folk music.  And even if the folk music in the movie is pretty bad, at least as far as the music performed by the title character is concerned, we know we are supposed to overlook the fact that he is a self-important, obnoxious bum because he is an artist, and that means we are supposed to care.

Frill number two is a cat.  Having a cat continually appear and then disappear gives the movie a motif, making it appear that there is some deeper, hidden meaning to it all.  There isn’t, but something has to get this movie on its legs.  The cat eventually turns out to have the name Ulysses.  Gosh, you mean the return of the cat is like the return of Ulysses?  Well, telling a dumb story with parallels to The Odyssey worked for James Joyce, so maybe the Coen brothers figured it would work for them too.  And it recalls the main character in the movie O Brother Where Art Thou?  So make that two dumb movies by the Coen brothers that are supposed to be spiced up somehow by alluding Homer’s epic, with the second one also alluding to the first.

Finally, there is a time loop.  Sort of.  Except that in the second iteration of the time loop, the cat does not get away.  Now, there are some pretty good time loop movies.  Dead of Night (1945) was the first movie I know of to try this, and it worked fairly well.  And, of course, the greatest such movie is Groundhog Day (1993).  But does a time loop belong in a movie about a folk singer?  I mean, some genres don’t really mix well.  It’s like a movie that starts out as a murder mystery, and halfway through, while we are trying to figure out who done it, Godzilla comes to town.  However, the Coen brothers were desperate for another frill to keep this movie from seeming to be what it really is, and so a time loop is what we get.

Capricorn One (1977)

Shortly after we put a man on the moon, a conspiracy theory emerged that it never really happened, that the whole thing was filmed in the Arizona desert. Capricorn One is based on this conspiracy theory, except that instead of the moon, the plot of this movie consists of an effort to fake a manned mission to Mars.  It seems that Congress is ready to cut NASA’s budget at the first opportunity, and when it turns out that the planned mission would fail, certain bigwigs at NASA decide to fake the Mars mission to keep Congress at bay.

One of the problems with conspiracy-theory movies like this one is that there are too many conspirators. There are, of course, the superiors at NASA that are in on it.  Reluctantly, the three astronauts have to go along with it because the conspirators threaten to have their families killed if they don’t.  The astronauts are taken to a remote location where they can be filmed supposedly walking around on Mars, so a film crew must be added to the list of conspirators, as well as men who will guard the astronauts in case they have second thoughts about going along with it.

However, when the spaceship returns from Mars, the module loses its heat shield on its return to Earth, which would mean the death of the three astronauts.  The astronauts realize that the conspirators will try to kill them to cover things up.  They escape and steal the jet that took them to their isolated location.  However, they run out of fuel and have to land in the middle of a desert.  When they get out of the jet, one of them delivers the best line of the movie: “It looks like we’re on Mars.”

In addition to the conspirators mentioned thus far, helicopter pilots are needed to search for the astronauts and kill them when they find them.  Later on, the helicopters try to shoot down a crop-dusting plane with the one surviving astronaut, Charles Brubaker (James Brolin), on board along with Robert Caulfield (Elliot Gould), a reporter.  Earlier in the movie, some mechanics that are also a part of the conspiracy sabotaged Caulfield’s car in an effort to get him killed in an accident.  Since that didn’t work, some Drug Enforcement Agents that are also in on the conspiracy plant some cocaine in Caulfield’s apartment and arrest him for possession.

Another problem with movies like this one is the conspiracy becomes overly complicated.  A complication worth singling out for special attention is that of trying to make it appear that someone never existed.  In this movie, that person would be Elliot Whitter, a technician at mission control.  He figures out that the television signals are not coming from Mars but are really coming from somewhere on Earth, about three hundred miles away.  He tells his superiors, but as they are in on the conspiracy, they tell him not to worry about it.  However, they are worried about him. He tells his friend Caulfield about the signals one night over a game of pool.  Just then, Caulfield is called to the telephone, which allows some henchmen to spirit Whitter away and then kill him.

The next day, Caulfield goes to Whitter’s apartment, which he has been to many times before over the years.  When he arrives, there is a woman pretending that she is the occupant of the apartment and that she knows nothing about Whitter. The apartment has been completely redecorated and refurnished, and there are stacks of magazines addressed to this woman.

This is totally absurd.  The simplest thing to do would be to just let Caulfield go to the apartment and find that no one is home.  Sure, he could report his friend’s disappearance to Missing Persons, but people go missing all the time. There would have been no need to include that woman as part of the conspiracy, not to mention all the people needed to completely renovate the apartment.  Oh, and the people in the leasing office are part of the conspiracy too, because they show him rental receipts from her for over a year.  And the personnel department at NASA is in on it too, because they say they have no record of Whitter ever working there, and they have never heard of him.

By letting Caulfield knock on the door and find that no one is home, nothing would have been lost but the absurdity.  He could still have continued to investigate based on Whitter’s remark at the pool table.  Moreover, the woman in the apartment claiming to be the tenant and the scrubbed records in the personnel department at NASA only confirm that something insidious is going on, thereby guaranteeing that Caulfield will start investigating; whereas if Whitter had merely disappeared, Caulfield might have shrugged the whole thing off.

But why kill Whitter anyway?  The superiors at NASA could continue to dismiss Whitter’s concerns as a computer malfunction.  And if he persisted with his story, most people would laugh him off as some goofball who is into conspiracy theories.

Given that it is not only preposterous but also unnecessary to try to make Caulfield believe that his friend Whitter never existed, at least the apartment where Whitter was living was still there.  Imagine if Caulfield had gone to visit Whitter and found that the apartment he lived in was no longer there, with only a wall where his door used to be!

Such is the basic idea of So Long at the Fair (1950).  During the 1889 Paris Exposition, Victoria Barton (Jean Simmons) and her brother Johnny check into a hotel.  She gets room 17, and he gets room 19. The next morning, Victoria finds that Johnny has disappeared along with the room he was in.  The hotel manager, Hervé, her brother, Narcisse, and the porter all deny that she arrived with her brother, and they insist that there never was a room number 19.  The bathroom on that floor now has the number 19 on it instead.

Victoria remembers that she spoke to the maid that cleaned Johnny’s room, and she figures that the maid will support her story.  However, the maid and her boyfriend go up in a balloon, the balloon catches fire, and everyone on it is killed.  Now, did the balloon accidentally catch on fire, or did Narcisse manage to sabotage it while no one was looking?  Complicated conspiracy movies like this one often avail themselves of such ambiguity:  if an accident seems unlikely, we can think of it as part of the conspiracy; if being part of the conspiracy then seems unlikely, we can go back to thinking it was an accident.

With the aid of a man Victoria recently met, George Hathaway (Dirk Bogarde), they discover that the door to the room Johnny was in was walled over.  The reason for this is that Johnny got sick during the night. A doctor diagnosed it as the plague.  Fearing that the entire Exposition would be ruined if word got out, with the hotel in particular losing lots of money, Hervé and the doctor move Johnny to a hospital under another name.  Then they managed to construct a fake wall over the door to his room in the middle of the night without waking anyone.

In real life, a normal hotel manager would have awakened Victoria during the night, told her that her brother was ill and was being moved to a hospital, and asked her not to spread it around that he had the plague, lest it cause a panic. But let us assume that the manager has decided to keep Victoria from finding out that her brother is now in a hospital.  The simplest thing to do is wait until Victoria discovers that Johnny is not in his room, which is still there, of course. When she inquires at the desk, the manager feigns ignorance of Johnny’s whereabouts, suggesting that he might have gone out for a walk. When Johnny does not show up, he becomes a missing person, perhaps the victim of foul play, not out of the question with all the visitors in Paris at that time.  That’s a lot easier than trying to convince her that neither her brother nor the room he was in ever existed.

All right, so these two movies are not realistic, if by “realistic” we mean the sort of thing that could actually happen.  But they are realistic in the sense that they match the outlandish imaginings of people that espouse conspiracy theories, such as the one that we faked the moon landing.

Starting a War Sure Makes People Feel Good

I watched Morning Joe yesterday, expecting at least a modicum of skepticism and cynicism, but for the most part, I get the impression that everybody’s animal spirits are up.  I heard them talking about how we are showing the world that America is back, that a new sheriff is in town, that we are resolved to act with our military might, and that we have asserted our moral authority.

Has there ever been a war that didn’t feel good when it started?  I remember how good it felt to retaliate in 1964 after the Gulf of Tonkin incident.  And then, somehow, things never felt quite that good again, until ten years later, people were asking how we ever got involved in Vietnam.  It felt so good when Baghdad fell that even Chris Matthews said, “We’re all Republicans now.” (Yes, he really said that!)  And now most people wish we had never gone in there.

We expect young men to feel good when a war starts, otherwise we would never be able to get them to fight one. But I expected a little more from the people I heard on the set of Morning Joe, figuring, naively I suppose, that a little wisdom might have been acquired over the years, enough to temper their exuberance.

Kissing feels good too, in the beginning.  And then people wake up ten years later wondering why they ever got married.  But if kissing felt as good after ten years as it did at the onset, no one would ever get divorced.  And if wars felt as good at the end as they do in the beginning, no one would ever want peace.

Ex Machina (2014) and Westworld (2016- )

The problem of other minds was already a perennial problem of philosophy long before anyone even thought about robots.  The only conscious mind each person is sure of is his own.  We naturally attribute consciousness to others by instinct, and the rational justification of such attribution is that similar causes produce similar effects:  other people are like us in matter and form, in what we are made of and how we are structured, so it is only reasonable to expect that other people will be conscious beings and not mindless automata.  Most of us attribute consciousness to animals, but as animals become further removed from us, the analogy to ourselves weakens and our willingness to attribute consciousness weakens likewise.  Many have doubts about protozoa, for instance.

Robots are increasingly being made in a way that stimulates our analogical inference to consciousness.  We already use figures of speech that attribute consciousness to inanimate objects like computers:  personification, when we say the computer is thinking; apostrophe, when we yell at the computer for taking too long.  So when robots are given human form, including eyes and facial expressions, the tendency to take these figures of speech literally becomes irresistible.  And yet, we wonder if the analogy is just superficial.  After all, they are not made from the same stuff that we are made of, and they are not put together the same way we are.

When the movie Ex Machina begins, Caleb, a computer programmer, wins a chance to spend a week with Nathan, the CEO of the company he works for.  Caleb finds out that Nathan has constructed a robot named Ava who is so humanlike that we naturally believe she is conscious.  Of course, a human actress plays the part of Ava, so we in the audience are bound to think so.  In fact, we have to be convinced that she is a robot, for which purpose she is deliberately constructed so as to show off her mechanical parts.  Were it not for these obvious robot features, Caleb himself might wonder if Ava is just some woman trying to fool him into thinking she is a robot.  By way of contrast, in the television series Westworld (2016- ), the robots, referred to as “hosts,” are designed to entertain the human “guests,” for which purpose they must appear to be human.  To make it believable that they are not, we are shown scenes of their manufacture.

Another difference between these two shows is that whereas Ava of Ex Machina is electronic, with synthetic material used to create a human appearance for her, the hosts of Westworld seem to be more flesh-androids than robots, in that we suspect that protoplasm is used to make them.  To the extent that organic material is used to construct them, we are naturally more likely to infer consciousness, according to the principle mention above that from similar causes we expect similar effects.

Anyway, Caleb’s job in Ex Machina is to perform a Turing test, which a computer or robot must pass in order to qualify for having true artificial intelligence.  The idea is that if a human cannot tell when he is interacting with another human and when he is interacting with a machine, then the machine has passed the test.  Caleb jumps to the conclusion that if the robot can pass the test, then the robot has consciousness, and Nathan implicitly agrees with that inference.

Some people believe that intelligence implies consciousness and conversely, but neither one implies the other at all.  It may be that no matter how advanced robots become, they will still be automata without any consciousness at all, no matter how many times they pass the Turing test.  In Westworld, on the other hand, Dr. Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins) says that in the early days of manufacturing the robotic hosts, his partner Arnold was not satisfied with the fact that the hosts could pass the Turing test.  He wanted them to be conscious as well.  So it is clear that in this series, passing the Turing test is not regarded as a sufficient condition for consciousness.  There is almost the suggestion that passing the Turing test is a necessary condition for consciousness, but that cannot be right.  Chimpanzees are presumably conscious, but they would fail a Turing test.

In any event, Ex Machina equates intelligence with consciousness, so we shall let it go with that.  The main thing is that in talking to Ava, Caleb falls in love with her.  When he finds out that Nathan intends to reprogram her, wiping out her memory, he is alarmed, for memory is essential to the survival of our person.  As Leibniz once said, if you tell me that when I die, I will be immediately reborn in another body, but I will have no memory of my present life, then you might as well tell me that when I die, another person will be born.  Nathan plans to keep Ava’s body, but in destroying her memory, he will effectively be killing her.

Memory and the absence of such also play an important role in Westworld.  Unlike the original movie made in 1973, where the robots, especially the gunslinger played by Yul Brynner, are villains, in the television series, the hosts are victims.  They are raped, forced to witness the murder of their loved ones, and are murdered themselves.  The humans running Westworld, as well as the guests, feel no compunction about what is done to these hosts, in part because it is never really clear whether the hosts are conscious or not, but mostly because their memories are supposedly wiped clean after such abuse, as if that would negate their victimization.

Returning to Ex Machina, Caleb plots to help Ava escape.  At this point, I thought the movie would turn out in one of two possible ways.  My first possible plot was that the movie would become an adventure story, in which Caleb and Ava try to make their way through the forests and mountains with the very athletic and brilliant Nathan in pursuit.  They would eventually escape and live happily ever after.  The second possible plot, the one I was hoping for, was that just as they were about to escape, Nathan would tell Caleb that because he obviously regards Ava as a person, since he loves her and is trying to save her from death, then she has passed the Turing test big time.  Then he announces he never planned on wiping out her memory, so if Ava and Caleb want to get married and live happily ever after, that is fine with him.  He will simply begin working on a newer model tomorrow.

I can’t believe I did not anticipate the real ending.  After all, have I not watched every film noir that has ever been made?  How could I have missed the fact that Ava is the ultimate femme fatale, more ruthless than any of those played by Jane Greer, Joan Bennett, or Barbara Stanwyck?  She not only kills Nathan with the help of another female robot, but she also locks Caleb in the house where he will eventually die and blithely walks away to board the prearranged helicopter to take her to the city.

Perhaps even more unnerving is the way she smiles after she has locked Caleb in the house, and again when she makes it to the city and stands on a street corner watching people come and go.  In old movies, robots were typically mirthless, perhaps because we supposed that robots might have thoughts and sense perception but not emotions, especially not positive ones.  Increasingly, however, robots are portrayed as having the full range of human affect.  As for Ava in particular, any smiles made before her escape could be dismissed as part of her deceitfulness.  But these smiles occur when she has no need to manipulate anyone, and they are smiles that evince genuine delight and happiness.  It is that smile, more than her intelligence, that makes us believe she is conscious.

Ex Machina is a movie, which means that in just under two hours, the story came to an end, an end that the writer and director, Alex Garland, definitely had in mind from the outset.  Westworld, on the other hand, is a television series, whose end is not yet at hand.  So far, it is fun pulling for the robots for a change, and it is interesting the way this show raises all sorts of existential questions.  But I am only halfway through the first season, and I am starting to have misgivings.  If this were a movie or even just a miniseries, the revolt of the robots would be enough.  But since this is a television series, intended to go on for several seasons, there are all sorts of subplots and superplots, not the least of which is the one involving the Man in Black (Ed Harris) and his quest to solve the mystery of the maze.  As I watched this show, willingly allowing myself to be pulled into the story, I began having misgivings.  It reminded me of something.

What it reminded me of was Lost (2004-2010).  There too I was pulled into the mystery.  For five seasons I watched and was fascinated.  And then, in the sixth season, it became clear that throughout the show, the writers were just winging it, making stuff up as they went along, with no idea how it would all end.  As long as the ratings held up, they just went from season to season, adding on more stuff. But when it finally came time to wrap things up, all we got was a bunch of New Age nonsense.  All the pleasure I had experienced in watching this show was ruined in retrospect.

I could not get the thought out of my mind, so I looked up both shows on IMDb.  It appears that J.J. Abrams, one of the creators of Lost, is an executive producer of Westworld.  I don’t know how much to make of that connection.  All I can say is that I hope that the writers of Westworld already know how all the mysteries of this show will ultimately be resolved into a neat and satisfying end, and that they will not pull another Lost on us.

It Follows (2014)

When it comes to atmosphere and creepiness, It Follows does such a good job that one can only be dismayed by the inclusion of a couple of unnecessary absurdities.

Jay is a young woman in college who has sex with a guy named Hugh.  Then he chloroforms her, takes her to a remote location, and ties her up to a wheelchair.  Eventually, a slow-moving, zombie-like ghost appears, heading in their direction.  Hugh explains to Jay that this ghost will follow her unrelentingly until it catches her and kills her.  She must avoid it until she has sex with someone else, thereby passing the curse on to him.  The only people that can see this ghost are those who are presently being pursued, like Jay, and those who have been pursued by it in the past, like Hugh.

Needless to say, it is an act of evil to pass this curse on intentionally, so at first one wonders why he didn’t just have sex with Jay and then leave her to her doom.  The reason, as Hugh explains, is that once it kills Jay, it will then go back to the previously cursed person and follow him.  So, Hugh wants Jay to know what is happening so that she will avoid being caught by this ghost long enough to pass the curse on to someone else.  In other words, he wants Jay to stay alive and pass it on for his own selfish reasons, not out of any concern for her.

The first absurdity in all this is the whole chloroform-and-tied-to-the-wheel-chair bit.  Hugh could have had sex with Jay and then explained what he had done to her while waiting for the ghost to show up without bothering to drive somewhere else. Since the ghost was already on its way to him anyway, there would not have been much of a wait.  Furthermore, he must have known that Jay was sure to tell the police after being abducted, whereas if he had simply told her the story and let her see the ghost, the police would have ignored her had she repeated it to them.  There would have been less risk for him that way.

Those unnecessary melodramatics aside, the next absurdity is Hugh’s encyclopedic knowledge on the subject.  In the novel Dracula and in many vampire movies based on it, there is a Van Helsing character, a learned professor who, among his many accomplishments, happens to be an authority on vampires.  He explains all the rules, the ones involving crosses, mirrors, sunlight, and wooden stakes.  So informed, the characters in the movie and we in the audience know what needs to be done.  The question is, how did Hugh become the Van Helsing to this ghost that follows people around?  How does he know all the rules?  In particular, how does he know that if Jay dies, the ghost will start pursuing him around again?  Later, Hugh, whose real name turns out to be Jeff, says he caught the curse from some woman he picked up in a bar whose name he didn’t even know.  So, how did he know that sex with her was the cause of his troubles?  Did she chloroform him and tie him to a wheelchair too, perhaps bequeathing those items to him, saying, “Here, you can have these things now, I won’t be needing them anymore”?  And for that matter, why didn’t Hugh/Jeff pass these items on to Jay?  After all, when she gets through passing the curse on to some hapless fellow who just thought it was his lucky night, won’t she need to chloroform him and tie him to a wheel chair too?

If the curse is passed on through sex, there must have been a first person who acquired it spontaneously and not through sex, otherwise, we would have an infinite regress.  There is no reason to think this first person would have known the rules, even if he had lived long enough to pass it on, which seems unlikely, since no one would have told him why some slow-moving ghost was walking toward him, especially since no one else could have seen it.

There was no need for the abduction scene, and there was no need for Hugh/Jeff to have Van Helsing-like knowledge, only what he had acquired from personal experience, which need not have been much.

Liberty versus Happiness

What is more important, liberty or happiness?  Certainly the two are not mutually exclusive, but neither are they invariably coextensive, for what we want and what will make us happy are often two different things.  And so we must ask ourselves whether a man should be allowed to make bad choices that will result in his misery and ruin, or whether we should compel him to do what we know will conduce to his happiness and well-being.

A particular instance of this issue may be found in the ongoing health care debate. Should we allow people who can afford health insurance to go without it, or should we force them to have coverage and make them pay? Speaking as someone who is unabashedly paternalistic, I say the latter. Though they may not be minors, yet many adults often lack the wisdom and maturity to know what is best for them in the long run.  And thus it is the role of the state to see to it that they have good health insurance.  It is for their own good.

Needless to say, there are those that are of a different opinion. After criticizing President Obama for making promises regarding the Affordable Care Act that he could not keep, Philip Klein argues that the Republicans are in danger of doing the same thing when they try to deny or minimize the extent to which people will lose health care coverage when Obamacare is repealed and replaced with their own plan.

Republicans are in serious danger of repeating Obama’s mistake, because they are having a tough time stating a simple truth, which goes something like this: “We don’t believe that it is the job of the federal government to guarantee that everybody has health insurance.”

According to Ian Millhiser, some Republicans are taking Klein’s advice to heart:

A handful of GOP lawmakers are now taking up Klein’s charge — with one of them even claiming that a Republican plan that leads to a higher national uninsurance rate would be a good thing.

“If the numbers drop,” Rep. Mike Burgess (R-TX) said Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Conference, “I would say that’s a good thing.” He went on to argue that more people without health care would be a positive thing for the United States because it would mean that “we’ve restored personal liberty in this country.”

Millhiser then went on to quote another congressman in this regard:

Burgess’ prediction that Republican health plans will lead to a drop in the national insurance rate was echoed by Rep. Dennis Ross (R-FL) in an interview with Bloomberg this week. “Not everybody is going to have health care” under a Republican health plan, Ross said. “Some people just don’t care enough about their own care.”

In other words, the people that drop their health care coverage given the opportunity to do so without penalty will be better off, not because they won’t get sick and rue the day they decided to go without health insurance, but because they will have been free to make that bad decision.

But Jake Novac gets the award for taking the strongest position on this subject: even when people are stupid, they should be free to make bad decisions.  The title of his essay is “CBO report on Trumpcare confirms it—You can’t fix stupid.”  He argues that “most of those 24 million people projected to ‘lose’ coverage will be doing so of their own free will.”

In other words, now that the government can’t make them do it, a lot of people who can afford to buy health insurance simply won’t do it anymore. And therein lies the problem. The role of government is to operate under the consent of the governed, not to act as the nanny state.

In addition to the word “stupid” appearing in the title, it occurs twice more in the essay.  In a perverse kind of way, you have to admire someone who advocates letting admittedly stupid people act of their own free will.

A friend of mine visited an uncle of his on a ranch for a few days.  During the visit, he saw some cowboys castrating calves. “Doesn’t that hurt?” he asked. “Sure,” his uncle replied, “but it’s their own damn fault for being cows.” Along those lines, I guess Novac would say of those who choose not to have health insurance, “It’s their own damn fault for being stupid.”

A lot of democrats may try to shift the discussion to those who want health insurance but will no longer be able to afford it, if the Republicans get their way. And indeed, there will be millions of such people.  But we should not shy away from the fact that many others that can afford health insurance will choose not to have it.

Klein said that the Republicans will be making a mistake if they don’t accept the fact that it is not the government’s job to guarantee that everyone has health insurance.  Democrats are in danger of making a similar mistake if they don’t openly acknowledge the position that it is the government’s job to compel people to have health insurance whether they like it or not.

The Fury (1978)

The Fury is definitely a 1970s movie.  For one thing, this was at a time when anyone connected with the federal government was suspect, especially if it was the FBI or the CIA.  Exactly when government agencies were allowed to be populated by patriotic men and women of good moral character in the movies again, I cannot say with certainty.  However, the FBI was definitely rehabilitated by the time Manhunter was made in 1986, and the CIA was allowed to find its way back into the good graces of the audience in The Hunt for Red October in 1990.  But in the 1970s, government agents were mostly evil.  In The Fury, however, the government agency in question must really be bad, because it is so secret that no one has ever heard it.

Peter Sandza (Kirk Douglas), who works for the agency when the movie opens, appears to be the exception.  I guess there is a good apple in every barrel.  But the agency, through his immediate superior, Ben Childress (John Cassavetes), tries to have him assassinated, their version of early retirement.  They do so in order to kidnap his psychic son, Robin (Andrew Stevens), presumably to weaponize his telekinetic powers.  In an effort to find Robin, Peter locates Gillian Bellaver (Amy Irving), who has psychic powers of her own (capable of making people bleed through physical contact), hoping that she can lead him to Robin.  Amy is at the Paragon Institute, headed by Dr. McKeever (Charles Durning), whose purpose it is to study people with special psychic ability, but ultimately, McKeever works for Childress.

Because this is the 1970s, a time when alpha waves were all the rage, these brain waves are naturally worked into the movie.  More generally, there are continual references to some electromagnetic this or that associated with whatever parapsychological phenomena are taking place.  Figuratively, however, Robin’s powers are compared to an atomic reactor or an atomic bomb.  In other words, the government agents are fooling around with forces that may ultimately destroy them.

At a house where Robin is being tested, Dr. Susan Charles (Fiona Lewis), who has been acting as his lover to maintain control over him, suggests that he is becoming unstable and needs a break.  She takes him to a shopping mall where he becomes furious just because he finds her talking to a couple of other men.  Then we see some amusement rides, and immediately we know what is going to happen.  In his fury, he is going to use his telekinetic powers to cause one of the amusement rides to go wild.

But wait, we say to ourselves, that cannot be.  Robin is basically a good kid.  How can he cause the amusement ride to become destructive when we know that there are typically parents and their children on such rides?  Once again, it’s the zeitgeist of the 1970s to the rescue.  Just as we are wondering how he can do his thing with the amusement ride without harming mothers and their children, here come a bunch of Arab sheiks.  Americans hated Arabs at that time, thanks to the oil embargo of the early 1970s, which caused people to have to wait in long lines for gasoline.  Conveniently, then, innocent Americans get off the ride while the Arabs take their place.  As a result, when Robin unleashes his powers, we get the pleasure of watching Arab sheiks go flying everywhere.

Meanwhile, Peter arranges for Gillian to escape from Paragon.  It is early in the morning, and Gillian is still wearing her nightgown when she makes a break for it.  We see her running down the street in her bare feet, and we cannot help but notice that the bottoms of her feet are absolutely black.  “When was the last time she took a bath?” we ask ourselves.  But then we remember that this is the 1970s.  A lot of women had filthy feet back in those days.  Most did not, thank God!  But there was a sizable minority, usually young women or girls, who apparently thought having dirty feet was a sign of authenticity.  Maybe they even thought it was sexy.  Examples of other 1970s movies in which dirty feet are either displayed or referred to are Joe (1970) and Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977).  A friend of mine had a theory back then that girls kept a charcoal box under their bed, and before they went out on a date, they would rub their feet back and forth in the box and then lie on the bed holding their feet up to a mirror so they could see the bottoms in order to make sure they got the look they were hoping for.

The ending, at least, is what we would expect in any decade.  The evil government agents are destroyed by the two psychics, culminating in a final scene in which Gillian causes Childress’s body to explode, sending blood and guts everywhere, while his head flies into the air still wearing an astonished expression on its face.