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Author Archives: disinterested spectator

Bitter Victory (1957)

Ideally, a movie should make sense on its own terms. It is a bad movie when scenes can only be explained by external logic, by what was going on in the mind of the director or screenwriter. John Ford was once asked, regarding the movie Stagecoach (1939), why the Indians chasing the stagecoach didn’t just shoot the horses, and his answer was, “Then there wouldn’t have been any movie,” which was an example of external logic. Actually, he was just being a smart aleck, because he could have said that the Indians wanted to capture the horses alive, which would have made sense, and more importantly, would have made the scene explicable in terms of internal logic alone.

A big problem with Bitter Victory, a movie about British commandos ordered to make a raid on Benghazi to steal documents from the German headquarters, is that too much of what happens in the movie is explicable only in terms of external logic. Nicholas Ray, the director, had some idea in his head about how things should turn out, which leads to one forced scene after another. The first one occurs in England before the commandos set out on their mission.  Captain Leith (Richard Burton) sees Jane (Ruth Roman) sitting at a table in a military night club. No sooner does he recognize her than Major Brand (Curd Jürgens) walks up beside him and asks Leith if he would like to meet his wife. What follows is a scene reminiscent of Casablanca, in which it becomes clear that Leith and Jane were once lovers, and cryptic remarks pass back and forth between them while Brand takes it all in, not understanding the particulars of the remarks but gleaning their general significance nevertheless. Because we have seen this sort of thing before, we question it more than we might have when seeing it for the first time.

In other words, the most natural thing for Leith to do when Brand asks him if he wants to meet his wife would be to say, “You mean Jane? I knew Jane before the war. I was just going over to say ‘Hi.’” Now, of course they would not admit they had been lovers, but there is no reason for Leith and Jane to deny they even knew each other, especially since their innuendoes make their previous relationship so obvious. By concealing that they knew each other and then making the concealment obvious, they only made things worse. So, why did they do this? Internal logic fails us here, and we are forced to reach for external logic. Ray wanted Brand to find out that Leith and Jane were once secretly lovers so that he would become jealous, and so Ray concocted this hurried, unrealistic scene to that end.

After the mission is complete, the commandos have to escape by walking through the desert.  However, two men are too injured to walk. Brand tells Leith he will have to stay behind with the wounded men until they die and then catch up with the rest of the men. That makes no sense. If they are going to die anyway, just leave them behind. Furthermore, in a much later scene, Brand reveals his orders, written down on a piece of paper, that their mission is so important that if men are wounded, they are to be left behind. Now it really makes no sense.

It gets worse. When Brand tells Leith to stay behind with the wounded, a soldier suggests making stretchers to carry them. Leith dismisses the idea, saying that the men would bleed to death in an hour. Sounds good to me. If they have scruples about leaving the men behind, carry them in stretchers for an hour, and then when they die, leave them in the desert. Instead, Leith stays behind with the wounded, and then, after everyone is gone, kills them. Actually, he only kills one of them, because he runs out of bullets. So then he decides to carry the other wounded man all by himself. You see, carrying a wounded man on a stretcher is a bad idea, but tossing him over your shoulder and staggering through the desert is a good idea. Conveniently, the man dies, and Leith is able to catch up with the rest of the men.

External logic to the rescue. The purpose of all this absurdity is to establish that Brand wanted Leith to kill the wounded for him, and then hold him responsible for doing so. That would be fine, if that could have been established coherently. But since internal logic fails us here, we have to reach for the director’s motivations instead.

After a while, the men run out of water. They come across a well, but before anyone takes a drink, someone suggests that the Germans may have poisoned it. The men put pressure on Brand to sample the water to see if it is safe to drink.  Rather than show fear, he takes a swig. It tastes all right, but Leith says it is too soon to tell. So, they leave the well without drinking any of the water. But if they were not going to drink the water regardless of what happened when Brand swallowed some, what was the point of Brand’s risking his life by drinking some of it in the first place? This contrivance can only be explained by Ray’s desire to show how Brand can be intimidated by his fear that others may think him a coward.

When Brand sees a scorpion crawling near Leith’s leg during a rest period, he does not warn Leith, hoping that Leith will be bitten. Mekrane (Raymond Pellegrin) sees the scorpion too, but does nothing. After Leith is bitten, Mekrane tries to kill Brand for letting the scorpion bite Leith. But if Mekrane cares so much about Leith, why didn’t he just walk over to the scorpion and step on it?

Finally, before Leith dies, he asks Brand to tell Jane that she was right and he was wrong. Instead, when Brand gets back to England, he tells Jane he did not hear what Leith said, but he probably said that he loved her. We know Brand is the sort who would lie about such a thing, but why this particular lie? As with the scorpion scene, I don’t think even external logic can make sense of this one.

If the movie is so illogical that not even external logic can make sense of some of it, we have to ask ourselves why film critics waste any time on it at all.  Now it is metalogic to the rescue.  Nicholas Ray is one of those directors that a lot of critics regard as an auteur, which means that all his movies will receive attention no matter how bad they are.

Bird of Paradise (1932)

In the movie Bird of Paradise, a bunch of men on a yacht stop off at a Polynesian island, where Johnny (Joel McCrea) and Luana (Dolores del Rio) fall in love. The rest of the men leave, but Johnny stays behind. He absconds with Luana, and they find an island paradise to shack up on.

But she is destined to be a virgin sacrifice for the Volcano God, and when it starts to erupt, the natives find her and bring her back. Johnny tries to rescue her, but he ends up becoming part of the sacrifice. He tells Luana there is only one true God, to whom he says the Lord’s Prayer. The sailors return and rescue them, but Luana voluntarily stays to be fed to the volcano. So, the Christian God loses out to the Volcano God, who gets his sacrifice.

She is not a virgin anymore, but what the Volcano God doesn’t know won’t hurt him.

Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932)

 

I suppose Boudu Saved from Drowning is a funny movie, if your idea of funny is someone behaving in an atrocious manner, while those around him keep letting him get away with it. The title character is saved from drowning (attempted suicide), and he is taken into the home of the bookseller who saved him. He then proceeds to deliberately wreck everything he comes into contact with, while exhibiting disgusting mannerisms. Thirty minutes into the film, you’ll wish the bookseller had let him drown. Forty minutes in, and you’ll be ready to hold his head under the water until he quits struggling.

The bookseller’s wife is a sourpuss, so Boudu rapes her and puts a smile on her face. I felt like a sourpuss watching this movie, and I felt violated by it. But unlike the wife, I did not smile.

Broken Blossoms or The Yellow Man and the Girl (1919)

In 1915, D.W. Griffith made Birth of a Nation, which was an entertaining movie, but had the slight drawback of being the most racist movie ever made.  To atone for this great sin, he had to do penance, and that’s why he made Intolerance:  Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages the very next year, whose message was that we should all be tolerant of one another, something the glorious Ku Klux Klan of the previous movie definitely was not. Intolerance was a boring movie, but it had to be done.  Unfortunately, it was also done to us, punishing us for enjoying Birth of a Nation, I suppose.

Griffith must have still been feeling guilty by 1919, because in that year he also made Broken Blossoms or The Yellow Man and the Girl, in which he tried to atone for his racist classic one more time.  The very title may sound a little racist to our twenty-first century ears, but he probably thought it was an improvement over the source material, a short story by Thomas Burke entitled “The Chink and the Child.”

The Asian in both titles is Cheng Huan, played by Richard Barthelmess in yellowface.  He is a Chinese Buddhist who decides to move to London to bring enlightenment to the white race.  He is unable to bring said enlightenment to the British, however, no doubt because the people in England were not sure what to make of a man who was apparently incapable of using the muscles in his face to form an expression.  I guess that was Griffith’s idea of the inscrutable Oriental.  However, Huan is able to achieve nirvana on a regular basis at the local opium den.

Whereas Barthelmess played Huan without an expression, Donald Crisp played Battling Burrows with enough expressions on his face for the two of them. Burrows is a boxer who enjoys being cruel to his young daughter Lucy. In fact, the only time Burrows is not bullying or beating Lucy is when he is at the saloon or in the boxing ring.  But he insists that she put a smile on her face, and so Lucy uses her two fingers to force her lips into a smile, which is ludicrous.  Supposedly, Lillian Gish, who played Lucy, came up with that idea, and apparently Griffith liked it, because she does it over and over again. The reason for this, presumably, is that if she had simply forced a smile on her face the way a normal person might do, we in the audience might be so dull-witted as to think she was actually happy.

After a particularly severe beating, Lucy accidentally stumbles into Huan’s shop.  When the effect of his opium pipe wears off, Huan notices her on the floor and takes her upstairs to his bedroom.  His love for her is pure and noble, but expressed in such a way as to seem downright creepy.  But when her father finds out she has been in Huan’s bedroom, he beats her with a whip until she dies.  Huan goes over to where Burrows lives, and, discovering that Lucy is dead, pulls out a revolver and shoots Burrows several times, killing him on the spot.  Huan goes home and commits suicide by disemboweling himself with a knife.  I thought that was something a Japanese Samurai might do as a matter of honor, not something a Buddhist is likely to do, but then I wasn’t aware that Buddhists went around packing heat, so what do I know?

This movie is simplistically didactic, instructing us that an Asian might actually be a better person than a Causian.  And to benefit from that lesson, we have to sit through what may be the most miserable ninety minutes in cinematic history.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)

Early in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, two men argue about which is the better form of entertainment, operas or movies, with one guy saying that he prefers movies, because he doesn’t like all that singing in operas.  The joke is that what we are watching is both a movie and an opera, for every line in the movie is sung.

In a typical musical, most of the dialogue is merely spoken, with songs being sung occasionally for some special reason.  One of the things about opera that is strange is that people sing about ordinary stuff that hardly seems to warrant musical expression.  For example, at the very beginning of this movie, Guy (Nino Castelnuovo), who works in a garage as an auto mechanic, is just about to leave for the day when his boss asks him if he can work overtime.  He says that would be inconvenient, and he suggests Pierre instead, who says he can stay late.  All this mundane conversation is sung to music, whereas it would only be spoken in an ordinary musical.  Fortunately, the music is pleasant and easy to take.  As in any opera, however, there are special musical pieces that stand out from the rest.  In this case, two songs in particular have been translated into English and recorded, which are “I Will Wait for You” and “Watch What Happens.”

Jacques Demy, who wrote and directed this movie, is often said to have borrowed the plot from Marcel Pagnol’s Marseilles Trilogy, plays that were made into movies, especially the first two of the three, Marius (1931) and Fanny (1932).  However, there are differences between these early movies and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg that are so striking that they render the actual similarities superficial in comparison.

As for the story in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Guy and Geneviève (Catherine Deneuve) want to get married. However, he is drafted to fight the war in Algeria. On his last night before leaving, they make love for the first time. And you know what that means. When a woman in a movie has sex with a man just once, she gets pregnant. We then figure that either Guy will be killed in the war, or he will forget about her and fall in love with someone else. Either that, or she will be so desperate about covering up the shame of her pregnancy that she will marry another man. At first, Geneviève’s mother, Madame Emery (Anne Vernon), is a little distressed about her daughter’s pregnancy, but after a while, neither she nor Geneviève seems unduly concerned about it.  In other words, there is not sufficient desperation on the part of Geneviève to compel her to marry anyone.

Already we have several differences between this movie and corresponding parts of the Marseilles Trilogy.  In the latter, the two lovers are Marius and Fanny.  However, Marius is not forced to leave Fanny.  He simply would rather go to sea and satisfy his wanderlust than marry her, and Fanny sacrifices her happiness and lets him go.  As noted above, Guy would never have left Geneviève had he not been compelled to do so, for he wanted to marry her more than anything else.

In the process of trying to sell some of her jewelry to pay the bills, Madame takes Geneviève with her to a jewelry store, where they meet a jewelry wholesaler, Roland Cassard (Marc Michel), who immediately falls in love with Geneviève. Because he is rich and respectable, Madame wants Geneviève to accept his eventual proposal of marriage. She never really liked the idea of Geneviève’s marrying an auto mechanic, and in an effort to disparage Geneviève’s love for Guy, she earlier told her that she (Geneviève) did not know what love is all about, that it is more than becoming enamored with someone’s face.  This is ironic, because whereas Guy and Geneviève had gotten to know each other very well, all of Cassard’s love for Geneviève is based on his doing exactly what Madame ridicules, becoming enamored with someone’s face.

Surprisingly enough, instead of Guy forgetting about Geneviève, she starts forgetting about him. After only four months, she says it feels as though he has been gone for years, and that she is losing the feeling she had for him. She has to look at his picture to remember what he looks like. It is true that she has only received one letter from him in four months, but you have to figure that a man fighting a war might not have the luxury of writing regularly (in fact, he is wounded by a grenade).  In any event, in the letter she receives from Guy, he writes that he is looking forward to coming home after his military service is over, marrying her, and seeing their child.

This is another big difference between the Marseilles Trilogy and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.  Fanny never stops loving Marius, even after she marries another man.  But Geneviève’s love for Guy simply fades away in spite of her efforts to hold on to it.

As a result of her waning feelings for Guy, Geneviève ends up marrying Cassard. The movie could have given her the standard motive of a woman desperate to cover up the shame of her pregnancy, as in Fanny, but it does not. It is unlikely that she would have married Cassard had she not been pregnant, but we still get the sense that her decision to opt for a marriage of convenience was made possible by the brute fact that her love for Guy had died.

Before Guy and Geneviève separate, they sing “I Will Wait for You.” The lyrics in the movie are a bit different from that of the popular recording of that song in English, but the thrust is the same. The two lovers express their undying love for each other. It reminds me of the movie Oliver (1968), in which Nancy sings the song “As Long as He Needs Me,” referring to her lover Bill, who has no need for her at all, and ends up murdering her. We have a similar irony with the song “I Will Wait for You.” Although the lyrics in the American version of the song say, “If it takes forever, I will wait for you,” Geneviève does not even manage to wait more than a few months.

Before being drafted, Guy was living with his dying aunt Élise (Mireille Perry), who was being tended to by a caregiver named Madeleine (Ellen Farmer).  After Guy returns and discovers that Geneviève has moved away and married Cassard, he talks to Aunt Élise to see what she knows about Geneviève.  He comments on several letters that were exchanged between Geneviève and himself, but most of them must have been written after she had married Cassard, since she earlier said she had only received one letter from Guy and that she did not know where to write him.  In these subsequent letters, she apparently could not bring herself to tell Guy about her marriage. In the course of his conversation with his aunt, he expresses surprise that Madeleine is still taking care of her.  “Hasn’t she married yet?” he asks, to which Élise offers as an explanation, “You know how well-behaved she is.”  Come again?  That’s a pretty cynical remark, even for a French woman.  In any event, he eventually marries Madeleine, who we sense has been in love with Guy all along.

Guy and Geneviève finally meet again when she pulls into the filling station that he now owns. She says she never expected to see him again, and that it was just by chance that she decided to pass this way. She offers no explanation as to why she married someone else, and he does not ask her why she didn’t wait for him to return. She asks him if he would like to meet their daughter Françoise, who is sitting in the car.  When he shakes his head No, we get the sense that this is neither from bitterness nor from any feeling that seeing his daughter would be painful for him.  Rather, his feeling for their daughter is like the love he once had for Geneviève, something that is simply gone.

In Fanny, when Marius returns and finds out what happened, he wants the child, but Fanny’s husband won’t give him up, and Fanny, who still loves Marius, stays with her husband, once more sacrificing her happiness for that of others (i.e., for her husband and her child).  But in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, when the former lovers finally meet again, Geneviève no longer loves Guy, Guy no longer loves Geneviève, and he is indifferent to the child they had together.

After Geneviève leaves the filling station, Madeleine and their son, who had been out Christmas shopping, return to the station, and we see that they are a happy family.

There is no villain in this movie.  No one is to blame for what happened.  That is just the way love is, a beautiful illusion that we think will last forever until it doesn’t.

The Crowd (1928) and Our Daily Bread (1934)

In 1928, King Vidor made The Crowd, a movie about John and Mary Sims, and then made Our Daily Bread in 1934, which is a movie about the same married couple.  Different actors play the roles in the two movies, but even if they had been played by the same actors, the second movie really does not seem to be a sequel to the first, especially since the son they had in the first movie is inexplicably missing in the second.

The Crowd is basically about a man, John Sims, who thinks he will make it big in the big city.  In fact, his father expresses those big dreams for him when he is born on July 4, 1900, as propitious a birth date as one could want.  As a child, his life is compared, somewhat superficially, with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.  At the age of twelve, he expresses his dream of being big himself.  That is the day his father dies, suggesting that our dreams have a way of being interrupted by the harsh realities of life.

An intertitle sarcastically announces that John has become an adult, and that he is one of the seven million people in New York who believe the city depends on them.  That is a stretch, because a lot of people have no such illusions, but John certainly does.  He ends up with a job in which he is just one of a thousand people.  All in all, it is not a bad job:  he works indoors, sitting down, no heavy lifting.  He even has the opportunity to steal a little time from his boss trying to win a contest coming up with a good advertising slogan.  And there is no overtime apparently, because at the moment the minute hand indicates it is 5 o’clock, everyone leaves his desk and heads for the exit.

Bert works in the same office with John, and he lines him up with a blind double date, where John meets Mary.  Though Bert is a fun-loving guy, yet he is a better worker than John and eventually gets promoted.  Furthermore, Bert is not contemptuous of other people the way John is, sneering at the crowd and remarking to Mary that most people are a pain in the neck.  John sees a man juggling balls with an advertisement on the clown suit he is wearing.  He points out that the poor sap’s father probably thought he would grow up to be president.  Much in the way that Stanton Carlisle (Tyrone Power) is destined to become the geek in a sideshow in Nightmare Alley (1947), so too is John destined to become the juggler in the clown suit as punishment for his derisive remark.

After kissing Mary a couple of times and seeing an advertisement (“You furnish the girl, and we’ll furnish the home”), John asks Mary to marry him.  They get married, but there is no home to furnish, only a small apartment with a Murphy bed, where John dreams about the big house he thinks they will eventually own.  After a while, it all starts to get on their nerves, and they start quarreling, although John is the one who does most of the complaining and sniping.  They almost split up, but then Mary tells John she is pregnant, and so they make up.  They have a son and soon after that a daughter.  And soon after that, they start quarreling again, with Mary growing weary of John’s dreams about making it big while Bert actually got a promotion.

While at the beach, John starts juggling balls to amuse his children, recalling the geek motif of the juggler in the clown suit.  Nevertheless, John comes up with an advertising slogan based on juggling balls, and it wins him five hundred dollars (about seven thousand dollars, adjusted for inflation).  After John buys some presents, they call their children through the window to come and get the toys he bought them.  Heedlessly, the children run across the street, and their daughter is run over by a truck and killed.

After a few months, John is still so upset that he cannot do his job.  Even though Bert is now his supervisor and would probably be understanding, John quits before Bert can say anything, throwing a tantrum, flinging his ledger on the floor, and saying, “To hell with this job.”  Oddly enough, when he gets home, Mary is in a great mood as she prepares food for the company picnic.  We have to wonder, if Mary has recovered well enough to think about having fun, why can’t John at least go to work and do his job?  In any event, John tries to get work elsewhere, but fails at one job after another, once again putting stress on the marriage.  In some ways, this reminds us of Penny Serenade (1941) and The Marrying Kind (1952), two movies in which a marriage ends up on the rocks on account of the death of a child.  Like those two movies, the idea is that a good marriage can ultimately survive such a tragedy.

Mary tries to make ends meet by sewing dresses while John hangs around the house depressed.  Her brothers come by and offer John a job, but he turns it down because it is a “charity job.”  John leaves and almost commits suicide by leaping in front of a train, but ends up finding work juggling balls in a clown suit.  He goes home to find that Mary is leaving him to go live with her brothers.  He talks her into going to a show with him, having purchased the tickets with the money he made, and at the theater having a good time, they see his advertisement of the clown juggling balls in the program, suggesting that he might succeed again in the future.

Apparently John fails to make a go of it coming up with advertising slogans, however, because in Our Daily Bread, we find that he no longer even has the job juggling balls while wearing that clown suit. An uncle gives them an opportunity to work an abandoned farm, and they decide to take it. I guess John is no longer too proud to take charity from one of Mary’s relatives.  Unfortunately, they know nothing about farming. A genuine farmer, who lost his own place, breaks down on the road, and John invites him and his family to join them. John then gets the idea of inviting other people to join the farm, using their diversity of skills to turn it into a cooperative commune.

Naturally enough, there are scenes showing how well this works out, but there are also scenes of trouble. There is a discussion of the kind of government they will have for themselves, and we get just a taste of political discord. There is a scene involving a troublemaker, who is quickly forced to behave himself. John tells Mary about one of the members of the commune trying to steal some stuff and sell it for his own personal gain. We want to see more of this, because there are not many movies premised on the idea of desperate families forming such a commune, and we are curious as to whether these elements of discord could be overcome. Unfortunately, the movie diverges from these issues.

First, it slides into a man-against-nature situation, in which drought threatens to ruin their crops. There are lots of movies about farmers struggling against the elements, and it seems a shame to waste time on that theme here. The only good thing that can be said in its favor is that they all pull together and build a path from the river to the crops for the purpose of irrigation, solving the problem through their own effort and ability. Another movie might have had someone pray for rain, followed by a downpour, so at least we were spared that deus ex machina.

Second, there is a diversion with no redeeming features at all. It concerns the arrival of a blonde femme fatale, who almost succeeds in getting John to desert his wife and the farm by running off to the city with her. Movies about a wicked woman making a good man go wrong can be lots of fun, but that plot element does not belong here. Besides, it is a little irritating the way Mary blithely takes John back after abandoning her, even if only temporarily.

The movie should have spent less time on the drought and none at all on the femme fatale, thereby leaving more time to dramatize all the difficulties in getting people to cooperate in such an enterprise, especially since many of us have doubts as to how well something like that would work out anyway.

MyRA, My Ass!

The federal government is now making available a new kind of savings account called myRA, which is a play on IRA, the individual retirement account.  It allows a person to have money deducted from his paycheck and deposited directly into a savings account.  The amount can be very small, and there are no fees.  The money is invested in United States Treasury securities, and no taxes have to be paid on the interest until it is withdrawn.  The original contributions, however, can be withdrawn without penalty.  When the maximum amount of $15,000 is reached, it will be rolled over into a Roth IRA.  All in all, it sounds pretty good.

But as you can no doubt tell from the title of this essay, I don’t like it.  Some people have voiced the objection that the return on the investment is piddling.  It is likely to keep you up with inflation, but there will be no real return of any significance, as opposed to investing in the stock market.  That worry is the least of my concerns.  In itself, there is nothing wrong with the myRA, notwithstanding the small return paid by the government securities.  In fact, for an individual with no savings, the myRA would be just fine even if it paid nothing in the way of interest.

There are three stages of investing.  In the beginning, what matters is not the return on your investment, but the fact that you are saving money at all.  You could just put the money in a sock and keep it in the drawer for all that it matters, because the interest on the first few thousand dollars is just not worth worrying about.  Later, as the amount of savings becomes substantial, the return on that money does become important.  There may even come a point where the return is greater than what you are able to contribute to your savings out of your paycheck.  Finally, there is the capital-preservation stage, where you have so much money that you no longer have to worry about saving any more or worry about getting a good return.  Your chief concern at that point is just making sure you don’t lose it.  The myRA is for people in the first stage, the savings stage, and so the objection about the paltry return is beside the point.

My objection to the myRA is not that it is bad for the individual that takes advantage of it.  Were I just starting out as a young man with no savings, I would probably open one myself.  My objection is what this represents ideologically.  To explain what I mean, I must start at the beginning.  I started working in the 1970s, around the time the IRA first became available.  Because I worked for a company with a profit sharing plan, the rules back then were such that I could not avail myself of this kind of account.  But when I lost that job in 1983, I rolled the money from the profit sharing account into an IRA.  At the time, the maximum contribution was $2,000 per year (about $4,800, adjusted for inflation), which I started making annually.  Because I was able to deduct the contribution from my taxes, the net result was that I contributed $1,700 and the government was contributing $300 (just over $700, adjusted for inflation).

I remember thinking at the time that while this was a good deal for me, it was wrongheaded as public policy.  Anyone who could save that much money every year did not need help from the federal government.  The people the government should be helping are the ones who are so poor they cannot put any money aside, because they can just barely make ends meet.  The $300 the government was giving me each year should have gone to the needy.  Of course, with an IRA, the taxes are only deferred and must eventually be paid when the money is withdrawn.  But now that I am retired, the first $12,000 I withdraw each year from that IRA is excluded from taxes thanks to the exemption and the standard deduction.  After that, I pay at the lowest tax bracket.  In short, I end up paying a lot less in taxes than I would have had I never opened an IRA.

By coincidence, 1983 is the same year the Greenspan Commission issued its recommendations for Social Security, which consisted of an increase in the payroll tax and an increase in the retirement age.  This really brought my objection to the IRA into focus.  I was all for the tax increase, but I didn’t like the increase in the retirement age.  I would have preferred that the retirement age be kept the same and the payroll tax increased even more.  In other words, instead of the government giving people like me a $300 tax subsidy, it should have put the $300 into the Social Security Trust Fund (I know the $300 would have been counted as general revenue, but it could have been diverted into the Social Security Trust Fund through adjustments in the tax code).

According to the government, “myRA® is designed to make saving for retirement easy for people who need it most – workers who don’t have access to a retirement savings plan at their job or lack other options to save.”  No, they are not the ones who need it most.  It is the people who are so poor they cannot save that “need it most,” not the ones that are well off enough to be able to set money aside.  And so, my objection tomyRA is the same as my objection to the IRA (my objection to 401k plans is similar but more complicated, because these plans encourage contributions from employers, which is a good thing).

But this is only half my objection.  Some people cannot save because they are too poor.  Other people cannot save because they are deficient in character.  These are the people that could set money aside in a myRA or even an IRA or 401k plan, but will not do so because they are profligate, spending all they earn and even borrowing so they can spend more.  They are the grasshopper in the well-known fable by Aesop of “The Ant and the Grasshopper.”

Now, on the one hand, people who fail to save because they lack the virtues of thrift and industry will often plead hard luck, attempting to place themselves amongst those that have not saved money through no fault of their own.  On the other hand, many people, conservatives especially, are prone to do just the opposite, to regard the people that cannot help being penniless as being where they are as the result of bad choices made of their own free will, and therefore getting what they deserve.

As important as this distinction may be from a moral point of view, we need to protect people from poverty in their old age in either case.  Regardless of whether someone fails to save as the result of circumstances beyond his control, or because he carelessly squanders his money with no thought of providing for his future, he needs the protection of the state.  That is why no voluntary savings program provided by the government can be a substitute for a program like Social Security, in which the savings are mandatory, cannot be withdrawn at will, and cannot be borrowed against.  People that lack the character to save will either not avail themselves of amyRA in the first place, or will participate in the plan for a while, but then take the money out as soon as a few thousand dollars accumulates and blow it on some frivolous expenditure.

Conservatives like these voluntary savings vehicles because they are essentially a way to reduce taxes, whereas the only way to maintain the Social Security benefit far into the future would be through a tax increase.  Rather than increase the payroll tax or lift the cap on that tax, conservatives prefer to cut the Social Security benefit by raising the retirement age again, reducing the cost of living adjustment, means testing the program, or even privatizing it.  The general refrain is that people of a certain age, say, fifty years or older, will not be affected.  Those under the age of fifty will then have time to adjust their plans for retirement, presumably by saving more.  For example, the Trustees Report for Social Security for 2015 says, “The Trustees recommend that lawmakers address the projected trust fund shortfalls in a timely way in order to phase in necessary changes gradually and give workers and beneficiaries time to adjust to them.”

But such thinking is either terribly naïve or willfully cynical.  The only adjustment that can be made by people too poor to save will be to resign themselves to even more poverty in the years ahead.  As for those lacking in character, they will not change their ways.  You could tell them when they reach the age of eighteen that there will be no Social Security at all when they get old, and they would still not save a dime.

People who have good jobs and can save their money, who are frugal by nature, and who are blessed with a modest amount of good luck can take full advantage of all these tax deferred savings plans, of which myRA is the latest variation.  But anyone lacking in money or character either cannot or will not save no matter how many of these plans the government comes up with.  This business about people having “time to adjust” is not realistic.  It is just a convenient assumption to ease the conscience of conservatives as they make plans to cut back on entitlements.

All these voluntary savings vehicles are of benefit only to those who really don’t need them, while being of no benefit to those who are likely to having nothing saved for their old age.  In other words, the myRA may appear to be a harmless way to encourage people to save, but it is ultimately the expression of an ideology of individual responsibility, one that says, “If you don’t use this plan to save your money, then you have only yourself to blame when you end up in poverty in your old age.”  The revenue the government forgoes in subsidizing the ants should instead be put into the Social Security system that protects the grasshoppers against their own worst instincts.

Rain Man (1988)

Rain Man is based on a premise so absurd that it undermines all the sentimental good feeling we are supposed to experience while watching it.  Charlie Babbitt (Tom Cruise), who is on the verge of bankruptcy, finds out that his father, from whom he has been estranged for many years, has died.  He goes back home in the expectation of inheriting his father’s estate, inasmuch as he is the only living relative, at least so he thinks.  But he finds out that aside from an old car and some roses, the entire estate, worth $3,000,000, has been put in trust for someone else.  That someone else turns out to be an autistic older brother he never knew he had (he never finds out why no one told him about this older brother, Raymond (Dustin Hoffman), and neither do we).

Charlie decides he is entitled to half the estate.  So far, so good.  Up to this point, the movie is more or less within the realm of what might actually happen in the real world.  In said real world, Charlie would have hired a lawyer to contest the will, and then he could have gone about his business while waiting for results.  I once had a cousin who left all her money to her lover.  I figured that was the end of it, cut and dried.  But a lawyer thought otherwise.  I signed an agreement with him, and two years later he sent me a check for $22,000.  Now, if a mere cousin can break a will, I figure one of the sons of the deceased has a really good chance of doing so.

Instead of just hiring a lawyer, however, Charlie kidnaps Raymond from the institution where he has spent most of his life.  Then, he calls the head of the institution and demands $1,500,000 in ransom to get Raymond back.  That would be all right if we were supposed to think Charlie is a criminal, but we are not.  We are supposed to ignore the fact that in the real world, Charlie would end up in prison.  Instead, we are supposed to believe that he is going to show up in court with Raymond by his side, saying, “I have him now, so give me the money!” as if that is going to strengthen his case.

In true Hollywood fashion, we get the best of both possible worlds.  Charlie comes to care for Raymond, forgoes his claim on the estate, sends Raymond back to the institution where he belongs, and promises to visit him regularly.  But, thanks to some card counting on the part of Raymond earlier in the movie, he and Charlie won $85,000 playing blackjack, just enough money to keep Charlie from being forced into bankruptcy.  But it is a little hard to enjoy this happy ending after spending half the movie suffering through that ridiculous kidnapping plot.

Deconstructing the Look on Ben Carson’s Face

The most disturbing thing about Ben Carson, at least to me, is not that he believes that abortion is murder, that homosexuality is a sin, that evolution is false, or that a Muslim should not be elected president.  These are views widely held by the social conservatives of the Republican Party, including some of the other candidates running for the nomination, views that we have come to expect.  No, what disturbs me about Ben Carson is the look on his face.

When I watch Mike Huckabee or Rick Santorum giving a speech, I see men that have to tell me they are deeply religious in order for me to know about it. Their views on abortion, gay rights, and evolution are such that I would not like to see them become president, but at least they seem to be (dare I say it?) normal.  They strike me as men who just happen to have beliefs and values quite different from mine and that of most Democrats, probably because they were raised that way.

But when I see Ben Carson, I experience a visceral aversion.  Thank goodness he is a Republican, because I would really be conflicted if he were leading in the polls as a candidate for the Democratic nomination the way he presently is in some polls as a Republican.  In other words, he could be pro-choice, supportive of gay rights, secular in his thinking, and open to the idea of a Muslim’s being president of the United States, and I would still be troubled by the possibility of his becoming president on account of the look on his face.

Referring again to Huckabee and Santorum, both men have won the Iowa caucus in the past and have done reasonably well overall in their bids for the nomination, but they lost in the end. And so it is that I fully expect Ben Carson’s candidacy to have similar results.  The difference is primarily one of imagination:  it’s not that Carson has a better chance than Huckabee or Santorum did in the past; it’s that the thought of his actually winning the nomination and then the presidency is just so much more horrifying.  And all because of the look on his face.

Because he and Donald Trump are both doing so well in the polls, some people argue that their supporters are alike in wanting someone that is not part of the political establishment, the difference being that whereas Trump is a loudmouth, Carson is soft-spoken, which many find reassuring.  Not me.  I admit to the guilty pleasure of enjoying Donald Trump’s performance, for much of what he says is funny.  But Ben Carson never makes me laugh, not even when he says something laughably ignorant.

At first I suspected that Carson was on medication, and some have called him the Ambien candidate.  But it finally occurred to me that Ben Carson, through his serene facial expression, his habit of closing his eyes, and his manner of speaking softly, is presenting himself as a man who is at peace with God.  By saying that he is “presenting” himself in that way, I do not mean to suggest that he is a hypocrite or a fraud.  Rather, he presents himself that way as much for his own benefit as for ours.  Perhaps the explanation lies with his violent past.  He admits that in the past he was “volatile,” that he had a tendency to lose his temper and attack people.  He had to counter that tendency with an equally strong, opposing passion for saintliness.

Carson is a Seventh-Day Adventist, a sect that believes in the literal truth of The Book of Genesis.  Not surprisingly, then, Carson does not believe in evolution, going so far as to say that the theory was “encouraged by the Adversary.”  On the other hand, in an interview on CNN, he said of himself that he is “not a real religious person….  I’m a person who has a deep and abiding faith and relationship with God.  But I’m not really into a lot of religious dogma and rituals — ‘You can’t do that, and you can’t do this.’ I don’t believe in that. I believe you have to have a deep and abiding faith in God.”  When asked by Bill O’Reilly on Fox News whether he believed in Adam and Eve, he said, “I know a lot of people say that I believe the earth is 6,000 years old, and they have no basis for saying that. I don’t know how old the Earth is.”  He went on to say that according to Genesis, ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth’ — and then there’s a period there. You don’t know how much time elapsed.”  He followed this by saying, “He’s God. If he wanted to create an Earth that was billions of years old he could do it.”

Given his low opinion of dogma, and his willingness to treat the story about the world’s being created in six days as allegorical or figurative, one might think the way would be open to him to accept evolution the way many liberal Protestants do, as something that took place over billions of years, guided occasionally by the hand of God.  Nevertheless, by his own account, evolution is an evil doctrine, presumably because it contradicts the story of creation as laid out in Genesis.  What is going on here?

Before drawing any conclusion from that, let us consider the reason he gave for saying that a Muslim should not be elected president.  “I would have problems with somebody who embraced all the doctrines associated with Islam,” Carson said. “If they are not willing to reject sharia and all the portions of it that are talked about in the Quran—if they are not willing to reject that, and subject that to American values and the Constitution, then of course, I would.”  In other words, what makes a Muslim unacceptable is his belief in the dogma of Islam.  But if a Muslim is like Carson, one who does not think dogma is important, then such a Muslim might be all right.

The dogma of a religion is a set of beliefs that are fundamental to it.  They are something that requires thought, if only to understand them.  But one thought leads to another, and the first thing you know, you run into a contradiction.  Some people resolve the contradiction by rejecting the dogma, by rejecting the story of Adam and Eve, for example.  Others attempt to construct an elaborate theory that will be compatible with the evidence (the fossils of dinosaurs are of antediluvian monsters that never made it on the ark, or God put the fossils there to test our faith, or they are they work of Satan).  But one solution is simply to avoid thinking altogether. That is the path taken by Ben Carson.

When Scott Walker famously admitted he was going to “punt” when asked about evolution in England, we all suspected that he believed in evolution, but was afraid of losing the evangelical vote.  This was the same man who said, “There’s no such thing as a hypothetical.”  But in saying such things, Walker was simply concealing his thoughts from us.  Carson is concealing his thoughts from himself.  Or rather, he is suppressing his thoughts before he even has them. Carson is protecting the dogma of Christianity by refusing to think about it.

When he speaks about his “deep and abiding faith in God,” he is talking about a feeling, a feeling that he believes renders unnecessary any kind of critical thinking, which is why he gets exasperated with “Gotcha” questions about his tax plan or his proposal to get rid of Medicare and Medicaid.  He is in a state of grace and his heart is filled with joy.  This is why he speaks softly, slowly closes his eyes, and has the look of serenity upon his face, for he is at one with the Lord, with whom all things are possible, including his plans for taxes and entitlements.  And this is why he is doing so well in the polls, for when people see the way he looks and hear the way he speaks, they sense the purity of his soul and the goodness of his heart.

No wonder I’m appalled.

On the Effect of the Supernatural in Horror Movies

This is the season for horror movies, what with Halloween being less than a week away.  And so it is that we may expect to see a lot of horror movies offered on television for our entertainment.  Now, what we want from a horror movie is to be scared, and the question is, Does the presence of the supernatural in a horror movie add to its ability to frighten us, or does it detract from it?

The answer to this question undoubtedly depends in large part on whether one believes in the supernatural.  For people who are really superstitious, their belief in the supernatural may be so strong that they find horror films about witches, ghosts, and demons too frightening, and will not watch such movies as a result.  I actually knew a girl like that when I was in college, and I decided not to continue dating her anymore as a result.  It’s not that I minded her being superstitious.  It was her refusal to let me take her to the Halloween special being offered at the Triple Threat Drive In that made me realize there was no future for us.

As for myself, I have quite the opposite reaction.  The presence of the supernatural in a horror movie so lessens its believability that, all things being equal, its capacity to frighten me the way I would like is diminished to the point that I am likely to lose interest.  Mind you, some of my favorite horror movies involve the supernatural, but that is in spite of it, not because of it.

Of course, most of the monsters in a horror movie correspond to nothing real, however realistically they may be depicted, even where there is no supernatural element.  There are no Frankenstein monsters, no pods from outer space taking over our bodies, no zombies trying to eat our flesh.  And yet, as unrealistic as these monsters are, as unbelievable as they are, their ability to frighten us is enhanced by their being either the work of mad scientists, aliens from another planet, or threats arising from natural forces not fully understood, rather than being the result of demonic possession, witchcraft, or the like.

An interesting example in this regard is the movie Häxan:  Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922). It is not always clear in this movie whether the scenes depicting witches, demons, or Satan himself are mere visualizations of what people once believed, dreamed, or were forced to confess, but in any event, when these supernatural creatures are being depicted, they really have a good time, and so do we.  Beautiful naked witches are seen making love to horned demons, while other demons furiously churn their butter as they watch the witches cavorting about. In one such scene, monks are seen to be terrified by the presence of Satan.  But later in the movie, we see religious authorities torturing a poor old woman in an effort to make her confess to her participation in a witches’ Sabbath, and we are given to believe that she is completely innocent of witchcraft, especially since the general thrust of the movie is that there is no such thing as witches.  It is this part of the movie that is truly disturbing, whereas the supernatural scenes are enjoyed with mild appreciation.  In a similar way, The Conqueror Worm (1968), which is about Matthew Hopkins (Vincent Price), Witchfinder General, and his assistant, John Stearne (Robert Russell), is more horrifying than a story about real witches would have been.  All things being equal, a movie about men like Hopkins and Stearne, who use their position of power to satisfy their greed, lusts, and sadistic delight in being cruel, is far more likely to horrify us than a movie about actual witches flying around on broomsticks.

Just as we see that natural horror is more frightening than supernatural horror when we compare movies about witchfinders to movies about witches, so too are horror movies about natural maniacs likely to be more frightening than movies in which madness arises from supernatural influences.  Psycho (1960) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) were inspired by an actual person, Ed Gein, and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) is based on the life of Henry Lee Lucas.  But even if these movies were not inspired by actual serial killers, the mere fact such men actually exist makes it easy for such movies to frighten us.

On the other hand, consider The Shining (1980), a movie about a family that moves into a haunted house, the result of which is that evil spirits take over Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), the husband and father, causing him to try to kill his wife and child.  As we all know, men sometimes murder their wives and children, and so a movie about a man chasing his son through a house trying to hit him with an axe could be incredibly terrifying.  But since Jack’s mania is inspired by demonic spirits, most of the terror is drained from the movie.  Of course, the silliness of the “Here’s Johnny!” scene, which was played for laughs, was probably sufficient on its own to put ironic distance between us and the mayhem.  This was no mere comic relief. That scene made it impossible to take anything that followed seriously.  Still, the fact that Jack Nicholson’s character is under the influence of demonic forces actually provides even greater distance.  Too much distance, in fact, the result of which was that I was quite bored by it all.  The Babadook (2014), on the other hand, is more effective.  First, there is no “Here’s Johnny!” scene. Second, the movie seems to be more about madness than the supernatural. As a result, the mother in this movie is far scarier than the father in The Shining.

One reason why the supernatural works against a movie’s ability to frighten us is the same reason we don’t believe in the supernatural in the first place: it doesn’t make sense.  In The Omen (1976), it is clear that Damien is the Antichrist, and as various people in the movie become convinced of this, they try to destroy him.  Now, I generally try to get into the spirit of a movie when I am watching it, and in this case, I tried to suspend disbelief and accept the premise of Christianity on which this movie rests.  But I couldn’t help myself. I found myself wondering why everyone was so upset about the appearance of the Antichrist when his existence confirmed the prediction that some say is made in The Bible.  This would mean that everything is unfolding according to God’s plan, the Day of Judgment is at hand, and all of us are about to go to Heaven (well, not me, because I am an atheist, but as I said, I was pretending to be a Christian while watching the movie). Presumably, killing the Antichrist while he is still a child, before he has a chance to really do anything, would be thwarting the will of God, so I would think that the rational thing to do would be just to kick back and relax.  In other words, I really could not get into this movie.

In a similar vein, one of the problems with the story of Faust, the man in the German legend who sold his soul to the Devil, is that we never understood why anyone would make such a foolish bargain in the first place. A few decades of wealth, power, fame, and sex in exchange for an eternity of burning in the fires of Hell? Evil may be fascinating, but stupidity never is, and we quickly lose interest in the fate of anyone dumb enough to make that deal.  One reason that the movie Angel Heart (1987) works so well is that Johnny Liebling (Mickey Rourke), the man who makes a pact with the Devil, knows of a ritual that will allow him to substitute someone else’s soul for his own, so that after reaping the benefits of a pact with Lucifer, some other poor slob will pay the price while Johnny gets to go to Heaven, with God shaking his head, saying in exasperation, “Another sinner gets off on a technicality!” Things don’t work out well for Johnny, of course, but at least the ritual in his possession makes his decision to make a pact with the Devil a rational one (sort of).

Regarding the story of Faust as told by Goethe, Nietzsche said, “A little seamstress is seduced and made unhappy.  Surely that could not have happened without supernatural interference? No, of course not!  Without the aid of the incarnate devil, the great scholar could never have accomplished this.”  Right.  He sold his soul to the Devil in order to get laid. It is hard to regard anything so silly as being tragic, especially when some angel butts in at the last minute and says Gretchen, the seamstress, is redeemed, just as Faust is redeemed for no good reason at the end of Part II. Men have been seducing young girls and abandoning them since caveman days, and every such instance is more tragic than the one told by Goethe involving the supernatural.  And don’t tell me we are supposed to understand this story allegorically, because allegory does not work when the story taken literally makes us roll our eyes.

Not only are horror movies involving the supernatural somewhat incongruous in this or that particular, which puts a strain on the rational intellect, but they also tend to offend our reason by having no rules or limitations at all, at which we point we give up and quit thinking. Natural or man-made monsters are not like that.  Whether it is Frankenstein, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, or the Terminator, we know they have their limitations, allowing us to try to figure out, along with the good guys in the movie, how to stop them.  Though I don’t care for vampire movies, at least they have rules involving exposure to the sun, dread of crucifixes, and wooden stakes through the heart.  But a lot of movies are like Poltergeist (1982), where we have no clue as to what will happen next, nor any sense of what can be done to stop the evil forces until the very end.  As a result, all we can do is passively accept whatever.

In some cases, there are rules, but we haven’t the slightest idea what they are in advance of what happens.  One of the worst offenders in this regard is The Devil Rides Out (1968).  In this movie, when the Duc de Richleau (Christopher Lee) discovers that a young friend of his has become caught up in Devil worship, he reveals that he has been studying the subject for years, and so he knows just what to do, because he has it all memorized.  There must be fifty-seven varieties of rules, rituals, and incantations you have never heard of, which we learn about only when Richleau pulls them out of his hat. As a result, reason is suspended, for we are reduced to waiting to find out about the next new rule.

If a movie must be about the supernatural, the least it can do is have a strong character who sneers at such nonsense.  All supernatural horror movies feature some characters that are skeptical, for it would be unbearable for everyone to be a believer right from the start.  But all too often, the skeptics are minor characters quickly brushed aside.  In the really good horror movies of the supernatural subgenre, the nonbeliever holds out for a long time, giving us someone to identify with, thereby easing us into the necessary suspension of disbelief as that character slowly comes around. Thus, we have Holden (Dana Andrews) in Night of the Demon(1957), Luke (Russ Tamblyn) in The Haunting (1963), and both Father Karras (Jason Miller), who is losing his faith, and Chris (Ellen Burstyn), an atheist, in The Exorcist (1973).  And finally, there is that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), when Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) is being warned by a friend that it is unwise to meddle in certain mysteries.  Indy dismisses his friend’s concerns, comparing him to his mother, and saying that he is talking about the bogeyman, a bunch of superstitious hocus-pocus.  “Besides,” Indy says, “you know what a cautious fellow I am,” as he tosses his forty-five pistol on the bed.  In other words, it’s all right if supernatural stuff goes on in the world, as long as the hero has contempt for such things, at least until close to the end.

And so, generally speaking, as far as my preference regarding horror movies is concerned, the less there is of the supernatural the better, and none at all is better still.  Of course, that girl I knew in college was of exactly the same opinion, though for totally different reasons.  Maybe I should have compromised and taken her to see a Godzilla movie instead.