The Last of the Mohicans:  The Book and Its Adaptations

Introduction

The tragedy of miscegenation is twofold:  First, there is the conflict between a loving couple from different races and the racist society that disapproves of their union.  Of course, this is a particular type of situation in which society disapproves of love even where race may not be involved, the classic story of which is Romeo and Juliet, in which the couple is of the same race but of two feuding families. Second, there is the hapless fate of their offspring, for in a society that abhors miscegenation, the children of such unions will likely be despised.  In particular, they may have a harder time finding love than their parents did; for their parents fell in love despite the opportunities to marry within their own race, whereas their children will find their chances for marrying greatly circumscribed regardless of which race they choose to affiliate with.

This twofold tragedy is a natural subject for novels, plays, and movies.  Of movies in particular, West Side Story (1961) is a good instance of the first type of tragedy arising from miscegenation.  It not only updated the Romeo and Juliet story, but also racialized it by having the boy be Caucasian and the girl be Latina.  Regarding the second type of tragedy of mixed-race love, Imitation of Life (1959) is probably the best representative.

Most of us enjoy these stories from an egalitarian vantage point.  We disapprove of the racial animus that forbids miscegenation while sympathizing with the lovers or their children that suffer undeservedly from societal condemnation. I sometimes wonder, however, if racists enjoy these stories too, though for quite different reasons, seeing them as tales of sin and punishment.  So, in West Side Story, someone who strongly disapproves of the intermarriage between whites and Puerto Ricans might understand Tony’s death as condign punishment for violating that taboo.  And people who abhor mixed-race offspring might watch Imitation of Life and say to themselves, “That’s what Sarah Jane gets for trying to pass for white.”  Had there been Capulets and Montagues in the audience, they might have favorably regarded the ending of Romeo and Juliet as teaching what can happen when you disobey your family in matters of love.

The Last of the Mohicans involves both types of tragedies arising from miscegenation, although you would never know it just from watching the movies. When a movie varies significantly from the novel on which it is based, one sometimes wonders why the producers of the movie did not simply make up a whole new story and film it under another name.   The main reason, of course, is that though the plot of the movie departs in many ways from that of the novel, yet it is too similar in other respects to escape the charge of plagiarism should the producers pretend it to be an original work. Furthermore, the public’s familiarity with the novel acts as a kind of advertisement.  By “familiarity,” however, I do not mean that the public in question have actually read the novel.  Far from it.  Most people have not read The Last of the Mohicans nor ever will.  But they know that it is a classic in American literature, and they figure that even though they have no interest in reading the novel, watching a movie based on that novel might provide them with an evening’s entertainment. Moreover, it is the fact that most people have not read the book that allows the producers of the movie to take liberties with impunity, for the most disappointed members of an audience will usually be those who have read the book and know it well, and they will be few in number.   And so, the stories in some of the movie versions of this novel almost seem to be taking place in a parallel universe, where the characters and setting are more or less the same, but the relationships are different and different people live and die in the end. Furthermore, the manner in which the story is changed over the years reflects the sentiments on the part of the producers and the audiences as contemporary values are projected back into the eighteenth century, thereby rendering the past suitable for present consumption.  To make matters even more confusing, critics reviewing a movie sometimes project their knowledge of the book into the movie while others project the movie they just saw back into the novel.

In particular, there is the peculiar fact that though the novel involves both a miscegenous couple and a person of mixed race, yet the dramatizations tend to keep the first but avoid the second, and even the first is depicted in various ways and with differing degrees of emphasis.  These differences intrigued me, resulting in reflections that led to this essay.  In sorting this out, it is necessary to keep in mind the question as to whether James Fenimore Cooper, his audience of readers, the producers of the movie versions, and the audiences of those versions are of the enlightened, egalitarian type, deploring racism, or the racist type, affirming it, interpreting the story respectively as one of undeserved suffering or of punishment for sin.

In sorting out the various ways miscegenation is treated in the novel and the adaptations, I have divided this essay into several parts, this first one being the introduction, of course.  This is followed by a review of the novel.  Then the adaptations that were made before the Civil Rights Movement are considered, followed by the adaptations made shortly after the beginning of that movement.  After that, I discuss the 1992 version, which was made in what might be called our “post-racial society.”  I realize there are still problems of race relations to this day, but relatively speaking, they are much diminished from what they once were, as is reflected in this most recent adaptation of The Last of the Mohicans, though in a manner that is less than felicitous.  Finally, there is the conclusion.

The Novel

The setting of the novel is the French and Indian War in America in 1757. Natty Bumppo is a major character in this novel as well as in James Fenimore Cooper’s four other Leatherstocking Tales.  In this novel, however, he is referred to as Hawkeye and as La Longue Carabine.  His two companions are Chingachgook and his son Uncas, the last two members of the Mohican tribe. They are basically on the side of the British. The Hurons are Native Americans that fight on the side of the French.  Magua, a Huron by birth, but now an outcast, is the villain.  Cora and Alice Munro are daughters of Colonel Munro, commanding officer of Fort William Henry. Cora has black hair. As for her skin, I lack the ability to paraphrase Cooper’s description of her and will thus quote him directly: “Her complexion was not brown, but it rather appeared charged with the color of the rich blood, that seemed ready to burst its bounds.” [p. 26]  She has a serious temperament.  Alice, the younger of the two sisters, is a blonde with blue eyes and fair skin.  She has a lighthearted temperament.  Finally, there is Major Duncan Heyward, who is in love with Alice.

The driving force that puts a wedge between this novel and the movie versions that came later is the fact that Cora has a mixed-race heritage. Now, you might think that a novel written in 1826 would have said that Cora was part “Negro,” for that was a polite term in those days.   However, the circumlocution by which her father refers to the fact of her mixed-race ancestry is remarkable for its excess of delicacy, worthy of the sensitivities of the twenty-first century.  Colonel Munro says of her:

I had seen many regions, and had shed much blood in different lands, before duty called me to the islands of the West Indies. There it was my lot to form a connection with one who in time became my wife, and the mother of Cora. She was the daughter of a gentleman of those isles, by a lady whose misfortune it was, if you will,’ said the old man, proudly, ‘to be descended, remotely, from that unfortunate class who are so basely enslaved to administer to the wants of a luxurious people. [p. 312]

The degree of Cora’s racial mixture is not made explicit. However, Munro’s use of the expression “descended, remotely” implies, at the very least, that the mother of Munro’s first wife was not African, but rather one-half African. From this it would follow that Munro’s wife was one-quarter African and that Cora was one-eighth African.

Perhaps Munro’s avoidance of the word “Negress” and other acceptable terms at that time, like “mulatta,” “quadroon,” or “octoroon,” was due to the fact that it was his daughter Cora he was talking about.  In fact, he berates Major Heyward for being a southerner, suggesting that he was prejudiced against her. When Heyward first asked for his daughter’s hand in marriage, Munro assumed it was Cora he was interested in, for she was the older of the two sisters. When it turned out that Heyward wanted to marry Alice, Munro jumped to the conclusion that he was slighting Cora on account of her dark aspect.  He continues:

Ay, sir, that is a curse, entailed on Scotland by her unnatural union with a foreign and trading people. But could I find a man among them who would dare to reflect on my child, he should feel the weight of a father’s anger! Ha! Major Heyward, you are yourself born at the south, where these unfortunate beings are considered of a race inferior to your own.

‘‘Tis most unfortunately true, sir,” said Duncan, unable any longer to prevent his eyes from sinking to the floor in embarrassment. “And you cast it on my child as a reproach! You scorn to mingle the blood of the Heywards with one so degraded — lovely and virtuous though she be?” fiercely demanded the jealous parent. [pp. 312-3]

It is interesting to observe that Munro refers to the part of Cora’s ancestry that is not white as “that unfortunate class,” while in speaking of the attitude of southerners, he uses the expression “considered of a race inferior to your own.”  It would, of course, be anachronistic to suggest that Munro is of the opinion that has become fashionable of late that race is just a social construct. More likely, it is an effort on his part to diminish, at least in his own mind, the taboo nature of miscegenation, for marrying someone of another class would not have carried quite the same stigma as marrying someone of another race.

Heyward protests this charge of prejudice against him, saying it is only on account of his love for Alice that he lacks an interest in Cora.  In any event, the race in question of which Cora was a part is scarcely referred to elsewhere in the novel, except when Magua goes into a speech about how the Great Spirit colored men differently, intending the black ones to be slaves [p. 599].

The hesitancy on the part of Munro to name explicitly the black race that formed her ancestry was probably more than just sensitivity on his part regarding his daughter.  It may be that Cooper wished to avoid offending his readers, who might have flinched at a blunt description of Munro’s first marriage. People in general were uncomfortable with the idea of miscegenation and the offspring they produced.  There was a sense that the children of mixed-race couples should not exist. First, the marriage of black and white that brought them into existence was thought to be intrinsically wrong.  Second, the offspring of such marriages presented a problem when it came to their getting married:  because they are part African, they are too black to marry someone who is white; but being part Caucasian, they are sometimes too white to be suitable for marriage to someone who is black.

Of course, it takes two people from two different races to produce a mixed-race child in the first place.  Therefore, it is certainly not out of the question that someone of mixed-race ancestry should find someone to marry too. But Cooper disapproves of miscegenation, so notwithstanding the fact that people had to cross racial lines in order for Cora to be born, Cooper does not want Cora to do likewise and have a child of her own, lest the reader think miscegenation meets with his approval, so he kills her off in the end.

Uncas falls in love with Cora, and she seems to return the feeling.  Uncas’ being a Native American, however, does not solve the problem of Cora’s unsuitability for marriage, for she was too white to marry someone of the “red race,” as it were. As a result, Cora has to die in the end, in part because her very mixed-race existence was disturbing, and in part to keep her from marrying Uncas, whom Cooper also kills off, possibly as punishment for wanting a white woman.  This is achieved by having Magua forcibly take Cora, intending to make her his squaw. Cora threatens to jump off a cliff to avoid the fate worse than death, but another Huron stabs her in the breast, killing her.  Uncas arrives, too late to save her, and he is killed by Magua. Then Hawkeye shoots Magua before he can escape.

At Cora’s funeral, the Native Americans talk about how Uncas and Cora will be spiritually married and live together in the happy hunting ground, but Hawkeye, expressing Cooper’s sentiments, shakes his head “at the error of their simple creed” [p. 686], disapproving of even this much miscegenation.

In other words, though Cooper extols friendship between men of different races as something admirable by having Hawkeye’s best friends be two Mohicans, yet he is unequivocal about his disdain for a sexual mixing of the races.  In fact, just in case anyone might have doubts about a white man that hangs out with Native Americans all the time, Hawkeye says at one point, “I am not a prejudiced man, nor one who vaunts himself on his natural privileges, though the worst enemy I have on earth, and he is an Iroquois, daren’t deny that I am genuine white” [pp. 49-50]. This need to affirm the purity of his whiteness was not thought amiss by Cooper when he wrote this novel, but notwithstanding Hawkeye’s insistence that he is not a prejudiced man, his need to assert that he is genuinely white belies that denial. Were anyone today to insist that he was genuinely white, daring anyone to contradict him, we would undoubtedly suspect him of being a white supremacist. Actually, it is probably not so much that Hawkeye, expressing the apprehensions of Cooper, feared that anyone would think him a Native American that worried him, but rather that someone might think he was of mixed race, part European and part Native American.  Cooper had a strange ambivalence concerning race. He was fine with men of different races being friends and living amongst each other, but he was averse to the notion of men and women of different races marrying.  And because the offspring of such mixed marriages is thought to be something odious, Hawkeye is at pains to declare his racial purity.

After Munro’s first wife died, he married another woman, who is Alice’s mother. As noted above, Alice is blonde with blue eyes and fair skin.  Now, it would have been unthinkable to have Alice be the one that Uncas fell in love with and who reciprocated those feelings for him. It was one thing for Colonel Munro’s wife to have been the daughter of a white man and a woman of African descent, taboo though that was, but it would be quite another thing even to suggest that a white woman would have any feelings of affection for someone of another race.  Had Uncas and Alice been the ones in the novel to develop a romantic relationship, unconsummated though it may have been, it would not have been sufficient to kill them off in the end. The reading public would have demanded that Cooper be killed off as well. In other words, Cora’s mixed-race ancestry is what allows Cooper to suggest an attraction between her and Uncas.  According to Cooper’s way of thinking, it was because Cora was one-eighth African that she was able to find Uncas attractive, whereas a blonde, blue-eyed, unadulterated white woman like Alice would have no natural inclination for men with dark skin.

My conclusion is that while we today read this novel as a tragedy of undeserved suffering caused by a racist society, for Cooper, his story was one of sin and punishment. Cora’s lonely life and unhappy end was the result of her father’s sin of marrying across racial lines.  It put her in the position where only a Native American might take an interest in her, and even for that both she and Uncas are punished with death.

Movie Adaptions before the Civil Rights Movement

The 1920 version of The Last of the Mohicans follows the novel pretty closely, as closely as might be expected from a seventy-three minute version of a long, involved novel.  The main difference, as far as miscegenation is concerned, is that nothing is said of Cora’s having a mixed-race ancestry. When the movie starts, Cora and Alice are at Fort Edward, which is remote from the fighting. Major Heyward is in love with Alice, just as in the book. There is also a Captain Randolph, a man the intertitle says is more interested in women than warfare, who is in love with Cora.  No such character exists in the book.

If we refer back to the discussion between Colonel Munro and Major Heyward, quoted in Part 2 of this essay, we can see why the novel most definitely did not want a character like Captain Randolph in the story to act as a suitor for Cora. First, it is the fact that there was no one asking for Cora’s hand in marriage that leads to the misunderstanding about which daughter Heyward wanted to marry, which in turn leads to the discussion of Cora’s mixed-race ancestry.  Second, the fact that there is no white man in the novel who wants to marry Cora is not just an accident of circumstance. Rather, it represents the more general situation regarding Cora, which is that her being part African makes her a dubious match for a Caucasian.  But once the producers of this movie decided to omit Cora’s mixed-race ancestry, there no longer was a good reason for her not to be of some interest to one of the officers, and so a Captain Randolph was created to fill that void.  As for Hawkeye, he is asexual and has no interest in either of the women, just as in the novel.

Randolph, out of cowardice, becomes a traitor and betrays the British when they get to Fort William Henry.  Shortly thereafter, he is killed.  He never had much of a chance with Cora in the beginning of the movie, and he had no chance at all once she became enamored of Uncas. As in the novel, she and Uncas fall in love, and as in the novel, their miscegenous inclinations are prevented by having them die in the end.  In this case, Cora tries to jump off a cliff to get away from Magua (Wallace Beery), but changes her mind when she sees Uncas coming to rescue her. She grabs on to Magua who was trying to stop her.  But when Magua sees Uncas, he uses his knife to make her let go, just to spite Uncas, whom he then kills in turn.

In the 1936 movie version, we see right off the bat that the whole business about Cora’s mixed-race ancestry is going to be omitted, for it is Alice who is the brunette and Cora who is the blonde.  In fact, one with a suspicious turn of mind might wonder if the switching of hair color was the result of a deliberate effort to eliminate the dark truth about Cora’s ancestry even in the minds of those few in the audience that might have read the book.  More likely, it is just the result of complete contempt for the story on the part of the producer, who may not have even bothered to read the book himself.

To make matters even more confusing, their personalities are switched. Cora, now the blonde, is like the blonde Alice in the novel, lighthearted but weak. Alice, now the brunette, is like the brunette Cora of the novel, serious but strong.  If Major Heyward were in love with Cora, we might figure that those who produced this movie just got the names mixed up.  But no, Heyward is in love with Alice, just as in the book. Only in the movie, his love is unrequited. This is so she can fall in love with Hawkeye (Randolph Scott), who in turn falls in love with her. When the movie ends, we are led to believe that they will eventually marry.

Needless to say, this is a very different Hawkeye from the asexual man of nature in the novel.  But it is a development not unexpected.  It may have been all right for heroes in nineteenth century fiction to be celibate, but the twentieth century seemed to be uneasy with men like that.  So, finding a woman for Hawkeye was just the thing in 1936.

I noted in Part 1 that some critics project what they see in a movie back into the book.  One reviewer of this 1936 version (TCM) says, “You may recall from your high school literature class that Alice will eventually fall for Hawkeye….” Well, you may recall that, but hopefully you do not, because no such thing happened in the novel.

As for Cora, her father says that she was engaged to be married to a young man who was lost at sea in a naval battle.  So, like the 1920 version, it is made clear that she is suitable for marriage to a white man, whereas in the novel, long before we are made aware of Cora’s mixed-race ancestry, we feel the tension in Cora’s situation by having her be an older sister with no suitor, past or present, despite the fact that she is a beautiful woman.

The miscegenation involved in Cora’s ancestry may have been omitted in this movie, but the threat of miscegenation between Cora and Uncas has not. And what is striking about this is that there is more tolerance in the movies for miscegenation when the white woman is a brunette than when she is a blonde, as Cora is here.  However, this difficulty is skirted by having the affection between Uncas and Cora go primarily in one direction:  Uncas is in love with Cora, but she seems only to like him.

Just as the critic reviewing this movie for TCM “remembered” Alice falling for Hawkeye in the novel, so too do some critics (Variety, Ozus) see things in this movie that were only in the novel. In particular, they say Cora falls in love with Uncas, but I think the authors of those reviews must be bringing their knowledge of the novel to the movie, for I do not see it in the movie itself.  In fact, Cora continually refers to the man to whom she was once engaged, presumably as a way of reassuring the audience that she cannot be in love with Uncas, if she still loves her deceased fiancé.  So, in addition to making it clear to the audience that Cora would have been suitable as a bride for a white man, adding this deceased fiancé to the story, one whom she still loves and grieves for, was presumably intended to keep the audience from supposing that she might have romantic feelings for Uncas.  Still, things get a little too close for comfort, so she still has to die in the end by flinging herself off a cliff to avoid the fate worse than death.

Movie Adaptations after the Civil Rights Movement

Two versions of this novel were made in 1965, both foreign films, one going by the English title The Last Tomahawk and the other by the English title The Fall of the Mohicans, only the second of which was available for viewing.  In this latter film, both Cora and Alice are brunettes, but like the 1936 version, their personalities are reversed from that of the novel, with Alice having the stronger character. Major Heyward acts as though he has no interest in her. In fact, he seems to despise her. But finally, after the surrender of Fort William Henry and the massacre by the Hurons, when Heyward and Alice are captives thinking they are about to be put to death, he tells Alice he loves her. If there is a reason for deviating from the novel in this way, I cannot imagine what it is.

The only thing that seems to remain constant in these movies thus far is that the one named Cora, regardless of her hair color or personality, is the one whom Uncas falls in love with. One almost gets the sense that once Cora’s mixed-race ancestry had been eliminated from the story, the people that produced these movies saw no need to worry about which sister had what color of hair or what kind of personality, who was loved by Uncas, or who died in the end.  And to a certain extent, I guess they are right.

This version makes it explicitly clear what Cora’s feelings are toward Uncas, for she says to him, “I love you.” Chingachgook, however, disapproves, telling Uncas that he must perpetuate the Mohican line by marrying a Mohican woman.  It seems the producers of this movie have forgotten that the reason for the title of the book is that there are no more Mohican women around for that purpose.

Uncas and Cora die in the end, but not in the usual way.  Uncas and Magua (called “Cunning Fox” in this movie) fight to see who will get Cora in a camp of the Delawares.  When Uncas kills Magua, another Huron shoots an arrow into Cora for spite, and then another puts a spear in Uncas’ back.  So, there is no leaping off the cliff to escape the fate worse than death for Cora. Of course, neither was there any leaping off the cliff at the end of the novel. But the producers of most of the movies apparently figure that as long as Cora has to die and there is a cliff handy, she might as well jump off it.  One wonders if Cooper wanted to suggest that as a possibility by having the scene of Cora’s death occur near a cliff, but then pulled back from it and had her stabbed to death instead so that she would not have to go to Hell for committing suicide.  But I digress.

At their funeral, the Delaware chief Tamenund says that Uncas and Cora are together in the happy hunting ground, just as in the book.  But unlike the book, we do not see Hawkeye shake his head in disapproval at the thought of miscegenation, even in a spiritual sense, in some afterlife.  So, owing to the Civil Rights Movement, Hawkeye has become more tolerant in this regard.

In 1971, a BBC TV mini-series was produced, but which I have been unable to see.  (I could buy the DVD, but I am more of a cheapskate than a film scholar.)  From what I can gather, however, it is the most faithful adaptation of the novel. In particular, Cora’s mixed-race ancestry is actually referred to in gossip, which has it that Cora’s grandmother was a one-half African. Given the year in which this mini-series was made, it makes sense that both elements of miscegenation were finally able to become part of an adaptation.  In fact, as we shall see, it turns out to be an inflection point, after which the elements of miscegenation begin to fade away.

Then there is the 1977 made-for-television movie.  As in the 1965 adaptation, Alice and Cora are both brunettes.  Even if, like most movies, the part about Cora’s mixed-race mother from the West Indies is omitted, one might think that Alice and Cora would still be distinguished by the color of their hair, one being blonde and the other brunette, as a way of staying faithful to the book regarding Cora’s black ancestry while avoiding any explicit reference to it. Still, the important thing is that even though the year of production is 1977, a time when much progress had been made in the realm of civil rights, and ten years after anti-miscegenation laws had been ruled unconstitutional, and, I might add, ten years after Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, there is no hint of Cora’s ancestry being anything other than white.

The reason for avoiding Cora’s mixed-race ancestry in the late 1970s, however, is not likely to be the same reason for avoiding it in 1920 or 1936.  Instead, it was probably a simple matter of budgetary considerations. To keep production costs low, those who produced this movie never filmed any scenes that take place at Fort William Henry.  Except for a brief scene at Fort Edward in the beginning, all we get to see are the scenes that take place in the forests or in some Native American camps. Only at the very end of the movie do we hear about the surrender of the fort and the subsequent massacre from a couple of officers. Therefore, because Heyward never makes it to the fort in this movie, he cannot have the conversation about Cora’s racial ancestry with Colonel Munro.

Cora does not die in the end.  In fact, she does not even threaten to jump off a cliff, although she is close to one. Magua tries to shoot her out of spite, but Uncas jumps in front of her and takes the bullet.  Chingachgook then kills Magua.  In other words, by 1977, attitudes about race in America had improved to the point that Cora’s love for a Native American no longer necessitated her death.  Having gone this far, one might wonder why they didn’t just go ahead and let Uncas live too, so that he and Cora could get married and live happily ever after. You might suppose that they couldn’t do that because Uncas and Cora would have had children, thereby perpetuating the Mohican line, which would contradict the title of the movie. But that would not really be a problem on account of the whole prejudice against miscegenation and the offspring arising therefrom. In other words, Uncas and Chingachgook would still be the last of the Mohicans because half-breeds don’t count. And so, notwithstanding the willingness of the producers of these movies to change around the story regarding who loves whom and who lives or dies, they just could not bring themselves to spare Uncas right along with Cora.

The Post-Racial Period

For all the changes in the personalities of the two sisters and their hair color in the previous versions of the novel, at least they were consistent on one point, which is that Cora was the one that Uncas fell in love with.  No longer. In this version, Uncas falls in love with Alice (Jodhi May) instead of Cora (Madeleine Stowe).  In any event, we are prepared for Uncas to fall in love with somebody when, near the beginning of the movie, someone remarks that it is high time Uncas found himself a woman and married her.  So later, when we see him looking at Alice with longing, we know what he has on his mind. However, there is no indication that Alice feels anything for him, at least not in the version I saw.  There is some footage showing Uncas holding her while she appears to be in shock, and I suppose that made it into the director’s cut. Moreover, some say there is a screenplay indicating a love scene between them, but if so, the fact that these scenes never made it into the theatrical release is the result of choices made by those who produced this movie.

Anyway, this time it is Cora instead of Alice whom Heyward is in love with, but she declines his offer of marriage because she falls in love with Hawkeye (Daniel Day-Lewis) with whom she has a sex scene of sorts.  The reason for the sex scene—which is either really passionate hugging and kissing or actual intercourse with their clothes on—may have been homophobia:  the scene was needed to preclude the possibility of a homoerotic interpretation. This was not a consideration in the earlier versions, but by 1992, the idea that Hawkeye would live in the woods with two Mohican men, without having any interest in women, would have created a vacuum, regarding which suspicions of homosexuality were bound to rush in.

Unlike Cora, Alice has no suitor.  And who can be surprised? She is a big nothing, just a pretty face.  I don’t know what Uncas saw in her.  I guess it was the pretty face.  It seems to be enough for some men.  Furthermore, as she is the younger sister, the fact that no white man is interested in her is not as suspicious as when she, under the original name of Cora, was the older sister and had no suitor.  She flings herself off the cliff in the end, and the synopsis on IMDb says it is to “join Uncas in death,” but once again one suspects this would be the result of projecting the novel (or some previously watched adaptation of such) into this movie. Rather, she could easily have leapt to her death just to avoid becoming Magua’s squaw.

Actually, her leaping to her death seems rather pointless.  Since we are given no reason to think she is in love with Uncas, his death would not be sufficient reason for her to take her own life.  As far as the old fate-worse-than-death motive is concerned, this was already scotched by Hawkeye when he told Cora to “submit” if she is captured, that he will find her and rescue her.  In other words, the attitude in this movie is that being raped by a Native American is no longer a fate worse than death, an attitude fitting for a post-racial society. Better to let Magua have his way with her until Hawkeye had a chance to enable her to escape.  You might argue that Alice never got the word, that she was still laboring under the old values, which held that a woman must preserve her honor at all costs. But while we are watching the movie, we find it hard to make this distinction.  Once Hawkeye has affirmed authoritatively that a woman should try to stay alive even at the price of being raped by a man of a different race, we cannot help but regard Alice’s leap to her death as misguided.  And as we see in the subsequent scenes, she would indeed have been rescued without being raped had she just continued to allow herself to be held captive.

Conclusion

In my discussion of the novel, I concluded that for Cooper, his story was about the sin and punishment of miscegenation, while most people today would understand it as a story of innocent people being forced to suffer in a society that forbids love between people of different races.  Regardless of how the story is understood, however, the effect is intensified if Cora’s mixed-race ancestry is a part of it, especially since it is this that leads to her being attracted to Uncas.  So, why would the movies, with the exception of the BBC mini-series, invariably omit it?

The 1920 version of this novel was produced just five years after Birth of a Nation, in which the villains of the piece are both “mulattoes,” one instigating the Civil War, the other causing discord during Reconstruction. If the audiences at that time were inclined to think of such people as inherently evil, small wonder then that this had to be suppressed in the case of Cora, for she is no villainess.  On the other hand, miscegenation between Caucasians and Native Americans was somewhat more acceptable, as can be seen from the successful movie The Squaw Man (1914) and its remakes, although an unhappy ending is still necessitated. However, in The Squaw Man, the man is white and woman is Native American, so their union in marriage is allowed, even if finally ending tragically.  In The Last of the Mohicans, however, the woman is white and the man is Native American.  There is always less tolerance for miscegenation when it is the woman who is white and it is the man who is of another race.  Therefore, the love between Uncas and Cora had to remain unconsummated.

For similar reasons, the 1936 version also suppressed Cora’s mixed-race ancestry, especially since it was made three years after the Production Code began to be rigorously enforced. Cora’s affection for Uncas is downplayed, but Uncas is still portrayed as being in love with Cora, so that is enough to necessitate the death of both of them.

The 1965 version was made one year after the passage of the Civil Rights Act.  As a result, it does not hesitate to allow Cora to openly declare her love for Uncas. One would think the time had finally arrived to allow Cora’s mixed-race ancestry to be made explicit.  The fact that it is not may be laziness on the part of the producers, who were content to follow the lead of the previously made movies rather than worry about the novel, especially since it is a cheaply made foreign film.

Though I have not seen the 1971 version produced by the BBC, from what I gather, both Cora’s mixed race ancestry and her love for Uncas are part of the plot.  This is exactly what one would expect, given the climate regarding race relations at that time.

The 1977 version was such a cheesy production that I don’t think much should be made of it. Cora’s mixed-race ancestry is omitted, but this version is unique in allowing Cora’s love for Uncas to go unpunished, though Uncas is not vouchsafed the same consideration.

This leaves us with the 1992 version, which omits Cora’s (i.e., Alice’s) mixed-race ancestry and gives no indication of any feeling between Cora (i.e., Alice) and Uncas. Given the fact that this was a big budget production, one would think that the time was ripe for a movie that not only kept the names and hair colors straight, but also emphasized both Cora’s mixed-race ancestry and her love for Uncas.

Now, some apologists for this version point to the fact that the director, Michael Mann, said that his movie was based on the 1936 version rather than the book.  But is that an explanation or an excuse?  In other words, I suspect that Michael Mann wanted to avoid the whole issue of miscegenation, and knowing the prominent role it played in the novel, he skirted the issue by claiming that his movie is more of a remake than an adaptation.

Had this movie been made before the 1960s, the reason for suppressing the two elements of miscegenation would have been the one given previously for the 1920 and 1936 versions, which is that audiences were still uncomfortable with people marrying across racial lines and having mixed-race children. But that can no longer be the motive here, for as we have seen, when the 1971 mini-series was produced, including both elements of miscegenation, the times had changed to the point that this was no longer a problem.

As best as I can tell, this leaves us with only one reason why Michael Mann left out or greatly minimized the elements of miscegenation.  He didn’t think it was important.  He figured no one would any longer care if one of the sisters were of mixed-race ancestry or if she were in love with a Native American, on account of the times having changed so much.  But by that kind of reasoning, we might as well not make a movie about the French and Indian War, for no one cares about that anymore either.  In other words, just as audiences have no trouble taking an interest in a war of minor importance historically, so too do audiences have no trouble becoming emotionally involved in conflicts between individuals and society, even if such conflicts no longer exist.  By leaving out the elements of miscegenation, Mann cut the guts out of the story.  His version of The Last of the Mohicans seems to be neither a story of punishment for sin nor of innocent suffering at the hands of an intolerant society, but just an action/adventure costume drama in which a couple of the characters die in the end for no better reason than that’s what happened to them in the other movies.

However, there is still hope.  Just as attitudes about race have changed over the years, so too has there been a change in attitudes about homosexuality. Undoubtedly, another version of The Last of the Mohicans will someday be made, and a future director, unconcerned with the possibility of a homoerotic interpretation, may allow Hawkeye to be ostensibly celibate, just as in the novel, while letting those who wish to interpret his relationship with Chingachgook as being something more than friendship do so.  And if that same director is alert to the universal theme of the individual against society, he may see that the two elements of miscegenation in the novel can be resurrected to good effect.

On the Likelihood of Impeachment

A lot of us thought that articles of impeachment would be brought against the president of the United States shortly after the inauguration, because a lot of us thought that Hillary Clinton would be that president.  Now that it is Donald Trump who is president, our fear of impeachment has become our hope.  How likely is the hope of an impeachment and conviction of the president to be realized?  Not very.

First, we rarely impeach presidents.  Only two presidents have been impeached, although it is clear that Nixon would have been impeached too had he not resigned. So, just as a statistical matter, Trump’s impeachment is unlikely.

Second, of the two presidents that were actually impeached, neither was convicted in the Senate.  So, if impeachment is rare, removal of the president is rarer still.

Third, in all three cases, the party that had a majority in the House of Representatives was different from that of the president.  Because Trump’s party is the same as that of the majority in the House, an impeachment by this Congress would have no precedent in that regard.

We would like to think that congressmen would rise above party politics when it came to the serious question of impeaching a president, but our most recent example does not inspire much confidence.  As I remember it, Republicans tended to say that President Bill Clinton should be impeached for committing perjury and obstruction of justice, while the Democrats said it was just sex.  Regardless of which side was right, there is no question that there was a strong correlation between one’s opinion on the matter and one’s party affiliation.

Finally, in talking about impeachment, it is inevitable that some party pooper will point out that even if we were to impeach, convict, and remove Trump from office, Mike Pence would become president.  Under normal circumstances, this would be a most undesirable result for us Democrats; but right now, I’d say Mike Pence is starting to look pretty good.  And, as far as Republicans are concerned, Mike Pence is someone a lot of them would have preferred all along.

On the other hand, the fact that Al Gore would have become president had Bill Clinton been removed from office was not sufficient to change the outcome.  Even though Al Gore would then have been an incumbent president in 2000, which is always a greater advantage to a candidate than being the sitting vice president, and thus he would have been more likely to beat George W. Bush, Democrats were still opposed to Clinton’s impeachment.  So, Republicans, as much as they might prefer Pence, will not likely impeach Trump.

Though it is unfortunate that considerations of impeachment are as political as they are, yet it could have been much worse. When the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, which changed the way we pick the vice president, it is unlikely that anyone was thinking about the implications for impeachment at that time.  However, had the Twelfth Amendment never been ratified, the vice president would be the one who got the second most electoral votes.  In short, absent this amendment, Hillary Clinton would now be the vice president of the United States.

If you think political considerations make Trump’s impeachment unlikely now, without the Twelfth Amendment, it would be completely out of the question. Trump really could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and get away with it.  On the other hand, should the Democrats win control of the House of Representatives in 2018, the temptation to impeach Trump and put Hillary in the White House would be irresistible.  Trump aside, anytime the majority party in the House was the same as that of the vice president, you could expect the House to impeach the president for spitting on the sidewalk.  The odds of impeachment would veer from impossible to inevitable every time the majority in the House changed to a different party in a midterm election.

However this turns out, we should be grateful for this serendipitous consequence of the Twelfth Amendment.

The Return of Torture

President Trump wants to torture people.  Whether he will succeed in bringing back “enhanced interrogation techniques,” black sites, and extraordinary rendition remains to be seen.  Many people are reassured by General Hayden’s remark that if Trump wants someone waterboarded, he will have to bring his own bucket.  I am not one of them.  Trump would be happy to bring his own electrodes.  Only he won’t have to.  There may be those in the CIA, as Hayden claims, that will refuse to torture people the way they did in the Bush administration, fearing that they will be subject to criminal prosecution in the future; but there will always be those willing to step up and take their place, in part because they wish to please their superiors, and in part because they truly believe it is the right thing to do.

Of course, there will be those who willingly engage in torture simply because they like it, because cruelty is fun.  But most need to feel morally justified in what they are doing.  And once that moral justification is in hand, they can inflict pain with a clear conscience.  To that end, torture is justified on either utilitarian grounds or on retributive grounds.  Regarding the former, torture is said to be useful in promoting the greater good.  The phrase “enhanced interrogation techniques” expresses this point of view.  The idea is that information is extracted through torture that will prevent innocent people from being harmed.  As for the second justification, those being tortured are said to deserve it.

Most of the time, both the utilitarian and retributive justifications are assumed to be present.  That is, the person being tortured has information that is useful and that person is evil.  After all, anyone who had information about some imminent terrorist attack would not likely be an innocent.  However, many of those who favor torture believe that either justification may be sufficient on its own. Regarding utility as the sole justification, John Yoo, the author of the “Torture Memos,” said that a child’s testicles could legally be crushed to extract information from his father.  Presumably, the child does not deserve to have his testicles crushed, but the father might decide to talk once he saw what was happening to his son, giving information that would be useful.  And Antonin Scalia believed that only cruel and unusual punishment was unconstitutional, not cruel and unusual methods of extracting information.  In his view, even American citizens convicted of no crime could be tortured for the sake of extracting information, provided the pain was not being inflicted as punishment.  Presumably, therefore, reporters who refuse to name their sources could legally have those names beaten out of them.

By the same token, many favor torture as punishment even if no information is to be extracted.  We find this in the expression, “Hanging’s too good for him,” and in the delight some people take in the idea that a convicted criminal will be ass-raped behind bars.  They want the criminal to suffer more than that which is entailed by incarceration or capital punishment alone.

This last should not surprise us, because the popular concept of Hell is the ultimate expression of the desire to have people suffer for retributive purposes only.  The suffering of the damned was never justified on the grounds that they would eventually tell God what he wanted to know, but only because they deserved to burn forever in the eternal fire.  Living as we do in an increasingly secular society, it is easy to forget that even today, 58% of Americans believe in Hell.

Now, if a person believes in Hell, then he believes that the suffering of the damned is righteous and approved by God.  I suspect there is a strong correlation between people that believe in Hell and people that think torture is justified, although I am aware of no research in support of this intuition.  Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe torture is justified, but whether that group and the 58% who believe in Hell correlate, I cannot be sure.  Of course, if there is such a correlation, the question remains as to whether people approve of torture because they believe in Hell or people believe in Hell because they approve of torture.  I assume the causality goes both ways:  the idea of Hell came into existence because people believed in torture, and then their belief in Hell came to reinforce and sanctify that belief in torture.

In light of all this, with so many Americans believing in torture, in this world and in the next, it would not surprise me if President Trump gets his way in bringing it back.

Where Are My Children? (1916)

Where Are My Children? is an early twentieth century movie about birth control, abortion, and eugenics.  Its aim was to promote birth control among the inferior masses, lest they breed excessively, while discouraging abortion among the rich, lest their superior traits die out from lack of offspring.

Fearing that a dramatic presentation of these issues as one might find them in the natural world would be insufficient to the case, the producers of this movie thought it wise to support them first with a metaphysical prologue:

Behind the great portals of Eternity, the souls of little children waited to be born.

So, just in case you were wondering, man does have an immortal soul, and it preexists his own body.  But then we are informed of a few things you probably never even thought of:

Within the first space was the great army of “chance” children.  They went forth to earth in vast numbers.  Then came those sad, “unwanted” souls, that were constantly sent back.  They were marked morally or physically defective and bore the sign of the serpent.  And then in the secret place of the Most High were the souls, fine and strong, that were sent forth only on prayer.  They were marked with the approval of the Almighty.

Of those who believe people have immortal souls, many suppose that all souls are equal, the difference between one person and another being solely a function of the body, in combination, perhaps, with the exercise of free will.  But not so, according to this metaphysical prologue.  Some souls, long before they come to occupy a body, are better than others:  some are “fine and strong,” some are “morally or physically defective,” and some, presumably, are just middling, the “chance” souls.  I’m not sure how a soul can be physically defective, by the way.

Anyway, this prologue having been completed, we have now been suitably prepared to descend to Earth where we are introduced to Richard Walton, the District Attorney, who believes in eugenics.  As he looks upon the proceedings of a criminal court, where people are being convicted and sent to prison, he sadly remarks to an acquaintance, “These poor souls are ill-born.  If the mystery of birth were understood, crime would be wiped out.”

Now, let’s see.  These souls he refers to cannot be those approved of by the Almighty, sent forth on prayer.  And they cannot be the ones that were sent back, because here they are in the courtroom.  They must be those “chance” children of the first space.  Apparently, the word “chance” is being used to convey the idea of inferior people having babies, not because they want children, but because they have sex without giving it any thought.  We can’t help but wonder at this point:  are the poor inferior because they have inherited inferior traits from their parents, or are they inferior because they were given inferior souls?  Or, possibly, to mix eugenics with soul-metaphysics, are inferior souls inherited?  Perhaps this is what Walton means by the “mystery of birth.”

Walton then reflects sadly on the fact that “his wife was childless.”  This is immediately followed by a scene dripping with self-indulgence.  Mrs. Walton is relaxing outdoors, supine upon a pillowed chaise lounge, eating bonbons, which she shares with her three dogs.  Mr. Walton arrives home, and shortly after, his sister and her husband arrive for a visit.  She has a baby, and the intertitle informs us of its significance:  “Walton’s sister had contracted an eugenic marriage and her first child was a source of great interest.”

The scene shifts back to the courtroom, where Walton is trying a Dr. William Homer for the crime of distributing literature recommending the use of birth control.  Walton reads from sections the doctor’s pamphlet, which advances several arguments.  First, unwanted children are the cause of much evil in the world.  Second, pregnant women often seek abortions in their desperation, which in many cases results in their death.  Third, there is a hint that unwanted children acquire syphilis from their low-class mothers, resulting in blindness and insanity.  The doctor goes on to tell of the misery he encounters in the slums, including suicide and wife beating, owing to the fact that birth control is illegal.

There are a few things worth noting about this trial.  First, Dr. Homer does not deny that he broke the law.  His argument is that it is a bad law, that birth control should be decriminalized.  I suppose he is hoping for some kind of jury nullification.  Second, we hear only the doctor’s side of the story.  We never hear Walton giving his final summation to the jury.  Now, that summation might simply have been, “The defendant admits he broke the law.  I rest my case.”  However, it would have been interesting to hear arguments supporting the law, perhaps in the form of references to the Bible or to the disturbing idea that if people have access to birth control, they will have sex just because it feels good.  But we never hear such arguments.  The closest thing we get to the other side of the issue is a shot of the elderly judge shaking his head in disgust.  Finally, the intertitle tells us that a jury of all men finds Dr. Homer guilty.  This reference to a “jury of all men” implies bias, the idea being that it is women that suffer most from unwanted pregnancies.  Taking it all together, we must conclude that this movie was primarily interested making a case for legalizing birth control, not in presenting a dramatically interesting trial.

Meanwhile, on another pillowed chaise lounge lies Mrs. Carlo, Mrs. Walton’s best friend, who is most unhappy.  We know she is pregnant, because the winged soul of her fetus hovers over her shoulder.  Mrs. Walton comes over for a visit and, finding out about Mrs. Carlo’s situation, recommends that she see Dr. Malfit, whom Mrs. Walton has used before.

It may be wondered why these rich women, who were willing to have illegal abortions, would not use birth control to prevent pregnancy in the first place, something Dr. Malfit would have undoubtedly been willing to traffic in as well.  I suppose that is because most forms of birth control available at that time would have required the cooperation of the husband, and we are given to understand that these rich husbands are desirous of having superior children.  Of those forms of birth control that would not require the complicity of the husband, it might not have been easy for the woman to sneak it.  In any event, as a practical matter, birth control, especially as it was in 1916, when this movie was made, would not have been completely effective, so that the occasional pregnancy would still have had to be dealt with.  Dramatically speaking, however, this movie seems to want a neat dichotomy on this subject:  to associate birth control with the inferior masses only, and to promote it as a good thing; to associate abortion with the rich, and to discourage it as an evil.  The reason for both being eugenic, to improve the human race by limiting the number of inferior births while increasing the numbers of those that are superior.

When Mrs. Carlo has the abortion, we see the soul of the fetus returning to Heaven, and the intertitle says that one of the “unwanted” ones has been sent back.  Is this supposed to be a soul in the second category?  It was unwanted all right, and it was being sent back, but there was no indication that it was morally or physically defective, or that it had the sign of the serpent.  Maybe the idea is that the mother’s immoral character had tainted the soul, thereby giving it that serpent sign.  Recall further that the prologue said that the unwanted souls are “constantly” being sent back, which means it happens over and over again.  Apparently, God knows which women will have an abortion in advance, and so when they get pregnant, he sees to it that the fetus gets a soul from the unwanted category.  Anyway, Mrs. Carlo can go back to being a social butterfly without the nuisance of having to raise a child.

Mrs. Walton’s brother Roger comes to visit her, and at the same time, the maid asks if her daughter Lillian can stay with her for a while.  In short order, Roger seduces Lillian and gets her pregnant, a winged soul hovering over her shoulder.  She tells Roger of her plight, and he asks his sister for help.  She is horrified to find out that he had sex with a woman.  Today, we are used to the idea that premarital sex is perfectly acceptable, while abortion is something that many people regard as a great evil.  But in this movie, married women like Mrs. Walton see nothing wrong with having an abortion, but they recoil in horror at the idea of fornication.  And the movie would seem to share this attitude, as can be seen in what follows.  Mrs. Carol finally gives Roger the name of Malfit, and he takes Lillian to the doctor’s office.  But whereas countless married rich women received abortions from him without harm, this abortion for an unmarried working-class woman is botched.  Lillian dies as a result, cinematic punishment for what an intertitle called the “wages of sin” when first depicting her pregnancy.

Walton finds out what happened, and he brings Malfit to trial, where he is convicted.  Before being taken away to prison, Malfit hands Walton his ledger, which has records of abortions performed on his wife and those in her social circle.  He returns home and finds those very women gathered together in his home.  He says he knows why none of them have children and that he should bring them all to trial for manslaughter.  After they leave, he asks his wife the title question, and then expresses outrage that he, an officer of the law, must shield a murderess.

Just before finding out that her brother had gotten Lillian pregnant, Mrs. Walton decided she would have children, since her husband wanted them so much.  But the damage done by the abortions has rendered her forever barren.  And so, we see her and her husband growing old, with images of the three children they would have had if she had not aborted them.

The movie’s case in favor of legalizing birth control is twofold:  it would ameliorate the suffering of the poor, and fewer inferior children would result in less crime.  And the case it tries to make against abortion is twofold as well:  it is dangerous for poor women, and it results in rich women having fewer superior children.  But notwithstanding this movie’s presumption that rich people have superior traits worthy of being passed on to their offspring, what is presented to us dramatically hardly persuades us of this conceit.  The women are just lazy and pampered, and the men seduce lower-class women, getting them pregnant.

Of course, the best movie dealing with these issues is Idiocracy (2006).

Devil in a Blue Dress (1995)

Devil in a Blue Dress conforms to the standard formula for a private detective story set in 1948, back when such movies flourished as film noir.  Moreover, it is set in Los Angeles, a common location for such movies.

What gives this movie a decided twist is that the private detective, Easy Rawlins, is played by Denzel Washington.  He and a lot of other characters in this movie are, like him, “Negroes” or “colored,” the words used in the movie, considered polite at that time.  To refer to them as African Americans would sound anachronistic, so I will follow the movie’s lead in this matter.

When the movie starts, Easy is unemployed, sitting in Joppy’s bar, looking through the classified ads. Joppy introduces Easy to a white man named Dewitt Albright (Tom Sizemore), who offers Easy a chance to make some money.  The job turns out to be that of trying to find a white woman named Daphne Monet (Jennifer Beals).  Albright says she has a “predilection for the company of Negroes.” As a result, she frequents John’s Place, a bar for colored clientele. White women are allowed in, but not white men, which is why Albright needs to hire Easy.

As with most movies of this sort, we follow Easy through a convoluted tale, learning things as he does, trying to piece it all together, with dead bodies showing up everywhere, and the police suspecting his involvement in those murders.  Unfortunately, there is one thing in this movie that did not make sense to me.  Were this not such an enjoyable movie to watch, I would forget about it. But since I did enjoy watching it, this apparent defect nagged me to the point that I ended up reading the novel on which it was based in hopes that doing so would clarify matters.

But let’s start with the movie and look at things from the vantage point of having seen it and now know the whole story.  The backdrop for all the action is a race for mayor between two candidates, Todd Carter and Matthew Terell. Each has a secret that could become a sex scandal:  the fiancée of Todd Carter is a mulatta who has been passing for white, that woman being Daphne; Terell is a pederast, whose present sex slave is a prepubescent Mexican boy, who is also Terell’s adopted son. When Albright hires Easy to find Daphne, he tells him that he is working for Carter.  Later, Easy finds out that he is actually working for Terell.

When Terell finds out that Daphne is part Negro, he uses the information to force Carter to drop out of the mayor’s race.  However, Daphne finds out that there are pictures of Terell having sex with children, and she figures that possession of such pictures can be used to force Terell to drop out of the race and to keep silent about her being a mulatta.  The Carter family had given her $30,000 to leave town, but she figured she could use some of that money to buy the pictures.  Then Carter could become mayor, and the two of them could be married.

It is this business with the pictures that is not credible.  A man named Richard McGee has the pictures, which he agrees to sell to Daphne for $7,000. Adjusted for inflation that would be about $95,000 in today’s dollars.  She pays him the money, but he doesn’t have the pictures on him at the moment, so he’ll have to get back with her.

Oh, sure!  No one would pay that much money for pictures like that unless he or she received the pictures at the time the money was paid.  In fact, Daphne gives no indication that she has seen the pictures, so she would not know for sure that they even exist.

Beyond all reason, then, she trusts Richard McGee to bring her the pictures eventually.  However, after giving him all that money, she neglects to tell him where he can find her or give him a telephone number where she can be reached.

As it turns out, McGee not only intends to give Daphne the pictures, but he is desperate to do so as well. You see, the way he figures it, as long as he has the pictures in his possession, his life is in danger because Terell will be willing to have him killed to get the pictures back.  But he doesn’t know where Daphne is. He tries to get into John’s Place, hoping to find her there, but he is not allowed in. So, he puts the pictures in an envelope and gives them to Junior, the bouncer at John’s Place, telling him it is a letter.  He asks Junior to give the “letter” to a woman named Coretta and for her to pass it on to Daphne, since the two women are friends.

Now that he no longer has the pictures in his possession, he has nothing to worry about, right?  Of course not.  Albright simply assumes that McGee is holding out on him when he refuses to turn over the pictures, so he kills him and then ransacks his house looking for the pictures.

Anyway, Junior gives Coretta the “letter.”  But when she looks inside the envelope and sees the pictures, she decides to sell them to Terell, letting him know she has them.  But then she figures that as long as the pictures are in her possession, her life is in danger, so she puts the pictures in her Bible and gives it to Dupree, her boyfriend, to take with him before he leaves her house in the morning.  Now, if I spent the night at my girlfriend’s house, and she handed me her Bible to take back home with me when I left in the morning, that would give me the creeps.  But Dupree thinks nothing of it.

Anyway, now that Coretta no longer has the pictures in her possession, she has nothing to worry about, right?  Of course not.  Daphne says that when she found out Coretta intended to sell the pictures to Terell, she asked Joppy to scare her, but he kills her instead and then ransacks her house looking for the pictures.

So, that’s the part of this movie that did not make sense to me.  After that, Easy and his friend Mouse (Don Cheadle), a psychopath, visit Dupree, who mentions the Bible that Coretta gave him, inside of which Easy finds the pictures.

By this time, Albright and a couple of his henchmen have kidnapped Daphne and taken her to an isolated house in the country.  They start torturing her, thinking she has the pictures.  Easy and Mouse force Joppy to lead them to that house. They kill Albright and his men, rescuing Daphne.  Mouse kills Joppy too.

Once Easy gives Carter the pictures, Terell drops out of the mayor’s race. However, Carter can no longer marry Daphne for fear that the facts about her race might still come out and ruin him politically.

Mouse had gotten Daphne to give him $7,000 for the pictures, and he gives half to Easy, who decides to become a private detective for a living.

As noted above, I was so bothered by the irrational behavior of the characters in the movie who were trying either to buy or sell the pictures of Matthew Terell having sex with children that I decided to read the book to see if it made more sense.  As it turned out, there are no such pictures in the novel.  That means that while a lot of the people in the novel are doing the same stuff as in the movie, their motives are different; and while a lot of the people that are killed in the novel were also killed in the movie, the reasons why they were killed are different.  It’s quite disorienting.

Compared to that, all other differences are minor.  But here are a few. Matthew Terell is Matthew Teran in the novel.  He is the one who has dropped out of the race early on because Todd Carter has information regarding his pederasty.  In return, Terell/Teran tries to get information on Daphne, figuring to pressure Carter into dropping out of the race on account of her being a mulatta.

Daphne is not given $30,000 by Carter’s family.  She stole it from Carter. Now, adjusted for inflation, $30,000 in 1948 is the equivalent of over $400,000 in today’s dollars.  So, what are we expected to believe, that Carter had that much cash just lying around?

Albright is looking for Daphne in order to get his hands on the money she stole. So, why is Daphne still hanging around Los Angeles?  If you are going to steal that much money, the first thing you should do is leave town so that no one can find you.  In other words, the novel has its own problems of believability.

Going back to the movie, it is understandable why the story was changed the way it was.  I mean, as long as there is a pederast running for mayor, there ought to be pictures of him having sex with children that can be used for blackmail.  With that as a major plot point, the movie has an intensity that simply is not there in the novel.  I just wish the story made more sense.  I just wish the story made more sense.

The Hidden (1987)

The different types of aliens that we encounter in science fiction movies are limited only by our imagination, and they can be grouped in various ways as we see fit, one of which is our attitude toward these aliens.  Of course, the most general attitude toward them is fear, at least in the beginning, since we fear the unknown.  But there are other attitudes more specific than that.

One attitude is disgust.  And the most disgusting type of all is the insectoid, an ugly, repulsive creature, often reminiscent of an insect, but one that typically goes about on two legs.  They are evil, dangerous, and must be evaded or destroyed.  In A Trip to the Moon (1902), the insectoid Selenites are decently attired, but most insectoid aliens do not wear clothes, as is befitting of anything subhuman.  Because they are subhuman, we usually encounter them when we go to their planet (or our moon), since they are incapable of developing the needed technology to come to us.  One exception to this is The War of the Worlds (1953), in which the aliens who launch an invasion of Earth may not be insectoids exactly, but they do look pretty repulsive.  When we visit other planets, it sometimes happens that an insectoid will manage to get onto the rocket ship and head back to Earth with us, as in It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958), the precursor to Alien (1979), the most famous insectoid movie of all.  It was always a given that there was no reasoning with these creatures.

Another type quite common in science fiction movies is the humanoid.  They look like us, they wear clothes, and they even speak English. They are usually technologically advanced, and thus come to Earth, although in the television series Star Trek (1966-1969), the crew of the USS Enterprise would often encounter humanoid civilizations on other planets less advanced than that of America at the time the show was produced. They may be dangerous, as are humans, but they look like us, so we are comfortable with this type even so.  And there is always the chance that they can be reasoned with, as in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951).  These movies may also feature insectoids, as in This Island Earth (1955). In that movie, the principal aliens are humanoids, but there are also mutants, insectoids that walk around with exposed brains, so they are easily dispatched, if you can get behind them and hit them right between the lobes.

Regarding the different attitudes we may have toward aliens, one more type worth mentioning is the ET.  Aliens of this type are similar to humans, but they are physically slight with large heads and big eyes.  They are not only technologically advanced, but usually spiritually advanced as well, as evidenced by the fact that they don’t wear clothes, indicating that they have progressed beyond any concern for modesty.  They do not speak English.  They are usually the ones to visit us.  This type is a latecomer, found in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E.T. the Extraterrestrial (1982). They are typically friendly and benevolent, even childlike.  Our attitude toward them is affectionate.

The emergence of this type in the 1970s is probably an expression of the peace movements formed in opposition to nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War.  Both movements represented a desire to get along with other nations rather than continue an attitude of Cold War hostility.  In science fiction, this expressed itself as a desire to get along with aliens from other planets, and the easiest way to imagine doing that was to picture them as ETs, as being as innocent as children.

But in so doing, we made things too easy for ourselves.  Of course we can get along with aliens that look like that.  But what about aliens that are as ugly as they are physically imposing, the insectoids?  The bar scene in Star Wars (1977) shows all types getting along together, humanoids and insectoids in particular, but the tone of that movie is cute, not to be taken seriously.  A more realistic depiction of our being able to get along with an insectoid would be far more challenging.  Such a movie was almost made.  Almost.

The Hidden (1987) could never have been a great science fiction movie on a par with 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), but as most science fiction movies go, this one could have been something really special in its own small way.  Unfortunately, those most responsible for how this movie was told, screenwriter Jim Kouf and director Jack Sholder, did not have the courage to carry things out to their logical conclusion, but pulled back to something they felt would be safe. Big mistake.

FBI agent Lloyd Gallagher (Kyle MacLachlan) enlists the aid of local cop Tom Beck to hunt for a succession of people connected to a bunch of strange murders.  As Gallagher knows, but Beck does not, they are pursuing a criminal alien from another planet that takes over human bodies, and when the police manage to pump one so full of lead that it can barely function, it leaves that body and takes over another.  During the transfer, the human body opens its mouth, and a large, disgusting parasite that looks part slug and part insect comes out and enters into the mouth of its new host. As the alien moves from one host to another, it really seems to enjoy the pleasures afforded it by dwelling inside a human:  it likes fast cars, rock music, and sex.  Its big crimes are motivated by a desire for money and power.

Eventually, it turns out that Gallagher is actually an alien cop from the same planet as the alien they are pursuing.  After coming to Earth, Gallagher took over a human body that was going to die anyway.  Just before Gallagher manages to destroy the evil alien, Beck suffers fatal bullet wounds. But Gallagher has met Beck’s wife and daughter, whom he likes, and having lost his own wife and daughter at the hands of his nemesis, he decides to take over Beck’s body just as Beck is about to breathe his last.  But when Gallagher opens his mouth, we see no parasite emerge, but only a golden beam of light leaving him and entering Beck’s mouth. When the doctor enters the room, along with Beck’s wife and daughter, they find that Gallagher has died and Beck has seemingly made a miraculous recovery.

If only Gallagher had opened his mouth and another parasite had come out and entered into Beck’s mouth instead!  We would have been forced to think that something that looks like a combination slug-insect could be good, decent, and kind. That would have split those alien stereotypes wide open, metaphorically reminding us that someone who is ugly may nevertheless be a nice person to know.  But Kouf and Sholder had a failure of nerve.  They were afraid that even though Gallagher had established himself as the good guy, once those in the audience saw that deep down inside he too was an ugly parasite, they would have concluded that Gallagher was evil as well.  I suppose some in the audience might have thought so, but most would have understood that the ugly parasite that was in Gallagher’s body, but is now in Beck’s body, would be a good husband and father.

Some people try to salvage this movie by arguing that Gallagher and his nemesis, though from the same planet, were of two different species, but that strains our credulity.  How would a beam of light have had a wife and a daughter back on the planet it came from?

In the end, that doesn’t matter.  We can make up any story we want.  But the result will still be the same.  The minute Gallagher opened his mouth and a beam of yellow light came out instead of an insectoid, this movie became second rate.

Bridesmaids (2011)

Bridesmaids is a comedy about a bunch of women that are getting ready to be bridesmaids for one of their friends who is getting married.  I thought this movie was funny and I enjoyed it, so there is no criticism coming from me in that regard.  What struck me about the movie, however, was the irony of marriage that was obvious to the audience but seemed to escape the characters in the movie.

On the one hand, the women in the movie that are single want to get married and look forward to being married as something wonderful.  There is, of course, Lilian (Maya Rudolph), the woman who is about to be married.  Then there is Annie (Kristen Wiig), who is going to be her maid of honor, at least initially.  Annie is single and wants to get married.  Unfortunately, she is having a succession of one-night-stands with the same man over and over again.  That man is Ted, played by Jon Hamm, whose good looks are almost painful to behold, especially if you are a man who has had to compete for women with the likes of him.  Ted will never marry her, of course, for he doesn’t even like her to spend the night, but wants her out of his place as soon as they are through having sex.  When she finally breaks up with him (if you can call it that), he utters a classic line as he drives away:  “You are no longer my number three.”  Finally, there is Megan (Melissa McCarthy), who is in the movie strictly for laughs.

On the other hand, the women in the movie that are married (or had been married) find marriage to be either sexually frustrating, sexually repulsive, disappointing, or just plain miserable.  Annie’s mother (Jill Clayburgh) is divorced and still resentful over being left for another woman over twelve years ago.  Helen (Rose Byrne), Annie’s nemesis, admits that her husband travels a lot, and she is lonely.  Rita (Wendy McLendon-Covey), who is stepmother to children that despise her, dreads having sex with her husband.  And Becca (Ellie Kemper) is sexually frustrated because she is married to a neurotic man for whom sex has to be done under specified conditions so exacting that they often end up not having sex at all.

But the women that are single are oblivious to the unhappy situations of the women that are or were married.  Moreover, the unhappily married women are equally oblivious, for they also think it is just wonderful that Lillian is getting married.  Some people can learn from the mistakes of others; some people have to learn everything the hard way; and some people don’t learn no matter what happens.  When it comes to marriage, these women seem to fall into the last category.  Unfortunately, that only means the movie is true to life.

While the women are getting ready for the wedding, Annie meets Nathan (Chris O’Dowd), a police officer.  They seem to be suited to each other.  They have sex over at his house, and he has no qualms about letting her spend the night.  He even wants to spend the day with her when they get up.  But she gets cold feet, saying, “Last night was a mistake.”  Then she refuses to return his phone calls.  Annie feels bad about the whole thing, but no matter what she does, he refuses to accept her apology.

Life is full of misunderstandings and hurt feelings, but I have never rebuffed an apology in my life.  The minute someone indicates that he or she is genuinely sorry about something that happened, I find it impossible not to be forgiving.  That does not mean I will let that person back into my life, for that is another thing entirely.

In other words, Nathan could have accepted her apology and then said that, indeed, the night they made love was a mistake, but they could still be friends.  And “being friends” need not mean socializing together on a regular basis, but only that they smile at each other and exchange a few pleasantries when they meet.  The way he held a grudge against Annie for so long was a warning sign against having a relationship with him.  And for what?  She really did not do anything so terribly wrong.  In fact, it was not even the sort of thing for which I would have expected an apology.  Our search for love is full of false starts and blind alleys, and we don’t know how things will end up when we start them.  But then, I guess the way Annie refused to accept Helen’s apologies means she is not much better than Nathan.  Maybe they deserve each other.  But it’s going to be a rough marriage.

Love Actually (2003)

We do not expect romantic comedies to be realistic, and so there is irony in the title of the movie Love Actually.  Rather, we expect such movies to be idealistic about love, allowing couples to go through all sorts of absurd situations until they finally marry and live happily ever after.  However, our tolerance for this is limited, which is why romantic comedies should be no longer than an hour and a half.  Love Actually goes on for two hours and fifteen minutes.  As a result of this length, we become painfully aware of the difference between the way love actually is and the way Love Actually says it is.

But the difference between love as we find it in the world and love as it is presented in this movie is exceeded by the difference between between the value this movie places on love and what love is really worth, for love is not an unqualified good.  The narrator, who we later find out is the prime minister, says that the Arrival Gate at Heathrow Airport cheers him up, assuring him that love is all around.  Well, after people have been separated from each other for a while, absence has made the heart grow fonder.  But when we have had our fill of those we love, we can be grateful there is a Departure Gate as well.

The main reason for the length of this movie is that it consists of several different interweaving stories, centering around three themes:  communication, sacrifice, and homosexuality.

Communication

It is a common situation in romantic movies to have two people that would be perfect for each other if one of them would just speak up and say, “I love you.”  In one of the stories, Mark videotapes the marriage of Peter (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Juliet (Keira Knightley), who constitute the obligatory miscegenous couple, something that has come to be expected in movies of late.  Mark is Peter’s best friend and best man at the wedding.  Peter wants Mark and Juliet to be friends, but Mark does not appear to like her.  Later in the movie, Juliet discovers, when she sees the videotape of the wedding and reception, which is always focused on her, that Mark is obsessed with her.

Now, for some reason, the movie keeps promoting the idea that Christmas is the perfect time to be honest about one’s love.  So, one evening shortly before Christmas, Mark shows up at Peter and Juliet’s place, and Juliet answers the door.  Mark has a bunch of large cards on which stuff is written.  The first one says for Juliet to tell Peter it is Christmas carolers, and he plays a recording of caroling that is on his tape recorder.  (It is almost painful to relate this part.)  He reveals one card after another, confessing his love for her.  She kisses him affectionately.  We get the sense that if Mark had just spoken up earlier, she might have married him instead.  The result is a spiritual ménage à trois, in which we are to imagine that Mark and Juliet will now be able to love each other, though not consummating their feelings physically, which will make Peter happy, since he wanted them to be friends.

In a second story, Jamie (Colin Firth) discovers that his girlfriend has been having an affair with his brother when he comes home early one day.  I wish I could say that it was unrealistic for her to have sex with Jamie’s brother right there in the house where she and Jamie live together.  I mean, clearly, she should have gone to the brother’s place for sex.  But people actually do such things, so I can only say that it’s stupid, not unrealistic.  Anyway, he retreats to a place in France that he apparently goes to every year to write.  He is alone there except for a housekeeper, Aurélia, an attractive young woman who speaks only Portuguese.  They are such soulmates, however, that they recapitulate each other’s thoughts in their own language.  So, even though they technically cannot communicate with each other, they nevertheless share the same thoughts and feelings.  When it is time for him to go back to England, she returns to Portugal.  Jamie makes a determined effort to learn Portuguese.  When he speaks it just well enough to express himself, though imperfectly, he travels to Portugal, finds Aurélia, and tells her he wants to marry her.  She accepts his proposal in English, revealing that she has been making an equal effort to learn his language.

David (Hugh Grant), a bachelor, is the prime minister of England.  He falls in love with Natalie, who is a member of his household staff, but he cannot bring himself to tell her how he feels.  He does have the nerve to ask her a bunch of personal questions about her love life, however.  One day, he walks in on her and the visiting president of the United States (Billy Bob Thornton), just as the president is making a move on her.  The way this movie encourages communication, I suppose the president should get some credit for communicating to Natalie his desire for a little nooky.  In any event, David is disturbed by this and has her transferred to a job where he will not see her anymore.  He gets a Christmas card from her, which essentially says that she loves him, after which he finds out where she resides so that they can live happily ever after.

Daniel (Liam Neeson) is mourning the death of his wife and is worried about raising his stepson, Sam.  Something seems to be troubling Sam, and after making a concerted effort to communicate with him, Daniel discovers that the problem is that Sam, who is eleven years old, is in love with a girl at school named Joanna.  (And here he thought it was the fact that the boy’s mother just died.)  Joanna is extremely popular, and Sam doesn’t think she even knows he exists.  Daniel convinces Sam that he must tell Joanna how he feels about her, or he will always regret it.  Sam catches up with her at the airport and tells her he loves her.  He is taken away by security guards, but she catches up with him and kisses him.

Sarah (Laura Linney) is in love with Karl, someone she works with.  Harry (Alan Rickman), who is her boss, brings her into his office and tells her he knows all about her love for Karl.  Moreover, he tells her that everyone in the office also knows, including Karl, and so it’s time she did something about it.  Where does he get off?  But then, as noted below in the section on homosexuality, she is just as bad as he is, prying into Mark’s personal life.  And this recalls the way David pried into Natalie’s personal life.  Apparently, communication is supposed to be such a wonderful thing in this movie that it does not occur to anyone to mind his own business.

Moreover, a lot of people have stuff they wish to keep private, and it is rude to tell them that you know all about their innermost thoughts and feelings.  Worse than prying into someone’s private life is telling him he has no private life at all, that he is exposed to all the world.  It is just good manners to pretend not know such things about another person, thereby allowing him to keep his dignity.

Anyway, she finally does get together with Karl, and they almost consummate their passion for each other.  But then the phone rings.  As this leads to the next theme, sacrifice, I will take up the rest of this story up in the next section.

There are two stories almost too silly to bother with, except that they show how forced and overworked this whole business about communication is.  In one of them, John and Judy perform naked, simulated sex scenes as body doubles for a movie.  But John is shy, and it takes a long time for him to work up the courage to ask her out on a date.  When he finally does, she accepts, and it is clear that they will soon be lovers.

In the other, there is Colin, a nose-picking nerd, who decides that his problem is that British women are too stuck up.  He decides that he will do better in America, especially with his accent.  When he gets there, he immediately ends up being invited to spend the night in the same bed naked with three beautiful women, and with a fourth roommate, said to be the sexy one, who is on her way.  In this case, it is not what is communicated that is important, but the accent with which it is said.

Placed one after another in this fashion, we see that this movie is unrelenting in its advocacy for communication as the panacea for all problems romantic.  Now, it is certainly true that in order for a romance to get going, someone has to make the first move.  But what is a necessary condition for love is not a sufficient one, and I trust no one is naive enough to think otherwise.

Looked at realistically, even if Mark were lucky enough to have a real-life Juliet answer the door instead of Peter, she would probably not have appreciated his unwanted advances and would have thought his routine with the cards to be creepy.  The last thing a recently married woman wants is to be lusted after by one of her husband’s friends.  Imagine how stupid a real-life Mark would have felt once he saw the expression on the face of a real-life Juliet, just before she shut the door on him while he was fumbling for the fourth card.

As for Jamie and Aurélia, the conceit that while they cannot communicate through language, they nevertheless commune with each other in spirit, is something a man might imagine is happening with a woman that he has just seen strip almost completely naked before she jumped in a pond.  But in real life, once they get to the point that they can literally speak the same language, he may not like what he hears, as when he heard his girlfriend yelling at his brother from the bedroom that she was naked and ready for sex.  And lest we forget, there was undoubtedly a time when Jamie and his girlfriend loved each other very much and fancied they were soulmates.  It is part of the illusion of love that we dismiss the disappointments of a previous passion, saying that time didn’t count because it wasn’t true love.  We blame the person we loved, or we blame ourselves for being foolish, but we never seem to blame the real culprit, which is love itself.

The story that bothers me the most, however, is the one in which Daniel talks Sam into telling Joanna how he feels.  It is one thing for a man to suppose that all he needs to do is tell a woman he loves her, and all will be well, but I really cringe when a parent talks a child into doing something like that.  It would have been well within the realm of the possible for Joanna to react negatively to Sam’s telling her that he loved her, because she thought he was a dork.  And as children have less tact than adults, she might have expressed her contempt for him without reservation.

Sacrifice

It is the purpose of love to get us to make sacrifices for other people.  So, even when it’s working, it’s working against us.  Often as not the sacrifices are small, and we are rewarded with the pleasures love affords us.  But this movie is sentimental about those sacrifices even when they become excessive, saying that love is worth it even when our own happiness is price that must be paid —provided it is the woman who makes the sacrifice, of course.

When Harry finds out that Mia, his new secretary, wants to have sex with him, provided he buys her an expensive present for Christmas, he decides to get her a solid gold necklace.  He tries to buy it on the sly while shopping with his wife Karen (Emma Thompson) in a department store, but the sale is interrupted when she finishes her shopping and finds him at the jewelry counter, where he pretends he was just looking around.  She laughs it off, saying that her expectations are not so high as to think he would buy her jewelry after all their years of marriage.  On another day, he returns by himself, buys the necklace, and puts it in his coat pocket.  When he gets home, Karen feels something in his coat as she hangs it up.  She finds the box, opens it, and concludes that it is a present for her.  When Christmas arrives, and they open their presents, hers turns out to be just a CD.  She is heartbroken and later confronts him over it.  He admits he was a fool, and she says he has made a fool of her, and that life will always be a little worse from that point on if she stays with him, which she does.

Realistically, a man would have to be a fool to try to buy a necklace for his mistress while shopping with his wife.  Even buying the necklace when he was by himself would be risky.  A jeweler I used to know said that one night he was waiting on a customer who was buying a diamond necklace, when suddenly a woman walked up to him and said, “Hi George.  Are you getting that for Emily?”  He said that he was, and the woman assured him that his wife would love it.  When she left, the customer turned to the jeweler and said, “I guess I’ll need to buy two of them now.”  In fact, it was just this situation that inspired the jeweler to have Wednesday nights at his store be for men only, so that neither wives nor friends of wives would know about such surreptitious purchases.  In any event, said purchases would be kept at the office, not brought home for the wives to discover them.

The important thing, however, is the theme of the woman sacrificing her happiness for the sake of others, presumably for the children in this case, a feature not uncommon in Hollywood melodramas.  When Karen confronts Harry, letting him know about the necklace, she asks him what he would do if he were a married woman in her situation.  Would he wait to find out if the husband just gave a woman a necklace, or whether it involved sex, or whether it involved love?  Harry does not answer that question, but the answer is obvious.  In a movie, a woman is supposed to forgive her husband.  The more interesting question she might have asked is what he would do if he found out his wife had given a man an expensive present, wondering whether it also involved sex, or even love.

A man might make a sacrifice in a movie, but it is typically on a grand scale, such as that of Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities.  But it is women that sacrifice their own happiness in the movies for domestic reasons, something that men almost never do.  And while the movie did not have Karen ask Harry what he would do if his wife were cheating on him, the movie answers that question nevertheless in the story about Jamie.  He certainly did not forgive his girlfriend when he found out that she was cheating on him.  Of course, the movie avoided a completely equivalent situation, one in which they were married with children.  In fact, by not even giving his girlfriend a name, the movie made her a nonperson, allowing Jamie to easily rid himself of her.  And this absence of a name was no mere consequence of the small role she had.  When Jamie finds his brother in his home, he asks, “The lady of the house let you in, did she?”  What an interesting locution!  How easy it would have been for him ask, “Judy let you in, did she?”  A special effort was made to avoid giving her a name.  Nevertheless, even if she had a name, and even if they had been married with children, it is unlikely he would have remained married to her.  Had he forgiven her and stayed with her, he would have been despised as a cuckold.  But when a woman forgives her husband in a movie, making a sacrifice for the sake of the family, it is sentimentalized to the point that her staying with him is portrayed as something noble and fine.

The incipient relationship between Sarah and Karl, referred to in the previous section, is interrupted by her violent, psychotic brother Michael, who keeps calling her on the phone from the insane asylum.  Later on in the movie, with all hope of finding happiness with Karl gone, we see Sarah visiting her brother, giving him a big hug.  The idea, you see, is that her love for her brother is what is truly important.  But once again, we have a story about a woman who nobly sacrifices her happiness for someone else.  Those that made this movie knew better than to have it be a man who was sacrificing his love life to take care of an institutionalized relative.  The second time Sarah’s brother calls while she and Karl are trying to have sex, Karl suggests not answering it because it won’t make her brother’s situation any better.  But she answers anyway, spoiling the mood for good.  We gather that if Karl had been the one with that brother, he would have visited him from time to time, but he would have lived his own life as well, with the phone turned off when he didn’t feel like being bothered.  We feel sorry for Sarah, but we are supposed to admire her for her sacrifice.  But had Karl allowed phone calls from his brother to take precedence over everything else, including his love for Sarah, would not the audience have despised him a little for that, regarding him as weak?

Homosexuality

There are no homosexuals in this movie, but the subject keeps coming up in ways that seem strange.  When it does, the movie dares us to object.  We would not hesitate to object if the situations were heterosexual in nature.  But as it is, we say nothing, lest we be accused of homophobia.

For example, there is a photograph of four naked men, seen from behind, that the movie insists on repeatedly showing us.  As feminist critics have pointed out, art in general, and movies in particular, are oriented around the male gaze.  If we see a photograph of a beautiful, naked woman, we naturally regard it in terms of how a heterosexual male would react to it.  He would enjoy the view, of course.  In a similar manner, a picture of a naked man and a naked woman would please the straight male as well, as he vicariously contemplates the idea of their having sex.  But a picture of naked men by themselves is disturbing to the male gaze, as it immediately suggests homosexuality.

Think of your typical pornographic movie.  It will have lots of scenes of naked men and women having sex.  And it will usually have at least one scene of two naked women having sex.  The male gaze approves of this, because it gets to enjoy twice as much female flesh.  But you will never see in such a movie two naked men having sex.  That belongs in the subgenre of homosexual pornography, because that is not what the male heterosexual wants to see.

So, from the point of view of the male gaze, a photograph of four naked men is homosexual in nature.

Now, if a movie kept showing us a photograph of four naked women from behind over and over again, we would have no trouble saying, “Why does the movie keep showing us this?”  But as it is four naked men, with its homosexual implications, we say nothing.

Billy Mack, a has-been rock star who has made an unexpectedly successful comeback, decides he would like to spend Christmas with his manager, Joe, telling him he’s the love of his life.  Joe makes a nervous joke about Billy being gay when he says this, the kind of joke you make when you are not sure what the truth is.  Joe offers to shake hands, but Billy wants a big hug.  Then he suggests they watch porn together.  I suppose we are to assume it is heterosexual porn, thereby removing the possibility of a homosexual relationship between the two after it was ambiguously suggested.  The movie dares us to object to this scene.

But let’s assume instead that Joe was Josephine.  Billy Mack’s telling Josephine that she was the love of his life would make for an awkward scene, even though the element of homosexuality would not be present, owing in part to the ambiguity of the word “love,” and owing in part to the fact that the love expressed by Billy, however understood, might not be mutual, especially when Billy insisted on a hug.  I won’t go so far as to imagine, as part of this change of gender, that Billy would then suggest to Josephine that they watch porn.  But that aside, if we wanted to say that the scene made us feel uneasy, we would have no problem doing so.  But in the actual scene with Joe, anyone who felt uncomfortable watching it would probably keep that to himself.

At the wedding reception of Peter and Juliet, Sarah can tell that Mark seems a little down, so she asks him, “Do you love him?”  Now, if she had asked, “Do you love her?” we would not hesitate to express our disapproval.  Asking a man at a wedding reception if he is in love with the bride of his best friend simply is not done.  Her coming right out with a question like that would have been inappropriate because it was none of her business.  And we would have had no trouble saying so.  But since she asked him if he was in love with Peter, the movie is once again daring us to object.  And it might not be so bad if Peter were openly gay, but he is not, for the simple reason that he is not gay in any sense.  Her asking him that question is supposed to be justified because she thought he might need someone to talk to about it.  In other words, this dovetails with the communication theme discussed above.  But being willing to listen to a close friend who needs to talk is one thing, and suggesting something personal like that to a casual acquaintance is something else again.  I mean, just because Mark arranged for male prostitutes to be at Peter’s stag party, that is no reason for Sarah to jump to any conclusions.  Of course, as noted above, right after Sarah has the impertinence to ask Mark if he is in love with Peter, Harry, who is her boss, has the impertinence to ask her how long she has been in love with Karl.  There sure are a lot of nosy people in this movie.

Daniel suggests that Sam is a bit young to be in love, since he is only eleven years old.  But Daniel humors him when Sam insists that he is not too young.  Fine.  But then, when he starts to ask Sam if the feeling is reciprocated, he begins by saying, “And what does she…,” hesitates, adds the word “he” as a possibility, and then completes the question, “…feel about you?”

Now, while this movie dares us to find anything wrong with Daniel’s tentative use of the word “he,” we might note that the movie itself did not dare for it to be a “he”:  for Sam to say he is in love with another little boy; for Daniel to encourage him to tell that boy how he feels about him, or he’ll always regret it; for Sam to tell the boy at the airport that he loves him; and for the boy to chase after Sam and kiss him.  The movie presents itself as being ever so enlightened by flirting with a pronoun, and then retreats to the safety of a little girl.

We have reached the point that we now need a new term, homophobia-phobia, the fear of being accused of homophobia.  The movie dares the people in the audience to express any misgivings about the scenes discussed above, and so great is their homophobia-phobia that few are willing to do so.

Conclusion

This movie won a lot of awards, and it was a box-office success.  A lot of people really liked it, critics included.  I suppose they agree with the movie that love is such a wonderful thing that it is worth taking any risk, making any sacrifice.  But it’s not.

Great Progress Has Been Made Regarding Israel

If we just focus on the events of the past few days, it may appear that a low point has been reached regarding America and Israel.  However, if we stand back and look at things from a broader perspective, taking a historical view of things as it were, it is clear that great progress has been made.  To understand this, we must go back about forty years.

In 1975, NBC broadcast a made-for-television movie called The UFO Incident, which I did not see at the time.  People told me it was pretty good, however, so when the network decided to rerun the movie, I decided to watch it.  It was based on a true story about a couple that said they were abducted by aliens, bits and pieces of which were recalled by them through hypnosis.  Now, I don’t believe their story, but I do believe in good science fiction.  I especially liked the part where the aliens put a needle in her navel as a pregnancy test, the idea of which causes me to wince every time.  So, there I was enjoying the movie when it was interrupted by a special announcement about something having to do with Israel.  I suppose it might have been the Camp David Accords, which would mean the year was 1978, but it might just as easily have been the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty, which would mean the year was 1979.  I don’t know, because I was so disgusted that my movie had been interrupted that I really wasn’t paying attention.  So, I don’t know the year, and I don’t know the substance of the announcement, but I sure remember the movie I was watching.  I had to wait a few more years before I could actually see the movie in full.

Those were the days before I had cable (it still had not come to my part of Houston by that time), and it was a time when most people did not yet have a VCR, including me.  And so, my video entertainment depended on the three major networks and of a couple of local stations.  Movies were edited for sex, violence, profanity, immorality, and time.  Those were dark days.  In other words, it was rare to have a good movie to watch on television, which meant that having a good movie interrupted by some news event was exasperating, especially a news event that I cared nothing about.

By the time of the 2000 Camp David Summit, the situation regarding Israel was much better.  I had cable, providing me with lots of unedited movies, and there were video stores all over the place where I could rent movies in the forms of video cassettes, laser disks, and DVDs.  I don’t even remember if ordinary broadcasting was interrupted with announcements about the summit, probably because I was watching a movie safe from interruptions.  Today, things are better than ever.  We have cable, Netflix, live streaming, DVRs, and so on and so forth.  There is no longer any need to fear being molested by events concerning Israel.

When it comes to the news that matters, however, our cup runneth over.  We no longer need depend on the evening news, but have news coverage and talk shows around the clock.  And that is fine, because there is a lot going on in the world that does matter and in which I take an interest.  But not Israel.

You see, way back in the 1970s, when my movie was interrupted, I remember thinking at the time that it was all pointless, that it was never going to end, that it was just the same old nonsense being churned over and over again.  Nothing that has happened in the almost forty years since has changed my mind.

I hate to think anyone is still under any illusions on this matter, but just in case there is, I shall lay it down right here and now, once and for all, that Israel will never give back the West Bank.  Never!  But it would be crude for the Israelis to say as much, however, so they have said and will continue to say that they are willing to enter into negotiations on the matter when the time is right and when certain conditions have been met.

Furthermore, I again assume that no one is under any illusions on this point, but just in case, I also aver that American politicians know that Israel is never going to give back the West Bank.  But it would be crude for them to say as much, so they have said and will continue to say that America wants to help negotiate a two-state solution that will involve a return of territory in the West Bank as a place for the Palestinians to have their own state.

When I was in college, I sometimes went on a date with a girl in which I knew before the evening was out that we were not suitable for each other.  However, I thought it might hurt her feelings if I never called her back.  So, typically, on the following Thursday, I would call her up and ask her if she would like to go on a date that Saturday.  It was my hope, of course, that she would say no.  Never once was I disappointed.  Invariably, the girl would say that she would like to go out, but she already had a date.  I flattered her by pretending to want to go out with her again, and she saved my ego by telling me she already had plans.  This was much nicer than my implying that I didn’t want to date her again, or her saying that she didn’t want to date me again, which was the truth.

Actually, a better analogy would be a date arranged by family or friends, in which the boy and girl not only have to worry about each other’s feelings, but also have to be considerate of those family and friends who are observers, as it were.  To make the analogy even better, the boy would call the girl every Thursday for a date that Saturday, and every Thursday she would say she already had plans, and in this manner they would pretend to want to date each other for forty years. Similarly, with the rest of the world watching, Israeli and American politicians have pretended to want to negotiate a solution for the Palestinian people for over forty years, so that feelings will be assuaged all around.

The only problem with all this is that owing to the fact that everyone really knows that Israel will never negotiate a two-state solution and will never give back the West Bank, talk of such is pointless and boring.  No progress has been made on that nor ever will be.  But, whereas the movies we watched on television were once greatly threatened by events concerning Israel, thanks to modern technology, we no longer need to fear having our movies interrupted by the pointless and boring Middle-East pas de deux.  And that is progress indeed.

A Passage to India (1984)

When we speak of Freudian interpretations of drama, we must distinguish those works created with no thought of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory from those that were created with Freud’s theory in mind.  Plays written before Freud can safely be assumed to fall into the first category, as when Hamlet is interpreted in terms of the Oedipus complex.  There is less certainty regarding dramatic forms created after Freud’s theory had become well known, for there is always the possibility that an artist purposely decided to spice things up by putting a little Freudian symbolism in his story.  In the case of Forbidden Planet (1956), the Freudian element is explicit, the monster being finally explained as a material manifestation of the id.  In the case of this latter type of movie, we are forced to interpret it in Freudian terms even if we do not care one whit for Freud’s theory.  That being said, it is with some confidence that I place A Passage to India into this latter category.  And so, while I am not especially prone to interpret drama in Freudian terms, this movie appears to have been influenced by Freud’s theory to a degree that references to that theory are unavoidable.

But first things first.  Based on the novel of the same name, published in 1924, the story is set in India in the 1920s, when India was still a part of the British Empire.  However much the novel may have expressed criticism of British colonialism, the movie itself was produced in 1984, in a postcolonial world, where the collective judgment is that colonialism was simply wrong.  In fact, it is regarded as so wrong that little room is left for subtlety or nuance.  The Indians are all portrayed as good in one form or another—religious, moral, polite, kind, etc. —while the British are all portrayed as bad in one form or another—rude, snobbish, arrogant, bigoted, etc. —with only three exceptions:  Adela (Judy Davis), Mrs. Moore (Peggy Ashcroft), and Fielding (James Fox).  Adela and Mrs. Moore are just setting out for India at the beginning of the movie, so they do not share the prejudices of the British that have been in India for a while.  Dr. Aziz (Victor Banerjee) makes this explicitly clear when, after almost being run over by an automobile full of British citizens, he says to his friend that all Englishmen become unpleasant within two years of coming to India, while he gives Englishwomen only six months.

Fielding is a special case.  He has been in India for some time, and yet he retains his good qualities, being friendly with Indians and treating them with respect.  That is so we have someone to identify with.  You see, we all like to flatter ourselves that had we lived in some other time and place, we would somehow still have our American, twenty-first century values and sensibilities, and that we would have been moral heroes, refusing to go along with the norms and mores of that place and time.  So, had we lived in the antebellum South, we would, of course, have freed all of our slaves.  Had we come of age in Nazi Germany and been ordered to be a guard at Auschwitz, we would, of course, have refused, choosing to be executed rather than participate in the holocaust.  And had we been a British subject assigned to a post in India in the early twentieth century, we would, of course, have been just like Fielding, refusing to go along with his white countrymen in their condemnation of an Indian (Dr. Aziz) who has been charged with attempted rape of a white woman (Adela).  Without Fielding to identify with, the white reader of the novel and, later, the white audience of the movie might have been adrift.  White people might have tried identifying with some Indian in the movie, but most white people really prefer to identify with a character that is also white.  It is one thing to ask people to identify with a white person who has no prejudices against people of color, but asking them to identify with the people of color themselves might have been asking too much, certainly when the novel was published, but probably today as well.

Adela goes bicycle riding by herself, and she decides to explore a seldom used path.  It takes her to an abandoned building adorned by sculptures of men and women making love.  This arouses repressed sexual desires that distress her greatly.  Then she notices a bunch of monkeys looking at her.  Agitated, they start to chase her and she runs away.  The monkeys represent her animal passions, and what she is really running away from is her own lust.  On a previous evening, she had broken off her engagement with her fiancé, but upon returning, she tells him she has changed her mind and wants to get married.  In other words, even though she no longer loves him, she figures it is better to marry than burn.  Other Freudian symbolism consists of Aziz having a fever and the sweltering heat of the sun, all of which are suggestive of sexual passion.

When Adela and Mrs. Moore, Adela’s prospective mother-in-law, first arrived in India, they wanted to meet some Indians socially.  They got no help in this regard from the British people that lived in India, who were appalled at the idea, but Aziz accidentally made the acquaintance of Mrs. Moore and through her Adela.  He is so enamored of them that he invites them to a picnic in which they can visit some mysterious caves.  Through one incredible coincidence after another, one by one, many of the people who were invited are eliminated—Fielding arrives too late, a chaperon arranged by Adela’s fiancé is dismissed by her, and Mrs. Moore becomes fatigued and remains behind—so that only Aziz, Adela, and a guide arrive at some caves.

Aziz runs off to smoke a cigarette.  This is nothing but a contrivance, the movie’s way of allowing Adela to be alone.  She enters a cave by herself.  The cave, of course, represents her unconscious.  When Aziz finishes his cigarette, he goes looking for her.  He stands at the entrance to the cave as if about to enter.  Now the cave represents her vagina.  She becomes overwhelmed with her forbidden lust for Aziz and bolts, eventually falling down the hillside into some cactus.  Just as she was really running from her sexual desires when she ran from the monkeys, so too here she runs from her desire for Aziz and not from Aziz himself.  Being hysterical, she so vividly imagines being ravished by Aziz that she believes he actually assaulted her.  As a result, charges are brought against Aziz.

Every white person thinks Aziz is guilty except Mrs. Moore, who says there is nothing she can do and returns to England (dying on the way), and Fielding, who asserts Aziz’s innocence.  Adela’s fiancé is a judge, but he has to recuse himself.  He is replaced by an Indian judge.  During the trial, much is made of the fact that Aziz is a widower and therefore deprived of a sexual outlet, except for his occasional visits to brothels or his collection of girlie magazines.  Needless to say, nothing similar is said about Adela’s being a maiden who is also deprived of a sexual outlet.  When Adela is put on the witness stand, she recants her previous testimony, and Aziz is acquitted.  At this point, we realize why the judge had to be an Indian.  If Aziz had gotten a fair trial from a white judge, this would have been out of keeping with the movie’s simplistic formulation:  Indians good; British bad.

So, as often happens in movies in which a man of color is accused of raping a white woman, he turns out to be innocent because the woman is to blame somehow:  either the woman lied, was hysterical, or behaved in provocative manner.  I covered this subject at greater length in my essay, “Rape and Race in the Movies.”