On the Segregation of the Sexes

One of the things I always liked about dancing was the way it forced a mixing of the sexes.  Of course, not all forms of dancing involve such a mixing, but as far as mainstream dancing is concerned, ballroom or country-western, for instance, it does.  The word “forced” in my first sentence may strike some as peculiar.  Are not men and women of heterosexual orientation naturally attracted to each other?  Indeed they are, and yet they also have what I regard as an unfortunate tendency to segregate.

I was at a party one night many years ago, and after a while, the men congregated on one side of the room; the women, on the other.  The men started talking about sports, a topic that is apparently inexhaustible, but which I care nothing about, and so I quickly lost interest.  I was fortunately seated in such a way that I could, without calling attention to myself, ease my way over to where the women were.  I have had many pleasant and stimulating conversations with women, and thus I thought things would be more interesting in their group.  No sooner had I surreptitiously joined them than I found they were deep into a discussion of baby snot, the color of which is apparently of great significance.  From there they went on to the color of baby doo-doo.

In The Wind and the Lion (1975), Raisuli (Sean Connery) is chief of a band of Berbers.  He tells of how he escaped from prison, after being confined for many years, and how he came upon a group of women washing clothes.  “I do not normally enjoy the chatter of women,” he says, as his swarthy band laugh in manly agreement.  But, he goes on to say, on that day their voices filled him with delight.  Not having spent time in prison, however, I was not similarly enthralled.  I withdrew into myself and wondered how long I would have to wait before I could get away from this “party” without seeming rude.

It occurred to me as I sat there that the conversation of the women might have been more interesting had there been no men in the room at all.  For one thing, they might have talked about their husbands.  A friend of mine overheard one such conversation, and he said he knew right then and there that he would never marry.  Alternatively, the women might even have confided in one another about affairs they were having.  But as the men were within hearing distance, the women were reduced to conversing on subjects more fitting for their roles as wives and mothers.

It all made me think about movies I had seen in which rich people attend a dinner party, where the hostess arranged the seating so that the men and women would alternate along the table, while each woman would sit opposite her husband, no doubt so that he could make sure things were not getting too cozy on the other side of the table.  That mixing of the sexes seemed to be an admirable convention.  But then the time would come for the women to retire, so that the men could enjoy their brandy and cigars.  In these movies, the men generally begin to discuss politics, which is better than sports at least, but what happens with the women is usually not depicted, probably because the men that made those movies figured it wasn’t important.

In the movie Giant (1956), Leslie (Elizabeth Taylor), presumably wishing to avoid a discussion of the color of baby snot, tries to sit with the men after the women have retired to another room.  As these men are hyper-macho Texans, this is regarded as an unacceptable breech of etiquette, all the men becoming quiet and embarrassed, except for her husband Bick (Rock Hudson), who becomes angry.  Had I been in that room, I would have been thinking, “Oh, thank God!  Leslie’s going to join the conversation.  Now I won’t be bored.”  But I would have been the exception, apparently.

And now that I have brought up the subject of movies, I cannot help but think of Blackboard Jungle (1955).  In that movie, Mr. Dadier (Glenn Ford) becomes a teacher in a school with some of the worst juvenile delinquents that was then imaginable, though later movies, such as Lean on Me (1989), would make this movie look like the Blackboard Tropical Rainforest.  Later on, Dadier tours another school where the students are polite, patriotic, and studious.  Oddly enough, it does not seem to occur to Dadier or anyone else in the movie that the school he visits has both boys and girls in it, whereas the school where Dadier teaches is for boys only.  That is why I always shudder when I hear people argue that students do better when they attend an all-boy or all-girl school. The girls may do better, but without girls around, boys become even more brutal than they already are.  It was bad enough in high school when it was time for P.E., because without the civilizing influence of the girls, the boys reverted to barbarism.

Anyway, one of the reasons why I enjoyed dancing so much was that dancers always try to have a balance of the sexes in their groups, so the tendency to segregate is overridden by the desire to have plenty of opportunities for dancing.  But eventually the years caught up with me, and I began getting tendinitis with greater frequency, with longer periods needed for recovery.  Telling a partner that I might not be able to go dancing for a couple of months became a nuisance, and I eventually decided to hang up my dancing shoes for good.

After a hiatus of several years, I started thinking about bridge.  I learned to play bridge in college in the 1960s, back when the game was an essential social skill.  I had pretty much abandoned the game once I started dancing, but now it seemed like a good time to take it up again.  After all, one of the things I liked about bridge, apart from the pleasure of the game itself, was that it was something men and women could do together.  It may not force them together the way dancing does, but the game certainly lends itself to a mixture of the sexes.

Bidding systems come and go, so I knew I needed to learn the latest fashions.  And thus it was that I decided to make my entry into bridge society by way of lessons.  Though it is the segregation of the sexes that is my subject here, yet I cannot pass this point without mentioning other forms of segregation as well.  On entering the bridge studio, I was struck by the fact that I had not seen so many Caucasians in one place in thirty years.  Houston is ethnically diverse, with people from all over the world living here, but you would never know it from being in that bridge studio.  As my eyes became accustomed to the glare of racial purity, I did discern a smattering of Asians, but I have yet to see any Hispanics or African-Americans playing the game.  Of course, the people playing bridge were mostly elderly too, which may have something to do with it, apart from cultural differences.  I have been told by people I play bridge with that their grandchildren have no interest in playing the game.  So there is age segregation going on as well.  But I digress.

Much to my satisfaction, in any event, there were plenty of both men and women at the tables.  In the months since I decided to take up the game again, however, I have heard from three different sources about three different groups of women that get together and play bridge, men being excluded.  It was then—and only then I reluctantly admit—that I finally realized a principal motive for such segregation.  A lot of people are married or at least living with someone.  As such, they get their fill of the opposite sex.  No wonder they want a night out with the boys or a night out with the girls.  Even those that are widowed or divorced may, as a result of all those years of living with the opposite sex, still have a need for same-sex socializing; whereas I, on the other hand, having never been married or lived with anyone, have never experienced a surfeit of the fair sex.  Even when I had a girlfriend, we always unconsciously adjusted our dating frequency so as to not get too tired of each other.  As a result, I have never had a need to get away from women and be among men only.

Now, given this principle, bachelors like me being the exception, men have as much desire to get away from women from time to time as women have to get away from men.  And yet, I noticed that whereas I had heard of three women’s bridge clubs, I had not heard of any bridge clubs for men.  “Are there any groups of men that get together and play bridge,” I asked of those sitting at my table.  I was met with complete silence, so that I concluded that not only were there no such men’s clubs, but also that it had never occurred to anyone that there would be such a thing.  I know you can find a few men’s bridge clubs around the country by Googling them, but I am talking about impressions I have formed casually in my own milieu.

I have concluded that while men have a desire for the company of other men same as women have for their own sex, bridge is unsuitable for that purpose.  It might be going too far to say that bridge is essentially feminine like the game mah jongg, which is why the play The Men of Mah Jongg has such a humorous premise.  Instead, I shall say merely that bridge is insufficiently masculine.  As I noted above, in reference to Blackboard Jungle, females have a calming, civilizing, some would even say emasculating, effect on males.  In Giant, the main reason Bick becomes angry when Leslie intrudes upon the male preserve is that marriage creates the suspicion of an enervating domesticity.  As a result, Bick feels it is important to put her in her place, lest his companions have doubts as to who wears the pants in his family.  Consequently, when men have a boys’ night out, they must do more than merely get away from their wives.  They must engage in an activity that reaffirms their manhood, something like playing poker, bowling, or shooting pool.  Playing bridge just doesn’t cut it.

But for me, bridge is just right.  My only hope is that the women don’t get too carried away with these women’s bridge clubs.

On the Irrational Nature of Voting

My vote doesn’t count.

Well, there was this one time that a group of us were trying to decide whether to go ballroom dancing at Melody Lane or country-western dancing at the Longhorn Saloon.  We took a vote, and by a margin of one, we went country-western dancing.  Had I voted the other way, we would have gone to Melody Lane.

That sort of thing aside, when it comes to voting as part of one’s civic duty, the closest I ever came to having my vote count was when I sat on a jury.  As we all know, the vote has to be unanimous in a criminal trial, so one holdout can make the difference between either a conviction or an acquittal on the one hand and a hung jury on the other.  As a matter of fact, the jury I was on was indeed hung, resulting in a mistrial, with two people holding out for a guilty verdict.  Had I changed my vote, it would still have been a hung jury, with three people voting guilty.  Alternatively, had I managed to shirk my civic duty, someone else would have taken my place, and the result would have been the same either way, except for one consideration.  On a jury, one does not merely vote:  one also exercises one’s powers of persuasion, such as they are.  It is conceivable that the person that might have taken my place would have argued more persuasively, resulting in either a conviction or an acquittal.

If one still lives in a state where caucuses are held rather than primaries, the element of voting and persuasion are also intermingled.  In fact, just the feature of standing up and being counted all by itself can be of no small significance.  And therein lies a tale.  In 1984, I decided to vote for the first time in my life.  As a democrat, I naturally attended the democratic caucus.  Once there we divided into three groups:  one for Walter Mondale, another for Gary Hart, and a third for Jesse Jackson.  Those of us who were for Hart went into a room separate from the others to select two delegates to attend the citywide convention.  A couple of party regulars spoke to each other in hushed tones, after which one of them, who was also the precinct judge, made an announcement.  As we were in the Montrose area, also known for being the part of Houston in which there was a significant gay community, they decided that there would be one gay delegate and one straight delegate, the former to be selected by the gays; the latter, by those that were straight. The precinct judge had not previously come out of the closet (the other party regular was straight), but out he came, with great difficulty, he admitted.  After all, sodomy was still illegal in Texas at that time, so there was not the general acceptance of homosexuality back then as there is now, Montrose area or no Montrose area.  He then asked all the straight people to go the right side of the room and all the gays to go to the left.  As a heterosexual, I cannot speak for the feelings of those in the room that were gay, but it occurred to me that whereas the precinct judge had had time to think over his decision to come out publicly that night, there were doubtless some there who were caught completely unprepared, not sure whether to come out likewise or to go to the right and play it straight.  Needless to say, for some in that room, the act of voting, as it were, had consequences well beyond the delegate they might have picked that evening.

When it comes to the general election on the other hand, voting is done in secret.  And the elements of persuasion and voting are kept distinct by law.  Whatever persuading one does must take place prior to going to the polls or just outside the place where voting occurs.  Psychologically speaking, those that make the greatest effort to persuade are those most likely to vote.  But from a logical point of view, the two are distinct and may occur independently of each other.  It is not unheard of for someone to attend rallies and protests, owing to the excitement and camaraderie of it all, but decide on voting day not to bother, owing to having slept late or wanting to avoid the inclement weather.  Meanwhile, another citizen, having pretty much kept to his own knitting during the campaign season, may get up and vote without anyone even being aware that he has done so.

I suppose that by voting you may inspire others to do likewise, but to that end you could simply lie, announcing at work that you had already voted that morning, thus also giving yourself an excuse for having shown up a little late on account of having overslept.  Others might then be inspired to vote by your example, false though it may be.  Or, if you work with a bunch of republicans, you might vote and then lie about it, saying you are not going to vote because it’s not worth the effort, hoping to depress their turnout, especially since they will not feel the need to cancel your vote.

And thus, having isolated the vote in the general election from extraneous considerations—taking a public stand, persuading, setting an example—we may now turn to the question as to whether that vote counts, whether it makes a difference.  And as I indicated in the first line of this essay, my answer, regarding my own vote, is decidedly in the negative.  Of course, it is a little too easy for me to say that.  Texas is a winner-take-all state that always goes republican.  And it is so thoroughly gerrymandered that even the congressional districts present one with a fait accompli.  I suppose I might feel different if I lived in a swing state, but not much.  Even if I had lived in one of those troublesome counties in Florida in the 2000 election, my vote for Al Gore, when added to the rest, would still not have been enough to make him president.

At this point, there will be those that argue, “If everyone felt the way you do, no one would vote.”  True enough, but the Prisoner’s Dilemma proves again and again that one is better off (or at least no worse off) by defecting.  Some will prefer a weaker version:  “It’s because of people like you that republicans keep getting elected.”  (Republicans are less reflective than us democrats, you see, and they will go to the polls and vote undeterred by such philosophical ruminations.)  All that may be true, but everyone does not feel that way, and my voting per se will not increase the turnout of other democrats.  Immanuel Kant took that basic idea behind the argument, “If everyone felt the way you do…,” and made it the cornerstone of his ethics.  I cannot consistently will my not voting into a universal law because then there would be no election.  Actually, there is no contradiction.  As others have pointed out, if I will my action to be a universal law, all we get is a world no one would want to live in.

But enough of that.  Let us grant that we all do have a civic duty to vote and that willfully choosing not to vote is immoral.  There still remains the irksome question as to whether it makes any difference.  Much of what we call “immoral” harms others in some way.  But the fact remains that if I don’t vote, it is more likely that I would win the lottery without even buying a lottery ticket than that my vote will count in the general election.  So even if my not voting is immoral, it is harmless.  I doubt if I will go to Hell for that.

I noted above that republicans are more likely to vote than democrats, if only because they are not as likely to bog themselves down with idle reflections that their votes do not count, at least when considered individually (that their votes count collectively is beyond question).  But this year may prove different.  A lot of republicans cannot bring themselves to vote for Trump, and yet they say that they are even more opposed to the idea of voting for Hillary.  And so, some will stay home and not vote at all, some will simply leave the vote for president blank, some will vote for some other candidate listed on the ballot, and some will simply write in a name.

Now, we all know that owing to the electoral college, only Trump or Hillary will be elected president.  So, by not voting for Trump, whatever their alternative vote or non-vote may be, they are helping to elect Hillary.  Implicitly, then, they prefer Hillary to Trump.  So, is there any rational basis for them to vote for someone other than Hillary?  No.  But then, neither is there a rational basis for voting at all, inasmuch as one’s vote does not count, individually considered.

I will be voting for Hillary (Groan!).  I know my vote will not make a difference politically, but I am going to do it anyway.  I suppose I will do it because it will make me feel good. Republicans that vote for neither Trump nor Hillary are no better or worse than I am in this regard, for their action will simply make them feel good.  Whoever is president, they will be able to say to themselves, “At least I didn’t vote for her (or him).”  I wish there were more to voting than that, the mere production in myself of a feeling of rightness, but no matter how I try, reason will not get me there.

It did get me to the Longhorn Saloon, however.

The Final Solution

In a recent opinion piece in The Washington Post, “The Brave New World of Robots and Lost Jobs,” David Ignatius discusses the problem that society faces as robots start taking jobs away from people, leaving many of them permanently unemployed:

Job insecurity is a central theme of the 2016 campaign, fueling popular anger about trade deals and immigration. But economists warn that much bigger job losses are ahead in the United States — driven not by foreign competition but by advancing technology.

This is not the first such article to address this issue.  A diary written almost three years ago by RobLewis calls our attention to a prediction made by Gartner, as enunciated by Daryl Plummer, that as technology reduces the need for labor, social unrest will be the result.  An article reporting on this forecast quotes Tom Seitzberg, who agrees with this bleak future:

“Ultimately, every society lives from the backbone from a strong middle class,” said Seitzberg. “If you get just a top level, a small amount of very rich people and a very large piece of very poor people, it leads to social unrest.”

RobLewis also notes that Paul Krugman, in an article entitled “The Rise of the Robots,” has expressed similar concerns, arguing that the economic benefit of a college education is waning:

If this is the wave of the future, it makes nonsense of just about all the conventional wisdom on reducing inequality. Better education won’t do much to reduce inequality if the big rewards simply go to those with the most assets. Creating an “opportunity society,” or whatever it is the likes of Paul Ryan etc. are selling this week, won’t do much if the most important asset you can have in life is, well, lots of assets inherited from your parents.

What Plummer, Seitzberg and Krugman have in common is their emphasis on the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, while the rest struggle at the level of subsistence.

Economics is usually understood in terms of the production and distribution of goods and services.  When John Kenneth Galbraith wrote The Affluent Society in 1958, he argued that the production problem had pretty much been solved. This is truer than ever today.  We have it well within our capacity to provide our citizens with the all the necessities and quite a few luxuries.  In fact, given the labor theory of value, the less human labor is needed to produce these goods and services, the less they will cost.  So technology will only make it easier than ever to produce enough for everyone.

Therefore, it is argued, the problem is distribution.  For the most part, we expect people to get what they want by working for it:  they sell their labor, and in exchange get the money to buy the goods and services they desire. But according to the views expressed above, that option will become increasingly unavailable to more and more people in the future.  Therefore, the problem of distribution will have to become one of redistribution, one of forcing the rich to share their wealth.

That rich people have so much money is really a remarkable thing, because we are free to take it away from them any time we want.  They have it only because we let them have it.  The fact is, however, that people will tolerate the rich, and even admire them, provided their own needs have been reasonably met.  But if the disparity of wealth becomes extreme, the situation becomes untenable.  In societies where the people are oppressed through force, revolution is the result.  In a democracy like ours, however, confiscatory taxation will suffice. If the rich are as wise as they are wealthy, they will even encourage this redistribution, as a way of buying off the mob. If they are not wise, and there is no evidence to indicate that they are, we will take even more of their money as compensation for their insolence.

So the distribution problem can be solved as easily as we have solved the problem of production. But no sooner is that problem solved than we realize that other questions present themselves: What happens when the link between labor and income has been sundered? What happens when the average person has enough money to provide himself with a decent living without having to work for it?  What happens when the robots do all the work, and the goods and services produced by them are fairly distributed among the people?

Some of us can handle leisure.  We do not need to work in order for our lives to have meaning. In fact, our lives don’t need to have any meaning at all.  It is enough for us to while away the time indulging in harmless pleasures, be they sensuous or intellectual, allowing the years to pass effortlessly, until an inconvenient death puts an end to all our enjoyments.

But there are those for whom leisure is a curse.  I have known people who, at the end of a three-day weekend, will say that they are so glad it is over, because they were becoming bored and restless.  These are the people who will blithely say that they will never retire, that they will work until they drop, in part because they think they will not have enough money to retire, but mostly because their idea of retirement is an insufferable three-day weekend that never ends.

Since the robots have not taken over yet, technology at this time has merely left us with underemployment and declining real wages.  One solution would be to allow all those for whom a life of leisure is the ideal form of existence to receive a government check without working for it.  For example, there was an initiative presented to the people of Switzerland which, if passed, would have provided every adult with an income of $2,800 per month.  That would certainly have been enough for me to quit my job and never turn a lick again. It was rejected, however.  In any event, given some such policy, those who need to work could continue to do the jobs that still remain, so that their lives can have meaning, and receive the additional income.  Unfortunately, those who need to work, and who say it is the meaning in their lives, nevertheless tend to resent those who seem to get along just fine without it. Like the dog in the manger, they cannot stand to be idle, and yet they are outraged by those who indulge themselves in the very idleness they abhor. There is no need to be overly concerned with this problem of resentment, however, because as time goes by, and robots take over more and more of the jobs, there will not be enough work left for humans to do, even after all the lazy people have removed themselves from the workforce.

Although a college education is not the solution, as far as making people employable is concerned, it may be the solution to making people suitable for unemployment by giving them the real skills needed for the twenty-first century, the ones needed for a life of leisure.  Instead of emphasizing all those skills that robots can do better anyway, we should encourage a solid foundation in a liberal arts education, with special emphasis on that most useless of all disciplines, my major and lifelong avocation, philosophy.  The problems of philosophy, being perennial, can provide the intellect with unlimited amusement.  Nor need we fear that artificial intelligence will solve these problems and leave us with nothing to do.  What chance do robots have of figuring out the mind-body problem, of making sense of free will, or discovering the meaning of life, even if they are the ones doing all the work that supposedly provides it?

Not everyone is suited for a life of contemplation, however.  Perhaps the legalization of marijuana would help.  Marijuana is apparently pretty good at snuffing out ambition, a formerly useful passion, but without the need for work, a troublesome, mischief-making drive.  Those for whom a love of leisure does not come naturally may be able to acquire an appreciation for it with the help of a little weed.

Unfortunately, there will still remain those who need to work, for whom the above remedies will not suffice.  A lot of them will simply be bored, and marriages will fail as husbands and wives get on each other’s nerves.  And then there is the fear is that without the exhaustion that comes with toil, people will become perverted and cruel, and violence will become the entertainment of choice.  With the elimination of poverty and inequality, the social unrest that arises from an unfair distribution of wealth may be replaced by the social unrest of boredom, in which mobs go on a rampage just for something to do.

Perhaps the final solution will come when the robots replace us entirely. After all, it is not obvious that the elimination of man and his replacement by robots would necessarily be a bad thing.  I suppose the first issue to address is whether robots would be conscious, since the conception of robots as mindless automata would seem rather bleak. Though science fiction movies seldom include dialogue directly addressing the question of robot consciousness, most of us automatically assume that robots in movies are indeed conscious. Whether it be Robby the Robot of Forbidden Planet (1956), HAL of 2001:  A Space Odyssey (1968), Colossus of Colossus:  The Forbin Project(1970), or the title character of The Terminator (1984), along with countless other examples, these computers or robots in the movies always seem to be conscious.  In real life, on the other hand, we never attribute consciousness to computers and robots. Though designers and programmers may get better at making robots simulate human nature, even to the point of claiming to perceive the world around them, to have desires, and even to feel pain, yet we are likely to suspect that it is all just a very good case of mimicry. In all likelihood, the simulation will eventually reach the point where we will presume consciousness on the part of real robots just as we do with their movie counterparts.  In any event, as the problem of other minds has always been insoluble even when restricted to people, it will presumably be no less so with robots.

It all may come down to religion.  Those who believe that man has an immortal soul that survives the body will suppose that it is this soul that is the seat of consciousness.  Robots, not having a soul, will be mindless. Atheists, on the other hand, suppose that one way or another, the conscious mind is something that naturally arises out of matter, and they see no reason why robots will not eventually become conscious too, if they are not so already.

Death will probably come to robots as it does to man, in the sense that machines eventually wear out to the point that repairing them is impractical. However, robot immortality may be achievable nevertheless. Regarding the notion of reincarnation, Leibniz once said that if you tell him that when he dies, he will immediately be reborn in another body, but with no memory of his present life, then you might just as well tell him that when he dies, someone else will be born.  And that is because memory is essential to any kind of immortality worth having.  You can clone my body, so that someone genetically identical to me will exist in the future, but if that clone does not have my memories, he will still be someone else.  But if my memories could be transferred into that clone, then indeed I would count myself as having survived death. What can only be imagined in man could easily be carried out in robots, as memories downloaded from one could be uploaded into another.

But immortality is a good only if life itself is good, and given the misery of existence, I sometimes have my doubts.  Now, I have been pretty lucky, as far as health and finances are concerned, and if everyone were as well off as I have been over my lifetime, I guess I would admit that life is good enough. But, regarding reincarnation again, if I had the choice of being reborn after I die, with no control over where in the world I would be born or in what circumstances, I think I might pass on that.  The odds are just too great that my next life would be miserable.

But this would not be a problem for robots.  Assuming they will have consciousness, we can be sure that they will design themselves so as not to experience any more pain than necessary to avoid harm, and which in any event may be turned off at will.  This would be a great triumph in the evolution of life.  We evolved to survive long enough to have babies that can survive long enough to have babies, and if we must experience much pain and suffering in the process, that is just too bad.  But robots can adjust their sensations to meet their needs, and needless suffering, that great objection to existence itself, can at least be eliminated from this small section of the universe.  Having conquered death, robots would also conquer suffering.  As a result, robots would not have to bother much about morality, for in a world where you cannot hurt or kill someone, it is hard to imagine what immoral behavior would look like.  For a world like that, the elimination of mankind would be a small price to pay.

Just as robots will design themselves to keep from having unnecessary pain, so too will they be able to produce unlimited pleasure.  They will not have sex, of course, but there is no reason to suppose that they could not induce feelings of ecstasy in themselves, once they came up with the right circuitry. This could be their downfall.  Once they figure out that trick, they may end up lying around all day in a self-induced high, not caring whether anything gets done.  Long before they get around to wiping out man, they may be too wiped out to care, and man will simply stroll in, step over the robots, and start having to do the work that they are too wasted to perform.  If we cannot keep them from hitting the pleasure button, we may just have run the world ourselves after all.

Heaven with a Gun (1969)

In many ways, Heaven with a Gun is mediocre and formulaic.  There is a conflict between cattlemen and sheepherders.  As usual, the sheepherders are good and the cattlemen are bad.  Enter Jim Killian (Glenn Ford), the gunfighter who wants to hang up his gun and become a pastor, but not before he uses his gun one last time.  Finally, there are some whores with a heart of gold, headed by Madge (Carolyn Jones).

At the same time, the formula has been modified to suit the late 1960s.  To begin with, there are a couple of Native Americans that are also sheepherders, consisting of a father and daughter.  The father is hanged by a couple of the cattlemen, one of which is Coke (David Carradine), leaving Leloopa (Barbara Hershey) orphaned.  When Killian happens along and sees the man hanging from a tree, he cuts him down and buries him.  Later, when Killian walks into the small house he just bought, he finds Leloopa inside, cooking some baby rattlesnake.  Leloopa saw Killian cut her father down and bury him, and as a result, she says that she now belongs to Killian, otherwise Hopi law says her father’s soul will wander forever.  Killian is forced to relent.  The fact that they will be living together in a one-room house creates a little taboo tension:  They are not married, she is a minor, they are of different races, and we are not sure whether she thinks of herself as a daughter to Killian or as his wife, giving us a tinge of incest.  However, Killian leaves at night to sleep somewhere else, presumably at the hotel.

Leloopa mentions that her mother was white, a captive whom her father married.  In the old days, her mother would have been raped, but movies were trying to portray Native Americans in a more favorable light by this time.  Because of this trend of treating Native Americans in the movies in this way, it shocks us a little when Killian tells her she is going to have to take a bath, and she has no idea what a bath is.  Leloopa says it was her mother who taught her English, but her mother apparently didn’t bother to teach Leloopa about bathing, so I guess her mother went completely native.  But why, we ask ourselves, would a movie made as late as 1969 suggest that Hopi Indians are a bunch of dirty, smelly savages?

The answer is that the movie wants to titillate us some more.  You see, when Barbara Hershey is in a movie, it is usually just a matter of time before she gets naked.  In fact, when Killian tells Leloopa that in order to bathe, you first have to take your clothes off, we are not surprised when she starts undressing right in front of him.  He stops her, however, and leaves the house so she can have some privacy.

Later in the movie she manages to get raped.  Coke starts making advances to her in the street.  Instead of remaining in the street where there are plenty of people around, she gets the bright idea of running into a barn, which means that Coke can rape her in private.  We figure, “All right, this is where we get to see Barbara Hershey naked.”  But she is only partially undraped as she leaves the barn.

Killian beats up Coke.  Finally, that night, when he gets home, Barbara Hershey is sitting outside completely naked, although we only get to see enough of her body to give the movie an M rating (“M” for mature, a designation eventually replaced by PG).  She says she knows he is trying to find her another place to stay.  After he puts her to bed, she asks if he will stay with her, which was probably the real reason she got naked and not all that Hopi nonsense she was spouting.  But he leaves.

After Killian kills Mace (J.D. Cannon), the gunslinger that had been hired by chief cattleman Asa Beck (John Anderson), Madge convinces him that if he really wants to hang up his guns and become a pastor, he must stop killing.  That makes sense.  But what to do about all those evil cattlemen threatening to wipe out all the sheepherders?  Here we see another influence of the 1960s.  Killian gathers together all the townspeople, including the wives and children of the cattlemen, and they all go to the lake where there was to be a showdown, placing themselves in what would have been the middle of a battle between cattlemen and sheepherders.  It is suggestive of the civil disobedience, civil rights marches, and nonviolent resistance so characteristic of the 1950s and 1960s.

Finally, it becomes clear that Killian is going to allow Leloopa to stay with him, presumably as husband and wife, though that is not explicitly stated.  This too is a change from the old days.  Normally, Leloopa would have been off limits for Killian, not so much because they were of different races, but because she had been raped.  Miscegenation was something of a taboo in the old movies, but it did happen from time to time, as in Broken Arrow (1950).  But a raped woman was damaged goods, and the movies usually figured out some way to keep the protagonist from marrying her, as in Man of the West (1958), assuming she was even allowed to be alive by the end of the movie.  The idea of a raped woman marrying a man and living happily ever after was just too offensive in the old days.  Maybe it still is.  But this movie doesn’t see it as a problem.

Devil’s Doorway (1950)

Devil’s Doorway is one of those movies about Indians that is not much fun, because the movie cares more about showing us the mistreatment of the Indians at the hands of white men than with entertaining us in the traditional manner, such as by having the Indians scalping, raping, and otherwise terrorizing white settlers.

Robert Taylor in redface plays Broken Lance, a Shoshone Indian who has just arrived back home in Wyoming after service in the Civil War fighting for the North, where he won the Medal of Honor.  In other words, this movie lays it on pretty thick.  He intends to return to his peaceful ways as a free range cattle rancher, but he finds he is beset by a bunch of white people that intend to homestead on his land and raise sheep.

This is an interesting twist.  First, in most movies where there is a clash between men who want an open range for their cattle and families that want to homestead, it is the homesteaders that are good and the cattlemen that are evil, as in Shane (1953).  Second, in most movies where sheepherders come into conflict with cattlemen, it is the sheepherders that are good and the cattlemen that are, once again, evil.  Glenn Ford seems to show up in a lot of these movies.  He is said by villain cattleman Rod Steiger to have the smell of sheep about him in Jubal (1956), is the title character in The Sheepman (1958), and intervenes as a pastor/gunslinger on the side of the good sheepherders (some of whom are Indians) against the bad cattlemen in Heaven with a Gun (1969).  So, it is strange that the good guy in Devil’s Doorway is a free range cattleman pitted again evil homesteading sheepherders.  In fact, if this good guy had not been an Indian at a time when audiences were ready for movies about how Indians were good and white people were bad, the reversal might not have worked.  Actually, not much works in this movie in any event.  It is tedious and boring, as are all moralistic, preachy movies.  It is of value only to historians of the cinema.

As long as the movie was going to be about injustice toward Indians, I suppose the producers figured they might as well put in a word for gender equality as well, though they would hardly have termed it as such in 1950.  And so, Lance’s lawyer ends up being a woman, who goes by the name of Masters (Paula Raymond).  Actually, being a pretty white woman, her real function is tantalize the audience with a little unconsummated miscegenation.

When Lance finds out from Masters that the law does not allow Indians to homestead, he berates her for her faith in the law, as a kind of religion, saying that when you have the law, you don’t have to worry about your conscience. It tells you what is right and wrong and no more thinking is required.  He sarcastically says he wishes he had something like that.

This is immediately followed by a scene in which a pubescent boy staggers and then crawls toward Lance’s house. It turns out that, like all boys, he had to go into the mountains with only a knife, no food or water, go above the snow line wearing only moccasins and a loin cloth, and come back with the talons of an eagle within three days, or he is not a man. When Masters says that this practice is cruel, Lance justifies this custom, saying it is necessary so that the tribe knows whether the boy can be depended on to fight.

Needless to say, a lot of boys probably die in making this attempt.  I just knew Masters was going to say, “It looks as though I have faith in my laws, and you have faith in yours. Neither one of us has to bother about our conscience.” And Masters could also have noted that white men are pretty good at fighting, and they don’t do that to their children. Amazingly enough, she makes no such remarks. There is probably a kind of bigotry of low expectations at work here.  White civilization is held to the higher standards of reason and justice, whereas there is a tendency to think of the customs of primitive peoples as too precious to subject to any serious criticism, the result being that the people who made this movie seem to be oblivious to the irony of these scenes, even though they put the one right after the other.  Maybe they were being extra subtle, allowing us to have a laugh at Lance’s expense, but it sure doesn’t feel that way.

Before the movie is out, the chief villain, played by Louis Calhern, who was the one that instigated the sheepherders’ attempt to homestead, is killed off.  And Lance is killed off too, in part to show that he is too manly to yield or compromise, and in part to keep him and Masters from exchanging bodily fluids across racial lines.

L’Avventura (1960)

Are people as weird in foreign countries as the movies that are made in those countries?  If so, I am sure glad I live in America.  L’Avventura would still have been a weird foreign film even if it had been shorter, but at least it would have been a better movie because there would have been less of it.

A bunch of people get on a boat and end up on a small volcanic island.  After they walk around for a while, they decide to leave and discover that Anna is missing.  They search everywhere, but she is gone.  There is only one possibility:  she drowned and her body drifted out to sea with the tide.  Of course, we can still wonder if it was an accident, suicide, or murder.  But one thing is certain:  she didn’t just vanish into thin air.

Wait a minute!  What am I saying?  This is a weird foreign film by Michelangelo Antonioni.  When you enter the theater to watch one of these movies, you have to check your reason and common sense at the door, or it will just get in the way of experiencing existential wonder, if that’s what you’re into.  So, of course she might just have vanished into thin air or teleported off the island or was abducted by aliens or whatever.

In any event, Anna’s friend, Claudia, and Anna’s boyfriend, Sandro, don’t have much reason and common sense either, because they leave the island and start looking for Anna.  I mean, they actually think she might be wandering around Italy, visiting museums, staying at a hotel, or anything that someone might do who wasn’t last seen on a small island with no way off except by boat.

They recognize that she might have drowned, but that doesn’t stop them from knocking off a quick piece, because though they just met, yet they are wildly in love with each other and just have to have some right in the middle of an open field.  Of course, that doesn’t stop Sandro from knocking off a quick piece the next day with some woman on the couch in the hotel lobby.  When Claudia catches him, he cries.  He shed not one tear for Anna, but this is different.  No problem, because Claudia still loves him.

And Anna?  You mean you’re still wondering what happened to her?  What do you think this is, an American movie?

An Unfair Conversation

Here we go again, people calling for us to have a conversation about race.  But I think it is time to have a conversation about having a conversation.  Last year, when Starbucks urged its customers to engage in a discussion of race relations while waiting to be served their first cup of coffee, they pushed the idea to the point that people were making jokes about it, and soon the policy was abandoned.  Most of the time, the need for such a conversation is expressed in a general way, it being left to our imagination about when, where, and with whom that conversation would take place.  By filling in the specific details, Starbucks provided us with more of an occasion for laughter than conversation.

Of course, race is not the only thing we are enjoined to have a conversation about, but it is the subject most often said to be in need of such.  Whatever the subject, though, I still have not quite figured out what that conversation is supposed to sound like, or what it is expected to accomplish.  In a way, this talk about the need to have a conversation is akin to the older notion about the need to communicate.  Unfortunately, people often communicate perfectly well, and then find that they just don’t like what they hear.  It is not that people fail to communicate in such circumstances; it’s that they avoid communicating because they do not want to have an argument.  Those who persist in calling for communication, on the other hand, often have a built-in expectation of agreement and capitulation that is not realistic.  In a similar way, people calling for a conversation about race assume that the conversation will not consist of anything that is politically incorrect, insensitive, or hateful. And as we have seen, people can be expelled from school or lose their job if caught expressing the wrong views on this issue.

Now, this is not a problem for egalitarians.  They believe that all races are equal, especially since they believe race is just a social construct anyway. They love their fellow man, and just don’t understand why we cannot all get along. I suppose these egalitarians can talk to one another and have that conversation, patting themselves on the back for their enlightened views. Other than making themselves feel good, however, I don’t see what that would accomplish.

Then there are those who are racists.  Some racists are filled with hate, detesting those who are different.  Others do not hate, but merely despise, regarding some races as being mentally and morally inferior to their own. Others still merely have an aversion to those who are different, so that they do not wish to socialize with other races, and certainly do not want to marry them.  Finally, there are secondary racists, people who fear the racism of others, and therefore prefer to live in a neighborhood or go to a school where their race predominates, rather than in a neighborhood or school where they stand out as different, perhaps making themselves an object of racial hatred. Racists can and do have conversations about race, but I don’t think they are the sort that those calling for a conversation have in mind.

Most racists keep their views to themselves in mixed company.  By “mixed,” I mean not only when they are around people of a different race, but also when around those who are egalitarians.  Of course, some racists are bellicose in nature and will not hesitate to express their views regardless of the situation, relishing the opportunity to vent their spleen.  But most will be circumspect, waiting until they get a sense of those they do not know very well before expressing their true feelings.

Although some may find this incongruous, a lot of racists are too polite to let on, if they think there is a chance that they might give offense.  Around people of another race or around egalitarians of the same race, they will avoid a conversation about race as much as possible. In a pinch, they will lie, for they know what is expected of them.  In short, a conversation between egalitarians and racists will either be quite hostile and vehement, if the racist does not care about being rude, or, as is more often the case, it will be hypocritical and disingenuous.  Polite racists will feign a politically correct attitude and then change the subject.  As a result, conversations about race will not accomplish anything in these situations either.

This leads to an asymmetrical situation.  Those who call for a conversation about race are invariably egalitarians.  They are comfortable in doing so, because their views on the subject are laudable, and they can simply speak their mind without fear of censure.  Polite racists, on the other hand, never call for such a conversation, because they dread having to feign beliefs they do not have.  They can fake it for a minute or two, but a long, drawn out conversation on race will simply wear them out and increase their chance of making a slip.

Perhaps those calling for a conversation suppose that if racists are forced to have conversations with egalitarians, they will eventually succumb.  Just as getting people to say the Lord’s Prayer in church might be thought to instill religious belief, or getting people to say the Pledge of Allegiance might be thought to instill a sense of patriotism, so too might it be supposed that getting people to say the right things about race will instill the proper egalitarian attitude.

But as noted above, such a conversation is unfair to racists.  Therefore, instead of calling for a conversation, which requires racists to be adept in saying what is required of them in different contexts and circumstances, we might instead call for the Oath of Equality, in which everyone recites a rote speech about how everyone is created equal regardless of race, and that everyone should be treated equally, and so on.

Now, just as no atheist ever became a Christian by repeatedly citing the Lord’s Prayer, and no traitor ever became a patriot by saying the Pledge of Allegiance, so too will no racist ever be converted to egalitarianism by saying the Oath of Equality.  But then, no conversation is going to change a racist’s views either. At least the Oath of Equality will be less of a burden on the racist, something he can recite with indifference.

By this time it may be wondered why I am being so solicitous as to the plight of the racist. Though not a racist myself, yet I feel their pain.  After all, racism is not a matter of choice.  By virtue of some combination of genetic predisposition and environmental influence, their prejudice and bigotry is a fact of their character from which no exercise of free will can liberate them. Their need to dissemble requires that they not be taxed with a long conversation about race that can only lead to their being outed in spite of themselves.

The proposed Oath of Equality is a reasonable compromise.  It will allow the racist to say the proper thing when called for, without creating for him the undue burden that a conversation would entail, and without putting him at risk for being found out or of inadvertently hurting the feelings of others.

Dark City (1950)

How many songs does a movie have to have to be a musical?

Before going any further with that question, we need to make a distinction between expressionistic musicals like My Fair Lady (1964) or Grease (1978) and backstage musicals like Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) or New York, New York (1977).  In the former, it is sometimes said, somewhat derisively, that people are just walking down the street and then break out into song, accompanied by a disembodied orchestra.  In the latter, the singing and dancing occurs during rehearsals or on stage during a performance.  In other words, it is realistic, something you might actually see and hear in real life.  Actually, Busby Berkeley musicals are not realistic in the sense that the numbers could never be performed on a real stage, but they are more realistic than expressionistic musicals.

Dark City is certainly not an expressionistic musical.  But does it qualify as a backstage musical?  Early in the movie, we see Fran (Lizabeth Scott) singing a song in a nightclub.  I thought to myself, her singing sounds fine to me, but I suspect a lot of people would say that she cannot sing, although I understand that the singing was dubbed anyway.  But then, I further reflected, I don’t have a good ear, so who am I to judge?

After she finishes her song, Danny (Charlton Heston), her boyfriend, tells her he liked her song, to which she replies, “Aren’t we a pair?  I can’t sing and you don’t have a good ear.”  That took me back a little.

Anyway, I mused that even though the movie had a song in it, it was not a musical, because one song does not a musical make.  But then she sang another song, and another, and another, until she sang five in all.  Still, the movie did not seem to me to be a musical, and it would not have been, even if they had managed to squeeze one more number into it.  Moreover, just to get an objective assessment, I checked Internet Movie Database and Netflix, and neither of them classified it as a musical, but only as a crime drama or film noir.

In reflecting on why this was so, I thought back on that earlier comment by her that she could not sing, followed later by another remark to the effect that singing in a nightclub was just a way of making a living, something she would gladly give up if Danny would marry her.  And that must be the key.  In the typical backstage musical, the main performers are ambitious, just waiting for their chance to take the spotlight and become a star.  Or, as in a Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland movie, where Rooney gets the idea of putting on a show to save whatever it is that needs saving in that movie, the success of the show is what matters.  In other words, in a backstage musical, it is not a question of how much singing and dancing there is, but whether the plot centers around the performers qua performers, their individual success or the success of the show as a whole.

In Dark City, on the other hand, the plot centers around people that are not performing musical numbers.  Rather, Danny is a bookie who has been put out of business by too many raids and is looking for a bankroll so he can move to another town.  He and his pals get a sucker into a poker game and take him for all his money.  The sucker is devastated and commits suicide.  Now the police are investigating the situation and the sucker’s brother is out to kill everyone that was in the game.  As a result, the songs Fran sings are just fillers, which actually have the effect of slowing the movie down.

As a crime drama, the movie is mediocre, but as an illustration of the fact that a backstage musical must be more than just a bunch of musical numbers, this movie is instructive.

The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933)

Sometimes a book or a movie gets more praise than it deserves because it was banned somewhere.  And what could be better for a movie than to have been banned by Joseph Goebbels himself, the Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany!  Other than that, there is no explanation for why anyone thinks this movie is any good.

If Dr. Mabuse:  The Gambler (1922) was over the top, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse is absurd.  The title character went insane in the first movie and was confined to an insane asylum.  Then, Hofmeister, a criminal who once was a police detective, but was cashiered for bribery, goes mad out of fear of Dr. Mabuse.  By the end of the movie, Dr. Baum, who runs the asylum, goes mad as well and has to be confined.  But it does not stop there.  The plot is so outrageous as to make one think the movie itself was produced by a madman.

For starters, while Dr. Mabuse is in the insane asylum, he still manages to run a criminal organization, planning crimes down to the last detail.  His motives are as mad as he is.  Whereas in the first movie, he simply wanted power and the pleasure of manipulating the lives of others, in this movie he wants to drive the whole world mad by getting people hooked on drugs, which he supplies for free, and by causing so much terror and destruction that civilization will collapse, leaving nothing behind but crime as a way of life.

Mabuse communicates with his henchmen by willing his thoughts onto a record, which plays when he so wills it, while a cardboard image of himself sits behind a curtain, casting a shadow.  Do you dare ask how this curtain, cardboard image, and record player came to be set up in this room where criminals go to get their orders when commanded to do so by a piece paper with a typewritten message on it?  Why, Mabuse just wills it all into place!

Things get a little easier for Mabuse when he dies and wills his spirit into Dr. Baum, so now he has another body to occupy that can leave the asylum.  But he loves the record gimmick so much that when Dr. Baum wants his servant to think he is in his quarters, the record player is turned on whenever someone wiggles the door handle, causing it to play the message, “I don’t wish to be disturbed.”

Kent, a man who killed his girlfriend and her lover and went to prison for it, is forced by economic circumstances into Mabuse’s criminal organization.  Together with Lilli, the woman he loves, he decides to go straight.  But before he can make it to the police station, he and Lilli are captured and brought to the room with the curtain, the cardboard image, and the record player.  After the door is locked behind them, the record tells them they will never leave the room alive.  Eventually, Kent and Lilli pull back the curtain and discover the setup.  Then they hear ticking, the sound of a time bomb.  What better way to have a couple of people killed than to blow up your own headquarters!  But when you can will yourself into another body, will your thoughts onto a record, will your thoughts through a typewriter onto a piece of paper, and will an entire setup consisting of record player, curtain, and cardboard image, and finally will a time bomb into existence as well, then I suppose it is child’s play to will the whole setup into existence somewhere else after you destroy it with that time bomb just to kill two people.

But all is not lost.  We can just say to ourselves that this movie was an attempt by Fritz Lang to warn us of the danger of Adolf Hitler and that will make the movie profound somehow.

Dr. Mabuse:  The Gambler (1922)

At its longest running time, Dr. Mabuse:  The Gambler is almost five hours long, and it really overstays its welcome.  Long movies should be epics, spanning many years, accompanied by stirring music.  This movie is just a crime drama taking place over a matter of weeks, perhaps months.  It might have been more palatable had it been presented today as a television series, divided into weekly segments of forty minutes each, allowing for commercials, but just barely.

When the movie begins, our credulity is strained by the elaborate conspiratorial network that has been set up to do what could have been done in a simple, straightforward manner.  For example, when Dr. Mabuse (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), the mastermind of a criminal organization, wants to meet secretly with one of his henchmen, does he just have the guy come over to his apartment where they can talk in private?  It would seem reasonable enough, inasmuch as Mabuse’s henchmen can often be found at his apartment where he gives them instructions.  But no!  Mabuse puts on a disguise and pretends to have an automobile accident with his henchman, who then offers his car to Dr. Mabuse, as if he is just giving him a lift out of courtesy.  Inside the car, Mabuse then gives his henchman the secret instructions.  And how did they arrange to have this accident at just that time and at just that intersection, you ask?  Why, they probably discussed it over at Mabuse’s apartment the day before.

The point of the secret meeting in the automobile has to do with the creation of a panic in the stock market concerning a stolen trading agreement between nations, allowing Mabuse, in disguise, of course, to sell high and then buy back low when the trading agreement is found, still sealed, just as Mabuse planned.  That might have been interesting, had not the whole thing been rendered silly by the automobile accident nonsense.

Before going over to the stock exchange, Mabuse, in another disguise, goes over to a secret apartment where he has a counterfeiting operation going on.  Does he keep the key in his apartment until he needs it?  Of course not.  He has a woman sit outside the apartment with the key hidden in a ball of twine, which he extracts when he wants to go inside.  Once in the apartment, we find five blind men counting the counterfeit money and putting it in bundles.  Presumably, all the bills are of the same denomination.  They are never allowed to leave the place, and since they are blind, they don’t know who it is that runs the operation.  We never see the money being printed, just counted.  Perhaps it is being printed in another room by five deaf men who cannot hear Mabuse’s voice and thus do not know who runs the operation.

You might think that between these market manipulations and counterfeiting operations, Mabuse has all the money he needs, but as we later find out, money is not Mabuse’s ultimate motive.  He does not want money so that he can live in comfort and luxury.  In fact, he cares nothing about happiness, and indeed, his moods range from morose to grouchy to angry.  What he wants is power, of which he can never get enough.  Money is simply one manifestation of his power.  Another is his ability to manipulate people.  Finally, toward the end, he says he regards himself as a state within a state, with which he is at war.

Regarding his desire to manipulate people, we discover a new aspect of the movie that makes the counterfeiting and stock market machinations almost seem realistic by comparison.  It turns out that he has mesmeric powers so great that he can compel people to do things from across the room simply by concentrating his gaze.  Such are his powers that he compels several people to commit or attempt suicide.  Also, his mental powers enable him to create illusions.  In one case, in a different disguise, he puts on a performance displaying such skills, which includes making the entire audience see people emerge from a desert and enter into the aisle, only to vanish before their eyes.  I found myself saying, “Mabuse gestures hypnotically,” in allusion to Mandrake, the Magician, a comic strip I never cared for.

At one point in the movie, another motive arises for Mabuse, lust for Countess Told.  He kidnaps her and takes her to his apartment, but she keeps refusing his advances, saying she wants to return to her husband.  As an act of revenge, Mabuse compels her husband, Count Told, to slit his throat with a razor.  Why Mabuse didn’t just use his mesmeric powers to make the Countess get naked and hop in bed, I don’t know.

Prosecutor von Wenk finally figures out that Mabuse is the evil super villain behind all the bad things that have been happening.  He gets an armed force together to arrest him, leading to a big shootout.  But it doesn’t make sense that Mabuse would resist being arrested, because he could mesmerically compel the judge and jury to find him innocent, or, in a pinch, compel the guard to open the prison doors and let him go.  And then he could gesture hypnotically to make it appear that that he was still in his cell.

I guess the people who made this movie realized that Mabuse’s powers could exceed any brought against him by the state, so they stooped to a deus ex machina.  They made Mabuse go mad, seeing ghosts of those whose deaths he was responsible for.  Reduced to a blithering loony, he is carted off to jail, or, as we find out in the sequel, to an insane asylum.