A Face in the Crowd (1957)

In a small town in Arkansas, Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal) works for her uncle, the owner of a local radio station, as a roving reporter doing a program called “A Face in the Crowd,” where she interviews plain, ordinary folks.  When the movie opens, she has decided to go to the county jail to see if there is anyone of interest there.  Because Sheriff Big Jeff Bess is sweet on her, she has no trouble getting access.  After several inmates turn away from her attempts to get them to tell a story or sing a song, the sheriff suggests the new guy with the guitar, arrested on drunk and disorderly.  When the deputy goes over to wake him up, someone hollers out, “Better watch him.  He’s mean.”  Sure enough, when the deputy kicks him, the inmate, Larry Rhodes (Andy Griffith), turns around with a face full of hate.  He softens up, however, when he sees Marcia.  Still, he refuses to cooperate until he knows what he will get out of it.  The sheriff promises to let him go in the morning.  Suddenly, Rhodes becomes quite charming.  As he picks up his guitar, Marcia, speaking into the tape recorder, talks about how she majored in music at Sarah Lawrence College, where she learned that the real American music comes from the bottom up.  “When George Gershwin played in New York,” she says, “it was black tie, but the real beginning of it was by folks that never owned a tie.”

We might call this populist music, which comes from the lower classes and is somehow more authentic and genuine than the elitist music that comes from the scions of well-to-do families, who study at musical conservatories, learn to read sheet music, and acquire a theoretical understanding of the subject.  Furthermore, Marcia limits this observation to American music, because part of the ideology of America is the belief that anyone with talent can make it, there being no class barriers to hold him back.  Another part of that ideology is a faith in the common folk, those that never owned a tie, to determine through the democratic process what kind of government they will have and who shall preside over it.  It is this ideology that underlies what follows.

Continuing with her introduction, she nicknames him “Lonesome Rhodes.”  He tells her he needs to warm up first, and in doing so, puts on a great performance, which Marcia secretly tapes, and which turns out to be quite a hit when played on the radio.  His ability to be great in an unscripted, unrehearsed, spontaneous manner dovetails nicely with Marcia’s populist theory of music.

Marcia is so fascinated with Lonesome’s performance that she has failed to ingest the crucial information provided to her and to us right at the beginning, that he is mean and selfish.  But that is not the worst of it.  People who are consistently mean and who always want to know what’s in it for them are easy to deal with.  You simply avoid them.  But the way Lonesome switches to a completely opposite personality (the one we usually associate with Andy Griffith) in an instant, becoming charming, friendly, and funny, is what makes such people unnerving.  These are the kind of people we should really avoid, but often fail to do so because their affable side is so appealing.

Part of Lonesome’s appeal is his ability to speak to the cares and joys of ordinary people, especially working class, to whom he shows great affection.  Eventually, he becomes so popular that he is offered a spot on the Grand Ole Opry by a theatrical agent who compares him to Will Rogers, saying that Lonesome is not merely someone who can sing catchy songs and tell funny stories, but someone with power.  He accepts the offer, taking Marcia with him, as his “girl Friday.”  As they board the train, he waves goodbye to his fans in that little town in Arkansas, turns around and says, “Boy, I’m glad to shake that dump.”

Now, a lot of us make an effort to get along with people, sometimes pretending to like them more than we actually do.  But most of us keep our actual feelings to ourselves, perhaps revealing them only in quiet moments at night, while talking to a close friend.  But there is something detestable about someone who smiles one minute and sneers the next, who feigns affection for someone, only to express utter contempt for him as soon as he is out of hearing.

Marcia is stunned by Lonesome’s remark.  He assures her he was just joking, saying, “You ought to know better than to believe everything I say.”  The irony is that he is actually giving her good advice, but only if she reverses its intended meaning.  She smiles, thinking that she should not believe him when he says something that sounds mean, when, in fact, it is when he is being nice that she should not believe him.

His first night on the set, he brings out a poor black woman whom he found wandering the street late at night because her house burned down and she and her children had nowhere to go.  He asks everyone to send in fifty cents to help out.  The plea turns out to be wildly successful.  This scene drives home the point that he could be a force for good, if he wanted to, but his real motive is manipulative, just a way of making himself popular.  In fact, later in the movie, he calls an African American waiter a “black monkey.”  But at least the woman got herself a new house.

The success of his show leads to businesses wanting him to advertise their products.  His methods are unorthodox, but vastly more successful than the usual kind of commercial.  As he becomes increasingly successful and popular, even having a ship and a mountain named after him, he starts having an affair with Marcia.  She is in love with him, but he continues to fool around with other women, and a wife even turns up.  He promises to get a quickie divorce in Mexico, but then comes back married to Betty Lou Fleckum (Lee Remick), a seventeen-year-old majorette.

During all this, we see that there are two kinds of people.  On the one hand, there are the poorly educated, working-class people who are all taken in by Lonesome’s shtick; on the other hand, there are the well-educated, sophisticated members of the professional class who merely see him as someone that can be useful to them.  Marcia is a bit of both, her mind clouded by having fallen in love with him.  In other words, this is an elitist movie.  While it primarily is telling the story of a man that is dangerous because of his powers of persuasion, its subliminal message is that it is the lower classes that are dangerous, because they are the ones who fall for Lonesome’s act, and they can vote in elections just like everyone else.

This danger becomes manifest when General Haynesworth gets Lonesome to consult with Senator Worthington Fuller on his presidential campaign.  Along with a bunch of big shots, they watch a boring, platitudinous presentation on film.  Fuller admits, “I know that’s not what the American people want to hear, but I think I know what’s best for them.”

Now, Fuller certainly has an elitist attitude, but it is not the same elitist stance as that of the movie, a stance that is represented by Mel Miller (Walter Matthau), a writer assigned to Lonesome, but who doesn’t have much to do, because Lonesome never works from a script.  In other words, we normally associate elitism with liberalism and progressivism, with the Democratic Party.  But it would be a very different movie if Senator Fuller were a Democrat.  That is to say, it would be a very different movie if Fuller were hiring Lonesome to help him push a liberal agenda, say, advocating desegregation, universal health care, and more aid to education.  And it would be different in a bad way, at least from the standpoint of the leftwing orientation of this movie, for it would put liberals in a bad light, showing them to be cynically employing a huckster like Lonesome Rhodes to manipulate the public for their own political ends.  Therefore, it is essential that Fuller be a rightwing conservative.

Actually, the word “elitism” so strongly connotes liberalism that the term “conservative elitism” almost seems to be an oxymoron.  There is such a thing as a conservative elitist, of course, but he is referred to by other names, Rockefeller Republican, Wall Street Republican, establishment Republican, or simply moderate Republican.  A major difference is that liberals are more comfortable with the idea that educated professionals should run the government, whereas conservatives tend to have an anti-intellectual philosophy in which the ordinary man is best suited to run things.  As a banner displaying one of Lonesome’s quotes says, “Nothing is as trustworthy as the ordinary mind of the ordinary man.”

When Fuller appears on Lonesome Rhodes Cracker Barrel Show, designed to showcase the senator in a way to make him acceptable to just plain folks, Lonesome asks him what his opinion is on the subject of “more and more and more social security,” understood in the broad, generic sense to include not only Social Security proper, but also welfare and unemployment insurance.  Fuller answers that people worry too much about security, protection, coddling from the cradle to the grave, which weakens the moral fiber.  He talks about how Daniel Boone never needed unemployment insurance or an old-age pension.  All he needed was his axe and his gun.  And so, Lonesome Rhodes is the means to getting the gullible yahoos in the audience to elect a man like Fuller, who promotes the rightwing agenda of dismantling the welfare state.

As noted above, Mel represents the movie’s elitist liberal standpoint, but in an understated way.  We never hear Mel express a political opinion.  We simply observe that he is not taken in by Lonesome, who is the subject of the exposé he is writing, Demagogue in Denim, and he does not like Fuller, saying, “He has the courage of his ignorance.”  Since Mel’s positions are unstated, it is easy to identify with him, because we can just fill in the blanks with our own views.  Marcia thinks that Mel is going too far, that Lonesome is still basically a decent country boy who is overwhelmed the powerful people that surround him.  In addition to representing the liberal elite, Mel also plays the role of the nice guy whose frustration is that girls, even the nice ones, always seem to go for the scoundrels.  In other words, he is in love with Marcia.

The threat of a Fuller presidency becomes even greater when Lonesome says Fuller will make him Secretary for National Morale, effectively making Lonesome the power behind the throne.  Marcia finally realizes how dangerous Lonesome is.  In the control room during a live broadcast of the Cracker Barrel, after Lonesome has been talking about guns, God, and family in connection with Senator Fuller, Marcia turns the stage microphone back on after the show is supposedly over, and people across the nation hear Lonesome refer to them as morons and idiots, saying they are so stupid that he can make them believe anything.

This is not the typical open-mic situation, in which a politician is caught making an injudicious remark when he did not realize the microphone was picking up what he was saying; and which the newspaper headline compares to “Uncle Don,” the host of a children’s radio show, who supposedly referred to his young listeners as “the little bastards” after he thought the show was over, although that story is now thought to be apocryphal.  Unlike those situations, this is no accident.  America is saved from Lonesome and a Fuller presidency by a deliberate act of will, by Marcia’s intervention.  In other words, now that Marcia is of the same opinion as Mel, she too represents the movie’s political point of view, that it is the liberal elite that must save America from being taken in by rightwing populism.

Mel tells Lonesome that he will probably be on television again after a cooling-off period, because a lot of people have short memories, but it will never be the same.  Soon there will be someone else that reminds them of Will Rogers.  We even see a scene in which Joey DePalma (Anthony Franciosa), who helped Lonesome hustle his way to the top as his New York agent, has a new client ready to step in and take Lonesome’s place.  Actually, this is the one weak spot of the movie.  A man like Lonesome comes along once in a lifetime.  And even if DePalma’s new client were just as talented as Lonesome, the public would not be ready for anyone even remotely like him for a long time.

At the end of the movie, Mel tells Marcia, who feels guilty for having been the one to create this Frankenstein monster, “We were all taken in.  But we get wise to him.  That’s our strength.  We get wise to him.”  In other words, liberal elites like Mel and Marcia get wise to him, but it is up to them to protect the gullible public from themselves by writing books like Demagogue in Denim or by turning the sound back on to reveal the real person behind the façade.  Or by making movies like A Face in the Crowd.

Theoretically, there is no reason that Senator Fuller could not have been a Democrat.  Lonesome did not believe in anything but himself, and so he would have been just as glad to ask Fuller, “What do you plan to do about poverty in this country?” to which Fuller would reply, addressing the sorts of issues appropriate for 1957, “We need to end racial discrimination, guarantee health care for the elderly, and provide federal aid for education.”  And then, Marcia, being a far right conservative, horrified at the creeping socialism that this would entail, turns on the microphone while Lonesome is insulting his audience, thereby ruining Fuller’s chance of being president and all but guaranteeing the election of a Republican.

In general, Democrats would probably not have liked such a movie.  First, it would have suggested something hypocritical and manipulative about elitist Democratic politicians.  Second, there would have been nothing frightening to Democrats about the senator’s political agenda.  Of course, that hypothetical agenda was eventually enacted, but we have to imagine ourselves as being in 1957 when the movie was made.  And third, the hero (Marcia) would have been a conservative Republican.

But would not this version have been most pleasing to the people on the right?  After all, Republicans go to the movies and buy tickets just like Democrats, so it would seem that money could be made catering to their attitudes and values.  And just as liberals would not have cared for my imagined, right-wing version, I suspect conservatives didn’t care for the left-wing movie that actually exists.

One explanation is that Hollywood is predominantly liberal in its politics, something conservatives are always claiming.  But movies with a conservative slant do get made from time to time.  After all, Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead was made into a movie in 1949, which is actually quite good.  And since that movie also starred Patricia Neal as a Rand heroine, espousing her own version of the will to power right along with the men, her persona would have been just right for the conservative version of A Face in the Crowd that my imagination has conjured up.

Perhaps the problem is that the left-wing agenda that I imagined for a liberal Senator Fuller just would not have been as scary to conservatives as the right-wing agenda of the senator in the actual movie.  And it needs to be scary for dramatic purposes.  So, let us imagine something a little scarier, something suitable for present-day politics.  Fuller could come out and say that we need to repeal the Second Amendment, declare a second amnesty for illegal immigrants, and provide federal funds for abortions.  I think that would present a more frightening specter of liberalism for the conservative audience, who would cheer when Marcia turned on the microphone and saved the day.

As there are enough conservatives in this country to elect a Republican president, control Congress, elect conservative governors and state legislators, there are enough conservatives to buy tickets to see a conservative version of A Face in the Crowd for it to make a profit.  And a lot of us Democrats would be perverse enough to buy tickets too, for the sheer masochistic thrill of it all.  And the way Hollywood is not shy about producing remakes, with alterations to suit the times, the movie is ripe for another treatment.  I feel certain that we will never see a remake of this movie, at least not the conservative version that I am thinking of, but as to what this feeling of certainty is based on, I cannot say.

Perhaps we liberals really do control Hollywood after all.

Disease Etiquette

In July of 2014, it was reported that scientists had discovered that we would all be healthier if we started using the fist bump instead of the handshake to greet or say goodbye to one another.  Such deadly diseases as MRSA and influenza would be much less likely to spread from one person to another, if the fist bump were employed as the standard means by which we physically express our affection or friendship for others.  Actually, there is no need for any physical contact at all.  Smiling and saying hello or goodbye should be adequate, and that would be even better than the fist bump as far as hygiene is concerned.  But first things first. We cannot expect people to give up the primitive act of physically expressing their warm regard for their fellow man all at once.  The fist bump would be a good first step.  Later, we could eliminate that too, letting words and facial expressions do the job.  At least, so it would be were it not for a countervailing consideration.

As a result of this scientific report, one might have expected doctors to take the lead with the fist bump, thereby setting the example for the rest of us. If so, those expectations were surely dashed when the very next month we saw pictures of Dr. Kent Brantly being hugged again and again by doctors and nurses alike after being released from Emory Hospital where he had been treated for Ebola. The scientific study in question did not measure the likelihood of disease transmission by hugging as opposed to shaking hands or fist bumping, but my layman’s intuition tells me that hugging would be worse.

The ostensive purpose of the hugging was to express a degree of warmth and affection that could not be captured by a mere handshake, let alone a fist bump.  But the real purpose was to advertise the confidence the healthcare professionals had that Brantly was no longer contagious. It was not enough merely to announce it.  They had to demonstrate it with an embrace. Never mind that someone in the group might have the flu, or, which is far more likely given the hospital setting, MRSA.  At that moment, hygiene had to take a backseat to etiquette.  It would have been quite ironic if, as a result of all the hugging, Brantly had immediately come down with MRSA and died from that after having beaten the odds against Ebola, but it had to be done.

Something similar occurred about thirty years ago.  When AIDS was first discovered in the early 1980s, no one knew how contagious it was.  For all we knew, it might have been transmitted by saliva or by mosquitoes.  There was even a joke going around in which a doctor calls up his patient and tells him that he has AIDS.  “As a result,” the doctor continues, “we are going to have to put you on a diet of pancakes and eggs over easy.”  Puzzled, the patient asks, “Will that cure me?”  “No,” says the doctor, “but it is the only thing that we can slide under the door.”

When it was determined a few years later that AIDS was primarily transmitted by blood and semen, and thus was not communicable through ordinary contact, it became de rigueur to hug people who had AIDS, mostly in front of television cameras, not so much in everyday life. Once again, the hugging served a twofold purpose:  to express affection and to demonstrate physically that it was safe to be in a room with someone who had the disease.

The etiquette regarding AIDS was also important in overcoming the moral taint of the disease. At first, all that was known was that there were four groups of people who had AIDS: homosexuals, intravenous drug users, hemophiliacs, and Haitians.  Because homosexuality turned out to be a major factor in contracting this disease, the stigma that was then associated with this sexual orientation made the disease shameful instead of just scary. There was a gay comedian who had AIDS at that time, and when asked what the hardest part about having the disease was, he answered, “Convincing your parents that you’re Haitian.”  Therefore, the hugging served the additional purpose of showing that one did not morally condemn the person who had AIDS.  In the movie Philadelphia (1993), which is a movie about a man who has AIDS, we see several instances of this obligatory hugging.

Of course, venereal diseases had had a moral dimension long before that, causing feelings of ambivalence.  In Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet (1940), the title character discovers a treatment for syphilis.  On the one hand, he wishes to overcome to the stigma attached to this disease, and yet he belies this enlightened attitude when he emphasizes that it can be transmitted by touching an inanimate object, like a drinking cup.  I guess the Production Code did not allow him to mention the old excuse of toilet seats.  In any event, the drinking cup vector is obviously meant to provide a moral excuse for the person who has syphilis, and so he implies the shameful nature of the disease in the very act of apologizing for it.

When I joined a fraternity in 1964, the pledges were given a booklet describing what was expected of them.  One of my fellow pledges was distressed by something he read.  “This booklet says we are not supposed to associate with people who have syphilis or gonorrhea,” he said at the next meeting for pledges.  “Now, you can’t tell whether somebody has a venereal disease just by looking.  I mean, a guy can’t help it if some girl gives him a dose.  Besides,” he continued, “a shot of penicillin will fix him right up, so what’s the big deal?”  The sexual revolution had not quite started yet, but this guy was clearly ahead of his time.

The active member who was presiding over the meeting assured him that the purpose of the passage was to express disapproval of promiscuous behavior and the frequenting of prostitutes, activities which would be likely to communicate the diseases in question.  Promiscuous behavior!  If only that were my problem, I thought, for I was still a virgin, and that state of innocence so exasperated me that I was almost envious whenever I heard that someone had gotten the clap.

A few weeks later, another active member was explaining to me the proper behavior for a fraternity man, especially regarding other members of the fraternity.  “For example,” he said, “I know that I can trust you with my sister.”  That was news to me.  There were plenty of other girls on campus, of course, but I just did not like the idea that any girl was off limits to me as a matter of principle.  I mean, I had not known about this when I pledged. Besides, I thought, I’d be the one taking a chance.  For all I knew, she might have syphilis, and they would throw me out of the fraternity.  I decided not to express my feelings on the subject, and so I just nodded my head, knowing full well that if his sister were up for it, we’d figure it was none of his business.

The sexual revolution began soon after that, and by 1969, an entirely different attitude was being promoted, as evidenced by the notorious public service commercial, in which the song VD Is for Everyone is sung while we see pictures of the most wholesome, middle-class people you ever saw.  At least, they looked a lot more wholesome than some of my fraternity brothers.

It is said that the sexual revolution was made possible, in large part, by the pill.  A big advantage of the pill is that it precludes the need to use a condom to avoid pregnancy.  But that is also one of its drawbacks.  It definitely creates a problem for a guy when he is about to have sex with a woman for the first time, and when he whips out a condom, she says, “You don’t need that.  I’m on the pill.”  Now, as we all know, the pill provides no protection against sexually transmitted diseases.  Prudence, therefore, dictates that he put the condom on anyway.  But what can a man say at such a moment?  Is he going to ruin the mood by saying, “But Honey, I don’t know where you’ve been”? He could be a gentleman by taking the odium on himself, saying, “Well, last month I had sex with a woman of ill repute, and if she gave me syphilis or something, I don’t want to give it to you.”  Either way, such a breach of etiquette by bringing up the possibility of disease at that delicate moment will probably be the ultimate prophylactic, in that it will result in there not being any sex at all.  As every man knows, once a woman says she is on the pill, bedroom etiquette requires that he put the condom away and heedlessly plunge right in.

In the movie Pretty Woman (1990), Julia Roberts is a prostitute.  She has dinner with Richard Gere, after which she flosses her teeth.  Clearly, the point of this absurd scene is to alleviate our fears about venereal disease. “Any woman who would floss on a date,” the movie is conveying, “could not possibly have an STD.”  Otherwise, we would spend the rest of the movie wondering how long it would take Richard Gere to discover he had the crabs.

In the movie Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977), Diane Keaton makes fun of a man who is about to put on a condom.  “Is that for you or for me?” she laughs. Here the poor guy is trying to do the right thing, and he becomes an object of ridicule.  And if he is anything like me, such ridicule will immediately bring about a state of flaccidity.  This is not true for everybody, of course.  I had friend in high school that joined the Navy after graduating. When he came back for a visit, he had a harder bark on him than when he left.  He told about how one night when they had docked in some port on the west coast, he picked this woman up in a bar and they went to a hotel. “As soon I closed the door,” he said, “I just started taking off my clothes. When I took off my skivvies, she said, ‘Just who do you plan to satisfy with that?’  And I said, ‘Me, bitch, me.’”

And then they proceeded to have sex!  Now, is that hardboiled or what?  In any event, I would have been more like the hapless fellow in the movie who was devastated by Diane Keaton’s derision.  I like to think that the reason she was murdered at the end of the movie was that it was punishment for her being mean to some poor guy trying to reach a reasonable compromise between carnal desire and fear of disease.

In general, it is rude to suggest that someone might have cooties.  So don’t expect the fist bump to become a socially accepted means of avoiding disease any time soon.  The rule of etiquette today is the same as it has always been: better to be polite and risk getting sick than to insult someone by indicating that you don’t want his germs.

Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet (1940)

Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet is a movie with a paradoxical goal:  the title character tries to convince people in the movie not to be ashamed of something that the movie itself is obviously ashamed of.

It begins with a prologue informing us of the fact that the movie is based on a true story, explaining that it was the goal of Dr. Paul Ehrlich (Edward G. Robinson) to develop chemicals, which he called “magic bullets,” to treat the diseases that are the “scourges” of mankind.  No mention is made of the particular scourge that this movie is about, which is syphilis.  Already, we get the first indication of reticence on the part of the movie to actually mention the word “syphilis.”

In the first scene, a young man enters Ehrlich’s office for a physical examination.  As with the prologue, Ehrlich does not utter word “syphilis,” referring to it as a contagious disease, and then, incredibly enough, adding that it is “an infection just like any other.”  Inasmuch as the unmentioned syphilis was, at that time, an often fatal, neurological degenerative disease, what are we to make of this inappropriately reassuring phrase, “an infection just like any other”?  A clue to what he is getting at comes with the following remark, “I’ve seen cases where it was transmitted by an inanimate object.”

In other words, most people get syphilis through sexual intercourse, which makes the disease shameful.  Therefore, to separate the disease from the shame, Ehrlich is making excuses for the patient’s condition, indicating that he might have contracted it in some manner other than sex.  Hence the phrase, “an infection just like any other.”  Of course, we all know that this young man probably had sex with a prostitute.  So, in the very act of telling him (and us) that the disease whose name he won’t utter might have been contracted in a non-shameful manner, he is implicitly saying that the vast majority of cases of syphilis, which are contracted through sex, are not infections just like any other, but are in fact something to be ashamed of.

Several times the man asks if there is a cure, and each time Ehrlich avoids answering the question.  However, when the man asks if he can get married, Ehrlich says that is out of the question.  During this conversation, Ehrlich is putting some substance into a jar for the man to apply to his skin.  He picks up a label, holding it between his thumb and fingers, licks the label, and applies it to the jar.  Now, how’s that for an inanimate object?  In the very act of licking something his hands just touched right after examining the patient, he makes it hard for us to take him seriously about alternate means of transmission.

He lies to his patient that some people are cured, but the man does not believe him, and while supposedly getting dressed, the patient commits suicide, apparently slitting his own throat with a scalpel.  Needless to say, nothing like that ever actually happened, but exists solely for its melodramatic value. Later, Ehrlich tells his wife Hedwig (Ruth Gordon) that the man is better off dead, and the world is better off because he cannot infect anyone.  He despairs that all the treatments he prescribes are useless, just something to give patients a false sense of hope.

From this point on, the movie follows Ehrlich through various medical discoveries.  As is typical in movies about scientists, the role of accident is emphasized, “Eureka!” situations, as it were.  For example, when Hedwig turns on the furnace to provide more heat in Ehrlich’s laboratory, it allows for a successful staining of a microbe that he had been struggling to produce without success.  Such accidents do occur in science, of course, but they are given more significance in the movies than they really deserve, because they have more dramatic value than the norm of dull, plodding science that moves from one carefully controlled experiment to another.

To further add to the drama, the movie provides us with an Arrowsmith situation.  During a diphtheria epidemic, there is a ward in which there are forty children suffering from this disease.  Ehrlich is told that he must use his serum that he believes will cure the disease on only twenty of the children, the other twenty being the control group.  Needless to say, Ehrlich gives the serum to all the children.  Of course, in these Arrowsmith situations, there is always a de facto control group anyway, which is all the people that were dropping dead from the disease prior to the experiment.

In any event, about one hour in, the word “syphilis” finally makes its way into the movie.  And now, what he once referred to as “an infection just like any other,” he calls “man’s most vicious disease.”  However, shortly after he embarks on testing the effect of arsenic compounds on syphilis, the institution for which he works decides to cut off his funding.  He turns to Franziska Speyer (Maria Ouspenskaya), a rich woman determined to dedicate much of her late husband’s fortune to some worthy project.  She invites him to a dinner party, and when asked what he is working on, he shocks the guests by uttering the word “syphilis.”  In this way, the audience is invited to regard itself as superior to those guests by not being shocked when it hears that word.

Anxious to reassure the guests, he returns to the earlier dodge of saying that this disease can be transmitted by an ordinary object like a drinking cup or eating utensil.  When I was young, it was toilet seats that were the inanimate object of choice for transmitting syphilis by means other than sexual intercourse, but I suspect the people that produced this movie were almost as embarrassed by the word “toilet” as by the word “syphilis.”  In any event, we see that Ehrlich is once again trying to remove the shame of syphilis with his reference to alternate forms of contracting the disease, which he refers to as “innocent ways.”  In so doing, however, he implies that there are guilty ways of contracting syphilis, which are by far the most common, such as by whoring around.

Eventually, he develops Compound 606, later to be marketed as Salvarsan, a compound that allows arsenic to kill the spirochete bacterium without harming the test animals.  We then get the trope of the scientist that experiments on himself, when one of Ehrlich’s staff injects himself with the compound to see if it is safe for humans.  Following this, we get another Arrowsmith situation, in which Ehrlich allows Compound 606 to be made available to doctors before he is through testing it, sacrificing strict scientific procedure for the sake of the dying patients.  As a result, a few patients die anyway, leading to accusations against Ehrlich, who in turn sues for libel.  This is most fortunate, from a cinematic standpoint, because a trial is also a good way to dramatize science.

In the end, however, Dr. Ehrlich was more successful in his struggle to defeat syphilis than he was in defeating the shame that comes from contracting it.  The movie itself is proof of that.

 

M (1931 and 1951)

In the original version of M made in 1931, as well as in the remake of 1951, a city is plagued by a man, played by Peter Lorre, who is killing children.  The police become so relentless in their pursuit of the killer that the ordinary way of life of the criminal underclass becomes disrupted.  As a result, the criminals take matters into their own hands, capture the child killer, and have a trial of sorts, during which he tells everyone that he is compulsively driven to do what he does.  Before the mob can do anything to him, the police show up and take him away.

In the 1931 movie, it is never explicitly stated that the children are sexually molested, but it is implied, and in any event, we would automatically assume as much anyway.  In the remake, however, the movie goes out of its way to make it clear that the children are not molested.  While a crowd watches the chief of police on television warning parents about the child killer, played by David Wayne, someone in the crowd asks, “What’s he mean the children were neither violated nor outraged?”  Someone else in the crowd responds, “What’s the difference?  He killed them, didn’t he?”

Well, it may not make any difference to the people in the crowd, but I should think it would have been better for the children if they were simply murdered than if they first raped and then murdered.  More importantly, it must have made a difference to the Production Code Administration.  It was not sufficient merely to omit all reference to sexual molestation.  It had to be explicitly denied.  At the same time, all of the killer’s victims are little girls, which would indicate a sexual preference.  Presumably, just in case the audience refused to believe sex was not involved, the producers went the extra step to avoid any hint of homosexuality.  (In the original, on the other hand, one of Lorre’s victims is a little boy.)  The killer takes the shoes of his victims, which suggests a fetish, which in turn suggests a sexual perversion.  Furthermore, in one scene, a man and wife are informed that their child has been a victim.  As they start to leave, the woman turns around in desperation and says that maybe it is a mistake, that the child is someone else’s.  We can only conclude from this that there was no body in the morgue for them to identify, that the police were only going by the doll and the girl’s dress, which are on the chief’s desk.  He holds up the dress for her to look at, which she recognizes as belonging to her daughter.  From this we can only conclude one thing:  the killer took off the girl’s clothes, and her naked body is yet to be found.  Still, we are supposed to believe that sex is not the motive for these murders.  Censorship can be confusing.

It goes without saying that the original was much better, and one way in which it was better is that the killer simply had an evil impulse that he did not understand.  In the remake, owing to the popularity of psychoanalysis at the time, we are given an explanation for the killer’s behavior as resulting from something that happened when he was a child.  As a harbinger of that explanation, we see him strangling a clay model of a child, with a picture of his elderly mother sitting right beside him, almost as if she were watching him do it.  At the end, when the child killer is surrounded by the underworld figures that captured him, he gives a garbled explanation about how his father mistreated his mother, and how she raised him to believe that all men are evil.  As a result, he reasons that since he is a man, then he is evil and deserves punishment.  So, he has to kill little girls, partly to keep them from growing up and being mistreated by evil men, and partly so he will get caught and get the punishment he deserves.  The explanation comes across as artificial, unsatisfying, and unbelievable. Fortunately, we are not told why he took the girls’ shoes, which would only have made the explanation even more tortured.  The remake was destined to be inferior to the original, but it would still have been a lot better movie had all that psychobabble at the end been left out.

Soylent Green (1973)

From a 1973 perspective, when Soylent Green was made, this movie imagines the world in 2022, where the temperature is stifling owing to the greenhouse effect, eventually to be called global warming, and presently climate change.  Overpopulation has reached critical proportions, there being forty million people in New York City alone, most of whom are in filthy rags, sleeping in the street.  Only the very rich and well-connected eat what for us is ordinary food, while the vast majority must eat crackers of different colors indicating their quality, with green being the most desirable because it is the most nutritious.  Even water is rationed.  And electric power is unreliable.

Detective Thorn (Charlton Heston) shares an apartment with his assistant Sol (Edward G. Robinson), referred to as a “book,” on account of his ability to do research on old written material.  We see Thorn having to struggle to use the steps to their apartment because there are so many people sleeping on the stairs.  Later, when a riot starts because there is a shortage of Soylent Green wafers, we see dump trucks called “scoops” being used to remove people from the streets.

Sol helps Thorn investigate murders.  One murder in particular is that of Simonson (Joseph Cotton), one of the privileged few referred to above, living as he does in a luxury apartment.  We witness the murder, in which Simonson is resigned to his fate, even suggesting that he deserves it, that it is in accordance with the will of God.

Before the murder, we saw that Simonson lived with a woman named Shirl (Leigh Taylor-Young), referred to as “furniture,” essentially a prostitute who comes with the apartment.  Thorn checks Shirl for bruises, to see if Simonson used to knock her around.  When he doesn’t find any bruises, he tells her she was a lucky girl.  We see other women being beaten in this movie as well.

When Thorn investigates the crime scenes of rich victims, he typically loots the place, but this time he really scores, taking items of food like beef, vegetables, and liquor.  He also helps himself to the “furniture,” having sex with Shirl without caring whether she wants to or not.  Of course, it’s Charlton Heston, so naturally she likes it. However, we find that the new tenant that will soon be moving into that apartment is repulsive, telling Shirl that he will be having friends come over, and he expects her to be “fun.”  Gulp.

Thorn figures out that Simonson was assassinated, and when he gets too close to the truth, political pressure is applied to get him to end the investigation.  When that doesn’t work, he almost is assassinated himself.

Thorn brings some reference books from Simonson’s apartment for Sol to look into.  From them he learns that Simonson was on the board of Soylent Corporation.  He also learns a terrible secret, the one that led to Simonson’s murder, and he decides to end it all by going to an assisted-suicide center, where he gets to look at scenes of nature as it once was and listen to beautiful music for twenty minutes before dying from some concoction he imbibed.  Just before he dies, he tells Thorn that the plankton used to make Soylent Green is disappearing from the oceans.  As a substitute for the loss of plankton, people that die are secretly processed and turned into the Soylent Green wafers.

For the purpose of this movie, we need to set aside the fact that cannibalism can lead to the transmission of abnormal prions, causing serious neurological disease.  The movie gives no indication of any awareness of this, and audiences watching this movie at the time were doubtless unaware of it as well.  Within this movie, the entire of objection to Soylent Green wafers being made out of people is that the idea is icky.

If disease is not a consideration, then in a world that is overpopulated and in which there is a food shortage, turning people into food is rational.  After all, we are not talking about the kind of cannibalism where we have a bunch of savages standing around a pot with a missionary in it.  The people being turned into food either died naturally or, in the case of assisted suicide, voluntarily.  So, the worst you can say about this form of cannibalism is that the idea of eating people makes us feel queasy.

Neither Simonson’s acquiescence in his own murder nor Sol’s suicide would seem to be warranted, if that’s all there is to it.  However, I have heard of people dying of starvation, even though surrounded by food, when that food is regarded as unpalatable.  For example, I guess one could survive on a cockroach diet, but it would not be easy to pick one up and stick it in your mouth.  On the other hand, if the cockroaches were used to make wafers, then with the proper seasoning they might suffice, especially if the government lied and said they were made out of grasshoppers.

Therefore, in an apparent effort to make this form of cannibalism insidious instead of just repulsive, the scriptwriters have Thorn tell his supervisor, “They’re making our food out of people.  Next thing, they’ll be breeding us like cattle.” Unfortunately, this line, which is supposed to make us even more horrified by what is going on, only makes us groan at its absurdity.

In a world where there are too many people, it makes no sense to breed more.  You just eat the ones you have.

Furthermore, why breed people like cattle instead of just continuing to breed cattle?  Thorn took some beef from Simonson’s apartment, and there is reference in the movie to farms, where cattle are raised.  Why divert resources from cattle breeding in order to breed people instead?

Finally, you would have to feed people more protein to raise them than you would get out of them once you brought them to slaughter.  To put it differently, any person being bred as food would have to be fed the equivalent of several other people over his lifetime.

Because this idea of breeding people is illogical, throwing it in at the last minute undermines this pessimistic vision of the future.

The Final Judgment of Atheism

The unacknowledged but implicit standard about the true and the good belongs to us atheists. All statements about physical reality and moral worth must meet with our approval.  And that means we are also the ultimate arbiters as to what counts as acceptable in matters of religion.

Now, what would most meet with our approval would be if there were no religion at all, but being atheists, we are nothing if not realistic.  Not everyone can live knowing that there is no God that watches over us and cares about us; knowing that there is no immortal soul, but that death is the end; knowing that there is no such thing as karma, but that the world is full of wicked men who live quite comfortably and will never be punished for the evil that they do; and knowing that suffering has no purpose, that there are countless innocent victims whose pain and misery is meaningless and serves no higher good.  We wish that people did not need to believe in God, the immortal soul, karma, and a purpose for suffering, but they do, and allowances must be made for that.

And because of this almost universal need for religion, it follows that atheists must ever be held in low regard.  We must be thought wrongheaded, if people are to believe in what we deny.  Thus it is that our judgment, not only as to what is true and good, but also as to what counts as an acceptable religion, can never be admitted, however much it may be followed in practice.

A religion is acceptable as long as it never contradicts what atheists believe, apart from the supernatural fluff that may be appended.  For this reason, Republican politicians would probably benefit from having an atheist as an adviser.  Consider the case of Scott Walker, who decided to “punt” when asked about evolution.  On the one hand, Walker knew that to do well in certain primaries, he needed the votes of fundamental Christians.  On the other hand, there is no way that in 2016 this country will elect a president who believes in the literal truth of the Book of Genesis.  Since it is better to risk losing a primary to Mike Huckabee than to guarantee a loss in the general election, he should have asked himself (or his atheist adviser), what kind of answer would satisfy the atheists?  Then, without hesitation, he could have said that he believes in evolution, but that evolution is guided by the hand of God.  As long as he was not specific about exactly what that hand of God did, he would have been fine.

In general, references to God’s interference with world affairs must be kept to a minimum if they are to pass muster with atheists.  As long as it is not overdone, we do not insist that such claims make sense, for we realize that religion cannot be rationalized.  Saying, “There but for the grace of God go I,” for example, is equivalent to saying, “Thank you, God, for not doing to me what you did to him,” but only an atheist would carry out that implication, and such is not to be expected from the religious person who utters that expression of humility.  Also, saying it was a miracle that a baby survived a plane crash is permissible, even though an atheist would wonder what kind of grudge God had against all the other passengers, who died. With magnanimous self-restraint, we atheists tolerate the characterization of this kind of chance event as a miracle, provided it is about something good, in this case, the survival of a baby. Under no circumstances, however, must God’s interference with the world be punitive.  We atheists do not approve of any remarks by religious leaders that such things as September 11 or hurricane Katrina were God’s punishment for America’s iniquity.  And it is through atheist disapproval of such remarks that people of faith can be sure that these disasters were not the acts of a vindictive God.

Just as we atheists will allow for an occasional miracle, but not for acts of punishment on the part of the Deity, so too do we allow for belief in Heaven but not Hell.  It is for that reason that in the typical movie about Jesus, we almost never hear the Son of God talking about people going to Hell for their sins, even though there are several passages in the Bible where he does just that.  Sometimes the relatively harmless expression “gates of Hell” will be heard when Jesus is giving Peter the keys of the kingdom, but in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), even that part of the speech is omitted.   (An exception to all this is The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), in which Jesus spends half the movie fulminating about all those who are damned to Hell.)

Regarding movies about Jesus, we atheists are always deeply moved when Jesus saves the adulteress by challenging those in the mob to let the one without sin cast the first stone.  That is the atheist’s ideal conception of Jesus, a man of forgiveness.  And so, no Jesus movie would be complete without that scene.  But we do not like it at all when we read those parts in the Bible where Jesus says that it is a sin to get a divorce, and that to marry someone who was divorced is to commit adultery.  That is why we never hear these words coming out of Jesus’s mouth in the movies (not even in the exceptional Gospel According to St. Matthew).

And that means that in the debate between Protestants and Catholics as to whether divorce is a sin, the Protestants are right and the Catholics are wrong.  In like manner, because atheists believe in birth control, it follows that in this matter too, Protestants are right and Catholics are wrong.  This is why the criterion of atheist sanction is so valuable.  Protestants and Catholics, by themselves, can never solve these problems.  The Protestant believes that God agrees with him just as surely as the Catholic believes that he and God are in agreement.  And as God is not forthcoming on these issues in a way that is acceptable to both sides, they cannot be resolved by appealing to the will of God.  But atheists are forthcoming in these matters, and that gives Christians an objective criterion for determining what God really thinks.

And this leads to the question as to whether ISIS represents true Islam or not. Appealing to the imams and other authoritative Muslims gets us nowhere, for they no more have direct access to the will of Allah than do the members of ISIS.  Nor do we get anywhere by taking surveys of the Islamic countries, for such surveys reveal wide support for practices that people of other faiths, such as Christianity, find abhorrent.  As with the disagreements between Protestants and Catholics, disagreements between Christians and Muslims cannot be resolved by appealing to either God or Allah without begging the question.

Fortunately, the issues can be settled by atheists.  ISIS does not represent true Islam because we atheists disapprove of what they are doing.  True Islam, just like true Christianity, must conform to the atheists’ final judgment as to what is right and what is wrong.

It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955)

Faith Domergue had a cold beauty that made her suitable as female scientist, Professor Leslie Joyce, in It Came from Beneath the Sea.  It also helped that she was a brunette.  The stereotype of the cold, hard scientist whose intellect does not allow itself to be swayed by mere sentiment and feeling was especially prevalent in the old science fiction movies, and thus a beautiful female scientist constituted a special challenge for a macho leading man, used to having his way with women.

In this movie, said macho leading man is Commander Pete Mathews, played by Kenneth Tobey.  Tobey already had experience as Captain Patrick Hendry in The Thing from Another World (1951) breaking down the resistance of science assistant Nikki (Margaret Sheridan), who is referred to as a “pinup girl,” so you might think things would be a little easier for him in this film; but then, Faith Domergue also had experience playing the beautiful, cold scientist, Dr. Ruth Adams, resisting the charms of Rex Reason playing Dr. Cal Meacham in This Island Earth (1955), so I guess that made them even.

A lot of old movies are sexist by twenty-first century standards, but science fiction movies from the 1950s, with their inevitable beautiful female scientists, often have a feminist theme in them, pushing back against that sexism.  As a result, the message tends to be mixed, with the movie expressing a sexist attitude one minute and a feminist attitude the next.  For example, in Rocketship X-M (1950), Dr. Lisa Van Horn is a female scientist who is going to be part of a crew on the title spaceship.  Much is made of her qualifications. But then, when it comes time for the astronauts to secure themselves for blastoff, we see that the men can easily strap themselves in, but one of the men has to strap Lisa in.  This strange combination of sexism and feminism is especially flagrant in It Came from Beneath the Sea.

Joyce’s colleague is Dr. John Carter (Donald Curtis).  Other than when first names are being used, he is always addressed as Dr. Carter, never as Mr. Carter, but while Joyce is frequently referred to as Professor Joyce, she is often addressed as Miss Joyce as well, presumably because her status as a nubile maiden takes precedence over her professional qualifications.  They have both been called in to investigate a hunk of mysterious substance that got caught in the diving plane of Mathews’ submarine.  After an initial inspection, however, Joyce is not willing to spend any more time studying the specimen, because she has more important matters needing her attention elsewhere.  In other words, she is just as hard to get as a scientist as she is as a woman.  However, her expertise in marine biology makes her indispensable, and she is forced to continue with the investigation.

Of course, once Mathews has seen what Joyce looks like without her protective radiation suit on, he is especially glad she will be forced to continue on, and he wastes little time making his moves on her.  He wants to know if there is anything going on between her and Carter. “Oh, you mean romance,”  she says, as she picks up a foot-long test tube.  While gently holding this scientific prop with phallic significance, she teases him about the lack of women aboard a submarine, but she refuses to say whether there is anything between her and Carter.  Later, when Joyce definitively determines the nature of the substance, Carter kisses her on the cheek, and then she nestles in his arms as Mathews calls Naval Intelligence.  If they were actually involved romantically, this would not be so strange.  But they are not.  As a result, we once again get that strange mixture of feminism and sexism:  on the one hand, she is the expert in her field and has found the solution; on the other hand, she is a pretty girl that men just naturally kiss and hold in their arms, even when that man is a colleague in a professional setting.

Anyway, the substance turns out to be a piece from a giant octopus.  The octopus has been exposed to a lot of radiation owing to tests of the hydrogen bomb.  Radiation did not make the octopus big as it did the title character in The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) or the ants in Them! (1954), because this octopus has always been big.  However, the fish it was used to eating have natural Geiger counters in them that make them avoid the octopus, forcing it to leave its natural habitat and seek food elsewhere.  It is amazing what lengths these 1950s movies would go to in order to make radiation the cause of whatever monster they had to deal with.

Joyce and Mathews are somewhat contemptuous of each other’s profession.  She says to Mathews, “my mind just isn’t attuned to discuss things on your level, Commander.”  Later, hearing that Joyce and Carter will be meeting in Cairo to investigate the sinking nature of the coast of the Red Sea, Mathews says to Carter, “Sounds ideal.”  When Carter refers to it as mixing work with pleasure, Mathews responds, “Work?  Oh yes, that is your work, isn’t it?”

On their last night in Pearl Harbor, they all decide to have dinner together at a restaurant.  Mathews is bossy, practically pulling Joyce out of her chair while announcing they are going to dance and even telling Carter to order her a steak.  She refuses to dance, says she does not want a steak, and sits back down.  But she agrees to his suggestion of lobster and finally agrees to dance with him.  While discussing the weather in Hawaii, which is always balmy, she says she likes the winter and the snow, which naturally suggest frigidity on her part.  At first, we think that Mathews is going to try to kiss her, but she moves her head forward and kisses him instead, and then puts her arms around him.  So, contrary to appearances, she is a sexually aggressive woman.  Then they return to the table and have their meal.  When Mathews realizes that Joyce still intends to go to Cairo, he is shocked.  Presumably, he thought that since they kissed, she was going to give up all this foolishness about a career, marry him, and have babies.  He leaves in a huff.

Their plans to go to Cairo, however, are foiled by the occurrence of another incident.  It seems a tramp steamer has disappeared at sea, and Admiral Norman has rescinded their release so they can investigate to see if there is any connection to the previous one with Mathews’ submarine.  Fortunately, they find a few survivors.  In order to get the facts, a doctor examines them.  After the first survivor tells his story, in which it is clear that the giant octopus attacked the ship, the doctor indicates that he does not believe him, starts humoring him, and tells him in an ominous manner that he is to be taken down the hall to talk to another doctor about what he thinks he has seen.  The other three survivors are not fools.  They realize the other doctor is a psychiatrist and that their mate is likely to be diagnosed as mentally ill and confined to an insane asylum.  So, they deny having seen anything.  They are given lie-detector tests, which show that they are lying when they deny having seen anything.  And then the first survivor recants his story so that he can be released from the infirmary.  Mathews and the other officers are exasperated and just don’t understand why they can’t get the truth out of these guys.

Professor Joyce rises to the occasion.  Removing her coat so as to expose a little more of her soft, warm flesh, she tells the officers she will talk to the first survivor when he is released, and then contrives to be alone with him in a room.  Using her womanly wiles—giving him sexy looks, touching his hand, showing a little leg—she gets the man to admit he saw the sea monster, which the officers hear through the intercom.  So, you see, that’s why we need female scientists, because they have special ways of getting to the truth.

Mathews and Joyce decide to investigate reports of poor fishing along the northwest coast, because it may be that the octopus has been eating all the fish.  They spot what might be called an octopus footprint on the beach and they send for Carter.  Meanwhile, they decide to check out the fish population in the area, which they do by putting on the swim suits they just happened to have with them.  No fish, so they do a little hot necking on the beach.

When Carter arrives with the deputy sheriff, Mathews asks Carter to help him persuade Joyce to leave and let the Navy take over the job.  When Carter asks what Joyce has to say about that, Mathews responds, “What’s the difference what she says?”  At that point, Carter proceeds to lecture Mathews about women:  “There’s a whole new breed who feel they’re just as smart and just as courageous as men.  And they are.  They don’t like to be overprotected. They don’t like to have their initiative taken away from them.”

Joyce picks up the argument:  “A, you’d want me to miss the opportunity to see this specimen, one that may never come again. B, you’d be making up my mind for me. And C, I not only don’t like being pushed around, but you underestimate my ability to help in a crisis.”  Carter says that he is entirely on her side, as she nestles into the arm her puts around her.  Mathews concedes to having lost the argument.

Suddenly, the octopus appears and kills the deputy, causing Joyce to scream like a girl.

The octopus starts wreaking havoc on San Francisco, Mathews and Carter take turns saving each other’s lives, during which Joyce screams again, finding solace first in Carter’s arms and then Mathews’, until at last the octopus is killed.

They have dinner again.  Mathews, noting that women can change, says he wants Joyce to marry him and start a family.  She says she hasn’t time for that, indicating that she is an independent, career-minded woman, who wants nothing to do with a life of domesticity.  But then she offers to collaborate with him on a book, How to Catch a Sea Beast, a title that lends itself to more than one meaning, inasmuch as Mathews, as captain of a submarine, is something of a sea beast himself.  From this we gather that her ultimate goal is to trap a man.

Clash of the Titans (1981)

Ray Harryhausen has provided the special effects for many movies, some of them quite good.  In Clash of the Titans, however, one gets the feeling that instead of the special effects being used to dramatize the story, the story is guided by the desire to display some special effects.  The result is rather lackluster.  The story in the movie, however, such as it is, is a big improvement over the original myth.  In fact, this movie, when compared to the source material, provides an excellent example of the need to modify ancient tales in order to make them suitable for modern audiences.

As for the story in the movie, much is driven by the lunacy of the gods.  When the unmarried Danaë (Vida Taylor) has a child (Perseus) out of wedlock, her father, King Acrisius (Donald Houston), feels that he and all of Argos have been dishonored by her sin.  He is especially put out by the fact that he had locked her in a room where no man could get at her beautiful body, but she got pregnant anyway.  (In the original myth, Danaë’s son was destined to kill Acrisius, which was his motive for trying to keep her away from men, but in the movie, Acrisius is simply jealous of her beauty.)  To purge the dishonor, he condemns his daughter and her child to die in a coffin set adrift at sea.  Zeus (Laurence Olivier), it turns out, was the father, having visited Danaë as a shower of gold.  Zeus is horrified that Acrisius of Argos would commit a murder, so to punish him, he has Poseidon (Jack Gwillem) unleash the Kraken, a sea monster, to wipe out the entire city of Argos.  At the same time, Danaë and Perseus are saved.

When he grows up, Perseus (Harry Hamlin) falls in love with Andromeda (Judi Bowker), who is under the spell of Calibos (Neil McCarthy), the hideously disfigured son of Thetis (Maggie Smith).  Perseus chops off the hand of Calibos, who then begs his mother for justice. She is reluctant, because she suspects her son wants revenge rather than justice.  But when Queen Cassiopeia (Siân Phillips), the mother of Andromeda, dares to claim that her daughter is more beautiful than Thetis herself, that is just too much.  As punishment for insulting her beauty, she demands that Andromeda be sacrificed to the Kraken.  Almost as an afterthought, she says that this will give her son justice too.  So, Andromeda must be punished for what Perseus did to Calibos as well as for a remark made by her mother, a remark, by the way, which happens to be spot on.  A running theme through all this is that guilt and punishment are not individual matters; instead, punishment may fall on anyone who is associated with the person who committed the misdeed.  Unfortunately, this insane notion of justice is frequently found in the myths of ancient religions, and there are still vestiges of such even today.

Anyway, Perseus has to figure out a way to kill the Kraken and save his beloved Andromeda.  After much to do, he learns that he must obtain the head of Medusa, a gorgon whose look will turn any living creature to stone.  Perseus chops off her head and returns in time to let the Kraken get a good look at it, turning him to stone.  Andromeda is saved, and she and Perseus marry and live happily ever after.

Now compare that with the original story. When Perseus set out to get the head of the Medusa, he didn’t know Andromeda from Adam.  He just needed a wedding present for a king who was getting married.  Perseus got the head, put it in a bag, and headed for home, hoping he would be in time for the nuptials.  On the way there, he saw the beautiful, naked Andromeda tied to a rock, while being threatened by Cetus, the other name for the sea monster.  He decided to save her, but first he made sure nothing happened to his wedding present by putting it behind some rocks for safekeeping.  Then he killed Cetus with his sword.  Having seen Andromeda naked, he just had to have her, so they got married. Then he grabbed the bag with the head in it and headed off for the wedding that started it all.

The story is vastly more complicated than that, especially since different versions stand in contradiction to one another.  But the point is that the story in the movie is a definite improvement, and so much so, that it proves that we should not be terribly concerned with how faithful a movie is to the source material, so long as the movie is enjoyable.  Unfortunately, Clash of the Titans, while an improvement over the original myth, is only fair.

Studs Lonigan:  The Book and the Adaptations

In the 1930s, James T. Farrell wrote the trilogy Studs Lonigan.  There have been two adaptations of this book, both with the same title, but neither of which is readily accessible for viewing.  The film adaptation made in 1960 invites comparison with Rebel Without a Cause (1955), since both movies are about troubled youth.  Because this movie is only 95 minutes long, it is a much abbreviated version of the story as told in the book.  In 1979, a TV mini-series was produced whose length of 360 minutes stood a much better chance of faithfully representing the book, but it failed to do so.

It would be tedious to enumerate all the differences between the book and the two adaptations, but there is one difference that stands out from all the rest, a change in the very essence of the central character.  Both the movie and the mini-series make Studs out to be a much better person than he was in the book, more likable and sympathetic.  And this is too bad, because it is the only novel in which the central character is a bully, and it would have been nice to have this defining trait preserved in either adaptation, which could easily have been done, even in the 95-minute movie.  This is not to say that Studs Lonigan is the only novel featuring a bully, but typically, it is the character who is bullied that is central, not the bully himself.  In Farrell’s trilogy, we are always inside the head of Studs.  We get to see what it is like to be a bully, how he thinks and feels.

A lot of people might not even think of this as a novel about a bully. Certainly, the title character never thinks of himself in that way.  But then, you will not hear many people say, “I am a bully.”  Oh, sure, one might admit to having been a bully on one or two occasions, for which one is ashamed. But we seldom encounter anyone who will characterize himself as a bully, as if it were his essence.  And yet, we have scarcely reached the third page, when Studs refers to “goofy Danny O’Neill, the dippy punk who couldn’t be hurt or made cry, no matter how hard he was socked….”  A minor character, it was the bullied Danny O’Neill with whom Farrell identified.

The day never passes that Studs does not think about beating someone up, although it is something he thinks about more than he actually does.  Studs does have his moment of greatness when he beats up Weary Reilley, who is an even worse bully than Studs.  But throughout the novel, Studs finds plenty of glory in pushing others around who are smaller, weaker, or more timid than he is, especially when he and his pals outnumber their hapless victims.

One of my favorite parts of the novel occurs when a priest gives a passionate sermon attended by Studs and his gang.  We hear Father Shannon warn against the evils of smoking, drinking, and necking.  And for a brief moment, we allow ourselves to hope that he will admonish the young toughs about fighting.  We don’t expect him to say they should turn the other cheek. That would be asking too much.  But perhaps the priest will at least urge them not to be so quick to throw the first punch, especially if the boy being punched is weaker and smaller.  It is not to be.  In fact, Father Shannon tells them that if they catch some college atheist making a play for their sister, they should beat him up.  Later, Studs and his gang talk about the sermon, and it is clear that they are glad they have sisters, because beating someone up always feels better when you can be righteous about it.

At the end of the novel, Studs regrets the fact that he never kissed Lucy when they sat in that tree, that he dropped out of school instead of continuing his education, that he didn’t save his money, and that he ruined his health with all the smoking, drinking, and carousing around.  But he never regrets being a bully.

On the Failure of New Year’s Resolutions

Celebrating on New Year’s Eve is just harmless fun, even if what is being celebrated is the mere passage of time.  All our other holidays honor something or someone that is important in some way.  Never mind that we usually forget about what we are honoring and simply think about getting the day off, especially when we observe that holiday on a Monday so we can have a three-day weekend; we still have the excuse that the holiday means we care about whatever it is.  But when we take the day off in honor of the fact that another year has passed, we have to admit that we are being just a little bit frivolous, though there really is nothing wrong with that.

And when we kiss someone at midnight, when the New Year begins, the kiss is likewise meant to be somewhat frivolous.  Of course, for me, a kiss is never frivolous.  I have on several occasions excused myself just before midnight and hidden in the restroom until it was all over, because I fall in love too easily.  Not that there is anything wrong with falling in love, but I don’t want to become some woman’s love slave just because she happens to be in my vicinity when the New Year is being rung in.

Finally, the resolutions we make on New Year’s Eve are likewise best thought of as frivolous, sort of like reading your horoscope or indulging in your favorite superstition.  In other words, I find it is best if make a resolution that I really do not care whether I keep or not, like resolving not to call in sick so often just to get the day off, or resolving not to flirt with married women this year, a resolution that might be broken just seconds after midnight, if I forget to hide in the restroom.

But just as some people take astrology or some superstition too seriously, so it is that some people take the resolutions they make on New Year’s Eve too seriously as well.  In such cases, these silly notions stop being harmless fun and begin causing trouble.  Now, I have no doubt that there are people who, having read their horoscope, acted on it to their advantage, or who have had bad things happen to them on Friday the thirteenth.  And by the same token, I suppose there are people out there who have resolved to quit smoking or lose weight on New Year’s Eve and then succeeded in doing just that.  But just as astrology and superstition, when taken seriously, are more likely to cause harm than work to our benefit, so too are New Year’s resolutions more likely to result in failure.

There are three reasons why this is so.  First, when you decided you wanted to, say, quit smoking, the time to quit was right then.  By waiting until New Year’s Day to quit smoking, you are as much as admitting that your intention to quit is as frivolous as the holiday itself.  If you don’t take yourself seriously when you decide to quit, you will not succeed.

Second, New Year’s Eve happens only once a year.  To continue with the example of smoking, most people quit for a couple of weeks or months, and then start up again.  If you were counting on the magic of the New Year to help you out, you are likely to give up when it doesn’t, as if you have to wait until another magic moment comes along to try again.  But if you quit on some ordinary day for the simple reason that that was the day you realized you needed to quit, and then you relapse, you only need to try again a few days later, because one day is just as good as another.

Third, New Year’s resolutions are made public.  You announce to everyone that you are going to quit smoking.  On the one hand, this may help.  By making your resolution to quit smoking a social fact, you will be more motivated to stick with it, lest you look like a loser if you start up again.  But if you do fail after having socialized your decision to quit, your failure becomes socialized too.  Now you have to put up with everyone kidding you or reprimanding you about how you have started smoking again, and rather than risk such humiliation in the future, you are likely to just keep right on smoking and give up on quitting.

That is why it is best not to tell anyone you are quitting smoking.  As important as it may be to you, you will be amazed at how hardly anyone seems to notice that you have quit.  If someone does notice and asks you about it, you can simply say, “I am trying to cut back a little.”  But even if you admit that you are trying to quit, the fact that you did not make a big deal out of it, but only acknowledged your attempt to quit upon being asked, means that your failure will not be the occasion for mirth and ridicule.

The result is that if you do start smoking again after a couple of weeks, you will not be reluctant to try quitting again a few days later.  Because most people will not even be aware of what you are doing, your relapses will seem to be just temporary setbacks and not outright failure.

And there is one more thing, although it has nothing to do with New Year’s resolutions.  Some people will wait until they have finished smoking the carton they have just bought before quitting.  Alternatively, they will throw away what cigarettes remain.  Either way is a mistake. Don’t finish the carton and don’t throw it away, because not having cigarettes in the home will not save you.  Keep that unused carton in the cupboard.  That way, if you relapse, you won’t feel as though you have to finish the new carton you will end up buying before you try quitting again, and you won’t feel like a damn fool for having to buy more cigarettes if you threw a lot of them away.

Let your New Year’s resolution be, “I will no longer wait until New Year’s Day to make an important change in my life, nor will I make a big public announcement about it when I do.”