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The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MyRA, My Ass!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rain Man (1988)

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

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

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

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

Deconstructing the Look on Ben Carson’s Face

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No wonder I’m appalled.

On the Effect of the Supernatural in Horror Movies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Forsyte Saga: The Book and the Adaptations

When I finally set out to read The Forsyte Saga, a collection of three novels by John Galsworthy, I expected it to be entertaining and mildly thought-provoking, but something easily forgotten as soon as the last page is read and the book is placed upon the shelf.  Instead, I found the book to be a little creepy, but in a persistently disturbing way, so that my thoughts keep returning to it.

The theme of the first novel, The Man of Property, is completely revealed in its title, and Soames Forsyte is the man.  Unfortunately, among the many things he regards as his property is his wife, Irene.  This might not be so bad were it not for the fact she had an intense disliking for him from the very first.  When he impulsively kissed her arm one evening, she shuddered with revulsion.  Soames noticed this shudder, but he persisted in asking her to marry him.  Eventually she agreed, thinking she could stand it, but after they were married for a while, she finds Soames to be so repulsive to her physically that she asks for her own bedroom, by which it is understood that they will no longer be having sex.

So, why did Irene marry a man for whom she had such a powerful disliking?  The book gives us only a hint as to the answer, covered briefly in the space of a couple of pages.  It tells us that Irene’s stepmother, Mrs. Heron, was anxious to get Irene married off for two reasons:  First, she cost Mrs. Heron more than the fifty pounds a year that Irene’s father had left her.  Second, Mrs. Heron was anxious to get married again, and the men she hoped might propose to her kept being distracted by her beautiful stepdaughter.  As a result, Soames was able to enlist Mrs. Heron’s cooperation in courting Irene.  Nevertheless, these are not sufficient reasons for a woman to marry a man that repulsed her, and the novel tells us that Soames never could figure out why Irene did finally consent to marry him.  It should be noted that between Irene’s fifty pounds a year and the money she could earn giving piano lessons, there was no need for her to marry anyone.

Apparently, the various people who decided to adapt The Forsyte Saga found it as disturbing as I do that Irene would be willing to marry a man for whom she has such a strong, visceral aversion.  In That Forsyte Woman (1949), which is mostly an adaptation of The Man of Property, Irene’s revulsion for Soames before she marries him is suppressed. Instead, she is portrayed as making the mistake of marrying a man she didn’t love and then regretting it afterwards.  In other words, it is easy to understand a woman’s making that mistake, so the movie is essentially making excuses for Irene.

In the 1967 television mini-series, Mrs. Heron has a prospective suitor for herself.  He is a lecher, and he gives Irene to understand that she is the real object of his sexual desires, which he intends to pursue once he has married Mrs. Heron.  This would certainly explain why Irene would marry Soames as a way of getting away from her future stepfather.  But there is no such character or situation in the book.

In the 2002 television mini-series, the two reasons given in the novel as to why Mrs. Heron would like to see Irene married are adhered to, so it comes closest to being a faithful adaptation on this point.  However, both reasons are dramatized and given more intensity than is indicated in the book.  In particular, Mrs. Heron acts as though her financial situation is desperate, owing to her need to support her stepdaughter, whereas in the book, there is no indication that having to support Irene is an inordinate burden.  And there is also a scene in which Mrs. Heron becomes furious when the man she was hoping would propose to her expresses an interest in marrying Irene instead, following which she tells Irene she will not support her for another year.  Irene replies that she cannot support herself on her own, though that is exactly what she does do later on.  In other words, this adaptation is consistent with the book on this point, but takes pains to make explicit what the novel only suggests.

The point is that each of these three adaptations is determined to make Irene a sympathetic character, whereas the book leaves us a little perplexed as to why Irene ever consented to marry Soames.  Furthermore, the 2002 adaptation portrays Soames as being more vehement and angry than in the book, at one point almost maniacal, as if to make Irene a more sympathetic character by virtue of her being terrified of his scary behavior.  In fact, the entire mini-series becomes increasingly maniacal, with people yelling and getting physical in a way that never occurred in the book.  The 1967 adaptation, which includes material from the sequels as well, is more faithful to Soames’s character in this regard.  He is still an unpleasant fellow who raped his wife, but this earlier version is content to allow Soames a bit more self-restraint, much as he is portrayed in the book. And Irene is not afraid of Soames in that version or in the book, but merely filled with revulsion at the thought of him. In fact, with the exception of the bit about the man who intended to marry Irene’s stepmother, the 1967 is far more faithful to the book than is the 2002 version, which really takes liberties with the story. On the other hand, That Forsyte Woman has one thing the two mini-series do not: star quality.  Actors Errol Flynn, Greer Garson, Walter Pidgeon, and Janet Leigh give this movie a vitality that the television mini-series seem to lack by comparison.  But let us now set these adaptations aside and consider only the book from here on.

Irene has a friend named June Forsyte, who is the daughter of Soames’s cousin, and a woman whom Soames dislikes, for he suspects she puts ideas into Irene’s head. To get her away from June and other such people, he decides to build a house in the country where he can have Irene all to himself. Then it would be just the two of them, side by side.  And this at a time when there was no such thing as television!

Soames hires Philip Bosinney to build the house for him.  Bosinney is an architect, and the fiancé of June.  Boy, if that is not asking for trouble!  When it comes to business, I always prefer to deal with strangers.  You may think you are going to get first class work at bargain rates when doing business with friends and family, but as often as not, there is a misunderstanding that leads to grief, and thus it is in the novel as well.

To make matters worse, Irene and Bosinney fall in love and have an affair. Soames suspects as much, which only adds to his frustration at being estranged from his wife, and so one night he decides to exercise his conjugal rights by force.  In short, he rapes Irene.  (Note:  In That Forsyte Woman, Soames does not rape Irene, but only slaps her.) Now, Soames is a bit of a stuffed shirt and not very likeable, but we do not expect something like this. The result of this violation is that whereas before, Irene had merely been repulsed, now she is thoroughly devastated.  Soames feels guilty and ashamed, but at the same time, he believes he was in his rights, and that Irene was just being unreasonable.  When Bosinney finds out about it, he becomes so distracted that he walks into the path of a carriage and is run over and killed.

It is interesting to observe that in this novel, which is written by a man, a man rapes his wife and traumatizes her, whereas in Gone With the Wind, which is written by a woman, a man rapes his wife, and it is just what she needs, satisfying lusts she never knew she had.  You would think it would be the other way around.

Irene leaves Soames, and years later they get a divorce.  She then marries “young Jolyon,” June’s father.  Speaking as a man, if my best friend had an affair with my fiancée, and then after she died, he proceeded to marry my mother, no one in my family would ever see me again.  So, this must have been pretty rough on June, but she manages to hold up reasonably well.  In any event, Jolyon and Irene end up living in the house out in the country that Bosinney had built for Soames, just the two of them, side by side.  And still, television had not yet been invented. However, this marriage turns out to be idyllic.  They eventually have a child, whom they name “Jon.”  Soames remarries, hoping to have a boy, but his wife has a girl instead, after which she can no longer have children.  They name her “Fleur.”

When they grow up, Fleur and Jon meet and fall in love.  So we have a Romeo and Juliet story, in which the two feuding families are two main branches of the Forsyte family, that of Soames and that of Jolyon.  Both sides of the family try to keep them apart, but at the behest of his daughter, Soames visits Irene and assures her that if their children marry, she need have no fear of having to meet him again socially.  He promises her that whatever else happens, she will never have to see him again.  He offers to shake hands, but she refuses. It is here that my sentiments begin to change. In the beginning, Soames comes across as a monster, while Irene is a sympathetic victim. But by this point, I find myself feeling a bit sorry for Soames, while Irene is beginning to make me feel uneasy.

Since this is a Romeo and Juliet story, I expected Jon and Fleur to marry or die trying. Instead, we have a very different outcome.  Jolyon writes his son a letter, in which he explains why he and Irene object so strenuously to his marrying Fleur.  He tells Jon that if he marries Fleur, it will “utterly destroy your mother’s happiness,” that it will be a “nightmare,” causing her “pain and humiliation,” and whatever children Jon and Fleur have, they will be a constant reminder of the “horror and aversion” that she can never forget. And in the end, since Jolyon knows he will soon die from a bad heart, he tells Jon that his mother would be all alone.  As for the part about Irene’s being all alone, I guess that is what happens when you betray your best friend, marry her father, and then move out to the country, where you practically never see anyone but your husband, your son, and the maid.

The result is that Jon breaks off his engagement with Fleur, and subsequently buys some land in British Columbia where he and his mother can live, just the two of them, side by side.  He says in a letter that he thought about moving to California, but it is too nice there. This is supposed to be a joke, but that is the only reason given in the book.  In other words, Jon and Irene could have moved to, say, San Diego, where Irene could get out and make some friends, or, since friendship does not seem to be her thing, at least she could socialize and find some activities she might enjoy.  Instead, Jon buys a farm in a part of the world where they are likely to be snowed in six months out of the year. And they wouldn’t even have television!

If this situation between Jon and his mother seems a little strange, it is made all the more so by the oedipal adumbrations in Jon’s youth.  As a child, he tells his mother that he does not want to go to school:  “I want to stay with you, and be your lover, Mum.”  And this is followed by a protracted scene in which Jon, finding out that his father will not be in his mother’s room that night, asks if he can sleep with her.  All right, I know that children sometimes sleep with their parents, although it was never something I wanted to do.  And I know that little boys sometimes say they want to marry their mothers.  But real life is one thing, and novels are another.  John Galsworthy would not have written these scenes into the novel if they were not important.  At the very least, Jon is a mama’s boy, something Fleur clearly sees when she tells Jon he is tied to his mother’s apron strings; for Fleur was ready to get married anyway, their parents’ problems be damned. Knowing how Irene betrayed June, Fleur regards Jon’s mother as someone who will not hesitate to destroy the lives of others, and I’m inclined to agree with her.  But in the end, Fleur is defeated.

So Jon and his mother live happily ever after.  Well, not quite, because Galsworthy wrote another trilogy years later, in which Jon and Irene move to North Carolina, where Jon finally gets married, almost as if Galsworthy realized what he had written in the first trilogy, and then came to regret it. A lot of readers, me included, have been bemused by the fact that Jolyon, who was appalled at the idea of Soames’s attitude that a wife was the property of her husband, and Irene, who was the victim of that attitude, should end up enslaving their son to his mother.  In the preface to the first trilogy, Galsworthy makes the following remark:  “A criticism one might pass on the last phase of the Saga is the complaint that Irene and Jolyon, those rebels against property—claim spiritual property in their son Jon. But it would be hypercriticism, as the tale is told.”  He points out that Irene said to Jon, “Don’t think of me, think of yourself!”  But she approved the letter her husband wrote to Jon, and that single sentence, especially in the way she says it, is more likely to augment Jon’s feelings of guilt than diminish them.  Today we would call it being passive-aggressive.

There is a theory in literary criticism that rejects authorial intent as being the final word concerning the meaning of a novel.  I never paid much attention to that theory until now, but here it seems especially apt. Galsworthy may deny that Jon’s parents have enslaved him, and he may have subsequently tried to undo the oedipal implications in the first trilogy, but at the expense of being charged with “hypercriticism,” I think it is there in the way “the tale is told.”

The Naked Jungle (1954) and Three Violent People (1956)

One day my coworkers and I were sitting around bored, and we got to discussing movies. At one point I asked if any of them had seen The Naked Jungle.

“What’s it about?” David asked.

“It’s based on a short story,” I said, “Leiningen versus the Ants, about a man in South America who finds out that army ants are on the march and headed toward his plantation. Everyone else in the area is fleeing, but he is determined to stand his ground and fight them.”

David said that he had never heard of it, and the two other coworkers, Judy and Kevin, did not recall having seen it either.

“Well,” I continued, “this guy, Leiningen, tries all sorts of ways to block the path of the ants, but the ants figure out ways around those obstacles, until it looks as though he will be overwhelmed by them and eaten alive.”

“Were they giant ants?” Judy asked.

“No,” I said, “just ordinary-sized ants, but billions of them.”

They all were shaking their heads, indicating that none of them had ever heard of the movie. Suddenly Kevin spoke up. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Is this the movie about a guy who has a mail-order bride, but then he finds out she has been married before, so then he doesn’t want her because she’s been used?”

“Uh, yeah,” I said, “that’s the movie.”

“Oh!” Judy said, “That’s the one with Charlton Heston and William Conrad.”

“I’ve seen that movie,” David said.

I was bewildered. “I didn’t mention that part of the movie,” I said, “because I didn’t think it was important.”

David laughed. “Yeah, John, you thought this was a movie about ants, and it was really about damaged goods in the mail.”

Well, the short story had nothing about a mail-order bride in it, so I guess that was the reason I had dismissed that part of the movie as just melodramatic filler.  But I saw the movie again recently, and now I realize that it is not until the movie is half over that the Commissioner (William Conrad) utters the ominous word marabunta.  The first part is devoted to the conflict between Christopher Leiningen (Charlton Heston) and his wife Joanna (Eleanor Parker) over the fact that he is getting another man’s leftovers.

Charlton Heston had the right screen persona for this role, fearless of physical danger, his only weakness being his pride, especially when it comes to women.  This is summed up nicely in another movie he was in, Three Violent People (1956).   There he stars as Captain Colt Saunders, a Confederate Civil War veteran, who falls in love with Lorna (Anne Baxter), not realizing she is a prostitute.  Another woman, one Ruby LaSalle, who owns the saloon and hotel where Lorna is staying, and who knows her from back when, warns her of the danger of marrying Colt while pretending to be a lady, saying of him, “Because men who aren’t afraid of guns, Indians, or rattlesnakes are afraid of a little laughter behind their back.  And there’ll always be some man with a weak mind and a long memory who’ll remember a girl who worked at Selma’s in Baton Rouge or Tess’ in Frisco.”

Meanwhile, back in the jungle.  When the Commissioner warns Leiningen of the ants, Leiningen says the reason he does not want to temporarily leave his plantation until the ants are gone is that he is afraid his workers will return to the jungle and never come back.  But that seems to be a stretch.  If the workers preferred the jungle, they would have left a long time ago; if they prefer working on the farm, they will return.  We suspect that Leiningen is just stubborn

He is also stubborn in the short story, but for a different reason than the one given in the movie.  When the District Commissioner is unable to convince Leiningen that nothing can stand in the path of the ants, he tells Leiningen his obstinacy endangers himself and his four hundred workers.  And this obstinacy arises out of Leiningen’s “lifelong motto: The human brain needs only to become fully aware of its powers to conquer even the elements.”  Of course, it was primarily his brain that he had in mind, for he was contemptuous of much of his fellow man, whom he refers to as “dullards,” “cranks,” and “sluggards,” who invariably folded when confronted with any kind of danger.  “But such disasters, Leiningen contended, merely strengthened his argument that intelligence, directed aright, invariably makes man the master of his fate.”

The Leiningen of the short story had prepared in advance for all sorts of problems that might threaten his plantation, and eventually did, including flood, drought, and plague, and he had defeated them all, while his fellow settlers merely caved.  And he had prepared for the ants.  A moat surrounded three sides of the plantation, while the river protected it on the fourth side.  The Indian workers had such confidence in Leiningen that they received his calm announcement of the coming struggle with complete confidence:  “The ants were indeed mighty, but not so mighty as the boss. Let them come!”

And just to show how easy it would have been for everyone to step aside until the ants passed, this Leiningen of the short story moves the women and children, as well as the livestock, to the other side of the river where they will be perfectly safe.  Not that they were in any danger, as far as he was concerned, but they might be a nuisance:  “‘Critical situations first become crises,’ he explained to his men, ‘when oxen or women get excited.’”

For whatever reason, then, both in the original story and in the movie, Leiningen is stubborn.  And this too fits with that same persona Heston had in Three Violent People, as Ruby makes clear to Lorna:  “He once chased a rustler all the way into Mexico for 20 scrawny cows, when he owned thousands.”  Speaking of the whole Saunders clan in general, she continues, saying, “They’re always willing to get killed or kill, if they think they’re right.  And they always think they’re right.”

In the beginning of this movie, we see a brawl taking place in the street between a bunch of carpetbaggers and veteran Confederate soldiers, still in their uniforms, on crutches, missing an arm here or a leg there.  It is noted that these fights break out several times a day, with the crippled Confederates being the ones that get arrested and put in jail.  Clearly, we are supposed to sympathize with the Confederate veterans and regard the carpetbaggers as a scourge.  And just as it’s the ants that are coming for Leiningen’s plantation in The Naked Jungle, so too are the carpetbaggers, under the authority of the provisional government, coming for Colt’s ranch in Three Violent People.

Colt’s brother Cinch (Tom Tryon) wants to cut and run.  He says they still have horses in the hills that have been hidden from the provisional government, which already seized the Saunders’ cattle.  He argues that they could sell the horses elsewhere for a fortune, and then move on and buy a new ranch somewhere else.  But just as Leiningen refuses, against all reason, to run from the ants, so too does Colt refuse to run from the carpetbaggers.

When Leiningen finds out that Joanna has been married before, he arranges for her to return to the United States.  As for Lorna, that man with a weak mind and a long memory does indeed show up.  He tells Colt about Lorna’s past.  Colt tells Lorna he will arrange for her to go back to the town where he met her.  As he explains his reason for doing so to his gran vaquero (Gilbert Roland), he says, “A man must do what he must do.”  That’s right.  He really said that.

At this point, the plot of Three Violent People becomes more involved than that in The Naked Jungle, the details of which need not detain us.

In the end, Leiningen’s plantation is more destroyed by his fighting the ants than would have been the case had he simply left until it was all over with and then returned:  all his furniture is burned to create a fire barrier, and the dam is destroyed to create a flood.  So too in the short story is it a pyrrhic victory, where lives are lost by fighting the ants, while nothing is gained by defeating them.  But at least Leiningen can say he stood his ground.  Colt manages to defeat the carpetbaggers and keep the ranch he would have otherwise lost, so in his case, his refusal to retreat seems to have been worth it.

Finally, regarding what I have been informed is the most important part of The Naked Jungle, Leiningen manages to get past his disgust at having married a widow, and he and Joanna live happily ever after.  And in Three Violent People, Colt manages to get past his disgust at having married a whore, and they live happily ever after too.  But let’s be clear about the significance of these situations and their implications regarding the manliness of these two Charlton Heston protagonists.  A wimp could have remained married to either of these women without the slightest misgivings about her past, allowing himself to be cuckolded ex post facto.  But a real man is justifiably proud and cannot so easily set aside his dignity and self-respect.  Only after he has been victorious in battle, demonstrating his manhood before all the world, can he then find it within himself to be magnanimous and forgive a woman for being less than sexually pristine.

They Died with Their Boots On (1941)

The theme of They Died with Their Boots On is that glory is of greater value than money. And George Armstrong Custer (Errol Flynn) is all about glory. Right at the beginning of the movie, when he arrives at West Point, he announces that he wants to be a cavalryman in the army for the sake of glory, to leave behind a name the nation will honor, noting that there are more statues of soldiers than there are of civilians. We shrink from positing glory as a motive for anyone in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries (we prefer to say that soldiers fight for our rights and freedoms), but for any story set prior to the twentieth century, glory seems to be acceptable as a reason for going to war.

Custer makes this statement about glory to Ned Sharp (Arthur Kennedy), who will prove to be his nemesis. But at this stage of the movie, he appears to be just a prankster, playing a trick on Custer on account of the fancy uniform and entourage of dogs and a servant he brought with him, a trick Custer seems at this point to deserve. Eventually, Sharp will come to represent the evils of capitalism, which values money above all else. But this side of him must wait until after the Civil War.

Speaking of which, the Civil War breaks out while Custer is still a cadet. He is given his commission early and sent to Washington. And then he is made a general through a clerical error. Most Hollywood movies take liberties with history, and this one is no exception, there being so many it would be tedious to list them all. But this one deserves special comment. The reality is that he was made a general because there was a shortage of generals needed to command the ever increasing number of brigades, and Custer seemed to be suitable on account of his superior qualities as a cavalry officer. By making his promotion to general be just a lucky break instead, the movie is telling us that chance is the only difference between us and a man like Custer. That way we will like him better.

Lately, people have begun to object to statues of Confederate generals and to army bases named after same, calling such men traitors.  But this was hardly the attitude when this movie was made.  Because the Confederacy lost and was eventually reunited with the North, for a long time Confederate soldiers and the civilian population that supported them were regarded as basically good Americans, a magnanimous gesture on the part of the North, made for the sake of unity.  In The Birth of a Nation (1915), that unity of North and South was their “Aryan birthright,” illustrated when Yankee veterans protect southern white women from being raped by a mob of recently freed black men.  In Gone With the Wind (1939), the southerners are first portrayed as noble, but later as tragic victims of war.  Confederate soldiers are almost always portrayed as honorable, as in The Red Badge of Courage (1951), when a rebel sentry on one side of a river warns a Yankee on the other side to move back into the shadows so he won’t have to shoot him.  And Confederate veterans are likewise favorably depicted, as in The Searchers (1956).  We might have expected the South to portray itself in this flattering light, but it is interesting that there are no movies from this period of comparable status that show the war from the point of view of the North.  Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) and Abe Lincoln of Illinois (1940) honor the president who presided over the Civil War and ended slavery, but both movies stop before we get to the war itself.

In the spirit of unity and reconciliation then, They Died with Their Boots On never lets us see a single Confederate soldier being killed, and only one wounded Yankee is seen after a battle. We see Custer leading a charge, and we expect to see what we usually do in such cases: men on horseback slashing and shooting the enemy soldiers as they break through the ranks of the opposing infantry. But the camera stops filming just as they approach the Confederate soldiers. Then another charge is led, and we think that this time we will get to see some bloodshed; but once again we are denied such a scene. And then a third charge is led, and we think, “All right, the first two charges were just a tease, but now we are going to see a complete battle.” Nope.

But this makes sense when we recall that the theme of this movie is glory.  I have never seen a movie in which killing Confederate soldiers is represented as something glorious, comparable, say, to killing the Redcoats during the American Revolution or killing the Nazis during World War II.  And so, while we do see movies in which Confederate soldiers are killed, there is always a sense of the futility of their cause, of the tragedy that such a war had to be fought at all.  It would have been unthinkable in this movie to have Custer and his men gloriously slaughtering Confederate soldiers.  And so it is that just as the Lincoln movies stopped before the beginning of the Civil War, so too does this movie stop before Custer and his men reach the point of killing Confederate soldiers.  His glory during those charges must be inferred.  But that’s all right, because later in the movie, when war breaks out with the Indians, we get to see lots of killing to make up for the bloodless presentation of the Civil War.

Just as Sharp kept turning up wherever Custer was during the war, as a thorn in Custer’s side, so too does Sharp seem to show up everywhere Custer is after the war, except after the war it is always about money. Sharp and his father approach Custer about having him lend his name to a corporation, so that they can all cash in on his renown, but Custer is insulted by the suggestion. Later, when Custer is assigned to the Territory of Dakota, he arrives to find Sharp selling guns to the Indians and liquor to the troops, who spend all day in the bar.

Custer closes down the bar and runs off the Indians. Then he decides to get the regiment in shape, to make them a fighting unit. To this end, he has them learn the song “Gary Owen,” which they all sing, except for that one fellow in the back who was reportedly singing “Mr. Custer.” I guess songs go more with glory than with money, which is why Sharp doesn’t have a song to go with his money-making schemes. In addition to the song, Custer tells his men that their regiment will be immortal, even should they die in battle. And later, he tells Sharp that unlike money, which you cannot take with you when you die, glory stays with you forever.

The Sioux Indians sign a peace treaty, giving them the Black Hills. But when Sharp and his associates want to get their hands on the land for development purposes, they start a rumor that there is gold in them thar hills, hoping to cause a gold rush that will overwhelm the Indians with settlers, who will then be supported by the government. Actually, it was Custer who started the gold rush by announcing that he had found gold in the Black Hills, but that would not be in keeping with the movie’s simplistic opposition, which is that Custer wants glory and Sharp wants money, and so the story about gold is attributed in the movie to Sharp instead.

And it is also in keeping with another simplistic opposition, which is that Custer is good and Sharp is evil.  After Custer’s death, his wife Libby (Olivia de Havilland) presents a letter to General Sheridan, written by Custer in anticipation of his death in the coming battle against Crazy Horse (Anthony Quinn).  Libby sums up the most important part of the letter as follows:  “The administration must make good its promise to Crazy Horse (Anthony Quinn).  The Indians must be protected in their right to exist in their country.”  How fine and noble must Custer have been to express such sentiments about the Indian chief and his tribe who would soon kill him and his men!

To this, Sheridan assures her that Custer’s final wish will be realized:  “I have authority to answer that from the administration, the president himself.  Come, my dear.  Your soldier won his last fight after all.”  Certain detractors would have us believe that Sheridan said that the only good Indian is a dead Indian, but this movie informs us that he cared as much about Native Americans as Custer did.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Before the battle, Custer kidnaps Sharp and brings him along to the Little Bighorn. Custer figures they will all be killed in the coming fight, and by bringing Sharp along, he will bring about the demise of the one person in the movie in whom all the evil seems to be concentrated. Instead of running away, however, Sharp redeems himself in the battle, and dies telling Custer he was right about glory after all. And apparently he was too, because in the last scene of the movie, we see the images of Custer and his 7th Cavalry Regiment riding to the tune of “Gary Owen,” thereby reassuring us that the regiment and its glory are immortal, whereas we do not get to see any final images of Ned Sharp engaged in his various profiteering schemes, stuffing money into his pockets as he puffs on a big cigar.

But Custer did not go to all this trouble so that we could imagine him and his regiment singing a song.  As he stated at the beginning of the movie, it is the physical manifestation of glory in the form of a statue that he cared about.  And for a while, it seemed that he got what he wanted.  But there is now a petition to remove the equestrian statue of Custer in Monroe, Michigan, on the grounds that he and his 7th Cavalry were responsible for the genocidal slaughter of Native Americans.  Sic transit gloria mundi.

Swept Away (1974)

In Swept Away, Raffaella (Mariangelo Melato), who is a rich woman, her husband, and their rich friends rent a yacht and go sailing in the Mediterranean. She and her husband carry on screaming arguments about political ideology, with Raffaella expressing her fascist views with much vehemence. We all expect Italians in movies to be passionate, but we have never seen anything like this. Gennarino (Giancarlo Giannini) is a deckhand and a communist, whom she treats like dirt.

When Raffaella and Gennarino get stranded on a deserted island, he decides to reverse roles with a vengeance. He beats her into submission, forcing her to call him Signor Carunchio, while calling her Raffaella (when not calling her a bitch or an industrial whore), instead of Signora Lanzetti, as he did on board the yacht. Then, when all this verbal and physical abuse has finally made her want him to ravish her brutally, he says that is not enough. She must tell him she loves him, kiss his feet, and worship him like a god. She actually does kiss his feet and submit to him totally, falling madly in love with him. But he still beats her whenever she misbehaves, as when she presumes to think instead of doing what she is told.

This may be a minor point, but it is odd that Gennarino, the communist, believes that women should be totally subservient to men, which we would be more likely to associate with fascism.

Anyway, the day finally arrives when a boat comes within sight of the island. Raffaella does not want to signal them because she fears being rescued might spoil their happiness. But Gennarino believes that only if they are rescued can he be sure that she truly loves him. Once rescued, Raffaella might have been able to thwart public opinion and marry Gennarino, but when she sees him being greeted by his wife, who talks about their children, she has misgivings. But given Gennarino’s attitude toward women, why should he care about what happens to his wife? He wants Raffaella to go back and live on the island with him, but she decides against it. He reverts to calling her a bitch and an industrial whore.

Because this is supposed to be a comedy, we hesitate to take all this Mediterranean misogyny too seriously, but there simply is not enough humor in this movie to overcome the revulsion we feel at the way he treats her, especially since the movie seems to prove he is right in believing that a man can make a woman love him by degrading her and beating her.