Retro Review :: The Quiet Earth (1985)

It's been a while. I've traveled to the edge of the world and back (or at least finished another year of university) and let me tell you... the maps are right: there be dragons. With a little extra time on my hands for the moment, however, I've decided to catch up on some movies I've been meaning to watch.

Between Anchor Bay and The Criterion Collection, many sci-fi and horror classics have been deservedly saved from the abyss of cinematic obscurity that has been created by a society that seems to have no long-term memory whatsoever, at least (or maybe especially) when it comes to art or entertainment. Anchor Bay, in an effort to save even more films, has recently unrolled a Cult Fiction series of DVDs, a set dedicated to obscure and beloved films. The series isn't themed. Digging deep into the vaults of many different genres, such horror, sci-fi, grindhouse crime and exploitation films and even camp spoof, the series includes such gems as The Wicker Man, C.H.U.D., and even Werner Herzog's great Fitzcarraldo. Yes, it's a strange collection. However, many of these films deserve to be seen, if for no other reason then that they show us just how derivative much of our modern cinematic endeavours have become.

One of these Cult Fiction films is The Quiet Earth, a 1985 New Zealand-made apocalyptic tale about the last man on earth. Sound familiar? Sure, especially with a certain blockbuster currently cluttering up our mental airwaves. However, this is the movie I Am Legend should have been, wanted to be, but never had any hope of actually being.

At precisely 6:12 in the morning, Zak Hobson (Bruno Lawrence, who I'd never heard of before but who is astonishing here) wakes up to discover that everyone else in the world as disappeared. The buildings are all empty, the roads are littered with the wreckages of suddenly abandoned vehicles, and fallen aircraft take out entire city blocks in flaming death dives. There are no bodies; everyone has just vanished. Not even animals or insects remain. What follows is a character study of mental deterioration. With no other living being around him, Zak descends into madness. Remember those scenes in I Am Legend where Will Smith was running around, making friends and talking with mannequins? Remember how interesting they were compared to the poorly fabricated digital escapades that followed them? The Quiet Earth is like those scenes... only much, much better. Though those scenes can shamelessly harvest the organs of The Quiet Earth, they can't even begin to breath the kind of life into them that suffuses The Quiet Earth.

While other movies try to portray isolation and madness they so often do so by watering them down for us and by giving us a sanitized version of them. It's the Wilson effect and it assumes that an honest depiction of human madness would be too uncomfortable for an audience to handle, at least in mainstream cinema. Zak, however, has no volleyball. Neither he nor the filmmakers give us a buffer between Zak and his madness; they gives us no anthropomorphic crutch to temper Zak's isolation. So he rages about in a silk dress, brandishing his shotgun. He repeatedly, and without any real explanation, shoots a crucifix. While assuming the role of President of the Earth before an audience of cardboard cut-outs that include Hitler and Nixon, he confesses his crimes. In fact, for the first act of the film there are hardly any sci-fi or thriller elements to the story at all. What we get instead is a very convincing character study in effects of pure isolation on the human mind.

Unfortunately, the following two acts are not quite as interesting. The narrative is fleshed out a bit more and Zak eventually rebuilds himself and begins to piece together a theory of what happened to everyone. A few predictable plot devices ensue: yes, Zak isn't entirely alone; yes, humanity is probably too self-destructive for its own good. Nevertheless, despite a few missteps, the film is a triumph. While it is not "Quite simply the best science-fiction film of the '80s," as the quote on the box would have us believe (that honour goes to Blade Runner, after all), it is a film that deserves to be seen, not only by science-fiction fan but by anyone who loves good movies.

In the holy pantheon of science-fiction, there are only four films that, as far as I'm concerned, have achieved a full apotheosis: Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Andrei Tarkovsky's Solyaris (1972), and Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982). While The Quiet Earth is not quite as good as these films, it is perhaps one of those rare films that comes closes to matching their greatness. This of course means that it is by leaps and bounds better than almost any sci-fi flick you're likely to see coming out of Hollywood any time soon. Seeing The Quiet Earth has actually upset me a bit. 'Cause if I missed this one, what other great sci-fi films have I missed only because they have unfairly slipped out of sight and out of our short-termed, pop-cultural minds?

Eichmann in Jerusalem (excerpts)

I recently read Hannah Arendt's book Eichmann in Jerusalem, her report on the 1961 Israeli trial of Adolf Eichmann, the so-called "architect of the Holocaust." The book is disturbing, not so much because it describes the crimes perpetrated on the Jewish people by the Nazis, but because it so clearly states that the people who committed these crimes, especially Eichmann himself, were not monstrous or psychotic but ordinary and "banal" people, people who for whatever reason abnegated their ability to think and discriminate and simply handed themselves over what they all could see was a murderous agenda. I chose these passages because they focus not only on the massive moral failings of the Nazis themselves but also on the personal and intimate failings of all the people the Nazis influences, which are in many ways more frightening because of these peoples' ordinariness.

"And just as the law in civilized countries assumes that the voice of conscience tells everybody 'Thou shalt not kill,' even though man's natural desires and inclinations may at times be murderous, so the law of Hitler's land demanded that the voice of conscience tell everybody: 'Thou shalt kill,' although the organizers of the massacres knew full well that murder is against the normal desires and inclinations of most people. Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it - the quality of temptation. Many Germans and many Nazis, probably an overwhelming majority of them, must have been tempted not to murder, not to rob, not to let their neighbors go off to their doom (for that the Jews were transported to their doom they knew, of course, even though many of them may not have known the gruesome details), and not to become accomplices in all these crimes by benefiting from them. But, God knows, they had learned how to resist temptation."

*****

"'We knew this. We did nothing. Anyone who had seriously protested or done anything against the killing unit would have been arrested within twenty-four hours and would have disappeared. It belongs among the refinements of totalitarian governments in our century that they don't permit their opponents to die a great, dramatic martyr's death for their convictions. A good many of us might have accepted a death. The totalitarian state lets its opponents disappear in silent anonymity. It is certain that anyone who had dared to suffer death rather than silently tolerate the crime would have sacrificed his life in vain. This is not to say that such a sacrifice would have been morally meaningless. It would only have been practically useless. None of us had a conviction so deeply rooted that we could have taken upon ourselves a practically useless sacrifice for the sake of a higher moral meaning.' Needless to say, the writer remains unaware of the emptiness of his much emphasized 'decency' in the absence of what he calls a 'higher moral meaning.'

But the hollowness of respectability - for decency under such circumstances is no more than respectability - was not what become apparent in the example afforded by Sergeant Anton Schmidt. Rather it was the fatal flaw in the argument itself, which at first sounds so hopelessly plausible. It is true that totalitarian domination tried to establish these holes of oblivion into which all deeds, good and evil, would disappear, but just as the Nazis' feverish attempts, from June, 1942, on, to erase all traces of the massacres - through cremation,, through burning in open pits, through the use of explosives and flame-throwers and bone-crushing machinery - were doomed to failure, so all efforts to let their opponents 'disappear in silent anonymity' were in vain. The holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect, and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. One man will always be left alive to tell the story. Hence, nothing can ever be 'practically useless,' at least, not in the long run. It would be of great practical usefulness for German today, not merely for her prestige abroad but for her sadly confused inner condition, if there were more such stories to be told. For the lesson of such stories is simple and within everybody's grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that 'it could happen' in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation."


Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Penguin, 2006. 150, 232-33.

"A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
"The breath goes now," and some say, "No,"

So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of the earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.

But we, by a love so much refined
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two:
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the other do;

And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearken after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like the other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.

Pictorial :: Sally Mann

These photos may be distressing to some people. While I think they possess an ethereal and fleeting beauty, a beauty that flourishes like a flower planted amongst the rocks, I can understand how they may make some people uncomfortable.

One of the great things about being a student is constantly being exposed to artists of who you were previously unaware. I'm currently writing a paper on the photography of Sally Mann, whose photographs of her own children are loving, sympathetic, distressing and entirely true to the human experience. In her own words, Mann says, We are spinning a story of what it is to grow up. It is a complicated story and sometimes we try to take on the grand themes: anger, love, death, sexuality, and beauty. But we tell it all without fear and without shame. These aren't just pictures of Sally Mann's children, they are an look into the heart of humanity with all its beauty and frailty, all its hardship and cherished memories. The particular occasion may be her children but they are about all of us. Enjoy.

Jessie Bites, 1985

Jessie at Five, 1987

Gorjus, 1989


Emmett, Jessie, and Virginia, 1989


Fallen Child, 1989


Emmett and the White Boy, 1990

Mann, Sally. Immediate Family. Aperture, 1992.

Review :: Be Kind Rewind

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) put Michel Gondry on the short-list of directors to keep an eye on. It was inventive, sincere, emotional and hallucinatory - but it was hard to tell how much of that film's genius should be credited to master screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich and Adaptation) or to Gondry, who was only known as a music video director before that, working with such bands as Massive Attack and My Chemical Romance. The Science of Sleep (2006), however, proved that Gondry could not only direct great material but write it too. Now with Be Kind Rewind, he solidifies his reputation as auteur in the making; in a time when "quirk" seems to be the name of the game (see Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited or Jason Reitman's Juno), Gondry is one of that game's young masters.

When the owner of a VHS rental store (Danny Glover) goes on vacation, he leaves Mike (Mos Def) in charge with only one rule: keep out Jerry (Jack Black), Mike's friend, who has a habit of inadvertently destroying things. Of course, Jerry doesn't stay out and shenanigans ensue. It seems that a failed attempt at sabotage has left Jerry rather magnetized and his presence in the store blanks all the tapes. Now, in an effort to save face with a certain customer who could report them to their boss, they grab a camera and film their own homemade version of the movie she wants, Ghostbusters. They soon realize that despite their amateurish efforts, their movie has began to gain a certain amount of notoriety and they soon find themselves filming their own versions of favourite films, everything from Rush Hour 2 to 2001: A Space Odyssey.

While not quite as provocative and intelligent as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or as compulsively inventive as The Science of Sleep, Be Kind Rewind is a clever and endearing look at how community is built not only around geo-political facts but also around certain intangibles, such as a shared experience or a favourite story. Be Kind Rewind continually blends these communal factors as Mike and Jerry not only create their own versions of films but end up doing so in order to raise money to save the historical, but condemned, building in which the video store is located. The film is a statement about the power of art and is a loving homage to culturally significant films, films which ran the gamut from slapstick humour to razor-sharp political commentary. Art, when it is released, becomes the property of its audience, becomes a part of the shared experience that shapes and informs our communities. Gondry perfectly captures this in Mike and Jerry's "do-it-yourself/youtube" sensibility that at once celebrates art and gives it back to us.



But the film's not perfect. At some times it is a little too given over to sentimentality, especially in the film's final scenes, which were a bit too predictable and feel a tad manipulative. Also, while the actor's are solid and for the most part wildly entertaining, Gondry has a tendency to let Black act out a bit too much, as if he simply turned on the camera and let Black take it from there, which sometimes works and sometimes does not. My feeling is that Jack Black is only interesting when a director has a tight reign on him, when he's allowed to be manic and silly but only within the governed bounds of the director's vision, as he was in Stephen Fears High Fidelity, where Black's over-the-top performance served the film instead of distracting us from it. For the most part, Gondry manages to do this, although there are a few moments when the performance calls too much attention to itself and we remember that we are watching Jack Black and not Jerry. But in the end, these criticisms are minor and don't really take away from the film's charm.

Be Kind Rewind is at its best when it simply indulges in its own brand of comic fantasy and heartfelt whimsy. Mike and Jerry's films, horribly underproduced and amateurish as they are, are the pulsing, glowing heart of this film and are a complete joy to watch. They are not spoofs or underhanded jabs at Hollywood and big budget filmmaking; they are a loving homage and appropriation of the films that entertain and inspire us. Gondry has captured the enthusiasm and the joy of artistic creation and has himself created a minor masterpiece. In a spring movie season that doesn't seem to be offering much, Be Kind Rewind is a must-see for anyone who loves film.

"The Hollow Men" by T.S. Eliot

The Hollow Men

Mistah Kurtz -- he dead.

           A penny for the Old Guy

               I           

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
          
               II           

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer --

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom
          
               III           

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.
          
               IV           

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.
          
               V           

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

                   For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

                   Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

                   For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Hamlet 3.2

Some Hamlet now. Perhaps we can find the meaning of life in Hamlet. Perhaps we cannot. If we can or cannot, however, we still find ourselves in its text, staring back at us, as terrible and as familiar as we'd expect. Enjoy.

PLAYER KING. I do believe you what now you speak,
But what we do determine oft we break.
Purpose is but the slave to memory,
Of violent birth, but poor validity,
Which now, like fruit unripe, sticks on the tree,
But fall unshaken when they mellow be.
Most necessary 'tis that we forget
To pay ourselves what to ourselves is debt.
What to ourselves in passion we propose,
The passion ending, doth the purpose lose.
The violence of either grief or joy
Their own enactures with themselves destroy.
Where joy most revels, grief doth most lament;
Grief joys, joy grieves, on slender accident.
This world is not for aye, nor 'tis not strange
That even our loves should with our fortunes change;
For 'tis a question left us yet to prove,
Whether love lead fortune, or else fortune love.
The great man down, you mark his favorite flies;
The poor advanced makes friends of enemies.
And hitherto doth love on fortune tend;
For who not needs shall never lack a friend,
And who in want a hollow friend doth try
Directly seasons him his enemy.
But, order to end where I begun,
Our wills and fates do so contrary run
That our devices still are overthrown;
Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.

Hamlet, Act 3, scene 2.

Review :: Rambo

Rambo may be the best action movie of the year. It may be the best action movie of the last ten years. Sylvester Stallone gives us something we've been wanting for a long, long time: a grown up action hero, a franchise that's capable of growing up as much as its audience has. John McClane should take notes.

It seems to me that Rambo is Stallone's critique of the action hero. It is a story of one man, John Rambo, but it is also a meta-story, the story of all action heroes. Rambo has always been a tortured soldier but somewhere along the way his story was hijacked: the Vietnam vet was turned into just another 80's action icon, and suddenly all his torture, all his pathos evaporated. He became just another shining, muscled symbol of adolescent masculine fantasies. As entertaining as these fantasies may be (and their value as entertainment is certainly debatable) they are insincere and callous, almost nihilistic in their willingness to portray violence as entertainment. Most action movies, after all, only play at morality; they use only a basic distinction between good and evil as a thinly-veiled excuse to justify the graphic depiction and glorification violence. Rambo does not. At one point in the movie, during a voice-over/dream soliloquy, Rambo admits to himself, "You didn't kill for your country... you killed for yourself." It is as if, in damning himself for what he's done, John Rambo, and Sylvester Stallone, is damning us the audience for finding enjoyment in the mindlessness of the prototypical action hero, the cartoonish hero capable of inflicting massive amounts of damage without suffering the mental or spiritual aftermath.

Rambo, though one of the most violent movies I've seen outside of the horror or torture genres, subverts the average mindless action movie by giving meaning to violence, by grafting its violence onto something most action movies do not have - a moral theory. The film is a redemption story, the story a disillusioned soldier once again finding meaning in the chaos around him. But it's more then just that. I read the film as Stallone's own rejection of the action movie conventions that made him a star and the as the reinvention of the moral hero, of the hero that even thinking people can admire. Rambo is the work of a mature filmmaker, of a filmmaker capable of reflecting not only on the world around him but on his own part in creating that world. For all its violence, the film is introspective and reflective and will prove to be, I think, the best action movie of this year.

Review :: There Will Be Blood

There are some movies that make criticism seem inadequate.

I think of art and criticism as two complementary modes of thought, one the implicit and the suggestive and the other the explicit and argumentative. Art is the warm and breathing form of the human; it's our desires and our emotions given shape. Criticism is the cold and precise surgeon's scalpel, cutting away the tissue of imagination to see how it all fits together. Criticism is neither violence nor murder, however; rather, criticism is like an anatomy of the human mind. Together, art and criticism form a hermeneutical synthesis: art meets criticism on the fields of thought and in between the two we grapple with our own minds and struggle to find meaning. The difficulty, however, is that it can be awkward to synthesize the two, since art and criticism speak entirely different languages. When criticism attempts to apprehend art, especially (as is the case in this article) the art of the moving picture, it must translate it, and in this translation something can easily be lost. For all its nuances, all its intricacies and precision, language language is cold and dead; it can often fail to contain, or even suggest, the majesty or elegance that can be evoked from even some of the most simple camera moves.

All of this is to say that I don't know what to say about Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood. It is the kind of movie that can make criticism seem inadequate, that can make us feel like any attempt to dissect it with words were merely an awkward fumbling towards uncertainty. Several days have passed since I saw There Will Be Blood and I am still not certain what, if anything, I should say about it that would do the film justice. It is the kind of movie that other movies wish they could be. It is the end of cinema, cinema's apotheosis.

The fear that I was over-reacting, that I had somehow been caught up in a fever of generosity, is one of the factors that kept me from writing about There Will Be Blood the moment I got home. I wanted and needed time to reflect on what the film had made me feel. In the theatre, with the sounds and images of Paul Thomas Anderson's genius surrounding me, I felt I was witnessing something that hadn't been seen since Kubrick - the limits of narrative cinema. Now, upon reflection, I think I still feel the same way.

There Will Be Blood is a story of madness. Daniel Day-Lewis plays Daniel Plainview, a self-made oil tycoon; Paul Dano plays Eli Sunday, the self-appointed cult mouthpiece for the Church of the Third Revelation. When the discovery of oil brings Plainview to Sunday's church, the two begin a rivalry that will span decades and that could ultimately destroy them both.

That's about as much as I want to say about the film's plot. It's not a complicated movie. Like King Lear or several of the films of either Stanley Kubrick (Lolita or Eyes Wide Shut) or Werner Herzog (Aguirre or Fitzcarraldo), There Will Be Blood's power and grandeur are borne from simplicity, from a mythic and terrifying depiction of human desire and ambition turned violent and self-destructive. The terror that we feel while watching Day-Lewis' Plainview isn't the terror of the unknown or the alien but the terror of recognition, of seeing our own mundane and all-too-human capacity for madness.

This is without doubt Paul Thomas Anderson's finest film to date. I loved Boogie Nights, Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love, but those films only hinted at the genius that Anderson displays in There Will Be Blood. With this film, Anderson evolves from artist to visionary. The change in Anderson's work here is like the transformation in Ingmar Bergman between Smiles of a Summer Night and The Seventh Seal, or in David Cronenberg between Scanners and Videodrome. Anderson has stepped up from being good and has become great. It's breathtaking to think that Anderson is still young.

I could go on. I could rave like a lunatic. I could throw more words at There Will Be Blood and hope that some of them are appropriate or adequate. I won't, however. The film is still too vital in my mind, still too alive to properly dissect. I've mostly talked my way around the movie, talked more about my experience of the movie then about the movie itself. The most I can say is this: I've seen the best of film. I've seen Kubrick and Kurosawa, Lynch and Herzog. Now I've seen Anderson. And as far as I'm concerned, he ranks with the greats. He's standing on the shoulders of giants and becoming a giant himself.

Mini-Review :: Juno

For the most part, I try to keep my reviews fairly formal. I don't want merely to restate a film's plot or simply to devise clever ways of simply saying "I think this" or " it's rubbish." I review films as if they are works of art and literature that demand or require intellectual responses... at least, I hope I do. But this, I suppose, means that I limit the kinds of movies I want to review (of course, I reviewed both Live Free or Die Hard and Halloween on this site so obviously a movie doesn't need to be intelligent to warrant an intellectual response). It also means that unless a movie provokes me, either positively or negatively, I don't really have anything to say about it.

Which brings me to Juno. Juno is a fantastic film filled to the brim with those elusive qualities we like to call "heart" and "quirk," not not so full of either of them as to be too sentimental or too pretentious. It's tender and it's human. For better or for worse, however, that's all I can come up with to say about it. Ellen Page's performance is pitch-perfect and is a beautiful combination of strength and vulnerability and Jason Reitman's direction is remarkably solid, always ironically flirting with indie cliches and yet remaining self-aware enough to avoid them. That's it. I loved the film but have nothing of real substance to say about it, at least not yet. There are a million other reviews of this film out there, most of them raving, so I'll just leave it at this: go see it.

Essay :: History and Civilization in Heart of Darkness

This is an excerpt from an essay I wrote on Heart of Darkness. It doesn't necessarily represent my own thoughts on the subject but it is, I think, accurate to what Joseph Conrad was saying in his novella. Enjoy.

History is too large a topic and too large a word simply to throw around. The word needs to be limited, defined, its scope narrowed, before it can become an effective hermeneutical tool. In this essay, history will refer to the story that people tell themselves about themselves, to the reported story of human events rather than to a scientific or otherwise objective account of events; it will be treated as a theme, as something Joseph Conrad is interested in discussing and commenting upon in Heart of Darkness. The study and representation of history is one of humanity’s chief ways of understanding itself. In this way, history is very similar to, and functions in much the same way as, a myth, that is, an informative and identity-creating story.

Unfortunately, Conrad’s treatment of history in Heart of Darkness is rather cynical and unflattering; it tends to uncoil history and to reveal an ugly truth that is living inside of it. If it is true that history is written by the victors than history, like economics, is very much the tool of the ruling class, an ideological broadsword used rather inelegantly to hack and bludgeon into submission those who would challenge authority. This means, then, that history is probably largely artificial, a construct laid over the consciousness of a people in order to control them. History exists only in the human mind, a point Conrad seems to make very early on in the novella. The unknown narrator, before Marlow even speaks, contemplates time and the image of the river Thames and says, “What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth? … The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealth, the germs of empires.” The river, and perhaps the whole earth, is indifferent to time; it stands still and simply is while people scurry about, build and collapse empires, and pass away.

In the novella, history and time are tied to civilization and to progress. London is emblematically the present and represents all the achievements and glories of civilized humanity; the jungle is the past, it is nature in its purest form, devoid of human subjection and control. The Thames, however, flows through London, reminding the unknown narrator that all of this, all of civilization, merely stands rather precariously on the edge an all-consuming jungle ready to retake what was taken from it the moment that civilization falters. William Blake said that where man is not nature is barren; Conrad seems to agree, but only to an extent. Nature will inevitably reclaim that which belongs to it and is careless of humanity’s so-called achievements. Nature is not domesticated by civilization and time, it is merely temporarily caged by it.

This combination of time and civilization means, however, that by stepping out of civilization one is also stepping out of time or at least stepping backwards inside of it. Indeed, this is exactly how Marlow describes the journey to Kurtz, as a peeling back not only of civilization but also of time. He says, “Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings.” By stepping back in time and out of civilization, Kurtz and even Marlow open themselves up to see who they really are; they cut themselves off from whatever “humanizing” influence civilization may have and risk losing themselves in nature, in the basest and most savages impulses of “purified” human nature, nature that is without the guiding and restraining influence of history. Marlow feels this movement, feels the change happening around and inside of him as they travel back in time along the Congo. He says, in what really amounts to a scathing critique of human achievement, “We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember, because we were travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign-and no memories.” The creation of identity afforded to humanity by time and history is, Marlow discovers and Conrad suggests, largely illusory and artificial. History is a fence thrown up in the hopes of stopping an eternal tide, a self-deception that allows us to function as a society but which may crumble the moment we venture outside of our permitted bounds.

"The Second Coming" by W. B. Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Notes on Galileo

I came across this information in a book my father lent to me, From Five Fingers to Infinity by Frank J. Swetz, and I thought I'd pass it on. I hope it's as interesting to you as it was to me.

The Roman Catholic Church’s historic condemnation of Galileo and his theory of a heliocentric, Copernican cosmology are often used as a symbol – and as a rallying cry for the “free-thinking” literati and scientist – of Christian anti-intellectualism and of Christianity’s reluctance to accept, and its antagonism towards, scientific inquiry. Christians, they say, are mired in a state of blind and refusing faith, a faith that is unwilling to see reason and that is unable to accept fact. Christians are small-minded, irrational, superstitious and seditious of free mental activity; they want to suppress any idea that may contradict of confuse their dogma; anyone who disagrees with this evaluation needs only to look at the case of Galileo to see that it is true.

As a Christian apologist, and as someone very much invested in the idea of free intellectual pursuit, the case of Galileo has always been a point of embarrassment for me as, I’d imagine, it has been for many other thinking Christians. Of course, it’s quite possible to avoid the whole issue, or at least to try to avoid it, by shifting the blame from Christianity at large to Catholicism in particular or to any organized and centralized religion in general; but rather than solving the problem this merely moves it, creates other problems, and ultimately creates greater points of schism in the universal church itself. Shifting blame amounts only to finger pointing and that gets us nowhere. Besides, it’s insincere. Evangelical America is hardly more open-minded than the Roman Catholic Church and if we were to condemn one brand of Christianity as anti-intellectual we would need to condemn them all.

However, as it is with all matters deeply entrenched in either dogma or ideology, the controversy surrounding Galileo’s confrontation with the Church has been related in history by the authority of biased pens, by authors guided by love for their own agendas, many of which are all too pleased to subvert religious belief of any kind by any means. Recently I read a portion of a very interesting book called From Five Fingers to Infinity, in which can be read a very interesting discussion of Galileo and the Church. The Church, it seems, did not take issue with Galileo’s science or even with the fact that his science seemed to contradict certain aspects of interpreted Scripture; rather they took issue with the fact that, despite the vehemence of his conviction, Galileo failed provide sufficient enough proof of his conclusions. Now, in our day, Galileo has the benefit of having since been proven right (about some things; certainly not about all that he proposed); then, however, when new cosmologies battled old ones for cultural ascendancy, he himself failed to convince. He simply did not have the scientific proof to convince anyone but those already convinced.

So what’s the point I’m trying to make? Perhaps rather than having a point this is more a note to myself; perhaps I’m simply using my blog as a commonplace book and I’m jotting down a piece of information that interests me. As an apologist, and as someone committed to free thought, however, I’m very much concerned about the manipulation of information, with the ways in which what actually happened differs from how we relate what happened; I’m especially concerned when that manipulation is designed to dirty and smear my faith. I am not an unthinking man and yet I am a man of faith. To many this is a contradiction; but it seems to me that the deliberate misrepresentation of an historical fact to further an agenda is also a contradiction, one entirely less justifiable. If Galileo indeed could not prove his theories to a great enough degree of satisfaction, than it is far less troublesome that the Church attempted to suppress him; the fact that Galileo happened to be right, right in spite of his proof and not because of it, cannot be taken as evidence of the Church’s “fear” of science. The controversy surrounding Galileo is not that the Church, faced with the indisputable evidence of a scientific fact, attempted to silence the voice of reason; this did not happen; the controversy is that the whole episode has been taken as evidence against something that does not exist. The Church did not and does not fear science; ironically, in demanding that the evidence by incontrovertible, the Church was holding Galileo to a higher degree of empirical rationalism than he could deliver.

For a more detailed discussion on Galileo’s confrontation with the Church, read From Five Fingers to Infinity, by Frank J. Swetz (pages 444-47).

Review :: Sweeney Todd

I haven't seen the musical. I have no intentions of ever seeing the musical. I watched Sweeney Todd as a movie and that's how I am going to approach it in this review.


I can never really get a handle on how I feel about Tim Burton. I actually like many of his films, especially Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas (which, yes I know, he technically did not direct) and Sleepy Hollow. At the same time, however, while I really like what he has done, I'm often struck by the suspicion that, rather than being a visionary or an auteur, Burton is actually an artist mired in a state of creative limbo; I fear that he cannot escape the over-produced gothic pretensions for which he is known. Big Fish, easily his best film to date, succeeded so well because it managed to force those pretensions into the service of a story that truly used them instead of simply relying wholly upon them. With Big Fish, Burton seemed to transcend himself and really grow as an artist. But he last two films, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the miserable Corpse Bride, both felt disingenuous and like awkward attempts to create a trademark "Burton" film. I had hoped that Big Fish signaled a maturation in Burton's work; but then I feared that it were merely an interesting digression in an otherwise stalling career. So I entered Sweeney Todd with mixed feelings, hoping for an enjoyable Burton film and fearing that I might get exactly that.

While Sweeney Todd did little to assuage my fears about Burton's inability to transcend his own style, it did demonstrate once again that, when used correctly, the Burton style can still create enjoyable, if somewhat vacuous, films. Based on the Broadway musical, and very much a musical itself, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is the story of, as you'd expect, Sweeney Todd (Johnny Depp), a barber-turned-serial-killer out for blood and vengeance against the London judge (Alan Rickman) who violently separated Todd from his wife and who sent him away to prison under false charges. Upon returning to London years later, Todd meets Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), who tells him of his wife's death and of his daughter's adoption by the same judge who sent Todd away. Mrs. Lovett becomes his partner in crime and together they ghoulishly slaughter unsuspecting victims, whose only crime was wanting a good shave, and they then... well, they then cook them and serve them in Mrs. Lovett's meat pie shop.

The biggest problem with Sweeney Todd is that it doesn't really work as a movie. Perhaps it works better as a musical, I'm not sure. But while the performances are generally solid, especially Depp's, the characters are really very, well, obvious. They are exactly what they seem to be, each and everyone one of them. There is never any question that Todd will begin slitting throats; Rickman's Judge Turpin is simply as cruel and depraved as you think he is; the young sailer Anthony (Jamie Campbell Bower) is the virtuous lovestruck young man; etc, etc. And while each character is essentially a cartoon of itself, we are never really given a reason to believe in any of them. Todd is a murderous monster and yet he is never justified or explained. He just is. Why he begins killing people at random, people who have neither done anything to him nor who facilitate his revenge, is a mystery, especially since, as we see in a long song/montage in which he cuts many, many throats, he doesn't seem to be enjoying himself but rather simply going through the motions of murder. Why Mrs. Lovett, who is at least as monstrous as Todd, wants to help him is an even bigger mystery. I'm not familiar with the language of the stage but in the language of film this type of omission is just sloppy and rather obnoxious. If you want your main characters to kill and cook people you should at least go out of your way to earn it. What the film actually feels like is a the retelling of a legend that the audience is already familiar with and simply accepts without argument or hesitation. Unfortunately, the story of Sweeney Todd is neither well-known nor interesting enough to warrant this kind of treatment.

That being said, there is enough in Sweeney Todd to enjoy that I'd still recommend it. Those Burton pretensions really pay off in the production department. While I still wish he'd outgrow them, his gothic sensibilities really work well here, much like they did in Sleepy Hollow. London has never before looked this dirty and this disgusting which, of course, means that it looks beautiful on film; Mrs. Lovett's over-sized oven and meat grinder are hilarious and appropriately terrifying; and the blood, which flows liberally in this solidly 18A-rated film, is garishly red and thick. The movie actually meanders a bit and gets distracted by a b-plot about two young lovers that isn't really all that interesting. But once the blood starts flowing, and flow it does, the movie regains its focus and becomes rather macabrely enjoyable as we all get to see what we wanted to see coming into the film: Johnny Depp slitting throats. Speaking of Depp, he is once again quite entertaining. Depp has lately managed to make a career out of playing quirky/cartoonish characters, something I'm not sure I like. Just look at the three-movie fiasco that is Pirates of the Caribbean. While I'm still not convinced that Depp is a great actor, I am convinced that under the right conditions he can really perform and those conditions seem to be right when Burton is around.

Of course, the big question going into the film not whether Depp can act but whether he can sing. For the most part, Depp (and everyone else in the film for that matter, except for maybe Carter) is able to pull off the songs. He's not Ewan McGregor in Moulin Rouge! and he seems to be able to only sing one style but he gets the job done. However, the big problem turns out to be not the actors but to be the songs themselves. Most of the movie is sung and about halfway through you start to suspect that the lines are simply being sung for the sake of singing them. There is nothing truly remarkable or memorable about any of the songs and I walked out of the theater unable to remember the melody of any of them, a major failing when it comes to a musical.

Ultimately, Sweeney Todd is a mixed bag. The combination of the light-hearted musical atmosphere and the slasher-style blood splatters, not to mention the cannibalism that our antiheroes foist on the unsuspecting London populace, creates a strange and almost schizophrenic feel, a juxtaposition which I suppose is intended to be part of the story's charm but which really didn't work for me. It ultimately feels like something was missing, some bit of social or political commentary, some shred of poetry that could tie the whole thing together and explain why Todd and Lovett resorted to such extreme measures. And yet, even with all these criticisms of it, I'd still recommend Sweeney Todd. It's ghoulish and fun... if you don't think about it too much. And hey, any movie in which you get to see Sacha Baron Cohen's throat slit can't be all bad, right?

Atlas Shrugged (excerpt)

(I've lately been reading Atlas Shrugged in my spare time. It's an enormous novel and much of it is philosophical discourse. It's wildly didactic and I'm constantly wary of it's claims. And yet, their is a power and a majesty to it that comes from absolute sincerity. I may not agree with her, but I can't not hear Ayn Rand's voice, shouting through these pages with prophetic intensity. Regardless of it's particular ideology, it is a keen and acerbic look into human nature and it is fascinating. There are certain novels which, when you read them, you find that they perfectly articulate many of your own unarticulated and only hinted at thoughts. This is one of the novels for me. This except is a crucial scene between Henry Rearden, one of America's leading and most persecuted industrialist, and Francisco d'Anconia, a supposed playboy and a philosopher of the highest order and a man trying to save Rearden's soul. Enjoy.)

"You take pride in setting no limit to your endurance, Mr. Rearden, because you think that you are doing right. What if you aren't? What if you're placing your virtue in the service of evil and letting it become a tool for the destruction of everything you love, respect and admire? Why don't you uphold your own code of values among men as you do among iron smelters? You who won't allow once per cent of impurity into an alloy of metal - what have you allowed into your moral code?"

Rearden sat very still; the words in his mind were like the beat of steps down the trail he had been seeking: the words were the sanction of the victim.

"You, who would not submit to the hardships of nature, but set out to conquer it and placed it in the service of your joy and your comfort - to what have you submitted at the hands of men? You, who know from your work that one bears punishment only for being wrong - what have you been willing to bear and for what reason? All your life, you have heard yourself denounced, not for your faults, but for your greatest virtues. You have been hated, not for your mistakes, but for your achievements. You have been scorned for all those qualities of character which are your highest pride. You have been called selfish for the courage of acting on your own judgment and bearing sole responsibility for your own life. You have been called arrogant for your independent mind. You have been called cruel for your unyielding integrity. You have been called antisocial for the vision that made you venture upon undiscovered roads. You have been called ruthless for the strength and self-discipline of your drive to your purpose. You have been called greedy for the magnificence of your power to create wealth. You, who've expanded an inconceivable flow of energy, have been called a parasite. You, who've created abundance where there had been nothing but wastelands and helpless, starving men before you, have been called a robber. You, who've kept them all alive, have been called an exploiter. You, the purest and more moral man among them, have been sneered at as a 'vulgar materialist.' Have you stopped to ask them: by what right? - by what code? - by what standard? No, you have borne it all and kept silent. You bowed to their code and you never upheld your own. You knew what exacting morality was needed to produce a single metal nail, but you let them brand you as immoral. You knew that man needs the strictest code of values to deal with nature, but you left the deadliest weapon in the hands of your enemies, a weapon you never suspected or understood. Their moral code is their weapon. Ask yourself what it is that a code of moral values does to a man's life, and why he can't exist without it, and what happens to him if he accepts the wrong standard, by which the evil is the good. Shall I tell you why you're drawn to me, even though you think you ought to damn me? It's because I'm the first man who has given you what the whole world owes you and what you should have demanded of all men before you dealt with them: a moral sanction."

Rearden whirled to him, then remained still, with a stillness like a gasp. Francisco leaned forward, as if he were reaching the landing of a dangerous flight; and his eyes were steady, but their glance seemed to tremble with intensity.

"You're guilty of a great sin, Mr. Rearden, much guiltier than they tell you, but not in the way they preach. The worst guilt is to accept an undeserved guilt - and that is what you have been doing all your life. You have been paying blackmail, not for your vices, but for your virtues. You have been willing to carry the load of an unearned punishment - and to let it grow heavier the greater the virtues you practiced. But your virtues were those which keep men alive. Your own moral code - the one you lived by, but never stated, acknowledged or defended - was the code that preserves man's existence. If you were punished for it, what was the nature of those who punished you? Yours was the code of life. What, then, is theirs? What standard of values lies at its root? What is its ultimate purpose? Do you think that what you're facing is merely a conspiracy to seize your wealth? You, who know the source of wealth, should know it's much more and much worse than that. Did you ask me to name man's motive power? Man's motive power is his moral code. Ask yourself where their code is leading you and what it offers you as your final goal. A viler evil than to murder a man, is to sell him suicide as an act of virtue. A viler evil than to throw a man into a sacrificial furnace, is to demand that he leap in, of his own will, and that be build the furnace, besides. By their own statement, it is they who need you and have nothing to offer you in return. By their own statement, you must support them because they cannot survive without you. Consider the obscenity of offering their impotence and their need - their need of you - as a justification for your torture. Are you willing to accept it? Do you care to purchase - at the price of your great endurance, at the price of your agony - the satisfaction of the needs of your own destroyers?"

"No!"

"Mr. Rearden," said Francisco, his voice solemnly calm, "if you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down on his shoulders - what would you tell him to do?"

"I... don't know. What... could he do? What would you tell him?"

"To shrug."


Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. New York, NY: Signet, 2007. 420-22.

Postmodernity and Literature

In the last couple weeks, a debate of sorts has been taking place in the university newspaper I write for, The Sheaf. Doug Goldie fearlessly and ignorantly attacked the study of classic literature, saying that the mores and sensibilities of Homer and his Iliad were so outmoded and so detached from our postmodern way of life as to be pointless. What value, he asked, can there be in a document that contains such fierce violence, such prejudiced hierarchy, and such obviously chauvinistic views of women? The article both angered and depressed me, filling me a sense of creeping dread. Thankfully, however, it also sparked an outcry and in the following issue an article by Brennan Richardson appeared, denouncing and rebuking Goldie for his short-sighted and narrow article.

While postmodernity may not be all bad, as I sometimes think, it certainly is not all good and Goldie's article contained many of the alarming symptoms of postmodernity that frighten me, symptoms which threaten not only to destroy our sense of greatness and worth but also to unhinge our society and kick it loose from its foundations. The past, its accomplishments, its failures and its literature - especially its literature! - is the foundation of our minds. Whether we like what our heritage offers to us or not, whether we agree with it philosophically or morally, our heritage must be acknowledged; if we ignore it or, worse, alter it to fit our own preferences, we lie to ourselves, we deceive ourselves and the truth will never be found within us. We may stand on the mountain's top but we do so only because there is a mountain standing below us which we did not make. If we step off the mountain, we fall and we die.

In Milton's great poem Paradise Lost, Satan, filled with hate and arrogance, boldly declares to the angel Abdiel,

"That we were formed then, say'st thou? And the work
Of secondary hands, by task transferred
From Father to his Son? Strange point and new!
Doctrine which we would know whence learnt. Who saw
When this creation was? Remember'st thou
Thy making, while the Maker gave thee being?
We know no time when we were not as now;
Know none before us, self-begot, self-raised
By our own quickening power, when fatal course
Had circled his full orb, the birth mature
Of this our native heav'n, ethereal sons." (Paradise Lost, V.853-863)

Milton was not familiar with postmodernity but was nevertheless familiar with its impulse, its desire to cut itself off from its own creation, to cut off the very branch upon which it sits. We are not self-made, as Milton's Satan claimed of himself; we are not of "birth mature." We are who we are and what we are because of a long history of human success and failure. In Paradise Lost, Satan, because of his deliberate refusal to acknowledge his own debt of creation, to acknowledge that he is dependent on something outside himself, was confronted with the vengeance of a justifiably wrathful God; the sight of that flaming chariot was so horrible and so revelatory that, instead of engaging it in impossible battle, he instantly leaped into the horror of chaos and eventually landed in hell. It may seem like too outrageous an analogy, but it seems to me that postmodern man runs the risk of facing a similar sort of judgment when he rejects or ignores that which created him, be it a God, an empire or simply a heritage. The past is immovable; it remains; it guides us, shapes us and, when we ignore it, punishes us.

The great literature of the past is the record of human accomplishment; it is our document of lineage; the proof that we can create great things, that we as a species can rise above the mud and accomplish more than merely war and death. I don't care that The Iliad hurt Doug Goldie's feelings. The Iliad has survived and been revered for thousands of years. It is, quite frankly, more important than Doug Goldie and his narrow opinions. If you cannot gain insight into the human condition from the man Matthew Arnold called "the clearest-souled of men," the fault is not with Homer but with you. The problem with classic literature is not that it contradicts what we'd like to think; the problem is that not enough of us are listening to what it has to say.

Review :: Beowulf

Postmodern man is a like a child who, when confronted with the laws of his parents, breaks down in a weeping, screaming fit of rage, howling at the injustice of not being allowed to do what he pleases. The child is ignorant and impudent and cannot respect either authority of tradition. A story is told for hundreds of years but when postmodern man, this child, hears the story he feels he must change it, make it look more like himself. He tells himself he is "updating" the story, making it more "relevant" to his own situation, but he is lying to himself. He is polluting the story, changing its essential meaning; he is forcing it to please him; he does not want to be offended by what it says.

I am not judging the film as a film at this point. If it were only a film, and if it were not adapted from a canonical text, I would probably have enjoyed it. It is inventive and really quite breathtaking display of graphical prowess. But it calls itself Beowulf and I am judging it as an artifact, as a symptom, of postmodernity, as a display of what is wrong with out current modes of thought. We don't believe in pure heroes anymore; instead of reaching up to them, we pull them down to our level.

That is all I have to say. I loathed Beowulf for no other reason than that it is not Beowulf. Change the name, make a new story, say whatever you would like to say, but do not tell me this is Beowulf. This film is a mockery of that heroic poem. It creates ambiguity where none exists; it takes heroism of the highest order and smears mud all over it; it rejects greatness in favour of a flawed character. This is not Beowulf.

Werner Herzog

There are some artists who, when you are finally made aware of them, completely take over your imagination. They restructure everything about your experience of a medium, whether it is a newly discovered poet renovating your experience of poetry or a newly found painter revolutionizing your experience of canvas. In the world of film, I've had this experience three times now. The first time, three years ago, was when I devoured the films of Stanley Kubrick. For months, he took over my mind and I found my experience of film constantly evolving. Then it happened again two years ago when I finally discovered the brightest star in cinema, Akira Kurosawa. The experience was almost sublime and for months the images of Seven Samurai haunted me like no film has ever done before. Now, I find that it is happening again. It is not happening on as revolutionary a scale as with Kubrick or Kurosawa (there are only so many times your understanding of something can be destroyed and remade, after all), but it is happening in subtle ways that I appreciate just as much. I have discovered the films of Werner Herzog and I have fallen in love all over again.

I have now watched five of Herzog's films: Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht, Woyzeck, Fitzcarraldo, and his most recent film Rescue Dawn. All of them have been exercises in madness and nature, in reaching the limits of human endurance and sanity, and all of them have gently shaped my expectations for what film can do. For so long I have lived and breathed in a cinematic world of stylization, from the pure bravado and exhilaration of Sergio Leone's West to the hallucinations and nightmare of David Lynch's human interior and to the mutation and evolution of the human mind and body in David Cronenberg's world of medical horror. And I have enjoyed these worlds completely. The fantastic and the stylized throws reality into glaring relief; we understand the shape of humanity by charting its outer limits, tracing it's boundaries and by occasionally stepping out further than ordinary human experience demands. Herzog does this too but from an entirely different vantage point, one from which artifice itself nearly disappears and we are left only with the human, naked and exposed, the subject of intense and unblinking scrutiny.
Anyone who has seen a Herzog film has probably, or at the least should have been, struck by his documentarian sensibility. It would be a lie to say that artifice disappears in a Herzog film but it would not be a lie to say that he often manages to make us forget about the artifice, forget that we are looking at something essentially unreal. He gives us images so tactile, so visceral and grueling, so candid and almost voyeuristic, that we are tempted to believe he has stolen away into the jungle with only a camera and managed to capture an event as it unfolds before him. There are moments when this documentary style is almost distracting, as when the camera lingers on little accidents or unscripted events, which ironically draw attention to the artifice of the film exactly by highlighting its lack of cinematic polish, but these moments are rare and forgivable, if one even notices them. While the rigor and clarity of vision of a Stanley Kubrick produces some of the greatest and strongest works of cinema, Herzog's steady and unflinching gaze penetrates deeper into the tissues of humanity and nature and makes us feel like we are watching ourselves, watching a real human drama full of obsessions and madness.

And the world of Herzog is a world of madness, of men stretched to the limits of experience either by insanity or obsession. These are the extremes, these are the myths of man that define us. Here on the edge, here in the jungle, here on the very brink of murder, here is where Herzog defines the human. Herzog's examination of humanity can be startlingly bleak, as in the haunting Aguirre, and it can also be triumphant even in the midst of despair, as in Fitzcarraldo or Rescue Dawn. The human spirit has a great capacity for insanity, it seems, but only because it has a great capacity for strength and power. The films of Werner Herzog explore these two extremes, both of which he suggests are often far more closely related than we'd like to think or admit.

Once a revolution has occurred, it is almost impossible to return to the way things used to be. After Kubrick, I saw movies differently. I had experienced the medium's true potential in the hand's of a true artist. I feel the same way, now, with Herzog.

The Election

Today it's election day in Saskatchewan. I thought of this.

"There is no end to suffering, Glaucon, for our cities, and none, I suspect, for the human race, unless either philosophers becomes kings in our cities, or the people who are now called kings and rulers become real, true philosophers - unless there is this amalgamation of political power and philosophy, with all those people whose inclination is to pursue one or other exclusively being forcibly prevented from doing so."

Plato, The Republic. Translated by Tom Griffith. Cambridge University Press, 2004. 175.

Review :: The Darjeeling Limited

The first Wes Anderson movie I saw was The Royal Tenenbaums and it was on a lazy weekend while I was working at a summer camp. Another counselor and I went into the nearby town to buy pizza and rent some movies. I had recently heard about Anderson and was interested; I remember her being interested in it only because she thought it was another Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson comedy. It is not just another comedy and I think our different reactions to the movie are rather typical of responses to Anderson in general: I fell completely and immediately in love with the film's quirky and loving attention to nuance and minutia while she was simply bewildered by it and probably indifferent to the film as a whole. I don't think she hated it; she just didn't get it.

There is a tendency for some critics and fans to snobbishly say to a film's detractors, "you don't get it," as if this declaration somehow demonstrated a film's value or, worse, as if they, the fans, were somehow privy to secret knowledge about the film which everyone else missed because they are simply not as intelligent. I have often wondered whether I sound like this. The truth is, however, that some people "get" Anderson and others do not. But it's not a matter of esoteric gnostic insight or even about being smarter than the average bear; it's simply a matter of sensibility. Anderson is not the most insightful or mysterious of directors; his stories are not really all that more intelligent than any other well-made and serious comedy or drama. But it is his visual style, his lavish attention to detail and minutia, and his quirky and almost excruciatingly deadpan sense of humour, which set him apart. You either like that or you do not.

The Darjeeling Limited is the story of three estranged brothers, Francis (Owen Wilson), Peter (Adrian Brody) and Jack (Jason Schwartzman), who have not seen each other since their father's funeral over a year ago. Each of the brother's lives are imploding in various ways and so, convinced and slightly duped by Francis, the eldest of the three, they decide to make a "spiritual journey" across India on a train, the Darjeeling Limited.

The story is not complicated and I don't suppose it needs to be. The journey metaphor has been seen many times before and we are all familiar with its tropes and idioms. Anderson is not reinventing the wheel. What is interesting about this story, however, and what separates it from most other road or journey movies, is how little actually happens on this journey. They don't meet a wide variety of odd characters; they are the odd ones. At the end of their journey, they don't find anything - no wizard behind the curtain, no Kurtz in his jungle; they find themselves. The brothers, Francis especially, are deliberately attempting to prompt some sort of religious experience; they've scheduled their enlightenment and reconciliation on the itinerary. And yet, even though they tell themselves they have noble motives, they are consistently petty and thoughtless, self-indulgent and more often than not they exploit their exotic surroundings in a typically Western and material manner. They visit temples and spend more time buying shoes than saying prayers. It is only when they are finally forced off the itinerary and confront the humanity of the people around them that they discover something profound and ultimately unarticulated about themselves.

Of course, all the regular criticisms of Anderson could still be said of The Darjeeling Limited. The film appears pretentious and arrogant and seems to be filled with an inflated sense of self-importance. I think it is. And I think it probably deserves to be. Anderson has achieved something that most filmmakers rarely do: the creation of a completely idiosyncratic and convincing style. He inhabits every frame of this film. He is complete control and he never falters in his execution. Nearly every frame is densely packed with details, each one of which contributes to a deeper and more satisfying understanding of the characters. However, the one criticism that I do think holds water, a few drops anyway, is that Anderson is sometimes a bit too heavy-handed in his execution. Some of his metaphors seem too obvious. Most of the time this fits in nicely with the film's themes, as when Francis, who is looking too hard for an authentic experience and probably measuring his life according to the familiar conventions of a journey metaphor, receives a flash of insight when their train becomes "lost." Other times, though, this heavy-handedness seems unnecessary, as if Anderson could have achieved the same thing without actually having his characters articulate it.

Yet while it sometimes feels like Anderson is hitting you over the head, it at other times feeling like he is a master of the ambiguous and the unspoken, as in the brilliantly executed short film Hotel Chevalier, a companion piece of sorts to The Darjeeling Limited. Anderson can be subtle; sometimes he chooses to be obvious. In either mode, he's crafting brilliant and enjoyable films. The Darjeeling Limited doesn't replace The Royal Tenenbaums as my favourite of his films but it does once again validate my opinion of him as an artist. The Darjeeling Limited demonstrates that after five feature length films, Wes Anderson is not loosing steam and remains an important and brilliant director.