"Monsters, monsters from the id!"

While rummaging through movie classics recently, I ran across one of the greatest of science fiction films ever, Forbidden Planet. Released in 1956, it starred Leslie Nielsen as spaceship commander Adams, Walter Pidgeon as the mysterious Dr. Morbius*, and Anne Francis as his lovely, innocently wise daughter, Alta. Loosely based on Shakespeare's Tempest, no movie did more, in one stroke, to make science fiction a respectable genre.

Today, Forbidden Planet seems somewhat awkward. The original trailer didn't quite know what to do: proclaim it just another B.E.M. ("bug-eyed monster") movie, or pitch it "highbrow"? But its innovations make up a long list copied in obvious ways by almost all later movie and television science fiction. Looking for the origin of the Star Trek transporters and warp drive, or the suspended animation of Lost in Space and 2001? Looking for the origin of the whole Star Trek paradigm -- an Earth ship encountering humans stranded on an alien world, humans needing but not wanting rescue; or the familiar trio of captain, executive officer, and doctor? Looking for the origins of a sophisticated visual science fiction with literary roots? The origin of Star Wars' charming, superhuman robots? The sinister potential of advanced technology? Far-out electronic "space" music for a score? Here it is.

MGM knew what it was doing and spared no expense or care for detail. The production values were astonishing for the time. The robot later known as Robby was introduced by Forbidden Planet and would later make multiple movie and television appearances. Here he is an aloof but ever-helpful machine that (who?) can, from a small sample, make apparently endless supplies of anything desired. Reminiscent of his avatar Caliban, he is the remains of a race of superintelligent beings called the Krell, whose technology Morbius reconstructs and uses to enhance his own mind to superhuman levels. Glimpses of the Krell's technical achievements are thrown out to whet the audience's appetite. The only mystery is the why the Krell vanished.

The movie's most brilliant stroke is that the Krell and their likeness are never shown, only hinted at. Also never shown directly is the monster that kills several starship crew members and which is only glimpsed in one scene produced by some Disney personnel "lent" to MGM. A technique borrowed from horror flicks -- never showing the danger directly -- moves Forbidden Planet far beyond the staple sci-fi movies of the Fifties. The cinematography in Technicolor and the score entirely produced by electronics, not traditional instruments, reinforces these qualities.

The full force of the story doesn't kick you in the head until the last scene. Watching the detonation of the planet from far away, Anne Francis and Leslie Nielsen are left to contemplate the failure of a high civilization, the awesome Krell, whose technical mastery put them under the illusion that they had escaped their own animality.

POSTSCRIPT: The electronically-scored soundtrack is available on a separate CD, which was first released in 1986 for the film's thirtieth anniversary. A special two-disc DVD set was issued for the movie's fiftieth anniversary in 2006.

The score's creators, husband-and-wife team Louis and Bebe Barron, were not sure they were doing sound effects, or music -- until John Cage convinced them that it was music.
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* An interesting merger of "morbid" and "Möbius," as in the non-orientable Möbius strip.

Is modern art that bad?

Are the Philistines on the march over at the Guardian? Joe Queenan just published there a splenetic outburst against modern art. He doesn't seem to like much after about 1900. Terry Teachout does his own examination of Queenan's hostility at the Wall Street Journal. Complaints about modern art -- I don't mean just negative reactions to anything new, but sustained, visceral dislike for the modern -- are as old as modern art itself.

There is a problem with artistic modernism, especially music. But the problem is more recent than Queenan thinks and dates from the 1950s, not the 1900s. It is true that the "break" that defines modernism happened some time in the decade or so before 1914, and much of modern art's problem with the general public dates from those years. But the literature and visual art of that period have long since been been assimilated by both critics and the general public, and the same is true of most of its music. The later art of the 20th century has just been a working out of that moment: the breakdown of inherited realist, classical, and romantic esthetics.

Since 1945, the fates of the arts have diverged. Literature has proven the most conservative, largely abandoning the modernistic experiments of, say, Proust, Joyce, and Nabakov. There is widespread admiration for their achievements, but few serious imitators. Literature's close relation to time-bound narrative, reinforced by the ubiquity of movies and television, made that fate difficult to avoid. The visual arts suffered a different fate: widespread appreciation of and big money for signature breakthrough works. Still, there were fewer and fewer serious imitators and practitioners in the last century's concluding decades.

Something entirely different happened to music. While undergoing wrenching changes from the end of the nineteenth century -- the rise of commercialized popular music, the influence of non-Western musical cultures, the exhaustion of the classical-romantic paradigm -- Western "art" music was still vigorous down to the Second World War. The distinction between "popular" and "high" music had not yet become a chasm. Contrary to Queenan and other critics,* the twentieth-century repertory is second only to the nineteenth century's in being studied, played, and listened to.**

The true failure of modern art happened after 1945. The sheer destructiveness of the Second World War had multiple, devastating impacts on European centers of art, reinforcing the existing disruptions of war, revolution, and exile. Classical music, especially the core Romantic and Austro-German traditions, has taken its time recovering from the way it was misused by the collectivist movements and totalitarian states of the first half of the twentieth century. The straddling of popular and classical musical cultures, by the 1950s, seemed fatally compromised by either accusations of "selling out" or knuckling under to the agit-prop demands of "socialist realism." On the other hand, the unprecedented explosion of techniques and resources for popular music, starting in the late 50s, pulled audiences elsewhere. Then television miniaturized everyone's mind.

And something else went wrong in the decades after 1945: the academicization of once-radical artistic tendencies, especially Expressionism, a movement that started in Germanic countries as a reaction to the popular cheapening of Romanticism. Expressionism was a brief but potent episode of "hyper-romanticism," in the sense of validating the artist's expression of (usually negative) inner feelings, regardless of external form or audience comprehension. It's impossible to systematize such a tendency. The originating works of this movement have still not lost, and probably will never lose, their power to shock. Yet, starting in the 1920s with Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, attempts have been made to reduce it to formula. Formulas enabled lesser talents to create lifeless imitations of something that can't be mimicked. Appreciation and artistic creation became mired in a familiar Germanic-academic tendency to load esthetic values down with a lot of heavy theorizing.† After 1945, the spread of higher education put this questionable and half-digested theorizing on everyone's dinner table, as it were.††

Esthetics begins and ends with the senses, not Theory.‡ The origins of modern Western art lie in the happy symbiosis of the inward feeling of the northern peoples (Germans, Celts, Slavs, and others) with classical notions of proportion, form, and timing preserved by the Italians and French. Modernism began to sprout in the late nineteenth century when that symbiosis broke down, and the Germanic and the non-Germanic went their separate ways.
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* Like Henry Pleasants, whose Agony of Modern Music (1955) is entertaining, right in many details, and wrong in the big picture.

** I use "nineteenth century" loosely, running from late classical (late Haydn, mature Mozart and Beethoven) through late romantic, bordering on modern (Mahler and Strauss). The "high" modern period ran from the 1890s until the 1950s, from Debussy through, say, Bartók and Bernstein.

† A complaint made earlier and more effectively by Tom Wolfe in his Painted Word and From Bauhaus to Our House. The Germans themselves have a nifty term, Augenmusik -- "music for the eyes" and not for the ears.

†† Perceptive readers will sense the tortured ghost of Allan Bloom and his prolix, controversial Closing of the American Mind haunting this posting. The trouble with Bloom's book is that he took twice as many words as needed to make his (largely valid) point.

‡ "... this blathering jargon, which so warms the hearts of philosophy professors ..." (Schoenberg himself).

At the movies

In thrall to ideology, formula, and powerful special effects, Hollywood has had a difficult time producing really memorable movies recently, although the situation is slowly improving. The independent and semi-independent scenes are livelier than ever. Movies made in and about the Middle East are especially rich these days, with Iran and Israel leading the pack.

The Band's Visit (Bikur Ha-Tizmoret, 2007) is the first feature of Israeli director Eran Kolirin, with some Hebrew and Arabic, but mostly in English (which is why it didn't qualify for the Oscars as a foreign film). The story is a bit of a fairy tale, the plot set in motion by one of those subtle Middle Eastern misunderstandings. In striking sky-blue uniforms, the Ceremonial Police Band of Alexandria, Egypt, is sent on a cross-cultural visit to the Arab cultural center of the Israeli city of Petah Tikvah (Door of Hope, founded in 1878 and the oldest modern Jewish settlement in Israel). But in Arabic, there's no "p," only "b," so the visiting musicians accidentally take a much longer bus ride to Beit Tikvah, the House of Hope, an ironic name for one of those dreary Israeli development towns in the Negev desert (or so it seemed to me).* And the movie sets off from there, in a probing story both realistic and surrealistic. See it if you have a chance.

Another must-see recent foreign film is The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen, 2006), a powerful first work from German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck and an Oscar winner (German, with English subtitles). Set in the mid-80s, a few years before the end of Cold War, the story centers around an agent of the East German secret police (Stasi) assigned to spy on a couple, becoming absorbed into their lives beyond even the obvious potential for voyeurism. Over East Germany's 45-year history, the Stasi became the most efficient and cunning secret police ever known. Many millions of people, often themselves blackmailed by information from existing informants, became in turn informants themselves, turning the whole country into a giant snitching exercise twisting all institutions and relationships. Precisely the social and cooperative virtues supposedly prized in a communist utopia were relentlessly undermined by the destruction of trust and the isolation of individuals from one another by an all-powerful state.

The legacy was and still is painful, since the full truth about this system became known after the Berlin Wall came down and shocked the disintegrating country, accelerating its fall. The Lives of Others is a powerful piece of Cold War history and joins the ranks of other anti-collectivist classics such as 1984 and Darkness at Noon. Hollywood's ideological bent and historical ignorance make such movies difficult to produce here. Don't miss it.

POSTSCRIPT: Another recent offering from the former Soviet bloc, set in late Cold War Romania, is 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (4 luni, 3 saptamini si 2 zile, Romanian with English subtitles). I have not seen it, but have heard nothing but very positive things about it.
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* That's how the ancient Neapolis ("New City") in northern Palestine became the modern Arabic Nablus. Thus Arabic-speakers argue about "bolitics," not about politics.

See, Tracy really wanted it ...

There are those of us who, last decade, were deeply impressed by the parallels between the career of a real Democratic First Lady-turned-candidate and a certain fictional high-school class presidential candidate, Tracy Flick, in Tom Perrotta's novel Election. Flick was memorably played in the 1999 movie by Reese Witherspoon. High school class president, boss's wife ... what's next?

Now that an upstart has come to challenge the One Who Is Not To Be Challenged, the parallels deepen. SlateV reports in-depth.

Things fell apart

... and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.

- Yeats, The Second Coming

Joan Didion's classic Slouching Towards Bethlehem was published 40 years ago, just as American culture and politics were coming apart and the conformist liberalism nurtured by the Great Depression and World War Two caved in. Her perceptions of the Boomers (a half-generation younger than she) were uncannily on-target and ring true all these decades later. The famous title chapter, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," dug into the hippie culture of Haight-Ashbury right around the Summer of Love (1967) and discovered anomie and profound social disconnection. But don't miss some of the other essays as well, about California dreamin', the concluding gems on places, and the sublime "Personals," especially the two on self-respect and morality - or what she called the "insidious ethic of conscience." *

What would become so characteristic of the Boomer style - the morality of private conscience versus a social ethic - was pioneered by people - the first "hipsters," the Beatniks, activists, people fascinated by hobos and the "bluesmen" - born in the 1930s and somewhat older than the first Boomers. The 1930s were the only truly radical decade in American history ("radical" in the European sense). But those who came of age in the 1950s found little attractive in the totalitarian cults of the 30s. Postwar expanding opportunity deflated political impulses, which became rechanneled instead into a radicalism of personal style, with a strong esoteric tinge - all very different from the earlier American taste for the plain and obvious. In full flower - Didion's book is a snapshot album of that moment of flowering - it would lead to an anarchy of petty and sometimes violent competing authoritarianisms, most obviously in the form of "lifestyle" and religious cults, but also the student and "new" Left and the Black Power movement. This indeed informs the Boomers' most characteristic political trait, their taste for fringe ideas and converting them into irritating crusades. Later, in middle age, the Boomer obsession with such culty ideas would turn into such causes as "global warming" and, in some respects, the war in Iraq.

Didion's point is reinforced by a thought from Lionel Trilling:

Some paradox of our nature leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.

Didion firmly rejected the cult of private conscience and the incessant attachment of "morality" to every desire or need. Lest we think this makes us better people, we should remember that people rarely carry out the worst evils purely from self-interest. Such evils are always strongly tinged or even determined by a fanaticism and one-ups-man-ship often labeled "idealistic." The cult of fake absolute morality lies at the root of much of what's wrong with the Boomers, or at least their politically active wing. It's not totally new in American culture; moralistic streaks are obvious in older generations, evidenced by certain Presidents like Wilson and Carter. But never have pet zealotries become so widespread and democratized as they have in the years since 1965. It was then that, as she put it, "the whine of hysteria" came to be heard in the land.

Here we can also better understand the nature of the moral sickness, often mislabeled "moral relativism," that afflicts the Boomers and their children. The problem is not moral relativism. It is rather, too many competing moral absolutisms. The media, by serving up a fresh set of moral absolutes every day, compound the problem. It's like atonal music - the center does not hold, and there's no "key" to come home to. It's every key at once.

The arts have also bowed to cults of inner and private fantasies. Didion's deadpan-witty "I Can't Get That Monster Out of My Mind," about the decline of Hollywood movies, skewers the then-new, now-old and tiresome, system of auteur-ship that replaced the older studio system. What it allowed was directors and producers to film their private fantasies, but not necessarily good movies. Perhaps they're worth making, but not always worth watching.

So. With perhaps a little prodding from abroad, we are all grown up now in Hollywood, and left to set out in the world on our own .... Whether or not a picture receives a Code seal no longer matters much at the box office. No more curfew, no more Daddy, anything goes. Some of us do not quite like this permissiveness; some of us would like to find "reasons" why our pictures are not as good as we know in our hearts they might be. Not long ago I met a producer who complained to me of the difficulties he had working within what I recognized as the [old studio] System, although it did not call it that. He longed, he said, to do an adaptation of a certain Charles Jackson short story. "Some really terrific stuff," he said. "Can't touch it, I'm afraid. About masturbation."

Didion's politics might be described as "eclectic-liberal." But her book is essentially conservative, inasmuch as it implicitly holds culture as more important than politics. Some of her pieces (hint!) are quiet satire, an inherently conservative form.** Didion's work is often bracketed with that of Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson - the "new journalism" of the 60s and 70s. But while she was writing in and about the same period, her style is engaged but definitely third-person. She's sometimes passionate, but not the intensely subjective, in-the-midst-of-it, writer trying to erase the line between herself and her subjects.

The Boomers often still flounder in their playpen of narcissism, so well captured by Didion, and many of them will apparently never leave it. They'll grow old first.

POSTSCRIPT: And when they're sixty-four, and older, what will things look like? Take a peek with Megan McArdle.
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* This perception of the post-1965 free-fall of American culture and politics informed her title, taken from the famous poem by Yeats. The poem is frequently alluded to and short enough to read in its entirety in a minute or two. Yeats penned it in 1919, just after the First World War.

The kulturpessimismus that engulfed Europe in the 1920s and 30s took a while longer to sink in here. The fad for existentialism and nuclear-holocaust anxieties of the late 40s and 1950s were the first signs of it. But until the mid-60s, American society still largely retained the nineteenth-century faith in reason, progress, and humanity that had been killed off in Europe.

** So quiet, that in fact, some readers have mistaken Didion herself for a hip-ironic-mocker of California. But of course, if you read the book, you'll learn that from she's from California - the Central Valley - and thus the real McCoy. Perhaps Slouching Towards Bethlehem is, at bottom, the diary of a Sacramento girl come to San Francisco and New York to wonder at the hippies and ask some embarrassing questions.

Ferris saves

Really, he does :)

Ferris Saves is a Web archive of all those fun-filled teens and twenties movies of the 1980s and 90s. While the site has not seen much activity recently, it's a treasure trove of reviews and links of all those greats of yesterday, starting with John Hughes and his immortal creation, and Saint Molly too.

Tolerating the intolerant

Tolerance is a personal virtue, but it's not a political principle. Freedom or rights - that's a principle. Tolerance is too fragile to bear the weight that people sometimes lay on it. Earlier this summer, the father of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter killed in Pakistan by Islamic fanatics in 2002, wrote this moving and pointed essay on tolerance and what's wrong with it. Unfortunately, it's behind a subscription wall, but here are some essential passages.

I used to believe that the world essentially divided into two types of people: those who were broadly tolerant; and those who felt threatened by differences. If only the forces of tolerance could win out over the forces of intolerance, I reasoned, the world might finally know some measure of peace.

But there was a problem with my theory, and it was never clearer than in a conversation I once had with a Pakistani friend who told me that he loathed people like President Bush who insisted on dividing the world into "us" and "them." My friend, of course, was taking an innocent stand against intolerance, and did not realize that, in so doing, he was in fact dividing the world into "us" and "them," falling straight into the camp of people he loathed.

This is a political version of a famous paradox formulated by Bertrand Russell in 1901, which shook the logical foundations of mathematics. Any person who claims to be tolerant naturally defines himself in opposition to those who are intolerant. But that makes him intolerant of certain people - which invalidates his claim to be tolerant.

Shall we be tolerant of the intolerant? The recent movie about Daniel Pearl's life and death, A Mighty Heart, brought this question into sharp focus.

The political lesson of Russell's paradox is that there is no such thing as unqualified tolerance. Ultimately, one must be able to expound intolerance of certain groups or ideologies without surrendering the moral high ground normally linked to tolerance and inclusivity. One should, in fact, condemn and resist political doctrines that advocate the murder of innocents, that undermine the basic norms of civilization, or that seek to make pluralism impossible. There can be no moral equivalence between those who seek ... to build a more liberal, tolerant world and those who advocate the annihilation of other faiths, cultures, or states.

.... Thanks to the release of A Mighty Heart, the movie based on Mariane Pearl's book of the same title, Danny's legacy is once again receiving attention.... At the same time, I am worried that A Mighty Heart falls into a trap Bertrand Russell would have recognized: the paradox of moral equivalence, of seeking to extend the logic of tolerance a step too far.

The founders of modern liberal democratic thought understood this point well, particularly in connection with religion, since that was the great burning issue of the Western world a few centuries ago, when modern liberal societies first took form around the north Atlantic coast. They could consistently apply rights even to religious sects they didn't like or thought were a little crazy. Some of them (like Voltaire, Jefferson, and Hegel) had ambiguous feelings about Christianity and negative views of Judaism. But their commitment to rights and to freedom of religion was unequivocal.

A more recent example was H. L. Mencken, the famous libertarian journalist from Baltimore. To his diary, he confided sometimes negative views of blacks and decidedly mixed feelings about Jews - even though, in his case, it was literally true that some of his best friends and closest colleagues were Jews. Nonetheless, he was a consistent critic of antisemites and one of the few national journalists to criticize Woodrow Wilson (originally from Virginia) for imposing southern-style segregation on the District of Columbia and the federal government when he became president in 1913.

These dead white gentlemen understood that political principles aren't just about immediate personal feelings. Rights or freedom as a political and legal concept has a precision and a solidity intrinsic to it that's not a necessary component of tolerance. Rights are not a unilateral indulgence, but a reciprocal recognition and a consistent principle. Tolerance is essential for common social life, but trying to make it a political principle turns it to mush - a lazy conformism that the "professional obscurers of moral clarity" slip into like a pair of comfortable but ratty old jeans.

Indeed, following an advance screening of A Mighty Heart, a panelist representing the Council on American-Islamic Relations [a Saudi-sponsored front group] reportedly said, "We need to end the culture of bombs, torture, occupation, and violence. This is the message to take from the film." The message that angry youngsters are hearing is unfortunate: All forms of violence are equally evil; therefore, as long as one persists, others should not be ruled out.

Danny's tragedy demands an end to this logic. There can be no comparison between those who take pride in the killing of an unarmed journalist and those who vow to end such acts - no ifs, ands, or buts.... My son Danny had the courage to examine all sides. He was a genuine listener and a champion of dialogue. Yet he also had principles and red lines. He was tolerant but not mindlessly so. I hope viewers will remember this when they see A Mighty Heart.

Year-end round-up and a merry ...

Random thoughts on the year's best books and movies ....

* Lawrence Wright's The Looming Towers: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 is the best narrative history of the 9/11 attacks so far. It's tightly focused on the primary actors and shows you through personal vignettes how the attackers succeeded and how the defenders failed. For more background, see this posting. C-SPAN's BookTV interviewed Wright recently.

* The year's best political book is Mark Steyn's America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. We're living through an era of rapid geopolitical change, and unfortunately, our political elites mostly spent the post-Cold War period asleep, misunderstanding, or lost in absurd partisan follies. Steyn's book will get you thinking, get you infuriated, get you to agree or disagree - but most of all, it will get you to wake up, open your eyes, and pay attention. As a bonus, it features Steyn's trademark zany humor and wordplay. He's shamelessly promoting it over on his Web site (greedy bastards, these conservatives :).

In connection with the theme, consider Niall Ferguson's much larger tome, The War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and the Descent of the West and this related posting.

* Another Big Book is Diarmaid MacCulloch's The Reformation, released in paper this year, and the best one-volume history in a long time. It focuses mainly on the religious and social aspects of the Reformation, but also lays into the relief the unintended consequences: the simultaneous growth of religious freedom and oppression, the separation of religious authority and civil government, the divergent histories of western and central-eastern Europe, the rise of skepticism and the Enlightenment, and the rise of the nation-state. Useful for understanding the modern Western political system and to compare with the many-centuries decline of the Muslim world. (Don't let all that oil $$ fool you!) A tale both interesting in its own right and highly relevant to our current mess.

* For popular science, I've beaten the subject of string theory and its failure to death, but remember Peter Woit's Not Even Wrong and Lee Smolin's The Trouble with Physics.

On a more positive note, don't forget Nina Planck's Real Food, reviewed here. Related is The Omnivore's Dilemma, which I haven't read, but have heard good things about.

* It has nothing to do with 2006, but I rediscovered it this year, William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways, a quintessentially American book about a quintessentially American thing, the road trip - in this case, around the US in 1978 in a van called Ghost Dancing. A good companion is another, rather different classic also based on a road trip, Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the first book I read in college and never forgot.

Both books are sometimes compared to Kerouac, but either one is far better.

* The year's funniest movie is Little Miss Sunshine, a sweet, sharp barely-functional family comedy of mini-epic proportions, with an unforgettable ending.

* The year's sexiest movie: The Devil Wears Prada. It's really a chick flick, but no healthy male should pass up two hours with Anne Hathaway. Plus it has KT Tunstall's catchy theme song.

* NOT the year's funniest movie, but still worth watching for its bizarre scatology and unique "plot," is Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Sacha Baron Cohen brings Ali G. and his questionable antics to America, to impress and awe the unwashed natives. The BBC was less impressed: see please here for BBC reviewing of Borat cinema.

* And don't forget United 93, a small gem of a movie that never got the attention it deserved. Democracy in action: airliner passengers don't wait for Homeland Security; they figure it out for themselves and act.
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On Donner, on Blitzen ... on Donder, for purists ... oy ... and to all the nice goyim out there, merry Christmas and happy new year ... and to all, a gut yuntif :)