Fun 4th of July fact: from the middle of the 20th century to the present, the US has probably produced a more impressive crop of great opera singers than any other country. Maria Callas, James King, Leontyne Price, Robert Merrill, Grace Bumbry, Marian Anderson, Anna Moffo, Beverley Sills, Shirley Verrett, Sherill Milnes, Marilyn Horne, Jess Thomas, Renee Fleming, Martina Arroyo, Jessye Norman, Frederica von Stade, Kathleen Battle, Thomas Hampson, Isabel Leonard, Lisette Oropesa, Eric Owens, Dawn Upshaw, Samuel Ramey, Joyce DiDonato, Deborah Voight, Lawrence Brownlee, Alek Shrader, and many others hail from the US.
As long as America exists, it will need at least some shared narratives to bind together its civic community. For a long time, we’ve tried to make the country’s establishment and its founding institutions the center of our civic narrative, cultivating an almost-religious veneration for the founders and the constitution. But I don’t think that this longstanding “civil religion” is viable. The Founders had plenty of remarkable, beneficial, and lasting achievements, but it’s hard for me to stomach treating men like Washington and Jefferson, who kept their fellow human beings in slavery, as pure heroes. (I imagine that those whose ancestors Washington, Jefferson, and men of their class kept in bondage would find it even more difficult to stomach.) The US Constitution was a spectacular innovation in 18th century republican statecraft, but it was also, as William Lloyd Garrison wrote, a “covenant with death” whose entrenchment of slaveholders’ power set the stage for years of ruthless exploitation and a bloody civil war. Even today, it still helps a cruel and reactionary minority retain power nationwide. I can’t worship the US constitution while a president who un-democratically came to power without a plurality or majority of the popular vote robs the country and imprisons thousands in inhumane camps without due process, protected from impeachment by the wildly unrepresentative Senate. If we don’t put the Founders and the Constitution in their proper historical place, our old civic religion will choke us.
We should allow the arts, letters, and sciences rather than politics to assume a central place in our civic narrative. The United States has produced an outstanding array of thinkers and creators. Unlike the framers of the Constitution, they come from every part of the American social party; unlike the blessings of political liberty, the products of their work are fairly universally available. The great opera singers I listed above– a collection of farm boys, children of immigrants, African-Americans, and Jews who beat the Old World at its own game– are sterling examplars. We can acknowledge our country’s historical imperfections and failings, but still celebrate a flourishing and noble national heritage.
Olivia Wilde’s BOOKSMART is a sharp directorial debut which features many superb comedic set-pieces, imaginatively staged fantasy sequences, and strong comedic performances from young actors– many of whom were previously unknown. It would be worth a recommendation on those merits alone.
I found, though, that it also spoke to aspects of my life experience in ways that few other films address quite as effectively or honestly. As the meme goes, I felt personally attacked by BOOKSMART’s relateable content. And the film’s attack genuinely cut, because in one of the film’s heroines, Molly, I recognized myself at my most judgmental and least kind.
In a previous post, I talked about the disciplined and narrow track which ambitious high school students have to follow in order to win admission and scholarships at prestigious colleges, which I called the cursus honorum. BOOKSMART’s heroines, Molly and Amy, are high-achieving high schoolers who put everything but their close friendship with each other aside so that they could dedicate themselves more fully to success in the cursus. Molly, whose walls are decorated with pictures of Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Michelle Obama, wants to rise to power and glory as the youngest-ever Supreme Court justice; Amy, who wants to spend the summer before she goes to college on a service trip in Botswana, wants to achieve so she can help others. By the final week of high school, it seems like the universe has rewarded their decision to sacrifice romance, partying, and mischief for academic success; Amy will be heading to Columbia in the fall, and Molly will be going to Yale. On the last day of school, Molly is smugly certain that her hard work will put her ahead of her drinking and sex-having fellow students, who she talks about with contempt.
Molly’s worldview is shattered when she finds out that the students who she dismissed as slackers or sluts also succeeded in school and got into good colleges. The film’s plot starts in earnest when she emerges from her ensuing catatonia and decides that she and Amy will have to try to make up for years of missing out in just one night.
I quickly recognized that Molly’s high school path, her contempt for some of her fellow students, and her resentment echoed aspects of my own life. She’s the worst, but I was the worst in similar ways. In high school, I was so dedicated to my schoolwork and extracurriculars that I spent only a little time doing the sort of unstructured, unsupervised goofing-off and hanging-out that helps teenagers foster their strongest friendships and first romantic relationships. I only had one two-week fling before I graduated, and I didn’t have sex or get properly drunk until I was about halfway through college. My belief in the trade-off I was making brought out the worst in me. I was often aloof, distant, and arrogant with my fellow students, and I often looked down on or insulted those who didn’t seem to share my dedication to knowledge and hard work. I felt that my trade-off, in some karmic sense, that I should get to lord it over my peers in the “next life” of adulthood, and felt resentful when admissions decisions or financial considerations allowed some of them to go to colleges which were more prestigious than the one which I attended. My sacrifice, contempt, and resentment weren’t as exaggerated or visible as Molly’s, but they were similar in kind, if not degree.
A lot of screenwriters were nerds in high school, so we’ve seen a lot of protagonists who experience this sort of resentment or contempt. Unfortunately, many of those writers lack the insight to recognize that this resentment is misplaced and the judgments that it leads us to are frequently incorrect. Indeed, in some films, like REVENGE OF THE NERDS, the writers celebrate the protagonists’ triumph over the people who enjoyed the pleasures they had missed out on– which includes cruel pranks and a literal sexual assault– as a natural, moral, and just outcome. Because former high school strivers make up a disproportionate chunk of America’s young cultural, intellectual, economic, and political elite, this narrative has toxic consequences. It blinds these young men and women to the role that random factors played in their own success and provides them with an ideological justification for ignoring the claims of the dispossessed. It’s also harmful to them as human beings; unjustified resentment poisons those who carry it. I only started becoming aware of my attitude and how harmful it was a few years after I graduated from high school, and even though I’m much more socially adept and self-aware than I used to be, I haven’t healed entirely. I still have a bit of a chip on my shoulder about having “only” gone to Rice rather than a top-tier Ivy, MIT, Caltech or Stanford. I’m still far too prone to equate my value as a human being with my academic success. And, when I heard about my upcoming 10 year high-school reunion, my first thought was the petty pleasure of showing everyone how attractive and successful I am now rather than the much richer and more meaningful joy of seeing how everyone who I shared an important life phase with has grown and matured. I know that all of this is silly and self-destructive, especially in light of the many favors which fortune has shown my life; I only hope that with a continued search for mindfulness and compassion, these feelings will fade further.
In her last wild night of high school, Molly, after experiencing Dionysian ecstacies that snap her out of her rigid Apollonian self-discipline and a painful shock which jolts her out of those ecstacies, learns and grows. She recognizes the value in classmates who she dismissed and lets her resentment go. I hope that this movie helps a generation of nerds like Molly and I learn to let go of our empty judgment and resentment more quickly.
Zhang Yimou, the director of HERO, HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS, and CURSE OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER, has returned to what he does best: crafting highly stylized and surprise-filled wuxia (ie: Chinese period martial arts) movies painted in distinctive, striking color palettes.
A particularly striking example from HEROAnother from HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS
In a bold departure, Zhang’s new film, SHADOW, uses a stark monochrome color palette reminiscent of the school of ink-wash painting which flourished during the Northern Song dynasty.
“Sitting Alone by a Stream,” by the great Northern Song painter Fan Kuan (c. 960-1030 CE)
A landscape shot from SHADOWInk-wash paintings also decorate many of SHADOW’s costumes
As always, Zhang’s use of color serves his film’s overall thematic and narrative ends. SHADOW is a film about opposites: light and dark, fire and water, male and female, war and peace, action and reaction, aggression and accommodation. The tai ji diagram (which plays a major role in several of the film’s scenes) represents the opposing forces of yin and yang as separate but unified; SHADOW in turn emphasizes binaries and then collapses or inverts them in surprising ways– the white, black, and gray of its palette all have parallels in the film’s story.
Yin and yang, represented simultaneously in a diagram and in combat
The conflict between opposites at SHADOW’s thematic heart is embodied by its protagonist, a man named Jing who has been trained since boyhood to serve as a body double for the Kingdom of Pei’s powerful military Commander. In many ways, Jing is the Commander’s opposite. He reacts to circumstances which the Commander creates and he is gentle towards the wife who the Commander treats sternly. The Commander wants to conquer cities and seize thrones, while Jing only wants to return home to his blind mother. But at the same time, Jing mirrors his hated master with uncanny perfection, as another character says, he is “more Commander than the Commander.”
Both Commanders likewise stand in opposition to the King of Pei, who at least appears to be a passive and scheming dilettante who prefers calligraphy to battle and dishonor to struggle; the King, in turn, stands in opposition to his passionate, outspoken younger sister. All of these tensions explode into action when Jing, acting on the wounded Commander’s behalf, challenges Pei’s ally General Yang to a duel for the fate of a city, disrupting the King’s plans for peace. I don’t want to spoil the unfolding of film’s complex plot; I think that most viewers will be both surprised and satisfied by its many twists and turns.
Ultimately, I found SHADOW excellent, but I don’t think that it quite lives up to HERO or HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS. The monochrome color palette is striking and thematically appropriate, but it doesn’t allow Zhang to create the narrative progression and visual variation which characterize those earlier wuxia epics. SHADOW’s blacks, whites, and grays don’t change with the film’s revelations, and it’s a bit too easy to leave with the sense that nothing has changed. That might be part of the film’s thesis, but as a viewer, I found it somewhat frustrating. SHADOW is still a great cinematic experience, though; I would encourage you to see it on the big screen if you can.
Why the Dreamworks Classic Still has an Ogre-whelming Hold on our Hearts
This evening, I’ll be attending an outdoor screening of Shrek. The movie’s animation and soundtrack show its age, but almost twenty years after its release, the irreverent send-up of fairytales and Disney movies still commands an impressive following, providing fodder for fan-festivals, memes, mash-ups, and one particularly spectacular crowd-crafted remake.
So, why does Shrek still have such a hold on the millennial imagination? I posit three simple answers
1: Shrek is Good
The most obvious reason for Shrek‘s enduring success is its quality. Although the film is packed with references to pop culture and jabs at its producer’s former employers at Disney, it never succumbs to the lazy practice of substituting un-elaborated references for actual jokes.* Its humor, characterization, and thematics all work together; the success of each enhances the others. Consider, for example, the “ogres are like onions” scene:
The scene’s comedy and its pathos come from the same root: Donkey’s repeated fundamental misunderstandings of Shrek’s real nature and the increasing frustration that Shrek feels as his attempts to explain himself fail. Their exchange reveals that paradox which shapes Shrek’s ogre-all approach to the world outside his swamp. He desperately wants to be understood and loved as he is, but both his fearsome appearance and his sheer irritability make his efforts to reach out both difficult and painful. He suffers from what the pessimistic philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer and the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, call the hedgehog’s dilemma. How many children’s movies make you laugh while simultaneously exploring a very real and painful aspect of the human condition? This success contributes to Shrek‘s enduring popularity.
2: Shrek’s internal contradictions align the film’s ethos with Millennial culture
Shrek is rife with paradox. It’s a satire of moralistic fairy-tales which is also a sincere and effectively-executed fairy-tale which delivers its own moral about self-acceptance. It also savages the sterile, all-pervasive, context-insensitive commercialism of the Disney empire even though its creators launched one of the most inescapable, all-pervasive, and disturbing merchandising campaigns the twenty-first century has seen so far.
Even in the most intimate spaces, you cannot evade his gaze
This combination of irony and sincerity characterizes a lot of millennial culture. Memes (whose referential nature Shrek prefigured) deploy ridiculous juxtapositions to articulate their authors’ deeply-held beliefs. Across the political spectrum, tumblr social justice activists, Chapo Trap House-ish “dirtbag” leftists, and Pepe-posting 4chan neo-nazis create online personas which fuse self-mockery and political intensity. Brace Belden, a twitter shitposter with the handle “PissPigGrandad” who risked his life fighting alongside the anarcho-socialist militiamen of Rojava in Syria might be the best epitome of the ethos. Shrek is a fitting text for this generation’s ethos.
3: Shrek was the End of History’s Last Gasp
After the fall of the USSR, politicians and pundits alike proclaimed the emergence of a new global era of peace and international cooperation under the benevolent guidance of the United States and other wealthy neoliberal nations. The political theorist Francis Fukuyama argued that the 1990s marked the “end of history,” and that there would be no great conflicts to come over the world’s overall economic and political order. The years from 1992 onward, which saw a brief period of democracy in Russia, the expansion of the European Union, successful humanitarian interventions in the Balkans, the start of a Palestinian-Israeli peace process, and the global expansion of free-trade agreements suggested that he might be right.
The illusion of tranquility which Fukuyama and his disciples fervently embraced was shattered by the September 11 attacks, which precipitated a new period of war in the Middle East (conflicts in which the supposedly peaceable liberal powers played a leading role). Fears of Islamic terrorism stoked the ascendancy of reactionary nationalist movements in Europe and the United States, while the anti-war movement nourished a resurgent left. It was increasingly clear that the leaders of the neoliberal order could not deliver the peace and prosperity they had promised.
Shrek came out in April of 2001, and became a box-office smash during the End of History’s last summer. For Millennials, the movie was a final moment of innocence, the last gasp of a charmed era when we were certain that we would inherit a world which was richer in material wealth, love, and understanding than the one we were born into.
*Sadly, xkcd gradually succumbed to exactly the sort of laziness that Randall Munroe critiqued here.
The most interesting films to review are often those which bring together a variety of excellent elements and then manage to fail anyway.
I think that Paul Schrader’s 2018 film FIRST REFORMED ultimately falls into this category. Rave reviews greeted its release a year ago, and I would agree that there’s much in the film that’s worthy of praise. Its premise brims with promise– Ernst Toller, an eloquent, hard-drinking, journal-scrivening, cancer-ridden, guilt-plagued Calvinist minister (portrayed by Ethan Hawke) struggles to confront four deaths– a parishoner’s, his son’s, his own, and the Earth’s. His own church, a lovely but near-empty colonial relic of a dying mainline Protestant denomination, is only sustained by the donations of a wealthy businessman who reaps his profits from environmental destruction. There’s a sharp resonance between the protagonist’s predicament and his church’s historic theology; he struggles with humanity’s structural complicity with environmental sins (a modern parallel to the historic Calvinist doctrine of humanity’s total depravity) and his own inability to change or redirect the painful fates which both he and his planet face (a condition which perhaps all humans share in a universe where events are determined by divine predestination). In some sense, FIRST REFORMED is a dark mirror to Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. That novel’s narrator, the Reverend John Ames, is also a Calvinist minister who reflects on the human condition as he dies of cancer, but unlike Ames, who bears constant witness to God’s grace, FIRST REFORMED’s protagonist believes that he has been forsaken.
Only a soul very far from God’s light would ever mix Pepto-Bismol and whiskey
Schrader uses a visual language that’s wholly appropriate to his hero’s bleak interpretation of Calvinist theology and his own existence. His shots are, for the most part, as monochromatic and austere as the title church’s interior.
The film’s beginning is appropriately harrowing; moments of great tenderness punctuate expanses of struggle and despair. In one particularly powerful scene, the film’s high point, Ethan Hawke’s minister tenderly inters the ashes of his parishoner, an environmental activist who chose to end his life in the face of the futility of his efforts to prevent climate change, in a contaminated lake.
Unfortunately, FIRST REFORMED does not live up to its promise. Toller’s lucidity and insight degenerate over the film’s course as his drinking and despair worsen; instead of seeing a sympathetic, intelligent man struggle with his faith in the face of life’s horrors, we see him effectively descend into madness. By taking this path, the film abandons much of its thematic potential; Toller’s actions lose much of their ethical and spiritual significance as his compassion and capacity for reflection degenerate. Because of this, it’s hard for the film’s final moment of grace to hold any great significance. The film’s timely thematic treatment of global warming is effectively brushed aside. Toller’s final moment of joy feels more like an abandonment of reality than a decision to reject what he calls the “pride” of despair and recognize the creative potential which hope carries even in the darkest situations..
This was an intelligent, intense, and timely film. I only wish that it adequately addressed its own rich themes and avoided copping out of the dilemmas at its heart.
Our words could only do you justice
If they restored your red blood
To its home in your veins
If they gathered scattered limbs
And stitched them together
If they pulled bullets and shrapnel
From your ruptured organs
If they filled your wounds
With new and living flesh
If they extinguished explosions
Which ripped you apart
If they cut bombs’ wires
Or pulled a clip from a rifle
If they turned back time
And made you whole
Perhaps an almighty god
Silently recorded your final prayers
And, at the end of time
Will repair you as we cannot
Restoring your atomic dust
To its breathing shape
Command your killers’ hands
To tell their dark deeds
And grant you a place
In an Earthly paradise
Or a heavenly garden
Until then we must give you
Only the petty immortalities
That we mortals can confer
On the virtuous dead
Untimely ripped from Earth’s womb
We will tell your stories
Carve your holy names
On smooth stone monuments
Care for your close ones
With your own tenderness
And stop your slayers
From realizing their blood-soaked visions
Behold mighty Nimrud
Lord of men, lion-slayer
His supple bow arches
Like his swift horse’s back
Its four hooves leaping
Never landing on solid Earth
Just as the arrow sharp as lightning
Ever-nocked at his rich-robed shoulder
Never pierces the lion’s roaring heart
Behold Nimrud’s triumph
Forever trapped in stone
Battle-bloodied soldiers
Forever marching home
Nineveh now forgets
The tramp of sandaled feet
The flash of sharp bronze swords
Behind them weary captives trudge
Backs burdened with precious plunder
To fill a fallen city’s treasure-house
This too is a treasure-house
Flush with stolen glory
Frozen fragment of a faded empire
Which once outstripped Nimrud’s strength
And his cruelty
I left a fervent religious faith behind in adolescence, but I retain a deep and abiding appreciation for works of art that explore the distinctive joys, pains, duties, and doubts which accompany spiritual life. I was raised as a Protestant, and consequently, have a particular fondness for works, like Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Home, which spring from the Protestant religious experience, but I have to acknowledge that the Catholic artistic tradition probably outstrips my original faith’s.
The Saint Louis, MO Cathedral Basilica. My childhood faith, uh, doesn’t make ’em like that.
To a certain extent, Catholicism’s artistic muscle stems from the Church of Rome’s longstanding tradition of using beautiful images, ornate decorations, and imposing spectacle to bring believers into the emotional states which inspire them to believe and act as it believes that God demands; Protestants, suspicious that this practice was idolatrous, usually focused on using music, text, and oratory to achieve the same goals. The faiths’ attitudes towards sin, salvation, and suffering also play a role. Catholics tend to display the crucifix in contexts where Protestants display the empty cross, emphasizing Christ’s humanity, sacrifice, and death rather than his divinity, resurrection, and victory. Analogously, Catholics treat salvation as an ongoing process rather than a singular moment; the Protestant believer is saved by faith alone, while the Catholic must constantly confront his failures, confess, and repent. Accordingly, the Catholic tradition, especially in the modern era, seems more likely to produce works which delve deeply into believers’ frailties, failures, and doubts. Graham Greene and Shusaku Endo’s novels The End of the Affair and Silence admirably represent this tradition; so does the subject of this essay, the devout French composer Francis Poulenc’s 1956 opera Dialogues des Carmélites (Dialogues of the Carmelites), which I got to see a live broadcast of at a Nashville movie theater this morning.
Dialogues is an intellectually sophisticated and emotionally intense opera centered on a rigorous and ascetic convent of French nuns who need to muster all of their faith and strength in the face of challenges that spring from both their everyday lives and the Revolution roiling the world around them. We encounter the order through its newest novice, Blanche de la Force, a stern but brittle aristocrat whose pride, devoutness, and hunger for heroism co-exist in uneasy tension with her fearful disposition. In this production, Isabelle Leonard, a mezzo-soprano with a lush, dark, carefully controlled voice and sophisticated acting skills, captures both Blanche’s hauteur and her anxiety with grace and subtlety. Blanche joins the austere Carmelite order hoping that its rigor and discipline will give her the strength and security that she seeks. After joining, she wrestles with her motives and her doubts in encounters with her fellow novice, the uncanny, innocent, and enlightened holy fool Sister Constance (a high soprano role, beautifully and hauntingly sung here by Erin Morley) and her convent’s acerbic, insightful, and forceful prioress. Madame de Croissy (the stentorian dramatic soprano Karita Mattila, whose performance never lacks either authority or tenderness.) Blanche, the sub-prioress Mother Marie of the Incarnation (the Glaswegian mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill, who has a voice that’s both lighter in tone and more forceful than Leonard’s offering a striking and effective contrast), and their sisters face an even greater challenge when their prioress suffers a painful illness, faces death with an all-too-human fear and anxiety, charges Marie with Blanche’s care, and leaves the convent behind with a dark prophecy. Here, you can see an excerpt from the prioress’s harrowing death scene:
In the opera’s second half, the convent, under the leadership of the new prioress, Madame Lidoine, a humbler, somewhat more grounded woman, has to decide how to face revolutionary decrees dissolving monastic communities, and how they will face their own deaths. Blanche, Madame Marie, and Sister Constance all have to make difficult choices and find the best way to balance their fears, desires, and duties. Poulenc and the performers elegantly balance the humanity of the opera’s main characters with the high drama and sacred significance of their actions. Here’s an excerpt from the opera’s final scene, which, in context, made me cry buckets:
Unfortunately, Dialogues of the Carmelites has already closed at the Met itself, but you can catch it again in theaters later this week. I would highly recommend this experience, even to viewers who aren’t particularly familiar with opera. The piece mixes modern and romantic elements, using a musical/narrative language which most listeners will recognize from 20th century film scores. The libretto (for those who don’t know much about opera: the words the characters sing) is thoughtful and dramatically sharp (unfortunately not always a given even with good operas), and both the score and vocal line effectively communicate the thoughts and feelings which lie behind characters’ words, making most effective use of opera’s power to make complicated psychological states and emotions clear and visceral through music. The major performers in this production offer technically stunning singing and intelligent, involving acting. David McVicar’s staging is aptly dark, austere, and claustrophobic. Overall, it’s a sublime and powerful experience, even to a skeptical leftist like me, who probably would have worn a Jacobin’s cockade in his Phrygian cap until he got guillotined for questioning the Terror’s scope and targets. I imagine that religious viewers, and Catholics in particular, might find it all even more rewarding. I’d recommend that you catch it while you can!
I posted this small piece on Facebook last year, during an difficult week of wrestling with kidney stones. I recently re-read it, decided that it held up, and decided to share it a bit more widely and permanently here.
Another consolation during kidney stone time has been watching Chef’s Table, which, at its best, combines the wholesome joy-of-beautiful-food and joy-of-craftsmanship aspects of the Great British Baking Show with the power to inspire genuine awe.
I also think that the show offers a wonderful implicit case against naive versions of the Romantic theory of creativity, which locates the origin of art and knowledge in the genius of single individuals. The best episodes of Chef’s Table focus on cooks who are more interested in the food they make than they are in themselves. Their stories show how they create beautiful and novel dishes using the rich conceptual raw materials provided by older culinary traditions and the land around them. The chefs who are more interested in themselves than the food, by contrast, are more invested in the mythos of the solitary, isolated genius. Unfortunately, as a consequence, they cut us off from any real understanding of their craft. Frances Mallmann’s fire-roasted food looks absolutely mouth-watering to me, but his pretentious ramblings about his own individuality and freedom from normal attachments never helps us access or understand it. His colleagues’ more revealing explanations suggest that if he had a better understanding of his relationship with other humans, and the Earth, which make individual creations possible, he would have a better understanding of his own art.
Cosmic Atlas 