House of Cards

I often quip that I “don’t like” or “don’t watch” television. It’s probably truer, though, that I’m just not in the habit of watching it, and don’t miss it now that I don’t have one. A TV didn’t go well with my living room furniture, and so I opted not to buy one when I got my apartment in Paris. I have been perfectly content to watch DVDs on my iMac.

That said, there is one type of TV show I positively loathe, and that is the indefinitely recurring scripted drama series. There is nothing focused about them, no clear direction, no consistent character evolution. Even the “best” ones have more than their share of mediocre episodes, clear evidence of the industry’s need to churn out a product at a fixed temporal rhythm trumping the natural rhythm of the creative process. And inevitably, any such show that is popular enough to continue for too long is bound to jump the shark. Nothing good lasts forever, and long-continuing scripted dramas inevitably succumb to their attempt to defy this principle.

Some authors say they never write stories with the ending in mind; I, however, cannot function this way. I have to have a structure and a vision when I write or tell a story or it will collapse on itself. Sure, sometimes I change my vision radically, but I strongly believe that the geometric structure of compositions and narratives is as important as the content and style, and that the best writers should be competent (if not trained) mathematicians. (I realize my opinion on the matter seems to be the minority view in a society that does not particularly value polymathy.)

Accordingly, while I loathe the indefinitely recurring scripted dramas, I am much more amicably inclined when it comes to the miniseries or the serial, particularly those adapted from fictional works. I have to confess that when it comes to fiction, I tend to prefer the audio-visual spectacle of the cinema or the theater to written prose. Regrettably, at two hours, movies adapted from good novels are generally far too short to capture the full grandeur of the source material.

Enter the miniseries, the compromise between television and cinema. Well-executed, it can preserve all of the insight and color of the original novel while giving us a window into a fantastical alternate universe. And yet I’ve only fairly recently discovered the miniseries, though I greatly enjoyed both Granada Television’s Brideshead Revisited and BBC’s The Life and Loves of a She-Devil.

Currently, I’m watching the BBC’s House of Cards. There aren’t enough good things to say about this one, but I think that from a prosaic point of view, the series (though slightly different from its source) is particularly effective at evoking introspective moral outrage and repugnance. The love affair between the married politician and the beautiful young lady is so convincing and their Machiavellian tactics so artfully executed as to almost elicit our envy and sympathy… until their actions culminate in such terrible crime and filth that one is left in horror at the whole thing, jerked back to the painful reality that sin always has its consequences, and at the most unexpected moments.

Example: the sin of making an indefinitely-recurring scripted drama and the consequence of it jumping the shark at the height of its popularity. Heehee.

Independence Day

The last time I did anything special for my country’s national holiday was in 2008.  I didn’t do anything in 2007 as I was gallivanting around Ireland.  For the past three years I’ve been in France and, regardless of my thoughts about the storming of the Bastille (it was little more than a symbolic theatrical blood orgy, and a tiny one at that), I’ve taken part in 14 July festivities (though not of a specifically national character) since 2010.  To be honest, I rather regret that.  Because I really like neighborhood fireworks shows, homemade vanilla ice cream with hot fudge, grilled cheeseburgers and late-night movies.

(In 2011, my 14 July festivities consisted of five friends, oven-roasted English-bacon cheeseburgers, the neighborhood firefighter industrial music ball and a whole lot of something I don’t particularly care to recall.  Let’s just say I broke in Decade III of the Quintidi of Messidor 219 with a fair concussion.  Literally.)

The best Independence Day we ever had was in 1995.  In just a day or two my big lean Norwegian extended family would congregate in a mountain resort just a few hours away from our house for the triennial cousinade, and my mother’s siblings and their children stopped over to see us.  So, over the 4th of July, we had our own little mini-reunion for the Austrian-mutt branch of the family at my parents’ house.

4 July 1996 was decidedly lower-key:  sober and, I daresay, just slightly depressing after the ambiance of the previous year.  The subsequent Austro-Norwegian mountain gathering and two weeks with the grandparents without my parents were the real highlights of that summer.  I didn’t even see Independence Day in the cinema.  (But we weren’t really big on cinemas in my family; we were, however, big on CINEMA.  Actually, looking back, I think the local video rental store made the bulk of its revenue off of us… I went to school with the owner’s daughter and she was always pretty nice to me.  Now I realize why.  My parents must have something on the order of thousands of VHS tapes and DVDs in the house.  For my part, over the past three years alone I have acquired some 95 discs in my Parisian apartment.)

Today, I happened to come across Siskel’s and Ebert’s old review of the 1996 film, Independence Day.  Their thoughts on the film pretty well mirror my own:

I do remember the destruction of the White House standing out quite vividly in that film.  This was back during the day when the U.S. economy was (supposedly) top-notch, optimism was everywhere and everyone felt invincible.  Some people argued that the President of the United States at that time acted as though he WERE invincible, and while I’m hard-pressed to disagree, I’m also hard-pressed to think of a POTUS in living memory who did NOT.  (Jimmy Carter, MAYBE.)

In any case, that vivid image was right on the front of the VHS cover of Independence Day, and I remember how much satisfaction it gave the skeptics of the 1990′s invincibility cult.  Now, it’s not that I want to turn this blog into a political ranting hole, but the following anecdote is just too funny not to tell:

Curious little kid that I was, right before I watched the movie, I pointed to that VHS cover and asked someone I knew whether Bill Clinton was in the White House when it blew.  Republican that he was, my interlocutor responded, “I certainly hope so!”

The more things change: prisons, Catholicism and blondes in the movies

No contest?

I like to use Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter with my company’s clients as prototypes to train them to eek through and navigate long and torturous semantics.  (The novel is one of my favorites, a status I cannot accord to the 1996 film.)  One particular client this week, a Frenchman (as most of them of course are here in Paris), was puzzled by the juxtaposition in the following sentence:

But on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.

“Isn’t ‘prisoner’ synonymous with ‘convicted criminal’?” he asked.

Actually, it is not.  The novel is set in the mid-17th century, and penitentiary–that is, the institution of incarceration as a punishment for non-insane criminals–is a 19th-century and largely American invention.  The institution represents an aberration in human history.  Historically, prisons served no more useful a function than what is commonly called jail:  a means of holding captured soldiers, reluctant witnesses or suspects awaiting trial.

How the times have changed!  Such have the times changed, in fact, that when you reveal this information to someone on either side of the Atlantic, the first reaction is almost always, “How did they punish felons?”  In practically every Western country, penitentiaries have displaced the historic punishments for criminal offenses: fines, flogging, forced labor, banishment and capital punishment.

The past 170 years are but small part of human history, but given the revolutionary changes and upheavals of the modern era we should perhaps not be surprised at how fast collective frames-of-mind could have changed during this time.  But to convince you just how quickly the institution of the penitentiary has crept into our collective mentality, let us revisit a quote from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1930 film, Murder!

In the scene where the jury deliberates on the verdict of the young actress Diana Baring, one juror laments the weight of the decision:

“Either we’ve got to let her go free–that’s not fair for the rest of the world if she’s guilty–or we’ve got to hang her and… that’s barbarous!”

A fellow juror suggests that they “recommend her to Mercy,” a sort of penitentiary institution.  And the response is:

“Mercy!  Is that what you call it?  Twenty years cut out of life!  The best years!  And to spend them in hell!  Have you ever been inside a prison?  It takes a ‘civilized’ community to think out a punishment like that!”

Oh, sure, there are people agitating for prison reform, these days, but how many of us actually question the premise of using the penitentiary as criminal punishment?  This kind of humble and reluctant acceptance of capital punishment and strong condemnation of the penitentiary seems to most of us like a relic.

But that’s one thing I love so much about movies:  the canon of cinema is a fascinating multimedia documentation of all the social and cultural changes that took place throughout the 20th century.  Of course, many of them are far more subtle than this example.  I doubt, for example, whether most modern audiences would pick up on the nevertheless more-than-aesthetic differences in the way the Roman Catholic Church is portrayed in 1943′s The Song of Bernadette as opposed to 1992′s Sister Act–even though both films portray the Church in a positive light.

(Hollywood films at any rate always portrayed religion positively from 1930 to 1968, as they were bound to do by the Motion Picture Production Code, itself not containing any explicitly Roman Catholic references but most definitely the product of the Catholic Legion of Decency and certainly very much in line with Catholic teaching as it is presented in most standard American catechisms.)

On the flip side, sometimes we might be so inclined to take the constant upheaval of the modern world in stride that we are actually shocked when the films reveal an example of just how much things have not changed.  Think, for example, of the take on the blonde characters opposite their brunette counterparts in 1953′s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 1972′s The Godfather, 1989′s She-Devil, 2000′s Legally Blonde (sorry, but “Elle Woods” was not portrayed as nearly as intelligent as a lot of critics and viewers seem to have thought) and 2001′s Miss Congeniality.

What is it about YouTube that makes it such a GOLD MINE??

No, seriously, that IS my room! I swear!

“My name is Nicholas Gregory Patricius Moses, and I am addicted to YouTube.”

I can no longer deny it.  I work on the computer a lot and I have to constrain myself while I’m on the job, but once work is done… HOO YA.  No kicking back and flipping on the TV.  I just go straight to YouTube.

The funny thing is that YouTube is something of a novelty, and those who know me know I’m into vintage things.  (My house contains only old or old-style furniture, as suggested by the image of my work station off there to the left.)  But YouTube is already nearly seven years old, and as we all know, in the wonderful world wide web, seven years is perpetuity.  Thus, a nice clip from 2006 or 2007 can rightly be considered “vintage” by YouTube standards.

So, not surprisingly, my favorite videos on YouTube seem to be the vintage ones.

Yes, late at night, clicking around with insomnia, I happen upon those YouTube Golden Oldies.  I really need to make a channel to organize ‘em all, I know.  I’ll get around to it, I’m sure, when the pressures of everything these couple of months dies down.  At least now that I’m actually entering the Blogosphere and not just watching, for the first time, I have an idea of what to share (and, equally importantly, what NOT to share ).

Anyway, today, I happened totally by chance across two AMAZING French short films (courts métrages)… all the way back from 2007!  The first one is J’attendrai le suivant (I’ll Wait for the Next One), a 2007 work that actually got an Oscar nomination for Best Short Film (not surprisingly):

The second is considerably lower in production value but no less well-conceived, well-written and well-acted.  It’s called Le Paquet and also deals with love and anxiety in the métro, albeit in another of France’s cities, my home base of Paris.  Interestingly, it is shot on a line I frequently traverse myself:

Brilliant, just brilliant, these pieces!  Each perfectly captures the emotional anxiety that can set in around about one’s late twenties:  is my career on the right track?  Is what I’m doing something that matters?  What about family?

Anyway, hope you’re not stressing about any of that.  Tomorrow’s for making resolutions; today, hope you just enjoy those little golden oldies as much as I do.  Fresh out of the mine.

(I know I need to install the thing to make this blog bilingual; I’ve just been a bit preoccupied with content and networking this little week off!)

Age of Innocence, mon œil

No comment on the accents, though

I am not really well-versed in the ongoings of late 19th-century American upper class society, so I hesitate to write too much about Age of Innocence.  What I can say is that Vincent Canby’s appraisal of this piece as a “gorgeously uncharacteristic Scorsese film” is hardly justifiable, at least insofar as this film does exactly what I would have expected Martin Scorsese to do with such subject matter.

Let me start by saying that I admire Martin Scorsese’s work and I always have.  I have always felt I could relate to what the man was saying and enjoying on a level that I can’t with most other living directors.  There are three recurring flaws, however, about much of his corpus that tend to distort his storytelling and sociological insight:

1. His films are long, often but not always excessively so for what they are.
2. His characters subject themselves to melodramatic and at best marginally plausible personal trials stemming from rather trivial pursuits, lavishing just as marginally plausible angst upon angst before doing the right thing.
3. For someone who generally ends up vindicating tradition, holiness and even sheer “convention” at the end, he goes awfully far down the road to showing us just how terribly constraining and ugly they were.

One qualification: these flaws do not, in and of themselves, necessarily ruin the viewing experience, especially because the brilliance of a Scorsese movie tends to lie more in the depth of the ambiance rather than the plot or characters.  Given that fact, such flaws bequeath to Scorsese’s films a weathered charm of the sort that makes an old, sturdily built piece of furniture appear rustically beautiful by today’s standards, even though by the standards of its time it would have been rather plain.

But they are there.  And probably the most fleshed-out examples containing all three characteristics are The Last Temptation of Christ and Age of Innocence.

I might also opine that the title of the latter is not particularly suited to its portrayal of sharp, shrewd and understated characters.  In the same vein, the protagonist’s wife, given the way she deliberately calculated to keep her husband faithful, was awfully cunning for a woman of “hard, bright blindness,” and “incapacity to recognize change,” who according to the narration “died thinking the world a good place, full of loving and harmonious households like her own.”  I can’t help but wonder whether the choice of title is not deliberately cheeky.

Of course, Age of Innocence is based on the 1920 Edith Wharton novel, which apparently won acclaim for accurately portraying the New York City upper crust.  I’ve no idea how faithful the film is to the novel, but if it is anything like the latter, and if the latter is indeed an accurate portrayal, then I am quite intrigued.  The East Coast upper crust is shown here as born of some sort of strange mix of aristocratic courtisanship, bourgeois prejudice and bohemian attitude.  Still, I’m amazed that, at least in this movie, they can appear so drab and un-wordly despite their globetrotting and clever intriguing.  The Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont would surely be disappointed!  Accurate or not, no other director could get away with this.

But it’s a Martin Scorsese movie.  Watch it for the action and the ambiance and you won’t be disappointed.