THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
One might even say that [Home
Secretary Charles] Clarke's Britain, with its identity
cards, its rapid abolition of fair trial and vastly
increased police powers, is turning into a fascist regime.
Or a Soviet one.
I think it is highly doubtful
that these measures give us any protection against the
alleged terrorist threat, as claimed by the Moonie-like
devotees of the "9/11 changed everything" cult.
But even if they do, I would
much rather risk the terrorism than submit to this rapid
and thoughtless dismantling of freedoms which have taken
centuries to create.
—Peter Hitchens, London Mail on Sunday, January
30
Kevin
Michael Grace, 4.48 p.m., January 31, 2005►
ALL YOU NEED IS LURVE
Mike Nichols probably thought he was rather clever
setting one of Closer’s
climaxes to the strains of Così
fan tutte. Nichols probably never
stopped to think that drawing attention to the genius of
others is rather stupid when one is engaged in making
rubbish.
Così fan tutte is about two men sharing two women.
So is Closer. That’s all they have in common. No,
wait. I’m being too generous here. Così is about
men and women. Closer is about four handsome yet
tortured manikins shrieking "I love you" to one
another in a simulacrum of London that resembles nothing
so much as Notting Hill without the gritty realism.
Greenery yallery, Tate Modern Gallery. Plus, Julia Roberts
says "fuck" a lot.
Così fan tutte was the final collaboration between
Mozart and Lorenzo
da Ponte. Like Le Nozze di Figaro
and Don Giovanni, Così could be said to be
a lesson in the virtue of deception. Lies, not love, make
the world go round. We lie to each other because we
can’t bear the truth. For instance, the truth contained
in the opera’s title, "Women are all the
same." Inconstant, that is, despite their
protestations of eternal devotion. Da Ponte understood the
two great negative truths about men and women—men
can’t abide being humiliated; and women can’t abide
being proved wrong. But Così (like Le Nozze di
Figaro and Don Giovanni) is a comedy, because
da Ponte understood the secret of connubial
contentment—(wilful) ignorance is bliss. We must allow
men their pride and women their rectitude. We must save
the appearances.
Man is the only animal that lies. Yes, we lie to
progress in sin, but we also lie to save each other’s
feelings. Closer’s manikins (Julia Roberts, Jude
Law, Natalie Portman, Clive Owen) need not save the
appearances because appearances are all they have. The
characters created for them by screenwriter Patrick Marber
don’t have feelings; they have emotions. And the
emotional intensity these four Anglo-Americans display is
excessive even by Italian standards.
In Italy, of course, as da Ponte knew, the seeming
emotional incontinence is pro forma. It’s another
form of polite deception; the Italians protect themselves
from offence by pretending to be offended by everything.
Americans and Englishmen (of the non-ethnic varieties)
pride themselves on their emotional temperance. As a
result, they are easily offended.
All this is to say that in any situation connected,
however tenuously, to realism, Julia and Jude and Natalie
and Clive would not say what they say to each other in Closer
and especially not in the manner they say it. Unlike
manikins, people, whatever their ethnicity, are
particularly offended when they are embarrassed or
betrayed sexually. And when insult is added to sexual
injury, watch out. When Jude Law slaps Natalie Portman,
the audience is supposed to gasp. I couldn’t help
thinking it was about time and wondering how it was that
this obvious psychopath hadn’t been strangled by Clive
back in the "gentleman’s club." Or why they
all hadn’t murdered each other several times over.
Here are two truths about sexual lies not known by
Patrick Marber and Mike Nichols. 1. Women, despite what
they might say, do not want to hear the truth about his
infidelity. If you confess, you are confirming her worst
fear, and she will hold it against you for as long as you
live. 2. Men, despite what they might say, do not want to
hear the truth about her infidelity. If you tell him, you
are destroying his last hope, and he will hold it against
himself for as long as he lives. Men can’t abide
humiliation; and women can’t abide being proved wrong.
There are so many false notes in Closer that it
would be closer to the truth to say that every note
rings false. So I’ll mention one only. Julia determines
to leave off with Jude, and to motivate herself, she
marries Clive. She then takes up with Jude again, and when
Clive returns from a business trip, Julia prepares to
lower the boom. Clive, suspecting something is up, throws
her a curve ball by telling her he had sex with a whore
while in New York. Clive tells her this because he
"loves" her so much. And so what does Julia do?
She uses this stick tossed to her by Clive to beat him
with, to justify her decision to leave him, right? No,
that’s what a human woman would do. Here,
Clive’s confession serves to bring home to Julia what a
decent chap he is. In Closer, the bogus proverb
"you only hurt the one you love" is the rubber
that erases the alleged "thin line between love and
hate."
Closer is the phoniest movie I’ve ever seen. It
is also, and this is no coincidence, utterly po-faced.
Sexual obsession is a rich comic vein; but Marber and
Nichols can’t be bothered mining it. Neither can they
bother the least effort to make Julia and Jude and Natalie
and Clive more than ciphers. They have no friends and no
interests; and despite all being professional successes,
seemingly don’t care about their work. All they care
about is "love." Sweet, sweet lurve.
This raises an interesting question. Is adultery now a
chick thing? I mean in the sense of it being initiated
mostly by them. Because there is no doubt Closer is
as much a chick flick as The Joy Luck Club. Ignore
all the talk about how "scorchingly honest" or
whatever Closer is. Honest films about difficult
subjects are hated as much as they lauded. About
Schmidt, Your
Friends & Neighbors and Happiness
are three examples. They are not "feel good"
movies, but Closer very much is. It peddles a
comforting but unvirtuous lie that many women can’t get
enough of: "the road to Hell is paved with good
intentions." That any amount of bestial behaviour and
plain bad manners is always forgivable when inspired by
"love."
Recently I asked Peter
Augustine Lawler to explain to me the hold Sex
and the City had on so many women. He said,
"Those girls had an absolute openness; they had no
inner lives, but they spilled it all." In Closer,
neither the women nor the men have inner lives, but they
spill it all anyway. All you need is "love."
But what does "love" mean to these women?
What does it mean in an age when sexual intercourse has
been divorced from procreation and procreation has been
divorced from motherhood? In an age when serial monogamy,
having proved too demanding, has been replaced by
"hooking up." In an age when women are expected
to maintain their sexual attractiveness unto perpetuity,
even as they know this is no protection against desertion.
In an age when "female" is relevant only as a
"gender" and not as a sex.
When these women say, "I love you," what they
mean is, "I am!"
Clive and Natalie and Julia and Jude: Four manikins in
search of a soul
Kevin
Michael Grace, 8.15 a.m., January 31, 2005►
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
The peddlers of community
arts determine that the absolute quality of the ceramic
ashtray is less important than the fact that the children
work and play together.
—David
Mamet
Kevin
Michael Grace, 12.21 p.m., January 30, 2005►
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
Complete frankness is always
a mistake among friends
—Muriel Spark, Loitering
With Intent
Kevin
Michael Grace, 9.43 p.m., January 29, 2005►
THE WAY WE LIVE NOW
Pubic grooming, it turns out,
is one of her favourite topics. “I tell women to buy Playboy—it's
like a hairstyling magazine for down there,” she says,
motioning to her lap. “I have some clients who say,
‘But I'm a wife and a mother!' But the truth is, honey,
that was 20 years ago. Now the kids have grown up and left
home and the husband is off with the secretary and you're
sitting at home with a seventies bush from the waist down.
Well, I wonder why.”
—Jacqueline Bradley, author of The
Bombshell Bible, "the first
makeover book for style and soul," interviewed
by Leah McLaren
Kevin
Michael Grace, 3.25 p.m., January 29, 2005►
BELATED ADMISSIONS
The Ambler has often heard it said he is unduly
"negative," even that he "hates
everything." One is tempted to take a perverse pride
in this, but it is demonstrably untrue. I love several
things, including, but not limited to, the symphonies
of Joseph Haydn, the paintings
of Velázquez, the novels
of Muriel Spark, the films
of Stanley Kubrick, beer, wine, tobacco and
the Mass
of Pope St. Pius V. Oh, and sunsets: long,
subtle, infinitely gradated Northern sunsets.
Indeed, I am not immune to the temptation to appear
"positive," to count myself as one who is
"part of the solution, not part of the problem,"
yada, yada. This gemütlichkeit pose has led me on
occasion to praise the unpraiseworthy or to hold my tongue
when the unpraiseworthy is praised by those in whose
esteem I wish to be held.
I am sparing no relevant facts, as Muriel Spark says.
As an example of the first kind of dissembling, two
years ago I
praised to the skies Peter Jackson's The
Fellowship of the Ring. To my shame, I
actually suggested that if the second and third parts of
Jackson's version of Tolkien's trilogy were as good as the
first, "The
Lord of the Rings really will be the
greatest film ever made." And yet, after rereading
this panegyric, I see that the truth was struggling to get
out even then. I noted "a lack of breathing room, a
certain relentless quality" in Jackson's epic. Which
was, I see now, a polite way of saying that The
Fellowship of the Ring bored me beyond measure.
Largely from a sense of duty, I braved the braying
teenaged hordes and sat through The
Two Towers and The
Return of the King, with the same
result. I was long past caring by the end of part the
third, but I did notice that Jackson failed the test I had
set him. It's not just that Jackson did "stumble
between Frodo's crucifixion and ascension," his
evident purpose was to give us Tolkien without tragedy,
and in this ignoble purpose he triumphed. I also
noticed that long before the end I was thoroughly sick of
Jackson's Frodo. Elijah Wood's strength as an actor is his
ability to induce the creeps, a talent he expressed to
great effect in The
Ice Storm and, more recently, in Eternal
Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. He bids
fair to become the Elisha
Cook Jr. of his generation.
As a example of the second kind of dissembling, I kept
quiet about The
Passion of the Christ, even after
confirming what I so feared—that it is an artistic
failure. I had so much invested in its box-office success
and the concomitant gnashing of teeth this would induce
from Abe
Foxman, Charles
Krauthammer, et al. I love Mel
Gibson, for several reasons, not least his love of the Mass
of Pope St. Pius V, and his purpose in
making The Passion was noble, but he has confused
filmmaking with religious devotion to disastrous effect.
That is to say, the Stations of the Cross cannot be
transmuted into drama.
It's no good saying we all know the story of Jesus
Christ. (That's not really true anymore, but never mind.)
Every dramatic production is a discrete entity that must
be judged solely with regard to its contents. Thus
Gibson's refusal to explain why Christ became a
public enemy and a sacrificial lamb results in a two hours
of torture at first largely inexplicable, then gratuitous
and finally, boring. I also noticed that John Debney's
score was both ubiquitous and intolerable and that James
Caviezel was a weak Jesus. In the latter's defence, he was
speaking words he did not literally understand, a fact
that applies to the rest of the cast as well and renders
otiose any comments on their acting. Gibson's embrace of
the cult of authenticity (thoroughly inconsistent, in a
film that traffics so heavily in special effects) reveals
his ignorance of his medium. All films are make-believe;
great films are lies told in service of a higher truth.
All pictures are lies, which is why certain religious
zealots are compelled to destroy them. Mel Gibson's
production company is called Ikon, so one would have
thought he would understand this.
So ends my tirade. In service of my never-ending quest
to be "part of the solution," I'll end on a
"positive" note. Franco Zeffirelli's Jesus
of Nazareth does "go off the boil
somewhere between the Crucifixion and the Ascension"
but is otherwise a magnificent achievement. Anthony
Burgess's English script makes us fully aware of why
Christ was put to death, why His message was so scandalous
(and remains so). And in Robert Powell, we have a Messiah
whose face is so luminous, so imbued with the Divine, it
is terrifying to behold.
If Jesus of Nazareth is the best life of Christ
I have seen, then Carl Theodor Dreyer's Ordet
is the best religious film of any kind I have seen. Jesus
said, "If thou canst believe, to him who believes,
everything is possible." We Christians say we believe
this, but who many of us do? And what would be the result
if we lived as if we really believed this? This is what Ordet
is about. It is of particular interest to filmmakers
interested in learning about the tremendous power of economy:
economy in exposition, in movement, of composition and in
gesture. Oh, and it has no music to speak of in it.
Ordet: 'None knoweth the day.'
Kevin
Michael Grace, 3.13 p.m., January 29, 2005►
CREDIT WHERE DUE
This space has repeatedly attacked Michael Coren for
being, not to put too fine a point on it, insane. So it is
pleasing to report that his
column today on Belinda
"Big Tent" Stronach is uncommonly
sensible:
Even if Harper and the Tories
eschewed all moral issues, there are those who would still
call them bigots. The forces of social liberalism in this
country demand not tolerance but affirmation.
Every Conservative MP and go-along-to-get-along
"social conservative" in this country should
have this tattooed on his palm, for ready reference.
Kevin
Michael Grace, 11.59 a.m., January 29, 2005►
PENSÉE
The rich now expect their children to be as well
designed, luxuriously appointed and free from defects as
their German sedans.
Kevin
Michael Grace, 10.17 p.m., January 28, 2005►
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
Appetites must be cultivated.
—Auberon Waugh
Kevin
Michael Grace, 10.15 p.m., January 28, 2005►
IS THIS A RECORD?
Mike Jenkinson writes:
This is why I don't like the
post office: almost without fail, every January, my mail
service basically dries up to nothing.
Kwanzaa hangover, perhaps?
This afternoon I received a correctly-addressed,
first-class letter postmarked Seattle, January 15.
Thirteen days to travel 85 miles. No exclamations points
follow that last sentence, because once I started, I
couldn't stop. Thank goodness none of us depends much
anymore on Canada Post and the USPS, but how is it that
the Age of Privatization, circa 1975-1995, somehow
passed by these quasi-governmental "services"
and their first-class mail monopolies?
My favourite personal mail delivery horror story
concerns the USPS, and, as I recall, happened one January.
I was living in San Diego and opened my mailbox to find an
opened and resealed plastic magazine envelope devoid of
contents, indeed devoid of any mark of provenance
whatsoever except for a sticker informing me that the USPS
was not responsible for the loss of whatever had occupied
the envelope. This went far beyond the usual post office
insults: scandalously late delivery, torn, crushed,
mangled, water-damaged or otherwise disfigured periodicals
and books. No, this was a cosmic insult. I had to
laugh.
Kevin
Michael Grace, 10.09 p.m., January 28, 2005►
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
We have plunged down a
cataract of progress which sweeps us on into the future
with ever wilder violence the farther it takes us from our
roots. Once the past has been breached, it is usually
annihilated, and there is no stopping the forward motion.
But it is precisely the loss of connection with the past,
our uprootedness, which has given rise to the
"discontents" of civilization and to such a
flurry and haste that we live more in the future and its
chimerical promises of a golden age than in the present,
with which our whole evolutionary background has not yet
caught up. We rush impetuously into novelty, driven by a
mounting sense of insufficiency, dissatisfaction and
restlessness. We no longer live on what we have, but on
promises, no longer in the light of the present day, but
in the darkness of the future, which, we expect, will at
last bring the proper sunrise. We refuse to recognize that
everything better is purchased at the price of something
worse; that, for example, the hope of greater freedom is
cancelled out by increased enslavement to the state, not
to speak of the terrible perils to which the most
brilliant discoveries of science expose us. The less we
understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought, the
less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all
our might to rob the individual of his roots and his
guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the
mass, ruled only by what Nietzsche called the spirit of
gravity.
—Carl Jung, Memories,
Dreams, Reflections
Kevin
Michael Grace, 3.06 a.m., January 25, 2005►
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
Demonstrable bodily lesion is
the gold standard of medical diagnosis. Without practical
convertibility into gold, the value of paper money rests
only on faith. Without conceptual convertibility into
bodily lesion, the diagnosis of disease rests only on
faith. Unbacked by gold, paper money is fiat
money—the politically irresistible incentive for
debauching the currency, called "inflation."
Unbacked by lesion, diagnosis is fiat
diagnosis—the medically irresistible incentive for
debauching the concept of disease, called
"psychiatry."
—Thomas Szasz, The
Untamed Tongue: A Dissenting Dictionary
Kevin
Michael Grace, 1.48 a.m., January 24, 2005►
ENDANGERED SPECIES WATCH
Time was when "The Star-Spangled Banner" was
performed before ballgames by brass bands or opera
singers. Not very sexy, of course, but certainly decorous
Then in 1968 at the World Series in Detroit (for which we
can blame Ernie Harwell), José Feliciano's shooby-doo-wop
version (All
Music Guide: "Idiosyncratic
Latin-jazz performance") knocked 'em dead (no doubt
literally, in the case of some vets), and another great
tradition was mortally wounded.
"To honour America," is how the National
Anthem is always introduced, but whom or what, I wonder,
is being honoured when we hear F.S. Key's words from the
likes (and usually the synced lips) of the Backstreet
Boys, Frank Gifford's wife or Roseanne?
Or 11-year-old Timmy Kelly?
Little Timmy sang the National Anthem before the NFC
championship in Philadelphia yesterday, and, after
Roseanne's (no synced lips there!), this was the worst
rendition I've ever heard. Timmy simply can't sing, and by
this I mean that his pitch modulated wildly and
continuously from start to finish: cracking, then
bottoming out and then back again. It's customary at this
point to add something like, "But it was better than
I could have done" or "Better than I could have
done at his age," but I'm not altogether even sure of
that. Let's put it this way, if Timmy had been auditioning
for American Idol, Simon Cowell would have reduced
him to tears for our cruel amusement.
The crowd gave Timmy Kelly a hearty ovation, but then
they knew something about him I didn't until a couple of
hours ago: like José Feliciano, he was born
blind—and he has cerebral
palsy. Oh dear. So this is the way we live
now. We treat the disabled with grotesque sentimentality,
cooing at them like panda bears at the zoo, while the mere
probability of disability as revealed by an amniocentesis,
ultrasound or PGD test becomes an automatic death
sentence. My, what fine fellows we are!
Kevin
Michael Grace, 1.43 a.m., January 24, 2005►
KULTURKAMPF
Whether "gay marriage" will be legalized in
Canada will depend greatly on the decisions made by its
Catholic Members of Parliament. This is a subject I
examined in a January 20 article for the National
Catholic Register:
[Bishop Frederick Henry of
Calgary] was also critical of the Canadian Supreme
Court’s use of the metaphor of a “living
tree” of constitutional law to justify
its rejection of millennia of legal precedents
establishing marriage as a union only of opposite-sex
individuals. “If you’re going to use the image of a
constitutional ‘living tree,’ you must remember it has
many roots—culture, history, anthropology, philosophy
and religion—and if you’re not attentive to all of
them, you risk the tree becoming diseased and crashing
down,” he said.
“The institution of
marriage exists prior to any establishment by the state.
From time immemorial, it is the union of a man and woman
faithful in love and open to the gift of life,” Bishop
Henry said. “Homosexual unions are not open to the gift
of life, so how can homosexual marriage be a right?” [More]
This article (at least on the Internet) is illustrated
with a picture of a black (or Hispanic) woman looking
downward. Why, I cannot imagine, but as she is rather
attractive, I'm not complaining.
Kevin
Michael Grace, 10.55 p.m., January 23, 2005►
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
Just because you're lost
doesn't mean to say that your compass is broken.
—David Mamet, The
Edge
Kevin
Michael Grace, 10.15 p.m., January 23, 2005►
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
America is currently ruled by
an oligarchy that is squandering national life, fortune
and reputation and yet identifies itself as Conservative.
—David
Mamet
Kevin
Michael Grace, 7.20 a.m., January 14, 2005►
