The Spinning Man (2018)

  As intellectual thrillers go, The Spinning Man is the philosopher’s whodunit.

As Dr Evan Birch teaches his Philosophy of Language class, what we call the truth is not an objective reality but a matter of perception and memory. So, too, the class exam question (a sign pointing down to a chair): Prove this is a chair. If you exempt the simple physical reality of the present chair and require a linguistic proof of its existence, then Detective Molloy can properly build on the denial of the chair’s material reality: “What chair?” The cop and the philosopher both seek proof, with the former’s stakes the higher.

So the eponymous professor Birch spins his philosophic play on reality and language. He spins the truth, any material or objective reality, to protect himself. In the first scene, he ends up helplessly aspin when he can’t distinguish between his imagination and reality. His guilt about improper engagement with a student leads him to believe he killed her. That guilt continues even after Molloy assures him of his innocence. His sexual guilt prevents his accepting his innocence. 

This film didn’t receive the respect it deserves perhaps because it denies us the satisfaction of a pat conclusion. Two mysteries remain hanging at film’s end. The philosopher’s  profession of innocence at the scandal of his previous post is undermined by his present propensity to predatory fantasies. And when does the violence in his engagement with the African American student occur: now or in the event of a year ago, for which she now apologizes in hopes of beginning an affair? Clearly they have different “truths” around that.

The script, performances and moral ambiguity make this thriller an extraordinary work, well worth reconsideration. Rare is the fiction that takes guilt of intention as seriously as guilt of deed. OIn the other hand, given our parlous present state, do we need another reminder of the occupational hazards of thinking?

Glass Onion

  Rian Johnson expands his range as a dab hand at genre explosions. Here he runs the Agatha Christie murders-at-a-weekend-estate whodunit through the contemporary wringer.

Hero detective Benoit Blanc returns as a Deep American South Poirot. The script gets the brilliant subtle deduction out of the way toot sweet. Blanc solves the planned mystery days earlier than planned. That plot layer out of the way, the deeper mystery and deaths real and apparent proceed.

Villain Miles Bron is like an almost likeable Elon Musk. The smug oligarch lives off his parasitic old friends. If the heartless corrupt destructive moneybag is one nod to our real world, the terrible, ignorant influencer is another. Quoth Birdie Jay: “I'm a truth teller. Some people can't handle it.” Benoit makes the current correction: “It's a dangerous thing to mistake speaking without thought for speaking the truth. Don't you think?” She, like the populist’s masses, doesn’t. Her latest blunder is to praise the world’s biggest sweatshop because she assumes that refers to their making her popular sweatpants.

As the title suggests — and Bron’s castle embodies — this film’s social reality is a hollow center layered with removable, insubstantial appearances. Blanc solves the real mystery — having so quickly despatched the artificial — when he sees past the illusion of substance accorded the wealthy: “Look into the clear centre of this glass onion. Miles Bron is an idiot!” 

By slipping a bit of Bron’s power into a woman’s hand Blanc enables her by smashing his glass art to destroy Bron and his status. The glass art embodies the transparency and fragility of his ostensible accomplishment. The friends who formerly supported him against her now veer with the wind to support her instead. 

However much fun this film is, it’s a sharp-eyed critique of the world’s centralization of power in the hands of the amoral richest. Sending up the genre also blows up the social structure it mirrors. 

We have a lot of fun spotting the array of stars making cameo appearances. The more serious equivalent is seeing our collapsing social order reflected in the glass onion genre this satire sees through, unflinchingly. As the familiar genre conventions are exercised, as through the onion darkly, we’re spurred to more individual responsibility as citizens. 

As Blanc admits, the individual’s power, even the hero's, may seem limited: “I am not Batman. I can find you the truth, I can gather evidence, I can present it to the police and the courts, but that is where my jurisdiction ends.” But without such mobilization of individual responsibility the social mechanism has no impulse to work. 

Nice to see Daniel Craig working up a new franchise, with Bond expertise, a tongue even further in chic cheek and engaged in a more human shenanigan.

The Fabelmans

We know this film presents Steven Spielberg’s recollection of his childhood, his growing insights into his parents’ troubled marriage, his early experience of antisemitism and his fascination with filmmaking. So what else is there?

The family name. Sammy Fabelman personifies the Jewish storyteller, the Jew in Sammy and the narrative conviction of the fable-man. In Spielberg’s case, the extremely able fable-man. 

Indeed, when Sammy’s prom-screening converts his school bully into an iconic All-American ideal, the Golden Boy — to the bully’s moral confusion and chagrin — Spielberg encapsulates the theme of Neal Gabler’s How The Jews Invented Hollywood. The persecuted immigrant Jewish merchants created The American Dream in their projection of an idealized urban America. In defence against antisemitism they imagined an ideal America that just might accept them. 

It never did, entirely. As with Sammy’s Jesus-loving girlfriend, embracing the Jew requires his conversion.

The second driving theme is John Ford’s lesson on filmmaking: “When the horizon is at the top, it's interesting. When it's on the bottom, it's interesting. When it's in the middle, it's boring as shit! Got it?“

Got it. But that’s as true for life as it is for visual composition. Life demands the extreme, whether the height of passion or the depth of despair. The median blah is a waste of the materials whether of art or of life. For Sammy’s mother Mitzi, her husband is the mid-space horizon, his friend the high/low depending on your balance of passion and morality. Sammy's "uncle" is more supportive of his passion for film than his father is. 

        Mitzi doesn't just practice Ford's wisdom but also articulates it: “You know what I miss most about the piano? Surrendering to the score.” As does at greater length Uncle Boris: “Family, art. It will tear you in two….Art will give you crowns in heaven and laurels on Earth, but also, it will tear your heart out. Art is no game! Art is dangerous as a lion's mouth. It'll bite your head off.” 

As if to prove that, it’s by filming his family’s picnic that Sammy discovers his mother’s passionate affair with his father’s best friend. That is to say, making art opens a reality beyond the artist’s awareness and experience. What making art can discover can tear out the heart or bite off the head — or compel further exploration and risk.

        For Spielberg, that’s show-biz. Aka art. Aka life. 

The Menu

Smoking murders your palate, wouldbe gourmand Tyler advises date Margot in the film’s first scene, as they prepare to leave for the special $1,250/plate dinner on a remote island. Haute cuisine here also kills.

Margot is a last-minute replacement for the woman Tyler originally booked for the dinner. Her arrival disturbs the management because she doesn’t readily qualify for the master Chef Slowik’s intention: a burning Day of Judgment both for all the “Takers” who selfishly abuse humanity and nature and for all the “Givers” who abet them. With the rage of an Old Testament prophet Slowik plans to destroy the entire system, the evil and those who serve them. At least, the system on that island.

Because Margot does not belong on the 12-sinner guest list, for this precious Last Supper, Slowik allows her to choose whether to die among the Takers or among the Givers.  When she is tricked into radioing for outside help, Slowik demotes her to the Takers.

But Margot is radically unlike all the others. Unlike the suicidal Givers working the kitchen and the fortress, she has not sold her soul to the charismatic charlatan chef (an echo of Trump and the other populist false gods). Unlike the Takers, she comes from the service industries. Depending on serving others, she has learned how to protect herself and how to deal with unexpected threats. The servicers are not as helpless as the served, the self-servicers. 

Likelier an expensive escort than a waitress, Margot outsmarts the brilliant despot chef by slipping him out of his rigid pattern of behaviour into another one. He is locked into the routine of high concept absurdly specialist dishes, over which he asserts mortal authority. To escape Slowik she shifts him into another plot. By rejecting his food she challenges his manhood and authority. By ordering a prosaic cheeseburger she shifts him into another pattern of bahaviour. Powerful with his own menu, he’s helpless in her new script, her "menu." She requests a takeout box. When Chef Slowik provides that their new pattern of behaviour allows her to leave with it. 

The satire in this brilliant, harsh work cuts all ways. Except for Margot, all the other diners are demonstrably selfish and corrupt. One’s husband, dressed executive, is among Margot’s clients. His chopped-off finger is a euphemism, Another table seats men criminally associated with the island owner. A compromised highclass restaurant reviewer is with grovelling enabler. The famous movie star has such a rampaging ego he won’t let his PA quit. Slowik condemns her to die because she didn’t fund her Brown U degree with student loans. They all deserve to die, determines the master chef, who panders to their privilege with “meals” of absurd scarcity, pretentiousness and wastefulness.      

The customers are first disturbed when their tacos bear photos of their various guilts. Here they are supposed to eat what they are, not the minute refinement to which they aspire. The chef humiliates pretentious Tyler by letting him expose his own overblown claim to know cuisine. Tyler hangs himself, following the staff Chef wannabe Jeremy, who blows his brains. He wanted the Chef’s life but fell short so he makes himself a menu item. Not even the Chef’s death-in-life mother escape the moral anesthetizing, stupor and ultimate murder by her prize son. At last, a matricide on the menu not the mattress.

The Chef rails against the public vulgarization of “eating.” But his preciosity in addressing absurd “tastes” is an equivalent folly and abuse of nature. Appropriately, having presumed to a moral superiority for his aesthetic dedication of diet, the Chef and his robotized followers die with their target victims in a conflagration of Smores. The gourmands and their slaves burn away in treacly vulgarity, melting together.

The coincidence of this film’s release with Triangle of Sadness (see my blog) suggests a widening awareness of the growing abyss between the Takers and the Givers. Instead of yacht workers saving their helpless masters, though, here the system is so compromised that the Givers prove as selfless and suicidal as the Takers. They all perpetuate the system — and devote themselves to an amoral leader with far less character than charisma.  

“I told you we weren’t leaving,” asserts the smug movie star. Of course, he’s used to “living” in disaster/horror movie scripts. But his attempt to escape this one fails. More like his victims than he would believe, the Chef has reduced himself to a menu item, serving up his own integrity with every silly dish. While he is unable to revise or control his compulsions, our Margot does. She escapes that absurd, fatal menu by requesting the humble cheeseburger. She has the heart and intelligence to deploy it. 

Little Big Man (1970)

  As the film’s moral center, Old Lodge Skins distinguishes between “the White Men” (which includes “the black men”) and his “Human Beings.” Given the steady downward pull of gravity — in morality as in physics — the old sage is prepared to die because his people and their ethic are doomed. This even after a decisive victory: “There is an endless supply of White Man. But there always has been a limited number of Human Beings. We won today... we won't win tomorrow.”

The values that distinguish the sage’s Human Beings evoke the Yiddish mentschlichkeit — the idea that the human must be humane, respectful of nature and humanity. This four years before Mel Brooks presented the Yiddish Indian chief in Blazing Saddles. 

To Old Lodge Skins the Human Beings are more sensitive than the dominant spectrum of White Men: “the Human Beings, my son, they believe everything is alive. Not only man and animals. But also water, earth, stone…. But the White Man, they believe EVERYTHING is dead. Stone, earth, animals. And people! Even their own people!” 

And so overall: “It makes my heart sad, a world without Human Beings has no center to it.” The old man centers his blindness — and hence vision — in his heart, not in the eyes: ” My eyes still see. But my heart no longer receives it.” So he prays “Thank You for my vision, and the blindness in which I saw further!” He names Jack Little Big Man, not Big Little Man, because the boy’s big heart makes him essentially big despite his small size, not a little man enlarged by his accomplishments.

The Human Beings are doomed before the White Men’s attack. Their playful game of tag to humiliate the cavalry is overwhelmed by the White Men’s rifles. The Human Beings’ concept of humiliation falls before the cavalry’s shamelessness. 

In a comic version of the White Man’s disappearing humanity, the peripatetic shyster Allardyce Merriweather rejects the “streak of honesty” Jack got from — the misnaming is revealing —  “that damned Indian, Old Tepee…. He gave you a vision of moral order in the universe and there isn't any.Those stars twinkle in a void there, boy, and the two legged creature dreams and schemes beneath them,… all in vain Jack.” As he moves from one crooked scheme to another his humanity dwindles in the literal loss of limbs and organs. Merriweather personifies the bit by bit loss of humanity, like Erich von Stroheim’s German officer in Le Grand Illusion. Still, “After Mrs. Pendrake his honesty was downright refreshing.”

As the 121-year-old Jack Crabb looks back upon his life of test and tribulation, swerving between antithetical cultures and moral systems, his story assumes Old Testament proportions. In the slaughters and in their interstitial pauses there is the moral lesson in how to be a proper human, here that Human Being. Louise Pendrake is Biblically out of sin when she observes -- when still the violent pastor’s wife before her brothel widowhood -- “Moses was a Hebrew, but Jesus was a gentile, like you and me.” Espying her sexual looseness ends Jack’s “religious period. I ain't sung a hymn in a 104 years.” 

In short, Jack’s history is a chronicle of absurdity and moral inversions: “There was no describing how I felt: an enemy had saved my life from the violent murder of one of my best friends... The world was too ridiculous to even bother to live in.”

One key contrast between the Whites and the Human Beings is the two-spirit Little Horse. In appearance and behaviour he is today’s “queer.” As a boy he declined to join the war party against the Pawnee, a decision for which he is honoured not castigated. Later, he greets Jack’s return: “You look tired Little Big Man. Would you like to come in my teepee and rest on soft furs? Come and live with me and I'll be your wife!”

Crabb identifies him as “a heemanee for which there ain't no English word. And he was a good one, too. The Human Beings thought a lot of him.” The heemanee is obviously an antithetic advance upon the homonymous “he-man” of the historic and continuing White preference. This 52-year-old film anticipates the current critique of heteronormativity, avant le lettre. This is as significant a target as the white suprematism.

The film often reverses the gender roles. Jack’s sister Caroline initially expects to be raped by the attacking Human Beings. Her dread disappointed, she abandons her young brother and rides off. She reappears as a macho leader of the citizens group that tars and feathers Jack and Merriweather. She performs the righteous violence she expected of the Human Being males. Similarly, Jack’s Swedish wife Olga moves from the constant compliance of her “Yah” to dominating the Human Being husband who kidnapped her. Where the two-spirit Human Being lives by gentleness the two White characters turn to violence and domination.

Jack’s turbulent shifts between the White and Human Being cultures emphasizes the arbitrary nature of the codes by which we live. Hence the Cheyenne known as Contrarian, who speaks the reverse of what he means. As we absorb Jack Crabb’s story we may recall that the crab is known for advancing by moving sideways. 

The antithesis between White Man and Human Being itself presents some reversals. Old Lodge Skins keeps his faith despite his disappointed attempt to die: “Well, sometimes the magic works. Sometimes it doesn’t.” The myths he sells parallels Merriweather’s exploitation of vulnerability:  “Listen to me, a two-legged creature will believe anything and the more preposterous the better: whales speak French at the bottom of the sea. The horses of Arabia have silver wings. Pygmies mate with elephants in darkest Africa. I have sold all those propositions.”

Old Lodge Skins sells the same myth: “Snake women … copulate with horses, which makes them strange to me. She say's she doesn't. That's why I call her Doesn't Like Horses. But, of course, she's lying.” His one white wife showed no “enthusiasm when you mount her.” Yet his dream vision of Jack with four wives comes true when Jack obeys his wife’s assignment to her three sisters. Jack saves Old Lodge Skins by “selling” him on his myth of invisibility. There the magic works.

The old sage’s condemnation of the White People can be as sweeping as theirs of his: “It is said that a ‘black’ White Man once became a Human Being. They are a very strange creatures. Not as ugly as the white man true; but they are just as crazy!”

There is also ambivalence within the Human Beings’ code. After Younger Bear saves Jack, he declares “You and I are even at last. I paid you the life I owe you. And the next time we meet, I can kill you without becoming an evil person.” 

Wild Bill Hickock proves as Human as the indigenous. Without knowing he is about to die he arranges for Jack to convey the funds to send his mistress Lulu (i.e., Mrs Pendrake) back East. With a sharpened sensitivity he sees past Jack’s gunfighter pretence: “I wouldn't have put your total that high. No offence, Hoss, but you ain't got the look of murder about you. Not like that fella over there.” That sleeping man Jack dismisses as “just a common drunk” then tries to kill Bill and is efficiently shot through the lungs and heart. The accomplished gunfighter Wild Bill Hickock is constantly nervous about “getting shot.”

In contrast to Hickock, General Custer displays an arrogance that is the Human Beings’ antithesis. Custer is a comic exaggeration of the Human Being’s virtues. The potential heemanee of his dandified image — his manicured moustache and beard, his flamboyant white suit on the battlefield, his nakedness in his tent — is undercut by his swagger. Hence his empty assurance to Olga: “My dear woman, you have nothing to fear from the Indians, I give you my personal Custer guarantee.”

Custer’s assertions are a nonsensical version of Old Lodge Skins’ observations, e.g., “Nothing in this world is more surprising than the attack without mercy!” He pretends to a higher insight into people, proud he can read a man’s profession. The bandy-legged Jack must be a mule-skinner. When he’s later corrected in his reading of Jack, Custer turns that acknowledgment of error into an overriding virtue. Sparing Jack, he declares ‘Your miserable life is not worth the reversal of a Custer decision.”

When he contemplates his doomed attack at Little Big Horn, Custer plays Contrarian himself. To Jack’s warning against attacking, Custer declares: “Still trying to outsmart me, aren't you, mule-skinner. You want me to think that you don't want me to go down there, but the subtle truth is you really *don't* want me to go down there!” Before he’s finally cut down Custer rants madly: “A Custer decision impetuous? GRANT called me impetuous, too, the drunkard, sitting there in the White House, calling ME impetuous!” The famous White Man pretending to Human Being substance is the false hero of the saga of a man trying to navigate two conflicting cultures. 

The rest is history, and not just Jack Crabb’s.   

The Searchers (1956): The Gospel According to Look

 

    The Comanche woman that Martin Pawley unwittingly marries erroneously assumes that his repeated “Look” means he has renamed her, replacing her native identification as a free flying spirit. Martin and Ethan stick her with that name. As we expect of such a resonant classic, even such an apparently marginal element is found to carry the heart of the film. Its primary direction is for us to look —  past the superfices of our social conventions into the dark heart of American racism. 

Ethan disdains of the 1/8 Cherokee Martin as a half-breed, a “blankethead.” This despite Jeffrey Hunter’s bright blue eyes and his character Martin’s devotion to Ethan’s brother Aaron’s family. When Martin’s family was slaughtered by Comanches Aaron adopted him and raised him as kin. In an echo of Ethan's epithet, Martin thinks he is trading two Whiteman tophats for a blanket -- but it's for Look.

        Look in a tophat remains in Ethan's view a blankethead. That visual joke holds a central theme of the film. A human is a human whatever the exterior appearance or overlay. The villain here may be Scar but he proves human as Ethan -- and more of a family man.

Martin considers Ethan’s abducted niece Debbie to be his sister. For him, the emotional connection trumps the question of blood. He rejects Ethan’s bequest for denying her as his last surviving kin. He stands in front of her when Ethan is poised to shoot her. In that tense triangle the message is to look beyond differences of race or colour to the common humanity beneath. 

The warm, sympathetic character of Look is significant as the film’s first humanization of the Indian. It breaks the steady stream of references to the savage. When we laugh at Martin’s abusive treatment of her, rolling her down the hill, we commit ourselves to the racist diminution of the Other. She flees when she hears their quest for Scar, but leaves them an ambiguous direction, a stone arrow that m ay direct then to Scar or to her destination. She seems as afraid of Scar as the searchers are. But she is slaughtered among other innocent Comanches by -- the cavalry. The men's words over her corpse are hardly redress for their abuse of her. 

Extending the parallel savageries, when Ethan and Scar finally confront each other, they echo respect for each other’s command of the other’s language: “Did someone teach you?”  Ethan recognizes the “Scar” in the Spanish “Cicatrix,” but he fails to recognize that the film’s radical “scar” is his own racism. We get that “look” of intense hatred in the famous closing-in shot on Ethan’s shadowed face. Completing Ethan’s identification with Scar, the white hero scalps the chief after Martin shoots him. 

The hatred for the native is so sweeping that it corrupts the virtuous Laurie Jorgensen. Though in love with Martin, she approves of Ethan’s plan to kill Debbie: “Fetch what home? The leavings of a Comanche buck, sold time and again to the highest bidder, with savage brats of her own?… Do you know what Ethan will do if he has a chance? He'll put a bullet in her brain. [pause] I tell you, Martha [Debbie’s mother] would want him to.”

Contrary to those racist assumptions, Debbie has blossomed in her life with Scar. As she tells Martin, she always remembers her own family but now wants to stay with Scar and his. “These are my people.” 

Perhaps the film’s moral center is Laurie’s mother. Mrs. Jorgensen is a former schoolteacher, married to the Swedish immigrant rancher Lars. She alone reads Laurie’s experience of Martin’s insufficient letter. In a summary apprehension of America, she articulates the hopeful spirit of the Texican: “nothing but a human man way out on a limb.” The border-American is alone, exposed, endangered, due to the isolation and dismissal of a people. She hopes for a society of acceptance, where people don’t suffer for their difference: “This year and next, and maybe for a hundred more. But I don't think it'll be forever. Some day this country's gonna be a fine, good place to be. Maybe it needs our bones in the ground before that time can come.” The unrealized dream of an egalitarian America rings as true for 1956 (when the film was released) as it was for 1868 (the film’s setting) — and, tragically, as it remains today.

Ethan’s own moral center is discovered beneath his conscious hatred and rage. His intention to kill his contaminated niece is at least in part rooted in the fact that — as a tombstone suggests — his mother, like Martin’s, was slaughtered by the Comanches. But in the climactic moment, when he captures Debbie, his conscious will is overruled by a body memory. His instinct to sweep her up reminds him of the identical moment at his homecoming. Finally he accepts their connection beyond the difference in her appearance. He goes beyond his “look.”   

The imperative to look — beyond surfaces, differences — is given both a comic and an epic representation. In the comic, Lars Jorgensen twice puts on his eyeglasses to prepare to listen to his wife or daughter read aloud a letter. The quirk is an amusing reflex for the man who cannot read but will hear the letter. To learn is to look.

The epic “look” command is in the film’s most dramatic composition. In both the first and the last shots, the image is dominated by a thick black frame, which opens to reveal a smaller space that admits the light of the outside world. That darkness is continuous with the darkened theatre in which the film was made to be viewed. The shot establishes the darkness of the freshly planted civilization amid the magnificence of the sprawling, towering Monument Valley where director John Ford found his crowning glory.

That composition recurs within the narrative, when the heroes find refuge from attacking natives in front of a massive cave. Again, the shot originates within a dark frame. Even in the interiors, door frames and windows restrict the characters yet reveal them to us. We have to look beyond our traditional frames.

Perhaps the most moving scene of looking is when Martha, collecting Ethan’s overcoat, lovingly caresses it, feeling alone with her sentiment. That brief moment suggests a backstory: They had been in love, before Ethan took to his solitary journey. Indeed, that suppressed love registers in the characters’ looks, glances, movement. in the earlier scene of Ethan’s return.

       It’s important that we see Martha’s intimate revelation. But we also see the Reverend Captain Samuel Johnson Clayton see it. Sensing the exposure he dramatically respects that intimacy by looking up and away. He works his donut and coffee as Ethan enters, dons the coat and plants a farewell kiss on Martha’s forehead. In a more dramatic evasion, when Ethan comes upon her raped corpse, he violently protects Martin from that sight, leaving the body to burn in the shed. That prevents an ineradicable look.

As both the lay preacher and the Texas Rangers captain, Clayton personifies the combination of religious and secular law. That doubles his tension with Ethan, whose racist vendetta and outlaw independence leave him forever scarred, forever excluded from the warmth of a community. When Ethan walks away from his reunited family it is to wander eternally through the winds, as he described the fate of Comanches who've had their eyes shot out. 

Here the characters are always looking. Mrs Jorgensen scampers to watch her daughter’s suitors fight it out in the red dust, the wedding party turning into a civilized, ritualized savagery. As Ethan and Martin track Scar, the violent chief comes to recognize Big Shoulders and The One Who Follows. And of course we are all watching the film. As the framing composition makes it, we’re in the dark world of prejudice in need of an illumination. Until we perceive and embrace the larger humanity we like Ethan ride rootless alone.

The Indian as sexual threat was in the 1950s a surrogate for the white man’s fear of the Black. Old Mose Harper is a safe Black, steeped in his inappropriate Bible quotations, alternately imitating the Indian or shooting at him, with one simple craving: a rocking chair by the fire. He brings Ethan to Debby by pretending to be mad, i.e., madder than he is. The domesticated harmless Black appears in place of the sexual threat that has resonated since Othello’s black ram tupping the white ewe. 

Yet for all Ford’s liberal humanitarianism here the film still bears some limitation of its times — and to this day. For all the central drama’s attack on racial prejudice the one irredeemably corrupt white character — Jerem Futterman — is by his name a Jew. This greedy and duplicitous trader per the Reverend Captain Clayton “probably deserved to be shot.” Ford's egalitarianism only went so far.

Tar

  “Time is the thing,” conductor Lydia Tar tells her interviewer Adam Gopnik (unpersuasively played by Adam Gopnik). She’s referring to what her one hand controls on the orchestra while the other directs other elements. Time and its control — by us, on us — could be the central theme of the film. Especially if controlling time leads one to assume they can completely control others' lives.  Implicitly: Time wounds all heels. 

Perhaps that’s why the film opens with a juggling of time in its structure. The first thing we see is an assistant’s phone, with emails reporting the maestro’s awakening and mood. She is the central subject. We hear an Asian singer — which turns out to anticipate the closing scene, where the brilliant Western classical conductor has been reduced to working with a minor Asian orchestra. As we will see, this reduction is not racist.

When the opening credits unreel they are predominantly the technical ones that normally/always come at the end, after the plot has concluded, when everyone is leaving. Here the film conductor — director Todd Field — stops and uses time for at least two effects. He ensures this audience will pay the techs proper respect. (No-one leaves a Cate Blanchett film this early.) He also reserves the end-credit slot for the climactic acknowledgment of all the music that makes this work such a rich experience, even apart from its plot, acting and themes.  

The film is also very much of its time. It surfaces the harassment and sexual exploitation issues we daily hear about, from the classroom and the workplace up through our bastions of high culture. Some of the latter transgressors are named. These abusers are usually men, exploiting their power, personal and official, for their pleasure and advantage. But here the guilty power is a woman conductor, Lydia Tar (whose very name connotes a darkness crying out for retributive feathers).    

Gopnik’s opening recitation of Tar’s prominence may seem to go on too long. That heft is necessary to establish the heroine’s stature and power. Her achievement seems all the more impressive when we glimpse her origins — the shabby home she has kept, her loutish, resentful, righteous brother — and the high-power level on which she asserts her influence. A private flight takes her from Berlin to New York for her book opening and a deposition. Her past echoes in the abandoned ruin to which she follows the pretty cellist she hopes to seduce. Her literal fall and scarring there anticipate her end. 

Tar commands our early respect in her master class, especially when she confronts the young man’s Woke disdain for Bach: “Unfortunately, the architect of your soul appears to be social media.…

The narcissism of small differences leads to the most boring kind of conformity.” We may return to her side when an illicit videotaping of that class is rejigged to incriminate her. But she loses us when — with the fury of a woman scorned — her undermining of a young woman’s career drives her to suicide. 

At her nadir, Lydia humiliates herself by physically attacking the conductor of her former orchestra, onstage. She’s reduced to conducting a minor Asian orchestra. Now she’s in a cheap hotel, seeking a massage in a brothel. Worse, her symphony is performing for a ludicrously costumed and masked audience — like a popular culture fan rally. This cultural fall is a bitter parody of the scholarly study she did for her doctorate, immersed in an isolated indigenous tribe’s music.

Cate Blanchett’s achievement here is remarkable. It included her learning German as well as piano and conducting performance. Her tough, determined character admirably pursues a lofty ambition. She channels Rocky in her sequences of running and boxing the heavy bag in the gym. This is a woman working a man’s power. 

Yet she still shows her softness in her scenes with the little girl, who by calling her Lydia suggests she’s the child of Lydia’s violinist lover. She tries to live a motherly warmth she never experienced. Performing sans rehearsal. In approaching the pretty young Russian cellist, however, the woman turns predator.

Perhaps that’s the film’s point. Acknowledging the history of male predators, the film deliberately broadens its target to include this woman. Sexist abuse and predation transcends gender, as Tar’s music transcends culture.

The Names in Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939)

  Of course the key name both in the film and in the Ernest Haycox source story is Lordsburg to which the societal cross-section on this coach are headed. That gives the parable a religious/moral dimension. How do these characters here prepare their souls for the Lord’s burg? 

My meditation is prompted by the two central — and antithetical — characters and their consanguineal names. Now, what marshall would ever be named Curly? Figures of the law are expected to be ramrod straight. So a Marshall Curly? Then there’s the outlaw, The Ringo Kid, a rather amiable name even before the Beatles magnified a Starkey into a Starr. These apparent opposite characters connect in their names as in their actions and in what they signify.

At the film’s climax the marshall opts not to arrest the outlaw after another killing. Instead he allows him a fresh start across the border, in Mexico. This is to save him from — that crushing irony — “the blessings of civilization.”  The marshall has come to respect outlaw Ringo’s virtue, both in his crime — a defence both of his self and of family honour — and in his respect for and resurrection of the (obligatory) Fallen Woman. 

The men’s names fit that dynamic. The marshall’s “Curly” connotes softness. A curl isn’t hard like “bent” (see Gatewood below). It leads into the implicit circles both in the Ring and its closing O. The circle is a completed curl. These antagonists’ names confirm their shared humanity in their sensitive flex of the law. The enemy Plummer family suggest a deeper evil, the depth they evilly plumb.

Said Fallen Woman is named Dallas, presumably after where she’s from. That is, she is defined by her past. But then Ringo reads a different future into her relationship with the respectable wife and her newborn. Himself a social outcast, he can appreciate a new potential in her.

In contrast to this virtue, the corrupt banker Gatewood’s name evokes the “wood” hardness of the civilization spreading into the frontier. The wood like the “civilization” of banking is imported to the desert. The “gate” suggests the fencing both in the towns the pioneers imposed upon the open West and in the town’s own fragmentation into private yards. When Mrs Gatewood and her cronies drive Dallas out of town they harden this exclusion. Exposing their false morality, Gatewood exploits the broken telegraph line to abscond with the bank’s funds. He is as outlaw as the Indians who broke the connection.

Similar themes appear in the coach’s other two couples' names. Hatfield is especially courtly towards Mrs Malory, even saving one bullet to save her from the fate worse than death should they be taken captive by the savage. Hatfield is the southern gentleman, the black sheep of an aristocratic family. The Confederate major turned “tinhorn gambler.” They are connected through his army service in her father’s regiment but also in literature. Sir Thomas Malory is famous for his poems about flowering knighthood, including the death of King Arthur. Where Mrs Malory reflects Hatfield's chivalry, his name also recalls the family feud with the Hatfields. That connotes social disorder, the bloody rifts within “civilization.”

The whiskey drummer may seem truer to the actor’s name — Donald Meek — than to his character, Samuel Peacock. As the character falls far short of the flashy strut implied in the family name, it’s a comic parallel to Hatfield’s descent. So, too, Peacock’s new friend Doc Josiah Boone recalls Daniel Boone, the famed pioneer who claimed to be trying to escape civilization — only to have it follow him ever further. The genre's stock character of the drunken professional — often played by Thomas Mitchell — is another figure fallen from grace. His weakness either explains his flight from the East or reveals his disenchantment with his new refuge. 

        Not to forget Buck, the hearty driver of the six-horse machine. Bucking is what the wild horses do, until the human master "breaks" or tames (i.e., civilizes) them. The driver's name arrogates the initial power of his charges,

As the names in this richly nuanced classic confirm, the trip to Lordsburg allows even the fallen the possibility of redemption. Indeed the stagecoach trip to Lordsburg starts in Tonto (in Arizona), which means “wild one” in Potawatomi. The journey from wildness to salvation should not preclude moral flexibility and care.

Triangle of Sadness

And so it came to pass that this year’s Cannes Palme d’Or was awarded to Ruben Ostlund’s  Poeme de Merde, abstractly enough titled Triangle of Sadness. 

That makes sense. For if there is any conclusion to be drawn from the current state of increasingly autocratic global politics, swelling injustice and a sober despair it’s this. if, as per the adage, the poor are always with us, the obscenely rich are always against us. And only growing in number and power. (As it happens, I saw this on the eve of the American election.)

The film is a satire of Swiftian decorum and anger. It opens and closes on Carl, a young stud trying to win the love of his Influencer partner Ya Ya. At the end he rushes through a forest in hope of saving her life. In both scenes she's defined as a selfish manipulator.

In the film's prelude several handsome young men are vying for a modelling job. Carl is instructed to “relax your triangle of sadness,” the mid-brow area that expresses emotion. “And open your mouth so you look a bit more available.” Here emotions are to be hidden or fabricated: Targeting such suppression of humanity, the film flaunts that title. 

In Chapter One Carl and Ya Ya quarrel over a dinner check. He bristles against “gender based roles” and “bullshit feminism,” rejects the “trophy [wife] shit” and is determined to make her love him. As “influencers” they are empty beauties selling their image. Despite her claim to be current, Yaya wants the traditional security of the “kept woman.” She expects Carl to pay her way.

In Chapter Two they enjoy a free yacht trip, spewing photos of themselves. It’s so luxurious a helicopter delivers a valise with three jars of Nutella. Another boat is despatched to take away a crew member fired when Carl complains the man appeared bare-chested. The model was disturbed by the genuine hirsute manliness. The ship offers to sell Carl an engagement ring for 28,000 euros.

The passengers are the creme de la crumb. Russian mogul Dmitri proudly declares his fertilizer fortune: “I sell shit.” So he understands the Influencers’ reduction to Image, when Yaya pauses the pasta at her mouth, determined to pose rather than eat. 

The British arms dealer Winston is less honest: ““Our products have been employed in upholding democracy all over the world.” He makes hand grenades. If democracy is held up here, it’s in the sense of the wealthy continually robbing the poor. But they also arm the underclass, as the pirates blow up the yacht with a grenade. As  Clementine observes, “I say, Winston, I believe this is one of ours.” The couple is a homey decline from the Churchills.

The cruise crew is a microcosm of social stratification. To pamper the clients a sparkling white staff are instructed to fulfil every client’s request, however absurd or impossible — in expectation of “a very. Generous. Tip!” In an insensitive imposition of “equality” Dmitri’s wife demands a staff girl join her in the hot tub: “Everyone is equal!. I command you, enjoy the moment!” Of course, one would not command an equal — and could not command enjoyment. 

From the crew’s orgiastic celebration of “Money Money! Money” we cut to the uniformed workers, quiet in their quarters, the hidden but vital Asian and Filipino menials. When the entire crew submits to the water-slide “pleasures” that the Russian woman ordered, the first signs of a serious storm appear. Nature seems to respond to that social disordering.

In what follows, satirist Ostlund almost manages to out-Salo Pasolini. He floods the affluent with effluence. The excrement that studded the language in the first chapter here materializes in force. First the gourmand passengers start vomiting all over. Then comes diarrhea not just human but mechanical. The toilets overflow, flooding the floors. 

        Against the diners' growing nausea the well-trained staff can only prescribe more eating. Cutting back, self-denial, are alien concepts in this world, even when the luxury dining room turns vomitorium.

As the filthy rich are reduced to this materiality a demented German woman continually repeats “In the clouds” — as if only the demented can so locate the human in the heavens.

The ship’s captain has been secluded drunk so far, clearly unable to bridge the gap between his duties and his politics. For he’s a self-styled “shit socialist.”  When the others ate smoked octopus he ordered a hamburger and fries. He and the Russian fertilizer mogul retreat to his cabin. The American Commnunist and the Russian Capitalist regale each other by swapping Socialist jokes. 

Congruent with the shit-flood, the captain demands on the PA “Stop the bullshit and pay taxes.” Then “You’re swimming in abundance while the rest of the world drowns in need.” As played by the affable working-class persona Woody Harrelson, the captain sometimes seems the director’s spokesman: “I’m not angry with you. I understand that your greedy behaviour is just a way to preserve . . . that you’re rich, filthy rich.” The excrement connotes the filth of the self-serving rich. They are, after all, flush with money. 

The captain concludes with his allegation that his government was behind the murder of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and the Kennedy brothers. As if to wreak poetic justice that’s when the boat of pirates appears, blowing up the yacht, which at this point looks like the battleship of the captain’s vision.  

In Chapter Three: The Island, the few shipwreck survivors find their social structure reversed. The Filipino toilet manager Abigail raises herself to Captain because only she can catch fish, clean them and start the fire to feed the others. She also takes Carl away from Ya Ya, buying his romance with — an apt parody of phallicism — pretzel sticks. 

In contrast to her efficiency, one of the men struggles to kill a donkey by bashing its head with a rock. That may provide the clue to how to read the closing scene with Abigail and Ya Ya. The open ending allows the viewer’s choice whether the working class can sustain its hardwon status or will yet again cede it to the less capable but habitual authority. This ambiguity echoes the question in the prelude: “So is this runway casting for a grumpy brand or a smiley brand?” The three characters also form another triangle of sadness, however we decide Abigail's last act.

 

The Banshees of Inisherin

  In playwright Martin McDonagh’s new film the context defines the plot. A few scenes of remote gunfire connote the Irish Civil War in 1923. The Western island setting is remote from the war, with only that occasional aural connection. Yet the village drama is a miniature of the civil strife that erupted after Ireland won its independence. The mainland war replays here as a conflict between two friends. 

The folk musician Colm is suffering from despair. Sensing his imminent mortality he composes a folk tune to provide some afterlife. Exposing that futility, the song’s (as the film’s) title just sounds good. It has no reality. There are no banshees there.

More damaging is Colm’s other resolve. to cease wasting time on his longtime close friend Padraic, who is a standard dumb bloke. But as Padraic’s bookish sister Siobhan reminds Colm, all the men on that remote isolated crag are dumb — or they would long since have left. As she eventually does. 

Like the civil war, indeed like most wars, that small difference swells into a tangle of destruction, both mutual and self. When Padraic refuses his old friend’s insistence upon being left alone, Colm chops off one of his own fingers for each day of offence. He is quickly reduced to one fingerless hand. That ends his fiddling pleasure, leaving him to stab his fiddle into the air in mute musicianship. Once he is unable to play his tune it won’t outlive him.

When Padriac’s donkey Minnie (persuasively performed by Minnie) fatally chokes on some fingers, his injured innocence turns mortal. Rejecting Colm’s apology and offer of peace, he burns his former friend’s home to the ground. Even then he refuses to make peace. They won’t be “quits” until Colm dies. “Some things there's no moving on from. And I think that's a good thing.” On such stubborn squabbles are most wars waged.

The apparently homey little community is rife with aggression. Humorously, Colm disdains of the law: “If punching a policeman is a sin then we may as well pack up and go home.” The priest who hears his confession himself erupts into indignant violent profanity. He reads the Latin but speaks the vulgate. In another family, the father mercilessly beats his wife and son, who drowns himself when Siobhan confirms his expectation that she would never fall in love with the much younger and irritating boy.

At the end Padraic, having supposedly won his satisfaction, is left alone. His sister gone, he brings his cows and horse into his house. This is his finally stable relationship. Colm is left with far more isolation than he requested. Indeed the entire community is left — as Colm admits to and suspects Siobhan of sharing — just “entertaining myself while staving off the inevitable.”

There is a true serenity and beauty in the island’s bleak landscape. And even in this doomed community, a warmth and pathos emerge from the small, tense lives of paralysis and despair. 

And note this: if a calendar turning up April Fool’s  Day did not establish the 1923 setting there is nothing in this film’s setting, speech and themes that could not represent today. If we don’t see ourselves there we’re the April Fool.   

The Tenant (1976)

  Trelkovsky takes pride in being a French citizen, but as a Pole even in worldly Paris he is ever the Outsider. 

At work, he’s a minor functionary disdained by the women and bullied by the brutish males. As we learn nothing else about him he’s a character unwittingly in search of an identity. Polanski plays him as a gentle, nice man — but lacking a firm core. He can counter his prospective landlord’s reluctance but not his office friends’ coarseness.

As if to try an identity on for size, he rents the apartment of a woman who tried to jump to her death. The room’s nine mirrors make it an instrument of self-reflection — were he confident in any self to reflect. Instead he draws into the suicide Simone’s life. He visits the comatose all-bandaged woman in the hospital, where he meets her friend Stella. They meet again at Simone’s funeral, then he joins her party in a bar.

Their possible affair starts with Stella’s erotic initiative at a Bruce Lee screening. A tryst in her apartment fizzles when Trelkovsky freezes on questioning his identity. Is he still himself when he has lost a tooth, when he has lost a limb, several limbs, his head? With that fixation he has begun to lose his self.

The gentle hero’s experience turns Kafkaesque when he thinks the other rooming house residents are conniving against him. Complaints of his noise continue beyond the justified. He becomes entangled in house politics when he declines to sign a petition against another tenant. When he’s robbed, the landlord, Monsieur Zy (evocative of Josef K?)  persuades him not to report the theft, to save the house’s reputation and to avoid himself becoming known to the police. When Trelkovsky responds to a summons he finds they already have a file of complaints against him. 

Now Trelkovsky suspects the community is trying to make him kill himself, as they perhaps did Simone. The conversion begins when the neighbourhood cafe brings him the morning hot chocolate that Simone always had. When he orders Galois they always bring him her Marboros, falsely claiming they have run out of his brand.  

Essentially Trelkovsky is not just a tenant passing through a rented apartment but a man  passing through another identity, the suicide’s. He privately dons makeup and Simone’s dress and dyes his hair her black. Feeding his sense of the unnatural, he espies other tenants using the communal toilet across from his window; they stand there blankly staring. 

On an imagined trip to that toilet he looks across and sees himself spying on himself. A wall of Egyptian hieroglyphics would be left by the Egyptologist Simone herself, from the grave. 

Trelkovsky’s paranoia ultimately destroys him. Finding salvation with Stella, the illusion of Monsieur Zy at the door drives Trelkovsky into mad destruction of her flat. Having lost his self he drifts into repeating Simone’s suicide, indeed doing it twice to properly “perform” her role as he assumes it. 

Though Trelkovsky can’t save his own life he does save another’s. He patiently and generously consoles a man who has secretly loved Simone and has finally come to tell her that — only to have Trelkovsky report her astonishing suicide. 

        In our age of gender fluidity the film offers yet another possibility. The gentle Trelkovsky, sensitive, repelled by his office mates' aggressiveness, may rent the woman's apartment and be attracted to identifying with her as a way to express his own suppressed feminine nature. Hence his resistance to Stella's offer of a sexual relationship, especially when he retreats to speculate about the essence of his own identity. Fantasizing the other residents' determination to kill him may be his way of suppressing his female aspect. He blames them for driving him to kill the woman in him. Hence his double dive -- once as his male self, once as his female.

With writer/director Polanski also performing the lead role, the drama assumes another dimension. A writer like an immigrant moves through a new world with new people and a new life whenever he submits to his imagination. The danger is again abandoning his self and  losing any hold on reality. The film’s opening shot is the view downward from the fatal apartment — the two suicides’ perspective. It’s a doom waiting to be seized, a story to be told and risk being stuck in.

Barbarian

  What happens when an attractive young documentary film researcher stumbles into the horror genre? 

You get an acid vision of post-Reagan America. We are, after all, experiencing the America that grew out of the Reagan trickle-down economics and bubble-up right-wing populism. The film’s title is a concise summary.

As we see, the monster’s father stayed in the ostensibly proper Detroit suburb when civilization left. The once idyllic American neighbourhood is now a ruin. In a clash of elements an Air BnB now conceals — and feeds — an underground horror chamber where the ideal of nursing motherhood has turned monstrous. The monster stalks the night — and the rental above— for prisoners she can force into being her sucklings. As she kills the non-obliging, her parody of nursing does keep at least Tess alive. 

In the final irony, the end titles play against the ‘50s rock classic Be My Baby. That romantic anthem has become a monster’s fatal compulsion. Indeed the female monster is a bitter amplification of the imprisoned wife in Jane Eyre, the novel discovd incestuous ered in a tenant’s suitcase. 

The documentary context extends from heroine Tess’s responsible profession down to the porn studio in the cavern. The monster supplies her now helpless old father with videos of the prisoners they have tortured — presumably starting with the housewife we see him setting up for abduction. In contrast, in Tess’s new project a woman filmmaker covers the reclaiming of abandoned properties— whether neighbourhoods or values.  

Once confronted with a normal man — the TV producer AJ — the monster’s father kills himself. But how “normal”  is AJ? 

As the plot’s ostensible hero he is totally compromised. He’s the absentee and oblivious owner of the property now so poisoned. He has come to liquidate it in order to pay his legal charges to defend against a rape charge. As he describes the incident to a buddy and as he indiscreetly tells the woman’s answering machine, she has a strong case. As the monster is a perversion of motherhood  AJ is a perversion of romantic manhood. 

In exploring the property he has so long neglected he so obsesses over his measurement that he fails to see the dangers around hi

He even fails as the film’s “hero,” despite his part in freeing Tess. While his shooting her may be accidental, he instinctively sacrifices Tess to deflect the monster, to save himself. As befits such a film-centered hero AJ has his eyes gouged out. 

The monster’s female nature may be unusual, but the sexual threat is largely accorded the male: from the monster’s rapist father down to the rapist AJ. She is the product and victim of her father’s rapes. Indeed the threatening atmosphere is so sexual that in his first scenes with Tess Keith may well be innocent. But the scene ripples with sexual danger. His nightmares and her mysteriously opening doors catch the danger in their minds — and in the underground of their world. 

With these themes and strategy this is a contemporary take on the classic horror genre, extremely polished and effective.

Both Sides of the Blade

  In this brilliant romantic tragedy a solid woman Sara (Juliette Binoche) is torn between her committed lover Jean (Vincent Lindon) and her wild former passion Francois (Gregoire Colin). 

The film opens on Sara’s idyllic seaside holiday with Jean and ends with her left alone, a victim of her own emotions, her lover’s selfishness and — as if all that were not enough — mischance. A lifetime of womanly obedience ends in dashed loves and a dark solitude.

The scenes of intimacy and conflict stand up to anything in Bergman.  The predominantly low string score tightens the lovers’ tension throughout.

As this is a Claire Denis film the romantic plot is given a political correlative. As one of Sara’s radio interviewees cites Fritz Fanon, racism is a psychological problem because it is rooted in people being locked-in in their identities. So here are the three central lovers. When Francois resurfaces as Jean’s business partner and Sara’s disaster, she tries to negotiate between her two lovers. She is ultimately betrayed by one man and her own compulsiveness. 

The political theme also involves 15-year-old Marcus, Jean’s black son from his marriage to a Martinique woman. Jean tries to save the despairing teen from letting himself be defined by the dominant white society and resigned to servitude. That’s Sara’s struggle too. The epilogue is a pallid, lifeless scene of Jean and Marcus at a juvenile rugby practice, their spirit lost.    

        The title? It's those damned locked-in identities. If you're not cut from the outside you do it within.

        Claire Denis has had an astonishing year. She has made two world-class films, this and Stars at Noon (see my posting). In both she balances the personal and the political. Both have remarkably explicit sex scenes, always with a point both psychological and political. The performances, scripts and cinematics are uniformly brilliant/

Stars at Noon

  Claire Denis’s latest post-colonial anatomy of oppression is a contemporary replay of the 1984 Sandanista revolution in Nicaragua. Hence the covid masks, cellphones and assumption of American weakness.   

As the American wouldbe journalist trying to escape, Trish (Margaret Qualley, Andie Macdowell’s daughter) has a curiously Latina aspect in her character. With her fluency in Spanish, her dark hair and striking, undernourished features she could “pass.” But her expose of government kidnappings and killings have frozen her passport. Her pretence to press privilege is false. The American publisher of tourist blather wants nothing to do with her.  She is rootless in a strange land.

To buy airfare home she sells sex — but only for US dollars. She also uses sex to keep two local “friends” to help her. As she says, “one can’t get it up.” That would be the fossil Minister of — wait for it — Vice. The other, a studly selfserving cop — to her tribulation — can. Her last hope — both for escape and sexual satisfaction — is the mysterious British salesman Daniel, who himself turns into a political liability when he meets her in that lions’ den. The backdoor that served the prostitutes in her hotel room has no state equivalent. 

The helpless American’s dependence upon the white-suited Brit is itself a historic echo of damaging colonialism. As in her abbreviation of Patricia, Trish is reduced altogether, unable to draw on American support, disdained by the locals, especially those who suffer for trying to help her, like the driver whose lifeline auto is burned for his effort. The outside world isn’t awed by “America” anymore. 

So for all her modernity the lovely Trish remains exemplar of The Ugly American. She insults the black owner of her motel, her “cesspool.” Though scrambling (so to speak) for the Yankee dollar, Trish lavishes cordobes on the locals whom she endangers with her demands. For all her presumption of agency — both as American and as Modern Woman — her salvation rests with a CIA doofus. 

Denis’s film is an experience. Its scenes of wit, arousal and initiative barely conceal its overwhelming spirit of helplessness. Hence perhaps the title. Stars at noon? As the times are out of joint, it’s that cursed spite that our poor lovable Trish was born to set it right!  

        Check out my piece on Denis's followup film, Both Sides of the Blade.

"America and the Holocaust" -- Ken Burns

  Ken Burns’s PBS documentary on America’s role in the Holocaust is the year’s most important new work of art. Its historic sweep is detailed, searching, profound, intellectually solid and emotionally compelling. It also catches truths as applicable to America and the West today as it is about the Nazi period.

That is, Burns’s latest epic series succeeds on the three time-schemes that any ambitious historic art work involves. An artist’s approach to some long past event undertakes to represent a significant truth about the period it depicts. Given that open choice of subject, it is at least equally about the time the work was made as it is about the time in which its action is set. Why else make it? Finally, the best historic works also catch a truth about the time when the work is seen  — even if it’s decades after the work was made and hundreds of years after the subject event.

Burns’s new series pointedly reflects upon the resurgence of white supremacy, xenophobia, fear of immigration and especially antisemitism, the appeasement or toleration of murderous dictators, that undermines Western democracies today. Especially the subject, America. 

Don’t miss it. And don’t leave it smug that “we’re not like that anymore.” In politics, in the media, in our universities we once again — or still — are. That’s why Burns made this now. 

A History of The Gauntlet

 

Furor Arma Ministrat: A select history of the Gauntlet

By Melanie Woods, April 27 2017 —

On Friday Sept. 23, 1960, 1,300 newspapers appeared on the stands of the newly minted University of Alberta, Calgary (UAC) campus. While the campus only consisted of two buildings back then — now known as Science A and Administration — the population was blossoming. The campus looked forward to welcoming over 1,000 new students for the 1960–61 academic year.  

Fifty-seven years later, the University of Calgary’s population totals well over 30,000 and dozens more buildings have sprouted across campus. But some things never change. University presidents still remind us to “lift up our eyes,” the Dinos still play sports and the Students’ Union and university still bicker over MacHall. 

As the newspaper of record, the Gauntlet has documented all of the university’s changes since that first issue on Sept. 23 1960. And through that time, the Gauntlet has changed too. In the past 57 years, the Gauntlet has switched publication dates, times and sizes. It has added new features and discarded others. In the 1990s it launched a website — www.thegauntlet.ca — and has also expanded through social media, radio and video. 

This year, the Gauntlet stopped printing weekly for the first time in its history and will move to a monthly magazine with a daily updated website. On the eve of this new chapter, we decided to look back on some of the key turning points in the history of the Gauntlet and the U of C. 

Sept. 23, 1960: Birth of a campus and a newspaper

“FROSH, WE ALL— In a sense, we’re all freshmen this year, as the Calgary university of Alberta packed up kit and caboodle to move to its new grounds. But it’s not physical buildings which necessarily sets apart the university from, say, the high school. It’s the people that inhabit and the ideas that are born in those physical edifices that spell the crucial difference. Still, this year should be a unique one for us all. The buildings are totally alien to all, strange and unexplored. Every day will bring new mysteries to be solved, new adventures to be enjoyed, new tribulations to be suffered and survived.” Maurice Yacowar, Sept. 23, 1960.

The Gauntlet wasn’t the first student newspaper at the UAC. That distinction belongs to the Cal-Var — short for Calgary Varsity — established when the UAC was still located at the campus that is now the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology. In 1948, then-president of the UAC SU Frederick Cartwright established the Cal-Var Commentary, which published until 1960, when the UAC moved to a newly minted northwest campus.

To usher in a brand new era at the new campus, the SU decided to publish a new newspaper, releasing volume one, issue one of the Gauntlet. In its early years, the paper’s small office was located in Room 027 in the basement of what is now the Administration building. The paper was funded by the SU, had a circulation of 1,300 copies published weekly on Fridays and presented the same slogan it does today — “furor arma ministrat,” Latin for “rage provides arms.” 

Its first editor-in-chief was Maurice Yacowar, then a second-year English student described in his introduction as “the man who has dedicated himself to the conquest of vice, corruption and complacency.” Yacowar would also go on to have the distinction not only of being the first Gauntleteditor, but also the the first to be fired from the job.

Yacowar faced heat for a short story published in the Gauntlet’s first literary supplement, Callidus, on Feb. 14, 1961. The story featured depictions of the loss of virginity and sexual intercourse and caused widespread outrage across the campus and the city. The supplement was deemed illegal due to controversy over its publishing and was seized, with Yacowar fired by the SU shortly after. 

The SU claimed the firing was due to a multitude of reasons concerning editorial control of the Gauntlet, but in a Feb. 22 editorial, new editor-in-chief Alan Arthur questioned the move. 

“If, as Students’ Council asserts, this had nothing to do with their action, why did they hold a special meeting two days after the seizure, instead of waiting until their next regular meeting to consider Mr. Yacowar’s fate?” Arthur wrote. 

So would begin a long and complex relationship between the Gauntlet and the SU. 

The 1960s–70s: Growing into an independent press

“Control of the major communication media should not rest with the governing body, whether that body be the students’ council of a university or the government of a country. We’re talking freedom of press. The staff of this newspaper will not be forced by [Students’ Legislative Council] or its executive to publish anything. We will publish what we deem to be the proper content and lineage.”The Gauntlet Editorial Board, Nov. 22, 1978

The Gauntlet underwent many changes in its early decades. It changed its slogan to “the people’s newspaper” in the mid-1960s. The paper also moved from Friday to Wednesday in terms of publishing dates, then experimented briefly with publishing twice a week in 1972. That only lasted eight issues, but they went back to the twice-a-week model the following year, publishing on Tuesdays and Fridays for the next few decades. 

But during all these small changes and editorial board turnovers, tensions grew between the Gauntletand its readership, as well as the Gauntlet and the SU. The paper faced a defunding referendum vote in the fall of 1969 that proposed stopping SU fees from going to the Gauntlet. 

“When the Gauntlet was a bland, conservative rag nobody complained about shelling out two bucks a year for it. But now that we are disturbing a few minds, there is suddenly a move to smash us,” editor-in-chief Jimmy Rudy wrote in an Oct. 22, 1969 editorial about the referendum. 

The Gauntlet returned in September 1970 a little haggard, but quickly recovered. However, the tense relationship with the SU persisted, simmering beneath the surface. In 1978, it reached a boiling point.

On Nov. 22 of that year, the Gauntlet published a front-page editorial titled “Gauntlet editorial – newspaper principles.” In the piece, the Gauntlet editorial board detailed what they deemed to be undue influence from the SU on the paper’s content, particularly regarding advertising. The SU executive had struck a policy to dictate and control the ad presence in the Gauntlet. The Gauntletclaimed this went directly against the SU’s constitution, which stated “the editor shall control the content of the Gauntlet.” 

On Nov. 29, the SU executive published a response on the Gauntlet’s cover. “It is our interpretation that the SU is the ‘business manager’ of The Gauntlet, and the paper’s editors and staff are not empowered to decide all business matters,” John Lefebvre wrote on behalf of the SU executive. The Gauntlet brought its response to the Review Board, which ruled on Jan. 10, 1979 that the union had delegated ad lineage responsibility to the Gauntlet editors, thus ending the conflict. 

A month later in the 1979 SU election, the Gauntlet ran a referendum campaign to gain autonomy. The question asked students if they would be willing to contribute $1 a year for full-time students or $0.50 a year for part-time students to support an independent Gauntlet Publications Society. “Both the operation of the SU and the operation of the newspaper are becoming more and more sophisticated,” co-editors Scott Ranson and Mark Tatchell wrote in a Feb. 2, 1979 editorial. “Both are now worthy of their own autonomous, individual existence.”

On Feb. 16, students voted over two to one to fund the autonomous campus newspaper. The society held its first Annual General Meeting on April 11, 1979. In the final editorial of the year, Ranson called the referendum win a “total victory.” 

In the first editorial of the following year on Sept. 6, 1979, new co-editors Michele Bestianich and Rory Cooney welcomed students in an editorial titled “Autonomy at Last.”

“Now more than ever the Gauntlet is a student newspaper. Whether the Gauntlet continues to strive for responsible journalism, or succumbs to financial and especially staff instability is up to the student body,” they wrote. “The hard work of past Gauntlet staffers has formed a base to work on, and we hope students will participate as the Gauntlet continues to grow.” 

1980 to now: An evolving Gauntlet

“A year from now, the issues reported in the Gauntlet will have been forgotten by most of us … but they will, nonetheless, affect us in some way. That is education.” Roman Cooney, April 11, 1980

The ‘80s and ‘90s marked continuing change for the Gauntlet. Publication dates, frequency and numbers shifted. The Gauntlet started to print in colour in the 80s and moved to full-colour newsprint in 2015. The Gauntlet’s website was introduced in 1998 and its focus on social media spread across various social media platforms over the following two decades. 

In 2001, the Gauntlet moved from its offices in MacHall 310 — now occupied by CJSW 90.9 FM — to its current location at MacHall 319, just above the Den and Black Lounge. This year, the Gauntletreceived $492,694 in Quality Money funding to renovate and update the space.

On Jan. 14, 1993, the Gauntlet published its thousandth issue. At the time, the newspaper had a circulation of over 13,000 print issues a week. In its final year of weekly publication, that number had flatlined at 6,000 a week.

However, the web presence that started in 1998 has skyrocketed. Currently, the Gauntlet receives around 40–50,000 hits a month on its website. More people than ever are talking about articles online, retweeting tweets and engaging with Snapchats. 

The Gauntlet’s slogan is still “furor arma ministrat,” which originates from Virgil’s Aenid and translates to “rage provides arms.” In the Gauntlet’s case, the rage is a desire to inform, and the arms is student press — even as that form evolves and shifts.

This edition marks the first time the Gauntlet will publish monthly. It’s the next chapter in a very long, very complicated story. Like many changes before this — from an editor fired over a short story about sex to a fight for autonomy — the Gauntlet will continue on, as it has for over 57 years on the University of Calgary campus.

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