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.