Michael Ferguson

The Theory of Everything

Directed by James Marsh

 

 

This is a beautifully made film about the life of Stephen Hawking, who, at the beginning of a promising career in theoretical physics, was diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease).  His doctor told him there was nothing he could do for him and gave him two years to live (in 1963), but he is still alive today, and continues a very productive life as a theoretical physicist.  He was lucky.  He had an exceptional woman who loved him, was willing marry him and take on the arduous task of caring for him, dedicating herself to keeping him alive and giving him the best life he could have under the most unfortunate circumstances.  If it wasn’t for her, he would be long dead.  They raised three children together and he is one of the leading theoretical physicists in the world today.  This is not a tragedy from any perspective.  It is a great story of multifaceted triumph of the human spirit against tremendous odds.

The film does a number of things very well.  The characters of Stephen Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) and his wife, Jane (Felicity Jones), are very well drawn.  Superb acting brings the characters to life with great vividness.  The film also very effectively portrays the formidable task of caring for someone with a progressive, degenerative disease.   My family went through this in a ten year decline of my mother with Parkinson’s Disease and other ailments.  My father insisted on keeping her at home and caring for her himself, which he did with unswerving devotion all the way to the end in 2010.  I was there at one point when she was slumped in a wheel chair with her head down refusing to eat, and the nurse told us her body was shutting down and she would probably not last two more weeks.  My dad told me to go uptown and get some jars of baby food, which I did.  I brought them back, he fed them to her with a spoon, and she ate it.  In two days she was eating normally.  She lived another four years as a terminal patient.

The point is that having one person who is totally committed to caring for such a one who is disabled and hopelessly declining can greatly extend their life and vastly improve the quality of their final years.  It is not something you can buy; it is not something you can manufacture; it is not something that can be done by institutions.  The value and advisability of such a herculean effort I will not discuss.  It is something born out of inner necessity — love, if you will — on the part of the one who takes on the task, like someone who decides to climb Mt. Everest, or sail across the ocean.  One cannot force a person to do it, but a person who has set his or her mind to the task can hardly be dissuaded.  It is an obvious, unquestionable dedication that does not quail before the most insuperable challenges.  I think it is what Nietzsche had in mind when he wrote that whatever is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.  Jane Hawking shared this fathomless inner drive for selfless dedication.

As I watched the film I wondered how this woman was produced.  She is unlike any woman I have encountered in my adult life.  I am sure it had to do with the fact that she is English, and that she came of age in the early 1960s, but I feel there has to be more to it.  Over many years I have had dealings with many young American women, and my observation is that as you get close to them, you find great question marks over their lives.  Particularly in their dealings with men, sex, marriage, motherhood, all of the classic aspects of femininity, are very problematic and confusing to them.  Their heads are full of illusions and conflicts and uncertainty to the point where they are just not equipped to deal with intimate personal relationships.  It is very typical and does not require extensive documentation.

The girl in this film is not like that.  She is absolutely solid in her personal identity, her sense of herself as a woman, and what she wanted for her life.  She is remarkably free of serious psychopathology.  She had an unshakable self confidence in her ability to deal with the arduous undertaking that she was embarking on.  And she achieved what she set out to do.  She got her Ph.D., she raised three children, and she cared for Stephen with unflinching dedication that enabled him to have a long, productive life far beyond anyone’s expectations.  If there is a Nobel Prize for superwomen, she should get it.

It is probably true that she was naive and that her self confidence was inflated.  My own experience with my father caring for my mother evinces the need for outside help.  No matter how determined and self reliant one feels, the task of caring for a person with extreme disability overwhelms the capability of a single person.  A reliable support network is necessary.  My father eventually accepted this against initial resistance, and the film shows that Jane Hawking also built a support network in the face of the toll it was taking upon her.

The film does not dwell on the conflicted aspects of the relationship between Jane and Stephen nor on the toll that the weight and burden of caring for him took on her as he progressed in his illness.   Rather, it emphasizes her sturdiness and resilience and unflagging dedication to Stephen.   It is an inspiring, touching story that is relevant to many people in the United States and around the world.  There is enough of the physics to get a flavor of Stephen Hawking’s work, but the film is not about ideas.  This is a human drama, a romance, a story that is intimately personal.   It is an achievement of the highest quality, beautifully filmed and masterfully told.  It should become a classic.

Scheherazade

By Haruki Murakami

The New Yorker, October 13, 2014, pp. 100-109.

Translated from the Japanese by Ted Goossen.

In Haruki Murakami’s revisitation of this ancient classic, a woman the narrator calls ‘Scheherazade’ tells stories to her lover, Habara, “because she wants to.”  She seems to need to talk.  Nothing is at stake, certainly not her life.  Habara was enthralled by the stories because he was “able to forget the reality that surrounded him, if only for a moment.”  They “eased [him] of worries and unpleasant memories,” and he needed this more than anything else.

The lovers don’t call each other by their names.  He doesn’t know hers, and she doesn’t use his.  “She barely spoke during their lovemaking, performing each act as if completing an assignment.”  She would leave at 4:30 to prepare dinner for her family, and Habara would be left to dine alone.  He watched DVDs and read long books.

There wasn’t much else to do.  He had no one to talk to.  No one to phone.  With no computer, he had no way of accessing the internet.  No newspaper was delivered, and he never watched television.  (There was a good reason for that.)  It went without saying that he couldn’t go outside.  Should Scheherazade’s visits come to a halt for some reason, he would be left all alone.

It is a little hard to figure out what this relationship is all about — that is, why it even exists.

Habara had met Scheherazade for the first time four months earlier.  He had been transported to this house, in a provincial city north of Tokyo, and she had been assigned to him as his “support liaison.”  Since he couldn’t go outside, her role was to buy food and other items he required and bring them to the house.

  Apparently, having sex with him was part of her assignment as well.

no vow, no implicit understanding — held them together.  Theirs was a chance relationship created by someone else, and might be terminated on that person’s whim.

So there seems to be some large, mysterious institutional force governing their lives and defining their roles and their functioning within this rather choreographed relationship.  It sounds like he might be under some sort of house arrest, or perhaps he has some disability or injury that he is recovering from.  It is never clear why these two people meet frequently and what motivates them, or why Habara has such a sense of confinement.  It is also unclear why they could not continue to meet even if this nameless, faceless force decided to terminate their “liaison.”

I think this ambiguity, this absence of internal motivations, is important.  Perhaps it is a comment on Japanese society.  I haven’t lived in Japan, so I cannot speak authoritatively on this, but from casual observation, it seems that many Japanese people live very structured lives that are defined by external forces, social expectations, that are a pervasive, overarching presence in their lives.  Thus, much of what they do and how they live is done in order to fulfill these imagined requirements and obligations, rather than from a deeply personal sense of purpose.  People don’t know why they are doing what they are doing, but they know they are supposed to do it — so they do.  What is the “reality that surrounds” Habara that he is so eager to forget, and thus so readily loses himself in Scheherazade’s narratives?  Japanese society.

I once met a young Japanese woman who had freshly arrived in the United States.  I asked her, “Why did you come to America?”  She replied simply, “Freedom.”  I was a little taken aback by that blunt response and all that must have been behind it, but I think it is not an uncommon sentiment among young Japanese women.  Japanese society can be burdensome and confining for young people and this relationship between Habara and Scheherazade, defined and controlled by a powerful unseen force, evokes that sense of invisible boundaries and sweeping tides.

There is nothing resembling spontaneity in this whole story, with the possible exception of their conversations.  The conversations after sex seem to be the only place in their lives where they can interact of their own volition  and participate in life as themselves.

Their sex was not exactly obligatory, but neither could it be said that their hearts were entirely in it. . . Yet, while the lovemaking was not what you’d call passionate, it wasn’t entirely businesslike either. . . to what extent did Scheherazade see their sexual relationship as one of her duties, and how much did it belong to the sphere of her personal life?  He couldn’t tell.

After this ambiguous set up of the relationship between Habara and Scheherazade, the story shifts focus and is taken over by a reminiscence Scheherazade relates from her adolescence that dominates the remainder.  Habara and Scheherazade, the couple, retreat and Scheherazade herself steps forward to claim center stage, specifically, a relationship — or, rather, an obsession — she had in her teens, which impelled her to break into houses — not to steal things, but to satisfy a psychological compulsion.  So it becomes a story within a story, or rather, a substory taking over what had been the main thread.

Scheherazade was obsessed with a boy in her high school class.  She broke into his house (rather easily through the front door with a key hidden under the doormat), and proceeded to go through his things, lie in his bed, smell his clothes, take a couple of innocuous souvenirs, and — very importantly, leave some small mementos of herself behind in inconspicuous places.  She is a rather aggressive girl, but in a very indirect way.  She never approaches the boy himself.  She tries to get close to him through the things he uses and lives with: by occupying the space he occupies, but when he is not there.

she began thinking about what to leave behind.  Her panties seemed like the best choice.  They were of an ordinary sort, simple, relatively new, and fresh that morning.  She could hide them at the very back of his closet.  Could there be anything more appropriate to leave in exchange?  But when she took them off, the crotch was damp.  I guess this comes from desire, too, she thought.  It would hardly do to leave something tainted by lust in his room.  She would only be degrading herself.  She slipped them back on and began to think about what else to leave.

Murakami does not write very well about sex.  He does not seem to understand it.  What I mean is he is detached from visceral passion.  Lust.  He doesn’t want to let himself or any of his characters feel it.  Neither Habara nor Scheherazade feel lust or strong passion in their relationship, and the above passage repudiates lust as a motivating force in Scheherazade’s behavior as a young girl toward the boy in her dreams.  It sanitizes her obsession with the boy.  It desexualizes her smelling his shirt and taking it home, lying in his bed, looking at his hidden pornography.  It makes the girl seem unreal and discredits her obsession with the boy.  If she had stuffed her wet panties under the boy’s pillow and approached him with a dripping cunt that was eager to fuck, it would have given her character more credibility.  She would have to do it in a Japanese way, of course.  Murakami could figure that out.  But Murakami cannot write the story that way.  He wouldn’t know what to do with a girl like that.  Believe me, there are plenty of Japanese girls who are not afraid of lust.

Scheherazade actually has more interaction with the boy’s mother than she does with the boy.  In fact, it seems likely that the boy never became aware of Scheherazade’s interest in him, although it is very clear that his mother did — and she put the kibosh on it.

When my break-ins stopped, my passion for him began to cool.  It was gradual, like the tide ebbing from a long, sloping beach.

The subsiding of Scheherazade’s interest in the boy is as amorphous and inexplicable as her obsession.  But it was the mother’s actions that locked the door and made the house inaccessible to her.  The boy himself was still readily available.  Scheherazade mentions watching him in classes at school and watching him on the soccer field.  She could have approached him in any number of ways.  It leads me to think that this obsession was more about the mother than it was about the boy.  Nothing she did had any impact on the boy, or even reached his awareness.  But the mother knew everything, or at least would soon discover everything, and Scheherazade knew this.  Still she pressed forward in defiant provocation.  It was an attempt at asserting independence — from the mother — through sex.  But it was quashed.  And it appears she never recovered.

Habara and Scheherazade have one more lovemaking session, at Scheherazade’s suggestion, and then she dresses and leaves.  It is not clear why Habara is left ruminating about the possibility — or rather, the certainty — of losing Scheherazade, and the greater specter of losing connection to all women.  Being “deprived of his freedom entirely” was the way he put it.  The invisible puppetmaster that pulls the strings on all of their lives and limits them to a very narrow range of possibilities, seems destined to pull the plug on his tenuous connection to humanity and leave him completely desolate.  This is his greatest worry.  There is nothing in the story to substantiate this fear, any more than there is anything in the story that explains why this affair is even taking place.

In the world Murakami creates these invisible forces that shape and define and limit our lives are both capricious and malevolent.  We can’t see them or influence them, yet we are always under their shadow.  Scheherazade gave a hint to the nature of that unseen, but all powerful governing force: the all knowing and all intrusive Mother, who locks doors and hides keys and crushes all free spirited love and passion.

One can look at this story in two ways as a commentary on the outward forces in Japanese society that define and structure and limit the lives of people, but it also represents a depiction of internal, unconscious forces within the self that restrict and crush the individual spirit.

The original story of Scheherazade was, perhaps, the earliest literary representation of a serial killer.  It remains paradigmatic.  An all powerful king who had felt betrayed and abandoned by one lover takes his revenge on all women thereafter.  Every day he marries a virgin and has sex with her.  The next day he beheads her and marries another.  This continues indefinitely, and endless stream of murdered, slaughtered virgins.  It is a tale of unbounded cruelty and hostility toward women from an original injury by one.  The king is so insecure and so lacking in his own sense of loveability that he feels he must kill each new woman or she will surely betray and abandon him.  This original insecurity and sense of being unloveable did not start with the lover who betrayed him, but rather, started with his mother who was never able to make him feel loved and secure in her love.  His rage was so extreme that he had to kill every woman he came in contact with.  It was the only way he could relate to women.  The betrayal of the first woman who touched off the spree was only the spark that lit a tinderbox that had been waiting for many years.  The injury that she inflamed had been inflicted many years prior, and indeed, goes back to the cradle.  Killing women was palliative, but not curative.  It assuaged his rage temporarily, like a valve letting off steam, but it did not begin to heal the original injury of neglect and abandonment that continued to fester and give rise to new waves of rage that demanded appeasement.  This is why serial killers need to keep on killing.  The mere venting of rage is not a cure.  Sex alone is also not a cure.  Scheherazade had the right idea.

Habara feels that abandonment by Scheherazade is inevitable.  It is only a matter of time.  This expectation was present before he ever met her.  It had nothing to do with anything she did or said.  His fear of being deprived of his freedom entirely is not a fear of external forces — there are no external forces — but rather of internal anxieties and insecurities that might cripple and disable his ability to connect on any level with women.  Scheherazade’s stories eased him of “worries and unpleasant memories” — most likely in relation to women.  He very likely had many of them starting way back with a mother who could not love or make him feel loved, and perhaps abandoned him.  Lust and passion are way too dangerous for a man this fragile.  Deep attachment is the utmost danger, because from an early age he learned that strong attachment leads to devastating disappointment — over and over again.  This is what the story is about.

The original story of Scheherazade ends optimistically, even triumphantly.  Murakami’s contemporary reworking is less optimistic, but has some promising trends.  The original story is a story of healing, through, perhaps, sated rage, coupled with satisfying sex, coupled with a continuing narrative whereby the wounded ruler becomes invested in the future.  Being able to see a way forward that is not an abyss of abandonment and devastation is a very important aspect of the healing process.  That is what Scheherazade’s narratives were able to do for the murderous king.  He was eventually able to fall in love with Scheherazade and make her his Queen.  A decisively optimistic outcome.

In Murakami’s story there is less healing and less optimism.   Murakami’s story ends with gloom and foreboding.  What is positive in Murakami’s tale is that Scheherazade and Habara were able to connect with one another in genuine communication from the heart through the stories she told after sex.  Sex was not the primary avenue of communication for this couple.  Their sex was obligatory and somewhat perfunctory.  The real action between them occurred afterward, when she told him stories of her past.  He took a genuine interest in her life and she found a receptive audience for things she needed to reveal.  This very positive connection aroused Habara’s anxieties of abandonment.  There has not been enough time to effect a healing of his underlying vulnerabilities and injuries, but if they continue, perhaps for A Thousand and One Afternoons, they might achieve a similar outcome to the original tale.

 

Hide and Seek

Directed by Joanna Coates

 

 

 

This film is a cross between summer camp, group therapy, and pornography.   Written by Daniel Metz and Joanna Coates, who are married to each other, perhaps it is a response to marriage.  This fantasy of four young people isolated in a pastoral setting, all having sex together and playing children’s dress up games to act out the conflicts in their lives is partly idealistic and mostly escapist.  The characters, except for Charlotte (Hannah Arterton), have no past and no connection to the outside world.  Nobody works; they are presumably a group of independently wealthy young actors.  It is not clear how they came together for this adventure in sex and self exploration, but it is clear that they do not know each other at the beginning, and are very uptight and uneasy with one another.  They like to create structure for their interactions.  They schedule who sleeps with who, they create performances for each other, they dress up in costumes and play role games like kids.  But they have sex like people in their 20s.  The sex is pretty good in this film.  There is one scene where one of the males is laying sideways across a bed with full erection masturbating.  Charlotte comes into the room and unexpectedly finds him in thrall, then quietly stands and watches.  It’s hot.

The film is rather slow moving, but then, it is not going anywhere.  It doesn’t really develop very much, nor do any of the characters, with the exception of Charlotte.   Charlotte is the only one with an explicit connection to the outside world and her own past.  She brings an ex-boyfriend to the farm to stay for a few days, apparently without an advance notice to any of the others in the group.  Simon (Joe Banks) shows up as a surprise and takes up an uneasy residence.  He is not well received by the group and his appeal to Charlotte to return to him fails.

The scene I liked best from the film was an enactment of a funeral for Simon that the four did after his departure.  They put an effigy in a makeshift casket, solemnly carried it outside and ceremonially burned it.  This was very good because it illustrates very well what you need to do when you break up with someone.  You have to have a funeral and burn the body of the deceased ex-lover, creating visible finality.  It makes that person psychologically dead — in your mind — and allows you to move on and open yourself to new possibilities.  It is very important to be able to do that.

I saw this at the Mill Valley Film Festival and afterward they had a Q&A with Daniel Metz and Rhea Mole, who played Leah in the film.  I asked Daniel to explain the relationship between the title, Hide and Seek, and the film.  He gave a rather lame response about the allusion the game Hide and Seek makes to childhood and how it resonates with the childlike play of the group depicted in the film.  OK, but that is a very oblique connection.  The content of the film doesn’t really relate to the performance of Hide and Seek as a childhood game.  I think titles are important and this title could use a little more imagination.

This film is a little reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman in its introspection, but it is far less dreary.  Bergman’s characters are depressed and self absorbed.  These characters have a genuine emotional and psychological connection to one another, despite the fact that they use role playing games for much of their communication.   Active, satisfying sex also gives them strong emotional bonds and a pervasive  underlying spirit of good will and mutual interconnection.

There is a lot that could be criticized about this fantasy and its viability as a lifestyle.  Particularly, since this film isolates the four from most connection to the larger society.  It is those outside connections that create stresses and pressures that often derail such alternative lifestyle experiments.  This film also does not deal with who these people are in terms of their development as persons, where they came from, and why and how they gravitated toward this exotic experiment with a group of strangers.   The internal dynamics driving each of them as individuals is left unexplored, and those forces would undoubtedly impact the outcome of such an experiment.

One thing I would judge positive about the film is that its portrayal of the characters and their lifestyle is ultimately optimistic.  It does not end with failure and breakup and estrangement.  All four of them remain committed to the group of four, despite an array of assaults, both internal and external.  They feel it is a rewarding, enriching, happy experience and at the end they are staying together.  I don’t know if that counts as happily ever after, but it is an upbeat, positive judgment.  The film puts forward an interesting, unusual alternative lifestyle and presents it sympathetically.  It leaves a lot to be desired in the execution, but I am in accord with its spirit.

Bloody Daughter

A Film by Stephanie Argerich

 

 

The title of this film is misleading.  It suggests either abuse or extreme hardship or menstruation, but none of these play out in the film.  While ninety percent of the film focuses on Stephanie Argerich’s mother, the renowned pianist, Martha Argerich, the title comes from her father, Stephen Kovacevich, himself a pianist of the first order, and seems to refer to the roughness in Stephanie’s relationship with him.  He offers an explanation of the term ‘bloody daughter,’ which doesn’t quite make sense, and seems to reflect confusion and misunderstanding.  The term ‘bloody’ is a British expletive of disputed origins which is used as an intensifier, similar to the way we use ‘damn’ in the United States, or a less savory word that is much rougher and cruder.  It doesn’t really fit well with the content of this film.  I wish they had been able to dream up a different title.

But the film is outstanding.  It is a disarmingly intimate portrait of a very unusual family of remarkably talented people.   It is classified as a documentary, but it is actually a personal journal, rather than an attempt to construct an organized narrative of the facts.  There are very intimate scenes throughout this film.  Things one would not ordinarily include in a documentary.   A sequence of Martha waking up in bed in the morning and sipping her coffee at her bedside.  A tense scene between Stephanie and her father doing paperwork to obtain his official acknowledgement of Stephanie as his daughter.  Kovacevich has stalled and dragged his feet on this matter for thirty-four years.  No explanation of what that is about.  An outdoor scene of Martha and her three daughters painting their toenails and discussing their lives in a park.  Martha is on camera through most of the film.  Stephanie is intently preoccupied with her mother.  There are many close ups of her mother’s face and eyes, as if she is trying to incorporate her mother or understand her mother through the camera.

While there is a lot of conflict and tension within this family, there is also great warmth and strong personal bonds.  I wouldn’t call this a dysfunctional family at all.  The members are engaged with one another, there is good communication between them, and there seems to be a lot of basic good will among them, despite some friction and misunderstanding.   They are a family that introspects more than is common in the United States, I would judge.  They seem to make a genuine effort to understand themselves and their relationships to a degree that I find unusual as an American.  American people are not very self-knowing, and one seldom hears them discuss their family relationships with much sensitivity or insight.  This film is strikingly different in that respect.

There is great music throughout the film.  Both Martha Argerich and Stephen Kovacevich are world class pianists.  There are sequences of them performing at various stages of their lives.  It is clear that music serves as an adhesive that binds all of these people together.

The film is in French and English with subtitles available in a number of other languages as well.  There is a menu where you can select.  Argerich speaks French despite originating in Argentina.  Kovacevich is American, but has lived most of his adult life in England.  Stephanie speaks English, and French with her mother.  If you like classical music, piano, or European life and culture, this is an excellent film that is a personal, in depth study of a fascinating family of top quality musicians.

The Last of Robin Hood

Directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland

 

 

 

I have no criticisms of this film.  It is excellent in every respect.   It depicts the last couple years of Errol Flynn’s life (Kevin Kline) and his relationship with Beverly Aadland (Dakota Fanning).   Beverly Aadland was fifteen at the time the relationship started, although she passed for twenty.  Flynn comes off more favorably and sympathetically than he probably was in real life, but it was a positive, convincing portrayal of his relationship to Beverly Aadland.

Flynn involved Beverly’s mother Florence (Susan Sarandon) in the relationship, having her accompany them on trips and appear with them in public places.  It provided cover for his relationship with the young girl, and Florence cooperated and even encouraged the relationship.

It is an interesting romantic story: well acted, well conceived, and well presented.  I think the significance of this film is that it strikes a blow against some of the prejudice and nonsense that seems to prevail in our culture regarding sexual relationships across wide age gaps and with partners who are quite young — “underage,” as if the government can draw a line and declare people beneath a certain age boundary unfit, or unsuited, or incapable of behaving and functioning in a constructive sexual relationship, when it is well known that people show erotic response and interest in things sexual literally from birth.

I can tell you for a fact that many young women are attracted to men considerably older than themselves and that such relationships as depicted in this film are much more common that might be realized.  The vast majority of them play out in quiet discretion, but occasionally one is exposed and made into a public sensation and sanctimonious prosecution.

I think there is a growing perception that these laws and these hysterical prosecutions are much more destructive and pathological than the relationships that are their objects.  Lives and careers are destroyed, families are broken up, communities are disrupted and riven, institutions are shaken and weakened.  All over a little bit of sex with a young person.  It’s foolishness.  Sex does not harm children.  That has never been proven by anyone.   How could it?  Children are capable of erotic arousal from a very early age.  They are curious and quite readily explore it given the opportunity.  It is quite natural.

We live in a society where it is perfectly legal to train children how to use automatic weapons, but if you show a child an erect penis, you can be put in jail and tarred with being a sex offender for the rest of your life.  There is something wrong with that, ladies and gentlemen.  I think that the perversity of this is beginning to emerge into consciousness across a wide swath of American society.

These laws creating the concepts of “statutory rape,” or “child molestation,” are a legacy of religious prejudice and are designed to prevent children from growing up with healthy, accepting attitudes toward their bodies and their desires.  In recent years we’ve seen increasing havoc created throughout society at all levels by the boundless viciousness with which these laws are enforced.  It is time to dial this all back and rethink this in a fundamental way.  Religious conservatives have succeeded in hijacking the power of the state to enforce their negative sexual agenda on the entire society.  State power has replaced ecclesiastical courts.  This is improper and unconstitutional.  In 2003, in Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court of the United States struck down laws against sodomy making consensual sex between same sex partners legal in all fifty states of the United States, although such sexual acts have been condemned by religious ideologies for centuries.  It was a declaration of independence for the state against the tyranny of religious prejudice in policing sexual behavior.  This trend needs to continue and be carried forward.

This film, while not belaboring the point, serves as an illustration of the wrongheadedness of the current statutes governing sexual relations between young people and adults.  It is an indirect critique of the current sexual regime in our legal system and a blatant contradiction to widespread prejudices against relationships that cross wide gulfs in age.  An excellent job on a neglected, but much needed theme.

This is a letter I wrote recently to Dr. Patrick J. Ferrillo Jr., Dean of the University of the Pacific, Arthur A. Dugoni School of Dentistry.  It conveys my reaction to their new clinic that opened in July at 155 5th St. in San Francisco. 

 

Dear Dr. Ferrillo,

Yesterday I had the privilege of being treated as a patient at your new clinic at 155 Fifth Street in San Francisco.  I have been a patient at the University of the Pacific Dental School for over twenty years, and your students and faculty have done a marvel with my teeth for which I am very grateful.

However, my reason for writing today is that I was disturbed and troubled by my experience yesterday, so much so, that I feel compelled to write and share my thoughts and observations with you.  My student dentist, (name omitted) and his assistant, (name omitted) were excellent and showed great capability and conscientiousness.  This letter, though, has nothing to do with their performance or my treatment as a dental patient.  It has, rather, to do with the ambience and character of the new space where the clinic is now located.

My initial impression as I walked through was one of sterility and impersonality.  I don’t mean sterility in the sense of the absence of bacteria, but rather the absence of human warmth and personality.  This initial impression grew and intensified throughout the afternoon.

The layout and arrangement of the new clinic has been calculated in every consideration to minimize the interaction between the student dentist and the patient.  The patient sits in a chair that is facing into the back of the cubicle, with the student’s workstation and computer directly behind the patient.  The result is that the student is constantly talking to the back of the patient and the patient is responding away from the dentist into empty space.  The student may try to lean around the back of the chair and the patient may try to twist his body on that uncomfortable seat so they can see each other a little bit, as we did, but it is a very awkward, uncomfortable, stilted way to conduct a conversation.  And the effect is that it discourages the patient and the dentist from talking to each other anymore than is absolutely necessary, reducing personal interaction to an absolute minimum.  I believe this was a deliberate, conscious choice on the part of the interior designers.  I would not say that the layout of the space was thoughtless.  On the contrary, I think it has been carefully thought out under the guidance of the most perverse and misguided values.

One positive thing I can say about the interior design is that the cubicles are spacious.  There is plenty of room in those cubicles in contrast to the ones on Sacramento Street, which were so cramped that the students could hardly move around the dental chairs.  It is too bad that you have made such poor use of that generous spatial allotment.  The student’s computer is positioned on an unmovable pavilion at the front of the cubicle that divides and partially blocks the wide entranceway creating a closed in effect.  Perhaps it was intended as a visual obstacle to make it less easy to see in or out of the cubicle.  But its immobility means that the student has to do all of his work and analysis out of sight of the patient.  The patient never sees what the student is looking at.

At one point early on, my student presented me with a small electronic tablet on which I was to sign my name to authorize charges.  But the cord was too short.  It wouldn’t reach from the computer station to the dental chair.  I had to twist awkwardly on the chair and reach around and the student did something I could not see to get a little more length out of the cord so I could sign my name.  This is one example of the ridiculous inconvenience of having the computer and related equipment on something that cannot move, and positioned so that the patient in the chair is completely excluded from it.

When the instructor comes to discuss the case with the student, the discussion takes place behind the patient with the patient facing in the opposite direction being unable to participate or comprehend what is being discussed.  The patient is effectively excluded from the deliberations on his own case.  I think this was also a conscious, considered decision in the design.

The height of the partitions between the cubicles is about shoulder high effectively preventing anyone who is not standing up (and many that are) from seeing anything else that is going on in the clinic.  This underlines the sense of isolation that the patient feels being positioned away from the dentist and his associates who are working on him.  In the Sacramento Street clinic a person sitting upright in a chair could see all around the clinic humming with activity.  I always enjoyed this and found it stimulating and interesting to watch: the people coming and going, the diverse activities, the buzz of conversations, the attractive female dental students.  It provides stimulation and a sense of inclusion and participation in a group activity.

On your website you boast that the dental school, “is renowned for its humanistic model of education.  Accentuating the positive, respecting the individual and empowering its dedicated faculty to provide the best possible learning environment for every dental student are among the school’s primary goals.”  I had to laugh when I saw that.  This new clinic makes a mockery of those values.  This new space is one of the most inhuman, depersonalized environments I have ever seen in a medical context.

This is all justified under the guise of preserving the patient’s privacy.  What does that amount to?  Is it that you imagine that people do not wish to be seen or have it known that they are being treated in your clinic, like it’s some pornographic book store?  Or do you think people might feel self conscious or embarrassed should someone see them laid back in a dental chair with their mouth open being worked on by the student dentists?  This is a very minimal inconvenience and should not drive the design of the entire clinic.  The feeling of self consciousness or embarrassment is a signal that one is not alone.  It is impossible to feel self conscious when one is alone.  In order to eliminate the feeling of self consciousness, of being vulnerable in the gaze of another person, it is necessary to eliminate all sense of connection, to create a sense of solitude, which is exactly what you have done.  It is a great price to pay to remedy a most unobtrusive problem, if it can even be called a problem.  I would just call it a phenomenon, a condition of the experience of being in a teaching clinic.  It should be seen as benign since it underlines the sense of participating in a communal activity.  It creates a sense of inclusion and mitigates whatever indignity one might feel by virtue of the fact that we are all subject to the same conditions and we all share a common experience in this place.

The elevation of “patient privacy,” to a paramount value, I don’t see as benevolent.  I see it as another instance of the dehumanization and depersonalization that is increasingly pervading society in our architecture and our public space.  “Privacy” is interpreted to mean minimizing interpersonal contact by structuring the physical environment to make it as difficult as possible.  This new dental clinic is a paradigmatic example of that trend.

However negative these effects that I have pointed out are on the patient, the most insidious and detrimental impact of this architectural misdirection is the impact it has on the students and on their relationship with their patients, and most importantly, on their attitude toward their patients.   Throughout the afternoon I pointed out to my student dentist the things that I saw wrong with the way the clinic and the cubicle space was laid out.  His attitude was “Well, that may be, but these are the conditions that are given and we have to make the best of them.”  At the end of the day, when his assistant walked me to the escalators she asked me what I thought of the new clinic.  When I explained to her exactly what I thought about it, she probably wished she hadn’t asked.  But she could understand my point of view, but again, she is reconciled to a circumstance about which she can do nothing.

So what is going to happen is that students, and faculty alike, are simply going to  accept this as the given conditions in which they must work.  And they will make the best of it, of course.  But they will fail to perceive the impact that this is going to have on their interactions with their patients and on their relationships with their patients — if there are to be any relationships.  These conditions discourage the formation of “relationships.”  The patient becomes an impersonal “object” to be worked on.  The whole atmosphere becomes depersonalized.  The students will accept this as “normal.”  They will be conditioned to expect things to be this way.  It won’t be taught.  It won’t be pointed out.  It will just be absorbed the way one breathes poisoned air.  This is the most far reaching and malignant impact that this architectural affront will have as long as this clinic exists.  It affects the many thousands of people who will be treated in this clinic in the coming years, but it will extend beyond the clinic and affect the character and practice of dentistry in the United States more broadly by virtue of the students who will be acculturated to this impersonal style of relating to their patients.  This is a public issue that goes well beyond my personal case and even beyond the clinic.

If I were in your position I would fire the people from the university who were on the design committee for this clinic, and sue the architectural firm that realized the design and layout of this clinic for creating a brutal, oppressive atmosphere for the students and faculty to work in and for the patients to be treated.

There are three things you can do to fix that place, although it would be expensive.  But I think the expense would be worth it and would create a permanent improvement in the ambience of that clinic for every single person who comes through it or works in it.

1.  The dental chairs need to be turned 180 degrees, so they are facing out toward the entrance of the cubicle rather than toward the back wall.

2.  The computer and all of the related equipment needs to be on a mobile stand that the student can move as he needs to, instead of being in a rigid, fixed location.  It should be closer to the patient and visible to the patient.

3.  The height of the partitions between the cubicles should be about half of what they are now, giving anyone sitting up in a chair a full view of the entire clinic.  This would not enable people to see patients who are prone and being worked on.  It would simply create a panorama of visual interest and a sense of inclusion, rather than isolation.

Since this issue is of public interest rather than my personal medical case, I decided to post this letter on my blog where the world can see it https://forallevents.com/reviews/.  I think it is important for people to resist the depersonalization that is taking place more and more in our public spaces and our architecture, and the first step in resistance is to point out what is happening.  So that is why I am writing to you and that is why I am posting this in a public forum that others may perceive and be inspired to speak out and voice their opposition to the creeping dehumanization that is affecting all of us, and to prompt the University of the Pacific to live up to the humanistic values that it professes.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Sincerely,

Michael Ferguson

Magic in the Moonlight

Directed by Woody Allen

I spent most of this movie wondering why it was made.   It is not a movie about characters and plot and story line so much as it is a movie about contentious grappling with big philosophical issues.  Does God exist?  Is there an afterlife?  Is there a “spiritual” realm apart from the world we see and experience, and do some people have special access to it?  How much faith should we put in science and rationality?  Do we need our illusions to maintain our humanity?  A rather esoteric constellation of topics for a mainstream movie.  The characters are rather simplified and cartoonish.  The plot is contrived and manipulative.  Yet the film is so well made, so well acted, and there are enough surprises that you are prevented from being bored to death with these tiresome philosophical arguments.

Woody Allen seems to like Europe, the 1920s, Dixieland jazz, and the well off and educated.  There are allusions to books and writers like Nietzsche, Shakespeare, Dickens, Freud, etc.  You have to have gone to college and studied liberal arts to watch this movie.  The characters have some intriguing qualities, but he is not interested enough in them to develop them or their relationships in any depth or complexity.   The girl, Sophie, (Emma Stone) is beautiful, but he seems hostile toward her.  She starts out attractive and appealing, but then morphs into a deceitful, conniving, low class, criminal.  He can’t seem to make up his mind whether to let a romance develop between her and Stanley (Colin Firth).  Finally, with her exposure as a fraud, the romance angle is repudiated once and for all, but then turns around yet again as the curtain is coming down in a very unconvincing reappearance for a happy ever after ending with Stanley.  It reflects the confused, indecisive character of this whole film.  There is some humor that works.  It works to some extent on the level of light entertainment, but the simplified, distorted characters lack the substance to give weight to the serious issues that the film wants to be preoccupied with.  I just didn’t get the “message” that this film was trying to get across, but it did seem to be trying to get some kind of a message out.  Some people in the theater applauded at the end, but not me.

Madame Butterfly

San Francisco Opera Performance

June 21, 2014

 

 

There are two ways of looking at this opera, and one of them makes sense and the other one doesn’t.  However the presentation favors the nonsense interpretation.  It’s the difference between a story from the Bible seen as a metaphor that has a moral lesson or a symbolic meaning, and taking it literally as a retelling of historical events.  Most of the time the literalist understanding is flawed and sometimes reduces to nonsense, but the moral message could still resonate and be comprehensible whether you agree with it or not.  Such is the case with Madame Butterfly.

This opera has some sophistication, in contrast to La Traviata, which I saw last night and dispatched to the ashcan.  Madame Butterfly is beautifully and imaginatively presented.  A special accolade should go to the production designer, Jun Kaneko.  His skillful use of lighting and special effects as well as colorful, attractive costumes created a marvelous visual spectacle.  The singers really put their hearts into this.  From the point of view of the performance and the staging it was truly world class.

It is the concept and interpretation of this opera that I have a problem with.  Lieutenant Pinkerton married Butterfly in Japan while he was there on assignment with the U.S. Navy.  Pinkerton is straightforwardly dishonest from the outset.  Even as he sets about to marry Butterfly, he explicitly states his anticipation of a “real wedding” with an American girl.  He does not take the Japanese girl or the wedding seriously and is quite frank about it.  So one might ask, “why is he doing this?”  Why does he need to marry Butterfly?  He could have her, or many other girls, on a short term basis for probably far less money than he paid to marry her.  Why is he saddling himself with a marriage in a foreign country that he does not take seriously, when he doesn’t really need to?  His behavior just doesn’t make sense.

They get married and the girl is crazy about him. By all measures she is highly motivated and devoted to him, and he seems pleased with her.  She wants to go to America and be his wife.  She renounces her religion, she wholeheartedly embraces American culture and the American way of life.  So why not keep her?  What more could a guy want in a wife?  Why not take her along when he leaves?  Why does he leave this wonderful young Japanese girl behind, when he just went to the trouble and expense to marry her?  It is left unexplained why he left Butterfly behind in Japan in the first place.  If he never wanted to keep her to begin with, it did not make sense to marry her.

Furthermore, Butterfly is a geisha.  Geishas were not prostitutes in the sense that we understand them.  They were entertainers, they were well trained for their role from an early age, and quite sophisticated.  They had social skills and acute perception of men and their needs.  But Butterfly is presented as an immature numbskull who lives in a cotton candy world of fantasy and self delusion — very unlike a geisha.  So Butterfly’s character lacks credibility from very early on.  She does not seem like a Japanese woman at all.  Pinkerton’s behavior also lacks credibility from the very beginning and throughout.  So I watched this whole opera in a state of profound skepticism about both of the lead characters.

So Pinkerton leaves and Butterfly stays in Japan.  He is gone three years.  During that three years’ time, he meets, courts, and marries and American woman whom he brings with him on his return to Japan.

Question:  At what point does Mrs. American Pinkerton find out about Mrs. Japanese Pinkerton?

Case 1:  Pinkerton tells her about his Japanese marriage before he marries her.

“Darling, I want to marry you.  But I think I should tell you something.”

“Sure, baby, what is it?”

“I’m already married.”

“You mean to another woman?”

“Right.  I married a Japanese woman in Japan less than three years ago.  But now I’m going to dump her and marry you.”

“That’s great.”

“So let’s go ahead and get married.”

“Sure, why not?  Oh, I’m so thrilled that you would dump another woman that you had just married and marry me!  I must be so powerfully appealing to you!”

“You are, indeed.  And there’s something else.”

“Oh?”

“I have a two year old son with my Japanese wife.”

“Really?”

“I want to go back to Japan with you in tow so you can meet my Japanese wife, I’m going to tell her I’m dumping her for you, and then we’re going to wrench my young son away from her and bring him home with us so that you can raise him as your own son.”

“Nothing could make me happier.  I’ll start packing.”

“Now I know why I married you.”

If that doesn’t seem real enough to you, then consider Case 2:  Mrs. American Pinkerton finds out about Mrs. Japanese Pinkerton after she is married to him.  Pinkerton courts her, proposes to her, and marries her without ever mentioning that he has another wife already in Japan.  They get married and the morning after their wedding they are having breakfast.  She serves him his pancakes and he says to her,

“Honey, I need to tell you something.”

“Sure, baby, you know you can tell me anything. I’m your beloved wife.”

“I’m already married, Sweetheart.  I have another wife.”

“Well, what about it?”

“I married her in Japan less than three years ago.  But I like you better.  I’m going to dump her and keep you instead.”

“I’m very touched.”

“There’s something else.”

“Don’t hold it back.  Share it with me, baby.  You know I’ll always be there for you.”

“I have a two year old son with her.”

“Big deal.”

“I want to go back to Japan.  I want you to go with me and meet my Japanese wife.  I’m going to let her know I’m dumping her once and for all, and we are going to take my son away from her and bring him back with us for you to raise as your own son.”

“That sounds awesome.”

“I’m glad you are so understanding.”

“Our love will conquer all, darling.”

I think either alternative is equally plausible.  But then, once we have the new Mrs. Pinkerton in Japan and the first Mrs. Pinkerton is enlightened as to what is going down, she is faced with several alternatives.  She could return to being a geisha, which would not be all that bad.  The production in its ignorance portrays this as “dishonorable,” but that is a very un-Japanese attitude.  In Japan geisha were, and still are for the few that are left, highly regarded.  The second alternative would have been to marry the wealthy Japanese man, Yamadori, who was very interested in her and wanted her.  That, of course, could have been a plus or a minus, you can never tell.  And the third alternative was to give up her child without an argument and kill herself, which is what she chose — totally ridiculous folly.  Why does she so willingly give up her child to this strange woman who shows up one day on her doorstep with the man she married just a few years ago?  She says that she must obey her husband and hand over the boy.  Why would she feel like she must obey a foreign man who deceived her, betrayed her, and now shows up with the woman he is dumping her for demanding the child that they had together.  Butterfly is not credible as a woman.

This is why I have concluded that looking at this opera as a story of interpersonal tragedy reduces it to total absurdity.  The presenting story simply lacks credibility.  But there is another way of looking at it that has much more plausibility.  If one looks at the story metaphorically, then it really does begin to make some sense.

This is the story of the rape of Japan by the western powers in the nineteenth century, and the United States in particular.  It is the story of ruthless colonial exploitation and the Japanese struggle to come to terms with it.  The United States did not send its warships into Japanese harbors in the nineteenth century as a gesture of friendship.  The object was to open it up to colonial exploitation as had happened to China and other Southeast Asian nations.  There was a great struggle in Japan over how to deal with this.  One strain of thinking was that Japan needed to modernize, to adopt western technology and culture or it would be inevitably subjugated.  But there was also resistance to this.  Many Japanese became enamored with western culture and fascinated with the United States.  To be sure Japan was a repressive, feudal society.  Westernization with its traditions of civil liberties and individual rights had a lot to offer ordinary Japanese.  This opera offers a verdict on that infatuation with the West and its likely outcome for the Japanese.

Butterfly should be seen as the simpleminded, superficial, trend in Japan to naively embrace western culture, values, religion, etc.  Butterfly represents the foolishness of this course and the disappointment and disaster it will inevitably lead to.  Taking the child away from Butterfly represents the younger generation of Japanese turning away from traditional Japanese values and culture and being wholeheartedly given over to westernization.  Butterfly’s embrace of all things Western is the instrument whereby the children are given away to the West — they follow her example.  Butterfly’s suicide should be understood as the outcome of that ill-considered embrace: the self-destruction of the Japanese as Japanese.  It is a much more profound tragedy than this preposterous love story that is only a facade.  This opera has promise and could be a great production if it could be directed to emphasize this clash of cultures and this imposition of imperial power upon Japan, rather than as a sorrowful tale of love gone wrong between two people who are both unconvincing on their own terms.

I think the opera makes this metaphorical intent very clear in the name of the American Lieutenant, “Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton,” and his ship’s name, the “Abraham Lincoln.”  He is clearly representing America, the historical power and cultural bellwether, and not just himself as a person.  His callous reprehensible behavior reflects the attitude of the American government toward Japan and serves as a warning to Japanese people enthused in their naive embrace of American culture.  This issue remains in play even today in Japan.

The problem with this opera is that it emphasizes the personal tragedy, which is kind of silly, really, and subordinates the symbolic clash between the intrusion of western imperial power and the relatively backward, technologically inferior Japan.  The story really does not work if it is conceived as a personal story of love and betrayal between two people.  But that is the way it seems to come out in the performance.  I don’t know if it could be directed and staged differently to bring out a more macroscopic interpretation, or if it is just badly written and can’t be fixed.  This story has to be seen symbolically, as a story of grand conflict between two civilizations of very different character.

I was surprised to see the director Nicola Luisotti make the remark in the program notes that “prostitution was illegal in Japan” (p.43) during the time of this story (the early 1900s).  Could it be that this man who says he has directed this opera 70 times, including twice in Japan, is so brazenly ignorant of its historical context?  Japan has had a thriving sex industry from time immemorial.¹  Maybe it was a misprint in the program.  Prostitution was legal pretty much everywhere in the United States and everywhere else in the world around the time of this opera’s conception (very early 20th century).  It was only over the course of the first two decades of the twentieth century that commercial sex was suppressed in the United States.  In Japan prostitution continues to thrive, although the influence of the United States after World War 2, and pressure from Christian groups has steadily eroded the public acceptance it once enjoyed. (Bornoff, 1991, p. 331)  If Luisotti really thinks that prostitution was illegal in nineteenth century Japan, then he has no concept of this country at the time in which this opera is set.

The second act was excessively long and most of the time was spent simply waiting for Pinkerton to return to Japan.  Waiting for something to happen is not dramatically effective except for a short time to raise tension and expectancy.  If waiting becomes the dominant theme in a performance, it devolves into something akin to watching clothes tumble in a dryer.  Unless there is something else going on, waiting has to be kept within reasonable proportions.  In this opera there is nothing dramatic going on except the introduction of “Sorrow,” the toddler who is the son of Pinkerton and Butterfly.  He does take over the second act to a large extent.  That three year old boy, Miles Sperske, deserves a special award of merit for his demanding role.  He was on stage for most of the second act during which he was required to sit patiently, motionless, and silent in the midst of continuous ongoing drama and stimulation.  It was quite an achievement for a young toddler.

While this opera was staged and sung at a very high level of quality, it is a deeply flawed opera that is not well thought out and shows ignorance of Japanese culture and character.  It does at the same time present a telling lesson to the Japanese and to all nations and peoples around the world who thrall to America’s culture and its political and economic agenda.  Butterfly’s outcome could be you.  Think of Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Latin America, etc.  There are some universal themes here that it would pay to heed.  It would be a much better production if it emphasized those larger themes rather than this ill-conceived love story, which I don’t think was ever the primary intent of this opera.

 

 

 

1.  Bornoff, Nicholas (1991)  Pink Samurai:  Love, Marriage and Sex in Contemporary Japan.  New York, London:  Pocket Books.  See especially Chapter 11.

La Traviata

San Francisco Opera Performance

June 20, 2014

 

 

I think I am going to quit going to the opera.  It is an artform that I seem to dislike.  I seldom warm to these performances.  I am unimpressed with the composers, that is, as purveyors of ideas about life, values, and commentary on society and human relations.  They seem mediocre, superficial and hopelessly conservative.  I don’t usually like the music very much either, except for Wagner.

La Traviata is, I would say, the worst opera I’ve seen.  It could have been written by a Catholic priest.  It drips with contempt and hatred for women from beginning to end.  It is unrelenting.  I am surprised that women’s groups are not picketing the opera house.  It is hypocritical and maudlin.  I felt a great revulsion watching it and thought about leaving after the first act, but I wanted to review it, so I stuck it out.  But it was punishment.  It was not an enjoyable evening at all.

Verdi is clearly writing about a character he knows nothing about.  No experienced courtesan would be a sucker for a delusional idiot like Alberto.  Nor would an experienced courtesan allow herself to be bullied by an arrogant, pompous jerk like Alberto’s father.  A courtesan would seduce him, charm him, disarm him.  Violetta never even tried that.  It never occurred to her, but it is instinctive in women who habitually relate to men on a sexual level in their daily experience.  Violetta is a totally unconvincing character from the beginning all the way to her long, drawn out death, and the plot seems contrived and ad hoc, with abrupt turn-arounds in the characters and their attitudes toward one other, none of which make any real sense.

In Act II Violetta has apparently succumbed to Alfredo’s childish, naive proposal offered in Act I, and they are living together in the country and apparently getting along well.  Violetta is supporting him in a reversal of her customary role, but they are running out of money living far beyond their means.  It is a very unlikely scenario for an experienced sex worker to get herself into.  It is only three months after Act I, not exactly a well tested love, although it is represented as an epic romance for the ages.   Violetta is then approached by Giorgio, her lover’s father, who seeks to sabotage his son’s relationship by persuading the (former) courtesan to give him up.  But why?  So that his (Giorgio’s) younger daughter — a girl of supposedly impeccable purity and innocence — can get married to some asshole who is putting off the wedding  because he thinks Alfredo’s involvement with Violetta is tarnishing his image.   Does anybody else out there see how ridiculous this is?  And Violetta, after a melodramatic struggle, falls for it, and accedes to Giorgio’s demands, without even consulting Alfredo.  Very few women would be cowed by an approach of this sort, let alone an experienced courtesan who knows how to manipulate and subdue men.  I should have gotten up and walked out and set an example for how people should respond to this instead of writing this review that no one will read.

The notes and other commentary on this opera try to spin Violetta as setting a noble example of love as self sacrifice.  She is sacrificing the love of her life, at the behest of his father, to enable an allegedly pure young girl, obviously superior to her, whom she does not even know, to marry a total jerk, whom she also doesn’t know.  The only thing she knows about the man that she is giving up the love of her life for is that he is so contemptuous of her that he would deny himself a marriage to a girl who meets his qualifications of purity and innocence on account of Violetta’s relationship with the girl’s brother, which has nothing to do with them.  And so Violetta says, “OK, I see your point.  I’ll dump my lover whom I am crazy about, so you can come down off your high horse and marry this little bitch who has fooled you into thinking she is so innocent and pure.”  It is beyond absurd.  It insults the audience and despises every woman in the auditorium.

The third act could probably be eliminated.  It does not contribute anything to the main story line.  Its only purpose seems to be to heap more contempt and degradation on Violetta.  It confirms Alfredo as a hapless, deluded, naive sucker.  It just underlines Verdi’s contempt for all of these people, who are only cardboard characters anyway.  The fourth act is a long, drawn out, dreary, dismal death agony.  At times sentimental, at times self pitying, it’s enough to make you sick.  It felt like it would never end.  I was so glad when Violetta finally died.  The third and fourth acts probably could have been condensed down to about fifteen minutes instead of the almost hour and a half that they interminably ran.

The program said that La Traviata is the most often performed opera in the world.  If La Traviata is the world’s most often performed opera, what does that say about the abysmal condition of this artform?  What does it say about the sickness and confusion over sexual relations within our society that people would support and applaud something so blatantly hypocritical and so trenchant in its contempt for women?  It reflects how bleak and  impoverished we must be in our personal relationships.  It is really appalling that the audience would sit there through that entire awful second act between Giorgio and Violetta and not one person was laughing, hooting, booing, catcalling, or hissing.  No one threw any garbage at the stage.  What is wrong with these people?

During the first intermission they left the curtain up and Production Director George Weber narrated the set change for the audience, explaining how the sets are built, stored, and changed between acts, which was a very interesting presentation — more interesting than the opera itself.  During the course of this presentation it was mentioned that it takes 290 people to stage this opera, including the cast, the orchestra, the stage hands, and everyone else connected with it, and costs between $1 million and $5 million.  If that much effort and expense is going to be put forth to produce an opera to be viewed by the public, then it should be a production that is not so insipid and cartoonish in its conceptualization and does not insult the audience and display such naked contempt for the women of society.  This opera should never be performed again.  It is a cesspool of confusion and hypocrisy.  I curse it.  It is not fit for modern people.

 

Palo Alto

Directed by Gia Coppola

 

 

This film reminded me of the 1985 novel Less Than Zero, by Bret Easton Ellis.  It is a similar tale of cultural and psychological disintegration in the youth of the white American upper middle class.  I would judge it good, with some reservations.  The characters are generally well drawn and memorable.  Very distinctive personalities amid a vivid rendering of this superficial, pained, directionless, clueless, youth culture where nobody seems to be able to relate to one another in a constructive way and everyone self-medicates their loneliness and inner turmoil with alcohol and drugs.  I wonder how people who live in Palo Alto regard this film?  These are your children, Palo Alto, do you recognize them?  The film offers nothing in the way of analysis or understanding.  It just presents things the way they are — or at least as the filmmakers see them.  This probably does reflect the reality of many American young people in the white middle class.  But there are probably also many kids who are never exposed to this kind of cultural, social, psychological, moral, and spiritual  decadence.  If the film is representative, then it means things have not gotten any better since Bret Easton Ellis published Less Than Zero twenty years ago.

I would like to single out Nat Wolff for a special commendation.  He did an excellent job creating Fred, the out of control, angry teenage boy on the edge of murder and suicide.  It is not easy to create a totally unsympathetic, repulsive persona — I assume he is acting — whereas most of the actors in this film were playing roles not far removed from who they actually are.  Emma Roberts did a nice job with April, the confused, conflicted girl, groping her way through this wasteland of blasted people.  She comes the closest to being a sympathetic center of gravity in the film.

I have some serious reservations about the film.  A number of things did not work.  The most salient was the evolution of Emily (Zoe Levin), the good hearted, lonely girl who looks for love in all the wrong places by providing sex to any and all.  She seems particularly indiscriminate in taking on Fred — and she doesn’t seem to do Fred any real good.  He doesn’t improve any on account of her.  She undergoes a dramatic, inexplicable transformation from ready sexual compliance to vicious attack dog, giving Fred his comeuppance by smashing a bottle against his head.  But it doesn’t make sense.  It completely nullifies her character and turns her into something completely different without making any kind of convincing transition.  The filmmakers must have decided that we can’t just leave a likeable slut alone.  That would be too offensive to  American middle class women.  So we have to turn her into a hostile, avenging bitch that we can be more comfortable with.  Unfortunately, it turns Emily into a completely unconvincing shell of a character.

Another problem is the soccer coach, Mr. B. (James Franco).  Mutual attraction leads to an affair between the coach and April, who also works for him as a babysitter.  But then the coach two times her with another girl on the soccer team.  April finds out, gets upset, and breaks off the relationship.  It completely undermines the credibility of the character of Mr. B.

But I think the reason this was done is that the filmmakers feel a strong need to discredit this relationship and affirm officially prevailing sexual prejudices.  It is unacceptable in American society for an older man to have a sexual affair with a teenage girl, particularly if he is her teacher or soccer coach.  There is a very strong public profession of this bias in our popular culture.  It is nonsense, of course, like most of our publicly espoused sexual biases, and in fact relationships of this sort go on all the time in high schools all over America.  A certain number of them are exposed and appear fairly frequently in the news media, and people lose their jobs or go to jail on account of them.  However, the vast majority play out in anonymous secrecy.  Our legal system treats these relationships as “rape,” although in fact very few of them are actually “rapes.”  The film exposes this very clearly for the lie that it is and that is to the film’s credit, but then they have to turn around and repudiate the point that they spent a lot of time and effort to make.

The real problem here is the girl, April.  She is a willing, if not eager, participant in the sexual relationship with the coach.  This makes a mockery of conceptualizing such a relationship as “rape.”  This has to be punished.  She can’t be allowed to get away with this.  So Mr. B’s feelings for April have to be nullified and April has to be made to look like a confused, immature girl who made a foolish mistake which she herself now recognizes.  April comes around to a “right” view that is in line with prevailing disapproval.  The filmmakers must have consulted with the Catholic Church on the script.  So this makes for another degrading blemish on the film.

Finally, the film is very skittish about male-male sex, and never really deals with it head on.  Teddy (Jack Kilmer) drops in on Fred at his house when he happens to be out and comes inside to share a joint with Fred’s father.  A seduction attempt by the father on Teddy is hinted at but abruptly terminated before it gets a chance to go anywhere.  Later, near the end of the film, Fred’s inclination toward the same sex is obliquely suggested and then quickly repudiated.  But he had shown no such interest at any time earlier in the film.  I think the filmmakers introduced this in order to tar him further by implying he is gay after having Emily cut his head open with a bottle.  If they had really wanted to take this issue seriously they should have made the sexual attraction between Fred and Teddy evident from the beginning.  But the filmmakers don’t really know what to do with this subject.

So while this is a seriously flawed film, its characters and its portrayal of the disintegrating culture in which they struggle for their emotional survival are strong enough to hold a viewer’s interest and attention.  It presents the sexual preoccupations of lonely, lost teenagers in the white upper middle class, but in the end affirms the conventional moral judgments on human relations that American audiences (or censors) will insist on.  This severely limits the film and gives it an atmosphere of ordinariness when it could have been a bold challenge to our normal judgmental attitudes.  The film does a very good job of depicting the social and psychological decay and disintegration that is the outcome of our archaic, oppressive sexual culture that fails utterly to offer young people an avenue of sexual relatedness that is positive and constructive, but in the end it simply reiterates those very values and prejudices that are the root of the problem. It had the potential to be a truly great film, but fell down on account of the mediocre, conventional vision of the director and script writers.