Chesterton on the arrogance of civilization

detail from The Course of Empire: Desolation, by Thomas COle

Last night I finally started reading The Napoleon of Notting Hill, an early Chesterton novel that I’ve just never gotten around to. The opening chapters are vintage Chesterton, and probably even a little more fresh and brisk than his later fiction. The novel is set in the London of far-distant 1984 (another underrecognized Chesterton-Orwell connection?), a sort of dystopia of efficiency where everything is regulated, everything is chugging along successfully, and everything is dull.

In the opening chapter, two bureaucratic functionaries, both dull men in black suits, are walking to work in the pre-dawn twilight when they run into the deposed President of Nicaragua. They are immediately drawn to the President not just because of his elaborate and brightly colored costume, but because of his magnetic air of regal authority. That he produces a pocket knife and soaks his handkerchief in his own blood, next pinning the bloody rag to his breast as a flag to commemorate the loss of Nicaragua, only cements their interest in him.

Nevertheless, the two fall into an argument with the President. Barker, the intellectual of the two (“He had a great amount of intellectual capacity, of that peculiar kind which raises a man from throne to throne and lets him die loaded with honours without having either amused or enlightened the mind of a single man”), condescendingly argues that the President’s overthrow and the absorption of a once-independent Nicaragua into a North American superstate is not a bad thing, because Progress. That absorption brought education, science, and progress even if it meant the decline of the things that made Nicaragua unique.

The President, understandably, assumes that Barker’s sympathies are with the unnamed larger nation that took Nicaragua over. “My sympathies are with no nation,” Barker replies. “We moderns believe in a great cosmopolitan civilisation, one which shall include all the talents of all the absorbed peoples.” Consumed, assimilated, brought up to some external standard, scientifically progressed into a deracinated copy of every other “absorbed people,” the Nicaraguans have lost even their once famous ability to capture and tame wild horses.

“‘I never catch a wild horse,’ replied Barker, with dignity.”

Such folk skills are, to him, “a mere barbarian dexterity.” But the President cannot help but feel “that something went from the world when Nicaragua was civilised.” 

“Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours?”

“Something, perhaps,” replied Barker, “but that something a mere barbarian dexterity. I do not know that I could chip flints as well as a primeval man, but I know that civilisation can make these knives which are better, and I trust to civilisation.”

“You have good authority,” answered the Nicaraguan. “Many clever men like you have trusted to civilisation. Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours?”

It is not the point of Chesterton’s novel, but this is a striking preview of the globalist blender—well before it was set to puree by the internet—complete with the self-satisfied moral superiority of the big as they wield their bigness against the small. And the President’s final line is a good reminder of the fate of all civilizations, no matter how confident, successful, and progressive. At the very least it is a warning against the tyranny of the present.

As for the President, he departs the story with an even sharper and more evocative line, and possibly one to live by:

“Every man is dangerous,” said the old man without moving, “who cares only for one thing. I was once dangerous myself.”

And with a pleasant smile he finished his coffee and rose, bowing profoundly, passed out into the fog, which had again grown dense and sombre. Three days afterwards they heard that he had died quietly in lodgings in Soho.

For those of us who sense the going of “something” from the world with the advance of “civilization,” see this reflection on Paul Kingsnorth from back in January. For the “theological task” of the present age, that of making modern man have even “an inkling of what has been taken from him,” see this passage from Jünger’s The Forest Passage that I posted last year.

Orwell, Camus, Chesterton, and bad math

Earlier this week I read this really interesting piece by William Fear on the most distinctive trait shared by Orwell and Albert Camus: “Both of these writers took the view that truthfulness was more important than ideological allegiance and metaphysics, that the facts should be derived from the real world, rather than the world of ideas.” I can’t weigh in on whether this is true of Camus—I think I read The Stranger and The Plague somewhere around seventeen years ago in college—but it strikes me as a good assessment of Orwell.

Fear uses a particularly striking example to illustrate the closeness of Orwell and Camus’s thought on truth and the threat posed to truthfulness by modern ideology, a major concern for both men—what Fear calls “common ground.” He begins with a line from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four:

“There comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death.”

— George Orwell, 1949

He then points out that, in fact, “these words are not Orwell’s at all. This is a quote from Albert Camus’ novel La Peste, which was published two years before Nineteen Eighty-Four, in 1947.” Fear doesn’t give the exact quotation but this is what I turn up in searching for it:

“But again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. The schoolteacher is well aware of this. And the question is not one of knowing what punishment or reward attends the making of this calculation. The question is one of knowing whether two and two do make four.”

— Albert Camus, 1947

Orwell’s quotation is almost exact, and the import of the quotation—the ideological threat, enforced through peer pressure and naked authority, to admitting what is objectively true and the courage required to do so—is precisely the same. Again, common ground for these writers.

So Orwell got the idea from Camus. But… did Camus get the idea from Orwell? Fear quotes one of Orwell’s book reviews from 1939:

“It is quite possible that we are descending into an age in which two plus two will make five when the Leader says so.”

— George Orwell, 1939

Fear declines to speculate on precisely whether Camus got this mathematical example from Orwell, noting that the nature of each man’s influence on the other is really beside the point, and continues with his essay. I recommend reading the whole thing.

But a longtime reader of Chesterton cannot read the these three variations on one idea without going back yet further, to a column by GK Chesterton published in the Illustrated London News in 1926. I quote this at greater length because the context makes it clear that the parallel runs deeper than the use of 2+2 as an example:

“We shall soon be in a world in which a man may be howled down for saying that two and two make four.”

— GK Chesterton, 1926

But there is not only doubt about mystical things; not even only about moral things. There is most doubt of all about rational things. I do not mean that I feel these doubts, either rational or mystical; but I mean that a sufficient number of modern people feel them to make unanimity an absurd assumption. Reason was self-evident before Pragmatism. Mathematics were self-evident before Einstein. But this scepticism is throwing thousands into a condition of doubt, not about occult but about obvious things. We shall soon be in a world in which a man may be howled down for saying that two and two make four, in which furious party cries will be raised against anybody who says that cows have horns, in which people will persecute the heresy of calling a triangle a three-sided figure, and hang a man for maddening a mob with the news that grass is green.

And this in itself recapitulates something Chesterton wrote as early as his essay collection Heretics, published in 1905. Its stunning final paragraph includes this passage:

The great march of mental destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer.

So did Orwell get this example from Chesterton? We know Orwell read Chesterton, and that Chesterton even published some of Orwell’s earliest work. So I’d add Chesterton to the lineage of this idea.

But alongside Fear, I’d also say it doesn’t entirely matter. What does matter is the reason Chesterton and Orwell and Camus kept coming back to the childish simplicity of 2+2: an abiding concern for the truth, a truth to be found out there in reality rather than in here in personal perception or political ideology, and a shared—and quite justifiable—anxiety about the threats it faces.

I’ve written before about Orwell’s view of the relation of the modern historical discipline to objective truth, here and here, and about Chesterton and Orwell’s overlapping concerns with language and clarity here. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni quoted the Heretics version of Chesterton’s line in a clip that went mildly viral—at least among Chesterton fans—several months ago. I still know next to nothing about Camus, largely owing to a prejudicial suspicion of twentieth-century French thinkers, but Fear has convinced me to look again, and more closely.

My problems with Glass Onion

Benoit Blanc in Glass Onion: “No, it’s just dumb!” Note the literal lampshade.

I’ve mentioned twice now, once in my initial review and once in my 2022 at the movies post, that I had some nagging misgivings about Rian Johnson’s latest Benoit Blanc mystery, Glass Onion. I’ve been mulling those problems over ever since I saw the movie around Thanksgiving and wondering whether I should ever try to work through them in writing. Well, a couple weeks ago my friend Danny Anderson of The Sectarian Review offered a short, pointed critique of the film that I’ve taken as permission and encouragement to do the same.

As I wrote at the time I first saw Glass Onion, I can’t lay out my problems with it without giving too much away, so consider this a spoiler warning.

Briefly, what I most admired and enjoyed about the film when I first saw it was its intricate structure and its humor. I think I mostly stand by that, though what I remember of the humor has somewhat soured on me since I first saw it. We’ll get to my deeper problems momentarily.

In his post, Danny faults Glass Onion for being clever but hollow, for jerking the audience around by offering a mystery without an actual mystery, and for its self-righteous indulgence in pillorying shallow, cartoonish characters.

Any disagreements I have with Danny’s assessment are only in degree, not kind. Or to put it another way, I agree with every point here, albeit with differing levels of intensity. To take these one at a time:

• Glass Onion’s structure still impresses me, but as other elements of the story have continued to bother me I’ve come to see the film’s fugue-like transparent layers as unworthy of the story it tells. It’s like a perfectly crafted sonnet in praise of cannibalism.

• I agree completely with Danny about the way the film manipulates the audience. Johnson’s self-awareness, the constant calling of attention to storytelling conventions and what he is doing, goes beyond the tongue-in-cheek or the meta to the pathological. Johnson displays an utter contempt not only for the characters he creates—leading one to ask “Why bother?”—but for his audience. Again, why bother? Is this purely about showing off?

• Danny’s last criticism, Johnson’s political point-scoring via ridiculous caricature, is where he spends most of his time, and while I agree completely on this point the characters bother me somewhat less because Glass Onion is pretty clearly a farce. For all the music-box intricacy of his plotting, Johnson doesn’t deal in nuance when it comes to human beings. I don’t necessarily like that (note that in my original review I described every character as “annoying”) but I’m willing to give it a pass purely for the sake of the genre.

To these I would add a few more misgivings of my own, some minor and technical but others, like Danny’s most serious complaints, what John Gardner called “faults of soul.”

First, and related to Danny’s point that Johnson continuously plays false with the viewer, Glass Onion breaks some of the classic rules of fair play in a whodunit story—namely Ronald Knox’s ten commandments of detective stories. The film bends or breaks several of these, as you can read about in greater detail here, including artificially withholding important clues. But the biggest and clearest cheat is against rule ten: “Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.” Compare The Prestige, a film in which twins are part of the mystery’s solution and Christopher Nolan sets this revelation up expertly.

Two possible rejoinders occur to me: First, that rules are made to be broken, a point I’ve made plenty of times myself. Agatha Christie rather famously violated a number of Knox’s rules. And second, Glass Onion is not really a whodunit after all, but a combination revenge story/heist caper. To these I say: Rian Johnson is no Agatha Christie, who could match her mastery of plot and boldness in experiment with genuine compassion and a keen understanding of human nature; and to argue that presenting the audience with a mystery but having it turn out to be something else is just another dodge. And don’t make me bring up “subverting expectations.”

Second, and related to Danny’s argument about political point-scoring, there is Johnson’s obvious and already much commented-upon pandering to leftwing identity politics. But this is so much the norm for Hollywood now that it feels pointless to complain about. (Interestingly, both Danny and I discerned that Johnson’s worldview is shaped entirely too much by the anti-discourse of Twitter, a point that even made its way into the Honest Trailers spoof of Glass Onion.)

But—to use the same note about politics as a jumping-off point—my most serious misgivings always had to do with the climax of the film. When the aggrieved Andi finds her mission of vengeance stymied by Miles Bron and company, she simply starts smashing his collection of glass curios, a spree of vandalism that culminates in a (somehow) non-lethal explosion that destroys Bron’s glass onion house, an act Andi can only top by deliberately destroying the Mona Lisa.

Remember Johnson’s political pandering, and the strawmen he has peopled his film with, and remember as well that Glass Onion takes place in the late spring of 2020, a setting Johnson is not only mining for quarantine and masking jokes. I’d wager that a climax in which injustice is not corrected but simply reacted to with a childish tantrum—by breaking other people’s stuff, setting things on fire, and destroying art—is not coincidental. And I’d argue absolutely that this is an instinct that does not need to be encouraged, much less held up as the satisfying final act of a drama of theft and restoration.

So the more I’ve reflected on Glass Onion, the more it’s struck me as precisely what Danny described in his post: hollow and self-satisfied, slick but contemptuous, a triumph of “precociousness over substance,” and a marriage of political shallowness with irresponsible virtue signaling. And these problems—“faults of soul,” as I mentioned above—originate with the film’s creator.

As so often, Chesterton comes to mind: “A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.”

Missing the point

Or, “Inadequacy of response revisited.”

Ben Sixsmith, a young British writer and a contributing editor of The Critic whose work I enjoy, recently published an interesting review of a new book on “Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment” in the Washington Examiner. This ostensibly academic study includes a chapter on “Jackass,” a show that apparently “takes aim at America.” I’m guessing it also does a lot of “calling into question” and, especially, “interrogating.”

The less said about the state of academia, the better, perhaps, but the book’s “opportunistically ideological” section on “Jackass” is where Sixsmith zeroes in. Having noted that the author suggests that the show’s self-inflicted comic violence is some kind of reaction to “the contextualizing bleakness of America” post-September 11th even though “Jackass” premiered in 2000, Sixsmith makes a more broadly applicable point:

It might seem peculiar to take an analysis of an obscene stunt show quite this seriously, but the point I am prowling toward is that intellectual analysis of pop culture that purports to expose its hidden aesthetic or social relevance often misses the point on the most basic level. Writers would never get away with saying The Waste Land was inspired by World War II, but the lofty heights from which they judge more unsophisticated entertainment allows mistakes to sit unnoticed.

The charge of “politicization” is often philistinic. All culture can have political or at least social implications. When culture is assessed through a specific political lens, though, it can diminish rather than expand its significance.

Coincidentally, this morning a friend passed along this video essay on antiwar filmmaking and the new adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front. It compares 1917 unfavorably to the new All Quiet because it is not bleak or nihilistic enough to get an antiwar message across but does so without stopping to consider whether that was actually the point of 1917.

You might recognize that this is similar to Slate’s accusation in 2020 that, by not explicitly sermonizing against nationalism, 1917 was an “irresponsibly nationalistic” film. As I wrote then:

These are manifest absurdities, but are apparently what Slate writers and their ilk want out of a movie like 1917. Tell us how bad the British officer class was. Don’t other the Germans. Don’t “validate the nationalist impulses that led to such terrible bloodshed.” Don’t give us a movie, give us a disquisition. Give us a sermon. Give us a Slate article.

All of which cheapens or, in Sixsmith’s well-chosen words, diminishes the story and its power.

See again my remarks on inadequate political or ideological responses to art from a couple of months ago. Or go, as is always recommended, to Chesterton: “Missing the point is a very fine art; and has been carried to something like perfection by politicians and Pressmen to-day.”

Three great sages on talking to oneself

Point: CS Lewis in chapter VIII of A Preface to Paradise Lost, writing of self-referential and -reverential modern “poetry which exists only for the poet”:

“There is nothing especially admirable in talking to oneself. Indeed, it is arguable that Himself is the very audience before whom a man postures most and on whom he practises the most elaborate deceptions.”

Counterpoint: GK Chesterton in a tongue-in-cheek review of his own short comedy play Magic, a quotation I once shared in the very early days of this blog:

“If a man does not talk to himself, it is because he is not worth talking to.”

Case study for your consideration: This exchange from “Tankin’ it to the Streets,” an episode from season six of “King of the Hill”:

“Hank: You know, Dale, sometimes I think you say things just to hear yourself talk.
Dale: What do you want me to do, ignore myself?”

Project for synthesis: In what ways is Dale Gribble A) the self-deceived man described by Lewis and B) a man worth talking to, as described by Chesterton? Is he either A or B or both A and B? Is he B despite or because of A?

File under either “Silliness” or “Questions Hank would never ask.”

Gilgamesh and Job

Sam Kriss, in an essay at The Lamp that is ostensibly a review of Sophus Helle’s new translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh but is really an extended meditation on death, summarizing the value of Gilgamesh’s 4,000-year old refusal to answer:

The Epic of Gilgamesh is here to confront you with the problem of death, not to solve it. It is not therapy. It was not written to make the world any less cruel. But this is precisely why, against myself, I do find it comforting.

This naturally brought to mind Chesterton’s most powerful and challenging paradox, from his “Introduction to the Book of Job,” the Old Testament book that is “chiefly remarkable . . . for the fact that it does not end in a way that is conventionally satisfactory”:

This, I say, is the first fact touching the speech; the fine inspiration by which God comes in at the end, not to answer riddles, but to propound them. . . . Job [is] suddenly satisfied with the mere presentation of something impenetrable. Verbally speaking the enigmas of Jehovah seem darker and more desolate than the enigmas of Job; yet Job was comfortless before the speech of Jehovah and is comforted after it. He has been told nothing, but he feels the terrible and tingling atmosphere of something which is too good to be told. The refusal of God to explain His design is itself a burning hint of His design. The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.

And I happened to read Kriss’s essay this morning before heading to church for a sermon from Ecclesiastes 3, part of an ongoing series about the book which, with Job, is my favorite in the Bible.

Less therapy. More ancient Near Eastern confrontation of enigmas.

Read essays both at the links above. They’re well worth your while.

Eugenics and Other Evils

One of GK Chesterton’s lesser-known works is the 1922 treatise Eugenics and Other Evils. This is a shame, as it was and is an insightful and challenging polemic on a topic that has changed its rhetoric and outward forms but has grown no weaker in the century since he wrote it. I first read this over a decade ago—I would guess around 2009 or 2010—and revisited it via audiobook in the late spring of 2020. The following is not a proper review, but the notes I posted to Goodreads when I finished. I hope this will encourage y’all to read this book.

—————

Chesterton at his most lucid and persuasive, arguing forcefully against post-WWI British schemes to establish legal eugenics regimes. (The same thing was going on in the US at the same time, culminating in the Eugenics Society’s notorious 1927 test case Buck v. Bell, which went all the way to the Supreme Court and resulted in a decision upholding mandatory sterilization laws for the “feebleminded,” a decision encapsulated in one of the most mean-spirited court opinions in the Court’s history, authored by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Chesterton argues that eugenicist advocates are overenthusiastic about an untested and highly theoretical “science,” that they cannot possibly have the iron grasp on heredity that they claim, and that the legal measures proposed for the implementation of their plans will create a division of haves and have-nots more cold blooded and brutal than anything established by the spoliations of late nineteenth century industrial capitalism. Urban industrialism and the cruelties of commercialism have already robbed the poor of their dignity and their private property, he argues, so the plans of the eugenicists to take away even the family and the freedom to choose a mate and be fruitful—one of the only licit pleasures left to the proletariat, he notes—is both of a piece with modern social Darwinism and an unprecedented monstrosity.

If the hubris and cruelty of the eugenics movement are staggering, even more so are their condescension to the poor, whom they propose to help by slowly winnowing them, and their lack of awareness of their own elitism, as they are never the object of their proposed plans but, should they get their way, the autocratic enforcers. Chesterton rightly discerns that the cult of the expert—a fin de siecle obsession that has never really left us—is ultimately about establishing an unaccountable new hierarchy of powerful elites.

Chesterton’s arguments strikingly anticipate the shape of much modern argument about issues like abortion on demand and other bioethical questions—not to mention the rise of divorce, the establishment of intrusive state-mandated medical regulations, and the confiscation of children by the state on grounds of hygiene or ever-shifting psychological criteria—and his arguments against “scientific” interference with birth as well as birth control and the ever more intrusive top-down government control of everyday life feel very prescient indeed.

Not everything in the book is on target. His lengthy tangent on capitalism—a favorite Chesterton hobbyhorse—feels too much like a tangent, but where he strikes home, he’s excellent, and his feel for the larger underlying assumptions of the issues of the day make this lesser known book still shockingly relevant.

I first read this probably a decade ago. I’ve just listened to the excellent audiobook read by Derek Perkins. I recommend it, though a print edition with minor annotations to explain who some of the now more obscure figures of the Edwardian eugenics movement may be preferable.

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I first read Eugenics and Other Evils in Volume IV of Ignatius Press’s Collected Works of GK Chesterton. It is also available as an audiobook—the one I refer to in these notes is a really excellent reading—and for free online at Project Gutenberg and Wikisource. This is a short and punchy book that is still important, and is well worth your while.

Robert Eggers and the art of constraint

The New Yorker published a very interesting long profile of filmmaker Robert Eggers last week. Eggers is the writer and director of three films, including The Witch, The Lighthouse, and The Northman, which is due out in less than three weeks. While I found the artsy ambiguity of The Lighthouse too self-reverential and pretentious, I’ve deeply admired both of his previous movies for their attention to historical detail, dialect, setting, and atmosphere. I look forward to The Northman for those reasons, especially since this film will tell a story in my personal wheelhouse.

The whole profile is worth reading, but I wanted to draw attention to two things about Eggers’s craft that I particularly appreciate.

Against Scooby-Doo materialism

First, a point made obliquely, not by Eggers himself but by director Alfonso Cuarón:

Alfonso Cuarón, the director of Gravity and Roma, read Eggers’s screenplay of The Witch in 2013, when the movie was still in development. “I was just in awe of it,” [Cuarón] told me. “I was, like, more than anything, curious.” Cuarón observed that, unlike other filmmakers, who treat the magical or the symbolic as breaks from normality, Eggers makes no such distinction. “It’s as if those elements are as natural as the weather. And people coexist with those elements as a matter of existence,” Cuarón said. “There’s no question about the existence of witches. There’s no ulterior explanation. . . . It was just witches.”

This, indeed, is one of my favorite things about The Witch as well. There’s no ambiguity, no explaining away, and no revelation of fakery at the end (what I call “Scooby-Doo materialism”), just the grim reality that this evil is real, and a real threat. Eggers presents all of this on the characters’ own terms, as people of their time and place and background understood them. I wish more historical films could nail this the way The Witch does.

In addition to selflessly getting modern assumptions out of the way and presenting an alien world as it understood itself, this storytelling technique or philosophy can also have dramatic power. Presenting the supernatural as frankly and doubtlessly real was my plan going into my novel No Snakes in Iceland, in which a 10th-century Christian Anglo-Saxon living in heathen Iceland is recruited to kill a draugr or aptrganga—a corporeal ghost. Unlike The Witch, however, it takes a while for the supernatural to show up, so that it is a surprise when the ghost does appear and does wreak havoc in inimitable Icelandic fashion. More than one reader has told me that the ghost being real, as described by the parade of characters assuring the narrator that it is, was like a plot twist in and of itself.

For artistic constraint

I also appreciate the profile’s attention to Eggers’s artistic restraint and constraint. This theme runs through the entire piece but is especially clear in a few places, as when Eggers’s Northman co-writer Sjón, an Icelandic poet and novelist, talks about situation their film’s story in the middle of a real time and place:

Writing The Northman with Eggers, Sjón imagined the script as a missing saga. Most of the story takes place in the year 914, during the early settlement of Iceland but before the founding of the Althing, the parliament, in 930. “There is still a certain kind of lawlessness,” Sjón said. “I realized that we could slip in a family there, that settled early and then just disappeared from the face of the earth.”

Working within rather than against the history, finding gaps where you can “slip in” a story that will mesh with known history—this is exactly right, and is the approach I worked through for the novel I’m still revising, which is set in the hazy borderlands between the Anglo-Saxons of the Migration Era and the British kingdoms of what is now Wales in a period without a lot of firm documentation.

As I hinted above, Eggers also constrains himself to the viewpoint, beliefs, priorities, and practices of his historical subjects. Eggers is not apparently a religious man, but he presented the bleak Calvinism of The Witch’s Puritan characters fairly. In The Northman he apparently presents the Vikings with uncomfortable accuracy, refusing to step in and editorialize on behalf of modern sensibilities or to (more insidiously) soften their attitudes:

On a bad day, you’re in the tenth month of the edit and you’re trying to deal with notes from a test screening in Texas, where the audience was befuddled by the Nordic accents, character names like Leifr Seal’s Testicle, and the unsettling moral outlook of tenth-century Iceland. “None of those things are changing,” Eggers said, while Ford was processing footage of the young Amleth, hiding in a forest. He started to laugh. “Like, those things can’t change. And those are kind of the biggest obstacles.”

Again, an audience unsettled by contact with an alien world is probably a good sign. Or so I hope, since this is something else I’m dealing with in my current manuscript.

That’s story and setting. Here’s another passage on Eggers’s filmmaking technique. After describing the precise and minutely planned storyboards and utterly minimal camera movement, the essay’s author turns to The Northman’s stars, Alexander Skarsgård and Anya Taylor-Joy:

During the first two weeks, in which Amleth [the protagonist] mostly labored on a farm, Skarsgård felt conflicted by the filming process. “I’m not used to working in that way,” he said. “There was a moment where I was, like, I could either freak the fuck out . . . because you feel like: Well, there’s no space for me to explore my character. I’m a robot.” But Skarsgård chose to submit: “You play around with it, and then small details will then open up, like a flood of inspiration, and suddenly you’re in it.”

Taylor-Joy, who was working with Eggers for the first time in six years, realized how much of her conduct on set derives from their work together. “Who I am, or how I identify as a performer and a collaborator, really does come from ‘The Witch,’ ” she told me. “If you come onto a movie that’s already been storyboarded . . . and you know that’s the way the film’s going to look, I actually find that incredibly liberating,” she said. “I can do my own version of this dance within the parameters that have been set. And I’ll end up with something more interesting[.]”

Modern artists, be they poets or novelists or painters or sculptors or architects or composers or filmmakers, bridle at constraint and are skilled at developing ideological schema to justify casting it off: formal poetry, representational art, realistic sculpture, classical architecture—these are all inauthentic, clichéd, bourgeois, repressive, eurocentric, racist, et cetera et cetera ad nauseam world without end. These are all excuses for ill discipline and chaos. They also obscure bad art. A cynical man would say that’s the whole point.

But real art, like real love, embraces limitation and constraint—even purely artificial, arbitrary ones. Perhaps especially the essentially arbitrary ones. Why fourteen lines for a sonnet, or common meter for a ballad, or rhyme at all? (In two novels now I’ve intentionally limited my vocabulary based purely on etymological considerations no one may even notice. But it matters to me and to the story.) Eggers is an object lesson in the value of rules, order, and form. He doesn’t have to shoot his movies the way he does, but he and his actors all benefit from his willing submission to constraints, even finding themselves, as Taylor-Joy puts it, liberated, freed to explore creatively with a space that wouldn’t exist without those constraints.

Or as a wise man once put it, rules and order “give room for good things to run wild.” That was Chesterton on Christianity, of course, but even more to the point is this on art itself: “Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.”

This is wisdom Eggers clearly and rightly intuits, and I’m grateful that he’s let it shape his artistic sensibilities so profoundly. I hope he uses his powers for good.

Conclusion

I’ve written on self-imposed artistic constraints before in reference to historian John Lukacs and, of all people, Jerry Seinfeld. You can read all of The New Yorker’s excellent profile of Eggers here.

When Muggeridge met Chesterton

Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-90) at work; GK Chesterton (1874-36) reading in Brighton, 1935

Yesterday at our local used book store I snagged a one-volume copy of Malcolm Muggeridge’s Chronicles of Wasted Time: An Autobiography. It’s rare to find any Muggeridge books—at least at the bookstores I most often visit—so I was excited to run across this one. And in leafing through it I found this marvelous anecdote near the very beginning, in which Muggeridge describes his childhood encounter with GK Chesterton:

Chesterton, complete with pince-nez, about the time of the scene described by Muggeridge

[A]s a child, a writer was in my eyes a kind of god; any writer, no matter how obscure, or even bogus, he might be. To compare a writer with some famous soldier or administrator or scientist or politician or actor was, in my estimation, quite ludicrous. There was no basis for comparison; any more than between, say, Francis of Assisi and Dr Spock. Perhaps more aware of this passion than I realised, when I was still a schoolboy my father [Labour politician HT Muggeridge] took me to a dinner at a Soho restaurant at which G. K. Chesterton was being entertained. I remember that the proprietor of the restaurant presented me with a box of crystallised fruits which turned out to be bad. As far as I was concerned, it was an occasion of inconceivable glory. I observed with fascination the enormous bulk of the guest of honour, his great stomach and plump hands; how his pince-nez on a black ribbon were almost lost in the vast expanse of his face, and how when he delivered himself of what he considered to be a good remark he had a way of blowing into his moustache with a sound like an expiring balloon. His speech, if he made one, was lost on me, but I vividly recall how I persuaded my father to wait outside the restaurant while we watched the great man make his way down the street in a billowing black cloak and old-style bohemian hat with a large brim.

This child’s perspective is wonderfully evocative. And it also reminds me of a passage from Chesterton’s own work—The Man Who was Thursday, when undercover policeman Gabriel Syme reaches the meeting of the highest anarchist council and encounters the terrible and mysterious Friday:

Then, as Syme continued to stare at them, he saw something that he had not seen before. He had not seen it literally because it was too large to see. At the nearest end of the balcony, blocking up a great part of the perspective, was the back of a great mountain of a man. When Syme had seen him, his first thought was that the weight of him must break down the balcony of stone. His vastness did not lie only in the fact that he was abnormally tall and quite incredibly fat. This man was planned enormously in his original proportions, like a statue carved deliberately as colossal. His head, crowned with white hair, as seen from behind looked bigger than a head ought to be. The ears that stood out from it looked larger than human ears. He was enlarged terribly to scale; and this sense of size was so staggering, that when Syme saw him all the other figures seemed quite suddenly to dwindle and become dwarfish. They were still sitting there as before with their flowers and frock-coats, but now it looked as if the big man was entertaining five children to tea.

As Syme and the guide approached the side door of the hotel, a waiter came out smiling with every tooth in his head.

“The gentlemen are up there, sare,” he said. “They do talk and they do laugh at what they talk. They do say they will throw bombs at ze king.”

And the waiter hurried away with a napkin over his arm, much pleased with the singular frivolity of the gentlemen upstairs.

The two men mounted the stairs in silence.

Syme had never thought of asking whether the monstrous man who almost filled and broke the balcony was the great President of whom the others stood in awe. He knew it was so, with an unaccountable but instantaneous certainty. Syme, indeed, was one of those men who are open to all the more nameless psychological influences in a degree a little dangerous to mental health. Utterly devoid of fear in physical dangers, he was a great deal too sensitive to the smell of spiritual evil. Twice already that night little unmeaning things had peeped out at him almost pruriently, and given him a sense of drawing nearer and nearer to the head-quarters of hell. And this sense became overpowering as he drew nearer to the great President.

The form it took was a childish and yet hateful fancy. As he walked across the inner room towards the balcony, the large face of Sunday grew larger and larger; and Syme was gripped with a fear that when he was quite close the face would be too big to be possible, and that he would scream aloud. He remembered that as a child he would not look at the mask of Memnon in the British Museum, because it was a face, and so large.

There is a great deal of wink-wink self-parody in Chesterton’s work (cf. Innocent Smith in Manalive), but it had never occurred to me that those parodies might include the gargantuan—and ultimately quite surprising—Friday. Something I’m going to consider next time I read it.

Muggeridge concludes his anecdote on a note of nostalgia tinged, as all real nostalgia is, with melancholy:

I only saw him once again. That was years later, shortly before he died, when on a windy afternoon he was sitting outside the Ship Hotel at Brighton, and clutching to himself a thriller in a yellow jacket. It, too, like the pince-nez, seemed minute by comparison with his immensity. By that time, the glory of the earlier occasion had departed.

As it happens, I’ve seen two photos of Chesterton in Brighton from 1935, the year before he died: one of him walking down the seafront across the street from the Old Ship Hotel and one that closely matches Muggeridge’s description of Chesterton reading (see also the top of this post).

Like I said, two wonderful and vividly realized reminiscences. Looking forward to reading more in this book.

Rationality's bumptious myopia

Almost exactly a year ago I wrote a post, based on an aside in John Lukacs’s book The Hitler of History, about why it’s a mistake to assume Hitler was insane. In addition to being untrue—which is reason enough—to do so absolves Hitler of moral responsibility for his actions and distances us from some needed self-reflection.

Today at The Critic I came across this excellent short piece by Stephen Wigmore: “Putin must be mad… and other lies Western elites tell themselves.” From the introduction:

Nobody is infallible, but it’s interesting that many commentators seem to respond, not by reflecting on their own mistaken assumptions, but by declaring that the problem wasn’t their analysis, but just that Putin was intrinsically “irrational”, “deeply irrational”, “not in his right mind”, an “irrational actor”, etc, and therefore, presumably, impossible to predict.

This sounds suspiciously like a cop-out, from people who have failed again to do the thing they claim expertise in: understanding the minds and thinking of global leaders and political actors. This isn’t just people instinctively covering their backsides, but reflects a mistaken and superficial understanding of what “rationality” is, that underpins the worldview of modern progressive liberalism.

Wigmore examines Putin’s perspective on world events, contemporary political alignments, Russian security and economic needs, and the very history of Russia itself—filtered through Putin’s Pan-Slavic nationalism—to explain that Putin is, by his lights, proceeding rationally: “None of this is to say Putin’s decision was wise or correct or even safe for him, let alone anyone else. The decision to invade Ukraine clearly represented a huge risk but for Putin and Russia, given his aims and objectives, a measured one.”

Describe Putin as evil, certainly (I do, and find this covers most of what I need to communicate); talk of him having miscalculated or having made strategic errors; describe his assessment of the relative preparedness of his own forces as mistaken. But to describe him as irrational or mad? Wigmore digs into this:

What do Western commentators mean when they label Putin irrational? Some appear to simply mean that he does not think like they do, or make the decisions they would. They appear genuinely unable to understand how someone may coherently and logically think from different assumptions than Western Liberals to reach different conclusions. One particularly laughable set of questions was asked by a liberal US commentator called Lawrence O’Donnell, who back in the day was also a writer for The West Wing, the political fiction so beloved of American and British liberals. “Is Putin smart? What would make him smart? His (weak) education? […] Has he had any valuable learning experiences anywhere in the world?”, he sneered to his 2.8 million twitter followers. He may as well have said with appropriate hauteur, “well, he’s not an Ivy League man, is he?” Bizarrely, it did not seem to occur to O’Donnell that after rising from being an obscure KGB officer to the undisputed ruler of Russia for over 20 years, Putin might have had some relevant experience and skills, despite not attending Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Throughout his piece, Wigmore makes similar arguments to those of Lukacs but goes yet further, arguing that the retreat to insanity or “irrationality” as an explanation of Vladimir Putin’s actions is a symptom of intellectual failure: “Western elites must label Putin irrational because they are committed to the idea it is not really possible to be intelligent, rational or logical and disagree with them.”

This is the fruit—borne out, as Wigmore notes, everywhere from John Rawls’s philosophical arguments that “by sheer coincidence” lead to liberal social democracy to the implosion of nation-building experiments in Iraq and Afghanistan—of Enlightenment assumptions. High on the discovery of the laws governing physical reality, Enlightenment rationalists sought analogous universal laws for what had previously been the realm of art, theology, tradition, or happenstance and arrived at the conclusion that their preferred systems—liberalism, democracy, and secular representative government—are universally accessible to pure reason and therefore not only universally desirable but universally applicable. The two-hundred-odd years of application have been mostly a disaster.

Wigmore rightly condemns this misbegotten “bumptious myopia.” But he might have used one word, which Chesterton defined as “the incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition” or elsewhere, and more pithily, as “the failure of the mind to imagine any other mind.” That word is bigotry.

To return to Wigmore:

Western secular elites are committed to their ideas; their policies and conclusions follow inevitably out of “Reason” itself. But any mathematician could tell you that Reason is a GIGO system—Garbage In, Garbage Out: any amount of nonsense can be logically derived from incorrect premises.

And until Western elites reckon with that, recognizing that even evil men can be just as rational as they are, and return reason to its rightful and honorable place as a tool—but just a tool—there will only be more hubristic bigotry, and more nasty surprises.

Read Wigmore’s entire piece at The Critic here. You can read that lengthy passage from Lukacs with my glosses here, and I quoted from the same book in a more apocalyptic register here. Finally, here’s Chesterton on bigotry.

Chesterton on the danger of historical films

Over the weekend I made an unexpected 36-hour trip to Texas and back. On my way home I listened to the latest episode of Bill Simmons’s Rewatchables podcast, a two-hour discussion of Oliver Stone’s JFK. The two hours was more than welcome in the pre-dawn flatlands of northern Louisiana where I listened to it, and fully the first hour turned out to be a thought-provoking discussion of a topic that has been on my mind for weeks and that I’ve been generally concerned about for years: falsehood in historical films.

Simmons and his guests spent a lot of time discussing and comparing the streamlining and condensation inevitable in a historical film with the outright fabrication—especially of major characters—that Stone does throughout, but what really caught my attention and got me thinking was a description very early in the episode of JFK as “provocative, if not wildly irresponsible.” How much responsibility does a filmmaker have, whether to the facts, his audience, or both?

All of which brought to mind the following passage, from “On the FIlms,” a newspaper essay collected in As I Was Saying in 1936, the year of Chesterton’s death:

The second fact to remember is a certain privilege almost analogous to monopoly, which belongs of necessity to things like the theatre and the cinema. In a sense more than the metaphorical, they fill the stage; they dominate the scene; they create the landscape. That is why one need not be Puritanical to insist on a somewhat stricter responsibility in all sorts of play-acting than in the looser and less graphic matter of literature. If a man is repelled by one book, he can shut it and open another; but he cannot shut up a theatre in which he finds a show repulsive, nor instantly order one of a thousand other theatres to suit his taste. There are a limited number of theatres; and even to cinemas there is some limit. Hence there is a real danger of historical falsehood being popularized through the film, because there is not the normal chance of one film being corrected by another film. When a book appears displaying a doubtful portrait of Queen Elizabeth, it will generally be found that about six other historical students are moved to publish about six other versions of Queen Elizabeth at the same moment. We can buy Mr. Belloc’s book on Cromwell, and then Mr. Buchan’s book on Cromwell; and pay our money and take our choice. But few of us are in a position to pay the money required to stage a complete and elaborately presented alternative film-version of Disraeli. The fiction on the film, the partisan version in the movie-play, will go uncontradicted and even uncriticized, in a way in which few provocative books can really go uncontradicted and uncriticized. There will be no opportunity of meeting it on its own large battlefield of expansive scenario and multitudinous repetition. And most of those who are affected by it will know or care very little about its being brought to book by other critics and critical methods.

I find Chesterton’s cautions here compelling. Movies, being visually stimulating and, of necessity, simplified, go down easy. People believe them. Furthermore, movies borrow liberally from each other, meaning that a successful but inaccurate movie’s falsehoods will be reproduced indefinitely. (Think, for example, or the trope of medieval longbowmen firing unaimed volleys into the air as indirect fire, an absurdity that started with Laurence Olivier’s Henry V and continues right down to the present.)

And that’s also assuming a good faith effort on the part of filmmakers to tell what they think is a true story. But filmmakers both then and now often feel no obligation to do so. One odd trend that I’ve noticed in recent years is taking a real historical figure and giving them wholly fabricated homosexual love lives, as with baseball player and renaissance man Moe Berg in The Catcher Was a Spy, Queen Anne in The Favourite, and paleontologist Mary Anning in Ammonite. In the latter case, the director made it explicit that he had appropriated a real person’s life story as revenge for “queer” stories that had been “straightened.” There’s not much an artist with such a sense of grievance won’t do to score points against them, whoever “they” are.

But real people are not just counters in a game artists play to make a point, or elements in a composition that can be rearranged to suit the artist’s taste. They’re real people. And real things are intractable. Toy with them too much, bend and twist and reshape them to fit a prefabricated plot arc or accepted genre conventions, and they may end up unrecognizable—and fatally cliched. (Here’s one notable case.)

Furthermore, a “doubtful portrait,” a Chesterton puts it, of a real person isn’t just inaccurate, it can damage real reputations. Four cases I happen to know about:

• Boxer Max Baer, a kind-hearted man bothered by the deaths of two former opponents due to head injuries, was depicted in Ron Howard’s Cinderella Man as a pompous thug proud of killing two men in the ring and who makes sexual advances toward James Braddock’s wife. Audiences, oblivious to the character assassination, “whooped and hollered” when Braddock took Baer down at the end. Baer’s son, Max Baer Jr. (of “The Beverly Hillbillies” fame), responded to the movie with “If Howard and [Russell] Crowe were sitting here, I’d hit them.”

• In the 1964 film Zulu, Private Henry Hook, who earned a Victoria Cross for his actions at the Battle of Rorke’s Drift, is depicted as a drunk, thief, and shirker who makes good in a moment of desperation—a screenwriter’s invention purely for dramatic purposes. The real Henry Hook was a Methodist lay preacher and teetotaler with a spotless disciplinary record. His elderly daughters walked out of the film’s premier.

• American Gangster, a 2007 movie directed by Ridley Scott (whose presence should always sound warning sirens for historical accuracy), softened drug lord Frank Lucas to make him more palatable and invented adulterous affairs and a bitter child custody battle for detective Richie Roberts, who in real life did not have kids—and was still alive when the film came out.

• William McMaster Murdoch, First Officer of the Titanic, is depicted by James Cameron (more warning bells) in the 1997 film Titanic as shooting passengers during a stampede for the lifeboats before turning his gun on himself in remorse. The evidence this is based on is sketchy, and, like Henry Hook above, Murdoch had living relatives who took exception, not to mention a hometown with an educational fund in Murdoch’s memory. Cameron and his studio never formally apologized but threw £5000 to the memorial fund. (Titanic made $2.2 billion worldwide.)

Public ignorance and mistaken or outright careless filmmakers are threats to the truth, but I think Chesterton is right in pointing out that it is film’s monopolistic effect that is the gravest danger. The kinds of films audiences flock to and, more importantly, remember are too complicated and expensive to make competition—correcting the record—viable. And so a Zulu comes along and the handful that really know and care about the memory of Henry Hook spend the next sixty years trying to get the real story out.

Of course, anyone who enjoyed the movie can always be directed to a more detailed, comprehensive, and accurate book on the subject. I’ve done this a thousand times if I’ve done it once. But how many people actually take those recommendations? I’m guessing one in a thousand is optimistic. How many people are going to read Andrew Roberts’s 700-page biography of George III when they can yuk at him in Hamilton instead?

Per Chesterton, immediately following the passage quoted above:

“A false film might be refuted in a hundred books, without much affecting the million dupes who had never read the books but only seen the film.”

This is something I think about a lot, but I’m not sure I have any answers or solutions to the problem beyond a renewed commitment to truth and a sense of responsibility among filmmakers. Because telling a true story well is not impossible, and those films that successfully fit a true story—inevitably streamlined and simplified but in such a way as to hint at the real story’s complexity—to the medium of film are my beaux ideal. (Here’s one I’ve written about before.)

As for the guys on the Rewatchables podcast, they concluded their deep, thoughtful discussion of Oliver Stone’s paranoid, grievance-driven tissue of distortions and fabrications by agreeing—emphatically—that LBJ and the CIA were behind Kennedy’s assassination. So much for that.

Chesterton vs Brooks

Two quotations on progress, presented without comment.

From David Brooks’s essay “What Happened to American Conservatism?” (AKA “Conservatism is Dead”) in The Atlantic:

“If [the Democratic Party’s] progressive wing sometimes seems to have learned nothing from the failures of government and to promote cultural stances that divide Americans, at least the party as a whole knows what year it is.”

Which brought to mind this line from GK Chesterton in an interview with the New York Times, 1923:

“My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.”