Mr Bennet’s library

I’m currently reading Pride and Prejudice out loud to my wife every night before bed. Though I know the story well, this is the first time I’ve actually read it since college probably eighteen years ago. As much as you can appreciate Austen’s wit, goodness, and insight, there is nothing like actually reading her work to blow you away.

It’s also easy to forget, in a world full of imitators that feature the trappings of Austen’s world but not the wit, goodness, and insight—and are increasingly skanky, to boot—how fantastically funny Austen is. It’s hard for me to get through a chapter because I’m constantly laughing.

Last night we read some of the choicest early chapters featuring Mr Collins. After finding Mr Collins “as absurd as he had hoped,” Mr Bennet is stuck with a living, breathing, rapidly aging joke in his house. Specifically his library. This is bothersome to Mr Bennet, because, as Austen tells us:

“In his library he had been always sure of leisure and tranquillity; and though prepared, as he told Elizabeth, to meet with folly and conceit in every other room in the house, he was used to be free from them there.”

Sarah and I agreed to have that made into a nice sign for our own office/library door.

Sandbrook, Anglo-Saxons, and mad Americans

I think I’ve said all that I want to say (here and here) about the academic controversy surrounding the term Anglo-Saxon, but I wanted to acknowledge one more news item about it and an appropriate response from a favorite historian.

Earlier this month Cambridge announced that Anglo-Saxon England, the preeminent academic journal in the field, was changing its name to Early Medieval England and its Neighbors. This comes, as Samuel Rubinstein noted at The Critic, during a seeming lull in the Anglo-Saxon wars, one that had suggested to Rubinstein that the controversy had finally petered out.

But after Grendel comes Grendel’s mother, and between institutional inertia and the unsleeping restlessness of intersectional ideology, such a name-change—even if too late to please the activists originally fulminating against the term—was probably inevitable. Perhaps we can look forward to academic presses changing the titles of the thousands of old studies, monographs, and histories using Anglo-Saxon on their covers.

But as Luther said, in a line used by Lewis as an epigraph to The Screwtape Letters, “The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.” And so Rubinstein linked to this great response to Cambridge’s Twitter announcement from Dominic Sandbrook:

Hear hear.

“A handful of mad Americans” is exactly right. As I noted in my original post on this subject, the chief activity of the small, insular, pettifogging, puritanical, ruthlessly status seeking, and ideologically captive American academy today seems to be to export American neuroses to the rest of the world—ideologically colonizing foreigners and demanding conformity and obedience. This observation isn’t original to me, but it aptly describes the situation. It’s embarrassing. More mockery and an occasional firm “no” to the tiny number of activist scholars who push this kind of thing could help tremendously.

I remarked recently on the irony of mentioning Sandbrook and The Rest is History here only when I had a problem with him, which is rarely, so I wanted to make sure I noted this model reaction to academic nonsense. May his tribe increase.

Read Rubinstein’s latest on the controversy here. And get yourself a good book about the Anglo-Saxons that doesn’t dither over the term Anglo-Saxon. Here’s a good recent one, and here’s a great old one.

An annoyance of collective nouns

Last week First Things posted an article by George Weigel on “terms of venery,” that is, collective nouns, especially those used of groups of animals. There are a lot of them. Weigel cites “a pomp of Pekinese,” “a tower of giraffes,” “an ostentation of peacocks,” and “a murmuration of starlings”—among many others—as favorites, and writes that “an exaltation of larks,” which is also the name of a book on these words by the late James Lipton, “may be as good as the venereal game gets.” Veneral being an approximate adjective form of venery, just so we’re clear.

I’ve actually mulled writing about terms of venery for a long time, since the very early days of this blog. But I’ve avoided doing so for a long time because I try to keep this blog relatively positive and these words just plain bug me. So permit me a half-serious rant.

These collective nouns bug me in the way lots of twee, intentionally precious things do, even where they’re meant as jokes—as many of these terms clearly are. (So much so that joke collective nouns have persistently been mistaken for “real” ones, “a congress of baboons” being the best example. This raises the question of who actually gets to decide which of these things is official.)

Which is not to say that some animals don’t have odd collective nouns. Some are quite ancient. Fish move in a school, for instance, because in Old English such a group was called a scolu. The modern alternative shoal is likely the direct descendent of that word and is pronounced almost the same. It’s a strange linguistic accident that it came to resemble the Latinate school. A few others go a ways back as hunting jargon, the professional shop vocabulary of gamekeepers on the estates of the landed aristocracy. But there’s no earthly reason anyone should called a flock of starlings a murmuration.

I didn’t have strong feelings about this until I read an otherwise good novel by a contemporary Southern novelist who used three of the outlandish bird-related ones—I remember a murmuration and a murder—within a few pages of each other during a dramatically and thematically important funeral scene. I was so distracted and irritated that I swore off such terms altogether.

So as far as I’m concerned, and regardless of species, birds gather in flocks, larger mammals in herds, predators in packs, fish in schools. I may not get the lip-pursing amusement of writing about obstinacies and ostentations when some buffalo or peacocks blunder into a scene, but at least I won’t distract the reader.

Weigel ends his article by proposing some new terms of venery to go along with the better established ones. I’d like to end this post by proposing one of my own—a collective noun for groups of collective nouns: an annoyance.

Dr Strangelove versus technocracy

Peter Sellers as Group Captain Lionel Mandrake in Dr Strangelove

Last week I showed my US History II students one of my favorite movies: Dr Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. While the usual points of discussion of Dr Strangelove are the Cold War policies and theories that inspired it—the arms race, brinkmanship, deterrence, paranoia, and most especially mutual assured destruction—for years now I’ve noted a more subtle strain of critique running through the film: the false promise of technology and technocratic leadership.

Having gone rogue and radioed his wing of nuclear-armed B-52s “the go code” without authorization from the President or the Pentagon, Gen Jack D Ripper can wait in satisfaction for his men to breach the peace and commit the US to all-out war because he is the only person in the world who can communicate with the bomber crews. This is thanks to the CRM-114 “discriminator” on the radio, which blocks out any transmission missing a three-letter code prefix. While the bomb is the most obvious technological threat in the film, it is communications technologies, technologies meant to connect and to facilitate greater understanding, that most stymie the characters in their efforts to recall Ripper’s bombers.

Kubrick plays with some rich irony here. Radio communication with the bombers is blocked thanks to the CRM-114, but Ripper also barricades himself inside his headquarters, won’t answer the phone, and impounds even the privately owned radios on his base. During the US Army’s frantic attempt to shoot their way in, capture Ripper, and put him on the phone with the President, the phone lines are cut.

All but one: a Bell pay phone, through which Group Captain Mandrake—perhaps the only sane character in the film, and who spends most of the movie frightened out of his mind in Ripper’s office—attempts to call the Pentagon only to be blocked by an unhelpful operator.

Technology surrounds every character, insulating them from each other and limiting not only the options available to them but even the options they can imagine. Not for nothing is Mandrake introduced in the midst of a massive bank of IBM computers (see the imagine above), staring at a continuous feed of printed data. The President and the Joint Chiefs in the War Room depend entirely on “the big board,” an electronic map of Russia marked with the bombers’ targets and flight paths, for information about what’s happening outside. The film’s climax begins when they learn that some the information presented on the board is incorrect. And Dr Strangelove both enters and exits the film talking about computers—first to explain how the Soviet doomsday machine works, and at the end to describe a potential method of selecting suitable survivors to go into hiding. The latter comes after the doomsday machine has already been triggered and everyone on earth has mere minutes to live.

The saddest aspect of the film is the way the technological trap US leadership has walked into rubbishes the virtues of the men in their charge. Rippers’s men and the US Army troops sent to capture him shoot it out with each other and even die, both in the belief that they’re the good guys.

But the point is made clearest with B-52 pilot Maj Kong. Though played by comedic actor Slim Pickens, Kong is the film’s straight man. (Supposedly Kubrick never told Pickens that the movie was a comedy and Pickens treated the role as a serious thriller lead.) He is visibly bothered to receive the go code and treats his mission in deadly earnest. As far as he knows, flying in a vast sky of ignorance thanks—again—to the communication blackout, the US is under attack and he and his men may be the country’s only defense. He unironically invokes patriotism and pluralism to buck up his crew and navigates his plane with immense ingenuity and courage. In any other story Kong and his men would be the heroes. But their flight is ironic comedy gold because of the situation created for them by leaders that trusted too much in technology to do their judgment for them.

The ideology and amoral strategizing of the Cold War creates the scenario depicted in the film, but it is technology that keeps it moving toward destruction regardless of the characters’ increasingly panicked attempts to prevent it. Dr Strangelove’s most famous attribute—alien hand syndrome, which allows his right hand to operate independently, not to mention embarrassingly—works as a neat visual metaphor for the entire situation: an amoral genius who cannot control his own body. The machines are in charge.

Perhaps the most telling line in the film comes from Gen Buck Turgidson, when he is first briefing the President on the situation: “I admit the human element seems to have failed us here.” Pesky humans.

If not an intentional critique, Dr Strangelove at least gives pride of place to technology as one of the causes of the accidental nuclear war that obliterates the world at the end. Given the realistic short-sightedness, love of technology for its own sake, and self-serving foolishness of most of the characters, it presents a good argument against depending technology to make our decisions for us.

But then again, Dr Strangelove came out sixty years ago. The bombers are probably already past their fail-safe points.

Wildcat trailer reaction

Maya Hawke as Flannery O’Connor in Wildcat

As I noted in my 2023 movie year-in-review, Wildcat is one of the films I’ve been looking forward to this year. Though it was completed and premiered at a film festival last year I hadn’t heard any news about its distribution or release until yesterday, when a great trailer appeared on YouTube.

Wildcat takes place over a short stretch of the early 1950s, when young writer Flannery O’Connor (Maya Hawke) moves back home to Milledgeville, Georgia and is diagnosed with lupus, the same disease that had killed her father when she was sixteen. While struggling with her illness and its severe effects she tries to sell her first novel, a searing Southern gothic religious fable called Wise Blood. Like her short stories, it’s deeply Catholic and Southern and poignant in the sense of sharp, cutting. It’s a hard sell.

It’s unclear from the trailer precisely how much of O’Connor’s life Wildcat covers, but there are scenes suggesting her time among the literary elite in the northeast in the late 1940s, after she had graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and when she was laboring over Wise Blood. The trailer suggests a strong contrast between the world O’Connor leaves behind and the clay-banked roads and nosy church ladies back home in Georgia—a contrast O’Connor was certainly aware of and wrote about.

Perhaps the most intriguing thing in the trailer are the scenes from several of her short stories—”Parker’s Back,” “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” “Revelation,” and especially “Good Country People”—in which O’Connor and her mother Regina (Laura Linney) play major characters like the cynical Hulga or the self-righteous Mrs Turpin. Catching even short glimpses of scenes I’ve imagined many times—a crowded doctor’s office waiting room, a Bible salesman running across a field carrying a prosthetic leg—got me excited in a way I haven’t felt for a movie in a while. Apparently these are intricately intertwined with the events of O’Connor’s real life. I’m curious to see how this works, especially since it’s so easy for a film about a writer to slip into the biographical fallacy (or what CS Lewis called The Personal Heresy): the idea that everything a writer writes is based on his or her actual experiences.

But I’m most pleased to see that Wildcat takes O’Connor’s Christianity seriously. Apparently Ethan Hawke, who directed and co-wrote the film, was inspired to make it when he read the Prayer Journal that O’Connor kept as a writing student in Iowa. O’Connor, in addition to being a brilliant writer, was prickly, hard-edged, had a chip on her shoulder as an outsider in the postwar literary world, and was fervently orthodox and devout. Her faith suffuses her work not only coincidentally but by design. Wildcat’s trailer manages to evoke all of this. Here’s hoping that the full film delivers.

A few other notes:

• The Southern accents sound pretty good. O’Connor was originally from Savannah and, though recordings of her remind me a lot of my paternal grandmother, an Athens native, O’Connor’s speech has some peculiarities that must be down to her roots, Savannah having some distinctive dialect features even by Southern standards. Listen to her read “A Good Man is Hard to Find” sometime.

• I’m interested to see how the film explores what some people perceive as O’Connor’s cruelty (“Sometimes I feel like you’re trying to stick pins in your readers,” her editor says in the trailer). The question of just how unpleasant a writer can or should make the reader feel in order to make a point has concerned me for a long time.

• Maya Hawke looks a lot more like O’Connor than I would have guessed was possible based on what I’ve seen of her in “Stranger Things” and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Kudos to her and the film’s hair and makeup folks.

• I like the cinematography a lot. It’s clearly digital but has some creative composition choices and lens work—e.g. the way the focus and bokeh fall off at the edges off the frame, which reminds me of The Batman. A distinctive look will probably help support O’Connor’s story and give it the otherworldly feel it will probably need.

• Wildcat was apparently shot mostly in Kentucky rather than Georgia. From what I can see in the trailer it looks like a good stand-in, though it’s funny to me that, with so many movies shooting in Georgia as a substitute for more expensive locales, such a Georgia-centric story wound up being shot elsewhere.

It’s striking, having watched the trailer several times now, how present O’Connor’s crutches are. The final “coming soon” shot of O’Connor at the family mailbox, which has been one of the only images available for a while, has them plainly visible but I never noticed them. And there they are behind her as she types up a manuscript or struggles even to walk around the house. Some early film festival reviews I’ve read suggest that Wildcat is not just a story about a writer publishing a novel but a meditation on suffering, the threat of death, and God’s grace. I’m here for it.

Wildcat is currently scheduled for a big-city release on May 3 with wider availability to follow, though I haven’t been able to find any details about that yet. Hopefully we can look forward to a time in the late spring or early summer when we can catch Flannery O’Connor in theatres.

Sturgeon Wars

Last week some of the staff writers at National Review, of all places, had an amusing exchange of views on the current state of Star Wars. It began when one wrote of being “Star Wars-ed out.” Another seconded that feeling and drew an analogy with the Marvel movies: both are series that have decreased in quality as the suits behind them have produced more and more “content.” Yet another followed up specifically critiquing the trilogy produced by Disney while rightly reserving some small praise for Rogue One.

But the best and most incisive perspective came from Jeffrey Blehar, who with aggressive indifference toward everything since Return of the Jedi forty years ago, mildly suggested that not much of Star Wars is any good. Dissect and fuss over the prequel trilogy, the sequel trilogy, the Disney+ shows, and cartoon shows and novels and comics and video games however you want, none of it is as good as the original trilogy and most of it is terrible. In fact, the best thing to come of Star Wars since 1983 is Mr Plinkett.

I mostly agree (and wholeheartedly agree about Mr Plinkett), and that’s because I’m a big believer in Sturgeon’s Law. In its simplest formulation, Sturgeon’s Law states that:

“90% of everything is crap.”

For several years now I’ve been saying that Sturgeon’s Law applies just as much to Star Wars as to anything else, it’s just that Star Wars got its 10% of quality out of the way first. What they’ve been producing ever since is, well…

I have ideas about why this is, including but by no means limited to Disney’s desperately overvalued purchase of the rights to the series and—probably more importantly—its merchandising, executive mismanagement, ideological capture of the filmmakers, oversaturation (speaking of Marvel), and of course simple artistic failure. But there are three more fundamental problems that I’ve seen with Star Wars over the last couple decades.

One is that everyone forgot that Star Wars was lightning in a bottle. The original film didn’t emerge fully formed from George Lucas’s head like a nerd Athena, it was the product of a difficult production, a demanding shoot, and a host of other limitations. The many points of friction in the production required genuine creativity to solve, not least from a brilliant editor and one or two real creative geniuses like Ben Burtt and John Williams. But the very success of Star Wars meant that the circumstances that shaped the originals have not recurred. Everything since has been greased by money, money, money, and the synthetic smoothness of the prequel and sequel trilogies allowed bad or incomplete or incoherent story ideas to slide straight through into the finished films.

Second and relatedly, with one or two exceptions the fans and producers of Star Wars drifted into a category error regarding what kind of stories these are. Star Wars since Return of the Jedi has been treated like fantasy set in space. Mr Plinkett, among many others, has noted the ridiculous and gratuitous multiplication of planets, species, vehicles, and everything else since The Phantom Menace. But Star Wars wasn’t originally fantasy—it was a Boomer pastiche of westerns, Kurosawa samurai films, World War II movies, Flash Gordon serials, and a film school dweeb’s skimming of Joseph Campbell. As Star Wars quickly became the cultural remit of younger generations and more and more Star Wars “content” was churned out, those referents were lost to all except the buffs and nerds. The galaxy far, far away came to be treated as an infinitely expandable object of “world-building” when it is and always was an assemblage of spare parts.

I don’t mean that dismissively. Being made of spare parts is not necessarily a bad thing. The originals are greater than the sum of their parts, and it’s worth pointing out that the handful of new Star Wars material that tried to tap directly into some of what inspired Lucas—war movies about ill-fated missions in Rogue One, westerns in the first season of “The Mandalorian”—were good. Eventually ruined by committee-think, but good.

The final problem, which brings us back around to Sturgeon’s Law, is that the fans allowed it, even demanded it. Having had that 10%, they gobbled up that 90% we’ve been getting since and kept wanting more. I know plenty of people have complained about the storytelling, the filmmaking, the behind-the-scenes drama, the ideological drift of the Disney films, and everything else, but for every Mr Plinkett or Critical Drinker on YouTube there are a thousand people who are satisfied with anything as long as it has the Star Wars logo on it. From archetypal storytelling to lifestyle brand—that’s the real Skywalker saga.

This is by no means unique to Star Wars fans, as some trends among purported Tolkien fans have made clear in the last couple years. But if people want to enjoy their favorite things again they need to regain their suspicion of corporations as well as remember the difference between quantity and quality.

Napoleon Bonaparte, teenage blogger

Yesterday I shared a post about Andrew Roberts’s Napoleon: A Life on Instagram. Coincidentally, when looking back at Goodreads to see how long it took me to read it, I discovered that I finished it eight years ago today, which I’m taking as an excuse to share a line that has amused me ever since.

Writing of the young Corsican’s submission for a French literary prize, Roberts relates:

Napoleon would later claim that he had withdrawn the essay before it was judged, but that is not in fact true. The Academy’s examiners gave it low marks for its excessively inflated style. One judge described it as ‘of too little interest, too ill-ordered, too disparate, too rambling, and too badly written to hold the reader’s attention’. Years later, Talleyrand obtained the original from the Academy’s archives and presented it to Napoleon.

Napoleon’s reaction speaks for all of us who started a blog during college:

“I found its author deserved to be whipped. What ridiculous things I said, and how annoyed I would be if they were preserved!”

One sympathizes.

Napoleon then—like anyone who has at some point deleted some ancient, teenage musings—burned the essay, “push[ing] it down with the tongs” to make sure it was good and gone. After all, “It might have exposed me to ridicule.”

Making faces at the world

One of the books that most shaped me when I was figuring out how and why I studied history was The Face of Battle, by John Keegan. I read it in grad school at Clemson and ended up writing my own master’s thesis as a similar series of experience-focused case studies. This week I revisited it via the audiobook, which I listened to on my commute. It was great to go back to it after fifteen years of further study and growth, to see familiar passages afresh and to rediscover many, many details I had simply forgotten.

Like this, from Keegan’s chapter on Waterloo:

What else are we to make of the experience of the 40th Regiment? They had arrived at Waterloo dead tired after a march of fifty-one miles in forty-eight hours; three weeks before that they had disembarked from America, having been six weeks at sea. During the day of Waterloo, they lost nearly two hundred soldiers dead and wounded out of seven hundred, and fourteen out of thirty-nine officers. ‘The men in their tired state,’ Sergeant Lawrence wrote, began to despair during the afternoon, ‘but the officer cheered them on continuously.’ When the French cavalry encircled them ‘with fierce gesticulation and angry scowls, in which a display of incisors became very apparent’ the officers would call out, “Now men, make faces!’

“Make faces!” is precisely the kind of real-world absurdity in the face of death that can’t be invented. Not without effort, anyway. In all of my war fiction I’ve tried to include surprising or absurd notes—but only because I’ve read of so many like this.

Oddly—but in the free-association spirit of this blog—that moment from Waterloo brought to mind a favorite passage from CS Lewis. In a letter to his friend and fellow Inkling Owen Barfield, Lewis contrasted a certain materialist vision of the world with what living in it is actually like:

“Say what you like . . . the world is sillier and better fun than they make out.”

— CS Lewis

Talking of beasts and birds, have you ever noticed this contrast: that when you read a scientific account of any animal’s life you get an impression of laborious, incessant, almost rational economic activity (as if all animals were Germans), but when you study any animal you know, what at once strikes you is their cheerful fatuity, the pointlessness of nearly all they do. Say what you like, Barfield, the world is sillier and better fun than they make out.

Indeed, and even in the dark and grim moments. Perhaps especially then.

What a good boy am I

Big Jack Horner exasperates his conscience in Puss in Boots: The Last Wish

After muddling through my mixed feelings for a movie at great length, here’s a brief note on a movie that, to my great surprise, I unreservedly enjoyed: Puss in Boots: The Last Wish.

The villain of the film, Big Jack Horner—Little Jack Horner, all grown up and a titan of the pie baking industry. Jack is a gigantic, resentful businessman who collects magical baubles (Cinderella’s slipper, Mickey’s wizard cap, Aladdin’s magic carpet, Mary Poppins’s bottomless carpetbag, and numerous other Disney Easter eggs show up in his collection) and wants a magical Wishing Star’s one wish for himself. He sets out in pursuit of Puss and company with a bag full of these trinkets he intends to use as weapons.

Among them is a parody of Jiminy Cricket with a Jimmy Stewart-soundalike voice. His name according to the credits is Ethical Bug. As Jack’s misdeeds and casual cruelties stack up, Ethical Bug becomes more and more distraught. They have this exchange as Jack walks across a human bridge made of his (surviving) bakers and Ethical Bug decides to try out some therapy:

Ethical Bug: There’s good in all people, there’s good in all people… You know, Jack, maybe we oughta dig a little deeper. Tell me about your childhood.

Jack Horner: Ahhh… You know, I never had much as a kid. Just loving parents, stability and a mansion, and a thriving baked goods enterprise for me to inherit. Useless crap like that.

EB: [facepalm]

JH: But once I get my wish I’ll finally have the one thing that will make me happy!

EB: Oh, well, what’s that?

JH: All of the magic in the world. For me. No one else gets any. Is that so much?

EB: Yes!

JH: Agree to disagree.

You can watch this sequence in the first minute and a half of this clip montage. Jack, I should mention, is brilliantly voiced by John Mulaney, who makes him both evil and hilarious. He might be my favorite movie bad guy in a couple years.

One of the reasons for that is Jack’s refreshingly straightforward quality. He’s resentful—an almost Dantean picture of envy, as his wish above suggests—but not damaged. He has no tragic backstory, he is a victim of neither systems nor individuals, and he has no legitimate grievances whatsoever. He has just learned to desire what he shouldn’t have. And he flummoxes the naïve therapeutic talk of Ethical Bug. Sometimes—most of the time—people are just wicked. And far from being reduced to a simplistic bad guy, Jack is a fully rounded and believable character.

Where the trend at Disney is to explain away villainy as victimhood—think Maleficent or Cruella—Puss in Boots: The Last Wish gives us a cartoon Chigurh, or the Joker, or, more to the point given the film’s spaghetti western influences, Angel Eyes. It’s funny, it’s smart, and it strikes nearer the truth than a lot of other recent movies. Of all the Shrek films’ subversions, parodies, and outright vandalism of Disney, this may be the best.

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.”

Frozen II’s big dam problem

Runeard’s Dam in Frozen II

This month Before They Were Live, a Christian Humanist Radio Network podcast covering every film in the Disney animated canon in chronological order, finally reached Frozen II. Or, as my kids used to call it—with unwitting accuracy—Frozen Number Two. Hosts Josh and Michial have a great discussion about the film’s strengths and its many, many shortcomings, but there’s one aspect of the film I’m going to take this sliver of an excuse to vent about—the dam built by Anna and Elsa’s grandfather.

Having a daughter who was four when Frozen II came out (so you know where I was opening weekend), having watched it far too many times since, and—the sticking point for me—having once written a book about destroying a dam in Norway, I have thoughts.

Frozen II’s dam was built as “a gift of peace” to the Northuldra people, the film’s thinly-disguised Sami, who live in the Enchanted Forest, a region both far, far away (i.e. a couple hours’ walk) from Arendelle and near enough to be at the head of the same fjord. Over the course of the film, Anna and Elsa learn that the dam was actually a Trojan horse attack on the peaceful Northuldra because of their grandfather’s wicked suspicion of magic-practicing peoples. The dam has, somehow, shrouded the Enchanted Forest in an everlasting fog. Only destroying the dam will dispel the fog and make things right, but doing so will also unleash a torrent of water that will destroy Arendelle. It’s a social justice trolley problem.

So—what’s been bugging me since that Saturday morning three years ago:

First, what is this dam doing? People don’t just build dams for fun. The Frozen movies apparently take place in the early 1840s, so this is too early for the dam to provide anyone with hydroelectric power, but it also doesn’t seem to be providing anyone with hydraulic power, either. Even if that was the intention, it’s too far away from Arendelle to do them any good. Flood control is the most plausible reason, but even this is a stretch given the environment. As for the recipients of this dam, the Northuldra are reindeer herders—why give them a dam at all? And even if it was offered, why would they accept?

Beyond serving no obvious purpose, Frozen II’s dam doesn’t even function like a dam. The water of the deep lake behind it does not apparently flow over the dam—or anywhere else. Having no hydro station, it doesn’t even have intakes that could redirect the water through the cliffs to the valley below the dam. Here’s the dam that I scaled up in imagining the Grettisfjord dam in Dark Full of Enemies. Look at it on Google’s satellite view and you can see on the right, the southeastern side of the lake, the intakes for the pipeline to the power station downriver. Frozen II’s dam is just a literal wall plopped in the wilderness that created a lake that somehow just sits there.

In Before They Were Live, Josh and Michial hesitate to fault Frozen II for sloppy storytelling, but I am less inclined to be charitable. The dam makes it clear that the story is secondary to the politics. It is a symbol and only a symbol. It has to be there so it can be destroyed, just like the Northuldra have to unnecessarily accept the gift of useless infrastructure so they can be haplessly victimized. And all of this has to happen so that the audience can vicariously grieve over generational injustice and accept that the cost of Doing Better is utter, year zero, civilizational destruction.

And that brings me to my biggest problem with Frozen II on this score: the seemingly minor detail that man-made lakes can be drained. The lake could be drained, the fog dissipated, the dam demolished bloodlessly, in controlled conditions that would not annihilate everything downriver. (Seriously, read about dam failures, both unintentional—here’s one from my neck of the woods—and otherwise. Anna might as well atone by nuking Arendelle.) The destruction at the end of the film—which is prevented by a deus ex machina anyway, because all recent Disney films toothlessly refuse to follow through on their own logic—is completely unnecessary.

Josh unfavorably compares Frozen II to other, better films’ “fairy tale logic,” arguing that Frozen II lacks it. He’s right. Frozen II’s story is governed by Jacobin logic. Bolshevik logic.

I’m only half kidding, and only barely overstating it. Regardless of whether you agree with the politics or not, this is bad storytelling. Fortunately—since I do not agree with the film’s politics—the storytelling is so bad, the plot is so slipshod and scattered, and the climactic action so blunted in its effect on the characters, that few people who are not already ideological fellow travelers will end the film having had some kind of awakening. But, Lord knows, I could be wrong.

I’ve embedded the latest episode of Before They Were Live in this post—give it a listen! And I highly recommend subscribing to the show. Josh and Michial bring great dedication and insight to the show, and their discussions always maintain a high standard. Though I wouldn’t call myself a Disney enthusiast by any means, each new episode sidelines whatever else I’m listening to. I think y’all will enjoy it, too.

You can visit the show’s official website here and the Christian Humanist Radio Network’s main page here. The CHRN also has a Facebook page which you can like or follow for regular updates on all of their shows.

Devotion and Glass Onion

Jonathan Majors and Glen Powell as Jesse Brown and Tom Hudner in Devotion, and Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc in Glass Onion

My family’s Thanksgiving Break arrived just in time this year, giving both my wife and I some much-needed rest and our kids a lot of good time at home, all together. As an added bonus, the break started off well for me when my father-in-law took me to see a movie, and then my wife and I spent the evening of Black Friday on a date that included steaks and another movie. And what is more, both movies were good. After months of nothing interesting in cinemas, this has been a good couple of days.

The films are Devotion and Glass Onion. I intended to review Devotion the morning after seeing it, but just because I’m on break doesn’t mean I’m not busy. After seeing Glass Onion last night with my wife and wanting to review that, too, I decided to put together a joint review of both. I hope one or both of these will sound appealing to y’all, and that you’ll find something here to enjoy.

Devotion

Devotion, based on the book by Adam Makos, tells the true story of Ensign Jesse Brown and Lieutenant Tom Hudner, naval aviators who saw action in the Korean War. The movie transpires over the course of 1950, when Hudner was transferred to a naval air station in Rhode Island and met Brown, the first African-American naval aviator and therefore still a curiosity to outsiders despite being mostly accepted by his fellow pilots. When their commander assigns them as wingmen for fighter training, Hudner and Brown test each other in skill and daring, slaloming through the masts of sailboats and buzzing a house in the nearest town. It’s friendly and professional, but they’re also clearly feeling each other out.

The early tensions of the Cold War loom in the background, and after their squadron is issued powerful and dangerous new aircraft—the F4U Corsair—Brown and Hudner deploy to the Mediterranean and finally to Korea. Here, late in the year, after the Chinese intervene and stream across the Yalu River into North Korea, overrunning American and UN positions and surrounding and pinning down Marine units at the Chosin Reservoir, Brown and Hudner provide close air support, attacking ground targets, strafing Chinese units as they mass for attack, blowing up bridges. It’s facing MiGs and anti-aircraft fire in Korea that will most sorely test Brown and Hudner’s skills and friendship.

As played by Jonathan Majors and Glen Powell (also of Top Gun: Maverick, making this his second naval aviation role this year), Brown and Hudner are a study in contrasts. Brown is stolid, stoic, but with something simmering just below the surface; Hudner is gregarious and upbeat but by no means naïve. Brown is a married family man and a teetotaler; Hudner is single, on the prowl, and doesn’t mind throwing one back with the boys.

One could call this standard buddy movie material but Majors and Powell play it with great skill and subtlety, making Brown and Hudner feel like real men with real depth to them, and so what begins as a professional relationship with some low-key rivalry grows into a friendship that takes on great weight and meaning by the end. The more they get to know each other, the more each grows. Iron sharpeneth iron.

The acting is good across the board, especially Majors and Powell but also Christina Jackson as Brown’s wife Daisy, who takes the usually thankless role of the wife waiting for her husband back home and gives it serious heart. As strong as Brown and Hudner’s relationship becomes over the course of Devotion, it’s Hudner’s relationship with Daisy that gives the film is greatest emotional weight. Fittingly, they have a coda together.

The main draws for me were the aviation and the Korean War setting. Both are excellently done in Devotion. Korea doesn’t get much attention nowadays—it has really earned its nickname of “The Forgotten War”—and I’m glad to see a good film that provides a small but clear window into the topic. The film stresses both the continuities of this conflict with World War II (having fought in that war gives an aviator an authority that even rank doesn’t) and change (the integration of the armed forces, most obviously, as well as a change in opponents). The handful of battle scenes showing the ground conflict are well-executed—a nighttime attack in which more and more and more Chinese troops appear in the flickering, wavering light of flares was even scary.

The aviation also proved excellent. I’ve learned since watching Devotion that director JD Dillard insisted on practical effects, real aircraft, and real flying wherever possible, and the film has a strong sense of verisimilitude and authenticity as a result. The filmmakers’ painstaking attention to detail makes everything feel real. Devotion’s flying sequences may not have quite the palpable sensory thrill of Top Gun: Maverick, but they’re close, and for the same reasons. The combination of practical effects and real planes with Erik Messerschmidt’s rich, moody, classically styled cinematography also means that Devotion looks great, far better than a comparable film like Midway.

Furthermore, the aviators in this film act and talk like real pilots, worrying over things like weather, visibility, maintenance, windspeed and direction, the approach when landing on an aircraft carrier, and more. Brown, for example, excels in his F8F Bearcat but worries about the overwhelming torque and limited cockpit visibility in the Corsair. This is not just about verisimilitude, but sets up important events later in the movie. It’s just good, solid filmmaking.

I have not yet read Makos’s book and can’t vouch for the truthfulness or accuracy of every detail of Devotion’s story. Certainly some aspects of the film feel like stock Hollywood elements, especially a racist Marine who keeps reappearing and challenging Brown. But the rest strikes me as true to the source material. I especially liked that a crucial moment in the plot is motivated by the respect Brown and a white aviator have for each other because they’re both Southerners. The respect afforded all the characters in all their particularity gives the film a complexity that makes not only the action but the situation feel real.

Devotion’s refusal to make sweeping statements, avoiding political grandstanding or simplistic caricature in favor of closely examining the friendship between two wingmen, makes it a more subtle, nuanced, mature examination of racial division and healing—not to mention comradeship, courage, professionalism, and love—than I’ve seen anywhere in a long time. But more than that, it’s a well-crafted and moving telling of an important true story, and that alone makes it worth seeing.

Glass Onion

Following up my review of Devotion with a review of Glass Onion means going from the sublime to the ridiculous. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Glass Onion opens (in May 2020, the last halcyon days of the pandemic before society started eating itself) with a series of oddballs receiving an elaborate puzzle box. Communicating with each other by phone, they work their way through the puzzles to receive a signed invitation to a private island getaway from an old acquaintance, tech billionaire Miles Bron (Ed Norton). They convene in Greece for the boat ride to the Glass Onion, Miles’s elaborate, showoffy mansion where he keeps a Porsche on display on the roof (since there are no roads on the island) and has rented the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. The guests are Claire (Kathryn Hahn), an annoying liberal politician from New England; Birdie (Kate Hudson), an annoying fashionista with a talent for saying stupidly offensive things and is being kept from her phone by her assistant (Jessica Henwick); Duke (Dave Bautista), an annoying manosphere Twitch streamer who arrives with his girlfriend, Whiskey (Madelyn Cline); and Lionel (Leslie Odom Jr), who is just a scientist.

But two unexpected guests arrive as well. One is Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), who has no connection with Miles but has dark forebodings about unexplained invitations to gatherings like this. The other is Andi (Janelle Monáe), a cofounder of Miles’s tech company who was elbowed out of her leadership role, her fortune, and more. She was invited, but it was clearly pro forma. No one expected her to come, and they are disturbed that she has. Blanc notes, observes, hypothesizes.

Blanc is also greatly bothered. Miles has planned this get-together as a murder mystery roleplaying game. Why would he suggest the idea of himself, murdered, to a house full of people who wouldn’t mind doing exactly that?

I can’t write much more without giving anything away, and I certainly don’t want to do that. But a clue as to what to expect from Glass Onion arrives early, delivered by Yo-Yo Ma, of all people, at a bizarre Covid party held at Birdie’s penthouse apartment. When a music box in Miles’s puzzle begins playing a classical tune, Yo-Yo Ma explains that the tune is Bach’s Little Fugue in G Minor, a fugue being a seemingly simple tune that, when played back and layered over itself, changes, revealing extraordinary complexity and unexpected surprises. The central metaphor of a glass onion, which is both layered and clear at the same time, also suggests a great deal about the way the film works.

And that is one of the joys of Glass Onion—the complexity, the careful construction, the doubling back and revelation. It had a lot of genuine surprises and was brilliantly crafted. I’d even rate its plotting as better than Knives Out. The other joy is the humor. Glass Onion is hilarious from beginning to end, with a lot of well-earned laughs deriving from character and well-executed setups and punchlines, not just references and allusions as in a lot of other comedy these days. There’s also plenty of pure silliness, but the fact that a lot of the jokes also work as plot points or signposts for the viewer points back to the quality of the film’s construction.

The cinematography is good, the costumes and sets are great, and the performances—cartoonish as the characters are—are good. Craig is especially good as Blanc. In the first half of the movie I wondered why Blanc, who was mostly cool and collected in Knives Out, was so befuddled and buffoonish in this one. But in the second half… And Janelle Monáe, whose natural sanctimony I usually find off-putting, was truly brilliant in a role that turns out to be a bit of a fugue or glass onion itself.

I did have a few misgivings about Glass Onion. The setup and middle act were brilliant, but the film missteps tonally in the end. Some of the climactic action is bothersomely childish. Again, I can’t elaborate without giving too much away. And while the characters were all wildly entertaining and well-performed, they were still broad caricatures whose foibles and flaws felt like familiar types and some of the jokes at their expense were low-hanging fruit. Dave Bautista’s manosphere influencer, for instance, rants about masculinity and is obsessed with guns but lives at home with his mom. Got it. One suspects Rian Johnson spends way too much time online. Fortunately, almost all of the characaters reveal more about themselves as the film goes on, doubling back, layering.

But these are minor problems. Knives Out, the first Benoit Blanc mystery, was one of my favorite movies of the year when it came out in 2019. I wrote that it “was the most fun I’ve had at the movies this year.” That’s probably also true of Glass Onion.

Conclusion

I’m glad to say that after a long cinematic dry spell this year, I’ve gotten to see two good films in just a matter of days. Devotion and Glass Onion are solid, well-constructed movies and well worth seeing in theatres. Glass Onion in particular is a Netflix film and as far as I know will only be in theatres for a week. I hope y’all will check it and Devotion out.

Happy Thanksgiving!