Deliverance: a recommendation and a detail

James Dickey and Burt Reynolds on the set of the film adaptation of Dickey’s novel Deliverance

This morning the latest episode of John J Miller’s Great Books Podcast dropped and I was excited to see its subject: James Dickey’s first and greatest novel, Deliverance.

Miller’s guest is Cat Baab-Muguira, who has previously appeared for an episode on Poe and written a book about Poe’s unlikely self-help guidance, which is high on my to-read list. Miller and Baab-Muguira have a really excellent discussion not only of the plot and extraordinarily rich characters, writing, and themes of Deliverance, but also of the film adaptation and Dickey’s life and reputation. (I have some secondhand Dickey stories of my own, courtesy of a neighbor and former coworker.) They discuss the novel’s masculinity especially well, refusing to drop into the oversimplification du jour of “toxic masculinity,” and they handle the most infamous elements of the story deftly, not parking on the sensationalism of it but digging into the layers of meaning Dickey applied to his story. This is one of the best episodes of the show I’ve heard.

But—every time they said that the novel takes place in “northwest Georgia” I yelled at the radio, “northeast!”

This was a really strange detail to goof up, but they repeated it five or six times and so confidently that I began to worry that I’d gotten it wrong. But nope, here’s the novel itself, as Ed talks with his wife the morning of the big canoe trip’s departure for the mountains:

Spoiler alert: It doesn’t go okay.

Even Wikipedia has this wrong. Which, as I said, is strange, because every carefully chosen detail of the novel suggests the northeast Georgia mountains. (And there’s no disputing where the film was shot.) The drive northward from Atlanta seems pretty clearly to be that toward Gainesville and points north—I’m old enough to remember changing landscapes and roadside scenes very much like those Dickey describes—and the small towns, mountains, rivers, woods, vegetation, and especially the massive gorge described by Dickey match those of my neck of the woods. And this is important because the setting was important to Dickey and the story. Northwest Georgia is my friend Sam at All the Biscuits in Georgia’s territory and, with all due respect to that area, it’s an entirely different region from “the mountains.”

Again, this is an otherwise excellent episode of The Great Books Podcast. I just had to get that down in writing somewhere before I could move on with my day. If you’ve read Deliverance you know us hillbillies can’t let things go.

You can listen to the episode at the link above or in the podcasting app of your choice, and I strongly recommend you do. Baab-Muguira’s book on Poe is called Poe for your Problems: Uncommon Advice from History’s Least Likely Self-Help Guru. It’s on my birthday wishlist and I hope to read it soon.

I wrote about Deliverance here a couple times last year: first in reference to outsiders’ prurient interest in what Flannery O’Connor called the grotesque; second, having been moved to reread the novel, as an illustration of John Gardner’s idea of the “vivid and continuous fictional dream;” and finally in my reading year-in-review, in which I decided it was the best novel I read in 2022.

Should trouble come

Ethiopian soldiers of the Imperial Army’s Kagnew Battalion in Korea, 1953

Watching the movie finally got me to read SLA Marshall’s Pork Chop Hill. Part II begins with a chapter on a patrol into a hazardous area of the front line known as the Alligator Jaws in the spring of 1953. The small patrol runs into a much larger Chinese force and fights them off from a ditch with a foot of water flowing through it.

But here’s a twist: this patrol is composed of Ethiopian troops sent to Korea by Emperor Haile Selassie. The troops acquit themselves well. One corporal’s arm is blown off at the shoulder by a Chinese grenade, and he calmly hands his weapon off to the man beside him and continues giving orders. This patrol’s performance is especially noteworthy since they are newly arrived in Korea and this is their first combat experience whatsoever.

Here’s how the action concludes as the Ethiopians withdraw to safety.

In that interval, [Lieutenant] Wongele Costa abandoned his position on the left side of the ditch. The casualties were carried to the position on the right flank. But in the darkness, he missed one man, not knowing that [Private Mano] Waldemarian was dead. So he called for lights again to assist the search. When the flare came on, he could see Waldemarian in the ditch. He sat there in a natural position, the rifle folded close in his arms. Wongele Costa crawled over to him, found that he was dead and so returned, carrying the body. Thereby he simply followed the tradition of his corps. Fiercely proud of the loyalty of their men, officers of the Imperial Guard are likely to say to a stranger, “Should trouble come, stay with me, I’ll be the last man to die.”

Chills.

Marshall goes on to note that among the Ethiopians, “in battle, it is the officer invariably who takes the extra risk to save one of his own.” He credits their success in withstanding Chinese attack to pre-patrol preparation, with the leaders carefully familiarizing themselves with their area of operations daily so that they knew their way even in the dark. And, in broken terrain, the Ethiopians would hold hands to avoid losing each other (by this point in the book Marshall has described American attacks falling apart this way at least ten times), a technique that “western troops would . . . scorn as beneath dignity.” The tradeoff, of course, is vulnerability to artillery and mortars, but on this patrol everything worked. Fitness for purpose.

The Ethiopian presence in Korea was a fascinating surprise to me, and I intend to learn more about it.

Room to swing a cat

This week Law & Liberty published an ambivalently positive review of The Reactionary Mind, by Michael Warren Davis, a book I enjoyed when it first came out. The reviewer, James M Patterson, takes Davis to task for romanticizing the Middle Ages, in the course of which Patterson writes this:

[Davis’s] criticisms of journalism and technology are good, though a little naïve. For example, he says, “It was the peasants, in their simplicity, piety, and common sense who saw through all the made theories” of their day. These same peasants also massacred cats because of their association with evil and witchcraft.

Okay, but what this blog presupposes is… maybe they didn’t?

This is a story I’ve been meaning to dig into for years now. It doesn’t pass the smell test for me, especially because it is always brought up to denigrate medieval people or illustrate their credulity and primitive violence. Like the term “Dark Ages,” if a story, factoid, or anecdote is always brought up to achieve the same effect, and if that effect is always to cut the subject down, double and triple check it, starting with primary sources. So consider this post a set of notes toward a deep dive sometime in the future.

Patterson, above, is making an offhand allusion. Again, the flippancy should arouse suspicion. If it’s this easy to demonstrate the stupidity and superstition of the medieval peasant why is there any difference of opinion? But the broad outline of the story in its various forms usually falls back on these points:

• In the Middle Ages, cats were closely associated with the Devil and devil worship

• The association was so strong that in June 1233 Pope Gregory IX (r. 1227-41) issued a bull titled Vox in Rama condemning cats as servants of the devil

• As a result, medieval people across Europe massacred cats

• The lack of cats caused growth in the rat populations of Europe, leading to the Black Death

That last point is usually the Paul Harvey twist to story, really driving home the consequences of such brute stupidity and violence toward cats. That’s what you dummies get! seems to be the implied moral. Cat people twitch their whiskers and purr.

If you want the most elaborate and self-congratulatory version of this that I’ve run across, see this World History Encyclopedia article on “Cats in the Middle Ages.” The author is not an historian but a “freelance writer and former part-time Professor of Philosophy” and lards his treatment of the subject with a lot of stuff about the position of respect and honor accorded cats in the ancient world (supported by a Victorian classicist painting of Egyptian cat worship), the way medieval “religious bigots” attempted to undermine that position, and—on the other side of Middle Ages chronologically—how the Protestant Reformation “broke the power-hold of the Church over people's lives and allowed for greater freedom of thought.” Citation needed.

That article is a pile of bad research (seriously, look through the bibliography at the bottom), whiggish clichés, and Dark Ages mythology, but it is just about the Platonic ideal of the medieval cat massacre story.

Now, a fair-minded person, one not content to accept any old slander of medieval people that comes his way, should be able to see problems with this story or at least points that are open to question. A few that have occurred to me every time I’ve heard some version of this:

• Were cats really that closely associated with the Devil? Why?

• A papal bull condemning cats? Why would a pope bother with an official pronouncement on something like this?

• How did the pope’s condemnation result in popular massacres of cats? Are there not several steps missing between an official letter from the pope and peasants programmatically butchering animals?

• Vox in Rama was written in 1233. The Black Death, so-called, arrived in Europe from Central Asia in the late 1340s. Was there really a lack of cats in Europe for that long? Are these events related at all?

Accepting a story that leaves itself open to questions like these is predicated on uncritically believing that medieval people were stupid. (It also relies on a Tom & Jerry-level understanding of zoology.) But our hypothetical fair-minded person, having asked the questions above, might be tempted to ask one more:

• Did this even happen?

The answer seems to be No, not really. At least not in the way laid out above and as popularly regurgitated over and over and over.

A few good places to start picking apart this story:

• Here’s a Medium article that accepts rather more of the myth of medieval cat hatred than I prefer but does a good job of demolishing the proposed connection between purported cat massacres with the arrival of the plague.

• Here’s a broad look at cats in medieval society. Though regurgitating the Gregory IX papal bull/Black Death myth as a side note, the article does a good job showing the recognizable role cats played as pets and ratters in medieval communities, from common farming families to abbeys and royal households.

• Here’s a Medievalists.net gallery of medieval depictions of cats ranging from 8th-century manuscript illuminations and marginalia to 16th-century paintings. Note that most of them are either purely naturalistic or playful in that genuinely sweet medieval manner, showing cats doing human things.

• Also from Medievalists.net, here’s a short review of a scholarly journal article on cats’ bad reputations in medieval Europe. Note the chronological range of sources it draws from and the distance it has to reach for examples of medieval “hatred.”

• Here’s a Quora answer to a question about Vox in Rama provided by someone who has actually read and understood medieval literature, understands what a papal bull is and how it worked, gives attention to the bull’s context, and quotes it at length.

• Finally, here’s a 2020 article from Museum Hack on the specific question of Vox in Rama.

The last two items above are the strongest, so if you look at any of these, look at those two. A few of the things Tim O’Neill on Quora and Alex Johnson at Museum Hack do well in rebutting the story of the cat massacres:

• Both present the actual passages of Vox in Rama that deal with cats. If you’re expecting a rabid churchman’s spittle-flecked denunciations, prepare to be underwhelmed, as cats are only incidental and are featured alongside toads and zombie-like specters as part of a rite of initiation. The “animals” in the rite are also clearly shape-shifters—demons taking on physical form—rather than actual toads and cats. This points to the bull’s broader context.

• Both explain well what a papal bull is, its specific function as official papal correspondence, and its reach and effects. Vox in Rama was written and delivered to the Holy Roman Emperor, the Archbishop of Mainz, inquisitor Konrad von Marburg and others for a specific purpose and was not a universally applicable diktat. Misunderstandings of this kind point to the limits of the modern imagination, shaped as it is by centralized government and totalitarianism, and to the bull’s original broader context.

• Both note that Vox in Rama does not at any point call for the killing of cats and that, even if it did, the plague arrived far later than the bull, so a connection between the two is nonexistent, and that even with cats around the plague would still be able to spread among humans because it was fleas rather than rats that spread it. And, as Johnson notes specifically, fleas don’t mind living on cats. In fact, a flea living on cat might have a better chance of biting a human.

• Finally but most importantly, the context. Both point out that Vox in Rama was written to warn about and combat a supposed satanic cult then operating in central Germany and that the bull is narrowly focused on this.

Knowing this and reading the actual text of the bull should be enough to scuttle the myth of the pope-ordered cat massacres. Why, then, does it persist? O’Neill sums it up well:

Despite there being no evidence to support any of these claims, they are repeated uncritically because they have found their way into a couple of badly researched books and because they appeal to people's prejudices about the Middle Ages.

Emphasis mine.

Again, consider these notes toward a deeper dive. (I’m especially intrigued by parallels between the satanic rites described in Vox in Rama and those cooked up by Philip the Fair as an excuse to liquidate the Templars a decade earlier.) I’m most grateful to O’Neill and Johnson for quoting the actual text of Vox in Rama, as its lack of availability foiled my attempts to look into the primary sources behind this story some years ago. I aim to look deeper still and write all this up in a more presentable form someday, though the misinterpretation and misrepresentation of the source at the root of the story seems to settle the question pretty conclusively.

If I am to end this post with any peroration or call to action, let me simply repeat this: If you run across any story repeated context-free purely as a cudgel to denigrate a past period and its people, look into it. Deeply. Whatever you do, don’t accept it because it confirms your prior impressions or prejudices, and definitely don’t breezily repeat it to dismiss someone else’s arguments. Real history is done on purpose.

Pork Chop Hill

Gregory Peck as Lt Joe Clemons with Woody Strode and Norman Fell in Pork Chop Hill (1959)

Last week was my wife and children’s spring break, and while they spent a few days in Charleston I caught up on a backlog of war movies. The one I most looked forward to was 1959’s Pork Chop Hill. The Korean War is underrepresented in the war film canon and, owing largely to my granddad’s service there in the Air Force, I’ve always been interested in what few films there are about the conflict. As it happens, this is one of the best.

Pork Chop Hill focuses on just a few US Army infantry companies and a few days in the spring of 1953. (By coincidence, the 70th anniversary of the action depicted in this film is this coming week.) As peace negotiations between UN forces and the Communist Chinese and North Koreans drag on elsewhere, American outposts on Pork Chop Hill are overrun and orders come down to Lt Joe Clemons (Gregory Peck) to retake the hill.

The hill is tall and steep and the barbed wire entanglements Clemons’s superiors said had been obliterated by artillery fire are still there when his men finally reach the top. Clemons’s company takes heavy casualties; the men start bleeding away in ones and twos well before they reach the trenches. Motivation and exhaustion pose further problems. Officers and NCOs have to urge their men forward and even to fire their weapons. But properly led—and with ample application of automatic fire and grenades—the GIs retake the trenches and bunkers at the top of the hill bit by bit.

Here Clemons’s depleted company consolidates its control of the hilltop and faces further dangers: friendly fire, Chinese holdouts, repeated communication failures, enemy artillery bombardment, lack of ammunition, lack of food and water, and lack of reinforcements. Even the arrival of another understrength company under Clemons’s brother-in-law, Lt Walter Russell (Rip Torn), proves temporary when Russell’s men are ordered back off the hilltop. Heavy Chinese counterattacks prove harder and harder to repulse and each one leaves Clemons with fewer men. By the end, Clemons and his handful of surviving infantry sit stranded atop the hill, waiting. If the Chinese drag out peace negotiations long enough to retake the hill and if Clemons is not reinforced, he and his men will be annihilated.

Pork Chop Hill is a masterfully crafted, no-frills, no-nonsense war film—a true classic of the genre. It tells a specific, narrowly focused story exceptionally well. This shouldn’t come as a surprise as the director, Lewis Milestone, made his name 29 years earlier with the original screen adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front. The film is finely staged and shot, balancing the confusion of combat with the coherence necessary to filmmaking in comprehensible but intense combat scenes.

The film also has good performances from an excellent cast. Pork Chop Hill is an amazing who’s-who for movie buffs. In addition to Peck and Torn in the leads (though Torn doesn’t appear until about two-thirds of the way into the film), Martin Landau, George Peppard, Norman Fell, Robert Blake, and Gavin MacLeod play small parts as officers, grunt infantry, and radio men, and the legendary Harry Dean Stanton appears in an uncredited early role. Real-life West Pointer George Shibata plays a Japanese-American officer and Woody Strode stands out as a fearful GI the officers suspect of malingering. Strode’s interaction with James Edwards, a fellow black infantryman who makes it his job to keep an eye on Strode, injects some understated personal and racial drama into the story.

Pork Chop Hill’s technical qualities and its cast are all excellent, but it’s the film’s atmosphere and attention to detail that sells it as a great war film. When Clemons’s company steps off, the march uphill is agonizingly long, and the attempts to breach the Chinese wire frustrating and lethal. The trench warfare is presented matter-of-factly, which only makes it more hair-raising. While there is plenty of rifle and machine gun fire to worry about, artillery and grenades are the real threats. Even throwing a single grenade into an enemy machine gun position can prove hazardous, with one soldier missing and being wounded when his own grenade bounces back and explodes nearby. Less frightening but much creepier is the wry taunting of Chinese political officers via loudspeaker, providing a kind of evil Greek chorus to Clemons’s attacks.

The film also dramatizes the immense difficulty of communication especially well. Clemons has two radio men and uses multiple runners but still can’t relay or receive messages effectively, a problem that only grows worse once he has seized the top of the hill. There is perhaps no better dramatization of Clausewitz’s dictum in On War: “Everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult.”

In The Mask of Command, the late Sir John Keegan presents case studies in four styles of military leadership: the Heroic (Alexander), the Anti-Heroic (Wellington), the Unheroic (Grant), and the False Heroic (Hitler). One could usefully apply the same taxonomy to war movies. In its straightforward, unassuming presentation; its nuts-and-bolts attention to the work of combat; its stoic, uncomplaining reflection on danger and hardship; and its steadfast refusal to exaggerate either the glories or horrors of war, Pork Chop Hill is the Unheroic war film par excellence. I strongly recommend it.

The film is based on the book of the same name by the influential but controversial Brigadier General SLA Marshall, which he wrote based on after-action interviews with the men involved in the real attacks on Pork Chop Hill. I’m ashamed to say I’ve owned a copy since grad school but never read it. I intend to fix that this weekend.

Meet Thomas Bowdler

Last week, in writing about efforts to cleanse the work of Agatha Christie and other dead authors of language and elements that modern people find offensive, I described just such a sanitized edition of one of her novels as bowdlerized. I tried to work in an explanation of that term but it was beside the point and that post was already long enough. But I’ve been thinking about it since then.

Given the way the words censor, censored, and censorship arouse a lot of word games and linguistic dodging among the people who want to vandalize dead writers’ work (“No one is being censored, you ninnies”), bowdlerize, bowdlerized, and bowdlerization may be precisely the right words for our time.

The Bowdler at the root of these terms is the English physician Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825) and his sister Henrietta. There is apparently some historical and literary critical debate about which of them is more responsible for the kind of work we know as bowdlerization, but it’s indisputable that they worked as a team. Their project? The Family Shakspeare [sic], a complete library of Shakespeare’s plays with all the impropriety taken out. The Bowdlers not only cut strong language, religious oaths, blasphemy, sexual allusions and themes, Shakespeare’s numerous and legendary dirty puns, and even entire characters, but took it upon themselves to improve unhappy endings like that of King Lear or change major plot points like Ophelia’s suicide in Hamlet, which in their edition became an accident. Bowdler having also removed all the sexual references from Othello, one wonders how the reader would know what was going on, what was at stake, or why everyone was so upset.

Bowdler published the Family Shakspeare under his own name in 1818 and became a byword for prudery even in his own lifetime. His was the kind of project we moderns might knowingly chuckle at. Certainly, whatever other problems we have today, we view ourselves as above this kind of thing.

I submit that we are not. Here’s how Bowdler advertised his tidied up Shakespeare:

THE FAMILY SHAKSPEARE: in which nothing is added to the original Text: but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a Family. By THOMAS BOWDLER, Esq. F.R.S. and S.A. “My great objects in this undertaking are to remove from the writings of Shakspeare, some defects which diminish their value; and, at the same time, to present to the public an edition of his Plays, which the parent, the guardian, and the instructor of youth may place without fear in the hands of the pupil; and from which the pupil may derive instruction as well as pleasure; may improve his moral principles, while he refines his taste; and without incurring the danger of being hurt with any indelicacy of expression, may learn the fate of Macbeth, that even a kingdom is dearly purchased, if virtue be the price of acquisition.”

There’s a lot going on here, not the least of which is Bowdler’s bluntness in describing his cuts as “remov[ing] . . . defects which diminish [the plays’] value” and his clearly instrumental, pragmatic view of what literature is for. (Note the language of “value.”) And it is clear from his remarks on the moral of Macbeth that Bowdler, like those who think you can have Christie while cutting a bunch of Christie’s words, thinks that there is something hidden in Shakespeare that you can still get without the “defects.” But what caught my eye was the phrase “without incurring the danger of being hurt.”

Or, as we might say in these enlightened times, avoiding and preventing harm.

Harm is the modern bogeyman. The specific perceived threats have changed—a culture as vulgar and perverse as ours mocks at the very idea of “indelicacy of expression” but is puritanically fastidious about transgressions against ethnicity, race, sexual preference, and even obesity—but the intent, the method, and the fundamental prudishness is the same. So is the result: works published and sold under an author’s name that cannot truthfully be said to be that author’s.

Bowdlerize most precisely names the moralistic, artless, destructive impulse to “fix” the “defects” of someone else’s work, and I hope it reenters our lexicon for more widespread use. Maybe then our present literary vandals can rediscover the one virtue the Bowdlers had that they manifestly do not—shame.

You can read more about Thomas and Henrietta Bowdler at Middle Tennessee State’s First Amendment Encyclopedia here and at Smithsonian here. I recommend both pieces. I had planned to open this post with my own first experience discovering that a favorite text had been bowdlerized, but I’ll save that for another time.

Charles Portis: LoA and two good appreciations

Yesterday was the official publication day of Charles Portis’s Collected Works in the Library of America. This is an 1100-page one-volume anthology that includes all five of Portis’s novels, four of his short stories, four essays, his autobiographical essay “Combinations of Jacksons” (which I quoted here last week), and a selection of his Civil Rights reporting.

I’ve been anticipating the release of this book ever since LoA announced it online a few months ago. I gather from a few reviews I’ve read that it is worth acquiring even for those of us who already own all of Portis’s novels and Escape Velocity, a “miscellany” edited by Jay Jennings, who has also edited this new collection. I’m curious to look at it; the LoA description says it includes all of Portis’s short stories but his earliest, “Damn!” is not in the table of contents. It also doesn’t include his play Delray’s New Moon. Regardless, it’s going on my wish list.

With the release of the Collected Works I have run across several reviews and appreciations. Here are two exceptionally good ones that I hope y’all will check out.

First, in an review titled “Gringos and Gnomons” in The American Conservative, John Wilson, a great Portis devotee, offers a wonderful appreciation of Portis’s capacious, idiosyncratic, and above all precise body of work from the “deliciously weird” Masters of Atlantis to Wilson’s favorite—and the one vying with True Grit to become my own—Gringos. Wilson:

Why is Gringos my favorite? It has everything I love in Portis’s fiction, all entwined in a single book. Human self-deception, comedy, wickedness and goodness, quotidian joys and sorrows and mostly unspoken consolations of faith, deep absurdity, betrayal and friendship, a sympathetic narrator/protagonist who sees a lot but misses so much: you get that all in Gringos. I was terribly disappointed when no more novels followed, but in retrospect maybe that wasn’t surprising. Sentence by sentence, it is (so I think) easily among the best American novels of the last fifty years.

Wilson’s review is paywalled online but I was able to read the whole thing in the print edition. It’s worth seeking out. When I read it to my wife she said, “This sounds like something you would have written.” Not because I’m as good a writer as Wilson, who is always a delight, but because my repeated praise of Portis has always fallen along the same lines.

The second review I’d recommend is “Signs and Wonders,” a longer essay by Will Stephenson in Harper’s. Stephenson includes not only a good overview of Portis’s novels but some great anecdotes about Portis the man, opening with a great bit about Portis’s visit to Buckingham Palace in the early 1960s. The whole essay is too full of good material to summarize, so please accept this sample paragraph and go read the whole thing:

And just as “recluse,” as Pynchon once said, can be code for “doesn’t like to talk to reporters,” so too can “cult writer” be code for “doesn’t live in New York.” After his fishing-shack sojourn, Little Rock would remain Portis’s home for the rest of his life—“as much as I can call anyplace home,” he clarified to a Memphis newspaper in a rare interview after True Grit’s release. “I guess I don’t really have one.” His regional association can confuse this point. In fact, Portis spent years living out of his truck, as well as in trailers and motels and non-descript apartment complexes. He spent a substantial portion of each year in Mexico. Even True Grit was written, he said, in a village about two hundred miles north of Mexico City; he seemed to consider San Miguel de Allende a kind of second home. His books are as much about being away from Arkansas as they are about being there. The Dog of the South and Gringos are both set predominantly south of the border, Norwood draws on his fish-out-of-water experience of living in New York (and traveling the country), and True Grit’s action takes place largely in the Choctaw Nation, present-day Oklahoma; it is a journey into the past and into historical research, his serious commitment to which is everywhere in evidence in the non-fiction pieces included in this book.

As it happens, this exilic aspect of Portis’s work—journeys to and from, with home seldom glimpsed outside the rearview mirror—is one of the most Southern things about him. One of these days I’m going to get around to writing an essay about that.

Portis’s novels rather famously went out of print during the 1990s (or earlier) until brought back by Overlook, which was seriously doing the Lord’s work there. But even since it became available again, the delight of Portis’s work has most often spread by word of mouth and the occasional paean in places like Oxford American, The Believer, and Esquire. Nevertheless, the covers of his books had to settle for blurbs that often felt faintly dismissive. The most irritating to me, reprinted again and again, was Roy Blount Jr’s: “Charles Portis could be Cormac McCarthy if he wanted to, but he’d rather be funny.” Blech.

So it’s gratifying to see Portis getting this kind of recognition. Per Wilson again:

Only long after [a friend] introduced me to Portis did it occur to me that one of the charms of his work was that his name had never even been mentioned when I was in grad school, nor was it bandied about in the lit mags and such I routinely read.

Ditto. I discovered Portis, as I imagine many others did, through True Grit, which I read when the Coens’ film came out just after I finished grad school at Clemson. Very soon I moved on to The Dog of the South and Masters of Atlantis. I certainly felt like I had discovered something—maybe not the last precious Atlantean manuscript but dang close. And I, too, hoped for just one more novel. I think Gringos was the last of his novels that I read, just a few months before my wife and I married. That was ten years ago. Rereading it a third time this spring was a joy—better than ever. And you know how Flannery O’Connor said you can tell when a book is good.

The LoA is a nonprofit publisher and $45 may look steep, but you can’t get all five novels that cheaply in individual paperbacks. All five—and I agree with Wilson, if only through experience, that you can jump in anywhere. If you’re intrigued by Portis, have read True Grit and want to read more, or just like good stories, the LoA’s Collected Works will be worth your while.

Corroboration

A few weeks ago when I reviewed the new All Quiet on the Western Front I faulted the filmmakers for thinking they could improve upon the original when the improvements came at the expense of the novel’s characters, themes, and subtlety. There’s a lot of that going around.

Yesterday The Critic had an interesting review of a new BBC miniseries adaptation of Great Expectations, an adaptation the reviewer describes as “extensive literary vandalism.” In omitting much and adding much else, prolific screenwriter Steven Knight claims he “tried to . . . imagine if Dickens was writing the story now and had the freedom to go to those darker places, what would he do? If he had been liberated to write the things that were going on that he wasn’t allowed to write about.”

The Critic’s reviewer rightly takes Knight to task for this tired excuse to “read between the lines”—which being translated is “make stuff up”—and provides a short description of the series’ departures from Dickens. But the penultimate paragraph broadens her scope from this particular bad adaptation to the current wave of them:

Unsurprisingly, the first episode of BBC’s Great Expectations has been reviewed badly. Many commentators have pointed to “wokeness” as the problem. The rot actually runs deeper: it is simply bad, and it’s bad because Steven Knight doesn’t understand Dickens. To junk Dickens’ striking dialogue, captivating plots and nuanced characters is to entirely miss the magic and meaning of the original. Knight isn’t alone in his hubris. Netflix recently took a sledgehammer to Persuasion, replacing Austen’s profound meditations on “perpetual estrangement” with lines like: “we’re worse than exes. We’re friends”. Despite its popularity, nothing incenses me quite as much as the glossy makeover Baz Luhrmann gave to The Great Gatsby. I’ve no doubt that we must brace ourselves for hundreds more of these heavy handed remakes, as director after director imagine themselves better placed to explore the human conditions than artists of old, artists whose works have endured centuries longer than any of these adaptations will. 

“Miss[ing] the magic and meaning of the original,” all in a misguided effort to be gritty. Netflix’s All Quiet fits this description quite snugly. Read The Critic’s whole review here.

A second, smaller point of corroboration of some of what I muddled through in my review came from James Holland and Al Murray’s We Have Ways of Making You Talk podcast, in a “USA” episode in which historian John McManus joined them to discuss Saving Private Ryan. These three chatting about that movie was a sure way to get my attention.

At approximately 13:00, Murray makes an interesting aside about the film’s horrifying vision of Omaha Beach and the way that vision was seized upon for promotion:

Al Murray: Have you read William Goldman on um—the screenwriter William Goldman wrote about Saving Private Ryan and he wrote some very interesting stuff about it. Because when it was being promoted, all the PR was: This is the most realistic war film ever made. It’s all true. True to life in its depiction. Yes, it’s a story, but the depiction is entirely true-to-life, was the pitch. And get this—war is hell. War is horror. And Goldman kind of—who wrote A Bridge Too Far, of course—he sort of says, Well, come on, I thought we all knew that. Everyone knows war is hell, war is horror. What are you taking us for, here?

As I wrote regarding All Quiet on the Western Front, platitudes aren’t enough to sustain a movie. No need belaboring the obvious. Fortunately, Saving Private Ryan has more to offer.

A great episode. Listen to the whole thing here.

I wrote about Saving Private Ryan for its twentieth anniversary back in the early days of this blog. The film turns 25 this summer. Holland’s Normandy ‘44, a comprehensive history of Operation Overlord and the Normandy campaign, and McManus’s The Dead and Those About to Die, a study of the 1st Infantry Division at Omaha Beach—a book I would have given anything to have back when I was writing about Corporal Phillips in high school—are both excellent and well worth your while.

Portis on the New South

Main Street in a purportedly Southern city

Since rereading Gringos back at the beginning of this month I’ve been revisiting more of the late lamented Charles Portis’s work, particularly the short stories and travel essays collected in Escape Velocity. This comes from his magnificent memoir “Combinations of Jacksons,” published in the Atlantic in 1999. Throughout, Portis uses the phrase “combinations of Jacksons” to denote a certain kind of rural, unsophisticated, rambunctious, indeed ungovernable but good Southerner. Salt of the earth, good folks—an instantly recognizable type.

Here, Portis moves from describing how the support of a great uncle who rode with Quantrill and Jesse James for Theodore Roosevelt, a New York Republican, infuriated other Confederate veterans in 1904 (“Unseemly spectacle, coots flailing away”) to make an aside about the gradual, creeping fulfilment of the hopes of the Henry Gradys of the South:

For more than a century now, at intervals of about five years, southern editorial writers have been seeing portents in the night skies and proclaiming The End of the War, at Long Last, and the blessed if somewhat tardy arrival of The New South. By that they seem to mean something the same as, culturally identical with, at one with, the rest of the country, and this time they may be on to something, what with our declining numbers of Gaylons, Coys, and Virgils, and the disappearance of Clabber Girl Baking Powder signs from our highways, and of mules, standing alone in pastures. Then there is the new and alien splendor to be seen all about us, in cities with tall, dark, and featureless glass towers, though I’m told that deep currents are flowing here, far beyond the ken of editorial wretches in their cluttered cubicles. A little underground newsletter informs me that these peculiar glass structures are designed with care, by sociologists and architects working hand in glove with the CIA, as dark and forbidding boxes, in which combinations of Jacksons are thought least likely to gather, combine further, smoke cigarettes, brood, conspire, and break loose out of a long lull.

The essay is tinged throughout with a ubi sunt melancholy, perhaps nowhere more pointedly than here.

I live just outside a city of exactly the New South described here—glossy, polished, deracinated, full of outsiders. Not so much out-Yankeeing the Yankee as letting him take over. (Here’s a spoof I recently discovered. You laugh so you don’t cry.) I think Portis was onto something. I also hope he turns out to be wrong, that the pendulum will swing back, that his Jacksons will “break loose” and combine again.

Agatha Christie vs the dominion of content

Near the end of the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men, hitman Anton Chigurh breaks into his employer’s office and shoots him. The reason? Professional betrayal. His unnamed boss had not only hired him but put a group of cartel killers on the same job without telling him. The result was half of the chaos in the film. As Chigurh watches the light go out of his boss’s eyes, a hapless accountant explains the reasoning behind the betrayal: “He feels—he felt that the more people looking—”

Chigurh cuts him off. His reply is a line I often think of: “That’s foolish. You pick the one right tool.”

Up until now I haven’t written about the Roald Dahl fiasco, a story that has turned into a slowly unfolding revelation of widespread censorship of long-dead novelists. Since Puffin’s silly, craven, artless changes to Dahl’s stories were revealed earlier this year, changes to other authors have come along including Ian Fleming and now Agatha Christie.

Still, I felt like I had actually anticipated this and said all I had to say about it two years ago, when a small but loud number of book influencers on Twitter, Goodreads, Instagram, and TikTok demanded the cutting of individual lines from several popular authors’ latest books. Then, while reading about the Agatha Christie revelations this week, I saw this:

I had heard that Oates is a bit of a… character on Twitter. I can’t judge based on one screenshotted tweet, but even if this were the first strange, ill-informed, and thoughtless thing she had said it would still belong in the Condescension Hall of Fame.

There’s the backhanded compliment of “clever,” the kind of word used of a precocious toddler or a dog that answers more than six or seven commands; the sniffy invocation of style and “sociological realism” as standards of excellence that poor Mrs Christie simply can’t afford; the scare quotes around the idea of a plot twist, as if this is some kind of outlandish and distasteful feature of primitive storytelling; and of course comparison with “more literary” authors, whatever “literary” means here. Probably arbitrarily difficult, though that doesn’t describe Twain, who certainly wrote to entertain, and only some of Faulkner, who still had a connection to a reading public in a way most latter-day “literary” types do not. This is the kind of blithe snobbery more likely heard from the mouths of clichéd British aristocrats in bad movies than in real life.

Last week I finally got (most of) my thoughts about the dominion of “content” out of my system. Read that if you haven’t so you can see where I’m coming from. But note Oates’s last and presumably most important argument: “changing her language will hardly matter.”

Oates’s snobbery is nasty enough, but the implications of this idea are abominable. A good writer is a craftsman. He selects his words carefully and precisely. As he writes he looks for—to bring Chigurh back in—the one right tool, the exact word expressing what he intends and that no other word can. Each word matters. Each must be right. A good author will find it regardless of whether he’s trying to be “literary” or not, and Agatha Christie was a good author. She paid attention, planned carefully, and worked hard at what she did. So did Ian Fleming, something I’ve taken pains to point out.

What Oates is arguing here is the logical endpoint of storytelling as mere content production. She suggests that some gnostic form of Christie’s stories exists independent of the words with which Christie, their author and creator, constructed and told them. As long as you get that, it doesn’t matter what particular words are used to deliver it. They’re interchangeable and replaceable and can be tailored to the consumer. All of this reduces Christie’s careful work to branding on content. The snobbery is a cheap justification of vandalism.

I go into this not because I have an animus toward Oates—I’ve never read any of her presumably “more literary” work and don’t really know anything about her—but because the sentiment she expresses here is representative. I’ve seen many variations of it, usually something like: “They’re just changing a few words so that modern audiences can continue to enjoy them.” Enjoy what? Christie’s books? Because that’s what the editors and sensitivity readers are fooling with.

It’s not Christie’s books that need to change. Oates—a writer!—and everyone who agrees with her or supports the alteration of old books should be ashamed. Not because Christie was the greatest writer who ever lived, though she was a good one, and not because purportedly offensive things must be left in print, but because to treat a writer’s tools, his words—every one of them, even those of which we disapprove—as irrelevant is to undermine the very idea of writing as a craft. It’s an ugly and destructive betrayal.

As it happens, the changes to Christie’s books were not news to me. Last year after Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook’s The Rest is History episode on Christie I dropped by Barnes & Noble to browse her books. On the copyright page of the very first one I picked up I read a note from the publisher stating that “minor editorial changes” had been made to “outdated cultural representations” but that “for the most part this classic work is reproduced as originally published.” For the most part is doing a lot of work there.

I didn’t buy that book. It wasn’t the one Christie wrote and I was not going to pay for one some grubby failure of a sensitivity reader had gotten ahold of. If you care at all about stories or the art and craft of writing, I encourage you not to settle for bowdlerized, compromised editions, either. And I hope publishers take note.

*****

Addendum: The commonly repeated and mindless rejoinder to the specific example of Agatha Christie is: “What about And Then There Were None? AKA Ten Little Indians? AKA Something Much Worse?” If you can’t tell the difference between changes to a book overseen and approved by the book’s author and those undertaken long after the author is dead, you don’t belong anywhere near someone else’s work.

Against content

In the latest episode of “Half in the Bag,” during an interlude regarding The Whale, streaming entertainment, and the recent cancelation of shows with low viewership, hosts Mike and Jay enter their weary satirical mode:

Mike: [zombie-like] Watch the programs on your TV.
Jay: [laughs]
Mike: Watch programs. Watch the movies that we talked about, I guess, or don’t. Watch the programs. Programs!
Jay: Content!
Mike: Content!
Jay: Content! It’s not “movies” anymore, it’s “content.”
Mike: Watch those contents.
Jay: It’s not TV shows, it’s content. “Willow” didn’t make enough money with its content so they canceled it. Move on to next content. “Mandalorian” season three is not doing as well as season two.
Mike: Bring back Grogu.
Jay: Bring more content. Give me content.

And, finally:

Mike: [demonic, surrounded by flames] CONSUME MORE CONTENT.

They put it even more succinctly a few years ago.

If there are any themes to speak of in this hodgepodge of a blog, this commonplace book, one of them is surely the idea that not only the things we talk about but the way we talk about them matters. This applies not only to our meaning but to the individual words with which we express it. Words have meaning. They should be used precisely and with care. This isn’t pedantry. As George Orwell argued in an essay I’ve invoked here many times, sloppy language leads to sloppy thinking. And vice versa.

The trends Orwell and others in his day noted have continued uninterrupted. We’re living at the sharp end of a long period of careless, apathetic imprecision in how we speak, write, and think. To be precise: a decline. The signs are everywhere. But nowhere is the sloppiness, vagary, imprecision, and muddle more pronounced than in the way people talk about art and creativity. And again, this can be seen most clearly at the vocabulary level—words.

The movies are particularly vulnerable to the rot, especially in popular discussion of the unstinting flux of superhero movies, remakes, video game adaptations, and streaming series. “Franchises” and “IP”—business terms that stink of the boardroom and the copyright lawyer—are commonplace ways to talk about movies now.

But the vilest, the stupidest, the most insidious and invasive of all of today’s sloppy art language is “content.”

A word that, like franchise and IP, began as a lowest common denominator legal term is now the default among even the general public. Instagram and YouTube users tell their favorite photographers and video essayists “Great content” and “Quality content” and “I love your content!” All of which are apparently meant to be compliments.

A book has a table of contents to tell you the most important thing about itself—what precisely is in it, what specifically you can expect. Ditto the lists of contents on medicine bottles, shipping containers, and boxes of Legos. But as used today content means nothing more than “stuff.” Everything is content. Novels and short stories are content. Movies and YouTube videos are content. Photos are content. Music is content. Book reviews and blog posts and longform essays are content. The news is content. If all of these things and more can be called by the same word, the word is useless.

I am writing a blog post right now. This morning I wrote announcements for my students and e-mails for my colleagues. Last night I passed the 30,000-word mark on a short novel. This week I revised and submitted an epic poem to an online magazine. A few weeks ago I drafted, revised, and submitted a short story to another. At supper the other night I drew Puss in Boots on a napkin for my son. Are all these things just so much content?

Once upon a time, art was specific. We described it with a huge and sometimes highly specified vocabulary. It was rich in specific nouns and precise verbs. Writers and journalists wrote stories. Authors wrote novels. Musicians composed or improvised thousands of kinds of music and played hundreds of different instruments. Poets composed poems—or, if you go back even further, they shaped songs. The vast team of the film crew wrote, directed, blocked, lit, costumed, miked, slated, shot, cut, and printed whatever part of the film fell within their prerogative. What do creative people do now? They “produce” “content.”

Produce, like a factory. Mechanically, seemingly automatically, with no single person to credit and in great quantities. Should we be shocked that the quality has suffered? My colon produces content.

And what do you do with content? Verbs again. We don’t read, watch, look at, listen to, or even think about content. Sure, all of those faculties are engaged on some low, barely involved, power-saving level, but what we do is consume it. Like a fire, a monster, a glutton, a plague of locusts, or a wasting disease. I have actually heard living human beings use one of the handful of breaths they get in their one precious finite life to begin a sentence with, “When I consume content…”

I am become content, the destroyer of worlds.

“So what?” I imagine lots of people saying. “That’s just how people talk. Let them like what they want to like.” First, no. Second, consider the consequences of our imprecision, the knock-on effects. Just like produce uses the language of the factory to erase the artist and his craft, discipline, and hard work, content boils the vast universe of art into whatever porridge-like slurry fills a particular vessel. Doesn’t matter what it is as long as there’s something in there to be consumed. Then you can demand more. And complain that it’s not very good.

Art is unique. Content is interchangeable. Art is irreplaceable. Content is disposable. Art is challenging. Content is numbing. Art strengthens. Content atrophies. Art satisfies. Content addicts. Art demands excellence. Content needs only to be available. Art endures. Content fades, falls apart, and is forgotten. Art is life. Content is death.

I keep wanting to hedge or claim I’m using hyperbole to make a point, but I really mean this. The state of the arts, of creativity, culture, and most especially storytelling, is dire. And the sloppiness with which we talk about producing content rather than making art only makes things worse. It’s a vicious cycle. To take it back to Orwell:

[A]n effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. . . . It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

But note that I said “dire” but not “hopeless.” Following that passage from Orwell, the very next sentence is this: “The point is that the process is reversible.”

It starts with each of us and our habits of speech. If you’re an artist, don’t call your work “content.” Call it “work.” Don’t be a “content creator.” If you write stories, paint pictures, compose music, or even make videos, call it that. And insist on it. Whether your work is an a hobby or a profession claim it specifically, as an honorable way to spend your life doing something specific and meaningful. Show yourself and your work some respect.

And if you are only a “consumer” meant to “consume,” get specific again. Don’t talk about, praise, or even criticize “content” any more. Talk about stories, movies, videos, music—all of it, specifically, and what the real people behind art have to do to make it—and don’t consume them, but watch, read, listen to, or even just look at them. In a precise word, enjoy them. That, too, is honorable. For what other reason would an artist make art except for people to enjoy it?

I don’t know how to save all of art or to encourage a new wave of creativity or to save Western Civilization, but speaking and writing precisely and specifically, not settling for content—whether as mechanical producer or gluttonous consumer—will force us to think in new ways about our stories, music, and art and how and why we make them. More precisely, more specifically, and hopefully in the cause of truer, better, and longer lasting art.

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.

All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)

Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer) takes cover in Netflix’s All Quiet on the Western Front

Last Sunday night, as Netflix’s new German-language version of All Quiet on the Western Front was winning four Oscars, I finally got the chance to watch the film. This was thanks to a limited one-night theatrical release. I’m really grateful I got to watch it on the big screen, with high-quality theatre sound. I can’t imagine how watching this on a TV, tablet, or phone would diminish it.

I have, however, had a hard time writing a review of the film. I’ve been fiddling with this—fighting with it—since last Monday. As I wrote last fall, I have anticipated a new film adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front for more than twenty years, and as I wrote in my movie year-in-review, I had had enough of the new film spoiled for me to be anxious about just how good of an adaptation it is.

Sure enough, having seen the film I am of two minds about it. So I’ve decided to approach the film from two angles.

As a film

Considered purely as a film, this All Quiet on the Western Front is effective and technically impressive. Sunday night it quite rightly won Oscars for production design and cinematography, and I think its makeup and sound, for which it was nominated but didn’t win, and its costume design, for which it wasn’t even nominated, were award-worthy as well. The care taken over its locations, sets, costumes, and how all of these were photographed give the movie a remarkable tactile quality. Not only does the film look and sound great, it also feels real.

The lead performances are also good, especially Felix Kammerer as young Paul Bäumer and Albrecht Schuch as the gruff veteran Kat. Kammerer in particular proves extraordinarily expressive in an underwritten lead role. His boyish scarecrow frame from which his oversized woolen uniform hangs and his enormous blue eyes, which stare out disconsolately from beneath his enormous steel helmet, really sell him as a teenager in over his head, going from wide-eyed enthusiasm to shellshock. Schuch, as I had hoped, offers a Kat more true to the mentor and expert scrounger of the book than previous versions but excels most by showing the bond between himself and the younger men he takes under his wing. Bäumer and Kat’s relationship is perhaps the best thing about the movie.

The battle sequences, which I have seen praised to the heavens, are excellently staged and shot. Long gliding Steadicam shots follow the characters in mad dashes across no-man’s-land and through the trenches. A raid in which Kat and another older soldier named Tjaden—about whom more below—work their way through the French lines and stumble upon a well-stocked field kitchen is especially involving. The filmmakers also depict the fevered brutality of hand-to-hand combat with bayonets, shovels, and fists clearly and realistically.

Again, as a film, this All Quiet also has weaknesses. One of its four Oscars was for its score. I found it distracting—jarring bleats of dubstep and seemingly random snare drum hits punctuate quiet scenes, an obvious intrusion of the modern into painstakingly authentic visuals. Some of the supporting roles are not well performed, especially a German general added to the story by the filmmakers (again, more below), although this weakness has more to do with the writing than the actors. And the film’s tactility and brutality sometimes feel gratuitous, like slasher-movie squick that is only there for shock value.

This last criticism is the hardest for me to formulate, probably because it has to do with the film’s overall tone and approach to the material. It also points toward the film’s most fundamental problem. An analogy from the film itself occurs to me: in one of the film’s final moments, Bäumer, fighting a poilu with his bare hands only minutes before the armistice, has his face shoved into the muck at the bottom of a French trench and he almost smothers. The in-your-face quality of the violence—the grossness, the muck, the squirming, the goopy sound effects—is supremely unsubtle.

That lack of subtlety is my most serious criticism of this finely crafted movie. And, as I hinted above, this, its tone, and its horror movie sensibility are also indicative of its most basic fault—it is a bad adaptation of the novel.

As an adaptation

This film is not All Quiet on the Western Front. I’m not sure I’d call it an adaptation, more another World War I story very loosely using elements of the novel. I got the sense even before the film was half over that the filmmakers had approached the novel as raw material to be cut up and repurposed. I’d estimate about 20% of the book is here, mostly in isolated incidents, visuals, and individual lines of dialogue.

Whatever, right? You can’t get everything in. An adaptation has to adapt. These are all things I’ve said myself, and they’re true. The problem is the basic approach, structure, and attitude of the film, and a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes All Quiet on the Western Front great that informed these decisions.

That the filmmakers view the novel as raw material is clear from the fates the characters suffer. In the novel, Kropp, the smallest and sharpest of Bäumer’s classmates, is wounded with Bäumer, loses a leg, and contemplates suicide as he thinks ahead to civilian life as a cripple. Movie Kropp attempts to surrender to the French and is torched with a flamethrower, thrashing in agony in the omnipresent mud as Bäumer watches. Tjaden, a lanky chowhound with a special hatred for their drill instructor (Corporal Himmelstoß, AWOL) survives the novel and even appears in its underwhelming sequel, The Road Back. Movie Tjaden is wounded and kills himself with a fork in the field hospital. Kat’s death, one of the most poignant scenes of the novel and both previous film versions, is altered so that rather than suffering a minor wound and being killed by shrapnel as Bäumer, unaware, carries him to the aid station, he is shot by a scowling French farmboy while stealing eggs and bleeds to death.

I go into detail here not only because the alterations are so extreme but because most have clearly been made for shock value. (People in the theatre visibly jumped and turned away in disgust when Tjaden started stabbing himself.) The film is as subtle as a sledgehammer.

The structural changes are more extreme. Huge sections of the story are missing entirely. Bäumer and his friends’ training under the martinet Corporal Himmelstoß, Bäumer’s time home on leave, Bäumer’s time recovering from his wound with Kropp in a military hospital—these subplots, which are not only thematically important but provide crucial moments in Bäumer’s character arc, and many smaller incidents are gone.

All of this has been left out in order to facilitate the strangest artistic choice made by the filmmakers: to compress the years-long story of the novel into the final three days of the war. Following a brief prologue set in the spring of 1917, the film picks back up with Bäumer and his comrades on November 8, 1918. Their activities at this time—patrolling, scrounging, flirting with French farm girls, reading the mail, going up to the front again—are intercut with the peace mission of Matthias Erzberger, the Centre Party politician who met French Marshal Ferdinand Foch and signed the armistice that ended the war.

Did that summary sound like it had turned into the introduction to a Wikipedia article to you? That’s how out of place this subplot feels. The inclusion of Erzberger and the armistice negotiations—scenes around which Bäumer’s entire story has been reorganized—wrecks the film.

The problem with jettisoning large parts of your source material and inserting a lot of original material—Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movies also come to mind—is the almost inevitable mismatch in quality. Great novels become classics for a reason. Who do you think you are to improve them? If you’re going to do this, you had better insert really, really good material, something that tonally and thematically enhances and reinforces the point of the original. Occasionally this works—the Coen brothers’ True Grit pretty seamlessly blends verbatim adaptations of Charles Portis’s novel with scenes and dialogue of their own—but more often it weakens things.

Where All Quiet adds to the novel, it falls back on the hoariest World War I clichés available. Erzberger’s real-life mission spurs the fictional General Friedrichs, in the last few hours of the war, to launch an attack on French positions out of spite. This is pure invention. (A few historians have pointed out that if you want a real historical example of a hardass general who got his men killed on the last day of the war for no reason, you should be looking for an American.) Friedrichs is a cartoon character: an overweight, goggle-eyed Prussian with a shaved head and handlebar mustache who fulminates against the Social Democrats over champagne in his chateau while his men die in the mud. I can’t fault the actor; he does his best with a caricature. But a caricature it is.

These changes also grant the film an omniscience that is pointedly lacking in young Paul Bäumer’s narration in the novel. Like any soldier, all he knows of the war is the bit he sees, which in a trench is little enough. Bäumer himself says that the only important things to him are the purely practical things—food, sleep, boots, a comfortable toilet seat, the best weapons for hand-to-hand combat—in the little patch of the war where he and his friends are trying to survive. What matters in the novel, all that matters, is Bäumer, his friends, his slow-motion destruction. He is quite explicitly a stand-in for an entire generation. Roping in Erzberger and Foch gives the film a top-down political perspective that Remarque quite rightly chose not to give his narrator. In this way the film achieves political awareness at the expense of the thing that made the story powerful.

That’s a lot of detail, but I don’t mean to be laborious. I want to illustrate specifically the results of the filmmakers’ artistic approach to Remarque’s novel. All of these problems, as I suggest above, stem from a misapprehension of what All Quiet on the Western Front is meant to say and what it is that makes its message so moving.

Irony and pointlessness

I’ve seen a number of critics and online fans of this new film, when someone has dared to point out how badly it deviates from the book, argue that the changes don’t really matter. Two representative examples pulled from YouTube: “[Y]ou’re missing the point of it all: this is the movie that best depicts the meat grinder that was this war,” and, speaking of clichés, “To people that say that it isn't an accurate adaptation, at the end of the day, the book’s point was to make people understand that war is hell and no movie has come close to eliciting that feeling to me like this.”

But here’s the thing—none of that is, in fact, All Quiet on the Western Front’s point.

This should be obvious. “War is hell” is a platitude. It’s a cliché. It’s a substance-free statement that can be used as both excuse and condemnation; one can apply it to any conflict and people will nod piously. (Remember that the man who made that expression famous died in 1891; he was not talking about the industrialized slaughter of conscripts in World War I but the much smaller-scale wars of nationalist suppression he ruthlessly waged against Southerners and Indians.) But platitudes stretched to movie length are boring. And is there anyone today who doesn’t “understand that war is hell”? Why bother with the obvious?

I’d argue instead that what makes All Quiet on the Western Front a tragedy is not the horror of what happens in major assaults, trench raids, nighttime patrols, or artillery barrages, but its pointlessness.

One of the things I’ve come to admire about Remarque’s novel over more than twenty years and many readings is its deep and subtle irony. Remarque suffuses his story with irony. Positively, this creates nuance reflective of the complexity of real life. When he arrives at the front for the first time, for instance, the hated drill instructor Corporal Himmelstoß turns out to have redeeming qualities after all, not least real physical courage. Negatively, Bäumer and his friends find that nothing they do matters.

The book is full of examples. Every major episode makes this point. Steal food, earn a medal, get ahold of some nice comfortable boots, trick out your personal toilet seat, convince a French girl to sleep with you, avoid catching your head in the telephone wire over the road, learn how to identify artillery shells by sound, tell the cook that the entire company is here for lunch, tell the people at home what the war is actually like, be brave, be cowardly—none of it makes a difference. That, not the hellishness, the dismemberment, or the filth and discomfort, is what makes modern war terrible.

The book’s two climactic episodes drive the point home. In the first, Kat receives a minor leg wound from some shrapnel. Bäumer carries him to an aid station only to find that, at some point along the way, more shrapnel has hit Kat in the head and killed him. Bäumer didn’t even notice. All that effort and Kat dies anyway. The second is the novel’s famous concluding note, the only part not written in the voice of Bäumer himself:

He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front. He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come.

The irony is not that a huge, horrific attack was ordered by a bonehead general just hours before the armistice—something that would be remarkable—but that the snuffing out of one young soldier’s life is not worth noting. It doesn’t even matter specifically what day it is. “All quiet” or, to translate the original literally, “nothing new.”

Both of these incidents make it into the movie and both are altered according to the filmmakers’ vision, and both lose the nuance and subtlety that make the novel so poignant.

Remarque’s novel is painful because the reader is won over by a band of young men whose worth Remarque makes obvious and whose destruction he shows to be pointless. The film is painful because it screams in your face for two and a half hours. One of these is not only a more truthful dramatization of modern war, it is better art, and it will be remembered far longer.

Conclusion

I’ve just spent a hundreds of words being the “The book was better” guy, but when a book is as good as All Quiet on the Western Front it pays to respect it. This film simply uses the title.

I do, however, want to end on a note of praise. Where the film does stick closely to the book it excels. Again, most of the material taken from the book consists of individual images (a naked corpse high in a tree, blown out of its uniform by a trench mortar), repurposed scenes (the novel’s darkly humorous and ironic opening scene at a field kitchen, shifted in the film to the final act and made another moment of horror), or specific lines of dialogue, but one sequence in particular stands out as an example of what the filmmakers might have done with a closer, more faithful adaptation.

One of the most celebrated scenes in the novel, one rendered in all three film versions now, is that in which Bäumer takes cover in a crater during a French counterattack and stabs a French soldier who unwittingly jumps in next to him. Both are left isolated in no-man’s-land, and Bäumer watches the Frenchman die, choking on his own blood, for hours. After that he goes through the man’s wallet and learns about the man he has just killed.

This All Quiet dramatizes this sequence brilliantly, and is one of the few places where I’d say more realistic gore has improved upon previous versions. The Frenchman’s death is agonizing; watching it wrecks not only Bäumer but the audience. And going through the dead man’s effects to find his name, his occupation, a photo of his wife and daughter quietly achieves what the entire rest of the movie has laboriously striven with noise, blood, and guts to do.

That’s a credit to Remarque. As for this film, it was for me a huge If only.

If you’re looking for World War I-branded action in an authentic pitch of icky horror, if you just want a war movie produced to the highest technical standards of modern filmmaking, if you want to see Saint-Charmand tanks onscreen for the very first time, or if you’re trying to dissuade someone from joining the military—all reasons I’ve seen given out to watch this film—then perhaps this All Quiet on the Western Front is worth seeing. But if you’re looking for a film version of the novel, this just isn’t it.