A Coffin for Dimitrios

Having read and reread a lot of John Buchan, Ian Fleming, John Le Carré, and Len Deighton—some of the great names in spy novel and thrillers—I noticed another name that often came up when, between their books, I would read about these authors: Eric Ambler. Ambler, an English novelist with a career stretching from the 1930s to the 90s, is often fitted into a crucial place in the history of the thriller between the more romantic adventure style of a Buchan, the hardened but still exciting sensibility of a Fleming, or the grey workaday espionage of a Le Carré or Deighton. Ambler’s name came up often enough, and with serious enough admiration, that it stuck in my mind, and when I ran across a copy of his 1939 novel A Coffin for Dimitrios I eagerly seized the chance to read it.

A Coffin for Dimitrios begins with Charles Latimer, a former academic now subsisting on his surprisingly successful mystery novels, aimlessly whiling away a trip to Istanbul as he prepares for his next book. When he meets Colonel Haki, a Turkish police officer, at a party and Haki expresses admiration for his novels, Latimer is given the chance to look into a real crime, to see the disorder of crime, violence, and death, the incompleteness of real mysteries.

Latimer, intrigued, agrees, and Haki takes him to the morgue. On the slab is the body of Dimitrios Makropoulos, a Greek master of organized crime. The police had fished him out of the Bosporus that morning, stabbed and drowned.

Haki briefs Latimer on Dimitrios’s record: theft, blackmail, murder, espionage on behalf of parties unknown, conspiracy to assassinate the president of a fragile Balkan state, drug smuggling, sex trafficking. Dimitrios’s crimes, Haki makes clear, are not the equivalent of a tidy poisoning in an English country house, and Dimitrios himself was thoroughly nasty. Unredeemable. And terribly powerful.

After Haki’s tour of the morgue and reading of Dimitrios’s file Latimer tries to move on, to return to work on his next book, but Dimitrios’s true story nags at him—especially its incompleteness. Haki’s file had long gaps in it, with Dimitrios disappearing from Izmir or Athens only to appear again in Belgrade or Paris years later, working another racket. Latimer decides to find out the whole story. He tells himself it’s research for a book.

Latimer’s search takes him from Istanbul to Athens, Sofia, Geneva, and finally Paris. At first he doesn’t realize what he’s got himself into. Questions about Dimitrios provoke icy silence or outright hostility. Local authorities obligingly try to help, but it’s clear that they have only the thinnest understanding of Dimitrios’s career. Latimer gets his best information from Dimitrios’s former collaborators—a Bulgarian madam, a Danish smuggler, a Polish spymaster—but he must work to convince them to talk and only slowly realizes that they have angles of their own to play now that Dimitrios is dead.

There is much more to A Coffin for Dimitrios, but to explain more would be to reveal too much. One of the pleasures of Ambler’s sprawling detective tale is the manner in which it unfolds, with Latimer picking up clues, chasing leads, and often stumbling across information that is more meaningful to the criminals he meets than to himself. Simply understanding what he’s uncovered makes up a large part of his work, but his sense that he’s onto something important keeps him searching even as his research grows more dangerous and the surviving members of Dimitrios’s criminal network start to ensnare him in their own schemes.

The novel’s setting proves another of its strengths. This is eastern Europe twenty years after the catastrophe of the First World War, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the creation of new states like Yugoslavia out of the rubble of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Memory of the war and the violence and chaos that, rather than ceasing, grew worse in the aftermath haunt every place Latimer visits and every person he meets. Cops, customs officers, nightclub dancers, and even strangers on trains all have stories to tell. This is the bustling, seedy, multilingual, darkly cosmopolitan world of international crime—imagine Casablanca crossed with The Third Man—and Ambler evokes it brilliantly.

And, like all of the other writers I began this review with, Ambler is an excellent writer. Strong, direct prose and precisely observed descriptions immediately draw the reader in, and, despite the globetrotting plot, Ambler does not waste time on travelogue. In addition to The Third Man, which I enjoy just as much in Graham Greene’s novella as the noir film based on it, A Coffin for Dimitrios reminded me a lot of Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male, another thriller whose plot bestrides Europe just before the Second World War and one of my favorite reads last year. This is a spare, tense story of obsession and revelation, of an ordinary man drawn by his own curiosity into a dark world standing just out of sight in the streets of Europe’s most important cities.

If A Coffin for Dimitrios has any flaw, it is that the pacing flags somewhat in the middle as several characters in a row retell their stories of falling in with Dimitrios, but these chapters are entertaining and interesting in their own right and set up a suspenseful and satisfying final confrontation between Latimer, one of the many crooks he has met along the way, and a figure he never expected to meet when he began his search.

If you like any of the other authors I’ve mentioned above—and if you follow this blog you must surely like a few of them—or if you simply enjoy solid, well-crafted, fast-paced, and suspenseful thrillers, check out A Coffin for Dimitrios. Having read this one, I’ll certainly read others by Eric Ambler.

Suspicious Minds

Rob Brotherton’s book Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories had been sitting on my shelf, waiting to be read, for just over four years when I ran across an Instagram reel in which a smirking mom wrote about how proud she was of her homeschooled child questioning the reality of the moon landing “and other dubious historical events.” When people in the comments asked, as I had wondered the moment I saw this video, whether this was really the kind of result homeschoolers would want to advertise, she and a posse of supporters aggressively doubled down, lobbing buzzwords like grenades. I think the very first reply included the loathsome term “critical thinking.”

Silly, but unsurprising for the internet—especially the world of women mugging silently into phone cameras while text appears onscreen—right? But I had not seen this video at random. Several trusted friends, people whose intellects and character I respect, had shared it on multiple social media platforms. I started reading Suspicious Minds that afternoon.

Brotherton is a psychologist, and in Suspicious Minds he sets out not to debunk or disprove any particular conspiracy theory—though he uses many as examples—but to explain how and why people come to believe and even take pride in believing such theories in the first place. He undertakes this with an explicit desire not to stigmatize or demean conspiracy theorists and criticizes authors whose books on conspiracism have used titles like Voodoo Histories and How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World. He also, crucially, dispels many common assumptions surrounding conspiracist thinking.

First among the misconceptions is the idea that conspiracy theories are a symptom of “paranoid” thinking. The term paranoid, which became strongly associated with conspiracism thanks to Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” is inappropriate as a descriptor because of its hint of mental imbalance and indiscriminate fear. Most conspiracy theorists, Brotherton points out, believe in one or a small number of mundane theories that are untrue but not especially consequential, much less worthy of anxiety. A second, related misconception—and by far the more important one—is that conspiracy theories are a phenomenon of the “fringe” of society: of basement dwellers, militia types, and street preachers in sandwich signs. In a word, obsessives. As Eric Ambler puts it in A Coffin for Dimitrios, “‘Obsession’ was an ugly word. It conjured up visions of bright stupid eyes and proofs that the world was flat.”

The idea of conspiracy theories as fringe is not only false, Brotherton argues, it is the exact opposite of the truth. In terms of pure numbers, repeated polls have found that an overwhelming majority of Americans believe in at least one major conspiracy theory—the most common by far being the belief that JFK was killed by someone other than or in addition to Lee Harvey Oswald—and often more than one. Conspiracist thinking is mainstream. It is the norm. This cannot be emphasized enough.

But why is this? Is it, as I must confess I used to think, that those numbers just provide evidence for how stupid the majority of people are? Brotherton argues that this conclusion is incorrect, too. There is no meaningful difference in how often or how much educated and uneducated people (which is not the same thing as smart and dumb people) adhere to conspiracy theories. Conspiracism is rooted deeper, not in a kernel of paranoia and fear but in the natural and normal way we see and think about the world.

Conspiracy theories, Brotherton argues, originate in the human mind’s own truth-detecting processes. They are a feature, not a bug. The bulk of Suspicious Minds book examines, in detail, how both the conscious and unconscious workings of the mind not only make conspiracist beliefs possible, but strengthen them. In addition to obvious problems like confirmation bias, which distorts thinking by overemphasizing information we already believe and agree with, and the Dunning–Kruger Effect, which causes us to overestimate our expertise and understanding of how things work, there are subtler ways our own thinking trips us up.

Proportionality bias, for example, causes disbelief that something significant could happen for insignificant reasons. As an example, Brotherton describes the freakish luck of Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian assassin who thought he had missed his target, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary, until the Archduke’s car pulled up a few feet in front of him and stalled out as the driver changed gears. This farcical murder of an unpopular royal by an inept assassin caused a war that killed over twenty million people. That people after the war—on both the winning and losing sides—sought an explanation more commensurate with the effect of the war is only natural. And the classic example is JFK himself, as many of the conspiracy theories surrounding him inevitably circle back to disbelief that a loser like Oswald could have killed the leader of the free world.

Similarly, intentionality bias suggests to us that everything that happens was intended by someone—they did it on purpose— especially bad things, so that famines, epidemics, stock market crashes, and wars become not tragedies native to our fallen condition but the fruit of sinister plots. Further, our many pattern-finding and simplifying instincts, heuristics that help us quickly grasp complex information, will also incline us to find cause and effect relationships in random events. We’re wired to disbelieve in accident or happenstance, so much so that we stubbornly connect dots when there is no design to be revealed.

That’s because we’re storytelling creatures. In perhaps the most important and crucial chapter in the book, “(Official) Stories,” Brotherton examines the way our built-in need for narrative affects our perceptions and understanding. Coincidence, accident, and simply not knowing are narratively unsatisfying, as any internet neckbeard complaining about “plot holes” will make sure you understand. So when outrageous Fortune, with her slings and arrows, throws catastrophe at us, it is natural to seek an explanation that makes sense of the story—an explanation with clear cause and effect, an identifiable antagonist, and understandable, often personal, motives.

Why does any of this matter? As I heard it put once, in an excellent video essay about the technical reasons the moon landing couldn’t have been faked, what is at stake is “the ultimate fate of knowing.” The same mental tools that help us understand and make quick decisions in a chaotic world can just as easily mislead and prejudice us.

This is why Brotherton’s insistence that conspiracy theories are, strictly speaking, rational is so important. As Chesterton put it in a line I’ve quoted many times, “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” Merely thinking is not enough to lead us to the truth. Brotherton’s book is a much-needed reminder that finding the truth requires discipline, hard work, and no small measure of humility.

Dune: Part Two

This week is my spring break, which means I’m trying to rest, see family, and get caught up on some of the things I’ve wanted to write about for months. And I’m glad to say I started my break off right with a long-anticipated viewing of Dune: Part Two.

When the first part of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune adaptation came out two and a half years ago I was glad to admit to being apathetic about seeing it—I had read the book and enjoyed it but wasn’t blown away by it—because that made my surprise and excitement about how excellent the film was all the greater. The first film’s achievement was to take what was best of the sprawling, intricate, often unwieldy novel, keep its complexity while making it comprehensible in a visual medium, and greatly improve the story’s pacing. Dune: Part Two continues in much the same way.

The film picks up more or less where the first Dune left off, with Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) and his mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) bereft, Paul’s father the Duke having been murdered in a carefully orchestrated coup by the family’s greatest rivals, the Harkonnen clan. Paul and Jessica now live at the sufferance of a tribe of desert Fremen led by Stilgar (Javier Bardem). Jessica, pregnant with her dead husband’s second child, must protect herself, her unborn baby, and Paul. Paul simply seeks revenge. To get it, he must not only learn how to live and fight among the Fremen but work his way into a position of leadership among them.

This story arc makes up most of the first hour of the film, with Paul repeatedly tested and slowly rising in the esteem and even worship of the Fremen—some of whom, including Stilgar, believe he is a long-prophesied Mahdi or messiah—and with the Fremen carrying out ever more aggressive attacks on the Harkonnen’s spice harvesting operations in the desert. All of this is thrilling and brilliantly executed, particularly a sequence in which Paul has to pass his final test, one that is administered not by his Fremen mentor but by the sandworms. Paul also falls in love with the Fremen girl Chani (Zendaya), a doubter who sees prophecies of the Mahdi as a cynical ploy either to enslave the credulous or to keep them waiting, biding their time under the status quo. Jessica, as a member of the female cult of the Bene Gesserit, is part of the problem as far as Chani is concerned.

Meanwhile, the Harkonnens, led by the evil and physically repulsive Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård), thinking that they have wiped out Paul’s family, have escalated their efforts to destroy the Fremen and reconsolidate control over the desert and the harvesting of spice. The film begins with a glimpse of their brutal and systematic slaughter of the Fremen, and so it comes as an unpleasant surprise that there are Harkonnens out there who are more evil yet—namely Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler), a nephew whom the Baron brings in to replace his thick-witted and ineffective older brother Rabban (Dave Bautista). Where the Baron uses brutality and conniving to get what he wants, Feyd-Rautha revels in causing pain and destruction.

Lurking yet further in the background, the Emperor (Christopher Walken), his daughter Irulan (Florence Pugh), and his personal Bene Gesserit advisor (Charlotte Rampling) quietly await the outcome of the Harkonnens’ efforts. The Emperor weighs his options, opining to Irulan with Machiavellian candor, deciding whether and how to respond to each fresh bit of news.

And then there are Paul’s dreams and visions of future famine, mass starvation, and the slaughter of billions, a meeting of the southern Fremen that is fraught with disagreement, the psychedelic poison used to promote Jessica to the rank of Reverend Mother, her unborn baby’s telepathy, Paul’s seeming death and resurrection, and more and more and more.

It’s a lot, and, as in the first film, it is to Dune: Part Two’s great credit that all of this plays out smoothly and understandably—especially as it ventures into some of the book’s weirder territory—building from small beginnings in the desert to a climactic final battle on a massive scale.

One artistic choice that certainly helps is the decision to do little in the way of explaining what happened in the previous film. Notice how, in my summary, I didn’t explain what spice was, or the planet Arrakis, why anyone is fighting for control of both, what a sandworm is, and how any of these things are related to each other? Dune: Part Two doesn’t, either. Rather than get bogged down in “as you know” scenes meant to get a forgetful audience caught up, the film starts in medias res and keeps on moving. People who haven’t seen the first part probably won’t know what’s going on, but this also means that thanks to the excellent pacing and escalating action and dramatic tension in each, Dune and Dune: Part Two work together as one giant film. Back-to-back viewings like those nine-hour Lord of the Rings marathons are bound to become a custom among fans.

Sets, costume design, cinematography, sound, music, and special effects—all are excellent, with expert care and craftsmanship in every detail. As much as I love to examine the technical aspects of a good film, I don’t actually have much to say here. The quality of the filmmaking is impeccable. Like the first movie, Dune: Part Two creates a totally absorbing world for its story to play out in and presents it using the medium of film to its fullest potential.

The performances are mostly good as well, especially among the supporting cast. Javier Bardem as Stilgar and Josh Brolin as Paul’s old trainer and mentor Gurney Halleck stand out especially well as two men who both believe utterly in Paul, albeit in different ways and for dramatically different reasons. Austin Butler makes a chilling entrance as Feyd-Rautha and only becomes more threatening and evil as the film progresses.

As for the leads, I actually liked Timothée Chalamet less in this film than in the first one. I believed his Paul as a callow youth with plenty left to learn, but, once adopted by the Fremen and fully integrated as a fighter, I found him hard to accept as a warlord on the rise. Chalamet conveys Paul’s charisma and leadership mostly by yelling, which is effective for showing how the power Paul assumes in pursuit of revenge slowly corrupts him but less for showing why the Fremen would risk their lives to support him, Mahdi or not. He’s still effective as Paul, but is somewhat outdone by the story and characters surrounding him. Rebecca Ferguson, on the other hand, is still excellent as Lady Jessica. Like Paul, she goes into the desert at the end of the first film a weak and vulnerable refugee and emerges from it at the end of this one a figure of terrifying power, but thanks to Ferguson this transformation is completely convincing.

If I have any complaint whatsoever about the movie, it’s in a handful of supporting roles. Zendaya’s Chani starts off charming, her subtle flirtation and romance with Paul warm and believable, but once Paul embarks on his mission to bring down the Harkonnens and the Emperor she mostly seethes, glowers, and storms out of rooms, and she never completely overcomes the stilted delivery I noted in the first movie. Likewise, Florence Pugh’s Princess Irulan is both underwritten and underperformed, Pugh’s flat affect and monotone speech contrasting badly with older costars like Christopher Walken and Charlotte Rampling, who convey much with great subtlety. But these are small things in a big movie, and if Villeneuve gets his way and makes a third and final Dune film, perhaps we’ll get more, and better, from both characters.

Dune: Part Two is an excellent sequel to one of the best sci-fi adventure films ever made, not only continuing but building on what the first film accomplished. It’s brilliantly made and thoroughly exciting—the final attack on the Emperor’s base by an army of Fremen riding sandworms is one of the gnarliest things I’ve seen in years—and a trip to the movies that was well worth the wait.

Scruton on style

Last week I revisited the late Sir Roger Scruton’s Beauty: A Very Short Introduction via audiobook on my commute. It’s an excellent precis of much that is fundamental to his thinking and, true to the subtitle, a wide-ranging introduction to many topics that bear further thought. Here’s one.

From a discussion of the role proportion plays in the creation of vernacular architectures by launching the builder on “a path of discovery” to what “fits” and is “suitable” for each detail in relation to the others in Chapter 4, “Everyday Beauty”:

One result of this process of matching is a visual vocabulary: by using identical mouldings in door and window, for example, the visual match becomes easier to recognize and to accept. Another result is what is loosely described as style—the repeated use of shapes, contours, materials and so on, their adaptation to special uses, and the search for a repertoire of visual gestures.

I like the idea of a style as mastery of a discipline’s “repertoire,” the selective, purposeful use of a shared vocabulary. Scruton’s example is architectural, but he also refers throughout the book to painting, sculpture, cinema, and most especially music. My mind naturally suggested literary style, with its literal shared vocabulary and the many effects and fine shades of meaning that a firm control of English can yield.

Scruton himself raises the idea of control as a component of style in the next chapter, “Artistic Beauty”:

“True artists control their subject-matter, in order that our response to it should be their doing, not ours.”

True artists control their subject-matter, in order that our response to it should be their doing, not ours. One way of exerting this control is through style . . . Style is not exhibited only by art: indeed, as I argued in the last chapter, it is natural to us, part of the aesthetics of everyday life, through which we arrange our environment and place it in significant relation to ourselves. Flair in dressing, for example, which is not the same as an insistent originality, consists rather in the ability to turn a shared repertoire in a personal direction, so that a single character is revealed in each of them. That is what we mean by style, and by the ‘stylishness’ that comes about when style over-reaches itself and becomes the dominant factor in a person’s dress.

The tension between originality and a common vocabulary and the need for balance is an important topic and one Scruton returns to later in the book, but he continues by introducing another consideration:

Styles can resemble each other, and contain large overlapping idioms—like the styles of Haydn and Mozart or Coleridge and Wordsworth. Or they might be unique, like the style of Van Gogh, so that anyone who shares the repertoire is seen as a mere copier or pasticheur, and not as an artist with a style of his own. Our tendency to think in this way has something to do with our sense of human integrity: the unique style is one that has identified a unique human being, whose personality is entirely objectified in his work.

This passage in particular offers a lot for the writer to think about. Every writer has heroes and idols and role models, other writers whose control over their work has influenced our own technique, consciously or not. This starts young. It’s been more than twenty years since I read Stephen King’s On Writing, but I still remember and think often about this passage:

You may find yourself adopting a style you find particularly exciting, and there’s nothing wrong with that. When I read Ray Bradbury as a kid, I wrote like Ray Bradbury—everything green and wondrous and seen through a lens smeared with the grease of nostalgia. When I read James M Cain, everything I wrote came out clipped and stripped and hard-boiled. When I read Lovecraft, my prose became luxurious and Byzantine.

All of which is, for King, a crucial developmental stage in the writer’s life, one that should be refined through constant reading and writing, so that eventually one is no longer writing in imitation but in “one’s own style.”

But if you’re aware of what you’re doing and working hard at it, particularly in order to achieve a certain specific effect—so that, per Scruton, the readers’ response will be my doing, not theirs—it’s hard not to become anxious that one is working merely in pastiche or even accidental parody. Have I sacrificed my integrity to sound like someone else? Inconsistency doesn’t help. I’ve worried more about this on some projects than others. Why am I confident that I can use tricks learned from Charles Portis but not those from Cormac McCarthy? Food for thought.

I think, naturally, of John Gardner and his description of “mannered” prose, a term he’d certainly have applied to McCarthy. “Mannered” suggests artificiality or phoniness, the lack of integrity Scruton suggests above, which is how every good writer hopes not to come across. But I also think of Elmore Leonard, another author whom I’ve quoted here many times, and who worked hard to make his style the absence of style. Scruton contends that that is impossible:

Style must be perceivable: there is no such thing as hidden style. It shows itself, even if it does so in artful ways that conceal the effort and sophistication . . . At the same time, it becomes perceivable by virtue of our comparative perceptions: it involves a standing out from norms that must also be subliminally present in our perception if the stylistic idioms and departures are to be noticed. Style enables artists to allude to things that they do not state, to summon comparisons that they do not explicitly make, to place their work and its subject-matter in a context which makes every gesture significant, and so achieve the kind of concentration of meaning that we witness in Britten’s Cello Symphony or Eliot's Four Quartets.

This is exactly right, and Leonard would agree. Leonard’s style, which was precisely designed to “conceal the effort and sophistication” of his writing and make it seem effortless, was immediately recognizable because it was distinct from the “norms” described above in particular ways—something Leonard himself noted. Those “norms” or context are the broader shared vocabulary we began with—which gives shape to one’s work through contrast.

And that final sentence on what a firm, controlled, purposeful, precise style can do, using the power of allusion, implicit comparison, the subtle significance of every detail to “achieve . . . concentration of meaning”—is there a writer who wouldn’t die happy having that said of his work?

Melancholy in the outfield

A few weeks ago I revisited a childhood favorite with my own kids. Angels in the Outfield came out when I was ten years old and an enthusiastic baseball fan. I must have watched it fifty or sixty times over the next few years, before I aged out of it and the real-life drama of the mid-90s Braves gently edged it out of my imagination.

What I remembered most about Angels in the Outfield was the comedy, the slapstick baseball action, the standard sports movie joys of becoming a team and winning the big game, and the music. (I noticed, though very young, that composer Randy Edelman’s score had a lot of cues suspiciously similar to his work on the previous year’s Gettysburg, one of my favorite soundtracks.) What I was not prepared for upon rewatching it as an adult just how firmly the plot’s foundation was built upon pain, sorrow, and longing.

Roger, the main character, lives in foster care because his mom has died and his dad is a negligent, uncommunicative deadbeat. When the film starts his father has already signed over his rights to his son and has shown up just long enough to tell Roger, a job he performs badly. Is that guilt we see in his eyes, or just awkwardness in performing the unwanted duty of talking to his child? When an oblivious Roger asks when they can “be a family again,” his dad replies with a “when pigs fly” scenario that Roger takes literally. And Roger’s younger friend JP seems bright and happy all the time but collapses into grief when another boy is moved out of the foster home, an emotional response the movie suggests is always ready just below the surface. This is clearly a child struggling with abandonment.

But the vein of sadness runs through the adults, too. California Angels manager George Knox seethes with grievance, not only having had his career cut short when a dirty player slid into him cleats-first, but also becoming a manager only to be saddled with the worst team in the league. The man who injured him, Ranch Wilder, is now the Angels’ radio announcer and loathes the team as well as Knox. His entire demeanor suggests he resents being kept down when he is meant for greater things. And Mel Clark, a former star pitcher who developed a pain pill addiction under Knox’s managership at Cincinnati and who has the film’s clearest redemption arc, is revealed at the end to be only six months away from death. He has lung cancer and doesn’t even know it yet. And so even the longed-for victory in the playoffs is tinged with loss.

I’m not going to pretend that Angels in the Outfield is a great movie or serious drama; it’s simply well and honestly crafted and it treats all of these scenarios seriously. None of it feels forced, none of it is used merely to jerk tears, and none of it is tidily and painlessly resolved. In fact, most of the characters don’t actually get the specific thing they want at the beginning of the film.

This brought to mind two things I had reflected on long ago. The first is an essay from Film School Rejects called “The Melancholy of Don Bluth,” an excellent read on animated films like The Land Before Time, All Dogs Go to Heaven, or An American Tail—all three of which were in constant rotation in the Poss household when I was growing up. Bluth’s movies have a reputation for going to dark places Disney typically balks at, to the point that they’re sometimes the subject of internet memes about “trauma.” Please.

The artistic upshot of Bluth’s willingness to include death and—perhaps more importantly—mourning in his films is a truth and richness often missing from comparable animated films:

Thematically, there is an ever-present air of death about Bluth’s work that is profoundly sad. Bones litter certain set-pieces; illness and age are veritable threats (shout out to Nicodemus’ gnarly skeleton hands); and characters can and do bleed. Critically, Bluth films don’t gloss over grief, they sit with it. From Littlefoot’s straight up depression following the on-screen death of his mom, to Mrs. Brisby’s soft sorrow at finding out the details of her husband’s death. There is a space for mourning in Bluth’s stories that feels extra-narrative, and unpretentious. Critically, this is distinct from, say, wallowing. Bluth’s films have a ridiculously productive attitude towards mourning, most lucidly articulated through Land Before Time’s moral mouthpiece Rooter: “you’ll always miss her, but she’ll always be with you as long as you remember the things she taught you.” Disney meanwhile, tends to treat death as a narrative flourish, or worse, a footnote. And in comparison, even notable exceptions like Bambi and The Lion King seem immaturely timid to let palpable grief linger for longer than a scene, let alone throughout a film’s runtime.

The other thing that came to mind was a podcast conversation on The Sectarian Review concerning Hallmark Christmas movies. At some point during the conversation I drew a comparison between Hallmark romantic comedies and older romcoms by pointing out that films like You’ve Got Mail, as fun and bubbly and appealing as they are, also have vein of genuine pain running through them. Kathleen Kelly takes her mom’s little bookshop up against the big chain store and loses, an event the film doesn’t gloss over and doesn’t paint as some kind of moral victory. Who doesn’t feel the pang of her loss as she closes up shop for the final time and walks away into the night, her mom’s shop doorbell jingling in her hand?

Only Pixar, in older movies like Up and Toy Story 2 and Inside Out, has recently attempted to include such real pain in their stories. By comparison, most of the recent crowd-pleasing PG-13 action fare or animated kids’ movies in theatres or the mass-produced dramas of the Hallmark Channel are pure saccharine—thin, fake, and probably carcinogenic.

I have no firm conclusions to draw on this topic except to note that, for whatever reason, even in our simplest and cheapest stories we’ve lost something important. And if you feel some of this and hope for catharsis, one of the oldest reasons for watching a drama that there is, you’ll have to go to older films for it.

Political prestige and pathetic dignity in a dying civilization

Yesterday was South Carolina’s Republican primary. Coincidentally, I also started a classic espionage novel I’ve been meaning to read for a while: A Coffin for Dimitrios, by Eric Ambler. Last night as the unwanted updates on the unwanted results of the unwanted primary slowed to a trickle I settled in to read a few more chapters before bed. And in the middle of Chapter 5 I read this:

“In a dying civilization, political prestige is the reward not of the shrewdest diagnostician, but of the man with the best bedside manner. It is the decoration conferred on mediocrity by ignorance.”

Apropos of nothing, right? After all, more than just about any other political process, a primary election is a popularity contest that is all about flattering, cajoling, and slinging enough mud to win. And winning is not the mark of distinction the candidates think it will be. Verily, they have their reward.

Ambler continues:

Yet there remains one sort of political prestige that may still be worn with a certain pathetic dignity; it is that given to the liberal-minded leader of a party of conflicting doctrinaire extremists. His dignity is that of all doomed men: for, whether the two extremes proceed to mutual destruction or whether one of them prevails, doomed he is, either to suffer the hatred of the people or to die a martyr.

Ambler was wryly describing the situation in many former Austro-Hungarian and especially Ottoman territories as part of the background plot of his novel, but the situation is instantly recognizable, not only in many other historical eras—I think immediately of Cicero—but in the present. Both major American political parties have plenty of doctrinaire extremists and doomed men to go around. But what we have too little of is that “pathetic dignity,” the attitude of the defeated who are truer to principle than to victory.

Maybe it’s my contrarianism, my commitment to a conservatism with little modern application, or my Reepicheep-like love of lost causes and last stands, but I hope to see more of that “pathetic dignity,” more people willing to lose than to flatter a terminal patient.

Seneca on internet rage

Seneca was a Stoic philosopher and teacher most famous, in the former role, for his Letters on Stoic philosophy and, in his latter role, as the personal tutor to Nero. Talk about wayward pupils. The following comes from Book III of his treatise De Ira (On Anger) in James Romm’s translation for Princeton UP, published as How to Keep Your Cool:

“[Y]our anger is a kind of madness: because you set a huge price on worthless things.”

— Seneca

Look now! Let’s examine other slights: food, and drink, and the elegance people work at for the sake of these; insulting words; gestures that don’t convey enough honor; stubborn beasts of burden and tardy slaves; suspicions and dark interpretations of someone else’s words, which make the gift of human speech into one of nature’s many injuries—believe me, these things are not serious, though we get seriously heated over them. They’re the sort of things that send young boys into fights and brawls. We pursue them so gravely, yet they hold nothing weighty or great. That’s why I tell you that your anger is a kind of madness: because you set a huge price on worthless things.

Years ago, in the early days of this blog, I shared a passage from another great ancient thinker, St Augustine of Hippo, that seemed to describe internet trolls 1600 years before the fact. Let us add this bit of Stoic insight to that file. As an acquaintance wrote to me after I rediscovered and shared this line yesterday, it’s remarkable how much of people’s behavior and reasoning on the internet can be explained by Stoic teaching on how unchecked passions over piddling things warp one’s reason.

James Romm, by the way, is also the author of Dying Every Day, an excellent book on Seneca, his relationship with his most famous student, and the way that relationship and the seeming failure of Seneca to decisively shape Nero has dogged his posthumous reputation.

Werner Herzog on psychoanalysis (and the 20th century)

Coincidental to my reading and review of Bill Watterson’s The Mysteries last weekend, today I ran across this passage on psychoanalysis from filmmaker Werner Herzog’s recent memoir Every Man for Himself and God Against All*:

“I’d rather die than go to an analyst, because it’s my view that something fundamentally wrong happens there. If you harshly light every last corner of a house, the house will be uninhabitable. It’s like that with your soul; if you light it up, shadows and darkness and all, people will become ‘uninhabitable.’ I am convinced that it’s psychoanalysis—along with quite a few other mistakes—that has made the twentieth century so terrible. As far as I’m concerned, the twentieth century, in its entirety, was a mistake.”

As in Watterson’s book, Herzog suggests here that the drive to illuminate and resolve—and, inevitably, to control—can only end in catastrophe. Food for thought.

Last year I read Herzog’s short novel The Twilight World and greatly enjoyed it. I haven’t delved deep into his filmography, which I keep meaning to correct, but his movie Invincible has proven uniquely haunting to me ever since I first watched it twenty years ago. I recommend it.

*German title: Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle. The German-language audiobook is the only version currently available through my library. Might be a good opportunity to scrub some of the rust off my German.

The Mysteries

“‘In our world,’ said Eustace, ‘a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.’
‘Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.’”

— CS Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

I feel like the publication of a new book by Bill Watterson, whose “Calvin and Hobbes” ended its run twenty-nine years ago and who has remained almost entirely quiet since, should be more of an event than the release of The Mysteries has proven. But then, given the book’s title and most especially its subject matter, maybe that’s appropriate. Call it a mystery, but not one of the Mysteries.

The story is simple enough. This blog post will probably end up several times longer than the entire book. The Mysteries introduces the reader to a medieval-ish world of castles and half-timber towns in which the people and their king are bounded by dark forest. The forest is the domain of the Mysteries, whom no one has ever seen but everyone knows have terrible powers. At first the people strive not to understand but to protect themselves from the Mysteries, putting huge efforts into building walls and chronicling the long history of their fears in tales and art.

Then one day the king decides to strike back against the Mysteries, dispatching knights into the forest on a quest to capture and bring back a Mystery. After a long stretch of futile searching, one knight succeeds, returning with an iron box chained to a cart.

At last, a Mystery is revealed—and the people discover that there’s not, apparently, very much to them. Their fearful powers turn out to be “mundane.” And capturing one Mystery opens the way to capturing others, to the point that the people not only lose their fear of the Mysteries but come to find them boring. One clever illustration shows a medieval newspaper stall full of headlines like “YAWN.”

Then, the Mysteries understood and no longer feared or the object of much attention at all, the people demolish their walls, cut down the forest, and overspread the land. They mock the old paintings inspired by the Mysteries. They now live in a world of jet aircraft and skyscrapers and the king no longer appears on the balcony of his castle but on TV or behind the wheel of a car on a busy freeway, drinking a Big Gulp. At last, the narrator tells us, they control everything.

Or do they? The sky turns strange colors and, ominously, “things” start “disappearing.” The king assures them that this is normal, wizards study the phenomena, and life continues apace. Then, “too late,” the people realize that they’re in trouble. An indifferent universe wheels on.

In the final pages the viewpoint of the illustrations pulls back farther and farther from the people and their conquered land, into space, beyond the solar system and the Milky Way. “The Mysteries,” the story concludes, “lived happily ever after.”

One notable aspect of The Mysteries is that although Watterson wrote the story, it is illustrated by caricaturist John Kascht. Watterson and Kascht worked on the pictures in close collaboration for several years, experimenting with and abandoning many styles before arriving at an atmospheric, unsettlingly dreamlike aesthetic combining clay figures, cardboard scenery, and painted backdrops. The effect is powerfully eerie, especially as the pace of the story accelerates and the fairytale world at the beginning of the book gives way to one that resembles, disconcertingly, our own.

If the pictures are murky, moody, and ambiguous, often more allusive than concrete, so is the story. This, according to Watterson, is by design. I’m not typically one for deliberate ambiguity, but it works brilliantly here. This “fable for grownups,” as the publisher describes it, achieves a timelessness through its strangely specific soft-focus art and a broad applicability through its theme.

And what is that? The most obvious and easy referent to the consequences the people face in the book’s closing pages is climate change, whether anthropogenic or not. But The Mysteries is not an allegory but a fable. To narrow its message, if it has one, to a policy issue is to cheapen and limit it.

The core theme of The Mysteries is disenchantment. Since the Scientific Revolution uncovered the wheels and levers of the universe and the Enlightenment insisted that the wheels and levers were all there is, was, or ever will be, the mysteries of our own world have retreated further and further from our imaginations and the place we once gave them in our daily lives. The powers that once kept people within their walled towns have been banished—or rather seized and repurposed, put to work for the people’s desires. Fear or, to put it more positively, awe of the world has given place to self-assured technical mastery. We control everything.

Or do we?

The Mysteries is probably not what anyone anticipating the return of Bill Watterson would have expected. I was certainly surprised, but pleasantly. As befits the creator of “Calvin and Hobbes,” a work that prized imagination above all else, The Mysteries treads lightly but surefootedly across deep ideas, and powerfully suggests that whatever Mysteries once lived in the forest, we have not sufficiently understood them to warrant our boredom, apathy, and self-indulgence, and we certainly are not free of them. We are, in fact, in graver danger through our indifference to the Mysteries than we ever were when we feared them.

Signs of life?

The scene of the crime

Yesterday and today I got to make my first visits to a brick-and-mortar bookstore in a while, the two Barnes & Noble stores just north of me in Greenville. After Thursday’s post I visited them with the concept of censorship—real censorship which, per Alan Jacobs, most properly “refer[s] to the removal, by some legal or commercial authority, of certain portions of a text or film or recording”—nibbling at the back of my mind.

As I’ve written before, there is a trend of deleting or altering portions of the work of both living and long-dead authors either to meet the demands of social media mobs or to forestall future such mobs. In a post about Agatha Christie and the diluting effect of the reign of Content, I mentioned looking at a copy of one of her books a few years ago and seeing a content warning and an admission that the publisher had changed the book. As I noted then, “I didn’t buy that book. It wasn’t the one Christie wrote.” Since I was back in the bookstore where that anecdote took place, I decided to look into this problem again.

The books in question are recent reprints of Agatha Christie mysteries from Vintage Books, which feature beautiful cover art and type design. The new Vintage edition of Poirot Investigates, a short story collection, was published in 2021 and includes the following special note on the first page, before the reader even reaches the table of contents:

This book was first published in 1925. Like many books of its era, it contains some offensive cultural representations and language that detract—and distract—from the value of the work. Accordingly, editorial changes have been made in a handful of places to remove racist language and depictions, but for the most part this classic work is reproduced as originally published.

This is the note to which I responded, in that blog post, that “For the most part is doing a lot of work there.”

But in the 2023 Vintage edition of Christie’s Poirot novel The Big Four this note has migrated to the smaller print of the copyright page and reads like this:

A Note on the Text: This book was published in 1927 and reflects the attitudes of its time, including outdated cultural representation and language. Minor editorial changes have been made in a few places to remove offensive terms, but for the most part this classic work is reproduced as originally published.

Note the lack of any attempt to make artistic claims regarding allegedly offensive words “detract[ing] and distract[ing]” from “the value of the work,” a crass utilitarian turn of phrase that has rightly disappeared. And the remaining verbiage hedges a bit more: “minor editorial changes” still “have been made,” passively, but there is no charge of “racist language,” just “outdated” and “offensive” terms. But these are tiny improvements. Outdated is the language of chronological snobbery de rigueur, and I think offense should be in the eye of the beholder—and of course Christie’s work has still been altered.

But a note of hope creeps in with the new year. In the brand new 2024 Vintage edition of The Mystery of the Blue Train, the copyright page includes this:

A Note on the Text: This book was published in 1928 and reflects the attitudes of its time. The publisher’s decision to present it as it was originally published is not intended as endorsement of cultural representations or language contained herein.

That’s more like it. While I’d still prefer publishers to leave the texts of dead authors alone and just expect their readers to read like grownups, I greatly appreciate Vintage deciding to publish Christie unexpurgated and owning the decision to do so. No “minor editorial changes” are being made (by whom?) here; the publisher decided. A good strong statement, and one that I hope sets a pattern going forward.

Relatedly, this afternoon I happened upon a Vintage reprint of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, part of its Black Lizard crime novel series. Vintage has published Chandler for some time, but this was a newish reprint with a foreword by James Ellroy copyrighted 2022. This edition had the following Publisher’s Note facing the copyright page:

Dear Reader,
Thirty years ago Vintage Books acquired Black Lizard, adding some of the greatest crime fiction from the postwar era to a list that already boasted the best noir fiction. The new imprint, Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, published the foremost in crime and noir—books that epitomized the genre as well as those that reshaped it and pushed it in new directions. These are the novels that have been an inspiration to subsequent writers, and modern crime remains in dialogue with them.
While these books are outstanding works in the genre, they are also firmly of the time and place in which they were written. These novels may contain outdated cultural representations and language. We present the works as originally published. We hope that you enjoy discovering, or rediscovering, these classics.
Sincerely,
The Publisher

At first I thought that this was a bit much, with a cringing protest-too-much tone that I didn’t care for, but upon reflection I appreciated the subtle appeal to tradition and continuity within a genre and the firm acknowledgement that every genre has masterworks that deserve to be read and admired. And the ownership of publishing a book as written, even more directly here than in The Mystery of the Blue Train owing to the use of the first person, is most welcome.

So I’m hopeful. A bit, at any rate. All of these examples come from just one publisher, after all.

And, looking elsewhere, there is still much work to be done. William Morrow has just reissued the entire corpus of Ian Fleming Bond novels in rather bland-looking paperbacks with the following at the top of their copyright pages:

This book was written at a time when terms and attitudes which might be considered offensive by modern readers were commonplace. A number of updates have been made in this edition, while keeping as close as possible to the original text and the period in which it is set.

Good: placing the onus of offense on the modern reader. Bad: “updates,” as if Fleming’s carefully crafted stories are a glitchy app from a tech startup run by twenty-year olds. As it happens, whoever bowdlerized the books did a comically unthorough job of it.

I don’t know if this is the start of a reversal or just a lonely temporary reprieve from the madness affecting the publishing industry over the last few years, but I pray it’s the former. It’s worth keeping an eye on and, of course, hoping.

Doing the book-ban shuffle

Over the weekend I took my sons to an old-fashioned barbershop for haircuts and a glass-bottled Coke. I also introduced them to a joy I had almost forgotten—the old-fashioned comics pages (“funnies,” as my granddad called them) in an old-fashioned Sunday newspaper.

Something that was not old-fashioned was the theme of Sunday’s “Pearls Before Swine,” one of my favorite daily strips when I was in college. Here are the two opening panels:

Notice the little definitional shuffle from panel one to panel two. The news anchor mentions books being removed from libraries. Goat asks about banning books.

These are not the same thing.

Naturally, “Pearls” being “Pearls,” contemplation of the purported danger of certain books is just a clever setup for an absurdist subversion at the end. Read the whole strip for a good laugh. But precisely this imprecision—the confusion of bans and censorship with local decisions about what is and is not on the shelf of a library—is endemic now.

Alan Jacobs had a good post on this subject back in the fall, when there was an epidemic not of books being banned but of self-regarding people congratulating themselves on their superiority to the imagined reactionary troglodytes who want books banned. (Look at the comments section on that “Pearls” strip for a representative sample. Everyone seems to know that it’s precisely the people they don’t like who are the worst about this.) Responding to just such an essayist who had boasted of her habit of “intentionally purchasing and reading books that are banned” and who linked to a list of such books, Jacobs wrote:

The problem here is that none, literally not one, of the books on the list [she] links to have been banned. Neither have they been “censored,” which is what the article linked to says. That’s why [she] can buy and read them: because they’ve been neither banned nor censored. 

What has happened is this: Some parents want school libraries to remove from their shelves books that they (the parents) think are inappropriate for their children to read. You may think that such behavior is mean-spirited or otherwise misconceived—very often it is!—but has nothing to do with either banning or censorship. 

This is partly pure linguistic sloppiness—the same problem that causes people to treat the words racism, bigotry, and prejudice as interchangeable. Sloppiness is bad enough, but it also proves advantageous to people who may know better but have political axes to grind. So when one mom complains about books in a local school library and the school decides to retain them, partisans can claim the governor of that state—who is otherwise entirely unrelated to this local non-story—is personally banning books and who does that remind you of?

Notice that that Snopes article I linked to still does the little book-ban two-step at the end by invoking a supposed “rise” in “censorship” in the state in question, though. More on that below. But Jacobs’s point stands. Here’s more from him:

In a sane world, the term “ban” would be reserved for books whose sale and circulation are illegal in some given place, and “censorship” would refer to the removal, by some legal or commercial authority, of certain portions of a text or film or recording. (I say “commercial” authority because sometimes companies that own the rights to works of art decide, without legal pressure, to delete some lyrics in a song or change certain words in a book.) But thanks to people who want to smear their RCOs [Repugnant Cultural Others], it is now common to use precisely the same words to describe (a) what the nation of Iran did to Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and (b) a polite letter from a parent to a school librarian asking that books that offer anatomically detailed descriptions of sexual practices not be readily available to third graders.

As it happens, there is actual censorship of the kind Jacobs describes happening in the United States, but it’s not much-hated state governors pushing for it. And what do you know? Here’s a book that has been removed from sale by a serious commercial authority. But somehow I don’t see the people who buy “Fight Evil, Read Books” totes lining up to demand a copy.

Jacobs concludes with what should be an indisputable statement of truth: “This failure to make elementary distinctions is neither politically nor intellectually healthy.” But as long as this kind of sloppiness remains politically advantageous there will be no incentive to correct it. None.

Regarding the much-commented upon “rise” in censorship, bans, or whatever you want to deceptively call them, the ALA, which has proven adept at political axe-grinding, has helped manufacture this impression, dangling the specter of hillbilly theocrats banning Maus or whatever. (Speaking of manufactured, deceptive stories that became opportunities for virtue signaling.) Jacobs links to two detailed and helpful posts on the ALA’s “book ban paranoia” from Micah Mattix. The salient fact from Mattix’s reporting:

The 20% figure [a reported 20% increase in “challenges” to books in libraries] concerns the number of unique titles, but the actual number of requests to censor is only up by 14—from 681 in 2022 to 695 in 2023. That’s right. Across nearly 120,000 libraries, which serve millions of students and patrons, 14 more requests to censor have been filed.

Check out Mattix’s posts here and here.

The problem with all these book bans is that no one is banning books, and very, very few people even want to. We need to stop talking like it.

How fragility honors the dead

I’m currently reading and almost finished with Ron Rash’s latest novel, The Caretaker. One of the main characters, Blackburn Gant, is a disfigured polio survivor and the titular caretaker of a church graveyard in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. Blackburn, owing to his occupation, his outsider status in the town, and the events of the novel, has a mind consumed with death, regret, and his quiet duty to render proper respect to the dead in his little patch of ground.

Late in the novel, as the plot builds toward a climactic confrontation, Blackburn walks into town and has this small moment:

“As he neared Middlefork, Blackburn saw to the left where, among broken slabs of stone, small blue flowers bloomed. If you came upon periwinkle in woods or a meadow, Wilkie said a graveyard likely had been there. It had always struck Blackburn how something fragile as a flower could honor the dead longer than stone. Longer than memory too, a lot longer.”

A beautiful and evocative passage. Sarah has told me that daffodils, which might surprise you in scattered clusters or even great bright patches in the middle of the woods as you drive through the rural South, often mark the sites of old homeplaces. Ever since she pointed that out I’ve noticed them everywhere, vanished homesteads, without even the usual stone marker of a lonely chimney, and I’ve often felt something of what Blackburn feels here.

At least in the South, businesses that cut tombstones describe themselves as selling monuments. One wonders just how much of our purposeful effort to remember or be remembered—no matter how monumental—will survive while the small, accidental, fragile things with which we’ve marked a loss or even just the passing of time will outlast both them and us.