Uses of nostalgia: A Sport and a Pastime

 If someone starts off by insisting he is telling the truth, the effect is usually the reverse of what he intends. That's not even close to an original thought. But what about the reverse? When a guy insists he is lying, do you tend to think he is really hoping to hide something? Do you think, "Maybe this story isn't a factual account of anything that actually happened but there is stuff here the story teller doesn't want to reveal about himself"?

And there you have the genre that A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter fits into. It's a genre in which a man lets his fantasies run wild and thereby manages to express some rather aggressive and frankly male truths that otherwise might not get said. We don't seem this sort of novel much these days but I think it's a legitimate genre and a very male genre at that. The most famous example is Huck Finn.

It's also a very American genre. Despite having Shakespeare and his poetic heirs to draw on, the English don't write novels like this and neither do the French or Russians. The other thing about it is that there is Eros between men at the core of it. It's a peculiarly American thing to write novels that are intensely homoerotic without being gay.

The feminist critique writes itself and isn't completely beside the point. The love interest, she isn't distinct enough to be an actual person, is a fantasy figure in a genre that used to be called exotica back in the 1920s and 1930s. The plot is always the same. Upper middle class (or even plain middle class) American goes to another country where standards of living are considerably lower than they are at home. That enables him to hang around for a long time while living a pretty rich lifestyle by local standards. He meets a girl and falls in love but, alas, he cannot stay forever because, well, just because, so he leaves her.



Our heroine, Anne-Marie is, as you would expect, given what was a-cliché-and-then-some by the early 1960s, a remarkably convenient girl. She is eighteen, she is easily available, she is highly excitable, she is agreeable to anal sex and apparently likes it, finally, and probably most important of all, she is skilled at not getting pregnant because, get this, her mother has instructed her on the matter. Ah, those French mothers, so unlike the mothers of nice girls at home.

As damning as all that sounds, the male love interest, and he is very much a love interest for our narrator, isn't any less a fantasy figure. Indeed, to complain that these two are fantasy figures is to miss that that is what they are meant to be. Our narrator, a francophile photographer who has gone to a small provincial city in France hoping to become famous, fantasizes them into existence. He doesn't care whether they live or die.

CAVEAT: Spoilers and some vulgarity uncharacteristic of this blog start here

In fact, he kills one of them off and the effect is staggering for the lack of difference it makes. The character is named Philip Dean and no one ever shed a tear at his death for he is a fantasy from the get go. He is 10 years younger than the narrator of the story and he shows up in a  Delage that he has sort of borrowed and sort of stolen that is ten years old!

A Delage is a real car but it is, as you can see from the image below, also a dream car; it is the car every man of a certain age wishes he'd been able to drive into the places one would like to drive a car shaped like this:

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar but there are other times where the phallic imagery is blunt enough that the only comparison blunt enough to count is, well an erect penis. So when a man in his mid thirties gets a crush on a boy in his twenties who drives a car that a man in his thirties fantasizes about but a man in his twenties would think silly and old, you should be able to figure out that the story is next going to involve a girl of the older man's dreams who is going to let the younger man park the car that isn't really his in her garage.

Dean, and he is referred to as "Dean" more often than Philip, drives the Delage expertly and, usually, fast. The car starts to rust and age over the time that Dean stays ...

... because he stays too long. He stays until his money runs out and then he stays some some. He takes advantage of others, including women, to make ends meet. He is clearly abusing the hospitality of our narrator, whom he stays with, and the man who was foolish enough to lend him the Delage. Most of all, he is abusing the trust of Anne-Marie who thinks this very rich (as compared to her) young man will marry her.

I found myself wanting to complete every mention of "Dean" with "Moriarty". Salter's character has a lot in common with Kerouac's. You know you shouldn't trust him but you do because he does stuff that you want to do, stuff you don't have the courage to do because ...

Well, why don't we have the courage to be men anymore?

Here is the Dean situation. He's with Anne-Marie. He can see that he is going to have to leave. He knows that he'll tire of her. He knows they aren't really compatible. He knows that she is hoping for more than he will deliver. But he stays. What, against that barrage of good reasons not to do this, convinces him to stay? He stays because, "Her — is sopping."

I know, I usually eschew that sort of language but I think it has a genuine artistic purpose in the novel and that is why I quote it here. Sometimes, quite often actually, you find yourself torn between something you really want to do and a lot of good reasons not to do it. The problem is that they're the sorts of good reasons that your teacher, your priest and your mother always hit you with. Even after you start to see that prudence really is a virtue you will continue to resent those people and their good reasons. You will think, and rightly, that while it would be a bad idea to pull a Dean now that it wouldn't have been such a bad thing to have done it back when you could have, back when they were most determined to stop you. And, now that it's too late, you want to turn around and hit them in the face with, "Because her ... was sopping, that's why!"

The whole thing is a fantasy just like Huck Finn lighting out from sivilization. It's the sort of fantasy you might have actually puled off but you didn't so it's just a story you tell yourself now. The thing that I loved most about the novel is the great lengths Salter goes to the drive this point home and the equally extreme lengths some critics go to miss the point. The only real thing in this story is the narrator. The fantasy really is his fantasy and that is the scandalous thing. That's the thing that men feel and we are increasingly made to feel like we aren't allowed to feel.

"I want you to express your feelings," says the woman. Okay, you think, here are some ... . Silly you, you didn't realize that the feelings you're supposed to express are the ones she gives you permission to express. No, it's worse than that: you are required to express the permitted feelings even if you don't actually feel them.

To return the fantasy point. There are a few scenes set in Paris where our narrator interacts with a couple of rich American expatriates who are so utterly fictitious that Salter may as well have cut and paste them out of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. He did that on purpose. Almost all the rest is set in small provincial French city that doesn't exist. In the unlikely event that a high school class put this on as a play, a couple of simple painted backgrounds would be all that would be needed to invoke the two places. They don't have any real existence beyond what they can evoke. It's telling that our narrator is a photographer because photographs of the places would be all you would need.

A related point: reading the criticism, I see that Hemingway is often invoked and that is odd because there is nothing of Hemingway in this book. The Paris scenes are a Fitzgerald pastiche, they are like Daisy and Tom Buchanan do Paris. The most important stylistic echoes we find in this book are a mixture of Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell. If you'd given Miller the draft of Justine and asked him to do for Durrell what Pound did for Eliot's Wasteland, you'd have gotten something close to A Sport and a Pastime.

There is a great touch towards the end of the novel when our narrator has to drive the Delage. Up until now, at the hands of Dean, this car has been a magic carpet, always moving smoothly and easily; with the narrator at the wheel, it drives like a truck. And of course it would. The dream sports car of your youth can barely keep with traffic now.

The narrator of the story is often described as an unreliable one in the criticism but that is the opposite of the truth. He's an absolutely reliable narrator of his own fantasies and thereby tells us more than he realizes. When he tells us that,

In his clothing he conceals, like an assassin, a small tube of lubricant

we get the point. The trick isn't getting Dean to talk Anne-Marie into anal sex. The thrill comes from narrator/author letting himself have the right to think this way. Try it. What small tube of illicit desire do you have hidden on your person? Imagine talking your girlfriend, your wife, or that woman two tables over at Starbucks into doing it. You're allowed to think of these things and your girlfriend or wife should be woman enough to deal with your thinking them and expressing them, which is not to say she will agree to let you do them. It's 100 percent okay to look at a woman, even a friend, and think, "I'd love to ..." You're not a monster for having the thought.

Men who came back from various wars in the mid 20th century had the courage to confront this. (Salter flew 100 missions in Korea!) Lately, we men have allowed ourselves to be whipped into being submissive little boys about this. This book is a healthy antidote. What you actually do with your sexual feelings is a more complex question but trying to pretend they aren't there will only bring you regret and pain. There isn't one ounce of regret for Dean or Anne-Marie in this book but there is the pain of an old wound that goes with the suppressed fantasy, the chances  that were never taken.

Body Heat: Which Film Noir antihero are you?

The emotional basis of the standard detective story was and always has been that murder will out and justice will be done. Its technical basis was the relative insignificance of everything except the final denouement. What led up to that was more or less passagework. The denouement would justify everything. The technical basis of the Black Mask type of story was that the scene outranked the plot, in the sense that a good plot was one which made good scenes.

Introduction to Trouble is My Business by Raymond Chandler

Chandler goes on to say that this is a perspective Black Mask writers shared with film makers. That's true, although we should recognize that what makes a good scene in a book and what makes a good scene in a movie are often not the same thing. The point is a good one, though, and we can see it well exemplified in Body Heat. If the video file were damaged such that you couldn't see the ending, you could still enjoy it. If aliens brainwashed everyone who had seen the movie and destroyed every existing copy so the end was unavailable, you could still enjoy it.

That's largely because it is a movie about the past. Ned's past, he tells us, "is burning up out there". He's surrounded by it, not as Jameson thinks, because he is unable to face the present, but because he is unable to face the past and it, like a ghost in a movie, will continue to haunt him until he listens.

We are all surrounded by the past. We aren't surrounded by history because history is a story about someone else. The past is something we own and the past is something that owns us.

A key moment in the opening stages of the movie is when Ned first sees Matty. He's wandering along the shore front on a very hot summer's night. It's a resort town and it's full of past. He comes to a bandstand and listens to the band. They are a shade too good to be honest, sounding a lot more like Count Basie's band than any actual community band ever could. And the song they are playing is "That Old Feeling"!

It's a tune that everyone knows so we hear the lyrics in our head:

I saw you last night and got that old feeling
When you came in sight, I got that old feeling

And, just at that moment he sees Matty. For the first time. The song is not about seeing someone for the first time. It's about seeing an old lover and realizing that you are still in love with them. That doesn't matter because we, and Ned, think we know what the old feeling is. He is in love with this new woman and must have her.

It's erotic love in the Greek sense. It unbidden and it hits him like a sickness and seems to drive him to his fate.

But what old feeling is it really? And who is it for? Because who is Matty? She isn't who he/we thinks she is.

Initially, she reminds us of Lana Turner playing Cora Smith in The Postman Always Rings Twice because of the white dress she is wearing. Soon, however, she will seem more like Phyllis Dietrichson from Double Indemnity. (Both these are based on James M. Cain novels and there is probably something worth noting about that but I don't know much about Cain.)

Originally, the script called for two murder attempts just as happens in Postman but they scrubbed one when reviewing the dailies. It slowed down the action too much. My point in mentioning it is to show that the confusion was intentional. Contrary to what is often said of it, Body Heat is not a remake of anything. The movie, like Matty Walker, is deliberately hiding what it is really up to by pretending to be something it isn't; the movie deliberately trades on mistaken identity. We see it, we get "that old feeling", meaning we think we know this story already, and so we think we know how it has to go.

The effect is a little like those quizzes that we see all over the Internet that invite us to find out which character from a show or movie you are. The trick is that anyone who sat down to do a Which character from a particular film noir are you? quiz already knows who these characters are and the temptation is to fill out the answers so you get to be Sam Spade rather than Miles Archer. Who, after all, wants to be the chump? But the trick the movie is playing on us is that it keeps shifting ground so we don't know which film noir we're in and, consequently, we don't know how to play our part; what Matty does to Ned Racine, the movie does to us.

Only one of the classic film noir is called Out of the Past but that title would work on many others in the genre. A recurring theme in film noir is the guy who is trying to shake off, forget or hide his past and that past gets him every time. But what is Ned's past? What is it that's "burning up out there"?

Well, it's his sense of being not good enough. That's the thing that keeps haunting him—he can't admit he has needs because he thinks that will lead others to abandon him. When Ned reveals his needs to Matty early on he immediately has to undercut himself:

Ned: I need someone to take care of me, someone to rub my tired muscles, smooth out my sheets.

Matty: Get married.

Ned: I just need it for tonight.

Actually admitting he wants love is too dangerous.

Robert Glover, in a brilliant book, says that nice guys are guys who don't think it's okay to be just as they are. They believe they have to hide their failings because they believe they are bad. They assume that anyone who really gets to know them will reach the same conclusion. You may think Ned isn't terribly good at hiding his inner shame above but he's seeking approval through self deprecation. Lots of people do this.

Glover identifies two strategies nice guys use to hide their inner shame. One, obviously, is to suppress it. Another is to exaggerate how bad we are and essentially defy others to prove us wrong. That's Ned.

Poor Ned, he has to live with constant reminders that he isn't good enough and he hides it with a lot of acting out bad-boy behaviour. The point of all this behaviour is to get approval from women and the most important kind of approval is sex.

One of the most revealing moments is the anal sex scene. We see Matt's face in pain and her hands gripping the satin sheets (a lovely touch that) as she just barely endures what she is going through and it is very clear to us that she isn't enjoying it. Ned senses this too but, when he asks if she is okay, he mixes up the message: she says, "Don't" and "stop" and these are two separate statements but Ned hears them as a single sentence and starts driving harder. Why can't he see it? Because what really matters to him is the approval; what matters to him is that a woman has granted her approval by agreeing not just to sex but to anal sex. This external agreement "confirms" that he is the nice guy that his internal sense of self perpetually denies him.

Glover reminds us that nice guys aren't really very nice at all and Ned confirms this over and over again in the movie.

The scene that separates Body Heat from all the pale imitations that it inspired is the restaurant scene where Edmund unwittingly talks Ned into murdering him. Edmund accomplishes this by tapping into Ned's weakness. He does so because he has seen Matty playing with Ned's lighter and Edmund's possessiveness obliges him to drive it home that Ned can never have Matty. Edmund thinks he is winning because Ned confesses that he is just the sort of weakling that Edmund took Matty away from in the first place. But those of us who know the nice guy modus operandi, know that this confession is really just a way of hiding inner shame; Ned's joking about himself masks a violent rage at his not being able to get what he wants. And then they both laugh and we are chilled to the bone.

Ned is so firm in his conviction that he is a nice guy that he insists that he and Matty not "pretend" that Edmund deserves to be killed. That's a beautiful example of the lengths we can go to when doing really monstrous things but needing to believe we are nice guys. The odd thing is that it is sort of true: it is self-hatred that drives Ned to kill Edmund.

Okay, I could just keep going but I have to stop somewhere. If we go back to Raymond Chandler, we see that he has a solution to the problem he describes most crime fiction suffers from.

As to the emotional basis of the hard-boiled story, obviously it does not believe that murder will out and justice will be done—unless some very determined individual makes it his business to see that justice is done. The stories were about the men who made it happen. They were apt to be hard men, and what they did, whether they were called police officers, private detectives or newspaper men, was hard, dangerous work.

Well, that's a nice little fantasy but it hardly matches what actually happens in a typical Raymond Chandler story where, more often than not, the detective is more concerned with a distorted personal standards that had little to do with, as Chandler himself put it, with any scruples or ethics.

When Ned digs the truth out about Mary Ann, he isn't pursuing justice. He isn't likely to get it as, best case scenario, the only way to prove he wasn't responsibly for one murder would be to implicate himself more deeply for the other. The very most he can hope for in digging out the truth about Mary Ann is a little self knowledge. That, however, is something.

Body Heat and the uses of nostalgia

Let's stick with Jameson a while (see Part 1 if this doesn't make sense to you). He singles out Body Heat for discussion in his essay because it is a nostalgic film. That's important because, as he correctly notes, it isn't self-evidently a nostalgic film. On the surface it looked like anything but when it came out (it is now necessarily nostalgic because it is an old film).

Here is a nostalgic memory of my own. They used to sell a lighter that looked like a revolver. You'd pull the trigger and a flame would ignite at the tip of the barrel. It looked like a gun but it was something else. Jameson's point is that a lot of movies produced in the 1970s were nostalgic even though they look like they are something else.

All by itself, that's a good point but not a terribly original one; lots of people made it at the time. Nor do I think it is terribly difficult to see; as proof, I offer the fact that I saw it and discussed it in previous posts on Body Heat. What makes Jameson interesting is that he claims that the nostalgia is a form of pastiche and that this resorting to pastiche says something about the era that produced such films.

... in a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is is to imitate dead styles, to speak through masks and with the voices of the styles in an imaginary museum. But this means that contemporary or postmodernist art is going to be about art itself in a new kind of way; even more, it means that one of its essential messages will involve the necessary failure of art and the aesthetic, the failure of the new, the imprisonment in the past. (p 18)

And you can see how this will tie to Jameson's Marxism. This sort of argument suggests that the ideology of what Jameson sincerely hopes is "late capitalism" is no longer up to justifying the existence of consumer society.

It seems to me exceedingly symptomatic to find the very style of nostalgia films invading and colonizing even those movies today which have contemporary settings: as though we were unable unable today to focus on our own present, as though we have become incapable of achieving aesthetic representations of our own current experience. But if that is so, then it is a terrible indictment of consumer capitalism itself—or, at the very least, an alarming and pathological symptom of a society that has become incapable of dealing with time and history. (p 20)

The key phrase here is, "as though we have become incapable of achieving aesthetic representations of our own current experience". If that is true—which is to say, that we have ended up in nostalgia not willfully but because of failure to be able to do anything else—then this is indeed and indictment of our culture.

One powerful hint that this might not be the case is Jameson's hesitancy in making the point. He has so hedged his argument so with the use of various conditional claims that it is easy to suspect that he doesn't believe what he is saying. Let's analyze that argument a little. The key point here, it seems to me, is that this nostalgia is just a delusion; that the sort of take it offers on the past has no rational use. If we can demonstrate that there is a willful rational activity in this sort of nostalgia, we will have an answer to his argument.

First a caveat: we cannot destroy Jameson's position. If a century of economic, cultural and political failure, to say nothing of the greatest mass murder in history, are not enough to make Jameson and others see the futility of Marxism and related types of command and control politics, nothing we can say will. The most we can hope to do is to show that there is a way to read a film like Body Heat as a achieving a meaningful "aesthetic representation of our own current experience".

Next a reminder: Jameson is not making a new point for a Marxist. If anything, his argument is a cliché of Marxist thought that can be traced back to Marx himself:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte)

We might say that Marxism begot modernism. What I mean by that is that modernism tries to deal with the past in an objective way just as Marx did. (This is another essay for another time, but I would argue that what Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Wagner and modernism have in part is that they are all attempts to reform and restate the Enlightenment project in an efforts to revive it.)

Historians sometimes make a distinction between history, which can be documented, and "the past", which can only be told, that can help us here. For example, in late antiquity we find tribes in the Balkans who claim to be descended from a mighty warrior who came south from what is today Sweden. Now there is some truth embedded here and there in this sort of story. The people of the north were mighty warriors who were feared and respected by those on the European mainland. It is even possible that some might warriors did come south and establish communities. It is even possible, although extremely unlikely, that a tribal group we find moving into the Roman empire from the Balkans in the late fifth century actually is descended from a community founded by a mighty northern warrior. But, and this is the important thing, even if this extremely improbable thing were true, there is absolutely no way of tracing it in history.

In any case, it wasn't true. The story of being descended from a mighty northern warrior was a story whose value was in the telling. The telling of stories like this allowed these people to bond as a people (a process historians call ethnogenesis) and the measure of the its worth for the people who used this story was not its historical accuracy but its effectiveness; if the story inspires people to bond together and to work effectively as a people, then it is a good story, a good use of the past.

Modernists rejected the possibility that the past could have any use independent of what could be done with it objectively. Think of how James Joyce, in moving through A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man rejects all the mythologies of Ireland. After doing this, he returns in Ulysses with a mythology from Ancient Greece that is picked and applied in a way that is artificial. Joyce doesn't expect that you will see Leopold Bloom as Ulysses. Quite the contrary, he expects you to be jarred by the contrast and so see how little Bloom has in common with a Greek hero. He is using the mythology in an objective way; it is only because you can see it from the outside that it is of any use.

We might imagine another version of the story where a cousin named David Bloom reads Homer and chooses to embrace the manly ideal in Homer and try to become like Ulysses. A modernist would only tell that story to demonstrate how pathetically the old cuckold would fail. His purpose would be to be objective, that is outside the myth; for the modernist, the person who tries to internalize the values of the old story can only be deluded. At the very most, the modernist might admit that these stories tell us something about human psychology because they exist as archetypes in our subconscious.

What the modernist cannot admit is that these stories might serve valuable moral ends. That they can inspire and guide us to be better men. And that, I will argue next week, is exactly what the story of Body Heat proposes to do.

A little light culture: postmodernism , nostalgia and Body Heat

I've been reading what is apparently a classic essay on postmodernism by Fredric Jameson. It caught my attention because Jameson says some fascinating things about my favourite movie, Body Heat, in the course of the essay. I kept reading because what he says strikes me as typical of so much of modern academic thought. This is the first of what will be at least two blog posts on the subject.

Jameson claims to be engaged in a purely descriptive process—that is to say, he claims he isn't judging. The ostensible point being that an objective assessment of postmodernism would provide data that would be useful for analyzing the society that produced this art form. Trouble is, he's lying.

We can tell he is lying because he keeps using terms such as "late capitalism" which tend to give away the game: which is that he's already prejudged the era and is only looking for further evidence to back up the conclusions he has already reached. There is, as I've said before, nothing wrong with that. Ultimately, what matters is how well his arguments do or don't hold together. That said, the self-deception at work here—his charming (in more than one sense of the meaning) belief that he is doing some sort of neutral analysis—is worth keeping in mind as we go ahead.

Where to start? How about here:

The second feature of this list of postmodernisms is the effacement in it of some key boundaries or separations, most notably the erosion of the older distinction between high culture and so-called mass or popular culture. This is perhaps the most distressing development of all from an academic stand point, which has traditionally had a vested interest in preserving a realm of high or elite culture against the surrounding environment of philistinism, of schlock and kitsch, of TV series and Reader's Digest culture, and in transmitting difficult and complex skills of reading, listening and seeing to initiates.

That's hardly neutral language and it isn't difficult to guess where Jameson's sympathies lie. Which isn't to say that his interest is simple. As a good Marxist, he has to write "so-called mass or popular culture" because he can't really allow himself to believe that this stuff actually is popular in any profound sense. At the same time, his use of words like "schlock" and "kitsch" and the sneering reference to "Reader's Digest culture" are clearly elitist.

This is hardly new. Except that the attack would have been on middle-brow rather than mass culture, it's not hard to imagine one of the Bloomsburies writing the above in 1910!

The list of postmodernisms he refers back to includes the following: the poet John Ashbery; the architect Robert Venturi; pop artist Andy Warhol, serious composers John Cage, Philip Glass, and Terry Riley, pop artists the Clash, Talking Heads, and the Gang of Four. the film maker Jean Luc Godard as well "a whole new style of commercial or fiction films; and the novelists William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon and Ishmael Reed as well as the French Nouveau roman.

This essay was written more than 30 years ago now and the thing that is most likely to strike us now is how some of the people and types of art listed turned out to be just passing trends. I don't think anyone seriously imagines that Philip Glass, while interesting as an individual, represents any sort of long-term trend in music. The Gang of Four, a now-forgotten new wave band, seem to have made the cut because of the chicom reference in their name and the Clash because they were Marxists as neither was particularly postmodern. Others listed seem, from the longer perspective, to belong more to modernism than postmodernism; John Cage and the Nouveau roman fit into that class.

In the end, we will find that this matters less than we might guess for the only things in the list that Jameson has any profound points to make are the new style of "commercial or fiction films" (a rather broad category) and not so much postmodern architecture as one building, the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles.

If we read what he has to say about the commercial and fiction film, we find that his primary claim is that these movies operate in what he calls "the nostalgia mode". I think he is on to something there and I'll come back to that next time. Part 2 is here.

Mystical nostalgia and authenticity

Last week I gave the example of a man the Lemon Girl once knew. This man had been doing his genealogy but abandoned it when he found out he was adopted. He decided that the people who had raised him, their history and culture had nothing to do with him.

Today, I want to turn the telescope around and look at the problem from the other end.

Here's a thought experiment,

Suppose you are given a box of books that once belonged to your Aunt. One day, perhaps some considerable time later, you are leafing through one of these books and a letter falls out. It is a letter your mother wrote to her sister decades ago. In it, she confesses that she is pregnant by a man who is not your father. She names the man. You recognize him as a friend of your parents' from the early days of their marriage. You look at the date at the top of the letter and realize with a jolt that the child she conceived is you!

You know the name of the man who you now realize is your biological father. There are a few pictures of him in your family photo album and you remember a few stories in which he figures. Other than that, you don't know much about him other than that he died a few years ago.

Here is the question: Other than having passed on his DNA, what has this man to do with you? Is his life, are his dreams, his culture, his family heritage, important to you?

Some people will unhesitatingly answer, yes. Others will be more hesitant.

But it's more than an abstract question. I might immediately think this person relevant to my life but never get around to actually doing anything about it. That I do or that I don't might say something about how much I really feel that this person has something to do with me.

What do I think? Well, this is one of those rare occasions where I think Sartre is right. Your connection with this man will be important if you make something of it. If you don't, it isn't important. It's entirely up to you to choose. If you choose, then his culture becomes part of yours. If not, then not.

When I object to authenticity, it is the sense that you don't have a choice that I object to. I object to the notion that there is a certain kind of world or life experience that naturally goes with some states of life and that some sort of moral compulsion follows from this. "You're white and male, you couldn't possibly understand what we feel or experience unless we educate you," or, "As a woman you owe it to other women to be a feminist."

Downton Abbey

As an aside, there is a wild debate on an issue related to this going on between members of my extended family on Facebook right now. It was all inspired by an article from The Telegraph in which journalist Katy Rink (great name!) claims that the show is boring. If you read the article, however, you quick realize that the author's point is not so much that the show is boring but that she wants you to find it boring and stop watching it.

More importantly, she wants you to all stop identifying with it.

Let us not cling on, hopelessly to this ridiculous sentiment – this nostalgia for our great loves of the past – which sees us paddling around in the pitiful wash of the great steamer. 

And that is her real problem. She thinks that world was inauthentic and she wants everyone, especially women!, to start living what she considers authentic woman lives. A lot of women, however, keep thwarting her by choosing to identify with a past she wishes would just go away.

If it was just Downton Abbey, Katy Rink's impotent rage would seem over the top but it isn't of course. Millions of women love all sorts of period dramas from the novels of Jane Austen to Mad Men and they openly express their desire to return to these more formal times. And these women aren't stupid—they understand about the benefits of antibiotics, modern dentistry, women's rights and so forth—but they also see that something worth having back has been lost too. They want to reclaim it as theirs and, because they do, it is theirs.

Nostalgia and The Wonder years cont'd

Does anything about this paragraph from Slate's reconisderation of The Wonder Years strike you as odd?

For a head trip, consider that Kevin Arnold and Sally Draper are exactly the same age: While Kevin is sheltered in a safe suburban bubble with his nuclear family, not kissing Winnie even when they are parked at Make Out Point, Sally has been exposed to a creepy adult world full of home intruders, adulterous fathers with their pants off, avuncular family friends receiving blow jobs. Sally’s already practiced at contending with drunk, gropey boarding-school boys. It’s hard to imagine Kevin as one of those boys.

The words that should get your bullshit detector flashing are "sheltered" and "bubble".

Factually, it's credible. Kevin did live in a safe suburban neighbourhood and Sally has been exposed to a lot of creepy stuff. So much so that the parents of the girl who plays Sally won't let her watch the show. And I have no trouble at all believing that a child of divorced and dysfunctional parents like Sally Draper would have an unenviable childhood. (Families are never dysfunctional but the people in them sure can be.)

But why take it for granted that Kevin is sheltered in a bubble while Sally is exposed to the real 1960s?

What is at work here might be called the modernist fallacy. Modernists insist that we live in a world that is fragmented, disenchanted and frightening. They keep insisting this even though most of us in the west know no such world. The only way to avoid this indisputable evidence against their favourite fantasy is to insist—over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again—that the comfortable and comforting lives that most of us have lived is a sheltered fantasy only possible in a suburban bubble.

... The Wonder Years insists that the suburbs were a shelter, a place where the intensities of the ’60s barely registered, where the death of a beloved math teacher mattered more than the assassination of world leaders, where free love didn’t make Kevin and Winnie any less nervous about kissing.

That's projection. The show doesn't insist that the suburbs were a shelter. It only insists, because it's true, that the suburbs were actually good places to grow up no matter what intellectuals might insist to the contrary that these things either never happened or they were only possible because the people who lived them were members  of a privileged elite.

Interesting, in that regard, that wealthy Sally Draper is credible as a girl exposed to creepy and scary stuff while Kevin Arnold growing up in a very ordinary middle class setting is equally credible as not being exposed to all that stuff. Isn't shelter from scary stuff usually the sort of thing that comes from wealth and power, which Sally's parents have in abundance?

Nostalgia isn't the escape it's often painted as being. It's an act of rebellion against an intellectual elite who want to rob you of your history and culture.

Nostalgia

One of my favourite themes and it comes up in a post by Slate's television critic about The Wonder Years.

... it was always explicitly about nostalgia: a reminiscence of the honeyed, home-movie days of midcentury American adolescence that wanted its audience to miss the past from the very start. And unlike those series, The Wonder Years is hovering influentially over this fall’s new comedies, a batch of family sitcoms riffing on taciturn dads like Jack Arnold and the fantasy that life used to be simpler.

If you read it, you'll notice it's a weird piece in that it doesn't quite identify the problem it wants to talk about.

 I mean, you can guess the problem. It is anger at people who like shows like The Wonder Years for wanting to return to a past that either "can never be regained" or, more harshly, "never existed in the first place". It's a common strategy for reformers. Pope Francis was pushing it the other day.

The defining aspect of this change of epoch is that things are no longer in their place. Our previous ways of explaining the world and relationships, good and bad, no longer appears to work. The way in which we locate ourselves in history has changed. Things we thought would never happen, or that we never thought we would see, we are experiencing now, and we dare not even imagine the future. That which appeared normal to us – family, the Church, society and the world – will probably no longer seem that way. We cannot simply wait for what we are experiencing to pass, under the illusion that things will return to being how they were before. (Father Z's added emphasis retained.)

He doesn't want you to think that he is changing the church. He wants you to think that the world is changing so we have no choice but to change. (And ducking personal responsibility is a big part of this argument: "Don't hold me responsible for this.")

The argument that things have changed so we have to live differently is a powerful one and that is, no doubt, part of why people keep using it.

Two questions though:

1. Isn't this trivial? Or, to put it another way, isn't change constant such that change is a thing that never changes, a thing that every generation in history has dealt with?
2. Does everything change? Or are there aspects of life (really important, even basic aspects of life succh as human nature, for example) that don't change?

And I'll leave it there for now. More in Monday.

Imitatio project: Nostalgia

First thought

What do these words mean?

Because there are people out there who buy things. People like you and me. And something happened, something terrible. And the way that they saw themselves is gone. And nobody understands that. But you do. And that's very valuable.

Give up?  think it's the boomer vision of the 1960s.

They're the words that Don says to Peggy at the end of Season 3 to win her over and get her to follow him in starting a new agency. The obvious suggestion is that Peggy, having given up her baby, knows what it is like to lose her innocence.

The whole Peggy and her baby subplot might seem like a lawnmower moment; that is to say it might seem like one of those moments where the show just gets weird and quirky because it can, and "screw you" loyal viewer expecting sense. But it isn't. That plot is all about abortion. But the creators were too chicken-hearted to show an actual abortion so we got this crazy Peggy-was-in-denial-about-being-pregnant plot instead.

But the consequences were exactly the same as if she'd had an abortion. And thus her "abortion" is her loss of innocence.

Why is that the boomer vision of the 1960s? Because every boomer lost their own innocence sometime. It was more likely in the 1970s than the 1960s but the 1960s are the decade with the revolutionary mythology associated with it. As a consequence, boomers narcissistically  project their personal loss of innocence onto the whole decade. Some terrible event, the Kennedy assassination is the usual favourite, changed everybody so that "the way they saw themselves is gone".

Now the fascinating thing here is that Weiner obviously thinks we will see a strong parallel between Peggy and Don here. She lost her innocence by having a heavily disguised "abortion" and he lost his in Korea.

And I hope you can see the problem here. It doesn't fit either character. It makes them both into passive characters whose major significance is what happened to them as opposed to what they did. That's not the way we see them when we watch the show at home but I think it is the way Matt Weiner saw them when he created them.

Think of Don's return from Korea in season one. What was his plan? He has to have known that he would be recognized immediately when he got off the train. So why did he even get that far? Was he planning to step off the train and put a finger to his lips so everyone would be quiet until the other authorities were gone?

None of it makes any sense. And I think it doesn't make sense because Matt Weiner has always conceived of Don not as a deserter, that is, not as a guy who acts, but as someone nursing an old wound. ("Teddy told me that in Greek, “nostalgia” literally means “the pain from an old wound.” It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone")

Here's the problem, you can't disdain nostalgia if you like and watch Mad Men. The whole appeal of the show is nostalgia. If you hate the show, you can hate nostalgia. If you hate the fact that other people love the show, you can hate nostalgia. But if you like, even just a little bit, you can't do that.

So , whatever else he does, Matt Weiner has to justify the nostalgia. At the same time, he has to be true to the porogressive liberal notion that the past is so tainted with sex and racism that it is EVIL!!!!! and that the only justification for past culture is that it led to future culture. The old wound is what allows the show to both embrace and reject the past. Well, Weiner thinks it does anyway.

More tomorrow ...

Mad Men: The Better half

I thought the key quote of the episode was something Megan said:

I keep trying to make things like they used to be but I don't know how.

Anyone who has ever been in a marriage (or other long-term sexual relationship) will understand that sentiment. There was an odd kind of magic when you didn't know one another quite so well as you do now. Part of this was the sexual mystique that a partial stranger has and the sense that every knew encounter could teach you something new about you and them. And part of it had to do with  the fact that you both used to try harder. Now both know how to shut down the other with little passive-aggressive tricks any time they start something that requires a reciprocal effort from you. And you use those passive aggressive tricks not because you no longer fear losing them but because you no longer want to try as hard as you used to.

What do I mean? Well, lets look at Don and Betty in this episode. It will be interesting to see how the other commentary runs because you could use some dime-store Freudian analysis to diminish either  either to a nothing. Don cannot connect sex with intimacy. Betty on the other hand, needs attention from men other than the one she is married to to get her batteries charged (and Henry has a latent cuckold fantasy in that he gets his charged by seeing her pursued by other men). My prediction is that most of the other armchair analysis of the show will consist of people picking the person they least like and crap on them from great height for their shallowness. But all three are equally shallow—or all three are equally deep if you prefer that option.

And so to are Megan, Pete, Joan, Roger and Peggy. They are all have mixed feelings for the man that used to be. The women are looking for it in their partners and the men are looking for it in themselves but neither knows how to make that happen any more the way they live now.

Here is a bit of grand theory of Mad Men. Don Draper is an heroic ideal of manhood. I know, but he's a "fraud who is living a lie"  and all the other bullshit that sensitive modern guys aren't supposed to be opposed to but, and this is the important thing, all men and all women find him more interesting that modern sensitive men. Fake or not, Don actually has an identity that is the sum total of what he does. He is what he does. And he is mysterious because his identity (his primary identity) is the sort of secret alter ego that all the wimpy little hipsters who watch the show dream of having. (Yes, I appreciate that that might be applied to me as well.)

But every man alive knows that Don Draper isn't just mythology no matter what they taught him at college. We know this because we all knew men like him. In my case, it was my godfather who rose from a family of dirt poor famine Irish to considerable success in business. Along the way he ditched his "authentic" poor Irish wore identity and killer suits with fedoras, drove luxury cars with leather seats, was a member of an exclusive salmon-fishing club with rights to some of the best salmon water in North America and ... well, it's hard to tell how much else because the man was a bit of an enigma.

That male past was real and it was compelling ane, let's be blunt, erotic in a way that current men are not.

And this episode seemed to me to be about that. Everyone seemed torn between examples of that old masculine ideal and some newer, less exotic but supposedly more dependable type.

Having trashed the show a lot this year, I thought they did one thing very well this episode. That is they started to use nostalgia within the show itself. When we all started watching this, Mad Men was about our nostalgia. Critics claimed it was a past that never existed but we know that's beside the point: any past, real or fictional will no longer exist precisely because it is past. But the show has been on the air long enough now that the characters' nostalgia for their own past is becoming a factor. Thus we have Megan wanting to make things like they used to be.

The point of any nostalgia worth the name is not the accuracy with which it portrays the past that it is nostalgic about. What matters is the sense of loss that we feel right now. That's what it has to get right.

A final brilliant touch was the visit to Bobby's camp. That knotty pine paneling, the dining hall, the picture windows with the lake in the distance, even the country gas station where Don and Betty run into one another on the way. All these things touch some chord with anyone who ever went to camp.

Perhaps more importantly, they also touch a chord with anyone who didn't go to camp but who once visited or even just saw pictures of some classic old camp and wished that had been part of their past.

I have one major problem though.  As I've said many times before, the show moves too quickly to actual sex. In real life, Betty and Don most likely would not end up in that cabin together. All the same sexual tensions would exist between them but it's rarely that easy to end up having sex with someone. It hardly ever happens in fact. Most people might have an experience where sex happens that easily maybe once in a lifetime.

In real life when two people who used to be lovers get together, they go through the same sort of exchange Don and Betty have here without any actual sex. It would have been better drama and more honest drama if they had talked and talked with all sorts of sexual tension and then one morning Don had woken up and gone to talk with Betty over breakfast again only to find Henry sitting with her.

And that would have opened other moral possibilities as well for we all have these sorts of sexually charged encounters that go nowhere in real life and they are useful things to us. In the show they can't be precisely because the show treats actual sex too lightly.

PS: I thought the episode did a nice bit of teasing it's critics. That portrayal of Abe this season was like saying "this is what you really look like to other people" to the people who write at Slate or The AV Club.

Roadside attractions: Signs

Think about your decision-making as you hurtle down the highway. You're tired or hungry and you're looking for a place to either sleep or eat. And you see a sign. If the sign says "Best Western" or "Burger King" you already have a whole lot of criteria for your assessment. You either like and trust those brands or you don't. Either way, you can make a decision quickly.

And it's important to make a decision quickly because you'll be past the place in seconds and you probably won't turn around. Turning around is a lot more effort than stopping.

But what is the sign is not for a chain but for an individual motel or restaurant? Then the sign has to convey everything.

This sign got me thinking about signs:

Cozy Cabins, Woodstock, New Brunswick
I love that and that isn't surprising because I was looking for nostalgia. That sign is a thing of beauty and it must have cost somebody plenty once upon a time. It must have been magnificent at night. It may still be, I only saw it during the day so I don't know if the neon still works.

But what is it selling? Right now the thing that stands out once you get past nostalgia is the blank piece of unfinished plywood on the bottom. That's where the features once were: "TV", "air conditioning", "magic fingers" whatever. All you have now is that they have cabins. You can't even say with any certainty that they are "cozy" in a good way. That's just the name of the place not a feature. Right now, the owners don't seem to have anything special to offer.

There are only two reasons to stop here now: either, like me, 1) you are attracting to old motels and want to visit as many of the vanishing breed as possible before they are gone forever, or 2) you are looking for the minimum footprint for the duration of a job you got in town.

Cozy Cabins is no longer on the main highway so you can't blame the owners. No one is going to see the sign anymore except for nostalgia hunters like me.

Town & Country, Fredericton, New Brunswick

Another beautiful sign. Neither this nor the previous sign is original or, rather, both are heavily indebted to the famous Holiday Inn sign. But who cares? If you are going to be influenced, you may as well be influenced by the best.

The "town and country" also has a certain cachet from the name. It speaks of a time when words like "regency" and "brougham" and "coupé" and "estate" all carried a sense of being part of the gentry and everyone aspired to that. Did the hotel itself ever have it? When I was a kid it did. There was something about this stretch of road down near the river that smacked of country gentry. Not anymore though.

Knight's Inn, Fredericton, New Brunswick

Knight's Inn is a cute pun. Too cute? Not for motels where cuteness such as "Dew Drop Inn" is long established as acceptable practice. Knight's Inn is also a chain but you get the feeling that they don't think their brand carries much value as the sign says it is much more important to them that you know it's a motel than which particular type.

No name motel somewhere in Gaspé, Québec

I forgot to make a  note of where I got this one. It carries the philosophy of the previous sign even further as the motel here has no name at all. For those of you who can't read French, the sign says that it's motel, that it's a truck stop, that there is a restaurant named Pastali and that there is Diesel. And that's all they give you to make up your mind.

Blue Moon, Saint Andrew's, New Brunswick

Looking at the Blue Moon it's hard to tell if it is still in business. OTOH, it has looked like this for years and years now. It actually looked a lot better this year than it did last time I saw it.

But that sure is a mighty pretty sign. The name was dreamed up in an era when everyone knew the song and that would have added something in its favour as you drove into town wondering where to stop. Like the Cozy Cabins above, the owners apparently don't think they have any features to pitch besides it's being a motel and having a nice name. And that may be all they need; I suspect there is always some business in Saint Andrew's.

Greenside, Saint Andrew's, New Brunswick

There is a famous hotel in Saint Andrew's that has a beautiful golf course. This isn't it. The Greenside doesn't have a golf course and doesn't claim to have one. It is actually beside the green? Not as far as I could see but you may want to stay here while in town to golf anyway. In any case, perhaps enough of the cachet that goes with golf will rub off to pull you in even if you're not a golfer.

Picket Fence Motel, Saint Andrew's, New Brunswick

Hey, truth in advertising! Why you can see the picket fence right there under the sign. And there are real flowers, a well-maintained cottage-style garden in fact, to back up any implicit claim made by the tulips (or daffodils perhaps) on the sign. And you'd want to stay here why? There may be lots of good reasons but none are noted on the sign. But, as I have already noted, that may not matter in a perennially popular destination such as Saint Andrew's.

In any case, love your sign.

Winsome Inn Motel, Saint Stephen, New Brunswick

"Winsome" means attractive or appealing and it's a word that used to be used to describe the kind of girl a boy could imagine falling in love with, as opposed to a beauty he could want but would never meet. But the telling thing here is that the owners are actually selling you features. They have a pool, queen beds, deluxe continental breakfast ( a concept that makes no sense as a "continental" breakfast means simple and unadorned), microwaves and fridges. Perhaps the most important details are the CAA approved and "newly renovated" which tell you that they have been putting money into the place. They don't have as much money as Best Western so you aren't going to get a giant bed with two bazillion count sheets and all sorts of other luxury but the place has been kept up and we can beat Best Western's price and you won't regret it.

In other words, this the only sign in the collection that is actually effectively selling you something.

Roadside attractions: Megan's

 When a government decides to move a road it alters a whole way of life. This isn't really new in human existence. Rivers have moved, although not often, and shorelines have eroded or silted up forcing people to close up shop and move. But we have never seen anything like the way governments can alter entire regional economies simply by building a new road, a bigger, better road, a quarter mile west of the old road.

Things like this happen:

The sign on the awning on the left says, "Megan's". That was the restaurant. The right side was a gas station with a small store. Between them, they probably provided a couple dozen jobs in a rural economy where jobs are scarce. They also represented individual investment. The gas station would have said "Esso", or "Gulf" or ""Shell" or some other big name but if you got closer you would have seen the sign that said it was "Bob's Esso" or some such thing. It was a franchise. Bob put his own money into it and he kept adding to his capital investment over the years.

In the last few decades Bob would have had increasing competition from huge new places built by large corporations with very large capital reserves and his place would have started to look shoddy by comparison.

But he still had the location and that enabled him to hold on.

Then the government moved the road and he no longer had a location of any worth. Then Bob and Megan and many others who had put their lives' work into building up and maintaining businesses along these roads folded up.

If you think I'm being sentimental, you're right. I don't want to make some pity plea here. Service industries have to offer service and if their competitors can offer better that's that. But no one cares much about what happens in some rural area like this. And governments are huge artificial factors here and when they do something like build a new road, they speed up the upheaval.

Maybe even for the good. Sometimes some real creep has cornered some local market by getting the only prime location early and has long used his financial and political power to dominate locals in unpleasant ways. Even if the existing owner was a good person, they may not have put much capital into the business and quality and service may have lagged. Mind you, the price of that is that Megan's gets replaced by Subway or Burger King or some other larger company. That brings gains but you also lose something. The new road may as well be pretty much anywhere because it looks just like a divided highway pretty much anywhere.

But, whatever happens, a new road really stirs things up. And it always reduces the number of local jobs. The new highway is bigger and people drive faster and stop less often.

And we just float by someone's hard work in ruins and we don't even think about it much. You can't and shouldn't stop these things but there is something to regret hear.

And there is something to get nostalgic about.

Nostalgia

This photo turns out to be the key to my whole trip. It was kind of like Blow Up because I took it for one purpose and then discovered another in it. Unlike that old movie, the more I looked, the more I saw. Here is the photo, you can click on it to see it larger:

I took the picture casually, uncaringly and  initially because of the rock cut you can see in the background. That rock cut is progress. They are making that cut to put in a new divided highway some distance to the west of the present one. It's further away than the photo makes it seem. They have to do this because people have bought up property along both sides of the present two lane highway, which has been in place (with straightening an other improvements) since my mother was a girl. Ironically, many of the property owners who were too expensive to expropriate will be driven out of business when the road moves. The old road will still be in place but the traffic on it will largely disappear and so will a lot of gas stations, restaurants and motels.

The rest stop where I took the photo, and I place I always stop at, will also disappear. These things are going anyway, mostly because our politicians are too spineless to stop out-of-control litigation but that is a subject for another day.

Look at aesthetics here. That building in the foreground is the original and it is built in a style that derives from old Adirondack camps. Here is a side view:

It's probably because of Teddy Roosevelt that this style spread to park facilities, summer camps, campgrounds, cottages and camps all over in North America.

The first thing to catch my eye, though, was the camper:

That's a vintage thing, there were campers like that when I first came to this rest stop with my family as a little boy. (Nowadays the only people who still seem to have them are fishermen.) The camper made a bigger impression on me than the building because it moves. That it was there was more powerful than a building that could be, and soon will be, locked up and left over because it's too much trouble to tear down. The camper represents a way of living that someone is still pushing, like a failing Christian denomination that still has a few older members.

What is the dividing line between traditions like stopping at this old rest stop and religious experience? I feel compelled to stop, like I would wandering off the way like a failed follower of Tao if I didn't stop. At the same time, I can see all this stuff melting away like so much superstition, like a false religion (as I too am melting away like grass that springs up at dawn and withers by the afternoon sun. But then there was that camper like a sign. And that became the theme. The past is hiding in clear view in the present. And I looked for it everywhere I went.