Williams announced the grand-jury indictment of one of former Archbishop Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua's top aides for allegedly endangering children by shielding pedophile priests from detection and shuffling them into unsuspecting parishes where they could continue the perversions of which they are accused.I have to say I am happy to see this and hope there are more such indictments.
It's believed to be the first time a high-ranking Catholic official has been accused of being criminally accountable for covering up priest abuse.
Friday, February 11, 2011
Cover-up prosecuted
I see that some in the Catholic blogosphere are unhappy about the following:
Three pictures
It was visit day today so the next, and final, Philadelphia Story post will have to wait til Monday.
Meanwhile some shots of things that caught my interest walking downtown on the way to bus from my visit.
This is, don't you think, an interesting pitch for selling jeans. Once upon a time, some "cool" pastors tried to use jeans to sell religion. It didn't work. Apparently the opposite approach does. And what could "true" mean in this context? And why is he holding his T-shirt like that? Is it just me or does this ad seem like it's aimed at boys who like other boys?
The temptation is to ask when sexy went away but maybe they have a point. I mean, we keep hearing that "sex sells" but it is odd how much money and effort is spent selling sex. That applies to the first picture above too.
This is significant because it admits something that neither the people who promote porn nor the people who so desperately want to ban it never admit and that is that most porn is really boring. It seems to be the case that if you drain sex of everything that makes it human and meaningful it can sometimes be boring. Who would have guessed? (That backwards "k" is a fine example of cutting edge graphic design.)
You might not guess but The Prowlers and The Rookers and Jenny Woo are all bands and not ultimate fighting teams. I love the bit at the bottom where it says "no weapons". Punching people in the face is just fine but leave the shiv at home please.
I'm also shocked to see that there is no minority representation in this poster. Someone might almost get the impression that Oi music is all about racism and hate. Oh wait ...
Meanwhile some shots of things that caught my interest walking downtown on the way to bus from my visit.
This is, don't you think, an interesting pitch for selling jeans. Once upon a time, some "cool" pastors tried to use jeans to sell religion. It didn't work. Apparently the opposite approach does. And what could "true" mean in this context? And why is he holding his T-shirt like that? Is it just me or does this ad seem like it's aimed at boys who like other boys?
The temptation is to ask when sexy went away but maybe they have a point. I mean, we keep hearing that "sex sells" but it is odd how much money and effort is spent selling sex. That applies to the first picture above too.
This is significant because it admits something that neither the people who promote porn nor the people who so desperately want to ban it never admit and that is that most porn is really boring. It seems to be the case that if you drain sex of everything that makes it human and meaningful it can sometimes be boring. Who would have guessed? (That backwards "k" is a fine example of cutting edge graphic design.)
You might not guess but The Prowlers and The Rookers and Jenny Woo are all bands and not ultimate fighting teams. I love the bit at the bottom where it says "no weapons". Punching people in the face is just fine but leave the shiv at home please.
I'm also shocked to see that there is no minority representation in this poster. Someone might almost get the impression that Oi music is all about racism and hate. Oh wait ...
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Trusting the experts
Susan Sontag once said an astomishingly true thing:
Looking back, I often think about sex experts. If I imagine the preposterous case of a guy who read only those awful got-game seduction manuals for the last twenty years, and another guy who read only the responsible advice from experts, I have a horrible sinking feeling about who would do better at actually relating to women. Because as Neanderthal as those guys are, and they are, stuff like this does keep turning up to vindicate them.
Imagine the preposterous case of somebody who read only the Reader's Digest between 1950 and 1970, and somebody else who read only The Nation between 1950 and 1970. Who would be getting more truth about the nature of Communism? There's no doubt it would have been the Reader's Digest reader.That upset a lot of people but it's true.
Looking back, I often think about sex experts. If I imagine the preposterous case of a guy who read only those awful got-game seduction manuals for the last twenty years, and another guy who read only the responsible advice from experts, I have a horrible sinking feeling about who would do better at actually relating to women. Because as Neanderthal as those guys are, and they are, stuff like this does keep turning up to vindicate them.
Charity?
I got a pitch from a charity I sometimes support today. This is what the headline said:
How did we ever get to the point that we think this way? To thinking that charity was about others deserving what we presumably have ourselves?
Even a desperate poor child deserves a little happinessThat is so weird. Even? and deserves?
How did we ever get to the point that we think this way? To thinking that charity was about others deserving what we presumably have ourselves?
The Philadelphia Story (5)
Yare?
Do you want to be yare? It's spelled that way by the way. It rhymes with "are" and that is probably why most websites discussing the movie spell it incorrectly. It's been the curse of many a movie fan who has gone looking for "yar" in the dictionary and found nothing.
I guess the answer to the question would depend a lot on what we think "yare" means. Don't feel too bad, I don't think Philip Barry was entirely certain either. Here is the definition he has Tracy give in the play/movie:
I suppose it's okay to say that sort of thing about a boat and it would be a compliment but not about a woman. Or would you? The "dry rot" bit is rather harsh and vulgar really. Only a pig of man would say such a thing but perhaps it is different when a woman says it? But what of the rest of the definition, the part we might take to be a compliment? Well, it's tricky isn't it?
If we were talking about sex it would be easier but we're not talking about sex in The Philadelphia Story. Or, to be more precise about it, we're not talking only or even primarily about sex. Sex is certainly there but the thing that daunts Tracy so is not exclusive to sex but rather applies to her whole life.
It might also be acceptable to say a woman was yare on the dance floor if we were doing ballroom dancing. A woman who moves lightly and easily and responds quickly is everything a dancer should be. But you wouldn't want those qualities in a woman running a business, conducting a research project or raising a child. And I'm absolutely certain you wouldn't want those qualities in the woman you were going to unite yourself to for the rest of your life. You'd want her to be able to do that in some situations but there are other times when you want her to be pigheaded and stubborn about how she stands up to you even to the point that you might not appreciate it so much at first.
Class boats. Very upper class.
I do hope my gentle readers will forgive me if I assume that, like Mike Connor, you don't know what a class boat is? Even most sailors will get it wrong. Ask them and they will tell you about something called a one-design class and that is not what Dexter designs, builds and owns.
Most large sailboats are raced according to a handicapping system. A bunch of parameters are put into an algorithm and a number comes out and that denotes the expected performance relative to other boats. To win you have to do better against the expected performance of your boat than the other guys do relative to the expected performance of their boats. The tortoise only has to move fast for a tortoise, he doesn't need to be faster than the hare. This way, everyone can bring the boat they want to the race. It makes sense, as yachts are terribly expensive, that you pick the type that suits you rather than buying a boat that is specifically for racing.
In class boat racing, all the boats are designed so that they have the same handicap. To win you have to be first over the finishing line and every other boat is a Cheetah. It's a no compromise approach that, generally speaking, only very rich people can afford. In fact, nowadays bigger class boats are owned by syndicates and sponsored by advertising. The day when individuals could afford to own such things is mostly over.
But here is the thing, a class boat is quick and responsive but no one would call them easy to handle. Sailing one is like riding a tiger; in a breeze they will give you a white knuckle ride you'll never forget. They are brutally unforgiving boats. "Unforgiving" meaning that if you make a mistake you are likely to end up wet and perhaps much poorer.
Which yare is the yare that we really want?
Yare could mean different things in different contexts. Forget about boats for a while and think about cars because more people have experience with cars. You could call a sports car yare in that it responds quickly and you can feel every sway or bump in the road. But on a long trip you might not want that. It would get kind of tiring after a while. On the other hand, a car that was too easy to handle might get boring.
And which kind of yare was the True Love? We get a hint when Dexter says:
(None of which he regrets and that opens up an interesting sidebar: so it's okay to enjoy yourself a bit when a drunken woman responds to your sexual overtures but you're supposed to draw a line somewhere. So where exactly is that somewhere? Mike admits to kissing but he pressed himself up against her, which had to feel good, and he got a squeeze or two in and maybe ... well they did change into bathing suits, maybe he got a little more specific about what and where he squeezed and, gentleman that he is, he is leaving that out of his report. It's a fascinating question isn't it? And it's a different question for, say, three women discussing it while working their way through a bottle of Pinot Gris than it is for a couple of men bragging over scotch? And it would be a different question again in front of a judge and jury wouldn't it?)
I promised to say more about language today but I'm not going to get to it just yet. I started on this yare thing and it seems more important. (Someone asked me the other day, "I'll be interested to see where you go with this?" Well, so will I.)
Another thing I said yesterday is that the movie is rather easy on men. We never get any notion that men might be expected to be yare. The men in this movie win Tracy's favour by being, well, by being father figures. Even Mike, who kisses her, must be the responsible one when they are both drunk to win her deepest appreciation. At the same time, however, these men all do rather caddish things that no one holds them to account for and that is troubling. It bothers me anyway.
But it matters less than it might because this is really a movie about women. It's about a particular kind of woman, a woman who aspires to and achieves class. Difficult word class. For the most part people who have it don't use it, at least not in a positive sense. The women I know who actually have it only use the word ironically when referring to women who don't.
Class is exclusive and we don't like to be exclusive. We spend a lot of time telling ourselves not to think of ourselves as better than others and we spend a lot of time trying to be better than others. For women, it's a particularly daunting proposition. A woman who achieves the sort of virtue that would justify distinguishing her in this way is often brought down a peg by being called cold, or hard or distant or unforgiving.
She gets called that by guys who feel rejected and intimidated by her.
But here is an odd puzzle for you. Millions of people love The Philadelphia Story. For approximately 110 minutes we watch the rather hard Tracy and love her. And then, in the last two minutes, Tracy promises she will be different from now on. Is that really what we want of her? Did Mike fall in love with a woman who promised to be easy to handle? Did we?
Do you want to be yare? It's spelled that way by the way. It rhymes with "are" and that is probably why most websites discussing the movie spell it incorrectly. It's been the curse of many a movie fan who has gone looking for "yar" in the dictionary and found nothing.
I guess the answer to the question would depend a lot on what we think "yare" means. Don't feel too bad, I don't think Philip Barry was entirely certain either. Here is the definition he has Tracy give in the play/movie:
"my, she was yare... it means, uh... easy to handle, quick to the helm, fast, right. everything a boat should be, until she develops dry rot."Here is what Oxford says:
(of a ship) moving lightly and easily, easily manageable.
I suppose it's okay to say that sort of thing about a boat and it would be a compliment but not about a woman. Or would you? The "dry rot" bit is rather harsh and vulgar really. Only a pig of man would say such a thing but perhaps it is different when a woman says it? But what of the rest of the definition, the part we might take to be a compliment? Well, it's tricky isn't it?
If we were talking about sex it would be easier but we're not talking about sex in The Philadelphia Story. Or, to be more precise about it, we're not talking only or even primarily about sex. Sex is certainly there but the thing that daunts Tracy so is not exclusive to sex but rather applies to her whole life.
It might also be acceptable to say a woman was yare on the dance floor if we were doing ballroom dancing. A woman who moves lightly and easily and responds quickly is everything a dancer should be. But you wouldn't want those qualities in a woman running a business, conducting a research project or raising a child. And I'm absolutely certain you wouldn't want those qualities in the woman you were going to unite yourself to for the rest of your life. You'd want her to be able to do that in some situations but there are other times when you want her to be pigheaded and stubborn about how she stands up to you even to the point that you might not appreciate it so much at first.
Class boats. Very upper class.
I do hope my gentle readers will forgive me if I assume that, like Mike Connor, you don't know what a class boat is? Even most sailors will get it wrong. Ask them and they will tell you about something called a one-design class and that is not what Dexter designs, builds and owns.
Most large sailboats are raced according to a handicapping system. A bunch of parameters are put into an algorithm and a number comes out and that denotes the expected performance relative to other boats. To win you have to do better against the expected performance of your boat than the other guys do relative to the expected performance of their boats. The tortoise only has to move fast for a tortoise, he doesn't need to be faster than the hare. This way, everyone can bring the boat they want to the race. It makes sense, as yachts are terribly expensive, that you pick the type that suits you rather than buying a boat that is specifically for racing.
In class boat racing, all the boats are designed so that they have the same handicap. To win you have to be first over the finishing line and every other boat is a Cheetah. It's a no compromise approach that, generally speaking, only very rich people can afford. In fact, nowadays bigger class boats are owned by syndicates and sponsored by advertising. The day when individuals could afford to own such things is mostly over.
But here is the thing, a class boat is quick and responsive but no one would call them easy to handle. Sailing one is like riding a tiger; in a breeze they will give you a white knuckle ride you'll never forget. They are brutally unforgiving boats. "Unforgiving" meaning that if you make a mistake you are likely to end up wet and perhaps much poorer.
Which yare is the yare that we really want?
Yare could mean different things in different contexts. Forget about boats for a while and think about cars because more people have experience with cars. You could call a sports car yare in that it responds quickly and you can feel every sway or bump in the road. But on a long trip you might not want that. It would get kind of tiring after a while. On the other hand, a car that was too easy to handle might get boring.
And which kind of yare was the True Love? We get a hint when Dexter says:
Well, I'm designing another one anyway, along more practical lines.Except that practical doesn't quite sound like true love does it? Would you love Tracy Samantha Lord if she were altered so as to be along more practical lines? Miss Pomeroy 1926 is certainly different from the Tracy we've seen up until then but no one would call her practical and neither George nor Mike find Miss Pomeroy 1926 "easy to handle"—although Mike does get to do some "handling".
(None of which he regrets and that opens up an interesting sidebar: so it's okay to enjoy yourself a bit when a drunken woman responds to your sexual overtures but you're supposed to draw a line somewhere. So where exactly is that somewhere? Mike admits to kissing but he pressed himself up against her, which had to feel good, and he got a squeeze or two in and maybe ... well they did change into bathing suits, maybe he got a little more specific about what and where he squeezed and, gentleman that he is, he is leaving that out of his report. It's a fascinating question isn't it? And it's a different question for, say, three women discussing it while working their way through a bottle of Pinot Gris than it is for a couple of men bragging over scotch? And it would be a different question again in front of a judge and jury wouldn't it?)
I promised to say more about language today but I'm not going to get to it just yet. I started on this yare thing and it seems more important. (Someone asked me the other day, "I'll be interested to see where you go with this?" Well, so will I.)
Another thing I said yesterday is that the movie is rather easy on men. We never get any notion that men might be expected to be yare. The men in this movie win Tracy's favour by being, well, by being father figures. Even Mike, who kisses her, must be the responsible one when they are both drunk to win her deepest appreciation. At the same time, however, these men all do rather caddish things that no one holds them to account for and that is troubling. It bothers me anyway.
But it matters less than it might because this is really a movie about women. It's about a particular kind of woman, a woman who aspires to and achieves class. Difficult word class. For the most part people who have it don't use it, at least not in a positive sense. The women I know who actually have it only use the word ironically when referring to women who don't.
Class is exclusive and we don't like to be exclusive. We spend a lot of time telling ourselves not to think of ourselves as better than others and we spend a lot of time trying to be better than others. For women, it's a particularly daunting proposition. A woman who achieves the sort of virtue that would justify distinguishing her in this way is often brought down a peg by being called cold, or hard or distant or unforgiving.
She gets called that by guys who feel rejected and intimidated by her.
But here is an odd puzzle for you. Millions of people love The Philadelphia Story. For approximately 110 minutes we watch the rather hard Tracy and love her. And then, in the last two minutes, Tracy promises she will be different from now on. Is that really what we want of her? Did Mike fall in love with a woman who promised to be easy to handle? Did we?
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
The Philadelphia Story (4)
What fresh genre is this?
If we try and place The Philadelphia Story in a genre we are faced with an embarrassment of riches. It fits into a number of likely slots.
It could, for example, be a remarriage story. These were popular at the time and both Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn had hits with other movies in that genre. Grant had already starred in a wonderful movie called The Awful Truth and Hepburn would later do the good but over-rated Adam's Rib. And Tracy and Dexter do get divorced and remarried but it doesn't fit the type quite because the movie is all about one side. In a remarriage movie both the wife and the husband have to change to get back together.
An odd thing about The Philadelphia Story is how ridiculously easy it is on the men. Dexter, Seth and Mike have a lot to apologize and make up for but none of them ever do. Tracy left Dexter for very good reasons; he was an alcoholic and he beat her. And the case against her father is also rock solid. He really did have an affair with chorus girl and he never apologizes for having done so. In fact, the movie features one of the most morally insane arguments to ever make it to the big screen wherein Seth Lord tells Tracy that he is having the affair because she wasn't a good enough daughter. Fortunately, this isn't a very important plot point or else it would ruin the movie.
(Mike, meanwhile, treats Liz shoddily but never even sees that he has done so never mind apologize for it.)
The movie instead is almost entirely about its heroine and that is maybe the first hint about the genre it actually fits into.
Before going there, one more false trail. And that is the bring-the-big-people-down-to-earth genre. This stems from 1870 when one of most prominent preachers in the country, a man named Henry Ward Beecher, got messed up with another man's wife. The thing that made the Beecher-Tilton scandal fascinating to the public was not the scandal but the ongoing revelations about the real lives of the rich and famous; it was seeing the socially exalted revealed as silly and frivolous people.
Again, Hollywood made a genre out of this. The best is a probably movie called It Happened One Night in which Claudette Colbert plays a spoiled rich girl who learns about life by running into a hard-nosed reporter played by Clark Gable. "Just what she needed," we say, "to be dragged out of her cocoon and forced to deal with real-life problems. " And The Philadelphia Story starts off looking like that only Macauley Connor suddenly discovers that the rich girl is actually pretty special.
So what is it then?
I think this movie is the closest that Hollywood has ever come to producing a Jane Austen type story. And it comes so close it breaks my heart to think that Philip Barry wasted his life trying to produce capital-A "art" when he could have been doing more of these.
What makes it a Jane Austen type of story? Lots of stuff.
I'll begin with the setting. The story is set in a big house with an absent father. The big four Austen stories feature this touch. Mr. Dashwood is dead in Sense and Sensibility, Mr. Bennet is hiding from reality in his library in Pride and Prejudice, Sir Thomas Bertram is away dealing with his properties in the West Indies in Mansfield Park, and Mr. Woodhouse is off in a world of his own in Emma.
That absent father is crucial because his not being there allows the social order of the house to get out of control. Jane Austen's mothers, like Margaret Lord in The Philadelphia Story tend to be silly and ineffectual. And the female lead in these stories is always looking for something like a father figure. They seek an emotionally stable figure who values the same sort of life project they do. One of the powerful indications that this is what is really being sought is that there is zero sexual chemistry between Dexter and Tracy in this movie.
Next, it's a story about marriage and not about falling love. Austen's novels have been described as marriageship stories and not the courtship stories they often are taken to be. The universal failing of TV and movie adaptations is that they try to make them into love and courtship stories. The lack of sexual chemistry between Hepburn and Grant here is, oddly enough, what makes it work. It isn't that they aren't capable of it, it's that the story is about something else and that something else is working out how to be married together. This is true in real life as well, by the way, it's much easier to fall in love than to work your way around to what it takes to make a marriage work.
(Again, if you don't believe me, watch the remake. Again, there is little or no sexual chemistry on screen between Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly who play the lead parts in High Society. But they were certainly capable of it because they were having a torrid affair during the filming of the movie. It's a marriage and pursuit of happiness story, not a love and sex story*.)
The next thing crucial to an Austen-type story is a Shakespearean touch (one of several). The thing that differentiates class in this story is language. Next time you watch the movie, notice how much the first time Tracy encounters Mike and Liz is like Hamlet with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Tracy, like Hamlet, is pretending to be crazy and a weird sort of duel ensues in which she outmatches them completely in the use of language. I'll say more about this tomorrow, but neither Tracy nor Dexter ever fail with language. They speak an elegant, expressive and powerful language and that is what marks them as superior.
Another Shakespearean element that Austen uses is the contrasting world. In Shakespeare it is the court and the forest and Austen does that herself quite wonderfully in Mansfield Park in a scene where the characters run around the forest running into one another. She also does it with London, however, in Sense and Sensibility which serves as a contrast to the big house. The purpose of this contrasting world is that the rules and rigid social structures that hold in the first world are absent and characters keep matching up with others they normally would not.
In the movie the contrasting world is a special type like the forest in A Midsummer Night's Dream. It is a land where magic potions change people and here the magic potion is alcohol. The magic forest is the land of drunkenness and Tracy and Mike enter it. And it really is a magical world like the forest in A Midsummer Night's Dream. If you don't believe me, check the times. Notice when Tracy and Mike leave the party and all the things that are supposed to happen between then and sunrise. There simply isn't enough time left for everything that does happen in the real world. It is only because everyone enters a magical world and they keep meeting up in different parts of this enchanted forest that it does happen.
And then they all return and the world goes back to normal but the people in it have changed.
The final Shakespearean touch typical of Austen is the changing partners. The couples get flipped around and, in so doing, our heroine gets an opportunity for some valuable self knowledge.
And that, of course, leads into another crucial Austen touch. The successful resolution of an Austen novel always turns on virtue gained through better self knowledge.
Tomorrow, all about Tracy Samantha Lord, the magnificent character who makes this movie work.
* The most telling example of how Hollywood just doesn't get this is The Jane Austen Book Club. In it a bunch of people join a book club that reads only Jane Austen and the movie draws a parallel between each individual character and the book she or he presents at the club gathering. It almost works right up until the end. The last scenes, however, feature people tearing their clothes off and jumping into bed together. You couldn't get Austen more wrong if you tried. Even sea monsters make more sense in the plot than that.
If we try and place The Philadelphia Story in a genre we are faced with an embarrassment of riches. It fits into a number of likely slots.
It could, for example, be a remarriage story. These were popular at the time and both Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn had hits with other movies in that genre. Grant had already starred in a wonderful movie called The Awful Truth and Hepburn would later do the good but over-rated Adam's Rib. And Tracy and Dexter do get divorced and remarried but it doesn't fit the type quite because the movie is all about one side. In a remarriage movie both the wife and the husband have to change to get back together.
An odd thing about The Philadelphia Story is how ridiculously easy it is on the men. Dexter, Seth and Mike have a lot to apologize and make up for but none of them ever do. Tracy left Dexter for very good reasons; he was an alcoholic and he beat her. And the case against her father is also rock solid. He really did have an affair with chorus girl and he never apologizes for having done so. In fact, the movie features one of the most morally insane arguments to ever make it to the big screen wherein Seth Lord tells Tracy that he is having the affair because she wasn't a good enough daughter. Fortunately, this isn't a very important plot point or else it would ruin the movie.
(Mike, meanwhile, treats Liz shoddily but never even sees that he has done so never mind apologize for it.)
The movie instead is almost entirely about its heroine and that is maybe the first hint about the genre it actually fits into.
Before going there, one more false trail. And that is the bring-the-big-people-down-to-earth genre. This stems from 1870 when one of most prominent preachers in the country, a man named Henry Ward Beecher, got messed up with another man's wife. The thing that made the Beecher-Tilton scandal fascinating to the public was not the scandal but the ongoing revelations about the real lives of the rich and famous; it was seeing the socially exalted revealed as silly and frivolous people.
Again, Hollywood made a genre out of this. The best is a probably movie called It Happened One Night in which Claudette Colbert plays a spoiled rich girl who learns about life by running into a hard-nosed reporter played by Clark Gable. "Just what she needed," we say, "to be dragged out of her cocoon and forced to deal with real-life problems. " And The Philadelphia Story starts off looking like that only Macauley Connor suddenly discovers that the rich girl is actually pretty special.
So what is it then?
I think this movie is the closest that Hollywood has ever come to producing a Jane Austen type story. And it comes so close it breaks my heart to think that Philip Barry wasted his life trying to produce capital-A "art" when he could have been doing more of these.
What makes it a Jane Austen type of story? Lots of stuff.
I'll begin with the setting. The story is set in a big house with an absent father. The big four Austen stories feature this touch. Mr. Dashwood is dead in Sense and Sensibility, Mr. Bennet is hiding from reality in his library in Pride and Prejudice, Sir Thomas Bertram is away dealing with his properties in the West Indies in Mansfield Park, and Mr. Woodhouse is off in a world of his own in Emma.
That absent father is crucial because his not being there allows the social order of the house to get out of control. Jane Austen's mothers, like Margaret Lord in The Philadelphia Story tend to be silly and ineffectual. And the female lead in these stories is always looking for something like a father figure. They seek an emotionally stable figure who values the same sort of life project they do. One of the powerful indications that this is what is really being sought is that there is zero sexual chemistry between Dexter and Tracy in this movie.
Next, it's a story about marriage and not about falling love. Austen's novels have been described as marriageship stories and not the courtship stories they often are taken to be. The universal failing of TV and movie adaptations is that they try to make them into love and courtship stories. The lack of sexual chemistry between Hepburn and Grant here is, oddly enough, what makes it work. It isn't that they aren't capable of it, it's that the story is about something else and that something else is working out how to be married together. This is true in real life as well, by the way, it's much easier to fall in love than to work your way around to what it takes to make a marriage work.
(Again, if you don't believe me, watch the remake. Again, there is little or no sexual chemistry on screen between Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly who play the lead parts in High Society. But they were certainly capable of it because they were having a torrid affair during the filming of the movie. It's a marriage and pursuit of happiness story, not a love and sex story*.)
The next thing crucial to an Austen-type story is a Shakespearean touch (one of several). The thing that differentiates class in this story is language. Next time you watch the movie, notice how much the first time Tracy encounters Mike and Liz is like Hamlet with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Tracy, like Hamlet, is pretending to be crazy and a weird sort of duel ensues in which she outmatches them completely in the use of language. I'll say more about this tomorrow, but neither Tracy nor Dexter ever fail with language. They speak an elegant, expressive and powerful language and that is what marks them as superior.
Another Shakespearean element that Austen uses is the contrasting world. In Shakespeare it is the court and the forest and Austen does that herself quite wonderfully in Mansfield Park in a scene where the characters run around the forest running into one another. She also does it with London, however, in Sense and Sensibility which serves as a contrast to the big house. The purpose of this contrasting world is that the rules and rigid social structures that hold in the first world are absent and characters keep matching up with others they normally would not.
In the movie the contrasting world is a special type like the forest in A Midsummer Night's Dream. It is a land where magic potions change people and here the magic potion is alcohol. The magic forest is the land of drunkenness and Tracy and Mike enter it. And it really is a magical world like the forest in A Midsummer Night's Dream. If you don't believe me, check the times. Notice when Tracy and Mike leave the party and all the things that are supposed to happen between then and sunrise. There simply isn't enough time left for everything that does happen in the real world. It is only because everyone enters a magical world and they keep meeting up in different parts of this enchanted forest that it does happen.
And then they all return and the world goes back to normal but the people in it have changed.
The final Shakespearean touch typical of Austen is the changing partners. The couples get flipped around and, in so doing, our heroine gets an opportunity for some valuable self knowledge.
And that, of course, leads into another crucial Austen touch. The successful resolution of an Austen novel always turns on virtue gained through better self knowledge.
Tomorrow, all about Tracy Samantha Lord, the magnificent character who makes this movie work.
* The most telling example of how Hollywood just doesn't get this is The Jane Austen Book Club. In it a bunch of people join a book club that reads only Jane Austen and the movie draws a parallel between each individual character and the book she or he presents at the club gathering. It almost works right up until the end. The last scenes, however, feature people tearing their clothes off and jumping into bed together. You couldn't get Austen more wrong if you tried. Even sea monsters make more sense in the plot than that.
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
The Philadelphia Story (3)
Fires within
There is a sort of grid we bring to movies, plays and books when we put on our critic hat. And we all put on a critic hat when we try to explain a movie like The Philadelphia Story. When sitting there in the dark we don't need to explain it. It's just us and the movie and my how we love it.
Anyway, let's get back to the grid. It goes something like this. "There is a character and she has a flaw and she must overcome her flaw to have a happy ending or not overcome it and have a tragedy." And this movie encourages us to understand it that way. We are told, point blank, that Tracy Samantha Lord has a flaw and here it is in the words of CK Dexter-Haven:
Because Tracy Samantha Lord is a first class woman and she is a first class human being and she is that from the beginning. And "class" is the right word here.
A great essay I read on Edith Wharton once talked about the status of words. They all seem more less equal in a list but in a story some words acquire incredible importance and in this movie the word "class" has a whole lot of power and Tracy has it. She seems to have it in two senses: in one sense she is magnificent and we all want to be here and in another sense she is part of a class we know we can't be part of and we want to knock her out of it.
You don't believe me? Well, watch it again, and pay special attention to the drunken scene after the party where Mike and Tracy are alone together. For that is the transformational scene. It is what happens there that enables Tracy to change. It is there that she comes face to face with something about herself that is crucial to her happiness. When you watch it again, ask yourself, is the thing she needs to face her own human frailty? Because I think you will see in that clip that Tracy's real need is for something else altogether.
I don't think it is that at all. I think that what Tracy needs to face is her own womanly magnificence. And it's not just me, the movie itself has two competing lines. You can see them both in the clip linked below. Right up until about 2:44, it's all about human frailty and then everything suddenly shifts and Mike tells Tracy about something in her that is not human frailty at all. Which of the two is it that she really needs to be told? Watch it yourself and tell me.
There is a sort of grid we bring to movies, plays and books when we put on our critic hat. And we all put on a critic hat when we try to explain a movie like The Philadelphia Story. When sitting there in the dark we don't need to explain it. It's just us and the movie and my how we love it.
Anyway, let's get back to the grid. It goes something like this. "There is a character and she has a flaw and she must overcome her flaw to have a happy ending or not overcome it and have a tragedy." And this movie encourages us to understand it that way. We are told, point blank, that Tracy Samantha Lord has a flaw and here it is in the words of CK Dexter-Haven:
You'll never be a first class human being or a first class woman until you've learned to have some regard for human frailty.And one way to explain the movie is to take that at face value. It's no way to watch the movie though. No one sitting alone in the dark and forgetting themselves as this movie and its heroine washes over them sees it that way.
Because Tracy Samantha Lord is a first class woman and she is a first class human being and she is that from the beginning. And "class" is the right word here.
A great essay I read on Edith Wharton once talked about the status of words. They all seem more less equal in a list but in a story some words acquire incredible importance and in this movie the word "class" has a whole lot of power and Tracy has it. She seems to have it in two senses: in one sense she is magnificent and we all want to be here and in another sense she is part of a class we know we can't be part of and we want to knock her out of it.
You don't believe me? Well, watch it again, and pay special attention to the drunken scene after the party where Mike and Tracy are alone together. For that is the transformational scene. It is what happens there that enables Tracy to change. It is there that she comes face to face with something about herself that is crucial to her happiness. When you watch it again, ask yourself, is the thing she needs to face her own human frailty? Because I think you will see in that clip that Tracy's real need is for something else altogether.
I don't think it is that at all. I think that what Tracy needs to face is her own womanly magnificence. And it's not just me, the movie itself has two competing lines. You can see them both in the clip linked below. Right up until about 2:44, it's all about human frailty and then everything suddenly shifts and Mike tells Tracy about something in her that is not human frailty at all. Which of the two is it that she really needs to be told? Watch it yourself and tell me.
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