Manly Thor's Day special

Blood Simple: the manliness lesson
"To really get a movie like this, I think you have turn around and watch the audience watching it. See yourself in the dark watching and figure out why this stuff resonates."


My thesis—which is a highfallutin way of saying the thing I keep coming back to—is that neo noir films have something to say about the challenges of being a man since 1980. And Blood Simple seems to me to be a great movie for that. Not for anything it says on purpose but for the things that just slip in.

After the narrated bit I discussed in the previous post, we get a dialogue between two people in a car. There has been a lot of commentary about the men in this movie and what their behaviour indicates. But pay attention to the woman here. Men often complain that women send mixed messages about sex but, I have often contended, a woman who sends mixed messages about sex is normal. The woman in this scene does something else. Something that is all too common today but rarely gets much criticism. As a man, you want to be able to recognize this behaviour pattern so you can get the hell out when you see it.

As I say, things go deeply wrong in this movie and lots of people have commented about the ways the male characters contribute to that going wrong. But this woman is trouble, real serious trouble. Our sense of charity tends to lead us to thing that she is just troubled but you don't want any part of her life.

Manly Thor's Day special

Neo noir: Blood Simple
(I am on vacation and the first post of the day keeps getting later and later ... )

The title from this one comes from Dashiell Hammett.

"If I don't get away soon I'll be going blood simple like the natives. I've arranged a killing or two in my time, when they were necessary. But this is the first time I've ever got the fever"

Hammett's ultimate objectives were political. He was a communist and he believed that the seeming surface order masked a deeper imbalance in human affairs. So, as much as the observation above may look like a comment on human psychology, it's really a comment about the ideology of capitalism.

Yes, I know: BORING!!!

And that is why nobody reads Hammett much anymore.

But suppose you took the politics out of it. Suppose you just had a bunch of Hammett-like characters floating along aimlessly in a world that made no sense? That is what the Coen brothers do and they tell us so in so many words at the opening of their very first movie. As Blood Simple opens we have big pan shots of Texas and, classic noir image, oil derricks accompanied by a classic noir narration. But read what the voice says:

The world is full of complainers. But the fact is, nothing comes with a guarantee. I don't care if you're the Pope of Rome, President of the United States, or even Man of the Year—something can always go wrong. And go ahead, complain, tell your problems to your neighbor, ask for help—watch him fly. Now in Russia, they got it mapped out so that everyone pulls for everyone else-- that's the theory, anyway. But what I know about is Texas ... and down here... you're on your own.

We don't know who is saying this and I'm going to leave it that way. Just think of those words. There is a very clear disavowal of Hammett going on here despite his having inspired the title.

Here is another way to think about all this. Suppose liberalism lost its favourite explanation. Although most liberals are not and never were Marxists, they did buy the theory of capitalism and its discontents being at the root of everything. But suppose they lost that and all they had was the art that had been built on that ideology. Then you'd get movies like the ones the Coen brothers make. Beautiful, artfully crafted movies with nothing at their core. Movies that are inspired by a deep love of movies and of movie-making but movies that show very little affection for humanity.

These are movies in which things do, as our narrator hints, go deeply, deeply wrong but without any real explanation as to why. The Coen brothers dodge this by setting movies in places like Texas and Fargo. That is to say, places sophisticated movie-goers can see as far away and foreign. For this is a movie not so much about a world gone wrong but about a world that no longer makes sense to good liberals and it's a good thing to have it all happen over there someplace.

To really get a movie like this, I think you have turn around and watch the audience watching it. See yourself in the dark watching and figure out why this stuff resonates. More to come ...

Studiously uncool fly fishing

Every once in a while, I wonder if all this new technology is really worth it.

An uncle of mine left me all his old fishing stuff including several really nice bamboo fly rods. He also left me one rod of absolutely no distinction. That is the one I want to talk about here.

It's a True Temper rod in fiberglass from the 1960s. I'm not sure how my uncle came by it. All his other rods are custom built bamboo and all his reels are House of Hardy (including a Cascapedia so eat heart out). And then there is this one cheapy model probably purchased from a hardware store. True Temper also made my wheelbarrow just so you get an idea of what kind of provenance we are talking about here. Maybe he was on a business trip and decided to fish on an afternoon he had off and bought something cheap because his gear was at home. Or maybe he kept it for taking other nephews fishing who that he didn't trust with his expensive bamboo. I don't know.

I do know that he kept it around from the 1960s until the day he died in the 1990s, so maybe he liked it. Maybe it was the rod he kept in the trunk as he drove around just in case he saw a little stream he wanted to try.

It's a seven-foot rod for five-weight line. That's what I reckon anyway as the people who made the rod didn't care enough to indicate the line weight on the rod. I tried a bunch of lines from three weight to six weight. You can cast four weight on it but it feels whippy and you can cast six weight on it but you have to concentrate more to prevent the line from slamming down. Five weight casts easy and smooth and comes down gossamer light.

The thing is, and this is really quite amazing, that it casts as well as my high-tech graphite rods. I got it out to forty feet easily and got it past fifty by adding a single haul. If I started using tricks like double hauling and a weight-forward line, who knows how far it could cast? But who cares as just about every fish I've ever hooked was somewhere between ten to forty feet out. (I determined the length of the casts by measuring the distances between the windows on a nearby public building and then casting parallel to the wall.)

It has a slow action like bamboo (although it is a little bit faster than most bamboo I've cast). Slow action and full flex takes a bit of getting used to. Mind you, graphite takes a bit of getting used to if you're never cast it too. Once you do get used to it, it's easy to cast and very forgiving. (It also has a soft tip. I've cast slow-action graphite rods but they tend to have stiff tips that ruin the feel. This isn't a stiff rod that the builders tapered to allow it to flex at the bottom, it's a rod that flexes progressively more along the entire length depending on how hard you choose to push it.)

It's a bit gaudy for my taste. The rod is white and the wrappings are garnet with some gold trim that serves no purpose at all. On the other hand, perhaps that is fitting as it is one of the odd coincidences in my life that every school from elementary to university I ever went to had garnet and gold as its official colours. True Temper called this model "The Executive" which is kind of funny but at least one bona fide white collar professional (my uncle was head of gastroenterology at the Mayo Clinic) bought one so maybe it isn't so funny after all.

It's only seven feet long and I'd have picked eight feet given my druthers. (I also suspect that True Temper didn't have exacting quality control so you couldn't be sure that every rod they made would be as good as this one. On the other hand, they were and are so cheap you could probably buy one knowing you could just toss it if you didn't like it.)

But it's a darn good rod and it belonged to a man I loved and who loved and cared about me.

It's getting overcast here and the barometer is falling. Time to go fishing.

The mini-skirt theory of marketing and politics

I've mentioned this before. When I was at university the fashion industry reintroduced the miniskirt. It caused a political reaction in some people. That is to say, some people didn't just ask themselves whether they did or didn't like these things, they asked what it said about society at large that such a choice was being offered to women. They actively hated the miniskirt and hoped it would fail because they didn't want to live in a society where women dressed this way.

Feminists at the time claimed victory quickly. A pollster asked women and found that 95 percent of women didn't like miniskirts. That claim was premature for the shorter skirts quickly won out especially among young, hot girls. At my university a big look for a lot of preppy girls was to wear a grey or white miniskirt with a navy blue blazer only the skirt was so short that from behind it could look like the blazer was all they were wearing. It was a look designed to make guys do double takes and it worked.

The thing is that I bet the poll numbers didn't change much over time. I'm sure that had a second poll been conducted after the miniskirt had triumphed in the mid 1980s that the numbers would have moved but they wouldn't have moved much. Less than 95 percent would have voiced objection but I bet the majority of women still would have said they didn't like them. The thing is, Who cares what the majority of women think? At the time, I cared about what women who wore miniskirts thought.

(One of my favourite memories from the early 1990s is of waiting to meet a woman at a restaurant that no longer exists in the market area. I still remember sitting on the terrace and looking up and seeing her come along the street in her khaki miniskirt and all the guys looking at her and her long legs. You can think less of me for this if you want, I won't care, but it felt very good to be that guy that evening. The two of us were just walking by the place where it happened the other day.)

If you were a politician, you'd have to care because if the majority of women vote against you, you have a problem. But if you're selling miniskirts and only five percent of women buy your product you'll be fabulously wealthy. And if the five percent who buy your product are hot young women, you will also be fabulously famous.

So, as I say, who cares what the majority of women think?

But that is what identity politics is supposed to be about isn't it? About not having to care what other people think? I mean, how dare I laugh at the guy in make up and frilly, effeminate clothes waiting at the bus stop? That 95 percent of people are heterosexual, look heterosexual and act heterosexual doesn't matter so why should it be any different when it comes to any commercial choice I might make?


Which all got me thinking of these ads from a couple of years ago and how brilliant they are.

There was a whole series of them and I remember seeing them stuck to the boards outside a construction site. That itself was brilliant. They put the ads right where the people most likely to hate them typically put their posters for political causes or "alternative" music. They knew the ads would bother exactly the people whom they wanted to reach wanted to see bothered and they put them right where they were most likely to offend.

You can test this for yourself by Googling "Canadian Club Ads" and seeing just how upset people got. They proved themselves to be just the grim, humourless people you'd hope they'd be.

But what upset them? Well, the giveaway is how many produced "parody" ads in which the woman with Dad is replaced with another guy in the picture. Or they turned it around and made it "Your dad wasn't your mom's first." As the Serpentine One often points out, 99 percent of criticism comes across as defensive and this is a case in point.

And they are threatened because the subtext of the ad is about normalcy. I use "normalcy" advisedly because "normality" is something to settle for and "normalcy" is something desirable. That was what the ads sold: they told people that what they are is just fine. Nothing wrong with being a guy just like dad who likes fishing, doesn't obsess about body hair, ran around a bit as a young man and then got married and had you. And there is nothing wrong with it.

That is where the people who hated the ads so much gave themselves away. They don't like normalcy at all. They aren't really fighting for the right to be what they want to be, they are fighting to stop you from being what you want to be.

Hollaback?

A group that calls itself "Hollaback Ottawa" has lately plastered the neighbourhood with really cheap eight and half by eleven sheets telling is that "Street harassment is not a compliment". And that is true.

That needs to be said. Hollering, "Hey honey, nice ____!" at a young woman is not a compliment. It's not even meant as a compliment. It says, "You object. Me appreciator of objects."

But even though the central claim is right, everything about this group is wrong. We can start with the papers they have taped everywhere. There is an arrogance in thinking that your cause is so important that you have the right to shove it in everyone else's face.

And then there is the message: "Street harassment is not a compliment". That tells you a lot. They think that someone needs to be convinced. Who? Most guys don't holler this sort of stuff.

But it gets weirder when you visit the group's website. Because nothing there is about guys yelling out comments about women's bodies. It's about ugly street harrassment that is a very real problem in cities like Ottawa. And yet everything about this campaign is doomed to failure.

For starters it alienates the group the campaign most needs if it is going to succeed: heterosexual men. It's an overtly feminist campaign and it makes heterosexual men feel like they are the problem.

It's also very narcissistic. You can see this in what is currently the top post. It's an account of getting harassed on a #98 bus. The thing is, I'm sure the story is true (although possibly exaggerated for effect). I've been there myself. I should note that I'm six foot one and 240 pounds. As a rule, people don't mess with me.

And yet this guy did. "Hey Mr. Businessman", was how he started. And he kept building up with increasingly menacing threats. And just like the woman at Hollaback, no one else on the bus did a thing. The guy was speaking loudly enough that everyone in the general area could hear him. They all sat there looking forward, not wanting to call attention to themselves.

The guy stopped, however, and did so very quickly when I confronted him. He had counted on my being submissive and quiet. He had counted on shame keeping me meek. He obviously has very little real experience with authority figures or he would have grasped that the man in the  charcoal grey suit is the very last person you want to victimize. I spoke up and spoke up loudly. I called his bluff and raised the stakes even higher. I knew he was counting on me wanting to remain inconspicuous.

And I did one other thing that I'll get to later.

It would have been a very different experience if I'd been a 130 pound woman. In her position, I couldn't use power the way I did. If a woman raises her voice, it doesn't convey power and authourity.

But the bus driver does convey power and authority. And that is the other thing I did. I made the bus driver act. She or he sits at the front of the bus, wears a uniform and comes equipped with an emergency communication system to call help and the police respond very quickly to incidents on public transit. The driver has a job to do so they can't be expected to catch every incident but once you call their attention to one, they have to act. Even if they aren't keen to help, it's not like they can hide. They're driving a big red and white bus with numbers all over it. And it's their job to report incidents once they are made aware of them.

You'll notice that the woman in the story at Hollaback does no such thing even though the thing she describes as done to her is a serious, go-to-jail crime.

Why not? Well, just read the site and you'll see why. None of this stuff is about the guys who do this stuff. It's all about the women themselves as well as other victim communities GBLT and whatever else is in the alphabet soup this week. Here is how the public transit story ends up:

What happened was terrible and for me, really drove home the need for Bystander Intervention. Clearly, nobody is immune to these types of situations and even someone like myself, who is an advocate against street harassment, has self-defense training and supports surivivors of sexual violence, can be a target for street harassment and can be left feeling powerless.

It's just an opportunity for her to talk about herself.

And that, quite possibly, is all Hollaback Ottawa is.

As long as this is the public face of feminism, then feminism will fail.

The importance of being a predator

I was walking by a house nearby where a couple of young women live. They're both really sweet and we always chat. As I came by with the dogs, they were out in the garden and one of them, knowing that our oriental lilies are thriving, asked for advice.

Her problem—as is the problem of everyone with oriental lilies around here—is that hers are being eaten by red lily beetles. I said, "They're pretty easy to deal with really. They are slow moving clumsy bugs so five minutes a day picking them off the plants is all you need to do to control them."

And she asked what did I do with them after picking them off. I said I squished them between my fingers. She made a face at that so I said that, if that bothered her, she could just drop them on the patio and step on them. "They're so slow and stupid, it's no problem."

That wasn't helping.

So I said, "If you don't like squishing them, just fill a bucket with soapy water and flip them into it." (The soap takes away the surface tension on the water so they drown quickly.)

That was worse. What she wanted to do was pick the beetles up and carry them somewhere else so they could live happy and fulfilling lives but spare her lilies.

As I say, these young women are really sweet but they think that way about a lot of things. There are a lot of others just like them.

No culture with this sort of attitude can or should survive.

It is important to be a predator. Instead of recognizing this, we've made it a dirty word.

Update: Many thanks to The Fourth Checkraise for the linking.

Sort of political Monday

The politics of noir and how they differ from neo noir
The original round of noir films had a politics and, as usual, Raymond Chandler was the guy who set it out best.

Possibly it was the smell of fear which these stories managed to generate. Their characters lived in a world gone wrong, a world in which, long before the atom bomb, civilization had created the machinery for its own destruction, and was learning to use it with a moronic delight of a gangster trying out his first machine gun. The law was something to be manipulated for profit and power. The streets were dark with something more than night. The mystery story grew hard and cynical about motive and character, but it was not cynical about the effects it tried to produce nor about its technique of producing them.  

Notice that the Tommy gun is not feared for its own ability to do significant damage but for what it symbolizes, a "civilization that had created the machinery for its own destruction". A world gone wrong is a world that is in search of a better politics. And we see this a few lines later that the problem is not the Tommy gun and the criminal wielding it but rather a political problem caused by a political culture that had come to see the law as "something to be manipulated for profit and power".

This passage of Chandler's is so well written it pains me a bit to point out that it is all a giant delusion. A delusion dreamed up by progressives desperate to pretend to themselves and others that progressivism had nothing to do with the gangster era at home of with fascism abroad.

The cynicism of the original noir era is only the flip side of the idealism of progressivism. Think of Elliot Ness and you have the whole ethos. Only the incorruptible knight working for the feds could stand up to the mob. We see an odd tension between the government Ness works for and the individualism he embodies. People did not want to put their faith in the federal government as an institution. They wanted to believe in a grand romantic hero who worked for the federal government. This guy was trustworthy because he still believed in the dream.

By now the Ness-as-hero story has been pretty thoroughly debunked. The only thing I might repeat is a reminder that the crack down on the mob was only necessary because the feds had made the mob profitable with the Volstead Act, which put prohibition into practice.

Of course the notion of banning alcohol and thereby freeing people from this corrupting force so they could thrive was a progressive idea. And there you have the rub for the progressives of the 1930s and 1940s. The gangster era was really the fault of the progressive politics they loved and they needed to shift the blame elsewhere.

Sometimes the shifts are quite comical. One of the great films of the 1940s is Key Largo. But it's greatness today depends absolutely on our not taking its politics seriously. These politics are represented in the movie through Humphrey Bogart who plays a soldier just back from the war who only wants to earn an honest living only to run into a bunch of gangsters who represent the same sort of corrupting force he has just come back from helping defeat in Europe. And the gangsters are keen to bring back prohibition and somehow the movie leaves us with the impression that it was people like the gangsters and not good progressives responsible for it in the first place.

And so we had noir. In these movies the hero is still a romantic figure engaged in an unequal struggle with human corruption and corruption will often win. Even if he dies, however, there is something untainted about the hero. And somewhere there is a suggestion that if government could somehow be cleaned up, everything would be good again.

That world view is still there in Chinatown even though that movie suggests that the bad guys always win but something has changed by the time we get to Body Heat, Palmetto, the various Coen brothers movies and even Mad Men. Now the problem has become not just endless human corruption but especially the corruption in the soul of the hero. Harry Palmer and Ned Racine live in a world of corruption but there ultimate failure is their fault alone.

That is a big shift from the story of ordinary citizens with faults to be sure but also with a pure dream (the American Dream) that is corrupted by forces from outside them whether those forces be demon alcohol, corrupt local government or capitalist fat cats.

Except for Elmore Leonard and James Ellroy, author of the book upon which LA Confidential is based. They didn't get the memo. They still write about a dark world wherein little people struggle against huge odds and massive corruption to succeed.

And this older conception runs through movies based on their work, such as LA Confidential, and gives them an old-fashioned feel. It is noir but it isn't neo noir. And it doesn't quite fit into our world where people have it much easier and where the evil that most threatens us is our own dark desires.

The problems that we see in movies based on Leonard and Ellroy novels such as LA Confidential is how to reset society and the solution these movies provide is Platonic. They say that society can be set right only by embracing the noble lie. A small group pf people have to do something outside the law that makes the law possible. Sometimes these people are base criminals but they arrive at an exceptional moment when exceptional men are called for and they do the modern equivalent of shooting Liberty Valance. It can make for good entertainment but it doesn't connect with our world. It connects with a set of political fantasies.