Manly Thor's Day Special

Neo noir: Monsieur Hire
Monsieur Hire is another perfect little movie much like Body Heat. Also like Body Heat, it is a movie that can be watched more than once. The first time you follow his story and the second time you follow hers. Finally, it also uses the camera flâneur rather than classic noir narration to pull us in.

It starts with a touch of narration and that is unfortunate. Unlike Kasdan, Patrice Leconte didn't have the courage to throw away the narrator from the detective story this movie is based on. Still, it's worth lingering on this narration because it gives us a clue to what the original story looked like; a clue about some parts that were cut out to streamline the story down so it would work as a movie.

The original story is by Georges Simenon who cranked these things out by the yard but was something of a genius nevertheless. The classic story about Simenon is that a friend of his called one day only to be told that M. Simenon couldn't come to the phone because he had just started writing a book. The friend said, "It's okay, I can wait." Simenon wrote so many books that no one knows how many books he wrote. We don't even know how many different pen names he used. And no one knows how many copies of his books have been sold (many, many millions of copies is as close as we can get).

The best of these books are among the best crime novels ever written.

The narration is odd because the man doing it, whom we will soon learn is a police detective, is overly sentimental about the murdered girl he is describing. He is an older man with silly romantic ideas about innocent young women at risk in a dangerous world. (The actress playing the victim was obviously chosen for her physical similarity to the femme fatale in our story.)

And how does he see himself? A knight come to battle evil.

 This is a touch common to all Simenon plots. The detective must overcome some personal weakness in order to successfully figure out the criminal he is dealing with. In this film, this whole aspect gets dropped out of the story except for these few remnants here at the beginning. But it is worth considering for us analyzing the movie because the reason it is so compelling is that we suffer from the same flaws that the detective has. We have silly romantic ideas about beautiful young women.

The still living young woman who will draw our hero to his actual doom and us to our figurative doom is this woman:

Yes it's Sandrine Bonnaire. To have her look up at you with that expression would be, to use the current slang, epic. Okay, but a question for the guys (women can feel free to listen in just be discreet about it): Is there anything special you'd like to imagine her doing when she looks up at you with that look? I know, I know, how utterly typical of me. But you can imagine it can't you?

That's the odd thing about the innocence we think we see in women. It isn't innocent at all. I don't mean the obvious point that our intentions aren't innocent towards Sandrine here. That's true enough but we don't want her to be innocent either. Not really.

Back to our story or what have you
The narration is soon gone and that is a good thing because the movie can't really start until we get it offstage. As in Body heat what replaces it is the camera flâneur. This a loitering presence that seems to move impassively from disconnected scene to disconnected scene. All these scenes are carefully constructed to give us important details without giving us any narrative. We learn a lot about M. Hire the character.We learn that he is a loner who doesn't like people but that he is attracted to the innocent. We learn that he is romantic. We learn that he is a person of interest for the police regarding a recent murder. And we learn that he is a voyeur.

What we don't learn sitting in the dark watching, is that we are also voyeurs. There is almost no nudity in this movie and they're ought to have been even less. But what there is is a key fetish object (also shared with Body Heat). If you are one of the very few men who doesn't yet have a fetish for white satin bikini panties Sandrine Bonnaire will make sure you do by the time this is over. And it has to be white doesn't it; why they are the colour of innocence. But I'm not a voyeur just because I am sitting there in the dark watching a woman who can't see me ... no, no, of course not, the voyeur is a character in the movie.

And so it goes us watching as if we were like a camera with it's shutter open. The amazing thing is how long this goes on. In Palmetto and Body Heat we got about 8 minutes of this seemingly directionless stuff before the interaction between our hero and the femme fatale began. In M. Hire we get 17 minutes and 45 seconds. The trigger is that she catches him watching her.

BUT, no one reacts to that discovery the way they ought to. The girl does not call the police but tries to establish some sort of rapport with the man who has been watching her. He, however, does not welcome this which is even odder. The girl whom he has been watching is suddenly offering to make herself available to him and he is resisting. Why?

Well you have to watch the movie now.

The manliness lesson
 There are some nice touches. At one point M. Hire tells a story and it is a classic Parisian urban myth about a little old lady who fed the pigeons and everyone loved only years later they realized she'd been poisoning the pigeons. M. Hire tells the story to a prostitute he is frequenting. The thing is that it is the mirror image of the story that M. Hire is constructing for himself. The little old lady is a smiling presence who is loved by everyone but secretly poisons pigeons.  M. Hire is a man who never smiles and is hated by almost everyone but the big surprise he is trying to prepare is that he is really a romantic knight who will rescue the young girl and ride off to a secret romantic escape and happiness.

Nigra sum sed formosa. I am black but beautiful. Don't read that as a racial claim but as a claim about shame. In the original context (which is the Song of Songs from the Bible) the line is spoken by a woman who has a darker complexion that her friends. If you prefer, imagine her as the only girl in Grade 9 with zits. She is unfairly shamed because of issues she has no control over. But she isn't us, is she? Our problem isn't that we have been unfairly shamed but that we are sinners. That is the illusion. It's not that the world mistakes us for evil. We really are evil but still think we are somehow beautiful. A lot of the romantic delusion is a redemption story without a redeeming God and since this delusion has no God to play the godlike role we try to play it ourselves.

In the movie we have two romantic delusions running past one another. They are his story and her story. Both trade on the dream that there is a way to really connect with another human being that cuts past all the social BS.

M. Hire wants love and he lives in a  world where you are stuck between two poles. One is the cold social world where he doesn't fit and the other is the world of illicit sex. That is crucial to the illusion.

You need three things to be  mystic:

1. A distrust of ordinary language
2. A binary opposition of good and evil
3. A mystical faith in some special sort of experience that transcends all this

M. Hire has all this in spades. He distrusts ordinary society, he divides the world into the innocent little white things and the big degraded parts and he believes that he is able to experience this young woman's beauty in a special, pure way that will lift them above all the degradation.

Her fantasy is the belief in the man who is the lonely outsider that only she can love, the rebel that no one else appreciates. It's a story played out in hundreds of trite pop songs. Like this one for example:



The thing is that the misguided angel is just a misguided angel. But her delusion is not about him. Her delusion is about her capacity to love; and it has to be about her love because he can't love. But she thinks everything is going to be alright because she can love him "enough for both of us". This is crazy of course. In real life, the misguided angel will neglect her and hurt her. If she marries him, he may beat her and her children and he might even kill her. Every murder-suicide you've ever read about was the work of a misguided angel.

But still the fantasies persist. In our different ways, men and women imagine there is a way to ignore all the social standards and find a shortcut to real love. Just the two of us against the world.

This can't end well. We know that right from the beginning.

But why? Is it the romantic dream that is tainted? I don't think so. Yes, it's crazy to think there is a short cut around the social norms. It's like someone who can't swim dreaming of walking on water.

But the thing is that M. Hire and Alice both can swim and so can we. The disabling thing is not the imagined dream but rather the imagined problem that leads us to crave the dream solution. To be loved, we need to be loveable but when we look at ourselves we seem damaged, lonely people.  And damaged, lonely people don't get love. That's why we need the shortcut.

And changing our self image is no solution. That's just the craving for a shortcut in new language. To be loved we actually have to make ourselves better. There is no other way.

There is no shortcut. The only route to love is to become a  socially and sexually successful person. That's the only sort of person who gets love and that is the only sort of person who can give love.

There will be an a post with the aesthetics of manliness from this move later today.

Still on vacation

Caught three nice smallmouth inside about twenty minutes on a dry fly yesterday just before it started to rain. Biggest was about sixteen inches. It's awful nice to be close enough to a good fly-fishing river that you can just grab a rod and walk there. It would be much nicer if it were a trout river but I'm accommodating myself to smallmouth. I landed one yesterday that made three nice jumps and tailwalked a bit. After releasing it, I looked up and saw people stuck in rush hour traffic watching me.

Yes, I'm staying home this vacation. We've spent so much on renovations that we'd feel guilty if we don't reign in our spending now.

It's funny 'cause you walk down the bank and you are about fifteen feet below street level and the riffles drown out the traffic and the ducks and fish are all around you. There were mergansers, a couple of woodies and the ever present mallards including a couple of hybrid mallards. Also a few cormorants. Cormorants a are beautiful and majestic bird that many people hate (probably because they think the poor birds eat too many fish). I saw a beaver shoot some small rapids. You may as well be out in the wilderness if you don't raise your eyes the above fifteen feet. (I think I need a canoe.)

The closest I got to a traffic jam was when I almost stepped on a snapping turtle. I looked down and saw the dinosaur-like tail just in time. We had a sort of a face off because he or she was lounging across the only place I could wade through to get where I was going. I kicked some water at it and it moved away grudgingly. I clearly wasn't even remotely frightened of me. If it hadn't given in, I probably would have had to wade around some other way.

One really neat thing I saw were little islands that have been formed by mergansers disposing of the shells of zebra mussels after eating them. Originally seen as a grave threat, the zebra mussel has proven to be little problem in the long run. On the other hand, the purple loosestrife is a back with a vengeance. Just a few years ago, scientists were bragging they had managed to control the plant. Guess not guys.

That said, I bet it ultimately just fits in the way lots of other imported plants such as the daisy have.

Doing house work today because it is still raining.

There will be a film noir post tomorrow. The rest of today will probably be quiet as I am away from my desk. It seems like a good week to be away as all sorts of awful and portentous things are happening. I don't think western civilization is over or anything like that but some parts of it look decided unhealthy.

I keep thinking of those ten states where men outnumber women:

North Dakota, Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming.

If I cross California off that list and just think of those places, it makes me feel good about western civilization.

I am going to ge a few things done here. I need to purge clutter in a  big way. Maybe stage an intervention on my own compulsive collecting. Then I'm going to pour a whisky or whiskey (Canadian Club or Bourbon) and read some Gierach or perhaps some McGuane or maybe I'll go traditional and read some Haig-Brown.

Marketing alcohol to women

In a recent comment, Billy Carmichael said,

Have you enjoyed the STRUT line of wines at the Wine Rack? The labels each feature a pair of very nice legs, a different pair for each wine. I am partial to "Savy Blanc". I encourage you to check it out. The wine is lovely too.

I was surprised to find that in the press release that the product was "crafted with an appeal to the fun, youthful, and fashionable female wine drinker". I could have sworn it was made for me. 

This is the stuff he is talking about.

And you could be forgiven for thinking that a lot of stuff marketed to women is really for men given how much they use women's bodies to sell this stuff. That said, they use women's bodies in a very different way than, just to pick a random example, Coors does.

Feminists used to argue that photos that show only parts of women thereby objectify women. Perhaps, but they also make it that much easier for a woman to project herself onto the image presented. Maybe her legs aren't quite that but they're good legs or they could be. She wouldn't project herself into the Coors image nor would she want to. The Strut image says cofidence to me.

Now you may think that is not the way women should see themselves but I bet you the people behind Strut and similar products have lots of research establishing that "fun, youthful, and fashionable females like very much to see themselves that way.

And the Strut woman is politically committed too:

That's not who you aspire to be, it's the woman you already believe you are and now you can buy proof by the bottle.


Strut wines have an "edgy" video too.




There are men in those ads but the main focus is clearly women. The men, tellingly, are all urban guys without much sex appeal.

Strut is one of several brands pushing this strategy. There is also Girlie Girl Wine:

And Girls' Night Out

The whole business of selling booze to women is fascinating. The ads are always lifestyle ads. Wine is sold to women in the same ways that beer is sold to men. The quality of the product is not a feature.

And, before we get too upset, remember that the ads probably work.

The magazine ads are the ones that fascinate me most. The ads aimed at women always seem to show three women together having fun. This is an ad for pre-mixed cocktails.

You don't find these ads in house magazines nor do you find them in Martha Stewart. These campaigns are aimed at single women and, oddly enough, they are mostly aimed at unmarried women who get together with other women.

The key thing to remember is that lifestyle ads usually don't sell the lifestyle. They play on fear. It seems like a very risky game. The trick is to present the thing the customer's is scared of being but spin it positively.

For example, beer ads are aimed at guys who spend most a lot of time with other guys in bars and who have deep doubts about their ability to interact with women. Look at this ad and see how it confronts the fear directly.

And by doing so it reassures the guy who buys the beer. He thinks he knows he isn't that guy. He has a sense of humour! The exact same game is being played with the wine ads for women. Cause to say "fun, youthful, and fashionable female wine drinker" is really just a positive spin on "single". The women these products are targeted at want reassurance that they aren't lonely singles sitting at home drinking pre-mixed cocktails and Pinot Gris with their best girlfriends. Here they are in a still I captured from that Strut video above.

"We don't need to prove anything to anybody." Of course not, who said you did?

Sort of political Monday

Dear Patty Myers

Over the weekend I was sent what purports to be a letter from an angry person about to retire named Patty Myers responding to Senator Alan Simpson on the cost of social security. The letter begins as follows:

Hey Alan, let's get a few things straight..

1. As a career politician, you have been on the public dole for FIFTY YEARS.

2. I have been paying Social Security taxes for 48 YEARS (since I was 15 years old. I am now 63).

3 My Social Security payments, and those of millions of other Americans, were safely tucked away in an interest bearing account for decades until you political pukes decided to raid the account and give OUR money to a bunch of zero ambition losers in return for votes, thus bankrupting the system and turning Social Security into a Ponzi scheme that would have made Bernie Madoff proud.

And it goes on and on and on. Number three is where she goes awry. I suspect that Patty Myers doesn't actually exist but here is how I would answer her.

Dear Patty Myers,

Let me clear up a basic misunderstanding you have here. Your social security payments were not paid into any account. Social security payments have always gone into general government revenues. They have never earned interest. The system has always depended on there being more people paying into it than were drawing money out of it. Every penny you ever paid in Social Security deductions was already spent years ago.

That is not unlike a Ponzi scheme in that Ponzi schemes also depend on more people paying into them than drawing out. It may interest you to know, Ms. Myers that people have been raising doubts about the viability of such a scheme since it was first proposed. They were generally attacked as being “mean-spirited” and “uncaring” for doing so.

There was something called a "social security lock box" but it was actually just an accounting trick and it was dreamed up decades after the fact. You may have read that the USA is in debt to the tune of $14 trillion. Well that number doesn’t include the money the government has committed to pay out for Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. If you include those amounts, the national debt would be $75 trillion!

You have clearly never bothered to educate yourself about even the smallest details of how the system actually works and now you are getting outraged at the people who are trying to fix it.

The nature of social security has also changed over the years. When you began paying into the system 48 years ago, it was understood to be social security. That is, it was understood to be a system that would help protect the weakest and most vulnerable from destitution when they were no longer able to work. The assumption had been that most people would provide for their own retirement by saving or that other family members would help take care of them after retirement.

That all changed with the post-war generations including you (you are a baby boomer born in 1947). They and you repeatedly voted for governments that expanded Medicare, Social Security and other assistance programs until they became not security for people who really needed them but rather entitlements that people think they are owed as you clearly believe you are given your angry response here.

Incidentally, your generation, the baby boomers, have collectively proven to be the worst savers in history and when you factor in the government programs you have demanded but not been willing to pay for, you have lived beyond your means your for your entire lives.

In doing so, you and the governments you elected loaded more and more debt onto future generations. They added to the cost of employment with mandatory employer contributions thereby making the structural unemployment levels higher. They developed a system that eroded public virtue because people began to think that the government would take care of them when they didn’t have a job and when they retired and so they were much less likely to save for these things. I should point out that there were also politicians who pointed this out in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. In repayment for doing their job and arguing for fiscal prudence, these poor politicians were subjected to vicious personal attacks by other politicians and the press. They were accused of not caring.

And no Patty, it’s not your money. When you give money to the government it becomes government money to use as elected officials see fit. The entire social security system could be cancelled tomorrow by a simple act of Congress (as it could be cancelled here in Canada by a simple act of Parliament). Your social security is entirely dependent on the charity of others.

In that regard, you might consider the plight of all those kids in their twenties entering the toughest labour market since the 1930s. Because they will very shortly be running things and one of the tough decisions they are going to have to make is whether to continue to sustain a system that they probably will never see any benefit from.

In conclusion Patty honey, two words ...


UPDATE: There has been some pushback in the comments from someone who does not understand the nature of the "fund" in question. To get a better grasp of how this ultimately will all go wrong, read this.

Where the boys are: an addendum

There are only ten states where men outnumber women. They are:

North Dakota, Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming.

That list is revealing. California is the odd man out and it's numbers probably have a lot more to do with immigration than anything else. (Urban California anyway.)

But look at the rest of the list. What do those places all have in common? They all have good fishing and/or hunting* for starters. And think of the literature associated with those places. Imagine that those states were a separate country. What would it's national culture look like? It wouldn't look like the sort of stuff that gets studied in English departments that is for sure.

Related. 

* "and/or hunting" added. Arizona does have some good fishing but I think most people would think of the hunting first. Trout obsessive that I am, I didn't.

Role models

Left over from my earlier post, I think it is interesting that The Last Psychiatrist says this:

But a closer reading reveals something else.  This is how he begins his article, the very first line:

When considering an occupation, most people look for a role model.

Not only is that not true of most people, it’s an odd thing for a 44 year old to look for.  But that’s the problem.  Unsure of himself, unsure of what kind of a person he wants to be, he tries to define himself by linking himself to others:  “pirate philosophers” and “intellectual swashbuckling.”  Swift and Voltaire, not Marcuse and Adorno.  And sci-fi writers, both book and TV.

Why is this odd? I would think that most people are aware of who they want to be and that they are aware of the gap between them and that person. And the best way to bridge the gap is just what Doug Texter suggests: find a role model. And 44 is as good an age as any other to do this. You might regret that you didn't do this earlier but only long to realize that it's pointless.

Womanly virtues Friday ...

Where the boys are
We have student houses in our neighbourhood. They are slowly being weeded out as this is is one of very few neighbourhoods in North America where house prices continue to climb. I have no idea why.

But some student places still survive because, oddly enough, students are really lousy tenants. Many landlords will refuse point blank to have them. As a consequence, students pay through the nose for housing. If you own a tear-down  in an upscale neighbourhood near a university, you can soak students until your place is condemned. And that is what happens here.

Anyway, we have the worse possible student tenants living down the road from us this summer: party girls. There are, I think, five of them. They don't seem to work and they don't seem to have classes this summer. They are just living here so they can have a good time away from home for the summer.

The girls themselves are not the problem. The problem is that a good time for them means having guys over. They always invite a lot more guys than girls. I counted at one party there were at least two guys for every girl. You'd think it would be pretty obvious that this was a recipe for trouble. Every party—and they had two or four a week—ended up with guys out front shouting at one another.

Until the cops came a week ago. It's been quiet since then. My theory is that at least one of the girls was jolted back to reality by this and put her foot down and told the others no more of this.

I mention all that by way of explaining that I am very dubious the hail of criticism that has landed on this article by Douglas W. Texter. Critics say he doesn't want to work in a university English department because the field is too feminized. (It's a shame really that a guy with a name like "Texter" isn't going into English.) I think he is making a more profound point and one women would do well to take to heart.


Here is what he says about women academics in English:

We think differently. What motivated me to go to graduate school was different from what seems to have motivated many tenured female academics I’ve talked to. Much of what I’ve heard from older women about why they became professors revolves around issues of professional acceptance, equity, the desire to allow other women’s voices to be heard, and wanting a place in which to say what’s on their minds. Also, many of the older female professors I’ve known were quite angry about those issues. While I can certainly understand their drives, they are not mine.

I think there is something wrong with that list. It's like old Sesame Street game: one of these things does not belong with the others

1. Professional acceptance
2. Equity
3. Desire to allow other women's voices to be heard
4. Wanting a place in which to say what’s on their minds

The first two and the last are self interested reasons and the third is idealism of a sort. And it's a lie.

Look, I've spent most of my life around the sort of women who who get serious Blue-state kinds of education and who work in pink ghettos such as Academics, Psychology, Law, Health Care, Human Resources and Communications. In theory they are all for allowing other women's voices to be heard but in practice they are mostly still the sorts of women who invite twice as many guys as other women to their parties. Theoretical women—particularly theoretical women of colour, theoretical lesbians, theoretical poor women—they love. Actual rivals, not so much.

In practice, they tend to behave just like the party girls down the street.  No matter what they say to the contrary, these women wish there were a lot more guys in their field. The reason men are not attracted to these fields has nothing to do with the supposedly hostile atmosphere. It has everything to do with what English departments have become. And I think Texter actually does a pretty good job of putting his finger on it:

The people and writers I like have a sense of adventure, wit, and intellectual fearlessness. Those are not the values of most of the men I’ve met in English departments. In 15 years in and out of the discipline of English (including a few stints in publishing), I have made exactly three male friends (other than college and high-school chums and my fund-raising colleagues). That’s not enough.

Not everyone agrees.  I don't think much of Texter as a man either but I do think he is smart enough to see what is missing in his life. If, for some reason, you were terrified of adventure, wit or intellectual fearlessness, the safest place for you would be an English department. And that isn't surprising if you read the following list of requirements again:

"... professional acceptance, equity, the desire to allow other women’s voices to be heard, and wanting a place in which to say what’s on their minds..."

You can't have these three things (minus the lie about other women's voices) and adventure, wit or intellectual fearlessness. A place where we can find acceptance, equity and where we can say what is on our minds is a place where real challenges have been expunged. It's a comfort zone where real dissent has been suppressed.

I'll stop about here because I don't have any terribly profound point to make. The non-profound point is this: Women, like men, make most of their life choices based on short-term interest. If you really want to be happy with a man—and no one is saying you have to—you need to understand male aspiration and that means looking beyond your short-term interest.

In literature, things have been going wrong for a long time.

(Note, some wording changes to clarify points have been made to this post.)