Amarcord

I loved Fellini and especially this film and Roma. I saw this movie at least twenty times back in the 1980s. I have to admit, however, that I loved it because I misundersood. as do most people. The way most people see this film, and the way I saw it the first night I caught it, is contrary to what Fellini meant the film to be.

The film we tend to see is a tender and moving recreation of life through a child's eyes very similar to Meet Me in St. Louis. You have the ineffectual father, the knowing mother, the same sorts of spectacle (Here the Grand Hotel and a passing Ocean liner take the place of the world's fair). We also have a similar story structure of vignettes tied together in the loosest possible way by a narrative that follows through the seasons beginning in the spring.

As we follow through, the film relies heavily on dramatic irony. The characters are all engrossed in their immediate concerns while we in the theatre know we are watching a world that has been swept away by modernity. This is all the more poignant because we can see that the characters all think they are the latest modern things themselves.

You can even match some scenes up. The shots of the youngest of the two sons in Amarcord going to school through the fog  are very similar to the scenes of young Tootie out on Halloween in Meet Me in St. Louis. The younger children are always up to mischief and the older children are always playing with fire sex but always to no real intent.

The primary difference between the two movies is, or ought to be, that the Italian film is pessimistic and the American one is very optimistic. And little wonder. The audience for Amarcord knows that all this childish innocence was swept away by fascism and the horror of war. The audience for Meet Me in Saint Louis saw a world that had been swept away by progress and prosperity. Neither audience would look back on the changes with unmixed feelings but the gap is obvious.

Or it ought to be. Everyone who ever saw Amarcord came away enchanted. Part of the reason for this is that Fellini was hugely influenced by American culture and he couldn't resist the wonder of the movies. There is one enchanting scene after another in Amarcord. My favourite, and I'm far from alone in this, is when the young boys visit the Grand Hotel after it is closed for the season. They stand on the terrace where the elegant couples danced just a  few months before and peer in.



There is also a scene where the boys are having a snowball fight and the local nobleman's peacock has escaped. There is a wonderful fantasy scene of the town beauty and visiting royalty. And it just goes on and on.

But Fellini's intention was to show that the Catholic church infantilized Italians, leaving them unable to grow beyond childish understandings of politics and sex. And that is the problem. Fellini was dodging responsibility here. He sees fascism as something that happened to Italians as opposed to seeing it as something they did.

You often find Germans remembering the Nazi period in similar fashion. You might think that the Nazis and the fascists were an alien force who occupied Germany and Italy against the will of the locals and that the only fault of the people was not being strong enough to resist it.

This is most evident in Amarcord in a sequence in which the protagonist's father, a communist, taunts the fascists and they track him down and force him to drink a glass of castor oil leading to the obvious consequences and his humiliation in front of his son.

This is the usual trick of intellectuals with romantic notions about the one of the most destructive and hateful ideologies ever conceived by humanity; communists are presented as well-meaning people who were innocent in the face of evil. In fact, the Italian communists used the rise of fascism and the second world war as an opportunity to ruthlessly eliminate ... wait for it ... not their fascist opponents but their rivals on the left, the anarchists. (The anarchists were no better and were just as eager to eliminate the communists only they lost  just like the Bloods lost to the Crips.)

In retrospect, communists like to argue that they at least saw the danger of fascism. In fact, communists in the 1930s spent their time trying to convince everyone that the real danger was FDR.

Teh real problem is that Fellini never grew up. He never stopped being the enchanted child. He was a bitter enchanted child but an enchanted child nonetheless.

Tiger?

The issue here is not race but culture. Deep culture.

The thing that was most impressive about Tiger Woods was his ability to come back from a bad lie. It's an essential skill in golf because no one can hit good clean shots all the time. On any given day, you will find yourself having to struggle back after hitting a bad shot. And to see Tiger play in his glory days, was to be humbled at how good he was at that. He was better than anyone else I ever saw play the game.

So the obvious question is why can't he do the same in real life? Why is it that, having screwed up on a massive scale, he can't come back?

I got thinking about that after watching this fascinating diavlog between Robert Wright and Jonah Goldberg:



The two men have clearly found something to agree upon here and that is interesting because they are two men who usually have no trouble finding things to disagree about. What they are in agreement about is virtue. Wright lets that show early in the discussion by using the word "hubris". That Greek word tells us that the concern here is something so deep in Western culture that it tends to underpin what we say and do even if we, like Robert Wright, like to think we are capable of putting a critical distance on that culture.

What I think the two men miss, however, is that Tiger Woods' ongoing struggle comes about because he also shares this cultural heritage. Now you might think, "Of course he does", but it isn't so obvious that a black man would given modern racial politics. The very fact that Woods excelled at the game of golf is important here. It is a game that comes with built in cultural assumptions. Golf requires prudence in a way that basketball or hockey, for example, do not.

A lot of white people, whether we like to admit or not, were thrilled to see Woods succeed because we saw his success at golf as proof that the some of things that keep black men down are cultural not racial. We saw Woods succeed and thought, given the same cultural values that young white men are given, young black men too can succeed at golf. And that is important because we see golf as a marker for success in life in general. We can admire someone who becomes a huge success at at basketball or hockey but we see that as success in just one thing. No one thinks that being good at these games requires the same sorts of virtues that success in life does. Golf is a one of a very small number of sports that do.

And that is why Woods ongoing failure is so moving. As Robert Wright correctly notes above, the public is more than ready for his redemption. The problem is that Woods himself is not. He can't just forgive himself and play brilliantly again. The man is torn right down the middle. He betrayed not just his family, friends and fans, he betrayed everything he stood for. His case is more like Jospeh Conrad's hero Lord Jim than it is like other public failures such as Michael Vick, Eliot Sptizer and Anthony Weiner. Those men were all frauds and hypocrites who were caught out being frauds and hypocrites. Woods was found betraying their very values that make him the man he is and has wanted to be his entire life.

Pray for him.

Sort of political Monday

September 12, 2001
I remember heading out with the dog that morning, still in a daze. I remember feeling, as someone else I was reading this morning put it, completely unmanned. I think that if I had found someone or something to get very angry at that morning, I would have done so. I wasn't looking for such a thing, it's just that that is what unmanned men do. The most dangerous men in the world are the ones who are weak and know they are. (That is what the men who committed the atrocity were.)

What I found instead was an American flag. It was hand made and posted in the window of a woman I know. That may not seem like an unusual thing but it was in this neighbourhood even on September 12, 2001. To the best of my knowledge, she and I were the only persons in the entire neighbourhood to express such overt support of the USA.

And I think what she did was much braver than my response. Everyone who knew me, already knew how I'd respond. Anyone who knew her would have expected the exact opposite. She was the sort of person who spoke of a decline of America with great enthusiasm before that horrible day ten years and a day ago today. Confronted with those events, she had suddenly seen there was something wrong with the views she usually expressed.

She was the only one to publicly show support but she wasn't the only one to suddenly feel uncomfortable about their past anti-Americanism. The people in my neighbourhood are almost all anti-American (university educated Canadians are overwhelmingly anti-American). Talking to them the next few days, I found that the conventional liberals and conventional conservatives, for the most part, remained reflexively anti-Americanism but were suddenly qualifying and explaining and acting guilty.

They reminded me of children with hatreds. You may seen this. A group of kids develop and nurse a hatred for some adult or other kid. And then something horrible happens to the object of their hatred and you get this sudden moment of clarity. Everyone has to decide whether they are going to grow up or whether they are going to bitterly cling to their childish hatred.

Anti-Americanism is like that in a country like Canada. It's the immature childish stance of many Canadians. It's not a game. People who are playing a game can drop it easily. It's something deep in their personalities. There was a moment after the attacks, however, when it became obvious that some were more self aware than others.

It didn't last. Within a few years, the war in Iraq gave everyone an excuse to slip back to the security of their former stances.

It's odd because Canada and the USA are not rivals. We couldn't be. For starters Canada is only one tenth the size of the USA. More importantly, however, Canada can only exist because of the USA. This is a country that has always owed its very existence to the protection of others. Historically, Canada has only been possible because France, Britain and then the USA were willing to protect it.

To take only the most obvious example, imagine how different Canada would be if we had to mount a credible defence of our borders? We'd have to spend a huge amount more than we currently do and that would eat into other spending. It is questionable whether the country would have it's current borders in the first place if we had had only our own credibility to defend the territory ourselves during the years the country grew.

Rather than face this, many Canadians choose instead to engage in the childish fantasy that the USA represents some sort of ominous threat to our very existence.

A rather bleak portrait of the women who use dating sites

In the earlier post, I quoted this argument about what does or does not constitute sexual promiscuity from a  site called How about we ...

The average American woman loses her virginity at 17 years old. So that's one sexual encounter.

So the average 30-year-old American woman will have been sexually active for 13 years. This means that, in addition to the initial sexual encounter, if a woman has sex with 4 partners over the course of 13 years, she's considered promiscuous. That's about 1 sexual encounter every three years.

Come on, men! Having sex once every three years does not a promiscuous woman make!

The folks at How about we ... publish a fair number of pieces arguing that women are unfairly represented in other places, Ask Men being a favourite target which isn't surprising given that five and half million women visit Ask Men every week month. You might even call these articles feminist in intent. Well, you would if you didn't step back and consider the portrait implicit in those paragraphs above.

 It may be possible to present a bleaker picture of the "average 30 year-old American woman" than those three paragraphs but I don't know how you could do it.

For starters, lets look at the interesting linguistic slips here. The word "average", for example, tells us that this article is aimed at people who want to be thought average, which is to say "not weird". But the staggering bit of vocabulary is "sexual encounter". The survey that inspired this response asked men how many sexual partners a woman has to have before they would consider her sexually promiscuous. The writer at How about we ... read that as "how many sexual encounters ...."

So if we fill out the portrait we are getting of a typical user of dating services here we are getting a picture of a ... a loser. Yeah, I'm sorry to be so blunt but really:

• She's single in her thirties,
• she's been sexually active for thirteen years but her sex life consists mostly of encounters and not long-lasting relationships.

Now maybe the writer at How about we ... is just wrong about the women who use the site. That would be reassuring. She is almost certainly wrong about some of them but I wouldn't count on her being wrong about most.

By the way, does the average American woman lose her virginity at 17? If you go the link they give (it's Wikipedia) what you find is by some point in their seventeenth year fifty percent of American women lose their virginity. That does not correspond to any meaningful definition of "average".

And who wants to settle for average in any case? The word is only being used because the article is aimed at women who are still single (or single again after a divorce) in their thirties and are looking for reassurance that they are normal, well-adjusted women who would make good partners after all.

And when we read it that way, the thing gets trickier. We know that early sex is a bad thing if you want a successful marriage. That means that you don't want to be like the significant chunk of that fifty percent who have their first sex before their seventeenth birthday. I'd suggest a more meaningful conclusion is that waiting until you are seventeen is the minimum threshold to aim for.

Womanly virtues Friday

Sexually promiscuous?
So here is the basic story. Every year, the very popular Ask Men site does a survey of men's attitudes about a wide variety of subjects. One of the questions they ask is, "At what point does a woman become sexually promiscuous?" The answer they are looking for is the number of sexual partners at which this threshold is crossed.

In response to the numbers that respondents gave, the writers at a site called How About We ..., which is really a dating service, were incredulous.

I'll get to the numbers in a minute but let me point out something we might miss because it's too close to the surface here: men don't want promiscuous women and women don't like to be thought of as promiscuous. The good folks at How about we ... dispute the number of partners it takes to be considered promiscuous, they most pointedly did not say, "What's the matter with promiscuity?" Think about that for a while!

For six decades now the media have been running stories telling us that there has been a massive shift in attitudes about sex. If we believe the media, our society has been getting steadily more permissive and more experimental about sex. This is nonsense.

Okay, here are the conservative numbers I've got you primed for (and the ones of note are the ones under the American flag*).

Defusing the threat
What I want to convince you of now is that both these sites are really in the business of reassuring their readers. The real point of the response and, perhaps more surprisingly, the Ask Men survey is to reassure people in certain target groups that they are either normal or close enough to normal that they don't have to worry.

Let's start with the two sites. How do they make money? How about we ...  is a dating site so they make their money by attracting clients and the clients they need most are women. Keep that in mind as you read the counter-argument they make:

The average American woman loses her virginity at 17 years old. So that's one sexual encounter.

So the average 30-year-old American woman will have been sexually active for 13 years. This means that, in addition to the initial sexual encounter, if a woman has sex with 4 partners over the course of 13 years, she's considered promiscuous. That's about 1 sexual encounter every three years.

Come on, men! Having sex once every three years does not a promiscuous woman make!

Now let's forget about whether we agree with that or not for a moment and ask ourselves this: why the average thirty year old woman? Why pick that age? And the answer to that is because women in their thirties are the ones who use dating services.

What these women are seeking is confirmation that they are desirable partners and so they want to be reassured that they are not sexually promiscuous. That's why the site had to respond to the survey.

The question is easier with Ask Men because they make their money from advertisers. The key demographic for advertisers is men between 25 to 34 years of age with above average incomes. And we should be aware that some of these men, particularly the ones on the high side of the scale, will be married.

To make money, Ask Men has to attract these readers. Lots of other people, including millions of young women, visit the site everyday but the ones they really want are those men. That means that they want to be absolutely sure those men see their own attitudes, hopes and fears reflected back at them when they go to Ask Men.

So you can be certain that this survey is, in fact, an accurate reflection of how men in that group think. And that also means I have bad news for the women who are threatened by the thought that these men will think them promiscuous if they have had five or more sexual partners.

If you read the whole survey, you'll find that these men are mostly a pretty conservative lot. They are also largely a decent lot—much more so than most media at women would lead you to believe—although there is clearly a small subset of total creeps in the group.

Okay, okay, enough with the cute analysis Jules, do you really thing a woman with five or more sexual partners is sexually promiscuous?
That's the wrong question. The question is why do 42 percent of American men think she is?

Let's start with an important assumption: most men seek a partner who is a few years younger than them. What that tells us is that "promiscuous" really means "a woman a few years younger than me who has already has had as many or more sexual partners as I have".

Yeah, let's take our hats off to Ask Men because they have asked the question, "How many sexual partners have you had?" in the only form that could possibly get a really honest answer. So the take away here is that among college-educated men between the ages of 25 to 34 (the most desirable marriage partners for most women):

• Forty-two percent have had five or fewer than five sexual partners,
• Thirty percent have had somewhere around ten sexual partners,
• Ten percent have had somewhere around twenty partners, and
• Three percent have had somewhere around fifty sexual partners.

And we might turn the question around and ask, which of these men are women most likely to want as partners in a serious relationship?

But we can also see the answer to the question of where promiscuity starts. Most people have somewhere between one to ten sexual partners. Passing the fifth partner means that you are moving into the upper range of normal. Passing the tenth means you are moving out of normal.

The only thing to add is that normal is nothing to sneeze at.


* Canadian readers will note that our numbers are virtually identical and the Aussies aren't far off. The oddballs are the sex-crazed Brits.

Manly Thor's Day Special

Social Convention ≠ Arbitrary
Pastabagel has an interesting and challenging post about what parents should do when their son says he wants to wear dresses. It's interesting and challenging because his answer is that you should not let your son do this.

He isn't quite sure how firmly he wants to say this however. First time, he wants to be all rational and agreeable about it.

So when the girl says “I want to use the boys’ bathroom” or the boy says “I want to wear pink dresses” they aren’t revealing their gender identity or their sexual preference. They simply have encountered a social rule that they can’t understand rationally, and they are looking for you to explain it.

If we stop right there, we can begin to see the problem. The obvious question is, "Explain what?" There is very little to explain.

Question: "Why can't I wear a pink dress like my sister?"
Answer: "Because boys don't wear dresses."
Question: "Why don't boys where dresses?"
Answer: "Because they don't."

And anybody who has ever played the why-game with a child knows this can go on forever. That's because the why-game doesn't seek an explanation. As Pastabagel notes, the child is looking for limits in exactly the same way they do when they misbehave. Your son isn't stupid, he already knows that boys don't wear dresses and he already knows that you don't like being asked "why?" twenty times in a row. (By the way, he still knows this even if he has seen a boy on television or in a movie wearing a dress. He's a boy, he knows how to recognize transgression when he sees it*.)

So what does the child want? He may not necessarily want anything at all. For the most part kids and adults just do stuff without thinking why. The more important question is, "What does he need?" but let's leave that aside for a minute and go back to what Pastabagel wrote:

What matters is not that the child presented the challenge to the rule, what matters is the parent’s response. Is the parent going to enforce the rule, permit me to break the rule, or signal that in fact there is no rule at all. It’s not about permissiveness, it’s about acknowledging reality.

And there is the real rub. The reason the challenge is so difficult is that it forces the parent to take a stand. The child is not, as I say, seeking anything but they are putting you in a position where you have to act and you don't want to.

Why don't you want to act? Well partly because you don't feel comfortable with what you already know is your response. You don't want your son to grow up to be a transvestite. If you're a good enlightened parent you don't want to say that because it makes you look, well, bad. You don't hate transvestites and you don't hate gays and you'd still love your son if he grew up to be either or both but you'd really rather that didn't happen.

In fact, either of those eventualities are way off the scale. You want your son to grow up to be a pretty typical man in all sorts of ways. You want him to be a healthy, handsome guy who gets a good job in a good field, marries a good woman and has children. But you can't quite bring yourself to believe that is okay for you to want this enough to signal to your son.

Why not?

Mostly you can't do it because of a move that Pastabagel makes elsewhere in his argument. This move:

Gender, as the left is fond of pointing out, is a social construction. Boys get blue, girls get pink. It’s not biology that determines that, it’s just a social convention. In fact the rule is so arbitrary it used to be the opposite and through some clever marketing and accidents of history, it switched.

"Social construction" is a pretentious way of saying, it could have been different. In some cases, as in the case Pastabagel cites, it actually has been different. In other cases, not so much. Despite a lot of pretending otherwise, for example, there has never been a society that was really tolerant of male homosexuality. But Pastabagel's first premise is sound; many social conventions regarding gender identity have been different in the past.

Now "gender" is a lame word in many instances but it applies here. These are factors about being a boy or a man that are socially determined; not "constructed but "determined". And I say that because notice how the word "arbitrary" just slips into the discussion here.

What's wrong with "arbitrary"? What's wrong is that there is nothing arbitrary about social conventions. Consider this possibility. Your son grows up to be a teen and he and his friends start harassing an effeminate boy at school. You get a call from the school and confront your son and he says, "Your rule is just arbitrary, for most of history what I am doing was perfectly acceptable. We aren't physically hurting the boy, we're just letting him know where his place is." You're not going to accept that. You're going to tell your son that he is wrong and you are right and that's the end of that. And you may even remind him that our society takes this particular "social construction" so seriously that it is willing to use the criminal justice system to discipline boys who harass boys the way he has been doing.

To go back to my earlier question, "What does he need?, the answer is that your son (or daughter) needs authority. They need you to tell them and show them what kind of person you want them to be. You are their father, you not only have the right to do this, you have an obligation. They need to know that you stand for something. The day will certainly come when they, as adults, come to you and tell you that they can't or won't be some of what you want them to be but, for now, they need to be shown.

And, yes, because you are a good parent, you will forgive and accept them when they tell you this.

Yes, I did write "forgive". You are an authority because you are a parent and that is what authorities do. Authorities who say, "Decide for yourself" about everything aren't authorities.


* And it is transgression, the adult male who wears dresses wouldn't like doing so if wearing dresses was the normal thing for boys and men to do.

Wednesday culture

Yes, it's a new idea for an ongoing series of posts. This blog is primarily a way to focus my thinking and I liked writing the film noir reviews so much over the summer that I think I'll keep up with one essay on some movie or book or such thing every week. And today it is,

Meet Me in St. Louis
I've seen this before but never really watched it. My mother and my sisters watched it every time it was on TV and I was there somewhere but whatever I was doing, I wasn't paying attention to the television. I remember nothing about the plot or the music in the thing. My only memory was hearing my mother and my sisters endlessly commenting on and analyzing the thing much the way the Serpentine One and I do when we watch girlie movies together now.

And, oh yes, this is a girlie movie but let's not start there. Instead lets start with la belle epoque.

One of the big literary and cultural motifs of the twentieth century is the belle epoque as seen through the eyes of children.

And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.

And you have all the same elements in Eliot (who lived in St. Louis during the time this story is set), in Proust, in Waugh, in Fellini and here in Meet Me in St. Louis. You get a story of two stages of youth told against the passage of time according to some formal structure such as the passage of the seasons. The normal fears and pleasures, victories and losses of childhood are made more poignant because of our awareness that machinations in the adult world that are only dimly understood by youth will bring the whole thing down.

Dramatic irony is a key part of the story telling. We know things that the characters do not, lending deeper meaning to what they say than could have been understood by the character themselves. Perhaps the key line is when Tootie, played by Margaret O'Brien sees the wonderful buildings at the fair says, "They'll never tear it down." The movie audience of 1944 would all know that the whole thing was long gone just a short while after the fair because the whole thing was built of what was for all intents just plaster and was intended to last only the length of the fair (not unlike a movie set).

An odd consequence of this sort of story telling is that the problems that trouble the characters face are all diminished in our eyes because we know these people will live through two world wars and the great depression compared to which having to move is small cheese. There is a mocking tone to the story telling that is not unlike (and certainly is descended from) the dramatic presentations given in Minstrel shows. It allows us to pretend we are different from characters whom we actually have a lot in common with.

Now as much as I love literature, I have to admit that movies have a huge advantage over literature in telling this sort of story. A movie can put us in into a childlike perspective that literature can never achieve. As a consequence, movies revisit this genre over and over again. Two of my favourite examples are Queen of Hearts and Amarcord. Fellini's Amarcord  is, for all intents and purposes a remake of Meet Me In St. Louis set in a small town in Italy.

Girlieworld
This is a woman's movie through and through. The men have their moments but they are silly and ineffectual bit players in the women's stories. The two characters that make the movie are Tootie, mentioned above, and Esther, played by Judy Garland. One of the most heartbreaking things about the movie is to be reminded of just how spectacularly talented Garland was.

This world may be innocent of adult motives but it is not innocent about sex. Right from the opening scenes in which younger sister Agnes, played by thirteen year old Joan Carrol, comes in from swimming her underwear see through from being wet.

Later, Esther is being squeezed into a corset by her older sister. The "pain" noises Garland makes sound more like she is simulating orgasm and I don't think that is an accident. And the most famous scene in the movie, where Judy sings Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas to poor Margaret O'Brien who is crying her eyes out (reportedly because director Vincent Minnelli told her dog had just been killed by a car) features a strong supporting but unsupported appearance from Judy's beautiful right breast which gets as much lowing attention from the camera as either of the girl's faces do. I suspect that more than one young male viewer keen to not make a bad impression on his date was grateful that he could put his hat over his lap after that scene when this movie was in the theatres.

That capture doesn't even begin to do that breast justice. On screen it is, by far, the most animated player in the scene: it moves, a lot!

And while you may think this is my usual prurience at work it is actually very much to the point as one thing this movie is very much about is sex and the challenges faced by young women to get boys to notice them sexually. The goal is not actual sex nor, perhaps surprisingly, is it marriage. We see the latter when Esther achieves what we might imagine to be her goal of getting the boy next door to propose and immediately starts getting ready to gently let him down. These girls are not sexually innocent but they are still girls and not in any hurry to grow up.

An interesting subtext is that Vincent Minnelli was at the very least bisexual and probably homosexual. The challenges of a gay man in a society of the time were not unlike those of young women in that he would want to signal to other men that he wanted their sexual interest without being explicit about it. Either despite or because of this, it's one of the best movies about sex and sexuality that you will ever see. It's a brilliant movie in every sense of that word: very highly recommended.