Beginners. Dir. Mike Mills. 2010.

The simple story of an aging father (played by Christopher Plummer) who finally comes out as gay after his wife dies. The emphasis is on the fears his son has developed growing up in a family where he could tell his parents were not happy. The son (played by Ewan McGregor) struggles to feel and trust in the happiness that loving another person brings. His girlfriend (played by Melanie Laurent) has similar deep-seated doubts. As the father slowly dies of cancer, leaving behind a dog with separation anxiety, the son learns to make a commitment to another. The father’s gay lover (played by Goran Visnjic) furthers the son’s progress by his emotionally open and honest manner. The element that adds profundity to the film is the son’s voiceover as a series of ad-based images from the 1960s flash on the screen. These are images of smiling children, nuclear families, everyday consumer objects like cars, public restrooms where closeted gays had trysts, combined with the son-narrator’s declarative statements pointing to what happiness was supposed to be and what was at stake for men who did not live up to the consumerist, hetero, breadwinner role for men.

Habibi. Craig Thompson. 2011.

The word habibi means “my beloved” in Arabic, as explained in an expository section of this graphic novel, which tells the story of two children, one sold into slavery, the other born a slave. Dodola, a twelve-year-old, escapes a human-trafficking ring with the child of a fellow slave who has despaired and left her child to be killed by the slavers. Dodola raises the child, whom she renames Zam (and calls Habibi), by trading food for sex. As Zam/Habibi grows up, Dodola comforts him with stories of Abraham, Moses , Noah, Job, and the Garden of Eden. Habibi is well paced, coordinating the central story of Dodola trapped in the harem of a sultan, Habibi’s ordeal as a young man upon being separated from Dodola after nine years, flashbacks to Dodola being sold as a wife at the age of nine to the scribe who taught her to write, stories of angels and jinn and struggling prophets, and expository sections on the meaning and power of the written word and the numbers one through nine. The blatantly expository sections detail features of the nine magic squares, the luoshu or “river map” that was delivered to humanity on the back of a river-god tortoise. The number/word sections are beautifully organized, as is the overall pattern of the novel’s interlacing narrative segments into nine chapters. The depth of the story comes from the expository sections that explain the mathematics of the magic squares and the phonemic and morphemic figures of Arabic writing related to the luoshu. They are illustrative of the sacredness of writing and, in particular, of the sacred shape of Arabic sounds, syllables, and words in the Qur’an. The novel is further deepened through a thematics of environmental consciousness, for the story is set in the contemporary world, with its urban blight, pollution, and politicized corporate control over water distribution.

The Manual of Detection. Jedediah Berry. 2009. 

This novel came out the year before the film Inception and has a storyline that reminds me of it, both being about entering the dreams of others and manipulating their perceived reality through suggestion in the dream state. The differences are that Berry’s novel is humorous with a noir-mood overlay, being set somewhere in the 1930s, a time without contemporary technology. The story revolves around a woman (Cleo Greenwood) and her daughter, who are masters of hypnotism and dream “detection.” The central character, Charles Unwin, is a clerk who works for an Agency whose agents are pawns of upper-echelon handlers called “Watchers.” The watchers do all the real detective work in the dreams of agents and suspects. Thematically simple in its focus on the coterminous territory of order and chaos and the need for an internal doppelganger of sorts to provide mystery in one’s life, the novel is most interesting to me in its way of exposing the relationship between storytelling and interpreting, that is, between storyteller and intended (or unintended) reader. Berry’s novel is also simply quite fun to read, a carnivalesque romp that makes much of the chaos that ensues when people simply don’t wake up but go through their everyday routines while still in dream states. (This reminds me of Gaiman’s Sandman, specifically those first few episodes of the series and the Hector and Lyta Hall section of volume two.)  Much is made of mirror selves, and the doppelganger feature is played to the extreme in a house-of-mirrors scene. With clever intertextual references, like including an actual carnival and calling it “Caligari’s Carnival” (here’s an obvious allusion to Michael Hoffmann but also a reminder of the E.T.A. Hoffman story world) ,” Barry’s novel is a postmodern reader’s funhouse.

Margaret. Dir. Kenneth Lonergan. 2011. 

In this film (screenplay also by Kenneth Lonergan) Lisa, a rebellious teenager of uptown Manhattan, is wracked by guilt after she distracts a bus driver, causing him to run a red light and kill a pedestrian. The adults in Lisa’s life, including her actor mother and long-distance father, fumble with their own challenges as Lisa becomes more and more surly and manipulative. I think the film’s greatest strength is its presentation of a range of defense mechanisms that keep characters isolated from one another. An interesting study of self-destructive isolation by several characters. An interesting cast, including Anna Paquin, Mark Ruffalo, Matt Damon, Matthew Broderick, Jean Reno, a cameo by Allison Janney, and even Renée Fleming playing herself.

Skyfall (2012)

One of those movies ripe for intertextual interpretation, all those references to the gadgets, Bond’s Astin Martin car, musical motifs—topped by Adele’s velvet-blade “Skyfall” lyrics—, spy-culture motifs like the cyanide capsule, the “cut-throat razor,” and glamorous settings  . . . of earlier Bond films and how they turn critic on themselves and, especially, on the post-cold-war MI6 media-saturated culture. I’m sure film/lit/culture critics are already presenting papers and publishing interpretations on the self-reflexivity of the film and the thematic richness that this Bond installment can boast. I’m especially taken with the postcolonial subtext suggested by the Ralph Fiennes’ Gareth Mallory character (who has served in the Special Air Service and been held hostage for a time by the IRA), the unnamed-until-the-end Eve Moneypenny (Naomie Harris), and the colonialist Scottish location. The plot, itself, points to the British Empire’s end of days when both media and governmental investigative powers question the need for a 21st-century spy organization. Much is made of the shift, from the empire threatened by other empires (the old U.S.S.R., China, North Korea storylines) to near-untraceable threats from an individual terrorist.    

And M’s flag-draped bulldog provides humor about the  even as she, the tragic figure of empire control, stumbles inexorably toward her demise. Again, that self-reflexive quality of the film is evident, both in the way Judy Dench plays the doomed M and in the figure of the ceramic bulldog, which inexplicably survives an explosion that destroys MI6 headquarters. The self-reflexive irony is completed as the shadowy terrorist is revealed, a vengeful agent that M has sold out years ago.    

And this leads to another compelling theme, the orphan/mother (or is M more paternal than maternal) relationship between agent and empire. The emotional depth of the film (typically missing from most of the earlier Bond films) is provided by the tensions between Bond, orphaned in childhood, and M (she ordering Eve Moneypenny  to “take the shot” in a fight scene that puts Bond in front of the bullet) and between M and the terrorist Raoul Silva or Tiago Rodriguez (played by Javier Bardem), who calls her “Mommy.” The parent/child theme intersects with the end-of-empire theme as Bond returns to “Skyfall,” is Scottish home.

There, Silva and his high-tech military weapons are bested by the low-tech innovations of Bond, M, and the groundskeeper of Skyfall, played by the classic film artist Albert Finney. The intertextuality of old-style Bond film and this new, more emotionally relational Bond style is developed fully here, coming full circle from the early part of the film when Quartermaster (Ben Whishaw) gives Bond a low-tech “standard radio transmitter” and spits out, “You were expecting an exploding pen? We don’t really go in for that anymore. . . . Please return the equipment in one piece.” What can Bond— the “old dog” with “new tricks,” as Eve Moneypenny puts it—say  but “Brave new world.”

Getting Caught Up: Read in April/May, 2013 

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides—wonderful rambling saga of Detroit and the coming of age by a hermaphrodite who finds out she is genetically and gonadically male around the age of 15.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson—Pretty standard antisocial, brilliant detective character, Lisbeth Salander. Remindes me of Eve Dallas series by J. D. Robb. Such stories as these emulate the troubled but less extremely troubled psyche of James’ Dalgliesh. Her Death in Holy Orders and The Murder Room at the top of the heap of the detective/crime genre with hers being true novels.

Death Comes to Pemberley by P. D. James—outdoes Jane Austin in prose style and cleverness for getting Wickham charged, tried, found guilty, then found to be innocent and traveling to the New World—most impressive for digging into Elizabeth’s guilt over attraction to Wickham and Darcy’s mild internal struggle with his own arrogance toward Wickham and slight struggle over his class biases.

Finn by Jon Clinch—Clinch’s first novel, beautiful prose style, reminds me of Faulkner—tells the story of Huck Finn’s father, an alcoholic who is obsessed with black women (slavery times) and who at the same time hates Black Folk, a kind of self-denigration functioning in the novel—very cleverly answers the question “Is Huck Black?” by giving him a free-slave mother.

Unnatural Causes by P. D. James—the second or third Dalgliesh mystery (Cover Her Face being the first) with Dalgliesh not being on the official case but he and his Aunt Jane Dalgliesh being drawn into the mystery of the seemingly natural death of a neighbor whose body has had its hands cut off. Lovely metadiscourse with the opening section describing the body in a boat also being part of the novel that the dead man was writing.

Reality Hunger by David Shields—on the fictionality of reality and the human urge toward the fictionally dramatic in life, memoir, autobiography, documentary, etc.—also on art forms that sample/plagiarize, including Reality Hunger itself, and on bricolage.

The Mimic Men by V. S. Naipaul—read for possible EN325 Postcolonial Lit course, but found no narration and too too much of the first-person internal monologue of a “colonized man.” Seems to follow the pattern of  The Plague by Camus but with no balance between narrative’s plot and the internal monologue. The middle section is pretty solid, but not the first part, and the 3rd (last) section is also a bit weak.

Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee—read for EN325, will use it because the first-person reflections are set within a plot clearly told by the main character. On the frontier life revolves around the dread, the expectation, the raison d’être of “waiting for the barbarians.”

Weep Not, Child by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o—a compelling story told in flat minimalist prose, so the reader has to imagine most of the internal reflection process. We get to see something of the thoughts of the main character, Njoroge, as he imagines himself a scholar savior to his people in Kenya.

Ragnarok: The End of the Gods by A. S. Byatt, a telling of the birth and end of the Aesir. Really interesting for its inclusion of dense lists of plant and animal and mineral and astronomical life forms as well as thick descriptions of two key plants, the world-ash Yggdrasil and the sea-tree Rándrasill. The vividly described Norse myths are juxtaposed with and shaped by the thoughts of an unnamed “thin child” who is sure her father will never return from the war (WWII) and fills her wartime days with reading. She questions the way the world was formed, the nature of God/gods, the “ineluctability” [a word used again and again in the novel] of the badness of gods and badness of humans, the role of destiny in human life. She is drawn to Loki, whose shape-shifting fiery “light-bearer” being is all about finding the patterns that exist in all things and bringing chaos to them. The thin child, too, is concerned with knowing the patterns that control life. The narrator makes much about the gods being creatures who bind each other and other creatures. “The word for gods is also the word for bonds, and Loki, like his son Fenris, was bound” (119),  the narrator says of the Aesir’s revenge on Loki for the death of Baldr. The descriptions of Jörmungandr, the Midgard-serpent, and her father, Loki, are wonderful presentations of (for Jörmungandr) a voracious appetite to contain all life within her oroboric self and (for Loki) an obsession for collecting and studying the patterns of life and subjecting them to transmogrifying chaos.

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides—very fun meta-fiction, where audience gets inside the head of Leonard so that we want him to succeed in his marriage plot as much as we want Mitchell to succeed. Finally, even though Mitchell loves Madeleine, he lets her go because that is the plot she needs. As he says, a new plot, a new novel ending.

Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman—Fat Charlie Nancy has to deal with his trickster brother Spider in the way humans have to deal with their amoral gods. And then Spider actually falls in love with Fat Charlie’s fiancé Rosie.

Jerome Bixby’s The Man from Earth (2007)

from Falling Sky Entertainment

Directed by Richard Schenkman

John Oldman   David Lee Smith

Harry               John Billingsley

Will Gruber     Richard Riehle

Edith               Ellen Crawford

Dan                 Tony Todd

Sandy              Annika Peterson

Art                   William Katt

Linda               Alexis Thorpe

Jerome Bixby wrote Star Trek and Twilight Zone episodes, so it is no surprise that Jerome Bixby’s The Man from Earth combines philosophical meanderings, a science fiction concept of a biological wonder, namely a fourteen thousand year old man, and a seasoned cast, including John Billingsley, Richard Riehle, Ellen Crawford, and Tony Todd. What did surprise me is how long it took for me to “suspend my disbelief.” I was willing to put aside the historical coincidences, that John Oldman, the Upper Paleolithic man who showed no signs of aging past thirty-five, had known Van Gogh and Christopher Columbus alike. But I was put off by one of those misconceptions that my contemporaries have with the medieval world. I groaned out loud when John Oldman described Columbus’ fear of a flat earth, as if that late medieval/early modern captain actually DIDN’T know the world was a sphere. Actually, the going theory of the late middle ages was that the earth was a somewhat squashed sphere, something like a balloon with hand pressure applied around its “equator,” squashing it ever so slightly into an elongated near-sphere. I said to myself “If this fellow really did live in medieval Europe, he would not have worried over a flat earth.” He would have been more afraid of the effects of bathing. Flat-earth talk was something like our stories of the boogey man today, frightening to children . . . and adults not quite in touch with reality.

How surprising, then, that fifteen minutes into the film I was totally engrossed. Maybe it was the film’s fresh approach to some of the important questions of life, including the function of aging, of learning, of religion. Maybe it was Oldman’s initially oblique way of dealing with his life during the past fourteen thousand years, asking his friends what they would assume about life for a “caveman” or Phoenician Sailor, or medieval man in France. No, it was his amazingly plausible interpretation of  the “prehistoric origin of the vampire myth,” saying that because he never aged while community members around him grew old, they “thought I was stealing their lives away to stay young.” I was hooked.

And I really started paying attention to how the film explored the workings of memory, the role of personal experience in our understanding of the past, and contemporary, academic expectations of cold, hard evidence of veracity. Ah, evidence! When asked about ancient artifacts, whether he had any as proof that he had lived in Paleolithic times, Oldman declares that he has carried nothing with him from the distant past, for why would anybody carry through time simple tools that can be fashioned anywhere, tools constantly being replaced by new ones, better ones. Just because a twenty-first–century museum places a hunk of flint chipped into a knife gingerly in a dust-free, climate-controlled glass case doesn’t mean the user of that knife didn’t toss the knife away when he found a really fine piece of flint . . . or when in his travels he came across a settled band of humans with the first metal forge.

The difference in perspective is an intriguing part of the Jerome Bixby’s The Man from Earth. But the nuances of the film is set into a deceptively simple plot: a professor of history has decided to leave tenure behind, and his colleagues gather to wish him well . . . and find out why he would do such an irrational thing as abandon an intellectually—and economically—secure position. In the course of the “farewell party” plot, which is essentially a free-flowing conversation in the course of an evening, Oldman reveals that he has to move on periodically, before those around him notice that he doesn’t age as they do. In his first few hundred years of his life, it seems, he learned the hard way what can happen to relationships when one who is blessed (or cursed) with eternal youth is confronted by old friends or spouse or even children. A painful situation, according to Oldman, and sometimes dangerous, for having a body that does not age doesn’t mean that the body can’t be killed by neighbors bearing torches and pitchforks . . . or wooden stakes.  

In the course of the film Oldman reveals that he has sat at the feet of the Buddha and attempted to bring the message of Siddhartha Gautama to West Asia, to the Roman Empire around two thousand years ago, taking the name of one Jeshua bin Miriam. He tells this part of the story almost comically, to the horror of his colleagues, especially a particularly Christian colleague, Edith. He bullets out a report of his time with the Buddha and the next five hundred years, culminating in an attempt to bring the Buddha’s message of peace to war-torn Judea: “Guy met the Buddha. Liked what he heard. . . . was Etruscan . . . didn’t like what they became, a giant killing machine . . . they weren’t really apostles . . . they didn’t do any teaching, Peter learned a little more about fishing . . . crucifixion . . . he blocked the pain . . . slowed his body processes . . . they thought he was dead . . . . he attempted to go away undetected . . . tried to explain . . . they were ecstatic.” And so it came to pass that a major religious figure was “born,” with “a lot of fairy tales mixed in.” Oldman cries out that he never intended the Judeo-Roman world to mistake him for a savior, as if anyone could “save our souls that we had never lost in the first place,” that old story of a woman and a snake and an apple being a gross distortion of the human condition. “Cookies and wine . . . that’s not what I had in mind,” Oldman says ruefully.

And as Oldman’s rueful—or as the character Edith would say, sacrilegious—meditation on his experiment in influencing human behavior unfolded, I was struck with a deeper more provocative message than the “Christ” story as the misunderstanding of desperate people in a desperate time. This interpretation of the central figure of Christianity is not new to me.

But neither is the concept that captivated me. It’s just that the film really drives home a very basic lie, the lie of the importance of individual human experience. I was overwhelmed in a visceral way with the implications for what is known as individuality and for that equally potent concept called “naming.” My reaction begins not with Oldman’s rendition of the slice of his life called “Jeshua” but the out-of-hand by most of his colleagues. The shared cultural experience of the past two thousand years presses upon them. And this is no surprise. They can’t help but reject the story of Oldman as the Christ. He gives his name as Jeshua. They re-name him “kook.” What is one individual human’s version of a story the face of a version known by billions. How can an individual maintain—no, how can an individual develop in the first place—a schema of reality that is isolated from the the names and narratives of the collective hive, the Borg, call it what you will.

John Oldman is the only individual in the room . . . and even he is conditioned by the collective, the “hive mind.” The evidence against individual experience, that mis-empowered narrative of a mis-named person, is richly developed in the exchange over the identity of Jeshua/John, and in answers that Oldman gives about about how he handles the loss of loved ones, about illnesses he has had . . . about whether he really is a vampire of sorts. Oldman keeps reminding his colleagues that what he knows about life in different periods of pre-history and historical periods comes in large part from the findings of current research. For example, he knows he had illnesses thousands of years ago, but the names for those illnesses are fairly recent inventions.

The lie—or is it a mere trick—of taking individual experience as the core of identity is blatantly exposed as Oldman explains how he knows he was a Cro-Magnon man, in the way he fields questions about his anthropological name, his identity as Cro-Magnon. This issue of understanding as a function of naming is brought into focus when he says,  “I was a Cro-Magnon, I think . . . when the Cro-Magnon was first identified, when anthropology gave them a name, I had mine.” The idea of knowledge being an act of naming takes me back to the Garden of Eden and Adam asserting his dominance over creation by naming it. There’s power in naming . . . but even more power in the collective social body to set the parameters of identity.

Oldman has to be a “caveman, liar, or nut,” for these are the names we assign to truly individual experience. And even Oldman sees himself as an aberration. He is, after all, the product of his times.

If Oldman—and philosophers, linguists, social scientists, etc. etc. etc.—are right that we know ourselves and our environment only in relation to socially-constructed reality of a particular time and place, then the act of remembering the past is strongly conditioned by how we are schooled to know the past. It is no wonder that Oldman “remembers” Christoforo Columbo as “Christopher Columbus” fearing a flat earth. After all, John Oldman is hindered by our contemporary view of all things old. He is always ever as young as we are!