Fascist Science Fiction


Fascism can be attractive.

A golden age of science fiction took place between the late Forties and the Seventies when the new technologies that made readers think they were in the future were atomic weapons and spaceships where everyone could jaunt to strange places and alien civilizations distant and isolated from one another just as had been the case when Gulliver could get on ship and also visit very different kinds of societies and apply an anthropological eye. That period had not yet invented computers and a previous period in “Brave New World”, from the Thirties, had invented test tube babies and mood altering drugs, and the Thirties and before had envisioned a war made destruction of civilization, though the image of plagues were as old as “Exodus” and as current as Poe. Moreover, the post WWII science fiction age carefully distinguished between science fiction, as driven by technology, from science fantasy, which was driven by medievalist sentiments concerning fairies and goblins, that best represented in Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles” where the aliens are ghostly specters surrounding the Earth visitors who  have colonized Mars.

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The Decade of the Forties

The temper of the Forties was resiliance.

Memory is a first resource for capturing the aura of a decade, every decade defined by its specific theme and concern, as the Depression was in the Thirties, which began in the crash of 1929 and ended abruptly in 1940 hen the United States became the Arsenal of Democracy and everything was paid for on government credit and that made the Depression disappear. The Forties as a decade was marked by the Second World War and its recovery afterwards and the looming Cold War and ended in 1950 with the Invasion of South Korea. Here are three ways to take the temper of the Forties: personal memory, the movies of the time, and the cultural structure implanted in the period to accomplish particular goals but also provide meaning for the decade.

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Cold War Nightmares

The prospect of nuclear anihilation was and is terrifying.

No atomic bombs were ever used during the Cold War and by the time of the end of it in 1987 it had become clear that Mutually Assured Destruction had worked to deter the use of atomic weapons. They had not been abolished by law, as had chemical warfare, but like chemical warfare were not useful as military weapons because chemical weapons were unreliable and nuclear weapons more than reliable for wiping out the country that used it first. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Millay said to Russian military leaders exactly what the United States would do if the Russians used even tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine and that warning was heeded. Nuclear weapons were off the table and the threat that the United States had or would develop a protection against nuclear weapons, however much its cost and implausibility, had been part of the decision by the USSR to give up the Cold War.

But the prospect of a nuclear exchange that would devastate the United States, the Soviet Union and Europe dominated all their imaginations during the time of the Cold War. Nuclear warfare was the apocalyptic event that everyone dreaded even while the various homelands remained intact and the United States and Europe became even more prosperous while the Soviet Union was in economic decline, which was the real reason the Soviet Union had to capitulate. It couldn’t come close to meeting American military expenditures. So the Cold War was filled with forebodings and we have to rely on books, films, and academic studies of what atomic war would be like to provide the texture of the Cold War, to spell out what never eventually happened but what might well have been.

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The Taste of the Eighties

 What it felt like back then.

The temper of the times for a particular decade can be described by the social upheavals that mark the decade. The Thirties were the Depression; the Forties were theWar and its reconstruction; the Fifties were the affluent society and the civil rights movement, and so on and so on, with each decade having its characteristic sociological events. It is difficult to characterize decades with their cultural emanations in that culture is unevenly produced. The Thirties was sparse on novels though it did produce memorable films and popular music. The Forties had an outpouring of drama, both Miller and Williams doing their best work. The Fifties included novelists and writers such as Bellow and the immigres Nabakov and Arendt, which did give a sense of the deeper meanings of the decade. But it is also possible to speak of what we might call “the taste of the times'' referring to the felt rather than the deeper meanings of a time, what is experienced and readily available, even as that quickly passes and so has to be recovered or exposed from memory as the way it was, never mind the deeper currents. I am reminded of this more restricted focus by having looked at the first season of “LA Law” a network tv series originally aired in the Eighties, which does not seem so long ago but which the usual process of cultural amnesia has abolished until it was made available this fall on Hulu streaming, a service that did not exist when  “LA Law'' first aired. Think of those episodes as a way to recover Eighties fads and preoccupations even if current cultural commentators recently offered in the New York Times find the series quaint or distasteful rather than engaging the truths of the times they told.

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Two Blockbusters

“Oppenheimer” and “Barbie” ain’t much.

I had been looking forward to seeing two blockbuster movies of the summer, “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie”, partly so that movies would bring large audiences back to the theaters where they belonged with wide screens and amplified sound and darkened auditoriums, which has always been the right way for a hundred years to see movies, now that covid was over. And the audiences came, the gross net of the two movies now close to two billion dollars. That's not chopped liver. But I was disappointed with both of them and it made me wonder why people liked them so much.

“Oppenheimer'' was at a disadvantage for me because I like stories that start at the beginning and move along until you get to the end, flashbacks only happening when it is necessary to bring up the past as a present juncture, as when Darcey tells about how Mr. Wickham had engaged with Darcey’s sister when he finally explained to Elizabeth why he so distrusted the cad. It struck me that “Oppenheimer'' was jumping around in time, especially in the beginning and so the film was choppy, without a narrative flow, and I thought difficult to understand unless you were already familiar with the details of the history as I was because the security  clearance hearing took place when I was in high school and had already learned the lore concerning the development of the A bomb. I was disabused when my daughter was able to follow the story even without having already learned its history. I thought that Roland Joffe’s “Little Boy and Fat Man”, the movie of 1989 that just concentrates on the essential and contained story of the Los Alamos project, was much superior to “Oppenheimer'', and Paul Newman had stolen the show as General Groves. Newman should have won an Oscar for one of his post-pretty boy roles.

The movie “Oppenheimer” was also sloppily edited. A critic said that two nude scenes were exploitative rather than liberating, as if those were the only two possibilities. The scenes showed intimacy and jealousy, which are certainly traits of sex. But the story was not elaborated as to whether Oppenheimer was a highly sexual creature rather than  that he had a young love he could not get over. Similarly, a moment when Kitty Oppenheimer lapses into child neglect to the point that her husband puts his child with another family for a while is not expanded to show that his wife was generally a poorly functioning person. Either expand it or drop it. 

The final judgment of Oppenheimer made by the movie, though it may not be the one the director Christopher Nolan wanted, was when the movie has President Truman say that Oppenheimer was a cry baby because, after all, the blood was on Truman”s own hands because he had dropped the bomb rather than on Oppenheimer’s, who just made it. Truman’s character always looms large in most comparisons and so Oppenheimer is presented as a wavering reed  rather than to be taken as a man plumbing a deep moral dilemma. The movie provides no comeback to the Truman remark.

A major failing of the movie to me was that it was not set in the proper historical context. Louis Strauss and J. Edgar Hoover were agents but not the impetus for the vendetta against Oppenheimer. This was the McCarthy era and the idea of Communism was enough to get people at bay. Remember the House Un American Activities Committee and the espionage trials and finally the Army McCarthy Hearings which brought the era to its end, Eisenhower sure that McCarthy would be overwhelmed by the military even if he had reused on the campaign  trail in 1952 to defend his mentor George Marshall for accusations that Marshall  was a disgrace to the uniform. Oppenheimer was just someone else who was abused for communist ties and had never betrayed his trust, though my high school history teacher thought it was naive to have thought that. I still want a movie that goes over McCarthy, whose paranoia and hate are reborn as Trump but without the ideology, even though the story was very well told by Richard Rovere’s book and by the Edward A Murrow telecast at the time.

I was even more disappointed with “Barbie” which I thought would analyze in a humorous way the plight of women so that I could defend the male point of view. But the movie was such a mishmosh of ideas that there is no way to take a purchase on it. I guess I was hoping for “Major Barbara” which I found very unsettling when I first read it as seeing munition makers as progressive. Or where, in “Pygmalion”, a poor flower girl can become the appearance of a princess, able to confront men as equals, through hard work and being exposed to men who treat her as a lady. Consequences are the result of causes. But causes are absent in “Barbie”. Instead, Barbie Land has an all woman Supreme Court. Does that mean society is equal because four of the current Supreme Court are women? What is the basis for inequality? All men do when Ken takes over Barbie Land is turn his home into a man cave rather than a girlie place. There is a speech whereby “mean” Barbie lists the degradations to which girls are subject. Women are supposed to look adoringly at men who sing while strumming their ukuleles. But men also fawn on women, complementing them on how pretty or accomplished they are, just to please them. Flattery is the stock in trade of courtship. What is the substance of male domination? It could be job discrimination or reproductive rights or the male threat of physical abuse. The movie never says. I wish the screenwriters for “Barbie'' had taken the time to straighten out its ideas rather than just look at the visuals so as to create a franchise set of pictures about Mattel. But they got what they wanted, which was sufficiently superficial so  that everybody could have a good time.

A female friend said that Barbie, the doll, was historically important because it showed women could be anything they wanted to be, which was not possible previously. I hardly think dolls are all that important even if they are invoked as such, as was the case when Kenneth Clarke said that black girls shunned black dolls (which was not true) and so showed a stigma about being black. It is similar to when people said that boys would be less violent if they didn’t have toy guns. Boys just took up twigs and called them guns. Gender is deeper than just toys. Now Barbies, which are just toys, are taken to make girls free to be what they want, as if that weren’t happening since Seneca Falls. And the availability of the pill at the same time when Barbie made its way seems to me to be a more powerful change in the relation of women to men.

A male friend of mine who reads literature carefully was taken by the “Barbie” point of view that women had engaged in self-discovery when, until recently, they had not. I couldn’t disagree more, which is the real nub of the issue. Men, I think, are traditionally supposed to be only one thing throughout the eons of history. They are solid, which means reliable, reasonable, stoical and moral and to be otherwise is to be a cad or over emotional, or a wuss, like Hamlet, or a reprobate. No exceptions to the approved type, whether in Homer or “Genesis”, and whether that type is admired or seen as limited. Macbeth and Othello are different but both are doomed for violating the male stereotype. Women, on the other hand, can be anything they want to be. Delilah is a lover and also a betrayer. Chaucer’s wife of Bath adopts her nature to the circumstances as she gets older. Elizabeth  Bennet is both ambitious as well as outspoken.

So why these two blockbusters for two inferior movies? A good answer is offered by Pauline Kael, the longtime New Yorker film critic, in commenting on “The Sound of Music”, a much inferior of the Rodgers and Hammerstein productions, thin on plot and a but ludicrous in plotting in that, as Kael observed, what if one of the children did not want to be a chorister? And yet “The Sound of Music” was, at the time, the tenth greatest movie gross of all time. Kael’s answer for the big attendance was merchandising rather than art. The title and tone had been pre sold by its history and advertising and so was what people were prompted to view. But I have a less cynical but more dourfull explanation, which is that people like poor efforts which do not work their plots out even though they also like some that do, like “Casablanca'' and “The Best Years of their Lives”. “Oppenheimer” treats the hero as anguished when he is driven because it is easier to think that way rather than to think of him as like Werner von Braun, who cared more about rockets than about politics. “Barbie” is fuzzy on ideas because Feminist ideas are fuzzy, cliches a substitute for reasoning. Being both artful and familiar to a movie’s level of meaning is very hard. I hope Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon" will turn the trick of showing the protagonist as both cruel and progressive and so memorable, providing a valuable insight into what great leaders can be.

"The Queen's Gambit"

I have a liking for the long form in television ever since I saw the twenty six half hour episodes of “Victory at Sea” in the Fifties, the bass narrator and the Richard Rodgers score accompanying the film record of naval battles in both the Pacific and Atlantic theaters. Although the sitcom was a weekly half hour episode, you could think of it as also a miniseries in that it was a set of seasons, five to seven years long, from “All in the Family” to “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” to “Cheers” and “Friends” and “Seinfeld”, all of which exhausted their possibilities by the time the series ended. There was nothing else to say. I felt the same of “The West Wing”, which follows an administration something akin to reality, or at least a Liberal version of one, until a successor President comes into office, predicting it would be a minority President before Obama became one. And I was struck by the miniseries  “Band of Brothers” which followed the 82nd Airborne Division from the training for D Day to past the end of the war while the heroes were still in Europe, the story having rightly ended in that what happened to these heroes in the Fifties and afterwards was irrelevant. “The Best Years of Our Lives” was a different story. And so I am not surprised that television dramas also take the long form, particularly the HBO miniseries “The Queen’s Gambit”, which uses seven hour long episodes to tell its story and which I have seen through for three times, just as I have seen the run of “The West Wing” three times. The long form was invented by Charles Dickens who allowed himself digressions to side characters and subplots whatever the main matter of the story was whatever the coincidences required to tie these together so as to provide the full amplitude of life while Jane Austen was based on expanding the form of a play and, even further back, Fielding was posing as a mock epic to structure “Tom Jones”, itself a mighty saga filled with outrage and uncertainty. And so I come to “The Queen’s Gambit” not quite that glorious but a very successful bildungsroman worthy of Dickens, which is no faint praise indeed.

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When the Academy Awards Was an Event

—until recent films stopped processing current events.

It used to be that the Academy Award telecast was an event. People wanted to watch people preen in their tuxes or tails and the women stuffed into their gowns, all of them displaying their “real” personalities and interacting with one another even if they had taken roles in different movies and also to see as it was happening which persons and movies got awards because that seemed important, these matters raised out of entertainment, just a pastime, into an event of historical consciousness. Journalism may be the first draft of history, but movies are the reconsidered draft, whereby “Gone With the Wind'' rehabilitates the antebellum South by eliding the cruelty of slavery and “The Best Years of Our Lives'' confronting how people who survived the war would carry on. You wanted to be there while it was happening, akin to a World Series game or the Simon and Garfinkel event in Central Park or the Bicentennial fireworks or some other non entertainment events like 9/11 or Jan. 6th which were also confined in time and space and played out for a national and international audience.

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Gender and Class in Thirties Movies

In four years we will mark the centenary of “The Jazz Singer”, the first talkie movie. That is as long a time as the century between the time of “Great Expectations” and when I graduated from college. That seems to me to be a very big difference. There should be a major celebration of the invention of the talkies, as important as great battles or other events so dedicated, because so much was ushered into our consciousnesses. Maybe the publication dates of great novels, those who always seemed to have been here once they were created, should also provide a new version of a saints calendar, also now forever once canonized. Oh, and how the talkies talked! The dialogue of Thirties films, often based on plays and novels, were crisp and witty and eloquent, characters saying what they had to say about themselves and other people and their situations, even including “The Grapes of Wrath”, where Henry Fonda makes clear enough what an Okie immigrant family off to California had to say for himself in his understated way. But that decade was so long ago, however vibrant they may still be, that the topics covered in them, across the genres of comedy, tragedy and melodrama, are very different from the ones seen today and so it takes some excavation so as to mine them.

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Time in Literature

Fiction is only sometimes an attempt to present a straightforward presentation of a story from beginning to end, which is what we would be led to believe by Aristotle’s dictum that stories have beginnings, middles and ends. To the contrary, writers tell their stories by wandering around between what is presumably past, current and future, each with their own way of doing this, and that in part is what makes their storytelling into an art, something controlled by the artist, So a story may have a beginning, middle and an end, but the telling of it is in the hands of the storyteller. Let us consider some of the ways authors do this.

Homer is a master of bending his narrative as he sees fit. The story of the Odyssey which begins, if one were providing a straightforward chronology, with Odysseus leaving Troy, having his adventures, and then reaching Ithaca, in fact has layers and layers of overlap of plot that are remarkably concise, each with a purpose, even while Homer is getting on with his narrative. The starting point of the epic is when the gods get together and, Poseidon being out of town, decide to release Ullyses from his thralldom to Circe. But before getting on with that, Homer takes up many matters, past, coterminous and future. He refers in some detail to the matter of the House of Atreus, where Agistes kills Agamemnon, and Orestes kills Clytemnestra, which shows how badly things can go when the return of a warrior goes sour, and we are about to hear the story of how the return of Ulysses fares. We also learn a good deal about the blinding of the Cyclops, which set Poseidon against Ulysses, long before that story is itself elaborated, and so suggesting, in something of a preview, the basic conflict which led to Ulysses's troubles. And we learn of the message to Telemachus about his father’s return, which tells us that the climax of the story will be about that. The story has not been set from start to finish, in a linear matter, but in an allusive one, so that all of these events are held in the mind simultaneously, as if the reader were a kind of god himself. In bestowing this role on the reader, or in presuming it, this kind of storytelling that wanders about in time becomes a way to read and find meaning. So jumping about in time as a feature of writing becomes jumping about as a feature of reading. 

Not all great literature jumps about in time, even if the human mind does. Shakespeare is remarkable for telling his stories front to back, starting at the point he wants to jump into the story, and then telling it straightforwardly until its conclusion. “Hamlet” starts off with the Prince recently returned to Denmark and then takes it through various incidents until the plot, all played out, just has to be ended, as it is with a duel that no one really needed but which the frustration of the characters with one another demanded. “Macbeth” starts with clues to his ambition, and carries that out until he is cut down, which also comes sooner or later to such folk. Shakespeare is the master of the history, where time might seem one of the few things that can connect diverse events together, in “Henry VI” those including Joan of Arc and Jack Cade. Shakespeare makes up for fidelity to the way time works in a linear way by allowing characters to endlessly explain their own or one another’s motivations and through poetry that transcends the story and by the ironic juxtaposition of the characters. Shakespeare is thus to be compared, as he often is, to Racine, who abides by the Aristotelian unities by making references to actions that take place offstage or are remembered from the past, while Shakespeare is considered lax because he has as many scenes as he wants to tell his story, when in fact he is just abiding by a different discipline, which is to tell stories front to back.

Many of the books of the Old Testament, like “Genesis”, “Exodus” and “Samuel I and II”, also tell their stories from front to back, Noah hearing the voice of God, Moses left in the bulrushes, David as shepherd, war hero, soother of the king, and then guerilla and, later than that, king in his own right. Sometimes that means the stories will be very short and not so sweet because they are records of events, the motives left to inference. Abraham hears from God that he should sacrifice Isaac, takes him to the altar, and then is released from his obligation. The mystery of what has happened in the very briefly told story is debated for millennia and gives rise to the deepest of religious feelings. 

A master of jumbling up time, on the other hand, is Jane Austen. She begins the earliest of her completed novels, “Sense and Sensibility”, with a question of property, which is the opening for other of her novels including her last, “Persuasion”, to which she also brings her ruminations on the relationship between property, wealth, and courtship. In “Sense and Sensibility”, the Dashwoods have been kicked out of their elegant house because Mr. Dashwood had not found a way to leave any money to his second family and had relied on a deathbed promise by his son to make things comfortable for them. Then in a bit of comic dialogue stellar for its conciseness, the son’s wife talks him easily enough out of carrying out any commitments he has made, first by insisting they need far less and then nothing at all, a guilty conscience always finding excuses for what it is about to do. 

Austen also overlaps story lines. There is the romance of Marianne Dashwood with first John Willoughby and then with Colonel Brandon. There is also the romance of Elinor Dashwood with Edward Ferrars. The two stories are set off against one another in that Willoughby is exposed to be a cad while Edward Ferrars had never acted in an unethical way. All this rearrangement of plot is very different from meaning, which is what the plot points to, and in the case of “Sense and Sensibility”, that has to do with the Romantic consciousness, which is something that Jane Austen deplores, however much she is committed to the idea that, as in Shakespeare, a happy ending means that all the couples are matched up with the ones they are supposed to love. Marianne prefers Romantic poetry and the cottage that the Dashwoods are forced to move to is described as “romantic”, but the truth is, as Maryann finally comes to understand, true romance lives in deeds rather than in sentiments, in sense rather than in sensibility, and that matches the basically conservative or modest way in which Elinor conducted herself, keeping her feelings and pain to herself, while Marianne had made a spectacle of herself and acted as if she were the only girl in the world who had given her heart to someone and not have her affection returned. Such is life.

By the time Jane Austen reaches her third novel, “Pride and Prejudice”, she has rearranged the pieces on her chessboard to make the main plot line more clear. Darcy is initially disqualified from being a suitor by his arrogance just as Colonel Brandon had been disqualified by his age. And Darcy does come to the rescue, getting Wickham to marry Lydia, just as Colonel Brandon comes to Marianne’s rescue: defending her honor, finding her in a storm. The two sisters, in “Pride and Prejudice”, Elizabeth and Jane, also both find their soul mates. But other elements of “Pride and Prejudice” have been sorted out. The Willoughby character has been replaced by Wickham who goes after a different sister who is younger and more naive than Elizabeth while the possibility of an inferior marriage has been elicited through the view of Charlotte and Mr. Collins, clearly subsidiary characters. These having been isolated out, Austen can deal with how such complex outliers as Elizabeth and Darcy can overcome convention and reinvent their feelings despite the heavy weight of customary usages and prejudices that they both share. The couple are partly Beatrice and Benedict and partly Antony and Cleopatra, this time not representing two different empires but someone from the nation of men and someone from the nation of woman trying to understand one another. “Sense and Sensibility is not that complex. Its main outcome is that for circumstantial reasons on the part of Elinor, and more gradually by Marianne, they do find good matches for themselves, good because the lovers can understand one another, regardless of economic pressures. For Jane Austen, at that point, that is the freedom people have: to acknowledge a soulmate.

The key to Austen’s plots are often the revelation through a letter or a conversation concerning something that happened before the novel started. This may seem a simple device whereby to resolve her plots but in fact gives away something very central to the meaning of her novels: that what seems to be a set of events is in fact a revelation of something that had always existed even if it had been clouded or unknown. Austen is doing Ibsen before his time. A suggestion that this is the case is the novel that seems to be contrary to this pattern: “Mansfield Park”, where late in the novel Fanny Price does not act as she is supposed to, which is to be decisive so as to save the family that has taken her in and treated her as one of their own. Her failure to act is a revelation: this is what she has always been. What had seemed like the gangly demands of a young person trying to fit in, as when she demands a horse of her own, turns out to be her true character: stubborn, selfish, passive aggressive. So what the story has told us is nothing but what was always the case but it took the novel to get that across, to make us read it backwards in the light of what happened last. This is Chekov or Ibsenism before its time. The true action of the drama is what it reveals rather than what happens within it. The audience moves forward even if the story doesn’t very much do so.

Charles Dickens, the great successor to Jane Austen, is radically different from her. He is a front to back story teller who may introduce side characters marvelous for their quirkiness and also include subplots galore, but generally Dickens follows a life as the protagonist gets older, allowing for pauses and for stages of life that are jumped over. But, I think, his crowning achievement is “Great Expectations”, where he works contrary to what the genre of romantic fiction would impose on him: a foreshadowing, in early life, just as in the opening of the Odyssey, of what will happen later. The traumatic event and the consequences of having met Magwitch in the cemetery is treated by Pipas not being that, nor is the reader expected to catch on that Magwitch is his real benefactor. Rather, Pip thinks it is Mrs. Havisham, perhaps because her social class is so much more lofty than his own, and that therefore Estella, her ward, is the one destined to be his. That may be a pleasing illusion but it is destructive to think that a life has been laid out that will goo according to a plan known to the gods and to the reader clued in as to what will happen. “Great Expectations” is radical because it lays bare the use of reminiscence as a motive. It is anti-Romantic l in that nothing matters but the present. Pip has become a middle level bureaucrat thanks to John Wemmick, and so he shall remain, romantic dreams of Estella irrelevant to real life.

That analysis reminds us that it is correct to think of Freud as the last Romantic. Freud says there is always an underlying story which underlies the present story and which arises, outside of the time when it occurred, to haunt and shape the lives of people in their present. Time has no meaning in the world of psychological meanings. The past is a constant source of revelation which, when rediscovered, sheds light on and can change life from what it has seemed to be about in the interim since the traumatic event which never goes away. Freud and Dickens cannot coexist.

Methods For Assessing Romance

When my college age son came home to visit, he would tease me for being “a chick magnet”. He was obviously concerned about his own person being attractive and he accompanied me on my walks with my dog and young women still too old to be interested in him would come to me while passing and chat up my dog. I don’t think I ever earned that accolade and I was well settled in my career with my wife, but it was amusing. My explanation was that girls, who are almost always out to meet a mate, so as to escape into their spouses’ lives, were naturally inclined to meet strangers walking dogs because a man with a dog is reliable. He is responsible for taking care of the dog and has regular habits, and so is more likely to be trusted than someone who is without a four footed companion. While girls may daly or fantasize with bad boys, they want to take a reliable sort home with their mothers and their fathers.This was worth thinking about, this radar on the associations of who is trustworthy and so worth a chase in the courtship sweepstakes, the first moves so important and permanent in their emotional impacts yet made on the basis of very little information, certainly not much when courtships are not arranged but are the result of meeting cute; at a mutual invite in a bar, or in a dating service, or on a bus where neither of you want to get off. It isn’t that guys look only at looks and allure while girls look for the long run. It may be that girls are less interested in an adventure than guys are, even if, once committed, girls will go to the ends of the earth to accompany their persons, accompanied, as might be the case, with their dogs. But the idea of dogs as a chick magnet is an idle speculation, an accumulation of suppositions rather than a premise supported by research, even though these grandmother stories, as they are said in Yiddish, are the basis for managing social life until the outbreak of social science in the late Eighteenth Century. Like Nora Joyce, my own late wife was long past ever trying to explain women to men.

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Cold War Nightmares

It is fun to refight the battles in the Civil War or in the Second World War. The dead have all been counted and the battles are so complex that there might have been very different outcomes in many of them. War is more complicated than chess if for no other reason that the values of the elements of force can change over time. So long range artillery are more important in the Russia-Ukraine War than are jet planes. Maybe Italy wouldn’t have been such a long slog that was not decisive if Mark Clark had better handled Salerno. Would Hawaii have been invaded if we lost at Midway? What if Union forces had not taken the heights on the first day of Gettysburg or Grant had not persisted on the second day of Shiloh and turned defeat into victory? So many imponderables that are no longer at anyone’s expense. Unless you worry that Jefferson Davis and Hitler might have won. Now, those would be nightmares.

On the other hand, I don't like to refight the Cold War. I lived through the entire thing, from the late Forties through 1989, when the Soviet Union collapsed, and I had nightmares throughout the period. During the Korean War, friends of mine in junior high school sang “MIG’s are a’comin; their planes are In sight” to parody the then popular tune “Shrimp Boats Are A Comin”. I calculated that I would survive a nuclear attack in my neighborhood, the central Bronx, if the A Bomb hit Lower Manhattan but not if it landed in Midtown. My friends and I were asked to tell our school how we went back and forth to home, probably for the innocuous purpose of redistricting school catchment areas. We took it as meaning that the school authorities could find where our bodies laid, though, of course, no one would bother. I dreamed of whether radiation was like a sunburn that fried me and, in my dreams, avoided windows because the shards of glass would riddle me as sure as a tommy gun. Pamphlets told me a brief coating of soil would keep me from radiation, but that didn’t help inside an apartment building. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, when I was a graduate student, a young woman was heard on Telegraph Avenue, in Berkeley, yelling out that she didn’t want to die and my friends and I made plans to go to the Oregon coast because I thought the wind currents were west to east and so likely to have little fallout. The crisis eased when Russian ships carrying missiles turned back from the American blockade of Cuba but I did not know at the time that there was a secret agreement that Kennedy would withdraw the Jupiter IRBM’s from Turkey because they were only offensive missiles in that they took time to get fueled and so could only serve as a first strike, not a response to the enemy's nuclear strike. There were so many loose ends in mutual deterrence that it seems likely that one of them would ignite the nuclear fire. Early on, writers wondered about what a war would be like. Collier’s Magazine, while in the Fifties, before it folded, had a sense that a war might be punctuated with atomic bombs but more conventional warfare might obtain. It believed the Allies would conquer Russia by land although New York City would have been hit by two nuclear attacks. Comic book artists imagined that the Soviets would attack the west coast of South America with an army. Science fiction authors postulated the Soviet occupation of America. Then there was the later version, which estimated, according to Herman Kahn in his “On Thermonuclear War”, that by the mid Sixties, it was now possible to annihilate the civilization of the attacked enemy, and so led to movies like “Fail Safe” and Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove”. No way out of a conventional war then, only the apocalypse.

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Heros and Roles

A hero is a person who takes risks of life or property or social respect so as to accomplish an end. Going beyond their duties makes someone a hero and that applies to all the firefighters who ran up the World Trade Center on 9/11 or the very few of those civilians who run into the surf so as to rescue someone from an undertow. By extension, Willy Loman can be considered a hero because he risked exasperation and planning and anxiety so that he could pay off his mortgage and so everyman is in some way or another a hero, but we usually treat heroism as people or categories of people who are extraordinary in putting duty above self interest. Other people are just conducting their lives and accorded dignity but not heroism.

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"Eleanor and Franklin"

I am rewatching he 1976 miniseries biopic “Eleanor and Franklin'' and I find it very moving, much deeper than the romance and marriage of Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII, who were ninnies who never accomplished anything other than flirt with Fascism and spend the Fifties, as I remember it, living in the Waldorf Astoria in New York and spending their time with cafe society, one evening after the other going to the famous restaurants, nor the even more dull Charles, who cruelly married Diana even though he knew himself devoted to Camilla, the true love of her life, who he reclaimed and who by now will become the Queen Consort when he finally ascends to the throne. The story of Diana is of a rather limited woman overcome by paparazzi though perhaps more so by a reigning queen who could do little else than to muddle with her family, mostly preventing them from marrying the people they wanted: her sister and then her son and finally having to give in to Megan, the divorced American Black woman who within a few years she and her husband spurned the whole family.

No, “Eleanor and Franklin” are about deep stuff, partly because it was based on the Joseph Lash biography, he having been a good friend of Eleanor’s when she was older, and because of Jane Alexander and Edward Herrmann in the title roles who while mimicking some of their peculiarities, such as her high pitched voice and his overly bon honomie, were beyond that and made the two fully human beings, their lives full of flaws and makeshift events and yet determined by both of themselves to make something of themselves, the truth being that neither of them might seem the metal to achieve high achievement.

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The Oscars As An Extravaganza

Extravaganzas, to coin a term, are large collections of people which gather together to celebrate an entertainment or a memorialization, often on a regular basis, and that results in the event getting some historical significance. Extravaganzas include Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, where a troupe of entertainers thrilling crowds with what was then the passing of the West, sharpshooters mixed up with real life Indians. Other extravaganzas include NASCAR races that at one time brought more people to their tracks than the professional leagues of baseball and football, and also open air concerts, such as Simon and Garfinkle in Central Park and the folk gathering at Woodstock, New York, and the bicentennial event in 1976 whereby people stood near the Hudson River to see ships assemble, parade and disperse. I was reminded of extravaganzas as a kind of cultural phenomenon, one so different from novels and plays and most tv programs, by watching Oscar night a few nights ago, Hollywood trying to revive the vividness of that occasion when Oscar night, from the Thirties through recently, did seem to make these memorable occasions that had measured out the cultural moments of the year, movies a sign of the collective consciousness of the nation because of what Jack Warner and Louis B. Mayer wrought. “The Best Years of Our Lives”, the Best Picture in 1947, showed the Second World War had ended because the film showed how veterans fared. The best Oscar years, to my mind, were those which hosted Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis and ended when Billy Crystal finished his run, though those Oscar extravaganzas have never done very well at presenting best song nominees. Those performances were always lame, perhaps because everyone was too keyed up to transport themselves into the tones offered by a song, while, on the other hand, those who design the sets generally do a good job, as happened this year where its booth like arrangements were similar to the Oscar dinners that preceded television, which adapted the theatrical venue for many years, with stars as the audience sitting in audience seats. What counted, really, on Oscar Night, were the monologue, the dresses, actors sort of being themselves and the thank you acknowledgments, people saying from the heart what they thought should be in their hearts even if, as Jean Hagan says in “Singing In the Rain” that what actors and actors do is bring a little excitement to the otherwise drab lives of those who watch film. The Oscars don’t seem as much of an extravaganza they used to be when films are not part of the general culture or have been fragmented so that highly thought of movies are not the ones who sell the popcorn.

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Flawed and Serious Romantic Comedies

The genre of the romantic comedy is long lasting and stable, reaching back to Menander, and currently available in great numbers in contemporary screening services. The basic idea of all of them is that a couple meets cute, which can also mean conflicted or troubled by their natures or their circumstances, the two becoming emotionally involved, amd then the story concerns how they deal with or unravel the conditions of how they met so that they can live happily ever after at least until they die, which in “Romeo and Juliet” not all that long after they met, and so treated as a romantic tragedy rather than a romantic comedy. That love obtains, and often triumphs, over the corpus of literature, suggests that love is a deep thing and that alterations in this perennial story reveal a good deal about how cultural ages themselves alter, love given as the standing parameter, not altered until very late, in Jane Austen’s time, when love becomes a mutual appreciation and involvement of personalities and not just a matter of sexual attraction, as that happens, as best we know, of Paris and Helen and Samson and Delilah.

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Feminism in Astaire and Rogers

William Hazlitt said that comedy arose at disjunctions in society, when people saw people as strangely juxtaposed. He might be thinking of the humor Samuel Johnson found in a woman preacher Johnson had compared to a dog walking erect: managing it but not very well. People a hundred years ago might find amusing minstrels or white people in blackface, though in present times that seems very offensive rather than an expression of artistic freedom in that blackface allowed people to be more uninhibited. Similarly, comedians in vaudeville found that the comedy was funnier if they used foreign accents or adopted foreign identities, such as Jewish or German or Chinese.. Such features can illuminate the culture and structure of the moment rather than simply provide a way to disdain it. The same is the case with the plots in Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies, meant to be amusing fluff and just interludes between seeing the heavenly and always uplifting dancing, when what they do is make funny the moment when men and women banter with one another about their situation, as it was for the moment, about how men and women could engage one another in courtship. So let us look at the comedy as sociology, particularly in “Top Hat” and “Swingtime”, those musicals produced respectively in 1935 and 1937, long before the first women's march in the Seventies, and also by counterpoint in “Follow the Fleet”, a service comedy in 1936 and directed by the same Marc Sandrich who had directed the other two.

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A Spielberg Masterpiece

Before turning to why Stephen Spielberg in his new version of “West Side Story” has created a gem and is successful at, once again, reviving movie musicals, after a considerable lapse, all the way back to “Chicago”, from 2002, because “LaLa Land”, from 2016, was a failure whether because the two stars had no chemistry or because the music was so poor, or because the genre of musical comedy, like the genre of the western, is just dead, the movie audience not relating to such vehicles, a more general point needs to be made. The first decade and a half of the talkies presented musicals as spectacular and artificial events and included futuristic mock resorts, such as in the Astaire-Rogers movie, “Top Hat”, from 1935, where the two played the Picolino, or else used the production of a musical as the excuse for offering up to the audience fanciful sets and costumes and masses of chorus girls and boys, as happens in dance number in “Gold Diggers of 1935”. Perhaps the last of these was Astaire dancing with Eleanor Powell in “Broadway Melody of 1940” where the set for the biggest event was said to have been the most expensive movie set manufactured up to that time, unless one includes from 1946 “Till The Clouds Roll By” a biopic about Jerome Kern which uses the starpower of MGM to do a medley of Kern’s greatest hits, topping it off with Frank Sinatra singing “Ol Man River” while wearing a baggy double breasted white suit with overly large lapels. Later renditions of that song sung while wearing formal wear rather than the dress of a stevedore became something of a joke. Something different was already available in the 1943 ”Meet Me in St. Louis” but it was a period piece and so might overlook that a convention of movies had turned the corner.

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What's Next?

When dealing with politics or whatever is large enough as a social matter to be considered history, those of us who are viewers or observers or whatever is the audience to politics and history always await what will happen next, knowing that, except for people who are alarmists or very certain about how well off they may be when the world ends, there is no end of new things, just like in a soap opera, where characters emerge and reemerge if the audience likes them or pass from the scene to new figures and their problems. In politics, there is always a new campaign, a new Young Turk, a superannuated figure who lingers on to become President, and new configurations whereby Jews and Blacks and women and Gays can become part of the political elites as well as the political masses. There are new issues, like climate change, and older issues, like abortion or voting rights, that get revived with a slightly different spin. Politics is like going to a carnival where you pick out which game you wish to take part in. The only cost to the game is the willingness of time and attention to deal with it, everyone is a master strategist or a tout who predicts which horse will win. Consequently, the viewers or observers are always trying to construct the succession of events as comprising a story so as to make sense of those events. What candidate will peak too early (like Kamala Harris) or just hold on, like Joe Biden, when, in fact, Biden was always ahead in the popularity contest even if he did not make headway in the delegate votes until after the South Carolina Primary. Nixon thought a candidate should peak just right while Nixon thought you go full out all the time. So, at the moment, a viewer like me thinks politics is at a lull, the dust up over Afghanistan over, waiting for whether Biden can pull off his reconciliation and infrastructure bills, neither voting rights or police violence going to amount to much, Biden a hero if both of the major bills pass and a good chance for him to retain congressional control after the midterms, while losing both will make him regarded as a failed President, and the press uncertain what to make of it if Biden gets infrastructure but has to be very scaled down to get reconciliation of what has now been called social infrastructure, which means the extension of entitlements, which is always the goal of Liberal politics. My theory is that there are lulls and moments of high drama, as when John McCain sustained the Affordable Care Act over President Trump’s objection, partly out of policy and partly out of pique. Isn’t that usually the case?

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Apartment Life

People outside of New York don’t get New York City apartments, or maybe it is that suburbanites don’t get what it means to be in a city. They complained to me when I lived in New York City that there was so much hustle and bustle on the streets that a person could never get any rest while normal places, those that developed in the suburbs after the Second World War, allowed the streets to empty out and go to sleep and so everyone could get restful. But that was not the case in cities where you could live in a residential neighborhood while a block away from a busy commercial area, such as happened to me a number of times, as when a child when two blocks away in one direction and three in another there was a bustling place where everything could be had, like restaurants and supermarkets and pharmacies and movie theatres and haberdasheries (remember those? What happened to them? Dress shops never closed up.) My parents’ apartment fronted on a park that received great sunlight and people sitting on their benches while their children made noise in the street, though that was not cacophonous, any more than children riding their tricycles in the suburban neighborhood in which I now live. Yes, my parents and I heard the El train just a block away, but it was the other side of it that was the other side of the tracks while my side was residential, just as living a block away from Broadway in an upper storey with a view of midtime Manhattan made you private and serene once you left the streets and followed a different pace of things, those of home life, rather than the ways of commerce and occupations.

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Directing, Scripting, and Acting

Henry King was a successful but rarely artistically accomplished movie director. From the time of the silence through the mid Fifties, which is an eon of changes through the talkies and then Technicolor, from slow and leisurely storytelling as in the black and white “State Fair” to the lavish melodrama of “Love is a Many Splendored Thing”, King’s movies made it at the box office but did not have the acclaim that was associated with the first rate directors like Wyler and Wellman and Ford. His movies were workmanlike but, to tell the truth, fell dead. Whether when it was a color musical such as “Carousel”, its boxy pacing and sets did not make Shirley Jones and Gordon Macrae soar. They both seemed doughty even though they were young and fresh, as Jones had shown a few years before in “Elmer Gantry”. The big interest in King’s “State Fair” was the pig. There was, however, an exception, when King seemed to go beyond himself, for reasons unclear, whereby he put it together so that the script, the cutting, the scenery and the acting made one movie spectacularly effective, ever a tribute to the mysteries of art. Here is the one that seems to me to be far above the rest of his oeuvre: “Twelve O’Clock High '', made in 1949.

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