Dragons and Hitchhikers
Four pictures and four books.
Red Dawn is an action B-movie from 1984 that was directed and co-written by the American film industry’s legendary militarist crank John Milius. The plot comprises a hypothetical scenario in which the Cold War goes hot with Soviet and Cuban forces invading the United States in a bid to cast the world’s last oasis of freedom and democracy under the shadow of communist totalitarianism, with the action confined to a small town in Colorado where a gang of teenagers, skilled in survivalism and lead by a twenty-something Patrick Swayze, hide out from the bad guys and reconstitute themselves as a partisan paramilitary force and strike at their oppressors with guerrilla tactics. I’ve known of this picture’s cult reputation for years and was expecting it to be at least fun or pleasantly campy, but the only good to say about it is that it’s paranoid, goofy and off-kilter in a deliriously reactionary sort of way (apparently very much the Milius métier). Commendably sincere as an anticommunist screed, but too poorly written and amateurishly acted to be entertaining. Even great character actors like Powers Booth and Harry Dean Stanton can’t make the dialogue sound anything but silly.
On the far other end of the spectrum culturally and qualitatively is Secrets & Lies, written and directed by the great English filmmaker Mike Leigh. Secrets & Lies was the first Leigh film I ever saw (back in 1996, when it was brand new) and the one that inaugurated my long-standing devotion to the entirety of his catalogue. With this recent rewatch of Secrets & Lies it was a deeply nourishing pleasure to discover that, as it turns out, the first of his films I ever watched arguably stands as his best. Leigh is known both for social realist kitchen-sink dramas and for period pieces about stout-hearted rebels, ground-breaking and flawed artists and good old-fashioned English eccentrics — or all three in one, in the case of Timothy Spall’s fine turn as Mr. Turner in Leigh’s 2014 biopic about J.M.W. Turner. Spall is one of Leigh’s team of trusted regular collaborators and he does much to anchor Secrets & Lies as a hard-working, goodhearted suburban Englishman who is “in the middle” between “the three people” he loves “most in the world” who nevertheless “hate each other’s guts”: his high-strung and brittle wife played by Phyllis Logan, his kooky, fragile, impoverished older sister Cynthia played by Brenda Blethyn and his sister’s angsty, rebellious daughter played by Claire Rushbrook. The attempts on the parts of these four characters to maintain the stasis and equanimity of their day-to-day lives and to hold back the dam-burst of pain and recrimination they fear will result from unrestrained honesty and intimacy are thrown out of balance by the intrusion into Cynthia’s life of a young woman played by Marianne Jean-Baptiste who is looking to make a first connection with her birth mother. That Jean-Baptiste’s character is black, only learning that she is in fact biracial when she finds out that Cynthia is her biological mother, is just part of what makes her intrusion into Cynthia’s personal and family life so dramatically confounding, since Cynthia has spent two decades raising one daughter on her own with barely so much as a recollection of the other one whom she gave up for adoption without as much as a parting glance. All of the performances in Secrets & Lies are by very capable actors who are skilled in Leigh’s distinctively collaborative writing style, which has seldom yielded a more efficient and affecting story about believable characters experiencing the high drama of everyday human tribulations. Leigh’s regular cinematographer, the masterful Dick Pope, has an intimate but unobtrusive sense of where to plant the camera and composes each shot with restraint, refinement and nuanced lighting and color designs. This is perhaps the best film I’ve seen by a filmmaker who has made several of my favorites and I can’t recommend it strongly enough. Moving, gratifying and eminently watchable with some of the best screen-acting of its era.
During 2020 and 2021 I watched in chronological order all fifty-eight feature films from Walt Disney Animation Studios, from 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to 2019’s Frozen II, so I’ve been looking forward to their fifty-ninth offering Raya and the Last Dragon, even though the trailers gave me a hunch that I wasn’t going to like it. It’s less bad than I expected and is neither the Studio’s best nor worst recent work, superior to 2014’s Big Hero 6 or 2018’s Ralph Breaks the Internet and pale in comparison with 2013’s Frozen or 2016’s Zootopia and Moana. Raya and the Last Dragon is situated aesthetically and thematically at the precise geographic midpoint between Star Wars, video games, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Wings of Fire novels and the Game of Thrones franchise, with a distinctive manga-inflected eastward tilt that perhaps anticipates the increasingly globalized cultural marketplace of five or ten years hence. Raya has no show-stopping musical numbers to slow the breathless, relentless narrative pacing and succession of ambitiously-choreographed but bloodless action sequences that comprise this fantasy epic about a warring quintet of enemy nations who must learn to put aside their differences and celebrate their common heritage to return spiritual and political balance to their environment. Basic, banal, inoffensive high fantasy stuff with a plush-toy message of inclusiveness and charity and a cultural aesthetic that is rooted in ancient Asian cultures rather than in ancient European ones.
While we’re in this territory, here are the fifteen best features from Walt Disney Animation Studios in something resembling a ranked order of quality and significance.
Beauty and the Beast, 1991.
Dumbo, 1941.
The Three Caballeros, 1945.
Fantasia, 1940.
Pinocchio, 1940.
Bambi, 1942.
Moana, 2016.
The Little Mermaid, 1989.
Zootopia, 2016.
The Lion King, 1994.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937.
Lilo & Stitch, 2002.
One Hundred and One Dalmatians, 1961.
Frozen, 2013.
The Princess and the Frog, 2009.
Anyway.
Desperately Seeking Susan is a 1985 picture directed by Susan Seidelman that synthesizes interpersonal drama and madcap comedy into a cohesive story executed with a reasonable standard of class and more than enough aesthetic inventiveness to never be boring. It’s not transcendent or ingenious cinema, but it’s fun to watch and dazzling to look at. The story involves Rosanna Arquette’s character defying the mundanities and tedium of her middle-class domestic life in New Jersey by becoming obsessed with Madonna’s character Susan, a trouble-making Manhattanite libertine with a rebellious sense of style and wry attitude. Spiritually Arquette’s character is trying to integrate her Jungian shadow and become a healthy individual who can balance her flaws, strengths, regrets and fears, which plays out literally with her crossing over from a desire to be like Susan to an amnesiac period during which she literally believes she is Susan. Arquette and Madonna, both on-screen naturals then shy of thirty years old, do a great job of carrying across a screwball premise that wouldn’t have been out of place in the studio system of the Forties. They also look great doing it, backed by outstanding hairdressing, makeup and costuming, as does a well-cast and impossibly handsome young Aidan Quinn as a decent guy who falls hard for Susan, or rather for the version of Susan that Arquette’s character believes herself to be. This movie cranks up the vintage Eighties aesthetic as high as I’ve seen it go without tipping over into tackiness; there are reams of beautiful, arresting, slightly garish compositions suffused in the glowing pastel-and-neon tones and patterns typical of the era and inventively stitched together from the juxtaposition of varied fabrics, backgrounds, exterior surfaces and mural designs. The picture goes out of its way to draw on the punky PG-13 cultural capital of New York City in the Eighties without resorting to parody or mockery. Desperately Seeking Susan is a good time at the movies and an informative aesthetic cross-section of its era.
Recent reads include some of Bill Amend’s FoxTrot comics from the early years of the new millennium as well as a classic science fiction novel and two very well-written and thoroughly-researched non-fiction books about interesting areas in history and policy.
The first time I read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams was sometime shortly after eighth grade, a school term during which my best friend and I got in trouble for declining to do our in-class assignments in favor of spending each period for an entire quarter with him describing and explaining to me the contents and details of the first novel in Adams’s multi-book Hitchhiker’s cycle. Shortly thereafter, probably less than a year or two after watching Secrets & Lies, I borrowed from him and read the first five installments in the “increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker’s trilogy.” This 2021 rereading of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the book that inaugurates the series and was the basis for a lousy 2005 motion picture, was my first time revisiting Adams’s work. I had a fine time. Relatedly, I’ve read both installments in the two-part sequence of memoirs by the brilliant and influential biologist, writer and polemicist Richard Dawkins in which he delineates the contours of his close friendship and mutual fandom with Douglas Adams, who seems to have been an incredibly fun guy to know.
Next I read the 2020 book The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace by the Israeli authors Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf. As they outline in the book’s opening paragraphs, Schwartz and Wilf “both come from the political left in Israel” and “have been very strong proponents of the two-state solution” who “became increasingly baffled as repeated efforts at reaching an agreement between Israelis and Palestinians kept failing, even though the proposals presented to the Palestinians were in line with what they said they were seeking.” Schwartz and Wilf document their scores of scholarly sources with extensive endnotes and write with sufficient elegance, clarity and sophistication to treat the grim urgency of their subject matter with the seriousness and even-handedness that it demands.
After finishing the copy of The War of Return that I got from the public library, I found in a Little Free Library A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal by Ben Macintyre, a 2014 book I didn’t know existed on a topic that has been of long-standing fascination to me ever since a mentor and university writing teacher exposed me to the 2003 BBC television drama Cambridge Spies. In the subsequent years I read Kim Philby’s own memoir about his espionage career, written after his defection to the USSR and published basically as a piece of Soviet propaganda, as well as a biography of Philby by Phillip Knightley and an ambitious piece of science fiction and speculative historical fiction by Tim Powers called Declare in which Philby appears as a character of significance who is much more sinister and important even than the real Philby is known to have been. Macintyre’s well-researched and accessible account of the Philby affair, “a display of brutal English politeness, civilized and lethal,” is the most engaging of any Philby-related book I’ve read. Macintyre’s writing is wry, sprightly and forceful and his book gives the broadest and most informative overview of Philby’s character and of how he grew from an English lad from the right sort of family into a committed communist idealogue to an ingeniously clever and sure-footed double-agent and finally to a disgraced, depressed, traitorous defector. Like Schwartz and Wilf’s book, Macintyre’s A Spy Among Friends reminds me that there are few things as engaging and rewarding as a brilliantly-written non-fiction book about a fascinating subject. If you are interested in either subject or simply admire good research and writing, The War of Return and A Spy Among Friends are both well worth your time.