Lightness and Fables

I watch a good picture which in turn makes me want to read the source text. I finish a lengthy history book. I read children's books, comics and a reference book about a television program I like.

Film Selection: Now I Have to Read the Source Material

I dig a good "against the backdrop of" movie, and this is a very good one. Somewhat out of an interest in catching up on old Daniel Day-Lewis pictures, I got around to watching The Unbearable Lightness of Being, directed by Philip Kaufman in 1988 from the 1984 novel by Milan Kundera. Day-Lewis plays a handsome and charismatic surgeon in Prague during the time of the Prague Spring and Soviet invasion. His character seduces countless women with his oft-repeated clinical/seductive instruction to "take off your clothes," while also finding himself involved with two women he may genuinely love. These are a rural naif played by Juliette Binoche whom he marries, and a libertine artist played by Lena Olin with whom he has an undeniable spark of lustful chemistry which is so powerful that it eventually singes his wife as well. Two men who get involved in the sexual, romantic and political lives of the female characters are played by Derek de Lint and Stellan Skarsgård.

Binoche's character finds a vocation as a photographer, capturing journalistic images of the invasion and fighting to get them beyond the Iron Curtain after she and Day-Lewis's character find exile in Switzerland. But ultimately they make the fateful choice to stop trying to escape the fate of their homeland and to contentedly drown further into its depths, at the expense of both of their careers and of any ability to balance a cosmopolitan urban lifestyle with a lack of freedom under a surveillance state. They find happiness through relinquishing the lightness of being for the acceptance of receding into obscure country life. Olin's sexually liberated artist character keeps rambling westward towards freedom and liberty, if not peace and satisfaction.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being is enjoyable and even moves at a brisk and watchable pace for a nearly three-hour outing, partly because it wraps up a lot of grand themes like love, sex, work, politics and creativity in a realistic-seeming story about how events in Czechoslovakia in the Sixties upended and reordered individual lives. It's also well-made with handsomely restrained photography, good acting and sensible, moody lighting and visual design. Olin's character appropriates a family heirloom hat as a symbol of what she carries across relationships and borders, while director Kaufman, his co-writer Jean-Claude Carrière and his photographer Sven Nykvist repeatedly deploy a motif of mirrors that may suggest something about the difficulty in finding a reliable reflection of one's self in a repressive society. Suspension of disbelief is required to accept that these characters would all be speaking English all the time, though the casting and acting are universally good enough to help the viewer get lost in the illusion. This film lingers somewhere between arthouse playfulness and dramatic self-seriousness, a brew that makes for an enjoyable and interesting saga of the difficulties of being human in Europe in the twentieth century.

On the other hand, Kundera is said to have thoroughly disliked the movie adaptation because he felt that it missed the point of his book. So now I'm interested to read the book.

Literary Update

I finished Benny Morris's book Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001. Long, dense, fact-rich historical analysis of groups of people who have different reasons for why they are fighting one another but who all view their concerns as non-negotiable. (Well, actually, negotiations were attempted and did happen over the decades, with wildly mixed results.)

Having been published in its final form in 2001, this book trails off after the collapse of the 2000 peace process and in the midst of the Second Intifada, events which Morris has subsequently acknowledged helped him to conclude that the Palestinian leadership had all along been prioritizing the destruction of Israel and exclusion of Jews over statehood and self-determination.

But while one can sense Morris circling them towards the end, those explicit conclusions are not to be found in this particular text, which has a lot of other historical terrain to cover. Morris’s written criticisms of both sides (in the broader Arab-Israeli conflict, not just between Israelis and Palestinians) and the various factions within them are all in the context of simply trying to elucidate what happened over the decades of competing interests and spirals of deterrence and violence, working to understand incentives and outcomes rather than to make sweeping moral conclusions. Which makes this painstakingly-researched and accessibly-written book very useful for getting informed about facts and history. It’s harder to get into a frothing rage or oversimplify a complex set of issues when you’re getting swept along into a fine-grained and thoroughly-annotated historical account.

Those facts and history as Morris documents them paint a complex picture of peoples who all had sincere, if not equally good or smart, reasons why they made the choices they did. (Towards the end of the book he notes that the “Zionists’ message, all along, had been that only Zionism could save the Jewish people from the jaws of European anti-Semitism, and Hitler proved them right.”) Interestingly, the Jews, Zionists and Israelis come off seeming both worse and better than their enemies, largely because Morris simply had so much more information to work with in understanding their motivations, choices, policies and mistakes. As he mentions in the book's preface, the "Zionist side tends to be illuminated more thoroughly and with greater precision than the Arab side," while there "are no comparable Palestinian archives, and whatever exists in the archives of the Arab states has been and remains closed to researchers." He also points out that the Zionists gave themselves a head start because "historiography, in the modern sense, has been far more developed on the Jewish-Zionist side" and that "there has been a marked quantitative gap between the two sides. The Arabs have simply produced far less historiography and related published materials." (Apparently this is to some extent true of the competing parties’ superpower patrons. Morris quotes numerous influential British and American dignitaries and wonks while being left to sometimes merely make informed speculations about Ottoman and Soviet motivations and reactions.)

Morris is uncompromisingly unsentimental about any of this. He famously served in IDF combat roles in several Israeli-Arab wars while also later being jailed for conscientiously refusing to serve in the occupied West Bank, but on the page he's just a researcher, historian and talented writer. His research leads him to some factual conclusions that can be spun in different ways depending on the biases of the reader, so: let's say for the sake of what I derived from this book that all parties to this conflict and its various skirmishes can usually be discerned to have had understandable reasons for their viewpoints. But I furthermore suppose that violent confrontation, much as we would like to outgrow it altogether, is historically sometimes the best way to test clashes of societal values through the ages, and I think it's uncoincidental that dynamic and more open societies tend to win wars against static and authoritarian ones. They are better able to produce, transmit and improve upon ideas and explanations, including the generation of more war-worthy tactics, technologies and economies, which explains in part why, as Morris notes, the "Arab states, like the Palestinians before them, lost the 1948 war as well as all the subsequent wars" and that the "main reason for their defeat on the battlefield lay in the cultural and technological gap between the contending societies, which translated into a major discrepancy in levels of organization and national mobilization." We can screech and crow about which sets of societal and cultural values are the most moral or produce the best outcomes for the most individuals, but it seems to me that if non-liberal and anti-democratic societies had the best ideas for how human beings should live together, then by definition they would be able to better organize themselves to win unjust or just wars against their much smaller neighbors. For all of Morris's frank willingness to note the occasions on which the Zionist ideology or Israeli governmental apparatus made foolish or immoral choices, his extensive research and analysis of both sides seems to sturdily buttress this concept: literate, liberal, argumentative, open societies tend to be good at defending themselves.

I read this book in lieu of reading Morris's book about the 1948 war and Michael Oren's book about the 1967 war. But having imbibed a lot of knowledge and intellectual value from my first time reading a Morris book, I may still proceed onto his more recent book about 1948. Otherwise I tentatively see my approaching literary outlay involving reading or re-reading books by Homer, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Milan Kundera, William Godwin, his daughter Mary Shelley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Swartzwelder, Ben M. Freeman, Gerald Murnane, Einat Wilf and her co-author Adi Schwartz.

I should note that I also notched up two children’s books on the complete reading list, Buck Denver's Hammer of Strength: A Lesson in Loving Others, written by Phil Vischer and illustrated by Greg Hardin & Kenny Yamada, and Knitting for Dogs by Laurel Molk. I unexpectedly found myself wandering around downtown Denver for a day and read a book apiece in the main branch of the Denver Public Library and in the extensive and pleasant Denver Art Museum. The former book, which turned out to have nothing whatsoever to do with the city of Denver and in fact oddly enough did mention ancient Israel, was read in the library. The knitting-related book was read in a Museum exhibit called the Nancy Lake Benson Thread Studio.

Comics Update

I finally finished two books related to The Simpsons and the last two volumes in Alan Moore's run writing for the DC Comics Swamp Thing character.

The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror Ominous Omnibus Volume 3: Fiendish Fables of Devilish Delicacies is an exquisite collection of comics done in the horror-parody style of The Simpsons "Treehouse of Horror" special Halloween episodes. I really respect how the editors involved in making "Treehouse of Horror" comics go out of their way to put a varied array of interesting, venerable and/or talented writers and cartoonists to work on these books. Despite being confounded by the lackluster entry from at least one comics writer whose work I usually dig, I was rarely bored by the clever and eye-gouging stories and images in this book. Highlights include work contributed by industry legends and mischievous rebels like Dan DeCarlo, John Costanza, Ben Jones, Sammy Harkham and Gilbert Hernandez. Plus a fine Swamp Thing parody written and drawn by original Swamp Thing co-creators Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson!

The Simpsons: A Complete Guide to Our Favorite Family, created by Matt Groening and edited by Ray Richmond and Antonia Coffman, is that reference book about the first eight seasons of the show that I've been studying since childhood and recently re-reading in its entirery. Now I’m done and it’s on the complete reading list. I used to obsessively tape new episodes and syndicated reruns of the show on the family VCR, eventually compiling about twenty tapes, and this book was a useful resource when I drafted a detailed document of the contents of every tape so that I knew which one to pop in for which social occasion or slow-passing Saturday.

There have been various schisms among the faithful over the decades about when, if and how The Simpsons lost its way. During the program's doldrum adolescent years when I really thought the show was painfully and irreparably tarnished by its decline, it didn't occur to me that we weren't even a third of the way through its eventual run up to the present day, nor that it would get (some of) its groove back by ceasing to insult the audience and by hiring on new waves of good writers and artists. Presently I have seen every episode of the first twenty seasons, but the show was already into an aesthetic rebound by that point in its production, and some of the episodes I’ve sampled from seasons after the twentieth have been beautiful to behold and even commendably experimental with some novel approaches to telling new kinds of stories about our favorite family and their dysfunctional townspeople.

BUT, leaving aside how bad the show got for several years after its first run of glory and whether it became worth watching again later, the nerdiest debate is often about the contours of the “classic years.” Does the crude first season of footing-finding count along with the insanely great several seasons that came after? Are the ninth and tenth seasons part of the best years or not?

The correct answers as per my orthodoxy are respectively "Yes" and "No." (Though I’m interested to hear what anyone else thinks.) The first eight seasons are the only sequential and consistent grouping of episodes that could be excised form the rest of the program's multi-decade run and presented as their own separate show, a show that would have worked spectacularly well as the entirety of the series if they had stopped there (which, if you listen to the DVD audio commentaries, it seems apparent that most of the original writing staff thought would in fact be the case, which partly explains the controlled tonal shift in the eighth season that left little room to maneuver right after).

The first season is relatively crudely made and the jokes less sophisticated by the standards of subsequent seasons, but I see it as having a raw, trailblazing, punky, anarchic quality that emanated from Matt Groening's subversive creative DNA in the underground Life in Hell comic strips that got him his job as a television show-creator in the first place. By the standards of the time, when prime time animated television comedies were not the norm and nothing quite like The Simpsons had ever been seen before, the earliest episodes must have felt blazingly novel. (Being too young to stay up that late, I was dimly aware only of the images of Bart sweeping the nation and didn’t get around to actually seeing the first season and some of the second until well after I had became obsessed with tuning in for the third, fourth and fifth.) America wasn't expecting something this morally or aesthetically subversive to sneak into prime time network television, and it took some parents a few years to catch onto the fact that a cartoon they may have unthinkingly parked their children in front of was inculcating messages questioning institutions like school, government, industry and religion that had been enshrined by nearly twelve years of conservative national politics. (There was at least one bitterly outspoken conservative on the writing staff of The Simpsons from the very first season in the person of John Swartzwelder, the show's most legendary and well-respected solo-working writer.)

Seen from that point of view, it's unsurprising that First Lady Barbara Bush publicly insulted the show in 1990 and that her husband directly attacked it as a deleterious influence on American family values while running for reelection in 1992. It's equally fitting that the show later responded with one of its wackiest, most self-referential and funniest episodes in 1996, the gleefully apolitical and scalding personal attack of "Two Bad Neighbors" in which H.W. and Barbara move in across the street from the Simpsons. This afforded the writing staff the opportunity not just to make fun of Bush as a public figure but also to mount a parody of Dennis the Menace with the Dennis-responsive cultural figure of Bart tormenting a tired Mr. Wilson-like relic of stodgy Eighties politics. It’s a spectacularly fun episode to watch whether you get all these layers or not, as I can personally attest from having watched it in both conditions.

This leads me to my argument for why the eighth season is the last great season of the classic years and why the ninth and tenth seasons, which have scattered good episodes and are defended by some fans, simply can't hold up to how great and bizarre the experimental eighth season was. During the preceding years and with increasing frequency into the seventh season there are occasional stories that transcend conventional episodic storytelling in favor of toying with a premise itself, in a way that I suppose only an animated show could get away with at the time. Flipping through the reference book and including "Two Bad Neighbors," I count three of these experimentally-plotted episodes in the seventh.

But in the eighth, discounting the non-canonical "Treehouse of Horror" installment, I count nine episodes (depending on if my classifications all hold up to your scrutiny) out of the remaining twenty-four that take what in another season would have been treated as just a premise, and massage it into a metatextual concept. And they almost all hold up as classics.

Stories that could and would have been done more straightforwardly in previous seasons get bizarre conceptual twists. In "You Only Move Twice," what could have been just a story about Homer getting a great new job opportunity that takes the family to an idyllic new town — additionally becomes an occasion of Homer obliviously wandering into an episode-length James Bond parody, with his compassionate and dynamic new boss also being a Bond villain. In "El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Jomer (The Mysterious Voyage of Homer)," what would in earlier years have amounted to a story about Homer questioning whether he and Marge are truly soulmates — gets one of the show's theretofore strangest and most visually stunning second acts, in which Homer goes on a psychedelic odyssey guided by a mystical "space coyote" with the voice of Johnny Cash. In "The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochy Show," The Simpsons uses its own cartoon-within-a-cartoon show to explore and respond to fan critiques that The Simpsons was past its prime, with Lisa directly commenting that "It's as good as ever. But after so many years, the characters just can't have the same impact they once had." In the groundbreaking "Homer's Phobia," the show not only had the bravery to confront the then-controversial issue of anti-gay bigotry and take a clear and firm moral stand for equality and acceptance — but it also created a gay character named John who looks, talks and acts like John Waters to be voiced by the real John Waters, and made the entire episode a meditation on the aesthetics of camp. In one instructive scene, the camp impresario "John"/Waters tries to explain camp culture to Homer (and to the viewer); Homer has no idea what John is talking about because Homer is a character on The Simpsons and is confined to an in-universe cartoon sensibility and intellect.

And such and such. The eighth season has a proportion of these episodes high enough to make the whole season feel distinctly experimental and self-referential compared with what had come before, while still falling within the most developed look and feel of the show's original hand-drawn animation style and with the original all-star voice cast lineup. I do indeed believe from listening to the audio commentaries that the writing and production staff really did think they must be getting close to the end, because it wasn't widely thought at the time that the show could realistically stay popular much longer, so I wonder if maybe some of them were consciously or subconsciously hoping the eighth season would be the last. Perhaps the fact that it wasn't, and that new showrunner (and deserved fan punching bag) Mike Scully took the ninth season into a stark new direction, explains the jarring shift for the worse in the show's look and feel after the eighth. But I think whether intentionally or not, the writing staff made the eighth into such a wonderfully weird, outré and still outstandingly hilarious and beautifully-animated batch of episodes that it didn't leave much room for novelty in the years immediately after. Which explains to me why those episodes felt so tired and perfunctorily-animated, and worse why the consistent message in most episodes of the ninth, tenth and eleventh seasons became "You, the viewer, are a sucker for still watching this show."

At the time I myself couldn't believe that the show would keep going as long as it now has, and it was a moment of growth in my adolescence to realize that this institution that I cherished, that had shaped so much of my personality and sense of humor and was part of the reason I wanted to be a writer and cartoonist, seemed to have curdled before my eyes. It stung to accept and internalize this apparent truth but it felt mature to decide that I'd rather leave while I'm in love and, for years thereafter, to simply stop watching new episodes.

But The Simpsons did have a few impressive tricks still up its sleeve — first with the The Simpsons Movie, which was much better than anyone had any reason to expect it to be based on the quality of the weekly episodes around that time, and then under the later years of Al Jean's second and longest stint as showrunner, from the thirteenth to thirty-second seasons, during which he un-Scullied the proceedings and guided the show back to taking itself seriously and respecting the viewers. And, even when the writing didn't always make perfect sense, producing some of the most dazzling animation that the program ever showcased. I really like the vest.

Furthermore to this beer: those last two Swamp Thing books are good.

• Saga of the Swamp Thing: Book Five was written by Alan Moore with art by Rick Veitch, John Totleben and Alfredo Alcala, colored by Tatjana Wood, lettered by John Costanza and with original series cover art by Stephen Bissette and original series cover color by Tatjana Wood. Bissette wrote the introduction for this volume, a collection which most engagingly depicts a bitter confrontation in Gotham City between Swamp Thing and Batman, leading to Swamp Thing's consciousness getting exiled into the cosmos, spending the sixth volume bouncing around interstellar space looking for new pockets of plant life from which to manifest a replacement body.

• Saga of the Swamp Thing: Book Six was written by Alan Moore, Stephen Bissette and Rick Veitch with art by Rick Veitch, John Totleben, Alfredo Alcala, Stephen Bissette and Tom Yeates, colored by Tatjana Wood, lettered by John Costanza and with original series cover art by Stephen Bissette, John Totleben and Bill Sienkiewicz and original series cover color by Tatjana Wood. Another introduction by Bissette. The last, weirdest and most experimental of the six volumes comprising Moore's Swampt Thing run. I had forgotten until re-reading this that Bissette wrote one of these issues. There's a lot of great stuff going on here with some really trippy and out-there visuals, including a full page in which the panels and compositions are cleverly composed to look like Swamp Thing's screaming face, which has a deeper meaning in that unsettling story because it involves the horror of Swamp Thing manifesting a body out of sentient plants. There are other really strange nightmares and adventures too, like Swamp Thing being forced to procreate with a sentient techno-planetary entity. Moore and company pushed the writing and illustration as far past the bounds of formal superhero comics as they could, and it doesn't always make for the most thrilling reading from a narrative standpoint, but I respect the willingness to try new things. Eventually Swamp Thing manages to get his consciousness home to the Louisiana swamp where he is reunited with his love Abby.

Lastly, in keeping up with my daily diet of classic newspaper comics: I have made it through the year 1991 CE in The Complete Far Side. The last strip I read, from New Year's Eve 1991, is the strip set in a distant future of flying cars and a science fiction skyline...with a sign advertising "APPEARING TONIGHT: GEORGE BURNS." The passage of time would render this gag obsolete less than five years later. But perhaps future technology can renew this premise by reviving George Burns's consciousness and reconstituting him in the body of some sort of clone, robot or cyborg. I don't really know that much about Burns's work, but I would like if it someone could make this happen just because I would find it interesting.