Pride and Shelter

I finish reading a book and start reading another. I read newspaper comics from different eras and watch nine movies before decamping to San Francisco.

I made it onto the train from Vermont to Philadelphia and spent three weeks shuttling between the homes of friends and family members in Philly and New Jersey. I’ve tried to make progress on the Terry and the Pirates book that I was given in Vermont, finding Caniff’s strip to be as confidently and professionally drawn as his reputation foretells. But I will confess that while hanging around New Jersey I spent more time with the first book of a hardbound three-volume set of The Complete Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson.

I finished Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen after spreading my read across three different editions and dipping into several chapters’ worth of an audiobook recording by Josephine Bailey. The last third of the book is when it really kicks into gear and I ended up reading more than a hundred pages in a couple of days.

Austen effectively contrives to resolve the issue of Bingley seeming to have ghosted Jane and gets them back together and engaged. His sister Miss Bingley, who had a significant and self-interested part to play in the attempt to break up Jane and Bingley, shows herself to be more petty and vindictive even than she intends to be. Elizabeth finds herself turning on her younger sisters Kitty and Lydia for being too childish and impressionable, which feeds into the elaborate drama swirling about the rakish Wickham, who gets a kick out of trying to elope with young girls. He runs off with Lydia and everyone becomes deeply concerned that he’s going to sabotage the Bennet family name by having premarital sex with her. Darcy, whom Elizabeth has long since remarked “improves on acquaintance,” gets involved and saves the day by using his wealth to help secure the marriage and hold Wickham to account. Austen’s story-craft shines through tying together these narrative threads and giving Darcy an opportunity to demonstrate how goodhearted and magnanimous he is when no one is watching, putting his loathing of Wickham beneath his love for Elizabeth and doing more than anyone could reasonably expect of him to help the Bennet family (and, tacitly, his enemy Wickham) out of an emotional, reputational and financial quagmire.

Even after this situation is resolved, Elizabeth has the intelligence and common sense to treat her new brother-in-law Wickham, to whom she was empathetic when she was taken in by his deceptiveness, with Corleone-like iciness. By this point her feelings for Darcy have evolved as well, largely revolving around the remarkable sequence earlier in the text where she finds herself being shown around his country estate of Pemberley while he’s not at home and gets to understand him better by metaphorically inhabiting his character from the inside. When they reconnect in person, he builds on the letter he wrote her after their earlier confrontation to establish that he is indeed a far better person than she previously gave him credit for and that he is still interested in her. She proceeds to come around, finally discovering not only that he saved the day with the Wickham/Lydia situation out of his love for her — but that he did it without intending to get any credit for it.

One of the most stirring and scintillating scenes in the rush and thrill of the last section of the book is Elizabeth’s confrontation with Lady Catherine, who is vehemently opposed to a union between Darcy and Elizabeth and tries to throw her weight and wealth around in telling Elizabeth this in no uncertain terms. Elizabeth correctly sees, not out of self-interest but on principle, that Lady Catherine should be directing this bullshit to Darcy and not to her. Basically she’s bullying Elizabeth instead of keeping her petulant demands within her family where they belong, and Elizabeth’s dynamic wit and intellect shine as she stands her moral ground and refuses to be intimidated into making promises, even to someone as powerful and well-respected as Lady Catherine. Meanwhile Lady Catherine’s pet Collins sends an absurd and overwritten letter warning of Lady Catherine’s dissatisfaction. I genuinely can’t tell of the officious busybody Collins whether he means well or is at heart an asshole who knows what he’s doing, but either way at this point in the book he has ceased to be anything other than gratingly irritating. Good thing Elizabeth didn’t accede to his pushy marriage proposal back in the book’s early chapters.

By Chapter 59, very near the end, Darcy has finally gotten some perspective on himself and can own his faults, fairly crediting Elizabeth for catalyzing this process of personal growth. Elizabeth’s father approves of Darcy’s request to marry Elizabeth and makes an astute comment to her about how important it always was for her eventual happiness that she marry someone she can look up to, knowing she wouldn’t have thrived with a partner beneath her intellectual level (like Collins) or moral level (like Wickham).

I’ll be in no great hurry to tear through the rest of Austen’s catalogue, but I won’t rule out further dabbling as my reading habits warrant. For now I have pivoted back to my historical hobbyhorse of the American Civil War with the copy of Bruce Catton’s Terrible Swift Sword, the second volume of Catton’s Centennial History of the Civil War, which I found in a Little Free Library before departing Seattle in July. I’ve never read Catton before but he makes sure to mention in the introduction that the three volumes of the History can be read individually, and I’m glad to have started with one that promises some heavy action, taking the reader as it does from the period immediately after the Battle of First Manassas, when everyone stopped pretending that the War was going to be a gentlemanly contest between West Point alumni who had fought on the same side in the Mexican-American War, to the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest day in American history and a significant turning point at which Lincoln’s conception of the nature and purpose of the War underwent its most significant and impactful evolution. Terrible Swift Sword was published in 1963, just over a century after Antietam and around the same time as Why the North Won the Civil War, and I half-expected Catton’s prose style and areas of focus to feel as dustily antiquated as did those of the essayists of Why the North when compared with the writings of contemporary Civil War historians like Drew Gilpin Faust or the fêted James McPherson, whom I discussed in a recent entry. But Catton’s writing is wry, sprightly and insightful enough to feel as if it could have been composed yesterday, and I’m looking forward to learning new things about a favorite subject.

But as to Caniff and Catton, I must say this: I have assumed temporary command of a small and beautiful apartment in San Francisco while my friend its regular occupant is out of the country, and nearly every wall in the place is lined with records, CDs and books. I might well be quadruple-fisting books this month, balancing perhaps a short novel or poetry collection with Catton’s nuanced historical text and interposing, say, a coffee table book of Saul Steinberg cartoons with Caniff’s newspaper strips.

I watched nine movies since filing the last entry.

Sherman’s March, directed by Ross McElwee, 1986. A buddy of mine turned me on to this picture in 2003 when McElwee was releasing his film Bright Leaves. Since then I’ve gone through most of his films at least once but this is the one I come back to time and again. McElwee is most well-known for his autobiographical documentaries such as Sherman’s March, wherein he acts as director, photographer and subject — albeit a subject who mostly hovers about the proceedings from behind the camera and through placid, soothing voice-over narration that coolly belies the introspective turmoil churning beneath the surface of his North Carolinian drawl. His approach is self-indulgent but never pretentious or boring. McElwee is a Southerner who is fascinated by William Tecumseh Sherman; in Sherman’s March he intends to make a documentary retracing Sherman’s March to the Sea which decimated portions of the rebellious Southeastern United States during the culmination of the American Civil War. While he was building up to production, McElwee’s girlfriend ended their relationship and he used the funding for his film to instead examine his family history, personal problems and romantic misfires as he travels through his home region confronting his lifelong fear of nuclear war and struggling to find love or lust. For obscure reasons I felt deeply compelled to closely reexamine a meditative documentary about an over-thinking, creatively-motivated and self-fascinated man in his late-thirties, recently out of an important relationship and on the road nursing a lack of clear direction and an obsession with hoping to meet available women. I simply can’t imagine why.

This watch of Sherman’s March was interrupted by a call I received to tell me that a friend of mine in San Francisco to whom I really looked up had suddenly and unexpectedly died, which is part of the reason I find myself now back in this city where I’ve formerly had so many significant experiences, some along the lines that McElwee outlines in this compulsively watchable picture. While in this geographical and conversational neighborhood, we might as well note that Sherman himself lived and worked as a somewhat aimless civilian in San Francisco in his late thirties before the War radically redirected the course of his career and life.

Gimme Shelter, directed by Albert and David Maysles, 1970. Excellent and legendary documentary about The Rolling Stones and the disastrous Altamont Free Concert of 1969, which was undone by head-scratchingly poor planning which resulted in at least one homicide and is widely viewed as one of the nails in the coffin of the Sixties. I put this film on in honor of the life and death of Charlie Watts, the great drummer for The Rolling Stones whose career of outstanding work has meant so much to me throughout my life (he fittingly stands alone in the opening frames of the film). I only saw Watts perform live once, in March of 1999, and the last time I watched Gimme Shelter was at a theater in early 2002 with the surviving Maysles brother in attendance. Gimme Shelter documents the closing weeks of The Rolling Stones’ 1969 American tour and leads into the mounting horror of Altamont, when an apprehensive arrangement for the use of the concert grounds and the early circulation of bad LSD portended sinister vibes. The coup de grâce was the decision to use the notorious Hells Angels motorcycle gang as security to guard the stage, which leads to the Hells Angels getting into contemptuous stare-downs and eventually physical fights with both the performing musicians and the panicky, intoxicated, disorderly crowd, culminating in the killing of eighteen-year-old concertgoer Meredith Hunter, which the Maysles’ camera catches in real time and presents in the editing bay to the band as a kind of awful elegy for the naive cultural era of peace and love. The Rolling Stones have always been a splendidly messy cavalcade of a rock act and Gimme Shelter finds them in way over their heads and vulnerably responsible for their shortcomings as professionals and individuals. A band as talented and uncompromising as them wouldn’t expect and don’t deserve a document any less honest and damning than this one, and the Maysles guys delivered a great movie about the deep significance and disposable flimsiness of the art form of rock and roll. A documentary as different from and as great as Sherman’s March.

Leaving Las Vegas, directed by Mike Figgis, 1995. Nicolas Cage does a good job playing a disintegrating alcoholic screenwriter who has lost everything to his addiction and determines to drink himself to death in Las Vegas. Elisabeth Shue performs well as a troubled prostitute with whom he moves in, though on the condition she will neither ask him to stop drinking nor have sex with him. She eventually does both; they ultimately have sex at the precise moment when he is passing from life into death, which is an interesting idea that is here presented in an overwrought and melodramatic fashion. I saw this on VHS shortly after it was first released and was getting a lot of praise and awards. Several of the more arresting images and moments stayed with me down through the decades, but the movie does not hold up, if it was ever any good to begin with. The writing is silly and implausible with a lot of embarrassing, over-emphatic feints in the viewer’s direction to make sure that banal details which Figgis apparently thinks of as nuanced subtleties don’t go unnoticed. The gaudy 16mm aesthetic, which I understand on an intellectual level as a way to crystallize the atmosphere of Las Vegas and the depressing inner lives of the wayward protagonists, simply isn’t interesting to look at. Figgis seems to have a peculiar theory of editing that involves leaving in only what is relatively uninteresting, so almost every scene feels like it goes on too long or has an atonal ring. Cage and Shue are both capable, if not ingenious, actors and they do competent work trying to make the poorly-written dialogue feel authentic and natural. Way overrated.

The Rock, directed by Michael Bay, 1996. Another Cage picture that I saw around the time of its initial release. The Rock and Broken Arrow both came out in 1996 and were the first two R-rated action pictures I saw in a movie theater alongside my father and with his full blessing. I guess after years of lobbying my folks to let me watch uncensored versions of violent movies, my father was starting to cave in and consented to participate as a bonding gesture. Michael Bay is an action director with a booming, maximalist style and an eye for color and detail. In The Rock the jangling of a chain, turning of a key or flipping of a coin are given the same tactility and overly-serious moral consideration as the near-incessant discharging of ordnance and seriocomic crunching of bones. Gunfights, explosions and mass deaths occur frequently enough to become banal while insignificant gestures and corny lines of throwaway dialogue are tuned way up as if they were proclamations thundering down from Mount Olympus. This works quite well because Bay and his collaborators are skilled professionals with the astonishing level of attention to detail needed to balance so many disparate elements (loud sounds, Boschian compositions, elaborate choreography) all cranked up to maximum setting. The premise involves Ed Harris as a rogue Marine Corps brigadier general using stolen rockets loaded with poison gas deployed on Alcatraz Island and pointed at San Francisco to threaten the federal government for ransom money. Cage plays the FBI chemical weapons expert who is attached to a Navy SEAL incursion team tasked with disarming the rockets. Sean Connery plays an old man secretly detained by the feds who successfully escaped Alcatraz when he was a young secret agent for the British government (an aging-Bond gimmick that neither Connery nor the writers oversell); he is promised his freedom in exchange for helping the SEAL team break back into the prison that he once broke out of. All quite clear?

There’s loads of genuinely rousing action with plenty of gruesome bloodletting and an efficiently-composed, never-boring story. The picture looks and sounds good and is well-cast with solid supporting turns from John Spencer, William Forsythe and Vanessa Marcil. The biggest problems are the silliness of the dialogue and the implausibility of a number of important turns in the story, but these flaws are nearly subsumed by the overwhelming scale of what’s happening onscreen and the unrelenting pace of the action. There’s a car-chase through the streets of San Francisco that adds little; taking that entire scene out would have made this already good movie into a better one. Same goes for an elaborate and too-long scene in which the renegade Marines serving under Harris’s character massacre the Navy SEALs, including their leader ably played by the great Michael Biehn. Those are my biggest gripes with a genre classic that has aged surprisingly well and is as much fun today as when I saw it at the multiplex as a lad.

The Limey, directed by Steven Soderbergh, 1999. I saw this one on VHS back around 1999 and recall being bored and perplexed, which is precisely how I felt this time around. Terence Stamp plays an Englishman just out of prison who is in California on a mission of revenge directed toward those he thinks responsible for the death of his daughter. There’s a lot of experimental editing choices which are cool in theory but render the proceedings too disjointed to invite the viewer in and care what happens. This movie sucks, and you know what? After my recent experiences watching Traffic and No Sudden Move and reflecting on his other pictures I’ve seen over the years, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m just not a fan of Soderbergh’s work. I see him as a guy who would rather practice and refine different aspects of his craft than apply them equally to the vision of something greater than the sum of its parts, so his movies always have interesting aspects to them while themselves usually remaining uninteresting in the main. But seldom as nauseatingly uninteresting as with The Limey. The only good things I can say are that Stamp is every bit as a powerful and charismatic a screen presence as he is in other, better pictures, and that Luis Guzmán’s involvement never makes a movie worse.

Wolfwalkers, directed by Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart, 2020. I’ve been looking forward to this because I love the previous films from this production team, The Secret of Kells and especially Song of the Sea. All are family-friendly animated pictures involving encounters with mythical creatures from Irish folklore. Moore’s visual style is enchanting and intoxicating, with a unique sense of visual geography and a fascinating interplay between spatial dimensions which he manages to weave seamlessly into his storytelling to subtly indicate when characters are traversing the border between the world as they know it and the novel sense of self with which they begin to engage when they discover the magical creatures lurking just outside their spheres of awareness. He also makes a design habit of overlaying and interlacing rectangular shapes with circular or ovular ones, which provides a scaffold for all sorts of sophisticated visual and narrative applications. The mature, sober use of color and smooth character movements make these worlds feel authentically inhabited and the stories set therein are exquisitely sensitive, heartfelt and moral. This one concerns an English girl in Kilkenny in 1650 who falls in with a benign but misunderstood community of wolves and “wolfwalkers,” magical beings who retain human form when awake and take lupine form when their human bodies are asleep. (They can also communicate with the wolves and possess powerful healing magic.) This is a lovely, soulful movie-watching experience that is best had on a big, fancy television with an elaborate sound system turned up loud (which is how I was privileged to experience this watch while I was cat-sitting for my cousin in Philly). Song of the Sea is still my favorite of Moore’s pictures; Wolfwalkers is a close second.

Greyhound, directed by Aaron Schneider, 2020. I watched this one with those same Philly cats on that same fancy television and nice sound system. A while back I heard Tom Hanks explain on Conan O’Brien’s podcast how he secured the rights to the novel on which this film is based, wrote the screenplay adaptation himself and was as proud of the result as he was disappointed to see it scuttled from theaters by the pandemic. Greyhound is a concise, all-action seafaring World War II picture about an American destroyer ship escorting a large naval convoy across “the Black Pit,” the portion of the Atlantic where Allied ships were beyond the reach of air support and prey to vicious pack-hunting U-boats. I wasn’t expecting to watch two Elisabeth Shue pictures in the same week, but she makes a brief appearance in the beginning of Greyhound as Hanks’s character’s girlfriend who declines his proposal of marriage just before he ships out for his first command. (She doesn’t have much to do here but she looks class and elegant in a fine piece of Forties-style costume design.) Almost all of the movie is Hanks’s character and his crew trying, on their first time crossing the Atlantic, to balance the competing demands of their task — rescuing drowning sailors from damaged Allied ships, coordinating movements with other members of the convoy and variously eluding, pursuing, assaulting and destroying U-boats. Everyone likes to see Hanks play this kind of avuncular-but-gritty normal guy under duress and he gets serviceable backing from the versatile actor Stephen Graham as the ship’s executive officer. This is a modest, staid, brisk, adroitly-assembled war picture that makes great use of sound and keeps the action tense and buoyant. It’s decent, unassuming cinema that avoids the pitfalls of most modern war pictures but fails, or doesn’t even try, to approach anything close to the transcendent or profound.

American Factory, directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, 2019. Astute and engaging documentary about a derelict General Motors plant in Ohio being converted into a glass-manufacturing factory by a Chinese company and the ensuing clash of cultures, values and personalities that plays out on the production floor and in the corridors of capitalist and communist power. Like the other documentaries mentioned above, this is a fascinating and engrossing real-life story about flawed and complicated human beings attempting to navigate trying circumstances in a changing world. In the case of American Factory, it’s the forces of industry and globalization that, for better and worse, roil and upend the lives of individuals of all classes from both sides of a significant cultural chasm with troubling implications for the future. Great movie; highly recommended.

Kate, directed by Cedric Nicolas-Troyan, 2021. Dreary, forgettable action picture that is well downstream of Kill Bill and John Wick, stealing liberally from both without anything novel to show for it. Mary Elizabeth Winstead has undertaken a physical reinvention to play the hardened assassin Kate, sporting a spare, lean, no-makeup-type look that almost succeeds in the nearly impossible task of making her look more tough than pretty. She does what little she can with the shit material she’s been given. This poorly-written and muddled-looking picture has a story borrowed from the superior 2006 Jason Statham action movie Crank but remains a thoroughly uninteresting waste of our and Kate’s limited time. Winstead’s cool new look is the most interesting thing about it and can be studied online without recourse to the movie itself.