Queens and Insects

I read a piece of Greek drama. I watch three movies from 2005 and three movies from 2021. I read a classic short story and a recent novella.

I’m still balancing the four books I took with me when I left Seattle with access to the home library contained within the apartment I’m occupying in San Francisco. I’ve read two of the four road books, Pride and Prejudice by Austen and Terrible Swift Sword by Catton, and have started in on the third of these, The Transformation (‘Metamorphosis’) and Other Stories by Franz Kafka (translated and edited by Malcolm Pasley), while continuing to grab whatever interesting-seeming books are to be found around my friend’s pad.

One of these was Bakkhai, written by Euripides in 405 BC and translated in this edition by Anne Carson in 2015 (I guess more commonly stylized as The Bacchae). I had never heard of this fast-paced, unsettling and violent play before and in fact had never read Euripides (or Carson). Royal protagonist Pentheus of Thebes ultimately gets torn limb from limb by the titular band of Theban women who have entered a frenzied state of mass hallucination as a form of celebratory worship toward Dionysus, god of wine and madness (spelled “Dionysos” in this translation). Among them is Pentheus’s own mother Agave, a queen of the Bakkhai who finally comes out of the rave and down from her manic high to discover that she is holding her son’s head in her hands, perverseley justifying Pentheus’s earlier worry that these Bacchanalian rituals were infecting the female population of Thebes and negatively affecting his society. Pointedly, though, before meeting his demise, he is curious enough about what the Bakkhai are up to in the mountains to be convinced, with conspicuously little prodding from Dionysos himself, to decide against sending in shock troops to “make war on the Bakkhai” and instead dress up as a woman and infiltrate the Dionysian rites, which is how he gets in over his head and how his head gets separated from the rest of him.

While this smashes the Theban royal family to shards in typically tragic fashion, from Dionysos’s point of view this play appears to me to approach black comedy, and a pretty funny one at that. If the Bakkhai were uniformly rewarded for their worship of Dionysos, the ending would be more straightforward and less interesting; instead Dionysos lights a fuse that sets his own Bacchanalia ablaze by using Pentheus’s curiosity and latent desires against him, tricking him into engaging with the taboo culture he claims to hate and making of him a gruesome sacrifice that elevates the Bacchic ritual madness into something thoroughly and disconcertingly out of control. Everyone, including the queen of the Bakkhai herself, is forced to accept the cost of really letting go and indulging in truly Dionysian pleasures. Bakkhai seems comic if one accepts that the costs and benefits of partying beyond the point of no return are inextricably intertwined, tragic from the point of view of the guy without a head or the mother who has come down out of the mountains to a self-ruined life and bloody hilarious from the universalizing perspective of a mischievous, pissed-off god.

I caught up on two movies I’ve been anticipating eagerly, the 2021 film Nobody directed by Ilya Naishuller and the 2005 prestige adaptation Pride and Prejudice directed by Joe Wright, in which I became interested as a result of reading Austen’s novel.

Nobody, an Action Movie with a Twist (you’ll never believe it - the hero is a normal, relatable guy!) is exquisitely assembled in many ways — fine casting, cool look and a crisp, sprightly editing sensibility. It’s the content that disappoints, offering precisely nothing new and losing enough confidence in its own premise to let the third act degenerate into incoherence. The ingenious comedian, writer and actor Bob Odenkirk is so good at playing the schlubby-until-he’s-angry protagonist that his perfectly-calibrated performance almost bleaches the novelty out of his unexpected action star turn. It’s one thing for action pictures to be silly but it’s a sin for them to be boring, and in so being Nobody has more than a little in common with the even-worse 2021 action picture Kate about which I wrote several entries back. What the studios managed to get under the wire before the pandemic changed the movie-making business seems quite lifeless in the main and it will be interesting to see if the mainstream action genre as we’ve come to know it is down for the count.

Pride and Prejudice is as beautifully-made, in an aesthetically inverse style, as Nobody, but it has Austen’s fine and influential novel for source material and thus provides something more entertaining to watch and characters more interesting to care about. As in his other pictures like the decent-enough Ian McEwan adaptation Atonement and the excellent action/espionage fairytale Hanna, Wright’s skillful deployment of color, lighting, music and camera movement are most ambitiously and effectively concerted in his dazzling use of roving long takes; he possesses the requisite technical skill in combination with a good storyteller’s sense of how they should be used to convey narrative information. In Pride and Prejudice these storytelling compressors are much needed for the sake of efficiency, since the film’s only significant failing is that in trying to collage a rather lengthy novel into a two-hour film the filmmakers have somewhat abrogated the book’s point. (Having not seen it, I’d wager that the much-fêted 1995 television series was a format better-suited to the content.) The key roles of Elizabeth and Darcy are stocked suitably by Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen, while the really juicy parts of Mrs. Bennet, Collins and Lady Catherine are performed thrillingly well by the brilliant thespians Brenda Blethyn, Tom Hollander and Judi Dench.

While I adored indulging in this beautiful and charming confection of a film, there’s something quaint about how much they were forced to leave out or rearrange and how in so doing they risk missing Austen’s main points about the two central characters. The changes that Elizabeth and Darcy undergo on their journey from disliking to loving one another — she to come to grips with the truth that it’s not enough merely to possess her superior intellect but that it must be used properly, and he to chill the fuck out and, despite genuinely being a superlatively virtuous and moral person, take himself less seriously — can’t but help get muddled in a two-hour film with this many characters and themes to juggle. This is an observation I couldn’t avoid having recently spent so much time reading and contemplating Austen’s novel and is more a criticism of the studios’ overeagerness to adapt complicated texts into too-short films than it is of this particular movie, which overall is quite a good one.

I decided to see what else I could find from 2021 and 2005 that might be of interest. I ended up moving along to a surprisingly lousy 2005 kitchen-sink addiction drama called Little Fish directed by Rowan Woods. It actually caught me off-guard that a movie with such a high concentration of Australian screen talent (Cate Blanchett, Hugo Weaving, Sam Neill) could be so drearily confusing, slapdash and boring. Give this one a wide berth (Blanchett was her usual outstanding self six years later in Hanna; try that one instead).

I’m not very knowledgeable about The Muppets characters or franchise, so I had no personal stake going into Muppets Haunted Mansion, the brand-new Halloween special on Disney’s streaming service that reimagines the Haunted Mansion theme park attraction as a setting for a gothic, macabre overnight adventure for Muppets Gonzo and Pepe the King Prawn. Muppets Haunted Mansion is clever, concise and funny and carries on what I can infer from my limited Muppets experience is a Muppets tradition of figuring out how to make classic puppetry craft work in concert with up-to-the-minute filmmaking techniques like CGI, which is done here with supreme clarity and elegance. Everyone involved in front of and behind the cameras seems both to be taking their work seriously and having fun at it, which can’t help but spill like gravy into a good experience for the viewer.

From there it was on to two documentaries about still-relevant historical subjects from the Sixties. First was the 2021 Netflix release Blood Brothers: Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali. This should prove fascinating and enlightening to anyone with any degree of familiarity with the material; what’s new in Blood Brothers isn’t the historical information but the cracklingly fresh and modern perspectives and analysis from expert commentators like Cornel West and from close family relations of both Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, including grown daughters of both men who provide novel insights about the joys and regrets both experienced during and after a deep friendship that was short, intense and historically influential. The film has a slick, professional, engaging tone and manages to get a lot of significant information across succinctly. Importantly, it also has a reasonably restrained, nuanced approach to the gravely serious and still-urgent historical material, allowing some of the intertwined but difficult-to-reconcile views of Malcolm and Ali, as well as views of them from those who respect and admire them to this day, to balance and inform one another.

The documentary I watched from 2005 was Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria, directed by Victor Silverman and Susan Stryker. It’s about a 1966 incident here in San Francisco of which I was unaware, “the first known instance of collective, militant, queer resistance to police harassment in United States history,” in which drag queens, transsexual people and transgender people (all terms variously used in the film) of San Francisco’s infamous Tenderloin area stood their ground in one of their favorite hangouts and refused to be intimidated out of being true to themselves. The documentary is to-the-point, managing both to give the historical material a fair treatment and to leave the viewer wanting more, and the directors make the most from a workmanlike, low-budget look that doesn’t obstruct their knack for storytelling. I didn’t know that the Tenderloin was once a center of queer culture (portrayed as the seedier side of the culture in the film) or that a riot in response to police corruption and harassment took place there some three years before the more well-known Stonewall riots in New York City. (Maybe it would be too smart by half to pretend to make anything profound out of the point, but I can’t help but think of the Tenderloin as depicted in Screaming Queens as a kind of Bacchic rite of the swinging Sixties and the overzealous policemen who pushed the queens too far as Penthean interlopers who made “war on the Bakkhai” and bit off more than they could chew.) This documentary is an enjoyable, important and invigorating piece of San Francisco history and it made an interesting juxtaposition with Blood Brothers, showing how different approaches to important topics of social and historical importance can be equally rewarding.

As I mentioned above, I’ve made some headway with the Kafka collection I’ve been lugging back and forth across the country. This week I got through the book’s titular story The Transformation, perhaps Kafka’s most well-known, about the horrifying banality that settles over a family when one member of the household, the adult son Gregor Samsa, awakes one morning to find that he has transformed for no reason into a giant insect. Because it was lying around the apartment and was too good of a connection not to engage with, I also read over the course of the same evening the 2019 Ian McEwan novella The Cockroach, a timely, blistering satire directed with simmering ire at contemporary British politics in which McEwan recapitulates Kafka’s premise by imagining that an insect awakes one morning to find that he has transformed for no reason into a human being, namely Jim Sams, a fictitious bully of a Prime Minister whose silliness, cravenness and bluster McEwan claims shouldn’t be taken as a thinly-veiled “resemblance to actual cockroaches, living or dead.” Prime Minister Sams’s program is mainly focused on impressing the childlike American President and Twitter pugilist Archie Tupper (whom Sams suspects may be a fellow cockroach-turned-human) and on enacting a program of massive change to British society called Reversalism, in which the flow of all rational economic theory is inverted: everyone will be expected to pay to work and grow rich through mindless shopping, and the UK’s trading partners will shove money into British coffers for the privilege of forking over continental goods, resources and labor. (How do you really feel about it, Ian?)

We all know precisely whom and what McEwan is savaging here, but he’s doing it with a reasonable balance of charmingly Swiftian satirical disgust and a Kafkaesque sense of bewilderment and alienation that feels wholly appropriate for our moment, whether or not one agrees with McEwan’s implied political positions in The Cockroach. He seems grimly determined to demonstrate that bone-dry English humor is alive and well and that satire can still provoke a response and perhaps even positively affect the real world, but two years on from the publication of The Cockroach the deteriorating culture on both sides of the Atlantic shows no sign of having been course-corrected by McEwan’s tasteful, dignified throat-clearing. Nevertheless I wouldn’t demand more from McEwan, or for that matter from Kafka (who lived in comparably troubling times and wrote The Transformation just over a century before McEwan published The Cockroach). When the going is bad, the least and best a good writer can do is lay down a piece of paper and pick up a pen.