I’ve spent the last two weeks standing up on behalf of distant relatives I’ve never met in the face of blithe rhetorical posturing from some of my closest friends and favorite artists. The take-havers and meme-sharers are out in force and flying their true colors for all to see and it’s been a stressful but ultimately sobering and deeply clarifying moment. It’s a time-honored antisemitic tradition when Jews are subjected to a pogrom, genocide or other large-scale injustice to blame the victims for somehow bringing on the crime; the expert-level coup de grâce is to breathlessly and decisively accuse the Jews in general of precisely that to which we ourselves have just been subjected.
Basically I want everyone to put their phones down and read books. Truths about morality, history, culture, geography, politics and ongoing events can’t fit in these dogshit takes and falsified infographics we’re throwing around. Seeing people I quite like and professionally admire take to their phones to wave their absurd tribal credentials doesn’t make me much more cynical or heartbroken than I already was about the festering problem of antisemitic tendencies in the types of social and creative circles in which I run. But the rush to project a provincial American political narrative onto a part of the world about the history and geography of which the opinion-havers can’t demonstrate a basic working knowledge while tortured, mutilated and burned bodies of murdered civilians were still being identified and child hostages are still being held prisoner is a vulgarity it takes impressive determination not to be ashamed of.
The scale and viciousness of the pogrom of October 7 definitely has me in no mood to be the slightest bit more gentlemanly than I have to be in suggesting that people
admit how little we know about a developing situation,
contemplate that an evil they have the parochial luxury of tuning out has reared its head on a “side” they have built a sense of personal identity around “supporting” but have no business speaking for and may well in the long run be doing more to harm, and
simply express fewer opinions about something they effectively know nothing about.
There is no intellectual friction in this opinion-having economy and it costs no one anything to be wrong. Nor, apparently, to hint at or occasionally openly express antisemitism and a fundamental lack of knowledge about the history of this part of the world, how current borders came to be and how problems like refugee crises and the mass-murder of civilians got as bad as they are and as worse as they are now certain to become.
Some of those distant relatives I’ve never seen face-to-face have fled the frying pan of war in Europe for the fire of the new pogroms and others are battling for the defense of their lives and country where the rockets are falling. Fortunately certain online communities are apparently uniformly expert in history, foreign policy and political theory; these individuals know exactly what the correct counterfactuals would have been and everything that is presently wrong with a part of the world about which most can scarcely recite a single date or fact. Most reassuringly, they seem overwhelmingly confident that they have a prescription for what to do that will fix these problems once and for all. Details are a little scarce and for some reason they get touchy when asked to actually provide any, but I’m sure a cohesive plan to peacefully solve everything that no one has ever thought of or tried before is forthcoming any moment. I’m interested to see it but curiously there haven’t been any substantive particulars as yet.
To alleviate some of the exasperation and exhaustion of the past several weeks I’ve been keeping up with reading Don Quixote and also decided to get another FoxTrot book from the library. I’ll have more to say about both next time. For now I’ll note that in the previous entry I offered readers an opportunity to vote on what picture I would watch for this entry; none of the four selections were films I actually wanted to see and as it turned out there was a three-way tie in the voting and so I felt obliged to watch all three. Fittingly the first two involve heavy references to noted antisemitic writers Adolf Hitler and T.S. Eliot.
They Saved Hitler’s Brain, directed by David Bradley, 1968. Apparently this was originally produced as a terrible black-and-white science fiction B-movie in 1962 and then had some extra footage added to the beginning in 1968 when a new distributor bought the rights and wanted to put it out as a television presentation. Yard sale cheap look, thoroughly indecipherable script and a grinding dullness. Finally gets halfway interesting when the protagonists come across the only engaging bit of mise en scène in the picture, the sight of Hitler’s still-living head preserved in a jar with a huge, weirdly distended swastika perched emblematically above it. Appallingly boring movie with little redeeming kitsch.
Four Quartets, directed by Sophie Fiennes, 2023. This was by far the least unpleasant of these three pictures. I’ve never especially understood or admired Eliot’s poetry but Ralph Fiennes is one of my favorite actors and he definitely enlivened many of Eliot’s words for me more than Eliot has ever been able to do on his own without the Fiennes factor.
R. Fiennes committed the entirety of Eliot’s lengthy poem cycle to memory, which I dig because memorizing poetry so I can recite it to try to impress people is a hobby of mine, but Fiennes is not me and I am not a pretty girl. This filmed adaptation of Fiennes’s stage version of Four Quartets is characterized by subtle and intelligent direction from S. Fiennes with some sensible lighting, sound and blocking choices adapted from the stage and the addition of worthwhile Fiennesless cutaway images of breathtakingly beautiful and placid English country locales. For the parts where Ralph is performing on stage the film uses a confined aspect ratio and for the cutaway sequences Sophie expands to fill the frame with a fuller ratio, an interesting use of visual space edited in concert with location that I quite liked.
I was mostly into the commanding presence of Ralph himself and was in and out of the poetry. But one passage did arrest my attention as seeming apropos for the morally dire few weeks we’ve all endured and enacted upon one another, a reference to the “conscious impotence of rage
At human folly, and the laceration Of laughter at what ceases to amuse. And last, the rending pain of re-enactment Of all that you have done, and been; the shame Of things ill done and done to others' harm Which once you took for exercise of virtue.”
Lastly I just want to mention that I’ve always been annoyed by Eliot’s lines about how
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
That passage bothers me because one time in middle school a teacher told them to us and then made the class spend what felt like an eternity guessing feebly at whatever profound meaning Eliot intended or that this particular teacher was reading into them and holding over us. I forget if we arrived at a conclusion or revelation and the lines have never been interesting enough for me to want to dig into any deeper than that. Which isn’t to say I wouldn’t be open to some hypothetical Eliot expert trying to explain them to me in the context of a poem the rest of which also does less for me as a piece of text than as something interesting to watch Ralph Fiennes recite.
Knight of Cups, directed by Terrence Malick, 2015. Only late-period Malick could possess the clout to get Christian Bale and Cate Blanchett into a scene together and the determination to make it listless and uninteresting. That’s a good metaphor for this film generally: breathtaking image-composition of the kind that made me constantly want to freeze the film and hang it on my wall, punctured incessantly by narrative insolvency and character interactions that aren’t just dull but also embarrassingly discordant and implausible.
Bale plays a screenwriter who is making loads of money in Hollywood but has been unhappy since the death of a brother years ago; an earthquake gives him the existential impetus to examine his explosive relationships with his still-living brother and father and with a sequence of women he has loved and/or dated over a period of several years. This is all set against the backdrop glimmer of Los Angeles and Las Vegas, two areas that provide Malick with more than enough dazzling material for his keen photographer’s eye to linger over but don’t enhance his discomfiting obsession with making skilled actors like Bale, Blanchett, Brian Dennehy and Antonio Banderas amble around on garish sets improvising often inaudible and always pretentious dialogue while the camera thrusts in and out of their personal space.
There is a distinctive moment that I liked early on when Malick fills up the screen for like maybe thirty seconds with a really cool piece of stop-motion collage that looks like it was entirely cut from glossy modeling-session black-and-white prints. This seems to me to suggest a visual clue that the whole picture should be read entirely as a collage and more or less not at all as a story. In principle I like this idea but then T-Mal should have either made the film shorter or made the images and their juxtaposition more radical and experimental like the collage sequence itself. Knight of Cups finds Malick largely doing away with an interpretable set of cinematic rules, but based upon this and the several pictures he made before it’s apparent he could have used more constraint and discipline at this point in his career. I don’t know to what degree his subsequent films have reflected this necessity. I don’t currently find myself interested enough to want to find out.