On The Road

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This apocalypse shouldn't have been televised

I posted this quasi-review on my gaming blog Save Versus All Wands, yesterday. But I'm going to crosspost it on Mahound's Paradise as I think it has relevance to the sorts of issues that are often discussed here - those regarding the culture of life (vs. the culture of death), among others.

I've already been involved in a fair amount of back and forth on this in the Save Versus All Wands comments and on Google+ and Facebook, and it is already clear that I hold a distinctly minority opinion. I sort of expected that, but what's interesting to me is how disagreement about The Road in particular and Cormac McCarthy in general seems to be completely independent of typical "ideological" lines. People who I usually agree with on gaming and/or politics or religion hold radically different opinions on this one. I suppose that's refreshing but it's also slightly annoying, at least in so far as I feel that almost everyone else in the world is wrong (and I'm right - howling into the wind or the nuclear winter clouds or whatever).

To take one example, I implicitly argue below that the movie is sort of anti-life (because it's a bit creepy about suicide). But one pro-life commenter claimed that the film is about as pro-life as any film could be.

I do think that people seem to read into the movie what they wish (I do not exempt myself from that). And this is perhaps due to the somewhat abstract nature of the setting and story. In the comments section on the first blog, one commenter praised the film for its "hope." But another praised it for its unflinching and unromanticized view of a post-apocalyptic world (I took that as saying that there isn't a lot of hope).

I feel like I should add more to the text to make a better case, but realistically, I'm not sure that would help convince anyone. For the sheer masochism of it, I'll probably write a separate post on how Cormac McCarthy is completely overrated. One of the foremost defenders of that position is B.R. Myers, a Green Party, vegan, animal rights guy. Life is interesting and diverse.

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Last night, too tired to read or write, I watched the post-apocalyptic film The Road, for the first time.

I couldn't believe how how horrible it was.

The movie is cliched, pretentious, virtually plotless, disgusting, depressing, boring, silly and uninterested in any sort of realism or explanation whatsoever beyond the "stark realism" of, gee, isn't nuclear winter (or whatever it is) rough.

That's quite a profound insight.

There are no names in the movie. There is only Man, Boy, Woman, Old Man, Veteran, Motherly Woman and so on (we know this from the end titles). The post-apocalyptic wherever is so rough that people don't even have names.

Also, even though virtually everyone is dead and there's nothing but old stuff everywhere, there are no shoes nor ammunition to be found. The radiation got it, too, I guess.

Why did the man and his son wait so long (at least as long as the age of the boy - ten years, perhaps) to set out from interior wherever to coastal wherever? Or are they just really slow?

Since all vegetation appears to be dead, and there are no animals or even insects, how did the man and the boy survive for so long?

A few other people seem to have survived for that long through practicing cannibalism, but in order to eat live people, those live people would have had to survive long enough for other people to then eat them. How did they survive for that long? 

Why are the man and his son surprised when they get to the sea and it is not blue? Since everything is gray due to the perpetual cloud clover, what did they expect, Club Med?

Why, dying of starvation but having come across a hidden shelter filled with an almost limitless supply of food, do the man and his son flee after thinking they just might have heard a barking dog?

Now, I suppose some of these questions might have had answers, but the movie makes no attempt to provide them. Such questions and answers are unimportant, the movie makers seem to be saying.

Or, rather, the only answer to these and other questions is that things in this story do not really happen for reasons, nor do people think or behave rationally. Instead, things happen or people think and behave in ways solely calculated to advance the movie's tone. The tone is everything. I got the tone after thirty seconds. But the movie makers wanted to make sure I continued to get it for two hours. Good and hard.

Man and Boy survived for ten years because the movie would have been less compelling if it had been about Man and Infant.

Actually, I think it might have been more interesting and less cliched.

"I love you, son."

"Waaa!"  

The Road is also a deeply immoral movie. Yes, movies can be immoral when they convey immoral messages. Here are a few of them:

When calamities happen, it's a common, rational and even proper reaction for human beings to kill themselves. 

When trying to survive, the most important thing is knowing when to kill yourself. 

If someone you love - your wife, perhaps - wishes to kill herself, do not attempt to stop her. Let her walk away alone into the dark woods.  

When getting ready to make a final stand against bad guys, don't use your gun against them. Rather, point your pistol at your son's head. 

Don't ever try to save kidnapped people from being eaten by cannibals. Put the lock back on the door and run away. 

If you shoot a man (perhaps an innocent man), run away as his wife weeps over his burning corpse. 

If you're one of the last men on earth, don't be kind to strangers, under any circumstances, even if they're old defenseless men who look like Robert Duvall. 

And if you do have second thoughts about the propriety of, say, stripping a man naked in the freezing cold and taking all his belongings, make it up to him by leaving his clothes in a pile, miles away (where it's unclear if he will ever find them), topped with a small can of fruit. Do not include a can opener. 

If you love someone who has died - in this case, your wife - show that love by throwing your wedding ring and her picture into a river. 

And so on. 

Teach these things to your son.

Oh, I know, the movie isn't saying that people should behave this way. It's just showing you how two people - Man and Boy - did behave, because, you know, apocalypse.

Live is tough and then you shoot your son.

As an antidote to this awful film, read any Golden Age or even New Wave science fiction story about people trying to survive an apocalyptic event. True, the heroes of these stories are not always moral paragons (which, of course, in and of itself is fine), and the moral messages are often odd - consider, for example, the creepy pro-incest banter in Heinlein's Farnham's Freehold - but at least these are stories with interesting characters and plots, and the authors try to model actual behavior, or at least interesting behavior.

I recommend Fritz Leiber's short story, A Pail of Air.

Compared to The Road, Thomas Disch's hopeless The Genocides is a joyous walk in a beautiful park.

If you're flipping around on Netflix and encounter The Road, don't do it.

You want a bleak tail of people trying to survive a grueling trek through gray and rainy woods? Watch The Barkley Marathons.

Crossposted at Save Versus All Wands.

Ronald Reagan in The Killers

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Ronald Reagan would have been 105 today.

One of the most inaccurate characterizations of Reagan was that he was a "B-movie actor." He was actually quite an A-list performer for most of his career. His biographer, Paul Kengor noted:

By the 1940s, he was one of the top box office draws in Hollywood and received more fan mail than any actor at Warner Brothers except Errol Flynn.

His later career was somewhat harmed by his politics. Though he was at the time an FDR style liberal, as the President of the Screen Actor's Guild from 1947-52 he forcibly opposed Communist infiltration in the union and the industry--a politically incorrect stance among the media elite.

In "The Gipper on the Silver Screen," a 2004 article for National Review Online, S. T. Karnick neatly chronicles Reagan's film career. But I want to talk a little about his final movie role in the great noir crime drama The Killers (1964). Interestingly, it was the only time he played a villain.

The Killers was a quasi-remake of the 1946 film of the same name, which was in turn loosely based on the Ernest Hemingway story. Though the original was a good film, the remake was superior, with fine acting by Reagan, Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, John Cassavetes and the wonderful Clu Gulager.

The story is on the surface a bleak one with every character morally compromised in some way. Appropriately, the two professional killers of the title--Marvin and Gulager --though thoroughly amoral, are perhaps the most sympathetic or at least the most interesting. Marvin's fatherly guidance to Gulager is priceless. Reagan plays a gangster with a taste for betrayal who poses as a legitimate businessman. Dickinson is the utterly dishonest and murderously selfish gold digger. And Cassavetes is the naively besotted patsy. The film is hugely enjoyable and entertaining.

Reagan has a number of great scenes.

In this one he gives Dickinson what she arguably richly deserves (given her subsequent behavior), though in the dramatic context it was probably done out of jealously. Apparently Reagan regretted doing this scene. While I would agree that it is never appropriate to strike a woman, if any fictional female character in movie history ever did merit it, it is "Sheila Farr."

And here is the final death scene, where three out of the four main characters--played by Reagan, Dickinson and Marvin--perish in the space of three minutes. (The Cassavetes character died at the beginning of the film, but he appears in flashbacks.)

Marvin is the mortally wounded assassin who must carry out his final task. Losing blood is arguably similar to being drunk, and apparently Marvin was drunk during the filming of the scene to the point where the director almost told him to go home. Luckily he didn't. It works brilliantly.

But Reagan's understated performance rivals Marvin's physically dramatic one. "Jack Browning" is at his safe, quickly putting money in a bag, trying to outrace Marvin and the police.

I love the way Reagan looks at Dickinson as she attempts her final betrayal. "There she goes again," he notes with his eyebrows.

And then he stoically looks from the silencer equipped gun pointed inexorably at him to the money in his hand and sighs. His unsaid final words: "It's only money. I almost made it, but now this is how it all ends."

Great stuff!

Happy birthday, Mr. President.

"It Was Not For the Supremacy That You Have Sought My Blood. But Because I Would Not Bend to the Marriage!"

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This is the final part of the trial scene for the 1966 film, A Man for All Seasons.

Paul Scofield plays Saint Thomas Moore.

He gave up everything, including his life, to defend the clear words of Christ...

...on divorce.

The indictment is grounded in an Act of Parliament which is directly repugnant to the law of God and His holy Church, the supreme government of which no temporal person may, by any law presume to take upon him. This was granted by the mouth of our Savior, Christ Himself to Saint Peter and the bishops of Rome whilst He lived and was personally present here on Earth. It is therefore insufficient in law to charge any Christian to obey it.

Have mercy.

That speech strikes the contemporary Church like thunder.

The interesting thing about the film is that it was written by a non-Catholic and non-Christian.

Robert Bolt had been divorced three times.

Some believe Bolt rewrote the intensely Catholic Moore into a sort of free-speech liberal.

I think this is half-true. But Bolt himself was aware of the issue:

I am not a Catholic, nor even in the meaningful sense of the word a Christian. So, by what right do I appropriate a Christian saint to my purposes? 

What first attracted me was a person who could not be accused of any incapacity for life, who indeed seized life in great variety and almost greedy quantities, but who nevertheless found something within himself without which life was valueless, and when that was denied him, was able to grasp his death... 

So, St. Thomas More's deep religious convictions—the motive of his life and death—are too often minimized or even discounted as a kind of amiable eccentricity. 

Yet is it meaningless to write about a saint and leave out God.

Faithful Catholics think of the sixties as a turning point. By the mid-sixties the rot had already set in, and all that.

But what's notable is that in 1966 a thorough-going and principled Catholic could also be a sympathetic free-speech liberal.

A Man for All Seasons won six Academy Awards.

The film could not be made now. For that matter, at least two other films based on Bolt's screenplays--Lawrence of Arabia and The Mission--could not be made now.

Today, such a character as Moore, or Moore as written by Bolt, would be called a hater.

I do none harm. 

I say none harm. 

I think none harm. 

And if this be not enough to keep a man alive, then, in good faith, I long not to live.

Yeah, sure. He was a hater.

Enjoy your rainbow.

Christopher Lee on the Occult: "Never, Never, Never. You Will Not Only Lose Your Mind, You'll Lose Your Soul."

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Now that I have your attention, you might as well listen

Questioner: It's well known that you have a huge interest in the occult and one of the largest collections of books, ah, of the...

Christopher Lee: I don't have a huge collection, Somebody wrote I had twenty thousand books (laughter). I would have to live in a bath (extended laughter). I have maybe four or five (more laughter). I have The Devil Rides Out, first edition, signed to me by Dennis Wheatley. There's a book just come out, about him called The Devil is a Gentleman. And I have met people who claimed to be Satanists, who claimed to be involved with black magic, who claimed that they, not only knew a lot about it. But as I said, I've certainly been involved, and I warn all of you, never, never, never. You will not only lose your mind, you'll lose your soul. I don't have a big library of the occult. No. I don't know. Look, the internet and the media, if they can't think of something to do, they invent it (laughter). If they can't think of something to say, I mean, they invent it. I don't know who thought that one up. Looks good in print, I suppose. But it's not true.

Watch the actual video here:

Lord Summerisle on Paganism, Christianity and Jesus

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"They do not weep for their sins."

In The Wicker Man, one of the most entertaining and profound horror films ever made, the late Christopher Lee plays Lord Summerisle, the "Laird" of a Pagan community on a Scottish island. The articulate and gentlemanly representative of an ancient religion has a love of peace, a respect for nature and a hate streak for Christ. We learn only at the end what that must imply. Sergeant Howie is the policeman sent to the island to investigate an unexplained death...

Lord Summerisle (contemplating the movements of a snail): I think I could turn and live with animals. They are so placid and self-contained. They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins. They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God. Not one of them kneels to another or to his own kind that lived thousands of years ago. Not one of them is respectable or unhappy, all over the earth.

Sergeant Howie: Your lordship seems strangely... unconcerned.
Lord Summerisle: Well I'm confident your suspicions are wrong, Sergeant. We don't commit murder here. We're a deeply religious people.
Sergeant Howie: Religious? With ruined churches, no ministers, no priests... and children dancing naked!
Lord Summerisle: They do love their divinity lessons.
Sergeant Howie (outraged): But they are... are naked!
Lord Summerisle: Naturally! It's much too dangerous to jump through the fire with your clothes on!

Sergeant Howie: What religion can they possibly be learning jumping over bonfires?
Lord Summerisle: Parthenogenesis.
Sergeant Howie: What?
Lord Summerisle: Literally, as Miss Rose would doubtless say in her assiduous way, reproduction without sexual union.
Sergeant Howie: Oh, what is all this? I mean, you've got fake biology, fake religion... Sir, have these children never heard of Jesus?
Lord Summerisle: Himself the son of a virgin, impregnated, I believe, by a ghost...

(Note how the Pagan comes out against sexuality, at least when used for reproduction.)

Sergeant Howie: And what of the true God? Whose glory, churches and monasteries have been built on these islands for generations past? Now sir, what of him?
Lord Summerisle: He's dead. Can't complain, had his chance and in modern parlance, blew it.

Christopher Lee, as an actor and a Christian, sketched out the nature of evil for us, better than many saints.

The Wicker Man made me flinch. It also helped me understand.

Requiescat in pace, old friend.

Conspiracy Monday: Capricorn One

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The poster says it all

This Conspiracy Monday post isn't about an alleged actual conspiracy but rather a fictional one--a faked Mars landing as portrayed in the wonderful 1978 movie Capricorn One.

Some think of this film as a guilty pleasure, but I think that undersells it. It's a fabulously entertaining roller-coaster ride of a movie that manages to make its outrageous premise believable, or at least believable enough, for its two hours and four minutes.

I claimed that the the conspiracy was one of fiction, but that's not quite true. The "Mars landing" of the story is really a half-heartedly veiled version of one of the Moon landings, perhaps the first Moon landing. And one assumes the filmmakers pulled back from that explicit premise out of fear of being politically incorrect. There are three astronauts in a small capsule--which, given the fact that they are going on a months long mission to Mars makes no sense--and the "landing" seems to consist of little more than stepping onto the surface, planting a flag and making a short speech. The 1970's technology is almost identical to that of the Apollo missions. And the "look" of the players--astronauts, Mission Control, the media, the families--is precisely that of the era. This isn't the near future but the present.

So, minutes before launch, the astronauts are secretly spirited out of the capsule to a secret warehouse in the desert and informed that due to an unanticipated defect in the life-support systems, "you guys would all be dead in three weeks." Since the Mars program is teetering on the edge of being canceled, an incredible scheme has been concocted to fake the landing on a soundstage and thus preserve the momentum for future missions. 

"I have to start by saying that if there was any other way, if there was even a slight chance of another alternative, I would give anything not to be here with you now. Anything"

The astronauts only agree to participate after being told that the lives of their families are now at stake:

You think it's all a couple of looney scientists, it's not! It's bigger. There are people out there, "forces" out there, who have a lot to lose. They're grown ups. It's gotten too big, it's in the hands of grown ups!

Amazingly, the plan goes along without a hitch, with the astronauts acting their roles from their desert location--though one tries to send a coded message home--until the "returning" capsule burns up in re-entry. (Was this planned? The film doesn't make it clear.) Obviously, the astronauts must now be eliminated...

What really makes the movie is the incredible ensemble cast of not-quite first-tier actors--or at least actors that were not quite first-tier at the time (1978), either because they were still on the way up--Sam Waterson, James B. Sikking and Barbara Bosson (the latter two would go on to star in Hill Street Blues a few years later)--on their way down--Elliott Gould, Telly Savalas and Hal Holbrook--or sort of permanent B-stars--Karen Black, Brenda Vaccaro, James Brolin and (of all people) O.J. Simpson.

There's a funny unrequited back and forth between the hack investigative reporter Gould and the TV anchorwoman Black, a black helicopters versus crop duster chase with Savalas, desert survival with Brolin eating a snake, an insane uncontrolled drive through city streets with breaks cut by the bad guys, faked space-capsul interviews, an endearingly off-color senator, people suddenly disappearing after they "ask too many questions", a thoroughly oily Holbrook, the new widow (or so she thinks) Vaccaro tearing up to her son who is so proud that "my daddy went to Mars", crooked FBI agents planting drugs and much more.

Without giving too much away the final scene is a triumphant stick-it-to-the-secret-government moment that is almost perfect.

Would that all conspiracies were this much fun.