A Night at the Museum

Home for the holidays, I end up watching movies with my mother. Two nights ago on TV was the sequel to the “Night at the Museum” (the one set at the Smithsonian). I hadn’t seen the first movie, but the basic plot of both was fairly simple: each night a magic tablet from ancient Egypt brings to life the exhibits at a natural history museum (in the first) and the Smithsonian (the second), with the exhibits restored at dawn. Ben Stiller plays a night guard who befriends the exhibits in the first movie, and in the second saves them from a power-mad pharaoh, Napoleon, Ivan the Terrible, and some mobsters after the exhibits were transported to the Smithsonian for storage.[1] Along the way, Ben Stiller meets Amelia Earhart (Amy Adams, who falls in love with him), Einstein bobble-heads and Abraham Lincoln. The movie had its cute bits (Amy Adams among them), but it mostly just annoyed me–had I not been home (or had I the remote) I would not have watched.

Here are a couple of the reasons:

  • “Natural History” – I have some misgivings about history based museums as a general rule, though I do like looking at the art. This movie is set with exhibits of a natural history museum–which mixes animals, dinosaurs, Sacajawea, neanderthals, Mongolians, Romans, cowboys, and Teddy Roosevelt. As is hinted to in the plot of this movie, the key to the exhibits has little to do with “natural history” and everything to do with drawing visitors. Nevertheless, the general idea that natural history is stuff that happened outside and in the past without a link to science persists. This description has bothered me more as I age because it draws a distinction between civilization and nature and places the pre-modern beyond civilization.[2]In some ways, this is a semantic complaint since they could just call it a catchall museum (or antiquary?) and be done with it. Yet, sometimes the semantic concerns are the most insidious because it is possible to be entirely oblivious to what is happening.
  • The entire movie was reduced to stereotypes and caricatures. General George Custer being obsessed with his hair and being a terrible tactician, Napoleon’s obsession with his height (likely a product of British propaganda, as much as anything), and the romantic version of the photo “the kiss,” which, by all accounts was not nearly so welcome. The plot of the movie is designed as a vehicle for cameo appearances. The story can be done well (e.g. “Midnight in Paris”), but it can also result in excessively cheesy reductionism, which was the case in this film.

[1] The museum replaced the exhibits with animated and interactive displays.
[2] Throwing Teddy Roosevelt into that category also provides a level of unintentional comedy.

The Desolation of Smaug: a review (spoilers)

I had thought to reread the latter portions of Tolkien’s The Hobbit before writing my review of Peter Jackson’s movie, but, as the folks on NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast demonstrated this week, no such diligence is needed to completely trash this movie. From what little there I remember of the book, there are a number of truly unnecessary, egregious changes, but I want to focus on some of the broader issues from the movie rather than the picayune, which are frustrating, but, ultimately, not the greatest flaws of the movie.

A few of the key complaints laid by PCHH this week:

  1. tDoS basically operates on a single, helter-skelter pace, with just a few brief lulls where people were incapacitated.
  2. tDoS simply begins and ends without much in the way of introduction or conclusion, or even picking up where the last one left off. If the third movie picked up as much removed from the second as the second did from the first, Smaug will likely be dead off camera.
  3. the distinction was drawn between action and spectacle, tDoS clearly being the latter in place of the former instead of the latter supplementing the former.
  4. Not enough Martin Freeman

In addition to these, Linda Holmes made the comment that many of the scenes looked like a high-end video game rather than a movie. I had a similar complaint about tDoS, except that it was not just the visual effect that I had a problem with. I noted last year when I wrote about the first installment that the chase scenes felt like a video game level in that the characters had to hit the right button in order to advance, an unfortunate technique that Jackson expanded upon in this movie. First, while walking through Mirkwood, I had flashbacks to Final Fantasy X and then, in the escape downriver, it felt like a repeat of the escape from the goblin caverns from the first movie–and an easy tie-in for the merchandising department to make a video game level from.

It had troubled me last year that Jackson downplayed Bilbo’s street-cred as a burglar, something that he re-establishes in the waxing moments of the film. In a way I was glad that tDoS reestablished this plot point, but the rapid change between the first installment and the second as to what was worthy of respect in Bilbo’s character was irritating precisely because it should have been unnecessary.

Some issues that bothered me in passing:

  1. One of PJ’s shticks seems to be shoe-horning more elves into every movie he makes and, if possible, to invent or foreground love stories that contribute to the bloat in his movies. It has been a while since I have watched his King Kong movie, but at this point I wouldn’t be surprised to find an elf or three.
  2. Why was there a huge amount of greenery around the forest until you got down to Lake Town and suddenly there was ice everywhere? This seemed to be an abrupt change because PJ needed to demonstrate how much everyone in Lake Town was suffering, but just sort of came in from left field.
  3. A good chunk of the waning period of the movie (I have no idea how long it was, exactly) involved the dwarves running around their deserted kingdom trying to enact a plan that involves some sort of preset Rube Goldberg machine. Except that it seemed “the plan” involved them all instinctively knowing where to run without ever really explaining what they were doing or what they hoped to accomplish. As it turns out, they didn’t hope to accomplish anything of much significance and the whole episode was just an excuse for flashy CGI.

But one last thing that bothered me in tDoS that seems to be cropping up in a lot of movies these days is unnecessary diversity. Peter Jackson would not go so far as to make any of the hobbits or dwarves a person of color because that does not fit with the story and yet when there are shots of the crowds in Lake Town, particularly when they are there cheering on the declarations of Stephen Fry’s portrayal of a repugnant Master of Lake Town, a sizable percentage of the people look black or Asian.

I have problems with this on two levels. First, other than a few hair color/race issues with the elves, this is the only real artistic license taken with race thus far in the Hobbit films. Tolkien did not make all the people in his world white, but he did draw distinctions about generally who lived where. If one was going to take the other races largely at face value, it seems forced to include this much diversity here, particularly since–and this is the second level– it was still the poor, huddled masses who are black and Asian cheering on (particularly in the PJ version rather than the JRRT one) their oppressive white overlords. [1] I am, generally speaking, a purist when it comes to my preferences in the visual representation and I believe that in the realm of Tolkien-esque fantasy literature, themes of racism are often transposed onto the tensions between the actual races rather than the skin color within a single race. [2] When this is the case, it seems excessive to force diversity into the films.

If one were to claim artistic license in this instance and make the world more colorful than it was in the books, there is a right and a wrong way to do it. What happens in Peter Jackson’s film is what I would call the wrong way–where the people in charge, both good and bad, are white and the under classes are people of color. But why couldn’t the heroic Bard be a person of color? Again, this is not the artistic choice, I would have made and to make the population of Middle Earth more colorful would have changed the overall films and probably made a lot of people really mad, but to force this little bit of diversity in just seemed unnecessary.

Now that I have spent over a thousand words trashing the movie, I want to close with something I like. It remains the case from last year that I am intrigued with what PJ decided to do by filling out the details of a slim children’s story in order to make it a true prequel to the Lord of the Rings movies that he already did. I may be in the minority, but one of my favorite things about fantasy stories is the pageantry of world-building and so I usually don’t mind getting to see more of the world. The problem with this movie is not necessarily with concept, it is with execution. This movie was painfully bloated, with jarring transitions, painfully wasted acting talent, and is more designed to show off the technical wizardry than tell the story. [3] There are plenty of other ways in which PJ’s choices in directly the dramatically alter the morals found in The Hobbit, but I have already gone on too long. In the end, tDoS is simply not a good movie.[4]

[1] And, surprise, they will also get to cheer on their white liberator in the next movie.
[2] These are also worlds where true evil exists and they should not be cleared of all racist implications since the black skinned people, whether the Haradrim of Tolkien or the Drow and Duergar of Dungeons and Dragons, are far more likely to be black skinned, while the white skinned folk may be either good or evil.
[3] In this way it seems like the same critiques that were so devastatingly leveled at George Lucas in the transition from Episodes 4-6 to Episodes 1-3.
[4] I will likely see the final installment of PJ’s Hobbit movies, if only for completion’s sake, but tDoS mostly served to redouble my conviction that I am done with movies made out of books I like.

Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis

James Dixon is an English World War Two veteran and a young contingent faculty member at a small university in the UK midlands. He specialized in medieval history not because he felt a particular vocation, but because it was easy and spends most of his time trying to avoid teaching unless the class is composed of attractive women. Jim’s career is in limbo, with an article out for review being delayed and he is unable to get a direct answer from the head of his department as to his status for the upcoming year. His love life is no better, as he takes care of and feels beholden to his colleague, Margaret, who has recently had an issue with anxiety and had to be institutionalized. In short, Jim is in a state of limbo. The story proceeds from here, picking up steam when Jim meets Christine, a young woman who piques his interest and the girlfriend of Bertrand, the son of the head of Jim’s department.

Jim pisses off just about everyone around him, often by trying to white-wash his mistakes. In return, Jim is annoyed by everyone around him, people who he finds annoying, superficial, narcissistic, etc. Only Christine is exempted.

More than in any book I have read, I simultaneously sympathized with and was utterly repulsed by the main character, Jim and so went my opinion of the book.

First, the good. Jim seems like a generally decent person and he usually tries to do the right thing despite his uncertain position. In my current position as a graduate student I certainly sympathize with his financial and academic stresses. Additionally, while Amis tends to telegraph the catastrophes Jim walks into, his plans go awry in funny ways that escalate to a grand climactic implosion.

Then, the bad. When I decided to read Lucky Jim, I was led to believe that the protagonist was just a man whose efforts to do good failed in increasingly spectacular ways. The general plot is recognizable in that construction, but I found Jim much less benign than the blurb implied. For one thing, as a student who feels some measure of vocation both for my chosen topic, I was annoyed with Jim’s decision to specialize in a topic because it was easy. Likewise, I was irritated with his primary teaching interest to be to avoid eager male students and to collect attractive female ones. This general apathy about his profession and superficial interests also manifested itself in Jim’s interest in Catherine. He doesn’t pursue her primarily because she interests him as a person, as he seems to want the reader to believe, but mostly because she is prettier than Margaret, with a dash of spite towards Bertrand.

To my mind, Jim is a generic, generally cowardly schmuck. His saving grace is that everyone around him is significantly worse than he is. There are duplicitous women, elitist professors, arrogant artists, womanizers–Jim is not a particularly good person, but he is justified that he is better than they are. It is easy to demonstrate examples in the story of Jim being wronged, how he is being supportive toward Margaret, and how he is acting gallantly toward Christine by saving her from Bertrand who is just using her. But what jumped out to me is that Jim is just as superficial and often as petty as these other people are as he desperately tries to cover up his mistakes and “saves” Christine from Bertrand because is attracted to her.

I may be too harsh on some of the gender dynamics given that the book was published 1954. Nevertheless, I found the dissonance between Jim’s claims to benignity, his somewhat superficial motivations, and the awfulness of almost everyone else in the story frustrating. I sympathized with Jim, both because of bad things happening to him and because some of his circumstances struck close to home, but too many of his actions and behaviors were among my personal pet peeves. My sympathy waned as the book wore on and Jim’s actions piled up and when his career in the academy resolved, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of relief for everyone involved.

Lucky Jim is a comedy of errors created by putting Jim in an environment he is largely unsuited for and surrounding him with awful people. The main drawback I had (if you were previously unable to guess) is that I found Jim off-putting. Beyond that, it was distasteful to me, though not entirely unwarranted, that the people worse than Jim in the story were the rest of the people connected to the academy.

Next up, I am about halfway through Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, and am taking Camus’ The Stranger and Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden with me over the holidays.

The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi, Jun’ichiro Tanizaki (T. Anthony Chambers)

Perhaps the easiest way to explain Tanizaki’s 1935 novel, The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi, is to posit the existence of a “secret history” genre, that, if loosely defined could be expanded to include alt-earth or even roughly contemporary mystery-thriller novels such as Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, the “American Treasure” movies, the Men in Black, or superheros. More narrowly, this genre blurs the lines between fiction, rumor, and history in order to explain how the world was (or is) at a particularly point in time beyond the historical record. The author or narrator of the text usually takes a stance that the record is flawed (at best) or manufactured (at worst), but, thanks to previously disregarded sources, this secret history will fix the oversight.

One frequent trope in this genre is that beneath an honorable facade and commendable actions lie paraphilia–sexual depravity and unspeakable behavior. For instance, Procopius, a sixth century historian from Caesarea, records that the Empress Theodora would exhaust up to thirty young men at a single sitting and lament that she was unable to have sex through her nipples, finding her other orifices insufficient (9). Now, Theodora probably did nothing of the sort and Justinian was almost certainly not a plague-bearing demon intent on destroying mankind (12), but these appear as the causes of suffering during Justinian’s reign in a text that a later Latin title appropriately calls “The secret History.”[1] As a historical record, Procopius’ work is problematic (though not useless), but it is an entertaining read. For the purposes of this discussion, though, this style of narrative, replete with conspiratorial stories and a declaration that the stories will set the record straight are particularly well-suited to fiction.

In Tanizaki’s tale, the author purports to be telling the coming of age story of the lord of Musashi, which, he says, will also reveal the origins of the lord’s peculiar brand of sadistic sexual proclivities that do not appear in the official record and exist only as rumor. According to the author, the official story about the lord is that he was a fearsome warrior and commander during the period of Japanese civil wars in the 16th century, but at the start of the 20th century he has “discovered” two memoirs written by people who were close to the lord and set the record straight. Unlike Stendhal’s The Abbess of Castro, which Tanizaki translated into Japanese in 1928, both the characters and the sources The Secret History are works of fiction.[2]

I cannot say that I loved this novel, but it was short and eminently readable, with enough tension and characterization, particularly with the juxtaposition of the increasing depravity of the lord of Musashi and the aspirations to purity of the people around him, that I was entertained. Despite its content, or perhaps because of it, The Secret History possesses a subdued humor that emerges from the absurd lengths the young man goes through to achieve satisfaction. Moreover, Tanizaki portrays Japanese culture at the time–something I know little about–as obsessed with decorum, which heightens the tension between the Lord of Musashi and everyone else. And yet in the preface, the author says that he sympathizes with the lord because everything he did, including bring peace in a time of civil war, was caused by an overwhelming passion for a beautiful and refined woman who did not reciprocate his feelings. He sympathizes with this man, while simultaneously recording precious little that is actually sympathetic.

Here I am being deliberately vague. The central conflict in the narrative, exacerbated by his introduction to the beautiful and refined woman, is the awakening of his arousal by a particular scene when he was twelve and how the desire evolves over the next decade his life. The changes in his life cause his fetish to change and the pursuit of his fetish changes his ambitions in life, and the author suggests that it is the latter half prompted the actions that would be recorded in the official histories. He concludes by saying that the Lord of Musashi continued seeking a sexual partner who would satisfy his bizarre stimulus after the events in the historical novel, but declines to continue the account because it would detract from how the lord is perceived. Further, in this novel about outlandish sexual proclivities, there is no sex, though, as a warning for the squeamish, there are a few violent episodes. The point of the story–as in historical accounts–is to explain how some state came to be. The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi is not a tabloid tell-all, but is meant to explain how this man was able to bring about peace, with the explanation to be found in his thwarted desire.

The Secret History was a good book, but it also felt to me as though it was a quality addition to a genre rather than a brilliant original piece of literature. The faint praise here may also stem from my limited experience with Japanese fiction and culture, thereby rendering a deep appreciation for the cultural messages impossible. I enjoyed The Secret History well enough that I am going to read another of Tanizaki’s novels, Arrowroot that was translated in the same edition. Anthony Chambers’ translation was smooth and clear and the prose was measured and subtle, but there was also no one aspect of the novel that jumped out as exceptional. For all the adjectives that could be used to describe the story–graceful, elegant, subtle, funny, etc–it is not a book I would emphatically demand people read, but it is one that has my recommendation. As noted above, this was a quick read, only about 130 pages, and if there is anyone looking for something relatively short to read over a weekend, you could do much worse than The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi.

[1] The Greek title is merely anecdota, or “unpublished things.”

[2] This information is in the translator’s prologue. Tanizaki published The Secret History some seven years after his translation.

November Reading Recap

It may be in the mid-50s and sunny here in mid-Missouri, but the Calendar says that today is December 1. Here is a review of the reading I did in November before I jump back into the craziness that is the end of the academic term.

  1. Bend Sinister, Vladimir Nabokov – One of Nabokov’s early works, this novel follows the professor Adam Krug, an intellectual celebrity from a nation that espouses an ideology of militant mediocrity, as the leader of the country tries to seduce him into endorsing the state philosophy. There were some bitter and funny passages in Bend Sinister, but Nabokov writes like a pompous a…the book operates on a number of different levels that I sometimes found difficult to follow. This may have been that I was reading the novel as a night-cap during a week of frantic writing and I may need to read it again when I am less distracted.
  2. Snow, Orhan Pamuk – The book that took me most of a month to read because of the world beyond the book. The most common review of Pamuk’s work I have seen is that he is adept at spinning out hundreds of pages without character or plot development. I cannot totally disagree. Snow is the report of the novelist Orhan’s investigation into the death of his friend Ka, a Turkish poet who lives in exile in Germany. The bulk of the novel is a recounting of the events that took place in the frontier town of Kars in Eastern Anatolia during a three day stretch when a snowstorm cut the town off from the rest of Turkey and the local military officers staged a coup against the rising power of political Islam. Ostensibly, Ka had gone to Kars to write an article about the “headscarf girls,” young women who were committing suicide because the schools were forcing them to remove their scarves. But, as the reader quickly discovers, the article is an excuse to visit Kars–Ka has actually gone there hoping to take up with one of his former schoolmates, and the wife (now separated) of another schoolmate and current local politician with one of the Islamist parties in Kars. In Kars, Ka finds himself once more inspired to write poetry.

    This is the short and straightforward version of the plot. Usually I am a reader who needs to like one or more of the characters in a book to really find myself drawn in, but that was not the case with Snow. I didn’t really like any of the characters, but Pamuk’s prose invoked a dream-like state when I was reading it. I sympathized with individual passages and felt a connection with individual episodes, but, more than anything I connected with the setting. As in all of Pamuk’s work I have yet read, the Turkish identity crisis–between the Turkish communities in Germany, urbane Istanbul, and poor, hodge-podge remote areas of Anatolia–features prominently in Snow. I still cannot put my finger on exactly why, but I really enjoyed this novel, and it was a perfect prelude to the next book.

  3. Turkey since 1989: Angry Nation, Kerem Öktem – Reviewed here, Öktem argues that Turkey is a nation built upon a series of (often totalitarian) paradoxes, deep state actors, and ethnic tensions. He suggests that the people have largely been left out of the equation in Turkey, being manipulated by the various political actors rather than being served by the government, even when the elected officials have had the upper hand.

Next up, I am about a quarter of the way through Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim and just received a copy of Albert Camus’ The Stranger.