The Beiderbecke Affair

The Audience Can’t Be Cynical Anymore

Terry Teachout quotes himself on violence in films; to wit, he suggests that violence in film these days is violence without consequences, that it exists only for the sake of itself:

. . . violence is an unreal presence and acts of butchery are no more consequential than Wile E. Coyote’s eternal pursuit of the Road-Runner. Automatic weapons are emptied blithely, BMWs driven off cliffs, handsomely coiffed heads blown to pieces—but there are no funerals, no weeping widows, no innocent bystanders imprisoned forever in wheelchairs because they happened to be standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The context of his posting, of course, is Cho Seung-hui, who was supposedly inspired by the 2003 Korean revenge film Oldboy. The Washington Post, among others, has noticed similarities between Cho’s self-portraits and images from the film (the former can be seen below and the latter above).

The Post finds even more to say about the relationship between Cho and the films of John Woo.

These similarities between fact and fiction, of course, raise striking issues that all creative artists—but especially those who deal in stories that offer visceral violence as part of their pleasure principle—must deal with. Woo built engines of excitement and stimulation that pleased millions and made him a wealthy, internationally known man. Yet now, all these years later, a young man might have used them as the vessel of his rage and alienation, taken the icon of the movie gun and moved from the intimacy of the DVD player and the arena of his imagination to the public arena, and there reenacted the ritual. This time the carnage is for real.

A little too easy to be smug on this point, I think. Here’s Oldboy director Park Chan-wook on the subject (from a New York Times Magazine profile by Ian Buruma a year ago):

Sitting in his office not long ago, we talked about violence, or more specifically about Park’s terror of violence. “In my films, I focus on pain and fear,” he said. “The fear just before an act of violence and the pain after. This applies to the perpetrators as well as the victims.” To illustrate his point, Park described a scene from his last film, Lady Vengeance, in which the father of a kidnapped and murdered child finally has the kidnapper at his mercy, tied to a chair in an abandoned schoolhouse. The father is there with his family and relatives of the child murderer’s other young victims. They all patiently wait their turns to wreak a terrible revenge on the defenseless killer.

“The father,” Park continued, “has picked up his ax. His daughter tries to restrain him. The audience expects her to say something like, ‘No, don’t do it!’ Instead, she asks him to leave the victim alive, so the rest of the family can also have a go at him. The audience laughs. The next shot shows the father with his ax dripping blood, terrified of what he has just done. The audience can’t be cynical anymore and regrets having laughed at the preparation for such a brutal act.”

Park didn’t smile while he told me this. Violence, for him, is a serious business. He may have a disturbing way of manipulating the viewers’ emotions, but as he explained to me, the focus of his work is not “the beauty or humor of violence.”

PREVIOUSLY: Déjà vu; Oldboy is “a grand, gritty, indelible experience, the sort of picture that mimics great literature in the way it envelops you in a well-told story while also evoking subtle but strong gradations of emotion.”

UPDATE: Slate weighs in:

The “Vengeance Trilogy” is difficult, painful to watch, and obsessed with depicting revenge as the ultimate act of narcissism—a way to wallow in your problems and proclaim “Oh, poor me” with a hammer. But it’s easy to get lost in the surfaces of a movie as technically thrilling as Oldboy and ignore that it urges the audience to question the thrills it offers. Park Chan-Wook sends up genre conventions to point out that we intrinsically like violence—how it looks, the risk it carries, the satisfaction of seeing a dispute resolved by a swift poke in the nose—but that the consequences make us uncomfortable. Still, it’s probably the film’s endlessly consumable mix of technical pizzazz and heavy-duty violence that have made it an instant cult classic; many critics and viewers love Oldboy for the rush of images rather than the ideas hiding in the shadows.

 

Feeling a Bit Bi

From the the front page of the Sunday Star Times in Auckland, New Zealand.

A Manifesto

Although I oppose(d) the war (whatever that means); although I oppose the torture of detainees and the rape & murder of innocent Iraqis; although I twice voted against & oppose the current administration; although I oppose (strenuously) “I Support the Troops” bumper stickers (as if I don’t support the troops, some of whom have been my own family), not to mention the too-casual charges of treason that come only from the pie-holes of idiots; although I oppose the unintentionally jingoistic local TV news stories that describe the troops  as “defending our country” (honestly, how is that really true in Iraq?); I can’t support this. This is just stupid.

UPDATE: Of course, I’ve been known to overreact now & again.

IMAGE: Professor Pan

A Plea to Stop the Bickering

Here is a letter to the editor (assuming, of course, that this paper actually employs editors) exactly as it appeared this morning in the Cedar Rapids Gazette.

Middle East fighting not needed in America

If the Jews and the Muslim’s want to enter into the Middle East conflict, they should go back to their so-called mother country and do it there. This is America, we do not need this bickering going on here.

The next thing you know it will escalate in this country and they will be fighting here. We have enough problems on our own. If you want to be an American, then be an American.

Glenn Suchomel
Chelsea

I’ve never been to Chelsea, but Wikipedia tells me that, “like many rural Midwestern towns, [it’s] in decline. The few businesses left include a saloon and an oat processing facility. As of 2006, the city is awarding free residential lots to qualified people in a bid to attract residents.”

I imagine Glenn sitting in that saloon, out of work and sipping from a sweaty bottle of Genuine Draft, nodding in agreement as he watches clips of the Congress debating same-sex marriage on FOX News.

“It’s part of God’s plan for the future of mankind,” says Rep. John Carter of Texas. Bob Beauprez of Colorado sees “the very hand of God” at work. “We best not be messing with His plan.” Man and wife “wasn’t our idea,” Mike Pence of Indiana reminds his colleagues. “It was God’s.” “I think God has spoken very clearly on this issue,” says Phil Gingrey of Georgia, and when someone begs to differ, he replies, “I refer the gentleman to the Holy Scriptures.”

This is America, after all, and we need this kind of bickering here. The Washington Post, meanwhile, reports that “Democrats and a couple of sympathetic Republicans wondered whether . . . their colleagues were fiddling while Beirut burns.”

IMAGE: Lebanon, drawn by W. H. Bartlett, steel engraving by W. Floyd (1836)

Off with Their Heads

In my role as journalist, I have been called many, many names in print. (Only a couple of times have I ever been called out in person, one of those times being a memorable few minutes on live television.) Readers of the “About Me” link know the drill: I am maniacally vacillating, politically correct, disingenuous, puerile, self-righteous, foppish, talentless, irksome, unfunny, stupid, embarrassing, and pretentious. I am a scum-suckin’ creep and what I write is distorted, psychotic gibberish.

I receive each attack with the same shot of adrenaline: It is traumatizing but also thrilling and even (in some weird way) satisfying. Still, no one has ever called for my head.

In the Denver Post yesterday, some yahoo (from Littleton, ironically) did just that. Here’s his letter in full:

Response to killing of U.S. soldiers in Iraq

Re: “Soldiers’ bodies found; deaths were ‘barbaric’” June 21 news story.

Why have those who have continually howled at our treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo met the recent kidnapping and sadistic and brutal murders of our two young soldiers with deafening silence? Where is your outrage now? Not only should we behead 100 prisoners in retaliation (complete with Web-posted snuff videos), but also the editors, commentators, college professors and left-wing congressmen who would suddenly break their silence to come out in support of these enemy jihadists. We need to stop listening to these sanctimonious hypocrites who apply the rules of war only to our side. Let us untie the hands of our troops and allow them to fight and win.

Wow. Sometimes that’s all I’ve got.

IMAGE: Judith Beheading Holofernes by Artemisia Gentileschi (1612–1621)

James Wood (Of All People) on Stephen Colbert

James Wood wants to know what it says of The Washington Post “that its most biting writers are those working in the style sections or reviewing films? It is no wonder that 54,000 people have written to thankyoustephencolbert.org.” He then suggests that the MSM, in its response to the recent flap, has demonstrated an unfortunate inability to read:

Richard Cohen, in a recent column in The Washington Post about how unfunny and “rude” Colbert was, commented on the following Colbert passage: “So the White House has personnel changes. Then you write, ‘Oh, they’re just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.’ First of all, that is a terrible metaphor. This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring. If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg!” On this, Cohen expounds: “A mixed metaphor, and lame as can be.” Ah, Mr. Cohen, high-schoolers study “irony” in their English classes so as to avoid slips like yours. Remember your Chaucer? First of all, Colbert is supposed to be in character as a defender of the administration: His metaphor is deliberately comically inefficient. Second, the apparently “mixed metaphor” is itself a commentary on the “terrible” Titanic metaphor—it is supposed to be a second “terrible” metaphor, squared. Third, isn’t this quite a nice dig at the stylistic laziness, the verbal narcosis, of most political commentary—of precisely the kind practiced by Cohen? (Perhaps it takes a terrible metaphor to recognize a mixed one.)

So we have a heaven-made circularity: Colbert, abjuring comedy for bitter irony, attacks the MSM like the bloggers do; the MSM decide not to mention Colbert, or decide that he wasn’t funny, or was rude; and the bloggers get to cry foul, charging that this shows, at best, exactly what is wrong with the cloth-eared MSM—or, at worst, that a conspiracy to silence Colbert has begun. At which point the MSM, in their stolid, evenhanded way, write up the “controversy.” Who can blame the bloggers? They are right that Colbert was often not trying to be funny, but to be insulting—and there is something breathtakingly, sublimely insulting about the way Colbert, in the midst of his rudeness, continues to use the words “sir” and “Mr. President” not ten feet from the man he is dressing down. And, if they are not right about a conspiracy of silence, they are right about the press’s reflexive respect for authority, for only this can explain the chummy way in which, say, The New York Times first reported the event, with its relaxed and relaxing account of the comic genius of Steve Bridges (he was prepped in the White House!).

A Magical Bomb Silently Explodes

I’ve found cause to tweak the Atlantic’s literary editor Benjamin Schwarz in these pages, but this month he’s in fine form. His “Editor’s Choice” is Among the Dead Cities by A. C. Grayling, a philosopher’s meditation on the ethics of the air war during WWII. “This book will vex and outrage many readers (as it did when it was first published in Britain earlier this year), for many wrong reasons and for a few right ones,” Schwarz begins. The essay that follows is typically thorough in its judgment of Grayling and in its treatment of this thorny & fascinating debate.

At one point, Schwarz singles out Paul Fussell’s Wartime as “among the most cynical and astute books ever written about the conflict”—which, I admit, led me to pump a fist. It’s nice to hear one of your own judgments validated by a critic as severe as this one. Which led me to pull Fussell’s memoir, Doing Battle, off the shelf. I’d been thinking about Fussell already after debating intervention in Darfur with Dan Green. Among the questions implicit in such a back-and-forth include whether the means of war can ever justify its ends. In the case of “Little Boy” and “Fat Man,” the ends were reduced to just that: ending the war. Schwarz points out that in the final days of the Second World War “finesse and accuracy yielded to a grisly slog, the only goal of which was to finish the job regardless of the cost to the opposing side.”

That, anyway, was all that was on the minds of G.I.s who anticipated invading Japan. Fussell remembers the anxiety well:

The way we dealt with the coming hell of further and doubtless much more savage fighting was to ignore its inexorable approach and to solace ourselves with images of the great times (meaning drink and sex) we were going to enjoy on our magical thirty days. I think none of us had the courage to face openly the grave unlikelihood of our survival. Instead, we repressed it below consciousness, where it festered and broke out in nameless angers, quarrels, and fistfights. We spent the hot days of early August bitching, eating, and sleeping. Informed as we were about events on Iwo Jima and Okinawa, we knew the Japanese war couldn’t possibly end until we personally ended it with our artillery, mortars, rifles, bayonets, machine guns, and now, flamethrowers.

One day, the normal babble of the camp rises in volume and assumes recognizable forms. “Hot shit!” “Jesus Christ!” “Is it true?” “God damn!” “Holy Jesus!” Unbelievable, such a dramatic reprieve. Equally unbelievable, the news a few days later of a second magical  bomb. Then, the negotiations about the Emperor’s remaining in place. Finally, the fantastic news about the Jap surrender. Was it a dream? A hoax? There must be a catch. But no, we had won the war. We infantrymen were not going to be killed after all. We were going to see our girls and wives, our parents and children, brothers and sisters again, and live among them happily forever. The sudden reversal of expectation was too much for me to  handle phlegmatically. I was simply speechless, and idea-less as well. The night of the day that brought the news of the total surrender, I repaired to my tent to rejoice in silence and darkness. I avoided talking to anyone, lest I burst into tears in public.

That phrase “magical bomb” sticks with me every time I read that passage. The darker side of that magic comes from Hiroshima, the hauntingly understated essay that John Hersey originally published in The New Yorker and then in book form in 1946.

Then a tremendous flash of light cut across the sky. Mr. Tanimoto has a distinct recollection that it traveled from east to west, from the city toward the hills. It seemed a sheet of sun. Both he and Mr. Matsuo reacted in terror—and both had time to react (for they were 3,500 yards, or two miles, from the center of the explosion). Mr. Matsuo dashed up the front steps into the house and dived among the bedrolls and buried himself there. Mr. Tanimoto took four or five steps and threw himself between two big rocks in the garden. He bellied up very hard against one of them. As his face was against the stone, he did not see what happened. He felt a sudden pressure, and then splinters and pieces of board and fragments of tile fell on him. He heard no roar. (Almost no one in Hiroshima recalls hearing any noise of the bomb. But a fisherman in his sampan on the Inland Sea near Tsuzu, the man with whom Mr. Tanimoto’s mother-in-law and sister-in-law were living, saw the flash and heard a tremendous explosion; he was nearly twenty miles from Hiroshima, but the thunder was greater than when the B-29s hit Iwakuni, only five miles away.)

When he dared, Mr. Tanimoto raised his head and saw that the rayon man’s house had collapsed. He thought a bomb had fallen directly on it. Such clouds of dust had risen that there was a sort of twilight around. In panic, not thinking for the moment of Mr. Matsuo under the ruins, he dashed out into the street. He noticed as he ran that the concrete wall of the estate had fallen over—toward the house rather than away from it. In the street, the first thing he saw was a squad of soldiers who had been burrowing into the hillside opposite, making one of the thousands of dugouts in which the Japanese apparently intended to resist invasion, hill by hill, life for life; the soldiers were coming out of the hole, where they should have been safe, and blood was running from their heads, chests, and backs. They were silent and dazed.

Under what seemed to be a local dust cloud, the day grew darker and darker.

The debate, of course, has raged for 60 years, although it has occurred mostly in the halls of academe. Lately, something like a discussion has broken out in Germany, spurred by the posthumous publication a few years ago of the essay “Air War and Literature” by German novelist W. G. Sebald. In it, he challenged the German literary community to confront the awesome wreckage left in the wake of Allied “dumb” bombing. Sebald’s argument—that Germans’ obsession with their collective guilt has obscured the reality of their simultaneous victimhood—can be neatly turned around: Americans’ obsession with their collective good (cue Stephen E. Ambrose, Tom Brokaw, Band of Brothers) has obscured the reality of their simultaneous evil.

Years after the war, Fussell published “Thank God for the Atom Bomb” in The New Republic, an essay that drew many angry responses. Fussell was interested in attacking what he considered to be high-minded rhetoric like this from J. Glenn Gray, author of The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle (1959): “The combat soldier knew better than did Americans at home what those bombs meant in suffering and injustice. The man of conscience realized intuitively that the vast majority of Japanese in both cities were no more, if no less guilty of the war than were his own parents, sisters, or brothers.”

Fussell called such hand-wringing “cant.”

The future intellectual historian who will write The History of American Canting in the Twentieth Century will find much to study and interpret in the utterances of those who dilate on the special wickedness of the A-bomb droppers. Such a position can perform for the speaker a valuable double function. First, it can display the fineness of his moral weave. And second, by implication it can also inform the audience that during the war he was not so socially unfortunate as to find himself down there with the ground forces, where he might have had to compromise the purity and clarity of his moral system in the interest of survival. Down there, which is where you find the people you and I don’t normally know (just as we probably don’t know anyone who was killed in Vietnam), down there is the place where coarse self-interest is the rule. When the hysterical young enemy soldier comes running toward you with wild eyes, firing, do you shoot him in the foot, hoping he’ll be hurt badly enough to drop or misaim the gun he’s going to kill you with, or do you shoot him in the chest (or if you’re a prime shot, in the head) to make sure that you, not he, will survive that mortal moment?

When talking about Darfur, Dan Green argued that more reliable arguments in favor of war are made by veterans or those who show themselves willing to serve. [Ed: See comments.] It seems to me that a willingness to serve, to face that moment when “the hysterical young enemy soldier comes running toward you with wild eyes” is in itself unreliable. Such a willingness could no longer have anything to do with purity and clarity, with politics or geopolitical goals.

Which is why we’re still stuck—civilians like you & me, on the left & right & in the center—debating war and making terrible decisions the consequences of which, in the end, we thankfully know nothing.

IMAGE: A-24 aircraft assigned to the 3rd Bomb Group during World War II (Elmendorf Air Force Base)

Again and Again, Witnessing Ourselves Witnessing Genocide (And Doing Nothing)

This is from Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families:

In May of 1994, I happened to be in Washington to visit the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, an immensely popular tourist attraction adjacent to the National Mall. The ticket line formed two hours before opening time. Waiting amid the crowd, I tried to read a local newspaper. But I couldn’t get past a photograph on the front page: bodies swirling in water, dead bodies, bloated and colorless, bodies so numerous that they jammed against each other and clogged the stream. The caption explained that these were the corpses of genocide victims in Rwanda. Looking up from the paper, I saw a group of museum staffers arriving for work. On their maroon blazers, several wore the lapel buttons that sold for a dollar each in the museum shop, inscribed with the slogans “Remember” and “Never Again.” The museum was just a year old; at its inaugural ceremony, President Clinton had described it as “an investment in a secure future against whatever insanity lurks ahead.” Apparently, all he meant was that the victims of future exterminations could now die knowing that a shrine already existed in Washington where their suffering might be commemorated, but at the time, his meaning seemed to carry a bolder promise.

May 1994. That was 12 years ago exactly, and today we are wondering whether the victims of Darfur will even rate a museum. This is from today’s New Republic:

Never again? What nonsense. Again and again is more like it. In Darfur, we are witnessing a genocide again, and again we are witnessing ourselves witnessing it and doing nothing to stop it. Even people who wish to know about the problem do not wish to know about the solution. They prefer the raising of consciousnesses to the raising of troops. Just as Rwanda made a bleak mockery of the lessons of Bosnia, Darfur is making a bleak mockery of the lessons of Rwanda. Some lessons, it seems, are gladly and regularly unlearned. Except, of course, by the perpetrators of this evil, who learn the only really enduring lessons about genocide in our time: that the Western response to it is late in coming, or is not coming at all.

Were the 1990s really that long ago? They are remembered now as the halcyon and money-happy interval between the war against Soviet totalitarianism and the war against Islamic totalitarianism, but the truth is that, even in the years immediately following the cold war, history never relented. The ’90s were a decade of genocides—unimpeded (Rwanda) and partially impeded (Bosnia) and impeded (Kosovo). The relative success of those genocides was owed generally to the indifference of that chimera known as “the international community,” but, more specifically, it was owed to the learning curve of an American president about the moral—and therefore the operational—difference between genocide and other foreign policy crises. The difference is simple. In the response to most foreign policy crises, the use of military force is properly viewed as a last resort. In the response to genocide, the use of military force is properly viewed as a first resort.

Elsewhere: Can Holocaust be plural?

IMAGE: Bryan Denton

The Parent Trap, Or How Walter Kirn Hopes to Save a Little One in Need

Walter Kirn, on Andrew Sullivan’s blog, begins an entertaining post on the TomKat birth this way:

If unborn children really had rights, the infant daughter of the actress Katie Holmes and the temporarily-humanoid immortal starseed that styles itself ‘Tom Cruise’ would have been delivered by a lawyer. Breaking the absolute silence of the delivery room, the lawyer, on the infant’s behalf, would have sued for spiritual guardianship and demanded that all profits earned from sale of the child’s story and image—including ‘virtual’ profits in the form of publicity for its parents—be deposited in a trust account to fund its lifelong psychotherapy needs. It would also be stipulated that such therapy could not be interfered with or curtailed by ‘Cruise’ or his religious representatives.

In the following paragraph, Kirn declines to type a rather mild obscenity. Is he from Iowa?

PS—Find Kirn’s online serial novel, The Unbinding, here.

A Long Night in Iowa City

I can now attest: It really does sound like a freight train. EarthGoat has more.

IMAGE: St. Patrick’s Catholic Church, Iowa City, by Matthew Holst, Iowa City Press-Citizen