Dispatch the Editor

If you’re looking for a movie experience that resembles reading, consider Wes Anderson’s new film, The French Dispatch, a portmanteau comedy which dramatizes a series of articles submitted to the titular magazine.

Founded in 1925 and located in the town of Ennui-sur-Blasé (yes, fictional), the Dispatch is the French foreign bureau of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun. Its editor is a no-nonsense Midwestern transplant named Arthur Howitzer, Jr. (Bill Murray), who goes by the motto, “No Crying”. The four stories that comprise the film also comprise the magazine’s final issue, released in 1975, the year Howitzer died and, in his will, ordered the magazine to close.

The first segment is “The Cycling Reporter,” a brief travelogue by Herbsaint Sazerac (Owen Wilson), who tours Ennui, mostly on bicycle, documenting the town’s idiosyncratic delights: Le Sans Blague café, a pick-pocket’s alleyway, a pesky manhole. Among Sazerac’s observations: the town has changed very little over time — the blasé view of Ennui, perhaps.

Next is “The Concrete Masterpiece”, recounted in a lecture by a toothy and orange-glowing reporter called J.K.L. Berensen (Tilda Swinton). Her article details the life and career of Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio Del Toro), a murderer-turned-painter who shook the art world with a series of abstract frescoes inspired by his nude muse — and prison guard — Simone (Léa Seydoux). Berensen’s article also portrays the seedy art dealer, Julien Cadazio (Adrien Brody), a fellow inmate of Rosenthaler’s serving a sentence for tax evasion, who befriended the artist and sought to acquire his work.

In the third story, “Revisions to a Manifesto,” Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand) documents student protests, perhaps inspired by those in Paris in 1968. Her subject, and love interest, is a young revolutionary named Zeffirelli (Timothée Chalamet) who composes a manifesto in his bath tub demanding that the boys be granted access to the girls’ dormitories; Krementz looks on maternally and offers to proofread the lad’s work.

Last, and most fanciful, is “The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner”, told by Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright) of the Tastes & Smells department. He recounts a private dinner with the Commissaire of the Ennui police force, prepared by the legendary police chef, Lieutenant Nescaffier — celebrated among “cooks, cops and captains” for a type of fine cuisine (“Gastronomie Gendarmique”) made for police officers. The dinner is disrupted when the Commissaire’s son is kidnapped and held for ransom by criminals, one of whom is a failed musician called The Chauffeur.

Altogether the film is something like a flip book — a box of wonders that consists of an unfurling series of sketches. Anderson makes frequent use of tableaux vivants and frames that combine multiple narratives. The subtitles are dense, fast and rendered in tiny font, conjuring the experience of reading. For all the ink spilt on Anderson’s filmmaking style over the years, he is also one of the most purely literary filmmakers of our time, so much so that I’d suspect his idols are writers rather than filmmakers. The closing credits pay tribute to such luminaries as James Thurber, E.B. White, Mavis Gallant, A.J. Liebling, and Lillian Ross.

Growing up in Texas, Anderson became enthralled with The New Yorker, and this film may fulfill a long-held desire to bring that magazine to life. Yet his main fascination is not the finished product, but the process through which the lived experience of ordinary people is transcribed into art or story — whether in the form of the written word, oil on canvas, film, or even food. Anderson admits his fetish for haute culture through the names and setup of each story, but he also wants to show us how intellectualism boils down to a fixation on normal people doing normal — and even mundane — things.

It’s as if to say, you don’t need to be special to have your name recited in a lecture hall or article, but you do need a writer to take an interest in you. And then, God willing, that writer needs an editor.

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The French Dispatch, 2021. Written and directed by Wes Anderson. Starring Bill Murray, et. al. Adult situations and journalistic dilemmas.

Avert Your Eyes

It’s possible that Adam McKay’s view of America has never been dimmer, and that’s saying something of the director of The Big Short and Vice. Neo-Trumpists and billionaires are in cahoots with social media abusers and the New York media, while Silicon Valley weirdos and inscrutable scientists try to lecture us about this or that. Who can be trusted? Who can even be reached?

It is with such weight of exasperation that McKay’s new film, Don’t Look Up, lands with a thud. Don’t look up at what? A comet is hurtling towards Earth, according to astronomers Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) and Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), and will extinguish all life upon its impact in six months.

No one seems inclined to hear this news, much less care. President Orlean (Meryl Streep) is busy scheming ahead of the midterm elections and the confirmation hearing of a dubious court nominee. She proposes to “sit tight and assess”, to the delight of her deranged son and chief-of-staff, Jason (Jonah Hill), and the bewilderment of the astronomers. Two morning show hosts (Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry), caffeinated and self-absorbed, seem incapable of spelling the word “comet” but urge their guests to get media training. The eccentric billionaire, Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance), plans to mine the celestial object for rare metals to enrich his cell phone company, and has the clueless president tucked in his pocket. Everyone else, it seems, has buried their head in the sand of social media.

Though this may all sound familiar, it’s actually an absurd premise meant to set up a critique of American life as we’ve come to know it, and perhaps a sober cautionary tale disguised as a fit of madness. If a world-ending comet seems far out (it is), other threats like disease and climate change do not. There’s nothing wrong with the metaphor that likens comet deniers to anti-vaxxers or climate-change deniers, but had the film chosen a more literal imperative — say, “Listen To The Scientists” — the alarm bells might have rung more clearly. It’s hard to imagine anyone going for that, so instead McKay marches out a who’s who of A-Listers and does a bit of hand waving: people scribbling on chalk boards, montages of nature footage, and so on. The goal isn’t to broaden a scientific discussion of any sort, but to entertain us with a vision of America in which ignorance and narcissism abound and no one can focus on the threats to our existence.

It’s an intriguing setup given the parallels to reality, but it also becomes its own kind of distraction. Proving an argument by bashing one’s opponents may be fun, but it’s also the bad habit that too many of us fall into — and perhaps the root cause of the dysfunction in our politics. McKay expects us to cheer for his lampooning of the “anti-science” crowd while making only a few flippant gestures to science. Is this what it looks like to be “pro-science”?

The film is grounded, though, and for every outrageous moment there’s someone on the screen who looks shocked. Lawrence and DiCaprio, an unlikely but captivating pair, become the focal point of the film’s most pressing question: how do people who agree politically continue to work together productively? It turns out that’s not so easy, especially when trying to make scientific information compete with the endless noise in our media (more on that from the physicist, Brian Cox). While Kate accepts that her anger at not being heard — however justified — will get her cancelled, Randall keeps on with his mood-controlling pills until he’s made a joke not only of himself but of the serious situation at hand. If McKay’s voice is in the film, it emanates from his two leads — who are so right, and yet so wrong.

Many of us, beleaguered by two years of pandemic, find ourselves in a similar predicament: peering out at a dangerous world full of idiots and misinformation, yet content in the belief that we have not only the moral — but also the factual — high ground. The anti-science people are bozos! Take my word for it, just don’t ask me to prove it.

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Don’t Look Up, 2021. Written and directed by Adam McKay. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence. Adult themes, humor and comets.

The Rest is History

The paradox of the prequel is that it’s based on what’s already happened, even though it purports to come before. The story can — and perhaps should — proceed through references to things that viewers have already seen, which may make it hard for a prequel to stand on its own.

The Many Saints of Newark — the feature-length prequel to The Sopranos — occupies a gray area between being a great film in its own right and an add-on to the HBO series that came before, or after.

Billed as the story of Tony Soprano’s upbringing, the film is full of his idols: Johnny Boy, Uncle Junior, Dickie Moltisanti and more. The center of the story is not Tony, but Dickie — Christopher’s father and Tony’s uncle. “Moltisanti” means “many saints” in Italian, implying that this is about a family; they could have been the Johnsons — or the Smiths — of Newark, but instead they were the Moltisantis.

Fiction mixed with reality as this film came together, when Michael Gandolfini, son of the late James Gandolfini, signed on to play teenage Tony. Portraying a younger version of one’s parent must be uncomfortable, but it wouldn’t be a movie about the mafia — let alone the Sopranos — without a lot of close gazing at the affairs of fathers and sons. Now and then, young Tony shoots a glance that looks a lot like old Tony, and it’s not just because Michael is a good actor; he’s also the man’s genetic child. Pacino and Caan evoked Brando at times, but never to this degree.

This film could be seen as a dedication to James Gandolfini, whose acting genius came to light through his portrayal of Tony. The rest of his career was less remarkable, and he died before his time — in 2013 — in a hotel in Rome. His thirteen-year-old son, Michael, was the one who found him dead on the bathroom floor. These are real events, but if they sound like the outline of a mafia movie, maybe the Sopranos sequel is in the making. Privately, and in other roles, Gandolfini was more reserved than he was as Tony. His colleagues described him as patient and empathic on set, often to a fault, which may strike Sopranos fans as hard to believe.

After Ridley Scott’s Gladiator came out in 2000, Russell Crowe famously said of the tigers with which he performed stunts, “tigers don’t act”. True enough, and if you caught the recent 20-year reunion of the Sopranos cast, you may wonder if the same could be said of certain Italian-American actors, and if that may be the source of gravity David Chase captured in Sopranos and which reverberates through Saints: what you’re watching is not real, but it also is real.

When young Tony drops into Holsten’s, where the screen went dark on old Tony years ago, it may be hard to resist flashbacks of your own. The notorious ending of Sopranos sent fans into a tail spin of speculation over the unseen fate of Tony. Did he die suddenly of a heart attack? Did hit men burst into the diner and shoot him? Did Meadow walk back to her car? Did David Chase run out of lines? Of course, the answer is: none of the above. This was an artists’ trick by Chase — to pretend to conceal that which did not happen.

René Magritte employed a similar trick in his 1964 self-portrait, The Son of Man, by painting an apple over the face of the man in the bowler cap. People speculate about what is behind the apple, but the reality — or whatever you want to call it — is unknown. Good artists have a way of persuading people to look closely at what they are doing, even if there is nothing in particular to see. David Chase hails from this lineage, and in Saints he gets us to look again at Tony’s alleged demise and consider a world of other possibilities.

Saints thus reveals itself to be both a mafia procedural and a postmodern family saga. The good old days are sacred, as is the patriarchy, but so is the counter-narrative among those who question or reject all of that. The film takes place in the past, but is a product of the present. Not everyone is Italian, or even white. Michael is James’ son in real life, while in the film he is a young James. Death is the end of a life, but not of the story.

This is a moment for the mafia genre, which was shaped by great craftsmen like Martin Scorsese and Francis Coppola, but has been commercially usurped by franchises like Star Wars and The Avengers that have dared to play a bit faster and looser with matters of time and family relations. The gold-standard film prequel came not from the mafia auteurs, but from George Lucas, who launched his poppy sci-fi franchise with Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill in 1977, and then, some twenty years later, filled in the missing first half. In his latest film, The Irishman, Scorsese used digital de-aging technology to make Robert DeNiro look younger — the height of irony given that Scorsese probably knows better than anyone what DeNiro looked like as a young man. Now we have time-warp Tony with his real-life kin playing a past version of himself. Not even the mafia are immune to quantum mechanics.

Sopranos broke the conservative mold of the mafia genre, but not by playing with past, present and future. Chase and the writers mostly avoided flashbacks and circular conceptions of time, but they did put a mob boss in the therapist’s chair, where he eventually got to talking about feelings, dreams and other far-out things. This was subversive, to be sure, both to the founders of mafia cinema and to Tony’s own forebears in the show, whom he nostalgically likened to guys like Gary Cooper — “the strong, silent type” — who “weren’t in touch with their feelings” but “just did what they had to do”.

By declaring Tony’s psychology fair game, Chase gave the Sopranos writers a blank check to explore not only words and actions but the inner life of the mind. The result was a deeper and more nuanced look at a character than anything seen in the mafia movies, which may explain the longevity of The Sopranos at some 80 hours of screen time.

Now, in another fold of the time envelope, Saints takes us back to the idolized era before therapy and dream sequences, when tough guys simply shot each other, beat up women and took care of business without emotion. At long last, Tony’s many saints in their prime; but young Tony somehow looks less starstruck than we might have thought.

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The Many Saints of Newark. 2021. Directed by Alan Taylor. Written by David Chase. Starring Alessandro Nivola, Jon Bernthal, Ray Liotta and Corey Stoll. Language, violence and other mafia stuff. Rated R.

Of Masters and Men

One would expect a film called The Master to contain a character who is the master. In The Bodyguard there is no doubt that Kevin Costner is the bodyguard, nor that Adrian Brody is the pianist in the film of the same name. This is also true of The Machinist, a harrowing 2004 film in which Christian Bale plays a machinist, as well as The Dark Knight, The Mummy, The Postman, The Artist, The Patriot, The Highwayman and numerous others. Even films such as The Honeymooners and The Babymakers revolve around the kinds of characters you might expect.

It’s not clear in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2012 film, The Master, who the master is. It’s not even clear that the title refers to a specific character in the film. Maybe the master is Anderson. Maybe the master is you, the viewer. Or God? Maybe it’s a reference to the particular cut of the film we’re watching. Is there a master? No one knows. 

One candidate for “the master,” though not a very good one, is Freddie Quell (Phoenix). Freddie excels at rash behavior and excessive drinking. A WWII veteran tormented by unnamed traumas from childhood and war, Freddie stumbles drunk through life, unable to hold down a job or a meaningful relationship, leaving a trail of destruction in his wake. 

Eventually he stumbles into the orbit of Lancaster Dodd (Hoffman), a wealthy renaissance man who takes an instant, though highly paternal, liking to Freddie. Maybe Dodd is the master? He does lead a cult that includes his hypnotized-looking family and worships something called “The Cause” which resembles Scientology. He speaks forcefully and pretentiously, and waxes poetic about beliefs such as that the earth is a trillion years old and “man is not an animal”. 

Freddie is easily enthralled, and becomes obsessed once Dodd subjects him to “processing”, a bizarre interrogative technique designed to probe the subconscious and resolve something or other. Dodd professes to dig deep, but the deeper one digs into Dodd, the less of any meaning one finds. Is Dodd brainwashing Freddie or trying to help him? Maybe, like a lion tamer, he simply enjoys having a lurching beast tied to his post. 

In the downtime between therapy sessions, Dodd enables Freddie’s drinking, even while those in his inner circle warn him of the dangers of courting an unstable drunk. Freddie, the simple-minded mixer of poisons, carries the shame of being an alcoholic and a vagrant, while Dodd drinks furiously into the night and wakes up in the morning exalted as a healer. 

But what kind of master is Dodd? His wife, Peggy (Adams), looks at times opiated by her husband’s ferocity, and at other times totally unphased by him. One morning she finds hubby slouching over the bathroom sink, hungover from another night of boozing with Freddie, and proceeds to grab him by the manhood and masturbate him to completion. She knows what he’s been up to, and it only takes her so many seconds to start and finish the conversation. Who’s the master now? 

She follows that up with a visit to Freddie’s bedside, and implores him to put away the booze or get out. Her power grab in the center of the film begs a question: are Dodd and Freddie the kind of men to be admired? Do they have real demons and aspirations? Something in me wanted to believe that, but it’s obvious that Peggy sees them as garden-variety boys in need of some reckoning. 

The relationship between the two men turns and sputters. Freddie leaves, but doesn’t stop drinking, and it only takes a minor manipulation for Dodd to lure him back. Ultimately Peggy, despite all her conviction, proves unable to rehabilitate either her husband or his drinking buddy in the slightest. She stomps off in frustration. All prospective masters have given and gotten comeuppance, at least once or twice over.

Do human power dynamics resolve into such a mobius strip? Evidently every master has his or her master; as children we learned this in the game “Rock Paper Scissors”, in which each implement can defeat or be defeated by exactly one other implement. Somehow this weird fact of nature pervades human relationships way beyond childhood. Paper-thin Freddie is ripped to shreds by Dodd’s gnashing blades. Dodd buckles under the weight of Peggy’s rock. But Peggy is enveloped and neutralized by Freddie. Around and around it goes. 

Maybe Anderson means this as a rendition of the trinity: the father, son and Holy Spirit personified in his three leads. I imagine he is too much an atheist to make a religious film, though, so I prefer another interpretation, which is that Freddie, Peggy and Dodd represent the id, ego and superego, and the clash there between. 

Freud says that the human psyche consists of multiple opposing forces: sexual and aggressive impulses spring up from the id, the superego counters with morality, and the ego attempts to mediate with reason. Perhaps this is our trio — Freddie the id, Peggy the ego and Dodd the superego. If so, we have arrived at somewhere human, but still conspicuously without a master. Whatever the case, it’s worth realizing that this is not a film about “the relationship between two men.” That setup has been proposed in other works, but is probably the stuff of fairytales; in real life, there is always at least a third person present, if not a fourth, fifth and sixth. 

The charm of this film ultimately lies less in its psychological pursuits than in its craft. I have long admired Anderson because he excels at what he does. The Master is a filmmaking clinic, even if it says relatively little about the questions it raises. So what? Shot on 70mm film, the photography bursts through the screen with saturated colors and guile; like a late Edward Hopper painting, there’s no mistaking that this is mid-century America — a stark place brimming with confidence and delusion. 

Early in the film, Freddie works as a photographer at a department store, snapping portraits of the customers. Anderson gives us a series of closeups through Freddie’s lens: a beautiful woman, three young brothers, a debutante. Is this technicolor? It feels so familiar and yet so strange. In the soundtrack Ella Fitzgerald croons, “Get thee behind me, Satan”. War is over, and who doesn’t want their picture taken anyway?

Anderson deserves respect for putting so much faith in actors and cameras. One wonders how many times he threw the script on the floor and simply asked Hoffman and Phoenix to get in character. Depending on your perspective, the result is either a great film or a collection of taped acting exercises — or pretty much anything in between. 

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The Master. 2012. Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams. Adult themes and booze, and occasional language and intimacy. Rated R.

Living the Dream

Americans are a people steeped in fantasy. The “discovery of America” by European settlers (the pilgrims) was the initial fantasy-come-true — the fulfillment of an improbable dream for religious freedom in a faraway land. Those settlers actually didn’t discover America — there were already people living here — but that didn’t disturb the fantasy. If anything, it provided the first bit of proof that crazy dreams could be realized here. The “American Dream” was born.  

The westward expansion of white colonists that ensued over the next few centuries (aptly called the “Manifest Destiny”) was driven by a thirst for new lands. In fact, the expansion of this country — both territorially and economically — was enabled by the enslavement of African-Americans and the genocide of Native Americans. But that didn’t disturb the fantasy either; we continued to extol the merits of “hard work” and “self reliance”, believe in the opportunities that lay ahead in places unseen, and fantasize about who we could become there. 

We still tuck the sins of our past under the rug to make room for the nostalgia of white expansion, and the stories of Lewis & Clark, Henry Hudson and John Cabot still loom in our consciousness as tokens of the unending novelty of this land and the indomitable promise of self-actualization (also known as “becoming who we really want to be”). But those stories are also the bedrock of the white colonist identity (aka “white fantasies”) and part of the reason so many Americans are still able to look past the oppression and injustice around them with impunity.

Now there are no new places left to be discovered in America. Every stone has been unturned. Every river, forest and mountain range has been crossed. But to this day, in our culture and electorate, there remain deep and imaginative musings about the lives of other Americans — those that are experiencing a different slice of the “American experience”. 

City dwellers fantasize about life in the country — the woods of New England, the desolate panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, the bleached Nevada desert, the sprawling Plains, and the hills of Appalachia. These places seem so otherworldly as to be dreamlike to Americans reared in metropolises dominated by streetlights and skyscrapers. What might life be like as a coal miner, or a cowboy? Meanwhile those in small towns and rural areas dream of life in the big city — the glitz of Times Square, the glamor of Hollywood and Madison Ave, the gleaming futurism of Silicon Valley and the seemingly boundless economic opportunity on offer in so many of America’s big cities.

Americans have been known to uproot and move across this country, sometimes against great odds, in pursuit of these fantasies. In The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck attributed human migration to disasters such as the dust bowl. But the longing for new lands is actually in our blood.

What, for instance, does it mean to be a New Yorker? It doesn’t mean that you were born there, just that you embrace a certain mentality and lifestyle. Believe it or not, there are some great New Yorkers from other states, and even other countries. What does it mean to be a Texan? It’s not necessarily about growing up in Lubbock or El Paso, but about embracing the Texan way of life. We all have at least a vague sense of what it’s like to live other people’s lives, and like method actors on a stage we have collectively crafted, we are driven to interpret what it means to be this kind or that kind of American. 

Fantasy can drive people to do great things and better themselves, but it’s also, by definition, a departure from reality. The election of Donald Trump exposed this aspect of our culture. All kinds of explanations have been proposed for Trumpism as a coherent political ideology, but it’s hard to overlook how much Trump’s celebrity persona has been an irresistible shiny object to so many Americans, and the biggest reason for his political success. People talk about him, and people talk about not wanting to talk about him. There aren’t many people outside those two camps.

During the Obama administration, Trump gained attention with a series of outlandish comments and support for the Tea Party. His presidential campaign took off not by embracing conservative or Republican values, but by enlivening his bizarre roots in reality TV. In the 2016 presidential campaign, he presented a fantastical — and mostly falsified — version of himself to the American people: a proud, confident, all-American man who had achieved great success in business and accrued the trophies so many Americans apparently covet: wealth, power, fame, a beautiful spouse, and undyingly loyal offspring.

Before he was elected president, a litany of facts came out that debunked the myths about Trump, revealing a less inspiring and more troubled person. But for the American people the fantasy persisted — not for a few days or weeks, but for the entirety of his presidency, and quite possibly well beyond that, his defeat in 2020 notwithstanding.

Why? Americans broadly share a susceptibility to fantasy — about ourselves, about others, about “what’s out there” and about our political leaders. The “American Dream” may be an old trope — a slogan conceived in a bygone era of provincialism and faith, before celebrity culture and technology became the dominant forces in our lives — but fantasy is deeply ingrained in us, and its power (the power of the “American dream”) seems as potent as ever.

It’s obvious that many Americans have a tendency to look past basic facts to beliefs that are groundless, if gratifying. It’s less obvious, but perhaps more telling, that this habit pervades our culture; some worship God while others worship the famous or the wealthy, but the underlying mentality is much the same. On the left and right of the political spectrum, cities and small towns, pious and secular places alike, fantasy is a powerful force in our lives. The fantasies may differ, but the predilection is the same.

It’s reasonable to see Donald Trump as a product of this cultural animus. Wealthy? Yes, but largely because it was handed to him, not because he earned it. A great businessman? No, there’s no evidence of that. Deceitful, provocative, unhinged? There’s ample evidence there, and indications of mental health issues misconstrued as charisma. A loving, loyal family? Not the one he grew up in, and the jury’s out on the one he made for himself. Famous? Sure, but by what means? Powerful? Yes, but probably only for a short while. The facade of Donald Trump — one that has been carefully constructed over many years — quickly starts to crumble when you look at even the most basic facts. But so many people are disinclined to do that; seventy million people voted for him in this election, and tens of millions more have been captivated by him (whether they admit it or not), despite a train of abuses, lies and falsehoods that is too long to summarize. Few would admire the real man, but the airbrushed image is totally enthralling.

This doesn’t mean that there are “two Americas”, as the media likes to say, or that many Americans are flawed people who don’t know what’s good for them. Rather, the rise and fall of Donald Trump reminds us of what has always been true in America: we are all subject to a culture that values the creation and pursuit of fantasy to an alarming degree. Where one dies, another takes hold, and the pattern continues. Everything around us — from the media we consume, to the products we buy and the devices we use — tells us it’s okay to indulge in our fantasies to any extent we please.

If manufactured fiction appeals more than reality, Americans have every license to buy fiction. The danger is that the means of manufacturing are becoming more ubiquitous, thanks to the rapid advancement of technology and media. And for whatever reason, people seem to crave fame more than they used to. That along with the physical separation imposed on us by the coronavirus may make it only harder to discern what’s real from what’s fake. Does that mean the door is wide open for a swath of Trump acolytes to enter our political system? Only time will tell. And can our political system, which already lags terribly behind our culture, keep up? The Trump era suggests it’s going to be a challenge.

Re-Litigating the Confederacy

I thought this was an interesting take, and I agree mostly but not completely. If I think back to my high school American History class, where I got my first quasi-adult version of Civil War history, the most persuasive argument I can remember described economic interests and states’ rights as factors that led to war. For the confederacy, preserving slavery may have been the stated motive, but there were underlying economic interests at play (more on that below). For the Union, it was about preserving the power of the federal government and the economic advantages of the industrializing northern states — not freeing the slaves. That is, the Civil War was not a battle strictly over the morality or racial justice of slavery, but over competing economic interests.

Even if slavery was the main issue for the South, it’s not clear that it was about preserving white supremacy as much as the favorable economics of free labor. In 1860, the two most valuable assets were land and slaves — and for the south these were inextricably linked in an agrarian economy that produced crops and sold them to the north. Southern whites were enjoying a first-world standard of living in an essentially third-world economy, because they had free labor. Meanwhile, the industrializing Union states were benefitting both from high import taxes on foreign manufactured goods and access to a free raw materials market in the southern states, where sugar, tobacco, cotton, indigo and rice were being produced by slaves. That meant the north could buy raw materials on the cheap and sell goods in a protected market; a win-win for the north and a mixed bag for the south.

For the south, the prospect of falling further and further behind the north because of trade policies that were being negotiated in Washington was unacceptable. For the north, the secession of the southern states was unacceptable because it meant the north would have to strike a new trade deal with a foreign nation (the confederacy) to continue procuring raw materials, likely at much higher rates. Far from being a clash between good and evil, or even between opposite ideologies, the Civil War was the divorce of two economic systems that had become deeply and problematically dependent on each other.

It was also a major example of the Republican Party acting to quell insurrection in order to preserve law and order. If the fugitive slave laws weren’t bad enough, the secession of several states signaled a clear and present danger to the economic and political stability of the north. Deterring insurgencies to preserve the union has been a cornerstone of Republican orthodoxy pretty much ever since. We see that at home, with Republican administrations taking a hard line against civil disobedience, and abroad, with wars waged in the name of rooting out “insurgents”.

This is why it’s strange to hear Trump and other contemporary Republicans talk about Abraham Lincoln as the president who committed the Republican party to individual liberties. It would be more accurate to paint Lincoln, in his efforts to put down a revolt, as the first law-and-order Republican.

Superhero Problems

Venom is the story of Eddie Brock (Hardy), a San Francisco TV journalist who loses his job, home and girlfriend (Williams) after going off script during an interview with an influential scientist named Carlton Drake (Ahmed). As suspected, Drake has been up to no good — importing alien specimens from outer space and using local homeless people as guinea pigs to test a controversial procedure in which the aliens are osmosed into human hosts. Down and out, but driven by curiosity, Eddie sneaks into Drake’s lab and accidentally merges with an alien “parasite”.

By way of mnemonic device, the aliens are actually called “symbiotes” for their ability to achieve a state of symbiosis with humans. At first, this seems more like Drake’s pipedream than reality — the first few trials result in the deaths of the test hosts — but Eddie is the one to break through; once joined with the symbiote, his eyes turn milky white and he gains a monstrous inner voice, superhuman strength and an appetite to match.

Hardy turns up the physical comedy to slapstick level as his Eddie comes to terms with the fact that the alien is not only in his body but in his head. Physical movements need to be agreed upon, along with more subtle mental acts like intentions, opinions and self-image. At first Eddie seems to be hearing voices, but the symbiote, “Venom,” wants more — a dialogue, a relationship.

Split identity has been a common character trait in comic book movies, but rarely have we had a superhero — or villain — who suffers from divided mental states. Eddie’s condition hints at illness, or at least a personality disorder: he sweats profusely, loses all feeling in his body, takes up a diet of live food, and abandons any sense of normal social conduct. To his ex and her new boyfriend, a coiffed and genial doctor, Eddie seems “crazy,” “unwell” and “in need of medical attention.” There is a knowing irony that others in Eddie’s circumstances sometimes fall into similar shape but are not able to explain away their symptoms with an alien parasite. What should we make of such people?

Some of our favorite Marvel heroes have been off the rails, or at least estranged from humanity while also feeling the need to protect or predate. People like that also exist in real life without superhuman alter-egos, and Venom hints at this. To what extent have the comics equated the onset of superhero abilities with something that resembles sociopathy or a psychotic break — and to what extent has that been a way of avoiding talking about mental illness? It is certainly possible to imagine Eddie, after such a bad run of luck, going off the deep end without being host to a supernatural life form. In the final scene before he merges with the Venom, we see him standing alone on a bridge, as if to suggest that a suicidal level of dejection is what’s needed to morph into a superhero. The owner of Eddie’s local bodega, a Chinese woman who wants him to meditate, says, “Life hurts, Eddie. It just does.” As we see him lying on the floor of his apartment listening to Eckhart Tolle self-help tracks, her words seem like one of the best ways to understand Eddie, and perhaps one of the most biting critiques of this superhero genre to date: this guy isn’t a superhero, he’s a mess.

Marvel movies came on the scene in the early 2000s with the idea to re-purpose content from our parents’ generation into something that would capture the minds of younger audiences less prone to flipping pages and reading the printed word. Early titles included X-Men, Batman, Spiderman and The Hulk, recognizable even to Millennial moviegoers at the time. Those of us who grew up with comic book lovers for parents could appreciate the transferability of the comics — literally illustrated storyboards — to the movies, and more so to the business of making movies: by their very format, comics do the heavy lifting for the screenwriter, director and actors, making the project of making a movie less painstaking and therefore more profitable. Hence the burgeoning Marvel universe, which began as a handful of titles and now counts deep into the dozens.

Commercial success also suggests popular appeal, but in what does the timelessness of the comics consist? For one thing, these superheroes speak to the part of us that feels different — at once inferior and superior to those around us. Nearly every comic traces the story of a seemingly regular human who comes to discover their superhero powers, either through a process of introspection, as in the case of X-Men and Batman, or through a physical communion with the supernatural, as in Spiderman, The Hulk, Antman and Venom. These stories are metaphors about the power of accepting one’s differentness, and therefore they have been appropriately aimed at children and teens.

Venom takes a slightly different route by understanding differentness in the context of mental illness — or something like it. This may mean that we’ve arrived at a new moment in the history of the comic book genre, where the impact of the earlier movies has finally rattled through our culture for long enough to create something of a feedback loop about what these superheroes mean to us — and why we can’t get enough of them. Comics were conceived in a bygone era in which mental illness was understood and discussed in a much different — and more closeted — way. But the outrageous success of this genre means that we now have lots of movies about superheroes and comparatively few movies about people for whom life is simply a struggle, as it is for Eddie. Why can’t we tell a more adult superhero story?

Meanwhile, in the character of Drake we find another curiosity of our times: an innovator whose talents are bona fide but whose notions of how to help humanity are flawed, and whose underlying motivations are questionably moral. The nod to Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and others is clear; who are the “superheroes” of our day and what have they done for us lately? Where reality lacks, imagination thrives.

Breaking up Categories of Free Speech

Robert Simpson, in Aeon, proposes a new way of understanding/adjudicating free speech:

…put free ‘speech’ as such to one side, and replace it with a series of more narrowly targeted expressive liberties. Rather than locating actions such as protest and whistleblowing under the umbrella of ‘free speech’, we could formulate specially tailored norms, such as a principle of free public protest, or a principle of protected whistleblowing. The idea would be to explicitly nominate the particular species of communication that we want to defend, instead of just pointing to the overarching genus of ‘free speech’. This way the battle wouldn’t be fought out over the boundaries of what qualifies as speech, but instead, more directly, over the kinds of communicative activities we think need special protection.

I think the problem with categorizing speech is you open the door to attaching different values to each of the categories. Maybe we come to believe that categories a and b are very sacred, while categories x, y and z are somewhat less sacred. However that gets parsed, you’ve lost the notion of free speech being sacred as such.

Who cares? Maybe no one. But I’d argue that in making that move you’ve eliminated two very important, and intertwined, concepts behind the First Amendment: 1) there’s no way to know how speech will be framed or deployed in the future, and 2) courts and regulatory bodies have an important role to play in determining which actions are justified by constitutional amendments (the First being just one of them). Once you subdivide speech I fear you undermine the ability of ‘free speech’ to adapt to changing norms and methods of communication.

Also, it’s not clear to me that this proposal is about First Amendment jurisprudence as opposed to a legislative — or conceptual — reevaluation of the First Amendment. When Simpson says things like “Instead of throwing out free speech entirely…” or “replace [free speech] with a series of more narrowly targeted expressive liberties” or “Any time a country is creating or revising a bill of rights,” my mind goes to constitutional theory rather than jurisprudential history, especially given the lack of court precedent cited in the article.

If we’re talking about how judges should interpret the First Amendment as it’s written, then I think we need to have some categories, doctrine, etc. The problem is that there are always going to be new cases that come before the courts that entice or compel judges to create a new category (like ‘corporate personhood’), thereby revising — or discarding — the doctrine.

This goes back to my point about the methods of speech constantly changing, which I think makes the effort to interpret the First via some finite set of categories seem a little stuck in the present, unless you believe that Citizens United (and cases that followed) was a judicial overreach by a momentarily corporatist court (just one example from recent times). If you don’t think that, then I think you need some rationale for when/why/how it’s okay to create new categories out of thin air once you’ve committed to a framework of judging by existing doctrinal categories.

The CFPB and Predatory Home Lending

I’ve been reading this morning about this CFPB investigation into seller-financed home sales.

Apparently after 2008 a couple firms started buying up cheap (sub $10k) properties — mostly in the midwest — from Fannie Mae. Since then they’ve been putting low-income homebuyers in the properties on long-term, high-interest installment plans — called “contracts for deed” (where the seller retains ownership of the property). Pretty soon the loan becomes a cash pit, the homebuyer defaults, the seller evicts and then flips the property.

There are racial and historical overtones to this — contracts for deed were used extensively from the 1930s to 1960s in poor black and hispanic neighborhoods where it was difficult to get a mortgage. Needless to point out the societal changes that were occurring during that period. Today these contracts are used almost exclusively in poor areas of color.

Somewhat troubling to read about this, especially against the backdrop of having read so much in the past week about folks in the Rust Belt being “disgruntled” and “dissatisfied” and “disillusioned” with Obama-era housing. Trump looks poised to significantly reduce the role of the CFPB, which would only allow this kind of predatory lending to flourish.

It occurs to me that when stuff like this happens, people don’t think to blame the lender (they’re just doing their job, right?). Instead they blame the government — the president, their state reps and “Congress”. To me this is an example of how people could be swayed to vote for the wrong guys and gals because they’re disenfranchised and under-informed.

73 Days

This is funny…

“Another contributing factor: Mr. Trump’s victory surprised even his own top advisers, who, before Tuesday, were unable to focus the New York businessman on the 73 days between the election and inauguration, a senior aide said. They said Mr. Trump didn’t want to jinx himself by planning the transition before he had actually won.

During their private White House meeting on Thursday, Mr. Obama walked his successor through the duties of running the country, and Mr. Trump seemed surprised by the scope, said people familiar with the meeting. Trump aides were described by those people as unaware that the entire presidential staff working in the West Wing had to be replaced at the end of Mr. Obama’s term.”