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sparkypantaloons · 3 years ago

Text

A Storm

“I promise you.” Bruce had said. “If you come home, I will keep you safe. I will keep them safe. I will keep us whole. I promise.”

Tim is taken. Each of his family react differently.

There’s a rushing in Tim’s ears. Like a waterfall. It’s so loud he can’t see. Can that happen? Can noise affect sight? He doesn’t know.

There’s a hand on his back. Gentle, but firm. He thinks maybe someone is talking to him, but he can’t see. He can’t see anything over the rushing in his ears.

No, that’s not right. He needs to start again. Try again. He squeezes his eyes shut tight, covers his ears, takes a deep breath.

“Tim?” Is it Bruce? Someone’s hands are on Tim’s arms, pulling his hands from his head. The person in front of him is stooping slightly, so they can look him in the eye. “Can you hear me?”

“'m fine.” Tim says. But his eyes can’t focus, it’s too loud in here. “I just need, I… just need t’sleep.” He grimaces, the noise too bright for his eyes.

There’s more sound then. Voices he thinks, but he’s not sure. He can’t see who they belong to. Then there’s a hand around his ankle, gripping him roughly. He flinches in the hold, starts to struggle as his shoes are removed. Then his socks. What is going on?

His feet? What about his feet? He tries to speak, but it’s so loud in here, he can’t form the words. A forehead presses against his, green eyes bore into his own. Jason?

Hands hold his feet to the floor, press down. More talking. It could be shouting now.

The hands let go of his feet. Move to his face. “Your feet, Timmy. Concentrate on your feet.”

Tim opens his eyes. Jason is still there, his bright green eyes, searching and insistent. “'m home?” Tim mumbles.

“Concentrate on your feet, Timmy. What can you feel?”

Tim closes his eyes again. His feet. He can feel… wood. Wooden floor. Wooden floorboards and the thin gaps between them. The Manor floor. The Manor.

“Yeah, Timmy.” Jason says. His hands move from Tim’s face, pull the teenager into a bear hug. “You’re home. You’re home.”

Leslie pushes her glasses back up her nose. Lets out a sigh. “It’s just going to take time, Bruce.” She says. She’s firm, as always. But there’s a softness in her eyes. A sadness. “Like all things.”

Bruce doesn’t speak. Just rubs his face with his hands. Hangs his head.

“Why is he so disorientated?” Dick asks. His right hand is still bandaged up, swollen, but it’s no longer bleeding through.

Jason sucks his teeth from where he’s leaning against the wall, his arms crossed. Leslie and Dick both ignore him.

“Sensory deprivation, especially for so long-- it can take a little while to recover.” Leslie is matter of fact. There’s no point mincing her words. “You have to take it slow.”

“Touch is best to start with.” Jason says, pushing himself off the wall. “It’s grounding.”

Dick, Leslie and Bruce look over at him. He shrugs. “It worked for me.”

A pained look crosses Dick’s face. Leslie interrupts before he can speak. “Let Tim lead, let him set the pace.” Her words hang in the air. “It’ll take time. But he’s strong.” She says. “He’ll pull through.”

Dick wakes up in a sweat, breathless. His right hand is throbbing. He tries to flex his fingers, flinches as his broken knuckles protest. It’s not the worst injury he’s ever had. Not by far. But the way he got it…

He shakes his head, tries to dislodge the memory of a shattered eye-socket, a dislocated jaw, a cracked skull. Tries to shed the jarring realisation that he broke his hand on a man’s face. Tries to make himself at least feel a sense of responsibility for the damage done. He doesn’t.

He makes his way to the kitchen, pads barefoot through the Manor. He pulls an ice-pack out of the freezer, holds it on his aching fist. The cold seeps into his joints, consumes the burn of displaced bone and absent guilt. He feels calmer.

Touch is grounding, Jason had said. Dick doesn’t want to think about how the younger man, his younger brother, knew that. Doesn’t want to know which one of a lifetime of traumatic experiences had taught him that little gem. But he can’t dispute it. The touch of the cold helps.

He makes his way back upstairs. Turns left, instead of right. To Tim’s room.

The door is pulled to. The most Alfred would allow. Bruce had been adamant about staying by Tim’s side, so had Jason, so had Dick. Alfred had refused all of them.

“Wayne Manor is the safest, most secure building on the eastern seaboard, if not the entire continent. None of you will do Master Timothy any good if you don’t get some sleep. He will be safe, in the meantime.”

Bruce had tried to protest, Jason had made threats, all but hissed at Alfred’s suggestion. The older man hadn’t budged. “I will stay with Master Timothy. In case he wakes.”

He wasn’t wrong. They needed rest, all of them. The search had been… long. Too long. Desperate, and increasingly frantic with each passing hour. And there had been so many hours.

He swallows down a memory. Of the howl that felt like it had been ripped out of his soul when they found Tim. Dick hadn’t even realised the noise had come from his own mouth, didn’t notice the tears of rage on his own face, as he took his hands to the men holding Tim captive. Broke his hands on the men who had taken his brilliant, darling brother. Locked him in the dark, alone, for too, too long.

Dick hovers outside Tim’s door. Holds his ear to the wood. He can’t hear anything over his own breathing, his own heartbeat.

“Just open it, Dickhead.” It’s Jason. He's dressed in a spare pair of Bruce’s pyjamas. Despite his size they're somehow still too big for him. It makes him look young. Too young. Dick stares at him for a moment before doing as he says.

The pair of them fill the doorway. Wait as their eyes adjust to the light in the room. Gloomy shadows fall in through the window; the blinds have been left open. Dick’s eyes scan the bed but his ears hear Jason’s breathing hitch. He feels the younger man go rigid beside him, knows his own body has responded the same. Because Tim is gone. Again.

Panic forces itself into what little space is between them, and Dick is only vaguely aware that Jason is gripping his wrist. Holding him too tightly, clinging onto him as though he’s scared one of them will disappear too.

A small cough brings them back to their senses. Alfred. The older man is sat in the corner of the room, by the window. A patient vigil in the dark. He nods to the far side of the bed.

Jason all but drags Dick with him as he marches into the room. They stop just past the bed. Tim is asleep on the floor. He’s curled into a ball, a single sheet held tight over his head. Dick only knows it’s him from the tuft of hair that’s sticking out.

He feels Jason let go of his wrist. The younger man stumbles backwards. He nods to Alfred then leaves the room, gone as quick as he entered.

Dick watches him go, a new worry blooming in his chest. He looks at Alfred, and the older man shakes his head sadly.

Jason is in his old room. His old en-suite more accurately. His knees protest against the tile as he wretches into the toilet.

I am safe, I am warm, I am whole.

He repeats the words in his mind like a mantra. Tries to control his breathing. He fails. Another wave of nausea has him wretching again. Acid burning its way up his throat.

A hand presses to his back and he flinches. He hadn’t heard anyone come in. Bruce places a glass of water on the floor beside him, pushes his hair back from his face.

Jason wipes his mouth on his sleeve, takes a shaky sip of water. Bruce rubs circles on his back.“Don’t.” Jason croaks, and he hates himself when the warmth of the hand is removed. He looks up at Bruce. “You promised you’d keep them safe.” He says, and he can’t keep the hurt out of his voice. Can’t keep the tears from his eyes. “You promised.”

“I know.” Bruce says. He pulls the younger man into a hug, holds him tight against his chest. “I’m sorry.” His son’s tears soak through his shirt.

Jason doesn’t know how long they sit there. Tangled limbs on the cold, hard tiles of the bathroom floor. Only knows that he needs Bruce to let go. He pulls himself out of his father’s arms, pushes himself to his feet. He needs to brush his teeth.

Bruce sits on the floor behind him, as Jason scrubs the bile and acid from his mouth. He presses too hard with the toothbrush, can taste the copper of blood against mint. But the dig of the bristles in the soft flesh of his gums is grounding. Reminds him he’s still alive.

I am safe, I am warm, I am whole.

Jason can remember sleeping on the floor. He’s slept on so many of them. The dingy corner of their apartment growing up, when all they could afford was a single mattress and Willis refused to let him share. The cardboard box by one of the subway vents behind the old Monarch Theatre. The floor of this very bedroom, the bed too soft for him to sleep in, threatening to drown him as soon as he fell asleep. Then the streets again, when he had wandered aimlessly after his death.

He can remember the dark too. Of being locked in a closet and forgotten for days at a time, when his infant crying became too much for Willis. Of his eyes swollen shut as the Joker beat the life out of him. Of his coffin, as he lay there screaming for Bruce to save him.

Jason’s life was a short but terrible history of hard floors and dark rooms and Tim’s was never meant to be like that.

They’d found him in all but a box, eight feet by eight feet by eight feet. There were no windows, the door had been soldered shut. He was being fed once a day. Some bread and water slid through a hatch in the wall, and a bucket too. Swapped out every 24 hours. Nobody ever spoke to him, nobody ever asked anything of him. No-one ever demanded anything from them either, neither The Bats, nor The Waynes.

He spits into the sink. Toothpaste pink with blood. He rinses his mouth. Splashes his face. Takes a deep breath.

They just took him and kept him. Because they could.

Jason had known people like that too, once. If he clings to it, it’s the only thought that makes him grateful Tim has been left alone for so long. Even as it leaves a bitter taste in his mouth.

Coming home, coming back to his family had been as painful and awful as clawing himself out of his own grave. An endless fight against the pit and its madness, that drove him to hurt the people he loved. An ongoing battle against the deep, deep wound in his heart that The Joker still lived. And a terrifying, haunting fear that he would lose them again. That after all they had been through, after he finally got his family back, they would be taken from him and he would be alone once more.

“I promise you.” Bruce had said. “If you come home, I will keep you safe. I will keep them safe. I will keep us whole. I promise.”

Jason turns away from the sink. Walks back into his room. Leaves Bruce sat on the cold, tiled floor.

Eventually Bruce pulls himself to his feet. Jason’s room is empty when he passes through. He doesn’t allow himself to wonder where he might have gone. Of all the broken promises he has made to Jason, he knows this one has hurt his son the most. That Jason’s single biggest fear is losing the family he has so desperately longed for, both of his lives. That Jason would rather never love at all, than love and lose it all over again. This time had been too close. For Jason. For all of them.

It had taken them too long to get a lead on where Tim was being held. Far too long. And even then, they couldn’t confirm an exact location. They’d had no choice but to split up. Cass, and Damian had joined the Titans on the West Coast. Dick and Jason had come with him on the East.

He pulls out his phone, checks on the location of Cass and Damian for the nineteenth time that night. They’re making steady progress. Will be in Gotham before sunrise. His arms ache with a desperate need to hold them, know that they are safe. To have the physical proof, that all his children are alive and breathing, in his hands.

It had taken him a long time to let go of Tim once they found him. To pass his sweet, brilliant boy over to Leslie, so she could check him over. Confirm he was okay.

Tim was older now than Jason had been when he… Tim was older, but he had still felt just as small and young and broken, when Bruce had lifted him out of that box they’d kept him in. Out of the darkness. His body weak and trembling.

It had been Tim who had been taken, but Bruce had looked at the body in his arms and seen Robin, limbs twisted and broken. Seen Nightwing, lips blue and heart stopped by a hand held to his face. Seen another Robin, sword run through him, splitting his battered body almost in two. Seen Red Robin, riddled with bullet holes, blood running out of every one. He had held Tim and seen everyone of his children dead in his arms. An endless cacophony of death.

He reaches Tim’s room. Stands in the doorway and hopes that Alfred can’t see him in the darkness. He tries to remember back to when he took Dick in. Tries to recall what, in the name of all the Gods, had possessed him to allow his child, his children, out into the night with him. Tries to remember how he reached the conclusion that he could risk their single precious lives for his own crusade. How he could risk their safety for a single second.

He steps into the room. Hears Alfred sigh from his seat by the window.

“Don’t ask me to leave.” Bruce croaks out. His throat is tight, trying to hold a tidal wave of emotion at bay. “Don’t.”

Alfred stands. “Of course not.” He says softly, and he gestures to where Tim is sleeping on the floor. “Did you get any sleep?” He asks.

Bruce doesn’t respond. Just stares down at Tim, eighteen but looking for all the world like the ten year old who had shown up on Bruce’s doorstep all those years ago. The sheet is twisted round his limbs, his face screwed into a frown.

“Why is he on the floor?” Bruce asks. Though he has a good idea already.

Alfred takes a steadying breath. “He’s been…” He pauses. “He’s been sleeping on the floor so long, it’s what he’s used to n—“ He cuts himself off abruptly, turns to the window away from Bruce.

Bruce feels a burn in his throat. Knows that Alfred is fighting down the same tears that he is. He places a hand on Alfred’s shoulder. “I’ll stay with him now. Get some rest.”

Alfred nods. Places a hand over Bruce’s but doesn’t look at him. “And you, Bruce.” He says and he leaves. Pulls the door closed gently behind him.

Bruce turns back to Tim. His darling boy. He kneels down, gently detangles the sheets from his son’s legs. Tim doesn’t stir. Bruce lies down next to him, lays the sheet over them both.

Touch is grounding. Jason had said. And it’s all Bruce can do not to pull Tim into his arms and never let go. But Leslie had said baby steps. So instead he settles for running his fingers through Tim’s hair and holding his face in his hands. Moves his head closer so he can feel the soft rise and fall of Tim’s breath.

This would have to do, for now.

#batfic #batfamily fanfic #red hood #red robin #nightwing #tim drake #jason todd #alfred pennyworth #dick grayson #bruce wayne #batdad #spbfic

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preserving-ferretbrain · 6 years ago

Text

Not-So-Very Lovely

by Viorica

Sunday, 26 July 2009

Alternate title: "A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Rape House"~

I can't figure out what happened to Stratford this year. Last year's season was brilliant, with at least eight shows that I'd happily see over and over again. This season, not only has the quality of the productions dropped drastically, they seem to have given up on having any kind of coherent theme running through their program. Last year's playbill- which included

Fuente Ovejuna

The Trojan Women

The Taming of the Shrew

, and

Shakespeare's Universe: Her Infinite Variety

- was full of plays that examined the role of women throughout history. This year, not only do they not have any theme, someone appears to have thought that a good follow-up to shows like

Fuente

, and

Trojan Women

was a show that derives its humour from the sexual enslavement of women. Hilarity!

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum

is one of Sondheim's lesser-known musicals, and for good reason- the majority of the songs are rather bland and forgettable. The show's main "appeal"- if you can call it that- comes from the jokes. The story revolves around Pseudolus, a slave living in Ancient Rome, who wants nothing more than to gain his freedom. Pseudolus belongs to Hero, a dopey young man who still lives under the thumb of his overbearing mother. One day, his parents leave for a visit to the country, and Hero confesses to Pseudolus that he's fallen in love with a girl who lives in the neighbouring brothel. That is, it's referred to as a brothel- since the show repeatedly establishes that the women within are the spoils of war, who are bought and sold with no say whatsoever in the matter, it's actually more accurate to call it a rape house. Hero promises Pseudolus his freedom if the woman can be freed and united with Hero, and hijinks ensue, culminating in a revelation from Hero's long-lost neighbour, Erronius.

You can probably spot the musical's first problem just from the paragraph above- the entire plot revolves around

a fucking rape house

. Not only that, but nowhere in the text is it ever suggested that the existence of this place is in any way wrong. On the contrary, the fourth musical number takes place in said house, whilst the women therein are paraded in front of Pseudolus and Hero, and Pseudolus barely restrains himself from groping them. Each of them women fits into a different stereotype- the Cleopatra-wigged Egyptian twins, the dominatrix, and even a goddamn African warrior princess, complete with a leopard-print bikini, spear, and war whoops. Sexism: now with bonus racefail!

But, you might think, it can't be all bad. So the courtesans are one-dimensional sex objects- what about Hero's love interest? Surely she has a vested interest in freeing herself, and is canny enough to see Hero as a way out of her situation?

You might think that, but you'd be wrong. Philia (as she turns out to be named) is in fact a total ditz, the dumbest of dumb blondes. Her big musical number, "I'm Lovely", is all about her complete uselessness at doing anything besides being ornamental:

I'm lovely, All I am is lovely. Lovely is the one thing I can do. Winsome, What I am is winsome, Radiant as in some Dream come true. Oh, isn't it a shame? I can neither sew Nor cook nor read or write my name. But I'm happy Merely being lovely, For it's one thing I can give to you.

Now compare it to Pseudolous's first big song, "Free":

When I'm free to be whatever I want to be, Think what wonders I'll accomplish then! When the master that I serve is me and just me-- Can you see me being equal with my countrymen? Can you see me being Pseudolus the citizen?

Not only is she useless at pretty much everything, she has no willpower. Although she falls in love at first sight with Hero, that doesn't stop her from flinging herself upon anyone who she thinks has a claim to her. You see, Philia has been sold to Miles Gloriosus, and shows no emotion whatsoever about it. If someone tells her that he owns her, she'll automatically flop to the ground and spread her legs apart, adding even more of a disturbing submissive subtext to the whole thing. Of course, she ends up trotting off into the sunset with Hero, but I doubt she'd have shown any kind of resistance if she'd ended up being carted off by Miles.

Everything resolves itself eventually- Philia is freed, as are the rest of the courtesans (though as their pimp gleefully informs the audience, "I'll just get more!") Pseudolus is freed

and

gets the dominatrix courtesan into the bargain, Hero's parents (who consist of a long-suffering father and a shrewish, domineering mother- gotta squeeze more negative female stereotypes in there!) bless their son's marriage, Miles Gloriosus gets the Egyptian twins, and Erronius is reunited with his long-lost children, allowing the show to squeeze in one last rape joke:

Erronius: My virgin daughter!

Hysterium (a slave disguised as Philia): I'm not a virgin!

Erronius: Those filthy pirates!

Ha ha! Gang rape is hilarious!

I suppose it's pointless to indict a musical written in 1962 for lack of political correctness, but that's no reason not to blame the people who keep it alive by routinely staging it. Apparently, it's very popular as a school production. Want to trivialise women who are raped and sold into sexual slavery?

Funny Thing

! Because

The Boys From Syracuse

just didn't have enough rape jokes.Themes:

Theatre

Minority Warrior

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~Comments (

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)

http://francoisdillinger.blogspot.com/

at 05:46 on 2009-07-26Not much to add. But here's a

here's a link

to some fail at Comic Con.

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Rami

at 07:00 on 2009-07-26That doesn't sound particularly savory, I'll give you that -- and you would have thought that by the latter half of the 20th century they would have known better.

I've not seen it, and I know very little of Sondheim in general -- I've seen a couple of productions of Into the Woods and that's about it. Is there any kind of way in which the play could be seen as ironic?

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Nathalie H

at 15:00 on 2009-07-26I would say that the song

Lovely

is definitely supposed to be quite ironic. However, that doesn't necessarily vindicate it, and from what I remember of seeing this show (albeit a few years ago) I'd say that the Power of Irony ® does not save this show from its general sexism fail.

(Disclaimer: not seen this for a few years. Didn't notice most of this stuff when I did, and am slightly ashamed of that. Therefore, comments I make are mostly based on knowledge of the song 'Lovely' rather than much I remember about the show of a whole. However, I do agree that the score's not that great.)

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Viorica

at 16:37 on 2009-07-26

Is there any kind of way in which the play could be seen as ironic?

According to Wikipedia, some directors have chosen to cast Pseudolus as female, which *could* be seen as ironic- one female slave attains freedom through the enslavement of other women. However, it's mostly up to the direction, not the text itself, which doesn't have any nudge-wink "We're really deconstructing all this sexism!" moments. So it's up to each individual production to draw attention to it. The one I saw didn't, though when I raised the issue afterwards, several of my (female) group members said that they'd felt the same way.

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Jamie Johnston

at 19:40 on 2009-07-26Ladies and gentlemen, a Defence of Sondheim on Three Fronts. These will be Point Out The Parody, Concede The Worst Parts, and Shift The Blame.

Yes, this is not the jewel in Sondheim's crown. It comes very early in his career, only slightly after

West Side Story

I think, and, more importantly, it isn't really a full-blooded Sondheim musical. It's a play by Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart with songs by Stephen Sondheim. The original idea was Shevelove's, and though Sondheim was involved from an early stage he always felt that his work on the show didn't really fit what the other two writers were doing. When he asked his friend James Goldman about it, Goldman said, "The book [for those who aren't musical buffs, this is the term for spoken dialogue, and sometimes also the general plot, in a musical] is written on a kind of law-comedy vaudeville level with elegant language, and you have written a witty score, a salon score". Sondheim found it was too late to really address the problem, but he later used to advise people, "Make sure you and your collaborators are writing the same show". (I'm getting this from pp.151-152 of

Meryle Secrest's biography of Sondheim

, by the way.) So to some extent one needs to look at the score (including lyrics) separately from the book, because the same criticisms may not apply equally to both. Having said that, he did collaborate on a show which is undeniably pretty much Carry On Up The Tiber (even if it does have what I maintain is a more than averagely sophisticated score), so clearly a certain amount of fail there. But before I entirely leave the blame-shifting part of the defence, let me observe that really the only criticism that's made above for which Sondheim himself is responsible is the song

Lovely

, which I suggest doesn't deserve the criticism.

As Nathalie's already said,

Lovely

is definitely and quite transparently ironic. It's principally Sondheim taking the mickey out of himself, specifically out of the lyric he'd written a few years earlier for the

West Side Story

number

I Feel Pretty

. The song is, as Viorica says, "all about her complete uselessness at doing anything besides being ornamental". Philia is a spoof of the standard one-dimensional love-interest. What Sondheim didn't like about

I Feel Pretty

was that it was the female lead singing un-ironically about how she derives her entire feeling of self-worth from the fact that a boy likes her and this makes her feel attractive. Which is what

Lovely

is sending up. And, to be fair to Shevelove and Gelbart, I think Philia is written fairly consistently throughout the whole show as being utterly useless is every respect, and her admirer Hero is similarly written as a rather feeble adolescent who is fixated on her for no better reason than that she's pretty. Remember that he's played in the film by Michael Crawford, and this was before

Phantom Of The Opera

, opposite Annette Andre who had mostly played dumb blondes in TV series like

The Avengers

and

The Prisoner

. You don't cast it that way if you want the audience to see the leading romantic couple as anything other than complete nit-wits. The point is rather missed by comparing Philia's big number to Pseudolus'. Pseudolus is the main character and drives most of the plot. Philia is a comic device whose purpose is to be completely passive and uninteresting. A much fairer comparison is to Hero, whose

own solo song

is an equally feeble and empty-headed genre-self-parody.

... Forum

as a whole is an uncomfortable combination of homage and piss-take, with Sondheim being almost exclusively on the piss-take side but the other writers hedging their bets. The plot and the characters are cut and pasted together from Plautus, and some of the humour comes from caricaturing the already exaggerated comic tropes of Roman comedy (which was still worth doing in 1962 when a reasonable number of people had studied Plautus in school). That's one of the main reasons why Pseudolus is the only really interesting character: in Roman comedy the slaves are the only remotely multi-dimensional characters. Now in a sense

... Forum

is a step backward from Plautus because Plautus actually has some reasonably well-developed female slave characters; but that, I suspect, is because the other thing the show is trying to parody is the post-vaudeville tradition that in the UK produced things like the

Carry On

franchise, which went mainly for the one-dimensional female leads that

... Forum

parodies (and which is also where the ghastly parade of racially-stereotyped sex-slaves comes from, because although there is national stereotyping in Roman comedy it has quite a different character). The show is a commentary on one ancient comedy tradition and one contemporary one. It isn't a very successful commentary, largely because its non-musical writers spend at least as much time simply indulging in the bad habits of both traditions as they spend making fun of them. But you can't really look at it outside the context of Roman comedy and 1950s low farce because it makes no sense without that background.

And that's why Viorica is entirely right to suggest that it probably shouldn't be staged any more, except for audiences who have some familiarity with Plautus and with '50s comedy. It doesn't make sense any more in the same way that

Avenue Q

won't make sense in 40 years' time. But that's also why I don't think it's right to accuse it in quite the way this article does. In particular I think the criticism that

... Forum

doesn't "suggest[..] that the existence of [Marcus Lycus' establishment] is in any way wrong" falls a little flat. (I replace "rape house" with "Marcus Lycus' establishment" in that quotation not because I want to suggest the establishment isn't an abominable thing but because "rape house" is too tendentious, "brothel" is, as Viorica observes, too benign, and "place where men pay a pimp to have sex with slaves who clearly never consented to their involvement in the enterprise as a whole and are clearly not getting paid but who apparently do expect to and are expected by others to consent to specific acts of intercourse" is too long.) What, one has to ask, is the alternative? Point out that slavery is wrong? I would be more worried, frankly, if anybody had felt in 1962 that that might not be taken for granted by everyone in the audience. Replace the sex-slaves with free women freely choosing to have sex for money? That would be a flagrant anachronism, would entirely destroy the plot, and would in any case only make it 'okay' provided one took the view that entirely unexploitative prostitution is possible and acceptable, which is far from universally accepted. Have no such establishment in the story at all? Sex-slavery is so central to Roman comedy that its removal would make it completely pointless to do a musical based on Plautus in the first place. I guess you could say that in that case they just shouldn't have done a musical based on Plautus. That's a respectably coherent view, I suppose, but a little puritanical for my tastes. As it is, they do almost as well as anyone could do without abandoning the whole project: the pimp is clearly not meant to be a sympathetic character; the only character who seriously proposes to exploit any of the women in question is Miles Goriosus, who is as close to a villain as the play has; and the sex-slaves are indeed all freed at the end. To object that the pimp will only buy some more is effectively criticisizing the show for omitting to abolish the whole system of slavery as part of the ending, which is a bit like criticizing

Rent

for daring to have a happy ending without having one of the characters discover a cure for HIV.

... Forum

has problems, and probably shouldn't be done any more - certainly not in schools - but one has to look at it as a parody, albeit one that intermittently falls off the wagon when Sondheim isn't writing it.

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Viorica

at 21:02 on 2009-07-26

Philia is a comic device whose purpose is to be completely passive and uninteresting

So . . . she goes from being a one-dimensional female character because the creators didn't bother to flesh her out to a one-dimensional female character who is such because the plot demands it? That's not much better.

the only character who seriously proposes to exploit any of the women in question is Miles Goriosus

Not quite. During "The House of Marcus Lycus", Pseudolous drools over each of the women as they are paraded in front of him, and only turns them down (with visible disappointment) when Hero points out that they aren't who he's looking for. Even in the most throwaway jokes, like Hysterium's "Isn't it amazing?" in the clip you linked to, it's being played for laughs, and given the actual nature of what

does

go on there, it sits very uncomfortably with me.

I never noticed the parallels between "I Feel Pretty" and "Lovely", but then I never read the former as Maria deriving her self-worth from her relationship with Tony. Rather, it seemed to be capturing the first-relationship giddiness that the character is experiencing at the time. It could have been done without the theme of "I find myself attractive because a boy likes me.", it seems, if not better, than certainly more relatable than "Lovely"

Philia's status as a parody of dumbass love interests is questionable, simply because unless you're actively looking at it that way, it isn't really obvious. Which goes back to what you said about it being a parody of vaudeville- if you aren't familiar with what the original writers were going for, it just reads as an extended dumb blonde joke. Hero is similarily stupid, but it just doesn't carry the same connotations.

To object that the pimp will only buy some more . . .

My objection isn't so much that Lycus intends to buy new girls, it's that the lines is thrown in as part of the Big Happy Finale. "I'm free!" "I have Philia!" "I've found my children!" "I'm gonna buy some more slave chicks!" It's rather jarring to see it presented as something we should be happy about.

probably shouldn't be done any more - certainly not in schools

Unfortunately, what sparked this article was the annuncement that my local youth theatre is putting it on next year. :/

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Wardog

at 16:36 on 2009-07-27I'm a bit embarrassed ... I actually saw the film of this with Michael Hordon and, uh, I wasn't offended in the slighest. I didn't think it was a great musical, to be honest, in that there was Jamie mentions above a definitely disjunction between what the songs were trying to do and what the script was.

I'm not say, by the way, Viorica, that I don't think you should find it offensive and I definitely agree that it probably shouldn't be regularly taken out of the Sondheim box but I saw it as basically not especially decent parody...

And it does have some lovely Sondheimish moments.

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http://sistermagpie.livejournal.com/

at 18:44 on 2009-07-27

I'm a bit embarrassed ... I actually saw the film of this with Michael Hordon and, uh, I wasn't offended in the slighest. I didn't think it was a great musical, to be honest, in that there was Jamie mentions above a definitely disjunction between what the songs were trying to do and what the script was.

I can go you one better--I was in this play in high school and wasn't offended by it. The four male leads were played by the four buddies who were the most talented in their senior class and it was fun to watch. (The four leads not including Hero.) I think it just played as so vaudevillian it didn't occur to me to read it that way. I have only positive associations with it just from that production.

In fact, when I think of "I'm Lovely" I rarely remember Philia singing it. I mostly remember the scene where Hysterium sings it in drag.

It's not all that memorable for songs, certainly. The two that mostly survive are Comedy Tonight (a song that starts out saying nothing should be taken seriously) and Everybody Ought to Have a Maid, a celebration of sexual harassment on the job. Which is pretty bad, but probably beaten out by even more blatantly sexist songs in other musical.

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Nathalie H

at 19:07 on 2009-07-27Jamie: Thanks for all the background, you've really illuminated what's going on here - why I always felt it was a poor show compared to Sondheim's usual fare, with which I am fairly familiar although not quite in that level of detail, and also why anyone felt the need to write the bloody thing in the first place!

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Dan H

at 10:49 on 2009-07-29

I'm a bit embarrassed ... I actually saw the film of this with Michael Hordon and, uh, I wasn't offended in the slighest.

I think the thing about the film is that it's so clearly of its time that it's quite hard to be offended by it because it was so clearly made in the 1960s and is so clearly parodying a style of comedy that was very popular at the time. Of course as Jamie observes part of the issue is that it's not an especially good or consistent parody.

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Jamie Johnston

at 18:55 on 2009-07-31

- Viorica

Sorry, I seem not to have explained very well. My point is not that the plot demands her to be one-dimensional. That would, as you say, be no excuse. My point is that the show itself is making a point about the fact that the plot demands her to be one-dimensional. This is actually one of the few points on which I'd argue that

... Forum

rises above being iffy but often enjoyable to actually be a rather clever and admirable piece of work, because here the parody isn't just of 50s comedy or of Plautus but of an extremely common fictional trope. How many stories have there been throughout history, and continue to be, in which the leading boy falls in love with the leading girl based solely on her beauty, sometimes without even having had a single conversation with her, and in which her beauty is therefore her sole relevant characteristic. Usually it turns out that she does have many other attractive features, and sometimes even some unattractive ones, but when you look carefully you still find that these make no difference at all to the boy's love for her or to anything else in the story, so they're entirely irrelevant and are really just after-thoughts added on to disguise the fact that the writer has no interest in her as a human being.

... Forum

mocks this type of story ruthlessly and, I'd suggest, fairly effectively, by making it utterly explicit that the leading girl's beauty is not only her sole relevant characteristic but in fact her sole characteristic. D'you see what I mean?

I'll concede the point about the scene's in Lycus' house. Yes, we're being invited to laugh at the fact that these various men are leering over women who haven't chosen to be leered over, and that probably isn't a good thing, even though to a great extent we're laughing not at the women's predicament but at the way the men's brains entirely stop working as soon as they see a bit of thigh. Similarly it's a fair point about Lycus' comment in the final scene, although I'm not sure that we're necessarily supposed to be glad that he's going to buy some more slaves; but nor is it supposed to totally spoil our enjoyment of the show, which it would if we really thought about it, so yeah.

As to

I Feel Pretty

, yes, there are certainly much more charitable readings of that song, but the one I mentioned is, as I understand it, more or less Sondheim's own feeling about it, which is what lies behind his spoof of it in

Lovely

. My own feeling about the song is somewhat different though still not altogether positive, principally because it makes Maria seem a bit obnoxious. But I try not to think too hard about

West Side Story

because the music is so utterly fabulous and the story is so utterly bleh.

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Arthur B

at 19:09 on 2009-07-31

But I try not to think too hard about West Side Story because the music is so utterly fabulous and the story is so utterly bleh.

I think this is a common problem with most adaptations of

Romeo and Juliet

, since the motivations of the characters are simply baffling to modern audiences. (Then again, I think

Romeo & Juliet

works best if you assume that Shakespeare's attitude towards the young lovers is absolutely cynical, and that the tragedy isn't in the woeful and awful things that society does to people in love so much as it's in the idiotic and ridiculous things that people in love do to themselves.)

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http://sistermagpie.livejournal.com/

at 19:54 on 2009-07-31

My point is that the show itself is making a point about the fact that the plot demands her to be one-dimensional. This is actually one of the few points on which I'd argue that ... Forum rises above being iffy but often enjoyable to actually be a rather clever and admirable piece of work, because here the parody isn't just of 50s comedy or of Plautus but of an extremely common fictional trope.

That's how I've always taken it--it hits that idea pretty hard, I think. And that's very Sondheim. It reminds me of "Kiss Me" from Sweeney Todd, another song that sends up the trope of young lovers in love for no other reason than the girl has yellow hair. And in that song, imo, he manages to mix the mocking of the trope with real sympathy for the girl's predicament. Anthony comes across as maybe a bit foolish for claiming to be in love with a girl he's only seen, but Joanna is grasping at her only chance to escape a horrible fate.

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Shim

at 22:29 on 2009-07-31

...the motivations of the characters are simply baffling to modern audiences.

It's a shame the way good stories of their time end up seeming nonsensical. Admittedly people do adaptations, but some don't lend themselves to that either. For example, farces are a problem because the embarrassments characters are trying to avoid are often irrelevant now. The old chaperone, breach-of-promise and so on school of things is out too.

On that note, I feel modern comedy sometimes struggles because you have to stretch things further and it's hard to do that well. Being found by the Bishop visting another woman's husband doesn't cut it any more - now you have to be in your underwear and covered in caramel. Or whatever.

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http://pozorvlak.livejournal.com/

at 19:51 on 2009-08-02OK, I'm rather late to the conversation here, and I haven't seen the musical, but: it would be completely anachronistic for any of the characters to suggest that sex-slavery was anything other than The Way Things Are. And a completely straight portrayal of a morality that's so alien to our own could, if done well, be both deeply unsettling and very good. I'm reading Plato's

Republic

at the moment, and I'm getting that sensation a lot.

Incidentally, it was interesting to hear about Miles Gloriosus. I've noticed a tendency for characters called Miles in fiction to be villains.

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Jamie Johnston

at 23:38 on 2009-08-02Of course, anachronism and its geographical equivalent (what's that called, anyone? anatopism?) were themselves notable features of Roman comedy, so one could do quite interesting things with that...

When you've finished with the Plato, try to find Betrand Russell's summary of it in his big ol'

History of western philosophy

: it'll reassure you that no, it isn't just you, Plato's ideal state really does sounds absolutely horrifying.

Villains called Miles? Interesting. In this particular case the name is actually lifted directly from the plot of one of Plautus' comedies,

Miles gloriosus

, meaning 'the full-of-himself soldier' (which is what the character in

... Forum

is).

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Wardog

at 22:54 on 2009-08-03Hehe!

Anyway, I think you can count yourself lucky, Miles. Characters called Kyra are invariably prostitutes.

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Viorica

at 01:45 on 2009-08-24My mother went to see it this afternoon, and brought back a program. This passage (from the director's notes) stuck out:

All great musicals have serious underpinnings, and this one is no exception. It involves a love story, of course, as most musicals do, but the driving force of the plot is the quest of the central character, the slave Pseudolous, for his freedom. For all its zaniness and goofiness, Forum has at its core a real concern for human rights and human dignity, and it is from that essence that the show draws its emotional life.

. . . yeah.

#Ferretbrain #A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum #Minority Warrior #Viorica #Theatre

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kicksparkleaxe-blog · 6 years ago

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Swim with anyone who asks including former enemies, and watch friends just in case. Trust strangers, and always be suspicious of the familiar. Never synchronize: a hybrid is the most vigorous of all; a haute monoculture always dies, so when the calla lily plagiarism bridge collects a toll from your work, then laugh and make a song out of the absurdity. This is a theatre of the absurd, so if you have to push a boulder up a mountain again and again like Sisyphus, change the route every time and celebrate the pain, it gets easier as you go if you’re a kid forever. Children have immortal souls, and maturity is realizing that you need to have that innocence and danger forever.

The strongest swimmers dive into open water, and they are like the ocean: their surface and muscles may break, but their soul never does. You can bruise or cut the shore of a hero, but an ocean is indestructible. When there is smog, the ocean rises. When there is trouble, there are cunning exiles. Never stay still or in one place. Build feet like wings by flying from anything that comes your way, including things you like. The best chef has a taste for everything.

Capture any fire with aplomb, and be so beautiful they want to buy your alchemy. Build any gadget or product or art or thought yourself to start, and always be recording and building and breaking and remixing, and every second is another start. When you build a brand, offer a living wage, bathroom breaks, air conditioning, offer resources from materials to instructions to workshops so that the seeds can blossom. We must be a greenhouse in a possible nuclear winter. Let interns write the CEO’s speech; they have trusted me, and I realized: not all CEOs, the best ones are inventors and soldiers and artists at heart. Your brand should be your soul, it should reflect your actions and your fate and the response you chose, it should be bonded by everyone you’ve ever hired, everyone who has ever inspired you, the people you inspire, and the sweat of everyone’s brow.

CEOs have believed in me, because the best bosses are entrepreneurs and they can identify whoever has a diamond mind and they never extract something that harms. The truest entrepreneurs trust whoever believes in themselves enough to correct a leader or suggest something new. The best leaders are those who were humble enough to follow, the best architects have built the structure themselves. Try to plant a scarlet future in the cracked soil of the scars you let show, and you will grow the capacity of an orchid with the hardiness of a dandelion. A spore is as soft as a lamb, with the delicacy of a fairy and that flight: it has a wishing well inside, and all vulnerability and every hope makes a brave warrior.

We built your cities brick by brick, atom by atom, we are the molecular bonds, we are the concrete that binds everything you see, we are the beams in your palaces and the rays between the pixels on your screen and all the star dust that inhabits us all.

We clean your house, we listen when you don’t want us to speak. We sing what the kings think is unspeakable. Every jester is a bard, and every tragedy has a comedy inside. Laugh when you cry. Kings are basic, and so are the Barbies they abuse if the Barbies never question it. It’s a Bratz or a troll doll that does. Sour Patch Kids forever in a White Milk Dud present. We will build the future, they steal cause they wish they were us, and honestly, not all white people. Not all activists. We change every moment, so record everything, adapt, evolve.

Be a 4D Chess Emperor or Empress. Play Go, play tetris, play every sport, take Plato’s cave and make playdough, and that is the match that lights it up.

That’s your reputation: a reputation is your contribution to history. Your actions define your destiny.

The only answer is the question, and the best questions inspire more. Be too cool for school, be too school for cool, be so confusing and unique that no one accepts you, and one day they will idolize you. If everyone says you’re wrong, but you believe in yourself: history will absolve you, and your echo will be a banshee for the other ghosts in the night, who are both haunted and illuminated by what they saw.

It’s okay if you don’t understand. Admit it. And focus harder. Einstein said he is not so smart. He just stays with problems longest.

This is what a prophet looks like; a prophet is a rebel against the illusion of a still world. Ambitious and ambiguous, hoping to inspire you, who wants to empathize with everyone, including the people they sometimes hate for the pain. Realize that love and hate have the same intensity, and the worst thing is to be “normal” or “moderate”, because as Hannah Arendt said, it is the moderates that refuse to see the fascism behind the manners and the current rules and the fringes who see that anarchy is the fairest forge of all. The extremists are very similar, and they’re the ones we remember, for good or for ill, depending on how you look.

If someone is strong enough to harm you, they can also be an effective ally, because they know your blind spots, and they have weapons and strategies that you can learn.

The fringes define the base, because the boundaries measure the board, every law is a rule, and every outlaw is an inventor: the instruction manual and guidebook are everything you’ve ever consumed; understand what you eat, or it will consume you.

Be a Trojan horse or a lover someone didn’t think they’d like, but you’re actually the best. Be a Helen and fuck whoever you want, start a war for your freedom, and trust anyone who would fight a battle for you; if someone would’ve launch a war for you, leave, and if they gang-rape you or batter your or abuse you, honestly, try to let their new girlfriends know and keep an eye on your ex-abuser, like we must protect each other. Be Joan of Arc in a Teen Vogue world that only catalogues the basic, but wishes it was you. Another magazine in another country for adults will invite you to shoot for them; that’s happened to me.

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iol247 · 5 years ago

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Hyakujos Fox

Once when Hyakujo delivered some Zen lectures an old man attended them, unseen by the monks. At the end of each talk when the monks left so did he. But one day he remained after they had gone, and Hyakujo asked him: `Who are you?’

The old man replied: `I am not a human being, but I was a human being when the Kashapa Buddha preached in this world. I was a Zen master and lived on this mountain. At that time one of my students asked me whether the enlightened man is subject to the law of causation. I answered him: “The enlightened man is not subject to the law of causation.” For this answer evidencing a clinging to absoluteness I became a fox for five hundred rebirths, and I am still a fox. Will you save me from this condition with your Zen words and let me get out of a fox’s body? Now may I ask you: Is the enlightened man subject to the law of causation?’

Hyakujo said: `The enlightened man is one with the law of causation.’

At the words of Hyakujo the old man was enlightened. `I am emancipated,’ he said, paying homage with a deep bow. `I am no more a fox, but I have to leave my body in my dwelling place behind this mountain. Please perform my funeral as a monk.’ Then he disappeared.

– Excerpt from the koan Hyakujo’s Fox

In Zen, a koan is a story or dialogue designed to trigger and test understanding. It’s a fascinating literary form. Incredibly dense. Often, koans convey multiple layers of meaning in less than a hundred words. Sometimes just a few sentences.

The koan Hyakujo’s Fox, sometimes called the Wild Fox Koan, is of particular interest to me because it touches on many of the themes near and dear to us here at Epsilon Theory. Here a monk transforms himself into a fox by “clinging to absoluteness.” While this is absurd on its face, it’s really just a fancy way of arguing that perception is reality.

You are what you eat, the saying goes. More importantly: you are what you think.

Recently, a friend and I were texting about the meaning of life. (what? you and your friends don’t text regularly about the meaning of life?) My friend wrote that in the end, all you can really do is carry your cross to the finish line. I quite like this. It cuts right to the heart of the issue. There are no Answers. There is only Process. I did suggest adding an inscrutable Zen twist, however. My version:

In the end, all you can really do is carry your cross to the finish line. Except there is no finish line, there is no cross, and there is no you.

People sometimes ask me, if all the world is narrative and meme, then how can we tell what’s real?

As far as social reality is concerned, it’s about as real as any game or theatre production. There’s the White Collar Corporate Power Game, for example. There’s Partisan Political Theatre. There’s the Social Status Game. If you prefer more high-brow forms of entertainment, you can indulge in Religious Theatre and Intellectual Theatre (I have a soft spot for the latter). But let’s not kid ourselves. It’s theatre and games, all the way down.

This shouldn’t come as news to anyone. Heck, it’s been right there in the Bible for over a thousand years. That bit about the camel passing through the eye of the needle easier than the rich man making it to the Kingdom of Heaven? That’s Jesus teaching that wealth and status are not inherently meaningful or worthwhile. Accumulating wealth and power are just games we play.

A while back, I wrote a note about this manufactured nature of social realities. I wrote then that it was a clear eyes note. Well. This is the full hearts sequel.

You see, I’m pretty confident asserting that social reality–what we think of as “how the world works”–is the output of the following chaotic process.

nature (basically physics & biology) + nurture (operant conditioning) + randomness (error term)

I say this is a chaotic process because social reality is a three-body problem. There’s no closed-form solution. And the process is extremely sensitive to starting conditions. Everything else, as they say, is commentary.

I’m pretty sure the above is true. Yet it troubles me. First and foremost, it induces many a dark night of existential dread—that thick, dark curtain of despair that tends to descend whenever we contemplate our inevitable end. It’s not really physical death that bothers us (if it were, we wouldn’t find very much consolation in religion). No. What really bothers us is ego-death. What really bothers us is the dissolution of the self.

After all, physical death is no biggie if your consciousness (soul) transcends physical death. If that’s the case, then dying isn’t much different from moving to another country. Ego-death, on the other hand, is true death. Ego-death is non-existence. The void.

So what if there is no grand meaning to it all?

What if it all really does reduce down to nature + nurture + randomness, and the entire arc of the history of our universe is just a single run in some elaborate Monte Carlo simulation?

Frankly, you can take this to some pretty dark and nihilistic places. Perhaps no one articulates it better than the Misfit, the psychopathic antagonist of Flannery O’Connor’s short story, “A Good Man Is Hard To Find.”

“Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead,” the Misfit continued, “and He shouldn’t have done it. He thrown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can—by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness,” he said and his voice had become almost a snarl.

The Misfit is one of my favorite antagonists in literature. You can read him almost any way you want. Maybe he’s nothing more than a rambling, murderous redneck. Or maybe he’s the most coldly rational, self-aware, introspective character in the story. The Misfit spent an awful lot of time in prison, after all. He’s had plenty of time to meditate on The Meaning of Life.

“Some fun!” exclaims his accomplice, Bobby Lee, after their gang finishes killing the Grandmother and her family.

“Shut up Bobby Lee,” the Misfit said. “It’s no real pleasure in life.”

(SPOILER) That’s the last line of the story. These days I like to read the Misfit as a kind of anti-zen monk. He’s got it all twisted. But he hasn’t necessarily got it wrong. He’s Hyakujo’s Fox. For clinging to absoluteness, he has been sentenced to suffer 500 rebirths as a psychotic spree killer.

So what the hell are we supposed to do about all this, exactly? How does one cultivate a clear-eyed view of our world without embracing murderous nihilism?

For starters, we quit looking for Answers. They don’t exist. Self-actualization has no closed-form solution.

But there is a Process.

The three images above are all of ensōs. An ensō is just a circle, drawn in a single stroke. Hitsuzendō is a form of zen practice where one draws ensōs as a meditative practice. The process is simplicity itself. You just draw a circle with a calligraphy brush. Maybe you close the circle. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you’ve got a thick, continuous circle. Maybe not. It doesn’t really matter what the circle looks like. Don’t overthink it. Just draw a circle.

Here’s the trick: everything we do in life and investing is as simple as drawing an ensō. Every. Single. Thing. As Ben wrote in his Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can’t Lose manifesto:

“You want freedom? You want an autonomy of mind and spirit? You want that as an inalienable right? A right that is yours simply because you are a human being? Well, that comes at a price. And the Kantian price is this: everything you do, you must do for the right reasons.

It’s really as simple – and as difficult – as that.

What are the right reasons? You don’t need me to tell you. You already know what they are, in every situation you’re in. You have a moral compass. But I’ll tell you anyway. Acting for the right reasons means acting in a way that reflects who you ARE as a moral human being. It means acting for your identity as a moral human being, not as a propitiation to some god or potentate, not as an exchange for some “greater good” that someone else has talked you into pursuing. Not even for gaining a Supreme Court seat. Not even for denying a Supreme Court seat.”

Note that I wrote this was simple above. I didn’t say it was going to be easy.

Question: Is morality socially constructed through a process where biological systems are socially conditioned to respond in particular ways to particular stimuli, or is morality an innate moral compass manifested in Kantian ethics?

Answer: Yes.

Now draw yours.

https://www.epsilontheory.com/hyakujos-fox/

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lainahastoomuchsparetime · 5 years ago

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There are four threads for this part of this series, so there’ll be four blog posts (plus a bonus one that isn’t about any plot or content, but just me making jokes for like 10 minutes.)

Warning in advance that these will be pretty image heavy as obviously I took a lot of screencaps because movies are a visual media. Without the visuals, they’re just audiobooks.

(Link to Twitter thread.)

Let’s talk about the 1934 Anne of Green Gables by RKO Radio Pictures!

But first some history.

The first Anne of Green Gables adaptation was a silent black and white film starring Mary Miles Minter who honestly seems like she was a super interesting person. Her wikipedia page was really neat to read.

Now, it’s said one of Montgomery’s inspirations for Anne look-wise was Evelyn Nesbitt, and personally in this aspect, I can see why they cast Minter.

See this picture of Evelyn Nesbitt:

Source: Theatrical Cabinet Photographs of Women (TCS 2), Harvard Theatre Collection, Harvard University.

And here are two pictures of Minter:

(Look who learned you can make little collages on wordpress so pictures can be next to each other! Boy, that’s gonna come in handy later.)

Minter has a star on the Hollywood walk of fame. I’d like to see that some day.

As a silent film star, much of Minter’s work has been lost to time. As much as 75% of silent film has been destroyed by fire, purposeful destruction, and poor storage leading to decay.

The 1919 silent film adaptation of Anne is considered one of these lost films, which is a shame. However, you can watch a clip of what’s been recovered by Jack and Linda Hutton here on youtube

youtube

If you’re ever around Muskoka, Ontario, I’d suggest checking their museum, the Bala’s Museum, out. Since it’s the 100th anniversary of the film, they’re doing a special exhibit this summer about it.

Also if you’re ever in the area, and you hit up their giftshop, I will legit pay you back + the shipping if you send me the DVD they’ve made of the 1919 movie XD (Editing Laina: I’m seriously considering buying this.)

While I find this a fascinating piece of history, Montgomery HATED the 1919 movie. They didn’t seem to tell her it was being made (her publisher wasn’t good – there were later long legal battles) and she only found out about it when her cousin saw it. Her cousin hated it, she hated it, and I don’t think it was too popular in general. Montgomery especially hated that they changed the setting from P.E.I. to New England.

New England.

Sorry, America, you can’t have our Anne.

Apparently there were a lot of other odd choices, too, including a pet chicken, a skunk, American flags, and… an angry mob that Anne fended off with a shotgun?

Some um. Interesting choices indeed.

Montgomery also said Minter was “very dainty, very pretty and utterly unlike my gingerly Anne.” Keep that in mind as we go through adaptations, perhaps.

Back to 1934, though. This version stars Dawn O’Day, who took on “Anne Shirley” as her stage name. Can you imagine that today? It’d be like Daniel Radcliffe deciding he was going to be called Harry Potter the rest of of his life.

Going forward, when I need to refer to the actress, I will call her “Shirley” similar to how I’m referring to the author as “Montgomery”. I want to respect her wishes about what she wants to be called, but calling her just Anne would be confusing lol. Or, what she wanted to be called, since she did sadly pass away in 1993, but I still want to respect that.

She also has a Hollywood Walk of Fame star. That’d be a fun trip, finding all the Anne’s through time on there

Shirley was also a very interesting person. She would later in her career be in a movie called Murder, My Sweet, her last role before retirement at age 26, which was one of the first film noirs and influenced so many that came after it. She also has some interesting history that links her to the Hollywood Ten which I don’t really know about all of that business, but if you ever need a school project or something, it seems really interesting to read about.

We open the film with a lot of beeping and a film company logo I didn’t recognize. “A Radio Picture” or RKO Pictures, was a big company in this time period, but I’m clearly not an expert in 30s film.

Seriously though there was a lot of beeping. I was wearing earbuds the second time I watched this and it was a lot.

I do love the full credits before the movie starts. I love old Disney movies that do that, too. Funny how long they used to be, isn’t it?

The credits roll over some… tbh, somewhat grainy images of a rural area. It is an 85 year old film so, you know. I’m working with the best I can get, but I’m not particularly wowed by the scenery.

Then we move to a pretty little house with a young blonde girl cutting flowers outside. A tall, thin woman with dark hair opens the window and tells the girl, Diana, to look at something.

Wait, Diana? I mean, okay. She could be visiting Mrs Rachel Lynde.

The woman points out to Diana that Matthew Cuthbert is driving by, and Diana says, “Yes, Mother.”

Excuse me, Mother?? Who is this person?????

Well, Diana’s mother wonders where Matthew’s going and says he never goes to town this time of year, never visits anyone, and is too dressed up to just be going for a drive. He also isn’t driving fast enough to be going for a doctor.

Here we take a minute to pause and ask wtf did this movie do to poor Diana? Why is she blonde??

The mystery woman says she won’t “have a moment’s peace of mind til I find out from his sister Marilla”. Smooth dialogue there, movie.

We go right into Green Gables’ kitchen where Marilla is polishing silver at the table. She says, “Good morning, Rachel” and asks how everyone at the Barry house is.

Wait. She’s Rachel BARRY?? I… I’m going to need to come back to that.

Honestly this casting surprised me a little. The actress playing Marilla does not fit her physical description of being tall and thin. As Luce said, if you just saw this screencap, you’d probably think the one on the right Marilla and the one on the left Rachel.

However this actress is an amazing fit for Marilla and she’s probably my favourite casting choice in the whole movie. She’s a little prickly and very brisk, but it works great. Ability over appearance being true here. No, she doesn’t fit the physical description of Marilla from the book, but she really does embody her wonderfully.

The talk goes very similarly to how it did in the book: they’re adopting a boy from Nova Scotia to help out as Matthew’s getting older and having heart troubles. The dialogue here is basically straight out of the book.

However, there’s a really out of character line when Marilla offers Rachel a cup of tea, and Rachel replies, “Now, how can a body drink tea when they’re so excited they’re about ready to burst?” That’s really more of something ANNE would say.

Orphans are risky, styrchnine in the well, it’s all very book accurate over all, and the movie takes us out to Bright River.

Honestly I like this set. It looks how I pictured the train station.

The station master says a girl has been dropped off, and Matthew is confused as he was expecting a boy.

And honestly, again, this is a good shot. She looks so alone.

I’ve now given this movie like three compliments. This is where that ends.

Anne introduces herself and my first complaint is that I don’t love this casting. First of all, every actor in this movie is American and they don’t sound right. It’s all like… 30s Hollywood. Which I believe is a mid-Atlantic accent, or like an “affected” accent. If you’ve ever seen Wizard of Oz, it’s kind of like how Judy Garland talks in that. It doesn’t fit the setting.

Second, as Montgomery said of Minter… Shirley is a bit too perfect for me. She’s very pretty and very chipper and perky. Just doesn’t do much for me as an Anne performance.

Third, what is this hair????? Why do the ends look like that??

Fourth, she is not 11. This is a 17 year old playing a 14 year old.

One of my big problems with this movie is that the interactions between Anne and Matthew just feel… off. I think a lot of it is honestly aging her up while keeping her behaviour the same.

And I don’t like the actor playing Matthew. I’m sorry, but he’s kind of creepy.

Matthew agrees to take her home, though with different dialogue. In the book, he’s mostly silently like, “Need Marilla to fix this.” And just apologizes for being late. In the movie, he says, “I guess it’ll be alright.” No, it’s not the biggest change in the world, but his whole performance is off so I’m nitpicking.

She talks his ear off on the drive home, as expected. They pull dialogue from the book, but again Shirley being so much older makes it a little odd. It’s very child-like stuff and it doesn’t seem the same coming from a near-adult.

I do like them including Matthew saying he doesn’t mind if she talks. That’s one of my favourite lines.

Interesting film history note! The background of the driving scene is greenscreened. This is a pretty early example of greenscreen/chroma keying. This studio was a pioneer in the technology. It’s not too obvious considering the time period, either.

I still can’t with her hair, though. And it’s hard to tell it’s red. Not their fault, but a limit of the medium.

Otherwise the scene goes by the book, except Anne says, “My eyes are green.” Book!Anne’s eyes are grey. And it’s said more than once! Normally that’s not something I would care about BUT IT’S A BLACK AND WHITE MOVIE. You can just say they’re grey!

Like that just confuses me.

Anyways, time for our first look at Green Gables!

Honestly, not the worst. Compare Montgomery’s grandparents’ house and the actual real Green Gables and it’s not bad.

The real Green Gables is on the left, and the Cavendish home her grandparents owned is on the right. Green Gables photo is by Natulive Canada via Wikimedia Commons and I did a quick edit of it to make it black and white so it would match the others better and be better for comparison. The Cavendish house photo is courtesy the LM Montgomery Society which is truly a wonderful site, and the original can be found in the LM Montgomery Archival Collection in the University of Guelph.

It’s not exactly what I personally pictured, but it’s okay.

The movie, however, decides that Anne is to be the one to name it Green Gables. I don’t know why.

Marilla is annoyed to see Anne, as you’d expect. Another nitpick, but they give Matthew extra dialogue in this scene. Not a ton, but it bothers me. And Marilla’s a bit meaner to him, too.

Anne does break down into tears when told she can’t stay, which is book accurate (though she claims she isn’t crying). It’s actually less dramatic than what it is in the book.

We follow the book pretty accurately through the name conversation and I do like the Anne/Marilla interactions. Marilla isn’t cruel, just brisk and exasperated. Her actress is seriously the best of the bunch here.

Matthew suggests Anne could stay, and ugh, just look at his creepy face.

I kind of think the actor is trying to play Matthew as “slow” in a stereotypical, offensive way at the beginning of the movie. I’m forcing Luce to watch most of these with me (I love you @soveryqueer) and I asked them if it was just me, and they kind of got that vibe too. It’s strange and creepy and I’m really not a fan of this Matthew overall.

The next afternoon, Marilla takes Anne to… pick up Mrs Spencer? And then they all drive to Mrs Blewitt’s house, which the credits spell as Bluett for some reason.

If you’re confused, pleased know it’s the movie and not my recapping skills. I was also confused watching it.

Mrs Spencer says she’s sure Mrs Bluett will take Anne. There’s a few little kids running around at Mrs Bluett’s but they seem better behaved than I’d expect. And you know, 4 kids is fewer than I expected, too.

Mrs Spencer says she brought them there as Mrs Blewitt is so anxious to get anyone to help with the children she’s sure to take Anne.

Also the baby is cute. Luce thought it was a fake baby at first XD

This is where we actually learn Anne is 14 and I began to have some suspicions about how the plot would play out.

The scene plays out mostly as it does in the book, with perhaps a touch more obvious annoyance at Mrs Bluett from Marilla, which honestly works as we don’t have her POV here.

The baby is having a great time. Look at the little foot kicking all happy.

JEEZ this baby is almost 90 years old!

Also Mrs Bluett has almost more of a Southern US accent? The actress was from Maryland – is that considered the South? Odd choice for PEI, again.

I do like that they didn’t have Anne say anything. She just looks at Marilla, absolutely miserable, and Marilla says to the others she better talk Anne home to talk it over with Matthew. As in the book, she’s definitely using him as an excuse.

However, we have our first instance of them leaving something major out. The conversation with Marilla about Anne’s backstory never happens. We never even learn about the Thomases or Hammonds. I guess that was too serious.

Marilla’s line is great, though. “I oughtn’t do anything without consulting him.” Sure, Marilla. Sure.

Marilla says if they decide not to keep her, she’ll bring or send Anne back tomorrow.

Aw, they give Matthew’s dog line to Marilla! Matthew also is very casually smoking in this scene which isn’t really in character. He mostly smoked when he needed to think deeply about something.

It’s really weird, though, that they give him random extra dialogue but take away a great line of his from the book that really showed how much he disliked Mrs Blewitt and cared for Anne already since it was so unlike him to say.

The bedtime prayer scene goes pretty much as planned, besides some minor backstory changes. Marilla’s actress is great here. She really nails the balance between flustered and knowing she should disapprove of what Anne’s saying, but actually being amused.

I’m ending the post here, because we hit about the twenty minute mark of the movie and it’s pretty long already. Twenty minutes of this movie took me two hours to thread which again is why there will be four of these posts. It’s a lot of movie.

I’m gonna put all my links in the last post, so this is it for this week! Part two next week.

Anne Adaptations: 1934 Anne of Green Gables – Part 1 There are four threads for this part of this series, so there'll be four blog posts (plus a bonus one that isn't about any plot or content, but just me making jokes for like 10 minutes.)

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cromulentbookreview · 7 years ago

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TumblTURN

Thank God for Tumblr. Seriously, Tumblr is the best. used to think I was alone in my love for AMC’s Turn: Washington’s Spies. Then I discovered Tumblr. Thank you, Tumblr.

I wish I had known about the Tumblr Turn fandom when I first started watching the show - definitely would’ve felt less alone. Since we are now in the final season of Turn, I wanted to give something back to the Tumblr fandom that has sustained me. As I am a cromulent book reviewer / future librarian / future reader’s adviser, I figured I’d gather up a list of books, TV shows and other media for my fellow Turncoats to read/watch/enjoy during the long wait between episodes. And what will be the even longer period after this season ends, when we will have no more Turn at all.

Also: Fourth of July, so it’s a great day to binge on Turn.

Before I start with a list of recommendations, though, I gotta have a Turn gif party to show off all the things I love about Turn. Because screw historical accuracy, Anna and Major Hewlett belong together (damn it, Burn Gorman, you’d better come back this season! Even if it’s just for one episode! Even if it’s just for one scene. Just one scene, that’s all I need!),

But let me just introduce you to some of the people of Turn: there’s Abe. He is a terrible spy,

Mary is a spy grand-master,

Robert Townsend spies for ten minutes, is best spy ever,

and Caleb shaved off his beard for Abe, that ungrateful shite!

Look at that beautiful beard.

Ben Tallmadge’s pants could stand to be a little tighter...

And would it be so hard for them to bring Major Andre back from the dead? Come on, he was pretty...

Simcoe is evil for the sake of evil,

(and we love him for it),

Meanwhile, Abigail is done with all this BS,

And Benedict Arnold is a whiny little bitch, nothing new there. Good job, guy-whose-name-is-now-synonymous-with-treason.

Peggy is seriously questioning her life choices.

And, of course:

Annalett forever, goddamn it!

Sorry, but I ship them so hard. Probably one of my favorite ships of all time. I will go down with this ship. Suck it, history, I’ve got my ship.

OK! On to the books and things Turn fans can...uh...turn to when they run out of Turn.

To everything, turn, turn turn...

Uhm, I mean..

I didn’t want to just stop at readalikes, though. I watch a lot of television, so I included some watchalikes as well. But, since I deal primarily with books, there will be some bias toward books. Also a bias towards fiction, because...well, I like fiction. I’ve lumped all the fiction together, adult, romance, children’s, middle-grade, YA, genre, etc. etc.

FICTION

For full disclosure I will say I have not read all of these. I’ve read only a few (slow reader), but using my librarian skills, I’ve rustled up some titles that may appeal to Turn fans. If they end up not appealing to you...uhm...sorry?

Anyway:

Any of the Revolutionary War Books by Ann Rinaldi. This includes:

Time Enough for Drums

The Secret of Sarah Revere

Or Give Me Death

Hang A Thousand Trees with Ribbons

Finishing Becca

Cast Two Shadows

A Ride Into Morning

The Fifth of March

Wolf By The Ears

I swear I’ve read at least one of these at some point, but I really can’t remember. Based on the descriptions, though, they sound like they’d be a great fix for the pining Turn fan.

Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes

Or, the first thing my brain thinks of when I see the name Johnny Tremain:

Hee.

Redcoat and The Fort by Bernard Cornwell

I’ve read Redcoat during a prior Turn-related-book-binge, and it was OK, but not really my thing. It might be your thing, though, so give it a chance.

Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales: One Dead Spy by Nathan Hale

(Not the real Nathan Hale)

A graphic novel version of the story of Nathan Hale. I highly recommend all of the Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales books, as they manage to cover some pretty heavy topics in US history with a mixture of absolute seriousness, historical accuracy, and humor. You’ll find them shelved in middle grade, but hey, I’m an adult and I think they’re great.

Seeds of America series by Laurie Halse Anderson

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation series by M.T. Anderson

The Spy , The Pilot and Lionel Lincoln by James Fenimore Cooper

Renegades of the American Revolution by Donna Thorland

In Gallant Company, book 5 of the Richard Bilotho novels by Alexander Kent. Set during the Revolution if you’re in the mood for some nautical fiction told from the Tory perspective. I’m really big into nautical fiction for some reason.

Just Jane: A Daughter of England Caught in the Struggle of the American Revolution by William Lavender

I’m currently reading this one right now. It’s OK, not stellar - the writing style seems more geared toward middle grade than YA.

Soldier's Secret: The Story of Deborah Sampson by Sheila Solomon Klass

Sophia’s War and The Fighting Ground by Avi

Woods Runner by Gary Paulsen

The Scent of Death by Andrew Taylor

Revolutionary War + Murder Mystery! Long, though.

The Traitor's Wife: The Woman Behind Benedict Arnold and the Plan to Betray America by Alison Pataki

The Winter of Red Snow: The Revolutionary War Diary of Abigail Jane Stewart, Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, 1777 by Kristiana Gregory

Yeah I have a soft spot in my heart for the Dear America books. Read them a lot when I was in middle school. So...recommended for middle grade readers as an intro to history via fiction

Alex & Eliza by Melissa De La Cruz

Or: Damn you, Lin-Manuel Miranda.

WEBCOMICS

The Dreamer, by Laura Innes

Highly, highly highly recommend for Turn fans pining for more Turn.

NONFICTION:

Washington's Spies: The Story of America's First Spy Ring by Alexander Rose

Or: the book the series is based on. “What do you mean you haven’t read the book the show is based on?” *Shove*

George Washington doesn’t have time for nonsense.

George Washington's Secret Six: The Spy Ring That Saved the American Revolution by Brian Kilmeade and Don Yaeger

Common Sense by Thomas Paine

Wait, didn’t they make you read this in school??

1776 and John Adams, by David McCollough

Lafayette in the Somewhat United States by Sarah Vowell

Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution and Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution by Nathaniel Philbrick

Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War by Karen Abbott

If you’re interested in early-American spycraft and badass lady spies during the Civil War...

Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow

Don’t worry, Hamilton fans, I wasn’t going to leave this out.

Hamilton: The Revolution by Lin-Manuel Miranda

There, I hawked your book, can I please have Hamilton tickets?

Ok, so there’s a ton of great nonfiction about the Revolutionary War that I’m not mentioning here, but it’s getting late and this post is really long already...if you think something should be included, add it in a note or something.

John Adams (HBO)

How have you not seen this?

Frontier (Netflix)

Khal Drogo is an 18th century Canadian fur trapper. Far too short at only six episodes, but a fun show all the same. Set earlier than Turn and in Canada, but...but...Khal Drogo.

Poldark (PBS Masterpiece Theatre)

Set during the same time period as Turn - begins when Ross Poldark is sent home after being wounded in America during the Revolution. Starring the most attractive dwarf from the Hobbit movies.

*broods broodingly*

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (BBC / BBC America)

Because I will hawk this series to whoever will listen. It’s Regency England...with magic! It’s fantastic. The book is 9,000,000,000 pages but it’s worth the time to read. Or, if you don’t have time, watch the series. It’s excellent. How will it help Turn fans? Uh...well, you can watch it, and find out.

The AMC Period Dramas, including: Hell on Wheels, The Son, Mad Men, Halt and Catch Fire and The Terror, which is coming soon, but not soon enough because I need it now, goddamn it. Anyway: AMC is like America’s BBC when it comes to period dramas. No other network can beat them. I highly highly recommend Hell on Wheels (it’s on Netflix!), it’s criminally underrated. Also: Anson Mount. Drool.

MOVIES

Honestly, my attention span is too shot for movies. If it’s longer than an hour my brain shuts down. Apart from the obvious Revolutionary War movie starring that racist Australian guy, if you guys have any recommendations, please let me know about them.

THEATRE

Hamilton

Come on, did you really think I’d leave that off this list? I wish I could see Hamilton someday...but I’m poor. I hear they might be doing Hamilton here in the Pacific Northwest and...oh, wait, as I typed that sentence, the tickets sold out. Even though they haven’t actually been officially announced or gone on sale, they’ve sold out. Dear Lin-Manuel Miranda: please just have a camera crew record a production of Hamilton and show it in theaters. That way everyone can see it. Like me. If anyone out there has Hamilton tickets they’d like to give to me...

Damn you, Lin-Manuel Miranda, you gorgeous genius. I bet you lived in a closet before Hamilton but now you live in a mansion...

...I think your great, please give me Hamilton tickets.

1776

There’s a movie version of this, but it’s the original Founding Father’s musical.

Also, apparently being a good violin player means you’re good at sex stuff? I honestly don’t know and I’ve been questioning that song ever since I first heard it.

The Devil’s Disciple by George Bernard Shaw

I hadn’t heard of this play until I started mining for Turn-related media. Sounds pretty good, though and the full text is available via wikisource (see link).

So that’s my massive list of Turn materials which might soothe us once the show is off the air. I am open to more suggestions. Seriously, give me more suggestions, I’m going to need a lot when the show’s over. Also, I need more Annalett fic, please.

Whiskey? Yes.

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ratherhavetheblues · 7 years ago

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PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON’S PHANTOM THREAD “I need to do some work…”

In the spirit of craft, so central to this film, we’ll cover first (all but one of) the essentials of where it’s going; to be followed by how it fares. Though set in London in the 1950s, purporting to be a love story about a renowned couturier, Reynolds Woodcock, and a young woman, Alma, first seen as a waitress in a rural locale, we have to get over its old-timey, sentimental sheen and take to heart how old and wooden the maestro is and how like an ungainly woodcock Alma is (searching at night in soft ground—in her case, for poisonous mushrooms by which to seal his dependency on her). They have a child, and by their lights have a happy life.

Fans of Pride and Prejudice might be tempted to imagine that the good old days are back. But how many 50s romance aficionados are left out there? Has Anderson overestimated that the emotive skills of actors, Daniel Day Lewis and Vicky Krieps, could draw a crowd to pay the bills for his deep and difficult 21st century vehicle? (From my perspective, I’m saddened, but not surprised, that in a centre of more than 6 million, only 2 theatres found it worth showing.) This massively quixotic endeavor ensnares us in its fantastic brilliance which no one wants to see.

There are many candidates vying in this picture, for filling the presence of “phantom thread.” We’re given, if we’re awake enough, a foothold on the real breakthrough very early on. Reynold’s current doll begins to chafe at the breakfast table, denouncing him (politely, of course, this being a drawing room in the realm of British good breeding) on account of, “There’s nothing I can do to get your seeing me…” The rigidly tastefully groomed owner of the mid-town Georgian mansion which doubles as his studio and production floor—seen at the outset, one morning, attending to body and raiment as if he no longer can, as if he ever did, distinguish between perfect artefact and human volcano—stages thereby what he might imagine to be a British volcano in telling the talkative serf, “I can’t begin my day with confrontation… I simply have to have silence.” At which, a rendition of “My Foolish Heart” fills the cordon bleu air.

What’s going on here, with that almost papal corporate dismissal? Those of us who have seen and remembered other Anderson films (which the entirety of the critical gushing as to status quo here chooses to ignore) have access to a cinematic agency obsessed with artisans becoming grotesque in the course of short-circuiting their gusto for life. We learn that Reynolds reveres the memory of his prim little mother who taught him to sew (shown as a ghost in her perfect, if old-fashioned, wedding gown, in one scene where he needs a break from uber-serf, Alma, who opts for the crutch of reincarnation, “over and over, forever…”) The serenity he lobbies for turns out to be booth foolish and wise. Foolish, in failing to take to heart that his precious output will mean nothing in the plunge of time. Wise, insofar as the remarkable resoluteness he musters in the service of a primal creativity means something.

This putative comedy of love is in fact a mystery of errors. Serious errors, wherein to savor that thread of phantom ripeness. In the wake of the most recent confirmation that he is all thumbs when it comes to promising strangers, he tells Cyril, his sister and business partner, “I have an unsettled feeling…” On that only too quick to remedy a poisonous state-of-affairs by throwing money at it, he subscribes to his partner’s advice in the form of that British antidote to rude urbanity, the country home, where candid flora and fauna can be put in the service of a halfway house. One other notable aspect of that fleeing a métier of tempering and respecting those generally deemed by history to lack a dimension of significant savoir faire, is Reynold’s priceless Bristol sports model, especially its windshield. Though rather pinched and coiled at his digs (when not being worse-for-wear self-consciously balletic), he finds himself (or rather half-finds himself) creating tapestries of reflection as, at dusk, he flows along a country road assured of being one of the formidable, headed for knighthood. These optics have a precursor being formidable in a very different sense, namely, the driving episodes in the films of Abbas Kiarostami. The latter speak to a dynamic seldom, if ever, engaged by those of the land placing their bets on a “common sense” producing the likes of Woodcock’s first creation seen by us—a Tudor, straitjacket-like contraption—and scientistic yeomanry, sniping forever against the uncanny. (In the early days of their strategizing, we have a scene where Alma is being photographed to project into a fashion magazine that very typically static British sense of days gone by. He shakes off those doldrums, declaring, “I have to do some work!” And here the crucial dynamics of work become far from a fait accompli. As if to suggest that the proud Bristol owner can’t get over the gilded carriages of yore, there was the Tudor ensemble hovering persistently, as if coming to a head. “Let’s take it for a walk,” the roadster guy—not—suggests, at perfect pitch, for that snug little island, to that woman trapped in the straightjacket.) Kiarostami, like Anderson, is about struggling to maintain what today we’re calling “phantom thread,” the rigors of which our protagonist lacks the guts to deal with back home. Off on that hiatus, he prides himself on finding Alma to be a breath of fresh air, in being (commonsensically) plain, clumsy and having a photographic memory in dealing with the complexities of his yeoman breakfast at the Victoria Hotel—the prelude of his (imagined) seduction of a new fair lady striking him as a possible accessory by means of which he might master his tendency toward “unsettled feeling.” Accepting his invitation to dinner, Alma sets off several other signs that his recruitment career (a paragon of cordiality—later in the night she will tell him, “You’re a very handsome man…”) has reached a higher plane. She shares his self-satisfactory indifference to the car’s being enhanced by reflectedness of overhanging tree branches in the night on country lanes as illuminated by the high beams, in favor of drinking in the flash of a terribly expensive speed wagon. As he shows her around his childhood home, there is a gambit, regarding a photo of his mother in her bridal gown, concerning superstitions about such dresses, in the course of which he feels the need to describe his nanny/ tutor and the curse of any one but the principals touching the gown on the wedding day: “…as if anyone would have her…She was monstrously ugly. We called her “the Black Death…” This amuses Alma, as he acutely knew she would be (prone to such adolescent, essentially British cruelty, despite her Germanic accent). Their eyes meet, and smug silence prevails. Rather than being a portal to the phantom, the uncanny, she breaks the silence with, “In a staring contest, you would lose…”

We must not disregard the output of charm (however studied) coloring this new encounter. From Alma’s self-deprecating smile on stumbling before coming up to take Reynolds’ breakfast order, to the both of them enthusing about the (programmed) first impressive dinner where his taste for dining is on display, and then the (also programmed) after-dinner step of marvelousness, his fitting her for a gown, his hospitality is nothing short of regal. He rounds up Cyril to assist him in completing the many measurements required to produce haute couture standards. But with that duet chiming out numbers, we have a rendering of Alma as a commodity the full details of which comprising the tried-and-true and, perhaps, still room for another dimension. The remainder of this coverage must measure the highs and the lows, and where that really takes them.

After the hard reality of that math and Alma’s incandescent smile therein, she seamlessly becomes part of the powerhouse company. How can we describe her function there? “Muse” is a non-starter, since she knows and cares nothing about fashion design. She dabbles a bit regarding stitchery and modeling, with no distinction. There is virtually no sexual fire, neither material nor imaginary. She seems to have no culinary interest, nor any ambition toward artistry. Woodcock seems to have embarked on an experiment of foreignness, strangeness—as a supplement to his susceptibilities of easily losing concentration. In his self-seeking bedrock and wide respect (from the quick and the dead), he could have been ready to embrace alternative practices. She adopts the white smock bedecking the middle-aged expert and professional seamstresses who, unlike her, must report early for duty from outside the center of gravity. (During that sparkling debut, Reynolds notes in passing, while taking the schema of her body, “You have no breasts…” In reply to this she declares, with some heat, “I never could love myself…” He tells her, “You’re [hopefully] perfect” [being, that is, not like one of her puffy predecessors who prove to be unable to shut their mouths when he’s [forever] working].) On the job he tells her, “You have beautiful manners…” Thus (at this moment) she seems to coincide with those well-mannered, elderly ladies dawning on us in the form of a silent choir, a choir in which she is allowed to infrequently perform solo turns. On that platform, monied clients and cronies march along swimmingly, providing a world she feels herself to somehow belong. As if completing her curriculum vitae, she adds, one day, apropos of her keeping up with Reynolds’ often midnight to 4 sleep allowance, “No one can stand as long as I can.” The visceral undertow of this super-civilized enterprise comprises the true drama of this “romantic subject.”

Reynolds does not have long to realize that that “honeymoon” has ended. Alma wonders why Cyril clamps down so hard on the tone of the living spaces. “Because it’s beautiful,” Woodcock interjects. “Maybe I like my way,” she rebuffs. She eats noisily, and he reproves, “Please don’t make such noises, Alma. It’s very distracting.” Cyril intervenes with, ‘Too much movement harms Reynolds’ work.” Slurping away, Alma, seeing a way to win the day, insists, “I think he’s being too fussy,” Later in the day, she knocks at his lodge-like inner sanctum. “May I come in?”/ “I’m working,” he says, with emphasis upon “working” (the likes of which she cannot imagine). Cyril sweeps by with his dinner, establishing a sort of power beyond the range of rebellious novices. And yet, next day, the rebel fits into an appointment marked with smiles all round—both Reynolds and the long shot unwilling to miss a good thing.

Unwelcome volatility does not constitute the new; but Alma’s resilience does (for what it’s worth). The bemused but deeply committed sister explains to the bold critic, “Placing him at a disadvantage leaves him depressed for days…” Reynolds, in a bid to smooth over their differences with one of their unifiers, namely, extraordinary food, brings her to a mushroom domain, where plunging one’s hands into moist and porous soil prevails. Also in the cards is a primer on poisonous species, followed up by illustrated literature back home—painstaking preparations being a calming force. Their unspoken pact as to culinary craft coincides with a commission from a wedding-bound heiress who refers to herself as “so ugly,” and insists he attend the round of receptions. Though this rather farcical, always tipsy, figure—very fat and very awkward—inadvertently assists our protagonists in joining closer about an imperative of exclusivity (seen in the savaging of the Black Death), there is about her sense of unsatisfactoriness that which redounds to some aristocratic validity and speaks to the makeshift affections and disaffections of Reynolds and Alma, nowhere close to remarkableness. Hating to have to partake in such a circus, there they are, while gossip columnists dredge for scandal. Barbara’s perpetual inebriation (like Dean Martin’s) would be old hat; but her Dominican Republic playboy/ consort offers fresh blood. Later in the evening, Barbara collapses in a stupor which annoys them no end. “I’m angry,” Alma emotes. “She doesn’t deserve it [the dress] … It’s your work!” She marches to the bedroom (Woodcock in tow) where the saddened bride has been placed out of sight. There she pulls off the gown. Dead weight being an outrage, of course; but what about their dead weight?

The next client, also arriving to benefit from Reynold’s way with bridal gowns, is a Belgian princess, who appears to be everything Barbara isn’t. She gets under Alma’s skin by not recognizing her at the reception line. As the preparations begin, the anonymously-dressed only other young person strides up to beauty well within her comfort zone and blurts out, “I live here…” She proposes to Cyril that what would add an ingredient of the new is for everyone (including Cyril) to get lost and allow Reynolds to taste her cuisine amidst total immersion in the wonderfulness of herself (being more than a backwater notable). “To give Reynolds a surprise!” would be the heart of the matter. Cyril telling her she’s against such a departure merely increases her zeal. “I’m trying to surprise and delight him… something new!” On returning from a contact which would have been not new, Reynolds greets her with a chilly, “What is this?” He signals a halt to the partnership, along lines of, “Let me collect my wits for a moment…” Then he proceeds with the reflexive politeness having, until now, always won the day. “Very nice of you, Alma…” He’s now in deliberately under-stylish pajamas and housecoat (remarkable that he would own them); and Alma has a taste of the long wait to come before any clear success for her ambitions will be seen. She flounders with the redundant, “Will you make her [the princess] a wedding dress?” After contemptuously enumerating to the now-bore all the previous commissions he has completed for the celebrated beauty, from her baptism to her debut, he takes his seat before the omelet she has cooked and viciously pours out an insulting amount of salt (in wounds already open). “Do you like it?” she slides into masochistic delirium. “I do,” he can’t miss. “No, you don’t like it at all!” she persists, like walking through shards of glass. “What is this?” he brings to hateful candor. “I wanted to have you for myself,” she miserably becomes utterly common. The shootout concludes with her, “I don’t need you!” And his, “Don’t act so tough” [comprising his own slip into soap opera]. “Don’t waste my time,” is his regaining his station, a station he knows he needs to abandon, but can’t stomach the test.

Reynolds’ best next step would be to downscale his papacy and see Alma for what she is—a far more destructive incident than he’ll ever fully understand. Instead, on the thesis that any idea is better than nothing, he succumbs to what might be a nervous breakdown to someone not aware of her adding tiny mushroom particles to the hotly contested surprise, a necessary supplement in lieu of the hoped-for charm. Next morning in the studio he is not himself and he asks rhetorically, as to the princess’ hoped-for coup, “It’s not very good, is it? It’s ugly!” And with that he falls over the mannikin, damaging the outcome of failing concentration. He’s carried to that bedroom few have seen, he vomits a bit; and then there is Alma, ready to help. “It came over me,” the victim explains. “Don’t fuss or I’ll die right here! Just give me some silence… I’ll be down shortly.” Alone with Cyril, he laments, “I’ve made a terrible mistake.” Cyril tells Alma, who has come and gone during the confusion, “Come along…” Alma stays. He tells her, “I’m scared, Alma…”/ “Yes, of course you are,” the young heiress-in-progress replies. “I’ll take care of you… You’re not going to die.” Not nearly as impressed with the restorative powers of the social climber, Cyril brings aboard Dr. Hardy, son of a blue blood, who makes Alma’s day by referring to her as Mrs. Woodcock. Mr. Woodcock orders the man of science: “Keep your hands off me.” Alma is pleased to relay her near-husband’s wish in the form of “Fuck off!” With the medical crisis/ scandal ebbing, the narrative of this rocky silk road makes its move to the full extent of how bad things can get. Under the auspices of Cyril’s professionalism and the loyalty of the no-name toilers, there is a very productive, all-night choir fest. At the culmination point at dawn (for the 9 a.m. deadline), Alma (one of the serfs with no problem working without sleep) partakes of Reynolds’ little whimsy in inserting at a hem a bit of fabric stitched to carry a priceless signal no one will ever read. Here the endowment to the serene royal being from a tiny land (recently pressed down by a military juggernaut) reads, “never cursed.” (That the Belgian King at the time quickly capitulated, may be involved in the sneer.) But Alma thinks the better bet would be not to risk disclosure, since her campaign regarding Woodcock has reached a fait accompli. The latter having bounced back, he is deeply grateful to her nocturnal efforts, made to look as if she was somehow in the forefront. (He comes upon her asleep on a sofa, the others having gone home.) He caresses her, tells her he loves her and proposes three times before she deigns to say “yes.” He declares, “I can’t do without you…” (A few hours before, he was feverish and seemed to be having a visit from his mother. He calls out, “Are you always here? I don’t understand what you’re saying…”)

On to marriage, and now with healthy Alma’s noisy eating there is Woodcock the Lesser squelching his disgust. At their wedding reception (not as obviously disastrous as Barbara’s), an ageing titled woman, Dr. Hardy’s Mom, draws Reynolds’ attention to Alma’s crude, immature heartiness and a disconcerting penchant for never looking his way. Dr. Hardy, getting lots of attention from the not at all blushing bride, urges her to attend an imminent, annual New Year’s Eve event he finds thrilling. With the year down the drain, as it were, Alma insists, “I want to go dancing, right now!” Reynolds, rather predictably, interjects, “You’re joking!” “We need to go dancing,” the closet athlete prescribes./ “I’m going to work,” the once-dabbler in dynamics signs off. Later, he does drag himself away from his sketching and drags her home. Soon she frequents that mushroom patch to put him at a further disadvantage, in order to obviate his saying, “You’re joking” when she suggests having a baby.

That Woodcock knowingly subjects himself to this second stage of pathology reveals to us the extent of his retreat from self-control, presaged by his overestimation of his mother. During the run-up to their becoming a nuclear family, Alma evinces manipulative control not merely idiosyncratic but patterned on a specific form of coercion, stern and scientific. Her assurance “I want you to be strong again,” may not be strictly true. This pair press us to depths they lack; and a range of viciousness widely assumed to be conquered.

Phantom Thread has more game to puzzle over than the moves of an NBA All-Star! But its destination comes down to one—and one we never see in this film. The implication in the term, “phantom,” is that we have something “only in the imagination,” “apparently real but not actually so.” But our title includes “thread,” hearkening to active links between one’s “imagination” and phenomenality beyond it. That title, then, implies sensibility the heart of which being a very strange weave of energy. Our story, as you can see, is a non-stop travesty of that potential. The tonality of the action is keyed by the throttling of that kinetic factor. Reynold’s early rapt application to perfect fit upon arresting fabric, color and composition may be ludicrous and somewhat deranged; but he, without seeing clearly the point of his passion, was addressing a valid and crucial matter, Alma, perhaps a refugee from the recent War, could be pardoned for caring nothing about Woodcock’s obsession. But nature does not work that way, despite the very popular shams of planet Earth. Anderson’s art is to evoke a huge and painful lacuna quietly coming to bear at the depths of tepid souls.

Within this alert, there is a matter of malignancy further confirming that we are in the hands of a most audacious and reflective filmmaker. Barbara, the alcoholic multi-millionaire who is remarkable in knowing she is a piece of work—presuming to order a reluctant Reynolds to attend her triumph—has a surname, Rose. This episode coincides with Woodcock finding Alma increasingly crude and destructive of his passion for the innovative gifts deriving from silence. Unlovely Barbara, as we know, has a first stairway to the stars in the form of undergoing a press conference while being, as usual, tipsy. One of the newshounds, noting the less than liberal lineage of her Dominican Republic playboy/ “lover,” calls out, “Tell us how you provided visas for Jews before the War!” Someone else incensed by the rescue was Alma. At the reception with Woodcock, she intently regards Barbara from afar. What she sees is the bride collapsing in a drunken stupor. “I’m angry! That dress doesn’t belong to her!” she growls. Reynolds, not nearly as offended by Barbara’s politics, cautions, “Don’t start blubbering, Alma…” She shoots back, “It’s your work they’re insulting!... She can’t behave like this in a gown from the House of Woodcock!” Having brought Reynolds onside by an appeal to his track record and vanity, she leads a march to the bedroom where the new bride was carried after the embarrassment. Her knock on the door is sharp and loud, like the announcement of a Gestapo raiding party at a Jewish residence. With Reynolds covering the door and stalling family members, Alma—ordered by his dictate, “Take the fucking dress off!”—rushes to the bed and tears off the supposed commercial scandal. Then, in a cut, they are seen basking (on a dark street in front of a bar—recalling a beer hall putsch)—in their supposed victory which has once again brought balance to imbalance. (Barbara had been the picture of dead weight; but their dead weight was far more difficult to discern.)

From this point on, Alma’s you-go-practical-girl for the betterment of love loses its allure. During the uprising of the surprise dinner (prefaced by her self-pitying, “I don’t know what I’m doing here…”), Woodcock is heard to blurt out, “Are you a Special Agent? Do you have a gun? Where’s your gun? Why don’t you go back where you came from?” Her malaise in face of the impossible-to-match Belgian patrician and impossible-to-match volatile seer that is Woodcock elicits residues of poison to tip the scale her way. (During the shouting match, she spews out a storm of ridicule for those courtesies tracing back to Camelot. Her recent mantra, “too fussy,” referring to what in her eyes can be nothing but soft weakness, reflects (unlike the windshield reflections she cares nothing about) a campaign where one who can out-stare and out-stand others might bend such victors to her liking. “Something new” was her description of the intimate dinner the main point of which being to drug him without any mishaps. Her, perhaps sharply defined, new; his, perhaps nebulous, old—with the potential to be far newer than hers. In the all-night heroics—secretly driven by Alma’s subversiveness—we are reminded of the air-raid shelters during the Blitz, and her version of the V-2 missile. As she attends to the poison she has fired off, she promises to Reynolds, “I won’t fuss…” On the completion of the assignment in the morning, we have a kind of All Clear. She supports Reynolds’ refusal to be examined (and get to the bottom of the matter) by Dr. Hardy. “He wants you to fuck off.” Hardy resurfaces as touting the New Year’s Eve venue the décor of which resembles a Nazi-Era beer hall. After the total capitulation of Woodcock’s knowingly swallowing another foul round—to become, to all intents and purposes, a situation of Alma’s becoming his mother—we have what many would think to be wedded bliss, but some of us would think to be an invasion and occupation (a later return of the handsome parents to that party centre ups the Mid-Century red and black Nazi décor), leading nowhere. Woodcock seems to cut quite a figure in his Bristol roadster. But the Bristol concern included airplanes, the effective lift of which never darkening his door. (The parallels and contrasts to Hitchcock’s post-War film, Notorious [1946], [not to mention the subversive flood of the rest of his work], should play a part here. Showing off old-timey impeccability and its clear sailing ahead, speaks ironically to the instance of irredeemably deadened sensibility rocketing from quite far back and prevailing in various ways today. Phantom Thread being breathtakingly more than a period melodrama.)

Hardy doubles as Alma’s confidant (and lover?) at some indeterminant time in the future, along lines of her intermittently positing the highlights as far as her foolish heart can see. “Being with Reynolds has been a dream come true …And I have given him every piece of me… He is a challenge to be with… He’s like a child… He needs to come down… We often would sleep from 12 to 4 and then work straight through… No one complained… And after he’s gone he’ll wait for me in the afterlife, or other afterlives… We’ll have large gardens where everyone will play games…”

#paul thomas anderson

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