Movie Review: Elysium

Directed by Neill Blomkamp. 2013.

spoilers

I entered the theater late. I'm sorry, but it happens every so often. In the opening scene, a rock band performs in a stadium as a riot rages outside. As partiers revel inside, a young boy witnesses a mounted policeman lynch one of the protestors and, enraged, pelts the officer who chases after him. Perhaps it is because I was late and not yet settled, but I was taken aback at the sight. I felt perhaps that the heedless rock and rollers mimicked me as I watched the movie. Was I ignorant of or indifferent to some terrible crime on my doorstep?

Alas, dear reader, this is not the plot of Elysium. (And I did not arrive late.) What I watched and have just described the trailer to the new Metallica album which preceded the feature. What I watched and described is also and in every single way, superior to Elysium, which is the 68th and most catastrophically derailed movie I've reviewed.

Elysium's most notable feature is its tedium. In fact, my mind stretches simply to recall what happened. The tedium is the result of several factors. First, we know the story is going to end up on the space station, and as such the script needed to do everything possible to make us forget that up until the characters actually got there. At a minimum it needed to build a cast of interesting characters whom we could like or dislike, it needed to seed tension between them, and it needed interim goals for which they could strive. Second, the script needed to paint a world of rules, not just situations. Third, the plot details needed to make sense. Let's look at these problems in turn.

I. Characters

Matt Damon is a convincing everyman. Here he's fine and good as Max, a cleaned up ex-con who suffers an accident at work which gives him a few days to live. But even if I assent to the idea that he has the right to trespass on Elysium and utilize their private resources, how am I supposed to wade through all of these the half-baked considerations and identify with the character:

Up until the last moments, Max is only trying to save himself. At the end, though, and without any words or indications of any kind, he decides not only to try and save others but to sacrifice himself. Why did he try and save the girl? Moreover, why did he change his mind about saving her, having formerly led the authorities to her house just to save himself? As far as saving others goes, was he trying to save everyone else too and did he think he did? If so, why? Concerning himself, even if he healed himself on Elysium, what did he think was going to happen when he landed on a space station where the people in charge clearly had no qualms about killing intruders? Even if he would go to jail, he had said he never wanted to go back to jail.

The only other main character who receives any, well, characterization is Delacourt (Jodie Foster), who seems to be in charge of defending Elysium against the immigrants who try to fly in. She reveals her only motivation when, questioned by an inquisitorial board for torpedoing several incoming vessels of immigrants, she replies that she wants to preserve it for the children. That's it? Is this a joke? She then wants to orchestrate a coup to gain control over the board, which she deems too soft on immigration, by some chicanery with Elysium's computer systems. I guess everyone on Elysium wouldn't know, or wouldn't care? Does the computer decide who is president or was there an election imminent? Is the office of president permanent? What is Elysium's actual immigration policy and government? Delacourt was rebuked by the board, so she's apparently at odds with someone.

Are we supposed to infer ideological tension from two people with completely incomprehensible motivations?

II. Tension

Even though their ideologies don't compete as one might expect, perhaps there could have been some situational tension between them. Unfortunately, they never meet in the movie. So yeah. . . Instead, Max's nemesis is a psychotic agent whom Delacourt illegally used to hunt him down. Before continuing, though, isn't it well known that it's very hard to control psychotic people? Delacourt knows the guy's record and uses him anyway, so I guess she thought he'd listen, a fact of which she was so convinced that she, unwisely, walked up behind and started badgering him. Smart move! Anyway, the guy's nuts so he doesn't have any relevant motives. (Hence his absence in Part I above.) As a result, he's not so much a source of tension as the annoying guy in the way whom we know will get defeated. Thus, there's no tension.

Is there tension between Max and the guy carrying the data Max needs? No, that guy has almost no lines. How about between Max and the woman he inexplicably loves? Nope. She asks him to save her daughter, and he says no and leaves. Then he changes his mind later, maybe. Between Max and his partner? No. Between Max and the black market kingpin who hires him for the data heist? Nope. That guy never kills Max because Max has the data, and then he inexplicably decides to give the data away at the end anyway.

Are you starting to sense how these problems pile up into a big mess?

III. Interim Goals

There is simply not enough diverse activity leading up to the finale. Max's injury sets up a countdown of five days, after which he'll die. The script needed a bunch of small steps for Max leading up to arriving on Elysium. Instead, he gets the data and is captured and brought there in several short sequential scenes which just sort of list into one another, making the film both long and uneventful. This is not illogical, but it is dreadfully unsatisfying.

IV. Rules, not Situations

I'm struggling to find out just what's caused Earth's woes in this movie. The prologue tells us the planet is polluted and overcrowded. Somehow that has thrust everyone into poverty. Is there also an economic depression? Where's the connection? What happened? Why aren't there just tens of thousands of skyscrapers, or people living on the sea? Does the writer not realize how preposterous the notion is that the entire planet is out of room? Wouldn't anyone think to pool land and try to improve it? There are clearly police and there's no apparent disorder, so it's feasible. Perhaps there is no property? Are the people actually slaves or do they get paid? Somebody's getting paid because the factory owner says he's losing money, which means he's paying someone for labor or material. Can't the people buy things? Wouldn't that make an economy? Or do they import things from Elysium? Those planet-side clearly have skills. Can't they use their skills to benefit themselves in some way? They can evidently build spaceships.

On the Elysium side, who built this thing? The people on the planet? Again, did they get paid? Who makes all of their stuff? Where do they get their resources? Doesn't anyone work for the people on Elysium? Wouldn't that make a class system on Elysium too?

Are we really just supposed to put all of these questions aside?

–

And for what would we put them aside, anyway? A guy with radiation poisoning, battling a sword-wielding psychopath by means of a pneumatic exoskeleton? For completely incomprehensible and impossible uses of technology, especially the obviously-misunderstood process of encryption? For Jodie Foster's continuously changing accent, and occasionally moving upper lip? For somebody shooting down an orbiting spaceship with a shoulder-mounted rocket?

For a farcical ending in which a computer program simply "makes everyone a citizen of Elysium," a preposterous solution which ends with flights of robotic doctors heading down to the planet? Even if Elysium had the resources to heal the whole planet, what about the overpopulation? What about the apparent economic collapse? Let's just pretend Elysium didn't exist and all of its people were back on the planet: what would that solve?

We also ought to note the peculiar lack of dialogue in this movie, which as one might imagine makes it quite difficult to know what they're thinking. So we don't. In fact, it's completely incomprehensible that anyone had the audacity to film a script so inept at establishing character, tone, tension, and context that its product is offensively tedious to the moviegoer. The only noteworthy question Elysium provokes is whether the yawning gulfs in comprehensibility originate in the writer-director's conception of reality or execution of fantasy.

Read our follow-up: Elysium Revisited

Presidential Rhetoric VI: John Quincy Adams

Welcome to Part Six of our series on the rhetoric of American presidential inaugural addresses. Please feel free to look at the previous entries in the series:

1. Worthy of Marble?
2. John Adams
3. Thomas Jefferson
4. James Madison
5. James Monroe

We continue with our present look at the rhetoric of John Quincy Adams' inaugural address. The first presidential son of a president, John Quincy fittingly owes his considerable education, Classical and otherwise, to his father.

As a child he was instructed in history yes, but with a point of observing "treachery, perfidy, cruelty, and hypocrisy" which he "should learn to detest." Before his teens he delighted in Shakespeare, though in old age he confessed what humor he had missed as a child. Later, visiting Johnny at the Passy Academy in Paris in 1778, the father Adams would remark, "this child. . . learned more french in a day than I could learn in a Week with all my books." Years on when studying at Leyden, Johnny would receive from his father a gift of Terence in  both French and Latin, which the boy had of course learned by now de rigueur. From Leyden Johnny would write how he was "writing in Homer, the Greek grammar, and the Greek testament every day," although his father would write, outraged that the curriculum didn't include Cicero and Demosthenes, an inclusion upon which he insisted. Johnny's Harvard years, which he didn't reflect on with too much affection, rounded out his formal education, before adding to it an MA from his alma mater and joining the bar, age 23.

Let us see to what end the second presidential Adams' considerable intelligence, education, and experience met the occasion of his Inaugural Address, delivered Friday, March 4, 1825.

As usual, the speech is available via Bartleby, which we reproduce here boldface, with my comments following.

–

[A] IN compliance with an usage coeval with the existence of our Federal Constitution, and [B] sanctioned by the example of my predecessors in the career upon which I am about to enter, [C] I appear, [D] my fellow-citizens, in your presence and in that of Heaven [E] to bind myself by the solemnities of religious obligation [F] to the faithful performance of the duties allotted to me [G] in the station to which I have been called.

For his opening, Adams has folded all of his introductory ideas into one sentence. He begins with two parallel prefaces in which he identifies the occasion of his inauguration as [A] coeval, and thus of equal authority, as the constitution, and [B] sanctioned by his predecessors' examples, and thus sanctioned by tradition and excellence. Adams delays his appearance in the speech until [C], which coming after his prefaces about the history of the constitution and the previous presidents, gives the effect of Adams appearing at this moment, a subtle and effective instance of style mirroring content. No sooner does he introduce himself, though, than he addresses his fellow-citizens [D], smartly associating himself with the people and continuing the image of the speaker presenting himself to the people. Adams continues with overt religious analogy by identifying his oath as sacred [E], his duties as both [F] obligatory (faithful performance) and specific (allotted), and his election as democratic. [G]

The most succinct opening yet, Adams packs a lot of detail into a very small span with his Latinate and Ciceronian phrasing.

Movie Review: Pacific Rim

Directed by Guillermo del Toro. 2013.

Roger Ebert once champed at the idea that Stanley Kubrick was once approached to make a pornographic movie. What might a truly great director have made, the late critic surmised, from a preposterous collection of cliches and routines. Guillermo del Toro might not be in the Director's Pantheon just yet, but I entertained a similar curiosity when I heard the maker of Pan's Labyrinth would helm a mainstream action movie. What subtext would he underlay, what mystery would hang about, what details would linger in the shadows. Of course he would hit all the basic action beats, right? Well, to Pacific Rim there's a good, a bad, and an ugly.

The good comes all upfront, and I'll admit for about 10 or so minutes I was pretty thrilled. We open with a classic suit-up montage set to Ramin Djawadi's rollicking score which is so ballsy and vigorous that I didn't care he basically reworked his Iron Man soundtrack. Then a huge nasty monster snarls up out of the ocean and as it's about to crush a fishing boat, a massive robot stomps into the frame. With no lasers, rockets, missiles, swords, or electronic gadgetry, the two behemoths slug it out in a bruising, brawling fistfight. I was in machismo heaven as the two gutsy pilots, electronically connected to each other and their Jaeger, coordinated their movements to pummel the beast.

This bravura opening precedes a few suitably varied riffs on action cliches. Instead of walking us through the overused sight of a monster showing up and surprising everyone, Pacific Rim begins in the middle of the beast onslaught. It shows us a weary public, economic distress, waving political commitment: the tolls of war. I wanted to see more of these elements and had the threads been strung throughout, later scenes would have carried more import. For example, at one point, the Jaeger program is officially discontinued and the remnants carry on as a resistance with scant resources under their General Pentecost. These two variables could have introduced a lot more tension, say, if we acutely felt the lack of resources (like in Aliens) or tension in the command structure (Die Hard.) We also a see a surprisingly friendly look at a black market, which here sells the remains of the aliens (Kaiju) to the resistance for study. This was noteworthy, but it wasn't developed into a significant point that the governments had failed and the resistance was doing the job.

Pacific Rim also introduces another fruitful, if foolish, premise: the pilots share each other's thoughts when connected to the Jaeger. Yes, it's unnecessary and implausible, but I thought it had a lot of potential. I thought we'd see interesting pairs of people fighting together. Maybe some of them are criminals or scoundrels and they need to learn to work together or with soldiers who have no choice because they're not an official outfit anymore. Nope. The setup is exploited only once in a long, heavy-handed scene and then abandoned. There the two main characters, Raleigh and Mako, hook up to the Jaeger and we learn that Mako had a traumatic experience fleeing a Kaiju, so when "drifting" in the Jaeger with Raleigh the first time, she can't control herself. And then the second time they're linked everything's fine. Raleigh is not developed any better. Is he fighting for revenge after losing his brother, to save the earth, or as the movie suggests, just because it's better to die fighting? I'm not expecting profound character arcs here, but I don't think getting one clear motive is much to ask. Raleigh and Mako never really learn to work together, nor do we see what they have in common, so they don't feel significant as a pair.

Alas, the remaining problems with Pacific Rim are more problematic because the genre depends more strongly on these elements. First, every action movie uses an "or else" countdown to funnel the action towards a climax. Pacific Rim does this in two unsatisfactory ways. The first is the shtick that the Kaiju are coming at a fixed, increasing rate. This is fine for us, but it's handled as theory in the plot, so the other characters don't believe it. As a result, they don't move with an urgency which is felt outside of scenes, that is, structurally in the movie. For example, if the clock is ticking, we and the characters should feel trepidation every time a new wave shows up and a Jaeger team steps up to the plate to fight. Since it's just more of the same to them, we don't feel any escalating tension. The second countdown shtick is General Pentecost's plan to nuke the portal from where the aliens come. Unfortunately, we don't know why he's waiting and not carrying it out; there may be a reason, but we don't know it and so we forget about the plan.

Pacific Rim's second action foible is disobeying the Rocky Principle, which holds that we'll watch a main character get bloodied and bruised, but we can only live with it after he comes back and beats the living hell out of the bad guy. After the dismal losses in Hong Kong, the finale here had to be more than an underwater version of the opening. What I think the writers were going for, though, was the sense that the Jaeger program was deteriorating, and thus really couldn't succeed. Yet for that to work the story needed a clearer countdown scenario and a "fight in the shade" moment in which some troops fight to the death while others complete the secret plan (300, Return of the Jedi, The Matrix Revolutions, Independence Day, among many.) Instead, it's kind of depressing to watch the good guys get pummeled, and even Raleigh and Mako's Hong Kong success feels murky and unsatisfying.

Fourth, any battle is only as good as the preparation leading up to it. The gold standard is The Lord of the Rings. Here, though, the excitement of the showcase Hong Kong battle is predicated on several factors which are not set up enough to serve as foundations for a payoff. Specifically, there's not enough lead into 1) how Raleigh and Mako make an effective team, 2) the sense of space around Hong Kong, 3) the fighting styles of the other pairs of Jaeger pilots, and 4) the strengths and weaknesses among the Jaegers, and 5) the plan of defense. As a result, the battle feels disconnected and there's no punch to the actions because they're not prepared.

Fifth, missed opportunities stick out like a sore thumb in any movie, but in one with so little development they're even more egregious. Pacific Rim has five central characters, none of whom are properly paired. The two quarreling hot shots should have learned to work together, the two old men should have washed down the gulf in glory, and Mako should have stayed solo and independent, pulling off the near-impossible feat, like her rescuer General Pentecost, of solo piloting a Jaeger. Instead we get an unsatisfying mishmash of pairings and a final scene which looks like the woozy, romantic finales to the old Bond movies.

Lastly, there a few too many gaps in logic. You can tolerate many such flaws in a fluid, confident movie, but they start to thud when they come too heavy and often. There's an analog Jaeger? It has diesel engines? Why are there no other military forces of any kind on the planet? If monsters are coming out of a hole in the ground, why not put defenses at the site of the hole? If the characters are sharing each other's thoughts, why do they talk to one another? How could a wall possibly have seemed like a good idea?

There are parts to like in Pacific Rim, like Ron Perlman as a black market Kaiju mogul, and some clever details, like a district built around the bones of a Kaiju and a pretty spectacular fight in Hong Kong, but these elements are unsupported by any significant, even passable, context, and thus flat. The monsters are fun and gruesome, but we only see them at night in the rain. In a few scenes I couldn't even tell how many monsters there were or whether they had been killed yet. What gives?

I really wanted to like Pacific Rim, but far from redeeming a silly genre, it limps along as B-movie.

Movie Review: Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery

Directed by Jay Roach. 1997.

If you can recall America circa 1997 you can probably recall Austin Powers. Mike Myers' breakout role as the randy International Man of Mystery was more than a movie, it was a craze. So charming was the titular spy, in fact, and so long could movies stay in theaters and the public consciousness, that everyone seemed to adopt Austin's playful, naughty vocabulary. You can lament that Oh Behave! and Yeah Baby! carried popular cachet, but who wouldn't trade in Bootylicious for Shagadelic and Honey Boo Boo for Austin Powers? Nostalgia aside, I did worry a bit when I popped in the DVD. Would Austin 'Danger' Powers charm again, and coax laughs after sixteen years of aging into fuddiduddiness, or would he seem a juvenile relic?

Well, my verdict is in and it wasn't close: Austin Powers is actually a good movie. A very good movie, and for a lot of reasons.

Foremost, there is a basic simple structure and the movie sticks to it. Frozen in 1967 and defrosted thirty years later to defeat his nemesis, Austin Powers is a fish out of water. The script wisely keeps Austin front and center the whole time and doesn't take detours. It also successfully uses this premise, Austin's acclimation to the modern world, as a prop for jokes, creating a sense of unity. The film's other prop is Austin's untamed libido, the spark for love and conflict with his sexy-but-stodgy partner, Vanessa Kensington. That's it, but it works. Modern comedies looking for a model could do worse.

It would be trite and cruel to say that the gags and jokes in Austin Powers simply "work." First, every joke in the movie, I believe, works. No, they're not all equal, but there's an ebb and flow to the laughs which climaxes in each scene. Take a simple one in which Austin Powers squares off in a poker game with the No. 2 henchman of his nemesis, Dr. Evil. In this brief scene, you get: 1) Austin introducing himself as Richie Cunningham (a play on his fish-out-of-water status), 2) the anatomically-sounding name of No. 2's secretary (a play on the Bond tradition of suggestive names for the femme fatales), 3) Austin's grammatical jumble of "allow myself to introduce. . . myself (a play on words), 4) and the climax of Austin staying on five in blackjack, a joke set up at the beginning of the scene. Again, there's a flow and peak to the humor that make a pleasing pace.

Also, notice that each of those jokes is a different kind as well as degree. Another scene illustrates this variety even better.

Austin and Vanessa have been captured by Dr. Evil and, in spy-vs-spy tradition, enjoy a last meal with the villain before being put to death. On the one hand the scene plays like the staple from Bond movies where the villain lays out his grandiose plan, but the kick is that Dr. Evil's son is at the table and the kid is hassling his father about how he should kill his enemies. The result is that the dynamic of the spy plot is constantly jilted by the familiar sight of a domestic dinner-table squabble. Another scene is equally effective using this contrast. There, Dr. Evil attempts to discuss evil business with the henchmen at headquarters, but the failed henchman he just sentenced to death is screaming in agony downstairs. The scene upstairs is played like a board room meeting in which Dr. Evil is trying to pitch a proposal, but the tone is constantly upended by the screams coming from downstairs. Both of these scenes are peppered with smaller jokes, but the attention to tone and the subtle subversion is effective.

Another secret to the success of Austin Powers is how it sets up its jokes for the payoff. Sometimes this is simple, such as when the literally-named No. 2. causes a walk-on Tom Arnold some confusion as he overhears Austin fight an assassin in, of course, a bathroom stall. Other times the set-up is elaborate, such as the finale. Here we have half a dozen jokes climaxing at once in an orgy of humor. First, we have the Femme Bots: mechanical robots which can seduce and kill any man. In a lesser movie they'd simply be introduced and exploited for a quick joke, but their earlier introduction gives their appearance kick. Second, we have Austin's own infamous irresistibility. Third, after Austin's sexual slip up, Vanessa is on the watch for his infidelity. Fourth, the scene is treated as a dance number. Fifth, the context is the preposterous one of Austin doing this to save the world. Sixth and lastly, we have the running gag of Austin's chest hair, which takes on a life of its own here. These individual lines all blast off in the hilarious climax of Austin out-mojoing the Femme Bots by a striptease in which he vamps about in his Union Jack knickers to I Touch Myself.

There are plenty of other jokes in Austin Powers, too, from the escalating proof of Austin's ownership of the Swedish Made Enlarger Pump, to the two "accidentally" censored nude romps whose choreography to the Blue Danube waltzes suggests an elegance belied only by the visual innuendo and ever incipient nudity. Don't forget about the plain jokes, from Mama Cass' death via ham sandwich to Mr. Bigglesworth, from Dr. Evil's rolling chair too, of course, Austin's groovy vocabulary.

All of these jokes are stitched along the central threads of the spy satire and Austin finding his place and love in the modern world. Unlike its sequels, the latter is handled pretty gently and the movie finds a genial tone between laughing at and with Austin. We don't laugh so much at him as at the incongruity of his expectations and reality. By the end, we're surprisingly happy for Austin as he decides to be a one woman guy for Vanessa.

In short, Austin Powers is a blast that fulfills the promise of the swinging opening where all London is swept up in the magnetic spy's irresistible mojo, all the way through to the Man of Mystery's little apology for liberty: "now we have freedom and responsibility, and that's groovy baby!"

The Case of Anthony Weiner

New Yorkers are __________ that Anthony Weiner is running for mayor. Your choices are: outraged, insulted, stupefied, or shocked. They're all correct, of course, and they're all irrelevant as far as I can tell. Why? Because disgrace is a fickle condition.

The word implies the status: a fall from honor. So to fall from grace you need to have some to begin with. The worse your crime, the more honor you'll need. Only by this calculus can many of history's Great Men come out smelling so good. Julius Caesar may have exterminated Gauls, but that little paragraph of "reforms" that comes at the end of the text book chapter makes it all better. Napoleon might have plunged Europe into war, but the Napoleonic Code was so progressive. In American history, Lincoln suspends habeas corpus and fights a war against Americans, but he supports the 14th Amendment. Wilson lets the Versailles Treaty get well out of hand, but he dreamed big: a League of Nations.

John Adams is an interesting case. He passed the abominable Alien and Sedition Acts, but all he did for the better was avoid war with France. Priorities.

Bill Clinton is another interesting example. Here we have an unremarkable administration led by a man who is charged by the House of Representatives with perjury and obstruction of justice. Clinton would seem to have had no capital to expend, right? Well, not in terms of objective accomplishments or virtues. He did however benefit from his own charisma and the appearance that the charges against him were motivated by political maneuvering and not the law. His case suggests that by honor and dishonor we don't mean anything necessarily involving virtue so much as favor. For many, Clinton never fell from grace and to this day people casually throw around how he was impeached simply for sexual impropriety.

Which brings us to Anthony Weiner, everybody's favorite politician-cum-photographer, portraits a specialty. Why has Anthony Weiner sunk to Caligula's popularity level while Slick Willie's a hit everywhere?

First, he didn't do anything exceptional which might have let this miasmatic funk waft by. The emperor is deflowering virgins? Well, it's better than civil war, and oh look at the pretty buildings!

Second, like Eliot Spitzer, Weiner looks like a loser. People will tolerate, it seems, dishonest and even abusive behavior, but one whiff of the pathetic and you're out.

Third, Weiner is an easy target. He's not in office, so no one has to call for a resignation. There's no need for special laws or elections or procedures. We don't need to question the system. Everyone just gets to poke fun. Right now, amidst so many problems we refuse to deal with, castigating this man feels like an easy way to exercise power and regain confidence. We'll tolerate incompetence, corruption, deceit, and mayhem at every level of government, but his line we will not cross.

No, Anthony Weiner is not a great or virtuous man, but his failure should be at the ballot box. Meanwhile, the finger-waggers would do well themselves to take responsibility for the city and nation's runaway problems, risk their own fortunes and reputations, and suspend their incredulity at the audacity of a failed fool's hope.

The Snowball of Progress

That aspect of conservatism which is simply a disposition toward preservation gives rise to much consternation for both progressives and conservatives. On the one hand, conservatives in simply preserving the status quo must preserve what they do not actually approve. On the other hand, progressives must concede they too need a conservative disposition if they are to preserve progress. Ideology naturally determines just what each person wishes in particular to preserve, but testifying that disposition often trumps ideology is the fact that both sides wish to preserve nearly every political policy.

It is thus the position in 21st century America that we find ourselves in a state of legislative torpor, not due to a natural democratic deadlock, but the fact that we can't both infinitely preserve and progress everything. Everything which has been added to policy at the national level is sacrosanct. What was once added as an experiment or a measure for the moment is now eternal policy. Moreover, it no longer satisfies conservatives or progressives enough to conserve, for even reductions in the rate of increase are viewed as regress.

Of military matters, we went from debating the prudence of a standing army to mainstream politicians regarding as "dangerous" any upset to the surveillance state. Regarding economics we have failed WWII era planning still gumming up commerce and a near-century of the Federal Reserve presiding over the dollar's decline. If you want to End the Fed, though, then you're some crazy old cook. In education, academic perfection was attained for mankind back in the hoary antiquity of 1979. If you admit to skepticism of The Department of Education you might as well confess you want to grind up the Parthenon friezes.

The irrational origins of the social services are as forgotten as the debates which surrounded their passage. They passed so they're permanent. Conserve progress. There's a telling line in the BBC television program Yes, Prime Minister in which the naive private secretary to the PM, Bernard, asks Civil Service chieftain Humphrey Applebee about the progressive schools:

Bernard: Surely progressive education was an experiment which ought to be validated?

Sir Humphrey: Yes, Bernard, but not in-validated!

Never mind whether they were needed at the time or now, never mind whether they worked at the time or now: we have the programs. They're permanent. Resistance is futile. The states as bastions of experimentation? Pfft! Every program's a winner! Between the people who believe they are necessary and those who actually use them, the programs are popular enough to prove invulnerable to protest. One can no more propose change to Social Security than one can propose to chip away at the Washington Monument. History has been written.

Without the creative destruction of a free market constantly reallocating scarce resources to where they are needed most at the moment, leviathan stomps along, following its antiquated map. The conservatives and progressives have succeeded, contra both conservatism and progressivism, in enslaving the present to the greatest fools of yesteryear, a mind-boggling fact which prompted the following summation from Chesterton:

The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.

The result of programs accruing at such a rate and being administered on such a scale has had a twofold effect. The first is that the government has ceased to become a guarantor against aggression but a dispensary of rights with the Commander in Chief doubling as apothecary. The second result is clamor for the uses and services of the government even as its inefficiencies reduce the quality and availability of the product. The government has effectively crowded out both a marketplace of trade and the virtues of civil society. A fragment of Ennius describes the pernicious effect:

Cum debere carnufex cuiquam quicquam quemquam, quemque quisque conveniat, neget.

Since the rascal denies that anyone owes anything to anyone, let each one sue the other. 

To arrest the downward trajectory of commerce, politics, and civility, conservatives and progressives need to realize that neither disposition implies linear activity. Instead, both require prudent cultivation, a process always slow, often oblique, and varied with respect to person, place, technique, time, and tool. Not every good must find expression in government policy, and not every policy, even the good, need be permanent. The alternative is a Sisyphean punishment for both the foolishness of thinking politics permits the solution to all problems, and the hubris of believing you've found it.

Just Plain Bad

The latest speech from the 21st century Cicero has arrived and it's a doozy. How long and boring and tedious it is!

It's all over the place, from attempts at epithets, "proud Maytag workers," stranded analogies, "the bargain began to fray," and inexplicable shifts in tense:

Technology made some jobs obsolete. Global competition sends a lot of jobs overseas. It became harder for unions to fight for the middle class.

We get some awkward ordering of phrases:

But by the time I took office in 2009 as your president, we all know the bubble had burst.

 Then there are plain old bizarre turns of phrase:

doled out bigger tax cuts to the very wealthy and smaller minimum wage increases for the working poor.

You can dole cuts? "Smaller minimum increases?"

Strained connections:

And so what happened was that -- (applause) -- the -- the link between higher productivity and people's wages and salaries was broken.

A link between three things?

Don't forget pointless asides:

Or they'll bring up "Obamacare" -- this is tried and true -- despite the fact that our businesses

So what's tried and true? That they bring it up? Doesn't that imply that you were just lying?

Then there are the vast gaps in explanation:

we've got to continue to end the war in Afghanistan

So we've been ending it? When? How? When was the middle? When did the end begin? What constitutes an end? Can you in fact be ending before you've ended, or is there simply an end?

We get perhaps the worst antistrophe ever:

That's what we have to spend our time on and our energy on and our focus on.

"Let's see, which word should get the emphasis? Hmmm. I know, on, because words!"

Don't forget the plain old ugly: It does not require having, everybody who's fighting to get into, the cornerstones of what it means. Oh the humanity!

Finally, there's the incomprehensible:

This growing inequality not just of result, inequality of opportunity, this growing inequality -- it's not just morally wrong; it's bad economics because when middle-class families have less to spend, guess what?

Nope, I'm not guessing anymore. I'm out of here.

Sum and Part

Daphnis ego in silvis hinc usque ad sidera notus
formonsi pecoris formonsior ipse.
–Vergil. Eclogue VI. 43-44

The connection between man and deed is a curious one, not nearly so obvious and finite as it seems. Philosophy asks if what we do is ethical, most often approach the question from the perspective of agency, focusing on ethics and effect. The natural sciences are concerned with cause and process. Similarly, psychology asks us why we do something and history asks who did what, when. There is between these pursuits, though, the strange phenomena of how deeds and ideas adhere to man, who exists as he fashions himself, as his deeds form him, and how he is perceived by others. None of these factors is predictable or permanent. What do we make of men, then, when each one is Proteus?

History hands down as it transforms. On the one hand, we inherit Heraclitus as the weeping philosophy and Haydn as the laughing composer. Cicero is the model republican, Pericles the model statesman. Like Cleobis and Biton, these figures are frozen in time and honor as epitomes of virtue. On the other hand, Julius Caesar varies from age to age. Is he the tyrant, the betrayed, or the commander? Why do some deeds seem to shake right off their perpetrators? Caesar doesn't take much flak for the Gallic War, Pericles for the Peloponnesian, Cicero for being pompous, Augustus or Napoleon for police states, and so on.

The famous, however, stand exceptions to the rule that it is man's fate to be forgotten by this world. Even we mortals style ourselves, though. Sometimes we identify with our profession, sometimes by our faith or ideas, sometimes by one virtue or other. We act one way with one person, and another with others. We wonder about or avoid our motivations. It is often noted that only the individual ever knows himself, but less so that there's an element of perpetual uncertainty even for that endeavor.

When I act, then, is it the intellectual, the Catholic, the teacher, the man, the friend? Do I act from principle or as some grand whole greater than the sum of its parts?

Strangely, that which escapes man attains a unique grandeur. I speak not of natural phenomena such as caverns, sunsets, and great trees, but works of man which seem not to have been authored but rather in anonymity gifted into nature's domain. Consider the nameless medieval cathedrals and the chants which echo through the ages. How different is it reading Aristotle than Plato, the latter's thoughts being bound up in the curious character of Socrates whom we come to know while Aristotle's colorless, humorless treatises seem sprung from logic itself. (All for that quirk of fate that his other writings were lost.) How different is it to read Vergil in the context of 1) Vergil's art, 2) the politics of the early Roman Empire, 3) Augustus, and 4) the influence of other authors, than it is to read Homer, who reaches out raw but pure from the darkness. There seems such a freedom in the figures on those Greek jars, created not in some academic paradigm for a museum, but for living.

Like the ambiguities about ourselves, those of nature often do not obscure but refract and reflect us in our attempts not at analysis, not at use, but at contemplation. They invite not study, but a, if not pure then primarily, aesthetic experience.

Where Are My Eagles!

Skeptical eagle is skeptical.

I don't want to talk about the coma-inducing sentimentality of this ridiculous piece of music, and I don't want to talk about its musical development, or lack thereof. I don't even want to kvetch about how boring and repetitive the song is, or its jejune imagery and pedestrian vocabulary. I just want to know what's going on with the birds in this song. Is that so much to ask?

The lyrics:

CHORUS:
And He will raise you up on eagle's wings,
Bear you on the breath of dawn,
Make you to shine like the sun,
And hold you in the palm of His Hand.

The snare of the fowler will never capture you,
And famine will bring you no fear;
Under His Wings your refuge,
His faithfulness your shield.

First, how will we be raised up on the wings? Does the author mean on top of wings? Clearly not, because you can't be on top of the wings which must be flapping if the eagle is flying. So what he must mean is "by means of" wings, but how does that work? In this thinking we must be transitively moved by the wings, since the wings move the bird which move whatever is attached to the bird. That's an awkward conception given how we don't say that we flew by means of wings if we take a plane, or drive by means of wheels if we take a car.

The whole vehicle is important, though, be it plane, car, or bird, because you can't raise someone up by wings alone: what about the rest of the eagle? You clearly need the body because the wings couldn't fly without the body. He must mean the whole eagle, then, which means that wings is synecdoche for the eagle, which is already a metaphor. Yowza!

Yet more problems arise since birds lift by grasping with their talons. This can't be how we are to be lifted, though, since the talons grip by piercing. Ouch! Maybe then, we're tied to the eagles. If so, who's tying everyone to the eagles? Do we tie ourselves? Who unties us?

Hold on, now I'm in the palm of his hand? We just established that eagles don't have hands, they have talons! So what is His Hand then? It can't be a metaphor for the bird because it is capitalized and it refers to something which the bird doesn't have. It must simply refer to God, but then why are we talking about birds?

Anyway, things don't improve in stanza two. Where did the fowler come from and why is he coming after me? Wouldn't he be going after, I don't know, the eagle? Also, why would I get caught by the fowler? Am I likely to get caught in a trap for birds? If the fowler is Satan, then why isn't he going after the bird? Or if he's going after me, not being a bird, why is he a fowler? Also, considering how many people are picky about using archaic language at mass: fowler, really? Maybe the fowler could help tie you to the eagle, ever think about that Mr. Author? Then the fletcher and the archer could be the bad guys and the tailor can cut you loose when you land. Just a thought.

So now I'm definitely under the wings, but am I just present anywhere beneath them or am I sort of nestled under them? I can't be nestled if he's flying, but then how am I protected if I'm not nestled? If I'm just hanging what happens if  the archer shoots at me? Also, if I'm tied to the eagle, how is his faithfulness my shield? Can he untie me? How? Would he try to maybe bash me against a rock to knock me off? If I'm tied, though, wouldn't that make him crash too? Finally, where's the eagle going. Is it a migratory eagle?

Wait, is there one eagle or more? Am I tied to two eagles? Are they the same species going to the same place?

I'm so worried now, what am I supposed to do? Should we try different birds? Falcons, owls, swallows? Help!

John Williams: The Asteroid Field

John Williams is likely the most known and loved composer of movie scores in the last forty years. He's probably the most popular composer outside the world of movies, too. When folks think about Williams' work, though, they likely think of his great themes, from the galloping Raiders march and unfolding grandeur of Jurassic Park to the languishing violin solo of Schindler's List. Rightly regarded for their concision and expression, these themes tend to overshadow other aspects of the scores, namely the sustained mood and motion, and the instrumentation. We can find these virtues in full swing in one of Williams' best pieces, The Asteroid Field, from The Empire Strikes Back.

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N.B. Since we don't have a digital score here to which we can jointly refer, I'll be less discussing syntax than style, color, and effect. In lieu of bar numbers I'll refer to time codes in the above video.

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The open strokes in the cellos set both pace and scene, with the star destroyers in hot pursuit of the Millennium Falcon. These strokes then proceed at first just underneath plucked strings, then underneath triplets in the flutes, then with splashes of brass. This slow, soft opening, the drift into the asteroid field, is then smashed by a forte unison whose exclamatory effect is amplified by the cymbals which seem to splatter the energy throughout space, an effect which is picked up and maintained by the reverberation of the percussion's angular theme. Next the brass enters, all halting and herky-jerky like the rickety Falcon hurtling through space.

Now we're flying every which way. (:20) First the brass throbs along, hurrying and fleeing past the cymbal's starbursts and around the percussion's twisty theme, given torsion and tension in the strings. (:40) Then way up in the orchestra debris starts to whistle by. At (:55) the brass seems as if it's about to break away but it settles into an equally hasty, nervous version of its figure. (1:05) Next the strings get carried away in a torrent of rising frenzy but at (1:12) the brass reasserts itself with a slowly crescendoing figure whose last note bursts with a clash of cymbals. Asteroid field indeed.

(1:20) Here the brass is back but the tension remains as the percussion frenzies away until the winds puff along a stubborn version of the percussion's first theme. At last the strings snatch up the theme and spin it into a sprawling brass forte theme (1:36) which soars gloriously through the stars.

(2:00) We are all rhythmic variation here, building and prolonging the tension until the next swooning release of the main theme, which comes not at the false climax of (2:25) but at (3:16) with more fanfare than ever. Here, the concert ending vanishes into miniature scampering and a final crash whereas the film version flows into Williams' gliding, celestial theme, warm and atop on the winds, which plateaus the tension of the movement.

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In conclusion, The Asteroid Field is one of Williams' most exciting and effective pieces, with rhythm and instrumentation so effectively complementary that the effect is downright visceral. A triumph of suspense, and vitality, the work is suited to its visual counterpart that the cinematic combination strikes the primeval spot between terror and wonder from where we look, ever childlike, upon a grand, wide horizon.