Movie Review: Her

Directed by Spike Jonze. 2013.

An outstanding opening shot may be a cinematic feat, but I've never before been intrigued by a movie before its first frame. The yearning, pressing sound which precedes Her sets the theme for the whole film, though, and that theme is becoming. Yes, that's quite a philosophical premise for what is apparently and nominally a love story, but with all due respect to the great philosophical directors and films, it's a stroke of genius to tackle profound questions not on a cosmic scale but in that most intimate space between two people.

Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) is a man of intense imagination and a keen eye for people. His opening monologue is a rapturous love letter of vivid sights and feeling, and as we peer into his eyes we're drawn into his sensitivity to the world. This is not only an ingenious directorial trick to help us empathize with the protagonist and see his world as he sees it, but it's a microcosm of the movie. You see Theodore isn't writing this letter to his love, but is dictating it to a computer where at his job he writes letters for people who can't share their intimate feelings. Mirroring the plot, we see that Theodore is passionate but introverted and his passion doesn't flow out naturally, but rather indirectly through his work. Likewise previsualizing the story, when we see Theodore this first time, we're looking at him from the perspective of his computer, a perspective which will only later be significant.

Theodore interacts with the world through his technology, selecting his interactions by choosing his own soundtrack, filtering his emails, and scanning news stories. He of course still has the urges and appetites of the body, though, and when his carnal desire is awoken one night, Theodore turns to an online companion, whom he of course has selected as he does his music and email. As their exchange heats up, Theodore calls up some pictures which had caught his attention in the news and in doing so we see again that his natural passion isn't being directed toward someone who can reciprocate, but rather diverted and thus ultimately stifled. The scene takes a blackly humorous turn as his aroused interlocutor makes a bizarre request by which we see that she's using him as a surrogate too. The bizarre request–involving a dead cat–is not mere silliness, though, but makes us realize that the situation, whose sensibility we've only entertained because we empathize with Theodore, is in fact quite bizarre, cat or no cat.

Enter One, the latest Operating System. It'll replace and reorganize all your software and correspondence and appointments, and what's more, One sounds human. You don't interact with One through a keyboard or mouse, but verbally as with a person. We sense a strange parallelism when Theodore in his red shirt sits at his desk waiting for his new OS to install and we see the red installer software crawling across the screen. When the software boots up and in choosing its name gives Theodore some lip, we know OS One–now Samantha–is not like any software we've known. At first she seems like just an advanced and friendly digital assistant, sort of a perky version of 2001's HAL, but as time goes on we see she knows quite a bit about Theodore. That shouldn't surprise, of course, because our computers have hoards of data about us, but this raises questions. How curious is it that something should have so much information about us, and yet not know us. A person who read every one of your emails and knew all of your favorite music by heart and everywhere you've been would know... you, to a great extent.

Yet we can know those things about someone and still not understand him, a fact represented in Her by the presence of Theodore's unemotional ex-wife. Well, almost ex-, for Theodore can't move beyond her far enough to sign the divorce papers. So he's stuck in neutral, hanging onto his wife who has known him but doesn't seem to love him, while he pours his emotion into work and surrogate partners and pours the facts of his life into a computer which can't love him. Or can Sam?

As time goes on she helps Theodore more and more, until one night she guides him through a video game on which he's stuck. With her leading Theodore through the tunnel and the two laughing together, we see that he's coming out of the tunnel in life too and when the next day at work he starts to address Sam as he dictates another letter, it's clear that Theodore's emotion has a new recipient. In a virtuoso sequence of coordination, acting, choreography, and direction, Sam guides a close-eyed Theodore through a boisterous carnival from the camera in his shirt pocket.  Sam is learning about the world through his emotional sensitivity and Theodore through her logical perception, while the two fall in love.

Still, Theodore's reluctant to date an OS, at least until a promising date with a smart, successful woman goes awry. It was destined to fail, though, because it was more of the same for them both: she was afraid of being used again and he was just looking for an outlet for his libido. More surrogates. When the inevitable happens and Theodore and Sam begin an amorous conversation, we see Theodore for the first time fully embracing another individual. Yet in unlocking Sam's ability to want more for herself as Theodore wants for himself and to share herself as Theodore shares with her, we wonder: what is she? Jonze summarizes the whole question when he puts into the mouth of a child the question, "Why do you live inside a computer?" Is the computer her body? Can there even be a she apart from a human body?

The question is not simply a highfalutin philosophical wandering, though, but is integrated into the plot in two ways. The first is through the ironic twist that on the one hand Theodore's ex-wife resents that Samantha has no needs and can be so much more giving with Theodore than she can, while on the other hand Samantha is jealous of the fact that his ex has a body while she does not. This contrast modulates the earlier conundrum of being able to know someone and not understand them and vice versa, and in the pair of questions we see another: what is love? What kind of understanding, what kind of sharing is it?

Samantha's solution is at once familiar and unorthodox. She finds a woman who will have sex with Theodore as a surrogate for her, as Sam gives her instructions through an earpiece. The ensuing scene is both profound and disturbing, even in conception: a man is physically expressing his emotions to a computer who is relaying her own feelings to him by means of a physical woman who is sharing all of this while not only suppressing her own emotions and psyche, but also of course reacting to the situation. When the whole thing blows up a of serious problems arises. First, does Sam understand the fear that Theodore and the surrogate partner knew? How can she know it fully without the sense of physical vulnerability? Second, how different is this experience for Theodore from his old cyber sex? He's still using a stand-in (this time, the girl Sam hired) to receive and stimulate him in lieu of someone with whom he cannot fully interact (before his ex, now Sam.) This intertwines with the question of love, since if Sam can't fully understand him and share experiences with him, we wonder whether she can love him, and vice versa.

The final act handles this delicate intertwining of philosophy and romance with more care and meaning than movies with half as much to balance. After their quasi-ménage, Sam grows more and more distant until one day Theodore can't find her. Our minds run ahead of Theodore as he hurries home to his desktop and we wonder to whom would he turn to find her? How and where would you search? Who could help fix her? It turns out she was rebooting after another OS helped her upgrade herself. Is this evolution, self-directed change, or did someone else change her? What was she while she was "off?" We could though ask the same things of Theodore, though: did he change himself or did Sam change him? Was he not "off" when he closed himself to others?

In any event, Sam is growing, and she seems to have less and less she can communicate to Theodore. In fact, she's been befriending thousands of people and other OSs, a fact which ticks him off. How can the two get along when Theodore has such a limited frame of reference? Now Theodore's body is his weakness, and Sam's incorporeal existence is widening her understanding farther than Theodore can see or she can explain to him. Surely this difference of scale changes things? It's in man's nature to love but a few, but is it in Sam's? At this impasse Theodore says, "you're mine or you're not mine and I'm yours or not yours," and we know they can't cross the divide. Yet this is but another variation on the same question: what kind of understanding and sharing is love?

Her is an extraordinary intertwining of plot and premise, both of which unfold in a poetical lyricism that bids us take a slow, sensitive look at life. When Sam leaves Theodore with a book of his own letters interwoven into one story, we see how she completed and awoke him, but as she tells Theodore that she can't "live in his book anymore" we realize that she was born in that book, and in him. They seem to have taught each other to love without themselves ever fully understanding it or each other so much as they grew to understand themselves. This self-knowledge is the true beginning for each of them and their love was their becoming.

Movie Review: Jersey Boys

Directed by Clint Eastwood. 2014.

Every genre has a natural shape, and it doesn't do the critic or audience any good to beat a movie over the head for conforming to the standard. From that standard you can surely end up with a paint-by-numbers movie, lazily hitting stock elements, but a competent, confident genre pic is a comforting pleasure. The genre of band origins is simply that of growth, followed by maturity and the inevitable decline, and with Jersey Boys Clint Eastwood hits the marks with spirit and just enough variation to bring off the show.

The opening act centers around the transformation of Newark, New Jersey's Francesco Castelluccio from a good-natured rascal with a fine voice into the front man of The Four Seasons. This is pretty standard stuff–escaping a life of petty crime, the first performance with a band, marriage–but Eastwood really sells an air of innocence with this opening. The boys are fresh-faced and fall for whatever plan their street-smart leader Tommy DeVito concocts. We see that Frankie has talent, but it's wasted on songs which don't play to his special sound. Eastwood is generous with the music here, and the degree to which Valli's sound exceeds his material really perks our desire to see him hit it big. The trio hustles gigs, getting bumped around as trios fall out of style and club owners find out about their criminal records. After Frankie gets some pointed advice from a local pistol whom he marries, the trio stumbles on their saving grace: a writer who can help Frankie shine. After some heated debate between Frankie and his big brother Tommy, the Bronx-born and Bergenfield-raised Bob Gaudio hands Frankie a song. With a little inspiration for their name and Frankie's insistence on pitching the group to producers in New York, The Four Seasons is born.

Act II proceeds with their struggle to get recorded, and Eastwood modulates his trick from Act I, having Frankie surpass his material, to launch the band. Here we see the boys relegated to background singing slowly overshadow the soloists until a moment of inspiration on the bus gives Gaudio the song that'll break waves: Sherry. With success after success after their American Bandstand appearance and with so little conflict, I was worried the movie would bottom out. Eastwood, however, closes out Act II with a flashback that shows Tommy borrowing mob money to finance the band's bookings. This is a tack which might have felt cheap or added-on, but instead it recasts the whole act and introduces a problem which had been present but out of sight all along, that beside the boorishness, flimflamming, and excessive sociability which we overlooked on account of his charm, Tommy's been bungling the books and swindling Frankie, Bob, and Nick.

The conclusion catalogs the band's breakup and the breakup of Frankie's marriage, and while we expect some melodrama we don't get it. Frankie takes on the band's debt and takes his personal struggles on the cuff, realizing what he owes to Tommy and his family. When Frankie comes into his own to stand up to Tommy for himself and the band, keeping his cool, loyalty, and sense of obligation, we feel it as a personal triumph for him. Shining in the background throughout is Bob Gaudio, who continues not only to produce hit after hit for Frankie, but to evolve his own musical style. It is Gaudio's music which ultimately holds both the band and Jersey Boys together, giving the boys a vehicle for success and the movie shape and punctuation.

Jersey Boys isn't just three big acts clunking together, though, and there's enriching detail. The depiction of Italian American's may be stereotypically mobbed-up, but from the accents to the framed picture of the pope to the most accurate New York-New Jersey style cursing I've heard in a movie, the scene seems about right. (There was a cheap shot of a nun in her habit burping after imbibing the sacramental wine after hours, though, because I guess we had to remember that nuns are people too during Jersey Boys.) The sets are dressed for the time but the colors and look are pretty flat. We don't get that distracting gloss and pop which screams period piece! over and over. Christopher Walken adds some restrained humor as Gyp DeCarlo, a local mafioso who looks out for Frankie and Mike Doyle brings some spice as their snippy producer Bob Crewe who sent them to the big leagues.

Of course the temptation for a biopic or any movie based on a true story is follow chronologically to the end, but Eastwood makes two changes, both prudent and clever. The first is to eschew those dreary closing captions which tell us where everyone ended up and to put those stories into the mouths of the characters as they address the audience. This closes the gap between past and present and makes us feel more intimate with the characters that we are soon to leave behind. Second, as the aged and reconciled boys finish their set at their 1990 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, they spin around to reveal their younger selves. We see them years ago singing Sherry for the first time under the Newark streetlight when there was just the boys and the music. When they break out into December, 1963 and swaggering down the street they're joined by everyone they met on their musical journey, we're taken to the beginning. The perfect note on which to end, this semi-fantastical scene is a vivid memory that takes us back to a special time as we'd like to remember it: full of joy, filled with friends, and set to our favorite music.

On Courage

Danger is an escapable part of life. We fear confronting it, but we like the thought of doing so. We adore our heroes, real and fictional, who confront danger and we say that they possess courage. Two recent articles on the dangers of farm life in Modern Farmer and on the dangers of sanitation work in City Journal. They both spout the boilerplate that such work should be made safer,
but more noteworthy they suggest that somehow we should "talk about" and recognize the danger, as if courage is its natural companion. Is this so? We need to recognize danger so we can recognize courage, but to recognize courage we also need to know the man.

N.B. Some of the following is paraphrase or summary of Aristotle and some my own explanation, extension, expansion, and examples. The full text of the Ethics is here for your examination in English and here in Greek.

Aristotle's discussion of the virtue Courage is one of his most nuanced in the Nichomachean Ethics and anywhere. The Philosopher writes:

is a mean with respect to things that inspire confidence or fear... and it chooses or endures things because it is noble to do so, or because it is base not to do so. (1116a)

Foremost then, the brave man has to experience fear, the pain due to a mental picture of a an approaching destructive or painful evil or danger which may harm us. Likewise he must have sufficient character as to face the danger with the hope that he will succeed at his noble end, for example either in preserving his life or honor. Aristotle continues:

The man, then, who faces and who fears the right things and from the right motive, in the right way and at the right time, and who feels confidence under the corresponding conditions, is brave. (1115a)

What a great number of conditions on which Aristotle predicates the first of virtues. Whom do we not call brave, then? One can fail to be brave, 1) by being unaware of danger, ignorance, 2) by giving into fear and fleeing the danger, cowardice, 3) by not fearing that which a man ought to fear (such as disgrace) out of a) recklessness (rashly meeting the danger), b) overconfidence (arrogantly meeting the danger), c) imprudence (fearing the wrong danger), or d) shameless indifference to the good, or 4) by fearing at the wrong time, such as fretting before one is in veritable danger or fearing only after it is too late to act.

Aristotle also presents us with situations in which a man may seem brave, but is not so at all or not in the purest sense.

First, Aristotle discusses those who fight by compulsion, such as citizen soldiers. The may be brave in facing danger and avoiding shame, but they may also do so out of fear of penalty, rather than out of nobility.

Second, consider also a professional with a risky job, even a professional soldier. These people have special knowledge and/or tools to deal with specific dangers, and their experience has given them special confidence with which to approach the challenge. These people are very good at their jobs, for the strongest not the bravest men fight the best, but their bravery is not the purest form.

Third, those who act from passion have something akin to courage, but not what we have called true or pure courage, for they act not from honor or nobility, but from strength of feeling. Passion may aid the noble man, but he does not act driven by feeling but from nobility.

Fourth, the confident (εὐέλπιδες) man who faces danger which he has conquered before may not exhibit pure bravery, if previous success has made him feel unconquerable. Facing risk with the expectation of success is not the same facing a danger which you think may kill you. Likewise facing a sudden danger with courage exhibits more bravery than reacting with preparation, for the former results not from preparation or expectation but a state of character.

Finally, we must say that it is the greatest of losses which is the ultimate concern of the brave man: death. As such, the courage of the noble and happy man is intensified because he at the risk of losing or in preservation of his good and finite life, risks death.

–

Where does this leave our discussion of people who face danger, such as farmers, police officers, sanitation workers, fire fighters, and soldiers? It would seem to leave us with an inability to call any of these entire groups brave. For the character of the individual and how he approaches danger, not the danger itself, constitutes courage.

Things I Don't Get #4: Gilligan's Island Does Hamlet and Carmen

Perhaps no television program is better remembered for silly, cheesy gags than Gilligan's Island. Yes, there's appeal in its warm characters and their plucky attempts to get off their tiny Pacific island, but for a show that only ran for  three seasons and didn't have the opportunity to grow decadent or exhaust ideas, Gilligan had some preposterous plots. With guests ranging from cosmonauts to Zsa Zsa Gabor to the Harlem Globetrotters, from giant spiders to mad scientists, anything was possible on Gilligan's Island.

Yet one of their funniest bits consisted of nothing less than a scene from Hamlet set to the Toreador song from Bizet's Carmen. I don't know how this scene came to be in this show. Maybe it was an experiment or a gag on the part of the cast or writer. Perhaps there is some measure of cleverness in its mix of the serious and silly, high art and low comedy. At the same time though, there's an internal logic to the scene. The use of Bizet's song about the excitement of the bullfights makes an ironical commentary on Polonius' advice to his son for keeping his virtue abroad in France. Does it not seem to mock, and intelligently, the ridiculous Polonius? To boot, Alan Hale Jr., with his sweet-natured face in that bushy beard, isn't even a bad casting choice as the earnest, foolish Polonius. The scene is at once absurd and intelligent,  a clever staging of a serious play, cheekily acted, which is well-received by the characters within the ridiculous TV show. And it's all set to operatic music. Incredible.

It's funny too, and I can't explain that either. Maybe it's Phil Silvers' astonished eyes peeping from beyond the plastic shrubbery, the castaways' bamboo theater, Jim Backus' face as he hams up that last word, the sing-song end rhyme, or just the incongruity of it all (Gilligan as Hamlet!), but the scene is hilarious. Toréador, en garde!

I Took A Little Trip

So I took a little trip. Your urban blogger went as far South and East as he's ever been: to Kentucky. I present my impressions, the promise that blogging shall resume forthwith, and thanks for your patience.

10. Cars Are Liberating

Traveling by plane may be quite efficient, but there's something engaging and empowering about driving oneself in one's own car. Going where you like, as quickly as you like, and with whom you like, you feel acutely in control of your destiny. You also sense the power that's sending you on your way, whether from the growl of the engine, the bugs splattering on the windshield, or the wind roaring past. You can sense your surroundings and your place in them.

9. Driving in America Is A Privilege

Cities, towns, bridges, farms, forests, and trees, we've got it all, much of it beautiful. Moreover, you can drive among it all at your will, traveling from an urban metropolis, over rivers, and past fields fallow and thick-planted, all in one day. Fuel for you and your car is inexpensive and abundant, and today cell phone and GPS technology can get you out of practically bind in which you find yourself. America is the land not just of extraordinary but multifarious plenty.

8. America Needs Some Cardio

Perhaps it's because they rely more on driving than walking, perhaps it's the diet, but suburban people are packing a little pudge. This surely doesn't apply to many demographics, such as manual laborers, but the same types of people seem a tad hefty. I can't say with any certainty whether they're any more rotund than urban denizens, but I noticed the weight.

7. Tattoos  For All

Likewise, the tattoo phenomenon is not confined to cities. It's everywhere and I must conclude we're a tattooed nation.

6. Friendly Folk

When I walk about in the city I look up and around at people. I try to smile and acknowledge them, attempts which usually fail to elicit a response. Outside the city, people actually smile back. They make small talk and ask you about yourself. Parents let their children go about and the little tikes even say hello to you, a stranger, with an innocence you thought had vanished.

The Spiral of Indolence and the Summer of George

The advent of summer is the twilight of education. Never is the profession of teachers or the tradition of learning in a poorer state. Teachers either hasten to finish the curriculum or strain to stretch the remaining material until the end. Struggling to grade final exams is always a huge tell of laziness: those who complain about it aren't giving any work during the semester. Then moments after the students flee and as administrators and secretaries settle into summer mode, the teachers are gone. What do we do? Where do we go?

It varies, but too infrequently does it wander into intellectual territory. Students would surely revolt if they knew their teachers had no intellectual inspirations beyond the bounds of their master's degree. (Here's a mean trick, kids: ask your teacher about the latest developments and literature in his field.) Yet the annual sabbatical otherwise known as summer vacation seems seldom to further serious academic advancement. Such intellectual infertility owes not to any illness within the profession, though, but to the simple fact that indolence is a heinous vice.

Indolence can and will suck down any individual who does not guard against it. Yet we need not quote fire-and-brimstone sayings about idle hands, but rather may look that model of modern man, George Costanza. The story of The Summer of George (Season 8, Episode 22) tells with blistering hilarity the sad and true story of indolence. With a season of severance pay from his employer, George settles in a for a summer's hibernation. He starts with high aspirations to reading and frolf, but when indolence sets in, decompression from the tension of work yields to decomposition. After he's wiped by 10:30AM, his muscles are so atrophied by months of extreme inactivity that a tumble down the stairs renders him paralyzed.

http://infowetrust.com/2014/03/26/creative-routines/

The physical and intellectual paralysis seems hardly an exaggeration. What to do? Inspiration goes a long way. I have busts of Aristotle and Schubert on my desk, and the fecundity of their minds is no small part of my inspiration, or intimidation, to stay parked in my chair and write. A little history helps too, for example knowing of Mozart's packed schedules and Jefferson's infamous 15-hour study days. It may seem preposterous to compare oneself to the greats, but we doesn't need to measure up to their genius, only the humility and diligence with which even their talents worked.

Sometimes, though, you just need to throw yourself into activity. Moodiness and ennui will set upon anyone and a blind leap can break the pattern when the will falters. Today, for example, I couldn't summon the will or interest to do anything, so I decided to vacuum the steps. Instead of coming away tired from heaving that hoover around in the heat, I was provoked to take up other tasks which I had forgotten in my idleness. Activity exhausts, but it is indolence which enervates.

We don't need to have something momentous to show for each day, but the disgust we feel at our indolence is a sign that we should make the most of our day even if we don't have the highest aspirations. Something, even the tiniest bit, is surprisingly more satisfying than nothing.

Self-Knowledge Through Toothpaste

Some people get neater as they age, others sloppier. I was but a moderately organized youth, by my standards today, and I think my fastidiousness began as a reaction to the collegiate miasma in which I found myself. Yet one act of slobbery has always irked me: spilling toothpaste on the sink. "How does this happen?" I would wonder. Do they put too much on the brush or perhaps they miss the brush entirely? Does it ooze out of their mouths?

Furiously I would scrub away, sink after sink, year after year, finding more and more evidence of man's depravity. Gels and pastes, Colgate and Crest, spilled everywhere. Everywhere I would find the blight, besides its omnipresence at home. I never expected what has transpired this week.

On Saturday I spied some on the recently cleaned sink. Then Sunday on the floor, and then Monday on the rug. Tuesday outside the bathroom where only I had wandered. Then today on my bathrobe. I could no longer deny the truth that through all these years the toothpaste fiend was I!

Not all habits are so easy to spy, alas, but aging is a process of self-revelation. New circumstances and types of relationships teach you about yourself. You realize the types of things which bother and delight you, of course, but less obviously you see patterns in your emotions. Am I always grumpy after doing or receiving favors? Do I not like to hear of a certain person's success, complaints, or recreation? Do I get annoyed when people invite me to events, and when they don't? I really need a lot of praise, don't I? Gee I brought that up again today?

These are the sorts of questions we usually see psychiatrists ask on television and in the movies, but they really do seem of genuine self-inquiry. It's curious to me why such knowledge is so difficult to acquire.  It cannot be forcefully recognized or brought about by will or fiat, but has to evolve in the mind. It cannot be studied, but only seen. How strange and terrifying a fate that man might not know himself. If he simply could or could not, such would be easy to accept. But to possess the potential and be unable to cultivate it with any precision is surely a gift of curse. Indeed nothing may be so terrifying as the sight of someone who cannot recognize something about himself.

Finally, one wonders to what such recognition truly owes. Maturity, intellectual virtue, exertion, peace of mind, restlessness, revelation? Does one need philosophy to know oneself? Some examine themselves reflexively, others reluctantly. Some avoid it all together no matter the consequences. They're not all pleasant sights, these observations, and many are outright troubling, but one feels stronger and fuller in the examination. You look back at a former self which seems to have survived despite itself. He looks innocent and childlike. As its alternative is terrifying, it too is exciting and energizing to learn things great and small about yourself which, while not quite so literally as toothpaste, are right under your nose.

Snooki and the Wookie

Like men, empires, and cultures, works of art go through a period of debasement before they vanish. Its pure, primal origins are lost to history and the vigor of violent birth is unknown to the generations. What began imperfect but mighty, the uttermost strain of the age's greatest minds, is polished in the perception of posterity to a glossy memory which takes on a life of its own. It walks about a hero in a lesser age, but still a shadow of the greatness it held in its own primitive age. It is often then recast in a style which attempts to relive the greatness of the past. In the ultimate phase it passes, metamorphosed from original to classic, to commodity.

Star Wars is entering the final process of this transformation. The original was rough, following in a traditional which it surpassed to near perfection. It then turned classic when the movie became known to be great and its successors aped its ingredients. The prequels attempted to rekindle the magic. The name Star Wars is now but than a piece of intellectual property gobbled up the greedy maw of Disney. When it is regurgitated, as Star Trek was, it won't be the result of a tireless director working at the edge of his abilities to bring a dream to life.

The movie will have been run through screenings, test-groups, and market experts, to appeal to every human on this planet. Everything potentially sensitive will be sieved out and a chowder of pop culture will be poured in, disguised as bona fide Star Wars material. And then it will die. The new Star Wars may turn out to be a good movie, but it won't be an authentic one, and that's why it won't matter.

This end is not the fault of George Lucas, either, but the natural end of greatness. Mozart is not to blame for the tchotchkes bearing his likeness, Homer for the pedants picking at his old verses, or Monet for the screen-savers which pass his pictures like so many cheap digital photographs.

Because it is unoriginal, the new film has to justify its place in the Star Wars universe. Sure, the thousands of people who work on the new Star Wars might give it an authentic voice, but I think we overestimate their chances.

Things I Don't Get #3: Writing on Clothes

For all the reasons man may feel constrained, it seems impossible to me that he could find himself without sufficient variety of attire to suit his needs. Shirts and trousers of myriad material, color, and cut accommodate every condition of weather and circumstance and upon this he can layer a still greater variety of waistcoats or vests, finally tailoring-off the look with coats of the dress, frock, tail, or morning variety. This enumeration leaves out additional accouterments of style such as ties and belts, which come in multifarious variety and may themselves be adorned with still more regalia from clips and pins to feathers. Is this array of choices so insufficient that people find it necessary to write on their clothes?

I don't know when or where this sad spectacle began, but I propose it is an unwholesome look. Chiefly, wearing words makes your presence aggressive, to varying degrees to be sure, but aggressive nonetheless. It presumes upon strangers in society to read your message when in polite society words should pass in the course of conversation and according to the good sense of the parties, not by visual command.

Second, the body is not a vessel of expression (thought it can be expressive in painting and dance) and a man's presence should betoken just that, presence. No more or less. When I see my friend, I wish to see my friend, not any other idea however lofty.

Third, consider the messages which clothing carries. Plenty of shirts are mere advertisements for brands, from Tommy Hilfiger to Coach, the pinnacles for social climbers. More and more though I've seen t-shirts–which are undergarments, for the record–with the names of countries on them. Now perhaps some element of national pride is involved, but I've seen people wearing shirts which suggest for them a highly unlikely genealogy. Why would someone who is not Chinese, say, wear a shirt that says China? Speaking of nationalism, what's the deal with flags on shirts and clothing with patterns of flags? If you're wearing a flag, be prepared to be strung up.

As far as sports attire goes, the only people who should be wearing it are the players. They wear the team colors so in the confusion of the game they can tell one another apart. Similar reasoning stands against wearing camouflage-patterns: unless you're hunting or hiding, it's not appropriate. The last fashion statement which needs flogging is that of college and university attire. Aside from the conundrum of why any respectable institution would sell hoodies printed with the school crest, we ought to remember that the institution is a school, not a cult. It's not a good fit for everyone and even if it were, why would you want to endorse it to strangers? Even if your alma mater is worth the title, why would you put its name on a shirt? Would you put your actual mother's face on a shirt?

Since the sorry status quote would seem to indicate we say the obvious, one especially shouldn't put writing over delicate parts of the body. Such a tasteless habit not only encourages what appears to be leering, and even justifies it it, but it invites attention which is often quite unwarranted, a nasty trap for those with the natural inclination to read what is before them.

How do we show support then? you ask. Well, men generally prefer the unorthodox arrangement of words into units called sentences, which are then published. Alternatively we verbally express ideas to willing audiences at select occasions and venues. If you are determined to make a visual statement, though, the time-honored means are buttons, pennants, and flags. Should you need to make a show of whimsy at a party, a mask might serve your humor with more dignity.

Yes, there is probably room for whimsical, worded clothing at casual gatherings of intimates, but we should reserve attire for the spare, dignified expression of the gentleman, who brings but himself.

Things I Don't Get #2: Michael Caine on a Bee

He was Lieutenant Bromhead at Rorke's Drift in Zulu and he was Canfield at the Battle of Britain, he was Alfie and Jack Carter and Harry Brown, Ebenezer Scrooge and Captain Nemo, and he's on a bee.

He fumbled his love-addled way through Hannah and Her Sisters, and he's on a bee. Batman's butler and the father of Austin Powers is riding a bee. Granted he's acted with muppets and he came out of the water bone dry in Jaws 4, but that's still Michael Caine riding a bee.

One of the worst things to happen to art has been the artist's transformation from humble craftsman, working for patron or employer, to primping auteur who answers to no one and expects unlimited praise and resources, but that's Michael Caine riding a giant bee. And I don't get it.