Movie Review: Transformers: Age of Extinction

Directed by Michael Bay. 2014.

The first of Michael Bay's Transformer movies is the only movie I ever turned off with the intention of never seeing the rest. I couldn't understand what was happening and visually it was a complete mess. The 2007 progenitor of this series, though, was buoyed by some hilarious sitcom-style humor, namely from the much-maligned Shia LeBeouf and his screen dad, Kevin Dunn. That Transformers: Age of Extinction shares the same virtues and vices as its predecessor tells me two things. First, Michael Bay is satisfied with his work. Second, he missed his calling as a director of sitcoms. Now I don't dislike this franchise or Bay himself and I won't pile on more disdain for the man's cinematic malefactions. What I am is disappointed, because this whole series could have been a blast.

The franchise should have been an unapologetically loud, patriotic, macho, and fun series, grounded in simple, traditional, American values, and held up by classic American hero archetypes. Even this weak installment could have been pulled together into something worthwhile. Extinction features Mark Wahlberg as Texan inventor, brilliant but down on his luck, who upon finding head Transformer Optimus Prime is embroiled in national political intrigue, interstellar assassination, and internecine robot warfare. A talented screenwriter could have had a ball with that setup, but this script is utterly indifferent to anything resembling theme, plot, and characterization. There are threads of interest, but they're nearly invisible burdened as they are under layers of cliche and action.

Still we imagine what could have been with even the slightest effort. Mark Wahlberg's struggling inventor Cade Yeager could have been a hero with whom we identified as a dad, patriot, and intellect. Too Optimus Prime as a leader struggling to protect his separated troops could have been an interesting parallel character. Kelsey Grammer's CIA bigwig hunting down the Autobots could have introduced questions about political alliances and reflected a little on the debate about America's role in the world. The CEO-inventor played by Stanley Tucci works only because two-thirds through the movie Tucci hams up his performance into some genuine comedy as he is chased around Shanghai, but he could have been a meaningful foil for the lead.

Yet without ideas Transformers 4 is just a $200,000,000 jumble in which a transforming truck rides a robotic fire-breathing dinosaur around Shanghai to protect Stanley Tucci from an alien searching for him with a big magnet.

Movie Review: The Sound of Music

Directed by Robert Wise. 1965.

I had never seen The Sound of Music but I entertained a passing and unfriendly familiarity with a number of its tunes for what seems like my whole life. It seems that either in reproduction or parody one will invariably hear something of The Hills Are Alive no matter how assiduously one avoids the Rogers and Hammerstein classic. I wondered, though, what manner of musical could possibly string together such candied tunes as My Favorite Things, Maria, and Climb Every Mountain. What legitimate drama could support Sixteen Going on Seventeen? To my undiminished surprise, The Sound of Music manages to pull it all together, if only just, and pitched a little too romantic for me.

More surprising, though, is that the script pulls it off with a solid intellectual footing. I don't mean with the well known romance between Julie Andrews' pure, perky novitiate Maria and Captain von Trapp (Christopher Plummer), the widower who runs his big Austrian family like a military brigade. That romance is all well and good, if lengthily prepared and predictably carried out in the plot, but it is the cultural context that perked my interest. It's not by itself interesting that the von Trapps live in the specter of a nascent Nazism. That political group, their era, and its crimes have been exploited on film for decades in every conceivable genre. In action movies they're acceptable automata to be remorselessly mowed down by the good guys and in dramas they're the staple spokespersons for hatred. Comedies use them as fodder for gags about mustaches and bloviating dictators. Little of this is revealing, though, but of all places who thought The Sound of Music would reveal to us something significant about evil?

J. R. R. Tolkien wrote in 1941 to his son that, "You have to understand the good in things to detect the real evil."* Instead of showing us more evil, The Sound of Music shows us the good. Yes, the frolicsome scenes of song and dance are idealized, but there is a purity and authenticity to them which seems all the more beautiful and frail a flower under the threat of the Nazi boot. We've scene the physical violence of Nazism in countless films, but precious few have shown us the cultural destruction, and fewer, if any, the violence done to the Germanic traditions subsumed into the Nazi maw. How much more crass and cruel does the violence of Nazism look when it attempts to stamp out and subvert the gentle values of its little brother. The von Trapps don't suffer terribly, but their culture of convents, the peace of their hillsides, the way they made clothes for their children, all of that is shattered.

The film's chief contrast, though, is that between the forced political organization of the Nazis and the freely flowing kindness of song which Maria brings into the family and which brings them together. She teaches the children to sing of the hills and flowers, of goatherds and the simple pleasures of life as Captain von Trapp is hounded by members of the rising Nazis to fly the party flag instead of his native Austrian colors. At a fancy gala in which Captain von Trapp entertains some visiting German dignitaries, his seven children put on a charming little musical routine which Maria taught them and by which they say good night. When the Captain commends the innocent voices of his children as what is best in the nation, a guest protests in favor of German virtues, to which the Captain replies that, "some of us prefer Austrian voices raised in song to ugly German threats."

We find a pleasing symmetry too between the political and personal, for just as Nazism is a perversion of the Germanic spirit which is foisted upon the Captain, so his own stern authoritarianism with which he governs his children is a deviation from his character. While the film wisely steers clear of further explication about the obvious politics, Captain von Trapp learned his coldness after the death of his wife. To this theme of learned autocracy, both personal and political, the theme of musical love and peace forms a counterpoint, especially von Trapp's own Edelweiss. This gentle folk dance captures the Captain's love for his now fragile fatherland, and it is also the song with which he awakens from his stern slumber and warms once more to his children, and, of course, to Maria.

So well does Edelweiss captures these themes–the fall of his homeland and the rebirth of his family–that I wish the movie ended with it as a more bittersweet note. Alas the final scene of the plucky von Trapps climbing a mountain to the tune of, you guessed it, Climb Every Mountain, is a little too hammy and chipper. I can't really begrudge the movie a hopeful ending though, and the sight of the family taking their traditions together into the future, if not in their homeland, is rewarding enough.

–

*To his son Michael, 9 June, 1941. The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. Ed. Humphrey Carpenter. Houghton Mifflin. 2000. p. 54

Reconciliation

There's a fine line between perspicacity and wisdom and I'm not sure on which side of the divide falls George Bernard Shaw's statement that, “A man's interest in the world is only the overflow from his interest in himself."Taken by itself the statement seems more clever aphorism than philosophy, a cheap sophism to indulge the narcissistic. Yet taken with another quote from the very same man–that, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."–there appears a wisdom to the thinking. I'll charitably assume so, at any rate.

The wisdom seems to me the realization that a great deal of man's struggle is with the fact that the world is not he. We rejoice in individuality, but we long for reconciliation. It is man's curse that the otherness of the world so essential for even recognizing his own being is simultaneously a source of antagonism. Moreover, the otherness from which we are separated is large, intractable, and worse than incomprehensible, parts of it are inscrutable. The mysterious world and the other wills in it are not wholly mysterious and the ensuing possibility for success is a source of both dynamism and despair. Yet what does success look like? Happiness and virtue, but the search for happiness conceals its origin in the ontological quandary, a need to reconcile with a multifariously different and often hostile otherness. To find this reconciliation he has three choices: remaking, rejecting, or redeeming.

Remaking is perhaps the most common path. Man can either attempt to remake the world or himself. Some men are concerned with the matter of the world and attempt to reconfigure the atoms of the world for man's good. These are the scientists and engineers who've been elevated to the preeminent ranks of society in the last two hundred years. Other men, the architects, build structures to dominate the land, and their structures reform the face of the earth. Shaw was right that without such dissatisfaction man would enjoy precious little material progress. Yet most people are incapable of such labors and passing aside their inability to remake the physical world, they attempt to remake men. There is no way persuasively to fake the ability to build bridges and make medicine, but promises of justice, liberty, and unity are too easily sold. Such are of course the goals of political liberalism and progressivism, but despite what they support on ballots, most people don't have a political bent to their actions. Instead we attempt to remake people we know, nudging them slowly but surely until they resemble us. This is usually subconscious, and frighteningly so, but do we reward those who do what we want and punish those who differ? Do we not by our actions encourage others to do the same, and are we not drawn to follow? We remake to reconcile.

Not ourselves, usually. Sometimes with great reluctance, though, we can nudge ourselves into habits more conducive to prosperity. The transformation can of course be major or minor, and stem from pragmatism or principle, but we can change with effort.

Rejecting the world is a period through which everyone passes, although it's possible to ground rejection in principled nihilism. It's no small coincidence that rejection tends to spur rejection. When we're spurned by lovers, we reject love. When we're spurned by bosses, we reject business and economics. When the political reigns are held by the opposition, we say that the system is broken. Most people come to terms with basic facts of life–you need a job, some people won't like you, not all problems can be fixed–but the paranoid reject the world as a malignant otherness.

Redemption is the release of man from the lonely quandary of being a self among others. It is instead of a change, a reunification. As we have observed this reconciliation is sought politically, socially, scientifically, and psychologically, but these means are transient and imperfect. The unification is sought aesthetically too, and perhaps this experience surpasses the others. For for what seems to unify all more than the pervading strains of music? How easy it is to imagine life, whether walking about town or pondering the cosmos, set to music. Too the aesthetic experience invites a coming together of personal impressions–those of artist and audience–with aesthetic principle. Still the experience of art is temporary and cannot fully transcend the isolation of otherness.

The only full redemption has already been paid for man, though, by the suffering of Christ, a passion which redeems man both on earth and in eternity. Man is unified to man each by their unity with Christ, and then man is unified with creator in eternal contemplation.

In his two perfect prayers, St. Thomas employs terms of redemption to describe the freedom and unification in the Eucharist. The Body is healing, enrichment, clothing, and cleaning; freedom from necessity. It is also the extinction of desires and lusts, the quieting of impulses; freedom from one's own and all wills but the divine. Finally it is a happy "consummation" and an "ineffable banquet," a fulfilling to the utmost. We are fortunate that the English translation retains the beautiful sense of consummation here: the bringing to perfect and thus ultimate completion.

It's unlikely that we can choose just one path of remaking, rejecting, or redeeming. We need to make a safe place for ourselves in the world that is somewhat inhospitable. Likewise we do need if not to remake others, to restrain evil, which requires a polity of virtuous men. We need to remake ourselves, to extirpate vices, yes, but also to love, for all forms of love require a change, whether to virtue or selflessness. All loves are likewise a form of unity, as hatred and war of destruction. This polar model has been cluttered for us by cheap pop references to love and war, but the classical (and especially Epicurean) conception of love and war, Venus and Mars, as natural forces is fundamental. Lastly it is evident that the bad must be rejected.

Our goal ought not to be excluding a given path of remaking, rejecting, or redeeming, but learning prudently to perceive and cultivate by kind, expecting, as Aristotle encouraged, no more or less than what each can offer. Much heartache and suffering could be avoided by not expecting perfect reconciliation now and forever through each path alone.

Presidential Rhetoric VIII: Martin Van Buren

Welcome to Part Eight 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
6. John Quincy Adams
7. Andrew Jackson

See Also: Presidential Rhetoric: Grading the Graders

We continue with our present look at the rhetoric of Martin Van Buren's inaugural address. Will there be any stylistic curiosities in this speech from the New York-born, Dutch-speaking president?

The text of the speech, via Bartelby.com

–

1. Fellow-Citizens: The practice of all my predecessors imposes on me an obligation I cheerfully fulfill—to accompany the first and solemn act of my public trust with an avowal of the principles that will guide me in performing it and an expression of my feelings on assuming a charge so responsible and vast. In imitating their example I tread in the footsteps of illustrious men, whose superiors it is our happiness to believe are not found on the executive calendar of any country. Among them we recognize the earliest and firmest pillars of the Republic— [1] those by whom our national independence was first declared, [2] him who above all others contributed to establish it on the field of battle, [3] and those whose expanded intellect and patriotism constructed, improved, and perfected the inestimable institutions under which we live. If [A] such men in the position I now occupy felt themselves overwhelmed by a sense of gratitude for this the highest of all marks of their country's confidence, [B] and by a consciousness of their inability adequately to discharge the duties of an office so difficult and exalted, [C] how much more must these considerations affect one who can rely on no such claims for favor or forbearance! Unlike all who have preceded me, the Revolution that gave us existence as one people was achieved at the period of my birth; and whilst I contemplate with grateful reverence that memorable event, I feel that I belong to a later age and that I may not expect my countrymen to weigh my actions with the same kind and partial hand.


While the opening sentence begins with the now traditional sentiments of modesty and following in the footsteps of great predecessors, two words stand out: cheerfully and happiness. This is the first time any degree of cheer or joviality has made its way into any inaugural address, and while these words don't constitute frivolity, they do mark a uniquely festive sense of gratitude for having inherited such a great nation from such great men. Van Buren's use of the word calendar is also worth a note, for on the one hand it can simply mean register, but also it can mean guide or example, and even by metonymy it can refer to the history of the presidency. The firm image pillars of the Republic is no throwaway, though, but itself becomes the foundation for the rest of the paragraph. Van Buren breaks the Founders into three groups of those who 1) declared independence, 2) fought for it, and 3) those who firmed and expanded it. This is a novel and engaging way of reiterating the feats of the Founders, and note with him who the indirect reference to the now nearly deified Washington.

The next sentence is a gradatio of increasing tension from phrases A-C, but it reads simply as a condition: If A and B, then C. Van Burn ends with a most surprising turn, an invocation to the people to regard him not as one of the Founders but to regard him as one of them and to judge him not with the gentleness with which they treated their forefathers, but impartially. A most uncommon sentiment, in and out of politics.

Finally, note the simple, lucid flow of ideas in connected pairs of conditions:

1. I follow in the footsteps of great men
2. who fall into three categories.
3. If they were nervous about the duty, great as they were,
4. how much must I be?
5. Also unlike my predecessors, America was a nation when I was born, 
6. so judge me as one of you and not one of the Founders.

This is a solid opening, full and formal but not orotund, and tightly organized.

Theater Review: Violet

Music by Jeanine Tesori. Libretto by Brian Crawley. 1997/2014 (Off/On Broadway)

Toward the end of Violet there's a big bubbly gospel number in which dancers accompanies the buoyant lyrics. Now this ensemble didn't have long to shine on stage, but they really gave it their all, especially the two ladies up front who let loose a nearly-distracting degree of enthusiasm. While I didn't care for the number, which I've forgotten entirely, I did enjoy and do remember their spirit. That's pretty much how I feel about Violet, the story of plucky girl's bus trip from North Carolina to Tulsa looking for a preacher to heal her scar.

I'll mention first Violet's chiefest success, which is a clever trick of staging the flashbacks of the titular main character at the same time as the unfolding story. This device rescues a story which if told linearly would have started to flag after its first hour. Beyond the energizing effect though, the sharp juxtaposition of these scenes brings some unique insight, as when Violet, fooling around with a fellow passenger during the Memphis layover, remembers her first time with a man. Rather than simply remembering a scene from act one, the presence of everyone on stage at once makes us more strongly identify the past characters and actions with the present ones.

This is a simple trick, but it works. Until the end, anyway, when after reaching the preacher, her father appears onstage in flashback. When she accuses him of intentionally maiming her so that the disfigurement might repel boys and keep her close to him, the father responds that wasn't so and apologizes for the accident. She believes this, which makes her feel so good that she thinks her scar has been healed. So presuming she didn't actually experience communication with the dead or divine, and that her flashback (i.e. the product of her consciousness) couldn't and therefore didn't tell her something which she didn't already know, what happened? What caused her transformation? If it was just a memory, which is the only thing it could have been, why does she believe him now?

Perhaps the awakening came when the preacher said her problem was her character and not her face, which is reasonable, but is that all it took to convince her, some frank advice from a man she just learned is a charlatan? This development is ultimately unsatisfying not because of its origin in the preacher, though, but because Violet is not introspective, or at least because the process of her reflecting on her character is not part of the story. Violet's resolution needed to come not from a logical proposition which she could just accept, but via a developed plot line, such as her relationship with Flick, a soldier traveling with her on the bus, which had been dramatically prepared.

Anyway, when she finds out that Flick, who chose not to sleep with her for what seem to have been moral reasons, or timidity, does indeed love her scar and all, she's happy. Since we don't know what she thought about him not sleeping with her, though, we again don't know what caused her sudden change of feeling. Why is she so enthralled now? She didn't learn anything new about him.

I'll touch but briefly on the music, which is a credit to the performers though not the composer. They played with a lot of gusto, but there's very little of interest in the score except for the variety of genres which is both pleasant and sensible given the changes of locale from stop-to-stop. Unfortunately the start of every number featured a jarring distraction: the disappearance of everyone's thick southern accents as they shifted into perfectly neutral pronunciation for their song. Still, the tunes are attractive and lively enough in the moment to move the show along.

I enjoyed Violet because I was in cheerful company and because the cast and band gave their all, but the experience is of a spirited performance of a somewhat dull show. Violet is pleasant enough to watch but its tunes and plot fade quickly after the curtain falls.

Lost in Translation #1: Vergil

Perhaps the most difficult tasks for the teacher of foreign languages is to persuade students of the need to read a work in its native language. In an era not only of plentiful translations but of numerous good translations, why turn to the original? The difficulty of this task of persuasion is compounded by the fact that it's nearly impossible to make this point clear and attractive at the introductory level when students are performing the thankless work of basic mechanics. Yet if the student does not grasp this notion at some early point, he risks wandering astray from the appreciation of his acquired language as a conveyance of literature. It's a terrible fate that the first utility of Latin, for example, is so often said to be its ability to improve one's English vocabulary.

Toward the end of showing Latin as a language of literature I would like to take a look at some passages of choicest Latin and compare them not merely to good translations, but to fine ones. I hope to demonstrate in this Coleridge's dictum that, "one criterion of style is that it shall not be translateable without injury to the meaning." (Lecture 14 on Shakespeare) I don't mean in any instance to denigrate the translator, moreover in studying the Latin and English in parallel one's appreciation for the task and success of these translators can only grow. Still, that task is in the end impossible to fulfill to perfection, at least for any work which maximizes the possibilities unique to its native language.

It seems prudent to start with one of the best and best known passages of Latin's most famous work, the Roman Classic, the Unclassical Classic, the Homeric reincarnation, the Augustan renaissance, Vergil's Aeneid. The translation is by Robert Fagles, published 2006.

We enter in Book IV, where a seething Dido rages at Aeneas, whom she caught stealing away.

–

365 'nec tibi diva parens generis nec Dardanus auctor,
366 perfide, sed duris genuit te cautibus horrens
367 Caucasus Hyrcanaeque admorunt ubera tigres.

/ "No goddess was your mother!
No Dardanus sired your line, you traitor, liar, no
Mount Caucasus fathered you on its flinty, rugged flanks
and the tigers of Hyrcania gave you their dugs to suck!

English eschews both leading with the dative form and the dative of possession (it is to you, vs of you, or the possessive adjective your), so Fagles presents us first with goddess (diva) and the possessive adjective your. The logic of the sentence is preserved, but the effect of leading with Aeneas (tibi: to you) and concluding with Aeneas (perfide: you traitorous one) enjambed onto the next line is lost, and the effects are that of 1) amplifying the accusatory tone of the line and 2) linking the two lines.

An understood linking verb (est: was) links diva to parens and Dardanus to auctor, a gapping which produces a line of stark juxtapositions. In the English, Dardanus auctor spills into a whole clause just for the need to use as a stand-in for auctor (founder, originator, progenitor), English's sired (forefathered), whose noun form sire is both deprecated and tied up with associations of its use as a salutation. Now sired is probably the best substitute, but its use results in a circumlocution which comes at the price of brevity and thus potency. Likewise perfide (faithless, traitorous, deceitful, false) becomes traitor, liar, which still doesn't quite capture the sense of scandal and outrage of perfide.

Fagles truly does a superb job with 366, so much that the layer of translation fades to an invisibility which would do Coleridge proud, but again there's no way to mimic the word order permitted by inflection, and thus the ensuing effects. Here, after in 365 declaring from whom Aeneas was not born, Dido describes who were his parents, according to her insult. The whole line is a preparation though, which isn't fulfilled until Caucasus enjambed into the beginning of 367 tells us just who was his father. Likewise lost is Vergil's sandwiching of te (you, i.e. Aeneas) between duris and cautibis (on hard crags.) Too, while flinty is a brilliant substitute for duris, conveying both physical and emotional hardness, rugged doesn't capture the sense of dread in horrens. Finally, in English we lose the emphasis of the parallel placement of Aeneas (perfide) at the beginning of the line and horrens at the end.

Again, though, Fagles' 367 captures the meaning of the line, but the style and imagery is in rerouting, lost. First, the English is cluttered with and, the, of, you, their, and to, a volume which dilutes the potency of the idea. Next, the stark back-to-back placement of Caucacus and Hyrcanae is an exotic splash which is lost in separation. What the Latin says obliquely or subtly in image, admorunt ubera tigres, the tigers drew up/near their teats, with "for suckling" implicit, Fagles says literally with "gave you their dugs to suck." This is quite a subtle difference, but the phrase "drawing up the breast" typifies the action as associated with nursing, whereas Fagles English spells it all out. Also lost is tigres' emphatic separation from its adjective Hyrcanae and placement at the line's end.

Finally, ubera tigres in Latin is a tight-knit pair of noun and direct object, linked by their constituting the hexameter's famous zippidy-do-dah final feet. Though they are in different cases and thus function differently, Latin can place them together and produce a non-grammatical, purely visual-aural relationship between the two. Here, the two words simply by their proximity produce a clear image: tiger nipples. It may sound silly, but that's a very bestial image which perfectly concludes Dido's scurrilous contention that Aeneas is not born from the soft goddess of love and a son of Zeus, but hard crags and animals. He's inhuman, to her, and this is the perfect image for that sentiment.

In contrast, Fagles' English shows the same images in a different series with different connections for a different effect. Compare the following and try to visualize each image as it comes:

Latin: Hyrcanian gave nipples tigers
English: tigers of Hyrcania gave you their dugs to suck!

More processing is required by the Latin to supply the understood information, but the brevity and word placement produce a more compact, more vivid image, compared to which the English seems rather literal, as if the image is being explained to you rather than presented. The potential of this cascade of images and associations is one of the chief powers and pleasures of the Latin language.

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!