1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 99: The castle

(Not based on Kafka’s novel.)

Seldom viewed outside of Australia, The Castle (1997) is revered in that country. Wikipedia tells us that this movie

can be seen as a social study [of] the lives and aspirations of the inhabitants of suburban Australia. The central character, Darryl Kerrigan, ties into the stereotypical depiction of an “Aussie battler,” a man who will protect and serve his family through bold and sometimes ruthless assertion.

I’ve not observed Australians in their natural habitat. Doubtless, there’s much about this movie that I don’t understand.

Even so, I love The Castle.

One begins by snickering at the protagonists – hapless Melburnians pursuing the Australian Dream in their dismal, airport-adjacent cul-de-sac. But by the end, one is touched by these people. One wishes they were one’s neighbors.

(It’s gratifying when one well-heeled outsider – a broadminded constitutional lawyer, played by the grave but twinkling Charles “Bud” Tingwell – is admitted into their circle.)

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Darryl Kerrigan (Michael Caton), patriarch and hero, is lovable because there is so much that he loves: his family, his dogs, his tchotchkes, his boat, his garden, his pre-fab country house on a nondescript lake, and of course his suburban home (his family’s “castle”). Not to mention his neighbors and his lawyers. Having thrown in his lot with X, Darryl loves X proudly and unconditionally. We hear him, in a wedding speech, declare his family’s love for the new son-in-law; and what goes for that adoptee goes for every animal, vegetable, and mineral that Darryl claims as his own (or as his own’s own). It doesn’t matter that Darryl’s wife and children are pitifully ordinary, or that one son – in what I suspect is a symbolic nod to Australia’s origin – is in prison. Darryl treats each family member with something approaching veneration. And each of them responds in kind.

Darryl is not a rich man. He earns his living towing cars (i.e., clearing away others’ property). His boat, house, house-extensions, holiday house, and dogs – purebred racing Greyhounds – seem to have been accumulated opportunistically. The Kerrigans scour the trade papers for bargains. Once acquired, each purchase is accorded quasi-heraldic status. Non-purchases too: witness how the household acquires its front gates.

The Kerrigans are consummate appropriators. The movie’s sly irony is that it recounts their struggle against appropriation by outsiders.

One day, the Kerrigans receive notice that their house is to be compulsorily acquired by the airport, so that the runway might be extended. The Kerrigans and their neighbors oppose this order in the courts. But their lawyer is out of his depth, and the airport is backed by powerful business interests.

“I’m starting to understand how the Aborigines feel,” mutters Darryl.

(It’s a mark of comic deftness that this unadorned political statement produces one of the movie’s biggest laughs.)

It isn’t hard to guess that the Kerrigans’ misfortunes will be reversed. In time, the lawsuit is heard by Australia’s highest court. The judgment favors the Kerrigans, and the “castle”-dwellers end up better off than before. The legal aspect of the story is, I suspect, sheer fantasy. The movie’s really interesting questions aren’t about law; they’re about value. Can a life of utter tastelessness be good? How important is the aesthetic component, comparatively speaking?

Proverbs 15:17 says: “Better a vegetable dinner with love than a stall-fattened ox with hate.” The movie illustrates this principle.

For it leaves us in no doubt that the Kerrigans’ aesthetic is very, very bad. Indeed, it’s their utter non-descrimination, their determination to embrace absolutely every piece of kitsch, that enables them to love each other as they do. This is made clear from the beginning, in a brilliant faux-naïf voiceover by Darryl’s youngest son, Dale (Stephen Curry):

I believe the movie is responding to particular book: the classic Australian work of architectural and social criticism – The Australian Ugliness (1960), by Robin Boyd. (See the book’s Wikipedia article, and its Text Classics webpage.) Images of jet planes, electrical wires, and large TV antennae feature prominently in both works. It can’t just be a coincidence.

Some day, I may read the book, and then I’ll understand The Castle better. As funny and touching and socially observant as it is, it’s an “ideas” movie, really.

A public service

I hope this is useful: a document listing the World Cup match times.

(They’re all set to the time zone in which I reside. If you’d like a list of match times set to a different time zone, let me know, and I’ll make one for you.)

The document can be printed on two sides of one sheet. I intend to fold up my printout, and to carry it in my pocket. I don’t want to always have to fire up the Internet to find out when the next game is.

The games will be played at different times every day.

(Why so?

This wasn’t always the case.)

The crash; Should I marry a murderer?

Karin returned to the office after a week’s vacation. I am at home with the boys – including Samuel, who has been puking – and with the three cats.

“School of Hard Knocks” Dory still fights with Ziva and Jasper. We worry for her permanency in our house.

She is gentle with humans, only occasionally biting them (in self-defense).

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Two noteworthy Netflix docs:

(a) The Crash

(b) Should I Marry a Murderer?

I don’t often look at Instagram or TikTok, so these two shows were something of a revelation for me.

Text messaging has for some time been a staple exhibit of the true-crime genre. (See, e.g., Lover Stalker Killer.) But, to my knowledge, only in the last year or so have documentarians made much of compulsive video posting.

The first show’s protagonist is a villain. The other show’s protagonist is a victim/​witness. The former is a teenager just out of school; the latter is a thirty-ish professional – a forensic pathologist (!).

It’s the teen who’s coldly calculating. The corpse dissector is warm-hearted, loyalty-torn, and ultimately heroic.

What they have in common is, they’re always posting video.

And, in the footage they post, using drugs.

(Each program goes to some length to explain that its protagonist’s drug use is tangential to the outcome.)

Both protagonists have unconditionally supportive parents, for better or for worse.

One show is as chilling as can be; the other is almost heartwarming. I recommend them both.

Body-text fonts, pt. 51: De Vinne

Our ten-year anniversary festivities continue. On the day itself – Thursday – we took Daniel and Abel to the beach; Samuel was in school, but Karin’s mom joined us. Then, today, Karin & I left all three children with Karin’s dad and traveled to Niles. We watched The Sheep Detectives and ate cheap hot dogs at the cinema, strolled through the park, bought books and fancy candy, and dined on pizza. It was very “us.”

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Penguin typeset a 1988 edition of The Virginian (1902) in De Vinne, a font from the late nineteenth century …

… only to re-set and reissue the book in Stempel Garamond, a little later. I guess the initial nod to quaintness was regretted.

Time was, this book was taught in schools.

On holiday in the “Region” (Northwest Indiana)

Karin & I will soon have been married ten years.

To celebrate, we dropped off Jasper, Ziva, and Dory at a cats’ hotel and headed west with our three little sons.

Not very far west.

Not as far as Illinois. Not even as far as Gary, Indiana. We did cross over into the Central Time Zone.

Our activities in the “Region” were zoological, botanical, athletic, culinary (White Castle), and commercial.

We toured: Michigan City, Valparaiso, Merrillville, Hobart, and – unpremeditatedly – Beverly Shores.

Beverly Shores is a beach town next to the Indiana Dunes National Park. Our phone GPS took us there because we asked it to find a playground. But we couldn’t park the car without a city-issued permit, so we didn’t play in Beverly Shores.

Instead, we drove and gawked. We could see Chicago across the lake, and there were spectacular houses that looked out in that direction. Some had been built for the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933 and then transported east, by boat.

I hadn’t known that there was such glamor in the “Region.”

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Our hotel was in Portage. It had a breakfast buffet and an indoor swimming pool. We used those conveniences daily.

It took all our effort to keep the children from destroying our suite. Abel, in particular, was a menace.

Samuel asked to go home and, the first night, was physically ill. He improved.

It was Daniel who took to the holiday with especial keenness. We hardly could coax him out of the pool.

One night, our family was bathing when a man and a woman came into the pool area. They looked very sheepish (they had come in and gone out once before). They disrobed, got into the hot tub, worked up some courage, and, I daresay, proceeded to do the deed while we were across the room. You’d think it was their honeymoon or anniversary; such was their involvement. But I suspect they were adulterers who had come to the “Region” to escape detection.