1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 3: From the journals of Jean Seberg

This is a documentary. Its subject, the actress Jean Seberg (Breathless), recounts her life story. Only, she does so from the perspective of someone who is dead – Seberg committed suicide in 1979 – and “her” words are uttered by another actress who looks how Seberg might’ve looked, had she kept on living. They aren’t really Seberg’s words, but, rather, the documenter’s. He’s pretending that Seberg would have spoken these words, had she spoken from beyond the grave.

The narration doesn’t sound as if it’s been mined from journal entries. It’s too meticulously planned out, too retrospective, too lecture-like. That’s how it’s supposed to sound. The unnaturalness isn’t in the narration but in the title.

“Seberg” (the narrator) shrewdly analyzes the lives and careers of other actresses of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s: Ingrid Bergman, Vanessa Redgrave, and, especially, Jane Fonda. These actresses made it to the top of their profession. The movie asks whether this was a victory or a degradation.

Just as the movie is concerned with an entire cohort of actresses, it also discusses the men who directed or acted with that cohort: in Seberg’s case, Otto Preminger, Jean-Luc Godard, Romain Gary (her husband), and Clint Eastwood. The men generally crafted their movies so that the male characters would seem powerful and the female characters would seem weak. Preminger and Gary were particularly ruthless in this respect.

There’s an episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, “Frank Sets Sweet Dee on Fire,” in which a vile old man sets his daughter on fire to make a compelling TV scene. Well, this documentary shows how Otto Preminger set Jean Seberg on fire when she played Joan of Arc.

There’ve been lots of Joans of Arc, but none except Seberg was ever literally set on fire.

All the Joans were exploited, however (as one fascinating montage makes clear). All of them – Seberg, Falconetti, Bergman, and others – were shown burning at the stake because men enjoyed watching women suffer.

Watching the Joan of Arc scenes, I thought: This is awful. What directors do to actresses – and what audiences want to see – well, it’s just inexcusable. If movies encourage people to look at women in this way, they shouldn’t be viewed.

When a manly actor such as Eastwood is photographed, the close-up evokes alertness or grit – something active. On the other hand, when the performer is a woman, the close-up evokes longing (Greta Garbo) or piety (Bergman) or, worst of all, blankness (Seberg) – that is, some form of passivity.

As this documentary explains it, actresses don’t have much control over their own performances. The director has the control. The director can edit the shots before and after a close-up to favor a certain interpretation of the actress’s state of mind.

You might wonder if the documenter, Mark Rappaport, has contempt for his subject. After all, he puts words into “Seberg’s” mouth. He’s the one who has “Seberg” interpret her life and those of her fellow actresses chiefly in terms of victimhood. According to the documentary, Seberg is a victim of Preminger and her other directors, of her husbands and lovers, of her audiences, of the FBI. In the end, she barely has the agency to kill herself – it takes her several tries, and while she is still alive in between those tries, her friends treat her as a breathing corpse.

Rappaport has made other movies in a quasi-documentarian style (the best known is about Rock Hudson). I haven’t seen them. But it would be useful to compare them to this one. Does he always turn his subjects into victims – the men, as well as the women?

(In this shot, the narrating “Seberg” is superimposed over footage of the real Seberg. The documentary does a lot of that sort of thing. In one scene, for instance, it glues Audrey Hepburn’s head on top of Seberg’s body. It also juxtaposes footage from different movies, and it digresses from its biographical narrative to explain certain aspects of film grammar. It certainly is educational.)

The game

One team came to play.

Liverpool “stormed” for about thirty minutes, stealing the ball, creating good scoring chances, looking much sharper than Real Madrid.

Madrid’s thuggish captain, Sergio Ramos, ended this by yanking Mohamed Salah to the ground by his arm and falling with full force upon him. He injured Salah’s shoulder. Thus, Liverpool’s best player was made to leave the game.

Liverpool unraveled after Ramos’s brutal act.

Shortly after halftime, Madrid scored a flukey goal. Loris Karius, Liverpool’s goalkeeper, threw the ball off the foot of Karim Benzema, and it rolled into the net.

Liverpool rallied well enough to tie the score after a few minutes.

But, characteristically, Madrid resolved the matter by calling upon a substitute from its well-funded bench. Isco, who’d been struggling, was brought off for Gareth Bale (once, the world’s highest-priced signing).

Bale, the super-sub, scored with a bicycle kick.

Then he scored with a shot that swerved off Karius’s palms. It was a bad night for Karius.

The final score, 3 to 1, was as I’d predicted.

It could have been 4 to 1, but Cristiano Ronaldo, who’d been tepid all night, had his last scoring chance derailed by a spectator who invaded the field. The referee ended the game a few seconds later.

None of Madrid’s goals involved much constructive effort. All depended on isolated moments of individual brilliance (or good fortune) …

… made possible by a prior act of deliberate, ruthless thuggery.

See, this is why neutral spectators such as I cheer against Real Madrid. Madrid has great players, yes. But these players cheat. They don’t win by playing constructively (even Luka Modrić, who gave one of the best performances, did nothing but defend).

What’s the point of having these stars, if this is how they win?

The point, their supporters will say, is simply to win.

Then let them have their victory. This was a game that would have made Franco proud.

Trash-talking

The Champions League final will be played in two days.

Vicente del Bosque, who has won the Champions League as the coach of Real Madrid, as well as the World Cup and the Euros as the coach of Spain, believes that Real Madrid will handily defeat Liverpool. He doesn’t think there’s “even one Liverpool player who would improve Madrid, not even [Mohamed] Salah” (the quotation is from this article).

Actually, right now, Salah is better than any of Madrid’s forwards, but del Bosque has an excellent point. Player for player, Real Madrid is overwhelmingly the better team.

Then again, that is why Liverpool employs the “storming” tactic (see two entries ago). It allows a team to have a good chance, head-to-head, against an opponent whose players are more skillful. Already this year, it has allowed Liverpool to thrash Manchester City.

In other news, the legendary Xavi, formerly of Barcelona, offers this amusing analysis of Real Madrid’s defensive midfielder, Casemiro:

“Madrid break apart, seven players attack and Casemiro stays back on his own to cover the centre.”

Pretty impressive, right? Covering the center all alone? Not impressive enough for Xavi:

“He does not dominate space-time.”

Whoa. That’s a tall order. I’m not even sure if I dominate space-time.

I predict that the score will be Real Madrid 3, Liverpool 1. But I want Liverpool to win, and I think that that could very well happen.

A visit to Indianapolis

Our anniversary is today. Karin & I were married two years ago.

On Saturday, we took a trip to Indianapolis. We stopped at the Dutch Café near Peru, Indiana, and ate several plates of food. This affected all the walking that we did at the Indianapolis Zoo.

It was a mediocre zoo on the whole. Some of the buildings were overly grand. They called attention to themselves rather than to the animals. The animals were minimally described by their placards, and many weren’t described at all. (I wistfully recalled the much humbler Austin Zoo, which gave heaps of information about each species, and, often, about an individual’s life history.)

Still, the zoo had four redeeming features:

(1) The parking lot design. Not all the lanes were parallel or perpendicular to each other. They seemed to be staggered diagonally.

(2) The elephants and rhinos. One male rhino, in particular, caused the ladies to blush.

(3) The suckling warthogs, whom Karin recorded:

(4) The pettable dog sharks. This, easily, was the best thing about the zoo. The sharks would swim around in a shallow tank. We visitors would reach in and pet them lightly with two fingers as they passed by. If a shark failed to receive a petting, it would make a u-turn and swim by again. The sharks seemed almost mammalian in their desire for affection. And their skins were wonderfully smooth; petting a shark felt like petting a loving, living hot dog.

Lest you worry that petting was forced upon the sharks, let me reassure you that there was a part of the tank where they could rest undisturbed.

Here’s a video from the Dodo about petting a somewhat larger shark:

Unfortunately, there was no traditional, farm-like petting section in the zoo. I guess the zoo could afford elephants but not goats.

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Afterward, we drove around downtown Indianapolis and saw the state capitol building. Without especially going out of our way, we have now seen the capitol buildings of the following states:

Utah
Wisconsin
Texas
Indiana

On the way home, we stopped at Half Price Books in Carmel, the ritzy suburb. We were one week too early. Next weekend, for Memorial Day, a sale will be held.

There’s a storm coming

The final of the UEFA Champions League will take place in about one week, on Saturday, May 26. Liverpool and Real Madrid are the contestants. Neither came close to winning its respective domestic league this year.

How, then, did these teams manage to do so well against the cream of Europe?

This article by Simon Kuper explains a key tactical concept: “storming,” or relentlessly trying to steal the ball in the other team’s end of the field.

Storming is my preferred way of playing small-field soccer. Imagine playing a full-court press on a basketball court against opponents who aren’t allowed to use their hands. The odds of stealing the ball are good.

On a full-sized field, however, ball carriers have more space, and those who press must sprint farther. Storming is much harder to pull off.

Regular soccer is like stone/paper/scissors. Teams that specialize in keeping possession and passing out from the back are vulnerable against teams that specialize in storming. This is because storming creates turnovers near the goal. But teams that are good at storming suffer more against less skillful teams that settle for “parking the bus” in front of the goal with nine or ten defenders. This is because teams that storm are more vulnerable to counterattacks. They also thrive in chaos, which is what other teams avoid succumbing to when they park the bus.

This explains why F.C. Barcelona, the renowned master of keeping possession and inflicting “death by a thousand cuts,” continues to dominate in the Spanish league. Barcelona and the stormers at Atlético de Madrid both play against less skillful opponents who try to park the bus. Over the course of a lengthy round-robin tournament, this favors Barcelona over Atlético. (Real Madrid isn’t a pure representative of any of these styles. More on R.M. later.)

On the other hand, in the Champions League knockout stages, Barcelona must occasionally get past a storming team without relying on its superior record against other contestants. Barcelona faces much worse odds when it goes head-to-head against such foes. And so it has been knocked out by such stormers as Atlético, two years ago, and Roma, this year.

In its quarterfinal, Liverpool, a storming team, knocked out Manchester City, which likes to do some storming but is more of a possession outfit. Liverpool then outstormed like-minded Roma in the semifinal.

(In the English league standings, however, City left Liverpool in the dust.)

Of the three strategies, “death by a thousand cuts” and “storming” require the most specific personnel. (Just about any team can “park the bus” as long as it has one speedy forward who can retain possession long enough.) In particular, it’s hard for a team to acquire midfielders who are good possession-keepers and good stormers. The mindset required for making sustained charges into the thick of things is the opposite of the mindset for drifting into space, receiving the ball, slowing things down, and making judicious passes.

This is where Real Madrid, with its great wealth, has the advantage over everyone else. It has enough good players to try either strategy. When an opposing team parks the bus, R.M. can inflict the thousand cuts. And when R.M. comes up against a storming team, it can bring in players to switch out of its usual possession mode. Thus, at each new knockout stage, it adapts itself to its opponent.

This ability to match up well against a variety of foes is what allows R.M. to get through knockout tie after knockout tie, year after year, even in a very bad year. Of course, all it takes to be eliminated is one bad matchup. Liverpool isn’t built to win a round-robin league against good possession teams, but it is built to shred even the best opponent on a given night.

If I were coaching Real Madrid against Liverpool, I’d have my defenders simply kick the ball down the field and hope for my skilled attackers to retain possession. And if they couldn’t, I’d switch tactics and park the bus.

Whatever happens, I don’t think this game will offer much by way of midfield sophistication.

May’s poem

This month’s poem, “In Praise of Darkness,” is by Jorge Luis Borges.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Old age (or so it is called by others) / can be the season of our happiness. / The animal has died, or nearly died. / The man remains, with his soul. / I live among vague and luminous shapes / that are not yet darkness. / Buenos Aires, / which earlier was spreading into suburbs / toward the endless plains, / is once again La Recoleta, El Retiro, / the smeared streets of El Once / and the ramshackle old houses / we still call the Southside. / There was always too much going on in my life; / Democritus of Abdera plucked out his eyes so he could think; / time has been my Democritus. / This half-light moves slowly and causes no pain; / it flows down a mild slope, / it is like eternity. / My friends do not have faces, / women are what they were so many years ago, / the streetcorners may have changed, / there are no letters in the pages of books. / All this ought to terrify me, / but it is a sweetness, a coming back home. / Of the many generations of books on earth / I shall have read only a very few, / which I go on reading in my memory, / reading and alchemizing. / From the south, from the east, from the west, from the north, / the roads converge, / the roads that have brought me to my secret center. / Those roads were echoes and footsteps, / women and men, death throes, resurrections, / days and nights, / dreams and between the dreams, / every moment of yesterday, even the meanest, / and all of the yesterdays of the world, / the unflinching sword of the Dane, the Persian’s moon, / the deeds of the dead, / the shared love, the words, / Emerson and snow and so many other things. / Now I can let them go. I have come back to my center, / to my algebra, to my key, / to my mirror. / Soon I will know who I am.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

(Translated by Robert Mezey)

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In his article “Against Narrativity,” the philosopher Galen Strawson denies that humans typically organize their lives according to narrative patterns (in any sense of “typically” that is more than just statistical). He also denies that it’s typically good for a person to organize his or her life in this way. Some people, Strawson contends, naturally orient themselves “episodically” rather than “diachronically.” In so doing, they incur no moral cost; but it would be costly for them to try to reorient themselves.

Giving an example of an episodically oriented person, Strawson mentions Borges.

I thought of Borges as an example before Strawson mentioned him. But I’m not quite sure what he exemplifies.

Is the Borges of this poem episodic or diachronic? Is he concerned with narrative, and, if so, how?

These orientations occupy a spectrum, according to Strawson. Borges’s Funes is at the strongly episodic end. Augustine is strongly diachronic. People can be anywhere in between.

But I’m tempted to place the Borges of this poem onto more than one position on the spectrum.

Mother’s Day

7:00am: I’m awake after a night’s sleep of three hours. At my first stirring, Young Chirpie Chirpington (Jasper) becomes hyper-alert and paces back and forth upon my body. He emits high-pitched noises.

Son, must you chirp so? Have you no dignity?

Ziva, the shyer one, merely pokes at my feet with her claws.

This is why it’s better for Karin to awaken first.

Zzz …

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9:30am: One more hour of sleep, and then it’s off to our new church (we switched churches a few months ago). In Sunday School, the adults are slowly reading through 2 Timothy. As always, Paul is concerned that there shouldn’t be division among the believers, or useless arguing.

One woman suggests that there’s more useless arguing today than there was in Paul’s time – or even than when she was young. Today, people argue about things like politics. Or gender. Or the weather.

The weather? Karin & I are doubtful. Isn’t that one of the few safe subjects?

(Later, Karin’s mom suggests that the woman meant global warming.)

During the worship period, Karin & I watch over the nursery. (Due to Mother’s Day, the regular nursery worker is in the service.) This nursery has comfortable rocking chairs and a TV. Karin plays with the two small children while I download music from Spotify onto my phone.

We also view a part of Dumbo. As a Mother’s Day movie, Dumbo is appropriate, if sad.

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12:30pm: Surprisingly, it takes the better part of an hour to drive from church to Karin’s mom’s house. First we’re detained in an especially slow lane of traffic. Then we’re detained at a railroad crossing.

Calm down, Sweetie, I encourage Karin. Enjoy this nice, long, live version of “The Man-Machine” that I just downloaded.

Karin is not appeased.

1:30pm: We arrive at Karin’s mom’s house. The women sort through old photographs. I sleep on the couch.

3:30pm: We arrive at home. Karin sleeps in our bed. I sit in an armchair and try to write, but mostly I alternate between sleeping and sneezing (the night’s short rest has made me vulnerable to drafts).

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Tomorrow morning, it’s back to the office at IUSB.

Happy Mother’s Day, my dear Mom.

Two commencements

First, I want to congratulate my Uncle Tim (my father’s brother). During the recent commencement ceremony at Bethel College, he was honored as the Professor of the Year.

Although he’s a philosophy professor, he has taught many other subjects, including biblical literature, Latin American cultural geography, and the history of sport, and he has served as Bethel’s archivist.

He moved to Bethel in 1993, having previously worked as a missionary at the Jamaica Theological Seminary and the Caribbean Graduate School of Theology in Kingston. He holds graduate degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, the University of Chicago, and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. As an undergraduate, he studied at Fort Wayne Bible College, which later became Summit Christian College and then Taylor University Fort Wayne. (That campus is now defunct.) Relishing the overkill, he likes to decorate the back of his van with stickers from all these schools.

He wears a beard, a poncho, and a fishing hat. He says “Shalom” a lot. People call him Brother Tim. On a conformist campus, he’s something of a countercultural icon. People who don’t know him mistake him for a 1970s-style Christian hippie. He likes to talk about the persons and practices of our denomination (especially those of the early twentieth century), Christians in the developing world, missionaries, athletes, and ecclesiastical and collegiate politics. Secular politics hold little attraction for him. The same is true of logic, science, and anything that smacks of positivism. His vision of Christianity is both ecumenical and rooted in tradition.

He impresses those who listen to him. My sense is that the people at Bethel are less receptive to him than they used to be, and so this award may have come a bit late. But maybe I’m too pessimistic.

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I didn’t attend Bethel’s commencement. I usually avoid those ceremonies. Yesterday, however, Karin & I attended IUSB’s graduation ceremony, which was held at Notre Dame.

The keynote speech, given by the President of Indiana University, was a defense of truth. (You can read the version delivered in Bloomington.) The speech was rather bland even though it took a side in a perennial dispute.

You relativists and subjectivists! – the speech insinuated but didn’t say – Look where your way of thinking has led us! To Donald Trump! To “alternative facts!”

I wondered how many listeners understood.

I marveled at how utterly boring these mass graduations are. Hundreds of people must be recognized (they’ve paid tuition, after all). This leaves little time for anything significant. And yet … this is the last opportunity to teach these students. Why settle for a recital of platitudes? Even if these are platitudes that, embarrassingly, many academics now reject?

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We attended the commencement because I’d been invited to watch one of my tutees collect his master’s degree in social work.

I believe he’ll do a lot of good for the youth that he intends to serve. As a tutee, however, he often was difficult to work with.

During tutorials, he’d complain about the unspoken racism at IUSB.

If my own classmates can’t be genuine with me – he’d say – how are they going to be genuine with the population they’re going to work with?

Then he’d thank me for listening to him.

It’s like free therapy, he’d quip.

Well, I wasn’t prepared to be his therapist. Listening to him wore me out – especially on those occasions when he was irate with me.

But he liked me well enough, and I think I helped him to write better. And so, when he invited me to the commencement ceremony, Karin & I went. He was the very last person to receive his degree. He lagged a little behind everyone else in the ceremony – he walks with a cane – and so he had the whole stage to himself, and the audience cheered and cheered for him. It was very moving.

Afterward, Karin & I went to his graduation party at a restaurant in downtown South Bend. He greeted us warmly and went around introducing me to everyone. Karin & I were pleased for him, and we ate as many chicken wings as we could.

An inconsequential game from the past

For no special reason, I watched a video of a league contest between Internazionale and Venezia that was played in 1999.

Inter’s roster drips with talent. The video’s highlighted players are Roberto Baggio and Ronaldo, but Iván Zamorano gives a strong supporting performance (three goals) and there are cameos by Pirlo, Simeone, Zanetti, and others.

Surely, a team of world beaters!

Well, no. That season, Inter would finish eighth in the Serie A.

I am gotten the better of by the Swedes

Last night, we had quite a nice storm, with bright lightning flashes and sheets of rain. Ziva ran to the bedroom, to hide. Later, she poked her little face around the blinds and peered out at the rain. In our neighborhood, there was just a little flooding, and a small section of our street was blocked off.

Today was my last workday of the semester. I’ll be at home for one week, and then Summer Session I will commence.

Today, also, I finished reading Roseanna, the first mystery in the famous series by Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö – perhaps the most “procedural” crime novel I’ve ever read. No quirky investigators here. Just meticulous ones. I found it quite gripping.

Reputedly, the book also is humorous, although, to me, that aspect was rather faint. I think I knew which parts were the funny ones. Oh, well: Swedes 1, John-Paul 0.

I’ve owned the first four of Sjöwall’s & Wahlöö’s books for many years, and now it looks as if I’ll be acquiring the other half-dozen.