1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 31: The truth about cats & dogs

From IMDb:

Janeane Garofalo has been quite vocal about how unhappy she was with the film. Initially it was an independent film, but it was turned into a big-studio project when Uma Thurman signed on. Garofalo remarked, “I think it’s soft and corny. The soundtrack makes you want to puke. And everybody’s dressed in Banana Republic clothing. The original script and intent was very different. It was supposed to be a small-budget independent film, with a lot more complexity to the characters. …” Garofalo has since disowned the film, calling it anti-feminist.

Ah, well, too bad. This is the movie she’ll be remembered for.

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Well, maybe not. IMDb lists the top four movies she’s known for:

• Ratatouille
• Mystery Men
• Wet Hot American Summer
• Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion

Not, alas, The Truth about Cats & Dogs.

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I was just out of college when I saw this movie on TV. Since then, I’ve fondly remembered Garofalo’s performance. I didn’t remember that Uma Thurman was in the movie. Not that Thurman is bad; hers is a tricky role, and she acquits herself with aplomb. It’s just that Garofalo is superb.

Garofalo plays a type who appears now and then in romanctic comedies set in and around Los Angeles:

A variant of the “lonely hearts” columnist, this stock character dispenses advice, over the radio, about matters of the heart. Off the air, however, she is lonely. Against her better judgment, she permits one of her callers to get a little too close for comfort.

The splendidly earnest Geneviève Bujold, in Choose Me (1984), occupies this role. A more recent example – who is much more crass – is a young woman who hosts a satellite radio show in the third season of Netflix’s Love.

Garofalo’s character, Abby Barnes, is situated halfway between these two radio personalities. A veterinarian, she gives medical and relational advice to pet owners. She has a distinctive style: her wordplay is quick and slightly off-color; her advice is blunt but kind. One can believe that a casual listener would stop turning the dial and settle down to hear Doctor Abby Barnes talk to strangers about their pets.

One caller is Brian (Ben Chaplin), a young Britisher whose dog is having a crisis. Abby gives helpful advice. Brian calls again (not on the air) to ask Abby out on a date. Abby reluctantly agrees.

“What do you look like?” Brian asks.

This touches a nerve. Abby tells him that she is tall and blond (she is short and dark). She stands him up.

And then the movie puts its stock protagonist into a rather different stock scenario:

The protagonist’s love object becomes attracted to one of the protagonist’s friends. To disavow any claim on the love object – and, perhaps, to remain in the love object’s orbit – the protagonist encourages the relationship by advising and lending considerable wit to the friend.

This, of course, is the plot of Cyrano de Bergerac and its progeny (e.g., Roxanne). Usually, the witty, pining protagonist is a man, and the love object is a woman. This is inverted in The Truth about Cats & Dogs.

Abby’s friend is Noelle, a relatively new acquaintance who is getting out of a bad relationship. Noelle is played by Uma Thurman, who is blond and very tall. When Brian comes to the radio station to plead his case to Abby, he sees Noelle and infers that she must be Doctor Barnes.

Abby tells Noelle not to correct the misunderstanding. In the rest of the movie, Brian woos the awkward Noelle, whom he believes to be Abby, while Abby tags along as a “third wheel.” Of course, there are sparks between Abby and Brian.

And there you have it: the story plays out as you might expect it to do.

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The movie’s strength lies in its characterizations. Chaplin makes Brian into a very nice bloke. He is as kind to Abby as to Noelle when the three of them are together – and, indeed, when he and Abby happen to be together without Noelle. He also must convey both singlemindedness and vacillation: he is resolved to persist in wooing the person with whom he has spoken on the radio, but when he’s with “Abby,” she isn’t at all the sort of person he knows Abby to be.

The real Abby, loving him from afar, is the character who makes the movie fun to watch. It’s poignant to observe a cynical person gradually realize that she is desired for herself. In one long sequence, Brian calls Abby at her apartment. Since they’re physically apart, Brian believes he is talking to Uma Thurman’s “Abby.” Even so, the real Abby is drawn to him. She and Brian talk until early morning. One blush follows another as Abby hears Brian compliment her, tease her, and declare his love – love for her mind, her character, rather than for Uma Thurman’s looks.

Thurman’s is perhaps the most difficult role to pull off. Noelle, who is superficially dim, has reserves of insight and fellow-feeling. She receives lots of ill-intended focus from men. It’s as surpising to her as it is to Abby when someone as kind and attentive as Brian comes wooing.

The movie is predictable, but there is a tiny amount of suspense. How will the disclosure of “Abby’s” real identity affect Noelle’s and Abby’s friendship?

There are signs that Noelle wants Brian for herself, despite his connection with Abby. But is Noelle really the kind of person who’d betray her friend?

Abby believes she might be. Partly, this is her knee-jerk assessment of women who are desired by lots and lots of men. But Abby also believes it because, in this case, it’s not altogether off the mark.

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I’ll give away the ending:

Noelle stands with her friend.

The movie has lots of animals in it. They’re included for comic effect. But the movie is about people, not animals. Why, then, is it called The Truth about Cats & Dogs? What truth does the movie reveal about cats and dogs?

Well, let’s allow ourselves to be a little crude and to put scare quotes around some of the words: THE TRUTH ABOUT “CATS” & “DOGS.” Some beautiful women are thought of as “cats” who undermine other women. And some women are thought of, or think of themselves, as ugly “dogs.” The title suggests that these hateful appraisals need not be true.

Also: “CATS” & “DOGS.” Ampersand. “Cats” and “dogs” in partnership – as friends.

The movie may be “soft and corny,” as Garofalo says, but that doesn’t make it anti-feminist. It’s anti-anti-feminist. It’s about how a smart woman who has trouble getting along with certain other women learns to see the truth about her friend and herself. Perhaps I’m “mansplaining,” but I wish Garofalo would look beyond the glamorous casting and the Banana Republic clothes and see the truth about what a lovely movie she’s helped to make.

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Another celebrated South Bender

Last Sunday was cold, and our church met indoors, but today’s service was held in the parking lot, in balmy weather. After Karin and Samuel and I went home and ate lunch, Samuel refused to sleep, so I pushed him in his stroller around the block. “Enjoy the last day of good weather,” one neighbor said. Sure enough, the temperature is supposed to fall by twenty degrees.

Another sign of summer’s end: people have been towing their boats back into the neighborhood.

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Recently widowed, Karin’s mom went on holiday to Beaver Island in Lake Michigan, a two-and-a-half-hour ferry ride from the northern town of Charlevoix. Beaver Island seems to be a hideaway for the rich. The residents kept telling Karin’s mom not to walk on the beaches (which may well be their private property) or on the roads (which probably aren’t).

“You’re lucky you didn’t get shot,” her brother said.

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Pete Buttigieg’s failure notwithstanding, a South Bender will become a very high federal official. I mean the Notre Dame professor, the Catholic charismatic, conservative Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s SCOTUS choice. This is hardly the nomination that Pete’s fans would have wished for. As for me, I don’t mind Barrett like I minded Brett Kavanaugh. Although Barrett is both a textualist and an originalist, she might rule as justly as any SCOTUS judge could do (it’s U.S. constitutionalism and judicial review themselves that are problematic, I’ve come to believe).

But the hypocrisy! What was it the Republicans were saying four years ago, when Obama wanted to install a judge before an election?

I’m surprised that I continue to be surprised.

Here are some interesting remarks by a friend of a friend. (As always, to enlarge an image: click on it; then, right-click on it; then, open it in a new tab; and, finally, click on it again with the magnifying cursor.)

I re-train my logical faculty

As the temperature cools, I wonder if I should cut the grass less often. Its growth this week has been negligible.

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Having not studied any formal logic for about fifteen years, I’m working through some very basic textbooks to undo the rust. The funnest one is Logic by Wilfrid Hodges (2nd edition, Penguin, 2001), but not for any reason to do with logic (were I a logician, I’m sure I’d find things to quibble with; indeed, logicians are so finicky, they often assign their own notes when they teach). I just like Hodges’s wry humor and poetical examples. The book makes heavy use of truth trees, which I don’t remember ever having worked with.

I also have the first edition of Barwise & Etchemendy – the book that Cornell undergraduates used to study – but not the software. Oh, look! The second edition is online! All typeset in glorious, drab Computer Modern! Which, incidentally, looks the same as the current font of this blog.

Also online, also typeset in Computer Modern, is the open-source forallx (“for all x”) by a philosopher I once heard speak at Cornell. He praised the grad student who commented on his talk because the student’s notes were nicely typeset (in Computer Modern). It was a genuine compliment, not a Gricean insult.

After I’m happy with my re-mastery of propositional and predicate logic, I’ll read Quine’s Philosophy of Logic, which I meant to do eighteen or nineteen years ago.

“But can he do the job?”

Were I to become a full-time member of a philosophy department with at least some undergraduates under my care, I’d try to establish a one- or two-credit “professional development” seminar to make sure that those considering grad school could make an informed choice.

Yes, it would have to be a course. A couple of informal sessions wouldn’t suffice. The content ought to be repeated several times, in readings, lectures, and class discussions – and with a megaphone. (Even then, there’d be a real danger that the undergraduates wouldn’t listen carefully enough.)

I’d probably assign this book by the philosopher Jason Brennan. It gives lots of useful, blunt, goal-oriented advice. It tells which parts of one’s soul one would have to sell to get an academic job after grad school. (The part that loves to teach, for instance.) Here is an interview in which Brennan mentions some of the book’s highlights.

Another book, by an ex-professor of anthropology, Karen Kelsky, is also worth looking at, but it’s a brutal downer and not always helpful. One senses that Kelsky is writing with cruel glee, grinding people down with minutae about what to do and not do. Then again, who am I to say? I’m on the outside looking in. Perhaps those tiny details do matter in the job market. My impression, though, is that many of them do not matter. For example, I’ve looked at lots of CVs of successful, recent job seekers, and plenty of them run afoul of Kelsky’s very detailed rules for how to write a CV. But then, maybe that level of detail is dictated by her audience. Maybe a lot of job seekers are desperate enough to want to be told where to dot their i’s and cross their t’s.

What I’d definitely assign is this short address by the philosopher David McNaughton. Brennan and Kelsky assume that the goal is to get the job. McNaughton considers the more important question (raised repeatedly by Dan Hedaya in Joe Versus the Volcano):

I KNOW HE CAN GET THE JOB, BUT CAN HE DO THE JOB?

Or, rather, can the job seeker do the job well; that is, can the careerist philosopher write anything worth reading? On McNaughton’s view, professionalization is stunting, and the profession weeds out lots of potentially valuable contributors.

McNaughton is very down on how academic philosophy is done. Brennan thinks it’s much more workable. Who is more trustworthy? I’ve read around in several of Brennan’s books; I like him, though I tend to disagree with him; but he often sounds like he’s on an ideological mission. I’ve read around in several of McNaughton’s books, too, and encountered moments of disinterested curiosity, and even profundity; and when McNaughton isn’t being profound, he’s at least rubbing shoulders with and expounding authors who are profound. Besides, I’ve always been inclined to agree more with McNaughton’s professional priorities, anyway.

This isn’t to say that I agree with everything McNaughton says. He disparages Michael Dummett’s prose style, and I actually quite enjoy reading Dummett.

O brave new world

Though officially it’s summer – the autumnal equinox is still to come – I saw frost this morning, dusted over lawns and rooftops.

“At least you won’t have to mow much longer,” Karin said.

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How cold and snowy will be the winter of 2020–2021? The Farmer’s Almanac and Old Farmer’s Almanac disagree.

It’s just as well: neither of them is considered very reliable.

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Indiana is in a sweet spot, climate-wise, according to ProPublica. The most habitable weather will migrate here by midcentury.

On the other hand, southern Missouri will have the climate that Louisiana has today, and coastal Louisiana will slip under water.

Forecasts for Ecuador are dire, too. If they are correct, it’ll be an unfamiliar world.

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I often wonder what sort of world Samuel will make his life in. Will its furniture – its countries, its climactic zones – remain in place?

Or will that furniture be drastically rearranged?

And how will Samuel earn his keep?

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Things have changed before. I think of the New World colonizers – and those they colonized. Their lives were swiftly altered.

The colonizers’ resilience and adaptability are celebrated. Their political legacy is worshiped.

But the truth is, many of them were ruthless, and their casualties were high. (And that’s to say nothing of those they colonized.)

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I’m not so far from being a casualty myself. I never quite adapted to my own migration, in 2000. And when the economy tanked, in 2008, well, that was pretty much the end; I realized, studying at a rich school, that material thriving was beyond me.

And now the economy has tanked again.

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What would it be humane to do with Samuel? To encourage him to thrive? Or to prepare him for the worst?

September’s poems

Two from The Oxford Book of Satirical Verse. The first is by a great figure imitating a great figure.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

The Scholar’s Life

When first the college rolls receive his name,
The young enthusiast quits his ease for fame;
Through all his veins the fever of renown
Burns from the strong contagion of the gown;
O’er Bodley’s dome his future labours spread,
And Bacon’s mansion trembles o’er his head;
Are these thy views? Proceed, illustrious youth,
And virtue guard thee to the throne of truth,
Yet should thy soul indulge the gen’rous heat,
Till captive science yields her last retreat;
Should reason guide thee with her brightest ray,
And pour on misty doubt resistless day;
Should no false kindness lure to loose delight,
Nor praise relax, nor difficulty fright;
Should tempting novelty thy cell refrain,
And sloth effuse her opiate fumes in vain;
Should beauty blunt on fops her fatal dart,
Nor claim the triumphs of a lettered heart;
Should no disease thy torpid veins invade,
Nor melancholy phantoms haunt thy shade;
Yet hope not life from grief or danger free,
Nor think the doom of man reversed for thee:
Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes,
And pause awhile from letters to be wise;
There mark what ills the scholar’s life assail,
Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail.

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(Samuel Johnson, in The Vanity of Human Wishes: The Tenth Satire of Juvenal Imitated)

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The second poem is by a man who, for good or ill, seems not to have been greatly taken with Johnson or his biographers. It didn’t help that Johnson panned his book.

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Dr Johnson

Here lies poor Johnson. Reader! have a care,
Tread lightly, lest you rouse a sleeping bear.
Religious, moral, generous and humane,
He was, but self-conceited, rude, and vain:
Ill-bred, and overbearing in dispute,
A scholar and a Christian, yet a brute.
Would you know all his wisdom and his folly,
His actions, sayings, mirth, and melancholy,
Boswell and Thrale, retailers of his wit,
Will tell you how he wrote, and talked, and spit.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

(Soame Jenyns)

Some ethical reflection

Consider two declarations:

(1) In 2016, Trump said: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”

(This seemed pretty hyperbolic at the time. Now, not so much.)

(2) Three days ago, it was revealed that although Trump knew that the coronavirus is highly transmissible – and that it’s “deadly stuff” – he held large gatherings and was slow to promote social distancing because he “wanted to always play [the danger] down.” “I still like playing it down,” he told Bob Woodward, “because I don’t want to create a panic.”

These actions – shooting somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue (hypothetical) and knowingly playing down the danger of COVID-19 (actual) – have a great deal in common, morally speaking. They’re both deadly; they’re both deliberate; and, on the face of it, they’re both outrageous, or they ought to be.

Exercises. Answer the questions of either Set 1 or Set 2, and those of Set 3.

Set 1. (a) What are the morally relevant differences and similarities between the two acts? (b) Which of the two acts would it be morally worse for Trump to do?

Set 2. Recall that Trump’s electoral opponent this cycle is Joe Biden. When Trump made the first declaration, in 2016, his opponents included Democrats Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, as well as Republicans Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, John Kasich, and Marco Rubio. (Trump has never run against Hitler or Stalin.)

Given whom Trump competes against, would voters be morally justified in remaining loyal to Trump …

(a) … were he to shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue?

(b) … even though he deliberately and knowingly played down the danger of COVID-19 – and even though his action may well have caused many thousands of premature deaths?

Set 3. Can these exercises even be done with any seriousness, or are the answers so obvious that it would be a waste of time?

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Though I condemn Trump for his response to COVID-19, my own response has fallen well short of what I think it would be good for people to do.

Today, I attended Rick’s funeral. It was held in a crowded gym.

Oh, I wore a mask, but I was there far too long for the risk to cease to be negligible (see the first chart in this useful article).

I came away with a souvenir – a t-shirt with this caption:

I WENT TO

RICK’S MEMORIAL

AND ALL I GOT WAS

THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT

I pray that that’s all I and the other mourners came away with.

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Of course, this isn’t to say that the same countervailing considerations apply to my situation and to Trump’s …

Or that I couldn’t make tradeoffs to balance off my action’s increased risk to public health. (Could Trump make tradeoffs on the scale that his action demands? I doubt it.)

Still, I remain very dissatisfied about what I did. I hope that, for his own sake, Trump also can acquire a sense of dissatisfaction.

I take on more responsibility in the home

Yesterday’s temperature plunged to sixty (F); it felt downright cold. I decided that Samuel should wear pants. He thought this was hilarious; he thrashed and thrashed, taking one leg out of his pants while I tried to put the other leg in. He did this every time I changed his diaper.

I do my share of caring for the boy; but, also, until now, I’d hardly ever bathed him or put him to sleep at night. I’m expert at putting him to sleep during the day, but the night-time task is altogether different. I’ve regarded it, and the bathing, as within Karin’s sphere. Well, tonight, I did both those chores (Karin needed to compose her remarks for Rick’s funeral). I did the bathing particularly badly. Samuel wasn’t pleased. He usually lingers in the tub and splashes the water with his legs for several minutes after he’s clean; this time, he was eager to get out. But he came through the ordeal. I expected his bedtime ritual to go even less smoothly. But he listened respectfully as I read to him, and he finally dozed off during his third book, Dr. Seuss’s Fox in Socks.

There is a social worker who talks to us about our baby every other week. It seems she’s been grading Samuel. Two weeks ago, all his grades were high, except in the category of gross motor skills; but this week, the social worker was pleased to report that his gross motor skills had received a grade of 55 out of 60.

Pepe is of the immortals

In one day, Samuel has gone from slithering on his belly to crawling. He used to crawl just one or two feet at a time. Now it’s his preferred mode of locomotion.

He still slithers when his arms are weary.

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Full episodes of Midsomer Murders have long been streamable gratis, with advertisements, through IMDb.

Now, FilmRise has posted quite a few episodes to YouTube. The videos appear to be ad-free.

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Watching the UEFA Nations League, I was a little surprised to see Pepe trot out onto the field for Portugal. “He is so, so old,” I told Karin.

(He’s only a couple of years younger than I am. He’s older than David.)

“Maybe he’s like Grimes,” said Karin.

It took me a moment to understand whom she meant. At first, I was thinking of Grimes the musician. Then I realized that Karin was referring to Captain Grimes of Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall.

GRIMES WAS OF THE IMMORTALS

Hi, bird!

A new month, a new season: the days are cooler and shorter. Samuel gets into trouble if left alone. Yesterday, he was doing pushups on some steps; when his strength gave out, he fell on his chin. And today, a moment too late, I saw him swallow a hairball from the kitties.

Increasingly, he speaks. We were especially surprised a week ago when Karin greeted a passing bird – “Hi, bird!” – and Samuel mimicked her – “Hi, bird!” His little voice rang out strong and clear.

(I’m told that Bird is something his cousin, Ada, also likes to say.)

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Some recent reading:

(1) Coetzee’s Late Essays, which I’ve just finished. A theme in the chapters on Samuel Beckett and Patrick White is the inadequacy of language, and especially of writing, for conveying certain aspects of human experience. Painting is better for conveying pure thought; dance, for conveying physicality. Well, yes. This is why I watch TV and, when not obese, play soccer.

The book discusses much more than this. I plan to try out Irène Némirovsky’s novels thanks to Coetzee’s chapter about them.

(2) I’ve just started reading Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?, Michael Sandel’s bestselling introduction to political philosophy. Who knows? Maybe someday I’ll assign it as a textbook.

Two chapters in, my feelings are mixed. The book begins with a nice discussion of a real-life policy issue – whether price gouging should be outlawed – and what utilitarians, libertarians, and virtue ethicists might say about it. Then the method of reflective equilibrium is introduced, though not by that name and not with any mention of its most famous proponent (John Rawls, whose theory of justice is discussed later in the book). Unfortunately, reflective equilibrium is illustrated with a long and not very political discussion of trolley scenarios.

Next comes a chapter on utilitarianism. Some of Bentham’s wackier ideas get more coverage than in most books of political philosophy. It’s good to see a philosopher’s policy suggestions presented together with his theory. On the other hand, little is said to dispel the impression that Benthamite policy is generated by utilitarian theoretical commitments rather than by Bentham’s prejudices or those of his society. (Virtually all present-day utilitarians would reject, for instance, Bentham’s idea to quarantine poor people in labor camps.)

(3) I continue to read one of C.P. Snow’s novels each month. September’s novel, The Light and the Dark, is about a Cambridge scholar of the Manichees.

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Here is a blurry photo of my son. He sleeps on fox sheets with his stuffed friend, Emilia Fox.