1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 44: (a) The Canterville ghost; (b) The craft; (c) The Simpsons, “Treehouse of horror VII”

This month, three jolly horror pics: an episode of The Simpsons, and two movies with Neve Campbell.

Scream also came out in 1996. That movie made Campbell famous, but I didn’t mention her in my review of it.

The Canterville Ghost

I think Campbell is better in The Canterville Ghost, a pretty negligible piece of filmmaking. Wilde’s tale has been redone for cinema or TV at least twenty times. A British version was broadcast just one year after Campbell’s was shown on ABC.

Wilde’s material is too slight for ninety minutes. Thirty or forty-five would have been all right. This could have been a chapter in an “anthology” series, paired with some other nice story like “A Christmas Carol.” (The ghost, a wicked old man, ultimately repents and becomes a “friendly” ghost.)

Anyway, Campbell. She’s in little-rich-girl mode, very pouty and naïve. Her character is sixteen; in Wilde’s story, she is thirteen. It’s transparently an act – by 1996, Campbell is well into her twenties, and she looks her age – but the mimicry is good. Campbell gives nary a “wink.” Well, maybe just one. She yells out Sooorrriee with a Canadian accent after the script has mentioned thirty or forty times that her character is from Indiana.

Campbell is Canadian. The actors who play her family are mostly British or Irish.

I wonder if this has anything to do with the story’s satirical purpose, which is to make fun of U.S. citizens who come to live among the English.

Patrick Stewart is the ghost.

The Craft

I said “three jolly horror pics,” but this one gets less and less jolly as it goes along. Basically, it’s Mean Girls before there was Mean Girls, only with better performers (Campbell, Fairuza Balk, Rachel True, Robin Tunney) and with impressive special effects. And these mean girls are high school outcasts, not high school socialites. And they’re witches. They don’t wreak havoc through gossip, social betrayal, etc., so much as by casting spells.

Is anything gained by supernaturalizing the Mean Girls template? I think so.

The witches receive power from a benevolent deity but then use it for vengeful, banal purposes. This isn’t just meanness: it’s blasphemy. I doubt that the movie set out to teach any lesson, but this one is worth noting.

I don’t think viewers would get any vicarious social pleasure from observing the clique in The Craft. This is not a circle anyone would wish to belong to. It is almost contractual: the girls need each other because their magic is stronger when there are four of them. Each girl has her own agenda; none seems to care much for the others, or even to aspire to be accepted by the others.

What is compelling is the fantasy of gaining power over one’s enemies – and over one’s friends.

“Treehouse of Horror VII”

For me, this is the most memorable episode in the “Treehouse of Horror” series. It contains three mini-episodes. (1) Something strange lives in the Simpsons’ attic. (2) Lisa’s science fair project takes on a life of its own. (3) Space aliens abduct Homer. It would ruin these little stories to describe them further. But I will say that the third story is ultimately about U.S. politics – and that it reflects what in 1996 was a common belief: that, regrettably, the two major parties are indistinguishable from each other.

How different things seem today.

P.S. I grew up listening to the show in Spanish, and even then I understood how excellent the translating and voice acting were in that language. Here is a video about the voice actor who played Homer. He seems to have changed a lot of the dialog for his audience.

P.P.S. Look out for the space aliens, who appear briefly in the video.

Sax infusion

Karin has been sick, and she missed a day and a half of work. She didn’t get tested for COVID – no time slots were available at the testing centers. There must be many test-takers now, what with COVID and the flu.

Samuel and I have been fine.

As I type this, it’s his going-to-sleep time.

“Sammy, what music would you like tonight? Saxophone or piano?”

“Saxophone.”

(“Songbird” is good, but the other songs are lousy – and this is supposed to be Kenny G’s best album. More often, I put on Gato Barbieri.)

“Sammy, stop kicking or I’ll put you in your crib.”

A successful threat.

He ends up in his crib anyway, but not before we’ve let him go to sleep near his parents.

The birthday boy

Happy birthday (yesterday) to Samuel, who is two. Here he flaunts his new German trainers, which his Aunt Edoarda & Uncle Stephen gave him.

He also got a set of wooden coasters from his Aunt Mary & Uncle Martin (when he visits their house, he plays with their coasters). … Dear me, if I try to list who has given what, I’ll leave someone out. I’d better just declare my all-extensive gratitude.

Other gifts: cleaning supplies (broom, mop, etc.); tools (hammer, power drill, etc.); clothes; greeting cards; books; pumpkins; candy; and cold hard cash.

We took him to two “trunk or treat” gatherings. Until this year, I was barely aware that people did this. Samuel wasn’t interested in collecting candy, but he did enjoy drawing with chalk in the parking lot.

For the record, he was dressed as a lion – not as a bear, as some 40% of his fellow “trunk-or-treaters” thought. Karin’s friend Nora brought her little daughter, Charlotte, dressed as Madeline. In that series’s fourth book, Madeline and the Gypsies, Madeline and her friend Pepito are forced to wear an old lionskin. Therefore, Samuel also was in Madeline costume. (I can almost feel the collective eye-roll. Well, this is parenting: one’s activities and cultural references become more childish. Before long, I’ll be finding meaning in Chuck E. Cheese.)

Or maybe he was Sam the Lion from The Last Picture Show.

Tonight the rain is heavy. Karin & I were in our basement, watching TV, when we saw one of our window-wells fill up with water (like the episode of Get Smart in which a flooded telephone booth almost drowns Max and Ninety-nine). Underneath the window-well, water seeped out from the wood panelling and onto the floor. We moved some boxes away from the deluge and resolved to seal up that window-well ASAP.

In memoriam

It looks like I won’t be going to the funeral after all.

My dad shared these photos of my grandma and her family. The first was taken many years ago in the Ecuadorian jungle.

(My little mother is in this photo – she is the youngest daughter.)

This more recent photo was taken after the deaths of my grandma’s husband and of her second daughter, Irene.

You can see how cheerful my grandma was.

She also was one of the most studious people I have known. She constantly read the Bible and books about the Bible. Her sight was very poor, and so, using a magnifying glass, she would proceed slowly; and because of the effort it cost, she would read little else – she placed God first. But when I was young and she could see well enough, she made for me a tape recording of all of Charlotte’s Web.

You’ll recall that after my grandpa died, I mentioned the books that he and my grandma had written together. They were narrated from his perspective. But she was not the lesser author.

He was rather legendary – a Great Man, I’ve heard people say. He was a force. But so was she. He would have needed someone like her to keep up with him. I remember watching a presentation that they used to do for U.S. churches. They would speak the Shuar language to each other; and, as was customary in dialog between the older Shuar, one of them would begin to speak before the other had finished his or her sentence, so that there was no pause between the utterances.

I used to talk to her quite a bit. She would listen, and she was not intolerant of my opinions, but there was no changing her mind. She had long before decided which path to take, and she tenaciously continued down it. It is better to be like this, I think, so long as one goes in the right direction.

Which, of course, she did.

R.I.P. Grandma

My mother’s mother died today in a suburb of Kansas City. Because it is almost midnight, I’ll wait until next time to say a few things about my grandma.

My mother has traveled to Kansas City.

I don’t know what sort of funeral will be held – the pandemic complicates everything, of course – but it is not out of the question that I should travel.

October’s poem

Chinua Achebe, “NON-commitment” (1970):

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Hurrah! to them who do nothing

see nothing feel nothing whose

hearts are fitted with prudence

like a diaphragm across

womb’s beckoning doorway to bar

the scandal of seminal rage. I’m

told the owl too wears wisdom

in a ring of defense round

each vulnerable eye securing it fast

against the darts of sight. Long ago

in the Middle East Pontius Pilate

openly washed involvement off his

white hands and became famous. (Of all

the Roman officials before him and after

who else is talked about

every Sunday in the Apostles’ Creed?) And

talking of apostles that other fellow

Judas wasn’t such a fool

either; though much maligned by

succeeding generations the fact remains

he alone in that motley crowd

had sense enough to tell a doomed

movement when he saw one

and get out quick, a nice little

packet bulging his coat pocket

into the bargain – sensible fellow.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Dante puts Judas near the bottom of Hell, with the traitors. Pilate is not brought down so low: he is with the self-centered opportunists (that is, if lines 55–57 of canto III refer to Pilate, which is controversial).

So: is “noncommitment” more like malicious treachery? Or is it more like opportunistic indifference to the good?

Or is “noncommitment” not a single and genuine kind of sin but an artificial, gerrymandered sin?

Or does Achebe (or Dante) simply get the exemplars wrong and accuse Judas, or Pilate, or both of them, of the wrong kind of sin?

I wish I could say these sorts of philosophical questions are slowing down my reading of the Inferno, but, the truth is, I’m mostly ignoring them and plowing on ahead.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

In a recent interview, Michael Huemer says:

In the first day of one history class in elementary school, I thought that I liked history, but I later learned that I’d been tricked. The teacher (Mrs. Denison) had started a discussion of the question, “Who discovered America?” It was traditionally said that Columbus discovered it. But wait, there were already Indians (that’s what people called the Native Americans then!) living in America when Columbus arrived. Also, there was evidence that Leif Erikson had traveled to America hundreds of years before Columbus. Etc. I thought this was a great discussion. But as I was later to learn, that wasn’t typical of history classes, that was really more like a philosophy discussion, and I actually hated what history classes were normally like.

In another elementary school class, the teacher read a story in which a king had promised some big prize to any hero who could save his daughter from, well, something bad that had taken her captive. I don’t remember the details, except that basically three people wound up all contributing to saving the princess. Each one (as I would now describe it) provided a causally necessary but insufficient condition on the rescue. We then had a discussion of the question: Who gets the prize? Again, I thought that was a great discussion. As I much later recognized, that was also a philosophical discussion.

And it continued like that throughout all my years of schooling. All the really good classes that I ever had were discussions about questions that I would later recognize as philosophical questions, or at least philosophy-adjacent. But there was never enough of it. Not until college, when I could have whole classes on philosophy.

I’ve spent a lot of time wondering what the point is of studying literature and history apart from mining ideas (philosophy) from them. It’s a hard question. My inability to answer it was one big reason why I ended up just studying philosophy.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

C.S. Lewis suggests that the point of reading literature, at least, is to mine experiences:

Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realise it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, therefore I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes cannot write books. …

Historians, though, tend to eschew this sort of justification of their craft. I’ve heard them talk of “locating” the self in a larger temporal context (or of “busting myths” that misplace the self in some false context – the historian’s version of Lewis’s quip that “good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered”). I’ve not heard them talk much of “enlarging” the self through partaking in the experiences of others. This sort of aspiration, they regard as suspect. Whereas Lewis says, “My own eyes are not enough for me,” historians say, “I insist on setting the evidence in front of my own eyes” (which, in practice, amounts to setting just a few links of an unavoidably long and complex evidentiary chain in front of their own eyes).

But perhaps historians don’t generally say this. Perhaps I have been listening to unrepresentative historians. But I doubt it.

Venezuela 2, Ecuador 1

This is the second qualifier we’ve lost to a team at the bottom of the standings.

This defeat is especially galling. We were ahead 1–0 and seemed to have the Venezuelans under control. I guess we were excessively confiados.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Karin & I continue to unpack. Today I cleared out about half of the kitchen and nearly all of the front parlor. It was like a super long game of peg solitaire – I’d clear away one “peg” to make room to clear away another, so I could access yet another “peg” – only, these “pegs” were liquorbox- or bananabox-sized and filled with dishes or books, and the empty spaces were on three different storeys of the house.

I was glad for the workout since I didn’t run. Yesterday, though, I did try out a new route: eight laps around a nearby school. The sidewalk was uneven and hard, and on the last lap I injured a groin muscle. But I toughed it out: I needed to burn extra calories: I was to go to a restaurant with Karin’s dad’s family.

Here is our group portrait, with little Samuel at the end of the table:

After the meal, Karin & I stopped at my parents’ house and retrieved the food we’d left in the freezer. But when we got back to our new house, the power had gone out.

I had to sleep without using my CPAP machine, and so I woke up many times.

Ecuador 3, Bolivia 0

The goals were scored in the first twenty minutes, and the rest of the game was a cool-down session for our starters and then a tryout for various bench players. Énner Valencia broke Ecuador’s career scoring record.

Afterward, Bolivia’s captain, the goalkeeper Carlos Lampe, was interviewed.

He said: We were our own worst enemy – or something to that effect.

Let the scoreline not cause us to forget the solid defending that we did in the second half.

I’m afraid he was deluding himself.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

We’ve moved to South Bend. Kind church friends helped us; so did Sam the architect; so did my parents; so did Karin’s dad & Carol, his girlfriend. Samuel was parked in front of the TV for many hours in a mostly happy state, but he would cry whenever I’d leave to move things into the new house. When I’d come back, he’d hug me and whimper, “Don’t go.”

The new house is crammed with disordered furniture and boxes. The rooms are impassable. Karin’s dad & Carol helped us to tidy up our bedroom, so at least we’ll have a place to sleep tonight.

Jasper and Ziva are distressed, of course, but they have been venturing out from their hiding places in the basement.

More qualifiers

This long day began for me before five o’clock. Then I didn’t get a full meal until after two; a couple of hours later, I was sleeping from sheer exhaustion. Did Samuel sleep today? He did not.

Thankfully, Karin was here to watch him: she stayed at home to prepare for the move.

My parents and I spent much of the day cleaning the new house, and we waited there for a plumber who didn’t come. A different plumber will come next Wednesday … after Karin, Samuel, and I have moved in.

Until this plumber arrives, the bathtub will serve as our all-purpose sink.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Ecuador’s next World Cup qualifier will be played tomorrow night (8:30 ET).

Opponent: Bolivia.

Location: Guayaquil.

This will be our first home qualifier outside of Quito since 1997 (the last one also was played against Bolivia, and in Guayaquil).

Afterward, we’ll travel to Venezuela and Colombia. It makes sense to prepare for those games on the Caribbean coast by playing our home game in a hot, coastal city.

Guayaquil was in the news a few days ago because a particularly brutal prison riot happened there.

Last days in Mishawaka

Happy birthday to Karin, who is thirty.

As she pointed out, our ages start with the same digit. For now.

The grownups’ books – not Samuel’s – have all been transported to the new house, except the 35–40 vols. that I’ve set aside for imminent use. I miss the books that are out of reach. Until lately, I’d never had such an urge to read “The Canterville Ghost.”

The furniture, including the beds, will be moved on Saturday. This will be our last week at my parents’ house.

Like a good addict, I worry about where in the new neighborhood I’ll exercise. I’ll miss Mishawaka’s riverwalk. Its pavement once seemed too hard, but my legs have gotten used to it, and I have no trouble covering an extra mile on little more than a whim. Some mornings, I go incredibly fast, faster than I would have dreamed, because I have to get back to the house before Karin can leave for her job.