1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 82: Babe

This is a tale about an unprejudiced heart, and how it changed our valley forever.

My grandpa liked this movie.

I do, too. I always did.

It was the first movie I ever rooted for at Oscar-time, in 1996. It shoulda won! But since when do “talking animal” movies win? Jim Henson could have made Maus with Roman Polanski or Steven Spielberg and it still wouldn’t have won Best Picture, not even with a lead performance by Adrien Brody (or Tom Hanks, or Daniel Day-Lewis …).

Ah, well. We can bestow humbler laurels upon Babe.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

To begin with: this is the best “talking animal” movie, physically speaking. The sheep, the duck, and Babe the Pig himself are especially convincing. They move their mouths, but they also talk with their bodies. You understand them at a glance, even when they’re silent. They’re always emoting – twitching with nervous energy – like George C. Scott or Toby Jones.

And they’re not always comical; they have range. What is sadder than this sheep?

Then, scenically, there’s what I think of as the “Kennedy Miller” look. KM is the Australian company responsible for the Mad Maxes and John Duigan’s two great pastoral movies, The Year My Voice Broke and its sequel, Flirting. Babe is KM’s most famous export.

The specific visual quality I have in mind has less to do with Babe’s immediate setting – a cutesy farm, the kind on supermarket packaging – than with skies, weather, and natural light. The KM signature shot is of mist rising over hills at dawn, or of clouds hanging over hills in the afternoon.

“A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”

Indeed, because this is such a joyful movie – with the feel-good ending of a sports flick, to boot – it’s easy to overlook its harshness. For it is harsh. Harshness is more overt in the sequel, Babe: Pig in the City; but the first movie has plenty.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Perhaps the clearest way to indicate the harshness of some of the movie’s currents is to trace those same currents elsewhere.

Babe is as non-kosher as can be. Even so, he’s a kindred spirit to Isaac Bashevis Singer’s creation, Gimpel the Fool.

Like Gimpel, Babe is an innocent soul,

reliable, beyond suspicion, and – above all – extremely gullible.

But what really couples Gimpel and Babe is that each of them – gullible from birth – comes to accept rather than overcome this condition. This is a consequence of a deliberate, principled refusal to condemn others.

The pig promised himself that he would never think badly of any creature ever again.

Which is radical. What kind of protagonist would actually live this way? Only a creature ripe for exploitation.

To view the problem a little differently, consider: Does Singer approve of Gimpel?

I’m inclined to think that he does. But then I myself, with my pacifist leanings, am likely to confuse a willingness to be treated as a doormat for a kind of heroism.

Singer’s tale drips with irony. Arguably, much of it lands on Gimpel. Lovable as Gimpel is, just about everything goes wrong for him.

He dies a beggar’s death, pining for the afterlife:

No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world. At the door of the hovel where I lie, there stands the plank on which the dead are taken away. The gravedigger Jew has his spade ready. The grave waits and the worms are hungry; the shrouds are prepared – I carry them in my beggar’s sack. Another schnorrer [beggar, sponger] is waiting to inherit my bed of straw. When the time comes I will go joyfully. Whatever may be there, it will be real, without complication, without ridicule, without deception. God be praised: there even Gimpel cannot be deceived.

Which is paralleled in Babe:

There was a time not so long ago when pigs were afforded no respect, except by other pigs; they lived their whole lives in a cruel and sunless world. In those days pigs believed that the sooner they grew large and fat, the sooner they’d be taken into Pig Paradise, a place so wonderful that no pig had ever thought to come back.

Babe himself, through his good fortune and actions – he learns, by talking to sheep, to herd them – will escape the knife. But pigs generally do not. This is driven home to Babe by a cruel and jealous cat:

[Cat:] “You know, I probably shouldn’t say this, but I’m not sure if you realize how much the other animals are laughing at you for this sheepdog business.”

[Babe:] “Why would they do that?”

“Well, they say that you’ve forgotten that you’re a pig. Isn’t that silly? And they even said that you don’t know what pigs are for.”

“What do you mean, ‘what pigs are for’?”

“You know, why pigs are here.”

“Why are any of us here?”

“Well, the cow’s here to be milked, the dogs are here to help … with the sheep, and I’m here to be beautiful and affectionate. …”

“Yes?”

“The fact is that pigs don’t have a purpose. Just like, ducks don’t have a purpose. … Why do the Bosses keep ducks? To eat them. So why do the Bosses keep a pig? The fact is that animals that don’t seem to have a purpose really do have a purpose. The Bosses have to eat. It’s probably the most noble purpose of all, when you come to think about it.”

“They eat pigs?”

“Pork, they call it. Or bacon. They only call them pigs when they’re alive.”

“But, uh, I’m a sheep pig.”

“[They’re] just playing a little game with you. Believe me, sooner or later, every pig gets eaten. That’s the way the world works. Oh, I haven’t upset you, have I?”

This plunges Babe into despair. But is he sad for himself, or for his race? Does he really expect to be killed – and, even if he does, is that the main cause of his grief, given the expectation of Pig Paradise?

Or does he grieve that his kind is of no value to his Boss – whom he loves – beyond providing material for the crudest exploitation?

Answering these questions requires attending to what lifts Babe from his depression. The farmer (James Cromwell) – strong, silent, singularly inarticulate – nurses him, and brings himself to sing to him:

If I had words

To make a day for you

I’d sing you a morning golden and true

I would make this day last for all time

And fill the night deep in moonshine

That is: If I could tell you, Pig, I’d tell you that your life is dear to me, that you are dear to me alive, alive forever.

That’ll do, Pig

he tells Babe in the end. Well done, good and faithful servant.

For Babe, words worth living for. Babe, the innocent one, as innocent as a babe, his Boss’s dear babe.

What did your mother call you, dear?

a sheepdog asks him.

She called us all “Babe.”

We are all babes; all others are our parents. Babe obtains two adoptive mothers, natural enemies to one another: this sheepdog; and Ma, a sheep.

This is a tale about an unprejudiced heart, and how it changed our valley forever.

It all hangs together, you see.

Have a blessed new year.

Carte blanche

Arguably the best tactical formation: the old 1⁠-⁠4⁠-⁠3⁠-⁠2⁠-⁠3⁠-⁠2.

One could make a case for adding a “9” (false nine) between S and CF who drops back just in front of, or even behind, AM.

It is now fashionable to use ILBs and IRBs (“inverted” left- and right-backs). I don’t see the need; I should think others could cover the space.

Closing credits

Merry Christmas!

Rejoice, rejoice, daughter of Zion,

shout aloud, daughter of Jerusalem;

for see, your king is coming to you,

his cause won, his victory gained,

humble and mounted on an ass,

on a foal, the young of a she-ass.

He shall banish chariots from Ephraim

and war-horses from Jerusalem;

the warrior’s bow shall be banished.

He shall speak peaceably to every nation,

and his rule shall extend from sea to sea,

from the River to the ends of the earth.

Zecharaiah 9:9–10 (The New English Bible – the translation I read this year).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Farewell, for the time being, to my step-grandma, who has gone to live with her daughter in southern Illinois; and to my grandpa (R.I.P.).

“He is not God of the dead but of the living” (Matthew 22:32).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Welcome, Abel Barnaby, my littlest son. How celebrated he is, everywhere we take him.

Daniel and Samuel seem untroubled by him. The cats seem downright unaware of Abel, although Abel himself, so young, sounds like a cat (that’s how I distinguish him in a crowd of children).

Karin said today that she had one aim this year, which was to have this child. Abel, so-called, has been with us a short time. As “Pip,” however, he was ever-present in our talk.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Samuel has begun school spectacularly. We’ve been given to understand that he’s popular – a shock to us. His classmates look out for him. One friend follows him around and pulls his sagging pants up for him.

If Samuel is our introvert, Daniel is our good-natured scene-stealer. He’s the one with whom librarians and store clerks chat.

Winsome or taciturn, whatever you are or do, do it for the Lord.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Sports. Ecuador finished with a great victory that cast a nice glow over a frustrating year. (Indeed, this summer’s Copa América showing was rather good.)

At the club level, Moisés Caicedo and Piero Hincapié proved their worth.

Our Olympians also triumphed.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Politics. Ha!

Exercising. Ha!

Music. The song I listened to the most, by far, was “Style” by Taylor Swift: both versions: hers (re-recorded), and the original with copyright ajeno. I’d often choose “Style” as my lead housecleaning song.

I listened to almost nothing else by Taylor Swift.

Honorable mention: Dettinger.

Viewing. I subscribed to the Criterion Channel.

I’d often fall asleep viewing true crime shows on Tubi. I may write about Australian vs. Canadian crime.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Reading. I joined a club and was forced to read books I’d never choose so that I might force others to read books they’d never choose. This is salutary. Everyone needs reminding that there are other consciousnesses in the universe. “We read to know we’re not alone” (misattributed to C. S. Lewis). More like, we join book clubs to learn that, alas, one is not alone.

That said, what follows has to do with my private reading choices. I read two or more titles by these authors:

• E. M. Forster
• Jon Fosse
• C. S. Lewis
• Nancy Mitford
• Anthony Powell
• Peter Temple
• J. R. R. Tolkien
• Laura Ingalls Wilder

They’re all good authors, but whom you mightn’t’ve read but really should is Mitford. And, for linguistic virtuosity, Temple.

I’m probably the last grownup among my blood relations to have finished reading The Lord of the Rings. I made my first attempt in the fourth grade. That year, my parents bought me an extra birthday gift – a t-shirt – on the condition that I’d finish Tolkien’s series. That albatross has finally been cast off. It was necessary, first, to outgrow the shirt; to obtain the Ph.D. and sire three children; to read through the Bible several times; to read Beowulf, and the eleven Strangers and Brothers novels (for a better feel for Oxbridge). To learn to slog. It was no small victory, gaining the knowledge and courage and endurance to leave the Shire and cross Middle Earth.

Proust is on the docket for 2025, once I’ve finished Powell; after Proust, possibly Trollope or Balzac. But I doubt I’ll ever read The Silmarillion. Too few hobbits; too many elves.

Body-text fonts, pt. 34: Stempel Garamond

(from E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India)

What I really enjoy about Stempel Garamond is that its zero is thickest at the top and bottom ends, rather than at the left and right sides. (This is a feature of the “lining” – i.e., tall or uppercase – zero. The “oldstyle” zero – short or lowercase; in, e.g., “30,” above – is just a thinnish circle.)

It’s unusual for a tall zero to be top-and-bottom heavy.

Cf. the more ordinary tall zero of Adobe Garamond, Stempel Garamond’s plainer descendant.

O Christmas tree

We erected and decorated our waist-high plastic Christmas tree.

Karin was dissatisfied. The tree stank. The cats had peed on it in the storage-room.

So, Karin’s friend, Nora, lent us a taller plastic tree. Samuel and Daniel decorated it.

Almost all the ornaments now hang from the bottom third of that tree.

(Some have been smashed.)

We put gifts under the tree. Samuel has been tearing off the wrappers.

R.I.P. Grandpa

His obituary.

A few labels to identify him by:

• Hoosier farm boy
• educator
• churchman
• “seagoing cowboy”

Re: the last (and most glamorous) label. He transported livestock, in the 1940s, to war-ravaged Greece.

This portrait is from a 2014 “seagoing cowboy” reunion.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

He was best known as a missionary to Ecuador.

He lived in Esmeraldas and evangelized throughout the rustic northwestern provinces. He’d walk many miles from little town to little town.

The church published this condolence:

(The verse is actually Psalm 116:15. Here, in the Reina-Valera translation, estimada – like precious in the KJV and NIV – means costly. Compare: Mucho le cuesta al Señor ver morir a los que lo aman [this translation is Dios Habla Hoy]. The basic idea is the same as in “Jesus wept.”)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

He was the grandparent I knew best … the one near whom I lived longest … and the one who took me with him on several long trips (to Panama and Jamaica, and around Ecuador).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

He was the grandparent who’d discuss literature and movies with me. I’ll dwell on this at some length. Grandpa was a humane man. His Christianity certainly touched everything about him. But his faith wasn’t the only thing that made him humane.

I trust the other tribute-givers to highlight his more overtly spiritual qualities.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

He disagreed – respectfully, if somewhat impishly – with my rather bloodthirsty literary tastes.

Once, having read the Lambs on Shakespeare, I was going on about Macbeth (or whatever). Grandpa was unimpressed.

I think that when Shakespeare makes someone die, it’s because he has no further use for him.

That’s quite a notion to put to a second-grader. I’ve been mulling it over, ever since.

He didn’t care for Agatha Christie, either. The murders were too gleeful.

The detective story that I like best – he meant “A Scandal in Bohemia” – is a sentimental tale, in which the detective falls in love.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

But his was a sin-conscious romanticism. He was keenly attuned to grades of evil and redemption.

I told him, when I was reading Huck Finn, that I imagined Huck’s father to be like the drunkard in Hoosiers.

No, no, much worse, he said.

It was an enlightening correction.

Once, we watched a series of Disney movies together (he was looking after us children while our parents were out of town). He enjoyed the movies’ wit. But, to his own surprise, he was deeply moved by Beauty and the Beast.

I thank you, Father – he prayed with us that night – that you have made it possible for people to change.

He had no use for such movies as Kind Hearts and Coronets, with its casual, cynical violence, or Inherit the Wind, which treats an entire society as contemptibly cartoonish.

Not that he disliked cartoons as such: he relished 1066 and All That, Flannery O’Connor, and Peanuts.

As an adult, I lent him David Michaelis’s biography of Charles Schulz. He returned it with profuse thanks. I enjoyed it very much, he said, that is, until Schulz’s life went off the rails.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I spent college vacations at his house. I’d catch him sneaking into my room, returning furtively borrowed novels by Kenzaburo Oe or J. M. Coetzee. Some he liked, some he didn’t. I could tell what he thought of a novel by how he put it on the shelf.

Of Coetzee’s Michael K, he said: This book describes a redemption that even a severely limited man can attain.

His own daily life was disarmingly simple. I believe he once seriously considered retiring to a trailer house. For lunch, he’d open a can of beans, or he’d take me down the street to Wendy’s, where he was content to eat a baked potato. His love for the underdog was almost fanciful. Hence his delight in such charmers as The Mouse that Roared and – to his family’s considerable amusement – Baby’s Day Out, which he first saw in Ecuador, on a bus. (I’ve already mentioned Hoosiers.)

He also liked novels that told the story of a life (the odd Dickens or George Eliot) or that described rural societies that preceded or coincided with his own (Stowe, Twain, Tarkington, Stratton-Porter, Rawlings; he was raised in Indiana but also spent time, as a youngster, in Florida). I believe his favorite book in Spanish was a rural idyll called El camino – most likely, the one by Miguel Delibes.

He spoke and wrote beautifully. I was in high school when I began, consciously, to pattern my syntax and cadence after his.

If I strain after a turn of phrase, it’s because I merely imitate, all-too-imperfectly, what came naturally to my exemplar.

The same is true of many of his descendants, in their respective pursuits.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

He died on Friday morning, of a heart attack. He’d turned ninety-seven the previous day. His widow, my step-grandma, is my sole remaining grandparent; my grandma died in 1991.

December’s poems

I conclude this year’s poem series

With poems from the Opies

(pp. 19–25)

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Masculine, Feminine, Neuter,

I went for a ride on my scooter,

I bumped into the Queen

And said, Sorry old bean

I forgot to toot-toot on my tooter.

∙∙∙

A bug and a flea

Went out to sea

Upon a reel of cotton;

The flea was drowned

But the bug was found

Biting a lady’s bottom.

∙∙∙

Adam and Eve in the garden

Studying the beauty of nature;

The devil jumped out of a Brussel sprout

And hit Eve in the eye with a tater.

∙∙∙

Julius Caesar,

The Roman geezer,

Squashed his wife with a lemon squeezer.

∙∙∙

The sausage is a cunning bird

With feathers long and wavy;

It swims about the frying pan

And makes its nest in gravy.

∙∙∙

The elephant is a pretty bird,

It flits from bough to bough.

It builds its nest in a rhubarb tree

And whistles like a cow.

∙∙∙

As I was going to school one day to learn my A.B.C.,

I fell into a washing tub and sailed the ocean sea.

There came by a Chinaman who said I was a spy

And if I did not talk to him he’d poke me in the eye.

He tied me to a cabbage stalk

And cut my head with a knife and fork,

I grew so fat that I could not walk

And joined the Chinese army.

The captain’s name was Bango,

Bango was his name,

And he played upon his whiskers

Till the clouds rolled by.

∙∙∙

’Twas in the month of Liverpool

In the city of July,

The snow was raining heavily,

The streets were very dry.

The flowers were sweetly singing,

The birds were in full bloom,

As I went down the cellar

To sweep an upstairs room.

∙∙∙

I went to the pictures tomorrow

I took a front seat at the back,

I fell from the pit to the gallery

And broke a front bone in my back.

A lady she gave me some chocolate,

I ate it and gave it her back.

I phoned for a taxi and walked it,

And that’s why I never came back.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

I learned years ago with Samuel, this track is brilliant for getting babies to sleep.

The cook, the QB, the babe, and their father

We ate dinner at church and everyone got to look at Baby Abel. They sent us home with two trays of lasagna.

Samuel was inspired. During our nap-time, he broke into the fridge and gathered ingredients.

“Today we are making goldenberry lasagna. Fresh and squeezy!”

My subconscious registered this and yanked me out of my slumber. Oh, no, you don’t.

This is what I found:

Ingredients: (a) goldenberries; (b) iced tea.

It could have been worse. It has been worse. Tonight we caught him trying to put something into the oven.

Absolutely not, I told him.

Absolutely yes, he said.

Watching cooking videos with a five-year-old isn’t a good idea.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Right now, I’m watching Monday Night Football, with Eli and Peyton Manning and Bill Belichick. Daniel stands in his diaper in front of the TV and pretends to be the quarterback. He stamps his foot and calls out numbers. One! One! Two! Two! Three! Three!

Abel (cont.)

Hospital pics.

At home. (Fat but pleased.) A shy first meeting of the brothers.

The photostream ends here.

Karin is staying at home with the new child. Today, we all watched Mary Poppins – Abel’s first movie (as it was Daniel’s, as it was Samuel’s).

Abel’s cousins, Ada and George, brought supper.

Of names, etc.

Karin’s colleague: “What’ll you name your baby?”

Karin: “It’s a secret.”

“Another biblical name?”

“Yes.”

“Thomas?”

“No.”

“A name from the Gospels?”

“No, from the Old Testament.”

“Noah?”

“No.”

“Ishmael?”

“No.”

“LOL Cain and Abel ha ha ha ha ha ha …” (leaves).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Our son was born this afternoon. His name is Abel Barnaby.

Likely nicknames: Abe, Abey, Abey Baby, Abey Barney. His pre-natal name, “Pip,” might stick for a while. His cousin, Ada, is fond of that name.

Anyway, there’s no reversing the decision. The paperwork has been submitted.

Samuel was adamant: His little brother was to be called Abel; he was to be born in December, not in late November as his parents hoped. Oh, how glad Sammy was on Dec. 1 when I told him “Pip” definitely wouldn’t be born in November!

Daniel’s feelings are unknown. He’s a cheerful little boy, though, so I am hopeful.

The two big brothers are at home with their grandparents. Abel is with Karin & me in the hospital. The three brothers will meet tomorrow or the next day.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

“Abel” is spelled the same in English and Spanish. It’s a simple and recognizable name, if not a common one.

The namesake came to grief, but he is honored in the Old and New Testaments.

As for “Barnaby” … well, there’s the biblical Barnabas, another fine person; there’s D.C.I. Tom Barnaby of Midsomer Murders; and there’s Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge, which opens with this sentence:

In the year 1775, there stood upon the borders of Epping Forest, at a distance of about twelve miles from London – measuring from the Standard in Cornhill, or rather from the spot on or near to which the Standard used to be in days of yore – a house of public entertainment called the Maypole; which fact was demonstrated to all such travellers as could neither read nor write (and at that time a vast number both of travellers and stay-at-homes were in this condition) by the emblem reared on the roadside over against the house, which, if not of those goodly proportions that Maypoles were wont to present in olden times, was a fair young ash, thirty feet in height, and straight as any arrow that ever English yeoman drew.

Of the titular character, I know nothing; but the sentence is worthy of commemoration.

It’s late and I’m exhausted. Details and pics will follow. Just know that Karin is well; Abel is well; I love him; and he sleeps peacefully and preciously, wrapped up like a burrito.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 81: Midsomer murders: The killings at Badger’s Drift

[D.S. Troy:] “Why would they want to kill her? Unless it was adultery. I suppose it could have been ass bandits.”

[D.C.I. Barnaby:] “What?”

“In the wood.”

“You mean homosexuals, Troy?”

“Well, that’s what I said.”

“You are as politically correct as a Nuremberg rally.”

∙∙∙

[Mrs. Barnaby:] “Was that Sergeant Troy just now?”

[D.C.I. Barnaby:] “Yes.”

“I’d like to meet him one day.”

“No, you wouldn’t.”

Poor Detective Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby (John Nettles) must fight on three fronts: professional, domestic, and, of course, criminal. Bucolic Midsomer County is “the deadliest county in England.” People aren’t just murdered there: they’re speared with pitchforks, beheaded with guillotines and swords, poisoned with mushrooms, locked in freezers, tied down and then bludgeoned with wine bottles launched from catapults. Motives include: incest, ancestral loyalty, class hatred, religious mania, orchid covetousness, and every flavor of vengefulness. One outwardly mild killer, bored with England, murders while hallucinating that he lives in the Old West.

The first episode, “The Killings at Badger’s Drift” (1997), is based on Caroline Graham’s novel. A kindly old spinster, searching the woods for orchids, stumbles upon a person or persons in flagrante delicto. Horrified, she flees … is pursued … is dispatched. Barnaby and young Troy (Daniel Casey) are called to the scene. Troy is eager to conclude that the death was accidental. But a neighbor suspects foul play, and a nosey parker blackmails the killer. Bodies soon pile up.

Barnaby studies a connection with a previous death, the (allegedly) accidental shooting of the first wife of a rich landowner. This odious man is now engaged to his much younger ward (Emily Mortimer), whose casual untruthfulness piques Barnaby’s interest. Her brother, an artist (Jonathan Firth, Colin’s brother), is quarrelsome and perhaps slightly unhinged. But he’s less alarming, and certainly less revolting, than the smarmy undertaker who drives a too-expensive car and lives too harmoniously with his mother. Familial relations in the County are, as a rule, either discordant or perverse.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

It’s with some relief, then, that we also view Tom Barnaby’s utterly bland home life. His daughter, the winsome Cully (Laura Howard), is an aspiring theatre actress who bounces from gig to gig (and, in other episodes, from boyfriend to boyfriend). Tom’s wife, Joyce (Jane Wymark), engages in cultural pursuits of virtually every form. Tom is the casualty of Cully’s and Joyce’s hobbies. In this episode, he complains of the daintiness of Joyce’s cooking: she serves him quail instead of chicken.

Unsurprisingly, then, he relishes eating out of the house – in the pub or police canteen – or would relish it, were he free of that obnoxious greenhorn, D.S. Troy.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Barnaby – English for Barnabas – means something like Son of Encouragement. Grumpy as Tom can be, the name is apt. Barnaby treats suspects with respect, and he gives Troy his due. In time, Troy will earn Barnaby’s trust – and a promotion to Detective Inspector, away from Midsomer County.

Other young sergeants will come and go. (How many of them will fall for Cully?) Tom and Joyce will age into curmudgeonliness. After thirteen seasons, Tom will retire; John, his cousin, will replace him as Detective Chief Inspector. John’s family will replace Cully and Joyce. The parade of sergeants will continue. (Medical examiners, too.)

The body count will rise.

The show has now aired for twenty-four seasons and in twenty-seven different years, lampooning/​celebrating every English trope under the sun. Boys’ schools? Check. Pagan ritual? Check. C. of E. bellringing and grave-tending? Check. River punting? Racehorse breeding? Pub-keeping? Landscape painting? Check.

There’s the occasional sequence in Wales or on the Continent, but the scenery is overwhelmingly Southern English. Picture-postcard settings are preferred. (In the show’s first scene, the doomed spinster happily pedals by a sign commemorating Badger’s Drift’s “best kept village” status.)

Off-camera, cast and crew would rise early and ride trains to far-flung locations. Fed-up regulars would leave the show to escape the grind.

Meanwhile, the nation’s best actors would take turns as guests. Anna Massey, Toby Jones, Joss Ackland, Olivia Colman, agèd Bond girls, members of the sprawling Fox family: all lent their talents to this show, this national institution.

Midsomer Murders is a showcase for cottages and pubs and manors, for lawns and fields and forests, for customs respectable and insane; but also for actors trained in old-fashioned, theatrical, British craft.

Meritocracy isn’t a realistic aspiration

How are penalty takers selected? Conversion rate can’t be the whole story. Messi and Cristiano, who miss often enough, will always be their teams’ first-choice shooters.

We Ecuadorians are no wiser. We keep sending Enner to the spot. Sheer sentimentality, I suspect. It’s been years since he dispatched cleanly.

Mbappé and Salah missed penalty kicks this afternoon for Madrid and Liverpool. The commentators pretended to be surprised. Why? I’ve seen other horrendous misses by both players; everyone has.

Liverpool’s best taker by far, Mac Allister, was playing brilliantly and had already scored. He wasn’t considered for the penalty.

Salah is a good shooter, but Mac Allister is near-automatic.

I’d’ve assigned Madrid’s kick to Lucas Vázquez, another inspired player (he’d won the foul). He routinely delivers in the clutch. The weedy fellow has won five Champions Leagues, for goodness’s sake.

It’s his utter professionalism – in addition, perhaps, to his seniority and nationality – that earns Vázquez the captaincy when he comes off the bench. (Carvajal is injured.)

Anyway, I wouldn’t let Mbappé, that bundle of nerves, near the spot – not with the game on the line.

Ancelotti is no fool. His specialty is “team chemistry.” Stock me with talent, no matter how egotistical, he says, and I’ll combine the elements so they don’t clash. But his wizardry has limits. Madrid’s vaunted strikers can’t all function at once – not yet, anyway. Mbappé, the newcomer, is dead weight. His confidence has plummeted.

I believe that it was for this reason – or, perhaps, to prevent a tantrum or sulk – that Ancelotti allowed Mbappé to take the penalty. Not to maximize the likelihood of immediate success, but to promote the squad’s long-term success.

Even so, what I saw today, and have seen in many other games, shows that pro sport, so often celebrated for meritocratic purity, is in fact far from pure. If cutthroat Madrid and stats-savvy Liverpool defer to their Big Cheeses in big games, what are the prospects for meritocracy in a nation as a whole?

Painful anticipation

Not nice for expectant dads, really not nice for expectant moms: prodromal labor.

When Karin’s contractions started, I cleaned the house and packed supplies; I thought we’d soon leave for the hospital. Well, days have elapsed. We’re still at home. The house is a mess, again, and I’m running out of clothes.

We went to church and received diapers, gift cards, and well-wishes. The pastor & his wife put out a tray of delicious Walmart cupcakes in our honor. Few adult congregants partook. Those who did, were shy to. The pastor, bless him, has slimmed down this year, conspicuously enough that he must work the theme into his sermons. Gluttony is as sinful as lying, he said last week.

Well, I suppose it is. And so this morning our church stood around the cupcake table, not eating, remarking that sugar fuels cancer.

A few of us ate with gusto. The frosting turned our lips and teeth blue.

Colombia 0, Ecuador 1

I recant.

We are AWESOME.

This is the best goal that Enner has scored for Ecuador.

We made a very good Colombian team look ordinary. We did it with the ball, the first half-hour – and without it the last hour, sans one player.

The Colombians created opportunities; but it was evident, early on, that they were going to have “one of those nights.” I sat back and watched them miss their tap-ins, point-blank shots, potshots … every kind of shot.

(I prayerfully sat back.)

We’ve conceded just four goals in twelve games.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Karin and Samuel are ill. Daniel and “Pip” and I aren’t – yet.

The first snow fell last night. It’s time to start my winter reading:

• Dostoevsky, various
• Kafka, The Castle
• Jack London, various
• Christiane Ritter, A Woman in the Polar Night

I already have begun reading The Long Winter from the “Little House” series. The Ingallses endure a South Dakotan blizzard … in October.

Body-text fonts, pt. 33: Century Old Style

The “Century” fonts – ITC Century, Century Expanded, Century Old Style, Century Schoolbook, etc. – aren’t as similar as one would expect. This is explained by font-writer Allan Haley:

Century Old Style (this month’s fêted font)

has more character and personality than the other Century designs. It is the red-headed, freckle-faced member of the family.

And why is that?

Not really an Old Style design [the other “Century” fonts aren’t, either], … it does have … angled serifs in the lowercase and a flavor of Old Style traits.

Ah, yes, I see what Halley means. The font is hardly Centaurish (for instance), but it’s also not abjectly un-Venetian.

Also notable is Century Old Style’s wonky uppercase “C.”

The font’s general plainness and its quirks ensure that it

almost cannot be used in an inappropriate application, and it virtually cannot be overused. Where other typefaces, which have a similar range of abilities, can become commonplace or unexciting (sort of typographic vanilla), Century Old Style maintains a personality and a presence (more like French vanilla).

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

Some pulpy Vintage Black Lizard crime novels (e.g., by Jim Thompson) are set in Century Old Style. Alas, I can’t find a worthy specimen to post here.

Instead, here is a page from a book of old British commercial art. (The author is Robert Opie, the son of those marvelous antiquarians, Iona & Peter.)

Enlarge, please.

And here is a page from a children’s bible.

Different companies issue darker and lighter versions of Century Old Style. I’m partial to this new (absolutely free!) version. Weary of Times New Roman? Use this instead.

Ecuador 4, Bolivia 0

With an eye on their upcoming home match against Paraguay, the Bolivians rested almost all of their starters. They brought a team of youngsters to Ecuador.

One of them committed an atrocious handball in the penalty box.

Not a good strategy in the Era of VAR.

Red card.

Penalty kick converted – barely – by Enner Valencia … who, two minutes later, assisted Gonzalo Plata.

Game over.

This was a cakewalk for us. I’ve never seen a game handed over quite so blatantly.

“Not a real game,” said the Peruvians who narrated my broadcast. I agree.

I had prayed for an anxiety-free contest. Boy, wasn’t it ever. It was dull.

After the fourth goal, and with half an hour remaining, we brought on a handful of subs who ran around like headless chickens, trying to score. They didn’t.

It could have been five, six, seven goals.

We’ve played eleven games; scored only ten goals (four of them last night); stayed comfortably within the qualification zone. Failed to inspire. I’ve yet to enjoy any of our matches. Our defenders are superb. Our attackers are bottomless wells of disappointment. The coaches tried too hard to defend early in the cycle, and we never got into a goalscoring groove.

We’ll play in Colombia on Tuesday. That might be our hardest remaining contest.

“Pip” flips

“Pip” is upside-down, so that’s a relief.

Apparently, he has lots of hair. The latest ultrasound even showed his eyelashes.

Now, we wait. …

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

R.I.P. our wonderful church sister, Donna – another driving force behind our adult Sunday School. She was ninety-two and quite spry, physically and mentally, until this year.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Tomorrow, in Guayaquil, Ecuador will play a crucial World Cup qualifier against Bolivia. We’re shorthanded; the Bolivians, more so.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Lest I neglect them – and before they lose to 2nd-ranked Ohio State – the 10–0 Indiana Hoosiers are ranked 5th in the land, in football. They lead the conference. They’ve brutalized every foe but one (the defending national champs).

Their stadium is packed every week. Their uniforms are simple and good.

I’m glad.

But it is a sign of the Apocalypse.

Nesting-time

From a friend’s Facebook page:

Yeah, well, Trump and Vance reside in counties that went to Harris. So there. 👅

Life goes on. “Pip” is due to be born in three-and-a-half weeks. Fellow churchgoers have been giving diapers and other tokens. At home, the task of the season – instinctive for Karin, imperative for me – is “nesting,” i.e. reconfiguring one’s living quarters for the baby. The most urgent time for this appears to be 10:00 or 11:00 p.m.

Anyway, that’s why I didn’t post last night – I was busy “nesting.”

Physically, things are progressing well, except that “Pip” still needs to flip upside-down. Karin lays frozen veggies on herself to goad him.

My take

Who do you want?

Barabbas!

(24 Hour Party People)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Happy birthday, yesterday, to me. I watched Liverpool torch Leverkusen. Guy Fawkes fireworks exploded all game long. People like that sort of thing, you know?

My mother was unwell but still brought me a cake.

The weather was how I prefer it. At night, I put on I Know Where I’m Going! for more of the same. The boys wouldn’t let me finish it.

November’s poem

“The Nomad Harvesters,” by Marie De L. Welch:

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

The nomads had been the followers of flocks and herds,

Or the wilder men, the hunters, the raiders.

The harvesters had been the men of homes.

But ours is a land of nomad harvesters.

They till no ground, take no rest, are homed nowhere.

Travel with the warmth, rest in the warmth never;

Pick lettuce in the green season in the flats by the sea.

Lean, follow the ripening, homeless, send the harvest home;

Pick cherries in the amber vallies in tenderest summer.

Rest nowhere, share in no harvest;

Pick grapes in the red vineyards in the low blue hills.

Camp in the ditches at the end of beauty.

They are a great band, they move in thousands;

Move and pause and move on.

They turn to the ripening, follow the peaks of seasons,

Gather the fruit and leave it and move on.

Ours is a land of nomad harvesters,

Men of no root, no ground, no house, no rest;

They follow the ripening, gather the ripeness,

Rest never, ripen never,

Move and pause and move on.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

I came by this in Carey McWilliams’s book, Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 80: Cure

I’ve been stumbling across references to mesmerism – in Poe, in William James. Even this month’s E. M. Forster reading, Maurice, touches on hypnotism, mesmerism’s better-regarded cousin.

This is the key difference between the practices, as I understand them. Hypnotism, to be effective, must be welcomed – or at least not resisted – by the subject. In contrast, mesmerism, due to its eerie basis in “animal magnetism,” is supposed to influence even those who resist.

Mesmerism once was widely feared. After the French Revolution,

major politicians and people in power were accused by radicals of practising animal magnetism on the general population.

In his article “Under the Influence: Mesmerism in England,” Roy Porter notes that James Tilly Matthews suggested that the French were infiltrating England via animal magnetism. Matthews believed that “magnetic spies” would invade England and bring it under subjection by transmitting waves of animal magnetism to subdue the government and people. Such an invasion from foreign influences was perceived as a radical threat.

Not everyone objected to being mesmerized. Desperate people welcomed it as a cure. Scientists lent it credibility.

No longer. Now it belongs to history – and to the horror genre.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The distinction between mesmerism and hypnotism is blurred in the thriller Cure (1997). Subjects are induced to commit murders they wouldn’t ordinarily commit. The question is whether they murder willingly.

How different, really, are you and I from the “monsters” we condemn? This is the theme of many policing stories, and of such cringe-thrillers as Oldboy. Cure belongs to both traditions.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Bizarre killings plague Japan. The victims are slashed with similar markings. Each killing is done by a different person.

Each killer immediately and remorsefully confesses and is taken into custody. Each killer had never done violence before. Each is baffled.

So are the lead detective, Takabe, and Sakuma, the psychologist he consults.

Even if you manage to hypnotize someone, you can’t change their basic moral sense. A person who thinks murder is evil won’t kill anyone under hypnotic suggestion.

So says Sakuma, a rather naïve figure. His manner conveys that this is the scientific orthodoxy. I don’t know if it is, but the assertion, in this unqualified form, is doubtful. People murder deliberately while believing that murder is wrong; if people act wrongly while aware of their moral beliefs – if their urges aren’t stopped by the safeguard of their own conscious disapproval – why wouldn’t they acquiesce to a hypnotist’s suggestion?

Sakuma’s personal advice to Takabe is better. Don’t let the investigation consume you, he urges; look after yourself. Not all is well with Takabe, whose wife is psychologically disturbed. His own smooth façade has started to crack.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The investigators learn that a young drifter has been seen near every crime. They track him down. He appears to have severe amnesia.

The scenes with the drifter are, to me, the movie’s most absorbing ones. Do-gooders take him in, try to help him. Police question him. Or, rather, he questions his questioners. Where am I? Who am I? Then, after a half-dozen questions, the sequence resets: Where am I? The drifter is quiet, laconic, apparently uninterested. His failure to supply answers suggests insolence as much as memory loss. As his questioners’ frustration mounts, he imposes his own rhythm on the interrogations. Then, he flips the questions back on the questioners. Who are you? He asks about their lives, their homes. He plants suggestions. In short, he hypnotizes, or mesmerizes. I don’t know how realistic this is. I’ve not seen conversations like this in life, or in any movie. But they’re fascinating; their rhythm is … hypnotic. They’re worth the price of admission.

There are dreamlike locations, too: an empty, wintry beach; an abandoned, old, wooden dormitory; the bowels of hospitals and prisons. There are hallucinatory sequences (the halluciations are Takabe’s).

Here is a long video about Cure’s unsettling techniques – an exposition of how movies use ordinary sights and sounds to subtly re-tune our emotions.

Don’t watch it now if you plan to see this movie; do if you don’t.

Freddie Freeman, pt. 2

John-Paul: “Children, what should I blog about?”

Samuel: “Blog that we’re getting a new brother – ‘Pip’.”

A heartwarming answer.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Let us again salute Freddie Freeman, who has homered in every game of this World Series. (As I type, it’s the third inning of Game 3.)

Freeman looks just like Mike, my next-door neighbor. Talks like him, too.

I mentioned it.

“It’s been pointed out before,” Mike said. “It’d be nice to be him.”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Is it strange that I want to read a 900+ pp. textbook of British criminal law?

Is my anglophilia/​crime lit appetite out of control?

Today I learned of Lon Fuller’s “speluncean explorers” (1949), which I am a little ashamed not to have come across before. I had read about R v Dudley and Stephens (1884) and Philippa Foot’s “fat man stuck in the cave mouth” (1967), a sort of Lon-Fuller-Meets-Winnie-the-Pooh scenario (see p. 7; Foot says the case is “well known to philosophers,” although I confess I don’t know who previously discussed it).

Similar cases involve the shipwrecked guys who fight over a plank; and, in Candide, James the Anabaptist, whose plight, perhaps not interesting to the theorist, is (I hope) especially poignant to the person on the street.

The sports

You’ll have to enlarge this to read it.

I would choose the sushi, the ham-and-cheese pizza, the pasta salad, the Nutella sandwich, the bologna-and-chorizo sandwich, and the fruit.

(I doubt the authenticity of this. Was there no second fullback?)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

It’s time for my annual baseball peek: Dodgers vs. Yankees, World Series Game 1. No runs yet. I’ll watch until the Fox Sports app’s free preview expires. We need a TV antenna. … The celebs are out in droves. … It’s nice to see such plain uniforms on both teams. I appreciate the subtle palm trees on the Dodgers’ socks. … Shohei Ohtani sure is … tall. … I like it that so many people in Japan are watching the Dodgers at 9:00am.

Karin: “Sports ads are garbage.”

First run scored: triple, then sacrifice fly. Dude wore a mitten to slide home hand-first. I’d never seen that.

Update: First walk-off grand slam in World Series history:

He is a “sixth-generation Salvationist” (Wikipedia; cf. the source article).

Happy birthday to Samuel

He turns five tomorrow. Quite a ritual awaits him at school. He’s to carry a globe around the classroom five times while his teacher and classmates sing to him and eat granola bars. Photos of his short life will be displayed.

Karin & I worry about the singing, which Samuel doesn’t always take to; but we’ve drilled the expectation into him, and he bears it stoically.

He now seems to like school. He was downright excited at the bus stop this morning after what must have been a too-long Fall Break.

(The driver took the wrong street but quickly turned around and came back for Samuel.)

He’s losing various perks: the WIC vegetables, the books from Dolly Parton, the visits from privately funded social workers. But he wouldn’t eat the vegetables, anyway; and he continues to peruse the books that arrive for Daniel.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I ought to mention, today I saw one of the brightest “firework displays” of my lifetime: Madrid’s and Dortmund’s rehash of last season’s Champions League final. I have no love for Madrid, but my goodness, what talent, what tremendous self-belief. Pedigree is real.

Body-text fonts, pt. 32: Caslon 224

Benguiat is a fine choice for horror movie opening titles – but not for body text.

Well, what other fonts did Ed Benguiat make?

Hmmm … ah, yes, Caslon 224. Arguably not for body text, either. But I’ve seen it used in this nice little book, Tolkien’s Ordinary Virtues.

A bit eye-watering due to the very high contrast between thickest and thinnest strokes. But – allowing generous spacing between lines – not bad.

Really, it’s a font for benign fairy tales. Hence its aptness for a Tolkien-inspired, quasi-devotional book.

P.S. Cheaper and less eccentric (once certain ligatures have been disabled) is this obscure Serbian font, Bajka. It creates a similar fairy-tale effect.

Movies for Halloween

Catching up on unseen horror movies.

(1) Karin has a friend who arranges “watch parties.” Everyone stays at home, watches simultaneously, and exchanges text messages.

Are they good movies? They are not.

How can a person love camp to the exclusion of all else? How does she persuade family and friends to watch with her, month after month, year after year? It boggles the mind.

Two sub-genres of camp are represented at these parties: Hallmark and horror. ’Tis the season for horror. (Hallmark is for Christmastime.)

I relate this, not to complain, but to admit that last week’s selection was much better than usual. I’m referring to Dario Argento’s Phenomena (1985). (Philomena, I kept wanting to call it.) It’s set in a girls’ boarding school in the Swiss Alps. Jennifer Connolly and other girls climb out of dormitory windows and wander through forests, at night. Some girls are murdered.

Then there’s the little matter of Connolly’s ability to communicate with insects.

Baddie going to slice you open? Just summon a swarm of flies to protect you.

And there’s a hyper-intelligent monkey. And there are turns by Patrick Bauchau and Donald Pleasance.

This is the second of Argento’s movies I’ve seen. Suspiria (1977), an earlier “watch party” selection, was much worse. Karin’s friend loved Phenomena so much, she was ready to watch it again the next day. I might choose to watch it again on an airplane, or in prison.

(2) Midsommar (2019) is a tedious Wicker Man rehash with an awesome performance by Florence Pugh.

It’s sometimes remarked that the character of Hamlet is much too splendid for the rest of the play. Something like this can be said of Midsommar. What if Ophelia (not Hamlet), inarticulate but facially and gesturally exquisite, were to visit a savage (Swedish!) tribe? What if her companions – one of them, her loutish boyfriend – were a bunch of Rozencrantzes and Guildensterns?

That’s what Midsommar is.

It also must be said that the opening scenes, which involve a murder-suicide, are genuinely wrenching. Everything turns silly after that.

Of toilets

The British famously named one of their scientific boats Boaty McBoatface; in the same spirit, I hereby christen our new toilet Flushton McFlushface – “Flushy,” for short. (Karin’s dad kindly installed it yesterday.)

“Flushy” resided some days in our parlor, inside a big box, and became like a piece of furniture to us – which, I suppose, is what it is. Samuel and Daniel played upon, and inside, the box.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The Middle Ages weren’t always so-called. Likewise, our old toilet, previously unnamed, is now “Not Quite Flushy” because of its position in the History of Toilets – and because of its chief defect.

We carried it out to the front porch where, due to rain, churchgoing (ours, not the toilet’s), etc., it has remained. With luck, it’ll be immortalized by Google Street View. This afternoon it toppled onto its side. I don’t know if it was pushed by wind, urchins, or stray cats; or if a part of it simply crumbled.

I intend to break it into smaller pieces with a hammer, to fit it into the trash.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Enough of toilets. For the second half of my reading year I’m plotting a march through Dostoevsky. Curious thing. His canon is crowned by the “five major novels.” Russians list them differently than do English speakers. Russians include The Adolescent; English speakers typically don’t. They might include Notes from the Underground (a novella) or reduce the list to four. It’s not as egregious as, e.g., Oregon’s having become the best college football team in the Midwest’s 18-team Big Ten Conference; but it’s gerrymandered, all right.

Anyway, I plan to read Notes, the Russians’ “five,” and probably The Double and The Gambler; so, either way, I’m covered.

P.S. See this useful webpage re: translations.

October’s poem

Ecuador 0, Paraguay 0.

More futility.

The ref and the VAR failed to decree a penalty kick for us.

Such mistakes happen less often in these days of video review. I’ll listen when CONMEBOL publishes the booth officials’ audio.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

A rather chilling poem by John Keats:

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

This living hand, now warm and capable

Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold

And in the icy silence of the tomb,

So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights

That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood

So in my veins red life might stream again,

And thou be conscience-calm’d – see here it is –

I hold it towards you.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Netflix just released a new Unsolved Mysteries season. One episode shows Britons talking with the dead. These spiritualists, with their fancy electronics designed for listening to bat-calls, first seem nutty … and then, well, they record some strange things.

Most remarkable, to me, is one spiritualist’s less-than-admiring verdict of another: “He’s possessed.”

You’d think they would have considered that risk from the beginning.

Too much

Reading:

• Dante Alighieri, Paradiso (yes, still)
• Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty
• **Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked this Way Comes
• E. H. Carr, What Is History?
• *Erskine Childers, The Riddle of the Sands
• John Cottingham, ed., Western Philosophy (this anthology is terrific; if you only ever read one philosophy book all the way through, let it be this one)
• René Descartes, Discourse on the Method
• ***Charles Dickens, Hard Times
• G. R. Elton, The Practice of History
• E. M. Forster, Maurice
• **Elizabeth Gaskell, Gothic Tales
• Homer, Odyssey (this month’s fantasy book)
• Anne Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario
• C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy
• The New English Bible, M’Cheyne schedule (Kings, Paul, Psalms, Ezekiel)
• Anthony Powell, The Kindly Ones (bk. 6 of A Dance to the Music of Time)
• Sally Rooney, Intermezzo (a library copy, barely begun; time is running out)
• **The Marquis de Sade, Justine, a.k.a. The Misfortunes of Virtue (so far, basically Candide)
• Peter Temple, Truth
• Laura Ingalls Wilder, By the Shores of Silver Lake (bk. 5 of the Little House series)
• Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

Good grief.

* = for fall-time
** = for Halloween-time
*** = “for relaxing times”

My (cat) lady love

Happy birthday to Karin. I found an age-appropriate gift at Goodwill: a volume of James Herriot’s Cat Stories (large-print).

We celebrated at a Mexican ice-cream shop. Nachos, jalapeños, elotes, tortas, paletas, and ice-cream, washed down with mineral water: What could be better?

The shop’s Instagram page has a photo of ice-cream with spicy Cheetos in it.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 79: Drifting clouds

“Trams in Helsinki” (Wikipedia).

Things go from bad to worse in Aki Kaurismäki’s “proletariat” trilogy (1986–1990). Owners oppress proles. Proles oppress other proles; they take their misery out on each other.

The “Finland” trilogy, which Drifting Clouds (1996) inaugurates, is happier. Things go from lousy to dire … to hopeful. Most of the characters aren’t vile. They’re downtrodden, lonely souls; but they’re downtrodden and lonely in laconic solidarity with each other.

Maybe Kaurismäki once pined for revolution. Maybe that idealism gave way to bitterness when the requisite solidarity never materialized. Maybe that’s what fuels the rage of, e.g., The Match Factory Girl.

Drifting Clouds isn’t revolutionary. All it asks for is ordinary decency. Politically, it’s an about-face for Kaurismäki: away from vengeance, toward fellow-feeling and dutiful citizenship – even under capitalism.

Not that oppression has ceased in Drifting Clouds. The government cruelly cuts jobs. Big chains drive small restaurants out of business. Employers refuse to employ the un-networked. Banks refuse to lend to the poor. Casinos prey on the desperate. Gangsters swindle and threaten, and then carry out their threats.

But the victims are kinder to each other. That’s the difference. Some of the capitalists and bureaucrats are decent, too.

At the movie’s center is a touching marriage. Lauri (Kari Käänänen) and Ilona (Kaurismäki’s favorite actress, the remarkable Kati Ouitinen) get by via the “rent-to-own” system. Their television, sofa, and bookcase will require years of paying off; once the bookcase is paid for, they’ll be able to start buying books. Then they lose their jobs. They drink, they despair, but they keep going. They’ve already been through the wringer. They got married because they got pregnant. The child has been dead for years.

There are no other children in the movie. It’s a society of oldsters. Even the young adults seem old. Ilona works at a restaurant that is going broke because the aging patrons can no longer drink as much as they used to.

That sort of irony – heavy drinkers who can no longer drink; a child-centered, childless marriage; bookless bookcases – comes up again and again.

The restaurant – “Dubrovnik,” named for an Eastern European equivalent of Palm Beach – goes under. It’s a tragedy for the staff, yes. But the moment is marked by humanity. The owner does what she can for her workers. And, on the last night, clients come dressed up to pay their respects. They give away flowers. It’s funereal, dignified, and moving.

Lauri loses his job driving a tram. I have to eliminate four jobs, the supervisor tells his drivers. I’m not going to decide. I’ll let the cards do it. Lauri draws a low card. It seems heartless. Why not let him stay on the basis of seniority, or merit? But I wonder if the Finns see it differently. The card-lottery says: Your differences don’t matter. You are all basically equal. You each get an equal chance. Maybe deciding like this helps everybody to get along.

Earlier, I mentioned laconic solidarity. It matters that these are people of few words. One character is a drunk. His friends take him to rehab. When he’s better, he puts on his suit to leave, and his friends arrive to bring him home. They all walk out together without saying a word. Keeping quiet preserves everyone’s dignity and makes it easier to simply do the right thing.

It also makes the movie very funny. There’s something hilarious and winsome about the quiet acceptance of disaster. Who wants a society of whiners? Complaining isn’t endearing; petulance is poison. Much better to live as the Finns do.

In reality, of course, even Finns complain. We all do it. Drifting Clouds is an idealization, then. One comes away thinking, I wish I could bear hardship like that.

People suffer. We see it in their faces. We admire them for suffering quietly. We do what we can for them.

The Finns seem to have become a caring people; maybe they always had it in them. The state now famously encourages and heavily subsidizes child-rearing. Is it a last-ditch effort to escape always being a society of down-and-outs? I don’t know. I do know that today’s policies would have made all the difference to Lauri and Ilona, who can’t afford another child because they can’t even afford books for their rent-to-own bookcase.

P.S. A word on the director’s style, which is instantly recognizable. The action is carefully measured. In contrast, the physical elements are colorful, strikingly arranged, and witty. If the movie were a painting, it’d be a Baltic American Gothic … inside the Nighthawks diner. There are long scenes in which characters listen while live musicians play old pop dirges. I wonder how much of this was borrowed by Wes Anderson, who generates an entirely different – and, to my mind, obnoxious and forced – effect, all too cheery and precious. Closer in spirit to Kaurismäki is Terry Zwigoff (e.g., Ghost World). But his is not a solidaritous impulse. His heroes are irredeemable, unapologetic outcasts. They may be right, they may be noble, but they don’t make society better.