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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”)

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.