1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 86: The sweet hereafter

The spiderbitten little girl peers up at her father as he rides with her to the hospital. With one hand, he calms her; with the other, he grasps a knife to cut her throat that she might breathe, that he might not lose her. The girl survives. She grows up and addicts herself to drugs. Her father effectively loses her anyway. He’d once hoped for happiness with his daughter (and with her mother, from whom he also is estranged).

He thinks of the girl as he travels to a remote British Columbian town. A lawyer, he is recruiting plaintiffs for a class-action suit regarding a deadly schoolbus accident. Courting each household in turn, he trots out tired arguments for holding someone accountable, preferably a deep-pocketed entity, a municipality or a corporation rather than an individual. The more nebulous the scapegoat, the more eagerly the victims’ parents join the suit. They’re angry at a universe that has frustrated their expectations for their children, for themselves. (Just one parent resists this way of thinking. He already has had to grieve for a dead wife.)

Movies about grief are the hardest to watch. This is a hard movie. There are passages of startling beauty – flashbacks. They are not comforting. The camera hovers over wintry mountains and rivers, tracking the school bus as it wends toward disaster. Children play. They sleep. A teenager sings sweetly. The memory of these things is not sweet. All is embittered by the knowledge of how these lives will end.

The most piteous character is the lawyer (Ian Holm). The dark implication of his story, if I interpret it correctly, is that losing one’s children is the norm. They needn’t die; alienation suffices. But then, who’ll pay? Whoever is left to pay. Spouses. Neighbors. One’s town. Those with whom one does business. Anyone. The universe. Harboring vengeful thoughts, one becomes the prey of those who traffic in vengeance. The traffickers themselves are in vengeance’s thrall. This is this lawyer’s affliction.

The movie doesn’t object to vengeance as such. One character obtains it, and perhaps rightly: the teenager who sings so sweetly. The actress, Sarah Polley, performs a remarkable about-face. She is winsome, then ice-cold.

Maimed but not killed in the accident, this girl obtains new clarity about the false hope and love that her father (Tom McCamus) instilled in her. She avenges herself on him – and on the town. Arguably, her victims deserve their punishment. We have seen the town’s loyal spouses and its cheats, its wonderful parents and its abusers, equally bent out of shape by grief, equally desirous to inflict damage on third parties. One suspects that they grieve as much for their own frustrated ambitions as for the loss of their children. He would have been a good man, one townsperson, a sympathetic figure, says of a particular dead boy. Maybe so, but this child’s goodness, his special worth to others, is beside the point. The death of the unattractive “slow” boy is just as grievous.

Grief’s piteous distortions on the mind were previously studied in director Atom Egoyan’s great Exotica (1994). The Sweet Hereafter (1997) is interested in these, and in communal distortions. The movie quotes Robert Browning’s “Pied Piper,” in which a selfish town’s children are lured away, leaving the adults bereft. The poem’s significance for the movie is a complicated question. (Egoyan adds lines of his own.) But one clue is that it’s a poem about a community, not just one parent or family. One’s children, one’s hopes, even one’s grief – these things are not one’s exclusive property. Everyone participates.

The sports

Barcelona’s manager, Segundo Alejandro Castillo, preached while riding a bus in Guayaquil:

I guess the city buses have TV now.

The other Barça beat Madrid in the Copa del Rey final, a thrilling foulfest. Just before the game ended, angry Madrid players left the bench, ran onto the field, and pelted the referee with ice chips.

Twenty minutes of highlights:

One of those perfunctory blog entries I warned about

Indifferent to the NFL draft, I still couldn’t help wondering: Where does the name “Shedeur” come from? (As in: Shedeur Sanders, Deion’s son.)

By coincidence, I found out. It’s a Hebrew name. Numbers 1:5 identifies Shedeur as the father of Elizur, who was a leader of the Reubenites.

Now I know.

Body-text fonts, pt. 38: Pilgrim

R.I.P. the Pope.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

This month’s typeface, the designing of which was begun but not completed by Eric Gill, is one of my favorites. Like Ehrhardt and Plantin, it was a common British choice for typesetting paperbacks during the ’fifties, ’sixties, ’seventies, and ’eighties.

Good times!

Then Pilgrim fell into disuse because of the eclipse of metal type. Its decline made it apt for fancy “retro” productions.

It used to grace the cheap stuff. I assume that its name was meant to evoke the oft-reprinted Pilgrim’s Progress.

Incidentally, if you want to know what fonts are especially good at small sizes on cheap paper, compare reprints of The Lord of the Rings. (Don’t look at bibles; too many are incompetently produced.)

I wish Pilgrim would come back into vogue.

A good digital interpretation is Canada Type’s Bunyan Pro. See this PDF for samples, including a short essay on the suitability of Gill’s fonts for body text.

Arendt, pt. 3

Perhaps Origins is just so huge, so comprehensive, that no matter what travesty might occur nowadays, it will have been foreshadowed in that book’s pages.

(I suspect that this very nearly is the case regarding some other interminable writings, e.g. Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.)

Today’s historical parallel is with France’s notorious Dreyfus Affair, discussed in Origins, ch. 4. A mostly ordinary man – a member of an ethnic minority group – is shipped away and imprisoned. Probably, he is innocent; certainly, he is deprived of his basic procedural rights. His imprisoners, caught out, refuse to rectify their mistake. The incident divides society. One faction supports the prisoner. (If his rights are so egregiously disregarded, why trust the state to uphold others’ rights?) The other faction supports his captors. (Who’ll protect the nation if the captors lose face?)

The current travesty is less awful than the Dreyfus Affair in two ways: many politicians and ordinary people already support Kilmar Armando Ábrego García, and judges already have insisted on due process. Whether the righteous prevail remains to be seen. (And if you don’t know which side is behaving righteously, see this.) If the righteous do prevail, this item by Judge Harvie Wilkinson, a Reagan appointee, ought to become a classic. It was written for posterity. It will be anthologized. If highschoolers can still read, they will be made to read it. (A PDF is here.)

See, also:

France and the Dreyfus Affair: A Brief Documentary History

Prisoner of Honor (1991; dir. Ken Russell; feat. Richard Dreyfuss)

An Officer and a Spy (2019; orig. J’accuse; dir. Roman Polanski; feat. Jean Dujardin)

Reading report

My reading year concludes on the 30th. Or, rather, on the 1st (a few years ago, I decided I could have a “day of grace”).

Books to finish (I’m behind):

• Christie, Towards Zero, which I’m rereading because there’s a new TV miniseries
• Forster, The Eternal Moment and Other Stories
• Garner, The Stone Book Quartet – this month’s “fantasy” choice: much less fantastical than I was led to believe, but no worse for that
• Dante, Paradiso, which I should have finished years ago
• Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, for the reading group
• Homer, Odyssey, last month’s “fantasy” choice – and the preceding month’s, and the preceding month’s. … It’s not that I don’t like it – it’s great – I just keep switching, mid-month, to other fantasy books
• O’Brien, The Third Policeman, which I should have finished years ago; also fantastical; also brilliant (a book’s quality is no guarantee that I’ll finish it promptly)
• Powell, Temporary Kings and Hearing Secret Harmonies, the last two books of A Dance to the Music of Time (a “warm-up” for reading Proust next year)
• Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth, a “warm-up” (pun intended) for next year’s “weather disaster” reading

I’m reading philosophy but won’t finish any titles by the end of the month. (Don’t think I’m neglecting my field.)

Anyway, if certain blog entries strike you as perfunctory, you can guess what is occupying me instead. (Actually, I might be brushing up on titles by Agatha Christie, typing them out for this quiz. I know all the titles but have trouble recalling them in one sitting. Once, I remembered all of them except [a] the novel I’d just finished and [b] And Then There Were None.)

I was finishing books at a regular clip until December, and then Abel was born.

April’s poem

… is Boney M.’s “Rasputin.”

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

There lived a certain man in Russia long ago

He was big and strong, in his eyes a flaming glow

Most people looked at him with terror and with fear

But to Moscow chicks, he was such a lovely dear

He could preach the Bible like a preacher

Full of ecstacy and fire

But he also was the kind of teacher

Women would desire

Ra, ra, Rasputin

Lover of the Russian Queen

There was a cat that really was gone

Ra, ra, Rasputin

Russia’s greatest love machine

It was a shame how he carried on

He ruled the Russian land (and never mind the Tsar)

But the kasachok he danced really wunderbar

In all affairs of state, he was the man to please

But he was real great when he had a girl to squeeze

For the Queen, he was no wheeler-dealer

Though she’d heard the things he’d done

She believed he was a holy healer

Who would heal her son

But when his drinking and lusting and his hunger for power became known to more and more people, the demands to do something about this outrageous man became louder and louder

“This man’s just got to go!” declared his enemies

But the ladies begged, “Don’t you try to do it, please!”

No doubt, this Rasputin had lots of hidden charms

Though he was a brute, they just fell into his arms

Then, one night, some men of higher standing

Set a trap; they’re not to blame

“Come to visit us,” they kept demanding

And he really came

Ra, ra, Rasputin

Lover of the Russian Queen

They put some poison into his wine

Ra, ra, Rasputin

Russia’s greatest love machine

He drank it all and said, “I feel fine!”

Ra, ra, Rasputin

Lover of the Russian Queen

They didn’t quit: they wanted his head

Ra, ra, Rasputin

Russia’s greatest love machine

And so, they shot him till he was dead

Oh, those Russians

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Throw a kiss, Harry

Samuel’s first spring break. We didn’t go out of town, but we did take the boys to the local Bricks & Minifigs store. I’d never seen them more excited to be anywhere. It’s a pleasant store: clean; well-lighted; not overwhelmingly full of merchandise; inexpensive, as long as one can keep from going hog-wild.

The cashiers were a couple of sad-sacks. Not just bored: despondent.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The more time I spend with children, the more I marvel at the lifelikeness of Mary Chalmers’s Throw a Kiss, Harry.

Read it here. This is the bowdlerized version from the ’nineties. It’s the version familiar to our household.

The original version, from the ’fifties, is even truer to life: Harry’s mother casually threatens to spank him.

Whether they actually spank or not, parents’ll recognize how tempting (and gratifying) it is to threaten retribution.

Children are simultaneously so naughty and so adorable, so ornery and so affectionate. These are the truths that Throw a Kiss, Harry understands.

More Arendt

… which I’m sure you were itching to read this morning.

But first, an item of local interest: a graduate of nearby Goshen College is the author of the Library of America’s latest “story of the week.”

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From Origins, chapter 7:

It took the Boers several decades to understand that [British] imperialism was nothing to be afraid of, since it would neither develop the country as Australia and Canada had been developed, nor draw profits from the country at large, being quite content with a high turnover of investments in one specific field [gold mining]. Imperialism therefore was willing to abandon the so-called laws of capitalist production and their egalitarian tendencies, so long as profits from specific investments were safe. This led eventually to the abolition of the law of mere profitableness and South Africa became the first example of a phenomenon that occurs whenever the mob becomes the dominant factor in the alliance between mob and capital.

In one respect, the most important one, the Boers remained the undisputed masters of the country: whenever rational labor and production policies came into conflict with race considerations, the latter won. Profit motives were sacrificed time and again to the demands of a race society, frequently at a terrible price. The rentability of the railroads was destroyed overnight when the government dismissed 17,000 Bantu employees and paid white wages that amounted to 200 per cent more; expenses for municipal government became prohibitive when native municipal employees were replaced with whites; the Color Bar Bill finally excluded all black workers from mechanical jobs and forced industrial enterprise to a tremendous increase of production costs. The race world of the Boers had nobody to fear any more, least of all white labor, whose trade unions complained bitterly that the Color Bar Bill did not go far enough.

The racism described here is race-rule. Boer clans subsisted by forcing native tribes to farm for them. They didn’t want this arrangement upset by the development of industry or bureaucracy. (They got their wish.)

“Mob” in Arendt refers to the agglomeration of misfits: people excluded from the workings of a polity: people fulfilling no communal organizational or economic function. Mere hoarders of wealth; speculators; subsistence farmers; unemployed workers (the individualistic ones, not those moved by solidarity).

As separatist farmers, Boer clans belonged to the mob. So did people involved in the gold rush: investors as well as individual miners. Rich and poor.

Mob-rule occurs when such people use politics to prevent the development of “normal” governance and commerce. For example: Jews

settled down permanently into a unique position for a white group. [Footnote: “Jews constituted roughly one-third of the total immigration to South Africa in the twenties, and … in sharp contrast to all other categories of uitlanders, settled there permanently; their share in the annual emigration is less than a per cent.”] They neither belonged to the “lifeblood” of Africa nor to the “poor white trash.” Instead they started almost immediately to build up those industries and professions which according to South African opinion are “secondary” because they are not connected with gold. Jews became manufacturers of furniture and clothes, shopkeepers and members of the professions, physicians, lawyers, and journalists. In other words, no matter how well they thought they were adjusted to the mob conditions of the country and its race attitude, Jews had broken its most important pattern by introducing into South African economy a factor of normalcy and productivity, with the result that when Mr. Malan introduced into Parliament a bill to expel all Jews from the Union he had the enthusiastic support of all poor whites and of the whole Afrikander population.

The timeless lesson is that it behooves the most speculative and exploitative businessmen – captains of mostly useless industries (extraction of ornamental minerals, space exploration, gambling, luxurious transportation and housing) – to maintain a dysfunctional society: to lord it over desperate, disconnected, disaffected workers and voters. Plodding but sound officials and workers who bring order to chaos are best eliminated. Energetic immigrants who do so are best kept out. You can see how this describes our own moment.

As I read, I’m tempted to draw analogies between past and present, almost to treat Arendt as an oracle. Of course I don’t know enough to judge whether she gets the past right. And the analogies that suggest themselves in certain moods seem farfetched in others. How closely can Obama really be likened to Arendt’s Disraeli? I don’t know.

The origins of totalitarianism (1951)

A slog of a book, with prophetic flashes. Here’s one.

“I would annex the planets if I could” (Cecil Rhodes said this). Arendt comments in ch. 5:

The imperialist-minded businessman, whom the stars annoyed because he could not annex them, realized that power organized for its own sake would beget more power. When the accumulation of capital had reached its natural, national limits, the bourgeoisie understood that only with an “expansion is everything” ideology, and only with a corresponding power-accumulating process, would it be possible to set the old motor into motion again. At the same moment, however, when it seemed as though the true principle of perpetual motion had been discovered, the specifically optimistic mood of the progress ideology was shaken. Not that anybody began to doubt the irresistibility of the process itself, but many people began to see what had frightened Cecil Rhodes: that the human condition and the limitations of the globe were a serious obstacle to a process that was unable to stop and to stabilize, and could therefore only begin a series of destructive catastrophes once it had reached its limits. …

By “Victory or Death,” the Leviathan can indeed overcome all political limitations that go with the existence of other peoples and can envelop the whole earth in its tyranny. But when the last war has come and every man has been provided for, no ultimate peace is established on earth: the power-accumulating machine, without which continual expansion would not have been achieved, needs more material to devour in its never-ending process. If the last victorious Commonwealth cannot proceed to “annex the planets,” it can only proceed to destroy itself in order to begin anew the never-ending process of power generation.

There it is: why Elon Musk wants to colonize space and destroy the U.S. government.

I’d say “there in brief,” only it could be briefer.

I have a friend, a Trump/​Musk fanboy, who says he needs the “CliffsNotes” version whenever he’s directed to an explanation of why Trump/​Musk’s actions are illegal, repugnant, not in the country’s best interest, and so on. Usually I want to say: Just read the article (the legal document, etc.).

But I admit we need CliffsNotes for Arendt.

Here’s my own summary and application – not so brief, alas, but with plainer language.

It used to be that businessmen driven to make wealth from wealth didn’t involve themselves in national politics. (Arendt goes on about this at length.) If the government kept things stable enough for business, businessmen didn’t care who ruled the country. But countries are too small. Eventually, businessmen would use up their countries’ resources and saturate their countries’ markets. So they couldn’t indefintely keep growing their businesses at home. They’d have to go elsewhere.

Businessmen tried speculating abroad as private agents, but conditions proved too risky – too unstable. So they brought in their countries’ armies to guarantee stability. (And a leg up – although I don’t recall Arendt saying this; anyway, she doesn’t emphasize it.) Deploying armies required businessmen to involve themselves in governing their own countries as well as the new lands where they did business. So, eventually, businessmen came to dominate the business of governing (in no small part, by promoting the myth that businessmen are the best rulers). But, eventually, they’d run into trouble with other countries (ruled by their businessmen). Besides, the planet was too small. Country-scale problems of exhaustion and saturation were bound to recur on a global scale; as it’s shrewdly noted on James Bond’s familial coat-of-arms, “the world is not enough.” So, one “Bond villain,” Musk – possibly with Rhodes’s words in mind, Rhodes having been a big cheese in Musk’s home of southern Africa – tried colonizing other planets. But that was stupid. So, instead, he just took over the world’s most powerful government and destroyed as much of it and the rest of the globe as he could so that he could get more wealth for himself doing what governments used to do. This was less stupid, insofar as it profited him (tabulation is ongoing), but it sure was petulant, and the casualties were enormous.

I want to stress that I’m not endorsing ideas, just formulating them.